Page 23 of Godslayer
I follow, but pause just inside the door, trying to look at everything at once. It’s nothing spectacular—just a white-tiled hallway, really. But it feels… otherworldly. There’s a hum in the air. Like machines are working in some distant part of the station.
It’s all very… I don’t know. I don’t really have a word to describe the style of this place. Hard. But functional. There are white pipes running both left and right on the ceiling. There are even some coming down the walls and disappearing into the floor. Everything is covered in the same white tiles as the train tunnel outside, which reflects the light pouring out of lanterns that line the hallway at evenly spaced intervals. But these lights don’t appear to be powered by spark the way the ones in the Maiden District of Tau City were. The glow is mostly neutral white, with a bit of yellow.
“Which way should we go?” I ask, finding myself slightly out of breath from all of the excitement.
Tyse shrugs. “One way is as good as the other.” He chooses right.
I let go of his shirt—reluctantly—and follow. The hallway curves to the left as we walk and soon, we come to another door.
Tyse stops, his fingers gripping the handle of the door, and winks at me. “Moment of truth?”
“Do it,” I nod. Still a bit nervous, but forcing myself to sound brave.
The door must be very heavy because Tyse puts a lot of effort into opening it, and the moment the seal is broken, the noise of machinery is so loud, I see Tyse’s lips moving, but can’t hear him talking.
He starts pointing. Then grabs my hand and we enter the new room.
It’s massive. When I look up, it’s like being inside a tower, that’s how many floors there are above us. But it’s nothing like any tower I’ve ever been in. It’s dark, and wet—many pipes are dripping—and there is a lot of metal.
Metal stairwells, metal steps, metal railings.
There is a lot of glass as well. Massive containers—all empty—line every wall. They look like enormous jars. Each one has tubes coming out of it, which disappears into the walls.
The setup reminds me of the UpCity brewery Finn used to take me to in the Canal District that year I was part of the Extraction. Before I was chosen and sent to the Maiden Tower to live and my days were filled with duties. Only those vats weren’t made of glass, but copper. And they weren’t this massive or complicated.
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. Whenwe 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?”
