"Lady of Mazes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Schroeder Karl)

6

"This is wrong," said Qiingi as Skaalitch passed out of sight behind some hills. He sat awkwardly in his seat, staring down at the landscape with some complex mix of sadness and loathing in his eyes. With a start Livia realized that he was feeling guilty — guilty at taking the easy way to Barrastea, and not walking.

Livia had summoned her full Society as they ran to the aircar, but something was wrong with that, too. The ani-mas of her family and friends appeared, but they stood listlessly, unresponsive, as if most of their attention were elsewhere. She supposed it was, if Barrastea was the city that Raven's warriors were marching on.

"Speak to me," she said to the Society. "What's happening below?"

At first nobody responded. Then the image of Lady Ellis turned slowly and looked at her. "We have gone into games mode," said the anima. "Join us on the ground at city center, Livia."

She let out a breath in shock. Only two or three times in her Me had she been into the war games submanifold of Westerhaven. Parents showed young children how to get there, when teaching them about emergency realities. But nobody went military lightly, or for long.

She wanted all of this to just stop stop stop. She needed a chance to think, to find an exit from this strange new manifold she was living in. But the clouds continued to whip past, and a warrior of Raven really sat by her side, in a place that should have been impossible for him.

She made her way into games mode by tuning down certain features of the outside world and amplifying others. "Qiingi, you must come in here with me," she heard herself say; as she worked he had faded to the gray of a nonparticipating noncombatant. She flung him a reticle — a set of frames, icons, and interactive objects that he could use to select the attitudes and focus of the subman-ifold. After a surprisingly short time he was fully real next to her again; she supposed Raven's people had some counterpart to this place.

The rest of the world, though, had gone hyperreal. Things in her immediate vicinity — the aircar, Qiingi, the closest clouds — were suddenly perfect in their clarity. It was as though she were seeing Qiingi for the first time: every hair, every breath he took registered as a distinct object or event. At the same time, everything beyond this little bubble of hyperreality had been reduced to a wire-frame tactical display. The sky was neutral gray, the land a sketch covered with icons and winking lights.

"Give me a portable map," said Livia. The map appeared, pretending to be a paper object on the dashboard. She unfolded its half-felt leaves until it lay across her lap. Qiingi turned from the simplified outside view, leaning over her shoulder to examine the map. "Is that your land?" he asked. She nodded. "And those little torches?"

Tiny winking lights were scattered across the map's surface. "Those mark where fighting is happening." There were hundreds scattered evenly throughout the manifold.

"You've invaded us," she said in despair. Qiingi shook his head.

"Your lands and ours have always been the same," he said. "Many of our people wander for much of the year, and they know that the lands they walk through contain other peoples, though they rarely see you. Livia, they are our lands, too."

Livia shook her head, but she knew he was right. If the horizons were falling ... Where Raven's people had communed with life and nature for centuries in silent forest cathedrals and trackless meadows, suddenly they found themselves standing in or next to farms and towns full of blaring machines and swooping aircars. Mobs of people crowded up against them at every turn.

"There have always been lands that are not strongly real for either of our peoples," Qiingi continued. "There, we encounter one another. These places are where we stage our raids, those of our young men happy to war with yours. But it is wrong for that war to be everywhere or involve everyone, as it now seems to." livia barely heard him, because the aircar had punched its way through a series of big puffy clouds and there, spread out below them in topographic relief, was Barrastea.

The city was almost unrecognizable in this tactical view — but she could see that it was surrounded by a perfect ring of flickering light. The battle indicated was on a scale never before seen in Teven Coronal. "But this," she whispered. "This can't be your people."

Qiingi saw where she was pointing. "No, not us," he agreed. "We stage raids. We defend ourselves. We don't — "

The world suddenly spun around them. Her inner ear gave no sign of what had just happened; the war games submanifold wouldn't permit sensations such as vertigo or nausea. Livia found her awareness snap away from Qiingi, to the cloud of aircars through which they were suddenly diving.

The sky was full of whirling icons, some the green of friendlies, some red. Something loomed close, was, for an instant, the vision of a tumbling, half-ruined car falling past. Then coming straight at her, filling the sky, was a giant eagle.

Qiingi shouted something in Raven's dialect. There was no sound or sensation to the impact, only a squeezing pressure on her face as she was suddenly nose to nose with the dashboard, the sparking blue stuff of her angel having prevented her shattering her face on it. Just above her right ear, a huge avian claw was widening a hole in the aircar's canopy.

Qiingi stood up in his seat, reciting something in a loud voice. He stood face to face with the eagle, whose beak was the size of his head. The eagle matched Qiingi's gaze, opened its beak and screamed. The scream came right through Livia's military consciousness and took root in her deepest fears. She watched herself whimper and shrink back. But Qiingi didn't blink.

Then the eagle was gone, replaced by a cold gale and the sky and earth, sky and earth flipping by in rapid succession. Even as she realized they were in a spin the car righted itself and went into a more sedate spiral, aiming itself at the Great Library in the center of Barrastea. In this giant stone edifice were stored records and artifacts from all the manifolds Westerhaven had touched. Teven's history was preserved there; so it was fitting that this was where the founders had set up their command post.

Something huge that was all angles blocked the sky. Livia had a confused glimpse of black wings with black eyes on them, a beak with faces carved in it — then they were past and had missed the compound. Treetops whipped by just under the car and leaves fanned up behind like spray from a boat. Barely clearing a low stone wall, the aircar slowed at last and bumped to a stop.

"Out! Out!" Qiingi shoved her onto the grass as the black and red thing reappeared. It was nightmarish but recognizable as a living manifestation of a Raven design. Each part of its body was a separate creature, each so distorted as to be unidentifiable. It stood atop a row of trees and roared.

Qiingi dragged her into the shadow of an archway. "We need weapons," he said in a reasonable tone.

For the moment the monster wasn't moving, just roaring, so Livia looked around. The games submanifold swept into strong focus around her: the sky was separated into quadrants, with a giant circular compass rose centered on Livia herself. Different quadrants glowed different colors and different intensities depending on the disposition of forces under them, so that she could see at a glance how the battle was progressing. The sky was crisscrossed by lines showing advances, retreats, and logistics and supply.

They were standing on the edge of Carewon Avenue, a long green mall that extended from the center of Bar-rastea to the outskirts. It would be a perfect funnel for enemy troops; also a good place for ambushes, dotted as it was with hedges and groves. As she looked down the length she saw people pouring out of distant side ways, running chaotically. Some were pursued by gigantic things that hopped from one person to the next, like a boy stomping on ants.

"Don't move!" She turned in time to see Qiingi being forced to his knees by four Westerhaven youths. Belatedly she realized he must look like an enemy to them.

Livia summoned all her authority and pushed aside the barrel of their squad leader's rifle. "Stop! He's one of ours."

It took some convincing for them to lower their guns; the boys were shaking from what they had seen this morning, and were quite prepared to shoot anything non-Westerhaven. Although Qiingi looked like a warrior of Raven, the war games submanifold had marked him as an ally; that was the only reason he was still alive.

Livia took off her shift and gave it to him. "Tune this to some Westerhaven clothes, Qiingi. And ... tie back your hair or something."

As he hurried to comply she turned to ask the boys what was happening. "Who agreed they could raid Bar-rasteaT asked one, his eyes wild. "This is crazy!"

"It's not a raid," she began, but before she could explain further the boys wavered and were replaced by ani-mas. Livia found herself facing the founders.

"We got your message," said Lady Ellis. "It gave us a few minutes' warning. Thank you, Livia."

"A few minutes?" said another of the founders. "Maren, it might as well have been nothing."

"We always knew something like this could happen," said Lady Ellis. "Once we turned our backs on what we'd built ... "

"It's the anecliptics," said another, fear in her voice. It was the second time Livia had heard this strange name. She raised a mask, partly to hide her astonishment at hearing the founders expressing doubt and confusion; while there, she asked, "What's an anecliptic?" of her Society. Nobody answered.

Meanwhile her own anima said, "Wordweaver Qiingi, may I introduce the founders of Westerhaven." As they nodded to one another, Livia thought back to the party at the Kodalys. Lady Ellis had talked about her fears then; she had worried that they have found us. Could they be these ancestors, and were they the same as the mysterious anecliptics? These thoughts flickered by momentarily then were gone, unimportant as they were in the face of the current situation.

Qiingi cleared his throat. "I have spoken to the ones who are doing this," he said.

As usual, his understated style worked: the founders gave him their full attention. He briefly described Kale, and what the man had said. "I have been thinking about our conversation. I believe that the invaders think they are doing us a favor. They believe we are enslaved by illusions, and that they are freeing us from the ropes of a dream."

"They seem to be primitives," agreed Livia. "They don't know that reality is always mediated. They see that inscape is a filter between us and reality ... "

"But they don't see that when you're outside the manifolds you're just living with a different set of filters," said Ellis and nodded. "Thank you, it's good to have some idea of their motives. But it may be too late to help us."

Kale's words had been clear: he believed the people of Teven were using inscape to hide from the real world. But Livia had lived outside inscape; she had seen nothing there that she didn't see within it. It was the emphasis that changed when you changed the technologies mediating between you and the world. Before the accident, her angels, implants, and augmented senses had skewed reality one way; afterward, her clothes, hands and feet, and biological senses had skewed it another. Part of reality had been turned up, other parts turned down or shut off. But neither showed the total picture; one was not true and the other false.

"We have to talk to them," said one of the founders. "Find a way to make them understand — "

Lady Ellis shook her head. "It's too late for that." The other founders glanced at one another. Several nodded grimly.

Livia dismissed her anima and spoke directly to Lady Ellis. "Ma'am, these beasts — the warriors ... How can we help?"

"You have to reach us at the library," said Lady Ellis, pointing. "The Great Families are trying to save our heritage, and your peers are on the front lines. Unfortunately, we're faring badly. Now that the horizons have been blown, weapons that should only work for Raven's people or Westerhaven work in both. It seems as though Raven's warriors have been training to take advantage of the fact. Our own people ... it's swords against totem spirits, Livia. Our people don't know how to react, they're getting cut to pieces."

"But surely we have better weapons," said Livia.

"The big guns haven't made it to the front lines yet. You must understand, everything your generation and your elders know about the world led them to expect that rifles and grenades would not work against Raven's forces. But if their spirit-warriors are effective against us ... Chagrined, she added, "I tried to strengthen Westerhaven against this sort of possibility, but my efforts were too little too late, I'm afraid."

Founder Whyte himself stepped forward. "For now, Livia, you must stay out of the fight. We've sent scouts to the borders of Westerhaven to verify that what's happening here is local, and not a general attack on Teven Coronal. So far the collapse seems confined to this area. That means if things go badly, we can always retreat to another manifold. Because you've got experience outside in-scape, we may need you to lead your peers to safety."

Retreat, she thought, yes, that might be prudent. Wait — when had she started thinking impossible thoughts? To abandon the very reality that they had crafted for themselves over so many generations ... She could see the Great Library in the distance — the very heart of Teven, where her family and friends had spent their lives and passions gathering and preserving all the stories, paintings, sculpture, and music of Teven's mortal manifolds. Westerhaven was a celebration of all difference, it was the very soul of Teven. To abandon it ...

She shook her head, trying to summon some argument that the founders would agree to. "But ... some of our people won't be able to journey to another manifold." How could they? Who could abandon all they held dear, which was what inscape would demand of the traveler?

Ellis nodded sadly. "Those that can't will make a final stand with us. We'll defend the library. Those that can go will need a guide. That's where you and the other diplomats come in."

"But — " The founders had vanished, leaving her standing in the open with the four amateur soldiers.

"Come on!" They ran for the distant marble slab of the library. Thankfully, Raven's monster ignored them as it screamed into the air. As they ran Livia looked around through the war games submanifold and took stock of the situation.

Some of her friends were dead. She had brief moments to contemplate the fact as they paused under bridges or trees, so the realization came and went in random waves of horror. Had she not seen death before firsthand, the knowledge alone might have paralyzed her; as it was, more peers were dying because they simply couldn't believe what was happening to them. They stood in intersections throughout the city, swords drawn, each facing down a charge by up to hundreds of warriors. First their angels, then they were cut down. Their own friends saw them die, and the shock froze them into immobility. They became easy prey for Raven's warriors — no, the ancestors' warriors. Livia found herself turning back more than once, shouting warnings, running to help people who were too far away. Each time Qiingi dragged her back, and they continued toward the library.

She was just succeeding in shoving these terrible deaths out of her consciousness when Livia realized where they were; she instantly stopped running. The others crouched down behind a wall just ahead of her; some mythic beast was crunching over the earth no more than a few meters away. "Livia, get down!" shouted one of the squad. She didn't listen, didn't care.

She was home.

The canopies that slanted over the Kodaly estate were torn. Paths and stone sidewalks were clotted with debris; ways that had been at once public and private were now gutted out of human usability by fire and collapse. The shock of it filled her with a kind of cold; she watched herself running, like somebody else's anima, away from Qiingi and the others, through low archways and across parks full of flaming trees. They were running after her, yelling, but she didn't care.

"We're safe, dear, we made it out!" Mother was saying. She and Livia's father floated alongside her, unscathed but not really here. Livia's footsteps faltered. "Let it go," said her father. "You can't save it. We need to defend the library."

Then she came around one last corner and stood next to the statue of Feste. The park/ballroom lay before her, with her open-air bedroom visible in the coignes of the arch opposite. She could see the bed she'd slept in since she was ten; the footlocker open with a childhood's worth of arts and crafts spilling out of it; her clothes scattered and now torn under the talons of a beast like an unfolding flower of black and crimson, its petals grimacing faces and its claws the beaks of savage birds.

It spotted her immediately. Livia swore, and cast about for somewhere to hide. Feste wasn't big enough. She began to back away, even as the monster raised its wings and prepared to leap on her.

She turned to run and there came the beat of giant wings behind her. She drew her sword — little good that it would do —

— And an explosion knocked her off her feet. Blocky pieces of monster hit the ground and one rolled to a stop next to her head. It was a claw the size of a table, and it looked surprisingly like it was made of wood.

She sat up and looked back. The statue of Feste was gone. Black scorch marks extended across the grass, which was dotted with the strange gore of the monster.

Someone reached down a hand to help her stand. She took it and got to her feet, then followed the hand up the arm and saw who it was.

"Rene?"

Rene Caiser was aged by fear and covered in soot, but his gaze was steady as he smiled at her. He had some sort of rocket launcher slung over his shoulder. "Follow me," he said as Qiingi and the others ran up. "The library's less than a kilometer."

Strange, when you could bring back any moment of your life in full color and detail, relive every word of every conversation, hear the buzzing of the insects on any perfect day — strange, for the most important days of your life to be unrecorded. Yet, for Livia there had been times after the crash that were as vivid to her in memory as if they'd just happened. Others ... whole weeks had been lost, become mythological. She and Aaron had debated who did what and when, but it was pointless. Memory had shattered along with the bodies of friends in the crash, even as she saw the plans and dreams of the peers vanishing now.

At ten years' age, Livia had begun seeing things. Mother was pleased; she explained that this happened to everyone as they approached the age where they could make decisions for themselves. What Livia saw were distant cities, strange flying signs that spoke to her, people who walked through walls, and everywhere words and ethereal conversations that poured and dove around her like the surging waves of an ocean. The visions were beautiful and overwhelming. But she quickly learned that she could summon or dismiss them, or parts of them, as she chose.

One day she ran around the manor with a wand in her hand, pointing and going "poof" at this and that. When she caromed around a corner and met Mother, she pointed the wand at her and said, "Poof, you're a good cook!"

Mother tried not to look annoyed. "Livia, dear, you can't change the real things of the world. You can only change inscape things, and hide or reveal real things. All you can really change is yourself."

Livia thought about that for a moment. She tapped her own head with the wand. "Poof!" she said, "I think you're a good cook!"

All her friends were getting into the vision thing. The boys were a little slower than the girls, so for a year or so she and her friends had it all over them in inscape. What was in, and what was out, was terribly, terribly important — not only how you appeared, but what appeared to you signified your place in the girls' nascent Society.

Over time she came to learn that this was indeed a serious game. She was being shown a wider world than Westerhaven, a world of distractions and seductions so powerful mat they could mesmerize her for days and shake her sense of self and duty down to its foundations. She was being challenged. She was also being given all the tools she might need to construct as true a version of herself as she desired.

She could choose to turn away from Westerhaven and embrace some other manifold that suited her character and ambitions better. It wouldn't even be necessary for her to leave home to do this; that other world would interpenetrate hers, its denizens becoming more real even as her childhood friends and family faded. She could live the rest of her life on these grounds where she'd been born, yet completely outside Westerhaven. Or, she could embrace the Societies she'd been born into and tune herself more and more in their direction. Accept this, discard that feature of the world until Westerhaven was all there was.

She had come to terms with this strange new world — was beginning to accept it — when one afternoon she found herself crawling out of the burst skin of an airbus, drenched in blood that she could not will away.

None of the blood was hers. The whole world had turned a strange yellow, the sky given over to a pillar of dust the width of a mountain that seemed to rise to infinity. In every direction the landscape was torn and flattened as if giants had rampaged across it. After a while of puzzling, Livia decided that the strewn matchsticks in the distance had once been a forest. In many places the underlying skin of Teven Coronal showed through the stripped soil. These scars were midnight black, and smooth as glass.

She turned, a slow stagger as her legs failed to coordinate. She looked for her Society. "Hello?" There were no human forms visible anywhere. Only what she'd seen in the gash she'd just exited. Human forms — partly. Some still moving where they hung; none alive.

The moment of realization came like white light, like the burn of a flare overtaking reason. Livia ran — — and here was one of those holes in her memory.

Some time later she huddled with Aaron under the trunk of a downed tree, as rain plummeted around them, fat, oily drops of it. There was no sound except the mindless drumming of the downpour and Livia's own cries as she called over and over for her Society. For anyone.

Neither of them understood it. They tried over and over to switch off the rain. Stand the trees back up. Bring the corpses in the bus back to life. Things changed when you willed it. People listened, the right things happened. Yet all was silence and the world had turned its back on them.

The first thing Livia had said to Aaron was, "Where are we?' Not what happened; what happened had to do with where you were in inscape. What happened was what you decided happened. Next was, "Who's doing this?" After all, whatever happened did so for a reason, and it was always somebody's reason in particular.

She supposed that the next few holes in her memory had to do with realizing that none of these assumptions was true anymore.

Later, after jumbled recollections of fear, pain, and hunger, she remembered other survivors. They had wandered like ghosts through the blasted landscape; the story was that Livia had led them, and Aaron, out of the dead zone and back to the manifolds. But about half didn't make it In retrospect, she could name the things that had killed some: thirst, exposure, shock. But two of the adults had simply stopped, without apparent reason. They had struggled for a time to comprehend what had happened to them, and failed.

Years later, she wondered if it wasn't the indecisive realities of adolescence that had given her the strength to guide the others after the crash. She and Aaron were already living in a phase where inscape had come unlocked; it was a huge step from that to having no inscape at all, but still they had been able to take it. Not so the other survivors.

Westerhaven had weapons and troops aplenty to withstand any assault by Raven's people. They were part of the games submanifold and were never intended to be used on people, but were still potent. It didn't matter. As the hours dragged on, defeat after defeat changed the zones of the compass-sky over Livia's head from green to red. When it became too much and she couldn't watch any more, Livia left the games manifold to find herself sitting in sunlight in a park full of well-manicured shrubs and exuberant flower beds: the Great Library's grounds. The only sounds here were the zizzing of passing bees and the clear-throated song of a skylark.

She remembered then that catastrophe takes its time as much as any ordinary day. Later, memory would erase this moment, leaving only the pain. For now, this place was real. In wonder and emotional exhaustion, she simply stared at the gardens through the trembling air of afternoon.

She was still sitting that way when the founders returned. They were grim-faced and silent. There was no need to explain the situation; Whyte simply gestured and Livia's Society reappeared, now populated with what was left of the peers. All were running or trudging in her direction while behind them Raven's warriors burned the houses and shattered the towers of Barrastea. Survivors of other generations were rallying behind their own exemplars, some to fight, others to flee.

"As you travel you must leave behind one or two people in each manifold," said Lady Ellis as the first aircars of the evacuation flattened the flower beds Livia had been contemplating. "There must be a chain of people capable of getting messages back to us here."

"All right."

"There's one other thing, Livia." She leaned in and spoke quietly — an action Livia had only ever seen in old movies. "If everything fails, you are to make your way to the aerie. Do you know it?" Livia nodded; the aerie was a Westerhaven outpost built into the south wall of the coronal, high in the mountains. It was reachable only by air-car, or from the Cirrus manifold.

"I've sent Aaron Varese there with his team," said the founder. "I don't know what good he can do, but ... your peers have workshops at the aerie. And it's in the skin of the coronal. That should make it impregnable. If ... if this catastrophe is everywhere ... go there."

Livia wanted to know more about Aaron's part in all this, but in the end she simply nodded, watching as her an-ima shouted and waved, rallying weary fighters near and far. "Come!" it cried. "Form up and tell us your status!"

Her pixies appeared, sporting little military hats. "We've got our orders!" one said, saluting smartly. "Re-connoiter and report!" It waved a tiny map. "This is your path to safety, Livia."

The map, expanded, showed a flight plan in real space as well as circled points that indicated where she should leave each of four charted manifolds. As she was tracing a trembling finger across it, Qiingi came to stand by her. "I have spoken with your founders," he said glumly. "I am of your family now, Livia Kodaly. My home is gone."

She nodded numbly. For a moment she was tongue-tied, so her anima appeared and said briskly, "All right. You're familiar with travel between manifolds, Wordweaver Qiingi. Can you help me shepherd these people to safety?"

"If safety exists." He frowned at the map. "What are these places?"

"Close neighbors of Westerhaven that don't overlap any of Raven's lands. If the ancestors' warriors aren't there, we can use them to stage a counterattack." She let the anima talk; Livia's own attention was on the increasing flood of arriving aircars and running squads of men and women. "Since these places are so close to our own reality, most of the peers should be able to travel to them without difficulty. If we have to go beyond them ... " The line on the map continued beyond the neighboring manifolds, but the next circle had a question mark next to it Qiingi nodded. "Maybe I will be able to help with those places. Some may be similar to Raven's." She heard a trace of wistfulness in his voice.

She stared in an agony of grief at the survivors who now stood or sat about, or wept on one another's shoulders. Some of the wounded floated unconscious in grayish clouds of angel-stuff. If this war was spreading generally, they might all have to flee far from what they knew. She doubted that all of these people would be able to make such a journey; paradoxically, as with Livia and Aaron after the crash, it might be the youngest peers who would have the least difficulty.

A dozen meters away, a young man was walking between the wounded, comforting them. He was covered in dust and blood, his hair matted and his face grim. But he spoke to each injured man or woman himself, not through his anima. Livia felt a flash of admiration for his courage, and shame at herself for hiding behind her agencies. It was Rene, who had run back into the streets after delivering her here, days ago it seemed.

She dismissed her anima and walked over to him. He looked up as she put her hand on his shoulder. "Livia Did you find Xavier?"

Livia almost burst into tears, but suppressed the anima that offered to take her place in the conversation. "We just barely got out," she managed to say. "The ancestors are in control of Raven's people ... Have you met Word-weaver Qiingi?"

Rene looked Qiingi up and down angrily. "You invited the monsters in."

Qiingi didn't reply. After a moment Rene broke his gaze and sighed. "What are we doing here?" he asked.

"We need your help," she said. Briefly she outlined the founders' plan to fall back into other manifolds. The fear on Rene's face became sharper as she spoke; finally he shook his head. "I don't understand it," he said. "Why do we have to do something so ... suicidal? Abandon our homes? Then they've won."

"Westerhaven isn't its geography," she said, trying to make herself believe it was true. "We are the manifold, Rene. That's why we have to make sure we're not divided. Going next door is our only option for now. But it doesn't mean we've lost."

"But to 'go next door' as you put it ... No, Livia, we will lose ourselves. To travel at all you have to reject your own manifold and embrace the ways of another. How can we do that and not lose ourselves?"

Others had heard and were gathering around now. She could see the doubt on many faces. In moments they might reject the idea entirely, and then would even the founders be able to rally them?

It was time to play the card she hated the most, and at this moment Livia wished more than anything that she could do so from behind a mask. Let her anima take over for a while. But they would know if she did that and she couldn't have even one person believe that she didn't have faith enough in the plan to support it wholeheartedly.

Livia adjusted her voice to carry to all the peers, including those not yet here. "You know me," she said reluctantly. "I'm one of the famous survivors of the farside crash. I have lived outside of all manifolds and come back to tell about it. I know I haven't spoken much about the crash over the years. But I did learn something; my survival and return are the proof that I learned it" She took a deep breath, wishing that she really believed what she was about to say.

"We think Westerhaven lies in the way we live — in our Societies, our chosen technologies and systems. But when you have all those things stripped away, you find that you're still of Westerhaven. How can that be? It's because all of this," she gestured around herself, "is only the visible manifestation of what Westerhaven really is. It is what we value — about ourselves, each other, and the world. The Societies, the animas and agencies, these are merely how we manifest those values. When we travel we will find equivalents and recreate Westerhaven in other forms. And when we return we will be stronger for it. Believe me. I know, I have the scars and the knowledge to prove it. I came back.

"Follow me. Follow me now, and I will lead you there and I will lead you back again."

Without masks, she stared down the doubters. And for the first time in her life, Livia knew what it was like to truly lie.