Chapter 14

Olyrean sat at the edge of her bed, trying not to think.

There were lots of things she was trying not to think about. She was trying not to think about the fact that her bed was actually a dried-out carcass, for example, or how her pillows were regurgitated organic matter. She was trying not to think about the weird dream she had last night, where she had been back in her house–her real house, on Moody Blue–when Baxter walked in wearing a wetsuit and snorkel and she kissed him. She was trying especially hard not to think about why he’d been wearing a snorkel.

But most of all she was trying not to think about the voice coming through the little silver bracelet on her wrist, berating her.

“You’ve been there for well over a month now,” came the glopping, glubbing voice of Tordle, in all his drooping, dripping smugness. She still didn’t know what species her immediate superiors at SPECTRA were, but she imagined Tordle was probably something rather wet and unpleasant, like a jellyfish. “You might be a junior operative, but we expect some sort of progress.”

She sighed, rubbing her temple. A sympathetic Pirikki bird fluttered through the window and dropped off a mimosa on her bedstand. “I think that finding out that The Radiant One had a secret communication link counts as progress, don’t you?”

“If it even exists,” Tordle grumbled sloppily. “I have a hard time believing it does. We would have known about it. You can’t even find the computer again.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Olyrean muttered. She grabbed the mimosa and sipped it and found that it was, in fact, not a mimosa, which she should have expected, since those required ingredients that were found entirely off-planet. But it was sweet and refreshing and, most importantly for the moment, alcoholic.

When she had first told Veezeebub and Tordle of the computer she had found in The Radiant One’s bedroom, they had wanted verification, so she and Jack had ventured back into the hidden halls to find it again. Only it couldn’t be found. The tangle of hidden hallways that lay behind the walls of the Grand Temple had rearranged themselves while they weren’t looking. They had been back a few times since to map them out, but the only thing they had managed to accomplish in their exploring was to become almost hopelessly lost multiple times. At the very least they hadn’t run into anyone else, like they had that first night.

“Regardless,” Veezeebub cut in with his sharp, nasal drone, “we cannot actually verify the existence of this computer, and you did say that you were in an area with a high concentration of divine magic…”

“I didn’t hallucinate it,” she snapped. They had been on this before; possible side effects of divine magic causing hallucinations like feelings of blissed contentment and completeness.

“Of course,” Veezeebub said in that very specific way which actually means ‘of course I am correct, but I don’t want to argue with you right now’. “Now, this other lead of yours–the, ah, sad Quizbarling–”

“My other lead? He’s not really a lead, he’s, well…I don’t know, I–I just think he’s weird.”

“Weird is good,” said Veezeebub. “We can work with weird. It is our approach to intelligence gathering, Agent Olyrean–other organizations might concern themselves with the petty and mundane, focused on ‘gathering evidence’ and ‘making rational decisions’. SPECTRA, on the other hand, thrives on weird.”

“You know,” said Olyrean, “I had noticed that.”

“It is not entirely without reason, junior operative,” Tordle glubbed in, putting a heavy emphasis on ‘junior’. “We choose agents because our tests indicate that they have good gut instincts. I suggest you listen to your gut. I do it all the time.”

Olyrean sullenly looked at her stomach and gave it a half-hearted poke.

“In fact,” Tordle went on, “I’m doing it right now. What’s that, gut? You want me to…no. No, I couldn’t possibly. No–no, you can’t make me. Stop this! Put down the gun, gut! Put it down!”

The sound of gunfire and yelling came through her bracelet, and then the line went dead. She shook her wrist. Nothing.

“Whatever,” she muttered.

Listen to her gut, should she? She might have complained about what terrible, vague advice that was, but that was getting to be a little redundant when it came to check-ins with SPECTRA. And besides, really, it wasn’t like she had much else to do. Though she expected that after the failure of Korak’s store yesterday that the lizard-man would be coming to pester her for more thorough market research sometime soon.

On a whim, she decided to try to call home. Inter-reality communication wasn’t cheap, but she had a random urge to hear from Baxter, and she was supposed to be following her gut, wasn’t she? She just wanted to check in, to hear a familiar voice amidst all the stress. It definitely, she thought, had nothing to do with her dream.

She waggled her fingers at the bracelet and it graciously decided to work for her. After a few moments of ringing, Baxter’s face popped up on a holo-screen. “Ah, hello, mistress,” he said. “So nice to hear from you.”

He was wearing a snorkel.

Olyrean dropped her faux-mimosa.

“Is something the matter?” Baxter asked as she fumbled about trying to recover.

“No, no, nothing’s wrong!” Olyrean tried to keep the edge of panic from her voice. That snorkel looked a whole lot like the one he had been wearing in her dream. She supposed that wasn’t that unusual, after all there was only so much design variation in snorkels. Except of course it was weird for him to be wearing one in the first place. Unsure of what to say, she stuttered for a few moments before deciding that the best course of action was to resolutely pretend it didn’t exist.

“So,” she said, “Is everything, ah, alright, with the house?”

“Oh, everything’s just fine,” Baxter replied casually. “Running like clockwork. The house is definitely fully intact. And how is your mission going?”

At that moment, a great pulsing drone rose in the background, sounding like nothing more than an angry hornet getting increasingly upset at being poked, if the hornet was the size of an interstellar battlecruiser. It climbed to a shrieking pitch and then clattered away with a series of small explosions. Baxter gave no indication that he heard anything

“What was that?” Olyrean shouted.

“What was what?”

“What do you mean, what–All that noise!”

“I think you must be imagining things,” Baxter said, before something else behind him exploded and he ducked as a piece of shrapnel went flying past his head. “I mean, it’s nothing–”

“Nothing?! It sounds like it’s blown up half my house!”

“–just my experiment,” Baxter went on, “Which I will remind you, you encouraged me to do–”

Olyrean could vaguely remember telling Baxter that he could get along with optimizing her laundry chute, but she could not for the life of her imagine how anything he did to that aim could be making noise like a cruise missile hitting her kitchen. She tried to communicate the finer points of this perspective to him, but all she managed was a strangled “...buh?”

Somewhere on Baxter’s side, klaxons began to shriek. “Damn,” he said, glancing behind him. “There’s a containment breach. Listen, mistress, if it’s alright, I’ve got to go take care of something now. Call me later, if you can.”

She tried to tell him that it was very definitely not alright, but before she could get the words out he had already hung up. Quickly she attempted to call him back, but the bracelet apparently decided it no longer wanted to obey her commands no matter how much she wiggled her fingers at it.

“Alright, then,” Olyrean murmured numbly to herself. That was enough phone calls for today. Just another excellent matter for her to try not to think about.

She got up and staggered off to the common room for breakfast.

Brugga, Moyom, and Jack were there already, gathered around a spread of pancakes and–well, it was meat from some animal she didn’t know, thin roasted slices of a purplish hue, but she was sure it had committed some form of charming voluntary suicide before it was laid on their plates. There were drinks, too.

“You alright?” Jack asked as she sat down and grabbed another not-mimosa. “You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine,” Olyrean said hoarsely. She eyed the spread over the table.

“We made sure to save you some breakfast!” Brugga gave her a tentative smile. On top of his head, his beret rolled its eye. Olyrean stared at him until he began to sweat, and then when no one was looking, slowly drew her knife across her neck in a slashing motion. The orc gulped audibly.

“Korak better hurry up, or he’s going to miss out,” Jack said. “Anyone seen him this morning?”

Moyom’s antennae drooped. “Sad he ams, must be. Offer for scale grooming in the dark-times, he missed.” She clasped her grabbers together and stared off wistfully. “Everywhere I would have groomed. Everywhere.”

“Okay,” said Jack. “He’s probably–”

“Everywhere!”

“–probably just a bit depressed because his store didn’t work. Well, that’s no reason to lay around in bed all day.” Jack motioned to a Quizbarling servant, who had just walked in with another platter of pancakes. “Would you mind going to wake up, er, Likely Handbag? That’s what you people call him, right?”

“That’s right!” the Quizbarling, a young woman, beamed brightly. “But I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Well, why not?”

“Why,” she smiled, “Because he’s on vacation, of course.”

The clatter of dropped forks and glasses rang around the table.

“Oh, dear,” said the maid. “Should I get some napkins?”

“No,” said Jack, his spilled drink dripping down the front of his power armor. “Get out.”

***

To say that Korak’s disappearance had everyone on edge would be like saying that a star going supernova was a bit of a lightshow. The statement wasn’t untrue, and from a distance it might even be an appropriate descriptor, but it absolutely failed to capture the fury of what was happening.

Jack immediately locked down the portion of the Grand Temple that the Americans were housed in. This was not done subtly. Quizbarlings watched from a distance, troubled, as he hammered a metal spike full of blinking lights into the stone wall of the temple hallway. Soon enough, silver-gray tendrils were sprouting from it, weaving their way over the murals and friezes, covering the ceiling and floor until what had formerly been the temple hallway now looked like it had been woven in some sort of metal cocoon. Small, beetlelike camera drones crawled between the vines and set out in a swarm through the halls, their lights blinking suspiciously at every Quizbarling they passed. And finally, the metal threads wove themselves into a pair of thick NuSteel doors that slammed themselves shut with a resonating KLANK, sealing off the hallway containing the American’s rooms, isolating them completely.

Everyone came to the common room, which now looked more like a military battlestation than a place where they had taken their breakfast only a couple of hours earlier. The walls were lined with bright holo-screens showing the feeds from the various camera drones; curious Quizbarling faces peering into the cameras fish-eyed, murmuring to each other, none of them looking particularly happy. In the corner sat a rattling white box, clanking and groaning: an oxygen scrubber and filtration system. Even the air they breathed was on lockdown.

“Right!” Jack shouted once they had all gathered, with a snap in his voice that abruptly reminded them that he was, in fact, a soldier. “Now that we’re as secure as we can be, I think we can discuss what happens next.”

“Well, I think that first I need to know how to get through the doors,” said Brugga. “I have a civics class in twenty minutes, and–”

His beret twisted on his head to glare down at him.“You absolute imbecile! There’s not going to be any more classes. And good riddance, too.”

“I’m afraid your hat is right, son,” said Jack. “We’ve got a security emergency, which puts me in command. And I say that none of us are leaving this area.”

Olyrean had been looking at the bank of monitors, watching the worried Quizbarling faces sadly. Now she turned around, wanting to say how wrong-headed this all was. If the Quizbarlings had wanted to take them, as well, they could have done so at any time, and locking themselves off in this section of the Grand Temple wasn’t going to help anything. But she saw Jack’s worried face and fell silent.

So, fortunately, Moyom spoke up on her behalf. The Ixxari’s shell opened and her wings spread out, and she drew herself up in an instinctive threat display. “A words is us!” she buzzed. “Dear is Korak, and very symmetrical. But words have with the priests, we must! If kisses have failed, only kiss harder!”

“Does anyone actually understand what this overgrown mantis is babbling on about,” drawled Brugga’s hat.

Jack was only shaking his head. “It’s an unacceptable risk. The Quizbarlings might look friendly, but they’ve proven themselves hostile, as far as I’m concerned. We can’t just let them pick us off one by one.”

Olyrean finally worked up the courage to speak. “I–I agree with Moyom,” she managed.

“Oh good,” Brugga’s hat said. “Let’s hear from old hairy ears. Always a pleasure. Have you never heard of waxing, girl–”

Olyrean crossed the room, swept the hat from Brugga’s brow, and dashed it into the corner.

“I agree with Moyom,” she repeated, stronger this time. “We don’t know that they’re hostile. We don’t really know that anyone is harmed at all, do we? And what can we do about it, if we just hole ourselves up here?”

“Stay safe,” said Jack.

“We could all stay safe forever if we just never left our beds. If we can’t go out, how are we going to liberate these people–or how are we even going to just find Korak?”

Moyom fluttered her wings in agreement. “We need a brave time! A time for chivalry, a time for honor!”

Jack gave a heavy sigh, and a grimace drifted over his weathered face. “You don’t understand,” he said gently. “It’s out of my hands, now. It’s not my decision alone, my orders are to keep you secure.”

“Orders from whom?” asked Olyrean. “I thought you were the highest ranking military authority on this mission.”

“Not anymore.” He paused for a moment, glancing to Libby, who stood in the corner of the room, seemingly lost in thought. He shrugged, then turned back to them. “The fleet is on its way,” he told them. “As soon as they can spin up a portal big enough for a battlecruiser. They should be here by this evening. It’s liberation by invasion now.”

Olyrean’s stomach sank what felt like halfway down to the planet’s core. “But that’s so stupid,” she said. “Won’t The Radiant One just teleport the fleet away? If anything, it’s just going to make things more dangerous for us, by pissing him off!”

“Yes,” Jack said wearily. “I said the same thing. But the Senate already held a vote. They insisted. It is very, very stupid–”

“Not necessarily,” said Libby quietly.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

They all turned to look at the AI, who gave them a crooked little smile.

“Well,” she said. “The Hyper-Senate wouldn’t, uh, know about this, so I guess it was still stupid of them to order it…”

“Know about what?”

“Um. Well.” Libby played with her skirts and bit her lip. “Let’s just say, maybe when the fleets arrive, it won’t be the disaster you think it will be. Maybe The Radiant One isn’t so, ah, invincible as he seems.”

There was a moment of complete silence.

“What do you mean?” Olyrean asked. “Are…are you saying you can kill him?”

“Oh, I wasn’t supposed to tell you…” the AI said, clutching her hands to her cheeks bashfully.

“What?”

“I wouldn’t kill him, of course,” Libby clarified. “Not me. It’s something the engineering AIs have been working on. It’s been a real pain in the ass, but we think we’ve got it figured out now.”

“How?” Jack demanded. “How would you kill The Radiant One? I don’t think a bomb is going to cut it, or I’m pretty sure we would have tried already.”

“Welllll…” Libby frowned, biting her lip. “I really shouldn’t tell you, and it’s all very complicated, but…alright, I’ll try to explain it. First, imagine a tree. How do you get rid of it?”

“You chop it down,” said Jack.

“No, you can’t cut it down–”

“Burn it,” Brugga suggested.

“No,” said Libby. “It’s an invincible tree. I forgot to mention that. So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?”

“Uproot it,” said Olyrean.

“No, you can’t do that either–look, just stick with me here, okay? You can’t get rid of this tree by conventional means. So, there’s this special, invincible tree, but it’s still a tree, right, and it’s going to do what’s natural, and put down roots. So you make a box for the tree to grow its roots into.”

“Is this one of those riddles?” asked Brugga. “If a tree falls in the woods while clapping, what sound does it make? That sort of thing?”

“No,” said Libby very patiently, “just listen. So you have the tree growing its roots into the box, right? Then inside the box you put another box. And then another, inside that one. And another. It’s boxes all the way down, right? And then…once the tree’s root system is so deep in the boxes that you’ve captured most of it–this is the important part–you delete the boxes!”

She flashed a devilish smile and looked around expectantly.

“What?” said Jack.

“Oh right,” said Libby. “The boxes are virtual. I thought I said that. Well, do you get it?”

“No,” said Olyrean. “Libby, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Look, I just want you to know you’ll be safe!” Libby cried. “I don’t want you to be afraid. We’ll handle The Radiant One if necessary.”

“By killing him?”

“Not if I don’t need to!” the AI protested. “But–well, I don’t like Americans going missing!” She stamped her foot for emphasis, and a shower of whistling red sparks rose from where her holographic shoe didn’t strike the ground.

Moyom stood, her wings abuzz. “Register, outrage am. Register protest of terrible decision-process, am! Broken hemolymph oxygenation organ of me, have you! Ah!”

She stormed off to her room. Olyrean was not far behind, though she paused at the doorway. “I have to agree,” she said, trying not to look at Jack. “There’s got to be a better way than this.”

***

At first Olyrean followed Moyom to her room, but her friend had locked the door and was in such a state that she didn’t answer to Olyrean’s tentative knocking. There was an awful lot of clacking and gurgling coming from behind the door. It was slightly worrying. She hoped it was just the sort of sounds her friend made in stress or grief.

Eventually, Olyrean left Moyom and padded her way forlornly down the metal-cocooned hallway. She definitely didn’t want to remain cooped up here. But what other choice did she have? Jack seemed deadset on keeping them on lockdown.

She came to the steel doors, the impenetrable barrier now closing her off from the rest of this foolish, strange but rather pleasant world. A world that would have lasers and bombs raining down on it soon enough. She wanted Quizbar liberated, but not like this. But there was nothing she could do to change it. At least not from behind closed doors, especially not hermetically sealed NuSteel ones.

Hopelessly, she shook her bracelet at them. “Come on, you stupid thing,” she muttered. “Do something about it. Being SPECTRA should count for something.”

To her utter surprise, the bracelet blinked a series of white and blue lights, and then announced, very loudly, “HACKING COMPLETE.”

The doors slid open.

“Wh–” Olyrean managed to get out, before they began to close again. There wasn’t much time to make a decision. She dashed through just as the doors klanged shut behind her once more.

The halls beyond were strangely empty. It seemed like news of the Americans being upset had spread, and everyone was staying clear. She was alone. She shook her bracelet at the doors once again, but to no effect. Good thing she had just taken the chance, then. It seemed like it wouldn’t work a second time.

Despite it all, a thrill ran through her. This, now, this was real spy stuff. She could still try to carry out her mission.

What was the mission now, though? Now that the fleet was on its way, and Quizbar was about to be liberated the hard way?

“Oh, hello,” said someone as she padded by, buried in these troubled thoughts, and then they said it again because she hadn’t noticed them the first time. Finally Olyrean looked up, and she could do nothing but stare.

It was the grim-faced Quizbarling, sitting alone on a windowsill. The one that had stood out so much, the day she first came to the palace; the one she had glimpsed that first night she had explored the hidden tunnels of the Temple. Perhaps he wouldn’t stick out so much anymore, since now there were many more Quizbarlings running around looking unhappy now, but still. The Quizbarling she had been curious about, the one she had always wanted to question. And she found that now that he was in front of her, she didn’t have any idea what to say.

So, fortunately, he was the first to speak up. “I thought I had lost my chance to speak to you,” he said, gesturing back toward the steel doors, with a sort of weary listlessness.

“Me?” said Olyrean. “You wanted to speak to me? I wanted to speak to you.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

Olyrean opened and closed her mouth, realizing that an honest answer of either well, you looked very sad or I spied on you in your secret tunnels was not one she particularly wanted to give. “Well, uh, maybe we should introduce ourselves first,” she managed.

“Of course.” He nodded. “I am Fallen Nest. And I know of you, Fuzzy Ears.”

“Of course,” Olyrean muttered. “Why did you want to talk to me, then?”

“Well, not you particularly,” he said. “I’ve wanted to talk to…well, any Americans, really. Any and all. Just for some…perspective.”

He paused, and looked off into the distance wistfully. He looked, Olyrean realized, very, very tired. Not tired in the way she felt, with the emotional whiplash of the day, and not tired the way she might feel after hours of hard work. No, some part of him seemed simply…worn down. Done. She got the impression that if she was not careful, he might crumble in her hands like some long-dead plant.

He seemed to have fallen deep into some deep rut of thought, so she gently reminded him of where he was. “Perspective on what?” she asked.

Fallen Nest came back to himself by bits and pieces, blinking at her slowly. “Oh,” he said, somewhat embarrassed. “I’m just interested in how you Americans, er, live, I suppose. I was just sitting out here, wondering…what I would do, now that I couldn’t talk to you. But now I am, I suppose. I had been told your leader ordered you to remain put.”

“Yes, well, sometimes your leader doesn’t always make the right decisions,” she said. “If you want to know what being an American is about, knowing that’s part of it. I think.”

His eyes glittered. “Fascinating,” he said. “And everyone…all of you know this? You…defy your leaders? Question them? Even if it might be…impolite?”

“Well, usually we try to be polite first. But when something’s important, sure.”

“Show me,” he demanded.

Olyrean looked at him.

“Show me,” he said, and now there was a real hunger in his voice. His hands gripped tightly at the edges of his sleeves, the knuckles going white. “Show me being impolite to your leader.”

“Uh, well…I don’t know if I can do that right now…” she said. If she marched back to Jack and gave him a piece of her mind, she was pretty sure she would find herself confined to her room for ‘security purposes’. But she could see on the Quizbarling’s face such an intent desperation that she held her tongue. She could do him one better than Jack, she realized. If her SPECTRA bracelet cooperated.

She waved her fingers at it in the manner of controls that she thought might work and, much to her relief, it did. A small hologram of President Furth, severe and gaunt and draped in black, popped up and hovered above her wrist. It was just a local copy, of course, not the real thing, and not nearly as smart. The real President’s brain was probably the size of a planet, and you needed to be somewhere with solid comms to yell at the real one. In fact, it was a bit of a cheat, because such a copy didn’t actually carry any authority, but it would serve her purposes.

“Hello, Mr. President,” she told him.

“Hello, Olyrean,” the hologram replied, answering her in perfect quizbarlish. “It’s so nice to see you–”

“Yeah, of course, that’s great,” Olyrean interrupted him. “Look, I just wanted to tell you you’re a real asshole.”

“Oh,” said the President, a bit crestfallen. Fallen Nest looked eagerly on. “Oh. I, uh, I see. Was that it–”

“Just to clarify,” said Olyrean, “you’re the current leader of the United Worlds of Infinity America, right? The most powerful, er, man? Or machine, such as it is?”

“I do hold the most important office in our great republic, yes,” he replied, “and I–”

“Yeah well, you’re a complete jerk. Fuck off,” she said, then hung up on him.

Fallen Nest breathed out a long, shuddering breath. “Fascinating,” he said. “Exquisite.”

“Yes, well, just part of being an American.” Olyrean considered him for a moment, then reached a decision. She did not know if anything she could do would stop the invasion at this late hour, but she might as well try everything that chance threw at her. “Listen,” she said, “The Americans…they’re very concerned about our missing friends. The ones that the priests keep telling us are on ‘vacation’. Do you know anything about them? If we could just see them, know that they’re okay…I know The Radiant One is says they are, but–”

But Fallen Nest was already shaking his head. “I am not a priest,” he told her. “I don’t know where your friends are. And….if I were being truthful, I…I…I do not know that you should trust the word of The Radiant One.” This last came out in an almost strangled whisper. “I…I sometimes question his…his wisdom.”

Olyrean’s heart sank. That was just about the very worst answer he could have given. If the other Americans were hurt in any way, she thought it very likely that not only would there be an invasion, but that the weapon Libby talked about–whatever it was–would be used. She clawed after the only lead she had. Trust her gut, SPECTRA had told her. Well, she thought, here goes.

“I–look, I saw you in the walls. In the tunnels behind the walls, I mean,” she said. His eyes widened, but he kept his silence. “Things are very bad right now. The Americans are very, very angry. We need to do…something, in order to calm everyone down. Bringing everyone back from vacation would do a lot to stop something very bad from happening. Do you understand?”

Fallen Nest gave her a pained look. “I would help you, if I could,” he said sadly. “But I just don’t know how. I was only a…a guest of those, behind the walls, if you understand. There is little I might tell you.”

“We found a computer,” she babbled on desperately. “In what must have been The Radiant One’s sleeping chambers.” Fallen Nest’s expression had progressed from pained to pitying, but she pressed on. “We know he was communicating with someone on our side, but we don’t know what they were saying to each other. Some American. Maybe they were talking about where the Americans on vacation are. If you could just tell us who–”

“I am sorry,” he said again. “But I don’t know. I…” then he paused, frowning thoughtfully. “Well,” he said after a moment, “There is a way we might learn.”

“Anything! How?”

He nodded to her, then glanced swiftly up and down the empty hallway. Plucking a candle from a nearby sconce, he grabbed her hand and ushered her swiftly away. “My friends behind the walls are…archivists, of sorts,” he told her, as he led her down a sure path through the twisting halls. “They keep records of every word that The Radiant One has ever uttered. For the holy wisdom that might be found in them, you see. They’re very particular about it. So if there was some conversation you were interested in, the records might hold it.”

They met no one in the halls–the Americans locking themselves down had scared away any other Quizbarlings who might have dared to approach. He swept her into a side room where one of the strange statues of the angels stood, and with a brief gesture set it rumbling aside to reveal empty darkness.

They strode swiftly through the narrow passageways, taking dozens of winding twists and turns quick enough to leave her breathless and hopelessly confused as to where they were. Fallen Nest barely stopped to pause at each branch in their path before deciding which way to go. Having an uncanny memory for directions must be a quirk of Quizbarling biology.

Finally, the passages opened up into a cavernous room. Olyrean couldn’t help but gawk. It was an entire library hidden from the rest of the Grand Temple, and not a small one either. Countless shelves lined the walls, and countless scrolls filled the shelves.

“The words of The Radiant One,” whispered Fallen Nest. “Well, he’s had quite a lot of them through the years.”

Olyrean immediately recognized that she had a terrible problem.

“Um,” she whispered back (it just seemed like the sort of place where you should whisper), “Is there some kind of sorting system…?”

“Only the ones the archivists know,” Fallen Nest replied. “I was free to explore, but they never taught me.”

“Can we get one of them to help us?”

“I rather think they’d likely arrest you for being here, instead.”

Well, there was no choice about it, then.

Quickly she ran to a shelf and pulled down a leatherbound book. “Hey!” she hissed as Fallen nest plucked it from her hands.

“This just contains minutiae,” he clarified for her. “The words themselves are in the scrolls. Let me help you. I spent some time here, and I can at least narrow down the search somewhat.”

And help he did. The Quizbarling was much taller than she was, and his thin fingers deftly pulled scroll after scroll from the upper shelves that she would have struggled to reach. A little bit of life seemed to come back into him, from the search. A flicker of a smile played on his lips. She would have liked to know what it was that made him so different from all his fellows, but she really didn’t have the time to worry about that now.

Their search was not entirely random. Fallen Nest, in the time he had spent here, had at least figured out that the scrolls were organized by topic. They could pluck one out, read briefly, and from that know what the rest of the scrolls on the shelf might say.

“...Don’t put all your Pirikki eggs in one basket,” she read. “Fear not to part the leaves of lettuce. A blunderhog on the grill is worth three in the grass. What is this nonsense?”

“Farming advice.” Fallen Nest told her. “Next shelf.”

“This is supposed to be the wisdom of a god?”

“I wasn’t very impressed with it, myself,” he said, rolling the scroll back up and replacing it. “But…well, to be fair, I suppose it’s a lot of pressure when someone’s recording everything you say.”

They moved on swiftly through the shelves. A soup without salt isn’t worth a brandyfrog’s hop. Cooking. If you court with flowers, be ready to pull up weeds. Love. Trust your neighbor, preferably upstream. Politics, somehow? A thousand banal sayings drove her half-mad, and there was no scroll that contained anything at all like a record of a simple conversation.

She slumped against the shelves even as Fallen Nest continued to pull down scrolls. She imagined the huge, gleaming hulks of American ships hurtling through the void of space. This might be a waste of precious time that she just didn’t have.

Idly, she glanced over to the book she had first pulled down, and, just so she could read something else besides bullshit, flipped it open. It was mostly minutiae, as Fallen Nest had said. Nothing but some bartering records for ink and papyrus, an entire section dedicated inexplicably to recipes for stew, visitor logs…

Visitor logs.

Olyrean shouted and flipped quickly through the pages.

“What is it?” Fallen Nest asked, coming to peer over her shoulder.

“Visitor logs. Maybe we can’t find the conversation, someone must have come here to set the computer up. If I can find out who…” What? What could she do? Well, she could know it, and that would be a start.

Unfamiliar names fluttered past. She turned one last page and then stopped, staring at it in shock.

At the bottom of the page were the names of the previous liberation team. Above that, someone had written in bold, red ink: THIS PERSON WANTS TO KEEP THEIR VISIT A SECRET, SO PLEASE DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING!!!

And below this, the name:

Blugswelv Murtlebix.

“Who’s that?” asked Fallen Nest.

“The Vice President,” Olyrean mumbled. He had been here? It certainly was a secret, because she had never heard of any such visit. What had he been doing?

Suddenly, her little team communicator that she kept pinned to her robes crackled to life. She had forgotten that she wore it. “Olly!” Jack shouted through it, sounding none too pleased. “Olly, are you there? Come in!”

“I’m here, Jack,” she answered back to him. “I–”

“Get back here right now,” he barked. “I never gave you the authority to leave!”

“Just listen, please–”

“No, you listen. It’s dangerous out there. Moyom’s just gone missing too, and she’s not answering her comms. This is an order, not a suggestion. Get back here.”

He spoke with such authority that it took all the courage she had to muster up her reply. “No,” she told him. “Look, Jack–I’m trying to find the last liberation team–I found something, here–did you know the vice President visited in secret?”

“Murtlebix? That toad?” Jack sounded curious, but only for a moment. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not safe.”

“No. I need to do this. Maybe it can stop–”

“That’s fine,” Jack said. “I’ve got a ping on where you are. I’ll come get you myself.”

His voice cut off. Of course, he could track her through the comms. She turned it off and then, for good measure, ripped it from her robes and threw it in the corner. “We can’t stay here.”

Fallen Nest nodded, and then he took her by the hand and led her with frightening speed through the hidden hallways back to the light. Olyrean almost imagined that she could hear Jack stomping around in the distance. At the very least, she thought, he might get lost somewhere in there.

“Thank you for your help,” she told Fallen Nest. “I…well, I’m not sure what I can do with this…”

“It was my pleasure,” he said, and again that small smile carved through the sadness that seemed permanently etched in his face. “It was…enlightening, to see how you Americans deal with each other. I will try to talk to the others. Perhaps I might even be able to distract the one who is chasing you.”

Olyrean paused. Again, she wished that she might ask him why it was that he stood out so among all his fellows, but she simply didn’t have the time. “Thank you,” she told him instead. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

He nodded, and Olyrean quickly darted away. Even if Jack didn’t know where she was now, she thought it was probably best to keep moving. There were camera-drones all over the Grand Temple, and they might even have orders to look for her specifically.

She managed to walk for perhaps thirty seconds before a bag was thrown over her head, and rough hands grabbed her and dragged her away into the dark.