Page 97 of City of Stone and Silence

Prime will be aware of it—I’m sure of that, from our brief encounter in the access chamber. I just hope he won’t know what it means.

It’s the better part of an hour before I spot movement, down at the base of the ziggurat. I tense, expecting walking corpses, but eventually it’s the dog-headed angel that emerges from the shadows. I breathe a sigh of relief and start jogging down the ramp toward it.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be able to hear me,” I say, slightly winded by the time I get to the base. The dog-angel shakes its head, silently, and lopes off into the forest.

I follow, staying alert, this time knowing what to expect. We travel a short distance, and then the angel stops at a shallow trench. It’s not the deep pit it dug last time, and I look at it questioningly, but it puts one foot delicately in the hole. I lean over and see the dull gleam of a conduit at the bottom.

“—found one that runs closer to the surface,” Hagan says, when I put my hand on it. His ghostly features materialize in front of the angel. “And Silvoa says it’s deeper in the network, or something like that, and it’ll take longer for Prime to find us.”

“Not that much longer.” Silvoa shimmers into existence beside Hagan, a slender iceling girl made entirely of gray light. “This is a low-level run, a few more branches from the primaries, but he’s still going to catch on eventually.” She cocks her head. “Good job not mentioning my name in your broadcast, though. I wasn’t sure you’d catch on to that.”

That the two of them came when I called—that they’re real, and not figments of my imagination—fills me with a deep relief. On the other hand, Silvoa’s brusque, patronizing manner can be almost immediately annoying. I take a deep breath.

“I won’t waste time, then,” I tell them. “I need help.”

“With what?” Silvoa snaps. “How far have you gotten?”

“I talked Gragant into letting me use his access point.”

“Well done.” Silvoa peers at me. “I’m surprised he trusted you so easily.”

“There may have been a naked snow meditation challenge involved,” I mutter. Hagan raises an interested eyebrow, and Silvoa laughs out loud. “But Catoria and the Cresos turned me down flat.” I glance in the direction of Soliton. “And I don’t know how much time I have left. If time is really passing faster outside—”

“Time doesn’t pass faster outside,” Silvoa says. “What gave you that idea?”

I frown. Could she not know? It seems unlikely. Her post-mortal perspective has given her a lot of time to study the Harbor.

“We know the Cresos clan were exiled from the Empire around a hundred years ago,” I say, cautiously. “But you and Catoria have only been here for five. So—”

“Oh, no question of that,” Silvoa says. “But it’s not that time passes at different rates, it’s that there’s not enough energy to run the Harbor.”

Apparently I looked baffled, because she heaves a sigh.

“If it helps,” Hagan says, “I’m lost, too.”

“Look,” Silvoa says. “Both Soliton and the Harbor are powered by Eddica energy. That’s the energy of life and death. It’s everywhere in the world where animals, especially humans, are living and dying. But you’ve seen what it’s like outside the dome—not much life here. So the Harbor needs to get its energy from somewhere.”

“It gets it from Soliton?” I think of the huge, steady flow of power I’ve been feeling from the ship. “So it’s like a … a fishing trawler, that goes out and comes back with a big catch?”

“Something like that,” Silvoa says. “Except there were supposed to be more ships—you’ve seen the wrecks. And Soliton doesn’t work as well as it used to. So there’s not enough energy.”

“What happens when it runs out?” Hagan says.

“The Harbor shuts down. Everything sort of … stops.” She gives a ghostly shrug. “From the outside, the dome becomes impenetrable until Soliton shows up again. From the inside, of course, nobody notices that years have gone by in the time it takes to snap your fingers.”

“So,” I say slowly, “right now, there’s no difference between the inside and the outside?”

“Other than the temperature,” Silvoa says, smirking a little.

“How do you know all this?” Hagan says.

“I’ve been locked inside the Harbor system for five years with nothing to do but occasionally get tortured by a lunatic,” Silvoa says. “Obviously I’m going to poke around as much as I can. There’s a lot of information in there if you know how to ask.”

My mind is running along a different track. There’s no time difference yet. That meant that a week here was only a week in the outside. Which means only a week for Tori.

In one sense, it doesn’t matter. If Soliton leaves before I can get onboard, it won’t return for twenty years, and Tori will still fall into Kuon Naga’s hands. My deadline hasn’t changed.

But I realize I still feel an enormous relief. The thought that six months had passed already has been weighing on my mind more than I realized. If I can get onboard the ship, turn it around and get back to Kahnzoka—