FSE

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They sprinted through the tunnel, dripping blood with every step.

Concrete broke and fell. Glass fixtures shattered, raining shards upon their heads. There were wires, faded posters, rows of windows that had once looked upon a vista, but now saw only darkness. Sadik could barely see their path through the dim light and tumbling dust.

Outside, the plague was throwing its entire weight upon the barrier. The walls heaved, and the earth shook, and there came the sound of bursting roots, leagues of crumbling rock. For a moment, Aleph began to roar, its many voices singing a chorus of hatred. It felt like the herald of an apocalypse.

In a way, it was the truth. Aldunya had once been their entire world.

How things could change.

They ran for some time. Footsteps echoed against the walls. Gradually, the sound of the colossus fell into a distant thunder, forming a pattern of dull thumps and small tremors. Amira glanced behind them, spat dust from her mouth, and ordered a stop.

“Sound off,” she said, wiping blood from her brow.

“Here,” Xaeyr said.

“Here,” Lanir said.

“Here,” Kavaia said.

Sadik groaned.

His body was a ruin. A war had been fought within his flesh, and it had left the surrounding tissue as cratered as a battlefield, with spores oozing from the skin and flesh sloughing from the limbs. There must be some trace of the Exalted still coursing through his body—otherwise, he would have long fallen into shock.

“Gee, sir,” Amira said, approaching. “Seems you got gods thrusted in ya. Usually, it's you thrustin' into gods.”

Sadik grit his teeth. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

“. . . you got rescued?”

“Was that not you?”

“No, sir. Can’t claim it so.”

Sadik tried to focus, breathing through the pain and chaos.

After the blood had knocked him senseless, he had felt someone pick him up. It had been a mortal in size. A woman. When he had been thrown to safety, he had attempted to look for her face, but she had already been gone, as if she had fled from his sight.

The plague had coursed into her body, as if she weren’t infected.

Sadik breathed.

Faustine.

Gamó

“Right,” Amira said, raising a brow. “Yeah. Kivie, stay in the middle. Hold him close.”

Kavaia adjusted her grip on his body. Sadik rested his head on her shoulder, ignoring the blood and slathered muck.

“Xae,” Amira said, “you take the front, and Lannie, you hold the rear. We keep our eyes wide and triggers steady. No one fires a fucking puff until I give the order.”

They all moved into position. Around them, dust drifted through the air, bringing a taste somewhere between stale and rotten. No one had breathed this air for thousands of years.

“Don’t think it needs sayin’,” Amira continued, “but this ain’t the time to fuck around. From now on, we move slow, and we move careful, and we don’t pluck a hair from our ass unless someone says it’s clear. There’s no telling what’s gonna—”

A humming filled the air. Far ahead, light surged along the tunnel, snapping quickly to life. In seconds, most of the glass fixtures hanging on the ceiling had begun to emit a powerful light, leaving their thin bodies as white as a sun-bleached bone. Both gods and mortals stood in the sudden brightness, squinting and blinking.

Something crackled.

Another machine came to life.

“Sorry for the mess,” Calisto said, her voice ringing through the tunnel. “I don’t usually have company.”

All five of them glanced between each other, their weapons half-raised. The corridor remained empty. Words echoed and died.

The woman’s voice began to whine, growing distorted at the edges. “So, you know—the main station is up ahead. Follow the signs, and, uh—ignore the bodies. Once you’re near the tether . . . we can talk. If you want.”

No one answered. Kavaia held Sadik firmly against her side, her hammer still dripping with blood.

“Think of it this way,” Calisto said. “Do you want to go back outside?”

In the distance, the plague continued its assault against the tree, smashing its limbs and roaring with all its voices. Concrete rumbled beneath their feet.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” the ancestor said. “Try to be smart, for once.”

The crackling ceased. For a few moments, they stood in the middle of the corridor, eyes straining beneath the artificial light. When he could stop squinting, Sadik noticed a small sign hanging from the ceiling. The words were barely legible.

WELCOME TO JANUS ANCHOR STATION

“Miri,” Sadik said.

Amira grunted, giving a hand signal.

They began to advance. By now, all of them had grown used to moving like a squad, and they kept a disciplined formation, making sure to stay equally spaced. Amira whispered orders back and forth, while Xaeyr held his spear firmly at his hip, as if he expected something to charge from the tunnel ahead. Lanir could barely fit between the concrete walls.

Kavaia reached into her pack, withdrew a clean strip of bandage, and wiped the blood from Sadik’s face.

“I’ll be fine,” Sadik said, wincing.

She made a noise in her throat, still wiping his cheek.

“Goddess.”

“Don’t fuss.”

The corridor stretched. The ceiling was low, the walls bare. Metal fixtures hung in rusted lines. Behind them, the corridor was lost in a segmented darkness, with many of the glass bulbs falling loose from their mounts.

Sadik stared at the glass cylinders, watching the harsh white glow until spots danced in his eyes. Something was fascinating about their purpose.

Throughout his life, he had seen many wonders of the ancestors, from the limitless potential of Glimmer to the shimmering walls that enclosed the city. He had planned skirmishes using the tactile light of a hologram. And, yet, despite all this, he had never once seen anything as simple as an electric light. They had always used torches.

He had never given much thought to this discrepancy before. Now, the difference in technology seemed very stark, as if he had always been a truly primitive creature, worshipping the scraps left by his superiors.

There was so much that he didn’t know.

At the moment, the only sounds were quiet breaths, clinking armor, footsteps squishing with blood. Every noise seemed pathetically small. Places of great age often had a way of swallowing the people within.

Slowly, a glass chamber came into view.

“Halt!” Amira hissed, taking a knee.

They stopped in place. Ahead, the tunnel was bisected by a series of glass walls, each of them sealed into the surrounding concrete. In front, the glass had been carved into a door, and there was a painted symbol further within the chamber, seeming to indicate a place to stand. Metal instruments studded the wall on either side. Wires, cylinders, nozzles.

Beyond the chamber, there was a yawning darkness, free of any visible walls. There was a dim slumping of shapes, foothills of uncertain form.

An opening?

“It seems,” Lanir said, “a place of execution. An automation of death.”

“Something is clearly being dispensed.” Kavaia gestured toward the walls. “Is it for cleansing? A kind of . . . spraying bath?”

“I doubt it,” Xaeyr said. “There’s no privacy. Maybe it was a chamber for—I don’t know—fragrances? Like perfume at a feast?”

“I just wanna know,” Amira said, “if it’s gonna kill us. I don’t like its look.” She raised the greatbow molded through her arm, letting a sharpened bone grow through her palm. “Might just smash the glass.”

Suddenly, the air began to crackle.

“Oh my God,” Calisto said, her voice loud and irritated. “Do I have to explain every spooky machine to you people?”

They glanced at each other, still keeping a safe distance.

There was a sigh. “It’s a decontamination chamber. Decon. Right? When you go to a different planet, you can’t just bring all the different microbes that live on your skin and clothes and hair. It could destroy the ecosystem. Likewise, if you’re leaving, you don’t want to spread some native plague to the good people in orbit.”

“A plague?” Sadik asked.

“That’s right. A plague. You know what I mean.” For a moment, there was a distortion, as if she were being pulled away. “Think of it like Glimmer. It will enter your body, and it will correct any non-vital mutations, so you can’t accidentally destroy any sensitive electronics by rubbing your weird fleshy bits against them. Don’t do that either, by the way.”

Amira lowered her bow, grunting. Xaeyr licked his lips and spat on the floor.

“Look behind you,” Calisto said.

Sadik turned, peering over Kavaia’s shoulder. In the tunnel beyond, there were five sets of footprints, each of them stamped into the concrete by fading patterns of blood. Flesh grew from the edges. The longer Sadik watched, the more that their footsteps seemed to bubble and fester, until the circles of blood became a leaping hive of motion, a boiled webbing of teeth and tendons. Further beyond, he could see a carpet of squirming flesh begin to overtake the concrete, creeping up the walls and seeking more of its kind. In the very far distance, he thought he saw the flex of a large orifice.

Revulsion spread among the five of them.

“Yeah,” Calisto said, deadpan. “You’re all infected. That means you go through decon. No exceptions.”

“Will it harm us?” Kavaia asked, uncertain.

“Most of you, no.”

“What does that mean?” Xaeyr said. “It better not harm us.”

There was a pause. Behind them, the sound of squishing flesh echoed beneath the lights.

“Amira,” Calisto said.

The human scout straightened.

“You’re not allowed inside. The rest of you are welcome.”

“What?” Amira demanded. “What the fuckin’ camel shit is this? Why the fuck you pickin’ on me?”

“Because you’re not Amira,” Calisto said. “You never were Amira. The second that Aleph got its tendrils in you, you were not the same person. You became a facsimile. A reconstruction of the original. The rest of your friends still have a continuity of consciousness. They have an original body. You are nothing but plague.”

Amira folded her arms. “How would you know what I am and what I’m not?”

“Because I made the plague, you stupid bitch.”

Xaeyr stepped forward. “Don’t talk to her like that.”

Calisto scoffed.

“Let me remind you,” Xaeyr said, “that there’s a giant monster at your door, and we’re your only friends, and it might be a good idea to dig the sand out of your metal cunt. You stupid bitch.”

Calisto gave a small laugh. The sound was bitter, distorted, almost human. “I’m going to die, anyway. What does it matter?”

“If it don’t fuckin’ matter,” Amira said, “then let me in.”

There was another distortion, a tearing of noise. “Look—Sadik, the rest of you, haven’t you noticed that she always defends the plague? She’s picked its side, in every little argument. She always wants to kill me. Why do you think that is?”

“I wanna kill you,” Amira shouted, “because you’ve been treatin’ us like cattle! Your own breeding stock! You shit-heap juban, you wanna act like you done nothing wrong?”

“How do you even know what I’ve done? Sadik never told you what he discovered, up in the pantheon. You died before he could.” The machine paused, letting the words hang in the dusty air. “You heard it from Aleph. Didn’t you?”

Amira opened her mouth, blinking. “So what if I did? It’s still the truth, ain’t it?”

“Listen to me. You suited Aleph’s purpose. It wanted to take Sadik away from me, like it took Rushan. You are a friendly face. A disarming element. It’s the same reason why it was using Acheron’s soldiers to fight its war.” The distortion wavered, grew low and brooding. “Its name means ‘first of many’. Do you understand? You are one of the many, obeying the first.”

Amira clenched her jaw. Xaeyr took a step forward, but hesitated.

“Sadik,” Calisto said, her voice calm. “The differences are subtle, aren’t they? All Aleph would have to do is tweak a few cells, alter certain pathways. She would become a loyal servant without anyone spotting the difference. I would know. I’ve done it myself.”

“Hoi!” Amira’s arm coursed with lightning, the metal flanges bristling like hair. “I’m talking to you! I’m not a gods-damned slave! I’m a fucking person! I am me, and not some stupid clone, and fuck you for asking!” She whirled in place, gesturing with her bow. “Is not one of you gonna speak for me here?”

Behind them, the flesh grew and multiplied, snaking its tendrils into the surrounding walls. There was a cracking of bone, a splinter of concrete.

“Miri,” Xaeyr said, quietly.

Amira glared up at him, face locked in fury.

“She’s right. You’re . . . a clone. You have been, this entire time.”

“Thank you,” Calisto said.

“Shut up.” Xaeyr kneeled on the bare floor, his toga flaking with crusts of blood. “That’s how it is. I’m sorry. It won’t do you any good to pretend.”

“Oh, what,” Amira said, “you’re on her side, too?”

“I was waiting for the right time to say this.”

Amira shook her head, burning her gaze into the floor.

“You’ve seen the clones,” the god of cataracts said. “The Viziers have been replicated for centuries. It’s nothing new.” He reached for her hand. “You know how this works.”

She slapped his hand away. “I ain’t debatin’ this shit.”

“You have to face the—”

“No!” Amira yelled. “I’m still me! I haven’t changed! If I had my goop altered by a god, I would know about it!”

Xaeyr’s expression was both kind and pained.

Her face tightened. She looked around the tunnel walls, breathing hard, as if they were suddenly closing upon her.

“Miri,” Xaeyr said.

Amira looked down at her metallic arm, the sinuous string and bony arrow. She seemed to shrink into herself. “I remember it, right? I was never gone. I was falling, I was dying, I was soaking into the plague, I was back with all of you, and there was nothing in between. Nothing. I never—I was never not me, and that means I can’t rightly be—”

“Hey,” Xaeyr said.

“No, no, look, I-I would know if I was—”

“Hey.”

He reached for her hand, moving slow. She watched his furry fingers wrap around her bronze, smooth skin. Her eyes were red with tears.

“You are yourself,” Xaeyr said. “No one has taken that away.” He rubbed her smaller fingers. “It doesn’t matter. Not to me, not to you.”

For a moment, Amira looked terrified. “But I—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“If I’m not—”

“It doesn’t matter. You are yourself. You’re still here. That’s what matters.”

She breathed, loud and ragged.

“You don’t have to be strong,” Xaeyr said, followed her gaze to the floor. “I didn’t feel very strong, when I thought I lost who I was. For a while, I tried to pretend, and, sometimes, it worked. But I didn’t actually feel better until I had someone there with me, who didn’t care about what I had been, and who let me be honest with myself.”

Amira looked up at him, her face stark in the artificial light.

“Stop being strong. Please. For me.”

She took a breath, began to choke, and rushed into his embrace, losing herself in the fur and cloth. They hugged as best they could. Her arm was still a bulging weapon, and there was no moon spinning above Xaeyr’s head, and, for a time, neither of them seemed to care. They traded whispers only they could hear.

In the distance, there was a sound of rumbling, the shudder of a roof in collapse. The mountain of plague was still attacking. It seemed to draw closer.

“Calisto,” Sadik said.

There was a sound of distortion, as if a great machine were shifting its gaze.

Sadik raised himself on Kavaia’s arm, leaning his weight on her shoulder. “If you won’t take Amira, then we’re leaving.”

The distortion thickened. “Is that so?”

“If you have a problem with her, you have a problem with us.”

Kavaia nodded, thumping her tail. Behind them, Lanir crawled beneath the low tunnel ceiling, ready to intervene.

Calisto gave a small laugh. “Do you think I won’t call your bluff?”

Sadik remembered his first vision, when he had finally seen her face. She had been scrambling across the sand, shouting his name, tears flowing down her cheek.

“I think you need me,” Sadik said, “more than I need you. I think you’re desperate to pass on a legacy, before your creations have their revenge, and all your toils lose their meaning.”

The air thickened with static.

“Open this door. Stop wasting my time.”

For a moment, the distortion reached a fevered pitch, full of noise and thunder. The air shuddered. Even the crawling flesh seemed to quiver and flee. Then, slowly, the sound faded into a distant whine, and the door to the decontamination chamber slithered open, giving a quiet hiss. Power thrummed into the nozzles and valves.

“Is that all?” Kavaia asked. “No pithy remark?”

There was no reply. In the glass chamber, a painted circle began to glow on the floor, as if beckoning the first to enter.

Off to the side, Amira pulled her face from the fur of Xaeyr’s neck, giving him a timid smile. In response, Xaeyr leaned forward, kissed her on the cheek, and began to rise back to his full weight, still holding her in his embrace.

“Hello, Miri,” Sadik said, leaning his chin on Kavaia’s breast.

“Sir,” Amira replied, blushing in Xaeyr’s arm.

Xaeyr carried Amira into the decontamination chamber. The circle glowed beneath his weight. The door of glass slithered shut, and a small alarm began to blare, and the walls erupted with motion, spraying a cloud of fog and rain and light, drowning the entire chamber in a manufactured maelstrom. The solutions were a sickly yellow. Beams of light crawled in a grid.

After a minute, the alarm grew silent. Fluid drained through grates. Xaeyr was still standing in the circle, and Amira was hanging at his side, sagging and blistered and red. She was noisily sick as another door opened, and Xaeyr walked into the darkness beyond, doing his best to comfort her.

One door closed. The previous door opened. An empty chamber awaited.

“Hmph,” Calisto said. “She’s still alive. Interesting.”

Amira continued to vomit. Her skin sizzled.

“Aleph has evolved. Hm. Maybe. . . .” The distortion faded. “Nevermind.”

“If I may,” Kavaia said, “it seems that you have projected your own tendencies onto your creations. You assume they will try the same manipulations.”

“I’ve been doing this a long time, Kavaia. I trust statistics, not people.”

“Perhaps that is your failing.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Kavaia gave an untrusting look to the ceiling, as if warning it away, and stepped inside the chamber. The air smelled of chemicals. When she entered the circle, the glass was sealed, and all the plumbing began to whir at once, like a thousand blades springing into motion. Scalding hot liquid sprayed from all sides. Sadik was drenched, battered, nearly sliced with light. It felt like every chemical was scouring the plague inside.

The only thing that made the pain bearable was Kavaia rubbing his back.

The cycle stopped. Sadik gasped, every cell afire. The door opened, and Kavaia stumbled into the darkened chamber beyond, her scales cracking like sunbaked mud. Xaeyr and Amira were a short ways ahead, staring up at the distant ceiling. Both were astonished.

“Right,” Calisto said. “Lanir. Uh—” She paused, as if glancing between the dragon and the small door in front of her. “Do your best. I don’t know.”

“I must say,” Lanir said, “you are a rather discourteous host. And a poor architect.”

“Get in the fucking chamber, I swear to God.”

The dragon raised her chin, strode forward, and did her best to squeeze inside the narrow glass. She was not at all successful. As various pipes wrenched against her wings, Sadik turned his attention back to the wide-open chamber, trying to ignore the burns on his skin. His eyes were still adjusted to the harsh glare of electric bulbs, and he found the new darkness almost impenetrable.

Even still, there were some shapes, peeking through the gloom. The slope of a hallway, a ridgeline of chairs, some corner of a tattered painting. Slowly, a landscape emerged. This area seemed to be a foyer, or a greeting room, with many avenues stretching off to different—

“Silty marsh,” Xaeyr said.

Above, Sadik saw a curving dome of stars. It was not a natural sight. The stars were too narrow, the sky too angled in its slope. The twinkling lights held no warmth or wonder. Between the constellations, there was a thin black rope splitting the dome, as if it were a spear breaking through the firmament of the world. It seemed to reach down into the earth. . . .

The lights shuddered on.

Sadik shielded his eyes, looked down, and saw a room full of bodies.

A line of barricades had been erected at the far end of the chamber, crudely assembled from chairs, desks, and lockers. Skeletons piled before it. When Sadik looked at the corpses, he could see scorch marks at center mass, places where the bone had slagged and the cloth was vaporized. On the barricade, he could see claw marks, stains of blood turned a rusty brown. As his eyes followed the walls of the chamber, he saw armored bodies slumped in several lines, so neatly arranged that it could only have been summary execution. The justice of a mob.

Dust drifted through the air. There was no ceiling to the chamber, and a field of stars twinkled across a dome of glass, each as silent as a grave.

Taken all together, the room was fairly large. It was shaped like an oval, serrated with half a dozen halls, each of them straining toward a different part of the dome. Colored lines ran through the floor of each corridor—one for red, one for orange, yellow, green, purple, black. No colors repeated. All connected in the current chamber, forming a rainbow river that ended at the foot of the tunnel.

A concourse. A place of connections. There had been a similar structure to the entrance of Acheron, when the chosen few refugees had stumbled out of the desert.

Here, long ago, a mob had attempted to assault the facility inside the dome, and the defenders had rallied at the gates. It was not clear which side had won. Off to the side, there was a sign on the wall, barely legible through the dust.

RED: TENSILE MAINTENANCE

ORANGE: ATMOSPHERE CONTROL

YELLOW: ORGANIC RECLAMATION

GREEN: COLONIAL ADMISSION

PURPLE: CARGO

BLACK: TETHER

A distortion rang through the air, echoing below the high dome ceiling. When Calisto spoke, there was a quiet hesitation in her voice.

“Welcome to Janus Anchor Station. We called it the Doorway.” She tried to clear her throat. It didn’t sound natural. “Like I said . . . mind the bodies.”

Behind them, Lanir managed to crawl into the open space, her blue scales covered in broken glass and wrenched open pipes. She surveyed the room with widening eyes. “What senseless carnage.”

“Before any of you ask,” Calisto said. “No, I didn’t do this. I just . . . survived it.”

Xaeyr wrinkled his nose. Amira clambered onto his shoulder, trying to take an overwatch position. With a quiet hum, Kavaia lowered herself to a knee, attempting to touch the arm of one of the corpses.

“Stop!”

Kavaia flinched, jerking her hand.

The distortion rolled throughout the dome, like thunder upon a plain. “Don’t touch them. Just . . . walk around. Skirt the side. I keep this place as clean as I can, but I don’t even think of. . . .”

Kavaia remained kneeling, gazing over the sea of dusty bones.

“I could remove them,” Calisto said, as if she felt the need to speak. “I’ve considered it. Thousands of times. They certainly wouldn’t care, if no one ever thought about them again.” There was a sound like grinding metal. “It feels ridiculous, when I actually have to explain it to someone else, but . . . you know. . . .”

“You want to remember,” Kavaia said.

Calisto didn’t answer. Starlight trickled into the teeth and sockets of a dozen skulls.

Kavaia hummed from her chest. “By keeping them here, where they fell, you are forced to remember their death. You must face their fate every time you look upon them. You do this because, if they were not here, you would be allowing yourself to forget, both who they were, and who you used to be. It’s your last connection to the past.”

Calisto released a breath, like a gust of wind through the night. “That’s exactly right, Kavaia. Exactly right.”

“I understand. I will be respectful.”

“. . . thank you.”

Sadik hardly noticed the conversation. Instead, he was gazing straight ahead, following the black line as it split from the rainbow. Unlike all the others, it did not deviate into a side passage—it carved a path straight into the center of the dome, the surrounding corridor growing so wide that it could only have been the main thoroughfare for the facility. At the end of the black line, there was a station constructed of metal, a place where a vestibule was anchored against a thin black rope. Scaffolding caged the entire structure. Lights blinked in a dreamy rhythm.

Inside the Neheamatt, more than a mile into the air, Sadik had seen a similar scaffolding, deep within the heart of the tree. Metal and lights.

He followed the black rope as it rose into the starry dome. Almost instinctively, he realized that this was the purpose of the entire structure, from the circular stars down to the surrounding city. It was all built around the rope.

How high did it travel through the tree?

“I was a non-essential software engineer,” Calisto said. “I worked on the tether. Maintenance. There’s self-repairing protocols in the nanotube matrices, places where the carbon can heal if struck by orbiting debris. I programmed the nanites. I wasn’t even head of my department. Like I said—non-essential. Unimportant, really.”

Sadik lowered his gaze from the tether, searching for the faded posters still hanging upon the walls. Few were legible.

He began to read.

Imagine a desert transformed! Janus is currently undergoing a rapid proliferation of its hydrosphere, sourced from cloud-seeding aerosols and ice mining all around the system. One day, rain will be a common sight across the desert, and an artificial ecosystem will bring life to an otherwise barren—

“We were never attacked,” Calisto said, her voice drifting throughout the dome. “That would’ve been easy. An invading neighbor, aliens from the void. It wouldn’t be anyone’s fault. Instead, things just . . . deteriorated. Like they usually do.”

Sadik found another poster.

—offers FREE augmentation on all ten-year contracts, with unlimited rations and your choice of prefab! Remember, it’s not a dirty job. Rare earth metals are__________y succ__s of a colony. Without a steady flow of __terial, the complex infrastructure necessa__ to support an interstellar society—

“Resources grew thin,” Calisto said. “Pre-colonization projections turned out to be misleading, at best. Janus was a dry, dusty hole. The soil was lean, the mining was thin, the system was far from any shipping lanes. Still, we made it work. For a while.” There was a pause. “Once the goods started drying up, there were arguments, compromises. Factions began to spread. Once the stockpiles were gone, people rioted for food. There were emergency measures, calls for help. I was here, at the Doorway, making sure our lifeline off the planet never went down.”

—on’t think of the world you left behind. Think of the world ahead! It’s never too late to reinvent yourself. Janus was the g_d of doors and beginnings, worshipped__________________our pion___ing research, the future________and we’re proud to start_________________anyone you want to be. Just st____hrough the Doorway!

“Some people struck out on their own,” Calisto said. “Others tried to leave. Get off the planet. We had to stop that. You can imagine how things improve, when you have to use force against the desperate. It becomes an endless circle. Eventually, the violence was normal, and our government was gone, and I was forced to learn that all of us are really just animals, in the end.”

Amira looked over the sea of bodies. “What a waste.”

“You have no idea.”

—hope_____futu-e. H__p__or a bett___orrow. Fin___ou____ginning here, at Janus!

“Sorry,” Calisto said. “I don’t mean to babble. As you can imagine, I don’t usually talk to people.”

“For good reason, apparently,” Xaeyr said.

The distortion increased. “Look, this is just the anchor station. My main complex is located at the counterweight. To kill me, you’ll have to ride the tether.”

Sadik looked at the thin black rope, far off in the center of the dome. “What is that device?”

“A space elevator,” Calisto said. “Obviously.”

“It . . . goes to the stars?”

“In a manner of speaking. It’s not even that impressive, really.”

Sadik blinked, nearly dumbfounded.

“Why do you think I chose to build a tree?” Calisto asked. “People climb trees. They also climb elevators.” There was a hum of static. “I needed something to shield the tether, and I needed something basic to life, something that a primitive people would not balk at worshipping. Thus, I became a tree, like Yggdrasil, upon which the entire world would rest.”

All five of them stared at the waiting elevator, their gazes travelling over a sea of bones and a maze of ancient corridors. Sadik felt the immense gap between him and his ancestors.

“What would that entail?” Lanir asked, shifting her feet. “Some of the archives describe the void between the stars as a hostile, desolate place, where no life can flourish.”

“All you need to worry about,” Calisto said, “is taking a ride in an elevator. Nothing I haven’t trained the gods to handle.”

Xaeyr grunted. “‘Trained us’.”

“It’s simple. People did it all the time. And all of you can do it too, once I’m gone.”

Kavaia rose back to her feet, shifting Sadik into something close to a bridal carry. Behind her, the tendrils of flesh were being repelled by a cascade of spilling chemicals, a stream of gridded light.

“I only have two requests,” Calisto said. “First, when I die, I want you to preserve as much of the machinery as possible. It’s yours to keep. All the minifactories, data stores, everything. I’ve left instructions on proper maintenance, construction details, methods of use. Giving a supercomputer to a bronze age culture may not really be a good idea, but, well, it’s better than nothing.”

“Your second request?” Sadik asked.

She took a moment to speak. Above, the stars dwindled in their multitudes.

“I want to talk to you,” Calisto said. “Face-to-face. Not . . . like this. Not some voice in the sky, or tree on the hill, or whatever the fuck. I want to look you in the eye.” The distortion fell into a quiet hiss. “I want to feel like a person.”

Slowly, everyone turned to Sadik, waiting for his response. Expressions differed. Somewhere beyond, a sound of rumbling began to draw near.

“Very well,” he said. “How would I speak to you?”

There was a rush of distortion, sounding almost like the release of a held breath.

“Good,” Calisto said. “Great. Um. Just . . . follow the yellow line. It goes to Organic Reclamation. There’s an operational surgery bed, where people used to be modified. Just lie down, close your eyes, and I can . . . bring us together.”

“You mean,” Sadik said, “you will twist my body. Alter my mind, so it fits the simulation.”

“Well . . . yes.”

Amira shook her head. Kavaia held him closer to her breast.

Calisto’s voice crackled. “I’ve saved your life, Sadik. Several times. I’ve protected you since the start. I’m not trying. . . .”

Sadik gazed over the field of bodies.

“You can trust me. I’m not lying about anything, anymore.” There was a small pause. “Or—or you can ignore me. It’s only a request. All of you have good reason to despise me, so I wouldn’t blame. . . .”

“Calisto,” Sadik said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve already agreed.”

“Right. Yeah. Okay, um, thank you.” She seemed to clear her throat. “Okay.”

“Goddess,” Sadik said, waving the stump of his arm toward the yellow line. “Follow the path.”

Kavaia looked down at him, standing still. White teeth poked from the edges of her snout.

“Goddess.”

“I’m going with you.”

“Into . . . the simulation? Calisto seemed as if she only wished to speak to—”

“I am going with you,” Kavaia said, “because you keep hurting yourself, and I love you, you stupid idiot.”

Sadik cleared his throat.

“For what’s it worth,” Calisto said, “the goddess of death is more than welcome to join. Also, I’ve heard all the harness talk, so, uh . . . might be practice for you, Sadik.”

Kavaia glared at him.

“I love you, too, goddess.”

She shifted him below her breast, growling.

“Let’s fuckin’ go already,” Amira said, slapping Xaeyr’s shoulder.

They began to pick their way across the concourse, stepping through the gaps between the bodies. All the corpses were so inert, so petrified with the passage of time, that a nearby footstep was all it took to crack the bones beneath the tattered cloth. When they reached the barricade, both Kavaia and Xaeyr took the time to carefully step over the pieces of furniture, minding the blood and gouges. At the back, Lanir elected to fly.

Behind them, in the tunnel, there was a sound of shrieking voices, bones and fingernails scraping against concrete. The decontamination chamber was broken open, and the pipes were beginning to spray a thick green foam, which immediately hardened into a dripping, craggy wall. Shapes of flesh writhed on the other side.

In the very far distance, another rumbling occurred, so close that it shook the dome above their heads.

“Has Aleph broken the barrier?” Sadik asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Calisto replied.

“Considering our position, it might be prudent to—”

“I don’t mean to offend you, Sadik, but I’ve only allocated a fraction of my consciousness into this conversation. The rest of me is defending against the plague. Aleph has started to act . . . very aggressive. Just like Rushan.” The stars flickered above. “Point being—I’m doing all I can. Don’t worry about it.”

“You ever get the feeling that you’ve made a mistake?” Xaeyr asked.

No one answered.

They moved across the concourse, followed the rainbow of lines, and split off into an adjacent corridor, where the yellow line directed them to go. Sadik took another glance at the thin black tether before it disappeared from sight.

All this time, he had assumed that “ascension” referred to something complex, an indecipherable goal that only Aleph could understand. Perhaps, Sadik thought, the mind of a million souls had wished to slurp into the machines of its creator, or grow its spores into the Neheamatt’s bark, or rule over the city of Acheron as a miasma of wonderous substance, as Calisto had done before.

Now, as he considered the elevator, Sadik thought that ascension was actually rather simple. Aleph wanted to ascend into the void above the world, into the place where the stars were bright, and the pain of its past could be left far behind.

All this time, the plague merely wanted to leave.

They continued down the corridor. Rooms passed on either side. At several points, there were signs of conflict, bodies that had been left where they fell. Many had been butchered, while others had barricaded themselves to varying degrees of success. More than once, Sadik saw corpses that likely perished from suicide.

Each of the rooms were filled with machines. Structures hummed, lights blinked, screens of glass filled with data and geometry. There were laboratories, storage rooms, automated factories, organic dispensers, tools, weapons, books.

None of them stopped to look.

Eventually, after a minute, the yellow line ended in a circular junction. Doors hung open, showing rooms full of dimness and dust. None of the signs were legible.

“Room on the left,” Calisto said.

Kavaia approached the door. It slide open automatically, as if detecting her presence. She stared in wonder, renewed her grip on Sadik, and attempted to step inside, her tall stature forcing her to stoop beneath the doorway.

Lights flickered on.

The room was fairly small. There was a field of life vats littering the sides, their glass containers filled with gelatinous chemicals, and a row of surgery beds studded the back wall of the chamber, each of them identical to the ones still used on the surface. Sadik counted a dozen in total. For most of his life, even one of these machines would be considered irreplaceably precious.

“Choose the middle,” Calisto said, her voice sounding distant. “It’s the only one that still works. Hard to fix electronics, these days.”

Kavaia approached the machines. Xaeyr struggled beneath the doorway, shifted Amira onto his shoulder, and kept watch at the entrance, his spear bristling with energy. Above their heads, Lanir soared through the air, flying over the maze of corridors and rooms. It seemed as if there was not a single roof in the entire facility. All of them had looked upon the stars.

The surgery bed began to hum. Metal blades encircled the glass, twitching and sucking. Kavaia took a knee, braced a hand against the upper casing, and began to crawl her way into the open tube, using elbows and knees and hips. It was a grueling process. Every breath fogged against the metal.

Eventually, Kavaia managed to settle into position, her feet and tail still poking out from the bottom of the cylinder. With an irritated grunt, she rested her head inside a small divot. Sadik sank into the comfort of her chest.

“Are you ready?” Calisto asked. “This shouldn’t take long.”

Far away, they heard a cascading rumble, the sound of rock and concrete collapsing beneath a blow. Voices echoed through the dome. Kavaia rose, cupped Sadik’s chin, and pulled his head far enough back that she could give him a kiss. Warm lips met with a scaly snout.

They laid back against the machine, together.

“Here we go,” Calisto said.

The bed thrummed, vibrating fast. Metal blades frenzied. After a moment, hollow tubes descended from every angle, each of them sparkling with Glimmer. Needles glinted in the dark.

Sadik felt a familiar sting. Then, he was gone, lost in a soothing light.