The sprawling gilded expanse of the thirty-first floor spread out like another Gilded Night inside of the pillar, wisps of smoky black nightmares patrolling the streets for anyone unlucky enough to be caught outside. Sechen fiddled with a seam that had split on her dress, needle shaking between her fingers as she tried to thread it with emerald green she’d picked up on floor twenty eight. She grunted in frustration as her fingers slipped and the thread passed right next to the eye, setting her supplies down on the table and leaning back with a sigh.

“Prisoner did say you could use your Issi now.” Paui pointed out from across the table. “You don’t have to torture yourself with just to thread a needle.”

“It’s not the needle that’s the problem.” Sechen shook her head, flexing her shaky fingers. “If I can’t get rid of these shakes, then I’m always going to be spending Issi to fix them. And I’m already spending way too much Issi on my problems.”

Paui nodded knowingly. Sechen had explained everything Prisoner was helping her with a few days ago, and she’d even expressed interest in joining her. Paui was nowhere near as far behind as Sechen was, but she had one fatal flaw that even Prisoner had trouble dealing with.

“It’s terrifying trying to live without Issi.” Paui said quietly. “I don’t know how you do it all the time. I feel so weak, so tired, so irritable. And my clumsiness gets a thousand times worse. But look at you. Your muscles were barely there, but with that stuff Prisoner keeps giving you they’re growing by the day. You almost look like a whole different person now.”

“The first few weeks were the worst.” Sechen said idly, licking the fraying thread and picking up the needle once more. “My body was too weak for the strong stuff Prisoner’s got me hopped up on now, so just standing was a struggle. But I got better. And now I’m almost to the point where a practitioner my age is supposed to be, according to him.”

The thread missed the eye by a mile.

“Except for your shakes, of course.” Paui said with a teasing smile as Sechen set the needle down once more with visible frustration. “With your shakes and my clumsiness, we can come together to make one completely useless person.”

“The only useless person is one who accepts they will never be better.” Gilt said from under the table, his form shifted to be closer to a cheetah than a lion now that he didn’t have to worry about carrying Elach or fighting. “Have you two thought on Prisoner’s words? Metea/Irric and I have already informed him of our decisions, and yet we have heard nothing from the two of you.”

“We’ll decide once Prisoner tells us why we’re stuck here. Hells, nothing’s going to happen until he miraculously starts being able to move again, so what’s the point in worrying?” Sechen leaned back in her wicker chair, the material creaking under her growing weight. “We’ve been here for almost a week, and we’ve all been making some real progress on our Issi. Even you, shiny, so don’t be in such a hurry to leave.”

“It is not me who is in a hurry to leave.”

“Yeah, yeah. Prisoner’s antsy and Metea/Irric’s getting worse. He’s stuck in this place while all of us can go out and explore the mostly empty nightmare city. I get it, I really do, but we can’t go out on our own. We aren’t strong enough, and Prisoner knows it, but he’s scared for some reason. Metea/Irric can’t protect us in the state she’s in, you’re barely stronger than Paui and I, and Paui and I are... well, we’re weak.” Sechen shrugged. “Hoalt’s gonna have to wait a little longer for his dirty work to be done, since the only person strong and sane enough to get it done is stuck on this floor for some eternals forsaken reason.”

“Prisoner theorizes that it has something to do with Elach. Though he cannot fathom what that might be.”

“You’ve been talking with him a whole lot, haven’t you? Any words of wisdom to help us break through our respective problems?” Sechen asked with the smallest drops of venom in her words. Paui sat up straighter, listening with interest.

“Nothing that would help you, I am afraid. He has his hands full with Metea/Irric at the moment, so he cannot be there for you two as he wishes he could.” Gilt stretched under the table, then settled down against Sechen’s legs. “Have you looked into the intricacies of this floor as you said you would?”

Paui nodded, pulling out and flipping through a small notebook she always kept on hand. “This floor is a combination of floor thirty one and thirty two, stacked on top of each other without a ceiling in between. For some reason floor thirty one is above floor thirty two, which is why we’re safe up here in this tall building, but if we go down to the ground level we’re suddenly dealing with floor thirty two. Somehow. The pillar is way more confusing than those first ten floors made it seem five years ago.”

“I asked for the intricacies, not a surface-level analysis.”

“Quiet, snarky.” Sechen chided, nudging Gilt with her foot, who made a startled noise then grumbled something like an apology. “She ain’t finished yet. Go on, Paui.”

Paui smirked and nodded thanks before continuing. “The ground floor is one big scavenger hunt. There’s five riddles posted on a big board in the center of the copy of the city, and they change once every three days. We need to solve three of those riddles and go where they tell us to, where we’ll find a token that’s valid for fifteen days before it disappears. Sech and I solved one riddle to confirm the info we got from the other people living here, and it seems to be all true so far. But the thing is that the tokens are locked to the people who actually participated in the search. I don’t know how it does that, but only Sech and I can use the one we’ve got.”

“Will we then require a token for each of us to gain passage to the thirty-third floor?”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet. There are three holes for three differently shaped tokens on a pedestal in front of the board, so I assume we’ll have to find three for each of us. Or maybe three for the whole group, but everyone has to participate if they want to move on?” Paui shrugged. “I’m not really sure, to be honest.”

Gilt made a low rumbling in his chest, which led to a constant stream of ‘r’s over Sechen’s vision. “Interesting. How did the two of you manage to solve a riddle on your own? I assume it did not include combat, and no offense meant, but you two are not exactly the stealthiest, so the nightmares must have been privy to your movements.”

“The first one’s pretty much free.” Sechen said, setting an ovaline stone down on the table. “There was a tutorial ‘riddle’ that someone with half a brain could’ve solved: all we had to do was climb on top of the board and unlatch a little compartment that was painted to look like wood. Some kind of Issi thing spat the stone out at us a few seconds later.”

“But it wouldn’t fit in any of the holes.” Paui added.

“Right. The holes were shaped like a cutout of a triangle, a square with three stars cut deeper into it, and an infinity symbol. Or an eight we looked at from the wrong angle. But none of them were oval shaped, and we had a bad feeling that that place was more complicated than we thought. You still have the sketches of it?” Sechen asked.

“Yup, got them right here.” Paui flipped through her notebook to a page with a rough sketch of the plaza safe zone. “Do you want to come up and see, Gilt?”

“You two are perfectly capable of describing it to me.” Gilt said with a yawn. “I am comfortable here.”

“Lazy cat. You want to describe it, or should I?” Sechen asked.

“You’re better at it than I am, so here.”

Sechen leaned over the table to accept Paui’s notebook. “Alright. So, we’ve got the plaza here; a good twenty feet of safety in the dangerous nightmare filled streets. It’s made of a bunch of crescent moon-shaped scorched black bricks, but there are a bunch of squares in the ground that aren’t quite the same color as the bricks. They’re around the edges, one in each of the cardinal directions and another between each pair. Whatever you call the not-cardinal-directions.”

“They are called the ordinal directions.”

“Ordinal directions, gotcha. So one for each cardinal and one for each ordinal. Then you’ve got the board in the center of the plaza, and the pedestal in front of that. There are a bunch of buildings around the plaza, but they’ve all got that sort of haze that everywhere on ground level has. Nightmare smoke or whatever.” Sechen waved her hand. “But that isn’t important. What is important, and a little sketchy, is that the squares of not-so-seared brick were the exact same size as the base of the pedestal. Not an inch different.”

“Eight mysterious squares along with a single pedestal. That corresponds to the number of floors per grouping if we do not count the lone sanctuary, does it not?” Gilt asked.

“That’s exactly what we were thinking!” Paui said excitedly. “The pedestals have to be how we get from floor to floor. We couldn’t find an exit anywhere, not that we looked too hard, but it should have been pretty obvious like the last ten, right?”

Sechen nudged Gilt before he could say anything.

“This place is built to test people, Paui. If this floor group’s big thing is riddles, then the exit might be hidden too.” Sechen explained.

“Huh. I never thought about that.” Paui nodded. “That’s the problem with being in the army; you don’t really learn how to think. You learn to trust and do what you’re told.”

“I was merely going to tell her exactly what you did.” Gilt’s grumbling words flowed only over Sechen’s eyes, so she knew they were for her alone. How he managed to convey sulking with letters alone never ceased to amaze her.

Sechen cast her gaze down at the table. He wouldn’t have said it anywhere near as kindly, like all the other times he’d been overly blunt with Paui. Sechen was learning quickly that Paui was amazing at a few things, and those few things had landed her her job as runner in Temery Hoalt’s unit, but she wasn’t trained to do much of anything beyond that. Prisoner was working on changing that, and Sechen pitched in whenever she could. She was growing… attached to Paui. Her smile, her laugh, how easy she was to talk to, how she overreacted to being teased. And she was hot. That was a realization Sechen had been struggling with ever since she had drinks with Paui.

Paui noticed Sechen’s gaze and smiled, then began scribbling something in her notebook. That woman loved her notes. Sechen’s hands went back to her needle and thread, the urge to let her Issi take over getting stronger by the second. She’d endured far worse than this, though, and she wasn’t going to let a little frustration break her resolve.