Puppet Strings

The second message came on the ninth night.

It did not come in a mirror. It came in the dark, in the quiet, as Archie lay on a folded coat in the vault with his eyes open, listening to the soft sounds of the others sleeping. He felt it first as a coolness at the back of his skull. A faint tapping, like a fingernail on glass. Then a voice, low and intimate, speaking not in his ears but behind his eyes.

Archie.

He closed his eyes.

Thank you for the diary. I've read every page. You have a gift, you know. A very precise one. I've shown a few excerpts to my associates, and they were deeply impressed.

"What do you want?" he whispered.

Only a small thing. The voice was warm and cheerful. I'm approaching the end of my work, and I find I've a technical difficulty. Your friend Mr. Park removed one of my monitoring devices, in Space Three. I managed to restore partial coverage through the Guardian relays, but I've lost the high-resolution feed. I need to see the final Gate. The one at the heart of this world.

"I can't give you that."

Not give. Place.

A weight dropped into the fold of his coverall.

He sat up, hand shooting to his chest. There was something there, small, flat, and warm. He drew it out. It lay in his palm, in the dim light, a black lozenge about the size of a pack of cards, with a silver coil at one end and a single red light.

It was blinking. Tick. Tick.

Where did you get—

I've delivered it, said William. It's a simple thing. Attach it to the Gate when you find it. Anywhere on the housing. It will do the rest. A pause. Please don't take too long. I'm afraid the others are growing restless.

"The others?"

Why, the investors.

The pressure on his skull lifted. The cold faded. He was alone in the vault, with a small black box in his hand and the sound of Venn's breathing rising and falling in the dark.

Put it down, said a small voice at the back of his mind. His own, cracked and thin. Put it down. Throw it away. Wake them.

Wake them and say what?

He looked at the box for a long time.

He thought of Venn's face, gray on the pavement. He thought of the pulse that had gone through the world like a blow. I need not do very much to unravel the lot of you. He thought of a hundred gray-suited Archies, smiling, and a hundred paper cups.

It's one small device, he thought. It doesn't hurt anyone. It's a camera. It only watches.

They'll be safe.

He closed his hand over the box and slid it back into his coat.

…

They found the Gate on the thirteenth day.

It was at the top of a tower in the center of the Mirror World, a gray stone shaft rising out of the heart of the city like a needle. They climbed it in silence, up four hundred steps, with Venn carried between Jin and Zoe and Archie going ahead with the lamp. The air thinned. The walls were polished glass, and in each pane a pale face flickered by, then another, their own and not their own. At the top they came out onto a broad round platform, open to the pewter sky, with a low parapet and a wind that tasted of nothing.

At its center stood the Gate.

It was identical to the one in the lab. The same heavy ring of dark metal, ten feet across. The same coils at the base, the same intricate lattice of cables and sensors. The same dim blue shimmer in the center, a curtain of liquid light. It stood in the gray emptiness like a doorway to nowhere, quiet and enormous, and as they came up the last steps it began, softly, to hum.

"It's the end," said Jin. His voice was hushed. "Or the beginning. It's the way back."

"How do you know?"

"It's the one thing in this place that isn't backward." He pointed. "Look at the writing. On the control panel. It's the right way round."

Archie looked.

It was true. A small gray panel was set into the base of the Gate, and the label above it, in neat engraved capitals, read FDRI GATE MARK II — CONTROL. The letters were crisp, upright, unreversed. A real thing, in a place of reflections.

"We need to figure out how it works," said Zoe. "There has to be a sequence. A key."

"I'll look at the panel."

"I'll look at the base."

They spread out. Zoe knelt by the coils with her lamp. Jin bent over the panel. Venn, propped on a coat against the parapet, watched them with a faint tired smile. And Archie, with a pounding heart, walked slowly round the far side of the ring, out of the others' sight.

Now.

He took out the box.

His hand did not shake. That was what horrified him. It was steady as a surgeon's. He knelt, and ran his fingers over the housing until he found a flat place beneath the lowest coil, hidden in shadow, and pressed the little black lozenge against the metal. It clung. The silver coil unwound, spread across the surface in a delicate web, and went still.

The red light blinked. Tick.

Thank you, whispered William, in his head.

He stood. He wiped his palm on his coverall. He turned to go back to the others, and found himself looking directly into the eyes of Jin Park.

…

Jin was standing ten feet away, at the edge of the platform.

He had a wrist-pad in his hand. His glasses were pushed up on his forehead. He had come round the ring without a sound, and he stood now quite motionless in the gray wind, looking at the place where Archie had knelt, at the faint metallic gleam of the thing beneath the coil.

"Archie," he said.

"Jin—"

"What is that?"

"It's nothing."

"Don't." It was very quiet. "Don't say it's nothing. Not again."

He walked forward. His step was slow and precise. He crouched by the housing and looked at the lozenge. He did not touch it. He turned his head and looked up, and his face, in the pewter light, was the face of a man who has found a knife in the hand of his friend.

"You put this here."

Archie said nothing.

"Archie. I'm asking."

"Yes."

"Why?"

The word hung between them.

Zoe had come round the ring behind Jin, with her lamp in her hand. She stopped dead. Venn, propped against the parapet, said "Guys?" in a small voice.

"It's William's," Jin said. He rose slowly. "It's a repeater. The same coupling. The same coil. It's the thing I cut out of Meridian-7." His voice began to shake. "You installed it. You carried it here. You've had it since, since when? Since the bank? Since the night you stopped sleeping?" He drew a breath. "You've been writing for him."

"Jin."

"The ledger. The journal." Jin took a step. "That's what it was. It's been going to him. It's been going to him this whole time."

"You don't understand."

"Then make me!"

It rang across the platform like a shot. Jin was shaking. He had flung his wrist-pad onto the stones, where it lay cracked. His glasses had slid down his nose. His eyes behind them were wide and bright and wet, and Archie realized, with a sick drop of the heart, that he had never in his life seen Jin Park cry.

"Make me understand," Jin said, hoarsely. "Because I trusted you. I trusted you with my life. I trusted you more than anyone I've ever met. And you've been selling us to that man for two weeks."

"I wasn't selling—"

"Then what?"

"Protecting!" Archie cried. His voice cracked. "He had the Gate! He could have cut the power! He could have killed Venn! I had to give him something!"

"Archie," Zoe said.

It was very soft. It was not angry. He turned, and her face was white, and her large dark eyes were fixed on his with an expression he had never seen there before, an expression of dreadful gentle grief.

"Who told you to do it?"

"Zoe—"

"Who told you?"

"William." The word came out of him like a stone. "He spoke to me. In the mirror. He said, if I cooperated, he'd hold the Gate. He'd see you all safe. He said he'd put us in new bodies. I thought. I thought if I just gave him—" He gestured helplessly. "I thought it would buy us time."

"You thought."

"I thought I could handle it."

"On your own," said Jin.

"I—"

"You thought you could handle it on your own."

Archie closed his mouth.

…

"You chose to be his puppet," said Venn.

He had not spoken before. He was sitting against the parapet in the wind, a pale fragile shape in a gray coat, with his hands in his lap. His voice was thin, but quite clear. There was no anger in it. That was the worst of it. He sounded merely puzzled, and very sad.

"That's what you did, man. You chose it."

"I didn't choose—"

"You did, though." Venn shook his head. "He said jump and you said how high. You didn't even ask us. You didn't say, Hey, guys, this guy's offering me a deal, what do we think? You just. You just kept it to yourself and did it."

"Because it was my fault. Because I was the one who could—"

"No." Jin cut across him, with a terrible flat calm. "No. You should have told us. We'd have found another way. We might have found a hundred. Venn is not made of glass. I'm not made of glass. We've been in this thing together since the beginning, and you took it upon yourself to decide that we couldn't be trusted with the truth." His mouth twisted. "You didn't protect us, Archie. You managed us."

"There was no other way."

"You didn't try!"

The wind dropped.

It was a silence like a held breath. The four of them stood on the high platform in the pale light, three on one side and one on the other, and between them lay a space that had not been there a moment before. Archie looked at each of them, desperately. At Jin's blazing, aching eyes. At Venn's bleary tender ones. At Zoe's.

She had not spoken since her question. She stood with the lamp in her hand, quite still. She did not look angry. She did not look afraid. She only looked at him as one looks at someone on the far side of a river, very small, very far away, and not coming across.

"Zoe," he said.

"Don't."

"Please."

"Archie." Her voice trembled. "I'm not mad. I need you to know that. I'm not." She drew a breath. "I'm just. I'm so tired."

She turned away. She set down her lamp on the stones, and knelt beside Venn, and took his hand. She did not look back.

Behind Archie, beneath the lowest coil of the Gate, a small red light went on blinking, quiet and patient, in the dark.

Tick, it said. Tick. Tick.