To Saia’s surprise, taking care of the sea snake helped her survive the days of monotonous work. They had placed the tank in one corner of the room, next to the wall of glass but opposite the maps’ table. She was amused at how carefully the engineers stepped around it, even when they were already standing quite far.

The turns had changed a bit, since the sun settled a bit earlier each day, a consequence of the constant movement of the city. Each morning, the engineers’ rulers and pencils came closer to the quadrant where the mountain was, even if the advance was frustratingly slow. She knew it was better to act as soon as possible, but she kept wondering what would happen if she was found out before the rebels realized she had sabotaged the weapons and given her the exact position of the shard. They could break the pact and not give her anything at all, and then she’d have to decide whether to waste more time or act based on incomplete information.

She waited for midday to come, when the engineers left and Filsun arrived to start their lesson.

“Let’s start with the full body,” he said. “Last time your control wasn’t as stable as it should be.”

She refrained from commenting and waited for him to become gaseous. She gave him a second to settle himself, then focused all of her power on keeping him solid. The more they trained, the more surprised she was at how easy it had become: she could instinctively feel which parts of his viss had to be nudged which way, as if the flow inside his body was a picture and she could tell which details didn’t fit with the rest.

“Are you done?” Filsun asked, as if he couldn’t feel it in his whole body.

“Yes.”

“Well, then…” He moved his arms around, then suddenly spun on the spot, trying to break her control. Saia waited patiently as he jumped twice on place, then tried to bend each of his fingers backwards with the opposite hand. Her control didn’t slip once.

In the end, Filsun shook his arms in front of him.

“We should focus on the hands again, they’re not as solid as they could be.”

Saia felt a flash of irritation at that blatant lie, but didn’t show anything other than calm.

“And here I thought I had it right,” she replied, doing her best to keep her tone light and uncaring. “It looks like soon you won’t have anything to teach me.”

She felt his energy buzz. She was sure that if she let him free of her control, he would start levitating out of nervousness.

“If Serit’s research ever gets approved again, you will need to be perfect. What would happen if you solidified an ambassador and their hands rained past the threshold?”

Saia refrained to point out how little she cared about that. Besides, the kernel Serit was building would have forced her to keep someone whole no matter what.

“Have you seen other spirits around, recently?” she asked, instead.

Another wave of buzzing, followed by a clear lie.

“No, of course.”

“Are you sure? Because I’ve seen them fly past the window.”

She pointed at the wall of glass, and at the same time loosened her control on his body. It started expanding toward the ceiling, the contours smudging.

“We should change room, or they could see you next time,” she concluded.

“You’re lying. Hilon would have told me.”

“Hilon isn’t always here, and she doesn’t have my reach.”

She held his gaze. Even if he decided her words were a lie, they both knew he couldn’t risk having the elders know he was there.

“You can’t leave this room,” Filsun said. “Not without Hilon’s permission, and I don’t think I can ask her anything more.”

“We don’t need to go far. Some of the laboratories have no windows, and they’re just down the corridor.”

She knew exactly which one would be ideal for her plans, but she feared that being too specific would have revealed her true intentions.

Filsun slowly returned to his normal shape, even if it trembled quite a lot.

“I’ll ask,” he finally said, then flew out through the keyhole.

Saia waited, looking out of the window and at her sea snake in the tank at the same time. Now that she could easily see the viss inside each creature in her domain, she appreciated the thousands of rivulets traversing its coiled body, resting on a mound of earth that was currently immersed in sunlight.

The next day, right after the engineers had left, she heard the sounds of a muffled discussion outside the door. Filsun was late, so Saia imagined what it was about.

In the end, the door opened again on his gaseous figure.

“I convinced her. She says to use whatever place we like, as long as we don’t touch anything.”

Saia reluctantly stepped out, expecting to be deactivated.

“She also said that if you hope to find some secret information lying around, you’re wasting your time,” Filsun specified, floating beside her as she walked down the corridor. “The engineers have been instructed a long time ago not to leave anything of importance around here.”

Saia only half-listened to him, too busy calculating the position of the laboratories compared to the weapons’ deposit.

“This one,” she said, pointing at the door right next to the room she actually wanted. “Or maybe that one.”

“That one,” Filsun agreed immediately, entering exactly where she needed to be.

Her plan would have worked with any other laboratory, since they were so close to each other, but she wanted to avoid any waste of energy, since she didn’t know exactly how many weapons she needed to sabotage.

Filsun had been given the keys to the laboratories too, so he opened the door with ease. That spoke volumes to how little Hilon actually cared about Saia wandering around. After all, she couldn’t get a step further than the area assigned to her without being deactivated, key or no key.

Filsun hovered over the table at the center of the room.

“Let’s start again,” he said. “And I’ll be moving around before you start, so it won’t be that easy.”

Saia didn’t find the exercise to be as difficult as he had anticipated, but she still made a good portion of mistakes, since the biggest part of her attention was focused somewhere else. Namely, the room right above her, inside her reach once she had expanded her domain past the thick ceiling of rock.

The crates were still there, and still filled with weapons. Each trident was divided into four parts: the higher portion of the pole, with the long blade at the end of it; the lower part that could be screwed to the other to reach the full length of the weapon; and the two smaller spikes that could be ejected separately once attached to the main body.

She continued expanding her domain, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary anymore, to check that there wasn’t anyone in the room. The only guards were on the corridor outside; as long as she didn’t cause any loud sounds, they wouldn’t have noticed her tinkering.

She shrunk her domain a bit, only including the crates. They were eight in total, containing twenty weapons each, every set of four pieces held together by a sturdy rope. She examined the central part, as it seemed to be the most important component, and looked for a mechanism that could resemble the drawing provided by the rebels. She found that the ejection was activated by a pattern of iron wire hidden in the tight space of the pole, of which only a tiny surface emerged, flat as if it was a button. The point of contact.

Saia didn’t understand why she couldn’t just cut the wire. She didn’t see how the guards could repair it without breaking the weapon in half, which would have made them ineffective all the same. The only explanation was that the rebels wanted the guards to use the weapon, only to have them misfire and, possibly, hurt whoever was holding them.

Saia retracted, paying a bit more attention to Filsun’s lesson as she reflected on what to do. She didn’t know for sure whether sabotaging the weapons that way would have hurt anyone, but if it was true, it went against the pact she had made with the rebels. At the same time, there was no reason for the guards to fire their weapons if it wasn’t to kill someone.

Not that she had a choice, if she wanted her shard.

She expanded her domain again and set out to work on the small mechanism at the base of each of the two ejectable points. It took the rest of the lesson for her to sabotage the crates, even if that convinced Filsun he had found a skill she still needed to practice.

She spent the rest of the day in the navigation room waiting for a sign of the rebels, wondering how they could ever find out that she had sabotaged the weapons in the first place. She considered it weird for them not to give her any instructions in that sense, and that made her suspect again they had been lying, and the vague position of the shard was all she would get from them.

Until one of the engineers of the second turn arrived in the late afternoon with a jar of cookies.

“They’re for us,” he said, leaving it open on the table for his colleagues. “It was someone’s birthday at the kitchens and they gave one to each group.”

Saia had been examining everything that had crossed the door since she’d completed the sabotage. When she checked the sweets too, she found an already opened card tied to the jar. The content was a generic ‘thank you’ message, the background decorated in pencils with wiggly lines and geometric shapes that reminded her of the buildings and streets of the nine villages when seen from above through the binoculars.

It was a more detailed map of the fifth level. One of the geometric shapes was noticeably darker than the others, and someone had left a drop of their viss on it for good measure. Another one had been marked, smaller and at the very edge of the drawing, and she realized it was the elevators’ room.

She waited until the engineers were focused on the maps, then slashed the string tying the message to the jar to make it fall between two rods. For the first time since she’d been made to work in that room, she looked at the end of the turn with apprehension. There was no more postponing or hesitating. She couldn’t get more ready than she was, and any delay was a waste of precious viss.

Eventually, the engineers left for their one-hour break, leaving Saia alone. A part of her started counting the seconds the instant the lock turned.

She approached the tank. The sun was setting a bit earlier than usual, and as a result the snake wasn’t particularly active. Saia dropped some dried meat in the water, letting the splashes of the snake in pursuit catch her face. She waited for it to finish eating, then caught it by the head, careful not to squeeze too tight. She held it in front of her, sending a bit of viss to calm it down.

She reflected on what she knew about spheres like herself. They could give their viss away as they pleased, even to other gods, but they couldn’t absorb it in any case, not even if it was abandoned on an object and not belonging to a living creature. The monks wanted them to die exactly when expected. Which made sense, considering how Zeles had managed to escape them. Just like she was about to escape now, thanks to her own mistake at Ifse.

She would never forgive herself for putting her future at risk, or Serit for taking Aili's shard. But if it hadn’t happened, there was a chance she’d have never connected the birdguards to the ability to see viss, nor to the fact they needed her to be extremely bright to track her movements from afar. The less viss she had, the closer they had to be, the less precise her surveillance would become. Granted, having less viss also made her less powerful, less dangerous to them. But it also left her free to move.

She knew that, and yet she kept holding the snake, frightened by what she was about to do. Her viss were years of her life, and she had already lost too many. The only reason why she didn't know the exact day of her death was because she refused to make the calculations. Knowing the year was like feeling pressure around her mind, a grip that she only ever felt while facing Vizena. She had only maintained some peace of mind by thinking she still had decades before that moment, despite it getting closer and closer every time she used her energy. And if getting her shard required more time and viss than she had anticipated, if she was stuck at Iriméze for any reason while it got too far from the mountain again, she might die without even seeing her family again.

She was acutely aware of the only hour she had at disposal flowing away from her. She had to get the shard before then, or the engineers could come back and give the alarm. She tried not to think of the possibility that they came back earlier than usual, or that someone else, like Hilon or Filsun, would enter that room while she wasn't there. Her plan was meant to fool the birdguards, but it could do nothing against normal surveillance.

That thought was the last nudge she needed to start pushing her viss into the snake. She increased the flux gradually, checking how much was left inside her sphere. She couldn't get down to the quantity a human produced in a day, because it wouldn't have lasted her half an hour. But she remembered Muyut, the tanhata, and his body that contained enough viss for her to survive for eighteen years. That number only took into account what was needed for a god that lived near the mountain, or for her if she kept her domain fairly small. Every time she expanded it, every step she made further away from the mountain, she eroded that reservoir a bit more.

She kept slightly less viss than Muyut to avoid implying him in her escape. She paused for a moment, letting the sense of loss wash over her. It was a weird kind of grief, since it was directed mostly at herself, and she couldn't express it in any outward way.

The snake tried to slither off from her weakened grip, then turned its head to bite her arm. The teeth scraped against the rock. Saia peeled it away with minimal strength.

“I just gave you forty years of my life, you little shit,” she said, then dropped it back into the tank. She checked the animal's viss: it was bright enough, almost like her sphere had been. Probably enough to fool the birdguards for an hour.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the wall of glass. The birdguards might have not recognized her viss, but if she got close enough to one of them they would have known she was out of the designated area. She needed to change how she looked.

The tanhata was once again a source of inspiration: she altered the material of her body until she looked like a statue of quartz, a deep red with orange hues. Just flashy enough for anyone to assume she was a tanhata with a glance, without lingering on her human facial traits. Serit hadn't seemed to know much about those people despite living on the fourth level for part of their life, so she hoped the other shilvé wouldn’t see through her disguise.

She took the rebels’ drawing from the floor, then checked the room one last time, as if all of her possessions weren't contained inside the bag she was always wearing. On a whim, she opened the cabinet and took out the maps. She doubted they were useful without knowing the necessary calculations, but Aili would appreciate them.

She approached the door. She resisted the urge to check whether there was someone in the corridor by expanding her domain: she could easily put any guard to sleep, there was no need to waste more viss.

She kicked the lock with enough strength to detach a piece of wall as well. She caught it before it could touch the floor, holding the door at the same time to prevent it from hitting the painted stone of the corridor. She hesitantly put a foot on the other side, then stepped forward some more, aware that the birdguards looking in her direction at that moment were seeing the smaller aura of viss of a tanhata detaching from the bigger one of her sphere. She imagined them wondering why there was one of them in her room, and forced herself to walk away slowly not to arouse more suspicion.

She only relaxed once on the other side. The factory was filled with the usual bustling and the noise of the machines. She walked faster, eyes fixed in front of her, to give the impression she was there for a purpose. The few workers who weren't intent on operating tools or observing procedures noticed her and started talking with each other. She had to resist the urge to expand her domain and listen. She needed to believe her disguise was good enough, at least for the moment, and keep going.