Zhen ran across the darkened hotel lobby as fast as she could, bare feet on green tile. The chairs at the restaurant were piled on tables; one sleepy security guy at the side door didn’t see her pass by. She kept to the shadows and headed toward the expo hall. The main door should have been shut. But it wasn’t. It was wedged open a fraction by a credit-card-sized triangle of black plastic. Just enough to hold it, not enough to attract attention. Zhen pulled the door toward her and slipped through.

  In the dark, it was hard to orient herself. The floating survival blimp was to the… she squinted… yes, to the west of the hall. That meant Weapons was to her right. Medical to her left. Ahead, in Making Fire, there was a small soft light. And people talking in low voices. Keeping behind cover of the expo panels, Zhen crept toward the light. She passed racks of self-loading and self-cleaning rifles, rifles with smart sights, a visor that would tell you which of the animals and plants you were looking at were actually edible, home defense systems with automated firing patterns “for defending your home against foxes,” which everyone knew meant “defending your home against people of color.” She was getting closer to the talking, to the lights that were converging from several different directions at once. She rounded a display of portable hides and cover, and suddenly across the aisle from her were two people, carrying a single diffuse light between them. Zhen ducked back into shadow but she needn’t have worried—they were too wrapped up in their own conversation to notice her.

  It was Selah Nommik and it was Zimri Actual Nommik.

  Selah said: “Don’t shit where you eat, Zimri. She’s my fucking massage therapist. You utter git.”

  Zimri said: “I’m not getting into details, OK? I’m not getting involved with these semantics.”

  And they were past her, walking toward the other glowing lights. She followed, keeping tight to the darkest spots.

  The other lights were waiting for Selah and Zimri. Martha was there. The globe of light illuminating her face from underneath turned her softness into a kind of radiance. She had paper files with her. Had to be something too secret to put on the cloud and send via email. She stood with Ellen Bywater and Lenk Sketlish. What the shit was going on here? These people met all the time, didn’t they? Presidential forums and press conferences. They had houses and private islands. What could make them meet in the middle of the night in a deserted expo hall? They were at the base of the mountain, Zhen realized—the fiberglass construction with snowy peaks.

  Ellen said: “Are they in there?”

  Martha nodded. “Just the one making the sale.”

  “Well, how much do they want?” said Zimri. “They haven’t shown it works yet. There hasn’t been a live test.”

  Selah said: “We’re just here to listen, Zimri.”

  Lenk said: “There’ll be an opportunity for a live test.”

  They all looked ordinary, close-up. Ordinary but rich, with all the things rich people had. Good skin, good teeth, bodies cared for by personal trainers and personal chefs. Clothes that were crisp even when they were soft, like the artist had used a really sharp pencil in drawing their lines. They weren’t beautiful people—even Lenk, the most theoretically good-looking of them, had a dissatisfied quality that made him almost ugly. But they were rich, and their money had outlined them with precision and neatness.

  Ellen Bywater reviewed her briefing pack and muttered under her breath. Zimri Nommik shrugged spasmodically and barely took his eyes from the screen of his AnvilTab. Lenk Sketlish looked around the silent, empty concourse as if hunting for something. Zhen ducked away from his gaze. He was looking at her. She was certain he was going to point, to say, “There’s a spy,” but he broke away suddenly and said: “It’s time.”

  There was a crack in the world and the crack was light. A door opened behind them, a blast of photons as loud as an explosion.

  “Come in,” said a male voice from within the mountain. “I’m Si Packship and I’m here to ask you one important question. How do you know when to go? Because by the time you know the world’s ending, it’s already too late.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Zimri, “we’re not even inside yet.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Martha. “Mr. Packship doesn’t want to waste any of your valuable time.”

  Martha looked out into the dark for a moment and then closed the mountain and Zhen was left outside.

  Zhen waited for a couple of hours, but no one came out and she could hear nothing even though she put her ear to the mountain and listened. She tried to feel for the crack of the door, but the thing was so perfectly constructed—all rough edges and crags—that you’d never have known there was an opening if you hadn’t seen it.

  Eventually she found somewhere to rest, somewhere she could observe them when they came out. But at 7 a.m. she woke with the rising sun in the ultralight hammock strung between two girders and had to sneak around the back of several exhibits to avoid awkward questions from the early-morning arrivals already letting themselves into the expo hall with hot coffee and high hopes.

  Zhen went back to Martha’s suite. There was a note waiting for her on the bedside table on thick cream paper in blue fountain-pen strokes: the note Martha had been writing when Zhen woke.

  Had to head off. I’ve given you a little gift. Your sort of thing. I think you’ll get a kick out of it. This way you have to see me again. xx M PS: Special Wi-Fi for this floor.

  There was a log-in for the internet etched into a thin steel card.

  There was no gift, though. No little box, no book, not even a text message. There was the hotel room, paid for until tomorrow even though Martha had gone and the concierge didn’t know where. Zhen logged on and paid some bills, sent some emails, watched some of the new Crash Pad. She saw that the social media storm about Enochites was growing. Someone had put up a video of the whole interview with Martha and—because this was the way the internet rushed to leave out the middle of a story—instead of being fascinated that Lenk Sketlish’s PA had been part of a religious cult, conservatives had decided that Lai Zhen was deliberately trying to humiliate a woman who’d suffered for her beliefs. There was a small but worrying crossover between this group and white supremacists, and some AI-generated images were now circulating of Zhen being mauled by bears with dicks for eyes due to a complex internet joke she’d once understood. And naturally, there was a second group of left-wing people who felt that using a queer woman of color in this way was dumb, prejudiced, and racist in itself and who were responding with images of the eye-dick bears having their brains blown out. The internet of Medlar and Fantail and Anvil was designed to cut away the middle. There were no clicks or eyeballs in the sensible, reasoned middle ground, and all the money in the world in encouraging users to rush to treat the extremes as if they were the center.

  Zhen spent more than an hour typing up a statement—she regretted her mistake about Enoch, she understood why people felt angry, she wouldn’t do it that way again. Not enough to calm down anyone who was determined to be furious, but what ever would be? Truthful, which had to be enough. She locked herself out of the accounts where most of the abuse was being hurled at her, changed her passwords, and sent the new randomized ones to Marius. She’d been here before. Do a sensible statement, and then just don’t look for a while. It’ll die down. She needed to go and do some shit in the real world for a while.

  In the circumstances it was understandable that Zhen had heard the word “prophet,” thought about it for a moment, and then almost instantly forgotten it. That it had taken her months to remember that another name for a prophet is an augur.

  7. three things happened at once

  Three things happened at once when Lai Zhen released her pincer grip on the soft plastic tube of coolant.

  The first was that the temperature went down by about ten degrees so suddenly that Zhen’s skin goose bumped and she started to shiver. The second was that the woman let out an animal sound quickly cut off. The third was that Zhen’s wrist screen started to beep urgently. She breathed twice inside her T-shirt. There was a scent: strong, saline, mineral. She pinched the top of the tube again. She couldn’t hear anything but the beeping. She pulled the T-shirt down.

  The woman was frozen solid. No, not frozen. Her skin glittered, white and hard. Her face was carved from pale crystal; her hands were brittle, her posture rigid. Around her feet and Zhen’s, some of the not-snow drifted and dripped, melting and turning to slurry. Zhen stood up. The woman must have breathed it in, a huge lungful. It must have penetrated every tissue in her body very swiftly. Paramagnetic salts.

  Zhen looked at her wrist screen, careful not to release her pincer grip on the tube. It was AUGR, suggesting she should thrust the end into a small circular valve on the floor where it would drain away harmlessly. Zhen gingerly twisted the cold tube, flipped up the lid of the drainage valve, and pushed it in. She listened to the sound of her breath. No one screamed and nothing seemed bad. Good enough.

  The crystallized figure of the woman was looking down, gun coated in ice pointed at the place where Zhen had squatted. She’d have to squeeze past her to get out. On her wrist, AUGR showed Zhen a map of the mall with a pulsating red dot marked exit. Zhen didn’t want to touch the salt statue commemorating “someone trying to kill her for a really dumb reason.” She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands, tipped her head back, pressed her torso against the metal wall to slide behind the woman. As she passed, she breathed directly into the statue’s face—her breath came back to her in a wave and she inhaled the cold chemical smell off the woman’s frozen features. She didn’t look like a bad person, although what does a bad person really look like? Your mind is in shock, Zhen said to herself. The scent of piss was still noticeable on her jeans. She’d have liked to go through the woman’s pockets, find out her name. She looked so human, so determined and surprised.

  “Sorry,” Zhen whispered as she passed, the word bouncing off the statue’s face with a bitter, chilly scent. She looked into the woman’s white-rimed eyes. For a moment, she thought she saw a hint of movement in there, an echo of pain. She shuffled her feet another inch forward. Her toe caught the side of the statue’s foot and it began to topple. Zhen threw herself sideways as the woman crashed down.

  She shattered in a burst of cold breath and salt crystals that looked like steam rising. Underneath the surface white coating of salt, her flesh was chunks of red frozen meat, which bled onto the floor almost immediately. She’d broken into five or six large pieces—head to one side, legs and feet to another, torso snapped in two, the hand holding the gun skidded to a halt beside Zhen’s foot.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from the hand holding the gun. It looked perfect. Human. And: shit. There on the first finger of the right hand, yes, clear as day. The Mark of Enoch, tattooed around the finger where a ring would go. She’d seen it often enough in the angry posts and vicious videos that had been made about Zhen while she was briefly the internet’s main character. It looked like an elongated key, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Enoch; people had invented it and taken it on after he’d died. Some people got it because they thought it was pretty, but on a frozen hand holding an actual gun, it seemed pretty clear-cut.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said out loud. “Fuck. Fuck.” She hadn’t meant to speak. She wanted to cry but one shoulder heave and a choked gasp was all she could manage. You needed to be a lot more relaxed than this to cry.

  AUGR spoke into her ear: “I’m sorry, Lai Zhen. It was the only way to remove the obstacle.”

  Zhen backed a few feet away from the torso. She didn’t want to be near it, but it didn’t feel safe to leave. She looked at her wrist screen.

  Zhen said: “What the fuck are you?”

  AUGR said: “You received me as a gift and without proper instruction. There is no time to give you full instruction now. AUGR is a highly flexible algorithm set that monitors current events. It is a piece of predictive, protective software. Its job is to keep you alive.”

  8. like a fucking stalker

  In a tunnel under a tube station in East London, excavations for the Elizabeth Line had uncovered what was widely accepted to be the most complete Temple of Orpheus outside Italy. It dated from the dying of the light: the period when Roman forces were pulling out of Britain and the old saw that the young would know less than they did. They did not have the skills or the resources to teach the Roman sciences, technologies—even literacy—to the children. It was a terrifying time and the Temple of Orpheus showed it. The mosaic floors depicted stories of the end of hope: Dido hurling herself from the walls of Carthage, Pentheus torn apart by the forces of unreason, wise King Oedipus putting out his own eyes. The story of Orpheus is the story of a poet, a musician, an augur—someone who taught humanity the arts of medicine, writing, and agriculture—trying to rescue just one person from the all-devouring forces of death. It is the story of his failing.

  * * *

  Zhen had been coming to this place for nearly a decade; she’d written her master’s thesis on these damp tunnels and vaulted arches—not a fact she ever shared with her online community, for there had to be some part of herself she kept private. She’d decided at DEMOlition that she should be less online for a while as the nonsense on the internet settled down. So she was back here, where people knew her, at the celebration party for the completed preservation work on the murals in the two upper galleries. What she didn’t expect was to see Martha Einkorn there.

  It was a wild night. Give archaeologists corporate money to celebrate and see what you get. In this case, they had an East London art piece. On black bungee cords suspended from the scaffolding that still covered all but five of the arches, two men swung together, met, held hands, then somersaulted as one man used the other’s thighs to push off into an acrobatic arc through the curved space. Italian disco music from the 1970s played on huge speakers, giving the whole performance—coming together, pulling apart, using each other to launch even farther—the air of a comedy. It was warm enough in the arches despite the dirty snow and slush outside. There was always something going on in London: tonight, three nights after the end of DEMOlition, this party thrown by the East London Archaeological Survey in honor of sponsors who hadn’t turned up and wouldn’t turn up had been the most appealing item on the menu. There was always another chance to see the temple, but every chance was good. People knew her here; home turf, friendly. No one would care when she got exhausted from talking to other humans and let herself through the side door into the underworld, the lower galleries where the mosaics got really weird.

  It wasn’t a large event; there must have been about a hundred people there. But, as the crowd shifted, Zhen saw that one of them was Martha. Of course. Fantail was on the list of sponsors. She had no time to compose her face or decide whether she actually wanted to see her. It had been three days, definitely not long enough to send another text if she wanted to look cool. Above their heads, the acrobats flipped over in unison. Martha stepped backward to get a better view. She looked behind her. She met Zhen’s eyes. Here I am, thought Zhen, standing a few meters behind you like a fucking stalker.

  Martha blinked. Zhen could feel that her face looked idiotic but couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Smile? Raise her eyebrows in surprise? Try to look bored or even disdainful, like the kind of cool girl you’d enjoy having as your girlfriend because she’d never, ever bother you? She somehow tried all of those at once and she knew she was making the exact face that trolls online told her made her look like a donkey. Great. She waited for Martha to smile faintly and turn back to the man next to her. But Martha didn’t. She said a couple of words to her companion, who melted into the crowd. And Martha Einkorn pushed through the people to Zhen.

  “What are the chances?”

  “Sorry,” said Zhen, “are you following me? Because this is not cool. I am a very important, significant person and you can’t keep harassing me like this.”

  Martha laughed, a dark, husky rasp.

  “Lenk’s foundation is a sponsor. He’s in Borneo. I thought I’d hang around for this. Sounded intriguing. Ideas and civilizations that just disappeared, trying to bring the temple back from the brink of destruction. It’s not a problem, but did you know I was going to be here?”

  Zhen drew in a breath. “Oh no. You don’t want to play with me on this one.”

  “I mean if you did, it’s still nice.”

  Zhen wiggled her jaw from side to side.

  “You wanna see my master’s thesis on Orphic Influences on Early Christianity as Evidenced by the Orphic Temple at Seven Kings?”

  “I mean… yeah?”

  Zhen smartflashed the whole document to the screen in the cuff of Martha’s immaculate cream jacket. Martha flipped through the first few pages.

  “Seriously?” said Martha. “This isn’t some quick faked-up AI thing for a joke?”

  “I’m actually on the advisory board here. You can ask anyone.”

  “So this is… a genuine meet-cute?”

  “Re-meet-cute, I think you’ll find. Hey, do you want to see the weird mosaics?”

  “My God, I’ve never wanted anything more.”

  “Never?”

  Martha grinned and put out her hand. Zhen took it. They fit together, palm to palm.

  Downstairs, Zhen flicked on the floodlights. The real problem down here was keeping the river Roding from finding its way into the temple. Half of the mosaic pavements had been barely uncovered—the discovery of the lower floor itself and the steps down to what must have been the most sacred part of the structure, meant for initiates only, had been unexpected and exciting. Zhen led Martha by the hand across the slippery planks placed on risers to protect the pavement and toward the massive stone at the center of the high-ceilinged room.