Bo Bo was silent as Yi Cao pushed through the destruction left in the wake of the Young Master. Fire Ki suffused the air, like the aftermath of a natural disaster instead of some boy barely two decades old. Sympathy flames, pale and thin, provided the only illumination, tossing jagged flickering shadows across shattered halls as they slowly dissipated into Ki.
Sheets of steel pinged and popped as they cooled. Distant machinery rumbled as they forced sporadic bursts of air down ducts and corridors that groaned with every change in pressure.
Most of them had been destroyed.
The maintenance tunnels he’d fought his way down only twenty minutes ago, a century to Yi Cao now that it was done, didn’t lead all the way to the Kispuhru nest. The tunnels terminated, perhaps twenty yards further down, past two more bends and dozens of shattered blackened engines, in a honeycomb of narrow ducts barely ten inches tall by a foot wide.
Those ducts were gone now, or their mouths were. Ragged steel sheets were all that remained, dangling like lacerated lungs in the rib cage of the newly blasted passage way that cut through the rock behind them. Some of them still glowed from the heat, dull red in the dimly lit passageway. Others still sighed with moving air, cool, where it kissed the crisped sighed of Yi Cao’s neck as he passed beneath them. The stone that once formed a solid wall between two passageways crunched under his feet as he clambered to the tunnel revealed by the Young Master’s work.
Signs of battle littered the second maintenance tunnel. Empty tubes of brass chimed like bells as he kicked through them, past a technomancer’s weapon mounted on wheels like a cannon, half melted through the center and oozing noxious smoke. Other things, little things, crunched beneath his feet around a section where the ceiling had collapsed, filling the hall with spikes and silvery filaments that still snapped with lightning where they’d coiled around coarse steel and chunks of rock.
He had to leap to carry on, up a hole eight feet wide blasted from the ceiling to a second tunnel that ran out of the wall above. His cultivation threw him harder than he was used to. He rammed his head on the ceiling, almost fell, would have, if the gravity hadn’t disappeared in the hall above. He rubbed madly at his head as he turned slowly in a constellation of drifting rubble, then grabbed for a wire he used to drag himself in, and along the hallway through more debris and drifting bits of burning things, things, he told himself, things, floating with the discarded weaponry they’d held in life. Things he didn’t want to see.
The gravity flipped on the opposite side of the tunnel. Yi Cao used a chunk of steel jutting from a shattered bit of ceiling to flip with it, pistol in front, always in front where it could respond to the flickering green lights that might point to something trying to kill him at any moment.
Something rattled behind him, and he jerked, twisting awkwardly in the rising gravity, to spot a shadow whipping through the darkness. He spat pins at it, but it was gone before he’d turned, bat like and ragged as it dove down the hole Yi Cao had come from. He hit the ceiling turned floor badly, nearly lost his pistol, but remained rigid facing down the corridor where the shadow had fled until long seconds had passed and his heart had slowed.
A construct hung just ahead, iron body drizzling liquid gore where smoke rose from what had once been human in its guts behind an engine that wheezed as it spun a single broken blade in looping crazy circles, as though still hoping to keep him from reaching the heart of the Imyenki nest.
Zihan waited not far beyond.
The Young Master stood smoking in a vault of a room, domed and enormous, after the tight confines of the maintenance tunnels. A cistern cut from stone twelve feet high with the remains of some mechanism jutting from the center of the floor and holes carved into the walls like the nests of birds. The stink of guano, and trash, and cooked meat, mingling with the acrid tang of Zihan’s tobacco. A single blue star in the ceiling of the vault turned the Young Master’s smoke into a halo around him, helping to disguise the tiny bodies of the blue men who littered the floor like fallen leaves, half obscured by the trash and glowing copper spheres stacked up in a heap at the center of the room like a dragon’s hoard.
He snapped the wallet open in his hands as he smoked, spun it, snapped it shut again, stared at the smoke rising towards the ventilation, blue and hazy in the light of the artificial star.
Yi Cao holstered his pistol and stared at the room, littered with he dead.
“You wanted power.” Zihan pulled the smoke stick from his mouth, looked at it, snapped the wallet open, closed. “This is what that looks like.” He stuck the tobacco stick back in his mouth and took a drag.
Yi Cao flipped one of the diminutive corpses over with the toe of one shoe. A man. They were all men, as far as he could tell. Blue skinned and monstrous, but with a scrap of trash around each in a sort of loincloth, some of them even dressed in scorched togas or with the odd bit of jewelry wrapped around wrists or necks or stuck to their heads. Lady’s rings, and glittering tech. A feather, on one.
“Having power and exercising it are different things.” Yi Cao replied.
Zihan sucked in a breath of smoke then blew it out in a sigh. He waved his hand to disperse it. “If you have power, someone will always force you to use it.” He said. He flipped the wallet, open, closed, tossed it. Yi Cao looked up just in time to catch it.
“Usually, the fun part of a job like this is looting the place.” Zihan said. He pulled on his stick and waved the smoke away from his face with a grimace. “Spirit beasts normally have a special source, or some kind of spiritual herb they’ve half ruined. A secret grotto you can cultivate in, or report to a local sect for a bit of silver. This, though.” He kicked at the trash in the bottom of the cistern and took a pull from his tobacco stick. “Nothing here but junk.”
They both stood, looking over the battlefield for a moment while smoke curled from the holes carved into the walls as nests.
“Take what you can.” Zihan told him. “Anything that looks useful.” He bent and pulled one of the gently glowing spheres from the trash, then tossed it to Yi Cao. “Anything looks like we might be able to sell it later on, or use it for something. No point leaving everything for Feiruhn. I’m sure he’ll be taking whatever we leave behind.”
Yi Cao dialed the wallet open, then dropped the sphere in and bent to collect more. Zihan kicked over a little pile of jank stacked near the core, crushed it, and surveyed what remained.
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“We’ll take the proper light last.” He said. “No idea what powers it, but no point leaving it here where it doesn’t do us any good. Doesn’t do these boys any good either.”
Yi Cao poked through the littered corpses, collecting their stolen treasures and tossing them into the void while Zihan smoked in silence.
Yi Cao glanced briefly into some of the nests along the walls, but stopped when he found a diminutive figure, blackened by flame, curled around something even smaller in the back of one of the homes. He focused on removing the lights after that. All of them he could find.
Zihan watched him. “Remember this.” He said. “This feeling. Whatever it is.” He looked away and took a pull from his stick, blew pale smoke and watched it curl around him in the light. “It’s the barrier most people don’t want to cross. The difference between the immortals, and everyone whose remained a human being.”
He put his smoke stick back in his mouth but didn’t seem to see the world around him anymore. “Treasure it.” He said quietly. “Don’t forget it.”
Yi Cao found an arm, something mechanical and hollow, human sized, with a lot of cables popping out of the gauntlet and a black glove on the end. He considered putting it into the wallet, then tossed it back into the midden and looked around.
He wondered what he felt, then tried to ignore the answer as he picked gingerly through the scattered remains to pull another light sphere out of the trash it was half buried in.
He felt things, under his feet, even when he knew there was nothing there. Things he didn’t want to remember when he’d crunched down on them while they still ran.
Better to be numb.
The numbness didn’t last.
True to Zihan’s prediction, Feiruhn hadn’t expected them to survive. Hulking security guards and men with scripted weapons glowing with Ki met them as they returned through the road of destruction Zihan had carved through the station to get to the nest. They stared wide eyed at the Young Master as he advanced down the hall carrying the star he’d looted from the ceiling. They’d apparently heard most of the battle all the way from the gambling hall and the hall itself, when they reached it along with their honor guard of awed cultivators, was hazed by smoke pumped in despite Feiruhn’s order to have the vents closed. The guests were gone and a disgruntled Hua Feiruhn met them in the middle of the floor with three guards of his own, each marked by the different worlds they’d come from.
Neither he nor Zihan spoke when they finally drew level until Zihan tried to toss him the glowing sphere, only for the star to go floating up into the open ceiling of the gambling hall.
“That’s going to screw up my speakers.” Feiruhn grumbled.
Zihan shrugged. “Sorry about that.” He went to put his hands in his pockets but realized he’d burnt out one of them in the fight. He gave a crooked smile and crossed his arms over his chest instead.
“You’s never told me your rank of advancement.” Feiruhn said with a scowl. “Boys up there said you fairly tore through the walls. Fire Ki everywhere. Enoughs so one of em insisted on staying to try and push ‘is cultivation.”
“I haven’t touched a testing formation in a years.” Zihan replied.
Feiruhn narrowed his eyes. “You could wager a guess.”
“But I won’t.” Zihan replied. “And you’ll have to be satisfied with that.”
Feiruhn glanced at Yi Cao then pursed his lips and studied Zihan again. “You’s really just plannin on passin through?” He said. “Rob this treasure ship and then go home?”
“You have people cultivating in my residue.” Zihan replied. “I’m obviously not going to make any break throughs here. Just passing through. A place to get what I need back home.”
“Maybe.” Feiruhn conceded. He nodded. “Maybe indeed.” He studied the floor for a moment, then nodded and flicked a hand. “Go on then.” He said. “I’s got a mess to clean up and a ventilation system to get back in working order. Governor is going to lose its shit when it finds the break, and I’ll probably have to pay for it. You didn’t do it clean, whatever you did up there.”
“I just broke through a fortress for you.” Zihan said. “It was never going to be clean.”
Feiruhn shrugged. “True enough.” He turned to go and Zihan turned towards the door,
Yi Cao surprised himself by stopping both of them with a word.
“We should be paid.”
Feiruhn turned to him and he met the old man’s eyes. He cocked an eyebrow and turned to Zihan. Zihan tittered and leaned on a table to wait. Feiruhn turned back to Yi Cao.
“We have living expenses.” Yi Cao told him. “You’re going to need more work from us in the future.”
“Way you’re master said it, you’re going to need me more than I’s gonna need you.”
Yi Cao just looked at him and waited.
“What?” Feiruhn scowled and waved a hand in the air. “You think I don’t have other people who can do what he did?”
Yi Cao remembered the mechanical monster crawling with Imyenki that fell on them in the confines of the corridor and forcefully shoved the memory aside.
“No.” He said.
Zihan scooped a deck of cards off a table near the center of the room and riffled through them. “Balance.” He said. “We did you a favor. The heavens demand you do us one in return.”
Feiruhn growled something under his breath then glanced towards the doors leading into the maintenance halls they’d just emerged from. “Fine then.” He said. “Where are you staying?”
Yi Cao told him.
“Your bills are paid.” He said. “Within reason, mind, and for a week, end of that week, I may have something more for you.”
Zihan nodded and tucked the deck of cards into a breast pocket that had survived the ordeal of battle relatively unharmed, then jerked his head for Yi Cao to follow him.
Yi Cao nodded to Feiruhn and followed Zihan out into the glittering concourse filled with glowing projections of prize money, flashing lights, and half naked women.
The girls were waiting for them when they returned to Te’klub. Not for them, truly, but for Zihan, who had them help him remove his destroyed clothing in the privacy of their rented room.
“You want a girl, we can find you one.” Zihan told him as Yi Cao stared into the beer at the table before he and the girls went back. “I’m sure one of these two could recommend someone.”
“Plenty of lonely girls out there.” Kalemal replied. She ran an arm over Zihan’s shoulder and snuggled her cheek against his to flutter her eyelashes in Yi Cao’s direction. “Could find you two or three for what he’s paying me.”
Yi Cao looked up only to glare at the girl. Her skin pulled at his eyes, the curve of her limbs, the sparkle of her augments like jewelry at her bare shoulders. It all reminded him of the corpses littering the floor and he turned away, back to his beer and the reflection floating in it.
“No.” He said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “No. I’m not interested.”
“If Zihan wasn’t such a jealous sort, I’d offer to take care of you myself.” Kalemal said. She kissed Zihan on the cheek and grinned as Zihan’s smirk turned sharp.
“Such a tease.” He replied.
She rolled her eyes and ran a hand through the hair at the nape of his neck. “So easy to tease.”
Bealtiel kissed him on his other cheek, then slid off the triple layer of human beings they’d become when he entered, to gently tug Zihan to his feet.
Zihan left him with the money card. “Take a bath.” He said. “Get cleaned up. The bath house even has girls, if you change your mind.”
Flames occupied his mind as he cleaned up. Corpses, and the thunder of weaponry that bit into the technomancer’s clothes while his pistol screamed at him to kill.
The pistol wanted to go over his “performance” while he sat brooding in the tub, flickering green light around its smiling face that made Yi Cao’s finger twitch and his instincts scream that he was going to be killed if he didn’t shoot the thing that materialized within the circle. For the first time he reached up and fiddled with the clip in his ear hoping to find some way to remove it, only to order Bo Bo to leave him alone when it wouldn’t come apart. He tucked the weapon under the bed when he went to sleep that night, and dreamed of violence while he stood over a child on a bridge in the middle of a rattling forest filled with flames, and threw him into the stream.
“You did well.” Zihan had told him as he pulled the star from the ceiling of the cistern to lead them out. “For your first battle, you did well.”
He woke to find his pillow stained by tears, and something hard and painful trapped inside his chest making it hard to breathe, images, in his head, that made it difficult to cultivate and impossible, over the next three shift cycles, to get any sleep at all.
“It will come even easier for you next time.”