As the next few weeks passed, Miliam found herself with little to do except join Abigail for a couple more dates. It was a nice distraction, but it didn’t allay her concerns, and she became increasingly worried about how long it was taking Abigail’s university to get in touch. She’d asked the scholar for a progress update, but apparently she wasn’t involved in the process at all since it was currently more of a computer interface issue.

  When she finally received a call requesting an in-person meeting, Miliam practically melted in relief. She agreed to the earliest meeting she could get and asked Aoibhe to accompany her, relieving her of Tessa-duty for the time being. Unlike last time, they would be going to the university itself for negotiations, but regular shuttles to the surface made getting there easy.

  Having only seen True Eden so far, Miliam was unprepared for the sight of a major world in a modern magical society. Until now magic was somewhat abstract to her for the most part; most of its applications weren’t very showy and could have easily been handwaved as a result of scientific principles she wasn’t educated on. But Kappa Ceti Prime, and its capital of Kappa City, were another beast entirely.

  As her shuttle descended towards the surface, buildings came into view much sooner than Miliam had expected. Before she could ask how tall they were, those same buildings’ bases became visible- but they weren’t in contact with the ground. They were simply floating hundreds, maybe thousands, of meters above the ground. Bridges, flexible like string, connected the structures loosely, but the people on them walked as if they were on solid ground, unaffected by the movement of the surfaces beneath their feet.

  Earth had had billboards, so Miliam wasn’t surprised to see advertisements, but many of them seemed to be projected onto the air itself like holograms. These weren’t 2D visuals, either, but fully three-dimensional, moving representations of people, products, and all sort of other things which seemed to dance in the sky in a display so dazzling it was hard to tear her eyes away.

  Only once the shuttle she was on dropped below that layer of the city did Miliam manage to look at anything else. Something seemed odd, beyond the abundance of magic, but it took her a while to figure out what it was. Then it hit her: there was almost no traffic in the sky.

  “How does anyone get to those buildings?” she asked Aoibhe, who was sitting beside her, occupied with reading something on her grimoire. “I don’t see any cars, or any other shuttles.”

  “Hm? Oh, shuttles are only used for going between the surface and orbital stations. Down here it’s all teleporters. We’ll be using one to get to the university, too,” Aoibhe explained once she remembered that wasn’t something Miliam would just know.

  Quite frankly, Miliam had almost forgotten about that sort of teleportation. Aoibhe had used it once to board the Astrum Vitae for the first time, but it had never been useful since. Technically her ship utilized teleportation every time it engaged it translocation drive, but that felt different somehow- it was the entire ship doing the moving.

  “And that’s…safe?” she asked tentatively. Fiction was full of horror stories about teleportation, and she didn’t want to be disassembled on a molecular level or create a clone of herself by accident.

  “Aye, it’s exactly the same as how the translocation drive works, but there’s even more safeties built in since the platforms are stationary. They won’t even activate if anything is only partially on them and they just swap the coordinates of everything in a certain volume above the destination and source,” Aoibhe elaborated, calming Miliam’s fears.

  “Doesn’t that take a lot of energy?” she asked next. The Astrum Vitae needed to charge its capacitors for hours after every jump, so she’d never really considered teleportation something that could be used so freely.

  “Nay, the cost of teleportation on a planetary scale is so low a reactor the size of the Vitae’s could power a teleporter all day long,” Aoibhe denied without looking up from her grimoire. Humming, Miliam looked back out the window to find they were already about to land.

  If the buildings in the sky were dazzling, the city on the ground was mesmerizing. There was impossible architecture that defied the very concept of structural integrity with how thin it grew in some places, trees that wrapped around and through buildings as they ascended towards the sky, moving tapestries flowing across the walls, and ‘pipes’ that seemed to channel water through thin air without losing a drop. Miliam was fairly certain she saw a water tower at one point, but it had no walls- it was just an enormous ball of water spinning in place high above a plaza below, shimmering with refracted light and casting rainbows around it, the only evidence of its functional usage the narrow streams feeding into and out of it.

  Some entire streets were just vertical. People walked onto a curved ramp that shifted them ninety degrees until they appeared to be walking directly up a wall, except all the structures there were oriented the same way. It was impressive and mind bending to look at, even if Miliam couldn’t begin to fathom the point of it.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Her view was cut off when the shuttle drew into a landing slip. The entire trip had only taken a few minutes, similar to riding a bus into town. As soon as it came to a stop just about everyone aboard stood up, furthering the comparison. Things were chaotic as people shuffled off the shuttle and into the transit station- a hub for teleporter platforms leading to all sorts of places. The building was roughly circular, with the outermost ring of the upper level containing the slips shuttles parked in.

  “This way,” Aoibhe said to Miliam as they came off the shuttle. She had her grimoire in her hand still, and Miliam caught a glimpse of a map on it- probably showing the way to the platform they needed.

  It was fortunate that Aoibhe was so tall, because Miliam might have lost track of her otherwise. The station was vast and ornate, arranged like a large bowl ringed with clear-domed platforms all the way up and down its sides. From the edge of each level one could easily look up or down to see the rest, making navigation easy, as the layout was predictable and every platform was labeled.

  Some sort of magic was at play with the signage, as any time Miliam’s eyes fell on text in the distance it seemed to magnify until she could clearly read it. Some kind of light refracting enchantment that could detect eyes on it? Or was it an effect that was always active, but only evident when viewed directly? She couldn’t even begin to guess how it worked, even with all of the self-study she’d put herself through.

  Following Aoibhe, Miliam left the bowl-shaped center of the transit station and entered an outer ring that seemed to be full of lower-trafficked platforms. That must have been why the pilot needed a map; these were harder to find since they weren’t visible from the main chamber. As they passed by various chambers, Miliam noticed numbers projected near the door to each one with times listed out indicating when the platforms would next activate. Each also seemed to have a dedicated operator, which fit with her understanding of magic- it was difficult to automate, and while wards could do so to an extent, they weren’t good for repeated activations.

  Occasionally they passed by a platform right when it was used, giving Miliam a preview of what using one would be like. It wasn’t flashy. Everyone on the platform would disappear and be replaced by another group of people in an instant, so quickly that there was no perceptible moment where the swap was made. Then the new group would file out, only to be replaced as more people trickled in. The process was so fast that lines didn’t really have time to form.

  After a few minutes of walking, Aoibhe led Miliam into one of the domes, labeled as leading to ‘Kappa Shell University.’ The attendant didn’t acknowledge them, and there was nowhere to swipe a grimoire for payment, so Miliam could only assume the service was free like the shuttle had been.

  While they waited for the platform to whisk them away, Miliam stepped away from Aoibhe to take a closer look at the dome. It was hard to tell if it was glass or crystal. Normally Miliam might have assumed the former, but she knew magic made the production of certain materials a lot easier, and it presumably helped with shaping them as well.

  She blinked, and then she was somewhere else.

  “What are you doing? Come on,” Aoibhe called from behind. A bit disoriented, Miliam turned to catch up to Aoibhe. They weren’t in a dome anymore; this platform was clad in a glossy, brown hardwood that gave it a certain old and venerable feeling. Stepping out into the hallway was like exiting a lecture hall into the corridors of an ancient institution like Oxford, built of old stone with decorative arrangements and soaring arches above. It made the place feel far larger than it really was; in reality, looking at the other platforms allowed Miliam to determine pretty quickly that it only had platforms leading to major central hubs like the one they’d come from.

  “This is…exactly the kind of place I would imagine Abigail working at, actually,” she muttered to Aoibhe, who chuckled.

  “Aye, it is, isn’t it? Looks older than it is, though. Most of the weathering was done deliberately, for show,” Aoibhe pointed out, although Miliam was unable to tell the difference even with that information.

  “How can you tell?” she asked while scrutinizing the stonework.

  “I can’t. But I went to school here, so I learned all sorts of things about it,” Aoibhe explained with a shrug.

  “Pilots need a university degree?” To Miliam’s knowledge it was more of a certification than a degree in her time, although she could have been wrong about that. It wasn’t like she was extremely familiar with the subject.

  “Aye. The actual technical skills are one thing, but the calculations used in translocation jumps require some extremely high-level math, and we’ve got to be able to perform them ourselves in case the navigation computer is disabled for some reason. Most magical systems can be operated independently of the computers, so it’s more likely than you might think,” Aoibhe explained.

  “Huh. I never really saw you as a mathematician, but I guess you did say something about that while the Astrum Vitae was recharging way back when,” Miliam commented, remembering her pilot’s initial distrust of the ship’s old computers.

  “Aye? And what did you see me as, pray tell?” Aoibhe interrogated, looming over Miliam menacingly. She’d lost the ability to intimidate Miliam some time ago, though, so it failed to have the intended effect.

  “A tree that would blow over in a stiff wind,” Miliam replied flatly. Aoibhe clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction, but then something grabbed her attention.

  “Looks like we’re here,” she said as she indicated a nearby door. Inside was a meeting room- the one where they would be speaking to a university representative about selling the data they’d recovered. Miliam paused outside and took a deep breath.

  “Alright, let’s do this. I’m counting on you in this one. I’m no good at haggling.”

  “Aye, cap’n.”