Meanwhile, you stall. You go through the motions. You provide electricity, food, drugs on the one hand. Camps, the Partials, and repression on the other. You don’t need to control territory in the normal way. You don’t see the city from the sky looking down, like humans. You see it from the underground looking up. And you control the underground. That’s your homeland away from home. You can choose what you hold on to aboveground and what you don’t. So long as you rule everything below. So long as you can block access to whatever you like.

You leave the burnt-out tanks on the streets, don’t clean up the HFZ not as a warning to the human population, but because you don’t have the personnel to do that and keep working on the towers, too. And because, on some level, you don’t really care about any of it. Not any of it. Especially not governing. All you care about are the two towers.

And do you know why? Because we might have called it a door all this time. “A window. A machine.” But it’s more complex than that. It’s not just a door. It’s a beacon. Because, you see, Finch, they don’t need a huge door if they’ve found a way home. Not according to our intelligence. No, they only need a door this big if they’re planning to use it to bring more over here. To Ambergris. To the world.

The Silence? All of what Duncan Shriek said in those old books—it’s true. Except he was wrong about this one thing. They’ve found they like it here. They want to stay. Permanently. In numbers.

Now, is that exactly what happened, and how it happened? No, probably not, because we can’t actually imagine how they think, or what they think about. And it might not even be a door yet. It might just be a beacon. If they haven’t found their home yet.

But what I’ve told you is close. Close enough, according to our sources.

… You may not believe me, Finch-Crossley, but I don’t take any of it personally. Not really. They behave as their nature and their situation warrants. I can respect that. There’s a sick kind of honor in that, really. But that still doesn’t mean I don’t plan on finishing what Manzikert started. Because, as you’ve guessed, we now have a new weapon. A new weapon that is very old.

They’d reached the far shore, the sea giving way to land. The boat nudged up against a lip of flat rock. Which led to an overhang carved out of the black stone. The ancient fossilized remains of a fireplace out front. Beyond the fireplace, evidence of habitation.

Almost as unreal as the story the Lady in Blue had told him. The air moist and cold. Finch shivered.