A passageway, she thought.
Keeping her eyes shut, she walked along the wall, bare palm pressed to its surface. Finally she came to it—the gap in the foundation was just below her. She opened her eyes, knelt, and pressed her palms to the floor.
The floorboards crackled to life inside of her, creaking and groaning, telling her of thousands of footfalls, leather soles and wooden soles and, sometimes, bare feet. Her skull tickled as termites and ants and other tiny insects roved through her splintering bones.
But one part of the floor was different—it was separate, and it had something screwed into it.
Hinges, thought Sancia. A door. She followed the feeling in her mind until she came to the far corner of a dusty blue rug. She pulled it aside. Underneath was an old and scarred trapdoor.
“A basement?” said Gregor.
“When the hell did we get a basement?” asked Orso.
“The scriving library was renovated years ago,” said Berenice. “Much of the old walls were torn down and built over. Artifacts are still around—doors that go nowhere, things like that.”
“Well, this goes somewhere,” said Sancia. She wedged her fingers underneath it and lifted the trapdoor up.
Below was a short flight of musty stairs, which ended in a small tunnel that ran behind the wall. It was completely dark at the bottom.
“Here,” said Berenice, holding out her light to Sancia.
Sancia put her glove back on—aware, suddenly, of Orso’s careful gaze—and took it from her. “Thanks,” she said, and she dropped down, holding the scrived light.
She touched a bare hand to the wall. The tunnel spoke to her, darkness and dust and cool, stale moisture. She followed its path to a small, rickety ladder, which led to an old crawlspace, an interstitial segment of an older floor plan, walled off and forgotten. And at the far back was…
<…await to trace my path in the pool of clay and wax…When will my mate begin to dance again? When shall we move, when shall we sway?>
<There it is,> said Sancia. <Finally. I’ll crawl up and swipe the thing.> She crawled forward.
<Wait,> said Clef. <Stop.>
She stopped. <What?>
<Move forward…just a bit. A foot. No more.>
She did so.
<Shit,> said Clef. <There’s something else. It’s almost overpowered by the listening rig. Hear it?>
Again, a voice emerged from the mutterings—but this one was not the recording rig.
<…I wait. I wait for the signal, for the token, for the sign,> said this new rig. <How I long to see the sign, how I long to feel it press upon me. But if not…If my lands are broached by those who do not bear the sign, oh, oh, the spark I shall make, bright and flashing, hot and sizzling, a brief, wondrous star…>
<What the hell is that?> asked Sancia.
<I don’t know,> said Clef. <It’s back there with the recording rig, though. Right next to it. I can’t show you what it is, though—only what the scrivings do.>
Sancia held the scrived light up, but she couldn’t see that far back into the crawlspace. She thought about it, then pressed a bare hand into the wood.
She felt wood, and nails, and dust, and termites…and she felt the rig back there, or what she thought was the rig. It was some kind of iron stand that was quite heavy—she guessed the roll of wax or clay or whatever it wrote on was big.
But beside it was something else quite heavy. A barrel, she thought…Wooden and round and filled with something…
She smelled the air, and thought she smelled something sulfurous.
She froze. <Clef—so…this thing…if someone gets close to it without the right, uh, signal or whatever…>
<Then it makes a spark,> said Clef.
There was a pause.
<Wait,> said Clef.
<Yeah,> said Sancia.
<It’s a bomb, isn’t it.>
<Yeah. It’s a goddamn bomb. A big goddamn bomb.>
Another pause.
<I’m, uh, going to walk away slowly,> said Sancia. <Really slowly.>
<Good idea,> said Clef. <Great idea. I like this idea.>
She slowly withdrew back down the passageway. <I guess there’s no way to break the scrivings,> she said.
<Not without touching it,> said Clef. <I can see what it is, learn a bit about what it does, and I can show you—but I can’t tamper with it without contact.>
<So. We’re scrummed.>
<Unless you want to risk being blown into pudding, then yeah, basically.>
She sighed. <Well. Let’s go tell the others, then.>
* * *
“So we can’t get close to it,” said Gregor. “We’re stuck here.”
“Right,” said Sancia, sitting on the floor in the dark, brushing dust off of her arms and knees.
Orso stood in silence, staring down into the dark passageway. Ever since she’d returned, he hadn’t said a word.
“Surely there must be a way around the device?” said Berenice.
Gregor shook his head. “I’ve dealt with scrived mines in the wars. Unless you have the right signaling device on you, you’ll be pulped.”
“So we can’t get to the listening rig,” said Berenice. “But that can’t be that critical, yes? I mean, we generally know all the things we’ve divulged to these people, right, sir?”
Orso didn’t answer. He just kept staring down into the passageway.
<I don’t like that,> said Clef.
<Me neither.>
“Uh,” said Berenice, disconcerted. “Well. I meant we could try to look at the rig itself to identify the person who made it—but I’ve been working on the gravity plates all afternoon, and I still have nothing.”
“Then we focus on what we know,” said Sancia. “We know the rig’s down there. We know it’s working. We know everyone got to see Orso at this damn meeting, and they know he’s alive now. So someone will be coming. Soon.”
“And when they come,” said Gregor, “we either capture them or follow them. Following them is my preference—it can reveal so many more things…” He sighed. “But I suppose capturing and questioning them is our only choice. We’ve no idea what campo this agent of theirs would return to, nor which enclave within the campo itself! We’d need sachets and keys and all sorts of credentials…”
<Sounds like fun to me,> said Clef.
<You sure you want to do that, Clef? We don’t know what kind of obstacles we’d run into.>
<I told you. I don’t want to sit uselessly in your pocket all day, kid.>
“I…I can talk to my black market contacts,” said Sancia. “I can get sachets to get into the campos.”
“You can get that many sachets?” asked Gregor, surprised.
The idea was preposterous. But maybe they didn’t know that. “Yeah.”
“And credentials?” asked Berenice.
“If you pay me enough,” said Sancia, “I can get you into the campos.”
Clef laughed. <That’s an easy profit.>
“Then I think it’s settled,” said Gregor. “You get your sachets, we set our trap, and wait. Right?”
“Right,” said Berenice.
“Right,” said Sancia.
They all waited, and turned to Orso.
“Sir?” asked Berenice.
Finally, Orso moved, turning to look at Sancia. “That was…quite some performance,” he said quietly.
“Thanks?” she said.
He looked her over. “There’s a simple way to stay alive as a hypatus, you know—never include a scriving in your designs that you don’t completely understand. And, girl…I must admit, I don’t understand you at all.”
“You don’t need to,” said Sancia. “You just need to understand the results I get you.”
“No,” said Orso. “I need a lot more than that. For example—how do I know you’re telling the truth about any of this?”
“Huh?” she said.
“You go into the dark, say you found the rig, but we can’t get close to it. If we go down there and look ourselves, we die. There’s no way to check. That all seems convenient to me.”
“I’ve helped you before,” she said. “I found the damn rig in the statue!”
“But how did you do that? You never told us. You haven’t told us a damned thing!”
“Orso,” said Gregor. “I believe we can trust her.”
“How can we trust her if we don’t know how she’s doing what she’s doing? Finding a rig is one thing, but seeing through walls, finding the trapdoor…I mean, she went straight to it like a dog on the hunt!”
<Uh oh,> said Clef.
Orso turned to her. “You figured all this out just by listening?”
“Yeah?”
“And touching the walls?”
“Yeah? What of it?”
He stared at her for a long, long time. “Where are you from, Sancia?” he demanded.
“Foundryside,” she said defiantly.
“But where originally?”
“Back east.”
“But where east?”
“Go east enough and you’ll find it.”
“Why are you so evasive?”
“Because it’s none of your damn business.”
“But it is my business. You made yourself my business when you stole my key.” He stepped closer, squinting at her, his eye tracing over the scar on the side of her head. “I don’t need you to tell me,” he said quietly. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. I already know.”
She tensed up. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like a murmur.
“Silicio,” said Orso. “The Silicio Plantation. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”
The next thing she knew, Sancia had her hands around his throat.
* * *