“You need a mask.” Lettie said, as she pulled a cloth wrapping around her face. Mazelton noticed that it was clearly a custom product- it sealed neatly over the front of her face and under her chin.

“I don’t suppose you have a spare?”

“I do not.”

“Ah. Alright, I think I have a handkerchief here, give me a moment and I will make something.” Mazelton pulled out the cloth and with a bit of effort, fashioned something that could barely be considered better than nothing.

“That is not a great mask.”

“Nope. On the other hand, given that I have almost no cloth, it is an outstanding mask.”

“What were you planning to do if there were poisons or pathogens in the air?”

“Run away from the poison until my body could process it out, and if I picked up something nasty, just burn it out again.”

“That is… for the sake of my sanity, please memorize the following phrase- “I must not boil myself to fix avoidable problems.”

“Barely qualifies as braising, really.” Mazelton had pressed his finger to the control near the door. Same mechanism, but it wanted far less heat to operate. Another KTCHUNK sound, surprisingly meaty for an interior door, and a hiss of pressure escaping as the door cracked open. It swung out slightly towards them. Before they could reach for the door, the door swung wider and wider, until a stack of corpses fell through the gap.

“Mazelton, shut the exterior door.” Lettie said. He did so. Lettie crouched down and started examining the corpses. They were humans, five of them. Two were noticeably older and wearing tunics with beautiful and elaborate beading. The other three wore tunics with much less complex beading, though Mazelton quickly spotted that the patterns shared a few motifs with the fancier clothes. If he had to guess, he would say that it was the patriarch of the family, his favored wife or concubine, and three children or young clan servants.

He frowned at that thought, and chided himself. What a wheelbarrow of assumptions! It could be that the two elders were religious leaders, wearing their vestments, and the three younger ones were their acolytes. The more complex patterns could indicate obligations, and the youngsters had fewer obligations and thus less complex beadwork. It could simply indicate a change in fashion, with the hopelessly gaudy, hopelessly dated elders still not “getting it.”

And they all appeared to have a giant hole punched through the top of their heads. It looked like something grew out of there, then in the endless centuries that followed, it died too. So. More to consider than just tunics.

Mazelton took another look at the bodies. Lettie already had a roll of surprisingly small, but terrifyingly sharp, knives open and was beginning to prod the bodies in a way that suggested weird autopsies were a rare treat for her.

“What ever happened to that skull I left with you?”

“Oh, that thing is really cool! Thanks for that, I have been having a ball teasing it apart and figuring out what makes it tick. That being said, this does need all my attention, so… later?”

“Sure. Mind if I go on ahead?”

“Touch NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL.”

“So you are saying I should start licking things?”

“Don’t be an ass.” Lettie looked up at him, her eyes serious. “I have spent a fair amount of time prospecting. Everything is dangerous until proven otherwise. Everything. The dust, the air, the rocks under your feet- everything. So have a good look around, but do your very best to. Touch. Nothing.”

Mazelton nodded. He was always ready to listen to experience.

He stepped into a remarkably well preserved apartment. He flashed his light around. This looked like some sort of family room- a sofa (or possibly a day bed?) sat facing a couple of chairs around a small table. Then the room opened up more, into a little dining area and continued into a small kitchen. There was a door to his right as he passed the sofa, and a small hallway continued down past the kitchen area. Not wanting to leave an unchecked door behind him, he peeked into that room first.

It was… strange. Sort of recognizable, sort of not. There was a slightly raised, square brick area, set on gravel. The bricks were spaced about a centimeter apart, clearly intending to let water drain down into the gravel, then from the gravel through a small open channel into the base of another brick structure. This structure was about knee high, with a hole slightly bigger than Mazelton’s spread hand on it. There was a wooden bucket and ladle next to the hole, and what looked like a copper bottomed bucket next to the square of bricks. It took him a moment but he got there. It was the bathroom. They bathed by heating water in the kitchen and washing with it, letting the used water flow into the toilet, helping it stay clean. It must all fall into some sort of composter, or drain into some kind of septic system. Otherwise, the room appeared empty. Mazelton moved on.

The sofa and day bed provided no real clues as to what happened. The little table had been knocked over, the chairs shoved out of the way. Something violent happened, but not too violent because nothing was smashed up. No wall art that he could see. Odd. People liked decorating walls, even if it was just drawing murals. There were little boxes up in the corners of each room, though what was in them wasn’t clear.

The dining area (or at least, that’s what he thought it was), was likewise pretty empty. It was a single round table, sitting on a single plinth, with five chairs arranged around it. It looked excessively cozy to someone that grew up in the Ma Clan House, but it was a secret bunker. Sacrifices would have to be made. Presumably. Mazelton frowned at the table and chairs. The table was dusty, but it still looked remarkably solid. He crouched down and shined his light up at the underside of the table. There were some tiny geometric shapes carved into the material, crude drawings. A child? But what the hell was the material? He didn’t recognize it. He usually would assume some sort of advanced polymer, but so far, there was no evidence of writing, and chemical engineering tended to rely on a lot of writing. He shook his head and pressed on to the kitchen.

The kitchen was quite sensibly laid out, in Mazelton’s opinion. He based that on the kitchens who’s cores he recharged back in Sky’s Echo. It had a similar sort of layout. A little sink with a cistern above it, to provide water. It drained out under the floor, and where it ultimately wound up, Mazelton didn’t know. He frowned again at the cistern and sink. Both were some manner of hard ceramic- porcelain, perhaps? But he didn’t recognize the pipe connecting the two. Again. More of that… whatever it was. There was a modest, and now quite dead, heat stone cooktop, with a backsplash he couldn’t understand. It looked like, at one point, it was lined in layers of some sort of thick cloth. The cloth was backed with an eighth of an inch of pig iron, itself connected to bands of crystallized green corrosion. Generally what he associated with copper. The copper buried itself into the wall.

Mazelton just stared for a while at the heat stone. He could be considered a minor expert on the subject of heat stones, but he had never seen an arrangement like this. Everything else said standard kitchen- a jar for the cooking tools next to the cook top, shelves for ingredients, a stoneware pot. Normal. So what, exactly, was that idiot backsplash?

He tried to imagine the... family? at dinner. The eldest was displaying their dominance by preparing the food. The heat stone was simmering the food in the pot. They brought the pot to the table, and served it into the bowls that were doubtless in one of these shelves. So they sit around the table and start to eat. Two and a half meters away, the stove top is radiating heat. Enough heat to boil water and sear meat. Heat, heat, heat, in this small stone room. And, ok, the mountain is cold. It is going to absorb some of that heat. But the heat stone is running all the time. There is no off switch for radioactive decay. It may take a while, but the bunker would get warm, then hot, uncomfortably hot, then fatally hot. Until the heat dissipation of the stone matched up with the rate the radiant heat came off the stove.

Unless, of course, you covered and insulated it. Most homes would never do that, at least in the north. You needed that heat. It was often the only source of heat in the whole house. But now that he thought about it… didn’t the heat stones on the wagons come in heavily insulated boxes? They did. The families would carefully pull the lids off the boxes before tipping the stones out onto the ground. Hell, he had seen the insulated boxes the clan made to ship the stones out.

He smiled with satisfaction, having solved the mystery. The backsplash was, in fact, a hood. It would hinge down over the stove, insulating the heat. Any heat that made it through the cloth was picked up by the iron, then by the copper, and from the copper it was conducted deep into the stone of the mountain for dissipation. Heck, they could probably leave the hood open just a crack to control the heat to the temperature they found most comfortable.

So what did it mean that the hood was all the way up? That would have been, eventually, fatally hot. Mazelton got a nasty feeling in his gut about where this was going. Mindful of Lettie’s instructions, and feeling the tug of his own paranoia, he declined to open any cabinets. Plenty of time for that later.

He pressed on down the hallway to the right of the kitchen. There was what looked to be an exterior door at the end of the hall, with two rooms on the left and none on the right. The exterior door was sealed, just like the doors they came in through, and he noticed that the same locking mechanism was in place. Not only did you need the key to get in, you needed it to get out. Now just what the hell did that mean?

Mazelton retraced his steps to the first room behind the kitchen. It appeared to be a master bedroom, with a bed large enough to sleep two comfortably, or three uncomfortably. There was a chest of drawers up against one wall, and a narrow wardrobe in the far corner. Two little tables on either side of the bed, with what looked like dead light cores on plinths atop the tables. It was a pretty small room, and with everything in it, there really wasn’t much space left. Another geometric picture on the wall, like a bunch of triangles had fallen off the polygon tree and got swept up into a heap like dried leaves, bounded by a perfect circle. It was, according to Mazelton’s aesthetics, shit. But the owner of this place clearly disagreed, giving it pride of place directly across from the foot of the bed. Right where they could look at it as they woke up and went to sleep.

Once again, no books. Nothing that looked like any sort of writing. No little nick nacks or jewelry scattered about. No little tray or hat placed to catch things emptied out of pockets as they exited and entered the bunker. Mazelton looked around the room once again. He was sure that if this bunker was hiding secrets, it was likely in this room. Still. Not touching things.

The last room was the only room that more or less looked like what he expected. Bunk beds, two sets of two beds, each pushed up against the opposite wall, with a single chest of drawers in the middle of them. On top of the chest was a simple ceramic pitcher and three cups. No wall decorations, no rugs softening the polished stone floors. One long depleted light core in a sack, hanging from the middle of the ceiling. He had seen cheerier prisons, but… if you just needed a place to sleep and ride out an apocalypse, it wasn’t terrible.

He returned to the dining area and thought through what he saw… and what he didn’t see. The latter was what really concerned him, and he wasn’t coming up with any satisfactory answers. He decided to share his unhappiness with Lettie.

“So do you want the weird news or the scary news?” He asked. Lettie gave him an astounded look.

“Are you reading my mind? No, impossible, I am thinking far too quickly for you to follow along. But I was going to ask you the exact same thing!”

Mazelton ignored the dig. “Want to go first?”

“Sure. Let me show you. Now, first things first, shine your light over their heads. Not the hole, we are going to get to that, but, yeah, like that, along the side. Now, look familiar?”

“No, not really. The jaws are weirdly proportioned, and the nose cavity is worryingly large too.”

“Oh we will be getting to that, don’t you worry. Try letting your eyes go unfocused, and then imagine it’s someone you know. Who is it?”

“Bokamba. Motherfucker beat the shit out of me when I was sixteen and I never forgot his face.”

“I am shocked, shocked to learn that the Bo and the Ma don’t play well together. And yes, Bo was the answer I was looking for. I am pretty sure that what we are looking at here is a Bo Clan test population.”

Mazelton stopped to process that for a second.

“Are you saying that the Bo, what, green smithed some people harder than usually advisable, then hid them in a bunker umpteen thousand years ago?”

“Let me peel back the lips here. See the teeth? Still omnivore teeth, got those shearing incisors, but no canines and the molars are subtly bigger. No wisdom teeth either, from what I can tell. Engineered for a predominantly, or exclusively, plant diet. Next, the nose cavity. Not only is it bigger than it ought to be, it appears to have a pretty complex internal structure too. Now, most of the soft tissue is desiccated to a bizarre degree, so I can’t dig too deep into this, but they also have a ton of extra glands around their bodies, some of which are even connected to their fingertips. Now, I hear extra glands, I think Bo.”

“Yep. Classic Bo.”

“The hole punched out through the top of their heads, less classic.”

“Sure, it’s a new look for them, but they were always indifferent to the tides of fashion.”

“Are three foot tall stalks of fungus in fashion this epoch?”

“Trust the Bo to get it wrong. Lichen is the look. Fungal stalks, really?”

“And here is where it gets scary. Most of the materials have desiccated and basically turned into dust, but from what I can see, they were probably dead well before they piled up on the door.”

“Eh?”

“I think that they got a fungal infection that ate their brain, connected it’s root system to their nervous system, and tried to go outside to spoor. The stalk punching through the top of their head is basically the spoor delivery system.”

“Is that even possible? I mean, connecting roots to nerves, let alone finding the door?”

“The roots to nerves thing isn’t exactly what happens, but… short answer is yes. Generally it happens to ants. Never seen or heard of anything remotely on this scale, though. I mean, nothing even mammalian. This is something almost certainly green smithed. As for how they found the door… I have no idea. Fungus doesn’t have a brain, and before you start asking about whether it was using their brain… almost certainly not. Maybe the back doors were open and someone used the last of their strength to initiate an emergency seal? I don’t know.”

“Why are you certain that it wasn’t hijacking their brain?”

“Because of a lot of things, but in the simplest terms… Human brains have similar architecture, but the actual memories aren’t neatly divided into chunks. They are a vast, complex web of interconnected nodes, each connection containing a piece of what you think of as “memory,” or for that matter, “thought.” Also, the brain is-”

Lettie waived her hand in frustration. “It’s not all that you think with, I guess is how to put it. You have a trillion gut flora which are not biologically part of you. They accumulate in your guts from the time you first suck a teat, right up until your final meal. They are born, reproduce and die in your guts, and in the process help break down the food you eat into chemicals your body can metabolize and use. They also generate all kinds of chemical signals that impact mood, your ability to sleep, your ability to focus, what you want to focus on- you get the picture. They are part of your “brain” too. And I am pretty sure the fungus cannot hijack them, not to mention everything else that goes into resolving the issue of walking through two doors and getting outside.”

Mazelton looked boggled. Lettie grinned, the nasty little grin of someone watching a friend step in the same shit they did.

“You know, arguably they are the real “you,” those trillion gut flora. The meat suit that you mistakenly think of as “you” is just their spaceship, a vast contained world that can travel around and gather more resources for them. You might think it’s a symbiosis and you are in the driver’s seat, but given how much of “your” brain chemistry they control, who really is “you?”

Mazelton made a sort of gawping noise, vaguely waving his hand as he tried to assemble a halfway rational response.

“Oh, and you found something weird too? Go on, do tell.”

Mazelton took a moment longer to try and defragment his brain, told his gut flora to settle the hell down or he would show them how the Ma dealt with insolent freeloaders, then told Lettie what he saw.

“It’s what I didn’t see that has me worried. Namely, food.”

“Presumably in the cupboards in the kitchen?”

“Let's say that every inch of every shelf was crammed with high calorie, nutritionally adequate food. Given five humans, two fully grown, three still growing, they would have a month or so of food at best. Maybe a few months. But then what? Their threat model was a two week apocalypse?” Mazelton shook his head disdainfully.

“No, there is something else, and it connects to the other things that are missing. Namely, entertainment. No obvious reading material. Almost no art, and what art there is, is either hugely important or graffiti. No art supplies. Nowhere to exercise, but look at them, still quite fit. No weapons. No drug paraphernalia. Wildly inconsistent levels of technical development. They could make running water for a sink, but not a shower or a flushing toilet? The lighting here is bad. I mean really bad. Not totally non-existent, but other than in the master bedroom, it would be very limited.”

“Okay.” Lettie said slowly, trying to puzzle it out.

“There is, however, an exterior door at the other end of the bunker.”

“Ah. You think that this is just one apartment attached to a bigger complex?”

“I think it would have to be. Maybe this was their version of a luxury apartment- a room with a view? Or maybe it was given to a politically reliable family, leaving someone trustworthy to guard the back door.” Mazelton said.

“Alright so let's put it all together, at least based on the available information.”

“Let's start with the assumption that this apartment is connected to a bigger base, because otherwise nothing makes sense.”

“Agreed.” Lettie nodded.

“So at some point, some people, who have some connection to the Bo clan, get put in here.”

“The apartment is generally extremely tidy, there is no evidence that it was neglected. We can assume that they were here reasonably voluntarily.”

“Or at least they didn’t particularly object. There is no evidence of them being literate, but it is hard to look at their material culture without inferring literacy. Also, if they were a Bo offshoot, they absolutely had access to literacy and written works.”

“So we can infer that either they were not allowed to keep written works in the apartment, or we are not seeing their data storage medium, or the Bo made them illiterate for a reason.”

“Which would make the whole extended base a test facility. Which would tie back to the fact that these people have been heavily modified.”

“Right. So let's not take absence as evidence- the things we did not see are not here. They may exist elsewhere, but the things that these comfortable, well dressed people wanted and were able to keep with them, are all here.”

“They weren’t prisoners, or at least they weren’t always prisoners. There was an ice bucket on the “back porch.”

“Well, there was a bucket, we have no evidence of access to ice. But yes. They had direct access to the exterior, and didn’t use it. Related, did you find the key?” Lettie asked.

“No, I assumed it was on a corpse?”

“Nope.”

“Huh. Another mystery.” Said Mazelton.

“Let's move on. At some point, they pick up a fungal infection.”

“Right. But they didn’t appear to do anything about it, at least until it was in the terminal phase. Really just the last few minutes of their life.”

“At some point they have lost access to the key. Did they destroy it, or did an outside force take it? Insufficient evidence.”

“So the fungal infection. We don’t know how it spread through a person or how long the symptoms took to appear, but they couldn’t be all that severe, and probably came on very fast. The beds are all neatly made, suggesting that nobody was bedridden. There are no signs of vomiting or voiding the bowels.”

“Right. So there are two scenarios. One is that someone knew that a fungal infection was spreading through the larger base, and locked them in until they were safe after a period of quarantine, or they died. Scenario two is that they didn’t know it was happening, but acted in their final lucid moments to keep the thing from spreading. Threw the key in the toilet or something.” Lettie tapped her lip with her index finger.

“Scenario one has more evidence to support it. Firstly, because we have no evidence that they threw the key anywhere, second because there is no evidence that they were interrupted doing a particular task, and third… Think about the stove. You know that the symptoms come on very suddenly. You are locked in with your family…” Mazelton spun a finger in the air to acknowledge the assumption. “You have just been locked in, and you are sitting around the table, talking it out. Wondering how long this could last. And then your vision goes wonky. You lose feeling in your left hand and you smell fudge. It’s the fungus. You are all going to die.”

“But you are good little citizens of Secret Bo Bunker Alpha, so you want to do your best to help the rest of the bunker pull through, and that means limiting the possibility of transmission to as close to nothing as possible. And if everyone in the bunker dies, you want to make sure you don’t start the next apocalypse early. So you open the hood of the stove all the way.”

Mazelton nodded along. “Right. But at this point your gut flora have a splitting headache, as the thing between your ears has turned into a growth medium for the fungus. It snakes a tendril up through the top of your skull, then widens it until you crack open like an egg. The fungus is in command of the space ship now.”

“The fungus has one imperative: reproduce. When an ant gets infected, the fungus walks it out of the colony and up a tree as high as it can go, then basically turns the ant into a sort of planter as the spores spread out and drift around in the wind. So this thing wants to, if not find a high place, then at least a place where the spores can spread.” Lettie followed up, holding her chin.

“And if it is complex enough to puppet a human body, can we infer that it can feel pain and act to avoid it? Because if it’s not reading memories to try and get to the balcony, there is another reason they would all be stacked up by that door. It’s the furthest spot from the stove. Strictly speaking, the door into the rest of the bunker would have been the better choice, but the family was already in the dining area in our hypothetical. They would have had to get closer to the stove, to the pain source, to get to safety. It’s a fungus, so it’s not that smart. It moves in the straightest line away, knocking over any obstacles in its path.” Mazelton concluded.

“It’s not smart enough to close the hood. It’s not sentient to the point that it could conceptualize something like the hood. So they stack up on top of the door, hoping that eventually things cool down. We don’t know how long it took between infection and movement. Presumably it would have taken days or weeks for the chamber to get dangerously hot. But it’s dim, with little to no air flow, because everything is sealed up. So the fungus is not getting any of the normal cues it would rely on to initiate moving. But it keeps getting hotter, it moves away from the heat, and eventually dies. But the heat stone is always on. So it kept getting hotter for months or even years. I don’t know what the peak temperature the apartment could have been held at, but it wouldn’t have to be boiling or roasting hot. Despite that, an elevated temperature, for that amount of time, would sterilize most forms of bacteria, let alone fungal life. Everything in here dies, its spores along with it.”

“Not that we want to take off our masks and test that assumption.”

“Right. Or assume that everything is dead on the other side of that door.” Lettie breathed out heavily. “It doesn't explain everything, but it explains enough for now, I think.”

“So…” Mazelton dragged the word out. “What next? Do we close everything up, slap a biohazard warning on the rock face and search for another bunker, or press on?”

Lettie looked at him like he was an idiot.

“Access to a sealed Bo research base of unknown but presumably large size? Just try to stop me.”

It was an education watching Madam Lettie search a room. She would stand fixed in the entryway for half a minute, apparently memorizing the location of every particle of dust in the room. She then began gently teasing apart every inch of the place, starting with the obvious like the cabinets, and then down into the cushions of the sofa. As expected, a good deal of the furniture just collapsed instantly when poked. But some things, like the tables and the pottery, held up perfectly well. They didn’t find anything of note until they got to the master bedroom. Mazelton had insisted on saving it for last, but was disappointed when there wasn’t a secret safe behind the picture.

“It’s such a classic though.”

“Yes. Which is why no one with half a brain does it.”

“Boo. Boo for your lack of aesthetics.”

“Mazelton. Honestly. Would you hide valuables in a safe behind a picture?”

“I wouldn't hide them in the house at all. If I did have to hide them in this apartment? Probably buried under the latrine. Which we already searched.”

“That is a good spot, but actually, under the bricks in the bathing area would be even better.”

“Huh. Yeah I can see that.”

“But they didn’t do that either.”

“Nope. So… hidden compartment in the bedroom?”

“Here’s hoping. I’ll search the bed and the rest of the furniture. You search the floors, walls and ceiling.”

It was tedious. Lettie found some beaded bracelets who’s string had long since turned to dust. She also found a small pouch of gold and silver coins. Mazelton and Lettie just looked at each other and shrugged. Mazelton got the beads and the coins, on the basis that he could turn them into jewelry. The room got very dusty and unpleasant, but after an hour of scrabbling around on his knees, Mazelton found a faint resonance with his heat. He banged on the floor, hoping to hear something, but no luck. Instead, he started pouring his heat into the place where he found the resonance. After thinking for a moment, he tried the same pattern as the key. He had to hold it for ten long seconds, but eventually, there was a tiny crack sound, then a tinier hiss, and a hidden chest opened.

Lettie was on it in a blur of motion, body checking Mazelton out of the way to shine her light in. Mazelton shoved back, and then just focused on the loot. Which was… not what he was expecting.

“Lettie. Oh Madam Lettie, super prospector Madam Lettie.”

“Yes, Mazelton?”

“We found their porn. I hiked up a goddamn mountain and spent the whole day getting in here for some jewelry materials and goddamn porn. The porn they hid under their bed.”

“Oh don’t be so pissy. Look, those little statues are all recognizable humans.”

“Yes. That’s how I know it’s porn. If it was a pile of octagons, I might be more puzzled. But a three inch tall statue of two people performing a Dalian Handstand, makes me think it just might possibly be pornography.” Mazelton paused a beat. “Fun fact, I had a girlfriend that loved to do that.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Hey, since none of these are new to me, you keep the porn statues. I insist. Really. I insist. Keep them with you at all times, to commemorate this valuable find.”

“Gladly. By the way, do you realize that this is the first figurative art found that is associated with this culture?”

“Don’t care even slightly.”

“Fair enough. Ah, but there’s more.”

“Huh. I… don’t know what those are.”

There was a hunk of translucent pink crystal with a bewildering number of tiny chips in it. Squinting, he could see that the chips were actually manufactured- each being neatly carved and having almost imperceptible ridges within them. If it was done by hand, the jeweler must be a maniac or a genius.

The other thing was a slim rack of vials, each with a black residue at the bottom. Like everything else in the bunker, they weren’t labeled.

“I’m going to go with some kind of drugs for the vials, though I would need to do a real analysis to be sure. Either way, the medicinal value has been reduced to nil. As for the crystal…” Lettie’s grin was feral. “That is a data storage device. I don’t know how they planned to read what’s on it, but that’s what it is.”

“Oh? How does it work?”

“A laser, that is, a highly focused beam of light tuned to a particular frequency and amplitude, would bounce off the various… what do you want to call those? Impressions? In the crystal. The light would then reflect back to a machine that would read those changes in the light and turn that into information that the machine could understand and communicate to a human. Or whatever.”

Mazelton tapped his lip. The little crystal was about the size of the last two knuckles of his pinky. It didn’t look like it could possibly hold much, but there were an awful lot of those little impressions.

“How much information could something like this hold? A book? Two books?”

“Try every book written in an epoch. The data isn’t just stored in the impressions, it’s the whole crystal. And text would be the least of it- there would be images, potentially, and other more data intensive media.”

Mazelton looked impressed.

“I have heard of similar technology, of course, but I’ve never actually seen this. Am I understanding you right in that you actually need one or two other machines to read what’s on there?”

Lettie instantly nodded. “Yes, it’s basically worthless without the machines to help you read it.”

Mazelton looked at her. And continued looking at her. And kept on looking at her. Madam Lettie had an extremely thick face. But Mazelton had an extremely piercing gaze.

“Alright, yes, there are some things I can do to read it. And no, I’m not going to get into it. Just… call it random Pi Clan ingenuity.”

“Sure, sure. Horrifyingabominationagainstnaturesayswhat?”

“What?”

“Sorry, something stuck in my throat. Look, obviously you can keep the crystal. But I am going to need your help with something, either finding it in this bunker or you are going to have to make it for me.”

“And what’s that, exactly.”

“A weapon. The Collective needs to either die in its entirety, or be so weakened that it will no longer dare fight us. At least as far as this caravan is concerned.”

Lettie paused a long minute, processing that.

“You want to exterminate the hundreds of people from the Collective, including elderly and children.”

“Yes. Do unto others before they can do unto you, and all that.”

“You want to exterminate hundreds of people on the off chance they might kill you, even though they have made no actual attempts to kill you.”

“Yep. Any suggestions?”

“Not doing that? I mean, it’s what, a few more weeks until you split off for New Scandi? A month? You can’t keep a bunch of mostly civilians calm for a month?”

Mazelton shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But either way, the decision for violence would lie with them, and happen at the time, place and manner of their choosing. And if they feel like their benefits are threatened by my existence, and they are, they will most certainly move to kill me. Either now or in the future. So yes, they all need to die, and die now. Some deniability would be preferable, obviously.”

“You want to murder hundreds of people because you believe that they will inevitably want to kill you, that there is no hope of peace or reconciliation, that the only reasonable course of action is to kill them entirely.”

“Yes. What have you got for me?”

Lettie sighed and looked around the bunker, filled with the dead who died from the wrong apocalypse.

“You honestly aren’t worried I might sell you out?”

“No, not really. They are barely people to you, and you have deliberately hidden your affiliation with the Pi. You know they would come for you too. They might thank you for the tip. Then kill you to keep you from changing your mind and letting me know.”

“They are people to me. I haven’t spent my life in a Clan House. I live out amongst them. I spend more time talking with them than anyone from the Clans! I am part of this epoch, not just killing time until the next apocalypse!” She was shouting by the end.

“Yeah. So if you had to choose between decoding that crystal, which would contain the only written records in the world associated with this culture, and some secret Bo clan experimental data, or saving a drowning child of the Collective, which would you choose?”

“That is a false-”

“Yeah, it is. But you would choose the crystal, ten times out of ten. Because the knowledge is real, and lasting, and valuable, and the best way to ensure that more children exist is to preserve and transmit the knowledge into the future. The kid is a blip, one way or the other. Knowledge, potentially, is forever.”

They stared at each other.

“Also you know that I will absolutely find a way to attack regardless of what you choose, except my ways are much more likely to cause unintended damage to unrelated people. My means will probably be radioactive, with all that that implies. And you will absolutely not be able to benefit from the crystal.”

Lettie looked over at Mazelton, and saw underneath the pleasant mask he wore. Saw the Mazelton still crawling over corpses, escaping his burning, murdered city. Saw the Mazelton that believed, bone deep, in the Ma creed- “Whatever it takes to live.” He would make peace if he thought it would work. But he was still in that burning city, where quarter was neither asked nor given. He was incapable of peace.

“That’s what you want from all this, isn’t it? Getting married, going out to the back of beyond. You are still escaping Old Radler.”

“Yes.”

Lettie looked around, then down at the crystal. It occurred to her that while she was stronger, faster, smarter and better armed than Mazelton, she wasn’t actually confident in being able to kill him. Not when he was standing right next to her. Not when he was willing to trade an injury for her life. And she didn’t really care that much about the Collective. And she really did want to know what was on this crystal.

“Well. Guess we are exploring the rest of the bunker. Lets go get you some murder-tools.”