Ashley was never going to forgive Smithiner if the idiot died. What could possibly have possessed the poor fool to try and sustain not just one, not just two, but five people in place of their symbiotes. They had all survived, given fresh symbiotes from the shelter stores. But it had driven the poor old fool to the breaking point.

Starved for oxygen and glucose and possibly even infected with something!

“Come on! Come on! Wake up you overfull bag of rotten sap! You can’t die on us now! You owe me pay out on all that tungsten fruit!”

She was trying to sound angry, she was furious! But not at him. It just, she didn't want to deal with this. She had been the one who came in from the fields without a spare set of lungs. She should have been the one to suffer for her mistake and cutting corners.

Not Smithiner.

He’d kept picking up and saving them as their symbiotes failed, he had herded he confused and injured ahead of him until they found shelter. And now he was just an unresponsive quivering lump matter how deeply he drew on the input lines.

One of the other clerks that Ashley didn't know by name was tending to him gently and bandaging the wounds he had torn into himself to give more anchors of his friends to suck the life out of him.

She was thankful someone had been around who had at least an idea of how to help him. There had not been many clerks in the shelter, most of them were field workers. Two of the big orbies that Ashley normally thought of as traders but might very well be locals she just had never met.

They were all packed tight, huddling and shuffling symbiotes in and out of the refreshing chambers. The shelter was meant to support quite a number of people for a long time.

Ashley had started coming too after she was hooked up to a proper symbiote. Her bruised and raw trachea itching horribly as it finally had a proper sleeve to start healing inside of instead of the rough and awful contacts of Smithiner’s intake fixture. How did he stand to have those things embedded in his flesh like that?

She was fidgeting and trying to shout him back awake even though it had not worked the last three times. But no one told her to stop, many of them had family or friends in similar situation or worse. She saw a few staring at her blankly in a way that made her suspect they wished they had their loved ones here to simply yell at.

The room was so smothering that no one wanted to talk overly bright and yet conversations still echoed and flashed off the sharp angles of the interior. The shelter had been fixed with ceramics and molds where they needed to infill between the metal and stone of reef bones.

Ashley was the loudest wailer here by far. But still no one told her to shut up and let others tend her friend. No one told her to be quiet even though she could see how some of the more badly light burned winced from the sensitivity of their injuries. The town’s anti-astro missiles had been used in the avenues. Weapons meant to ward off void beasts, that could crack open the hardiest silo or battery tower had detonated close above them.

Many a voice coil was going to require either replacement or long healing with a poultice of some other kind of city magic. It would cost a lot of the tithe for the injured of the Town to recover from this.

And still they let her shout and cry and vent her anger and pain and hurt and worry. They all had something to cry about. No one had the heart to tell her that she was not allowed to voice hers.

It wasn't fair.

The dangers of the world were supposed to be a tour in the solar canopy and the ocasional wandering animal from the void. The doctrine and archives said it so, They were you use the defenses to protect themselves from simple dangers. But it was not supposed to be like this.

Not these things!

Dragons?!

What kind of fair reef was it that there were things like dragons!

It made her want to scream, in fact she was screaming.

She was yelling about this now.

“It’s not fair! We shouldn't have to huddle and hide like THIS! Those things are rampaging up there attacking our HOME! Breaking open our silos! Killing our friends and families!”

She felt hot, she felt angry, she was making her symbiote work double time. She was going to go over to the seal station and pop the lock and blast doors open and go out there and murder those things!

She was going to go to the tallest tower and scream her rage to the void till one of them noticed her and then she was going too-

“Ashley! STOP! What are you DOING?!”

Smithiner? He was okay? she looked around, he didin't sound okay, reedy and garbled, she was being let pass, but she could see the anger and the agitation and the heat in her fellow field workers. She saw them itching to follow her. Saw some trying to decide if they should move to help her open the doors.

She looked down at her own hands ready to initiate the unlocking sequence.

What was she doing?

She had been so angry, and hot and wanting to go out and wave her arms screaming in long light til one of the things swooped by too...

So that she could let them...

So that the monsters could...

Swallow her?

What the foul radiators of the solar canopy was she THINKING?!

She looked around at those around her, taking her lead because they had been thinking the same thing.

“What... why? WhaT!? What’s going on?”

Then she heard the voice, laughing inside her, light bursting inside her head like someone had just heard the most hilarious but cruel of jokes.

It was not a laugh she liked at all.

She saw the other field workers with the symbiotes responding and looking around to try and track the direction the laugh came from but the other clerk and the orbie and of course her friend Smithiner were still as if they heard nothing at all. Her friend was worried and exhausted as he gazed at her.

She felt her symbiote tremble in fear.

“Smithiner... I... I don’t like this... I don’t understand”

Smithiner held his gaze on her. But she found her eye staring at the solid wall that cut them off from the void. Beyond which Ashley felt a terrible assurance was one of the dragons staring right back at them. Through layers of stone and defenses.

She was certain she knew exactly where it was.

And slowly she came to realize that every other Field hand was staring towards it as well. And then the voice inside her that was somehow also coming from the presence she knew she was there far beyond the safe and yet such confining walls spoke.

“yOu CaN LiStEn AnD cOmE oUt LiKe GoOd SnAcKs. Or We CaN cOmE iN!”

Smithiner looked at everyone, Ashley only just realized that her friend was reedily pleading for her to respond. Why had he tried to talk when she was trying to.

Trying to listen?

But the thing was AWFUL why did she need to listen to it?

Oh wait smithiner was her friend she should listen.

“-ashley please... everyone, what are you doing, s-say something”

She shook herself a bit and tried to tear her eye away from the ‘spot’ where the dragon was.

“D-don’t you hear it? C-can’t you feel it? It’s right out there... if... if we j-just open the door I’m sure we can... uh fight... g-get it”

The other clerk snatched her with a grabbing arm and shook her.

“Yon stupid sprat fluster scamp! Mein Eldest grand father nearly died saving ye! No talk of going back out there at all for such foolish venture!”

She shook her head, that made sense, why did she keep thinking to try and go and-

The light flashed warning signals as one of the locks disengaged on main entrace to the shelter.

She should go help them open the others...

Wait What?!

“Oiy! Blubble heads! Git from there ya idiots! You let the monsters in with us yen fools!”

The other clerk leaped across to the door controls and tossed the person who had been putting in the codes to disengage. They seemed confused and dazed as they sailed across the main shelter hallway. Hardly even grasping to arrest their course.

But another fumbled towards the control panel and had to be shoved off.

“None of that!”

The clerk who was apparently one of smithiner’s grandchildren tapped at the control panel and engaged the lock again.

Ashley looked back at the weak continence of her friend and then to the other clerk. At all the other people that she could see the same kind of half muddled frenzy in the eye as she realized she must also have. They were all itching to get out of the shelter. It itched like a sick symbiote.

It almost burned. Distracted nearly enough to make one ignore the laughter that echoed inside their heads.

“cOmE oUt AnD pLaY mY sNaCkS! i’M gEtTiNg PeCkIsH!”

Intellectually Ashley knew that was a terrible idea, but she ITCHED so bad to do as she was told anyway.