Jay kept poking around the office-like space, trying to make sure he wasn’t missing something. The slatted wood panels that lined the room were alternatingly dark and light and it was only once he got closer that he realized that some of them were thicker than the others. On a hunch, he tried to slide one of the sections between the potential doorframe to the side the way he had the outer door.

  It opened soundlessly, as expected of a sliding door, revealing a room that could have been any office out of an 80s business building. There was a window stretching the length of it, looking out over a long drop that ended in a cityscape. The executive-style desk sat with its short end against the wall, as dusty as the carpet and everything else in the room had been.

  He rifled through the drawers briefly and found nothing but sludge and the occasional dead nest of bugs, dessicated corpses moving as he opened and shut the containers. There weren’t even writing utensils in any of them; the office might as well have never been used for all that he could tell.

  There were two more of the rooms tucked off the sides of the main space. The second was the same as the first but mirrored. The third was larger, nestled away at the very furthest corner from the entryway.

  And this room actually held something interesting. A pane of glass, no bigger than one of his hands, glowing the same blue as the default System boxes. It was like a cheesy science fiction screen. It seemed locked to a single display: a population count of the necropolis.

  Six hundred thousand dead people. The sheer idea was staggering. Apparently the necropolis had been inhabited when it was locked away, and not by a meager population. It explained the city being outside the window as well; that many people needed a lot of places to stay.

  What was even more interesting was that there were two living people here. Himself, presumably, but who was the other? Had Kallin locked someone else away down here? Maybe he’d have someone to talk to, at least; he couldn’t pretend that wouldn’t be a nice thing. As long as they weren’t hostile.

  They were totally going to be violent, weren’t they? He wouldn’t be anywhere near as lucky as to find someone who was actually a friendly face.

  The four other undead were a curious inclusion too. Alister was presumably one of them, currently riding back on Jay’s arm to get a look at the screen, but he had no idea what – or where – the others could be. If Kallin had actually thrown someone else in here, there were good odds it was another [Necromancer], so maybe those three were the other living person’s resurrections.

  The lone unliving being was obviously the shambling remnants of Mirdun. That didn’t take much thinking to put together. Jay had a brief flash of hope that maybe it – no, he, that separation wasn’t doing any good and he needed to be done with it – would meet up with the other person and kill them first.

  But he couldn’t stop his mind going back to the idea of six hundred thousand dead corpses. That was a sizable city’s worth of targets for [Resurrection]. It was like he could feel the spell whispering in the back of his mind, urging him to use it, to find every single one of them and bend them to his purposes.

  Logically, he knew it was a bad idea. Trying to use that many casts of [Resurrection] at once would riddle him with tumors. But the desire was still there, and for a second he could have sworn he saw his palms flash with green light.

  Agensyx felt like he wanted to say something, presumably about the count of Other types of life, but ultimately didn’t.

  The trio returned to the staircase and continued down. The third level looked to be relaxation spaces, full of plush red-cushioned couches and loveseats. Jay took a quick look around to make sure there weren’t hidden offices in this one too and moved on after finding that there weren’t. It really did just seem to be an oversized living room, still in the art deco patterns of the upper floors except in solid wood paneling and gold leaf.

  The next floor down was quite a few flights of stairs, far more than the last had been, for reasons that only became clear when the group found an opening into the main area. This floor was several orchards of six trees each, the decaying mush of years of rotting fruit forming a visible miasma in the air. There was some kind of barrier on the door, clear but impassible for the stench and whatever wafting rot would come along with it, which was probably the only reason Jay wasn’t throwing up right now.

  The stairs below the orchard’s landing split, one side a green downward chevron and the other a red upward one. Directions on which side to walk on, clearly, but the red side showed clear signs of something extremely large forcing their way down them.

  Was this where Mirdun was when you saw him from above? Jay asked Alister, restricting himself to mental speech to keep the warped creature from hearing.

  I believe I saw him one floor further up, the skeletonized parasite replied. But it appears he has continued downwards.

  Better than coming directly up to us, Jay said, and felt both of his companions agree.

  He hesitated to follow the warped Mirdun down, but as long as he had continued going down, everything would be fine. It wouldn’t make any sense for it to double back around.

  Jay took a peek over the edge to see if any of the unknown inhabitants were waiting for him and saw nothing. That was a relief. He’d half expected to be running straight into one of their clutches.

  The archway on the next floor led into open space. It was easily large enough that it could have been an exterior area, but Jay recognized it easily enough from the office window above: the entryway square of the city that formed the necropolis proper. The city had two more terraced levels, but what the difference was between them hadn’t been apparent from that far away.

  He couldn’t tell where the light was coming from, but it was present enough to reveal the dust hanging in the air. In shocking contrast to the floors above, the stuff was everywhere, all swirling like it had just been kicked up by a breeze. But there was no breeze, not down here, or at least not right now. So why was it moving?

  A hand landed on his shoulder. A voice whispered in his ear. “Third alley down the rightmost street. The orange door.”

  Both feelings vanished before Jay could even turn around. There was no sign anyone had been standing there.

  Did either of you hear that? he asked his companions.

  I felt nothing, Agensyx said.

  Nothing here either, Alister reported.

  Well, listening to random advice without looking into it had never gone wrong for him before. His memory helpfully threw a montage at him of every time doing so had directly caused him issues.

  How do we feel about following a suggestion from a random disembodied voice? Jay checked.

  Both snakes answered in unison: Bad.

  Are you sure? It was pretty direct instructions.

  Just because there is someone else alive in here does not mean that you should trust that their intentions are pure, Agensyx warned.

  Jay shook his head. That’s not what I’m doing. That was totally what he’d been doing, wasn’t it? At least to some degree. To even consider trusting a random voice that he had no information about implied some degree of trust. But it might be something useful.

  So test it, Alister suggested. Try following the first step of the directions and see if your Origin objects.

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

  That was actually a really good idea. Jay took the parasite up on his suggestion, focusing on the instructions and moving toward the furthest right path into the city.

  Deviation, Jay said.

  Then we do not follow it, Agensyx decided. Whoever it is and whatever their motivations, they will have to suffer our absence.

  He picked another street and took a step toward it.

  A third.

  The final one.

  Okay, what the fuck is this? Jay complained. Every direction is apparently a deviation.

  Agensyx thought for a second, then replied. I have never seen a situation in which every option is equally as bad as the others. Does the message change?

  No, it’s the same every time, like some lazy asshole is duplicating it, Jay said. No indication of which route is better or worse than any other.

  No guidance from the notification boxes meant he had to seek it out elsewhere. At least he had a source of other information now, freshly created. Maybe this was why his new ring had formed with such a hyperspecific effect.

  Jay thumbed the Ring of Divine Guidance, twisting it around his finger. He wasn’t honestly sure how to activate it but under the logic that it would probably work however he thought it should, given that he had created it, he followed his instincts. Thumbing the ring around one more time until the gem was facing the inside of his hand, he brought it up to his mouth and whispered two words: “Guide me.”

  Whether it was luck that he’d chosen the right method or his own expectations that shaped it, it worked. The gemstone flared with an almost tangible light that condensed into a single solid trail.

  It led right back into the column of rock that was the entry to the necropolis.

  Apparently the ring thinks we missed something, Jay said. The guidance wants us to head back up the stairs.

  Then we do so, Agensyx said.

  Alister concurred wordlessly.

  I don’t see how we could have missed anything.

  Goddammit.

  The confusion from both the snakes floated across their mental connection, but he just shook his head. This wasn’t something he could have explained, not until he actually knew what was happening.

  Your cousin? Also, how are you reading my thoughts like that?

  The white boxes combined with the thought reading threw a memory back up: the Asanti’s pillar, just after the book, when something that spoke in the same kind of boxes had done exactly that.

  Oh. Wait, that wasn’t a unique thing? There are more of you?

  What a fucking joke.

  Jay didn’t dignify that with a response. Nothing in its words were worth that; whatever this was could criticize him for being rude all it wanted, but the only other being he’d ever knowingly met that could talk through white-backed System boxes was the Unlife abomination. Maybe he’d apologize if this turned out to be something different. It didn’t seem likely.

  Alister was trying to get him to explain who he’d been talking to, but he just walked back into the stairwell. He’d explain it while they followed the path to wherever it led.

  *

  The route seemed to dead-end straight into the wall of the lobby on the topmost floor. The roadblock at least let him catch his breath after coming up the stairs again; even his enhanced Resilience wasn’t enough to keep him from getting a stitch in his side apparently.

  Is it a specific area of the wall that it’s pointing to? Alister asked.

  “No,” Jay panted. “Just straight into the wall.” It was at chest height too, and pretty directly in the center of the panel, so there was minimal chance it was pointing at a doorknob. Plus, he didn’t see one poking out.

  Unless it was meant to be a button. He checked for that, pushing his finger into the gap between the metal decorations, and nothing happened except for a tiny shift to one side. The innermost layer of the hanging framework that formed the angular art deco pattern was apparently loose.

  It really shouldn’t have slid that far to the side, not off such a light touch. Jay pushed it to the side with intent this time, moving every nested rectangle until it slid up against the one next to it, and nothing happened. Disappointing, sure, but everything slid two ways.

  He moved it back the other way and felt resistance growing as the individual pieces came closer to meeting their neighbors, as if they were catching on something heavy that he was then having to drag along with them. For all Jay knew, that was exactly what was happening, since when they locked into place on the other side, there was a gap left in the middle. A section of the wall beneath the decoration was missing, leading into the first truly dark space they’d seen so far in the necropolis.

  These people are very fond of their sliding doors, Agensyx commented.

  “Looks like it.”

  The trio each moved into the hidden hallway in their own way: one slithering, one riding, one walking. Portions of the wall lit up as they advanced, fading out behind them in equal measure, from a light source that would have been clearly magical even if [Sense Magic] wasn’t shooting off every time it happened. The main clues were the lack of pressure plates on the floor or anything else that could be triggering it, and the light carrying that feeling that he associated with magical effects.

  It always felt like the magical light should waver. It never did; not even a candle’s flame worth of flickering.

  The hall was shorter than he had expected and widened out into a large chamber that didn’t seem to have walls. It had clearly defined edges, just no walls. The space beyond where the floor ended was a deep, roiling darkness that was so black it seemed to eat away at the light within the room, and at the edges of Jay’s vision he could see other rectangles of flooring that matched this one for plain grayness.

  Of slightly more interest to him than the slate tiles of the floor was the crystal chandelier-looking thing hovering in the dead center of the room. Where a normal version would have had clear crystal, this one had a pattern of gold and green crystals that formed an intricate sphere. Each of the crystal shards were mobile, swapping places or tapping against the ones next to, above, or behind itself, the movements accompanied by flashes of light.

  Jay recognized the gold material. It wasn’t hard to figure out; he’d just been using a chunk of the same stuff to direct him here. And he had a sneaking suspicion that the green crystals were condensed necromantic magic. Clearly it was a day for finding out that he wasn’t the first at things: not the first Earth-style human to get shoved into this world and not even the first of his class.

  He wished he could get his hands on that binder again. With how much flawed information was in there, it deserved burning. And if afterlife middle management could get dismissed, Kalras deserved that too for letting the thing continue to exist.

  “I’m not the best judge of that,” Jay admitted. “I’ve been hiding around on the outskirts.”

  The chandelier didn’t seem inclined to elaborate on that.

  “Now who’s being rude?” Jay asked, trying to approach this situation from an angle he knew it had some understanding of. “I thought the whole point of this was for you to give me some answers.”

  The crystal shards stopped their constant movement for just a second at that, then they resumed at double speed. The gaps became deeper, allowing him to see the center of the structure, where a solid chunk of black crystal sat. Unlike the other types, Jay had no idea what that was. Maybe he’d make that the first question he asked.

  That wasn’t the response he had expected.

  Jay sighed. Getting those answers was going to be a pain.