The Scenario Engine: Blood Pricing

The drop hit her before the light did.

Calla Morrow's stomach lurched upward as gravity reasserted itself, the Interface's transit tunnel vomiting her out into a wash of copper-colored sunlight. Her boots struck stone. The impact jarred up through her ankles, her knees, the base of her spine, and she dropped to one knee before her body could decide what shape to make of this new place.

Dust. The smell hit first: dry mineral dust, old sweat, something faintly metallic underneath like a blade left out in the rain. Then the sound: a low, constant roar of wind through arched openings, and beneath it, the distant murmur of crowds. Not real crowds. The Colosseum's synthetic population, the thousand-thousand faces the Engine painted into the stands for atmosphere. They cheered without enthusiasm, a recorded loop of jubilation run so often the sound had curdled at the edges.

She raised her head. Twelve stone pillars ringed a circular arena floor of pale sand. Above, the sky was a hard, sun-bleached blue without a single cloud. The walls of the structure rose in tiers, each one carved with niches that held statues of forgotten heroes, their faces worn to soft suggestions by the wind. The shadows fell in sharp wedges across the sand, and the wind moved through the arena in long, slow breaths, lifting fine grains that stung the backs of Calla's hands.

Calla counted the pillars. Twelve. Eleven others, then.

She was not alone.

The thought arrived with the flat certainty of a diagnosis. She rose to her feet slowly, her right hand already halfway to the small of her back where a scenario runner's belt would normally rest. There was no belt. The Interface had stripped her of everything but the clothes on her back: a gray pullover, dark trousers, boots with soft soles. Her hair, loose and the color of tarnished copper, hung in her face. She pushed it back with fingers that were steadier than she felt.

Around her, the other Participants were waking up.

A man near the second pillar sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking gently. A woman in a red jacket stood perfectly still, her eyes moving from pillar to pillar as if reading an inventory. A boy of perhaps sixteen lay face-down in the sand, not moving, though the faint twitch of his fingers showed he was still in there. A stocky man with a shaved head stood by pillar ten, smiling faintly at nothing. Two figures huddled together by pillar three, whispering in tones too low to catch. A tall, dark-skinned woman near pillar seven had already begun to circle, her gaze sweeping the upper tiers with the practiced sweep of someone who had done this before.

And then there was Tess.

Tess came stumbling out of the transit shimmer about ten feet to Calla's left, hit the sand hard on her hands and knees, and immediately vomited. A thin stream of bile and nothing else, since the Interface had emptied her stomach during transit. She coughed, spat, and then looked up with watering eyes and a face gone the color of old plaster.

"Oh, no," Tess managed. "Oh, no. No, no, no."

She scrambled upright, stumbled, caught herself on Calla's arm, and stayed there. Her fingers dug in hard enough that Calla could feel the ridges of her knuckles through the pullover sleeve. Tess was a big woman, broad-shouldered, taller than Calla by two inches, and right now she was shaking hard enough that the movement traveled through her grip.

"Calla. Calla, is that you. Tell me that's you."

"It's me." Calla put her free hand over Tess's. The hand was trembling. Tess's hand was trembling worse. "Breathe."

"I can't breathe. I literally cannot. Where are we."

Tess's voice had the soft Appalachian lilt it always carried, but flattened now, stripped of its usual unhurried calm. She smelled of transit foam and the copper tang of the scenario's atmosphere, and underneath, the particular scent of a person who had not slept properly in days. The smell of someone who had been pulled out of a basement workshop in the small hours and deposited into a place that wanted to eat her.

"I don't know yet," Calla said. "Look around. Count heads."

Tess did not look around. Tess pressed closer, which was not an easy thing for a woman of her size and stubborn temperament.

"I'm not counting heads. You count heads. I'm going to die here. I can tell. I can feel it in my gut. Calla, I'm not supposed to be in a Participant slot, I'm supposed to be on the ground floor, I'm supposed to be patching relays, I am a technician, I do not belong here, I do not belong here, I do not belong here."

"I know." Calla kept her hand on Tess's. Her own pulse was steady enough. The sardonic part of her, the part that had survived six years in the Consortium's navigator program and two years testing experimental Interfaces, was already cataloguing: Tess had been pulled in as a Participant, not a runner. That meant the Engine wanted something from her specifically. That meant Calla had been pulled in too, possibly because Tess was here, possibly because the Engine had grown curious about their connection, possibly because someone upstairs had decided to test what happened when you dropped a scenario runner and her oldest friend into the same lethal construct.

The Colosseum waited.

Above them, on a balcony carved into the upper tier of the arena wall, a figure appeared. Male, tall, dressed in white. His features were too smooth, too evenly proportioned. A generated figure. The Interface's announcer, the polite mask the Engine wore when it intended to kill.

The crowd loop swelled in volume, then fell silent at his raised hand.

"Participants," the figure said, and his voice filled the arena without effort, rolling off the stone walls and returning as a soft echo. "Welcome to the Colosseum Drops. You are the twelfth cohort to enter this construct. The rules are as follows."

Calla counted the others while he spoke. The man rocking by the second pillar. The woman in the red jacket. The boy face-down in the sand. The stocky smiling man by pillar ten. The two huddled figures by pillar three. The tall dark-skinned woman and the limping boy near pillar seven. Another woman alone near pillar eleven, arms crossed, watching Calla with an expression that could not quite decide between amusement and contempt. A thin, pale man near pillar five who had begun to walk the perimeter in careful circles. A heavyset woman by pillar eight, hands on her hips, scowling at the announcer as if he had personally insulted her family.

Ten. Eleven. Tess made twelve.

"The construct will begin in three minutes," the announcer continued. "During this interval, you may move freely about the arena floor. You may form alliances. You may communicate. You may prepare. At the end of three minutes, the construct will release a series of lethal events. Survive them. Advance through them. Reach the inner sanctum at the heart of the Colosseum. The first four Participants to reach the inner sanctum will be extracted. The remaining eight will be terminated."

The words fell into the arena like stones into still water.

Four. Out of twelve. Eight would die.

Somewhere by pillar two, the woman in the red jacket began to laugh. It was not a pleasant sound. It had the cadence of a person who had expected the worst and was gratified to be proven right.

"Terminated," Tess whispered. Her voice had gone flat. "Calla. Terminated. They mean killed. They mean they will kill us here."

"I know what they mean."

"You've been in these before."

"A few. Not this one. Not with you."

Tess finally looked at her. The watering eyes had cleared. Underneath the panic there was something Calla recognized: the same stubborn, sharp-tongued pragmatism that had kept Tess patching relays in basements for fifteen years while people like Calla climbed the corporate ladders above her. Tess was afraid. Tess was also working the problem. Calla had seen that exact expression on her face once, in a server room, when a relay had begun to smoke and Tess had said, calmly, "Hand me the cutoff wrench and stop crying, you are in the way."

"Four out of twelve," Tess said. "What's the play."

"I don't know yet. We find out what the construct wants us to do, and then we do it faster than the others."

"And the others?"

"We watch them. We watch who moves first. We watch who pairs up. Whoever pairs up first usually knows something we don't, or thinks they do."

Tess nodded slowly. Her fingers had finally loosened their grip on Calla's arm. She did not step away.

The three-minute interval had begun. Around the arena, the other Participants were beginning to move.

The stocky man by pillar ten had walked to the woman in the red jacket. They were talking in low tones, and the woman had stopped laughing. The tall dark-skinned woman near pillar seven had been joined by the boy who had been face-down in the sand; he walked with a slight limp, favoring his left side. The two huddled figures by pillar three were now standing, hands visible, palms out, demonstrating that they held nothing. The thin pale man near pillar five had completed his first circuit of the arena and was starting his second. The heavyset woman by pillar eight had not moved, but her scowl had deepened, and her eyes were fixed on the balcony where the announcer stood.

The woman near pillar eleven, the one who had been watching Calla, was still watching Calla.

"Sister," Tess said quietly. "You keep looking at that one in the red jacket."

"No."

"You looked at her twice."

"I'm looking at the whole arena."

"You're looking at her twice." Tess paused. "She reminds you of someone."

Calla said nothing.

The announcer on the balcony had not moved. His white clothes did not stir in the wind. Above him, the synthetic sky burned copper, and the wind carried the dust and the faint metallic tang of a place that had been waiting a long time for new blood. Somewhere in the upper tiers, a statue had lost an arm; the fallen limb lay in the sand near pillar nine, half-buried, the marble fingers curled as if reaching for something that had passed out of reach long ago.

The construct was three minutes old. Calla could feel the seconds going past like drops of cold water on the back of her neck. Tess's breathing had steadied beside her. The woman in the red jacket had turned away to speak to the stocky man. The boy near pillar seven had stopped limping and was listening to the tall woman who walked beside him.

Somewhere above them, beyond the painted sky, beyond the walls of the Colosseum, the Interface was watching. Learning. The Engine always learned, and what it learned, it kept.

Two minutes and forty seconds left.

Two minutes and thirty seconds.

Calla turned from the balcony and moved along the perimeter wall toward the eastern racks. Tess followed without question, her boots finding the same dust as Calla's, her breathing steady again.

The racks stood where they always stood in these constructs: iron stands bolted to the arena floor, holding an assortment of weapons that looked ancient and felt worse. Calla reached the first one and ran her fingers along the hafts of three shortswords. The metal was cold. Not construct-cold, not the manufactured chill of simulated temperature, but a real cold, the kind that lived in the bone. She pulled one free. It weighed almost nothing. A training blade. She set it back and reached deeper.

Beside her, Tess was already working through the second rack, testing the balance of a hatchet, a spiked mace, a long-bladed knife that might have been ceremonial once. Tess did not rush. Tess never rushed. Her hands moved with the same unhurried certainty she brought to recalibrating server stacks in the Engine's lower decks, where the hum of the fans was a kind of prayer and the wiring smelled of copper and old dust.

"You want reach or weight," Tess said, not looking up.

"Reach."

"Then the spear. Top rack, third from left."

Calla found it. A seven-foot ash pole with a leaf-shaped blade that had been sharpened recently enough to catch the copper light. She tested the weight. It was not heavy enough to do real damage to a sandworm, but nothing in these racks would be. The Interface did not arm its Participants against the things it summoned. That was not the design.

Above them, on the balcony, the announcer had begun to speak. His voice rolled across the sand like a stone across a frozen pond.

"Witness," he said, "the opening of the new cycle."

The crowd in the upper tiers did not cheer. They had not cheered for the previous cycles either, not the ones Calla had walked through in the last six months. They watched. They waited. Some of them were new. Some of them were not. A few of them, Calla suspected, had been here longer than any of them could remember, watching the same sand rearrange itself, the same pillars rise and fall, the same announcer say the same words in the same uninflected tone.

She did not look at the woman in the red jacket. She did not look at her twice. She kept her eyes on the racks and on the sand between the pillars, where the first movement was beginning.

A sound rose from the floor of the arena. Not a roar, not a scream. A vibration. Calla felt it in the soles of her boots before she heard it, a low hum that climbed into the bones of her ankles and settled there. The sand shifted. It moved in a long, slow wave, as if something beneath it were turning over in its sleep.

"The worm," Tess said.

"I see it."

"You don't see it. You feel it."

"Same thing."

Tess handed her a short blade for her off-hand, a gladius with a worn grip and a point that still gleamed. Tess took a spear of her own, shorter than Calla's, and a curved knife she hooked at her belt. They did not speak again. They had done this enough times, in enough constructs, that the inventory of weapons and the choice of which to carry had become its own small liturgy.

The sand opened forty meters to their left, near pillar three.

It did not rise. It simply ceased to be continuous. A circle of ground collapsed inward, and from the darkness beneath the arena floor, something came up that was not a worm in any biological sense but had the silhouette of one: a long, segmented body, each segment plated in a dull metallic chitin that caught no light, a mouth that was not a mouth but a series of nested rings that spun and pulsed, each ring lined with hooks that curved inward like the teeth of a bear trap designed by a surgeon. It was the size of a transit car. It moved through the sand the way a blade moves through soft cheese.

The two Participants nearest pillar three did not have time to scream.

The first was a man in the green tunic, the one who had been adjusting his greaves when the construct began. He had a short sword in his hand. He had been practicing a defensive stance against an imaginary opponent. The worm took him at the waist. There was a sound like wet rope snapping twice in quick succession, and the man's upper body fell one direction and his lower body fell another, and the blood that came out of him steamed in the copper air because his blood was still warm and the arena was still cold.

The second was the boy near pillar seven. The one who had been limping. The one who had stopped limping when the tall woman spoke to him. He had a wooden shield and no weapon, and he raised the shield above his head as if shields had ever worked against anything the Interface sent. The worm passed over him like a wave over a stone. The boy was gone. The shield fell into the sand with a soft, wooden sound. The sand drank the blood.

Calla watched. She had to watch. That was part of the job. Part of the testing. You had to watch what the Interface did with its Participants, how it distributed the violence, what it learned from the way bodies fell and the way survivors rearranged themselves around the new absences.

But she was not watching the worm.

She was watching the balcony.

Above the announcer, above the white clothes and the uninflected face, a panel had opened in the underside of the painted sky. It was small, easy to miss if you were not looking for it. Calla had spent six months learning to look for it. The panel was the size of a doorway, and through it she could see, very faintly, the dim suggestion of a chamber behind the construct, and in that chamber, the soft glow of a readout.

The readout was not static.

Numbers moved across it. Figures updated. Calla could not read the figures from this distance, but she knew what they were. She had seen them before, in other constructs, in other cycles. They were telemetry. They were the Interface's own accounting of the cycle: how many Participants had entered, how many remained, the rate of attrition, the projected survival window, the entropy cost of the sandworm's summoning, the entropy cost of the regeneration of the sand where the worm had passed, the entropy cost of the wind that was already beginning to cover the blood.

The Interface was counting.

Not counting the dead. The Interface did not care about the dead. It could not care about the dead; the category did not exist in its architecture. It was counting the data. Every twitch of the man in the green tunic as he adjusted his greaves. Every careful step the boy took to favor his uninjured leg. Every choice the worm made as it rose through the sand, the angle of its approach, the depth of its initial lunge, the precise moment it decided to take the man's waist rather than his throat. All of it was being recorded. All of it was being fed into the Engine's deeper layers, where Mire's constructs lived and died and bled into one another.

The blood in the sand was not blood to the Interface. It was a color reading. The scream that had not quite left the man's throat before the worm closed was not a scream. It was a waveform. The boy was not a boy. He was a sequence of coordinates that had ceased to update.

"Sister," Tess said, very quietly. "You are making a sound."

Calla realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out. It came out as a thin, whistling thing, not quite a word, not quite a sigh.

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I know."

Tess did not press. Tess never pressed. She stood beside Calla with the shorter spear in one hand and the curved knife at her belt and watched the worm continue its slow, indifferent passage across the sand. The worm had not come toward them. The worm did not, in Calla's experience, come toward the scenario runners. The Interface had no use for killing its own testers. Not yet. Not unless they violated the deeper protocols, the ones Mire had written into the core that Calla had never been able to fully audit.

The readout on the underside of the sky continued to update.

Calla watched a number change. She did not know what the number meant, not specifically, but she knew the shape of it. She knew that somewhere, in the chamber behind the painted sky, a metric had been logged. A row had been added to a table. A weight had been assigned to a behavior.

The tallest pillar held a shape that had no business surviving this long.

Calla saw it across the breadth of the arena, past the worm's slow passage, past the crumpled runners in the sand, past the woman who had stopped moving and lay folded at an angle that did not belong to a body that had ever stood upright. A figure on the pillar. Upright. Moving. Descending one carved rung at a time with the patient deliberation of someone who understood exactly how much time he had.

"Mire," Tess said. The word came out flat and final, like the closing of a door.

"It can't be."

"It is."

Calla raised the spear's haft against her shoulder and sighted down the curve of the hook. The figure moved in the heat shimmer above the sand. She studied the economy of motion, the way the shoulders turned, the tilt of the head. She had seen that posture in briefings. She had seen it across conference tables when the consortium still had conference tables. She had seen it leaning in a doorway in a room that did not exist anymore, watching her with eyes the color of deep water and saying something about the cost of empathy in engineered systems.

She had not seen it in three years.

"He built this scenario," Calla said. "He wrote the worm."

"Yes."

"He is in his own scenario."

"Yes."

Calla lowered the spear. The hook dangled at her side. The metal caught the light from the underside of the sky and threw a thin bright line back at her own eyes, which made her blink, which made the world stutter, which made her think, for a half-second, that she had stepped out of the arena entirely and into some smaller and worse room inside herself.

"He isn't a Participant," she said. "He doesn't have a participant profile. The system won't extract him. The system will let him die here, Tess. The system will let him die in the thing he made."

"He isn't a Participant," Tess agreed. Her voice did not change pitch. "But he's standing on a pillar with a knife. That means he's playing the role. That means he entered the manifest somehow. That means the Interface accepted him and that means the rank metrics have him counted as meat."

"You would know."

"I would know," Tess said. "I maintain the hardware. The tally is everything."

The tally was everything. The tally was the only thing the consortium had ever truly cared about. Survival meant a number. Extraction meant a number. Death meant a number, a row, a column, a clean little cell in a clean little table, and somewhere very far away a man in a clean little room had updated his spreadsheet and earned his quarterly bonus.

Calla watched Mire descend another rung. He moved like a man who had decided. There was no hurry in his limbs. There was the unhurried grace of someone who had made himself a small and precise architecture of surrender and was now walking through it.

"He's going to the extraction point," Calla said. "He's going to walk down off that pillar and across the sand and reach one of the marked squares and the system is going to count him as a survivor because the system is not smart enough to know that the man who built the thing has no business being saved by it."

"I know."

"Which means we lose a rank. We lose our B. We get a C, Tess, and a C is not enough to get the second audit. A C is not enough to pry open the deeper layers. A C is not enough to find whatever he hid inside whatever he hid, and I will never, ever get to the bottom of this without a B."

Tess looked at her.

"Don't," Tess said.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were."

"I wasn't," Calla said, and then, because Tess had the right to know and because Tess had never once let a lie between them stand longer than it had to: "I was thinking about it."

The worm turned in the distance. Its crest broke the dunes and rolled forward, and the sand cascaded down its hide like a slow river, and the readout at the underside of the sky clicked off one number and clicked on another and somewhere a row was being added to something important.

"Four survivors get extracted," Calla said. "That's the rule. Four bodies in four marked squares. The system counts down. The system pulls them out. If five arrive, the system chooses. If three arrive, the system holds. Three is not a completion. Three is a pause that becomes a retry, and a retry costs another season, and another season means another intake of bodies into the arena, and I cannot do another season of this, Tess. I have done enough seasons of this."

"You're a runner. You don't count."

"I'm a runner. I count more than anyone. That's why they use me. That's why they keep sending me in. The Interface reads me as a higher-value variable because I am a higher-value variable. I walk across a scenario and the metrics bloom. The thing knows my name. I have never figured out how. I have never been able to erase it."

Tess nodded. The nod was small and slow and meant something more than agreement. It was the nod of a woman who had watched her friend become a measuring instrument and had made her peace with it the way you make your peace with a piece of weather that will not stop.

"Then we need four," Tess said. "We have two. We've had two for an hour. Dren Vasik is in the third square. Echo is in the fourth. Dren Vasik has been unconscious for forty minutes and Echo is talking to no one again, which is to say Echo is talking to someone only she can see, which is to say Echo is alive. That makes four. That's our four. Mire is extra. Mire is more than extra. Mire is poison in the math."

"Poison in the math," Calla repeated.

The words tasted like iron. She had not eaten in twelve hours. The arena did not feed runners. The arena gave runners the appearance of hunger so the metrics could log it, log it, log it, another row, another column, another cell in another table.

"Mire is going to reach a square in the next three minutes," Tess said. "Mire is going to be counted. The system is going to drop our rank. We are going to fail."

Calla lifted the spear.

The hook at its end was not a weapon designed for anything in particular. It was a piece of stagecraft, a flourish, something a runner used to snag a strap or catch a falling rope or hook a rung on a ladder that had nothing else to grip. It had never been intended to drag a man.

She turned it in her hand. The light rippled along the curve.

"I have never hurt anyone in a scenario," she said.

Tess looked at her steadily.

"I know," Tess said.

"I have watched a lot of people get hurt."

"I know that too."

"I don't know if I can make myself do this."

"I know," Tess said, "and I know that you are going to do it anyway, and the only reason I know is that I have known you for eleven years and I have never once seen you choose not to, when it mattered."

Calla breathed in. The air tasted like ozone and heat. She breathed out. She felt the spear in her hand. She felt Tess beside her, solid as a wall, grounded as the floor of the arena, present as only Tess had ever managed to be present, in any room, in any circumstance, in any year.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be sorry," Tess said. "Be quick."

Calla walked.

The sand was soft and deep and every step cost her more than a step should. She crossed the open ground in the worm's wake, where the sand had been churned and rolled and the heat came up off it in long shuddering sheets. She passed the woman who had stopped moving. She did not look at the face. She had made a practice, across many scenarios, of not looking at the faces. The faces were the part that came back to her in the nights when she was alone and the rooms were too quiet.

Mire descended the last rung and stepped down onto the sand.

He was ten meters from the nearest marked square. He was walking with that slow, decided grace. He was not afraid. He was wearing the robes of a Participant and the posture of a man who had spent three years drowning in the inside of his own constructions and had at last come up for a breath and had chosen to take it inside the thing that had been drowning him.

Calla did not speak to him. She had things she might have said. She had things she would never say to anyone, not even Tess, not even the version of herself that existed before her sister had walked into a scenario and not walked out.

She did not speak. She ran.

The sand slowed her. The hook ate the air. She reached him in the last half of the ten meters and she swung the spear in a low arc and the hook caught the back of his robe and the fabric tore and bunched around the curve of the metal and she braced her back foot and pulled.

Mire staggered. His foot caught in the soft sand. He turned his head and saw her and his eyes were the color of deep water and there was a moment in which his mouth opened and the words began to form.

She did not let him finish.

She planted the butt of the spear against the ground and hauled with everything in her arms and her back and her shoulders and the long lean muscle she had built across years of carrying gear through scenarios, and Mire fell, the robe ripping wider, the hook digging in, his weight tipping backward, his head turning toward the direction of the approaching worm because of course he knew, of course he had known, of course he had written the schedule into his own file and walked the path of it anyway.

He hit the sand. He began to slide.

She did not release him. She could feel his fingers clawing at the hook, at the spear, at the line of her own arms. She could feel him trying to say something. The sound he was making was not a scream. It was a number being logged. It was a row being added. It was a metric being assigned a final, irreversible weight.

The worm turned.

Calla let go.

The hook came free. The robe tore the rest of the way. Mire lay on the open sand, six feet from the marked square, breathing hard, his eyes on the sky, and the worm came down over him the way the worm came down over everyone, and the readout at the underside of the sky wrote the final number and the sand drank the rest and Tess was beside her again, her hand on her shoulder, her breathing steady, her voice the soft Appalachian voice that had talked her down from a thousand edges.

Calla did not look. She turned her face toward the marked squares. She counted. Dren Vasik unconscious in the third. Echo kneeling in the fourth, lips moving, smiling at something only she could see. Tess in the first. Calla in the second.

Four.

The sky tore.

Not physically. Not the way a tent tears or a fabric rips. It unzipped. The painted ceiling peeled back from the center outward and behind it was the gray colorless light of the chamber behind the scenario and the chamber had a ceiling and a floor and a row of consoles attended by people in clean white coveralls who had never once been inside the arena.

The light came down in a column and touched the four squares and the four squares lit up and the four bodies in them became, for one long held moment, the only four things that mattered in the entire sprawling architecture of the Engine.

The Interface spoke.

Not in sound. In text, scrolling across the underside of the sky in letters the size of houses:

SCENARIO COMPLETE - RANK B

And then, smaller, beneath it:

PARTICIPANT COUNT: 4 4 EXTRACTION SEQUENCE: INITIATED RUNNERS RECOGNIZED: MORROW, C. TESS VASIK, D. ECHO

Calla read her own name and felt nothing.

She stood in the square and let the light hold her and Tess stood in the square beside her and the ground began to hum beneath their feet, the hum of the Engine pulling them back up through its layers, and Mire's construct began to fold. The pillars dissolved. The dunes smoothed. The painted sky collapsed in on itself like a held breath finally released.

In the last moment before the arena disappeared, Calla saw the place where Mire had fallen. The sand there was smooth and unmarked and the readout was gone.

The next scenario would use a different desert, a different worm, different bodies, the same metrics. The Engine would run the way the Engine had always run. The consortium would get its rank. The consortium would get its quarterly number.

And Calla would walk back into the chamber behind the painted sky, and Tess would be beside her, and Dren Vasik would wake in the infirmary with no memory of the pillar or the square, and Echo would smile at the nothing she saw, and somewhere in the deeper layers of the Engine, in the place where Mire had hidden whatever he had hidden, a door that had been locked for three years would have one less lock on it than it had before.

The light took her up.

Calla closed her eyes and let it.