Marigold waited in line at the train depot. A train was the easiest way to get down to her apartment, and though she knew the likelihood of catching one in the present circumstances was slim, she thought it worth a try. She waited in line for close to an hour now and watched a steady stream of tears, threats, and teeth gnashing, as creatures went up to the ticket desk only to be turned away one by one. She had very little hope that her experience would be different, but she had to be certain. She scanned the room while tapping her fingers against her apron and her foot on the floor.

At least the line gave her time to think. She thought about Maxwell, who she had left in the depot’s waiting room. He had looked scared when she left him. He usually looked scared. A certain amount of worry was inevitable upon confronting the utmost secrets of the cosmos, but why couldn’t Maxwell do the reasonable thing and swallow his emotions? Maybe it was a human deficiency.

After that, she thought about her job and if anyone had figured out where she had gone. Marigold was doing what she had to do, but would her supervisors see it that way? She doubted anyone had noticed yet, but if they did, she would have a lot to explain. Word would make it back to her mother and father, and there would be the normal lectures about the burden of Caretaking and upholding the family name.

Mostly, she thought about the whole big mess they were in. The last time things had ground to a halt like this had been when she was a child, and the universe needed to be reclassified, realigned, and reordered. She remembered the days of rationing and thought about how different it was from what was unfolding in front of her now. Back then, everyone had pulled together. The only way that seemed likely to occur now was if everyone was pulling together on something small and defenseless.

“How can the trains still be down?” The Zvex demigod in front of Marigold shouted at a disinterested clerk behind the glass partition.

“Are you an engineer?” she asked in reply.

The demigod shook his head in bewilderment.

“Then answering your question would only waste my time and yours.”

Marigold chuckled to herself.

For a moment, it looked like the demigod was about to test the width of the glass with his hammer-like fist, but he closed his eyes, sighed, and stomped off.

At last, it was Marigold’s turn.

“Bribe or threat?” the clerk asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Were you planning to bribe or threaten me, or are you dim enough to see hundreds of people before you get turned away and think you were an exception? As I’m sure you already know, we have no idea when most of the trains will be back up and running, and I can’t sell you a ticket until they are.”

“I get it, but I’m a Caretaker.” She flashed an identification card. “It’s important I get down to the lower levels. I’m on official business.”

“Oh. Someone important. That changes everything.”

Marigold perked up. “It does?”

“Absolutely. I’ll rush you onto a train right away. Do you want the one that just exploded in a ball of fire or the one that’s shooting up and down uncontrollably?”

“The emergency shuttles must still be going.”

“If you were authorized to use an emergency shuttle, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

Marigold rolled her eyes. “So, you can’t help me?”

“You can walk, just like everyone else.”

“Great, thanks for the help. Maybe think about a new line of work.”

“Believe me, I think about it every minute of the day,” the clerk replied.

Marigold made her way back down the corridor to the waiting room. An impatient goblin nearly bowled her over on his way to the counter. He pushed his way through the line, and Marigold could hear him shouting and snorting as she walked away.

Things were bad, but she had a feeling they were going to get worse. Nobody wanted to admit it, but the more monstrous tendencies of her fellow citizens seemed to be bubbling very close to the surface these days, and if the current stoppage went on much longer—well, it would be good to get a human far away from the crowds in the Junction before that happened.

She returned to the waiting area and found Maxwell slumped down on a wooden bench, staring up at the faded golden moldings of the central hall. He was trying to look relaxed but was clearly terrified. Whether it was by the creatures that surrounded him, his dire situation, or both, she couldn’t tell.

“Come on, we’re going,” Marigold said.

Together they walked back toward the exit.

“Isn’t this the way we came?”

“I couldn’t book a train. They’re having issues.”

“Issues?”

“Long drops and fiery crashes. That kind of issue.”

“They can’t all be down,” Maxwell replied. “We came to the Junction on a train.”

“A cheap, off-the-network, technically illegal train.”

“Can’t we take another one of those?”

“Not through the middle of the city, no.”

“Oh,” Maxwell said.

Marigold could tell he was stopping himself from asking follow-up questions.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “There’s an escalator nearby.”

“Why didn’t we just take that in the first place?”

“Well, the escalator is bound to be broken. It’s very long, and I was pretty sure you would complain about the walk.”

*

Marigold was annoyed at being right. The escalator wasn’t working and the walk was even longer than she remembered. They had to make their way down the steep, narrow stairs by foot. Off in the distance, a few avian creatures were flying gracefully toward the lower levels. Hopping had always seemed sufficient for Marigold’s purposes in the past, but she had never been so deprived of transportation options before. For the first time in her existence, she wished she, too, could fly.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Maxwell kept fussing at his disguise every time they passed another creature. In the last few hours, Marigold had noticed that the more worried he grew, the more awkward he acted. It was bound to get them caught. She looked around for a distraction, something to take the human’s mind off himself and their increasingly hopeless journey.

“See that down there?” she said, pointing over the side of the elevator to the city’s lower level. “That bronze dome is called The Great Weave.”

Maxwell’s eyes followed Marigold’s finger, and he stared in awe at the object. She wished he could have seen it before the corrosion had set in, before tatty sky-rises had sprung up on all sides and eaten away at its stateliness.

“What do they weave?” Maxwell asked.

“Fate, once.”

“How do you weave fate?”

“Before the Backend was run by computers, certain basic laws of the universe were regulated by what we called Artifacts. That was one of them. The weavers worked an immense tapestry, dictating the relation of things as they entwined the threads.”

“But not anymore?”

Marigold shook her head. “Not since they built the causal engines.”

“What happened to the tapestry?”

“It’s too unstable to have two different technologies generating the same function. It was digitized and burnt.”

This seemed to bother Maxwell. He looked more uneasy than before she had spoken. She realized she didn’t know enough about humans to comfort them. She shouldn’t have tried.

“I’m hungry,” Maxwell said.

Hunger was a problem she could solve easily enough.

“Alright. In about five minutes, we’ll reach the midpoint where we transfer to another escalator. We can take a break there and eat something,” she said.

The midpoint was more crowded than Marigold remembered. Officially, the area was only a few hundred square meters, but it had grown as dense as some of the smaller leviathans. What had once been a simple connecting platform with a few kiosks had grown into a warren of cheap apartments, seedy shops, and less-than-gourmet eating establishments. Of course, there wasn’t enough space for these developments on the small patch of floating concrete, so they had fused the new developments to the old, building upwards and out, so that the countless balconies, boxes, and flophouses clung one to another, dangling over the void below. All the additions slanted up or curved down at imperfect angles, giving the impression that the city was melting.

It was dark inside the cluster of buildings, but their path was lit by a kaleidoscope of floating lanterns designed to lure customers into nearby shops. Marigold had visited most of them, but today she was only interested in the stall at the far end of the corridor. It was her favorite. She led Maxwell toward the plain blue door and went inside.

“Welcome. Take a seat. First time?” It was Alibe’s customary greeting. No matter how many times Marigold visited, he seemed completely unable to recall that she had ever been there. She wondered if the forgetfulness wasn’t just a canny way of preserving his customer’s anonymity, but one look at Alibe’s sticky, unkempt demeanor dispelled suspicions of cunning. Marigold had initially liked the lack of fuss, but the more she visited, the more she viewed his imperfect recall as a challenge. How many visits would it take before he knew who she was?

“Yeah, first time,” Marigold said.

Alibe looked down at Maxwell’s shirt. “That’s so freaking funny, man.”

“Sorry?” Maxwell said.

“Kroglings, man, I wish.” He laughed to himself as Marigold led Maxwell to a pair of seats at the far end of the counter.

“Slow day,” Marigold said.

“Is it?” Alibe asked.

Marigold looked around the empty diner and then back to Alibe, who seemed to have already forgotten the comment. “What’re you having? Eggs?” He smiled at both of them broadly.

“Actually—” Maxwell began.

“Eggs is all he does,” Marigold whispered.

“Right, eggs,” Maxwell agreed.

Alibe nodded and turned around to prepare their meal. Marigold gazed out the panoramic windows at the Lower Junction below. This was the real reason she enjoyed visiting. The panoramic windows that lined the wall behind the bar afforded the best view of the city. She loved being sandwiched between the pretension of the Upper Junction and the proper city below. It was the only place you could get a sense of what the Junction was in its entirety, get a sense of the millions of inhabitants butting up against each other, with all their contradictory and nonsensical desires and opinions. What was annoying and chaotic up close seemed orderly here.

“So not all the neighborhoods move?” Maxwell asked.

“No, the lower level is built directly on top of the Core,” Marigold said.

“That’s good. I’m not sure I liked the moving. It felt like there was a tiny, never-ending earthquake.”

The sight of a luxury-class leviathan stalling above them briefly distracted her attention. Her mother had suggested she buy a place in one of those hulking, overpriced monstrosities. She had protested for months when Marigold had instead taken her allowance and used it to buy an apartment in the Lower Junction. Her mother still brought it up to this day, asking when she planned on moving out of her hovel. The thought stirred up Marigold’s old resentment, and she ruminated about her parents until Maxwell whispered something that shook her out of internal arguments.

“What is he?” Maxwell whispered.

Marigold followed his line of sight to Alibe preparing food behind the counter. “Alibe?”

Maxwell nodded.

“He’s a cook,” Marigold said.

“I mean what kind of god or demon or whatever? He looks kind of strange.”

“That’s not very nice. Besides, I thought humans still remembered elves.”

“That? That thing is an elf?” Maxwell asked.

Why was Maxwell confused? Alibe had the standard wrinkly ears, scraggly beard, and long wavy blond hair—nothing out of the ordinary—and his backward baseball cap and tinted sunglasses did little to conceal what he was.

“He looks nothing like an elf,” Maxwell said.

“And what do elves look like?”

“I don’t know. Not that. Tall, sexy, like supermodels with pointy ears.”

She looked back over at Alibe again.

“He’s alright,” she said.

Maxwell raised an eyebrow at her.

“I think the problem has less to do with his appearance and more to do with how humans describe creatures from the Backend. Humans are bad at recalling things and when you combine that with hundreds or thousands of years of human-to-human transmission, things get distorted. Most of your depictions of creatures back here are unrecognizable to us.”

“So, what was the thing chasing me earlier, a unicorn?”

Marigold laughed. “No unicorns are terrifying. You would know if you saw a unicorn. That was a drûxin.”

“A what?”

“You’ve probably never heard of them. They’re one of the older things that live back here.”

“He seemed to think you have money.”

“Right.”

Marigold knew something like this was coming. It was only a matter of time as soon as anyone found out about her job.

Maxwell seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “I mean, I don’t want to seem rude, but you’re a caretaker, aren’t you?”

He wasn’t going to drop the matter.

“Please don’t make a big deal of it.”

“Of being a janitor?”

“A Caretaker.”

“Do those terms have a different meaning back here? Are you more of a caretaker in the figurative sense?” Maxwell asked.

“What is a figurative Caretaker?”

“I don’t know, cleaning up existential messes, universal catastrophes, that sort of thing.”

“Something like that.”

Maxwell took a long time to think about this and was getting ready to speak again when Alibe came over and saved Marigold from further interrogation.

“You guys are in for a real treat this time,” he said.

“Why? Did you do something special with the eggs?” Marigold asked.

“Nope,” Alibe replied.

He served them both a single hard-boiled egg on a large plate. Marigold thought it looked delicious, but Maxwell seemed apprehensive.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“What kind of egg is this?

“Why does that matter?”

“I’ve just never seen blue eggs before. What bird do they come from?”

Marigold laughed again. “Bird? Who would eat anything that came out of a bird?”

Maxwell said nothing. He cracked the shell and took a tentative bite. The food apparently met his human standards, and he shoveled more into his mouth under the bandana. A strange thing happened as he ate. He looked peaceful for the first time since Marigold had rescued him from the Spa.

Was that all it took? All this time, she could have put him at ease with a little food. She watched him eat for a few seconds, pondering how this creature could regulate his behavior and mood so poorly, and then tucked into her own meal.

The portions here were large, and she could never eat more than half of her egg, but it was as delicious as ever. She could feel her mood shift with each bite, not as dramatically as the human, of course, but she had to admit she was feeling better. Perhaps she had needed a break, too. She was just starting to enjoy herself when a familiar, irritating voice called out from under the table. She had been so distracted she hadn’t noticed that she hadn’t heard its voice for much of the last hour.

“Psst, frog,” IT said.