The grass was dry and cool beneath him.
Ruben sat with his knees pulled up, forearms resting on them, and stared at nothing in particular. The geothermal warmth moved through the air in slow, even waves, like the breath of something enormous and patient, and from out here the ambient light of the crystal ceiling spread across everything in that particular amber-to-pale-gold gradient that his brain kept trying to file under late afternoon and kept failing to, because there was no sun to set, and the light came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Oscar was going to be alright.
He held onto that first, the way you hold onto the one solid thing in a room that's moving. The old woman had said it clearly, without softening it into false comfort, and he believed her precisely because she hadn't softened it. Oscar was going to be alright. That was real. That was the thing that mattered.
The rest of it...
He exhaled.
The rest of it was that Lance Onida had been fifteen feet away from him, had looked directly at him, had closed his fist, and the world had ended. Just like that. No negotiation, no warning, no moment where Ruben's intelligence or his dragons or Corbin's absolute refusal to go down had made the slightest difference. Lance had decided, and gravity had agreed, and that had been that. If whatever had brought them here had instead deposited them at Lance's feet on a dry surface somewhere...
He didn't finish that thought. He'd already run it. The answer was the same each time.
And Oscar still needed a hospital. Whatever Maret could do here, and clearly she could do quite a lot, Oscar needed proper stabilisation, the kind that required equipment and trained staff and probably specific compounds to counteract whatever Paul had been pumping into him.
He needed to get the boy moved as soon as Maret said it was safe, and to do that he needed to understand the geography of wherever he was, and to understand the geography he needed...
He stopped.
He sniffed.
He sniffed again, more deliberately, turning his face slightly into the moving air.
Nothing. Or, not nothing, but the absence of the specific something he'd been breathing his entire life without registering it as a presence until now. No exhaust. No coal-grey undertone of industrial smoke. No wet-brick smell of city rain on tarmac, no chemical sweetness of cleaning agents on crowded public floors, no undertow of a thousand compressed human lives sharing recycled air in close quarters.
The inner cities of Ostara had a smell that Ruben had simply accepted as what air was, everywhere has it, the compound in Ostara had it, Brumália had it in concentrated, fog-thickened form, layered over with the damp and the particular metallic bite of fog.
This smelled like...
Clean. It smelled clean. Not clean the way something was clean after being washed, but clean the way something was when it had never been anything else. The air here had notes of mineral-cold stone, of the rich, turned-earth depth of the fungal forest behind the house, of fresh water somewhere nearby, of something faintly sweet that he was beginning to associate with the bioluminescence itself, as if light, down here, had a smell.
He'd been breathing it since he woke up and hadn't noticed until now, because his body had simply been grateful.
He looked up.
He'd been avoiding looking up properly. He wasn't sure why, some instinct that the sky being wrong would cost him something he couldn't afford to spend right now. But he looked up.
The clouds were not right.
They were not wrong, exactly, they were too much. Too present, too vivid, hanging at a height that felt closer than clouds were supposed to get, and they moved differently, without the suggestion of wind behind them, more like the slow deliberate turning of something that was generating its own logic. They were not white. They were the deep, swirling blue-purple of a bruise caught in good light, threaded through with teal where the bioluminescent crystals above caught their undersides, and as he watched, a slow current moved through the nearest bank and the colours shifted, the teal bleeding into something almost silver, the purple deepening at its edges, and it was, objectively, the most alien thing he had ever seen and also objectively, undeniably beautiful.
He stared.
Somewhere up in the upper atmosphere, too distant and too faint to be certain, something golden moved through the cloud layer, and for just a moment the mist lit from within, a warm amber pulse that spread through the purple-teal like veins.
He looked at that for a while.
Neth-Solara.
He turned the name over. He had a good memory for geography, he'd spent enough time obsessively reading about Ostara's territories to have built a reasonable internal map, and Neth-Solara appeared on none of it.
Not a rumour. Not a disputed territory. Not even the kind of deliberately vague blank space that sometimes appeared on maps when a government wanted to indicate nothing to see here without technically lying. Just. Absent. As if it did not exist in any record anyone had thought to make, or had ever been allowed to make, or...
He thought about the old woman's face when he said Dario Kosta.
The way she'd gone still the way deep water goes still, not calm, but pressurised.
He pressed his thumbnail against his opposite palm slowly. Thought about it.
He did not want to think badly of Dario. That was the honest version of it, and he was at least honest with himself, even when he wasn't with anyone else. Dario Kosta was the first adult in his life he'd been able to hold up as something other than an example of what people became when they stopped trying.
Everything online, every record, every interview, Dario was good. Principled. The kind of person who attracted other principled people, who built things that lasted, who had raised Bruno Fernando, and Bruno was, Bruno had unlocked their cuffs and walked away, had looked at two cornered kids and made a quiet choice. People like Bruno didn't come from nowhere.
There had been the Shinko-Ken business. A quick campaign, barely a week, politically messy in the way all border disputes were politically messy. But war was war. Ruben had no illusions about war. Bad things happened in them and that wasn't always the same as the people in charge being bad.
Except.
A genocide was not a border dispute. A genocide was not a bad thing that happened inside a war the way bad weather happened inside a season. A genocide was a decision made at a level where Dario Kosta had certainly been present, because Dario Kosta had been present at every level of consequence in Ostara for almost sixty years, and I wasn't there and I didn't know were things that got said afterward, in the particular register of people who had been there and had known.
He didn't know. He genuinely did not know, and he was aware that not knowing was different from it not being true.
Alfred Stein had been trying to make Dario into a monster and Ruben had resisted that, had filed it under powerful man's enemies rewriting his story, had held onto it as a manipulation to be seen through.
He stared at the glowing, impossible clouds.
He was less certain now than he had been this morning. He wasn't sure what that meant yet. He set it aside in the way he set things aside when they were too large to be useful right now, not buried, just shelved.
The sound of the door was quiet, but he heard it.
Fenn came around the side of the house with the particular energy of someone who has been waiting for a reasonable interval to pass before doing exactly what they were going to do anyway. He had a small, composed smile on his face, the smile of someone actively managing their own enthusiasm, and his glowing paint-marks caught the ambient light and flickered faintly as he moved. His eyes were doing something complicated that he clearly believed was subtle.
He stopped a few feet from Ruben and looked at him.
Then he walked around him. An almost complete circle, slow, not rude, just thorough, the way someone walks around a thing they are trying to understand from all angles. Ruben watched him do it with the flat, patient expression he reserved for situations that he had decided not to escalate.
Fenn came back around to face him.
He looked at Ruben's face. Then up, at the ceiling, at the crystal dome and the glowing clouds and the vast amber-lit expanse of the geode sky above them. Then back at Ruben.
He pointed upward with one finger.
"So," said Fenn. "You're from up there."
Fenn was not a tall kid.
Ruben clocked that first now that he was standing, they were close to the same height, which meant Fenn still had growing to do or Ruben had less than he'd like to think about. He was wiry in the way of kids who were permanently in motion, with the particular leanness that came not from deprivation but from a body that simply burned everything it was given because it was always doing something.
His face was open and angular, not quite finished yet in the way fourteen-year-old faces weren't, and his dark eyes caught the ambient light with a brightness that had less to do with the glow of the paint-markings on his cheeks and more to do with whatever was happening behind them, which was apparently quite a lot, always.
The markings themselves were smeared with the casual confidence of habit rather than ceremony, dots along both cheekbones, a curved line across the bridge of his nose, and in the cavern's diffuse amber warmth they pulsed with a faint, living luminescence, very softly, the way embers pulse when you breathe near them. His hair was dark and close-cropped, and he was wearing a sleeveless vest in a deep rust-brown over a long-sleeved undershirt, with the rolled-up, slightly battered quality of clothing that had been worn many times and was valued for its usefulness rather than its condition.
He was looking at Ruben like Ruben was the most interesting problem he'd encountered in recent memory, and was making only moderate efforts to disguise this.
Ruben looked back at him.
Then he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Ostara."
Something lit up in Fenn's face, not surprise, because clearly he'd already worked this out, but the specific delight of a confirmed hypothesis. He made a small, involuntary sound that was almost a laugh, and then composed himself, and then immediately stopped composing himself because the composure wasn't really his natural register.
"Okay," he said, and sat himself down on the grass a few feet from Ruben with his knees crossed, like he'd been invited to do exactly that. "Okay, so. What's it like?"
Ruben blinked. "What's what like."
"Up there." Fenn gestured at the crystal ceiling with both hands, broadly, as if indicating not just the dome above them but everything beyond it, the ocean, the rock, the surface world, the whole complicated mess of it. "The sky-world. All of it. The real sky." He paused. "I've read everything in our library about it. Which is..." He made a face. "Not much. And what there is, is." He tilted his head, searching for the word. "It is very much written by people who are not interested in telling you what things look like."
"What is it like?"
"Like, every book about the surface world is about what happened to our people there. Which is important, I know that, I'm not," He pressed his palms flat on his knees in a gesture that looked like something he'd developed for situations where his thoughts were moving faster than his words. "It's just. The history we have is one note. One note, the whole way through. The world above is pain. The world above is the place our grief came from. The world above will consume you. And that's..." He looked up at the fake sky. "That's the whole picture we get. Like a place that only exists to do damage."
Ruben was quiet for a moment.
"From the way your grandmother reacted," he said, "that might just be accurate. For her and a lot of people on this island."
Fenn's expression flickered. Not dismissal, he wasn't that kind of kid, but something more complicated. An understanding sitting alongside a wanting that hadn't yet resolved into anything.
"Yeah." He picked at a blade of grass by his knee. "Yeah, I know."
"She went through something dreadful." Ruben said it straightforwardly, without trying to soften it into something easier to hold. "Whatever happened to the people here, that kind of thing doesn't leave. It's not going to leave. It's going to be in her until her last day, and it should be, because it was real and it was done to her and... she doesn't owe me or anyone the performance of being over it."
Fenn was quiet.
His face had gone to somewhere more serious than he usually seemed to live, that open, mobile brightness settling into something steadier and more careful. He nodded slowly.
"She doesn't talk about it directly," he said. "Not to me. Some of the elders do, in school, in the history lessons. But nanna, she gets a certain way." He paused. "Like earlier. I've seen it before. Something trips it, and she's just, somewhere else for a little while. Somewhere I can't reach her."
Ruben nodded.
He thought about his mother and then he thought about something else instead because that was a door he was not going to open right now.
"From what she said, from what you've said," He looked at the ground. "It sounds like my grandfather and a lot of the Paladins put your people through untold grief. A long time ago and right up until the end." He paused. The word grandfather still sat strangely in his mouth. It was not a word he'd had use for, growing up. Dario Kosta had been a concept before he'd been a person, and the concept had been almost entirely constructed by other people's testimony, and today he was less sure of the construction than he'd been yesterday. "For whatever that's worth from me."
Fenn looked at him carefully. Then he nodded again.
"In school," he said, "they told us about the two waves. The first, the first was when the Paladins and the army came to the Archipelago and hit the biggest island. Yth-Mora, it was called." He said the name with the particular precision of someone reciting something they'd been taught to say correctly. "Most populated island in the whole chain. First strike. They burned a lot of it. A lot of people didn't..." He stopped. Started again. "After that, in the second wave, it wasn't fighting anymore. It was, rounding up. Moving people. They built things on the remaining islands. Structures. At first we thought," He made a gesture. "I mean, they thought, the elders, they thought it was some kind of prison or camp. Somewhere to be contained."
Ruben's stomach was moving in a way he was keeping off his face.
"But that's not what it was," he said.
Fenn shook his head. His voice had gone quieter. "No. They were building labs. They wanted something from our people. Something specific, the elders aren't totally clear on what, or if they know they don't say. But the structure wasn't about keeping people locked up. It was about..." He searched for the word. "Using them."
Ruben thought about Oscar's arms. The constellation of old needle marks. The drug cocktail. Paul Strahm in the sewers with a child strapped to a machine, talking about biological batteries.
He thought about how old those marks on Oscar's arms had been. How long someone had been doing that to a child, and what the infrastructure of doing that to a child at scale looked like, and where the funding came from, and whose signature was at the top of the authorisation.
The odd guilt arrived the way it had been threatening to since Maret's finger had been pointed at him, not the guilt of having done something, but the guilt of having benefited from a world whose costs you hadn't been required to pay and hadn't looked for. He had been in Ostara for three years. He was not Ostaran by birth or blood or choice. He had arrived there the way you arrived in a dream, without context, without consent, and had simply tried to survive it.
But three years was long enough to carry a passport. Long enough to wear a nation's shape without examining who paid for the tailoring.
He noted, at the edge of his thoughts, that his birthday was coming up. Sixteen. It occurred, briefly, and then he set it aside, because it was not a useful thought and Oscar needed a hospital and Corbin was missing somewhere two hundred and fifty miles underground.
He looked at Fenn.
"I'm going to find a way out," he said. Not a boast. Just a statement of what was true. "For me and for Oscar and for Corbin, when I find him. And when I do, I'm not going to speak about this place. Not to anyone." He held Fenn's gaze to make sure it landed correctly. "I mean that. Your people have been through enough. I'm not bringing anyone else to their door."
Fenn studied him for a moment. He had the look of someone running a quick, instinctive assessment, not cynical, just careful, the particular carefulness of someone who had grown up hearing what the surface world did to people who trusted it.
Then a slow smile spread across his face. Genuine, warm, and carrying in it something that looked very much like relief.
"I hope you stay long enough," he said, "before you figure out how to do that." He picked up the grass blade he'd been pulling at and turned it between his fingers. "I want to know more about it. The world up there. I want to come to my own conclusions about it, not just," He glanced back at the house, briefly, with a look that was not disrespectful but that held something private and complicated. "Not just inherit everyone else's."
Ruben looked at him.
He thought, not for the first time, and not for the last, that fourteen was an age that got very little credit for the amount of genuine thinking it was capable of. "Yeah," he said. "Alright."
They sat in a companionable quiet for a moment, the geothermal warmth moving between them, the glowing nebula clouds shifting slowly in the crystal-lit sky above.
Then the door opened.
The knock came first, a single, practical knock, the knock of someone who had been raised to announce themselves, and then Maret appeared in the doorframe. She had removed the working apron and replaced it with a plain dark coat buttoned to the collar, and she had a small canvas bag over one shoulder that had the look of a thing always kept packed.
Her dark blue eyes moved to Ruben with an expression that was not warm but was not the open grief of earlier either. It was the expression of a woman who had composed herself and intended to stay composed, and who was offering a very specific and limited version of peace.
"The boy is stable enough to move," she said. "His temperature has come down to a manageable point. He needs a proper facility, and there is one in the second residential tier, a twenty-minute walk from here."
Ruben was on his feet before she finished the sentence. "Thank you"
She stepped into the doorway.
Not blocking it exactly, but occupying it in a way that was not accidental. She looked at him steadily.
"I will take you," she said. "I know the path and I know the staff at the facility. You do not." A pause. "You will follow my lead on how we present this. What we say and what we do not say. Understood?"
It was not a question that particularly invited negotiation. Ruben understood this and nodded.
"Understood."
From somewhere inside the house came a rapid series of sounds, something being moved from a shelf, the thud of a drawer being opened too fast, a muffled noise that may have been Fenn talking to himself in the private shorthand of a person who narrated their own actions. Then footsteps.
Fenn appeared behind his grandmother in the doorway, slightly breathless and wearing an additional layer, a knitted outer jacket in dark green with the thermal-paint marks on his cheeks freshly applied, still wet enough at the edges to catch the light in a brighter smear, and carrying in one hand a flat, rectangular pad of drawing skin stretched over thin wooden backing, its surface covered in small, dense sketches, and in the other hand a short charcoal pencil that he was already tucking behind his ear.
Maret turned to look at him with the expression of a woman who had anticipated this development and had not yet decided whether to address it.
"I'm coming," Fenn said, with the specific tone of someone establishing a fact rather than asking a question.
"Fenn...!"
"I know the second tier better than you do." He said this with perfect, cheerful, devastating accuracy. "You always take the long way past the Sylthas quarter because you like the lamp-posts there."
A beat of silence.
Maret looked at him. He looked back at her with his glowing markings and his pencil behind his ear and his pad of sketches and his absolute commitment to the position.
She exhaled through her nose.
"Put on proper shoes," she said.
He was already gone back inside before she finished the sentence, his footsteps rapid and light across the stone floor.
Ruben looked at Maret.
She did not look back at him, but something at the very corner of her mouth, barely anything, a ghost of a thing, shifted very slightly toward something that might, in better circumstances, have been the distant relative of a smile.
"Thank you," Ruben said again, quietly.
She looked at him then. The dark blue eyes held him steadily.
"Don't thank me yet," she said. "You haven't met the city."