We Leapt Into the Sky

Chapter 17

The door to the console room slid shut behind her.

Kendra returned to the main chamber of the ruins and climbed the steps of the central platform. She found a secluded corner tucked behind the colonnade. There she sat against the warm yellow stone, resting her head in her hands.

"I don't understand," she said. "The machines saved me, but I don't know what they think I can do to help them."

As the hours passed, the machines failed to appear.

Kendra studied the ruins, following the blue markings that studded the buildings at eye level. The system that oversaw the caretakers had fed her data from nodes in the ruins—points in the circuitry where the machines collected information. She hadn't understood the data, but it seemed to be information about the condition of the individual buildings.

She held her palm to the blue marks, trying to activate them the same way the caretakers had done with the hidden doors. Every so often, she found a node. The data remained incomprehensible, but she was gradually able to grasp that the nodes connected in a network throughout the ruins.

Over the days that followed, she developed a rudimentary map. Kendra knew the main chamber well, and she understood that the caretakers' vents ran throughout the cavern walls. Noises and vibration came from an area higher within the plateau. Between the sounds and her new mental map, Kendra found her way through passages and behind the hidden doors that led to the cavern above.

It was a sprawling cave, though still smaller than the one below. Here, gray stone buildings rose from the floor. They weren't built from the golden stone from Asteracea; instead they were made from the grayish rock of the plateau.

The machines were busy extruding a plaster-like substance onto the floors. Slowly, they laid a new foundation. Kendra glanced between the existing buildings—they were familiar. The tallest structure was nearly identical to the one they'd found in the abandoned cavern far below, down to the intricate carvings and carefully sculpted stone decorating the windows. Several buildings were copies of those that had been cordoned off and left to deteriorate in the cave the machines had sealed away.

But these buildings were plainly created from the natural stone in this cave. They were new. As she watched them, the machines began to drill into the wall. The vibrations shook the floor, and the noise intensified, echoing until Kendra covered her ears and dashed away. The hallways rumbled, and she hurried to escape the din.

Why would the caretakers build replicas of the ruins? Were they so keen to avoid the corrosion that their computer system had spoken of that they'd let the original buildings be destroyed?

She returned to the console room; there was only one way to know. Kendra held her hand to the points of light on the console.

The white empty space reappeared before her, and she drew in a deep breath. "I've been to the cave where the caretakers are constructing new buildings," she said, translating her words to images. "Some are buildings I've never seen before, but others are replicas. Why?"

Images from that cavern filtered into view. Diagrams of buildings rotated in the air, while numbers and other incomprehensible data scrolled by.

Kendra pointed at the tall building with the most ornate carvings and stonework. "That one. I know I've seen another copy of that building in the cavern that used to be sealed. The storage capsule."

"Inaccessible due to corrosion," the system said.

"Corrosion, meaning those crystals. Isn't your purpose to preserve and take care of the existing buildings? Because they were transported here from far away, weren't they? I don't understand why you would wall off all those ruins and reconstruct them elsewhere."