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Many Many Years Assignment

In the oldest days, the world had been a water droplet with a pebble at its core. It floated through the recesses of space while burning rock, hidden by blue oceans, came to the surface of the world and cooled. After a time, the great, cool rock now marking the world was pulled into pieces, forming continents. These continents eventually came to be inhabited by life.

The first intelligent beings to come to the world of land and water were the Dragonfolk who knew and know all things. The Daemen and the Raethians followed the Dragonfolk and were in turn followed by the Humans. A myriad of other creatures came to inhabit the world before, after, and in between the rise of these races, but did not come to dominate the globe’s continents as those four did.

After thousands of years of history, the world saw the Dragonfolk settled into their isolated archipelago, the Verde Islands, and the Raethians content on their small, round continent, Raeth, while the Humans and the Daemen settled onto the long western continent, Nassab.

And thousands of years of history would follow in which other groups and other continents would rise and fall.

In a verdant field of rolling hills and lush meadows, stood a castle. The castle was of worn gray stone, and a throng of buildings huddled under its rule. The buildings in turn were surrounded by fields and thatch-roofed houses that supplied the food for the buildings and caste. Around the fields and thatch-roofed houses were rolling hills, and around the hills were meadows which were surrounded by forest, and the world spiraled out from there, to the minds of those who lived in this city surrounded by hills, all the way past the shores of Nassab, and out to the Islands of Cryparta, Raeth, the Verde Islands, and a host of other exotic places.

And this was fine.

But it happened, once, that the verdant fields and meadows, that the smooth, grassy hills, and the tall, friendly trees, turned against the castle of stone and its city and its thatch-roofed houses.

It happened that, one day, plants killed as men do.

Long before he had ever been born, his unimaginably ancient relatives had watched something positive become something thoroughly negative.

And they had shrugged.

But that was the nature of the Daemen, when push came to shove, and most of them were fairly sadistic, anyhow.

Other persons, with more knowledge of life and nature, had not shrugged, however, and they had decided to do something about the darkness that now plagued the world. One of these persons had come to the village of his ancestors, the village he had grown up in, and had said, “Here is great good turned to evil. Who will not be tempted by it?”

And it was his unimaginably distant grandfather who had stepped forward and said, “I will not.”

Personally, it was his own conviction that this remarkably far-off relation had just been pushed out of the crowd by someone with a mind for a joke and gotten saddled with the job. But who was he to say?

So the one who had come gave to his grandfather a vibrant, green stone that glowed with the string of life that writhed inside it, and she, the one who had come, said, “Then you and your kin will be guardian of this until such time as it must be restored.” And then she told him a story and a plan.

They then broke apart the great, green stone, and to his far-distant grandfather’s kin and clan, the pieces of the stone were distributed. For centuries, they passed from Daeman to Daeman as one person died and the next took up his or her inheritance.

And always there was one who bore a mark upon their right cheek – a sigil like a cross whose right side had been combined with the number-three – and always this one held the legend that the others remembered not.

And the pieces became a sign of the clan, and the sigil became a burden to the bearer, and, somehow, no one was ever tempted. At least, not by the verdant, green stone that now hung in pieces about an entire, massive family’s necks.

The secrets of the tale that the one who had come told were never uttered to those who need not know, and, somehow, everything was fine.

Until recently.

A little less than four decades ago, a small Daeman boy was born. His parents loved and cared for him in the usual method of the Daemen which is to say, hardly at all.

This small Daeman boy grew with a piece of stone hanging from his neck, his dark hair flopping in his eyes, and the conical ears of his race poking out from his head horizontally, with that usual racial inconsistency common to Daemen. The small boy played in mud and enjoyed little things and proved to be less cruel and dramatic than the rest of his race. He would always prefer to let the lizard crawl along his arm than to try to separate it from its own.

But such is the nature of a misfit child in any society as it is the nature of society to be very, very peculiar.

At the tender age of ten, which is the Daemen equivalent of five human years, the small Daemen boy was brought before his town’s leader where he was made to stand quietly while the old Daeman looked him over and thought.

“Well,” the man had said after a time. “You certainly are unfortunate, boy.” The man’s voice had sounded like paper; paper being crumpled and uncrumpled, crumpled and uncrumpled.

The boy had looked up at him from between strands of dark hair, and had said nothing, though he certainly inquired.

“Indeed,” the voice had crackled. “You have been truly unfortunate in the timing of your birth. Why, you could have cropped up sooner, or perhaps you could have been the child your mother’s womb now coddles. But no matter, you have come when you have and there is naught else for it.”

The boy’s head had tipped to the side, and he had frowned.

The man had considered the boy and had allowed himself a tired old sigh. “Your name is Asher, is it not?”

The boy had brightened then, pleased to be introduced to a subject he knew something of, and had nodded vigorously.

“Well, Asher. I have something very important to tell you,” the man had said. Then he told the boy a story and a plan.

And not a moment later, the boy had been brought to the village temple and had had a cross bred with the number three sliced, carefully, into his face.

His right cheek had stung for a week.

The stone castle that had stood, so bold, in a field of plants had been replaced by its surviving people and their children. Where it once sat, a bulbous building of man and science stood in its place. Metal like polished copper formed the organic shapes that made an immense, entirely enclosed, city several hundred feet above the ground, supported by thin legs. The city was one of metal and rubber; on maps it was called the Metal City, but its inhabitants called it MetC.

Its inhabitants had never once in their lives seen the sun nor walked upon the earth nor breathed fresh air. They lived entirely isolated from all things of nature with false food and walls of sienna brown and turquoise. They passed through boxes that scanned their DNA for unacceptable genes and trapped them if one such was found. Some of them lived in old, silver pipelines that ran through the city and that had once been used for the city’s cleaning crew but now were the “Homeless Pipelines” – the realm of the rejected genes who stole now to live.

MetC feared all outsiders and brought nothing within its walls if it could prevent such, though there was still one door to the outside. All of MetC’s air was reprocessed and then processed again. Plant life was outlawed, and any who could do anything to change that a criminal.

But of these things, the most curious was the single way in and out: A turquoise, metal box – both door and scanning device – led to a balcony from the old stone castle and to true, open air.

Not to mention several hundred feet of empty space between the balcony and the ground.

And if you survived that drop through guile or magic or miracle, there was a whole country’s worth of desert to get through.

When the boy, Asher, aged twenty years (though he was, in all respects, the equivalent of a ten-year-old human), one of his older brothers, Jiff’un, went missing.

It was not and is not unusual for Daemen to wander off for an extended period of time without saying anything about it, but usually there’s something in the Human newspapers about horrible demons terrorizing the local populace in that instance. As there wasn’t, Jiff’un’s absence was of some concern.

Several small search parties set out to locate Jiff’un, and though the local populaces were thoroughly terrorized and plenty of small hints of Jiff’un’s passing through a town or village discovered, the boy was never found, and it was, with a shrug and a sigh, presumed that he had been killed by some overzealous man whose farm had been razed by a passing Daeman and who didn’t particularly care which Daeman was responsible.

After a suitable period of mourning, life in Asher’s hometown resumed as normal, though down, Asher and the village elder noted wryly, one small, green shard of stone.

Ella hadn’t been born when the outsiders came, but Rhoder had been four and while that made his memory of the event faulty, at best, he did remember something.

The outsiders had come through the desert in a little vehicle with a small, black box in their hands. They drove up to MetC and two guards who had been standing on MetC’s incongruous stone balcony had thrown to the outsiders a ladder. The outsiders climbed up, black box in hand, and passed through the DNA-scanning checkpoint that served as door without having their DNA scanned; for one day, the checkpoints that so plagued the anomalous inhabitants of MetC did not serve their purpose, and the homeless ran rampant and free.

The outsiders passed through the throngs and crowds of MetC’s startled inhabitants and went unimpeded by the checkpoints that may have declared them unfit for MetC’s halls. The city’s guards brought the outsiders to a massive vault, recently installed, and disappeared inside with them. Later, when the outsiders and guards reappeared, the tiny obsidian cube was nowhere in evidence.

The outsiders left, promptly, the way they had come. The checkpoints came back online and life resumed.

The Homeless Pipelines were alive with talk of the incident for weeks, and much was speculated.

But no one could puzzle out what was in the box.

Roughly two years ago, a shiver of fear ran through the Metal City’s general populace.

Something and gotten inside MetC without being invited.

And that something set off the Checkpoints without ever once getting trapped inside them.

The rejects of the Checkpoints were both exhilarated and afraid. That it was possible to evade the Checkpoints was nothing short of exciting and allowed a sorrowful people some hope while inspiring others to seek out the method to avoiding the Checkpoints. But that something could evade the Checkpoints… well. What power was that?

Naturally, the populace as accepted by the Checkpoints was simply terrified, and they became doubly so when MetC’s guards began expressing genuine fright.

The something that had gotten inside the supposedly impenetrable citybecame known as “The Shadow” for its ability to appear from shady corners and envelop a man in such darkness as the reason for the man’s chilling screams could not be fathomed. The Shadow appeared in man-form, but with no features to distinguish for shadow and darkness clung too close to its frame. The eyes, however, burned through the darkness and paralyzed all who found their own eyes locked with those hellish ones just before they experienced a highly uncomfortable death.

But the Shadow seemed to be limited to MetC’s vaults of food or treasure or water – places that the average person passed without ever really knowing about. The Shadow appeared in engine rooms and the places dedicated to circulating MetC’s reprocessed air. The Shadow flitted here, flitted there, and once or twice flew through the Homeless Pipelines like a shot.

But never once did it harm a civilian.

This did not stop the civilians from fearing and wishing to harm it.

Theo unscrewed the metal plate and sorted through a series of wires. It took what seemed a lifetime, but he finally located the dark green one and yanked it from its place. He had all of five seconds to put the wire back, he knew, but supposed that it would be enough.

The fourteen-year-old boy pulled a small plastic box from his pocket and forced the green wire through a hole in its top. He then fastened a black wire hanging from the box’s bottom into the place where the green wire had been. He screwed the metal face plate back in its place and dashed off around the corner and into the Homeless Pipelines.

Ella was already there, waiting. “So?” she said.

“Should be fine. We just need to wait and see if the thing starts beeping ‘cause it’s been tampered with.

“How long do we have to wait?”

“Just one minute.”

“Okay.”

One minute later, no warning systems had sounded; the two teenagers exited the Pipelines to gaze upon the Checkpoint at midnight. The empty hallway stared back, and Theo broke into a grin.

“Awesome! That means you should be able to get through Box 3A2QN59 now!” he said.

“Is it safe? Should we test it?” Ella said, biting her lip.

Theo shrugged. “If you want to try it, then go ahead.”

“Well, that would be best, right? Better to find out that it doesn’t work now than have you go through all the trouble of getting the rest of them set up and then find out that they don’t work when all four of us are running for our lives and get stuck in the Checkpoint, right?”

“Well, sure, yeah,” Theo said. “Makes sense. But I’m totally positive that they’ll work.”

Ella bit back her remark on that not being a guarantee of success but rather approached the Checkpoint instead.

The turquoise doors snapped open to engulf her, making her jump back, startled. Theo laughed at her fright, and she shot him a silencing look before stepping, hesitantly, into the machine’s maw. The doors closed with the same speed with which they had opened. A hiss of air, as of the doors sealing themselves shut, shivered through the air.

Ella’s skin broke out into goosebumps and she glanced nervously at her surroundings, which were markedly bare and gaudily turquoise.

There was a blank screen on one wall which was the only thing to look at. She directed her gaze to it, only to see the screen burst to life. The bottom of the screen displayed a series of Gs paired with Cs and Ts paired with As. To the left of the screen, the double-helix of a DNA strand began to spin, slowly at first, but then picking up in speed so that it was hard to distinguish its features. The letters along the bottom began scrolling by, almost too fast to read, and on the right of the screen words appeared and flashed by rapidly so that Ella caught, at most, half a word.

She saw blue flash by once, and presumed that the machine had just read the genes determining her eye color. Walnut slipped by, and she guessed that meant hair even as she read dryad and knew that the machine had spotted the anomaly that barred her from the Checkpoints – her ability to sense life and grow plants; her nature magic.

Hundreds of other brief phrases flashed by, and she wasn’t always sure what the pieces she caught referred to though others were quite obvious. Slim and short made perfect sense, but hemoglobin count and O+ didn’t seem to be pertinent to anything.

As the awe at seeing her DNA whiz by began to fade, the process slowed and, eventually, the DNA stopped spinning, the letters stopped flying, and the only words on the right of the screen were

HUMAN – ANOMALY: DRYAD

SEARCHING DATABASE…

SUBJECT ACCEPTED. Please proceed through door

The door to Ella’s right shot open, and she quickly filed through, letting loose a breath she hadn’t known she’d held.

Theo was on the other side of the Checkpoint, setting up Box 3AB2945K for his own travel through the would-be barrier. He screwed the faceplate hiding the machine’s inner workings and his modifications from sight, grinned, and slipped into the machine. A surprisingly short time later, the doors on Ella’s side slid open and he came out laughing.

“Man, I love this stuff,” he said. “Computers are so fun!” He bustled over to the far end of the corridor and the Checkpoint stalls located on that side. Generally speaking, MetC’s corridors were broken, by the Checkpoints and a sense of common courtesy, into two “traffic lanes.” Thus, the Checkpoints on the right side of a hallway allowed passage through in only the forward direction for persons on that side. The Checkpoint stalls on the left side did the same, but for people traveling on the left side. Thus, Theo had to modify the Checkpoint stalls on either side of a Checkpoint so he and his companions could move through Checkpoints regardless of their direction.

Presently, he did so, and the two compatriots passed through their respective stalls, still uneasy with watching their DNA spin before them, but finding the sensation of uncomfortable peculiarity already fading. Theo went on to set up two more pairs of Checkpoint boxes that his other companions might pass through.

“I’m going to start carrying these little modifiers around,” he said. “So if we get in a tight spot and I haven’t set up the boxes at a given Checkpoint yet, I’ll always have the tools to save our hides.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ella said agreeably. “Anyway, we should get back to the safehouse before Daiza and Rhoder start worrying.”

“Yeah. Man, those two fret like they were our parents or something.”

Ella grinned in response and started off toward their little hideout, Theo in tow.

A year after the Shadow’s arrival, MetC’s guards chased the Shadow from a vault and trapped it in one of the Homeless Pipelines. Then they flooded the lines with water from the sewage reprocessing vaults.

When the lines were drained, not a soul was dead. The Homeless who had been in the line in question jibbered about a man made of shadow with glowing red eyes who scooped them up and took them through small shadows into another pipeline. They said the shadow-man had gone back for every last person before finally sitting with the people he had saved until the lines were drained. Then the Shadow had passed back through a little dark space in the corner of a wall with not so much as a farewell.

Two days later, the Shadow appeared again, in the chief guard’s room.

The chief was dead, and scratched onto his wall was a message: NO MORE CIVILIAN DEATH.

And that was all.

Ella and Daiza had grown up in the Homeless Pipelines as friends and compatriots. When Ella was five, the two girls met the eleven-year-old Rhoder, a pretty burly kid who had been on his own in the Pipelines for longer than was necessarily healthy. He and the girls joined up as a group, and he proved to be an invaluable asset. Some nine years later, the trio met a twelve-year-old Theo who gladly became the fourth member of their posse and who happened to have managed to locate and hide an unused apartment outside of the Pipelines. This secret two-room “house” had become their hide-out and home, and it was certainly a grand improvement from the Pipelines where anything could and usually did happen.

It was also far more secret. The Pipelines were generally ignored by the local populace unless someone got a little too bold and stole their supper from the wrong civilian, but the fact remained that people knew it was there; which, of course, meant that, at any time, someone might come in and arrest you and goodness knows what your punishment for being born would be.

In any case, the apartment was a safe place hidden behind one of the peach-colored metal wall panels. Knock three times to get the inhabitants’ attention; they’ll check the security cameras Theo aimed to watch that corner, and then they’ll let you in.

Ella banged thrice on the panel and waited until she heard the soft whoosh of the apartment’s actual door sliding up. The panel swung open to admit Theo and herself; Daiza was standing in the entrance way and shut the doors behind them. “You two are late!” she said. “You’re so incredibly, awfully, amazingly late!”

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, mom,” Theo said. He ducked to avoid her flying hand and scurried up the three stairs and into the living space and, from there, the corner of the large room that contained his workstation and the monitors connected to security cameras throughout MetC whose footage he had learned to loop and alter, thus preventing any of MetC’s security forces from witnessing his or his fellows’ movements.

Daiza frowned after him then turned to Ella. “So? What took you?”

“It just took Theo longer to rewire the Checkpoints than he thought. When he pulled a wire from the first one, an alarm went off and we had to scurry into the Pipelines to avoid the guards who started coming our way. Apparently the thing’s on some sort of timer and if you take out a wire and don’t put it back soon enough, the alarm goes off.”

“What?! You almost got caught!”

Ella laughed. “Not really. The guards thought that it was the Shadow that set off the alarm, so we went to a different set of Checkpoints and made the modifications on those, and everything went fine.” She grinned broadly. “The modifications work, Daiza! We can go wherever we want now!”

Daiza couldn’t help the small grin that twitched onto her face then. “Well, modifications or no, you two should probably eat something.”

The girls walked into the living space; it was every room a house required all combined into one sizeable area. A couch, table, and bookshelf of illegal books took up most of the space, and two sets of partitions blocked off the kitchen-area and the sleeping space, respectively. A few pots of equally illegal soil were scattered throughout the apartment with plants, grown special by Ella and her magical green thumb, thriving within them. The sleeping space was simply a space with sleeping mats on the floor, and the kitchen was similarly limited, though there was a small oven, stove, and a tiny refrigerator. Mostly, though, the kitchen was small counter space with cutlery, pots, pans, plates, and a few bowls. Theo’s workspace had taken up a corner across from the kitchen. Several TVs, computers, and a hoard of other tools and devices that Ella, Rhoder, and Daiza didn’t understand were all hanging off the walls or sitting on a relatively low desk. Theo could generally be found here, in a bean-bag chair or a rolling office chair, working on some knick-knack or other. Beside his workspace was the door to the bathroom which contained a sink, a toilet, and a basin. There was also a pump system that Theo had rigged to get water from the sink into the tub and to move the used tub water through to the sink. (After all, they had had to make do with what plumbing was already in the apartment, and a tub hadn’t been involved. Apparently, the apartment had been half-constructed when Theo found it. He therefore found ways to ensure that they had all the basic amenities they required without drawing attention to themselves or their apartment.)

The house was, all in all, a small, make-shift space, but none of the group noticed, for it was the most any of them had ever had.

Rhoder stepped out of the kitchen space with a pan of some sort of soup in his hand. “’Ey, Ella!” he said, beaming. “Hungry?”

“You bet,” she said.

Theo stretched and leaned so far back in his chair as to almost tip it over.

Ella peered ‘round the partition between kitchen and living space to look at him; Theo grinned, sheepishly, back. “Almost fell,” he said by way of explanation.

She shrugged, nodded, and resumed reading the evening newspaper (swiftly stolen perhaps two hours before from the nearest newspaper stand). No news of the alteration to the Checkpoints. It had been a week since that first venture out, and Theo had gone out with Ella or Daiza or Rhoder several times since to modify several of the other Checkpoints. But, apparently, no one had noticed any change.

Well, good.

She flipped back to the front page to begin reading the news in earnest.

“Anything good?” Daiza asked, coming over and leaning on the back of Ella’s chair.

She shrugged. “Well, more about that Shadow. Apparently it’s appearing more often and doing more damage. ‘Experts theorize that the Shadow is looking for some artifact’ blahblahblah… ‘the Shadow appears to have left the western half of MetC and has not been spotted in the southeastern section of the city for nearly two weeks. Northeastern residents are advised to…’ diddle-dee-dee. So forth, so on.”

“Huh,” Daiza said. “Weird.”

“Yeah.” Ella flipped to the next page only to have the paper ripped from her hands.

“Look at this!” Daiza exclaimed. “Just check out this headline! ‘Ancient Artifact to be Moved. Residents Blocked From Sector NE12.’”

Theo popped around the corner. “Loot?!”

“Totally!” Daiza whipped around and answered the boy’s beatific grin. “We have got to check this out.”

Rhoder came over presently, hands in pockets. “What are we checking out?”

“An ancient artifact!” Theo announced. “I bet we could sell it on the black market for thousands, whatever it is. Think how much we could buy!”

“That only works if it’s a worthwhile artifact,” Ella pointed out. “If it’s just some dusty old document, I doubt the black market’ll have much of an interest. What is it?”

“Uhm…” Daiza skimmed through the article, frowned, then carefully examined it, running a finger along each line. “It doesn’t say,” she said at last. “There’s no description, no picture, no nothing.”

“Probably just stupid MetC security crap,” Theo said. “And if they’re keeping what it is a secret, it must be valuable. C’mon, let’s find out what we can and go after this thing!” The boy bounded round the kitchen partition and hopped into his chair, nearly upsetting it again. His fingers flew across the keys of the main computer as he searched for information, and information he found.

Ella tapped the earpiece. “Say that again?” she said.

“There should be an air vent nearby. Can you see it?” Theo’s voice crackled over the earpiece.

“Oh, sure. I see it.”

“What’s that tone for?”

“Oh, nothin’ much, It’s just, y’know, about ten feet above me.”

Theo snorted. “Baby. Arright, um… head down the pipeline to your left then take a right at the first intersection. There’ll be one pipe going up and another going down. Take the upward pipe and follow it for, like, five hundred yards. There should be another vent there. In the ground.”

“Okay.”

Ella turned and headed down the first pipeline and took a right at the first intersection.

The Pipelines were, among other things, dim. Red and half-working yellow lights provided the only light, and though the Pipelines were made entirely of a silvery metal, they sure as hell didn’t reflect light all that well. The circular tubes were, furthermore, closed off from the intensely bright, artificial light that the rest of MetC, even the present day’s routes for the city’s cleaning crew, enjoyed. Though doors with the yellow-and-black stripes of WARNING or CAUTION appeared frequently, very few of them actually led to the outside, this deep in the Pipelines.

The Pipelines also echoed. The floor was an industrial grating raised perhaps six inches, perhaps a foot above the bottom of the pipeline that had a nasty tendency to clang. In more inhabited sections of the Pipelines, the noise was decreased some if only because people’s bodies muffled some of the sound, but this far back in the Pipes?

Well, things sucked back here. Ella was jumping at shadows. The little red lights in these tunnels looked like eyes in a shadowy face, if you caught them out of the corner of your eye, just so. It made her think of the reports and descriptions of “the Shadow” and recall some artist renderings.

Creepy.

She came to the sloping pipes and followed the one that was rising until she noticed a small vent low in the left-hand wall. Here she stopped. “Theo, I’ve found the vent and I’m going in,” she said.

“Okay,” Theo’s voice came back.

Using a screwdriver, she removed the vent from its place and crawled into the rectangular shaft behind the grate. “How far do I go in this thing?” she asked, crawling on hand and foot.

“Checking that now,” Theo said. She could hear him typing over the earpiece.

Ella snorted and kept crawling along for a good hundre—

“HOLY--!”

A piece of loose vent gave way under Ella’s weight, and it was a fortunate thing that her reflexes were as sharp as they were for, hanging from the edge of the vent with one hand gripping the metal and bleeding as the edge of the vent bit into her skin, Ella had ample time to notice that she was several hundreds of feet in the air – and she, honestly, couldn’t see the ground. Theo was chattering away in her ear, panicked.

“Shut up, Theo! I’m busy!” she snapped.

She could barely make out some guards on a catwalk far below, but they apparently had missed her scream and never heard the piece of venting hit the ground. This calmed Ella some, though, of course, not entirely. She swung her free hand up to grasp the edge of the vent and winced when the metal began to cut that hand, too. Cautiously, she began a slow pendulum motion, throwing her weight forward and back. There was some sort of rib-like structure some three feet in front of her presumably used to help this tube-like room maintain its shape. If she could swing just enough, she could probably land her feet on the thing and use her momentum to get up onto it. There was definitely enough of a ledge for her…

…maybe.

She swung back and forth for what seemed an age, grinding her teeth against each recurring bite on her hands from the vent’s edge. At length, she decided her momentum was probably sufficient and, anyway, she couldn’t maintain a grip on the vent for much longer.

So she swung forward with extra force and let go.

Her feet did, indeed, connect with the ledge of the rib and her momentum threw her forward enough to be balancing on the very edge of it.

But it wasn’t enough to throw her all the way to safety.

She teetered, pinwheeling her arms and shifting her weight backward and forward in an effort to maintain balance, all the while knowing that she would fall.

And fall, and fall, and fall.

And who knew if she would ever touch bottom?

For a split second, she felt equilibrium return. For a small moment, she thought she was home free. And when she thought it, she relaxed, and then she fell backwards.

What would strike Ella as strange later was that she was sure, she was deathly positive¸ that her feet had left the ledge, that she was half a second into a fall when, suddenly, somehow, she found herself standing on the ledge.

She thought it strange, too, that before she found herself safe, standing and stable on the ledge, she felt what must have been a hand on her back that pushed her up, back to the ledge. It was, for all the world, like the stabilizing hand of a parent. And like that parental safety line, the pressure of the hand remained, ready to catch her should she fall again, until she turned her head to see who could possibly be there.

And there was nothing but a sensation that someone had disappeared.

But—

“Ella! Are you alright?!”

She winced away from the sound of the earpiece. “No need to shout, Theo. I’m okay. Well, my hands are a mess, but otherwise I’m okay.” Ella sat down and began to rummage in her bag of supplies in search of bandages.

Theo paused – probably to take a calming breath. “Okay. Where are you?” he said.

“Um…” she said, and took in her surroundings, even as she began bandaging her hands. To all appearances, she was in a dark tube with a grill catwalk running through its center. Circular metal “ribs” marked the tube at regular intervals – it was one of these that she was standing on. “I think I might be in the vault,” she said after a moment. “It’s a bit scarcer than the vaults usually are, but it’s just as dark and heavily guarded.”

“Oh. Then no problem then,” Theo said.

“Well, not exactly. I’m kinda on the ceiling.”

“…what?”

“Yeah, I know. Hold on. I’ve got an idea.” Ella began rummaging through her bag again, searching for a coil of rope. “There’s these big holes in the flat parts of these, like, support arcs in the ceiling – that’s what I’m standing on, Theo.”

“And?” he said.

“Well, if I can tie a rope through two of them, to the metal in between, it should be sturdy enough to hold my weight. Then I can use it to get to the catwalk.”

“She said like it wasn’t totally risky,” Theo replied in a dull monotone.

“Oh, shush. Keep quiet if you aren’t going to say anything helpful.” She set about tying the rope between two holes with several sturdy knots, then began to slide down the rope.

The end of the rope was perhaps a yard, horizontally, from the catwalk, but only a foot above it. Ella exercised her weight-swinging move again and landed, safely, on the catwalk, thanks to a little rope-swinging, Tarzan-action. There were two guards she could see on the catwalk presently – both too far off to be little more than vague blotches of approaching light.

Okay, she thought. I can’t stay on the catwalk. She cast about for another place to go, and the holes in the grilled catwalk caught her eye. Ah ha!

When the guards happened by a few moments later, Ella was nowhere in evidence. “Anything happenin’, Hank?” one said.

“N’aw. Same old, same old.”

Ella chuckled mentally to herself from her position hanging beneath the catwalk with fingers and toes (she had taken off her shoes and plopped them in her bag) clinging to the catwalk grill. Slowly and carefully, she began moving, first the left foot, then the right arm, now the right foot, now the left arm.

“So I heard this rumor,” the first guard said.

Hank cut him off, saying, “Oh, hell, not another one of your stories.”

“Hey, hey, hey! This one’s totally legit! I heard it from the boss-man himself,” the first guard said. “He said that people’ve seen the Shadow around these parts. He thinks the Shadow’s gonna come into this vault!”

“Aw, that’s crap,” Hank said. “How’d he know that?”

“I dunno, man, but I brought an extra clip just in case.”

“Oh, like bullets can harm that thing. It’s a shadow; it’s insubstantial.”

“Yeah, whatever, Hank. You say that again when I’m killin’ the Shadow and getting’ the girls.”

“Aw, whatever, man.”

The guards moved off, and Ella moved, silently, below them.

Her heel struck cool metal, surprising her.

The catwalk ended at a massive, silver pedestal formed by successively thinner metal cylinders stacked atop one another. Two guards stood at the end of the catwalk bordering the plinth, leaving Ella at a loss for how she was going to get up onto the thing. After some thinking, she moved so that her hands clung in almost the same space as her toes, then let her feet swing loose. For a moment, it felt as though the sudden shift in her weight would dislodge her fingers and she would fall, but her fingers remained strong, if abused.

It took some nerve, but Ella unhooked the fingers of one hand from their place and moved them forward, then did the same with the other hand, bringing herself closer to the metal cylinder that she meant to climb onto. It looked like there was a small ledge between the wall of the thinnest, topmost cylinder and the one below it. She moved forward again and got the balls of her feet on the ledge then cautiously let go of the catwalk with one hand, sliding her hand up to grip the edge of the topmost cylinder. Once she felt fairly secure, she slid her other hand to the edge, and began moving around the cylinder until she was roughly opposite the catwalk. Then she pulled herself up on to the top of the plinth and, crouching, examined the situation.

The guards were still standing at the end of the catwalk, looking out over it and occasionally murmuring between themselves. The only other thing of note in the area was a small, glass table with a black box in the middle of it and a glass over it.

Something in the box felt alive.

Okay. That was weird. Better not worry about it right now, though.

Quietly, Ella padded over to the table and lifted the glass up to—

Alarms blared through the vault, echoing and jumping off of walls and being lost in the darkness. The guards at the end of the catwalk spun around, guns raised while Ella just stood there, stupidly, a deer in headlights.

The guards began to move to fire and Ella thought Ohnohnohnohnohnohno and—

A shadow dropped from the ceiling, startling the guards and causing one to shriek, “It’s THE SHADOW!” before he was quite separated from his voice box. The other guard turned to run but he was soon incapacitated as well.

And then the Shadow turned to Ella with glowing, red eyes and the dark formlessness of nighttime fear, and all she knew was that something about it felt so positively, alive, more alive than anything that size rightfully could, but now its mouth opened in a wicked grin and it said—

“Way to not check for traps, y’moron.”

Well that kicked her back into gear. “Excuse me?” Shots rang out behind the Shadow who whipped around with a snarl. “Grab that box!” he said to Ella. Paying her no more mind, he gestured to either side of himself and two massive, lithe beasts made of darkness rose up from the ground and barreled down the catwalk to the guards who had fired the shots in question. The creatures pounced on the guards, smothering their horrified screams but not blocking them out entirely.

The Shadow turned again to Ella and held his hand out to her. “C’mon,” he said. “We need to get out before reinforcements come.”

“But—“

“No but, girl. Either you come with me or you go with them. Now come on.”

Not much of a choice, she thought, and took his hand.

The fight to escape was strange, at best. She and the Shadow barreled down the catwalk, single file, and stopped when guards appeared before them. Invariably, the Shadow would gesture somehow and darkness would take a shape and smother the guards, leaving them dead when it left but never quite showing how it had killed them. Once or twice, a particularly brazen guard ran straight up to the Shadow and Ella, and, on these occasions, the Shadow would produce a short knife from seemingly nowhere and kill the guard with a swift slice through the throat.

They ran to some uncertain point of the catwalk whereupon the Shadow stopped and, after dispatching another pair of guards, asked, “You had a rope; where is it?”

Startled, Ella said, “It should be hanging about a yard to the left of the catwalk… There. It’s there. But how did you--?” And without any explanation, the Shadow picked her up in its arms and leapt, catching the rope in one hand and urging her to grasp it and start climbing.

So she did, all the while thinking that the Shadow smelt like apples and wondering how a shadow could have a scent.

Ella crawled out of the vent, swearing at Theo. “Just have the hideout ready when we get there!” she hissed. The Shadow exited the vent after her, somehow seeming to be entirely unimpressed with her or her gang of friends.

“FINE!” Theo shouted; then the earpiece went silent.

Ella spun around. “Okay, Mr. Shadow-man, you—“

“Have a name, actually.” The glowing red eyes faded to vaguely blue gray, and the shadow dripped away to reveal a man roughly her age in appearance with conical ears sticking out from his head horizontally. A mop of dark hair sat on his head, long enough to start falling into his eyes where it was shortest in the front. There was a sigil on his right cheek, plainly cut into his face long ago; it was a cross-shape with a number-three shape sliding off the right horizontal of the cross. His clothes were nothing like those of MetC’s people and were surprisingly clean for clothes that he ought to have been wearing for two years running.

Ella gasped at the sight of his ears. “You’re a demon!”

“We generally prefer Daeman,” he said. “My name is Asher.”

Silence fell before Ella managed to force some words out. “Um, I’m Ella,” she said lamely.

“Fascinating,” was the sarcastic reply.

“You don’t have to be so rude,” she snapped.

“Of course I do,” Asher said. “It gets things done. Now, that box you just stole? I’d like that back, please.”

“…Back?”

He nodded. “Yes, back. This place stole it from my people, and I need it.”

Ella hesitated. It could be worth a whole lot of money. And why give it to this total stranger…? Well, he did have those Shadow powers. “Why do you need it?” she said at last.

“Hopefully to save the world.”

That got a quick bark of laughter out of her. “Save the world? That’s ridiculous.”

“Not exactly,” he said. He seemed to think for a moment then added, “Look, why don’t you open it?”

Ella hesitated.

“It isn’t going to bite you,” Asher said.

“No, of course not,” she replied quickly, too quickly. She was cautious in taking out and opening the box, nonetheless. Inside the obsidian case was a small, green gem. Inside the gem, a bright squiggle writhed and squirmed. “It’s alive,” Ella breathed.

“You can use Earth Magic?”

She nodded slowly. “What is this?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from the faintly glowing stone with an effort only to see a similar glow emanating from beneath Asher’s shirt.

“It’s a shard of the Atrice,” he said.

“What?”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you, but… well. The Atrice is a large stone filled with more life than you could possibly imagine. Hundreds of years ago, a particularly greedy man created a device that used the Atrice’s life and power to destroy and kill people en masse. It only ever struck once, but that was enough. Have you ever wondered why MetC abhors all plant life and everything to do with the natural world?”

It seemed like a nonsequitor, but… “Are you suggesting that MetC was targeted?”

Asher nodded. “Hundreds of years ago, there was a city made of stone standing in this very spot. It was prosperous and fine, and the people only as selfish as the rest of the world’s people. It became the test subject for the Atrice-weapon. It was swarmed by plants that tore down the buildings and decimated livestock. The plants in the fields pulled themselves from the ground and strangled the people who worked over them. All of the plant-life for miles simply uprooted itself and came to destroy the old stone city. Then all of the plants died, and once they’d rotted away and decomposed, the barren land left behind slowly became a desert, and the few survivors of the cataclysm set to making a new home on the ruins of their old one, but this one, they decided, would be plant proof. And it is. Mostly.

“MetC, the metal city; isolated and alone, it stands as a bulbous blemish on the landscape of a red-brown desert that none quite know how to survive. No plant could survive that desert, and any that did would be unable to get in to MetC. Anything plant-like – such as yourself with your plant-magic – is trapped inside and left in places, like these ‘Homeless Pipelines,’ where it can be safely monitored and occasionally exterminated.”

Ella was silent for a moment. “But why is the Atrice broken up?”

“After it was used to incite a holocaust, a small group of humans and one Dragonfolk man – yes, Dragonfolk – banded together to take the Atrice and destroy the weapon. Thanks to a changeling child, they accomplished their first task, but they failed in the latter and only managed to hide the weapon away. But, they had the Atrice and supposed that this was the important part. They broke the crystal into hundreds of pieces, and then wondered what to do with them. They reasoned that someone had to guard the crystals, that they couldn’t just leave them lying about, not when one little shard contained so much life.

“So it happened that the changeling came to a village of Daemen and asked for guardians there. I don’t know what possessed her to seek aid from us, but she found what she needed in the form of my grandfather of I don’t know how many centuries gone by and his family. The pieces were distributed amongst them and then amongst their children and so forth and so on, until every member of my family, even very distant members, had a piece of the Atrice. When one family member died, the piece passed on to his or her nearest, unadorned kin. No one Daeman had two pieces, and no one Daeman would, the changeling had said, until such time as the Atrice must be reformed. She had also stipulated that there always be one child who be marked as different from the others, and there always has been.

“All of this was done to prevent the Atrice from being misused again,” he finished.

Ella considered for a moment. “And you want me to give you this shard?” she said after a time.

“Yes.”

“But you already have one.” She gestured to the glow from beneath his shirt. Asher nodded and tugged the gem, which hung from a string, out into the open. It was significantly larger than the shard that Ella held, and it was multifaceted. The life emanating from it was simple ludicrous in the scale of things. “You’ll notice that I already have several, however,” he said.

As Asher held it, it began to pull away from him, stretching out toward the shard that Ella held in its box. The shard jumped once, twice, then leapt the distance to Asher’s chunk of the Atrice. For a moment, Ella was blinded by a brilliant flash of light and a brief sense of all the life the Atrice represented and every shard’s approximate location. When the light cleared, Asher held a marginally larger stone.

“Sorry,” he said. “The Atrice has been called to reform. The pieces are trying to rejoin their fellows, and I’m responsible for seeing that they do.”

“But… you said it’s not supposed to be all together!”

“Not before now, it wasn’t. Some years ago, one of my cousins disappeared, and with him a piece of the Atrice. It was concerning, but ignorable. Or it was until more of my family members disappeared or appeared dead with their Atrice shards missing. Someone was stealing the Atrice from us, as far as we could tell. When we looked further into the matter, we found that the old Atrice weapon had been recovered and whoever had found it was trying to reform the Atrice.

“Which, naturally, is no good. I’ve been sent to put the Atrice back together before the enemy can.”

Ella was silent for a full five minutes then. “What makes you think I’d keep quiet about this stuff?” she asked.

Asher shrugged. “Well, to be honest, I need help collecting the pieces of the ATrice.”

“And?” she prompted.

“And you’ve got skill in Earth Magic – you should be able to sense the pieces when I can’t see them.”

“And?” she asked, grinning.

“And I’m sure you’d love to get out of this Metal City,” he said with a grin.

Ella’s smile broadened. “Just let me pack my bags.”