“How was I supposed to know!” Arcen howled.

  “I told you back on the ground floor!” Elena shouted. “Before you died, I was telling you all about it! You’re telling me now you didn’t even hear any of it?”

  Arcen couldn’t even remember what exactly happened after their fight. His mind was meshed with the King even as he lay dying, and he had holes where memories should be. He only remembered glimpses that he saw during the fight. Sounds weren’t as clear in his memories.

  Elena stared at him, her eyes wide and lips quivering.

  “Do you think I'd just go around with some random grown man like that? Do you think I'd just hold hands with some dude?” she continued, without even pausing to breathe. “Oh god, I feel weird now! I thought you knew me all this time!”

  “Now you just wait a goddamn minute. You told me all of this after you shot me? As in, when I was literally dying!?” Arcen shouted back at her. “How am I supposed to remember that?!”

  “Oh... my god! I thought you heard it all! I thought you just didn’t want to talk about it again!”

  “Why exactly would I not want to talk about it?”

  “Well, because… ” Elena paused, biting her lip. “I don’t know! Okay? I didn’t want to sound like a needy little kid or anything!”

  The fuck is she on about? Needy? How is that needy? She’s getting more upset and making even less sense. I should just tone it down.

  “Alright, let's just calm down. My point is, you should’ve said all this after you brought me back, I would’ve remembered it. Have you died before? Do you know what it's like when your brain shuts down like a broken computer?” He asked, trying to keep his voice stable. Elena's threshold for getting yelled at was quite low.

  “I’m sorry then, I guess... ” Elena mumbled, turning away with a deep frown on her face. Somehow, she was more upset about this than him. He had to remind himself that he was arguing with a middle schooler.

  Arcen felt like they were upset at two different things. He rubbed his forehead with both his hands. This child had gone ahead and complicated things even further.

  He had clear memories of the events after he was revived. He remembered how Elena told him Jenna was still alive. He remembered rushing to help her right away.

  I forgot all about Jenna. Wait. If Wells is here, what happened to her?

  The sudden realization hit him like a gut punch. The last time he saw her was when the supposed Helviter Asset Recovery put her in an ambulance heading out of the tower.

  “Hey?”

  He snapped out of his thoughts. Elena was staring up at him, her amber eyes dancing on his face for any reaction. “Are you mad at me? I’ll say it properly now. We are cousins.”

  She had noticed his bitter expression when he was thinking about Jenna. Arcen relaxed his face. Too many things were happening at the same time. He decided to pull the thread that was laid before him right now with this cousin business.

  “I'm not mad at you. Alright, we’re cousins. Do you have any proof of this? How are we related? Where did you find this?”

  It's probably not even true in the first place.

  “You're my mom's... mom's... dad's... sister's... son,” Elena said, counting her fingers.

  Arcen froze when he heard it. His mother never had a brother, none that he knew of anyway. His family wasn't big. There were issues his mother never wanted to talk about. The only close relative that Arcen grew up with was his grandmother, his mother's mother, who died when he was eight. There was another family of 'in-laws' called the Hendersons who lived in a quiet suburb in North Dakota. It was Kysa and Kylan's aunt from their father's side.

  That's not right. I shouldn't think that way about them.

  That thought had leaked from his past self he hadn't outgrown yet. His mother never officially married anyone. She had Kysa and Kylan with a man called Logan, whom Arcen had only seen a handful of times. When he was fifteen and angry with his mother, he'd wanted to 'correct' these 'mistakes' just to spite her. It was obvious he looked nothing like his siblings. His mother had Kysa in her early twenties, she had him with a mystery man in her late twenties, and she had Kylan in her thirties after going back to the same man again. He just wanted to hear it from her own mouth, which never happened.

  Even so, he always knew it was unfair to the Hendersons to call them Kysa's aunt or Kylan's aunt. That whole family loved him as much as they loved their own children. They had always been nothing but kind to him. Mayday rudely interrupted his teenage rebellion, the life of his mother, and then it killed two of his youngest nieces. Hendersons were still living where they always lived, just shells of their former selves. He hadn't visited them in years.

  Among all of these relatives, none had ever mentioned anything about a brother of his mother. Angelica Henwick, his mother, had always been an only child, and as far as he knew, she inherited everything from her family. His mother having a brother was a completely new concept, one that had never even occurred to him until it came out of Elena's mouth.

  “This can't be true! my mom didn't have a brother,” he said, rubbing his cheek.

  “Well, she did, dear grandma left him in Russia.”

  Russia!? There is no goddamn way that's real. This has to be a fever dream.

  “Well, are you Russian then?” he asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yeah?” Elena said with an 'of course' expression. “Isn’t that obvious—”

  Arcen stared at her for a few seconds as if she would suddenly start looking like the Russian that he had imagined in his head. That was getting him nowhere. She still looked bizarrely, perfectly human, with perfect skin due to her oil; she still had the same intense eyes and long brown hair. Racial identities didn't work the same after Mayday. He had a warped sense of it due to his own mutation and the sheer diversity of people that he'd seen in the last eight years.

  She kinda does look Russian, now that I think about it.

  “So you're saying my grandma was Russian?” Arcen asked. He couldn't even picture her face anymore. He couldn't imagine that sweet old lady doing anything in Russia. As far as he knew, she was a loyal housewife her entire life.

  “Yes, she was born there? You never knew?” Elena asked, completely unbothered.

  Who else was Russian without me knowing! Am I fucking Russian too?

  As Arcen grappled with these thoughts like a paranoid man from the time JFK was president. Whether any of this was true or not, he just realized how little he really knew about his family. In the last eight years, his family history had started and ended with Kysa and Kylan. Those were the only two that mattered to him. He didn't really know his mother; he hadn't known his grandmother, and he definitely hadn't retained anything about his grandfather.

  If Elena was speaking the truth, she was his second cousin. That was much closer than he anticipated. Somehow, it had spanned two different continents. He felt like he was trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle after a toddler ate half the pieces. He really couldn't verify any of her claims, even if he wanted to. He'd have to get out of the tower and ask Kysa about what she knows, visit their old family home, dig up old diaries from the attic, or something.

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  “Alright then. You're Russian. How did you end up here? Do you remember your mother? tell me more.”

  “I don't really remember her. I was brought here by a charity when I was five. I was adopted. I found her name a while back, though. It was Valya Komarova, her mother, my grandma, was Viktoriia Praskoviya, and her father, my great-grandfather, your mother's older brother, didn't have a record anywhere in a GGC database.”

  How packed is that family tree over there in Russia?

  He didn't know how old this older brother of his mother was supposed to be to fit three generations below him. His mother was almost 44 years old when she became a tree. This man would have to be twenty or thirty years older. Elena's grandmother would have to be in their fifties or younger, and Elena's mother would be around Kysa's age or younger.

  If any of these were true, His family tree was a damn family circus. He had a lot to figure out if he ever made it out of this hell tower. For now, he needed to focus on surviving that long.

  The black egg. I have to take it.

  Somehow, the stars had aligned for him once in his life. Elena had been close to him because of this cousin deal. She really seemed to believe it, going so far as getting upset when he was clueless about it. She had revealed that in her outburst earlier, where she went off about how she wouldn't do the things she was doing for random men. She clearly placed a lot of value on them being related.

  Right now, it didn't matter if it was true or not.

  I have to play into it. Get her to trust me more, steal that goddamn egg when she doesn't expect me to.

  He'd already decided not harm her. The taking of the black egg itself didn't have to be violent. If he could somehow coax her into handing it over, this could end without anyone getting hurt physically or mentally.

  This cousin thing was a welcome distraction either way.

  “Well...I guess that's that,” Arcen sighed, flushing his mind. “Nice to meet you, my dearest long lost cousin!” he extended his hand with a smile.

  Elena looked taken aback for a brief second. Then she smiled pleasantly and shook his hand.

  “Now if you still feel weirded out when touching my hand, that's all on you,” he said, mockingly. Elena squeezed his soft octopus hand tighter.

  “No, now it's all okay!” she said, a wide grin spreading on her face. “Now that's out of the way, where do you want to go?” she asked, clapping excitedly.

  “I don't know. I just need a smoke,” Arcen said, rubbing his oily hand on his trousers.

  Elena took him to meet Barnes, Rika's second in command, who was officially in charge of the base camp. He was an insectoid mutant with green and black exoskeleton segments on his forearms and the sides of his neck. He wore the same military outfit that Arcen had seen Wells wearing back in the doctor’s chamber.

  I wonder who these guys really are.

  “Ah, you're here,” the man said as soon as Elena popped her head into the tent. He stared at them with his bright green eyes through a pair of half-rimmed glasses resting lazily on the bridge of his nose. There was an instant undertone of 'not you again' in his voice. Elena smiled in an exaggerated, cheeky way and ushered Arcen in.

  “Guess who I found?” She asked, presenting Arcen as she caught him in a hunt.

  “An octopus, obviously?” Barnes said, unimpressed.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Arcen said, ignoring the man’s curious gaze.

  “How dare you. This is my trusted adult guy. Ha! Now that I got one, you can’t yell at me for climbing towers by myself anymore.”

  “I don’t know if this is how you do that, young lady!” Barnes frowned at Arcen. “You two don’t even look related in any way. My point still stands. No one under the age of eighteen belongs in towers.”

  “Well, just talk to the GGC about it then,” Elena said with an indignant scoff. “It’s not like it's illegal or anything.”

  Why isn’t it, though?

  Arcen hadn’t really thought about it until this moment. It didn’t make sense to allow children into towers where all civil laws ceased to exist the moment you crossed a threshold on the ground. There was a lot that could happen to a child in a tower, and none of it was good. A lot has happened to him already, a grown adult. He didn’t want to imagine what a psychopath like Morgav would’ve done to him if he were twelve.

  “It should be illegal, though. Why isn’t it?” Arcen asked, airing out his thoughts.

  “Oh, not you too!” Elena sighed.

  “We can agree on that, Mr...?” Barnes stared expectantly at Arcen with a friendly smile.

  “...Arcen,” he said, with a nod. They were standing too far apart for a handshake, and Barnes looked busy with what he was doing.

  “Barnes, Pleasure to meet you. I like people with common sense.”

  “It’s not Illegal because they can’t make it illegal!” Elena protested. “It’s actually Illegal to stop me! The law says ‘no individual should ever be barred from entry into a tower domain.’ I’m an individual! Just look at me!”

  “Why is it written like that, though?” Arcen asked, still unable to see what the GGC intended. He'd not paid any attention to politics in the last eight years.

  After the global distribution of the Mind Matrix and the establishment of the GGC, they made it very easy for citizens not care about politics, as caring too much about it was one of the quickest ways for you and your entire bloodline to disappear like you never even existed. Even so, this tower law didn't make sense.

  “You still can't drink, smoke, drive, or marry, but you can die a million different ways inside towers at any age?”

  “Because everyone has the right to meet their gods. Even newborns. It’s not something that the GGC decided. It’s an absolute rule enforced by Rootsong itself; they can’t make the will of the gods illegal by writing things on paper,” Barnes said calmly. “That doesn’t mean we should just let children climb towers, I'll always strongly discourage them, no matter how good they say they are at it!”

  This Rootsong again? I have to know more about it.

  Arcen didn’t want to test Barnes’ limits of patience by asking chained ‘why’ questions like a three-year-old.

  “Oh my god, y-you’re an age racist!” Elena shouted at the top of her lungs.

  Arcen burst out laughing as soon as the words hit his ears. Barnes frowned at Elena over his glasses, rolling his eyes.

  “What are you two here for?” Barnes asked, hauling a heavy, long, square box onto the table before him. There was a fresh white towel and a spray bottle with green liquid. It looked like he was getting ready to polish something.

  “Well, Rika wants him to stay around, so she said she's going to give him a hundred thousand Gold a day until she returns,” Elena said, pulling out the signed piece of paper from Rika.

  Barnes looked at it for a few seconds, folded it, and slid it into a thick leather-bound book on the table.

  “Follow me,” he said, standing up.

  They followed him into a small room to the left. Inside were gas tank-shaped containers neatly arranged in a grid. Barnes walked up to one with a tall metallic pump attached to it on the lid. It had a number keyboard like a typewriter. He typed in a hundred thousand and grabbed a lever to the side.

  “Put your hand here,” he said, nudging Arcen towards the metallic outlet.

  When Barnes pulled the lever, a thin line of Gold dripped down to Arcen’s palm, gathering in a skin-tight pool right away. This pool never stacked in height. Gold remained at a constant thickness, pushing its edges from the center where more Gold was being added. It wasn’t a huge amount. It only covered his hand.

  That’s half a million Aura.

  Arcen glanced around as Barnes reset the pump, carefully handling a small droplet of Gold that had been dropped. This entire room was full of tanks of Rika's Gold. If they were all full, which they had to be, this was worth about another billion Aura in this tent alone. This was like walking into a bank vault, much less protected.

  Well, the protection is the fact that she has two billion on herself, and there are no laws.

  His eyes brushed by a peculiar thing on a shelf in the far corner. Stacked neatly like a gun locker were what could only be weapons made of Gold, not liquid Tower Gold, but the real Gold.

  “What are those?” Arcen asked Barnes, too curious not to ask.

  Barnes turned to him with a small frown. “What do you mean? What are those?”

  “Those things in that shelf, are they made from Gold or something?”

  “Those are weapons,” Elena said, interrupting them. “Sorry, he’s really new to all this,” She said to Barnes.

  As far as Arcen knew, Gold was a bad metal to make weapons with. “Are they for like, show?” he asked Elena, still baffled. It didn’t make sense to climb a tower with decorative weapons that belonged in a private collection or a museum.

  “Oh no, they work. You probably haven’t seen it before. When you have Gold like Rika does, it’s the only way to store more Gold in less space. The metal is called Goldinum, technically. It’s Tower Gold compressed with massive Aura pressure until it becomes solid. It’s as tough as some steel alloys. You can only make and forge Goldinum inside towers,” she recited, as if she were reading from a book. She seemed to know the correct definition for anything right away.

  Maybe some mindhacking thing I don’t understand.

  “Suspiciously knowledgeable for a kid, huh?” Barnes remarked with a small grin. “Almost like she’s reading a script. I wonder how that works.”

  Elena flashed her teeth, a cheeky smile spreading on her face. “That’s a secret, old man!”

  “If that’s all, I have matters to attend to. Return tomorrow for your Gold,” Barnes ushered them out of the Gold room. Once outside, he paused, looking at a pile of long rectangular boxes. “On second thought, I need you to do a delivery for me.”

  “Oh come on! I was going to have some fun… ”Elena groaned.

  “Not you, him,” Barnes said, pointing at Arcen. “Miss Rika might pay Gold for nothing in return, but I think we're all better served contributing to the base camp. Don't you agree?”

  Do I want to be a tower delivery boy?

  Arcen nodded. He was in no position to refuse after receiving the Gold. He had to be here whether he got paid or not. He just hoped this delivery wouldn't involve dying a horrible death.

  “You seem capable. Carry four of them to the Third Waypoint. She knows what I'm talking about. Hand them to Colin Fraser. These are valuable weapon components. I'm giving the task to you because you seem like you can carry them. I'm really trusting her to see it through,” Barnes said, gesturing towards Elena with his head.

  She groaned, rolling her eyes.

  Colin Fraser? This Colin guy again, isn't that Wells?

  Arcen looked at Elena. “That's the guy that we met in the morgue, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Good.”

  What the heck is mr.octopus' family tree? and more importantly, would it be enough to steal the egg?

  Next chapter on Friday.

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