“Yes! Fine! Deal. Calm down. Do I come to you, or you come to me? I don’t have a visual.”

Silence. Naecia shifted nervously. The others were doing the same. The com squawked and a translation appeared on the display:

Look again.

Aptat scrunched their brow and turned to the others, who were just as mystified, then minimized the com feed and expanded the visual.

Like ink bleeding through paper, the Timelance materialized, filling the screen before them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The Scythin pushed Patton up the platform and dumped him into the dredge.

“Patton, shut your eyes!”

Bad advice, said Jezzer whisperingly.

The second Scythin did something to the dredge.

“What’re they doing?”

Anxiolysin.

Anxiolysin. I remembered Dekies threatening Naecia with it. Some sort of drug that makes you pay attention. “I’m trying to save you guys! Why are you doing this?”

Death comes, said Jezzer, now forcing me slowly back into the dredge. Save us.

“Save you? Save you from what?”

Save us. We are hunger.

“Wait a minute.” I looked Jezzer over, at the increasing ashiness of the armored plates, their mottled edges. “You’re sick, aren’t you?”

The boids shifted and a dull green coursed over them. Hunger.

“I want to help you – you don’t have to do this to Patton. Please!”

Jezzer knelt down on the side of the dredge, leaning directly over me and whispered the words like a breeze through chain-link, You... do this... to Patton.

“You’re making a huge mistake, Jezzer. What if you kill him? I told you I’ll quit if that happens.”

Jezzer turned their head to the second dredge, where an orange glow haunted its interior. You should begin.

Holy shit! They were going to leave Patton in the dredge for as long as it took me to find the Chime. Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God. Focus, Ben. Focus.

Jezzer said there were thousands of these city structures. The Chime is inside one of them. It must be the one I’m building, right? Must be. Has to be. Oh God, I hope it is. That must be why it imprinted on the cord. My prior wouldn’t have imprinted a bunch of red herrings, would they? They couldn’t have known to even think of such a thing, surely? Was the implantation of false reflections even possible?

Shit, it was hard to concentrate without nectar.

I dialed in, letting the first few shapes come to me. I latched onto them and dropped into the depths of my psyche, where I quickly found the floating city. The Blue quadrant, or Kingdom Fungi, was the least developed, probably because I had the hardest time retaining the fragments and modules that went there. Where Animalia was fully built out and Protista and Plantae were modestly arranged, Fungi was a wasteland. So, naturally, that was probably where the Chime was hiding.

I need more nectar.