Chapter 53: The Road Obstacle
The transport van for Thall took forty minutes to load because the array could not be tilted past twelve degrees, and Doctor Nischov personally supervised every one of those minutes in a coat that was too good for a loading bay, snapping at porters who had been doing this job since he was a resident. He counted the degrees off a spirit level he had brought himself, twice on every lift, and made them set the whole frame down again when the rear caster caught the lip of the ramp.
He rode in the back with her. Nobody had asked him to. When Theo tried to thank him for it, he waved it off with the specific irritation of a man who has decided to be indispensable and does not wish to discuss why, and then he shut the doors from the inside.
Estea came down last, because Estea had opinions.
"We’re going in that one, not the second one."
"They’re identical, honey."
"What is it with hideous-faced people, this is why I despise humans. At least get some people with presentable faces."
Theo wished he could sink into the ground. But then he had to remind himself.
’That’s true, they were born inside the Tower, and are villainesses, of course they have this kind of rotten attitude.’
He was forgetting, for a moment, the insufferable true nature of these women.
The man in the second vehicle was reassigned, at speed. Everyone who looked ugly and unlookable by Estea’s standards was being shuffled out and sent to the protection vehicle, and not one of them asked why, because the order came down from Aide Lance’s office and the office did not explain itself.
This was one of those times Theo just had to stand on the side with his hands in his pockets, and watch his crippled wife select people with presentable faces she wanted to keep seeing, because her eyes were too graceful to fall upon hideous faces.
’Make it make sense to me.’
Theo, Estea and Sesan entered the second vehicle. Sesan sat with her hands in her lap and her frost-pale hair loose, and looked out of the window. Estea took the far window. Theo was in the middle, which was where Theo was always in the middle.
Uthed took the seat opposite, sword across his knees, and closed his eyes, and was not asleep. Frank rode in the front of the third vehicle. Even though Aide Lance had relieved him of his duties, he still decided to come anyway, and Lance had looked at him for two full seconds and then said nothing about it.
Then they rolled, four vehicles and a life-support van, out of Dumphrey Avenue and west.
The western checkpoint took eleven seconds. Theo watched the guard glance at the plates, straighten, and wave the whole convoy through without a single question, and he watched the man’s face while he did it, the way the boredom went out of it and something careful came in behind, and something in Theo’s stomach shifted sideways.
’So this is what power and authority looks like.’
Estea was watching him watch it, and she shifted her gaze, and her voice came afterwards.
"Don’t get used to it..."
Theo chuckled dryly.
"I’m not."
She sighed.
"You can’t help it. None of us can, power is intoxicating, and addictive, but if it can be given, it can be taken, you just need to offend the right people. It’s a cruel world, seek control and control alone. That’s not given but seized."
For a moment Theo was silent, and surprised. Even Uthed, opposite them, opened his eyes, and thought.
’Such wise words, she sounds like she has lived over twenty lifetimes.’
Theo smiled.
"I’ll keep that in mind..."
After a moment, he just had to go and add.
"So you do care after all."
Estea’s head turned a fraction, because that was not the answer she had prepared for, and then she gave the window her attention as though the window had asked for it.
Then the city let go of them.
It happened all at once, the way it does on the western artery. The last of the low buildings gave up, the checkpoint fell away behind, and the road went into the green, and then there was nothing on either side but trees standing close and old with the light coming down through them in long bars across the asphalt. The bars came in through the glass and went over Sesan’s face, one and then the next, slow at first and then quicker. She turned her head to follow it. She had her palm flat on the window, fingers spread, and the glass fogged a small white ring around the heel of her hand. She kept it there.
Theo watched her do that and felt the day get better.
He had the whole afternoon planned in his head. Get the array down into the sublevel first, because Nischov would not settle until it was breathing. Then the beds, then the kitchen, then the ramp, then dinner, and he had bought a chicken.
’And then tomorrow I start on the Tower.’
At twenty-six minutes past the checkpoint, the vehicle slowed.
The lead vehicle had drifted right. The van behind them was closing up until Theo could see the driver’s knuckles on the wheel through two windscreens.
Theo sat forward.
Uthed opened his eyes. He watched Theo for a moment, and then spoke quietly.
"Mr Theo. Do not put your hand on the door."
Then the sky ahead of them, above the treeline, about a kilometre up the road, came apart.
There is no good way to describe a Gate opening for the people who have never watched one. The colour goes first. A patch of the world roughly the size of a house simply stops agreeing with the rest of it, and the air around the edge of that patch bends, and everything the light touches through it comes back wrong, the green of the trees behind it going grey and then going a green that does not happen in trees. Birds went up out of the trees for a mile in every direction, all at once, in a sheet.
[Warning: Dimensional aperture detected]
[A Gate is Manifesting Within Your Perimeter]
[Category: Four]
[Distance: 940m]
The convoy stopped.
Theo had his hand on the door.
He was not aware of having moved it there. That was the part that would bother him later, in the dark, when he had time. Twenty-one years of wanting to be a Hero does not leave of a man because a Heroine with a yellow cape smashed his head on an elevator door.
Besides nothing mattered more to him right now than the fact that his head was singing:
’Nothing must happen to Thall.’
The door was locked. He pulled it twice before he accepted that. The door had been locked from the front since the checkpoint.
Lance’s voice came through the cabin speaker, flat and unhurried, and Theo understood that the man had put himself on that channel before they had even left the loading bay, because he had known.
"Mr Theolyne. Stay in the vehicle."
"There are people on this road, you’ll need help protecting them..."
"Strangely enough, there are no people on this road. It was held for us."
Aide Lance paused and chuckled.
"That is one of the several reasons this is interesting. Stay in the vehicle."