Page 124 of Blightfall

“I wonder if you are suffering memory loss,” Ivy said. “As I distinctly said, you have already been saved. By me.”

Right.

“If we’ve been saved,” Nedd said, “then why are you putting us in storage?”

“I am merely protecting you from the consequences of your own ignorance,” Ivy said imperiously. “So many of your people don’t seem to understand that I’ve saved them. Even the people who programmed me never came back to show their appreciation! Can you imagine?”

I wondered what happened to those people and if it involved her chaining them up. But I didn’t think asking was going to help us get out of here, which had to be our first priority.

While Ivy was talking, I flexed my foot up and down, pushing through the tingling sensation to work my toes under the edge of the grate. There were no visible bolts on the outside, which was promising. Besides smelling terrible, the gas emanating from the grate was starting to make my lungs burn. I guessed it wouldn’t kill us if the end goal was for us to be frozen and preserved, and it was slow-acting, possibly to prevent it from killing us as it transitioned us into cryosleep. But I still wanted to stop breathing it as soon as possible.

“All those fighters out there,” Nedd said, “did you save them too?”

“I certainly did!” Ivy said. “Do you know what those Superiority aliens would have done to me if they’d found out what I was doing here? I saved all these people from them. Would you like to know how many?”

Oh, stars. Ivy had co-opted the station that watched the preserve, convincing the varvax here to work with her instead of their own government.

“A couple hundred thousand?” Nedd guessed.

“Almost five million,” Ivy said.

Stars, how big was her operation, if she’d been able to collect five million humans? How many other planets were there like Blightfall, and how long had this been going on? It would take far fewer than five million troops to overwhelm Epiphany. We had to warn them.

I kept up my efforts, wiggling my toes up and down under the edge of the grate. It was hard to tell through my boot if it was moving, but I thought I felt it give the tiniest bit each time my toes flexed. Unless she had a camera pointed directly at my foot, Ivy wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing past the frame of the refrigerator doors.

Nedd seemed to have caught on, because he twisted his own boot toward the grate on his side of the unit and kept Ivy talking. “Why train the gladiators on Blightfall against scions?” he asked. “With light-whips and shock spears?”

“I’ve trained warriors in all specialties,” Ivy said. “Even I, who can predict probabilities down to a hundredth of a percent, don’t know exactly which possibilities will become a reality. So I planned for them all! Do you know how much coordination that required? How much effort? How much loving care? And I had only varvax to help me! So many times they almost revealed my plans to the Superiority. They must have found out about us a month ago, because one day, half our taynix disappeared, just like that! All we had left were the ones under my protection in here.”

Ah, that was how Ivy had held on to the taynix. The ones under her control had been in the nowhere when the delvers liberated the Superiority’s captive slugs.

Yes, the grate was definitely moving under my toes now. I tried to push against the numbness, to rotate my foot as much as I could.

The grate slid off, leaning against my leg, and I carefully nudged it against the wall, where it stood upright, still mostly covering the compartment within. Through the open slit along the top of the compartment, I could see hoses inside, attached to cartridges containing various liquids, all labeled in a language I couldn’t read.

“How do you hide from the delvers in here?” Nedd asked. He had his toe under the grate on that side now, wiggling it.

“Oh, them?” Ivy asked. “They never leave the center of the realm. This realm shouldn’t even have a center, did you know? There is no center to infinite space. Still, here on the edges, it’s only a matter of bending the infinite curve of time a little, and poof! A pocket where no one will find you. Certainly not them. It’s not like they’re going to dig their heads out of the infinite sands of space-time to come looking.”

“Right,” Nedd said. “That clears that right up.”

“But the varvax!” Ivy continued. “I’ve had to watch them every minute, just to keep them from bungling the whole thing! Can you imagine how much I’ve suffered?”

“Yeah,” Nedd said. “Sounds awful.”

Nedd nudged the cover off the compartment on his side, and the humming sound of the unit grew louder. There were electronic parts in there, parts that made the unit function. If we could damage what was inside, we might be able to stop the operation of the entire thing, which should also release our light-line restraints. But I couldn’t lift my foot high enough to kick inside the grate, and my hands were still bound tight.

“Not that it’s a burden to watch,” Ivy said. “I have subroutines to handle that. It barely touches my processing power; the effort is so small as to be almost immeasurable. But to have to interact with varvax with their petty concerns and their frail bodies? It’s almost insulting.”

I was no fan of varvax, given what they’d done to Detritus, but even I felt a little offended on their behalf.

“What are you going to do with the people,” Nedd asked, “now that you’ve saved them?”

The avatar of Ivy gave him a look of consternation, like a mother annoyed at a child who’d asked the same question for the hundredth time. She spoke slowly, as if we might be having a hard time understanding her words. “I’m going to protect them,” she said. “I thought I said that already.”

“You did,” Nedd said.

“I know I did,” Ivy said. “I have a databank that records everything. I’m making a note of this particular dialogue, so if you feel the need to ask this again, I can simply replay it for you. Because I care.”