It was hot and dry. It was hot and dry and had been hot and dry for several hours now. As Maxwell scanned the horizon, he could see no sign that it would stop being hot and dry anytime soon either. They had walked the narrow winding path through the featureless desert without stopping, and Maxwell was beginning to forget that he had ever had a life outside this barren landscape. He had tried counting the round grey rocks to keep his mind occupied, but he had lost track somewhere around 5000.

More pressing than the mental fatigue, however, Maxwell’s legs could not take much more. He needed a break. He didn’t want Marigold to yell at him again, but his legs had moved from sore to burning to numb, and he now felt wobbly all over. He could not be sure that they would not buckle at any moment, and he would end up flat on his face with a mouth full of grey sand.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said, when he felt himself on the verge of fainting. “I need to rest.”

“What, here?” Marigold said, motioning to the expanse of nothingness on all sides.

“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. I just need to sit for a minute. I need water.”

“This is true,” IT said from Marigold’s bag. “My records suggest humans need a surprising amount of water.”

Marigold grumbled and groaned but eventually conceded. To Maxwell’s astonishment, she began to pull out folding chairs from her too-small bag and then a large blue tarp which she strung up along two poles that were also somehow in her bag.

“How are you doing that?” Maxwell asked.

“What?” Marigold said, exasperated.

“How does all of that fit in there.”

“The bag? It’s a tool of the Caretaker’s trade, plenty of room.”

This didn’t answer Maxwell’s question, but the conversation ended there.

When she was finished, she pulled out IT who spun around twice, took in the sand, and decided it was too much too large to be vacuumed and rolled under the shade of the tarp. Maxwell took a seat next to him.

“And the water?” Maxwell asked.

Marigold produced a flask from her apparently bottomless bag.

Maxwell barely got out a thank you before he was glugging down an obscene amount of liquid.

“I don’t suppose you have any food in there?”

“Food? Marigold asked.

“Is that a strange thing to ask?”

“You just ate.”

Now it was Maxwell’s turn to be perplexed. “I had a single egg several hours ago.”

“Exactly. How much do humans need to eat?”

“More than an egg,” Maxwell grumbled.

“Wait,” IT said, calling out from between them. “Get this, according to my database humans eat an average of three to four pounds a day.”

“Impossible. Look how small he is.”

“That’s what it says. Typically, two or three times a day.”

Marigold shook her head. “All that wasted time.”

“Very inefficient,” IT agreed.

“I don’t need to eat a lot,” Maxwell said, growing ashamed of what was beginning to feel like gluttony.

Marigold rummaged around in her bag a final time. “Well, I have these nuts, but you better ration them. I was saving them for breakfast tomorrow.”

The small container held small brown pebbles that did not resemble any kind of nut he was familiar with, but he gleefully gobbled them down under the disapproving eye of Marigold. He chased the chalky nuts down with more water and handed the food back to Marigold. She pulled out a single nut and swallowed it in a gulp.

“It feels like we’re at the beach,” IT said. He sounded as if he was enjoying himself.

“How is this like the beach?” Maxwell asked.

“You know, sun and sand and folding chairs—the beach.”

“Beaches have water.”

“I’m going to pretend we’re at the beach,” IT said stubbornly.

Maxwell gazed out at the flat sands that surrounded them on all sides, baking under the cloudless sun and blue skies. It took him several minutes before he realized how strange it all was.

“Wait, are we outside or inside?” Maxwell asked.

“What are you talking about?” Marigold said.

“We went down that slide, so we should be in the Core, right? But there’s a sky and sun here . . .”

“The sun is artificial, and the sky is painted.”

Maxwell tried to discern this, but other than the strange stillness of the air, there was nothing to suggest that they weren’t really in a desert.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Why bother?” Maxwell asked.

“Because of you,” IT answered.

“Me?” Maxwell said, trying to connect the un-connectable dots in his head.

“Not you, you,” IT continued. “Humans, I mean. This used to be the holding place for the newly dead before someone figured out the Spa. Humans waited there until their time was up.”

“Like Purgatory?”

“Kind of but there was no penance involved. It was supposed to be called the Waiting Plains, originally.”

“Why did it change?”

“Because humans like to complain,” Marigold interjected. “All that whining and moaning, and it didn’t take long before it developed its present nickname.

Maxwell ignored the comment that was clearly directed at him. “I’m still not understanding why humans would need a fake sky and fake sun.”

“I guess to stop them from panicking.”

“When they found out they were dead, you mean,” Maxwell said.

IT and Marigold said nothing further, and Maxwell returned to his water and nuts in silence.

*

The break was short and didn’t take long until Marigold was rushing them back across the desert. Fortunately, the rest of the walk was not as long as Maxwell feared. After another couple hours, they came to the stone arches of the old Administrative Quarters. It was elegant and stately and remained pristine in its vacancy. Gold and silver accented every edge. Large banners hung down in sharp reds and blues. Paint saturated every corner of the otherwise austere structures. It was beautiful and looked like Maxwell imagined ancient Greece or Rome looked back before they were ancient.

“What happened to this place?” Maxwell asked.

IT spoke up from the bag. “The official line was that it could not meet the demands of our modern information society. I think they had trouble retrofitting some of the old buildings or something.”

“It’s a shame,” Maxwell said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It is,” Marigold agreed. “But beauty isn’t efficient or cheap. It was easier to keep administrative offices closer to the city.

They walked in silence down the empty stone streets, their boots echoing in the stillness. The buildings thinned out as they reached the end of the old city and behind one last stone arch came to a simple black door sitting against a structure that had the rough dimension of an old phone-booth. Written in gold paint on the door were the words Archive.

“This is it?” Maxwell asked.

Marigold didn’t respond. Her lips were pursed, and her face was wrinkled in concern.

“What is it?” Maxwell asked.

“It’s looked,” she said, pointing to a very hefty padlock affixed to the door.

“Maybe IT knows something,” Maxwell said.

Marigold reached into her bag and pulled out the robot and held it up so IT’s sensors could scan the lock.

“What are you doing? Why are you showing me this?” it said at last.

“It’s a lock. You opened the last one,” Marigold said.

“That one was electronic. This is just a big, stupid padlock. What were you expecting me to do, suck it open?”

Marigold shoved IT back in her bag, ignoring its usual protests. She brought her hands to her waist and stood in place for a long moment staring at the lock.

“Um, I don’t know if it’ll work, but there’s something I can try,” Maxwell said. “Do you have a hairpin in your bag?” he asked.

Marigold gestured to her hairless amphibious head.

“What about paperclips?”

Marigold looked inside for a moment and then produced a handful, dropping them into Maxwell’s hand. He took one, bent it into an L shape, and slid it into the lock.

“And a screwdriver? Something small.”

Marigold pulled a small toolkit out of her bag and produced a range of screwdrivers with bits of all sizes.

Maxwell tested the thickness of various pits until he found a long thin one that fit in easily. Sliding the paperclip in after it, he twisted and turned until something clicked into place and the lock fell away.

Marigold looked shocked. “Good job.”

“It’s not a big deal. It’s an easy lock.”

“But you opened it. That’s something.”

“You mean, because I wasn’t useless for once?”

Marigold patted him on the back. “Exactly.”

“Did we do it? Are we in?” IT asked through the bag. When nobody replied, IT began to talk to itself. “Yes IT, we figured out a way in. Yes, Maxwell escaped the monster. Yes, we made it down the slide. We appreciate you can’t see anything inside Marigold’s cluttered bag and realize that our success depends upon keeping you informed.”

Behind the door, there was a narrow shaft leading downward and a ladder leading into darkness. Marigold went first and Maxwell followed. They descended a long time in the darkness. Maxwell wondered how far down they were now in the inverted pyramid he had glimpsed from the train. The Core had seemed very big, but there had been all the jumps, and stairs, that big slide, and now this endless ladder. Maxwell liked to think they were close to the bottom, but he had no evidence to back this up.

“What is the Archive, exactly?” Maxwell asked, realizing he knew very little about the locked structure he had entered.

“It’s where the Scholars lived and worked before the war. They used to study and compile their records here.”

“Like what that demon Walter does?”

“He’s an Analyst. They’re the ones the Scholars were fighting.”

“Right, of course,” Maxwell said.

The ladder came to a stop at the top of a round central hall. It was only a few metres in diameter, but what it lacked in width, it made up for in depth. The floor ran along the side of the cylindrical room, but it went down in a spiral, down so far that Maxwell could not fathom the bottom. What he could see were books. Every inch of space along the Archive’s rounded walls were filled with thousands and thousands of tomes, interrupted only by the occasional door set into the wall. It was somehow both intimidating and cozy at the same time.

Maxwell drew closer to one of the shelves and read off some of the closest volumes aloud. “Forbidden Mysteries of Atherock, Occult Enigmas of the Estuary Nebula, Hidden Secrets of the Neverwere—do the Scholars just write about supernatural things?” he asked.

“They wrote about everything. You’re just looking at one fraction of one section.”

They began to make their way downwards along the faded carpet that ran the length of the sloped floor.

“When did the Scholars all disappear?”

“No one’s sure,” IT called out in a typically chipper voice. “The Scholars locked them up here hundreds of years ago and nobody has heard from them since. Nobody could check because the treaty forbade it.”

“What treaty?” Maxwell asked.

“Shh,” Marigold said.

“So, we’re not supposed to be here?”

“No,” IT replied. “We are very much not supposed to be here. This is a prime violation, and if anyone finds out, that’ll be it for all of us, though I suppose you’re doomed anyway, and they’ll probably just put me back in the computer, but Marigold’s probably looking at jailtime. Isn’t that right frog?”

“I’m going to turn you off if you don’t shut up,” Marigold said in response.

As they got closer to the bottom, Marigold became noticeably more tense. Maxwell wondered if it was because of their trespassing or if she knew something he did not.

Suddenly she froze, peered down into the dark pit in the centre of room and turned to Maxwell. “Stay quiet and move quickly,” she said.

Maxwell didn’t question her.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she muttered.

“What’s going on?” IT asked.

“It looks like someone’s here.”

“How? In what way could someone be here?

“Not so loud.”

“You know, I’m tired of your control issues. If you’re going to keep taking my help, you need to let me know what’s going on.”

IT’s voice was getting louder and echoing through the hall.

“I warned you,” Marigold said.

“No, no, don’t—”

She reached into her bag and flipped a switch to silence the robot.

Maxwell thought better of talking, especially when he saw what had aroused Marigold’s concern. At the bottom of the Archive was a broad open room lined with desks in various states of disarray, but what Marigold was no doubt worried about was a flickering light in the middle of it all. Something down here was alive.