The platform the marshals guided Ashe onto sat at the edge of the district. It was circular, built from reinforced paneling that had been welded onto the old stone-like structure underneath. It began to move the moment the last marshal stepped on it, rising slowly, and by the time it locked into place at the upper level, Ashe could already see where they were taking her next.
The monorail waiting there was unlike anything she had seen down in the streets below. It was narrow and long, built as a single continuous body and colored in muted grey tones, likely chosen so it wouldn't stand out too much. It ran along a single elevated line, suspended above the ground by a row of pylons stretching in both directions as far as she could see.
She stepped in carefully and took a seat near the back. The marshal beside her kept his rifle visible at all times, as if there were some kind of danger to be wary of. Ashe glanced at him, registered him, then turned toward the glass.
The monorail soon departed, accelerating quickly along the guide line. At that height, the whole of Railen became visible at once. From inside the town, it had felt dense and loud and enormous, but from above, it all seemed so small against the ruins of Lethon beyond. A timid attempt at rebuilding humanity within the vast hold of old remnants nobody understood anymore.
Ashe was observing the distribution and complexity of the ruins when the monorail slowed as it approached a junction. The moment itself was brief, but in that small window she caught something moving along the surface of one of the buildings close by. Letters. And they were forming in the same pattern she knew Seven used. She narrowed her eyes and leaned toward the glass until her forehead was close to touching it. The shapes moved too quickly and the angle was already changing, but she caught one thing before it finally disappeared. Her name.
Seven? She thought. Could that have been Seven?
"Hey." The marshal's hand came down on her shoulder and drew her firmly back into her seat. "Stay where you are."
She tried to keep the letters within her line of sight but the marshal's grip tightened on her shoulder once more, forcing her to straighten.
She could have imagined it. Seven had never struggled to appear on any surface before, so there was no reason he couldn't have done the same here, inside the monorail itself. He had gone silent after the facility. Why? Was it that his role had simply ended there?
—
They eventually passed a series of old broken archways covered in vegetation. Their walls were massive, built from stone blocks that couldn't have come from Railen. Their enormous scale matched the ruins in Lethon far more closely. Beyond these arches, a cylindrical building soon came into view. Its structure was simple and solid, with window frames masked by the walls themselves, making it difficult to tell where the stone ended and the glass began.
The marshals led her inside through a series of corridors she eventually lost track of. There were others there too, people watching her as the group passed, or rather staring in such a way that she couldn't quite tell whether they feared her or they were simply curious in an unsettling sort of way.
The room they put her in was small, with two chairs, a table, and bare white walls all around. The marshals directed her to the chair on the near side, and then, without warning, they took her by the arms and forced them forward across the table, pressing them into two recessed compartments that looked specifically designed for this. She tried to resist and attempted to pull free a couple of times but the restraints inside, a mechanism she couldn't clearly see, were already in place. There was little she could do.
"Seriously," she said, watching the two marshals move toward the door. "Is this really the way?"
But neither of them replied, they simply left the room in silence.
Ashe scoffed and looked around, trying to ground herself in this new and strange situation she found herself in. But there was nothing to analyze, nothing to hear or see except those damn bare white walls around her.
Fifteen minutes or so might have passed when the door slightly opened at the threshold again. She looked up at the sound and fixed her gaze on the narrow gap in front of her. At first, no one was visible beyond it, but then she realized the person on the other side was in fact smaller in stature, positioned lower than she had expected.
The boy was standing in the gap with his body mostly behind the door and only his face in the opening. He was looking at her directly, with the same expression she remembered from the crowd back in the market district. His hair was the same pale shade as hers, and there was something shy in the way he appeared.
"Hello?" she said.
He didn't answer. He remained at the gap for another moment, then pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. He moved to the side of the room first, as if testing the area in some unusual way, then gradually closed the distance until he was standing beside the table on her left side.
"Who are you?" she asked.
He still didn't speak. His attention was fixed on her forearm, just above where the compartments held her in place, and where the bare skin revealed the dragonfly mark. He studied it with a strange insistence, as if there was something deeply important about it he didn't want to miss. Then he reached out and touched it.
As soon as he did, a series of quick flashes ran through Ashe's mind, and a tingling sensation moved through her like a current. There was no pain, but both her motor functions and her vision became entirely useless as though her body was no longer her own. Like it was caught in a repeating pattern of connection and disconnection. She couldn't tell how long it lasted, or even what was real through the flashes themselves. Eventually things began to settle slowly and so did her breathing as her senses gradually returned.
Immediately afterwards, writings appeared across every surface simultaneously, the table, the walls, the floor below her feet, even the ceiling above her head was filled with dark markings. And what was worse, she couldn't grasp their meaning at all, as though she lacked the focus to process what they represented. They were there, and yet not there at all.
And then, suddenly, it just stopped. The writing was gone and the room was exactly as it had been before. Also, the boy was no longer beside her.
The door opened again and this time a man entered through it. He was particularly calm, dressed differently from the marshals, wearing plain clothes in dark tones that didn't stand out in any way. He looked at her for a couple of moments assessing the state she seemed to be in, somewhat restless, sweating and with her eyes slightly unfocused.
He pulled the second chair out from the table and sat across from her.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
Ashe looked at him for a long moment, then at the space around her, trying to regain composure as best she could given the circumstances.
"Where's the boy?" she asked.
"What boy? No one has entered this room before me. It's been locked since the marshals secured it."
She held his gaze for a moment, then looked down at the table and the compartments restraining her.
"You're sweating, are you okay?" the man eventually asked.
"No, I'm not okay. Your guys strapped me to a table and left me here like I'm some sort of test subject."
"The restraints aren't a form of punishment," the man corrected. "They're standard protocol. After what happened in the street this morning, it would be irresponsible to remove them without an assessment."