I’d learned that Phenadoor was honeycombed with tunnels, which varied in size from tall and wide corridors to little more than crawl spaces. One particular passage burrowed at a sheer angle into the mountain’s base then out beneath the seabed where it split into multiple branches. From these, veins of a deep blue crystal had been chipped away at, initially by generation after generation of low-status Mi’aata, and latterly by captured Divergent. The much-prized crystals were a primary component in Phenadoorian technology.
I’d been placed in Unit 22, a work party of nine Divergent, all baffled by my presence, and each responding to it with vagueness, hostility, eccentricity, or incomprehensible madness. Mostly, they avoided me as much as possible. The exception was an individual named Tharneek-Ptun, who appeared inexplicably drawn to me and persistently engaged me in conversations that made little sense and that he carried on whether I acknowledged him or not.
When Unit 22 wasn’t employed on one of the long backbreaking shifts, it occupied quarters carved out of the side of the main passage. The Mi’aata slept in gelatine-filled troughs. This was not the same healing stuff I’d bathed in upon my arrival in Phenadoor and I found its slimy texture unpleasant, so I’d drained my trough and put a rough blanket in the bottom. My bed was hard and uncomfortable, but every time I lay in it I was too exhausted to notice and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless slumber, unconscious even of the continual pronouncements that echoed through the tunnels.
“Wealth and comfort can be yours if you make the well-being of Phenadoor your primary purpose. Those who work the hardest are the most rewarded. Do not doubt. Do not question. Do not lose focus. Remember that, in striving for the betterment of Phenadoor, you are striving for yourself.”
As usual, it was a siren that woke me, and a Mi’aata warden who forced me to my feet. Like all his fellows, the brute was armed with a crystal-topped pikestaff, the tip of which delivered an agonising bolt of energy to anyone it touched. He employed it freely and viciously, jabbing the weapon repeatedly into my ribs. My muscles spasmed, my limbs jerked, and I let out a cry of pain.
“Get in line outside!” he ordered. “And the rest of you filth! All of you! Outside. Now!”
We stood and shuffled from the small room, lined up in the roughly hewn tunnel, and with the wardens harassing our every step began to walk along it, following its sloping floor downward.
Tharneek-Ptun, at my side, mumbled, “We descend once again, and in doing so fold inward, do we not?”
I gave what had become my standard response to his irrational statements. “Indeed so.”
“And in folding inward we mine our own resources.”
The atmosphere was dense and hot. All the tunnels were lit by glowing crystals and fitted with pipes that sprayed a fine mist of seawater over the Mi’aata to cool them and keep their skins moist. Noisy pumps then removed the water to prevent flooding. While this was beneficial to my fellows, it caused me great discomfort and my skin was covered with sores that couldn’t heal beneath the onslaught of corrosive salt water.
Following a zigzagging sequence of slopes, we were mercilessly prodded along, descending deeper and deeper until, eventually, we reached one of the mine faces.
“Take up your tools and get to it!” a warden snapped.
“Digging ever inward!” Tharneek-Ptun muttered. “How far into your own mind have you gone, Mr. Fleischer?”
“Too far,” I answered. “And you?”
“Right up to the barrier.”
My interest was piqued. So far, my unit had offered little by way of useful information, though the more coherent of them had railed against the social order of Phenadoor, calling it stagnant and self-absorbed. The rest of Ptallaya, they claimed, was primitive and undeveloped, so why not expand into it? But if such sentiment came from a unifying source—as the Quintessence suspected—my fellows appeared to know nothing of it.
“Barrier?” I asked.
Tharneek-Ptun remained silent and hammered at the vein of crystal while a warden passed by, then responded, “That which blocks true revelation. The insurmountable. The impenetrable.”
“And if you could pass this barrier, what would be revealed?”
“My origin. Have you never wondered what you were before you were born?”
“I’m not sure I was anything. Besides, I’m rather more concerned with what I might be now, while I live. What’s the first thing you remember, Tharneek-Ptun?”
“I recall the sea, and being taken aboard an underconveyance. That is all.”