CHERRY HAD TO WAKE up a pilot to fly her to Suddene. She waited for him impatiently on the roof of a government building. It was past one in the morning, and a cold wind had risen. Cherry waited in the dark silence, hugging herself with her one arm to try to keep warm. She hadn’t even thought to put on a jacket before leaving home.
While she waited for the pilot to arrive, she pulled out her interface from her bag to watch the recording of the underground city again. The clarity of the vid wasn’t great. Low light conditions and the basic interface recorder the supervisor had used meant that the images were often fuzzy and too dark to make out clearly. But even on her very first viewing, Cherry had been forced to agree with Fletcher’s assessment: the excavator had broken through into a vas
