Prophesy had foretold of meteorites pummeling Grater Barren, reducing it to dust. And a calamity had occurred, but it was no meteor shower. No one. Neither prophetess nor actuary, had predicted the city’s true fate: a collapse into the center of a colossal hole in the earth’s crust. The ground under the city had broken and sunken an unmeasured distance through the earth’s crust. Roughly estimated, the abyssal vacuum stretched miles deep, deeper than even oceanic trenches.

The fall inside the earth should have admitted no survivors, but with the impact, leylines released pockets of energy within the trembling ground. Most of the pockets were combustive. A lateral explosion carved out a shelf, perpendicular to the vertical abyssal vacuum. It extended many miles wide in all directions around the vertical abyss, and this shelf caught some fraction of the Barronite citizens as they plunged below the surface. Smaller pockets of the same ley energy remained stable. These pockets caught and sheltered a few citizens where they crouched, buried in their shelters. In the end, five hundred thirty-seven survivors out of one half million citizens emerged from the destruction onto this lateral shelf.

The initial survivor count dwindled to some 400 hundred in the months following the first rescue effort, owing to injuries and the further complication of having very little food. The heartiest of the victims discovered water, seeds, and survived through a strictly choreographed, lock-step manipulation of abyssal energy fields running through a crack in the lateral shelf. Theirs was a feat of survival unlike anything in recorded history.

The people married and were given in marriage. Women bore children. The shelf could support only so many, but especially in the first years, they needed every man, woman and able-bodied child to work and produce food.

More than food to eat and water to drink, however, Barronite children needed education. Every bright mind must be trained on the enormous task of their continued subsistence, or ultimate escape from the abyssal shelf. They hadn’t survived a calamity of this magnitude to give up and die now. General Rudyard Travertine marshaled all of the survivors to the cause. They wanted an academy, he claimed, within which the sharpest minds could collaborate and solve their immediate problems, and he would lead the back-breaking work himself.

A few tried, but at last no one would oppose the proposal offered by much-decorated General Travertine. His was the only experienced leadership they had left. They needed him, and they couldn’t dispute that their dark plight required a brilliant solution. They had given their children the abyss for an inheritance. At least they could build them a school.

*

Every available Grater Barren hand performed a rotation on the Academy’s construction, and with such public participation, the building ought to have harbored few, if any secrets. But even in its partial completion, its secrets were legion.

Nexius Stone labored harder than anyone on the building, though his claims to admission within it were few. Now, he stood at attention in front of General Travertine in the General's private quarters near the construction site. The room offered some shelter from the abyssal heat, but drops of perspiration ran down his face and neck. How did the General appear so cool?

Travertine leaned back in his seat, assessing the youth with his veteran eyes and instinct for strategy. Too many of his own men had died. And he had chosen allies painstakingly slowly since the fall into the abyss. He had to measure them with such caution, but he’d had his eyes on Nexius for at least three years. And he detected more than sufficient strength and fitness, as well devotion, and reasonable conformity from the boy.

“I’ve noticed the improvement in your stone mason craft over the months of construction. You're doing good work.”

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“Thank you, Sir. It’s one thing I'm good at.”

“You can do much more than stone work, I’d warrant. We both know Lieutenant Stone’s son can do anything he sets his mind to.”

Nexius swallowed. He couldn’t think of his father without his throat tightening.

“I’d like you to begin working with me in the North Wing."

Nexius’s eyes widened. It was an honor. And an honor he’d strived for, even though he knew the General couldn’t afford to be too choosy.

“But you must understand. The North wing is unlike the other three wings of The Academy. It is to be an official, by invitation only, unit. A place where the best and brightest can think and build plans without intrusion.”

Strange how the General began a work by breaking things down, even while every able-bodied man and woman beneath him was slaving to build the same thing up. Rank and file Barronites all believed they were working for each other, for their children, but were they?

The General's praise was a powerful thing. It would Nexius's status in the community, and that was currency. With few young women of marrying age, the General's favor would secure Nexius's choice in a future wife. The General knew what he was doing and didn't pick winners lightly. He always collected capital on his investments--always. Nexius, however, was still a bit of a mystery.

The General couldn't know about the three days Nexius had spent buried in hot earth and carnage. The eleven-year-old Nexius dug his way out of his earthen shelter with the pathetic help of a metal spade. He was weak, but patient. The clay was loose and unsettled. It removed with pressure. All that dark clay above and around him wasn’t his enemy, not the earth. The earth had sheltered him in a cocoon.

Somewhere in that pile of clay, he uncovered his father, the giant Lieutenant Stone. Found him gasping for breath. Their gazes locked as though for the first time. And his father’s fresh gaze stung, because those somber amber eyes looked upward and saw him, maybe for the first time. His gaze spilled with tears and he squeezed his son’s cold, clay packed hands.

“Dad?"

“It’s me—you found me…it can only be God’s miracle…” He coughed.

Tears rolled down Nexius’ clay streaked cheeks. “Dad, you’re alive, don’t go—”

“This is not your fault. This is my fault—my fault. We did this. It turned on us. It turned on us.”

“What turned on you?”

The giant shook his head. “Listen here.” The man thumped his chest weakly. “Listen.” And then Lieutenant Stone’s eyes stilled and became like glass and Nexius called out to his father and tried to shake his massive shoulders, but he had already died, and Nexius might cry all he liked; he could not call his father back from the dead.

*

No one ever saw detailed plans for the Academy's North wing, except in pieces. No one but Nexius. He saw everything--all the pockets in the building’s construction. Pockets and panels. Crawl spaces. Trapdoors. Peep holes.

The Academy was a trick on itself. It was a lie within a lie. A hoax waiting to happen. It was supposed to be an honest school where children learned to think about hard problems. It might occasionally allow free thought—then it would spy on it. Steal it and reform it into something more acceptable. Something Travertine could harness for himself.

Nexius had an idea of what was happening, even while he calloused his own hands throwing up the false walls and framing in all of the lies and secrets. Not knowing how, exactly, to oppose the man who was a legend in his own time, he followed orders, but not exactly.

He also improved them.

He built pockets within the pockets. Passages inside the passages. Peepholes behind peepholes. And he disguised all this with a cautious attention to detail so perfect, it could not be easily discovered with the naked eye. He might never earn a seat inside the Academy. He would never be faculty, but The Academy was his.

Nexius closed himself behind a corner wall of the North Wing and moved in. He stayed through the day and long past curfew. By day, he seemed to be be toiling away, following the blueprints. Following instruction. And he did follow them. But he had much more than a blueprint to follow. He had a maze inside of his mind that followed in lockstep with the blueprints and made them so much more. No one ever noticed, because so few had been authorized to work in the North Wing in the first place.

Nexius was a master of spacial awareness. He could see the designs in his head and the more he worked, the more ingenious he became. To be sure, it took time to accomplish all this, but he had time and little else. And when you are a spacial genius, one does not count the hours devoted to your art. Time flows like an ebullient spring, and soon, your work, though unfinished—nothing of Nexius’ could ever be truly called finished—must come to end. But from another point of view, his work was only beginning.