As soon as she did, a signal reached her Razor. This beacon triggered in response to her weapon, then, though she could choose if she allowed the Razor to respond.
Curious, she let it transmit back, and a green light appeared in her vision. Coordinates a few hundred kilometers away, still within the ocean. Though her Presence warned her that finding something specifically keyed to her on the surface of a random dying world was dangerously suspicious, she followed it.
There was only one person who would leave her a message here. This might even be Ozriel’s hiding place.
That would be just like him: predict where she would end up, and then hide there, waiting for her. Waiting on a dying world would just add style, as he saw it.
She tore through the water, but was forced to stop in less than a second. A spatial crack the size of a finger stretched vertically for hundreds of meters, its edges sputtering with chaos, and its heart looking into the void. Water gushed through it in an endless waterfall, but that wasn’t what concerned her.
Cracks like these were often left behind after an Abidan’s battle.
Extending her senses as far as she could, she found other cracks, getting wider and wider as they drifted into the sky. With the chaotic interference, she couldn’t detect anything further than about a kilometer, but they might very well keep going. If this had been a battle between Judges, the spatial cracks could have gotten wide enough to swallow suns.
There was no testing that now. This Iteration’s stars had already vanished—there had only been one inhabited planet in each universe, so it was the last to disappear before the world fragmented.
She flew on, dodging other spatial cracks. If not for the chaos of the merged worlds and Limit’s corruption, she would have sensed these the second she landed in this reality.
Finally, beneath a storm of spatial cracks, she found the location of the beacon.
It waited for her beneath a city-sized dome of stone.
There was Abidan technology here, because the dome remained stable and unaffected despite the chaos of the water above and the world outside. She slipped lower, but as she got closer, a hole opened in the stone.
[It would be wiser to alert Sector Control,] her Presence said.
If it really was Ozriel down there, and she turned him in before hearing what he had to say, he would never forgive her. She drifted in through the hole.
The inside of the dome was very simple. It was all a single room, its structure reinforced by the Way to add stability, and big enough to swallow a city.
But there were no streets or buildings inside.
Only pods.
Transparent, organic pods in rows for hundreds of kilometers. All filled with people, sleeping and drifting in liquid.
The pods had been arranged in grids with space between them, so the people emerging could leave and walk away, but there were no other facilities. No shelters, no water, no plants. Each pod gave off a slight radiance, but that was the only light.
[Twelve million, four hundred forty-five thousand, six hundred thirty-two people,] her Presence reported. [And some shipping crates containing culturally significant icons.]
“Point of origin?”
[Iteration Two-one-six: Limit.]
Of course. The Abidan had evacuated the elite of Harrow, and she herself had saved a million and a half survivors of the combined world, but no one had saved the population of Limit. Their world was destined to end, so the Abidan had allowed it.
Except for Ozriel. He’d saved enough to preserve the unique genetics and cultures of a doomed world.
But there was one more feature of the space inside the dome: spatial cracks, which buzzed like a storm in the air. The structure of the building and the pods were still intact, but Ozriel must have protected them. Otherwise, the void would have swallowed them by now.
Even so, the chaotic interference was so strong here that the air crackled with it, and Suriel had to move carefully around each crack. Not that they would threaten her, but she might stick to them like iron to a magnet.
The cracks were thickest surrounding a door at the far end of the compound…a door marked with the image of a scythe.
Well, that was simple enough.
With one hand, she shoved the heavy stone door aside, and the chaos hit her like a stench. The room on the other side of the door was only as large as a one-room office, and positively black with spatial cracks, so that it looked like the weapons of two Judges had clashed in here.
Except that a conflict like that would have destroyed this shelter and most everyone else in Limit.
She couldn’t see much in the room past the nest of hissing cracks in reality, but half of a desk remained in the center. A fist-sized ball glowed blue on that table: a beacon, though all the chaos in here must have degraded it. And on the far wall, a spray of ancient blood and flesh, as though a man had exploded right before the door was sealed for a century.
[Impossible to identify remains,] her Presence reported. [Chaos and time have destroyed them beyond the point of analysis.]
The beacon was still resonating with her Razor, indicating that it held a message. She reached out to accept it, but hesitated.
Not out of reason, or to buy herself a moment to think. She was scared.
Ozriel had come here to prepare for Limit’s death. He had left this message here for her after a battle…or had he prepared the message before the battle began, stretching out past the planet?
Either way, it wasn’t good news. This message was not about to tell her that Ozriel was safe, happy, and ready to return to work.
She was afraid for herself, afraid for the Abidan, and afraid for the man she’d known even before she’d joined the Abidan Court. He had always been Ozriel to her, but there had been a time before she was Suriel, the Phoenix. They had been friends.
She accepted the message, and her senses were consumed in endless white.
This was a perfectly ordinary way to send a message in Sanctum, headquarters of the Abidan. Sharing senses and experiences was common, and crafting an experience like this would have taken Ozriel seconds. But the world of this message crackled, tarnished by damage and chaos. The world of white was speckled with imperfection, as though she watched it through grainy film, and interference was a constant hiss in her ears.
At least she wasn’t alone.
Ozriel stood before her in his polished black armor, the Mantle of Ozriel streaming behind him like a boiling cape of shadow, and the white hair running down his back. But it was all fuzzy, like a half-forgotten dream. His face blurred, though she could fill in the gaps from memory: cold and distant and grim.
In person, he had more of a sense of humor than any other Abidan she’d ever met, but he always wore an expression like a man bracing himself for terrible news.