Reach for Infinity

KHELDYU



Karl Schroeder


THE TRUCK CRESTED a hill and Gennady got his first good look at the Khantayskoe test site. He ground to a stop and sat there for a long time.

Spreading before him were thirty square kilometers of unpopulated Siberian forest. Vast pine-carpeted slopes ran up and up into impossible distance to either side, yet laid over the forest of the south-facing rise was a gleaming circle six kilometers in diameter. It was slightly crinkly, like a giant cellophane disk or parachute that had been dropped here by a passing giant. Its edges had been perfectly sharp in the photos Gennady had seen, but they were ragged in real life. That circle was just a vast roof of plastic sheeting, after all, great sections of which had fallen in the past several winters. Enough remained to turn the slope into a glittering bulls-eye of reflecting sheets and fluttering, tattered banners of plastic.

Underneath that ceiling, the dark low forest was a subdued shade of gray. That gray was why Gennady was now putting on a surgical mask.

Standing up out of the top quarter of the circle was a round, flat-topped tower, like a smoke-stack for some invisible morlock factory. The thing was over a kilometer tall, and wisps of cloud wreathed its top.

He put the truck into gear and bumped his way toward the tumbled edges of the greenhouse. There was no trick to roofing over a whole forest, at least around here; few of the gnarled pines were more than thirty feet tall. Little grew between them, the long sight-lines making the northern arboreal forest a kind of wall-less maze. Here, the trees made a perfect filter, slowing the air that came in around the open edges of the greenhouse and letting it warm slowly as it converged on that distant tower.

“There’s just one tiny problem,” Achille Marceau had told Gennady when they’d talked about the job, “which is why we need you. The airflow stopped when we shut down the wind turbines at the base of the solar updraft tower. It got hot and dry under the greenhouse, and with the drought – well, you know.”

The tenuous road wove between tree trunks and under the torn translucent roof whose surface wavered like an inverted lake. For the first hundred meters or so everything was okay. The trees were still alive. But then he began passing more and more orange and brown ones, and the track became obscured by deepening drifts of pine needles.

Then these began to disappear under a fog of greyish-white fungus.

He’d been prepared for this sight, but Gennady still stopped the truck to do some swearing. The trees were draped in what looked like the fake cobwebs kids hung over everything for American Halloween. Great swathes of the stuff cocooned whole trunks and stretched between them like long, sickening flags. He glanced back and saw that an ominous white cloud was beginning to curl around the truck – billions of spores kicked up by his wheels.


He gunned the engine to get ahead of the spore clouds, and that was when he finally noticed the other tracks.

Two parallel ruts ran through the white snow-like stuff, outlining the road ahead quite clearly. They looked fresh, and would have been made by a vehicle about the same size as his.

Marceau had insisted that Gennady would be the first person to visit the solar updraft plant in five years.

The slope was just steep enough that the road couldn’t run straight up the hillside, but zig-zagged; so it took Gennady a good twenty minutes to make it to the tower. He was sweating and uncomfortable by the time he finally pulled the rig into the gravel parking area under the solar uplift tower. The other vehicle wasn’t here, and its tracks had disappeared on the moldfree gravel. Maybe it had gone around the long curve of the tower.

He drove that way himself. He was supposed to be inspecting the tower’s base for cracks, but his eyes kept straying, looking for a sign that somebody else was here. If they were, they were well hidden.

When he got back to the main lot, he rummaged in the glove compartment and came up with a flare gun. Wouldn’t do any good as a weapon, but from a distance it might fool somebody. He slipped it into the pocket of his nylon jacket and climbed out to retrieve a portable generator from the bed of the truck.

Achille Marceau wanted to replace 4% of the world’s coalpowered generating plants with solar updraft towers. With no fuel requirements at all, these towers would produce electricity while simultaneously removing CO2 from the air. All together they’d suck a gigaton of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. Ignoring the electricity sales, at today’s prices the carbon sales alone would be worth $40 billion a year. That was $24 million per year from this tower alone.

Marceau had built this tower to prove the plan, by producing electricity for Northern China while simultaneously pulling down carbon and sequestering it underground. It was a brilliant plan, but he’d found himself underbid in the cutthroat postcarbon-bubble economy, and he couldn’t make ends meet on the electricity sales alone. He’d had to shut down.

Now he was back – literally, a few kilometers back, waiting for his hazardous materials lackey to open the tower and give the rest of the trucks the all-clear signal.

The plastic ceiling got higher the closer you got to the tower, and now it was a good sixty meters overhead. Under it, vast round windows broke the curve of the wall; they were closed by what looked like steel Venetian blinds. Some portable trailers huddled between two of the giant circles, but these were for management. Gennady trudged past them without a glance and climbed a set of metal steps to a steel door labeled Небезпеки – ‘HAZARD,’ but written in Ukrainian, not Russian. Marceau’s key let him in, and the door didn’t even squeak, which was encouraging.

Before he stepped through, Gennady paused and looked back at the shrouded forest. It was eerily quiet, with no breeze to make the dead trees speak.

Well, he would change that.

The door opened into a kind of airlock; he could hear wind whistling around the edges of the inner portal. He closed the outer one and opened the inner, and was greeted by gray light and a sense of vast emptiness. Gennady stepped into the hollow core of the tower.

The ground was just bare red stone covered with construction litter. A few heavy lifters and cranes dotted the stadium-sized circle. Here there was sound – a discordant whistling from overhead. Faint light filtered down.

He spent a long hour inspecting the tower’s foundations from the inside, then carried the little generator to the bottom of another flight of metal steps. These ones zigzagged up the concrete wall. About thirty meters up, a ring of metal beams held a wide gallery that encircled the tower, and more portable trailers had been placed on that. The stairs went on past them into a zone of shifting silvery light. The stuff up there would need attending to, but not just yet.

Hauling the generator up to the first level took him ten minutes; halfway up he took off the surgical mask, and he was panting when he finally reached the top. He caught his breath and then shouted, “Hello?” Nobody answered; if there was another visitor here, they were either hiding or very far away across – or up – the tower.

The windows of the dust-covered control trailer were unbroken. The door was locked. He used the next key on that but didn’t go in. Instead, he set up the portable generator and connected it to the mains. But now he was in his element, and was humming as he pulled the generator’s cord.

While it rattled and roared he took another cautious look around then went left along the gallery. The portable trailer sat next to one of the huge round apertures that perforated the base of the tower. Seated into this circle was the biggest wind turbine he’d ever seen. The gallery was right at the level of its axle and generator, so he was able to inspect it without having to climb anything. When Marceau’s men mothballed it five years ago, they’d wrapped everything vulnerable in plastic and taped it up. Consequently, the turbine’s systems were in surprisingly good shape. Once he’d pitched the plastic sheeting over the gallery rail he only had to punch the red button at the back of the trailer, and somewhere below, an electric motor strained to use all the power from his little generator. Lines of daylight began to separate the imposing Venetian blinds. With them came a quickening breeze.

“Put your hands up!”

Gennady reflexively put his hands in the air; but then he had to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Sorry. Is just that, last time I put my hands up like this was for a woman also. Kazakhstan, last summer.”

There was a pause. Then: “Gennady?”

He looked over his shoulder and recognized the face behind the pistol. “Nadine, does your brother know you’re here?”

Nadine Marceau tilted her head to one side and shifted her stance to a hipshot, exasperated pose as she lowered the pistol. “What the hell, Gennady. I could ask you the same question.”

With vast dignity he lowered his hands and turned around. “I,” he said, “am working. You, on the other hand, are trespassing.”

She gaped at him. “You’re working? For that bastard?”

So, then it wasn’t just a rumor that Achille and Nadine Marceau hated each other. Gennady shrugged; it wasn’t his business. “Cushy jobs for the IAEA are hard to come by, Nadine, you know that. I’m a free-lancer, I have to get by.”

“Yeah, but–” She was looking down, fumbling with her holster, as widening light unveiled behind her the industrial underworld of the solar uplift tower. Warm outside air was pouring in through the opening shutters now, and, slowly, the giant vanes of the windmill fixed in its round window began to turn.

Nadine cursed. “You’ve started it! Gennady, I thought you had more integrity! I never thought you’d end up being part of the problem.”

“Part of the problem? God, Nadine, is just a windmill.”

“No, it’s not–” He’d turned to admire the turning blades, but looking back saw that she had frozen in a listening posture. “Shit!”

“Don’t tell him I’m here!” she shouted as she turned and started running along the gallery. “Not a word, Gennady. You hear?”


NADINE MARCEAU, u.n. arms inspector and disowned child of one of the wealthiest families in Europe, disappeared into the shadows. Gennady could hear the approaching trucks himself now; still, he spread his hands and shouted, “Don’t you even want a cup of coffee?”


The metal Venetian blinds clicked into their fully open configuration, and now enough outside light was coming in to reveal the cyclopean vastness of the tower’s interior. Gennady looked up at the little circle of sky a kilometer-and-a-half overhead, and shook his head ruefully. “Is not even radioactive.”

Why was Nadine here? Some vendetta with her brother, no doubt, though Gennady preferred to think it was work-related. The last time he’d seen her was in Azerbaijan, two years ago; that time, they’d been working together to find some stolen nukes. A nightmare job, but totally in line with both their professional backgrounds. This place, though, it was just an elaborate windmill. It couldn’t explode or melt down or spill oil all over the sensitive arboreal landscape. No, this had to be a family thing.

There were little windows in the reinforced concrete wall. Through one of these he could see three big trucks, mirror to his own, approaching the tower. Nadine’s brother Achille had gotten impatient, apparently. He must have seen the blinds opening, and the first of the twenty wind turbines that ringed the tower’s base starting to move. A legendary micro-manager, he just couldn’t stay away.

By the time the boss clambered out of the second truck, unsteady in his bright-red hazmat suit, Gennady had opened the office trailer, started a hepafilter whirring, and booted up the tower’s control system. He leaned in the trailer’s doorway and watched as first two bodyguards, then Marceau himself, then his three engineers, reached the top of the stairs.

“Come inside,” Gennady said. “You can take that off.”

The hazmat suit waved its arms and made a garbled sound that Gennady eventually translated as, “You’re not wearing your mask.”

“Ah, no. Too hard to work in. But that’s why you hired me, Mr. Marceau. To take your chances.”

“Call me Achille! Everybody else does.” The hazmat suit made a lunging motion; Gennady realized that Nadine’s brother was trying to clap him on the shoulder. He pretended it had worked, smiled, then backed into the trailer.

It took ten minutes for them to coax Marceau out of his shell, and while they did Gennady debated with himself whether to tell Achille that his sister was here too. The moments dragged on, and eventually Gennady realized that the engineers were happily chattering on about the status of the tower’s various systems, and the bodyguards were visibly bored, and he hadn’t said anything. It was going to look awkward if he brought it up now… so he put it off some more.

Finally, the young billionaire removed the hazmat’s headpiece, revealing a lean, high-cheekboned face currently plastered with sweat. “Thanks, Gennady,” he gasped. “It was brave of you to come in here alone.”

“Yeah, I risked an epic allergy attack,” said Gennady with a shrug. “Nothing after camping in Chernobyl.”

Achille grinned. “Forget the mold, we just weren’t sure whether opening the door would make the whole tower keel over. I’m glad it’s structurally sound.”

“Down here, maybe,” Gennady pointed out. “There’s a lot up there that could still fall on us.” He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “You were with us yesterday.” They’d done a visual inspection from the helicopters on their way to the plateau. But Gennady wasn’t about to trust that.

Achille turned to his engineers. “The wind’s not cooperating.

Now they’re saying it’ll shift the right way by 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. How long is it going to take to establish a full updraft?”

“There’s inertia in the air inside the tower,” said one. “Four hours, granted the thermal difference...?”

“I don’t think we’ll be ready tomorrow,” Gennady pointed out. He was puzzled by Achille’s impatience. “We haven’t had time to inspect all the turbines, much less the scrubbers on Level Two.”

The engineers should be backing him up on this one, but they stayed silent. Achille waved a hand impatiently. “We’ll leave the turbines parked for now. As to the scrubbers...”

“There might be loose pieces and material that could get damaged when the air currents pick up.”

“Dah! You’re right, of course.” Achille rubbed his chin for a second, staring into space. “We’d better test the doors now... might as well do it in pairs. Gennady, you’ve got an hour of good light. If you’re so worried about them, go check out the scrubbers.”

Gennady stared at him. “What’s the hurry?”

“Time is money. You’re not afraid of the updraft while we’re testing the doors, are you? It’s not like a hurricane or anything.

We walk all the time up there when the unit’s running full bore.” Achille relented. “Oh, take somebody with you if you’re worried. Octav, you go.”

Octav was one of Achille’s bodyguards. He was a blocky Lithuanian who favored chewing tobacco and expensive suits.

The look he shot Gennady said, this is all your fault. Gennady glanced askance at Octav, then said to Achille, “Listen, is there some reason why somebody would think that starting this thing up would be wrong?”

The boss stared at him. “Wrong?”

“I don’t mean this company you’re competing with – GreenCore. I mean, you know, the general public.”

“Don’t bug the boss,” said Octav.

Achille waved a hand at him. “It’s okay. A few crazy adaptationists think reversing climate change will cause as many extinctions as the temperature rise did in the first place. If you ask me, they’re just worried about losing their funding. But really, Malianov – this tower sucks CO2 right out of the air. It doesn’t matter where that CO2 came from, which means we’re equally good at offsetting emissions from the airline industry as we are from, say, coal. We’re good for everybody.”

Gennady nodded, puzzled, and quickly followed Octav out of the trailer. He didn’t want the bodyguard wandering off on his own – or maybe spotting something in the distance that he shouldn’t see.

Octav was staring – standing in the middle of the gallery, mouth open. “Christ,” he said. “It’s like a f*cking cathedral.”

With light breaking in from the opening louvers, the full scale of the place was becoming clear, and even jaded Gennady was impressed. The tower was a kilometer and a half tall, and over a hundred meters across, its base ringed with round wind turbine windows. “But I was expecting some kinda machinery in here.

Is that gonna be installed later?”

Gennady shook his head, pointing at the round windows.

“That’s all there is to it. When those windows are open, warm air from the greenhouse comes in and rises. The wind turbines turn, and make electricity.”

Gennady began the long climb up the steps to the next gallery.

His gaze kept roving across the tower’s interior; he was looking for Nadine. Was Octav going to spot her? He didn’t want that. Even though he knew Nadine was level-headed in tight situations, Octav was another matter. And then there was the whole question of why she was out here to begin with, seemingly on her own, and carrying a gun.

Octav followed on his heels. “Well sure, I get the whole ‘heat rises’ thing, but why’d he build it here? In the middle of f*cking Siberia? If it’s solar-powered, wouldn’t you want to put it at the equator?”


“They built it on a south-facing slope, so it’s 85% as efficient as it would be at the equator. And the thermal inertia of the soil means the updraft will operate 24 hours a day.”

“But in winter–”

“Even in a Siberian winter, because it’s not about the absolute temperature, it’s about the difference between the temperatures inside and outside.”

Octav pointed up. “Those pull the CO2 out of the air, right?”

“If this were a cigarette of the gods, that would be the filter, yes.” Just above, thousands of gray plastic sheets were stretched across the shaft of the tower. They were stacked just centimeters apart so that the air flowed freely between them.

“It’s called polyaziridine. When the gods suck on the cigarette, this stuff traps the CO2.”

They’d come to one of the little windows. Gennady pried it open and dry summer air poured in. They were above the greenhouse roof, and from here you could see the whole sweep of the valley where Achille had built his experiment. “Look at that.”

Above the giant tower, the forested slope kept on rising, and rising, becoming bare tanned rock and then vertical cliff. “Pretty mountains,” admitted Octav.

“Except they’re not mountains.” Yes, the slopes rose like mountainsides, culminating in those daunting cliffs. The trouble was, at the very top the usual jagged, irregular skyline of rocky peaks was missing. Instead, the cliff-tops ended in a perfectly flat, perfectly horizontal line – a knife-cut across the sky – signaling that there was no crest and fall down a north-facing slope up there. Miles up, under a regime of harsh UV light and whipping high-altitude winds, clouds scudded low and fast along a nearly endless plain of red rock. Looking down from up there, the outflung arms of the Putorana Plateau absolutely dwarfed Achille’s little tower.

“I walked on it yesterday when we flew up to prime the wells,” said Gennady. Octav hadn’t been along on that flight; he hadn’t seen what lay beyond that ruler-straight crest. “That plateau covers an area the size of Western Europe, and it’s so high nothing can grow up there. This whole valley is just an erosion ditch in it.”

Octav nodded, reluctantly intrigued. “Kinda strange place to build a power plant.”

“Achille built here because the plateau’s made of basalt. When you pump hot carbonated water into basalt it makes limestone, which permanently sequesters the carbon. All Achille has to do is keep fracking up top there and he’s got a continent-sized sponge to soak up all the excess CO2 on the planet. You could build a thousand towers like this all around the Putorana. It’s perfect for–” But Octav had clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Shht,” whispered the bodyguard. “Heard something.” Before Gennady could react, Octav was creeping up the steps with his gun drawn. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Gennady hissed at the Lithuanian. “Put that thing away!” Octav waved at him to stay where he was. “Could be bears,” he called down in a hoarse – and not at all quiet – stage whisper.

The word bears seemed to hang in the air for a second, like an echo that couldn’t find a wall to bounce off.

Gennady started up after him, deliberately making as much noise as he could on the metal steps. “Bears are not arboreal, much less likely will they be foraging up in the scrubbers–”

Octav reached the top of the steps and disappeared. Here, the hanging sheets of plastic made a bizarre drapery that completely filled the tower. Except for this little catwalk, the entire space was given over to them. It was kind of like being backstage in a large theater, except the curtains were white. Octav was hunched over, gun drawn, stepping slowly forward around the slow curve of the catwalk. This would have been a comical sight except that, about eight meters ahead of him, the curtains were swaying. “Octav, don’t–” The bodyguard lunged into the gloom. Gennady heard a scuffle and ran forward himself. Then, terribly, two gunshots like slaps echoed out and up and down. “No, what have you–!” Gennady staggered to a stop and had to grab the railing for support; it creaked and gave a bit, and he suddenly realized how high up they were. Octav knelt just ahead, panting. He was reaching slowly out to prod a crumpled gray and brown shape.

“Jssht!” said the walkie-talkie on Octav’s belt. More garbled vocal sounds spilled out of it, until Octav suddenly seemed to realize it was there, and holstered his pistol with one hand while taking it out with the other.

“Octav,” he said. The walkie-talkie spat incoherent staticky noise into his ear. He nodded.

“Everything’s okay,” he said. “Just shot a goose is all. I guess we have dinner.”

Then he turned to glare at Gennady. “You should have stayed where I told you!”

Gennady ignored him. The white curtains swung, all of them now starting to rustle as if murmuring and pointing at Octav’s minor crime scene. More of the louvered doors had opened far below, and the updraft was starting. Shadow and sound began to paint the tower’s hollow spaces.

Nadine would be hard to see now, and impossible to hear.

Hopefully, she’d noticed Octav’s shots; even now, if she had a grain of sense, she’d be on her way back to her truck. Gennady brushed past Octav. “If you’re done murdering the locals, I need to work.” The two did not speak again, as Gennady tugged at the plastic and inspected the bolts mounting the scrubbers to the tower wall.


A SIBERIAN SUMMER day lasts forever; but there came a point when the sun no longer lit the interior top of the tower. The last hundred meters up there were painted titanium white, and reflected a lot of light down. Now, though, with the sky a dove gray shading to nameless pink, and the sun’s rays horizontal, Achille’s lads had to light the sodium lamps and admit it was evening.

The lamps were the same kind you saw in parking lots all over the world. For Gennady, they completely stole the sense of mystery from the tower’s interior, making it as grim an industrial space as any he’d seen. For a while he stood outside the control trailer with Octav and a couple of the engineers, trying to get used to the evil greenish yellow cast that everything had. Then he said, “I’m going to sleep outside.”

One of the engineers laughed. “After your run-in with the climbing bears? And you know, there really are wolves in this forest.”

“No, no, I will be in one of the admin trailers.” Nobody had even opened those yet; and besides, he needed to find a spot where late night comings and goings wouldn’t be noticed by these men.

“First, you must try the goose!” While the others inspected and tested, Octav had cooked it over a barrel-fire. He’d only made a few modest comments about the bird, but Gennady knew he was ridiculously proud of his kill, because he’d placed the barrel smack in the center of the hundred-meter-wide floor of the tower. He’d even dragged over a couple of railroad ties and set them up like logs around his campfire.

Achille was down there now, peering at his air-quality equipment, obviously debating whether he could lose his surgical mask. He waved up at them. “Come! Let’s eat!”

Gennady followed the others reluctantly. He knew where this was headed: to the inevitable male bonding ritual. It came as no surprise at all, when, as they tore into the simultaneously charred and raw goose, Achille waved at Gennady, and said, “Now this man! He’s a real celebrity! Octav, did you know what kind of adventurer you saved from this fierce beast?” He waved his drumstick in the air. Octav looked puzzled.


“Gennady, here. Gennady fought the famous Dragon of Pripyat!” Of course the engineers knew the story, and smiled politely; but neither Octav nor Bogdan, the other bodyguard, knew it. “Tell us, Gennady!” Achille’s grin was challenging. “About the reactor, and the devil guarding it.”

“We know all about that,” protested an engineer. “I want to know about the Kashmiri incident. The one with the nuclear jet. Is it true you flew it into a mine?”

“Well, yes,” Gennady admitted, “not myself of course. It was just a drone.” Of course the attention was flattering, but it also made him uncomfortable, and over the years he’d learned that the discomfort outweighed the flattery. He told them the story, but as soon as he could he found a way to turn to Achille and say, “But these are just isolated incidents. Your whole career has been, well, something of an adventure itself, no?”

That burst of eloquence had about exhausted his skills of social manipulation; luckily, Achille was eager to talk about himself. He and Nadine had inherited wealth, and Gennady had sensed yesterday that this weighed on him. He wanted to be a self-made man, but he wasn’t; so, he was using his inheritance recklessly, to see if he could achieve something great. He also had an impulsive urge to justify himself.

He told them how, when he’d seen the sheer scale of the cap and trade and carbon tax programs that were springing up across the globe, he’d decided to put all his chips into carbon air capture, “Because,” he explained, “it was a completely discredited approach.”

“Wait,” said Octav, his brow crinkling. “You went into... that... because it had no credibility?” Achille nodded vigorously.

“Decades of research, patents, and designs were just lying around waiting to be snapped up. I was already building this place, but the carbon bubble was bursting as governments started pulling their fossil fuel subsidies. Here, the local price of petrol had gone through the roof as the Arctic oilfields went from profitable to red. But, you see, I had a plan.”

The plan was to offer to offset CO2 emissions of industries anywhere on the planet, from right here. Since Achille’s giant machines harvested greenhouse gases from the ambient atmosphere, it didn’t matter where they were – which meant he could sell offsets to airlines, mines in South America, or container ships burning bunker oil with equal ease.

“But then, Kafatos stole my market.”

The Greek industrialist’s company, Greencore, had bought up vast tracts of Siberian forest and had begun rolling out a cheaper biological alternative to Achille’s towers.

“They do what? Some kind of fast-growing tree?” asked Gennady. He knew about the rivalry between Achille and Kafatos. It wasn’t just business; it was personal.

Achille nodded. “Genetically modified lodgepole pines. Super-fast growing, resistant to the pine beetle. They want to turn the forest itself into a carbon sponge. It’s as bad an idea as tampering with Mother Nature was – as oil was – in the first place,” he said, “and I intend to prove it.”

The conversation wound down a bit after this motivational speech, but then one of the engineers looked around at the trembling shadows of the amphitheater in which they sat, and said, “Pretty spooky, eh?”

“Siberia is all spooky,” Bogdan pointed out. “Never mind just here.”

And that set them all off on ghost stories and legends of the deep forests. The locals used to believe Siberia was a middleworld, half-way up a vast tree, with underworlds below and heavens above. Shamans rode their drums between the worlds, fighting the impossible strength of the gods with dogged courage and guile. They triumphed now and then, but in the end the deep forest swallowed all human achievement like it would swallow a shout. What was human got lost in the green maze; what came out was changed and new.

Bogdan knew a story about the ‘valley of death’ and the strange round kheldyu – iron houses – that could be found halfburied in the permafrost here and there. There was a valley no one ever returned from; kheldyu had been glimpsed there by scouts on the surrounding heights.

The engineers had their own tales, about lost Soviet-era expeditions. There were downed bombers loaded with nukes on hair-trigger, which might go off at any moment. There were Chinese tunnel complexes, and lakes so radioactive that to stand on their shores for a half an hour meant dying within the week. (Well, that last story, at least, was perfectly true.) “Gennady, what about you?” All eyes turned to him. Gennady had relaxed a bit and was willing to talk; but he didn’t know any recent myths or legends. “All I can tell you,” Gennady said, “is that it’ll be poetic justice if we save the world by burying all our carbon here. Because what’s in this place nearly killed the whole world through global warming once already.”

The engineers hadn’t heard about the plateau’s past. “This place – this thing,” said Gennady in his best ghost-story voice, “killed ninety percent of all life on Earth when it erupted. This supervolcano, called the Siberian Traps, caused the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. Think about it: the place was here before the dinosaurs and it’s still here, still taller than mountain ranges and as wide as Europe.” There was nothing like it on Earth – older than the present continents, the Putorana was an ineradicable scar from the greatest dying the world had ever seen.

So then they had to hear the story of the Permian extinction. Gennady did his best to convey the idea of an entire world dying, and of geologic forces so gargantuan and unstoppable that the first geologists to find this spot literally couldn’t imagine the scale of the apocalypse it represented. He was rewarded by some appreciative nods, particularly for his image of a slumbering monster that could indifferently destroy all life on the planet by just rolling over. The whole thing was too abstract for Octav and Bogdan, though, who were yawning.

“Right.” Achille slapped his knees. “Tomorrow’s another busy day. Let’s turn in everybody, and get a start at sun-up.”

“Uh, boss,” said an engineer, “sunrise is at 3:00 a.m.”

“Make it five, then.” Achille headed for the metal steps.

Gennady repeated his intent to sleep in the admin trailer; to his relief, no one volunteered to do the same. When he stepped through the second door of the tower’s airlock, it was to find that although it was nearly midnight, the sun was still setting. He remembered seeing this effect before: the sun might dip below the horizon, but the lurid peach-and-rose colored glow it painted on the sky wasn’t going to go away. That smear of dusk would just slide up and across the northern horizon, over the next few hours, and then the sun would pop back up once it reached the east.

That was helpful. The administration trailer needed a good airing-out, so he opened all its windows and sat on the front step for a while, waiting to see if anybody came out of the tower. The sunset inched northward. He checked his watch. Finally, with a sigh, he set off walking around the western curve of the structure. A flashlight was unnecessary, but he did bring the flare gun. Because, well, there might be bears.

Nadine had done a pretty good job of hiding her truck, among gnarled cedars and cobwebs of fungi on the north side of the tower. Either she’d been waiting for him, or she had some kind of proximity alarm, because he was still ten meters away when he heard the door slam. He stopped and waited. After a couple of minutes she stood up out of the bushes, a black cut-out on the red sky. “It’s just you,” she said unnecessarily.


Gennady shrugged. “Do I ever bring friends?”

“Good point.” The silhouette made a motion he interpreted as the holstering of a pistol. He strolled over while she untangled herself from the bushes.

“Come back to the trailer,” he said. “I have chairs.”

“I’m sleeping here.”

“That’s fine.”

“... Okay.” They crunched back over the gravel. Halfway there, Nadine said, “Seriously, Gennady. You and Achille?”

“What is the problem?” He spread his hands, distorting the long shadow that leaned ahead of him. “He is restarting his carbon air capture project. That’s a good thing, no?” She stopped walking. “That’s what you think he’s doing?”

What did that mean? “Let’s see. It’s what he says he’s doing. It’s what the press releases say. It’s what everybody else thinks he’s doing... What else could he be up to?”

“Everybody asks that question.” She kicked at the gravel angrily. “But nobody sees what he’s doing! You know–” she laughed bitterly, “When I told my team at the IAEA what he was up to, they just laughed at me. And you know what? I thought about calling you. I figured, Gennady knows how these things go. He’d understand. But you don’t get it either, do you?”

“You know I am not smart man. I need thing explained to me.”

She was silent until they reached the admin trailer. Once inside she said, “Close those,” with a nod at the windows. “I don’t want any of that shit in here with us.”

She must mean the mold. As Gennady went around shutting things up, Nadine sat down at the tiny table. After a longing look at the mothballed coffee machine, she steepled her hands and said, “I suppose you saw the pictures.”

“That the paparazzi took of you two at the Paris café? There were a few, if I recall.”

She grimaced. “I particularly like the one that shows Kafatos punching Achille in the face.”

Gennady nodded pensively. It had been two years since Achille came across his sister having dinner with Kafatos, his biggest business rival. The punch was famous, and the whole incident had burned through the internet in a day or two, to be instantly forgotten in the wake of the next scandal.

“Achille and I haven’t spoken since. He’s even taken me out of his will – you know he was the sole heir, right?”

Gennady nodded. “I figured that was why you went to work at the IAEA.”

“No, I did that out of idealism, but... anyway it doesn’t matter. I knew all about Achille’s little rivalry with the Greek shithead, but something about it didn’t add up. Achille was lying to me, so I went to Kafatos to see if he knew why. He didn’t, so the whole café incident was a complete waste. But I eventually did get the story from one of Achille’s engineers.”

“Let me guess. It’s something to do with the tower?”

She shrugged. “It never crossed my mind. When Achille came up with the plan for this place, I guess it was eight years ago, it seemed to make sense. He knew about the Permian, and he talked about how he was going to ‘redeem’ the site of the greatest extinction in history by using it to not just stop but completely reverse global warming. The whole blowup with Kafatos happened because Greencore bought up about a million square kilometers of forest just east of Achille’s site. Kafatos has been genetically engineering pines to soak up the carbon, but you know that.” She took a deep breath. “You also know there’s no economic reason to re-open the tower.”

Gennady blinked at her. “They told me there was, that was why we were here. Told me the market had turned...”

She sent him a look of complete incredulity; then that look changed, and suddenly Nadine stood up. Gennady opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, just as one of the windows rattled loosely in its mount. Nadine was staring out the window, a look of horror on her face.

A deep vibration made the plywood floor buzz. The glass rattled again.

“He’s opening the windows!” Nadine ran for the door. Gennady peered outside.

“Surely not all of them...” But all the black circles he could see from here were changing, letting out a trickle of sodiumlamp light.

By the time he got outside she was gone – off and running around the tower in the direction of her truck. Gennady shifted from foot to foot, trying to decide whether to follow.

Her story hadn’t made sense, but still, he paused for a moment to gaze up at the tower. In the deep sunset light of the midsummer night, it looked like a rifle barrel aimed at the sky.

He slammed through the airlocks and went up the stairs. All around the tower’s base, the round windows were humming open.

Gennady fixed an empty smile on his face, and deliberately slowed himself down as he opened the door to the control trailer. He was thinking of radioactive lakes, of the Becquerel Reindeer, an entire radioactive herd he’d seen once, slaughtered and lying in the back of a transport truck; of disasters he’d cleaned up after, messes he’d hidden from the media – and the kinds of people who had made those messes.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said brightly as he stepped inside.

“Close that!” Achille was pacing in the narrow space. “You’ll let in the spores!”

“Ah, sorry.” He sidled around the bodyguards, behind the engineers who were staring at their tablets and laptops, and found a perch near an empty water cooler. From here he could see the laptop screens, though not well.

“What’s up?” he said again.

One of the engineers started to say something, but Achille interrupted him. “Just a test. You should go back to bed.”

“I see.” He stepped close to the table and looked over the engineer’s shoulder. One of the laptop screens showed a systems diagram of the tower. The other was open to a satellite weather map. “Weather’s changing,” he muttered, just loud enough for the engineer to hear. The man nodded.

“Fine,” Gennady said more loudly. “I’ll be in my trailer.” Nobody moved to stop him as he left, but outside he paused, arms wrapped around his torso, breath cold and frosting the air. Already he could feel the breeze from below.

Back in Azerbaijan, Nadine had been one of the steadiest operatives during the Alexander’s Road incident; they had talked one evening about what Gennady had come to call ‘industrial logic.’ About what happened when the natural world became an abstraction, and the only reality was the system you were building. Gennady had fallen for that kind of thinking early in his career; had spent the rest of his life mopping up after other people who’d never gotten out from under it. He couldn’t remember the details of the conversation now, but he did remember her getting a distant expression on her face at one point, and muttering something about Achille.

But it wasn’t just about her brother; all of this had something to do with Kafatos, too. He shook his head, and turned to the stairs.

A flash lit the inside of the tower and seconds later a sharp bang! echoed weirdly off the curving walls. The grinding noise of the window mechanisms stopped.

A transformer had blown. It had happened on the far side of the tower; he started in that direction but had only taken a couple of steps when the trailer door flew open and the engineers spilled out, all talking at once. “Malianov!” one shouted. “Did you see it?”


He shook his head. “Heard it, but not sure where it came from. Echoes...” Let them stumble around in the dark for a while. That would give Nadine a chance to get away. Then he could find her again and talk her out of doing anything further.

Octav and Bogdan had come out, too, and Bogdan raced off after the engineers. Gennady shrugged at Octav and said, “I am still going back to bed.” He’d gone down the stairs, reached the outer door and actually put his hand on the latch before curiosity overcame his better judgment, and he turned back.

He came up behind the engineers as they were shining their flashlights at the smoking ruin that used to be a transformer. “Something caused it to arc,” one said. Bogdan was kneeling a few meters away. He stood up and dangled a mutilated padlock in the beam of his flashlight. “Somebody’s got bolt-cutters.” All eyes turned to Gennady.

He backed away. “Now, wait a minute. I was with you.”

“You could have set something to blow and then come back to the trailer,” said one of the engineers. “It’s what I would have done.”

Gennady said nothing; if they thought he’d done it they wouldn’t be looking for Nadine. “Grab him!” shouted one of the engineers. Gennady just put out his hands and shook his head as Bogdan took hold of his wrists.

“It’s not what I would have done,” Gennady said. “Because this would be the result. I am not so stupid.”

“Oh, and I am?” Bogdan glared at him. At that moment one of the engineers put his walkie-talkie to his ear and made a shushing motion. “We found the – what? Sir, I can’t hear what–”

The distorted tones of the voice on the walkie-talkie had been those of Achille, but suddenly they changed. Nadine said, “I have your boss. I’ll kill him unless you go to the center of the floor and light the barrel-fire so I can see you.”

The engineers gaped at one another. Bogdan let go of Gennady and grabbed at the walkie-talkie. “Who is this?”

“Someone who knows what you’re up to. Now move!”

Bogdan eyed Gennady, who shrugged. “Nothing to do with me.”

There was a quick, heated discussion. The engineers were afraid of being shot once they were out in the open, but Gennady pointed out that there was actually more light around the wall, because that’s where the sodium lamps were. “She doesn’t want to see us clearly, she just wants us where it’ll be obvious which way we’re going if we run,” he said.

Reluctantly, they began edging toward the shadowed center of the tower. “How can you be so sure?” somebody whined. Gennady shrugged again.

“If she’d wanted to kill her brother, she would have by now,” he pointed out.

“Her what?”

And at that moment, the gunfire started.

It was all upstairs, but the engineers scattered, leaving Gennady and Bogdan standing in half-shadow. Had Octav stayed up top? Gennady couldn’t remember. He and Bogdan scanned the gallery, but the glare from the sodium lamps hid the trailer. After a few seconds, Gennady heard the metallic bounce of feet running on the mesh surface overhead. It sounded like two sets, off to the right.

“There!” Gennady pointed to the left and began running. Bogdan ran too, and quickly outpaced him; at that point Gennady peeled off and headed back. There was another set of stairs nearby, and though the engineers were there, they were huddling under its lower steps. He didn’t think they’d stop him, nor did they as he ran past them and up.

Bogdan yelled something inarticulate from the other side of the floor. Gennady kept going.

“Nadine? Where are you?” She’d been running in a clockwise direction around the tower, so he went that way too, making sure now that he was making plenty of noise. He didn’t want to surprise her. “Nadine, it’s me!”

Multiple sets of feet rang on the gallery behind him. Gennady took the chance that she’d kept going up, and mounted the next set of steps when he came to them. “Nadine!” She’d be among the scrubbers now.

He reached the top and hesitated. Why would she come up here? It was the cliché thing to do: in movies, the villains always went up. Gennady tried to push past his confusion and worry to picture the layout of the tower. He remembered the two inspection elevators just as a rattling hum started up ahead.

By the time he reached the yellow wire cage, the car was on its way up. Next stop, as far as he knew, was the top of the tower. Nadine could hold it there, and maybe that was her plan. There wouldn’t be just the one elevator, though, not in a structure this big. Gennady turned and ran away from the sound of the moving elevator.

He could hear somebody crashing up the steps from the lower levels. “Malianov!” shouted Octav.

He was a good quarter of the way around the curve from Gennady, so Gennady paused and leaned on the rail to shout, “I’m here!”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m right on her heels!”

“Stop! Come down! Leave it to us.”

“Okay! I’ll be right there.” He ran on, and reached the other elevator before Octav had reached the last flight of steps. Gennady wrenched the rusty outer cage door open, but struggled with the inner one. He got in and slammed it just as Octav thundered up. Gennady hit the UP button while Octav roared in fury; but three meters up, he hit STOP.

“Octav. Don’t shoot at me, please. I’ll send the cage back down when I get to the top. I just need a minute to talk with Nadine, is all.”

In the movies there’d be all kinds of wild gunplay happening right now, but Octav was a professional. He crossed his arms and glowered at Gennady through the grid flooring of the elevator. “Where’s she going?” he demanded.

“Damned if I know. Up.”

“What’s up?”

“Someplace she can talk to her brother alone, I’m thinking. Reason with him, threaten him, I don’t know. Look, Octav, let me talk to her. She might shoot you, but she’s not going to shoot me.”

“It really is Nadine? Achille’s sister? Do you know her?”

“Well, remember that story I told last night about Azerbaijan and the nukes? We worked together on that. You know she’s with the IAEA too. You never met her?”

There was an awkward pause. “What happened in the trailer?” Gennady asked. “Did she hurt him?” Octav shook his head.

“She was yelling,” he said. “I snuck around the trailer and came in through the bathroom window. But I got stuck.”

Gennady stifled a laugh. He would have paid to see that; Octav was not a small man.

“I took a shot at her but she ran. Might have winged her, though.”

Gennady cursed. “Octav, that’s your boss’s sister.”

“He told me to shoot!”

There was another awkward pause.

“I’m sure she doesn’t mean to harm him,” said Gennady, but he wasn’t so sure now.

“Then why’s she holding him at gunpoint?”

“I don’t know. Look, just give me a minute, okay?” He hit UP before Octav could reply.

He’d gotten an inkling of the size of the tower when they’d inspected it by helicopter, but down at the bottom, the true dimensions of the place were obscured by shadow. Up here it was all vast emptiness, the walls a concrete checkerboard that curved away like the face of a dam. It was all faintly lit by a distant, indigo-silver circle of sky. On the far side of this bottomless amphitheater, the other elevator car had a good lead on him. Nadine probably wouldn’t hear him now if he called out to her.


The elevator frameworks ended at tiny balconies about halfway up the tower. Nadine’s cage was slowing now as it neared the one on the far side.

Gennady shivered. A cool wind was coming up from below, and it went right through the gridwork floor and flapped his pant legs. There wasn’t much to it yet, but it would get stronger.

He watched as Nadine and Achille got out of the other elevator. A square of brightness appeared – a door opening to the outside – and they disappeared through it.

When his own elevator stopped he found he was at a similar little balcony. There was nothing here but the side-rails and a gray metal utility door, with crash bars, in the outer concrete wall. The sense of height here was utterly physical; he’d sense it even if he shut his eyes, because the whole tower swayed ever so gently, and the moving air made it feel like you were falling. Gennady sent the elevator back down and leaned on the crash bar.

Outside it was every bit as bad as he’d feared. The door let onto a narrow catwalk that ran around the outside of the tower in both directions. He remembered seeing it from the helicopter, and while it had looked sturdy enough from that vantage, in the gray dawn light he could see long streaks of rust trailing down from the bolts that held it to the wall.

He swallowed, then tested the thing with his foot. It seemed to hold, so he began slowly circling the tower. This time, he tried every step before committing himself, and leaned on the concrete wall, as far from the railing as he could get.

Now he could hear a vague sound, like an endless sigh, rising from below. That, combined with the motion of the tower, made it feel as if something were rousing down in the wall-less maze that filled the black valley.

After a couple of minutes the far point of the circle hove into view. Here was something he hadn’t seen from the helicopter: a broadening of the catwalk on this side. Here it became a wide, reinforced platform, and on it sat a white and yellow trailer. That was utterly incongruous: Gennady could see the thing’s undercarriage and wheels sitting on the mesh floor. It had probably been hauled up here by helicopter during the tower’s construction.

A pair of parachutes was painted on the side of the trailer. They were gray in this light, but probably pink in daylight.

Now he heard shouting – Achille’s voice. Gennady tried to hurry, but the catwalk felt flimsy and the breeze was turning into a wind. He made it to the widened platform, but that was no better since it also had open gridwork flooring and several squares of it were missing.

“Nadine? It’s Gennady. What’re you doing?”

“Stop her!” yelled Achille. “She’s gone crazy!”

He took the chance and ran to the trailer, then peeked around its corner. He was instantly dazzled by intense light – flarelight, in fact – lurid and bright green. He squinted and past his sheltering fingers saw it shift around, lean up, and then fade.

“Stop!” Achille sounded desperate. Gennady heard Nadine laugh. He edged around the corner of the trailer.

“Nadine? It’s Gennady. Can I ask what you’re doing?”

She laughed, sounding a little giddy. Gennady blinked away the dazzle-dots and spotted Achille. He was clutching the railing and staring wide-eyed as Nadine pulled another flare out of a box at her feet.

She’d holstered her pistol and now energetically pulled the tab from the flare. She windmilled her arm and hurled it into the distance, laughing as she did it. Gennady could see the bright spark following the last one down – but the vista here was too dizzying and he quickly brought his eyes back to Nadine.

“Found these in the trailer,” she said. “They’re perfect. Want to help?” She offered one to him. Gennady shook his head.

“That’s going to cause a fire,” he said. She nodded.

“That’s the idea. Did you bring a radio? We dropped ours. Achille here has to radio his people to shut down the tower.” She looked hopeful, but Gennady shook his head. “We’ll have to wait for that new bodyguard, then,” she said. “He’s sure to have one. Then we can all go home.”

The good news was, she didn’t look like she was on some murderous rampage. She looked determined, but no different from the Nadine he’d known five years ago. “We can?” said Gennady. “This is just a family fight, is that it? Achille’s not going to press charges, and the others aren’t going to talk?”

She hesitated. “Come on, can’t you let me have my moment? You of all people should be able to do that.”

“Why me of all people?”

She smiled at him past smoke and vivid pink light. “‘Cause you’ve already saved the world a couple times.”

She turned to throw another flare.

“Not the world,” Gennady said – only because he felt he had to say something to keep her talking. “Azerbaijan, maybe. But... all this,” he gestured at the falling flares, “seems like a bit much for having your brother get into a fight with your date.”

“No. No!” She sounded hugely disappointed in him. “This isn’t about that little incident with Kafatos, is it Achille?” Achille flung up his free hand in exasperation; his other still tightly held the rail. “Although,” Nadine went on, “I’m afraid I might have given brother dear the big idea myself, a couple of days before.”

“What idea?” Gennady looked to Achille, who wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“When he told me about the tower project and said he wanted to use the Putorana Plateau as a carbon sink, I told him about the Permian extinction. He was fascinated – weren’t you, Achille? But he really lit up when I told him that though it was heat shock that undoubtedly killed many of the trees on the planet, it was something else that finished off the rest.”

“What are you talking about?”

Nadine pointed down, at the disc of plastic-roofed forest below them. “You drove through it on the way up here. It’s out there, trying to get into our lungs, our systems...”

“The fungus?”

She nodded. “A specific breed of it. It covered Earth from pole to pole during the Permian. It ate all the trees that survived the heat... conifer trees, tough as they were. And here’s the thing: it’s still around today.” Again she nodded at the forest. “It’s called Rhizoctonia, and Achille’s been farming a particularly nasty strain of it here for two years.”

Gennady looked at Achille. He was remembering how the day had gone – how Achille seemed to be building his restart schedule around prevailing winds, rather than the integrity of the tower’s systems.

If you wanted to cultivate an organism that ate wood and thrived in dry heat, you’d want a greenhouse. They were perched above the biggest greenhouse in central Asia.

Nadine hoisted up the box of flares and stalked off along the catwalk. “I need to make sure the whole fungus crop goes up. You need to make sure Achille’s engineers close the windows, or the heat’s all going to come up here. See you in a bit.” She disappeared around the curve of the tower; a short time later, Gennady saw a flare wobble up and then down into the night.

He turned to Achille, who had levered himself onto his feet. “Is she crazy? Or did we really come here to bomb Kafatos’s forest with spores?”

Achille glared defiantly back. “So what if we did? It’s industrial espionage, sure. But he screwed me over to start with, made a secret deal with the oligarchs to torpedo my bid. Fair’s fair.”


“And what’s to prevent this rhyzoctithing from spreading? How’s it supposed to tell the difference between Kafatos’s trees and the rest of the forest?” Achille looked away, and suddenly Gennady saw it all – the whole plan.

“It can’t, can it? You were going to spread a cloud of spores across the whole northern hemisphere. Every heat-shocked forest in Asia and North America would fall to the rhizoctonia. Biological sequestration of carbon would stagger to a stop, not just here but everywhere. Atmospheric carbon levels would shoot up. Global warming would go into high gear. No more talk about mitigation. No more talk about slowing emissions on a schedule. The world would have to go massively carbonnegative, immediately. And you own all the patents to that stuff.”

“Not all,” he admitted. “But for the useable stuff, yeah.”

A metallic bong bong bong sound came from the catwalk opposite the direction Nadine had taken. Moments later Octav showed up. He was puffing, obviously spooked by the incredible drop, but determined to help his boss. “Where is she?”

“Never mind,” said Achille. “Have you got a walkie-talkie?” Octav nodded and handed it over.

“Hello hello?” Achille put the thing to his ear, other hand on his other ear, and paced up and down. Octav was staring at the balloons painted on the trailer.

“What is that?” he said, assuming, it seemed, that Gennady would know.

“Looks like they were expecting tourists. Base jumping off a solar updraft tower?” From up here, you’d be able to slide down the valley thermals to the river far below. “I guess it could be fun.”

“I can’t get a signal,” said Achille. “You,” he said to Octav, “go after her!”

“You can’t get a signal because you’re outside. They’re inside.” Gennady pointed at the door in the side of the tower as Octav pounded away along the catwalk. “Try again from next to the elevator.” Achille moved to the door and Gennady made to follow, but as Achille opened it a plume of smoke poured out. “Oh, shit!”

The tower had been designed to suck up air from the surrounding forest. It was already pulling in smoke from the fires Nadine had lit with her flares. And she was moving in a circle, trying to ensure that the entire bull’s-eye of whitened pines caught.

“Yes! Yes!” Achille was gasping into the radio, ducking out of the smoke-filled tower every few seconds to breathe. “You have to do it now! The whole forest, yes!” He glanced at Gennady. “They’re trying to get to the trailer, but they’d have to fix the transformer first and there’s too much smoke, I don’t know if they’re going to make it.”

Gennady looked down at the forest; lots of little spot fires were spreading and joining up into larger orange smears and lozenges. If Nadine made it all the way around, they’d be trapped at the center of a firestorm. “We’re stuck too.”

“Maybe not.” Achille ran to the trailer, which turned out to be full of cardboard boxes. They rummaged among them, finding more flares – not useful – and safety harnesses, cables and crampons and, “Ha!” said Achille, holding up two parachutes.

“Is that all?”

The billionaire kicked around at the debris. “Yeah, you’d think there’d be more, but you know we never got this place up and running. These are probably the test units. Doesn’t matter, there’s one for me, one for you.”

“Not Nadine?” Achille shot him an exasperated look. She was his own sister, but he obviously didn’t care. Gennady took the chute he offered, with disgust. He would, he decided, give it to Nadine when she came back around – if only to see the expression on Achille’s face.

Achille was headed out the door. “What then?” asked Gennady. Nadine’s brother looked back, still exasperated. “Are you just going to walk away from your dream?”

Achille shook his head. “The patents and designs are all I’ve got now. I can’t make a go selling the power from this place. It’s the fungus or nothing. So, look, this fire might eat the tower, but the wind is blowing in. The Rhizoctonia on the fringes will be okay. As soon as we’re on the ground I’m going to bring in some trucks, and haul away the remainder during the cleanup. I can still dump that all over Kafatos’s God-damned forest. We lost the first hand, that’s all.”

“But...” Gennady couldn’t believe he had to say it. “What about Nadine?”

Achille crossed his arms, glowering at the fires. “This has been coming a long time. You know what the worst part is? I’d made her my heir again. Lucky thing I never told her, huh.”

As they stepped outside a deep groan came from the tower, and Gennady’s inner ear told him he was moving, even though his feet were firmly planted on the deck. Looking down, he saw they were ringed by fire now. The only reason the smoke and heat weren’t streaming up the side of the tower was because they were pouring through the open windmill apertures. Past the open door he could see only a wall of shuddering gray inside. The engineers and Bogdan must already be dead.

The tower twisted again, and with a popping sound sixteen feet of catwalk separated from the wall. It drooped, and just then Nadine and Octav came around the tower’s curve, on the other side of it.

Achille and Nadine stared at one another over the gap, not speaking. Then Achille turned away with an angry shrug. “We have to go!” He began struggling into his parachute.

Octav waved at Gennady. “Got any ideas?” Neither he nor Nadine were holding weapons. They’ve obviously realized their best chance for survival lay with one another.

Gennady edged as close to the fallen section of catwalk as he dared. “Belts, straps, have you got anything like that?” Octav grabbed at his waist, nodded. “The tower’s support cables!” Gennady pointed at the nearest one, which leaned out from under the door. “We’re going to have to slide down those!” He could see that the cables’ anchors were outside the ring of fire, but that wouldn’t last long. “Pull up the floor mesh over one, and climb down to the cable anchor. Double up your belt and – hang on a second.” Octav’s belt would be worn through by friction before they got a hundred feet. Gennady ran into the trailer, which was better lit now by the rising sun, and tossed the boxes around. He found some broken metal strapping. Perfect. Coming out, he tossed a piece across to Octav. “Use that instead. Now get going!”

As they disappeared around the curved wall, Achille darted from behind the trailer. “Coming?” he shouted as he ran to the railing.

Gennady hesitated. He’d dropped his parachute by the trailer steps.

It was clear what had to be done. There was only one way off this tower. Still, he just stood there, watching as Achille clumsily mounted the railing.

Achille looked back. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

Images from the day were flashing through Gennady’s mind – and more, a vision of what could happen after the fire was over. He turned to look out over the endless skin of forest that filled the valley and spread beyond to the horizon.

He’d spent his whole life cleaning up other people’s messes. There’d been the Chernobyl affair, and that other nuclear disaster in Azerbaijan. He’d chased stolen nukes across two continents, and only just succeeding in hiding from the world a discovery that would allow any disgruntled tinkerer to build such weapons without needing enriched uranium or plutonium. He’d told himself all the while that he did these things to keep humanity safe. Yet it had never been the idea that people might die that had moved him. He was afraid for something else, and had been for so long now that he couldn’t imagine living without that fear.


It was time to admit where his real allegiance lay.

“I’m right behind you,” he said with a forced smile. And he watched Achille dive off the tower. He watched Nadine’s brother fall two hundred feet and open his chute. He watched the vortex of flame around the tower’s base yank the parachute in and down, and swallow it.

Gennady picked up the last piece of metal strapping and, as the tower writhed again, ran along the catwalk opposite to the way Nadine and Octav had gone.


HE ROLLED OVER and staggered to his feet, coughing. A cloud of white was churning around him, propelled by a quickening gale. Overhead the plastic sheeting that covered the dead forest flapped where he’d cut through it. The support cable made a perfectly straight line from the concrete block at his feet up to the distant tower – or was it straight? No, the thing was starting to curve. Achille’s tower, which was now in full sunlight, was curling away from the fire, as if unwilling to look at it anymore. Any second now it might fall.

Gennady raced around the perimeter of the fire as the sun touched the plastic ceiling. The flames were eating their way slowly outward, pushing against the wind. Gennady dodged fallen branches and avoided thick brambles, pausing now and then to cough heavily, so it took him a few minutes to spot the support cable opposite the one he’d slid down. When it appeared it was as an amber pen-stroke against the pre-dawn sky. The plastic greenhouse ceiling was broken where the cable pierced it, as it should be if bodies had broken through it on their way to the ground.

As he approached the cable’s concrete anchor, he spotted Octav. The bodyguard was curled up on the ground, clutching his ankle.

“Where’s Nadine?” Octav looked up as Gennady pounded up. He blinked, looked past Gennady, then they locked eyes.

That look said, Where’s Achille?

Neither said anything for a long moment. Then, “She fell off,” said Octav. “Back there.” He pointed into the fire.

“How far–”

“Go. You might find her.”

Gennady didn’t need any more urging. He let the white wind push him at the shimmering walls of orange light. As the banners of fire whipped up they caught and tore the plastic sheeting that had canopied the forest for years, and they angrily pulled it down. Gennady looked for another break in that upper surface, hopefully close to the cable’s anchor, and after a moment he spotted it. Nadine had left a clean incision in the plastic, but had shaved a pine below that; branches and needles were strewn across the white pillows of rhyzoctonia and made Nadine herself easy to find.

She blinked at him from where she lay on a mattress of fungi. She looked surprised, and for a moment Gennady had the absurd thought that maybe his hair was all standing up or something. But then she said, “It doesn’t hurt.”

He frowned, reached down and pinched her ankle.

“Ow!”

“Fungus broke your fall.” He helped her up. The flames were being kept at bay by the inrushing wind, but the radiant heat was intense. “Get going.” He pushed her until she was trotting away from the fire.

“What about you?”

“Right behind you!”

He followed, more slowly, until she disappeared into the swirling rhyzoctonia. Then he slowed and stopped, leaning over to brace his hands on his knees. He looked back at the fire.

Sure, if Achille had been thinking, he would have known that the fire would suck in any parachute that came off the tower. Yet Gennady could have warned him, and didn’t. He’d murdered Achille, it was that simple.

The wall of fire was mesmerizing and its heat like a wall pushing Gennady back. There must have been a lot of fires like this one, the last time the rhyzoctonia roused itself to make a meal of the world. Achille had engineered special conditions under his greenhouse roof, but it wouldn’t need them once it got out. The whole northern hemisphere was a tinderbox, a dry feast waiting for the guest who would consume it all.

Gennady squinted into the flames, waiting. He didn’t regret killing Achille. Given the choice between saving a human, or even humanity itself, and preserving the dark labyrinth of Khantayskoe, he’d chosen the forest. In doing that he’d finally admitted his true loyalties, and stepped over the border of the human. But that left him with nowhere to go. So, he simply stood, and waited for the fire.

Somebody grabbed his arm. Gennady jerked and turned to find Octav standing next to him. The bodyguard was using a long branch as a crutch. There was a surprising expression of concern on his face. “Come on!”

“But, you see, I–”

“I don’t care!” Octav had a good grip on him, and was stronger than Gennady. Dazed, Gennady let himself be towed away from the fire, and in moments a pale oval swam into sight between the upright boles of orange-painted pine: Nadine’s face.

“Where’s Achille?” she called.

Gennady waited until they were close enough that he didn’t have to yell. “He tried to use a parachute. The fire pulled him in.”

Nadine looked down, seeming to crumple in on herself. “Oh, God, all those men, and, and Achille...” She staggered, nearly fell, then seemed to realize where they were. Gennady could feel the fire at his back.

She inserted herself between Octav and Gennady, propelling them both in the direction of the lake at the bottom of the hill. “I’m sorry, I never meant any of this to happen,” she cried over the roar of the fire. All I wanted was for him to go back to his original plan! It could still work.” She meant the towers, Gennady knew, and the carbon-negative power plants, and the scheme to sequester all that carbon under the plateau. Not the rhyzoctonia. Maybe she was right, but even though she was Achille’s heir, and owner of the technologies that could save the world, she would never climb out from under what had just happened. She’d be in jail soon, and maybe for the rest of her life.

There were options. Gennady found he was thinking coolly and rationally about those; his mind seemed to have been miraculously cleared, and of more than just the trauma of the past hour. He was waking up, it seemed, from something he’d thought of as his life, but which had only been a rough rehearsal of what he could become. He knew himself now, and the anxiety and hesitation that had dogged him since he was a child was simply gone.

What was important was the patents, and the designs, the business plan and the opportunities that might bring another tower to the plateau. It might not happen this year or next, but it would have to be soon. Someone had to take responsibility for the crawling disaster overtaking the world, and do something about it.

He would have to talk to Nadine about that inheritance, and about who would administer the fortune while she was in prison. He doubted she would object to what he had in mind.

“Yes, let’s go,” he said. “We have a lot to do, and not much time.”