Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 279
that she was being watched, or followed. It had nothing to do
with any townspeople who might glance at her on the way by.
This was an older, and more fundamental, fear.
If she closed her eyes, Calandria could invoke her
inscape senses: infrared sight and the galvanic radar that told
of the presence of mecha or Winds. She couldn’t help herself-every
few minutes, she paused, closed her eyes, and looked
around using these senses.
Ever since the night that the Heaven hooks came down,
Calandria had refused to let herself be lulled back into thinking
that Ventus was a natural place. She was trapped in the gears
of a giant, globe-spanning machine--a nanotech terraforming
system that barely tolerated her kind. This appeared to be
ordinary dirt she walked on, but it had been manufactured; it
took more than the thousand years that Ventus had been
habitable for soil like this to form naturally. The air seemed
fresh and clean, but that too was moderated by unseen forces.
Those unseen forces were a threat. They might yet kill
her. So she remained vigilant.
Calandria turned into a narrow alley and went through a
roughhewn door that had a latch but no lock. Up a flight of
stairs, through another door, and she was home.
This was the safe room where they had intended to hide
August Ostler. The room was about four by six meters. It had
one window which let out on the street--not an advantage,
because mostly it just let in the smell of the open sewer that ran
down the center of the lane. The place was built of plaster and
lath. Calandria could hear the landlady snoring in the room
next door. But it was out of the elements, and warm at night.
That was all that mattered.
Currently everything she had was in this room, or on her
person. Their horses had been killed in the destruction of the