The black dust cloud pooled on top of the spilled fuel. The liquid shimmered, light coming from within it. It was that golden light that the armor’s spirit absorbed.

The metallic swirl whisked away the glow from existence. One small droplet's worth, one after another.

Condensation formed under the dust, the smallest droplets already freezing from the ambient temperature. Typical of a power cell, water was the waste material once it extracted the energy portion.

Father held out bits of cut alloy scraps from his pack in offering to the cloud. The armor accepted and surrounded it, nibbling away until nothing remained in his hands except for the ceramic white shards that had been originally on the scrap.

The dust would swirl around the matter it consumed, then stream back down to fuss over the damaged sections. Frayed parts grew back as it consumed the scrap. In a few minutes, the armor had repaired its leg back to working condition. It had left only frozen condensation and rejected material behind.

There were many names for this spirit. But no argument that this wasn’t the very soul of the armor.

Each relic armor had its own. So long as parts of the soul were still active, it could rebuild an armor from even a fragment, though I’ve never heard of anyone insane enough to put that to the test. These were too rare to experiment on. The chance to lose an armor would be terrifying.

Father withdrew the moderately spent power cell, tucking it back into the suit’s leg holder as reserve. It clicked shut, pulling the room back into darkness. Our headlights were the only source left. In the new obscurity, the teal lit mites seemed to spring up everywhere. On the ceilings, walls and ground, now noticeable again.

“Do they… attack people?” I’d always heard that the machines from the underground attacked humans. I’d just had my first encounter with one a few minutes ago, and so far it hadn’t even acknowledged my presence. Can’t be sure if it’s intelligent or not.

Father stood back up, tossing aside the waste material and wiping off the accumulated sleet. “So long as the superstructure isn’t changed from whatever design is in their head, they ignore everything and everyone.”

“Can I touch one? And it won’t bite back?”

He seemed taken aback by that question, “I... suppose you could. Why would you want to?”

Curiosity propelled me, taking off the environmental suit’s gloves, skin exposed in the open air. Chill instantly siphoned the warmth in my hand, but I could bear with it for a moment. There was no way I could pick up something that small with these thick gloves.

Father looked on with what I think was puzzlement.

The mite did not try to escape when my hand loomed over it. Neither did it deviate its course when I picked it up. It’s legs continued to twitch and flail around, searching for the ground but otherwise not any more bothered by the lack of it. The body was still tiny, almost hard to grab. Closer inspection showed that the light they’d carried was at the front, almost where the eyes would be if this were an animal.

I sat the mite down on the palm of my hand and watched. It really looked like a tiny fat hybrid of a triangle and rectangle. A metallic ant. The legs quickly gripped to my palm, and the machine crawled around, its tiny forelimbs probing my skin almost in annoyance. Maybe because of the ice cold air that was already numbing my hand, there wasn’t any bit of a sensation.

Or more likely, it truly was too small and light. Soon it had reached the edge and made no move to slow down. I had to rotate my hand to prevent it from falling, but even so the mite continued to single-mindedly seek the edge no matter how I turned.

“What I can’t understand is why you wouldn’t want to see these things in more detail, Father. They’re fascinating.”

He said nothing to that. Instead, he shook his head and continued down the empty streets, still searching for something, knocking on walls occasionally.

“You said they break down other mite’s works. What happens when two living colonies are in the same area?”

Father grunted, “They don’t fight. They deconstruct the other’s buildings while building their own, from what I’ve heard. They don’t care where the damage comes from, even if it’s from other mites. They’ll simply try to fix it. Whatever form that looks like.”

I could see what he meant, my mite hadn’t stopped trying to throw itself off my hand from the very moment I’d picked it up. They truly had one-track minds. “Is it even possible to walk through a section that’s trapped between two colonies?”

“Mites build randomly, but there’s always a path forward that’s accessible by foot. They seem to follow that rule above all others. When two colonies fight for ground, they seem to agree on a mutual main path.”

I let the mite walk off my hand. It tumbled down onto the ground, coming to a stop on its back. It’s legs continued to seek the ground without success. Other mites stopped and made their way to their fallen brother. In moments, their forelimbs helped lift and rotate the distressed mite back onto the ground proper. So, they could at least speak to one another and had some sense of teamwork.

“If I brought back a mite to the surface, what would happen?"

“It would return to its colony?”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t see any reason to study these. They can’t be tamed. A mite speaker might know better.”

Father stopped in his tracks, then groaned deeply, his right hand palming his head as if he’d made a mistake. “...They’re undersiders who claim to communicate with the mites. Mite speaker. It’s in the name.”

“Claim to?”

“Nobody knows anything about the mites or what built them. All I’m certain of, is that the underground looks the way it does because of them. Anyone who tells you they know more is double-dealing and trying to fleece you of something. You’re a Winterscar, spotting this should be intuitive.”

Now that their fellow mite brother had been rescued from its orientation issues, the mites left with disinterest, searching for anything that did not fit the blueprint they’d designed. My gloves neatly slipped back on my hands as I followed behind.

This place felt like a city, but only in how a painter would draw a city from memory. There were missing structures and city planning that just weren’t present. More like a lucid dream, a simulation of a city. “Will the colony always make this exact city?”

I could tell I was treading some dangerous ground here with Father. All these questions weren’t something he enjoyed hearing from me. To him it was all scholar scrapshit, and I was sounding more and more like a Reacher caste by the minute.

But this wasn’t information I’d be able to guess on my own, and as far as I understood his methods and rules, he’d only get angry at things I could have figured out

“I don’t know if they create the same city over and over. Again, those are questions for the undersiders who live down here.”

“And you’ve never asked them?”

“Most of the undersiders all stay within the safety of the cities, they could go their entire life without seeing a mite. Chances are, they wouldn’t know. And as surface dwellers, we're unwelcome in their cities. We’re seen as surface scum, desperate thieves at best. A deserved reputation at worst. Now end it with all these questions. We’re not safe or out of the snow yet.”

We continued exploring blindly for the next hour while I processed all I’d learned so far. Occasionally we’d take breaks to eat rations and drink. We never stopped for long, and he always remained tense. As if expecting the worst to happen.

In the clan, everyone loved to gossip about how danger filled the underground was, making it seem inhospitable to anyone who didn’t have relic armor. The first time any of this became reality to me was when Father stopped in his tracks and forced us to hide inside a room several streets away from where he’d noticed the danger. There, we stood in the dark, headlights turned off.

Comms off. Quiet. He signaled with his hand.

Acknowledged. I signaled back. Status?

Enemy. Possible. Nearby. He moved his hand quietly, shaping each so that they were clear in the gloom. I heard nothing nearby, the city was as quiet as it had always been for the past few hours. Something had seriously spooked Father, however.

Machine?

Yes. He answered. Draw weapons.

I nodded and slowly took out my scavenger pistol, safety clicking off, muffled under my thick gloves. He brought out his own rifle and aimed with one hand out through the doorway. For twenty minutes we stood still, ready for action.

It was the longest twenty minutes of my life.

Father’s weapon dropped back down from its ready position and he stood up, breaking the silence. “They’ve moved past us.”

“How did you spot them?” I had seen nothing nor heard anything. It seemed like he’d just randomly decided to hunker down.

Father stood back up, grabbing my own outstretched arm and pulling me to my feet. “I didn’t spot them, but the signs were there. Machines are predictable. I had a suspicion we’d walked into a patrol path of theirs.”

“Had we?”

Outside, the world looked the same as we’d left it, but Father still nodded. “I had the armor amplify sound. Heard them pass by a few streets away from here. We’re behind their patrol right now. Need to make ourselves scarce, and soon.”

That’s exactly what we did, picking a path completely perpendicular to where we’d had our close call. I hadn’t heard or seen anything, but this pattern of stopping to hide repeated three times over. Each time, Father would notice some evidence of machine patrol and have us hide in a room or building, waiting until they passed by. He’d point out how certain sections of the city had more debris than others, signs of machines lumbering by and damaging the roads. The mites would fix the holes, but the bits that were kicked off would remain, cluttering the place slightly more.

The longest it took was a half hour.

Each time, I never saw a hint of the enemy. That didn’t make any of it any less tense. Here was something that genuinely worried Father of all people.

Whenever the underground felt out of reach, the clan would complain about how it wasn’t worth the price to live down there. How dangers like this were too much to pay for the benefits of living free from the climate. But anytime a glimmer of hope came up, like a house announcing they’d recovered a new relic armor, everyone would be suddenly filled with stories of how wonderful it would be to finally travel back down to where we all deserved to live. Finding some meadow, forest, or even a metal fortress. Anything was better than the cold.

There was so much more to the underground than I had ever known. And Father clearly knew about it the whole time.

“Why didn’t you tell me of this?” I asked him, while we hiked through this stillborn city.

“You never asked.”

Oh great, semantics. “Don’t you think it’s important?”

“Why would it be important?”

“It’s the underground! Of course it’ll be important,” I said. “All of civilization lives down here, and eventually the clan will migrate here too.”

Father stopped and turned, faceless helmet holding my gaze. “When?”

This felt like a trap. Like another one of his lessons. But it was the ultimate goal of all the surface clans - to gather enough relic armors such that we could claim and hold land against the machines on a lower level. “Compared to the other surface clans, we’re well on our way so far.” I diplomatically answered.

He shook his head slowly. “No. Not in our lifetime, or your children’s lifetime. Lord Atius will see that day, but none of us will.”

“What? Why?”

“Numbers. Even the smallest city has at least a hundred armors. We’ve barely collected over fifty, and they say the clan is a little over three hundred years old. Even the poorest undersider lives like a king compared to us.” He continued down, periodically knocking on the walls as he went.

A hundred relic armors? For a small city?

Something was off about this, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It felt like he wasn’t telling the full truth, but the right questions slipped through my mind like sand.

We turned the corner and ran into another dead end. Instead of backtracking, Father tapped on the wall here as well. It sounded hollow. “If I had told you about the underground, you’d eventually wind up finding a way in through some chasm while seeking it out.”

He took a few steps back in my direction. “I’m not blind to your curiosity, boy. There are pathways and tunnels everywhere leading down into the underground, all of them miles away from safety. You’d die within the hour from the first encounter with the automaton.”

Before I could press him for more answers, he crouched into a runner’s stance and then exploded into a dead sprint forward.

The wall ahead stood absolutely no chance. It crumbled into pieces as he tackled through it.

“What are you doing?!” I shouted. Where the mites had been wandering mindlessly, now they moved to the wall with purpose, swarming towards it. Already the nearest had begun the tiny repairs.

Father’s voice echoed past the ruined walls. “I’m searching for a way out. Get in before the mites seal the way. They work quicker than you might suspect.”

I wasn’t sure if this was such a great idea, but it was clear the mites would not attack us as he’d said before. They'd already grouped on the edge of the broken wall, their numbers making it look like a glowing teal line. If I hadn’t seen them up close, I could have easily confused it with the occult. They seemed to have a monopoly on glowing lines.

Peering past the wall all I saw was just another empty building interior.. A countertop lined the side of the room. It vaguely resembled a barkeeper’s shop. I turned on my own headlights for additional illumination. Father’s form stood back up in the pulverized concrete dust, figure obscured by the light beams lighting the particles.

I sulked in my head and considered what he'd said before, that withholding information from me was for my safety. It didn’t escape notice that I’d done the same to Kidra for similar reasons. Choosing not to tell her what the House had been doing to encourage Father's addiction.

Turning his words around in my head, I hunted for a counterpoint. And failed to find any. Father’s reasoning… was sound. I’d just assumed it wasn’t from the start, searching instead for a way to validate my initial feelings. Which hadn’t been based on any logic now that I examined that thought in isolation. Ahhh ratshit.

That was a textbook sign of self-deception.

Tame that insufferable pride, boy. It will only get you killed down here.

I'd become more impulsive on this expedition. Too single-minded on my goal for that missing tech, looking for it in places I should have known had little to no chance for a discovery. Taking risks that even my status as part of the nobility wouldn't protect me from - if they'd ever found out about it.

It burned to admit, but Father was correct on this point. If he'd told me more about the underground, I would have almost certainly found myself slipping through those cracks, thinking I could survive down here. Convincing myself into a stupid death.

“Keith, the three gods left the world to protect us. They struggle and suffer each day against the oblivion beyond earth. What do you think would happen if the gods left their post in the heavens? If they rested instead of upholding their duty?”

It was just like him to pull up faith when he wanted to explain something more complicated. All right, I’ll play his game.

The three gods, circling the world. Urs, Tsuya and Talen. Floating in orbit around the world, deep in the heart of their flying fortresses. Each protecting the world with one hand to the darkness of space, and the other stretched out to their people. To recharge our power cells when they flew above.

Those power cells fueled our heaters, ships, environmental suits - everything really. I thought about the gods simply not being up there. No more celestial flyovers. No way to recharge power cells.

We’d all be dead within the week.

“The gods did not choose lightly, Keith. They are not returning, not now, not ever. They knew the cost of leaving and they paid that price. A hundred fold. The surface is not where they belong anymore - and the underground is not where you belong either.”

I got the message. This place wants us dead.

Father took my silence for what it was and continued further into the gloomy room. “Come. This should hold our target.”

Inside, the walls once more became less concrete and more metal and electronics. At the center of this room wasn’t a fountain, but a pillar of metal with a screen and keyboard oddly held by metal arms at the side.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

Father walked up to it, hand reaching out. “With any luck, our guide.”