We soon reached a circular opening in the ground, the top of a stairwell that spiraled into darkness. Engravings showed on its top steps, symbols that resembled ancient Iotic, a language no one spoke any more. I recognized them because decades ago, Doctor Orin had been thrilled when I showed him an aqueduct engraved with similar symbols. Ancient Iotic! he told me, as if revealing a great find. Maybe it was; I had no idea. One glyph on these stairs resembled the head of a great lizard, a symbol of strength; another showed the intertwined thorns that represented connections. Power and networks. How much of our history lay buried here, known only to the deepers?
We went down the stairwell, essentially a chute with steps. I could almost feel the weight of the aqueducts above us. Claustrophobia had never bothered me before, but now sweat broke out on my forehead despite the cold air down here.
Finally we reached the bottom. We came out into a cavern supported by natural stone columns, row after row of them forming arched supports for the ceiling, like a cathedral. Swirls of light sparkled everywhere in artistic flourishes. People walked among the columns, their glowing skin difficult to distinguish from the artwork as they passed behind rock formations, then reappeared. Someone was playing a flute, filling the cavern with a haunting song. The melody curled through the air like a musical echo of the light, amplified by acoustics until its resonance filled the space. Such incomparable beauty. The people in Cries, even most of us in the aqueducts, we had no idea what lay so deep below us. I wondered if my mother had ever walked among these arches.
We walked across the cavern, and it glistened around us, green, blue, and gold like a sea grotto. The air chilled my face. Ice glistened on the rock formations, but not all the water froze; glittering drops fell from the stalactites and created a shimmering mist unlike anything in the aqueducts. The uncommon beauty was so mesmerizing, I almost forgot the pain in my wrist.
Our destination turned out to be a curtain of rock on the other side of the cavern. We walked past it into the Down-deeper version of a hospital infirmary. A woman lay on a slab of stone softened with blue carpets. Another woman, a healer it looked like, was offering her a drink from a stone cup. Several children sat on the floor around a low table, laughing as they played a game using colored pebbles. Like everyone else here, they had an ethereal beauty, with those giant eyes, straight noses, and high cheekbones. So much beauty, yes, but also so much pain. One of the girls had no left leg. The boy had an arm that ended at the elbow. The third child had uneven shoulders, one side a handspan lower than the other. Yet they played with such joy, it wrenched my supposedly cast-iron heart.
My guides took me to a chair carved out of the rock wall and set with cushions. I sat down gratefully, careful with my broken wrist. The healer glanced at us, then turned back to her patient. It was several minutes before she came over to us. She watched me with a wary gaze, her eyes like dark pools, the pupils enlarged and dilated to capture light. Her hair looked silver in the bioluminescent glow from the swirls on the walls.
“Who?” she asked.
The woman with me said, “Up-under. Came for the singer.”
“Singer fired at us.” The man indicated me. “Up-under protected. Snapped wrist.”
The healer bent to study my wrist. Up close, I realized her hair was pale gold, a color unheard of among my people. The original human settlers on Raylicon had dark hair, skin, and eyes. Even if deepers had lived here for entire six thousand years since, that didn’t seem long enough for genetic drift to alter their hair and skin so much. I understood now what the doctors meant by “self-imposed” selection. Their ancestors must have engineered their genome to better suit their environment.
The healer lifted my wrist, prodding it, and I gritted my teeth. That hurt.
She glanced at me. “Can give meds for pain.”
“Nahya.” I didn’t want any drugs. I needed to be alert if Calaj showed up again, besides which, gods only knew what she would give me. Undercity medicine either came from the black market or some drug punker turned chemist. They could kill as easily as help.
They say pain is good for the soul, whoever “they” are, so my soul must have been in great shape by the time the healer finished. When she pushed the bones of my wrist into place, I nearly screamed. Mercifully, she worked fast; within minutes she had my wrist splinted and bandaged.
She tapped the back of my hand. “Not use.”
“I ken,” I gritted out.
She nodded, seeming satisfied, and with no more fanfare, returned to her other patient. She tried to coax the woman lying on the slab to drink more water, with no success.
The man followed my gaze to the other patient. “Dying,” he said.
“My sorry,” I murmured. I tilted my head toward the children. “And them?”
“Born that way. Many of us.” He showed me the inside of his arm. Red and purple veins were faintly visible beneath the pale skin. “Skin too thin.”
Gods. The aqueducts had a high rate of birth defects due to our inbred population, but nothing this extreme. “Above-city can help,” I said.
They didn’t even dismiss the idea, they just stared at me as if I spoke gibberish. My suggestion was too far outside their sphere of existence to make sense.
“Changelings help,” the woman said.
“Changeling?” I asked.
“Mother Down-deep, father Undercity.”
Now I saw. They widened their gene pool by taking lovers from among my people. “Why only father from above?”
“Up-under mother mostly goes back up with baby,” the man said.
“Ah.” My eyelids drooped closed. It had taken a long time to come this deep, and it would take even longer to return to the surface. I dreaded that trek. Maybe I should have listened to Doctor Karz and stayed in bed. At least I knew Karz’s name. None of the Down-deepers had offered theirs, and I didn’t insult them by asking.
“Up-under father goes back up, too,” the main said. “Never knows about baby.”
“Hmmm . . .” I tried to listen, but I was sinking deeper—
“Like for you,” the woman added.
I snapped my eyes open. “What?”
“You,” the woman repeated. “Down-deeper.”
“Nahya.” I touched my black hair. “Aqueducts.”
The woman tapped my arm. “Down-deep.”
Puzzled, I glanced down. My arms were my arms. They looked as they always—
Ah, hell. No. That couldn’t be.
My skin was glowing.
“Stop!” My male guide strode at my side. “You must stop.”
“You need rest,” the woman told me. She kept pace as we crossed the cavern.
I kept going. The cathedral-like cavern felt even bigger than before, but I couldn’t stop. How could my skin glow? It had never happened anywhere else. Something was affecting me here, and I had to get out before it turned me into I didn’t know what. Something alien.
The woman grabbed my arm and yanked me to a stop. I almost rolled her over my hip and slammed her to the ground, but I managed to hold back my reflexes.
“Rest,” she said. “Too far. You can’t leave, not now. Later.”
“Now.” I pulled away my arm. “I’m fine.”
“Not fine,” the man said.
I scowled at him. “Got work to do.”
“Insist?” the woman asked.
I crossed my arms, holding back my wince as pain shot through my wrist. “Insist.”
She and the man regarded each other.
“Yah, so.” The woman turned back to me. “Go shorter way.”
I breathed out slowly, calming my adrenaline surge. This place was a maze. If they could show me a shorter route out than the way I came in, I would gladly follow their lead.
The chamber measured only ten paces across, and the base of a stairwell took up most of that room. The stairs spiraled up and around, out of sight. We’d gone even farther into the Down-deep, until the light on the walls faded. Our skin still glowed
. It didn’t seem to hurt the people here, but I had no idea how it might affect me.
“Stairs go to surface,” the man said.
I nodded my thanks. “Good.”
Neither of them looked happy. “Can’t go with you,” the woman said.
It didn’t surprise me. The light on the surface would hurt their eyes. “It’s fine.”
“Not fine,” the woman said. “It hurts to go this way.”
“The light?”
“No. Pressure. On mind.”
I tensed. “The Jagernaut?”
The man shook his head. “No. Older pressure. Pure.”
“What means pure?” I asked.
“Ancient,” the woman said. “Good. But it turns us back.”
I had no clue what they meant. “It will turn me back?”
They looked at each other, then at me. They waited.
After several moments, I said, “What?”
They looked at each other. Again at me.
“No ken,” I said.
The woman nodded as if I had answered a question. “It won’t turn you back.”
“Sure?” I asked.
“Mostly,” she said.
Mostly? I didn’t want to be mostly all right. Down here, mostly and lethal weren’t that far apart. “Just stairs?” I asked. “No guards? No weapons?”
“Just stairs,” she said. “Nothing else.”
“Is trib,” the man said. “For flowing.”
It sounded like he meant the tributary for an underground river. Most bodies of water in the Undercity were contaminated. Poison. We had to filter our water to survive.
“River poison?” I asked.
“River of Ages,” the man said.
“I’ll be careful.” I never drank unpurified water.
They seemed satisfied with this assurance.
I motioned at the stairwell. “Where come out?” From my estimate, it would let me out in the desert at quite a distance from Cries.
“Temple,” the woman said.
“Izu Yaxlan?” I asked. That didn’t seem right. Those ruins were in another direction.
“Nahya,” the man said. “Temple alone.”
Max, do you know what they’re talking about? I asked.
No, he thought. According to the map I’m making, right now we’re under open desert. I don’t have much data on this region, however.
Why not? I had given him access to every known map of the world.
Probably because not much is up there. He paused. I’m having trouble with my positioning systems. A contaminant is filtering into your gauntlets. I’m not sure where we are.
Damn. I had to get out of here. Will this staircase let me out close to Cries to walk home?
Yes, you should manage, though it would be better if you weren’t so worn out.
I regarded my two guides. “My thanks for your help.”
They both nodded, looking like angelic ghosts, which made me wonder if this was a hallucination induced by whatever contaminant was bothering Max.
It’s not a hallucination, Max thought. Yet. You should leave.
I started up the stairs.
Up and around.
Up and around.
It was like ascending a chute. My elbows bumped the walls, and I reminded myself I wasn’t claustrophobic. Although my wrist ached and my head hurt, neither felt unbearable. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except I had a long way to go.
Eventually I reached the first landing, a flat circle about one meter across tiled with stone mosaics. I leaned against the wall, resting. Max, how long have I been climbing?
About eight minutes.
It felt longer. I wanted to be done. My head throbbed.
I set off again, up and around. The stairwell narrowed until the walls scraped my shoulders. Whoever built this exit must have been smaller than modern Raylicans, which eliminated the Abaj but not my people. In the Undercity, we tended to be shorter than the citizens of Cries. Poverty did that to you. The deepers seemed even smaller. My height came from a combination of genetics and a better diet than my peers. As much as I’d hated the orphanage where I spent the first three years of my life, with its cold halls and uncaring adults, I benefited from their healthy food. And for all that Dig struggled with her anger toward her mother, a relationship forged in the bitter furnace of the drug trade, the tainted wealth from the cartel kept her from starving, and she had always made sure Jak, Gourd, and I had enough to eat.
In our youth, I had assumed Dig would turn away from the cartel, given how much she hated it. Yet in the end she had taken over the Kajada cartel. Maybe she hadn’t known any other way. Not so for her children; Dig refused to let them walk that path. She had arranged with a gentle family to take them in if she ever died, and the three youngest lived there now. Dig’s eldest daughter had joined the military, only the second person after me in many generations.
I kept climbing.
Up and around.
Up and around.
I reached another landing and sagged against the wall, closing my eyes while I rubbed my temples. Gods, they hurt. The pain felt like a vise tightening around my head.
Max, how much farther? I asked.
If this stairwell goes straight up, I’d say you’re about a third of the way out.
Only a third? I felt too tired to reach the top, but I’d gone too far to retreat. The hike back to the infirmary was even farther than to the top of these stairs. Max, my head is killing me. Have my meds give me more pain killers.
Done.
I started up the stairs again, moving more slowly now.
Up and around.
Up and around
I didn’t even make the next landing before I had to stop again. I stood with my body braced between the walls, my forehead resting against the roughened stone, my eyes closed. Max, how long until the medicine starts working?
It should be working. He was doing one hell of a job simulating worry. If you couldn’t tell an EI’s simulated emotions from the real thing, how did you know they weren’t real? I had no answer. I could barely think. My head blazed.
Bhaaj, something is wrong, Max thought.
No kidding. Just . . . have to get out. I climbed one more step, bracing my uninjured hand against the wall. Another step. Then I stood, unable to move, staring at the roughened walls.
After a moment, my beleaguered brain comprehended that the walls weren’t “roughened.” Engravings covered them, glyphs in ancient Iotic. They looked almost perfect, as if nothing had touched these walls for six thousand years. They named this stairwell River of the Ages. No, Corridor of Ages. No, that wasn’t right, either. The stairs led to something called the Corridor of Ages.
I shook my head, then groaned as the pain spiked. I willed the agony to subside. It didn’t cooperate, so with no other choice, I started up the stairs.
How far, I asked, miserable.
I think you’re about halfway, Max thought.
To distract myself, I tried to read the Iotic symbols. “River,” I muttered. “Corridor. Ages.” I stopped. “Holy shit.”
“For a deity, perhaps it’s holy.” Max sounded amused, but it was fake. He seemed scared.
“Do those words sound familiar?” I spoke out loud. It hurt too much to think to Max.
“Yes,” he said dryly. “You cuss all the time.”
“Not those.” I forced myself to resume the climb. “The other words.”
“River, corridor, path, ages? Yes, of course they sound familiar.”
“No,” I whispered. “They don’t.”
“They don’t?”
“I was speaking Iotic.”
“That wasn’t Iotic.”
“Yah, it is. Ancient Iotic.” My fingernails scraped the engraved walls.
Silence. Then he said, “I thought you were speaking the Undercity dialect.”
“I was.” Gods almighty. “Max, it’s ancient Iotic! Our dialect, it’s a version of the language spoken by the people on Raylicon
five thousand years ago.”
“An intriguing discovery, if it’s true.”
I stopped and stared at the stairs, unable to move.
“You have to keep going,” Max said.
“Yah,” I muttered. “Crank up . . . my pain killers.”
“Your meds are already producing the maximum dose”
I put my foot on the next step. Then my other foot. Next step. Other foot.
Up and around, one step at a time.
Another landing.
“Ah . . .” The groan tore out of me. Agony seared my head. My entire body ached. My IR vision had quit working. Darkness surrounded me.
“Bhaaj, keep going,” Max urged. “You have to get out of here.”
I felt my way up the stairwell, blind in the dark. I couldn’t stop, or I’d die here, screaming in pain, buried under the desert. No one would find me. The deepers couldn’t come . . . no one else knew . . .
Dying.
Head splitting.
I sank to my knees, my hands braced on the steps. It felt likes knives were stabbing my broken wrist.
“You can make it,” Max said. “You must be close to the top.”
I crawled up another step.
One more step.
Pain. Dying.
One more—
Barrier.
NO! I struck out blindly. A wall blocked the stairs. I banged my fist on it, and a hollow boom rang out. Couldn’t go down, couldn’t go up, dying, dying, dying . . .
Someone was calling me, saying my name over and over.
“Bhaaj, answer.” Max kept speaking, calm on the surface, desperate underneath. “Bhaaj!”
“Yah,” I whispered.
“The door must have a release mechanism. Find it.”
“Can’t move—” Even as I spoke, I swiped my uninjured hand over the wall, blindly. Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop—
I hit a heavy stone bar, horizontal, held against the wall by bands of metal. I pushed the bar—and with a grating scrape, it slid upward.
The door suddenly gave way. I fell forward and slammed onto a stone floor. Groaning, I rolled onto my back in the dark. This place felt different, large instead of confined.