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.”“Urna.” That was all Rune needed to hear.He closed the distance between himself and the young man in two long strides.It was all he could do not to wind his fingers into the Interrogator’s starched shirtfront.“Has he been found?” Rune demanded.Then, checking his tone, he took a step back.The last thing he needed after the failure that had been last night was to be sanctioned for insubordination.After staring at Rune for several seconds, perhaps bewildered by this passionate reaction, the young man simply shook his head.“I’m meant to take you there,” he repeated.Clearly he had been given no further details or orders.Rune took a deep breath.“Of course,” he said.Then, unable to keep the sarcasm entirely out of his voice, he added, “Do I have permission to finish dressing myself?” He gestured at the outfit still spread over the bed.He donned it quickly.He almost missed a few straps in his haste.His fingers faintly trembled as he laced up his boots.“Follow me,” the Guard said.Rune complied, following closely, though he knew the way himself.It was all he could do not to run ahead.* * * * *Hours and hours of traveling by speedy electric bus.Even the regular stops at checkpoints, where bored or unpleasant Guard members checked the papers of everyone on board, didn’t slow the journey too badly.Still, it was a long haul, and Arvra Finean drifted in and out of sleep as the miles slipped past.She didn’t know why she’d been released any more than she understood why the Guard had detained her in the first place.She continued to wonder, idly now, if any of it had to do with the alarms that had gone off at the Citadel last night.Who knew? Who the hell cared?They’d given her her clothes back.It would’ve been strange to make the trip home wearing that skimpy lingerie.She was dressed again in drab functional attire, work clothes.Only her wild hair, that spray of multicolored spikes, gave her a vibrant appearance.A few of the other passengers glanced her way because of it but nobody said a word to her, which she was just fine with.The bus passed through farms, wild country, towns.She supposed it was exciting to see the landscape changing so.Most people, she knew, didn’t travel.They worked their rotten little jobs and stayed their whole lives in whatever shit-holes they’d been born into.The Lux, she guessed, didn’t want the commoners to have freedom of movement.Might give them ideas.Might stir them up.Get too many people talking together about how lousy things were and you’d have trouble on your hands.Lucky for the Lux they had the Guard.It wasn’t that Arvra was full of revolutionary impulses.She knew folks who liked to mutter about overthrowing the Lux and establishing a new, fairer government to rule the Safe.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Anybody running anything that constituted more than a dozen people eventually turned into a despot.Hadn’t some ancient philosopher said that? Arvra, halfway dozing in her seat, supposed so.Or if nobody had ever said it quite that way, the principle remained.Power turned regular people into assholes.She blinked open her eyes.It was afternoon.None of the passengers aboard were the same as before, but she was going all the way from the Citadel to the borderlands.Going all that distance just to be Urna the Weapon’s fuck toy.And now the ride home, wondering if this time he’d gotten her pregnant.She hoped not.She couldn’t afford to have a baby, couldn’t spare the time.They passed through another checkpoint.She presented her travel papers.At least the trip was paid for.It would’ve seriously pissed her off if she’d had to fork out her own money for this.She glared at the back of the stout Guard as he stepped off the bus.The surrounding hamlet was a dismal place, the pavement cracked, the buildings of shoddy construction.Even so, it was better than where she was heading.Arvra Finean stayed awake for the last leg of the journey home.Only a handful of riders were left on the bus.She recognized two of them but said nothing to either one.Traveling to the Safe’s border didn’t put a person in a chatty mood.She saw grimly set faces, despairing eyes.She sat stiffly in her seat now as around the bus the daylight started to dim.More than the ambient light changed.There was a transformation of the air itself, a kind of deadening, a heaviness added to the atmosphere.Arvra was never sure if the effect was purely psychological.But the scene outside the bus’s windows was unlike anything she had seen during her entire excursion here.They were moving into the shadow of the Black Ship.When the bus pulled into town the driver seemed eager to get the last few passengers off as quickly as possible, grab new ones, and get the hell back on the road leading away from the border.Arvra, stepping off, didn’t blame the driver.Being so close to the Black Ship was a scary experience if you weren’t used to it.Actually, it was frightening no matter what.Arvra, though, had grown up on the border, in this very town.Having the Ship hovering so nearby was normal.“Normal,” she muttered archly to herself, standing there on the street’s crumbling asphalt, feeling the chill of the vast shadow.Looking up.Letting her brain absorb the sight.That impossibly huge mass floating there in the sky, suspended by nothing, monstrous and dark and writhing, like a nightmare made giant and organic.It filled half of the sky, straddling that entire horizon from end to end.In one direction lay the sunlit lands and, as always, she was regretting not having paid more attention to them when she’d passed through, so to store up the images to counteract the horror of this.The Black Ship proper was still several miles from the town’s limits.But the edges of the Ship weren’t still.They wriggled.They subtly undulated.You could stare up at it for hours and it would never look precisely the same from minute to minute.But you wouldn’t want to gaze at it for that long, not unless you meant to scare the piss out of yourself and guarantee a month of clammy night terrors.Yet despite the Black Ship’s evident squirmings, nobody knew whether or not the thing was alive.It had always been called the Black Ship, implying that those who’d first witnessed it hadn’t deemed it a living entity of some sort.Or maybe those Elyrian ancestors who had been unlucky enough to be there for its arrival hadn’t been able to conceive of such a thing.And, really, it was just too damn big to be living.Reality wouldn’t allow for something of that size to be alive, even something from some distant dark corner of the universe.The Passengers—well, they were alive.Arvra, however, had more firsthand experience than most civilians with what lay out there in the decaying gloom beneath the great mass of the sickly glowing Ship.But people in this town knew about the Passengers too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]