I felt the soothing euphoria of the Coryphaeus running through both of them, counterpoint to the text of their bodies and gestures. That was unnerving. And of course they sensed my reaction as keenly as I sensed theirs. The mother frowned and averted her eyes, as if she had seen something distasteful. The child squirmed and arched against her body.

I hurried away at the next stop.

*   *   *

The next time I felt restless I went out at night, when the corridors were dimly lit and mostly empty. I had been working with Network interfaces all day and although I was tired I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

News had come from our fleet of drone aircraft that the Hypothetical machines were crossing the Transarctic Mountains faster than expected. Out in the Wilkes Basin the machines had looked like cumbersomely solid objects, but when they encountered rough ground they deformed in order to negotiate large obstacles. In extreme terrain they actually seemed to flow like a viscous liquid, moving edgelessly up narrow passes and steep, chaotic inclines. Estimates of the time it would take the machines to reach Vox were revised downward yet again.

The few people I encountered that night were bristling with conflicting emotions—their faces glowed like torches, to my eyes—and I hurried past them. I had begun to understand what Allison meant about collective insanity. It wasn’t just euphoria the Coryphaeus was sharing. Fear smoldered in the Voxish collective like a fire in a coal seam, too strong to be entirely suppressed. I passed a maintenance worker whose anxiety literally radiated from his face, a spiky halo of awe and dread. I felt it myself, a pressure as faint and persistent as the beating of my heart: the longing for a better and larger existence, set against the suspicion that what was approaching from the Antarctic desert might be nothing but a quick and nasty death.

Allison was awake when I got back, and she wasn’t alone. Isaac Dvali was with her.

I knew about Isaac’s miraculous recovery and the endorsement of the Voxish prophecies that had made him a public hero. His image was everywhere in Vox Core. But he was here without his minders, he was smiling at Allison and she was smiling at me: “We can talk!” she said.

Which made no sense. I stared at Isaac. To my eyes he looked gilded, like a painting of a medieval saint. More subtly, I could see hints of the trauma that had shaped him, sparks in an aura—he was a mosaic of colored glass, coruscating with unexpected energies. I asked him what he wanted.

“Let me explain,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Two. Allison’s Story

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SANDRA AND BOSE