"You've not seen much of the abyssal shelf, and I thought we should do something about that," Evra said, leading Sonia down the Academy steps and across school grounds. "We have copper and iron mines on the far shelf, so that's not exactly a pleasure trip, and although we don't have many wonders of the world down here in the abyss, we do have some things worth seeing."

Outside of the Academy gate, Evra mounted one of two bicycles. “I know you can out run me, but indulge me and come on a little ride with me.”

Sonia hesitated. “I’d rather run next to you than try to ride that contraption. I never learned.”

Evra's eyes widened. “What kind of a childhood did you have, Sonia?”

“Not much of one.”

“Every child in Grater Barren can ride a bicycle.”

Something fluttered in her stomach. “I can run whatever the distance.”

“You’re not running. You’re riding. And I’m going to teach you. Now get on.”

Sonia slung an awkward leg over the bar, and straddled the seat.

“Relax, it’s all about momentum. You know how that works when you run.”

“I use the downhill.”

“Same with bicycles. You have to get some speed. I’ll push you from the back.”

Evra took hold of the back of the seat with one hand. “Now push those pedals. The brake is on the right handlebar. Clamp it with your hand.”

Sonia squeezed the brake.

“That’s it. You’ve got it. Now let’s give it a go.”

A moment later, Sonia had cleared the footpath of pedestrians, steering a wobbling bicycle from one side of the path to the other. “Oh blast. I just ran over someone’s hat.”

“Keep going, you’re doing fine! Don’t stop now.” Evra had let go and Sonia wobbled through the street, upsetting a wheel barrel filled with potatoes, and raising every dog’s bark in a two-mile radius. Evra caught up with her on her own bicycle. “Brake! Brake! Good enough.”

Sonia needed no further coaxing. She leaned her bicycle against a stone wall and hopped on the rack over Evra’s back wheel. “I told you I’d rather not try it.”

“Relax, you don’t even have any bloody knees. You’ll be racing bikes by the end of the week, but enough practice for now. This isn’t really a pleasure trip. Not exactly.”

Evra hauled Sonia well beyond the Academy grounds toward the rural fields on the interior of the Barron shelf. Fields of wheat succeeded to potato fields. The day was warm, but the breeze cut by the speeding bicycle cooled Sonia’s brow as it caught her blond hair and sent it streaming behind her. Academy well behind her, she felt her shoulders relax and soak in the peace of the gilded rural landscape.

They covered miles like that, maybe as far as eight or ten miles. Evra kept pumping the pedals persistently, mile after unfatigud mile. Eventually, they entered a kind of canyon, and Sonia watched in awe to see red stone walls rise around them on either side. The further Sonia pedaled, the higher the walls climbed around them.

The opening in the exposed earth seemed to swallow them inside, baring its secrets. Sonia traced deep scars of explosive trauma written all over the earthen walls. She could see that the opening crack itself was a scar from the lateral explosion which had created the shelf years ago.

Her heartbeat quickened to see the evidence of a visceral impact—a power truly awesome had created this place. Next to it, what was she?

Evra slowed and brought the bicycle to a stop while Sonia hopped off the back rack. “What do you think?”

Sonia stared up at the ragged stone walls. “It’s amazing.”

“Destruction is sometimes the flipside of creation. In any event, there’s more to see. Notice the big pipe running up there?”

A large gray pipe ran the distance of the entire canyon. “Yes, I noticed. There must be a spring further in.”

“Exactly. It’s where we get much of our clean drinking water, which we’re forced to ration, but there’s no one to watch if we take a little extra at the pool. Come on.”

Sonia followed Evra as she hiked further into the crack. There was no path. Sonia hopped from boulder to boulder, slowly grappling her way inside. She wouldn’t have done it on her own, but Evra seemed to know what she was doing. At last, the sound of running water could be heard in the distance and the smell of sulfur seized her nose. “Are the springs sulfur?”

“There’s a warm spring that’s sulfuric higher up the canyon, but also a cold water spring lower down.”

Soon Sonia was looking at it, and she dropped to her knees, cupped her hands and brought drought after drought of water to her lips. She drank like she’d not drunk in weeks. And Evra did the same.

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Evra sighed. “Wouldn’t it be rich to have all the water we wanted?”

“We'd soon forget how precious it is.”

“No doubt we would, but it’s nice to imagine. Come on. I’ll show you the baths.”

A further twenty minutes up the canyon, and they reached the sulfur baths. Vapor billowed around the pool and the faint odor of sulphur permeated the air. Evra stripped down to her underwear and waded right into the hot, foamy pool. Sonia hesitated at the edge, but only for a moment. Her wish to be clean overpowered any sense of inhibition. She sank her grateful body deep into the hot water, and every cell trembled with appreciation. She exhaled and leaned her neck back against a stone, and for quite a while, neither spoke.

At last Sonia opened her eyes. “I don’t want to ever leave here.”

Evra smiled. “There’s nothing to eat, so I’m afraid we must.”

Sonia groaned. “This feels so good.” She couldn’t tell how long it had been since she had given herself a chance to let her guard down, to relax her muscles, and not worry about the impossible weight of expectations.

“Sonia, I hope you don’t mind my having done this, but I’ve invited a few friends to join us.”

Sonia stiffened. “Who?”

“A few of my friends who have children in your class.”

Sonia resisted a sense of disappointment. “I don’t mind,” she said, which was a lie, but she reluctantly followed Evra out of the pool and scrambled back into her tunic. When they reached the cold water spring down below, others had assembled, crouching on the bed of boulders below them, laughing and chatting while they sipped cool water.

Sonia recognized Nexius, among a few others wearing white tunics. Twelve or fifteen people. Evra greeted the small crowd and they all stood to clasp her hand in the customary greeting. “Hello. Thank you for coming all the way out here—I know it’s not easy to come.”

The people nodded and murmured their eagerness to cooperate. They had all wanted to come.

Evra continued. “A few of you have met Sonia, but you’ve all seen her. You know, of course, how my great aunt predicted an event of that type—as she predicted many important and devastating events in our past, but there are many things we don’t know, and the fact is, none of us really know the future. Our expectations of Sonia are suffocating, and I want to propose the possibility of your treating Sonia—not as an imposing and mysterious creature, but simply as a young girl. Possibly a friend. She doesn’t have wings. Maybe she never will. It doesn’t really matter if she doesn’t. I wanted to give her a welcome as one of our own people who was lost to us for a while, but whom we’ve since recovered. What do you say?”

The crowd murmured their agreement. And a moment later, they milled around her, introducing themselves one by one, but it was an awkward rite.

Sonia escaped from the party as soon as she could make a reasonable excuse, then she slipped away up canyon toward the springs. When she reached the baths, she turned abruptly around, face burning when she saw a white tunic slung over a broad rock. Water splashed and a voice called, “Wait, Sonia. I promise, I’m mostly decent.”

She peeked behind to see Nexius, sheepishly pulling a shirt over his bronzed torso. “See,” he pulled the shirt down around his lean abdomen. “Fully clothed.” He waved. “You can come up.”

Sonia padded her way over the rocks and sat down where Nexius gestured, on a rock not far away. But for a moment, neither of them spoke, and Sonia pulled her knees to her chin. The silence lengthened and she flinched at the sound of a crack!

"Sorry. Nervous habit," Nexius said, rubbing his knuckles.

He was nervous? Sonia shrugged. "Go ahead. It doesn't bother me."

Nexius sighed. “I feel like I should apologize."

"What for?"

"We're not very warm in Grater Barren. We're all so familiar to each other and I can imagine how it feels to be on the outside--on edge.”

She almost laughed. She'd never dreamed Barronites could be so warm. “Considering I'm a stranger? You've been so kind.”

“I didn't mean warm, I guess." He scrubbed his scalp with his palm. "We're strict conformists and keenly suspicious.”

Sonia dropped her gaze to the rock trail below. “I can’t blame people for that. How else could you have survived?”

Nexius sniffed. “I blame us.”

It was a strange thing to say. “Why?"

“I barely remember Grater Barren at the surface. None of the students at the Academy remember it. All we have are the stories of our parents and surviving grandparents--a lot of them hard to repeat.”

“What have you heard?”

Nexius’ cheeks colored and he went silent. Hard to repeat, indeed.

“My father was an officer in the military. And he was injured fatally in the fall, but he lingered a few days, and he told me things I never knew—things about the people that burned my ears--figuritively. In the end, he told me the fall saved more lives than it took.”

Sonia’s jaw slackened. "It killed hundreds of thousands of people!"

“So you have some idea how many people the fall saved."

"How is that even possible?"

Nexius stared off toward the horizon. "We frame our history up like we’re a peace-loving people, fighting only because we are trapped between two war-like civilizations, but we're not peace loving. The truth is we had no allies anywhere, and when we were up at the surface, we were constantly locked in battle. Arrow on the north. Flintstock to the east. We’ve fought for hundreds of years. We've taken territory, burned and plundered--taking no prisoners.”

Sonia shivered. “I suspect our enemies were just as war-like.”

“We escalated every conflict. We were always escalating everything.”

“What do you mean, escalated?”

“Barronites are students of the earth, Sonia. We were the first to develop firepower. The Arrowans developed the guns, but even before that, we created minefields with explosives. We used biological weapons…and more recently, we made a secret weapon.”

“What—what did we have?” She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

“My father wouldn’t say what it was, but he said it was a magnificent weapon that could kill masses.”

Sonia’s throat tightened. “And Grater Barren was going to use it. They were going to annihilate their enemy.” She didn’t wonder at this. Arrow would do the same.

Nexius frowned and nodded

“Even innocent civilians?”

“I doubt our fathers would have looked at it that way, but I think so.”

Sonia’s stomach turned, and she stared mute at the water trickling over the red rock.

He smiled, a forced smile. “It’s not so bad that we’re down here in a hole in the earth, and as far as I’m concerned, it's where we belong. We sent nothing but war and destruction into the world around us and no surprise, the universe sent us back the same. Part of me hopes we never get back up to the surface.”

Sonia exhaled the breath she’d been holding in her lungs. “Do you really mean that?”

“Yes, I mean it. Maybe we’re always worried about water, and other things…” His voice trailed off.

“What other things?”

Nexius cocked his head and seemed surprised. “You don’t know?”

“How would I know?”

He grimaced and rose to his feet. “Evra’s calling us. We’ve got to get back before curfew.”

*

At night, Sonia laid upon her mat in the apartment with the lights extinguished, listening to the wind howling in the vacuum of the abyss. What was the fear Nexius had alluded to? And how was it threatening the city?