She even sensed Thorn, linked into the same information-gathering network. His own thoughts, such as they were, echoed hers precisely. He was paralysed and compressed, unable to scream or even imagine the release that would come from screaming. She tried to reach out to him, to at least let him know that she was still present and that somone else in the universe was aware of what he was going through. And at the same time she felt Thorn do likewise, so that they linked fingers through neural space, like two lovers drowning in ink. The process of being analysed continued, the blackness seeping into the oldest parts of her mind. It was the worst thing she had ever experienced, worse than any torture or simulation of torture that she had ever known on Sky’s Edge. It was worse than anything the Mademoiselle had done to her, and the only respite lay in the fact that she was only dwindlingly aware of her own identity. When that was gone she would be free.
And then something changed. At the limit of what she was feeling through the data-gathering channels, there was a disturbance on the periphery of the cloud that had englobed her ship. Thorn sensed it as well: she felt a pathetic flicker of hope reach her through the bifurcation. But there was nothing to be hopeful about. They were just feeling the machines regroup, ready for the next phase of the smothering process.
She was wrong.
She felt a third mind enter her thoughts, quite separate from Thorn’s. This mind was bell-clear and calm, and its thoughts remained unclotted by the oppressive black choke of the machinery. She sensed curiosity and not a little hesitation, and while she also sensed fear, she did not detect the outright terror that Thorn was radiating. The fear was only an extreme kind of caution. And at the same time she gained back a little of herself, as if the black crush had relented.
The third mind skirted closer to her own, and she realised, with as much shock as she was capable of registering, that it was a mind she knew. She had never encountered it on this level before, but the force of its personality was so pervasive that it was like a trumpet blast sounding a familiar refrain. It was the mind of a man and it was the mind of a man who had never had much time for doubt, or humility, or much in the way of compassion for the affairs of others. At the same time she detected the tiniest gleam of remorse and something that might even have been concern. But even as she came to that conclusion the mind snapped back, shrouding itself again, and she felt the powerful wake of its withdrawal.
She screamed, properly, for she was able to move her body again. In the same moment the trunk shattered, breaking apart with a high-pitched tinkle. When she opened her eyes she was surrounded by a cloud of jostling black cubes, tumbling in disarray. The black wall across the bulkhead was breaking up. She watched the cubes attempt to merge with each other, occasionally forming larger black aggregates that lasted only a second or so before they too broke apart. Thorn was no longer pinned to his seat. He moved, shoving aside black cubes, until he was able to release Khouri from the webbing.
‘Have you any idea what the hell just happened?’ he asked, slurring his words as he spoke.
I do,‘ she said. ’But I’m not sure if I believe it.‘
‘Talk to me, Ana.’
‘Look, Thorn. Look outside.’
He followed her gaze. Beyond the ship, the surrounding black mass was experiencing the same inability to cohere as the cubes within the ship. Windows were opening back into empty sky, closing and then re-opening elsewhere. And there was, she realised, something else out there as well. It was within the rough black shell that encompassed the ship but not of it, and as it moved — for it appeared to be orbiting the ship, looping around it in lazy open curves — the coagulated black masses moved nimbly out of its way. The shape of the object was difficult to focus on, but the impression Khouri retained later was of a whirling iron-grey gyroscope, a roughly spherical thing made out of many spinning layers. At its core, or buried somewhere within it, was a flickering source of dark red light, like a carnelian. The object — it also made her think of a spinning marble — was perhaps a metre across, but because its periphery swelled and retracted as it spun, it was difficult to be certain. All Khouri knew, all she could be sure of, was that the object had not been there before, and that the Inhibitor machinery appeared strangely apprehensive of it.
‘It’s opening a window for us,’ Thorn said, wonderingly. ‘Look. It’s given us a way to escape.’
