Walking down the muggy streets of the residential quarter, Clare crumbles tightly into herself with both hands in her pockets.

She hasn't the slightest clue what to do. Any proper magi-tech engineer would just do the work, or admit to their failure and do their best to pick up the pieces, but Waine is offering her an easy way out. If she takes his notes and puts her name on it, she'll get her degree, get her guaranteed class four, get that forty an hour.

"But she wouldn't do that," Clare notes coldly to herself, passing beside a pair of agricultural automatons on their way to the mechanical eighth within the industrial quarter; likely for repairs, she guesses. She smiles at them like she would a person, and they nod their heads back; they're wonderfully complex thanks to Everhold's solid foundation of magitechnology, but only the ones that need to be. Managraphy is expensive and time consuming, after all, so they're usually made only as intelligent and safe as their environment requires.

With a misted, cold breath, she nods to herself with the decisiveness of an adult, despite her youth. Her mom won her commission fair and square; so will she. It won't be easy, but honesty is the one policy that she definitely instilled in her. Her mom never backed down when it came to the truth.

She gains a brief, nostalgic grin when she remembers the time her dad demanded to know why she left her auto and its parts in the downstairs bathroom.

"It's not like we get visitors, dear," Clare repeats to herself, quoting her mother.

She reaches her street and steps up to her home's front porch. She sniffs a moment while standing by the door. Her dad's already back; and the cooking food only barely masks the scent of the horrible, weird underground.

With a gentle knock, Clare is given prompt entry by the servant automaton, who bows its head in greeting. Her father only lets it open the door. He wouldn't trust it with anything else after the accident with her mother.

Clare thanks the machine, bows her head back, and steps in carrying everything she brought with her as her father's voice rings through the wooden home.

His name is Zach. He is a sad man.

"Hey," he starts, "short day?"

She steps up for a hug with the man, emerging from the bright kitchen. "Same could be said for you. How are you doing?"

They hug, his silver-white bristles brushing over her hair.

"Good, good I suppose," he says, drawing back to show the same gentle smile amidst that crushed, worldly face.

"Suppose?" They both enter the kitchen, the earthy notes of the tiles giving the room a comfortable warmth on top of the actual temperature coming from the pot at the side of the room, bubbling away with a promise of good things on the way.

Turning for the pot, he tosses his hand out dismissively. "Naw, it was good. Normal day, just tired."

She pours herself a glass of milk from the refrigerator and takes a seat. "Anything happen?"

"The usual. One of the autos got stuck walking between two nodes. Some genius decided to go down and switch 'em around."

She takes a sip. "Wow, people do that?"

He shuffles the pot by the handle, the simmering stew whining against the hot edges. "Not often. It's a no-man zone, after all."

Stolen novel; please report.

"Because it's important?"

"That, and..." he sighs. "The autos are real simple down there."

Clare knows to lay off. "I'm... I'm sorry, dad."

He shakes his head. "It's not safe for people without a personnel node on. The auto's down there will tear you right in half thinking you're some sewer refuse; too stupid to know the fucking difference between a living human being and just some stupid tr-"

"Dad, please."

"I just..." He sighs, and increases the heat before turning back to his chair. Only now does she notice the open beer next to the pepper shaker. He takes a quick swing. "People make me sick sometimes. They don't have a goddamn clue, acting like there's something worth hiding down there. Even if you didn't get killed, it's still illegal. If Everhold's power infrastructure were to take a hit, it'd put a quarter of the city down for a month, n' that wouldn't be pretty."

Despite her conscious mind's best efforts, her eye gains a spark when he passes the word "infrastructure". "So... why do they come down there?"

He takes a sip while he gives her a dissatisfied, concerned shrug. "Curious, I bet. Met a class one down there once, decided to hide out during work hours."

Clare looks to her glass. "That's pretty bad."

"He said he wanted to know the truth. He thought there was some way out from below."

"Out to the ocean?"

There's an expression on her father that Clare, as a growing lady, can just barely take note of here. She is certain that he has a brief look of disgusted, tired, hateful misery, as though her question had a physical, intensely bitter flavor to it.

"Yeah, out to the ocean," he says simply, staring into his ale with a mindless, soulless stare.

Clare smiles. "I'd like to see it sometime, you know."

"The ocean?"

"Yeah. I hear class fives can go up to Victor's observatory and see over the walls, even get up on the wall with the secret guard and see it up close."

He shrugs. "S'pose it'd be nice to see over the walls, if even once."

She nods, feeling like she's gotten her hand back in the discussion and off the indirect topic of her mom.

"By the way," he slowly brightens up, his tired eyes gleaming with a little positivity. "How'd the exam go?"

"I'm reasonably sure I got top marks, but..." she scoffs awkwardly, not sure how to break it to him. "I have a project thing... that I wasn't really thinking about. It kind of caught me by surprise."

He raises a brow, holding the bottle high to his lips.

"I... it's my thesis."

Zach blinks a few times in surprise, bringing his drink down. "You... oh, darling... I'm sorry."

"Thanks, I..." She shrugs like he would. "I don't know what to do. I told Professor Elwood it would be on infrastructure. Do you have any ideas?"

As sorry as he feels for her, he clams up, knowing exactly where this chat would lead if he let her have her way. "There's a lot you can do with a topic like that. You don't need my expertise for anything. After all it's your thesis, darling."

"Yes, but I just need some inspiration. I want to know how your job could be improved through engineering. You said that... that the substation autos could be improved. Don't you think you could get a magi-tech on it and make sure that they're as safe as the servi-"

"No. That's a stupid idea, Clare. I'm..." He turns away, leaning back and avoiding her gaze, which really is too much like her mother’s. "I'm sorry, but that's not going to work out. I don't want you coming anywhere near those things. Their plates are too old, the managraphic's smeared. There's no telling what they'd do if they saw two personnel nodes walking around, that and I only have one of them, so that's no twice. I have to be careful just as myself... they walk to me sometimes, thinking I'm a goddamn latch needing opening or something."

"I could tell you what they'd do."

He looks up at her like she's finally crossed the line. "That so? More than momma, huh?"

Clare's hair stand on end, staring back at her father's frost-blue eyes. "...Dad I... You said it was... you said it was an industrial a-... oh."

"Yeah, it sure as hell was. I didn't tell you about it because you were too young... but I guess you're old enough now."

At once, Clare's worries go from her thesis, to her mother's fate. She draws in, tightening her grip around the glass of milk to the point of nearly shattering. "Okay." She leans into a tilt, causing the little green-gem earring on her right ear to swing about with equal interest.

His eyes glaze over with aged, damaged carelessness. "...She was the best magi-tech in Everhold, your mom. She was Victor's personal adviser during the year three hundred redesign for the agricultural quarter's auto stable, but everyone knows that; everyone would tell you... She held the position for a few years."

"We were about to move into a new house, right?"

"I mean, what else would you do with that many pieces?" He sighs, shakes his head again, and continues. "She started getting... nervous."

"Nervous?"

"Yeah."