Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
The door has a big white H minus 5 painted on it. I run the coordinates through my head again—Sector 4, quad H minus 5, floor 2. “Is floor two on the other side then?”
Anneeta shrugs her shoulders against the floor. “I’ve never been in there. Not even in a dream. This is as far as I go.”
“You can’t come? Or you don’t want to come?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” She sits up and looks over her shoulder at the door, her head slowly tipping up to look at the H minus 5. Then her eyes meet mine, flashing a serious expression at me. “There’s too much power in there. It will make me sick. Can’t you feel it?”
I’m about to automatically say no and roll my eyes, but I realize I actually can feel it. It’s… like… a disturbance in the air. Electromagnetic something or other. Which is a word I don’t actually know the technical meaning of, but I’ve heard it enough during my time in the Sweep to understand that it fits here in this particular situation.
So I nod. “Yeah. I feel it.” Then I offer her my hand, which she takes, and I pull her to her feet. “You don’t have to wait.”
“I know. But I will. It’s my job to keep an eye on you now.”
“Is that what the god told you?”
She nods. “That’s what he said.”
It’s easy enough to dismiss her talk of gods. Or it would be, if a god didn’t actually live in this tower at one time. But I don’t dismiss it. I’m not sure what she’s seeing, or hearing, or feeling or whatever, but it’s real to her.
Which doesn’t mean it’s real to anyone else. Electromagnetic fields are like that. They can really fuck with your perception. So I make a mental note to ask Stayn—once I report back—if we could maybe get some kind of health care for her.
It’s the least I can do after all her help.
“All right then. You wait if you want. I’ll be back.” Then I open the door and walk through into the dark.
Unsurprisingly, the lights overhead do not turn on when I take a few steps. I had a feeling it was Anneeta doing that on the other side of the door, and now it’s confirmed. But it’s fine. I just get my torch out and turn it on. It’s bright enough to light up the entire length of the hallway—which, from here, makes the next door look very tiny, it’s so far away.
When I finally get to the end of the hallway and open the door up, I find myself on a stairwell landing. I’m halfway between two floors. Assuming two is up and one is down, I go up. But the number painted on that door is a one. Then I remember that the numbers are negative, and my assumption was wrong because floor two is below.
I go back down, confirm that the new floor is indeed two, and pull it open. Immediately the electromagnetic humming stops and the new silence is deafening. Not that the hum was loud to begin with. Extremely low frequencies don’t have to be loud to do what they are meant to do. But once you get used to the background noise, the absence of it is dramatic.
No lights in here either. This makes sense because if the hum is gone, then the power is too. Which is a direct contradiction to what Anneeta just told me. That she can’t come because the power is too strong.
Unless… the hallway is a kind of gate, meant to keep her out.
This seemingly easy job is turning into a spectacular mystery.
I keep walking forward, shining my torch on the walls, looking for another door or… something. This is the end of my coordinates. But it is immediately clear that this is not a hallway that leads somewhere, it’s a room. The actual destination.
“Well, fuck.” I mutter this, scrubbing a hand down my face in frustration. Is this it? Because all I see is a bunch of tech towers of some kind. About nine feet tall and placed end to end so when seen all together they appear to be a solid wall. I’m not an expert in tech, ancient or otherwise. My time in the Sweep was mostly spent killing people and clearing shit, not studying relics.
But once I take a better look at them, they are familiar. I’ve been enough places to recognize these towers as something archaic. I was in a firefight once with some Outland deviants in the Outlands Terminal and we were stuck in a room like this for two days waiting for backup. One of the guys with us that day was a techie and he called them server towers. Which was like… a god’s brain or something.