The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  Still, the dwellings didn’t lack in their human elements—or rather, their mutant elements—Sylvaine mused. Dozens, no hundreds; a whole village’s worth of mutants slept in its every nook, cranny, and makeshift bed. Some looked up to watch them pass. Some saluted with a fist to their chest, but most were deep in sleep, worn out bodies huddling for whatever rest they could manage.

  Desct deposited the engineer at a building, if it could be called that, somewhere in the middle. The structure looked like it might have once been part of a wide metal smokestack, removed and renovated with pieces of scrap, before having been dug down into the concrete.

  “Here’s your sanctum,” Desct said.

  Inside the only path was a haphazard stairway down into what appeared to be a long-abandoned basement. The walls of the upper section of the structure were covered in layers of burlap, old towels, and even Lazacorp uniforms. The space was dim, lit by a couple of handtorches either tied to or dug into the walls.

  As they descended, Sylvaine noticed forms on the floor, their mutations far beyond the worst of what she’d seen above. Bulbous and twisted bodies, open sores and strange growths of gear-like keratin. Some had doublings of their faces, lifeless mimics on the side of their heads or growing on their open chests, expressions of frozen agony. Others had limbs that bent in strange angles, or fused back into their bodies. Only two mutants were exempt from these extreme deformities: one, a man, who rested in a small cot at the far end, the other an one-armed woman, who walked between the sprawled bodies, helping the sickly figures drink from a stained bowl.

  “This is the closest we ever managed to a medical station,” Desct explained. Then, catching her expression: “Nothing contagious, of course, certainly not to you. Poisoning by slickdust injections. Lazacorp normally drags them away when they get to this point. We don’t know to where, but somehow I doubt it’s a refuge for them to live a long, healthy life.”

  The woman walked over and saluted Desct, who smiled and explained Sylvaine’s presence.

  “I don’t want to be a burden,” Sylvaine said, “I could stay above.”

  Desct shook his head. “They expel Roache’s damned commands at such a high volume that it smothers the entire camp. Their workaround, I suppose. The slickdust poisoned are especially susceptible. This is the only space we’ve managed to soundproof sufficiently. At least the only space Lazacorp hasn’t found.”

  It wasn’t much of a space, and Sylvaine started to wonder if perhaps she could try and brave the Under… no. If it were the just the booby traps, just the smell of rot and death, but to have Roache in her head again, to lose herself again... If the only way out of Lazacorp was to blow it up, well then she would stay down here making clockbombs.

  Desct slapped her on the shoulder and bid his goodbyes, with some vague words of hope. As he left, the woman mutant, who introduced herself as Ysabel, led Sylvaine to a cot at the far end. She pushed away some boxes to create a modest enclave of free space, and gave Sylvaine a bowl filled with water.

  “It’s… as fresh as we can manage,” the woman said.

  Sylvaine tried not to show her disgust as she sipped, muttering thanks. Placing down the bowl and dropping her bag, she rolled herself up in her cot. The fabric was coarse and foul smelling, but considering what surrounded her, that seemed a beyond petty complaint. How strange it was that just two month ago she had been one of the greatest young engineers in all of Icaria. Floating above everyone, an untouchable prodigy with pretensions of genius, until she had crashed down like the city itself. No, not quite, Icaria had actually been airborne at one time, but Sylvaine’s ascension had been a lie from the beginning. A deceit of Roache’s construction. For better or for worse—no, assuredly for worse—this place, this buried attempt at a hospital amidst a refinery’s forgotten landfill, this was the truth. Sylvaine had lost nearly everything, but she had a purpose, to destroy all that Roache had built. A project and the means to complete it, in the end that’s all an engineer needed, right?

  Sylvaine sighed and closed her eyes. She tossed her jacket over her head, trying to find a nap in the closest place to Inferno she had ever stepped foot.

  Chapter 31

  “That’s the monolith, right?”

  Sylvaine almost jumped. Ysabel was right behind her. The mutant stepped back, and put her lone hand to her mouth.

  “Sorry, sorry!” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “No, no, it’s all right,” Sylvaine said, turning back to her notes, on which she had made almost no progress on, despite an hour’s worth of intense staring. The mutants were confident about their plans, but for Sylvaine it wasn’t enough. There was something odd about the machine, a baffling design whose purpose must have been the source of Roache’s interest in her. It was clear enough that the device was ejecting some sort of sangleum product into the water, but that didn’t explain the function of this strange outcropping on the side of the complex. Sylvaine was all aboard with destroying Lazacorp’s creation, but she needed to know what, exactly, she was destroying, what Lazarus had wrecked her life to try and finish. Even Gall had seemed unsure of the purpose of this section of the machine, as many of his notes focused exactly on that odd module, but he had made pitiful progress. The notes just weren’t giving her enough. Or perhaps she just wasn’t enough.

  Sylvaine closed her eyes and rubbed her face. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep; her “nap” had barely even been that. At least her æthermantics were still working, if only somewhat. She flicked, with her free hand, the cubes of scrap she had formed in her morning practice, and tried to ignore the one metal puddle she had fused to the floor during a momentary loss of focus.

  “Wait,” Sylvaine said suddenly, “what’s a monolith?”

  “Oh, right,” Ysabel said, “that’s what we call the central complex here.”

  Sylvaine nodded, mentally slotting that information into the “useless” category.

  “I forget that you’ve not been here long,” said the woman.

  Sylvaine laughed and gestured to her fur. “I think I would look a bit out of place.”

  The woman laughed. “True, you look far too good.”

  Sylvaine wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, or just proof of how miserable conditions here had become. She tapped her pen on the empty page of her notebook, and then sat back, resting her eyes on the not-so-comfortable sights around her.

  One of the nearby mutants groaned, half bulbous with tumorous growths. Ysabel walked over and removed the rag from his forehead, replacing it with a slightly fresher one, before assisting him to drink.

  “You need help?” Sylvaine asked.

  The woman shook her head. “I can manage fine.”

  “Yeah, we’re the lucky ones,” shouted the male mutant, who was now rising from his cot. Sylvaine was surprised how well he had managed to sleep. He had been out cold when she arrived, and did not so much as snore while Sylvaine tossed and turned to the groans of the sick. Even more of a surprise was the man’s right leg, which Sylvaine now noticed was simply a pipe attached to a stub by a net of leather bands, likely slit from some scavenged jacket.

  “We’re too damaged to work,” he said “but strong enough to care for the really fucked up.” The man hobbled over, turning his head to stare at Sylvaine. “Who in Inferno are you?”

  “Sylvaine,” Sylvaine said. “The engineer.”

  “Oh fuck me.” He leaned on the wall. “Desct said we’d get an engineer. A real engineer, Guild-trained and everything. Idiot I was to believe him. Celina’s right.”

  “She’s real, Gualter,” Ysabel said. “I saw her working this morning.” She pointed at the metal cubes that lay beside Sylvaine.

  The man stared, eyes heavy with suspicion. Sylvaine sighed. She raised her gloved hand and lifted up a block, changing its shape in midair. The man’s eyes widened, and then he looked away suddenly, as if unwilling to view something that might harm his precious ignorance.
/>   “Well, since you’re finally up, Gualter,” Ysabel said, “can you wash Horst?”

  The man grunted, and started to wet a rag.

  “You two work early,” Sylvaine said.

  “I do,” the woman replied, “but it’s not exactly early, it’s almost noon.”

  “Really?” Sylvaine had no sense from the windowless room, but reached into her bag and checked her watch. Indeed, it was 11:37. Whatever Marcel’s fate was, it must have been chosen by now. Sylvaine tried not to dwell on the thought, struggling to hope that maybe he had actually pulled off his deceit. Still, theories on the many dooms the man might have walked into ate at her. Or maybe that was actually hunger.

  She pulled some salted taur jerky out of her bag, a tasteless breakfast provided by the cuisine-ignorant Kayip, though at least his cooking had never made her sick.

  “I didn’t see you eat,” Sylvaine said, mouth full, noticing the man and woman’s stares.

  Ysabel shook her head. “Takes time for our friends to sneak up some from meal tents. Even feeding just us two is a difficult. Many need to offer a small scrap, gifts from many dozens of meals, since no worker can afford to sacrifice more than a bite. And then someone has to sneak it down here. The guards don’t like the idea of us keeping the sick alive and away from them, so that’s not a simple task. Each one of us,” and she gestured to her patients, “makes it more and more likely that someone will get caught sneaking away food. And then…” She didn’t elaborate on the consequences, just sunk her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” Sylvaine said. “Here,” she offered.

  The man eyed the jerky, but the woman shook her head. “We’ve managed so far. You need to be strong and focused if you’re going to help take down the monolith. We can make it a few more days until our freedom, but for the first time we really have hope. Thank you for that.”

  Sylvaine felt herself blush, the first time in weeks from something other than shame.

  “It’s an excuse to wait,” Gualter said, sitting on his cot and scowling. “So Desct can keep us quiet and placid with his lies. We used to resist, you know that, ‘engineer?’ There was a time when we fought back, in any way we could. Under Desct we just nod our heads and do whatever Verus, or Roache’s voice, tells us.” He pointed to his leg. “I didn’t come in like this, I earned it.”

  “Accomplishing what?” Ysabel spat back. “Now we’ve given ourselves some breathing room, the guards rarely ever come by. We set ourselves up now for one clean shot.”

  “We wait like taur-cattle, like animals.” Gualter was now staring directly at Sylvaine now.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Ysabel said. The man grunted, and started to wipe down the half-conscious mutant beneath him.

  The door above suddenly flew open. The three froze for a half-second, until their eyes adjusted and it was clear the man above was a mutant, not a guard. A familiar mutant in fact, Gileon.

  Gileon skittered down the stairwell and approached Sylvaine, shaking slightly.

  “Marcel…” he stuttered. “Needs you.”

  “Marcel?” Sylvaine asked. “Is he okay?”

  The mutant nodded. “Hired by Verus, to work at the monolith…” He pulled up a makeshift tin-can water bottle from his belt and drank. “Needs help… Uh… Pretending to be an engineer. Think that’s what he said.”

  “Pretending to…” The man had survived, but only by plopping himself in a more idiotic pit. “How exactly am I supposed to get to him? I don’t exactly blend into the scenery.”

  The mutant wiped off a thin layer of sweat as he continued to nod. “Marcel has a plan.”

  * * *

  The inside of the monolith, (no, the Lazacorp facility, damn, now Sylvaine was even thinking it), was different than how she had envisioned from the schematics. This wasn’t because the schematics were particularly inaccurate to the reality, though there were a number of metal walkways that it didn’t display, but more because of Sylvaine’s new vantage point. That is, from the inside of a crate, covered in burlap sheets and few metal tools, staring out from a small hole cut in its side, which was also her only source of air.

  Sylvaine had quickly grown to hate Marcel’s “plans.”

  Still, this particular plan did seem to work. After the sun had set, she had been pushed and dragged on a dolly through Blackwood Row without raising any eyebrows or alarms, then left for a few hours at the loading bay of the monolith. It was a thoroughly unpleasant wait, and more than once she panicked at the sound of footsteps, almost making a mad run for it. But she forced herself still, and when someone did push against her crate again, it was with mutant hands. The mutant pushed her up into the tenebrous structure, where finally the lid was ripped off to reveal Marcel’s face, alongside several mutants.

  “You feeling okay?” he asked, as he helped her up.

  “Drag me here in a Demiurge-damned box, and you want to make small talk?” Sylvaine grumbled. Despite her tone and the dull pain in her back thanks to a poorly placed wrench, she was happy to see Marcel alive in one piece. But she wouldn’t let herself show it.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered. “I thought you might want to get a look at the machinery up close.”

  “And…?” she demanded

  He scratched his chin. “And I may have bet my life on pretending to be an engineer.”

  Sylvaine sighed, and pushed a welding iron off her back. “Let’s get to it.”

  In truth she was a bit excited. It was exhilarating to be back among machinery, even machinery built with ill intent, and the faux water treatment plant was an impressively massive structure. Though the lights were dim, she could see that the machine was several floors high, a towering cylinder of black metal. Great pipes skewered it in several directions, some feeding in water, others meant to hold raw sangleum. Every square metre was covered by walkways that led to different sections of the hulk, where hundreds of thermometers, flow-meters, æther-meters and other meters displayed the inner workings of the half-functioning machine.

  Marcel led her slowly as they circled up, speaking in whispers.

  “We have to be quiet. We’re not supposed to be here, I mean you, obviously, but technically Verus is sneaking me in.”

  They passed by several mutants, a few who watched them, a few acting busy, most keeping watch. The mutants’ belts were full of hammers, screwdrivers, drills and other tools, and though some stared at random sets of piping and idly prodded with their tools, none were actually working on the machine.

  “His men are focused watching the outside, to make sure Roache doesn’t notice,” Marcel said, “but they could walk in at any moment so the key is speed. And calm. If you hide and I can act the part…”

  Sylvaine touched her glove against the machineworks. It was clear enough the bulk of it was a variation of a general sangleum filtration unit and re-oscillator, common equipment for transforming raw mutagenic sangleum into usable æther-oil, though not usually attached to pipes leading to water treatment facilities.

  “There’s a module,” Marcel explained, in frantic whispers, “Verus is interested in it, seems like he had hired Gall to investigate it specifically. Now I know we need to plan the sabotage but in the meanwhile I promised Verus that I would figure out—”

  “Take me there,” Sylvaine said.

  “Yes, great!” Marcel nodded. He led her up a flight of stairs, to where mutant assistants had already hosted up her crate. There, in the back corner, an odd cylinder jutted out. Marcel stared at it with a sort of wariness. Sylvaine grabbed a screwdriver from one of the mutants and got to work.

  “Thank you,” Marcel said, “for bailing me out again. I just need some information. Technical terms, something, just anything that I could report back so that Verus actually thinks…”

  Sylvaine had already removed the outer casing of the module, to stare inside at the series of pumps, cogs, gaskets, and gearworks. She nodded to whatever Marcel was saying, and le
t the man’s nervous drivel fade into the background as she placed her gloved hand into the beautiful intricacies of the machine.

  Chapter 32

  “…Just be careful with your æthermantics, we can’t leave any evidence of you here for Verus, or any evidence of me for Roache, for that matter,” Marcel said. “You got all that Sylvaine?”

  The woman, head deep in the machine, grunted, and waved him off. Marcel nodded and watched Sylvaine work. She poked and prodded, unscrewed bits and held her glove up to the machine. Marcel started to pace back and forth on the walkway. After a few minutes he glanced over again, and then, satisfied in his uselessness for her task, he stepped out towards the guardrail.

  The room was dimly lit, only a few hanging industrial bulbs at half-power. Vaguely-formed shadows flickered around every corner, all innocuous and all liable to make him jump. A mutant leaned on the far railing, a young man named Sabyn who had been on monolith duty before. He had told Marcel that he was once a third generation taur-herder. Marcel hadn’t even been aware that there were that many generations of taur-herders. The man now smiled at him.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll keep my eye out,” he said.

  Marcel nodded, hands in his pockets, flicking the end of his belt with his thumb. “You’re managing to keep calm,” he observed.

  The mutant raised a shoulder and an eyebrow. “Every day there is a chance that guards might catch me doing something I’m not permitted or just come across me while they’re in a bad mood. At least today I don’t have to break my back while watching for them.”

  It made enough sense, and Marcel joined the mutant, staring down. He could see a few of the man’s comrades running back and forth, taking fake notes from the hundreds of dials on the goliath machine. All on Marcel’s orders, of course, to keep the act up in case a guard did come walking.