Ruins

CHAPTER 5 Decisions

To Rigg, Param was not invisible—he still knew exactly where she was, because her path was new and clear. That was how he had first discovered her, back in the house where their mother lived as a royal captive. Now, though, he made a point of not looking at her path, at the place where he knew she was, because he didn’t want Vadesh to have the option of moving his metal-threaded body into the same space she was flashing in and out of. Rigg wasn’t sure how much metal the body of an expendable contained, but it didn’t take much to do serious harm to Param.

“I know where she is,” said Vadesh to Rigg. “I have a perfect sense of time, and I know exactly how far she could have gone by now, even running.”

Rigg looked at Loaf, Olivenko, and Umbo. “Param made her own decision, it seems.”

“She’s going to get thirsty,” said Umbo.

“I don’t like splitting up,” said Loaf. “We can’t help each other then.”

“One thing is certain,” said Rigg. “We need to organize ourselves differently.”

He sensed Umbo growing stiff, resistant. Resentful.

“I agree with you completely, Umbo,” said Rigg.

“I didn’t say anything!” Umbo protested.

“When we started out, I was the one with the money. The jewels.”

“Still got ’em,” said Loaf.

“Do you want them?” asked Rigg. “You’ve had them before. I’ll give them back to you.”

“No!” said Vadesh sharply, before Loaf could answer.

“You’re not in this discussion,” said Rigg. “We can’t make you go away, and we couldn’t stop you from listening even if you left, but we’re not interested in your viewpoint, because as far as we can tell, you’re the enemy.”

“Those wild facemasks are the enemy,” said Vadesh.

“You’re their ally,” said Loaf.

“Please, let’s none of us respond to him, including me,” said Rigg. “I was making a point.”

“Wouldn’t want to interrupt your point-making,” said Umbo.

Rigg ignored Umbo’s dig, for now. “It made sense for me to pretend to be in charge at first because of the subterfuge we were using,” said Rigg. “Pretending I was a rich young heir and you were my attendants.”

“Oh, we were pretending,” murmured Umbo.

“Then I was captured, and Umbo and Loaf—you were on your own and you came to Aressa Sessamo to help me, and I’m grateful. I met Olivenko and brought him into our strange set of problems, and Param is my sister and she was in as much danger as I was. But at the end of it all, what I can’t figure out is why I should be in charge.”

“You’re not,” said Umbo defiantly.

“I’m relieved,” said Rigg. “The trouble is that Loaf and Olivenko defer to me whenever there’s a decision to be made. Which makes sense, because even though they’re the oldest and one of them should definitely be in charge, they don’t have any power over time, and they spend most of their energy sniping at each other anyway.”

“He does,” said Olivenko.

“You think you’re so smart,” said Loaf.

“Thank you for demonstrating my point,” said Rigg. “It’s asinine for the two of you to keep this stupid rivalry alive. Regular army against city guard—who cares? Loaf retired years ago and began two new careers—innkeeper and Leaky’s husband. Olivenko only joined the guard because his career as a scholar was wrecked when my father—my real father—died. An innkeeper and a scholar—but both of you large and strong and well-enough-trained to make anyone think twice about fighting you unless they seriously outnumber you.”

Loaf said, “He wouldn’t scare a—”

“Yes he would,” said Rigg. “Can’t you hear what I’m saying? Grow up, both of you, act like adults, and take charge of this expedition.”

“We can’t,” said Olivenko. “Not him or me.”

“Can so,” said Loaf. “Just don’t want to.”

Rigg glared at Loaf, who rolled his eyes like a teenage boy and looked away.

“It’s actually possible for each of you to allow the other to speak without contradicting him,” said Rigg. “The fact that you don’t seem to know this is why I’ve had to stay in charge, despite Umbo’s resentment.”

“I don’t resent—” began Umbo.

“ ‘I wouldn’t want to interrupt your point-making,’ ” Rigg quoted him. “ ‘Oh, we were pretending.’ I agree with you, Umbo. I have no right to lead, and I’m tired of it anyway.”

“Your father trained you to,” said Umbo grudgingly.

“Everything he trained me for has already happened,” said Rigg. “I got to Aressa Sessamo, I got my sister out of the house, and then with your help she and I got out of the wallfold before General Citizen and our loving mother could kill us. Beyond that, I don’t know what the expendable called Ram had in mind and I don’t care, because what matters now is what we have in mind. Only I don’t have anything in mind. The past few weeks have been all about survival and nothing else.”

“I thought you wanted to find out what happened to Knosso Sissamik,” said Olivenko.

“I do,” said Rigg, “but not so much that I think it’s worth dying for. I want to get out of this wallfold, that’s for certain, because I don’t trust Vadesh here any farther than I can piss, and even on a windless day that’s not far.”

“Where, then?” asked Olivenko. “Back to Ramfold?”

“No,” said Rigg. “I mean, you’re welcome to, but Param and I can’t.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” said Olivenko. “Unless one of you time changers takes me.”

“Maybe Umbo will take you,” said Rigg. “He proved a long time ago that he doesn’t need me to time travel.”

“And you just can’t get over it, can you?” said Umbo.

Rigg heard him and despaired. “Your ability saved my life. Saved my sister’s life. Saved all of us. I admit I felt weak and foolish when you could do it without me, and I couldn’t do it without you. But now we’re even.”

“Oh, definitely,” said Umbo. “You can go back eleven thousand years, and I can barely manage six months, which doesn’t get me through the Wall.”

“And you can stay rooted in the present and always come right back to the time you left,” said Rigg. “We’re different, and we’re both amazing. Now I’m telling you I don’t want to be anybody’s boss, all right? You be boss now. It’s your party.”

“Not me,” said Umbo. “I don’t want to be in charge of anything.”

“I know the feeling,” said Rigg.

“It seems to me you need impartial leadership,” said Vadesh.

Rigg didn’t even glance in his direction. “Loaf?”

“I admit I want to go home.”

“Then go. Please,” said Rigg. “You’ve already done far more than I ever hoped for. Leaky needs you.”

“If I don’t bring the two of you back to Leaky so I can prove you’re all right, my life won’t be worth a piece of bread surrounded by crows.”

“Why do we need anyone in charge?” asked Umbo. “Why can’t we just stay together as long as we feel like it, and split up when we feel like it?”

“Fine with me,” said Olivenko.

“Because you’re a scholar,” said Loaf. “I’m not picking a fight here, I’m just saying that one thing I learned in the army, either we’re together or we’re not. We need to know we can count on everybody who’s with us, or go it alone.”

Rigg buried his face in his hands. “You’re probably right but I’m just so tired of feeling responsible for everybody.”

“You’ve never been responsible for me!” Umbo said, leaping to his feet.

“Yes I have!” Rigg shouted back at him. “It’s my fault you had to run away from home. My fault you had to go to Aressa Sessamo, my fault you had to flee the wallfold, my fault you’re thirsty and under the power of this talking machine.”

“I made my own choices,” said Umbo stubbornly.

“It’s still my responsibility to make things right,” said Rigg, “but I’m not up to it, I can’t do it, I don’t even know what ‘right’ is anymore.”

“I know,” said Vadesh. “I tried to tell my people but they wouldn’t listen. I did what I had to do.”

“Param made a choice, all on her own,” said Rigg. “Without asking me. Which means she really isn’t my responsibility now.”

“She’s your sister,” said Loaf.

“She’s Knosso’s daughter,” said Olivenko.

“But not my responsibility,” said Rigg.

“I’m beginning to get the idea you don’t want to be in charge anymore,” said Loaf.

Rigg nodded wearily. “Communication is finally being achieved.”

“All right,” said Loaf. “Then I’ll be in charge. I say we follow this self-powered puppet to the water and drink up while we hear what he has to say. Everybody agree with that?”

“Yes,” said Olivenko. He shot a look at Rigg, as if to say, See? I can agree with Loaf.

“Fine,” said Umbo. “I’m thirsty.”

“No,” said Rigg.

They all looked at him in consternation.

“Oh, it’s the right plan,” said Rigg, “and Loaf’s in charge. It just felt good to be wrong and have it not matter. Param can follow or not, as she chooses.”

Vadesh, who was still standing close by, seemed a little perplexed. “So you’re going to do what I asked?”

“Yes,” said Loaf.

“Then what was all the discussion about?”

Loaf just shook his head. “It’s a human thing.”

“You’re not really very smart,” said Umbo to Vadesh.

“He’s just pretending not to understand us,” said Rigg.

“I think he never understood humans at all,” said Olivenko.

“Oh, you’re right about that,” said Vadesh. “But I know that if you don’t get water you’ll die, and I have water for you, as much as you want, so let’s go.”

He sounded so cheerful. He sounded just like Father. I cannot let myself trust him, Rigg reminded himself. He isn’t Father. Father wasn’t even Father. They’re all liars.

But following this face, this man, answering his questions, doing what he said—that was how Rigg had spent his entire childhood, his whole life until a year ago. To follow him again felt right; it was the feeling Rigg imagined other people referred to when they spoke of “coming home.”

Back in the same room in the factory, they drank their fill, recharged their canteens and water bags, said little as Vadesh said much. He talked about the days when the city had been productive.

“We kept the technology of the starships, as best we could. Not that we flew anywhere—air travel was too dangerous, what with the Wall. You couldn’t see it, so if a pilot strayed too near, he could go mad and crash the plane.”

Rigg tried to make sense of humans flying and decided that “plane” was a sort of flying carriage. Or boat, since it had a pilot. A flying boat. Would it have to fight the winds the way boats had to struggle upstream on a great river?

But he said nothing, for his project at the moment was trying to learn the way Vadesh thought, since it might help them get out of Vadeshfold safely. And it wasn’t just Vadesh. He was only the second expendable that Rigg had known, and there were things Rigg needed to learn about them. Every wallfold had an expendable, so he would be facing the equivalent of Vadesh or Ram in every one.

The expendables can make us rely on them, need them, love them, thought Rigg. Yet they can also lead us to our own destruction, as Vadesh did with the uninfected humans of the city. Had Father been manipulating humans the same ruthless way? Am I his son, or merely a particularly talented human with royal blood who could be manipulated to cause destruction? Maybe Ram was as careless with human life in his wallfold as Vadesh was in this one. In which case perhaps I should untrain myself, and refuse to see the world as Father trained me to see it.

Or perhaps Father, knowing I would face someone—something—like Vadesh, trained me precisely to be able to learn from and overcome a monster like this.

If only Vadesh didn’t look exactly like Father.

“But Rigg is too important to listen,” said Vadesh.

“I’m listening,” said Rigg.

Vadesh said nothing.

Rigg repeated back to him what he had just said. “This city was designed by human engineers. All these achievements were human.”

“You did not seem to pay attention,” said Vadesh.

“I was thinking that it seems very important to you that we understand that everything here was done by humans. At first I thought you meant ‘human as opposed to you.’ But now I see that by ‘humans’ you meant ‘humans possessed by facemasks.’ ”

“Not possessed!” cried Vadesh. “Augmented! It was what we hoped for at the beginning, what the great Ram Odin told us our work should be—to combine the life of this world with the life that humans brought with them.”

“So this is really the great city of the facemasks,” said Olivenko.

“Of humans whose senses were sharpened and intensified by facemasks,” insisted Vadesh.

“I thought you said that facemasks returned humans to a primitive state, all war and reproduction,” said Olivenko.

“At first. And in the weaker humans, yes, that was a permanent condition. But some humans were strong enough to overmaster the facemasks. And some facemasks were able to learn the civilized virtues. Self-restraint. Discipline. Forethought. Guilt.”

“Guilt!” said Loaf. “What were they guilty of? They were owned by animals. Ridden by them.”

“Guilt is a civilizing virtue,” said Vadesh patiently.

Father had taught Rigg the same thing. “Guilt is how a person punishes himself in advance,” said Rigg. “Before he commits the act, and afterward, even though no one else detected his crime.”

“It makes people self-policing,” said Vadesh. “The more people feel guilt, the more easily they live together in large numbers.”

“So the facemasks learned guilt,” said Loaf. “They still killed all the uninfected humans.”

“They didn’t!” said Vadesh. “Why do you think they did? They defended themselves.”

“Until the last normal human was dead,” said Loaf.

“No and no and no,” said Vadesh. “It was the uninfected, as you call them—I think of them as invaders from Earth—”

“Like you?” suggested Umbo.

“Invaders from Earth,” repeated Vadesh, “who returned to the city again and again until they murdered every man, woman, and child of the native people.”

“They were not native,” said Umbo. “They were captives.”

“They were a new native life form, half human, half facemask,” said Vadesh. “It was a beautiful blending—painful and frightening at first, for both, but then a fruition of both. As if they were trees that could not bear until they pollinated each other.”

“You’re a poet of parasitism,” said Rigg. “Are these the stories you told the possessed people, to convince them they were even better than humans or facemasks alone?”

“It’s the simple truth,” said Vadesh.

“And yet the people without facemasks were not persuaded,” said Rigg.

“Here’s a thought,” said Umbo. “What if the facemasks let go of the people they possessed, so the people could see how much better it was when they had the parasite? Then they could take them back by their own free choice. Or not.”

“Impossible,” said Vadesh.

“So you admit they would never choose to take the facemasks back,” said Loaf.

“Impossible to detach them. Both would die.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Rigg. “I think the facemask would die, but the human would return to health.”

“Both would die,” repeated Vadesh. “The bond cannot be undone. It was fatal to both. Always. Do you think we didn’t try, at first?”

“I’d think that the ability to detach would be the first civilizing virtue you’d get the facemasks to acquire.”

“They tried,” said Vadesh. “As they incorporated the genes they harvested from their human hosts, each new generation was more compatible. They needed humans more, preserved more of human nature. But the one thing they could not do was make themselves less effective as parasites.”

Rigg looked at Loaf, Umbo, Olivenko. “Finally, an honest sentence—Vadesh admits that the facemasks are parasites.”

“Of course they’re parasites,” said Vadesh. “I was the one who warned you not to drink from the stream, wasn’t I? I didn’t want you infected.”

“Where is all this leading?” asked Loaf. “What do you want from us?”

“I want you to bring humans back to my wallfold,” said Vadesh.

“So you can infect them again?”

“No,” said Vadesh. “Do you think I failed to learn the lesson of the past? Humans do not respond well to seeing other humans parasitized. They think of them as monsters, they destroy them to the last man, and then die out themselves, for fear of becoming infected.”

“They died out?” asked Loaf.

“They killed each other,” said Rigg bitterly. “When they were sure they had killed the last facemask-controlled person, they killed themselves—”

“Each other,” said Vadesh.

“Collectively killed themselves,” said Rigg, “so there was no chance that their keeper here could breed them with more facemasks.”

“They didn’t understand that I would never do that,” said Vadesh. “I am incapable of harming human beings.”

“But you can let them come to harm. Goad them to it, trap them. Aid their enemies.”

“Humans must be free,” said Vadesh. “It is deeply ingrained in my programming. I cannot defy that. All choices are to be made by humans. I merely help them carry out their plans.”

Rigg could not let that stand. “You are such a liar,” he said. “I was raised by one of you, and he was certainly not carrying out anybody’s plan.”

“He wasn’t carrying out your plan, you mean,” said Vadesh.

“Nor mine,” said Umbo.

“Nor the plans of General Citizen and Hagia Sessamin,” said Olivenko. “So whose plan was he carrying out?”

“Neither of us controls the other,” said Vadesh. “But we started out with the same directives—given to us by humans. Our original programmers, and then Ram Odin. He gave us a great work to do. The expendable Ram pursued it his way in your natal wallfold, and I pursued it as best I could here in this wallfold. I made mistakes. I misunderstood the depth of the human fear of the strange and new. They could not be reasoned with.”

“Meaning you couldn’t find them all and kill them,” said Rigg.

“I killed no one,” said Vadesh.

“But you found them,” said Umbo. “And told the facemask people where they were, so they could kill them.”

“I wanted them reconciled!”

“But ‘killed’ was almost as good,” said Rigg. “They were waging a war of extermination, and you weighed in on the side of those who were only half human.”

“There are safeguards now,” said Vadesh. “I’ve worked hard. Ten thousand years I’ve been breeding facemasks until all the obnoxious traits are gone. Humans would remain fully human, in charge of themselves.”

“We are never going to put on your facemasks,” said Rigg.

“But you haven’t even seen them!”

“What we need from you,” said Rigg, “and what I order you to give us, is information about the jewels. How do they work? How can we use them to shut down the Walls?”

Vadesh looked away—a gesture Father often used, to give the illusion of thinking things over. But it was only an illusion, Rigg understood that now. The mechanical mind made its decisions very quickly, and all this business of “thinking” was part of the pretense that the expendables were similar to humans. But they were nothing like humans.

“It seems to me,” said Rigg, “that you want us to think this is all about two species—facemasks and humans. But there’s a third species involved.”

Rigg’s friends looked at him, confused.

Vadesh understood him, though. “Expendables are not a species,” he said.

“Aren’t you?”

“We are not alive. We do not reproduce.”

“No, but you replace any parts that wear out,” said Rigg. “You don’t have to reproduce if you never die.”

“We are here to support and enhance human life,” said Vadesh.

The others laughed or hooted bitterly.

“Maybe that was your original law,” said Rigg, “but you proved that enhancing human life is the opposite of what you actually have in mind.”

“The facemasks eventually did enhance human life,” said Vadesh. “That was my great insight, when I finally understood it.”

“Humans are the only fit judges of what enhances our lives,” said Olivenko.

“I see that now,” said Vadesh. “I’ve learned. Do you think I don’t understand that I failed here? All the humans preferred murder and death, do you think I regard that as success? That’s why I beg you to bring humans back here, so I can undo my terrible mistakes.”

“You have the power to bring down the Wall,” said Rigg. “You expendables put it there, didn’t you?”

“We each have the power to shut down our own protective field. But the Wall consists of two fields, pushed up against each other. I could make the Wall half as wide, but I could not bring it down.”

“Unless the other expendables agreed with you,” said Rigg. “But they didn’t, did they?”

Vadesh once again said nothing.

“Silence from you is a lie,” said Rigg.

“They would not let me import a new population,” said Vadesh.

“If the other expendables regard you as so much of a failure that you can’t be trusted with more people,” said Rigg, “why should we contradict their superior wisdom?”

“Expendables must bow to the will of humans,” said Vadesh. “You can contradict us whenever you want.”

“Millions of people must have wished they could get through the Wall,” said Loaf. “It never came down for them.”

“Wishes are not informed decisions,” said Vadesh.

Rigg chuckled. “But who can possibly inform us, except you expendables?”

“Exactly,” said Vadesh.

“So we only know what you tell us,” said Rigg. “Which means that by choosing what to tell, you can shape our decision however you want.”

“And how did Ram shape your decisions?” asked Vadesh.

Rigg and his companions were not pretending; they had to think about it.

“He sent us to the Wall,” said Umbo.

“He prepared us to come through it,” said Rigg.

“So both he and I,” said Vadesh, “wanted humans to come through the Wall.”

“No,” said Rigg. “Father wanted us to have power over the Wall—and other things. Maybe he wanted to trigger General Citizen’s revolt against the People’s Revolutionary Council. But he never did anything to suggest he wanted us to come to you.”

“I’m what’s beyond your Wall!”

“In this direction,” said Rigg. “But we saw the globe in the Tower of O. If we had gone through the Wall in a different place, we might have come to a different wallfold.”

“But you came to this one. Did Ram turn you away from here? He knew you might come, and that if you did, you’d talk to me, and he did nothing to warn you against me, did he?”

“Oh, he warned me well enough,” said Rigg. “He taught me to notice when I’m being lied to and manipulated, and to resist it.”

“Show us how to shut down the Wall,” said Loaf.

Rigg looked at him, startled. It felt like betrayal.

“I want to shut down the Wall,” said Loaf. “These Walls have kept the human race divided into little pieces. In this wallfold, the human race wiped itself out. Who knows what happened in the other seventeen? It’s time for the Walls to come down so we can inform ourselves.”

“If we bring down the Wall,” said Olivenko, “people will come here and be infected by the facemasks.”

“We warn them,” said Loaf. “Filtered water only. They’ll find a way. People always do.”

“We don’t know enough yet,” said Rigg. “We can’t just bring down the Wall when we don’t know what people will find in the other wallfolds.”

Loaf laughed at him. “You say you don’t want responsibility, but here you are appointing yourself as the guardian of the whole human race.”

“They murdered Knosso in the wallfold he crossed into,” said Olivenko.

“Murder, massacre, warfare, disease, parasites,” said Loaf. “It’s the world. We should have the freedom of it. But no, Rigg thinks he can decide everything for everybody, keep everybody safe until he decides the human race is ready. Tell me, Rigg, how are you different from these expendables? Except that you’re not as well-informed?”

“You can’t just—”

But Loaf was not disposed to listen. “I can. You’re not in charge, remember? Each of us can go off on our own, if we want.”

“I thought you said we should stay together,” said Olivenko.

“Until it no longer makes sense,” said Loaf. “The rest of you can stay with each other—I advise it. You’ll be safer. But I want to get back through the Wall. I want to go home to Leaky. But then maybe I’ll come back. This is a vast empty land. It’s not just this city, it’s the whole wallfold. Who knows what could be built here? Vadesh is a lying snake, but the more people who come, the less attention we’ll have to pay to him. He wants the Wall to come down so immigrants can come in? So do I.”

Vadesh made an elaborate shrugging motion. “But it’s not just a person I need. It’s the jewels.”

Loaf looked at Rigg and held out his hand.

Rigg wanted to say, No, they’re mine, Father gave them to me, they’re my inheritance! But he knew he had no right to keep Loaf here against his will. So he drew out the bag with the stones and handed it to Loaf.

Loaf opened the bag and poured out the jewels into his hand.

“Ah,” said Vadesh. “This one is the key to Vadeshfold.” He picked up a pale yellow stone. “With this, a human can turn off this wallfield.”

“This wallfield is only half the Wall,” said Loaf.

“The other stone isn’t here,” said Vadesh. “The one that shuts down the field protecting Ramfold.”

“The one we sold,” said Rigg, realizing.

“The one that the People’s Council stole from us,” said Loaf.

“This one?” asked Umbo. He opened his hand, and there in his palm lay a red stone. Just like the one that Rigg had entrusted to Mr. Cooper, the banker in O.

“Where did you get that?” asked Olivenko.

“After all the times we tried to break into the bank to get it back, you had it all along?” said Loaf.

Now Rigg put things together. “He found it yesterday, when we first arrived.”

“It was just lying there at the edge of the woods where we slept,” said Umbo. “I picked it up.” He turned to Rigg. “You saw me, but you didn’t even ask me what it was.”

“I figured you’d tell me when it mattered,” said Rigg. “And you did.”

“So much for Rigg always trying to be in charge of everything,” said Olivenko.

“I never said that!” said Umbo.

“Yes you did,” said Olivenko. “About a hundred times, in a hundred ways.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Rigg. “Is that the right stone?”

Vadesh looked at it, then handed it to Loaf, pairing it with the yellow one from Vadeshfold. “These are the two you’ll need to bring down the Wall between Ramfold and Vadeshfold.”

“You put it there,” said Rigg. “For Umbo to find.”

“I did not,” said Vadesh. “I couldn’t.”

“Don’t all the expendables have a complete set of all the jewels?” asked Rigg. “This is one of yours.”

“You couldn’t use any of mine,” said Vadesh. “They can only be used by humans who grew up in the same wallfold as the jewels. They imprint on you. What would be the point of leaving one of my jewels for you to find? This jewel is from the Ramfold set.”

Vadesh spoke so confidently. Yet he seemed untroubled by the question of how the jewel got from Ramfold to this grove of trees. “Who put it there?” Rigg demanded of the others. It was plain Vadesh was not going to tell them, even if he knew, which he probably did.

“Maybe you did,” said Olivenko.

“Me?” said Rigg. “I didn’t have it!”

“Maybe you came back from the future, when you do have it, and you put it there,” said Olivenko. “Isn’t that possible?”

“Or Umbo did,” said Rigg. “And put it where he knew that he alone would find it.”

“But that would mean that in the future, I go back to Ramfold, somehow get the jewel, and then come back here and leave it for myself,” said Umbo. “Why?”

“We’ll never know,” said Loaf. “Because that version of the future is destroyed by the very fact that you now have the missing jewel, so you won’t have to go get it.”

“Why didn’t I hand it to myself, with an explanation?” asked Umbo. “At least I could have left myself a note.”

“You’ll have to take that up with yourself, later,” said Loaf. “What matters is, I have the power in my hands now to bring down the Wall and go home.” Loaf rose to his feet and faced Vadesh, looming over him. Loaf was big enough that this move no doubt intimidated most men, but Rigg didn’t imagine Vadesh was all that impressed.

“Come with me,” said Vadesh. “You can control the Wall now.”

“Where are you taking him?” demanded Rigg.

“I thought you weren’t in charge,” said Olivenko.

“I’m still his friend,” said Rigg. “A friend demands to know where you’re taking him.”

“Into the starship,” said Vadesh. “Inside the mountain.”