Fintan and RuTing studied the map by lamplight. He’d gathered enough strength for one more Step to get them past the gates, and she ran for miles carrying him.

  They disappeared into the woods, where RuTing manifested a shelter.

  The exertion of two burdened Steps plus the manifestation of the metal put Fintan precariously close sleep. His body would have become an inert husk until morning. Instead, he dozed. At level fifty, his body was so solid that bouncing on RuTing’s narrow shoulders wasn’t painful. In life, this would have been impossible, no matter their strength.

  The map on the back of the book had the territory of Zeusopolos with a stylized route all the way to Olympus. The many points on the path were marked with iconic war imagery—spears and shields.

  The flexible metal in his hands was an exact duplicate of the one he’d seen, but it was silver instead of gold. The composition of the page wasn’t the same either. He didn’t know what metal the foil was, but he’d manifested it by the density and touch of the other book.

  “I expected a scroll,” RuTing said.

  “I think it would be more difficult to create a metal scroll,” Fintan replied. “Unless you used small fibers, it wouldn’t roll up. Fibers would have more surface area for the corrosion.”

  The white film that eventually reverted everything to mist seemed to work from the outside inward.

  “They don’t follow the histories I’ve read.”

  RuTing’s knowledge of ancient Earth was more complete than his own. The Guannei kept written histories, some of which came before the Catastrophe that destroyed the planet's surface. His Union education included facts and occasional summaries of facts. If it wasn’t factual, it wasn’t allowed. While they were in the city she shared with him a wealth of speculation about the culture. All he had to offer was he heard the name Zeus was one of the gods worshipped before AI.

  “They must be some kind of modernized equivalent,” he replied, “hidden from the rest of humanity. They arrive by the thousands. Now we have an idea where they go. What do you make of this?”

  There was no compass on the map. Experimentally, he’d tried manifesting a compass early on, and the needle sat motionless. Manifested magnets worked, but there was no north or south pole.

  The map did have a legend. He thought the line might represent distance, but it had a ratio beside it. He recognized the measure.

  “It’s depth,” RuTing predicted.

  He thought she was right. His finger touched the measure.

  “Miles,” he said.

  “Kilometers,” she replied.

  No matter how the ideas were written, they saw it in their own language. No doubt, if he asked her to measure it with her fingers, the conversion would be obvious. That created all kinds of problems. Was the amount of silver he manifested the difficulty or the idea of the amount?

  The stylized Olympus at the end of the map reminded him of what he had heard about the Adversary. The silver mountain had a columned throne on top and a vortex about it.

  “I think this is where the Adversary is,” Fintan said. “He might have answers to get us back, but I think we should investigate these.” He pointed to the different confrontations on the road to Olympus. “These are other territories.”

  “The enemy of my enemy?” RuTing asked. “They could be worse.”

  He nodded.

  “They might be better, or at least more welcoming. The centaurs were marginally friendlier.”

  RuTing speculated on their selection based on the map. In the end she chose the conflict closest to them. The map meandered, and she thought that conflict might be with an easier opponent to test the soldiers. Left unsaid was a problem they both recognized, and Fintan saved it before going to sleep.

  “It’s thousands of miles to Olympus,” he said. “If that’s where a portal is, we need to get there faster.”

  “We will find a way,” RuTing replied, sleepily. Continuously manifesting illusions and running all night carrying him had tired her.

  “I think I have a way,” he said. “We’ll fly.”

  RuTing didn’t respond.

  In the morning, he woke before RuTing but waited until she was ready. She manifested a number of traps and alarms around their tent, and he didn’t want to get slingshotted into the river. Her traps and the Pegasus inspired him.

  After they manifested breakfast, he reminded her she agreed to help him test flight.

  “I did?” she asked surprised.

  “It was late. You probably don’t remember,” he said. “Since you’ve leveled, you can jump really high.”

  He’d seen her jump over forty feet. Even though her body was as solid as his own, she couldn’t do it anywhere. If she tried to jump that high on regular ground her feet sank into the dirt, and she lost most of the height. Landing was also an issue.

  “I thought you worked with animals?” RuTing asked.

  “I did, but every student in the Union is taught the basics of lift and drag.”

  He manifested a paper airplane. Paper was expensive in the Union, but one of its few uses in the classroom was to exemplify flight characteristics. He could manifest an enormous paper airplane if he needed to. RuTing was trained as an agent of Dadu. She told him she had FUD training to handle fear, uncertainty, and doubt. “You aren’t afraid of heights?” Fintan lofted the paper airplane to her, and she caught it out of the air.

  “No,” she said. “Powered flight is impossible without an engine, but if we had a high enough tower, we could glide.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Powered flight might be possible if he could manifest enough kinetic energy. Past results proved he could create a boulder midair or a rubber spring. The farther something was away from his body, the more difficult it was to manifest. Gliding was the easiest way to start. If they needed to, they could try using a couple of oak trees and a giant band.

  “Let’s start with something simple like a parachute.”

  “I don’t have time to manifest a parachute in the air, and it wouldn’t open by the time I landed.”

  Those were both problems Fintan considered.

  “I will manifest a lever and boulder. That will shoot you in the air higher. It should only take a second to manifest the parachute at the apex. The parachute will slow you, and then you can manifest wings.”

  He demonstrated by creating two wings like he’d seen in school many years ago. They were each fifteen feet long, created with a wood frame and canvas. He could barely lift them, and he dragged them over to RuTing.

  They had some clearing in the forest to work with. The river was about five hundred feet away and shouldn’t be a danger. He didn’t have the strength to use the wings, but when RuTing took them from him, she could lift them.

  She flapped them against the ground. The whoosh of air almost pushed Fintan over. For a second, her feet left the ground. This could work!

  When she raised the wings again, she sank into the soft earth.

  “Maybe if you turned your wings while flying, like the extinct honey bee,” Fintan said.

  “I’m not going to do that all day. I think you are on to something. Let’s glide.”

  She dropped his wings after studying the shape. He manifested a pile of stone and a bundle of shaved pine logs to create a long even platform for her to stand on and a place for his counterweight on the other side.

  He didn’t spare any effort. This could save them days of travel. In the Union, single-wing planes were used where hyptertubes weren’t available. They could travel the globe using very little fuel. He had never studied aerodynamics, but this was the answer, and RuTing had the strength.

  She stood on the end of the platform, and he manifested an enormous boulder. He stood at the far end and the boulder appeared only a few feet in the air above his hands.

  It crashed into existence, plowing the pine logs underneath it into the ground. Somewhere below the dirt, the unforgiving white crust of the afterlife stopped it from sinking.

  The pine logs shot up so fast they splintered and broke. Fintan noticed that as he and RuTing gained levels, their density increased. His manifestation broke, but RuTing launched upward.

  He could only guess at her altitude, but she slowed quickly a few hundred feet above him and started to fall. She manifested a parachute. The parachute deployed immediately, but she was still falling too fast. The wings appeared, and she flapped ineffectively, but with only a few seconds, she moved only a few feet forward before crashing on top of the broken pine logs.

  One large splinter went through her right leg, and she busted it off with a curse.

  “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Fintan said, but he checked himself. Maybe it did make sense. “It’s our density. The more levels we get, the stronger we become, and the more the river and gravity affect us. No matter how much we level up, we won’t be able to fly.”

  “If we had an engine, we could fly, or larger wings or a bigger parachute,” RuTing said. “It was a good idea, but we don’t know the math. We are stuck in an afterlife of primitive technologies.”

  Fintan could only agree. They lost more time experimenting than they would have walking or running. If he spaced out his efforts, he could create a few gilders each day. That would give them some time to level up before they reached the next conflict.

  And he had no doubt there would be conflict. He marked off the map, guestimating at the distance with his fingers. They would have several days before the spears met the ogres.

  They walked at a pace unsustainable in life, but the absence of roads posed the most problems. RuTing had escaped from Zeusopolis and followed the river. It was in the opposite direction they needed to go. They had to cut across open country.

  Fintan couldn’t run through the forest without the presence of mind, and that wore on him worse than the physical wear of snagging bushes and thorny trees.

  The rivers were marked on their map, even the shallowest stream. Continuously, he found himself attempting to flatten the map into a two-dimensional object when it wasn’t, and they got turned around over and over again until RuTing remembered a children's tale and manifested a giant ball of string.

  The string would dissolve by morning, but they avoided overlapping their route during the day. Without the map, it would have been impossible, but not only were the rivers on the map but also the current.

  If the map was correct then the water was flowing uphill. The impossibility could not be ignored.

  They stumbled into a clearing, finding the marked road. It was wide, at least sixty feet of thick concrete. The base was dug all the way to the bedrock of the afterlife. With the dissolution, he didn’t think it would last for thousands of years like ancient concrete, but it lasted all the same with only a thin sheen of whiteness.

  Fintan tapped his poniard against the stones, and he could hear and feel the density, although he wasn’t sure exactly how.

  As soon as they found the road, they moved several hundred feet away from it. He took out his small bag of gilders. He had a few hidden away, but the splurge of leveling had consumed most of them.

  “You should level up your legs,” RuTing said.

  She didn’t add, “You are too slow,” but he heard the words anyway.

  He created three gilders during the day and he concentrated, manifesting another to match. He handed RuTing two gilders and took two of his own.

  “We should stay at the same level,” he said.

  There were other drawbacks to leveling. If they weren’t at the same level they might make a mistake near the water. The system felt like a game, and accepting the game meant accepting the risks along with the rewards. He didn’t want to have to go one step further than necessary to get back to his family.

  RuTing felt the same way. She grimaced when he handed her the gilders.

  “The pine pole went right through you,” he said.

  When he added gilders to his mind, he became more solid, but his sense of self also became more difficult to damage. She was stronger, but his fortitude was higher, and his overall Skill had increased.

  He touched the gilder to each thigh, willing their absorption. Most of the weakness he felt from manifesting the gilder disappeared. He felt more hollow inside, but he knew a night of rest would fix that. He flexed each leg, feeling the new strength, and jumped straight up three feet in the air.

  “If you want to jump, you have to work on your butt,” RuTing said.

  They camped out far enough away from the road to hide the light. RuTing added a maze of false walls, traps, and alarms.

  Fintan was doubtful if they would all work. RuTing didn’t have many tells, but he knew she took secret delight in each trap, and he caught her smiling as she described what would happen if an assailant surprised them in the middle of the night.

  He wondered what Guannei training looked like, but she didn’t share the details of her upbringing beyond the stealth techniques.

  “You didn’t kill people?” he asked worriedly. Somehow, she rigged a wall of spikes to flip out of the ground.

  “Of course not,” RuTing said. “We guard the People from robots.”

  The way she said People seemed different from the citizens of the Union. He wasn’t sure if she considered him one of the People. He was sure about one thing. They were friends, and that past was one she had left behind.

  In the morning, they followed the road, running faster than the wagons of soldiers. RuTing didn’t try to maintain the illusion continuously. That was too much effort. With his increased levels, they covered the ground quickly. By noonday, they arrived at an unmarked sentry point.

  At the first sign of soldiers, RuTing manifested the illusion. To be safe, they ran for the bushes beside the road. If other Skilled people were working with the military, they might be detected.

  Fintan was determined to make a wide birth, but the forest had cleared, the land was rolling hills pockmarked by blasted holes and small trunks of new growth and the foot patrols. Chariots dotted the landscape, going in all directions. This was the theatre of war. Fintan had very little knowledge of war. The Union had been at peace for a thousand years.

  His illusions weren’t very strong, and RuTing couldn’t cover them from all directions.

  They would have to go back to back, but he didn’t know much about the enemy of the Zeusopolans. In the contest on the map, the gilded symbol of spears and shields was met by a huge face, contorted and ugly, crouched over a massive body.