The Two Fangs

Chapter 2

When Crucis had begun bringing his gifts, Valle had burnt them every time. Nevermind that destroying legal tender was illegal and very detectable: when the Aequitas Army had arrested him after the first, they had quietly and anxiously released him as soon as they'd run his ID. Nor was it possible to give it away anonymously. He had abandoned some, but the tagged bills, knowing who had last possessed them, had been returned to him every time. Now he used Crucis's money to fund his relocation.

He had thought the very bottom of Atlantis would keep Crucis's eyes off him, and maybe it had for a while. At this point it seemed that Valle himself was incapable of laying low. He thought at first that he might move inward, abandon his apartment in the wallflower tenement and find somewhere to live a hundred miles farther into the ocean-bottom city. Maybe even ground level. Even if Atlantis was only a fraction the size of either of the formerly terrestrial cities, it was still vast and offered infinite opportunities to hide. It was the money that made him dismiss that idea, though. He couldn't use a fraction of it fleeing into the city, and he needed it gone. There would be no living in quiet luxury, spending the evil money bit by bit (though Valle fully suspected that would be the inevitable end of hisyears of running– would Crucis consider it a victory in this game?). Therefore, he was going up.

When the tunnels between the two cities were built, Atlantis sprang up around the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a waypoint for repairs and supplies roughly halfway between terminals. It grew rapidly from there, running far down the side of the ridge into the depths; for the better, since the original city was rent apart by earthquakes. The city as it had been for centuries was a vertical pillar four hundred miles wide and three miles tall, with a satellite dome buoyed another mile above. That last was the only part of the city that saw sunlight in the ocean outside, dim as it was.

Though it was technically only a short distance, travel from the bottom up to the rail station at the city's peak had to take three days, to account for the difference in air pressure. Vertrains crawled glacially up tracks that stretched the height of the city, their motion scarcely perceptible from a distance. They were shaped like stacks of round, white cylinders that engulfed their tracks, deep grooves separating each car. Valle bought himself space aboard one, a cabin in a car near the top of the vertrain.

He had to wait more than a day for it to arrive and unload, which he spent on a bench in the vertrail station nearest his now-former apartment.

On the bench facing him was a team of young Lookatmes, playing drums and low-toned flutes and singing songs of Osah while they danced in brightly colored shawls and skirts.

Look at me Osah
See how I move under the waves
Turn your eye to me God the Watcher

Judge me and everyone worthy

Their music was grating and it never ended, but Valle made no move to get away from it. He wanted the same thing, after all.

One of them, a squamate zoan, smiled at Valle and tapped two fingers on each eye, the sign of the Watcher. He looked away. they couldn't know that they were totally safe from Osah's wrath, that their little band's prayers neither grabbed some deity's attention nor assured him that they didn't deserve death. Random decimation did happen, but there was no protection from that.

He could them her things about Osah. Knowing them, they would be in infinitely more danger.
The Lookatmes thankfully didn't share his cabin, otherwise he might have abandoned the journey and let Crucis win. Instead he shared it with some pensive zoans in rumpled business suits, models horse and ibis, who left frequently for the dining car or the restroom or just to avoid the scowling bat. That was fine with Valle. As soon as the slow-rising vertrain was in motion, he settled in his seat and prepared for a long three days of watching the wallcreeper towers sink and disappear below him.