The Ring

When the wall finished crumbling, Nathan and the others stepped out of the entry box. Six men were waiting for them, crudely armored and toting metal spears — the sentries that Graham had spoken of.

"Names," one of them said. He was an older man, rough and grizzly and the largest of the sentries, standing at a height that dwarfed even Graham's. A thick book and a stubby pencil rested in his hands.

"Graham Rogsby."

"Wink Myers."

"Annie Mills."

The sentry's eyes moved to Nathan, who panicked under his stony gaze.

"That's Leaf," Graham said. He took a step forward, stealing the sentry's attention. "Can't remember his last name, but he's on Team Tinwolf — the one lead by Jack Rattler. Been like a corpse since we found him up there. Won't even say a word. I'm pretty sure something happened to his teammates."

Nathan caught on to his ploy. He made an effort to look as pitiful as possible, and with how fatigued he was, it was hardly a difficult task to accomplish.

The sentry looked him over, and his cold gaze softened just a touch. He flipped through his book and traced a finger over one of its yellowed pages.

"Leaf Bellings, first auxiliary of Team Tinwolf?" he asked.

Nathan gave a small nod, keeping his listless eyes set upon the ground.

"Did your teammates die?"

Nathan nodded again.

"That's all I need to know." He marked something down in his book. "I can have one of my men escort you to our barracks if you need some rest."

"We'll take care of him. It'll do him good to be around other sweepers," Graham said.

"Alright. The lifts on seventy-seven are broken, so use one of the other towers. Thank you all for your service to the Ring."

Nathan and the others started across a vast expanse of flat rock, moving toward the giant wall and its towers lurking in the distance. Hundreds of entry boxes cluttered the barren landscape, some of them crowded by sentries collecting the names of newly arrived sweepers. Above them, miles high, was the ceiling of the Underground, clutching enormous stalactites and legions of blue, twinkling lights. Pillars of earth rose up from the ground and pressed themselves against it, like the arms of Atlas holding up the world. He couldn't stop himself from looking around, gawking at the absurd scale of it all.

"They'll be pretty confused when they do the nightly census, I bet," Wink said. He seemed highly amused by the trickery they'd just engaged in. "One sentry marks a whole team down as dead, another has them marked down as alive."

"Definitely," Graham said. "We'll have people knocking on our door before long, asking who it was that came down with us. I'm sure we can make up a good lie, though."

Nathan watched Annie out of the corner of his eye. She had sleeked off a few minutes ago and was walking a good distance away from them.

"What about her?" he asked.

"Good riddance." Wink glared at her. "She never has anything nice to say about me. I'd like to see her try to draw a glyph."

"She's had it rough lately. I think the last thing she wanted to do was risk her life to save a stranger. And when that stranger claimed to be Nathan himself — " Graham grinned at Nathan — "well, that didn't exactly make things better."

"I never claimed to be the Nathan you guys are talking about."

"That's true, you didn't. You did say that you were from another world, though, and that fits the legend pretty well. It'll probably be enough for the Church to put you on that comfy-looking throne they've been holding onto for all these centuries."

"Imagine how Pastor Crags is going to react when Nathan shows up," Wink said through a fit of giggles. "I bet he'll finally croak."

Graham laughed. "That's probably the only thing that could kill that old man. I think even time itself gave up and just settled on making him uglier every year."

The three of them arrived at one of the towers of the wall, stood before the imposing size of it like ants in front of a castle. It was made of the same battered stone that formed the entry boxes, looking as though it had withstood countless sieges. A sign above its doorway informed them of its designation — tower number seventy-six. Annie had split from them entirely and entered a different one a few hundred feet away.

Upon entering, they came into a room with a staircase skirting along the walls, spiraling up the tower's impressive height. In the center of the room was a glyph of two circles, its largest one big enough to park a car in.

"Why did the gate glyph have five circles?" Nathan asked, observing the giant glyph. "This one only has two, just like the other glyphs — the tellies."

"Because of the order containment principle," Wink blurted out as though the question had an expiration date. "First-order glyphs only need one circle to hold their magic while third-order glyphs need three. If a glyph doesn't have enough circles, the magic will burst free before completing its instructions — the script, I mean. If it has too many, it won't be able to reach the perimeter of the last circle to fully trip; it'll fizz and burn the script up. See, a trip minimum is calculated by — "

"Nathan save us, now you've got him started," Graham said. A moment after, he looked at Nathan and laughed. "Sorry, but it might take me a while to stop using your name like that. Sort of didn't think you existed until an hour ago."

"Like I said, I'm not that Nathan."

"Yeah, yeah, sure. Let's just stomp the telly and hop a lift. The sooner we get back, the sooner we can get home and crash. I'm beat."

The trio stood atop the center of the glyph and stomped their feet on it. The rush hit Nathan, but he handled it well, coming out onto the top of the tower with only a slight stumble. Graham gave him a thumbs up.

After regaining his balance, Nathan moved to the tower's railing.

"Holy . . . " He leaned against it, eyes wide, mouth dumbly agape.

The Underground rested before him, easily the most astounding sight he'd ever seen. The walls and towers formed a circle, wrapping around the top of a great hole in the world. At the hole's center, all those miles down and miles away, sat the apotheosis of all cities — an ocean of buildings with streets of electric blue light slithering through them like eels. It was so absurdly large that his mind rejected its reality.

"Welcome to the Underground," Graham said, moving beside him. "That's the Ring down there. See the walls running along the outside of it? Yeah, I know — as though there weren't enough circles everywhere else."

"It's incredible." Nathan's eyes were fixed upon the Ring's lights. "How far down is it?"

"From here, about three miles," Wink said. He leaned against the railing by Nathan's side, mimicking his posture. "From the city? Nobody knows. The script on the gate keys is way too advanced for any geek to decipher, and performing tests would be way too expensive."

"Gate keys?"

Graham took the rectangle from his pocket, pulling it out by its chain. The thing was no more than a piece of metal now, devoid of the glow that Nathan had last seen it with.

"This is a gate key. It contains fifth-order magic in it — well, it did before we used it all, at least. Without this little guy, Wink's gate glyph would have fizzed." He rubbed a finger across the surface of it. "There's normally a small glyph right here to unlock the gate and use up the excess magic from the chalk. Fades away after it's used, though."

Wink tugged on Nathan's shirt to steal his attention from Graham. "You know, I could teach you how to draw glyphs if you want. Takes a while to get good at it, but it isn't too hard."

Doing magic. Nathan was filled with a child-like excitement at the thought, like Christmas had come early and the tooth fairy had slipped an extra dollar beneath his pillow.

"I'd like that," he said. What he really wanted to do was jump and shout with joy, but he felt it might have done injury to his image.

"Awesome, okay!" Wink hopped away and darted into one of the tower's three lifts — a glorified cargo container with a few rectangles cut out of it to serve as windows. "Come on, no time to waste, let's go! If we get to the Ring quickly, we'll have time to draw a glyph or two, Nathan."

Nathan moved into the lift as quickly as his dignity would allow. That is, to say, he bolted into it quicker than a rabbit being chased by a hound. He threw himself onto a red, cushioned seat by the window and viciously tugged at the seatbelt for a few minutes before managing to fasten it.

"I'm always the one who has to pull this thing, I swear," Graham said, shaking his head. He walked to the front of the lift and yanked on a rusted lever, causing the lift to rock forward and groan. Then, quicker than lightning, he threw himself into one of the front seats and threw on his seatbelt.

"Keep your head out the window, Nathan," Wink hollered from a seat across the aisle. He wore a smile the size of Texas on his paper-white face.

Nathan peeked out the window, and the lift groaned. Then it began to move. Very quickly.

The hunk of metal shot down the taut cable as though it had been propelled by rocket thrusters, going fast then faster, picking up speed as it kept on its sharp decline. All Nathan could hear was the shrieking cable and the air blowing against his face, forcing him to squint as he watched their rapid descent.

The Ring came closer every second. The lift swooped down toward it, easing the sharpness of their angle, slowing just a touch. Behind it, the wall and its towers had become faint and small, the ceiling just a brown, starry sky. When it came just a hundred feet above the ground, its cable steered it straight, pulled it harshly from its fall and launched it forward, directly toward the Ring. It shrieked for another half mile, then slowed to a whine and finally stopped.

"I think my heart is getting tired of me abusing it," Nathan said, running a hand through his messy hair. He unfastened his seatbelt and took a few cautious steps away from the seat.

Wink leapt up like a fire burned his bottom. "Come on, Nathan, we've got to get home to draw glyphs. Hurry, hurry, hurry!"

"You see what you did?" Graham asked, walking down the lift's narrow aisle. "He'll be like this all night. Won't shut up until he passes out or you put some sleep powder in his duck tea."

"Duck tea?"

"You've never had duck tea?" Wink said, the words coming out like an explosion. "We have a bunch in our fridge — three whole cases. And we have a huge table where we can play warbles. Have you ever played warbles?"

"What's warbles?"

Graham rubbed a hand against his face. "Oh, now you've really done it."

They exited the lift and came onto a platform of elevated earth — a sort of crude stop with slots for the tower's three lifts. While Wink discussed advanced warbles strategies with Nathan, Graham hit a glyph on the front of the lift that sent it screeching back up the cable in a trail of sparks, perhaps even faster than it had come down.

Other lifts could be seen around them, racing down their cables to their own earthen stops. People disembarked from them, dozens of them, all carrying stuffed rucksacks on their weary backs. They started down the paths of well-trodden dirt that led to the distant Ring — the great edifice of the Underground, sitting like a truncated pillar in the midst of a vast circle of dirt and rock. The trio started toward it as well, keeping a slow pace for Nathan's sake.

The sight of the Ring became increasingly intimidating as they drew closer, looming over them like a colossal, patchwork god. It was a cylinder of a size fit only for a mathematics textbook — a mass of stacked cyclopean stones, each the height of a man and possessing the battered, crumbling look that seemed to be the signature of the Underground.

"It just doesn't seem possible," Nathan said, unable to tear his eyes from it. "I mean, how tall are these walls? What's the diameter of this place? Is it a perfect circle?"

"Seven hundred and twelve feet, twenty-one miles, and yes." Graham grinned upon seeing Nathan's raised eyebrows. "The Sector D wall foreman is a good friend of mine. Guy never shuts up about the walls."

"It's true — Tubs only ever talks about the walls," Mink said.

Graham led them to what looked to be the Ring's only gate — a thick, rusted rectangle the size of a school bus. A very diverse and dense crowd was hanging out in front of it, and Nathan struggled not to stare at its nonhuman members.

"Other sweepers," Graham explained. "When the gate opens, gatemen will come out to log us, make sure none of us are criminals trying to sneak in. They'll ask us for our names like the sentries did, but I know these guys — I can get you past them. Well, unless it's Lily, but she isn't working today."

"Graham." Wink tapped the device on his wrist. "Three days after the Red. Lily is working today."

The gate rolled up like a garage door, screeching louder than a thousand nails being scraped against a chalkboard. Some armored men and women walked through, scabbards on their hips and clipboards in their hands. One of them honed in on Graham.

"Nathan save us," Graham muttered.