(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 26

It was always weird.
The impact of arriving near the wall was the same as before, almost precisely. There were tiny differences, but it was the same destinaiton, adjusted for an arrival right after the last departure. But that was the weird part. Even when arriving right after the last trip ended, there was a sense of echo, a kind of reverse deja vu. You didn't feel that you remembered something but did not know why. Instead, you knew that it was the same, all the same, but it still felt different.
The slip of paper was buried under the two stones. From this world's perspective, it had been buried only a few minutes ago. There was still black dust on the ground. Everybody left a part of themselves behind when the trip ended. Even if you neither ate nor drank, you breathed in the air. Every atom that your body absorbed in an age was left behind when your trip ended. The black dust was just the most dramatic example of it all. But it was always weird to look at the dust that you yourself had left behind.
Kris had, to nobody's surprise, been quite vocal against the whole thing, the idea of ging back to a place right after leaving. Even after staying at The Embassy for two days, he felt that it was reckless. In the dead of night, an arrival left a visible flash, not to mention the sound of an explosion in reverse, followed by an explosion of the more common kind. When it happened in a spot once, people grew a bit worried, but would likely disregard it. When it happened twice in one day, they could start asking questions. For most ages, he was right. People worried about loud sounds and flashes near their homes. But an age like this was different. Giant walls weren't build, or desperately kept standing, by people who wanted to keep an eye on the world. They were for those who cared only about life inside their wall. Nobody would wonder much about two loud pops in the wasteland within hours of each other.
The guards standing silently by the nearly closed gate at night made very few signs of being interested. To them, it was just another stranger seeking shelter, like no doubt hundreds or even thousands in just the last year. And with dawn still breaking, or breaking again, depending on perspective, their shift was probably ending, anyway.
The bulletin board was a different matter. The wall cast a powerful shade over the city inside, even as the tips of the tallest buildings still standing were illuminated by the sunlight, like the heads of mighty torches. And in that shade, it was human nature to be wary of others. It had been so through the ages, and the future was like the past in more ways than they were unlike one another.
"No sn..."
"No snick, got it, got it."
The same small man, the same bitter glare. He remembered. Either that, or he had a real bug up his ass about people getting close to the bits of paper! He did walk away the moment he saw the fresh piece of paper from Thor's clipboard get pulled out. No snick, new paper. No breach of local protocol.
A crudely improvised pencil, little more than a bit of charcoal sandwiches between thin wooden shavings and tied up with old steel wire, dangled from a bitof string, and nobody commented about using it. It left thick, uneven lines on the small bit of paper, but the message seemed to be visible enough. There were plenty of small, needle-like nails sticking out from the wooden bulletin board to mount it on.
And then, it was back to the wait. This wait had a beauty to it, though, as the sunlight kept crawling down the tall buildings, reaching slightly smaller and then even smaller ones as the morning minutes churned. The broken skyscrapers with all the plants were among those to feel the warmth of dawn early, the match-like sticks of steel and crumbling concrete lighting up in the distance, visible above the ruins closer to the wall when viewed from the right angle.
People began drizzling into the streets as mirrors high above were hit with enough sunlight to illuminate the streets properly. A few had browsed by the bulletin board before that, but there were many pieces of paper on it, and not enough eyes to go around, it seemed. Now, the number of eyes increased far quicker than the number of papers. It gave a strange rush to see someone step up to one's piece of paper and read it, even if the likely result was disappointment when they just moved on.
Hours passed. The sun rose higher in the sky, eventually making the mirrors redundant. And finally, finally, someone seemed to pay real attention to the job offer on that little slip of paper!
"You're the one offering the job for a city guide?" said a short, thin man in what seemed like his fifties.
"Yeah, the name is Marie. You want the job?"
He stared for what felt like a very long moment, seeming uncomfortably skeptical. It was hard not to feel that there was an insult hiding in that reaction, somewhere.
"Payment up front," he grumbled.
"And have you leave me in some ditch? Payment on arrival."
"Five thousand crowns," he said, clear voice, unwavering eyes.
"Three."
"Bye."
"Four."
He looked at the piece of paper, thinking it over. Then he nodded.
"This way," he more or less ordered as he turned and started walking into town. He was easy to follow, short legs and slow strides, but his absolute determination as he went through the growing crowd of people walking up and down the street did make for a bit of a challenge. There seemed to be a system to it, a way for people to move effeciently, and being the pnly one, it seemed, to not know that system made every step a toss of the dice.
"You haven't asked what I want you to find."
"No," he answered calmly, "and I'm not going to, not until we're in a place to discuss this productively."
He never turned around to look as he spoke, just like the woman from the plant nursery. There was a disturbingly militant vibe to both of their mannerisms, far too matter of fact for what seemed like it should be a standard conversation. Looking around, the tendency to stay silent unless pressed seemed to be widespread! The crowd had plenty of sound following it around, but there was surprisingly little talking, no sea of voices chattering away. It seemed cultural, and not something to be taken personal.
The man, who never mentioned his actual name, either, turned down a narrow alley between two buckling stacks of housing containers, the kind that had been everywhere back in the earlier visit, back when this place had been younger. Cracks riddled their surfaces, corners bent and broken. Time. It was a force to be reckoned with.
Where he ended up going was an odd example of that. It had been a container tower at some point, way back, but had toppled over. At a single glance, it was clear how the housing containers had been flung to the ground lengthwise, like huge, clumsy, rectangular spears that, rather than penetrate the ground, simply crumbled upon impact. But that was clearly ages ago. In the time between then and this, the fallen containers had been refitted, and they were now livable again. They still stood or lay as they had fallen, but they now almost looked like it was an intentional part of their design!
Stepping through what had once been a container roof, the man turned on a flickering electric light. It turned out to be just an old flashlight, dangling on a piece of nylon rope, but for practical purposes, it could just as well have been any normal lamp. And the place was full of little things like that, assorted durable goods that had been refitted for slightly, or massively, different purposes. The heating system had parts of what looked like cooking gear in it, an old tyre had been repurposed into an actually comfy-looking recliner, and so on. But most notable were the crude maps that covered just about every wall, along with much of the ceiling!
"Where did you get those from?"
The man finally looked back, following the pointed finger to the largest of the maps. Knowing the value of paper, it seemed like an absolutely reckless display of wealth to hang them so openly.
"My dad was a geologist, and geography was part of whatever he worked as a long time ago. He taught me the craft even before the Heavenfall. In the chaos, it turned out that knowing where even basic things were located was a valuable skill."
Listening to him talk, it seemed like he somehow resented what he described, as if he had a skill but not much joy in applying it. The whole thing seemed like a contradiction, like walking through a museum of some of the most amazing art with a tour guide who wanted to be anywhere else.
"Now, what are you looking for?" he finally asked, as he rounded a large table with its legs crudely cut down to match his diminutive height.
"It was called The Wheel Yard, several decades ago. I need to know where it is now."
He picked through a stack of maps, an absurd amount of paper. It was like watching someone shuffle through gold watches. He finally picked out a map that looked a bit old and worn, and pulled a small notebook from a shelf. While he flipped through the book, he kept looking at the map, referencing what he was reading, from the looks of it.
"Yeah, it's gone now," he mumbled, hard to hear if to just himself. "But they seem to have relocated much of the..."
His voice dragged out as he flipped a page back and forth a few times.
"Are you #*@!ing kidding me?" he asked, looking up from his book and maps.
"What? No, why?"
With a frown, he slammed the small book shut, then checked the map before he flipped through the stack again and pulled out another one. It was impossible to get more than a quick glance, but it seemed like the first map was of the whole town, while the second was a closer look at just a part of it.
"There," he growled, pointing at the map. An area, shaped roughly like a huge tilted comma. "The place was converted into a Heavenfall hunter's hub several years back. Which must have been easy, since the entire area was cleared out during a toxic spill."
As he spoke, it was clear that there was something between the lines, something he wasn't saying outright. Something that made him a bit angry, for some reason.
"How is that... bad?"
He sighed, putting the notebook away rather roughly and sorting the map carefully into the stack again.
"Hunters tend to cause spills when they tamper with Heavenfall tech that they don't understand," he said, clearly thinking ot made some kind of greater sense. When he realized that was not the case, he sighed. "Your Wheel Yard killed off half a block because they #*@!ed around with dangerous tech recovered from one of the Heavenfalls, and then they just built a bigger place where everybody died and continued!" His eyes seemed to actually be making some serious accusations. "Are you seriously asking me to take you into crazy country?"
He was leaning against the low table, looking awfully tired and bitter, realizing that he might have bitten off more than he could chew, and the choking hazard was starting to get a bit too real.
"I'm guessing... yes?"
He didn't like that answer.

"I see what you mean."
Eben, as the man turned out to be called, just sighed silently. His maps had been a fairly good guide, something that was apparently not easy to come by in a place that kept rebulding itself as it fell apart. Half the buildings on the way there had been little more than prettied up ruins, and the other half seemed slapped together from spare parts for things that were anything but buildings. It was a junkyard that had developed life and tried to make a home for that life.
And then there was this. If the rest of the city was a junkyard trying to be civlization, this was a townsized military grade fallout shelter trying to be an amusement park for the deranged. Everyone had laughably oversized gear strapped to them, some of it clearly lethal in one way or another. Places of entertainment tried to attract attention by mimicking the neon lights of a now lost world, but used assorted flammable materials to do so, like lighting the county fair exclusively with homemade fireworks! People walked around with injuries that, in any other time, might have had them forceably hospitalized, many of them slowly dripping blood through bandages or whatever could function as a cast for broken limbs. Although outright street war seemed to luckily not be a thing, toxic masculinity spilled over every now and then and brief fights erupted, until someone bigger than the fighters broke it up with even greater force. And from the looks of it, that toxic masculinity was in no way limited by gender.
"What the hell is this? How can this place even function?"
Eben shrugged with the facial expression of a man who had accepted that some questions were not meant to be answered. He did obviously try to think of an answer, though, shown in multiple failed attempts at starting a sentence and a body language that screamed resigned desperation.
"It's..." he sighed with some hint of defeat in his eyes. "They're hunters. Most of them spend the bulk of their time out in the wastes, trying to score big on some Heavenfall relics. It makes people... different."
His timid description of what was clearly a rough part of town did make some sense. Due to the overall pathetic state of the world in this age, The Embassy received very few refugees from it, simply because it took too many resources to build anything to send refugees back through time. So a lot of the information retrieved on the age was second hand, often from stories or crude historical accounts found decades or even centuries after it. Seeing it with one's own eyes was like stepping into a saturday morning cartoon. It felt unrealistic, in a way that didn't care if it felt unrealistic.
"The whole area has a perimeter patrol to make sure no rookie goes rat and spills the havoc."
"Rat?"
Eben looked over, his head tilted slightly upward to make eye contact. It felt odd to not be the shortest one in a group, for once.
"Yes, rat. They know they're meant to stay here, but some scurry out through some hole in the perimeter, either because they think there's something to be gained by it, or just because they think it's fun. Some even do it just to make a point about not being bottled up."
"Uh huh. Sounds very... American, somehow."
Walking into the area was like walking into a drunken rock concert. Nobody seemed actively threatening, but every sound and sight seemed to suggest that something could, by pure bad luck, fly through the air and become the source of brief disaster. Something, or someone, to be honest!
Nothing did, though. The locals, the ones that carried strange gear and looked ready to scream and set fire to things just because, seemed satisfied just to give the two newcomers on their turf a quick glance and then return to whatever they were in the middle of. A few looks seemed confused, maybe because it was very easy to stand out when not covered in bolted on improvised protection and strange items dangling from every shoulder and hip. Some even looked oddly concerned!
"There's your Wheel Yard," Eben said in a low voice, neither making eye contact nor giving any indication that he was looking for the place. This, in turn, made it impossible to know what he was even talking about, without at least some part of him indicating where to look!
"Right ahead and to  the right, sticking out behind the..."
He sighed and seemed to shiver a bit.
"... right behind the big burning wooden pig."
He was right. At least, he was right about there being a big, burning, wooden pig. He failed to mention the charred entrails, hopefully pig entrails, that sangled from chains attached to the pig like the ropes on a circus tent.
"I think it's a restaurant."
Eben grunted at the remark and gave the pig a quick look.
"Restaurant?" he asked. "Like, a place that serves food?"
"Yeah, don't you have those around here?"
It took a few seconds to notice that he had slowed his walking speed by about a third, and even longer to notice that he was giving a weird look.
"I haven't heard them called that in ages," he commented with a certain degree of disbelief in his voice. "You're not local at all, are you? I mean, not from anywhere even near here?"
A typical blunder. The language around the place was easy to understand, even through many thick and varied accents. There were a few bits of slang here and there, and several small oddities of grammar or phrases, but overall, it was easy to understand. And for any time traveler, that was a danger. It made it easy to slip up and start talking normally, using words and phrases that were no longer common. Or worse, that had taken on a whole new meaning.
"No, born up north, mostly on the road. Guess I've taken on a few quirks."
"Uh huh," he mumbled under his breath, the sudden interest in vocabulary seeming to fade as fast as it appeared. "I'm not eating anything here, by the way," he remarked as a byline. Looking around, that sentiment did seem to make a bit of sense.
"We need to get closer. I'd just march in but that might..."
"Yeah, it #*@!ing well might!" he burst out, almost immediately catching himself in it and looking around nervously. Nobody seemed to react. "Look, just keep a your shadow close. We have no idea what to expect around here."
"There. What is that place?"
Not  saying anything, Eben followed the discretely pointed finger to look at a tall, thin building, placed almost right across from what could be seen of the spikey building that The Wheel Yard had apparently become over the decades. The two buildings looked like complete opposites, The Wheel Yard little more than a slanted wall with spikes and, perhaps to honor its heritage, wheels mounted to make climbing them impossible. The otherplace had a clearly visible entrance lined by small fires and colored banners on its walls, almost begging people to enter.
"Relicony," Eben answered dryly.
"A what?"
He looked up, the same expression on his face as when he reacted to the word "restaurant".
"A relicony. For display of Heavenfall relics. How do you not know this stuff? Where the hell are you from up north?"
The typical procedure for The Embassy when entering a new age or location was to attach one or more locals to the operation, making them do the talking. This was why.
"We call it a museum."
The lie worked, or at least seemed to. He turned his attention to the entrance to this relicony, giving it a careful lookover before changing his walking direction reluctantly towards it.
Whatever the point of the relicony was, it had its share of fans! Large men and women, many covered in scars and old injuries, casually entered and exited the building. Up close it became obvious that the thin structure visible was simply the street adjacent part of a larger building, one that reached into the ruins behind it and opened up, like entering the neck of a bottle. Nobody took any real notice of the two obvious outsiders strolling into the place, nobody charged an entry fee or even seemed to watch the place.
That became all the more odd upon seeing the inside! Mounted in tentatively assembled, improvised glass cages, machine parts were displayed like ancient artworks. The large people treaded carefully, moving slowly and with an aura of respect and dignity that seemed completely at odds with the culture on display right outside. Other, less burly patrons of the place moved about a little quicker, but the whole place seemed washed in some almost religious reverance.
"Nearly all of them are fake," Eben whispered, his hushed voice carrying remarkably well in the quiet surroundings.
"Fake?"
He nodded.
"They have skilled crafters making them out of useless junk, just to not display anything they don't want to ever lose, or that they never had to begin with."
He stopped at one of the glass cases, looking at a cylindrical object wrapped in thin pipes and wires. There was a wooden plaque at the bottom of the case. It said "Subplasmatic impulse injection module, model Tymiaya 14b-6." None of it rang a bell.
"Who are they? Who is displaying this?"
"I'm guessing your friends across the street," he answered with a shrug. "This is all basically a wishlist from them, something to teach wouldbe hunters what things look like and let veterans know which relics will gain the best price."
"The Wheel Yard made this place? That curly headed woman sure did make a name for herself, I guess."
Although they were still quiet, people studying the relics were starting to pay a bit too much attention. Nobody else seemed to be talking, at least not at any volume worth noting, but it seemed to be something more than that, something deeper that made them stop and take notice.
"I think we should leave, Eben."
The short man gave the place a quick look around, then nodded carefully.
"I think you may be right."
Being in the relicony was just an excuse to get near The Wheel Yard without anyone caring, and that much had been achieved. But every second in the place seemed to  create a little more of an athmosphere of being watched, of people paying attention that they really should not. None of that boded well.
Leaving the place through the tall entrance made the sounds of the street rush in again, like a tide of sounds washing over everything. But unlike the flood of rowdy noise from before, this time, the noise seemed to want to keep its distance. Upon stepping out of the open doorway, it took mere seconds before anything close by fell silent.
"This is not good," said Eben, his voice cracking a bit.
"No, I think..."
The stick came out of nowhere! It was wooden and barely the thickness of an average human thumb, but it moved quick and hit hard! The pain was one thing, but the second it struck across the bridge of the nose, it seemed like all light was turned off by some magical switch. Some colors returned quickly as a blur, but by then, it was too late.
Being slammed into the ground was in many ways a callback to arriving outside the wall. Like the jump through time, the slam knocked out every semblance of air, but unlike the time jump, this came with hands groping and grabbing damn near everything. Four hands, at least, judging by the feel of it.
"Get the #*@! off me!"
Nobody listened. The hands were tying up everything, and they were doing so with terrifying skill, as if it was a common occurence.
"Shut up, Mary," hissed Eben, his face still a bit of a blur from the hit. He was on the ground nearby, also being manhandled, that much was clear. Who was doing it was still a mystery, though.
"What are you doing? Why are you...."
The hands died down. They had completed most of the tying, and even when they relaxed their grip, moving was nearly impossible. But what seemed to have made them stop was a set of thick boots walking up. Behind them, the small crowd moved about their business without interruption, nobody caring, or daring to care, about what was going on. Someone with authority. Or, at the very least, someone feared.
"Are these the ones?" came a deep, raspy voice, and someone mumbled an answer. The boots, the legs attached to them, knelt down, and a prodding hand started a very crude examination.
"They mentioned her by description," said someone, speaking in a low, respectful tone. A subordinate, adressing his superior.
"Did they, now?" asked the superior's voice in a tired but interested way. "She doesn't like that, does she now?"
"No sir," came the instant response.
The legs stood up again.
"Take them to the crates. She'll decide what to do with them later."
Whoever was standing there, obeying the orders of the booted legs, they were strong. Being lifted by the shoulders and feet hurt like hell, every joint trying desperately to handle the weight and the uncaring movements that it involved. It was only possible to make out that they were going across the street, to The Wheel Yard, or whatever it was now called. Who they were was impossible to see, no amount of twisting or writhing being enough to get a good look.
"Two locals from the relicony," said the superior voice, talking to someone just out of sight. "They were discussing the.... Sir?"
"Let me guess," said an old voice, very slowly, "this young lady was talking about a woman with curls..."
There was a hush over the people standing around, both the ones giving and taking the orders. The street was nowhere to be seen, nothing but dirt and walls in sight. And hanging in the air, carried by others, there was very little option for looking around.
"Yes, she called her the curly..."
"The curly woman," the old voice said, cutting off the superior, who clearly was not the old man's superior. A new set of feet appeared, wearing shoes made from leather and assembled bits of tough textiles. "We've met."
Gently, almost apologetically, the unseen people carrying just stopped doing so, without a word spoken. Eben's look, not that far away, was one of complete confusion as he was carefully laid on the ground, and he flinched when someone untied the rope holding both hands and feet in place. It was hard not to. But feeling limbs suddenly freed made up for it entirely, although it still hurt in every joint to clamper back up to stand.
"Hello, Marie," the old voice said softly. The face was covered in delicate lines of old  skin full of folds and long healed scars.
"Maltheus?!"