12 Miles Below

I could see Wrath looking like she’d run a mile in deep snow, shaken and mentally exhausted. Given what she’d just had to face, I’d also be part of the same speeder climbing up the same cliff.

For a machine, Feathers were oddly expressive, to the point they seemed more human than we did. Back when I’d known her as Hecate, I thought of her more like someone that had zero filter and utterly could not keep a poker face to save her life. I knew better now after I’d talked to Father about it.

Feathers delegated all their small ticks - like facial expressions, walking gaits and hand motions - to sub-algorithms, which would quickly specialize into complicated monstrosities of code that even the Feathers couldn’t parse through, effectively emulating the human unconscious. Just dialed up a few notches, because Feathers. Relinquished had wanted to make them better than humans in every category, and a blanket rule like that did come with tradeoffs. They multiplied everything human, not only in their physical appearance but also in terms of emotion.

At least, as far as Father explained it. He wasn’t very tech literate, but he really did try his best with this one. Didn’t have a choice in the matter, knowing his enemy was mandatory if he was going to mount any kind of offense at the time.

All this to say that if Wrath didn’t pay attention, her subroutines would outright make everything she was thinking about painfully visible.

The marble white skin was still eerie, but that had slowly faded away to feeling more normal the more time I spent around her. Comparing her to the spider that chased us a lifetime ago, I might as well be watching someone completely different with only the occasional echos to an older time.

“She may be onto us.” Wrath said sitting on her small throne of cubes, nervously fidgeting. She didn’t leave this location too often these days, spending most of her time digitally roaming around the city to verify things were running smoothly. I imagined a desk and paperwork in front of her. Made it easier to conceptualize what she was doing other than sitting around with her eyes closed.

“What percent on-to-us are we talking about here? A coin flip or time to pack up and hit the wastes?” I asked.

Wrath thought for a moment, eyebrows scrunching up. “My prediction software places the chances at a low twenty three percent. Nothing in the conversation marked any warning signs. If she is aware, she is intentionally obfuscating that conclusion.”

She nodded slowly. “I understand all assembled data point to the safer outcome. I may simply be compromised internally and overly suspicious.”

“That’s called a gut feeling, and usually they’re on the mark.” I said. “We should start packing our bags up anyhow. I need to live through all this scrapshit to get to the food part of our deal. They have fish on demand here, I’m not going back until I choke on fishbones first.”

Wrath nodded. “I agree with the first sentiment. I would also recommend you not dying to fishbones, that would be most ignoble. I will contact Yrob and the rest of the machine army here for preparations to move to the surface. It will be disorienting for them. They need advanced warning.”

Ah. Right. That tidbit.

With Wrath running into my sanctum asking to slightly murder me for the camera, I hadn’t really been able to wrap my mind around that newsbomb. Even more that it was delivered by a machine of all people, which only made the plot weirder. “I’ve recently learned a few things that change up the plan. A tiny bit.”

“A tiny bit?” Wrath asked, an eyebrow raised high in doubt.

People catch on so quickly, outright unfair it is. “Okay, fine, a lot.” I sulked and delivered the bad news all at once. “We can’t evacuate the machines to the surface.”

Wrath paused, then leaned off her little throne looking me square in the eye as if I were a bug to squash. “Explain.”

See, now she looked more like a real administrator. No need for a desk or anything.

“So, funny story, I got a tip from a suspicious source who contacted me through a comms unit smuggled into my workshop under everyone’s noses. And when I was alone, it told me I should abandon the idea of letting machines go to the surface because you’d all die if we did that. No, I'm not making that up or embellishing the details, it actually happened. In its defense, it made a great point.”

She tapped her finger on a concrete block, clearly waiting for the rest.

"Do you mind if we continue this over encrypted comms? Just to be safe."

She nodded, and Journey pinged a comms request. I accepted and went right into it. “Turns out, Tsyua had a clear idea when she took out Relinquished’s ability to conceptualize the surface - she needed a place to hide anything, including a reserve population of humans.”

That got her eyes to widen, and I could see her connect the dots just like I had. “A… reserve population? Oh.”

Not a great look for humanity. We were less like the tenacious heroes, somehow holding off the darkness against all odds, and more like that annoying drunk that snuck back into the estate grounds each time we were not-so-politely escorted out by the House guards. In this case the House guards were genocidal machines hell bent on destroying us and likely extremely pissed we were still around.

“It gets worse.” I said, a hand out before she could say more. “I don’t think Tsuya decided to trust anyone to just stick to the pact. There’s no gentlemen agreement going on here. She went with the heavy handed approach. Got a clean up team of some kind running around wiping out any nail that sticks out too much. Since she likes to use the imperials and they’re known to operate on the surface, they might have an executioner squadron running amok up there.”

Or a group of Deathless would be more her style. Why leave it to a group of wishy-washy people handing down traditions that could inevitably hit some conscientious objector? Pick a group of undying everlasting soldiers who all signed up for this knowingly and wouldn’t change their minds over the years.

“No. There is another force that would make more sense. The protofeathers.” Wrath said.

“The… what?”

She stood out of her throne and walked over, wings folding into a skirt around her waist. “We should adjourn for food. As I understand, it is a human tradition to share longer stories over a meal. And this will be a very long story.”

“Ah.” I grinned, “Still a gourmandizer deep down on the inside I see.”

Wrath pouted, puffing up a cheek as if insulted. “No, this is not the reason.” She insisted. “Speaking to mother directly has put considerable pressure on my nerves. I find food and novelty helps keep my mind occupied. In general, adult humans have between two thousand and four thousand taste buds in total. I have seven thousand, and am still experimenting with altering parts of them. Fine tuning requires more tests. Also, you did mention you wanted to eat fish.”

I shrugged. “As long as you’re paying.”

Never say no to free fish.

She did, indeed, pay for the meal.

And boy was I in for some culture shock. I’d been getting my meals delivered straight to me by Kidra or the knights before. Now that I was being dragged outside and shaken out of my fugue state, I was starting to realize just how different the Undersider city was in comparison.

The place was a weird mix of fantasy tropes and real living experience. Some parts made sense, others made no sense, and the traditions were all weird.

In the clans, we had a few centralized food courts where two to three dozen food carts surrounded the multi level tables at the center. Mechanical lifters would bring food trays up and down the levels so people could climb ladders in peace, along with designated times when people were allowed in, generally divided up by caste and sleeping hours. Logi handled that part.

Food carts took different spots at different levels, depending on their seniority and ranking. Anything that could be communal property was, in order to reduce the amount of overhead each food cart needed to bring with them. Leftover food got delivered straight to the agrifarmers to do their magic, usually ending up as mushroom feed. I don’t know all the details, other than the rumor of stiff competition between carts and micro-wars of their own going down, but generally consolidating space was the name of the game up there. The only exceptions were the House galas and festivities thrown, where they'd pull out all the stops, or within Retainer houses which were rich enough to have their own micocolony, complete with a feast hall for the larger Retainer Houses. Winterscar had one, and we often rented it out to the smaller Houses for example. Well now we did, once Kidra got a hold of the House finances after she became the Winterscar Prime. She was racking income hand over fist for that one.

Down here was a story of opposites.

A single room dedicated to one food cart was something of a generic fantasy trope that kept appearing in all the older books, often times not even a room but an actual building. Novel and confusing the first time I read it, but they appeared everywhere in everything I read, right alongside other staples like elven forests, dwarven fortresses, outdoor parks, human castles, oceans and tropical islands. As I grew older, I learned that some things really were fantasy and other things had actually existed at one point. Like massive glorified wooden sleds that somehow floated on water despite weighing a few hundred tons - with cloth sails that used the wind to push that massive weightacross mythical unfrozen oceans.

How that ended up being real but not normal underground dwarven cities was something I still had a hard time wrapping my head around.

Now, surface dwellers liked their festivals. We’d often go long ways to dress up for different occasions, costumes of expensive bright colors to display celebration (And wealth) - music, acting, stage props, the works. I think my favorite was the rising new moon festival, where entire dragons were crafted, needing multiple puppeteers inside to make them come alive along with a whole group of performers singing out the song stories accompanying each. Anytime there was a chance to decorate or play with costumes, the clans took it greedily and went all out to impress their neighbors and get their House names out there. I was used to seeing all kinds of replica props and theme rooms.

Walking into the restaurant felt exactly like that. Complete with waitresses in their expected costumes. As if a House was throwing a gala and had rented and furnished this entire room for the occasion, everyone pretending to be part of a story, all while knowing in a few days the room would be returned to normal since operational costs to keep such a thing going was far out of reach.

Except here it wasn’t a story, the restaurant was completely real and had been in operation for years. The staff weren’t just the House staff having fun role playing as people from the olden days. The uniforms worn weren’t facsimiles made in a few days to look the part - they were completely functional, right down to the slightly faded fabric from the hundreds of washes over a lifetime. Even their act was the sort of weary veteran, having done this song and dance a few hundred thousand times.

As if to spit in the face of anything conventional, the place was larger than the Winterscar hall itself. And we were considered high ranking nobility in the clan.

Undersiders were obscenely rich. No wonder they saw us as savages.

“Seats for two.” Wrath said jovially, clearly used to this.

The terrified waitress nodded slowly. “Would you like regular seating, or VIP seating?” She asked, admirably stuttering only once. The rest of the people here were growing silent, watching the Feather stroll in without a care in the world, while I was busy staring at everything except the Feather next to me.

“VIP seating if you would. I have matters to discuss in private.” She said.

A nod, a motion to follow, and off we went deeper into the massive room. And here was surprise number two. This restaurant didn’t just have one room reserved only for their patrons specifically.

The waitress led us to fucking stairs.

When I thought my jaw couldn’t drop lower, it turns out the upper floor was dedicated to single smaller rooms that were sealed off, with only one table at the center. The VIP seating. They even had their own plates and utensils that never left this building.

The waitress welcomed us in and brought out sheets of papers with food items listed there. “Here are the menus, would you like some water to start out with, or do you have a drink in mind?” She asked, this time with far more ease. Shock wearing off as she defaulted back to her usual boilerplate.

Wrath ordered us drinks and food since I had no idea what anything was or how I was supposed to act. “Tamery suggested this location. The VIP rooms in this restaurant were designed for high level transactions, the walls are soundproof and there are no recording devices. An additional sweep with my own sensors confirms their claims. We may speak in confidence here.”

“Sure… uh,” I floundered a bit, the sheer everything was getting to me. We had a godsdamned window and it showed a view over the city lake. I couldn’t make this up even if I tried. “Do you mind if I ask you a bit of general questions about the city? I realize I’ve been living under a hatch, and there’s maybe one or three hundred details I don’t understand. If we have the time to talk given the events.”

Wrath smiled, outright preening. “As someone who recently learned a great deal about that topic, I would be pleased to let you know more of my city. If Relinquished is coming, the scale of time will be measured in weeks, not minutes. Tamery would remind me often that even with war and strife in the world, it is important to relax and live - as she claims. Go ahead and ask.”

“Your city, huh?” I said. “Very possessive of you.”

Her smile didn’t fade, only growing slightly predatory as she looked out the window to her city. “I suppose this may be a remnant of my starting nature. Spiders are possessive of what we claimed as ours.” Then she frowned, flicking her gaze back at me, looking almost confused for a moment.

Wrath's fidgeting had an order to it I learned back when she was Hecate. The feather tips of her wings would start to flicker around, clinking softly against one another, even while folded up tightly. After which her hands cupped each other and thumbs would start kneading the joints. If she still hadn’t noticed the signs at that point, the next thing to happen would be a red blush over her cheeks, where she’d finally pick something to stare at in the distance. Usually at that point she’d notice and snap out of whatever bubble of thought she’d been stuck in and quickly school her features back into control.

Interesting thing to note is that I had the order wrong this entire time.

Hecate’s tan skin hid the blush long enough to be last place on her typical tells. Wrath’s alabaster skin in comparison did nothing to hide that blush, so that showed up almost instantly, before even the hand wringing or feather clinking.

“Something the matter?” I asked, watching her start the motions and immediately filing that into my mental list of things to poke fun at.

She froze, face going slack and the red tint bleeding away from her cheeks. “Nothing is the matter. I only realized a possible error within my systems and will need to review it for later. Now, you had questions?”

We spent a few hours talking shop about the city, and the strange culture down here. As I discovered, I wasn’t alone in having a hard time picking apart what was real and what was fictional. Elves were supposed to be fictional, but there were dozens of photos I’ve seen of elves proudly displaying bows, or posing before a large tree. Wrath added more fuel to the fire showing there was recorded footage of Elves doing impressive things with bows, or walking around fairs. Those had all ended up being staged, just human actors pretending to be elves. Turns out, humans of old also liked acting out stories, so some things of our nature remained the same no matter the era.

On her part, Wrath had access to a far more massive archive of books, only terribly sorted. Being a bookworm and having to integrate quickly into human society while undercover, she thought she could get away with reading a few thousand books and digesting it all.

If Tamery hadn’t been there to help Wrath sort through what was normal and not-normal, romance tagged books alone would have gleefully seen her plan burn to the ground.

It was pretty fun all said and done. Wrath had a lot of odd stories about her short time in the city, and some of the scraps she’d been in with Kidra. The two had very quickly setup some unworded gentlewomen’s agreement not to cause collateral damage, so fights would often be pushed far out from where they initially started. Wrath didn’t want her hard earned city to be blown up, and Kidra didn’t want innocent people caught in a crossfire. They compromised and ended up slowly moving their fight over the lake and the pillar rubble whenever they ran into each other.

Talk of fighting eventually led us right back to the fabled protofeathers and more somber topics.

“Like Deathless, there are generations of Feathers where we appear in a wave, usually with slight upgrades from research advancements studied from prior generations. To’Aacar was second generation. Shells were more economic, and easy to manufacture in mass. They were sub-optimized, with many flaws that wouldn't be corrected until later generations.” She said.

"Funny, wouldn't have guessed that given his ego."

“His generation wasn’t made to fight humanity. They were made to hunt down the first generation and destroy them.”

His words back then clicked neatly into place. I was created to hunt down and kill deities. What hope do you have?

"The true threat of the second generation wasn't from optimised construction, or stronger material composition. What they have has been outdated for centuries. Their learned skills and experience over that time span is where their reputation comes from." As Wrath explained more about the troubled history of the machines, it only made me consider how lucky we’d gotten. The fucker had literally been an assassin that hunted rogue Feathers. Tough damn luck, no wonder he caught on to her rebellion so quickly. He was already primed to look for that.

Even worse - the protofeathers, as Wrath described them, were basically walking city-crackers. Requiring entire armies to hold off. And those were Undersider armies, filled with relic armors and weapons. Surface clans were lucky to have twenty relic armors in total.

For the machines to take them down, they needed teams of Feathers working together to grind one down.

“Yep. That would do it.” I said. “If those last two protofeathers are missing, they’re on the surface. No doubt about it. They’d have vested interests in keeping the surface from being discovered by Relinquished, Tsuya probably cut them a deal. I don’t think they’d be in a negotiating mood when they spot a machine army making camp on their side of nowhere.”

“Even if we could defeat or placate them, I assume drawing Relinquished to the surface would spell the end of humanity as a whole, yes?” Wrath asked, already knowing the answer.

“Far as I understand it. Lose-lose situation, either we win against two demi-gods and have humanity under risk of being discovered by Relinquished, or - more probable - we lose and your people get massacred. And while the risk of getting discovered isn’t exactly certain, humanity hasn’t ever been winning against the machines on our own might. We’ve got a handful of cities after all this time and that’s it.”

Wrath’s halo twitched, circling around slightly as if with a mind of its own. “That has not always been the case.” She said. “I have uncovered some history in the archives that shows humanity did nearly make a recovery on its own power.”

That was news to me. “When?” I asked, and already realized the answer a moment after.

Cathida was about to become even more of a pain in the ass. By default I had her muted each time I talked to Wrath, but the old bat could still listen in on what we talked about. Which meant she was hearing everything said right now, and had a lot of opinions about it.

There’s really only one song surface dwellers knew about that had humanity standing anywhere near a threat to the machines.

The grand Imperial Empire of old. Looks like it wasn't quite so much myth and legend.

• Next chapter - A dangerous gamble

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!