Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
The floor is concrete. Puddles of water gather in low spots and a rainbow sheen shines across the surface when the light hits them just right.
Tyse has paused to look around as well. But then he nods to the left, where there’s another door, and we go that way. When we pass through the door, things change again. It gets quiet, for one. Thankfully. But that’s not the only thing that changes. The hallways are now plaster with bits of rock showing through in places where the veneer has cracked and flaked off.
It’s very reminiscent of home, except, where our colors were typically cream and sun-faded blue, these hallways are all shades of gray. Very Delta City. Even the lanterns on the walls are made of shiny copper, mimicking the design tastes of the god in the world above.
Tyse is tugging me backward, back to the door we came from.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Not this way. I think there’s people this way. I can’t know for sure, obviously, but the décor changed. Did you notice it?”
“Yes. It reminded me of home, with some differences to account for Delta’s personal taste.”
“We don’t wanna bump into people here, Clara. They won’t understand us, and it’ll probably cause trouble. We should stay on this side of things.” He gestures to the heavy door we just came through. “That’s where the bots live.”
“It’s so loud in there. It’s hard to think.”
“I know,” he says. “But we’ll go up. To the next floor. It’s a tower, did ya notice?”
“Yeah. The god’s tower?”
“Well, there’s definitely no second Delta living in this place. He’s not the type of god who would share a personality. But didn’t you say you never saw your god?”
“We didn’t. Not once.”
“So he doesn’t come here. I don’t know what this place is, but I’m curious now. Do you wanna go up? Or do you wanna leave?”
“Up, of course. I’m curious too. I’m dying, actually, to know what the hell is going on in these train-line cities.”
“Good. We’ll go up. That room in there is too loud to think, like you said. But I’m sure there’s more rooms to see than that.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because it takes a lot of infrastructure to run a city. That’s what all that is back there. That’s how the city exists. It’s the plumbin’ for the water, it’s the way the spark is processed. It’s the business side of things that the common person has no clue about. And before I leave here, I wanna see it.”
“OK. Lead the way.”
We return to the loud mechanical room and go up the stairs. Tyse pauses on the landing of the first floor, but then looks up. Pointing.
I nod, because what else can I do, the machines are too loud to talk, and we go up. But we don’t stop at two. We don’t stop at three. Or four. Or five. We go all the way up to the top. It’s a long climb and I’m huffing, very out of breath since I’m carrying a rucksack, by the time we stop.
Tyse turns to me. It’s not as loud up here, since we’re literally like a hundred feet above the machines down below, so we can talk now. “I want to see the dome.”
I squint at him. “Dome?” It hadn’t occurred to me that they’d have domed towers here, but of course they would. If the city is laid out like mine, the tallest towers have domes. “All right,” I agree. “Let’s look at the dome.”
He opens the door a crack, peeking through for a few moments. Then opens it wide. We step in, finding ourselves in a circular space covered in shiny, black screens. They cover every single space of the curved wall. “Wow,” I say, turning in a circle. “This is… well, I have no idea what this is.”
There’s no one in here—not even bots—so Tyse walks over to the nearest screen and begins studying it. “It’s a control room,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a way to watch people. Look.” He taps the front of the screen and it comes to life with a burst of light. A moment later, an image appears. A video. “There they are.”
He does this to many screens. Tapping dozens of them into life with a press of his finger. And each time one comes to life, it’s showing people. People who are walking around a city that looks almost identical to my Tau City, except for the color scheme.
I walk over to Tyse, who is standing in front of the largest screen in the room. It’s at least ten times as big as the others and shows a view of the whole city from the perspective of the tower.
The god’s tower.
I know this because on either side are two more towers. In my world, the one on the right is the Maiden Tower and the one on the left is the Extraction Tower.