#zilch.

  In the lead, a beast that could be called hulking if not for the smart grace of the way it walked, great feet near silent in the sand, each one filling into the print that fell before it. Behind it, the wind-worn young man. Every so often, it pauses. Turns its low-hanging head to look behind it at him. Waits for him to draw closer, before setting off again, ears held forward. Guiding him.

  Where to? He’s not sure, yet.

  He’s sure he hears it before he sees it. A low rumble. Something he almost dismisses as wind at first, or a distant vehicle, but the beast’s certainty makes him doubt it could be anything so mundane. Beast or not it’s smart enough to see no reason in chasing the wind, sensible enough not to get too close to something so fast-moving and bone-crushing as the supped up sports cars and monstrous trucks that populate the desert. No reward waited at the end of either avenue. So whatever they’re moving toward, whatever rattles like a thousand snakes in the dead of night, it must be something worth chasing. On and on, then, the beast and the boy trudge.

  It’s slow going. Has been, ever since the water ran short. Even slower after it ran out. He knows there must be consequences. But he cannot feel the pain of it, the drying out, cannot find the panic of the spark going dull. If his luck holds out he’ll just stop, and it won’t ever be a bother at all. In the meantime, the beast stops ahead of him again, turning back, slowing itself to wait. So he follows.

  The rumble begins to sound familiar. Despite the moonlight -three-quarters full on a cloudless night- he can’t see much. That is, he can see well enough, but there doesn’t seem to be anything noteworthy to see. Just long horizons of scrub and dust. (The only charm the flats had to offer them: the inability for something to sneak up. But then, it also made it impossible for them to sneak up on anything else.) That’s one sense out. He closes his eyes and follows by sound.

  He scans the desert new, thoughts of what he might be looking for now held in mind. It still takes a great effort, squinting into the night, before he finds it. Hidden by its color in flat plain sight, like a cleverly angled mirror. Once he spies the edges his discovers it must have been visible for awhile, and still it slips in and out of his focus, hard to hold.

  Soft, the beast’s weight crunching through the salty top crust of the flats. Louder, the ever-growing rumble rises to a rattle. Focusing on the consistency, and the pitch, anything that might help him work out what it is, gives him something to do while his steps go and go, automatic. Stumbling over the occasional loose stone. Sinking into the softer sand uncovered in the great paw prints. It clicks. He opens his eyes. Fans. The sound, with its hum and rattle and laboring whir, is fans. At least two, certainly, but perhaps more.

  It triples in size before they reach it. By then he’s found a second wind. No more thoughts about stopping, only curiosity of the great wall of a shape looming ahead. Even his legs seem to work a little better, weigh a little less, driving him up to the side of it to rest his hand on an honest to god wall topped by a series of circulatory units so large they should surely crush a small car if they fell from their place high over his head. And the rattle? They’re running. Every single one spinning and singing, alive with power.

  But what for?

  The door, of course, is locked. Set in the middle of the wide wall, heavy and obstructing. No weak points to make note of like the abandoned places scattered round. None other than the key, of course. The old kind, material, not a question of punch codes or pass cards. He’s picked them in the past. With the nibs of pens and the pins of fasteners. Most doors, he found, weren’t especially secure. Many of them could be jammed and forced.

  For this one, he finds a short length of stiff wire from a pocket and sets down on his knees to work. Twist and shimmy. Scrape, scratch, jimmy. It’s not working. And it could just be the door. It could be that it’s that less common kind, which resist attempts to be thwarted by a heavy gauge wire and time to spare. It could be they're already jammed and he hasn't even touched the tumblers. But he suspects, with a flare of frustration, that is has far more to do with the way his hands refuse him. Stiff and awkward. He pauses more than once to shake them out, squeeze and flex in the hopes of restoring the dexterity through the ends of his fingers. Still, as he tries again to turn the lock, they just don’t do what he expects.

  The wire falls into the sand.

  He shouts and rattles the handles, shaking the heavy doors in their frame. Beaten.

  “Youuuuu…” the low call of a voice interrupts. He turns to the beckoning with just enough time to roll out of the way as the beast charges forward. WHAM. It throws all of its weight against the doors, sending one swinging inward until it collides with something on the other side. It meant not you, but move. He struggles to his feet, knees strange from kneeling, and peers around the edge of the door. Inside, the beast gets to its feet and shakes itself, no worse for wear. It looks back at him. He follows it in.

  The warmth settles over him — so thick even he can tell it’s there. Heavy and humid. It reminds him of the lower city after a summer storm that had, reportedly, infringed on whatever means Better Living had of maintaining balance over these sorts of things, the wind and weather. After the wind tore down power poles and ripped scaffolds off of the alley walls and threw them into the streets, surrounded by puddles, the sun appeared. The water grew tepid, then hot, and the steam rose until the air itself was wet. That is what it’s like now. Wet air. So dense that, as he walks into the unknown beyond the door, his shirt begins to stick to him, front and back.

  He’d expected it to be dark inside. Darker, even, than the desert. But after a few steps and some adjustment, it’s not much changed. Strange shapes and shadows surround him, waving slightly in the wind produced by the army of fans. A look up shows him a strange sight: the moon. High overhead as always, three quarters full. Not a projection. A glass ceiling.

  Another click that begins to set things turning. Bring things to mind. The shadows begin to seem familiar. Even so, he doesn’t quite believe what he’s looking at until he reaches out, touching one.

  A leaf. Smooth and waxy, a pattern of veins on the underside presses back against his touch like a fingerprint. It’s cool to the touch. Just about the furthest thing from the sharp, often scraggly brush found across the desert behind him. Not so jealous a guard of the moisture, when the air is full of it enough to stick his hair down to his forehead. He tears the leaf from its stem before pressing further in. Running it in his hands, tracing the shape of it.

  The deeper he goes the bigger the plants become. Little ferns grow into tall, stalk-y flowers, into fountainesque growths with leaves the size of his hand… then arm… then entire torso. Smelling of soil and sweet things, the perfumes his sister wore. He lingers there, swaying like the leaves, tracing and tracing the branches of life in one little thing. Lost. Until a broad, muscular shoulder pushes into his hip, making him stumble. He catches himself on the same shoulder, the beast’s odd fuzzy body steady under his hands.

  It shakes like a waterlogged hunting dog, throwing him, gently, off of leaning on it. Then paces forward. “Here,” it whuffs through its teeth.

  Still following, apparently. He takes another leaf, a spade-shaped one larger than his face, then obliges. It brings him to another door. Happily, this one opens without either of them resorting to any harsher methods than turning the handle. This time, though, the space beyond is dark. Darker than dark. Deep and yawning. He might have believed it could open into a vastness of empty space occupied only by the dark, if not for the close-sounding way it throws all the sounds of the door opening and the fans back at him. The beast continues in, driven by…

  He’s not sure, as a matter of perfect fact. Intelligence, obviously. But is this more sense than thought? Or is it returning somewhere it has been before? Questions that have no distinctly accessible answers. His least favorite. (A challenge is one thing; a lack of result is another.) He chews on them as he steps into the dark, listening for the strange voices of the beast, should it decide to offer him any more instruction.

  He holds his empty hand out in front of him - the wall is close, he knows, but how close remains a mystery until he finds it with his palm. Rough. Concrete? Shaped into bricks. He feels along until he finds a rail, and a stair, and discovers thusly where the beast has gone: down. Deeper darks.

  The air becomes lighter as he descends, though still damp, and at a guess it’s cooler than the close swaddle of the greenhouse above. At least, the quality of it changes, the way he breathes it in.

  A dull glow takes shape. Either getting brighter, or his eyes are adjusting, or perhaps both. But the stairs creep finally creep into view as he approaches the bottom, and he steps down into a bizarre world of damp walls and more growth. Boxes of bizarre flowers and a few fungi that seem to be glowing are brief distractions as he scans the whole long space. The hunch of the beast draws his eyes to a tank.

  More accurately, it’s a well set into the floor, surrounded by pumps and filters and pipes leading down and up. Pulling it in, he guesses, cleaning it and resting it before sending it up into the greenhouse. And not in some cobbled-together mess of ill-fitting pieces and forced-to-work couplings, either. Neat, tidy, seam to seam. No leaks. Something either newly built, or else built to last and last.

  The beast already has its feet braced on the low wall that surrounds the pool, head lowered to the water, drinking deeply. Long pulls that almost seem like they should be impossible for even a beast that large. Where does it go? Ultimately, it’s arbitrary. He follows the example.

  A lean forward dips his arms to the elbow and finds it smooth and clear. Lit from below by pale light. He dunks his face straight in, letting the water sweep over the sun’s burns and the sand’s abuse. He opens his eyes, opens his mouth, drinks and blows a stream of fast-moving bubbles. Sways a bit, feeling the eddies of water curl around the edges of his face, drag at this hair. It soaks into him, lessening that husked feeling that has been building around him since he crossed the wall. They’ve found a pit of pure relief. He stays down until he can’t hold his breath anymore.

  When he draws himself up again, the beast is already sitting back. Staring at him with its reflective-shine eyes. Asking him something, he’s sure, though it doesn’t seem to have any words for it. An odd feeling sweeps him. He reaches into the pool again and drags his arm through the water, throwing water up and out at the beast.

  It snorts, startled, and backs away a step. The look in its eyes is indignant as it shakes the water from its mane.

  “Well done,” he tells it.

  “Well… done,” it echoes, teeth bared long into its wicked smile from the dedicated effort. “Done. Done, done.” Still muttering to itself, the beast stretches, and flops down onto the gound next to the well.

  It’s getting easier. A note to make as he goes back to the water, dragging it out in handfuls to splash over his head and the back of his neck. Smoothing away what can’t be more than dust but which seems like more. A barrier standing between him and the world. Him and sanity. Distracted, he gets lost again. Not paying attention in the least until a new rumble begins, one so much louder than the fans, and far more bone chilling.

  The beast is growling.

  Turning toward the way they came in, there’s a figure at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe two? It’s hard to tell - they’ve got the better benefit of the lights, he can only see shadows from where he is. Nevertheless, the shape of a gun is fairly unmistakable. Long barreled, an end that glints hungrily even in the dark. It points at the monster.

  There’s … something that happens. A feeling in his chest he has no name for, which twists and coils unpleasantly. It drives him. Pilots him, putting him face to face with the beast, closer than he’s even been except in the instances where it had snapped at him. Bitten him. “Wait,” he rasps. His voice is clearer than it would have been before the long drink, but it’s still more coarse noise than word. He grabs at the thick ruff of fur hanging over its shoulder and presses the word between them, staring right into its eyes. Wait. The growling stops. The twist in his chest lessens. He holds his hands out to the side, empty, and turns slowly around to face the gun.