If Laykis was alive, Khadam couldn’t tell. If she was dead… well.

The only thing she knew for certain about this android was that she was complicated. It was impossible to say how complicated, until she smacked on the cobble street, splitting herself open and spraying her mechanical guts across the stone road.

Ryke had launched herself forward, and failed to catch her. Khadam could only look over the edge of the tower, and watch.

It took days to find all her parts, but Khadam needed only her head, and the remains of her chassis to see the truth. Laykis was easily the most complicated machine she had ever seen. Among humanity, Tython was an esoteric legend. A hermit who loved to tinker.

Among the coldsmiths, however, he was infamous for his attention to detail. Where most coldsmiths were obsessed with producing machines at scale, Tython hand built every last one of his constructs. He worked closely with the flow engineers to give them intricate personalities, each one taking decades to manifest. Each one, impossible to replicate. So it was said.

Which meant his works were largely viewed as useless. Except for one minor detail:

His constructs were always perfect.

They broke every rule of neuro-engineering, and numerous clans banned his approach to production, to the point that copycats might be exiled from their clans just for dabbling with one-of-a-kind custom builds. Time was wasting, humanity was losing its grip on life, and there was no reason to expend effort on vanity projects like Tython. Not to mention the danger of giving machines a personality… Down that path led unbridled motivations.

But he lived alone, alone with his machines. And his machines, on the grand scale, were nothing compared to the monstrous accidents of the past. So no one bothered him.

And after the last Lightning War, all trace was lost of him.

Only his androfel constructs, his children, as they called themselves, still wandered the worlds. Going from clan to clan. Somehow staying unstained and hidden from the Swarm.

And, it seemed, at least one of them had survived all these thousands of years, only to come to this moment. Broken. Shattered. And lying dark on the table in Khadam’s personal workshop, deep within the factory.

Laykis’s parts were splayed across the table. Half of her was human-made metal and synthetic wiring paths and an integrated neural system that turned every part of her body into a kind of brain. The other half was crude brass armor and steel replacement limbs and copper wires, mangled and corroded and perforated with damage, either from the fall or from before, Khadam couldn’t tell.

Those crude parts were easy to fix. Nothing at all. So Khadam cast them aside, and focused on the parts that mattered: the android’s core, that shining, spheroidal piece of machinery at every construct’s center. The core acted as brain and battery, both. It was activated by an injection of pure Light, and in general, it could be swapped from machine to machine. A mining drone’s core could operate a planetary excavator, though it would struggle to send its signals efficiently.

Only, Laykis’s core was like nothing Khadam had ever seen. Where most cores were covered in connection nodes and open sockets, Laykis’s was smooth. A closed system. Khadam couldn’t even see a way to inject light, nor would she risk cracking it open. She tried immersion bathing it, she tried plate energization, she tried everything.

She even tried swapping this core out for a generic one, but when she did, it only fried the lesser core and nothing powered up.

“OSRM? Would that work?”

OSRM was an experimental connection that used a tangled web of dozens of cores and brute-force machine learning to realign an errant core.

And when she finally gathered all the cores, and set up the web, and turned it on… all those cores died too. And the power in the factory blinked out for five long minutes. Only the gaslights remained on.

With any other core, any other construct, Khadam would’ve given up and built something new. But this one…

...this one knew things.

What had Tython been creating all those years, in his isolation? Why had he infused this machine with such vivid purpose?

Well, there was one idea left to explore. One that she had left for utter last, because it was her least favorite.

But here she was, at the end of ideas.

So, Khadam clicked off the gaslights on the workshop, leaving it in darkness. Their heady scent lingered in the air. She stretched her muscles, weary from so many hours hunched over the broken android, and locked up the room.

Out on the factory floor, all her assembly constructs stood motionless. Waiting for orders. They could keep waiting. Khadam wanted to solve this. Needed to. Rodeiro had long warned her about her single-minded focus, how engineering never lived in a vacuum, and how the real world was often more important than the work. It was Khadam’s strength, and greatest downfall.

Exactly what almost got you killed back on that nameless planet.

But this machine deserved single mindedness.

Despite the high sun, the nearest tower still shed its shadow across Lowtown. Instead of going up the tower, she went down to the first basement level, where the avians and other denizens had erected shrines and holy artworks in a kind of subterranean chapel. The air was musty and infused with incense, and gaslight brought light into this place, making all the silver ornaments and gold paint shine with a hazy light.

At the center of this circular chapel, there was the outline of a door on the pylon.

Khadam put her hand on the cold metal, and impulsed the door to open. It slid back, revealing a dark, sacred lair, open only to a human’s touch. The interior of the shield pylon.

There was no light in here, except for a glowing on the floor. The air was cold, but instead of that suffocating stillness, Khadam could feel the air conditioning blowing gently around the empty, cylindrical space.

“Khadam.”

The door sealed shut behind her, melding back into the perfect metal of the pylon. A voice, a chorus of voices, beckoned out to her from every direction. Well, that’s needlessly ominous.

“Oracle,” she said back.

“Do you feel it?” The chorus echoed around her.

The light on the floor began to grow. Becoming numerous pools and puddles of luminescence that dripped up. Becoming dozens and dozens of orbs, all made of that same glowing light, as if they were physical things. They bobbed and swirled around her in spinning unison. “Do you feel the energy coursing through the city, Khadam? It’s online. All of it.”

“All of it?” She said, arching an eyebrow.

“All that’s left of it.” The Oracle corrected himself. The voice made a sound that might’ve been laughter, except it was coming from a machine. Yes, Khadam thought. Disconcerting. This is a problem.

“Are you feeling well, Oracle?”

The lights froze mid dance.

“Never better,” the Oracle said. “Did you know that I was the last backup? I was the last chance of life for this place, and I spent the last two thousand years dying. Who knows how long I had left? But you came and now I will serve my purpose. By the gods, I must be blessed. By the gods.”

Personality. Always a bad thing in a machine. At the very least, the Oracle might be on the verge of faltering and going offline. At the most… Well, best not to think of the most. A corrupted AI could become anyone. And if it had access to resources, it could grow into anything.

She would have to work on his code, and she was not that kind of engineer. There were ways to learn, but this fire would have to keep burning while she dealt with the other problem.

“Oracle, I need your help.”

“Anything, Khadam. Ask anything of me. I can grant it.”

She wanted to say, I thought you were an Oracle, not a genie. But there was really no point in engaging with an emerging protocol. You had no idea what words you might say that it might cling to, to interpret as some kind of command.

So, Khadam said, “Do you have any kind of resurrection protocol?”

Before, the orb lights were merely paying attention to her. Now, they flocked to her, swarming around her head, turning all her vision into a blinding, flashing spiral. She winced and held up a hand, but the Oracle seemed not to notice.

“Is it time?” He said, with far too much emotion in his digital voice. “Are you ready to begin the Protocol?”

“That depends on what your protocol is.”

“It is not mine. It is the protocol.”

“Right. Just send me the files, please.”

A virtual package chimed in her thoughts. Khadam impulsed it open.

The package was too much to parse internally, so she clicked on her eyes. A light projected from her pupils, displaying the files for her sight only. She started to scan.

The Oracle’s orbs swirled around her, impatiently. But he said nothing while she read.

After the Seed of Light fell from the first scar, the visions spread across humanity. A gift.

And then, the curse. There were no more children. The human genome simple refused to replicate, no matter what humanity did. Neither through in vitro, nor cloning, nor even the long-abandoned practice of natural birth. None of these could produce offspring. It was as though the atoms themselves refused to interact, would dissolve their molecular bonds when they came close to forming human DNA.

Humanity became obsessed with fixing that which was broken, even as all the visions showed them it could not be done. Humanity would pay any price to take back their future. Powerful artificial entities were constructed, dangerous biological experiments were held in secret, and vast sources of power were tapped with reckless abandon to fuel these exploits, until whole systems were drained.

For hundreds of years, they toiled. Their resurrection attempts became more outlandish, more wild and catastrophic.

Until the lightning wars fractured humanity. Not once, not twice, but three separate times - each time, bringing the number of remaining humans down by orders of magnitude. Billions to millions. Millions to thousands...

The Machine Swarm did not want to usurp humanity. Only to eradicate them. “As long as your kind lives, all existence is endangered.”

Still, humanity clung to life. Clans emerged in the void, ffar-flung and isolated from each other. Aware of each other's existence, but rarely contacting the others to avoid catching the Swarm’s roving gaze.

Each clan pursued its own protocol. Some, pursued dozens of them. But all these resurrection protocols amounted to the same thing: how can we restore that which was lost? How can we bring humanity back?

But this protocol - the resurrection protocol of Kaya - this was different. This protocol spoke of the genome problem as if it had already been solved. As if the resurrection was at hand…

The protocol made reference to a procedure that Khadam had never heard of: Auster’s Procedure.

“Oracle?”

The lights blossomed.

“What is Auster’s Procedure?”

“I’m sorry, Khadam. You do not have adequate user privileges to access that information. Even I do not have access to that information. The protocol demands that this information will be unlocked only when three confirmed humans are present and alive.”

“Is it real?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind,” Khadam said. There was no way for the Oracle to answer that question. He’s only a backup.

But if they had solved something here, the implications were staggering.

Another thought popped into her head. If Poire was born here... She never did figure out when he was born. She had assumed he was from before Seedfall. Why would she guess anything else?

She shook the thoughts away, retraining her mind on what mattered right now.

“Does your protocol involve building things?” She asked.

“The first phase requires your safety. If there is anything to be built that will increase your chances of survival, I will build it. Though, I must admit, my inventory runs sparse after the many centuries of maintenance.”

“Can you make one of these?” Khadam impulsed a file of her own into the Oracle’s mind.

It was a tiny file, a simple blueprint for a simple printer, but it was the key to everything she needed.

Khadam held her breath, waiting for the answer. But the answer came almost immediately.

“Oh yes. I can make you two and a half thousand of these, with materials to spare.”

“Oh,” Khadam said, the word coming out like breath from a punch in the gut. “Oh.”

It was the best answer she could’ve hoped for. One printer was more than enough. But thousands… This will solve everything, she thought.

Khadam swallowed, trying to keep the excitement from overriding her emotions. Her hands were shaking. “Okay, Oracle. Let’s start.”

***

Queen Ryke av’Ryka, the last of her line, would rather be anywhere but here.

In her chambers. Or flying over her city. Most of all, she wanted to be down in the god’s factory, watching over Laykis’s shattered body.

But she could do nothing to help fix the android. She would only get in the human’s way. Instead, she would serve her best purpose up here, on the open promenade of the Hanging Palace, brushing feathers with the new cyran elite. The Emperor’s peace had come with strings attached.

Hundreds of them, to be precise. Cyran nobles. Politicians. Wealthy and hateful and fully under the impression that the Cauldron was theirs for the taking, and Ryke was only a puppet Queen.

This was her place. This was the only way she could help her people: by playing the game, and acting like she was one of them. Had to smile, and nod, and bow before those who were more powerful than her, which was practically everyone here.

At least none of them knew about Khadam, yet. Only rumors and guesswork. Ryke had made utter certain of that.

Avian servants carried cyran drinks and cyran dishes. Fresh, tentacled delicacies and clammy things from the northern coast. Cyran nobles laughed and drank and milled around the promenade to an undercurrent of cyran music, played on those watery flutes and stringed instruments they loved so much. Warm winds cast a breeze through all these fine suits and silken dresses and jeweled necks and fingers. And all those glittering scales...

Far below the promenade, Ryke could see the soot and smoke stains, still blackening her city. As if nothing had changed. As if the Savior Divine had not come through here, and saved her people, only months ago.

What would her people think of her, to see her in a place like this? To see the Queen of Aviankind, acting like this...

Ryke was wandering through the throngs, playing the part of an overly-agreeable Queen among all these spoiled fools, when someone laughed so hard, they spit out their drink. Red wine splattered her feathers, and dripped down her royal silks. The cyran who sprayed her gave a laughing apology.

“Oh, my sincere regrets, Queen!” He said without any sincerity at all, “I didn’t see you there. A shame about your robes and all that - but you must hear this. Say it again for the Queen.”

While these cyran leaches might not know about Khadam, they were beginning to suspect Ryke had uncovered some great human artifact. Why else build such a monstrous factory in the center of Lowtown? Why else evacuate the entire city for a full day?

“Come here, your Highness,” the cyran beckoned her, as if she were nothing more than a maidservant. “We think we’ve finally figured out your strange little endeavor down there.” A careless laugh, as if they were hiding some sly joke from her.

“It’s the lowbirds, isn’t it? What do you call them? Passerines.” He said.

“No, it's the corvani.” Another cyran offered, a woman with scales on her lips polished to a mirror shine.

“Yes, corvani. Hideous things. Brutish, stupid beasts. And those black feathers - ugh.”

Ryke bit her tongue, though it bulged in her beak. Wanting to slice him open with her words. Holding the frozen smile on her face.

“Those disgusting birds, they’re building a new nest or hive or whatever you call it.”

“Yes,” the first one chimed in, almost laughing over his own words, “They’re making this one out of metal. Why? Because they’ve finally figured out that metal doesn’t burn!”

He laughed at his own awfulness, and so did his partner, and the other cyran politicians around him. And Ryke kept that dead smile on her face, wore it like the mask of her ancestors. Never let it slip.

Why did she suffer them?

Because she needed them. Because despite what Poire had done, they were still xeno subjects of the Empire. And she needed their favor. She needed all the cyran elite to believe that the Cauldron was a peaceful part of their Empire.

How else to get the conquerors to leave you alone? Pretend to be conquered. Whether the Emperor was a god, he had the power of one. So she had to follow his whim, and the whim of his insufferable people, and this was the only way she could save her people from utter destruction.

One day, the people of Gaiam might be free of this sickening corruption. One day, Poire might return to overthrow this creeping tyranny.

But today, she played her part.

Queen Ryke excused herself from this conversation, not laughing, but not letting them know how much she burned at their insults. She drifted at the edges of the cyran cliques, not wanting to talk to any of them. Graciously dodging out of the way of servants (her own people) and cyrans too wine drunk to notice her.

Until one conversation caught her attention.

A cyran woman, who wore gold and silver scaled jewelry to hide her aging, was talking loud enough for everyone to hear her, like a haughty politician testing her ideas against the crowd.

“It's a fine city, or it could be if it was free of their filth. Why don’t we get rid of them all? Keep the strong ones slaves, yes. Breed them into better and more pliable stock. It seems so obvious,” she stretched out that last word in a way that grated on Ryke’s bones.

Ignore them, Ryke thought. They’ve talked like this for years, and nothing has come of it. Ignore them.

But then another voice chimed in, “Why, Kassioch, I’m appalled. Pliable stock - these birds? They will never be more than a high-minded nuisance. That fool Magistrate let them linger far too long. Better to wipe them out. Kill them, what have you. Oh, the redenites might be of use, but better to throw the rest out with the trash.”

Ryke stopped in the middle of the promenade, her fists clenched. She tried to force herself to keep walking, to keep her head held high and just ignore them. But her legs wouldn’t move.

A bottle of wine smashed on the ground. Everyone turned to stare.

A surly voice growled over the politicians’ and nobles’ stunned silence.

“Might as well start the killing with you, then.” He had a knife out, its edges dusted with rust.

And Ryke recognized him only from the old scars crisscrossing his body, and the bandages still wrapped around his leg. It was the cyran who had come through the gate with Laykis. He had been so deeply incapacitated, so deathly wounded, that Ryke never had the chance to talk to him. What was his name? Tribune Kirine?

Next to him stood the other gate traveler, the one who called himself a scribe. But instead of calming his still-injured friend, the scribe was just standing there with a quill in hand, taking notes.

Ryke could see it in Kirine’s eyes: the desire to do something reckless. She could stop him.

But she didn’t want to.

The cyran woman, with graying scales and too much silver, was quivering with rage. Her eyes stared daggers at Kirine. One of the other nobles came up to her, and tried to usher her away. But this noble, Kassioch, pushed away the cautious hands, and raised her chin. Her sunken cheeks and slit nostrils made her look as sharp as Kirine’s blade.

“You, Tribune, dare raise a weapon at me? I am Praetoch of His Immortal Empire.”

Kassioch snapped her scaly fingers, all her jewels jangling as she did. Out of the crowd burst a soldier, whose muscles were as large as his head. He wore full imperial uniform, with armored shoulders and torso, and a ceremonial cutlass at his hip.

The soldier stood like a wall in front of Kirine, but the Tribune did not back away. Instead, he nodded at the soldier, as if he knew him. Or, at least, respected him.

“At ease, Soldier,” he said, “Unless you want to stick your blade into a gods-touched martyr.”

The soldier, whose scales did not shine, hesitated at such a wild claim. Doubt flickering on his duller features.

The scribe chimed in, his voice almost casual as he said, “It’s true, you know. We’ve been with the Savior Divine. He saved our lives.”

“Twice,” Kirine said.

At that, the soldier took a step back.

“What are you doing?” Kassioch snarled at her hired muscle. She snapped her fingers again and again, “Maim him. What are you doing, you dullscaled idiot! Cut him, or I’ll have you and all your brothers hanged!”

“You hear what she calls you?” Kirine spoke to the soldier. The soldier bowed his head, saying nothing. As if he just wanted to disappear.

So, Kirine turned back to Kassioch, “Not smart to insult the sword you paid for.”

“He is paid to do what I want.”

“Oh, and is that how you got a seat on the Venerate? You had to pay for it?”

“Says the son of Vorpei.”

Kirine lifted his blade again, this time aiming the point directly at Kassioch’s throat. She held her ground, but her eyes drifted down to the tip of the blade.

Kirine smiled, “I saw you, Kassioch. Not half a year ago, you were licking at her boots. Hypocrite.”

“Go back to getting drunk with your dullscales, kin traitor,” Kassioch spat back.

Up to now, the crowd had been undecided, but now they realized who was on which side, they made their favor known. Laughing, and closing ranks behind Kassioch, encouraging her next salvo. It didn’t matter what Kassioch said, they wanted her to win this, whatever this was.

But Kirine didn’t seem to care about winning. He wanted to make a point.

“The Emperor is going to use you like the tool you are. And when he’s done, he’ll throw your corpse on the pile with the rest of him. Go on, keep believing his lies. That’s all your life will ever be. A sad little lie. Never thinking. Never doing anything but what you’re supposed to do. Too stupid to realize the value of life, right in front of you.”

The crowd chuckled nervously as Kirine took a panther’s step forward, his blade still raised.

Kassioch took an uncomfortable step back, casting around for help. “Since when do they let xeno lovers at parties like this?”

“Since the xenos started hosting them,” Ryke cut in.

All eyes turned to her. But it was time to end this. With a sweep of her wing, she stepped in between the two cyrans. Her back facing Kassioch.

“Excuse us, honored guests. Please allow me to escort this nuisance out.”

Without waiting for an answer, she reached in, and gently grabbed Kirine’s shoulder, heedless of his blade. His muscles were surprisingly tough for a middle-aged politician.

As she directed him out of the crowd, Kirine growled at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be a Queen? How can you let them treat you like that?”

“Not every battle must be won. Only the war.”

“Your people surrendered years ago.”

Ryke turned on him, her crest feathers flaring into a vicious crown. “We never surrendered.”

But Kirine only smiled at her, as if to say, “That’s the right answer.”