"You know what I mean. Where are we? Why'd you bring me here? What's behind this thrill-mill business?"
The girl's hand came up in a too-quick movement, smoothing blonde hair already perfectly coiffured. A shutter seemed to close behind her eyes, just as it had on the voco scanner. "Really, Agent Traynor—"
"Would you rather I told you, then?" I stepped past her quickly, peering this way and that to be sure we were alone. "We'll start with why you brought me here; and the answer is, because you're scared."
Our eyes locked for an instant as I said it. Then, abruptly, Celeste laughed—a soft laugh, pleasant and unrestrained.
"On the contrary, Mr. Traynor." She took my arm. "However, let's go back to my quarters, where we can be a bit more comfortable. You must be terribly tired, after that insane ordeal with the mills."
Together, we moved down a dark aisle like that of a storage warehouse ... then through a doorway into another room, not too much larger than the one in which I'd been.
There was a difference, though: This place was the strangest I'd ever seen. Even the concept was alien.
There were no furnishings, in the normal sense, save bulky, twisted shapes, all knobs and hollows, that I'd have classed as statuary.
The floor, in turn, was weirdly geometric, a thing of slopes and planes, angles and undulations. Pyramids jutted up, adjacent to cubes and octagons and wedges. Color ran riot—here tinting and blending, there contrasting.