

# World of Glass

The Final Cycle, Book 1

By Matt Dymerski

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2013 by Matt Dymerski

Follow my work at MattDymerski.com.

# Table of Contents

Prologue: Somewhere Else

Rolf

Mjögen

Elizabeth

Ripples in the Sea

Pressure

The Hand

The Lone Path

Epilogue: Age's End

The Tree of the Future

About the Author

#  Somewhere Else

She leaned back in her autochair, gazing up at the ceiling's vast series of metallic angles and inlaid dull crimson tracers. Her eyes traced the purely functional design, following numerous wires, junctions, and relays... and she felt the sheer amount of time she spent idle in that room staring up at that hideous ceiling might just drive her mad.

A rare beep interrupted her unhappy reverie.

"What is it?" her counterpart asked, looking over from his own autochair and accompanying screens.

She brought the large holographic viewscreen close, reading the error with some disbelief. She threw the profile his way.

"What about it?" he asked, bouncing the info back to her screen. "Destroyed themselves three hundred years ago. It's long done. Registered and sealed."

She carefully examined the barren brown ball, letting out a small unbidden laugh of disbelief. "They're not dead."

"Ridiculous. We've got a dead-swept probe report every fifty years."

"I'm not surprised the other probes missed it. It looks like they're clinging to one coast line, here -" she traced the edge on the virtual globe. "I'll be damned. It's artificial."

"What is?"

"The coast line."

His smirk faded. "What about the population trends - how long until they peter out?"

"Never. They're growing."

His expression turned slightly fearful. "How many?"

"A billion."

He glanced toward the door, grinding his teeth for a moment. "Damnit..."

Her grin widened. "Isn't it grand?"

"Is there anyone else we can blame for this? That's a ton of missing data."

She shook her head. "Did you look at the live feed? They've got everything we missed."

"What do you mean?"

"It's all on file, there on that planet. Our probe can easily access the network, there isn't even any security. Every moment of every lifetime is recorded and public in that place."

"Sounds helpful, but that's not the standard way we analyze -"

"But we can _watch_ ," she interrupted, almost bubbly at the prospect of something to break the endless repetition. "Not just lifeless summaries and statistics! Anything could have happened down there in the last three centuries. It looks like constant upheaval. Just from surface searches, I can already tell they've gone through almost every governmental and societal system. Isn't that the point of everything we're doing? This is a _goldmine._ "

"What government do they have now?" he asked, visibly considering keeping the discovery quiet - at least for the time being.

She leaned over the arm of her chair, eyes bright. "Nothing."

"Nothing? How -"

"I don't know yet, but we can _watch_ ," she interrupted again. "And we can do the live-team's investigation ourselves, and if we get caught, we'll just say we were trying to help. If we report it as hosting life, they'll take it away from us. And then we'll be bored again. Move the probe closer, I want to hook in directly with their network. Engage the proper disguise, too, will you?"

He pulled the globe over, tracing the planet's still-visible wounds. Against continental browns and oceanic silvers, the constructed coastline stood out as an uneven grey streak. A single scar among many, it ran cruelly pitiful and small.

He could see how the other probes had missed it. "A billion people, in that tiny area?"

His dismayed question hung in the air unanswered. She was already deep in the live feed, oblivious.

#  Rolf

He shot awake, full of fire and desperation, his arms raised against some imagined fatal attack.

Snapping back to reality, he slowly relaxed his body, keeping his face out toward the passing water.

The boat's narrow metal edge remained as an imprint along his forearm. He gave the area a few furtive kneads, acutely aware of the sweat hovering above his eyes. Covering his action with a feigned repositioning, he wiped the drops away with a subtle movement.

In the rushing water beneath his outstretched hand, the prow's diverging patterns created the illusion of stationary rippling. He liked to imagine those waves expanding ever outward, spanning the glassy sea as they became vanishingly small, reaching shores far and unknown with the last of their energy.

Below the Unsetting Sun, the northern horizon seemed an implacable line between smooth silver sea and vaulted azure sky. He peered at the distant contour of the world for as long as he could stand the brightness, envisioning remote deserts kept continually burning under that relentless star. The fabled northern deserts would be a hellish wasteland, but they would be free of people... and he sometimes imagined living there might almost be worth it.

But that was unreachably far north, and the boat was heading west, and it only hurt to think about places he would never see.

Blinking against the residual glare behind his eyelids, he finally turned and gazed around the small boat. None of the other three occupants had noticed his startled waking - or, more likely, none had cared.

He saw them from a distance rather like the unreachable horizon.

Atop an immense castle wall, built anxiously high and desperately thick, he considered the logistics of sallying forth into unfamiliar territory.

He opened his mouth briefly, but then closed it again, turning his head slightly.

Beside him, a lanky young man of similar age sat curved against the speed-born winds. One head taller - a head crowned with loose brown hair, but bearded with red, all fluttering wildly - he held his seat tight, braced uncomfortably against the wind. "At least we'll be home soon," he muttered. "It'll be good to be back."

The dreamer ignored his own rising distress in favor of a sighted opportunity. "How is... your father?"

His fellow traveler smiled back, surprised. "He's well. Thanks for asking."

"Good," he continued, darting his gaze around uncomfortably, unsure what to do with his face and mouth - but certain he had to keep facing his colleague for this sort of thing. "That's good to hear... Og."

Smile curling with light-hearted suspicion, the named young man stroked his beard, carefully considering his next words. "Do you... want to come with us?"

All of his emotions surged forward against the inside of his castle walls, shouting - clamoring, even - but he kept his heart rate steady, his face neutral. "I guess. That's fine."

"Oh, come on," complained the girl on the other side of Og, turning from her bored lean against the opposite edge of the boat. "Really?"

"My father can use any Scientist he can get," the red-bearded young man countered, his tone diplomatic and positive. "I'm sure you two can find different projects, Elizabeth."

She sighed and turned back to her idle study of the darker southern sky.

The dreamer's eyes remained open, but his true self slumped against the hastily shut gates of his castle, recovering from the terror of momentary vulnerability. While so distracted, his unattended eyes glanced back at the boatman of their own accord.

Crouched at the steering mechanism, the weathered man shook his head with mirthful unspoken humor. It seemed that many newly minted Scientists played out their last minute drama on the boat ride home.

Turning away from the other passengers again, he focused on the western horizon ahead. The immense silver now bore a rapidly thickening grey line. He stared at that line, unable to resist reacting. As his heart rate spiked dangerously high, Og glanced over with some concern - but said nothing.

It wasn't real, not yet... not yet... he watched the growing grey, unable to avert his gaze, anticipating the single moment it all became his world again.

The change started directly ahead.

Riotous color surged across the rapidly approaching buildings, shooting out in both directions like a massive illusionary explosion. Data flooded his contacts, energizing his visual statistics, channeling into all his graphs and maps exactly the way he remembered. He had the strangest sensation that the cell hanging against his heart had suddenly grown heavier, somehow physically burdened by the sheer weight of the information pouring into it.

Beside him, Og looked down, adjusting the virtual color of his loose shirt from student-green through various shades of professional-red. He settled on a favorite hue, murmuring with approval.

Preferring not to stand out, the dreamer made no such change, keeping the synthetic material set to its natural grey. On the other side of the boat, Elizabeth also chose not to change to her colors, though for far different reasons.

The three new Scientists kept their eyes ahead in anticipation, and - almost abruptly - unfinished pillars surged past, each topped by busy construction workers, each connected by a web of girders, finished stone, and heavy equipment searing brutally loud noise across their wind-numbed ears.

Ahead of them, further pillars continued on into the fathomless gloom between water and stone, jutting from the smooth sea to support all civilization on man-made artifice.

Passing through the band of construction, true Stonework soon loomed overhead.

The boat came to a stop. They gazed up at crowding men overhead, and the laborers gazed down in return, grinning and calling out at the uncommon arrival. The three hesitated for a long moment.

"...here we are," the old boatman stated.

"Right," Og replied, steeling himself with a glance to each of his colleagues.

Helpful hands reached down, assisting his climb up the Edge and into civilization.

Eager hands grasped at Elizabeth's raised arm, pulling her up into the crowd.

No hands remained.

The boat rocked with the sudden lighter load. Retreating anxiously to the strongest room in his mental keep, he considered the pillar at hand, judging the best way to climb up unaided. The thick support ran wide enough to approximate flatness from any given angle, but its surface had been purposely left rough enough to scale alone.

Glancing up at half-seen peripheral movement, he found one calloused hand lowered toward him in offered aid. Warily, he accepted, ready for a sudden unkind release - but the surprisingly strong arm actually lifted him up, bringing him safely to his feet on the Stonework proper.

While the rest of the laborers focused on his colleagues, he faced his helper, confused.

The powerfully muscled man towered two heads taller than most around, and would still have had a head - at the very least - over Og. His face bore no readily identifiable features of any particular culture, and his eyes...

Locking eyes, the two stood in a shared moment of veiled surprise, battling through unspoken mutual scrutiny.

The dreamer instinctively pulled his adversary's lifelog, finding the file uncommonly short - and impossibly sparse.

The unusual giant had never spoken a single word.

"Here, have some," Og said to his gathered crowd, pulling bread from his satchel.

The dreamer pulled away from the anomalous man, filing away a dark sense of unease. He could feel those masked eyes - as lying as his own - watching his departure with wary curiosity. He stopped for a brief moment and turned back. "Thanks," he said, referring to the assistance that nobody else would have offered.

His word of gratitude elicited an almost imperceptible acknowledgement from the giant; a subtle relaxation around his eyes, and a small parting nod.

"Sure, here," Og continued, his tone compassionate.

The dreamer pressed through the crowd of sweaty, exhausted men, finding his lanky colleague doing exactly what he'd unhappily suspected.

Breaking a loaf of cricket bread into chunks, Og handed the pieces out to hungry laborers. They laughed, jostled, and cheered in response, genuinely grateful. For a few moments, he was their unexpected hero. They scarfed down the charitable treasure with eager abandon.

The moment the food was all gone, the crowd returned to work, leaving the three quite abruptly on their own.

"What?" the smiling young man asked, noticing his companions' reactions.

Elizabeth set her jaw for a moment.

"Oh... I didn't think." His eyebrows furrowed. "I'm sorry. We can get more food when we get to the Rails... they just seem like they need it more than we do."

She gave a begrudged sigh, followed shortly by a dismissive shrug.

The dreamer kept his face neutral, hanging back in his mind, unsure he had any place to comment. Realizing that Og was waiting for a response to the apology, he also gave a shrug.

The young man's smile returned.

Turning to the towering maze of stone buildings ahead, the three faced the prospect of entering the thicker crowds of civilization. The open sea had been a rare experience, and, for as long as they managed to live, they would likely never again be so alone.

Og eyed a gap between a massive azure chem-complex and a madly sandwiched habitation patterned unevenly by emerald and dotted with neon red. The crowd in the shadows seemed permissive, and the route ran more directly to the Rails than other potential passages. Various musical strains beat loudly from each gap in the maze, though the rhythms ran deeper from their prospective path. "Are you ready, Rolf?"

He blinked, unused to his own name. Alone in his castle, he had no name for himself - he simply existed. From a high window in his keep, he gazed out through neutral eyes, wondering why his colleague had asked that particular question in that particular manner. "Yes," he lied.

The three pushed through the crowd, heading for a rapidly moving flow on their visual map of the area.

It took him a few minutes to readjust to the map's incredible mass of red dots and motion, but years of practice soon highlighted the greater patterns in his awareness.

The data was easy - it was the press, the heat of bodies, the smell of sweat, the roar of a dozen conversations, the blanket of competing musics, and the seemingly random colors all around that combined to bombard his mind. His mental castle walls creaked under the intense pressure.

A laughing child to his left flickered her shirt's virtual colors between cyan and yellow to annoy her mother, and he was forced to look away. A passing bearded Nord glared and went out of his way to roughly bump his shoulder. Loaded with corrugated rods and stone blocks, a heavy flatbed truck eked its way through the press, and they were forced to wait for it to pass.

Overhead, two older women billowed laundry out of opposite windows, drying clothes the old-fashioned way and loudly exchanging neighborhood gossip. Above them, a few layabouts slept on small balconies, enjoying the upper street breezes. Even higher than that, among jutting solar arrays, rambunctious children threw a plastic ball back and forth between the rooftops, dangerously ignoring the irritated shouts of their father from his top-story window.

In the wake of the flatbed's passage, they began walking again. The air in his lungs, formerly light from the open sea, now hung heavy with stench and humidity. All around, buildings virtually colored by no greater pattern than random fancy combined to create patchwork insanity truly painful to behold.

"It's gonna be great to get home," Og mused aloud to Elizabeth.

Neither seemed bothered by the sensory assault.

He stopped abruptly as a nearby search returned his name.

A text message followed. "Hey, Scientist, got a quick job for you. Kind of an emergency."

His two colleagues turned in surprise.

He scanned over the linked problem before replying. He was the only one in the area with the proper skillset to fix the problem. "Alright."

"How long?" Og asked.

"A few minutes."

Elizabeth sighed. "We'll wait here."

He gave no reply, leaving them to cross the street's opposing crowdflows on his own. Tracing the map of the area, he angled around a high azure corner, heading for the western entrance of the massive chem-complex they'd been traveling past.

A seasoned older man waited at the opening, standing to the side to let the heavy chemical trucks enter and exit. Dour and impatient, he bore a thinly veiled sneer. "Well come on, let's get a move on. Whole line's held up. We've been down half an hour."

He followed the owner within the labyrinthine building, moving along massive pipes and past rumbling vats. Hundreds of chem-garbed men and women worked the machines, mouths covered by cloth. A horrendous stench seemed to roll and thicken with a life of its own.

The owner led him up grated metal stairs, down a short catwalk, and to a monitoring station. A worried young man fiddled with the controls. He pulled down his mask as they approached. "It's still not working."

"I can see that," the older man grumbled. He indicated the controls with a tilt of his head. "Here we are. Fix it, standard pay for a quick job."

The worker moved aside, and Rolf stepped forward, examining the readouts hanging in the air above the console machines. With flicks of his eyes, he swiped through an immense list of error messages. "The system's flagged quite a few problems... looks like there are years of missed maintenance and safety -"

The owner shook his head. "Just get it up and running."

Remaining silent, he grabbed streaming copies of the readouts, bringing them in the corner of his vision as he moved down the catwalk. Kneeling by a junction box, rummaging through his satchel for the right tools, he began testing the corroded workings within.

"What are you doing?" the owner asked, growing slightly annoyed. "Just tell it to stop holding the pipeline locked."

"It's not a software issue," he replied, keeping his tone careful and neutral. "The system was designed to mechanically lockdown when major hazard issues are detected."

"So you're lifting the lockdown?"

"I'm trying to get more data on the hazard -"

"I'm not paying for that," he replied, angry. "I'm paying you to lift the lockdown and get on your way."

The young man at the control station stepped over warily. "Maybe we should see what the problem is. People might get hurt."

"No. You're fired."

"What?"

"This company is about profit. You're obviously not on board with the bottom line. Get out."

"You're serious?"

"Yes. You're fired. Leave."

"But... we're pregnant... we won't have enough calories if I lose this job... my wife will lose the -"

"I don't care. Get out of my sight."

Rolf kept his head down, focusing on the work at hand, hoping the young man wouldn't try to enlist his support.

In the heart of his castle, within his deepest keep, a black silhouette sat at a roughly hewn chrome table and glared, imagining the screwdriver in his hand sinking into the owner's fleshy back. He was facing the other way... he would never see it coming...

A whirring roar swelled to life around them.

"It's lifted," he texted, his voice inadequate over the roar.

"Good," the owner replied, watching the young man he'd just fired walk away in despair. "Here's your pay."

He stood, face neutral. He did not give thanks.

The owner immediately posted a replacement job opening, sending it out to layabouts waiting hungrily in alleys nearby. "You can find your own way back to the street."

His feet took him down the grated steps, and his legs moved him along the massive pipes and vats, but his guarded eyes were on the workers watching him pass. Their breathing masks hid their expressions, but their manner seemed defeated. He'd expected resentment, but he had no explanation for their slumped shoulders.

Leaving the azure chem-complex in silence, he did not look back.

"Done already?" Og greeted him as he emerged from the crowd.

Elizabeth grimaced. "What's that smell?"

"It'll pass."

He followed closely behind the two of them, keeping his head down and his mind aloft. Riding the currents of data, he walked with his eyes half-closed, navigating the increasingly dense crowd purely by map. A few kilometers ahead, a massive cleft in the map cut through the architectural morass.

Seeing a text message reach Og, he read it. "Welcome back, son."

"Hey, my dad's awake," the young man said aloud, glancing back over his shoulder at the two of them.

Access notifications passed through Rolf's vision as the distant Scientist, Ragni, skimmed over transcripts of their arrival and recent conversations.

"So you two are coming here as well?"

Moving directly behind Og as the crowd grew too thick to progress otherwise, Elizabeth texted her response without hesitation. "Yes, definitely."

A moment later, Rolf added his response, entering the letters on his visual keyboard with hesitant swipes of his eye. "Yes."

"Good, we can always use more Scientists here," Ragni continued. "Any idea what you'd like to work on?"

He opened his eyes again as they entered the direct line of people heading for the Rails. A few blocks ahead, the tremendous superstructure ran perpendicular to the street.

From their perspective, it looked like a series of heavy horizontal cylinders supported by gigantic steel triangles, all shining at sharp angles with the reflected light of the Unsetting Sun. Flanked by high multi-colored buildings, the Rails stood out as starkly chrome and mechanical, cutting through civilization as part of a massive distribution web.

"You know my project," Og sent back, his demeanor momentarily grim.

"Are there any pressing issues?" Elizabeth asked.

Ragni scanned their backgrounds and listed skills. "As always, the more minds on the solar cells project, the better. We could use Rolf's programming and your engineering skills, both." A link followed his message.

Elizabeth examined the project's files and progress, hesitating for a moment.

Rolf waited, his eyes on her grey-shirted back as they shuffled through the crowd. He knew she was waiting to see if he was going to join - it seemed she was seriously intent on finding a project separate from his, as Og had suggested.

"Sounds interesting," she finally texted back. "I'll join that."

Her choice made, Ragni's examination of his data deepened.

He tried not to betray his anxiety. He had a tense notion that the distant Scientist was going to see his background and suddenly grow negative - but Ragni either didn't notice, or didn't care. His interest seemed caught by something else entirely.

"Oh, you've played it before," the old man texted, and Rolf's heart froze. "You know, we've had a programming project request on backlog for quite some time. No Scientists with the necessary experience or time to waste on fixing a game. You seem uniquely suited for this."

He viewed the accompanying link, running through the request.

It seemed that something was subtly wrong in his childhood haunt...

Fighting to keep his vitals neutral, he carefully considered his options. Ragni was right; he was uniquely suited for the task. It would be suspicious if he chose some other project instead... and, being who he was, he already had all the suspicion he could handle. "I'll take it."

"Good, good, good. I'll see you three when you get here, then." To one of them, he added another line. "See you soon, son."

Og's gait took on a highly positive up-step.

They reached the end of the waiting line of people, and, subsequently, the beginning of the food-bearing Rail cars. Taking turns interacting with the dispensary on the front of the rectangular chrome car, they each bought half a loaf of cricket bread from the automated stores within.

He stared at the screen. "Is this _right?_ "

Og glanced over. "Hmm?"

"The price. It's like twenty percent higher than two years ago!"

"Oh, I hadn't noticed."

A grumble traveled around the people behind them in line. He turned back to the ordering screen, intent on hurrying it up, but the discontent was - for once - not focused on him.

"Squeezing us for every bit we've got," a glowering teenager muttered.

A grizzled senior shook his head. "It's because the Peak's so low. Tough times mean tough prices. Just the way it is. I've lived through worse. You should have seen the Tyrant days."

The young malcontent made a disgusted noise, and the two began arguing. Others in line watched them, nodding along with one or the other.

Eager to get away from anything that might bring unwanted attention, he finished ordering, grabbed his food from the dispenser, and moved on after his companions.

He wolfed down his chunk in seconds, satiating his desperate body. He shivered once it was all gone, fighting the incredible urge to spend the last of his money on another half-loaf... but that meal had already been one of excess. It was dangerous not to carefully calculate every bite, every movement, every expenditure... and the unexpectedly higher price had left him subtly shaken. The pay for the chem-complex job had been effectively worth much less than he'd anticipated...

They moved down the platform and entered a dim compartment. Formerly stuffed with cricket bread loaves from the Fields, but newly empty after selling out its inventory, it now served as passage for a large number of people. An enormous press of bodies crowded in behind them, all heading for various destinations down the line.

Tucked in the corner, lacking any room to sit, the three Scientists stood and gripped a vertical bar.

Elizabeth's hand brushed his. She gave him a brief mean glare and moved her hand away.

Giving her no care, he leaned his shoulder against the shaking wall of the car, relishing the dimness and overpowering noise of travel. All things considered, the Rail's roaring sound and shifting darkness came as a blessed respite.

He let the mental stresses of the world at large fall away.

As his body calmed, his thoughts traveled outward.

He found himself idly skipping across the lifelogs of men and women a few blocks away from that mysterious giant back at the Edge. He kept his accesses distant, skirting around those people the man might know personally, avoiding leaving any overt clue as to the true target of his study.

They called him the Islander.

That made sense, at least as a nickname based on the popular theory of his origin. _Somewhere_ , they gossiped, there had to be an Island... a living landmass rife with food, where _life_ ran healthy and fat. That conjecture made perfect sense, given the man's height, musculature, and unknown origin.

Leaning against the wall of the swaying Rail car, relishing in the dimness and sense-numbing mechanical roar, he could almost believe it himself. That was the insidious nature of the rumor... he could fully understand how everyone would want to believe it; that somewhere out there was a wonderful place with bountiful food, free from ills, free from pain...

But - judging by the visual logs of men who were there at the time - when the Islander had washed up to the Edge a few months ago, half-drowned and burned deep red by the Unsetting Sun, he'd had no possessions hinting at any such place. He'd never said or written anything in all his time since. He'd given no grounds for such an idea.

The only support for his supposed paradise origin was his strangely healthy physique. His calorie balance just didn't make sense... with only his earnings from laboring as a construction worker at the Edge - barely more than the calories expended in the job - he'd somehow remained as muscular as the day he'd washed up.

He began guessing idly at explanations for the man's impossible calorie balance. Maybe growing up healthy had positive effects... maybe his gut bacteria were more efficient...

Or, maybe, he was secretly a very lifelike machine in disguise, a probe sent to spy on them in the best manner possible - by getting a cell and contacts like everyone else, and then watching society from the inside.

He shook his head and snorted, dismissing the unlikely notion. Too much science fiction, he told himself, pushing aside half-remembered stories from bygone days.

Shaking back and forth with the car's clanking rumbles, he let his real vision trace across the gloom-shadowed patterns on the patterned metal ceiling. No, as much as he wanted to believe it, the Island was just a dream; a false hope born from the wishful thinking of a starving society...

...and his conclusion had come to others as well. Over the last several months, the Islander's novelty had worn off. Popular interest had largely moved on.

He laid his head against the sturdy glass window, watching the absurd menagerie of colored buildings race past outside, a strange hopeful thought finding its way through his defenses. The Island might have been a fool's dream, but the Islander himself certainly existed. There still had to be a Somewhere Else... somewhere that wasn't _here_...

That realization electrified him for a few minutes, gripping him in a way he hadn't felt since reading those now half-remembered stories.

For a time, he tried to envision what such a place might be like, how daily life in Somewhere Else might go, but such baseless daydreams only made him feel worse. The constraints of time and resources always pulled his imagination back down into harsh reality; chains of logic tightened around his heart as he thought about other ways life could - or couldn't - work. Try as he might, he couldn't seem to imagine any happy way to live that didn't eventually run afoul of cold logic and limited resources... or of human nature.

He shook his head to dispel the entire train of thought, momentarily angry for some reason.

While the Rail car picked up speed, heading south toward the area that held the Main Hub, he let his bodily awareness tune out.

Logging into his old online haunt, he focused on the game's sight-filling visuals.

Reviving atrophied memories and emotions with every passing moment, he found himself at the edge of a familiar virtual city. The skyscraping buildings towered stark and white overhead, subtly hinting at the immense world running maze-like between their bases. The distant horizon lay filled with slowly moving continents, each bearing a different kind of city - and their vastly different subgames. It was a visually impressive interface, he often thought, built mainly for visual use by the computer illiterate... but he allowed himself a few minutes of indulgence.

The crowds were no less relentless within the false streets, though the experience was thankfully lacking in smell and heat. He moved between the virtual press with returning ease, traversing the immense alley-canyons with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.

He watched the passing individuals all around, scanning their lives by habit. Eight rowdy kids walked together while sitting in various crowded rooms of a ramshackle habitation in the north. A mother of four chatted about her stories with a friend in a virtual café while manually working in one of the lines in a southern chem-factory. Down a tremendous vaulted street rife with shouting game-item sellers, a familiar face turned, noticing his presence.

Quickly deciding he was tired of fake-walking through the familiar fake streets, he skipped away completely, accessing the chatlink he had in mind.

"Oh, hello," the old man within offered. Nearly sixty, his visual typing betrayed the slowness of age. "They finally have a Scientist free?"

"Yes," he answered, not going into further explanation. "Can you tell me more about the problem?"

"Well..." the old man wrote, pausing for several minutes to think and respond. "I just sort of inherited caretaking of this game when the last fan with real programming skill died. Do you know 4.3?"

Accessing the caretaker's data, he looked through his eyes for a moment. The man was a zombie, lying in an alley far to the south, in the Rain Belt - a hard place to survive long in that condition. "No. I knew this game was old code, but version 4.3?"

"Study me all you want," the old man responded, seeing the accesses. "But I'm the one who put in the request. I've nothing to hide."

"Hide? What?"

"Oh, I just thought -" he typed something out, but then deleted his words. "The checksums are off."

"Yeah, I see that in the request," Rolf replied, a little exasperated. "What does that mean?"

In his chilly, rain-soaked alley, the old man laughed. "I _don't know_. That's why I put in the request. We've been getting a 'failed checksum error' on random games for... I don't know, a year and a half now. The code isn't commented well enough for me to deduce the meaning. As with everything, it's a hodgepodge of additions and changes piled on willy-nilly by countless different contributors. This game is a century old, and it shows."

Leaning his head against the window again, swaying with the motion of the car, he sighed. "Alright. Maybe I'll take a look at the original programmers' lifelogs, see what they intended when they made the game."

"Thanks, kid." The old man scanned him in return. "You were once ranked eighty-second at this, huh? You going to play a few games?"

His reply came only after a hesitant moment of consideration. "I suppose I'll have to."

"Yes, I suppose so," the old man offered, frowning. It ran unspoken between them - given his condition, they would probably never speak again. "Thanks for your help, in any case. I hope you take care of this place... it's had a good run. It's seen many games. Many Ages, even."

"So it has."

He logged out - and spent the rest of the Rail ride struggling with memories and darkness.

Stepping down from the car, the sensory assault of civilization snapped him from the past. He blinked painfully through the shuffle of buying another half-loaf of cricket bread, again fighting the pain shot through his nerves by the higher price.

Bright colors and roaring conversations flooded his awareness, but he focused on the passing songs, plucking each note out of the sensory morass to construct a complete tune, enjoying the emotions and rhythms of each street's musical personality as they walked.

Each song ran with the spirit of the group that had decided to play it, and the cadences were as varied as the masses living in each building. As they had through much of his youth, the chained and overlapping notes - rhythms full of life and hope and emotion - gave him a solace that no mental castle could provide. All the hunger, heat, smell, and noise left him.

He floated for a time, putting one foot in front of the other blithely.

Faces passed by his partial awareness, their temperaments spinning vague tales of families and friends living out their lives. A frowning older woman watched two children tussle, her arms crossed at their horseplay. Two white-haired Anglan men talked on a grated walkway between buildings overhead, glaring down from above. Along one smaller street, a few girls clad in those certain colors watched the crowd for prospects, each looking away from him uncomfortably as he accidentally glanced their way.

He could see every fact about every person they passed, each moving around in their daily activities; socializing, sleeping, and living with persistent inexplicable momentum.

For him, despite the variety, it all ran flat and faded.

The endless series of slightly different dances had always kept him at a loss. How did they still care? How did it all matter so much? What was a family, anyway? Just some people that lived nearby, that was all, when it really came down to it.

It all came down to wanting, he thought sometimes. They _wanted_ things.

Og stopped in place, breathing heavily. "I'm tired. Anyone else favor a rest?"

Red-faced from the walk, Elizabeth nodded.

They moved away from the main flow, finding shelter in a dead-end alley full of zombies. He followed absently, still half in another world.

Carefully picking his way between prostrate forms, Og slumped against a wall.

Some of the starving men and women stirred, begging with silent eyes.

"I'm sorry," the young man replied. "I gave all our extra food away at the Edge..."

The zombies rolled over and returned to their half-awake stupors, awaiting the next chance at a job opening - that, or death.

Elizabeth uncomfortably ignored them, instead focusing on her project's files.

Returning from his absent-minded wanderings, he found himself staring. One emaciated woman continued to gaze at him far longer than was polite. A sharp, sweet odor lingered over the alley, hauntingly familiar in all its pain and portent.

He looked away, unable to bear her gaze any longer.

"What is that?" Og asked, sniffing the air. "Smells like... alcohol... and... something strange, sweet..."

He felt something snap. Despite his best self-control, he turned his head sharply forward, his fist clenched.

"Oh," Og said a moment later, skimming a few biology articles. "It's starvation ketosis! Their bodies have run out of glucose, and they're now breaking down fatty acids into ketones for energy, and we're smelling that in their perspiration and breathing -" He stopped, finally noticing his companion's death glare. "What?"

He forced his expression neutral again, vainly trying to hide what he felt was a blazing trail of emotions he'd unthinkingly seared across the space between them. "Just surprised you've somehow never encountered that smell before..." He glanced over at Elizabeth, finding her in rare agreement.

She held one eye narrowed, her manner wary and unhappy.

Across from them, Og straightened his back, sitting high against the wall. His expression darkened with rare seriousness. "Rolf, what do you want?"

Caught off guard by the strange question, he struggled for an answer. "I, uh -"

"No," the unhappy Nord interrupted. "I don't mean about just now. I'm an unthinking idiot sometimes, saying things like that. I mean, in the larger sense, the life sense, what do you _want?_ "

Trying to comprehend the question, he reached inside, touching upon that part of himself where memories and darkness lurked - but that particular door, locked and barred deep within his darkest dungeons, refused to yield. "Nothing."

"Nothing? Really? That's funny, because I've been trying to figure out what _I_ want, and I have to say, I've no answer either." He furrowed his brow with dark introspection. "Look, I've been thinking quite a bit. The things we talked about... the conversation we left unfinished. I know I didn't have the same rough life most have endured. When I joined the Scientists, you could have called me naïve, a braggart, and a fool, and you'd have been right."

He scanned the gaunt forms strewn about the alley before looking at Elizabeth. "But it was something you said. We were all arguing, like a week before Last Day, you remember? And you said... _that's the way things are_ is not a valid argument. Simple, I know, but I think you meant so much more than just the words themselves."

She listened, still wary, but waiting for the rest of his thoughts.

He took a moment to breathe, blinking rapidly to keep his eyes clear. "I was happy most of my life with the way things are, because it all works great for _me_. There's lots of misfortune, sure, but that's just the way things are, they'd say; I'd say. But these people, starving in alleys... and the violence..." Hesitating, he glanced at Rolf for a moment. "I can't even begin to say where things went wrong, or what exactly the fix is. I don't _know_ what we should do to make things better... but I want to try."

A moment of silence hung between the three of them.

Rolf glanced over at Elizabeth, unsure how to respond.

She looked around the alley. The zombies - mostly men, a few women, two children - were all watching their conversation with wide eyes. She turned back to Og. "This better not be another one of your passing crusades."

He slowly shook his head twice, and then held out his hand flat, palm down. "The things we talked about cannot be unsaid, or unheard. I don't know what I'm signing up for, but I can't go back to ignoring what's happening. Not anymore." He nodded to himself. "Yes. I'm on board. Let's take this right to the end, no matter how far that might be."

Wordlessly, she put her hand on top of his. They both waited expectantly.

Rolf locked eyes with each of them, and then stared at their waiting hands.

He'd been thinking about their heated conversation, too. He'd assumed it would be forgotten like every other talk about the unhappy way of things. He'd assumed their awkward tension would slowly fade into a happy dropping of the subject. Strangely, Og hadn't ignored it, hadn't just let it go... not this time.

It didn't make any sense.

But he didn't want it to make sense...

Against all his better judgment, he added his hand to the grip. "This is going to get us all killed, you know."

The tension shattered, all three shared a nervous laugh.

He put on a rare smile, strangely amazed at the new dynamics opening up before him. First he'd gained a job, and then colleagues, and now he had... friends?... like Og, he had no idea what he was getting himself into by actually getting involved for the first time in his life.

A grim and introspective silence hung over the three of them as they finished their break and left the alley.

The tension did not break until, sitting on three chrome toilets among ten lining the busy street, leaning back to avoid a momentary surge in the crowd accidentally milling against them, Og suddenly burst out laughing.

"Man, that got really serious there for a second."

Despite herself, Elizabeth's face screwed up and burned bright red, her suppressed laugh coming out as a squealing chuckle. "Yeah, wow, who knew you had it in you? So _deep_ ," she forced out, half-mocking - but half-hopeful.

Still laughing heartily, Og slapped him on the back. His sudden inclusion elicited a genuine smile of surprise. He raised his arms widely, mocking his own grimness back in the alley. "Ohh, it's going to get us all killed!"

An older man on the toilet to his right flinched at the sudden elbow in his face, and he frowned indignantly - but that only made them burst into painful fits of laughter that quickly left them breathless.

Og assumed the suddenly serious manner of a heroic Scientist from the stories, one fist raised in determination. "The world is in danger, and only we can fix it," he intoned deeply and mock-charismatically

Elizabeth cried out, laughing almost to tears.

Rolf watched both of them with a smile, pulling up his pants and letting the next waiting person use the toilet. The old woman had one eyebrow raised, staring at the three of them in annoyance.

He couldn't help but feel strangely optimistic. For a rare moment, life felt like life should feel.

He decided not to tell them that his comment about getting killed had actually been serious.

#  Mjögen

He stood between them under the streams of chilly water, glancing down to his right at Rolf's short black hair \- streaked with telltale hints of blue - and down to his left at Elizabeth's rare unkempt blonde. They were not the companions the boy he'd been two years ago would have chosen, but he now saw a fierce honesty and spirit within both that he'd only begun to truly value.

Traveling to the Scientists' Atoll, forced to live up to his bold youthful claims and actually sit down, study, and learn the sciences, a dark suspicion had found seed within his heart.

Climbing up the Edge into a swarm of hungry laborers, walking the crowded streets, resting in an alley full of starving zombies... he knew his dark suspicion had been right.

The sheet metal in front of his face seemed to reflect his own charmed upbringing, forcing him to look away. Absently rubbing the shower water across his shoulders and arms, he watched the street for a moment, noticing among passersby sharp cheek bones, gaunt eyes, and a quiet overhanging exhaustion that belied the area's bright colors and loud clashing musics.

The problems he'd boldly promised to solve suddenly seemed too insurmountable to topple, let alone approach.

"What happened between you two?" he found himself asking as a self-diversion, glancing down at his showering companions. "What's with the insults and the bickering? You made me violate my promise and look at your logs, but there wasn't even anything there."

Rolf seemed slightly more bitter than usual. He'd already known. "Nobody _made you_ do anything."

"Fine," he admitted, scratching his beard. "I care, and I broke my promise not to look at your lifelog. But there still wasn't anything there. You never even had a fight as far as I can tell. So what's all this back and forth about?"

Elizabeth turned her head away, dispensed more soap from the system, and worked on her legs.

Rolf gave no hint either, instead scrubbing at his hair with angry force, as if he could somehow remove his hated streaks of blue.

Their showers completed, they moved along the line of dripping bare bodies, passing by the blasting airdry vent and picking up their clothing from the autowash system.

They dressed in silence.

Soon after, he noticed an abrupt change in Rolf's manner. Without looking at his lifelog, all he could do was ask. "What's wrong?"

Rolf gazed down the street, his expression hard.

A furiously glaring young man about their age approached from three blocks away. His hair ran black, with light blue streaks.

"An acquaintance of yours?" he asked.

Rolf nodded, watching intently, but offering no explanation.

Unsure what the problem was, but certain the stranger seemed intent on violence, he wrote a text message. "Hey, leave my friend alone."

"It's not your business, Nord," the angry Subian wrote back.

"It _is_ my business. He's a fellow Scientist. Get outta here!"

He looked down at Elizabeth, expecting her to offer some insulting suggestion to leave Rolf to his own problems, but she just stood watching in strange, silent concern.

"Fair enough, I can respect that," the stranger replied. His next message went to Rolf directly. "I'll be around."

They kept walking in silence for some time after the strange encounter, but Rolf refused to explain. Og even caught Elizabeth glancing over a few times with subtle compassion.

Before he had a chance to ask, a request interrupted his thoughts.

With a worried word to his two colleagues, he ducked into a rough-looking light green residency building. Moving between the huddled families sitting on the dusty floor, he kneeled before a group of four at the back.

Rolf and Elizabeth stood behind as he examined the injured woman.

"When did you break it?" he asked, gently probing her swollen leg.

"We can't pay," she mumbled, her forehead running with sweat. Her husband, also a young Nord, held her up in a sitting position. Their two children played a game with several rocks, oblivious.

He shook the concern away. "It's fine. Don't worry about it. Do you have..." He looked around, sighting something that might do. "Hey, Rolf, will you get that rod?"

Surprised by the request to help, it took Rolf a moment to comply, but he eventually stepped over to the wall. Pulling a cutting tool from his satchel, he finished the job corrosion had started, prying the corrugated rod from the crumbling stone.

"Thanks." He took it, mixed together a few liquids from his own satchel, and began rubbing the rust off. "Need that sleeve?"

The husband shook his head, tearing off his sleeve quickly.

Elizabeth held the woman's leg while he leaned down, setting the broken bone back into place. Not wanting to alarm her children, she bit her lip to bleeding - but she managed not to scream.

He quickly set the cleaned rod against her leg and tied it tight.

"Lay her down. Good. Now let her sleep. It didn't look infected. She should be all right."

"I was so worried," her husband laughed, relieved. "I thought she'd have to go to the Fields. Will she be able to work?"

"In a couple weeks, yes. Don't push it."

"And you're sure you don't want any money?"

He shook his head again, grinning. "Come on. Fellow Nord, we take care of our own, right?"

He looked up at Rolf for support of his offhand comment, but found nothing but neutral blankness.

"Well, anyway, good luck. Feel free to text me if she doesn't heal. I'll try to send someone your way."

"Wow. We can't thank you enough."

All smiles at the praise, he nodded his way out, almost becoming embarrassed by the profuse thanks. The other families in the room murmured amongst themselves and watched him go.

"What was that about?" Elizabeth asked, happily surprised. "Since when don't you go for the money?"

"I dunno. It just felt like the right thing to say, after all that big talk earlier."

"The right thing to _say_ , or the right thing to _do?_ " she asked.

"Do. That's what I meant to say."

"Fair enough."

He bore a self-satisfied grin for several blocks. He wasn't sure which part had felt so great - doing good, or the profuse thanks for doing good - but he wasn't sure the difference mattered.

His spirits lifted even further as they finally approached the incredible complex of buildings he'd called home most of his life.

The Main Hub was less random than the rest of the Stonework, but had still grown into a strange patchwork of huge factories and labs according to rapidly changing needs over the last century. Myriad columns of steam and smoke hinted at the industries housed within.

Per tradition, the buildings were all kept their real colors, each reflecting the Unsetting Sun in shades of grey, orange, and brown. Each unique color came from a particular mine's materials, supplied from the Shield Mountains glowering on the western horizon. Even though the information was surely listed online like everything else in the world, he was proud that he could still name every single mine's particular color.

He'd been quite proud of himself when he'd managed to learn them all.

His smile widened as he thought of times past, matching each building to the right color and mining operation as the crowd's flow brought them inexorably closer.

"Guys. Have I ever told you about my nine brothers?"

To his left, Elizabeth looked up at him with a half-smirk. "At great length."

"I feel like _I've_ got their lifelogs," Rolf commented. "But only the most embarrassing moments, stuck on permanent loop forever."

"Yeah, yeah," he countered both of them. "I just wanted to say, since this might be the last time the three of us are just like this, and just ourselves, and..." He scanned the bright blue sky overhead, trying to think of the words - but none came. "I just want you to know. I meant what I said. I'll be there for both of you like family, if you'll do the same for me."

He saw both their heart rates rise, although Rolf's quickly evened.

"Are you sure?" Elizabeth asked, keeping her eyes ahead, her tone careful.

He reflexively moved to touch her arm, but paused a heartbeat away from actual contact. He drew his hand back. "I know what it means to you." He turned. "And to you."

Without missing a single step in the crowd, Rolf turned his head and gazed up at him.

Og felt briefly as if his entire existence was under scrutiny, but he resisted the urge to smooth down his newly-showered hair.

For once, Rolf gave a sincere, direct answer. "Yes. I accept."

He faced forward again. He did not elaborate.

Og turned back to Elizabeth. "There's something here," he said, his hands open. "The three of us. We get along. We've had some great times. I'm not the same asshole from First Day back on the Atoll."

She still kept her gaze on the high walls and sea of backs before them. "I know. But first that pact, and now a family-promise? Are you just excited to be back home?"

Instead of offering excuses, he held out his hand in the old style, mirroring their meeting from First Day - before his social blunders and accidental insults.

Despite herself, she laughed. "That one will never get old." She gave a great approximation of a smile, but still subtly shied away from his offered hand. "Fine, yes, we'll see."

He grinned, pulling back his hand. "Good. Since you're family now, I'll start collecting embarrassing stories about you two immediately."

They both frowned in response, dismayed.

"Dad!" he shouted, waving at the hunched giant standing by the wide entrance to the Main Hub.

Framed by sheer grey stone, Ragni leaned on his tall steel cane and waved with his free arm. Weathered by age and Sun, sporting a red beard and grey-streaked brown curls, people often said he looked the spitting image of his son - but Og didn't give any credit to those claims.

"Eh, it's just my tenth son," the old man said languidly as they approached, pretending to keep scanning the crowd. "Well, I suppose I'm happy to see you, Mjögen."

Og pushed through the last passersby and gripped his father in a massive bear-hug. "Don't you kid me, old man! Two years is two years, there's no pretending!"

Squeezed to straining, Ragni nodded with no small effort. "I suppose I'll have to admit to realizing you were gone... about a week or two ago. Yep, needed a chore done, and you were nowhere to be found."

"Dad," he continued, pulling away. "You've spoken to them, but this is Elizabeth, and that's Rolf. Officially."

"I heard," the old man responded, eyeing them. "So you two are family now. That comes with chores, you know."

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow, and Rolf froze, uniquely anxious. "Really?"

Ragni grinned, his scraggly beard emphasizing his mischievous grin.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "Great, there's two of them now."

Both Nord men laughed heartily, obviously considering themselves the funniest comedy team in existence.

"Dad, mind if I show them around? We'll meet you back for dinner."

"How's an hour?" Ragni asked, his eyes distant as he sorted through data. "I'll make my way over to the Railstop."

"We can do that -"

"No, I can walk just fine on my own."

"Seriously, Dad, we can -"

Ragni cut him off with a glare. "We've had this talk, _son._ Now's not the time."

Og nodded, his jaw set unhappily.

The old man smiled weakly, and then moved off. He leaned on his chrome crutch as he limped, walking with visible pain through the crowd.

His father gone, the young Nord stalked through crossing crowdflows and took a seat at the main quadrant's gapsquare. The wide space quietly opened onto the calm sea below, providing ventilation, access, and aesthetic.

Sitting on the edge, he gazed down, absently watching an Underman motor by on a small craft rather like the one that had brought them back to civilization.

"It's good to be back," he said to nobody in particular, his tone unconvincing.

Coming up, Elizabeth stood behind him in silence.

Rolf remained half-absent as always, his attention constantly running through nearby data, trends, and crowd patterns almost obsessively. Despite all that, he remained oblivious to the subtleties directly before him.

Og turned with the intent of snapping at him, coldly hell-bent on spitting unkind words at his strange friend for the first time ever, but his thoughtless words came out warm and smile-bound. "I think we can find a Night shift room for the three of us." He hesitated after, pleasantly relieved that he hadn't given in to his momentary darkness.

Elizabeth's brow tensed slightly, but she let the moment of sensed strangeness pass, opting for a barbed comment instead. "You sure you can't find a separate room for him?"

Rolf pretended not to hear her.

He shook his head, scanning the buildings, soon sighting the clay-colored East Residency. Leaving his perch at the gapsquare, he led them that direction, pushing through the crowds with a grim determination.

"So many Scientists," Rolf commented, accessing information constantly as they walked, noting the numerous satchels all around - the unofficial mark of a Scientist.

"Thousands," he replied, his eyes remaining ahead. "I grew up here, and I'm still a little intimidated by how much this place grows every year."

East Residency's arched entrance led into a series of hallways expertly carved to channel the Unsetting Sun. Each passage glowed with just enough subtle luminance to light their route. Each branching room somehow transitioned naturally into blessed darkness.

He made sure to glance back at Rolf when they first passed the rooms. His colleague bore an expression of disbelief. "You ever seen real darkness before?"

Rolf seemed unusually positive. A hint of a smile almost seemed to cross his features. "Well yeah, I've just never gotten to sleep in it..."

"You'll sleep like you wouldn't _believe_ ," he cheerfully countered, the last of his black mood finally passing. "And the cots are the best around!"

"Cots too?" Rolf peered into the passing rooms, trying to confirm for himself. "Wow. How much is this costing you, for all three of us?"

"Eh, don't worry about it. You're family now!"

Up circular flights of stone steps worn shallow in the middle, they came to the tenth and highest floor. Turning left, they carefully crept past Eve shift sleepers, making for the end of the hall. The last room greeted them with a slightly brighter welcome.

"A window?" Rolf whispered.

"A southern window," he murmured back. "We'll get to sit and watch the Rain Belt at least. You can just see it from the higher buildings in the Hub, I remember. It's really pretty."

Three rows of cots stacked three high lined the room rather tightly, barely fitting all twenty-seven sleeping boxes in a roughly cubical space.

He raised a quiet finger of pause, creeping down the small aisle to peer out the narrow window slit.

From outside in the hallway, Rolf and Elizabeth both accessed his visual feed, gazing out the window with him. He'd been right - over the endless span of jumbled buildings and interconnected walkways, the southern horizon shifted ominously with an immense line of burbling darkness. The Stonework in the distance traveled right up to it, beneath it, and beyond, disappearing into a hazy sheet that glimmered with constantly shifting prismatic colors - the ethereal dance of an ever-shining Sun against ever-present rains.

The man sleeping on the top cot near his head grumbled and rolled over.

"Sorry..." He crept back out of the room with a sheepish grin, finalizing their claim to two spots with a few flicks of his eyes. "Looks like this is home. Whole building's more than full on Morning and Eve shifts, but in those eight long sweet Night hours, we've got two cots."

Elizabeth glared. "It's you and him."

"Great. You better not punch me in my sleep."

Rolf examined the room with his typical deadpan expression. "No promises."

"So what's this about a promise to change the world?" Ragni asked, handing each of them a half-loaf of cricket bread as he sat down at the long steel table. "I made something of a similar boast when _I_ was young. What's your plan?"

Getting comfortable on the bench, Og looked first at Elizabeth, then at Rolf, then back at his father. "I... guess I don't really know."

Ragni's wrinkled face curled up in a knowing half-smile. "I didn't know either, when I was your age."

"What did you end up doing?" Elizabeth asked, taking a bite of her bread as she leaned in, visibly interested.

"Let's see..." He eyed the patterns in the stone ceiling overhead for a moment. "When I was your age... that's forty years ago next month. 265... is that right? Has it really been that long?" He took a moment to access his own past lifelog, giving a small laugh as he watched his younger self rioting. "Yep, that was it. The end of the Tyrant's Decade, and the last days of government in any meaningful sense."

At the word _government,_ various men and women eating nearby turned and watched them with concern.

"Just talking about days gone by," Ragni responded, his hands raised. "No worries."

Og tuned out for a moment, watching his father's riotous ancient actions with a grave look of introspection.

"What was it like, after?" Elizabeth asked, fascinated.

Rolf turned away, his cricket bread still half-unfinished in his hand.

Ragni mused aloud. "The Age of Gangs... ah... it didn't start well. We didn't have a name for it then. We couldn't have known how well the big cultural families were going to consolidate power in the new vacuum." He paused for a moment, considering. "Still, it was better than living under the Tyrant's brutal rule. I guess that's the struggle, though - slowly working toward a better life for your children." He seemed to glance at his son with an almost apologetic expression, barely discernible underneath a veneer of nostalgia.

Og let out a long, dismayed breath. "Where do we go from here, though? Twelve years of anarchy... it's all _we've_ ever really known. It doesn't seem too bad, compared to how people speak about past Ages."

"Eh," Ragni shrugged. "You could always keep your head down, just carve out a little pocket for you and yours. Try to keep them safe."

Og glanced over at his friend, expecting some negative comment, but Rolf just stared down at the table.

The old man paused, taking in a long sibilant inhalation through his nose. He let out a heavy breath before speaking again. "Yes. Things change when you've got a family to protect, and when that riotous youth within has been tempered by decades of struggle. But I don't expect you'll actually keep your head down. No son of mine goes without making a mark in this world."

At his father's compliment, thinking of his brothers, he made a fist. "Yeah, I was thinking. We're the young generation now, but we don't have any Tyrants or Gangs to suppress us. We can do it _right_ , live _right_ , make things the best they've ever been."

Elizabeth nodded in determined agreement.

"That's a nice dream," Rolf said, his voice low. "I hope you're right. I really do. I wasn't sure you were serious, with all those promises."

"A month ago, or even a week ago, it might have just been mouthing off," he admitted. "I like to boast, I know. But coming back here after two years away... it's weird, the things you can take for granted. The things you can remain oblivious to, or just get used to... and then to have all that thrust in your face again... you feel like an idiot for ever having missed it."

Ragni straightened, a subtle look of pride crossing his weathered features. "You sound just like your mother." He laughed, his whole body shaking with humor, nostalgia, and faded sorrow.

"What if - and get this," Og whispered loudly, raising his arms dramatically as he walked. "What if - we cross the Shield Mountains, and find out the barrens aren't so radioactive anymore? That could be our grand undertaking!"

Following him through the dim tenth-floor hallway, Elizabeth frowned. "Sounds ambitious."

"They said three hundred years, right?" he asked. "Well it's been three hundred and five. Why isn't anyone checking into it?"

Rolf brought up the rear. "Do _you_ have extra food and time to just climb right over the Shield?"

"Think of all that free space," he continued, oblivious. "We wouldn't have to build a single meter of land. It's just _there!_ It's just _sitting there!_ "

Elizabeth chuckled. "The construction companies would have a collective fit."

"Oh, you're right," he responded with dismay, scanning the results of prior expedition attempts - all quashed by major construction groups intent on protecting their profits.

They came to the room at the end of the hall. The dim light filtering in through the slit window at the back illuminated an array of cots now mostly filled with Night shift sleepers.

As he'd promised and reserved, the two highest cots on either side of the window lay open.

"Home sweet home," he murmured happily, moving inside and approaching the high cot to the right. Climbing up awkwardly, angling his long limbs and frame between the stone ceiling and the cot, he rolled in with relief. Sighing along with the warm draining sensation of much-deserved respite, he scooted over to make room for Rolf.

Across the small aisle, Elizabeth climbed up into her cot and lolled her head against the synthetic fabric.

He rolled over in confusion, realizing Rolf was still outside the room.

One of the sleepers had woken up and joined him at the door. The two young men spoke in hushed tones.

Standing with no small consternation and cursing his promise not to look at Rolf's visual stream, he walked over to them.

They both stopped talking abruptly.

Closer now to the woken sleeper, he realized the young man also had blue streaks in his black hair - he was from the same culture as Rolf.

"Hey," he said warmly, surprised. "I've never seen another -"

"I'm Dierk," the newcomer responded, smiling and holding out his hand in the old style.

Rolf interrupted them both with a forceful whisper. "Look, it's fine, he's already agreed to find somewhere else to sleep."

"That's ridiculous!"

Thinner than Rolf, but very direct with his curious gaze, Dierk tilted his head slightly. "He's right. Two of us in the same room is risky. People don't react well."

Og shook his head. "Bullshit. This is the Main Hub. We're Scientists. You're a Scientist, right?"

Dierk nodded emphatically. "Engineer on the solar cells project."

"Seriously," he insisted, his thoughts still caught up in the grand things his father had said. "I don't give a damn what they think. We're not going to let this be a thing anymore, especially not among people that are supposed to be enlightened. From now on we're not Nords, Anglans, Oranis, or even Subians. We're just Scientists."

Dierk stared curiously at him for several moments, considering. "Alright."

"Shh!" someone lying on the cot next to them complained.

He nodded again, insistent, and Dierk hesitantly returned to his cot.

When he was sure the young man was going to stay and sleep, he looked over at Rolf, only to find his friend watching him with the neutral gaze he always donned when he wasn't certain of the motives of others.

He shrugged, riding high from saying such grand things to Dierk. Rolf had no other option but to follow him to their cot.

Lying back to back on the slightly stretchy material, struggling to find a comfortable position, he began to wonder what his big talk might have meant to Rolf. Had anyone ever treated him like that? Rolf's childhood, whatever it entailed - and he could only guess, without looking at his lifelog - must have been a far cry from his own. The Main Hub, as people often said, was a rather posh place to live.

For the first time, he began to wonder about life growing up on the streets, and about how the hell an orphan had survived it all... he realized with some gloominess that, while he had been proudly making a game of memorizing building colors and names, Rolf had been living on the street alone.

He turned on one shoulder and looked past the back of Rolf's head, studying Elizabeth's sleeping form across the aisle. Not alone, he corrected himself - not entirely.

Lying there in the darkness, he felt a certain revelation about his ever-recalcitrant friend hovering at the edge of his thoughts, but the grand reveal stayed annoyingly out of reach - just like the young man himself.

"Don't punch me in the face while you're asleep," he whispered.

Rolf turned slightly. "No promises."

#  Elizabeth

She let her mind float in the dim outer marches of sleep. She could have just closed her eyes a moment ago, for all that she felt refreshed - but there was no pretending, no chance to feign further sleep.

She heard scuffling in the cot across from her; Rolf waking in a fit, no doubt.

"It's just me," she heard Og whisper fervently, audibly struggling with him.

A moment of silence passed.

A short, embarrassed whisper followed. "Sorry..."

Ignoring them, she began moving her eyes, scrolling through the messages she'd received while asleep. Most were proposals and propositions from random men - and sometimes families - dredging the short list of living blondes.

She deleted them without reading a single one.

Sitting up and hanging her legs off the edge of the cot, she swallowed, coughed, and scrunched up her eyes. A glance out the window brought a momentary image of the southern sky, burning high with searing blue and roiling low with shimmering rain clouds.

A calm breeze billowed through her heart, matched by the light draft from the window.

Another day, another opportunity... something good was near. She could sense it in the upward curve of life, in the contrast between today and yesterday. She was - officially, amazingly, finally - a Scientist. She almost couldn't believe it. Twelve years ago, told of that moment, she _wouldn't_ have believed it.

Groans and stretching filled the otherwise quiet room as Night shift neared its end.

Too tired for small talk, she nodded goodbye at Og, and then walked clumsily with the crowdflow leaving the room. Morning shift sleepers lined the walls in waiting, eager to crash for the next eight hours.

The ten flights of steps downward seemed endless, stepping down repeatedly in time with the thick line of people, but she was almost unhappy to see it end. She found herself thrust out into the Unsetting Sun's warm amber light, blinking and holding up a hand to shade her eyes until she reached the long shadows cast from the buildings across the wide main quadrant.

She'd read the files, had a visual map, and knew where to head, but she still felt a little uncertain just walking over to the solar cells project building by herself. She looked around nervously, but Rolf was nowhere nearby.

"First day blues?" someone behind her asked, catching up to her.

Immediately wary of yet another random suitor, she brushed away whoever it was. "I'm fine."

"Sorry," the other said, walking behind her. "I just saw your project when you three came in. I'm on it, too. I'm an engineer." He randomly switched topic. "I met Mjögen Ragnisson, he seems nice. Somehow I thought the son of such a famous Scientist would be - you know - all superior and stuff, but he was... nice."

Taking care to keep pace with the incredible flow of people spreading out to their various places of work, she glanced at her follower.

"You're -" she hesitated, seeing his lack of beard and telltale blue-streaked black hair.

"Dierk," he replied, holding his hand out in the old style.

She recoiled slightly.

"Oh, that's fine," he said hastily, withdrawing his offered handshake. "Mjögen didn't shake my hand either."

"It's Og," she replied, not wanting to explain her hesitation.

"Og?"

"That's what we call him, his nickname."

"Oh. Og. I like it. He's really tall."

She peered back at her strange new acquaintance. "Yeah..."

His gaze was already on the gigantic red-brick factory ahead. "Are you gonna crack the efficiency barrier?"

"The what?"

"We're stuck," he explained as the twenty-story high walls loomed above them. "Have been for some time. We keep redesigning, and redesigning, and redesigning, and -"

She held up a hand. "I'm new. It's my first day."

"You know what they say, fresh eyes and all that." He tilted his head. "Oh, hey, you're blonde. Wow, not many of you guys around."

Despite herself, she laughed. He was odd - and extremely talkative - but pleasantly harmless. For some reason, she felt a little better.

The solar cell factory floor spanned an interior space that seemed almost endless. Filled with assembly lines and an incredible array of monolithic machines, it looked every bit the design area for society's most important technology.

Dierk moved off to his workstation, and she stood near the vast entrance, petrified.

"Orientation over here," somebody mass-texted.

She peered past the milling crowds of Scientists, relieved.

Ragni stood upon a raised platform free of machines, an area obviously reserved for discussion. She headed in his direction, joining a circle of young men and women around her own age. She recognized some of them from the Atoll.

"Lots of graduates and transfers today," he commented, turning his clothes to the traditional light blue donned by teach-speakers. "I can advise you and guide you around here, but the rest is all really up to you."

She looked to her left and right, scanning intent faces.

"What do we do here?" Ragni asked aloud. "How about you, Elizabeth?"

She snapped her gaze forward. "Me?"

"Yes."

Quickly grabbing the question she'd missed from her own lifelog, she looked out across the massive factory space. "Design and upgrade solar cells?"

He snorted, but not in an unkind manner. "Yes, that's true." Leaning on his cane, he looked around, scanning each new face. "This -" he tapped the air in the direction of the controlled chaos around them. "This is the entire backbone of society. Every single brick, bread, and machine out there was made with the energy from the solar cells we create _here..._ and we're stalled."

"Stalled?" an olive-skilled Orani boy asked, concerned.

"Yes, stalled. We hit an efficiency barrier about eight months ago, and haven't been able to improve the design since. What does that mean for us?"

Nobody answered.

"Well," he continued, pacing a tight circle. "We're becoming a burden on our organization, for one. The large donors that support the Scientists have their own issues to worry about, what with the dropping Peak. Many wealthy people are reconsidering their investments. None of us are about to spark that volatile conversation by asking for more money."

He stopped in place. "And I'm sure you've been told a thousand times that, individually, we get paid a percentage of the improvements we make. Pay for performance, which sounds great in theory - only, we're not performing. Oh, but no pressure."

Nervous laughter circled the group, barely loud enough to be heard over the keening, whirring, and screeching of the factory's machines.

"But worse," he said after a moment, frowning. "The solar cells currently in production at the six major factories are still the eight-month-old design. The more that ship out, the more that get installed, the more our energy generation forecasts flatten. The Peak is creeping up on us."

Many of the others nodded. They seemed well aware of that fact.

While studying at the Atoll, she'd been aware of the trending problems, but the reality of the situation only hit her as she stood in that circle and saw the shared concern on the faces of her new colleagues.

"Here's what we've got now," Ragni continued, pulling up a complex three-dimensional layout. He pushed it into the air in front of him, expanding the virtual image in the middle of their circle. Myriad lines of light traced out the complex inner workings of a rectangular solar cell. "As you can see, we've reached the limits of our current fabrication tools. We can't make the components any smaller, and we can't pack them any tighter, at least not with any accuracy."

A taller Anglan girl on the other side of the circle spoke up. "What's the timeline on the next generation of fabrication capabilities?"

Elizabeth scanned her confident features, and then glanced around the group, wondering if everyone was really as well-versed as they seemed. She felt like she hadn't even had a moment to study the design. Ragni had sent her the files, but she'd only just arrived... when had _they_ found the time?

He grimaced. "Six months to a year." His words elicited murmurs of concern. "Every time we shrink a factor in size, it gets exponentially more difficult for them. They're doing the best they can, but we have to come up with something else in the meantime. We can't afford to wait that long."

Elizabeth absently stared at the design, running over it in her mind. She could picture the already-installed cells covering rooftops all across civilization, angled perfectly at a star that never moved in the sky. She cycled through a series of possible improvements, discarding each of them for various impractical flaws that only revealed themselves after deeper analysis.

Still absorbed in her mental permutations, she hardly noticed when the orientation circle ran its course and disbanded.

Not yet certain where she could best contribute, she wandered over to Dierk.

He sat on a chrome stool, bent over a long metal design table hosting many other Scientists and their various works. A small cell lay open in front of him. Seeing her, he carefully placed his fine instruments in their holders. "Hello. Have you cracked the efficiency barrier yet?"

"What? It's been like ten minutes." She snorted, unsure whether he was serious.

He looked back down at his work. "Oh, ok. I was just hopeful, that's all."

She looked around the floor, scanning the individual projects. "What are you working on?"

He perked up again. He lifted his virtual overlay from the prototype to the air between them, showing her his intentions. "There are quite a few limitations to our thin-film crystalline silicon design... but see here, and here, this new substructure. I'm experimenting with inner couplings that might trap the weakly absorbed long wavelengths so that they traverse -"

"- the film multiple times, increasing their absorption..." she finished his sentence, thinking out loud. "That's a great idea."

He tilted his head. "Thanks. It's right outside of our fabrication capability, though, so I'm not sure how to achieve it."

She saw the access to her log before the man behind her spoke.

"This Subian bothering you, Elizabeth?"

She turned around, facing an Anglan man a few years older than her. His chiseled jaw and slick-backed hair might have garnered attraction from anyone else. His dark brown eyes seemed to scan her hungrily. She sighed. "No, he's fine."

"I'm Jason," he said with a slight nod. "You should join our group. The twelve of us are working with a complete redesign based on a new material. We could use you." He made no attempt to hide his scrutiny of her hair.

Not wanting to make enemies, she repressed her usual reaction and gave a neutral response. "Sounds interesting. Thanks for the invitation."

Jason's features curled up in a wide grin. "Great. Say, are you doing anything this Eve shift?"

She turned away. "I'm going to have to read up on all the project files. Dierk, it was nice to meet you."

"You too." He moved his virtual design back onto his physical prototype and went back to work.

Moving across the floor, she found an unused chair next to a very dark Orani woman that was busy reading project files of her own. As she sat down, the woman noticed her, stared for a moment, and then stood and left abruptly.

Ignoring her, Elizabeth leaned her head back against the wall and began reading.

She took a moment to recall recorded moments from that morning, watching the dark southern sky, drawing calm from the distant and peaceful shimmering rains. All things considered, she thought her first day was going rather well.

As Morning shift ended, she stood and stretched, her body aching, her mind unfocused and exhausted from eight hours of complex study. She'd hoped to study for all of Eve shift, too, but she could feel hunger undermining her concentration.

Flitting through her visual map, she plotted a path to the Railstop two buildings over.

The crowd already ran oriented in that direction, and she flowed with it, leaving the tremendous red-bricked factory behind. Outside, the Sun burned the same as ever, and she briefly envied those who lived under the Rain Belt's darkness.

She searched for Og's location, finding him heading over from the biology labs. She waited near a gapsquare, leaning on the waist-high stone and watching the flat, glimmering seawater. Cool breezes circled up from below, offering a brief respite from the heat of the Sun.

"Hey you," Og greeted her, smiling and waving as he emerged from the crowd. "How was your first day?"

"Not too bad, all things considered. How were the labs?"

"Fantastic. The clean rooms are amazing. Way better than the student labs at the Atoll."

She took a moment to run through his recorded visuals, skipping to random moments in the claustrophobic white-walled rooms in which he'd spent the last eight hours. Each moment found him in the same place, bent over a microscope. "If you say so."

"Hey!" he shouted, waving over the crowd.

She watched Rolf approach, her eyes narrowed.

"What's goin' on?" Og asked, clapping his friend on the shoulder and leading the way towards the Railstop. "How's your uh, programming project going?"

He made a face in response. "Horribly boring."

"Really, why?"

Rolf made as if to reply, but a warning message suddenly cut him off. The sea of people around them reacted, turning as one to face the sudden focus of all attention.

A small figure darted through the crowd, stumbling and rasping weakly with the effort, a brightly highlighted chunk of cricket bread clutched in his hand.

He fell roughly across stone.

She stared down at the boney form sprawled near her feet. Clad only in tattered pants set to zombie brown, his emaciated form made clear his desperation. His recent actions and movements highlighted by the theft-warning, she could see his slow descent toward starvation, lying motionless in an alley...

Onlookers began to recover from their surprise, looking amongst one another with rising energy. An older Anglan woman and a grey-haired Scientist stepped forward unhappily. The two grim volunteers approached the prone child as he scrambled away from them, whimpering.

Heart pounding, she thought of all the times she'd witnessed this, and how it only grew harder each time. Memories of inevitability and powerlessness flitted through her awareness - but this time, there _was_ something she could do. She grabbed Og's wrist.

He looked down at her hand, taken aback, more surprised by her touch than by the thief scrambling past their feet.

"This is it," she said forcefully. "This has to be it."

"Be what?" he asked, caught off guard.

"We want to change things, right?"

She watched his face go slack as a million thoughts raced through his head. Worried that he wouldn't agree, she bit her lip and turned to Rolf.

He watched her with alarm, eyes narrowed, fists clenched tightly. He shook his head in warning, never dropping her gaze.

She pushed him angrily once, shoving him in the chest, but he still said nothing.

The two grey-haired volunteers moved to either side of the thief, hesitantly sizing up their options for killing him. The male Scientist lifted his foot, nearing the child's neck - but he paused, visibly disturbed.

"Come on!" she said to Og, the rising murmurs all around indicating the crowd was growing restless. If the two older people didn't do it, someone else would have to. "Og! Come on! They don't even want to do this - nobody wants to do this!"

Rolf stepped back. "Some do."

"How can we stop it?" the tall Nord asked, dismayed. "This is the only way we have to deal with thieves. It's just -"

"The way things are?" she asked pointedly.

He raised his eyebrows. "Well, shit." His heart rate rose even further as he sized up the situation. "I guess we're doing this..."

He moved to stand over the cowering child. The two who had volunteered stepped back, relieved. She moved forward and stood next to him.

A hundred encircled faces watched them. Light-skinned and dark-skinned, bearded and clean-shaven, young and old - a thick circle of men and women waited, expressions filling out the full range from dark to curious. They'd all seen thieves killed before, but the Nord and the blonde standing before them seemed to have something else in mind.

"Um..." Og yelled loudly, and the crowd quieted. "What if we didn't kill him?"

A wall of sound physically battered them as a hundred shouts and conversations broke out all at once.

Standing close to Og, she scanned each of the faces around her as best she could, struggling to come up with some further plan. Among the watchers, she spotted Rolf, who had already merged with the crowd. She glared daggers at him, but he just shook his head again, his alarmed expression again conveying his belief that this was a very bad idea.

Leaning down to lift the child to his feet, she and Og backed up slightly, finding themselves at the edge of the gapsquare. The crowd's confused roar seemed to be tilting toward blood rather than compassion.

She stared in horror at the shouting, dark faces and lifted fists. They were all so angry - so brutally, irrepressibly angry - where was it all coming from?

"There's got to be some other way," Og radius-texted, opting to abandon the vocal route altogether.

The grey-haired Scientist that had previously volunteered now raised his hands and stepped forward, attempting to calm the crowd. "What would you have us do?" he wrote back, starting a discussion thread.

Desperately guessing at solutions, he glanced down. "The food!" he wrote. "He hasn't eaten it. What if he just gives it back?"

The kid looked up at him with horrified eyes.

"Then he'll still die," the older woman volunteer wrote, holding her hands up in apology. "He stole because he's starving."

"Then we'll give him charity!" Elizabeth posted, struggling against an incredible sense of claustrophobia and impending violence as the energetic crowd surged close.

Everyone wanted to see, or to add to the discussion. Their conversation thread began filling up with replies as fast as they could be read.

"That'll just encourage thievery," the older Scientist managed to get a new thread in edge-wise. "Steal, and get free donations? No, we can't do that."

"It's my food!" a slick-haired Anglan man wrote, pushing out of the crowd. "I just bought the property rights from the girl he stole it from! It's mine now - look, it's registered to me!"

Elizabeth sighed in frustration as Jason moved to stand next to her and Og.

"I'll take it back, and we can let him live," Jason wrote to everyone around, his arms high in the air to grab attention. "Problem solved."

She glared at him - but any support was welcome, no matter how misguided.

"Can I have that back?" he asked, looking down.

The emaciated boy just stared at him, his clutched fingers twitching.

"He's still going to die," the Anglan woman wrote again. "Why upset the way things are done if he's just going to die anyway?"

"I'll give him some food," Og countered, standing taller against the crowd's roar. "And I don't care if it encourages other thieves, they'll make their own choices. _This_ boy is alive _right now_ , and _right here._ "

Elizabeth looked up at him, genuinely surprised at his conviction.

"So what's he going to do then?" an onlooker wrote. "Go lie in an alley again? Be dependent on further charity? We're _all_ starving, why should he get special treatment? Work is life, and he's got no job!" Supported by many readers, the onlooker's comment rose to the top of the discussion. The sea of noise took on a nasty tone.

An older man suddenly broke from the crowd, charging at the child. Caught off-guard, Og leapt in his way, pushing and struggling with him.

Several other men and women rushed into the fray, some shoving forward with murderous intent, some resisting and defending the small group.

"This is getting dangerous," Jason texted, looking down at her, the muscles in his jaw strained by adrenaline and tension. "We should leave."

She glared, holding the boy close. "No."

Both ranks began to swell with passive combatants shoving and pushing, all aware what real violence might mean - but it seemed only a matter of moments until someone threw the first real punch.

Comments began to flood her vision, coming in from practically everywhere as interested people sent links to the burgeoning riot to others.

Backing up against the gapsquare's waist-high wall, she kept the terrified boy next to her, wondering how the hell this had gotten so out of hand so quickly. They'd just asked a question... it was just a question...

"Let them kill me."

Stunned, she looked down.

The gaunt boy returned her gaze, his eyes glimmering with resigned tears. "It's not worth it. I didn't want to hurt anybody. I was just hungry."

"You can't be serious -"

"Sorry for taking the food," he said, holding the bread up and wavering in place weakly.

Jason accepted the chunk, frowning. "It's alright."

"I'm not going to let them _kill you_ ," she insisted, overwhelmed. "Come on, we can do this. We'll work it out."

He stood totally still for a moment - and then, in a startling burst of energy, he tore free from her grasp, clambered up on the gapsquare wall, and tumbled over.

She leaned over the side in horror, watching him splash into the sea below.

He did not attempt to tread water.

She could only stare as the inevitable followed.

His weakened body did not last long.

As his vitals went offline, the near-riot came to a slow, surprised cessation.

With the object of the argument dead, a massive deflation seemed to drain the crowd. It took a moment for most to figure out what had happened, but not much longer than that for murmured apologies and departures to begin. Many seemed relieved, but more seemed to remain bitter, eyeing their opponents with burning resentment.

In shock, she stood in place only half-aware, wishing she understood where the anger was coming from. Had something happened in the two years she'd been away? There didn't seem to be any theme to the sudden divide - there'd been Anglans, Oranis, and Nords on both sides of the massive shoving match.

The crowdflows resumed their normal patterns almost as quickly as they'd been disrupted.

Heart still racing painfully, she turned and stared down at the sea where the boy still floated upside-down, his arms out flat in the water. An Underman motored in his direction.

Og came up next to her and looked down as well. "At least he'll get to the Fields," he commented, seeing the approaching boat. "At least there's that."

"At least there's that..." she murmured, still numb.

#  Ripples in the Sea

"What the hell were you thinking?" Ragni demanded, rubbing his forehead as if to somehow assuage his worry.

"Dad, it's alright. Nobody got hurt."

The older Nord suddenly turned fierce. "You got _lucky!_ " Breathing heavily, he paced around, leaning on his cane. "What was your plan? What did you intend to do with that boy if you did somehow save his life? You almost started a riot in the middle of the Main Hub. You could have all been killed!"

Grim-faced, Og remained silent, respectfully listening to his father vent.

Elizabeth lowered her head in apology.

Rolf leaned against smooth brown brick, sometimes looking up at the thin blue band of open sky between the enormous walls overhead. A scant crowdline moved through the cramped lane, and a few layabouts sat along the edges, many watching them with interest.

The old man finally seemed to tire, ceasing his tirade with a sigh. "I'm just glad you're alright."

"I know, dad."

"Your hearts were in the right place, but you have to have a better plan. You have to choose your battles. You can't do it alone, either. There's strength in numbers, in your family and friends."

Og spared an unhappy glance at Rolf. "I thought we _had_ numbers."

Ragni glared at both young men. "Two or three, it doesn't matter! I'm talking ten thousand, a million. You know why the Tyrant was able to rule for thirteen years? Because he had this -" He pointed at the cell hanging against his heart, and then at the contacts glimmering in his eyes. "- and he had all the people who might resist him scared of their own secrets. Divide and conquer. It took thirteen years and nearly total unrest for our generation to bring that system down."

A harsh, high voice interrupted them.

"But you didn't bring it down," a girl accused, moving out of the crowdline to stalk brazenly up to them. "You made it total. You made it public. The Gangs took total control for _decades_ , and even now, with all that twelve years behind us, the legacy of your mistake remains, like chains around our necks."

The old man paused for a moment, eyeing the rude newcomer. Her clothes set to black with delicate traceries of blue, her colors matching her hair, she took a moment to smirk sadistically at Rolf. "Hey, _love._ "

He gazed back at her with unsurprised resentment, having noticed her approach on the map from quite a distance.

Elizabeth made a disgusted noise. "Kitna, leave us alone..."

"Us?" she tilted her head and raised her arms, offering a fight.

Ragni grunted, interrupting. "You're a little asinine about it, but I am not unreceptive to your point. We knew there was no going back when we took this route, but the trade was worth it. Better than having an omniscient system in the hands of one man - or a government. Now there are no secrets, and we're forced to get along as ourselves, without the lies and treachery of times past."

"Without the privacy, without the relief," Kitna shot back, her jaw set. She glanced at Elizabeth, roughly changing the subject. "You caused quite a stir with that near-riot. Thought I'd come see how my old _friends_ are doing."

Ragni's expression sharpened as he caught the newcomer's glare again. The two - one young, one old - fought a battle of silent stares, each analyzing the other intently.

Og moved to step between them. "Hi, I'm -"

Ragni raised a hand, silencing his son, and spoke again to the bitter young woman before him. His gaze seemed at once distant and penetrating, and his tone ran oddly pointed. "Whatever your reasons, if you're here, then you're here. You should help Rolf focus on his work."

Rolf started with surprise, confused, but then - for a split second - his cheeks seemed to tremble with some slow realization. He subtly straightened his posture, all unhappiness with Kitna's presence inexplicably gone. "Alright..."

Ragni smiled sorrowfully, studying him up and down. "I had a friend just like you at my age, cold and calculating, and we clashed often... but I'm the better for having known him." He looked at his son pointedly as he spoke. "But for right now, you kids need to get out of here. Go to a Hangout, do what young people do. For better or worse, the eyes of society are upon you now, and you'd best remember that."

With a respectful nod, Og turned away in silence.

"Thanks," Elizabeth offered.

Ragni smiled sadly. "Have fun."

Rolf followed his two colleagues, passing the old man with a confused glance of fear and curiosity. Kitna gave a parting hateful glare, following after Rolf.

Og pushed his way through the flows, leading the four of them toward the opposite end of the Main Hub.

"Six hours left in Eve shift," he thought aloud, his tone heavy with other thoughts. His jaw trembled for a moment, and then he shook his head - but he said nothing.

Rolf watched his vitals, well aware of his tall friend's emotional state. He wanted to say something, to explain himself, but he already felt terribly exposed from the opinions Kitna had voiced to Ragni. Although she'd been the one to speak, they'd felt like his words. The weight of the cell against his chest seemed to burn him with some raw unidentifiable pain.

"What, no _welcome back?_ " Kitna asked, curling her arm in his as they walked. "It's been two years."

He pulled away angrily. "And yet, still not long enough."

She donned a sarcastic grin, not in the least fazed.

Jason sat at the long chrome bar at the back of the Hangout. He stared down past his clear liquor at the bar's cherry-brown colorization, wondering, briefly, why brown was the traditional overlay. Had bars once been made of some other material, something naturally brown?

The grey-haired Orani sitting next to him, Edmundo, took a gulp of his own drink. He sighed with satisfaction. "Eh, what can you do?"

"I just stood there, Ed. Like an idiot. I should have jumped in the water after that kid. Or, I should have said something, but I didn't, and she just walked away."

"Ha, well, that's blondes," his mentor replied with a shrug. "It's hard to get what everyone wants. At least you've still got Lisa."

Jason looked up at the flat metal plate high on the wall, following the virtual image overlaid on top of it. On the displayed show, two talking heads argued about the near-riot at the Main Hub. "Nah, she ended things yesterday. That's three for three in seven years of trying. I'm starting to think the problem is me, that I can't have kids."

Ed gave a sympathetic frown. "Sorry, kid. Guess you really do need a blonde."

"Yeah, if better statistics can even help me..." He held up a hand, examining his gaunt forearm, cursing the limitations of the flesh. "If there was just _more food_..."

The older man laughed heartily. "Yeah, if only."

Sitting in silence for a bit, he glanced up at the show again. Curious, and desperate to think about anything else, he brought a copy of the stream directly to his vision. Gazing down at his liquor, he watched the two commentators argue over the events of the hour before, their words flashing by in text underneath as they spoke.

Showing a link to highlights from Mjögen Ragnisson's lifelog, the first man argued that this, here, was a great young man with good intentions. The other commentator seemed to be fixated on the arrogance of Scientists trying to decide things for others, as if they believed themselves a _government_...

Closing the stream, he grunted in disgust. "Yeah, like we Scientists have got no concerns of our own... or time to bother with that nonsense..."

Going over his memories - the chunk of cricket bread placed in his fingers by small hands, the confusion and rapid near-violence, how it had felt to stand there in that small group and face down the crowd, how that little boy had _apologized_ , looking so much like the son he'd always imagined he would have had...

He began to wonder why nobody was debating whether or not Ragnisson had actually been right.

"What do you think?" he asked.

Ed finished the last of his water and lowered the metal cup down on the bar. "About what?"

"About what he said, at the near-riot today. Should we actually change the way we handle thieves?"

His mentor suddenly seemed hesitant. "Um... it's all opinions, Jason. Let's not go there. Things are the way they are for a reason." He looked around nervously. "Hey look, it's your lucky day."

Peering through the crowd, surprised, he saw familiar faces - among them, Elizabeth. "No, it's alright, I probably shouldn't bother her."

Ed shrugged, tapped on the bar, and refilled his cup from the roving robotic spout that came over in response. "Thanks, barkeep," he joked, visibly relieved at the change in topic.

Following Og into a low space awash with loud conversations and competing musics, Elizabeth held her arms crossed, constantly scanning the faces and postures around her in a manner she realized was much like Rolf's usual vigilance.

For his part, Rolf seemed oblivious to the press for once, bumping into people as the three of them moved toward a small open space in the back, his attention focused on ignoring Kitna's pestering.

The four stood against the back wall in a row.

"Um, what now?" she asked.

Og moved his head with the light beat dominant in their section of the Hangout. "Fun!" he declared. "We have fun!"

"Is this... your scene?"

"You could say that. I did grow up here. Maybe we'll see some people I know."

"Oh... cool."

"Want to get some drinks?"

"Sure."

Wending their way between close-set tables, the two made for the bar, leaving Rolf and Kitna by the wall.

Leaning on the bar, Og grabbed four little metal cups from the rack.

Elizabeth held herself a little closer and anxiously stood behind him, waiting.

"They're talking about you," a brown-skinned older man with slicked-back white hair stated in surprise, turning.

"Me?" Og asked, surprised.

"Both of you, actually." He sent over a link.

Finishing the pay transaction and filling the cups with liquor, Og followed the distant conversation, an odd feeling fluttering in his head whenever they talked about him in the third person. "So weird... hey, are you a Scientist?"

"Yeah. Edmundo, over in solar. They call me Ed."

The tall Nord smiled. "They call _me_ Og."

"Yeah, had to be honest, I didn't know how to pronounce your name when I read it."

"It's old Nordic, it's actually pronounced -"

A clattering cup interrupted him.

"Sorry," the Anglan man on the other side of Ed apologized, seeming to snap out of some heavy distraction as he picked up his cup. "Oh, hey."

Elizabeth jumped slightly. "Hello..."

"Hey, you were out there with us! You guys all work in solar together?" Og asked.

She took her cup and squeezed forward to the bar itself, putting herself on the opposite end of the group from the man who'd greeted her. "Yeah."

Oblivious, the Nord raised a hand in greeting. "Og."

"Jason."

"That got intense very quickly. Thanks for the support out there." He glanced back over the crowd at Rolf, a shadow of unhappiness crossing his features.

"Sure..." Jason turned back to staring at the bar.

"Check this out," someone in the bar interrupted with a mass message, sending them a video link. "Kid does funky dance - this is hilarious!"

Interested in any distraction, Elizabeth took a look, watching it at the same time as Og. It showed some guy in another Hangout, down south under the Rain Belt, attempting a complicated dance and failing miserably. The crowning moment of the video came in the form of a painful-looking faceplant, followed by a quick recovery and embarrassed smile - as if he hoped nobody had noticed.

Og burst out laughing, and, despite herself, she cracked a smile. It was just stupid enough to hit her through her anxiety.

In the background of the recording, she could see an overlay with an image of their two faces, taken from a perspective in the crowd during the near-riot. She checked the video time - the failed funky dance had taken place twelve minutes ago.

Ragni had been right. The eyes of society _were_ on them... her lifelog was almost constantly accessed by strangers, so she'd grown used to it, but she now realized that even more attention had been heaped upon her - and upon Og.

She hunched down a little further against the bar, a sense of growing pressure constricting her heart.

"It's him!" someone said behind them.

Two girls approached with drinks in hand, their shirts set to the indicative light red of availability.

Og turned to face them, a wide grin crossing his features as he saw their colors, his old bravado returning quickly. "Why, yes, it _is_ me."

"That was really brave of you," the dark-haired Nord girl said, touching his arm.

"Were you scared?" her friend asked.

"Not a bit," he boasted, eyes locked with his obvious favorite.

Both girls noticed Elizabeth at the same time, hesitating out of obvious intimidation.

He waited a beat, and then gave a subtle cough.

"Oh." She blinked. "Um, I'll be over there."

"Thanks. Oh, give these to Rolf and Kitna, will you," Og said, making space at the bar for the girls. "Ladies..."

Suddenly on her own in the crowded space, but unable to really blame Og, she began heading to the back wall. She moved cautiously, feeling exposed and vulnerable, avoiding eye contact with those watching her as she passed.

"Hey," a stranger greeted her, moving in her way. "You here with anyone?"

She shook her head and pushed past by a different route. She'd purposely left her shirt passive grey at all times, but few seemed to care. She repeated her avoidance twice more before she reached the wall again.

Rolf remained in nearly the same position, absently flicking his irises back and forth, working on something and visibly ignoring Kitna's aggressive stare.

As she took up her spot on the wall again, Rolf held out his hand, saying nothing, not even glancing at her.

She handed him the extra cup Og had given her. Kitna took the other.

They stood in silence for some time, ignoring each other.

Her thoughts traced the pounding music as she let herself relax, shedding the harrowing stress of her lone passage through the crowd.

Her thoughts lingered on that boy, floating face down in the water. None of it made any sense. She glanced at Rolf, wishing she had the chance to talk about it - but he just kept working, his eyes moving back and forth rapidly.

"Check this out," she overheard someone to her left. "Girl attempts funky dance fail -"

Frowning, but unable to resist looking, she accessed the link the two had exchanged. This one was ten minutes ago, up north, copying the first funky dance... despite herself, she laughed again. The terrible phantom pressure around her heart seemed to lift somewhat.

A few hours later, they began walking back to East Residency, now numbering five.

Og walked ahead with the Nord girl hanging on his arm, both talking and laughing about nothing and everything.

Elizabeth watched them, annoyed. Kitna would have to find her own place to stay, but that still left two cots and four people... frowning, she looked over at Rolf. He walked alongside her, but hadn't spoken much all night. He hadn't even made a barbed comment about having to share a cot with her now that Og would be with someone else. He'd just been blank - even more so than usual.

"What are you _doing?_ " she suddenly demanded.

He turned his head sharply, and, for the briefest of moments, she thought she saw something unprecedented in his eyes... fear. Nobody else would have noticed the fleeting glimpse past his mask, but she knew. His usual blank expression returned almost instantly.

"Just working," he offered.

"Well... stop it..." she repeated the common dark humor mantra about overworking, only half-sincere. "You'll burn yourself out..."

He said nothing, turning his attention to his work again.

As they walked, something began to bother her. She'd thought Ragni's comment to Kitna and Rolf very strange at the time, but dismissed it... but now there was this behavior...

Accessing his project, she started going over his work, but she didn't know enough about programming to decipher it. "What is this? Checksum errors on some game?"

"Busy work to keep the Subian out of the important stuff," he responded.

She narrowed her eyes, not fully believing him, but there was nothing further to go on.

Fully aware of the connotations of their exchange, Kitna looked past Rolf, smirking at her.

The long climb up the East Residency stairs took her mind off anything but the fatigue, but, lying back to back with Rolf in darkness, she began to wonder again.

Og and his girl exchanged muffled laughter and whispered conversations on the other cot for quite some time, settling into even more annoying noises soon after.

Feeling Rolf's boney back pressed into hers, enduring all the stresses of the day replaying themselves, she felt the overpowering urge to wake him and suddenly apologize for all the mean things she'd ever said and done to him... but she had the horrible notion that he would just stare back at her with that blank expression, not caring, _always not caring_... so damn infuriating.

She got up and left the crowded darkness, wandering down the stairs and out into the sunlight, cursing the stress. Exhaustion was a killer, as the saying went, but she couldn't stand a second longer in that dark room, trapped in her own head.

Moving through the crowd of Night shift actives, she took up a seat at the edge of a gapsquare. Looking down at the smooth sea, she imagined she could still see that little boy floating face-down in the water... skipping back in her lifelog, grabbing his tag, she pulled his profile.

Alexander.

She hadn't had the chance to check his name at the time...

Trying to avoid depressing thoughts, she shook her head and did a search for more funky dance videos. That quickly proved pointless, as over a million different people had posted videos of themselves in the same vein. She tried looking at those with the most upvotes, but the iterative series of copies building on copies had evolved too quickly for her to catch up. She had no idea what she was looking at or why it was supposed to be funny... in-jokes upon in-jokes, she supposed.

Closing the list in dismay, she leaned on the warm stone, having no idea what to do next - in that moment, or in life. She'd tried making a stand over something, and it had almost ended in disaster. Ragni had said they needed a plan...

"Sorry, didn't know you'd be here," someone said to her left.

She turned to find Jason standing at the low gapsquare wall.

"I just couldn't sleep," he said, staring down at the sea below. "That kid was a damn hero. He died here to stop a riot, and it's like nothing ever happened." He gestured around at the milling crowds going about their Night shift business. "He said _it's not worth it._ He said that about his own life. I can't even comprehend the guts that took."

She curled her lip in a light empathetic frown.

"And everyone's terrified to talk about it," he continued, spilling his thoughts. "And maybe they're right. Everything we say or do gets heard by _everyone_. A stand over some thief kid here is a stand against every community everywhere. Against our very way of life."

She straightened, thinking about the intense unexpected reaction from the crowd at the time. "Yeah... maybe that's it."

"What do we do?" he asked, forlorn. "Children... dying in alleys..."

"Alone..." she added, her frown deepening. "I don't know. Maybe there's nothing we can do. Thieves can't get away with it. Everything's registered all the time. They know they're going to get caught."

"They do it because they're dying," he said. "Can't control themselves."

"Some can," she countered, looking back down at the sea. "But they're still just on their own. Growing up alone on the street is hell. Nobody cares about anyone's business but their own. They just let anyone... do anything... as long as it doesn't impact _them_... or their precious money." She squeezed her hands into clenched fists.

"Nobody has the time or energy to care," he admitted. "It's the Peak, it's the lowest it's been in a decade. The pressure's on."

"Yeah, I guess."

They stood in shared dismayed silence.

"Look," he suddenly spoke. "I'm sorry about how I acted this morning, when we first met."

She looked sidelong at him, wary. She suddenly noticed the slight slur of drunkenness in his words, and became visibly guarded. "It's fine."

"I just thought that maybe -"

"Don't."

He held out a hand. "No, I just mean -"

"Seriously." She turned away.

"I'm just -" He reached out and grabbed her forearm.

In a flash, her vitals spiked, and her face and neck flushed red with panic. "Don't touch me!" she screamed, pulling away forcefully, clawing with all her might.

He let go, taken aback by her reaction.

She ran off into the crowd.

Rolf remained painfully awake on his half of the cot, his gaze absently crossing the shadowed sleepers in the cot in front of him.

Without a word, Elizabeth returned. She curled up on her half of the cot in a ball, her heart rate dangerously high. As the bottom dipped with the extra weight, they slid back to back again.

He'd noticed her vitals spike, and then watched what happened, but he had no idea what to say or do for this sort of thing. He turned his head up as if to speak to her, but he closed his mouth again a moment later.

He lowered his head back to the cot's stretchy material, saying nothing.

She breathed rapidly for a few moments.

"I hate you," she whispered.

He turned back. "What?"

The cot squeaked as she rolled over forcefully.

"What?" he asked again, his voice low to keep from disturbing others.

Her expression furious, she pushed him.

He stumbled out of the cot, standing in surprise. "What are you doing?"

She followed him up, pushing him again. "Get out of here!"

Sleepers began stirring, watching the altercation from their stacked cots.

He stepped back. "Elizabeth, what the hell?"

She punched him as hard as she could in the chest.

"What is your _problem?_ "

Her jaw trembling, her face screwed up, she cracked a fist against his cheek.

Caught off guard by the pain, he pushed back forcefully.

"Guys, stop!" Og called from his cot, the Nord girl still curled in his arm.

Elizabeth pushed him one more time. "Get out!"

Rolf regarded her with confusion and anger, but said nothing, instead turning to walk away with a disgusted noise.

He stalked through the dark hallway, down the long stairs, and out into the crowds. The Unsetting Sun seemed especially hot and mocking during times he should have been asleep.

"Hey, wait!"

He stopped, saying nothing.

Dierk came up to him, his expression blank save for curiosity. "What was that about?"

He shook his head. "The usual..." He stalked over to the East Residency's outer wall, seeking a moment's peace to calm down.

Dierk followed him. "We could find another place to sleep."

"Why would you go, too? You're not the one kicked out."

He sniffed once, his thin angular nose expanding with the intake of breath. His eyes remained lightly positive. "Maybe we should start sticking together, rather than staying spread out."

"You'd take that risk?" Rolf asked, genuinely surprised.

Dierk blinked, but gave no answer.

On his map, he noticed Kitna returning. He sighed. A moment's peace - what a pipe dream.

She wandered in through the main entrance, heading for his location.

"Who's that?" Dierk asked, noticing his unhappy gaze.

"And then there were three," he muttered.

She moved through the crowd with a slinky grace, subtly challenging those around her as she walked, rather than attempting to pass by unnoticed as he preferred.

Rolf set his jaw, bracing for the coming trial.

"Hello!" Dierk greeted her, offering his hand in the old style.

"Who's this weird kid?" she asked.

"I'm Dierk," he answered for himself.

"He's Dierk," Rolf said flatly. "Dierk, this is Kitna."

She smiled slowly, taking his hand and shaking it. "Always nice to meet another member of our little tribe."

"Likewise." He turned to Rolf. "She seems nice."

He gave no answer, instead staring her down.

She put her hands on her hips. "What, can't a girl visit without getting the old suspicious-Rolf routine? You can't blow me off forever."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

She smiled over at their third wheel. "Hey Dierk, would you like to play a game with us?"

"Sure," he said with a smile, oblivious to the tension.

"Great." She sat down against the wall. They sank down next to her, one excited, one wary.

They logged in together in the middle of a massive white hexagonal space; the roof of some arbitrarily large tower. A few other virtual avatars lounged about, mostly idle, some running about.

She pointed at a distant floating continent.

They transitioned to the indicated subgame.

"Welcome to _Starships II_ ," she said, moving her hand in an arc across the vista below.

An array of rectangular starfields lay patterned before them, displaying fleets of ships engaged in tactical combat. Each game held two opponents, each commanding their own fleet.

They moved down the visual interface, heading into the main chatroom.

"You ever play this game before?" she asked.

Dierk brought his gaze back from all the games going on before them. "Nope."

She turned to Rolf. "Shall we play? For old times' sake."

Wordlessly, he initiated a game. They both entered the initial phase, choosing whether to keep or mulligan their seven-card hands of actions, resource structures, and ships.

"Special game over here," someone announced. "It's Kitna, Captain of Team Heroes-Two, versus a returning top contender - Rolf the Rude!"

He watched as the spectator count of their game rose dramatically, Dierk included. Commentary and messages began filling the chat.

"The Rude?" Dierk asked them.

He gave no response, but she answered with a smirk, elbowing Rolf in the ribs where they sat against the wall in reality. "He runs every match to the very last play, and never says good game."

Dierk tilted his head. "Is that rude?"

"Yes. You're supposed to say good game and concede when you reach a state where you can't possibly win."

"Oh. Guess the nickname makes sense, then."

She laughed. "Oh, and his deck builds are rather unique..."

"Don't explain my strategies," Rolf interrupted.

"You're not going to _play him_."

"I might, at some point."

"Typical Rolf. Though, I do admit, training some of the Heroes-Two kids, I teach them your philosophy. The game isn't just _Starships II_. You gotta watch what you say, plan what you do, and build a personality for the crowd. The real game is survival."

"Yes."

"Survival?" Dierk asked.

Neither said anything, instead indicating the betting pools. Dierk studied the running bets for a moment, his expression blank. "You get a small percentage of winning bets."

"Yes," Kitna answered. "That's the real game. Rich people with money don't just sit on it, and some prefer to spend it this way. So there's us. Win or starve."

"Oh."

"Yes," Rolf added, grim-faced. "Ready?"

She shook off her momentary darkness and put on a grin. "I've got two years on you, now. The meta situation has shifted significantly." As she spoke, she deployed a resource structure and a weak fighter-class starship.

"First turn ship," he commented, examining his hand. "Interesting. You might win if you can rush out enough ships fast enough." He deployed two resource structures and passed the turn.

"That's the plan." She deployed two more fighters, and attacked with her first one, dealing his starbase four damage out of its total seventy-five.

For his turn, he played another two resource structures. Still defenseless, he passed the turn.

She played another two fighters, and attacked for twelve damage.

On his turn, he did nothing, and passed again, simply building his resource reserves.

She drew another fighter on her turn, playing it and attacking with her five ships already in play for twenty damage. "Down to 39," she taunted, eyeing the direct-damage actions still left in her hand. The ships would get him low, and the direct attack would finish off his starbase in one turn. "Better do something or you're dead in two turns..."

"I can't see what she's got," Dierk commented. "What's going on?"

Rolf considered his own hand even as he replied. "It's the interesting thing about this game - the hook, if you will. It was created like a hundred years ago when things were a bit more lax. The game keeps certain information private until the end of the match. It's only added to the public log at that point."

"Wow. So you can't just look at what's in her hand, and she can't look at yours?"

"Right. It's unique in that aspect. Otherwise, it'd be totally different, and just another perfect-information game."

Dierk nodded in understanding. "Like chess?"

"Yeah," Rolf replied. "There's only so far you can go with games of perfect information. So this little game has maintained a cult following for quite some time..."

"Come on, take your turn," Kitna complained.

"I've got forty seconds left. I'm _thinking._ "

"Don't give me that attitude," she shot back, a smile creeping across her face. "Rolf the _Rude._ "

"Rude like this?" With his built-up resources, he played an EMP action, disabling all ships in play for one full turn rotation - but all the ships in play were hers.

"Damnit Rolf! I _had you!_ "

"Sure."

She played another fighter on her turn, but was unable to attack with her disabled ships.

On his turn, he played another resource structure - and another EMP action.

Rolling her eyes, she passed her turn, again unable to do anything.

For his turn, he played a new action, one which prevented all damage to his starbase for one full turn rotation. It would have left his defensive ships vulnerable, but he had none in play.

"Seriously?" she complained again.

"What's he going for?" Dierk asked, confused.

She sighed. "He's going to run me out of cards, just delaying the whole time, and then I lose."

"Aren't there any ways to deal with that?"

"Yes," Rolf replied. "And I'm sure she anticipated my favorite deck, and put in cards that will prevent her from running out - which is why I added this." As he spoke, he played a new kind of structure - one that would deal a single damage every turn. "Now it's just a matter of attrition. In seventy-five turns, I will inevitably win."

She glared daggers. "See, crap like this is why people hate you."

He couldn't help but smile. The expression felt unfamiliar, but good.

They began playing out the incredibly long game, the spectator count growing as they went. For every unique new play she came up with, he managed to put together a counter-move, holding his lockdown steady.

But he still waited, anticipating the more important move that he knew was coming - in a much larger game he did not yet understand.

"We should talk," she wrote in match's temporarily private chatroom, her typical bravado absent.

He drew in a deep breath, his heart pounding despite his best efforts. "About the checksum error?"

He could hear her move in surprise on the dusty stone next to his real body. "Yes. How did you know?"

"I suspected almost immediately," he wrote, sighing. "It was actually fairly obvious to anyone with programming skill - and knowledge of the game's privacy quirk."

The spectators looked on, oblivious. They would not see their private in-game conversation until the match released everything to the public log - normally.

"A hundred years ago," he continued, carefully choosing which parts of his suspicions to explain. "The original coder forgot to handle certain special characters in the in-game chat. This was almost never a problem, considering that none of them are on the in-game interface and the in-game chat is rarely used, but if you manually place one of these special characters into one of your sentences..." He played his delaying action for the turn.

She just sat for a moment, pretending to consider her hand. "It fails to encode in the public log," she finally admitted.

For a single intense moment, his body ran with a mix of terror and relief, his suspicion confirmed. The whole world seemed to shift with new and incredible possibilities. Every decision he'd ever made against the unforgiving world, every time he'd forced himself not to care, every time he'd hid in the crowd instead of standing against it - it all suddenly seemed worth it, to get to this singular discovery alive.

"It's _private communication._ "

She passed her turn without action. "Yes."

"They'll kill us if they find out."

In the real world, she touched his leg. "So don't let them find out."

"Is that why you came here? Because you knew I'd figure it out?"

"It's not the only reason. I've missed you."

He laid his head back against the stone wall, groaning. "You know I can't believe anything you say, not after what happened."

"You were going to join the Scientists," she wrote bitterly. "You were leaving. Nothing I said or did would have mattered."

"You didn't know that. And it was too late then, anyway."

Beside him under the Unsetting Sun, she wiped away a sniffle.

He doubted his own harshness for a split second... "Don't try to manipulate me," he wrote. "I know you're here because somebody saw a Scientist finally assigned to this project, and then they studied _me_ , and they looked at my lifelog, and they found the one person who might best manipulate me into keeping their _massive_ secret. And I can't tell who it is because so many damn people are looking at me just for knowing Og..."

She said nothing for several minutes, passing turns in silence.

"Well?" he wrote.

"They saw what you said when we were young," she finally admitted. "The rants, the passion. You were quite the zealot, you know that?"

He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath.

"They recruited me after studying you, and I jumped at the chance to see you again. I would never hurt you. It's not about hurting you," she wrote, gripping his arm. "They want you to keep the secret for just a little while longer."

"Why? What's happening?"

"They want to break our chains. There are so many of them, and they're all united. They have to be - we'll all be killed if anyone finds out we can communicate privately."

"But who?" he wrote, fighting the urge to get up and leap about at hearing the words he'd secretly wished for his entire life. "Who are they?"

"It's the Undermining, Rolf. They're real. It's what we always talked about, lying in that alley together, playing games of death for those sick rich assholes."

He bit his own lip to keep from saying anything aloud.

"It's finally happening - it's the revolution!"

He could give no reaction, instead sitting in shock, suddenly intensely feeling the Sun's warmth and the stone's dusty texture under his legs and even the roughness of the clothes on his skin. His tongue felt awkward in his mouth, and he suddenly sat fully conscious of his own breathing.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to shout fiercely at the oppressive atmosphere enforced by the crowd all his life. A small sliver of breezy light seemed to touch somewhere below his heart - a rising, inspirational emotion he hadn't felt in twelve years. It was that most dangerous of feelings, one which he'd seen get countless others killed... one which he'd used against others.

"No," he wrote back, shaking his head.

A terrible look of dismay fell across her features. "What?"

He looked away. "It'll get us killed. I have to expose this now, or we'll die."

For the first time in as long as he'd known her, her confident persona fell away. "But you can't - we can't live like this anymore!"

"My... friends... tried something like that today. They almost caused a riot. They would have definitely been killed."

"But that's the opportunity the revolutionaries hope to capitalize on," she wrote back. "People are doing something they haven't done since the genocides - they're _talking._ They're _questioning._ These are not the same people from twelve years ago. It's our generation now. This is a society under pressure, bursting at the seams, and we've only kept from exploding this long on the power of fear, silence, and mob rule."

He passed his turn, staring at her. "Where did you get all this? Is this your opinion, or theirs?"

"Both," she countered. "And I know it's yours, too. You won't have to put up with crap from people like blondie anymore."

"Elizabeth? She's fine."

"She's always insulting you. She's part of the problem."

"She's _fine_."

Passing her turn, she glared. "Why are you defending her? She's been horrible to you!"

"I'm not defending her. It's just..."

He couldn't put it into words. He kept replaying the near-riot in his mind, still unable to comprehend why she'd made those choices. How could anyone be so stupid, standing up to the crowd like that? But she was exceedingly intelligent, the smartest he'd ever met...

She wasn't stupid, not at all - which meant she instead had some unknown quality that allowed her to make those incredible decisions; some important factor that he, as a person, simply could not understand, or ever hope to match.

"Come on, Rolf," she pleaded. "What do you _want?_ "

He stumbled on his own thoughts. "Huh? What do you mean?"

"Love, money, respect? Or even... kids?"

His jaw opened and shut twice reflexively, but he had nothing to type.

"We could have those things," she argued. "But not here, and not now. They hate us, Rolf, because we remind them of what they did. This place is a dead-end for us, and I know you feel the same way. We _need_ this revolution to happen."

Her words meant something to him, but they were aimed at parts of him too heavily defended by high castle walls. All he could think about was Elizabeth protecting that child, a thief she had no connection to at all... it didn't make sense... it didn't make any damn sense...

"Shit."

Kitna narrowed her eyes. "What?"

Heart pounding, his every negative fiber screaming that he was making the wrong choice, he forced himself to write further. "I'll do it." He closed his eyes, fighting down his heart rate. "I'll keep the secret."

"Really?"

"Really."

She tentatively gripped his hand, and - for once - he did not brush her away. A moment later, she conceded the now-irrelevant ship battle. "Good game."

For a brief, terrifying moment, he waited, reviewing the public log. All the actions, ships, and numbers were there... he sighed in relief.

No text.

It had all failed to encode.

They'd communicated in private - and gotten away with it.

And he was making stupid decisions, protecting some secret revolution he knew nothing about, something that might get them both killed... but somehow, he only felt incredible, with lightness under his heart where usually there was only fear and void. He still sat alone in his deepest keep, but - at least for the moment - the dark specter that he kept imprisoned there now seemed absent.

"Good game," he said for once, and the onlookers that had bet on him jeered and sent congratulatory messages. None had any idea they'd just communicated privately. None had any idea the world was about to change... or that the change was building right under their noses.

"So, what'd you think of the game?" she asked, logging out.

"Looks fun," Dierk responded, standing. "I -"

An Orani teenager with spiked black hair bumped into him, knocking him down hard. Sneering, the kid made a disgusted noise.

"Hey!" Kitna shouted, leaping to her feet. The Orani and his two friends looked back at them with anger, but kept moving away. "Hey, asshole!"

Rolf stood hurriedly. "Stop! We don't want to start anything -"

She brushed off his hand. "No. Hey, putos! You come back here and apologize!"

The three punks suddenly turned and stalked back up to them.

"I'm sorry for my friend here," Rolf began, looking for some way to calm things down.

The Orani that had shoved Dierk stood tall, shoulders up, glaring at her. "What'd you call us?"

Kitna glared wildly right back at him. "Called you whores, kid. Now go don those certain colors and stand on the corner, right? Like your mother!"

"Oh, _oh_ , my _mother?_ You crossed a line, Subi."

Dierk finally regained his feet, blinking. "Is this a normal reaction?"

"No," Rolf muttered, trying not to shrink back as the Orani's cohorts stared the two of them down. "It's not normal at all. It's _Kit._ "

Visibly excited, she raised her hands and made a wild face, continuing to mock the punk that had disrespected Dierk.

Forced to defend his honor in front of his two friends, he threw the first punch.

She laughed, clutching her stomach lightly. "That's it?"

Rolf glared death at her, but was not caught unaware by the punk opposite him. The teenager was two or three years younger, by his look, but much bigger. He launched a powerful right hook, narrowly missing his head.

"Goddamnit, Kit!"

Dierk took a hit to the face but just blinked in surprise. "Hey! That is not nice."

Trying to grip her opponent's head in a lock as they struggled, Kitna grinned up at him, her nose bloody. "It's a fight, dumbass!"

"Oh."

The six descended into a wrestling tangle, beating on each other and falling against the wall and stone repeatedly. Amused layabouts watched with interest.

It was hardly Rolf's first street brawl. Aiming mainly to exhaust his opponent, he kept the wrestling ineffective and his injuries minimal. None had many calories to spare, so it only took two or three minutes for the sweaty tangle to unwind into lolling, groaning bodies.

"Nice moves, kid," Kitna breathed, wiping her nose dry and smearing blood across her shirt sleeve, where it disappeared into virtual black.

The Orani teenager breathed heavily and favored his sore cheekbone. "You know, you three are alright. Who knew Subians were cool?"

Rolf stared in confusion as the three punks grinned and helped them up.

Kitna gripped forearms with each of them before the three departed. The punks laughed and looked back at their opponents as they moved off, but their laughter was satisfied, not mocking.

"The hell?" Rolf muttered, watching their supposed opponents depart. "How's that follow...?" But he already knew he'd never figure it out. Like Elizabeth, Kitna, too, had qualities he'd just never understood. She'd always kept him on his toes, always causing trouble, and yet... it had always turned out to be worth it somehow... when he might choose to run, she confronted, somehow winning her way into possibilities he'd never considered.

He'd always loved that about her, before. He wasn't sure that feeling had changed, even despite everything that had gone wrong between them.

Dierk smiled, a small bit of blood leaking from a scrape on his temple. "They were nice."

"You see that, Rolf? They're angry. We're angry. And it feels _good_ to fight, even if it doesn't change anything. This is what it is to be alive, boys." She gripped each of them by a shoulder, breathing heavily, her chin dripping sweat. "Well that was fun. I think I gotta call it a day. We're burning sleep hours here." Her highly satisfied expression grew a little suggestive as she locked eyes with Rolf. "So..."

Despite himself, he laughed. "You're crazy."

Lying on her cot in darkness, watching Rolf and his game, Elizabeth's dismay and urge to apologize faded in favor of a slowly growing suspicion. Rolf's every reaction was muted to an incredible degree, invisible to anyone who did not know him so well - but she was certain he'd experienced a range of strange emotions during the game.

Going over the game's log, she saw no messages or anything else that might indicate what had managed to get to him.

She even watched the fight, as confused as Rolf by the result.

She listened as the three returned to the room, Rolf and Kitna taking Dierk's cot by the door.

"Hello," Dierk whispered. "We've switched if you don't mind."

She scooted over.

He curled up back to back with her. "Solve the efficiency barrier yet?"

She laughed softly. "No. How was the game?"

"It was fun to watch. I had fun. Kitna is scary and cool. She beat up a guy that pushed me."

"Yeah, I saw..." She looked at her visual map of the room, accessing the red dot next to Rolf's. She took a quick look at Kitna's recent history.

"Screw off," the Subian girl messaged in response to her access.

"Jeez, fine," she muttered, anticipating a satisfying moment a few hours hence when Rolf would wake up in a fit and probably punch her in the face. She couldn't help but smile.

"I hope we're not too tired for tomorrow," Dierk whispered. "It's tough staying up like this. You've got to be rested to crack the barrier, remember. Good night."

"Hah, sure. Good night, Dierk."

She forced herself to push all thought aside, but her dark unfocused suspicions followed her into sleep, coloring her dreams with sibilant whispers - and an inexplicable fear of some vague approaching disaster.

A disappointing instant later, she floated back into semi-consciousness. She let her mind float in the dim outer marches of sleep, listening to her bad dream continue to play out.

It took her some minutes to realize the truth.

She sat up.

The other sleepers were already awake, standing in the aisles and murmuring among themselves. All of them seemed to be looking to Og, who stood by his cot, fighting not to look worried.

She caught his attention. "What's going on?"

"There's been a riot," he answered weakly, as if he couldn't quite believe his own words. "In the southwest, near enough the Fields to cause problems. A few harvester-operators were killed." He licked his dry lips, thinking through the best way to explain it. "The nearest replacements were way up north, so they moved every operator down the line a few machines... but there were still four harvesters out for nearly thirty minutes."

A slow feeling of horror crept through her. Quickly accessing the Peak, she found her fears confirmed: the unexpected problems had dropped the number by nearly a quarter.

"They were fighting over a kid," he continued, raising his hands helplessly. "A thief."

"What do we do?" one of the onlookers asked.

"Let's just go to work as usual," he suggested with a veneer of sincere confidence. "We've still got the Peak to worry about. Keep the people around you calm. Remember, we're not enemies, no matter who may have been involved in that riot or which sides they chose. It'll be fine."

Considering his words, moving along with the crowd on the way to their Morning shift jobs, she almost believed him.

He walked alongside her, dismay clear on his face. "How did this happen? How did this backfire so much?"

She had no answer.

"Let's just hope it doesn't get any worse," he said half-heartedly. He opened his mouth as if to say something hopeful, but then frowned with worry instead. Turning away, he headed for the labs without saying goodbye.

#  Pressure

She stood near sheer brick and touched cool stone, drawing strength from its constancy. Down the divide between wall and crowd, Rolf and Kitna sat talking. Passing down the row of sitting and leaning layabouts, she approached to a certain distance.

She stood awkwardly until Rolf saw her.

She did her best to feign nonchalance. "Hey, that programming stuff, you can do that from anywhere, right..."

He studied her body language for a moment, and then moved to stand. "Yeah."

"What are you doing?" Kitna interjected.

"I'll meet you at Eve shift."

She stood in anger and grabbed his forearm. "No, seriously, what are you _doing?_ "

He pulled his arm away, offering no explanation.

"Is this about that family-promise with Ragnisson? Because that was with him, _not her_... and who knows if he really meant it anyway."

That did give him pause, but did not elicit the reaction she wanted. Instead, he only seemed unhappier. "I'll meet you at Eve. Good luck in your games today."

"Fine, do what you want." She sighed in disgust and sat back down, heading off virtually to manage her team.

Elizabeth bit her lip as Rolf came up, and the two of them headed off toward the solar factory. "I didn't mean to cause problems between you and her."

He gave a light snort. "It's always up and down, regardless."

It soon became apparent that Kitna might have meant more by her harsh words than a simple expression of a grudge. The main quadrant seemed darkly different in character. Instead of easily flowing lines, there were many discordant clumps. Small groups stuck together, their faces worried, their conversations low and quiet. Nords walked with Nords, Anglans with Anglans, Oranis with Oranis... they both noticed the undercurrents of fear as they walked. It was not lost on either of them that they had no group in which to find security, and that three might have been better than two.

"Did we do this?" she asked, terrible pressure clenching her heart.

Wary and vigilant, he stuck close. "No."

"But the riot, it was over a thief, just like what we did."

He shook his head. "Similar conditions, similar variables. With a billion people all connected like we are, someone else was bound to have the same idea."

"I suppose." She thought back on the millions of funky dance videos she'd seen mere hours after the original, wondering if her split-second decision to defend Alexander had been a similar seed for more unrest to follow.

"Plus it's the pressure," he added, as if he was trying to justify dismissing some other unspoken concern. "People are naturally looking for any outlet."

Watching his forced neutral expression, she wondered at her observed strange hints of something darker going on with him...

As they stood at the wide entrance, the factory floor yawned open like a massive Monotheist cathedral - very crowded, but paradoxically very quiet.

They passed groups intently huddled over their work, clustered Scientists exchanging grim and tense sentences.

She saw Jason across the floor, looking back at her. He coughed and turned back to his group.

"Hi Elizabeth, hi Rolf," Dierk greeted them, hunched over his prototype. He seemed oblivious to the change in the world's atmosphere. "Solve the efficiency barrier yet?"

She smiled weakly. "Yes."

"Really?"

"No."

He let his head droop slightly. "Oh, okay."

Grimacing at her failed attempt at humoring him, she looked back at the giant readout high on the front wall. The number lay significantly lower than the day before.

Instead of accessing more detailed analyses where all the increasing and decreasing statistics were drawn together, she preferred to watch the actual number. She counted to ten in her head.

Ten seconds for the Peak to drop one second... three days was really thirty days.

One month, and the food supply would reach insufficiency... she could only imagine the violence that would follow the shortage.

That seemed an incredibly tight deadline, and the pressure around her heart seemed to tighten further. The strained atmosphere all around suddenly made horrible sense.

She made her way to her prior spot against the back wall. Rolf sat next to her, absently engaged in his project. Whatever support she might have expected from that quarter, it seemed he had something more pressing on his mind.

Clenching one fist, she fought against the painful tightening in her chest, resisting a slew of worries and fears that hovered at the edge of her awareness.

Taking deep breaths, she called up that image she'd caught through the East Residency window. Distant rain clouds shimmered with the reflected light of the Unsetting Sun, creating more-or-less static rainbows she could see any time she wanted. The Rain Belt seemed so distant, so calm, and so monolithic... free, safe...

She stared at the ground, jumping her vision to different live streams outside until she found somebody who was looking at the Rain Belt in real time.

She jumped to recorded streams from the same area, looking for someone who had glanced at the Rain Belt from the same angle at a different point in the day.

There it was... the same shimmering plays of light... the same rainbows...

She glanced at Rolf, but he still seemed more absent than usual.

Seized with a half-formed revelation, she got up and hurried across the floor.

"Dierk..."

"Have you got it?" he asked.

She laughed with overpowering relief. "I - I don't know. But the, um... the lower wavelengths, the light you're trying to redirect repeatedly across the film..." She indicated his prototype.

"We can't place components of that size with enough accuracy yet," he replied.

She rubbed her hands, trying to put into words what she was thinking without letting the vague idea slip away. "But we don't have to. It's... context. Outside the design!"

"What is it?"

"The Sun doesn't move," she said with force, the idea becoming stronger and clearer in her mind. "We don't have to make a proper design. _It just has to work!_ "

He gazed down at his exactingly drawn designs. "Randomization."

"Yes! The components don't need to be placed accurately - we can randomize them, throw out the ones that don't work at all - but the ones that do...!"

Dierk finished her thought. "Whatever angle they _do_ work from, that will determine where the cell is placed... because the Sun doesn't move."

"Exactly."

He tilted his head. "See, I knew you'd crack it."

"But have we?" she worried aloud. "This is a brute-force method, not something we can model virtually. We won't even really understand what's going on at a quantum level - some of the cells will just plain work, and we won't really be able to say why."

"We should make prototypes."

She glanced at the slowly decreasing number high on the front wall, weighing time costs - and the likelihood that others would listen to a blonde and a Subian with an inelegant solution, especially given the social stresses going on. "Let's go. We have to start _right now._ "

"Where are we going?"

"Factory Six. We need to create a large number of cells, and we don't have the tools for that here."

"Can we do it alone?"

"Maybe." She looked across the floor, sighting Jason huddled with his group. A tall Anglan Scientist offered exactly the legitimacy they needed. "But we won't have to."

Engaged in a battle of virtual starships with Kitna, Rolf wrote his question slowly, almost afraid of the answer.

"Did they incite the riot in the southwest?"

She deployed a ship before answering. "I don't know."

"What's their plan?"

"I don't know... but their plans have been pushed up by the riots and the dropping Peak. They had a bigger plan, but now they have to resort to something to do with a refinery. My contact didn't go into detail."

He began typing out an alarmed response, but Elizabeth came up to him with Dierk and Jason in tow.

"Hey, we've got an idea, and we're going to Factory Six to try it."

He blinked, trying to suddenly shift mental gears.

"We could use a programmer to help with setting up the machines," she said, visibly excited.

"I've got Kit here and all..." he thought aloud. "I can program from here."

She shrugged with masked dismay. "I guess you can, yeah."

"Let's go," Jason added, standing on the other side of Dierk. "Every second counts."

"Right."

Rolf watched the three depart, feeling strange and torn in a way he didn't quite understand.

"Forget her!" Kitna wrote, attacking his starbase. "In case you haven't noticed, this isn't the alley. You're not stuck with her anymore."

He played his delaying action with a sigh. "You've got to find out what their plan is. I don't like where this is headed. I'm not going to protect some grand cause that might just get us killed as collateral damage."

"That's not how you felt yesterday."

"I think I was a little drunk from the Hangout." He grabbed a profile at random from the riot in the southwest, following the woman's timeline backwards, skipping to a shouting man, traveling further back in time to the arguments that had angered him... tracing effect-and-cause, he found the young Nord man who'd been the first to bring the topic up - seemingly out of the blue.

"He played _Starships II_ after the near-riot here," he wrote, not sure whether to be angry or afraid. "And his game generated a checksum error."

She passed her turn, unable to take any action. "They told me they've managed to cause false positive errors in a systemic manner to cover their tracks."

Standing, he began crossing the solar factory floor, heading back out into the main quadrant. "So it's impossible to be sure. I figured as much, I've seen it in the code. I actually spoke to the old caretaker who installed that sabotage. He did it under the guise of a failed attempt to fix the error itself." He checked the old man's data. "But he's dead now..."

"Starved?"

"Yes."

She lowered her head for a moment of respect.

He found his way to the East Residency wall and sat next to her again. "Who are your contacts?" he wrote.

"Nobody important."

Running through the possibilities, he checked Ragni's history. The old man had seemed to hint that he'd been chosen for this project for a reason... but there were no games in his recent history... scrolling back, he frowned.

"There was a spike in popularity of this game about forty years ago," he wrote, focusing his breathing to keep his heart from pounding. "It's... all the older Scientists..."

"Why does that matter?"

"They _know!_ "

"They know about the private communication bug? How?"

Suddenly, Ragni's talk about social movements and overthrowing the Tyrant in his youth seemed incredibly relevant. "Because they've used it before..."

"But why now? Why is it throwing errors now?"

He looked back across patch logs. "A system-wide security update last year. It added a new layer of checks. But I guess nobody was worried about obscure errors in a hundred-year-old computer game, and the still-living revolutionaries sure weren't going to tell anybody."

She leaned against him. "What have we gotten into?"

"Nothing, yet... we could still just stay out of it, do nothing. The guy that started the riot down south ended up dead himself very quickly. I'm not putting us in that kind of danger."

His thoughts raced endlessly over boundless vague possibilities. The Undermining could be virtually anyone, a small group of wishful thinkers, a large group of dangerous zealots... how could he possibly know?

Running a search, he came up with a list of over a million people that had all received checksum errors in the last eighteen months playing games of _Starships II_.

"Worthless," he wrote. "There's no way to tell who's involved."

She laughed, squeezing his hand. "I think that's the point..." Taking her turn in the game to keep up the pretense, she sighed. "Let's go."

He played his action, immediately wary. "Go?"

"Let's find some corner of this godforsaken Stonework and hide."

"There is nowhere to hide."

"You know what I mean. We just need to get out of the way. It's this place, the Main Hub. Something horrible _will_ happen here, whether we want it to or not. The Scientists won't just sit by and let the revolution happen, so they'll undoubtedly be dealt with. And, like _she_ said, can't you work from anywhere? 'Cause I sure can."

He watched the crowd for a minute, noting only passive or negative glances as people saw him watching. It didn't seem right, abandoning the Scientists without warning them... but he seriously doubted anyone would protect two Subians from whatever was coming.

She squeezed his hand again. "What do you _want_ , Rolf? Why are you here? Why are we surviving at all?"

"I honestly don't know."

She stood, pulling him up alongside. "Let's start saving up calories."

He groaned. "Not this again. Come on."

"I'm serious. Between your Scientist pay and the bets on my team, we can scrape up enough, I know we can."

He tried to pull away, but she kept his arm held fast.

"You _left_ ," she wrote, her expression fierce. "But now you're here, and so am I. _I know you_ , and I know you think about it."

"I never think about it."

"Fine, tell me to my face that you don't want a kid. That you don't want a family."

He kept his face neutral. "Maybe I do, but we've been down this road before, and we just don't work."

"You have any other Subian girls on call?" she wrote back. "Do you know any? Have you ever even _seen_ another Subian girl? Not just on some search, but in person."

"Don't play that card with me." He pulled away harder. "We can't base a relationship on lack of options."

She caught his gaze - his real gaze - and refused to let him go. "I mean that we'll make it work, idiot. Because we're alike, because we care about each other in a way nobody else can."

Forced to consider painful concerns he'd purposely kept buried, he felt completely off-balance. "I don't know."

"Then think about it," she insisted. "Let's just get _out of here!_ We can't be here when it happens!"

A rising murmur circled the crowd, rising to shouts of dismay and horror.

He stared around, wild-eyed, but the riot was elsewhere.

"They're fighting up north!" one layabout to their left said to her friend.

He grabbed the link they'd exchanged, watching the riot happen in real time. Men and women fought at the northern edge, burning sands visible in the distance between gaps in the buildings. A sea of people clashed furiously and randomly, many with makeshift weapons, but most with fists and the power of pent-up fear.

And there it was - food being looted from the injured and dead. There was no united mob to enforce the killing of thieves... a swarm of angry rioters pushed at a Rail car, trying to topple it and break inside.

A text arrived, interrupting his wide-eyed viewing with a rare system warning symbol. "All Scientists please meet in Forum B."

It was Ragni, calling an emergency discussion.

He turned to Kitna, grabbing her hand and conceding the game in a single motion. Whatever they might have between them, good or bad, she was right about one thing. "We have to get out of here."

Leaning back from his microscope, Og blinked, fighting strained eyes to enter the forum in question. The other Scientists near him in the white-walled lab followed, visibly worried.

The conversation was already in progress.

"The unrest is only rising. The Peak is the lowest it's been in a decade, and, worse, we've got a lot of young people asking questions."

He wondered if they meant him.

"Well why shouldn't they question?" someone else posted. "Nobody _decided_ any of this. It's all just cultural inertia."

Taking a moment to look for his friends, he realized that Elizabeth had already left the Main Hub, and Rolf was heading for the main entrance. Confused, he wondered why they'd both left without saying anything, and he began to write a message -

"Mjögen, what do you think?"

He froze.

An older Scientist two buildings down had addressed him directly in a post. "Well come on, you're at the center of all this, what's your opinion?"

Put on the spot, he realized he wasn't sure _what_ his opinion was. He hadn't spent enough time thinking about it. The major issues at hand had always seemed distant; had always seemed someone else's problem.

Ragni interjected before he was forced to admit he had no idea. "It's fine if people want to question, but this all comes down to our agreed definition of social good. Right now we tell each other that total individual freedom is best, but look at the result. Zombies are twenty percent of our population, living on some charity, yes, but mostly information work that doesn't require physical movement. That, or they fight over industrial job openings. The world we've built is brutal."

"How is that related to these riots? Or to the way we handle thieves?" another Scientist asked.

Og watched his father's body language from the visual stream of an onlooker in the room with him.

Ragni leaned on his cane. "It's all the same discussion, really, and one that we should have had after the fall of the Gangs. When it comes down to it, we have to ask ourselves: do we force the will of one group on others? And, if so, what goal and methods are best for society?"

"We don't need to. We'd have never made it this far without strong social cohesion."

"But do we really have social cohesion? Or is it forced through violence and fear? And what effect are we having on those coerced?"

"This philosophical stuff is all well and good," another Scientist posted. "But we need to figure out how to calm people down, or how to handle defense of the Main Hub and the six factories if things get worse."

The conversation turned away from Ragni's questions. He seemed darkly dismayed.

Og watched his father for some time, wondering...

"This is what we want to do," Jason continued, moving the virtual diagrams around in the air. "We'll scatter the components in this low-wavelength trapping layer - literally at random. We don't have the capability to accurately place them. _But_ , some percentage of the constructed panels will end up working for some specific angle." Standing tall with pride, he paused for effect. "And that's how we'll increase efficiency."

Next to Dierk, Elizabeth stood behind him, nodding along with his explanation.

Aarón listened, his bearing grave. His peppered hair and weathered skin seemed to match his silence in unspoken connotation.

She wondered if the older Scientist would take several young nobodies seriously in the middle of a rising crisis. Perhaps they should have taken the time to get Edmundo, Jason's older friend. From the same culture as Aarón, and of the same generation, his word might have carried more -

"Sounds good."

Jason half-laughed in disbelief. "What, really?"

The older man looked at each of them in turn, his countenance still grim. "If ever there was a time for bold ideas, it's now." He paused at Elizabeth. "You should take pride in your work. This isn't the streets. I like to think we Scientists hold ourselves to a standard of merit, rather than culture or standing. You could have presented this yourself."

She couldn't help but smile. "It's only my second day -"

He nodded gravely. "Unfortunately, it won't work."

"What, why?"

"It's ten to twenty times more expensive, at the least. We'd be burning tremendous resources on failed solar cells."

She felt her face burning bright red. "But if we don't do it, the Peak might hit. The food supply - the violence -"

"It's not under my control. It's just not profitable, so nobody will do it."

"Profitable?"

"Yes. Production chases profit. You think you're the first person to ever have this idea?"

She stared at him, horrified, wishing she didn't comprehend.

He shrugged. "There's just nobody to pay for it."

That terrible pressure around her heart threatened to return. "No," she insisted. "If it's profit motive, what profit is there in the Peak hitting? What profit is there in society imploding?"

His eyes seemed very heavy, and his shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. "Believe me, those who might have the capital to invest in your expensive process have more than considered that eventuality. The Peak hitting would not be the end of the human race - it would just mean mass death for the bottom thirty or forty percent, and that violence and starvation would erupt long before the food supply actually reached shortage levels. It's happened before. I'm sure you remember, and I'm sure there are some wealthy who are positioned to benefit immensely if such a thing should actually happen again."

She fought a surging roar in her head, her every fiber burning. A massive pain buried deep within her moved, finding place and sense. Trembling, she kept control through sheer force of will.

"Benefit?" she finally demanded. "Benefit how?"

Dierk answered her plea, his gaze on the ground. "Somebody always benefits."

Jason's features seemed drained of color. He nodded unhappily. "Own the right infrastructure, make the right investments..."

Aarón remained stone-faced. "As they say, work is life. And who supplies the work? Every disaster is an opportunity for change, but change isn't always good."

Her clenched fists shook with refusal. "This can't be it. We can't just accept this. Please help us. I'll find an investor somehow. I'll convince them."

The older Scientist bowed his head for a long, still moment, but then sighed. "I like your enthusiasm, even if I feel it's hopeless. Fine, let's go talk to people."

Leading them out of the quiet-halls, they emerged into the Factory Six complex proper. Colored with intricate patterns of yellow, red, and green that each flowed through the series of factories in accordance to function and flow, the place seemed an oddly navigable maze. Thousands of men and women labored on the lines, operating the machines. The lines themselves traveled off into the distance, disappearing into further spaces lost in the maze of pipes, walkways, and enormous mechanisms.

Aarón led them up metal stairs and along a narrow walkway. In light of the tremendous noise, he began texting with one of the operators, explaining their need. The woman indicated the farthest line.

After a winding sojourn through the maze, they came to the indicated line, and a mini-workspace with another Scientist bent over a table, modifying a gutted solar cell prototype.

Aarón and the woman conversed for a moment.

He returned to them. "There's something you should see."

Out of the building, through a brief bout of sunlight and back into another complex, they followed an incredible tumble of danger-red pipes. The sound remained overwhelming, but shifted away from screechy and sharp. Instead, the space reverberated with liquid pumping and swishing sounds, mixed in with something grinding and crunching.

"It's our fuel refinery," he texted. "Raw materials from the Shield mines are turned to transportable slag in the west, then piped here and refined. But apparently they've got this new byproduct you'll want to see."

Leading them to a tank off to the side, he scooped out some of the contents with a curved implement. The small pile of black debris glimmered brightly in the diffuse sunlight streaming in through windows set high above the pipe maze.

"We've just been dumping this new waste in the sea for the last month," he wrote. "But apparently it's got interesting refractive properties they've been waiting to investigate once we have enough placement precision. Might be a lead."

She grabbed the material's linked composition files, ecstatic.

Dierk nodded. "It looks promising."

"This might actually work?" Jason asked, shaking his head. "Wow."

Aarón carefully put the refining byproduct back in the tank. He smiled lightly. "It's been a long time since I've been so intrigued. I'm glad you were so -"

A refinery worker ran by them in a hurry.

A moment later, two more workers bolted past.

"What's going on?" Aarón texted one of them.

"There's a list!" came the enigmatic reply.

Concerned, the old man led their small group to the refinery entrance. The street ran more densely crowded than usual, filled with red-faced people arguing.

Kitna held his shirt tight as they pushed through the increasingly rough crowd.

"Rolf, what the hell's going on?"

He pulled her into an alley full of prone zombies, seeking respite from the tumult. He gripped his hair, his eyes wild. "My list... somebody publicized my list..."

"What list?"

"I just searched," he breathed, eyes wide. "I searched for all the people that had ever gotten a checksum error in the game!"

She grabbed his shirt harder, trembling with horrified understanding. "So you connected the error to _people?_ "

"But who would have... how would anyone have noticed or cared? They... they can't kill _a million people!_ " Even as he said it, dark memories circled his awareness, mocking his naïve comment. He looked out of the alley, tracing the randomly colored nightmare everyone else called society. Leaving the natural tones of the Main Hub - and its possible safety - now felt like a terrible mistake.

The mistake revealed itself between his racing thoughts. He'd been aware that facts could be obscured by private communication; he'd even wondered at the size and scope of the revolution - but there was no reason that private communication might be limited to only one group, or only one method.

The arena was far larger than he'd guessed.

She screamed terrified questions, clawing at him, but he heard nothing.

There was somebody else...

There had to be somebody undermining the Undermining... somebody ensuring that everything was going terribly wrong... they had to have exposed the list on purpose.

He gripped his forehead, resisting panic. Who would benefit from all this? He could sense multiple agendas at work, crossing purposes, but the next steps were impossible to predict.

And, in any case, his own personal demons refused to give him time to think on it.

In the distance, he saw certain dots moving on the map, eager to catch up to him outside the safety of the Main Hub. They didn't care about the list, or about the situation. They were coming for him, and Og wasn't around to warn them off this time.

As much as he hated to face it, he could feel the paths ahead constricting. Too much was happening, and too fast. He could feel each passing second slicing branches from the Tree of his future.

"We have to go... now." Grabbing her hand and pulling her along, mind on fire with desperation, he set off toward the paths that held the best chances. For the moment, the best action was delay - and putting the most distance between himself and his pursuers. He could sense something enormous about to happen; wills hanging dark and brooding over civilization, like the roiling Rain Belt's black presence - except not content to remain in place, instead poised to surge forth over unsuspecting millions.

Og dropped his tools and left the labs, heading for his father.

The Hub's main quadrant had ceased flowing altogether. Densely packed people stood in confusion, not sure what to do or feel. The tone of the crowd's roar shifted emotions rapidly, swinging back and forth between fearful and angry.

The conversation in Forum B had taken a much darker tone. An older Scientist had revealed something damning after a list of people with strange errors had caught public attention. "It's private communication," she'd written. "I know, because we used the secret system to help organize a revolution against the Tyrant. Someone might now be using that against us."

He tried desperately to follow the related conversations, but they'd begun progressing faster than he could read.

"There's over a million people on this list," one of the younger Scientists posted. "They can't _all_ be involved in a conspiracy!"

"Stop," Ragni wrote. "We can't solve this by creating a phantom enemy. This won't unite anyone, won't stop any violence."

"It looks like there's also code that generates the error randomly, possibly created by accident," another added. "It's impossible to tell who legitimately used the private communication bug."

"So we've got a million people in the public eye, and we have no idea whether they're guilty?"

He squeezed past people, ran up a set of stairs, and burst into the room where Ragni stood gazing unhappily out of a window.

"Dad! What the hell is going on?"

The old man sighed, rubbing his beard. "I'm glad your brothers aren't here for this."

Scattered layabouts watched their heated conversation with interest, all fearful.

"How can you say that?" he demanded.

Ragni's jaw trembled. "I think this might be it. We made it twelve years on our own, at least that's something."

He stood in shock. "What do you mean _this might be it?_ You can fix this, Dad, right? We can do something."

The conversation in Forum B turned toward defense plans for the Main Hub.

Ragni watched adults in the main quadrant hurry to hide their children. "I don't think so. Not this time. A million people, scattered all over civilization... there will be at least one in every community."

"We'll talk it out," he insisted.

"Not this time. The demographics of the game, and of the list, mainly involve those least fortunate. Zombies and the dispossessed. If we had certainty of guilt, it might be one thing, but this is exactly the unclear situation this system can't handle." He leaned on the window, watching the men and women outside organize, piling debris in front of the Main Hub's entrances and gathering makeshift weapons. "We have a million people out there who know they're not guilty, and their friends and loved ones who will believe them and support them, and then many more who won't know what to think."

"So there's our opportunity! We'll insist everyone remain calm and we'll work out a solution."

"No. I've seen this before. An invisible enemy is a powerful thing. Zealots always rise in situations like this, and they will use that phantom threat to goad the population to action. This isn't just going to be a riot, my son. This has been coming for a very long time."

He tried to breathe, fighting brimming sorrow. The world felt wrong, like he'd never seen it before, and he knew his last vestiges of blissful ignorance had finally faded. He suddenly saw the real possibilities, the real state of the world. People were going to die... and the people he cared about, having left the Hub, were not immune. "I have to go."

Ragni smiled, his pride overshadowing his sorrow for a moment. "I thought you might."

He took a hesitant step forward, not wanting to suggest that this might be the last time they ever saw each other.

"Just go, you big sap," the old man laughed, vainly shrugging off the situation. "We'll talk again tomorrow, when this is all over."

He sniffed, nodded once, and turned away, hurrying down the stairs with a pounding heart.

Elizabeth stood in the roaring crowd. Jason, Dierk, and Aarón clustered in an unhappy circle around her. Above, on an outside walkway jutting from the refinery, a fiery-eyed young Anglan stood, his clothes set to light blue.

"Make no mistake," he mass-texted, his speech drawing waves of shouted support. "They _will_ come to kill us. This was _never_ about thieving children or even some mythical Undermining subverting society!"

The crowd surged, and the four of them struggled to remain standing.

"Come on," Jason wrote to them. "We can't stay here."

They pushed through the crowd, making slow progress through the press.

"It's about _control!_ " the speaker wrote, throwing his arms up in the air. "Who works the Fields? Us! Who works the factory lines? Us! Who drives the trucks? Us! So why are we starving? Why do we live on the whims of the rich?"

The roar grew deafening, surging with each repeated call to action. She ducked under raised fists, all cheering for the words nobody would have dared spoken the day before. Reaching the wall, she helped pull her companions from the press.

"Are you tired of working to the bone for someone else? Are you tired of being cast into the flames as fodder? The fires of Factory Seven are still burning, glooming over civilization in a belt of black, oppression incarnate, a Rain Belt fueled by negligence, uncaring, and the bodies of fifty thousand of our brothers and sisters. Who was held responsible? Nobody! Are you tired of being told it's just the system, that it's nobody's fault, that _it's just the way things are?_ "

Surprised, she looked up at the distant orator, hearing her own thoughts reflected back at her.

The speaker began pacing. "When it's one against a thousand, we Marginalized have no choice but to submit - but millions together _cannot be ignored!_ "

Mouth agape, she watched as he committed the unthinkable.

"Today, we break our silence. Today, we speak. Try firing me for my opinion now, you bastards!" Lifting the cord from around his neck, he held his cell up - and then threw it into the air. Thousands of eyes watched it sail down into the crowd, a stunned silence falling over the area. The momentary quiet seemed almost more deafening than the prior roar. The world seemed to go still, all minds momentarily taken aback.

Then, it happened.

Someone else cast off their cell.

It arced through the air, falling back among the people.

The roar returned, an almost-physical wave of boisterous support and angry condemnation, two sentiments conflicting explosively. The first shoving and punching began almost immediately, the violence spreading in a rapidly expanding wave of its own.

Seeing the crowd move up against the wall, fearing an oncoming wave that might crush them, the small group of Scientists rushed for a nearby street.

"Wait," Dierk wrote, stopping once they were free of immediate danger. "I can't..."

"Can't what?" Jason asked, breathing heavily.

The thin Subian lifted his cell off and dropped it on the ground.

She stared at him in disbelief. "What do you think you're doing?"

His gaze seemed distant. He spoke almost absently, his unheard words transcribed to text by her contacts using the movements of his mouth. "Rolf and Kitna would understand. I just can't do it anymore. Please tell them."

She shouted after him, but he was already gone, lost in the churning sea of shoving bodies pouring into the streets.

Watching the distant riot as they moved, Rolf gave a questioning glance.

Kitna nodded, silently confirming his suspicion. The public breaking of the list had forced the revolution's time table even further forward.

He could feel the game progressing, moves and countermoves made by unknown players on unknown sides, employing vast strategies in a ruleset he didn't yet understand, aiming for goals as yet hidden.

He pulled in information constantly, trying to piece together the game, trying to grip some small foothold, but the picture remained far too large to predict the next move - and he couldn't get out of the way if he didn't know which way to run.

Nearby, they could hear someone shouting in the distance; two people arguing heatedly. Those passersby visible from their position hurried past the alley's mouth, probably heading for the safety of wherever they called home.

"Where can we go?" Kitna asked, visibly resisting panic.

"There's nowhere we can hide," he responded, pulling them into an alley and sinking down to the hard stone between two zombies. "Whatever else happens, we're on that list. If they decide to kill everyone on the list, they'll look for us. A single location search and there we'll be."

But, for the moment, he remained more worried about the three Subians heading their direction. Breathing hard, but thankful for the moment's rest, he staggered to his feet again.

They left the alley quickly, trying not to draw attention, but many fearful glances traveled their way from passersby who had the list cross-referenced and knew exactly who they were.

"Rolf!"

The text filled him with a sudden and powerful relief.

"Og! Og, damnit! What should we do? Should we head for the Main Hub?"

Somewhat distant from their location, the Nord pushed his way past worried clumps of families and through groups arguing with each other. "I'm not sure. They're debating all this on the forums, and there's some talk of throwing out anyone on the list if it comes down to it. They don't want to take a stand defending people that might be guilty of private communication."

He lowered his head bitterly, more than familiar with the feeling. "You mean they don't want to take a side."

Og grimaced. "Yeah."

Noticing two Nord men glaring at them from across the street, Rolf grabbed Kitna, and they both began walking, trying not to draw physical attention.

Up ahead, a few arguers stopped to turn and look at them.

The two Nords began moving.

"I'm going to the refinery to help Elizabeth, she's caught in the riots," Og wrote. "Can you meet us there?"

The Nord men began running toward them. An attack seemed nigh - until everyone on the street froze and went absent-eyed, their attention captivated by more pressing events.

Hurrying away from the area, Rolf and Kitna watched the live feed in the corner of their vision - along with a hundred million others.

The zealous Anglan who had been the first to cast off his cell now spoke to a contact held in his hand.

"Behind me is Factory Six and its refinery," he explained, grim. "We have control of these facilities, and we have rigged some of their mechanisms." He paused to allow two men clearing bodies to pass, and for his words to sink in.

"There will be no more violence. One-sixth of all fuel passes through these districts. You've seen what happens. This will become another Factory Seven if anyone attempts to attack us, or to cut off the Rails here. We refuse to live under the heel of _owners_ any longer. If those who would impose their will upon us come anywhere near, we will detonate the refinery and destroy ourselves - and the infrastructure around us. I encourage all who have suffered at the hands of society to join us here."

"As of this moment, we stand together. We stand as one - Unionized."

#  The Hand

"Can they... do that?" Jason asked, astounded.

Elizabeth scanned the dumbfounded throngs all around. The world had seemed on the brink of all-out anarchy mere minutes before... but now something completely unprecedented had happened. Even violence - usually the easy answer - now seemed problematic, in the face of a threatened explosion of some unthinkable magnitude.

She gazed up at the clear sky between the closely packed buildings towering above, following the impenetrable and flawless blue with her eyes. The vault seemed to form a path over the street ahead, mirroring a rising terror and hope in her heart.

Several older Scientists were heading that way as a group.

"Where are you going?" Jason shouted after her. "Wait...!"

Passing between milling and confused masses, she came to a vast open plain of stone, her hopes a chaotic storm of vague phantoms. She didn't know what to expect, but she felt drawn to this moment, to some uncertain opportunity...

The five Scientists eyed her with concern as she caught up to them. Numbering three women and two men, all many decades older than her, they raised eyebrows at her arrival and shrugged in various reactions, but they did not stop her from following them.

Across the stone wasteland, pockmarked by bloodstains and debris, the zealot stood watching, an unfamiliar device in his hand.

He tensed.

The lead Scientist, a woman with tightly-wrapped white hair, stood tall for a tentative shout. "Hello."

He glanced back at the supporters scattered behind him, silently acknowledging that this group was not here for violence, and then returned her greeting. "Hello."

"Can we -" The woman stepped forward when she realized she was speaking too quietly. "Can we talk?"

He eyed her warily, not sure what to say.

"What's your name...?" she asked, visibly realizing that, for the first time, she couldn't simply look it up. She had absolutely no idea who she was speaking to - or what he was thinking.

"Michael." He seemed to relax somewhat. "Have you been chosen as a representative? Has this group?"

"No." The older Scientist looked at her own stats, surprised. "But... over two hundred million people are looking through my eyes right now."

Elizabeth stood nervously at the back corner of the knot of would-be diplomats, keenly aware of the open vulnerability of their position, and of the innumerable throngs watching their every action.

Michael coughed mid-breath, surprised by the viewership. "That many? Okay then."

A light breeze swirled across the empty area, bringing a slight chill despite the sun.

The knot's leader continued. "I just thought that we could talk about this development, fiery speeches aside. I'm sure people want to know more, but without cells..." She raised her hands, indicating the lack of options for communication.

"Right." He seemed to acknowledge that realization with some chagrin. "What would they like to know?"

The group's incoming texts were hopeless, filled with support, hate, confusion, and millions of other messages they would never have time to read. The tough old woman chose one with confidence nonetheless. "Do you plan to still produce from this area? Are we still connected economically?"

"Yes," he replied immediately. "We don't expect to have food Railed in here without exporting production of our own. I'm really glad you asked that. As you can imagine, we haven't had much time to plan any of this." He stepped forward, breaching the empty territory between them. "Would you all... care to sit?"

"We don't have to kill anybody if they just go _there_ , to that refinery," someone said to their left. "We don't even know if they're guilty, right? A million people... that's a bit more than a thief-killing. Just let 'em go."

Kitna narrowed her eyes, watching Elizabeth and the distant group of diplomats with mixed emotions. "What does she think she's doing out there? She's going to get killed, or worse."

"She's doing what she does," Rolf answered, his attention on the sentiments brewing in the groups passing by the window. He glanced back at the huddled families in the dim room behind, all hoping for the storm of violence to just pass by. "I'll never understand it..."

Kitna touched his arm lightly.

He lay against the stone sill weakly, the stress of the last few hours finally catching up to him. "They're never going to allow it, though. Any of it. The refinery, the factory, the Union."

"Why not?"

Venom and fire surged through his chest. "I know you remember. You know as well as I do what happened when the big Subian families tried to unionize twelve years ago. I don't know how she still _cares_. The vast majority of people have only ever been horrible, vindictive thugs out only for themselves, bigots, hateful, never thinking -"

He spluttered on his own words, overcome with the astonishing depth of his own pain, bile seeping through his weakened castle walls - seeping out, from deep inside.

He gripped stone until his knuckles turned white, forcing his breathing and heart rate to slow. "There's just no way this Union is going to work. The animals will burst in there and kill everyone, no matter what the cost, just to satisfy their hatreds, to reinforce their sense of superiority, or whatever knee-jerk reaction drives them. We can't go there."

She put a hand over his. "We should, though. That's where we belong."

"We'll think our way out of this," he insisted, his attention on the three dots heading for them. "We only have the time for one choice, so it better be right."

Gazing absently out the window, he began thinking out loud. "So there's the pressure, and the riots, the conditions are right... then a huge divisive issue - the list of people with checksum errors... forcing people to take sides. Forcing confusion, and confrontations, and a directed riot at Factory Six to take control..."

He shook his head, frowning. "It's not a great plan. It can go wrong in so many ways. It seems rushed, like a hasty move in a losing game. I understand time tables change, but this... was this refinery thing not even their original plan?"

Kitna gave no reply, but her heart rate rose sharply, her eyes on the ground.

He put a hand in her short black hair, touching the streaks of blue as if to remind himself of something. He couldn't ask the obvious question of her without publicly confirming both their guilts, but the answer was equally as obvious. She knew more than she'd let on, and he'd already suspected it was unlikely she'd just been recruited into the revolution in the last few days.

She'd lied - again.

"I don't care," he whispered, keeping his response vague. "We just have to survive what's about to happen, alright?"

Her lip trembled, and one of her eyes brimmed with a single half-tear, but she couldn't apologize without giving them both away. "Alright."

"What do you think should we do?" he asked, hoping there was more to the revolution's plan; something she knew, but couldn't say out loud.

She stood and pulled him up by the arm. "We should go to that refinery."

An arm flung out across Og's path, holding him back lightly by the chest.

Behind him, an incredibly dense crowd watched and murmured to each other in a collective eerie calm.

Before him, a wide section of the Stonework lay filled with bits of metal, stone, and torn clothing. Bloodstains marred some sections. In the middle of all this, a group of Scientists sat -Elizabeth at their back corner - all talking with an Anglan man in light blue clothing.

To his left, another Anglan man held him back.

"Hey, it's you, from the Hangout -"

"Jason."

He nodded. "Is this really going to work?"

"I don't know, but I hope so. I've no idea how we'd have started a dialog with them otherwise. Can you imagine us trying to pick someone to go out there and speak for everyone?"

"No..." He watched the proceedings from Elizabeth's live feed. "But it looks like they're definitely making progress," he noted, watching the numerous Scientists in Forum B conversing with the diplomats, asking them to relay questions and concerns.

"They killed my brother," someone to his right choked out, his eyes red, his anger obvious. "We should attack now, while they're busy talking."

"Are you kidding? They said they'd blow the whole thing up!"

"He's right! The arrogance of these people is incredible - they think they can make a Union work? We'll all starve while lazy layabouts cash in on everyone else's hard work! I'm not supporting slackers. I won't do it."

Og's gaze jumped around as he tried to follow the arguments in the crowd. Thankful for his height, he tried to bring calm. "Let's just wait and see. This is preferable to untold violence, right? Let's just let them live over there, it won't be any problem for us."

"But we have no idea what they're doing," a woman shouted back. "What if they decide to attack us one day?"

Another yell answered her. "Attack us? They just want to be left alone!"

"Wait and see," Og said again. "Look, they're talking about that right now."

"They're asking how you plan to enforce social rules," the man acting as second said, reading the forum posts.

Michael raised his eyebrows. "We actually haven't thought that far. We certainly don't want to kill people on the spot, since we'll no longer have absolute knowledge of guilt."

"So you'll form some sort of militia to enforce..." the leader looked up the word. "Laws?"

"That could work. We used to have courts. Trials. We could bring those back."

Heart pounding, Elizabeth spoke up for the first time. "But didn't those just decide whatever the Gangs wanted? And what the Tyrant wanted before them?"

The older five Scientists turned and looked at her for a moment, as if evaluating her interruption.

Looking past them, she saw a familiar face in the crowd near the refinery.

Sitting against the distant wall, Dierk waved awkwardly.

She waved back, incredibly relieved to see he'd survived the initial riot.

"Yes," Michael replied after thinking about it. "But I'm sure we can solve those issues with time."

The older Scientists waited, as if subtly attempting to embarrass her, but she seized the opportunity to speak instead of backing down.

Referencing another post, she changed tack. "Oh, actually, they're more worried about that organized force becoming some sort of military. We don't have anything like that, and we'd have no way to tell what you're doing in your territory."

"They're worried that _we'll_ attack _them?_ " he laughed. "No, it is you who wield the Hand."

"What's that?"

"The Hand of Society. That's what we're calling it. There's nobody to blame for anything bad that happens. It's everybody's fault, and nobody's fault, all at the same time. It's the ultimate bystander paradox. In our case, here and now, the Hand is most employed when the majority wields violence against the Marginalized, and yet nobody actually takes responsibility. Thousands die, and yet, somehow, there is no murderer - no one held accountable, so it will just happen again. That's the Hand."

She just stared at him for a tick, breezes ruffling hair in her face - the demon finally had a name.

"I see you've suffered the same as we have," Michael said softly, examining her expression. "You could join us. The Scientists are a lot like a Union, you know. That's one of the few reasons you manage to exist at all."

Gripping one crossed leg, she looked back at her own crowd, her features pained, her memories a physical ache within.

And there, impossibly, was Og, standing in support, trying to calm the crowd and support her - and Jason, too. Both men ran a dangerous game of fast-talk and platitudes, working to keep the uneasy temporary truce.

But not Rolf.

Glancing down at the sun-warmed stone, she ran a search.

He was on his way, and not too far at that. She wasn't sure what she'd expected, but... that unexpected result made her feel strange and fuzzy, as if everything was going to be fine. Even with everything so strangely wrong between them, he was still coming.

She wiped her nose with her sleeve. "No, I'm alright. I've got... family... out here." She took a deep breath and considered her next words, but the patience of her older colleagues had finally run out.

"They want to run a vote," the oldest woman stated. "I think it's a good idea."

Michael blinked. "A vote? For... us?"

She nodded. "First one in twelve years."

Seeing the two of them head for the refinery, and calculating that they would reach it first, the three dots pursuing them suddenly sped up.

Finally breaking the ruse that he hadn't noticed them, Rolf checked their stats.

"Shit, they've got jobs," he breathed. "Calories..."

The Tree of his future suddenly shed many branches. He could almost hear the clock ticking in time with his heart.

"They can run?" Kitna asked, gripping his wrist. "The whole way here?"

"They're going to get between us and the refinery..." He looked around the street, eyes pained by bright greens and sheer yellows. "And who chose the colors for these goddamn buildings?! Who thinks this looks good?!"

He gripped his head, trying his best to plan a route that might end in salvation.

"Rolf," she insisted. "Come on! We'll circle around somehow. We'll make it."

He did not believe her, but no other option remained.

The street yawned wide before them, filled with people flooding past them, all heading toward Factory Six to seek asylum. The Union would have at least a million members - the list of potential private communicators guaranteed that. When faced with death or joining the Union, their choice was easy.

While the crowd surged toward Factory Six, they moved the opposite direction.

Gaunt, worried faces watched the street from behind the false comfort of closed windows, blemishes on the glass giving them an eerie ghostly aspect.

"Rolf," she said between ragged breaths from the effort of moving against the crowd. "I'm so tired..."

Holding her hand tight, he wiped sweat from his forehead with his free hand. "I know."

It wasn't enough. They simply didn't have enough calories, couldn't move fast enough.

"I'll make a stand," he panted.

"I'm with you, idiot," she coughed.

"They want me, not you. You should go."

She grinned, a drop of sweat falling from her chin. "Do I ever do what I'm told?"

An inspirational high note rose from a song playing from a building to his left. It matched his emotions, oddly enough. "There is another route I've been considering."

"Anything. I'm with you."

At that moment - maybe because the future seemed comprised of precariously few paths riding utmost luck, maybe because he'd never seen her so committed - she seemed the most beautiful thing in the world. For once completely present, for once ignoring the world of data and statistics flying high all around, he really looked at her. Her sweat-glistening cheekbones seemed incredibly real, framing her worried but determined eyes. "Your eyes are brown," he thought aloud, surprised.

Her face curled with a genuine smile, and he knew she had a thousand things to say - snappy comebacks, heartwarming comments - but she just nodded.

Filled with a strange determination - a strange hope - the two of them made a run for it, the only people heading east.

The only people heading east, save for their pursuers.

Looking back, he could see the first rounding the corner a block away.

"Up!" he shouted, pointing to his right, and they ducked into a muted red residence.

Numb, fearful families stared at them as they rushed through the halls, jumping lightly over layabouts and accidentally bumping into several passersby. They ran up the stairs, fighting red-faced exhaustion even as the first dot reached the main entrance of the building.

The area's map firmly in view, Rolf pulled at her each time they approached another turn.

Pounding across a grated catwalk, pushing between surprised onlookers, he slowed them subtly, letting the first pursuer catch up.

He pulled hard at a rusted support rod, breaking it off at just the right moment to bring it down with the full force of his body.

The rod fell hard across the lanky Subian running after them, slashing across his chest - he screamed in pain, gripping his body as he fell to grated metal, a spray of red splattering his shirt. He would survive the wound, but further pursuit was out of the question.

Scrambling back up from his fall, Rolf wasted no time. "That way!" he shouted, leading Kitna up another set of stairs, more than aware they were almost out of energy.

They reached the roof after a few floors, emerging into a forest of black panels and oppressive heat. The Unsetting Sun watched their flight, aloof and uninterested.

"That way?" Kitna asked, pulling him along.

He nodded, beginning to limp as he ran out of willpower to resist his old knee injury's slight impairment.

Their second pursuer rose out of the stairwell shortly after, laying an angry gaze on them. Shorter than the first, but visibly healthier, he retained the energy to run - and quickly pelted between the solar panels, closing the distance between them.

"Now?" she asked.

"Now!"

They pushed off the edge together, soaring across the gap between the buildings.

They broke apart, rolling painfully as they hit the top-floor balcony of the building next door.

Their pursuer eyed the jump, and then decided to follow, after settling on hatred over fear.

Rolf leapt to his feet and pushed as the other Subian landed, shoving him out and over. He tumbled onto the prior building's lower balcony, gripping his leg and shouting in surprised pain.

"Come on," she insisted, pulling him away from the sight.

They moved through dirty, dank rooms filled with wide-eyed families huddling in the dark. The steps down took them to the main street again, near the limit of their endurance -

\- an angry arm slammed him into the building's green-patterned outer wall.

"Finally caught you," a furious voice uttered through clenched teeth. "You're really the best survivor I've ever seen. I'll give you that."

"Get off him!" Kitna screamed, clawing at the tall Subian man.

He shoved her away with a furious grunt, and then looked to his prey again.

Reaching down desperately, he threw a handful of dusty gravel in the face of his attacker, freeing himself. Running for the corner, he bolted down, leaping a dozen prone zombies and curving into another main street.

A passing flatbed truck, loaded down with refined metals, had the street pressed thick with compressed crowd.

Jumping between the truck and the wall, he clambered over, climbing on shoulders and heads in desperation. Shouts of annoyance followed him as he turned down another corner - but this gap was no alley. Slimming down to less than the width of a person, the stone clawed at his clothes, grinding as he pushed forward in sheer agony - and then pulling at his skin, scraping blood and pain - and then he was out, stumbling into the street.

But he'd underestimated the power of his pursuer's hatred. The healthier man shed more than his share of flesh squeezing between the buildings, quickly catching up to him. A flailed grasp caught his tattered shirt, and a powerful grip forcefully slammed him against a blue-dappled wall.

"You will..." the other panted, his chest bleeding from a dozen places. "You _will_ answer for what you've done."

Back of his head hard against stone, Rolf locked eyes with his demon. "Your brother, right? I haven't forgotten. I remember them all."

The other Subian flinched for a split second, taken aback. "Yes."

He carefully considered his next words. "He wasn't very good at _Starships II_... he would have starved anyway."

The arm against his neck increased its pressure. "That's not the point. We were supposed to work together, supposed to survive as a people. I told you - I told you to concede, that he was starving, but you didn't. And he died. By refusing to cooperate, _you killed him_. You betrayed your people so many times. So many starved. And you think you can just go live your life, work for the Scientists, and be free of your crimes?"

Straining for breath, eyes misting, he gripped at the other's arm. "You blame me... why don't you blame the sadistic rich... betting on us...? That's not what they wanted... to see..."

Brow trembling, the other man hesitated again.

"And how many of us..." he continued, struggling to speak. "How many of us survived, anyway? Why are you... still alive?"

The arm against his neck dropped.

His assailant stared at a spot on the wall behind him. "I don't care about the people who bet on us, because I can't do anything to them. But you... you I can blame."

"No," Rolf countered. "That's a mistake."

"A mistake? How?"

"Look at that Union at Factory Six - they have the right idea. We've wasted years hating and fearing each other, but why? We didn't do this to each other. Others might have starved because I couldn't help them, refused to help them, but _I've never killed anyone_. I just did what I had to do, what the world forced us into. I'm not irredeemable." He stood, surprised at his own words. "If we just work together, if we just make the right choices, the _smart_ choices - if we play the game well enough, we can survive. If we just make enough good choices, everything will be alright. I really believe that."

He laughed, almost not believing the sliver of hope still residing, impossibly, within his heart. "There's always a possibility, always some way to win, some way to survive. Do you believe that? Because I do. Even after everything we've been through, I still believe there's a chance. There's always a chance. It's not nice, not happy, but it's fair. Life is fundamentally fair, in that brutal way. I have to believe that. I have to believe this was all _for_ something."

The other Subian man blinked a few times, visibly at a loss, all hatred and angst drained. He stepped forward, perhaps moving to speak, but he never had the chance.

The muted blue building behind them and the intricate brown-and-gold building across the street both suddenly shifted color palettes in response to changing light patterns. The street fell absolutely silent.

He could see it in their faces. He knew before he even looked to his left, following his assailant's terrified gaze. Too distracted by the chase, he hadn't been following the major events captivating everyone else...

The mountains on the western horizon could no longer be seen.

The main street's endless canyon channeled his sight down a tunnel of buildings, all leading straight into an infinite darkness. A massive black fist seemed to rise into the sky, forcing apart the scant misty clouds above in an unbelievably wide circle. Myriad arcs of fire framed the expanding ebon cloud.

It all seemed so distant, so quiet...

Roiling madness surged outward, storm clouds gone insane, eating the world in a raging tide.

In that moment, all his plans evaporated, wrenched from his very soul by the sheer power of reality itself. In the face of that power, he was nothing, his plans were nothing, and his foolish hopes were nothing. His impassioned hopeful words had been wrong.

He knew his mistake, then; a very personal and core mistake. He'd assumed, like the games he'd grown up on, that some manner of fairness sat hidden within reality itself.

But, of course, many groups would have benefited by the destruction of the refinery. Of course the Hand of society had called the Union's bluff - and of course they'd actually done it, rather than live a day longer as veritable slaves. The revolution was over the moment it began.

It had never had a chance.

He realized with utter certainty, in that moment of total despair, that there was not always a way to win; that life was not fair in any manner whatsoever, and that, sometimes, one could make every play perfectly and still lose - if the game was rigged.

He understood, then, that it _was_ rigged.

It always had been.

#  The Lone Path

As one, enmities forgotten, they turned and tried to run.

The crowd reacted less quickly, an agonizingly slow series of moments where old and young and Orani and Anglan and Nord and Subian ran alike, all too slow to escape, all chaff in the wind.

A massive hand gripped him bodily and threw him upward, a thick current of scraping dust blasting his raw skin and tearing through his tattered clothes as he hung in empty space for an endless time.

Eyes tightly shut, he had no chance to anticipate the impossibly hard stone crashing into his arms and legs. He felt his right knee crack horribly, and then he was in the air again, floating without thought and without sense.

Flat stone came again, rushing by, ripping skin horribly.

He rolled this time, sliding along, coming to rest on his side.

Coughing, unable to feel anything, dust sifting off with every movement, he pushed himself up, staring at the hard stone beneath his bloodied and dirtied hands.

He felt his own shocked outcry vibrate his throat, but no sound followed; deafening silence hung like a blanket in his numbed ears, punctuated only by a strange, high squeal.

His skull - no, every bone in his body - seemed electrified by pain. He felt his limbs, his tissues, and his very nerves, in a horrifically real sense. His body seemed a wire-doll, frail and weak, only loosely obeying his commands.

Looking past roiling swirls of dust and smoke in a throbbing daze, he found himself alone in the middle of the street, stumbling over a large crack in the Stonework itself on his hands and knees. Bodies lay scattered everywhere, though whether they were dead or alive...

A drop of something cool hit the side of his neck.

Touching the spot lightly, he looked around for the source.

Massive curving white columns towered overhead, seeming to touch the sky - sudden eruptions from below, impossible and beautiful all at the same time. As he stared at them, numbly trying to understand, they toppled, spilling between the buildings with a roar resonating through the street and into his very bones.

A young woman managed to get up and run from the oncoming sea. He raised a hand, not sure what he wanted to tell her, but he never had the chance.

Preposterous force seemed to grab his body, spinning him, madly shaking him, sweeping him farther and faster than he could process. For a brief moment, he managed to flatten his bare feet on stone, but the recovery was an imaginary one.

He felt the flow curve down. He held his breath as best he could through the interminable fall, shooting down deep into raging waters. Head pounding, lungs burning, he kicked - but thick mud shot up to his waist.

Powerful force continued to press down, and he waited, waited, waited, his neck straining, his head burning with desperation... until the forceful current shifted, and his thrashing freed him from the clinging mud.

Daring to open his eyes, blinking against the salt and agony, he saw chaos above, filtered through near impenetrable haze. The rapidly waving surface held incredible amounts of falling stone, bodies, and flaming patches of fuel.

Thrashing toward that chaos, trying to steer himself toward an open space, he swam up with all his strength, but the deadly surface only seemed to recede.

He found himself swimming in an endless tunnel, all underwater, but it seemed there was air - though he still held his breath out of paranoia. In the distance, a small aperture glimmered, approaching rapidly, an incomprehensible portal into an endless expanse of green void... he continued to kick and claw upward, refusing to acknowledge reality sifting away around his awareness.

_No!_ , he repeated furiously, though that mental voice he'd always considered his true self seemed to fade with each insistence, growing quieter as his body continued to thrash some unknown direction, eventually faltering and slowing, floating in darkness, peace finally numbing a lifetime of pain...

***

She had no thoughts. Mouth agape, she let her half-chewed chocolate bar fall, her senses numb from sheer disbelief. As the dark cloud roiled into scattered pieces, a tremendous circle of open sea now lay in the middle of the Stonework, littered with collapsed buildings, burning regions of fuel, and bodies... countless bodies...

"I didn't think they would actually do it..."

Watching the same feed from his autochair, her counterpart looked over aghast, struggling for words. He had no idea what he could possibly say.

Trembling, she pushed the live feed into the background of her holographic workstation for a moment, unable to keep watching. "Is this what we've been doing all this time?"

He shook his head, appalled. "We didn't do this."

" _We analyze destroyed societies_ ," she replied, her tone quiet but fierce, spittle flying from the force of her words. "You and I have seen this a million times, just long after the fact. This is always the beginning of the end."

"We're not the live-team," he said, fighting back horror. "We should have passed this on to them."

"But they don't _do anything!_ " she shot back, clenching a fist. "They just _watch!_ " She swept her arms in the air, indicating everything and everyone past the faded blue-grey steel walls of their work room. "Why aren't we helping them? They're dying down there at this very moment. We can _do something!_ "

He glanced at the door fearfully. "And if the higher-ups find out we've interfered?"

"I don't care what they do to us. We can't let this go on."

She pulled up all her files again, burning with anger and shaking with apprehension.

"Wait," he pleaded.

She froze her hand over the command sequence.

"What if this is it?" he whispered. "We've never seen any society quite like this. It seems volatile, yes, but what if this is what we've been looking for? What if they _make it?_ If you interfere, you might take that away from them. You might even hurt more than you help. You'll probably ruin it, in fact."

He wasn't wrong.

But she'd never seen anyone die before; never knew them almost personally, never had to watch the worst case scenario inevitably unfold. She'd only ever reviewed expansive statistics and cold data.

And besides, they didn't interfere. That was... just the way things were.

Face screwing up, she drew in a pained breath, her fingers still hanging undecided over the controls.

***

Arms closed around him.

Somebody grappled and kicked, pulling and pushing with intent desperation.

The water suddenly dropped away from his head, and he gasped through the smoke and dust, struggling to stay above the splashing froth.

"Rolf! It's me! Stop fighting!"

Kitna kicked repeatedly between breaths, keeping them both up.

It took several gasps for reality to return, albeit fuzzily.

"How the hell did you find me?"

Soaking, shivering, eyeing the nearby patches of fire warily, and rising and falling with the rolling waters around her shoulders, she gave him a mock glare. "I'm just awesome like that, duh."

He laughed between shivers, wincing against his horribly pained ribs.

Looking around in confusion at the muted grey Stonework in various stages of collapse all around, he touched his face. "I lost my contacts... and my cell..."

"Me too. Come on," she groaned, exhausted. "We've got to get out of the water."

A distant rumble hinted at secondary explosions somewhere nearby.

Swimming for a nearby pillar, they gripped the cold stone with agonized relief.

"Look out!" someone shouted - a distant fellow survivor in the water.

Another massive wave rolled in. He tried to get away from the pillar in time, but the force slammed him up against the hard stone. A painful fire and a physical crack seemed to resound in his arm.

He saved his scream of pain until after the wave passed and smoky air rushed around his face once more. Grunting as he splashed toward safety, he tried to favor his arm, now only a half-capable mass of agony and mangled flesh.

She swam back to the pillar in the lilting waves. "Come on. Up." She seemed even more tired than him.

Gripping the rough handholds with his one good hand, keeping his broken arm pressed up against his body, he pulled up with all his might. She held onto another handhold, and they inched up together, supporting each other.

Another rumble shook the Stonework. Something across the gap above crashed and shifted. An entire building toppled into the water with a deafening reverberation.

"Come on," she said again, panting. "Up, up..."

His whole body torn with pain, he gripped the edge of the street proper. They angled up together, falling on the sun-warmed stone just as the next big wave slapped at their feet, splattering them as one final taunt.

She laughed weakly, falling prone.

The street sat in curious silence, free of crowds for the first time since it was built. A few bodies littered the sea-swept corners. Fires burned at random. Many of the buildings around had collapsed, giving the area a strange openness.

He staggered to his feet, ignoring his cracking right knee and broken arm. He pulled at Kitna, lifting her up against his good shoulder.

Her bare skin felt slick and warm against his, and the tattered remains of her shirt dripped blood.

"You're hurt..."

"Yuh. Where to, captain?"

"That way," he said, looking east. The still-standing structures in the distance seemed oddly blurry. He blinked a few times, but they did not clear. He set his jaw as he realized just how much the world had denied him - he didn't even know his own body. He'd never had the chance. "I'm near-sighted..."

She laughed weakly again, and they staggered forward a few steps.

She pulled downward listlessly. "I need a rest."

A roar in the distance began growing louder; far different from the rage of the sea or the ferocity of the explosion - and far more dangerous. He knew that sound well. "We have to keep going. We can still make it... somehow..."

"I'll make you a deal," she panted, holding her shirt-covered side. "I'll tell you our plan if you tell me you yours. Nobody can hear us anyway, right? First normal private conversation in our entire lives, and all we had to do was blow it all up..."

Worried, he sank to his good knee. "Fine. What's your plan?"

"You're going to have to deal with it," she apologized. "A bigger version of what we ended up having time for."

"A bigger version?"

"It's on a dead man's switch. I don't know who it's linked to. It's mostly in place, but we didn't have the time or the sentiment or the..." She paused for a long, pained blink. "It'll go off if that person's vitals stop."

"Well, we can't count on using it, then, whatever it is. It won't last long. There are so many people dying..." he replied warily, listening to the approaching riots. "They're probably killing everyone on that list right now, and everyone who was heading for the refinery, and more -"

"It's a bomb, Rolf. A nuclear bomb."

It was his turn to laugh. "What? Come on. Where would they build something like that? Where would they hide it?"

She didn't smile. "Where would they communicate in secret? If your first guess isn't a hundred-year-old bugged computer game."

"You're serious."

She nodded. "I'm sorry. We were going to split society in half with the threat. Not just hole up in some refinery... it was never intended to actually go off."

He rubbed his face, trying to process the enormity of what she was saying. "But the dead man's switch -"

"It had to be a credible threat."

They both remained silent for some time, staring at each other, one apologetic, one disbelieving.

He suddenly felt very aware of the heavy smoke sifting past his hair, and of each and every scrape and injury. Past the heavy, gritty dust, he even felt a scant bit of the sun's warmth. A half-sob contorted his chest. "Are you... is this... are you saying... is this the end of the world?"

She breathed in once, her bloody lips curled up in an unhappy frown, tears running down her beautiful cheeks. "I'm so sorry. There's somebody else, there has to be. It went so wrong - _so wrong_ \- it was never supposed to happen like this."

He staggered back, holding himself up with his good arm.

There was nothing to say.

His thoughts were all on Elizabeth, and a little bit on Og, thankful neither would have to be here for the pathetic, agonizing, fiery end.

But within him, deep within, inside his most guarded keep - sitting at the crudely hewn chrome table with his inner self - a cold and black figure laughed. Reborn in that moment of pained despair, in that terrified moment after the explosion, the silhouette watched with sadistic humor. Dice fell on the imaginary table between them.

"That's alright," he said after a moment. "It's alright. So everybody's probably going to die at any moment. The plan's the same."

"Your plan?" she asked, leaning her head on the wall remnant behind her.

"We're going to steal a boat," he said, fierce. "And we're going to head east, under the Stonework, avoiding the riots. And we're going to find the Islander, and we're going to get him to tell us where he's from somehow. It's got to be Somewhere Else. I don't care where. And we'll go there, you and me, and we'll be far away from all of this. And they can blow each other to hell, kill each other in the streets, it won't matter. We'll be long gone."

"Is that what you want, Rolf?" she asked. "To just go, forever?"

"It's the plan."

She took a moment to respond. "Then it's a good plan."

He peered over the rough, shattered edge, scanning the waters below. "There's an Underman boat now. Wait here."

"Don't..." she breathed, reaching for him weakly with one arm. "Don't leave me here..."

"I have to. We have to keep going."

Steeling himself, holding his mangled arm tight, he leapt back into the now-calming sea. The water sank over his head, but he kicked up, trying to keep focused against all the screaming fears at the edge of his thoughts and the mind-numbing pain spiraling out from his arm. So the murderous crowd was coming, and there was an even bigger bomb somewhere, so what... everyone he knew was dead, so what? He still had Kit, still had the two of them, and they could still make it, however narrow the path might be - there was still a chance.

The rapidly ticking clock at the back of his mind sped up, keeping time with his racing heart.

"Just keep going," he muttered, climbing into the charred craft, exactly like the one that had brought him back to the Stonework only two days before. "Just keep going."

He clambered awkwardly over the two metal benches, splashing and sprawling toward the back, but the simple controls sat unresponsive. The engine had a large gash in its casing, torn open by shrapnel.

Shivering with chill, his jaw set against fiery pains all throughout his limbs, he used his good hand to investigate the mechanisms within.

"You were always better with machines," he said aloud, trying to keep that thought at bay - the thought that Elizabeth was a charred corpse somewhere.

He collapsed for a moment in the chill water in the curved bottom of the boat, exhausted. He wanted to scream in anger, but he had no strength for it. It was all he could do to gaze past the billowing black columns high above to the scant traces of clear blue, and speak to them, as if the vaulted sky could somehow carry his words to Elizabeth. "I'm sorry that I wasn't the friend you needed. I always thought you'd outlive me for sure, that you'd always be here..."

But she wasn't there, and he tumbled over the side, splashing toward the pillar with the last of his strength.

One hand up... one foot up... the other foot up... he strained his neck with the force of resisting a scream, the pain from his right knee almost unbearable... one hand up... one foot up... "Just keep going," he grunted, using his damaged knee again, his broken arm threatening to force him to black out.

Through it all, the clock kept ticking, faster and faster, now dictating his heart rate rather than the other way around.

He grasped and clawed up, falling roughly to the street, his limbs full of snapping little tendrils of fire.

Kitna reached out her arm, waiting, with no questions about the boat.

Lifting himself with a groan, he pulled her up, bringing her to his good shoulder.

"New plan," he gasped. "We fight our way east."

She nodded weakly, an exhausted smile hinting at her resigned understanding of what was about to happen.

Examining the nearby streets that still remained standing, he lifted his awareness free from his damaged body, fiercely calculating all the options. Without his cell and perfect information, it was all vague estimation... but it was all he had.

The rising roar hinted that the riots were nearing.

No, not the riots plural. _The_ riot - the violent surge to end all violent surges. This was a species in its last days. He knew there would be no holding back, not anymore.

Panting, he visualized the buildings that should be all around, his eyes narrowed. "I know this area... why do I know this area?"

A drop of blood fell from his left eyebrow, shooting down past his vision.

The roar was loudest to the south. That route would be certain death.

Passage to the east ran mostly along a wide central street. There would be no hiding there.

The north offered a long series of mazelike alleys, many still standing, many obscured by debris and collapses. He felt a small hope for that direction - without their cells, they couldn't be tracked in real time... at any other time, taking off their cells would have been a death sentence, but now confusion and anarchy would shield them.

Stumbling forward, he held her tight, and they limped north together, moving along a narrow battered causeway flanked by piles of rubble.

"Tell me about it," she breathed. "Tell me about Somewhere Else."

Turning a corner into a cluttered, high alley, increasingly supporting her to the point of nearly dragging her along, he tried to imagine it.

"They leave each other alone there, if that's what they want," he panted. "There's enough food there. That's for sure."

He paused to pull her over a pile of rubble; she helped as best she could with feeble efforts from her debilitated arms.

"What else?" she whispered.

"There's probably death there, we don't want to get too greedy," he smiled, turning another corner, moving them both past a series of strewn bodies and a flaming chunk of refinery wreckage thrown by the explosion. The heat seared his face as they eked past. "But people don't kill each other. There's no need. There's enough food for everyone, so there's no need to commit crimes at all."

Individual shouts became audible within the approaching roar.

The ticking clock, now prominent in his thoughts, doubled in speed again. His heart strained to its limit attempting to keep up.

She nodded weakly. "How do they... kids..."

They came to a wider street, far more structurally sound than most. The buildings here remained standing against all odds.

"It's all about the young," he continued, ignoring a desperate need to collapse. "Not like here. The children are happy. It's nice."

Unable to speak further, they moved in silence, the oncoming clamor echoing from every direction.

At some point, he realized he was fully dragging her along.

He stopped, his thoughts suddenly blank.

He touched her neck, checking.

The clock accelerated again, now a crescendo far past his ability to keep pace.

Time was almost up.

"Oh," he said to nobody, his tone absent. "Okay."

He laid her down gently against a nearby wall, slinging her down into as respectable a position as he could manage.

He adjusted her tattered clothing, and then ran a hand through her matted hair, smoothing it into the style she preferred. "I... I think they'll make sure you reach the Fields."

He remained on one knee, blankly staring down.

He wondered if he should be feeling something. If ever there was a time to feel a storm of emotions, it would be that moment, right? But there was just that empty void, surrounded by that high-walled castle he'd spent so many years building - protecting nothing.

There was nothing left; nobody left.

He wondered if he should be crafting some grand realization, some final epiphany about society or life or human beings. If ever there was a perfectly poetic point in time, it would be that moment, right?

He gazed at Kitna's calm face, her eyes closed as if she was asleep.

It was all just a game - a twelve-year-long game whose ending had always been inevitable.

He'd played it safe, played it cold, made the tough decisions and kept out of it all, and this was the reward - he'd outlived the other players in his little slice of the game. He would be the last to die. Rolf the Rude, he was indeed, playing it right to the end no matter what, and all the more bitter for it.

He'd never thought he could escape the Hand, not a second time, but Elizabeth's words had stuck with him since the first.

"We just keep going," he said aloud, taking one last indulgence in the ability to finally speak his thoughts aloud.

Gripping the wall with his good arm, he pulled himself up, still intent on heading east.

He made it to the corner before he finally figured out how he knew the area so well.

Standing in the corpse-littered street, gazing up at the horribly familiar buildings all around, a laugh forced its way out from behind his bruised ribs. They were grey without his contacts, but he knew their shapes by heart.

The pain didn't stop him. It was deep, genuine laughter, a response to the most enormous joke, the ultimate farce - a prank obviously played by reality itself just to be terrible.

"How are we back here again?" he asked, shaking his head, the entire situation laughably familiar.

There was even a pile of rubble and bodies in the same spot.

Laughing maniacally, he waited for the roar in the alleys, no longer harboring any illusion of escape.

An older Orani woman limped past, terrified.

He practically cackled with glee and disbelief. "It's the same street!" he shouted at her back as she hurried away. "It's the _same street!_ My family died here! Right here! And here I am again, come to join them! What are the odds?"

She glanced at him in fear as she turned a corner, but she did not reply.

"I'm not the crazy one!" he shouted after her. "It's everyone, it's the world!"

But the insane humor faded into fatigue with each passing heartbeat, leaving him empty again.

They came from every side-street all at once; a frenzied, bloodthirsty wave of animals in a rolling tumble of bitter violence, preceded by a thick surge of terrified victims.

Of the victims, some ran, some fought back, some shouted and pleaded, but it was no use. To the violent, these were not human beings - not now, perhaps not ever, at least not when it mattered.

Utterly calm, he stared down the oncoming Hand.

A corrugated rod jutted from broken debris to his left. He stepped over, pulled until it came free, and returned to his spot, standing with the makeshift weapon ready in his good hand.

It was in their eyes - that hatred that he knew so well.

It gave him some comfort, knowing that this would be the last cycle of violence. The revolutionaries might have had a different end in mind, but the result would still be peace - silence, even, after the bomb. For some reason, his soul was weary of the endless cycles of violence that had led them all to this point, as though he'd personally endured every single one.

In a way, he had. It all fell on him, now, coming to destroy him no matter who he was, no matter what he had - or hadn't - done to deserve it. It didn't matter that he'd technically never killed anyone directly. There was no morality or judgment. There was only death.

The rush of victims began surging past, running for their lives.

"Hey, idiot," the quiet gasp came, barely audible over the choir of terrified screams.

He turned, frozen by unbidden hope.

Kitna looked over at him with half-open eyes, a weary smile on her face. "I'm not dead. I just passed out."

Gripping the corrugated rod tighter, but abandoning the last stand immediately, he ran over to her in hopeful shock. "I didn't know - I couldn't tell - Og would have known better, how to judge your wounds..."

"Get us out of here," she breathed, looking past him at the oncoming tide of violence.

Nodding, summoning impossible strength, he lifted her with his good arm and broken arm, all muscles straining against the agony.

Stumbling for the nearest broken section of stone, he jumped.

Reality surged as the water roared past his head again. He kicked up, refusing to stop, refusing to let go of her or the metal rod that might be their only defense. Together, they turned another Underman boat right-side up, clambering weakly into it with no time to spare.

The thunder of violence clashed on the Stonework overhead as he hit the controls and sent the boat sputtering east.

Somebody jumped down, landing in the boat with them, almost sending them both flying.

It was his assailant - that final Subian who had cornered him.

A large bloody gash ran up his face, leaking a light sheen of red down dust-blasted features. His torn clothes sloughed off dirt with each movement. He huffed for a moment, catching his breath. "Truce?"

Kitna spat blood. "Truce? After all this time?"

Rolf waited, still ready for violence, but he made no first move.

The other Subian kneeled in the boat as it began picking up speed. He removed the fragments of his busted cell and tossed them in the water. "You were right, Rolf the Rude. I thought to myself, just before the blast... why don't I blame them? Why don't I blame the Investors?"

"The investors? Which ones?"

"Aggregate Investors. It's a group name. I wondered why they gave me a job, got me out of that alley. I thought it was out of remorse, or maybe pity for a zombie. But now, seeing what they've done, I've -"

But there was no time for the other man to finish his sentence. Three leaping rioters came down from the passing Stonework above, one missing the boat, but two catching him by the body and fighting their way onto the small craft.

"Rolf!" Kitna shouted, struggling to get up.

He didn't hesitate. His thrust shoulder pushed the two assailants - and the other Subian - back from the speeding boat, leaving them behind in the water.

He stared after them, wondering if he should feel horrified at betraying another of his kind yet again.

He did not feel horrified. Quite the opposite \- he felt only more confusion, at the fact that both the rioters were much older, rather than the young punks he'd expected.

He watched for as long as he could, still silently rooting for his counterpart to fight off the assailants and escape the water, but the under-stone gloom obscured all three long before the struggle concluded.

There was nothing to do except keep going.

Intense silence soon fell, their boat sputtering along through a weird sea of echoes, as if alone under the dust-hidden Sun.

Concerned by the growing number of bodies in the water, he peered ahead - and then stopped the boat against a pillar, grabbing an overhead arch to remain in place.

A cloying and sickly yellow-green gas filled the underspaces below the Stonework ahead, spanning as far north and south as he could see. No passage east presented itself.

Looking down, he backed away from the edge of the boat, where bodies floated thick enough to obscure the water itself.

"Hey!" a shout from above echoed. "Is that a boat? Hello? I've got gas masks!"

Wary, but knowing he had to take the opportunity, he responded. "Over here."

A white-haired older man ran over and climbed down into the boat, his shirt torn and his cell missing. He wore a grey mask over his mouth, square and thick, but he was still immediately recognizable.

"You're the owner of the chem-complex near the Edge..."

"Yes," the older man replied, looking down at the half-conscious girl in the boat, then back at him. "Hey aren't you that Subian kid I hired the other day? Yes, you are. A Scientist, good, we've got to get away. That gas is poisonous."

He took a half-step back away from the older man, clutching the corrugated rod defensively. "What happened here?"

"Well it's part your fault, kid," the owner replied. "But I suppose we can lay the blame on the accident."

"Accident?"

"The accidental explosion. Haven't you been paying attention? Looking at you, maybe you hit your head in all that. You should clean yourself up before we explain this publicly."

"The explosion was accidental?" he asked, brushing off the man's insults. "I thought that somebody called the Union's claims, and found out they weren't bluffing... what exactly happened?"

"It's lack of safety regulation," the owner replied. "Somebody didn't do the needed maintenance, and then all that Union garbage happened, you can guess the rest. A major line went off by accident. And the shaking and all that damaged things here, causing a chemical spill."

He could only watch in growing hatred as the older man began fast-talking himself, as if trying to rationalize his own actions.

"It's the lockdown mechanics in the equipment. That must have been it. Something faulty. Sure we didn't do the required maintenance, but that's just because the maintenance company kept trying to gouge us. Or maybe it was the workers. They probably sabotaged the machines on purpose, just to get back at me. Ungrateful, they are. After all the jobs I've created, the nerve! And besides, none of the other companies follow any sort of safety guidelines. I'd go out of business if I had to do that, since they're not doing it. It's our whole culture, really," he finally decided aloud. "Yes, that's what we should do. You and I, kid. We'll get out there, we'll call for the creation of some sort of safety inspector organization. Like your Scientists. Yes, we can change everything, so this won't happen again. We're going to turn this world around, back from the brink, you and I. Now take me north, I need to check on my family. My grandkids -"

The older man's eyes widened, matching startled gazes with Rolf.

The rest of the world stood suspended in silence.

The owner opened his mouth slightly, trying to speak, but no words followed.

Riveted in place, aghast, Rolf could only stare. Every line and wrinkle on the older man's face seemed to sear itself into his memory; the lines of his jaw, the slight moustache, and the horror in his eyes...

The man's hand came up, gripping the rod stuck through his throat and neck. In that moment, he ceased to be an owner, and remained only a man - dying like everyone else.

He fell backwards into the water, eyes still wide with disbelief.

Rolf stood in place, petrified, not understanding what he'd done, not comprehending. He slowly lowered his good arm, now weaponless. His shocked stare went from the body in the water to his own hand, still brown with flaked rust.

"Rolf," Kitna whimpered from her corner of the boat. "Rolf. It's alright. Just get us away from here."

Trembling horribly, he began moving, grabbing the small stack of gas masks the older man had dropped when the rod had been stabbed through his throat.

"Close your eyes," he told her, his hands shaking as he secured one across her mouth. "We're almost there."

Huddled down in the boat with her, he aimed it as best he could to the east, and then turned the engine on again.

Numerous bumps under the boat marked bodies passing in the water. He kept his eyes tightly shut, hoping not to hit a pillar or some other obstruction, strange itching and burning searing across his exposed skin - but no more, nothing lethal, as long as the masks held.

Eyes tightly shut, traveling blind through silent death, he began wondering if the darkness would ever end. He wondered if the nightmare would ever cease, or if they had actually died in the explosion and this eternal flight was to be their punishment...

She gripped his hand tight, reassuring him, that, at least for the moment, they were still alive.

Wind ran across his face, and he opened his eyes - the sea of death and gas receded behind them, dark and silent, watching them go with hunger.

Forced to tear off most of their clothes, he hurriedly used seawater to wash off the burning, sticky gasses, keeping the boat aimed east as best he could while he worked. "Good?"

She smiled weakly. "Better."

The dappled alternating light began changing as they reached the eastern Edge of civilization, the clock still racing in his mind. Time was beyond up, and decisions were few, and he had less information than ever.

Bringing the boat to a halt, he faced upwards, past the unfinished pillars.

The Edge was absolutely empty, probably for the first time in three hundred years, all the laborers gone to protect their families.

A lone giant remained, clad only in grey pants, his bulky arms employed in hammering a heavy bolt into a steel girder.

He stood, hefting his hammer, gazing silently at the uncommon arrival beneath his workplace.

"Islander," Rolf shouted, standing tall in his boat, trying in vain to steady his voice. "We need to get out of here. Please tell us where you come from. We'd like to go there."

The giant stared blankly at him for a moment, and then at his half-conscious bloodied companion. He said nothing.

"Help us."

The giant's gaze fell west, on the maze of buildings emanating a dull roar of unspeakable violence.

"Help us, damnit!"

The only response was a long look to the east, across the sea.

Feeling his lone path losing its last branches, he screamed his innermost thought. "I know who you are!"

The Islander's gaze suddenly shot back to him, his muscled body tensed.

"You sit on your high altar," Rolf shouted, filled with surprising vehemence. "You think you're above all this, think you're not one of us, that you're not responsible. Well _you're here!_ " His roar echoed across the Edge. " _You're here!_ "

He let his words fade before continuing, spittle falling from his lips in rage. "You're here, whether you like it or not, you're engaged. You have to do something. You - _have_ \- to - _do_ \- _something!_ Or we're going to die. Whatever else happens today, this one's on you. Nobody's watching. It's just you and us!" He thrust his arms forward desperately. "This is it for us. There's no other choice. This is our last path."

And yet, still, the Islander just gazed back at him, no response visible in his face.

"Fine," he spat. "Fine." He moved to the controls, ready to set off east with no known destination. His fingers hovered over the buttons, glancing one last time at the silent giant looking back at him.

The Islander reached down, lifting his cell. With one swift motion, he hurled the small machine up, over, and into the sea.

Rolf froze.

He hadn't expected his pleas to work, not really - but now this strange man... this... _stranger_... had opted to render their conversation private.

The silent giant lifted his head, matching his gaze again. His expression remained grim. After an intensely long instant, he finally spoke, breaking months of taciturn silence. His voice emerged strong and powerful, caring and grim, cautious and reserved, as if even a single sentence was more than he would dare risk if not so moved.

"There's nothing but death for you out there."

The words seemed to echo quietly between them for a few long seconds.

Listening to the first words the man had ever uttered on Stonework, he couldn't quite comprehend the message. "Nothing...? But... you came from somewhere... Somewhere Else. An island, something - it has to exist!"

The Islander only shook his head slightly, a subtle change in his expression indicating apology and remorse... but more than that, he would not offer.

Further pleas fell on deaf ears. The Islander watched him in silence, unwilling to speak further. Shouts, recriminations, and begging garnered nothing but a neutral stare - maddeningly the same as he himself had employed throughout his life.

"Rolf," Kitna whispered, stirring. "Let's go."

He fell to one knee, finally giving up on the watching giant.

"How do you feel? Are you -"

Her jaw trembled with repressed tears. "I'm sorry."

"Oh..."

"But I don't want to go to the Fields. I don't want those bastards to have my calories. I don't want to be part of the Grand Cycle anymore. Take me east."

He nodded, overwhelmed.

The boat sputtered to life again, taking them east, in parallel to the Unsetting Sun idly watching them from the north.

The Islander also watched them go, his neutral gaze following them to the limits of sight, the hammer still loose in his grip.

Once society and all its ills were out of sight, he stopped the boat.

Only the sun and a split sphere of silver and blue surrounded them.

He curled up next to her, his hand lightly on her weakly beating heart.

"You never answered," she breathed, pushing blood out of her mouth with her tongue to clear her words. "You never answer."

He ran his hand lightly down her neck, wiping away dirt and dried blood.

"What do you want?" she asked, intent.

He shook his head, at a loss.

"Tell me, asshole. I'm dying."

He laughed once, his forehead pressed into her neck. Totally private for the first time, the world nigh on ending, the words finally spilled forth. "I think about kids sometimes. About how I would never let this happen to them, never sell them out, never abandon them, never leave them to survive on their own. I would raise them without fear, without hunger, without pain if I could. I think about a family sometimes."

"With me?"

"Yeah."

"I'm pretty messed up," she whispered, a single tear smearing the blood on her cheek. "I... just always thought that you had a place in your heart reserved for me, no matter what I did, no matter what fights I got in, no matter who I pissed off, or what promises I broke... I'm sorry..."

"Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes," he said again.

She laughed without sound once, twice, and gripped his forearm weakly.

He sat up some indeterminate time later, truly alone for the first time in his life.

The only features that distinguished the endless sea from the endless sky were a subtle tint of silver and the Unsetting Sun reflected, two suns burning him with unceasing light. He studied these things with his real eyes - his fuzzy, nearsighted eyes - unable to proceed east into the unknown and unable to go back west into certain death. He would have rolled the dice on heading east, hoping to find some unknown land by pure chance before he starved, but the Islander's words echoed in his thoughts.

He waited for a time, gripping the hard metal side of the boat - a similar boat's side had once left an imprint on his forearm, not less than a week ago, on his return to the hellhole called society - but nothing changed. The Unsetting Sun seemed to grow larger in the sky, and the spilling heat began to reach painful levels against his scraped, battered, and raw skin.

"How did things fall apart so fast?" he asked, but her empty eyes just kept staring blankly at the other side of the boat.

He curled up in the bottom, seeking what scant shade he could. Minutes passed, or perhaps hours. There was no way to tell.

"You know, I think I'm over it," he said randomly, his skin beginning to redden. "Over this, over everything. It's a good question - what did I want? They never let me have anything, not even wants."

And still, in his deepest keep, in his most protected spaces, a black figure sat across a roughly hewn table and smirked at him.

"What?" he shouted, his voice echoless for the first time. "What do you want?!"

The silhouette touched the base of the ledger sitting on the table between them, as if testing its substance. Where before, it had always been blank by technicality and rationalization, a single mark now unmistakably marred the open page. He had lashed out in anger - killed, even - and there was no denying the world had finally gotten to him, finally sullied his soul. "A curious life, you've built for us. A castle of dreams to hide in. Too bad it wasn't enough... and it will never be enough."

He scratched at the sunburn working its way around his body. "Well, what would _you_ suggest?"

"Stop hiding."

He tilted his head, his lips painfully dry. "Genius advice, there."

"Stop hiding. Start taking control."

He sat up for some time, painfully aware of the warm metal against his legs and the searing sun against his peeling arms. The sea ran smooth and silver, and the sky ran smooth and azure, but nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. It was a universe of cycles, so he'd read, but nothing ever changed.

He fell back into the shaded bottom of the boat. "What has it been... a day?"

The silhouette across the ledger grinned. "Two. With your calories, you starve to death in another two, but you die of thirst in one."

"Go to hell," he spat, standing abruptly.

A smile crossed his face as one of his old favorite songs burgeoned through his awareness. The slow but emotional beats gripped his limbs. He began dancing in the searing sunlight, truly blissful and happy for several minutes, totally free of embarrassment, totally free of judgment - totally free of others.

"Ta way rahn, na way yeh -" he shouted, twirling.

He fell prone between the benches, laughing.

"Stop screwing around," his haunting shadow muttered. "We're going to die unless you do something."

But the song only grew louder, filling his consciousness utterly. "Na way yeh, ta wey in -"

"Focus!" the shadow roared, slamming his hand on the hewn chrome between them. "We're not going to die this time just because you've lost our damn mind. There's more at stake than you know."

He shook his head. "He was right. I did it. I refused to cooperate, and they starved. I tried to rationalize it, but it's always there, following me..."

The shadow only glared at him.

"And I stabbed that man in the throat. I just stabbed him, didn't even know I was doing it. I hated him _so much,_ I can't even put it into words. But does that make killing him right? Maybe this is what I deserve!" he shouted at the empty skies. "I played it to the end, Rolf the Rude, and I bought myself twelve more years. And yet, here I am... alone, the way I always wanted."

"Stop blabbering. The optimal strategy is to return."

"To what? They're all dead. I have nothing. Zilch. Zero."

"To run the risk of repeating ourselves: don't be an idiot."

Staggering, he relived that demonic fist rending the heavens, felt the explosion tear apart the buildings all around again, felt the force of the blast throw his body like chaff in the wind.

"A nuclear bomb..." the shadow whispered. "They built it. It's somewhere out there."

He glanced down at Kitna's pale body, licking his dry lips with a sandy tongue. "If it's a bluff, they'll know. They won't listen."

"Would it be a bluff?" his pain incarnate asked. "Would you kill one hundred million to save the other nine hundred million? What about three to save seven? Five to save five? It's all just numbers."

He curled down, his head pressed against hot metal, his face screwed up in despair. If he had any water left, it would have left him through his eyes.

"Rolf?"

He tried to sit up, but his body refused to comply.

Arms closed around his chest.

"Rolf, you're alive! I knew it!"

His thoughts addled, he even imagined himself lifted up. Or was it imagination?

"Am I... dead?" he croaked, his bone-dry lips croaked, his blistered skin burning painfully.

Elizabeth smiled back at him, her face wet with tears. "No, you're not."

He glanced past her, seeing a second boat pulled up to his. "How... did you... find me..."

"I'll always find you. That's what I do." She laughed, holding him close. "I followed as soon as I figured out where you were. You're not that far away. The Edge is right over there."

He nodded weakly, rasping a breath before he replied. "Oh... I'm nearsighted."

They laughed together for a moment - one weak, one strong, both confused and amazed in unison - but then, covered in her long blonde hair again, he began sobbing, his every pain pouring out in horrendous tearless sobs. "She's dead."

"I know, I know." She stroked his ragged hair.

He broke down completely, the imagined rising tenors of his favorite song obscuring all thoughts but grief with heavy beats of long sorrow and ancient pain. Even as Elizabeth pulled him into her boat, his thoughts ran broken and pained, but he still had one idea firmly in mind.

"Wait," he croaked, stopping her at the controls. "Have to do something first..."

Reaching over into the boat that held Kitna's body, he hit the ignition button.

The boat spurred into life, picking up speed, heading east in sync with those endless ripples in the sea he'd often watched and wondered about. He watched her body head off into the distance as long as his blurry vision would allow, taking some small comfort in the thought that her body would break all the barriers created by food and time, ending its solar-powered journey some untold distance away, on an unknown continent where she would finally be left in peace.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered after a moment of respectful silence. "Let's go back."

He closed his eyes, fearful of bringing his darkness with him. "We can't. We can't go back." He opened his eyes again, focusing. "There's a -"

But then he saw the cell around her neck. Telling her about the bomb was akin to telling everyone... but why hadn't it already gone off? "There's nothing but death back there," he finally said instead, still undecided.

"I've always followed you," she said quietly, holding him tight, looking around the empty sea for a moment. "Alley to alley, surviving together, you really did keep us alive when most other orphans eventually starved. Even joining the Scientists was your idea, and I can't imagine where we'd be otherwise. But it's time for you to follow _me_ now. Things are changing. We've waited our whole lives for an opportunity like this. But I can't do it alone, remember?" She smiled, but her trembling cheeks belied just how much worry had built up in her days of searching for him. "I need you to come back."

The shadow within his heart seemed weaker in her presence.

It was family, he realized. Family was _not_ just some people that lived nearby. It was _this_... it was hope that there might actually be a way forward. He'd lost something vital in the explosion, his last sliver of hope snuffed out in the face of incomprehensible power - but now that slightest fragment of faith felt replaced, restored.

Someone had come to save him... he'd thought the idea preposterous, had never even considered the possibility that somebody might look for him.

But that was family... he'd had it all along.

He did have to go back. He had to return, run the risks, and play the hated game. He had to find that bomb... because, no matter how hard he tried to deny it, no matter how deep he tried to hide within himself, something on the outside still mattered to him.

And, as he'd learned the hard way, the lone path led only nowhere.

"I'll come back," he forced out, his face screwed up with emotion, all his masks down. "But not because you say so." He let out a gravelly, pained laugh. " _I've_ decided to, that's all. It's not just for you."

She laughed tearfully once, relieved happiness lighting up her cheeks. "Fine, have it your way, butthead." She kept his hand gripped tight as she fiddled with the controls. "Let's go home."

#

Small hands tugged on his arm. Horrific pain seared out from his leg.

He bit his lip against the mind-numbing agony, managing to make no noise.

The hands continued their painful effort, dragging him out from under the pile of bodies.

Blonde hair fell across his face.

"Rolf? Rolf!"

"Lizzie?" he gasped, arching his back against the street's hard stone, shaking violently with pain.

"Don't call me that," she sobbed, her tears spattering on his face.

Sliding his head around on the dirty stone, taking stock of the nightmare, he stared at each pile of bodies stacked all around, trying to comprehend what had happened. Teary-eyed men and horrified women went about the business of dragging the corpses, handing them down gapsquares to Undermen for transport to the Fields.

"Everyone's dead," she whispered, grasping his shirt randomly. "They're all dead."

"You have to get out of here," he choked out. "Have to get out of the way... maybe they'll forget about you..."

"But my parents..." Her gaze went up to the pile she'd pulled him from, her face bright red, her cheeks wet.

"They're dead," he forced himself to say. "You have to _go._ "

"What about yours?" she asked, still staring at the pile. "Are they..."

He just shook his head, unable to speak the words.

"Your sister...?"

He shook his head again, clenching his eyes shut tightly.

She gripped his arm, looked around the street's chaos desperately, and then began pulling him toward an alley.

The pain thrust into his mind like a lance, hitting him with a forceful wall of darkness.

He returned to awareness slowly, his senses filling in one at a time.

She sat next to him, watching him intently.

High, close walls offered a slight sense of safety.

Dozens of other people lay around the alley in various positions, haggard, gaunt, and listless.

He initially thought he'd gone deaf, but no, the nearby street really sat in absolute silence. The lack of motion, conversation, and crowd presence struck him as eerie and wrong somehow.

A sickly sweet smell hung in the air.

"I think your leg's broke," she whispered, leaning in. "I thought you were gonna die."

Staring down at his torn shirt and tightly wrapped up knee, he struggled to think through senses half-numbed by fire. "My leg..."

She gave a sheepish frown. "I tied it with your shirt. That's what it said to do online."

He didn't know what to say. Nothing made sense. Everything was horrible. It was real, but it couldn't be; it shouldn't have happened, but it had.

She scooted next to him against the wall, folding up her legs, holding her knees close.

He stared at the opposite wall, tracing the large bricks. The building's cheery pink seemed almost comically out of place, and he felt like he should be laughing about it or at least making some comment, but everything felt flat and muted.

He curled his toes, testing his strained tendons. Taut stringy spasms punished him for trying to move.

"What are we gonna do?" she whispered, her head down on her knees, her words barely audible even in the strange quiet.

Trapped in a broken body, mind empty, emotions silent, he considered her question. Floating away from his usual center, toward mechanisms formerly obscured by the energies and distractions of youth, he came to rest on a wide, high plateau.

It was clear that action had to be taken. Visions of family, of neighbors, of acquaintances and strangers and the other neighborhood kids danced like haunting nightmares in grisly crowdlines along the plains of his mind below, tearing at his core.

He brought a brick forth, imagining it into his hands, and laid it forth. He envisioned a wall, a circular defense, blocking out the pain, grief, and shock, blocking out sight of his loved ones entirely. He would come back to them, he promised - when he had the chance. He would not forget, he promised, just delay.

Hiding in his small mental castle, temporarily relieved and alone, he let his cold mechanisms begin turning.

There were so many stories, read in his contacts late in Night shift when he was supposed to be asleep, of times past and times future and a thousand different worlds where life was different... but he couldn't remember any of them. Pulling one up in his vision, he tried to read the first few sentences, but the words felt flat and hollow.

This was the only life.

Certain enormities caught his attention. They were gigantic gears, or dancing symbols flowing together and apart in bizarre rhythms, or a thousand sprawling future paths diverging with every choice like the lone surviving Tree his family had visited the month before.

He'd always seen the enormities within, always known that he understood things faster than most people, always enjoyed grabbing ideas and dissecting them and reorganizing them and putting them back together better than they were before - but he'd never really understood their importance until everything else had been torn away.

Everything else had been torn away; everything except this blonde neighbor girl from the fifth floor.

And, of course, it _had_ to be _her_ , the other solitary smart weirdo, who always interfered with his role with the other kids... always managed to challenge him at computer games and always managed to mess up his attempts to look cool with smarts and always managed to generally frustrate and annoy him to no end...

But all that was gone.

"Food," he finally croaked, his voice strained. "It's always food."

She finally raised her head, but she remained visibly distraught. "I've got a little bit of money."

He checked his account. It now contained his parents' money, automatically transferred. It wasn't much, but it was the only hope for the moment.

"Me too. Can you...?"

"Yeah, I can get it for both of us."

He monitored the scattered dots all around. Many huddled in buildings in clumps. The people in the streets did not seem to be moving in any directed manner. "You should go to the Railstop now. It looks clear for now."

Sniffling, gathering herself, she nodded and scrambled to her feet. "I'll be back, I promise. Don't go anywhere."

He watched her dot intently, ready to warn her if anyone moved her direction, but they all remained distracted by some live speaker.

Accessing the feed, he found himself watching a brutal scene alongside a hundred million others. A long line of black-haired people with subtle blue streaks in their hair stood surrounded by hundreds of grim-faced and heavily tattooed men from the other major cultures.

He recognized the man speaking.

The greying Orani man held a long knife, already covered in blood. He spoke violently and vehemently, pacing back and forth in front of the line of captives. Behind him stood countless bloodied and angry-eyed men of violence, watching and nodding hungrily along with his words.

"Our Families will not submit to the whims of a _vote_ ," he roared. "The Subians have no power to enforce, and no fire for leadership. I believe we've taught the world a lesson today. Four great Families are now three. Orani, Nord, and Anglan -"

He stopped midsentence, a large blade erupting from his chest.

"This can't go on."

A burly giant behind him slowly withdrew the weapon, his eyes wild.

A kick sent the Family Father to the ground.

The burly man, clearly the second-in-command, stared downward at the body - and then at the other two Family leaders on either side of the wide area.

Nobody moved.

"We're all going to burn for what we've done today," he choked out, turning to the crowd. "I don't even understand how this happened. I don't care if the Subian families unionize. It's no cut on me. Who chose this path?"

"It wasn't our fault!" somebody shouted. "They were the ones vying for more power!"

"Yeah... it just happened... we couldn't stop it!"

A choir of yelled agreements followed.

The Nord and Anglan leaders each retreated within their groups. Both grey-haired men obviously knew exactly what was about to happen.

The Orani Second stared around in disbelief. "So it's nobody's fault, then?" His gaze came to the Subian prisoners. "You people better get out of here."

The hundred pushed away from their uncertain captors, running without hesitation.

"If anyone's to blame, it's you!"

"Yeah, he's the Second. Why didn't he stop it?"

"For all we know, he _wanted_ this to happen. Now he's the Father!"

"Nobody wanted this," someone else shouted. "He's right. We killed _millions_ -"

"No, you did. It started with your people."

"Us? It was clearly you!"

The first punch broke, and the last audible words were cut off, drowned out by an erupting wave of violence.

She crept back into the alley, red-faced from the effort and fear, falling back against the wall next to him. "Rolf, what's going on?"

He wasn't sure what to think. "They're killing each other."

She brought up the live feed, then immediately closed it, gripping her hand in her mouth. "Are... they all insane?"

He considered it for a moment - their violence, their brutality, the incredible swiftness with which the storm had surged across everything and everyone - and now across the Gangs themselves. "I really don't know..."

"The Scientists will do something," she said, worried but confident. "They'll say something, help things. They always figure out a way, right?"

"Yeah," he nodded, almost hopeful, thinking of his favorite Scientist from his favorite story. The tall Nord hero, Thilo Doransson, handled end-of-the-world scenarios all the time - and even managed to drop suave one liners in the middle of the worst situations. This nightmare was nothing compared to those stories... "Yeah, we just have to wait."

But no announcement seemed forthcoming, no plan in the works just yet.

She gave him his half-chunk of cricket bread, and they ate in silence, hopefully expectant.

She crept back into the alley, wary of the slowly returning populace in the streets. "Looks like people are going back to work."

"I guess they have to," he groaned, holding his swelled arm.

She gave him his half-chunk of cricket bread, and they ate in silence.

The low vitals of a zombie woman down the alley flatlined.

Two adults entered the alley and stepped past, dragging the body back out, heading for a gapsquare.

"Think they saw us?" she asked.

With hard eyes, he watched them go. He did not reply.

She crept back into the alley, emerging from the crowded street with a sigh of exhaustion.

Shaking him awake, she jumped back as he lashed out, swinging his arms in terror.

"Rolf, it's just me!"

Covered in sweat, slowly realizing that it had only been another nightmare, he took a few gasping breaths and tried to calm down.

She broke her half-chunk into two pieces and offered him one.

He shook his head. "What are you doing?"

"You need to eat, too."

"I can't take your food."

"You can if I give it to you. Then it won't flag you as a thief -"

"No, that's not what I mean. It's not the smart choice," he insisted.

"The smart choice? What?"

He set his jaw. "You've got to leave me here and go beg for a job or something. You can't be wasting the last of your food on me."

She shook her head. "No. Nobody's going to give _us_ jobs."

He gestured at his broken leg. "I can't do anything. I'm stuck. You're not."

"Shut up," she said flatly, pushing the bread against his good hand. "Take it."

"It's a waste," he replied bitterly. "Please just go."

She delivered a swift punch to his shoulder, her face screwing up with sudden tears. "Shut up. Just shut up. You don't get to give up. You don't get to die. You don't get to die and leave me here." Her fingers gripped his arm tightly, her knuckles white. "I can't do this alone. I can't..."

He envisioned her having to struggle through the approaching suffering by herself, alone in a world that was quickly revealing itself as cold, horrible, and uncaring. Even through all his numb and void, he still felt a pang of sorrow at that thought. "Alright," he gave in, sorry that he'd hurt her feelings so. "But how long can we really last?"

"It doesn't matter," she sobbed. "We just keep going."

Silently, apologetically, he took the cricket bread.

"We just keep going," she said again, sitting unhappily and sniffling as she ate her half.

He finished eating, but his stomach didn't seem to realize he was out of food. It continued grumbling with hunger.

"I did find some game where rich people bet and the winner gets some money," he finally offered, despondent. "I'm sure I could win some matches. And it's good because I... I can't move much, so I've got all day to work on it." He forced a small laugh that he did not feel. "Nothing else to do, right?"

"Yeah," she responded quietly.

But they both knew their best chance for survival - what she would have to do.

Steeling herself, she stood and dusted off her clothes, choosing those certain colors.

She crept back into the alley, holding herself tight.

Wordlessly, she threw a half-chunk to the stone next to him. She sat roughly with her own bread, staring at the ground as she tore into it.

He ate in silence, watching her. He had no idea what to say.

After a few bites, still staring at the ground, she finally spoke. "How did your games go?"

Wondering how she was feeling, he tentatively went into it. "I managed to win one, someone said I'm learning fast. But..."

"But what?" she asked, her voice distant and quiet.

"There are other Subians finding their way there. They want me to work with them, all of us together. But I don't think it's a smart idea. The rich bet-layers won't like it."

"So you're not going to work with the others? They'll get by, right?"

"I'll have to play against them. If I beat them... they'll probably starve. There are just too many of them."

Her head drooped even further. "Oh."

Worried about her, he reached out, but she flinched and gasped at his touch. He quickly pulled back. "Sorry!"

She shook her head, slumped down - and laid her head on his shoulder, settling in for the long, troubled time ahead. "The Scientists will -"

"I don't think they're going to do anything," he interrupted, too bitter to continue repeating that hollow platitude.

"Then _we_ will," she whispered, staring down at the dirty stone where their bare feet met. "We'll do it ourselves. I promise. Once we build up some money, once we get on our feet. A month or two, right? We can make it that long. We'll just keep going until then."

He opened his mouth to say something negative, to bitterly resist her silly dream - but he let it pass. It was a nice dream, and he hoped it would come true. He really did. "Yeah, a month or two."

Despair and pain burned palpably within both of them, separate but shared, demanding answer - but there was nothing more to say.

#

Weakly staggering to his feet with Elizabeth's help, minding the feeling of broken glass in his knee, his painfully swollen arm, and his raw burned skin, he stepped to the side of the boat.

Retreating anxiously to the strongest room in his mental keep, he considered the pillar at hand, judging the best way to climb up unaided. The thick support ran wide enough to approximate flatness from any given angle, but its surface had been purposely left rough enough to scale alone.

But of course, scaling it alone was impossible.

His one good hand faltered in the air. He couldn't quite believe he'd done this all just a week before. Standing in a boat at the Edge, considering a very similar pillar and how to climb it without help, he'd found a hand up from the only stranger in the entire world.

This time, the opposite reached down.

Og's firm grip found his hand, helping him awkwardly clamber up onto the Stonework.

"Gods, you look worse than some of the bodies around here," he commented, grimacing at his intended joke gone awkwardly wrong. "Er, that is to say, -"

He nodded painfully. "It's okay. I'm sure I feel worse than they do, too."

The tall Nord smiled lightly. "I'm glad you're alright." He took a moment to regard his friend happily, and then turned to help Elizabeth up.

Rolf looked past him, scanning the Edge with his bleary near-sighted eyes. Scattered laborers lined the unfinished pillars, but the operation was quieter and less frenetic than the last time he'd arrived.

Some blurry distance away, but still clearly a standout from the others, a giant leaned on his hammer and watched him for a moment.

"He say something to you?" Og asked, noticing.

Elizabeth stepped forward, having gained her feet. "That's how I found you, you know."

He turned. "How?"

"A lot of people were talking about how the Islander took off his cell in response to some guy shouting at him. They think he talked, or at least communicated something. I took a look, and... it was you. I'm not sure I would have ever found you otherwise."

He watched as the blurry giant stood and lifted his hammer, returning to work. He could see a small object shift on the man's chest - the Islander had gotten another cell, just like he would have to.

"So did he say something?" Og asked again, curious.

He wondered if the burly stranger had intended - no, it was too much of a longshot. It had to have been random chance. But still, he'd actually spoken... he'd _cared_ , in some manner. "No."

"Oh. Too bad, I guess."

"Come on, let's go get you a cell," Elizabeth said, putting an arm around his midsection and helping him move away from the Edge.

Og supported his other side. "Let's get some materials and set that arm, too. What else?"

"Clothes." She crinkled her nose. "And a shower, ugh!"

He limped forward between them, feeling strangely whole for some reason. "Hey, now..."

She laughed, her manner light, relieved, and hopeful.

They eyed the mazelike buildings of civilization proper. Without his contacts, they stood now rundown, dingy, and grey. The sensory assault that had formerly pained him now seemed a cheery mask; a mask that had obscured the pathetic reality that they lived over a dead and polluted sea on a long band of lifeless stone and rusted metal, itself the tiniest portion of a world so devastated it had even ceased to turn. The Unsetting Sun warmed his raw skin, watching from afar and shedding light on the truth of the world humanity had built for itself. Nobody had chosen it, no individual or specific group was at fault - and yet the result was still the same.

He almost preferred the mask.

In spite of it all, his heart was light and strong. He was no child this time. He saw the world as it was, but he also knew now that the world could change. It had gotten a little worse, but that meant it could also get better... if only somebody would start making those choices that nobody wanted to take upon themselves. A sidelong glance found Elizabeth under his arm, nodding in determination. Was she thinking the same thoughts?

He felt again that corrugated rod, his soul lashing out in anger, that old owner falling into the water, dead by his surprised hand - as startled as he had been that the supposed order of things could be so violated. That feeling of power still lingered in his heart... the power to change things - it did exist.

But for a beast as large as civilization itself, he would need a much bigger weapon than a rusty support rod. He didn't know what he would do with it if he found it, but the time for running and hiding was over. It was time to take control of his own future.

Elizabeth might have been thinking about the same goal, but he knew with certainty that his chosen path to that end would be far different.

"Are you ready, Rolf?" Og asked.

He met the Nord's questioning gaze, this time completely sincere. "Yes."

The character of the streets had changed completely. Huddled groups watched them pass. Clusters of people often blocked entire passages, men and women with jobs paradoxically sitting around like layabouts instead of working. The air was quiet; musics few and far between.

Parents kept their children close. Bloodstains still marred the stone beneath his feet, but the atmosphere was not one of fear or horror.

As he limped along, supported by his promise-family, he realized he really had no idea what had gone on in all the chaos he'd run away from.

"What happened? With the refinery and the Unionization attempt?"

Elizabeth looked to Og. A large range of emotions crossed the Nord's face.

"The people at the refinery, they're... dead, mostly," he finally said quietly.

"How did you survive the explosion? Weren't you both there?"

She let out a loud breath. "Ask him."

Og's cheeks burned as red as his beard. "People just listened, that's all."

"Listened?" he asked, brow furrowed. "To what?"

"We had some warning that one of the main lines was about to rupture - it was closer to you than it was to us \- and I was already talking to the crowd, trying to keep people calm... and instead of panicking, they just... listened. I had the idea, from what they did with the Field harvester-operators after the first real riot. If we all moved at the same pace, and in an orderly manner, we could all escape much more quickly."

"People listened and worked together?" he breathed, giving a weak laugh of surprise, his ribs punishing him for the sentiment. "They must really have thought it was the end of the world..." Momentarily terrified, suddenly remembering the dead man's switch, he nearly fell. "The list! The million people! What happened with that?"

"My dad got you off the list," Og replied, grinning broadly.

"But what happened to the rest?"

"Um, nothing yet. At least not to the ones that survived the riots."

"What, really?"

"They're going to have a forum to figure out what to do about it," the Nord explained. "Once everything calms down."

So that was why the bomb hadn't gone off already... whatever portion of the million had survived the chaos, the man or woman linked to the bomb must have numbered among them. There was still time. There was still a chance.

"They want him to be one of the moderators of the forum when it happens," Elizabeth said, visibly proud. "He's got quite the reputation, especially after the refinery."

Rolf blinked. "Wow. Good on you."

Og's sheepish grin grew wide enough to threaten his ears. "Oh, it's no big deal. We're in the public eye now, like my dad said."

"So we are."

"It's really Elizabeth that's the big deal, anyhow."

"Why? What happened?" He looked to her.

"Well..." She hesitated, now sheepish herself. "I just caught their attention. I don't even know why I did it, really. I just thought there might be a chance to help."

"What did you do?"

"I sat with the older Scientists that tried to hash things out with the union leader at the refinery."

"Right, I saw that. What happened?"

"Well, nothing really... we had to evacuate before they could hold a vote or decide anything. And then it all blew up..." She looked down at her feet as they walked. "Dierk was in there."

"Is he...?"

"Yeah. Jason, too. He stopped to help some abandoned children, and he didn't get away in time."

Rolf's response was quiet. "Jason? I don't think I ever met him..."

"Oh."

They let a moment of respectful silence pass.

"Dierk said to tell you he was joining the union, actually. He said you would understand," she said. "You and... Kit."

He nodded gravely, recalling the strange young man's face. "I wish I'd had the chance to know him better... I'll look up his lifelog sometime. But wait, whose attention did you catch?"

"The union's."

"But I thought everyone at the refinery -"

He stopped speaking as they turned and came in view of the cell factory they'd been heading for. The long, narrow building sat quiet. Within a large entrance, he could see a hundred or so workers standing around talking. Although a few trucks still sat loaded with crates of new cells, the production lines lay silent.

And the streets had been so different... the entire world felt stunningly on edge, as if frozen in time, waiting for some unknown change.

"They've chosen a hundred representatives to work things out with the owners and investors," she explained. "They asked me to be one of the hundred."

"Work things out?"

Og let out a deep breath. "They're on strike."

He felt his very heart tremble at the forbidden words spoken aloud. "Who?"

"Aside from a few critical industries..." His promise-brother grimaced, clearly unsure whether to be happy or afraid. "...everybody."

Blurs of light passed across his slowly sharpening vision.

He swallowed bitterly as the usual data flows began outlining themselves. The new cell hung against his heart, where he'd only just gotten used to having empty space... where he'd only just gotten used to having privacy, however fleeting.

"Alright, now sit, let's splint that arm."

He clenched his fists together, nails biting into his skin. His broken arm screamed, and his cracked leg ran a string of fire through his knee, but the pain was far more than physical.

The pain in his shattered body reached a limit he'd never anticipated. His senses stuttered, and a lance of pain stabbed through his mind.

He didn't recall blacking out, but he suddenly found himself blinking awake.

Og and his father stood nearby.

"Drink this."

A cup of water pressed against his dry, blood-encrusted lips, pouring cool life down his throat.

He gazed around the bare dusty walls and wide stone floor. A strange pattering sound emanated from the high empty window. With some confusion, he realized that it was raining outside. Even through his pain, his mind calculated scenarios for the explosion temporarily disrupting weather patterns, spreading the Rain Belt around...

"Hey, how do you feel?" Elizabeth asked, entering the room.

He groaned, but then noticed the eerie lack of layabouts. "What's with the room? Why's it empty in here?"

Ragni stepped forward, leaning on his cane.

"What?" he asked, looking up.

"The strike," the old man said cryptically, his features grim. "Do you know why it spread so far, so fast?"

"The refinery explosion?"

"No. Not exactly."

"Well what, then?"

"Did you pass through a several-block area filled with deadly gas?"

"Yes..." Apprehensive, he waited.

"She thought you might have."

Elizabeth gripped his good wrist.

Ragni sighed. "I also know that you were at the chem-complex in question, and you disabled the last safety mechanism for that factory just a day or two prior to the accident."

He gulped. "I just... it was... the owner... he -"

"We know."

"What?"

"It's not your fault, Rolf."

He frowned with worry. "What isn't my fault?"

Ragni slumped down, sitting against the wall opposite. "It's our fault. Our generation, our way of life, the choices we've made as a group. Choices we made for you, our children."

A chilling tingle crawled up his neck. Elizabeth squeezed his hand. He narrowed his eyes. "What happened?"

"It's not your fault, I just wanted you to know that first," the old man replied. "It could best be described as a cascade collapse. One thing went wrong, causing another, and then that caused another..."

"What _happened?_ "

"Systemic industrial accidents. Gas, fires, explosions, collapses... we've pushed this economy to the brink, and now we've paid for it. Aging infrastructure, no safety regulations, no maintenance, no planned zoning... residences next to factories..."

"A hundred twenty-six million," Og blurted, downcast. "Between the explosion, the riots, and the accident cascade."

"A hundred twenty-six million?" he asked, that strange chill riling his skin again. "A hundred twenty-six million... people? Like... _dead?_ " He looked to his friends, his chest tightening. "But we were talking... laughing... you didn't say anything..."

"It's too much to comprehend," Og replied, at a loss. "I was just happy you survived."

"Me too," Elizabeth said, watching him intently. "You're alright. _We're_ alright. That's what's important right now."

He found himself reliving that moment - his first hour back in civilization the week before, turning off that safety lockdown, imagining stabbing the owner in the back with his screwdriver... if only he'd done it then, rather than after the fact...

"And it's not all bad," she continued, sadly hopeful, always looking on the bright side. "The Peak's shot way up."

"It would, with thirteen percent of all people out of the equation," he commented without thinking. "Er..."

"It's alright," she said quickly. "The same thought's occurred to everyone else. It's a lot of breathing room - enough to strike, and mean it. So they did."

He looked between each of them, unsure what to feel. How could such an enormous tragedy actually leave society better off?

The shadow sitting by his innermost ledger tilted its head, intrigued.

"But the thing that gets me, above all else," Ragni said, tired. "The riots in the chaos - it was all young people, as if they were just _waiting_ for an opportunity to lash out and destroy. They were so angry. I've never seen anything quite like it, even in all the history I've been through myself. Why are they so mad?"

Og and Elizabeth both looked to him.

He gazed back at the old man, a thousand thoughts racing through his head. There were countless things wrong, countless injustices in a system built by the older generation to serve the older generation to the exclusion of everyone else... but there would be no easy answers, no grand revelations - not for them, and not publicly.

He had no idea where his future might take him, but he did know that voiced opinions were now on record forever, and the record did not change even if society changed. All the hateful and angry and insightful things he wanted to say at that moment might haunt him forever.

That was the world Ragni's generation had chosen for their children and grandchildren. By eliminating privacy, they'd only made the rift of silence total.

He wondered how many of his peers had drawn the same conclusions and kept their thoughts to themselves their entire lives. He'd somehow thought he was the only one filled with a lifetime of resentment and rage at an older generation that had utterly failed their children... but he wasn't the only one, not at all. He almost laughed - all that time, feeling alone and apart, and everyone else was feeling the exact same way!

"I dunno," he shrugged. "Guess we'll never know."

Ragni pursed his lips, disappointed. "Well, if you kids need anything, I'm here for you."

"Thanks, dad," Og said. "Rolf, you should rest."

"Feel better," the old man added, departing.

Og lingered behind, hesitant. "Rolf..."

"Yeah?"

"Sorry about Kitna."

He lowered his head. "Thanks."

"Sure." The tall Nord hesitated again, but then moved to depart after his father.

Rolf put up a hand. "Wait!"

Og turned and looked at him. Elizabeth waited, curious.

Rolf looked down at his bare feet, then at each of their faces. They were so alive, so genuine... and they were not out to hurt him, betray him, or leave him. He wasn't sure when exactly he'd forgotten that there could be people in his life that were not enemies.

The words came out painfully, as if speaking them ripped at deep, hidden wounds.

"I... want to be here."

Og searched his face for sincerity, surprised. Elizabeth's eyes trembled.

He looked away, unable to face them. "I know I don't let on... but I... I just..."

The tall Nord grinned, genuinely warmed. "Thank you."

Rolf looked back. "Thank you?"

Og nodded. "Yes. Now, you should sleep. Feel better, promise-brother." He turned and left, following after his father with a cheery step.

Elizabeth waited for a moment, as if there was something more she wanted to say, but then she let go of his wrist. "I've got a promising solar technique to pursue. I should probably -"

"Will you stay here?" he asked, taking a lesson from Kit and deciding to voice his wants.

She turned. "Stay here?"

"I'm really tired. I don't think I can make it to East Residency. Will you sleep here with me? I don't want to sit here by myself, I just -" He took in a pained breath, his bruised ribs cutting off his sentence.

"Yes." She stretched out, laying her head on his lap, resting against his uninjured leg. "Just try not to punch me in the face when you wake up."

He laughed feebly. "No promises."

Of all things that might have woken him from his furious nightmares, an ebb in the rain finally broke through his wall of sleep. Blinking sweat from his eyebrows, squeezing the muscles in his splinted arm lightly, he gazed up at the high window and tried to see if the sky was clearing.

"Troubled dreams, I see. Not unusual for you, judging by your statistics."

At the unfamiliar voice, he snapped his attention down to the space across the room.

His clothes set to an elegant pattern, a rather healthy-looking but wiry older man with slick grey hair returned his gaze, his expression steely but curious. "I see you haven't checked your scheduled pay."

Looking around the empty room confused, he shook his head. Elizabeth still lay with her head on his lap, asleep. The older man spoke quietly so as not to wake her, but his manner was no less sharp for it.

"As a commission incentive, Scientists are paid a certain proportion of the improvements they make. The donors that fund this organization have been more than satisfied with their output as a whole. But you see, a certain list was referenced by several hundred million conversations, sparking certain social problems... leading to quite a few deaths, and a rather incredible rise in the Peak. All of it linked back to you, and your project."

Listening to the older man speak, he felt a strange darkness circling. He checked his account... and there it was... a fortune in calories, a sum beyond his wildest reckoning. A million games of _Starship II_ \- a million bet payoffs - would have hardly begun to approach a fraction of that unbelievable amount.

The older man brushed some dust from his elegantly patterned shoulder before continuing. "I would say that you really shouldn't have received such an enormous amount of money, but the system is the system, and we can't really take it back, now can we? All we can do is fix the... oversight... in our future calculations, and, perhaps, ask you to come visit."

"...visit? Who?"

"A network of owners and investors, one of many looking for new options now that this whole strike business has muddled things."

"... which network?"

"Aggregate Investors."

The circling darkness became immediately real, chilling his heart - but he kept his vitals steady, even feigned slight excitement. "Interesting."

The older man snorted. "If you'd like to describe such luck with understatement, yes, it is interesting. We have quite a bit to discuss, and quite a bit to teach you... and we're not above the belief that... someone like yourself, with your... _history_... might teach us some things, too. We don't know everything. We're only human, after all."

He stared back at the older man, wondering if he meant the nuclear bomb, hidden somewhere in the mad sprawl of civilization... did he know? Did _they_ know? "Well, I can work from anywhere," he finally replied. "I might as well."

"You still plan on working?"

"Yes. Building on my prior project, I'm going to seek out other programming flaws in the system. I'm going to search for other ways to secretly communicate, and expose them. If someone's hidden something from society, I'm going to find it."

The other man gave no reaction, save a slight smile. "I'd expect no less from Rolf the Rude."

His eyes gave him away.

"Yes, I know who you are," he elaborated. "In fact, I bet on you many times when you were young. You're a ruthless survivor, and I like that. I was not surprised to see your name come up again, not even in this... peculiar fashion. It's been a pleasure to finally meet you."

He stood, again wiping dust from his pants. "When you're able to stand on your own, come see us south of the Rain Belt. I think the next few weeks will be very interesting." He paused at the door, turning back with an almost sadistic grin. "Perhaps we'll even play a game or two."

He watched the older man leave, chilled to his very core. He was veteran enough to know what had just happened, in a language of competition above and beyond the obvious.

His opponent had just introduced himself.

The rain outside began surging again, and Elizabeth stirred at the noise, adjusting her position.

He moved his arm, making sure she was comfortable.

The real game was about to begin, with stakes incomprehensibly high. There was no time to waste, on sleeping or worry or... grief.

He couldn't let himself be dragged down. He couldn't think about her body, still sailing east on a little solar-powered craft on the vast sea.

He stood at the outer wall, looking down at the immense plains of his mind below the plateau where his castle stood, watching the lines of the dead still dancing in endless mad procession. A dozen new faces now danced at the end of the line, among them Dierk, and... Kitna. They smiled as memories, once alive, now specters. With her danced two vague shapes, smaller than the rest... but they never were. They were just a future he wanted once, but that part of himself was just a liability and pain now.

He placed more bricks, building his walls even higher, blocking out the dead yet again. He would come back to them, he promised - when he had the chance.

He would not forget, he promised, just delay.

He pulled up the list of a million potential revolutionaries, accessing the lifelog of the first surviving name. One of them had to be linked to the bomb. One of them would know where it was. He began scanning through statistics, analyzing behavior and profiling actions.

He narrowed his eyes, noticing a different pattern entirely. Every action he took in his search had already been taken, logged by another before him...

He looked to the east, past countless walls, across milling oblivious crowds, and through distant eyes, daring a direct access - a challenge and a question without words.

Lowering his hammer and wiping sweat from his brow, the Islander looked west, his expression grim. The mutual scrutiny they had shared the week before returned for an unhappy, silent moment.

The Islander... _knew_.

Rolf felt immediately very aware of his own breathing. A thousand questions burst from his thoughts, but none reached his lips. He couldn't speak without giving them both away.

The moment passed. The giant returned to his work.

Lowering his gaze to the stone floor, Rolf began recalculating all his plans. He knew what had just happened, in a language of respect above and beyond the obvious. He had no idea why or how the stranger had become involved, but there was no mistaking it.

Another opponent had just introduced himself.

He pulled up his data again, moving even faster this time, his eyes darting and his thoughts racing, his chest filled by an indescribable feeling he very much disliked - a shadow creeping up the back of his heart, urging it to beat faster, lest it soon stop altogether...

A searing spear lanced through his head.

He tried to ignore it. He tried to keep focused, but the pain only grew.

"I said get some sleep!" Og texted, noticing his vitals spiking dangerously.

As much as he hated to wait, it was his only choice. The unknown person connected to the bomb had survived the worst of the disaster... it would not explode randomly. There was still time.

He could afford to wait a day.

He had money coming, too... that thought struck him strangely. He had more than enough money to not work for a day.

Setting the stress aside in his mind, he was immediately unsure what to do with himself.

An incredible weight lifted, promising to return soon, surely, but for now, his arm was broken, his skin burned, his knee pained, and -

He ran a hand along Elizabeth's hair, smoothing it the way he used to, before all their distance and fighting and the endless pains of life. It was his fault, he realized, for building walls so high they blocked out even the things that mattered. There needed to be a door, some small access \- a vulnerability, yes, but a lifeline as well.

A heavy, soothing panacea fell across him as he closed his eyes. His thoughts emptied, and he laid his head back against the wall.

Then, to the sounds of surging rain, he slept.

For the first time in twelve years, he did not dream.

#  Epilogue: Age's End

They sat together on the gapsquare wall, legs dangling above the silver waters below. A light drizzle kept the Sun's usual heat at bay, and the sea breezes brought fresh air welling upward around them, enhanced by the rain's humid breath.

Og watched Elizabeth laugh and push at Rolf's unbroken arm, her tone mock angry at some dour comment. Watching the two genuinely and visibly happy for a rare moment, he smiled. Heavy responsibilities seemed to have fallen on the three of them, but, for that single Eve shift, there was nothing to do but sit around and recover.

And some messy, unhappy rift between his promise-siblings finally seemed healed.

"What are you looking at?" Rolf commented, embarrassed to be seen happy.

Og raised his eyebrows for a moment and shook his head. "You two just reminded me of my brothers." He snorted. "Which reminds me, I need to start collecting embarrassing stories about you both."

Elizabeth opened her mouth to mock protest, but something caught her attention. Turning, she looked over in confusion. Rolf and Og noticed and turned.

A wall of people stood encircled, watching them with almost reverent expressions.

"Did you three mean what you said?" a young Orani woman asked.

"What?" Elizabeth replied. "When?"

The young woman sent a link.

In the video, the three of them sat along a table, eating with Ragni not an hour before.

"It's not the same, dad," Og countered, chewing on a stubborn piece of cricket bread. "We grew up in this system. We've never known anything else."

"We never had a choice," Rolf added.

Elizabeth nodded. "Or a voice."

Ragni raised one eyebrow. "When did you three get so united? You're... different now."

"It's not just us, dad. The younger generation is of age now, and we're asking questions. We're unsatisfied with the status quo. The three of us may have changed, figured out what's important to us..." Og paused to look at Elizabeth and Rolf's determined faces, a surprising spirit overtaking his words. "...but the world has changed, too. I think people will realize someday that this disaster ended an Age. Today is the First Day of a new era. This will be the Age of the Young, or the Age of the People. There's this concept that went viral, and it stuck with me... the Hand of Society. There are so many of us - too many of us - and when nobody's responsible for anything, we seem to get stuck in a negative cycle of disaster. We get worse instead of progressing. Somebody has to start taking responsibility."

"But who?" Ragni countered. "It's a losing proposition. That's what the Tyrant did, you see - destroyed anyone who tried to step up or speak out, like the government before him, only worse. Putting oneself out there is too risky. The weight of society's eye crushes any one person."

Elizabeth shook her head. "Doing nothing is a losing proposition. We'll take responsibility. We'll say what our generation has been afraid to say, we'll defend what matters, and we'll fight for what needs to be done. The weight of society's eye? I'm used to it, trust me. I can handle it."

"Whoah," Og interjected. "I didn't mean _us!_ Just... somebody."

"Who else, Og? Who else is there? Everyone else out there is making the exact same choice to remain a bystander. If we don't step up, nobody will."

Rolf swallowed the last bite of his cricket bread, his eyes unfocused, his tone bitter from experience. "She's right. There's nobody else. We live in a world of glass. We're naked, even when we're clothed, and that scares people. They keep their true thoughts to themselves their entire lives... because they feel vulnerable, and powerless. If they speak out once, it's on record forever, and someone will use it against them... fire them, refuse to hire them, keep them outcast... so they remain silent, and that's how we got here, isn't it?"

Elizabeth nodded in agreement. "The Age of Silence."

Ragni listened to them converse, his expression grim. "So what's your plan?"

She shook her head. "I don't know yet. We'll figure it out from here. But we promised to try, and I'm not backing out."

Og ran a hand down his beard. "That we did. I really had no idea what I was signing up for with that grand speech, but... I'm in, too."

They both looked at Rolf, awaiting his answer.

The three swung around from the gapsquare wall and stood, facing their onlookers.

"You're all here about that conversation?" Og asked, mouth agape. "And it's got a hundred million views already? How in the hell -"

"Did you mean it?" the Orani girl asked. "Will you speak for us? Fight for us?"

The other young men and women around her waited in awed silence, hoping for an answer.

Elizabeth looked to Rolf for support.

Only a few days prior, he'd fled from that very spot by the gapsquare, unwilling to stand and face down the crowd. He gave a concerned grimace - but, this time, he remained.

She turned back to the waiting hopefuls.

"Yes."

#  The Tree of the Future

Fire lurks somewhere in the world, ready to awaken at any moment.

Three friends begin journeys down three very different paths.

A simple discussion holds stakes far greater than any realize.

Competitors play a deadly game; the prize, total power.

A stranger makes his first move.

The future branches forth in:

Dead Man's Switch

The Final Cycle, Book 2

# If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review.

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# About the Author

Matt Dymerski is an author of science fiction and horror who has written throughout most of his life. As a long-time fan of both genres, he seeks to create engaging stories that contain both depth and heart. If he's made you think, then he considers his work a success.

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Blog: MattDymerski.com

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