Myra woke with a slight headache, a couple of calluses on her hand, and a faint sense of reserved satisfaction. The feeling of having a difficult all-nighter done and over with, but still with the need to get up early in the morning for the very class it was for.
Myra’s calves were burning as she trudged back across the bridge with Shera to meet Chrysji and Geel at the appointed time.
“So. I’m told you all did a [unknown word] job with that bridge of ours.”
“Yeah, it should stay working as long as the planks are restocked periodically. By the way, Shera still doesn’t speak Unkmirean.”
“Got it,” Geel said in Unkmirean.
If Myra had hoped he would be more polite now that they had passed the little interview, she was sorely mistaken. If anything, he was more casually disrespectful now that they weren’t potential clients. He was lying laterally on the sofa, his feet propped up on the arm. He was barely looking at them at all, instead fixated on a solitary game with a rubber ball that involved tossing it at the ceiling. The objective seemed to be to get as close as possible to the ceiling without touching it.
“Today,” he instructed, “I want you getting situated and getting up to speed on our rune work. Tomorrow, you’ll join us for training, and—”
“Wait hold on,” Myra said frantically. “We haven’t agreed to join yet.”
The ball hit the ceiling and went careening off. He scowled, either at the ball or at Myra.
“What do you mean, you haven’t agreed? You agreed to do the interview.” The ball telekinetically snapped back to his hand.
“Er, yeah, but that doesn’t mean—I mean, we still want to know what you’re going to be having us do.”
“We discussed this already. You’ll maintain our runework.”
“You… you don’t have a specific mission you want us for?”
“What are you going on about?” he said impatiently. “We already went over this. You’ll accompany us if any missions require it. That all depends on who comes along and hires our services.”
“Yeah but—but—”
But what? He did say that pretty clearly.
“Ah, I see.” He snapped his fingers, and a glint shone in his eye. “We still haven’t discussed your salary. That’s what this is about.”
“Er—Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. How much are we going to make?”
“Our general salary structure is a monthly base salary, plus bonuses for successful jobs.” He went on to explain the pay levels, which didn’t seem to match up with anything about the cost structure he had explained in the last loop. Myra let the numbers wash over her until Shera tugged on her sleeve.
“C-can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sorry, can you excuse us? I think Shera has concerns about the, uh, the money.”
Geel frowned, but he gestured for them to go on.
“W-w-what are we doing?” she whispered, once they’d found an isolated spot.
“Sorry, I know you can’t follow along, but—”
“I’m getting the gist of it,” she said. “It sounds like y-you were making plans to move here.”
“Well, they say they just want general runecrafters.”
“So the job opening has n-nothing to do with w-what they’re doing in Ralkenon.”
“I mean, they clearly need runecrafters—” She double-checked for anyone watching, then moved slightly more into an open area. “They clearly need runecrafters for something covert, right? They’ve been so evasive about it!”
She hesitated. “I d-dunno. I th-think eeverything they’ve said is consistent with just needing a general runecrafting expert on hand. They’re evasive because they’re a weird d-dubiously legal group of mercenaries. If they have a specific job for us, covert or not, they would need to, y-you know, tell us about it.”
“Maybe they’re still testing us.”
“They know we’re from Casire!” she insisted. “If they wanted help because they’re planning an attack on Casire, they would have passed over us, no matter how convenient we appeared!”
“Okay. Fine. I agree. It doesn’t all add up. And I don’t want to actually join up with these guys any more than you do—”
“You sure seemed eager to impress them yesterday.”
Huh? “Shera, what the—” fuck are you talking about?
She stopped herself from saying anything she’d regret.
Good Shera loop. Good Shera loop.
“Are you talking about the bridge? I just wanted to fix that stupid bridge. It was fun, and it was driving me crazy. But, Shera! No matter why they want to hire us, we’re going to be on the inside. We can dig around for information. If we get to craft a few runes while we’re at it, all the better.”
She twitched.
“Look, I understand that joining up with a… mercenary group… is a lot more than I’ve asked of you in the past loops. But I could really use your help.”
“I d-didn’t say I wouldn’t help.”
Myra hugged her. She squeaked, her now-familiar first-hug-of-the-loop squeak. Good Shera loop. “I knew I could count on you!”
“Of-of course!”
Myra hugged her again for good measure. “Okay!” Good Shera loop.
After finally hashing things out with Geel (which mostly involved losing at salary negotiation), they were sent to tour the compound with Chrysji. The circular platform was massive, about a kilometer in diameter, with wide open spaces and buildings erected mostly near the edge. At the center of the platform, a number of soldiers were engaged in a training exercise.
The first stop was to the barracks, which was a very long, rectangular building with hundreds of beds arranged in a single row, each spaced less than a meter apart from the next, with shelf space overneath for personal belongings. The room smelled unmistakably like ‘human.’
“Oh, so, we… have to sleep here?”
Myra couldn’t help but notice that the large, rectangular room lacked entirely in privacy. There were no bed curtains or dividers, and there was no segregation by gender (and the organization was mostly men, probably 70-80%, based on what she’d seen so far).
“There are two beds with yinz’s names on them.” She pointed. The two beds were at the far end, adjacent to a stretch of unused beds. Evidently, they just assigned the beds in order as new members joined. The one directly next to Myra’s, on the other side from Shera’s, was unmade and had sheets stained an unmentionable color.
Shera seemed unconcerned. But then, she probably wasn’t planning on sleeping anyway.
They changed into what Chrysji called the ‘casual uniforms’—basically just slacks and tank tops with the organization’s frog insignia. There was no dedicated changing room. This was going to be a joy.
They carried on with the tour. To Myra’s slight surprise, many of the buildings were not nearly as sparse and utilitarian. In fact, the barracks, plain and wooden, were more of an exception rather than the norm. The administrative hall at the front, the dining hall, and the open-air bathhouse were rather homely, with intentional, artistic masonry, and statues made of petrified wood at the entrances. Vegetation around the platform was spare, but there were large patches of dirt arranged as if intended for a garden. Or more likely, Myra, thought, they had sported gardens at one point, but no longer.
The training gym was another plain building, large, wooden and rectangular like the barracks, but the storehouse to the side was another artfully crafted hut.
They were shown to the mess hall, the meeting rooms, the medical center, the logistics office, and the supply rooms.
And then there was—
At the dead center of the platform was a small shack Chrysji called “The Well.” The shack was dilapidated, and the wood was both rotting and had weird bulbous growths on the inside. It had a very distinctive smell—Myra couldn’t tell what it was, but it was similar to the faint smell from the previous day, the one that had otherwise dissipated around the compound. The shack had no floor, and the ground was mud. The centerpiece of the room was a hole in the ground, about a meter across. There was a bucket hanging by a rope from the ceiling, and there was a crank.
“Er… Is this where you get—”
Myra was going to say water, but she stepped up to the hole, which opened to naught but inky blackness. To her shock, however, was the bucket, whose insides were stained with a dark and purple blotch. It might have been mold. There was no fucking way she or anyone else would drink water out of this thing. “This is, uh—what’s this for?”
“You’ll need to spend some more time around here,” she said. That was it for the tour of The Well.
◆
Chrysji then showed them the actual place to get water (which was very clean), and after that was the runeshop. It was near the edge of the platform, very out-of-the-way, but in one of the ‘nice’ buildings. Functionally, it was adequate. In fact, it was more spacious than it needed to be, and it certainly didn’t want for carving tools. It had all the usual reference books a runecrafter might need, and there were trunks full of diagnostic equipment. In fact, it would have been really useful to have had access to the room during the interview.
Actually—it was surprisingly clean and well-kept given that it evidently didn’t have a keeper.
“Is this used often? By anyone else?”
“Don’t think so.”
She spoke casually and carefree, no hint of shiftiness or doubt in her voice, but the runeshop had obviously been used recently. Shera seemed to find her response pretty suspect because she gave Chrysji an odd look. Chrysji didn’t seem to notice at all.
They were instructed to spend the day familiarizing themselves with the runework around the base, but that the next day they would be joining for regular training exercises with the rest of the team. So there was that to not look forward to, but in the meantime, they had a good excuse for nosing around. Geel had insisted that they be supervised for the time being, which was understandable, but they could pretty much go wherever.
Most of the organization’s runework (sans the suspension bridge) seemed to be pretty reasonable, mostly what she either knew or assumed to be standard. The group had various runic weapons; their pistols were enchanted to reduce kickback and improve aim, that kind of thing. There was a runic console that controlled the various defenses besides the bridge, like the massive anti-teleport field that blanketed the platform.
It didn’t take too much work to track down the runic wheel that she’d seen Geel’s team carry into Ralkenon. It was straightforwardly constructed, and it didn’t take much deciphering to figure out its purpose: to part a large body of liquid.
Huh. At the time, I assumed it didn’t work because it relied on the Common Library. But it was probably built out here, it doesn’t rely on the library at all. Knowing what I know now, it must be—
She inspected it closely, running her fingers down the edge of the cylinder, one line at a time, shining a bright light around it so she could see. Finally, she found what she was looking for—a deep scratch that cut through multiple runes.
It’s just not maintained.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
In fact, it was worse than that. The device was clearly designed for lakes and rivers. For water. Even if she were to fix the scratch, Myra was fairly certain it wouldn’t work for lava at all.
◆
There was some small relief in the understanding that the antagonistic mercenary group would actually just drop the ball on all their runework if Myra didn’t interfere. Even so, the pit in her stomach didn’t let up as she approached the mess hall with Shera.
The dinner crowd was a loud one. They were packed together, men and women, talking boisterously and laughing and ribbing each other. More than a few were drinking. She couldn’t help but remember what Iz had said about the group’s appearance near Ralkenon.
There was drinking, dancing. Throwing coins in the air.
They were celebrating.
Geel clapped his hands once. He immediately had the attention of the entire room, which quickly split to the two girls, quite a bit more of it going to Shera. “For too long,” Geel started, “we have been without any practitioner of the most esteemed pseudo-linguistic art of precise [unknown word] [unknown word] geometric craftswomanship. That changes today. Ladies, would you introduce yourselves?”
“Uh, hi.” She waved. “I’m Myrabelle. Um… I’ve been interested in runecrafting since I was a kid, and I’ve always wanted to use my skills for covert offensive applications.” She didn’t actually say ‘Myrabelle’, she gave a fake name. Everything was mentally translated anyway.
Geel looked to Shera, on whom many eyes were still fixed. “I’m Sh-Shera,” she said, inferring the situation from contextual clues.
“Now, why don’t we all introduce ourselves back?” Geel asked of the room.
Every soldier in the hall, in unison, said their own name.
“Great! Two of you got all that?”
“Er—”
“So! Anybody got runes they need read or written or turned upside-down, you hit up these girls.” He slapped them both on the back in an overly friendly manner. Shera jolted upright as if he’d sent an electric shock through her body. “You’ll find them most of the time in our runeshop, 6-8 each morning, 7-9 in the evenings, and they might be anywhere else any of the other times, but you can still find them, and they still have to help you out.”
“Wait up!” one of the soldiers called out from the back. “Where’s this rune shop, then?”
“We have a rune shop?” someone else asked. There were a few other quizzical comments.
“It’s on the east side somewhere,” Geel said vaguely. “You know, the—” He kind of sketched a map with his finger in the air. “Over there.” There was a chorus of “oohs” from the crowd.
Myra tried to share a bewildered look with Shera, but the girl still couldn’t understand anything they were saying, leaving her blissfully unaware of the presentation and its outright bizarreness. Geel finished with yet more praise for the utility and intrinsic beauty of the runic arts, all sentiments that Myra could get behind, even if they were expressed oddly.
◆
Dinner was pork, potatoes, and canned something-or-other. Despite the ambiguity of the last item, it didn’t smell or taste half-bad.
Reluctantly, they chose seats near Geel and Chrysji, who were sitting with a number of other people that Myra recognized from the team in Ralkenon. She took a spoonful of the mystery dish, which had more of a kick than she was expecting. She tried to listen in, but the conversation was somewhat inane. They gossiped about people Myra didn’t know.
She focused on Shera, who looked uncomfortable squished at the cramped table they’d sat at. “What are you gonna do tonight?” Myra asked.
“What d’you mean?”
“Are you gonna sleep in the barracks or…”
“I don’t sleep. I’ll find something to do around the c-compound.”
“Are you sure?”
“What’s th-the alternative? I could go to bed, but I’d just lay there all night. I’ve never been able to fall asleep without drugs. It’s okay, I-I’m used to it.”
Myra wasn’t thrilled about sleeping in a room with 100 other people, and she was even less thrilled about being on her own without Shera, but Shera was right. There wasn’t any sense in having her crawl in bed if it wasn’t going to do anything for her.
And so come nighttime, Shera wandered off and Myra prepared for bed.
She vaguely considered moving to one of the empty beds farther toward the end of the hall and away from everybody else, but ultimately she decided it was probably best not to do anything that risked pissing the organization off. How much did they value things like ‘assigned beds’ in their social order? It was probably best not to find out.
She quickly changed into pajamas, maximally covering herself despite the warm climate deep out here in the Unkmirean forest, then drifted off to sleep.
◆
When she asked Shera the next morning what she’d done all night, she simply said, “Stargazing.”
“Of course.” She put her arm around the other girl’s shoulder. “I’ll stay up with you sometime, just let me know if you want company.”
She twitched and averted her gaze, but she nodded.
“Did you find a good spot?”
“Mm-hm. I f-found their astronomy e-equipment, too.”
Myra blinked. “Oh, they have astronomy stuff?” It seemed fitting that Shera would somehow sniff that out so quickly. It was pretty useful, too. It would be a good idea to have an extra telescope on hand at the end of the loop, one for each of them.
“Yeah, they’ve got all k-kinds of stuff in the underground layer.” By ‘underground’ she obviously meant ‘inside the platform’.
“Ohh… I thought I sensed something down there. I wasn’t sure if it was off-limits or whatever since it never came up on the tour—”
“No, it’s easy to access,” Shera explained. “There’s all kinds of things down there, but I d-dunno, not much that seemed relevant to the murk bogs. There was a whole storeroom of… slides and see-saws. Playground equipment. Actually, it was k-kinda creepy.”
“Huh.”
◆
At the very least, they would be learning some interesting skills that could turn out to be useful for any time looper out of her depth against an array of unknown forces. Their first training session was “remedial pistols.”
“So you girls are the nerds who have never shot a gun before.” The instructor, who introduced himself as Nesr Wald, was a middle-aged man with a hard face and a hard nose. His lips were dry and cracked and stuck in a perpetual scowl, and he was also one of the soldiers Myra recognized from Ralkenon. He was speaking in their common language, and he used the same somewhat stilted not-entirely fluent style Chrysji used, but he was fluent enough to know words like “nerd.”
“Th-that’s us,” Shera said.
“Not even for fun,” he said flatly, as if he could hardly believe such people existed.
“We haven’t,” Myra insisted. Guns, as with many weapons that didn’t require magic to operate, were illegal in the empire.
Actually, they might have been illegal in Unkmire too.
“We’ll start with target practice,” Nesr ordered. He carelessly tossed one of the guns to Myra who scrambled to catch it, nearly dropping it at her feet.
Nesr cursed in Unkmirean. “Careful, girl! It is ready to fire!”
“My… bad,” Myra said.
They proceeded with their target practice, shooting at mechanical hummingbirds hidden in the trees. Shera was weirdly good at it. She explained that she simply measured the “bias” of her aim and then perfectly corrected for it by aiming slightly off of the target she intended to hit. Myra tried it, and it just resulted in her missing even worse than she otherwise did. Thus she ended the morning with ears ringing and one arm aching.
The afternoon was physical fitness and endurance. They had to run around the circumference of the platform for several hours, then do an obstacle course. This was a completely normal, reasonable, and even healthy thing to do.
“This fucking sucks!” Myra gasped out, managing to be semi-coherent through her deep panting. “I won’t even get to keep whatever gains I get from increased fitness!”
“W-well I’m not complaining.”
It took a second for the words to sink in, and then for a brief, panicked moment Myra’s brain grasped for a way to unlodge her foot out of her mouth. But then she caught onto Shera’s expression.
“I was j-just joking!” the girl said quickly, waving her arms as she caught Myra’s own look. “I’m really not complaining. I had fun. More th-than I thought I would.”
“Oh. Good.” Phew. “I knew you’d enjoy it,” Myra lied.
“Yeah. I g-got my standard d-deviation down to 7 seconds per lap.”
“Your standard deviation…?”
“Yeah. I try to make all m-my lap times as close as possible to each other.”
Myra almost laughed. “God, Shera, that’s so you.”
She tilted her head. “So ‘me’?”
“Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you doing athletics before.”
“Well, we never hung out much, so of course you haven’t.”
She gently nudged Shera to turn her back. Then she took her by the shoulder and dug her thumbs into her back.
“Do you do lots of sportsy stuff, though?”
“No.”
She continued to knead away at the sharp edges of Shera’s bony shoulders, and Shera made a soft humming sound. Good Shera loop!
The next day they had to train in guard-avoiding. This was actually pretty fun. Or… it was somewhat fun. It was basically a stealth game. Both girls were dreadful at it, never making it more than half a minute before being shot, but the strategy was interesting. The worst part is that the guards were using real guns and real bullets, which were very loud and quickly started to give Myra a headache.
The bullets were incorporeal, so they went right through the participants, but it was still disconcerting as her domain made her hyper-aware of any foreign enchantments passing through. Once or twice, a bullet went straight through her heart. She was also a little worried something would go wrong with her domain, that it would break the enchantment and kill her. There was also some small chance the enchantment would fail for a different reason, which would technically be her fault as the rune specialist.
Thank god for the time loop.
◆
They were resting for a few minutes before their next task, which was to help Nesr Wald fix up some pistols. While they rehydrated, a different man approached.
He was lanky, with a soft face and bronze skin. “You are the new rune crafters. Is that right?” He spoke in their common language without any prompting, though like Chrysji, it was somewhat stilted. “My name is Obyl. Some of our obstacles are acting up. Can you investigate?” He gestured towards the other end of the training area.
“Sure—um. We’re already expected—” She looked at Shera. “Should we… divide and conquer?” Myra was pretty sure she could take either of the tasks alone, but she wasn’t sure if Shera would be up for it.
“Oh, please, if you’re occupied, it’s nothing urgent.” He waved his hands, looking a little embarrassed.
“I can handle the p-pistols,” Shera said. They had already taken a look at the pistols in some depth, so she was probably more confident handling them than she was about the unknown obstacle course.
“Okay, come get me if you need help,” she said, hoping she wasn’t being too condescending or anything.
She followed Obyl, who made friendly small talk, mostly about Myra’s desire to “use her skills for covert offensive applications” or whatever it was she’d said during her introduction.
“Hey, Obyl, I got a question. Who was in charge of runes before me?”
“Old guy named Rickar. Retired about… 3 years back, I think. Real brilliant guy, could look at any system and break its effects down into runes, knew all the grammar forwards and backwards.”
“So what’d you do since then, after he retired?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like if something broke. Who’d you go to?”
“I don’t really know. Guess I made it someone else’s problem.” He chuckled to himself.
“So was Rickar the guy who made the bridge?”
“Mm. No, that’s… I’m not sure who made that thing, actually.”
“When was it built?”
He just shrugged. “I’m really not sure. We definitely had a normal bridge before that one. Geel could probably tell you.”
“Geel doesn’t really answer my questions.”
“Eh… yeah, Geel takes a bit of getting used to. Great leader, though.” Sure. “Maybe you could ask Mehar, or Jil…”
Myra helped out with the broken obstacles (which were actually quite simple—probably simpler than the pistols) and then to the dining hall for more mystery goop. Shera never showed up though, and after ten minutes or so, she started to get worried. She went to look.
Shera wasn’t hard to find, though. She had a plate of food, but she was eating on a bench outside.
“Hey, you finish up?”
She nodded.
Myra sat down. She didn’t look up from her food.
“Hey, is everything okay?”
“Nesr W-Wald, he was really… he k-k-kept—I kept asking him to step away, but he k-kept—” She shuddered, then she set her plate down and crossed her arms over her chest, as if protecting it.
“He… what did he do?”
She shook her head. Myra watched her for a while, then finally stood up. “I’ll kick his fucking teeth in.”
“W-wait!”
“I don’t care what he did, if he hurt you or—or groped you or—I’m gonna fucking kick him in balls until he’s—”
“He d-didn’t touch me! But he kept a-acting like w-would. Well, actually he did—” She rubbed her shoulder. “Just here, like—” She flicked at the shoulder strap of her uniform. “But like—”
“I’m gonna—”
“Wait!” she said again. “We need to k-keep our heads down!” She appropriately bent her own head down, still avoiding eye contact.
Myra grabbed her by the hand. “C’mon, let’s go find—Geel sucks, but maybe Chrysji will know how to handle these—”
“No!” She jerked her hand away. “Chrysji was there! She was helping with the pistols—She didn’t care!”
Then Myra realized she didn’t know much of anything at all. She plopped onto the bench beside her partner, and she gave up a gasp of exhaustion. They sat for a while, and finally she said, “Are you okay?”
“I told you, he d-didn’t really…”
“But are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
Myra could have kicked herself for letting Shera go off alone with Nesr Wald. That guy had been nasty from the beginning, nastier than even Geel.
The whole thing made Myra even more uneasy about Shera staying out on her own each night, but Shera was if nothing else more uneasy about sleeping in the barracks now, and Myra couldn’t just not sleep. She tried to stay up with her for a bit, but with the knowledge of another intense training course the next day, she forced herself to turn in around midnight.
◆
Since most everyone else would already be asleep, Myra chose to sneak in through the side door, so she only had to walk past the row of unoccupied beds before reaching hers. The lights were out, so she used a soft lantern spell to guide her way.
As she did, she couldn’t help but note something.
It was actually hard to miss, even in the faint lighting. The last bed at the very end of the row was a few meters from the wall. There was just enough space for one extra bed—and there had obviously been one there at some point. It caught her attention because of the holes in the wall, signs that a shelf had once been attached here, just as there were shelves all down the row. Looking closer, there were unmissable dents in the floor where the bed’s feet must have been, and the wall sported a (very faint) discoloration in the shape of a bed frame. There were also scrape marks on the floor, suggesting the bed had been moved laterally.
On a whim, not entirely sure why it caught her interest in the first place, she dropped to the floor to see if there was anything else. Weirdly, the scrapes seemed to go on very far down the hallway. Past Myra’s bed, past maybe twenty or thirty beds after that, past Obyl’s bed, finally ending at the bed of someone Myra didn’t know. And from there, there were scrape marks that led to the door.