“It happens,” I said. “Matt and I both puked within the first few hours we were in the Spiral.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Matt agreed. “It seems to be a rite of passage for Earthians.”

  “So we just traveled across the universe into a tomb?” Druck asked, also noticing the lack of an exit.

  “Hardly,” Keep replied. “It’s a safehouse.” He raised his hand slightly and a small square of the ceiling lifted and slid aside. “Badabing badaboom.”

  “Nice,” David said.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Druck agreed. "Zar, can you give me a boost?”

  “Sure,” she replied.

  “Let’s grab our gear first,” I said, reaching into the trunk. Our packs were shoved against the back seat, and I nearly had to climb back in to reach them, passing them out to Druck and Quasar.

  “Shaq, can you do me a favor and recon the upper floor?” Keep asked. “Just in case. It’s been a while since I was here.”

  “Sure,” Shaq buzzed. He hopped from my shoulder to the top of Druck’s head, using the perch to leap up through the hole in the ceiling.

  “How long is a while for you?” I asked.

  “About fifty years.”

  “You think your safehouse has stayed empty for fifty years?” Matt asked.

  “The odds are good. It’s in the old city.”

  “What’s that?” David asked.

  “Quick history recap,” Keep replied. “Atlas was the first planet settled by an Earthian generation ship when it fell into a wormhole and came out in the Spiral, timewise two thousand years before it left home.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Whoa indeed,” Keep agreed. “Like any good civilization, it took some time to get it off the ground. But within three hundred years, the settlers had spread across a good portion of the inhabitable parts of the planet. Within five hundred, they'd multiplied to pretty solid numbers and really picked up their exploration of the galaxy. After another thousand years, around the time I was born, humankind had spread to hundreds of planets, interacted with dozens of intelligent alien life forms, and basically made the beautiful mess we call the Hegemony. Not long after that, Sashkur invented sigiltech, the war happened, and the rest is more history that brings us to where we are today. The largest battle of the sigiltech war happened in orbit above Atlas, over the capital city of Haydrun. The fighting destroyed a large portion of the capital, and when the war ended and peace resumed, the Emperor at the time decided to cover what he began to call Old Haydrun and build New Haydrun on top of it. You with me?”

  “I think so,” David said. “So we’re in Old Haydrun right now.”

  “Bingo bango boingo. Give the kid a prize. Not just anywhere in Old Haydrun. This is my original place here. My home away from home, from back when I worked for the Royal Guard.”

  “Wait,” Quasar said. “You worked for the Royal Guard?”

  “Well, I had to do something to make a living. Rent doesn’t pay itself.”

  “What rank were you?”

  “That’s not important. What is important is that I had this place here in the old city, and fortunately, it wasn’t laid to waste during the war.”

  Shaq’s head dipped through the hole. “Clear,” he buzzed. “But smelly.”

  Keep smiled. “Nothing a little fresh air won’t help, I’m sure.” He motioned toward the hole. “Shall we?”

  “I’ll go first,” Druck said. “And help the rest of you through. Zar?”

  She stood to the side of the hole above her, forming her hands into a step. Druck put his foot on it and she boosted him up to the hole. He pulled himself through, his feet disappearing before he turned and reached back down for their gear. Zar passed him the packs and then helped all of the others to the upper floor, leaving Keep and me for last.

  “We’ll be right there,” I said. “Keep can push me up.”

  “Okay, Boss,” Druck said, leaving the edge of the opening.

  “What’s up, kid?” Keep asked once we were alone.

  “Your story,” I replied. “This room.” I turned a circle, eying the smooth walls, ceiling, and floor.

  “What about it?”

  “A safehouse usually has supplies in it. Food and water at a minimum. Enough to shelter in place for a while. I learned that by playing Fallout.”

  He smirked. “You got me again, Bennie.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t tell the others, but this room wasn’t a safehouse.”

  “It’s a prison, isn’t it?” I asked.

  His mirth faded. “Close enough. I hate to say it, but the best way to hunt archons was to get the right people talking. And nothing works as well for that as total isolation.”

  I swallowed hard, my whole body shivering. The more I learned about Keep’s past, the less I wanted to know.

  “Ancient history, kid,” he said, regaining his typical personality. “Literally. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The panel in the upper floor we now stood on slid back into place at Keep’s command, joining the patterned tile so perfectly it was impossible to see any seams. I looked across the rest of the space we had climbed into. Musty and covered in layers of dust, the small bathroom with the checkerboard flooring led out into a long corridor that would have looked right at home on twenty-first century Earth. Long dead electronic screens that I assumed had once shown portraits or landscapes hung from faded plaster walls that merged with deeply grained wood floorboards.. Overhead, flat round LED lights would have provided illumination if they had been functional. The open room at the end of the passageway was decorated in dark wood, a very ordinary-looking sofa facing our direction, flanked by a minimalist steel end table.

  “I expected something more sci-fi,” I said as Keep led me out of the bathroom. The others had spread throughout the space, doing their own bit of exploring.

  “Design goes through phases,” Keep replied. “When the settlers first arrived, they had to deal with limited resources and simplicity. Over time, things got more and more ostentatious until it rivaled the best, or maybe the worst, of baroque. Just wait until you see the palace. Then design swung back toward something a bit more classical, refined and understated.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, no weird toilets. No walls that are also screens or paint that senses your mood. No big open rooms with only one piece of furniture in it for no apparent reason. I don’t know. Sci-fi.”

  “Some things don’t need to be improved on, kid. There is such a thing as too much technology. Too much complexity, even if it looks simple on the outside.”

  “I suppose. I just expected a little more wow. Is New Haydrun like this too?”

  “Its shell is more modern, but if you’re talking about home decorating, it hasn’t changed much. Some people have all the bells and whistles you can want, but it isn’t the norm.”

  “Ben, take a look at this,” Matt said from the room on my left. At first, I thought he meant the room itself, but it was empty. He stood by a filthy window, the dust wiped away from a portion of it by his sleeve. The cleared portion offered a diffused view of the world outside.

  I walked over to it, squinting to look through. Keep had already said a large portion of Old Haydrun had been destroyed, so I expected to see plenty of mangled buildings, rubble, and debris. I wasn’t disappointed. Broken buildings jutted like jagged stalagmites up all around us. Overhead, a spaghetti web of pipes and wiring clung to a slab of material held firm by massive interconnected pylons. t The columns dropped into the old city and continued deep into the bedrock. Incredible to look at, but also unbelievably sad. So much destruction. So much loss. What surprised me was the amount of life still present in what I had thought would be, as Druck had put it, a tomb.

  There were lights on across the desolation, the spaces at the base of the damaged structures occupied, the streets immediately outside our location not completely deserted. A man in ragged clothes moved across my view only a few feet away, not even glancing in my direction as he passed. On the other side of the street, a woman in a dirty flight suit stood next to a dented and beaten hovercart half-laden with boxes of something she looked to be trying to sell to the limited passersby.

  “I thought Old Haydrun would be deserted,” I said, looking back at Keep.

  “Nope. The poorest of the poor need somewhere to live. So do the rest of the individuals that the more civilized part of society wants to forget. Old Haydrun is a dangerous place, but not much different than the worst areas of any Earth city.”

  “And yet they’ve never smashed your windows and broken in here?” Matt asked.

  “Go ahead, Mattie,” Keep replied. “Try to break that window. Give it your best shot. You can even shoot it if you want.” He looked at me. “You wanted sci-fi. There you go. The only thing getting through this window is sigiltech. Same for the front door.”

  “Is it fair to say you have your own wizard’s tower?” I asked.

  “Except only the first three floors are intact,” he replied. “So it isn’t much of a tower. But we’ve got the place to ourselves.”

  “I still don’t understand why we went through the trouble of buying the starhopper and bringing Head Case here instead of using sigiltech to transit,” Matt said. “Especially when you have this place to transit to. Even you said getting through the spaceport would be risky.”

  “Does this really seem like the ideal situation to you, Mattie?” Keep answered. “What if I brought you here and then we were separated or I perished? Bennie doesn’t know how to transit yet, and he’s liable to paralyze himself if he tries. It’s a much more complex action than pushing. I would venture to say this approach is a lot more risky.”

  “Good point,” Matt admitted. “In that case, I agree with you for once.”

  Keep smiled. “I’m glad we could find common ground.”

  We left the empty room, continuing down the main hallway. The door on the left closest to the end turned out to be the stairs, made of the same wood as the floor. It was tempting to go to the third floor to get a slightly better view of Old Haydrun, but I continued to the last room where the rest of the crew had already gathered.

  “Nice place,” Druck commented, helping himself to a seat on a long slab of cushion with a short back. He shifted his butt on it for a few seconds. “You could use more comfortable seating though.”

  “I never did entertain much,” Keep replied, the statement sending a fresh shiver down my spine. He had entertained plenty, just not in the way Druck meant.

  “This is so unbelievable,” David said. He stared out a large window that was surprisingly clean and clear. The view from this room looked down a wide cross-street where a few dozen people were moving toward or away from our position, oblivious to us inside.

  “I assume this window is mirrored?” I said, walking over to it to get a better look. A light overhead drew my attention, and a small drone zipped toward us, coming within a few feet of the window before turning and heading down the street.

  “That window doesn’t exist from the outside,” Keep answered. “Feel free to stare as much as you want. I used to come here all the time to think. When Old Haydrun was just Haydrun, there was always something interesting happening.”

  “What about the upper floors,” I asked, “before they were destroyed? Did you have the whole building?”

  Keep laughed. “Moi? Not a chance. This was a Royal Guard barracks. Once upon a time, I had a room on the sixty-first floor.”

  “How tall did this place go?” Matt asked.

  “Sixty-four floors.”

  “So you were pretty high up in the pecking order.”

  “I was in Special Services. More educated, better training than the rank and file.”

  “So, yes?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so.”

  His reluctance to take credit for his position surprised me. I hadn't seen Keep as being particularly modest. I had a feeling it was because he wanted to spend as little time as possible talking about his past.

  “Well, we’re on Atlas,” Quasar said. “Are we going to pick up our original plan from here?”

  “With some modifications,” I replied. “For one thing, we need to recover Head Case from the Royal Guard. For another, we’ve got David now.”

  “How does he change things?” Druck asked.

  “He exists,” Matt answered. “Which means he needs to be integrated into the plans.”

  “What plans?” David asked.

  “We need to pay a visit to the Empress of the Atlassian Hegemony. That’s the name of the collection of fiefs that compose each quadrant of the Manticore Spiral,” Matt explained. “We have evidence that one of the dukes under her rule intends to use sigiltech to overthrow her, so we want to get an audience with her to present the evidence and warn her of the impending danger. She’s not far. Up there somewhere.” I pointed at the ceiling. “In New Haydrun.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” David said.

  “It’s slightly more complicated than that,” Druck said. “Because me, Zar, and those two are wanted criminals.”

  “Oh,” David replied nervously. “You didn’t mention you were criminals.”

  “Would you have come with us if we had?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “There you go. We didn’t actually do anything wrong, which is why we broke out of prison when we had the chance.”

  “So you’re innocent?”

  “Completely.”

  “Isn’t that what everyone convicted of a crime says?”

  “In our case, it’s true.”

  “Isn’t that what everyone convicted of a crime says?” he repeated.

  I shrugged. “The point is, we need to be careful about how we get that audience with the Empress because odds are if anyone notices us we’ll be arrested on sight. Or worse.”

  David groaned. “This is just great. I thought I was coming back here with you to continue my research in peace, without having to worry that my apparently psycho mother wants to kill me. I’m not a secret agent or anything like that, and I have no interest in getting involved in a conflict. I could have stayed back on Earth with my mother if I wanted that. I’m a geek first. A scientist second. I’ve never even held a gun.”

  “Your mother came to the hotel with an AR, and you’ve never picked up a piece?” Druck asked.

  “No. I didn’t know she knew anything about guns before that.”

  “You don’t need to use a weapon,” I said. “Just stick close and stay out of the way, and you should be fine.”

  “Is it too late for me to change my mind about coming with you?”

  “A little,” Keep answered, chuckling.

  “Look, we have a plan. It got a little sidetracked but we’re back in business now. Once we head up to New Haydrun, we’ll be right back on target.”

  “Except for the part where our ship is impounded,” Druck said.

  “Not helping,” I snapped, glaring at him. “We’ll get our ship back.” I turned to David. “Anyway, you’re here. There’s no going back. And take it from someone who knows, once you’ve gotten a taste of what this place has to offer, you probably won’t want to go back.”

  “I hope you’re right,” David replied.

  “So, how do we get to New Haydrun from here?” Matt asked.

  “That’s the million dollar question,” Keep replied. “If you recall what I said about the type of individuals who live down here, you understand that the residents of New Haydrun do what they can to keep the residents of Old Haydrun out of their city. At the same time, they want the wrong kind of individuals to move down here so they’re out of sight, which means they can’t make travel from one to the other illegal.” He walked over to the window and pointed down the street. “You see that big pylon in the middle of the city?”

  I found the massive round support structure in the distance. It looked to be nearly thirty feet in diameter. Even from here, I could tell it was coated in a layer of fungus, slime, and grit that had to be anything but healthy. “It looks like a sewage pipe.”

  “And to most of the population upstairs, that’s a reasonable description. There’s an elevator in the center of that support pylon. Everything and everyone moving between the two cities goes through there. A security station scans faces and checks identification at the top. I don’t need to tell you why that’s problematic.”

  “There must be other ways to the surface,” Matt said.

  “Of course,” Keep admitted. “How else would that Sythian on the corner sell Popjoy?”

  I looked for the source of his comment, finding a small reptilian alien huddled against a large piece of crumbled skyscraper, a dozen vials of bright purple liquid laid out on a ragged blanket. “Let me guess? Drugs?”

  “Bingo,” Keep replied. “Gangs smuggle everything through old access tunnels and shafts left over from the lid’s original construction that they don’t want the authorities to see. It’s dangerous and dirty, and there’s always a chance law enforcement will raid the access and temporarily shut it down.”

  “Why not permanently?” Matt asked.

  “Come on, Sherlock. You’re letting me down. The City Guard raids the active access and either keeps the merchandise or pockets some nice bribes. They close off the tunnel with barriers they know will be breached sooner or later, and then rinse and repeat.”

  “You’re right,” Matt agreed. “I should have known that.”

  “And you can get us through one of these access points?” I asked.

  “Presumably,” Keep replied.

  “What does that mean?” Druck asked. “You live down here. What about your connections?”

  “I haven’t been here in fifty years. My connections would all be dead or retired. But don’t fret. Old Haydrun isn’t a complicated place. Money doesn’t just talk down here. It sings love songs. It shouldn’t take too long to make contact with a gang who has active access to the new city.”

  “What’re the risks?” I asked.

  “Primarily, that the gang leader will recognize you and turn you in for the bounty. We aren’t dealing with the most upstanding citizens on Atlas. It’s a good idea to always watch your back, your front, and both sides for that matter. Badabing badaboom.”