Chapter 105: The Empyrean Gates

The last step.

The strictly flat summit of the tower, of smooth black stone. The sun has long since set, but powerful auroras fall like a curtain from the cloud layer and illuminate the surroundings.

The Empyrean Gate may be here: at the exact center of the tower, two or three meters above the ground, a luminous triangle.

“The three-shaped form,” Ada indicates, signing the appropriate glyph.

They advance as best they can, in a cold breeze. In the distance, the apocalypse seems to drift away like a storm.

A silent bird falls from the sky: the Halcyon. When it reaches two meters above the ground, its reactors warm the air and it opens like a complex box to eject Andreï, who is carrying Pallas in his arms.

Ada wants to hug him even though he is “the weird guy” (and now, above all, the tired guy), but she settles for trotting toward him, exhausted, and raising a hand with a smile, just as he lays his officer’s body onto the ground.

“Is she asleep?” Ada asks, who likes people alive or dead, but not in-between.

“The last few days have been long for all of us, I think, Gorylkin.”

“Pff!”

Had he scrambled through the snow like she did? These people of the HS, Ada thinks, such delicate creatures. The Wau kneels beside Pallas, touches her forehead. Catatonia. He wakes her with a psychic caress, the way one wakes a sleeping child. Pallas blinks.

Other ships land: Salman’s Phoebus, from which he emerges carrying the slimy Abandoned over his shoulder. A Raven from the Ptah with a contingent of officers armed with rippers. Two others, packed with the last survivors of the Amaterasu, including its captain and its Xeno cat. Three Anti-Wau fall from the sky. The impact is harsh because the ground does not absorb the shock, and stunned, almost broken, they rise before the Wau knocks them out psychically for good.