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“Bullshit,” I blurted, accidentally spraying crumbs over my front. Oops, shit. “There is no way anyone has ever snuck through the entrances, especially not a human. It’s pants-shittingly terrifying enough going through the checkpoints with a Deep Earth passport. When you’re actually allowed.”
“You’ve been to Deep Earth before?” Beryl asked with interest.
“Yeah, once. We have some distant relatives who, for some unknown reason, decided to hold a big family reunion when I was a kid. It sucked.”
She chuckled. “It wasn’t fun getting to go and see Deep Earth?”
I made a face. “I mean, it was cool, sure. But seriously, the checkpoint guards are terrifying. At least they were when I was, like, ten. They had giant guns, and giant muscles, and they wore helmets that made them all look like android soldiers. And even though my mom had all our passports, they still make you feel like you’re doing something wrong or trying to, I don’t know, smuggle stuff through.”
“So you’ve only been the once?”
“Yeah. Mom swore after that visit that she wouldn’t survive another attempt to herd eight kids through the checkpoint without anyone getting accidentally shot.”
“Were you all nightmares?” Beryl asked, her tone filled with amusement.
“I mean…” I bobbed my head side to side. “Yeah. I think it was hard keeping us all in line. Nuni, Kiti and Laki used to ‘prank’ me a lot because they’re assholes. Well, Laki’s mellowed out now. But Kiti and Nuni are still assholes.”
“Kiti wasn’t an asshole.” Beryl gave my chest a light smack.
My ears fluttered with embarrassment. “Tell that to the ten-year-old me who burst into tears in front of all those big scary guards because the three of them pulled my pants down at the checkpoint.”
Beryl made a sympathetic sound as she rubbed my chest and pressed a kiss to my hair. “Okay, they sound like they were assholes back then.”
“They just picked on me because I was the smallest,” I grumbled, then stuffed more chips into my mouth. “Buttheads.”
Beryl snorted. “But you don’t actually dislike them, right? There didn’t seem to be any real animosity between you and Kiti when she and your mom visited.”
“Nah, I guess I love them or whatever,” I muttered. “Maybe not Nuni. He really is a dick. Still acts like a pompous frat bro even though we’re all in our forties now. But Laki actually apologised for picking on me when we were kids after they got back from travelling abroad. They’re nonbinary,” I clarified, then realised Beryl might not know what that meant—she’d had a pretty sheltered life. “Um, they were assigned female at birth, but—”
“I know what nonbinary means.” She rubbed my chest. “There are all kinds of people at the cult.”
“Oh, okay. Sorry, I wasn’t implying you… Sorry.”
Dipping her head, she kissed my cheek. “So what was Deep Earth like?”
I thought back to the vague memories I had of it. We’d all been hopped up on sugar after getting through the checkpoint, because it’d been the only way Mom could get us to shut up while she spoke to the guards and got our passports checked.
“It’s dark, which is nice,” I told Beryl. “Lots of tunnels and gigantic caverns. Our relatives lived outside of the city, so we only saw it from a distance.”
“There’s an actual city down there?”
“I mean, yeah, of course.” I tilted my head to look up at her with a tiny grin. “Did you think all the demiurgus down there lived in cave holes or something?”
Her round cheeks flushed pink, making me lunge up to kiss one. She gave me a nudge. “No, of course not. We learned stuff about demiurgus at the cult. It’s just kind of hard to imagine an entire city underground.”
“Yeah, well, it obviously doesn’t look like the mostly human-built cities.” I shrugged and turned back to my snacks. “The buildings are a lot more organic looking, and they don’t build them so tall. But there’s all kinds of stuff down there. I remember my however-many-times-removed cousins talking about playing at a nearby subterranean lake a lot.”
“Wow,” Beryl breathed. “I bet that’s amazing. And are there gems and stones everywhere? Like in your deeproom?”
“Yeah. Pretty cool, I guess. Lots of colour.”
“Do you think they’d ever let humans visit?”
I made a face. “Probably not. The demiurgus who live down there still live down there for a reason. They want to protect their way of life. Some of them don’t even like surface-dwelling demiurgus.”
“I see.” Beryl slipped her hand under the neck of my onesie to smooth it over my bare chest, making me shiver. “So the woman in this documentary is a total liar?”
“Most likely.” I grabbed a candy bar from the snack bag. “But it’ll be fun to hear what she claims she saw.”
