Something much farther down the throat of the Way, a blinking beacon, caught her attention. She shielded her eyes, although the tubelight was not excessively bright, and squinted to focus on a moving speck. It, too, was within the ribbon of light, but many stadia away, moving rapidly in their direction. She jerked her neck back as it reached a point just above them, saw that it was another huge rainbow prism, and realized it would collide with the first prism. Twisting about, she gasped as the prisms struck like trains on a rail. For a moment, they were one long green mass, and then the second prism passed through the first without damage to either, continuing its travel unimpaired in the opposite direction.

Patrikia had never described anything like that.

“I feel numb,” she said, glancing resentfully at Typhōn.

“It was your choice to see it all,” the escort said mildly. “None of me take this route often, themselves.”

She pondered that syntax for a moment, decided the view was less disturbing than what she suspected Typhōn meant, and faced forward again.

There were no obvious entrances to the tower. Nevertheless, the bubble passed straight through the rounded wall of a stacked disk, crossing an enclosed arc-shaped space filled with floating polyhedrons, and then through another wall. The bubble discarded its panoply of green lines, and descended along a leaf-green shaft toward what might have been a perfectly clear lens of glass. Distorted by the lens were sea-blues and sky-blues and light browns and cloud-grays; all the normal colors of her home. She held her breath for a moment, hoping against hope that the nightmare would end.

“This is the gate to Gaia,” her escort said. “A prior gate was opened here. Our gates are not usually so constricted in shape, but the prior geometry takes precedence.”

“Oh,” Rhita said. Free with information that meant next to nothing to her…

As they fell toward the surface of the lens, the color of the shaft reddened, then abruptly shifted to white.

The bubble struck the lens and they fell through. Below lay a coastline, gray ocean under cloud shadows, blue ocean in patches of brilliant sunlight.

Rhita could hardly breathe. “Where are we?”

“This is your world,” Typhōn said.

She knew that; and it was no dream, either. “Where on Gaia?”

“Not far from your home, I understand—I’ve never visited here in any self or capacity.”

“I want to go to…” She looked up and saw blue sky and an indistinct shimmer over their heads: the gate they had just passed through. “Can we go to Rhodos?”

Typhōn considered her request for a moment. “It would not consume much more energy. This project nears its limits, however. There will have to be results soon.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“This line of investigation. You must provide results soon.”