Being a scavenger is dangerous, but nobody in the Two Worlds was safe, really. The blasted lands were the worst of it, but decade by decade, they were shrinking. The only people who understood why or how were the Administrators, and well, they didn't talk to people much, least of all scavengers.

Teddy was a remarkable man in that he was born in the safe zones and still chose to make his life outside of them. His father was a chef and his mother was a mechanic, but he couldn't follow in their footsteps. Everyone agreed that his mother had shown him the blasted lands too early, before she had a chance to explain what they were and why they were dangerous, and somehow, ever since then he could see right through them, as though the lands were not covered with living clouds of hell-bent black and white fuzz.

Which, of course they were. Teddy saw them just like everyone else did. You had to see them to avoid them, and he did. He knew that his mother had made a very different mistake, and she and he had made a very quiet promise to keep it secret.

So now Teddy picked his way over a pile of junk that probably should have been a building on its side. Ahead, a static monster rippled through the side of a building, turning brick into sand and sand into glass and glass into brick, and steel into copper and copper into diamond and diamond into rubber, on and on until there was no knowing what the world had once been made out of.

None of that was worth scavenging even if the static monster went away. The Administrators provided stocks of raw materials to anyone and everyone. They didn't provide finished goods anymore, though. Rumor had it they came from "before," and they didn't give quite so freely as they used to. They still gave a lot, so they must have done a lot more.

No, what Teddy was looking for was in the corpse behind the monster. It was a corpse, no question, a good one or two centuries old, but it was an Archon, so it looked the same today as it did when it died in the falling of the world. As long as the static monster didn't trash it, Teddy would be sitting pretty on a pretty good find.

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Naturally, the thing didn't want to move on, but finally, after a good hour and a half, two hours worth of sitting and watching, it passed clean through the pile of rubble it had been rebuilding and moved on somewhere else. So after waiting another half hour to be sure, and listening intently all the while, Teddy approached.

The woman would have been beautiful, if she were alive today. I mean yes, the coat of dust and dirt on her wasn't exactly becoming, and at some point a steal beam had come down and torn her torso into pieces, but she had regenerated, and whatever immortality the thing gave her made sure that when she regenerated, her body twisted into a position where it had enough room, leaving only the torn remnants of her clothing where she had once been. Her exposed skin had glowing patterns of lights embedded in it, a graceful set of glyphs that meant something to someone--he had it on good authority different kinds of Archons had different patterns, but some said every set was different.

Some people got off on finding an Archon corpse, but Teddy had a girlfriend. Well, ex now, but he wasn't desperate, and what he was looking for was inside the body anyway. So with exceptional care and a muttered apology, he turned her head and tore into her neck with a knife.

Not many people could do this. Yes, the gore was a part of it, and it took a real kind of crazy to knife what looked like a sleeping woman, even when you knew she was dead. But on a technical level, most people simply couldn't get the thing out.

The thing was ethereal. It was a pocket dimension anchored inside each Archon body, and only an Administrator should be able to command one. They... didn't really clean up Archon bodies, though. But every now and then, people who went out into the blasted lands came back with something inside them. Teddy had been a young boy when he went out there, and he felt something just hanging in the air. Being a boy who didn't know better, he reached out his hand and grabbed it, and it never left.

Now he reached in with his fingers to a spot inside the woman's skull and commanded the thing to come out. When he retrieved his bloodstained hands, he felt it it there, at his fingertips.

Just another Pandora's Box to add to his collection.