Wind whipped at Miles’ protective robe as their platform drifted towards the dungeon entrance complex.

Water vapor clouds had formed in the Ialis night sky, blocking out the spiral of stars that normally cut through the void like a thin, meandering milky way. The rain had started a little after they left, a light drizzle that nevertheless soaked the moss-covered foothills North of Dendril City, creating pools and streams that sprang up out of nowhere.

He took a moment to marvel that the planet could even support an atmosphere and a biosphere. Whatever the Ialis dungeon was, it occupied almost the entirety of the planetary sphere, a thin crust of dirt and rock surrounding an apparently infinite hollow structure.

Infinite. How can it be infinite?

Miles looked down over the railing of the floating platform. Hundreds of feet below them, the ground was rushing past. He peered at the surface as if he could see down to its lowest depths, as if the dark moss would reveal the planet’s secret to him.

From interrogating They-who–fly-with-abandon, Miles had worked out that whatever held the dirt and inhabitants down against the planet wasn’t exactly gravity, which was a peculiarity of spacetime-like universes, but it was close enough for everyday work. Miles had been living in the weave for a while now and was pretty sure that if he’d felt one force gradient he’d felt them all.

Torg didn’t seem to be bothered by the rain. It ran over his carapace without affecting him, the overhanging chitin cowl of his shell acting as a hood for his eyes and insectile face. Trin did seem to be bothered by the rain. His fur was soaked, and he looked miserable. Every few seconds he ran a pair of mid-paws over his face, squeezing the water out of the fur there.

Miles’ robe was waterproof, which was nice, and something he should have worried about after they’d landed. He’d spent so long in the climate-controlled interior of Unsiel Station, he’d almost forgotten rain existed. Now, his hair was soaked, but he was dry from his neck to his knees.

The open-topped floating platforms seemed like a poor design for a transport system on a world that had rain. It had some kind of technology that slowed the wind as it hit them, a shield against the air they would otherwise be hitting at high speed, but that didn’t stop the wind or rain completely. Whether that deficiency was because of ineffable alien logic, cost constraints, or just an ordinary administrative mistake, the platforms were the standard way of getting around on the planet, so Miles would have to get used to it.

They’d left Bandy, back at the apartment with the scout. The little drone couldn’t care for the recovering Ankn, it didn’t seem to have that capacity, but they could at least keep her company.

“These are so slow,” Trin complained, his voice mournful.

Watching the landscape fly by below them, Miles couldn’t exactly agree. He’d flown on passenger planes that didn’t go half this speed, back on old Earth. It was only the distance between Dendril City and the entrance complex that meant it would take over an hour to get there.

“Maybe we buy a little ship,” Trin suggested. “With roof, and hot air, and a food maker.”

Buying even a small ship in the spiral was the equivalent of buying a large house back on old Earth. When they were having trouble even making rent, it wasn’t a realistic proposition. This job would help with that, but only if everything went well.

The client that Torg had lined up for them was going to be meeting them at the entrance complex next to the dungeon crater in a little over forty minutes.

Lestiel Dunverde.

They had his name from the contract document and his pronoun from his comm entry, but that was all they knew about him.

Miles still felt like he was going into a job interview, despite the fact that the contract was already signed and sealed, and it had him as nervous as he’d been since he signed on with the Kipper.

It might not have been so bad if Miles was confident about actually doing the job, but they’d done one short dungeon dive, and that was meant to qualify them to escort a stranger through it?

Only the client’s attitude of superiority and the fact that they were only going to the first level gave Miles any peace at the idea.

They should have time to land at the entrance complex and clean up a little before meeting him. Hopefully, he would be more impressed with them in person than he’d seemed on the comm.

***

The client’s ship was a slim dart of liquid black. It flew in silently, coming down at a thirty-degree angle at what felt like hundreds of miles per hour. As it reached the entrance complex, it slowed abruptly, dropping from high speed to a near-stop within a second, then turned in a lazy half-circle and floated down onto a landing pad.

It was shaped like a narrow teardrop, with the tip of the vessel ending in a point about forty feet in front of the rounded rear. There were no devices or equipment mounted on the hull, no windows, no features of any kind, just a perfectly smooth black shell.

Miles didn’t have a lot of experience with the various ships of the spiral, but this one seemed expensive.

When it was just feet above the landing pad, the underside of the ship seemed to flow downwards like water on glass, forming three spiked stilettos of the same black substance as the ship. The narrow spikes made contact with the landing pad with a sound like needles on stone.

Miles didn’t need an engineering degree to know that a spike was a bad shape for something that was meant to take any amount of weight, at least without damaging the surface it was resting on. He wondered if reading into that would tell him something about the ship’s designer.

Moments after it landed, another part of the ship’s hull flowed like liquid, this time opening a hole in the bottom. As soon as it was clear, the occupant hopped down, landing in a crouch below the ship and stepping out onto the landing pad.

For a split second, Miles thought he was looking at a human.

The sapient was humanoid, around six feet tall, with slim hips and long fingers. He had the same rough proportions as a human, except that he was skeletally thin, with skin that hugged an internal skeleton like it had been vacuum sealed on. His head was almost bald, just with a ridge of multi-colored hair that grew in a line along the center of his head before cascading down behind him in a long tail.

The color of his skin was hard to discern. Miles had initially thought it was absolute black, but as the sapient looked around, wherever the light from the skydock's lamps caught him, it appeared bone-white. The boundary between illuminated and shadowed skin was marked with a ridge of shifting rainbow oil shimmer. The whole effect made Miles think more of a stylized painting than something he could describe in merely human terms. He wasn’t sure it even was a color, maybe it was more of an optical effect, like a dragonfly wing.

The sapient took a second to look around and get his bearings, then sighted on Miles' group and began marching towards them.

He focused on Torg as he approached, the one of them he'd met before.

"I was so certain that you would fail to be here," he said as he arrived. "For clearing the most pathetic of bars, I congratulate you."

Clisk. 'Thank,' Torg said.

The sapient turned his head, taking in Miles and Trin.

Miles' robe was clean, still bearing the 'healer' symbol that'd been painted on it on their last dive. Trin had had a chance to clean up and dry his fur, but the rain and humidity had left him looking very fluffy.

The client was dressed in a tight-fitting flight suit of what looked like dark gray leather, with gloves in a slightly lighter color, and a pair of footwear that were like rigid-soled socks. There wasn't much in the way of embellishment on the outfit, but a large hood hung loosely behind them, and they wore a black synth fabric belt similar to the one that wrapped around Miles’ robe.

The client’s belt was clipped with a holster that held a sleek silver pistol, and a metal scabbard that looked like it could be holding a long, slim sword, maybe something like a rapier.

The silence between them was starting to get awkward, so Miles took the initiative and spoke into it.

“I’m Miles, the team’s healer,” he said. He didn’t really know how to talk to a client, on Earth or in the spiral, so he fell back on old patterns. Introduce everyone. “This is Trin, our scout, and you already met Torg, our lancer.”

He tried not to feel like a fraud as he labeled them with terms he’d only learned a few days before.

“I am Lestiel Dunverde, though if you haven’t yet discovered that, then I had exactly the right estimation of your intelligence.” Lestiel looked around, then up at the sky. “Before we leave the shelter of my ship, protect me from this falling water.”

Miles’ stomach clenched briefly. They didn’t have any rain protection for him. Maybe his robe? Lestiel’s fight suit looked as good or better protection from the rain than the robe’s rough fabric.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have a way to keep the rain off you,” Miles said.

Trin interrupted before Lestiel could reply to that. “Look, it rains here. That’s what you get. You didn’t prepare, so who’s stupid now?”

Lestiel turned, peering down at him sharply. The sapient’s eyes were white with black centers, no iris, but the pupils seemed to contain glints of silver.

“Did you know that your fur is soaked through?” Lestiel said in response. “You smell like a rug after a flood.”

“The entrance complex is this way,” Miles said, before that could escalate. He gestured towards the low open buildings a few hundred meters away. Without waiting for a response, he started walking.

After a few seconds, he heard the others start to follow. Encouraged at having successfully taken the initiative, Miles continued.

“Once we’re cleared to go in, we’ll be put in a queue,” Miles explained as they walked. “It might take us an hour to reach the front and actually enter the artifact, but with it being evening and with the bad weather, there might not be as many people ahead of us.”

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

He was making the last part up, but it seemed logical to him. That was how it always worked on Earth.

“You will pay our entrance fee into the artifact, of course,” Lestiel said, his feet squelching in puddles as they walked across the moss.

Miles had expected that. He'd checked with Bandy, and it turned out that entrance into the first level only cost thirty seln, but he still found it a little cheap of the sapient to make them pay it.

"Do we have an objective once we get inside?" Miles asked.

Lestiel was quiet for a few seconds before answering.

"I doubt you have the wherewithal to have discovered this, but I am a researcher at the Danis Institute. The Ialis artifact is my new topic of study. For my first visit, I will need biological samples taken from artifact-born life, as well as examples of the chaotic technology it seems to generate."

In his previous trip, Miles had seen both. Now, he only hoped they’d be able to accommodate him. From what he'd heard, it wasn't a sure thing.

"The artifact shuffles its layout occasionally, and it seems to be random," Miles said, hoping he was both right and that Lestiel didn't already know this. "We're not guaranteed to find what you need on this dive."

"Of course I already know of the artifact's patterns and peculiarities," Lestial said, his tone withering. "I just said I was a researcher at the Danis Institute. Are all scavengers this slow on the uptake, or are you a special example?"

Trin jumped in. "We are all slow," the Eppan said. "Scavenger lifestyle. Many knocks on head."

Miles felt the need to defend himself. "It wasn't so much to educate you, as it was a legal disclaimer. I'm just trying to be up-front about it. You might not get what you want."

"Then I suggest you re-read our contract, if you can read," Lestiel said. "It does not tie your payment to the success of my academic objectives."

"He can't read. Very sad," Trin said in response.

After a few minutes, they came to the same open-walled building that Miles had visited before, last time with Brisk. Not much had changed, except now four of the sharp attack drones drifted menacingly around the station in circles, constantly on alert.

There was a Gilthaen managing the station inside, their towering wormlike body wrapped in a high-collared black coat, with a silvery shirt underneath. As soon as they were close enough for Miles to get a good look, he realized that he knew them. It was They-who-share-ground, Consul Thunis, back on duty already.

“Consul Thunis, hello,” Miles said as they arrived. He hadn’t learned many things he wanted to keep from Brisk, but how to be polite to the staff of the entrance facility was one of them.

Thunis turned to look at them, then curled down from their imposing height, bringing their face down to look at Miles from a couple of feet away.

“Miles Asher,” the consul said, blinking loudly. They straightened back up. “I am no longer They-who-share-ground. I am now They-who-warily-tread. Please know me as Consul Thunit.”

“Consul Thunit, of course,” Miles said, enjoying having at least one interaction with a spiral sapient that he had some frame of reference for.

“I have not been given a chance to say this to you, Miles Asher. Thank you for your help during that other time. I recommended your boon to our Consul-general They-who-read-deeply.”

“Consul, thank you. That really helped us out.”

“Your actions were entered in our corporate logs. There you were recorded as He-who-burns-his-hand-on-mercy.”

“Oh,” Miles said, simply.

He didn’t know how to feel about that. He’d scalded his hand when he’d tried to touch the consul to heal them, not knowing that Gilthaens had a body temperature high enough to hurt him, but he hadn’t exactly acted out of mercy, and it hadn’t exactly been a burn, and anyway, the injury was long gone now; his Hasten Renewal spell worked as well on himself as it did on others.

“Consul, thank you,” Miles said at last, not sure how else to respond.

The consul’s head swayed, maybe in acknowledgment.

They entered their party’s details into the Gilthaen system and paid their entrance fee — thirty seln. As they were walking from the station to the transport platforms, Lestiel spoke up.

“How did you gain the respect of the Gilthaen?” he asked, peering sidelong at Miles as they walked.

Miles considered giving a serious answer, but he honestly didn’t want to open himself up to another one of their client’s scathing put-downs.

“By doing something stupid,” he said, instead.

Lestiel held his gaze for a moment, seeming to read more into the statement than Miles had intended. He turned back to look ahead of them and spoke in the same acidic way he had since he’d landed.

“Nobility in ignorance is the only kind of nobility that some people can hope for.”

By the time they boarded the platform, the rain had stopped, and they began their slow spiraling descent into the crater.

***

The outer door was shut. The platform had dropped them off at a point that was similar to their last entry point, but with differences. This time it was a corridor, about fifteen feet tall and six wide, with a floor made of a white material that felt like ceramic and a ceiling set with the same irregular blue lights Miles had noticed on their previous visit.

The crater had sheared off whatever the corridor had been traveling from, leaving a twenty-foot-long passageway that ended in a closed door.

This one had an intact panel. Miles couldn’t help but remember the trouble Trin had had with the last one.

Lestiel Dunverde was walking behind them. He was looking around as they moved, as if every aspect of the mundane corridor interested him.

When they reached the far end, Trin touched the door panel to wake it up, then started tapping pictograms that appeared on the screen.

The designs were shifting too fast for Miles’ Eyes of the Emigre to translate, but from the way the same designs kept reappearing, it looked like Trin was trying a lot of slight variations on the same path.

Lestiel stepped up behind the Eppan to watch him work.

“The doors are sealed with puzzles?” Lestiel asked.

Trin hummed, then spoke as he continued working. “More like bad interface. Like this. I say open, it says no. I say please, it says give key. I say here is key, it says no key. I say, no, your key reader broken. It says, give maintenance code. I put in blank code.”

Trin tapped a final icon and waited as the panel processed something.

After a second it changed, showing a symbol that translated as ‘YES’. Something mechanical clunked inside the wall.

“Then it works,” Trin said. “Not always so easy. Door maker messed up bad on this one.”

The door slid open, revealing a forest.

For a few seconds, they all hesitated. It was a surprising sight, here, underground, on this planet.

Miles stepped forward while the others were still staring.

It was a pine forest, Miles realized.

White trunks stood ten or twenty feet apart, stretching up a hundred feet or more into white mist. To the left and right, and out ahead of them, the forest floor stretched further than they could see, hundreds of meters of struggling grass and decaying plant matter.

The smell was almost overwhelming; scents of pine needles, damp earth, forest mulch, and distant rain. The trees were silver pine, Miles was sure of it. He was back on Earth. He was back on Earth.

He turned to look behind him and saw Trin, Torg, and Lestiel, standing just outside the door, jarring in this scene of normality. He was inside the dungeon on Ialis. He was still in spiral space, billions of miles from Earth.

The others cautiously stepped through. Lestiel’s eyes were wide, turning to take in everything. Trin had his scanning device out, tapping keys and not taking his eyes off the screen.

“These are silver pine trees,” Miles said.

He wanted to impress on the others how familiar they were to him, to him personally, and how alien an experience it was to see them here, but he couldn’t think of a way to put it into words.

“Are they dangerous?” Lestiel asked.

Miles turned, glancing around at the trees. “Only if they fall on you.”

Miles didn’t understand. It must have taken hundreds of years to grow these trees, even assuming the dungeon could give them the perfect conditions. Earth hadn’t even been in spiral space for that long. Where had the dungeon found the seeds? How did it plant and care for them? Why this kind of tree, from the specific area of Earth that Miles had grown up in? Was it all a huge coincidence?

“Could this be a simulation?” he asked nobody in particular.

“Not an insubstantial one,” Lestiel replied. He seemed distracted, examining one of the trees, pressing his hands against the bark.

“They’re biochemistry type C,” Miles said, belatedly, hoping it wouldn’t be an issue for the sapient.

Lestiel glanced his way before turning back to the tree.

“Big sticks are real,” Trin said, staring at his scanner while the rest stared around at the forest. “Room is only few hundred meters. Water in air makes it hard to see, so looks bigger.”

So it was just a huge underground room. And somehow the trees were real.

Lestiel extended his arm, and for a second Miles found him hard to look at. When he withdrew it, he was holding something new in his hand, a piece of tech that looked like a compact mirror. He’d just pulled it out of nowhere.

Trin gaped at his scanner for a second, then looked up, his eyes finding Lestiel. “What? How did you do that?”

Lestiel ignored him, popping the device open and waving it over the tree, his own scanner, Miles guessed. After a few passes, he closed the device and tore a piece of bark from the tree with his fingers. Both items vanished from his hands a second later.

“We’ll move on,” Lestiel said.

After waiting for Trin to finish what he was doing with his scanner, they grouped up and started walking out into the trees.

For a moment Miles felt a weird conflict between the familiarity of his surroundings and the bizarreness of it being here. It hit him like seeing a stranger approaching him wearing a familiar face. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

“I’m going to use some sensory magic,” Miles said. “I won’t be able to understand anything for a while.”

He got a curious look from Lestiel, but none of the others said anything, and Miles slipped into his Eyes of the Altruist.

Light sprang up all over the forest. At first Miles was shocked, thinking they were surrounded, but then he took a second to process and realized the shapes he was seeing were the trees.

The silver pines didn’t have discrete internal organs, exactly, but they did have structure. For the closest ones, Miles could see thin threads running up and down the trunks, which had to be the living stem of the tree. On some of the lower branches, he could see glowing pinpricks that corresponded to where needles emerged. Where the roots disappeared into the springy ground, he saw more vessels and structures, even some mottled colors suggesting damage.

Only the closest trees showed him any detail. The ones further out just had indistinct light misting over them, and the ones further away showed him nothing; too far for him to see the small details.

Miles was admiring the field of glowing threads when something flashed through the air up ahead of them.

He focused on it immediately, but by then it had passed behind a tree.

Trin said something, and Miles immediately switched back to Eyes of the Emigre.

“—something,” Trin was saying. He was glancing between his scanner and the trees up ahead.

Apparently, Miles wasn’t the only one who’d seen movement.

“What is it?” Miles asked.

“An animal biological sample?” Lestiel asked. He sounded pleased.

“Uh. Hot. Lots of legs,” Trin said. He tapped on his scanner. “Three meters. Four hundred kilograms. Somewhere there.” He pointed up ahead.

Miles instinctively started backing away from the thing hiding up ahead.

He suddenly missed Brisk, despite how illogical that was. It looked like they were going to be testing themselves in combat earlier than he expected.