“I see the pattern,” Melody repeated, “but what does it do? I’m sorry, Marius. I don’t mean to be rude. It just isn’t helping me to keep being shown examples without context. If you’ve discovered some significance...”

“No,” said Marius. “I guess I’m just getting carried away. I mean, this pattern... it’s everywhere.”

“I know. I just wish Solomon would have told us what it was.”

Marius leaned back in his chair and stretched his stubby arms. “Maybe he has. The guy has ‘cryptic’ written all over him. I bet you he gave us all sorts of clues.”

“I hate clues.”

Marius did a double take. “Then you chose the wrong profession, my dear.”

Melody gave him a half smile. “I study science because I like answers.”

Marius chuckled. “And now we’re being forced by politicians to liaise with a sorcerer. Seriously, we should have Solomon on an operating table, not stalking out labs and barking obscure orders.”

Melody nodded absently. “I would like to see what makes them tick.”

The door opened and six armed men entered, followed by Salamanca. Melody and Marius stood hurriedly and bowed.

“My Lord Duke,” they said in unison.

Salamanca waved their greeting away. “Where’s Solomon?”

The two physicists looked at each other, then Melody looked back to the duke. “We haven’t seen him. I mean, he was here but... he left. Hours ago. Is something wrong, sir?”

“The attack failed.”

Melody’s heart sank, and she struggled to get her words out. “But, they had, they... how?”

“The kzin have sided with the Tangents. Our forces were slaughtered, and the Harbingers were forced to retreat.” The duke strode to the far end of the lab, then turned back around. His eyes met hers, then darted towards Marius.

“Hey, Stubbs, would you get the notes from the printing team?”

He looked at her blankly, then, after a series of rapid blinks, he nodded and scurried out of the room.

“Well?” Salamanca held his hands out expectantly.

Melody gulped down her fear. “I’ve had all our security tapes sent to your personal mail, sir.”

“And that’s all the contact you’ve had? Nothing written? No discreet correspondence? No conspicuous requests? No unusual experiments? I’m trusting you, Omri. Was that a mistake?”

“No, sir. At least I hope not, sir.”

“You hope not?”

“Lord Duke, I...” She looked at Marius’s datapad. “He gave us an energy signature to search Albion’s systems for. I can send over our findings.”

“You’re just now thinking of this?”

Melody looked at the duke’s guards and gulped again. “I thought you just wanted me to... I’m sorry, sir. I misunderstood your instructions.”

“My what?”

“I mean, our arrangement, sir.”

He stared at her unflinching, unblinking.

“I’ll make everything available to you, sir.”

“Everything.”

“Yes, Lord Duke.”

He made no sound, no gesture. He simply left.

Marius entered the room immediately after the last guard was gone.

“Melody,” he said as he came running to her. “Melody, what have you gotten yourself into?”

“Marius! I told you to... how long... what did you hear?”

“Everything, obviously. What are you caught up in, Mel? Talk to me. What did you mean by ‘your arrangement’?”

“No. The less you know, the better.”

Marius shook his head. “You’re gonna end up just like your father.”

Her throat tightened, and before she could stop them huge tears were streaming down her cheeks.

Marius put his hands to his mouth. “I’m so sorry. Melody, please forgive me.”

She took her handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her eyes. “No. I mean, yes. It’s my fault. And you’re right.”

“It’s not your fault, and no, I’m wrong. All you ever do is your job. It's not fair that you’ve been put in this position, whatever it is. You don’t have to tell me anything. Just know that I’m here for you. Okay?”

She managed a quick smile, and choked out the words thank you.

Marius sighed. “I’ve gotta go, Mel. Tabi’s parents are coming over. Promise me you'll be safe.”

She nodded nervously. “I will.”

She didn’t eat that night, and her apartment felt hostile, as if unfriendly things lurked behind each cupboard and door and piece of furniture. Eventually she gave up tossing and turning and went back to her office, where she poured over the reports from the engineering staff. But the pattern was too widespread to trigger an epiphany. Had there been one case of its absence, then she would have a starting point. Frustrated, sue left her office and meandered through the lonely corridors of the Artifexus.

There were plenty of people on the night shift, but all were engaged in tests or deep reading. So Melody walked alone, worrying over the duke’s expectations and how cagey Solomon had been. When he had asked her to convince the duke to play along with General Sensus, she’d thought she’d found an easy way to give everyone what they wanted. The thought of spying on Solomon seemed then like taking part in an exchange, but now she felt as if she was betraying everyone, including herself.

She was near Oak, looking outside a window that ran the length of a hallway. She felt her throat tighten again as the thought of all those soldiers dying crossed her mind. Guilt stabbed at her then. Had she not made her Faustian bargain with Salamanca, would those people have died?

They’re soldiers, she told herself. Soldiers die. They literally sign up for it.

It was no use. She felt like leaping out the nearest airlock, freeing herself from the vice she’d put herself in, and from the pain of the high cost of her mistake.

Marius is right. It is my fault. And I am going to end up like Dad. While the duke had never been implicated in her father’s attack, the message he sent with six armed guards was plain.

They’re all thugs. Whatever their livery.

She wandered further down the hallway, remembering how alive her father had been before he was crippled. She’d been thinking of him ever since Solomon’s presence had been thrust on her. He reminded her of her dad, though less agreeable. Her father would follow his blunt comments with a smile or a silly joke, and when things were calm, he made a point to commend his staff and thank them for putting up with such an impatient director.

She reached the end of the window and remembered that one of the Harbingers had taken to frequenting Oak, asking Eno questions that, if rumors were true, went wildly outside of the bounds of her functions. But the rumors also insisted that she never gave him any replies. ‘I do not have this information’ she was claimed to have said when he tried to engage her in absurd conversations. But Melody paused outside the door to Oak, and a thought struck her. She turned back and began heading to the Artifexus, wondering how to accomplish the nebulous idea forming in her head, when an object outside the window caught her eye.

It was the size of an adult, a little larger than her but not really large. Oblong, wrapped in cloth, it was stiff as it floated by. She felt captivated by it, and though she should have been alarmed, she was not. She figured it was a piece of trash that was mistakenly jettisoned. As it turned and unfolded, she pictured a man dancing, and she felt lonely for male company. It would be nice to have a man hold out his hand to her at one of the galas, and to spin around the ballroom with his hands on her waist. Even Marius had someone, despite his piggish face and nasally voice.

The reflection of a face showed itself in the glass. She turned and there was no one there, so she looked back out the window, but the object was gone. She turned again, and the hallway was still empty.

I need sleep.

She turned to look out the window once more, enjoying the calm brought by the apparent emptiness of space. Her father never tired of telling her stories of Earth, but planetary life had always sounded stressful and hectic to her. She couldn’t imagine coping with the constant overstimulation of flora and fauna, without the black void to look into from empty hallways and quiet observation decks. Perhaps she could have handled Earth before the sky was marred, and the Big Empty could still be seen. But looking up into a dingy brown sky after fighting through huddled masses of beggars and thieves sounded awful.

The object reappeared. It floated upward from below the window, then hovered in place no more than a dozen feet away. The cloth wrapping began to unravel, teasing her with a glimpse at what was shrouded within. She put her hand on the glass and leaned close. The cloth turned, wrapping back in over itself, and the shape rotated away from her. She took her hand off the glass. Her foot pivoted, ready for departure. The hallway was as lonely as the space outside, as lonely as her. The cloth parted, showing the pale corpse inside. It opened its eyes.

“Melody” said Solomon.

She yelped and whirled, but there was no one there, and when she looked out the window there was nothing there either. She stood still, frozen, her heart drumming against her ribs.

I really need sleep.

When she made it back to her apartment, her next shift was only an hour away, so she hurried through her breakfast and shower, through on the uniform at the top of the pile on her sofa and hustled as quickly as she could to the nearest car. The transit station was packed, so she pulled out her commpad and messaged her senior staff that she would be late.

Every transit station along the way was crowded, and every car taken. Even the commuter trains and conveyer roads were full, so she walked on the side lanes, weaving through the ponderous citizens who seemed to have no appointments to make.

Why even be out walking at this hour? An old man stopped in front of her and checked his pockets. She clenched her fists and fought the urge to shout at him, then pushed past him when it seemed he would never find the object he searched for.

She found the Artifexus even less tolerable. She was bombarded with minutiae the moment she arrived, and her office offered no solace, as there was a message from the duke’s office reminding her that he was expecting a message from her. She compiled all the data he promised, almost screaming at her aids every time they barged in with trivialities that they deemed pressing, and when she was finished sending the engineering team’s reports to Salamanca it was time for lunch. She ate with Marius, who spoke unrelentingly about his in-laws and the terrible way they spoke to his wife, their own daughter, and then he asked her the worst question he could.

“Did you see your dad last night?”

“No.” She poked at her salad. The only ingredient she liked were the little translucent pearls from the vid’redic homeworld. They looked like little balls of glass and tasted like fresh fruit.

“Well, whenever you get around to seeing him next, tell him I said ‘hi’.”

“Sure.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“About what?”

“About whatever’s got you so glum.”

“I didn’t sleep.”

“Did anything else happen after I left?”

“No.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Okay.”

And then the storm cleared. After lunch, it was as if she wasn’t there. Her aids managed to solve their minor dilemmas without her, the hallways were less crowded and when she visited the labs needing her input the problems were simple. Grateful for the unexpected respite, she found an empty computer lab and began implementing her idea, compiling the full spectrum of the energy wave containing Solomon’s pattern in an animated 3D model and copying it to the computer in her wristband. She decided to leave early, stopping by her office on her way out and replying to a message from the duke.

“No, sir. I haven’t seen him today. Yes, Lord Duke. I will.”

Then she went to Oak, and while there were a few people walking along the hallway, she felt terrified to pass the window. She took the last ten paces at a jog.

Hello, Director Omri, said the aged mother.

“Eno, I have something I want you to look analyze.”

She carried a small holoplayer in her bag, in case she had a few moments during her shift to watch a clip of a concert, or a few short videos of baby animals. She loaded her file from her wristband into the holoplayer and set it on the floor. The energy wave appeared above. The room went dark.

“Eno. Are you there?”

There was no reply, but an image formed just below the ceiling of the large, empty room. Eight spheres circled around a ninth, and a beam of light shot from the ninth into a thick wall of cloud. Another image began taking shape of what lurked beyond the wall, and suddenly there was speech. Melody couldn’t make out the words. They sounded distorted, as if several voices of varied pitch were overlayed and speaking the words in reverse. Then a voice stood out from the others. It did not speak, rather it moaned lustfully, and Melody felt uncomfortable. Then there were screams, then growls, then weeping, and the mix grew hostile and disgusting as the voices all became pained and shrill.

Melody turned off her holoplayer and the room was again quiet and illuminated. She put the player in her bag and left in a hurry, looking over her shoulder every step of the way. She rushed home and stopped at the far end of the avenue. Two large, muscular men in similar clothes were walking past her door. One of them glanced at her window. Palms sweating, knees knocking, she took a car to the ambassadorial district and went to Solomon’s apartment, but there was no one there. She thought of calling Marias, but she would never forgive herself if he was ever hurt, so instead she went home. The men were gone, but she was still afraid. She locked her door behind her and dimmed every window.

She showered, changed into her pajamas, and sat shaking on her sofa. She wanted to watch a baby animal video, or an entire concert, anything to calm her nerves, but she was afraid to activate her holoplayer. She could turn on the television in her living room, of course, but the thought of standing and moving was too much to bear, so she sat in silence. Until she heard the voice.

“Please don’t be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you.”

Her heart drummed to the point of bursting. “Who are you?”

He sat in the chair opposite here. She hadn’t seen him until she heard him. He looked like the shadow of a snake.

“I’m here on behalf of a friend. My name is Sam.”