The descent continued. Lubin leaned against the wall of the elevator, his face a bloody cyclops mask. Clarke felt warm wetness on her upper lip: her nose was running. She reached up and gave it a scratch, inconspicuously jamming the plug in her left nostril tight against the leak.

Suddenly her body thrummed, deep inside, an almost subsonic quaking that vibrated her bones as though they were the parts of some great bass instrument. Faint nausea struck her in the throat. Her bowels quavered.

The two most likely options, Lubin had mused, are gas and infrasound.

She didn't know if gas was in Desjardins's arsenal—for all she knew the air around them was already saturated. But this was obviously some kind of squawkbox. The sound dish must stretch across the whole ceiling of the elevator, or maybe beneath the floor. The walls focused its vibrations, built resonances within the cage. The sound would be tuned to build intolerable harmonics in the lungs and middle ears, in the sinuses and trachea.

It made her sick even with her airways and hard cavities flooded; she could scarcely imagine the impact on unbuttressed flesh. The implants didn't deal with gastrointestinal gases—deep-sea pressure collapsed those soft pockets down with no ill effect—and acoustic attacks were generally tuned to harder, more predictable air spaces anyway. Desjardins's squawkbox was doing something down there, though. It was all she could do to keep from vomiting saline all over the compartment, from shitting in her diveskin. Any dryback would be on the floor by now, soiled and retching or unconscious. Clarke clenched at both ends and hung on.

The elevator stopped. The lights went out.

He knows, she thought. He figured it out, of course he figured it out. How could we think he wouldn't? How could he not notice?

Any second the elevator would lurched back into motion, drag them up through this ruined, booby-trapped derelict where sixty-five floors of countermeasures would turn them into—

Her head cleared. Her bones stopped tingling. Her bowels returned to the fold.

"Okay, guys." Desjardins's voice was tinny and distant in Clarke's flooded ears. "End of the line."

The doors slid open.

An oasis of bright machinery on a vast dark plain. That's what naked eyes would have seen: the Second Coming perhaps, a Christ-figure bathed in light and technology while all around was an infinite void.

To Lenie Clarke there was no darkness. The void was a converted parking garage, an empty gray cavern stretching half a city block on a side. Evenly-spaced rows of support pylons held the ceiling from the floor. Plumbing and fiberop emerged from the walls, crawled along their surfaces like a webbing of sparse vines. Cables converged into a loosely-bound trunk, winding along the floor to a horseshoe of workstations lit by chemical lightstrips.