“Hello, Miles! We lost the apartment. Did you have a good trip?”

Trin was upbeat as he greeted Miles at the skyport platform. The attitude could have clashed with how Miles was feeling, body-sore and needing a shower, but he was relieved enough to see them that the good feelings washed any negativity away.

Trin looked a little leaner than the last time Miles had seen him, a little gaunter, a little harder. The fur of his face was stiff and brush-like in places, his brown eyes had yellow rings creeping in from the outside, and the ridge of his nose sharper where it had been rounded before. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but after almost a couple of weeks apart, it was noticeable.

Torg had come to welcome Miles back as well. He looked exactly the same, the same enormous body of glossy shell, with a chitin cowl shadowing an insectile face. He let out a series of clicks as Miles stepped up.

'Welcome.'

"Hi," Miles said, looking between them.

He registered what Trin had said after a second.

"You lost the apartment?"

"Yes. It was all because we forgot to pay rent," Trin replied. "Then shower stopped working because we had not paid, then garbage stopped working, then comm message said get out."

Miles nodded along, pretending it all made sense. It had only been a couple of weeks and Trin could have missed two rent payments at most, but Miles had known the apartments in the tower had a high turnover. The system running them clearly wasn't giving residents any latitude.

At least he was already carrying practically everything he owned. He didn't need to worry about any of his things getting lost or left behind.

"Tell me you found somewhere else," Miles said.

"Yes. And it is much more expensive."

"Okay. Is there a shower?"

"There is a whole room for the shower!"

Miles grabbed the handle of his shield and started pulling it behind him, the elongated diamond of floating metal still loaded with his bags.

He wasn't distraught at the news he wouldn't be going back to the cramped, sterile one-room apartment, but he was grimly curious about what Trin had replaced it with.

The three of them set off, leaving the landing pad and starting to traverse the network of metal gangways that ran through the open-air skyport.

Miles rubbed a hand on his robe as they walked, trying to wipe off the greasy feeling, but only picking up new textures from the fabric. He wasn't desperate for rest, but he'd really been looking forward to the pull-down plastic wash cubicle in the room.

"So where is it?" he asked.

He had an irrational worry that the two of them had moved to a vacant room of the derelict tower above the mage enclave.

"A different building. Atofa Tower. It has nicer homes. There are three rooms. And two beds. You don't have to sleep near feet or face. There is cooking, and a washing room. Not just shower tent."

"But the rent is higher?"

"Yes. Two thousand every month. But we make money now. We have been diving the dungeon. Every day."

Miles slowed, almost bumping into Torg behind him. He hadn’t imagined them diving without him.

"How have you been going in without a healer?" he asked, instead.

"We have a healer. We found a mage healer who works for a split.”

"Oh." Miles swung his shield around to drag it with his other arm. "Who are they? What tradition do they use?"

"His name is Drani," Trin answered. "He uses index magic like you."

It seemed like Trin didn’t really even understand the question. Miles was a Harmonizer. As a new entrant into the community of Spiral sapients, it was the only tradition humans had access to through the index, but it was a well-rounded tradition, perfect for someone working in a support role.

Those subtleties were lost on Trin. To someone who'd never used magic, one tradition would look like any other.

So far, Miles could only tell a few traditions apart by the feel of their magical cores, but to Trin, all magic might as well all be the same.

Miles followed the pair along the raised gangways of the skyport, passing moored ships and moving to make way for sapients moving in the other direction.

Now that he was back in Spiral territory, Miles was back to being the only human he could see. That wasn't unusual for any species in a place like the Dendril City skyport. Trin and Torg were also the only members of their species visible. Around the skyport, Hurc travelers were slightly overrepresented, but mostly the people passing by were an eclectic mix.

There were Morchis travelers, often robed, with ridged mouthless faces and three pairs of arms each. Some members of the crowd were Purir, short humanoids with a patchwork fallen-leaf coloration to their skin. There was even a Pulstreen traveler, a barrel-shaped sapient with the look of a deep-sea filter feeder, moving in an elliptical glass tanks supported by slender mechanical chicken legs.

Miles moved alongside and through them, trying to make himself feel at home, trying to re-familiarize himself with the understanding that these were his people as much as anyone back on Earth.

They avoided the open-topped transit platforms in favor of a privately run city shuttle; a battered cube van of a weave ship where they squeezed in among six other passengers in tight quarters.

The pilot was a member of a species Miles hadn't seen before, a sapient with a quadruped body plan in a shape that was almost catlike, about three feet along their spine, with gray skin and scales running up to the first joint of each limb. They didn't wear clothes, except for an equipment belt around their neck.

"What did you do on Earth?" Trin asked as they took their places on a cramped bench.

"I got awarded a share of some asteroids in the Kuiper belt," Miles said. "I ate some food from home. I stocked up on junk food, did some clothes shopping. I met a smuggler."

"Did you punch your dad in the nehes?"

Miles' thoughts stuttered over the unfamiliar word. Without a direct translation, the magical effect of Eyes of the Emigre exposed him to a fleeting image of a patch of dense fur growing on the hips of an otherwise generic and featureless Eppan body.

As translation functions went, this one wasn't particularly helpful or welcome.

"No. I was lucky, I didn't have to go anywhere near him. I ran into some people from my settlement though…"

"And you punched them all in the nehes."

"No. I think they were just trying to get out, like me."

Miles spared a thought for Seth and his group. He couldn't see them really making the same leap he had, leaving Earth for a wider universe. Maybe he just wanted to think that he was better than them, but he was sure they had hangups and preconceptions that would get in their way once they got off Earth.

After a second, he went on. "I don't think they deserve to get out. And I don't think they'll make it. I think as soon as they see money from the allocation, they'll settle down on Earth, use it to feel important."

"You will never see any of them again," Trin said.

Miles thought he was trying to comfort him.

"To cheer up you can feed me some human food."

"No, I don't think so. Nobody has tested human food for Eppans."

"I will be first Eppan to eat Earth junk."

Overhead, the ship's engines whooped to life, and the vessel took off with the feeling of an ascending elevator.

Now that it was moving, Miles could tell the ship wasn't in good shape. It probably wasn't even weave-worthy. There were cracks running through the egg-shaped shell, places where weave corrosion had eaten gaps between its hull plating. Parts of it were rattling that shouldn’t be rattling, and the engines sounded off even to Miles’ inexperienced ear.

As the ship got up to speed, a gale started blowing through the cabin. The tub wasn't even airtight.

The damage nagged at him in a way that went beyond just being annoyed at the draft. It offended him on a spiritual level. It took him a minute to realize it was because he was judging it based on principles from his Harmonizer book. A ship with holes in it was not harmonious.

He did his best to ignore it, annoyed at Adept Furious for getting into his head. After ten minutes of pelvis-jarring travel, the pilot announced they were stopping at Atofa Tower. The hatch opened on an entrance lobby, and Miles and the others stepped out onto tiled floor.

***

Miles took the suspicious cell phone from his bag and jammed it into the lockbox. He closed the front, pushing the small metal door shut on tight hinges, listening to it lock with a mechanical snap.

The cellphone had been loot from the dungeon. Dungeon tech. It was a warped and twisted reflection of real-world technology that the dungeon produced as part of its existence. This one had even called him – not that there’d been anyone real or sane on the other end of the line. It was more likely they were just the phone mimicking whatever the dungeon thought phones were meant to do than an actual communication. The safe was meant to be soundproof and signal-blocking. Miles guessed he'd find out.

The apartment that Trin had found for them really was better than the old one.

The apartment in their old tower had been a severe, sterile room, meant to be completely species-agnostic, in its materials, its facilities, its aesthetics. It had been almost unlivable for anyone as a result.

The apartments in Atofa Tower were different. Each unit was designed with a different, specific culture in mind. There were Hurc apartments, Welven apartments, Morchis apartments, Gilthaen apartments, and homes for any number of species Miles hadn’t met yet. Their marketing pitch was that they could provide familiar housing for sapients from a wide range of species. Miles felt like he could wander through the building and get a tour of what home life like was for every species on the Spiral.

The appartment Trin had picked out was designed in the Homeworld Eppan style. It wasn't what Miles would call an ideal environment. It was too cool, with too many hard surfaces. It had an ambience that made the space feel like it was underground, but there was enough overlap in human and traditional Eppan fixtures that meant it was more comfortable than the bare box they'd moved from.

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The floor was tiled with a slate-like orange stone all the way through; in the cooking area, living area, bathroom, and sleeping area. The walls were completely covered with torn scraps of natural fiber paper, like rainbow mosaic wallpaper, made up of thousands of hand-sized fragments of different bright colors. They were positioned haphazardly and layered over each other to the point that they gave the walls a topography, low plateaus and soft torn-edged valleys.

The soft furnishings in the place all seemed to be rope-based. The seats in the living area were macrame pouches hanging from the ceiling, the beds were woven nets stretched over rectangular stone frames. The counters and hard surfaces alternated back to stone. Even the shutters that covered the apartment's single window were made of stone.

The shutters had been closed when Trin led Miles inside, and they were apparently staying closed. The only light came from a molding of artificial lights that crawled across the ceiling like glowing paint spatter.

Miles left most of his things packed away in his bag as he stepped from the bedroom back out into the main room.

Trin was reclining in one of the bags hanging from the ceiling, legs crossed, with his mid-paws strung through gaps in the net. He was tapping on his comm, rapidly messaging someone.

Torg was sitting on the cold stone tiles in the kitchen area, holding a limp bug the size of a hamburger in his graspers. Miles watched, fascinated, as he brought the bug up to his mouth parts and started gnawing at it. Over thirty seconds, he ate the entire thing.

As Trin noticed him, he pushed his foot against the floor to make the seat spin towards him.

“Drani is coming in twenty minutes,” he said.

"Drani. Your healer?" Miles asked.

"Yes. We are going to the dungeon today. Just a little visit. Two hours. We check if shuffle brought anything nice to the top."

"Oh. Do you want me to come?" Miles asked.

"No, is okay. You look tired. Drani will come."

Miles had showered after he'd been introduced to the apartment. It had been an Eppan shower, with twenty-five-degree Eppan body temperature water laced with synthetic Eppan body oils, but it had done its job.

He wasn't exactly fresh, he'd only napped for a few minutes in the last thirty hours, but with the magic effect of Hum of the Enduring, he felt like he was only just approaching the midpoint of an all-nighter. A little foggy, but still functional.

"I want to come. If that's okay," Miles said.

"It is okay if you stay,” Trin reassured him. “We do not need you. It is just a quick look."

"No, I'll come. I want to meet your friend "

"Okay," Trin said. His ear flaps twitched. "We take two healers. Very safe."

"Great. Give me a minute to get ready."

Miles left the area for the sleeping room. He pulled his robe of armored fabric out of his bag and threw it on over his clothes, then strapped the belt of storage pouches on over it. His comm unit went into one pouch, while he stuffed a handful of pill-sized light beads into another; the Spiral equivalent of disposable glowsticks.

His striker pistol went into a holster on his waist, and he slipped his dagger made from Ymn City metal into a spare pouch. He didn’t know what he’d use the dagger for, even if it was anything more than a sharp knife. Maybe it’d be useful if he needed to cut clothes away from a wound.

His shield moved easily when he grabbed the handle. It was recharged, unburdened by luggage, hanging in the air beside him on its levitation unit. It was ready to be used for its real purpose – keeping Miles from getting shot by ghouls, clawed by cobolts, or pulverized by nameless giants.

When he walked back into the living area he looked like a diver again.

Trin was already fully dressed for a dive. He was wearing his cap of armored fabric, with his tall-barreled pistol on a holster at his waist. The weapon seemed to fit better there, now. It didn’t have the same toy-like look as when he’d first brought it home. His new scanner hung by a strap from his shoulder, a cockpit’s worth of keys and switches spread along a skateboard-sized white plastic device, with three output screens embedded along it showing different readouts.

Torg was ready as well, wearing his breastplate, with an assortment of close-quarters weapons stuck to it with magnetic clips.

Miles had barely managed to sit back down in one of the hanging chairs before the front door whistled an alert tone.

Trin stepped up and tapped the access switch.

The door opened to reveal a male Eppan. He was about Miles' height, with a pronounced nose ridge and silver-gray fur. He was wearing tech armor; a suit of saucer-sized hexagonal metallic plates attached to a tough fabric undersuit. Each plate had a little credit-card-sized display showing its integrity as an overall value, as well as a row of obscure graphs.

He was an index mage. The ring on his upper right hand was one of the more expensive variations on an index that’d been available at the Morning Star Corporation showroom. He was also a Harmonizer. Miles could feel the unmistakable warm rotation of his magical core, so similar to Miles’ own.

“Heya Trin. Cool hat. You ready to go?” The stranger said. His eyes moved from Trin, turning upward to look at Miles. He pointed a mid-paw at him. “What’s that?”

“Hello Drani,” Trin said. “That is my friend Miles. He just got back from trip to home planet.”

“Oh, right. Why does it have a gun?”

“He is a diver. He was healer, before you. He is coming on dive today.”

Miles took a step toward Drani. “Hey, I’m Miles. You’re a Harmonizer too?”

Drani stared for a second, then put his face close to Trin and spoke quietly. “Is he sapient?”

“Yes! He’s very sapient,” Trin said, sounding annoyed.

“Okay, sorry! My chip doesn’t have his language I guess.” Drani turned back to Miles and lazily waved his mid-paw. It might have been a greeting. He quickly turned back to Trin. “Is he an unrecognized species or something? What’s up with that language?”

“He is from new iteration,” Trin replied. He was looking between Miles and Drani, his head flaps twitching in discomfort.

“Ah I get it. The provider I use only has established cultures,” Drani said.

“I can understand Drani just fine,” Miles said to Trin.

“He says he understands you,” Trin said.

Drani processed that, then turned to Miles. “Hey, that’s great! I mean, of course you do. I speak Standard 18. Every translator has that. Shame about your language.”

The Harmonizer magical tradition had its own translation magic available. Eyes of the Émigré worked on deeper and stranger principles than technology-based translator implants. Miles had it, and it had never really failed him. He was surprised that Drani hadn’t picked it up.

Miles didn’t see a point in replying. While they were working together, Trin would just have to translate for him. Maybe he could rig something up with his comm. The comm device had its own outgoing translation software built-in that didn’t rely on the recipient to do any work.

Torg interrupted by moving to the door, turning fully to give Miles what he interpreted as a sympathetic look, then back to face the exit.

“Woah. Hey, big guy. Okay. We all ready? Let’s hit the disks.”

***

Drani had spent the flight to the crater fussing over Trin. Talking to him, making jokes, dropping casual mid-paws on his shoulders, alternating between aloof forcefulness and seeking his approval. Trin had alternated between receptiveness and discomfort, as if he couldn't decide if he wanted the attention or not.

The other mage had been silent during the Entrance Facility processing, getting a fresh Gilthaen 'healer' stamp without comment, and only now they were climbing off the transport platform at the entrance to the dungeon was he trying to talk to Miles.

“So you’re a mage, huh? I wonder what kind. Hey Trin, what kind of mage is he?”

“Index type,” Trin replied.

Torg clicked a few times, adding ‘Harmonizer’.

Miles glanced at Torg’s back in surprise. He honestly hadn’t realized that Torg had known that.

“Oh, hey, me too,” Drani said. He shot Miles a confused look that quickly melted back to his easy-going default expression. “Hey, Trin. Ask him how high his Authority is.”

“Is very high,” Trin answered, without consulting Miles.

Drani went on as if Trin hadn’t said anything.

“I’m at 27 right now, but I’m hoping to get up to 30 by the end of the month. You really start to feel it at 30. Your attack spells really start tearing things up. You know anything about that, Miles?”

“Not really,” Miles said.

“He is healer. He doesn’t tear up things,” Trin said, rather than translate.

“He’s a real indoor guy, huh?”

Trin went quiet and to Miles the silence felt suddenly awkward.

The transport platform put them down at a wide natural stone ledge that fed into a number of different passageways. They were at the strata that corresponded with the fifth level of the dungeon. That was deeper than Miles had been since the expedition with Brisk, one level down from where his last expedition with Fran had ended up, but it was apparently what the group had been doing while he was away. From what Trin had said, they’d found it productive and not too dangerous, so long as they didn’t drop any deeper after entering.

Internally, Miles was doing mental math, trying to work out how much thirty points of Authority would cost through the index. From his experience, every point increase made the next increment even more expensive. The further the index was pushing an ability from its natural level, the more resources it took to do so.

Getting it up to 27 would have taken tens of thousands of seln. With that kind of money, what was Drani even doing here?

Up ahead, the rock opened on the left, a six-foot cleft where the stone had fractured along its grain. The opening exposed a tall Ialis door with just enough of the crater edge sheared away that the access panel was visible.

The four of them passed through the gap one by one, stopping at the door.

Trin had barely reached it before he was stopping, poking at the access panel, trying to navigate the pathway of corrupted commands that would open the door. From the way Trin was using it, it looked like one of the variations with a security flaw that would let someone bypass it with the right input.

“Hey, why don’t you let me get this one,” Drani said, coming up behind Trin. He put a hand on the small of Trin’s back to get his attention, then stepped to the side.

Without waiting for a response, he held up his mid-paw so that his index ring was within his line of sight.

Miles stepped forward to watch and caught a flicker of illuminated images passing over the surface of Drani’s eyes. Some kind of optical interface; a narrow projection coming from the ring itself.

After a couple of seconds, the sensation of external magic bloomed inside the Eppan healer, the warm spin of a core invoking Harmonizer magic, and then a burst of heat.

Drani reached out towards the door, grabbed the air, and yanked it back towards himself.

Miles knew that gesture. He’d used it himself. It was the way a Harmonizer confiscated Authority from something using Strike the Disharmonious.

But there was no way that a closed door counted as ‘disharmonious’ for the requirements of the spell. That meant the other mage must have used something like Convict the Disharmonious first, to bring the door into the spell’s jurisdiction.

Miles briefly wondered if that spell was the source of his high Authority. In theory, Strike the Disharmonious could confiscate authority for the caster. But even that couldn’t explain such a high rating. When Miles had tried it, the effect had been marginal, and what he’d gained had slowly eroded over the following days. Afterwards, he’d realized that he’d degraded the confiscated pool whenever he stretched his Authority by over-using Harmonizer spells.

While Miles was still processing the magic Drani had used, the other mage stepped up to the door and punched it. The metal door rattled in its frame.

He hit it again and flakes of metal shook loose, leaving a scar. After a few more strikes, with nothing more than his hands, he’d broken a hole through it. The spell had weakened the door and he had smashed a hole through it in its weakened form.

Miles had seen this effect before, both to a much greater extent when Master Curious had cleaned up the remains of a body in the Dendril City mage enclave, and to a much lesser extent when Miles had used the spell to soften up an Orbellius Ghoul on a previous dive.

Drani turned back to twitch his ears at the group before he continued tearing through the metal. In a few seconds, he had a hole big enough for himself to fit through. He stepped into the passage beyond, leaving Torg to widen the gap for the rest of them.

Miles didn’t follow immediately. He shared a look with Trin. The Eppan scout’s head flaps rippled in a kind of shrug before he followed. Miles stepped in after them.

The passageway beyond the door was immediately different from anything Miles had seen in the dungeon before.

He was used to metal walls and hard textured floors, but here the floor was soft and yielding, as slick and rubbery as eel skin.

The ground stretched and bowed under them as they walked, dimpling like the sheet of a trampoline. The way it depressed seemed to steal energy from every step, making movement as exhausting as walking on sand and making running all but impossible.

From the speed that the surface changed shape and the lack of support underneath, Miles got the feeling there was nothing below it but open space. It felt like they were on an enclosed rope bridge crossing a hidden chasm.

The walls were just as different. They were made of a kind of fibrous matting, hairy in the way that a coconut husk was hairy, and completely at odds with the material of the floor. Natural versus artificial, plantlike versus industrial.

The dungeon he knew tended to reflect the real architecture of buildings and stations out there in the weave, scanned from a distance or picked up from records people brought to Ialis, but he couldn’t imagine what culture would build a place like this.

“Can any of you get a picture of this passage?” he asked the group. “I want to try and work out what it’s mirroring here.”

If he had an image, he could try and work out what was going on with the construction later. Maybe he could map it to a known culture. He knew there were information communities out there on the exchange. Now that he was expecting a financial windfall from his dealings on Earth, it was past time he bought an account with them.

“Yes. I am recording,” Trin said. He consulted the screens of his scanner as they walked, and after a minute started giving a report. “I am seeing this tube go on for six hundred meters. There are four doors at the sides on the way. Two have noise from them. After six hundred meters, there is door in front, with big space behind.”

“Can you tell what’s underneath us?” Miles asked.

Trin angled his scanner down so that the stubby bubble at one end pointed at the floor.

“No. It all bounces off.”

“Let’s go crush whatever’s in those side rooms,” Drani said.

Miles felt an immediate reply to that float to the foreground, something like, Maybe we should avoid them, instead, but stopped it when he realized Drani wouldn’t even be able to understand him.

The other Harmonizer obviously hadn’t invested in Eyes of the Emigre. But then, if he already had a translation chip when he’d become a Harmonizer, why would he?

Trin accepted Drani’s suggestion without debate, and in the group dynamic that had formed while Miles was away, Torg seemed to be taking direction from Trin.

Miles pulled his striker from its holster and set the power slider to concussive blast. If he couldn’t influence the risks they took, he’d just have to try and help mitigate them.