“Hara? Are you... ah.”
“I’m
here.” The code was a scattering of
light in front of them, at least from his perception. There was almost nothing
happening right now at Prime’s road, the glittering sharp facade of the opening
program, as sealed and as imposing as ever.
The crystal dragons flanking it were quiescent, each with one paw raised
showing extruded claws longer than his arms.
“Every
time I’ve been here,” Hara said. “The
sky has been that weird blue. Mariush
and Dag... everybody says its the colour of the sky of the home planet. I’m not sure I like it.”
“Yeah. I prefer the pale blue and pink of spring,
really.”
They
sneaked around the massive rock that forced the road around it. Once around the rock Prime Gate would be at
the end of the massive statue lined road.
The land that had been Secundus and Tertius gates were now at the bottom
of a cliff that grew deeper every time Prime decided his country wasn’t isolate
enough.
“Zon
Elemfias says that the Milari remember this as a plain... a watered valley, not
this craggy mountainside.”
“Armadad
said that Prime is building himself a mountain to be the home of the God. He’s nuts.”
“Yes. What I want to know is how he persuaded all
his people to follow him in the first place.”
Kyrus
nodded and they left the road above with its gates and linings of statues and scrambled
down the mountainside to Tertius Gate, or the rubble over it, and stopped in
shock. It was melted shut. A volcano had
appeared under Secundus and lava had run over both destroyed gates.
**
Dag sat in her cottage and sifted and spun code
through her mental fingers, the strands pulling out from the tangled mass she’d
last harvested.
### ... secret
war on... ###...the ice has blasted a crack through here, and a lake ### ###
###... the bees have settled in the canyon and we’re ####d... ### we have water
and honey and bee larva and raghnall and birds... ### Gregori don’t trust
Perrin so much ### ## #######o kill us all, don’t you see? At least he’s going to try.
I
need to build fail-safes and back doors.
Not just two or three. Perrin is
a devious bastard. Look under the dragon’s egg first. T##en...
She searched the hank of code on her distaff. It had been tangled, burned, the ends melted,
some could be brushed out, saved, made sense of. But this was important. If her son was to go into the owner’s country
he needed his access codes. All of
them. The main gate for the Tertius CEO
was the most vulnerable. Who knew if
Prime... Perrin... if, or when, Perrin would
just decide that that whole section of code should go, rather than dance on the
graves of those he saw as his enemies?
## ## ## back
#### ##e ## ### colour o# #he sky ## ### The
rest was gibberish.
**
“There’s
no way in. How do we get in?” If he
could have been, Kyrus would have been panting. “How do they get out? We have to get a line of code through there
somehow, but that will just melt it into gibberish the instant it touches!”
“I...
have codes but I can’t use them for here.
We’d have to somehow fool Prime’s Gate to get in and I don’t have that
skill. I’m not sure anyone of us has that
skill.” They threw their arms around each other and, hidden in the shadow of
Prime’s triumphal archway above, stood shaking, looking at the ruins of code at
the bottom of the cliff road, where lava still ran, flowing to engulf and melt
the land.
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