The Relic

“Bezzy? It’s Enfie. Oh dear, you sound so sleepy, did I wake you? I’m sorry, I know you’re more of a night-owl—I promise I wouldn’t bother you like this if it wasn’t important. Hm? Oh no, I’m just peachy! No, I left Flytrap this morning. I’m on my way to New Cazzer, actually! Ah, yes…about that; I’m afraid things with the doctor fell through. There were a few problems. No, Bezzy, I didn't. I never even saw him. I’d tell you more, but I don’t have much time before the train leaves. Yes, I am, but we’ve taken a bit of a detour. There’s this militia depot not terribly far down the tracks from town and—what? Gods all, no! No. No I didn’t do anything!

“Listen, Bezzy, I—please, everything is okay! We’re going to be in the city by this evening—yes, we. Me and my new friend. Oh, her name’s Mayfly and she’s the sweetest little thing! You’re going to love her. We met on the train. No, Bezzy, she isn’t a snake, she’s thirteen. I know there are. Yes, I remember. Yes, you did. This is different. Because it is! Oh, just trust me! Besides, you’re going to want to meet her anyway, she’s just fascinating. Well, I suppose you’ll have to see that for yourself. Wonderful!

“I remember where it is. Yes, mayonnaise, I remember. Hm? No, no one’s listening. Bezzy, no one was—fine, okay, then what’s the new password? Okay, got it. Yes, really. I could say it back to you if—good, thank you. Oh, and one more teeny tiny thing: you’re probably going to hear something about a hijacking before we get in. No, no. Well, yes. But not really. It’s…complicated. Like I said, I’d tell you more, but it’ll have to wait ‘til tonight. I know, I’d have called you sooner, but the magi had some kind of—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it—a jammer, maybe, onboard. Everything was bricked until we got to the depot tower. Yes, three of them. Like I said, later—they’ve brought another shuttle in to take us the rest of the way. I am. Promise. Beautiful! I’ll make dinner tonight. Absolutely not, you can eat takeout when I’m gone; when I visit you eat real food. No buts. No buts.

“Alright. You’re a sweetheart, Bezzy. Thank you so much. Alright. I’ll see you soon. Toodles!”

***

Mayfly waited patiently on the bench while Enfie finished talking to her friend. All around her the other passengers did the same, chattering away into little devices they held up to their ears, which Enfie called ‘phones.’ She’d asked if she could use it to call home and check in, but apparently mama would have needed one too.

The depot was much smaller than Flytrap; a cluster of squat, utilitarian buildings and watchtowers, all centered around a 'radio' spire, and cramped behind a fence of iron bars. Outside was an unloading platform several times too small for the train, flanked by another, smaller pair of towers, and a cadre of guards whose uniforms had the same black and orange palette, but with armor pieced about them, and helmets that covered their faces. Enfie called them the Foxtail Militia. Soldiers.

Getting off the train had been scary. The soldiers filed everyone out onto the dirt, and made them wait nearly an hour while they walked up and down the cars. Their rifles were thicker, stubbier; they pointed them at anyone who moved or made noise.

When they’d finished with the train, all the passengers lined up. People who had prosthetics were left alone, everyone who didn't got pulled aside. They took one look at Mayfly’s exposed arm and passed her by.

Eventually the soldiers announced that another train would take them the rest of the way to New Cazzer. Most were allowed to huddle up around the platform, but the unmetalled folks were taken through the fence, into the windowless buildings. No one asked any questions.

People cried in the meanwhile. Enfie held Mayfly’s hand and told her everything was okay, and Mayfly believed her.

The new train came before anyone had returned from inside the depot. It was shorter, the seating was a pair of hard, segmented benches built into either wall, and there were no screens hanging above. Everyone filed in the same way they’d filed out—under strict instruction.

Soldiers joined them, two to each of its five cars. They stood motionless in the center aisle, rifles hanging from their shoulders, with one hand on the trigger, and the other holding straps dangling from the ceiling. There was no announcement, or ticket-scanning. The moment everyone was onboard, the doors shut and they were on the move.

Outside, the world passed in a russet smear.

Enfie sat them down at the end of their car, so that Mayfly had the wall to one side and her to the other. No one seemed to be paying attention to anyone else, but with how solemnly quiet the train was, when Mayfly did eventually speak, she did it in a whisper.

“Should we tell’em about what happened?”

Enfie’s response was hushed and immediate. “No.” And then, more softly, she added, “They’ve probably heard everything they need to. They know magi attacked, and they know we left them at the technoscape. The ‘how’s’ aren’t really that important.”

“Oh,” Mayfly said, just a bit deflated. “I thought the ‘how’ was pretty cool. Really, really scary, but cool, too.”

Giggling, Enfie tousled Mayfly’s hair “Well, I suppose it was pretty cool. I’m still sorry to have put you in danger like that. I promised I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, then I asked you to risk your life. You’re a very brave girl, I’m lucky to have met you.”

It was a blessing that her face couldn’t actually flush, and though her cheeks weren’t hot, she did feel that flutter in her chest that came riding with high praise. “You got everyone out, all I really did was run around. I do that all the time back home. We’ve got cats, and sometimes they get out into the woods and I’ve gotta go and snatch’em. Kinda tough, but it’s really good practice for the Chicken Chase.”

A curious look pinched Enfie’s face. “Woods? Are you a westerner?”

“Uh…” Mayfly looked outside. Red earth and rock, silver glints dotting the horizon. Flytrap was in the east, but that didn’t actually tell her which direction her home was. “I don’t…think so? I’m from the Valley, but I came here from one of those, uh, those metal-y forests. The techno-capes.”

“Technoscapes,” Enfie corrected. Then the surprise of what she’d said hit her bluntly. “Wait, out of one? As in—sweetie, do you mean near it? You weren’t in the technoscape.”

“Yuh-huh. That’s where I woke up with my body all different. I’m not all metal back home, and it’s really weird—but also it’s kinda neat? I can’t feel anything, which is sad cause there was this cat in the forest, and it looked really soft. But also, nothin’ hurts! Those magi shot me a few times and I didn’t feel a thing! So that’s cool. And I don’t get tired, and I don’t need to breathe—but I still do, y’know, ‘cause what if I stop doing it and then I go home and I forget? Anyway yeah, I woke up there, and I looked around a lil’ bit cause I’m trying to find this—oh, I didn’t even tell you! My mama’s sick, and I’m trying to find this flower, ‘cause it’s her favorite and when it died she stopped feeling well, so I think if I just…”

She noticed then that Enfie was staring at her rather hard, with her mouth open like she meant to say something, but kept forgetting what.

“Is…uh, Enfie? Is everything okay?”

It took several moments for her to answer.

“Mayfly,” she finally said, and still didn’t sound like she had the words she wanted. She glanced around, to the other passengers, to the soldiers, then lowered her voice to a shaky whisper. “Honey, are...are you a Titan?"

There was something commandingly real in her eyes, unlike anything Mayfly had seen in them before. Still there was the unerring comfort, the warmth, but swirling out from those blue depths was the strange marriage of pure wonder, and abject horror. In that moment Mayfly had the distinct feeling that her friend was afraid of her, and that felt almost worse than anything that had happened on the train. She wanted it to go away. But she also didn’t want to lie.

So, she took Enfie’s hands softly, and looked into her eyes with as much sincerity as she could muster.

“I don’t know what that is.”

***

The city is threefold: a pillar, a crown, and a heart.

Few things in Gen recall the first age—the pillar is one. A plateau in name, a terrestrial monument in its standing. It marks the heights men walked before. Before, when the rivers were lakes in migration. They carved their paths in rock, and dirt, until their beds were made in the sanguine soil, until it plunged the earth into its sunken mountains and valleys.

When that star struck, and the brittle honeycomb of this place collapsed, and the riverlakes ran coastward to make oceans of seas. When their last migration dragged with them their mountains, and their valleys, and left behind only a continental plain of that piteous, inarable blood-dirt. When Gen was made low.

The pillar remains.

The gods fought for a time. The foxes took heed from the birds and made roost. They hoard in the after-years, in the divine graveyard of the second age. In the pillar lee sprouts a man-made forest of concrete, of metal. Vines crawl upon the rocky face, worms bore holes through its body. There is much strife in the city’s rising. There is fire, and spark, and the climbing and crumbling of spires vying for their place among the clouds. Men who were once generals and barons to gods now see kingship before them. It makes them hungry. Long years pass, bloody years, before the raging pseudo-war quiets, and the aspirants shake hands to a shared future. A prosperous future.

The building resumes. An industrious crown mounts the pillar’s head.

It is lights, and steel, and when it is high enough to challenge the dawn to rising, it turns its growth downwards and out. The jungle of transports and forges and warehouses at the pillar’s base spreads. Its perfunctory roads blacken with asphalt; they branch and wind free as rivers, and along their banks rise countless buildings. It grows shops, and theaters, and tenement houses. Banks and shipping companies, suburbs and roughshod ghettos already old at their birth. Depots. Milita bases. Communities sprout and gather, trade and sport blossom in the pillar’s shadow and this too becomes the city. Preserved in its halls and in the flesh laid upon its altars is the faith of metal—another relic, younger than the rivers but old as the gods.

A wall is raised around the crown of iron and stone.

It is not enough.

The city is a heart. It beats, it pumps blood out into nothing and so it hemorrhages. It takes but it must also give—so that it can take more. A heart cannot beat disconnected from its body. A fox’s want breeds ingenuity.

It lays veins. Gen is big, it needs arteries thick and plenty that can run its length dutifully, and fast. Tracks branch from its walls, spreading at first by the work of blood and sweat, and then by blood and oil and the crack of electric willpower. It runs its trains to other towns, other cities, a railway proboscis that bleeds dry just more than it bleeds out, but never enough to kill. The city grows then, not in size but in worth, in power. Before long its trains pass the bounds of its vassals and as they expand out into the red wastes, more settlements form, more cities rise, born into service of the pillar, the crown, and the heart.

It is east, but it has made itself central. It is the lord of the horizon. Gen’s life pumps reliantly through the veins of New Cazzer.

And now, as the train draws close to its walls, so too does it carry ineluctable death.