If Nella’s presence had given Benji something to be distracted about before, the revelation that she was hiding something beneath the plantworking building drove him into full-on obsession. He had to know what lay in that cavern, why tending it had caused her to miss class. A couple sleepless nights passed as his thoughts churned. Unlike his room at home, his dorm room had no alley outside his window, no scuttle of rats or clatter of restaurant workers bringing their trash outside. Upperclassmen dorms tended toward quiet, and often the only sound was the far-off rumble of dragons flying red-eye routes to other regions of the Unified Coast. The university lay on one of the major flight paths, making students well used to looking up at the undersides of dragons in flight, or being buffeted by the sudden change in atmospheric pressure when a dragon inflated its heat sacs for extra buoyancy.

  On one of these sleepless nights, Benji decided enough was enough. He dressed and slipped out into the city. The plantworking building was an easy trip up the hill overlooking the university. The streets around the university were generally safe, even by the standards of a city with limited crime to begin with. They were never really deserted, even this late. He passed three or four students, some on their way to or from the library, others with glowing faces and reeking of mead. A gnome lumbered behind him for long enough that she might’ve been following him, before turning into one of the grungier taverns that catered to locals rather than students.

  The plantworking building was unlocked. University policy was to lock only private quarters or rooms that housed particularly valuable artifacts. The building remained open, unattended. This was often characterized as an “invitation to test yourself against an army of angry mages” if you stole anything or damaged university property. There was no rule against accessing a secret tunnel in an unlocked building, as far as Benji was aware. The army of angry mages was a terrifying specter regardless.

  Benji followed the same route as before, coming out in the empty lounge. It was somehow less eerie than it had been in the middle of the day. At this hour, its emptiness felt right.

  Benji turned to the couch, and the passage’s entrance.

  And found there was no entrance at all.

  He scooted the couch out and ran his hands along the wall. There was no groove, not even a suggestion of the open mouth. He tried pushing on it, applying a couple meager spells. First-years didn’t learn any workings that would really help. Unless opening the door required growing a plant slightly better than it would have otherwise. Benji doubted it was that kind of door.

  He sighed, trying one more time to find a spot that, when pressed, would trigger an opening mechanism. He soon gave up and returned to his dorm, deflated.

  ***

  Nella was already at the next day’s metalworking session by the time Benji showed up. She greeted him warmly, but every one of her movements spoke of deep tiredness. Instead of the usual joking around, she settled into the task at hand, following Mason’s instructions and running the kiln with as little extra motion as possible.

  “Thanks for dropping off the seed packets, by the way,” she said after a pause in conversation stretching close to ten minutes—long enough for the two students at the table in front of them to burn their hands in separate incidents and be sent off to the infirmary. “Your note was . . . deeply unhinged.”

  “That was my goal. Matilde said you weren’t feeling well. Are you doing better?”

  Her hands fluttered over the kiln’s controls, even though the temperature was already set correctly.

  “It’s just tenth year, you know? There’s a lot to think about between classes, work study, my thesis.”

  And meeting up with scary things beneath the university, Benji thought.

  Instead he said, “That is a lot. I’m barely keeping it together with just my classes. I can’t imagine how you balance it all.”

  “Then there’s the question of what comes after the university.”

  “Do you know what you’ll do?”

  Nella’s tired feature slowly formed themselves into a smile.

  “I’ve been trying to keep it quiet,” she said, “but I actually have an offer already.”

  “That’s amazing! I mean, I’m not surprised. You’re a brilliant plantworker. What is it for?”

  “Have you heard of the living plant collection?”

  The room had suddenly grown very quiet as Mason inspected one of the kilns at the front of the class. Everyone else scuttled away as if it might explode at any second. Benji was secretly grateful their conversation could continue without the expectation of doing more metalworking, especially at a relatively safe distance.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Benji shook his head.

  “They’re pretty niche, I’m not surprised,” Nella said. “It’s a collection of all known plants that grow along the Unified Coast—no matter how common, or how rare, there’s at least one of every specimen. The idea is, if something happens and a plant would otherwise go extinct, it can be repopulated from the collection.”

  “Bet it would have to be huge. I’m guessing it’s somewhere way out of the way? Like all the way out in Nül?” Benji said, referencing the furthest town he’d heard of, one of the larger logging towns in eastern Thelanel.

  “Thank Arren, no. It’s just a few miles outside Thelspoint. You can get there by carriage easily enough.”

  Benji made no comment about how the mere suggestion of Nella moving far away had made him feel.

  “This seems ideal, honestly,” Benji said. “You’re already in?”

  “As long as I can figure out how to graduate,” Nella said, putting a startling emphasis on the words “figure out.” “The truth is, they’re incredibly short-staffed. The work is demanding and requires plantworkers who are well-versed in a wider range of plants than most bother with. And it hasn’t been a priority for government funding, so the pay isn’t anywhere near what a university-trained plantworker would get elsewhere. I think the Head Gardener almost cried when I accepted the offer.”

  “Well, they’ll be lucky to have you.”

  “I hope so,” Nella said, shaking her head, her eyes once more taking on a vacant look. The kiln at the front of the class had been deemed structurally sound, and students slunk back to their desks. “Anyway, you don’t need to listen to me ramble the whole class. Were we disassembling an alloy?”

  “Without success, but yes.”

  Nella’s gaze remained intently on the kiln. Splotches of red ran up her neck and onto her face, over skin that was otherwise deeply tanned from so much time spent in the sun. She was either embarrassed about something, or felt she’d said too much.

  “We’ll get it eventually,” Benji said. “I believe in us.”

  ***

  All the way to the library after class, Benji turned their conversation over in his mind. Nella had been understandably cagey about the true pressures she faced. He had no real right to pry into her personal affairs, regardless of what he’d seen. But something about her tone had been so defeated, so fearful about her ability to keep it all together. It made Benji think whatever secret lay in the cavern wasn’t just something she needed to remain hidden. It was also dangerous.

  The trip to the library had ostensibly been for an assigned scavenger hunt amongst the languageworking texts, searching for any reference to the first known use of song in a languageworking. With Simon and Lucy tipping him off, Benji found the scroll easily, just a couple rings out in the stacks.

  This left him plenty of time to research the tunnels under the university.

  Thelspoint University Library, frequently shortened to TUL and then expanding colloquially to Tully in most students’ vernacular, was a marvel of organization, as long as one wasn’t too invested in finding the exact book one was looking for in a timely manner. Its rings formed growing layers holding more and more obscure texts as they went outward, with subjects arranged in slices beginning in the library’s central core. As a result, anything beyond a cursory investigation usually involved going at least a few layers deep into the rings, which became infinitely more complicated the further out you went. Because more advanced subjects were often difficult to distinguish—advanced bioworking might also involve metalworking to manipulate minerals at the molecular level, for example—interdisciplinary books were often found shelved halfway between two disparate subjects, placing them in the middle of an entirely unrelated field.

  Magelights built into the low ceilings cast long shadows over the stacks. Digging into the outer rings didn’t feel too dissimilar to the secret tunnel, except for the occasional presence of other students, and librarians either reshelving books, or helping lost students find their way out of the stacks.

  Benji claimed a seat on the balcony overlooking the main rotunda, where vaulted ceilings struck a marked contrast to the claustrophobic stacks. The grand design of the central core gave students a breath of fresh air, as if to bolster their courage before once again exploring the maze of books.

  Benji did get lost a few times as he scoured the history section, on the lookout for any references to passages, tunnels, or catacombs.

  What he found fascinated him. At least three different texts, none of them particularly obscure, referenced an entire network of tunnels beneath the university. They described it in an almost blasé manner, as if it were no more remarkable than the university standing on top of it. One text read:

  Though there has never been a full accounting of this subterranean network, some scholars estimate that there may be as many as three-hundred total miles. One might wonder at the dangers of an unexplored tunnel network of this magnitude. However, given the low incidence of monsters emerging from the uncharted territories, and the high incidence of mages becoming lost and either needing to be rescued or starving while exploring the tunnels, it is widely agreed that the tunnels are safer unexplored.

  Benji hovered over the word “monsters,” feeling the heat of the passage’s breath on his skin, hearing air rush in and out. He shivered despite his proximity to one of the fires that were always crackling in the fireplaces around the balcony.

  Another text noted that the network was likely not contained to the university, that its tendrils extended further out into Thelspoint. He hadn’t considered that. It seemed a distinctly university phenomenon. This led him down another line of inquiry, and he began searching for information about tunnel systems outside of Thelspoint. The results were mixed in their usefulness. Extensive scholarship concerned the Runnel, the gorge beneath the subterranean city of Lodefall. Benji hoped this wouldn’t be applicable, as the Runnel was most famous for stretching to unexplored depths, and for the giant lizards and sightless wyrms that occasionally crawled or squirmed their way out of it on their way to terrorizing the city.

  The other reference to cave systems was more oblique, and from far longer ago. The southern city of Eith—capital of Eithlanel—had a whole portion of the central city, including several of the largest shrines to Arren, taken out by a collapse. Since it had been nearly three-hundred years, not much beyond speculation was known or written down. The historical account described a city where the very earth had turned on itself, the tunnels suddenly bursting with life—and then death. Benji didn’t like the sound of that.

  Setting aside a few of the deeper texts on the subject to check out, and placing the remainder in the return bin for re-shelving, Benji got up to leave. Every new piece of information only underscored how much he didn’t know.