> I’ve still never been to Idhytse. The others passed near it when they first fled the desert, but even if they had chanced to encounter it they would not have been ready for the city - and the city would not have been ready for them. It was only a brief intersection of fate that brought life to that dead place. Without such an animating spark there is only sand, sand, sand.
>
> - Tasjadre Ra Novo, Jesa Sagoja: Zhetam Asade
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“You know,” Mark said, sticking the entrenching tool into a drift of sand and mopping his brow, “When Maja pointed us to Idhytse and told us about all the cool crap we could find here, I was really looking forward to it. I thought we had finally earned some rewards for all the bullshit we’d been through.”
Jackie leaned back against the blackstone wall, staying carefully within the narrow strip of shade the building cast on the sand. Where the sun struck, the air shimmered with heat haze under the merciless blue sky. “And now?” she asked, her lips pulling into a smile.
“I think the orange bitch is trying to kill us,” Mark muttered, joining her in the shade as he took a thirsty pull from his canteen. “Everything in the city is under literal tons of sand. This wall could be the second storey or the fifth, for all I know.” He glared out across the scorching dunes, the vast expanse of sand broken here and there by walls of pitted black thrusting upward. Each broke the titanic frozen waves of sand around it, forming small hollows on the leeward side that offered occasional respite from the heat. “It’s a minor miracle we were even able to get out of the gateway hall.”
“It’s not like she was lying to us,” Jackie pointed out diplomatically. “We’ve only been at this for half a day, and we’ve already found some stuff.”
Mark swallowed another mouthful and shook his head. “Charge crystals,” he said. “Some minor saon draim, a few sajamyn. Neat, but it’s stuff we already had back on the mountain.” He clipped his canteen back to his belt and stood up with a grunt of effort. “We need game-changers. Things that open up new options for us, or at least for Maja.”
Jackie craned her head to look out toward the coast, squinting at the thin iron-grey strip of ocean barely visible through the shimmering heat. “Maybe we should be looking in the city center, then,” she said. “Maja said they had power-generation equipment on the coast, and it makes sense that there’d be more cool junk left near the port where the buildings are densest.”
Mark nodded, following her gaze. In between them and the ocean lay a scattering of weathered building shells. More were left exposed closer to the water, and nearest to the coast whole clusters of them stood exposed under the sky. “Yeah, that’s the plan,” Mark agreed. “At least eventually, but not for right now. Ajehet and his crew should report back soon, but even if they don’t find anyone I want to hang around closer to the gateway until nightfall.”
“Worried about those scavengers Vumo mentioned?” Jackie asked. “We haven’t seen any trace of activity, and I’ve definitely been looking.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not out there,” Mark grunted. “With all these abandoned buildings even Ajehet’s scouts might miss them. I figure we can keep an eye out for any lights at night, see if we can spot any big groups of people.” He shrugged and grabbed the shovel, walking back toward the half-excavated window he had been clearing. “I know we’ve got limited time, but there’s no reason to rush. If there are locals left, they know the area a lot better than we do. The farther from the gateway hall we go, the more dangerous it is for us.”
He began the slow work of clearing away the sand once more, muttering frustratedly as each shovelful was half-replaced by sand trickling down from the sides of the hole. Eventually his efforts bore fruit, however, exposing a dark opening into the building that smelled of dust and dry rot.
Jackie wrinkled her nose as she crouched down beside him. “Well, at least it’s cooler in there,” she said. “Let me take a look.” She shrugged out of her pack and grabbed her flashlight.
“Wait, where do you think you’re going?” Mark protested. “You’re barely recovered from breaking your arm, you can’t go crawling around in there.”
She gave him a flat look. “My arm is fine,” she said. “You wouldn’t let me dig, so at least let me take a look around.” She eyed the hole speculatively. “Besides, you can’t fit through the hole yet. At least we can see if there’s something in there worth the effort.”
Her head was through the window before Mark had a chance to respond, and after several seconds she withdrew back into the sunlight with a grin. “Looks promising,” she said. “Some sort of storage area, there’s a bunch of boxes and stuff.”
“Be careful,” Mark warned. “You know some of the shit we’re looking for is dangerous.”
Jackie slipped her feet into the opening, then shimmied in until she dropped to the ground inside the buried room. It was a wide, low-ceilinged space stuffed with racks and boxes, haphazard and universally covered in a thick carpet of dust. Sand poured in from every window, blocking large sections of the room under drifts.
She caught a glint from her flashlight and frowned, walking towards some racks against the far wall. Dust-covered cylinders the diameter of her waist lay neatly arrayed on the metal. She lifted her hand to brush the dust away, but then thought better of it and blew vigorously instead. A gout of dust fountained up, choking the air and sending her into a coughing fit. She hastily backpedaled towards the window, waving her hand at the dust in a fruitless effort to clear the air.
“Jack?” Mark called out, sounding concerned. “You find something?”
“Dust,” she sputtered, wiping irritably at the fine particles clinging to her. As it slowly settled back over the floor of the room, however, she could see what it had been hiding. A grin spread over her face. The rack held oblong crystal pillars, their surface pristine under the dirt. “I’m no expert, but that sure looks like the heavy-duty industrial version of a charge crystal.”
“No shit?” Mark said, poking his head through to peer at them. “Damn, those are huge.”
Jackie moved back to the rack, counting them. “There are so many,” she breathed. “Even the small ones we have already can power the fire gauntlet. With the amount of energy these can store…” She trailed off, brow furrowing as she did some quick mental math. “Yeah, shit,” she muttered. “Mark, we’ve got to take these.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Mark sighed, eyeing the weighty crystal pillars. “At least we’re still pretty close to the gateway. Let me radio Jesse and let him know we found something, he should be here by the time I’m finished widening the entrance.”
Jackie nodded absently, wandering further into the abandoned storeroom. There were more racks of the gigantic charge crystals, and despite several being bare and empty there were still over two dozen of the pillars sitting quietly in their dusty repose. The rack at the end had been toppled by a collapsing wall, jagged shards of crystal spreading out amid a fan of sand.
She prodded at one of the larger shards with her boot, noting how a thin layer of melted sand clung to it in a frothy, glassy shell. It must have been charged when it shattered, she realized, exposing the yellow-hot core of the crystal to the sand. Rivulets cascaded down where she had displaced the fragment, and a glimmer of light caught her eye.
Frowning, she shifted more of the sand away until the faintly glowing core of a charge crystal peeked out at her, free of its insulating blanket of sand. Unlike the others it still held a noticeable glow within it, softly shimmering like a faint aurora. Jackie knelt to get a better look, clearing more of the sand away with her hands - and froze as an electric tingle shimmered through her right arm.
The dust that coated her skin shifted as if drawn by static, clustering in a webbed tracery of lines that branched across her forearm. The slowly shifting aurora within the charge crystal clarified, clustering towards the nearest facet. Feeling lightheaded, she moved her hand back and forth carefully. The glowing energy within the crystal followed her trailing fingers as they moved, roiling against the crystal’s edge in slow, undulating waves.
A sudden jolt ran up her arm as a spark leapt from the crystal to contact her fingers. She jumped to her feet with a muttered curse, only to freeze once more at the sight of a gossamer strand of light trailing from her index finger. It clung wispily to her fingertip, waving as if blown by a gentle breeze. She moved her hand and watched it trail weightlessly behind, incongruously careless next to the sound of her pulse hammering in her ears.
She shook her hand gently to see if she could dislodge it, but the strand of light held fast. The end whipped back and forth at her sudden motion flailing around until it brushed over her thumb - and stuck, leaving both fingers tethered.
“Shit,” she muttered, clamping down panic as she held her hand up to get a better look. She was reluctant to touch it further, although she had suffered no discomfort from the glowing thread so far. “Hey, Mark,” she called out, keeping her voice steady. “I think I might have a problem.”
“You touched something, didn’t you?” Mark called down, poking his head through the slightly-wider hole. “Shit, you totally touched something. What happened?”
Jackie held up her hand with a sheepish look, showing him the strand of light. “Technically I didn’t touch anything,” she said. “I just kinda got close to one of the charge crystals and this happened.”
“Does it hurt?” Mark asked.
“No, but it won’t come off,” Jackie said, waving her hand gently back and forth to demonstrate. “At first it was just on the one finger, but it seems like it sticks wherever it touches.” She frowned, then tried to brush the thread off of her thumb using the already-adhered index finger.
Instead of brushing loose, however, the two ends of the strand popped together with a little flash of light, freeing both of her fingers. She jerked her hand back and took a hasty step away from the glowing string. It now formed a tiny ring of light hovering in midair where her hand had been. She smiled shakily up at Mark. “I guess I-”
The ring shimmered, then exploded. A wave of force sent her staggering back a step, and she heard Mark curse as he bumped his head on the windowframe. Thick clouds of dust leapt up from every surface, choking the air and sending them both into coughing fits.
“Jack!” Mark called out hoarsely. “You okay?”
She coughed again and spit on the ground, tasting the grit in her mouth. “Yeah,” she called back. “I think so. Ears ringing a bit.”
“Me too, that was like a tiny flashbang,” he grumbled. “I don’t suppose you know what the fuck just happened.”
Jackie shook her head slowly, looking down at her hand. Her skin was still marked with a clinging web of dust in the same shape as the glowing tracery of molten-copper lines from her tablet vision. She rubbed her other hand over it, smearing the pattern, then let her hand drop to her side. “I have no idea,” she responded. “But I think I should probably keep my distance from the rest of those crystals.”
Stolen story; please report.
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Their discovery of the crystal storeroom proved to be the most exciting find that any of the teams had made that day. Jesse, Arjun and Gusje arrived fresh from the empty building they had been investigating following Jackie’s mishap with the charge crystal, and Ajehet’s scouts almost immediately after that. The scouting team had surveyed midway between the gateway hall and the city proper, dipping into the fringe of intact neighborhoods on the edge of the urban area.
Signs of habitation cropped up everywhere - scraps of cloth not yet faded by the desert sun, a footprint preserved in the lee of a building - but as of yet nobody had laid eyes on any of the inhabitants of the sand-choked ruins.
“Maybe they only come out at night,” Jesse suggested.
“Then they’re smarter than we are,” Mark muttered, shouldering another crystal pillar as he prepared to trudge back towards the gateway hall. They had managed to move the majority of them, but each pillar was heavy enough that only Mark and Jesse could carry them unaided, the sand and blistering heat making each trip a tortuous slog. Everyone was dripping with sweat save for Jackie, who had been keeping a healthy distance from the pillars and was looking mutinously bored about it.
Arjun crouched down beside her, looking concerned. He had likewise done light duty hauling the crystals in deference to his age, although he had gamely helped one of the Aesvain with their load. Now he settled down with a grunt of effort to sit beside Jackie, looking over at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Doctor,” he greeted her.
She smiled, despite her poor mood, and inclined her head in return. “Doctor,” she said. “You taking a break for ‘cheer up Jackie’ duty?”
Arjun shrugged noncommittally. “If I were,” he said, “I would probably start by asking how you’re feeling. Perhaps I’d inquire to see if there were any lingering effects from the incident earlier.”
“The incident,” Jackie groaned, rolling her eyes. “Please, this is weird enough without euphemisms. Call it what it is - Tija left me a loaded gun.”
“Are you sure it’s a weapon?” Arjun asked, furrowing his brow.
“If it’s not, then it’s broken in a pretty dangerous way,” Jackie replied. “But it didn’t feel broken.” She held up her hand, fingers splayed. “It was stable, even resilient. It drew a discrete quantity of energy from the charge crystal and stuck it to my hand, and it only blew up when I touched the ends together.” She sighed and leaned back against the wall of the building. “I may not have known what I was doing, but I was in control the entire time.”
“Nah, it was no accident,” she said, staring past her spread fingers into the hazy desert beyond. Her hand began to tremble, and she clenched it into a fist. “It’s meant to harm. She did this to me because she wanted to kill Eryha. She was so angry.” Jackie’s voice broke, and she fell silent for a moment.
Arjun looked at her with concern, but said nothing. After a few seconds he held out his hand towards her, palm up.
She looked at him askance. “You sure you want to do that?” she asked, her voice steady once more. “It has been zero days since my last accident.”
“After hauling that crystal, there’s not enough energy left in me to do much,” he chuckled. “Besides, if your trick worked on people I’m pretty sure we would have figured it out before now.”
“Probably,” she said, taking his offered hand and squeezing. “Thanks.”
“I am excited about the potential uses of those charge crystals,” Arjun said offhandedly. “I don’t even want to speculate on their total energy capacity relative to the others, but they’re orders of magnitude larger than the gauntlet crystals.” He craned his neck to look at the pillar being raised out of the storeroom, two of Ajehet’s scouts straining to haul it onto the sand. “I wonder what they were originally used for. Based on the scale I would assume they were for very large vehicles - or perhaps for emergency backup power at remote facilities.”
Jackie shrugged. “Could be that they were originally for weapons, just like we intend to use them,” she suggested. “The way they were racked up like that reminds me of the munitions shed back on the base.”
“Very possible,” Arjun said, nodding slowly. “I suppose there’s the possibility of finding a piece of equipment that accepts them, which would resolve the issue quite nicely.”
A wry grin plucked at Jackie’s lips. “When have things ever been that easy?” she asked. “I-”
She broke off, her eyes widening. “There’s… a child watching us,” she said.
Arjun frowned. “I don’t follow,” he said. “Do you mean the thing that Tija left you with? Is it observing us somehow?”
She blinked, looking at him incredulously. “What? No, I mean there’s a literal child standing about a hundred feet that way, watching us.”
“Out here?” Arjun muttered, looking where she pointed. Through the shimmering heat he saw a slight, dark figure half-concealed behind the crest of a dune. It was still for a moment - then vanished, seeming to realize it had been spotted.
“Shit,” Jackie muttered, jumping to her feet. “Hey guys, we’ve been seen!” she yelled, pointing towards the far dune. “There was a kid, just disappeared over that ridge.”
Ajehet dropped the crystal he was carrying and took off like a rabbit over the sand, followed closely by the others in his squad. He disappeared over the ridge within seconds, while Mark and Jesse walked forward to stare in his wake.
“Should we be following?” Jesse asked.
Mark snorted. “Be my guest,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’ll only run into him on his way back, though. These little guys have a huge advantage on the sand, they’re not sinking in with every step.”
Jesse nodded, turning back toward the ridgeline. It was only minutes before Ajehet and his men returned with a small child in tow, his shoulder firmly in the lead scout’s grasp. “We’ve got a fast one,” Ajehet said agreeably, giving the boy’s shoulder a squeeze. “Had to actually work to catch him.”
“He looks really young to be out here alone,” Jackie muttered, looking at Gusje. “He can’t be much older than your sister.”
“I’m not sure,” Arjun said thoughtfully, taking in the boy’s loose patchwork of clothing. He looked like he was wearing a collection of torn bedsheets, and his makeshift shoes were little more than cloth sacks tied on at the ankles. “He could be older and poorly-fed. It’s hard to tell under those clothes.”
Mark walked up to stand in front of the captured child, who stared up at him with wide eyes. “You got a name, kid?”
“Su,” the boy mumbled, his speech fast and rough. “Bigger than Big Man, you. Where you come from?”
“Not here,” Mark said, bending down so that he was at eye level with the boy. “Who’s this Big Man? Did he send you to watch us?”
“Not I, nah,” Su replied, avoiding Mark’s eyes. “Big Man got whole men he can send, he wants something watched. Just out catching skitters, me.”
“Skitters,” Mark said, raising an eyebrow. “And you just happened to come across us.”
“Honest, yeah,” Su replied, nodding vigorously. “Saw you from way off, went looking close. Never see men out here, they stay by the water.”
Mark exchanged a look with Jesse, then returned his attention to Su. “What can you tell us about the men by the water?” he asked. “Is that where you live?”
Su shook his head, looking incredulous. “Me, nah,” he said. “I got a spot, cool spot with a nice bed. Safe, dark.” He squinted up at Mark, looking suddenly suspicious. “My spot, yeah? Too small for you. You find another one.”
Jackie chuckled at Su’s sudden shift in tone, drawing his attention to her. His eyes widened once more as he looked up at her, then seemed to notice the presence of the others who had come to watch the conversation. He blanched, and fear crept into his eyes.
“No trouble, me,” he said hurriedly. “I go right back to my spot, forget I saw you.”
“He’s scared,” Jackie observed, speaking quietly in English.
“Nah, I got this,” Mark said, shaking his head. “Done this song and dance a few times back in Syria. Dammit, I was saving these...”
He sighed and returned his attention to Su, who shrank back. “Calm down, kid, we’re not going to hurt you,” he said, reaching into his vest pocket and pulling out one of their last MRE energy bars. The boy eyed him as he tore the wrapping off and took a bite of the bar. “Now, I’m not sure what a skitter tastes like,” Mark drawled. “But I’m pretty sure this tastes better.”
He broke a chunk from the bar and offered it to Su, who eyed it suspiciously. “Food’s not free,” he said, stating it with near-religious certainty. “You say what you want first, yeah?”
“We just want you to tell us what you know,” Mark said, slowly waving the food back and forth under Su’s nose. “Tell us about the men who live in the city, where they are, how they treat visitors. You do that…” He pulled out another energy bar, twirling it between his fingers. “And you’ll earn one of these all for yourself.”
Su stared at Mark for a long moment before his hand flashed out lightning-fast to snatch the morsel from Mark’s fingers and cram it into his mouth. His face slackened with bliss as the flavor hit his tongue, but before he had chewed twice his eyes had already locked onto the second bar.
Mark gave him a knowing smile and slowly slid it back into his pocket. “All yours,” he said, patting it lightly. “But first, you tell us what we want to know.”
Su dropped promptly to the sand, sitting and looking up at Mark with an earnest expression. “Everything I know, yeah?” he asked. “Lucky man, you, I know everything. Lived here my whole life, me. Tell you stuff worth two of those.”
“We’ll see,” Mark snorted. “Start with the men by the water, how many of them are there?”
After some prompting, Su painted them a rambling, unfocused and occasionally self-contradictory picture of the area around the old port. He had always lived there, and there had always been men in the port. There were others in the outer city, many of them children, but the densest part of the city was reserved for the men. That was where they had their water-gathering setup and a few sparse farms. Despite their meagre efforts most of the food in Idhytse came from merchants, who would visit every so often and trade sacks of grain and withered tubers for whatever salvage the denizens of the city could strip from the ruins.
For most of Su’s life the man in charge of the city was Scar Man. He kept an iron grip on the city’s scavengers, doling out food and privileged positions sparingly as a reward for loyalty. His commandment was simple - Food Wasn’t Free. Scar Man had no use for the city’s roving population of children, but tolerated them if they could bring valuable salvage his way. Most didn’t take the gamble, however - it was more likely that one of the men would simply beat them and take the salvage for themselves. Trade with Scar Man’s faction therefore proceeded via a complex system of intermediaries, fringe-dwellers that had arrangements with full members for food and favors.
Then one day the merchants stopped coming. Fearful murmurs spread through the city as food ran short, unrest spurring even more violence than normal among the powerful. Strange groups of people were seen on the periphery of the city, and whispers circulated of some unstoppable danger bearing down on them from the desert. In the midst of this, one morning Scar Man’s head ended up on a post in the middle of town.
From that day on, Big Man handed out the food.
Su was of mixed opinion on where Big Man had come from, having only seen him once or twice from afar. Some said he was a child from the city who had grown to adulthood in seclusion, others said he was a traveler that had only recently arrived there. Whatever the case, his ascension to the peak of Idhytsen society had profound effects. The city center fell largely quiet, the regular raids into the outskirts tailing off - although this may simply have been because there were no more merchants to sell to.
More worryingly, many who had previously lived on the outskirts went to the center, whether from desperation or curiosity - and did not return to their old haunts. Threats of violence were replaced with enticements of food and water from Big Man’s followers, but the residents of the city knew that Food Wasn’t Free. Su was one of those who avoided their suspicious generosity, seeking to avoid the fate of the disappeared. Where did the food come from? There were few possibilities in a city like Idhytse, and when the strange disappearances were factored in many of the city’s independent dwellers drew a distinctly unpleasant conclusion.
Jackie elbowed Mark excitedly in the side, her eyes twinkling. “I had to be right eventually,” she hissed.
“Why are you so excited that there are cannibals in the place we have to visit?,” he shot back. “Not only that, it sounds like there’s no way to get to the city center without Big Man knowing about it.”
“Still,” Jesse said thoughtfully, “maybe there’s a way to make this work. They sound desperate for food, and they know the city. Maybe we could get more of the Sjocelym rations through the gateway at the next check-in and trade for access to the city center.”
“You want to negotiate with the cannibals?” Mark asked. “Buddy, that does not sound like a winning strategy.”
“Think about how hard it was just moving these crystals from here to the gateway. It’s not like we’re going to be able to salvage much without their knowledge,” Jesse said. “And we don’t know what the situation is, or even if they really are cannibals. From what Su said, the people here seem desperate more than hostile. If we get a few days to look around in exchange for a way to resume their trade with the outside then we can at least determine if there’s anything in the downtown area worth salvaging.”
Mark looked back and forth between Jesse and Jackie, then over at Arjun, who shrugged. His shoulders drooped, defeated. “I just want to go to one nice place,” he groaned. “Somewhere calm. A peaceful, happy place where nobody is trying to stab us, rob us and-slash-or eat us.”
“Am I done, you?” Su asked impatiently. “You asked, I told.”
Mark rolled his eyes and tossed the energy bar over. Su snatched it out of the air, then frowned as he plucked experimentally at the wrapper.
“Listen, kid,” Mark said, fishing mournfully in his pack and coming up with another energy bar. “I’ve got one more job for you, and it’s worth my last bar. The chocolate-flavored one that I was really looking forward to eating. Hell, I’ll even open it for you.”
Su looked up at him, his eyes flashing trepidation and hunger. “What you want?” he asked.
Mark waved the bar enticingly through the air. “I want you to take us to Big Man,” he said. “I guess we need to have a little talk.”