About a mile ahead and to the right was a wicked looking airship. Unlike the inter-city shuttles, this airship looked like it had been cobbled together out of spare parts. Lots of sharp parts. Sticking out of the main envelope and in most directions, were sharp protrusions. The only spot clear was the mana engines. Smaller than most, this airship looked like it could only hold ten to fifteen passengers. Hugo couldn’t tell from this distance, but he thought he saw movement on the outside of the airship.

It wasn’t hard to guess its intended destination, the airship was barely above the level of the shimmer veins and headed straight for where the train would be in a few moments.

“It’s train jackers,” whispered the parent in the seat across from him.

It was the first words the man had said since he had sat down, and it shocked Hugo. It felt like when he put his hands up against a runed door. The sharp shock jolted through Hugo, the realization of danger almost painful. He wouldn't mind giving up all his money, as pitiful an amount as that was. But the real worry was that the train jackers would kill him if he made the wrong move.

They were in the second from the front train car. Hugo had heard that train jackers sometimes just killed people right off, just to show they meant business.

The train started to slow.

A few of the girls cried out. Their families soon joined them. They had hoped that the train would speed up instead of slowing down. They couldn’t hope to escape the nimble airship, but a speeding train would mean that the train jackers would enter from the back of the train, instead of the front near their own train car.

“Why are they robbing us?” a short girl asked her neighbor, “We don’t have any money on us, we paid before we left Tallinn. It’s not like the guides are rich.”

“Yeah they are, you dolt. The guides picked up hundreds of mana shards and crysts on our way up and down the mountain. There is at least a few platinums worth on this train right now,” her neighbor rudely replied.

“Oh yeah.”

The train quickly came to a stop and the airship had to turn to get to the front car. As it got closer, Hugo was able to get a better look at the airship through the press of bodies. The ship was obviously cobbled together. The mana engines weren’t even glowing the same color, one red, one blue. He couldn’t see the other two, but he bet they were castoffs from other ships too. Now that it was closer, he could see why the ship seemed so sharp. It was studded with guns. Some harpoons and some cannons, a few mounted long guns too. There were also a few that didn’t look like any guns he had ever seen. Hugo wasn’t sure, but the blue glow made him guess that some of them ran on shimmer. This was a ship meant for combat, hard and fast. There didn’t look to be much defense, it was all offense.

Most everyone was standing up at this point, not that there was anywhere to go. They couldn’t leave the train, or the monsters would get them. All parts of the train were going to be searched by the criminals, running to the back would do no good.

A young man decided to run to the back anyway. He got up and ran down the aisle, pushing people to the side as he went. Just as the kid got to the back, someone burst through the connecting door going the other direction.

It was a red vested guide. And judging by how the boy bounced off the guide, she was high ranked with plenty of strength and constitution. She ignored the boy and shoved her way to the front of the car. Then she stationed herself to the side of the front door, where it led to the next train car. People started yelling at her, asking her to do something, but she just turned and covered her mouth with a clenched fist. Most shut up after that. The ones that continued to talk to her were quickly shushed by their neighbors.

Another couple of guides entered the car, two men this time. One joined the woman at the front of the car, and the other stayed at the back. The two red vests at the front positioned themselves flush with the car walls just on either side of the door. They looked ready to ambush anyone who walked through. The woman had created a few lengths of chain and the man drew a few strange looking daggers from the sheaths at his waist.

The other man stayed at the end of the train car, just standing directly in front of the door he had entered through. He held his hands in front of him and stared at the door on the other end of the train car.

A horrible screech of metal and shattering glass heralded the arrival of the airship. A few screams came from the front train car, but everyone in Hugo’s car remained quiet. An acrid smell wafted through the air, faint but unmistakable. Someone had shot a shimmer caster.

They heard the other train door slide open, and someone walk onto the short connecting corridor. The people on the train ducked low, hiding behind their seats. The train construction was new and shiny, but now it felt flimsy. Just as the door to their car started sliding open, the guide on the opposite end of the car drew attention by yelling and throwing up a barrier.

The distraction worked, the jackers focused on the man, firing shimmer casters at him as soon as the door was open. Two shots missed, flying into the crowd and causing them to cry out. The third and forth shot splashed onto the blue barrier and started melting holes into it.

Three train jackers started walking into the room, continuing to fire at the guard. As soon as they were in range, the two guards to the sides reached out and grabbed at the jackers. The woman guard created loops of glowing chains, quickly wrapping up a jacker and pulling him to the side. The shimmer caster fell to the floor. The other guard took the same moment to whip his hands out and throw another jacker up against the wall. In the same moment, he used small daggers to slice along the jackers arms, making him drop his ax. The cuts were deep, and made the jacker unable to lift his arms. If he wasn’t treated soon, he would bleed out. The mountain guide pushed his foot into the jacker’s chest to keep him down. Both guards ignored the downed jackers and turned back to the door.

The third train jacker jumped back and out of the way. He yelled to the jackers behind him, making room so he could retreat. The barrier domain man used the distraction to dismiss his blue shield and race up to support his fellow guides.

He ducked out of the line of fire and yelled to the train jackers in the other car, “We got two of your guys and you didn’t touch us. Face it, you can’t do this job. Turn around and fly away and we won’t shoot you while you go.”

“We ain’t going nowhere! You got some mana cores onboard, and we ain’t leaving without them,” a voice from the other train car yelled.

He looked at the other guides in shock. Then he sighed and said, “Yeah, we got one mana core, but we also have a rank fifty-two runist on the train. Maybe you have heard of the Blue Devil?”

There was a pause, then came, “You’re lying. Nobody that big misses out on a heartbeat surge.”

“Nope, not lying. And you better be gone before he gets up here. He was just guarding the safe in case you lot decided to attack there first,” he said. There was a sound of a distant explosion. “Oop, sounds like your friends made a bad decision. Your time will be up soon. You better not wait around until he gets here.”

They didn’t get an answer.

As the unseen train jackers made up their mind, Hugo peeked out at the train jackers on the floor. He thought they looked strangely scruffy to be on this crew. No armor, just badly sewn leather jackets. They didn’t have nice looking porcelain masks like most gangs, just a bandanna with eye holes. Maybe they were just expendable grunts the criminals sent ahead into the unknown. But if they were expendable, why did one of them have a shimmer caster? When Hugo was training to join the shimmer corps, he was told that a single gun was worth two gold.

Another explosion sounded on the other end of the train. That must have been enough to convince the remaining train jackers to leave, sounds of them rushing away filled the other car. There were a tense few moments as the airship engines spooled up again. There was another screech of metal, sending up fresh cries from the people in the front train car. In short order, the airship was up and in the air again. Two of the guides raced to the back of the train to see if their coworker needed any help. The remaining woman tied up the injured guy and pushed them both into the corner.

Hugo ducked down, keeping an eye on the airship. There were far too many guns on that thing for him to feel safe until it was out of range. He was distracted from his vigil by yells from the car in front of him.

“We need a healer up here! A healer or a doctor! We have people bleeding up here,” someone yelled.

Two escorts stood from where they had stayed hidden during the attack. They both rushed up to the front train car. Hugo wanted to follow them. He didn’t have any medical knowledge, but he just wanted to know what had happened up there, how much the airship had torn up the roof. He didn’t get up though. He would only get in the way.

The crowd which had been quiet all this time, now burst into conversation. Everyone was talking to their neighbors. The volume in the car quickly rose.

It wasn’t long before three guides passed through their carriage, heading to the front. This time, Hugo couldn’t help himself, and followed them. They had stopped at the entrance to the front carriage, so he was only able to listen in.

All three were looking at something he couldn’t see and swearing.

“This is bad.”

“I don’t know. It looks like it was just the roof and walls that got damaged, the engine seems fine.”

“That looks fine to you? Half the housing is missing.”

“As long as we go half speed, we should be fine.”

“How are you so sure? They killed our engineer.”

“Well, since the alternative is to stay here and get torn apart by monsters, I am choosing to be unrealistically optimistic about the engine.”

There was another round of swearing.

Hugo peeked around the red vests. There was an enormous hole in the roof, and one of the walls was just missing. This was the engine compartment, and the shimmer engine took up half of the compartment. The one guide was right, the engine housing was torn up pretty bad, but the engine itself looked fine to him. The people in the front compartment didn’t look fine though. They had paid extra to have the nicer seats away from the rabble, and most of them seemed injured from the conflict with the train jackers. A few looked dead.

After a longer conversation, the mountain guides decided to start up the engine and listen to it as they slowly increased the speed. They all agreed that it was a terrible idea to start up the engine. But staying outside the city, even on a shimmer vein, was a worse idea right after the mountain’s heartbeat.

Hugo dashed back to his seat when he saw that they were going to start up the engine. It wasn’t until the train was floating forward again that he realized he was being dumb. If the engine had exploded, a few extra feet of distance wouldn’t have made any sense.

Luckily for everyone on the train, the engine didn’t explode, even when they pushed it a little faster. It wasn’t long before they saw the runic walls of Tallinn. Hugo was supposed to catch a connecting train from there back to his hometown of Reval. The business with the attempted train jacking made him late though. He had to wait another two hours for a train going the right way. He dropped off Marion’s letter. It hurt to think about, so he distracted himself.

He sat at the train station, bag at his feet, and looked past the city walls. The mountain, the whole reason for his trip, didn’t really have a name. Everyone called it shimmer mountain, but that was just as descriptive as calling it sandstone mountain. It wasn’t a proper name.

As far as Hugo knew, shimmer mountain was unique in the world. It was a natural phenomenon that collected and refined mana into shimmer, something that wasn’t found elsewhere. It is what made modern life and the shimmer corps possible. The factories and vehicles in town ran off shimmer. The corpsmen had casters and abilities that worked here and nowhere else.

The rest of the world used manashards, only found when monsters were killed. Harvesters were soulmarked people with the jobs of killing monsters and collecting their shards. But that was dangerous work, and so manashards were in low supply.

Shimmer corps and harvesters had an uneasy relationship in the eight cities of The Wheel. Elsewhere, the high ranked harvesters reigned supreme, but things were different here. The corpsmen used shimmer to enforce their edicts, leveling the playing field between an unranked guard and a rank twenty four adventurer.

Corpsmen sped around the city in shimmer powered carts, had shimmer powered casters, and the officers even had armor made of the shining white stuff. Shimmer made them deadly and strong. The guards weren’t invincible, they could and had been killed by harvesters. But the reverse was also true, plenty of harvesters had been put in their place by a lowly guard enforcing the law.

Things may be different elsewhere, but shimmer was the great equalizer here.

The first thing Hugo did when he got into Reval was go and see his mother. It didn’t feel like he was heading home, even though that is where he lived. It was definitely his mother’s apartment, not his.

Tired and dirty, Hugo put his mental blinders on and started the long trudge to the other side of the city. He had only had a few hours of sleep in between hours and hours of running, and it was catching up with him. He stumbled into someone, a nox, and she pushed him away, making him fall to the ground.

The nox swore and kicked at him. Hugo rolled out of the way, coming up and flipping the nox off. He didn’t trust himself to say anything though. It was clear from the nox’s clothing that she was one of the city's top merchants.

“Go back to where you came from, guttersnipe!” the nox said as she walked away.

“I was born here you unbalanced tarrok,” Hugo said, unable to keep from insulting her.

She didn’t seem to want to deal with him though, she just flipped him off with three hands. He knew that the odd number was supposed to be extra insulting, but he just scoffed.

He wasn’t insulted by her telling him to go back to where he was born, he just thought she was dumb for using an archaic insult. Sure, humans didn’t come from this world, but almost everyone in this city was born here. He was fairly sure that even his great grandfather was born here.

Everyone told him that humans came from Earth. It never felt like a real place to Hugo though. Those stories always felt like fairy tales to him. There was always something fantastical, something unreal, about those stories. And they always had a moral. Don’t trust strangers or someone like Columbus will kill your whole family. Respect your elders or the Nazis will take over your city. Don’t overreach or you will end up like the Romans.

Real life didn’t have morals. Sometimes it doesn’t turn out well in the end. Sometimes no one saved you from danger. Sometimes the bad guy won. Maybe most of the time.

It was time to go back to real life, to his mother.