The Ascensor in the middle would take them down.

Pry didn't even want to look around at this. The complete lack of anyone. It was just blank. It would be better below. It would be better below.

Before entering the Ascensor, the lift that would take them down into the Blind City proper, he dismounted Setty and walked along beside the long-legged Cyclops woman. She had two eyes.

“They can't see, or they can't see?” he said, turning to her, as they turned themselves around and Setty too; so good and obedient.

“They can't impose the way we see the world on it; the way you do. They can't make it that way just by means of the way we see. They can't see. - They're blind for it.”

He said nothing, listening to the long intricate cranking of the Ascensor that brought them inexorably down; watching only the flat underground rock surface. He soothed Setty, who wasn't particularly worried anyway, just watching her. She was fine - and the walls and the rock. But Setty was fine.

“We're only in Sack Town... the rest, we can't maintain any of it; there's so few/ there's none, and with the children...” She let that sentence hang. Pry considered replying in some shallow manner but in that second could think of nothing at all with which to respond.

Sack Town.

It opened before them.

So few of them remained that they all lived in Sack Town, the old quarter by the lift; the crooked old alleyways, and the brownstone habitations perched precariously one on the next; so that the alleyways themselves were canopied by the precarious overhang of ancient habitations.

So few, and those that did, the children: blind. He could weep. Even with his particular form of consciousness he could, in fact. He felt a dangerous sadness transport him.

- At such a scale he could transmit to – best hold it back; he hardly knew what he was connected to now. Beside Art and Pheel, so deeply, he – in this instant, saw the very world beyond their lids.

Even beneath that, in growing consciousness behind, of Massimo incorporating himself into this, in some sense, that – What had they started? Who controlled any of this? This story. It was palpable. The doom. The doom, that awaited them. All of them so that -

“All except -”

“I'm here for re-initiation – sent by Old Works. I was sent because I have to stop this, it, whatever it is - that kills us when the ceremony ends. But now you say...” He felt that doom, he had to fight it. He must: if he couldn't it would consume him and through him... everyone, all of them. Every. Thing.

“It's the same thing that's blinding them. - It's the same that -”

At that point an old [redundant] Cyclops crone took the reins of Setty, pushed something in her mouth that, whatever it was, rendered the old [redundant] crone instantly a highly trusted and important person in the mind of Setty. Pry nodded his thanks and followed Tenns wherever she was taking him.