Ralf was standing on a platform of cracked asphalt, with the chipped and faded remains of what was once a large symbol, probably the letter T or H, or perhaps N, within a now incomplete circle. He was waiting. As he waited, he looked around, taking in the 360° view. The platform was very tall: so tall that the climb had seemed to take a lifetime, winding up the exposed staircase that snaked around the red-brown hexagonal metal column on which the platform was perched, before finally emerging through a creaking trapdoor onto the asphalt, accompanied by the two or three suits that guided him.

Every time a gust of wind blew, the column would rock slightly. It wasn’t really noticeable near ground level, and it only felt like an inch or two as they climbed further up. But once they were really high, the jolts felt like several feet. Ralf wanted the suits to reassure him as he pressed himself to the flush surface of the column in a vain attempt to find something to hold on to. There was no bannister or guard rail, and when the column tipped him toward the edge, the only way to keep from rolling off was to sink into a ball and try to keep your center of gravity as low as possible. Ralf wanted the three or four black suits to explain to him that the column had been designed to bend in the wind like that; that all tall structures tilted this way, to prevent the superstructure breaking; that no one of consequence had ever fallen off. He knew all this, of course, but it would have been nice if those faceless men in suits would condescend to look him in the eye and confirm it. It was so nerve-racking, being up so high without a handhold.

But now, atop the platform, it was eerily quiet, and when the ground tilted, it felt subtle, gradual, and he could offset it by simply shifting his weight. Far below him, on three sides, was a tangled patchwork of familiar, dilapidated, and mismatched buildings, rendered foreign by the distance and the angle. He knew them well at ground level, or many of them, in any case. And of the others, he knew the type. They were hangars and warehouses and barracks and offices and other reclaimed Earth structures. It was the EN-Am Copter Pilot Headquarters and Training Center: his home for the whole of his career. And, for a time, the home of his wife, until she left him. He had seen much of that place, but he had never seen it from this angle, because in all his years of service, Ralf had never reached the top of his profession. Until now.

He let his gaze travel up, to the distant horizon, where the land met the silvery-blue sea. Ralf didn’t know why, but this sight was more unnervingly strange than the high-angle view of the buildings in which he had lived and worked. He squinted against the blinding glints of sunlight and turned away.

On the other side, there stretched the strangest sight of all. He had always known it was there, but had never seen it: the Great EN-Am Oxygen Farm. It was bigger than he had imagined, and far, far more unnerving. In stark contrast to the irregular jumble of the Copter village, the Oxygen Farm was a masterwork of precision: row after straight row of green trees, stretching as far as he could see, seemingly of equal height and girth. As he regarded it, he noticed that there were, in fact, sections of different types of tree, with the pointed, conical ones in particular standing out. He could see no sign of human life, beyond the obviously intelligent design which had shaped its layout, but he knew that on the surface, below that layer of green, were thousands of OxFarmers, milling about like the bugs they ate, tending to the trees upon which the entire human race depended.

Ralf looked up, and saw the great aluminum balloons, drifting through the blue, and knew they were filtering out the nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and other gases to produce pure oxygen, which they compressed in cannisters and floated up for delivery to the many human colonies. At least that was one delivery that didn’t depend on the…

There was something wrong. Ralf paused and listened hard for the anticipated sound of approaching rotors, of the Ascender Copter that would lift him gently to Skyport, where he could catch the Orbital Tether and finally leave this floating turd. It didn’t come. There was only the incessant, howling wind. No, not howling. Crashing. It came crashing in great, not quite regular gusts, like the waves of a vast and unfeeling ocean.

Ralf turned to the two (or was it three?) black suits, hoping to catch their attention. But he could only see them out of the corner of his eye. Whenever he turned to face them, they had moved, forever in his peripheral vision. There was definitely something odd about this. Why were they so far away? Why was he the only one leaving today? Some long-submerged but powerful part of his mind asked him what he could possibly have done to deserve to be the only one Going Up this trip. Why, it asked, out of all the pilots and all the OxFarmers and everyone else they could choose from, they would settle for a fat, sloppy, divorcé who spent three decades in the same job without a promotion.

He gritted his teeth against this unexpected resurfacing of his self-image, but when he cast his gaze downward in shame and defiance, he saw that his ever-present gut was missing. He could see his feet, clad in the kind of shiny, synthetic shoes he had never been able to afford, his legs in new fitted slacks – the kind which were never available on Earth – that showed off his muscular legs. And his white shirt was just thin enough that his toned chest was visible if you looked hard and from up close. He put a hand to his face and felt a neat, trimmed beard, and could almost see his face, poised at that ideal place between Youth and Age. It was a handsome face, his and yet not his. Not at all the face he had always seen in the cracked, cloudy mirrors, when he could bear to look, but still he someone knew it was meant to be his. It was perfect. And nothing on Earth had ever been perfect.

But still the three or four or two men in black eluded him, hovering on the edge of sight, and still the only sound to be heard was the crashing of waves of wind, each gust leaving that smell.

What was that smell? It was faintly dark and putrid, like the inside of his quarter at the end of a particularly wet day: that stink of damp and decay. But there was also something sharp in it: almost burning, or at least stinging. And binding the two together, that peculiar odor you always got from the scavenged hard synthetics: the plastics they dug up from the ground and used for furniture and building materials and sometimes even for clothing. The smell got stronger with every gust, and with every gust the platform rocked more violently.

It was now getting hard to keep his footing. He gave up analyzing the smell, looking for the black-suited men, or listening for the Ascender. He was now forced to put his arms out, to keep his balance. When the gusts shook the platform, he flailed wildly and leaned, first in one direction and then another, his face burning as he thought of how ridiculous he must look. Each time the gust ended just as he felt sure he would lose the battle and fall. Until finally it didn’t. He misjudged or mistimed his lean, misplaced his flailing arms. He felt himself tilt, had time to realize he would fall, as if time had slowed for him, then the platform rushed up to meet him and the impact made him gasp.

Ralf lifted his head. At first the wan, blueish light was so faint he couldn’t see anything but the glow itself. After a moment, one of the shadows coalesced into the shape of a squatting figure. Soon after, he could see details of the figure – a young man, unshaven, with dark, moppy hair – and the space they both occupied.

It was irregular; that was Ralf’s first impression. He had been in circular or oval-shaped spaces (the cockpits of some Copters, for instance), and he had seen rooms and building warped from their original square or rectangular forms into something else (such as many of the barracks he had lived in over his career). But he had never seen a space that betrayed no indication of a plan or purpose, a space that seemed to have simply formed, presumably at random. He had no name for it. There were no right angles, or any angle that had ever been right. All surfaces were curved, but there was no consistency. There were “bulges”, both convex and concave, wherever he looked, and these bulges themselves were full of smaller bulges. In fact, the entire surface was pitted, as if it had been subject to some form of corrosion. And worst of all, it smelt and felt damp, though no part of him and nothing he touched seemed actually wet.

The other man sat at the opposite end of the space, or cavity, at the black mouth of a tunnel which was one of two visible exits. The other tunnel was on Ralf’s left, clear across the cavity, and despite their apparent differences in age and weight, it seemed entirely possible that Ralf could reach it before the other man could stop him. Which probably meant it led to nowhere Ralf would actually want to go.

Ralf picked himself off the floor and hoisted himself into a sitting position. He did not remember falling asleep, but he doubted anyone could have dragged him down here. He had many questions, but he also had pride, and the thought of sitting here in this dank hole, in the weird light that came from the glass or plexi tube on the floor, asking stupid questions to some asshole who probably wouldn’t answer them anyway, made his teeth press together to the point of pain. The moment Ralf opened his mouth to ask something, anything, of his apparent captor, there would be no denying who held the power in this situation. And while no one would think Ralf held much power as it was, at least for now his powerlessness was unstated. And judging by the pissant little smirk on the younger man’s face, Ralf had probably compromised himself enough in his sleep.

Ralf turned his face away from the smirking man as nonchalantly as he could. He wanted to give the impression that he didn’t give a flying fuck about him, or their environs, or the situation Ralf was apparently in. Instead, he stared at an innocuous spot on the “wall”, equidistant from the man and the other tunnel. Ralf didn’t want the man thinking he was desperate to escape. And then, with no other options available, he began posing his many questions to himself.

Where was he?

The last thing he remembered was crashing the Copter and being pulled through the water to that bobbing mass of plastic. Ralf felt the floor beneath his hands. It was certainly similar, if not identical, to the feel of the “ground” he had landed on. So it was likely he was still there, on this floating island of plastic Jakub had called the Isle of Man. On? Or in? Ralf glanced up. The “ceiling” wasn’t high – he doubted he could stand fully upright – and looked to be made of the same material as the rest of the stinking hole. There were no cracks or openings, no sign of the sky above, and thus no indication of the time of day.

Which meant that, while he was reasonable sure of where he was, he could not be sure of how long he had been there. Again, he didn’t remember being struck or drugged, though he supposed a concussion would explain gaps in his memory. But once again, he doubted he could be dragged down here, unconscious, without knowing it, unless he were thoroughly out of it, and there were more pissants living in this plastic hellhole than he guessed.

Ralf took a moment to examine how he felt. Hungry and thirsty, yes. But not excessively so. Late for one significant meal, perhaps very late, but not quite on the road to starvation or dehydration. And he didn’t feel tired, which hopefully meant he had just woken up from a natural sleep. Maybe the trauma of the experience had caused him to crash, against his will and better judgement. After all, he didn’t feel “hurt”: no pain in his head, for instance, or anywhere else really. Except his eyes stung a bit.

His eyes! Ocean water had got into his eyes. Before he could remember to pretend to be unconcerned, he began blinking rapidly and rubbing his eyes and looking hurriedly around the room, making sure he could still see. Only the derisive laughter of his captor brought him back under control. Ralf could see the fuckface with the same clarity as when his eyes had first adjusted, or he was pretty sure he could, anyway.

“Worried about your eyesight, eh?” the laughing bastard said. Something about his tone or accent reminded Ralf of Sime.

“Yeah,” the pissant laughed, “You crashed in open sea. In the great acidic ocean. You’re doomed now, friend. Doomed!”

Then he let out more peals of laughter. Ralf merely grimaced at the wall, and wondered if he would get a chance to kill this twat, or Sime. He didn’t harbor any hope of “getting out alive”, but he figured it would be nice to take one or two of these bastards with him if he could. He also figured that the eye thing was just a jab at him. After all, he hadn’t even noticed the stinging until he concentrated on it.

Picking up where he left off, he was inside a floating piece of plastic, probably not more than a day after crashing the Copter. What was next?

Who else was with him?

Obviously this fuckstick, and probably Jakub and Sime as well, unless there were ways off the “island”. That was a major gap in his knowledge. Where were the other Copters? He assumed his was lost beneath the sea, along with the Saucer, but what about the other three? Could they land on this thing? And if so, could they take off? The Copters used jet propulsion to lift off before engaging the rotors, and the heat from that was almost certainly enough to melt plastic. But it was possible to use the rotors only for lift-off, as a back-up. They called it doing an  “Old School”, and all pilots had to demonstrate it before earning their license. It required a lot of space, though, and actually used more energy than the small amount of rocket fuel required for a standard take-off. It seemed impossible that there could be a hunk of plastic in the ocean big enough to hold three Copters, their pilots, and assorted kidnappers. But a lot of things had seemed impossible yesterday. And if the other Copters were here, then their pilots were too, and if they, like Ralf, were now abductees, rather than conspirators, then perhaps he would eventually have allies. If. Right now, that was another gap in his knowledge.

And finally, Ralf still did not know what the point of any of this was. Or how they expected to get away with it, considering the massive Eye in the Sky that was the Earth Orbital Space Station. These, and other questions which had not yet occurred to him, would have to remain unanswered. Ralf still refused to give his captor the satisfaction of watching him beg for information he probably wouldn’t give anyway. So they waited in silence: Ralf staring at the “wall”, and the dipshit staring at Ralf, his guffaws slowly deteriorating into quiet dismay over the course of an hour.

The ruse paid off, and when the hour was up, it was the captor who broke the silence. Ralf had absently put his hand to the floor to steady himself after a particularly big tilt.

               “Don’t be scared, friend,” his captor giggled. “They all move like that. Only Gondwala is big enough not to get waves.”

Ralf hadn’t felt particularly perturbed by the waves. He was, in fact, getting used to the lurches and undulations, and his queasiness was passing. The captor’s asinine smirk irked him, therefore; but he kept his face stoically trained on a spot on the wall. And this time, it wasn’t just to keep the dipshit from gloating. He needed to hide his elation at the two new pieces of information he had: there were more of these plastic islands, and the biggest one was called Gondwala.

Ralf wondered if he should respond, in the hopes of keeping his captor talking. But he also wondered if he could trust the little pissant. Could there really be several floating masses of fused plastic in the ocean, one of which was so big it didn’t move with the waves? If so, why had the Copter pilots never seen them? They regularly flew over open ocean (in case of accidents, it was better to crash into the sea, rather than risk damaging what little land was left for food, oxygen, and other Earth-dependent resources). And wouldn’t these “islands” be visible from space, and therefore useless as hiding places? It was frustrating that new answers produced new questions.

Before he could ponder any further, however, Ralf heard a shuffling, almost scraping sound coming from the unguarded tunnel. A shadowy figure emerged into the chemical light and rose, stooping under the low ceiling to glare at Ralf. It was Jakub.

He was still dressed in his uniform, now wrinkled and stained from the seawater. His grey hair was disheveled, and his face was shadowed with early beard growth. There did not appear to be showers or razors on the Isle of Man. Ralf met his gaze defiantly, but before either could speak, the dimwit guard broke the silence.

          “Any more of them?”

Jakub glared at him, but nodded tersely. He turned back to Ralf, but was too late to stop the moronic prattle from his apparent underling.

          “Our ‘guest’ here is worried about seawater in his eyes.”

          “Is he?” Jakub asked, without the slightest hint of emotion. Now it was Ralf’s turn to glare at the fuckstick guard.

          “Seawater has a pH of about 7.3, pretty close to neutral. Nowhere near ‘acidic’ enough to harm us, but unfortunately far too acidic for many of the lifeforms that once lived in the ocean.”

Ralf finally felt able to risk speaking without surrendering power.

          “Thanks for the science lesson. If you wanted to be a lecturer, you might have tried one of the Celestial schools.”

Jakub merely stared at Ralf, expressionless. Ralf used to love how flat and blank Jakub was. He never argued about anything. He always took the path of least resistance. He hardly ever spoke at all. He was goddamn perfect: one of the only other human beings Ralf could stand to be around. If he could have met a woman like that…

But now the silent, emotionless demeanour made Ralf feel sick. All that time, what must have been hatching behind that blank mask? What was hatching there now?

Ralf wanted to ask if Jakub planned to kill him, but he wanted it to sound hard and brave and unconcerned, and he didn’t trust the words to come out like that. So he simply had to keep staring Jakub down, trying not to blink.

          “Are you injured?” Jakub asked, “as in really injured?”

Ralf shook his head, and did not relax his glare.

          “Now that you’re awake,” Jakub continued, “we have more comfortable spaces available. And there is some food and water.”

          “Great,” Ralf said, noting the pissant guard’s incredulous expression. “Just like a fucking Loony hotel. What do you charge for this place?”

Jakub did not miss a beat.

          “You’re welcome to stay in this cavern, of course. But we’ll be taking the light with us. And even with light, the tunnels are quite unnavigable to…newcomers.”

Jakub motioned for the pissant to precede him down the unguarded tunnel. The pissant picked up his lantern and complied. The cavern grew visibly darker as the light moved away. Jakub remained stooping in the middle of the “room”.

          “Last chance,” he said. Just before Jakub turned to follow the pissant, Ralf heaved himself into a squatting position – with more noise than he needed to, so that Jakub would know he was coming – and prepared to shuffle down the tunnel after the pissant and his light. As expected, Jakub waited for Ralf to pass before joining them, cutting off his escape. Ralf didn’t know if the two were armed, or if they simply didn’t rate Ralf’s chances in a fight. Either way, he doubted he had anything to gain by fighting now. Even if he could manage to take on all comers, which even his inflated ego knew was impossible, Ralf still had no real idea where he was or how to communicate with the mainland. So he simply followed.

Jakub was right: the tunnels were completely perplexing. They twisted and turned randomly, at times even doubling back on themselves, frequently rising or falling steeply. The size varied even more. Sometimes you could actually stand or walk two or three abreast; other times the space was so narrow and constricted that Ralf honestly feared getting stuck. And there were branches: innumerable branches, leading off at all conceivable angles, including straight up and down. Some of these tunnels were too narrow for anyone but a small child to enter. Others were gaping caverns of their own. Most were dark, but many had faint lights of emanating out of them, or voices. Ralf intended to memorize the route back to the cavity he woke up in, despite having no real gift for holding such details in his mind, but dishearteningly soon he was forced to give up and merely follow the pissant guide, hoping each twist or turn or connection would be the last one. The stink of brine and bacteria grew more intense, and he felt he was moving farther and farther from daylight: the one advantage of being at the open sea.

Eventually, some innumerable turns after Ralf lost the will even to care where he was, the pissant halted and turned around. He had just passed the wide mouth of a cavity, out of which poured both light and laughter. The pissant looked past Ralf, presumably at Jakub, but if Jakub gave any sign or signal, Ralf was too slow turning around to see it. Then the pissant grimaced, gestured to the “room”, and said “In there.” Ralf would have hesitated, but in addition to the now-familiar salt and smells, he picked up the scent of food: not hot food, of course, but food nonetheless. The dry crackers called “hardtack” that formed a standard part of Copter pilot emergency kits; the sharp sting of preserved root veg; the dark, cloying sweetness of dried berries. Ralf entered the cave.

It was large enough for dozens to stand comfortably, and when Ralf crawled in and rose to his feet, eight people rose from a white table and drew their weapons: guns, apparently. Jakub entered behind Ralf and gestured for the others to lower their arms.

          “Our guest should have some food, and possibly rest afterward. He should be comfortable, but he will not require a seat at the table, and he should remain here until I find more suitable accommodations.”

The others obeyed Jakub without a word. Two of them, a man and a woman, moved to the mouth of the cave and stood on either side. A third – a bearded and disheveled man about Ralf’s age but less than half his weight – ushered Ralf over to a space against the wall, next to a stack of metal crates of various size. He made it clear that Ralf should sit, though he, too, spoke no words. A fourth, another man, brought Ralf a rectangular tray, smooth and pastel-yellow plastic, with a selection of the provisions, including three forms of wobbly protein, which Ralf recognized as soy, gluten, and a kind of artificial fungus confusingly called “corn”. Apart from the guards, they all returned to the table and resumed talking, but now in whispers. Ralf wanted to listen in, but he was overcome by the sudden desire to eat. He was more than halfway through his meal before he realized that Jakub and the pissant were nowhere to be seen. He had not seen them leave.

* * *

Windem Rizley Stowe, the so-called pissant guard, waited until the mess room was out of earshot before he addressed Jakub.

          “You’re sure you want to do it this way?”

Jakub’s disdainful silence was the only reply, and it unnerved Windem enough to stifle his planned further comments about risk and liability. The two moved along the tunnel in what was, for Windem at least, an awkward silence. After several minutes, the guard attempted another question.

          “Why is it called the Stockholm Syndrome?” He wanted to ask “Does it really work?”, but that line of questioning seemed too dangerous at present.

          “Stockholm is one of the Lost Cities,” Jakub answered, “It sank beneath the Ocean long ago.”

          “Oh,” Windem replied. He tried to keep his tone neutral, but Jakub could hear the note of disappointment. 

          “How do you think the Lost Cities sank?” he asked.

Windem was confused. Everyone in the Green Flame knew the history of End of Earth, which most humans merely regarded as the Migration. With no better idea, he began to recite.

          “Long ago, people put poison in the Earth: in the Air, in the Sea, in the Land. The Land Poison killed the animals, and many of the plants. The Sea Poison killed the creatures of the sea, of which there were many. And the Air Poison trapped the heat of the sun, melting the Great Ices that capped the Earth’s poles. When they melted, they caused the dead seas to rise, and the Cities on the Coasts were drowned, and new coasts were made. And we call these drowned cities the Lost Cities.”

          “When you recite it like that,” Jakub replied, “it sounds like it all happened at once. It didn’t. The process took hundreds of years. More than enough time to discover it. More than enough time to study it. More than enough time to stop it.”

Windem was even more disappointed. This was not part of the Litany, but it was a fundamental part of the Green Flame manifesto. 

          “I get it,” he complained, “They didn’t they stop it. But why is it-?”

          “They could have stopped,” Jakub corrected, “and they didn’t. They chose not to. They colluded. They sided with the Poisoners. The whole human race colluded in the destruction of their home planet, and almost every living thing on it.”

Jakub stopped walking and looked Windem firmly in the eyes.

          “They knew what they were doing,” Jakub said. “I have read the files. They are not easy to find, but they still exist. AAAlFa doesn’t think anyone would look for them, maybe doesn’t even know the files exist. Otherwise they’d be deleted. But the files are still there. People knew. And they chose to align with the Poisoners, with the Destroyers of the World. That is why the Litany says No One is Innocent.”

Jakub paused dramatically, waiting for this to sink in. He grabbed Windem by the shoulders.

          “That is why it’s called the Stockholm Syndrome” Jakub said, his eyes boring into Windem’s in the faint light. “It’s when you side with the enemy, against your own interest, and to the ruin of your friends. It brought about the End of Earth. Now, it will bring about the End of Humanity. It will bring about the Reckoning.”

Windem nodded, his body rigid with fear, as Jakub’s eyes and hand threatened to pierce him through. Each moment he prayed this show of actual emotion would pass and Jakub would return to his usual, unnerving iciness. For that was what Jakub was known for: the flat, emotionless manner in which he pursued everything, from casual conversation (such as it was), to planning attacks to executing the most extreme and violent orders. His voice was invariably measured and monotonous, his face still and unreadable, and his eyes cold and black like the void Windem saw out his bedroom window every day of his childhood on Lunar. Of all the things he had seen, done, and seen others do, all the as-yet unrealized plans he was privy to, Jakub Kendrik was the only thing that ever gave Windem second thoughts about joining the Green Flame.

Eventually, Jakub relaxed his grip and nudged Windem forward. Windem turned back down the hall, suppressing a shudder as Jakub followed behind.