The night before they left, Ita showed up for dinner. Jenna’s primary nanny Diane had requested the night off; Rissa happily shared that she thought Diane was planning a date night of her own. Normally, that would have meant either handing Jenna off to Erika or watching her themselves, but Ita had volunteered to watch the daughter of her Shameless One.
Serenity hoped she hadn’t said it that way in front of anyone else; he really didn’t need that sort of hit to his reputation.
During the meal, Amani and Serenity discussed the way to get to the Deep Gate. Ita was excited at the idea of investigating an ancient prison for the Shameless; Serenity couldn’t resist her eagerness and invited her to come with them.
When he offered to bring Rissa as well, Rissa rejected the offer with a soft smile. She had other plans for the day, though she did say that she was going to pull him away for an entire day some time in the not too distant future. Serenity wasn’t sure if he was happy about that or not; she muttered something about a vacation, but he didn’t really feel like he needed one. Maybe she just wanted to spend time with him? That was definitely worthwhile.
Date Night turned out to be a ridiculously campy movie ‘based on a true story’ of the Battle of Denver. Some of it was well done; it used a mix of actors and real footage from reporters who watched the action from closer than they probably should have to sell the reality. There was even footage of his meeting with the shaman. Serenity hadn’t realized it was caught on tape, much less that the entire translated text was available.
Not everything was well done, however. The rabbit-woman who followed “Serenity” around had to be supposed to be Ita, even though the name they used was Illia. The fact that somehow there managed to be a love triangle between Serenity, Illia, and Clarissa in the hours leading up to the battle was simply ridiculous; Rissa wasn’t even at the battle and no one had the kind of time they showed when they were preparing for war.
Rissa laughed her way through the movie. Serenity didn’t find it as amusing, but being with Rissa while she had fun was worth a lot. The time after the movie was even better. Maybe that vacation she was planning would be fun after all.
The next morning, Amani, Ita, and Serenity made their way through A’Atla’s corridors to the Vault. Amani only knew her way to the Deep Gate from there or from a particular surface entrance that no longer existed; it must have been destroyed in the fighting.
The first place Amani took them “didn’t look right.” The second one didn’t even have a door, just a dead end. The third ended when they reached a lift shaft that went up but not down.
Amani stared at A’Atla’s version of an elevator with a complicated expression. “I have no idea where we are.”
Serenity pulled up the map. He hadn’t been paying attention to how far they were from the Vault; each of the routes Amani had picked wound around like a drunk snake. Even with that, none of them really seemed to have a better route; for all that A’Atla was a ship, quite a bit of the interior made no sense, especially near the outer edges. As it turned out, they were over a mile from their starting point if they’d walked in a straight line. They were also three stories lower, but Serenity knew that wasn’t as deep as A’Atla went.
“Maybe we should have started with the map,” Amani muttered. “I couldn’t have done any worse.”
“I’m not so sure,” Serenity stated. “Look at the map. You’ve been tracing your way around something. It has to be large, but I don’t see a faster route here from our last stop.”
Amani seemed startled. “You can see the map? You don’t have a handheld.”
Oh, right. He still hadn’t mentioned that the Wizard of A’Atla had remote access, had he? Serenity could probably give her better access at this point, but it was easier to just pull one of his tablets out of his Rift and show her. Aide had the entire thing recorded, after all, and this way he could overlay the points where they’d stopped and their route.
It took them a while going over the map, but eventually Amani decided that she knew where they’d gone wrong: one of the time they’d gone down a broken lift, they’d gone down two floors to the bottom instead of stopping in the middle. She was pretty confident that the reason she’d gotten confused was that below that was always under construction, so she didn’t think about the turn; she didn’t have a construction authorization, so the lift automatically directed her to the exit. She’d never really thought about it.
Serenity didn’t comment on the fact that “always under construction” was a bit suspicious when it was near something important. It might be nothing or it might not; either way, it didn’t matter for now.
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The backtracking took an hour, but soon after they took the right exit from the lift shaft, Amani perked up. Serenity took that as a sign that she’d started to recognize the route again. Amani even started to talk, something she’d clearly been too nervous about before.
“I was never here until I was selected to build the Vault.” Amani sighed heavily. “Well, until my design was selected. It was strange; I had no idea that was what I was working on. I thought it was just a set of enchantments to make a secure meeting room, but Arvahd sent my design in as his entry. I’d never even heard of the competition!”
Competition?
“He planned to pay me for my work, which wasn’t cheap, but to take the prize money for himself. Even the tenth place prize would have been more than double what he paid me.” She snorted, clearly amused. “What he didn’t realize was that it wasn’t just a competition. When he took the money, he also signed up to work on the project - and since my piece won, he was supposed to be the lead designer. Which he couldn’t do without me, but he also couldn’t contact me or get out of it without returning the money and admitting what he did. So he tried to fake his way through it; he was a bit of an enchanter, after all.”
“Why couldn’t he just hire you?” Serenity knew that was done all the time in the modern world, after all; if you couldn’t do the work yourself for whatever reason, hire someone who could.
“He presented it as his work. If he hired me, he’d have to admit he lied. The really funny thing is that if he’d admitted he was managing my work and entered the pair of us as a team, he’d have gotten half the prize money and a stipend for as long as I worked on the team with no further work required on his part. Lying meant he forfeited the whole thing!” Amani laughed brightly.
“It wasn’t until it all fell apart for him that I found out just how much he made off my work on other contracts, too. That was funny; I didn’t mind half as much as the solicitor thought I should. It was interesting work.” Amani shook her head with a grin. “I guess that doesn’t matter anymore anyway. What does matter is that he was caught and confessed. That’s how I ended up lead designer on the Vault; it even worked that way in reality. No one else was able to pull everything together.”
Amani took a deep breath then gave a long sigh. “That’s how I ended up down here the first time. I asked a simple question, if there was anywhere in A’Atla that had a stronger material than what I knew. I’d seen hints of something, but A’Atla didn’t want to share. She can be like that, she likes people to explore. When they brought me down here, they didn’t even know the area around the Deep Gate used three different types of A’Atlan stone! All they knew was that the area was strong and secure.”
Amani looked down and scuffed the floor with her foot. “I hope Calu got out. Some of his Wolves weren’t always nice, but he was incredibly polite.”
With that, Amani was lost in thoughts of the past. They didn’t last very long, because it was only minutes before they reached the first signs of trouble at the Deep Gate: there was a statue of a wolfman in the middle of the corridor. It looked like the statue was of a mid-transformation werewolf with a spear attacking something. The statue was on its side, as though it had been knocked over, but that wasn’t the odd part. The odd part was that the spear and armor were both real, not part of the statue. They were magical, if not extremely so, and both looked like they’d been used in combat.
There was very little question about what had happened; something had turned him to stone. Basilisk was the usual top candidate but Serenity couldn’t rule out a Gorgon. Someone with the ability to curse someone to turn to stone was also possible. Whatever the cause was, it pointed to one thing. “Somehow, I think the Deep Gate is open.”
He looked up at Amani, who was staring at the stoned werewolf in shock. “Did you know him?”
Amani shook her head. “No, this isn’t Calu. I didn’t really know the others. They were … they were just Calu’s wolves. But to see this…” Tears gleamed in her eyes.
Serenity sighed. “This is your first time seeing a body, isn’t it?”
Amani nodded. She seemed almost ashamed of that fact.
“You can go back if you want; I’ll escort you. There’s no need to see what’s here.” When Amani didn’t respond, Serenity tried again. “It’s not shameful to …” He trailed off. That wasn’t a good way to say it. In fact, he couldn’t figure out how to say it. Saying she was lucky to not have had to deal with it before wasn’t any better. “It’s hard the first time. It eventually gets easier if you see it enough. Then you wish it had stayed hard.”
Amani looked up at Serenity with tears running down her face. She looked like she was about to start bawling at any moment, but she threw her arms around Serenity instead and enveloped him in a tight hug. He could feel the shudders she tried to mask as she cried into his shoulder. He patted her back to reassure her but that only seemed to make her cry harder.
What was he supposed to do now? This was exactly the sort of situation he didn’t know how to handle. He could sort of handle it when Rissa cried on his shoulder; he knew what she wanted was reassurance. He didn’t even know Amani that well; what should he be doing?
Ita was no help. She was sitting next to the stoned wolfman laughing at him. Anyone who didn’t know Sterath wouldn’t be able to tell she was laughing, but she was. She could clearly tell he was out of his depth but either she didn’t have any idea how to help or she didn’t want to. She probably didn’t know how any more than he did; after all, her experience was as unlike Amani’s as was possible for anyone. She hadn’t been sheltered for a long time.
Maybe Rissa could help? She’d laugh at him, too, but he knew she’d be willing to help Amani first. She might even have some ideas on what he could do if this happened again.