(Two hours Prior)
The library was warm.
That was the first thing Corbin had noticed when they'd found it, the warmth, the specific dry warmth of a room full of old paper and electric light, familiar in the way libraries were always familiar regardless of where in the world they happened to be situated, which in this case appeared to be somewhere that should not exist.
The building was two storeys, stone-built, with high ceilings and rows of dark wooden shelving that ran the full length of the floor in neat, orderly columns. Electric sconces lined the walls between the shelves, warm-toned and steady, casting the kind of light that made everything look slightly more permanent than it probably was.
They had been here for forty minutes.
Corbin was sitting on the floor between two shelves with his back against the wood and his knees wide and his arms resting across them, turning a book over in his hands that he had pulled from the nearest shelf out of something closer to frustration than curiosity. It was a mid-sized volume, plain dark cover, and the text inside was, mostly readable.
That was the thing. The language was close enough to what he knew that he could move through most of a page without stopping, and then he'd hit a cluster of symbols that didn't correspond to anything, angular and precise, woven into the sentences like a second current running beneath the first, and the page would stop making sense until they cleared.
He turned another page. Another cluster of symbols. He shut the book.
Lea was standing at the end of the row with a larger volume open across both forearms, her hood pushed back now that they were inside and away from the street. She had the focused, slightly inward expression of someone reading quickly and filing faster, her eyes moving in the particular economical sweep of someone who had learned to extract what they needed from a page without reading every word.
She was, fine. That was still strange to sit next to. Not fine in the way of someone performing composure, but actually fine, in the practical, grounded way she had of being wherever she was without apparent resentment of the fact. She had woken up in an unknown subterranean civilisation two hours ago with Corbin unconscious beside her and had, as far as he could tell, assessed the situation, waited for him to wake up, located the nearest public building that might contain information, and started reading.
Corbin had a bruise across his left shoulder that he was not thinking about.
He looked at her.
"So?" he said.
Lea turned a page. "Give me a minute."
"I've given you forty."
"You've given me forty minutes of you sighing at books and I've given you forty minutes of actual reading, those are different things." She turned another page. "Come here."
He got up and came around to her side of the row, and she tilted the book so he could see the open page. It was a history text, he could tell from the layout, the dense paragraphs broken by occasional illustrations, the kind of sober, authoritative typography that history books used across every culture he'd encountered. The symbols were here too, woven through the main text, but on this page they were also present in isolation, in a small sidebar box, arranged in a pattern that looked intentional rather than decorative.
"These markings," Lea said, tapping the sidebar. "I've seen them before. Not in books, on people. In the city, when we were walking." She looked up at him. "The older residents especially. And in some of the murals on the outer buildings."
Corbin thought about the streets they'd moved through carefully, hoods up, heads down, the city that had no right to exist at the bottom of the ocean, humming with electric light and tram-rails and the distant sound of ordinary life. He'd clocked the markings on the older faces without cataloguing them, filed under significant, return to later.
"Nine Clans," Lea said.
Corbin was quiet for a moment.
"The Nine Clans," he repeated.
"The lineage symbols. Each clan had its own. These," She moved her finger along the sidebar. "These are composite. Multiple clans represented in the same text, sharing a page like they share a community." She closed the book with the careful precision of someone who respected what they were handling. "And the people outside. Look at them, really look. The range of features, the mix of cultural dress, the way the older ones carry themselves versus the younger ones." She resettled the volume back on the shelf. "This isn't a remote island with a small population. This is a refugee settlement. A large one. Hidden."
"Hidden from who."
She looked at him with one eyebrow raised in the particular way she had that communicated please follow the logic to its conclusion.
"From us," he said. "From Ostara."
"From everything above the ocean floor, I think." She folded her arms and leaned against the shelf. "We are not on any map I have ever looked at. The architecture is unlike anything in Ostara's territories. The language is close but not identical. And the ecosystem outside," She shook her head slightly. "That's not natural surface geography. The light, the clouds, the temperature. We are somewhere enclosed. Somewhere very deliberately hidden."
Corbin looked at the ceiling. He thought about the false sky outside, the geothermal warmth that moved through the air.
"How far down do you think we are?" he said.
"Far," Lea said simply.
He exhaled hard through his nose. "Right."
He moved back to his spot on the floor and sat down again, not because he was tired but because standing felt like it implied he had somewhere to be, which he demonstrably did not. He pulled out his phone. The screen came on, battery at sixty-two percent, which was something at least, and the signal bar in the corner showed the icon he'd been looking at since he woke up, the small, unambiguous absence of any network whatsoever. Not one bar. Not searching. Just the hollow icon of a thing that was not present.
"Still nothing," he said, which was not news to either of them.
Lea glanced at the phone. "I'd be surprised if there was. If this place has maintained complete secrecy from the surface world, a signal reaching up through two hundred feet of ocean and rock would rather defeat the purpose."
"Two hundred feet."
"Or more. I was being conservative."
Corbin stared at the blank signal bar. He turned the phone over in his hands and then pocketed it because looking at it was not productive.
"You should technically be trying to capture me right now," he said. Not aggressively, just as a fact being placed on the table.
Lea looked at him with the flat, slightly tired expression of someone who had already run this particular calculation. "That would require me to be able to reach my allies, which would require,"
"Signal," Corbin said.
"Signal." She pushed off the shelf and walked to the end of the row, looking out through the library's narrow windows at the amber-lit street beyond.
Corbin said nothing. He filed this without comment.
"So. Wasted effort," he said.
"So. Wasted effort," she agreed, with the clipped pragmatism of someone accepting an unfavourable weather forecast.
He looked at her back.
"Hang on a minute how are you even here?" he said. "That fight, it was me, Ruben, Paul, Rosette, Lance, and, " He stopped. "That sneaky fuck Elijah." He said the name with the particular economy of someone compressing a significant amount of feeling into two syllables. "You weren't there. You were still back at the Clock Tower."
Lea turned from the window. Her expression had gone to somewhere quieter, more considered.
"I followed," she said. "When I felt the situation deteriorating, when I heard the aerial engagement on the frequency and then the frequency went dead, I came." She looked at her hands briefly. "I came in from the east approach and I was still a distance out when I felt Lance's Ego activate." A pause. "You can feel it when he uses Cosmic Vendetta at great output. It's not subtle. The air changes. The pressure changes." She looked at Corbin directly. "I used my Ego. Immediately. Reflexively. Just to weaken the blow," Her jaw shifted slightly. "And then I woke up here, and you were next to me on the ground."
Corbin absorbed this. He thought about Lance's hand dropping and the world simply agreeing with him, the indifferent, total force of it.
"He is one crazy," He stopped, edited himself out of some obscure courtesy to the library. "...individual."
"He is exceptionally powerful," Lea said, in the tone of someone making a clinical observation about a natural disaster.
"Yeah." He stood up. "We need to find Ruben."
Lea spread her hands at the library around them, the foreign shelves, the unknown city, the false sky outside. "We have no idea where we are. We have no map, no contacts, no signal, and no information beyond what I've read in the last forty minutes."
"Hospital," Corbin said.
Lea looked at him.
"We find the nearest big hospital," he said. The logic was already assembled and he laid it out with the flat efficiency he applied to anything tactical, which was most things. "If Ruben kept a hold of Oscar, then Ruben landed here with Oscar. Oscar was on a nasty drug cocktail that Paul had been pumping into him for God knows how long, and his Ego was running hot when Lance hit us. Ruben's first priority after landing, before anything else, before finding me, before working out where we are, before any of it, is going to be getting that kid to medical care." He looked at Lea. "If he landed anywhere near a population centre and Oscar is still critical, Ruben is going to find the biggest hospital he can and he is going to go there. So, we go there."
The silence that followed was brief.
Lea looked at him with an expression that had moved from assessment to something that sat just adjacent to being impressed, and was not going to say so directly, but was also not entirely concealing it.
"You're incredibly level-headed for someone who just woke up at the bottom of the ocean in an unknown civilisation," she said.
Corbin picked up his jacket from the floor and shook it out. "There's nothing else to do." He said this without self-congratulation, without drama, as a simple accounting of the available options. There wasn't anything else to do, so he was doing the thing there was to do. That was all.
Lea watched him for a moment. Then she straightened, pulled her hood up, and adjusted the set of her jacket with the quick, economic movements of someone returning to operational mode.
"Biggest hospital in the city," she said. "We ask around carefully. Hoods up, minimal engagement, don't make it obvious we don't know where we are."
"Obviously."
"I'm saying it anyway."
"I know."
Lance had been sitting on the same rock for twenty minutes.
It was a good rock, objectively. Flat-topped, low to the ground, positioned at the edge of a stone causeway that ran along the outer wall of the cavern where the city's residential tiers gave way to the raw geological face of the geode itself.
From here you could see a wide arc of Amalthea's lower districts, the lamp-lit streets, the transit rail running its quiet route between spires, the Mirror Lake beyond the outer buildings catching the bioluminescent ceiling and holding it perfectly, two skies stacked on top of each other. It was, in the way of places that had been built by people who had needed to make something beautiful because they had lost everything that was beautiful, genuinely lovely.
Lance was not looking at it.
He was looking at his hands, which were resting on his knees, which were doing something he did not entirely like. Not shaking, nothing so demonstrable. Just a faint, persistent unsteadiness, a tremor beneath the surface of the skin that he could feel better than he could see, like a vibration in a wall from a frequency too low to hear. He pressed his palms flat against his thighs and the feeling persisted.
He felt, in a word, terrible.
Not the terrible of exhaustion, which he knew well and had learned to manage. Not the terrible of injury, which he also knew and had a functional relationship with. This was something underneath both of those, a wrongness that sat at the centre of his chest and radiated outward in slow pulses, as though something fundamental had been jarred out of its alignment and was informing him of this through the only means available.
Elise was standing.
Of course she was standing. Elise Vogel stood the way other people sat, with her full weight committed to it, her spine straight, her Qiang spear held vertical in her right hand with the point up, positioned slightly behind her shoulder in the unconscious ready-carry of someone who had drilled with it long enough that the grip was simply how her hand rested.
She was scanning the causeway's length in both directions with the methodical back-and-forth of a lighthouse, and her expression was the expression she usually wore, clear, ordered, slightly impatient with the world for not being more clearly ordered.
"No sign of Neri," she said. For the second time. She said most things twice, once as an observation and once as a conclusion, and Lance had stopped finding this irritating approximately two years ago and had relocated it to the category of things that were simply true about Elise, like the way rain was wet. "No sign of Rosette either. And none of the outlaws." A pause. "I've been working through the possibilities. The radius of the impact, the directional force of the Submerge, the..."
"Have you figured out where we are?" Lance said.
"I have a strong working theory."
"That's a yes."
"It's a strong working theory." She looked at him. "The people here, the architecture, the lineage markings on the older residents, the cultural composite of the population. This is a protected settlement. A hidden one, almost certainly subterranean given the," She gestured upward at the crystal dome and the false sky and the whole impossible geological fact of their situation. "...obvious indicators. The Nine Clans. Surviving descendants."
"Right." Lance looked at his hands again.
"I don't fully understand the mechanics of how we arrived."
"Neither do I."
A pause.
"You used Cosmic Vendetta at a strong output," Elise said, with the careful tone of someone raising a point they know is going to land badly.
"I'm aware of what I used, Elise."
"The Submerge has never produced this result before."
"I'm also aware of that." He pressed his palms flat on his thighs again. The tremor was still there. "Can we," He stopped. Tried to find the right word for what he was feeling and found that the right word was embarrassing. "I feel sick," he said, because there was no useful alternative.
Elise looked at him with a fractional change in her expression, not concern exactly, more like a recalibration of her current threat assessment to include an additional variable.
"Define sick."
"Like," He made a vague gesture at the centre of his chest. "Wrong. In here. Like I've been..." He stopped again. Looked out at the mirror-flat lake, the doubled sky. "I shouldn't be here," he said. More quietly. "Of all the people who got pulled into whatever that was, I shouldn't be the one who ended up here."
Elise studied him. "What does that mean?"
Lance looked at her for a moment.
Then he looked away.
"We need to find a way back to the surface," he said. The subject was closed; the closure was total and effortless in the way he closed things, not with force but with a simple redirection of attention, like turning a page. "That's the priority. Everything else is secondary."
Elise accepted this with the minimal friction of someone who knew when a door was shut and had enough tactical intelligence not to knock on shut doors when there was other work available. She turned back to the causeway, ran her scan, returned to the problem.
"Getting back to the surface will not be straightforward," she said. "The settlement's existence was kept out of official Ostaran documentation, which makes sense given the, given the circumstances of its founding." She said circumstances of its founding in the tone she used for anything that required her to acknowledge events that existed outside her jurisdiction and were therefore not her professional concern. "What I could find in the academy archives suggested that the method of access was singular. One individual, one method. Not a door anyone else could use."
"If there's a way in there's a way out," Lance said. Flatly. The statement of someone who had decided this was true and was not interested in contrary evidence until he had tried everything else.
"Theoretically."
"Not theoretically. Practically. We find the exit, we leave, we get back to work." He rolled his neck, once, and the vertebrae popped in a way that sounded more than it felt, and he exhaled through his nose. "Speaking of getting back to work."
"The outlaws," Elise said. She said it with the clean, reflexive snap of someone reaching for something that was always within arm's length.
"I wasn't even thinking about them."
"I was."
"I know you were." He finally looked up from his hands and out at the city properly, the amber-lit tiers of it, the trams moving in their quiet routes, the distant sound of ordinary life going about its business with the profound indifference of ordinary life everywhere. "For all we know we're the only ones here. Maybe the Submerge scattered them somewhere else. Maybe they're on the surface. Maybe,"
"That would be an extraordinary coincidence given that they were in the direct centre of,"
"I said maybe."
Elise did not say anything for a moment, which with Elise functioned as a form of disagreement.
"Even if they're here," Lance said, "they'll turn up. This isn't a large world. We'll run into them eventually."
"They still need to be apprehended." She said this with the quality of someone reading from an internal document. "Ruben Rayo and Corbin Monet are still wanted in connection with the Gresham Incident. That doesn't change because of geography."
Lance turned his head and looked at her.
It was a specific look. Not unkind, Lance's looks were rarely unkind, which was one of the things people found surprising about him, given the rest of it, but knowing. The look of someone who had understood something about the person in front of them that the person in front of them had not finished understanding about themselves.
"Elise," he said. "We have no jurisdiction here."
She blinked. "This territory isn't on any world map. It's not included in any international,"
"It's not on the map because we didn't even know it existed." His voice was even.
Elise was quiet. Her expression had gone to the particular quality it went to when she was processing a logical challenge, not closed, but sorting, running it through the internal framework and checking the output.
She was not stupid. That was the thing about Elise that made her simultaneously easy to work with and quietly exhausting, she was genuinely intelligent and she applied that intelligence almost entirely in service of a structure she had never thought to question, which meant the intelligence kept arriving at the wrong destinations with perfect confidence.
She looked at him the way she always looked at him when he said something that sat outside her framework, with a slight, unconscious tilt of the head, recalibrating.
"The absence of a territorial designation means the absence of legal protection," she said. Carefully. "If no law applies here, then by extension,"
"I know what you're doing," Lance said. Not unkindly.
He looked at her steadily. "I'm not saying don't ever think about it. I'm saying we don't know this land. We don't know the threats in it. We don't know where our allies are. We don't know anything." A pause. "Rushing into things has never done us favours. We wait. We learn. We figure out how to get home. That's the order."
A long pause.
Elise straightened slightly, which was her version of a concession. "Understood."
"Good."
The tram ran its quiet route in the middle distance. Somewhere above the residential tier a faint golden pulse moved through the cloud layer and faded.
"They're reckless," Elise said, after a moment. The subject had technically changed but the direction of her attention had not. "Ruben Rayo especially. Operates on instinct, disregards procedure, draws attention to himself." She looked out at the city.
"If they're here only a matter of time before they do something visible." A pause. "So I'll wait. I can be patient." She said this with the serenity of someone who had built patience into their operating system as a tactical resource rather than a virtue. "When they make themselves known, I'll know where to find them."
Lance looked at her profile.
He thought, not for the first time, that Elise Vogel was exactly the kind of soldier a nation like theirs went looking for, smart enough to execute complex operations, disciplined enough to wait, and possessed of a fundamental loyalty to the structure itself rather than to any particular person within it, which meant she was reliable in the specific, terrible way that certain tools were reliable, exactly as useful as the hand holding them, and perfectly indifferent to where that hand was pointed.
He thought about saying this.
He thought about Bruno. Bruno had a deliberate way of being a person that Lance had always found, in his more honest moments, faintly incomprehensible and also faintly enviable. He thought about how Bruno would have handled waking up at the bottom of the ocean in a hidden civilisation built on a genocide their nation had committed.
Something they took part in.
Probably better than this, he thought.
"I wish Bruno was here instead of me," he muttered. To himself, mostly, in the tone of a man talking to his own shoes.
Elise heard it and chose not to respond to it, which was its own kind of grace.
Lance pressed his palms flat against his thighs again. He sat on his good rock.
And he waited.