Chapter 17
Chapter 17
Heartwood and I exchange a befuddled glance before we both dart for the low end of Machine Four. I reach it first and climb, clumsy in my efforts since the footholds I’ve grown used to are now on the underside of the behemoth. I slow down when I reach the circular passageway, brushing the ceiling, forgetting to breathe as I pass through.
Floor five measures one story tall, comprising the entire top tier of the tower, which is notably smaller than the floors beneath it, no more than three meters in diameter. The windows here are made of the same translucent material, but they’re even smaller, narrower. And in the center of the room flows a wide column made of liquid mirror, cascading like water in a fountain. It ripples with unseen wind, casting silvery patterns across floor, walls, and ceiling.
I can’t wrap my head around it.
Heartwood breathes audibly behind me. “It’s ... beautiful,” he murmurs.
I step closer, reaching out my hand, but he grasps my shoulder, holding me back. “Is it ... alive?” I ask.
“No.” He releases me and steps forward, about a pace from the silvery wall. Its soft glow makes his pale complexion even paler. “No ... I would know if it was.”
“Because you’re a god?”
He doesn’t answer. I reach forward again. He tenses. “Nophe—”
“I’ll be careful.” I tap just the tip of my middle finger against the liquid that somehow defies gravity, then whip it back. Hesitate, unsure if I’d even touched it. I thought I did, but I feel ... nothing. I try again, lingering a second longer. Nothing. Maybe a little coolness, but it doesn’t even feel like liquid. The silvery substance barely sticks to me. The bit that does rolls off my skin like oil on water and doesn’t mark my hand in any way.
I push my hand through it, then my forearm, then the rest of me—
A fifth machine. I knew there had to be one, but it steals my breath away all the same.
It’s slender and tall, reaching the full two stories of the tier. Its pale silver workings are made all the paler by the silver light. Its metal parts reflect the rippling silver, making me feel like I’m underwater. I walk around it, to where it forks and juts outward, through the wall of the tower itself, forming the protrusion outside. I whistle, running my hand over its shape, completely different from any of its companions. Like Machine Four, it appears whole. If anything is broken, it’s within.
I wait for Heartwood to join me. When he doesn’t, I pass back through the liquid mirror, oddly dry on the other side. Heartwood still marvels at the metallic fountain, cradling his hand to his chest.
“Are you hurt?” I grasp his hand and pull it back, shivering at the current his skin passes through mine. It’s a god thing, I think.
I really am a bad liar.
Just as I see the blistering burns on the tips of his first two fingers, he curls them inward and tugs from my grasp. “I tried to follow.” His gentle voice sounds reverent. “I could not.”
Brow furrowed, I approach the column of silver again. Push my hand through. It’s like water, but not wet. I circle around, the ripples following my movement, wondering if maybe I found the one secret entrance to the machine, but I can step through the material anywhere. And I do, coming face to face with Machine Five again.
That’s when it strikes me. “They’re fail-safes,” I whisper, shivering. The fortress. The inaccessibility of floors three, four, and five. The hidden lift. The rotating puzzle of Machine Four. The ... whatever this is, guarding Machine Five. They’re fail-safes. They’re meant to keep people out.
But why? What exactly is this tower trying to protect?
My mind spins, trying to piece it together, when I see something that steals my breath entirely. An engraving on a brilliant silver strut connecting the protrusion to the rest of the machine. A rhombus with three lines, the first cutting through the top, the other two nestled in its center, all parallel.
That’s my symbol. The one I invented for myself, that I engraved on my rover. That I found on the little light machine in my home.
How ... how could it possibly be here?
You’re just not as clever as you think,my thoughts fill in. It’s coincidence. But I know that can’t be true. I’ve never seen this symbol on any of the artifacts I’ve dug up. I came up with it myself. Drew various versions on my slates until I came up with something I liked. This can’t be happenstance. It can’t be.
That subtle ache in my core, that sense of something missing, pulses within me. Gapes like a great maw. Consuming, hungry, empty. I have to fix this. I have to repair this tower. It’s the only way I’ll fill this hole. The only way I’ll get the answers I seek.
Running my hands over the machine, I try to learn it, to memorize it. My tools are still below, but I need to find what’s broken before I can fix it. I move around Machine Five slowly, gazing from bottom to top, top to bottom, though I’ll need that ladder if I’m to reach the highest point, and the parts inside the protrusion are inaccessible. There are pistons similar to Machine Four’s, an enormous plated cylinder that I’m guessing is another rotary unit, and a complex network of large gears. Closer to the center of the machine, there’s a rod, easily six decimeters in diameter, angled above an equal-sized rubber grommet in the floor. A male piece that must—
—fit the female piece in Machine Four.
My jaw drops. I try to measure the trajectory of that male piece if it were extended without any tools, then dive back through the silvery shield. Heartwood hasn’t left. He says something, but I don’t hear it as I scramble back down Machine Four. Drop to the floor halfway down. Turn around and angle myself so ...
Yes!They would line up, if I rotated Machine Four back to its original position! They’d fit together. They—
Wait.
Could they all ...?
“Nophe.” Heartwood starts climbing down the machine.
“I have to see something,” I call over my shoulder as I rush to the lift. “I’ll be right back!”
I take it down to the second floor. Scramble down the stairs. Throw open the fortified door with renewed strength and run out into the sunlight. Turn, jogging backward, nearly tripping over newly sprouted emilies. The tower fills my view. More, more ... here.
Lifting my right arm, I line it up with the protrusion jutting out from the third tier. Then lift my left, lining it up with where I think that deep piece of Machine One went, the part Heartwood and I attempted to dig out.
The same angle. One straight line.
Slowly I lower my arms. “It’s all one machine,” I whisper. “And the tower is its shell.”
When Heartwood broke Machine Three, it broke all the rest, because they’re connected.
My mind flashes to the first vision I had, of Machine One in pieces, strewn across the floor.
Because it took you away from me.And if it did, then there’s a before I have no recollection of.
If ... if these visions are memories, then Heartwood wasn’t the first to break the machine. It was broken before. But who broke it the first time?
Whenwas Machine One in pieces? When did Heartwood pull apart the third?
When ... and what ... did I forget?
Heartwood emerges from the tower, out of breath, more hair pulled loose from his braid. He slows when he sees me, turns and follows my gaze, but doesn’t grasp the revelation.
When he catches his breath, he asks, “What’s wrong?”
Nothingforms on my tongue, but it’s not true. Everything is wrong. A few heartbeats tick by as I struggle not to drown in the torrent of my thoughts. “What were we fighting over?” I ask.
I feel his eyes on the side of my face. “I ... didn’t want you to hurt yourself, when you dropped—”
“No, not then.” I turn toward him, studying his face like I should know it better. I should know it better, shouldn’t I? “Before. On the first floor. I was shouting at you.”
His eyebrows draw close. “I don’t—”
“I told you to ‘kiss my mortal ass.’” I lick my lips. “You apologized to me, there.” I point to the protrusion. “But ... I can’t remember what we were fighting about.”
His brows release like a bowstring snapped. He leans toward me, then takes a step back. “Nophe ... what did you see?”
“I just told you what I saw.”
His countenance crinkles in on itself, like he’s going to scream, or cry, or ...
My heart misses a beat. He is a man lost in the desert without water, a flower plucked of petals, a machine without a motor, dripping oil in a slow, rusting death.
Irritation forgotten, I reach for him. Touch his elbow. “Heartwood ... what? What happened to me? To you?”
But he pulls away, as though I’m in a hangman’s noose and he’s the one who sentenced me.
“Heartwood!”
“Go, please.” Gravel fills his voice. “Go home.”
My chest hurts. It hurts, and I’m suffocating beneath hundreds of meters of sand. “But the sun—”
“It doesn’t matter.” He starts back for the tower. “Come back in another cycle, Pelnophe. But please, please, leave.”
The despondency of his request makes it impossible to refuse. Answers are within reach, but I can’t deny him. Not this time.
One of the wells has a collapsing wall, and I need to repair it. Yet for some reason, I find myself locked in my house, staring at my piecemeal light machine.
Is this something I’m supposed to remember? It doesn’t speak to me the way the machines at the tower do, but ...
But I have no ending for that thought. No direction.
This orb has a fuel compartment, unlike the tower machine. Machine, singular. But what in Ruin’s hell am I supposed to power it with?
I rack my brain until my head’s ready to burst. Abandoning my work, I get my digging equipment out of the shed and trek out to the farm. It’s late mist, the fog thinning by the time I reach my destination. Before heading down, I set up a pulley system and a harness so I don’t get stuck. I remove about half the fallen rubble before shoring up the sides of the well—a filthy job, but someone’s got to do it. Then I dig out the rest of the rubble. At least it’s not the well someone urinated in. The water’s dirty, but it’s water, and plants don’t care about dirt. Good enough for now.
The next mist has fallen by the time I finish, my hands and knees scratched up. I begin marching home, tired and cranky. My new normal, apparently. But I’d rather be tired and cranky than desperate and weepy. I think of standing in Heartwood’s doorway, tearing and scared. Madness. I’m still not entirely sure that’s not what this is.
Gods.No mortal has markings like those. I wonder if Moseus has something similar, but the idea of asking makes me queasy. I don’t know why—Moseus has always been the more reasonable of the pair. But ...
He’s never in the visions,I think, ignoring a chill creeping up my arm. Why is it always Heartwood?
Glimmers like small candles light the road ahead of me. Fresh emilies, glowing in clusters, unhindered by the mist. I watch them until I’m about to pass, then stop.
Glowing. Light. If that’s not power ...
Dropping my load, I pull out my shovel and stab it into the packed earth, right next to a pink emily. The roots are strong and deep. I dig down about two and a half decimeters before taking Arthen’s knife and slicing through the thick taproot. The glimmer lingers in the center of the flower, but noticeably dimmer. I dig up two more, then carry the haul back to my house.
I carefully pull apart one of the flowers, trying to understand its components, but plants and machines are very different creatures. There’s no pollen that I can detect, no residue left on my fingers. I grind a few broad petals in a bowl to make a paste, which I’ve done before for paint, but I don’t discover anything new.
I turn to the roots. We usually shred them and spin them into thread, and they hold well. My shirt is made of emily fibers. But my mind, working overtime, now sees them in a new light. Not as threads, but as wires.
Opening up the sphere of my light machine, I try segmenting part of the root and attaching it to the wires. Nothing happens, even when I close the orb. Reopening it, I tinker with the pieces, noticing a click when I turn the base of the wires. Connect them, and—
The orb flickers and illuminates, a brilliant white pouring from the glass. I gasp, eyes watering as I stare directly into it.
Serpent save me, it works. But why? What is this for?
I twist the orb, shutting the power off. I need to show—
No one.
The thought comes unbidden, like it isn’t my own. I need to show no one. Not yet. Rolling my lips together, I stash the machine below the floorboards. More questions, but I have one answer, at least.
It’s time I get the rest.