He dropped the strange cable that he'd felt the light running through, and blinked a few times. Maybe slicing it open with a claw and pulling it out of the ground to look inside had been a bad idea, but he'd been curious. He certainly hadn't expected it to be like looking directly into the sun on a clear day from the upper atmosphere. If he'd looked into it with his true eyes, he might have been permanently blinded.

He considered the two kinds of strange cable that he'd dug up and examined. One carried the same lightning-like power that moved some of the small carts. The other carried a much more powerful light than its soft song had hinted. The building behind him seemed to be molded out of nothing but mortar. A stronger mix, but essentially the same.

The cables ran like veins, like the underground waste and water channels that linked all of the dwellings into something larger. He hadn't noticed them at first, probably because they were like nothing he'd ever seen before. He looked around again, with his true eyes open, after carefully covering the dangerous one.

Their dwellings were larger and closer together this far down the mountain. And despite the empty streets, many of those held dozens or even hundreds of the mankind. Their numbers were staggering. The population of an entire continent in the past was gathered here, but the roads indicated that there were many more of them outside of this place.

Far from having run its course, the plague had settled deeply into the world and learned to thrive.He wasn't sure how he felt about that, but the world taught that those who could not change quickly enough died. Sleeping through their decline had been the wrong decision. Perhaps it wasn't just himself as an individual that was getting old, but his entire race.

His eyes showed him that the deeper into their city one went, the less wildlife there was. Perhaps it was some kind of hive at this size instead of a mere city, since they had stacked themselves in separated pockets of many layers. Not that it completely lacked wildlife, for all of its imitation stone, but it was confined into little pockets, like lichen growing in the cracks of a stone.

The veinlike energy cables didn't confer life upon the city itself, the buildings were inert despite the way the cables thinned and split as though they were feeding the buildings themselves the energies they carried. But the strings of the world still bent and curved toward the vast city, reflecting the enormous number of lives that it contained.

There should have been hearts here, the natural pull on the strings would make gathering them easy. There were even places where the strings touched, and life sang or hummed more vibrantly around those natural pools, but none of those that he could see from this distance had been tamed into a heart.

He closed his fragile true eyes, and the world dimmed to a more comfortable level. He didn't feel particularly elderly at the moment, he felt hungry on a thousand levels. The apples had taken the edge off of his starvation, even though he hadn't eaten nearly enough yet, and his mind was able to focus. He was so curious. Light could be bent, absorbed, and radiated, but he'd never imagined a channel built to carry it.

He would look inside of one of the light cables after the sun set, and see if they went dark with the rest of the world.

--

The vampire, formerly known as Gregory, and someday to be known as Norris, growled as he sorted the trash of a random person. People dressed in nice clothes didn't usually sort their trash in public, but when a cheery older woman carried her neatly sorted bags out of the building and stopped to stare at him with wide eyes, he discovered that he didn't have to come up with an excuse.

"Good on you," she said approvingly.

"What?" he asked blankly.

She used her chin to point at the carefully separated piles he'd been building. "Most people aren't bothering to sort their trash just because the city is too burdened to give out fines during this horrible virus outbreak."

"I'm just looking for a phone," he blurted. The separated piles were mostly just habit. He didn't know why he'd admitted that, and his mouth snapped shut.

She cocked her head and gave him another excuse, "Your girl got jealous and threw it away?"

He was NOT going to explain that this trash bin glowed more than others did to his true eyes, which probably meant that it held a still powered electronic device of one kind or another. It wasn't a reliable tactic, because the foggy white world that he could see with the last layer of his eyes open, seemed to be wrapped in blurry rivers and streams of light that weren't electricity. But living things and concentrations of power would also shine brighter than the rest of the white fog.

After a moment he nodded.

"Tsk," she said scoldingly. "Both of you are probably at fault. You should keep in mind that it's just a tool, and learn to pay attention to the needs of the people at your side. But throwing expensive things away is both a waste of money and of other people's labor. Certainly not a reaction to be admired."

As she talked, she waved her bags pointedly at the row of bins in front of him in a confusing manner, and when she asked a little sharply, "If you don't mind?" he could only blink at her in confusion.

"The six foot rule dear," she said a bit tartly.

"Oh, right, sorry," he apologized, as he backed away from the piles he'd been making so she could deposit her own bags in the bins.

She continued to hand out advice as she emptied each bag into the correct bin for its contents, and folded all but the food waste one back up. She stopped in the entrance as she walked away, and added kindly, "Everyone is tired of being confined, and just as scared of this virus as their grandparents were a century ago when that deadly influenza swept across oceans and through the large cities. Don't be too bitter with the girl."

He wasn't scared of the virus, because he'd never caught any kind of disease from a human yet, and he couldn't tell her that he remembered that year himself, but he smiled gently at her and said simply, "We will be okay."

When the door closed behind her, he resumed sorting the trash, but he felt less frantic and frustrated than he had. Things weren't so bad. He didn't normally return to a place that he'd regularly frequented in his 'past life', but he was wearing a different face and he could use a different accent if he focused on it, and he knew a place that might be ignoring the new regulations, if it was still in business.

--

She shook herself free of the ice, and looked around with a sigh. It was obvious with merely a glance that they'd chosen the wrong path.