Rusted barbed wire decorated the top of the tall copper fence, a gentle reminder that outsiders were not welcome. A gatehouse squatted just inside the perimeter fence, not much more than a rusted iron box — plain and efficient, quite the opposite of the intricate geometric facade of the refinery.

  It appeared to be the only way in or out the compound, and so Diya took the simplest course of action, she stepped up to the window and knocked. She didn’t know it at the time, but that knock began a series of events that would forever change her life.

  Rohan was dragging his feet, his body language made his frustration about not being told even the faintest hint of the plan quite clear. “Ah, yes, the old knock right on the front door approach. Brilliant.”

  Diya winked at him, then whispered, “watch the master work, grumpy butt.”

  A moment later the dirty glass window slid open, revealing a woman with horrible skin and an itchy looking wool eye patch. Diya couldn’t help but wonder if there was some correlation between the two. She wasn’t usually one to lock in on someone’s features like that, but this woman’s skin looked like someone ran a cheese grater against it.

  Rohan’s face twisted like he had just tasted something sour. Diya took notice and subtly elbowed him in the side. His part was small in her plan, but she didn’t need him to irritate the guard with his lack of self-control.

  “State your business.” The refinery guard demanded.

  “I am Captain Diya Akash, of the Township’s Airforce.” Diya had done her best to make her voice sound confident and authoritative, drawing a bewildered side-eye from her partner. “This is Lieutenant Rohan Santulan.”

  He offered an awkward nod.

  “Noted.” Said the guard, pausing only long enough to spit a mouthful of chewing tobacco into a spittoon. “State your business.”

  Diya nodded. “Yes, very good. I suppose I might as well state my business. We come as representatives of the military. Word has reached us of the mounting tensions here with the Kudrati. It is our task to explore the facility, so we might write a report detailing how the facility would best be supported by auxiliary military forces.”

  “I might add that we think your security personnel on site are doing a damn fine job.” Rohan rubbed the stubble on his jaw, nodding along. “But you know the saying, many hands make lighter work, eh?”

  The one-eyed guard sat stone faced, or perhaps sandstone faced in her case. “You lot don’t look like military. What proof have you?”

  Diya pulled out a military identification badge from a pouch on her belt, Rohan was quick to follow. As they held their military badges up to the window the guard squinted like the writing was in a foreign language, then fidgeted with her fingers. The awkward amount of time they stood there had Diya questioning whether the woman knew how to read.

  The answer didn’t seem to materialize. Instead, the one-eyed woman simply spit once more into her spittoon and grunted, a puzzling sequence of actions that left both Diya and Rohan scratching their head.

  When she disappeared from the window, Diya leaned over to Rohan and whispered to him. “Did you see how she was twiddling her fingers?”

  He looked confused. “Why is that important?”

  “Fidgeting means guilt. I think she’s up to something.” Diya whispered.

  Before Rohan could follow up, the guard reappeared with visitors’ badges in hand. The two let out a sigh of relief, but Diya still watched the woman suspiciously.

  “These will give you lot access, but you need to be out by sundown.” The guard mumbled, tossing the badges to them, and without another word the soot-stained glass window slid shut.

  As the two walked through the busy yard, laborers scurried about loading and unloading drums of what Diya assumed was blackblood. No one paid them much attention at all, leaving her to wonder if they could have just snuck in if needed.

  “Many hands make light work?” Diya chided, shaking her head.

  Rohan laughed. “Hey now, for all you know, it was my silver tongue that swayed her to let us in.”

  “More like almost blew it…”

  “Maybe tell me the plan ahead of time in the future so I can think about what I’m going to say!” Rohan whispered aggressively, brow furrowed.

  “I could. But it’s far more fun to keep you on your toes.” If her grin got any wider it might have caught the breeze and flown off her face.

  At that Rohan rolled his eyes.

  Entering the refinery was a truly surreal experience, like stepping into a strange new world — one made of elephant flesh. Iron scaffolding stained with rust, clung like ivy to the wet red walls. It was a cavernous place, with countless tunnels branching off deeper into the ancient creature. Carts rumbled up and down tracks carrying weary workers and machinery that appeared somehow wearier than the workers.

  Rohan and Diya gasped in overwhelmed agreement. It was a lot to take in. In fact, it proved far too much to take in. The putrid stench was exponentially stronger here than outside, something that only moments before seemed impossible. Their shared amazement mutated rapidly into shared disgust, and they found themselves coughing and gagging.

  A worker seemed to take pity on them and noticing that they were the only two people in the facility not wearing gas masks, brought them each one. They scrambled to put them on as if their lives depended on it.

  And who really knew, perhaps they did.

  To be entirely honest, the mask looked less like protective gear and more like something out of a nightmare. Two circular glass eyepieces, bulging slightly outward, were sewn into the dirty gray cloth. Diya noticed once it was on that the lenses seemed to fog up immediately, providing a slightly blurred, distorted view of her surroundings. She found the unreal quality of the place amplified now.

  With the mask on, the whole situation was rather stifling and claustrophobic. It smelled of damp cloth, old sweat, and a bitter chemical tang, though she supposed that almost anything was better than breathing in the noxious fumes of the refinery.

  Rohan appeared to feel similarly based on the way that he hugged the worker tightly, clearly appreciative of the gift.

  The worker, a thin blonde girl, shrugged him off with a nervous wave and turned to return to her work.

  “Wait!” Diya called out.

  The worker paused mid-step but didn’t turn around. Her shoulders hunched as if expecting trouble.

  “Thank you so much for your kindness. What is your name?” Diya asked.

  For a moment, the hiss of steam and distant groan of machinery filled the silence. Then, slowly, the girl turned her head just enough that one fogged lens caught the light.

  “Indira,” the girl said, her voice muffled through her own mask.

  “A lovely name.” Diya said, introducing herself then Rohan and explaining their mission, and for obvious reasons she left out that it wasn’t a real mission.

  Therefore, Indira listened politely, however periodically glanced over one shoulder or the other as if a foreman might appear and reprimand her at any moment.

  Diya placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “If you can give us a tour of the facility, I will pay you well for your time, Indira. If you don’t mind me asking, how many silver coins are you paid for a week’s work?”

  “I work six days a week, and earn two coins per day.”

  Rohan tried not to show it, but his face became a poster for his astonishment at the terribly low wage.”

  “Show us around the refinery, and I will pay you thirty silver coins.” Diya offered.

  Indira’s eyes lit up so brightly that her excitement was visible even behind hazy lenses. “B-but what if my boss doesn’t approve and I get terminated? It’s not a fantastic job by any stretch of the imagination, but this is how I take care of my family.”

  “You have my word that I won’t allow that to happen.” Diya said.

  The girl appeared to be in the midst of an inner crisis, but after weighing her options she had made up her mind, offering the pair a frail nod of agreement. Diya handed the girl a pouch of coins which Indira marveled at for a moment before tucking it away into her belt like it might fly away.

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  And so, the first area she guided them to was an iron catwalk. The narrow strip of grated steel provided a birds-eye view of a large cavern she referred to as, the Fuel Conversion Ward.

  “This is where the blood of Ghanesha is brought in its crude form to be distilled into what we all know as blackblood.” Indira explained.

  Diya did her best to focus on inspecting the production floor below, but the way that rust webbed the railings, and every bolt seemed to whisper warnings of age and strain filled her head with doubts about its structural integrity. She had never heard about any catastrophic failures at the facility, but then again, she had never really heard much of anything about the inner workings of the facility.

  From this height, the ward below was a maze of pipes, pressure tanks, and glowing conduits where the elephant’s blood, thick and black-red, was processed into volatile fuel.

  The floor was dominated by long rows of immense, circular vats, each one wide enough to swallow a house and deep enough that the bottom, if it even existed, was never visible. Massive articulated arms dipped into the vats and siphoned the fuel into huge metal drums mounted on tracked platforms.

  Diya was blown away by the scale of the operation. She had always assumed that to be sustainable, a small amount of blood was drawn to then create the blackblood. This was clearly no small amount of blood, it seemed as if the contents of the vats could fill a small lake.

  The second area Indira guided them to saw the three take a ride in one of the rickety carts to a freshly excavated chamber deep within the elephant.

  As the mining cart rattled along its narrow rail with a rhythm like a failing heartbeat—ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk—Diya was yet again blown away by the vastness of the operation.

  How many tunnels like this exist? How deep into Ghanesha does this operation reach? Is it possible that this could cause irreparable damage to our ancient host? Diya’s mind was full of questions, and in many ways, she felt like a fool for never realizing that any of this was happening right beneath her feet.

  A single overhead lantern swayed from its hook, casting spasms of light across the walls of flesh and scaffolding. Veins as thick as an airship’s rope pulsed faintly in the walls, they were half-submerged and in many cases the flesh surrounding them was bruised and appeared horribly infected.

  Past a collapsed arterial bridge, the tunnel opened suddenly, revealing a freshly excavated chamber. It was a cavernous wound, raw and steaming. The walls dripped with slick red ichor.

  Here, where the cart ground to a halt, the various laborers working didn’t so much as stop what they were doing to acknowledge the newcomers.

  In the center of the chamber was a puncture site—here a thick glass tube full of crimson liquid fed into a filling station surrounded by laborers siphoning the precious fluid into barrels. Surrounding it was heavy machinery that steamed and fired off with heavy pistons and pulleys.

  “This,” Indira explained, “is an extraction well.”

  Rohan examined the place with his jaw dropped. “How many of these wells are there?”

  The girl looked at him as if the question was ludicrous. “Who knows? Each well can only be used for a week tops, then a new one needs to be located and made operational.”

  “So…there are multiple wells operational at any given time?” Diya asked.

  “Well, of course. Our weekly quotas could never be met from just a single well.” Indira scoffed.

  Diya and Rohan shared a nervous glance that made it all too clear how unsettled the tour thus far had made them.

  Indira stepped over to one of the workers and told him something. Diya was curious what it was about, but it was far too loud for her to overhear.

  When Indira returned, Diya asked her about it.

  “Oh nothing, I know that man. I just asked if he might be coming to my brother’s birthday party tomorrow evening.”

  “Ah, I see. Tell your brother happy birthday for me. Now, let’s move on to the next area, we only have until sundown.” Diya suggested.

  And so, yet again they sped through the dark tunnels. While they zipped through the winding passageways, Diya considered how the dim lantern illuminating patches of the elephant’s flesh felt somewhat like a metaphor for the way this tour had shined a light on her complete lack of understanding. Suddenly, it made perfect sense why the Kudrati had made a mission of protesting against this place.

  The whole thing felt vile. At first, she thought it might just be the uncomfortable gas mask making her feel claustrophobic, but the more she thought on it, the more she felt it was the situation. She closed her eyes and took a deep, labored breath.

  I can do this. If I simply power through, then before I know it I will be back in the clouds with Shikra. So high above all of this.

  When she opened her eyes, they had arrived at the next stop on the tour.

  This place was the exact opposite of the first chamber. Here, the air was cold and antiseptic, no longer were they surrounded by enflamed flesh. Instead, everything was clean and white. Bright lights hummed overhead, casting long, soft shadows on the walls which were lined with padded medical cots, and containment cells of glass and cloth.

  The beds and cells were full of sickly workers, at least a hundred, if not more, all lying in medicated silence. Compared to the chaotic hum of machinery and laborers shouting to be heard over said machinery, the silence of this place was deeply unsettling.

  Nurses wearing mirrored masks moved softly between the rows of cots like ghosts, their faces perfectly reflective, and frighteningly featureless. They stopped occasionally to provide injections, or change the fluids being drip-fed to the patients through winding tubes.

  “This is the infirmary,” Indira whispered. “I prefer to avoid it, but thought it best for you to see.”

  Diya shook her head, alarmed that it was possible for this place to somehow be even more freaky than the last two. “How is it possible for there to be this many sick workers here?”

  A side door opened with a slow creak.

  “Captain Diya, how unexpected…”

  Diya’s stomach dropped. She immediately recognized the woman’s voice, it was the very last voice she wished to hear at that moment. Breath going cold in her throat, Diya turned to face her.

  Standing in the doorway, with a gang of guards behind her, was the proprietor of the refinery, Peacock Prisha.

  Prisha stepped forward slowly, heels clicking sharply against the polished tile floor. Even wearing a gas mask, the intensity of her makeup was still somehow noticeable. She wore an unusually angular coat, the material was shiny, and it was a hue that reminded Diya of dragon fruit. The mirrored masks of the nurses caught her reflection in colorful fragmented slivers.

  “You’ve wandered far from your clouds and birds today, Captain,” she said blithely. “No parade? No formal notice? I might’ve had the township banners flown proudly, had I known a hero would be visiting.”

  “I was hoping not to make a splash,” Diya said, tone deliberately flat. “I thought I might actually see the place for what it is…without all the makeup.”

  Prisha sneered—a thin, polished crescent. “And deny you my personal hospitality? Well, that just wouldn’t do. Though next time, I do suggest you arrive through the front gate. With a real invitation. There’s no need for you to keep breaking into my properties, I’ve nothing to hide and trespassing looks ugly on you.”

  Diya said nothing. Rohan shifted beside her, clearly trying to shrink into his coat. Indira was visibly trembling, she stared at the floor, as if refusing to look at the situation might see it cease to exist.

  Prisha waved her hand at Indira like she wasn’t worth addressing. “Thank you for informing me of the captain’s presence, girl. For your loyalty you may head home early today.”

  Indira sensing the tension, mouthed an apology towards Diya then took the opportunity to flee.

  Even though she hardly knew the girl, her choosing to rat them out felt like a real punch in the gut. It irritated her that it kept happening to her.

  Why does trying to help these people keep backfiring? When will doing the right thing actually feel rewarding?

  “You’ve been breaking into my businesses, rummaging through my personal artifacts, give me a good reason that I shouldn’t have you court marshalled?” Prisha went on, stopping beside a cot where a pale, trembling man lay hooked to a dozen slow-dripping tubes. Her frail smile flickered as she looked at him. “A bit of curiosity, was it? Or perhaps something a little more pointed?”

  Diya took a deep breath, then stood tall. “Councilwoman Prisha, we have reason to believe that you might be in league with the syndicate. We’re here investigating that possibility.”

  Fingers running against the pouch at her waist where she kept small explosives, she readied for what would likely come next Diya’s instincts had her anticipating a fight.

  When instead of ordering her gang of guards to attack, she simply hunched over laughing, Diya wasn’t quite sure what to do.

  The fit of laughter stretched on leaving Rohan and Diya nervously glancing at each other.

  “I don’t work with the Syndicate,” Prisha said under her breath, calm but sharp enough to draw blood. “And if I did, Captain, you’d already be at the bottom of one of these vats instead of standing here trying to look righteous.”

  “Then how do you explain the letter from the Cutlass Widow?”

  Prisha’s laugh was short and humorless. “That letter was a threat. Blackmail. Refusing Tessara’s ‘partnership’ has cost me more shipments than I can count. She wants control of the Ribcage, but she’ll get it over my corpse.”

  “You truly expect me to believe that despite the fact that your businesses profit off the plight of the common folk?” Diya’s voice was a blade’s edge. “You don’t seem to be losing any sleep over the state of things. As a matter of fact things look to be going pretty well for you from my persp—"

  “You know nothing of how I sleep, you little brat! I keep these refineries running because without them, the airships stop,” Prisha shot back. “No airships, no grain from the Reach. No medicine from the Commune. You think the rest of the Council will pick up the slack? Arjun certainly won’t! His ambition knows no bounds. He’s been quietly buying up transport contracts and foreign tech for months. That’s what you should be worried about. Or perhaps trying to find a way to stop the Syndicate instead of pointing the finger at the one person actively working to keep this township together!”

  Rohan’s brow furrowed. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying the pollution in your lungs is a price I hate, but it’s one we pay to keep the township going. Shut me down and you hand the Syndicate the perfect excuse to swoop in as our saviors. And if it’s not them, it’ll be someone worse!”

  “You’re killing Ghanesha,” Diya said, but there was hesitation now.

  Prisha stepped closer, her eyes gleaming in the sterile light. “And what’s your alternative? You think I carry this weight guilt free?” Her eyes traced the countless sick bodies filling the cots. “I do what no one else has the spine to do, and I just pray that when I’m gone someone else will have the fortitude to do what needs to be done.”

  Rohan swore softly, his suspicion solidifying into certainty. “Zoralia lied to us.”

  Prisha looked confused.

  “No, why would she do that?” Diya whispered.

  “She sent us here on a wild goose chase.”

  “What did you do?” Prisha asked, voice dripping with accusation.

  Diya massaged her temples, head shaking softly. “She wouldn’t do that…”

  “You have to accept it, Di. She had to have had some reason to want us distracted and for us to get rid of Prisha.” Rohan said.

  Prisha’s eyes narrowed, “What have you done?”

  Just then, a man darted into the room, out of breath and holding a letter. “M’aam, I’m sorry to interrupt, but this letter just arrived for you from the Capitol. It’s marked urgent.”

  Snatching the letter from his hands, Prisha quickly read it. The room fell deathly silent, tension filling the air, the place somehow seemed even more dreadful.

  The letter dropped from her hands and Prisha closed her eyes. “Arjun has called an emergency assembly in the Core. It seems that opportunistic weasel is poised to make his play.”

  Diya and Rohan’s mouths fell open in shock.

  “What do you figure this means?” Diya asked.

  Prisha gave a short, knowing nod. “We need to go at once if we’re to have any shot at stopping this madness. I can get you to the Capitol faster than on foot. We can go with my small security team in a transport barge.”

  Diya glanced at Rohan. He met her sad eyes, gave a single nod, and the choice was made.