Back at PAVE headquarters, Lilah felt like she was trapped in a foreign film and everyone could see the subtitles but her, as though the others had 5D goggles and could view some magic world that was obscured from her view. Their eyes locked onto wonders in a distance beyond the ordinary walls she was stuck with. For Lilah, the floating circular disk Onaiah described was a winding stairwell. The enormous hologram floating above a cavernous enclosure was just a projection.
Lilah briefly worried the body might have vanished, or that she had imagined it. But there he was, laying shrivelled and bent. Something about his pose made her think of the Egyptian mummies curled up for centuries in their tombs.
“You came here to kill me.” The hologram was at her side, smiling up at his projected pla
