Ignoring the calls from the pursuing guards, a bemasked Mary Airineth slams her boot into the rusted grate down in the agricultural quarter. The iron oxide snaps crustily forward with a crash, opening the way to the sewers, but most importantly, the magi-electric substation system. "I know it's here," she spits under her breath, crawling through with an indignant, wild rush. With a flick, she taps on her collar-bound light, shining out in a far reaching, if dim, bluish light. Mary dashes down the refuse-ridden etched stone spillways, she takes what seems like a dozen sharp turns in the dark. She's memorized the path, and she knows she doesn't have much time before Zach catches wind, but by this point she's is willing to meet any challenge to find the truth. It just doesn't make sense.

There's another turn in the dark system, and this one wasn't expected. She stops in place, her short, heavy breaths betraying her horror.

"It's the wrong way," she mutters to herself, her voice muffled through the gas mask's filters.

With a clumsy, frantic speed Mary unfolds the two maps of the interlaced sewage and substation systems. She holds them together, joining their ink into one, faded image, and shines her light from under it. It's simple enough, she just made one wrong turn. Her ears, however, tell a much darker tale.

From the edge of her hearing, she can hear it, the eerily-paced, promptly-measured steps of an automaton. She looks up from the maps while stuffing them messily into her pocket:

Posing like a leisured stroll, but at a pace that is just under a jog, a janitorial auto appears, its mana-graphic sight-sigil on its head like an icon of burning, murderous efficiency. She doesn't back up when it looks her way, having caught her in its field of vision. Of course the auto doesn't take her for a person; these ones aren't intelligent enough to have that sort of sophisticated artificial intelligence. Mary understands that the auto sees her as a confused pile of disposed organic matter, at five foot six in height and at one hundred and fifty two pound in weight; just something to be separated and moved out to prevent a clog.

Without ceremony, it starts straight for her, making no sound but for its foot steps.

"Administrator argument," she says coolly.

Reaching for her neck, it stops cold, its rock-like alloy fingers but a meter from her head.

Its managraph symbol pings white for a moment, showing that it's waiting for a command input.

Mary inputs nothing, but just passes by. She'll let Zach, the only man in Everhold to bear such an immense responsibility as maintaining the sewers and substations, to clean up after her. The auto is still as she leaves, to be stationary until given its next directive.

She retraces her steps, rechecks her maps, and then goes down another route. This one is right.

In only a minute she finds herself in the well-lit substation system area. She looks to the wall to the spray-painted relief.

"SUBSTATION 4" it says, with small arrows pointing left and right leading to either substation's 3 or 5.

With a bated, strained breath, she starts down the great circular way to substation 5. It's a long run, and it takes a toll from 4 to 5, and then 5 to 6, occasionally meeting autos along the way and initializing with her voice commands just as quickly. Once she gets to substation 6, she looks down the tunnel, curving away enticingly. There's no light down that way, but there is a way none the less. There's something there. With a few choice glances she looks over the half-dozen warning signs present along the walls as she passes them by:

"NO ACCESS"

"AREA UNDER MAINTENANCE"

"DANGER: CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS"

"DANGER: NON-SOCIAL AUTOMATONS IN SERVICE. SEVERE INJURY OR DEATH COULD..."

"PROCESSION INTO CORDONED AREA IS IN VIOLATION WITH PRINCIPLE 1-23..."

She makes sure to stop for the last one. "YOUR CURIOSITY IS NOT WORTH YOUR LIFE. TURN AROUND NOW. NOTHING PAST THIS SIGN IS WORTH DYING FOR," it reads.

She looks down the way, just a couple minutes more and she’ll be where the last substation is supposed to be. The one where it all hinges on. She steps forward, just when she hears his voice.

"Mary!"

She turns around, and sees Zach, fully kitted out and staring her down from substation 6's entry tunnel. He can see her clearly. Her usually slicked down, conservative style is a frazzled mess with strands reaching every which way— the mask's straps pushing them out of place comically. Her eyes under the lenses are wide, bestial, and impatient. Her demeanor is sunken, ready for movement; desperate.

"...Don't stop me," she says, her voice an empty husk of what it was a week ago.

"Baby, if you were going to take my mask why didn't you take my node? You know how danger-"

"Because you would've come down here with or without it. I wasn't going to risk you for my sake. Now please, just turn around."

"No, Mary. I'm owed an explanation. Just what the hell's going on with you?"

"You don't know. Nobody knows."

"What?"

"It's wrong, Zach. The whole thing's fucked up from the start."

He takes a deep breath. "Doctor Petrassus doesn't matter. Nobody cares what he said about you, honey. Just go to the secondary review and they'll cl-"

"This isn't about what he said. This is about the truth. I can't stand idly by while we slowly die out."

"I-is this about the granary? Everything's fine, honey! We have more food than we ever had! Everhold's better than ever! You of all people know tha-"

"No. It's not sustainable. It doesn't work. I did the math, I can't believe I didn't sooner."

"What?"

"I sat down and I figured it out, Zach. There's more to this than just the ocean... it's not even there."

There's a nervous pause between them.

"Of course the ocean's outside the walls, honey! We have people posted every day watching it!"

"Have you ever met one of these people?"

He scoffs. "You know they can't give away their identities. Their line of work is still top secret!"

She scoffs in return. "And do you even know what the ocean would look like?"

"We have pictures! The viewing port!"

"We have sketches. Assumptions. Generations of misinformation built upon a set of choice lies. We are trapped in here. No one asked, no one questioned. We just kept working. In our incessant reach for food, for the working day, we forgot where we came from."

"Honey."

She squints in the dim lights. "..."

"Don't do this. Clare is asleep, at home. She has no idea what's going on, and I don't want to explain to her in the morning that you went running and screaming into the sewers to get killed by an auto. Don't do that to her."

"Zach, I need to kn-"

"Don't do that to me. Don't be selfish. You're just going to get yourself kill-"

"And if I don't we will kill ourselves! Whatever our ancestors did those years ago, it wasn't reasonable. I can't blame them, they probably expected to be behind these walls for no more than a few decades, but we've been here for three hundred years, Zach. Histories and generations!"

"But King Victor knows, honey! He was there!"

"King Victor doesn't matter! I don't care if he's immortal. I don't care if he's a god! He's going to get us killed! He's senile! We have to find a way out!"

Zach peers behind her shoulder, to the construction zone between numbers 6 and 1. "...Mary. There is no way out. The ocean would have come in through a passage. The place would have flooded. The autos there, I saw them. They don't have social programming, at all. They would kill you no matter what you said, no matter what you had on you. If you go down that way, you will die."

She doesn't miss a beat. "That's a chance I'm willing to take for our little girl."

"She's too fucking young to lose her mother! Think about her! Don't you want her to have a good life?"

"There's no good life here, she wouldn't want her children to starve to death, and I wouldn't want her to have that."

"We're fine here, Mary! What the fuck have you been reading to make you think otherwise?!"

"In about a decade from now, we're going to start losing it. Harvests won't have enough nutrition in the soil. The rotations won't work as well. We're at the crest before the downward spiral. It's only going to get worse from here."

"It'll get worse if you give up! Don't you dare quit on me! Quit on everyone!"

"I'm not quitting. I'm trying to save you."

"By killing yourself!?"

"There's something down there, Zach," she nods behind her into the dark. "It's not labeled on the maps. I th-"

"That's because the city doesn't need more than six substations! We've never had a power outage, anywhere!"

"But it's still there. They wouldn't have it for no reason, Zach. There's something there, and even if no one else cares about what's there, it's the only way. I've spent hours, and hours going over the blueprints for the city. That is the only place the entrance could be."

"Hun, I saw the maps too. Nothing's there."

"Because you haven't checked for yourself. Just because it's not marked doesn't mean it's not there. I'm going to find out... I love you."

Zach takes a scarce, hard breath. "Baby, don't do this."

She starts off down the hall. "Bye."

"Stop!" He sprints forward. "Fuck's sake, Mary. Please!"

She doesn't stop, and her lithe frame goes through the complex at a speed he never expected she was capable of. With all his gear it's all he can do to just fall behind a little bit with each step. He sheds his pack. It's still not enough. He drops his tools, she's still faster. He finally drops his personnel node, that heavy, managraphed block ensuring safety from semi-social autos, onto the floor as he leans into a sprint.

Racing ahead down the corner, Mary can hear his frantic steps gaining on her, but coming up from the front is her salvation; at least that's what she thinks.

An unassuming automaton, brownish black from lack of cleaning, drones calmly in the dark; its glowing green managraph shining dull against the eternal blackness of the construction zone.

It notices her and starts forward like a woodcutter to a set log, prepared to split. It's slower than her, and she bypasses it around the side, forcing it to be a buffer between herself and her husband.

Zach isn't so sly when the auto turns on him. She can hear a crash behind her as he hits it, and a small struggle as he yells out administrator commands, all of which that the automaton ignores as it attempts to grab a hold of him.

"Mary!" Zach yells, regaining his footing as he scarcely slips from the auto's slow, certain grasp. "Mary, please don't do this!" he yells, blocked by the automaton's approach.

She hears him take a deep breath.

"Maryyyy!"

And that's the last she hears of him. She knew he would be okay. He deals with those stupid autos all the time, after all; but to be honest she would allow him to die for this. She wouldn't want to admit it, but she's honest with herself enough to know she would sacrifice anyone, even him, if it meant securing a future for Clare.

"I'm sorry, Zachi," she mutters, only a minute away from the seventh sector in the underground. While the above city may be split into eighths and quarters, there's seven substation turrets. She's almost there, past what she's certain is a fake construction project, made by a cowardly leader that refuses to let his people escape his insane social project. She passes a few splatters of blood, illuminated clearly by her bluish light. She inspects them without stopping: all giant, human-sized marks, accompanied by drained streaks across the floor as if the victims were dragged off shortly after.

Automatons at work, certainly.

Finally, she passes the last of the materials, molded and rusted with age. Something's wrong here, and no one, not a soul in all the city, is aware. In the dark hall, the tunnel leading to substation 7 juts out horrifically into the blackness. Untouched for hundreds of years.

She slows down, checks the way she came and the way looping around to substation 1, then turns in to the unhidden, but guarded passage. The thing she really, really hates about it though, is how incredibly tight it is; perfectly sized for an automaton. She'd have no room to get by if she met one, and could only go back.

Mary keeps her pace slow, trusting her ears to alert her of anything behind her. The ancient, moistened slime of the cobblestone is slick under her boots, forcing her to take to a flat-footed, even slower pace inside the silent passage.

After a whole minute of the mad, tomb-like quiet, she sees a light at the end.

With scoff of disbelief, she heads forward to the bluish light, shining like the day offering relief.

She knew it, she was right.

Taking care not to slip, she starts at a quickened pace toward the end of the passage, becoming so bright that she no longer needs her light. The thoughts of returning to the city flash through her mind, of telling everyone about the way out, about freedom from their kingdom-sized prison. She can't wait to show Clare the outside! She can't wait to see trees for the first time, just like she knows there'll be! Ignorance can be bestowed from generation to generation, but so can hope, and at this moment, there is nothing but hope in her heart, just before she reaches the end of the tunnel.

It's not daylight, but the blinding white-blue light of an automaton in an error state.

She stops flat, shorting her pace the second before crashing into the twitching automaton.

Mary takes stock of what she's seeing with wide eyes and a chill runs down her spine.

She's in a compact, round room, precisely the same that would hold a magi-tech substation, large, whirring contraptions regulating magitechnical currents to offset the chance of a rare, but rarely-survived overload.

The automaton, so old that its serial designation label is rusted to naught but an orange-brown smear across its neck, is flinching back and forth in an abrupt, almost human-like speed, as if moving to save a life.

Behind the uncanny scene, she can see, just barely visible past the automaton's floodlight of a face, a rounding corner, leading to a stairwell. "Substation 7" leads somewhere.

The engineer just stares at the scene for a moment, the auto making a droning preparation before the *click* that constitutes the error, again and again and again. She can't say for sure how long it's been here on it highest power setting, but she would venture to guess since the founding of Everhold itself.

Mary Airineth, class five magi-tech engineer and head for the last dozen top-emblem projects in the kingdom, subconsciously strokes her left ear-lobe, holding a small, green earring; a tick of hers she's afraid she passed onto her daughter the same week she gave her the other one of the pair.

Finally, she clears her throat.

"Administrator argument."

The auto does nothing, and she nods in self-response. Of course a non-social auto wouldn't listen to anything she says. The only way she could talk to it would be to open it up and alter its managraphy: the inner circuitry of the machine that magically dictates commands into the frame of the auto's golem-like body. She won't, she has no time, and she frankly doesn't give a damn about debugging autos at a time like this, when it's all waiting for her, all at the other side.

She takes the first step forward to pass by in the close, one-meter clearance offered by the automaton, and no sooner does she pass it, does she feel the rock-solid grasp of the automaton take hold of her shoulder.

There is no clicking noise this time.