The air seemed fresher as Dorian strolled out of the doors of the Guild. Humming to himself, he took stock of the sun in the sky. That whole jaunt had gone faster than he’d expected—there was still an hour or two left, it seemed, before he’d be kicked out.

Would he be kicked out, now that he had an Artificer’s badge? Pebble had said Guild membership was an avenue to citizenship. But if this Oasis worked like any of the bureaucracies Dorian knew, there was likely still a glut of paperwork and waiting between him and certified citizenship. The badge wouldn’t keep him from being booted out unceremoniously at sunset.

He’d be fast, he resolved. There were only two small errands to run anyways—nabbing a good set of Oasis-approved clothes and checking out the Sinkhole. It was an hour’s work, tops.

Hmm. There was a familiar prickle in his mind. A soft, hair-raising sensation. I’m being watched. He made a casual half-turn.

Crouched in an alley to the side of the Guild was a boy studiously pretending to forage through trash. As Dorian approached him, he could see the beads of sweat multiplying on the boy’s thin head. This was an unseemly animal; one of his brows had been burned off. His head was bald, his figure small and squat and swaddled in torn rags. It was obvious he was from the Outskirts.

“Hello,” said Dorian with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “My name is Io Rust, as you know. Might I know yours?”

At first the boy pretended not to hear him. Then, when he noticed Dorian wasn’t he lifted his head with the greatest reluctance.

“You talking to me?” rasped the boy.

“Yes. And you are?”

“Don’t got a name.” The boy shifted uneasily. “You a constable? Come to lock me up?”

“Please,” sighed Dorian. “Drop the act. You’re a grunt of the Mischief. Sent to monitor me for your gang after Pebble left.” It was a bit of a stretch, but Dorian said it with absolute confidence. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The boy flinched; his single brow jerked up. Ha! So I’m right.

“What mischief? Never heard of it,” the boy mumbled, struggling to school his features.

“Right…” Dorian rolled his eyes. “Well, if you were a member of the Mischief, I’d want you to take a message to your Chief. Tell him this.” Dorian drew out the Artificer’s badge and flashed it in the boy’s face. He saw its tiny reflection glinting against the boy’s shocked yellow eyes. Then he pocketed it.

“Tell him Io Rust is a Tier-1 artificer. I suspect there aren’t many Artificers in the Outskirts. Tell him I’m open to hearing offers for my services.”

“Uh-huh,” muttered the boy, fidgeting. “Listen, mister, I don’t know a Mischief. But…if I did, I’ll let ‘em know.”

***

It was important, when acquiring a new status, to start milking it right away. Contacting the Mischief wasn’t merely a business move—he suspected the gangs were the richest of the Outskirters, but their hoards likely paled in comparison to the wealth in the citizenry proper. No; he flashed his status to they knew to tread lighter around him. It was one thing to mess with some Tribesman with no Oasis ties. It was another to offend someone affiliated with the proud Artificer’s guild.

Speaking of contacting potential patrons, when was Nijo going to make a move? It’d been a month. Dorian suspected the Ugoc prince would send him a note once he’d arrived but so far, still nothing. Strange. Was this an implicit rejection of his offer, or was Nijo simply biding his time?

No matter. I can afford to be patient.

Dorian pattered along the dense, sun-beaten street, scanning for the store he looked for. Machine-shops and bustling eateries lined the streets on either side. Stacked on top of them were living-spaces and other shops splashed with color; he even saw a huge, gold-studded pagoda perched above a healer’s office—Temple of Jez, it read. The crowd choked up the street; the sun’s heat was an oppressive weight in the mid-afternoon. The population density here was literally suffocating. Everything everywhere was in constant motion; if it wasn’t the people it was the incessant thrum of machinery—metal doors clanking open, the click-clicking of clock-towers, the hiss of steam pipes, or the looming groans of the aqueducts as they disconnected and re-connected, casting thick swathes of shadow on the crowds below.

Dorian kept browsing until he came across a tailor’s shop. Finally! He went in and emerged half an hour later with several new sets of clothes—the first was well-fitting robes, unassuming, slate-gray and made of sturdy fibers. It wouldn’t look out of place here as servant’s wear, and it’d also blend in well enough in the Outskirts too. A solid compromise. He bought a full-body cloak for Kaya, the poor girl. She’d need to bear the Outskirts a while longer yet.

Truth be told, Dorian wasn’t sure of his long-term plans for her. He couldn’t drag her along forever, could he? Meh. I’ll figure it out when I’m done here. Worst-case, he’d drop her off at some settlement and move on. The thought gave him a little pang of regret, but that was only the ghost of Io causing a ruckus.

In his final few minutes, Dorian went toward the center of the Oasis. He followed the lines of the aqueducts in the sky; they all seemed to converge in one spot. A few minutes of sprinting later, he arrived at the end of the street.

He was struck by a crisp watery breeze. The street opened up to admit a vast expanse of sky-blue water. It was clear as glass and pulsed with qi; the late-afternoon sun made a stark-white streak of light down its middle. The Sinkhole luxuriated in the sunlight—sunlight sparkled all along its rippling, lapping surface. It was easy to forget he was looking a Sinkhole. He could’ve been looking at the twilight sky, a mad and infinite ecstasy of stars winking softly, set against a subtle, depthless blue. Underneath the surface was an endless forest of light-green kelp and other sea-grasses, clinging to the edges of the Sinkhole. All manner of multicolored sea-critters drifted about, some rough-skinned, some smooth; some scaled, others skinned. Silvery fish bigger than grown men floated lazily beneath the surface; other smaller fish, purplish in hue, flickered about in huge schools. He saw a few massive shrimp peeking out from behind kelp boughs. Translucent lobsters hid in cracks in the sandstone walls. The Sinkhole’s currents flowed through them all, seemingly without reason, moving to an unknown will.

Dorian frowned. Scratch that. He saw what made them move. The Sinkhole was surrounded by high, steel walls; sliding over them every few hundred meters were the openings to an aqueduct. If the Sinkhole was the world’s largest bowl, these aqueducts were the world’s largest straws, sucking greedily at waters which never ran dry.

Something else intrigued Dorian. The closer he got to the Sinkhole, the more he felt a harmony with it. Or, rather—something within it. The closer he stepped, the more his Bloodline started to throb in his veins. It was unmistakable. Resonance.

Somewhere deep in that Sinkhole, there was something kin to his Bloodline. Perhaps it came from the same species; more likely it came from a related species. Perhaps it was a dormant, bloodless body-part, like a fang long since drained of its Bloodline powers. Nevertheless, it intrigued him.

Strange, that this would come up here. If the Sinkhole held a relic with Bloodline powers cousin to his—or even better, another matching Bloodline scale, though he doubted it—he could brew Booster Elixirs to significantly speed up his cultivation. Perhaps he’d even unlock greater potentials in his own Bloodline.

As of now, he had only an inkling of knowledge of the Bloodline which lay within him. It was probably serpentine. Definitely strongly Death-aspected. If he could get his hands on Resonant relics, it might be a gateway to greater understanding—and with it, greater Techniques…Worth pondering.

But there was no getting closer to the Sinkhole for now. The walls which surrounded the Sinkhole had a number of gates, each of which was flanked by serious-looking guards. They rebuffed any who went too close—“No entry without a permit!” shouted one of them.

Dorian shrugged. The sun was setting. It was an excursion for another time. All in all, he was satisfied with all he’d gotten done today. He sauntered his way back to camp.

***

Kaya was curled up in a blanket in her new tent, sniffling and shuddering, trying her very best not to cry. She was failing. Her sobs forced their way through gritted teeth.

It was almost made her angry enough to stop crying. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t a crier! She’d always been the one who made fun of her brother for crying! She was the strong one. The cheery one.

Or rather, she used to be. Now she didn’t know what she was anymore. Not cheery. Certainly not strong—not anymore, as today’s scuffle proved. That man’s leery grin was etched into her mind; his tongue ticking those ugly lips as he bent her to the ground; the feeling of him forcing her to her knees…that feeling of horrible horror as she felt her body failing her…

She hated it more than she’d hated anything in all her life. Her nails dug into her palms, drawing blood. She sniffled and wiped the tears from her eyes. She hated those tears too.

She was feeling a great deal of things she’d never felt before. The worst of them was this new, strange sensation that’d slipped in through the cracks of her mind. Weakness.

She hate-hate-hated it. And she hated most of all that she could do nothing about it but cry. Crying was what weaklings did. She was Kaya Rust! When she ate a punch, she stood, grinned, and fired back. Always.

But that was back then, in a simpler time. Back then, when she had this…unquestioned confidence that she always could stand back up. That no matter how hard she got hit, she’d always prevail. She knew she wasn’t really invincible, of course, but deep-down she’d always assumed no matter how tough things got, she could win out. She’d believed it with all her heart.

She’d been so stupid. So naive. Hento’s body—that same lithe body she’d held so tenderly the night before—broken before her eyes. Moki, Tadi, Humita, even Muata, all broken. Just like that. So cheaply, strewn like dirty rags on the sands.

Her mind flashed back to this morning. Some cold, sober part of her knew that if she tried hitting that man again, she’d be hit back so hard she wouldn’t be able to get back up. If she’d been broken like that, in that dark alley trapped by his men—if Io hadn’t been there…

She pulled the blanket closer over her, covering herself up with it. She wanted to dissolve in it. Another ugly new feeling—shame. She hated that too.

It was blessedly quiet outside. At least she could wallow here in peace, in this little cloth-walled tent. The stink of the Outskirts was all-pervasive. After a few hours, she’d almost gotten used to it. Was this her life, now, getting used to shitty things? Would she get used to these feelings? This stink? This life? Would she cover herself up and hunch over and grovel out for the rest of her sorry days? What was she? Where was she? What was she doing here?

A third ugly new feeling. Loneliness. She’d never been lonely back in the Tribe. If not Io and her boy-friends, she had her gatherer girl-friends; she missed even the simple things, like cracking jokes in the morning with the head Gatherer, a wizened old lady named Malia, or singing bawdy songs around the dinner-fires with the rest of the Hunters-in-Training, slurping messily out of soup-bowls. But she couldn’t do any of that anymore, ‘cause they were all dead.

Maybe she should’ve died with them.

That was a line of thought she’d tried so hard to resist. But now she was being slowly sucked in; the thoughts bore down on her, choking her; she sucked in a shuddering, hacking breath.

When the screams came, she was almost thankful for the distraction.

First was the eruptions of qi. Then a blood-curdling scream. Kaya leapt to her feet. Another qi; another scream; to the right, an explosion of auras—three or four of them, all in the Vigor Realm.

To the left there flared a response. More than a dozen auras, all at least mid-Vigor. A few were in the Profound Realm. All brimmed with hostility.

Are we under attack?!

Kaya’s first instinct was to dash out and figure out just what was going on.

But a new feeling halted her in her tracks. She was overcome with a sudden, overpowering fear; her chest felt so tight she could scarcely breathe; her breaths came out in gasps, rattling in her ears. She felt small as a speck of dust. Tears threatened her eyes. She felt herself frozen, trembling.

And finally—finally—her anger won out.

“Screw….that!” she gritted out.

Battling every impulse in her body, she stormed outside.