Saia forced herself to stop contemplating her situation and focus on the rods again.

“How do they work, exactly?”

Hilon relaxed, probably glad to leave behind the idea of Iriméze falling from the sky.

“All the mechanisms can be activated both manually and through patterns, so we can use them even when we don't have specialized staff at disposal. Normally they’d have to be on the spot for this to work, as the pattern is carved on the machine. The alternative is to connect it to a wire, so injecting the opposite extremity with viss can activate the pattern.”

She stepped away from the wall of glass and approached a circle of rods.

“Each of these is connected to the corresponding pattern and can in theory activate it. In practice, a person alone wouldn't be able to do that, because they’d need the additional viss to cover the distance that divides them from the pattern. We considered building more chambers like this one to reduce the length of the wires, but we can't just dig everywhere without compromising the integrity of the city. And it would require having multiple teams of people focused on different chambers, which defeats the purpose of this project.”

Saia expanded her domain to see by herself what she was talking about: a wire of some dark metal she couldn’t identify was tightly wrapped around the end of the rod, half an armlength under the floor. The wire was contained by a barely fitting tube that proceeded downwards, then toward the door, together with dozens of identical tubes, each of them enveloping a wire, each attached to a different rod. She looked further, including the corridor and even a piece of the factory on the other side, but the tubes kept going beyond her reach. She shrunk her domain, guessing it would have been pointless to waste more viss: it was clear from Hilon's words that the mechanisms were scattered all across the city.

“How do I know which rods to activate?” she asked.

“We'll tell you. By 'we' I mean me and my colleagues, once they get here. We were a bit early.”

She opened a foldable chair and set it down next to the table, then took out a chart and some sheets from the cabinet. She spread them out in front of her, standing in front of the chair without sitting down.

“The representatives have tasked us with moving the city toward the closest empty lands,” she tapped a spot on the colorless chart, made only of gridlines, names and numbers, nothing else drawn on top of it. “Which means that we'll have to go back for a bit.”

Saia barely paid attention to what she was saying, too busy looking for the mountain on the chart. The lack of drawings made it difficult, but she found a dot in the lower-right corner labelled 'mount Ohat' in the flowy vertical script. Her viss buzzed with hope: if she could guess where Iriméze was on the chart...

She still wouldn't be able to steer the city in the right direction or even jump down without being deactivated.

Someone knocked on the door and opened it soon after, without waiting for an answer. Three people barely older than Saia entered in a line and greeted both of them with cupped hands.

“Just in time,” Hilon said. “I need your help to trace the new route.”

She briefly explained where they had to go, leaving out the details of why they wanted to avoid the major human settlements. The three engineers took out more tools from the cabinet, mostly pencils, compasses and rulers, and sat down all around the table with the chart at the center. Two of them started jotting down calculations, measuring the distances between dots with the ruler. The third one asked Hilon whether she already had an idea of the direction to take.

“We'll have to backtrack, of course,” she answered, tracing a line with her finger from one square of the grid to another.

Saia noticed it was only a square away from the mountain, whatever that meant. But Hilon's finger sharply moved left, getting away from that spot.

“And through here, then up again and we're at the center of the forest, no human settlement in sight. What do you think?”

The engineer suggested a new route. They discussed back and forth for a bit. Saia stood next to the glass wall, observing the exchange from above. The routes came close to the mountain, at most a square of distance, right before deviating toward the center of the external forest. If she wanted to escape, she needed to plan for the moment they entered that square. Even if she had no concrete idea on how to achieve that.

She focused on the buzzing of her viss, trying to calm it down to waves. There was a time she had no idea of how to get rid of Vizena, and now she'd been dead for long enough she had stopped thinking about her entirely.

Once the route was decided, it took a while for the engineers to ultimate the calculations. Saia spent it looking out the half-dome of glass. It was thick by human standards, which were nothing compared to her own. At least she had an easy way out, once her and Aili's shards were securely in her hands.

Hilon called out for her, distracting her from her thoughts.

“We're ready, Saia.”

She stepped away from the glass and stopped at the center of the room, where she could reach all the rods without expending too much power. Hilon was holding up a list on a scrap of paper. Each point corresponded to the label on a specific rod. The numbers next to them were probably the number of seconds she had to keep each pattern active.

“I know you could easily read the list and execute everything on your own, but we need to make sure it's working correctly. We'll go slowly and check on the various groups before moving on. So only activate a pattern when I tell you to.”

Saia nodded.

“Sibe?” Hilon called, and one of the engineers raised her head. “Stop me if one of the groups alerts us.”

The engineer nodded and took out a light from her pocket. It was small, portable, similar if not identical to Serit's. Saia held back the need to ask what it was and observed instead: the woman pushed her viss into the small brass pin stuck inside the glass, the rounded top protruding on the outside while the tip was immersed in the luminous fog on the inside. The viss flowed on the surface, a string of different intensities that Saia couldn't decipher without knowing the code. She expected the sprite on the inside to devour the viss in an instant, but instead it nibbled at it little by little. It was a huge contrast to how the sprites seemed to jump at any spark of energy that was offered to them as if they were always starving, but she'd already noticed how the light in those little lanterns moved slower than in the bigger ones.

Once the woman had finished, she put the lantern back inside her pocket and reached for the cabinet again. She took out a mechanism shaped like a door’s handle, with the shortest part attached to a flat base. The other extremity was suspended on top of the free half of the base, a tip of metal hanging vertically from it, close to the flat surface but not quite touching it. Saia perceived a sprite inside the metal structure, floating around in that space that was a little too big to contain it. There was a knob on the inside of the cavity, connected to the tip of metal through a small mechanism as tightly wound as the one of a clock. A sack of black liquid rested at the center of it, somehow unpierced.

Sibe positioned the base of the machine on top of the table, then sat down in front of it. She adjusted an empty sheet of paper between the tip of metal and the flat surface beneath. Saia expected something to happen, but the engineer only stared at it, one hand placed at the base of the sheet, only glancing up every once in a while to look at what was going on in the room.

“First thing you should do…” Hilon started.

“What is that?” Saia interrupted her, pointing at the machine.

She looked back at it, then smiled.

“Don't worry about it. Let’s start with thirty degrees west,” she added quickly, before Saia could reply.

She didn’t insist: it was better if the engineers thought she was completely unaware of how they communicated with each other. She could figure out the rest by herself.

She found the right rod immediately, but activated the one on the opposite inside instead, with the label 'Thirty degrees east'. She pushed the bare minimum of viss needed into the wires, in order not to alarm the shilvé to the point they would deactivate her.

A sudden tap made everyone turn toward the machine.

“Wait,” Sibe said, moving the sheet of paper slightly upward with her hand.

The tip of metal kept tapping at irregular intervals, tracing lines interrupted by small portions of empty space and some dots.

“Seems like the tilt is right, but we're going in the opposite direction,” she translated.

Saia tried to gauge how she had read the message from those irregular lines. She guessed that each length corresponded to a letter, but one would need to be trained to read them, as well as know the code.

She checked the inside of the machine: the sprite received a bit of viss from an outside source, which prompted it to become solid. In that tight space, it inevitably meant touching the knob on the inside of the chamber, thus activating the mechanism and moving the tip downward. The ink spillt down, staining the page.

“Saia?” Hilon called her.

She nodded and activated the right rod, reflecting on how that machine could work: it had to be somewhat connected to a small lantern like the one Sibe had used to send the message, but she couldn't figure out how. If the monks were the only ones who knew how to make the effect of a pattern happen far away from the source, but they were using the lamps to communicate before she arrived.

Unless there was a connection: the sprites in the lanterns and the ones in the machines weren’t different but two pieces of the same creature.

She thought back at how they moved and shifted in the air. Serit had mentioned pieces of the sprites’ bodies could temporarily detach when they moved in gaseous form. If she was right, the lantern worked a bit like a sphere’s shard, containing a piece of the sprite trapped inside the glass. Not enough viss to power anything substantial, but it was sufficient to communicate.

Hilon’s voice cut through her thoughts.

“Twenty degrees right. Hold for twenty seconds.”

They kept going until the list finished, almost an hour later. Then the engineers sat down to discuss again, a new list was produced, and the whole ordeal began again.

Periodically, messages arrived through the machine on the table, and Hilon asked Saia to activate the rod that closed some shutters or increased the amount of fake clouds produced. Apart from Hilon’s orders, the room was silent, each engineer counting the seconds on a clock while Saia got bored out of her mind. She realized she'd have to repeat the same thing the next day, and then the next, and forcibly stopped thinking about her future for fear of losing any hope she had left.

Brief moments of relief came when the engineers gathered around the table to adjust the route. They communicated back and forth with someone else, sending their messages with a pocket light and receiving answers through the machine. Saia could guess the square of the map that they were traversing by Hilon's gestures while pointing at the various areas. The distance from there to the mountain's square didn't look like much, but she didn't know how big each square actually was, when converted into real measures. She'd need to compare that morning's route planning to the next, to know how much they could move in a day.

The engineers left around noon to eat. Hilon lingered for a moment before following her colleagues.

“I’ll leave you activated during this time as a sign of good faith. But wander around or cause any damage, and you won’t have breaks anymore.”

Saia nodded, feeling a flare of irritation. Once the door was closed again and she was alone in the room, she wondered whether Hilon's concession was actually a gift or a way to make her hate the situation even more. There was nothing to do, except for witnessing her slow loss of viss caused by the mountain. She had the feeling it was slightly less intense.

Hilon and the other engineers returned after little less than an hour and immediately resumed telling her which rods she needed to activate. She needed all of her fisher's patience to not leave and face whatever consequences awaited her, but waiting in that room was not like waiting in the cave or in front of a lake at all. There was no sound of water to lull her mind, no physical fatigue that she could ease with a bit of rest, no spark of excitement when a fish or a snake appeared just under the water, no silent nature she could lose herself into. Just the tedious list of commands, and her always vigilant mind making her aware of the passing seconds.

Her tense viss immediately relaxed when someone knocked, anticipating a distraction. One of the engineers approached the door, but didn't open it.

“Who's there?” they said, voice high enough to be heard through the thick wood.

“There’s been an incident in the tunnels.”

The engineer opened the door while the rest of Hilon's team got closer, alarmed by the news.

“Incident?” Sibe repeated, glancing at the silent machine on the table.

The woman on the other side put a forearm against the door and leaned a bit against it, breathing heavily.

“Two workers were performing maintenance in the main tunnels, but their ropes broke and there are sprites incoming in about ten minutes.”

“Which tunnels?” Hilon asked.

“Segment thirty-seven. They're already past the closest shutters, so lowering them wouldn't change anything.”

“Is there a tanhata in service?”

“One, yes, but he's on break. My colleagues already went to call for him, but we thought we'd alert you too, just in case.”

Hilon took out a small lantern from a pocket and closed her eyes. Once again, Saia saw the message being absorbed by the piece of sprite inside. Then Hilon put it away and gestured for her to approach.

“Come with me, I think we need your help with something.” She looked at the other engineers. “Notify the groups to continue the maneuvers manually until we return.”

Saia followed Hilon, hating that she was giving her orders, but glad she was leaving the dullness of that room.

“What's going on?” she asked while they both followed the worker, always one instant away from breaking into a run.

“Some tunnels are used often enough that it's risky to detach them for maintenance, so the workers have to go inside. It's dangerous because a group of sprites running by can easily carry them away. If they push them against a wall with enough violence, they could seriously hurt or even kill them. It happened before.”

They were inside the factory now, quieter than usual since most of the workers appeared to have left.

“There's also the risk the sprites decide to kill them to eat their viss, since we keep them a bit hungry by design. Unlikely, but it could happen. Usually there are handles for the workers to hold and ropes that tie them to the entrance of the tunnels. This way they won't be carried too far before we can hoist them back inside.”

“But they broke,” the worker added, turning her head a bit to look at them. “Or were cut, we're not sure. The maintenance’s timing was also wrong.”

They reached the line of doors on the other side of the room and went through the only one that was wide open. A loud chattering came up from a staircase that went sharply downward.

“And what do you need me for?” Saia asked. “Getting them back?"

“Essentially, yes,” Hilon said. “You won't be alone, we have a tanhata on duty. You're the only ones immune to the sprites' arrival. We could call in more tanhata from the fourth level, but they wouldn't arrive in time.”

Hearing her words in the narrow tunnel that encased the staircase, the worker leading the way turned to glanc up at them, puzzled.

Soon they were at the bottom of the stairs, inside another room that looked like a cave, both because it was made of rough stone and devoid of furniture. The workers were gathering around a hole in the floor, closed by a hatch made of metal and glass. There was a smaller hole inside it, through which dangled a piece of frayed rope.

“Stand back,” Hilon said.

Some of the workers immediately obeyed, but the ones closest to the hole were still crouching and kneeling with their faces low to the ground, trying to look beyond the piece of tunnel that was visible through the glass. They scrambled away too once three guards stepped forward as if to remove them forcibly, even if none of them held a trident.

“We'll lower you inside,” Hilon said, then in a higher tone: “Someone find a new rope.”

A creature approached, taller than the rest of the crowd, a vision in green that stopped Saia's thoughts for an instant.

“I have the rope,” a voice said. It was breathy and melodious at the same time, changing in pitch at every word.

“Thank you, Muyut,” Hilon replied, stepping aside to make space for them.

Saia realized she was looking at the tanhata the worker had mentioned. She had unconsciously expected a statue exactly like the ones of the gods, with human features and a smooth surface of stone. Instead, Muyut was completely made of emerald pieces pressed against each other to form a humanoid silhouette, with bumps and irregularities where the different shapes didn't fit together. Golden light shined through the holes in his body that weren't covered by the tunic he was wearing.

The face was another striking difference with statues or humans. In the upper part, there were three perfectly round holes that Saia couldn't help but consider eyes, similar to the golden ones of the wind spirits. The lower part was covered with a dark gray scarf that piled up onto the broad shoulders. The volume of the cloth couldn't hide the fact that it was mostly flat, exception made for the irregularities of the emeralds. There was no movement when the tanhata spoke.

“Who is she?”

“Saia,” Hilon explained. "She'll come with you to rescue your colleagues."

The portion of Muyut's viss visible through the holes trembled and dimmed slightly.

“What are you?” he asked.

Saia hesitated, aware of the other workers in the room. The voices that could reach her domain were wondering why a human was tasked with saving anyone, since she was just as vulnerable as everyone else. Still, it comforted her to know that they considered her a human, despite Muyut understanding immediately that it was only part of the truth.

“You'll make each other’s acquaintance later,” Hilon interjected. “Now please go down there and rescue them.”

Muyut tied one end of the rope to a metal peg that protruded from the floor, then raised the hatch without apparent effort. She observed him while he worked, debating on whether to expand her domain to include him. If tanhata were similar enough to gods, he could perceive it and lose any trace of friendliness.

He jumped down through the hole and landed heavily on the tunnel below, the opposite extremity of the rope still in hand. He looked up at her, as if expecting her to do the same, despite the roof of the tunnel being tall enough that a human falling down could hurt themselves.

“Return to your tasks,” Hilon said, then gestured for the guards to come closer.

The crowd reluctantly stepped back. Saia took advantage of the chaos to jump down next to Muyut.

The guards partially closed the hatch behind them, leaving the rope stuck between glass and rock. Saia looked in front and behind herself, at the tunnel stretching in both directions. She expanded her domain a bit, to check for traces of viss. She found them, but her domain touched the man of emerald.

Muyut recoiled as if she had suddenly put a hand on his shoulder, stepping out of her reach, but not before she could sense his own domain: it was similar to her own, but compact against his body, like her own when she didn’t expand it. There was a lot of viss inside, eighteen years of life for the standards of a sphere.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I just wanted to check where we have to go. You can feel me?”

“I can feel anything inside my domain. What are you? Your domain wasn’t this big before.”

“I’m… It's difficult to explain.”

A knock above their head notified them of how little time they had. She started walking forward, Muyut flanking her, keeping a few steps of distance.

“I’m a bit of a tanhata, and something different at the same time. A mix between a human and a tanhata, let's say.”

Muyut recoiled again.

“That's not possible. Either you are one of us or you're not.”

“How did you know I was different?” she asked, eager to change the topic.

“I can feel it. You can’t?”

“You’re the first tanhata I meet, so it’s difficult to tell for sure. But no, I don’t feel any difference between our domains. But you knew I wasn’t human even without extending yours, that's why I'm asking.”

The golden eyes shined at her.

“Extending it?”

Saia was almost glad when a scream of help distracted him. They started running, stone feet clanking onto the metal floor. She pushed with as much strength she could, to gauge how well Muyut could keep up. There was no evident effort as he proceeded side by side with her.

“I can feel what you're made of,” he said, his voice louder to cover the noise of both their steps. “Glass, and some kind of stone as the vehicle. Your affinity is so muddled up I can't make anything of it.”

“Affinity?”

The tunnel bent to the left. There were two people crouched next to the wall, hands tightened around four handles jotting out of the metal. There were more that Saia hadn't noticed, tracing a loose path all along the pipes.

The workers were turning their heads one way and the other, as if undecided about what scared them most: whether the clangor of their rescuers’ run, or the luminous fog approaching from the other side. The only sound the sprites emitted was the wooshing of strong winds, made eerier by the absence of any breeze.

“Cover the one on the left with your body,” Muyut said. “I’ll protect the other one.”

Saia stood next to the workers and expanded her domain to include both of them, then generated a thick barrier of wind. Muyut stepped away from her domain, the revulsion evident in his viss, even if Saia couldn't guess what had prompted it.

The fog of sprites approached with a low rumbling. Saia tightened her barrier as much as she could, attracting Muyut's curiosity.

“You can control wind, at least.”

“At least?”

“We don't have speaking organs,” Muyut said, tapping the base of his throat. “We don't have organs. We can speak is by controlling the air a bit. Not to the level you do, though.”

The sprites were upon them. The force of their combined winds was strong enough to make Muyut waver. Saia wasn't hit thanks to the walls she'd erected to protect her from the brunt of the impact, even if two months of viss were pulverized in an instant.

Given the impetus of their approach she'd assumed they would just keep running further, but most of the group clustered around her barrier.

“They want your viss,” Muyut commented with a resigned tone. He lowered his face to the ring of sprites fluttering around him. “Our viss.”

The two humans looked around, their posture gradually relaxing as they saw the tempest of golden light rage without being able to reach them.

“What did you mean by ‘affinity’?” Saia asked.

“Your imprint. Where your viss came from.”

“It came from a mountain.”

Muyut’s eyes flickered.

“Normally what you're saying wouldn’t make any sense, but it explains a lot of what I'm sensing right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take humans, for example. Their viss irradiates flesh, blood and bones.”

“And that's bad, right? You don't like flesh and blood?”

“It’s the dissonance of three different things together. And you're a lot more, it’s almost too much to bear. If I knew they were pairing you up with me, I would have left.”

Saia observed him, not knowing how to react to that. She didn’t perceive any enmity coming from him nor in the tone of his words, even if it was difficult to be sure without examining his viss.

“Why?” she could only ask.

“It's the dissonance,” he repeated. “I thought humans were difficult to get used to, but you're so much worse.”

Whatever intelligence hid behind the sprites' fog seemed to finally realize there wasn't anything to be gained and floated on, toward the next feeding station. Saia let her domain shrink to its usual size.

The two workers were still attached to the wall like mussels, most likely due to shock. Muyut touched their shoulders and gently pulled them to their feet.

“We need to go.”

Saia followed the three of them toward the hatch of glass, frustrated at the slow pace after the freeing run with someone who could keep up with her. Even if that someone was weirded out by her viss in a way she couldn't fully understand.

The workers climbed the dangling rope, then Muyut jumped, grabbing the border of the tunnel and hauling himself up without effort. Saia jumped too and did the same, pretending to struggle and prop herself up with the rope.

Once she had both feet on the stone of the room, the guards closed the hatch. Hilon approached her, holding the old piece of rope. Saia wanted to ask more questions to Muyut, but he was already leaving, cutting through the ring of guards that were keeping away the few workers lingering on the staircase.

“I need your opinion,” Hilon said. “It's frayed, but some workers think it was cut instead. What do you think?”

Saia took the rope to examine it with her powers. She had no idea whether the rope had been cut or not, but she immediately noticed it was stained with a huge quantity of viss.

She expanded her domain, looking for more traces with the same or a similar imprint. She didn't find them on the walls and floor, but on a person. One of the workers who had stayed behind. She was about to address him when he raised a hand, a piece of paper stuck between his index and middle finger.

“It was just old,” Saia said, focusing on the man.

He slightly nodded, crumpled the piece of paper and let it fall to the ground before following his colleagues out of the room.

“Good, thank you,” Hilon said. “At least we can rule out a saboteur.”

Saia was too busy reading the message to give her any more attention: most of it was occupied by a rough drawing of the five levels of the city seen from above, little more than six circles one inside the other, from the bottom to the fifth level, which was the only one with highlighted by multiple layers of graphite. An entire section of it was highlighted with another circle, the borders thicker and darker than anything else in the drawing.

This is the area where you can find your shard, a message recited. If you want the exact place, sabotage the weapon deposit at the entrance of the factory. This is the reference you need. Destroy the message.

There was a smaller drawing underneath, much more detailed, depicting a tiny mechanism. An arrow pointed at the component she needed to remove, even if it lacked any sort of context.

She made sure the map and drawing were memorized in her viss, then sliced the paper into a hundred small pieces.