The first thing that came back was sound.
Not cleanly, sound arrived the way it always did when the body was deciding whether or not to bother being conscious, in fragments, in layers, in the wrong order. There was a low, constant vibration somewhere beneath him, felt more through the stone than heard, like a sleeping giant's pulse.
There was the faint metallic song of something turning in a slow current of air. There was breathing, two people, maybe three, at different rhythms, and underneath that, closer, a small sound that his brain could not immediately classify, shallow and fast and effortful, like something working very hard at a simple task it had lost the ability to do simply.
Then the coughing took over and thinking stopped being an option.
It came from somewhere deep in his chest, from whatever reservoir his lungs had apparently been filling while he was absent from the business of being alive, and it arrived without warning or permission, one massive, galvanic convulsion that threw him partially upright and expelled water he hadn't known was there across the stone floor in a sound that he would have found deeply embarrassing if he'd been in any state to have opinions about it.
Then another. Then the gasp that followed, the body's argument that this, yes, this, breathing, was the only agenda worth having, everything else could wait, and then a longer, lower cough, and then, at last, the air moving in and out of him in the way it was supposed to.
Ruben stayed upright, hunched forward with his forearms braced on the edge of the cot, and breathed.
His eyes were open. He knew this because he could see his own hands, dark against the pale weave of the bed-covering, and he could see the floor where the water had landed. Everything beyond that was blurred at the edges, wavering like a scene glimpsed through imperfect glass, warm amber light, low ceiling, the brown shapes of furniture, the smell of...
He registered the smell and his mind went sideways trying to process it.
He knew the smell of a very cold winter, of bus exhaust, of his father's apartment, of the particular damp cold of storm drains and the chemical bite of industrial cleaner and the dry, slightly electrical smell of Ostara's cities. This was none of those things. This was something deeply, almost violently organic, pressed herbs, mineral-cold stone, something faintly fungal and rich like turned earth, and underneath all of it something sweet he couldn't name, a bioluminescent sweetness, the smell of things that made their own light.
He blinked, and blinked again, and the room came into focus by degrees.
Two people.
One was old. Small and grey-haired, with dark blue eyes fixed on him from a kneeling position to his left with the alert, assessing calm of someone who had made a career of watching people regain consciousness and was not surprised by any of it. She wore an apron over working clothes, and her hands, presently resting on her knees, were the hands of someone who used them constantly, capable and unhurried.
The other was a kid. Maybe fourteen, maybe the same age as him, maybe younger. He was sitting against the wall between the two cots with his knees drawn up, and he was staring at Ruben with enormous, wide-set eyes that caught the room's amber light and held it, and across both cheekbones and the bridge of his nose he wore smeared markings, dots and curved lines in a faintly luminescent pigment, that glowed very softly in the room's dim warmth.
He had the look of someone who had decided, approximately two seconds ago, that he was witnessing something significant, and was trying to play it cool with limited success.
Ruben opened his mouth.
Coughed again instead. A shorter one this time, but deep and rattling, and he pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and thought, coherently, for the first time, where.
Where is this. Where am I. This is not, this is not anywhere I know.
He was going to ask that. He had the question assembled and ready. But his eyes, moving across the room in the automatic inventory his brain always ran, exits, threats, people, objects, landed on the second cot.
Oscar.
The word wasn't quite a thought. It was more primitive than that, a recognition that arrived not in language but in the stomach, a lurch of something that pulled him upright before he'd made any decision to move.
He got off the cot too fast and the room tilted hard to the left, his bare feet finding cold stone, and he grabbed the wall with one hand and crossed the narrow space in two stumbling steps and crouched beside the second cot, hands hovering over the small boy's shoulders without quite landing, not wanting to touch, afraid of what touching might tell him.
Oscar's chest was moving. That was the first thing. Rising and falling in that rapid, shallow way, too fast, but moving, and his face was flushed and damp from the cool cloths folded at his wrists and nape, and there was colour in his cheeks, too much colour, the wrong kind, fever-bright rather than living, but there was colour.
"Is he..." Ruben started, and his voice came out wrong, rough from the water and the coughing, stripped of the flatness he usually kept it at. He stopped and tried again. "Is he alright?"
He looked back at the two of them. The old woman and the boy.
The old woman was already moving toward him, settling beside the cot with that economical ease, one hand going to Oscar's forehead in a practiced check.
"He is fighting," she said, which was not the same as yes but was not no either, and Ruben understood from her tone that she was being precise rather than evasive. "The fever is still high but it has not climbed further in the past hour. His body is working." She looked at Ruben directly, her dark eyes level. "I need to know what was put into him. What was he given, and how."
Ruben straightened slightly. His mind was still sluggish at the edges, waterlogged in a way that had nothing to do with the lake, and he pressed the heel of his palm against his sternum once, a private reset, and tried to think clearly.
"I don't know exactly," he said. "Not the specific compound. Someone..." He paused, because the sentence a man was using him as a biological weapon required a context he did not have the energy to provide right now. "Someone was messing with his Ego. Suppressing it artificially and then forcing it to activate. The drug was part of that, keeping him sedated, keeping his ability from triggering without their say-so. It wasn't just one thing. It was a mix of stuff."
As Ruben got to think on it more, he was more and more disgusted by how cruel Paul was to anyone let alone a boy that was only eight years old.
The old woman was quiet for a moment, absorbing this with the neutrality of someone who had learned to receive terrible information without letting it interrupt her function.
Then she looked up.
"His Ego," she said.
The boy against the wall, Fenn, had gone very still. Not the stillness of boredom but its opposite, the stillness of someone who has just heard a word they recognise from somewhere important.
"His Ego?" Fenn said.
They were both looking at him. Not with the blankness of unfamiliarity, that would have been easier to read, but with something more specific. Something between recognition and shock, the expression of people who knew the word and were surprised to hear it from where it had come from.
Ruben straightened. He nodded once.
The old woman's expression shifted. The clinical composure remained in her hands, in the set of her shoulders, but something moved through her eyes, something old and weighted and not quite grief but in that country. She looked down at Oscar's sleeping face, the round, childish features, the tension that lived in them even now, the involuntary furrow between his brows as though even unconscious he was braced for something.
"So young," she said. Quietly, to no one in particular. The way a person speaks when they are saying something they have thought many times and are finally saying aloud. "For a child to have already stood at that threshold, to have looked into the dark and come back wearing something of it." She exhaled slowly through her nose. "The world asks too much of its children."
Ruben said nothing. He was looking at Oscar too.
He had thought that before. In different words, in no words at all, standing in Konrad's dark hallway with Oscar's small weight against his side. He didn't need to say it now.
"He will live," the old woman said, returning to the practical with the ease of long habit. "He needs proper stabilisation, there is a facility here, in the city, better equipped than this room. Once he has cooled further and his breathing has steadied, he can be moved safely. Perhaps in two hours. Perhaps four. I will know when I see it." She looked at Ruben. "Can you tell me more about the compound, anything at all? Colour, smell, the delivery method?"
"Needle," Ruben said. "Clear liquid, as far as I saw. The smell," He thought of the room in the sewers, the clinical reek of it, the particular wrongness. "Chemical. Not medicinal. I don't really know how to explain it."
She nodded slowly, filing this.
Ruben turned to face them both fully. He was still unsteady at the edges, he could feel it, the slight unreliability of his own balance, the faint tremor in his hands that he kept still through will alone, but he squared his shoulders and dipped his head, a proper bow, low and held.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you." He looked at Fenn, whose eyebrows went up slightly in apparent surprise at being included. "Whoever you are. Thank you."
He straightened.
And then the thought he'd been keeping at the periphery, the one he'd been refusing to look at directly, came forward.
Corbin.
The Clock Tower. The lake. Lance's hand dropping, that terrible downward pull, the pressure of something vast and indifferent collapsing the sky into a point, and then water, dark, cold, absolute, and then nothing. And he had woken up here. On a shore. Alone.
He moved fast, too fast for the state of his balance, and caught himself on the doorframe with one hand, turning back to face them.
"The shore. Where you found us," He stopped. Us. "Was there anyone else? When you found us, was I the only one, or, were there others? Other people on the bank, in the water, anything?"
Fenn's brow drew together and he looked at his grandmother. The old woman studied Ruben's face with that same inquisitive, measuring stillness.
"Just the two of you," she said carefully. "The child and yourself. The shore was empty otherwise."
Ruben's jaw tightened. He absorbed this without letting it into his face.
"Alright." His voice was level. "And the city, where exactly am I? Which district?" He was already running the geography, thinking about exits and paths and the fastest route between the western lake shore and the Clock Tower's likely debris field. "I need to know which part of Brumália I..."
He stopped because of Fenn's face.
The boy had tilted his head to the left with the expression of someone hearing a word in a foreign language that they are fairly confident they have misheard.
"Brumália?" Fenn said.
The old woman looked at Ruben with both eyebrows raised, very slowly, the way you raise eyebrows when you are not surprised by something but feel the moment requires the gesture. She repeated it in a tone of deliberate, gentle precision, the way a teacher repeats a student's answer back to them when the answer is not wrong but is also not what was asked...
"Brumália."
And then, instead of elaborating, she looked at him, just looked at him, in that particular way she had of looking, as though she were reading something written very small, and tilted her head to one side.
"You are from the world above," she said. Not a question. The inflection of someone completing an equation. "And most likely from Ostara."
Something in the way she said Ostara, the quality of the syllables, the particular tone, was not neutral. It was not hostile either. It was the careful tone of someone who has learned, through long experience, not to let their first reaction be the one that shows.
Ruben looked at her.
"What do you mean, the world above?" He heard the odd emphasis as he said it himself, heard it land differently than he'd intended, and a slow, cold unease moved through him that had nothing to do with the fever-warmth of the room. "Where..." He looked around the room again, as though the walls might offer some additional information they had been withholding. The low stone ceiling. The mineral smell. The geothermal hum beneath the floor, constant and deep. "Where am I?"
Fenn looked at his grandmother.
The old woman looked at Ruben for a long moment, and the look was not unkind, but it was the look of someone preparing to tell you something that will require a moment to land.
"You are two hundred and fifty miles below the land you have lived on," she said. Evenly. The way you say something that sounds impossible but happens to be the precise truth. "Below the ocean floor. Below the rock and the dark and the weight of the sea above it." She clasped her hands together in her lap. "The city of Brumália is not here. The sky is not here. The sun." She glanced briefly upward, toward the crystal ceiling with its slow amber pulse, and something moved across her face. "...is not here."
Ruben stared at her.
She held his gaze steadily.
"You are on a land called Neth-Solara," said Maret. "And as far as I know, you are the first person from the world above to arrive here in a very long time."
The copper bells outside turned in their slow current.
Oscar breathed his small, effortful breath.
Ruben stood in the amber light of a room two hundred and fifty miles underground and did not say anything at all.