Ramona waved vaguely to her left and clicked the rifle’s scope, activating it.
“Why the rifle?”
“Point cloud scanner.” She grinned.
The point cloud scope tagged the environment, differentiating between shapes. The temple would be large and round. It should stand out among the trees like a mushroom in the grass.
Ramona hung the rifle over her shoulder and faced the tree. “Give me a boost?”
He cupped his hands. She stepped on them, and he straightened, propelling her upward. Ramona caught a branch, pulled herself up, and scrambled into the crown.
A long moment passed.
“Found it,” she called down. “Two klicks. Think it’s safe to tag it?”
“Yes.”
The rifle popped. Ramona had shot at the temple, and the rifle’s targeting computer recorded the trajectory of the round. They would follow the scope the way mythical ancients followed a thread through a labyrinth. As long as the storm gave them another fifteen minutes, they would make it.
Lightning tore the clouds above them. Thunder rumbled, the heavens opened, and the rainstorm doused the forest.
Matias swore.
Visibility shrank to near zero. Matias sliced at the tangle of vines in front of him.
“A little to the left,” Ramona called out behind him.
He pulled his feet out of the mud, strode a couple of meters forward, angling to the left, and slashed again, carving a path through the brush.
The forest floor was soup. Mud sucked at their feet and gave way under their weight. The rain had soaked through their clothes in seconds. Warm at first, it felt almost icy now. All around them the canopy shook and trembled, not blocking the rain but channeling it into thousands of streams. If something lunged at them through the brush now, they would never see it coming.
He hacked and cut, half-blind, while Ramona followed him, staring into the scope. If they wandered off course, even by a few meters, they could walk right by the temple and never realize it was there.
His left knee was fucking killing him. He had put most of his weight on it in that damn hallway, shielding himself and Ramona from the sonic cannon, and after that second blast hurled him into the wall, he’d fallen right on it. His back hurt, his head hurt, too, and the crash had done them no favors despite the state-of-the-art crash seats, but the knee would require attention as soon as they stopped and he could get the med kit out of his bag. If he didn’t treat it, it would either lock up tomorrow or swell, and he had no idea what the next day would bring.
A wide leaf dumped a few liters of water right down his back. It ran under his collar and washed down his spine. Matias gritted his teeth and kept cutting. Using seco tired you out. He needed sleep and food. He didn’t care in which order, but he had to get one of them soon, because his endurance was at its limit.
A tangle of stranglers towered ahead. He ripped into them, sinking into the mindless rhythm of slashing strikes. Cut, cut, step. Cut, cut, step.
A hand grabbed his shoulder. “Matias!”
He turned to her.
Ramona pointed to the right. “We found it.”
He looked in the direction she was pointing.
A blue-and-white dome rose to the side, wrapped in a net of strangler branches. It looked like a bubble of pure blue caught in a web of silver filaments anchoring it to the ground. Two wide ramps led to the entrance.
They hurried to the ruin.
First Wave temples took their form from nephri spiders, which laid their eggs into a drop of their bright-blue mucus and wove their webs into parachutes around it to let the wind carry their offspring to new territories. A near-perfect sphere from above, from the ground the temple resembled an egg set on its side, with its domed roof sloping all the way down, like a web tacked to the forest floor just before it took flight. A pavilion rather than a cathedral, a seamless blend of natural and man made, where its worshippers became part of nature without disrupting it.
The building had no doors or windows, only two entrances, formed by the gaps between the roof and floor, directly opposite each other. Matias strode up the ramp, passed under the ten-meter-tall arch, and entered the temple.
The oval building lay empty, its stone floor strewn with dry leaves. To the left, at the widest, deepest portion of the pavilion, a simple altar, little more than a round basin in the floor, waited, abandoned. Opposite it, at the narrow end, a small spring trickled out of the wall into a series of stone bowls, cascading from the top all the way to the bottom, before vanishing into the floor. The blue roof, opaque from the outside, turned translucent from within, and the silver threads weaving over it glowed slightly, sparking here and there with an intense flash of white.