Cairo's aperture opened beneath Mara's sample box and tried to pull the whole archive into the cultivation roof.
Aren kept both hands on the box handles.
The floor under his boots became white tile from Meva Tal's laboratory shift. Black water moved below it. The sealed blade inside Mara's glass sleeve struck its copper mesh hard enough to bend one wire.
"Object custody current," Aren said. "No laboratory destination."
The archive floor ignored the statement and tilted another degree.
At Ridge, the one-ended road entered its local aperture sideways. Asphalt climbed through the receiver yard and came out as a vertical strip over Tera's lost service lane.
A current bus hung from the strip by four tires.
Thirty-seven passengers stood inside. Their driver held the brake and answered a Ridge intake call from a road that had no ground beneath it.
