On his last night on Earth, Miles dreamed he was back in the dungeon.

He was back in Ymn city. Blank gray structures loomed around him, vacant streets stretched out for miles.

The distorted giant was there, twitching along the streets, disappearing behind stone buildings before reappearing further ahead than it should have been.

Its eyeless head turned back and forth, looking for him. Slits like vents on its face blasted out a metallic wail, warning him, admonishing him, threatening him.

In the real place, the giant’s cry had been meaningless. Here it seemed to be an accusation. There was some terrible crime that Miles was committing, and the giant was his judge and executioner.

The stone pillar from the environ was there. Miles crouched behind it, silent, breathless.

In the real place, Eyes of the Emigre had let him read the inscription, but now it was indecipherable.

The giant flickered out into the street. It turned its head, spotting him. Immediately, it was moving, jerking towards him in an unnatural stop-start sprint, vibrating along the ground more than it ran.

Miles darted into a building. Inside, there was a stone chest. He pried off the lid. Within the chest there were a dozen tiny Welven infants crawling around the hollow space.

He put his hands into the chest, letting them climb up over him. He had to save them from the giant.

At some point, Miles became aware that he was dreaming. He played out the logic of the dream, running from the giant, never fully able to escape, but the fear of the situation was dulled.

Eventually, the dream version of himself pulled out his index and used a new spell to open up a passage in the floor, jumping down into a darkness that became the darkness of closed eyes as he fell.

He started awake.

A noise was ringing out from the corner of the hotel room. A repetitive electronic bleating. It was familiar. At first, he thought it was his alarm, but his comm didn’t make that tone. It took him a few seconds to recognize it as the ringtone of the cell phone he’d found on Ialis.

He jumped out of bed. Three steps took him to the pack. He opened the pocket and pulled the phone out.

The last time he’d got a call on the phone, the screen had shown a contact page with a distorted human face. Now, it showed a photo taken of a dark room. Only a semicircle of light was visible at the bottom of the frame, illuminating a metal floor. In the black background, two points of light were visible in the darkness, like light reflecting on glass beads.

Miles considered rejecting the call. He’d only brought the phone with him because Trin didn’t want to have it in the apartment without him, and Miles wasn’t totally ready to just junk it.

There wasn’t going to be someone on the other end, not really. It was just glitching dungeon tech. The calls had to be random, and any voice he heard had to be coming from some messed up function internal to the device. It literally had to. He was several hours deep into Solar space, there was no way a synchronous call could come from outside it.

It all added up to Miles simply not having to answer the call. He could live without the temptation to read meaning into it that wasn’t there.

He reached for the end call button.

A second before he could press it, the call connected on its own.

Miles stood, frozen, looking at the dark scene on the screen. A static hiss came out of the phone’s speaker, then a voice.

“Deeper.”

It was the same woman’s voice as before, with a static sound like it was being played back from a recording.

Miles stared at the device. He pressed the end call button. The phone didn’t respond.

“Deeper,” the phone repeated. “Deeper. Deeper.”

Every repetition had exactly the same intonation, the same static artifacts, like it was the same clip being played back every few seconds.

Miles dropped the phone on the bed, pulled on his clothes, and left the room.

***

The coffee shop Miles took refuge in had a radio playing. The presenter was speaking in Icelandic, but Eyes of the Emigre let him listen in anyway.

It was a one-person show, the same older woman introducing music, reading poetry, and issuing news broadcasts. The song selection was eclectic, everything from 22nd century mainstream titles from just before the bower break, to classics from the 30s. If a song had been released on digital media in the last hundred years, it seemed like fair game for the station.

The news was mostly local issues, with some spiral events thrown in. The story of the day was that the Forward Fleet was massing at the next break point—the location where the next iteration would arrive, when it arrived.

The presenter didn’t get deep into the story, but she had enough information that Miles thought that the station must be syndicated to one of those information databases he’d have to pay to access.

The coffee shop’s menu finally gave Miles the chance to try all the Earth delicacies he remembered, but hadn’t been able to get since the bower break. Coffee, soda, French toast with ice cream and bacon, hash browns, roast pumpkin, and a small bowl of yogurt with red berries.

He found it weirdly easy to just sit and work his way through three plates of it. He hadn’t even been hungry, and with Hum of the Enduring, this one meal might last him for days.

On the radio, a song ended early, and the presenter’s voice resurfaced speaking quickly.

“More news from events in the Spiral. The Forward Fleet now reports that a new iteration is believed to be imminent. Admiral Nigh Roth says: ‘A new world will arrive in our spiral within the next one hundred hours. There are indications that its arrival will be the result of a magical event. All of our advance forces are positioned to welcome them gently into our association.’”

The presenter was silent for a few seconds before adding, “If it comes as predicted, Iteration 27,202 will arrive at close to the average time interval for new iterations. It will be one of our neighbors, only two iterations down-spiral of Earth. Our junior in the Spiral by more than a year.”

Miles looked around at the other patrons of the coffee shop, watching how they were reacting to the news.

It seemed to prompt some interested conversation between a pair of local customers, but most of the others paused briefly to look at the radio, before going back to their meals. Miles couldn’t tell if they were already jaded to spiral events, or if the news just seemed too distant or abstract to acknowledge.

Miles was interested, but only in an academic way. He wouldn’t be spending enough time in the area for it to make much difference to him. Earth barely felt like his home at all anymore.

***

Miles went back to his hotel room eventually. The shuttle off-Earth wasn’t scheduled to leave until the early evening, but there were only so many places to go in Neyjavik.

He’d returned to find the cell phone as dead as ever, silent, with its screen off. He’d packed it away with reservations, but he’d wait to decide whether or not to dispose of it once he got back to Ialis.

Maybe the Gilthaens would have an idea what to do with it.

The new spell in his index was a different problem.

Name: Miles Asher | Index Value: δ#6,##5## |

Traditions: Harmonizer, Sky Quester, Tower Child

…

Spells (Tower Child)

Boundary Breach (Grasping)

Reconfigure a tower wall to allow passage.

It was almost easy to miss, sitting innocuously at the bottom of his spell list.

Boundary Breach.

I did not buy that spell.

It seemed impossible to deny the spell's connection to Ialis. Its similarity to the spell in his dream, its appearance on the morning of the cell phone call, the way the tradition used the word child, recalling his first 'call' on the cell phone.

Miles teetered on the edge of disbelief. Could it be a coincidence? Could the new spell have been a gift from someone? Or a glitch? Maybe a delayed effect from one of the delta cores he'd absorbed?

His instincts told him the call that morning was somehow responsible, but his instincts would always try to draw connections, even when they were illusory.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Did he dare try to cast it?

Not now, not when he had a flight to catch later.

The only people who might be able to shed light on it were the Morning Star corporation, and they didn’t have offices in this star system.

He finished packing the rest of his things, some toiletries, Earth snacks, and spare clothes in human cuts he’d shopped for earlier in the day, and stacked his bags by the hotel room door.

His dungeon metal shield was a burden. The levitation unit’s battery had run almost down to nothing, and there was no universal power connector here in Neyjavik. The wall sockets were all the electric variety.

Running power was a luxury on post-Bower Earth, a benefit of the country’s geothermal and renewables infrastructure, but no configuration of adapters was going to let him recharge spiral tech batteries from it.

Finally, when the flight was less than an hour away, Miles loaded himself up with his bags, grabbed the handle of his shield, and left the room.

It was probably the last space explicitly designed for humans he’d stay in for a long time.

***

The man in the leather coat was waiting for the same shuttle out as Miles.

It wasn’t a huge coincidence. He recognized half the people in the waiting area from his flight in. A lot of them would be doing the same thing he was, coming back just to redeem his claim, then leaving on the next flight out.

The only difference was that the guy in the leather coat had come with two suitcases, and was leaving with only a weekend bag.

If he could trust his Ears of the Diplomat, the man had arrived with items on the customs blacklist, and was leaving without them.

Miles’ report to the skyport’s security obviously hadn’t gone anywhere. The staff seemed like they had too much faith in their Spiral scanners, and not enough experience with the countermeasures.

Miles might be the only person on Earth who’d noticed that something potentially illegal was going on, and there was no way the city had a framework for opening an investigation based on a magical intuition.

He picked the seat opposite the man across a walkway, dumping his bags on the chair next to him.

“Have fun staying with your friends?” Miles asked the man.

It felt weird to start a conversation with someone who was much older than him, who was almost certainly a smuggler, but Miles was still feeling like a tourist, still existing in the liminal psychological space where talking to strangers was a normal thing to do.

The man barely looked up from his comm to see who was speaking.

“Yeah. It was a riot.”

“Did you forget your suitcases at their house?” Miles asked.

The man didn’t reply.

The doors to the lounge slid open, and the woman Miles had seen arguing with the teller at the Spiral administration building walked in.

She was still wearing her powered armor, metal plates that were dominantly red with white accents, and now she was carrying a long single-edged blade at her hip, a circuit pattern etched down its length. Miles had let the customs clerk remove the limiter from his striker, and it looked like the woman in armor had had her weapon returned as well.

She looked around for a seat, before walking over and sitting a couple of places from Miles, forming a triangle with him and the man in the coat.

“Hi,” Miles said to her, once she’d settled.

“Kid from the Spiral building. Hello.” She spoke in German, translated through Eyes of the Emigre into accented English.

Her eyes fell on the other man. “Nice coat.”

The man didn’t even look up. “Thanks. It’s an Earth original.”

Miles found himself looking at the woman while she was looking at the man in the coat. There was more than just the armor and sword to her equipment.

Now that he was closer, he could see the shimmer of augmentation in her eyes. It was some kind of optical enhancement, giving her irises a metallic gleam. When she glanced back in his direction, her pupils flashed with reflected light.

Miles was already doing the most dangerous job in the spiral he could imagine a human doing. What did she need all that equipment for?

“Is it okay if I ask what you do?” Miles asked her.

She fixed him with a level stare and said, “I kill people for money.”

Miles was concerned for a second, before the clanging of cracked bells started ringing around him. A lie.

The woman watched his face as his shock turned to unamused disbelief. She laughed.

“I’m a bodyguard,” she corrected herself, and this time Ears of the Diplomat stayed silent. “Three years ago, I worked for the Gemeinde, the European body, protecting politicians. They took me with them to their bunker when things went bad. Then they kicked us out. All non-essentials. That was a hard few months, but it turned out people up there also want protection.” She lifted her finger to point vaguely upwards.

Earth didn’t have technology or manufactured goods that were worth anything in the spiral. It hadn’t occurred to Miles that Earth might still have valuable skills to offer.

“I wouldn’t have thought being a bodyguard on Earth would qualify someone for that,” Miles said.

“Lots to learn,” the woman replied. “There are guns that can shoot a thousand miles, and defenses that make those guns irrelevant. So many new threats and countermeasures. A lot of what I know transfers. The philosophy transfers.”

Neither the woman nor Miles missed that the man in the coat was paying attention, while still pretending to read his comm.

“And you?” the woman asked Miles. “I’ve never seen anyone dressed this way.”

Miles looked down at himself. He didn’t know if she was talking about his robe or the shield.

“I’m a healer working on Ialis,” he said.

“Ialis. Is that the maze planet?”

“Kind of?” Miles said. “I’ve heard it called a dungeon.”

The woman waved at her ears. “Translation issue. Yes. The dungeon world.”

“Yeah.”

The woman stared into space for a second, then shrugged. After a minute of silence, she turned to look at the man in the coat.

Miles thought she was weighing up including him in the conversation, but seemed to decide not to.

“I’m Helene, if you didn’t know,” she said into the silence.

“I’m Miles.”

She reached into a slot in her armor and pulled a credit-card-sized comm unit half the way out. There was a question in her expression.

Miles brought his comm unit from his backpack and they tapped the devices together long enough for each other’s contact information to be recorded.

“So, I mostly work out around Iteration 24,000, planet Iun,” Helene said, apparently making conversation. “Old world, high civilization, very dense. Twenty-four thousand is a millennium world in four number bases, so it’s a popular crossroads for cultures that like round numbers.”

“That must take a long time to reach,” Miles said. It’d taken a week just to come a thousand iterations from Ialis, and that was on an express ship.

“Yes, four days. Luckily, my client had business at the Fleet.”

Four days. He knew that the aggregate physics that worked in the weave didn’t have the same speed limit as Earth’s spacetime, but Helene’s transport must have been traveling an order of magnitude faster than the Century Express.

“I wish you could drop me off at Ialis,” Miles said.

He meant the comment idly, but Helene seemed to take the comment seriously.

“Well. Maybe. I can ask. My boss is easy-going.”

Miles immediately felt bad. “Oh, no, it’s okay. I just meant…”

He caught himself and forced himself to stop. His first instinct had been to retract the request, it was too big a favor, but he silenced that voice.

Helene waved him off anyway. “No problem. She’s a big spender type. Let me just check.” She pulled out her comm, tapping out the start of a message. “You said you’re a healer on Ialis?” she asked, not looking up from the device.

“Tier 1,” Miles said. He was still only a Tier 1. He was going to need to change that. He was sure he could test into a higher rating with everything he’d learned, and his new spells.

“I can pitch this,” she said. She finished the message, then sent it.

She spent the next five minutes typing, reading, and occasionally laughing at replies. Finally, she looked up.

“The boss says you can come with us as far as Ialis. You’ll be riding as my understudy.”

“That’s… amazing. Thank you.”

“It’s okay. I told him you’ll work for free.”

“That’s fine too.”

Helene’s act of kindness was going to take about a week off Miles’ journey. He’d still need to spend a few hours on the shuttle from Earth to the Fleet, but he’d only have about a day of travel once he was back in the weave. He could work for a day.

“And if I’m ever on Ialis, you can put me up.”

Miles kept smiling, but imagined the tiny apartment he shared with two other sapients.

“Yeah.”

***

The green-blue circle shrank in the shuttle viewport. The vessel’s chassis rattled around him, despite the energy shields casting blue light over the void. Venus was visible to the right, the only star in that part of the sky.

Beyond the Earth, the night sky Miles had grown up with was absent. No stars and no constellations. It made the Earth, the sun, and the planets look isolated, a white-yellow disk and a handful of white dots floating in an infinite emptiness. The reality was that Earth had never been less alone. When the shuttle turned, he’d see the neighbors. The closest was much less than a light-year away.

Miles wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel, staring down at the retreating planet.

The space travelers of Earth’s history had described awe, a feeling of personal insignificance, and the conviction that Earth was precious.

Miles had to think that being one of twenty-seven thousand worlds re-contextualized the sight a little.

He felt the personal insignificance, but that wasn’t anything new. He wasn’t one of billions anymore, but tens of trillions.

If there was awe, then it was awe at what had been lost. The history of Earth’s last hundred years had been a constant rolling disaster, but humans couldn’t be blamed for the bower break. It had been arbitrary. A cultural, environmental, technological disaster that had literally come out of nowhere.

Was Earth precious? If another human asked him, he felt like he would have to say that it was, but he wasn’t sure if he really felt that way. He wondered if that was unpatriotic, or something to be ashamed of.

As the planet dropped into the distance, becoming a dull star, the warmest feeling Miles could call up was that he didn’t hate it.

Elsewhere on the shuttle, Helene was sitting in a window seat, still in her armor. The two of them would ride separately to the Forward Fleet, where the bodyguard would hopefully bring him onboard her employer’s ship.

If it all worked out, it meant he’d be back on Ialis in a little over a day. With Hum of the Enduring, he wouldn’t even need to rely on them offering him somewhere to sleep. He could be on his feet for the next twenty-four hours if he needed to be.

A chirp from Miles’ comm drew his attention. He looked down and saw a new message, another one from his father.

It stayed there as an alert, no hint at the content.

He stared at the notification for a minute, then blocked the sender. The new message and entire communication history vanished, deleted or archived, he didn’t care.

Eventually, the shuttle turned, and the spiral came into view.

Looking at it, Miles felt a cauldron of emotions boiling over. Awe. At the scale of civilization spread out along the coiling chain of worlds, at the fact that it managed to work as a unified culture. Insignificance. There had to be fewer than twenty people out there who even knew his name. Hope. Because all of those worlds out there had been through a similar catastrophe to Earth, and most of them had recovered.

He felt homesick, as well. Soon he’d be home, in Dendril City, with Trin and Torg, bouncing off the walls of their tiny apartment. And whatever fortune might lie in his future, he still had to work in the present. Soon, he’d be back again, facing down the passageways of the dungeon.