The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Sivaraksa closed his eyes. She thought he might have died, but then he opened them again and made the tiniest of nods. Naqi left her place of hiding. She crossed the open ground to Sivaraksa in a low, crablike stoop.

She knelt down by him, cradling his head in one hand and holding his own hand with the other. “Jotah… What happened?”

He managed to answer her. “They turned on us. The nineteen other delegates. As soon as…” He paused, summoning strength. “As soon as Weir made his move.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Join the club,” he said, managing a smile.

“I need to get you inside,” she said.

“Won’t help. Everyone else is dead. Or will be by now. They murdered us all.”

“No.”

“Kept me alive until the end. Wanted me to give the orders.” He coughed. Blood spattered her hand.

“I can still get you…”

“Naqi. Save yourself. Get help.”

She realised that he was about to die.

“The shuttle?”

“Looking for Weir. I think.”

“They want Weir back?”

“No. Heard them talking. They want Weir dead. They have to be sure.”

Naqi frowned. She understood none of this, or, at least, her understanding was only now beginning to crystallise. She had labelled Weir as the villain because he had harmed her beloved Pattern Jugglers. But Crane and her entourage had murdered people, dozens if what Sivaraksa said was correct. They appeared to want Weir dead as well. So what did that make Weir, now?

“Jotah… I have to find Weir. I have to find out why he did this.” She looked back toward the centre of the Moat. The shuttle was continuing its search. “Did your security people get a trace on him again?”

Sivaraksa was near the end. She thought he was never going to answer her. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, they found him again.”

“And? Any idea where he is? I might still be able to reach him before the shuttle does.”

“Wrong place.”

She leaned closer. “Jotah?”

“Wrong place. Amesha’s looking in the wrong place. Weir got through the cut. He’s in the open ocean.”

“I’m going after him. Perhaps I can stop him…”

“Try,” Sivaraksa said. “But I’m not sure what difference it will make. I have a feeling, Naqi. A very bad feeling. Things are ending. It was good, wasn’t it? While it lasted?”

“I haven’t given up just yet,” Naqi said.

He found one last nugget of strength. “I knew you wouldn’t. Right to trust you. One thing, Naqi. One thing that might make a difference… if it comes to the worst, that is…”

“Jotah?”

“Tak Thonburi told me this… the highest secret known to the Snowflake Council. Arviat, Naqi.”

For a moment she thought she had misheard him, or that he was sliding into delirium. “Arviat? The city that sinned against the sea?”

“It was real,” Sivaraksa said.

There were a number of lifeboats and emergency service craft stored at the top of near-vertical slipways, a hundred metres above the external sea. She took a small but fast emergency craft with a sealed cockpit, her stomach knotting as the vessel commenced its slide toward the ocean. The boat submerged before resurfacing, boosted up to speed and then deployed ceramic hydrofoils to minimise the contact between the hull and the water. Naqi had no precise heading to follow, but she believed Weir would have followed a reasonably straight line away from the cut, aiming to get as far away from the Moat as possible before the other delegates realised their mistake. It would only require a small deviation from that course to take him to the nearest external node, which seemed as likely a destination as any.

When she was twenty kilometres from the Moat, Naqi allowed herself a moment to look back. The structure was a thin white line etched on the horizon, the towers and the now-sealed cut faintly visible as interruptions in the line’s smoothness. Quills of dark smoke climbed from a dozen spots along the length of the structure. It was too far for Naqi to be certain that she saw flames licking from the towers, but she considered it likely.

The closest external node appeared over the horizon fifteen minutes later. It was nowhere as impressive as the one that had taken Mina, but it was still a larger, more complex structure than any of the nodes that had formed within the Moat-a major urban megalopolis, perhaps, rather than a moderately sized city. Against the skyline Naqi saw spires and rotunda and coronets of green, bridged by a tracery of elevated tendrils. Sprites were rapidly moving silhouettes. There was motion, but it was largely confined to the flying creatures. The node was not yet showing the frenzied changes she had witnessed within the Moat.

Had Weir gone somewhere else?