“Which starscraper do we start with?” Tolton asked.

Each starscraper took at least three days to inventory properly. They’d adopted a comfortable routine by the time they started on their third, the Djerba. The tower had survived Valisk’s recent calamities with minimal damage. Kiera’s wrecking teams hadn’t got round to “reclaiming” it from Rubra’s control. There had been few clashes between possessed and servitors inside before it was abandoned. That meant it should contain plenty of useful items. They just needed cataloguing.

To send the work teams down on a see/grab brief was inefficient, especially as there were so few of them. And the personality’s thought routines had almost been banished from the habitat’s extremities; its memories of room contents were unreliable at best.

“Mostly offices,” Tolton decided as he waved a lightstick around. He was holding one in his hand, with another two slung across his chest on improvised straps. Together, the three units provided almost as much illumination as one working at full efficiency.

“Looks like it,” Dariat said. They were on the twenty-third floor vestibule, where the walls were broken by anonymously identical doors. Tall potted plants in big troughs were wilting, deprived of light their leaves were turning yellow-brown and falling onto the blue and white carpet.

They moved down the vestibule, reading names on the doors. So far offices had resulted in very few worthwhile finds; they’d learned that unless the company was a hardware or medical supplier there was little point in going in and searching. Occasionally the personality’s localized memory would recall a useful item, but the neural strata was becoming more incapable with each floor they descended.

“Thirty years,” Tolton mused. “That’s a long time to hate.” There hadn’t been much else to do except swap life stories.

Dariat smiled in recollection. “You’d understand if you’d ever seen Anastasia. She was the most perfect girl ever to be born.”

“Sounds like I’ll have to write about her some time. But I think your story is more interesting. Man, there’s a lot of suffering in you. You died for her, you actually did it. Actually went and killed yourself. I thought that kind of thing really did only happen in poems and Russian novels.”

“Don’t be too impressed. I only did it after I knew for sure souls existed. Besides—” He gestured down at his huge frame and grubby toga. “I wasn’t losing a lot.”

“Yeah? Well I’m no sensevise star, but I’m hanging on to what I’ve got for as long as I can. Especially now I know there are souls.”

“Don’t worry about the beyond. You can leave it behind if you really want to.”

“Tell that to the ghosts upstairs. In fact, I’m even keener to hang on to my body while we’re in this continuum.”

Tolton stopped outside a sensevise recording studio, and gave Dariat a shrewd look. “You’re in touch with the personality, is there any chance of us getting out of here?”

“Too early to say. We really don’t know very much about the dark continuum yet.”

“Hey, this is me you’re talking to. I survived the whole occupation, you know. Quit with the company line and level with me.”

“I wasn’t going to hold anything back. The one conjecture all my illustrious relatives are worried about is the lobster pot.”

“Lobster pot?”

“Once you get in, you can’t get out. It’s the energy levels, you see. Judging by the way our energy is being absorbed by this continuum’s fabric it doesn’t have the same active energy state. We’re louder and stronger than normal conditions here. And that strength is slowly being drained away, just by being here. It’s an entropy equilibrium effect. Everything levels out in the end. So if we take height as a metaphor, we’re at the bottom of a very deep hole with our universe at the top; which means it’s going to take a hell of an effort to lift ourselves out again. Logically, we need to escape through some kind of wormhole. But even if we knew how to align its terminus coordinates so that it opens inside our own universe, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to generate one. Back in our universe, they took a lot of very precisely focused energy to open, and the nature of this continuum works against that. With this constant debilitation effect, it may not be possible to concentrate enough energy, it’ll dissipate before it reaches critical distortion point.”

“Shit. There’s got to be something we can do.”

“If those rules do apply, our best bet is to try and send a message out. That’s what the personality and my relatives are working towards. If they know where we are, the Confederation might be able to open a wormhole to us from their side.”

“Might be able?”

“All new suggestions welcome. But as it stands, getting them to lower us a rope is the best we can come up with.”

“Some rescue plan. The Confederation has its own problems right now.”

“If they can learn how to grab us back, they’ll be half way to solving them.”

“Sure.”

They reached the end of the vestibule and automatically turned round.

Nothing here,dariat reported. We’re moving down to the twenty-fourth floor.

All right,the personality replied. There’s a hotel, the Bringnal, a couple of floors down from where you are now. Check its main linen store, we need more blankets.

You’re going to ask one of the teams to lug blankets up twenty-five floors?

All the large hoards above that level have been used. And right now it’s easier to find new ones than wash the old; nobody’s got enough energy for that.

All right.dariat faced tolton, taking care to exaggerate his speech. “They want us to find blankets.”

“Sounds like a real priority job we got ourselves here.” Tolton slithered through a partly open muscle membrane and into the stairwell. The quivering lips didn’t bother him nearly so much now.

Dariat followed him, taking care to use the gap. He could slip through solid surfaces, he’d found, if he really wanted to. It was like sinking through ice.

One of the random power surges flowered around them. Electrophorescent cells shone brightly again, illuminating the stairs in stark blue-tinged light. A jet of foggy air streamed out of a tubule vent, sounding like a sorrowful sigh. A thin film of grey water was slicking every surface. Tolton could see the breath in front of his face. He gripped the handrail tighter, fearful of slipping.

“We’re not going to be able to salvage stuff from the starscrapers for much longer,” Tolton said, wiping his hand against his leather jacket. “They’re getting worse.”

“You should see what kind of state the ducts and tubules are in.”

The street poet grunted in resentment. He was actually eating a lot better than most of the population. Inventory duties had a great many perks. The private apartments with their small stocks of quality food and fashionable clothes were his to pick over as he wished. The salvage teams were only interested in the larger stores that were in restaurants and bars. And now the endless succession of lightless floors no longer bothered him, he was glad to be away from the caverns with all their suffering—and smell.

Dariat.

The startled tone made him halt. What?

There’s something outside.

Affinity made him aware of the consternation spreading through his relatives, most of whom were in the counter-rotating spaceport and the caverns.

Show me.

One of the slow flares of red and blue phosphorescence was shimmering through the ebony nebula, sixty kilometres away from the southern endcap. As it dwindled, several more began to bloom in the distance, sending pastel waves of light washing across the gigantic habitat’s shell. The personality didn’t believe the sudden increase in frequency was a coincidence. It was busy concentrating on collecting the images from its external sensitive cells. Once again, Dariat was uncomfortably aware of the effort expended in what should be a simple observation routine.