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.“In there,” he said, and pushed her into a small windowless room.As the door clanged shut, Li realized he had locked her into one of the lab’s old holding cells.It was a box.A box with soundproofed walls, a metal-sheathed door, with no furniture or windows or running water.A box built for a person.She heard footsteps echo beyond the door and the clang of another door slamming shut.Then silence.A scrap of memory floated into her mind: a ghost story about a group of kids who had come up to the labs and locked one of their friends into a holding cell as a prank.They had been called back down to Shantytown in some childishly implausible plot twist.When they returned the next morning, they couldn’t find the cell their friend was in.They ran up and down the windowless corridors, trying every rusty lock, throwing open the food slots of a thousand dark bolt-holes.The boy was dead when they finally found him.Killed, according to the internal logic of the tale, by the ghost of some bloodily murdered construct.Li shivered.How many psych-norm-deviant constructs had waited out cold nights and lightless days in this cell? How many had died in it? And how many of the people who walked free on the streets of Shantytown were the children of those dead, or of the lab guards and lab technicians and paper pushers who had helped kill them? The children remembered, even if no one else did; they told ghost stories about the very skeletons their parents couldn’t bury deep enough.* * *The door scraped open on protesting hinges.A line of light seeped into the cell, unbearable after the long darkness.Ramirez appeared in the doorway, bright and terrible as Gabriel.Li struggled into a sitting position, back against the wall, head spinning.Her internals told her to lie back down.She ignored them.He put a finger to his lips.Sshhhhh.She stood, shaking, shocked and ashamed that simply sitting alone in the dark for a few hours had so undone her.She knew she should be wondering where Ramirez meant to take her, thinking about how to get control of the situation.But all she could really think about was getting out of this ghost-ridden hole.That and trying not to fall down.Follow, Ramirez signaled.She followed.Another man walked beside Ramirez, one whose name she didn’t know and whom she had never seen before.Not Louie.After a few turnings, Ramirez disappeared and Li and the nameless hijacker continued on without him.Someone else joined them as they slipped down the dark corridor, but when Li tried to look back the man just grunted and pushed her forward.They moved deeper into the complex, back into the windowless labs under the shadow of the cliff face.They had traveled almost a kilometer when the hijacker opened an unmarked door and Li felt a waft of cold underground air hit her face.He stood aside and waved her through.As she passed she heard the gentle snick of a bullet being chambered.That’s it then, said a small voice in the pit of her stomach.She saw a blank wall in her mind’s eye, heard a single shot.“Down,” the hijacker said and pushed her down a steep flight of stairs into darkness.Thirty narrow steps of steel-reinforced concrete.A turn.A passage.Then forty more steps, these rough and uneven underfoot.Then a long, twisting passage that dipped and jigged but nonetheless kept trending unmistakably downward.The person behind Li stumbled and cried out.Bella.As they descended, the walls and floor began to run with water.The rock came alive around them, cracking and moaning like a house built on quicksand.Somehow, unbelievably, they were in the mine.Li tried to recall the location of the birthlabs.No drifts, no shafts, no passages ran within a kilometer of the complex.She was sure of that.Still, they were in a mineworks.It just wasn’t one that showed up on the company maps.And if her internals were to be trusted, someone was stockpiling live-cut condensate here.They hit a junction.Their captor lifted his lantern, and its light threw watery reflections on pooled runoff, picked out the stubbed-off ends of mined-out crystal deposits.It took him two turns around the walls to find what he was looking for: faint marks scratched into the rock at face level.Before the lantern moved on, Li saw a crescent moon, a pyramid, an eight-legged beast.“This way,” he said, and pushed them toward the left-hand turning.* * *Li had grown so used to the dark by the time they surfaced that the first glimpse of daylight was painful.They clattered up a flight of gridplate stairs, passed down a long hallway full of uninsulated wiring, and reached a tall steel door bolted from the inside.Bella leaned against the wall, panting and shivering.The hijacker reached into his pack and handed them each a rolled-up piece of cloth.“Put these on.”Li unfolded the cloth and saw that it was an Interfaither’s chador [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]