After breakfast, the large room they all stayed in seemed to empty. One group, including Los’en, went out to hunt for food and potentially dangerous monsters that were too close, while another with Orwin in the lead headed up to take care of the animals and improve the above-ground area for better defenses as well as all the little things that were better done outside.

  That left Sophia, Dav, Taika, Ci’an, Lan’ti, Xin’ri, Volat, and five people whose names Sophia couldn’t immediately remember to explore the area. She knew they’d been introduced; Xin’ri and Volat each had an assistant and the other three were members of Lan’ti’s team who were there mostly to provide muscle and fight monsters if they found any.

  Lan’ti took them into the corridors before he started talking about what they’d found. “This place was stripped at some point. Normally, I’d say that was after the Breaking, when people needed anything they could get, but everything was taken. That’s not normal; unless there’s a settlement nearby, people don’t come back and strip the large stuff and even steal the stones that make up the building, but that happened here.”

  “There could have been a settlement nearby right after the Breaking,” Volat countered. It was obvious this was a well-worn argument. “We haven’t found anything, but it’s been a long time. It might have fallen and been overgrown, or turned into a Challenge. Sometimes those fall when they end.”

  Lan’ti shook his head. “Challenges only collapse when they’d have collapsed earlier if they weren’t a Challenge. That’s why most don’t fall.”

  “According to Rias Glitterink,” Volat said with a nod. “If you believe that translation. I’ve never been confident in its accuracy; Lilas has no feel for the poetry inherent in Old Kestii and always translates the language as if each word had only one meaning. That’s not true in modern English, much less Old Kestii. I don’t think she was talking about Challenges at all, at least not the way we mean them. There’s absolutely no evidence that they even existed before the Tower was broken.”

  Lan’ti shook his head. “You might be right about that, but it’s not just Rias who said Challenges don’t fail simply because they’re solved. Most don’t collapse. Challenge, Lair, Nest, Hollow … they all act the same way. I’ve been to places that were altered and when it’s over, it’s like it was before, or at least like it might have been after that much time.”

  “Well, then what do you think happened to the stuff that was here? Was it just taken away?” Volat waved at the room with the tents. “It’s not like anyone could take that much rock far. After the Breaking, all of the powerful Called were crippled; who would move it?”

  “Machines,” Sophia answered without really thinking about it. They’d found raised tracks that looked a lot like railroad tracks that were apparently difficult or impossible to damage elsewhere in the Skylands; that seemed like evidence of a heavily mechanized society to Sophia. It wasn’t like it was early railroad technology, either; impervious rails couldn’t be easy to make, so no one would make them without a reason. Sophia was pretty sure railroads back home still used steel, and that certainly wasn’t impossible to damage, even for a determined man with a maul. “Is there a rail line near here?”

  “Rail line?” Volat sounded curious. “What do you mean?”

  It took Sophia a solid hour to first describe the paired rails they’d seen near the Cloud Clan camp in the southern Skylands and then explain what she thought they were used for. Dav had a few additions of his own; Sophia remembered to mention railroads and subways but she hadn’t even thought about the possibility of an aboveground trolley.

  When they finished, Volat said he’d have to ask the outside team. He didn’t know if there was an old overgrown paired rail nearby, but they were common enough that he wouldn’t be surprised. Sophia was pretty sure that if there was one, Volat would change his theory only a little; if there was a rail line, it was possible that whoever stripped the ruins came from farther away, but that didn’t really help determine when it happened.

  With that, they continued deeper into the ruin. Volat mostly took over from Lan’ti whenever there were words etched in the walls, which was fairly often. Most of the time, they were exactly the sort of signs Sophia expected in a large building, room numbers and plaques that said things like ‘Allowed People Only’ or ‘Cleaning.’ Sophia didn’t have to work hard to figure out what those meant.

  They’d found several bathrooms, and their size reinforced Sophia’s idea that this was a place with a lot of people but not a place meant to serve large crowds at a time. Each one was a square room with a single obvious, if empty, toilet and a sink that didn’t work; if there was ever a trashcan or anything else in the room, it was long gone. Volat translated the sign on the door as ‘Relief,’ which didn’t seem terribly unreasonable even if it was not the word in modern English.

  Other than the restrooms, almost all of the different rooms were empty with very little sign of what they’d once held. Most of them were large enough that Sophia didn’t think they were offices, but they were too small to have held more than a handful of people at a time. The only thing Sophia could immediately come up with as a possibility for a large number of ten-by-fifteen rooms set on a long corridor was apartments, but the complete lack of bathing facilities made that very unlikely.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  All of the rooms had mysterious divots in the floor, often set in either rectangular or circular patterns. Lan’ti’s theory was that something had once been bolted to the floor, even if he couldn’t explain what. Sophia thought that sounded reasonable; the holes did seem to be about the right size for a bolt or other anchor of some sort. That made her think that there had once been some sort of heavy machinery in each room, but why would you have one machine in each room with ordinary doors and no good way to move stuff from one room to the next? It didn’t make much sense to Sophia.

  She grew more and more puzzled as they continued forward, until one of the people she didn’t know interrupted Volat’s description of what the stylized script used for the numbers on the doors probably meant about the people who used the rooms. Sophia had already tuned Volat out; she was pretty sure that the fact that they were all in the same font just meant that one person had picked it out or maybe that it was all made on the same machine, not that they were a rigidly uniform sub-society or whatever Volat was trying to say.

  “Shh. I think I hear something.” The woman in front had her hand on her sword but hadn’t drawn it yet.

  Volat immediately stopped talking.

  Sophia listened. For a long moment, there was no sound other than the breathing of the people around her, but then she heard it. A thump, followed by a scrape, then a pause. The thump, scrape, and pause repeated; she was pretty sure it was getting closer.

  “Let us handle this,” Lan’ti whispered to Ci’an, just loud enough for Sophia to overhear. “It sounds like there’s only one, so this won’t take long.”

  The woman in front moved forward slowly, taking care not to make any noise. She stopped at the next door and listened. The other members of her team, including Lan’ti, gathered around her. After a moment, she shook her head and moved forward just as slowly and quietly.

  Xin’ri stepped forward and placed herself between the unopened door and the other noncombatants. She held a large wand with a circular glowing piece of flat blue glass set into an ornate diamond-shaped fitting at the head; the other end of the wand was a sharp spike. It was nearly two feet long and obviously made of metal, so Sophia was pretty certain it would work as a weapon in its own right if whatever magic it helped Xin’ri with didn’t work. Sophia hadn’t seen anything like it in the Broken Lands and told herself that she really needed to talk to Xin’ri about it when she had the chance.

  The woman whose name Sophia didn’t know kept listening at doors and moving forward. When she got to the third door, she nodded slowly and gestured to the rest of her team to move the rest of the way forward. The others all readied themselves, then she grabbed the door and yanked it open in one smooth motion.

  The other two people on Lan’ti’s team charged through the doorway, closely followed by Lan’ti. The woman who opened the door stayed outside and watched.

  A series of thumps said something was happening. Sophia waited a long moment as she heard more noise, then started to move forward. Dav followed right behind her, while Ci’an waited a little longer before she followed. Sophia guessed that was probably because of her brother’s instructions, but Sophia was pretty sure they were still following them as long as they stayed out of the room.

  When she got to where she could see, Sophia stopped and stared. It wasn’t a fight; instead, it looked like Lan’ti and his teammates were using hammers to break up old bones. “What the heck?”

  “The apparitions here don’t disappear unless they’re beaten into itty bitty pieces,” the woman at the door said with a huge grin at Sophia. “They’re not really that threatening if there’s only one of them, usually, but they vary a lot. Some of them can be problems if they know we’re coming, so we always try to overwhelm them immediately, then they beat them until they dissipate. Ruins apparitions are like that.”

  The woman inclined her head to the side. “You’re Sophia, right? I’m Azalea. I know Lan introduced us all last night, but I doubt I’d have kept all of the names.”

  Azalea was tall, well over six and a half feet, probably closer to seven, and that was before the bronze-colored cow’s horns that crowned her head. Sophia guessed that she was probably an “elf,” since Sophia kept being mistaken for one and they didn’t look all that different. Azalea’s hair was darker and her ears were a bit closer to her head and her horns were a different shape and color, but none of that seemed all that important to Sophia. She would have had no trouble believing that the other girl was another half-dragon like Sophia if people in the Broken Lands knew what a dragon was.

  “Thanks, I did forget,” Sophia admitted. “This is normal? They seem to be taking a while. Surely there’s a better way?”

  Azalea shrugged. “Not that we know of. Apparitions are pretty annoying; they can be anywhere and they even reappear sometimes. The only place we haven’t seen them is the main camp, at least not since we cleaned them out originally. That was a big fight; it’s where we found out that leaving the ones that want to hang back until last is a bad idea. They’re not even worth any Wisps!”

  “What did they do?” Sophia still wasn’t entirely sure what they were, so she couldn’t even begin to guess.

  “Some kind of stunning attack. It completely knocked out several people and it was days before any of them woke up. They’ve all recovered, but Orwin took it especially hard; I think that’s why he doesn’t spend any more time underground than he has to.” By the end of her description, the smile had faded from Azalea’s face and she had a slight frown instead. It shifted back to a small smile a moment later. “But enough of that. I can’t really help much with the apparitions because they’re just bones; do you think you can?”

  There is some work I could do on that wand image, but it’s almost right. Azalea’s bow has … issues, but other than that the image came out well.