Baahir unlatched the back door to the airship cabin and slid it aside. He checked his bag and glanced back at Hugo.

“No, no, no. I can’t just jump out of the airship,” Hugo said. “We have to land.”

“Not an option,” the pilot said, “We need a huge clearing for that and there just aren't any around here.”

“Look how high we are! We are still well above the trees!” Hugo said, his panic rising.

The pilot stepped away from the controls. He put his hands on Hugo’s shoulders and softly said, “Hey. Hey. You don’t have to jump out of the airship. There is another solution.”

The sentinel pilot grabbed Hugo’s arms and tossed him out the back door. He screamed in terror and flailed around as he fell. He crashed into the canopy of a tree. The branches slowed him a bit, but he kept falling. He crashed through branch after branch.

Eventually, he got his panic under control and grabbed a branch. He swung himself around it to arrest his momentum. He hung on with all four arms. It took him some time to calm down enough to look and see how high up he was.

Fifteen feet.

Hugo laughed. He let go and dropped to the ground. Luckily his backpack had stayed on him in the fall. His knife belt hadn’t though, and he looked around for it on the ground. Eventually he concluded it was stuck in the tree somewhere. He didn’t even consider climbing the tree to find it.

He saw Baahir in the distance and walked over to him. Hugo swore and said, “What was that about?”

Baahir shrugged and said, “We had a limited amount of time for the drop. He was just being practical.”

“There were other choices! We could have found a better landing spot! Or even just used a rope ladder!” Hugo said, exasperated.

“Huh, didn’t think of a rope. I just jumped. Maybe that guy is a bit of a jerk. Anyway, you look better now. You got a bit of grime on you. You were looking kind of prissy before,” Baahir said, “Come on, let’s go to the quarry.”

Hugo wanted to rant and complain some more, but his companion wasn’t the one he was mad at. He followed the harvester to the stone quarry. No one was there, it was too late in the season for the mundane workers that usually worked here.

Baahir knocked aside a large boulder and dug up a few things. They were weapons and armor. He handed Hugo a currass and a shortsword.

“What’s this for?”

“Put it on. We need to convince them that you are a harvester, and your shiny armor is too nice.”

Reluctantly, Hugo took off his lorica and strapped on the dirty currass. He kept his bracers on, but rubbed some dirt on them. He said, “Why did you hide this here anyway?”

“This is the armor from the rest of my team. The last time I was here, I was injured and couldn’t carry it with me,” Baahir said somberly. He took Hugo’s discarded armor and tossed it into the hole.

Hugo’s mood fell. He was wearing the breastplate of one of Baahir’s dead teammates. They had died out in the field, fighting a monster that was too strong for them. At least, that’s what Baahir said. He really hoped that he hadn’t killed his teammates and hid their armor to later sell.

He just had to get into the city, then he could get away from the sketchy harvester.

“Throw your bag in the hole too. I am sure all of your stuff is too nice. We don’t want the guards to have even a whiff of suspicion,” Baahir said.

Hugo thought about it for a second. It seemed like the harvester was just trying to convince him to give up all of his stuff so that he could sell it later. On the other hand, he had spent a lot on the stuff in his bag, so maybe the guards would be suspicious. Oh well, it was only money. He could always make more. He took out his packet and tossed his bag in the hole.

The harvester quickly covered up the hole and moved the boulder to cover it. He motioned for Hugo to follow him and they walked into the forest.

Hugo was glad that Baahir hadn’t said anything about his crossbow. They still had to get through a lot of forest before they got to the city, he needed to have a weapon he could trust. The next few hours were tense, but they didn’t run into anything dangerous. They came across a lumbering troll and a fire beetle. Hugo killed them both and kept their mana stones. Baahir grumbled about that, but didn’t have a good reason to take the stones for himself.

They stopped to rest when they were about five miles away.

Baahir said, “We are going to wait here until late afternoon. Most of the teams come in around then so we will blend in with them.”

After half an hour, Hugo said, “Do you have any food?” He hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning because he had been nervous.

“Do you see a bag? I don’t have any food.”

“If you were always planning on waiting, why did you make me leave my bag at the quarry? I had food in there.”

Baahir shrugged. He got up and walked over to some nearby mushrooms and harvested a few handfuls. He gave Hugo half of them and sat down.

Hugo waited to see Baahir start eating before he took his own bite. They weren’t good. They were just barely palatable and only Hugo’s hunger kept him eating. He promised himself a nice dinner when he got into the city.

Eventually, Baahir got up and said, “It’s about time to go, there is just one more thing first.” He grabbed a roll of bandages from his pocket.

Hugo got up and closed his eyes. He tensed himself as a whistling sound came from his right and knocked him down. His face was bleeding and his shoulder hurt. Hugo tried not to sob as he got back up.

“Almost done, your boss said you needed a broken arm too,” Baahir said.

“Actually, I was thinking...” Hugo didn’t get to finish the sentence before he saw the mace coming at him. He had enough time to jump out of the way but he stopped himself. He felt a crunch on his upper left arm and cried out.

“That’s the last of them, I promise,” Baahir said and bandaged Hugo up. He wrapped his face up and made a splint out of a branch.

Coming back injured would help him use the ID he had since the bandages would cover his face. The injuries would help sell their story too. Hugo found that he didn’t care much about that right now though, and his bandages had some tears mixed in with the blood.

They started walking, and Hugo had to keep himself from crying out as his arm was jostled. Eventually, the city came into view when they were a few miles out. They saw another team walking up and slowed themselves a bit so they would arrive just after them.

When it was their turn at the gate a guard gave their papers a quick once over and sent them further inside the walls.

There was a small desk manned by a man in yellow and white robes. A light mage. Baahir didn’t mention this. They handed over their papers and the man said, “Welcome back, what team are you with?”

“Harvester team fifty seven,” Bahrain said.

The light mage looked through some papers at his desk and said, “You’re a lot later than expected. We had assumed your team had died.”

“Most of us did, just me and Xhosa here are still alive. A barghast got the drop on us, tore us all up. I killed it in the end, but there were more of them in the area. We had to leave most of our stuff behind. We ate a lot of mushrooms,” Baahir said.

Hugo was impressed with how the harvester kept everything truthful and still managed to fool the mage. He was also glad that his cover identity used the name he had gotten used to, since it was a very common first name.

“What about you, Xhosa? Are you part of team fifty seven and is everything he said true?” he said and looked at the paperwork and started making notes.

Shit. Hugo couldn’t just say yes, he wasn’t part of team fifty seven. Instead he just said, “I am so sick of mushrooms, I just want to go home.”

The light mage laughed politely and waved them inside. Instead of the fancy turning room, they went through a series of heavy doors to make it inside the city.

“Ah, home sweet home,” Baahir said. “I can take you to my cousin, we can get your arm and face fixed up right away. He is a little farther away than the sentinel services, but he is better and cheaper.”

“No thanks, I’ll just pay to get it done near here,” Hugo said. He didn’t want to have any more contact with Baahir than he had to.

“Ok then, I guess this is where we say goodbye. As soon as you give me that letter,” Baahir said and held out his hand.

“Of course, of course,” Hugo said. He reached into the packet and pulled out the harvester’s final payment. Baahir thanked him and walked away into Deva.

While Hugo had the packet open, he looked at the runes Colonel Mandisa had included. There were just three of them, a light rune, fire rune, and sharpness rune. He crumpled them in frustration. Leave it to the colonel to only provide runes that Hugo had already learned. Next he looked at the pulsenote he had gotten from the General again. It was coded, but the gist of it was to go ahead with the colonel's plan. He crumpled that note up too. He was on his own now.

He turned and started looking for the life mages. They had a station here for the harvesters that returned injured. He was glad that no one was in line and he could get healed right away. They asked for a crazy high price to heal him fully.

He went ahead and paid it anyway. He needed to be fully healed for this next bit. His cover identity may be a harvester, but it wouldn’t be good to appear to be an incompetent one.

After he sold his mana stones, he headed inside the city. It looked fairly similar to Paarl, with more humans. The same architectural style, the same symmetrical layout, just with humans making up about half of the population. He looked around as he walked, but he didn’t see a single riese.

He didn’t have to go far to find a plethora of decadent culinary choices. He bought a honey crispel and ate it as he wandered the restaurant row. He was pleased to find it still tasted delicious to him.

He ended up in a seafood place. It reminded him of home, his first home in Reval. The prices were a bit much, but the stuffed squid was divine. He didn’t care for the fried potatoes that came on the side, which was disappointing, since he usually loved those.

He found a hotel nearby that rented rooms for cheap. The room wasn’t much bigger than a broom closet, but he didn’t care. He was exhausted from the trip and healing and fell asleep right away.

The next morning he cleaned himself up and headed south to look for the military base. Unlike most of the other cities on the wheel, Deva didn’t have shimmer corps in town. They had a military that fulfilled some of the same duties, but they were geared towards war.

He saw a pair of them walk the opposite way as he got closer. They had light armor with a helmet and grieves. Both of them carried a small shimmer caster and a sword. Despite looking the same, Hugo knew that it was likely that one of them was soulmarked.

The walls surrounding the military base were gleaming white, sparkling in the sun. It was an interesting rejection of the nox love of color, along with being ostentatiously clean. He walked up to the front gate and asked about seeing a recruiter. Hugo was referred to the small building across the street.

He walked inside and found a long desk spanning two walls. It looked like there was space for several receptionists but only two were there today.

“Hello? Is this where I talk to a military recruiter?” Hugo said.

The human at the desk recited by rote, “Mundane recruitment isn’t until next week, on the first day of Septimus.”

“Oh, I am not mundane, I am soulmarked. A runeist actually,” Hugo said, glad to have found the right place.

The man looked Hugo up and down and sighed, “Despite what you may have heard, we don’t actually take every runic mage.”

Great, Hugo thought to himself, this armor was supposed to help sell his story, but it was hurting his chances to be admitted. The cuirass was shoddy and ill fitting, the recruiter must have assumed Hugo was a terrible harvester if he couldn’t even afford good armor. Hugo would have to turn on the charm.