I hurried through some quick mental calculations. The nearest port of any appreciable size was Camrose. At full speed, it would take a ship at least four days to get here, which meant I had to stay hidden for at least another forty-eight hours, maybe longer.

Would my pursuers find a way to follow me across this huge darkened sphere? Maybe they were trailing me even now, in a similar flying room? I turned to look back, to see if I could perceive any hint of another craft in my wake, only to find that the room I was in was turning. Slowly and gracefully, it revolved until the glass door faced forwards, in the direction of travel, and I finally caught sight of what I was heading into.

Ahead, a circular opening revealed an even larger chamber beyond—a chamber so mind-numbingly gigantic that it should not have been able to fit within the confines of this planet. I couldn’t even begin to guess at its dimensions.

Something that looked like a tiny white sun burned at the centre of this colossal vault. I couldn’t look directly at it, so it was hard to guess its exact size. Nevertheless, I guessed it was far too small for its gravity to spark a fusion reaction, and therefore far too small to be a natural object. No race in the Multiplicity could have constructed such a thing; it was beyond all known technology, and probably beyond our understanding of the way stars behaved and worked. But it wasn’t that shining bauble that filled me with a dread so profound I felt the blood turn to sand in my veins. The thing that struck terror into my very soul was the cloud of objects that surrounded that impossible miniature sun in uncountable ranks, their dagger-like hulls throwing long shadows onto the walls of the chamber. For in the space between the star and the surrounding walls had been arranged thousands upon thousands of gleaming white starships, each with a hull like polished marble and a prow as sharp as a knife.

* * *

I remained in the cramped, flying room for a day and a night. Exhausted from the pursuit through the canyon maze, I spent much of the time asleep, curled uncomfortably on the hard white floor. When I awoke, I watched the approach of the little sun and its attendant ranks of lustrous vessels; when I slept again, I dreamt of Adam standing among the blackened, smoking stumps of a firebombed jungle.

Time passed slowly.

I began to catch myself humming tunes and talking to myself. I had never been very good at being alone, and the utter silence of the lift’s passage—I had begun to think of it as a kind of flying elevator—was so relentlessly oppressive to me that the sound of a voice, even my own, could bestow comfort and the illusion of company.