“Kind of like the sludge poop,” Druck commented.

  “Miss Van Gogh,” one of the guards said, eyes flicking to us, clearly confused by our presence. “Is everything okay?” The other guard’s hand slowly moved toward the pistol on his hip.

  “Van Gogh?” Matt said. “Keep, why did you pronounce it Vango?”

  “An honest mistake,” Keep replied.

  “Bullshit.”

  He shrugged. “I thought if I called her Van Gogh you might be more inclined to trust her.”

  “Because she has the same name as a famous artist?” I said.

  “No offense, kid, but I’m willing to bet you’ve trusted people for less.”

  “You aren’t wrong,” I admitted. “But that was before coming to the Spiral.”

  “Bron, move that hand from that piece before you wind up impaled on the chandelier,” Van Gogh ordered. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Just forget I ever mentioned making a quick sixty million.’

  “Yes, ma’am,” the guard replied as Bron’s hand fell away from his gun.

  “Our agreement was to make sure this group gets to New Haydrun,” she continued. “Is the shipment ready to go?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said again. “Klavin’s downstairs. He’s got everything set up already. He wasn’t expecting to smuggle organics, though.”

  She glanced back at us, uncomfortable with the constant reminder that she had intended to see us captured or killed. “Yeah, well, plans change.” She waved us toward the openings in the steel cage. “Shall we?”

  The two guards made sure to keep their hands where we could see them as we passed into the Archives. The narrow lobby led to a set of four openings, each flanked by marble columns. Beyond them, a large room had once offered dozens of computer workstations to access the datastore. Unfortunately, the roof had collapsed on the space, crushing most of the terminals and leaving everything covered in rubble and dust. A tarp was erected over the hole, preventing further water damage inside the building.

  “This way,” Van Gogh said, leading us toward a normal wood door on the left. She pushed it open as we approached, pointing us to a stone stairwell leading into the building’s basement. “All the way to the bottom.”

  We kept going, ending up in a hallway lit by overhead strips of LEDs, with large, open rooms on both sides. Every room had the same contents. Large, dark machines sprouted from a perforated metal floor, wires bundled and snaking away beneath the grating. Dark and lifeless, but I still recognized them as data servers.

  “Those came from Earth,” Keep said. “They were on the colony ship when it arrived in the Spiral.”

  “Do they still work?” I asked.

  “They might, but all the data they kept here was transferred to the Hypernet. Now, it all fits on a chip the size of your finger.”

  “The power requirements are too heavy for what we’re able to siphon from the overhead conduits,” Van Gogh added. “Now they’re gravestones. The past is dead.”

  “The past is coming back from the dead,” I said. “The same power that caused all of this. You already got a taste of it.”

  “Ben,” Keep said in a warning tone.

  “What do you mean?” Van Gogh asked.

  “The sigils,” I replied, holding up my hand and activating the rings. “The destruction of Old Haydrun came from these. Sedaya offers sixty million for our heads with one hand, while doing everything he can to make full use of the power of the sigils with the other. You think you’re getting rich, but you’re digging your own grave.”

  “What about you?” she replied. “Why do you have them if they’re so bad?”

  “Because we wouldn’t stand a chance without them,” I answered. “Like you just saw.”

  She nodded. “Why are you telling me this?”

  I shrugged. “We need all the friends we can get.”

  “She isn’t your friend,” Keep said.

  “But maybe she could be,” I responded. “Because staying alive is more valuable than sixty million electro.”

  Van Gogh laughed. “Only just. But I hear you. I’ll keep what you said in mind if you ever come back to my domain.”

  We reached the end of the hallway, passing through another door into a large storeroom. A bare-chested, muscular man stood in front of a long metal wagon, currently empty. Just beyond that, a metal grate covered a small hole in the wall, three feet in diameter.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Druck said when he saw the grate. “I thought we’d at least be able to stand.”

  “How are we going to make it to the surface without getting filthy?” Gia asked.

  “Miss Van Gogh,” the man said, eyes sweeping over us. “Jackson is ready on the other end. He gave the all clear.”

  “Thank you, Klavin,” she replied, turning to us. “Speaking of graves, here’s how this works. You all need to pile into that cart there. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t go. As soon as you’re in, Klavin’s going to drop a lead cover over the cart. It’s thick and heavy enough to block any potential scans from the Royal Guard. Tracking organics is one of the primary methods they use to locate active tunnels. Any questions?”

  David raised his hand. “How long will we be in there? I’m not claustrophobic, but I don’t like being so close to other people.”

  “If everything goes well? Thirty minutes, tops.”

  David’s face paled, but he nodded his acceptance.

  “You can lose the rags to save a little space,” Van Gogh suggested.

  “Good idea,” Matt said, slipping out of his threadbare coat. The rest of us followed suit.

  “Who wants the bottom?” Druck asked.

  “We’re going to have to Tetris this one if we want everyone to fit,” I said.

  “If I had known this would be in my future, I might have eaten fewer donuts,” David said. “Nah, probably not. It’s a good thing for you all that I happen to be a Tetris master.” He walked over to the cart, looking in before looking at us. “Zar, you’re on the bottom, on your right shoulder.”

  “Damn,” Quasar said. “Here goes nothing.” She climbed into the cart, laying on her side.

  “Gia, Ben, you’re next. You both need to lay flat facing one another, heads to the sides.

  “I can take Ben’s place,” Druck volunteered.

  “Ugh,” Gia commented.

  “It has to be Ben or Alter to create a flat plane to build the second.”

  “I don’t know if my back can take the pressure,” Gia said.

  “You can stay here,” Keep remarked.

  “I’ll go on the bottom,” I said. “To cushion you.”

  She nodded, still not thrilled. Neither was I.

  I climbed into the cart next to Quasar. Gia lowered herself slowly onto me, putting her face next to mine. It would have been kind of intimate if we weren’t about to be crushed under the weight of the others.

  “Shaq, slip in beneath Gia’s feet,” David said.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” Shaq buzzed. I felt his weight on my ankles a moment later.

  “Druck, Avelus, you need to make a C-shape on top, slightly on your sides. Matt, you and I will get into the remaining space. Sorry, man, but you’ll have to spoon me.”

  “Awesome,” Matt said.

  “Alter, you’ll go on top. We’ll have to leave the packs behind.”

  “There isn’t enough room for three layers,” Klavin said.

  “Yes there is,” David replied.

  “David, there’s a box in Zar’s pack,” I said. “It needs to come with us.”

  “I’ll grab it,” he said.

  “Well, I guess you get a million electro plus a nice haul of guns,” Keep said before climbing into the cart. “Don’t even think about trying anything because we’re in this sarcophagus. I can blow this thing open without much effort.”

  “I believe you,” Van Gogh said. “No tricks. I just want you out of here.”

  Keep and Druck took their places in the cart. David joined them, holding my box. His weight pushed most of the air out of my lungs, making it harder to breathe. Matt climbed in after him, forced to wrap his arms around the other man and squeeze in close. Alter climbed in on top of them.

  “The lid won’t seal like this,” Klavin said.

  “Just lower it onto my back,” Alter said.

  “Alter, are you okay with this?” I managed to squeeze out.

  “It’s the only way,” she replied.

  Klavin grunted as he picked up the cart’s lid, muscles flexing to position it before lowering it onto Alter’s back. With less light getting in, I couldn’t see her release her persona, reverting to her raw, alien form. I felt her tentacles snaking down to my legs as she flattened out.

  “There’s not a lot of air in there,” Van Gogh said. “So breathe as lightly as you can. Good luck up there. I mean it. And thanks for the guns and the funds.”

  She was still laughing as the cover finished settling over us.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Are we almost there yet?” Druck whispered, his voice strained by the pressure of having us all crushed inside the cart.

  “Shut up,” Quasar replied. “You’re using up our air.”

  “What air?” David said. “I can barely breathe.”

  “Exactly,” Matt responded. “All of you zip it.”

  Silence fell back over the inside of the cart. I had kept my eyes closed since we lost the light, doing my best to ignore the sensation of being pressed down like the bottom of a hamburger bun. It had worked for the first ten minutes or so, until my muscles started aching and my brain kept telling me I needed to move, if only a little. Except I couldn’t move. None of us could. To make things worse, it was starting to get hot, our combined body heat contained in the airtight container. I kept reminding myself this was the only way to get out of Old Haydrun and move the plot forward. No matter how uncomfortable we were. No matter how much it hurt, we had to endure it.

  A few more minutes passed. My breath was already strained. I could only take in small gasps of thinning air, not even enough to satisfy my increasingly burning lungs. I tried to pull in one more, only to find that there was none left. The others gasped around me, experiencing the same thing.

  We needed to get out of here. Now.

  “Keep,” I managed to squeeze out, wondering as I did if it was a bad idea. I knew he heard me because his sleeve began glowing, providing just enough light through the spaces between our bodies for me to make out Gia’s ear in my peripheral vision, and Matt’s shoulder overhead. One of Alter’s tentacles squeezed into the space as well, the translucent material diffusing some of the light.

  He might have tried to speak his focus word. All I heard was a light hiss repeated a few times. My lungs were on fire by then, my body desperate to convulse. I felt Gia’s muscles quivering on top of me as she reacted the same way. Sudden panic threatened to overwhelm me. I thought I could tell the cart was moving through the vibrations in the bottom, but now I wasn’t so sure. What if Van Gogh had closed the lid and just left us there to suffocate? But she knew we could break out, so why would she do that?

  Now I wasn’t so sure we could break out. If Keep or I couldn’t speak a focus word, we couldn’t push the cover off our tomb. But that didn’t make any sense. The focus word was supposed to be a helper. We weren’t actual wizards casting spells that required incantations. The spoken part was performative. Procedural. Keep had to know that. Didn’t he?

  Two more soft hisses from him suggested to me that maybe he didn’t. In all of his thousand years, he had probably never used sigiltech without vocalizing what he wanted to do. The connection between his brain, body, and the catalyst probably didn’t work without that missing piece.

  There was no air. We were all dying. The cart remained sealed.

  I was the only one who could fix it.

  I did my best to calm down. I could get us out of this. There was no reason to worry. The ring with the push sigil lit up. Closing my eyes again, I visualized the cart’s lid, creating a clear mental image of it. My hand tingled, telling me the catalyst was active and ready. Instead of speaking a focus word to execute the action, I pictured the cover being shoved off my mental image of the cart.

  At first, I didn’t think anything had happened. I still couldn’t breathe, and when I opened my eyes the cover was still in place. But my ring was glowing brightly and I sensed the energy coursing through my blood, feeding the sigil through some kind of quantum chaos, as David had described it. Gia shuddered on top of me, convulsing as she suffocated. Quasar twitched beside me, and I worried that Shaq, with his smaller lungs and faster heartbeat, might already be dead.

  A woody groan interrupted the friction of our clothing as we writhed. It gained in intensity, building up slowly, as though I was turning a dial on the push instead of blasting it out full bore. Keep had told me that was impossible. Then again, he also believed he couldn’t use the technology without the focus word. Maybe he didn’t know as much about the sigils as he thought he did.

  I fought to intensify my focus on the push, increasing the power a little more. The groaning increased in volume, the cover pulling at its anchors, trying to escape them. A little more force. A little more effort. I could almost feel the strain as though I were physically pressing on the lid, muscles straining to remove it. Only there was hardly any strain. My hand tingled but wasn’t going numb. The power flowed freely, out of the ring and up at the barrier blocking us from life-giving air.

  I turned the dial a little higher. Maybe a seven out of ten. One side of the cover popped and my efforts to breathe were rewarded. Cool air flowed into the cart and we all sucked in the oxygen, gulping it down. Instead of pushing harder to remove the cover, I held steady, keeping it raised enough so we could breathe without removing it completely. I could hear the cart’s wheels now too, rolling smoothly along the tunnel.

  “Did you do that, kid?” Keep asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I still am.”

  “How?”

  The question brought a smile to my face. “I guess imminent death is a better teacher than you are.”

  “Sink or swim, eh Bennie?”

  “It seems that way.”

  I continued holding the push with a level of control I had never even approached in the months since Keep and I started training. It felt so easy. Almost too easy. Every second that I used the catalyst was another second I could find myself paralyzed. I didn’t worry about it as much because Keep was right there. He could calm me if I had another episode of sigil sickness.

  A few more minutes passed. The corridor began to brighten, a literal light at the end of the tunnel. I pushed slightly harder on the cover, lifting it a little more. “Alter, you should shift back now.”

  One of her tentacles brushed my cheek gently before retreating, her central mass thickening again as she remolded herself like clay, transforming back into her Pilot Alter form. She had just about completed the metamorphosis when the cart came to a stop. I immediately dropped the push as a hand grabbed the edge of the lid, lifting it away.

  “Hurry up,” a deep voice urged. “It looks like the seal on the lid broke during the trip up. If the Blues were watching, they’ll be here any minute.”

  Alter jumped out of the cart, helping Matt and David out while Keep and Druck spilled out on their own. I was relieved when Shaq scampered free, hopping onto my shoulder, and Gia picked herself up off me.

  “Was it good for you, Captain?” she asked playfully before taking David’s hand. It seemed the lack of oxygen had made her a little punch-drunk.

  “Yeah, great,” I replied flatly, accepting Matt’s offered hand and climbing out of the cart.

  Quasar turned flat onto her back, remaining there for a second to enjoy the freedom to draw a few deep breaths.

  “Come on,” grunted the man who stood nearest the exit. Tall and lean, there was something about him that made me wonder if he was fully human. “Spotters say the Blues are headed this way. Unless you want to be arrested, you need to clear out.”

  “We definitely do not want to be arrested,” Druck said as Quasar crawled out of the cart.

  “Then go,” he said. “And get as far away from here as you can. When they see the empty cart, they’ll know we smuggled people. They won’t be happy to come away empty-handed, and they'll be looking for you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Keep said. “I know where to go.”

  We followed Keep out the door and down another short passageway to a stairwell. More of Van Gogh’s people were stationed there, and they waved us past, guiding us up the steps, along a few more hallways and out into a back alley between a pair of buildings. I looked up as we exited outside, happy to see daylight.

  “This way,” Keep said. “Shaq, you need to get out of sight. Jaggers are incredibly rare here.”

  “Okay,” Shaq buzzed. He left my shoulder, disappearing beneath my jacket and moving into my sleeve. His body flattened along my bicep, creating a slight bulge that I didn’t think anyone would notice.

  Keep led us along the alley, away from the closest street. Glancing over, I spotted dozens of people walking past, dressed in a wide assortment of styles that wouldn’t have looked out of place in LA. The only thing that really drove home that we weren’t in Los Angeles was the Jiba-ki that crossed with them.

  “Cool,” David remarked, no doubt getting a glimpse of the catlike alien at the same time I did. “I guess we aren’t too far from Pandora.”

  I looked back a second time just as we reached the end of the alley, about to join the other pedestrians along what appeared to be a much smaller street. A Royal Guard aerial personnel carrier landed at the other end, two full units of Guards pouring out from doors on both sides. One unit headed for the front of the building we had just left; the other started down the alley.

  “Don’t look at them,” Quasar snapped, getting my attention. “Act like you live here.”

  I turned my gaze away from the Guards, sticking tight to the others as we entered the flow of foot traffic. The wider thoroughfare offered a much fuller view of New Haydrun, and it took all of my willpower to keep my eyes straight rather than gawking at the surrounding buildings like a tourist. Even so, I couldn’t help noticing them in my peripheral vision. All glass and supertall, a lot of them vanished into the clouds thousands of feet above.