The Never Tilting World

by Rin Chupeco

  But that wasn’t even true anymore, was it? Mother Salla’s vengeance had been directed solely at Haidee’s mother. There was a reason she’d chosen not to attack the younger goddess, despite all the times she’d seen her out in the desert. Something about her own encounters with the mirage had made her think that Latona’s daughter was worth saving.

  That didn’t stop the goddess from being a huge pain in my ass, though.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said roughly, “what the rest of us think of you.”

  We drove for another five minutes before she responded, more quietly, “But I don’t know what it is you think about me.”

  I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She was watching the drifts sweep past us.

  “I wasn’t even a year old when the world broke,” she continued. “After that, being alive was all the reason they needed to hate me. I don’t know what hand Mother played in all this. She banned all talk of the Breaking in the Golden City, distracted everyone with merrymaking and revelry in exchange for their silence. Their tacit approval. But I don’t just want to protect the people under our rule. I want to help everyone outside the dome, too, and I don’t know if I will ever be successful at that.

  “But I have to try. And it’s hard when your own mother’s against you. When it feels like your mother’s happy to have the world broken as it is.” She finally turned to me. “If you hate me so much, then why bring me along?”

  My turn to say nothing. She waited expectantly for a few minutes before giving up, looking away with another sigh.

  “Did you ever do it?” I finally offered. “Bring something back from the dead?”

  She looked startled. “No. It’s a complicated process. I’ll need to wield all patterns like they were one, but I also have to figure out the right gate to use. I’ve tried Air so far, but that didn’t work. And without pure Water to draw from, it’s nearly impossible. I . . . I think I’ll have to travel farther west for that.”

  “But you tried it on the whale, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” She sounded bitter. “Maybe I really just don’t think things through, like you said.”

  “Your mother’s gonna be searching for you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s unusual to have someone used to the good life in the city come out here just because a mirage said so.”

  “Are you saying I’m spoiled? Because I’m a damn good mechanika, which is the furthest thing from being spoiled.”

  “Sure.”

  “I have friends there, you know. All mechanika. They treat me better than any of the nobles did. They’d never betray me.”

  “Mother Salla—my clan leader—doesn’t completely hate you. She said she knew you as a baby.”

  “She was one of my Mother’s Devoted?”

  “No. Your aunt’s.”

  “Oh.” She shifted uneasily, looking at me like I’d sprouted another head. “Is that why—is that why you tried to kill me? If this is some trick—”

  Even I had to wince at that. “If this was a trick, I would have brought more people, and you know it. My mother doesn’t want you dead, surprisingly enough. And neither do I.” Not anymore, anyway.

  “I never knew my aunt Asteria. Only that she tried to kill Mother, and tried to destroy the world in the attempt.”

  “My mother thinks your mother was responsible.”

  “That’s not true!” she snapped.

  “Mother Salla was there at the Breaking!”

  “In case you didn’t notice, so was mine!”

  “Latona wanted to rule Aeon in Asteria’s place!”

  “That’s a lie! Mother was going to save her!”

  “Says who?”

  “My father wrote about it in a letter!”

  “Yeah, because fathers are always impartial. Look, maybe we’ll just flag down the mirage and ask it.” I stuck my head out the window briefly. “If it ever lets us catch up!” I shouted after the fleeing ghost, but that didn’t slow it down, either.

  She sighed. “Did your mother ever tell you about some of the prophecies?”

  “Yeah. One.” She was gonna know it sooner or later, anyway. “‘When the dead find words, the goddess and the Devoted son will meet atop a fish not a fish, on a sea not a sea. It is she who travels to the endless Abyss, and it is he who guides her.’”

  She blinked. “But that’s us.”

  “Us and the damn whale, yeah.”

  “So we’re destined to meet? To travel to the Great Abyss together?” She smiled suddenly, her eyes awash in silver. “Was that why you came to the city? To look for me?”

  “Stop trying to make me your friend,” I growled, not liking how easily she threw the word destined about. “We knew your soldiers were returning with metal from the mines, and we wanted to see how much we could steal without anyone noticing. We pilfered a few of your guards’ outfits and snuck in at the back of the regiment. The sandstorm was an unexpected bonus. And a setback.” My clan had stolen all the silver from the wagons and escaped detection. I had stayed behind, overriding their protests.

  Because I was looking for her. I figured I’d spend a few days casing the city exits until she ventured out again, but the mirage had saved me the effort.

  Not like I was gonna admit any of that.

  She beamed at me. “I saved you.”

  “What?”

  She beamed harder. “I was watching from atop the dome. I redirected the winds away from you and your friend, just like before.”

  Great. “Yeah, well. Thanks.”

  “It was very bad of you,” she continued severely, “to be stealing from my city.”

  “Equally bad of you to be hoarding city resources, or we wouldn’t have to resort to stealing.”

  “Ah.” She reflected. “That’s true. So was larceny the only reason you were there?”

  “I—no. Like I said, we think there’s something to what the mirage—”

  “So you didn’t want to find me?” She sounded disappointed.

  I gave up. If she wanted me to pretend to like her, then so be it. “I found you anyway, so what’s the point?”

  And then I slammed on the brakes, hard.

  Haidee lurched forward, but I got an arm out between her and the dashboard. “It stopped,” I said tersely.

  The mirage was immobile, staring out into the border that lay between the Skeleton Coast we occupied and the vastness of the Sand Sea: flatlands made of preternaturally even sand that shifted and ebbed almost like water. No one in the Oryx clan had ever traveled into that dust trap, and for good reason.

  “No way in hell are we making it through that in one piece.” I turned to the mirage standing a few feet away. “Do you hear me? We’re NOT crossing this hellscape! The rig can’t cross this! We may as well attempt to cross an actual ocean! Can’t you conjure up some new wind or magic or whatever to get us across? Or better yet—an actual route we can drive through?”

  It watched me from underneath its cowl. I had the sickening sensation that if it raised its hood, there would not be much flesh remaining to see.

  “Why can’t we cross this?” Haidee asked.

  I pointed at a spot nearby; something rippled beneath the earth, the sands flowing aside to briefly reveal a large, dark shape winnowing through the fine dust like it was swimming through water, and then disappearing again from view. “That’s why. There are monsters the size of towers hiding within those depths. May as well serve ourselves up as fodder.”

  She stared down at the deceptively smooth ground before us, left eyebrow twitching like mad. “I’ve read about the Sand Sea, but I’ve never seen it with my own eyes. Do you know how many miles this spans?”

  “No. Never known anyone to actually make it across.”

  She was already dragging her sack out of the vehicle, pawing through its contents. “The coils and metalworks on the dashboard—they’re only there for show. If I’m careful, they’ll be more than enough to construct a roof above us, and
I could weave enough incanta on its surface to keep any monster’s teeth and claws out. I should terraproof the tires while I’m at it, too, though we won’t be needing that.”

  “You’re not seriously considering—”

  But the goddess was in a world of her own. “I’ll need to make this airtight enough to prevent sand from getting in, but also ensure there’s enough circulation I could funnel from outside to give us fresh air to breathe. . . . I could work one of these exhaust pipes into ventilation.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course. It shouldn’t take more than three hours—”

  “Three hours?” I shouted. “And then you want us to ride this rig through a Sand Sea full of monsters?”

  She shrugged. “Do you want to turn around, then? You go back to Mother Salla, and me to my city?”

  I didn’t want that, either. Not empty-handed. “I agreed to hunt down the mirage,” I groused, even though that wasn’t entirely the truth. “Not run all the way to the center of the world.”

  Her voice dropped, suddenly sly. “I’d never pegged you as someone who’d give up so easily. But if you’re having second thoughts, we can double back. I can drop you off with your clan and pay what you think is a fair price for this sand buggy. I’ll go on and—”

  I didn’t hate Haidee exactly, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to throttle her for having no sense of self-preservation.

  “I’ll come with you,” I snapped. “You’re going to get us killed, and we’re both gonna wind up at the bottom of some demon’s stomach, but I’ll come with.”

  “Thank you.” It annoyed me how genuine she sounded. “Like I said, it shouldn’t take more than three hours to build what we need.”

  “Three hours,” I grumbled, watching the mirage warily. It hadn’t moved from its spot, eyeballing us back. It understood, I realized, and that was a frightening thought. “And what can you do with this wreck in three hours, exactly?”

  A lot, apparently.

  Haidee, as it turned out, really was a mechanika, and an even better one than Millie. Being able to command multiple incanta was a definite advantage, but I grudgingly admitted that the goddess would have been a master at it even without them. In half an hour she had chopped off the metal cylinders she had scathingly referred to earlier as ugly aesthetics, and reshaped them into a metal roof over the rig using a mobile alternator that funneled her own fire incanta through her welding device as she worked. “It’ll keep us impermeable to sand and grit,” she explained with a shrug, like this was all just child’s play.

  In another hour she had reengineered one of the exhaust pipes into a purifier, allowing air to circulate through the vehicle while trapping any dust particles before they found a way in. She had crawled underneath the buggy and remained there for close to fifteen minutes, fusing holes and fissures shut to keep us sealed. The creatures making the Sand Sea their home would find it difficult to attack while we drove our way through, she was certain. “Most of them, anyway,” she added.

  “Most of them?” I had contributed nothing to the work; she had shooed me away whenever I drew near. I spent my time trying to approach the mirage instead, but it kept vanishing and reappearing some distance away, keeping me from drawing closer.

  “I can’t guarantee what manner of beasts we might find out there, but at least I’ve upped our chances. Even taking into account any arsenic in the rocks that might leach into the sand, I doubt it’s of a high enough concentration to corrode the metal. There may be animals inhabiting the area possessing toxins, but the roof and the incanta I’ll be adding there will make it harder for them to get to us. It should work in the same way our dome protects the Golden City, albeit cruder. I would have whipped up something better had I more time, but—why are you looking at me like that?”

  I worked at picking my jaw off the ground. All I’d brought were a few changes of clothes and my armor, my Howler, a bushel of glowfire grenades, and food rations. “No reason,” I heard myself say faintly. “Did you bring the whole mechanika facility with you?”

  She grinned. “I wasn’t dragging my bag along just to suffer the weight.”

  “What else did you bring?” I reached into the sack and pulled out a Howler—except it had a longer barrel and better sights, and was superior in every way to the one I was toting.

  Her Howlers had been retrofitted with an extra clasp and trigger, much like mine was. She’d modified her guns so I could use them.

  She’d been expecting to find me.

  Hell and sandrock.

  “I brought three.” She sounded almost embarrassed. “I did mess up your gun. Wasn’t sure you had a replacement.”

  “You were planning on looking for me?” I’d been trying so damned hard not to admit that finding her was the main reason I was even near the Golden City in the first place, and it turned out she’d been preparing for the same thing.

  I must have looked far too incredulous. Haidee’s back stiffened. “I wasn’t deliberately seeking you out. I just like to be prepared for any eventualities.”

  I let that slide, too busy running my fingers down the symmetrical grooves of the barrel walls. “Thanks.” I was truly grateful. Howlers were hard to come by, and on the Skeleton Coast they were our main line of defense against both the elements and enemy groups. It was a clearly expensive gift; despite having more abundant resources, the city dwellers were notoriously frugal with their metalworks. “For this, and . . . for the whale.”

  “The whale?”

  “We took it apart. Salvaged it for meat. I know you hoped for the opposite, but . . .”

  “You ate Betsy?”

  “We had to—wait. You named that damned whale Betsy?”

  She blushed.

  I threw up my hands. “No, it’s all right. Name her Betsy. Betsy kept us from starving. Name the buggy Dandelion if you want, I’m not going to argue.” In the space of three hours she had converted the war rig into some kind of sand-submersible, and if she wanted to name me Betsy, I’d let her if it gave us a fighting chance of living through this. I snuck a glance at the mirage. “Now what?”

  “Well, I’ll need to test it out first.” But rather than get into the new custom jeep, she turned toward the Sand Sea. She neared the edge where the ground ended and the dust-ocean began, and took a deliberate step forward before I realized what she was doing.

  “Wait!” I leaped for her and knocked her down, sending us both sprawling away from the border. Her footprint dissolved as a shadow swirled in the exact place she had set her boot down, a small whirlpool spiraling around and distorting the ground briefly before resuming its facade of a placid surface.

  “Oh.” Haidee inclined her head, trying to get a closer look despite nearly having had her blasted foot eaten. “They move pretty fast.”

  “That’s all you can say?” I choked out. Did this girl have no understanding of actual danger? Forget about any of the other nomads out here trying to kill her; she could accidentally kill herself all on her own, given enough time. How was she even alive that first time I saw her on her damned Betsy? How had nothing gotten to her before that point? Why was she the one of the two of us with all her limbs intact? “It could have bitten your leg off!”

  “I wanted to ascertain the density of the sand and how they could swim through something so—”

  “Listen. If you’re expecting to tag along, then here are a few ground rules to keep in mind. One: don’t bloody put your foot down in places where I’ve just told you there are monsters swimming underneath. Two: you walk where I walk, spit where I spit, hide where I hide, and step nowhere else. Three: you’re running every plan you make with me first, before you go ahead and do it, which means you’re going to listen to me and do as I say—”

  A brief cloud of smoke caught my attention, unfurling like a plume about ten miles away in a straight line behind us. I knew what that meant.

  “And four—you sure you didn’t leave anything important out when you were m
aking this buggy sand-friendly?”

  “I—I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything I need to—”

  “Good, because four: we’re both getting into your new rig and testing it this instant, because as I said in rule number three, you’re going to listen to me.”

  “But I don’t—” Haidee twisted her head to watch as vehicles poured out from behind a small ridge, and her eyes grew round. “Oh. Oh.” When I yelled at her to get in, she didn’t even protest, just scrambled into the buggy after me and bolted the doors shut.

  I revved the engine. “Any surprises you’ve added in here that you should tell me about before we start?”

  “I had some spare spark plugs that I swapped in for the old ones that came with the vehicle, so the buggy should run faster than it used to.” Haidee rattled on, so quickly I could barely keep up, “I’ve also repaired all the cracks I could find. This rig runs on fire-and-air-melted sand, so we can always just shovel more in if we run out.”

  “Swell.” I hit the gas and the rig all but flew forward, straight into the Sand Sea. “Hang on,” I shouted, a part of my mind screaming at me and my willingness to believe in ridiculous mechanika goddesses without so much as a test drive, and the rest of me screaming to keep moving because I’d just gotten a closer look at the buggies coming our way, and it turned out they were the Hellmakers come to collect.

  “What do they want?” Haidee cried.

  “They’re cannibals.”

  “What? Is that why they’re after us?”

  “Remember when I said I stole this rig?”

  “You stole from cannibals?! Why would you steal anything from cannibals?!”

  “I had a really, really good reason, all right?”

  We plunged straight into the Sand Sea—but instead of sinking completely, we wound up floating along its surface, half-submerged. I increased our speed, and we started swimming along at a reasonably quick pace, faster than I thought we would. I still had a good view of our surroundings above the sand, and whatever creatures that had been wriggling in its depths were leaving us alone. So far.

  And then I saw why. Some of the Hellmakers had plunged in just like we had, but without the benefit of a roof or engines that actually worked, which meant they were now up to their elbows in fine grit. They flailed around, abandoning their rigs to struggle back to shore—and I heard one of them scream, so loud I could hear him from inside our sealed compartment.