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"Come on, Aly." Julian said, pulling her gently away. And Aly went.

***

Days passed, bringing more storms with them. It seemed to rain nearly every day now. Aly tried to go back to her usual work, to forget everything that happened below. The first day wasn't so hard and the second day was manageable, but the more days that went by, the more her mind began to wander, her concentration blown away into the netherspace of her mind, replaced by fantasies that were unlikely to ever come true.

One, specifically, entailed her getting on the ship. Of her and her team making their way out of Lethe Maws and through space in hopes of returning home. Or if not home, perhaps somewhere—anywhere, really—better than the mines.

She also thought a lot about Ryziel. About his refusal to let her help him and how distant he had seemed, even though he had just rushed to save her life for no reason at all. How he confused her and kind of infuriated her, really, and maybe she would just go down below again after all and give him another piece of her mind while maybe trying to convince him a second time...

Yeah, no, that was a stupid idea.

Aly stuck to the upper levels and refused to go farther than the twentieth floor. She tried her best to stay around others and messaged Julian every so often to let him know she was okay. She got up early for work and went straight to her unit after her shift end. She didn't mope around or try to speak to anyone.

She was on level eighteen, trying to fix a large caster—a sort of flood light—when her concentration (or lack of) was broken by the sudden rush or people at the corner of her eye. Medical staff were coming out from the medical hub nearby. The hub wasn't large in any sense, which said a lot about the Xolis Council's need to provide treatment to those on Lethe. The staff rushed over to the elevator only a few yards away as the car came up and the doors opened.

From the car stepped out two miners carrying a third, a grex from what Aly could make out. The grex was limp in their arms, his head swaying back from his shoulders, tongue slipping from his mouth, his skin a sickly pale green. Aly dropped down from her position by the light to get a better look. Something was on the grex's stomach—something like a pile of brown and green vines or leaves, clumped together in a sort of mass. A few miners watching flinched away. Confused at first, Aly watched the medical staff press the pile of mush against the grex's stomach, and she realized it was his guts.

Her stomach rolled, and Aly had to turn away, hand against her mouth.

"Ripped up just like that tylian," Aly heard someone mutter close by.

The miners holding the grex gave him over to the medical staff, who took him inside.

"No way he's surviving that," said another miner.

"What could have got him?"

"Don't know. Something really awful, though."

Aly turned back to the light and quickly went to fix it. When she eventually did get it working again, she made for the elevator where the two miners who had been carrying the grex still stood, talking in low voices with the others, including a few other grex who wanted to know what had happened to their kin.

"We found him on the lower levels, by one of the stairways," said one, a tylian, his feelers flattened against the shell of his head.

"Did he have saliva foaming at his mouth?" asked one grex. "A purplish liquid?"

The tylian shook his head, and that seemed to alarm the grex.

"No venom was used, which means he didn't even try to defend himself," one grex commented.

"Unless he was caught by surprise before he could," mentioned another.

"I don't know. There were several wound marks in various places. It certainly looked like he was in a fight," said the tylian.

The grex seemed deeply disturbed as Aly passed by, making her way over to a separate elevator so as to not be in their way. As she took the elevator up to nine, she thought heavily about what she had seen and heard and what it meant.

She thought of Ryziel again but shook her head.

No, he couldn't have done it. Otherwise, she would surely have been one of those being carried off the other night. It was more likely that it was a sluth. Though it seemed odd that the grex's body, like that of the dead tylian, was so intact save for the torn stomach. The sluths would have at least eaten him, like they had likely planned to do to her before Ryziel had come. And they wouldn't have left his body on one of the other levels. She was pretty sure they didn't know how to work an elevator or find the stairs let alone navigate them.

So, something else was down below coming up to hunt.

There were things far worse than sluths. That's what Nar had said. And she believed it. Maybe she should just be thankful she even got out of the bottom alive at all. Maybe she really needed to put the ship and everything behind her and just worry about her life and the others. Maybe she should even consider asking Braxin to have them work in the warehouses after all.

Because, as awful as that might be, clearly, nowhere was safe in the mines. And, even though the enforcers were tracking them to keep them "safe," she would be a fool to believe that they could actually stop anything from harming them. They certainly hadn't done a great job the night she went below and almost got eaten.

The elevator stopped at nine, and Aly slipped out, making her way back to her unit. She stepped into her apartment and began to take off her suit when another thought came to her.

Ryziel could protect them if he cared. She learned enough about the nillium at the refugee facility to know they were a powerful race; strong, agile and fierce. Some of them were even said to have strange but useful abilities. They were acknowledged as the First for a reason. Their strength and power were what made them the elite of Xolis, which was why the other races respected and revered them.