Pen sits on her knees and looks at the bi-refractive-shard in her hand with bright eyes, which shine full of child-like wonder. Her body shakes from a mixture of excitement and from the biting cold that had been nipping at her for so many hours now. The glowing yellow crystal, which is the size of her own palm in width, but a full forearm in length, is the largest she had ever held herself. The largest she had ever had for herself.

 

It’s not some splinter or fragment or sliver, but an entire, whole shard. She could live for a month off of this easily – like a queen. Warily the girl looks around the dusty, crumbling ruin that she had delved down into; her gaze switching from bewonderment now to paranoia. She clutches the pristine crystal shard close to her chest, her fingers wrapping tightly around it.

 

It radiates such warmth, it feels good to hold against the shoddily thin, torn rags covering her body, which do little to keep out the underground chill. It’s hot like a bottle filled with piping water on a winter’s day.

 

Her eyes dart around the underground chamber in paranoia, searching for any creeping shadow that is about to twist, for any stone-borne gestalt to spring to life and to lunge at her from the corners of her vision.

 

But there is nothing.

 

Nobody else is here and nothing stirs in the room apart from the shifting of the airborne dust-motes surrounding herself, blown away by her own heavy, excited breathing. She shivers and holds the glowing crystal closer against her wraithly thin body, feeling more of its radiating warmth shine into her core. After a minute of sitting like that, Pen notices that she can see her now slowly heating breath in the cold air once again. But it does little to help with the sting and tingling of her long since numb feet, which are now filling with warm blood from her torso. The crystal resonates with a permanent gentle, dull hum that she finds almost pleasant to listen to, to feel.

 

She has to keep moving. This was a good find. But there might be more! She had come all the way down to this dangerous ruin, she might never get this chance again. She can’t leave now. She can’t quit now. Pen jumps up from the ground, both of her arms wrapped around the bi-refractive-crystal like a mother, holding a precious newborn. If she can find one more, maybe even two more, that’s all she needs. That’s all she needs.

 

Tilting her head down she wipes her brow on her shoulder, getting the slick strand of red-brown hair out of her face. Her head turns back to the small shaft behind herself on the side of the room that she had just come in from a minute before. The entrance to this floor of the ruin.

  

This was only the first room of this floor and she had found this treasure. At this point, it would be stupid not to go further, right?

 

Her arms never loosen their embrace around her find as she walks onward; silently meandering through the grim darkness. She uses the light seeping through the gaps in her grip around the crystal to brighten her way. It is quiet, except for the sound of her bare feet against the stone floors, the sounds of the occasional pebble or rock tumbling to the side, as she kicks them with a numb appendage, the occasional hiss of her breath with the accompanying wince as she steps on one.

 

The painful sensation now manages to shoot through her feet; her feet that are now returning to a vague sense of life at, perhaps, the worst time possible, as the newly rewarmed blood continues to circulate through her.

 

Suddenly a loud metal clanking rings out from somewhere in the distance. Pen jumps back, stumbling in fear of the sharp, metallic noise bouncing off of dozens of walls before reaching her. The echo makes its origins impossible to locate. She begins shaking again, this time not because of the temperature. Pen stands there quietly, listening and waiting; her mind telling her to run, but her greed telling her to stay. Her survival instinct is now internally conflicting with itself if it should prioritize the short-term or the long. It was probably just some metal that fell over, some old pipes or some rusted creature that had fallen apart eons ago, right?

 

Nothing else.

 

Pen nods to herself, gulping at the same time. With a grimace, she takes another tender step forward, half expecting the world to explode as she does so. But nothing happens. Warily she dares to take another step and then another, ignoring the shivering in her body and the nausea in her gut. Pen ignores the sting on her bleeding, half-frozen feet, caked with a dried mixture of dirt and matted red.

 

Just one or two more and she can leave. That’s all she needs. Just one or two more and she can go. She can sell them and buy real food, real medicine. She can pay back the money. No.

 

– She can leave.

 

The strand of hair falls back before her eyes and she does her best to wipe it away again, her grip still not loosening from the crystal in the least. As silently as possible, she creeps down the hallway of the forbidden floor of the ruin, listening out for any sounds. She listens for any hints of danger with her sharp ears up in the air, jutting out of her ragged, greasy, reddish-brown hair. They’re just as cold as her feet are. There are no unexpected sounds to be heard. There is still nothing apart from the tepid patter of her own sneaking movements and the gentle hum of the glowing crystal in her arms, which never stops.

 

A sudden burning feeling in her chest reminds her that she has forgotten to exhale and she lets out a long, extended, heavy breath; watching as it leaves her body like the trail of a ghost, floating away from the mortal plane

 

Walking through the darkness illuminated only by the light of the crystal, her eyes continue to dart around, searching for any signs of new light. For any signs of new danger.

 

Another metal crash strikes out and Pen ducks down, jumping behind a pile of rubble and bricks next to herself. She hides behind it, as if the glow of the crystal that she’s holding wouldn’t give her away in the otherwise perfect darkness. Her heart begins to beat fast once again and she feels the pulse of its strike lurching her body forward just an inch with each beat. She feels her eyes grow just a little wider with each beat. Her ears perk just a little higher with each beat.

 

Pen exhales again, realizing she wasn’t breathing for a second time now and she listens to the darkness ahead. She listens to the sound of some deathly machine ambling in the distance, clanking, grinding, walking.

 

The heavy beat of the girl’s heart is an overpowering, almost nauseating sensation that sends out wave after wave of rushing blood beneath her clammy, icy cold skin. The hairs on her arms and neck rise, sticking up into the air, as the heavy metal thuds ring out one after the other in the vague distance; like dull strikes of an old hammer, they give credence to the presence of some other entity inhabiting this floor of the ruins.

 

Each ring thunders out and echoes through the hall. Each step of the machine causes her to flinch just a little more, to squeeze the crystal just a little tighter and to cower down just a little lower behind the rubble.

 

The winding of its gears, moving back into place to prepare itself for each consecutive step, hisses out ominously, as forbearance of the potential danger lurking in the deep. The bot isn’t far away. However, even if she can’t tell where exactly it is, she can tell that it is close enough to be a threat. The next room, maybe a hallway down from that. It isn’t far.

 

She stopped breathing again, but this time on purpose. Fear courses through her. Fear of being heard, of being seen. Could she run back to the entrance fast enough if it had heard her? Even being this close to the doorway, she isn’t sure if she could make it in time, before it could catch up to her, if it went at full speed.

 

Bots are very fast, usually.

 

As she sits there listening, waiting, shaking, Pen’s panicked thoughts focus solely on the idea of escape. She has one whole shard. That’s enough, isn’t it? She could just go. If she waits a minute, she can just leave.

 

Sure, there might be more to find but…

 

The ringing steps continue on together with the hiss of the coils and with the whisper of piping steam, escaping some gap somewhere from some slit in the mechanical creature. All of them grow quieter together. Step after step, the sound fades away, until it is gone entirely again and the girl hears nothing else. Only the reassuring hum of the crystal remains with her and it acts as a gentle, tempting voice.

 

Slowly, Pen lets out her breath and looks back down the way that she had just come from again. Towards the exit, escape, safety. She could go back up to the town right now. Back to the life she was trying to leave. Back to that place.

 

Back to those people.

 

Pen grits her teeth and looks towards the darkness looming before herself like a curtain, waiting to be drawn.

 

Isn’t it a better choice? She would die if she went back. Not right away, not like she would down here; but she can’t live like that anymore. She just can’t.

 

No.

 

This is everything she has left, this opportunity is it. Everything or nothing. She has to get those shards now or she never will. She has to fight to get out of her old life now, or she never will.

 

– Just like the rest of them. She never would make it out. She’d become like them.

 

The crystal hums against her body, continuing to radiate the same reassuring warmth, keeping on with its seductive promise of more. The dull droning sensation is calming in a way, it numbs the edge of her thoughts and grounds them back into that determined state of mind, removing all of the fresh fear like the nighttime lullaby of a doting matriarch. It grounds her thoughts back into that goal oriented existence, removing those constant touches of terror and anxiety, as if they had never been.

 

It’s now or never. It’s do or die.

 

She gulps and gets up tenderly from the cold stone floor and begins creeping forward in an odd mixture of shuffles and timid tip-toed steps over the sharp rocks and crumbling debris. Breathing is a sort of a painful act. The air, which is thick with particulates, has already formed a black crust in her nose that is making it hard to breathe through. She ignores it, her hands never leaving the crystal shard. Opting instead to inhale through her mouth. She can feel a deep ache, as the cold air pulls against her temperature sensitive teeth. She can taste the old, ancient miasma on her tongue. Bits of dust and residue of an age now long forgotten scratch her throat as it goes to her lungs.

 

Just one or two more.

 

She steps forward, proceeding down the hallway towards the next room, listening with every step for the sounds of the bot that she had heard before. She doesn’t know what kind it was, but it sounded like it had four legs and was slow. Just a patrolling unit probably. Just an average F-class. Maybe a D, since this is a deep level, but probably nothing worse than that. Yeah. Yeah.

 

The thought makes her feel just a tiny bit better, but not much better honestly. Even an F-class bot can kill her. She’s slow. She’s sickly. The medicine she bought was expensive, but it was the only thing keeping her standing on her bruised legs and body right now.

 

She has to get more. She has to get enough so that she can leave the town, so that she can go to the city, like she had always dreamed of.

 

Pen exhales, walking forward through the cloud of vapor that had escaped her lungs and enters the next chamber, looking around it.

 

The room is… it is massive. It’s not a room, it’s a shaft. A round, vertical tunnel. Standing in the doorway, she looks ahead and down at the cylindrical opening before herself that makes up the hollow room which she can barely see across, due to its width and her own bad eyes.

 

The stone floor turns to metal here. It turns into net-meshed metal bridges that dig into the stone walls and rise around the outside of the cylinder up and down in a spiral with degraded sections crisscrossing through the middle. Some of these have long since fallen down into the abyss below.

 

Looking down, Pen stares into the darkness which seems to stretch on forever from up here, scanning the bottom of the pit for signs of something. Anything. But instead, all that she sees is nothing.

 

Stone walls lined with metal cat-walks and flat, faded lights,running in rings around the interior, are the only things here. Her eyes find nothing save for that. Even with the many ancient lights placed around the cylindrical shaft that still burn brightly to this day, her sight can’t pierce through to the bottom of the great pit. What was this place? What did the first-people do with such things, she wonders, as she stares down into the chasm.

 

And why did they make so much stuff out of metal?