Jonathan listened with his fingers resting beneath the torn edge of his shirt. Every few moments he moved them across the place where the wound should have been, as though the next examination might produce a different result.
Daniel described the collapse, then Kane explained what had happened after they brought him back. Jonathan’s attention shifted towards Sal, who was sitting beside his mother with both feet tucked beneath his chair.
“You did this?”
“We did.”
The boy’s answer brought Jonathan’s gaze around the room. He looked at each of them before returning to the dried blood on his clothes. There was rather more of it than he wanted to account for.
Isobel placed a glass of water beside him. He reached for it, noticed the state of his hand and stopped.
“We can wash that off,” she said.
He looked up at her. She had been busy since he woke, finding water, clearing space, fetching things that someone else could easily have fetched. Now that she was standing still, he could see the strain beneath her composure.
“Are you all right?”
She gave a small laugh that seemed to surprise her.
“You’re asking me?”
“It seemed polite.”
For a moment she looked as though she might say something else. Instead, she took a clean cloth from Ernesto and wet it.
Jonathan held out his hand.
It was nearly half an hour before they returned to the sack.
Gabriel found a shirt, and Jonathan washed as much of the blood away as he could. He dressed slowly, expecting each movement to hurt. When none did, the absence of pain unsettled him more than a little discomfort would have done.
Daniel remained nearby. He made no attempt to hurry him, but Jonathan was conscious of being watched and eventually stopped fastening his cuff.
“I went back,” he said.
Daniel’s eyes lifted to his.
“I know.”
“You told me to come out.”
From the adjoining room came the sound of Ernesto clearing a workbench. Jonathan listened to it while Daniel looked down at the floor between them.
“I did get it,” he added.
“You nearly died.”
Jonathan’s hand stopped at his cuff. Daniel had spoken quietly, which made it harder to dismiss the words.
After a moment, Jonathan nodded.
“Yes.”
Daniel sat beside him. The things he had wanted to say on the journey back seemed less useful now. Jonathan was here, fastening a clean shirt over skin that had been torn open less than an hour earlier. For the moment, Daniel was content to sit close enough to hear him breathe.
Vale brought the sack to Ernesto’s workbench and set the two cases beneath the lamp. Once he had wiped away the dust, their surfaces showed the same smooth finish as the object Daniel had taken from the room beneath Leyla’s house.
Daniel drew the nearer case towards him. He knew what lay inside it; the sensation had strengthened since the hillside until he could almost judge the amulet’s position beneath his fingers. Across the bench, Vale was already examining the other shell.
Jonathan withdrew the third object from the sack. It was another small metallic bar, rounded at the edges, with fine inscriptions along one face. When he turned it over, Mara recognised the arrangement of figures and branching lines.
“A memory stone.”
“That was what I thought,” Jonathan said, placing it beneath the lamp. Daniel’s glance was enough to keep him from adding anything about the decision to go back for it.
They left the stone there while they examined the cases. Daniel ran his thumb around the edge of his, searching for a seam, then turned it over. Vale studied a faint marking on the second shell and tried pressing it, first with his fingers and then with his whole palm. Neither case responded.
“Anything familiar?” Daniel asked.
“The material. Nothing that tells me how to open it.”
The others joined them. They tried holding the cases together, then concentrating around each keeper while he held his own. Daniel felt the connection gather with the familiar ease of their earlier work, bringing the object within his shell into sharper awareness. When they released the effort, however, it remained enclosed.
Ernesto had watched without interrupting. Daniel placed the case before him and asked whether he could see anything they had missed. The engineer examined it beneath a magnifying lens, following the edges and the faint marking Vale had found. After several minutes he admitted that he could find no joint, but indicated a corner away from the amulet’s position.
“I could try making a small cut here.”
Daniel looked at Vale, who considered the case before nodding.
A fine saw slipped over the surface without catching. Ernesto changed the angle, tried again and stopped to inspect the teeth. Mara examined the case beneath the lamp while he chose another tool. She could find no mark.
With Daniel’s agreement, he tried a powered cutter. Its noise filled the room, drawing Isobel to the doorway. When he switched it off, he wiped the surface and turned it slowly beneath the light.
“I can damage my tools,” he said at last. “That seems to be the extent of it.”
He returned the case to Daniel, who set it beside its companion. The memory stone lay between them, and looking at it brought back the desk beneath Leyla’s house: his hand reaching towards it, his fingers closing around something that should have disappeared with the room.
“It doesn’t have to open.”
Mara looked up from the bench.
“In Istanbul, I reached into the room and brought the stone back. Perhaps we can reach into this.”
He rested his palm on the shell. The amulet’s presence was clear, but so was the memory of the slab shifting and Jonathan turning back into the passage. Daniel waited until he could attend to the case without seeing the hillside.
“This time we’re all here,” Mara said.
They carried the cases into the main room, where the larger table gave them space to work. Jonathan sat nearby while Ernesto spread a cloth beneath the shells. Daniel began to draw his own towards him, then saw Vale watching the other and moved it into the centre instead.
“Yours first.”
Vale gave him room. The six settled around the table and focused, and Daniel felt the connection gather without the uncertainty he had experienced at the entrance. He placed two fingers on the shell and concentrated on the enclosed space beneath it.
He pictured a small opening above the amulet. Nothing changed at first. He reduced the circle, making it small enough to hold clearly in his mind, and a dark spot appeared beneath his fingertips. When he lifted his hand, light showed through a hole scarcely wider than the end of a pencil.
Daniel heard someone behind him draw a breath. He kept his attention on the opening, aware of the others maintaining the same focus. Its edge wavered briefly, then steadied. He allowed it to widen, slowly enough to follow the change as it happened.
No fragments fell onto the cloth. The smooth surface curved around the growing circle until there was room for Vale’s hand.
Vale waited to be certain it would hold, then reached inside. As his fingers closed around the amulet, its central gem brightened and the connection strengthened through all of them. Daniel felt the difference immediately. The opening no longer demanded his constant correction; it held its shape while Vale withdrew the object.
Its centre and five smaller stones shone against his palm. Vale looked down at it for some time, scarcely noticing when Daniel released the opening and the shell closed again.
Jonathan watched from his chair. Whatever he had intended to ask could wait.
Daniel brought his own case forward. With Vale’s amulet active, the enclosed space was easy to distinguish. He formed a second opening, widened it and reached inside. The amulet came free without resistance, its central gem warming his palm as the five smaller stones illuminated around it.
For a moment, he was occupied by the familiarity of its weight. After weeks of following clues and handling objects intended for other people, he had found something that felt as though it had always belonged with him.
Then he became aware of another presence.
He looked up. The others had noticed it too, and for several seconds their attention moved around the room, searching for someone who had not been there before. Isobel stood beside Jonathan. Ernesto was looking at the closed case. No one had entered.
Daniel could still distinguish each of his five companions within their connection. This was something beyond them, perceptible now that all six held their own amulets. It seemed close until he tried to locate it, and then the distance became impossible to judge.
“There’s someone else,” Sal said.
Elena glanced towards the doorway, but none of the ordinary people in the room appeared to have felt anything. Daniel watched Vale, hoping his experience might supply an explanation. Vale’s expression told him he had none.
Ernesto fitted the final two amulets into the frames he had prepared. Daniel continued to notice the warmth against his chest after the cord had been adjusted, along with the quiet presence at the edge of their connection.
They returned to the memory stone because it was the one object before them that might explain what had changed.
Jonathan placed it in the centre of the table and waited until everyone had gathered. Lindiwe touched the bar. A pale line moved beneath its inscriptions, and as the six focused together the markings filled with light.
The floor changed beneath their feet.
A broad, pale surface extended beyond the table, and the observatory’s walls gave way to a chamber whose far side lay well outside the building. Jonathan rose from his chair. He could still see his companions, but the chair itself had vanished, along with the desks, papers and equipment.
A rail curved beside a raised walkway. He reached for it and closed his hand around its edge.
“It’s solid.”
Ernesto tested it beside him, pressing down with both palms while Isobel looked upwards.
Earth hung above the centre of the chamber.
Cloud crossed an unfamiliar arrangement of land and ocean. Lights gathered along a coastline she could not place, and beyond the turning globe the Moon emerged into view. Isobel followed its movement before her attention was drawn to the smaller objects travelling between them.
One passed close enough for her to see a long, jointed structure carrying something within its centre. Beyond it, more of the solar system became visible. Craft approached immense structures suspended far from any surface; others travelled outward until they dwindled among the stars.
She walked along the rail. From each new position she could see around the objects overhead, following their depth and movement as though the chamber truly contained them. Nothing blurred when she turned. The detail extended behind her, above her and through an opening in the far wall.
A man carrying a small object walked through Gabriel.
Gabriel recoiled against the rail, but the man continued without turning. Lucía reached towards his sleeve as he passed. Her fingers met nothing, although the rail beneath her other hand remained firm.
Across the chamber, more people were working. Daniel recognised the Avari and watched one of them approach a curved recess in the floor. A pendant rested against the woman’s chest. Above her, a vessel was nearing a structure beside one of the outer planets.
She raised a hand, and a surface formed beneath it.
Daniel approached, drawn by the ease with which she shaped it. Symbols appeared where her fingers moved. One section widened while another disappeared, and the panel curved towards her as she continued working. It suited the reach of her hands and the task occupying her attention.
He touched its unoccupied edge. The surface was cool and firm beneath his fingers.
Her hand passed through his a moment later.
Daniel withdrew instinctively. She had not noticed him, and there had been no sensation of contact. He looked back towards the others, who were beginning to explore the same strange distinction: the room and its objects could be touched, while its people continued their lives unaware of the visitors among them.
An opening developed within the woman’s panel, revealing a landscape beneath unfamiliar stars. A machine crossed the ground towards a larger structure. She adjusted something and the machine turned, but the structure remained still.
She spoke to a man approaching from another part of the chamber. He wore a pendant too. After studying her creation, he placed his hand against a separate part of the surface. They waited together until light travelled along the distant structure and it opened. Something rose from within it, passing beyond the edge of their view.
The woman lowered her hand, then reshaped part of the panel for another task. Her companion remained beside her.
Daniel watched them, beginning to understand how much of what he considered extraordinary they had once taken for granted. The things he had struggled to create could become working surfaces, changed as a task demanded. From this room, those surfaces reached places far beyond Earth.
Around him, other Avari were using creations of their own. Each differed from the next. Some occupied the space before a single person; others extended between several people who altered them as they worked.
The chamber remained constant beneath the changing displays.
Jonathan walked along its perimeter, examining the shallow steps and a sequence of markings beside the opening in the far wall. Beyond it lay another room, with people working beneath a different arrangement of distant worlds. He stood there for some time, trying to fix both the layout and the markings in his memory.
Ernesto was occupied with the room’s surfaces. Isobel had stopped trying to identify every destination overhead and was watching the people instead. They looked into openings onto distant landscapes, moved machines beneath a red sky and followed craft travelling beyond the planets. Sometimes a person worked alone. At other times, another joined them before the task could proceed.
Kane remained near the centre, studying how the separate creations related to what was happening around them. Daniel joined him as six Avari gathered at a larger recess.
Their surfaces extended towards one another, joining into a shared environment. Each person continued to shape a part of it, while all six held the whole steady. Daniel could follow enough of their movements to recognise an intention he had already experienced with the others.
Light gathered between them. Several distant structures overhead brightened in response.
Then the memory began to fade.
The rail lost its resistance beneath Jonathan’s hand. People, panels and the broad pale floor disappeared together, returning him to the observatory with his arm extended into empty air. The chair was behind him again. Isobel stood beside the desk where she had left her papers, and Ernesto’s tools lay on the workbench.
The cases and the memory stone remained where they had put them.
Everything they had seen within the memory was gone.
Jonathan sat down and drew a sheet of paper towards him. He began with the chamber’s outline, adding the central recess and the opening through which he had seen another room. Around him, the others were looking at places that had briefly contained something far larger than the observatory.
“That was a place people worked,” he said.
Daniel remembered the panel beneath his fingers and the woman whose hand had passed through his. The room had felt no less real than this one, although they had been seeing it at a time when its occupants were still alive.
“We need to go back,” he said.
Jonathan looked up from the drawing. “Into the memory?”
“Into the connection. Here.”
Kane considered the outline taking shape on the paper. “As it is now. With us still here.”
Daniel nodded. They had watched people create the means to operate machines across immense distances. The chamber had been one of several places built for that work. They needed to recreate that control environment at La Silla and reach the system through it, with their bodies remaining in the observatory. This time, they would be connecting to what existed now.
How to reach it was another question.
The unfamiliar presence remained perceptible beyond their connection. Daniel attended to it for a moment, then looked towards Isobel. She was already turning to the terminal.
She sat at the keyboard, thinking of the room’s many openings and the worlds they had revealed. The presence she had called a ghost had been asking for their strength and authority. Now all six had their amulets, and they had seen what people bearing those objects had once been able to do.
She typed:
We have the six. How do we reach you?
Behind her, Jonathan continued sketching while the details were clear. Daniel watched the screen, conscious of the others waiting with him.
The reply appeared beneath her question.
Build together. Hold the space. I will meet you within it.