Sol learned two things in rapid succession: he had severely underestimated the intensity of his family’s reaction to his absence, and, much to his relief, Dex and many of the others who had worked with him had been long since arrested. No more names, it appeared, had come forward. Sol wasn’t going to press whether or not his father had anything to do with that. He’d rather not know.

Talia carefully clipped away an errant branch on the bonsai, sitting back with a satisfied sigh as she pulled the remains away. The tree had really come into its own over the last few weeks, and she was going to miss it when she left. Her bag sat on the bedside table, filled with the few belongings she had to her name at this point, and bundles of food that the boarding house owner had been preparing for her over the last two days. The city was pretty, but after enough time here, she knew the gardens were never going to be enough to keep her occupied. While the truck in the desert had been too much garden with too little tools, the garden here was too small, with too many tools and skilled caretakers. Still, some of what she had learned from chatting with a few of the men who tended the plants about oxygen supplementing would definitely come in handy back in the city.

They didn’t see their main teacher for over a week. In the interim, every day when they woke up, there was a new person there, taking them on some sort of excursion or activity. The first day was spent almost entirely in meditation in a temple-like structure in the center of the city. Pillows and rugs were laid out across the floor, long tapestries interspersing the carefully painted walls, all depicting various vistas from the mountaintop. Talia had to stop herself from asking why they couldn’t just meditate outside, where they could see the nature directly. It was essentially the inverse of the days they had spent talking and exploring, and while it took a while to get into the proper mindset, by the time evening rolled around, they had a difficult time getting out of the almost trance-like meditative state they had all reached. Two musicians sat in the corner, continuing to play music after another teacher came by and led them out for dinner.

Talia found the two young men already halfway through breakfast when she came down a few mornings after their hike. She had spent some time with her bonsai that morning, trimming it up and helping coax it along towards a fuller, greener look. It was a good, hearty one — they could be so delicate sometimes — and did really just need some dedicated attention. It was her quiet time in the day, now. Back home she would start almost every morning in the greenhouse. The smack of humidity as she went into it had been as good for waking up as a cup of coffee. There was nothing like that here, in the cool mountain air. Talia was finding she missed sweating it out at work. Everything was so heady here — people never stopped talking. Talking about what they were doing. Talking about why things happened. Talking, talking, talking. She had even gone by one of the gardens yesterday morning, in the hopes that she could find some peace and quiet there, but the sages working it had been deep in debate about stars or something like that.

When Talia, Noah, and Sol went to meet with their teacher, after two days that felt to the three of them like they had managed to cover every subject under the sun, and a few besides that, he was waiting, ready for them. He greeted them all in kind, and sitting up on the steps, asked them to tell him about their discoveries and theories.

The three sat quietly in the middle of a low courtyard. Another man from the city, one none of them had met, had shown up at the crack of dawn and escorted the three newcomers out here, leaving without a word. The courtyard itself was at the very back of the city, almost nestled into the mountain wall. Pillars surrounded them, ivy dripping down in between. The stone was cold underfoot, and Noah noticed Talia kept shifting as one part or another of her body became too chilled. He wished he had brought an over cloak to offer her or something, then shook his head. He wasn’t here to flirt.

“Alrighty, Sol, that should about do it,” the old man said, picking some small, furry animal that Sol didn’t recognize out of the trap he had set. “That’s the whole loop. Two stoats, not bad at all, not bad at all.” He laughed to himself, a giggly, high-pitched sound that did not match his face. He laughed a lot. It has become a sort of punctuation for the last two days.

Every step Talia took felt more and more like a mistake. The scenery was nice, sure, and she had been able to forage for enough food to keep her going — the entire elective semester she had spent on mycology had turned out to be more than helpful when it came to surviving off of mountain mushrooms — but she felt like she was getting nowhere, slowly. She could travel during the day in the mountains, that was nice. But no guides could help her here, her AI was beyond useless, and she was starting to try and calculate how much food she would have to gather up to even attempt a journey back. There was no guarantee Saleh’s tribe would be anywhere near where they had been, but their last spot had been on a trade route, so there was a good enough chance someone else would be there who could at least help her find her way back to his group. Or maybe she could just stay with whoever found her. She had a feeling going back would mean Saleh would try to court her in earnest, and as much as Talia had enjoyed his company, it just wasn’t a feeling she thought she could return. He didn’t know enough about plants, for one. That was always going to be a dealbreaker.

The gap between the two mountain peaks was formed by two tall, near-shear walls of what Noah could only guess was granite. Veins of varying colors ran through the sides, splintering and intermixing until they touched the dense, mossy ground where he sat cross-legged. He stared at the path in front of him. It was his last option. Over the last few days, he had hiked, climbed, and struggled through everything on this face of the mountain, ending up at a dead-end every time. Chasms he couldn’t cross, walls he couldn’t climb without specialized equipment, steel shale slopes that sent him tumbling and battered down the side. This was the last path he had been able to find. If he couldn’t find the path from this point… Well.