* * *

It was quiet on the street where Victor lived. This was a district for high-ranking professionals and they weren’t around at this time of day. Iona found Victor’s house (she noted with amusement it was another of her designs) and knocked on the door.

There was no answer, but Iona was in no hurry. She knocked three more times, leaving a minute or so between each knock. While she waited she looked around, checking who might see her. Victor’s house had an extensive porch that partly hid her from view.

When Iona felt sure nobody was watching, she pushed the door. It opened—doors in the city only locked from the inside, so that appeared to confirm Victor wasn’t at home. She stepped into the house and closed the door behind herself.

Iona searched through each room. The house was neatly kept, not dissimilar to her own. The main point of difference was that at the back of the house he had a small workshop with a fine set of tools, a workbench, and some good-quality wood. The workshop was lined with shelves containing a number of small carved ornaments, presumably made by Victor himself. The pieces were crude, lacking the finishing that the city’s manufacturing plants offered—definitely the work of an amateur, though they were much better than anything Iona could muster.

The piece on the workbench attracted her attention.

It consisted of a cylinder about thirty centimeters long, slightly tapered and with a larger cone on the tapered end. Two holes had been drilled in the cylinder and a couple of slim, short rods had been slotted in. These rods had rectangular panels attached to them. Iona moved her hands closer to the object but stopped short of touching it. She knew the object was very important but she also felt afraid.

Iona took the object and turned it over in her hands. It had been sitting upside down on the bench but Iona didn’t know how she knew it was upside down. The rectangular panels were adjustable and she tilted them forward and back.

A name appeared in Iona’s mind: Mull of Kintyre.

Now Iona imagined the same shape, but not made of wood: she imagined it in black and gray and white, and made from materials whose names she couldn’t think of right now. She saw it on a huge platform in a place with no trees or buildings. She saw herself, and some other people, going inside it . . . but she couldn’t imagine why she was going inside it and she couldn’t picture the faces of the people who were with her. But she felt sure this was a model of something larger . . . something that really existed somewhere.

But where though? You couldn’t hide something that size in this city. And why had she forgotten about it for so long?

Iona had to stop looking at it now because she was in danger of being overwhelmed by the thoughts it was triggering. She went to search the rest of the house.