rainbowfic | (no subject)

Name: Azzandra
Story: Transit
Colors: Newsprint (7. You can make yourself enter somewhere frightening if you believe you'll profit from it. The natural response is to flee, but you don't act that way anymore.), Blue Heeler (17. Sometimes special people come into our life, stay for a bit and they have to go.), Teal Deer (27. Intersubstitutability )
Supplies and Styles: Portrait
Word Count:6279
Rating: Teen
Warnings: mild language, lots of implied death (nothing graphic)
Notes: If I could please get tags for color: blue heeler, color: newsprint, color: teal deer, author: azzandra and story: transit

In the bowels of the city, several levels below the surface, but still several levels above the deep machines, the high priestess of Atoz put her feet up on the desk and leaned back as she snacked on a mince meat pastry and watched the screens.

The dozen screens clustered over the desk were old, several generation older than the kind of screen which had become fashionable on the above-levels. They had a steady white glow, unlike the newer, softer screens which shifted between shades of more forgiving yellow light. But for the high priestess, that made little difference. She had grown accustomed to the harsh white light of them, even as it chased away her sleep. Perhaps because it chased away her sleep.

The wall of screens above her desk was the closest thing to an altar that Atoz had. The old god was in every conduit of the city, and his beating heart was in the deep machines at the very foundations of Transit, but here, at this altar, the high priestess could see his inner workings, the operations and calculations Atoz was always conducting. It was like peering into the mind of divinity, seeing his thoughts even as they formed. Lines of glyphs flashed across some screens, images across others. Graphs, maps, numbers, lines and lines, ticking and shifting and changing.

And in the corner of her eye, the high priestess caught glimpse of a flashing notice.

She paused with her pastry halfway to her mouth, taken aback for a moment. Then she dropped her pastry into her plate, and the plate on the desk, on top of papers and tablets and bits of machinery she had strewn everywhere. She sat up straight in her chair, and she reached for the screen with the flashing notice. She pulled it close, its crane arm creaking, stiff from being immobile for too long, but the high priestess did not give it any mind. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.

A smile split across her face.

"Alright, kiddies, you know the drill," Zynthia boomed, as she strode into the courtyard and towards the small group. "What day is today?"

"Scavenging day," the three gathered technicians intoned, not exactly with as much enthusiasm as Zynthia would have preferred.

"Children," Zynthia said, her brows lowering in disapproval, "that is not the tone you take when the boss asks you that question."

She aimed a look to the nearest technician, Edem. He was turning the crank on his pistol, round and round, winding the gun slowly, and it took him a beat to notice Zynthia's stare.

"Uh..." Edem blinked. "It's scavenging day, hurray?" he offered hesitantly.

Zynthia sighed.

"You're on my list, Ed," she warned, and strode off to the edge of the courtyard, to a wall of lockers.

"Which list is that?" Obid, the technician standing right next to Edem, asked. He was in the middle of turning the crank on a gigantic blunderbuss, a much louder, much more difficult task, which he was still managing to accomplish at a brisker pace than Edem with his pistol. "The good list, or the bad list?"

"I've seen her filing system, I don't think it matters either way when she's not going to find that list again," Edem said.

Obid snorted a laugh.

The third technician, Ardor, had a rod on her hip instead of a gun. It did not require loading in the same way as the pistol or blunderbuss, so instead she was scribbling on an Alexyz tablet, marking down points of interest on a map, and the routes to those points. She was quiet, her eyes leaving the tablet only to dart around, but when she saw Zynthia return, Ardor coughed to warn the other two.

Obid smothered a laugh, and Edem ducked his head down, paying close attention to his pistol.

"Alright," Zynthia said, holstering a pair of pistols. "You know the drill. And the guys who've been talking shit can do the long hauls on this one."

Obid and Edem cringed.

Ardor flipped her tablet to show the city map on it.

"This is Broken Bridges," she said. Her voice was rough and low, like it was perpetually threadbare, so they leaned in to hear her. "The lower levels, especially the deep machines, are mostly inaccessible, and it's safe to assume that anything which can be accessed has already been picked clean by others."

"We go high instead of low, then?" Edem asked.

"Yes," Ardor said, and the map zoomed in on a quarter of the city where a few buildings had been circled. "The transmission towers are mostly intact. These three are the highest ones, but the bridges between them are, well, broken." She gave a tiny smile at this, which by Ardor's standards meant she found something uproariously funny. "Your options are grapple shots, or doubling back outside to access each tower from its individual ground-level entrance."

"I'll walk, thanks," Obid muttered. He was a large man, and thus felt nervous about using grappling lines, no matter how much he was assured they would take his weight.

"It's a nice day anyway," Edem agreed, even though he was so willowy that his weight would probably not even make a dip on the grapple line. His issue was more with the heights involved. "But if we're on the long haul, what're you two doing?"

"Secret business, my boy, secret business," Zynthia said, tapping the side of her nose while giving them her best shit-eating grin.

"I'm on a different task," Ardor added, with a lot less zest. She switched the image on the tablet to a different part of the city. "The luxury quarter of the city is mostly intact. Due to the very narrow window that Broken Bridges is usually open, most other scavenging parties have limited themselves to vital systems. There may be items of unexpected interest still left in the non-essential parts of the city."

"You're on a jackpot run?" Edem asked, dismayed. "How come I'm never on the jackpot runs?" he demanded of Zynthia.

"Because you're on the list, boy-o," Zynthia said, and tapped her forehead. "Riiiight up here. The bad list."

Edem shifted awkwardly in place, and dropped the subject.

There was something more fundamentally broken about the city than its bridges. They could see the stumps of walkways as well, jutting out from the towering buildings, cut short of their destinations. However Broken Bridges had looked in its glory days, it had never been quite as tall or quite as intricately built as Transit, and the disaster which had struck it had also cut off any possibility that it would ever catch up. This was not mere home pride on the behalf of the group either: few cities ended up as prosperous as Transit after the great Dispersion through the stars.

And Broken Bridges was not even unique in its situation, merely one of many cities to have been taken down by cataclysm, or slow decline, or mere entropy. They did not build cities like they used to, which was to say riddled with vulnerabilities and poorly planned. The oldest cities to have survived their journeys, cities like Transit, or Dreaming, or Gardens, were the ones with built-in redundancies and very conservative approaches to system upgrades, and the newest cities had adopted similar models.

But whatever had gone wrong in Broken Bridges, it had gone wrong spectacularly, and quicker than anyone could fix it. Ground level, the architecture was mostly intact, except for where the crumbled remains of the bridges above had fallen onto buildings like a stony hale; there was a certain shade of chalky-pink to everything that seemed to have been preferred by the former residents, and the steady artificial sunlight, stuck at a mid-morning golden hue, made everything look cheerful. The roads, especially, were seamless. Broken Bridges had been built after the advent of air transport lines, so its ground level roads were mostly smooth and narrow, meant only for foot traffic.

Edem and Obid advanced towards their destination slowly, cautiously, and in complete silence at first. Derelict cities tended to echo strangely, especially ones like Broken Bridges, whose deep machines were still alive. If you walked through enough dead cities, you tended to learn to feel the difference in the soles of your feet, and in all honesty, for all their unique dangers, derelict cities were still preferable to dead ones.

"No bodies," Edem muttered.

"What's that?" Obid asked, tearing his eyes away from a delicate wrought iron gate painted in a terrible hot pink.

"Like a dead city. No bodies anywhere," Edem repeated. His voice did not echo. If anything, it felt muffled, like the way sound was muffled when everything was covered with snow.

"Best not think about these things," Obid said. "Mysteries are made to keep your peace of mind."

"Maybe they evacuated," Edem continued.

"Yeah," Obid said, not because he was convinced, but because it was what you had to tell yourself sometimes.

Evacuate to where, Obid might have wondered if he was the type to wonder such things. Whatever disaster had struck Broken Bridges had been deep inside the Endless Night. Cities did not end up cursed to float through the Night unmoored if they had the choice to anchor themselves to anything. Only one of Broken Bridges' access gates was even open, and it was one that had been forced open long ago by scavengers.

"Towers up ahead," Obid groused, as they turned a corner and came to see the silhouettes of the three towers. It was something of an amazing sight to them. There was no way one could have seen the top of any building from Transit's ground level, even accounting for the fact that what counted as its ground level had steadily been creeping upwards for the past few generations as they built over and on top of older edifices. Transit's mid-levels were a knot of walkways, bridges, and suspended platforms.

As they passed the entry gate to the first tower, they stopped in the courtyard just before the door, listening and watching for a few minutes. It was pretty. There were creeping vines growing up a trellis, leaves turning red with lack of maintenance, but still kept alive by the deep machines. It was not enough for them to prosper, not enough for them to grow wild and out of control, but enough for a bit of green to cling to their lower stems.

Above them, the tower loomed. Its windows were still intact, an unforgiving sheet of gray; silent and patient.

The doors were glass, and stuck half-open. When they walked close and over the sensor pad, the doors made an attempt to open wider, but only moved an inch before groaning and going still again. Across the lobby, however, the elevator doors opened, smooth and eager after so long without any passengers. The light inside was still on, a sterile white shading into pink.

No matter how many derelict cities they visited, this never got any less eerie.

Ardor perched on top of a cobblestone wall, and surveyed the luxury quarter of Broken Bridges.

Decadence always had a different flavor depending on which city you went to. In Transit, it was a deep sour tang, the taste of black liquorice like the dark velvet wallpaper in upscale stores. It was the smell of incense and overheated electronics in the pillar gardens, where only the people in the heavy silver jewelry were allowed to go nowadays.

In Broken Bridges, it tasted sweet and cloying, like a dessert made with too much sugar, covered with too much fondant. It smelled like strong perfume overpowering the natural scent of an orchard in bloom. Ardor liked neither the taste, nor the smell of it.

The streets were a powdery blue, smooth and soft underneath her soles. The buildings were more glass than stone. Everything was pastels. Everything was too much pastels.

Except the trees. Along the streets, their skeletal branches still forming an overhang, there were neat rows of trees. They were real, not constructed, and they'd been planted in well-delineated circles of real earth. An ostentatious display, if anything. Their bark was pale gray, but their leaves had turned a vivid red, and had shed off the branches almost completely. If Broken Bridges had had winds, the leaves would be swept across the streets, but as it was, they fell to the ground with strange stillness, and they crunched underfoot when Ardor stepped on them.

Broken Bridges had not been inhabited for many decades. The trees were only recently starting to die off however; perhaps kept alive by the deep machines, until something recently broke, or a piece necessary to their maintenance had been scavenged away by someone.

Ardor thought about this as she neared a food stand. A container of salt had been knocked over, and the salt spilled across the counter top in a streak of white. Ardor dipped her fingers in the salt and brought them to her mouth, and it tastes like salt should. She looked at the rotisserie rods inside the food stand, however, and they were empty. No food, no rotting leftovers, not even the smell of anything amiss. Why the food, she wondered, but not the trees? Why the people, but not the salt? A flesh-stealing curse, maybe?

She put the thought aside as her attention was drawn to a pamphlet on the counter. The color on the cover drew her eye, but she picked it up and opened it to read.

After carefully going through the entire pamphlet, she reached into the tablet bag on her hip, and drew out her Alexyz tablet. It was still displaying the map, and Ardor carefully zoomed in on the luxury quarter, plotting a path around broken bridges and dead ends.

She memorized the path, and put the tablet away, but then she took the silvery rod off her hip that she carried instead of a gun. It was only about as long as her forearm, but she made a sharp movement, and it extended to its full length. Now it was long enough to reach the ground, and as she walked, she dragged its rounded tip along the street.

She hummed very quietly to herself as she walked, occasionally looking at the pamphlet. The rod made no sound as it dragged along, and it even seemed to swallow up the sounds of whatever song Ardor was singing. It was always best to not break the quiet in derelict cities, and Ardor knew that well.

It wasn't long before Ardor reached the showroom. Its glass doors may have once been automated, but now as Ardor stepped onto the sensor pad, they remained inactive. Ardor brought up the rod, studying its rounded end for a moment, and satisfied that it was adequately loaded, she tapped it against the ground lightly. The doors slid open.

Ardor held up the pamphlet as she walked in, but even without it, she would have seen it. The illustration was very close: the vehicle was pictured in a blue sky, action lines showing it zooming between towering buildings. 'Reigning from the Skies', the tagline declared. And then, in a slanting, elegant font, 'the Red Empress'.

But the illustration could not do the real thing justice. Elevated on a central platform, the Red Empress was a car painted in deep, inky red--and in a city of pastels, that color was what Zynthia would call a Statement. But it was also trimmed with polished chrome, whose actual shine the illustration had not captured. It had no functional wheels to speak of, only four stylized simulacra of wheels, metal wrought in baroque floral patterns that matched the chrome trim along the vehicle's length.

And the Red Empress was a long, sturdy thing. Its front end was sleek and rounded off as a compromise to aerodynamics, but its rear end was wickedly slanted to a point to suggest a streak of speed. A shape like a falling drop of blood. It had also had no roof, showing the lush leather seating inside. The pamphlet helpfully explained that the vehicle used a rounded dome energy field instead, for when the passengers did not want to feel the wind in their hair.

Ardor nearly chortled in excitement as she inspected the Red Empress from end to end. But she opened the pamphlet again and read the lines which had drawn her attention in the first place: ...assembled in our very own underground showroom workshop.

She walked past the Red Empress, past the sales counter, past a curtain, and right into an elevator. She tapped the panel, and the elevator's door closed, and took her down, to the assembly workshop.

A jackpot run, after all, was about finding unexpected treasures. And how many people would understand what valuable machinery a high-end vehicle workshop needed to make their miraculous devices?

A jackpot run was about finding unexpected treasures. You didn't always find what you wanted, you didn't always find much at all. It was a calculated risk, when you already had a very limited number of people you could send into a derelict city, to spare even one pair of hands on what risked being a fool's errand.

But Zynthia liked to think she'd outgrown being a fool a long time ago.

The building was nondescript. Another whitewashed maintenance block with heavy doors and small rectangular windows. A good place to hide something.

Zynthia blasted the lock on the door with one of her pistols, and even though nobody was there to see it, mimicked blowing smoke off the muzzle, and twirled the pistol in a showy loop before holstering it again. The inside of the building was dark, narrow... claustrophobic. The walls reeked like fear, though perhaps she was imagining that part.

She followed the hallways deeper into the building, and lower. She was guessing, for the most part, but eventually her intuition proved correct, and she reached a basement door at the end of a dank hallways.

The climate control was still on for the city; it tended to get very noticeable very fast when a derelict city's weather processing got even slightly skewed. But something down here was making condensation form on the slick walls. Had probably been doing it for a long time, judging by the smell of rotting plaster.

Zynthia had to put her shoulder against the door, and push as hard as she could just to make the door budge those first few inches. Then the door yielded to her weight, and she had to catch herself as it swung open the rest of the way.

She dusted herself primly as she looked around the room. No lights, just the glow from a small energy dome in the middle. But all the equipment in the room had been pushed into a semi-circle around the energy dome, and that was how Zynthia knew she was in the right place.

She approached a first terminal. The equipment was several generations outmoded, but it still seemed functional, if she could turn it on.

"Glitch witch with the switch, come and tell me which is which," Zynthia murmured the old children's counting rhyme, as her fingers went from one button to the other across the panel. She settled on a button with the final syllable, and pushed it.

There was a crackle of electricity, a distant, shuddering start, and then the whir of electronics as absolutely everything around the room lit up.

Zynthia grinned, and took out her tablet from its bag. She shot off a quick message to Ardor, a single word with an attached map location.

Jackpot.

The transmission tower was quiet, but not as eerily so as the rest of the city. It was a more mundane sort of quiet, like an office during the very early morning, momentarily empty but awaiting its workers to come in soon. Old devices still hummed along in stand-by mode on some levels, old clocks and terminals powered down so their internal batteries were still not drained despite how long they'd been running by themselves.

On the uppermost level of the tower was the transmission room, and its bounty of components. Edem and Obid unraveled their leather roll full of tools, and began taking off panels and disassembling machinery. The specialized parts that could be found in the deep machines were always valuable, but the more versatile, common components they'd find here were what really kept a city going.

They set to work as quickly as they could, taking apart everything that could be taken apart, and filling their bags carefully as to not break anything.

"Think there's time to take any souvenirs from the lower levels?" Obid wondered out loud.

"I think the better question is, do we have room for anything else," Edem said, gesturing to the pile of pieces they intended to take.

"Well, we got pockets, don't we?" Obid pointed out.

"I don't know..." Edem hemmed.

"You don't know if you've got pockets?"

Edem pulled a face, but didn't bother to respond. He got up to stretch his legs, and walked over near the window.

The top level had large, floor to ceiling windows, and even a glass door that had once led out onto a walkway. From what Edem could discern, the walkway had once connected to the top level of one of the other towers. Now there was nothing but the remains of a platform, crumbling away in a steep drop.

When Edem looked up at the sky, the artificial sun was still in its same position, despite the hours which had passed. The light remained its even golden hue.

<<Jackpot>>, was the only word in the message box, framed in an acid blue colored rectangle against a black background. The color contrast of the messaging program was too sharp and jarring.

<<Bit of an underreaction on your part>>, came the next message addressed to Ardor. She gave up the search for color options for now, before Zynthia became too impatient for a response.

She aimed the tablet's camera at the Red Empress and snapped a photo. The messaging system sent it automatically to Zynthia, which was startling, because she would have at least expected a confirmation first, but looking at the photo, it was perfectly framed and in focus, so maybe the goddess in the tablet assumed it met expectations. She was a young and eager thing, this Alexyz.

<<Alright, this isn't a contest>>, Zynthia replied next, with an air of sour grapes. <<Hope you shopped for groceries before hitting up the candy store.>>

This was one of Zynthia's amusing similes, she gathered. Something about scavenging the vital items before the indulgences.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard of the tablet, some of the keys so worn and faded that the letters on them were no longer legible. But with muscle memory that was not her own, she tapped out a reply.

<<Wait until you see what's in the trunk.>>

Message sent, she looked to the slumped body against the wall. Instinctively, she wanted to look away, but guilt ought not be coddled, as the saying went. She looked into the face of Ardor, slack and bloodless now, and knelt down.

"I'm sorry," she said out loud to Ardor, wondering if it would make her feel better. But it didn't, so instead she said, "No, I'm not sorry. Someone was going to be left behind here anyway, so in the grander scheme of things it doesn't matter if it's you or me. Ardor will still be the one walking out."

She nearly rose to her feet again, but then she spotted the silver rod on the ground, and picked it up. It was lucky she did, because it was just the last touch she needed to be Ardor.

She turned away from the motionless figure on the ground and packed the last of her bags into the trunk of the Red Empress. She tied the straps with knots that were muscle-memory to Ardor's hands, and she thought only the thoughts that Ardor would think. It was always important to be careful in the beginning, before the thoughts settled.

By the time she had finished, she was so completely Ardor, that when she looked around the workshop one final time, her mind did not even register the existence of anyone else slumped on the ground. After all, she was Ardor, therefore it could not be Ardor motionless before her eyes.

She climbed into the car and left, Alexyz tablet set to chart a course towards Zynthia's position. Nothing was amiss.

"This seems like a bad idea," Ardor said.

"It's only a bad idea if it ends badly," Zynthia said.

"There are certainly signs it will," Ardor muttered.

She had connected her Alexyz tablet to one of the terminals. It took some doing to find compatible ports. She had to connect three different cable adapters one into another, one of which had been scavenged from a completely different derelict city.

At the moment, Alexyz was parsing through the data, and popping up more warnings than Ardor was completely comfortable with. Some even had large, pulsating red exclamation marks, and Alexyz was not one given to overstating things.

"What's the worst possibility you can imagine?" Zynthia asked, as she wound her pistol.

"That the field isn't to hold anyone out," Ardor said. "It's to hold something in."

Zynthia actually paused for a moment, and Ardor almost hoped she'd reconsider the entire endeavor. But then Zynthia went back to winding her pistol.

"Well, we came all this way," Zynthia said, and shrugged.

"Hm," was Ardor's response.

But it was out of Ardor's hands now. If she refused to help, it wasn't as if Zynthia couldn't do this on her own.

"Turn it off, then," Zynthia said, hopping down next to the energy field. It was not very large, all things considered.

"I just want it on the record," Ardor said, "that if anything jumps out of that energy field and eats you, I do not get your job."

"You're not even clergy! How would you get my job anyway?"

"Who's next in line for it?"

Zynthia lapsed into silence for a very long time, as though the question only now occurred to her--which it very well might have. She had been priestess to Atoz for so long, that she had outlived any of the apprentices she'd had in the beginning, and at one point had forgotten to secure more.

"I'm going to make a note," Zynthia said. She then turned the safeties off on both her pistols. "Now, let it loose. I want to see what one of these godseeds looks like."

Ardor sighed, but had no real choice in the matter. Zynthia would cash in the winnings on this jackpot whatever it took. She flipped the switch, and the energy field flickered out.

Unfortunately, what also got turned off in that moment was the last battery keeping the city alive.

Edem was still looking out the window when, for lack of any other word, the sun... blinked.

Obid lifted his head from the bag he was packing as well, just as the light dimmed a few shades.

"The hell...?" Obid muttered, and then they felt it. They felt the sickening, lurching sputter of the deep machines in the soles of their feet. They had never experienced this before, but right beneath them, they felt the exact moment the city died.

Obid paled. Edem's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

"How long?" Edem asked. "Obid, how long after the deep machines die do the ghosts come out of them?"

"I... don't know," Obid said, running a hand through his hair. "I don't think anyone knows that."

Edem sent one more uneasy look to the windows, and the dimming light.

"Maybe let's hurry," Edem said, and they began to pack hastily.

From the depths of Broken Bridges, a howl arose. It was deep and resonant, and reached the surface like an earthquake.

The gods had been sleeping a long time in the deep machines. They had slept dreamlessly, waiting to be awakened once again. They awaited for the sacrifice to come, they awaited for the worshipers to remember their dues. They were kept alive only by the smallest, weakest battery, because no matter the shine of a soul, it could still not give off enough energy to do more than stop the deep machines from breaking down completely.

But now the battery, however lacking, had been shut down, and the deep machines flickered off instantly. And it was not until the deep machines turned off that the gods realized the offering to wake them was not coming. The covenant had broken.

They grew angry, and then they grew claws, and they ripped themselves upward and upward.

A debt was still owed, and they would take their due.

Edem and Obid had never filled a bag faster. The careful sorting and packing fell by the wayside as they began to throw the rest of the items into the bag as quickly as possible. They strapped both bags on, and prepared to leave, but Obid mashed the elevator button several times with increasing panic before they realized the elevator would not work now.

"Stairs," Edem said decisively, and advanced on the fire exit.

But he'd only just opened the door when they both heard the sounds coming from the stairwell. Something like paws slapping against concrete, and the snuffling and sniffing of something very big.

Edem very quietly shut the door again.

"On the other hand, grappling line sounds good just about now," Edem whispered.

Obid seemed to have gone pale to the very tip of his red beard, but he nodded. He'd found something to fear worse than the grappling line.

They pushed the glass door open and crowded together onto the small platform--all that was left of the old walkway between towers. It was a terrible, dizzying drop to the ground, the distance so great that their minds could not even process it.

Edem raised his grappling gun first, aimed it for the tower in the distance. He checked his harness one final time, nervously groping the line from his harness to the grappling gun to check a final time that it was secure, and then he stopped.

A strange reflection of something in the glass of the opposite tower drew his eye, and he turned to look as a streak of red came rounding around this tower and barreling closer.

Edem's jaw fell slack, and as Obid noticed and turned to follow his gaze, Obid's jaw was soon to follow.

A vehicle shot through the air, its perfectly polished paintjob managing to gleam even in the fading light. Ardor was hunched at the wheel, and next to her was Zynthia.

As fast as the vehicle was going, it managed to slow down smoothly, coming to a hover next to the platform, precisely in front of Edem and Obid.

"Get in," Zynthia yelled unnecessarily, because Edem and Obid already tossed their bags ahead, into the car, as they climbed into the back seat. The seat was wide and comfortable, and offered more leg room than they even needed, which was a good thing considering the size of their bags. The containment field of the car flicked to life around them, covering the passengers with a protective energy bubble.

There was something in the back seat that Edem and Obid noticed now that they were safely ensconced: a small pod, about the size of Obid's torso, and apparently ripped from its fixtures with very little fanfare judging by the dangling wires. Edem pushed it onto the floor of the car, and set a foot against it to keep it pinned in place. He had no idea what it was, but it must have been important if Zynthia and Ardor bothered to take it.

"Hitchhiker?" Obid asked, lightly kicking the pod. It made a dull sound, indicating it was not empty. He couldn't see inside it, but he recognized a life support system when he saw it--even if judging by the size, it was not meant for anything human.

"Zynthia has been picking up strays," Ardor confirmed, her knuckles white as she clenched the steering wheel. With Edem and Obid in the vehicle, she began moving away from the platform and speeding up.

Meanwhile, Edem couldn't help but twist in his seat and look back. And to his horror, what he saw was a black muzzle emerging from the room they'd just escaped, sniffing along the ground and stepping onto the platform.

He'd never seen a revenant before, or at least not one as fresh and powerful as this one. Its surface was a shifting, gurgling black mass, like boiling tar. Like boiling rage.

"Ardor," Edem squeaked, suddenly petrified by what was going to happen next.

The revenant emerged out onto the broken platform, and in a single stride jumped right off the edge. It hung in the air a moment, its legs wheeling a bit, and then retracting into its body--and then legs morphed to wings, at the same moment Ardor changed gears and the vehicle accelerated.

"Access gate, access gate!" Edem started screaming.

"I knoooow!" Ardor wailed in return, and then jerked the steering wheel with excessive force.

It took a moment for Edem to realize that the vehicle had some sort of failsafe that prevented it from changing angle too abruptly. Ardor was pulling the wheel to go down as sharply as possible, but the front of the vehicle only tilted downwards a bit, and remained more stubbornly horizontal than anyone inside would have liked. At this angle, they'd just splat against the inside of the city's dome, far above the gate.

Obid shouldered his rifle, rising and turning around so half his body was outside the vehicle's containment bubble. Edem could see Obid's hair and beard whip wildly in the wind outside the field, but Obid gave it no notice as he took aim. The rifle popped off a shot, a flash of light as it hit the revenant straight in the face. But there was only a slight dip in the revenant's roiling surface, a vague disturbance that did nothing to slow it down.

Obid spun the rifle's reel quickly, and took another shot, and another. Again, Edem could see only small indents, but no other effects on the revenant. He didn't think joining in with his little pistol would make any difference at all, if Obid's rifle had such little effect.

And the revenant was gaining on them.

"No, absolutely not," Ardor said, and the vehicle veered to the side sharply. Obid let out an 'oof' and dropped back onto the back seat, safely within the vehicle's energy field.

Edem was flung against Obid as the vehicle now tilted sideways. Whatever failsafe was preventing it from tilting diagonally down was apparently not preventing it from veering sharply down to one side. Ardor went in a sharp downward spiral around a particularly tall building, and the revenant disappeared from sight momentarily. It did not veer as sharply as the vehicle, and lost some ground in trying to change directions.

Ardor's spiraling descent had been angled just right to bring them to street level, and they dipped below the skyline, momentarily hidden by buildings along the sides of the road. It would not fool the revenant for long, but it only needed to until they reached the access gate.

Which brought up the next issue. The access gate.

"We'll have to smoke through," Zynthia said.

"Wait, no, what?" Edem asked, his voice going squeaky again.

"Can't exactly stop at the door and knock, kid," Zynthia said, taking out Ardor's Alexyz tablet. "Not enough time for niceties. Gotta smoke right through it."

Edem watched in horror as Zynthia uploaded a quick command on the tablet.

There was no way. There was no way she could time it perfectly so the gate opened and closed just quickly enough to let them through, but not the revenant. For one, the revenant was gaining on them again, having spotted them even at street level. If Edem turned in his seat and looked, through the vehicle's transparent protective field he could see the bullet of black smoke following them, roiling angry and forming a giant maw to eat them up.

For another, Zynthia was using an Alexyz tablet. Zynthia was not the best at getting along with Alexyz. She had been chief engineer since the city's inception, but she'd also been high priestess of Atoz long enough to have accumulated some very bad habits about interacting with divinities other than Atoz.

As if sensing his thoughts, Zynthia turned in her seat to shoot him a grin.

"Kid, this is exactly why you've still got a lot to learn," she said, and slammed her hand down on the tablet. The image on the tablet glitched out in a burst of divine power.

The twin white doors of the access gate slid open smoothly, and opened just enough for the Red Empress to zoom in without scratching her paint--and then closed again brutally, seamlessly, cutting off the revenant just at the tip of its nose. A puff of black smoke managed to sputter through, and dissipated on its own.

Ardor slowed down considerably now that they were in the access corridor between the two cities. The transparent ceiling showed the twinkling stars of the Endless Night, and the doors to Transit were just ahead, promising--if not safety--at least familiarity.

Edem's heart did not slow down for a while.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What a fantastic beginning! This was areally engaging and dramatic read, and I loved the world-building with the deserted cities, and the tech-ghosts and all of it a lot!

Thank you! :D

Writing this was quite a ride, but worldbuilding for this setting was definitely my favorite part.

Tags added! You're gonna get, like, all the prototypes!

Thank you so much! ...Wow, yeah, I didn't realize until I already tackled these prompts that nobody else had started on these colors.

Oh my GOD this world is so cool!!! I can't wait to learn more about it, and more about whoever it is who took Ardor's place, and the revenants, and the gods, and the cities, WOW. So cool.

Thank you! I have been rotating this setting in my mind for some time, and now that I'm writing the possibilities feel endless.