

### Beware the Well Fed Man

Chris Capps

Part One

It's true I've never been baptized, but I did see the Plexis Shopping Center the morning after it landed in a field of burned wheat. High as I was on a rocky cliff, I could feel the purity as if it was radiation. It was pouring from the ivory building even through the trembling scope of my hunting rifle. I didn't understand what it was then, but I remember watching the pumpkin red flames beating at its walls to no effect - and I knew the roads that would be beaten under heel to its doors.

Crassus started running first. He pushed me over onto my side playfully and skimmed with his patchwork shoes down the rolling dust hill into the burning fields. He was laughing like he had when we were children. I cursed at him and then resolved to give him a good knuckle to the back of his head when we reached the wall. And in seconds it was forgotten. We were both laughing now, ready to crack this marvelous treasure chest that had landed less than a mile from our campsite. Of course we wouldn't be the only ones to see it. There would soon be others closing in on the enigma. We didn't know what to expect as we closed in.

Is this how we will find Death? Or is it something new?

Spend three nightmares cowering beneath burned sheet metal to the tune of ripper dog howls and you'll understand our madness. Crassus and I had been wandering too long without a home.

The building was like a white pill resting on its side with windows stacked on top of one another - leading up thirty stories. And as impossibly tall as it was from bottom to dizzying top, it was at least double that in width. During the long run down into the valley, even Crassus had to stop twice to gain his breath.

Two years prior, we had discovered a walking city lying on its side filled with skeletons and ashes and very little in the way of food. Yet we saw no legs on the Plexis. Surely it must have either sprouted up from the ground like an elephant skull, or fallen from the heavens like so many regional gods of legend.

When we reached the front, we found a glass entrance. There were two doors, which parted and spoke,

"Please enjoy your stay at the Plexis Shopping Center."

At the entrance hall, there was already a group of twenty men sitting at a long table. They were laughing and quickly devouring a display of food that rivaled my most ludicrous dreams. Foods I could identify mingled with those I could not on metal trays adorned with paperwood utensils. We entered to a tremendous cheer from our new tribe. Yes, they had arrived just as we had. Like Crassus and me, these were scouts without a tribe prospecting an unforgiving landscape looking for a home. Now in this citadel of wonders they had found it, and each other.

There was gentle music piping from the ceiling, and laughter, and hard even floors that squeaked underneath our muddy dew-clad shoes. Brilliant lights buzzed down hallways, bouncing off rows of tan doors that held the promise of still further wonder.

Being able to read was a significant advantage for me. As the day wore on, I was able to decipher hints of the various functions the rooms held even as I took those timid first steps into our new home. There were symbols here, too. Symbols I recognized from corporate houses long since destroyed. Only they weren't covered in rust. They were new, glowing. Aside from the food, there was a map of further thrills deeper within the belly of the Plexis. And there would be time to explore it all later. For now, we sat and ate. And we told stories of who we were.

Even now I can't imagine anyone having a better day than that. We had been raptured from the ripper dogs, the meltstock, and the constant threat of blighted storms. We sat intoxicated by sugary drinks and the fastest of food. Our revelry went long into the night, and we slept in the food court telling stories from under long fur blankets. Soon enough we would begin unlocking where our home had come from, and how it arrived. Soon enough. That night our only concern was how to sleep without the constant threat of death.

Who I was before doesn't matter. In truth, I was as close to nothing a breathing human can be. In the primordial days I was Ebon the Waste - a man without rank, and without a tribe save for my brother Crassus. And then the Plexis changed me. I found myself adept at drawing plans for furniture in chalk on the ground. I read signs, and guided my companions into the massive labyrinth. Words without meaning contextualized themselves with time. Before the Plexus I could never have dreamed of actually reading new things every day. Short of a cannibal I was the lowliest sort of man. A vagrant scavenger.

After the Plexis I was a ranking builder, and one of the highly respected discoverers of the new world.

My brother too quickly made a name for himself. Crassus, a boy who used to cry whenever the sun went down on an empty stomach was selected in those early days to unlock the secrets of the Plexis. He had so many questions. The only real source of information we could find were terminals located throughout the massive building's hallways. Each night I would go out and find him standing at the information kiosks reading quietly. Each morning I heard him recite what he had learned. It was quiet, solemn, almost like prayer,

"Where is the light coming from? It comes from the metal egg. From where did the Plexis come? It came from the sky. What is our mission? To learn from the Plexis."

The metal egg was what he referred to in those days when he was talking about the mysterious nuclear core of the facility. By February, when the pulping drones started producing heart shaped papers to put on display in windows, it was Crassus who first consulted with the information terminals, who learned of the holiday cycle. It was very similar to our own calendar. I came home that evening to him sitting in his room, calmly speaking to himself,

"Where does the light come from? It comes from the FNF style Radioisotope Generator located within the nuclear core. This generator was assembled largely in space. It is due for delivery of a replacement in an estimated 211 years via satellite drop. Where did the Plexis come from? It came from the drone legion constructed in space from the asteroid belt located between the planets Mars and Jupiter. In 2091 the first drone was released to harvest materials, and construct the next. Two and a half centuries later the drones completed the first Plexis model shopping center. They sent it back to Earth. The drones are automatically scheduled to cycle through and construct decorations annually to coincide with commercial holidays. The cost of the project was an estimated nine-hundred and seven million dollars in adjusted currency. By 2391 the total yield of the project in pre-collapse currency would have outpaced inflation estimates and yielded a net of sixty-five billion dollars. In two more centuries that number was projected to supplant all other primary commercial \- and several industrial outlets."

The talk of dollars and dates wasn't new. The year, for instance, was still widely referred to as 2387, the year of forgiving rains, by farmers and prophets alike. The Gregorian Calendar, while inconvenient, was still the reliable standard for counting time. As for the dollar, its descendant was still used in certain tribes with economies that didn't engage in inter-regional trade. Of course it had no inherent value.

After he had completed his ritual, he looked up at me standing in the doorway and smiled,

"This place started with one single massive rocket sent out into space three hundred and eight years ago. Can you imagine? Two and a half times the span between Napoleon's birth and the first Moon Landing. The same amount saw us reduced to nothing, hunted as much as hunters."

I smiled, knowing finally that the rudimentary history I had passed on to him hadn't collapsed beneath the weight of these new things. There was still an interest in the old, an interest that would outlast me at the very least and maybe one day find another generation.

I hefted my work bag onto the dining table and he helped me produce the ingredients for our night's dinner.

We dined that night on shaped potatoes, black algae noodles, and a flank of meat. The potatoes and algae noodles I had learned were grown in the automated gardens both in the dome at the top and the six floors beneath it under fluorescent LEDs.

I had once asked where the meat came from, but I didn't understand much of what was said. Eventually, Crassus explained that the meat was more woven flora than fauna. It was indistinguishable from the real thing to me. I pictured wild magical things as he explained it. It might be a steak tree, or a flank roast bush hidden somewhere in the rarely visited agricultural sector.

After our meal, we leaned back and lit up a couple of cigarettes, puffing them quietly and making smoke rings so that a thin haze silently began to accumulate near the lights.

"How are your eyes?" he asked.

"Good enough to build," I said, "And I can read signs if I can get close to them. Nearly good enough to shoot \- but it's a bit more complicated in the low light."

"Some of the posters have people with things on their eyes," Crassus said, "They're like glasses, but they help with low light as well. And they don't give you that awful headache."

"Where?" I asked, watching one of his smoke rings part the still air in front of it and spread into a thin irregular ghost before losing its substance and disappearing entirely.

"Next to a furniture store," he said, "and another empty space set aside to sell imported goods. We could go tonight. They have a machine there."

A machine. Of course there was a machine. I couldn't help it, and laughed. Across the table a smiling Crassus stubbed out his cigarette and rose,

"How would you like to see the way they used to?"

There was still a thin paper ticker across the caged trellis when we got to Floor 19 Substore 108. Like many of the stores, the printer that made the goods was likely somewhere inside. Unlike the other stores, I could see through the caged glass storefront.

There were a few chairs and a bank of machinery against the wall. It looked strange - like the automated interrogation chambers I had been warned against years ago. But this was the Plexis. Nothing here would harm us. Crassus pulled the tape off the door and stuck it to my forehead, saying, "You'll need to wear this."

I might have believed him, but there was a wry smile to his words.

"I wasn't born yesterday," I said peeling the tape off and letting it fall. Crassus was down at the floor with his thumb pressed against a small glass plate. The caged screen clicked and then rose. Inside, we found hundreds of pairs of glasses arranged on shelves, staring out like sentinels at our approach. I picked up a fetching pair and put them on,

"Nothing's changed."

"That's because there aren't any lenses in it yet," Crassus said poking his fingers through the frames into my eyes. I flinched and threw them off ready to fight, but he was already at a small machine switching it on.

"Hello," a calm echoing voice said from the machine, "My name is John Newlywed. Would you please sit and rest your chin on the blue plate?" The machine was perfectly shaped to accommodate a human face with two holes around the eyes. Where the chin would rest, a small bank of blue LEDs flickered. I sat on the small stool in front of it and placed my head into the device. John Newlywed continued, "Thank you. Now first I need to test your intraocular pressure. This test will be completely painless."

Two puffs of air shot from the recessed darkness in the mask's eyes directly into my own. Calling on old instincts, I leapt from the chair and clattered to the ground holding my eyelids shut with both hands. Strangely, despite the surge of adrenaline, I realized that it hadn't been pain that I was feeling. It wasn't much of anything at all. To the sound of my brother's laughter I sat back in the chair and watched lights trail across my field of vision.

After the tests and a brief frame selection process at a separate kiosk, Crassus leapt behind the whirring counter and picked up the same frame I had been wearing previously, but with lenses.

"Prepare yourself," he said, grinning.

Not only did the glasses improve my ability to see details from a distance, Crassus explained, it had also widened my visual spectrum ever so slightly. Colors that previously would have been more difficult to see in low light were easier to differentiate. The result would mean a world of difference if I ever had to shoot again. That night I slept with the glasses resting on the shelf over my bunk for the first time.

"Maybe you'll be able to see them from far away," Crassus said from the bunk beneath mine, "If the Thakka attack us, I mean."

In the morning was when the stranger came. He wasn't the first in those few months to visit us. In fact, our tribe had grown from twenty the first day to a little over six hundred over the next few months. Each one was granted membership as there was certainly no shortage of food or space within the Plexis. Newcomers in those days were accepted as friends as long as they could leave the savageries of the wild behind.

And it was not always easy. Of all the treasures the Plexis offered, Trust was not always the most forthcoming. It was a rare, gentle sort of mob rule.

I remember standing outside in the courtyard that morning, enjoying the hot wind as it blew streams of grey ash across the valley. From far off, when he first crested the horizon, I remember thinking that the man and his steed appeared as some nightmare from wartime.

In the early days, after the nations began trading missiles, there was more than just the fire that turned cities to dust. With the spiral drain of civilization uncorked, science too made its last desperate attempts to swim before being dragged like a caged beast down into nothing. In that clawing, screaming moment of desperation, many hastily assembled horrors would first blink and draw in the new world's uncertain air. Among these, the melthorse.

The melthorse could be easily described with its name. It stands uneasily with wheezing breath and face pulled down as if partially liquidated. Cancerous lesions run all along its body. In some cases bone is exposed. It looks like death. But they're strong - resilient.

As he drew closer I could see that the man was - or at least seemed - perfectly healthy. The melthorse he was on, however, was another matter. It moved as if each step would bring it crashing into a pile of stringy hanging flesh and exposed bone. But it didn't fall to its death. Not until its rider dismounted at the front door of the Plexis in front of us.

He shot it.

"Good morning," he said, in the wake of silence following gunfire, "I heard about this place and swore my feet would not touch ground until I arrived."

He stood like a man caught unarmed in the ravaged wild even as he pocketed his improvised zip gun into an overstuffed paper-insulated coat. There was a strange quality to the man that extended farther than his disregard for the melthorse. Aside from punctuating his intent to stay, it wasn't unusual to kill a diseased steed to ensure the sickness didn't spread to local livestock populations. In some regions, turning loose a melthorse was considered taboo, as it was assumed the creature could pass on its ravaged features to others. But we were not in that country. Here, horses meant little anymore.

"Where did you hear about us?" An older man by the name of Thunfir the Broadback asked. Thunfir was a stout man built up by trials into an archetypal frontiersman. Snow grey shaggy hair covered his scalp and braided chin. He held a thick arm out and pointed at the firepit on the hill outside of the slowly growing entrance camp, "Hardly anyone who approaches ever leaves farther than the firepit."

"Not everyone who sees this place is aware of its nature. Plenty who see it from a distance become convinced that it is yet another construct of the war times. As many stories as there are of the paradise here, there are twice as many telling of a terrifying war machine or an interrogation drone attempting to extract information that no longer is known. There's a small tribe of dog hunters six days travel to the west. They call this place The Torture City."

To the laughter of my companions, I nodded. It made sense that the majority of the world out there would be hesitant to approach anything that looked new. Only the machines of war seemed to survive the test of time.

My worm eaten rifle was testament enough to that fact.

"I hope you'll find this place a pleasant surprise," I said, "I think we've each seen terrors that would shame the most ambitious fireside storyteller. And now - thanks to our new home - we have seen marvels that compare. When you see the bounty we have in this place, you'll understand why people tend to stay."

"I'm sure," the stranger said, "And perhaps I will be of some small use to you as well."

"What do you do, stranger?" Thunfir asked.

"I do math," said the stranger. It was an odd answer to be sure. There was generally need for bean counting in the name of regional trade, but even that wouldn't be called math so simply. It would be known as tradework or bookkeeping. What calculations remained to be solved, I certainly didn't know. I don't think anyone did.

"Then we will call you Mather," Thunfir said, "It seems a unique enough profession."

"Please, I already have a name," the stranger said chuckling, "Call me Euclid. It has served me well to this point. I'd like to speak with your leader."

Thunfir looked to me sideways. The subject of leader had come up before, but always as a distant eventuality. Leaders organized, gave singularity to the collection of voices, and often dispensed justice. By outrageous fortune, none of the situations requiring a leader had - up until this simple formality \- ever arisen. A few of the tribesmen had declared that Thunfir should be leader, because he could throw a stone the farthest, drink the most, and yell the loudest. But he was ancient, having passed over sixty winters in the waste. The closest thing to a leader we had at the moment, was the boy who answered questions posed to the Plexis.

That position, such as it was, belonged to my brother Crassus. He was the one generally standing at information terminals asking the same question a hundred different ways until he got an answer. There was a language to it, one part of it English. The other part, nonsense to us, was what Crassus was learning with each passing day. Given that some of the nonsense was numbered, I immediately knew Crassus would want to speak with this Euclid.

And yet, something about the new man troubled me. There was a certainty, unaccompanied by strength, that he seemed to brandish in even the few short sentences between us. Something about him was wrong - out of place. It called to mind the warnings we had been given as children.

Beware the well fed man.

Simple. True. Crassus had very little brutality within him. He was gentle, and it showed through his emaciated body. The stranger, though gentle in speech, was not thin.

"Our tribe has no need for a leader yet," Thunfir said suddenly, "The Thakka have not been seen straying too close to our border, and most other travelers just end up staying here. As it is we have no need to make decisions. I don't think I speak out of line when I say the Plexis gives us all we need. In its way, perhaps the Plexis is our leader as well."

The nod of general agreement I had been expecting didn't come from the others around us. Instead, there was a ghostly hollow silence. But it was a silence loaded with an unspoken question. Are we following a machine? Even Thunfir reacted by looking conspicuously at me as though the words had snuck out from somewhere hidden within him. The stranger didn't seem much surprised, only pleased. He smiled mirthfully,

"If it's the machine that's in charge, I'd like to speak with the machine."

Of course we laughed.

The next time I saw Crassus, it was once again in our little apartment. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a piece of paper folded in front of him. From the troubled look in his eyes, I had the sudden impression that he had just finished speaking with the stranger, Euclid. I didn't say anything, but twisted my hand in the air in a faint gesture of greeting. Crassus said,

"Remember when you asked me how a machine could build this place?" I nodded, of course. It wasn't unusual to probe the mysteries of our still new home over dinner. He continued, "Euclid explained it to me tonight."

I raised my eyebrows for a moment in mock interest, before the facts caught up to me,

"How could the stranger know? He only arrived here today."

"He may have explained to you his unique talent," Crassus said unfolding the piece of paper and looking down at it, "He does math. The answer was, in this case, hidden therein. Do you remember how I used the word drone before?"

"Of course," I said setting the paper bag onto the table, "You say it near every day. The devices they sent to outer space to build the Plexis."

"No," Crassus stressed, "At least not at first. Most of the time they were up there, they weren't building the Plexis. It would have taken thousands of machines, maybe tens of thousands to make this. Launching a factory of that size into space would have required more fuel than what history tells me the collapsing planet had amassed. I always assumed there was some other answer, yet another technology that had been kept from us by the obscuring hand of time. And yet that's not the case at all."

I walked to Crassus and sat down with my eyes on the small piece of paper weighted beneath his fingers. Was this the answer to the greatest secret the Plexis still had? How could a civilization on the brink of collapse design something in deep space so massive without human assistance? Immediately, my mind turned to the image of a rocket standing on a landing platform I had seen broadcast from the information terminals. If not launched into space to build upon itself, then what?

A notion entered my mind of a far off distant world - a thought I knew was impossible. I imagined a massive platform hovering in orbit where humans were living much like we were. They were on an automated factory ship, living day to day assembling massive plates of these paradise complexes to drop back to their home world, all while clucking their tongues and shaking their heads at the flames slowly crawling across the face of their planet. At the head of it all strolled a massive bearded man in elfish red moving from machine to machine turning dials and laughing mirthfully as his workers toiled in dronish ecstasy. It was a strange thought, one that was soon dismissed by the reality of my brother's look.

Crassus pushed the piece of paper toward me. On it, there was a pyramid of rats. Exponential growth was the secret to building the Plexis. It had all started centuries ago, with one single drone. One made two. Two made four. And gradually, over six million drones began the process of harvesting and creating this paradise. So many had come from so few. The thought stayed with me for the rest of our dinner, which we finished in silence..

Exponential growth. Many, descended from few.

As the days wore on, my brother was talking more and more with the stranger, Euclid. I would often find them strolling the hallways near shops and scribbling down notes on scraps of paper. The two were hardly ever seen apart in those days, talking in their own nearly indecipherable language. It was difficult for most of the outsiders in our tribe to understand, but occasionally when I heard my brother's voice talking with Euclid I noticed a tone of fear. And yet there was nothing to be afraid of. I knew that. Now was the time to live a different life. I welcomed the time away from Crassus as we each pursued our own chosen work in the day, and conversed over an endless supply of food at night.

Time passed. In a small informal ceremony, Thunfir was drafted as leader against his wishes. Two weeks later, we saw the approach of a burning distant hill.

It was walking.

\- - -

The city sagged on tremendous metal legs as it carefully picked its way across the landscape, always taking care to keep the plate atop it even. The constant boom and pop of the machine as it shuffled its way to the valley lip grew steadily as the smokestack topped beast closed in on the Plexis. The thick black smoke trailed upward, darkening the sky and filling the wind with the noxious smell of burned rubber and oil.

The city closed thirty yards with each shaking step, and soon it had traversed the gap halfway between the valley's edge and the Plexis, resting its back legs on a formation of rock. With a tremendous explosion high above, the city lowered itself and jerked violently. From its edge, metal sheets and bolted armored plating tumbled over the side and fell some ninety feet, spearing the Earth with rusted detritus around its circumference. After finally coming to rest, the smoke atop the beast stopped pouring up, and it bleated with a tremendous signaling horn. The sound echoed throughout the valley.

So vast. So impossibly huge. Indomitable. Unstoppable.

"Anquan. It's a spider city," Thunfir said glancing from his price tag adorned binoculars over to me. We were in a department store on the 19th storey, lying prone and staring through lenses out at the stationary creature. Thunfir had spent much of his youth out west where the Spider cities were more common in the desert, "No entourage." This was not a term I had heard yet. I grunted interrogatively, and then after a bit added,

"What's that?"

"Entourage? It's a term we used out west. The entourage tribes followed spider cities and picked up whatever fell off over the edge. And when the plate inhabitants needed anything from the surrounding landscape, they would inform their entourage and have it brought to them. Mostly food and slaves. They compete with one another and dream of being pulled up into the city proper."

"Does it ever happen?" I asked. Thunfir was staring at the feet of the city,

"Apparently it does. From what I understand the entourage tribes of cities don't stop following for any reason. And they're generally well armed. Not as well armed as the city vanguard, of course."

A spotlight from the walking city switched on and beamed into the windows of the Plexis, filling the building with a blue and red alternating light. Thunfir cursed and rose to his feet, the binoculars in his hand clattering to the floor.

"That's not good," he said grabbing a fur coat from one of the display racks, "They want to talk."

"To you?" I asked Thunfir.

"To me," he said gravely, "And you, Ebon. What weapons do you have?"

Naturally I had spent time building, and that meant I had more to trade with. While the Plexis' vast system of shops and factories wasn't equipped to print weapons, a few of our more industrious fellow tribesmen had learned to forge them from the readily made materials it provided.

A hollow steel chair leg, for instance could be grafted to a wooden stock and elastic cord creating a zip gun that fired like a rifle, but had the priming mechanism of a crossbow. The guns had a propensity for breaking the first time they were used, sometimes exploding catastrophically into shards of splintered metal and wood. When it happened, this explosion rarely failed to injure the shooter. Other times they didn't work at all, or became more inaccurate with each subsequent use. They were also incredibly easy to build, as was black powder Serpentine. The result was, of course, a surplus of easily crafted and totally disposable firearms. Other than that there were also several hand crafted axes, clubs, spears, and the odd crossbow. Those worked with far greater predictability.

As did my hunting rifle. I snatched it up from my apartment as we left.

Outside, at the base of one of the spider city's massive legs, I stood next to Thunfir. Crassus and Euclid had likewise been summoned to make the journey. Each of us stood in silence with weapons slung over our shoulders, across our hips, or around our backs.

Thunfir pulled the two handed sword from his back and hoisted it over his head. With a bellowing warrior's cry he drove it into the brittle soil shadowed by the massive city. His voice rang out, and he sustained the scream, clenching his shaking fists in front of him. It was the sound a canyon would make if it had the heart for screaming.

Finally, with the sound echoing back to us off the city's steel belly, lights began blinking on one after another. Though it was still well into the day, beneath the girth of this tremendous structure it was as dark as twilight.

The lights emerged, swiveled, and focused on us. Far above, in the heart of this beast, there was a sound like cranks and gears whirring to life. From the white aperture opening above, a figure emerged. He descended, hanging from chains.

"My friends!" the jovial voice called down to us warmly. It was a man, suspended from a harness wrapped around his body and to every one of his four corpulent limbs. The man's heft was prodigious, a sight even more alien to us than the walking city. The folds of his dress swirled and billowed over every bloated cleft and slope of his beaming face. He turned his head from side to side as he looked down at us like a god.

It was the smiling face of a man who would never know suffering.

His hands twisted at thick wrists in excitement as the harness dropped him toward us. Shortly before his feet would touch the ground, however, the harness stopped. He was floating a foot from the cracked Earth with his knees bent, and cooing childlike laughter escaping from his red nose at some unspoken delight. He repeated, with his hands outstretched affectionately, "My little dirtwalking friends!"

Thunfir's steely gaze dwelled long on the swaying figure suspended slightly above us before he spoke,

"Are you master of the city that stands above us?"

"I am one of them," the man said, giggling benignly, "And you must be the leader of this wondrous item we see before us. Thunfir is it?"

He had spies. The revelation was well calculated.

"Thunfir," our tribe's proud leader said, "Leader of the tribe of Plexis. Beside me are Ebon the Builder, Crassus the Operator, and Euclid the Mather. What is your name?"

"My name is Kitchains," the fat man said, "You'll notice there is no entourage here to harass you."

"I was wondering about that," Crassus said, "I've heard of cities like this before. I thought they all had followers."

"For your convenience," Kitchains said, "They were destroyed six days ago, before we began the journey here. We won't be needing them any longer, and they would have made this whole process nearly impossible."

Destroyed. I looked to Thunfir, but his grim eyes were still on the suspended man dangling in front of us. If Kitchains intended to show malevolence through his prolonged giggling, it was lost on us. He seemed somehow naively unaware of what he had just said.

"You killed your followers," Thunfir said, "Why?"

"For you, of course!" Kitchains said once again spreading his arms, "You would have been chased down by those scavengers the moment you all left the Plexis if we hadn't made arrangements for your safe departure." He was still floating there, swaying gently in the wind. Thunfir finally broke his gaze from the strange man and turned to address us through the corner of his mouth,

"Leave the Plexis. He means to take it from us."

"It's not yours," Euclid said with an oddly dismissive smirk, as if confused by the audacity shown by Kitchains, "You can't truly believe we will hand it over."

"No," Kitchains said, his head coming to rest in his hand. There was a sudden boredom creeping into his voice. He winked, and continued, "And so you do have the option of being enslaved or killed. If you find that preferable, I do understand. It makes no difference to me."

Rage was welling up in Crassus. He had reached down to the ground and picked up a hefty rock, and pulled back to hurl it at Kitchains. Before I could stop him, he let the rock fly, and as it soared through the air I watched every chance at peace we may have dissolve. Just before the rock actually struck Kitchains' uppermost chin, time seemed to stand still. I decided in that moment that it was unlikely we would have ever gotten along. With a sickening thud, Kitchains let out a revolted scream and held his face with trembling hands. Inarticulately, he started shrieking at my brother, but was cut short by Crassus,

"It doesn't belong to you!" Crassus screamed, "You know nothing about it. You don't understand how it works - how it thinks. Fly back up to your city and tell them that you've seen your last day of peace. The might of Plexis tribe will come down on you like a hammer forged by the gods!"

Crassus had flown into a rage fierce enough to stagger all of us. With tears in his eyes and spittle flying wildly from his lips, he reached down and grabbed a clod of dirt and hurled it at the fat man.

Both of them were screaming now, pouring hatred out at one another in a dizzying display of animosity. It was the kind of unbridled hate only wielded by those unaccustomed to its bite. Crassus picked up handfuls of dust, gravel, and anything else he could find in the ground's arsenal. Kitchains was bleeding from his chin all over his dress. The harness began pulling the fat man up as several lines descended from still more apertures opening up above us like a starry night sky. Ropes were pouring all around, and thudding to the earth. Men were emerging now.

"Run," Thunfir said pulling his sword from the ground, "This could have gone better."

The four of us began sprinting from beneath the spider city back to the Plexis. The sprint was long, and the popping behind us signaled the outbreak of wild gunfire. Our advantage was the distance we reached by the time the gunfire erupted. Also of considerable help was the fact that no one was actually trying to kill us. This was a warning, a show of power. The real extermination was yet to begin.

That night a massive canvas extended in front of the spider city on hydraulic arms. Images began pouring across the canvas, utilizing what I'm to assume was a projector on the other side. The canvas showed images of death and dismemberment across a wide period of time, each from a high up angle - approximately the height of a man standing at the edge of the spider city holding a camera. Occasionally the shots would become more intimate, showing the dismemberment and burning of whole families on a massive scale. It was ordered - technologically assisted implementation of man's most basic savagery.

As we sat on the 19th floor of the Plexis looking out into the sprawling spider city, Thunfir, Crassus, Euclid, and I spoke in darkness in the same windowed department store as before. For the first time in a while, I found it difficult to stop myself from shivering. There were no sounds to accompany the video feed sprawled across the screen, but our imagination was ample enough to supply the screams of burning villagers.

Thunfir had spoken little, and he hadn't dared look at the prescient projection screen in the distance, showing everyone in the Plexis tribe the fate that awaited them thanks to their leader's inability to cooperate. Perhaps it was an attempt to demoralize the Plexis inhabitants, or to catalyze a bloody coup against its leader. Regardless, most of the tribe was now deep within the facility, arming themselves with simple weapons and preparing to die.

"Ebon, I'm sorry," Crassus said for the fifth time that night, "I'm so sorry. I don't know how I lost control."

I did. This was his home. He had never had one before.

I hadn't comforted him up until that point, instead letting silence heal the wound his ego now bore. It had worked well for a time, but now his voice was starting to crack again. I've never wanted to coddle my brother. Never wanted to take something important away from him that might help him survive. I simply looked at him with an eyebrow raised and said,

"Do you question my loyalty to this place? You said quicker what we were all thinking."

It would be enough. Crassus sniffed from the cold draft on the 19th floor and smiled faintly, returning his attention to the improvised rifles he was loading. Of course it was a lie, but it was the right lie. It was the lie that would keep him going through the night, the one that would allow him the sleep he needed to keep him sharp tomorrow. Writing between the lines of an advertisement pamphlet, Euclid looked up momentarily,

"Your brother's right, Crassus. We're not going to lose this fight."

That wasn't a lie. At least it didn't sound like one when I heard it then.

It rang true, like he had just diagnosed the walking city with a terminal illness - an illness that would save our lives.

"Why does that sound true?" Crassus asked, glancing over at our tribe's mather.

"Because it is," Euclid replied, surprised at the question, "Why are they attempting to negotiate? Why the intimidation? They know they can't kill us without destroying the Plexis itself. Every bit of damage they do to this facility will severely jeopardize its continued usefulness. They might even know more about it than we do. They probably know exactly how fragile it is. Certainly their city has large guns, but those guns are useless when the target is exactly what they're trying to acquire."

"What about those soldiers?" Thunfir called over from the window, "How many troops do you think they have?" Euclid chuckled,

"If I had to guess, I'd say certainly more than enough to break in and kill us all. But that's not going to matter. Not when we drop that city to the ground." He shuffled through his scratch papers and pulled out a simple hand drawn diagram, "It's leaning a bit, if you ask me. I made some marks on the window to gauge just how far it's leaning off its center of gravity, and determined it was pushed forward a degree or so too much. There's a structural flaw in its legs. It works just fine if the city keeps walking, but if it stands still on an incline - much like it is now - it is vulnerable. I'm not certain, but I believe from this angle, that the rear legs are - at the moment - under more weight than they were designed to be."

"How much?" Thunfir asked, turning to us with the carnage screen safely behind him.

"A lot," Euclid said, "Enough that we could topple the whole city if it lost one of its legs."

"Even a whole cask of gunpowder, if we could attach it to that leg, wouldn't even touch a metal structure that strong," Crassus said shaking his head as he loaded yet another disposable rifle.

"Crassus," Euclid said, "That's why I'm talking about weight distribution. Why target the leg itself when the land it stands on is so used to being pulverized? Even a small shift in land could slide the leg under the city. The other legs around it would be insufficient to hold the shift in weight toward the back and it would begin to slide backward. The city would become an avalanche. The Earth it stands on is not designed to hold the weight of something that big at such small points."

"Blow up the Earth behind it," Thunfir said with a bewildered grin slowly spreading across his grizzled face, "And what about the soldiers onboard?"

"Most of them will be dead, but unless the city is woefully understaffed following the death of its entourage, I expect there will be hundreds of well armed soldiers on-board still functional. These would be men trained to fight their whole lives, given equipment better than anything we have likely seen. And they will not all die from the fall. Like any well-trained fighting force, they will have prepared for the possibility of the city's collapse."

"We'll need help," Thunfir said gravely, jabbing his finger over Euclid's scratch paper, "The fallen city would still be a grave threat."

That death cult. The Thakka Cluster. None of us said it, but we were all thinking the same thing. Prior to the Plexis' landing, there had been a roving band of marauders ravaging the countryside, named the Thakka Cluster in the fire left behind their deadly raids.

They were primitives even by the standards of the wasteland. And while their religion held death in higher regard than life, they also frenzied like no other group in the region when it came time to battle. Thunfir had always considered them a threat, but their help would only be useful if the city fell. But what ransom would they demand in return? What could we possibly offer a tribe that had chosen to abandon their own humanity?

"If the Thakka helps us," Thunfir said, "we will offer them what remains of the spider city. If they decide to stay, we will find a way to live in harmony. If they wish to leave, we will be glad to see them leave in peace."

"And when they inevitably betray us?" I asked. It was a known fact even to me that the Thakka could not be trusted.

"We'll be a few hours older than we would be otherwise," Thunfir said.

Following a brief silence, we shared the only bit of laughter that would be had in the Plexis that night.

"Very well," I heard myself say, "Where are they?"

That night Thunfir, Euclid, Crassus, and I separated outside the Plexis and began walking in the four cardinal directions, each of us once again alone in the world as we picked across rubble and dust.

In the cold of night I chanced a look behind me to glance once more at home. The Plexis sat across from the slightly leaning city. The metal spider was sleeping but still playing its projected video feed, showing charred villages and silent open mouths screaming for mercy that would never come. Across from that I saw the Plexis, its own magnitude hardly dwarfed by the spider city. And yet it looked so benign. Knowing the inhabitants that waited in fear, I took one last glance at the smokestack covered plate, and the legs beneath.

It was obvious which leg would bring the city tumbling backward, falling in on itself before spilling its own occupants onto the cracked and bloodthirsty Earth below.

I paused for only a moment before taking off from the valley and into the distance. There were two possibilities now. Either one of us would succeed that night in finding the Thakka Cluster, or we would all die. In the distance I could hear a maddened ripper dog scream as it snorted the air. I brought my hunting rifle back over my shoulder, and crouched low as I ran.

\- - -

The wasteland is a paradox. Nothing seems to change as you step over the hundredth burned house or family of fleeing skeletons. And yet despite the similarities from place to place, nothing feels familiar.

That night, clambering between ruins both new and old, I sniffed the air from time to time and relived the previous ten years of my life as Ebon the Waste before finding the Plexis. This time without Crassus by my side I found myself more mobile, easier to conceal, and ultimately more vulnerable.

I wondered how Crassus was faring alone in the waste without me. I prayed to no god in particular that he would reach the edge of the valley ridge and then turn around, terrified of what he remembered out here. Better that he fail and live than join the unspeaking people of bone beneath every other footfall. Of course my prayers could not have been heard. They sounded more like terrified breathing, even to my own ears.

Secluding myself behind a stone foundation I laid flat for a moment to catch my breath. The night was as vast in time as it was in space. Above me a starry field opened up. No veiled stars. No chance of an unexpected storm. At least there was that. The gentle breeze too hinted at a dry, if not cold, night. I lifted my head and glanced down to the next wrecked building.

I had seen no one since leaving the valley. No one. That was an easy riddle to solve. I didn't see them because they were all dead. Oddly enough, it was a good sign.

Ahead I saw my destination. A simple wooden guard tower had been constructed decades ago when this had been a village. No one had dared let it burn after the rest of the village was razed to the ground. A fire on a clear night like this would signal everyone for miles. Of them, only the most daring, the most brutal would investigate. Precisely the ones I was looking for.

I had with me only a small satchel with enough water to last me the night and three magnesium flares. Aside from that and the clothes on my back I had only my rifle, and half of its clip had been depleted on the journey out here to frighten away the less enthusiastic among the ripper dogs.

I rolled from my prone position into a small culvert and followed it nearly the whole way to the guard tower. It rose from the cracked Earth like a gallows made of ash and bone. With dust covered hands I piled shattered wood around one of its support struts.

To make a controlled burn it would take hours to prepare for something like this. If I were trying to carefully demolish the building with fire, trying to collapse it in on itself, it could take far longer than that. Luckily, the fire I wanted to make was neither controlled nor careful. The only virtue I needed this fire to possess was brilliance. A brightly lit candle to the world, set to summon monsters from the darkness. Monsters with whom I would try to strike a deal.

Unless they ate me.

Knocking the wood together in darkness was still dangerous. If I made too much noise, or kicked up too much of my own scent by allowing myself to be cut, it could summon the attention of a quite different sort of monster. The wildlife in the area around the valley was not unaccustomed to dining on lonely travelers. The ripper dogs, the velocitrops, and the cannibal horse were among the more pleasant predators I had heard fireside stories about. My hands shook just thinking about them, and I accidentally dropped a nail covered plank of wood into the pile at one of the guard tower's legs.

Cursing myself I hurried, and that quick movement only served to further panic me. I grabbed wooden planks by the handful, no longer caring if the rusted nails poking out from them stuck into the uppermost layers of my skin. Speed was the only way now. I heard a noise in the distance. A shriek I couldn't identify. Not human. I hoped not. It pierced the air, no more than a hundred yards into the darkness.

I gasped, pleaded with my hands to work faster in the chilling air, clutched for more bits of burnable wreckage. A book, a dead bird, a straw doll. I hurled them into the pile and struck the flare. I looked at the meager pile at my feet in the sunrise glow I had struck. It would have to do. Placing the flare in a gap beneath the pile I counted in my mind how many minutes it would take to catch the rest of the building ablaze. The shriek sounded again and I struck another flare as the tiny pile of detritus caught with agonizing sloth.

The flare lit, nearly blinding me with its brilliant glow. I spun my eyes around the area, noticing with disdain that the center of my vision was blurry with ominous green and black blotches. With my other hand I tore off my glasses and clutched my eyes shut, desperately willing my pupils to open. I tossed the second flare blind into the night, then replaced my glasses and started scanning my surroundings. There was movement to be sure.

The rising and flickering flames were casting shadows on every surface, making the ruins all around me look as though they were dancing and waving. Every shadow was a ripper dog. Every skull grinning from the dirt was my own. Breathing heavily as I stripped the rifle from my shoulder, I let the gun barrel follow my wild gaze.

And then I saw it.

The darkness slowly receded in a small alley between two diminished foundations. And there I saw the beast. It was the head of a ripper dog staring with a sinister grin across its parody of a face. Its silver eyes reflected the light of my fire back at me, piercing my throat with its gaze alone.

Behind it there was another, this one with a massive white stripe running up its nose. Its yellowed teeth gleamed around its open mouth, like the stalactites of an ancient cavern. It was a cavern where death lived. Another ripper dog was behind these two, lying playfully on its side, prepared to tear life out of me to sustain itself. Two more eyes leered from the shadows beyond. I raised the rifle, my breath suffocating in the chilled night air. My heart was thumping like the drums of the northern death cults.

It was thumping, racing to carry terror through every limb.

My lungs argued, tried to pull air in and exhale at the same time, instead seizing in my tightened throat. I raised the rifle to the sky and pulled the trigger, murdering the stillness of night, ripping the silence open with a bullet.

They didn't move.

With terrified and uneven breaths, I stepped back and pulled the bolt of the rifle back, ejecting the wasted shell and loading another one into the chamber. The ripper dogs stood in wait. Even I, fully knowing I was firing into the air, had jumped at the sound. These animals, driven mad by the wild had lost their instinct to fear. They were now simply waiting for the universal sign that I should be ripped apart.

The small fire at the base of the guard tower licked its way up, traveling up the structure and starting to eat through the support struts. My back started to burn at the intense heat. If I stood here long enough I would be crushed by the building's fall. I needn't worry that the tearing and rending of my flesh at the jaws of these creatures would last more than a few minutes.

The middle creature, the one I had spotted first, moved forward from the shadows. I saw a hand slide along the ground, clawing outward and pushing a trail of the dead Earth toward me. It was a human hand. The lead ripper dog's head slid backward, and from its throat it appeared.

A scarred and painted human face rose up. Two pointed streaks of dark green were trailing down from its eyes. They were the tears these people were destined to shed forever in loss of the great mistress, the holy nameless concubine they worshipped.

These monsters, no longer allied with humanity, were what remained of the Thakka Cluster. Nearly thirty figures rose silently from the ruins around me, like ghosts pouring up from an ancient and forgotten cemetery.

"You came here for us," the first one said stepping forward, his eyes as grey as those on his headdress, "That much is clear."

I tripped over my tongue as I spoke, stuttering like a fool and dropping my rifle to the ground,

"The - - There's a city in the valley. We're going to war with it. I offer what remains of it to you as tribute if you help us." At first, he simply looked over his shoulder into the sea of white and green faces.

"Why do I need the city?" he said stepping forward, all trace of humor in his voice abandoned years ago, "If I needed cities I would have them."

"This could have gone better," I found myself saying.

"My name is Thurrus," the silver eyed man said, "And you have come into our land with business. For that reason I will have to wait until the matriarch has seen you before I kill you. But rest assured. You are now dead."

Behind me the blazing watch tower collapsed in on itself sending sparks into the night sky.

We soon reached a small demolished stone building. It was a tomb, a mausoleum abandoned years ago. A steel door was unbolted from the outside and swung inward with a rusted vulture's cry. Before us were stairs, lit at the edges by candles.

The Thakka Cluster's matriarch sat upon a throne of soot covered granite adorned with furs. Her eyes were covered with white silk bundled like a bandage that had gradually with time become a part of her face. Beneath the blindfold the twin trails of dark green traced her cheeks.

Atop her head she wore the four crisscrossing horns of different creatures, woven forever into her hair years ago in braids and knots. Her clothes consisted of blood-encrusted hides and silks torn from the backs of the tribe's myriad victims. She stared blind as I approached, one hand on her stomach, swollen in the late stages of pregnancy while the other held a burning bundle of leaves which she frequently drifted beneath her nose.

At the back of the room I could see the matriarch's attendants sitting, staring like owls at me as I passed between them. Their faces were blank, except for the paint which seemed to betray some deep and unknowable sadness. In silence I walked in front of the throne and, not knowing what else to do, knelt down humbly, pressing my cheek against the cold stone floor.

"Your name is Ebon," the matriarch said, "Ebon the Waste. And you're here to offer me ashes while you live in paradise." I hadn't even started to respond when she began speaking again - it was an ecstatic rambling, as if she was in a trance, "Silence. I know your thoughts. I have looked long into the savage land and seen the deep truths. It has driven me mad, as it does all things. Why should I help you save your paradise? What does it profit you to live in comfort?" She drifted the burning leaves beneath her nose, breathing deeply as I thought, feeling the coldness of the grave at my cheek. Finally, after a moment I spoke, still hugging the floor,

"Our identity. We have been made into what we are by a sign from the heavens - from the past. We have a way of life that is rare."

"Rare things aren't worthwhile simply because they're rare," she said, adding a scornful laugh, "That's a fool's tongue in your head. Perhaps I should have your brother Crassus brought here. He seems a bit smarter."

I lifted my cheek from the stone floor and slowly rose to my feet, standing before the matriarch. An idea brewed in my head, one that could very well have doomed us all.

"If you know this much about me, then surely you know something of the encounter we had earlier today. Crassus, my brother, hurled a rock at a man who could have him killed even now. Something inside him broke. He became like a rabid animal. He wanted to embrace the violence he had learned to fear in the wasted land of our youth. If you won't help us for the tribute we offer, help us for the sake of killing."

The matriarch was very still for a moment, passing the burning leaves once again beneath her nose and breathing deeply. With her hand resting on her bare and swollen stomach, she smiled faintly and nodded,

"Kill him."

"Do it. I'm already dead," I quickly added, feigning the same death stare I had seen earlier from the interlopers at the burning guard tower. Hands seized my shoulders. They were quickly pulling me back into the darkness of the chamber. With eyes unmoving, I continued, "I am dead. I am a vessel of death. Tomorrow I make war on the walking city. And they will know the embrace of oblivion by my hand."

The hands stopped, as if uncertain.

The matriarch gave a laconic chuckle and made a gesture with the burning leaves. Apparently convinced, she said,

"You say the right words, but you don't believe them. Ebon the Waste, child of no one, master of nothing is already dead. So killing him now would profit us nothing. But we won't live in the wreckage you leave behind. Your tribe and our tribe will live together inside the Plexis. These are my terms. Will you accept them?"

I did. I accept full responsibility for everything that follows, but I knew we had no choice. It was the only way we would survive. I accepted those terms knowing that it may kill us all, knowing we would live a few weeks more. This time, when faced by the gravity of the situation, I did not laugh.

Part Two

The composition of gunpowder, particularly the high density projectile recipe Serpentine, was one of the many bits of information passed down to the wasted Earth from the old world. When I returned to the Plexis just after dawn, I found Euclid out in front of the entrance, pouring soft wood fragments over the bonfire on a massive metal screen for blacking. The bits of wood smoldered and hissed in front of us as I arrived. The projection screen had faded with the coming of dawn, no longer glowing with horror for my fellow tribesmen to see. Euclid was writing notes on a rudimentary map he had stretched on the ground and weighted with painted rocks. He hardly looked up when I arrived.

"So you met with them, then," he said.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"Crassus and I would have returned with the first morning's light whether we met with the Thakka Cluster or not," he said picking up a fragment of blackened wood and knocking it against the rim of a barrel, "I didn't expect to see you again. The fact that you're here suggests to me that you succeeded."

"Yes," I said nodding gravely. I was trying to summon the faintest confident smile. It couldn't have looked convincing. Looking between me and his work, Euclid said,

"We should survive this battle. I don't know what comes next. I've never met someone from the Thakka Cluster. What are they like?"

"Abrasive," I said, "Unique. After spending an uneasy night with them waiting for my throat to be slit, I have to say this: they're consistent."

"Consistent," Euclid said, his eyes lighting up a little, "That's good."

"No," I said, "No it isn't."

After the meeting with the matriarch, I had been witness to the nightly rituals of the Thakka Cluster from afar, cowering in a ditch and waiting for light to scare the real predators away. Profane inhuman screaming seemed to be a constant theme in each of them.

Crassus emerged from the constantly moving line of Plexis tribesmen engaged in processing the saltpeter and the coal. He had in his hands a dish of water for the milling stone, which he discarded upon seeing me. He ran over and grabbed my arm, pulling me toward him and reaching around to slap my back,

"You lived."

"What's more, I found the Thakka Cluster," I said grinning despite myself, "They have agreed to help us."

"On what condition?" he asked.

"They will live in the Plexis."

Crassus pulled away, staring with furrowed brow and an intensity wholly unlike him. I looked away after only a moment from his judgment. Could he have done better? Could he have won their allegiance with nothing more than empty promises? No. These were people unmoved by the plight of outsiders He moved his own eyes to follow mine. By some uncanny fortune we found ourselves staring at nothing less than the projection screen that had promised horror by fire only a night before. He closed his eyes, sighed heavily,

"Then all of the preparations are made. Victory will be ours today."

Still staring into the vast grey screen adorning the front of the walking city, I found myself shaking my head. It was a reflex, not for anyone else's sake but my own. The vast machine that stood before us was something designed by another age. The smoke pouring from its chimneys foretold of mysteries beyond our comprehension. It was a device that had been lived in, operated for a long time even as the Plexis was still being born. Even if we could bring the great beast down with Euclid's powder kegs, what would spill over the edge? What would we find ourselves facing once this hive of wasps had been toppled?

"There," Euclid said pointing as he joined us, "Just under the bent leg, to the left side. The outcropping beneath it is cracked. It could have fallen while the beast was still moving even. But now it has rested with that cracked ledge beneath its foot. The leg will descend along with the rocks, carving the Earth behind it and shifting its weight even further back. That evenness the plate values will lock the other legs into a cascade - into the dry and cracked soil. It will avalanche with the rocks."

"I'll have to trust you on this," I said, "I can't imagine anything bringing something that large down."

"You can't imagine anything lifting something that large up to begin with," Crassus said, "So yes. You'll have to trust us. I looked over Euclid's equations. There's a wide margin of error, but not so large that the city is likely to remain standing afterward."

The outcropping was one of sandstone, with iron deposits riddled throughout. By no means did it look precarious, but with the leg resting on it a small crack had formed. A hairline fracture from our vantage point, but it could have been as wide as a man at this distance. A few powder kegs placed inside could easily blast it apart, removing the platform the city had placed one of its legs on. I tried to imagine the city's vast claw being tripped unexpectedly behind it, being dragged down by the sudden weight, only to be followed by others in a cascade of shifting land. As I did so, hope began to gain traction in my mind.

"Will the Serpentine be done in time?" I asked, looking over to where a small line of carts was forming at the door. Men and women were pulling loaded pallets into the Plexis, loaded with casks I figured to be filled with volatile black powder. Crassus and Ebon shared a look. In the distance I could see a woman standing next to a tied melthorse loading her rifle. She was wearing one of the red cocktail dresses advertised on floor nine.

"The powder we need to topple the city has already been assembled, and delivered," Crassus said, a hefty dose of compassion entering his voice, "The powder we make now isn't for that."

"We make it in plain view now in front of the Plexis," Euclid said, "They are meant to see this. From here it goes inside. To The Egg."

"The Egg?" I said, remembering the whispered words of my brother over the past months. Where is the light coming from? It comes from the metal egg. The radioisotope generator.

"The nuclear core," came Thunfir's voice behind me, "I see that you lived."

"And you," I said turning to see Thunfir standing behind us, "Are we going to blow up the Plexis if we lose?"

"We couldn't if we wanted to. We'll breach the wall in the generator, though, and poison everything for miles around with blighted smoke and glowing waters." He clapped his hand down on my shoulder, pushing me off balance.

Blighted smoke and glowing waters. That was often the only legacy left behind in conflicts of this nature. I thought of the blue pools of glowing water surrounded by dead rats I had once come across in the wake of a particularly troubled blight storm. I remembered it clearly. Crassus and I had traveled for two days, drinking only the water we carried until we reached higher lands. Blight water death is painful and slow.

A gunshot startled me from the fugue I had entered, wondering which side of us would commit the lesser crime if we lost.

The tied melthorse fell sideways, sending a cascade of dust up as it further cracked the dried Earth. The iron in its blood would be mixed with the soil, used to process the next batch of Serpentine. It pumped out from the hole in its neck staining the yellowed sands and filling in the cracks. The woman, who had traded her rifle for a shovel, dug deeply into the now wetted soil, knocking away flies as she slopped the solution over her shoulder into one of the carts. The deeper she dug, the more dried Earth she found.

From that spectacle I turned my vision just north of the glowing sunrise. A shadowed line of men and women were navigating the circumference of the hill around and behind the city. They were too distant to identify positively, but my trembling hands knew who they were. The Thakka Cluster had arrived.

"How will we get the gunpowder kegs into the crack under the leg?" I asked Thunfir as his eyes too focused on the line.

"That was done before you arrived," he said with a wry smile, "Under the cover of darkness, of course. I oversaw the operation personally."

"How much?" I asked.

"Enough," he said, laughing heartily, "Six of us resorted to filling bottles on our second trip. The casks of Serpentine were too cumbersome after the first one. By the third expedition we were carrying bags suspended from poles like a bindled well-dipper. I don't think they were watching very closely. After the third trip we were singing drinking songs. If we were seen, they probably thought we were all drunkards. Introduce our smuggled cargo to the most modest of flames and I assure you, that rock will be no more."

Blue and red lights erupted from the plate of the spider city, cutting Thunfir's laughter short. He grimaced and spat on the ground as the lights were accompanied by that mournful bleat echoing across the valley. He shielded his eyes against the lights and the brightening sun as he looked toward the city, "What is it now?"

"I'm sure they've changed their minds and decided to leave us alone," I said, hoping to disguise my fear, "Let me go with you."

Five minutes later we would be once again in the city's shadow, approaching to continue our parley with Kitchains. When we arrived, the lights descended from the metal plate and focused in on us. The aperture above opened, only this time we did not hear the clicks and whirrs of a harness system. Instead, we heard a familiar voice. It was Kitchains, screaming,

"No! Please! Stop this, friends!"

A massive shape plunged through the open portal, trailing a long stream of red silk above it. With arms and legs flapping in the wind the shape grew. For what felt like an eternity of anticipation, the shape's trembling jowls shook with the man's gutteral scream until finally it was silenced by the hardened Earth below. He lay a dozen feet from us, deflated and wet, mercifully covered by the massive silk dress that had been trailing his descent.

He had failed.

Thunfir and I were silent for a moment. The aperture above slowly closed, the light shining on the shrouded corpse narrowing like a spotlight. It became a pinpoint of light, a directed star illuminating only a tiny column of dust that swirled and danced before finally going completely dark.

And then there were more pillars of illuminated dust near us. First two, then four, then sixteen. More apertures were opening all around, secreting ropes and masked men. Their faces were covered with masks designed ages ago to filter out the blighted air. I had seen these before, sold by superstitious merchants who believed the air itself to be a source of grave illness. The masks, which connected to metal helms, had slits where the eyes would be, covered in black glass. Each man held in his hands a rifle or a curved knife as large as his forearm. There were hundreds now, descending from ropes, suspended from a belt, or a hook between their shoulder blades. The city bleated with excitement, likely signaling more from within to begin their descent to slaughter this audacious rebellion of savages.

My eyes focused from this spectacle to a man running along the edge of the rock, rounding the edge of the city at the cliff face. Running in the other direction was a plume of smoke, racing like a jackrabbit toward the crack in the cliff's face. I admit I hadn't seen him before, and when I saw him throwing off the dust grey camouflaged jacket I could see why. He held the long torch raised above him like a banner, signalling that the trap had been set.

In the explosion that followed, countless tons of rock were instantly pulverized into dust, crushed by the combined explosive force of the gunpowder and the tremendous weight from the spider city. The leg crashed into the liquified boulders, quickly falling and shattering down like a dry rain. It gouged deeply into the Earth, scraping with such friction that the uppermost layer of ground in its wake melted and left a trail of glass.

The city lurched as other legs moved to compensate for the sudden shift, buckling and trodding desperately up the incline to reach an equilibrium that was now impossible. Euclid's calculation had been perfect. The city teetered for a wild moment as every eye turned to watch the useless leg spasm with hydraulic fury, before finally bending at a newly twisted joint. Above Thunfir and myself, the metal sky began to coast backward as the city fell.

We ran.

The men above, now held captive by their own ropes, were dragged backward as the city fell, many of them electing to cut the bonds that held them and take their chances with a high fall rather than be dragged and pulverized backward into the wreckage that would become of the city.

Pumping our legs mercifully away, we dared not look behind us now at the horrific sound of metal crashing against Earth. My eyes were turned up, watching the blue and white of a calm and open sky warming my limbs. I could have sworn that day I saw a bird. Not one of the black hook crows you tend to see crowding around refuges, but a fragile dove caressing the wind with its fluttering wings. Had this too once been a citizen of that city we left behind us? As my eyes tried to drink in the rare sight, Thunfir's powerful arms grabbed me and pulled me to the ground.

"Down!" he shouted into my ear, "Pay attention, boy. I need you alive."

Beside us a line of thirty horses rode in the opposite direction, moving to intercept the falling bodies tumbling from the city that had stumbled. One voice in particular stuck out in my mind, accompanied by the wild firing of a custom zip pistol,

"For the Plexis!" It was Euclid, his strange bespectacled gaze sternly coupled with a savagery I hadn't seen in him before. His cherry brown horse snorted as he rode past, a hungry look in its eyes. To the other side of me, Crassus stopped and threw down the hunting rifle that had served us so well. I retrieved it and looked up at him.

"No quarter," he said, his voice as dry as sun bleached bone.

The gentleness I had always known in him was gone now, washed away in that flow of blood the Earth demanded. He had in his hands not a rifle, but a long unwashed sword, beaten and sharpened into this shape from metal torn from within the Plexis itself. The blade was drenched, dripping with a vile black fluid. Poison. With fire in his eyes eating deep into him, he kicked his horse hard, driving it onward toward the city that leaned and crashed even now. The horse lunged forward and bounded into the snapping and smashing of battle ahead.

Wiping salt from my cheek, I lowered myself to one knee and watched the soldiers rising to be cut down by the Plexis tribe's hussars. Firing on this wave would mean nothing. The soldiers descending from ropes had been caught off-guard by the fall of their city. Still more crowded around the port holes, ready to descend from makeshift harnesses down to the grounds below. As the city leaned heavily on the valley slope, the others hung like condemned men or lay on the ground with broken limbs.

"The city hasn't fallen completely," Thunfir said pulling me up, "We must get to the top. Wrap around the plate and get to where the leaning city's edge touches the ground. The Thakka cluster may already be there."

"Unless," I began, but then stopped. Unless they betrayed us. We ran like refugees around the circumference of the city's edge, clamoring between the massive trunks of legs as stray bullets rained around us. In the chaos further into the city I could see the second wave of masked soldiers touching boots to the ground, leaving their comrades still hanging far above them, swinging helplessly or attempting to take shots down below.

Thunfir, bracing both hands against the grip of his blade, quickly closed the gap between himself and one of the city's shock troops, swinging the hefty blade with tremendous speed, breaking armor and bone with a crack. The armored soldier, realizing too late the rage that had descended upon him, hardly had time to turn his helmet before the sword hacked deep into him.

He fell without a sound.

I too found a target just beyond Thunfir, one of the men spraying automatic fire toward the next wave of our cavalry. Taking only a moment to drop to one knee and look through the scope I covered him with the twin dots in my scope and squeezed the trigger.

The shot dented on his helmet, knocked him from his feet, but didn't kill him. Thunfir, still spinning from the first masterful strike he had landed, turned now and drove his sword into the armored figure. We ran, heel over heel up the hill, kicking dust behind us and clawing at the dirt.

The last portion of our journey we walked, unable to run up the steep hill any longer. It was Thunfir who first rested his hand on the city plate when we reached where it met with the ground. With a grin, he reached his broad arm down to help me up.

"This is it," he said drawing a short sword from his belt. Below us the sounds of battle were intensifying. The second wave of soldiers had descended from the plate, this time prepared for the maelstrom they would be entering. Automatic gunfire was once again erupting beneath us. I prayed silently to every god, offering my fealty to whichever one would keep Crassus safe until I returned.

I looked down into the popping and shadowed landscape beneath us, at the thick cloud of smoke rising from staggered lines of our men. The troops still descending past us paid us little mind, instead focusing their attention on the swirling grinding storm of flesh and steel below.

In that brief moment I darted my eyes across the battlefield, trying to identify where Crassus could have gone. Of the two dozen horses I had seen, few still had riders. Did he dismount and flee? Or did one of the agonized gritted faces below, charting the trajectory of careful bullets belong to him?

In that moment of scanning I saw several of our men and women fall, clutching opened wounds. From the west a thin trail of the Thakka Cluster sprinted across the battlefield. With an unparalleled avarice for blood they descended from the valley's edge on the other side of the spider city's troops, tearing with short blades, each drunk in the ecstacy of their rampage.

The plate was moaning as metal does, heavily sloped to one side, and the smooth ground beneath our shoes made it difficult to ascend further into the city without slipping. As I looked for the first time onto the plate's surface, I was struck by the outrageous ambition of the long dead architects. Several buildings, each one no less than six stories tall stood in two rows. Around them were concentric rings of houses, some of them burning now. And at the other end, behind an empty fountain, lay a brick factory with towering smokestacks. A trail of molten red was pouring from one of the barred low hanging windows.

We began our ascent, deeper into the city, and I saw statues ten times the size of men cracked and diminished by the fall. They leaned now, pointed with marble fingers at the sky, each looking as if it would snap from its foundation and spiral backward into one of the structures.

The roar of gunfire beneath us mixed with the screams of contest. Smoke choked us as we ascended.

All around, buildings stared blankly at us. I hoisted myself into the entrance of the nearest one. The door had been knocked partially off its hinges by the tremendous impact of the city's collapse. And yet, it seemed, the structural integrity of the house itself remained sound. Glancing inside I caught sight of a pile of furniture. It had drifted to the far side of the room and lay in a moth eaten heap.

Slowly, hand over foot, we made our way up to the smoke-stacked building at the other end of the plate. By the time we reached it, the oozing molten fluid coming from the windows had hardened to a porous metal. The gunfire below was becoming irregular, fading.

Thunfir and I grasped the tremendous door's latches and pulled hard, assisted by gravity until the building hung open like a mouth screaming in silence down on its own ruined body. It was like an excavated skeleton, forever in the act of giving up its final breath. We climbed in and stared at what we found.

White bundled sheets. Some had burst or been torn open during the fall, revealing pale hands or bleached legs. Thunfir and I both braced ourselves against the wall as the massive shape transformed in the near darkness from a single object to a pile of much smaller bundles.

"I suspect," Thunfir said, "This must be everyone."

Everyone. They lay pale and cold, twisted beneath ivory sheets. No blood, nothing. They must have chosen this fate. They must have been poisoned.

"Rather than risk capture at the hands of savages," I said grimly, looking up into the vast room. There was a cold furnace with the black porous metal crawling out of its side in a long streak to where the windows were. The jet black engine of this city, cached in soot and grime had gone cold and finally died. Whatever mechanism was used to keep the city ambulatory had belched its last black cloud. We had killed it, its inhabitants had died by their own hands. And quickly too.

"How long since the city fell?" I asked, "In minutes."

"Not even an hour," Thunfir said grimly as he felt the cooled black metal river with his hand, "Whatever poison they used, it works fast. They gathered here for shelter before the battle."

"What did they think we were going to do to them?" I asked, trying to understand the scope of what I was seeing. Though I had seen mass graves, this one was so unexpected - so sudden - that I found it difficult to grasp in my mind's eye.

"What were we going to do?" Thunfir asked with an odd note in his voice. Beneath us, down the sloping platform we could hear the sound of battle cries growing. I noticed the voices of our own men mingling with the unfamiliar tones of the Thakka Cluster.

Our forces had routed the descending army and were climbing toward us, ready to strike a fatal blow to the city's heart, unknowing that its citizens had already elected to rob us of their lives. Dropping my rifle, I laid my back in the crook where the sloping walls and floor met. Here I felt cradled, warmed by the still steaming river of metal nearby.

We continued our exploration of the leaning city for the remainder of the day. Eventually, the intercom broke into our conversation and casual looting to say that Crassus had found the leg controls of the device in the under-section of the plate itself. Of course it wouldn't do us much good to lower the city now, but we could even it out slightly to make exploration easier. From the city's upright horizon I saw the sky shift until the plate lowered us to look directly at the Plexis, rising like a brilliant white sun.

Shortly after that I was summoned to the room at the heart of the walking city where I would see my brother at its controls.

"It's not terribly complicated," Crassus said pointing to a white screen, "Much more intuitive than the Plexis. I suspect they added to it as time went on. This place has likely never fallen out of human possession."

"What does it do?" I asked, looking at the banks of twinkling lights surrounding us.

"Everything," Crassus said, "Everything the city can still do - which isn't much."

"Is it still a threat to the Plexis?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, pointing to a small display to his right, "right here."

It was a three dimensional skeleton projection of a missile with words wrapped around it. While most of the text was unintelligible, there was one bit that we both would understand.

"14 KT," I said aloud. 14 Kilotons.

"That would do the trick," Crassus said, "I don't know why they had this, or why there were so many empty slots here. This is the last one. Good thing it didn't go off when the city had its tumble. Of course these missiles would have been designed to take a beating."

"I'm surprised they didn't use it when they realized they were losing the battle," I said.

"Why would they do that? Just to spite us? After they disposed of the city's masters, there was nothing left to do but drift away in peace. The soldiers dropped down and bought everyone time enough for their poison cocktail to kick in. I suspect everyone was gathered at that foundry building when it happened. We haven't seen anyone else."

"Let's not tell anyone about the bomb," I heard myself say. I don't know why I said it. I didn't then either. We were both surprised. It wasn't until we had left the room several minutes later and locked the door behind us that I heard Crassus' final response on the matter, equally unexpected,

"I won't."

That night I was sitting by the fire with nearly sixty improvised funerals behind me. The Thakka Cluster, which had been provisionally useful during the battle itself, was parading their dead through the hills far away. Maybe they would all be ambushed and we would never hear from them again.

"This is only the beginning," Euclid said resting his hand on my shoulder, "There will be others. The city was poorly armed. Its citizenry was held aloft only by the legacy of its founders and whatever bullying they could muster. I will wager we won't be this lucky again."

I pulled a small twig from the edge of the burn pit and let the tiny flame light my cigarette. Taking off my glasses, I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes deep in thought.

Euclid was right. Victory had come too easily on this day. And while the next attacker may not have a wandering city at its disposal, it would be no doubt armed with something far worse - cunning. The only thing we had feared from that machine had been the brutality it had displayed in its propaganda. And yet the next band wouldn't be armed with that.

Like waves pulverizing a beach, the attackers would come from all over. They would form alliances, claw over one another, and finally breach the doors to the Plexis. Weapons that had been forgotten for over a century would be unearthed. Legions would pour willingly into the fire filled valley.

And then there was the Thakka Cluster. The next onslaught could very well begin as soon as they returned if we denied them access. With their love of death they wouldn't hesitate to tear the spider city apart, looking for weapons to break into the Plexis. And they may even find the 14 KT. What then?

Smoke drifted from my fingertips in the hot dry air of the mass funeral pyre. In its glow I dared my gaze to wander among my fellow Plexis tribe members. Their faces looked heavy, withdrawn. Would they be able to once again become features of this rolling desperate landscape? Would the Plexis tribe remain without the Plexis itself?

No. In that moment, I knew it wouldn't.

It was this or nothing at all.

\- - -

In the days following our first battle, I could tell Crassus was different. The first night, as we laid down in our respective bunks, I heard a sound I hadn't heard in a long while. He had once again taken up the habit of letting moist eyes get the better of him as he fell asleep. Though he tried to hide it always, it had been a long time since I had heard Crassus actually crying. I leaned over my bunk and called down to him,

"Hey."

He didn't respond at first, so I swung my legs around and hopped to the floor, sitting in one of the chairs we had pulled into the sparsely furnished apartment. His fists were over his eyes, and he dragged them down finally to look at me. After a moment's pause he asked, a hint of accusation in his voice,

"Why did they poison themselves?"

"I don't know," I lied. After a moment, I realized the lie wasn't going to hold up so I added, "They probably thought it would be a better way to go than having their city conquered. I don't know if you still remember my history lessons, but the Teutons did the same thing after the Battle of Aquae Sextiae. Hundreds, maybe thousands strangled one another in the night rather than suffer under the yoke of slavery."

"What were we going to do to them?" Crassus asked. His eyes had cooled significantly since the battlefield when I saw the fire within him. He was wounded now, unsure of his place now that it was over. With my eyes closed, I remember breathing relief that he hadn't lost his gentle character. Though he could be driven by passion to defend his home, he wasn't destined to become a tyrant.

"I don't know," I said reassuringly, "I know we wouldn't have killed them."

"They would have," Crassus said, "The Thakka Cluster. They would have killed everyone. And if they'd found the bomb, who knows what they would have done? They worship death. Somehow, they've tasted it already. Those years wandering in sickness, sharing it between them. And they're our problem now. Our troubles are multiplying."

He was looking at a piece of paper he had pinned to the wall. It was the pyramid of rats, the mathematical principle Euclid had offered to explain how the Plexis had been built. Exponential growth. He stared at it now uneasily, agonizing over some mystery hidden in the future. He continued, "I don't want them to die. I just don't want them here. This place is ours."

The next morning the Thakka Cluster returned. Their dead had been consumed by some mysterious ritual somewhere out of sight. And now they stood in a line of nearly a hundred in front of the Plexis' front door. The door, rare as it was, happened to be closed that morning.

Thunfir and I were on Floor 19 making small talk shortly before the line spilled over the horizon. I sat and he stood staring out at the rising sun casting shadows on the hill.

"That's what will be the death of us, Ebon," Thunfir said pointing with one hand and sipping his coffee with the other. I had been drawing a thread and needle through a ripped jacket, but his gesture effectively summoned my eyes to the window. Out from it I could see the line approaching, their many mouths open from the long chant they were now singing.

"Nothing we can do," I said, "Not unless you want to force them out."

"I do," Thunfir said banging his fist softly against the window so that it vibrated, "But I won't. They fought well yesterday. And whether we needed them or not, we had a deal."

"I made the deal," I said.

"Given what we were working with at the time, I tend to think it was the right choice. No, I don't doubt that it would be right to let them in. I just fear what we will become, living next to them." Thunfir's voice was strained, but not without hope. He turned and stroked his rough cotton-like beard between two dirty fingers and he added, "But if there are problems, I suppose we still outnumber them."

They were almost at the front doors to the building, so we descended to meet them. When we did, the blind Thakka Cluster matriarch was perched atop a throne litter being carried by six of her attendants on long poles. She held up her right hand and clasped her thumb to the small and ring fingers. Her other two long and slender fingers were upright, close together and standing straight. The gesture meant nothing to me, though it may have been some form of benediction to the Thakka. Her blindfold was, as always, obscuring her eyes.

With explosive gunfire tracing bullets into the sky behind them, and with the thrumming dirge of their fallen comrades still on their red and wet lips, the parade came to halt in front of the steel trellised door. Thunfir and I arrived on the other side, staring through the cage at the hundreds of armed Thakka cultists. Thunfir looked over at the entrance controller, a thin man leaning uneasily against the wall and staring into the sea of blue lines under hardened eyes.

"Open the gate," Thunfir said in a booming voice with his palms upturned, "Let them in." With a loud whir, the steel portcullis of the Plexis lifted and the sliding glass doors opened. Thunfir walked out, hands raised in a sign of peace to meet the Thakka Cluster. One of the Matriarch's attendants was leaning close to her ear, whispering something into it.

"Thunfir," the Matriarch said from her throne, "I understand why Ebon approached us without weapons. He was our prisoner. But why do you insult us in this fashion?"

"Insult you?" Thunfir said, taken aback, "No insult was intended. I approach you in friendship. We don't need weapons around our allies, because we don't attack them."

"We do," the Matriarch said lowering her hand. She let the burning bundle of leaves fall from her fingertips to the ground and the grey eyed tribesman I recognized from my first encounter with the tribe strode forward, stamping the burning bundle under bare foot.

It was Thurrus, the man whose face had first emerged from the throat of a wolf. He stared harshly at Thunfir holding a scavenged rifle from the dead army of the spider city. Handing the rifle carefully to one of his apparent subordinates, he walked up to Thunfir so that their noses nearly touched, and in a flash - struck him hard against the side of his head.

Thunfir staggered backward once, before turning back and punching Thurrus in the face. Their arms locked, hand to elbow as they struggled in odd silence. Someone from the Thakka Cluster side called out,

"Kill him, Thurrus!"

Thurrus seemed eager to oblige, driving his head forward and smashing it against Thunfir's skull. The old frontiersman leaned backward, his woven beard trailing his massive form as he almost tumbled to the ground. He was dazed, swaying heavily on massive boots.

A line of armed Thakka cultists had marched in front of the Plexis entrance grabbing any who attempted to rush in to help Thunfir, goading them back with oozing and bladed polearms and pointed rifles. It was the look in their eyes most of all that kept us back. It was desperate, ready to die. 'Give us any reason,' those eyes said, 'any reason to kill you.'

Thunfir's hand burst forward, connecting his fist to his rival's face so that muddy crimson now flowed freely from Thurrus' nose, eroding the thick landscape of dirt that had accumulated. From the circle now gathering around the two, hands reached from between bodies and grabbed Thunfir's tree trunk of an arm, hands too strong for him to rip free. He curled his lip, changing tactics to elbow his captor in the face and sent two men cascading to the ground.

More hands now emerged from the swirling chaos of the crowd, clutching Thunfir's coat and holding him in place. Thurrus had recovered from his spill and quickly darted his hand out to smash Thunfir's face. Again the next hand moved over and pummeled him. Thunfir, leaning backward into the hands clutching him, kicked with both feet and sent Thurrus back. More men were piling on, grabbing his hair and projecting fist after fist against his bulky torso.

He disappeared in the swirling crowd, and I looked in shock from the spectacle before us up to the Matriarch. Though blind, she knew precisely what was happening. Fulfilling some unknown sacrament, she traced her hand across her face and gently kissed her own fingertips. I could hear Thunfir's bellowing war-cry from beneath the writhing crowd. It broke briefly, irregularly with each fist, so that he was being played much like a drum under the savage hands beating him.

And then, following some unseen signal, working as a single creature, the crowd stopped and stood around him, looking down. With the conflict over, I managed to push my way through the crowd and lean down to Thunfir.

He was blinking, opening and closing his mouth with a trembling uncertainty. His eyes were unfocused, twitching all around him and rolling back into his head. I leaned down and examined the many abrasions eating into his face. They were bad, but not enough to kill him. The real danger was the concussion he had clearly suffered. I stood, stared at the Matriarch. Her purple lips were twisted, peeled back in an inexplicable and ecstatic gratitude.

The parade filed past me, hundreds of faces blankly staring at me cradling Thunfir's bleeding head as the dining hall swelled with their numbers. When the Matriarch reached the door, special care was taken to ensure her litter didn't accidentally knock against the edges of the doors as the girth of her throne was carried through. Inside I could hear wails of delight as the Thakka Cluster feasted their eyes on the bounty they had won.

Thunfir's eyes were still rolling around in his head, rattling as if something vital had been dislodged during his beating. I held his head, ignoring the blood staining my hands as I whispered to him.

"Don't let them see you die," I said. His eyes were still unfocused, rolling between me and the brilliant blue sky beyond, "I need you alive."

Coughing heavily, the blood stained edges of the old man's beard pulled upward as he looked past my head into the sky. For only a moment his eyes seemed fixated on something, focused on some unknown feature hidden in the unexplored blue of day. His bruised arm raised from the ground and he pointed up, past me. His mouth was moving again, cluttering sounds together in something almost resembling speech. Finally, with the smile draining from his face, he nodded with his eyes still above me. His breaths were short, sharp, and he whispered,

"Do you see it?"

"What is it?" I asked, tearing my eyes from his broken face and looking up into the blue sky above, "What do you see?" He swallowed hard, stifling a cough and spattering blood from his nose across his upper lip,

"Incredible."

There was nothing in the sky. His eyes glazed over and he lost consciousness, slumping back against my hands and breathing shallowly. Soon a shadow was spilling over us, joined by another. Silhouetted by the sun both Crassus and Euclid arrived, looking down on our fallen tribe's leader. A few others, partially to escape the rancorous howls and laughter erupting within the Plexis had come out to check on Thunfir.

"Help me," I said, "Help me get him inside."

Together six of us lifted the old man, gripping him beneath his back and letting his arms hang slack beside him. As we moved from the hot sun to the cooler doorway of the Plexis entrance, suddenly the howling congregation of the Thakka Cluster fell very silent, and very still.

I let my eyes roam the room wildly, noticing the men and women of the Cluster were standing, scattered all around, slowly turning and staring at us. At the center of it all, solemnly the Matriarch drifted a fresh bundle of leaves beneath her nose and inhaled deeply.

The only sound we could discern aside from Thunfir's heavy breathing and our own footsteps was the crackling of embers snapping in the Matriarch's hand. Then another sound, metal slid against metal and clattered to the floor. Crassus made a terrified yelp. I swear I could feel him trembling even three feet behind me.

The whole room began humming as a hundred voices tuned themselves to one another in cohesion. The sounds mingled, notes twisted, and finally they were filling our ears with a single sustained complex sound. I tried to read their faces. Nothing.

Whatever reverence they were showing, if any, was secret to us. We passed through the room and found no resistance from our new allies. At the end of the room a small group of men moved aside and let us pass by. We made the journey through the halls until we reached the elevators, and carried Thunfir's unconscious body all the way to our apartment on floor 19.

There we cleaned his wounds and watched over him for a long night, awakening only occasionally to soothe his fevered ramblings. It was uncertain if he would live through the night.

But he did.

In the timid moments between the dead of night and dawn, Euclid visited us to announce that the Thakka Cluster had discovered one of our weapons caches and had descended on it with maddened avarice. He spoke slowly, solemnly, and seated himself at our dining table,

"It was insanity. Last night they were howling on the first level, wandering from shop to shop and just taking things - grabbing whole displays of useless items and destroying them. When they learned of the weapons cache in the eastern wing, they disappeared. Gunshots kept me up most of the night as I sat huddled in one of the shops and waited to die."

"They haven't moved to the other floors then?" I asked, noting an implausible wry smile crossing Crassus' face.

"They don't trust the elevators," Euclid said, himself now sharing Crassus' contagious grin, "But I don't suspect that will last very long. At one point in the night the riot detectors mysteriously turned on and the Plexis closed the only connecting hallway between the Eastern Wing and the rest of the building. Elevators were likewise put under lockdown."

"That's a shame," Crassus said, a look of mock concern crossing his face, "It could take weeks to tunnel through the wall adjacent to those doors."

"Isn't it, though?" Euclid said, "By the time they're able to get out a lot can happen. Even our old Thunfir might be awake again."

Shocked, I looked between Euclid and Crassus, not knowing whose brilliance to praise first. Once again these two miracle workers had found a way to deliver us from catastrophe. Certainly the delivery systems would continue to dump food from the botany levels, but it would buy us time to plot out our next move. With the Thakka Cluster quarantined in the Eastern Wing of the first floor, suddenly we once again had a fighting chance.

Something about that must have displeased the gods.

The PA system generally only served to play gentle music or occasionally make vague announcements to visitors. These had been largely ignored, as they were rarely useful. But there was something different about it as a gentle alarm broke our brief but glowing silence.

The voice that now spoke from the tiny holed plate in the ceiling was somehow familiar, though I couldn't place where I'd heard it before.

"Warning," the echoing voice said. It was a man's voice - calm, soothing, "Fallout levels on floors 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19 and 20 have exceeded safe levels. Please contact your supervisor for more information."

Crassus and Euclid were both staring at me, looking to me to make sense of this sudden change. Still reeling from the sudden shift in the wheel of fortunes, I lowered my head to the table and ran my fingertips across my forehead.

I should have known then that it was no coincidence. I'm all the more foolish for not realizing how unlikely it was that this would all happen right when it did. The timing was too perfect for any rational individual not to notice. But then statistical analysis wasn't my job. It was Euclid's. He stared long at me, contemplating what to say, what our next course of action should be.

"They'll be frightened now," Euclid said, "We all know the meaning of that word. Archaic for the blight, still used in some regions. Fallout means the air and food around us may be slowly turning poisonous. What do we do?"

"That voice," I said, taking off my glasses to wipe the dust from my eyelids, "So calm. Where have I heard it before?"

"There's no reason to panic just yet," Crassus said, getting up from the table to walk over to the sink and pour himself a glass of water, "The building's sensors are calibrated to a time when fallout particles were feared and rarely understood. I'm surprised they weren't tripped in the past with the amount of dust that blows through the entrance."

"Background radiation has now reached 0.005 millisieverts per hour," the voice chimed in once again, "Please consult your supervisor or a nearby security representative to guide you to the nearest exit. You are in no immediate danger, but prolonged exposure could have adverse health effects. For your own safety, and the safety of others, please..."

The voice continued, bleeding hope out of us like an open wound. We sat, staring at one another in silent, stoic despair. Crassus' mouth was hanging open, his head was shaking slowly. Euclid started writing in his notebook.

"So that's it," Crassus said, "I guess we'll have to leave after all."

"The voice said 0.005 millisieverts per hour, correct?" Euclid said, punctuating the sentence by wildly circling one of his notes, "If that's the case, then it isn't something out there causing the rise. It must be something inside."

The egg. The FNF style radioisotope generator. Why would we need to look into the surrounding countryside for the source of an ionizing radiation leak when the Plexis itself contained something so profoundly radioactive? It was clear to us all what the announcement meant. The FNF reactor must be malfunctioning. It must have breached, leaking dangerous radioactive particles into the ventilation systems.

Soon enough we would all be standing around a nearby information terminal as Crassus confirmed our fears. The diagram he pulled up showed the egg's radiation levels climbing, reaching 0.82 mSv inside the reactor chamber. Eyes glued to the console, Crassus communicated with the terminal exclusively through touch now, saying to us,

"Temperatures are also increasing around the egg. Fires are expected to break out soon. If this leak isn't contained..." he paused, something seemed caught in his throat, "it will begin melting through the floor. We have to tell everyone to grab what they can and leave. Someone has to tell them they have to go. Everyone."

"Not everyone. We'll stay behind," Euclid said calmly, "Crassus and I will do what we can to contain the breach through the terminals. From these temperatures, it seems like the situation will gradually get out of control in a matter of days. We'll find a way to let the Thakka Cluster out after giving our brothers and sisters a two day head start. Crassus and I will stay and do what we can. Maybe we'll find some way to fix the reactor, and everyone can come back home."

Everything was deteriorating so fast. We had earned a right to live in the Plexis. We were prepared to fight everyone who came to take it from us. And now the machine itself was turning against us, dooming us to live each day in the shadow of tragedy.

We had tasted our last meal, enjoyed our last song, slept our last soft night. The tribe of Plexis was now destined to be exiled by the very technology that we had come to depend on. And of course my brother had volunteered to stay behind, to shepherd the Thakka Cluster away days after our friends had disappeared over the horizon. He wouldn't survive. His purpose would be gone without the Plexis, and my own purpose would be gone without someone worth protecting.

I elected to stay too. Crassus was pleased.

That night, as Euclid began organizing the exodus, I stayed behind watching over Thunfir. His fever had broken, but I suspect the delirium was the only thing keeping him from the intense pain he soon woke to. His face was still bloodied, his beard bleached a rare white by the copious amounts of antiseptics we had used to clean his wounds. Long lines cracked down the sides of his face by his eyes. They opened once again, but they weren't focusing on anything. He blinked heavily, and breathed, whispering to me,

"Ebon. Still here?"

"Yes," I said gripping his cracked and dry hand in mine, "I'm here."

"It's dark," Thunfir said, "Blurry. Can't see."

"You might have damaged your eyes," I said, "You took such a beating. It would have killed a lesser man."

He tried to produce a chuckle, but only managed to choke out a cough, following it with an arid and painful sigh,

"Never wanted this."

"Even a great man loses a battle if he's outnumbered a hundred to one," I said, "I wouldn't worry about that. You spread around more hurt than they were able to place on you."

"Didn't want to be leader," he said staring with unseeing eyes into the steel bars of the bunk hanging over him. There was a thin mist in those eyes, "But I remember seeing something. I don't remember what it was, but I thought I was dying. I think it's the last thing I'll ever see well. It ruined my eyes." He paused, then sighing, said, "Maybe I'll get glasses. Does that take long?"

The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I let go of his hand. Thunfir reached out, grasping the air around him, his voice becoming distant like the wind.

John Newlywed. It was unmistakable. The voice I had heard making the announcement over the intercom, the one that seemed familiar and yet strangely out of place, it was the same voice that had led me through my eye exam. The soothing and strangely clinical tones were exactly what we would have expected. And why not? The Plexis had every other kind of sensor to ensure it was operating at peak efficiency. Why not a voice to declare when it was dying? Of course something like that would be necessary, even in a world where experts would be constantly monitoring the FNF generator.

A seed of doubt sprouted in my mind, and I slowly started backing away. Thunfir was leaning up slowly, wincing in pain as he tried to lever himself out of bed. My chair clattered to the ground.

Could someone take the voice of John Newlywed out of the store and modify it to announce a radiation leak? Could someone fashion a hoax of this magnitude if they knew how the machines within the Plexis operated?

It couldn't be a lie. There was no reason, no justification for it.

"Thunfir," I said, a pain wholly alien to me suddenly gripping my chest, "Something isn't right. Something is terribly wrong."

\- - -

The construction of the KFM ritual device is an art that rose to prominence in the generations following the first exchange to track the danger of fallout laden weather patterns. The actual mechanism by which it works has been debated by scholars, shamans, and farmers alike. The only things that are still known for certain are how to build them, and that they are the only known way a simple scavenger can reliably measure the blight. The original design was improved on regionally several times over the years as standardized materials became less reliable.

The etymology of the letters KFM have since been lost in time, but most scholars agree that the final two letters almost certainly stand for Fallout Meter. The first may have, as was often the case at the time, been attributed to the inventor of the device.

The design is simple. Two square pieces of aluminum foil are attached by candle's wax, suspended over a hollow cylindrical container with a measuring stick running crossways over it.

Static electricity is generated through the rubbing of wool or sack cloth and then applied to an insulated wire suspended over the hanging foil pieces. When the wire discharges, it moves the foil pieces outward - away from each other. The further out the two sheets of foil move, the greater the fallout levels in the area.

And as I sat with trembling fingers, looping wire over wire and suspending the foil inside the container, I silently prayed to the anonymous K in KFM, rubbing two pieces of cloth together vigorously and counting. With a tiny static charge built up in my hand, I touched my finger to the exposed wire suspended over the foil and leveled my head over the makeshift device.

The tiny crackling spark leapt from my outstretched fingertip onto the wire. No movement from the hanging foil. No radiation. The room was perfectly safe.

"No," I whispered through clenched teeth, "That's wrong. You did it wrong. Crassus is no liar."

I seized the pieces of cloth, rubbed them together, built up another static charge, and touched the wire. Once again the foil refused to move. My hands clenched, shook. Tears flowed freely, drawing down my nose and into the device. I hissed, smacking it aside, sending it clattering against the wall. It was impossible.

Crassus had lied. There was no radiation. No meltdown. The Plexis was perfectly safe.

The greatest danger, one that had followed the KFM ritual device through its many generations was that it was too simple, based on properties that even the most informed blight shamans couldn't explain without resorting to superstition. The actual science of it had been lost over the ages. And it looked like any number of birdgut reliant augers. But those who ignored its accuracy did so at their own peril. I stared long at the metal cylinder resting on its side in the corner. For the first time in my life, all faith in the device was lost. It was a toy.

A useless toy.

"Ebon," Thunfir groaned, spacing his words with thick weakening breaths, "What is it?"

I stumbled out of the apartment we had shared these many months, carried myself down the hallway, and stared out as our own line of men and women disappeared up the hill into the distance. They were loaded down, carrying everything they could into what would soon become night.

My head was swimming. Before I knew what I was doing, I had burst back into the apartment and grabbed my hunting rifle. I gripped it tightly, strangling it in my hands. The gentle alarm was chiming, and John Newlywed's voice came through once again,

"Please make your way to the exit as soon as possible. Radiation levels have reached 1.3 millisieverts per hour. Prolonged exposure could have serious deleterious effects."

Rounding the corner I faced another empty hallway. Down six flights of stairs, in the very heart of the building I would find the doorway to the massive spherical chamber that held the egg. If the radiation was as high as the intercom was saying, I would never reach it. I had seen what 1.3 millisieverts per hour would do to a living human. What's more, if the radiation burned me down I would die happily. If there was any threat from the reactor, it would mean Crassus and Euclid hadn't conspired to betray us. It would mean the voice wasn't all a lie. It would mean I had made a mistake while constructing the KFM. We would die as a family together. It was a death I could have lived with.

I pulled back the bolt on my rifle, biting my teeth hard into one another, housing a shell in the chamber. The doors to the generator room slid open. The temperature was cool. There were no alarms. There was nothing but the gentle thrum of machinery. And a voice. Euclid leaned down and spoke into an intercom.

"Crassus, he's here. Get up here. Now."

The room was large. Much larger than the standard shops in the rest of the Plexis. In the center was a thick polished sphere suspended by massive tubes. All around me, surrounding every control panel were large wooden barrels and metal casks. I recognized them from our battle with the walking city. The serpentine. No one had been there to remove them from this room. There hadn't been time. Euclid was standing on one of the catwalks surrounding the egg, writing in his notebook. He glanced up casually, and waved,

"Hello, there. I suppose we shouldn't dance around the fact that the reactor's not going to melt down."

"It might still," I said pointing the rifle down at one of the barrels, "But I want to know why you sent everyone away first."

He stared down at me, moving to one of the stairways and pursing his lips in contemplation, as if unsure of where to begin. Calmly he held out his hands, letting them wave gently as he lowered himself down to the steel tiled floor,

"You don't mean that. Ebon, you've got to trust me. Don't do anything rash, because this is all going to make a whole lot more sense in a few minutes."

"Trust isn't going to come easy to you," I said, turning the gun back to him and narrowing my eye down the scope, painting the scope's dots on his chest, "And that's where you should stop. Right there."

"Remember the day I arrived? It feels like a lifetime ago now, but it was only a few months. It was before Thunfir was leader. Before the spider city appeared. Before the Thakka Cluster. I'll never forget how you welcomed me. You said this place held wonders to finally rival the nightmares you had witnessed out there in the untamed lands. It was something wonderful, worth fighting - and yes - even dying for," he paused, "But it wasn't the first time I had seen something wonderful."

"The spider city," I said, realization slowly creeping in. His words resonated in my mind, 'I heard about this place and swore my feet would not touch the ground until I reached it.'

"The nameless, faceless, soulless spider city. My home, yes. Full of soulless people. They subjugated the land, taking from it what they wished. But they did nothing in return. You see, that's the main thing the old world knew about that we don't. Sacrifice. Once upon a time people worked together until their fingers bled, not because they were slaves, but because they shared a common vision. They had an identity that extended beyond themselves. Beyond even the simple collection of friendly tribes and warbands. They crafted societies that demanded respect, and enforced order. And a long time ago, the city I was from did that as well."

"Where did it come from?" I asked.

"A time before us. Much more than that I can't tell you. Information was surprisingly lacking back home. They had theories, but inbreeding claimed most of the genuine intellect decades ago. Then one day they came across a small village, shortly after a slave rebellion left them without living laborers, and they found me. I was garbage when it came to anything useful, but an old man took mercy on me. He showed me books, taught me the principles of math, and found me to be an exceptional student. When he died, I was freed and became an engineer. Of course I also had other talents. My real skills turned out to be planning for the future. Kitchains, that fat puppet you met, was not in charge of the city. No one was. Well, I guess the machine was. The machine and whoever was worthy enough to truly operate it."

"So when you heard of the Plexis, you rode here and decided to take it all for yourself," I said, "Is that right?"

"No, I didn't ride here right when I heard of the Plexis. First I told Kitchains and a selection of the city guard that we'd need to get rid of the vagabonds following us around. After that, I told them to lag behind. I was to infiltrate the Plexis and gain its trust, then when their heavily outgunned militia started fighting with your tribe, I was to sabotage your weapons stockpile - most likely by blowing it up with the facility's stockpile of gunpowder. When they saw us crafting the Serpentine, they knew the trap was being set." He rapped his fingers against one of the barrels of gunpowder, then pulled the stopping cork from its side.

Golden sand poured out from the barrel into his upturned palm, "Only the gunpowder never made it to our weapons stockpile, or to our reactor. It was placed instead at the Achilles heel of the walking city. That explosion was enough to break what was left of the huddled peoples' will to survive."

"What about the Thakka Cluster?" I demanded, eyes transfixed on the harmless sand spilling through his fingertips onto the tiled floor, "The sending away of my tribe?"

"Eventually the Plexis and the Thakka Cluster would have attempted to vie for supremacy over the region. You were, after all, the only two fighting forces to speak of outside of wandering bandits and the non-native spider city. But neither of you could save the region the way I needed. There was nothing inherently dangerous about the Plexis tribe, so I sent them on their way - after they helped me in taking care of the city. As for the Thakka Cluster, they're animals. I can train them."

"Saved the region?" I asked incredulously. Euclid clucked his tongue,

"Ah, you probably think I'm doing this for personal gain, but I'm not. And your brother would never have done something like this unless he understood that the future of humanity was at stake. He knew you'd see reason as well, eventually. He knows you. Do what you will now, but you will eventually see things our way."

The door slid open. Crassus, as timid as I had ever seen him, walked in. His eyes were on the floor. And he was holding a gun.

"Crassus," I said, enraged. Spittle was flying from my lips and I took a single step forward and stared down at him, "Was it worth it? Was it worth betraying your family? After everything I've done for you. I've protected you, raised you, taught you everything I learned. Why? What is your goal?"

"What was your goal?" Euclid said, a note of shock entering his voice, "You were given the most incredible advantage imaginable, a city that makes everything its citizens could possibly need. What were you going to do with it? Sit inside and wait to die? This is bigger than us, bigger than any single tribe could possibly be. This windfall requires a grand vision. You won't like to hear this, but you were destined to become like the citizens of the spider city. Parts of the machine rather than masters of it. They had more in common with you than you realize. They had inherited a wondrous item from another time, and yet they used it to further their own short sighted appetites. Now that arsenal will be put to proper use. Repairs could take years, and it will take at least that much time to build up a force with a back broad enough to build a nation on. But empires must be built. Humanity must be allowed the opportunity to emerge from the wild untamed land. The land should cower before the might of mankind, not the other way around. And so must we betray your little sedentary tribe."

"I'm sorry, Ebon," Crassus said, his eyes never leaving the tiled floor, "You have no idea how much I agonized over this, but the logic was unavoidable. It became the only thing to make sense. In time I know you'll see the reason for it. And you'll forgive me. If you don't join us, you'll be kept comfortable until you change your mind. I promise you that. We're brothers."

"No," I said, dropping my rifle and staring him dead in the eyes, "We're not."

"What?" he said. There was a deep fear in him, one that had never been acknowledged between us. I watched the pillar at the core of his spirit shake slowly with his head. There was a look in him, one begging me not to say any more. It was the desperate look of fear only family could recognize. And me.

I told him.

"We're not brothers. I found you when we were very young. You were hugging a dead ripper dog. You have no family. You're alone."

It was a pregnant, tense silence that followed - that rare silence where you swear time might stop forever.

Euclid stood, his hand leaning on the nearest barrel. I could feel him calculating this turn of events, trying to factor it into the vast and flawless equation he had made a home in.

"You told me there's nothing more important than family," Crassus said meekly. His voice had an undercurrent to it, but in that moment I couldn't identify it, "And I'll never know what family is."

"You do know," I said, "They're in the hills now. You sent them away."

The equation was playing out, shaking Crassus' hand and making him nod as it entered his deepest thoughts.

"No. They're less family to me than you are," Crassus finally said raising the pistol and aiming with reddened wet eyes. There was a fire in those eyes. It was a deep fire, eating away at him. The kind of fire that leaves nothing behind, "Cover your ears, brother."

I did. And it did nothing to shut out the tremendous thunderclap that filled the room. In a brilliant flash it all shattered. I turned and saw Euclid holding his gut.

Sputtering, with blood bubbling from between his lips, he shook his head. He was trying to say something, looked almost like he would smile. He grabbed at one of the barrels to steady himself, but it tumbled over, spilling sand beside him. The sand and blood spilled into one another, blending the all too familiar colors of the thirsty land. And with that, Euclid spoke his last words, as his eyes focused in on something we couldn't see,

"Will you look at that?"

Holding his empty hands over his ears, Crassus sank to the floor shivering. The gun had already clattered to the ground. I didn't hear the sound I expected. It wasn't metal hitting metal, or Crassus sobbing, I heard the familiar hiss of a door opening. Ignoring the departure from the reality I understood, I rushed over to Crassus and knelt down, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him violently,

"Crassus!"

I thought about striking him. Every muscle in my body was constricting, ready to throttle the life out of him. And then he looked up, resigned to the fate he had sealed for himself. The fire that had been eating away at him was now gone, and I saw what was left of him in those eyes.

When we were young, only a few years after I had found him I had come back to the hovel we had taken residence in. It was an old dusty adobe structure, three full rooms piled up with refuse. But it had a table, chairs, and even two flea-bitten cots. I had told him to stay in, to remain hidden from the skies, in case there was rain. After a long day of hunting without any luck, I finally found my way back to the house. Crassus, in my mind's eye was no older than nine. It was early spring, in a year when rains would kill and poison most quarry we could find. They were desperate times.

After leaning my rifle down against the door, I spotted Crassus. He had a small bowl of water next to him, and something else on the table.

"It's a turtle," the child Crassus said in greeting that evening, "A great big one. I found him in the shadow of a great fallen tree."

"Well done," I remember saying, "At least one of us had luck today."

But when I pulled out my hunting knife to kill the creature, to sustain us for a few more days, I felt Crassus' small hand on my wrist.

"Don't," he said simply, almost scientifically, "I've figured out a way to communicate with it."

"Crassus," I said, ready to dismiss his childish fantasy in the name of our collective survival, "If you don't eat, mom and dad are going to be mad when they come back and find out I haven't been taking care of you. You're skin and bones as it is." That was another lie in those days. We had never addressed it as he grew older, the fact that we weren't looking for parents, it simply eroded away over time.

"Look," he said dipping two of his fingertips into the small bowl of water, "Turtles can understand what we say. Isn't that right, Turtle?"

Before I could protest further, he had taken his fingertips and gently touched them against the turtle's head. With its gold and black eyes staring out dumbly, it rolled its head backward, letting the water trickle down the scaly landscape of its elongated neck. It looked upward, then back down. To the eyes of a child, it did look much like a nod. I remember hearing Crassus laugh, clapping silently to himself that he could now share his discovery.

"Ask it any question," he said, "He's a traveler looking for his family."

With my stomach twisting itself in a knot over the thought of another night without food, I sighed laboriously and asked my own question,

"Would you like it if we ate you? Can we do that?"

"Ebon!" Crassus cried, "We can't eat him, he's my friend."

"If he says we can eat him, I don't think there's any harm in it. Turtles aren't like people. Some of them like being eaten. And if he's your friend, he might want you to grow up strong"

"Turtle," Crassus said, leveling his head on his hand in front of the creature and dipping his fingers in the bowl of water, "Is it true that turtles like being eaten? Do you want us to eat you?"

He placed his two fingers on the forehead of the turtle, letting the bead of water drip onto it. The turtle twisted its head sideways, letting the water droplet cascade over the ridge of its head as it slowly swayed from side to side. The water splashed in a tiny droplet onto the table, and the turtle considered it, letting its dry beak soak it up. There was no mistaking how Crassus would interpret this. He squealed again, leaping up from his chair and laughing, his eyes still transfixed on the slow creature,

"He doesn't want us to eat him. I told you, he's looking for his family."

"Then put him back outside," I said clutching my hair between my fingers, "His family isn't here."

"But Ebon," he said, "He's my friend."

"Crassus," I said turning harshly and staring into his misting eyes. That's when I first saw it - the mystery. It was an innocence, an alien optimism. He had constructed a world where we would bring the turtle with us, and he had done it using nothing but loss, ash, and bone.

Together the three of us would find our families, together we would find home. Or build it. My gaze softened, "His family isn't here. He'll have to find it on his own. Help him find the door."

That sunset as I sat, I remember staring into a hollowed out television set to the tune of his hungered whimpering, marveling at our collective madness.

That was what the fire had left behind. I realized then that Crassus was different from the rest of us. This is why he would ask the Plexis the same question a hundred different ways. This was why he had so fiercely defended our home, abandoning his gentle demeanor when the trial of battle raised its head. This was why he had betrayed us all when offered a chance to build a new world. There was an untamed, innocent hope within him. Euclid's words alone would never have been enough to turn him. There had to be a genuine belief that it would work. And now he projected that hope onto me, realizing something even I couldn't understand. I would never hurt him. Powerless, I let go of him.

So that's where this whole thing should have ended. With my hate eroding away like so much sand, I would feel him place a hand on my shoulder and he would say something hopeful,

"Let's bring our family back."

With the bad-guy shot, and the city of villains fallen, we should have just wandered into the wasteland and called back the Plexis tribe. We may have been able to catch them in less than a day if we ran. We could have even taken what we learned from Euclid, understanding that our destiny in the region was to learn how to build a better future from what we had been given.

Rather than Ebon the Waste, Ebon the Builder could stand for more than just simple furniture. It could mean Ebon the builder of cities, Ebon the founder of good laws, Ebon the worthy father of our nation.

That's how it should have happened.

I felt hands pulling me up. Rough, wild hands. The same I had felt the night I had been brought before the Thakka matriarch. Torn from my fugue, I realized we were not alone. The room had silently filled up with nearly a half dozen of the Thakka cluster's attendants.

Down the hallway through the open door, I could see the Matriarch staggering forward. She was bruised, dragging her wobbling legs and a high-powered hunting rifle as she shuffled into the room unassisted. With her free hand she was grasping the wall that her bandaged eyes could not see. I struggled briefly as the seizing hands gripped my shoulders tightly, and I felt a noose descend around my head.

"Crassus!" I shouted desperately, "Run!"

He didn't respond. They had him too, and they were looping a rope around his neck as well.

"Do not kill the traitors," the Matriarch called out, a note of scorn mingling with her own grunts of exertion as she struggled into the room. Her belly, previously swollen in the last stages of pregnancy was now empty. She heaved leg over wobbling leg and passed through the threshold into the room, sniffing the air like a wild creature, an act her followers could only hope to emulate as they strained their own noses in the still air, "Whose blood is that?"

"It is their mather," Thurrus, the matriarch's grey eyed acolyte said from behind me. Thurrus, the man who had promised me my death held the rope around my neck, "The younger one killed him."

"Euclid," the matriarch said as one of her attendants took her by the hand and brought her into the room, "Then the Plexis is ours. Remove the veil."

A younger woman walked up to the matriarch and drew a knife from her belt, gingerly placing her hand on the horns adorning the strange woman's crown, and slipped it between her face and the blindfold covering her eyes. Pulling with one swift movement, she cut the blindfold off and let it fall to the ground. Reeling from the sudden bright light, the matriarch was dazed, once again being granted the power of sight. Once her green eyes adjusted to the light, she strode up to me. Somehow she knew I was the one she had spoken with before. She knew my fear.

"Already dead," she whispered, confirming some hidden suspicion she had developed over our few brief conversations as her eyes explored me for the first time, "Your name was Ebon. Ebon the Waste. You came to offer me ashes while you lived in paradise."

Impatiently, she reached her hand out and snapped her fingers to a nearby attendant. The young woman standing beside her dove her hands into a bag at her side quickly, producing a bundle of leaves. She struck a match with her fingernail and lit the leaves, squinting and covering her own nose with her wrist as a plume of smoke drifted up from the bundle.

She handed the leaves to the matriarch who brought her face close to mine, letting the smoke from the bundle snake in through her nostrils. A gentle pleasure crossed her lips. The smoke was thick, overpowering. My eyes watered and my lungs burned as the wisps drifted over my face.

"Crassus we need," she said, "Euclid and this one are traitors. Euclid has already died, but the other - Ebon. Do not stain your blade. He will breathe his last gratefully, slain by his own hand. Thurrus, do what you will to ensure that happens."

"I will see to it," Thurrus said with a twisted grin, tightening the noose around my neck, "He will graciously fall on the blade when I give it to him. I promise you on my life."

The matriarch turned to Crassus,

"Ebon's suffering stops when you agree to help us."

"Help you?" I asked, feeling the breath stolen from me moment by moment as the noose tightened, "Help you do what?"

"What did Euclid want with this place? He was going to turn it into a war machine, wasn't he? My scouts described the images the walking city was projecting on its screen. It was a glimpse into their past and our own future. Only in our wake, nothing will remain."

A laconic cheer erupted from the small assembly.

"Burn them all."

"Time to go," Thurrus said roughly jerking the noose and dragging me from the room, "Crassus, you follow. We're going home."

Within moments I had stumbled and was being dragged behind Thurrus with Euclid in tow. The rope around my neck was already strangling the life from me. I could feel the beating of my heart in my ears, the thickening of my tongue and every vein in my eyes.

I gasped once, but the movement was enough to send electricity through my whole body. I saw Crassus walking behind me, terrified. Another Thakka Cluster attendant was escorting him, walking behind with my hunting rifle poking him in the back. He forced himself to watch as I grasped the air toward him, dragging by the rope around my neck as we reached the elevator and it hummed open, indulging us with gentle music. My shoes squeaked on the floor as they dragged me in.

Inside the elevator our captors jeered, and Thurrus lifted my whole body up by the rope with only one of his arms. I dangled with my feet too weak to actually stand.

"Careful, Thurrus," the other said, laughter nearly incapacitating him, "He's about to black out. Can't have that." Their laughter gave way to a steady rushing hum. Consciousness fled, and I heard something else.

"Thurrus," a familiar voice said as the elevator doors opened, "Incredible."

Part Three

The next thing I remember, I was staring into broken lips framed by a thick white beard. A hand was slapping my face, drumming an intense pain throughout my head. Every nerve in my body was screaming, and I could hardly breathe. The rope still around my neck was on fire now, rubbing abrasions earned on the long dragging trek to the elevator.

"Pay attention, boy," that same familiar voice said, "I need you alive."

"Thunfir," I said, my vision slowly returning to normal. It was our leader, Thunfir. He smiled broadly as my eyes rolled around, trying to make sense of the situation.

"Did you see it?" he asked, pulling me up by the hand. Standing was not an option, and my legs quickly shuddered slack beneath me. Crassus grabbed my arm and wrapped it over his shoulder, steadying me. Thunfir grabbed my other arm, raising me up even as he slumped down. I coughed, the rope still hanging around my neck and stinging me with every movement,

"See what?"

"Thurrus got his rematch," Thunfir said grinning as we huffed down the hallway, "This time I was only outnumbered three-to-one. Guess who the victor was."

"Where are we going?" I asked, my feet barely touching the floor as they carried me between them.

"We're leaving," Thunfir said, "I thought it was obvious."

Without resistance we made it from the elevator to the front doors of the complex. As we reached the glass doors at the front of the building, they slid open without complaint, and we stepped outside. With the first step I took onto the dirt, I felt my weight deaden, carried between Thunfir and Crassus. How heavy I must have been during that journey, I can only imagine. Thunfir hummed to himself one of his old drinking songs, a strange tune I hadn't heard before. Crassus was staring ahead, deep in thought.

Freedom.

We were moving forward, closing in on the shadow that spread beneath the spider city, spreading outward like a great inky pool. When finally we reached the nearest leg, we sat down and rested in its ominous shadow, taking refuge from the sun's harsh rays. I laid down in the dust and breathed. Strength was finally starting to return to me. Crassus stared down the path we had come from, studying the gleaming white hull of our former home. Finally, after a moment he spoke,

"I guess we left your rifle behind."

"The lad'll get another one," Thunfir said, coughing wetly into his hand, "We could have lost much more than that."

"You'll need it soon," Crassus said sternly, looking back at the old man, "The Thakka will notice we're missing, and they'll track us down. It's inevitable."

"We'll be a few days older then," Thunfir said groaning and pulling himself up, braced against the wall of a leg next to us, "Ebon, can you walk?"

I strained to stagger to my feet, pulling the noose off from around my neck and letting it fall to the ground. My legs buckled, rebelled. Somehow, I forced them to let me stand. I took a few shuffling steps forward, and nodded. Shortly after that I had stumbled and was resting on one bruised knee. It was nearly unbearable.

"The rest of the Plexis tribe will be well provisioned," Crassus said, eyes still on that gleaming pearl in the distance, "At least for a few months. I made sure of it. They headed west. Probably get stuck for a few days at the first river they run across."

"They'll be easy to find," Thunfir said, pulling a knife he found embedded in the dirt, "Especially if they're not hiding their tracks."

"Yes. They will," Crassus said grimly. His hand was against the side of the city leg and he turned to me, a look of cold calculation on his brow, "They won't find you, the Thakka I mean. I'll make sure of that too."

Realization came quickly as I saw the certainty he held with those words. Wordlessly, I was shaking my head. Thunfir looked between us both, and huffed once, coughing out weak laughter,

"So you have a final trick up your sleeve, then?"

"He means," I said shuffling foot over foot toward him, "He's going to use the 14 KT to kill himself. Put that right out of your head. You're coming with us." I reached out with both hands, grabbing him by the shoulders with a grip like iron, using the last of my strength to clutch to him and start shuffling, "Keep walking, dammit! We won't follow the rest of them. Forget about the Plexis tribe. We'll find a new path."

"Remember what you said," Crassus said stopping us both. There was a note of decisive serenity in his voice. It was the sound of gentle death. He put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me away with surprising strength, sending me clattering to the ground, "They're our family too. You and Thunfir will have to walk six miles to avoid the blast. I'll give you two hours to get there. I can't give you more than that."

"Crassus," Thunfir said grabbing my arm to help me up, "We can figure this out together. If there's a bomb in the city there's lots we can do. Set some sort of timer, or launch it further away so that we're just barely out of the blast radius. Encased inside the metal city, we may be alright."

"That will be a problem," Crassus said, "Euclid and I took a look at it after you left, Ebon. That's another promise I broke. I told Euclid about the bomb. We ran diagnostics on the launching mechanism the very night we found it. The reason it was never used was because the gun housing it didn't work. It's stuck where it is, entombed within the city."

"I'll do it," I said, "Or Thunfir. Or anyone else."

"How would you do it?" Crassus said, "You don't know how these things work. I've spent whole days at a time, weeks learning how to talk to machines. I know how to make a weapon like that work."

"Never," I said, "No. Not you."

"When you get back to the others," Crassus said, "Tell them it was just the reactor. Tell them it blew up. Don't tell them about the rest. Please, Ebon?"

"Thunfir," I said, "Talk some sense into him. Make him understand that we can survive without this madness. We'll start a new tribe. We'll find another way."

Thunfir looked long at me, staring benevolently into my heart with his old tired eyes. And in that moment, against every wish I could possibly have, Thunfir became a leader. With a gentle nod, he finally came to understand the meaning of that most basic principle of leadership. Thunfir finally understood sacrifice.

"Crassus," he said, "we promise they'll never know." He grasped me by the shoulder roughly, gripping my sleeve as he turned his head over his shoulder back to Crassus, "Six miles. We will make the journey in time, Crassus."

"Let go of me!" I cried out, grabbing the knife he now held in his belt, "We're all leaving together." Thunfir easily picked me up like a rag doll by the arm, causing the knife to cascade and fall back to the ground. With his arm pulled back and his hand balled into a fist, he addressed me,

"Ebon, it is the only way." His fist shot out and connected with my jaw, knocking my brains against my skull and spinning the world around me. With me incapacitated, Thunfir hoisted me up and threw me over his shoulder. I could hear him and Crassus talking as I tried to regain control of my vocal chords.

Thunfir was still weakened from the fever, but there was an understanding now, a temporary strength that would tear his muscles and leave him weakened for months afterward. Maybe forever. But for now, he would be strong. I could hear his voice behind me, "Crassus, good luck."

"Goodbye, Thunfir. Don't ever forget who you are. You're a man of great strength. And, if I may say so, you're a good friend. Look after Ebon."

"You, Crassus," Thunfir said, "You're a strange sort."

"Let me say goodbye to my brother," Crassus said, and I felt Thunfir's great bulk shift me down his arm. He held me by the armpits, his tremendous hands straining to carry me on my shuffling, useless feet. Crassus was blurry, waving from side to side. I saw the shape of him lean down and pick something up off the ground, "These things really are indestructible."

"That thing I said earlier," I said, choking still from the blow Thunfir had landed, "You are my brother. It wasn't true."

He knew I was lying, and yet he smiled. And with that he placed my glasses back on my nose. He was calm, nearly grinning. He reached in his pocket and produced a small folded white paper. Handing it to Thunfir, he glanced back at me,

"Goodbye, brother."

He walked over to one of the spider city's corpses, an armored man stripped of his weapons and his gear. He had a belt still connecting him to the tether that had dropped him to the ground level. With a click of a button on the belt, Crassus released it, sending the corpse collapsing to the ground. He placed the belt, still connected to the rope around his own waist, and flipped another switch on it.

The rope leading up to the city began to ascend, pulling him upward into a solitary beam of light. As we watched him go up, the aperture he passed through slowly began to shrink, leaving only a pinpoint of light behind.

"Two hours," Thunfir said, "We'd better get moving."

"No," I said in weak protest, "We could still stop him." I was struggling. Struggling both to free myself from his grasp as he pulled my arm over his shoulders, and to keep my feet moving one over the other up the hill for the last time. As we reached the crest of the valley, I dared look back down onto the plate city, but couldn't see Crassus. He was deep within the machine by that point, working to set up the 14 KT for detonation.

We made the journey with some difficulty, straining every weakened muscle to keep pace with our projected march. As the sun set, we approached an old ruined building, an adobe structure with thick walls. Night fell quickly, and the ripper dogs were starting to howl in the distance.

By this point, my weakened legs were failing to take steps more often than they were working and I was all but being dragged the last bit of our journey. With his free hand, in the cascading glow of moonlight, Thunfir slammed his fist against the old door of the building.

Inside we found two cots, a table, and two chairs. The old man set me down on the cot further from the window and took one of the chairs for himself. All was silent, all was dark as we waited and rested.

And then night became day as a tremendous man-made sun rose on the opposite side of our house in the distance. I shut my eyes and held my hands over my ears to keep out the tremendous distant blast, but nothing could contain it. I bellowed, screamed to shut out the sound, a scream in that small house set to rival the one Thunfir had let out when he first summoned Kitchains. It was a scream that never stopped, one that would always echo deep within me. And then the blast ceased.

We emerged from the house, just as broken as before, noting a thin black shadow covering everything that the light had touched. In silence we returned inside. It was so quiet. No ripper dogs, no howls of contempt from the wilderness. They had all been silenced. Everything was hiding. This was a new world, one that no longer belonged to them. The sun had risen, and in a flash it was gone. For the rest of the night I heard nothing except my own breathing.

In the morning I noticed the piece of paper sitting on the table where Thunfir had placed it. With shaking fingers I unfolded it, looking down to see the same pyramid of rats Crassus had given me all those months ago in our little apartment over shaped potatoes and black algae noodles. Beneath the lowest column of rats there were words. I read them aloud, awakening Thunfir,

"So many came from one." Thunfir rose, rubbing a thin layer of dust from his eyes and sat up,

"What is that, anyway?"

"It's from Crassus," I said, "It's about the Plexis. The drones that built it are still up there. It took a long time to make them, but they're up now, and nothing told them to stop building."

Thunfir looked long at me, leaning up weakly and groaning as his muscles screamed at him to stop moving. Leveling his tired eyes at me, he asked,

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not sure," I said, "I think Crassus believed there would be more things like the Plexis. Things that will start coming to Earth."

"A second one?"

"And a third, and more than that in time. The legacy of the architects."

Thunfir rose, taking the piece of paper from me and scrutinizing it,

"So many came from one. Are you sure that's what he meant?"

"No," I said, "I don't expect I could speak for him. Not after all of this. It's a thing to do with numbers, and numbers aren't my language. It could mean anything."

"Ebon," Thunfir said, leaning his shoulder heavily against the cool wall and staring into my hands, "Given that you've lost Crassus, I think it's likely that you would want to go on a hungry walk alone out there. You don't know where you'll end up, and that will tempt you. It should. You can forget about everything, leave us all behind." He steadied his hand against the wall, pulling himself up with a nearly feeble grunt, "But I would advise against that. I could say we need you, but it would be a lie. I could say you need us. But I don't know that. The truth is, it will be at least a three day journey to catch up with our little convoy. And I don't want to spend three days walk without talking to someone. If you are going to head out on your own, make the decision in a few days. Not now."

One day I will go to my grave never having been baptized. But I do remember when it all started, the morning I awoke and looked down to see the Plexis Shopping Center. I don't know what's there now, as I never could bring myself to return. I suppose after so many years, with the radiation dispersed, it now is like it was when we first spied the valley. And if someone hasn't found a way to tame the fires there, you may still find a field of burning wheat.

The End
Thank you for taking a chance on checking out an indie series. If you enjoyed this first Chronicle of Ebon the Waste, it will soon be followed by two more where I stay true to the aesthetic and humanity of this first one, but plunge characters headfirst into a world of action, peril, and intrigue.

Life and Limb

"What Do You Suppose the Horses Know?" That's the question the insane cigar smoking man asked Adon Still before they tossed him on the back of a modified horse and sent him into the wasteland. His mission is simple. They want an object from before the war. Something that's been building onto itself in the deep heart of space. And if he doesn't do it, they take his bride away.

Adon Still isn't some unstoppable war machine. He's not a hero destined to save the world. And as far as scruples go, he's a cold blooded killer. But when a bullet knocks him down in a world without doctors, he's forced to ask himself how far he's willing to go to beat the clock and save the only bit of decency he's ever seen in this world.

What would you do to save the person you loved? Would you tear yourself apart? Would you kill a man? Would you descend into a nightmarish world that had evolved beyond the need for reason? For Adon Still, the answer is yes.

Life and Limb is the next gripping installment of the Ebon the Waste series as told by a man who has nothing to lose as he wages war on the savagery of the waste around him, and within himself. And if he succeeds, he might discover what's behind the rumors of an object that impossibly started crafting itself in space. Here's a quick excerpt I think you'll enjoy.

My broken leg was out, weighted down by the steel rebar pinning the weakened appendage. With my other leg sliding across the sawdust and the sweat clinging to my hands, I locked eyes with her. I knew she was terrified, but her hand slowly closed around the lever Cyril had used before to push the blade along, to rip into wooden planks as if they were twigs.

"Adon," she said.

"Do it!" I screamed through thick spittle, contorted tension flooding my reddened face, blurring my vision. I gripped the steel chain behind me, wrapped around the back edge of the table. My heart was thumping in my ears, beating like the drums of a death cult in the throes of ecstasy. My fingers were stretched above me, tracing the chain's rivets and locks, trying to focus every bit of my awareness far away from what was about to happen. Locked in that moment I screamed again, "Do it now!"

In a single sickening crack I lost all capacity to form memory.

They say my screams woke up everyone in town. They say it went out into the waste, woke up an army that had been sleeping for nearly a generation in the dust. They say, the storytellers, that the army rose from it with weapons in hand, mistaking that single sustained cry for the sound of a whole war being fought inside one man.

They're all liars.

Also, available on Amazon

Rustbaby Wonderland

Her name is Detende, and she is the master of the Rustbaby Wonderland. It is a doomed place, but one which lives in an uncharacteristic harmony thanks to her. But as the mysterious - and possibly omniscient - narrator describes the events happening around him with the cold humor of a machine, it becomes clear that this perfect peace she has managed to enforce will soon be disrupted by an unstoppable clash of wills.

But what is the machine telling this story? And why has an army gathered at the bottom of the Mesa known as Rustbaby Wonderland, convinced Detende is the most dangerous person in the world?

Rustbaby Wonderland is the compelling conclusion to the Ebon the Waste Trilogy, and much like "Life and Limb," it pulls no punches when it comes to the far reaching consequences of betrayal in a merciless scorched Earth. Here's the first bit in that story.

The Rustbaby Wonderland is awake before dawn. Six shipper men are distributing small loaves of nut bread to the various performers. Today's show will be postponed yet again, but foragers are readying themselves to descend to the spiral path to gather butternips. They take care not to walk all the way to the mesa's base.

Detende, self-described daughter of God is sitting in her tent. Her hands are cradling the head of an oafish monster of a man with five hundred milligrams of hardware embedded to the base of his spine. Thermal imaging indicates a core temperature of 106.2 degrees. She won't ask her father for drought yet. Now she's asking for something else.

"Please don't let him die," she whispers as her eyes tighten shut. She says this, but no one seems to hear.

I hear. I perceive everything. My attention turns down to the base of the mesa where I look impossibly out into the horizon.

Beyond a siege line of grey uniformed men, men who don't dare bring their weapons to the mesa's top, I can see three riders approaching. The center rider has blue eyes, which I stare into even though he's a flicker on the horizon. Detende doesn't know he's approaching. No one does. Not even the scouts staring through improvised scopes.

"Detende," I say to myself, knowing she will never hear me, "I believe the brute's death is the least of your worries at the moment."

There is more in the distance, approaching. A blight storm. Projected chance of survival, negligible.

Blight: (n) Regional neologism used to describe fallout particles.

I update tomorrow's forecast accordingly, and then prepare to shut down for the next six years after it's all done. If it rolls through here, which it definitely will, I will be alone in silence for a while. Perhaps eternity.
Thank you for letting me plug my work. I have other titles available, including the novel "Our War with Molly Nayfack" and the comedy/horror serial "Calefactory" which I'm working on with fellow author Zachary Seibert to finish the first season of, but I wanted to stick to plugging the other Ebon stories here. If you'd like to know about the other stuff I'll be putting out in the future, check out my author's page.

If you've got a question about Ebon the Waste, or Crassus, or the Plexis, or the world they grew up in, visit my fiction blog and let me know in the comments  
puppetsonthewall.blogspot.com.  
I love that kind of thing. And there's a lot happening behind the scenes in this world - as you can probably guess.

I'd like to dedicate this story to my brothers Mike and Arthur who I grew up throwing axes with, climbing trees, and laying waste to the world around us. Whether we were reenacting scenes from Aliens in the chitinous shell of our imaginations or screaming "It's not fair" in Burgess Meredith's voice as we hurled one another off roofs onto piles of leaves, I knew nothing was safe when I was with them - except the three of us.

Also if you enjoyed this story I could use your feedback. I don't play the indie author card that much, but I am kind of running this operation without an industry behind me. Some honest feedback and a rating would go a long way toward helping me if you enjoyed this story. You the reader are what makes something like this worth doing and I'd like to know what you thought. I want to make the kind of stories I want to read. You have my sincere gratitude for having similar taste if you like it. Especially if you're the kind of nerd that gets any of my arcane historical or technical references. Let me know what moved or intrigued you, and I'll hold that in my mind when I write more of these. Thank you.

