The Child Goddess by Louise Marley

took a sharp right up a steep entrance into a six-lane throughway. Jin-Li turned on the cart’s headlights, and tried to blend with the light nighttime traffic. Theirs was the only Port Force cart, but trucks, cars, other vans whirled past. The little motor whined, struggling to keep up speed.
    Phipps gave a short laugh. “Like riding in a can-opener.”
    “I know it. Hope the battery holds up.”
    “Got a spare?”
    “Yes. Have to stop to change it, though.”
    Phipps grunted. “Keeping my fingers crossed.”
    They cast each other a look of relief when the van took an exit from the throughway. It turned left when it reached the surface street, and drove north along the darkened waterfront, following the curve of the bay. Jin-Li doused the headlights again, and concentrated on the van’s taillights. In moments it came to a stop before a controlled-access gate.
    “Who lives there?” Phipps asked, gesturing with her long arm. Beyond the guarded gate a thicket of residential towers rose into the mist. Discreet lights set into the landscaping picked out their silhouettes and gleamed on exaggeratedly tall windows and miniature scrollwork balconies.
    “Mostly ESC executives. Nobody else could afford those apartments.” Jin-Li parked the cart at an unmarked curb that was masked by the drooping branches of a tall cedar.
    They climbed out, and stood in the rain, watching. A guard leaned from a lighted booth to talk with someone through the van’s open window, then moved to a control board. The long iron gate slid silently back on well-oiled wheels, opening just enough to admit the van. It closed again, just as silently, as the van disappeared between two of the towers, taillights winking out one by one as it turned and disappeared.
    Jin-Li and Phipps stood impotently beneath the cedar tree. Cold raindrops dripped past their caps and down their necks.
    “That’s it,” Jin-Li said glumly. “Far as we can go.”
    And Phipps growled, “Bastards.”
    *
    OA OPENED HER eyes to a dazzling brightness, and squeezed them shut again. Something had happened. She had slept hard, with no dreams. Her head ached, and the light that blazed in her eyes was too bright, not the light of her room at the infirmary, her room with Isabel.
    She heard Doctor’s voice, and someone else’s, a woman’s. She had woken to some new place. Some new power, greater than Isabel’s, had moved her while she slept.
    For a long time she lay without moving, wishing it was a mistake. Perhaps when she opened her eyes a second time, she would be back in the familiar cramped room, with the reader on the chair and the fuzzy toy. And Isabel.
    But she knew it was not a mistake. This was not the infirmary. The woman’s voice was not Isabel’s. The scratchy blanket that covered her was unfamiliar, and the brilliant light burned even through her closed eyelids.
    She waited for the dull ache in her head to recede. Her throat and mouth burned with thirst, and she was too hot under her blanket. When the voices stopped, she waited for the space of a few breaths, and then, cautiously, she lifted her eyelids.
    A more different place than the infirmary Oa could not have imagined. Sunlight poured through tall windows, glittered off a bay of gray-green water, shone on white mountains in the distance. She lay on a couch upholstered in an unlikely gold color. A white woven fabric covered the floor. There were chairs and tables everywhere, real wood chairs and tables, and a variety of large and small objects for which Oa had no name, a riot of colors and shapes.
    Slowly, she sat up, letting her bare feet touch the carpet. Its spongy softness invited her toes to sink into it. The view of water and sky and mountain also invited her, tantalized her, mocked her lack of freedom.
    Trying to make no noise, Oa stood. She took one careful step forward, and then turned to look behind her.
    It lurked in the farthest corner of the room, its black looping tubes and silver syrinxes poised