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[PREVIOUSLY ON...] Beneath the dying branches of Yggdrasil, with Venn unconscious on the moss and three silent blows from William's hidden hand still ringing in the air, Archie Moran felt the old reflex rise in him, the shrug, the lowered head. He could carry his friend through the door and say nothing. Instead he lifted his head. He chose to use the one weapon he had left, the strange, half-understood link between the Guardians and the Gate, and to tell the truth out loud.

…

"Sera," he said. "I need you to do something for me."

The Keeper of the Tree turned from the trunk.

She was kneeling in the roots with her hands pressed flat against the bark, and the green light that ran from her fingers into the wood was thin and flickering. Her face was gray with strain. Sweat stood on her forehead. The pulses had stopped for the moment, but the tree was not still; it shuddered at intervals like a horse after a gallop, and each tremor drew a small involuntary gasp from the woman beside it.

"I have little to give, Shieldbearer," she said.

"I know. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important."

"Ask."

"The Guardians can reach the Gate. Gregor said so. He said it was like tapping on a wall." He crouched in front of her, and looked her straight in the eyes. "I need to send a message. A real one. Not a few words. A full voice, to a man named Luca Ferrara, who built this place."

"Luca," Sera repeated, and something moved in her face. "I know that name. The Gate-maker. He lives on the other side."

"Yes."

"He is the one who opens the doors."

"Yes. And someone else is trying to close them."

She was silent.

"I'm not asking you to leave the tree," said Archie. "I'm not asking you to fight. I'm asking you to be a voice." He swallowed. "It will cost you. I know that. It may hurt."

"It may do more than hurt," said Sera. "If the one who shakes the tree discovers the message, he may shake harder."

"I know."

"Then why do it?"

He had been asking himself that for ten minutes. He had an answer now. It was not a good one. It was not clever, or even especially brave. It was only true.

"Because I've kept quiet my whole life," said Archie. "Because I watched a man take three years of my work, and said nothing. And because I've just realized that every time I said nothing, someone paid for it." He glanced at Venn, lying small and gray on the moss. "I'm done with that. I'd rather be wrong and loud."

Sera looked at him for a long, searching moment.

Then she smiled.

It was a slow, wondering smile, like the first light after a frost. She took her hands from the bark. She laid one over his, and one over her own heart, and closed her eyes.

"Tell me the words," she said.

…

They gathered round her in a ring.

It was Jin who gave the instructions, in a quick, low, level voice: where to stand, how to hold, what to think. Zoe knelt on one side with Venn's head in her lap. Brynja and her sisters stood guard at the perimeter, spears bristling. The soldiers drew back respectfully. Along the arch of the nearest root, in the red twilight, a hundred faces watched in silence.

Sera sat cross-legged on the moss with her harp across her knees. She did not play it. She had set both palms on its pale bone frame, and her head was bowed, and a faint white light had begun to gather in the hollow of her chest.

"Say it," she whispered. "Out loud. As you want him to hear it."

Archie drew a long breath.

He did not know, afterward, how he found the words. He had planned them. He'd drafted a dozen versions on the bark in the dark of the roots, short and sharp and cold. But when he opened his mouth, they all went, and what came out instead was just himself, rough and plain.

"Luca," he said.

The light flared.

"Luca, it's Archie Moran. I'm in the fourth Space. I'm alive. We all are." His voice shook, steadied. "I haven't got long, so I'll say this straight. William Cross is not what he seems. He planted a device in the Dimensions. A transmitter. It's been sending him everything: our vital signs, our locations, our memories. It's how he hurt Venn. He's using the Gate against us."

The white light climbed his arm. He felt it on his skin, a warm tingling like static.

"He is selling the technology. All of it. The data, the patents, the whole architecture of consciousness transfer. To a company called CorVitae Industries. I don't know the details, but I know it's true. A Guardian told us. William told him." He swallowed. "Please. Check his terminal. Look at his files. Don't let him know you're looking. If he thinks you're onto him, he'll close the Gate. He has the keys. I think he's been waiting for a reason."

The tree groaned. Somewhere above them, a branch cracked.

"I'm sorry," Archie said. His eyes were burning. "I'm sorry for everything. I should have said it sooner. We're all right. We're still going. But we need you, Luca. We need all of you. Please. Be careful."

He stopped.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Sera exhaled, long and ragged, and the white light poured out of her chest, a spear of silver, straight up through the dead branches and the burning sky. It struck the cloud-roof. It punched a hole. For one blinding instant, a patch of clear heaven opened above the tree, deep and cold and blue, and through it Archie saw, impossibly, a ceiling. White tile. A fluorescent tube, humming.

Then it closed.

Sera slumped sideways. Zoe caught her.

"Is she—"

"Alive," Zoe panted. "She's breathing. She did it."

"Did it work?" said Jin.

Archie looked up at the empty sky.

"I don't know," he said.

…

In the lab, a speaker coughed.

It was not a speaker anyone had installed. It was a small gray unit above the door, a relic of the old intercom, wired to nothing for fifteen years. Otis Brennan, who was hunched over his keyboard at three in the morning with his sixth coffee going cold, looked up.

The speaker coughed again, and crackled, and a man's voice came out of it, faint and cracked and unmistakably human.

"...Luca, it's Archie Moran..."

Otis dropped his mug.

It did not break. It bounced across the tiles with a hollow clatter, and brown coffee fanned out across the floor, and he sat there with his mouth open and his hands in the air. The voice went on. It came in fragments, through bursts of static, thin as paper, but there was no mistaking it. He had been listening to that voice for weeks over the telemetry. The gentle gravel of it. The dry, apologetic hesitation.

"...planted a device in the Dimensions..."

"...selling the technology..."

"...CorVitae Industries..."

"...check his terminal..."

He did not move. He sat in his chair, stunned and white, while the voice faded into a long hiss of static, and the speaker went dead. The lab was silent. The pods hummed. The coffee crept toward the foot of the main console in a slow brown tide.

Then Otis wiped his hands on his coat, very carefully, and stood.

He looked across the lab. In the dark glass of the observation suite, a gray figure was bent over a desk. A lamp lit his tablet. He had not turned.

He didn't hear it.

He's got headphones in.

Otis stood a moment longer, breathing hard. He thought of a sheet of paper in his breast pocket, folded in eighths. He thought of a plate of ham and cheese on rye, and a man's smooth voice saying, I'd hate for any distraction to get in the way of a bright future. He thought of Archie saying, in the dark, in a voice he'd never forget, Please. Be careful.

I'm a coward, he thought. I've always been a coward.

So I'd better be careful.

…

He took the long way round.

William Cross's terminal was in the second-floor office, the one with the door that locked. Otis did not have the key. But he did have, as every postgraduate student has, a particular gift for being overlooked. He waited until half past four, when the corridor was empty. He waited until the janitor had passed with his cart. He waited another ten minutes, for good measure, and then he went up the back stairs in his socks, carrying his shoes, and let himself in with a bent paperclip and a tool that Jin had once shown him.

The office was dark. It smelled of leather and expensive soap. A desk of black walnut stood in the center, with a laptop on it, closed, and a single framed photograph facing away.

He didn't touch the photograph.

He opened the laptop. It wanted a password. He tried the obvious ones, and failed, and sat for a moment in the blue glow of the screen, feeling stupid and young. Then he remembered something Jin had said, in a bored tone, over a bowl of noodles, about the way people choose their passwords. They choose the thing they love most. And it's always a person or a number.

He thought about William's smile. He thought about what a man like that might love.

He typed: CorVitae1.

The screen unlocked.

Otis made a very small sound.

…

It took him forty minutes to read.

He did not understand all of it. There was a great deal he could not follow: columns of figures, lines of code, a thick bundle of legal documents in a font so small he had to lean close. But he understood enough. He understood the folder labeled EXPORT, which held seventeen terabytes of files named for the four subjects and the dates on which they were recorded. He understood the draft email, unsent, addressed to a Dr. M. Aldridge, VP Strategic Acquisitions, CorVitae Industries, which began, As discussed, the proof-of-concept phase is now complete. He understood the contract.

It was nine pages long. It was drawn up between Cross Capital Partners and CorVitae Industries. It was dated for the following Friday. It specified a transfer of "all proprietary rights, patents, trade secrets, subject data and research materials relating to Dimensional Consciousness Transfer, including but not limited to the FDRI Gate Mark II," for a sum of four hundred million dollars.

It specified, in a footnote on page seven, that the "subject cohort" was to be "retained in situ pending completion of final data collection."

He read the footnote three times.

Retained in situ.

His hands began to shake.

That's us, he thought. That's Archie. That's Venn. He's going to leave them there.

He closed the laptop. He did it quite slowly, the way one closes a book that has said something terrible. For a long time he sat in the dark with his palms on the lid, looking at the photograph on the desk. He had not meant to. His eyes simply fell on it. It showed a young man in a graduation gown, grinning, with his arm round a plump, tired, laughing woman. His mother, perhaps. A face, he thought, that might once have loved him very much.

Then he got up, and crossed the room, and let himself out.

He went down the back stairs in his socks, and across the lab, and straight to the door of the little office at the far end. He knocked. He knocked again.

"Dr. Ferrara," said Otis, in a voice that cracked on the second word. "Dr. Ferrara, I'm so sorry to wake you. But I think we have a problem."