When Brisk had abandoned Miles, Trin, and Torg on Ialis, he’d left them with a few pieces of equipment. Either they weren’t valuable enough for him to bother trying to recover, or more likely, he’d been too busy running from Gilthaen attack drones to take back.

Miles had his striker pistol, a variable-power laser weapon that could knock around a large creature, or splatter a small one against a wall. It seemed like this time, they’d be facing a large creature. He pulled the striker from the pouch at his back and dialed the power slider on the side up to its maximum.

Torg had been left with some kind of energy rifle, Brisk had called it a cannon, as well as an ordinary-looking two-handed ax. He’d brought the ax with him down for this dive, but inexplicably, he wasn’t carrying the rifle. Maybe it was broken, or out of charge. Maybe Torg’s had a sense of honor that forced him to fight hand-to-hand. Miles didn’t know.

“Hey Torg, where your gun?” Trin asked.

Clitch. ‘Sold,’ Torg replied.

Oh.

Miles could question the wisdom of that decision later.

Trin looked like he was about to say something else, but he was interrupted.

Something moved to their right. Ten feet above them and to the side, a massive bulk leaned out from the trees.

Miles only had a second to get a look at it. The impressions that went through his mind in that split second were spider, dandelion seed, and mass grave.

The thing was a sphere of tangled limbs; arms and legs, wings and tentacles. Appendages from dozens of different species that radiated out from a central point, squirming and straining past each other.

It hung from a tree with a cluster of hands, fingers and claws digging into bark. On the other side, it had a particularly long white arm, six claw-tipped fingers spaced evenly around a flat palm.

A second after it appeared it launched the white claw at Miles, the arm snapping out with the claws held forward.

Miles fired his striker on instinct. He aimed for the arm flying at him, but he missed, hitting the thing’s main body instead. Several of the limbs emerging from the main body snapped and flapped limply at the impact, but they’d absorbed all of the force, and the central node wasn’t affected.

Miles had a split second to watch the alien hand flying at his face before Torg swung a pair of arms and swept his ax through the outstretched limb. Hand parted from arm with a wet crunch and the severed claw dropped limply to the side.

The creature in the trees made no sounds, it had no voice, but it shook at the injury, and the sound of flesh rubbing against flesh sent a shiver down Miles’ spine.

He raised his striker and fired twice more at the mass of limbs. More arms were broken, but that barely seemed to cost the creature anything.

Miles didn’t know anything about this enemy, least of all whether his magic considered it disharmonious, but he had a hunch.

He stuffed his striker back into the pouch at his back and brought out his index. He held his empty hand out towards the creature and tapped his index to cast Strike the Disharmonious.

Once again the pure note filled his mind, the sound of a struck bell ringing endlessly. Except, this time, as soon as he focused on the thing in the trees a discordant counter-note sprang up, clashing and warbling as it overlapped with the first.

Working on instinct that came from the spell, Miles grasped at the air and pulled.

Absent while he was just holding the spell ready, Miles finally heard the harmonic spell’s litany run through his mind.

Mere noise clashes with the song. In a harmonious world, the tuneless theme is stricken.

For a second Miles felt resistance, as if he were holding the corner of an invisible sheet. He pulled with all of his strength, and with a tearing sensation, his hand was released.

Far from feeling the normal rush of electric energy from his abdomen, this time he felt power flowing back down from his hand. It ran down his arm like water to his gut, from which it spread out through his body.

Miles looked up at the creature hanging from the tree. It didn’t look any different.

Next to him, Trin finished setting up his new weapon and opened fire on the thing. A swarm of firefly projectiles appeared in the air with a series of pops, flickering up at the creature and through it, tearing wide holes wherever they passed.

A pair of projectiles passed through the thing’s hidden central body, and it immediately started slipping from its perch. It lost its grip on the tree, fell through the air, and hit the ground with a rattle of cracking bones. Once on the ground, it lay there inert.

Throughout the conflict, Lestiel had stood back, watching with dispassionate interest. Now that it was down, he strode forward, walking a circuit around it while peering down.

“Interesting,” he said. He paused and lifted one of the limbs. When he let go, it dropped back down limply. Lestiel raised his head, looking from Miles, to Trin, to Torg.

“What are these called?” he asked.

“He is called slap boss,” Trin said, confidently. “Big scary arm monster. Don’t let him get you, he will eat your arms.”

“Fascinating.”

Miles stared at Trin incredulously. Did Trin really know something about the thing, or was he just making it up?

Trin glanced back at him. In that moment Miles saw a flash of mischief in the Eppan’s eyes.

He’s lying!

“Yeah,” Trin continued. “His danger is his big slaps. Watch out for claws too.”

“Is this one dead?” Lestiel asked.

Trin reached down and grabbed his scanner. He brought it up and started tapping at buttons.

Miles switched briefly into Eyes of the Altruist, looking over the body to check that the magic wasn’t showing him any living anatomy.

Shapes sprung up over the thing. A large oval, a network of fibers. Miles flicked back to Eyes of the Emigre.

"It's still alive," he said.

The thing moved.

It rushed at Trin, scuttling across the ground, grabbing and pulling itself forward by roots, tree trunks, and handfuls of bare earth. It was halfway to him in a second.

Trin screamed, a thin, untranslated aaaaa. He turned his weapon on it and fired.

Fireflies buzzed out of Trin’s pistol, but the projectiles only caught the creature’s limbs, missing the central body. They shredded arms, legs, and pseudopods, but failed to stop it.

Miles saw a flash of black chitin and Torg appeared, putting himself between the creature and Trin. The mass of limbs barrelled into him, forcing him back a step, but failed to get past.

Two of the thing’s arms grabbed Torg’s ax and tore it free, sending it flying away through the trees. Suddenly unarmed, Torg grabbed at the core of the thing and lifted it up, raising it above his head.

Miles understood that he was trying to give the others a clear shot. He pulled the striker from its pouch at his back, took aim, and fired.

Before, his striker weapon had knocked the creature’s arms around, but hadn’t done any real damage. This time when the force hit the central core, its limbs tore like tissue paper. The central core ripped free from the mass of arms and flew away like a struck golf ball. It traveled ten feet through the air before slapping against a tree trunk, hanging in place for a second, then falling to the ground, deformed and deflated.

Miles stood with his heart pounding in his ears. He looked around, then behind him, still twitching with energy, his body unwilling to believe the danger had passed.

When he was sure they weren’t going to be attacked by something hidden lurking out in the trees, he switched briefly to Eyes of the Altruist and inspected the fallen core.

There were still some faint lights hovering over the squashed sphere that had been at the center of the mess of limbs, but they faded to nothing even as Miles watched. He switched back to Eyes of the Emigre.

“It’s dead,” he said.

He shared a look with Trin. The Eppan looked like he was in shock, his eyes wide, his head flaps all half raised up. He had a death grip on his weapon, but under Miles’ stare, he lowered it to point at the ground.

“Well, I’m pleased you can tell a living creature from a dead one,” Lestiel said, sardonically. “That puts a higher floor on your skills as a healer than I guessed.”

Their client hadn’t seemed shocked or afraid by the sudden violence, nor had he moved to help, or even to try and escape. He’d simply stood and watched the battle unfold with a neutral expression. He was obviously armed, he had a pistol on his belt, but he’d made no move to draw it.

If Miles were being charitable, he might wonder if the client was so unused to violence that he’d been paralyzed through the entire thing. It was close enough to how Miles felt that he wouldn’t judge that. But he had an inkling that the man had simply never felt at risk from the creature, and wasn’t particularly invested in their survival.

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Lestiel began walking slowly to the downed creature. He paused at the mess of severed limbs to poke at them with his toe, turning them over.

“Hurc, Eppan, Morchis, Hug. Quite a collection,” Lestiel said, picking over the pile of limbs.

Miles followed him closer to the pile, peering down with grim fascination.

Closer up, Miles could see that the limbs weren’t in good shape. They looked old, dead. Withered skin, milky chitin, dried-out membranes, flesh that had started pulling back from where claws emerged from fingers or paws. It looked like they could have been dead for a while.

Lestiel crouched and picked up a three-fingered hand. He held one of the fingers firmly, then jerked his arm, snapping it. When he pulled it, the skin tore and the finger came free from the arm it was attached to. He brought it up to his face, examining it closely. For a second Miles thought he was going to eat it.

“Dead tissue. Strangely preserved,” he said. He stood back up and the sample disappeared from his hands like the tree bark had.

He moved on, walking up toward the thing’s core. Miles followed, curious, and Torg came after him.

As Lestiel reached the deflated ball of the thing’s core body he stopped to gaze down at it. After a few seconds of observation, he said, “This is an Orbellius.”

What?

Miles rushed forward to stand next to Lestiel. He stared down at the corpse.

It didn’t have much in common with the only other Orbellius Miles knew, Rhu-Orlen, his former captain.

Orlen had orangey-pink skin that had been covered in bumps, with a handful of stringy tendrils. The corpse had pinky-gray skin, with about a hundred white threads emerging from all over it. But when Miles thought back to what his Eyes of the Altruist had shown him, how similar was their internal structure?

He couldn’t ignore the possibility that this was somehow an Orbellius.

Miles felt his gut tightening. He’d thought it was just an animal, but Orbellius were spiral sapients.

“Did I just kill someone?” he asked quietly.

Miles felt a weird sickness in his body and limbs. He felt like he’d made a mistake, broken a law, committed a sin.

Miles wasn’t sure he was expecting an answer, but Lestiel replied.

“It wasn’t behaving much like a sapient, was it?” he said, scornfully. “And I’ve never known an Orbellius to do this to themselves, taking the body parts of other species. I’d say this was primitive behavior. Disgusting.”

Lestiel drew the blade from his hip, a narrow forearm-length sword. He slashed down with it once and the central core of the thing split open like a melon, releasing the stench of acrid chemicals and bitter rot.

“This is interesting,” Lestiel mused to himself. He used the tip of his sword to point at an area around the central organ. “See how the processing tissues are atrophied? I doubt this being was capable of thoughts more complex than simple survival imperatives.”

Miles peered down. He couldn’t see, but maybe that was because he knew next to nothing about Orbellius anatomy.

“You mean it was brain-damaged?” Miles asked.

“Or it never had any ‘brains’ to begin with. I wonder if this could be an Orbellius near-relative. I’ve heard of some species suffering their non-sapient cousins to share their worlds with them.”

“So, maybe it wasn’t really sapient,” Miles said, quietly.

“If it ever had been, it wasn’t when it died,” Lestiel offered.

Lestiel used his sword to slice out a section of the body, as if he were cutting a slice of cake. He raised it up in the air on the tip of his sword, then he did something. There was a subtle twist, and the sample vanished.

How are you doing that? Miles thought. His curiosity had been dampened by anxiety, and he didn’t ask the question out loud.

"Wonderful," Lestiel said, straightening up and sliding his sword back into its scabbard. "I have a sample of the silver pine and this slap boss, though in my notes I think I’ll refer to it as an Orbellius Ghoul, on account of the dead tissue it was using to move around. Let's see what else we can find, shall we?"

He set off through the forest, walking ahead without a care, as if they hadn’t just had a feral Orbellius launch itself at them.

Miles checked quickly on the others, and they set off following him.

As they walked through the mist, Miles replayed the battle over and over in his head. He’d never killed anyone before. Earth had seen some ugly days since the bower break, but Miles had been relatively sheltered in his family’s compound. He knew some of his relatives had killed people, but he’d run away before reaching an age when he was expected to join in on that.

Except now, he might have killed someone. A crazed someone who was threatening them. An unthinking someone, if he trusted what Lestiel had said. But still potentially a person, someone who might have had a name and a history. He didn’t care for Lestiel’s theory that it could have been a non-sapient cousin of the Orbellius species, something like the Orbellius version of a chimp. That seemed too self-serving.

There had been something in its behavior, too. The Orbellius Ghoul had come at Miles when he was holding his striker, then at Trin after he’d drawn his weapon. The ghoul had recognized what a pistol was and had prioritized their wielders as the biggest threats. To Miles, that suggested it had some knowledge or memory, even if it wasn’t thinking clearly.

Could it have been a salvager, lost in the dungeon during a reconfiguration? Or was it a creation of the artifact, like the pine trees around them had to be?

Miles remembered the spell he’d cast. Looking back, he wondered if it had even had any effect. It felt like it had worked, that nearly physical sensation of tearing, and he still felt different after casting it, more solid and real, somehow. He wasn’t sure what effect it had had on the target, if any.

It might have made the ghoul weaker and more fragile, that last shot, but he didn’t have any frame of reference, so it might have had little or no effect. His final shot doing so much damage might just have been a fluke lucky hit.

“No motion,” Trin was saying, watching his scanner. “No motion. Easy everyone. No more motion. We are clean.”

Miles kept his eyes on the surrounding mist anyway, scanning with Eyes of the Altruist every few seconds for anything alive.

“Door over there,” Trin said, reading off his scanner while forward and to the right.

They changed directions.

Miles wasn’t sure he even wanted to continue, but as long as they stayed below the four-hour time limit, their client was running the dive.

A couple of minutes after they changed direction, Miles caught sight of a shape between the trees up ahead.

“Wait,” he whispered.

It was a roughly rectangular shape, close to the ground, red, with lines or wires stretching out from it. It was too misty to make out any detail yet, but Miles didn’t want to take any chances.

“I’m seeing it,” Trin said. He changed a few settings on his scanner before reporting. “Not hot, not cold, not moving, not buzzing.”

Miles switched briefly to his Eyes of the Altruist, finding that as far as the magic was concerned, it wasn’t alive.

He continued forwards, drawing his striker as he moved to the front of the group.

After a few more meters he recognized what the shape was, and the realization stopped him in his tracks.

It’s a tent.

A red nylon dome tent, the kind that anyone on old Earth might have taken camping. It was anchored by guylines pinned to the ground with metal stakes, with a front flap closed by a zipper. Miles even thought he could make out the text of a brand name and a logo on the side, though it was too far away to read.

On the ground close to it was a plastic cooler, a short stack of chopped wood, and a cooking tripod. It looked as at home in the pine forest surroundings as the forest was jarring in the alien station.

Is someone camping out here, or is this like the warehouse, things manufactured by the dungeon?

Given the absolute improbability of someone bringing human camping supplies to Ialis, Miles had to assume it was a scene manufactured by the dungeon, though he couldn’t imagine how or why.

“What is it?” Trin asked.

They’d collectively decided that none of the camping supplies were creatures waiting to jump them and had drawn closer.

“It’s a tent and camping gear,” Miles said. “I think it’s like the warehouse we saw with Brisk. Fake stuff that the dungeon made.”

Lestiel had skipped ahead. He inspected the cooler then felt at the edges and popped the lid off. He spent a second looking inside, then moved to the tent and started trying to get it open. It took him a minute to figure out the zip.

Miles stopped to look in the cooler. It held a handful of cans, most sized like soda cans, a couple sized like beer. They had labels like Fruit and Special Suds. One was just called Vrrrrr. None of them were designs he recognized, but they were all in the style of soda cans common on old Earth.

“This stuff is all from my iteration, from Earth,” Miles said. He picked up one of the cans, turning to read the ingredients list. All gibberish. “Or, it’s meant to be.”

That caught Lestel’s attention. He turned and launched a volley of questions. “Which iteration? Have you ever left anything like this behind in the artifact? How many times have you been inside the artifact?”

“Iteration twenty-seven two-hundred,” Miles said. “I haven’t left anything like this down here, and uh—”

He didn’t want to admit this was only his second visit. Luckily, Trin piped up before his silence could go on too long.

“We been here lots of times. Maybe a hundred.”

Lestiel took one of the cans from the cooler. It vanished. He went back to the tent, rummaging inside, and pulling back out holding a couple of items. He approached Miles, holding them out.

“Are these also from your iteration?”

In his left hand, he was holding a distorted cellphone, in his right, a star-shaped alien device.

Miles held out his hand and accepted the cellphone. “This one is. It’s a communication device. That other one isn’t. I don’t recognize it.”

He examined the cellphone as he spoke. A glass screen with a narrow silver bevel. He didn’t recognize the make, but he wouldn’t expect to if it was something the planet had created. He pressed down on what he thought was a power button, but there was no reaction from the device.

"I will take the mystery device, then," Lestiel said. The star-shaped piece of tech vanished like all of his samples.

"If you don't mind me asking, how are you doing that?" Miles said, speaking before he had a chance to worry whether it was rude or not.

Lestiel glanced at him. "I'm not surprised I'm the first Draulean you've ever met, but shouldn't a healer be better versed in sapients' abilities? If you lack the mental capacity to store many details, as seems likely, then at least learn about the spiral's immortals. We hold a significant place in the spiral."

Miles stared back at him blankly.

Are all our clients going to be this annoying?

By unspoken agreement, Miles and Trin agreed to loot the camp. It didn’t matter that most of it was likely junk, they had so little that Miles thought it was still worth taking, and Trin’s attitude was just to take anything they could carry regardless of what it was. If Miles hadn’t intervened, he would probably have been stuffing his bag full of pinecones.

When they were done packing up, they had a folded-down dome tent, a polyester sleeping bag that had no openings, a survival knife with saw teeth on both sides instead of just the back, and an apparently perfectly normal and functional camp stove. Miles kept the cellphone for the nostalgia, and Lestiel was happy taking only his unknown device.

Miles thought they were done. Lestiel had his biological samples and an example of the tech the planet apparently made, but when they were finished at the camp, their client turned their attention to the nearest wall, where the outline of a door was faintly visible through the mist.

“Let’s continue. I’m curious how the structures vary from area to area, it can’t be all manufactured forest.”

As he walked out of earshot, Miles turned to Trin.

“We’re going to have to start writing our own contracts. This one was too vague. He might keep us down here for the full four hours.”

“Let Torg write them,” Trin said. “Big sweet talker.”

Torg was already following Lestiel. After a few seconds, Miles headed after them.