2 AL: IRENE

The hallway widened. There were several piles of debris littered around the area. Irene thought this area might once have been a sitting area. Laying around the walls were sleeping pads put together out of poorly tanned hides. The long wall on the widened section was made out of glass. The glass was opaque so Irene could not tell what was beyond it. The doors of eight rooms around the sitting area were wedged open. The rooms were cleaned out. They were obviously being used as workspaces. Each one contained a different project set up in it. One held a prize altar. The farthest open room away was the designated latrine.

There was no one here. Irene was pretty certain this was The Heights, a suburb of Chicago. It was the highest up of the suburbs shown on the Chicago downtown wall map. She searched for it for the last two days. This area was getting close to the dark regions. The wide spot in the hallway and all eight rooms were lit by working light panels in the ceiling. Irene thought that might be the reason this group decided to settle here.

Irene found a water source on the floor above. It was about a fifteen minute walk away. The area around the water was much darker. The water also attracted animals. Irene was attacked by a badger while filing her flasks. She went back for the carcass after she finally found the suburb. She made a poor attempt to gut the animal before hauling it back. She left the carcass in the middle of the hall by the sitting area and started a search of the surrounding rooms with closed doors looking for wood debris. She wanted to start a fire and cook some of the meat, but she didn’t want to be a burden on the small group.

In her search for wood scrap she found an abundance of rats. Every closed door hid at least one rat behind it. Irene wondered if the human presence was drawing more of them. During her search she found an anvil. It looked exactly like the one Elie the metal worker used. Irene tried to move it and found that it was far too heavy for her. She left the door to that room wedged open.

She heard voices raised in concern and the rush of footsteps coming toward her. Irene dropped her current load of wood onto her gathered pile just outside the cooking room. The occupants of the suburb were on their way back. They were alerted to Irene's presence by the string of dead rats she left behind.

Irene picked up her staff and waited near the wall. She tried hard to look harmless. She could hear caution and a trace of fear in the voices of those who approached as they discovered more rats. Irene decided she got a little carried away clearing rooms. She was bored just waiting so she continued long past the point where she found enough wood to cook dinner. She was working on learning the fear spell John told her about. She thought she might have learned it, since one or two rats she aimed at ran off. It still wasn’t consistent, so she wanted to find a couple more rats. She could only try it once before the rats charged the door and she switched to something more deadly.

The voices and steps fell silent. Irene was worried they were planning on staging an attack.

“Hello?” she called out. She thought the approaching party was just around the corner of a cross passage. A large man stepped out into the intersection. He was dressed in red touched leather armor. It was the first set of leather armor that Irene could honestly say looked visibly worn. The man was armed with a rather large knife and spear with a large black iron point on it. He was a total stranger. Irene smiled with relief.

“Who are you?” the man demanded. “Where is the rest of your party?”

“I’m Irene,” she responded. “I’m alone.”

“Who sent you?” he countered.

“No one sent me,” Irene responded. “I was a bit uncomfortable in Chicago. I saw the suburb on the map there and decided I might do better in a smaller settlement. This is The Heights isn’t it?” Irene could hear the slight murmur of another voice speaking to the man from around the corner.

“I don’t see anyone else,” the man said, obviously not speaking to Irene. There was another response that Irene could just barely hear. “I don’t think it is safe. She only has a staff, I don’t understand how she killed all those rats.”

“I am a wizard,” Irene called. She wasn’t certain if this man expected her to pretend she couldn’t hear him talk to the others. “I can protect myself just fine in the halls during the day, especially this close to dark space where there aren’t very many of the larger animals. At night it gets tricky. I can be killed in my sleep just as easily as the next person.”

The man tightened his grip on his spear at her words. She remained calm and made no sudden moves. There was a low murmur of multiple voices. Irene heard quite clearly “No, Sharl, don’t.”

A woman stepped around the corner. She was carrying an older baby balanced on her hip. Her belly was just starting to round with another pregnancy. She was wearing hunter's greens. The baby was dressed in a diaper that was also green. She didn’t stop at the intersection like the first man. Instead she kept walking, coming close to Irene.

“Sharl, come back here,” a second woman poked her head around the corner in order to call Sharl back. The first man scrambled to catch up with Sharl.

“If she is a wizard, she can kill me there just as easily,” Sharl called back. “I am not going to shout.” The woman stopped a few feet from Irene and shifted the baby on her hip. Her eyes took in the badger on the floor and the pile of wood debris.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Sharl and this is Billy.” She bounced the baby as she introduced him. She waved her hand at the spear man who was standing back so he kept a clear view of Irene. “That’s Greg.” Irene greeted the woman and smiled at the baby. She nodded respectfully at Greg.

“What do you want from us?” Sharl asked after the introductions.

“I am looking for a group I can stay with for a few weeks and learn from. In return I am willing to hunt, scavenge and help protect the settlement from wandering animals,” Irene responded.

“Will you share your knowledge of magic?” Sharl asked.

“I don’t know,” Irene responded. “It would depend.”

“On?” Sharl asked.

“What you intended to do with it,” Irene responded, “and if you are willing to share what you know.”

“What if we don’t know anything?” Sharl countered.

“Greg is wearing red leathers. He, at least, knows something,” Irene answered.

“You consider imbuing magic as valuable as wizardry?” she asked. Irene frowned slightly, a puzzled look on her face.

“Of course,” Irene responded. “If we are ever going to figure this place out, we need to understand it all. Crafting magic or utility spells are valuable to me too.”

“Utility spells?” Sharl asked.

“Yes, like how you tap on a water basin to make the water hotter,” Irene explained.

“It does?” Sharl asked, obviously surprised to hear something Irene thought was common knowledge. “Is it the same pattern we use to start a fire?”

“I don’t know,” Irene answered honestly, “because I have never started a fire with magic. See, we have already found a spell we can trade.” Sharl looked thoughtful. The baby began to fuss and she bounced it on her hip.

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“It's all right,” she called out to her party behind her. “Get those tubers in here and we can start processing.” Sharl turned and handed baby Billy to a surprised Greg. Greg barely had time to lean his spear against the wall, before his hands were full with the infant. “You can help me cook this badger for dinner,” Sharl said to Irene. “I will show you how to light the fire.”

The remaining members of the settlement cautiously entered the hallway as Sharl ordered Irene to bring the badger. Irene followed Sharl into the room set aside for cooking.

There were ten adults in the settlement, four men and six women. There were also eight children, little Billy was the oldest. Irene was horrified to learn later that the women all gave birth to at least one set of twins, two of them bore triplets. That was six missing children, but it was even worse than that. Several of the surviving children did not belong to these women. They were cared for by their fathers after their mothers were killed. The members of this group were all survivors from the official teams. Sharl and Greg were the core of the group.

The settlement spent most of their days watching the children, looking for food and gathering materials they could either sell in Chicago directly or craft into something they could use or sell. Meat was easy enough to obtain, but eating nothing but meat was a slow death, even with nanobots in your blood. The stories of slow starvation the suburb residents told Irene made her think that nanobots might be making the effects of eating only meat worse and faster acting, especially in the young.

These were the people, with the exception of Greg, who failed to ‘awaken their magic’. They could do some light crafting, but most of their crafting was done the old fashioned way, with hard labor. When Irene told them about the anvil she found, they were unimpressed. It was too heavy to be hauled all the way back to Chicago. None of them knew how to use it except as a table. Irene didn’t know anything about it either, but she saw Elie crafting the vent pins with it.

All their work gathering material to sell was so they could purchase the all important vent pins and door wedges. Only after they were purchased would they consider buying other items like tools, weapons and clothing. Greg’s worn leathers showed how close to the edge they existed.

Although unimpressed with Irene’s anvil find, they were very happy with her pile of dead rats. They skinned them all and worked as a community to tan them over the next four days. Irene helped out at every step, learning everything that she could. By the time the bounty was secured in bundles for transport into Chicago for sale, Irene thought she could complete the process herself if she needed to.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” Irene asked Sharl quietly. The two of them were on the middle night watch. They were sitting at one end of the widened corridor where they could watch both approaches to the sleepers. The group made torches from reeds they gathered from the same water feature they got their tubers from. They burned them at night in the corridor on both sides of the wide spot. Irene thought it was to help drive animals away. This group took their watches seriously, they were never done alone.

“No, go ahead,” Sharl responded. “A little conversation helps keep you awake. Just don’t wake the babies.” When they finally finished the rat hides, the surprisingly soft bundled furs were far superior to the poorly tanned hides that made up this group's beds.

“Why don’t you keep some of those new furs for yourself. These pallet hides have seen better days,” Irene asked.

“We always keep the worst for ourselves,” Sharl explained. “It maximizes our profits, but also it doesn’t really matter with the degradation.”

“Degradation?” Irene asked.

“You fit in so well, I forget you just arrived,” Sharl responded. “Anything you leave unattended in the ruins just disappears eventually. Items that you keep in contact with your skin last the longest. The things you inspect everyday are next. I thought you knew that. I have seen you check the contents of your bag and inspect that knife and camera of yours every night.”

“No,” Irene responded. She was surprised Sharl knew it was a camera, then she remembered they were part of an official exploration team. At one time they all would have been issued cameras. “I didn’t know that. Although maybe I suspected,” Irenet explained. “At the entrance to the ruins the carts and signal repeaters just fell apart. I have been paranoid that something will happen to my stuff. I lost some of it in the beginning and that made things harder.”

“Well your paranoia is serving you well,” Sharl replied. “Items that we brought in are the most affected. If you were to set that knife down in a random room and go back for it more than a day or two later, you won’t find any sign of it. At first we thought we were just not remembering which room we left it in. Items we acquired inside the structure do better. But as soon as you move or modify them, they become subject to increased decay until they just disappear.

“That is why we pull the vent pins and door wedges out and inspect them every morning and every night. Not only does that tell us when they need repaired or replaced, it actually makes them last longer,” Sharl went on to explain how looking at an item at least twice a day helped but you really needed to touch it to maximize its life span.

“How do you repair the pins?” Irene asked.

“Mary has a small repair hammer that she uses. You can ask her about it tomorrow,” Sharl offered. Irene wondered why Mary wasn’t interested in the anvil. It seemed to her that a hammer and an anvil should go together.

“In Chicago I was told that if you use bronze vent pins, the vents themselves fail,” Irene observed. She was thinking about giving them the bronze pins she purchased, but she wasn’t certain they would be useful for them.

“That is probably true. When we used carved bones we saw that problem. We rotated all our stored items around a set of rooms to give the vents a change to regenerate,” Sharl commented.

“The vents regenerate?” Irene questioned with some surprise.

“Everything in the structure returns in time to the exact configuration you found it in. Some areas are worse than others. Random rooms can be cleaned out and as long as you occupy it once a day they mostly stay that way. But take these debris piles here,” Sharl said pointing at the piles of junk dotting their sleeping area. “We have cleaned them up any number of times. Every time there is no one close by a little bit more of it reappears. If you accidentally leave something where they want to form it vanishes. Actually I think it gets converted into debris. That is why we stopped trying to get rid of them. At least this way we know where not to leave anything.”

“Huh,” Irene grunted. “Well I guess that explains that. I have been wondering about that debris since I got here.” She remembered there were similar debris piles at the south gate to Chicago. The other thing she wondered all the time was why this group settled here. During the last few days they traveled to several other locations that seemed much better suited for settlement. This group even knew the location of a large sanitation facility. They used the pools during the processing of the hides. Sharl was delighted when Irene showed her how to make the water hotter or colder.

“Why do you sleep here?” Irene asked.

“Because of the rest,” Sharl said, as if Irene just asked a really stupid question. “We haven’t lost a single child in the night since we committed to all sleeping together.”

“The rest?” Irene asked.

“The rest,” Sharl said, waving her hand around the area of the widened corridor. Seeing the blank look on Irene’s face, Sharl realized Irene didn’t know. “You don’t know about rests,” she said aloud.

“No,” Irene responded.

Sharl put one finger to her lips, in the universal sign to keep quiet. She moved over to the largest pile of debris and carefully moved several chunks of rusted iron to the side. When she found what she was looking for she moved to the side and pointed for Irene to look. Irene leaned in close to see a small glimmer of something. She squinted her eyes in the darkness, it looked like a cut jewel, like a diamond. She reached out and prodded it slightly with one fingertip. The stone didn’t move, but it changed color, filling with the palest shade of violet.

Irene saw that behavior before, in Londontown. This wasn’t a diamond or jewel, this was a tiny protection crystal. Sharl already returned to their watch position. Irene moved as quietly as she could to rejoin her.

“It’s a protection crystal,” Irene commented.

“Exactly,” Sharl responded. “That is what makes this a true rest. Sometimes you find areas that are laid out like this but without a crystal they are no different than any other room. If you are being pursued, retreating into one doesn’t help. Under those conditions animals completely ignore it. But if you are already in a rest area, animals will not approach.”

“Why do we keep watch then?” Irene asked.

“Unfortunately a rest only repels animals up to a certain size. What they repel is related more to the quality of the rest than the size of the crystal. This one with debris instead of furniture, opaque glass instead of a view and two exits without any doors will only repel rats. Something as large as a badger will ignore it, and as you know there are some badgers around,” Sharl explained.

“It sounds like you have seen stronger rest areas. Why didn’t you stay in them?” Irene asked.

“All the stronger rests I have seen were a lot deeper into the structure. The farther from dark space you get the stronger the animals are; rats, squirrels, badgers, cats, bears,” Sharl replied. “Not only do the types of animals get tougher, the individual animals get larger, stronger and faster. They start appearing in larger numbers. Since most of us have no magic, a badger is about the strongest animal we can face down alone. There are not many rests this close to dark space. We got lucky finding this one.”

Irene thought about the strange balance these people were trying to keep. At the same time she wondered what the effect would be if she taught them to throw lightning. She was afraid it would just empower them to push further into the structure. Which might get more of them killed. Irene scolded herself that she was just being pessimistic. Greg could imbue a weapon with fire and he stayed with this group because he loved Sharl.