Gideon the Ninth

This room—more spacious, more elongated—gave the distinct impression of having been ransacked. It was ringed with broad metal desks, and the walls were pockmarked with empty electrical sockets. There were shelves and shelves that must once have contained books and files and folders, but now only contained a lot of dust; there were discoloured places on the walls where things must have been tacked up and had since been taken down. It was a naked and empty room. One wall was windowed all along its length to let you see into the chamber ahead, and that wall had a door in it marked with two things: one, a sign on the front saying RESPONSE, and two, a little plaque on the top marked OCCUPIED. This had a bleary glow of a green light next to it, indicating that Response was probably not occupied. Looking through to Response—a bleak, featureless chamber, characterised only by a couple of vents on the far side of the square—the floor was an absolute shitshow of bits of broken bone.

The other wall—filled with brackets to prop up books that had long since been removed—had a door too, and this one was labelled: IMAGING. The Imaging door had the same plaque as Response, but with a little red light instead. Imaging also had a little plex window whose outside was smeared with old bloody handprints.

“Someone’s been having fun in here,” said Gideon.

Harrow shot her a look but did not enforce the vow of silence. “Yes,” she said. “Me.”

Her cavalier tried the door marked Response, but it wouldn’t move and there didn’t seem to be a conventional touchpad. Harrow said, “It won’t open like that, Nav. Come with me, and don’t touch anything.”

Gideon went with Harrow and did not touch anything. The autodoor to Imaging obligingly opened at their approach, revealing a dismal cupboard of a room with a huge array of old mechanical equipment, lightless and dead. A single ceiling panel fuzzed its way to life, white and pallid and not revealing much but more shadow. The long desk still had what she realised was a rusted old clipboard, to which a thin, nearly transparent piece of paper was attached. Gideon at last gave in to the urge to touch something, and the paper dissolved as though it were ash. It left a grey stain on her fingertips.

“Fucking yuck,” she said, wiping them on her front.

Harrow said curtly, “Have some care, you dolt, everything here is impossibly old.”

In the centre of the room was a tall metal pedestal. Atop the pedestal was a strange, flat panel of weirdly reflective glass—beautiful, with a dichromatic black fleck. The black-robed necromancer, painted brow furrowed with concentration, passed her hand over the top of the glass: it buzzed at her proximity, sending shivering green sparks jumping over the pedestal. Harrow peeled off her glove and placed one long-fingered hand directly on the glass. Two things happened: the glass folded over her hand like a cage, and the Imaging door shut with a heavy whunk. Gideon pressed into it, but it did not open again.

“What happens now?”

Harrow said, “Look through the window.”

Through the smeary little window Gideon could see that Response had opened up. Harrow continued, joylessly: “The door shuts in response to—as far as I can tell—weight and motion. I didn’t test precisely how much weight, but it’s around thirty moving kilograms. I have, at this point, sent around ninety kilos’ worth of bone matter into that room.”

The things Harrow could pull off with the tip of someone’s toe bone were astonishing. Three kilos of osseo for Harrow could have been anything. A thousand skeletons, crammed and interlocked within Response. Seas of spines. An edifice of cranium and coccyx. Gideon just said, “Why?”

Harrow said, stiffly: “Every single construct I’ve put into that room has been pulverised.”

“By what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If I take my hand off the pedestal, the door unlocks and the room reverts. I can’t see it. I only hear it.”

At hear it the hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, and she shook off her hood. Harrow jerked her wrist away from the pedestal and the glass neatly unfolded itself from her hand. The Imaging door opened with another automatic whunk, spilling light in from the anterior room.

Harrow worked each finger gently within its socket, and said, this time more brightly: “So, Griddle, this is where you are to be my shining star. You’re going out there to be my eyes.”

“What?”

“My skeletons don’t have photoreceptors, Nav,” the necromancer said calmly. “I know they’re being destroyed with blunt force. I have no idea what by, and I need to keep my hand on the thanergetic lock. You have perfectly functional eye jelly; you have a dubious but capable brain; you’re going to stand out there and look through the window. Got it?”