Through the window of the shuttle, Earth looked just like any other planet. A ball of matter drowned in water and festooned with life. It had one Spiral-acknowledged sapient species, human, C-type biochemistry, humanoid body plan.

It'd been a fourteen-hour journey to reach the world, crawling through viscous spacetime at barely a third the speed of light. Staring down at it, Miles was having to remind himself why he was there at all.

At one point, the night side of the planet would have been rashed with artificial light. Miles had seen photos, pre-bower, taken from the US orbital fleet. Every square inch had been lit up by luminous pinholes, clustering and threading like an incandescent slime mold. Now, every square inch was dark.

The brightest things left down there were man-portable floodlights, and the survivors knew better than to let energy escape into space. Every kilowatt-hour was needed on the ground.

The shuttle window fogged as Miles watched the dirtball grow in the viewport. He could make out a few known locations. Long Island, the Great Lakes, Florida, California. But the places they represented in his mind didn’t exist anymore. After the chaos, they’d become new features, with unknown realities.

There were features of the post-bower geography, too. The New York crater, where a stable fusion plant had been abandoned to its ambitions of sunhood. The wildfire scars running the entire Canadian west coast.

Newfoundland was more cove than land, now. It’d been the site of a terrestrial zero-point plant, one of the pins that’d burst the bubble.

Miles tried to avoid looking at the place he knew his home settlement was, but his eyes seemed drawn to it.

A hundred miles south of Lake Michigan, where forest met river, a crashing frigate had taken a bite out of the top of the hill.

***

"Miles Asher, get out here."

The Captain's voice hissed and popped out of the frigate's comm system, burnt wires and demagnetized components reducing the noise to a barely human electronic distortion.

Miles didn't like leaving his room, but the sound wasn't so degraded he could pretend he hadn't heard it.

He unearthed and pulled on plastic boots, straining to pull the material over bare skin, forcing himself to ignore the cold that pressed against his toes. When he was ready, he left the retrofitted storeroom and made his way through the corridors.

The settlement was built into the wreck of a '98er, all rubberized floors and sloping metal walls. The reactor was still hot enough to keep the heat and lights on through the particle winter, for those lucky enough to deserve a place inside. As the son of the Captain, Miles was that lucky.

It didn’t matter that Damien Asher had never captained a battleship before the disaster. Only a handful of the residents knew that he’d only been a quartermaster at a Space Force base, and nobody was talking about it.

He had a military rank, he had the codes for the wreck, and he had a map of outposts and storage locations. That was enough for people to defer to him. That was enough for people to defer to Miles.

Three teenage men watched Miles from a refuge alcove as he passed. Armed and blooded, they were the settlement's buzz-cut chosen. All of them were veterans of city raids and population runs, bandits and kidnappers, which made them heroes in the new order.

Assault wasn’t a crime for people like them, and their instincts were honed to pick out weakness in a herd. If Miles wasn't untouchable, he would have needed to worry about them. He kept them in his peripheral vision until they were out of sight.

A hand-painted white line marked the route through the groaning wreck to the entrance, which opened on a muddy field littered with plastic tents and corrugated plastic lean-tos. Outer members huddled in their shelters, wrapped in silvered plastic blankets against the damp cold.

The frigate that housed the secure part of the settlement had a plastics fabricator that had survived the crash. Scrap plastic was easy to scavenge, and they'd ended up making a lot of things out of it that they really shouldn't have.

Footprints marked the paths, deep boot impressions that had filled with gray water under the constant rain.

It couldn't be later than three, but the sky was already getting dark. The sun-reflecting particles in the stratosphere were still doing their job months after the world's industries had stopped putting out warming gasses.

The managed climate was another system that only balanced when it had the world's full attention. Another spinning plate sent flying.

Fifty yards away, a man with a short black beard and receding hairline stood on top of a crate addressing his troops. Damien Asher, master of the Frazer settlement.

Damien spotted him and waved him over. Miles started trudging through the mud, trying to stick to the more solid parts of a field that had very little solidity left.

Ratbugs skittered out of his way as he moved through the outer settlement. The giant pillbugs were an invasive species, another gift from the aliens, already everywhere. They bred like flies, could eat anything, including plastic, wood, and gasoline, and they were as happy in the snow as they were hiding under bedding. The more desperate among the settlement’s population had been eating them.

Miles reached the group and stopped a little way apart from them.

The assembled troops were men, for the most part. Dark-haired, unshaven, military haircuts and military builds, wearing camo fatigues and modular backpacks.

They could have all been Damien Asher’s biological children, by their looks, and it was consistent enough that they had to have been hand-picked for their similarity to him, even if it’d been subconscious on his part. Miles could barely have stood out more in that crowd.

“You’re taking Miles with you on this one,” Damien said, addressing the group.

“What?” Miles asked, flatly.

Damien’s patience seemed strained as he spoke to Miles. “We’ve caught another abduction raid coming down at Eagle Creek. We think they’re targeting the Indy holdouts.”

Miles’ heart sank as he thought of the alien ships. He knew them as lights in the sky and grotesque forms seen from a distance. The raids were getting more frequent. The alien ships touched down at places where survivors congregated, then left with those survivors on board. They’d left whole areas depopulated. There was never any signs of overt violence at the sites afterwards, but that just meant they had some way of getting people to come willingly. Miles’ father had suggested they were using some kind of mind control.

The Danville refuge had about two thousand survivors. The Captain had been targeting them with his own population raids and proselytizers for a while, but they still had people he wanted, people with skills or expertise, or who he thought would benefit Frazer in other ways..

Miles thought that, for his father, this ‘intervention’ was probably less about protecting fellow humans and more about monopolizing future serfs for his little kingdom, but the problem was that the aliens were taking people. Miles couldn’t dispute that. He hated that he and his father were aligned on that fear.

“Sir, what’s his role going to be?” Seth asked, one of the Captain’s favorites.

Damien Asher turned to stare at Miles. “Just let him watch.”

***

Miles was startled by a rattling in the hull. The shuttle’s shields had deflected a cloud of space junk fragments, sending them scattering out of sight to the left.

The view through the window had changed. Now, Miles could see Europe and Africa, as well as their destination.

Iceland had had it comparatively easy in the chaos following the bower break. High food security, energy self-sufficient. The built-in security of being an island had let them dodge problems nearly every other country on Earth had faced. They’d never dabbled in fusion or ZP installations, and the People’s Government had been hedging against global instability for the last fifty years. When the Earth had been hit by the equivalent of a massive solar flare from the break boundary, supply lines and modern farming had failed everywhere. Neyjavik had still managed to feed themselves. They'd been the first to welcome Forward Fleet aid ships.

The voice of the ship's comms officer came over the speakers. The translated drawl of a Standard-22 accent explained they were approaching the atmosphere. Next stop, Neyjavik. Local time 11 PM. Prepare for landing.

Miles fastened his seat strap and put his book tablet away.

The shuttle descended quickly, its energy shield parting the atmosphere without heating it. It dropped to a hundred feet over the ocean and before skimming forward toward the coastline. The low approach gave Miles a good look at the city.

Neyjavik had been a mid-century attempt at a modern business hub. The original buildings were all 2050s era, four and five-story blocks of sustainable wood and black solar glass, with their wedge roofs and accents painted in soft primary colors.

It had probably been a prestigious place for companies to have their head offices, once, before the world ended. Now it was the center of a refugee hub.

Beyond the pastel city center, the landscape devolved into an ad-hoc shanty town. Miles recognized the touch of non-human architecture in the mass-produced units organized across the sides of the valley. Boxes that weren't much more than shipping containers were lined and stacked along the grassy slopes in organic rings. He would have bet that inside, they looked a lot like his apartment back on Ialis.

The shuttle passed over the city and turned, aiming for a miniature skyport just outside the city. Lily pads of black metal littered a field at the edge of the city, scattered like they’d just been dropped from the air and left where they landed. It was the same style of skyport as in Dendril City on Ialis. It was jarring to see so much Spiral infrastructure springing up on Earth.

The shuttle came in to land with a rattling vibration punctuated by a hissing impact. The vessel’s interior lights came up to full, and the doors unlocked almost immediately.

Around the cabin, various sapients equipped themselves with environmental hoods or breathing apparatus, ready for the unmanaged atmosphere of the planet. A sealed environment could have multiple non-interacting atmospheres at once to cater to multiple biochemistries, but outside, anyone who couldn’t live off C-type gasses didn’t have that luxury.

Miles queued up to leave the craft. The time it took to shuffle to the door seemed to pass in a blur, but his first step out under the Earth’s sky in over a year seemed to trigger an endless, frozen moment.

The air was cold, smelling of salt, dirt, fish, and the hot electric metal smell of the ship washed over him. He could hear the crashing ocean and the cries of sea birds.

There were human skyport techs waiting on the ground to service the shuttle, dressed in high-vis vests with clunky steel toolboxes. There were safety signs labeled with human iconography.

The city was built in a low valley, and even in the dark, Miles could tell that the gentle slopes were drowned in green. Short, hardy grass, tangled shrubs, even a few low wind-stretched trees.

He only stood in the ship’s access port for a second before the crowd pressing behind him urged him out onto the platform.

Beyond the black platforms, the skyport was ringed with a tall wire fence, supported by weighted poles and topped with barbed wire. Plumes of black smoke dotted the horizon, blotting out city lights. Miles couldn’t tell if they were from campfires or burning buildings.

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A squat concrete building stood at one end of the fenced area, showing signs in English, German, Icelandic, and a Spiral language Miles couldn’t recognize. They all directed new arrivals to report to customs and immigration.

It’d been a year since Miles had needed to worry about immigration control. Should he have applied for a visa?

He followed the crowd of other passengers around to the rear of the shuttle, where he collected his shield and duffel.

The shield’s levitation unit seemed to be working as he pulled it out of the cargo shelf. He piled his bags onto the makeshift levitation sled.

He spent the walk over to the office checking his other gear. His index was still working, showing his usual catalog of spells, and he could feel that his magic was still active.

He could read every language on the customs signs. His Hum of the Enduring was still active, a warmth that clouded his core, buffering him against the need to sleep.

He’d cast Enhance Tool not long after boarding the inter-iteration ship, enhancing the Durability of his robe. He hoped it would make it better armor. Casting the spell had instantly brought his Authority close to breaking point, but the effect it'd imparted hadn’t faded yet. He could still feel it as the distant, muted prickle of external magic.

His comm was still working, the light-speed delay notwithstanding. Trin had kept in touch at first, but having to wait hours for a reply each way had put the scout off from sending casual messages.

The striker—he couldn’t test. It still reacted to Miles changing the dials, but he wasn’t about to fire it in public. It should still work. There wasn’t anything exotic about a beam of focused light.

His concerns about the weapon started to run in a totally different direction as he approached the administration buildings.

Lists of items forbidden in Neyjavik loomed on every flat surface. Explosives. Intoxicants. Spiral plant and animal products. Weapons.

It seemed like the government here was trying to keep a box closed that Miles was pretty sure had cracked when the bower broke. He didn’t think it would work. They couldn’t control every possible landing site for incoming ships, though from the armed guards, it seemed like they were at least making a sincere attempt at it.

Human security guards patrolled or observed, armed with holstered spiral-tech pistols. A mixture of black-blister CCTV cameras and spiral-tech scanner cubes sat at the corners of the building, observing the area, and a drone with a Gilthaen look patrolled the area outside of the fence.

When Miles stepped into the lobby area, he saw Spiral tech screens hanging from the corners, displaying a list of incoming flights. The listed arrivals were both from Spiral space, and from other parts of Earth.

He was surprised at that. He didn't know anyone had got local flights running again.

The survivors had to be using military planes, since nothing with civilian electronics would have survived the photon flash that came with the break. Where they were getting the fuel was anyone's guess. There hadn't been a functional oil industry for over a year.

He got into line at the customs desk, standing behind a human in a leather duster with two rolling suitcases. The smell of tanned skin radiated off the coat.

The man had been one of about fifteen other humans on the shuttle with him, interstellar travelers who didn't have the look of the refugee stations about them.

What were they doing out there in the spiral? How were other humans making their way?

There had been a refugee population on Unsiel Station, so he hadn’t been away from other humans for long enough to miss them, but a month was long enough for him to feel awkward around them, in a way he never did around other Spiral sapients.

With other species, the differences in culture, language, philosophy, and biology created a kind of friction in every interaction, and it fostered a lot of patience and leeway.

Interactions with humans, on the other hand, were razor-sharp. They were always assessing, always positioning, even in the most relaxed conversations.

He hadn’t missed other humans. He missed his roommates. He missed Torg's heat lamp, and finding a comfortable spot in the dumb bed he shared with Trin.

"Reason for visiting?" the human customs official asked the man in front.

The queue had moved. Miles was now in second place.

"Visiting family," the man in the duster said.

He'd barely finished speaking when Miles heard a clanging noise descend around him. It was the ringing of a cracked bell, the dropping of an iron weight, a sound that had more in common with an industrial accident than a musical note.

At first he thought it was coming from a speaker system, until he recognized it. Ears of the Diplomat. It was the discordant sound of the truth-telling magic he'd acquired at his last index upgrade.

Whatever reason the man was really here, it wasn't to visit family.

"And your address, while you're staying here?"

The customs official and traveler were both speaking different languages, one probably Icelandic, the other French. Neither were having trouble communicating, suggesting the spiral's translation tech had made it here.

"The hotel on Astun."

This time, the magic remained silent.

"Are you bringing any alien biological matter or intoxicants into the city?"

"No," the man said.

Ears of the Diplomat clanged again, more strongly. Another lie. Miles wondered if he should keep quiet about it. Just accusing the man of lying there in the queue wouldn't go down well with anyone.

"Are you bringing any weapons or explosives into the city?"

"No."

Ears of the Diplomat rang like falling pots and pans.

Miles examined the man again. Short dark hair, broad build, wearing a tracksuit under his coat. He could have been anyone, doing anything.

Maybe Miles really should say something.

The official finished with his questions and let the man go. Miles stepped up.

The clerk began asking the same questions of Miles.

"I think he was lying," Miles said, before the clerk could get started. "He lied about his reason for being here, about carrying weapons."

The clerk, an older man with wild hair, stared at him for a few seconds.

"Why do you think that?" the man asked.

Miles hesitated to explain. No matter how much spiral tech had made it to this city, 'magic' wouldn't be treated as a credible explanation for how he knew something.

"I have a Spiral tech lie detector," he said instead.

The man seemed surprised. "They didn't tell me I could have a lie detector." He reached under his counter and came up with a handheld walkie-talkie. "Hey Karen. There's a guy in a leather coat coming through. Give him a scan, will you?"

"Sure thing."

That seemed to be the extent of the action he was willing to take based on Miles’ accusation. The man put his radio away and continued with Miles' processing.

Miles hadn't arranged a hotel in advance, but when asked the clerk gave a recommendation for the same hotel the man in the duster had given. When he found out Miles' reason for visiting, redeeming his mineral allotment, he gave directions to the city's Spiral annex as well.

Eventually, the clerk asked Miles the same question about weapons, and he was forced to bring out his striker pistol, as well as the Ymn city metal knife and mace.

The man passed his eyes over the metal weapons, apparently not knowing what to make of them, but seized on the gun.

"I will have to limit this while you're here," he said. He pulled a small device from a cardboard box next to his station. It looked like a translucent plastic postage stamp. "I stick it to the barrel and it drains the energy. It will disable the weapon while it’s attached. We'll take it off when you leave."

"Okay?"

Miles surrendered the gun to the process. He wasn't planning on shooting anyone while he was here anyway. When the clerk was finished, Miles packed it away along with the rest of his things and moved on.

He spotted the guy in the duster as he passed into the exit lobby. The traveler was being inspected by a woman using almost the exact same model of scanner as Trin had been using when Miles first met him, a boxy device with a screen covered in scrolling text.

She fiddled with the scanner, an expression of concentration on her face as she tried to interpret a screen of numbers and monochrome graphs. As Miles made his way across the room, she gave the man a pass, letting him go.

Miles watched him step out through the doors.

She obviously hadn’t found anything on him.

Had Miles’ Ears of the Diplomat failed, there? The wording of the magical effect suggested it could be fooled, but not that it would give him false positives. From Miles’ experience, Harmonizer magic was absolute in a way that technology wasn’t. On the other hand, he knew for a fact there were devices designed to fool scanners. Brisk had tried to use a signal mask generator to sneak something past the Gilthaens on Ialis.

Miles followed the man out.

They were both going to the same location, the same hotel, and after spending longer awake than even his Hum of the Enduring could compensate for, Miles found it easier to follow the other man than work out the route on a local map.

He just hoped they’d have vacancies.

Miles and his unwitting guide moved away from the skyport into the city center. The architecture was very human. Wood, glass, asphalt, and concrete. Straight lines and rectangles, road grids broken up by organic shapes only when the terrain forced the issue, or when the city plan had needed to work around a pre-existing construction.

Outside, at night, the air was bitterly cold. Miles questioned the wisdom of walking to the hotel, but he hadn’t seen any other options. There were no cabs, no rideshares. The roads were almost clear, with only occasional passing cars. A few buildings showed signs of life, restaurants and bars with lights or loud music, but there was no foot traffic.

For a while he and the man in the coat had an entourage, some of the other passengers from the ship, human and non-human sapient, but the others broke off at various points.

When the cold started to move from uncomfortable to painful, Miles stopped and took his cloak from his bag. That did a lot to keep out the chill, and he resumed the walk.

Miles followed the stranger out of the city center, where the buildings began to shrink to two and three stories, then to single-level warehouses and mass accommodation.

By the time he’d started to catch glimpses of the undeveloped valley through gaps in the buildings, he was starting to realize that something was wrong.

It was late, he was operating on no sleep, still learning the limits of Hum of the Enduring, and he’d sleep walked right out of the city into what classed as its suburbs.

Most of the buildings were now low houses, brick-built, partially submerged in the ground. The refugee settlement that he’d seen surrounding the built-up city center was starting to be visible. There was no hotel this far out.

The man ahead of him cast a glance back from about a hundred yards ahead.

He spotted Miles easily, with nobody else on the street. He paused, seemed to think for a minute, then turned and started advancing on Miles.

Embarrassed, but not worried about the confrontation, Miles stood where he was and let the man approach.

“Are you following me?” he asked.

“Sorry,” Miles said. “I was so sure you were going to the hotel.”

He stared at Miles for a minute. “That’s all?”

“Yeah. I heard you say you were staying at the hotel, and I thought I could just follow you there.”

It took a few seconds before he seemed to accept that. If he was concerned before, he seemed amused now.

“You’re a fucking idiot, aren’t you.”

Miles accepted the judgment without comment.

“So, there’s nowhere to stay around here?” he asked.

“No. I’m heading to a friend’s,” the man said. Miles heard the clanging from Ears of the Diplomat again. “Hotel’s about a half mile back that way. Astun Street.”

“Thanks,” Miles said, flatly.

Forcing his tired brain to process the street names, Miles found his way back to the built-up areas of the city and followed the street signs to Astun.

A row of commercial buildings greeted him. A small mall, what looked like a cinema, and a hotel. It was almost like being back before the break.

The streets here were lit, and even the closed stores were lit. Apparently, the city had energy to spare.

Miles stopped at the hotel, stepping through a rotating door into a lobby that was heavy on wood.

The building actually had a night clerk, an alert-looking man in business casual sitting behind a curved desk. He was watching something on an LCD screen, and when Miles stepped up to the counter, he realized it was some kind of video streaming service. He was watching a music video.

Miles stared at the screen for a minute, until the man behind the counter decided to take notice.

He turned to Miles with a tight smile.

“How can I help you?”

“Hi. Can I rent a room? I should just need a couple of nights.”

After a moment of confusion where the clerk asked for a fee in Krona and Miles had to negotiate a custom price in Spiral seln, he was given a room number and wooden keycard.

The building had a working elevator that he rode up to the third floor.

When he finally stepped into the room, he barely stopped to turn the heating all the way up before zombie-walking into the bathroom and taking his first normal shower in a year.