Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
“All right then. You can leave me here, if ya want. I think I can find it.”
She shoots me a smarmy smile. Like she wants to tell me I’m full of shit, but she holds that in. “You can go first if you want. But I’m gonna follow just to keep an eye on you.”
“Is the god telling you to do that?”
“What god? There’s no god here, Tyse.”
“Right. Whatever then. Let’s go.” I start down the stairs, hopping four or five at a time just to see if I can lose her. But she keeps up, jumping onto a railing and sliding down it to pass me, leaping off at the last minute when she gets to the landing. Then she waves a hand, letting me pass.
She’s a weird kid. She’s always been a weird kid. But I’ve never had this long of an interaction with her before, so I guess I never realized just how weird.
Clearly, she’s in control of her situation. Which both makes me feel better and worries me more when I look too closely at what that means.
Everyone knows there’s leftover tech in the tower. Obviously, it’s how we get the spark. But there might be more going on in here than anyone realizes. And right now, I’m getting the impression that it’s got something to do with this child.
But that’s a problem for another day because I’ve been watching the sector numbers as we’ve been descending and we’ve reached a door with a large number four painted on it. So I stop and point to it. “Sector 4, right? How do we get to quad H minus five?”
Anneeta looks down into the black stairwell that might go on forever for all I know. Then she looks back at me as she simultaneously counts on her fingers and recites the alphabet. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. That’s eight. Which means four floors down, eight quads in.”
“How do you figure that?”
“That’s just how it works. It’s sector 4, level H. Four, four, four.”
“What about the minus five?”
“We’ll deal with that when we get there.”
I squint my eyes at her. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
She tsks her tongue at me. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
I throw up my hands. “Fine. Lead on.”
We go down again, three more floors, then she stops at that door. This time the white spray paint says four dash four. Anneeta looks over her shoulder at me, smirking, as she opens it. Again, the lights come on when we enter the new dark passageway. But in here, they do not sputter. Nor are any of them dark.
In fact, I think I can hear a hum. Like… there’s a generator.
And if I didn’t know better, I’d think the power was getting stronger.
But that’s not supposed to be possible.
Surely Stayn knows how deep this tower is. He did give me coordinates, after all, so he’s got some kind of blueprint of the place. Though I haven’t seen any indication of them, there must also be security sensors down here, because that’s how he got an alert. But does he know there’s full-on power? I mean, the whole point of taking out the god was to take out its power. The spark is supposed to be something residual that can do small bits of work, but not with any reliability.
Everyone knows the god’s power comes from a series of massive generators deep under the earth and that power can last for generations, even after the god is gone, because each god had thousands of banks of batteries for storage. I’ve never actually seen one in person with my own eyes, but while I was in Sweep I saw lots of things on vids and a battery bank was one of them. It was like… well, I couldn’t really grasp the size of it until a marker was placed to give it perspective. The battery bank was ten times as big as the megalopolis above ground. We were told it could run for several centuries before actually drying up.
The tower in Tau City has been decommissioned for three hundred and twenty-five years, so it should be nearing the end of its life.
Battery banks are normal. Spark is normal. Generators running full-on power three hundred and twenty-five years after being decommissioned is not.
I look down at Anneeta and find her wide brown eyes already looking up at me. “Can you hear that?”
She nods, but doesn’t say anything.
It’s easy to see Anneeta as some kind of unfortunate accident. Poor girl, people say. She’ll never have a life outside the spark. And it is sad, so I kinda agree on this point.
But what if… what if she’s not an accident? What if there’s something going on down here we’re not aware of and she’s a part of it?