“We could always call your mom,” said Tassadu. This was after Aissaba had spent some time arguing that going down the mysterious stairwell might have been a bad idea in the first place, that maybe they should bail.

Aissaba had a moment of panic when she reached into her pocket and discovered that her mother’s pebble was gone. But then, there it was, glowing in Tassadu’s talons.

“While you were sleeping–”

“Poisoned,” said Aissaba.

“–I was checking which pebbles still worked,” he said.

She snatched it from him. “Too bad you couldn’t tell my mom you bit me. I’m sure she’d have loved to hear how you almost left me in an infinite stairwell under the Johnson residence.”

Tassadu got the constipated look that sometimes came over him when he wanted to say something but couldn’t. It came out with a groan: “Thing is… I did talk to her.”

From somewhere in the distance up the stairs, the hum of machinery began – probably the fridge or the heating system in the Johnson residence. A reminder that the spatial bubble had burst, and they were back beneath the crust of the Earth, in wintry Montana.

“That would violate the Second Law,” said Aissaba, trying to figure out if this was one of Tassadu’s strange attempts at humor. “A spatial bubble would be infinitely far away from normal space.”

“And yet,” he said, “I talked to her. Which means…”

“It’s a protocol,” said Aissaba, crestfallen. The image of her mother gazing into the mask from the Bronze Age, her face haunted by whatever ghosts she saw therein – it had seemed so real.

Indeed, when she placed the pebble to her forehead, she found herself back in her mother’s apartment – looking exactly the way it had looked when she was a child. And exactly as it had last time she’d been here. The Bronze Age mask, the empty coffee mug, the haunted eyes of a woman that Aissaba was starting to think she barely knew. Or had never known.

“So you figured it out,” said her not-mother.

“Why?” said Aissaba. “Too busy to take an actual call?” The only upside here was that she could say whatever she wanted to the protocol. It was just mathematics masquerading as personality.

“I think you know why,” said the woman. For a mathematical model, the sorrow in her eyes seemed so deep that Aissaba almost felt it too. Or was this sadness merely the realization that her mother might not even be alive anymore? No doubt this was the eventuality for which the simulacrum had been created.

“Well,” demanded Aissaba, “what do we do? Visit the Rot Fortress or not?”

Her mother spoke a pair of words in what sounded like Greek, then possibly Sanskrit, then a half-dozen other languages Aissaba couldn’t place. “Virtue and Rot,” she finally said. “These are just translations. The question is whether you trust the translator.”

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“The Master of Language?” Aissaba said. “Not even a little bit.” Not after what he’d done to her mother, to Tassadu, to the twins. She shivered, suppressing the darker memories – of her fourth year at the Fortress, back when she had worn the blue robes of the Hall of Language, back when she and Tassadu were just fifteen. Back when the word “game” had meant something innocent and fun.

“There are prophecies about you too, you know?” said her mother, yanking her out of her dark spiral into the past.

Aissaba snorted. “Let me guess. They’re contradictory and make no sense.”

“I don’t know,” said her mother’s ghost. “I haven’t been able to access them. But if you and Tassadu feel you’ve been singled out by the Masters, perhaps it’s for reasons different from what you’ve assumed–”

Enough. Aissaba took the pebble from her forehead to find Tassadu pacing back and forth across her field of vision. With an exaggerated groan, Aissaba climbed to her feet, glaring in response to Tassadu’s offered talon.

“Come on,” she said. “Apparently, nothing is real and words have no meaning. So down might as well be up.” With that, she descended into the depths.

***

Cassandra locked the bathroom door, did the towel-in-the-crack trick, and started the shower. It wasn’t enough, though. Orion’s invasions of privacy knew no bounds. Pebble to forehead, the first thing she told the simulated dragon was the phrase she had heard the real Tassadu say: “Enter full simulation mode, please.”

“Exiting assistance mode,” said the dragon cheerfully.

The second thing she said was, “Okay, how do I keep my brother from listening in on us?”

The Tassadu simulacrum nodded thoughtfully, as if truly pondering the matter. “Ethics aside? We could knock him out with mind magic.”

“Can we do it from here?” said Cassandra. “The bedroom is through that wall.”

The simulated dragon ran some calculations in whatever constituted his mind. “With this language pebble, I wouldn’t risk it,” he said. “But I’m detecting several mind pebbles under his pillow. I could reflash one of them and use it as a relay.”

“Theoretically, if we did that,” said Cassandra, “would the pebble in his stomach, like, know that we did it?”

“Good question,” said the dragon. “Give me a sec.” A moment later he smiled, and said, “The pebble in his stomach is running a variant of what the Fortress calls the Common System of Operation. I can’t modify it without reflashing it, and it’s only accepting encrypted commands – but it also doesn’t seem to be scanning for security threats, which is the good news.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” said Cassandra.

“The pebbles under his pillow,” continued the simulated Tassadu, “are running the same CSO variant, with a different active sub-protocol. I could copy one of their states, repurpose the pebble, then restore it. I don’t think the blip would be observed. The whole system seems to have been designed under the assumption that you don’t possess a pebble external to the system.”

“Ummm,” said Cassandra, “let’s do it?”

“Thing is,” said Tassadu, “we can’t do a full reflash from here. Laws of Matter and Distance, you know? But if you could get close enough to shove your hand under the pillow, it would only take a moment.”

“What about from the bottom bunk?” she said. “Like, through the mattress?”