My sense of disquiet increased with every step we took. I almost wished for the guards to notice us, las guns and stubbers at least being familiar and definable dangers. The city was oddly configured, towers reached up a few dozen feet or so, some beginning in rough naves, others naked. The streets were paved, though it looked as though the stones fitted together with an impossible smoothness, something that none the less did not render them slippery. I glanced into some of the towers, accessible through roughly circular doors. Inside they were largely unadorned, though occasional niches showed cracked plinths where small items had obviously been removed. Heavy duty power cabling ran along the streets, tacked to walls with cargo tape or stapled into the ground with iron spikes. The cords went to flood lumens that were positioned to light various walls, or to small portable cogitator units, of the type archeors used at remote dig sights.

"You are the closest thing we have to an archeor Emma, can you tell us anything?" Hadrian whispered as we moved down a narrow boulevard over which the towers seemed to slightly crowd.

"I'm not very close to an archeor," I countered, but I knew that evading the question served no one.

"It's old, at least ten thousand years, not human," I supplied.

"How do you know?" Clara asked, I suspected more nervous than curious. She might be even less used to this kind of thing than I was, for all she had vastly more experience of combat. I had afterall been a part of the suppression of a powerful cult. Also I had been abducted by that cult previous to that, which I think counts.

"No stairs. Not one single staircase in the whole place," I explained nodding towards one of the towers in which a ramp coiled around the inside. It was a very inefficient design, one that didn't make sense unless the inhabitants were physiologically unable to climb steps. We entered into a square where one of the stella we had seen from the levy reared skyward, surrounded by packed crates that seemed to contain statuary smashed from niches. The stella seemed to rear out of the ground, and was made of a darker different stone. I got the queasy feeling that the stella had existed long before whatever alien creatures had raised the city began using tools. Strange markings had been chiseled into them some kind of script which tugged at the edge of my awareness, like something I had seen in a forgotten dream.

"Enuncia," I breathed, the word swimming up into my mind from somewhere else. My head throbbed painfully. I was suddenly skipping along the street of Quentain on Bonaventure, my hair done up in pigtails. Then I was in a cold cell, staring at something I couldn't make out. Both images flashed crazily across my vision, accompanied by blasts of psychosomatic sound, like heavily amped static.

"Are you okay Emma?" Clara asked.

"Yes," I replied by rote, "Why?" Before she could answer I raised my hand to my nose and stared at my fingers as they came away bloody.