More roars came, but when Tvorh looked backward, he saw nothing. Fear and flight began to dim back into wary curiosity, giving way to fatigue. “I think we’re all right,” he said, pulling Hrega off his shoulders and putting her on the ground.

He took a few moments to tear strips from his fraying shirt and wrap his bleeding feet. Then they crossed the massive circle notched into the floor and passed the bony console sticking up at the far end of its circumference. Rather than black rock beneath the semitransparent crystalline circle, there was a viscous purple fluid that he was sure he ought to recognize. It was definitely something he’d studied in the Archives while his father had been doing his rounds, and it troubled Tvorh that he couldn’t quite recall what it was.

The Archives. Father. That seemed like a lifetime ago.

All at once, the memory hit him. It was rendering fluid. He glanced at the control panel. “Hrega, we’re in a Last Era libraratory.”

“What’s that mean?”

Tvorh paused. He didn’t quite know himself. “It means,” he said at last, “that we can sell it.”

“But we don’t own it.”

“Why not? We found it. If we tell the right people about this, we could get rich.” But as soon as Tvorh said the words, he knew it would never work. The only Generosi he’d be able to tell about this place were of Gens Nxtlu, and they were more likely to pay for the information with a slit throat than with thalers or carats. Tvorh put such thoughts from his mind and glanced around, getting his first good look at the chamber since they’d touched the ground.

Above the next hallway over, a strange gray screen flickered with Last Era words. It had been years since he’d had the chance to read anything at all, never mind ancient languages. Tvorh closed his eyes and thought back to the hours he’d spent in the Archives. “Metagenetic Ecology,” he said at last.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a sign. There might be—” —there only might be, but oh, how he hoped and prayed that the still-functional lumins and the still-working door meant that this place was still fully powered— “—there might be food. And lots of it. Come on.”

The hallway was smaller than the primary concourse, but still wide enough for twenty men abreast. Some of the dilating doors in the hallway’s walls had broken control panels, the fluids having long since drained out of their busted piping, so Tvorh picked the first door he could find with an intact control panel on it. The Last Era numerals “117-108” were inscribed in the gold above the door and shone with faint luminescence.

Tvorh reached out and pressed a blister-like button on the panel. Locks disengaged, and the door slid open before them. Tvorh and Hrega walked into the small, well-lit chamber. One of the walls was diamondglass rather than metal; on the far side of the window, a series of luminous white spherical chambers, each roughly the size of Tvorh’s head, sat on five shelves. A console covered in dials and switches stretched beneath the pane.

Tvorh paused before the equipment. It was… complicated. Plus, his skill with Last Era languages appeared to have exhausted itself when he’d read the sign above the hallway entrance. Only a large button softly pulsing with green light differentiated itself from the myriad controls.

“Let’s give it a try,” he said, and pressed the button.

Hrega jumped and hid behind Tvorh’s legs as a disembodied feminine voice rang out throughout the room. “Ceasing suspended animation of subjects, cell 117-108,” it said in Common West Valley.

Hrega peeked out from behind Tvorh’s legs as horizontal slits appeared in the center of the white spheres and they began to split open. “Mother?”

“Don’t be silly, Hrega. It’s not mother. This place has been closed for centuries.” Inwardly, however, Tvorh admitted to himself that the voice did sound like his mother’s. Until Hrega had come out and said it, he hadn’t even considered how ridiculous it was of him to entertain the thought.

The spheres finished opening, and luminous white liquid spilled over their rims as gray shapes began to stir within the fluid. A moment later, a long-nosed creature poked its head out of one of the bowls.

“Look, Hrega. Rats.” They were unlike any rats Tvorh had ever seen, though. Their gray flesh was smooth and slick, like the skin of a sea mammal, and membranes slipped back and forth over their eyes as they crawled from the half-spheres and began to explore the limited space on the shelves.

“Are they good to eat, Tvorh?”

“I don’t know. I mean, they must have been here for…” Centuries. That word again. Was that even possible? “A long time.” But if they could be eaten… “Let’s open it up.”

The womanly voice filled the chamber again. “Cell 117-108: Suspended animation ceased, 20 Tumbling Seeding 1885.”

Hrega leapt forward toward the console. “Mother!”

Tvorh grabbed for her, but it was too late. Hrega pounded her hands on the buttons and levers before Tvorh could get his arms around her. “Cell 117-108, rattus delphinus vacuus. Commencing vacuum endurance test number one, 20 Tumbling Seeding 1885.”

“No,” Tvorh gasped, but he could only watch helplessly through the diamondglass as a distant whirring noise began and the fluid in the bowls stirred. The rats’ ears flipped and twitched as the air whirled out of the chamber.

Tvorh knew that as vacuum replaced the air of the chamber, the blood of the animals would begin to boil and the water of their bodies would seek to exit them through any path possible. The meat would be ruined. As he watched, however, he couldn’t make out a single sign that they were dehydrating. Instead, the rats simply began to hunker down. Membranes slicked across their eyes, they closed their mouths tight, and the holes of their noses and ears twisted closed.

Tvorh and Hrega stared at the rats as seconds ticked into minutes. “I think they’re surviving it,” Tvorh whispered in awe.

“Is that good?”

“If I’m right, it means we might actually have some food tonight after all. Come on. Let’s figure out how to open this thing.”

Several of the levers did nothing more than to change the pressure of the room, and once the air began to return, the rodents began moving again. After briefly scaring himself by pressurizing the animals at ten atmospheres (an oddity which had no visible effect on the rats except to make them move remarkably slowly), Tvorh managed to twirl the right lever. The tendons of the switch locked into place, the air hissed, and the voice spoke again. “Opening containment unit, cell 117-108. Have a wonderful day.”

The diamondglass pane swept downward into the console, and the squeaking rats leapt from the shelves, running out into the cell proper and racing for the still-open cell door. “Quick, Hrega,” Tvorh yelled, making a grab for the creatures. Their agility was too much for him in his injured state, and he came up empty handed as the last of them disappeared out the door. “Hurry. We have to catch them!”

The squealing rodents raced down the hallway toward the main concourse, forming a mobile, writhing rug of smooth gray skin. Hrega and Tvorh chased after the mass all the way back to the large circular carving in the middle of the main hall. Tvorh leapt for the nearest rat, but it evaded his grasp. As he hopped back to his feet, he noticed that Hrega had had more luck; whether by design or chance, she’d managed to break one of the animals away from its pack. It raced this way and that, and she herded it all the way over to the small, short console at the edge of the circle. As it realized that it had made the mistake of letting her corner it, Hrega pounced.

She lifted the creature up by its tail and smiled at it, then looked up at her brother. “Tvorh!—” Her smile faded to shock.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“What?”

A low growl rattled Tvorh’s insides. He turned slowly.

A horrifically misshapen creature, one which he could only have mistaken for human from a distance, stood nose to nose with him. It loosed a bellow so low and loud that Tvorh thought it would split his ears.

“Chimera,” he screamed, dodging to the side a split second before a long, wicked crab claw snapped closed around where his neck had been. He rolled to his feet and unsheathed his precious, priceless forgebone knife in one smooth motion. “Run, Hrega!”

As an enormous mouth too full of teeth by far descended toward his face, Tvorh caught a glimpse of Hrega clutching the rat to her chest and trembling in terror. He rolled backward as the chimera came after him.

Feet hit the ground. He pushed forward, leaping into the monster and trying to bring his knife arm to bear. What Tvorh lacked in mass, he made up for with sheer wiry strength; the abomination stumbled backward and he came down on top of it.

A single blow from one of its strong arms dazed him and tumbled him over. He barely got the point of the knife up above him before the chimera was snapping at his face again. Its face and skull bulged with tumors, and where one of its eyes should have been there was only smooth flesh. Tvorh marveled at its ugliness even as he plunged the blade up into its stomach.

It leaned back and howled with rage as he withdrew his knife. For a moment, the struggle ceased, and the monster peered down at him, regarding him with something not unlike respect as the wound in its stomach knotted up with a vile fungal bloom.

Then Hrega was striking the chimera’s head from behind with one hand. “Let him go.” But Hrega was pitifully small, and she succeeded only in attracting its attention; it turned, rumbled its low, organ-shaking roar, and reached for her.

Tvorh shoved it to the side, over the narrow rut that separated the main walk of the concourse from the quartz-covered pit of the rendering pool. He scrambled to gain his feet. “Hrega, hit the console.” He leapt, holding his knife before him, as the creature contorted itself to a balanced position.

The knife sunk in deeply, and a claw to the face rewarded Tvorh’s efforts. He screamed in pain and dropped the knife. The chimera rolled him over onto his back at the edge of the circle. Tvorh shoved his hands under the chimera’s throat and fought desperately to keep it from snapping off his face.

Then he was tumbling sideways as the ground beneath him split open down the center of the rendering circle. Tvorh grabbed wildly for a grip; by chance he managed to grab the edge of the floor as the circle became a pit beneath him. His fingers scraped the hilt of the dagger that he’d dropped on the ground as the chimera tumbled down toward the rendering pool. “Hrega?” he called up.

“Tvorh,” he heard her say.

“Hrega, just give me a second —”

“Tvorh, it’s coming back!”

Tvorh glanced downward. The chimera had managed to acquire a grip on the wall mere inches above the rendering fluid. What was it holding on to? A popping sound answered the unasked question as the chimera tugged one of its arms from the wall and slammed it back to the side of the pit.

It had grown suckers.

Tvorh scrabbled manically at the lip, trying desperately to pull himself up. He yanked his leg upward to the floor and felt the draft of the chimera’s chitinous arm smashing against the pit beneath his toes.

Tvorh rolled out of the circle and snatched up the knife, turning again to the pit as one of the claw-arms came into view over the side of it. With a wordless cry, he rolled back, leaned over the side, and plunged the knife down into the good eye of the monster. Its arms flailed off of the wall, and the blade slipped from its face as the chimera tumbled back down, spinning head over heels until it splashed into the viscous purple fluid. The monster screamed in pain as the acidic syrup burned through its flesh. In seconds, there was nothing left of the creature.

“Hrega,” Tvorh said, managing to keep his voice steady as he wiped the blade on his pants, “close up the rendering pool. And come on. Let’s get out of here.” He glanced back at the ramp they’d used to enter the concourse. “We don’t know if there are more of those things.”

***

Tvorh reached down and grabbed Hrega’s proffered hand, tugging her up out of the black hole into the slightly less dreary gloom of the Underways. As he did so, Tvorh glared about him menacingly, warning the beggars and street folk back. It wasn’t likely that any of them would get up the courage to attack a wiry boy in the bloom of late adolescence, particularly not one who had such a wicked-looking knife stuck through his belt, but it was impossible to be sure.

Hrega still gripped the struggling rat to her chest as Tvorh pulled her up and set her on the ground. Her thumb stroked the back of the tiny squeaking creature even as she maintained her death grip on it.

“Come on, Hrega. Let’s get home. Bilr will be waking up. She’s probably really hungry.”

Hrega glanced down at the tiny rodent but said nothing. She nodded, and Tvorh led her off through the crowded Underways. The hints of sunrise filtered down through the Chasm, casting wan red light in thin streaks across the main thoroughfare.

From here it was ten minutes as the mole burrowed to the tiny hovel that Tvorh and his mother’s daughters called home. Unfortunately, the Chasm was a treacherous landscape due to both its geography and its denizens. The Underways and the warrens of the Labyrinth beneath them existed in at least a dozen layers of tangled tunnels and makeshift holes that the disenfranchised and the lost called home. At any given place along its length, the Chasm itself sliced between two and five of these layers, granting a view of a sliver of blue sky to anybody in the area who looked up.

Tvorh never looked up any more. What was the point?

Tvorh and Hrega made a brief climb up the ladder that led to the fourth layer and then set off in the direction of home.

When he and his sisters had fled the influx of refugees from the Walking Death two years ago, Tvorh had chosen the fourth layer of the Underways due to its particularly treacherous terrain. With his mother and father both dead and gone, they had little protection against the undesirables who lived under the Table of Acerbia. Obscurity had to do where sheer might would have failed.

Tvorh wasn’t much of a fan of the gangs of feral children in this place, and the feeling was mutual.

They shimmied across a narrow ledge and emerged into a small chamber. It was part of the Chasm and open to the sky, but the walls above were sheer all the way to the surface of the Table. It had been the perfect place for Tvorh to situate himself and his sisters: rainwater was easy enough to gather, he could manage a tiny garden of hardy, tasteless plants in the rocky dirt during the Blooming months, and due to the sheer walls up above, he never had to worry about people rappelling down from any higher levels of the Chasm.

So he’d hollowed out a tiny cave in the corner of the tiny room, and now Hrega, Bilr, and he called it— well, not home, but something not entirely unlike home. Even the garbage dumps and the occasional dead body were treasure troves to a poor orphan like him. He was sure his father would disapprove, but a man did what he needed to survive.

Today looked to be another good day, because a pile of garbage up to his waist lay in the center of the open room. He patted Hrega on the head. “Run inside,” he said. “Get some water boiling for Bilr.” He motioned to the rat. “I’m going to go through the presents.”

“They’re not really presents, Tvorh,” Hrega observed.

He ruffled her hair. “Good enough for us, Reggy. Now go on.” When she had left, he turned to the trash heap and began to sweep away the useless clutter. A broken utility of some sort: bone casing, torn membranous screen. If they got to it soon, they could recycle and eat part of it. A battered canteen. Well, they could never have too many containers for water.

When he dove in again, his fingers brushed something smooth and heavy. It didn’t have the telltale broken weight distribution of a shattered object when he pushed it back and forth, and that alone was enough to pique his curiosity. He drew it out and stared in awe.

It was a pistol, perfect and unharmed except for the filth clinging to it. Utilizing half-remembered lore from long hours reading at the Archives, he toyed with it until he managed to remove its magazine.

The bullets were forgebone.

This thing had to be of astronomical worth. Who would have thrown it away? Gingerly, he tucked it into his belt. A weapon like this would be good for intimidation, self-defense, and maybe even for trading if times got too dire. It was a lucky find. “Thank you, fathers of my fathers,” he whispered, and for the first time in a long time he actually meant the words.

With treasure like the pistol in the pile, who knew what else he might be able to find? Tvorh thrust his hand back into the heap of refuse. Something soft and warm met his grazing fingers, and he jerked back.

Was that?—

Tvorh pushed some of the rubbish aside and peered through the hole. He could make out a bare scrap of pink flesh beneath the refuse. He poked at it. Yep, definitely warm. Either newly dead or still alive. More digging revealed a hand with thin but well-worn fingers, then an arm covered in some kind of flexible black leather. Tvorh set himself to uncovering the entire body.

At the sight of the curve of its bosom, he had to pause and catch a breath. Respect every man, his father had told him, and he couldn’t quite reconcile the thoughts going through his mind with the concept of respect. But he was a young man who hadn’t seen a woman who wasn’t filthy in years, and so his curiosity got the better of him. He glanced back at her black-suited body.

Her chest was rising and falling. It was almost imperceptible, but in the stillness he could hear her breathing.

Tvorh madly finished uncovering her. She was tall and thin enough that she ought to be skirting the line between survival and starvation, but beneath the skintight suit there were hard lines of musculature. She was grimy thanks to the rubbish, but he was fairly certain that her shoulder-cropped hair was some shade of brown. Her skin, or what was evident of it on her face and her hands, bore no obvious blemishes; not even a boil or a weeping sore.

She was, in a word, the most beautiful woman he’d seen in years.

The effect was marred only by the darkening of blood down the arm of her suit and the blue stains on her wrist where the suit met skin. Blue stains! In his shock, Tvorh grabbed for her wrist, wondering whether he’d lost his mind.

The wrist grabbed back, and the world spun after the trajectory of his hand. The waist of his pants moved as the pistol yanked free, and before he could reorient himself to handle the situation, Tvorh’s head was throbbing and he was lying flat on his back, staring up at the barrel of the gun.