Page 54 (2/2)

"Magpie?" Ana asked "A good omen"

Skyler walked closer, until he stood five meters from the dome

The others hadn’t moved "Not too close, Sky!" Ana called out

He leaned, picked up a rock, and tossed it underhand at the ainst the side as if it had hit solid round with a soft thud

"What the hell?" Skyler walked closer and reached out his hand

"Be careful …," Ana said froertips brushed the surface, Skyler felt a tingle of cold rush up his arm, followed instantly by the sensation of heat The pattern repeated like so frequency, and when taken as a whole felt pleasant He watched in fascination as the do of rainbow refraction stretched outward along the purple face He tried to pause his hand but couldn’t The current of cold and warm pulses filled his entire body, and his htsof rainbow light continued to grow as if his finger had touched a star and sent it into a supernova explosion

I should stop I should stop I should stop

He ht because it seeh his mind, as milky as the surface of the do him That he’d already entered the place That he was still outside All seean to stretch on and on, played back in soan to hover in place He tried to look down at his feet and found his head would only an to ainst the parts of his hts became the norm, the tables turned Suddenly he found there were corners of hisavalanche of ideas, memories, and desires They raced and raced until they blurred into infinity

Then all at once everything rushed back into normalcy

He was inside, and felt as if soht, and then rolled hih a pasta press A wave of nausea drove him to his knees Cold sweat erupted from every pore on his body All Skyler could do was stare at the purple-tinged dirt and shiver while the reaction passed

A hted himself He found it hard to breathe The air smelled of ozone and felt humid and still around hilanced back the way he’d co behind him looked the same A dark, purple wall that ended a few meters away froht and dark shades He could see where it ht ahead the purple barrier seemed as far away as the horizon There was no hint of the outside, no way to see his friends, to see Ana He waved anyway, in case they could detect some hint of hio crossed over hi in the entire "sky," he saw that it seeht to dark and back, less than ten seconds for each perfectly rhythpie darted and wheeled It chittered, as if saying, "We both h!" The harsh sound echoed queerly off the interior of the otherwise silent space

Finally, Skyler looked toward the center of the doround, but if such a thing existed here he couldn’t see it The ground within the doe toward the center, the earth curled upward Irew ever steeper until for a circular pillar in the very center The pinnacle rose a full hundred meters or an to curve back outward before an abrupt end at a flat surface

A giant pedestal, he ht of the dome The top appeared to be a disk just a fewsat atop it, he couldn’t see Certainly the spot was too s must be there

The earth that fored ht path to the center impossible The mounds were complemented by cavities where chunks of the earth see steep-sided miniature craters of a depth he couldn’t discern froht they were ponds at first, filled in with rainwater perhaps, but when he looked closer he realized that the surface did not ripple No, what filled these craters was just like that of the dome itself, as viewed froh their colors varied from red all the way to a brilliant topaz blue within one spie chirped as if in agreement

With an effort Skyler shifted his focus away from the ain, hoping to spot an easy path to the center Laced through all the mounds and depressions were cracks of indetere As if in defiance of this tortured landscape, clurass still held on here and there Wild-flowers dotted the es None, Skyler noted, broke through from below the domelike surfaces within the craters A squirrel darted across the ground nearby, froain

All the while the doht, every ten seconds The pattern lulled hie sound rippled through the dohter, and caround did not shake, and as quickly as the crackling sound eed it receded Skyler waited until it disappeared completely before he moved on

The first canyon proved only a meter deep and half that across He stepped over it and continued Every few steps he glanced up at that disk at the top of the earthen pillar Fogged as his mind was, he had no doubt that he must reach that pinnacle and see what the Builders had placed there The shape could not be an accident

Part of him wondered why the others had not followed hi through the doest, least pleasant experience in his life Even worse, he thought, than his fall into that glowing iris so deep below Nightcliff That had felt like his mind had been laid bare, every neuron exposed This felt like his memories had been thrown into a blender and run at s

Another canyon appeared before hi to it, but he felt sure it hadn’t just fors he realized he had indeedhis confusion, thesound from above, across the entire domed surface It lasted a few seconds this time and then abruptly ended

There were other noises, too, he realized Noises coh-pitched and brief as a drumbeat, at once familiar and alien

"I need a stiff drink," he said aloud "No Coffee"

He had neither on hand, but he did have water Skyler sat in the dirt and opened his backpack Normally he carried a canteen at his hip, but today he’d thrown everything in the pack so that he’d be able to shrug it off at a moment’s notice He’d wanted to be able to run away

Still the sky pulsed, as if a child stood at a sliding di it up and down in even intervals, fascinated by the effect It was starting to annoy the hell out of hi on, Skyler popped two pills between swigs of cool water

His aviator’s watch showed the wrong ti date Every few seconds the numbers would jump ahead by alet a fix on one of the satellite tih that barrier scrambled the electronics, he decided, and he e a new one At least the compass on it still worked