The room was smaller than Miles’ student apartment back on old Earth.

Walls of gray-blue metal that sucked in heat and reflected every sound, a floor of black plastic tiles. It looked like the room had been run off a production line somewhere, and then just slotted into the arcology like a box on a shelf.

It was about five meters from wall to wall, with shelving along one wall and a fold-out plastic cubicle that Bandy had explained served as shower, toilet, and drinking water source all in one. ‘It can dispense a wide variety of fluid solvents, and accepts a wide variety of biological byproducts!’

There was only one bed, and it was only dressed with plastic mats that reminded Miles of bubble wrap.

As a human living in mixed-species accommodation on Unsiel Station, Miles had become accustomed to living without the comforts of his home culture, but this was pushing the lower limits of what he could deal with.

And that was before even considering that he’d be sharing it.

Click-tuck. ‘Window,’ Torg observed.

Torg was still carrying the injured scout in his arms, a small oval pod of dark chitin, scarred and bruised, but apparently alive and stable. There hadn’t been a clear way for them to hand off the scout, no medical facilities they could leave her at, no one they could ask more detailed questions of about her care. She was apparently on the path to recovery, but they didn’t know her specific needs.

“Yeah,” Miles said grimly. “At least there’s a view.”

The room’s window was a tapered rectangle of clear glass set into one wall, looking out over the lights and spires of Dendril City.

The city itself couldn’t have been more different from the simple structures of the Gilthaen entrance complex.

Sharp towers of gray metal lanced up from flat ground, hundreds of meters high and only dozens apart; a dark, jagged forest, inexplicably crowded despite the vast open space of the surrounding wilderness.

Lurid strip lights in blue, green, and yellow were everywhere, growing out of the rugged metal exteriors seemingly at random, casting the towers in rainbow hues. The plant life that covered the surface of Ialis here had risen up, sending creeping black-leaved vines to clamber all over the towers, their tendrils reaching towards and swallowing the chromatic lights.

Bandy had claimed that the vines were biologically altered and placed here deliberately to enhance the city’s liveability, and that the chromatic lighting was to provide them with the energy they couldn’t get from the planet’s anemic itinerant star.

Miles thought that if the intent had been to make Dendril City feel more natural and inviting, it had failed badly. The result was the image of a dark, sterile, futuristic city waging war with a sinister forest — and losing.

The only exception to the gray architecture was the local consulate, a floating six-tier pagoda in the Gilthaen style, hovering at the height of the tallest buildings just beside the city. A little way off across the dull moss-strewn flats was a skyport, a dozen or more black pads set into the ground, with nearby Gilthaen buildings for servicing and administration.

A few of the small floating platforms drifted between the spires, taking people back and forth between the city and the skyport, or from one spire to the other.

The transport platforms could be called by sending a message to a central management system, and they were pretty much the only way to get around; the city wasn’t exactly walkable.

"What do you think?" They-who-fly-with-abandon asked. "Will you take it? It's basic, I know, but it's the cheapest option in the city that you can survive in."

Miles raised his hand and checked his comm, again.

> Financial Status [§,δ]

>

> §566 (§66 + §500)

> δ250 (δ0 + δ250)

Consul-general They-who-read-deeply had awarded Miles five-hundred seln for the 'payment' part of his request.

They'd also given him two-hundred and fifty delta after realizing he was mage, which was great, because Miles didn't know how to get it on his own.

In the middle of the room, Trin flopped backward onto the bed. He scurried in place for a second, then pulled his head flaps down over his eyes. After a minute of lying still, he sat back up.

"What is rent?" he asked.

"Three hundred and fifty standard exchange notes per span," Bandy announced cheerfully.

"Per span?" Miles asked. Per week, basically.

"Can't afford," Trin announced.

Torg clicked once, a sound that didn't translate, but that Miles got the impression as a general noise of disagreement.

Miles checked his comm again. He could technically afford a week's rent, but did he want to? He didn't know what his other expenses might be, and he definitely didn't want to be the only one of them paying for a room they were sharing.

"If we pool our money, I bet we could rent it for a week at least," Miles suggested. He felt awkward as he asked, "How much can everyone contribute?"

"Four hundred seln in savings," Trin said. "I can pay a third of rent, one time."

Miles nodded, satisfied. He and Trin were on the same page.

Clicktck. 'Same,' Torg said.

"Okay," Miles said.

In the end, it wasn't a hard decision; this was their only option.

"How to make money here?" Trin asked, directing the question at the drone.

The little donut spun to face him.

"Eighty-four percent of commercial activity on Ialis revolves around the Ialis artifact. Scavengers raid the artifact directly. Merchants supply the scavengers and trade in the equipment they recover. Mercenaries sell their services to fill gaps on professional scavenger teams, or to provide pre-made teams to temporary and non-professional scavengers. Professionals sell their services to the Ialis Corporation, working in support of artifact operations."

Cthick. 'Raid,' Torg said.

Bandy replied as if Torg had asked a question. "Scavenging directly from the artifact rewards randomly, not reliably. A team may find a valuable new piece of technology on the first visit to the first level, or they may raid the tenth level for many iterations without a significant find."

"How much could I make selling my services as a healer?" Miles asked.

The drone turned to face Miles. As a synthetic being, Miles didn’t think Bandy could lose patience or get tired of stupid questions, but that didn’t stop him reading suppressed frustration in the little unit’s slow rotation.

"As a Tier-1 healer, you are ineligible to serve as a healer working for the Ialis Corporation, but a search of local listings suggests a compensation rate of two-hundred standard exchange notes per dive, with the amount increasing proportionally with risk, experience, qualifications, and reputation."

"What about me?" Trin asked. "Scout. I am scout."

Bandly rotated even more slowly to face Trin.

"A search of local listings suggests an inexperienced scout could demand a base compensation rate of sixty standard exchange notes per dive."

"What!"

Clickthh. 'Lancer,' Torg asked.

"A search of local listings suggests an inexperienced lancer could demand a base compensation rate of one hundred and twenty standard exchange notes per dive."

"What!" Trin shouted again.

"So if we each manage to get in on one dive, we can make rent," Miles concluded.

"The population of Ialis is one-hundred and twenty thousand,” Bandy said. “Competition for positions on dives is significant."

"Okay, so we won't just fall into a job,” Miles conceded, “but maybe we could run our own dives until we find an opening somewhere. And if we don't, and we run out of money, then I guess… we just split up and find a way home, somehow."

Click-click. 'No-home. Exile,' Torg said.

Oh?

"I guess this is all or nothing for you, then, Torg," Miles said.

Torg clicked.

Given that going back to Unsiel Station would mean going back to a life of obscure subsistence, surviving, but without hope, Miles wondered whether it was all or nothing for him too.

***

When he was first getting oriented back on Unsiel Station, Miles had learned that a large proportion of trade in spiral space happened via the Exchange. Physical items could be bought there and either collected from a central location or delivered for a fee, with the availability of items strictly limited by the buyer’s proximity to the seller.

There was no reason this couldn’t work for everything, but the desire to see something physically in the flesh before buying it seemed to be a niche preference across every trading species in the weave. As a result, Dendril City had stores.

The Ishel Corporation Lounge was Ialis’ answer to a mall. It filled one of the skyscraper-tall black spires, covering two-hundred stories with tidy retail units, merchant booths, and automated food dispensers.

It was roughly divided into departments, weapons and armor, personal equipment, food and sustenance, medical care, with a heavy skew towards products that scavengers raiding the dungeon would need for their dives.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The three of them had split up at the entrance, a platform halfway up the spire, and had each gone to pursue their own area of interest.

Miles’ priority was items for the apartment, and he’d headed to a level whose label translated to homewares.

Looking at the bizarre range of items on display, he couldn’t imagine what kind of homes they were meant for.

Miles’ first thought had been that he wanted a blanket. A simple, flat blanket, a sheet of something thick to keep his body warm in the night. The first promising stall he’d approached had been loaded down with square sheets of fur, and one of those sheets had opened several eyes to peer at him.

“Night friends,” the ten-limbed vendor had declared to him, proudly. “No, where are you going? They only eat what you discard! Night friends!”

He found an automated store selling cooking vessels, pots and pans made of recognizable metals, and for a second he just stood there, basking in the normality and familiarity. Sure, some of it was shaped more like chemistry equipment than kitchenware, but that was just innocent variation.

Eventually, he had to move on.

He found an electronics stall selling tiny fingernail-sized devices labeled as heat lamps, but the vendor warned him off, saying an exothermic sapient would find the heat uncomfortable. There were insulating bodygloves that Miles considered and rejected, a piece of personal climate control tech that was way too expensive, a neural unit that would trick the body into thinking it was comfortable.

No thanks.

Finally, he found a place that his instincts told him was a camping store, where he managed to buy a synth fabric sleeping bag.

The thing was big for him, it could easily have fit Torg, but it was apparently well insulated, optimized for sensitive epidermal layers, and only cost fifteen seln. He left with it rolled up and strapped to the bottom of his backpack.

The shopping plazas of each floor were far less chaotic than the commercial melee on Delatariel Station, but after an hour, even the thin crowds and calm stares of the merchants started to overwhelm him.

Miles looked around, searching for somewhere quiet, then ducked into one of the few walled-off stores on the level.

The background noise of the shopping floor vanished as he stepped inside, some kind of sound-canceling tech, and Miles found himself standing in a long, narrow room. The walls of the store were lined with shelves holding row upon row of slim tablet-like tech devices, and behind the counter at the far end was a counter and a row of booths.

There was a vendor managing the store, a member of the same species as the merchant who’d sold Miles his robe and his ‘spells’ at Delatariel Station, but they only glanced at him once and didn’t move to talk to him.

Miles was grateful they weren’t giving him the hard sell straight away.

He started walking down the row of shelves, looking at them intently, giving himself a minute to recover. It would have been slightly implausible if he were a real customer, since all of the devices seemed identical, and none of them were labeled. He didn’t even really know what they were.

He saw one device that looked slightly different, taller, a little thicker. He bravely reached up and pulled it off the shelf, looking at it.

There was no label on the front either. On its face, the device was almost entirely taken up by the screen, framed on each side by a low bevel of the device’s silvery metal. There was a tactile button on the top and Miles tried pressing it, to no effect.

“Do you seek knowledge?” a voice hissed.

Miles jumped on the spot and turned around.

The vendor was right behind him. They’d approached without any sound and without catching Miles’ peripheral vision.

Closer up, Miles could see the similarities and differences to the mage merchant on Delatariel Station.

This sapient had mottled skin, bone white on ash white. The ridge running down the center of their face, practically their face’s only feature, was a slightly different shape, and their eyes were set higher up and closer together, with a centimeter of space between the eye and the edge of their face. There was a trace of a scar running below one eye.

Miles still couldn’t decide whether the texture of their skin was closer to leather or paper, but this sapient was dressed in a more form-fitting suit than the merchant on the station, and he could see that they had a pair of legs and six arms emerging from their sides. Their arms were arranged in pairs that decreased in size as they went down the body, with the lowest pair barely longer than Miles’ forearm.

Miles suddenly felt like he was being rude.

“I don’t actually know what these are,” he admitted.

The sapient took the slightly larger tablet from Miles’ hands and drew a spiked finger across the screen. A block of text appeared, and when they turned the device to face Miles, he found he could read the title.

The Hidden Secrets of Euphospher Engineering Tier 1 Volume 1.

“It’s a book?” Miles asked.

The sapient gestured around at the shop.

“A horde of knowledge; tomes and simulations to enrich the mind and entice the senses.”

Miles watched as the sapient slid the tablet — the book — back onto the shelf and turned away.

“I’ve seen books for sale on the Exchange. Do people prefer to buy them in person?” Miles asked. He hoped he wasn’t raising a sensitive subject or poking an economic wound.

“The exchange,” the vendor mewled with derision, “is curated by the Grand Banality, the Slaves of Orthodoxy, the Nexilaen controlled Exchange Corporation. They exclude any title which competes with their preferred volumes. The exchange is nothing but a vehicle for Nexilean chauvinism, and a tool with which to exercise control over our very minds.”

Miles found himself backing away towards the door. This was a little much.

He didn’t know if the vendor was a little unhinged, or if this was just a weird spiral sales pitch, but either way, it wasn’t making him comfortable.

The vendor seemed to flow towards and around him, scuttling by at an alarming speed and taking up a position that didn’t block his progress, but let them loom over him.

“You will find no books here that can be had on the exchange. My customers value my curation, my vision; a superior catalog for any subject that piques your curiosity.”

Miles took several steps back towards the door.

The sapient raised a hand, as if in appeal. ”I also run a lending operation for loyal members.”

Miles stopped backing away.

“You lend books? Like a library?”

The vendor lowered their hand, seeming to relax now that they had a hook in Miles’ attention.

***

Miles arrived back at the meeting point, a new pocket of his cargo pants occupied by the book tablet, with its store of apparently obscure reading material.

He’d paid twenty-five seln for a week’s membership in the bookstore’s lending program, an introductory rate that would go up to fifty seln after the first week. With that, he could borrow three books a day, and the only apparent limit on how much of the vendor’s stock he could get through was how quickly he could read.

He recognized it as a bit of a racket. He’d be limited in how fast he could read, and if he found a book that was useful then he was as likely to purchase it as return it. Depending on how well the sapient’s business was going, it might have been purely a marketing gimmick, but for Miles, cash poor and with time on his hands, it was a useful service.

It grated a bit that he had to pay for individual books, having grown up in the free-information environment of old Earth, but apparently the mercantile system of the spiral was more centrally managed than he was used to. On Earth, information availability was mostly limited by what was technologically possible. In the spiral, it seemed like it was a result of conscious decisions.

Miles had also bought a large bottle of Biochemistry-C food slime, scintil flavor, which was the best one. That should keep him nourished for several days, if not necessarily satisfied. The shower unit in the room didn’t provide any soap, so he’d done his best to buy the relevant chemicals to clean his body, clothes, and hair. He’d bought a silver ring with a pattern engraved along the outside, purely decorative, but he’d liked it, and it had been as cheap as costume jewelry.

He hadn’t got everything he’d probably need, but on the whole trip he’d spent less than sixty seln, and he had enough creature comforts that he could bring himself to face the stark room back in their tower.

He hadn’t spent any of his delta. Upgrades to an index were meant to be bought through the index, so that could wait until he was back at the apartment.

The entrance level was the busiest part of the tower, but Miles didn’t have any trouble spotting Torg stepping out of the elevator.

He was still carrying the convalescing scout, cradled in two arms, his other arms wrapped around a large plastic sack. He was wearing a new black breastplate that shimmered with rainbow hues and had some kind of boxy tech clipped to a bandolier that went diagonally across his body.

Miles felt briefly worried that he hadn’t bought anything that would help him on dives.

Torg found his way to Miles and they exchanged greetings. Torg reviewed Miles’ purchases without comment.

He tried to show Miles the contents of the sack, but even assuming Miles could have recognized anything in there, it was too cluttered and jumbled for him to pick items apart.

“I’ll look back at the apartment,” Miles said.

Trin appeared a few minutes later. He was carrying a new bag, a pouch that hung from a shoulder strap, and he was wearing a rigid cap made of rugged-looking synth fabric.

“Hey,” Miles said as Trin approached.

“Hello. Miles. Torg,” Trin said, then, “I got a gun,”

He drew a weapon from the pouch and waved it in the air for them to see. It was a white, plastic-looking pistol, with an elongated grip and a weirdly tall barrel.

A few people in the crowd veered to avoid them, others shot Trin intense looks.

“Let’s put that away for now,” Miles suggested.

“Okay.” Trin dropped the weapon back into his bag. “Can we go?”

Miles pulled out his comm unit and sent a message to call a platform.

***

Eppan feet were slender and fur-covered, with soft chalk-white skin on the underside, and two wide toes, and Trin’s were practically in Miles’ face.

The bed was wide enough for two, just, and Miles had suggested a top-and-tail arrangement. Trin had needed to be talked into it, wanting to sleep upright, and Miles didn’t want to disrupt it now by complaining. Trin’s toes twitched in his sleep. Did Eppans dream?

The room was dark, lit only by the diffuse chromatic glow from the city outside the window. At some point rain had started to fall, drumming heavily on the glass and blurring the colors and motion of passing platforms. It didn’t seem like Dendril City was a city that slept.

A huge shape hung in the corner of the room; Torg, who’d used claws to scale the metal walls and some kind of secreted glue to fix himself into place in the corner. It was apparently his preferred sleeping arrangement. He’d bought one of the heat lamps from the shopping complex, which was silently bathing him in warmth from below.

The injured scout was set up nearby. A scan with Miles’ Eyes of the Altruist had suggested that she was healing, and he’d tried his Hasten Renewal that afternoon, but he didn’t really know how to help.

He had been asleep. The patter of the rain helped, reminding him of home, on Earth, but something had woken him up.

He spent a minute staring up at the ceiling, wondering if it was worth trying to get back to sleep, when a sound came to him.

Chirrip.

He sat up, pushing the top of the sleeping bag down. He looked around, searching for the source of the sound.

Chirrip. ‘Food.’

This time when he heard the sound, he understood it. Something was hungry.

“Food.”

His gaze finally landed on the source of the sound. The small pod that was the injured ankn scout.

Miles slipped out of bed as quickly and quietly as he could, darting over to the pod.

“Hello? Hi? Are you okay?”

“Food,” the pod replied.

Miles noticed that one end of the pod had changed. A small opening had appeared, surrounded by a pair of hair-like appendages. As he watched, the opening gasped open and closed. A mouth?

“Food,” the scout repeated.

“Yeah, yes, okay. What can you eat?”

“Food.”

Sure.

The room was cold, and Miles was tired, and the conditions outside were grim, but Miles had a new patient to deal with. He was going to need to run some errands.