Chapter 64 - Questions in the Workshop

The red earth from the pasture in Acre dried quickly across the leather of Nicole's boots.

The heat radiating from the workshop furnace in townhouse forty-two evaporated the mud's moisture in less than ten minutes, leaving behind only a brittle reddish crust that crumbled onto the slag cobblestones with every step she took.

Nicole had not lowered the hood of her black-scaled coat.

She paced back and forth across the twelve-foot width of the workshop, hands shoved into her pockets, her chitin mandibles clicking beneath her raised collar in a rapid, erratic rhythm. Her four amber eyes with vertical slit pupils never rested, darting between the oak workbench, the ceiling support beams, and the double doors barred with the iron crossbeam.

The huntress's head was crammed with questions that her trench-trained instincts simply could not organize by priority.

"How does that air even work?" Nicole stopped abruptly before the bench where Dante was wiping down his pen with a dry cloth. "There was no smell of coal, Dante. No soot, and none of that electrical static that makes the hair stand on your arms near the streetlamp pylons. Where does that world's power come from if there's no Mana in the soil?"

Dante set his pen on the grid-lined notebook, resting his back against the wooden stool.

"Terrestrial physics does not operate on condensed ether," Dante began explaining with his customary calm, his gray eyes tracking the girl's agitation. "The atmosphere there consists of nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases. The driving force behind the machinery does not originate from Mana crystals or concentrated ash fireboxes. It comes from the internal combustion of petroleum distillates, freshwater dams driving copper turbines, and nuclear reactors splitting heavy atoms within lead-shielded containment vessels."

Nicole furrowed her brow, the two small horn buds at her hairline tensing beneath the fabric of her hood.

"Nuclear whats?"

"Forget the atomic part, girl," Maria cut in from the inner courtyard, seated on a low stool with a water bottle in hand, her new forty-eight-pound greatsword resting against her leg. "Dante's explanations will only make your brain boil for nothing. What you need to know is that things over there run on electricity flowing through plastic-insulated wires and gasoline you buy out of a curbside pump along the pavement."

Nicole took two strides toward Maria, resting her hands on her knees and leaning forward.

"And the food?" she asked, her voice carrying an almost desperate curiosity. "All that brush growing around the fence... that stuff sprouts out of the ground on its own without anyone shoveling burning coals onto the roots?"

"Sprouts right out of black loam fed by ordinary rainwater," Maria answered with a dry chuckle, taking a swig of water. "Nobody over there has to dig an acid drainage ditch to grow tubers. You drop a seed in the dirt, wait four months under the sun, and the food comes up clean, green, and completely unpoisoned. You don't have to saw through iron beast tusks just to get meal."

"And the people?" Nicole pressed, her amber eyes wide in the gloom of the workshop. "They don't slaughter each other in the street to steal one another's rations? There's no Legion patrol standing over the distribution lines with fixed bayonets?"

"There is no Legion," Dante answered from the workbench. "There are civil and military police forces to maintain basic public order, but food distribution is entirely private. There are commercial establishments called supermarkets: buildings four hundred feet long lined with shelves packed with meat, bread, cheese, fruit, and packaged goods. You grab a wire cart at the entrance, pick whatever you want to eat, pass through a checkout lane with an optical barcode scanner, pay with paper currency or a magnetic bank card, and head home to cook on a gas stove."

Nicole stood frozen for five full seconds, her mouth falling open beneath the collar of her coat.

The image of a warehouse stocked with food laid bare on open shelving, free of cast-iron security grates and lacking sulfur hounds growling at the entrance to prevent riots, sounded like absolute delirium to someone who had spent her entire life scraping over tins of rancid grease in the tenements of Canal Five.

"Anyone can just walk into this market?" she asked softly.

"Anyone with clean money in their bank account," Maria confirmed. "And we have plenty of clean money sitting in brokerage accounts back in the state capital. Currency we earned selling sulfur stones and fire crystals to underground jewelers downtown over the last seven years."

Nicole looked down at the red clay still clinging to the treads of her boots, then over to the workshop's double doors that barred the gray grime of the Capital.

The contrast between the two planes was far too jarring to assimilate in a single afternoon.

Dante tapped his fingertips against the oak workbench, calling the huntress's attention back.

"That pasture fenced with barbed wire we set foot on this morning is merely a clearing beside an unpaved road, Nicole," Dante said, his tone turning measured and direct. "It is simply where the spatial coordinates of the Capital happen to align with Earth's geography. There is no home built there yet, no municipal water, and no coil mattress."

He paused briefly, waiting for the girl to lock her gaze onto him.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Our actual home, however... the penthouse where we lived before boarding that freight train... sits two thousand miles away from that pasture, in southeastern Brazil."

Nicole lifted her head slowly. "The apartment you mentioned at the diner?"

"That very one," Dante nodded. "It sits on the top floor of a high-end residential building in the Acacias district. It has solid hardwood flooring, three spacious bedrooms with clean beds, an electric shower delivering hot water that carries no scent of boiler steam, a four-seater sofa, a fifty-inch television, and a tempered-glass balcony looking out over an entire city illuminated at night."

Maria let out a low laugh, resting her chin on her left hand.

"Even has a washing machine that does the laundry on its own without you having to beat rags against a concrete basin," Maria added with pride. "And a refrigerator that drops clean ice cubes right out of the door."

Nicole stared at Dante with wide eyes.

"Why didn't we just jump there this morning, then?"

"Because the physics of Planar Transit do not permit free teleportation between distant coordinates on the same plane, Nicole," Dante explained with his usual methodical patience. "The rift opened here in townhouse forty-two punches vertically straight through into the red clay pasture of Acre. To travel from that pasture to our penthouse in the southeast without triggering scrutiny from the Brazilian federal government, we would have to board a commercial airliner at the regional airport with you disguised as an ordinary passenger."

He pointed with his pencil toward the two small horn buds beneath her hood.

"You have two cranial bone protrusions, pointed ears, and multifaceted corneas. The baggage security x-ray at the Rio Branco terminal would flag the checkpoint within the first minute, and federal police would have you locked inside a transport van before noon for biological dissection in the nation's capital. That route is tactically non-viable."

Nicole swallowed dry, taking half a step back.

"So there is no way to reach this apartment?"

"There is," Dante turned a page in his notebook, displaying the hand-drawn schematic of the rail line they had mapped on the train. "Our original underground redoubt, the stone fissure out in the Ash Wastes, sits precisely upon the coordinates corresponding to our Acacias penthouse on Earth. That is where we initiated our first planar jump."

He rested both hands on the edge of the workbench, looking straight into the girl's four eyes.

"If you truly want to see our real home... if you want to understand what it means to live in a world devoid of boiler smoke, where food comes from a clean store and no one sleeps with a drawn blade in their hand... we can take you there."

Nicole stopped breathing for a beat. "How?"

"We catch the heavy freight train heading back at the north yard," Dante laid out the logistics with absolute clarity. "It is an eighteen-day run over Legion rails, crossing the Slag Desert back to Depot Twelve. We drop off at the station curve, hike twelve hours to our shelter in the Ash Wastes, enter the basalt cavern, and I open the rift in the floor. Two seconds later, we step directly into the living room of our apartment in Brazil."

He calculated the timeline off the top of his head:

"Eighteen days outbound by rail. Two full weeks resting on Earth, eating real food and sleeping in clean sheets without a soul suspecting a thing. Then another eighteen days riding the freight back here to resume our culling routine for the Capital's level thresholds."

Maria rose from the courtyard stool with her greatsword in hand, stepping into the workshop with heavy strides that set the tools on the bench vibrating.

The Sentinel pulled up beside Nicole, resting a heavy, warm palm on the huntress's narrow shoulder with a firm, grounding grip.

"Forty-five days of total downtime, girl," Maria said, her deep voice carrying a calm authority that offered instant reassurance. "We have a hundred and fifty days remaining on our mission timer before any deadline kicks in. We can make this round trip with time to burn. You spend two weeks seeing how normal people actually live, soak in a porcelain tub with real scented soap, and I'll take you to an authentic rodizio steakhouse so you can discover what fire-roasted prime picanha tastes like."

Nicole looked down at Maria's hand on her shoulder, across to the oak bench where Dante's notebook lay open, and finally toward the workshop's double doors that barred the gray streets of the iron empire.

Eighteen days rattling across iron ore gravel in a pitch-black freight car.

Eighteen days chewing salted jerky with flour mash and dodging sulfur hound patrols at desert water towers.

To any common resident of the Capital, that transit would be an inhuman ordeal bordering on military punishment.

Yet to Nicole, who had spent the last four years sleeping over acid conduits in the sewers of Canal Five and gnawing on raw potato peels scavenged from tavern garbage heaps, eighteen days in an iron box with Dante and Maria by her side was no hardship at all.

It was a road leading to a realm where the sky was blue, and where her mother would not have had to die just so she could breathe in peace.

Nicole drew her hood back with both hands, letting her short dark hair tumble free across her brow, baring her pale face and pointed ears to the yellow glare of the arc lamp.

She tilted her chin upward, the vertical slits of her amber eyes blazing with an unyielding decision.

"I can take eighteen days on that train, Dante," Nicole said, her voice clear, firm, and devoid of hesitation. "I can take thirty days if that's what it takes. I want to see your home."

Maria let out a booming laugh that shook the corrugated roof, slapping the huntress's back with a resounding crack that nearly drove the girl chest-first into the oak workbench.

"That's my point woman!" Maria cheered with a wide grin. "You're going to see what real living is, Nicole! And I guarantee that once you taste hot delivery pizza dripping with real cheese from Earth, you'll never look at another plate of machine-oil-roasted peccary shank again!"

Dante let out a brief scoff through his nose, drawing the timetable for Express 404 from his coat pocket.

"The next outbound freight departs the North Classification Yard the day after tomorrow, at seven in the morning," Dante said, his black pen already circling the departure date on the parchment. "We have forty-eight hours to secure this townhouse behind long-term runic wards, stock our travel rations from the canal bakeries, and secure our berths aboard the ore cars."

He slipped the schedule back into his leather portfolio, regarding the two girls with his customary calculating calm.

The decision was sealed.

They would leave the heart of the First Great Continent temporarily behind, not out of weakness or abandonment of the hunt, but to retreat to their true fortress and show the newest member of their crew the world where their entire journey had begun.