The track that ran from Maret's house toward the second residential tier was not a road in any formal sense, it was the kind of path that existed because enough people had walked the same way enough times that the ground had simply accepted the arrangement and the necessary people built on the make-shift blueprint.
It wound along the lower edge of the fungal forest, just inside the treeline where the phos-pillar mushrooms stood in their broad, ribbed columns and cast soft lateral light across the moss floor, and it was wide enough for two people walking comfortably or three people walking with the particular negotiated choreography of people who did not yet know each other's rhythms.
Ruben had Oscar on his back.
The boy weighed almost nothing, which was the part that kept catching at him in the quiet. He'd positioned him carefully, arms hooked under Oscar's knees, the boy's cheek resting against his shoulder, head lolling in the boneless, absolute way of a child in deep sleep, and Oscar had not stirred, had simply transferred his rapid, shallow breathing from the cot to Ruben's back without interruption, as if the location of the crisis was secondary to its continuation. The heat came through even now, faint but present, radiating through the thin fabric of Oscar's clothing and settling against Ruben's neck like a held coal.
Fenn was humming.
It was not a formal tune, or if it was, it had been personalised to the point of abstraction, a meandering, low sound that moved around a central melody without quite committing to it, the kind of humming that happened when someone's mind was occupied with something more interesting than silence.
He walked slightly ahead, and his thermal-paint markings caught the phos-pillar light as he moved, flickering softly against his cheekbones, his drawing pad tucked under one arm and his pencil already in his fingers despite there being nothing in front of him to draw yet.
Maret walked beside Ruben.
She was not a fast walker. She was a consistent walker, a particular distinction, the kind of pace that did not vary uphill or downhill or over uneven ground, that had clearly been calibrated over decades into something that could be maintained indefinitely without the body having to consult anyone about it. She had her canvas bag across one shoulder and her coat buttoned to the collar against the cool undertone in the air.
She looked at Oscar. Then at Ruben.
"You don't have an easier way of transporting him?" she said. It was not quite a question and not quite a suggestion. It was the tone of someone probing at the edges of a subject they suspected was larger than the surface of it.
Ruben considered the question.
What she was actually asking, what the shape of the question implied, given everything she'd already taken in, was clear enough. She was asking if he had an Ego. And beneath that, she was asking him to account for himself more fully than he had.
He thought about her face when he'd said Ego in the side room. The widening of those dark blue eyes, the quality of the silence that had followed. He thought about Fenn's face, the involuntary forward lean of someone who has just heard something that their entire body wanted to get closer to.
"I do have an Ego," he said. Straightforwardly, without building toward it. "I didn't use it because," He glanced at her profile. "I didn't want to alarm you. Given the reaction earlier. I figured you'd already had enough surprises for one morning."
He could feel, without looking directly at him, Fenn ahead on the path slow his humming.
"I was thirteen when I awakened it." He said this toward the path rather than at her. "Didn't see the need to add that to the pile."
Maret walked three paces in silence. Her expression did not change in any large way, but something moved through it, that same weighted quality from earlier, briefer this time, a passing cloud rather than a full weather front. The thought of a child standing at that threshold, as she'd put it, and coming back wearing something of it. He could see her processing it in the economy of her silence.
He looked ahead at Fenn, who had come to a mostly-complete stop and was walking very slowly with his head turned approximately forty degrees toward Ruben in a way that was designed to seem casual and was achieving something adjacent to that.
The intrigue on the kid's face was so barely contained it had ceased to be contained.
Ruben stopped walking.
He shifted Oscar carefully from his back and laid him down in the moss at the path's edge, gentle and deliberate, supporting the head, making sure the arms were settled, keeping his hands on the boy's shoulders for a moment until he was sure the breathing hadn't changed. Still rapid. Still there.
He straightened.
He looked at Fenn, who had turned fully now and abandoned any pretence.
Ruben brought his hands together.
It was not a complicated motion. He had done it thousands of times in the past two years in training, in combat, in the quiet of the compound's back fields when he worked alone before the others were awake. His palms met and held, and he felt the familiar pull, not pain, just pressure, the sensation of something very large being invited through a small door, and then he opened his hands.
The dragon came out golden.
Not in a burst, not with a sound, that was the thing about his constructs that still quietly amazed him even now, that they arrived the way water arrived when you opened a tap, steadily and absolutely and without drama. The golden fur spread first, materialising in dense, warm strands, and then the shape built itself outward from his hands, the long, serpentine body of a Chinese dragon, no wings, built for horizontal sinuous motion rather than flight, coiling up through the air with the fluid, unhurried confidence of something that had always existed and was simply choosing to be visible now.
Its mane, full and golden and moving slightly as though in water, rippled along the length of its neck. Its eyes, when they opened, were amber and calm and thoroughly uninterested in drama. Its entire body moved in one long, continuous, breathing motion, like a river deciding to be an animal.
It was completely silent.
Fenn's mouth was open.
Not dramatically, not a comedic gape, but the specific open-mouth expression of a person whose brain has suspended its commentary function because the commentary function doesn't have the vocabulary for what it's looking at. His pencil had gone still in his fingers. His drawing pad had shifted under his arm and he hadn't noticed.
Maret had taken one step back. Just one, involuntary, and she had stopped herself and stood straight, but the step had happened. Her eyes were wide in the way eyes went wide when the body registered something before the mind had finished assessing whether it was a threat, and then the assessment arrived and the wideness shifted into something more complicated, not fear, but the aftershock of surprise, still visible at the edges.
The dragon coiled around them both in a slow, spiralling arc, its golden fur catching the phos-pillar light and scattering it in warm motes across the moss floor. It lowered its great head toward Oscar, briefly, with the particular attention of something that had been summoned by the same person who had carried Oscar a long way on his back, and then it slid beneath the boy smoothly, lifting him from the moss and settling him along the broad, warm expanse of its back with an ease that made it look like this was exactly what it had been built for.
"Cool," said Fenn. The word came out reverent, stripped of all self-consciousness, the pure distilled reaction of someone who had not yet caught up to their own composure. He looked at Ruben. He looked at the dragon. He took two steps toward it and then stopped, his hand raised and hovering six inches from the golden fur.
He looked at Ruben.
"It won't hurt you," Ruben said.
Fenn touched it.
His fingers met the fur and he went very still for a moment, the stillness of a person receiving sensory information they hadn't expected and were processing carefully. Then a slow exhale. He ran his palm along the side of the dragon's neck, and the dragon turned its amber eye toward him with patient, luminous indifference and kept moving.
Maret watched this.
Then she looked at Ruben.
She studied him for a long moment, the same reading expression she'd used in the side room, looking for something specific in the arrangement of his features. Then she looked at the dragon, at the way it moved, at Oscar settled securely and peacefully on its back, and the conclusion she arrived at seemed to satisfy whatever the question had been.
"Keep it out until we reach the outer edge of the Residential Tier," she said. Her voice was steady and practical again, the working voice rather than the grieving one. "Once we are near the hospital, it goes. I don't want it in the wards."
"Understood."
They started walking again. The dragon moved alongside them with its liquid, soundless motion, and Fenn walked beside it with one hand resting intermittently on its flank, his humming resumed but changed now, louder, more certain, as if the tune had found its key.
"How many Ego users do you have here?" Ruben asked.
Maret considered this. "They exist. Most generations produce a handful. But they are not common."
Ruben nodded slowly. He scratched at his jaw, not even stubble was rooted, the particular injustice of being fifteen, and thought about the logic of that. Egos came from trauma of a specific, mortal kind.
"What about Phantasm?" he said.
Fenn looked up from the dragon's flank. "What's Phantasm?"
Maret's stride did not break. But something in her posture shifted, a fractional straightening.
"Manifestations," Ruben said, to Fenn, because the question had clearly been genuine. "Creatures. They form from accumulated human suffering, grief, violence, unresolved trauma, places where bad things happened repeatedly. On the surface they're," He thought about the best way to compress this. "They're everywhere. You learn to deal with them. Some places are worse than others."
Fenn was staring at him with an expression that had moved well past cool into something more unsettled.
"They don't form here," Maret said. "Not as they do above. We have never had one."
Ruben looked at her.
"Huh." He turned this over. "The only place on the surface I know of where Phantasm don't form is Atlantis." He paused. "I wonder if there's a connection. Something about enclosed, self-contained,"
"The grace of the Great Sage," Maret said, with a finality that was not hostile but was firmly closed. "Or perhaps simply fortune. Some questions do not require the answer to be complex." A brief pause. "We must keep moving."
Ruben accepted this and they walked on.
The low path opened gradually as the fungal forest pulled back, and the first proper view of the outer city arrived not as a dramatic reveal but as a slow accumulation, the way a piece of music builds, element by element, until you notice you are inside something large.
The suspension bridges came first, visible above the treeline as dark geometric lines crossing the upper air between stalagmite formations, their lamp-chains glowing amber in the cavern's diffuse light. Then the terraced stone of the first residential tier, carved directly into the face of the nearest spire, its windows lit warm from within, its narrow streets connected by external staircases and iron-railed walkways.
Then the distant suggestion of the city proper beyond it, Amalthea, rising in tiers up the central formation, its uppermost levels catching the bioluminescent light from the crystal dome and throwing it back transformed, blue-purple and teal, the colours of the clouds.
Ruben kept looking up.
The clouds moved in their slow, turning way, lit from above by the crystal formations and from within by whatever thermal current drove them, and they were still doing the thing they'd been doing earlier, the deep swirling purple-blue of them, the teal edging where the light caught them, and he was still finding it difficult to process as sky, exactly, but was finding it very easy to process as beautiful.
"The evaporation from the lake," Maret said, following his gaze without looking at him, in the tone of someone who had explained this many times and had made a kind of peace with the repetition. "The Mirror Lake is large, and there are geothermal vents beneath it that are constant. The heat drives water upward, and at the height of the dome the air cools and the pressure changes, and," She gestured upward. "Clouds."
"They don't look like surface clouds."
"No. The light source is above them. On the surface, your light source is above your clouds as well, but further, much further. Here the crystal dome is far, farther than we can really see from here, but also close enough that the clouds are backlit directly. What you see is the light being filtered through condensed water." She paused. "In the morning cycle, there is fog. Over the lake and the lower bridges. It clears as the vents heat the air."
"Does it rain?"
"Heavily. Straight down, no wind worth speaking of down here, so when it rains it falls in vertical sheets. The fungal forests need it. The Agrarian Ring depends on the run-off cycle."
Ruben nodded, still looking upward. As if in response to the attention, a slow golden pulse moved through the cloud layer above them, warm amber light spreading through the purple-teal like something breathing, and Fenn, who had been running lightly alongside the dragon's flank, stopped and pointed up.
"Hart," he said, simply, and smiled.
Ruben watched the light fade back into the clouds.
They walked on through the outer ring of the city, past the first stone-paved streets and the warm amber of the electric lamp-posts lining them, proper electric light, which surprised him less now than it had when he'd first registered the geothermal hum but still surprised him a little, past a row of low buildings with copper fixtures and carved lintels, past a small square where three older women sat at a stone table with their heads together, who looked up briefly as they passed and then back at each other.
Past a transit rail station, empty at this hour, its glass-fronted waiting area reflecting the cloud-lit sky in its windows. Past a fountain, actual running water, fresh, cold, a small circular basin with a plain stone figure at its centre, the water falling from its cupped hands in the absolutely straight, vertical drop Maret had described.
"When things have settled," Maret said, quietly, so it was between the two of them, "I would like you to come with me. To report yourself. Let the appropriate people know who you are, where you came from, how you arrived."
Ruben's first instinct was the same instinct it always was when someone in authority expressed an interest in knowing exactly who he was and where he'd been. He clocked it, noted it, and then thought more carefully about it.
She was an old woman who had taken two unconscious strangers into her home without asking permission from anyone. She had treated them and was now personally escorting one of them to a hospital. She had not sent for any authority when she found them. She was, in other words, already implicated, and she knew it, and she was telling him about reporting to the authorities anyway, which meant she wasn't asking him for his own benefit but for her own honesty.
He understood that.
"Of course," he said.
She glanced at him briefly. Seemed to find the answer adequate.
"How many hospitals are there?" he asked. "In this area."
"The one we are going to is the main facility for the whole of the Residential Ring. Largest on the island. The others in this region are," She considered. "General practice only. Suited for checkups, minor treatments. Not equipped for what the boy needs."
"Only the one main hospital."
"Yes." She paused. "Why do you ask?"
Ruben looked at the street ahead of them, the stone-paved length of it, the lamp-posts, the transit rail, the bridges visible above the rooflines, the estimated foot traffic, the entry and exit points where the road branched.
"Just scouting," he said.