\01:\LIMINAL\

It's now or never

I want to feel, I want to feel the glamor

Sweet, sweet surrender

It's now or never

Light filtered through the crystalline tunnel in triangular patches, showering Bryn in the glow of the Sunbulbs outside like a magnifying glass.

Glass crunched beneath her boots.

Sweat pooled at her soles.

She was already looking forward to the swampy walk back home.

“Make sure you’re not shoving it in,” Rontu barked.

Her arms trembled under the weight of the scriber as it bored another hole in the wall. She stiffened her stance, propping it up with her knees and back instead.

Everything ached.

“You’re gonna put a hole in your leg if you keep that up!”

Bryn flinched at his tone, sending the tip of her scriber squealing across the glass. The drillbit skipped like a rock across the surface. Then–

Snap.

Shards of graphite and glass punctured her first plate carrier like shrapnel, embedding in her suit. Something struck her safety glasses and fractured the lenses, knocking them askew across her nose.

She shrieked and tore them from her face, blinking wildly.

Not blind.

Good.

Rontu crossed his arms nearby, eyeing her from behind the emerald tint of his goggles.

She hated when he did that.

Even behind his mask, she could see that smug, arrogant grin. During her first week with the Glaziers, Bryn found him charming from a distance. A veteran of the company, close to her age.

The illusion didn’t last.

“I’m going back,” Bryn huffed, plucking the drillbit from her flaksuit. Thankfully it had only pierced through the outer layer and not the ceramic plates underneath. Spelunking without them was practically suicide, and she couldn’t afford to get more. Plus, she’d rather work on the sweltering surface than spend another minute down here with this rockbiter.

Rontu took the scriber from her and looked it over. He disengaged the battery and opened the main cylinder, letting out a low whistle as the air filled with the smell of burnt glass.

“If I were you, I'd stay down here as long as possible,” he warned, extracting a bent piece of filament from the scriber. “This thing's trashed.”

Plates were expensive, but Bryn's stomach instantly twisted itself into a knot at the thought of how much it would cost to replace rented equipment.

“Shut up. You're lying.”

Rontu shook his head and showed her the bent coil. “One of these? Not cheap. They only get cast back in Radiance. The Foreman is gonna freak if he has to have one shipped.”

Bryn snatched the rod from between his fingers and began working it between her palms, hoping to bend it back into shape. Try as she might, there was nothing a girl her size was going to do to bend tungsten.

“Kind of makes you look bad if your trainee keeps breaking things…”

He laughed in her face.

“Maybe that would fly if you were actually worth training. I thought TRIBE were supposed to be the best of us?”

She slung the rod to the ground.

Clang.

“You don’t know anything about me! Ever since I got here you’ve acted like you’ve got it all figured out. You’ve never even left this desert!” said Bryn.

Rontu shrugged, affixing his mask with a subtle click. “I’ve seen enough of your type to make a guess. You’ll either find another way to feed yourself, or you’ll die out here with the rest of us who can’t.”

Bryn felt her patience wearing thin. Whatever tongue lashing was waiting for her from the Foreman had to be more bearable than listening to Rontu attempt to read her. She wasn’t even sure if he knew how to read.

“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll take my licks. Anything to get away from you.”

She stooped to collect her safety glasses.

“Like you remember the way back.” He chuckled to himself.

She couldn’t admit that he was right.

She’d try just to spite him.

She shouldered her hardcase and yanked the broken scriber from him.

“Come on, no need for that…” Rontu said, catching her shoulder and stopping her mid-step.

She froze.

So did he.

Bryn’s head snapped toward him like a greased swivel.

He flinched.

”Do. Not. Stop. Me,” she growled through her teeth, seizing his wrist and flinging it away before turning her back on him.

How dare he.

Rontu jerked his hand back like he had grasped a live wire, staring at his wrist as she stormed off.

Shocked.

“Wait a second–”

“What do you want from me?” Bryn said, losing patience.

“Come back. You’re gonna get lost and I don’t wanna file that report.”

“No.”

He waited.

She wasn’t budging.

Rontu rolled his eyes and came to her.

“Look…I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”

She slowly shook her head in disbelief. “You act like I haven’t been trying.”

That seemed to wound him.

Just barely though.

“I’ll ease up.” Rontu said as he clasped his hands together, looking anywhere but her face. “But broken equipment means falling behind, and I’m not going hungry just because you can’t stop locking your legs when you scribe.”

“Get to the point,” she snapped.

“I’ll see what I can do about the scriber. These rentals are built like shit anyways.”

She watched him. Close.

Crude, but sincere.

“So your heart isn’t completely stone.” Bryn breathed. “Whatever. Can’t afford to have any more rations garnished anyway.”

They walked back to the site.

“How much do you owe?” he asked.

It was her turn to smirk as she brushed past him and sank to the floor, resting her back against the warm glass of the tunnel wall.

“More than you.”

“I doubt that.” Rontu scoffed as he brought the scriber up to chest height and resumed drilling. He squeezed the trigger, charging the spike with heat so it glided across the silicate wall gracefully.

“Must be all that fancy tech you keep buying. Seriously, how much were those shades? And I’ve seen the way you chow down at dinner! No one with a burden splurges on as much meat as you do.”

“Cheap breaks easily.” He snorted, drawing a clean rectangle across the wall. He dotted the corners with the tip of the scriber, sending hairline fractures across the wall to follow his markings. “And ignoring what your body needs is the dumbest way to die out here.”

The sound of the drill carried the conversation for the next few moments while Bryn mulled over his words. Maybe she had underestimated the pragmatism of the Glazier Golden Boy. The older Glaziers often spun stories about how if she skipped breakfast, she could be debt free years sooner. How a little hunger was worth the extra freedom in the end. She didn’t dare mention to them that what they put in their bodies to stave off hunger would kill them before they got there.

Food was expensive.

Drugs not as much.

“Thanks for covering for me,” she finally said.

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Glasses on if you’re gonna gawk.”

Bryn narrowed her eyes and shoved her broken glasses up the bridge of her nose with the tip of her finger. “Are you always such a stickler for safety, or do the girls just get special treatment?”

Rontu didn’t answer her at first, instead focused on properly milling what Bryn had started. Flakes of glass and cullet sprinkled across his boots as he worked, coating the tunnel floor in a fine, razor sharp dust. Bryn clutched her mask closer to her face, not wanting to risk Needle Lung. The wheezing in the barracks was unbearable enough.

“No. I can’t remember the last time we had a woman in the crew.”

Bryn snapped back to attention, realizing that he had stopped scribing. “What, really? Not a single one before me? I don’t believe that.” She grumbled, feeling rather self-righteous for someone who could barely lift the drill.

“You just have options I don’t,” Rontu continued, uneasiness spilling into his words.

He’d failed to catch himself in time.

She let the word hang in the air between them, jaw clenched.

Options.

“So you think we have it easy?” Bryn said, rising to her feet. “You think I want a little monster growing inside of me so I can get meat every day?”

“I didn’t say it was easy! I just said you have options!” Rontu lamented. “No wonder you keep screwing up. I say one thing and you hear another!”

“Well if you're so hard up for Glass, you could always sell your Code.”

“No way. My DNA is the only thing I own.”

“So now selling your body is a bad thing? Are you scared?”

The drilling continued without a response as Rontu carved into the wall, making sweeping passes back and forth as the hole grew larger. He could spot the difference between glass and quartz at a glance, but shutting Bryn up was another matter. His movements were less precise, his lines wobbling as he tried to align the scriber with his earlier drawing. The scriber made an awful hiss as the pressure valve released. He struggled to hold it steady as the machine bucked against him and rattled. The sound of the drill died down as it detected something soft within the deposit, winding to a choking halt.

Silence.

“Why did it do that?” Bryn asked, fanning the air as she peered over his shoulder. She strained to see what had gone wrong. After tearing the broken glasses from her face and finding she still couldn’t see the problem, she glanced at Rontu for an answer.

“I…don't know.”

She blinked twice. Her stomach felt as if she had swallowed the cullet at their feet, grinding blades of broken silicate alongside her breakfast. What did he mean he didn't know? The Glazier Golden Boy had been nothing but a know-it-all since she arrived, and while it had been annoying for the most part, she realized it had also been a safety net.

Sensing Bryn's shifting unease, Rontu attempted a possible explanation as he began working on extracting the tip of the scriber. “It's a failsafe for limp-armed rookies like you. Just in case you slip and hit something soft…like flesh.”

Bryn didn't take the bait. “What do you mean like flesh?” she said, echoing his tone. “We're three hundred meters below the Second Layer. The only flesh that should be down here is us!”

“It's not flesh,” Rontu said. “It's just something softer than glass.”

He gave the scriber one hard pull, dislodging a steaming cocoon of knotted wires and carbon fiber, which Rontu tried to peel away. The rod sizzled against his glove as he gripped it, the plastic and fiber optics coming apart in his fingertips as he tried to scrape the debris from the tip.

“Shit,” Rontu hissed through his mask, scraping the hardening slag from his gloves onto the belt of his flaksuit before disengaging the battery and drill rod.

“What did you hit?” Bryn shrieked, flinching as the smoking drillbit clattered to the ground next to her boots.

Rontu cleared the smoke from his vision and pulled out his multitool, plugging a cable into a port on his wrist. He unrolled a thin, red wire from a spool on his belt and threaded it through the steaming scribe hole, where it began to glow a dull red from the light within.

“Like a vein.” Bryn thought.

With one click, Rontu activated the wire’s camera display, his goggles filling with an image of the slag-riddled tunnel he had made. While it had hardened by now, it made navigating through the hole more of a struggle. Every few seconds the tip would snag on a little bump, which he had to promptly wiggle past with some finger finesse. Half a meter deep, he found the source of their second mishap of the day; a sleek, black robot squirming through the tunnel. It made a futile attempt to flee as the camera approached, but it gained no traction.

“Servitor,” he exhaled. “Figures.”

Bryn wiped her brow, feeling her shoulders relax. She felt a pang of guilt for the poor creature, but she was thankful that they hadn’t hit a gas pocket, or flesh. She watched as Rontu yanked his wire camera from the hole and let it haphazardly reel itself in.

“How bad is it?” She asked.

Rontu shook his head as he inspected his scriber. “The entire chamber is coated in carbon fiber…this thing is scrap.”

Anger boiled Bryn’s blood, and she slapped the scriber from his hands. “I was talking about the Servitor, you selfish rockbiter!”

“What?! Are you being serious right now?” He shouted back. “We just busted two scribers in one day, and you’re worried about the Servitor?”

She ignored him, snatching the rod he had ejected earlier from the ground and advancing with it. Rontu’s hands shielded his face as she lifted it over her shoulder and slammed it into the tunnel, leveraging the brunt of her weight against the hole until the glass around it began to splinter. Bryn attacked the tunnel with a ferocity she hadn’t felt since she arrived on the Glassway. Her fragile hands strained with the makeshift lever until the hole tore open into a fissure, the edge of the crevice catching her hand and ripping the thumb of her glove. Bryn hissed and shoved the tip of it into her mouth, tasting blood and grit. Without hesitation, she jammed her other hand into the hole and extracted a mass of wires and threads that writhed with a mind of its own.

“Oh! A Prizmink!” Bryn exclaimed, ferocity evolving into wonder as she inspected the creature in her hands. She could almost stretch her arms out completely before its telescopic spine tightened against her pull. When she released one end, the creature coiled back into a tight spring no bigger than her hand. The robot’s flank was composed of carbon threads thinner than silk, almost making it slip from between her fingertips like oil. Bryn ran her fingers along the torn hole in the Prizmink's belly where Rontu's scriber had caught it. Twisted wires jutted from the wound, and the nanofibers of its pelt were already beginning to unravel. As she touched the hole, the Servitor began to writhe in her grasp as it ran its internal damage subroutines.

“Shh…” she whispered, taking a close look at the hole. The Prizmink’s leg and hips were structurally collapsed. Total locomotive failure. Her fingers continued to stroke the underside of its neck until she found the power circuit hidden beneath its pelt. “It's okay…you're okay…”

Rontu remained silent, transfixed by the way her hands soothed the creature, lightly poking it in various places along its body. It wasn't his first time seeing a Prizmink, but it was the first time he had seen someone so interested in one. He held his breath as she held the Servitor aloft by its throat.

“Bryn…?”

Her thumb jabbed deep into the Prizmink's neck, its manipulators helplessly grasping the air. Bryn pressed harder until her hands shook, and she felt the battery in its throat dislodge from the socket. It thrashed against her grip, gears grinding against her palms as it projected error codes from its optics. The actuators in its spine gave one last pitiful jerk.

Then it went limp.

Bryn coiled the Prizmink between her hands, holding it to her forehead as she stared into the fading optics on its face.

“You are not broken yet…” she whispered.

They sat frozen for a few minutes, until Bryn stowed the damaged creature in a pouch attached to her hip. She caught Rontu’s gaze, bestowing the worst thing of all upon him;

Disappointment.

Rontu tried to clear the lump in his throat by coughing. He sputtered out something resembling an excuse, but it was obvious that this was far from the first time he had accidentally harmed a Servitor while working. He had never gone out of his way to chase them down for scrap like some of the other Glaziers, but he never felt ashamed of it before either.

“I didn't mean to…” he apologized.

She glared at him. “These things aren't replaceable, you know…”

“I didn’t know-”

Bryn let him squirm a little bit under her gaze, then let her shoulders relax. “Sounds about right. I guess I can’t be too surprised that’s how things go out here.”

He offered his hand to help her to her feet, but she swatted it away and got up on her own. She grabbed her scriber and slung it over her shoulder with a grunt, turning to look at him.

“I guess now we really do have to go back.”

Rontu picked at the melted carbon fiber in the chamber and looked at the snapped rod buried in the rubble. After a defeated sigh, he nodded.

—

They stayed silent as they trekked back through the tunnel they had dug that day. The crystalline walls were less reflective now that Sinth’s sterile Sunbulbs had begun to dim, but not enough that she felt she needed her flashlight. Bryn donned her broken glasses as Rontu had taught her, knowing that even in the evening the glass desert could blind her. Howling wind skipped across the tunnel entrance, leaving a droning echo that wavered enough to make her ears ring.

After a full sixteen hours under the Sunbulb, the Glassway could cook you faster than Medbay could find you. Bryn briefly considered cauterizing the cut on her thumb with a nearby pane. She checked her flaksuit's temperature regulator, dialing up the cooling as she felt the tunnel grow warmer. She had already learned that if she had the spare battery to use, it was better to leave in comfort. Plus, she didn’t have another shower token for the week.

Rontu scanned the sky, listening for the thunder of the breakers above. He automatically counted each crackle under his breath, clapping his hands softly to the rhythm of the Sunbulbs.

“Maintenance in ten,” he groaned, cracking his back.

Bryn looked around the area for signs of Servitors, her attention drawn to blindspots behind the hills and spiral pillars. The last thing she wanted was to be caught unaware.

“You’re fine. You’ll hear the Night Shift on the glass far before you see them,” Rontu said, trailing behind her. Trips back to Gemmer were often quiet between them. Talk of aching limbs typically dominated the conversation, and Bryn had quickly asserted that chafing was an off limits topic. That left little else to discuss.

Bryn tried to count the Sunbulbs as she had seen Rontu do, but she always lost count after a few dozen and had to start over. A growl in her stomach shifted her focus to dinner, and she silently wondered if a single Grain Seed would hold her until morning. Her hand palmed at the pouch on her waist, thumb idly rubbing the frayed fibers of the Prizmink as she lost herself in thought. A prickling crawl across the back of her neck pulled her attention back to reality, and Bryn became acutely aware of the eyes on her.

“What are you staring at?”

Rontu paused behind her, straightening.

Caught.

“What are you going to do with Tomo?”

Bryn halted, furrowing her brow as she looked at him.

“Excuse me?”

He gestured to the Servitor on her hip, dangling like a spring.

Bryn followed his finger, checking the Prizmink. She tilted its head towards her, reading the white letters stamped into the creature’s neck.

“TM:0? ” she read, studying Rontu’s expression.

She muttered the letters to herself several times under her breath, settling into a steady chant. Her eyes met his, and she snorted, quickly covering her mouth. She sounded it out slowly for him, dragging her finger across the stamp.

“To-Mo?”

Rontu scowled at her. “Yeah. What?”

She held the Servitor out to him, her finger tracing the stamp. “That’s the serial number.”

He scoffed and stuffed his hands into his pockets. Bryn swore she could see his cheeks redden behind his mask.

“It’s a Tomo. What are you going to do with it?”

She stuffed “Tomo" back into her pouch and shrugged. “If I can find the parts, I could repair it.”

Rontu let out a short laugh. “You might want to see what you can salvage from it instead. Foreman is going to scream our ears off about those scribers.”

“Tomo isn’t scrap! Besides, I need a project to prevent me from going crazy out here.”

The breakers thundered above, shaking the nearby Pane Shrubs hard enough to make them sing. The chittering reminded Bryn of the Nano-Servitors she would study in the TRIBE orchards. The Glassway dimmed panel by panel as amber emergency lights replaced the fluorescence, and the polished surface of the desert turned matte from the shadows. Heat vented from the fissures scattered across the plains, rising in steady waves until the horizon shimmered like static.

Soon, the Night Shift would begin their polishing.

Rontu caught her stride as they neared Gemmer, brushing her shoulder as he outpaced her. “If you can’t fix it…promise me you’ll sell it.”

“Why do you care?” She yawned, wiping sweat from under eyes. She could barely keep them open.

“Just promise.”

“Broken things are not worthless, Rontu.”

The Sunbulbs above powered off, bathing them in total darkness for but an instant.

Rontu was unreadable.

A phantom voice.

She clutched the Prizmink in her pocket.

“I didn’t answer your question earlier,” he said.

“About what…”

“About whether I was afraid.”

Bryn silently squinted as her eyes adjusted to the emergency lighting. She could barely see the outline of his shoulders against the desert around them.

Strained.

Weighted.

“Loadbearing,” she thought.

He slung his hardcase across them.

“No one’s digging me out of a hole if I break.”