The Necklace

Jin had been staring at the pendant for eleven minutes without blinking.

He crouched in front of the wall with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and his nose six inches from the socket. His lips moved. His fingers drummed on his knee, a quick soundless pattern, as a pianist's do when the music is somewhere else. The teardrop of pale metal glowed in its hollow with a soft, steady light, and in the light, hovering in the air like a breath of frost, lines of tiny characters were beginning to appear.

"It's talking," said Venn, in an awed whisper.

"It is not talking. It is displaying."

"Same thing."

"It is categorically not the same thing." Jin did not look round. "Be quiet. Please. This is the most beautiful piece of work I have ever seen, and I should like to finish being impressed."

He had changed in the last hour. Archie had noticed it first from the corner of his eye, as one notices a lamp turned up. The dry, careful, half-apologetic scholar had gone somewhere. In his place was a young man in a torn coverall with his sleeves shoved above the elbow and a smear of dust on his cheek, bent over the glittering air like a boy over a model aeroplane. He was grinning. He did not seem to know it.

"There," he breathed. "That's the handshake. And that, oh, that's gorgeous, it's recursive. She's nested the key inside its own checksum, so the system can't read it without already having it." He gave a short delighted laugh. "She locked it with itself."

"Is that good?" said Zoe.

"It's practically a haiku."

…

It took him three hours.

They sat round him in the closet in shifts, dozing and waking. Venn went upstairs and came back with biscuits and a thermos of the thin gray tea, which tasted of coins and which they drank anyway. Zoe stayed by the wall with her mother's notebook in her lap. Archie sat on the stool with his back against the shelves, half watching Jin and half watching her, and thinking about nothing in particular.

He found, to his surprise, that he was happy.

It was an odd sensation, here, in the lamplit hush of a dead woman's study, in a world that was a reflection of a reflection. It came up quietly, without announcement, like a tide into a harbor. He was happy because three people were in the room with him. He was happy because the girl across from him had stopped crying, and was reading, with her feet tucked under her and her hair behind her ear, and every now and then looked up from the page with a small, private, wondering smile.

She caught him looking, once. She did not look away.

"What?" she said, softly.

"Nothing."

"You're staring."

"I'm resting my eyes."

"On me."

"They're comfortable."

She blushed. It was a lovely thing to watch, in the green lamplight, the color coming up from the collar of her coverall into her cheeks. She ducked her head over the notebook. She did not turn the page for a long time.

…

"Right," said Jin.

It was nearly the end of the third hour. He had sat back on his heels, and taken off his glasses, and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. When he took them away the whole of his face was drawn and gray, and shining with a kind of exhausted triumph.

"I've got it."

"All of it?"

"All of what matters. The rest is, it's a great deal of rest." He waved a hand at the hovering text. "I can't read it all. She wrote the thing in a private language, half code and half music. But I can read the header. And the header says," he cleared his throat, "that this is a Master Key."

"We knew that."

"We knew a diary said so. This is the thing itself." He put his glasses on, and peered at the air. "It's a universal credential. It will open any lock in the Dimension system. Doors between Spaces. Guardian binds. The sealed floors of the lab, if we should ever need them. And," he drew a breath, "the Core."

"The Core?" said Archie.

"The seat of the system. Where Matteo is." Jin turned. "It's the only thing in the world that can open the Core door from the outside. Luca can't. He tried for years, and she told him she'd destroyed it. She hadn't. She put it round her daughter's neck."

"So we can reach him," said Zoe.

"Yes."

"Now?"

"Yes, now." Jin hesitated. "Well. Nearly now. There is," he rubbed his face, "a condition."

"Of course there is."

"The key is keyed. To a person. It will only work if it's worn." He looked at Zoe. "By someone with Diana Chen's genetic signature, in contact with the metal. It reads your pulse. It knows your mother's, because the two are nearly the same." He spread his hands apologetically. "That's why Luca couldn't use it. It would have to be you."

There was a silence.

Zoe looked at the pendant in its socket. She looked at the four of them. She put her hand to her throat as if the thing were already there.

"Then it's me," she said.

…

She did not go alone, of course.

That was the first thing Archie said, and the second, and the third, until she laughed and told him to stop. She took the chain out of the wall and put it round her neck. It flared, once, and settled, and she stood in the middle of the study with her head high and the pale light running over her face, looking oddly regal, like a girl in a story who has just been told her name.

"What do I do?"

"Hold it," said Jin. "Think of a door."

"Which door?"

"Any door. The one you most want to open."

She closed her eyes. For a long moment, nothing happened. The lamp hissed. Somewhere up the stairwell, a pipe knocked. Then, very softly, as though from a long way off, a clear note rose in the air, a single sustained tone like a finger run round the rim of a glass.

The wall behind the desk began to melt.

It did not crack, or fall. It simply went thin, the way ice goes thin in a thaw, until the brick became a shadow and the shadow a window. Beyond it, in a space without walls, a great dark dome glittered with threads of cold light. In the middle, a pillar of white fire rose from the dark like a lighthouse. And at its foot, so small that he almost missed it, a figure sat cross-legged on nothing, with its head bowed.

"Oh my God," said Venn.

"Matteo," said Archie.

"It's him," whispered Zoe.

She had opened her eyes. She stood with her hands at her sides and the pendant blazing at her breastbone and her face lit from below like a saint's. Tears stood in her eyes, and did not fall. She said, in a voice of absolute wonder:

"Mama, you clever, clever woman."

…

It happened a moment afterward.

There was no warning. There was only a cold that came from behind, a tingling at the base of the neck. Archie turned. In the doorway of the closet, in the dark of the stair, stood a man in a charcoal suit.

He was not quite there. The edges of him flickered. A thin green line of code ran down his shoes and vanished. But the face was William Cross's, smooth and tanned and pleasant, and the smile on it was precisely the smile he had worn at the lectern in the courtyard in New Hampshire, in the morning of the world.

"Hello," said William.

"Get out," said Archie.

"Oh, I won't be long. I just popped in to say hello." The avatar strolled into the room with its hands in its pockets. It gave the pendant a long, appreciative look. "My word. Diana. The old girl actually did it. Fifteen years I've been looking for that, and it was round the neck of a model."

"Don't talk to her."

"I'll talk to whom I like, Mr. Moran, I'm in my own property." The glittering eyes moved to Zoe. "Miss Chen. My condolences on your mother. I was very fond of her. She was the cleverest person in that building, and she had the dreadful judgment to be fond of Luca Ferrara."

"What do you want?" said Zoe.

"Me? Oh, nothing much. Merely the key." The smile widened. "I've got two and a half days before I take possession of the Institute, you see, and I would so like to have it in hand. Come now. Give it over. You don't understand what you're holding."

"I do."

"Do you?"

"It's my mother's."

"It's an asset." William sighed, lightly, with the weariness of a man who has had this conversation with many sentimental people. "It's a dead woman's work product, on a chain, in the hands of an unqualified person. I'm offering you a very generous price. Name it. I'll make you rich. I'll cure your mother. I'll make your whole life lovely."

"You can't cure her," said Zoe.

"I can, you know." Soft, and oily, and entirely kind. "That's the thing nobody in this room appreciates. I have the technology. I have the Clones. I could put her in a healthy body tomorrow. All you have to do is hand me the pendant, and walk away, and not ask where it goes."

Archie felt the girl tremble beside him.

It was only a small shiver, a ripple through the sleeve. But he saw her eyes go to the pendant, and the dome of light through the window, and the old man on the floor. He saw her think about it. He saw the whole of her desire go through her face in a single bright flash, and he put out his hand and laid it on her arm.

"Zoe," he said.

She looked at him.

She took a long breath. She laughed, shakily, and shook her head, and turned to the flickering man in the doorway with her chin up.

"No," she said.

"No?"

"No, thank you." She said it with a kind of fierce politeness, the manners of a girl who has been brought up properly and has decided to use them as a weapon. "My mother wouldn't sell it. She hid it for fifteen years. She wouldn't have wanted a man like you to touch it."

William's face went quite still.

"What a pity," he said, gently.

The green line ran up his legs. It climbed his chest, his neck, his face. For an instant the whole figure seemed to shiver, and then it shrank, like a candle flame in a draft, to a single bright dot, and the dot went out.

Silence.

"He'll be back," said Jin.

"I know."

"Quickly, then." Jin was already at the window of light. "Zoe. The door. Now. Before he finds another way round."

She nodded. She took Archie's hand. She did not ask for it; she simply held out her own, and he took it, and her fingers were small and warm and gripped him hard. On her other side Venn grinned like a boy at the top of a roller coaster.

"On three?" he said.

"On three."

They stepped into the light.