Seeklight

One of the windows was covered with a large sheet of paper ruled off into tiny squares. A red line crawled across it, sloping towards the bottom of the paper before it broke off. Rennie tapped at it, leaving little crescent marks in the dust. “I wonder what went down,” she said softly. Something about the empty factory seemed to have affected her mood as well.

“Dreams, maybe.” Daenek clapped the dust from his hands and turned away.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Rennie pushed the little room’s door open violently. The clatter it made striking the panel next to it vanished into the darkness. “There’s nothing here.”

Daenek nodded and started back the way they had come into the factory. As he walked with his head bent in thought, it was some moments before he noticed that Rennie was no longer right next to him. He turned and saw her several meters behind, bending down to look at something on the factory’s floor, the yellow light from her candle forming a sphere around her.

Maybe she found a coin somebody dropped, he thought.

Then this won’t have been a total waste. Waiting for her to come along, he looked idly around himself, holding his own candle in front of him.

He was a little distance from one of the looms that stretched up into the heights of the factory. A tangle of fibers spilled down its complex surface, like a frozen waterfall. He stepped closer to examine it.

The threads dangled into a little pile at the foot of the loom.

Daenek lifted them with his hand and held his candle close. The stuff was some kind of synthetic fiber, slick and milkily translucent against his palm. A drop of candle wax fell onto the threads and they burst into flame.

Quickly, he jerked his hand away but the stuff, with a billowing, cloying smoke, melted and clung to the sleeve of his jacket. He fell backwards, pulling more of the filaments from the face of the loom and into the fire spreading across the front of his jacket like a stain. The heat flickered upwards at his throat and chin. Frantically, he slapped at the flames with his hands.

Behind him, he heard Rennie’s footsteps running towards him. He caught only a glimpse of her face before she grabbed him by the shoulders and rolled him over onto his chest. She grasped the unburnt ends of the stuff and pulled it away, the flames billowing as it spun across the floor, end over end away from them.

In a few seconds the last bits still clinging to Daenek’s jacket were smothered against the floor. The rest had gone out as well, consuming itself into a little tangle of ashes. A nauseating smell of burnt chemicals permeated the air. “You all right?” said Rennie.

Daenek rolled onto his back and lifted himself up onto his elbows. “Yeah,” he said. He couldn’t see her face, as both candles had gone out and been lost in the scurry. “Just singed here and there, is ah1.”

She helped him to his feet and pushed him in front of her towards the factory’s door. Once outside, he leaned against the metal wall and coughed.

“I guess that makes us even,” he said. The taste of the smoke was still in his mouth. “Remember the time with the shaft?

Underneath the caravan?”

In the moonlight her face was visible, settling into an expression of annoyance. “I should care about being even,” she grated. “Just protecting my investment, is all.”

On the way back to the caravan she showed him what she had found on the floor of the factory. A rusty metal washer, that she flung into the bushes at the side of the roadway.

When they had climbed back aboard, Daenek stood for a few minutes at the guardrail, gazing back towards the village and the hills beyond it. A few of the other mertzers could be seen in the moonlight, straggling back towards the caravan, their revelry finished. But Daenek’s attention was elsewhere, on the unseen figures somewhere in the dark, the ones who had abandoned the village, their homes. Pioneers of the abyss, he thought. The phrase was solid and chilling in him as a block of ice. Falling ahead of us. To where we all might be, someday.

He turned away from the rail and headed slowly for the hatchway.

Chapter XIV

The returning was something that he had been secretly dreading and yet waiting for, since the moment he had first realized that it would inevitably come. And now, as all things did, it had come with the passage of time.