I asked Lucet to be there for me. I was still torn about her—from how she'd blown up at me to the terrifying degree of force she was willing to use to keep me inside her view of safety—but I still wanted her by my side when I met Zhytln.

She looked miserable when I walked up to her, and she tensed as if she expected me to strike her. But I just held out a hand halfway between us, and it bridged our souls like a sunbeam through the void.

"I still care about you," I said. "And I want you to be there."

I always found it odd how the cold created dew. The expression of sorrow in realspace should not beget the form of joy in soulspace. But something about it seemed fitting as Lucet gave me a weak, quavering smile.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I... I just wanted to help."

"This is me telling you how."

She took my hand, and together we walked to the Whispered Secret.

Frustratingly, Zhytln wasn't behind the bar; after waiting half an hour for a dazed-looking young woman to stumble out from the back, Zhytln holding a glowing asteroid of memory trapped within a broken ring, it wasn't hard to see why. She looked at the two of us and paused.

"...If you're here to kill me, please let me evacuate my customers first," she said.

Lucet hung her head. "No killing. Not unless you overstep."

Idly, I wondered if she'd seen Lucet's threats at the harbor. With the number of living memories she had infected Knwharfhelm with, I doubted she'd missed such a large splash.

"You claimed you could cure me of the cancer Iola infected me with. I want you to heal me, before it's too late."

Zhytln stopped, her eyes unfocusing for a moment, and the abomination of gears and pipes and dishes in her soulspace groaned, the people inside dashing around. In fact, now that I looked closer at the people rather than the machine...

Involuntarily, I recoiled. Those... those weren't human. They weren't even elves or fae. They were biped, yes, but the proportions were off in ways I'd attributed to bulky coats but turned out to be impossibly thick scaled flesh. And the dead giveaway that whatever those... entities... in Zhytln's soul were had nothing to do with humanity was the way one unfolded its segmented body, rising to nearly the machine's height, in order to reach a set of levers near the top.

Zhytln must've seen the roil of blood and bile in my soul, because she held up her hands. "I swear I will do everything in my power to cure you from your disease, as promised."

That, uh, was no longer my primary concern about Zhytln, or even in the top twenty. But I'd made up my mind. "Lucet, if you want to—"

She must not have been focusing on Zhytln's soul—or if she had, she'd done what I did and missed the inhuman creatures for the impossible machine—because she looked between me and her confused. "I haven't changed my mind. I'll find my own way to get help. With the cancer and... with... what I did."

I exhaled. "Well. Then let's begin."

Zhytln nodded and walked towards the back door. "Follow me, please."

Warily, I did so, still studying Zhytln's soul. If the creatures within her soulspace noticed me watching them, they gave no indication of it.

Zhytln opened the door, revealing a small, closet-sized chamber, gesturing for us to step inside.

"Is this where you'll be, uh, operating? It's a little cramped—"

"It is a conveyance to take us to the basement level," she explained. "Do not be alarmed; it is a simple pulley with a counterweight."

And with that, once Lucet had trickled in, she pulled a metal bar from a slot in the wall. With a clank-clank-clank of chains, the entire room began to descend.

Lucet squeezed my hand, eyes wide, and nodded towards the view of the solid, packed dirt outside the sinking room, occasionally studded with random junk. "Cienne, look," she said.

I frowned at the objects that had—seemingly at random—been buried beneath Knwharfhelm over the years. "What, the rubbish? Yeah, I guess they didn't always hurl their refuse into the void—"

"No. Look." Her soul flared with hemolymph anxiety, and I turned my soulsight onto the chambers of the elevator.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

It was like staring into the night sky.

Every single piece of junk buried within the floor—old clothes, scraps of paper, a pottery shard—held a memory within it, each one orders of magnitude larger than its container. Soulspace and realspace were never the same size, I knew that, but this was the first time I'd seen so many memories trapped in a single place, distorting soulspace like a balloon in order for all the memories to fit. And although looking in soulspace through that haze of memories was like trying to pick out a single star in the night sky, I could tell it extended around and down, in a solid cylinder. Like a cloud, a veil, a room.

Like a shell of vacuum around a hastily-rented inn, meant to keep outsiders from peeking in.

The pulley contraption rattled to a halt, and Zhytln opened the door. Mundane torches fluttered in the breeze from stone-lined vents in a corridor carved from the living rock. Zhytln stepped forwards, hauling open a heavy wood door, and revealed the chamber at the heart of the cloud of memories.

There was a copy of the machine inside her soul, hidden beneath her bar. But this one seemed more... complete. Its ticking was more muted than the frantic screaming of the engine in Zhytln's soulspace, its impossible architecture more streamlined than the constantly-strained metal that the segmented bipeds constantly fretted over and maintained.

And the machine beneath Zhytln's bar spoke.

"HAVE YOU FOUND THE ISSUE IN YOUR PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF PERFECT INTEGER CUBOIDS?" The machine grated out.

Zhytln shook her head. "The network is calculating a solution for me. I have come to request recompense for the truths I have given you, Truthteller."

The machine—the Truthteller—shifted gears, and I was reminded for a heartbeat of Meloai's clockwork insides as they rotated mid-air in ways that hurt my mind. "ASK, THEN."

"Recall the issue presented to you three sessions ago." As Zhytln spoke, six columns of crystal lit up in fluting patterns, beaming pure light in stuttering pulses like... like one of Iola's spells. My eyes traced where the crystal columns began and ended, found both to be vanishing points in mid-air, and I involuntarily shied away from the Truthteller as Zhytln spoke. "I have procured the subject for further examination."

"What the fuck is that thing?" Lucet whispered.

"PLEASE BE MORE SPECIFIC WITH YOUR QUERY," the Truthteller asked.

Zhytln gave us a frown. "Lucet, Cienne, this will go much faster if you refrain from talking."

Feeling uncomfortably like a chastised schoolchild—anything related to my education was something I wanted distance from, and fast—I tried to distract myself. Following a hunch, I took a tiny shard of the insecurity humming through Lucet's soul and sliced open a rift.

Where the gears disappeared in realspace, they reappeared in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood, hanging on walls to form a complex cogwork. I gestured for Lucet to look, as if this explained anything about the absurd technology hiding beneath Knwharfhelm, but she just shook her head and shrugged.

Zhytln repeated her question; the Truthteller grated out an answer. "FROM THE DESCRIPTION OF THE SYMPTOMS YOU HAVE PROVIDED, IT APPEARS THAT THE SUBJECT WAS INVOLUNTARILY EXPOSED TO HIGH LEVELS OF IONIZING RADIATION. MUCH AS THE REFLECTION OF VISIBLE LIGHT IN SOULSPACE IS WATER, THE REFLECTION OF MOST FREQUENCIES OF IONIZING RADIATION ARE WATER CONTAMINATED WITH HOSTILE MICRO-ORGANISMS. EXTERMINATE THESE MICRO-ORGANISMS IN THE SUBJECT'S SOULSPACE, AND THE CORRESPONDING CANCER WILL CEASE TO EXIST IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE BIJECTION BETWEEN SOULSPACE AND REALSPACE."

Microorganisms? Lucet mouthed at me. I just shook my head, trying to study the memories embedded in the walls. I made the mistake of turning towards the Truthteller—

The Truthteller had a soul.

And the Truthteller's soul was another Truthteller. Identical in realspace and soulspace. I had never, in all the magics and all the planes I'd explored, encountered anything whose form in realspace matched its form in soulspace exactly.

As if to rub in my face how naïve I was, Zhytln reached into her pocket and pulled out what looked like a miniature, ramshackle copy of the massive machine in front of her. I focused my soulsight on it and found that—yep, it, too, had a soul, and it corresponded to the knock-off Truthteller maintained by those inhuman bipeds in her soul. She flicked a few levers, waited a moment—and then the levers shifted positions of their own accord.

"Civilization One has not yet discovered optics, much less antibiotics," Zhytln informed the Truthteller. "How can Civilization One cleanse a soulspace of a foreign microorganism?"

"RADIATION GENERATED BY THE DEIONIZATION OF HYDROGEN IS EFFECTIVE AT DESTROYING SINGLE-CELLED ORGANISMS WHILE BEING INEFFECTIVE AGAINST MOST MULTICELLULAR LIFE," the Truthteller said. "DIRECT CIVILIZATION ONE TO FIND AND DEPLOY WITCHES ATTUNED TO MANIC JOY, AND UTILIZE THEIR SPELLS TO CLEANSE THE SUBJECT'S SOULSPACE OF FOREIGN CONTAMINANTS."

"You're going to shoot him with more eldritch light spells? Are you crazy? We want to heal his cancer, not give him more!" Lucet burst out.

Zhytln made a hsst! gesture with one finger, but the Truthteller was already explaining.

"TO CLARIFY, CIVILIZATION ONE WILL BE INVOKING MAGIC FROM THEIR SOULSPACE, ONE LEVEL ABOVE YOURS. YOU WILL NOT BE CASTING MAGIC YOURSELF, IN ORDER TO PRESERVE THE PLANET OF CIVILIZATION ONE."

"That doesn't clarify any—"

"Do you want my help or not?" Zhytln snapped.

"I'm seriously reconsidering that!" Lucet shouted.

I put a hand on her shoulder. "Please. Lucet. With all due respect, you don't get to decide that for me."

She flinched as if shot by an arrow.

Then she slumped over, shaking her head. Zhytln said something to the Truthteller—telling it to ignore everything she'd just said?—while I just held Lucet. She held me back, but only loosely, as if allowing me to step away if I needed to.

"I believe I understand the procedure you describe," Zhytln said. "Allow me to convey it to Civilization One."

She took out the miniature Truthteller from her pocket, flicking the levers in no pattern I could discern. A moment later, the bipedals in her soul started scurrying about.

Zhytln gestured Lucet and I back into the hall, and closed the heavy door behind her, sealing the Truthteller away in its basement once more.

"Cienne," she said. "I am about to transfer a memory shard into your soul. Please do not resist."

I met Lucet's eyes.

She squeezed my hand.

I nodded.

Zhytln closed her eyes.

And a shard of her soulspace flew straight into mine.