Atl-Verazlan Banquet Hall

Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge

4453.2.23 Interstellar

The news of the changed score went through the city fast. Janus was impressed by how quickly the people transitioned from celebrating their arrival to ignoring them. It was as if the Verazlan were incapable of admitting they’d been wrong to celebrate losers, so they skipped over the embarrassment entirely and pretended the procession had never happened.

Without so much as the hint of a frown, Tialli Atl-Verazlan invited them to a welcome banquet anyway.

“We should go while we can,” Janus said.

“We can’t,” Koni said. “We have to stay for the dinner, or my mother will lose face.”

Janus was about to tell Koni what he thought of Tialli’s honor compared to the life of his people, but Ryler stopped him.

“We should find out what we can about the score,” the cultist said. “Changes this big, with no explanation… they almost never happen.”

“When do they happen?” Janus asked.

“When the survival of an entire people is at risk,” Ryler said.

Janus stopped and looked at Ryler. “Are you sure that your memories of this place aren’t influencing you?”

Ryler blew a raspberry. “I’m not haunted, Janus. I just have a lot of data about what happened here. I got a little lost in it. I’m fine now.”

“Uh huh,” Janus said, turning to follow Koni, Tialli, and their escort of rangers to the Atl-Verazlan home.

Janus had met wealthy people since he’d become an aspirant. There had been Councilor Bennin, of course, but also Pasha, some of the Beta Stationers, the head researchers in Cofan, and the elder of Hayyam. Captain Tanaka owned several boats, which was a different kind of wealth. They all had different ways to display their wealth and spend their credits.

Tialli Atl-Verazlan topped them all. The Atl-Verazlan home was a compound that could only be called small in comparison with the Hall of the Fallen they’d just left. It was a massive structure three stories tall that made up an entire city block and included private gardens, reception halls, and the homes of several branch families. Rangers guarded the entrances, and each member of the team was scanned before they and their vehicles were allowed in.

“Does this place belong to the city?” Janus asked.

“No?” Koni said. “It’s been in my family for over a thousand years.”

Janus looked at Koni, but the Verazlan woman’s attention was focused out of the window as family members and household staff came to greet or assist them. A thousand years. No one held anything that long on Irkalla. Colonies collapsed and were eventually reclaimed. Families split up, moved, or were exiled. Janus had spent twelve years in one dome, twelve years in another, and then he’d been forced to leave the planet altogether. Motragi towns and villages were built where they were most useful, and sometimes they moved when new discoveries were made, allowing the jungle to reclaim the former settlement. Pugarians built cheaply and focused on trade routes and crossroads. They lived in those buildings until they fell apart, but the makeup of their townships constantly changed. He thought about what Koni said in the Hall of the Fallen, about Verazlans holding their ground at all costs, and he understood. A thousand years! Who could bear the burden of ending that much history?

The team got out of the vehicles.

“What do I do with Fury?” Janus asked.

“Jacko can take her to the stables,” Koni said.

A servant—presumably Jacko—came to take Fury’s lead. Janus handed it over. “Do you need to know what she eats?”

“They already know,” Koni said, and Jacko smiled at her fondly and bowed before taking Fury away.

Koni’s entire demeanor had changed. Janus didn’t know exactly what it was. She seemed both more relaxed and yet taller and more vibrant. Servants and lesser family members approached her, and Koni spoke to them calmly with the faintest lilt in her tone. Janus would have called it grace in anyone else, but this was Koni!

“Cousin Dee moved out of Lacantunia House so you could use the space,” Tialli said, approaching Koni in a cloud of attendants.

“That’s kind of her,” Koni said with a twinkle in her eye.

Tialli hugged her daughter, although there was a ceremonial feel to it.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Koni still seemed to enjoy it.

“Bet the grub’ll be good,” Mick said, coming to stand next to Janus with his hands on his belt buckle.

“Yeah,” Janus said, feeling like they’d entered a different world when they drove into the compound, and if he’d learned anything from living on Krandermore for the past year, it was that new worlds always hid new dangers.

***

Janus paced as he and the rest of the team waited for the banquet to begin. Koni was off void-knows-where, getting reacquainted with her fifty-first cousin four times removed or some other nonsense, and Janus knew his frustration wasn’t fair, but he still felt it.

“Will you stop moving back and forth?” Lira said. “You’re making me more seasick than the Fudo-Maru did.”

“During the fight with the tentacarth or during the flash flood?” Janus asked with a wry grin.

“Both,” Lira said, standing up. She walked over to the small balcony and looked at the small interior garden two stories below.

Lacantunia House was a “small” three-story residence within the greater compound. The second floor was a sort of open living and lounging area with balconies on two sides that allowed a pleasant breeze to flow through it. The floor above them was made up of several bedrooms and personal offices. It had been occupied by a lesser family and her entourage but was now given over to Team Invarian.

“I’m worried about the score,” Janus said. “After what we did in Hayyam, even if this ‘externality’ was removed from the calculation, it should have been higher.”

“Are you worried that we’re falling behind or that destroying the Greed Leaf lab was the wrong move?” Lira asked.

“Yes,” Janus said, and they both laughed. He wiped his mouth with his hand and joined her at the railing. “I thought it was the right choice.”

He looked down at the garden. It was a small, reflective kind of place, with carefully arranged fronds and pools full of slow-swimming bio-luminescent fish. He spotted one of the Atl-Verazlan staff members coming toward them with Fury on a leash. She looked up and met his eyes, letting out a playful belch of fire.

“I thought they were keeping her in the stables?” Lira said.

“I thought so, too,” Janus said. He hoped she hadn’t caused any trouble.

“I wouldn’t get distracted by the score,” Ryler said. “There’s a reason we don’t usually provide it to Aspirant teams directly.”

“Because they’d second guess every decision they made?” Lira asked, smirking.

Ryler bobbed his head, pouring himself a glass of water from a small refreshments table. “The simple answer is that we tried it, and sharing live scores with aspirants decreased the discrete number of drastically negative outcomes to near zero.”

Janus frowned. “That sounds like a good thing.”

Ryler raised a finger while he took a drink, then said, “But it also lowered the average scores by close to thirty percent. It was good for individual routes, even for individual stops along the route.”

“But it was bad for the ecosystem as a whole,” Janus said, surprised by Ryler’s openness.

“Yes,” the cultist said. “And the consequences outside the Trials were worse. Aspirants are supposed to force the hard choices, to make people act on things they’ve ignored. That can lead to short-term losses and pain, but the value of the aspirant program and the Trials is one thing almost all factions of the Cult agree on—there’s no denying the data.”

Janus looked at Ryler for a beat, taking a steady breath to still his inherent dislike of the Cult of the Survivor. This new Ryler—who was actually who Ryler had always been—was being open with them, talking casually about the Cult as if it were a legitimate organization with metrics and goals like they were performing maintenance on the people of Survivor’s Refuge and not a pseudo-religious group of fanatics who murdered people for science. “What’s your best explanation, then? Based on what you know and what you can tell me?”

Ryler dipped his head as if acknowledging Janus for understanding his position, and Janus hated himself for it. “If the score is swinging that much in that little time, it means that our team has done or stumbled across something significant and volatile. They’ll have a team working on it, maybe even advanced computing capabilities. As for the cause, it could be an ancient piece of technology or a chain reaction we set off inadvertently. It can’t have been the Greed Leaf because it started before we got there, and it’s only affecting us. There was another aspirant team in Hayyam, and they had at least as much to do with it as we did.”

“By doing nothing?” Janus asked.

“By failing to act,” Ryler said. “It’s a subtle but important difference.”

Janus thought back to the number of times both Primers and fellow outsiders had failed to act on his behalf, back on Irkalla. He knew the difference all too well. “What, then?”

Ryler shrugged. “The only things I can think of that are impactful enough are Copecki’s death, what we discovered about the Motragi, your pet jungle dragon, and Koni.”

Janus heard the scrabble of claws on the limestone floors and turned to see Fury pulling the stablemaster along, straining against the harness. Janus dropped to one knee and checked the flame dog for damage as she jumped up and tried to lick him. “Is something wrong?” he asked the stablemaster.

“No, Emissary,” the older man said, puzzled. He was a wideset Verazlan in simple leathers, and he handed over the leash. “When the others said you had some sort of fire-breathing lizard with you, I didn’t realize that she was tame, or I would have left her with you from the start.”

Janus frowned, ruffling Fury’s longer and softer neck scales. “What do you mean, tame? We picked her up in the wild.”

The stablemaster made a face. “Not possible, sir.”

“I’m not lying…” Janus said, more amused than upset.

“Look at her jaw, Emissary. It’s too small, and her head’s too big compared to her body. Heard you worked in the Cofan labs. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

Janus looked, and then he saw it. It should have been obvious. The only reason he missed it was that she’d been hiding from him, out in the jungle, and none of the other researchers had recognized her species. “She’s domesticated.”

The stablemaster crossed his arms and nodded. “Bet she took right to you once you gained her trust. And she knew right where you were, even when you were out of sight. I’d guess she was bred for hunting, or maybe for search and rescue.”

Janus smiled sheepishly as Fury leaned against him, her body heat like a little furnace. The biologists in Cofan were going to be so embarrassed, but sometimes it took a fresh set of eyes, someone coming in with no assumptions. It felt strange to be on the other side of it, was all, but he was grateful for the stablemaster’s unexpected perspective. “Thank you,” he said.

“No problem, Emissary,” the stablemaster answered, dipping his head before walking away.

Fury wasn’t a wild animal. She was tech—biological in nature, to be sure, and maybe bred using traditional methods, but tech all the same. Was she the reason their score had been so high to start with? And if so, had her bonding with him somehow undone whatever good she was going to cause?