City Without End (59 page)

Isobel and John would both be awake for the last transition; they’d cross together after activating the renaissance engine for the transform: Isobel to make sure John didn’t have a change of heart; John to make sure of
her
.

In the transition room, Chitra Kamath had just entered. She balanced her toddler son on her hip, adjusting his face mask that supplied oxygen for those too young to hold their breath.

“Get some sleep, Isobel,” John said as he settled into his chair.

“Who can sleep?” Isobel muttered.

Booth looked up from his crossword puzzle. “You can. Take a pill, we need you fresh tomorrow.”

“Chitra’s all yours,” Isobel told John, and left the control room, heading for a sandwich and a sleeping pill.

Leaning into the pickup mike, John instructed Chitra on the immersion process, feeling a bit like he was drowning a mother and child. But it was life, not death, they were headed for.

Chitra’s crossing was controlled by the mSap. The AI controlled it, monitoring the connection with the Entire; that part had to hold steady, and was. In the back of John’s mind curled a disquiet over how they’d been changing the order of the list, with the head folks holding back, letting others precede them. He guessed that neither Lamar nor Booth trusted the other to be left behind. Maybe at the last, the two of
them
would turn the lights out. That was fine with him. Who wanted to have such a thing on his shoulders? All the mSap engineers had drawn from a hat for the responsibility entailed in the last slots. But the world would undergo a
transform
of sorts, anyway. The Tarig made sure of that. Speeding it up was no crime, nor was saving a few good people.

The mSap registered a successful crossing. The pool cleared. Chitra and son and were at this very moment in the new world. John wondered mightily what would be the first thing they would see.

Outside the crossover vault, people were still gathered, sitting in huddled groups, giving support to the next ones lining up to go. A few people had already bailed out. They were allowed to go to the back of the list to settle down. John didn’t envy Alex Nourse’s task of managing them. When John had come on shift, he’d seen Alex with his clipboard, looking official as he chatted with people and organized the line. He’d also had a gun clipped to his belt. No one missed that little addition to the tech array.

John turned in surprise at a noise at the control room door. Lamar Gelde poked his head in. “Booth.”

Looking up from his crossword puzzle, Booth rose to his feet and joined Lamar in the corridor outside. He shut the door, leaving John to concentrate on his migration task.

Lamar looked every bit of his seventy-seven years. Booth had often wondered why Lamar even wanted to go over. Who would choose to be
old
for the next two hundred years?

Lamar glanced up at the stairs. “Folks are getting restive. Alex is having a hard time keeping them steady. It’s taking too long. It’s the waiting.”

“We all knew how long it was going to take. Can’t people go to bed?”

“They’re all out there. Nobody is sleeping, Booth. I think we should double up. The longer this takes . . .” He shook his head.

“Your nerves shot, Lamar?”

“Bloody fucking right.”

Booth bit down on a retort. “I’ll come up and talk to them.”

Lamar snorted, “You’ll talk to them? They hate you, Booth. You were supposed to be the first. How do you suppose that looks to everyone that—”

The control room door slammed open. “Jesus, get in here,” John shouted, lunging back to the control panel.

Booth and Lamar jammed in after him. Through the control room window they could see someone lying on the floor near the pool. Someone had collapsed. “They just came through,” John said, looking ill. “Came through, came up. My God.” He pushed past Booth and rushed into the corridor.

Alarmed, Booth ran after him to the transition room.

When he got there, he saw a woman covered in slime from the transition matrix, her white hair pulled into a clasp at the back of her head. Kneeling, she coughed up fluid. She was wearing dark clothes. That couldn’t be right.

Crouched down before the woman, John stared at her in dismay.

Booth looked at Lamar who had just come in the door. “Get Alex down here, fast!” They needed to control this situation, and Alex was good in an emergency.

Struggling to rise, the woman coughed up a wad of pool fluid. Then she sat up, leaning against John, who held her like she was contaminated with radioactive trailings.

“Who the fuck is this?” Booth asked John, who was supposed to be in charge of the transitions.

“She came
through
,” John whispered. “Up from the pool.”

“Dressed like that? Dressed in—” then Booth realized what John was trying to say and hadn’t quite put into words: The woman covered in slime and coughing her guts out had come
from the matrix
.

John wiped her face clean with a hanky. After a moment she pushed herself up into a sitting position, sopping wet and starting to shake. “Give her your sweater,” Booth snapped at John. She accepted it, looking puzzled by the garment. John put it around her shoulders.

At a sound from the door, they saw someone entering: a white-suited figure. The next in line for crossing. Booth waved him away. “She fainted,” he said, standing up to block the view of the visitor. “Wait upstairs. We’ll come and get you.”

The door closed behind him.

Shakily, John helped the woman onto a bench next to the vat. It was hard to tell who was shaking more: John or the visitor.

The woman spoke, looking directly at John. “No more,” she said, her speech heavily accented. She spoke English, so maybe she wasn’t from the other place.

“Who are you?” Booth asked her. Her age was impossible to guess. She didn’t look old enough to have pure white hair. . . . Then, Booth remembered Quinn saying that some of the people in the Entire had white hair while young. His heart was hammering hard enough to jump out of his chest.

The woman said, “He killing all. All are to dying.”

Booth exchanged glances with John. “Who is killing?”

“The Tarig lord dying persons in a pile of blood.”

“Oh God,” John whispered.

“Shut up!” Booth leaned down to her. “What are you talking about?

Who the hell are you?”

The woman looked up at him with clear, yellow eyes. She spoke again. “I called Ji Anzi. From where you call Entire.”

Booth seemed to have stopped breathing. Gulping in a lungful of breath, he struggled for calm, wrestling with the improbability of a
reverse
crossing.

But yet, with the connection established between here and there, maybe it wasn’t so outrageous after all.

The newcomer looked around her, noting the pool, the control room, the men gathered around her.

The door crashed open. It was Alex Nourse, with Lamar right behind him.

“Shit,” Alex said, seeing their visitor.

Booth nailed Alex with a stare. “Did you tell people to wait?”

Alex nodded. “We’ve got one in the dressing room, but we told him we’re taking a break. He’ll go back to the dorms.”

John blurted out, “She says they’re killing us as we go over. Everyone is dead. Everyone.”

Booth silenced John with a look. This wasn’t his lead.

Alex and Lamar joined the circle around the woman.

Booth thought it likely, almost certain, that the woman had come to them from the very place they were all bound. He would have been more impressed by this fact if she hadn’t just told them that the Entire would kill them.
In a pile of blood.

He got down on one knee to look her in the eyes. “What’s going on over there . . . Jiasi . . . what is your name?”

“I Jianzi.”

“Jianzi. What’s happened there?” Unconsciously, he had glanced at the pool, as though that was the direction of the Entire. “Tell us.”

Hugging the sweater around her shoulders, she said, “Tarig not wanting humans. Tarig killing all coming into our land. Hel Ese, she dying too.”

Worse and worse. “Helice Maki is dead?”

“Yes, sorry. Very much dead. They kill she. Now they kill you.”

John looked like he had just drunk a quart of pool matrix. He put his hand to his head, whispering, “Oh God, oh God.”

“Why should we believe you?” Booth spat at her, realizing that she could unravel everything, that John could blather this and no one would go over— that they would
all
lose their nerves. It nagged at him, that this might be a counterstrike. She looked harmless, but she had already derailed them, if temporarily. “Jianzi, do
you
want us to come over?”

“No. Lords killing you.”

“I mean, do you welcome us, personally?”

“In my person, do I have welcome of you?”

“Do you?”

She paused. “You should take welcome, certainly. Sadly, they not liking you.”

Alex burst into the conversation. “Who sent you?”

“No person sending. I always want be in Rose. Now door open—you open it, or lords do? But door open, I see dying, and I run for warning you.”

Booth and Alex exchanged glances. Deep shit. And she was maybe lying and maybe not. Alex shouldered closer to her. “Who’s doing the killing?

How are they doing it?”

“Lord Ghinamid using a—how you say, knife sword. Then with thrusting and slicing, he killing everyone to die.”

“Why the hell doesn’t someone stop him?”

The woman pursed her lips. “They Tarig.”

Alex whispered at Booth’s side. “Anybody search her yet?”

“Do it.”

Alex pulled her to her feet. “We’re going to make sure you aren’t carrying a weapon. You understand?”

The woman nodded, allowing Alex to pat her down. In her jacket he found something. Booth thought it looked like a heavy flexible cloth. Alex pushed her back down on the bench and began to read it.

Lamar knelt down beside her. “Why? Why are they killing us? Why not just shut down the crossover link?”

The woman looked at him, at his white hair, his face, maybe trying to make sense of a situation as bizarre for her as it was for them. “Tarig, they hating of the Rose.”

Lamar frowned. “But they sent us word we could come.”

Having finished reading, Alex nodded at them all to go out into the corridor. They left the woman and regrouped in the corridor.

Alex passed the piece of writing around. Booth got it first. English, of course, or Alex wouldn’t have been reading it. It was an account of the renaissance project from the viewpoint of someone inside the Entire. From the viewpoint of Titus Quinn, for Christ’s sake, who’d signed it.

Lamar looked at it next, swearing under his breath.

John said, “Why is she carrying the note? Why bring it
here
?”

Alex had grown very quiet. “Because Quinn hoped to alert someone here to what we’re doing. Unfortunately, for him, it’s
us
.”

John looked confused. “So she’s lying? They’re not killing us?”

Booth said, “That could be one interpretation. Maybe a damn good one.”

This Jianzi was against them and making up a story to disrupt everything. If Booth didn’t manage the situation, John Hastings could go off the deep end, killing the group’s confidence in the project.

The men leaned against the cool walls and tried to get a grip on what they were facing. Booth threw out: “I think she’s lying.”

John looked panicked. “But what if she’s not!”

“Why would Helice have sent the message that we could go over unarmed? We had it all worked out which message to send in each circumstance. She indicated
unarmed
. There were some issues, but not critical ones.”

Kay Kenyon 403 “To be fair,” Lamar said, “that could have changed.” His hand was resting on a gun he wore in his waistband. Booth hadn’t noticed before that Lamar had started wearing a gun.

Booth snorted. “Quinn’s behind this, he signed the paper. We knew he had to be kept out of it. Maybe Helice failed to do that.”

John shook his head. “She said everyone’s lying in a pile of blood. We’ve got to stop the transitions. It’s too dangerous.” He flicked a glance at Alex with his clipboard.

“Shut up,” Booth said to John. “You don’t give orders. You don’t make decisions.”

Alex Nourse frowned. “Why didn’t Quinn come himself, then? Why send a woman to stop us? She might be for real.” He nodded apologetically at Booth. “I’m not saying stop the crossovers. But I’m just asking.”

Lamar rounded on him. “You stupid scumbag. We’ve come all this way, and now you’re backing out?”

Everyone was talking at once, but Lamar had drawn a gun, and he faced off with the other three men. “Let’s be clear,” Lamar said. “There’ll be no defections. None.”

“Lamar, come on . . .” Alex moved forward with a placating gesture, but as he did, Lamar shot him in the face. At the impact, Alex jerked backward and sprawled on the floor, pieces of bone and blood clinging to the wall that had been in back of him.

With the roar of the gun still reverberating in his ears, Booth looked in disbelief at Alex’s body. “Fucking hell! Jesus fucking hell.”

Lamar licked his lips and pointed his gun at John. “You clear where we’re going with this? We’ve come too far. We’re going on.”

Booth felt like his legs might give way. Beside him, John was moaning, head in hands. Booth managed to say, “Lamar, put the gun away.”

The old man did, reluctantly. “I’m just saying. We stay the course.”

Booth took John’s elbow and shoved him toward the door to the transition room. “Go keep her calm. And get a goddamn grip.”

When John staggered through the door, Booth and Lamar faced off with each other. “Why the
fuck
did you kill him?”

Lamar’s lip curled. “He was wavering. He was influencing John. We’ve got to be steady.” He bent down and picked up the clipboard that had fallen from Alex’s hands.

Booth looked at that calm gesture, and shook his head. “You’re out of control.”

“Well, if I made a mistake, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry . . .” He’d just killed Alex. And he was
sorry
. Booth thought of the next people that would come down the steps. “Help me drag him out of here.” He pointed down the corridor. “Around to the back.”