"Log, PF plus three Tellurian hours. Lieutenant Seward reporting in. Well, I suppose I ought to be calling myself Mrs. Niemoller now.

"I'm counting six days of supplies. Continent twenty-four's pods weren't well stocked. The families tell me that between the Marxians and the ceilarchical forces in the streets, there weren't really chances to supply its pods for planetfall.

"Jacob's...well, the burns are pretty bad. Even the wildernesses aboard the Patrick Henry weren't this wild. I have no idea how we're going to find food or water.

"The horizon's the worst part of it all. I can't get used to how it goes down instead of up."

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

----

13 Tumbling Blooming, 1886 CE

Acerbian Alpine Wildlands

Elation filled Tvorh, and even though his throat was terribly sore from the mapping shout he'd loosed only a few hours earlier, he screamed a wordless cry of joy as he rocketed through the empty chaos.

Winds swirled about him, filling his ears with false landscapes, and he wished for one wild, untamed moment that there were some way to capture the nonexistent pictures that filled his mind. Falling through space, he existed in an ever-changing ocean of phantoms, plus one object that remained solid in the midst of the transitory auditory waves. Tvorh ducked his head and dove toward it.

It grew in his mind; the wings, drawn low so as to only minimally impede the speed of its descent, differentiated first in his mind from the rest of its form. The shapeliness of young womanhood, marred only by a long gun slung across her back, resolved in his ears as he sped toward her. When he was just a few yards above Aoife, so close that he could hear the paths of ten thousands strands of hair whipping about her face, Tvorh flared out his arms and legs and came in beside her.

He heard her turn her face to him, reach toward him. He took her hand, actuated his STIGMOS, and heard--or did he simply feel?--a gasp from his companion as their nervous systems entwined.

The ocean of noise submitted instantly to true sight as the world burst into bloom around him. He could see now from horizon to horizon, could drink in the lights of the blue sky and the green needles of the trees below him and the harsh bright whiteness of the snow that layered the ground far below. He shuddered delightedly, grinned to himself, whooped aloud, and he felt shared joy through the bond.

I could do this every day! he thought-screamed.

You'd have to take that up with the Princeps, Aoife replied. She sounded groggy. Had she gotten sick during the flight? Where's this valley?

Her eyes scanned the horizon. It was a bizarre sensation to be peering through Aoife's sight as he sought out his objective; she focused where she wanted, and Tvorh had to fight to make out the details in the periphery of her vision.

Just tell me where you want me to look. There was a hint of exasperation in the thought.

I don't know. That's the problem, Tvorh replied. He scanned through Aoife's vision. What's that?

What's what?

No, over to the left, a little. Down. Here, rotate. Tvorh shifted his weight so that the wind rotated him in a small circular arc. There! He pointed toward a mess of snow and sparser pine trees on the slope of the mountain spilling out from a rocky ravine. An alpine meadow. Do you see that?

The spot corresponded with the location that Tvorh had mapped with his sonar in the Labyrinth a few hours before. Nobody had been keen on hiking fifty miles through the winding tunnels to make it their target, but Tvorh had sensed an entrance into the Labyrinth in the mountains near Acerbia only a mile from the coordinates on the radio.

So they were skipping the hike from Acerbia by flying instead. The only problem was that the entrance was on the other side of the mountains.

In the north-south valley that bisected the continent. Vallus, where the Chimeras ruled.

Wait-- ye-- no. Hold up.

It's right there. Green.

More exasperation. There's a lot of green.

It's not needle green. It's mossy green.

Tvorh, you are one--

And the snow around the area is blue with blood. That meant a pack of Chimeras. Or, more likely, two packs of Chimeras, all fighting with each other.

A burst of excitement passed to Tvorh from Aoife. Oh! I see it!

Tvorh could see the spores shimmering in the air over Vallus below. This was Tvorh's first time over the hundred-mile-wide plain, and even Senrii said she'd never been to the east coast of the continent. Nobody flew over Vallus, not unless they liked aerial spores clogging the lungs of their boats and flying bat-scorpion monsters attacking their gas bags.

That meant no lungboats or whorlcopters for insertion or dustoff. Luckily, the Last Era drop pods needed testing, so they could launch straight in.

I don't see any Chimeras, but that blood...We'll probably land hot, Tvorh thought. Can you manage a landing on the ledge over the ravine and cover me from there? You ought to be safe, up that high.

Unless they have wings.

Well... yeah.

And the ledge's pretty small.

I thought you used to do this all the time.

I did. I was just letting you know how hard it'll be, so you know how much to praise me when I do it. Ready? Before Tvorh could respond, Aoife pulled away from him, and their nerves slipped apart. The world went dark; the formless ocean of bedlam returned. Her trajectory seemed true to his ears, though, so he let her go and focused himself on the drop zone.

If he came in too close to the ravine, Aoife wouldn't be able to cover him properly. Too far away and he'd be out of the meadow and in the evergreen forests; a beautiful place to be, but not when he needed her sniper rifle protecting him.

Where was Senrii, anyway? And what about the rest of their infiltration team? He hadn't seen anyone else in the sky.

He poked his SOPHIOS. Atmospheric pressure. It told him he was approaching the ground quickly now. The tips of the trees resolved in his ear's sight.

Ten seconds. He steered himself in the direction of the clearing, away from the trees, and communed with his SOPHIOS. Wings! Membranes burst through the skinsuit between his sides and his arms and whipped him with the force with which they caught the air.

Five seconds. Leg musculoskeleture! The SOPHIOS awoke a little bit more and obeyed him, reinforcing the bones and muscles of his lower body as he raced toward the snowy ground.

Three. Two. One.

The impact sent a plume of snow whole yards in the air. A split second later, the ground erupted all around him, and a horrible howling filled the air as a dozen or more Chimeras burst from burrows beneath the snow. The nearest was within reach; before it could get its torso out of the snow, Tvorh had his SOPHIOS release a blast of cryogenic bacteria around it. The snow around its weight shrank, cracked, turned to ice, and it screamed in rage as it struggled to free itself.

Another Chimera bull-charged him from behind. With one smooth motion, Tvorh drew his knife and dodged down into the bank, slashing as he did so. Blood spattered his face and his weapon hand, and then cold covered his whole face. At least the skinsuit retained heat well.

When he emerged from the snow, he was echolocating into the circular, serrated-toothed maw of a very large and apparently very angry chimera. It hissed obscenely and lunged down toward him. There was a crack and an explosion of flesh; blood spilled out between its spinning teeth, and Tvorh rolled to the side before it could come down on top of him.

Flat feet! Tvorh hopped up out of the drifts as his feet elongated and spread outward. He landed shakily, but now his weight was distributed over a wide area. The snow held him. From here, he had the advantage of height.

Well, sort of. Chimeras were often tall, and he was short. Speed had to be his friend; he couldn't match these things strength for strength. But his flat feet meant his speed would suffer.

His extra-strong legs could make up for it. When spines flew in his direction, he dodged out of their way before he even knew they were there. An ox-like Chimera, the same one he'd slashed when he first drew his knife, was struggling in the drifts in front of him; he leapt forward, landed on its back, and plunged his knife between its shoulder blades.

The thing bucked and howled, and Tvorh had to strengthen his arms in order to hang on. He heard three more charging towards him, more spines and caustic spittle flying, and miraculously-- by the bucking of the monster or by his own ducking and dodging-- he managed to avoid being struck. C'mon, he thought. Don't leave me helpless!

The ox-thing roared, reared back, and took off toward the overlook. Aoife! There she was, up above the ravine. Tvorh realized why his ranged support had been so sparse.

Some of the monsters did have wings. It was all Aoife could do to keep beads on the bloated buzzing insectoids that were harrying her. Her rifle cracked again and again, but until she cleared the sky, Tvorh would be on his own.

Nothing new there. He dug the handle of the knife deeper into the back of the beast and leaned to the side. It roared but wheeled with the weight. Even wounded, the thing could move quickly.

Tvorh drove the Chimera around in a half-circle and rode straight through his three pursuers. A horse-headed beast with a mouth like an anteater's whistled angrily at him as he passed, and the painful noise nearly knocked him off balance.

He left a cloud of flesheater bacteria behind him as he charged past.

Two of the three stayed up. Fathers of his fathers, were they immune? Great.

A sharp pain pierced his side, and Tvorh silently cursed himself for getting distracted. With his free hand, he yanked out a six-inch spine from his side. The SOPHIOS curled inquiringly within him, then relaxed. No poison, at least.

Two could play at the spine game. And Tvorh could shoot it with a lot more force. Tvorh wheeled the bull-chimera around again toward anteater-horse-face and his friend, ape-man-thing.

Anteater-horse-face first. Tvorh transferred the spine through his skinsuit into the gloves over his palm. Locked and loaded. Bouncing once, twice, thrice; the trajectory of his hand passed over the Chimera's open anteater-mouth. Before anteater-horse-face could unleash its ear-splitting whistle, Tvorh closed his ears entirely. The world went dark.

Release. There was a pressure in his hand; the spine shot out and disappeared.

He reopened his ears in time to witness anteater-horse-face whipping its cloven hands around its head, from which the spine protruded. Blood sprinkled the snow as the Chimera went down.

As he twisted the knife deeper into the ox-thing's back, trying to sever the spinal cord, Tvorh noted that there was a lot less motion on the ground than there had been before. Chimerical corpses lay dead or dying across the whole span of the clearing. Maybe Aoife had done her job after all.

Done it really, really well.

He caught the spinal cord with the knife; the ox-thing shuddered and tumbled. Tvorh leapt toward ape-thing. He caught it in the chest with his feet and in the face with the blade and rode it to the ground, then jumped off it.

Shield! He barely had time to get a forgebone shield STIGMOS up before a shredder-blast of keratin needles could skewer his face. As soon as they impacted, he pulsed a burst of air from the surface of the shield, sending the spikes back the way they had come into the body of a porcupine-like thing just a few yards away.

Tvorh turned and jabbed upward into the belly of a mancat that had dived, claws downward, toward him. The blade slipped between its armor plates and into its soft flesh, and Tvorh let its momentum do the work for him.

It came down limply on top of him. Its body covered his body; only his head was free to peer upward through the snow drifts.

A sharkface made an appearance above him, gnashing dozens of rows of wicked sharp teeth. Not good. Tvorh struggled, but the corpse of the mancat was too heavy. He couldn't get out from under it. And sharkface knew it. The thing was practically smiling at him.

Then sharkface's head exploded, showering Tvorh's exposed face with blood and brains. He spat and hacked to get the rancid taste out of his mouth, and as he did so, he almost missed the singsong call. "All clear!"

"That's great, Aoife," Tvorh said when he'd managed to get enough of the taste out of his mouth to stop retching. "Now get down here and help get this thing off me."

There was the sound of whipping wings and a gentle landing. A face--human, thankfully--peered down into the drift. Aoife slapped the button on the front of her wingsuit, and the wings folded up. "The mighty Tvorh laid low at last! Just wait until Senrii hears about this."

"She's not going to hear about this," Tvorh grunted as he shifted--maybe if he wiggled in the right way, he'd be able to slip his legs out from under the thing--"and if she does, I'll know who ratted me out. Now get me out of here before Senrii shows up and sees me."

Aoife knelt and started pushing against man-cat's corpse. Snow splashed against Tvorh's face as the body heaved. "If there's one thing I'm not, it's a rat. I'm more of a bat."

"A bat's just a flying rat. And I'm the one with echolocation." His ankle shifted beneath the weight; some more leverage, at last!

"But I'm the one who hears all the important stuff."

Tvorh pushed against the beast, and his body slid just a fraction along the snow. "Like what?"

Aoife shrugged. "Like the Magistrix asking Princeps Dorsin if Uxor Principis Oralie was pregnant yet."

"Do you always eavesdrop on them?"

"How else am I going to hear all the important stuff? I've been waiting for them to give in, but they haven't yet. The tension there! You could cut it with a knife. And I mean a bone knife. Not forgebone, just regular bone. Dull bone. Thousand-year-old-bone."

Tvorh grunted and heaved himself out from underneath the monster. He stood and dusted the snow off of the suit. "Thanks for the help, by the way," he grumbled.

"Don't mention it. What are friends for, anyway?"

"What do you say we take a snack?" Tvorh pointed up at the rocky outcropping over the ravine leading into the Labyrinth. "Dust off a place up there. You can show me your handiwork while we wait for the others to arrive."

Aoife clucked her tongue. "Senrii needs to stop being so fashionably late all the time. She's leaving all the fun for us." She winked at Tvorh. "And you do know how to show a girl the best time. Guns and hunting?" She sighed melodramatically. "Be still my pounding heart."

Why was Aoife acting so weird? And why did it make Tvorh feel so warm?

"What's for lunch?" Aoife asked as they sat down on the outcrop.

"Mycoprotein."

"Mycoprotein." The word sounded as if it itself were unpalatable to her.

"It keeps well and it's easy to carry."

"You can't have a picnic with mycoprotein."

Tvorh nodded down at the carnage. "There's fresh meat if you want it."

"On second thought, I'll take the mycoprotein."

"So," Tvorh asked when they were finally munching away, "that was some pretty nice work down there. Up here."

"You've got no idea. Look!" Aoife took his hand, and he linked with her. Color and light fell into place alongside the crisp scent and chill of the air. Mountainside cliffs dotted with snow-covered evergreens cut like a jagged knife's edge north and south; foothills rolled eastward toward shimmering, spore-covered Vallus.

No signs of civilization as far as the eye could see.

The clearing below was less serene. Upon seeing the carnage, Tvorh caught his breath and accidentally swallowed a mouthful before he was ready for it. A swift swat on his back courtesy of Aoife cleared his esophagus right up. "That," he gasped, "is..."

"A hell of a job," Aoife said cheerily.

The clearing was a charnel house, and Tvorh knew that most of the corpses hadn't been his victims. The bodies of Chimeras he hadn't even seen before-- antlered arachnids, a bulbous one-legged pustule-- littered the ground.

In that moment, Tvorh was really glad that Aoife had tagged along. "I guess I should have asked you to the range last night, huh?"

Aoife shrugged. The false modesty came through loud and clear via the neural linkage. Tvorh had forgotten to modulate the connection so that they were only sharing her eyesight. He didn't care. He was finding that he liked Aoife's head. "On the frontier, you don't have the Gentes telling you not to touch guns, and you also don't have the silly fear of them that city folk have. If you can't handle a gun, you die. So you learn. Daddy gave me my first when I was four."

"Four?"

"We don't mess around. Like I said, you learn to kill or you learn to die. If the Chimeras don't get you, the starvation will. We don't have mycoprotein vats or Wildlands defense perimeters. It's just you and your neighbors."

"I wonder what the Sodality thinks about having picked up a barbarian."

"Well, they'll overlook a lot thanks to the fact that I am just so beautiful."

"Stop fluttering your eyelids. I can't see when you do that."

She fluttered harder. "If I don't do it, how will you know how beautiful I am?"

"Do I need to?" As soon as Tvorh asked the question, a wave of embarrassment flooded the link. Aoife pulled her hand away, breaking the connection. What? It had been an honest question! Had he done something wrong?

They sat in silence for a while. Tvorh wished he were still holding her hand. Sitting on a scenic overlook was much less interesting when he couldn't see the scenery.

"Aoife."

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for coming out here with me. I really appreciate it."

"No problem."

"Especially since Senrii's so slow arriving. You really saved my guts."

Aoife huffed. "Not everything has to be about Senrii, you know."

Yes, Tvorh was pretty sure he'd done something wrong. He was relieved when he picked up the distant sound of bodies cracking through the air. "They're coming."

"About time."

Puffs of snow burst as Senrii and the rest of the strike team landed in the clearing, making little clouds in Tvorh's hearing. Aoife stood up and waved. "Over here!"

The strike team climbed up the cliffside and joined them. Senrii stood, hands on hips, and studied them. "Eating?"

Tvorh shrugged. "We were hungry. And, uh, I owed Aoife a date." Senrii smirked. Why was she always smirking? "Why were you so late?"

"Drop pod launcher had a short malfunction after it launched you. You seemed to do the job all right, though."

"Would have been easier with you here too."

"Look, kid. I didn't design the Thunderhammer. I just ride the tempest, you know? We're still getting the kinks worked out. Last Era tech doesn't come with instruction manuals. Besides." She looked toward Aoife, grinning. "I talked with Legatus Morvin, and we agreed you two lovebirds needed some bonding time."

"We didn't talk about that," Legatus Morvin deadpanned. He stood next to Senrii, his squad of several dozen gathered around him. Tvorh and Aoife had met him before the launch.

"Wouldn't have mattered anyway," Aoife muttered. Yeah, she was irritated at Tvorh.

Senrii clapped her hands once. "All right. If you two are finished up eating slash sulking..." She looked over Tvorh's shoulder toward the chasm cutting into the mountainside. "We've got some Last Era coordinates to investigate."

***

"You all right, kid?" Senrii yelled above the crack of gunshots and the screams of the dying.

"Fine," Tvorh called back as he waded through ankle-deep blood. "But I think I broke a nail on that last one. Fathers, but that forgebone is hard."

"It's why they call it forgebone."

Tvorh pressed on toward the quartz door at the end of the hallway. Last Era structures were usually proof against Current Era technologies, but there was no way to know it was intact for sure until he tried to open it.

"Where you going?" Senrii shouted behind him as he ducked under a severed arm that came flying toward him.

"Just to unlock it. So we can get inside."

"It's raining Chimera blood, and you're going to open that place up? Help us out here. There'll be plenty of time to get inside once we're, you know, not dead."

"I'm not interested in getting blood all over my beautiful face," Aoife added as her rifle cracked. "Especially if it's my own blood."

Tvorh sighed and turned back toward the battle. They were probably right; they needed him more here than inside. But he wasn't a legionnaire, he was rubbish with a gun despite his recent training, and besides, he really, really wanted to see what was inside that room.

A gurgling noise drew his attention to the ceiling of the stone hallway. Ten feet above him, a plastic, sucker-covered bulb spewed down a vile and viscous liquid. Tvorh dodged out of the path of the vomit, but not before a few drops of it touched his arm. It burned.

The floor of the cavern seemed to agree. Tvorh raised his arm, called on his SOPHIOS, and flung a ball of burning naphthgel at the bulb, which writhed and spewed as it burned to death.

The sounds of gunshots finally gave way to breathless whispers. Senrii came down the tunnel, her blade dripping with Chimera ichor. At least, Tvorh hoped it was ichor. "Big help, kid."

"Don't mention it," he said, giving the voice his best Aoife impression. "What are friends for?"

Aoife shot him a dirty look.

"Helping us not to get killed," Senrii said.

The sound of Chimera-claws tearing through the tunnels was unmistakable to Tvorh's ears. He pointed back the way they'd come. "We still have incoming. The second tunnel on the right."

Senrii nodded and reached into her skinsuit. It gave way and she drew out a canister about as big as Tvorh's fist. "Time to give this a test."

About a month ago, they'd taken the Symbiont-killing injection they'd discovered in the libraratory and aerosolized it with the help of Tvorh's mother. She'd worked in a chemical neutralizer as well to keep it from hanging around indefinitely, but... "Isn't that dangerous?"

"So is dying," Senrii replied as she jogged back up the hallway.

"Dangerous is Senrii's middle name, Tvorh," Aoife said. She leaned in and said, "Well, actually, it's Brunhilde."

"What? Really?"

Aoife shrugged.

Tvorh heard Senrii toss the canister down the hallway he'd indicated and vacuum-seal her flesh using the STIGMOS they'd derived from Bilr's first rat. He heard the aerosol spray.

He also heard the unmistakable sound of Chimeras in pain, dying along with the animating substance of their bodies. He'd known that Chimeras showed signs of Symbiont bonds, including blue blood and, well, the whole "genophagic mutation" thing, but seeing it proven like this was...

Well, he hoped that aerosol wouldn't drift back down this hallway.

Legatus Morvin wasn't Bound to a Symbiont, so it was safe for him. He withdrew a testleaf from his armor. Tvorh couldn't see the blue veins on it, of course, but as Morvin headed up toward the huddled mass of graying flesh that was a vacuum-sealed Senrii, he nodded. "All clear." He patted her on the shoulder, and she unsealed and stood up. Morvin looked down the hallway where the Chimeras had apparently died and whistled appreciatively.

A spring in her step, Senrii came back down the hallway, dusting off her hands and grinning as she passed Tvorh. "Guess what? It worked. Now, you coming or what?"

Tvorh turned back toward the door. "I was, until you stopped me."

"Yeah, well. Ductrix's prerogative. Get down there and get that door opened."

Finally. Tvorh headed back down toward the quartz door. A familiar bulbous pustule on the rock next to it seemed promising.

Senrii's hand on his shoulder stopped Tvorh from depressing the button. "We don't know what's in there, kid. Get your game face on."

"Oh. Yeah." Tvorh closed his eyes, breathed as deeply as he could, and felt for the consciousness swimming deep in his soul. Game face. That constricting feeling he'd grown to know and hate closed off his nostrils and his throat, and his mouth sealed with a slick, grotesque sensation, leaving only the taste of foreign flesh that was somehow his own. At least he didn't have to deal with nictating lenses over the eyes.

Morvin's legionnaires, bloodied but alive, readied their weapons and nodded.

Tvorh pressed the pustule next to the quartz door. An unpleasant screeching sound emanated from beyond it, and Tvorh worried that it would fail to open, but then long-disused musculature swung into motion, and the portal began to scrape away into the wall. A humid blast of musty air tousled his hair, and Tvorh almost tried to sniff at it before he remembered that his lungs were closed off.

Senrii stepped forward into the open doorway. The vacuum sealing over her face faded away as she looked about her in amazement. "Blood, bones, and bile." A massive chamber lay beyond. Its walls crawled with ivy and unidentifiable flora, a wide stony ledge ran along the outskirts, and on the floor far below the door, an enormous tree-like object waved gently in the very center of the room. A ramp with a dozen switchbacks descended to the floor. "Are you seeing this, Tvorh?"

Senrii hadn't dropped dead yet, so it was probably safe. Tvorh unsealed himself and stepped up beside her. "Yeah. I mean, seeing--"

"But you're getting it?"

"Yeah. What is it?"

Senrii pointed down at the central mass. "It must be a Tool." Her finger followed thick roots that crawled along the floor and up the walls to the raised ledge around the room, atop which rested bulbs like the closed petals of meters-long flowers, each one an even distance from its neighbors. "And those..."

Tvorh cocked his head. "I don't know what that is."

"They look like stasis chambers," Senrii said. "I mean, a really old version of a stasis chamber. Same sealed shape, though. And I think that's frost on their petals."

Aoife stepped up along them. "Fairy flowers." Seeing Senrii's confused look, she added, "There's an old story about a wicked Maga who conspired with Chimeras to put a beautiful princess to sleep inside a flower, where she slept a million years."

Senrii snorted. "Old story? Adonist nonsense, you mean. Blood! Princesses and Chimeras that spend their time tricking people instead of eating them. Your religion is weird, kid."

"Not part of my religion," Aoife said cheerily. "Just frontier fables to pass the time. I'm going to pitch it to a vidality producer. I'll put you in for the role of the wicked Maga."

"Ductrix," one of the legionnaires said, motioning past her with his rifle.

"What? Oh yeah." Senrii stood aside. "Of course."

The legionnaires filed through the doorway and took up position at the top of the ramp, sweeping their weapons back and forth. After a moment, one of them motioned toward the doorway.

Clear, then. And Tvorh wanted to see what was inside up close. He burst into a sprint toward the ledge and barely had time to catch a hint of shock on one of the legionnaires' faces before he'd gone over the side.

The air caught him as he tumbled, bearing him aloft on membranous wings. He glided out over empty space, looping around the central tree. He ducked between high branches and burst through clouds of leaves that tickled his face as he circled the massive body of the Tool. Tvorh landed before the cliff that he'd leapt from.

Senrii landed next to him. "Nice, kid," she said as she stood and brushed herself off. "You nearly gave them a coronary."

The legionnaires were rushing down the ramp, taking switchback after switchback to the bottom, panic written plainly across their faces. So was Aoife, looking irritated that he'd left her behind. Tvorh shrugged. "They motioned us in."

"Because they'd cleared the upper entryway."

"Anything that wanted to kill us could have shot us while we were standing in the doorway."

"Unless it was trying to trap us, moron."

"You're trying to make me feel bad for being too careless? Who are you and what have you done with Senrii?"

"Ductrix Senrii to you, and I have a responsibility to my subjects--"

"And here you stand next to me. I'll have to ask the legionnaires when they get down how they're feeling about that."

Senrii chuckled and clapped a hand on Tvorh's shoulder as the escort came huffing and puffing around the final curve. "So, Erus Tvorh," Senrii said loudly, "thanks so much for scouting the room for us. What did you find?"

"A big tree, a bunch of those huge tulip bulbs, and nobody lying in wait to trap us."

"Smart ass."

"And an entrance into the Tool."

"Where?"

Tvorh pointed at the central stalk. "Opposite side of the tree. It's about halfway up the body."

"Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go!"

"But Ductrix--" one of the legionnaires began.

"Hush! I'm the Ductrix and I say let's go!" Tvorh couldn't be sure, but he had an impression that she winked at him.

A minute later, they were on the opposite side of the chamber, staring up the body of the Tool. "I know it's too hard to see," Tvorh said, "but it's up there."

"Legatus Morvin," Senrii said, turning to the head of the legionnaires, "we'll need a rope and--"

"I got this," Tvorh said, taking a solid grip on the bark of the tree. His toes grasped the rough wood through the skinsuit, and he heaved himself upward

"Maga," the legatus said, "this is both unsafe and unnecessary. We need to call in for a team of inquirers."

"What can I say?" Senrii asked. "The kid does what he wants. Right, Tvorh?"

"Right!" he called back from ten feet above their heads. Climbing, which he'd always loved, plus proving his value to Nethress -- it was a combination made in Aoife's mythical heaven.

Life had been easier in the Chasm. He only had to keep his sisters alive. Now, there was a never-ending list of tasks to handle. He was glad to be Generosus Nethress, but --

Was that what he was? Nethress? When was he going to start feeling like it? When was this niggling worry that at any moment they might abandon him and Hrega and Bilr back into the Chasm going to go away?

Tvorh was so lost in thought that the next time he returned to the here and now, his hands were gripping the open slit in the wood. "I think I've got it," he yelled.

Senrii's voice drifted back up to him. "Can you get in?"

It was a vertical cut, definitely tall enough for him to squeeze into, but it was pretty narrow. Tvorh hoisted himself up to the slit and forced an arm in. Wide enough for his arm, check. And the rest of his body? He wiggled his hips and squirmed, and sank fractionally deeper into it. Inch by agonizing inch, minute by agonizing minute, he forced himself through.

His foot caught on the wood behind him, but he eased it through and turned his attention to the little chamber in which he stood. A wooden floor sloped down in a gentle bowl to a wooden throne. The substance atop the seat sounded different to his ears; it wasn't hard like wood, but soft and absorbent.

Flesh.

An amalgamation of skin, muscle, and vegetation didn't so much sit on as was anchored to the throne. Head lolling to one side, closed eyes, atrophied hands and feet that ended in creepers digging into the arms of the throne; moss for clothes and vines for hair.

It languidly breathed a syllable that would have been inaudible to anyone else, then slowly turned its head upright and opened its mouth.

Tvorh squinted. "What?"

The Tool drew a deep breath and whispered again. The word was definitely High Post-Exarchian.

He had no idea what it meant.

Tvorh racked his memory, trying to place the word. He hadn't studied the language with Gens Nethress, but he'd done some study in the Archives as a kid. Even if that study had been focused on written High Post-Exarchian, not spoken, it was possible that the word's root was still familiar...

Nope. Nothing.

The Tool's mouth was still open, upraised, as if it were awaiting something. Wait. That was it. Tvorh's genes bore the Key to this chamber, just like every other hidden room they'd discovered in the Labyrinth. And a Tool like this wouldn't just activate and deactivate for anyone, especially if it was keeping people alive in suspended animation.

It was waiting for a Key to unlock it.

Tvorh climbed the throne until he was practically hugging the body of the Tool, then called on his SOPHIOS. The Symbiont obeyed, opening a cut in the flesh of his arm and a corresponding hole in the skinsuit. Tvorh held the wound out over the mouth of the Tool and squeezed out a drop of blood.

It splashed onto the tongue of the Tool. The creature closed its mouth and sat serenely for a moment as if considering the situation. Then it whispered a single word in High Post-Exarchian.

This one Tvorh knew. "False."

A creaking noise from the slit in the side of the tree announced that Tvorh's exit had closed behind him. He was trapped.

And if that weren't bad enough, the walls were closing in on him.