From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 85: The Truth

I stared down into the hatch for a long moment.

The darkness below had the smell of stale air and the residual warmth of a system that had been running faithfully for a very long time. Whatever was down there had the power to turn on many wards across the wasteland. That was something.

Coco leaned over my shoulder and looked down into the dark.

"Are we going in?" he asked.

I didn’t answer immediately.

I was thinking about the part of Eric’s notes that didn’t survive. The damaged pages between the technical entries and the personal ones. He had disconnected the coupling himself. Eric seemed careful, he was the kind of person to write detailed manuals and keep organized notebooks.

He had disconnected it on purpose.

Why?

Maybe it wasn’t infinite. Some kind of limited reserve that needed to be managed carefully, rationed against the demands of three cities worth of infrastructure. Maybe reconnecting it without understanding the load limits would burn through whatever remained in a matter of days and leave nothing.

Or maybe there was a safety reason. Something in the pages I couldn’t read.

I looked at the second notebook, the technical manual. The diagrams were clear enough that I could probably follow the reconnection sequence without making a catastrophic mistake. But probably wasn’t the same as certainly, and I had no way to know what came after the connection was restored. No way to know if the infrastructure it had once supplied, still existed.

Also, wasting a finite, unknown energy source on an outpost that wasn’t being used felt like exactly the kind of mistake that couldn’t be undone.

I closed the hatch, the resonant click of it sealing felt final.

"We’re not connecting it." I said.

Coco looked at me. "Why?"

"Because we don’t know enough about it." I kept my eyes on the ward cube sitting in its housing above the table. "Eric disconnected the energy source for a reason. The pages that explain why are probably the ones that are gone. Reconnecting it just because we can doesn’t mean we should, at least not right now."

Phinyx nodded slowly from the doorway, as if this aligned with his own philosophy.

"When we get back to Argent." I continued "Damian might know what this facility was. Or there might be books in the Spire that can explain the infrastructure." I glanced at the notebooks still stacked beside the skeleton. "Or the answer might already be in one of these."

I picked up the remaining notebooks from beside Eric’s coat, careful with the brittle pages, and tucked them into my pack alongside the two I had already taken.

Then I stopped.

I looked at the skeleton one more time. The lab coat. The pen in the pocket. The careful handwriting in the notebook that had survived long enough to be read.

My name is Eric. Her name was Rue.

I turned and walked back through the hole I’d made, then through the lab, and out into the corridor where the white stone lamps cast a steady white light.

Coco was quiet for most of the walk back through the corridor.

That alone was unusual. He was normally the kind of person who filled silence naturally, not with noise exactly, just with presence. Now he walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor.

He spoke just before we reached the entrance.

"She was a person." He said. "Rue."

I stopped walking.

"She was a Hibrem." Phinyx said gently from behind us, as if that word explained something.

"She was a person." Coco repeated, quieter this time. "And then she wasn’t. And now she’s..." He trailed off and looked at his hands. "I hated Corruptors, and I’m still scared of them, but it was easier to think of them as monsters, I didn’t know they were..."

He didn’t finish the sentence.

I didn’t fill the gap immediately either, because I was thinking the same thing and had been since I read Eric’s line about the western countries, the pact and what they had done to the Hibrem.

Corruption.

Not a natural disaster, not a random catastrophe. Something deliberate, aimed at a specific group of people. And those people had been alive, had built things and loved each other, they designed water purification systems for their cities, and then one day they had become the monsters we were taught to fear from birth.

The monsters outside Argent’s walls.

The things we had been sent out to die against.

"Hibrem." I said the word out loud. "Whatever that means, whatever we might be..."

Coco looked up at that.

"Us?" he said.

"Everyone born in Argent." I replied. "Eric was Hibrem, Rue was Hibrem, the safe zones were built by Hibrem..."

The three of us stood in the corridor with the white stone lamps burning steadily around us, and nobody said anything for a moment.

"So the corruptors outside..." Coco started slowly.

"Were people." I finished. "A long time ago."

Phinyx exhaled through his nose, not quite a sigh. "Heavy vibes."

That felt like the most accurate summary anyone was going to offer.

Outside, the canyon pass had been transformed.

Kira had tried to grow the vine really tall. And by tried I meant that she succeeded so thoroughly that future generations would probably tell stories about the massive vine.

The outpost sat between two canyon walls, which meant anything meant to be seen from afar had to rise far above the cliffs. So she kept pushing the vine higher and higher into the sky until it could be seen from afar.

Finn had helped with the structure. Using the silver walls from the outpost, he shaped long supports with his ability and anchored them around the base so the growing weight wouldn’t collapse the plant. He’d also apparently added some decorative touches... because Finn couldn’t help himself.

The vine now stretched upward between the canyon walls. Silver braces climbed alongside it, holding the massive structure steady.

The entrance to the outpost was framed by living green and pale silver, a strange sight against the rust colored canyon stone.

Kira was standing back and examining it with her arms crossed, the expression of someone doing a structural assessment... if there was an expression for that.

Finn sat on a rock nearby with his hands hanging between his knees, looking tired but satisfied in a quiet way.

"How did it go inside?" Kira asked without turning.

"We found notebooks." I sat my pack down and showed her the stack. "History of this place, and a technical manual for the machinery below the floor. Also one very polite skeleton."

She turned then, her eyes going to the notebooks with immediate interest.

"And the machinery?"

"Still there, Intact, probably functional." I settled the pack back onto my shoulders. "But we’re leaving it alone for now."

Finn looked up. "Why?"

"Because I don’t understand it well enough to know what connecting it would do." I said. "And the person in charge of it disconnected it himself before he died, for reasons I can’t read anymore... maybe just to leave a mystery, but I can’t be certain about that."

Finn thought about that for a moment, then nodded slowly. It was the kind of nod that said the logic made sense even if the situation didn’t feel resolved.

"So we just... leave it?" Kira asked.

"We ask Damian when we get back." I replied. "He made the map, he should know what this facility was. Also if anyone has seen this kind of infrastructure before, it’s him."

She held my gaze for a moment, then accepted it with a short exhale.

"Two outposts left." She said.

"Two outposts left." I confirmed. "Try to contain your excitement."

I looked at the vine, at the pale light filtering through the clouds, at the dark stains still visible on the stone that Rue had turned into...

Then I looked at Finn.

"How far?"

He pulled the map from his jacket and unfolded it, tracing the remaining route with one finger.

"Maybe four days." He said. "If nothing goes wrong."

The canyon walls stretched ahead of us, narrow and shadowed, the green sky pressing down at the edges where the vine hadn’t reached.

Four days. Possibly more if Coco got stuck on a hole.

And somewhere, inside the silver walls of Argent, there was an old man with white hair who had never once mentioned that one of the outposts was an abandoned laboratory with an energy source.

I wondered what else he had decided not to mention, probably the part where he’d already known about all of this and just didn’t feel like explaining.