Episode 051| Sealed Mouths
Goran has Lika read the undercity map of Beyond the Line. Lika works out the system: rift mouths worth diving are marked with red circles — but a few carry a different mark, and no one goes down those. He crouches at one and reads it: stable, no hazard, full and untouched. It isn't a man-eating mouth — it's one someone has deliberately sealed off. Goran doesn't only sell rift goods down here; he also reserves rifts for 'the one up top' — and what that one wants isn't the goods, but the rifts themselves. #002 sits too deep for even him to reach. At the end Carson blocks Lika's way, then lets him pass — and on him hangs the same scent as the line on Goran's desk: Carson, too, is on that line.
Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 5 · 01:30 · Saint Tranya, Underground · Beyond the Line
The work Goran handed Lika kept getting odder, the deeper it went.
The first few runs it was mouths that had killed men. After that it was mouths that were hard to read. And after that, Goran simply gave up the spot in front of the wall of broken screens Beyond the Line, and left it to Lika.
That wall, Lika had seen when he first got into Beyond the Line. Dozens of stripped-out old screens pieced together, and on them a map of the underground that Beyond the Line had drawn for itself, line by line, dense with mouths running downward, every one marked. Earlier, he'd been hauled in under guard, and only had time for one glance. Now he stood in front of the wall as the man who read the map for Goran.
The more he read, the more he read out a set of rules.
The mouths came marked in two kinds.
Most of the mouths were marked with a red ring — some rings drawn thin, some thick, some circled once, some circled three times. Lika worked it out fast: the more times it was circled, the more men had died down there, and the more the goods were worth. The ones Carson took crews down were all circled three times.
But there were a few mouths that weren't marked with a red ring.
It was a small mark, one he couldn't make out at first. No ring, no red, just drawn there beside the mouth's number, quiet and still.
Lika pointed at one of them and asked the young man working the screens for him beside him: "What about this one?"
The young man — one of those who'd taken to hanging near Lika these past few hours, watching him read the mouths — followed his finger, and his face changed for a moment.
"That one, no one goes down," he said.
"Why? Too deep? Too dangerous?"
"Don't know." The young man dropped his voice. "But the ones with that mark drawn on them, nobody goes down. The ones who did go down, after, they weren't around anymore — not dead inside, just… gone."
Lika fixed the position of that mark in his memory.
Later that night, Goran sent him to read a new stretch of mouths. And in that stretch, there happened to be one with that mark drawn on the wall beside it.
Lika crouched down in front of that mouth.
By the young man's account, this should be a mouth that ate men. But when Lika reached his sense of bearings down into it, what he read made him frown.
[Rift · Layer 0 · Read]
[Structure: stable]
[Hazard source: none · below the average for goods mouths]
[State: intact · never harvested]Stable. No hazard source. Never harvested.
This mouth was safer than any of the ones Carson took crews down every day. The goods below it — not a single piece had ever been touched.
It wasn't a mouth that ate men. It was a mouth someone had deliberately left untouched, that no one was allowed to go near.
Lika stood up, the back of his neck gone a little cold.
The Beyond the Line he'd come to understand these past few hours had one iron law: where there were goods in a mouth, men went down. With the Source Stone this scarce, a mouth both safe and full of goods should be something men tore each other apart over. Yet this mouth lay here quiet and still, untouched, and even one as reckless as Carson gave it a wide berth.
Not because it was dangerous. Because someone had given an order: this one, leave it.
Leave it for whom?
Lika thought of that line on Goran's desk, the one running up to the high floors at the surface. He thought of Goran's words: someone who stands higher than I do.
What Goran did Beyond the Line wasn't only selling rift goods. Selling goods was the business out in the open, the thing that fed the few hundred mouths down here. But in the dark, he was doing something else for the one up top as well —
Reserving mouths.
Ringing off certain rifts, sealing them, letting no one touch them. Not for the goods inside, but for those rifts themselves.
These past few hours Lika had taken the whole undercity setup for a single trade — short on power, haul rift goods, work the margin. But this sealed-off mouth told him: beneath that trade, there was something else pressed down underneath.
What the one up top wanted wasn't goods at all. It was the rifts themselves. There was someone who stood higher than Goran, and through Goran, here under this city, one by one, he was gathering the rifts into his own hands.
What he was gathering them for, Lika couldn't yet read out.
But one thing came to him at once: #002.
He crouched back down and pressed his sense of bearings toward that sealed-off mouth, and then deeper still — pressed it down toward 2,300 meters in that direction. #002 was still there, dead below and a little to the south, signature L.K.S._Core. It was too deep, deep enough that even the one reserving these mouths hadn't reserved it.
What that one could reach were these shallow mouths. #002 lay where his hand couldn't reach.
Lika let out half a breath of relief in his chest — and at once drew it back in.
Because he realized he'd been crouching in front of this sealed mouth far too long.
He turned his head.
The young man working the screens for him was gone. The 2 men who were supposed to be on this stretch with him were gone too.
Only one man stood at the mouth of the passage, watching him.
It was Carson.
How long he'd stood there, Lika didn't know, nor how long he'd watched Lika crouching in front of this mouth no one was allowed to touch.
"What Goran told you to read," Carson said, his voice level, "doesn't include this one."
Lika stood up and dusted off his knees.
"I was just curious," he said. "A mouth full of goods, and no one goes down it."
Carson looked at him, looked for a long while. Then he did a thing Lika hadn't expected — he didn't call for men, didn't make a move, only turned aside and cleared the passage.
"Curiosity gets you killed fastest, Beyond the Line," Carson said. "Especially being curious about things you've no business being curious about."
Lika walked through the gap he'd cleared. As he brushed past Carson, he caught a faint smell on the man, one that didn't belong to the undercity — coming from the same direction as that line on Goran's desk.
Carson wasn't only a strongman who envied him.
Carson, too, was a man on that line.
【Ch. 051 End · Saint Tranya, Underground, Beyond the Line】
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