Chapter 124: Crack in sky ?

I sat there with my hand on my cheek like an idiot.

She had kissed me on the cheek. Quickly, then she pulled back at once, as if she’d touched a hot pan, and now she was staring at the table with her whole face going red from the collar up.

"That," Qing Yan said, to the burned dinner, "was not a scandal."

"You just called it one."

"I was speaking. It was a figure of speech." She snatched her plate, looked at what was on it, and put it down again. "You are not to mention it."

"I was about to say thank you."

She covered her face with both hands. Through her fingers I heard a muffled, furious noise that I decided not to translate. I let a few seconds pass, then reached over and moved one of her hands aside, just enough to see one eye.

"Qing Yan."

"What."

"It was a good kiss."

"It was on your cheek."

"Best cheek kiss I’ve ever had."

She made the noise again. But the eye was smiling. But then Someone pounded on the door.

It was Jiang Wei, and he was not a man who pounded.

He stood on the step with his hair flattened by sweat and his compendium clutched to his chest like a shield. Behind him, the sky had gone the thin orange of late evening. Whatever he had run from, he had not stopped to put on a coat.

"I’m sorry," he said, before I could open my mouth. "I know the hour. I wouldn’t have come, but the scouts on the eastern ridge sent for Captain Ru, and Captain Ru sent for you, and you weren’t at the hall, so..." He looked past me at Qing Yan, who had stood up very straight and was examining the ceiling. "Is this a bad time?"

"No," said Qing Yan.

"Yes," I said.

"No," Qing Yan said, louder.

"Don’t," Jiang Wei said, wincing, "tell me anything I’ll have to remember. What the scouts found can’t wait. There’s a crack in the sky."

"A what?"

"I’ll show you."

....

We went on horseback, which was new to me. The valley had a dozen old horses, shaggy and stubborn, and Captain Ru had picked me one with a rolling eye that clearly resented every pound I weighed. Qing Yan rode behind me with her arms around my waist and her chin on my shoulder, for balance, she said. I didn’t argue.

The eastern ridge was the end of the valley’s protection. Past it, the veil gave out and the hills ran down toward the wasteland where I had woken up. We rode up through a narrow cut in the rock until the trees dropped away and the whole country opened out below us , gray in the dusk, the corpse fields lying under the haze like a dirty sheet.

Captain Ru was waiting at the top with six of her scouts. None of them were looking at us. They were all looking at the same thing, and when I turned my head, I understood why.

It hung in the air about a quarter mile out over the plain, a long way up, higher than a tower and lower than a cloud. At first I thought it was a flaw in my eye, a thin bright scratch like a hair on a lens. Then my eyes adjusted, and I saw it was a line, perfectly straight, about forty feet long, and open.

It didn’t look like a hole. It looked like a seam where two pieces of sky had been stitched together badly and one of the stitches had come out. Along the edges, thin threads of pale violet light crawled and flickered. Inside it, where the gap parted, there was no color at all. Not black, not white. Just a depth I couldn’t focus on, the way you can’t focus on the inside of a well.

"It opened this morning," Captain Ru said. "Just after dawn. We thought it was a trick of the light, until it stayed."

"Has anything come out?"

"Nothing."

"Gone in?"

She turned her head. "Three of my scouts tried to reach it. They climbed the dead tree at the edge of the plain, the tall one, and jumped. They were thrown back. Hard." She nodded at the end of the line. One of the scouts, a thin young man, was sitting on a rock with his arm in a sling and a grimace on his face. "Broken collarbone. He says it felt like running into a wall of water."

"Not a wall," the scout muttered. "A hand. It pushed."

"Did you see anything on the other side?"

"No, Senior. Just..." He hesitated. "It’s quiet in there. I don’t know how to say it. It felt like looking through a keyhole into a room where no one’s home."

I looked at the seam again. And as I looked, something in my chest gave a small, strange turn.

It was lighter, and it pulled in a different direction, away from the core under my ribs and toward something much farther down, the oldest and deepest thing I owned. A feeling like standing in a doorway and smelling bread from a house you used to live in.

I couldn’t have said why. I didn’t want to.

"Barry?" Qing Yan’s hand found my sleeve. "Your face."

"What about it?"

"You went pale."

"I always look like this at sunset."

"You do not."

"It’s a trick of the light," I said, and she gave me a look that told me exactly how much she believed that, and let it go.

"Captain," I said, "has anyone studied the edges?"

"That’s the other thing." Jiang Wei had come up beside me, still clutching his compendium. He had opened it, I noticed, and was holding a page toward the light. "Look at the left tip. The one that’s brighter."

I looked. At the left end of the seam, at about the height of the highest cloud, a faint cluster of glowing marks hung in the air, small and tidy, like writing. It took me a moment to see that they were numbers. Or something near enough to numbers that my brain supplied the rest.

[10 : 00 : 00 : 00]

As I watched, the last pair flickered and changed.

[09 : 23 : 59 : 58]

"It’s a timer," Jiang Wei said, very quietly. "Ten days. I’ve been trying to read the formation, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It isn’t a spatial array in any text I own. The closest comparison is the sealing doors in the old sect vaults. They count down, too."

"What happens at zero?"

"I don’t know. I’d guess it either closes or opens fully." He swallowed. "I’d rather not guess which."

I stood there with the evening wind pulling at my sleeves and the whole gray plain stretched out beneath the thing. Nobody was talking. The horses shifted and blew. Somewhere in the corpse field, a loose piece of armor clinked in the wind.

"Open," I said, mostly to myself. "But nobody can get through."

"That’s what we think."

"Then what’s the point of it being open?"

Nobody had an answer.

.....

We didn’t go back to the valley that night.

I wanted to see it for myself. Captain Ru argued, and Jiang Wei argued, and Qing Yan said nothing and simply swung down from the horse and walked off beside me toward the plain. After about a hundred paces, the others gave up and followed.

The dead tree stood at the edge of the corpse field, a huge, black, split thing without a leaf on it, tall enough to see the seam from the lowest forks. I climbed it with my hands, because I didn’t trust my core yet. Qing Yan climbed after me with her robes tucked into her belt and a look that dared me to comment.

At the highest fork, we stopped. The crack hung just beyond us, close enough that I could see how the violet threads moved along its edges, like veins under skin. Close enough that I could feel it on my face, a very faint cold, steady and patient.

"It is looking at us," Qing Yan whispered.

"It’s a hole. It doesn’t have eyes."

"It feels like it does."

She was right. It did.

I put out my hand.

"Barry, don’t—"

"Just a little."

My fingers stopped an inch from the nearest thread. I could feel it pushing back already, a soft cushion of resistance that grew firmer the closer I came. I held my palm flat against it.

Nothing happened for a heartbeat.

Then a voice spoke in my head.

[Warning. Unregistered spatial signature detected.]

The System. It came up in pale blue text across the corner of my vision, flickering as though it were having trouble holding its form.

[Source: unknown. Origin: undetermined. Access: restricted.]

[Host authorization insufficient.]

[Countdown synchronized. Remaining time: 09 days, 23 hours, 41 minutes.]

I stared at the words. In ten days of being awake, the System had said more to me about the marketplace than it had about anything real, and now it was telling me, in the flat voice of a clerk reading a form, that this thing was bound to me.

’What does that mean?’ I thought at it. ’Synchronized to what?’

[Information restricted.]

’Restricted by whom?’

[...]

It didn’t answer. The text blinked twice and faded, and when it was gone, I realized my hand was shaking.