The Nex

by Tim Pratt

  Howlaa leapt into the air, twisting, and I jumped back. “What the –”

  “He caught a sniper’s tranquilizer dart, Miranda,” Wisp said. “Meant for you. But there will be more. We have to go.”

  “Can I – how do I teleport with you guys? How do I take you with me?”

  “We don’t know,” Wisp said. “Templeton said it should... respond to your thoughts?”

  I turned to the Regent. “Remember. If anything happens to my father –”

  “Yes, yes. This posturing is silly, Miranda. I have your father. You have my jump-engine. We’ll end up trading eventually. Why waste all this time?”

  I reached out to touch Howlaa’s slick, scaly side. “Wisp, can you... go up Howlaa’s nose or in her mouth or something? I can’t touch you, so I’m not sure...”

  “Of course.” Wisp’s motes ran into Howlaa’s gaping, panting, tooth-filled mouth.

  “Until next time, then,” the Regent said.

  I didn’t teleport far. Just into the kitchen, where Howlaa took up way too much room and knocked over a couple of garbage cans.

  My Dad wasn’t there. The kitchen was empty, though it was just like I remembered it, the bank of stoves and ovens, the prep tables, the big industrial sinks, the smells of herbs and cooking meat. A pot was bubbling over on one of the burners, stew turning to burned mess, and without thinking I walked over and twisted the burner off.

  “Perhaps we should go a bit farther?” Wisp said.

  I looked around, hoping for some sign that Dad was still here – a picture of the family, a lumpy mug I’d made for him at summer camp, something – but it was just a working kitchen, no personal stuff. I sighed. “Okay. Where? Earth?”

  “No! If we leave the Nex, the snatch-engines will be able to bring us back.”

  “Okay, then. Somewhere more local.”

  I jumped us back to the warehouse, beside the truck.

  We were at the center of a ring of a hundred Nagalinda, all aiming their complex guns at us. The Regent was there, or another simulation, sitting on the back of the truck. “Ah, Miranda. I know everywhere you’ve been, dear. My trackers have worked out your whole backtrail. And you can only teleport to places on the Nex you’ve already been – otherwise, you’re jumping blind, and even in your petulance I don’t think you’re stupid enough to try that. All your little haunts and way stations are surrounded. Really, now. This is the end. This is –”

  Howlaa snatched me up with one of her huge arms and barreled through the line of Nagalinda. Her shadowcloth slithered up over me, changing into a hard armored shell, and I heard darts pinging off the material, and the Regent shouting “I need her alive!” and Wisp saying “Oh dear oh dear oh dear.”

  Howlaa darted into some kind of deep, narrow storage room and dropped me on my ass, rapidly changing into human form and shoving the heavy steel door closed. I stood up and said “What do we do now?” and tasted blood on my lips. Crap. In all the commotion, my stupid nose had started bleeding again.

  Howlaa handed me a handkerchief, and I pressed it to my flowing nostrils.

  “They’ll be able to peel this room open soon enough,” Howlaa said. “But if the Regent is telling the truth about scouting our backtrail, I’m not sure where we should go. If we flee the Nex, we get snatched, and a blind jump...” She shook her head. “Too dangerous.”

  “We came so close,” Wisp said as the pounding on the other side of the door began, along with muffled shouting. “Perhaps it’s better if Miranda saves herself, makes an arrangement...”

  “We’re not done yet.” Howlaa snatched the handkerchief from my hands.

  “Hey, I’m still bleeding here!”

  Howlaa put the bloody handkerchief in her mouth and slurped. I winced and said “Oh my god, gross,” and then realized what she was doing, if not exactly why. A moment later she spat out the handkerchief and began to change...

  Into me. I was looking at a perfect image of me, only naked, and she was exactly the same, right down to the mole over my bellybutton. The shadowcloth slithered and wiggled and changed into my stupid Mabling costume, and one little bit of it crawled to her finger and became a copy of my ring. “Regent!” she shouted. “I’ve sent Howlaa and Wisp away, someplace you won’t find them, someplace they can survive. I’m coming out!” She turned to me and hissed, “Go. They can’t have every inch of our backtrail covered. Go someplace obscure, in the provinces, and lay low for a bit – they won’t look for you if they think you’re already in custody. This won’t buy us much time. Soon enough the Regent will realize I’m not you.”

  It was so weird, like if my mirror started ordering me around. “But... what am I supposed to do?”

  Howlaa shrugged. “Destroy the snatch-engines. Get rid of the orphans. Topple the government. Depose the Regent. Reunite with your father. Oh, and save me. Wisp will help.”

  “I – thanks, Howlaa. Be careful.”

  “Shushit. Being careful is for others.”

  “If you’d open your mouth, Miranda?” Wisp said.

  “Uh,” I said, and Wisp took the opportunity to zip into my mouth, which was kind of like having a mouthful of gnats, only more bubbly. I closed my eyes, thought obscure, and jumped.

  Chapter 12

  I sat curled up in the same pipe in that construction site for what felt like hours, waiting to be discovered or captured or shot with a tranquilizer dart. That last wouldn’t have been so bad maybe, since I would have actually been able to sleep. At least Wisp wasn’t bugging me – he seemed content to just hover there indefinitely.

  After a while, when it was dark, I whispered, “I messed up pretty bad, huh?”

  Wisp didn’t light up, but my eyes were adjusted well enough to see the swirl of motes before me. “The Regent is gifted at anticipating the actions of others,” he said at last. “You only wanted to see your father. It’s understandable.”

  “I ruined all your plans.”

  “Howlaa always says ‘plan’ is a four-letter-word for something that goes wrong. We simply have to... adapt to our new circumstances.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I am primarily an observer, Miranda. I am capable of doing my part for the cause of our freedom, certainly, but when it comes to creating stratagems, tactics, making plans... these are not my strengths. I always depended on Howlaa for such things.”

  Which meant... what? It was up to me? Not reassuring. “How long do you think we have before they realize Howlaa’s not really me?”

  “Difficult to say. Howlaa is genetically identical to you, and she is an adept imposter, so she will stand up to considerable scrutiny. Once the Regent begins to study the false jump-engine, however, the deception will become apparent. For now, I think it is safe to say that no one is looking for you. Yet.”

  “Which means if we’re going to do something, we should do it soon.” I crawled out of the pipe. The construction site was lit only by the streetlamps outside the fence. I walked around for a while, poking under tarps, until I found a long wooden box with a lid, padlocked shut. I rattled the big lock, then squeezed it in my fist.

  The lock flickered, and went from hanging on the box’s clasp to lying in the dirt at my feet. Very cool. The jump-engine could vastly simplify my shoplifting process, though after a few days of genuine adventure, the adrenaline rush of stealing bracelets was starting to seem kind of childish. I flipped open the box’s lid and peered inside. Wisp floated close and said, “Miranda, do you have any experience with demolitions?”

  “Is that, what, dynamite?” The box was full of neatly stacked cylinders, but they weren’t cartoon red with fuses sticking out of one end, just a dusty dull orange.

  “Yes. They’re dangerous if you aren’t experienced.” He paused. “They’re dangerous anyway.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Wisp. I don’t know what they teach in seventh grade around here, but we don’t have classes in blowing shit up in Pomegranate Grove.”

  “A pity. A teleporter with
access to bombs... you could be a one-woman uprising.”

  I found another box, made the padlock disappear, and considered the jumble of dirty tools inside. There was a big sledgehammer that seemed perfect, but I could barely even lift it – I don’t think it was made for human hands, even big burly construction worker hands. I picked up a wrecking bar with a curved end, about three feet long, and it felt good in my hands, something I could swing. “There we go,” I said.

  “Why do you want a weapon, exactly?” Wisp said. “Anything you could smash with that you could just as easily reach out and send away. Any door you wanted to pry open you could simply pass through.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t trust the whole magical ring thing. If the Regent finds a way to turn off the jump-engine, at least with this I’ll still be able to hit stuff.”

  “Contingency plans are never a bad thing,” Wisp said. “What now?”

  My rumbling stomach answered that before my brain could think about it. “We never did get anything to eat. All aboard, Wisp. We’re jumping.”

  A flicker, and we were back in the kitchen at Etienne’s, dark, empty, quiet. The pot on the stove was cold and crusted, and everything was still a mess from the interrupted lunch service, which meant my Dad must be in custody somewhere – he never left the kitchen messy like this. I hunted around and found some cheese and fruit and bread, enough to make a half-assed repast, and dug in while Wisp floated around the room.

  Once my belly was full, thinking was easier. If I could get to the center of the palace and send the snatch-engines into a black hole or something, the Regent would lose his biggest source of power... but he’d still be a pissed-off ruler with an army and a bunch of high-tech stuff at his beck and call. He’d never let my Dad free, or Howlaa, for that matter, and even though there was no prison on Nexington-on-Axis that could keep me out – or keep them in, once I found them – the Nex was a big place, and I didn’t know where to start looking for either of them.

  The snatch-engines were still key. They were the thing the Regent valued most. Just getting rid of them wasn’t enough anymore, because there was more at stake than Howlaa and Wisp’s freedom. Maybe I could hold the engines hostage. Put them somewhere out of the Regent’s reach, but not out of mine. He’d have to agree to an exchange of prisoners then, and I could negotiate for Wisp and Howlaa’s freedom, too.

  I picked up the wrecking bar. “Let’s go to the palace, Wisp. It’s time to snatch the snatch-engines.”

  ***

  First I teleported to the moving walkway, much to the surprise of all the people and things riding it – apparently Nexington-on-Axis never sleeps. A steam-powered piston-driven cyborg like Templeton – only even less human-looking – growled at me, and a bunch of LEDs on his face lit up. A twisted little imp with a pearl necklace riding on the shoulders of a bored-looking human boy said “Where did you come from?”

  “Blessings of Mab be upon you,” I said, conscious of my bedraggled wings and the fact that I’d lost my faceted glasses somewhere. So much for my disguise. I looked down at the palace, glittering and shifting in the distance, towers elongating and shrinking and corkscrewing with slow grace. At night, from above, the lights of Nexington-on-Axis were like galaxies colliding.

  Line of sight, I thought, and jumped to the roof of the palace. I knelt down and put my hand on the smooth surface of the roof. The stone, or whatever, was cool and slightly rough and weirdly organic, like touching the skin of a snake. I pressed down, and it yielded slightly, milky rainbows of color spiraling out from the pressure of my fingers. I walked up to the base of one of the towers, bigger around than a giant sequoia, and it didn’t look like a built thing at all, but like a growing thing, a tree branch sprouting off from the main trunk. “Where did the Regent snatch this place from?”

  “The palace predates the days of the Regent,” Wisp said in my ear. “It was the first structure on Nexington-on-Axis, as far as we know, home to the Kings and Queen and their children. Perhaps it is native to this place. The engines have never found anything like it again, though the Regent has searched.”

  “Huh. So do we have any idea where the snatch-engines are located?”

  “Just ‘the heart of the palace.’ But the palace extends for many blocks in all directions, and extends downward as well. There are whole wings that have never been seen by sentient eyes, sections that are utterly inaccessible, without doors, windows, or ventilation shafts. The Regent’s government occupies only a tiny portion of the palace. The rest... governs itself.”

  “So we’re going exploring, then. Will we know the snatch-engines if we see them?”

  “I suspect they will be difficult to miss,” Wisp said.

  I walked to one of the towers and put my hands on its surface. “Here we go.” I closed my eyes and stepped forward.

  When my eyes opened, it was dark, and Wisp’s motes lit up rapidly, his form spreading out to make a net of light. I stood on a smooth stony platform inside the curvature of the tower, with what I thought was a spiral staircase winding up into the darkness above and down into the darkness below. When I stepped closer, though, I saw there were no steps, and the curve was just a single glass rail, like a giant corkscrew. “What, am I supposed to slide down that?” I asked.

  “I don’t think this tower is designed for human habitation,” Wisp said.

  “Wonder what this lever does?” It was a crystalline rod about three feet long, set into the center of the platform, with a sparkling diamondlike knob on top. I tugged, and the lever didn’t budge – it wasn’t as delicate as it looked. “See?” I said. “My crowbar is already useful.” I jammed the bar between the base of the lever and the wall and pulled, and the lever creaked and inched forward. “Can’t use teleportation for leverage.”

  “I hope pulling that lever doesn’t trigger something unpleasant. Like the disappearance of this tower.”

  “If the walls start closing in, I’ll just step through them, and you’ve got nothing to worry about anyway, right?”

  “I can’t pass through impermeable solids, Miranda. My kind are difficult to contain, it’s true, but an airtight container closing around us fast enough can do it. I don’t know whether I’d be able to escape this tower or not.”

  “Better be ready to climb up my nose and in my ears and under my clothes in a hurry then, just in case.”

  I grunted and strained at the bar, and the lever gave way completely, slamming down against the platform with a sound like a spoon ringing against a glass.

  “Subtlety, thy name is Miranda,” Wisp said.

  “Shhh.” I listened. There was noise up above, a sound almost like whistling, like when you blow over the mouth of a bottle. “What is that?”

  “Onrushing death?”

  Something like a car on a roller coaster came spiraling down the rail, but it was low and sleek and rose-quartz colored. The car pivoted around and around as it descended, so even though the track spun in tight corkscrews, the front of the car always faced the same way. “I thought this palace was alive. This looks like something that was built.”

  “Perhaps the palace is both an organism and the habitation for an organism. Perhaps there is a central life form, somewhere, and the palace is merely its shell, built up around it like a nautilus. Who can say? But this is hardly the oddest thing you’ll find in the palace.”

  The car stopped in front of the platform. It was a no-frills thing, without pads or seatbelts, and the only control was a small lever. I climbed in. “I guess we head down.” I pushed the lever toward my feet.

  The ride was smoother than I expected, and with the pivoting-around I didn’t even feel dizzy, though the blank expanse of wall lit by Wisp wasn’t all that interesting. “Think there’ll be guards waiting for us at the bottom?”

  “Possibly,” Wisp said. “If this railway is monitored. But the palace is unimaginably vast. It has gradually consumed the buildings around it, growing around them the way a tree will grow around a nail driven into
a branch – or the way an oyster will surround a piece of grit to make a pearl – utterly enclosing and incorporating them. Even at its most active, the palace can seem empty. The business of government takes place only in a few stable chambers near the front doors. It’s considered suicidally foolhardy to venture much deeper, since corridors and staircases have a way of folding in on themselves, disappearing, and reconfiguring. Some say the Regent’s apartments and audience chamber and courtrooms and offices are actually dead parts of the palace, necrotic tissue in the organism, since they are the only rooms that never change. You and I are in one of the living sections. I don’t know what we’ll find, but it’s unlikely we’ll be found.”

  “I just can’t get over how weird this place is.”

  “The universe is vast and strange. Have you heard the theory that, in an infinite universe, anything that possibly can exist must exist?”

  I nodded. “My friend Jenny Kay told me something like that once – she said that everyone on Earth has perfect doubles way out there in the universe, some impossibly far distance away. And not just perfect doubles, but also slightly imperfect doubles, people almost exactly the same except for maybe a mole, a pimple, a missing tooth. I didn’t really get it.” I realized I’d just given Wisp permission to lecture, but it was better than staring at a blank wall, at least.

  “The theory holds that since all objects– you, me, restaurants, planets, everything – are composed of specific combinations of particles, all of those combinations would repeat an infinite number of times, assuming the universe itself is infinite. So there are countless versions of you, including infinite identical versions and infinite slightly-different versions. There are versions of you identical in every way, except you have the thoughts and memories of Mozart or Einstein or Howlaa –”

  I interrupted. “Wait, I get that physical stuff is just made of atoms or whatever, and that if you have enough space those atoms will fall into the same patterns over and over, but you’re saying thoughts can get copied too?”