the bunk hanging over him. There was a thin mist in those eyes, “But I remember seeing something. I don’t remember what it was, but I thought I was dying. I think it’s the last thing I’ll ever see well. It ruined my eyes.” He paused, then sighing, said, “Maybe I’ll get glasses. Does that take long?”
The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I let go of his hand. Thunfir reached out, grasping the air around him, his voice becoming distant like the wind.
John Newlywed. It was unmistakable. The voice I had heard making the announcement over the intercom, the one that seemed familiar and yet strangely out of place, it was the same voice that had led me through my eye exam. The soothing and strangely clinical tones were exactly what we would have expected. And why not? The Plexis had every other kind of sensor to ensure it was operating at peak efficiency. Why not a voice to declare when it was dying? Of course something like that would be necessary, even in a world where experts would be constantly monitoring the FNF generator.
A seed of doubt sprouted in my mind, and I slowly started backing away. Thunfir was leaning up slowly, wincing in pain as he tried to lever himself out of bed. My chair clattered to the ground.
Could someone take the voice of John Newlywed out of the store and modify it to announce a radiation leak? Could someone fashion a hoax of this magnitude if they knew how the machines within the Plexis operated?
It couldn’t be a lie. There was no reason, no justification for it.
“Thunfir,” I said, a pain wholly alien to me suddenly gripping my chest, “Something isn’t right. Something is terribly wrong.”
- - -
The construction of the KFM ritual device is an art that rose to prominence in the generations following the first exchange to track the danger of fallout laden weather patterns. The actual mechanism by which it works has been debated by scholars, shamans, and farmers alike. The only things that are still known for certain are how to build them, and that they are the only known way a simple scavenger can reliably measure the blight. The original design was improved on regionally several times over the years as standardized materials became less reliable.
The etymology of the letters KFM have since been lost in time, but most scholars agree that the final two letters almost certainly stand for Fallout Meter. The first may have, as was often the case at the time, been attributed to the inventor of the device.
The design is simple. Two square pieces of aluminum foil are attached by candle’s wax, suspended over a hollow cylindrical container with a measuring stick running crossways over it.
Static electricity is generated through the rubbing of wool or sack cloth and then applied to an insulated wire suspended over the hanging foil pieces. When the wire discharges, it moves the foil pieces outward - away from each other. The further out the two sheets of foil move, the greater the fallout levels in the area.
And as I sat with trembling fingers, looping wire over wire and suspending the foil inside the container, I silently prayed to the anonymous K in KFM, rubbing two pieces of cloth together vigorously and counting. With a tiny static charge built up in my hand, I touched my finger to the exposed wire suspended over the foil and leveled my head over the makeshift device.
The tiny crackling spark leapt from my outstretched fingertip onto the wire. No movement from the hanging foil. No radiation. The room was perfectly safe.
“No,” I whispered through clenched teeth, “That’s wrong. You did it wrong. Crassus is no liar.”
I seized the pieces of cloth, rubbed them together, built up another static charge, and touched the wire. Once again the foil refused to move. My hands clenched, shook. Tears flowed freely, drawing down my nose and into the device. I hissed, smacking it aside, sending it clattering against the wall. It was impossible.
Crassus had lied. There was no radiation. No meltdown. The Plexis was perfectly safe.
The greatest danger, one that had followed the KFM ritual device through its many generations was that it was too simple, based on properties that even the most informed blight shamans couldn’t explain without resorting to superstition. The actual science of it had been lost over the ages. And it looked like any number of birdgut reliant augers. But those who ignored its accuracy did so at their own peril. I stared long at the metal cylinder resting on its side in the corner. For the first time in my life, all faith in the device was lost. It was a toy.
A useless toy.
“Ebon,” Thunfir groaned, spacing his words with thick weakening breaths, “What is it?”
I stumbled out of the apartment we had shared these many months, carried myself down the hallway, and stared out as our own line of men and women disappeared up the hill into the distance. They were loaded down, carrying everything they could into what would soon become night.
My head was swimming. Before I knew what I was doing, I had burst back into the apartment and grabbed my hunting rifle. I gripped it tightly, strangling it in my hands. The gentle alarm was chiming, and John Newlywed’s voice came through once again,
“Please make your way to the exit as soon as possible. Radiation levels have reached 1.3 millisieverts per hour. Prolonged exposure could have serious deleterious effects.”
Rounding the corner I faced another empty hallway. Down six flights of stairs, in the very heart of the building I would find the doorway to the massive spherical chamber that held the egg. If the radiation was as high as the intercom was saying, I would never reach it. I had seen what 1.3 millisieverts per hour would do to a living human. What’s more, if the radiation burned me down I would die happily. If there was any threat from the reactor, it would mean Crassus and Euclid hadn’t conspired to betray us. It would mean the voice wasn’t all a lie. It would mean I had made a mistake while constructing the KFM. We would die as a family together. It was a death I could have lived with.
I pulled back the bolt on my rifle, biting my teeth hard into one another, housing a shell in the chamber. The doors to the generator room slid open. The temperature was cool. There were no alarms. There was nothing but the gentle thrum of machinery. And a voice. Euclid leaned down and spoke into an intercom.
“Crassus, he’s here. Get up here. Now.”
The room was large. Much larger than the standard shops in the rest of the Plexis. In the center was a thick polished sphere suspended by massive tubes. All around me, surrounding every control panel were large wooden barrels and metal casks. I recognized them from our battle with the walking city. The serpentine. No one had been there to remove them from this room. There hadn’t been time. Euclid was standing on one of the catwalks surrounding the egg, writing in his notebook. He glanced up casually, and waved,
“Hello, there. I suppose we shouldn’t dance around the fact that the reactor’s not going to melt down.”
“It might still,” I said pointing the rifle down at one of the barrels, “But I want to know why you sent everyone away first.”
He stared down at me, moving to one of the stairways and pursing his lips in contemplation, as if unsure of where to begin. Calmly he held out his hands, letting them wave gently as he lowered himself down to the steel tiled floor,
“You don’t mean that. Ebon, you’ve got to trust me. Don’t do anything rash, because this is all going to make a whole lot more sense in a few minutes.”
“Trust isn’t going to come easy to you,” I said, turning the gun back to him and narrowing my eye down the scope, painting the scope’s dots on his chest, “And that’s where you should stop. Right there.”
“Remember the day I arrived? It feels like a lifetime ago now, but it was only a few months. It was before Thunfir was leader. Before the spider city appeared. Before the Thakka Cluster. I’ll never forget how you welcomed me. You said this place held wonders to finally rival the nightmares you had witnessed out there in the untamed lands. It was something wonderful, worth fighting - and yes - even dying for,” he paused, “But
it wasn’t the first time I had seen something wonderful.”
“The spider city,” I said, realization slowly creeping in. His words resonated in my mind, ‘I heard about this place and swore my feet would not touch the ground until I reached it.’
“The nameless, faceless, soulless spider city. My home, yes. Full of soulless people. They subjugated the land, taking from it what they wished. But they did nothing in return. You see, that’s the main thing the old world knew about that we don’t. Sacrifice. Once upon a time people worked together until their fingers bled, not because they were slaves, but because they shared a common vision. They had an identity that extended beyond themselves. Beyond even the simple collection of friendly tribes and warbands. They crafted societies that demanded respect, and enforced order. And a long time ago, the city I was from did that as well.”
“Where did it come from?” I asked.
“A time before us. Much more than that I can’t tell you. Information was surprisingly lacking back home. They had theories, but inbreeding claimed most of the genuine intellect decades ago. Then one day they came across a small village, shortly after a slave rebellion left them without living laborers, and they found me. I was garbage when it came to anything useful, but an old man took mercy on me. He showed