25 - Access Granted

It’s achingly slow, but I appreciate that. Better slow and unseen than fast and discovered.They have to stop and become featureless parts of the landscape when I prod them and warm them to stop, whenever a dragon flies over. Perrin’s security is pretty predictable in this area. They always fly the same pattern I notice, check the same areas.  After the second time, the boys have it figured out and go still, just before I poked them. We are pillars of salt, of stone, in the talus.

Once we are forced to freeze as a massive data packet comes rumbling down the road, covered all over with spiked code, seething like infant oyuks on their parent’s backs, only these all have stingers and they look alien.  All the wrong colours.  The colours seem to designate recognition codes because the dragons swoop down and swing their heads back and forth as if scanning.  Are they smelling code?  Are they seeing code?

It’s a long while after the code has settled when Kyrus calls me from below.  “We’ve got a dome built down here.  Come on.”

It’s a hump of stone, with lava still flowing over part of it.  A blister like the bubbles of sand they domed up over us when the haboob caught up with us.  In this case protection from a flaming death instead of a flensing one.

Both Kyrus and Werfas are looking thinner, more transparent, but they’re grinning like maniacs.  So they should.  This is perfect.  Thick enough to hide any of us and they were lucky enough to find code embedded in the melted stuff.  Just chunks but it means that I’ll be able to throw up a door very quickly.

“I’ll make a door to plug this hole,” Kyrus says.  He has a handful of what looks like cooled lava and he’s drawing lava up and onto it, around and around, like icing a platter with molten rock.  He draws the stone up and around, hinging it on pins so the whole thing will pivot no matter how heavily he builds it up.  I have to admit, it’s ugly, or beautiful.  I'm not sure.  But then it’s beautiful in how he’s matched the volcano’s  rock so perfectly. It’s beautiful as it cools into these flowing colours of metal blue and black, streaks and smears of red melted and stretched into shape.

I hold Werfas’s shoulders, lending him strength from myself, from the Hive.  I can feel them somehow, outside myself.  Like humming in my ears.  They are filling me up with energy. Propolis, injected support, the taste of honey on my tongue.  I can feel the zon.  Only those who survived the journey, but Elemfias is there, on her warbird, with her armour and lance, just outside.  She’s there to back us up.  She doesn’t look a bit like she does in real life.  Here she’s young.  She’s on the other side of what I see as the chasm between the real world and the code.

There’s a puff of heat and the smell of flowers across my face and Kyrus finishes his door to hide our work-space.  I hear Elemfias yell “You can’t stay too long!”

“I know,” I whisper.  “We know.” The clock is ticking and we have to rebuild the gate before we can even try to find papa and da.

Elemfias draws on the air with her lance and it’s a gigantic clock, with a lance for a hand looming over her head, a red star blazing just over her head that the lance it ticking towards.  I don’t need the reminder.

I turn to stand up inside the bubble.  There’s a broken shadow of some steps, and a melted lintel flowing across the floor.  I clean code and Kyrus seals us almost in.  Now it’s Werfas’s job to watch that we’ve not been spotted.

Kyrus and I can rebuild this together.  Then anyone from either Lainz or Milar will be able to use it to gain access.

We join hands and together, with our free hands, draw the opposite corners of the door together, to meet in the centre.  We clasp those hands together as well and draw a straight line down the middle.  It’s plain.  It’s functional.  He and I flatten our hands and we step forward to set our palms on our sides of the split door.  There’s a flash as our deenay is encoded and the image of our palms is burned into our gateway.

*Access granted*

Kyrus grins at me and we pass a thread of ourselves into Werfas’s hands to unreel behind us whether we’re on foot or dare to fly. 

The doors fold open and we can see the odd and unsettling owner’s country, behind the massive gates he has set up.  We are going to rescue our fathers... and they will have the code we need to climb a glass mountain and steal communication from the one who has made himself a god on this planet.  You oyuck sucker.