The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

1:18 PM | Lavyrinthikos | September 25th | 1608 COVENANT

"I think I saw something move," Taharqa whispered, peering into the mist.

"Shut the hell up," Bao replied, after not even a moment. "You did not see anything move. You just cast the Life-Sensing Arcana just a second ago. There's nothing out there."

"It could be a golem," Taharqa protested.

"Lamu, do you see anything that might've been a golem on the heat scanner?"

"No."

"There you go," Bao hissed, as he led the way carefully down a rocky ledge. "There's no golem. Now stop trying to get everyone worked up. We can't afford to abort another delve because of you getting spooked by your own shadow."

"We could be dead if it weren't for me getting 'spooked by my own shadow' when we were on the recovery team last month," Taharqa replied, sounding so unnerved his teeth were almost chattering. "Every time we trust your instincts, something horrible happens." He flinched, his head darting in the other direction. "What if it's an ice golem?"

"That's not a real thing, Tarq," Gudrun remarked, her tone somewhere between concern and amusement.

"You don't know that. We don't know everything the Ironworkers were doing down here. Maybe--"

"If you do not shut your damn mouth, it's not an ice golem that you're gonna need to be worried about." He looked over his shoulder. "Ariadne, how long until we get to the periphery?"

"We are 0.4 kilometers from the planar terminus," the golem answered in its mechanized, vaguely feminine tone.

"Thank god," he said. "Everyone just-- Keep your panties on for a few more minutes. This is the closest we've been to a big score in months. Unless you feel like going without eris cells on our next trip, we can't afford any more cop outs."

Taharqa took a breath as if to speak again, but no words came. Lamu couldn't make out his lips behind his oxygen mask, but she imagined him pushing them together and trembling, like a dam threatening to burst.

They were 16 weaves deep, and by this point the landscape looked anything but earthly-- She could understand, to a degree, why Taharqa was frightened. It was not beautiful. The fog, a deep grey with a subtle yellow-tint from its ammonia, was so thick that you could feel it as you moved, brushing and twisting around their compression suits as if it were cream being whipped around a cup. Even with her visor, she could only see about six feet in front of her, and the ground below was lifeless mud of more or less the same color. Without Ariadne (she really hated that name, there was nothing more annoying than low-effort mythological reference) and the Power to guide them, they could have walked in circles for hours.

It was only when they got very close that the boundary of the Chamber was discernible at all. The sky itself bent down, the mist flattening and scattering upwards as it made contact like it was sand on oil; 3D matter on a 2D surface. They'd walked about a kilometer to get here - one of the easier ones to traverse.

"We have reached our destination," Ariadne declared, the ground thumping as it came to a stop.

"See?" Bao said, still terse. "Nothing to worry about. Fart clouds from corner to corner. Lamu, can you confirm this is the inflection point?"

She held up the rod of False Iron attached to her logic engine, twisting the bronze dial at its base. "Yes. If we can breach anywhere, we can breach here."

He nodded, relaxing slightly. "Tarq, how much can you tell us?"

Still trembling anxiously, he mumbled a Divination incantation, then spoke quickly. "90 kilometers wide, gravity anomaly, atmosphere... high oxygen, but with lachrymators."

"Lachrymators?" Gudrun asked. "As in, tear gas?"

"T-That's right."

She shook her head. "Every time I think I've seen every fucked up thing this place can throw at us, it manages to pull something new out of its ass."

"It's fine," Bao said. "If our filters managed this one, they'll manage anything. Plus, we'll be able to refill our air tanks for the journey back."

"At these levels of oxygen and space, there's going to be stuff alive in here, Bao," Taharqa warned. "You know what that means."

"We made it past the 11th weave, didn't we? Between you and Gudrun, there's no wild beast that's going to be a threat to us." But as he said that, he hesitated. "What kind of gravity anomaly?"

"I can't tell from here," he told him. "Nothing too severe, so it won't crush us, at least."

Bao reflected on this for a moment. As cavalier as he could be about everything else, Lamu had picked up on the fact that physically abnormal Chambers still spooked him. It'd been long before she'd joined up, but she'd heard about how four years ago half of his old team had been killed when an unexpectedly high-pressure environment had punctured their suits. He'd been intoxicated when telling the story, and suffice it to say, the details had been colorful. (Mostly red and brown, but still.)

"Right," Bao said, and took a breath. "Abnormal terrain?"

"I would have said if there was," Taharqa told him.

"Then let's strike while the bronze is hot. Get us in."

He hesitated. "Shouldn't we-- I don't know, have some sort of plan, first?"

"What's there to plan?" Gudrun said. "This Chamber's never been breached before. We go in, we give it the once over, and if anything is fucky we get the hell out of there. And hope a paradox beast doesn't rip our head off at a 100 miles per hour or something." She shrugged. "It's a leap of faith."

"Right," he said, the word heavy. "Right." He nodded a few times, trying to psyche himself up. "Everyone ready?"

"Give me a second," Lamu said, looking intently at her logic engine. "I'm calibrating the script to operate at shorter range. We don't want to waste any time hunting around for the facility once we're inside."

"Good thinking, Lamu," Bao complimented her. "Any idea what this place is going to be?" He knows by now that she will rarely give information unprompted, even if she has it.

"A life-seeding facility, most likely," she answered. "It's linked to the Tower's storage, and the eris demand is along the right lines."

Gudrun whistled. "Biomancy, huh? Think it could have the anima script of a lost old world species?"

Bao's eyes swelled and dilated, like the very idea of this was making him drunk. "If it does, we'd be set for life. At least so long as we made it back to the Mimikos without some asshole 'confiscating' it."

"I wouldn't get your hopes up," Lamu replied absently. "I'm done."

"Alright," Bao said. "Tarq, take us through."

The other man nodded. "Ariadne, prepare for breaching."

"Understood. Adjusting sensors."

He spoke the Planar-Weaving Arcana, the incantation specifically designed for reuniting the broken pieces of the shattered plane, if only briefly. The world around the group distorted, the 'wall' at the edge of reality unfurling as the ground beneath their feet warped and pulled back, as if they were being thrust forward yet somehow remained motionless. An altogether different environment appeared beyond, then expanded like a yawning beast to swallow them whole.

Even by the standards of the Lavyrinthikos, the landscape that awaited them beyond was surreal. On the positive side of things, the air was now completely clear, and the area was even well-lit, a shaft of illumination from the plane's Great Lamp cascading down from overhead as if from a broken window, the white breaking into its component colors at the edges. And the anomalous gravity was mercifully low rather than high, and not even that bad; more like having suddenly lost huge amounts of weight than walking underwater.

But as for how it looked... well, it was hell. Or at least a close cousin.

Everything was blood red. Grass that grew up to waist-level like jagged thorns; growths somewhere between trees and tumors reaching upwards to startling heights; even low-lying clouds overhead. And there was a quiet, high-pitched wail coming from somewhere, like the very land itself was screaming.

Taharqa quickly spoke the Plane-Unweaving Arcana as they came through, then declared "breached!" Anxiously. He looked over the group. "Everyone in one piece?"

Lamu looked over their party, too. For the first time in a while, they could all be made out; Bao in his brown, patched-up hand-me-down compression suit covered in patches, Taharqa with his sleeker black one and arcane interpreter adorning his head, Gudrun with her two-inch thick mechanical armor covering her entire body. All of them in their thick leather gas masks.

And of course Ariadne, towering over them all with its elongated metal torso and four spindly arms, plus vaguely-biological grey hind legs, the four sensors along the side of its otherwise featureless head flickering violet.

Lamu sneered at the thing. She'd done her best with the parts available, but it was still a grotesquerie. An offensively ugly, inefficient hackjob with foundationally poor engineering and scripting, unfit for even the low-risk hauling it was designed for, let alone what they had it doing now. She tried not to obsess about this sort of thing nowadays, but every ponderous step it took felt like a reminder of her situation.

"I'm... good, I think," Gudrun said absently, her gaze cast over her surroundings. "Well, that's foreboding."

"If it's safe, it doesn't matter how it looks," Bao said, despite looking no less concerned. "Tarq, Lamu, give me a rundown."

The former was already finishing the Life-Sensing Arcana. "There's life signs all over the place," he said warily. "Not small ones, either. It looks like there's only one type in any significant numbers, but they're big, warm-blooded, complex organ biology--"

"No need for the lecture," Gudrun said, pointing. "There's one right over there."

Lamu had to squint, but it was true. The thing was probably close to half a mile in the distance, but the land here was so flat and uniform that she could make it out without too much difficulty, especially since she'd had her eyes replaced a few years back. Like most paradox beasts, it was an unusual sight.

In build, the closest comparison to the thing was probably a giraffe. It was all neck - a lower body the size of a big cat like a tiger or lion, with a tail to match, except its back turned upwards after the second set of feet and just went and went and went, standing somewhere in excess of 20 feet; an impossibility made possible by virtue of the extremely low gravity. Its gait was closer to an arthropod, though, and it had features to match - dark amber-colored, chitinous skin, and legs that grew skinnier and skinnier that what met the ground couldn't be called feet or even hooves so much as fingers. (Though they wouldn't learn that part for a few more minutes, since at this distance it was obscured by the grass.)

By far the most insectile component, however, was the head - though it was hard to discern if it was one head or two. At the tip, the neck split at a 45 degree angle, with two many-eyed bulbous protrusions on either side, and a toothless cavity that one could only assume was the mouth. Each of these protrusions had long tendrils erupting from their apex that hung all the way down to the grass below, seeming to serve as some manner of... limb? Tongue? Nose?

Evolution was always beautiful, in a way, but the uniqueness of the Chamber in which these things arose - combined with the ambiguous and not-necessarily-optimal intervention of the Ironworker's seeding technology, which had guided the growth of all life in the Remaining World - made that difficult to appreciate. And on the surface, the aesthetics were bad. It was not clear to her what did what.

"Gods above, that's an ugly one," Bao muttered. "Why do so many of them have to be fucking bugs?"

"Same reason there was more megafauna on Earth in prehistoric times, I guess," Gudrun speculated. "Lack of diverse competition means the best evolutionary strategy is for simple life to just get bigger and bigger."

"Is that really how it works?" Taharqa asked skeptically.

She shrugged. "Eh, it's been a while since tertiary school."

Bao shook his head. "Are they dangerous?"

"Not at first blush." Taharqa muttered another Divination incantation, holding his simple military scepter - adorned with the crescent moon of the Grand Alliance - tightly. "They've got a scary amount of muscle and a lot of nerves in their backs and necks I can't even guess the purpose of, but they seem to just be grazers. It looks like they use those tendrils to pull up food."

"I've got a location on the Ironworker facility," Lamu said. "59 kilometers, bearing 136 degrees towerward. No sign of any active security."

"Fantastic," Bao said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "Eris still looking good, Tarq?"

"Yeah," he replied, nodding. "Still over 50% capacity."

"Great. Take us close, then."

He nodded again, speaking first the words of the Form-Levitating to bring them all into the air, then the Planar-Cutting Arcana. The world bent, and they shot forward. Bao was right to be excited; all things considered, this delve was shaping up to be the best they'd ever had. A smooth trip deep into the plane without any serious complications, and a potentially massive score at the end.

Some of that was on account of their intel. While usually they had to make do with second-hand bought information - which would often be sold to multiple delving teams, resulting in a waste of time at best or violent clash at worst - or outright rumor, this time they were following a fresh signal picked up by Lamu directly, coming from largely unscouted, virgin territory. This was the sort of opportunity that came around once in a blue moon, but as you'd expect, often exacted a price of its own.

But this time, that hadn't happened. It felt too good to be true. Which meant that it probably was.

Lamu had been delving for almost two years now, although she'd been involved in the 'industry' for closer to seven. The concept was extremely simple. The Lavyrinthikos, the lowest and oldest plane that it was possible for humans to 'safely' visit - beneath the Atelikos, Diakos, and Thyellikos, in that order - was made up of a shattered assembly of countless small demiplanes, an artifact of one of the Ironworker's attempts to re-create the physics of the original Earth. Because they were never intended to exist in isolation, each had their own quirks and strange features. These varied tremendously, ranging from 'basically normal' to 'essentially an alien planet' to 'missing critical elements of the laws of physics'. Traveling between these various pocket dimensions, or 'Chambers' as they had become popularly known, was a matter of retracing the connections they'd once had to one another in the Ironworker's original conception of the plane as a single, spherical world.

This led to a process of procedural investigation and mapping not unlike trying to navigate a maze. Hence, the name.

During the Interplanar Colonization Period, the Lavyrinthikos had remained more or less untouched due to the conflicts with the Wyrm in the Diakos that preceded the Great Interplanar War, after which the ban on settling the lower planes had maintained that status quo until its relatively recent abolishment. That meant that they were still full of valuable shit. Naturally, people - the same sort of pseudo-suicidal frontiersmen who existed in every era - formed teams to steal said valuable shit. Again: Simple.

The only complicated part, in Lamu's reckoning, was why she was involved with it.

The transposition brought them to the other side of the Chamber, close enough to once again see the boundary clearly, though this time the lack of fog meant it was largely just a curtain of strangely-reflected light. Many of the Ironworker's old facilities were easy to miss - more a part of the environment then a distinct building - but that wasn't the case here. A tall dome of smooth dark stone the size of a large mansion, it rose from the sanguine earth like a tumor on inflamed flesh. Pillars of ambiguous purpose with streaks of False Iron rose at its four cardinal edges, with a single small arching doorway was set between two of them.

This was beautiful. But it was easy for simple things to be beautiful. Ugliness existed in the space between the profane and the divine.

Lamu wished she could turn the part of the brain that made these judgements off when she was trying to work.

"That doesn't look like a life-seeding facility, Lamu," Bao said, his brow curling as Taharqa lowered the group to the ground. "Unless those pillars are an unconventional design, I don't see anything that could be a dispenser."

"No," Lamu spoke with a frown, latching the rod of False Iron to her belt and dropping it.

"What do you think it is?"

"I'm not sure," she answered. "The dome leads me to think data storage, but the only reason to have the False Iron would be to maintain a high degree of synchronicity with the Tower, which fits with the signals I was picking up earlier. So it must be doing something actively."

"Oo, a mystery box," Gudrun chuckled.

"Maybe it's a probe?" Taharqa suggested, as they touched down. "Collecting environmental data and sending it back?"

"No, the eris use is too high for that," Lamu told him. "It's bringing something here from the Tower of Asphodel. Or at least, it was when it was active."

"Something physical?" Bao asked.

She hesitated. "Probably," she answered after a moment. "At this level of energy, it's almost certainly pulling from the Tower's hard storage. Its cargo, more or less."

"Almost certainly?"

"It could be pulling a lot of data from the soft storage," she clarified. "But it's unlikely."

"Why might it be doing that?"

She didn't answer, glancing down at her logic engine and muttering under her breath.

"You're being sketchy, Lamu," Bao told her.

"I just don't want to speculate baselessly."

"Not to interrupt the tiff you guys are having, but there's kind of something we need to deal with before we should be worrying about what kinda prize we're getting out of this," Gudrun cut in. "Look, by the door."

Lamu frowned, then circled the dome a few more steps, trailing behind Bao and Taharqa. The angle had concealed it partly at first, but one of the creatures was lingering by the entrance, its head lowered towards the grass aside one of the pillars. Up close, it felt a lot more threatening. Even inclined downwards, the neck was almost tall enough to reach the roof of the structure.

"Ah, shit," Bao muttered. "Just our luck."

"Man, these things really are freaky looking up close," Gudrun commented. "Like someone split it down the middle of its skull with an axe... Are they in the databank, Lamu?"

She shook her head. "Doesn't look like it."

"We'll probably make a decent sum even selling the route to this Chamber." Gudrun grinned to herself mirthfully. "Got any ideas for a name?"

Lamu twitched slightly-- Hopefully imperceptibly. This was a joke that Gudrun liked to play, since she knew she was extremely bad at naming things on the spot. This had been established when they'd encountered a species of silver, crab-like paradox beasts, and upon being all-but-forced - the other three all pressing the issue at once - Lamu had suggested the name 'Srab'. Now it became a stupid ritual that the other woman, in particular, thought was hilarious.

Lamu disliked this habit so many groups seemed to share, of finding little things that their peers struggled with and making them into teasing routines of microhumiliation. Even signalling you found it disagreeable only seemed to reinforce the dynamic. She'd long accepted it as one of the many ways that non-hers tended to be intrinsically childlike and strange, and that could only be navigated around.

The quirks of human interpersonal behavior were like a rash. It was better not to touch them.

"Give her a break, Gud," Bao said, after she was silent for a moment. "Let's stay focused. We're gonna need to clear a path."

"We might be able to just... sneak past it," Taharqa suggested. "They do seem passive. I could cast the Object-Silencing Arcana."

"Not gonna work," Bao told him. "Look-- The door's sealed. Knowing these places, we're probably gonna need to do some serious damage to get it open, and I'm not gonna risk that thing getting pissed off when we're right on top of it." He looked to Gudrun. "Can you take it out?"

"I can give it a shot," Gudrun said, raising her distortion rifle. She made this joke every time.

"Alright," Bao said. "Do it."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Taharqa said worriedly. "We don't know what they can do, or if they're pack animals. What if it brings a horde down on us? I don't like what that musculature could say about the size of its vocal cords."

Bao scoffed in irritation. "Lamu, where's the next nearest?"

She checked the head scanner. "Half a kilometer off. Southwest."

He nodded. "Worst comes to worst, then, we'll have enough time to get inside the building and hold out in there. With a body like that, it's not like it's gonna move like a cheetah."

"You haven't seen some of the stuff I've seen out here," Taharqa muttered.

Gudrun was raising her eyebrow. "Am I killing this thing, or what?"

"Yeah, go for it." Bao looked up and over his shoulder. "Ariadne, follow her at 10 meters off at her three. If shit hits the fan and the thing starts closing distance, move in and hit it."

"Understood, master," the golem replied.

Without further word, Gudrun turned, advancing about a hundred yards to face the creature directly, both to get a better shot and to ensure it'd focus on her if anything went wrong. Ariadne lumbered behind, moving slowly to conceal the weight of its steps.

Lamu didn't care much for Gudrun's personality, but she couldn't help but acknowledge how talented she was at killing. She had little idea what her background was except that she'd been in the military at some point like Taharqa - this wasn't a business where you made friends by asking personal questions, even if she'd been liable to do so - but she'd only ever met one woman who was a better shot, and shooting was far from Gudrun's only talent. She had fantastic reflexes and instincts, was handy with a knife, and one time the group had gone to a bar she'd almost kicked a guys head off. And she didn't seem to fear anything whatsoever.

If she'd been an arcanist, she could have been one of the most elite battlemagi in the planes, but Lamu suspected she'd sooner have jumped off the rim back in Last Respite then learn any amount of math.

She moved into position, kneeling down on the ground and raising her long, silver rifle. Compared to refractor rifles, their successors were eerily sleek and almost too light, with none of the fuss of variable lenses - just a simple dial to determine the output of the energy core. Someone born in the Tricenturial War could have mistaken it for a toy.

The beast never had a chance to scream at all. The first shot, invisible to the naked eye as it moved through the air, tore through the lower neck wholesale, warping and shredding the space it occupied and sending it tumbling down into the grassy soil the creature had been feeding from. (Lamu had expected it to fall like a tree, but instead it was more like a streak of string suddenly untaut, flopping over on itself.) Blue blood splattered over the wall of the structure behind.

Gudrun flicked the dial, and the second shot removed one of its front legs with chilling precision, and three more pierced the core of its chitinous body in succession. It was overkill, the thing slumping over before the last of the three even landed.

"Showoff," Taharqa mumbled.

"Kinda weak," Gudrun said casually as she strolled back over. "Hoped it might have had a second brain in its body and gone berserk, or something."

"What, like a monster in an echo game?" Bao chuckled with amusement. The two of them always got along best in the group.

"Anue, you're such a fucking nerd," she said, shaking her helmeted head back and fourth.

"We should get inside," Taharqa said. "I'm relieved it went smoothly, but these things might have some other way to sense peril."

"Guess it's better to be safe than sorry," Bao conceded. He raised his voice. "Ariadne, get that door open!"

"Sensors indicate the door appears to be locked," the golem declared.

He flattened his brow. "Yeah, I can tell that already, you hunk of scrap. I'm asking you to break it down."

"Breaking and entering is a violation of my ethics script," it continued matter-of-factly. "Grand Alliance law dictates that only an emergency situation warrants--"

Bao sighed. "Lamu, it's acting up again."

She didn't miss a beat. "Ariadne, dump propriety data and rotate catalogue to script port zayin-alef-vav," she ordered.

A soft whirring sound came from the golem's chest. "FORMATION mode incept. FORMATOR category null."

"Category 'cartography'."

More whirring. "FORMATOR category CARTOGRAPHY. Command CARTOGRAPHY."

"Registry current-loc tsadi-gimel. Make current-loc 'HOME6.'"

It was a crude solution, but she didn't have the patience right now to do it properly.

This time it was more of a grinding. "Command performed."

"End formation mode, catalogue default." She looked back to Bao. "It will work now."

"Why does telling it to make the lock homesick work?" Gudrun asked, cheerfully curious.

Lamu almost corrected her, but stopped herself. This was not a real question. She had to remind herself that Gudrun did not ask real questions.

"When we get back, you really need to go over the scripting properly," Bao said. "One of these days it's gonna fuck up when we're doing something time-sensitive." He nodded to the golem. "Ariadne, force that door open."

"Are you sure you wish for me to damage your own door, master?" it asked.

"Yeah," he replied flatly. "I'm renovating."

The golem advanced on the tall doorway. It smashed its body into it at an angle until it opened a sliver at the edge, then dug all four of its hands into the crack, heaving with all its strength. Stone ground against stone, and slowly it was dragged out of the frame, until the portal was large enough for a person to get through.

"Alright," Bao said approvingly, licking his upper lip. "Lamu, anything on the scans?"

"Heat, infrared, echogram... nothing," she said, shaking her head.

"Tarq?"

He finished speaking another incantation under his breath, furrowing his brow. "Nothing with the Life-Sensing Arcana, and the interior seems safe based on the Anomaly-Divining and Spatial-Mapping Arcana, but..." He hesitated. "Might run a few more, just to be sure. Since we don't know what kind of facility it is. Maybe expand the radius."

Bao sighed. "Didn't you just say it'd be safer for us to get right inside?"

"I know, but..." He grunted. "I have a bad feeling about this, all of a sudden."

"Gods, you're in a really whiny mood today," Bao chided him. "What's your eris at, now?"

"Just dropped to 45%."

He narrowed his eyes. "Then we can't waste any more. We'll need 30 just to get back, and there might be another incident." He bent his head toward the doorway. "C'mon, let's go. We'll get in, grab the storage, and get out."

Taharqa looked uneasy, but nodded.

They proceeded inside, leaving Ariadne - who was slightly too tall to fit in the door - to guard their retreat. Taharqa wasn't wrong; there was barely anything to see in the dark chamber beyond. A circular hall ringed a mostly-empty central chamber, save for a short line of glass pods against the left and right walls and a false iron and stone terminal at the center. Often these places looked like tombs - some even decorated with strange, abstract art, presumably wrought by the Ironworkers themselves over their countless millenniums of boredom - but this one felt more akin to a warehouse.

Lamu had always felt that was strange. They couldn't come down here, or even see it straightforwardly, and they must have planned to clean up these places before allowing human settlement even if the plane hadn't been a failure, like they'd done on the Mimikos. So what was the purpose? There was nothing sadder to her than art without an audience.

She almost preferred it this way. Made the job simpler, too.

Gudrun went in first, raising up her gas lamp. "This one's not much to look at."

"We're not here for the decor," Bao replied. "Lamu, get whatever's in that terminal. Tarq..." His eyes wandered the room. "Check out those tanks."

"I don't even know what they are," the other man replied. "I've never seen tanks in one of these before."

"That's why I want you to check them out, genius," he replied flatly. And Gud, do a quick skirt of the outer loop, just in case."

"Roger that," she said sardonically.

Lamu was already heading for the chamber's center. At a glance, the terminal looked much like many she'd seen in these facilities over the course of the past month. Two protrusions of stone, one etched with a complex, angular pattern of False Iron, and another, rounded one interspersed with strange, rune-covered golden rings. The rings were what they were after - the Ironworkers artifices, sometimes linked to the Tower of Asphodel itself with a False Iron core - but many of the ones here would be redundant ones found in every facility, and removing them crudely could damage the entire system.

She'd need to interface with the system and perform an overview of what she was looking at first. She tapped her rod against the side of the first protrusion, not bothering to take it off her waist, and began the analysis on her logic engine.

"These look like they were for growing biological organisms," Taharqa said. "It's tough to make out, but I can see the staining at the base of the tank, pipes..."

"Didn't you say this wasn't a seeding facility?" Bao called out to her.

"It's not," Lamu said, slowly frowning.

"Then what could those tanks be for?"

She didn't reply, though it was a near thing. Ironworker scripting was effectively impossible to read conventionally, not even because it was especially advanced, but just because of the sheer scale. Even so, the logic of how they organized their data had long been catalogued, and you could make a pretty safe guess as to the purpose of a given installation just by how many categories and routines were present in the system.

She'd seen this data structure before, and knew what part of the Tower of Asphodel it was pulling from. It wasn't the hard storage.

And it made the situation they were in far more concerning. Not because it meant there would be hidden defenses, or that this whole thing was a total bust. If anything, it was the opposite - this was an incredible find. One that she knew certain types of people had spent their entire lives hunting for.

But it happened to be one that, unless they were incredibly lucky, could get everyone here killed.

"Lamu?" Bao continued. "Any ideas?"

"Taharqa," she called out. "Come over here for a second."

He looked confused for a moment, but obeyed, stepping across the room.

"I asked you a question, Lamu," Bao said, crossing his arms in annoyance.

"I need something checked with the Power," she lied to him, not able to think of anything else. "Shouldn't use much eris. This might be one of the facilities where they were testing how to make human beings stable in the Remaining World."

This wasn't even a lie, technically, though there was more specificity in the term 'human beings' then he'd likely assume.

"Biomancy after all, then?" Bao asked, sounding curious. "Alright, go ahead."

"What do you need me to cast, Lamu?" Taharqa asked, confusion in his eyes.

She paused, having little to no idea how to approach the situation. What she needed from him was to help discreetly destroy the artifices, and if possible the entire terminal, but how to persuade him to that effect felt beyond her abilities. Even though she probably got on better with Taharqa than anyone else in the group, that was largely just because he knew how to mind his own business. She'd been doing her best, but hadn't managed to cultivate much of a sense of camaraderie.

She decided to just be direct and hoped he'd understand. "Taharqa," she said, lowering her head and voice, strands of curled dark hair falling over the left side of her face. "This is an Induction testing facility."

He blinked, his eyes going wide. "What?"

"For affixing pneuma," she explained, cold sweat rolling down her brow. "These tanks are for growing human subjects."

"I--" He hesitated. "That doesn't make any sense. The Ironworkers never performed Inductions. People only noticed the problem with children's pneuma not being able to carry an Index after they were already gone."

Her lips tightened. This was what she was afraid of.

"Taharqa," she said slowly. "I need you to listen to me carefully. Do you remember how the Arcane Office told you how if you got assimilation failure, you weren't supposed to discuss your symptoms with anyone? Even other arcanists?"

His eyes went widened. "I-- How do you--"

"That doesn't matter right now. What it's important is: Have you ever wondered why that is?" She looked at him intensely. "It's because--"

"Uh, guys?" Gudrun called out from the outer hall, her tone unusually cautious.

"What is it?" Bao yelled back.

"There's food here," she told him.

You could have cut the silence with a knife. Lamu's eyes froze, then darted around the chamber.

Bao stammered. "I-- What?"

"I'm seeing crumbs, some oranges in a bag here," Gudrun continued. "I don't think we're the first ones to--"

And then there was blood on Lamu's face. An icicle was protruding out of Taharqa's right eye.