RuTing held a strawberry in each hand. Her back hurt from bending over. She considered herself physically fit even though she didn’t have the same flexibility she had in her twenties. She had fifty levels but didn’t add anything to her back. That was a mistake. She didn’t have back pain thanks in part to a specialized workout she learned in the Guannei—until now.

  “I can’t tell the difference,” Fintan said. He shrugged, visibly wincing. His shoulder muscles were tensed into a knot. He was in much worse shape than she was. His soft Union life hadn’t prepared him for manual labor. “Make it disappear.”

  He was weaker than she was, but his determination was all the same. They both wanted to see their families. They both died young in suspicious circumstances.

  They both left people behind that could be in danger.

  Before she met Fintan, she’d known only darkness. She remembered dying, and she didn’t believe there was a way out. His revelation that they could get a message or find a portal out of the afterlife into the real world was like the light of a new day.

  She hadn’t seen the sun come up since she died, but every morning, she felt the sensation. It was hope.

  A library card stood between her and hope. Like Fintan, she would do whatever it took to earn the card.

  She dissolved her manifested strawberry before the guards could see. Her five-gallon pail was only half full. Fintan’s less so. As pickers, they were paid by the bucket.

  The fields that supplied Bannerburg with all its food were close and vast. A city that size that refused to manifest food from the mists had to be fed the natural way. Crops were cultivated, and petrol-burning tractors tilled the rich but shallow soil.

  RuTing thought someone must have manifested the original seeds, but she didn’t question the process. Questions attracted unwanted attention. The guards wore the same lab coats as the rest of the doctors. The overly large clothing hindered them when they were small, but one swig of their formula turned them into ogres.

  They guarded the parameter from Centaurs, Zeusopolans and other would-be bandits that no doubt followed the Adversary. While RuTing and Fintan toiled, they used their clubs to hit rocks into holes in the turf. It was some kind of ancient game.

  That was not the only use for the clubs. The fields were irrigated by the river. When someone broke and ran for the water, the ogres clubed them senseless and carried them to Bannerburg.

  Most of the farm hands were failed Bomb Midges. Apparently, after many uses of the formula, the Midges didn’t return to full size. Sometimes, they grew to three-quarters height, but it was obvious their perfectly formed bodies were a miniature of what they had been before.

  The mists were thick in the fields. She picked the strawberries beside Fintan. With very little effort, she could manifest a duplicate strawberry and fill her bucket in no time.

  Fintan disagreed, and for now, she did it his way.

  At the end of the day, they turned in their tally chits for credit, and numbers were recorded against their debts.

  “Fifteen credits,” the Foreman told Fintan. They stood in line at the end of the day. He etched the numbers on foil paper. “Eighteen credits for RuTing. Those are respective numbers for newcomers.”

  “It will take us four or five years to pay off our medical debts, but we are making more than we are spending.”

  “That’s right,” the Foreman said. “But not all jobs pay the same credits. Tractor operators make three times as much. I’m going to keep my eye out for you two when a position opens. Not many people from the Union make it to Bannerburg. Everyone knows the Union schools teach specialized skill sets that we didn’t have in the colonies.”

  The citizens of Bannerburg often spoke of the colonies. They lived there before they died, but RuTing and Fintan hadn’t heard of any colonists. Almost all the people trapped in the afterlife had shared experiences different from their own. They only thing they knew was the colonists died frequently at a young age.

  The Foreman would keep an eye out for them, but no one aged or died in the afterlife. There were no accidents or injuries you couldn’t walk away from or recover the next day. When would they get a better-paying job? It might be a century.

  They returned to the city, always under guard but riding on a slow-moving wagon. Everyone else was too spent to do more than drag themselves to their room, but by the time they returned, RuTing’s back had fully recovered. Unlike the rest of the farm hands, she and Fintan had many levels.

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  “We have enough credits,” Fintan said.

  While they were in debt, they couldn’t draw from more than a fraction of their earnings. The library card was only a few credits. The draw would take a day to complete the transfer, but they could use it immediately.

  By the time they returned, the lighter had made his rounds, opening the valves and igniting the gas lamps. In the morning, he would make his rounds again. Unlike Zeusopolis, Bannerburg had a nightlife, and although the library closed only a few hours after dark, they had time if they left immediately from the drop-off and crossed the city.

  When they reached the marble steps, the glow of the gas-burning lamps highlighted the stacks of scrolls on shelves. Without the card, they hadn’t gone far inside. The librarian, a young woman named Cherry, had politely turned them aside.

  She manned the counter with a permanent smile and mid-length red hair that RuTing thought might have something to do with her name.

  There was something about Cherry that wasn’t like the rest of the citizens of Bannerburg.

  “You forfeited dinner to read a scroll?” Cherry asked. She sounded bubbly. No matter how hard RuTing tried, she could never imitate that kind of excitement.

  “I’ll have a big breakfast,” Fintan said. Like RuTing, he wore the plain brown clothing of a farm hand. The clothes had been delivered to them the next day. They were strongly advised to sell their exosuits. They only got a few credits for the material since it was suspected of witchery, but the Bannerites were committed to recycling.

  “We would like two cards,” RuTing said.

  “You know that library access is a subscription,” Cherry replied. She brought out a foil for them to etch their names. “There aren’t a lot of us in Bannerburg. If you understand the rules, you can fit right in.”

  Her statement confused RuTing, but Fintan grasped the consequences immediately.

  “You are from the Union?” he asked. “How did you get here?”

  “The same as you. I walked. I left the portals and took all the right turns or wrong turns to get here. That was centuries ago. I’m not sure how I avoided the Adversary. I’ve always been lucky.”

  Cherry must have died in her twenties. RuTing didn’t think of that as luck. Objectively, Cherry was beautiful, but now that RuTing knew what to look for, she realized Cherry didn’t meet the standards of the colonies. They were all perfectly symmetrical and built as if carved out of wood or stone. The Union didn’t permit genetic engineering, and while they had cures for many diseases, they often turned to robots to solve problems.

  “You’ve been here since your death?” Fintan asked. “Didn’t you ever wonder what else was out there?”

  “I could leave if I wanted to,” Cherry said. “You can leave as long as your debts are paid. By now, you probably realize you don’t age. If you want to know what’s out there, you can find it here. The information is freely available. You are new here, and you might start to think this is the worst system. If you do your job and stay out of trouble, you will find it isn’t. You can do pretty much whatever you want in your own time.”

  “That’s what I tell Fintan,” RuTing said. She didn’t believe it for a minute, but she knew how to sell sincerity. “We’ve already learned so much, and I think our earning potential is only going up.”

  Cherry waved them to the scrolls to her left. The label above was marked ‘Travel.’ There was a table with chairs not far away for readers.

  “After you read some of those scrolls, you won’t want to go anywhere.”

  Cherry gave them each a card. It wasn’t made out of metal but a stiff, laminated paper. It would probably last for a while and then get renewed as long as their accounts were current.

  Fintan took several scrolls under a subsection labeled ‘maps.’ He spread them out on the table. Like the card, the scrolls were woven with a fine metal thread, and the words were written in copper or bronze. The thread was as fine as anything RuTing had ever seen. The dissolution left a faint white haze on some of the words. Written in metal, they would last a long time, but the weaving must have taken forever.

  They surveyed the map of the afterlife, trying to make sense of the cities. The names and places were not familiar to them. Her education didn’t cover much mythology, but some places were named after gods or concepts she recognized.

  The land didn’t seem to be flat, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional.

  Fintan brought out another scroll, and they compared the two. Other people in the library barely took notice of what they were doing, but as the night wore on, they left. Cherry greeted newcomers, wrote names, directed readers, and ultimately showed them the door at closing time.

  “I don’t understand why there are so many different places,” Fintan said as he rolled up the scrolls. Some of the cities were labeled, and by cross-referencing the labels, they found a description with a few words.

  “The colonies had over two hundred gods,” Cherry said. She helped them put the scrolls away. Since they were made out of metal, they were very heavy, and Cherry heaved them over her head to get them into the right slot.

  Fintan picked up the scrolls as if they’d weighed nothing. In his exuberance, he was getting careless. She’d have to remind him later. Leveling was illegal in Bannerburg.

  “I don’t understand why so many cities are aligned with the Adversary,” Fintan said. He was disappointed. Their research created as many questions as it did answers. They stuck their heads together, whispering about which places they should investigate, but they hadn’t been able to whittle down the list. Where might they find a way out of the afterlife? They were both too afraid to ask Cherry. Giving away their motivation would compromise their position.

  “That’s easy,” Cherry said. “He controls the portal to the real world. They can’t get a message out unless they do what he says.”

  “What does he want to send a message?” RuTing asked. She needed to tell Richard about the Guannei. Her husband needed to know what happened to her. He needed to know the threats she left behind.

  Cherry’s voice lowered. There was no one else in the library, but her eyes darted to the left and right as if she was being followed.

  “This isn’t a conversation we should have,” Cherry said, “but everyone knows. For a million gilders, the Adversary will send a message up to two hundred and eighty characters.”