Just the two of us in here, the storm raging outside.
Beyond these glimmering rock walls lies death, far as the eye can see. But the girl in front of me is so full of life.
I expect her to blink or look away. It’s what people do when they accidentally make eye contact. But she doesn’t, and I can’t.
“Why do you stare at me?” she asks quietly.
“Um.” I reach for words and come up short.
She tilts her head, and maybe it’s a trick of the blue light, but her cheeks seem to darken with color, just for an instant. As if she senses it, she lifts her fingertips to press them against her skin.
They touch just near the dark smear made by the drops of blood that fell from the bodies up in the trees, and in that moment I remember that her friends are dead.
Skies. I’m reaching for something that’s not there. What am I doing? She’s not looking at me the way I’m looking at her, and I shouldn’t even be thinking about this. My own cheeks are hot as I grab for the first available subject change.
“This is, uh, the place you wanted to show me?”
She carefully steps out into the larger space, and I follow.
“Hold a moment,” she says, soft. “Here, I can get far enough from the walls to reach the mist that lies dormant in this place.”
“Uh, mist? Like that stuff outside?” I wish my voice didn’t sound so nervous. “I thought it couldn’t exist in here?”
“The mist is everywhere,” Nimh answers gently, though at the edge of the chrono’s light I can see her lips twitch. “A little is safe enough, and necessary for magic. There is a little trapped inside this old ruin, kept here by the cage of sky-steel around it.”
“How do you know all this?”
She smiles at me. “I discovered it when I was a little girl. No one else comes here.”
She reaches into that utility belt she wears, drawing out a pinch of something between finger and thumb. Bowing her head, she whispers to it softly, and then tosses it up into the air. Lifting her chin, she blows gently, and the tiny particles come to life. Glowing first like a swarm of tiny insects, they glide out into a larger, darker space, each one illuminating until it’s like we’re standing on the edge of a galaxy.
I’ve got my mouth hanging open like a palace tourist, but as I gawk at the beauty of it, slowly I begin to realize what I’m seeing.
It’s a huge—well, not a room, it’s too big for that. There are double-height ceilings, and a series of dark openings that lead away to other spaces—some on our level, others running off a balcony around the second level. At first I think it’s a grand hall, but then I figure out what I’m actually looking at. It’s much simpler than that, and so completely out of place here that it startles a laugh out of me.
She shoots me an inquiring glance, and I lift one hand to gesture at our surroundings. “It’s a shopping arcade,” I say, pointing at the rows of cement openings where the duraglass must have been. “Those are storefronts, right?”
“There were merchants here,” she agrees with a tentative smile. “I think once it was open to the sky, or they had the art of making much larger sheets of glass than we do now.”
I crane my neck back to take a look. She’s right—up where the ceiling should be, another gap is bridged by huge chunks of stone.
Outside might lie the plains and the ghostlands, but in front of me is evidence that, once upon a time, this really was a city.
One built by my ancestors.
I can see the bones of something familiar in it, but now it’s ancient, darker and wilder. It’s otherworldly, lit up by Nimh’s own personal galaxy. And when I look across at her, it strikes me all over again—she’s just like this arcade. Familiar and yet utterly different.
“Come with me,” she says, gentle as she interrupts my dazed train of thought. “I will show you what I found here when I was little.”
The floor of the arcade is flooded with old groundwater, and I notice Nimh avoids letting it touch her feet, so I do the same. If there was ever a place where something terrifying was going to be lurking, it’s here.
She picks her way around the raised walkway at the edge of the ground floor, pausing once to crouch and lay her staff across a gap in the pavement so the bindle cat can run along it to the other side, neat as any acrobat. When she talked to him outside, she spoke like he understands us, and I still don’t quite know how clever he is. Either way, I’m pretty sure I haven’t impressed him.
I peer into an empty store, and a memory springs up in my mind. My subconscious has found a result in that search program it was running, and it’s flashing like a lit-up sign.
For an instant, I’m not Below at all, not following this mysterious girl through this ancient place.
Just for an instant, I look at that dark tunnel and I’m at home. I’m underneath the city.
“North?” Nimh asks, pausing and turning back toward me.
“It’s like the engine rooms,” I whisper, pressing one palm against the stone again.
“Engine,” she repeats. “There’s that word again.”
The hairs on the back of my neck are rising, because it’s all clicking into place. The tunnel that led us here reminded me of the tunnels at the very base of Alciel’s engines. The walls there, between the slabs of ancient circuitry, glimmer when you run your flashlight over them. I think they’re infused with what Nimh calls sky-steel, just like this place.
And the mist-tainted air out on the plains—I can almost taste it again, and now I know why it freaked me out so much. It’s like a turbocharged version of the thick, stifling air in our engine rooms. I spent enough time poking around down there when I built the Skysinger’s engine that I’m sure I’m right. They’re one and the same.
My heart’s beating faster, and my gaze is darting around the ancient arcade as I study it in a new light, drinking it in like it’s the muddy-tasting contents of Nimh’s waterskin.
If they have sky-steel and mist here, does that mean they have materials I need to build a new engine for the Skysinger?
“This stuff,” I say, slapping my hand against the stone. “The sky-steel. You said your people came in here to dig it out? What do you use it for, to build …” I search for a word that might make more sense to her than engines. “Do you use it to make things? Machines? To power your boats, maybe?”
Nimh shakes her head slowly. “There is very little sky-steel to be had,” she replies. “The gods took almost all of it with them. What little we have, we use to power the guardian stones.”
“What are they?” I practically pounce on her answer.
“The guardian stones?” She blinks at me as if she’s having trouble processing the fact that I don’t know. “They stand at the edges of our villages. They repel the mist, just as the last remnants of the sky-steel here are protecting us now.”
“So you know how they work together? The sky-steel and the mist? If someone here understands that, they can help me power my glider. Maybe I could get home.”
“We …” She pauses, and I can tell she’s choosing her words. “Maintaining the stones is the work of our divinity,” she says finally.