2 AL: IRENE

They traveled three days through the corridors. They often doubled back and crossed their own path as they searched for a particular landmark. They slept in wide spots, on guard for invading rats. At first they refiled their water bottles from streams dripping down through collapsed ceilings. Later they found sandstone that weeped water. The water flowed into basins hollowed out of the stone. Instead of green plants at these stops they found large mushrooms and other fungi. No one knew if any of these were edible.

On the first food stop Jake produced a portable gas stove. Irene watched in a combination of horror and fascination as Sophia expertly skinned the rat and roasted it over the flame. It turned out she was assigned to animal culture. In flight the ship crew was fed almost exclusively on cultured meat. After landing they started raising chickens and rabbits with plans to eventually include cattle and sheep. Sophia must have gutted it earlier but Irene missed that in the dark. Jake offered her a piece which she ate with some trepidation.

“Not exactly chicken,” she commented as she ate it.

“No,” Jake said, “but it is close.”

After that Jake started running toward the sound of scraping claws in the hope of getting another one for dinner. His aggressive behavior appeared to scare the animals away.

Not only did they travel miles of corridors west they also dropped down at least ten floors. Most of the stairwells they took would not have been out of place on the ship. They were short flights of stairs with landings between. Doorways on the landings gave access to the next floor. The first stairs they went down were different. The hallway they were in entered an open space, over an echoing darkness below. The path turned into broad stars that followed the remaining wall which curved around. The wall straightened out and there was finally a landing. After the landing the wall curved again and stairs dropped them down to the floor below.

Irene was certain the drop was more than a single story. It was hard to tell in the dark but she thought it was two stories or more. When they stepped off the last of the stairs into the large room at the bottom, Irene was pretty sure they were completely turned around. The leaders paused for a consultation of their maps. They laid them out on some debris in the center of the room. Irene walked over to them in an attempt to get a closer look at the maps.

The bulk of their bodies blocked her view but she could overhear their discussion easily enough. They all agreed that this was the landmark they were looking for but they were confused because the door out was not where they were expecting it. Irene pretended to study the debris, in order to stay close to them. As she looked at the debris something about it truly caught her attention. She lifted the flashlight that was hanging from her belt and ran the light up over the object.

She thought it was a statue of some kind. It was an abstract work. The top of the section that was still standing reached up to the level of the landing. A section of it was broken off and collapsed into a pile beside it. It was this part the leaders were using as a table. The sculpture was constructed of stone and metal. A ribbon of dark cast iron curled up through the standing section. Cast into its surface were six lines of symbols that ran the entire length of the ribbon. There were hash marks intermixed with double crossed t’s and inverted y’s. Oxidized wires of copper or perhaps bronze, stretched from the standing portion to the debris laying on the ground.

As she looked at it she changed her mind about the part on the ground falling off the standing section. She thought it was always this way. The tall strong sculpture standing beside the broken one, wires of bronze binding them together.

“This way,” someone called. Irene realized she lost track of the conversation she was trying to eavesdrop on. The group of leaders were broken up and everyone was heading to an opening in the wall under the stairs. She fell into line next to Sophia, having no desire to get left behind.

The first sign of the greenspace was plant debris in the corridor along the walls. The next sign was a growing light in the distance. They turned a corner. The new hall was flooded with light. It nearly blinded Irene after the days of darkness. The big work lights went out on the second day, their charge exhausted. The leaders used smaller hand held lights to illuminate the path since then.

The group crowded the opening. The tile flooring ended in a precise line transitioning to soil. The structure stretched ten floors up to an open sky. The air in the opening was cool but not as cold as Irene expected.

The walls were broken glass, giving glimpses into the rooms beyond. The original teams traveled through these corridors at a much slower pace. They took the time to investigate the side rooms along the way. This group didn’t open even a single door. This was their first view of those rooms.

It wasn’t really the collapse that was described to Irene. There were the stumps of beams on the top that reached out over the opening like the remnants of a ceiling. The beams were far too small to have ever possessed the structural strength to actually span the distance. They were more ornamental.

“Everyone gather round,” the group leader called out. Irene never learned his name. The few people who wandered farther out into the trees came back to the group. The rest of them stepped a bit closer together.

“My group is going to stay here in the green three or four days and see if we can spark our magic. After that we are heading north to join up with Darien’s groups. Amy’s group,” he said, turning to indicate a woman who stood at his side, “is going to head west to Londontown. They have a healer in Londontown but she can only heal people with ice magic. Frank’s group are planning to strike out on their own.”

Irene noticed he didn’t indicate who Frank was. The other man who was in the leadership group on the trip stood on the other side of the speaker. Irene thought that must be Frank. “I know we have a few independents with us. My group is willing to take anyone who wants to go north with us,” the speaker said.

“Anyone who wants to go to Londontown can travel with us,” Amy assured the group.

“Frank will interview anyone looking to join his group first since that will be a longer term commitment,” the first speaker continued. “Before we break up, we have all agreed to share what we know of magic.”

The following discussion was fascinating. They knew about two types of magic. Cast magic, which was the throwing of balls of fire or bolts of ice and imbuing magic, which was adding an element to your weapon. You could get a flaming sword or an icy spear. The instructions were to set your feet, flex your grip, fix your intent, shift the hold on your weapon and thrust forward.

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Irene suspected that not all of these steps were required and that some of them were way too vague. The description for throwing a spell included inhaling power and gathering intent. There was no information about how to hold your fingers during the throw. Everyone seemed to think that the choice between fire and ice was inherent in the caster and could not be changed.

Yet Frank insisted that to produce an icy spear you needed to run one finger over the top of the handle of your weapon, which sounded a lot like setting your fingers into three groups. Although how you would ever get your fingers set into the one group while holding an object, Irene couldn’t understand.

As the talk went on, Irene decided the gathering intent phase was code for practice against live animals. Remembering her first experience this idea frankly terrified her, especially since they just entered a new area with completely unknown animals. She thought they should have been ‘awakening’ their magic on the way in against the known rats. Still Frank’s finger over the top of the weapon did have an echo of truth to it and so did gathering intent. Irene could see how facing off against a known danger might be part of how the monitoring program decided you wanted to cause damage to it. Like standing in front of the glass light panel signaled that she wanted to turn it on.

At the end of the discussion there was a demonstration section. No one imbued any weapons or threw any balls of fire that Irene could see. But she wondered if there were enough nanobots in any of them yet to actually see it. She stood quietly beside a tree and watched everyone carefully. She noticed the group heading north break away and gather by the outer wall of the greenspace near the entrance. They appeared to be lightening their loads. They went through their packs and dumped out a variety of things. When they were done, they moved north, following the wall.

Curious, Irene went over to look over the items they left behind. There were a couple camp stoves that were out of fuel, a variety of electronic devices that didn’t seem to work and extra clothing. There were several winter coats. Irene wondered if she should pick one of them up. It was getting to be winter, plus the extra padding might give some protection from injury.

She tried one on and realized there was something in the pocket. It was a set of nail clippers. She slipped it into her own pocket. It was small and light weight and she couldn’t remember if she packed any for herself. The find made her check all the other coat pockets. In the third coat she found a sheet of plastic that was a copy of the map. She quickly slipped it into her pack.

She wanted to give it a closer look. She felt like it was left by accident and she didn’t want the owner to come back and take it from her. She set down the coat and picked up her backpack and broomstick and went back into the hallway they exited out of. She stepped around the first corner and out of direct sight of everyone in the green.

Just as she set down her backpack to pull out the map she heard something moving farther down the hall. Straightening, she peered into the darkness. She firmed up her grasp on her broom handle. She thought about it but decided she didn’t want to try imbuing a weapon until she saw someone do it successfully. Instead she wondered if she could test her own theory of cast magic. When she saw the slightest flicker of motion in the debris along the wall, she started casting ice-bolt.

She tried five times before the rat came fully into view. She got another two off before it lifted its head and started sniffing the air. Her hand was starting to cramp. She could feel her form slipping as the rat fixed its gaze on her. She forced herself to slow down. This attempt was obviously going to be slower than the attempts in front of the wall inscriptions. Agatha thought fifteen to twenty perfect casts. If she messed this up, she would need even more casts.

The rat gave a snort and rushed at her. Irene stopped casting and grasped her stick with both hands. She balanced herself on her feet, just like she was taught in stick fighting class and gave the approaching animal a quick jab.

The animal stumbled. Irene jabbed it again, trying to crush it between the end of her stick and the floor. The rat stopped moving but it was obviously still alive. Irene looked down at the helpless animal and felt needlessly cruel. She stood there for a long moment wondering if she could do this. She hit it again, ending its misery.

This was not the world she was raised for. She was educated and trained for a world of science and industry. This violent survival was not something humans lived for centuries. The history of it was romanticized. A lost past when you lived by your own skills. Some of that was true. There was a rush of just feeling alive when the danger was passed but there was also the terror of facing death. So much of the conflict wasn’t skill at all, only luck and chance.

She heard the sound of claws on tile. Her head snapped up. There was just a hint of movement in the debris along the side of the hall. Irene found herself casting ice-bolt before she even thought about it. This rat sniffed the air a lot longer than the last one. The animal fixed its eyes on her.

A small cloud of snow appeared just past the end of her fingers and streaked to the rat. The rat stiffened and collapsed. Irene stayed poised for action. There was a lot to think about here. First thing, she saw that! That meant she was thoroughly infected with Agatha’s nanobots. The thought made her skin itch.

Second, that rat dropped incredibly easily. The animal she fought with lightning was still alive after the strike. She hit it four or five more times before it died. Of course she realized that it was not a rat for some time now. It must have been something that wandered in from outside. Irene remembered how it didn’t like the light and she thought the idea it came from outside was probably also wrong. Agatha said it took another fifteen to twenty tries before the casting was reliable.

If one spell hit killed them, that was going to be a lot of rats. She was just thinking that killing a rat was needlessly cruel. Could she really hunt down twenty of them and kill them before they could run away? The animals' skittish behavior when Jake actively hunted them was making a lot of sense.

She walked over to the second rat to see if it really was dead. It didn’t move and when she got near she could see no sign of life. She reached down to pick it up. She didn’t have a camp stove but there should be deadfall among the trees. She could gather that wood and start a fire to cook over. Her father’s multitool included a flint striker to ignite welding torches. Irene thought she could use it to start a fire.

The second she touched the rat, five coins of a dark material appeared on the floor next to it. Shocked, Irene froze and stared at them. They were in a little spilled pile. In the dim light it would be easy to miss them. She shifted the rat to her off hand struggling to hold both it and her stick. She cautiously reached down to pick the coins up. The instant her hand reached the coins they disappeared.

She jerked back. They were an illusion, she realized, like the little cloud of snow. Even that logic didn’t keep her hand from itching. She retreated back to the light and her backpack. She eyed the other dead rat. Deciding it was an experiment she barely touched it with the tip of her finger. Three dark coins appeared beside it. Clearly killing a rat with blows did not pay as well as using magic. A brush of her fingertips against just one of the coins caused all three to vanish.

Sophia asked Jake about a payout after he killed the first rat. Irene remembered some vague rumors among Darien’s people about a vending machine where you could buy things using credits you earned from killing beasts. These coins must be what both of them were talking about.

The first exploration teams were in the ruins for months before they reported anything strange. Irene could understand that if you only saw illusion with the use of magic. But these coins appeared on the rat she killed manually. The explorers killed hundreds of rats long before they saw anything. It was in this greenspace where they started reporting magic in large numbers. Could the nanobots be more dense here? Although Irene just arrived at this greenspace. She must have picked up the nanobots in her eyes earlier in the structure.

Was the density increasing with time? Was that a sign that the system was waking up?