CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX - INTO THE BLACK ECHO

Down.

Hadn't taken a genius to put this together. Oh, details eluded her, but... a region set as off-limits, an extensive and fairly well-hidden drilling operation, a surveyor who told the cartels to stay out of the lower tunnels, citing risks of shifting earth, a governor murdered by something moving through the tunnels... someone was hiding down here. There was a whole subterranean life to the colony. The cartels dwelled here, the old city of Rekida had built a labyrinth for intrigues, and while they had deserted the place... the purpose lingered. Rather like a temple. You could forget the names of the gods inside, you could forget every single ritual, but it was clearly a temple. The very nature of the structure demanded some sort of reverence, bound behaviour into certain forms. Like her beloved inner temple with corridors designed for wandering and conversing, corridors that prevented echoes that could disturb others, and provided a sense of academic cloistering. The sort of thing a judge needed to contemplate their judgements in peace and quiet, divorced from the rumble of the outer temple, and the howl of the world beyond.

She'd never see that place again.

So... something else was here. First, the Rekidans. Then, the cartels. And now... whatever this was. She had strange visions dance before her eyes - the Erlize, out here to set up some sort of monitoring station. The army, constructing a hidden base. Another organisation entirely. Maybe yet another instrument of the governor's control. Maybe even a foreign power, infiltrating and seizing the reins of the colony, intimidating Canima into submission, bringing the governor into the fold. The governor had needed to lie for years to stop the city of Fidelizh from investigating him, maybe even kicking him out - there was a reason he'd hidden so many of his records, kept the cartel exiles off the books. Maybe he'd wanted someone else to take over instead, someone who might respect his authority, and leave him as a quasi-monarch, as the headmaster he'd always wanted to be out here, unchallenged by bureaucrats and the Golden Parliament. Maybe the judges had been brought out here for that reason - to form a legal foundation for this process, to negotiate agreements, to provide advice and legitimacy. She stopped thinking about these possibilities quickly, there were too many, and many of them had the deceptive aura of plausibility.

The fact was, she'd know when she knew. No earlier.

...felt rather like having a strange-coloured blotch covering her arm, and having to go to a doctor to have it diagnosed or treated. No amount of picking would change it, no amount of paranoia. The ignorance would end when the appointment came. But... well, to be honest, there was no way it'd be a good result. The strange-coloured blotch would be a sign of an awful condition, and whatever lay down here would hardly be the... headquarters of the Society for the Advancement of the Condition of Children. No, the SACC would definitely not be down here.

Outside was nothing but dark earth, and the sound of cables straining, engines grinding. Advanced, it felt like. She'd maybe expected a... stairway, but not a full-on lift, that was just... that implied things. Nervousness crept up her spine, and exhaustion fought it down with remarkable ferocity. She'd already burned out her brain enough, amputated habit after habit, coping mechanism after coping mechanism. Her golden pince-nez were gone, her luck-cultivating gloves hadn't been used in ages, she was convinced her lodge-candle had gone out, Eygi turned out to not really like her at all, and she was doubting her purpose more and more with each foot they descended into the black echo. The weight of expectation was still here, but that was... stranger, and no god rode on her back. Everything she'd used in the past to keep herself calm and functional had snapped. Now... it was her. Her, and obligation. Her legacy was in tatters now that she'd sent so many humiliating letters, and the colony was soon to be destroyed. All that remained was the duty to do her damn job.

And then...

Stop thinking. Just... stop. She was close, wasn't she? Damn close.

The mutant was coiled around her legs, spine eerily flexible, limbs heaping on top of each other like an enormous cat. It was odd, Tanner thought. If humans became immune to contamination, mutants might actually become... allies, of a sort. Mutants would have nothing to gain from humans, and humans would have nothing to fear of mutants. They were rational creatures, if they stabilised enough. Just... their rationality was a very odd one, and it allowed for no loyalty, no friendship, no love, none of the natural processes that underpinned human relationships. Odd to think that. The red hair of the creature, from this angle, almost made it seem like Yan-Lam was down there, riding to the bottom of the earth. And if she latched onto that thought, she... felt a little more certain. Pretend the creature was Yan-Lam, and she felt the obligation to be impressive and professional settle on her like a blanket, soft as wool, heavy as iron. Comforting.

Right. Equipment check.

Coat, trousers, gloves, boots, gas mask, all functional. Automatic exchanger of filters, functional. Backup filters, present.

Truncheon... oh, very present, and highly appreciated. Contamination flask, also very present, not quite as appreciated.

Now for the bag. She unfastened it quietly and calmly, despite the fact that a mutant was coiled around her legs like some sort of pet - a pet which had no love for her and would eat her if it seemed advantageous. Huh. Come to think of it, that was sort of like having a cat, wasn't it? She had no doubt a cat would eat her if she died alone, would just see her as a free source of meat. Convinced that cats hunted rats to make sure humans had all the food and health they needed to remain fat and lively, made for better dinners when they keeled over dead one day. Anyway. Anyway. Nervousness was making her mind go a hundred bloody miles an hour, as was... was the desire to not think about anything else. The brain couldn't be shut down, but it could be overwhelmed with other things. Like speculation on cats.

Urgh.

Right. Bag. She had... an automatic quill (spare, she wasn't taking her good one down to wherever she was going), a fair amount of paper, a file bursting with notes (all of them copies, once more, not taking originals with her), ink, spare lenses... and then concessions to the strange and the unexpected. A rope. Manacles. Gas mask filters. Rags to feed the mutant contamination. Pills that would make her vomit blood and purge herself of poison. A flash of flamethrower fuel, ready to be ignited as a last-ditch effort. Some tools for creating light. No supplies, nothing but a bottle of water embedded into her coat, leading to a hose running up towards her mouth. No chance she was taking this gear off until she was done, no way of getting foot inside it. A packet containing the pulsing hourglass-shaped thing from the governor's safe. And... a gun.

She handled it awkwardly. Didn't like it. And it wasn't even the sort of gun she'd used when she arrived - it was much, much larger. Picked it up from the guards on the way out, slipped it into her bag and marched off with her mind full of other thoughts. It was a mutant-hunting gun, like the kind Lantha had used in the past. Long-barrelled, six-shot, meant for the demolition of flesh. Rifles were better for range, shotguns did more damage up close, but this could be carried wherever she went. Held a rifle charge, weighed close to five pounds once she loaded it up. With mutants, there was really no choice but scale. Nothing besides absolute bodily destruction would stop a frenzied mutant, nothing but the threat of such destruction could ward off a sane one.

The mutant kept a very firm eye on the thing, and Tanner felt her coiled body tense. Ready to lash out if Tanner tried anything funny.

No intention of doing so. The thing could do what she liked, as long as she didn't interfere with anything or attack anyone Tanner wanted un-attacked.

She loaded it carefully, practised cocking the hammer back, loading in the charges... not as difficult as she thought, though the gloves made everything significantly more clumsy. Still. Had a loaded pistol ready. Just in case. Just in case.

There was a sudden shift outside - had she...no, no, not arrived.

They'd just emerged into something. Taken them... an unnerving length of time to reach this depth, but now they were here... blackness waited beyond. The black of a void, not the solid, claustrophobic blackness of the deep earth.

For a second, there was only the grinding of gears.

Then a light flickered on. Theurgic, must be - she'd heard of their filaments, the strong ones that could produce little suns with the twitch of a switch. Not inside the compartment - outside. And she could see what lay beyond.

It was...

Oh gods.

It was an underground river.

She was inside an underground river.

Tanner Magg was inside an underground river.

And it was... emptied. She could see air, and a little moisture, but nothing resembling contamination. Not yet. Maybe later. The walls were uncannily smooth and rounded, the constant rush of contamination keeping them polished to a mirror sheen. Whorled with odd distortions, and... more than that. The black matter which had almost poisoned her to death - mutalith. The remnants of uncounted mutants, whether their whole bodies or just discarded pieces, crushed into a fine paste by the infinite pressure of this place. Unyielding. Unstoppable, at least until now. She'd never seen mutalith in large quantities, thought it was identical to coal, but... this wasn't. Not remotely. In its flawless state, unmined and close to the source, the mutalith gleamed like solid ice, and... she could see the things inside. Bones. Malformed. Spines that bent in impossible directions. Ribs that were meant to contain unnatural organs. Limbs with more power in them than any normal animal could muster, arms to break, legs to spring, tails to lash, wings to soar. Skulls with empty sockets stared at her, frozen within the black matter of the river's walls. None of them resembling one another in anything but faint details. Things with jaws like lampreys, like gorgonopsids, like bears, like nothing she'd ever seen. Some with two eyes, some with ten, some with none at all, some with uncountable pits where small eyes could rest, pockmarked like pieces of pumice. Only the unnatural power of mutated tissue keeping them intact. Uncounted thousands of them. A whole legion of dissected mutants.

She saw eel-like creatures that were longer than buildings. Saw compacted masses of bone fusing into cages large enough for her to live in. Saw humans with animal features, animals with human features, great briar hedges of limbs and ribs and wings. She saw a whale. A whole whale embedded in the shimmering black layers, still braced as if it was trying to swim. Seemed large enough to swallow the world... mouth filled with enormous, harpoon-like teeth, slots for eyes running down the sides of the spine, a tail that seemed... seemed to have once been filled with venom, with spines like those of a sea urchin. Saw a stomach filled with fully intact mutants. Would've devoured them whole, digested them slowly, let them fight with each other to leave only the finest, the best adapted, the most innovative. Let them integrate each other, then integrate the final product all at once. The ribs had teeth. Prepared to snap inwards and crunch down on the living mutants that were swallowed up. Saw tusks in the creature... a whale with tusks, ready to gore others. It took almost a full minute to pass the thing - it was angled downwards, seeming to dive through the earth with them. But they were so far from the sea, how could...

It'd lived in here.

It'd lived in the underground river.

She had an image of leviathans under the earth. Swimming beneath her feet. Growing larger and larger. Little worlds, each of them. Access to the purest forms of contamination. Larger than the titans the Great War had been waged by, that only theurgists had been able to kill. The unyielding glare of the light gave it no character, no soul, only the brutal facts of existence. This creature was large enough to crush a ship to pieces, to overwhelm even the largest mutant-hunting vessel. It could destroy fleets without a second thought, and... there might be swarms of them in the deep places of the world.

...her childhood terror of the writhing rivers was well-founded. And over a decade from when she'd first learned of them, she felt that terror stirring back to life in the pit of her stomach.

She descended into what felt like the blood vessel of an enormous, carbonised creature. And all around her were glimpses of its cells, its organs, its every other structure.

Drained dry by the Great War. And maybe refilling. Regaining some semblance of its former life.

The mutant actually reared up a little, staring silently out into the darkness, unblinking, unreactive.

Tanner hummed.

"You must be pretty special, being able to come down here. Not sure many make it."

No response. Well. She was alone, and had just found out her best and first friend had only ever tolerated her, and only politeness stopped her from telling Tanner to piss off. Just found out her best friend used the phrase 'a bit gianty' to mean 'obsessive, irritating, and clingy'. Might as bloody well talk to a mutant in the heart of an underground river.

"Do you feel anything when you look at them? I mean, do you... want to become them, or are you just wondering if they're any good to eat?"

Nothing.

"...you used to be a noble. I know that much."

This time, she didn't bother saying anything else. The mutant had twitched her ears at the first few words, but... no comprehension, no interest. It seemed remarkable that mutants just... didn't speak. Even if they felt no need to cooperate or communicate with anyone else, seeing other mutants as threats and humans as irrelevancies, it... well, contamination could refine the body to such a degree, but with the mind it seemed to always fall short. Unless, somehow, a bunch of sterile, speechless, heartless creatures was an improvement over whatever humanity did. Unless, if you separated humanity from the basic needs to collaborate, to socialise, to court and mate, to trust in something... unless amputating that from humanity just turned off everything else, it seemed surprising. Maybe that was it. Remove those needs, remove humanity. Improve the body, kill everything else.

Shame.

They kept going down. It was taking much longer than she thought, but now she had a reference point for their descent... they weren't going very slowly. Not at all. Going quite quickly, yet it was still taking this long. The underground river was vast, and the wall slowly receded from sight, leaving them once again in total, unyielding darkness. They shouldn't be here. Gods, they shouldn't be here. Tanner looked up at the top of the lift, terrified that the cable would snap and send both of them falling into the dark. But... no, no, just kept going, down, down, down... it took a while, but the walls came back into sight, this time sloping beneath them. They were close to the bed, surely. Why would anyone build down here, why would anyone even visit? Images of... the things down here being woken up, realising there was a world of matter on the surface, or worse, a world of threats that needed to be extinguished was... how large could a mutant become? She knew that land animals could only grow so large before they crushed under their own weight, and in the sea there was more room for expansion, but... mutants were endlessly refining. They made choices no normal creature did, in terms of how they grew. They never tired. They were near-immune to cold and heat. They had no dependence on water or food. They could adapt to almost any problem, integrate any biology, given enough time and contamination to fuel the process.

The titans were already large enough.

What about down here? All the contamination they could eat. And more than enough space.

Was the end of the world one of these mutants growing large enough to swell to meet the sides of the rivers? Consuming everything, not a drop left behind for the other mutants? Titanic eel-things, growing longer and longer, no retreating, only moving to confront one another, feuding and snapping until... one lived. A single creature stretching all over the world, winding through every underground river, containing worlds within itself, worlds of mutants that acted as nothing but cells for the great serpent, and...

...maybe then it grew immobile. No need to move. It grew stronger, to contain the matter within.

And maybe the rivers then flowed once more, the great eel-thing becoming just another layer of mutalith.

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

She shivered.

There were things unwise to contemplate. None of her contemplations would change things. They'd only make her own life feel less certain, more miserable.

Better to leave the rivers to their own business.

The floor approached...

And here, things changed.

Not as smooth. The Great War had emptied this place out, and that meant there was no crushing pressure to force all the discarded mutations and dead mutants into mutalith. They were intact. More intact than the others. And instead of being flat, they stood tall. They descended into an orchard of bones and meat black as oil. Tanner wanted the lift to keep going. Go on, go further, descend deeper, into the riverbed, seek out some hidden bunker, some kind of chamber isolated from...

The lift stopped with a clunk.

And the door began to open.

Tanner's heart was beating out of her chest. Hadn't expected it to go this low. Though it'd go to... to a tunnel, maybe. An underground bunker. Didn't expect it to go here. This wasn't a place for humans. Not a place for her. The mutant was eager, not even asking for more soaked rags to gnaw on. Just waited for the door to finish... then slithered out into the gloom. The light of the lift endured, thank the gods, but no idea how long. She had a few sources of light at her disposal - two lanterns, a lighter, and the buffalo horn. Freshly stocked with another hot coal, packed in with ash, ready to warm her and illuminate the gloom. Thing was, she almost wished it wouldn't. Almost wished that she didn't have to see what lay beyond.

Slowly, she followed the mutant.

The door hissed shut. But the lift remained immobile. She saw... oh, good, there was a control panel here, something to bring it back down. If it left, she wouldn't be trapped. This felt like a place where even dead souls couldn't escape, like she'd entered a world designed exclusively for mutants, with their own afterlives, their own eternities. Speaking of mutants - she was already gone, scuttling away on all fours to examine the forest around them, sniffing for any signs of sustenance. This was her promised land, an absolute paradise to feast upon. Likely every single instinct in her malformed body was shrieking 'eat, eat, eat, before the others find it, deny them any advantage, promote yourself beyond them'. No wonder she never slept, Tanner couldn't imagine sleeping in a world where everything was a perpetual zero-sum game. She gazed around herself, the rasp of her breathing apparatus filling her ears, the lenses of her gas mask twisting the edges of the world slightly, curling them like the edges of a map.

Bone orchard. As she'd said. This looked... like a junk heap. The accumulation of all the parts that mutants didn't need, too riddled with problems to be worth reintegrating. Right next to her was a ribcage of absolutely titanic size and length, stretching away into the darkness. Black-slicked crescents forming a chaotic briar. None of them were perfect, all were twisted in some way, trying to adapt from one shape to another. Some were split open, revealing dripping marrow-substance that seemed to be attempting to form a dozen different kinds of life. She saw antennae, fungal stalks, pulsing half-scaled glands, leprous matter that occasionally formed pseudo-mouths to draw in little ragged bits of breath that emerged from other mouths elsewhere, at no stage being processed into anything. The mutant gave the ribs a sniff, and immediately backed off, mouth glued shut. Too unstable. Eat that, and all those instabilities would reproduce throughout the body, contamination assuming that this was how things ought to look - cancerous, non-functional, maddeningly twisted.

Poisoned garden with rotten fruit. Elsewhere there were human skulls which were trying to form mouths from the side of their heads, the calcified remains of brain matter clinging to the half-made jaws. Brains with fur, mangy fur, black and brown and blonde. Saw a crab's husk the size of a horse, weighed down with putrid ichor filled with boneless limbs and loose muscle fibres that twitched like tiny worms amidst the sea of rot. Something that resembled an enormous praying mantis stood in the centre of the little area, looming above her with arm-blades glinting in the dim light... and yet within the shell was nothing but metal, exoskeletons repeating countless times like a nesting doll. Contamination thinking that this was how the creature should look, this was all a mantis was - endless layers of exoskeleton, some of them trying to emerge from one another, fighting their way free until the next came about. Repeating until all organic matter was gone, and a husk remained. The mutant had nothing to do with any of them.

And to Tanner's surprise... the mutant came back, slinking around her feet with precisely zero expression... yet Tanner knew she was agitated.

Fed her another rag. Just to be certain. But as she started to bunch it all up...

The mutant reacted violently, actually backing away from her. Fleeing her meal. Fleeing...

Oh.

The garden wasn't dead.

She saw matter twitching. Saw movement stilling as creatures scented it. Some invisible sense frothing with stimuli.

In her hands was purity. Was the key to fixing their ruined state.

She dropped the rag.

And the ribcage of cancerous marrow groaned, something inside trying to move for it. Tanner left the rag behind, stoppered the flask, moved fast to avoid any kind of further attention. The creaking stopped as the rag dwindled behind her, their sensory apparatus, their brains, none of them complex enough to actually realise who or what she was.

Even blind, deaf, immobile, senseless, malformed, mindless... even then, they could feel the source and goal of their hunger.

She looked around, committing everything to memory even as her heart beat faster and faster...

Strangely, for as terrifying as this was, there was something... oddly soothing about just being alone here. No-one to let down, no-one to embarrass, nothing to do but live. Well. She could always embarrass herself in front of the mutant. Not sure how, but she could. Maybe by dropping her contamination. Right, right... lift was here, and... beneath her feet, amidst the bones, she could see a path. No, path was the wrong word, it as a heavily discoloured segment of mutalith where things had been moved. A unique bit of force compared to the usual torrent of liquid this place had experienced since its formation - a scrape, rather than a smooth rush. Someone had been through here, and they'd been dragging something. She started to follow it, the mutant clinging close. What, did she want protection?

"Protection, then?"

Her voice came out muffled, and died before it could even catch an echo on the walls. The mutant glanced up. Stared. Then glanced away, disinterested.

"...come to think of it, probably didn't need the path. Just have to know to go forwards or backwards. I mean, this being a river."

No response.

"Your dress looks like it's been repaired a few times. Did you... survive the destruction of the city for a while?"

Nothing.

"Sorry. Hope you don't mind this. Bit like talking to a cat."

The mutant didn't even understand enough to take offence to that. Kept on all fours, even though she could easily walk on two. Probably a defence thing. Tanner could be the huge target, and the mutant could scuttle between her legs and hide herself amidst the coat. Should buy the thing a few seconds of time while Tanner was ripped to pieces by... whatever lay out here. Lantern in one hand. Gun in the other. Walking onwards with a mutant perpetually near at hand. Leaving behind the tiny, rusty metal bullet delivering her into the earth.

"Don't even think you'd be annoyed if I patted you. Don't think you recognise the body language."

A pause.

"Don't worry. Not going to."

That was all.

* * *

She walked.

The path beneath remained narrow. All around was meat and bone and shells and metal. All around were the tools of the Great War - an armoury for the other side. Unburned, too. Just... left here. Soon the river would refill, and all this would be washed away, allowed to grow into something greater. She had around her the embryo of one of those enormous whales, like the one whose skeleton was embedded into the mutalith walls, which gleamed like the chitin of some mysterious insect, like the surface of a black lake, like the slightest tap would shatter it all and send in waves of black matter and bones filled with meat. Still alive. Only sleeping. Sometimes her helmet tip-tapped as droplets fell from far above, not sure if was moisture or contamination. She changed a filter with a click. Those were the only sounds beyond footsteps. She was seeing a sight that, likely, very few humans ever would. Maybe none. If the Great War never happened again, when would these rivers be drained? When would a bone orchard ever have the conditions of forming?

It was unpleasant, thinking that she was one of the few people to see this sort of thing.

Unpleasant to think that this was going to be her highlight. Her thing.

Anyway.

Sometimes the bones formed towers stretching far up into the dark. Failed titans, maybe - they had the twisting spinal columns of those things, and sometimes she saw the oddly angular shapes of their shells, cracked open and empty. Dead, totally dead. Good. Good. She glanced at her coat - marked with droplets of sluggish contamination that eased their way downwards. A flash of worry - would the garden wake up, or... no, most of this stuff was dead. If she moved quickly enough, the creaking never grew too loud, the meat never moved too strangely. A droplet landed on her lenses, and before she could reach to wipe it off, she saw... things squirming in it. One eye was totally full of contamination, totally blocked. And in the light of her lantern, she saw how it shone, how it writhed, how it glittered in such a shade of gold...

Her glove took it away.

Clarity again.

It hadn't been long. Felt like longer. Sometimes she talked. Mumbled to the mutant, who never did anything. Learned to stop paying attention, evidently. She talked about Eygi. About Marana. About Yan-Lam. About Rekida. About the case. The mutant was a mute witness, and that was just what Tanner needed. A sounding board.

"I suppose you'll want to run away before the rest of the mutants come, won't you? Stop them eating you alive. But... you were hiding in the city, so... did you think that would work? Or did you think we'd kill them?"

A dry smile crossed her hidden face, feeling odd now she didn't need to monitor how it looked, made sure her lips weren't too dry, her smile wasn't too wide, her eyes were in the right positions. Just... got to smile, behind the mask.

"I'll pass your compliments along to the rest of the soldiers, if I get back."

Glanced around.

"Hope there's nothing down here. I mean, we'd be... pretty appetising."

The mutant didn't seem overly fussed.

"Well, if you're comfortable here, then I'm comfortable here."

The mutant looked up at her suddenly, staring with those ruptured eyes.

"Fortable."

Tanner actually let out a small shriek, barely audible through her gas mask.

What.

What.

No, no, no, no, no, that wasn't... mutants didn't speak, that was-

The girl looked up, and in an awful, hoarse voice that contained the vague hint of a growl, a shiver that reminded her of insect wings, showed teeth that curled inwards and a throat lined with fangs like a lamprey...

"Fortable."

Exactly the same intonation as how she'd said it.

"Can you..."

"Canyou."

Tanner stopped talking.

The mutant stared.

And moved on. Not another word emerging.

Tanner realised what was happening.

She wasn't teaching her to speak.

Just teaching her to imitate.

One day, a human would hear a voice going 'canyou' or 'fortable' in the dark...

And they'd walk out to find whoever was talking...

And the girl would be waiting for them. Horns twitching. Hair flaring red. Teeth glittering in the firelight.

Like hearing a jackal laughing. A cat imitating a baby crying by meowing at a certain pitch.

She didn't talk to the mutant again. Didn't want to be party to... whatever had happened. Never wanted to hear that voice again, it made her skin itch, made her heart leap into her throat, it was so close to human, yet so completely far from it. Just the feeling of... ignorance in it, the feeling of not knowing what any of the words meant. Just imitating her like she'd imitate a dog or a wolf or a bird, learn their calls to lure them out, get them before the contamination would set into their brains and stop them behaving normally. The mutant wasn't overly concerned with this, and shuffled on without a single glance back, content that Tanner was still going along the route. The bone orchard creaked. Tanner hurried to catch up, feet crunching on loose bones...

A crunch of bone. And a pop of whatever remained inside.

They walked for about twenty minutes longer, though time was impossible to really gauge down here. All Tanner had was a watch around her wrist, and that almost felt like it was mocking her. Bones, bones, black walls, drip-drip-drip... a mutant that never ate anything, a flask of contamination at her side, a gun in her hand... the occasional creak of something smelling the two of them and getting a few ideas.

And as twenty minutes slid by...

Something caught the light.

Tanner froze.

The mutant did nothing.

And, against her better judgement, she unwound slightly. Well. If the mutant was fine, then she was fine. The mutant would be the first thing any mutant here went for, after all. Canary in a coal mine, she was. If the canary was just waiting for the miners to ripen up so it could break free and eat their eyes. If the canary wasn't trapped to begin with.

The thing in the dark, it was... she saw a sheen to it, something metallic... a titan shell, something malformed, maybe even a piece of industry? She'd heard of the mutants in the Great War using... things like that, plating themselves with metal, growing it into their carapaces. Maybe this was one that hadn't fit, or had grown too large, got a mind of its own...

No, no, too smooth, too regular...

She looked around.

The path ended here.

Her breath caught in her throat.

This was where the equipment had been taken.

It was... it was huge. The size of a house. Dark metal, mottled and warped in places, but incredibly thick and strong. A few portholes here and there, tiny smoky glass eyes looking out into the world beyond. Perfectly spherical structure, save for the base, which was flat and nested comfortably in the ground. The amount of metal used in this, the obvious strength, the hauling of it to a place like this, the construction of a facility in a place so utterly hostile to all forms of life, the building of a lift down to reach it, the whole... the whole enterprise was rich in skill, in wealth, in power. It loomed above her ominously, portholes seemed to glare down, and she could've hugged it.

It looked human. What mutant needed portholes? What mutant needed rivets? Oh, it'd barely been an hour down here, and she was already aching for a sign of human construction, just something to say that this wasn't a waste...

For a minute, she just stared at it dumbly, sizing it all up. Ran a glove over the surface to just... confirm. Oh, it was normal. It was real. And the mutant was waiting patiently for her to do something, sniffing around for any kind of usable matter. Nothing yet. The bone orchard creaked a little around them both, some still-living fibres and pools catching their scent, the vaguest hints of their existence..

And she began to search for... something. There were no identifying signs on it, nothing obvious. Nothing saying 'this base built by-' followed by a long, highly clear, and utterly familiar name. She looked around the sides a little, checking... hm. Could see odd elements she couldn't precisely identify. Panels were things folded away into the sides, and... pipes, leading away into the ceiling. The whole thing felt frightfully warm, now that she was close. The damp turned the rest of the river into something truly frigid, but this was... downright toasty, almost uncomfortably so. The pipes leading away into the darkness...

Oh.

The fissures.

She could almost see what was going on.

Heat. They generated heat. Maybe in summer it was alright, maybe they didn't need to produce so much heat, but in winter... more than enough, maybe in the snow it was painfully obvious they were jettisoning it. So the governor told everyone to steer clear of the whole damn region, a whole field kept away from prying eyes, left undeveloped.

A base the size of a house, and it'd bent the will of a governor towards sheltering it, masking its construction, hiding it so effectively that she'd never found a shadow of it until she had the right clues, the right questions, the right answers, the right research materials, the right source. If she'd lacked a single component, this place would be unknown to her. Well-hidden, really. Damn well-hidden. What made her surprised, though, was that a surveyor had clearly looked into building a lift down here, maybe as a preliminary to constructing this place, though... that seemed almost a little unlikely, maybe there were multiple lifts going downwards at more isolated points. Either way, that surveyor had met with the cartel, talked with them, warded them away, and then... what, not told the governor?

Why?

The structure offered no answers.

Yet.

As she searched... she found something.

And her heart skipped a little.

It was a slot. A slot over a panel.

A slot shaped a little like an hourglass.

She reached into her bag, removing the object she'd retrieved from the governor's safe. Weighed it in her hands. If this... did something, it might well get her killed. She quickly thought of a story, a lie, even. Something to make sure she was... able to stay alive to see tomorrow. Right, right, had a story, had a story. Even could explain the mutant, if she needed to.

Right.

Right.

She inserted the device.

There was a click.

A clunk.

A hiss.

And the panel folded back to reveal an entrance, hissing as steam rushed through internal mechanisms. Idly, she imagined another puff of steam emerging on the surface, warming the sole vagrant snow-crane that had lingered, had presumably survived. This base was why the snow-crane had lived through midwinter, why it could be a vagrant and endure. Feeding on their steam. The metal stretched inwards for nearly a full foot, solid, reinforced, dark as pitch... Tanner glanced quickly over her shoulder. Ah. No need to worry. The mutant remained outside for now, staring around warily, hackles raised. Staying near the base, away from the bone orchard, which continued to shiver hungrily. Tanner didn't leave the contamination vial, wouldn't want to start a feeding frenzy..

"Be back soon."

The mutant stared.

Opened her mouth.

Tanner, heart racing, stepped through the panel before the mutant could try and repeat it back to her in that awful, hoarse, inhuman voice, showing her lamprey-throat and her curling teeth and...

The door closed behind her. A clunk, a hiss, a shiver of bolts drawing tight. Darkness around her... darkness save for a single point of light, right in front of her face. Dim, but present.

Behind this door there was a small chamber... and another door. Right, right, decontamination. Could see nozzles above her, ready to spray water, and she fastened her bag carefully, trying to keep everything as sheltered as possible. Should be fine, the bag was designed to resist moisture, contamination, everything. There were nozzles, sponges, even a bench along a wall. Professional.

And in the door on the other side was a window. Dim and sooty, like the others. The light was strange... dim, yes, but pulsing a little. And strangely... purple, as if emerging from within the depths of a bottle of wine.

And in that window of burgundy light...

A face stared at her.

...no, inaccurate. Very inaccurate.

Not a face at all.

A mask.

A metal mask. Grey. Heavy. With thick black glass covering the square-shaped eyes, a mouth covered by metal perforated with little holes for breath to wheeze through. Something ceremonial about, something practical. A mask a smelter might wear... or a priest. Ornate enough to be ceremonial. Plain enough to be practical.

And Tanner had a sudden sinking feeling. She knew that mask. Seen it when she started this whole rotten journey. Suddenly it made sense. Little things adding up. The cold-houses with their remarkably complex vacuum-sealing and climate-control mechanisms. Why the governor had been so secretive, why Canima had found himself utterly unable to talk, no matter what. How this place had ben funded. Why that hourglass had been so warm to the touch. Why this whole place felt... so advanced, why it used technology of startling sophistication, why the surveyor had been talking with the cartel, yet felt no need to reveal its existence to a single other soul.

They were always like that, after all. Silent. Conspiratorial. Their scarcity making them powerful. The cornerstone of any industrial economy, a cornerstone that was fully aware of its importance, and fully aware of how others would bid through the nose for their services.

The mask of a theurgist stared back at her.

And behind it, she saw more of them. Red-robed.

Startled by her arrival. Staring like wolves.

Quietly, she raised a gloved hand in greeting.

Silently, the theurgist raised one back.

And then the waters began to flow.