Tunnels ran like veins through the heart of Aarppaa station.

Narrow corridors ran, like rivers, to wider corridors, wider corridors to concourses, concourses into volumes that could only be described as arteries pulsing with a thousand passing feet, booming with their voices, and echoing with voices of mesmeric stones the size of barn walls, the shouts of vendors and performers from their stalls, and the hoot and claxon of various slabs of information projected in the air above the pedestrian’s heads.

People walked on everything. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, on surfaces that could no longer be identified as any of the three where floors, walls, and ceilings proliferated around the corridor to six, eight, and even nine individual sides each pretending that they were in fact the floor while the others merely pretended. In some places the floor itself moved, propelled it’s passengers, accelerated sections of its current of pedestrians, replaced their will for forward movement with its own so that they moved like grease within the mechanism of some vast machine, like bubbles caught in a rushing stream, or blood pumping, pumping, pumping, under the power of some distant thundering heart.

Yi Cao moved like flotsam in that stream. Hills rose occasionally from one of the concourse’s many floors, like anthills, or pimples, topped by whirling machines and glowing signs that directed traffic vomiting out of the tunnel’s depths to join the never ending throng. Light tubes drifted in the eddies of those machines, like malformed stars stretched out across the center of the tunnel’s gloomy volume while constructs, and people borne by constructs, shot between them through the air like bats or skyships in the dark.

A gate brooded at the end of the concourse, hundreds of yards across, like the mouth of some subterannean giant. People poured themselves into that mouth, hurtled headlong down the throat while others entered to crawl down the sides, each floor labeled by a massive sigil barely visible beneath tromping feet.

Yi Cao followed the current of people up the wall, as he now saw it, down to the open mouth that waited for them. He reached it with them, stepped, as he saw many others do, across the barrier where up and down switched places on a gradient, saw hair, and clothes, and jewelry, and things that could have been anything in between shift across the bodies of the people around him as he felt his own dance in the changing orientation while his stomach did a little flip. Someone threw an apple core from the moving crowd just at the apex of the switch. It flew upwards as though taking flight, hurtled along the gradiant until it bumped off of a light tube drifting a hundred yards above the opening at the center of a massive spherical volume where other flotsam and trash drifted in a ball.

Four more concourses penetrated the sphere, vomiting people onto the floor of this massive globe to swarm towards others like it, past banks of fat captive machines turning in their cages, the spinning blades forcing air into the volume so that it thumped and shook in Yi Cao’s ears. His eyes watered in the quaking air and his nose burned while echoing voices of thousands, millions, trillions, it felt, crashed around him like waves and deafened him.

He slowed. Stopped, looking up, then someone bumped into him and he staggered, followed by another as he pushed his way through across a current of people moving towards a concourse on the opposite side of the sphere. Figures whirled by overhead like shades in the gloom and feet stomped and hammered into the gray stone floor like the boots of the dead marching into the afterlife.

In the tumult Yi Cao almost didn’t feel the hand that snagged his bag and tried to rip it from his shoulder.

He snatched at it in the last second and felt himself jerked from his feet.

He stumbled on the smooth stone. Let out a cry that was lost in the overall noise then crashed to already bruised knees. The shock of the pain woke him from whatever stupor had come over him as he entered the volume and he grabbed the bag with both hands to pull his assailant down with him.

He twisted, lifted his head.

Found himself face to face with a boy who couldn’t have older than his little cousin, staring at Yi Cao in horror.

In Yi Cao’s moment of uncertainty the boy’s eyes twisted sideways and the terrified look was replaced by the impassive slotted irises of a goat.

“Pisser!” The boy screeched… bleated… He jerked at Yi Cao’s bag one more time, then leapt to his feet and scrambled away into the crowd leaving Yi Cao on the floor with his bag still clutched in both hands.

No one appeared to notice Yi Cao lying on the ground. No one offered to help him up, anyways.

Somewhere in one of the concourses connected to the spherical volume of the terminal, a horn sounded, long and low and sonorous, stirring the people around Yi Cao into a sort of frenzy. Yi Cao checked the knot on his bag as they jostled past him, then slipped it more securely around his neck. He found the sigil for concourse G next to one of the massive gates leading deeper into the rock then bent his head and shouldered his way deeper into the machine.

Deep, deep, in the bowels of the station, where the crowds of the concourse no longer flowed, and only sporadic traffic found their way down the veins of lesser tributaries into the vestiges where stinking grates gurgled with shifting fluids and caged mechanisms whirled down short corridors lined by sporadic light tubes and doors that seemed half marked by “out of order” signs.

Concourse G, Guo Gang had told him. Courselet Eleven. Sub-route L. Number Nine Eighteen, just before the utilities. All together, G11L918.

The place stank, even before the inn came in sight. Doorways lined the narrow corridor behind flickering mesmeric stones with static images on their faces and whispered voices more forlorn than forgotten graves. They whispered to him across the empty passageways while the few other pedestrians kept their distance.

“Shift approved virtual companions. Bring a friend on your shift. Keep them when you come home. Never be lonely again.”

“Bargain apparel. Last week’s style at last year’s prices. Resale available.”

“Get a second hand, second hand! Rebuild your current prosthetics or get a new one one second hand. Best prices guaranteed. Only functional prosthetics sold or your money back that’s the Rimushtushush promise.”

Some of the stones he passed didn’t even bother speaking either of the two languages he understood but clicked at him, or muttered gutterals, or, in the case of one stone that flickered more than the rest, sang gibberish at him in a child’s falsetto made ominous in the abandoned passageway.

Numbers above the doors and display windows set into the walls moved from the eight hundreds to the nine hundreds as the stench of sewage grew. He passed one number with it’s wall removed so that thumping heavy music punched into the hallway where a gaggle of men with the silver skin, or multicolored eyes, or mechanical limbs, of technomancers stood nodding with he beat and nursing drinks or cupping women similarly disfigured to their side while more shadowy figures writhed and twisted in the dark interior like flames. One man watched Yi Cao as he went by, tracking him with circular lenses where his eyes should have been and two slender arms tipped by what looked like additional eyes of the same kind, all while he bobbed his shoulders with the music and slowly spun a tall tubular hat and black wires crawled and flexed in his neck like veins or worms.

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Yi Cao remembered Guo Gang’s advice and kept his distance.

Nine Eighteen stood open to the hallway. A beefy gray skinned man with eyes black to their very edges sat reading underneath a sign that read “Te’klub’s” in Technomancer Script. One door down a yellow and black sign marked its neighbor as out of order just in front of a spinning mechasim that plugged the entire end of the narrow corridor and a sign in some script Yi Cao couldn’t read had “Chow Li’s Heavenly Cultivation Resources: Cheap” painted underneath it in Techish.

They gray skinned man glanced at Yi Cao as he stood hesitating in front of the place. He snorted, dragging on the stick of tobacco in his lips so that the smoke burst around his legs and whirled in the competing aircurrents moving up the hall and out the door of Te’Klubs.

The stench faded as Yi Cao stepped through, replaced by something less like human waste and more like old sweat, and frying meat, and an abiding taint of rust.

The place was an eating hall. A restaurant, or something very like the tea house he’d seen in Downfall Imperial city before the inner sect members kicked him out to find them a place to stay. Tables occupied most of the floor, ancient things neither wood nor steel but covered in battered layers of paint half stripped in places to show the striped layers accreted over the years or stained by cups and spilled fluids until they looked as though they’d been thrown together in a storm then sorted out and arranged with matching, equally battered, chairs. A long low bar ran the length of one wall in front of racked bottles and drums with spigots hanging from them while a minuscule man no more than three feet tall with a nose and long pointed ears, each feature the same size as the rest of his head, leaned behind it running a cloth across the inside of a glass mug while eyeing the half dozen patrons at the bar or tables nursing their drinks.

The midget smirked when he caught Yi Cao staring at him.

“Sit anywhere.” The little man told Yi Cao. “Though if you want quicker service you’ll want to sit at the bar. Little feet make for long walks you know.” He held up one foot as though in demonstration.

His voice, Yi Cao thought, came out surprisingly bass, though still shrill somehow, as befit something, or someone, so small, as though he didn’t really want to talk with his mouth and tried to resonate entirely in his nose to make up for it.

Yi Cao drifted to the bar, which, he realized, was much taller on his side than it was on the bar tender’s. He swung his bag around to the front as pulled up a stool several seats from a hairless couple, man and woman, though he only suspected, and the bartender levered himself off of his perch with a sigh to approach.

“What’ll it be?” The short bartender asked.

Thanks to the bar, he was actually taller than Yi Cao by several inches, at least while Yi Cao was sitting down. A sign behind the man read “Rooms: 12 C a shift, Get Up: 0.3 C, Meals: Chef’s Discretion. Drinks: Ask. Tips: Welcome.”

“I’m looking to get a room.”

“Are ye now?” The man finished wiping out the cup in his hand and flung the towel over one shoulder before eyeing the cup and sticking it back on a rack behind him. “Rate’s on the wall. How many shifts you thinking of staying?”

“I… don’t know.” Yi Cao shook his head.

“Not a problem. We’ve got a couple of vacancies. You tell me how many shifts you know you want to keep the room and I’ll charge you in advance. Twelve C a shift, but two credits off each shift you you rent in advance.” Without the glass in his hand the little man rubbed the stubby tips of his fingers together instead. “Seem reasonable to you?”

Yi Cao hesitated. “I have silver.” He said after a moment.

The tips of the bar tender’s ears seemed to droop. “Silver?” He asked.

Yi Cao nodded.

The man sighed and leaned forward. “Listen, kid. Can I call you kid? You’re taller than me but it’s a fair bet I’m older unless you’ve got some kind of gift. Inscrypti, right?”

Yi Cao frowned. “Inscrypti?”

“Sure. You know. Tattoo themselves with power. Call themselves farmers or tillers or something.”

“Cultivator.” Kahrio, in the artificer language that still rattled in his brain when he tried to use it, which could have been farmer, he now realized.

“Just so.” The bartender snapped his fingers and pointed at Yi Cao. “You’ve got their look.” He pinched the edges of his eyes and pulled them to make them squint then released them to wave around at the room. “You been around, yeah? You can’t have made it here without seeing all the folk they got on this rock. Two million last count on this rock alone, and five more rocks besides with habitats and stations moving in between, you know what they got all those people out here doing?”

“Mining?” Yi Cao asked. He’d heard something like that in the liner’s introduction of the place.

The short bartender pointed at him. “Boy gets the prize.”

One of the bald couple knocked on the bar and called for “another round” and the little tender raised a hand in acknowledgement before pulling down a couple of glasses from the shelf behind him as he went on.

“Silver’s no good here pal. I could get silver or anything you could think of by the hopper for less than it costs to stay a night here. Gold, platinum, jade. There’s a planet getting ripped apart around us. Dumb stone is valueless.”

He spun a bottle up from the shelf behind him and poured two measures of a clear liquid into each glass then shoved them down the bar so that they slid to a stop in front of the couple. He smiled as they picked them up, then spun the bottle once before he put it back on the shelf and turned to Yi Cao.

Yi Cao stared at the bartender thinking of the string of silver in his bag. “What are they… What are they doing with it all?” He asked.

The bartender frowned. “Off to the golems.” He waved a hand. “Stuck around their planet right next to the star.” He looked sidelong at Yi Cao.

“You ain’t got no credits?” He asked. “None? Most agencies don’t let their people here without em.”

Yi Cao grimaced and shook his head.

“Poor bugger. Well. Like I said. Silver’s no good.” He seemed to think for a moment. “Breathing stone?” he asked.

“What?”

“Is it magic?” The bartender rolled his eyes. “Your silver. Ki. The stuff the inscrypti go on about. Restricted material.”

Yi Cao put a hand to his pendant. “I guess. Technically it is.”

The tender waved a hand towards the door. “Try selling it then. Might get a few credits for it across the street. They can’t ever have too much of the stuff or there’s big fines from the Governor, but it’s better than trying to get along creditless out here. Let the piss bots catch you sleeping in a hall and they’ll put you on a work detail for vagrancy. No credits to be made there. Always refugees willing to pay for stuff from that world though.”

“But not you?” Yi Cao asked.

The bartender snorted. “Bartender.” He said. “Not junk peddler. Not me.”

Someone else further down the bar called for the bartender’s attention and the little man gave Yi Cao a final once over before he wandered down the bar to serve a woman with silver hands a mug of something while Yi Cao studied the surface of the bar and brooded.

Tiny toothpicks sat in a cup on the bar and Yi Cao picked one out he used to draw lines in a pool of condensation left by a previous patron.

“You still here?”

Yi Cao looked up to find the bartender back, wiping out the inside of another mug while the bald couple next to Yi Cao leaned over one of the little crystal tiles together and murmured.

“I, have someone, who will be coming after me.” Yi Cao said with a grimace. “He may be able to pay.” He looked up at the little man standing above him. “Do you mind if I wait?”

The bartender shrugged. “You got the price of a drink?”

Yi Cao shook his head. “Just silver.”

The bartender sighed then looked around the little room. “It’s a slow shift. Tell you what. You give me one of them silver pieces, and I’ll give you something cheap. You can sit over in one of the corners till your friend arrives. Maybe I’ll find a use for it somewheres.”

Yi Cao fished in his bag until he came out with the string of coins given to him for his mission by the elders. He untied one end and fished off one of the silver pieces which he handed up to the midget.

“Thank you.”

The bartender whipped a tiny cup down from his shelf and had it full and in front of Yi Cao faster than most cultivator’s could have drawn their sword. “Don’t thank me.” The bartender replied. He waved the coin in Yi Cao’s direction. “Just don’t piss in my bar. You need to relieve yourself you go down the hall or use the facilities like everyone else. Bot has a hard enough time keeping this place clean with all the drunks at shift change. I don’t need freeloaders shitting in the corners. You got me?”

Yi Cao dropped from his stool but hesitated. “Facilities?” He asked.

“Toilets.” The Bartender emphasized. “Forest gods.” He turned away. “This is a house, okay? Don’t shit in my house.”

He walked away, leaving Yi Cao to his drink.

“Of course.” Yi Cao replied.

There was no one there to hear.