Some Other Place
“Word of miracles spreads at the speed of whispers.”
(Part 24 of “The Misfits” series)
When the group split after their brief but eventful raid on Enuncium, their plan was to break into four teams. Each team would target a specific place at a specific time, traveling via four different artifacts to four critical junctures in the past. It all seemed to make sense to Rishi and Nilius, and even Burch to some extent, but Carolina’s crew was perplexed by the whole operation. They were taking much on faith and relying on Burch’s assurance that it would begin to make a lot more sense the moment they took their first leap in time.
Carolina, Transom, and Sōsh had their target set for Iophos, nearly a hundred years in the past, at a critical point in history. And because their artifact was along the same path in space, they would be traveling with the team whose target was Etterus. That team—Fieldstone, Draya, and Ren—would be aiming to infiltrate the office of the Etteran Deputy Defense Chief in the leadup to the war.
Rishi piloted the Yankee-Chaos with Carolina serving as Captain, and the transit was surprisingly manageable from the outer Letters. Their first stop was the third artifact of the twelve they’d visited previously with Carolina’s professor.
“I’m actually pretty excited to see it,” Fieldstone told Carolina over dinner. “Etterus before the war was supposedly something to see—at least that’s what we got told incessantly as kids.”
“Plus, you can actually go home this way without being hunted down,” Draya said, an attempt at dark humor that fell flat. Fieldstone sort of grimaced. He didn’t talk much about his fate in exile or his status as a traitor to the Guild, but the look on his face betrayed a deeper feeling he was keeping bottled up.
“Anyway,” he continued, “This whole time simulation prospect is so bizarre, I wouldn’t even believe it if it weren’t for the simulations Burch generated. But VR is a whole different feeling from being there. That’s sure something.”
“You sound nervous, old timer,” Transom said, floating in from the commissary. “Worst thing that can happen is you die and come right back. Sounds more like a vacation than a mission. People might pay a lot for that experience.”
“We could start a touring business, boss,” Sōsh suggested with a half grin.
“Something tells me the forces we’re meddling with aren’t intended for recreational purposes,” Carolina mused, her gaze seemingly fixed at some point far beyond the Y-C’s atrium. “Although?”
“Where would you visit?” Ren asked. “I know where I’d go—of all the places we’ve been. That’s easy. Lime Harbor, back before the star started cooking it. That city, three hundred years ago, in its heyday?”
“Recreational purposes?” Transom asked. “Apart from Earth, of course, Heder Floriston’s expedition. Hands down. That was the stuff of legend.”
Fieldstone nodded his approval. “If we ever get back that way like Verona and them, Floriston is a planet I would like to visit, I must say.”
“It’s quite beautiful,” Carolina said, her eyes returning to the room. “Speaking of tourist spots.”
“Really? You’ve been?” Fieldstone asked.
Carolina nodded. “In quieter times—although, I suppose the same things were happening then that were happening now. I was just ignorant of them, I guess.”
Her gaze grew distant again.
“Vacation,” Transom said, shaking his head at Fieldstone. “You lucky bastards.”
“We’ll make some memories at Herera for you, Sebastian. We can put them down in VR when we get back.”
“Some of them we’ll record,” Draya added, grinning. “Some of them are just for us.”
They arrived at the target artifact the following day, near noon standard time. Ren was the only member of the party with any familiarity of the artifacts or their workings. Though she’d never been inside one herself, she’d watched other members of the Yankee-Chaos crew venture inside the Kappa artifact on that first mission with Carolina. She had been briefing Fieldstone and Draya on the layout of their target artifact based on the data and video streams from the first mission. It was information Rishi insisted they study. Ordinarily, Ren knew, Fieldstone wouldn’t hesitate to absorb as much intel as possible for a mission. In this case, though, Rishi was the wrong messenger.
Ren could tell it was nearly impossible for Fieldstone and Draya to trust Rishi. Even though Carolina was still captain, Rishi seemed to have usurped Maícon’s role on the ship without a thought for whether the new crew members would accept her. Ren, Sōsh, and Carolina knew Rishi well enough, and even they had their doubts. The way Rishi had pulled Maícon offline still rubbed Fieldstone and Draya the wrong way—everyone else, for that matter too. But for Draya and Fieldstone, Rishi was a completely unknown entity, while Maícon had been a trusted member of the Yankee-Chaos’s inner circle for their entire time aboard. Now Maícon Prime’s processing core was a prisoner by Rishi’s sole action and sole discretion. In so many ways, it didn’t seem right.
The trio spent the last several hours going over the layout again, reviewing the mission objectives, and discussing contingency plans for finding one another in case they arrived in separate locations on Etterus.
Harold and Sōsh, meanwhile, had gone out to dig out the entrance to the artifact, which the crew had only scanned on their first trip out this way.
Once the door was open, Ren led the way in: down the outer tunnel, into the inner cylinder, all the way to the far wall at the head of the scepter-shaped structure.
Rishi had given Fieldstone clear instructions on how to focus the transit. His experience commanding ops units and his Etteran heritage made him the obvious choice to lead the mission once they were inside.
From the perspective of the crew outside the artifact, it looked like a visual effect. The trio was there on the floatscreen one second, and then in the flash of a single frame, they were gone.
For Ren, the experience was akin to passing out. She lost time, and when she regained consciousness, she was acutely aware her head was cloudy, and she was disoriented. She was on the floor, some floor in some filthy place, with a crowd of equally filthy adolescents and children gazing down at her, seemingly mocking her for the state she was in. One obnoxious boy put his face right up to hers as she sat halfway up.
“Blub-alub-alub-alub!” he shouted, sticking his tongue right out at her. Then he turned to the others. “Ya-ya’s broken! Blub-alub-alub-alub!”
The crowd around her cheered and laughed, mimicking the boy and repeating in a disjointed chant, “Ya-ya’s broken! Ya-ya’s broken!”
Ren sat all the way up, ignoring them and taking an assessment of herself, still not fully aware of anything—not to her identity, the place, the time, the events unfolding—and suddenly, at that, she became aware that she was triaging her own loss of consciousness. That’s right, she said to herself, you’re the doctor here, Ren. Assess accordingly.
In addition to the loss of consciousness and disorientation, she was wet between her legs, a sure sign of a grand mal seizure. She thought to ask how long she’d been seizing, but the character of that crowd told her that she wouldn’t get any type of useful answer, and at that thought, she realized she was now thinking clearly.
The artifact. The seizure was likely a condition of the transit, and the body—she looked at her hands, her filthy, small, pale hands: this was not her body.
“Where am I?” she asked a girl who was looking on, seemingly more concerned than the others.
The crowd started laughing.
“Ya-ya’s broken,” the boy announced again.
There was a long cheer, more mocking, stares and laughter.
“Where are we?” Ren repeated to the girl.
“We’re home, Ya-ya. Where else would we be?”
“Is this Etterus? What city is this?”
“City!” the boy exclaimed. “What city?”
“Etterus,” Ren repeated to the girl.
“What’s Etterus?” the girl said. “Ya-ya, you’re starting to scare me.”
Ren sat quietly in that same place, patiently waiting for the crowd of onlookers to disperse. She didn’t engage as they mocked her and poked at her, merely allowing the spectacle to die out, and slowly, one by one, the children and adolescents who’d surrounded her began to dissipate.
The one child, who’d looked at her with concern in her eyes, still sat across from her. Finally, when all the others had gone, the girl reached out her hand.
“What’s your name, little one?” Ren asked.
The girl’s eyes suddenly reflected a deeper terror. “Don’t you know your own sister? Did something break in you?”
Ren took her hand, an instinct to comfort the frightened child more than anything. “I’ve had a seizure,” Ren explained. “Sometimes memory loss is a symptom. I’m sure it will only be temporary. Please tell me your name.”
“My name’s Jendi, but I don’t believe you. I don’t understand what you just said. Ya-ya never talks like that.”
“Jendi, of course. Such a beautiful name,” Ren said. “If I’m not Ya-ya, sister, then who would I be?”
“I don’t know,” the girl replied.
“So, Jendi, where can I find some water? I’m thirsty.”
Ren got to her feet, still assessing. She guessed she was about sixteen—or at least the body was. The place, from the quick glimpse of her surroundings, seemed to be the inside of some broken-down industrial warehouse, dusty, dim, cold, and damp—something from a post-apocalyptic dreamscape. Concrete and rusting metal, echoing open spaces, and dim, small windows caked with deposited grime that obscured the view out. Ren couldn’t tell much about the landscape outside. The girl, Jendi, was leading her by the hand across this wide floor, where groups of young people were gathered, seemingly in small family units. She became aware that she couldn’t see a single person over thirty. There were clearly young mothers, sitting with infants, as well as toddlers, and many small children running about. The echoes of children shouting and crying resounded off the walls, dying in the distance of such a wide-open room.
The water dripped slowly from a pipe that came out of the inner wall. There was a small puddle and a trickle of a stream that streaked across the floor toward the outer wall.
“You drink this?” Ren asked.
“What else would we drink?”
Ren looked around for something to drink from. “A cup?”
Jendi looked back at her like she didn’t understand.
“Something to drink from?”
Again, confusion. Ren looked at the brackish water, grimacing. Her powerful thirst was getting the better of her disgust, so she reluctantly cupped her hand and began to lower it to the water.
Jendi’s eyes grew wide, and the child instinctively slapped her older sister’s hand just as Ren was about to touch the water.
“No?” Ren asked.
“Ya-ya! What is wrong with you?”
Jendi got down on her knees and lowered her lips to the water, making a slurping sound as she sucked the water up out of the puddle.
“Oh, because, yes, that’s far more sanitary,” Ren said.
Jendi lifted her head and then goaded her sister to drink from the puddle properly. Ren thought about it, and regardless of how disgusted she was, the body, she figured, would have been properly accustomed to drinking this water. So she lowered her head and drank from the puddle, thinking that she felt an awful lot like a feral animal. And after she’d slurped enough dirty water to slake her thirst, she looked around and realized, that she fit right in there.
There didn’t seem to be any real adults there, though to Ren’s eyes, there were some young adults that the adolescents and children took their cues from. She decided to remain quiet and try to pick up on as much as she could without making herself the center of anyone’s attention, Jendi included.
She thought about how she might orient herself to her location and time. She didn’t know Etteran history that well, but she’d never heard of any chapter like this—not anywhere in the Battery for that matter. She wondered if it was a consequence of the war—perhaps the early war days. Sebastian did tell some shocking stories of his youth, but in those stories, there were always adults, always military structure, academies, camps, divisions, hierarchy. What she saw here among these directionless children was chaos.
She asked Jendi to take her to the windows so she could look out on the planet outside the complex. She had to climb up on a rusted metal sill to get a clear look. Eyes were on her almost immediately. Ren did her best to wipe away the gray scum that was layered to the glass so she could get a glimpse of the world outside.
Somebody hissed at her.
“Get down, Ya-ya!” a boy’s voice shouted at her.
She looked over her shoulder and put her eye to the small clear spot she’d wiped clean. Jendi had reached up and was pulling on her ankle.
“This is not Etterus,” Ren spoke to the glass. “Not Etterus at all.”
“Get down,” Jendi huffed, trying not to shout, but it was clear the girl was now extremely nervous about the breach of the chaotic little culture’s norms that Ren was perpetrating.
Someone threw a rock at the foot of the wall.
“No!” somebody else shouted. “The god forbids it!”
Ren had seen enough and jumped down. She wasn’t sure whether the look she’d taken was forbidden, but she gathered from the fight that was breaking out behind her that the rock was a far greater taboo.
“You started trouble,” Jendi stated.
“Shall we go for a walk?” Ren asked.
“Why?”
“I’d like to look around.”
Exiting the room as quietly as possible was part of her motive, but Ren was also hoping to put the place into some context. What she’d seen out that window—a large dull green moon in an amber sky—that couldn’t have been Etterus. The bland, empty landscape brought no familiar world to mind. However it had happened, they’d missed their target, and seemingly by no small measure. The artifact had taken them to some other planet, and there was no sign of Draya or Fieldstone among these children. Was she alone?
Ren wondered what the hell had happened. She cycled through as many possibilities as she could manage with this teenage brain. As much as she tried to control the urge to pepper her young companion with questions, she kept letting them slip out, and the girl had no answers: The Battery Systems? What is that? What do you mean what planet are we on? Who is the god? How do you not know who the god is?
She did get answers to more practical questions, like whether the air was breathable outside, where the food came from, who’d built this complex—things of that nature.
As they walked, it seemed Jendi grew more comfortable talking. If the young girl knew any of these other children, it was only in a superficial way. They passed almost unnoticed, so young Jendi opened up and answered the strange questions, almost as though it was some new game of make believe. Jendi knew that game well. Imagining they were elsewhere was the only true joy those children had.
The god brought the food, but never enough. The ancestors of the ancestors had built this place long ago, carving the entire world into the mountain—a bit of a logical inconsistency, Ren, noticed. But it made sense for a child whose only world was this vast collection of industrial rooms, which, Ren gathered, was the base layer for a megastructure that had been carved into the side of the mountain range they were situated on. The atmosphere outside was not breathable. No. Though from what Ren gathered, kids did go out into it for short spells, but she couldn’t discern why from Jendi’s stories.
There were fights.
Yes, of course there were fights. There were hardly any adults, no schools, and no family structure to speak of. The two girls were sisters, but there was nothing to say of their parents. They stayed together in a type of small clan back in that room where Ren had arrived. That obnoxious boy who’d mocked her was their clan leader. Jendi didn’t use the word clan exactly. There wasn’t really a word for it. They just all stayed together and knew who was in charge by who ate first.
“Where are the grown-ups?” Ren asked Jendi.
“They grow up,” Ren thought she heard the girl answer.
“But where?”
“Up,” she repeated, pointing up to the ceiling.
“They go up? Higher up?”
Jendi nodded. “Closer to the god. Or they die in the fights.”
It wasn’t so much the comment that shocked Ren, although it certainly did, but what truly shocked her was the sincerely casual way Jendi stated that the children died in “the fights.” The tone wasn’t nearly as heavy as the dark humor soldiers like Burch and Sōsh would employ to make light of the impossibly heavy cost of battle. It was more like the child didn’t even regard the loss of life as a cost at all. Such death was a fact to this child as consequential as the fact they were on the bottom floor or not on Etterus. Here, you either go up or you die in the fights.
Ren began to get flashes in her mind—memories, she thought they must be—of brutal climaxes to these horrific battles. Something of the girl she was occupying was coming through. Ya-ya’s most vivid memories.
Up. That word was loaded with heavy feelings—sentiments from recent years and early in life. There was certainly a part of her mind that felt deeply conflicted.
“Our parents, Jendi?” she asked suddenly. “Did they go up?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Some things I do.”
“We don’t have the same father, Ya-ya. Your father was killed. My father went up and took our mother with him.”
“She left us?”
“Of course she did.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I was just a baby.”
Ren walked with Jendi through chamber upon chamber, each a slightly different version of the same place. Ren figured they had to have passed through nearly twenty of these giant, fetid warehouses of young people.
“We need to get back,” Jendi announced. “The Arvals live down there.”
That room was the border. There was no opening like the other doors. Ren could remember now. This barrier separated these superclans and was only opened for important gatherings. There were far more rooms she understood from Ya-ya’s memories. This planet was a breeding ground, Ren thought. And that thought, as they turned and headed back toward their squalid home, sent a wave of overpowering emotions through her. It wasn’t simply a literal breeding ground for these children. She couldn’t tell what was happening here exactly yet, but her gut pulled at her, a visceral understanding that as awful as their war had been back in the Battery, this place was as dark a side of humanity as she had ever witnessed.
The god came down with his highest servants. That was what set the fights in motion. It happened every few weeks. There was no other ambition here. The children scrapped with each other in a violent mode of play that made Ren extremely uneasy. Mock battles, hand to hand, fingernails, and teeth.
The rules, if you could call them rules, stipulated that you didn’t gouge eyes and you didn’t kill your own—not fully. True brutality and eye gouging was reserved for the rival superclans, for the real fights. Everything else was just practice.
Twice a day, the older boys would spar with weapons, chains and staffs. Ren almost thought to ask where these came from, but the answer was the same as all the other answers—from the god.
Some god, Ren thought.
The boy who’d mocked her upon her arrival here was nearing maturity. That explained much. He was no physical specimen to her eyes. There were no physical specimens: their meagre diet ensured as much. Ren tried to imagine how many of these boys would be a match for Transom or Fieldstone—these wild boys. Their untamed brutality against the trained efficiency and brute strength of a fully grown killer? Ten was the floor, she thought. About ten would be a match.
In the evening session, as the light outside the warehouse was reddening with the approaching sunset, she learned the boy leader’s name—Xen.
Everyone gathered around to watch Xen train with the chains. They all expected he could be challenged in the next fights. It was a dangerous scenario for his sparring partners. As the stress of the upcoming showdown increased, so too did the intensity of the practice. Inevitably, the sessions occasionally went too far.
They were whipping chains around the circle. Ren stood well back from the kids who formed the ring, pulling Jendi back by the wrist. She got a quizzical look in return from her younger sister, before Jendi shrugged and stood back with Ya-ya, looking on to see what they could.
These boys were clumsy with their implements. Ren had seen real fighters, especially with weapons. She’d seen Leda training with her staff on the shores of Keneise—precise, devastatingly powerful, and, above all, beautiful. A dance of human kinetic energy. These kids with these chains in their hands were so clumsy she couldn’t decide whether they were a greater danger to themselves or each other.
There was plenty of howling and shouts from the boys in the ring when contact was made, followed by hooting and whooping from the onlookers.
The boy Xen was sparring with got his chain tangled up by his wrist, which allowed Xen to move in, swinging the back end of his chain around the other boy’s shoulder. It wrapped around the arm, allowing Xen to pull the boy to the ground. A great howl went up around the circle, and it was only when this celebration had died down that Ren could hear the other boy was screaming out in pain—hysterical agony really.
She knew what it was immediately. The boy was writhing, reaching for his shoulder, only to pull back at the slightest touch. The kids all swarmed around him, trying to get a closer look. There was no blood, no obvious disfigurement of the bone. Some of them were mockingly howling beside the boy.
“Stay here,” she ordered Jendi, making her way into the circle. She gathered from the way they were shouting at him that the boy’s name was Nobu. By the time she reached him, Xen and another boy had already grabbed their staffs and seemed ready to pummel the wailing boy unconscious.
“What are you doing?” she asked them.
“Get out of here, Ya-ya,” Xen stated, flashing a disgusted look directly at her. “Blub-alub-alub!”
“We shoulda gonked your broken head yesterday!” an older girl shouted.
Ren put her arms around the boy Nobu’s torso, pulling him into a seated position. “This his going to hurt like hell,” she told him.
“What?” he replied, looking back at Ya-ya with his eyes pegged wide open.
She knelt beside him, and straightened his limp arm, pulling downward at the elbow and reducing the shoulder with the deft touch of a seasoned field medic.
The boy howled at the pain for a moment and suddenly stopped, inhaling from the shock of the pain’s sudden dissipation. The noise he made almost sounded like a hiccup.
“What did you do?” Xen asked her. “Ya-ya? How did you do that?”
She caught herself from speaking in complex terms—subluxation? No. Too much.
“His arm was broke,” she said. “I fixed it.”
The kids gasped.
“You can’t fix an arm,” the same girl shouted at her angrily. “Nobu is broken. We need to gonk him!”
“I’m fine,” he shouted back. “See!”
The boy hopped to his feet and began to move his arm.
“It needs time to heal,” Ren said. “Go easy.”
“Ya-ya, you don’t know anything,” Xen said, as much a question as a statement.
What he really wanted to know was how she’d done what she’d done and how she’d known how to do it.
From the way the crowd reacted, she might as well have made the boy levitate. A miracle to these wild children was no small news.
Ren could see the whispers spreading out like ripples on the water, all the way to the walls of that expansive room. She had no doubt that wouldn’t be the end of it. Word of miracles spreads at the speed of whispers.
The boy, Nobu, moved his group closer to Ya-ya. The process of all those noisy kids moving across the room was a cloud of dusty futons and shouting. The displaced group cried out their displeasure, mostly entreating Xen to enforce some unspoken order, but the miracle held too much sway for him to venture to intervene. And even a wounded Nobu, largely out of commission with a sling on his arm, was still the most powerful voice in that room behind Xen. Ya-ya, though, was certainly rising.
“You won’t be able to fight for a while,” Ren told the boy as she was fashioning his sling from a collection of loose, tied-off rags. “This will need time to heal properly, but it will heal.”
“When I do fight, I will take you up with me, Ya-ya,” he said. “If I win.”
She smiled. “I’m certain you will.”
“I’ll need to get stronger. Xen beat me too easily today. He’ll be gone soon, and it’ll be my turn.”
“Then you should rest that arm. Let it heal properly. You can begin training again slowly when there’s no more pain.”
“How did you get so smart, Ya-ya?” Jendi asked.
Ren smiled at her, not answering, simply placing a loving hand on the top of her head.
Hours later, as Ren was struggling to sleep on her dusty futon and pillow of stuffed rags, she became aware of a small face staring down at her through the haze of a nearly dreamlike state.
“Hello, little friend,” she muttered, only half certain the little girl was real.
“Are you Ya-ya?”
Ren nodded. “So they tell me.”
“They uhm … they say you healed someone.”
Ren opened her eyes wide to be sure the conversation was happening. The child was a girl of five or six, though it was difficult to tell, as all the children were so underdeveloped.
“Yes, child. What’s your name.”
“Uhm,” she responded, and then placed her hand to her heart, patting her chest twice and then resting her fist under her chin—their hand signal.
Ren sat up. “Draya?”
“It’s you,” the little girl said. “Thank God, Ren. I thought the healer had to be a doctor.”
“I thought I was here alone,” Ren replied. “Where have you been? Where’s Fieldstone?”
“My group is two rooms over. Ren, I am so scared.”
The little girl began to cry.
“Come here, love,” Ren said.
“Ssshhh!” one of the nearby kids admonished them.
“Settle down,” Nobu’s voice could be heard over the area.
Draya lay down beside Ren on her futon. “There’s nothing to fear,” Ren whispered in her ear. “You’re feeling what her little brain feels, Draya. That’s all.”
Draya clutched Ren’s hand.
“No sign of Fieldstone?” Ren asked.
“I was hoping you knew.”
“Oh, look at us. We have ventured off course. That’s for sure.”
“Ren, what is this place?” Draya whispered back. “I am so scared.”
“No fear, love. No fear. Whatever happens, we’re all going home. Let’s get some sleep.”
Ren cradled Draya’s borrowed little body in her arms, and they slowly drifted off to sleep.
Ren shared what little food she got with her two younger sisters, as she’d come to think of Jendi and Draya, who both stayed close to her hip now that she was seemingly under the protection of Nobu. Ren was scratching out the number of days on the concrete floor under her futon.
On the sixth day, she woke to a collective hum and a sense of movement around her. All the kids were getting up, preparing to walk. Ren looked to Jendi, who now understood her role as translator of the culture.
“The fights,” Jendi explained. “It’s time.”
A few minutes later, children and adolescents from the adjoining clans began walking down the main thoroughfare between the central doors to their great chamber. It was easy to see which way to go.
“How long is the walk,” Draya asked.
Jendi looked at her funny, as though the question itself was absurd. “I don’t know. Until we get there.”
“We’re going too?” Ren asked.
“Everyone goes,” Jendi replied. “What else would we do?”
That was a good question. What else would they do?
Ren couldn’t help wondering as they walked—Jendi’s little hand in her left hand, Draya’s in her right—how such a society came to be, who had shaped it like this, apart from this god figure, who clearly was no god.
The children progressed now with a purpose, orderly, focused, and solemn. This movement was ritual, the destination as sacred as anything could be in a hellscape like this.
They walked all the way to the unspoken barrier they’d stopped at the day Ren had arrived. The Arvals who lived in those rooms were migrating as well. And the rivals who lived on the other side of their own clan were stepping through their rooms. On this day, all this wasn’t just permitted but required.
The complex was larger than Ren could have imagined. She stopped counting after about thirty rooms, and she estimated they walked for nearly three times longer after that, until finally, they came to an inner amphitheater. An arena Ren estimated that must have held tens of thousands of these ragged children and young adults.
Jendi couldn’t explain how the process worked. She turned back to Nobu, who had walked nearly the whole way just behind them, clutching his arm to his chest, cradled in the sling. He seemed too enchanted by the gravity of the moment to explain.
The dusty arena floor, which had been packed with the eldest, who were standing there preparing to take part in the ritual, suddenly cleared. Ren could discern no coordinator nor directives—yet they all seemed to know how to move and when. At this, the hum of the crowd died down, and out walked the god.
“Oh my God!” Ren exclaimed, drawing strange looks from the children around her.
“What?” Draya said. “Ren, what is it?”
Ren reached down and lifted Draya onto her shoulders. “Recognize him?”
To Ren’s eyes, it looked like a familiar multi-use bot shell—an older version, surely, but the facial structure was nearly identical.
“An Andrew?” Draya whispered.
“Looks that way,” Ren replied. She looked down at Jendi. “That’s the god?”
Jendi shrugged and nodded. “Of course, Ya-ya. Shush!”
They were back several sections from the arena floor, but Ren could make out Xen clearly. She presumed the other young men and women down there on the floor with him were the leaders of their clans, and they were all facing one another in a giant circle with over a hundred participants eyeing each other down.
The god did not speak. He walked silently over to the circle of assembled youths and anointed the heads of the combatants. As they stepped forward, the Andrew directed them to a specific weapon—crude, rudimentary implements, like the chains, clubs, and staffs Ren had seen them training with.
And then, as the Andrew put up his arms, the entire arena howled like a pack of human wolves for perhaps ten seconds before the Andrew dropped his arms to his sides. Then, like some nightmare fever-dream of a pre-enlightenment warrior ritual, the two anointed youths began a battle to the death.
As the children around them continued to howl and shout, watching the two unfortunate warriors fight for their lives, Draya clutched Ren’s chin, her little hands reaching down from her seat atop Ya-ya’s shoulders.
“Where the hell are we, Ren?” she asked, leaning down, almost embracing Ya-ya’s head. “I can’t watch.”
Ren reached up and lifted the girl off her shoulders. Draya stood beside her on the other side of Jendi, clinging onto Ren’s leg. The room cried out almost as one, oohing and ahhing as the combatants delivered and dodged several close calls, until finally, one boy connected, drawing a great collective howl from the audience.
That first hit was a definitive one, the weapon was a staff with a pointed metal end—some sort of brutal metal spear—and the unfortunate boy on the receiving end staggered a step or two before falling. The victor wasted no time in rushing in to plunge his spear into the fallen boy’s torso just to be sure.
The horror rushing up from Ren’s gut was like nothing she’d ever felt before. She’d patched together warriors wounded in battle, but almost always they were maimed by the impersonal and random kinetics of an explosion that took them by surprise. That, or the heat of thermal fire or lasers from a drone, like Sōsh had survived. Nor did she ever have to witness the bodies she patched together getting burned, blown-up, or torn apart. This spectacle was beyond imagining. She envied the diminutive stature of Draya’s borrowed body and longed for a leg she could hide her own head behind.
This ritual. This brutal sight. There would be no one to patch back together today, she knew.
Draya, alone, was shedding tears, clutching Ren’s leg ever tighter each time the crowd howled bloodthirsty ecstasy at the conclusion of each battle.
Then, nearly an hour into the fights, the god brought his hand down upon Xen’s head.
When his opponent was chosen, Jendi looked up at Ren and said, “I don’t think Xen will go up, Ya-ya. It’s Bo.”
The boy, Xen’s opponent, was from a neighboring clan—Bo of the Shirvahl. They would be using chains. “Xen is good with chains,” Jendi declared, shrugging. “Maybe. Maybe.”
As soon as the Andrew’s arms dropped and the crowd howled, that boy Bo dropped his chain in a display of bravado. He pounded his chest and extended his arms, causing the arena to erupt. The Shirvahl began to chant his name, and before long, the whole arena had begun to copy them.
Xen approached cautiously, seemingly apprehensive, either because of the courage of the other boy or the crowd energy or both. He swung the chain in a controlled circle, keeping Bo at a distance, while the other boy seemed to be goading Xen to swing at him, and each time he crept closer and dodged away, the crowd chanted his name louder and louder, “Bo! Bo! Bo! Bo! Bo!”
Xen, Ren could see in his body language, was growing impatient, while the other boy danced in and out of the chain’s reach as though he didn’t have an ounce of fear. Then Bo paused, planting both feet flat, daring Xen to take the shot at him. He did, and rather than retreating, Bo sprinted toward him the instant he anticipated the swing, rushing toward Xen with alarming speed. He was nearly an arm’s length away when the chain landed, lashing Bo along the upper torso. With his arm extended upward, though, Bo was able to bring his arm over the chain and catch it under his shoulder. Ren could tell it was over.
Bo yanked the chain toward him so hard Xen lurched forward. Bo pounced so quickly and viciously it was impossible to follow the nuance of each movement. The final blow, though, was easy to see—a knee to the chest that dropped Xen to his hands and knees, unable to inhale.
Bo wasted no time, snapping Xen’s neck with a warrior’s precision. Ren covered Jendi’s eyes with her right hand and her own mouth with her left. Draya’s face was still buried in her leg.
The arena resumed chanting Bo’s name. Then, to Ren’s shock, Bo began a celebratory gesture—a deliberate dance of sorts, during which he patted his chest twice with his palm and then held a fist to his chin.
“Fieldstone!” Ren gasped. “Fieldstone! Draya, look!”
The little girl looked up, trying to climb up Ren’s leg almost. Ren lifted her into her arms.
“That’s the sign!” little Draya declared. “He’s here!”
Ren felt awful for Jendi as they filed out of the arena, but she and Draya had to get to Fieldstone. The positive side of his theatrical victory was that he was not difficult to find. A crowd of admirers surrounded him from the moment the fights were closed, and they swarmed him all along the walk back to the warehouse rooms.
The downside was that Ren knew it would be impossible to be subtle in approaching him. And as they finally did get close, she noticed people were greeting him with their gesture—their telltale hand motion that he’d displayed in the arena: two taps to the heart and a fist to the chin. She would have to announce herself directly using his real name. Each time she elbowed her way within sight of him, one of the girls would get swamped by the crowd and struggle to hold onto Ren’s hand.
The throng of people did thin out a little as they walked, though. Finally, it was Draya who lost patience with Ren’s approach. She pitched a tantrum that Ren realized was genuine. That child’s body’s emotions, being what they were, Draya was overcome, howling, crying, refusing to walk. She screamed at Ren to get Fieldstone’s attention.
Ren put the girl on her shoulders and scrambled as best she could to catch up to the crowd. She was ten or so steps away when Draya started shouting, “Fieldstone! Fieldstone! Fieldstone!”
The commotion puzzled everyone in that crowd. But it wasn’t long before Bo, who’d certainly heard the little girl’s cries, indirectly worked his way back to the pair. He made the gesture again as he approached and signaled to the crowd to give them space.
“It’s us,” Ren said.
He looked at the odd trio—Ren in Ya-ya’s teenage body and the two little girls, Draya riding on Ren’s shoulders and Jendi still clutching Ren’s hand.
“Us?” he said. “Who is who?”
“Draya,” Ren replied, reaching up toward her little rider’s head.
“Ren?” Fieldstone addressed the doctor. “And who’s this?”
He looked toward the other little girl, who turned away from his gaze bitterly.
“That’s Jendi,” Ren declared. “She’s my little sister.”
“Bo killed Xen!” Jendi shouted. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Fieldstone said. “Xen fought bravely and is honored now in death.”
Jendi didn’t seem comforted by the words, but to Ren, neither did she seem genuinely devastated. Doubtless, the ritual had always been a part of her world. Half of her leaders had shared Xen’s fate in the arena.
Fieldstone took Draya’s little hand in his. “Aren’t you a picture,” he said, shaking his head at the tiny girl perched atop Ren’s shoulders. “What are we going to do about you?”
It was a serious question as much an expression of emotions at finding Draya embedded in that child’s body. By then, he knew what winning in the ring had meant—he must go up a level, and he could take one person with him. But he couldn’t take that child.
“I want you two to come back with me,” Fieldstone announced. “It’s my last night with my group. Spend it with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere with him,” Jendi stated. “I hate him.”
“I need to go with him, Jendi,” Ren told her. “Can you find your way back to Nobu?”
“I can’t believe you, Ya-ya! You’re not even angry!”
“It’s not what you think, little one,” Fieldstone tried to tell her.
“I hate all of you,” Jendi shouted. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
The girl wrenched herself away from Ren’s grip and slipped into the crowd gathered around them.
“Should I go after her?” Fieldstone asked.
Ren shook her head. It had been her instinct to try and catch Jendi, but with Draya sitting on her shoulders, she didn’t want to risk dropping her little rider.
“I think she’ll find her own way home,” Ren stated. “That seems to be the way of this world.”
“Speaking of which,” Fieldstone said, “I can say confidently, this isn’t Etterus. This is some other place.”
When Fieldstone returned to his group in Bo’s body, the room erupted in cheers. His performance was a legendary one that would live for years throughout those dingy warehouse rooms. It was understood among the young people in that lowest level that the winners, by tradition, spent one final night among their group and were taken by the god to the next level the following morning with their chosen companion.
Fieldstone sat Ren and Draya on his futon and proceeded to circle the room. His hope was that if he greeted everyone, shaking hands and receiving their congratulations, he might return to his futon alone at the end of it, at least for long enough to talk to Ren and Draya without an audience. The process, though, took hours, so elated were the children in the group. None of them could remember anything like it. Nobody had ever dropped their weapon deliberately in the fights—and then to win? They wanted to bask in the glow of it. They wanted to follow Bo all night.
By the time he finally returned to his futon, the windows to the outside were dark. The fights had been an all-day affair—hours to walk there; hours of shouting, madness, and combat; hours to walk back; hours to settle down, to eat their meagre rations, and to say their congratulations and goodbyes.
Draya was fast asleep. Ren was nearly there herself.
As Fieldstone sat, he took a deep breath. “This is a problem,” he whispered, looking down at Draya’s little body.
Ren shrugged. “How does that problem rank against being transported to this hell in the first place?”
“I’m trying to figure it out, doctor. The Andrew is strange. If this were some other branch of humanity, how would they have the same multi-use models as us. Are we in the past? If so, how have we never heard of this bizarre pocket of history?”
“We could go back, no?” Ren suggested, gesturing to her temple with her hand in the shape of a pointed gun, making a popping sound with her lips as she pulled the imaginary trigger.
“It’s a thought, but I can’t help but think we got sent here for a reason. I followed Rishi’s instructions exactly when we entered the artifact. I was focused on Etterus in the moment we wanted to arrive, yet here we are.”
“There was some intelligence at the heart of those artifacts,” Ren reminded him. “We know that.”
“I don’t think we lose much by ascending.”
“You and me? You can’t take Draya.”
Fieldstone shook his head. “Us, yes. We can’t take Draya.”
“Have you heard anything about what happens, you know, as they ascend?”
“These kids don’t know. Just stories about getting closer to the god. Life is supposedly better the higher you climb. Vague, all of it vague.”
“There is an order here,” Ren said. “A twisted one to be sure, but it makes me wonder how a society like this ever came to be.”
“It didn’t just evolve. There’s a purpose—the structure of it, top-down. I think a lot of our questions will be answered by figuring out who’s on top. I don’t think it would be prudent to go back without knowing what this place is.”
“So we go up, and we leave Draya here? Alone in this place? In a six-year-old’s body, frightened out of her wits?”
Fieldstone sighed. “Let’s get some sleep, doctor. We’ll figure it out in the morning. It’s been a long day.”
Reluctantly, Ren lay down alongside Draya. Fieldstone got up and stepped over them both, lying down on the other side of the floor, with the peaceful body of the sleeping little girl between them. That uneasy question lingered in Ren’s mind for a time as she tried to get comfortable on that hard, dusty mattress on that hard, dusty floor. At some point, she did eventually drift off to sleep.
Fieldstone woke Ren early, before almost anyone else was awake. He put a finger to his lips as he stood beside her, gesturing for Ren to take his hand, and then he lifted her to her feet.
“It’s this way,” he said, leading Ren in the other direction this time, “Another long walk.”
Ren looked down at the girl lying in Bo’s futon. She knew immediately. She felt it before she had the chance to think it through, and her widening eyes betrayed her anger before she opened her mouth.
Fieldstone shook his head at her and again emphasized she keep her peace, placing that finger over his lips again more forcefully. He took Ren by the hand and quietly led her out of that room.
They’d made it through almost three rooms before Ren finally whispered, “You sent her back?”
“A mercy,” Fieldstone replied. “She didn’t feel a thing, doctor, I assure you.”
“What about ...?”
“It’ll be hours before those clueless kids realize, and they won’t cry over it long. They’re accustomed to death here.”
It was another hour or so before any of the rooms along their walk began to stir. On the walk, they caught up to other pairs making their way up—the winners and their chosen companions. How Fieldstone knew which way to go, Ren didn’t know, but they all seemed to be migrating as they had the previous day—unspoken understanding.
The surreal nature of the place sank in even more so this day. Now, instead of empty warehouse floors, these rooms were filled with sleeping children all settled into their places. Ren was still torn about Draya. She would be back on the Yankee-Chaos now. A blessing, true. But that little girl, whoever she was before their arrival, that girl was now gone forever. And this surely did not feel like a simulation, regardless of what Rishi and Nilius had theorized. This felt like another life.
The children began to wake up as Ren and Fieldstone walked farther. Some even cheered as they passed by—the walk they all hoped to take one day, no doubt.
At the end of the final room, there was a large archway with a staircase that led up to the next level. The Andrew stood at the base of the stairs. He knew them both by sight.
“Bo of the Shirvahl, you have taken Ya-ya of the Kindahl, an interesting and unexpected choice for your companion. You may proceed.”
They both bowed, imitating the Andrew’s gesture. As they climbed, Fieldstone looked over at Ren, “A figurehead,” he stated. “Andrew is not in charge. Gods don’t bow.”
At the top of the next level, they were greeted by a cyborg—a young man who explained he was to guide them. For Ren, the most shocking part of being greeted by this cyborg—who walked seamlessly with one prosthetic leg and a composite section of his skull exposed—wasn’t that he was a cyborg in such a place as this, it was that he was clean.
He took them down a hallway to a set of rooms. Inside, there were showers.
“You will scrub yourselves clean,” the cyborg stated. “Your stench disgusts me. You cannot be seen by any of the elders like this.”
A shower was a welcome sight for both of them. That stint in such a fetid, dusty hellhole on the lowest layer of this complex had given them both a new appreciation for the blessings of personal hygiene.
They scrubbed themselves down thoroughly using the soaps and brushes, and by the time they stepped out, their ragged clothes were gone. The cyborg returned, and whether he’d done it or it was autonomous, the curtain—an opaque floatscreen just outside the shower stall—suddenly vanished without warning, leaving both Ren and Fieldstone exposed to the young man.
“You will come with me,” he announced, looking them both up and down with an air of disgust. “Your first purification will begin immediately.”
Neither reacted; they simply followed. They’d both spent enough time around military hierarchy to recognize an initiation. This world was coming into clearer focus now. Survive the bottom level and then a door opens to a staircase. And then you were the lowest scum on the second floor—well-scrubbed scum at least, as the case was.
There was hardly time to wonder what purification meant before they were each pulled into a separate room. Ren had a better sense for the surroundings, almost immediately recognizing the telltale signs of a surgical suite, albeit an old one. A voice instructed her to get on the table and lie face-up.
“What is happening?” she asked. “What are you going to do to me?”
“You are going to submit yourself for purification, Ya-ya. Lie down on the table unless you’d prefer to return to the lower level.”
“Are you going to operate on me? Is that what purification means?”
“You will not feel a thing. You must make the choice, though.”
The door which had closed behind her opened again.
“You seem reluctant, Ya-ya. Were you not prepared? We can return you.”
Had it been her body, she’d have run, but this life, Ya-ya’s life, she knew that whatever happened, Ren’s life was awaiting her again at the end of it.
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “In all the excitement I didn’t get much sleep last night. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Ren did as instructed, getting onto the table and positioning herself in the middle of it. Before long, a basic humanoid multi-use with no personal features entered and began to cover most of her body. The bot began sterilizing her right shoulder. She had an idea of what was coming after they put her out. Additionally, when the bot had finished prepping her shoulder, it began to shave off one of her eyebrows.
Another multi-use model she’d never seen before came into the room.
“Who are you?” she asked him.
“I am the god Delius,” it declared. “I will be performing your purification. Right arm, left eye. When you wake up, you will be a more perfect person, closer to the gods.”
Internally, Ren was horrified. “I am grateful,” she said, doing her best not to betray her inner feelings, which registered less as fear and more as revulsion for what she gathered was awaiting poor Ya-ya, just as it once had been for the boy who’d shown them in. “I can hardly believe I am finally here.”
“Do try to relax,” the Delius instructed, placing a transdermal patch on Ren’s neck.
It was an old methodology—so old she could hardly believe it. Transdermal anesthetics predate colonization of the Western Battery, she thought. She also thought she was shaking her head at that thought, but she could feel she wasn’t moving. No. She was going out.
“Fieldstone?” she could hear her groggy voice calling out softly. “Are we home again?”
“Home?” the voice of a multi-use came back. “What is Fieldstone, Ya-Ya?”
“Fieldstone,” she mumbled back. “Who is Fieldstone?”
She opened her eyes, realizing she was coming out of anesthesia, giving something away.
Suddenly, the shock of the sight of things caused her to nearly jump off the bed. She reached out with her arms, both out of some protective instinct and to get a sense of the visual perspective, for half the world didn’t look right.
Her left arm looked normal in her right eye. Her brain wasn’t making proper sense of the imbalanced visual inputs. But her right arm had been replaced. She gasped and only then remembered—purification: right arm, left eye. She took a deep breath.
“That’s it, Ya-ya. Now you remember,” the multi-use stated.
“Delius?” Ren said.
“Yes. Good. It will take some time to adjust to your new eye. You’re very lucky. It takes many people to the third tier before they get one. Your number came up in the draw, though. You will see more than you ever could have imagined.”
“Surely,” Ren replied, doing her best to relax on the table and await instructions from the Delius.
She thought about Leda’s eyes, which she well understood. In the time she was aboard the Yankee-Chaos with her, Ren examined and treated Leda numerous times, which meant she had to do her research on that type of tech-eye, its properties, specifications, and capabilities. She never considered the possibility of being on this end of one—first-person perspective, a whole new viewpoint.
This one didn’t mesh perfectly with her natural eye. Either it wasn’t aligned properly yet or it didn’t interface 1-to-1 with the optic nerve and visual cortex. She tried to do a few of the tricks Leda could do with her eyes—zoom, yes; infrared, yes; spectroscopic vision; no. She could even pull back the frame to capture a wider view of the room, bringing everything in her periphery into focus—almost like a full one-eighty lens. She didn’t know Leda could do that, but she realized now that had to have been a feature of her friend’s vision.
She used that new visual input to inspect her new prosthetic arm. Like the leg of the boy who had brought them in, Ren’s new arm made very little effort in the biomimicry department. In fact, it seemed to be conspicuously mechanical-looking.
“Purification,” she marveled under her breath.
“Yes, quite a beautiful change, no?”
“I’ve seen better,” Ren replied, half distracted and half groggy still from the anesthesia.
“Have you?” the Delius asked.
Ren turned and looked over at him. “No. I’m joking. I’m a joker. I’m sure you don’t know that about me.”
“Ah, That’s quite amusing, Ya-ya. Now if you would step down, please.”
“Of course,” she replied. “When may I see Bo again?”
“Presently. All will be revealed as you are processed through the ceremony of ascent.”
“Sounds amazing,” Ren stated. “Am I going to get my clothes back at some point, or are we all nudists up here?”
“Nudists?”
“Yeah, it means like, you know—” Ren realized the Delius knew the word. It was she who shouldn’t. “I mean, you know. Sometimes I like to make up words that sound real.”
“I see,” the Delius said, seeming to inspect her face. “You are a curious young lady, Ya-ya. And, yes, you will be given new clothes for the ceremony. Your rags have been burned.”
“Good—” Ren caught herself from saying riddance. “Good. Thank you for purifying me Delius.”
“It was my pleasure, Ya-ya. I hope I have that pleasure many more times.”
“Oh, yes. Me too, certainly.”
The Delius gestured to the door to the corridor where she’d come in.
Fieldstone had undergone a similar purification to the boy, who was standing there again waiting for them. Fieldstone—Bo, really—was now a single leg amputee with an identical, albeit opposite, prosthetic to the boy. The composite plate was located on Fieldstone’s right frontal lobe. Ren thought about it—private thoughts. There was only so much time left for private thoughts if they were going to replace their biological processors the same way they were taking their biomechanical hardware.
“Bo,” she said, “come here.”
“We must get to the convocation,” the boy stated.
“One moment,” Ren replied, gesturing for Bo to come close, and as he did, she took his head in her hands, feigning intimacy. She whispered in his ear. “We need to understand this place before we go back—what it is. If we are thinking on their hardware, we cannot expect our thoughts to be private. Our mission now must be to observe everything we can, participate as though we are a part of this system, and report back what we see when we return. You and I must communicate without talking or thinking. Show me you understand.”
He gently pulled his head away. He looked at her, closed his eyes slowly, and nodded ever so subtly—almost imperceptibly.
“Let’s go, you two,” the boy said, interrupting what seemed to be their intimate moment.
“Nah,” Fieldstone replied, again gesturing ever so slightly with his head to let Ren know his meaning.
Ren returned that gesture with the affirmative sign Fieldstone had conveyed moments before. He nodded back at her. All was understood.
“Nah?” the boy replied. “What do you mean, nah?”
Fieldstone turned around. “Must be a glitch with my new hardware. I meant to say, ‘yeah,’ obviously.”
“Yeah, obviously,” the boy repeated. “Let’s go.”
They were taken to a room to get dressed. There was a mirror. Ya-ya’s eye was gone, and in its place, there was a mechanical fitting that covered both the eye and socket, composite had replaced bone to the orbit, all the way above to where the eyebrow once was. The look was manifestly mechanical, and to Ren’s mind, deliberately so. Even an inert glass eye made an effort to mimic an eyeball. Part of the point of this prosthesis, she decided, was to look inhuman, just as the plate on Fieldstone’s head revealed what had been replaced beneath it.
As she dressed, she quietly made the next logical leap—they were meching them, one part at a time. Second level, two parts. Going up, getting closer to the gods, with a multi-use bot as their avatar of a godhead? This was what Rishi and Burch had talked about—the other race of future technologicals, bipals she thought they’d called them. Rishi was the end stage. Here, on this second level, they’d arrived at the first stage.
Her clothes were clean—a bit old fashioned, not unlike something from the early colonial era. It fit with the anesthesia, with the antique Andrew bot shell, with the Delius.
Her top had the right arm either cut off it, or it had been printed specifically to show off that mechanical part—a clear way to identify her to others, perhaps.
This was some, bizarre alternative past, she decided. She also decided there was something important here, something they needed to get to the bottom of.
When they stepped into the corridor again, one of her theories seemed to prove correct: Fieldstone had one pantleg covering Bo’s remaining biological leg, while his mech-leg was proudly on display for all to see.
“With the exception of your face, you will keep your human skin covered at all times,” the boy instructed. “We may speak now. I am Rold. I will be your teacher. Which one of you won the fight?”
Ren and Fieldstone exchanged a puzzled look.
“I did,” Fieldstone answered.
“How well do you fight?” Rold asked Ya-ya.
“Not at all,” Ren replied.
“Not at all?” Rold looked shocked. “What do you mean, not at all? How did you get here?”
“Bo is the fighter.”
Rold looked her up and down. “I can see why you picked her, Bo, but you’d better hope she learns fast. You do realize she fights after you fight? If she loses, you lose too.”
“I can teach her,” Fieldstone answered confidently. “She will be ready.”
Rold shook his head doubtfully. “She’d better be, or I guess it’s your head you’ve gambled. Best of luck to you.”
Ren looked over at Fieldstone and shook her head.
“No fear, Ya-ya,” he stated. “The other girls don’t stand a chance.”
“You will meet the godhead at the invocation ceremony.”
“Did we not meet him in the arena?” Fieldstone asked.
“Do not interrupt me,” Rold said. “You were the best in your clan, and, yes, you won your fight or you would not be here, but here you are the lowest of the low. I will not tolerate insubordination.”
“Yes, Rold,” Fieldstone answered, the well-practiced dutiful soldier’s tone permeating his two-syllable reply.
The boy looked back quizzically but nodded his approval at being addressed so affirmingly.
“That god was one of the lesser gods. There are two other types of gods here. One we are going to meet now at the invocation ceremony. He is the main guide as we all struggle to ascend. He is exalted. Those who have ascended are the most exalted form of gods here: they are our ancestors who have fully achieved purification by rejecting all their human imperfections. We shall not meet them until we all do as they have done. We must ascend every level.”
“Our ancestors are an inspiration to us all, I’m sure,” Ren replied, nodding her head as convincingly as she could. “We aim to follow them.”
“Good,” Rold said. “Follow me this way. The convocation will begin shortly.”
As they followed Rold, it was the first moment Ren had to process this new face of this wholly unsacred place. Yet here they were again, on another ritual procession to a ceremony that seemed ritual in nature. The words they used, the barriers to entry, the goals—all coded religiosity into a phenomenon she knew to be completely irreligious in the case of Rishi, let alone Burch, Sōsh, and every other soldier who’d lost a biological part under her care.
The bipals, she kept thinking, trying to coax her mind to call back everything Rishi and Burch had told them about the technologicals. She believed she had a limited time to process this new picture. The second they integrated a piece of cortex to her brain they way they had with Fieldstone, they would have access to her thoughts. She needed to find a frame from which to examine this world and then fight to stay alive so she and Fieldstone could observe and report back faithfully. Most importantly, they had to figure out when and where this place was. Did it pose a threat?
Wherever they were, it couldn’t be too far from them. The similarities were too striking.
As they walked, Ren also observed Fieldstone, how seamlessly he’d adapted to that new lower limb. His gait hardly had a hitch in it—remarkable for such a clunky mech-limb. He played the good soldier so well, she had little doubt he’d fool everyone. Her fear was that he’d be so convincing she wouldn’t be able to tell whether he was playing along or had gotten lost in the part.
What would those neurotech replacements do to their thought patterns? Their ability to hold to their true identities?
Ren expected the amphitheater on this level to be smaller. But as they approached, the foot traffic was equal to the lower level, even as it was far more orderly. Rold seemed to know which way to go. He escorted them to an archway that led to a tunnel. She guessed it led to the floor of the arena.
“Do not speak unless you are directed to,” Rold told them. “If you have any doubt about what to do, always show deference to those above you, which—”
“Is everyone, yes sir,” Fieldstone concluded, nodding. “Especially the gods.”
“You should do fine,” Rold said. “I’ll rejoin you after the convocation.”
Ren and Fieldstone exchanged a knowing look as they entered the tunnel, communicating by saying nothing. Eyes and understanding.
“I’m glad I chose you, Ya-ya,” Bo stated as they walked, taking her remaining natural hand in his.
This amphitheater was no dingy fighting pit like the one on the lower level. That base place was a grave, whose sole purpose was to identify and eliminate dead weight.
Here, when they entered, they couldn’t help but allow their gaze to be captured by the lines of the grandstands, adorned with gleaming columns that stretched upward. The ceiling itself seemed an imitation of the celestial—stars, galaxies, moons, planets—all drawing the eyes to a hexagonal portico that seemed to open up to an infinite, glowing, heavenly sky. It was a convincing portal to the gods.
As they and the other victors began to take their places on the floor, Ren was shocked by the sound of music—something that had been entirely missing on that lower floor, not even the simplest children’s song. The sudden injection of art made the scene all the more powerful—the hairs on her neck stood quite involuntarily.
And now, as the lights dimmed in the arena and the music built to a crescendo, the light in that portico changed. She could see with her new eye. She dropped to one knee in a show of reverence as the god descended.
The others mimicked her gesture. She had seen long before the others, none of whom were so lucky as to draw a new eye. And as she continued to look up, following the change in the light, the godhead, the focal point of this bizarre cult world, soon came into focus.
“Oh my God,” Ren said, too shocked to keep the exclamation to herself. Fortunately, the music kept her statement from causing anyone to notice the outcry.
She reached over to Fieldstone. Pulling his ear to her lips. Then, she lifted up both arms in a gesture of exultation—a show of reverence to mask her reaction she knew must have been observed above by the descending godhead.
What she whispered to Fieldstone was what she saw—the figure coming into focus in her newly-installed technological eye—the godhead descending was unmistakable. An older shell, doubtless, but still never worn by another.
Their god, the exalted one, was Maícon.