NaNoFiMo, or National Novel Finishing Month, takes place during December – it’s for all of the people like me who didn’t quite get it done, and isn’t really any sort of official anything. My NaNoFiMo finishes this Saturday. The war arc has officially begun! Oh, there are some exciting things about to happen.

Word Count: 103,396

Graham couldn’t believe that the bullet had gone through the scientist’s fetch. The man had been bluffing in hopes Curie wouldn’t shoot him!

The room was silent now, but not for long – all three travelers knew that within moments there would be more people seeking out their location, and it was only a matter of time before all of them were captured and forced into The Collective. To this effect, it was their immediate decision to flee City Square.

“But what about Maiya?” Graham asked before they left.

“She is gone, undoubtedly merged with The Collective completely after this long. Unless she’s found her way into a fetch, which I doubt, then there’s nothing any of us can do. We must go.”

Graham smiled. “You’re not much different from the Adam I used to know after all.”

“I’m still a terrible author. I don’t know why I picked that as my profession! Writing was truly never my calling,” he said, and ran towards the light elevator.

“Wait!” Ames said. “Don’t go anywhere just yet. I have a feeling they’ll have guards stationed at the ground level. We should go elsewhere – any other way out of here is better than ground level. I know we can’t just jump out the building, but—”

“Talos,” Graham said.

“What?”

“We can go to Talos. The shipments on the lowest floors are going somewhere, because they sure as hell aren’t staying in City Square. We hitch a ride on a few of the containers through a portal to Talos and we’re home free.”

“That’s crazy. What if we don’t survive the trip? Last time we were both knocked out – I want to go home to Talos just as much as you’d like to go home to Earth, but risking our lives to go back to a dangerous place is madness. We should solve the shipping problem and stop the containers from going through the portal, if anything. That’s what we came here to do.”

“But you heard the man. Even if we stop the shipments, Talos has enough materials and knowledge to do it all alone. It’s beyond our control now, Jess. If there’s any hope of saving Talos, we’d need to convince the world leaders not to destroy it, and then subsequently convince The Collective that it doesn’t need to eat the damned planet to stay alive. Jessica, he said Cydian forces are already in Talos – there’s probably going to be a war. I’m sure not everybody on Talos is going to be like Ford and run away. We need to get people out of there.”

“There aren’t enough portals on Talos to do such a thing.”

Graham knew Ames was right, and could offer no solution. He initially thought that they could gather several corpus locks from the building and take them to Talos with him, but The Collective had shown him that they were all broken with the exception of the much larger shipping portal’s lock. “Then we’ll just have to go and make due with what we have. It’ll work out – there’s no other choice. We either go to Talos to escape this mess, find a portal to Earth, or face whatever’s waiting for us down on the lower floors. Take your pick.”

“There aren’t any portals to Earth we can get to without going through the main entrance,” said Curie. “I know of only one – the one I used to get back and forth between the Equation and an area nearby my house on Earth. And that’s not even on this country; nothing is on this country but that one portal to Talos, I’d wager. At any rate, none of us can die.”

“I don’t want to be sent back to The Collective,” Graham said. “I’d consider such a thing worse than death – losing my free will is certainly more than an adequate substitute!”

“Then we’re going to Talos?”

“I suppose so,” Ames said.

“Alright then,” Graham began. “I don’t think it matters what floor we go to, so long as we’re on one of the lower floors with moving packages. The robotic arms are carrying them to some distant location within the building; if we can manage to each hop on a container and ride it to the portal, then we’ll probably be safe. My bet is that the robotic arms go through the portal to an equivalent shipping facility on Talos, but I’ve got nothing to back that up. Either way, I think the trip will be safe enough – given that I haven’t died after traveling twice, I’m hopeful I won’t die after a third time.”

Ames was quite scared, but agreed with his plan. Graham set the light elevator to a negative floor number, one low enough that there would be minimal surveillance over the area, and stepped into the bulge of light. In a flash he was gone; Ames and Curie soon followed.

They emptied out onto an unfamiliar floor also filled to the brim with containers, which in turn were filled to the brim with weaponry and supplies for Talos. Graham thought about prying one of the containers open and grabbing each of the group members a mu gun, but it was clear this wasn’t the time, and it was unclear whether or not Graham even had the time to open the container, a lengthy process requiring incredible amounts of strength if one did not know how to properly open the fetch containers. He decided to leave the issue alone.

The only ceiling was the floor directly above, and because of this the trio could look up until a multitude of floors blocked their view further. Down below was the usual deep violet pit, a bottomless well filled with floor upon floor upon floor, stacked with crate upon crate upon crate. Along the walls leading down into that void crawled the robotic arms, safely carrying containers into the abyss.

They never crossed over to the floor. They always came down the walls already carrying containers. What were the containers, then, on that floor for? They merely sat around, wasting space. But this meant that the only way to ride one of the robotic arms was to jump over the border of the floor and onto the moving container, a dangerous attempt considering City Square’s bottomless abyss. Yet without any options, the group decided it was best to simply jump.

The containers never went any direction by straight down; at the very least, Graham was reassured that if he jumped, he would land on a container before slipping off and falling to his imminent death, resulting in his assimilation into The Collective. Recalling his frightening, yet brief, experience within the network, he resolved that there was no possibility of him missing his jump. He intended to make full use of the abilities of his fetch to land properly, and advised Ames to do the same. Curie was too kindhearted to tell them that fetches lacked any sort of magical jumping abilities, but saw what sort of confidence it brought the two world travelers.

“This is ridiculous,” Graham said. “I’m really going to jump?”

“It’s your plan,” Ames said, looking down into the violet void. “We still don’t know if the arms make a sharp turn somewhere to enter into the portal. Heck, the containers could be leaving the building and going up to another floor. The portal might have been on the top floor, not o one of these bottom ones.”

“We have no way of knowing that. This is the best we can do; not even I know where it is,” said Curie, frightened by the leap across the abyss. He reminded himself that these situations were the very reasons he did not often partake in exciting situations, for these situations were almost always deadly to some degree, and returning to The Collective was not his plan. For all he knew, Graham had found out his deeper secrets – secrets that, if exposed, might have destroyed Graham’s trust in the man, not that it hadn’t already been eroded to a shell of its former girth by all of the lies he had perpetuated in order to conceal his identity throughout the journey.

None of them could find the nerve to jump, and simply stared at the glistening glass containers for several minutes, worrying that they would never escape City Square alive. Through all Graham and Ames had experienced, this simple jump was, for one reason or another, the most frightening event of all. There was nothing to force them over the edge any longer; it was their will and their will alone. They waited for some guards, or perhaps some scientists, to storm the room with guns and force them to jump off the ledge and onto one of the fast-moving containers, but this never occurred.

Their will power was the only force making them jump. After at least ten minutes brooding over the situation, Ames stepped up to the edge of the room and looked down. “I’m going,” she said to Graham and Curie. “I’ll see you all on the other side. Don’t chicken out.”

She waited for the next container to whiz by, and jumped onto its curved, polished surface, nearly slipping, but saving herself by gripping onto the mechanical arm. Down into the void she went, until her figure was out of view.

Graham stepped up next, and waves goodbye to Curie. “You’re a terrible liar,” he said. “You could write if you really wanted to. You just needed to give it some effort. I’m surprised you don’t. With all of the knowledge available to you on Cydia, you do nothing. In fact, you spend your time avoiding it, something I truly can’t understand. If I don’t make this jump, the first thing I’d better learn in The Collective is that you’re writing the world’s foremost literary masterpiece.”

Graham saw the container fall quickly in front of him and jumped; Curie stared at the man’s body as it descended into the void, and watched helplessly as Graham lost his footing on the container and slipped right off.

Graham freefell into the void, but was not afraid, and did not even scream. He accepted his fate, that this one missed jump would cost him his consciousness, his mind, and his free will. Only when his freely falling body passed by the slow-moving Ames did he shed a single tear.

Ames, surprised and frightened to see that Graham had missed the jump, called out his name. “James!” she cried, clutching even tighter to the robotic arm so as not to suffer the same fate. “James, dammit!”

But he was long gone, out of view. By now Curie had also made the jump, and stuck his landing quite well. Only Graham knew between the three what was really at the bottom of the bottomless void – and why it was really bottomless. As his mind became more and more frightened, it became less and less aware of itself. Graham, no longer able to see either Ames or Curie, slipped out of consciousness, expecting his death to follow shortly.

Ames was about to jump after him, hoping she could do something to save him, but Curie shouted down to her, “Don’t do it, Jessica! If you jump, we could loose you, too. Let him go, there’s nothing that can be done for him. I have faith that he’ll be alright; James is resilient that way.”

Ames looked down into the onyx abyss and sobbed. She wanted to dive in after him, to grab him and hold him and keep him safe, knowing that it would instigate the exact opposite, and instead of one dead traveler there would be two. So she let Graham continue to fall. When she heard his screams disappear as he slipped out of consciousness she assumed he’d died, but then the entire building grew darker. The robotic arm was taking the container deeper into the abyss, where there was no light.

Ames felt a pulling sensation, not unlike freefalling – a familiar sensation she hadn’t felt since she’d first arrived in Cydia. The feeling provided by the presence of a portal.

She looked at the bottomless abyss, which was not really bottomless. Countless shipping containers and robotic arms fed themselves to the darkness at the bottom of City Square, yet none returned. They were returning from somewhere else – but how? And from where?

From Talos.

At once, Ames relaxed and let the container carry her beyond the abyss. Within a minute it began passing through total darkness, the subtle pull of gravity emanating from the air around it, and Ames slipped into her own world far away from Cydia, far away from Talos – away from anywhere, followed soon after by Curie several containers above. And the two continued to drift along in their unconscious state, surrounded entirely by the beautiful world of ebony.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

Wake up.

Goddammit, James, wake up!

He was completely unconscious – but Ames couldn’t figure out how this was possible. Couldn’t the fetches prevent knockouts? No, there was nothing that could have survived the portal without losing consciousness. Ames felt as if her entire body had been turned off while she’d gone through the portal, and that it had only recently turned back on. She worried about the safety of her fetch, but was reassured when Curie told her that she should be safe and sound. The slow and subtle churning noise of Carnot engines around the stance facility lulled her into a calm state.

Yet Graham still wouldn’t wake up.

“I have a feeling his mind is temporarily separated from the fetch’s mainframe. He’ll wake up soon enough; it can’t leave the fetch. We should get him somewhere safe, although I doubt there’s anything like that around here. So this is Talos, huh?”

Curie looked around at the building, a strange mix of Cydian and Talosian architecture, possibly a result of its close proximity to the portal and a high Cydian influence coming through the abyss. A good portion of the building was destroyed – lit on fire, blown up, the works – and any incoming containers filled with supplies crashed into a burning pile of debris on the far end of the building, which appeared to be a high-tech storage facility. Several workers lay dead on the floor, some next to containers, and others in the middle of the room.

Ames looked back at Graham’s unconscious body. “You have to wake up,” she said. But his body remained still – she had no choice but to pick him up and run with it. “Curie, I’ll carry the body. If we’re in Talos, I should be able to figure out where we are. There’s always a map somewhere.” Dammit, where’s Marcus when you need him? she thought. Hoisting Graham’s body upon her shoulders, however, significantly slowed her down. Curie took the body and told her to continue ahead, that he would find a safe place to rest Graham while they scoured the area to learn about Talos’s current condition.

They knew at least one fact: Talos was running out of time. As they stepped out of the destroyed shipping facility knowing that the leaders of Talos wouldn’t be receiving any more weaponry or materials, not without getting burned or killed by a mysterious force at the very least, they saw in the distance a city glimmering gold. Yet Ames knew that this golden city, which greatly resembled her oft regretted home in Lanford, was not Lanford City. Ford’s city construction projects had gained massive headway in her short absence. She paused, afraid to trek across the underdeveloped green plains to the unknown city.

The ground began to shake, and Ames heard gunfire. “Get him out of here!” she said to Curie. “I’m going to that city. It shouldn’t be more than a few hours; once I know where we are, we can figure out how to approach the situation. I’m not letting them get away with this like they did with the rest of my friends.”

Curie carried Graham away, who was dreaming about Wheat. To his unconscious mind it felt as though Wheat were attempting to contact him, just as he had done not too long ago on Cydia. He saw Wheat’s mechanical, pipe-ridden face appear to him, saying, “The Confederacy is near. Approach Gorom, find Marcus.” Wheat kept repeating, telling Graham to find Marcus, as if a mapmaker could solve all of his problems.

Curie carried Graham’s body to a nearby ledge that hid the body from view. The rumbling came from air ships, more than ten of them, flying low above the plains and shaking up the wind, which in turn provided a heavy stream of dust that pierced Curie’s eyes. Tanks, hulking machines lined with brass the liked of which Curie had never seen before, rolled along in the distance.

Whatever was going on, it had been doing so for a long time – at least since Graham arrived in Cydia.

On the path to the city, Ames was running into troubles of her own. Tanks blocked the entrance to this Lanford City clone, and knights roamed the area everywhere. Not armed with any sort of weapon, there was nothing she could do to get by them – her only recourse was to attempt to enter peacefully, something she was sure would result in her death. Reluctantly, she walked up to one of the knights and asked them if it would be possible to enter the city.

Of course, the answer was no.

But Ames was persistent, “Please, sir, one of my relatives lives in that city. I simply must enter.”

“A relative?” the crimson knight responded. “That’s a lie if I’ve ever heard one. Get lost, before I have to use force.”

“What kind of city is this, anyway?”

“Miss, I asked you to leave.”

“I told you that I can’t leave. I have to enter the city; it’s very important. My grandmother—”

The crimson knight, whose face was partially covered by the armor’s metal mask, scoffed through the metal at Ames and called his friends over. “You hear that? Her grandmother. What a little bitch. Are you lost?” His tall figure careened over Ames’s body, inspecting it for weapons. “Not even got a weapon. You’re not even worth my time.”

As the knight turned away, Ames reached out with her right arm and grabbed a hold of his shoulder. Before he had time to react she had spun the knight around and ripped off his helmet and began punching his freshly exposed face. His finely chiseled features at once turned to blood, and with her bloody fist raised high she dropped the knight. “The rest of you are next if you don’t let me into this city.”