And a dark, perfectly straight vertical crack opened in the wall, about two meters tall. It grew wider until it was enough to walk through. Standing in the doorway was a figure.

Iona hadn’t used the key yet.

The figure was pointing something at her, something that might be a weapon; Iona couldn’t tell. It was black and looked like a twisted tree root.

The four humans froze. Iona felt sure it was about to kill them.

It didn’t kill them. It took a step back, making space for them to come through. Behind them the city was burning, the smoke was seeping out through the doorway.

Iona walked out of the cage.

12

THE FIGURE KEPT WALKING backward, its attention fixed on the humans, pointing the twisted black thing at them.

“Is it a weapon?” said Saori to her colleagues in a low voice that broke into coughing.

“Let’s assume it is for now, shall we?” said Iona. All four of them had just been running as fast as they could through a smoke-filled environment. They all needed medical attention but the chances of communicating this to the figures seemed slim.

In the meantime the door of their cage was still open and smoke was seeping through it and there was always the chance of the Poramutantur getting out. Iona ushered the others forward and said to the figure, “You must close the—” before the door closed behind them.

Iona breathed out: their primary goal was achieved. Now to see if they could stay alive.

The room they were in was dark and lined with dimly lit instrument panels. Either the figures didn’t need much light to operate or they’d kept the lighting levels low so the inhabitants of the cage wouldn’t be able to see what they were doing in there.

The figure kept walking backward. None of the four humans made any sudden movements. None of them wanted to startle the figure. Iona was aware her attempts to read its body language might be completely wide of the mark—its social signifiers were probably very different from her own—but it seemed as though it didn’t trust them. This reading of the situation seemed to be consistent with how it had kept them in a cage for hundreds of years.

Two other figures were in this room and they moved to walk behind the one who’d let them out. Like the first figure they walked backward. (Unless they were actually walking forward? She had to take care not to make assumptions.) The humans kept moving toward them, keeping the distance between them more or less the same.

“Are they leading us somewhere?” Saori murmured between coughs. She was sounding pretty bad and Iona was wondering about her own condition. The cage had been keeping them all alive. Things could be very different now that they were out.

“Should we stop walking and see what they do?” asked Victor.

Iona was about to agree when one of the figures operated a control and the door to the outside opened. The figures kept walking backward, out through the door. The humans followed.