“No. Visual transmission must be keyed manually.”

“I see.”

“I do not.”

A joke? Elverda sat up on the bed as Dorn’s image winked out. Is he capable of humor?

She shrugged out of the shapeless coveralls she had worn to bed, took a quick shower, and pulled her best caftan from the travel bag. It was a deep midnight blue, scattered with glittering silver stars. Elverda had made the floor-length gown herself, from fabric woven by her mother long ago. She had painted the stars from her memory of what they had looked like from her native village.

As she slid back her front door she saw Dorn marching down the corridor with Humphries beside him. Despite his slightly longer legs, Humphries seemed to be scampering like a child to keep up with Dorn’s steady, stolid steps.

“I demand that you reinstate communications with my ship,” Humphries was saying, his voice echoing off the corridor’s rock walls. “I’ll dock your pay for every minute this insubordination continues!”

“It is a security measure,” Dorn said calmly, without turning to look at the man. “It is for your own good.”

“My own good? Who in hell are you to determine what my own good might be?”

Dorn stopped three paces short of Elverda, made a stiff little bow to her, and only then turned to face his employer.

“Sir: I have seen the artifact. You have not.”

“And that makes you better than me?” Humphries almost snarled the words. “Holier, maybe?”

“No,” said Dorn. “Not holier. Wiser.”

Humphries started to reply, then thought better of it.

“Which way do we go?” Elverda asked in the sudden silence.

Dorn pointed with his prosthetic hand. “Down,” he replied. “This way.”

The corridor abruptly became a rugged tunnel again, with lights fastened at precisely spaced intervals along the low ceiling. Elverda watched Dorn’s half-human face as the pools of shadow chased the highlights glinting off the etched metal, like the Moon racing through its phases every half minute, over and again.

Humphries had fallen silent as they followed the slanting tunnel downward into the heart of the rock. Elverda heard only the clicking of his shoes, at first, but by concentrating she was able to make out the softer footfalls of Dorn’s padded boots and even the whisper of her own slippers.

The air seemed to grow warmer, closer. Or is it my own anticipation? She glanced at Humphries; perspiration beaded his upper lip. The man radiated tense expectation. Dorn glided a few steps ahead of them. He did not seem to be hurrying, yet he was now leading them down the tunnel, like an ancient priest leading two new acolytes—or sacrificial victims.

The tunnel ended in a smooth wall of dull metal.

“We are here.”

“Open it up,” Humphries demanded.

“It will open itself,” replied Dorn. He waited a heartbeat, then added, “Now.”

And the metal slid up into the rock above them as silently as if it were a curtain made of silk.

None of them moved. Then Dorn slowly turned toward the two of them and gestured with his human hand.

“The artifact lies twenty-two point nine meters beyond this point. The tunnel narrows and turns to the right. The chamber is large enough to accommodate only one person at a time, comfortably.”

“Me first!” Humphries took a step forward.

Dorn stopped him with an upraised hand. The prosthetic hand. “I feel it my duty to caution you—”

Humphries tried to push the hand away; he could not budge it.

“When I first crossed this line, I was a soldier. After I saw the artifact I gave up my life.”

“And became a self-styled priest. So what?”

“The artifact can change you. I thought it best that there be no witnesses to your first viewing of it, except for this gifted woman whom you have brought with you. When you first see it, it can be . . . traumatic.”

Humphries’s face twisted with a mixture of anger and disgust. “I’m not a mercenary killer. I don’t have anything to be afraid of.”

Dorn let his hand drop to his side with a faint whine of miniaturized servomotors.

“Perhaps not,” he murmured, so low that Elverda barely heard it.

Humphries shouldered his way past the cyborg. “Stay here,” he told Elverda. “You can see it when I come back.”

He hurried down the tunnel, footsteps staccato.

Then silence.

Elverda looked at Dorn. The human side of his face seemed utterly weary.

“You have seen the artifact more than once, haven’t you?”

“Fourteen times,” he answered.

“It has not harmed you in any way, has it?”

He hesitated, then replied, “It has changed me. Each time I see it, it changes me more.”

“You . . . you really are Dorik Harbin?”

“I was.”

“Those people of the Chrysalis . . .?”

“Dorik Harbin killed them all. Yes. There is no excuse for it, no pardon. It was the act of a monster.”

“But why?”

“Monsters do monstrous things. Dorik Harbin ingested psychotropic drugs to increase his battle prowess. Afterward, when the battle drugs cleared from his bloodstream and he understood what he had done, Dorik Harbin held a grenade against his chest and set it off.”

“Oh my god,” Elverda whimpered.