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"Turn yourself around Nice slow , just be ready to adjust our path if we veer toward one of the walls"
"Just use my hands and feet?"
"Exactly Nice slowthat to yourself" The i herself oriented in the lack of gravity on their first visit together, and Tania thought she had enough report with the wo, pointers
A moain putting the hard, flat surface of her suit’s backpack against the case She aimed her thruster toward Earth The Elevator threads, all around her now, fored below in the haze and blur of clouds and atood five-second blast fro at the equivalent to a brisk walking pace The interior held a strange co spikes outside, and the crowd of Elevator cords left in their place, the tunnel beyond the hexagon door looked exactly the same
Stay sharp, she said to herself even as she added on another few seconds of thrust She climbed around to the front of the case nohere Vanessa waited Together they used their fingertips to push off the ceiling in a slight trajectory correction, and when the tis and arms forward to take the brunt of the impact with the end of the hallway
After a brief pause the wall at the end of the tunnel separated into angular sections, divided by bright lines of light The lines grew into gaps as the sections of wall slid away to reveal the room beyond
"We’re at the key room," Tania said for Tim’s benefit
"That was quick"
"This place feels like a second hohed Vanessa did not She’d flipped her gold sun visor up and Tania saw her eyes groide "It’s changed," the i the object She spun, and the room beyond sent a chill down her spine
The ten-walled "key rooone Instead she looked in upon a nearly spherical space, ten meters in diameter Uncharacteristic for the Builders, the loith a faint luminance that seeht, so dim it would have been hard to perceive had it not covered the entire interior, was alien in its flawlessness A perfect, unwavering, evenly distributed light that constituted the whitewhat it felt like From appearance alone she could not tell if it was solid, or if her hand would pass straight through it
Nestled within the glohite sphere were two strips ofthe circumference of the room The bands were perpendicular to each other, and met on the far side to form an X, exactly opposite where the door was
Tih the speaker in her hel"
"I’m not sure what to say," Tania replied "The key roo a sphere More in a second"
She glanced at Vanessa and nodded once, a gesture the other woently and drifted toward the opening, wrapping one hand around the edge
The gray love of her suit She moved her hand farther, then touched the white portion To her surprise it had a spongy feel, like a firlanced around Her first iray bands, the room was completely featureless
"What do we do?" Vanessa asked She still floated in the hallway, next to the bagged object
Tania continued across the space, then pushed off with her feet to drift back She turned at the uess Let’s see what happens"
Vanessa urged the bag forward and kept with it,the pace perfectly with slow, precise ress Soon she’d be bouncing about in zero-g like she’d lived in orbit for years
Tania drifted out toto be near the wall if so happened She’d barely an to move They spun like wheels, independently of each other, and in doing so the opening they’d fras, still spinning, began to tilt wildly, spinning on their axis noell Their motion revealed the portion of the sphere where the hallway had been just a second before Tania saw nothing save for the pure, spongy white surface of the sphere where the only exit had been
"Don’t panic," she said, realizing a second later she’d said it aloud "Tim, can you hearsound from the speaker inside her helarbled words cah in bursts now
"Some kind of interference," Tania said
Vanessa sucked in her lower lip in concentration "Maybe this room is meant to sever our communication"
Tania considered that She wondered ould have happened had they couywire The ht, would have severed it like a piece of string The thought worried her
The two s continued to rotate around the rooht She studied thes settled into a new position, forain on opposite sides of the rooh she couldn’t be sure in the otherwise featureless bubble of glohite
The rings stopped rotating axially but still rolled along their own length Tania watched, fascinated despite the sense of being trapped, as each ring began to slow to a stop When they did, a new opening appeared where their surfaces met In a perfect reversal of the exit hallway’s closure, panels slid apart on each band
Tania felt the tension within her melt The key room lay beyond Only the entrance this time was in the middle of what she had considered the floor She exhaled slowly as she took in the sight, looking for any other changes since last time, and saw none Still the ten walls that rose a hundred meters above Five were empty, just spacers really Between each of those were the five that had receptacles for the objects, each wall alive with the color that matched its "key"
"Didn’t we come in from the side last time?" Vanessa asked "Why would they reement, Tania pushed off to the new doorway and stopped herself at the opening She took a quick stock just to be sure nothing here had changed