Currency You Didn't Know You Carried

"Bureaucracy survives everything. Apocalypse, dimensional travel, underground civilisations—somewhere, someone is always processing the paperwork."

The detention quarter was a city unto itself.

I'd expected cells. Bars. The grim architecture of imprisonment that I'd seen in films and imagined in nightmares. What I found instead was something more complex—a compound that sprawled across a significant portion of the cavern floor, enclosed by walls that looked more administrative than defensive.

The gates closed behind us with a sound that was more final than loud—a heavy thunk of wood against stone, followed by the clatter of bolts being thrown. I felt it in my chest, that sound. The click of a lock. The end of one thing and the beginning of something else.

The vial pulsed against my skin. Warm. Steady.

Light in darkness, I thought. Hold onto that.

The formation moved forward, following a wide avenue that cut through the heart of the compound. Buildings lined both sides—not cells, but offices. Administrative structures, their facades marked with symbols I couldn't read but was beginning to recognise as official designations. The same style of carving appeared on each one, the same arrangement of shapes above each doorway, like street numbers rendered in a language I didn't speak.

People moved between the buildings. Carrying documents. Pushing carts laden with boxes. Stopping to exchange words before hurrying on to wherever they were going. Their clothing was more uniform than what I'd seen in the streets outside—grey fabric with minimal luminescence, practical and institutional. The clothing of people who worked in offices, who processed forms, who made decisions about other people's lives while sitting behind desks.

Bureaucracy, I thought. Even here. Even in an underground prison compound. Someone has to process the paperwork.

The observation almost made me laugh. Almost. Mum had spent years navigating bureaucracy—the endless forms required to prove that she deserved the help she needed, the letters that arrived demanding documentation for documentation's sake, the phone calls that went nowhere and achieved nothing. She'd always said that paperwork would survive the apocalypse. That cockroaches and tax collectors would inherit the earth.

Apparently, they'd inherited underground civilisations too.

The avenue opened into a courtyard.

Larger than I'd expected—perhaps fifty metres across, paved with the same worn stone I'd seen throughout the city. Buildings rose on three sides, their facades more elaborate than the administrative offices we'd passed. Carved figures flanked doorways. Symbols I didn't recognise decorated window frames. Everything was old, worn smooth by generations of use, but carefully maintained. Cleaned. Respected.

A fountain stood at the courtyard's centre.

The water cascaded from a carved figure—a woman, I thought, though the features had been softened by time until they were more suggestion than detail. She held something in her outstretched hands, water pouring from whatever it was into the basin below. But the water wasn't ordinary water. It glowed with that soft luminescence I'd come to associate with everything in Xylora, creating a pillar of light that illuminated the entire space.

Les Lumineux, I thought, remembering what Sylvie had called them. The tiny creatures. They're in the water. They're everywhere.

I stared at the fountain as we passed, watching the light ripple and shift with the movement of the water. Beautiful. Strange. Impossible, by any standard I'd grown up with. And yet here it was, as ordinary to these people as a drinking fountain in a Hobart shopping centre.

Figures moved around the fountain's edge—guards, by the look of them, in more elaborate versions of the grey uniforms I'd seen on the administrators. Their clothing was threaded with luminescent patterns that outlined their bodies in soft light, concentrated at collars and cuffs and the edges of what might have been rank insignia. They carried weapons I didn't recognise—curved things, dark and gleaming, that hung from belts or rested against shoulders.

They watched us approach with expressions of professional disinterest. Eyes tracking, faces blank, bodies relaxed but ready. We weren't the first prisoners they'd seen. Wouldn't be the last. Just another delivery, another problem to be processed and filed and forgotten.

The formation split at the courtyard's edge.

Most of the Éclaireurs peeled away, heading toward what looked like stables on the eastern side—taking the mules, I assumed, along with their wounded. I caught a glimpse of Martel sliding from his saddle, his face tight with pain, one arm cradled against his chest. Someone rushed to help him. Someone else was shouting instructions I couldn't understand.

The grey beneath me shifted, its ears swivelling toward the departing animals. It wanted to follow them. Wanted to go wherever mules went when the riding was done—somewhere with food and water and rest, all the things I wanted too.

But we kept moving forward.

Toward the far side of the courtyard.

Toward a building that made everything else I'd seen look modest by comparison.

It rose from the cavern floor like something that had always been there.

The facade was carved from stone—massive blocks fitted together with a precision that made me think of photographs I'd seen of Machu Picchu or the Egyptian pyramids. The kind of construction that made you wonder how anyone had managed it without modern machinery, without cranes and trucks and all the tools we took for granted. Each block was enormous, taller than a man, and yet they fit together so perfectly that I couldn't see the seams.

Columns flanked the entrance, thick as ancient trees, their surfaces covered in carvings that climbed from base to capital in continuous spirals. I couldn't make sense of what they depicted—figures and shapes and symbols that blurred together as we approached, too much detail to process, too foreign to interpret. But I caught fragments. A face, mouth open in what might have been song or speech or screaming. Hands reaching upward toward something I couldn't see. Animals that might have been mules or might have been something else entirely, their bodies stylised into geometric patterns.

Above the columns, an archway soared perhaps ten metres high. More carvings decorated its curve—different from the columns, I noticed. A different style, maybe a different era. These were more geometric, more abstract, patterns that repeated and interlocked like something mathematical rather than narrative. And inlaid into the patterns, catching the light and throwing it back, strips of metal that gleamed gold and silver and something darker that might have been bronze.

I stared at it. Couldn't help staring. The beauty of it, the scale of it, the sheer presence of the thing—it pressed against my exhausted mind like something with weight, demanding attention I didn't have to give.

This is old, I thought. Really old. Older than anything I've ever seen.

The thought connected to something I'd noticed during the descent—the mules, adapted over thousands of years. The ancient architecture mixed with newer construction. The layers upon layers of history, built on foundations I couldn't begin to understand.

Someone was here before them, I thought. Before the French and the Spanish and the English. Someone built this.

But who? And when? And what had happened to them?

Questions without answers. Mysteries I'd probably never solve.

The formation halted at the base of the steps.

Duval dismounted, handing his reins to one of the guards who had emerged from the building. They exchanged words—quick, quiet, too fast for me to catch even fragments. The guard nodded, his eyes flicking toward me, then toward Nelson somewhere behind. His expression gave nothing away.

Then Duval approached my mule.

"You will be taken inside," he said. His voice was flat, professional. Whatever emotion had animated him during the capture—the fury at his fallen Éclaireurs, the contempt for Nelson—had been locked away, replaced by something colder. Something official. "You will be questioned. You will answer truthfully. If you do not..."

He didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to.

"I understand," I said. The words came out rough, scraped raw by thirst and exhaustion. "Can I—" I swallowed, trying to generate enough moisture to speak properly. My tongue felt thick, clumsy, stuck to the roof of my mouth. "Can I have some water? Please?"

Duval studied me for a moment. Something flickered in his expression—not sympathy, exactly, but perhaps recognition. The acknowledgment that I was a living thing with needs, not just cargo to be processed.

"Inside," he said finally. "They will give you water inside."

It wasn't much. But it was something. A promise, however small. Something to hold onto.

He turned and gestured to the guards. Hands reached for me—multiple hands, gripping the straps that held me to the grey, unfastening buckles. The pressure around my chest eased. Then my waist. Then my legs, those dead, useless limbs that I couldn't feel being freed but could see being released from their restraints.

For a moment, I was suspended—held upright by the hands that gripped me, no longer attached to the mule but not yet anywhere else. Floating between states. Between the animal that had carried me and the stone that waited below. Because I couldn't stand. Couldn't support my own weight. My legs hung beneath me like things that belonged to someone else, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The guards realised this quickly.

"Il ne peut pas marcher," one of them observed. I caught marcher—walk. He was stating the obvious, his tone flat with something that might have been annoyance or might have been simple observation.

"Je sais," Duval replied. Then something else—a command, short and sharp.

I was lifted.

Not gently—there was nothing gentle about any of this—but efficiently. Two guards, one gripping under my arms, the other holding my legs, carrying me between them like a rolled carpet. Like something awkward and heavy that needed to be moved from one place to another. My bound arms screamed in protest, the position wrenching my shoulders into angles they weren't designed for. I bit down on the cry that wanted to escape. Clenched my jaw until my teeth ached. Refused to give them the satisfaction.

We moved toward the building.

Behind me, I heard the sounds of Nelson being processed—stumbling footsteps, sharp commands, the occasional grunt of pain as he was pushed or prodded forward. He was still walking. Still on his feet, however barely. Still maintaining that stubborn pride that seemed to be the only thing holding him together.

He's stronger than me, I thought. In every way that matters right now, he's stronger.

The observation wasn't bitter. Just true. A fact to be filed away alongside all the other facts of my situation.

The steps rose before us—perhaps twenty of them, carved from grey stone, worn smooth by countless feet over countless years. Shallow grooves marked the centre of each step, depressions created by generations of people walking the same path. How many years did it take to wear stone like that? How many thousands of feet, climbing and descending, day after day, century after century?

The guards carrying me took the steps without breaking stride, their footsteps synchronised, their breathing steady. This was routine for them. Just another day. Just another prisoner being carried to whatever waited inside.

We passed between the columns.

Up close, the carvings were even more intricate than I'd realised. I could see individual chisel marks now, the texture of the stone where it had been shaped by human hands. The faces of the figures stared out at me as we passed—some serene, some anguished, some with expressions I couldn't read at all. Eyes that had been watching this entrance for longer than I could comprehend.

Through the archway.

Into the building.

And the world changed again.

The interior was vast.

I don't know what I'd expected. A single room, maybe. An antechamber leading to corridors and cells. Something comprehensible, something human in scale.

This was none of those things.

The space that opened before us was a hall—a great hall, its ceiling lost in shadows far above, its walls stretching away on either side until they disappeared into dimness. The floor was stone, polished smooth, reflecting the light that blazed from every surface. And there was so much light. Not in threads and channels like I'd seen elsewhere, but in great sweeping patterns that covered entire sections of wall, creating shapes and figures that seemed to move as the luminescence pulsed through them.

Murals. They were murals, I realised. Murals made of light.

I tried to make sense of what I was seeing as the guards carried me forward. Figures, dozens of them, carved into the stone but illuminated from within by channels of luminescence that traced their outlines. On the left wall, a procession of robed shapes moved toward something—a doorway, maybe, or a portal, or something else entirely. Their faces were solemn, their hands raised in gestures that might have been blessing or farewell or something I had no framework to understand.

On the right wall, something different. Shapes that weren't human at all—geometric forms, spirals and circles and lines that interlocked in patterns too complex to follow. They made my eyes hurt if I looked at them too long, made my brain itch with the sense that there was meaning there, just beyond my grasp.

And ahead, dominating the far end of the hall, a single massive figure.

It rose perhaps fifteen metres, carved from the living rock of the cavern wall. A human shape, I thought, though the proportions were strange—elongated limbs, a head that seemed too large, hands that reached outward with fingers spread wide. Light blazed from channels cut into its surface, tracing veins and arteries of luminescence that made it seem almost alive. Almost breathing.

I stared at it. Couldn't look away.

What are you? I thought. What does any of this mean?

But the figure offered no answers. Just stood there in its ancient silence, watching over the hall with eyes that were dark hollows in its glowing face.

People moved through the space—officials in elaborate robes, guards in grey uniforms, figures whose purpose I couldn't determine. They passed beneath the murals, beneath the great figure, without looking up. Without seeming to notice the impossible art that surrounded them. This was normal to them. Background. As unremarkable as the posters on the walls of a government office back home.

The hall stretched perhaps a hundred metres before us. Our footsteps echoed—the guards' boots, my useless feet dragging between them—the sound bouncing off stone surfaces and returning from directions that didn't make sense. The acoustics were strange here, designed for something, though I couldn't guess what. Ceremonies, maybe. Speeches. Pronouncements from whoever ruled this place.

This isn't just administration, I thought. This is something more. Something sacred, maybe. Or something very, very old.

My head was swimming. The scale of it, the beauty of it, the sheer overwhelming presence—it pressed against me from all directions, demanding attention I didn't have to give. I was so tired. So thirsty. So far past every limit I'd ever known.

The vial pulsed against my chest.

Hold on, I told myself. They said there would be water. Just hold on.

We passed beneath the great figure, through its shadow, and the hall began to narrow. Archways appeared—side passages leading to spaces I couldn't see. Each archway was different, I noticed. Different carvings, different styles, different ages perhaps.

The first was decorated with curves and flourishes that reminded me of something Spanish or Mexican—organic shapes, flowing lines, the kind of ornamentation I'd seen in pictures of old churches. The stone was darker here, more weathered, the carvings worn soft by time.

The second was simpler, more geometric. Straight lines and precise angles, patterns that repeated with mathematical regularity. The stonework was lighter, newer-looking, fitted together with visible mortar between the blocks.

The third was different again—neither curved nor geometric, but something else. Symbols I didn't recognise at all, shapes that might have been writing or might have been decoration or might have been something else entirely. They didn't look European. Didn't look like anything I'd seen before. Older, maybe. From whatever civilisation had been here before the colonists arrived.

Layers, I thought dimly. The building has layers. Different eras, different peoples, all built on top of each other.

The architecture was telling a story I couldn't read. A history of this place, written in stone and light, spanning centuries—maybe millennia—that I could barely imagine.

The great hall gave way to a corridor.

Narrower here, the ceiling lower, the light reduced to simple channels that ran along the walls like veins. The murals disappeared, replaced by plain stone marked only by occasional symbols—directions, maybe, or room numbers, or something else I couldn't interpret.

The air was cooler here. Damper. Carrying a smell that reminded me of the caves outside—mineral and old, the scent of stone that had never known sunlight. Each breath felt heavy, thick with moisture, coating my throat with something that wasn't quite water but wasn't quite dry either.

I tried to track our progress. Count the doors we passed. Note the turns we took. Left at the junction with the carved serpent. Right at the archway with the missing cornerstone. Straight past a door that stood slightly ajar, offering a glimpse of a cluttered office within.

Building a mental map, I told myself. In case you need to find your way out.

But the exhaustion made it difficult. The images blurred together. The details slipped away like water through fingers. By the third turning, I'd already lost track of whether we'd gone left or right at the serpent.

More doors. More corridors. The sounds changed as we descended a flight of stairs—the echoing vastness of the great hall giving way to something more intimate, more enclosed. I could hear individual voices now. Conversations behind closed doors, the words muffled but the tones clear. Someone arguing. Someone laughing. The scratch of something on stone—a stylus, maybe, like the one I'd seen Duval's people use.

People work here, I thought. This is where the business happens. The questioning. The processing. The decisions about who lives and who dies.

The thought should have terrified me. Would have terrified me, maybe, if I'd had any terror left to spare. But I was beyond fear now. Beyond everything except the simple, animal need to survive the next few minutes.

We stopped before a door that looked like all the others.

One of the guards knocked—a specific pattern, three short raps followed by two long ones. I filed the pattern away automatically, another detail for the map I was trying and failing to build.

A moment later, the door swung open.

The room beyond was smaller than I'd expected. Perhaps four metres square, lit by a single channel of luminescence that ran around the ceiling like a crown of soft fire. A desk dominated the space, carved from grey stone, its surface cluttered with tablets and styluses and objects I couldn't identify. Behind it sat a woman I hadn't seen before.

She was older than Duval. Silver hair pulled back from a face that was all angles and assessment. Sharp cheekbones. A thin mouth. Eyes that lifted as we entered—pale and focused, the eyes of someone who was used to looking at people and seeing past their surfaces.

She wore robes rather than uniform, the fabric heavy with luminescent threading that marked patterns I was beginning to associate with authority. Not military patterns like the guards wore. Something different. Something that spoke of a different kind of power.

"Celui qui ne marche pas?" she asked.

I caught marche—walk. She was asking about me. Confirming which prisoner had been delivered.

"Oui, Magistra," one of the guards confirmed.

Magistra. A title. Another piece of the puzzle.

The woman—the Magistra—rose from her desk and approached. She moved with a grace that belied her apparent age, her robes swirling around her like something liquid. Up close, I could see more details: the fine lines around her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands, the way her gaze moved over me with clinical precision. A doctor examining a patient. A butcher assessing a cut of meat.

She spoke a command, gesturing toward a chair against the wall. The guards carried me to it, depositing me without ceremony. The chair was hard, uncomfortable, designed for someone who could sit upright without support. I slumped against its back, my bound arms screaming at the pressure, my dead legs sprawling before me in their useless way.

The Magistra studied me for a long moment. Her eyes moved from my face to my legs to my bound hands and back again, cataloguing, evaluating, reaching conclusions I couldn't guess at.

Then she spoke again—a single word—and one of the guards produced a water skin, holding it to my lips.

I drank.

The water was cool and clean, with that same faint mineral taste I'd noticed in the air. I drank like I'd never tasted water before, like it was the first drink I'd ever had, like my body was a dried sponge finally remembering what moisture felt like. I drank until the guard pulled the skin away, drank until my stomach protested at the sudden influx, drank until I felt something like life seeping back into my desiccated tissues.

"Assez," the Magistra said.

The water skin disappeared. I sat there gasping, water dripping from my chin, feeling the moisture work its way through my system. Not enough—nowhere near enough—but more than I'd had in longer than I could remember. My headache eased slightly. My thoughts cleared, just a little, like fog lifting from a valley.

"Merci," I managed. The word felt strange in my mouth—something I half-remembered from school, from films, from fragments of a language I'd never properly learned. But it was the only thing I could think to say.

The Magistra's eyebrow rose slightly. "Tu parles Xylorane?"

I caught the question mark in her tone, if not the exact meaning. She was asking if I spoke their language.

"Un peu," I tried. "Some words. I understand more than I speak."

She considered this. Her head tilted, just slightly, and I had the uncomfortable sense of being weighed and measured and found... something. Interesting, maybe. Or just unexpected.

"You have knowledge of the old tongues," she said, switching to English. But not any English I'd heard before. The words were formal, stiff, shaped by a mouth that had learned them from books and lessons rather than conversation. "The roots from which our language grew. This shall make matters easier."

She returned to her desk, settling into her chair with the air of someone preparing for a lengthy process. Her hands folded on the stone surface before her, pale fingers interlaced, the tremor I'd noticed earlier almost invisible now.

"You are Joel Gibbons," she said. "From Tasmania. From Earth."

It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"And you make claim to be a hostage of the Portal Pirate. Not his partner."

"I am his hostage. He kidnapped me from—"

She held up a hand, silencing me.

"Claims shall be verified. Evidence shall be examined. The Council of Luminarques will render judgment upon truth, not assertion." Her eyes bored into mine, cold and implacable. "For the present, I am interested only in establishing matters of fact. Your name. Your origin. Your condition."

"My condition?"

"You are unable to walk." She gestured toward my legs. "Wherefore?"

Wherefore. The word sounded like something from Shakespeare.

"I was injured," I said finally. "Before I came here. Badly injured. I... recovered, but not completely. My legs stopped working two days ago."

"Stopped working." She repeated the phrase as if tasting it, rolling it around in her mouth. "You would say you are paralysed."

"I don't know. Maybe. I cannot feel them. Cannot move them. But I do not know if it is permanent."

The Magistra made a note on her tablet, the stylus leaving glowing marks on its surface.

"You shall be examined by our healers," she said without looking up. "They will determine the nature of your condition and whether it may be treated." Her eyes lifted to meet mine again. "Until such time, you shall be held in the detention facility. You shall be questioned further. You will cooperate fully with all inquiries."

"And if I do?"

"Then your treatment shall be... tolerable." She set down her stylus. "If you do not, if you speak falsely, if you attempt to deceive us in any manner..." She did not finish. The silence said enough.

"I understand."

"I doubt that you do." A thin smile crossed her face, there and gone. "But you shall. In time."

She spoke a command to the guards—too fast for me to catch, in the blended tongue that still defeated me—and they moved to collect me. Hands gripped my arms, lifting me from the chair, preparing to carry me to wherever I was being taken next.

"One matter more," the Magistra said, stopping them. Her eyes found mine one final time. "The Portal Pirate. The one you make claim took you hostage. What is his name?"

"Nelson," I said. "Nelson Price."

The change was immediate.

Her face, which had been all professional distance and cold assessment, went very still. Her hands, folded on the desk before her, tightened almost imperceptibly. And her eyes—those pale, sharp eyes that had been weighing and measuring me since I'd entered—narrowed to something harder. Something dangerous.

"Nelson Price," she repeated. The name came out differently than my other answers had. Slower. Each syllable given weight. "You are certain of this?"

"Yes. That's what he told me."

The Magistra was silent for a long moment. Then she rose from her chair—a sudden movement that made the guards shift nervously—and crossed to the door. She spoke rapidly in Xylorane to someone in the corridor, too fast and too quiet for me to catch any of it. I heard footsteps hurrying away.

When she turned back to me, her expression had reset to that cold professional mask. But something had changed beneath it. Something I couldn't read.

"It would seem," she said, "that your arrival in Xylora is of greater significance than first appeared." She gestured to the guards. "Take him to the lower cells. He is to have no contact with the other prisoner until the Council has been informed."

No contact with the other prisoner. That meant Nelson was being held somewhere else. Somewhere separate. And the mention of the Council—that governing body she'd referenced earlier—suggested that his name had elevated this from routine processing to something more serious.

"You know him," I said. It wasn't a question.

The Magistra's thin smile returned, but there was no warmth in it. No humour. Just the cold satisfaction of someone who had just received unexpected good fortune.

"Nelson Price has long been sought by the Council of Luminarques," she said. "There is much he must answer for. Much that is owed." Her eyes held mine. "You have delivered unto us a valuable prize, Joel Gibbons. Whether by intention or chance, that shall be remembered when your own fate is determined."

She waved her hand, dismissing us, and the guards carried me from the room.

Into the corridor. Down more stairs. Deeper into the earth.

The vial pulsed against my chest, a small warmth in the cold stone dark.

Light in darkness, I thought. The light you carry matters more than the light around you.

But another thought followed, darker and more troubling.

What did Nelson do? What could one man have done to make them react like that?

I didn't know. Wasn't sure I wanted to know.

But I had a feeling I was going to find out anyway.