Bath led the descent into the tunnel. It wasn't as deep as the passage on Vast Desert, but it was still a solid five-hundred meters deep. When they reached the bottom, they found that the tunnel made a sharp ninety-degree turn, proceeding parallel with the surface.

Eventually, they found themselves standing before the threshold of a pitch-black chamber.

"Feels like deja vu, doesn't it?" Lisa murmured.

Bath had to agree: the passageways were similar to those on Vast Desert. Did Amethyn also possess a crash-landed arc?

"But there's nobody in the room," Lisa added. "Last time, AI Ninety-Seven was sitting in wait."

Bath quickly condensed his form, drawing in any strands of essence that he'd kept out as feelers. He didn't want to set off any protective systems that might view his diffuse essence as a threat. Then, he made the first step into the room beyond.

"There wasn't an AI Ninety-Seven at all back on Drift Jag," Bath reminded her.

Lisa made a face. "But that ship was different: It had clearly been overrun by robots, was radioactive, and buried deep under a mountain. I don't think it was meant to be found, or at least it crash-landed way worse than the Egdelek Arc."

"Check the room again with echolocation," Bath instructed. By now, he was standing at the center of the chamber. "See where I'm standing? There's an impression in the ground that stretches across its diameter."

"I see it," Lisa replied, walking forward. "But how are we supposed to turn this room on?" The glowing lights that had illuminated the room last time were all dark. Bath cocked his head. Before, AI Ninety-Seven had activated the mechanism that supplied power to the floor and opened up to the arc below.

Instead of answering her, Bath bent down and pressed his fingers into the impression in the floor. He began to push in opposite directions. Soon enough, he pried the floor apart, revealing the entrance to an arc-like ship.

"Nice," Lisa called out. "This door wasn't built with people like us in mind, right?" Bath had clearly had to exert a decent amount of effort to manually open the floor; no normal sapient would be able to similarly brute force their way onto the ship.

Bath gave her a lazy smile and began to drop down. "Come on, let's see what's here."

---

The inside of the ship was completely empty. Every library had been sacked and looted, while even the ship's entrance room--normally the bedroom--had been stripped of all furniture. The control room's pedestal was still intact, but one of its window-screens had been cracked. Altogether, the ship had clearly seen better days.

As he and Lisa stood in the control room together, he couldn't help but voicing aloud a suspicion. "Do you think that whatever was contained within this arc had something to do with Amethyn's last extinction?"

Lisa sighed. "I was thinking something similar, but I can't rectify the facts. AI Ninety-Seven said that the Egdelek Arc had only crashed a few thousand years ago. If this ship had crashed years earlier, I'm sure that whatever organization sent it out would have realized this strand of gates is dangerous. That being true, I doubt that the other two arcs would have crash landed on their respective planets. Therefore, I have a feeling that this ship arrived within the past few thousand years."

Bath nodded. "That makes sense--after all, I can't imagine that a ship's blueprints wouldn't change over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. If this ship really had arrived before Amethyn's latest extinction event, it would have to be significantly older than the Egdelek Arc."

He paused, looking at Lisa, the two of their eyes widening.

"So, if the ship only arrived within the past few thousand years..." she began.

"...Who was on Amethyn to loot it?" he finished.

Lisa looked around, an expression of unease clear on her face. "We're missing something," she muttered.

"We'll have time to figure it out later," Bath said. "Let's return to the surface for now and establish the new city-seed."

"Okay; you're right. I bet Fartuun will be able to use her V-Tap to pick up on details we're missing and try to figure out what's going on."

---

When the two of them returned to the surface, Lisa rifled through her Church gown's concealed, slitted pockets and retrieved a city-seed.

"I'm planting this one," she stated. "Bath."

"What?"

"You said that the city-seed has thoughts of its own."

He gave her an amused look. "It does, in a sense."

Lisa reached out to the city-seed, initiating a tie between the two of them. Dragonleaf fronds felt like blank slates to be molded; to Lisa's mind, the city-seed didn't feel any different. It certainly didn't have a shell.

"You have to grow it first," Bath added. "It's dormant now."

"Is there any way to slow down the growth process?" Lisa inquired. "I've seen lots of city-seeds grow, but I still don't really understand how they develop. It'd be really helpful for my own understanding if I could view the process at half speed."

Bath nodded slowly. "It's done."

Lisa didn't give any indication that Bath's on-the-fly gene editing surprised her.

Good, he thought. Even though Lisa had known what he could do for years, she'd still been a bit startled when he actually started putting his power to use. It'd been less than a half year since they'd started college, after all; before then, she hadn't seen him do much more than transform into different animal shapes.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Plant it, but keep your hand connected to a part of it at all times. It'll probably receive a good deal of influence from your mind," he explained. "In return, you should get a better sense of how it develops."

As soon as Lisa put the seed onto the soil, it began to spring up, leaves and roots expanding in every direction. She quickly gripped onto a coil of green stretching out horizontally, treating it like the kind of dragonleaf tether people used to communicate with non-verbal quasi-sapients.

For the first few minutes, she watched attentively as the seed's kernel expanded out. While she couldn't see what was happening below ground, she had a clear view of the city-seed's rapidly expanding canopy. Even slowed down by half, the growth reminded her of a nature video accelerating a year's worth of plant growth until it fit within mere seconds.

"How is it growing so fast?" she asked, genuinely perplexed. She'd never asked Bath before, taking the city-seed's growth for granted, but now she was curious.

Bath turned around to give her a sheepish grin. "I might have cheated a bit," he confessed.

"What?"

"Why do you think that I needed to personally make each of the city-seeds?" he asked.

"Uh..."

"I put a tiny sphere of condensed energy within each of them," he explained. He held out his hand; soon, a little dot the size of a fish egg hovered over his palm. "See this? It's incredibly massive."

Lisa narrowed her eyes. "The city-seed is light as a feather," she observed.

"Hold on," Bath interrupted. "What's important is that the mass doesn't want to stay in one place. It actually becomes raw energy, which in turn saturates the seeds, exciting their electrons."

Lisa gave Bath a dubious look. "How could the tiny mass you put into the seeds do that?" Wouldn't that lead to high levels of radiation, or something?

"Well, it's not that much energy," Bath replied. "A big part of why the city-seeds work is that they're much more efficient than unmodified plants."

Lisa shook her head. "Bath, I don't care how efficient your plants are; the city-seeds are the size of cities."

"Anyways," he said, continuing with his explanation. "The atoms in the seeds, whose electrons are in an elevated state of energy excitement, contain a huge, but balanced, repulsive force. This dissipates as the seed expands out into a city; after its growth is complete, it will rely on solar power and nutrients from the soil to sustain its growth."

"So you're basically saying that you energize the electrons within the seed so that the repulsion between adjacent atoms is much higher than it should be," Lisa summarized. ”Which in turn creates a source of harvestable energy." It almost sounded like a bizarre reactor.

"Something like that."

Lisa sighed and leaned on a nearby dragonleaf wall. "I still think it's impossible."

Bath shrugged.

"Maybe you're bending the rules," Lisa hypothesized. "All of the things you've been doing with COTD are seemingly impossible." It was one of the reasons why people so easily believed that Bath was a real god.

Bath narrowed his eyes. "I've been considering about that," he admitted. "But it doesn't feel like I'm bending the rules."

Lisa was about to reply when she felt the city seed's thoughts begin to develop. "Oh!" she exclaimed.

"What's it showing you?" he asked.

"Darkness and cold," Lisa replied, frowning. She sent back feelings of reproach--darkness and cold definitely aren't sentiments that a newborn plant should be thinking about--accompanied by the image of a warm house fire. In response, the city-seed began to poke at her memories, reminding Lisa of an illiterate child in a library haphazardly pointing to shelved books. It wasn't able to access her memories, of course, but it seemed to be aware that they were there, and that alone was enough.

She began to feed the city-seed random information, curious as to how it would use the memories and ideas that she was sharing with it. In general, the memories she was giving it weren't very clear and were jumbles of sentiments and images, but the city-seed took in all of them and wanted more.

Eventually, she had to break off the stream of information by removing her uncovered hand from one of the seed's dragonleaf branches.

Bath's eyes flicked up. "How was it?" he asked.

"Disorienting," she replied, cringing. "Whenever I shared a memory with it, I was forced to remember it as well. But they didn't make much sense. Honestly, I couldn't really understand the majority of what I was sending over."

“You think differently than I do, and differently from the city-seed," he said in agreement. "But that's not a bad thing. I can already see that the city-seed is taking influence from what you've shared."

Lisa followed his finger as it pointed to a nearby building. Instead of a normal, blockish shape, the building's edges were wavy and malformed. Lisa grimaced, worried about its structural integrity.

"Uh, Bath, maybe this is why humans shouldn't try to share lots of information with city-seeds."

He began to laugh. "Lisa, the building is beautiful. Just look around you."

She did, and began to realize that other buildings were also taking on a wavy aspect. Many of them looked like thick trees rather than apartment buildings. In an attempt to get a better vantage point, Lisa used her magnetic sense to rise into the air. From a few hundred feet up, she began to realize...

"Do you recognize them?" Bath asked, suddenly materializing behind her. His torso brushed against her back, his arms crossing over her shoulders and draping down her front. She twisted her head to make room for his on her right shoulder.

"Yeah, I recognize them." The city seed below was quickly coming to resemble the forest in which she and Bath had often visited in high school...though on a larger scale.

"Told you the city seed would take inspiration from your own thoughts."

"But it still doesn't have a shell," she retorted. "It can't really think."

"Does that matter?" he asked. "AI Ninety-Seven doesn't have a shell, but is, for all intents and purposes, a sentient being."

Lisa paused, unsure of how to respond. She understood Bath's point, but after spending her entire life touching people's shells, the lack thereof felt...extremely unnatural. It was like someone saying that a headless person could think without a brain. Even Bath had a shell.

"Remember, Lisa," Bath added, "You're only able to read shells because of the kursi symbiote. Just because the symbiote doesn't affect AI Ninety-Seven doesn't mean that AI Ninety-Seven can't think." He shifted his head's position to the other side of her shoulders. "That's still up in the air, I know--AI Ninety-Seven might not actually be intelligent--but the point stands. The neural network of the city seed is spread out and decentralized. That might be what prevents the kursi symbiote from infecting it, leading to your inability to register its emotional shell."

"...Maybe," she said. "I see your point. I might be conflating lack of intelligence with immunity to the kursi symbiote."

Bath nodded.

"Hey, what's that?" Lisa asked, her eyes focusing on one of the city's gardens. Her eyes lit up and she slipped out of Bath's arms, hovering forward. "It's us," she laughed.

At the center of the garden was a wooden growth. She could tell that the dragonleaf had been naturally shaped, rather than carved away; while this was unsurprising, it only served to enhance the beauty of the statue before her. While each city seed's many gardens contained artistic statues--many of which she knew that Bath had personally designed and imprinted upon each of the city seeds--she had never felt a personal connection to any of them.

This statue, though, brought warmth into her chest. It was a scene of her riding on Bath, his wolf's head gentle and proud. While the wood made it hard to tell, she could discern that the Lisa riding the wolf was still young.

"Is this the first time we went out in the woods?" Bath asked, shooting Lisa an inscrutable look.

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Lisa," he stated. "Think of the thoughts you shared with the city seed."

"I shared a lot of thoughts," she grumbled. "But...I think you're right: this is the first time I really began to see the real you."

"We make quite a pair," he replied, eyes distant.

Lisa turned away from the statue to look at Bath. "You know, however you're able to make all of this possible...thanks. Without you, I'd still be in school, living out a boring, meaningless life." Well, at least until some kursi organization recruited her. More than that, though, millions of people on Earth would still be dying of preventable things like hunger, thirst, old age, or disease.

"It's not for you," Bath intoned, voice coming out in a low, serious monotone. He paused for a moment. Then, his expression softened and he gave Lisa a lop-sided grin. "It's because of the Big WD!"

She stared at him for a solid two seconds before erupting into a fit of laughter. "Right," she drawled. "The Big WD." How could she forget?