Terms of Service

by Ciel Pierlot

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Romance; Science Fiction Romance; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

When her cousin gets kidnapped by a dastardly trickster, Luzia is forced to sell herself in servitude to the Eoi in exchange for his life. But the terms of the deal turn out to be much more complicated than she ever imagined…

Luzia N.E. Drainway never really thought too much about the Astrosi. They lurk above and below Bastion City – a giant multileveled megalopolis she calls her home – and they tend to keep to themselves. On the rare occasions they use their magics to meddle with human affairs, most people with an ounce of sense steer clear of whichever unfortunate soul happens to be their victim. Luzia is far too dedicated to repairing and maintaining the frequently-damaged Bastion to pay them much attention, and prefers to ignore the Astrosi just like everyone else.

That disregard gets blown out of the water when a rogue Astrosi and nefarious trickster named Carrion kidnaps her nephew and sells him to the Eoi, one of the Astrosi courts.

With no other options to save her nephew, Luzia trades her life for his and finds herself in service to the Eoi. Unfortunately for her, Astrosi logic is acrobatic in ways even the most devious human mind can barely comprehend. It’s not until the deal is struck that she realizes she’s trapped in the most abstruse verbal contract imaginable. She is essentially conscripted into their ranks, and her devotion to her city becomes stretched to breaking point by her new masters’ orders.

As she struggles under this weight, she begins to uncover the secrets of the Astrosi people – the internal battles for power between the two kingdoms, the never-ending conflict between them, the trickster Carrion who somehow bridges that gap, and the very nature of the Bastion itself.

Release date: September 23, 2025

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 400

Sample

Everything is positioned precisely, perfectly, and precariously. With her trusty tape measure, Luzia marks the distance between the pieces of her small model problem comprised of forks, a glass of water, and a crumpled-up ball of tinfoil. The cramped front room smells like filtered air, and in her mind she conjures the olfactory memory of fire and ash and burning fuses. Her stage is set.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Only if you agree to do the funny voices,” comes the response from the boy sitting across from her. “I’ll settle for just one.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll do funny voices, but only if no one’s dead by the end, all right?” She begins her briefing. “Okay then, let’s break it down. The fallen steel beam is forty feet long with a height of twelve inches, weighing approximately twenty thousand pounds. It is currently not secured on either end and balanced only by two ropes around its midsection. The exposed circuit box is attached to a wall on the other side of the beam. In three minutes, the sparking will increase to the point where they ignite the stripped power lines below. That fire will wipe out an entire city block.” She holds up her stopwatch, thumbing the button. “Three minutes starting now!”

Her nephew is on the case. The young boy’s palms are braced on the table, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, as he concentrates on the model. Stazi might only be ten years old but it’s never too early to learn.

“Do I have my body weight or the weight of an average first responder?” Stazi asks, walking his fingers up to the fork that represents the steel beam.

“Good question, and good job thinking ahead. Your current body weight.”

Most children Stazi’s age would be uninterested in such games, and Luzia is infinitely grateful that she’s managed to turn it into something enjoyable, something that gets him thinking about things other than schoolyard diversions. There are very real dangers that lurk in every corner of their lives, from the electricity they use for illumination to the walls that support the city stories below and above them. Most people walk past such things without thinking twice, but not Luzia. And she means to ensure that Stazi will be just as vigilant.

Stazi pokes at the model. “Are there any extra ropes or something I can use to tie up the beam better? Or are there other ways I can get to the circuit box?”

“You see a thirty-foot length of rope in the wreckage, but it will take at least forty seconds to reach and extract from the rubble, and you will be limited by how long it takes the plastic of the rope to begin melting or smoking.”

“Aw… Auntie Lu, why’d you gotta make it hard? Fine, I choose to ignore the rope,” Stazi decides. “I’m gonna take my chances with the beam. If I fall off, do I lose? Or is the fall short enough that I can climb back up and try again?”

This question is one she has a very easy answer to, given how many times she’s seen people she works with make that exact tumble. It’s depressingly easy to picture the same thing happening to Stazi. “At least five

bones in your body will be broken and you’ll be in agony before the fire eventually gets you, so I’m going to say you only have the one try.”

“How did the circuit box fall apart?”

“Probably–”

“I wanna use Astrosi magic to fly across.”

Luzia purses her lips and gives him a scolding look. “Stazi. Take this seriously, please.”

But it’s too late. Stazi’s attention has drifted to the thought of those disruptive, mysterious folk and he will not be dissuaded from the stories of the Astrosi and their abnormalities, which, to a boy of his age, are more exciting than concerning. Luzia had that period when she was about his age as well, though she had grown out of it rather swiftly once she’d hit her teenage years. Once she’d become an apprentice and saw firsthand the damage they were capable of.

“Pleaaaaaaaaaase?” he begs, putting on his best wobbling lip and innocent wide eyes. “Astrosi magic?”

With a sigh, she puts on a silly, overdramatic tone and sasses, “I’m a trespassing Astrosi that decided to break a circuit box specifically to challenge a young boy that doesn’t listen to his aunt–”

“Hey!” Stazi grins and then gasps in delight. “Oh – Oh! Was it Carrion? Pleaaaaaaaaaase?” 

“Generic curiosity of the Astrosi is one thing, so long as you never encounter one, but there have been confirmed incidents of Carrion’s evil actions within living memory. A single circuit box is the least of what they’re capable of.” She checks the timer. “Please focus.”

Stazi pouts. “But Astrosi magic–”

“There are no recorded incidents of Astrosi flying,” she points out, “or anything even remotely similar, for that matter. Now, the fire is still spreading–”

An unauthorized hand sweeps the model to the side, scattering the forks and knocking the tinfoil ball into the glass of water.

The two of them slide their gazes up to see Stazi’s father standing in front of the table, arms crossed in the universal signal to cut this out or else. As much as Luzia loves her older brother, she has to admit that he can sometimes be a bit of a curmudgeon. It’s not that Izax doesn’t understand the importance of all this, either. He knows as well as she does that they live in unsafe environs.

“Daaaaad,” Stazi whines, retrieving the tinfoil ball and drying it off with his shirt. “You burned down a city block. Thousands of people just died in a fire!”

“Sucks for them,” Izax says flatly. “Now go put your shoes on. If you keep murdering people with Luzia, you’re going to be late. And grab a bar before you leave! If you forget to bring lunch, you’re gonna come home hangry. And don’t forget to take your vitamins. And don’t forget to behave for your overly paranoid aunt. And don’t forget–”

Once Stazi has vanished into the next room to grab his shoes and bag, Izax sits down across from Luzia with a tired, disgruntled, and utterly unimpressed sigh. He rolls the tinfoil ball back and forth with a petulance only exceeded by that of his ten-year-old son. “This is the third time you’ve helped him with his infrastructure homework and it’s become a fiery death-fest. He’s supposed to be learning about shit like not touching old Era One buildings. Not ‘How to Save the Entire Bastion From Structural Degradation 101.’ ”

“That’s hardly enough!” Luzia winces and then lowers her voice, unwilling to let Stazi hear them arguing. “Sorry, but the Bastion does suffer from a great deal of structural degradation, and we both know it.”

The world of the Bastion stretches higher and deeper than anyone is capable of counting. A majesty of steel and aluminum and plastic, filled to bursting with factories and recycling facilities and the endless mass of tightly packed living units like this one. It just keeps going in every direction until you eventually reach the Fringes at the edge of the world. Even Luzia, who knows more of the Bastion than most, hasn’t explored all of it. No one ever has. So large is the Bastion that it’s impossible to do so even if someone dedicated their entire lifetime to the task.

Luzia views that as a challenge. One day she’s going to map every single inch of the world she lives in, chart every pitfall and every abandoned train. The Bastion is old and the technology that must have been used to create its infrastructure no longer exists, and thus its upkeep depends entirely on how much they can learn about it. She means to learn everything, even if it does take her an entire lifetime.

Luzia leans back in her chair and gives her brother a look. “There’s a reason he’s coming with me for ‘Take your kid to work day.’ ”

“Because my job is boring?” Izax replies with a sigh.

“Well, yes.” Her brother directs lightrail traffic for the nearby station – an important job, albeit not one that gets a child excited. “But what I’m teaching him is important. He needs to know the world we live in.”

“Let him be a kid without thinking about dying in a fire.”

“If he doesn’t know that there’s a possibility he could die in a fire,” she points out, “then he won’t see any warning signs that would indicate a fire is about to start. A fire that he could then die in. Just because it’s statistically unlikely to happen to him doesn’t mean it can’t happen. You know that.”

It is Izax’s turn to wince. His wife had choked to death five years ago after an electrical fire started at the water-treatment plant she worked in. That wasn’t the first time Luzia had been touched by the dangers of the Bastion, not given her career, but it had hurt something fierce.

Izax pinches the bridge of his nose. “I know. It’s only that just because you’ve decided to spend your life on fire safety duty doesn’t mean you have to make him do the same. He can pick his own path.” 

want is for him to be prepared. You want the same, don’t you? This is simply a matter of different methods for the same task.”

Another spectacularly tired sigh. “What this is, is an argument for another day. I haven’t even had my morning caffeine pill yet. Promise me that you’ll take care of him today, all right?”

“Always.”

With a flurry of coats and an enthusiastically swinging backpack, Stazi skids back into the room, grinning from ear to ear. “I’m ready!” He leaps for Luzia’s hand and starts dragging her towards the front door, hitting the control panel to slide it open. “Let’s go, let’s go!”

“And I do believe that’s my cue to go to work.” Luzia manages to grab her own coat and give her brother a one-armed hug around the shoulders. “I’ll see you for dinner on Thursday. And, just for you, I promise I will not mention fire for the entire evening.”

“You better not,” Izax grumbles, but he returns her hug. “See you, Lu-Lu.”

Daylight is beginning to sweep through this sector of the Bastion as the warm streetlamps automatically light up in a smooth glowing wave. Shades of blue-white and yellow-white begin to fill the entire one-hundred-and-fifty-story level, as well as the levels above and below, all lighting up at the exact same time, the ever-reliable 6:30 am. The kind of light provided by streetlamps is precisely calculated for what the human body needs. Luzia doesn’t understand how it works, not really, but she knows there are things that humans get from certain types of light that a daily vitamin pack can’t perfectly replicate. It’s the same reason most housing units have a daylamp or two in addition to normal light fixtures.

Izax and Stazi live in the Lower Transport District, so named for the number of train maintenance facilities in the area. It’s a good place to live, in Luzia’s mind. Sure, there’s the noise, but the ventilation systems are all good-quality Era One tech, well maintained and running smoothly. The housing units in this section are also a bit larger, which is a nice perk. Housing units with more than just a front room, sleeping room, and bathroom are always assigned to families, and of course she lives alone. She’d actually volunteered for a smaller unit, one that contains a single multi-use room and shares a bathroom with the thirty other units in its cluster. It’s not as though she needs the space, given that she will have no children, and there is always someone else out there who does. Each citizen of the Bastion is allowed to have only one child to prevent overpopulation, and those who want more have to submit a request and wait for someone else to give up their allotted child slot. Luzia has always been more than happy with being an aunt. If there is something she can give up for the betterment of others in the Bastion, particularly at no real cost to herself, she will do so gladly.

Luzia guides her nephew onto the nearest janky electromagnetic train and holds him close to her side as it grinds and groans its way through the city. It’s old. Everything in the Bastion is old. 

es, pressing his face against the plexiglass window.

“I’m not surprised,” she replies. “You don’t have any reason to go down more than a story or two, now do you? Your school’s only a few sections away and I don’t live far.” She tweaks his nose. “Maybe I’ll move down to the first level just to give you an excuse to make the trip.”

He grins at that. “It’d be so fun if you did. Maybe we could have Thursday dinners at your new place and then I could go exploring there afterwards! Maybe I could move in with you on the weekends?”

“Your dad would kill me if that happened. Your commute would be–” She does some quick math. “–let’s see, three hundred stories down at standard train speed, assuming you couldn’t get priority lift access… At least forty-nine hours. Besides, you wouldn’t want to live on the first. The bottom stories are rather close to… well, you know. Below.”

This level of the Bastion – the third – is one hundred and fifty stories tall, making it one of the largest levels. There are eleven known levels of the Bastion. The lowest three are the tallest at one hundred and fifty stories each. The four above that are shorter at one hundred stories each, and then the final four are only fifty stories, rather short and squat and mostly away from the bulk of the major factories. There are, however, a good deal more unknown levels to the Bastion.

They aren’t simply levels that belong to humanity; they belong to the Astrosi, capricious and inhuman folk, shrouded in rumors that vary from claims of immortality to those of ludicrous magics. They’re as old as the Bastion, people say, and thus as old as the world entire.

If you go too far down, all the way past the first level and into the sublevels, then you will eventually come to the throneworld of the Eoi, the Astrosi of the Deep. If you go too high, into the uncharted upper levels, then you will eventually come to the throneworld of the Vesperi, the Astrosi of the Mists. And you shouldn’t want to go to either, if you’ve a sensible head on your shoulders, which Luzia likes to think she does.

The train rattles to a stop in the bustling center of the Southwest Highvent District, so named for the large number of waste refineries in the area that require additional ventilation to keep the air clean, especially considering that the air gets thinner at the top of each level. Pressurization kicks in when transferring from level to level, but not from story to story. It’s all a running list in her mind, the buildings and the streets and the levels – what’s likely to break, what’s particularly flammable.

“Remember,” she tells Stazi as they are pushed out by the grind of passengers. “It’s important that you stay close to me.”

Stazi gives her a nod that’s trying its very best

 to be as serious as possible. “Got it.”

“No wandering off. Not even in my office.”

“I know, I know.” Stazi’s seriousness lasts for about one city block before he’s at it again, bouncing up and down as he asks, “So what are we doing today? Any floods that need taking care of? Collapsed walls? Power outages?”

She ruffles his hair, to his adorable annoyance. “I don’t know. That’s the thing about my job – I never know what my day’s going to be like. Or what my hours are, which you’ll care a lot more about when you get older.”

The crowds of people on this block are starting to slow from a brisk walk to a slow shuffle until the foot traffic comes to a stop entirely. Whispers ripple out, grumbling complaints that indicate a lot of people packed into a small street are about to get rather angry rather soon.

“…ridiculous waste of time,” someone mutters. “Can’t be as bad as they say it is, and don’t they know folks have jobs to get to?”

Another murmurs, “I don’t like the looks of that, not one little bit.”

It makes Luzia twitchy, all her instincts telling her that something terrible has happened even though she knows, statistically speaking, that it’s probably nothing serious at all. Her brain trusts statistics. The rest of her, not so much. Grabbing onto Stazi’s hand, Luzia pushes through the crowd shoulder first.

The entire road has been blocked off.

A chain-link fence sections off the road, and numerous signs have been thrown up declaring it to be dangerous and threatening anyone who dares enter without proper authorization. Luckily, the commuters are deterred by that and have yet to attempt to push past the barricade, as no one is really interested in being dragged to the Administrator’s Office and written up on charges.

like a shield as she shoves past the onlookers and towards the guardsmen. “First Responder, coming through. Excuse me. Ma’am, there’s no need for that kind of language, thank you very much. I’m a First Responder. Move out of my way.”

Two guards are standing in front of the barrier and one of them holds up a hand as Luzia approaches, telling her, “Sorry, but no entry. Read the signs, please.”

She holds up her identification for inspection. “Luzia N. E. Drainway, lieutenant-grade First Responder, engineering corp. At your service.”

“Oh, right then.” He steps aside and raises the yellow tape to allow her in, then pauses and raises an eyebrow at Stazi. “I’m not sure if the kid–”

Stazi has become far more cheerful at the promise of danger. “I wanna see!”

Luzia nods to the second guard. The good thing about Stazi being short for his age and Luzia having spent her life carrying very heavy things is that she can simply pick him up like a weightbag. While he whines, she hauls him up and then deposits him before another of the guardsmen.

“Keep him within the safety zone. Do not let him out of your sight,” she tells the woman in uniform. “He’ll try to run off.”

“No I won’t–”

“He’ll also lie about trying to run off. Don’t let him.”

The guardsman nods and puts her hands on Stazi’s shoulders to keep him in place. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after him.”

“Thank you.”

Luzia gives her nephew one final stern look that will hopefully keep him from doing anything more subversive than fidgeting and then lets the first guard usher her past the barricade into the disaster area.

Part of the road itself has been torn up. Sections of metal are lopsided, as though someone picked them up and tried to drop them back into place while blindfolded. Giant claw marks have carved up the metal as well, like some sort of heavy machinery has run wild through the street. Streetlamps have been either entirely knocked over or twisted into artistic metal sculptures. The city guardsmen have set up large light cubes around the area to compensate.

“Bloody good to see you,” the guardsman in charge of it all says, wiping dust and sweat from his brow. “I called the First Responder’s department less than five minutes ago. Wasn’t expecting one of you lot so soon.”

“I was in the area,” she explains, before her mind tunes out the rest of what he’s saying.

There are gouges all across the sectioned-off street. They don’t match Luzia’s initial impression of a bulldozer run amok. If they were caused by machinery, the patterns would have had to be deliberately designed. 

 If the machinery in question was malfunctioning, the gouges would still be more even – straighter lines, the depths of the gouges more evenly spread out. This is too… chaotic.

She reaches into her bag to retrieve her measuring tape and walks over to the nearest wall, noting the distance between the gouges and the semi-exposed electrical lines. Not as urgent a repair as it looks. They’ll have to prioritize fixing the ground first, lest it impact the floor below.

Something is buried in one of the gouges. A long laceration has cut up the ground there and there’s a smudge of something unnatural in the metal. She withdraws her protective gloves from her bag and snaps them on. Squatting before the laceration, she pushes a finger into the smear of fluorescent green. She rubs it between thumb and forefinger. It’s fuzzy, almost crumbly in a way that a chemical spill wouldn’t be. Thicker, too, made of something fibrous. She’s seen this before, though only once, years ago when she was still an apprentice.

“Astrosi…” she mutters to herself.

The guardsman blinks in surprise. “Well, yeah. But how could you possibly know?”

She holds up her fingers. “This residue is seen only after one of the Eoi has been in the area. The pattern of the gouges is too organic to be mechanical. And there’s the height of them as well. I could reach all of them if I jumped, but any machinery powerful enough to rip up the ground like this would be

 quite large. It wouldn’t be limited to the height of an average human-shaped being.” She rises to her feet and dusts off her gloves. “Thus it can only be Astrosi.”

Though this isn’t a common occurrence in her job, it isn’t entirely unfamiliar to her. All those years ago, she had seen the aftermath of a fight between the Eoi and the Vesperi, vicious enough to knock out two stories of a building, causing a chain reaction of structural collapses. The effort to fix it all had been astronomical, but what Luzia remembers most is having to drag bodies from the wreckage.

“Anything else?” she asks. She tugs off her gloves and replaces them with a fresh pair, putting the old ones in a hazard ziplock. There’s very little she can’t squeeze into her work bag and she prides herself on always been prepared for any eventuality. “They could have left something behind.” She has been trained to never be too careful when it comes to the Astrosi. “Whatever details you’ve got would be appreciated.”

With a jerk of his thumb, the guardsman gestures to a woman with a blanket around her shoulders who’s sitting far over in a corner of the street with another guardsman kneeling next to her. She has a shellshocked expression, all wide eyes and trembling jaw.

“We had an eyewitness to the whole thing. Feel free to ask her whatever you like,” the guard says. “We’ve gotten next to nothing out of her, apart from the fact that apparently that bastard Carrion showed up last night.”

Luzia draws in a sharp gasp and inches closer. 

“They did?”

Carrion is the most rumor-shrouded member of the already mysterious inhuman folk. A renegade, known for having turned their back on the two Astrosi thrones and gone off to work their own mischief. Of all the Astrosi, they show up in the human city the most, always to cause maximum chaos and destruction. Luzia is not a violent person by any means, but if Carrion were to turn up dead… well, she wouldn’t throw a party to celebrate, but she would certainly attend a party thrown by someone else.

“Yeah,” the guardsman nods. “Couple others showed up to fight them, but all that happened was a damn three-way scuffle and a whole lot of property damage. One of the others yelled Carrion’s name. That’s pretty much the only thing we had to go on – that poor woman didn’t see much. She tried to hide, mostly.”

“Were they here for a reason? All the damage I can see is rather contained to this one street. I would expect more splash damage if it was nothing more than fighting for the sake of fighting.”

“Who knows?” he grumbles. “Only thing we’ve got on Carrion is that they’re a damn lunatic.”

“All right,” she says as she returns to the wreckage. “Let’s get started.”

Luzia begins assigning tasks to the various guardsmen, having them take down the precariously leaning lampposts before they fully topple over and move the heavy metal structures out of the way. For her part, she gets to

work and begins dictating notes into her recorder as she goes over the scene.

The extent of the damage is deceptive, and she quickly becomes certain that it will require far more repair than she initially thought. She marks two places on nearby walls that will need some minor scaffolding, and then a few minutes later she finds remnants of a corrosive acid that are perilously close to an air vent. By now, a few of the guardsmen have brought out containment units, so at least that can be temporarily controlled without too much hassle, but it’s a short-term patch and she knows it’ll take quite some effort to repair properly.

Another First Responder shows up to the scene, a medic this time, and they begin to shuffle the shocked eyewitness away from the scene. They give Luzia a professional nod and leave behind more tools they’ve hauled over from the nearest Responder’s office.

“Whoah!” someone shouts. “Easy there!”

Luzia’s rushing off to them before they’ve finished their cry. A streetlamp with a slight bend in the metal pole is beginning to topple over, and the two guardsmen propping it up aren’t quite doing the job.

She slides herself between them and braces the metal pole against her shoulders, the weight sinking into her muscles. “Pick it up at the base!” she orders. “If it’s come loose like this, propping it up again would just leave it unstable.” One of them shifts to the base of the pole and she instructs, imagining what it looks like in her head despite being unable to see it, “Unscrew the connector. It’s the circular device between the pole and the ground.” A pause, a scratching noise, and

then the pole slumps against her shoulders. “Yes, you’ve got it.”

Between herself and the guardsmen, they’re able to walk the pole away from the rubble and deposit it on safe ground.

“Thank you very much,” a guardsman says, dusting her hands off and wincing at the way the metal’s weight has reddened her palms. “Damn thing was about to come down on all our heads.”

“Yes, it was. Make sure there’s no damage to the power line that was running to the streetlamp,” she absently tells them, already heading back to the job in hand.

The choppy mess of street that marks the epicenter has been left alone. From this vantage point, it doesn’t look too terrible, mostly surface-level disturbances, not as deep or dangerously placed as the gouges on the wall. She inches forward, keeping an eye on her feet and stepping over the various cracks and uneven sections.

How odd. The closer she gets, the more it appears as through the ground has been torn up from below, the street jutting upwards and outwards.

Another step and her foot lands on something wobbly. Every muscle in her body freezes up as she slowly looks down at the unsteady slab of street that is currently supporting all her weight. How far down does the damage go? What is below, for that matter? Many feet of support structures, or empty shafts? There’s a creak of metal. A crumble of old sealant. Very, very slowly, she carefully slides her back foot away from the epicenter…

Before she can move so much as two inches, the entire slab she’s standing on breaks off. 

s herself backwards just as it all falls down, scrambling until her palms slap onto solid ground. Heart pounding, she clings to the steady steel and watches the last of the falling wreckage vanish. All manner of commotion arises from the guardsmen and she hastily throws up her hand to silence them. She listens.

There’s the noise of all the rubble shifting and falling and then… nothing. No crash. No cracks. She heard it fall and she doesn’t hear it land.

“Miss,” the head guardsman says quietly, holding out a hand to her. “You all right?”

She grabs his hand and pulls herself away until she can rise up onto her feet again and get a proper glimpse of it all.

At first she had thought the shadows in the center of the wreck to be a result of poor lighting, but now that much of the upturned street has fallen away it becomes apparent that the darkness is far more sinister. The bits of wrecked metal and exposed piping have tumbled down to reveal a pit of pure, pitch blackness.

The head guardsman gets a tiny bit closer, craning his neck. “How far down does it go?”

“I have no idea,” she replies. “I can’t see a thing, and I couldn’t hear the debris land.”

Alarm pales the guardsman’s face. “Right then. What do you need?”

Luzia plucks up her courage and begins to get as close as she can to the sinkhole without risking another tumble. Reaching into her pack to retrieve a set of delicate pliers, she crouches low to the ground to more evenly disperse her weight and then deposits her pack somewhere safe to make herself even lighter.

“I’d need a droplight or something similar to measure the depth,” she says as she gets a better look. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it goes down an entire level. But that would be thousands and thousands of feet. It’s oddly clean-looking, too.”

“Maybe it’s some sort of Era One shaft?” the guardsman suggests.

“Could be.”

The Bastion is filled with buildings that are in use and those that aren’t. Most stable buildings were refurbished in Era Two, reconstructed over and over again to the point where they cannot reasonably be referred to as the original building. Then there are Era One structures that are so old that all entrances to them have been sealed up over time and are now relegated to being merely support structures for the levels above and below. Impossibly far from the center of the city are the Fringes, uninhabited wastelands of Era One buildings that have no remaining stability to them. Due to the uncertain nature of the Bastion’s structural integrity, they have long ago decided to shore up these Era One structures whenever possible and carefully not touch them when not.

Sometimes walls, grates, or hatches are found, but they’re usually left alone. The Bastion can be a rickety place, and breaking a rule about where not to go or what not to touch can get a person in a good deal of trouble very

quickly. The world was built with Era One technology, and now they live in an age when most of it is broken beyond hope of repair and the rest is so old that the last generation to know how to use it must have died thousands of years ago.

Era One or not, Luzia finds her attention drawn to something beyond just the nature of the pit. Sticking out of the pit wall is something small and oddly shining.

“We’ve got an unknown object down here!” she calls out.

She readies her pliers, adjusting them to elongate the handle. Leaning over the hole in the ground, she tentatively shifts a few sheets of aluminum aside, making sure not to move anything that’s currently load-bearing.

What hides beneath is almost silver in color, and it shines with an internal luminescence in the same way the light cubes do, though its light is far weaker. It appears relatively spherical in shape, and at just over an inch in diameter it’s easy for her to remove it from the pit without being concerned that it might cause further collapse. After examining it to ensure that it’s not damaging the pliers, she drops it into her gloved palm.

The guardsman comes up to her as she inches her way out of the danger zone. “What’ve you got there? It safe?”

“It doesn’t appear to actively be doing anything, but I don’t have any real way of knowing.” She returns the pliers to her bag so that she can better prod at the object with her thick, plastic-coated gloves. “Have someone fetch a containment pod just in case. We don’t know what could activate it. There’s so many exposed wires and pipes here that if it starts heating up or sparking we could have a massive

fire on our hands.”

The object isn’t perfectly spherical. It’s faceted – an icosahedron, if she counts correctly. She turns it over, checking for markings.

“It looks like it might be some sort of Era One device,” she remarks. Those pop up in the Bastion with more frequency than the average person might expect, sometimes when an Era Two building breaks or if they try to build something else over a dilapidated structure. “This one doesn’t look so bad. It’s not got a single scratch on it despite being so violently unearthed. Oh, that’s interesting…”

“What?”

“There’s some sort of odd pattern beneath the surface. It looks almost like circuitry.”

The guardsman leans over the object and pushes up his helmet. “You think? Hard for me to tell.”

“Mm, I think so. Do you see those lines? The tint of the metal? Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like standard Era Two tech.”

A second guardsman has shuffled over with a small containment pod in hand and she too bends over Luzia’s hand to ogle. “Weird shape. You know what, though? It does sort of look like something my mother had – a stone or something on a ring.”

“A stone? Really?” Luzia asks, raising an eyebrow. It looks nothing like a stone to her.

The same guardsman nods. “Yeah. It reminds me of a diamond.”

“Diamond?”

 new voice from behind them says, “A diamond? Well now, that’s certainly something, isn’t it?”

Luzia whips around.

It’s not a guardsman. Nor do they look like the average passerby who might have snuck under the yellow tape. They’re wearing a ratty overcoat and boots that are more duct tape and string than boot. The bright light globes make the stranger’s brown skin appear to glow, framing a strong jaw and a straight nose. A long, loose brown braid hangs down their back.

They snatch the device out of her hand and hold it up to peer at it.

“Excuse me,” Luzia protests, hands on her hips. “This area is off limits. I’m going to need to see some form of identification. ...