Briar Flint was lying on her sleeping mat in a state of sustained and focused irritation, which was not unusual. Deepwalkers as a species were not celebrated for their equanimity. But even by the generous standards her colleagues had developed for tolerating her general disposition, Briar was having an exceptionally difficult morning.
Technically she was a channeler, deepwalker being the broad cultural designation. She held a LEPfield commission, which was a job title rather than a species classification, though explaining this distinction to surface-worlders had long since stopped being something she bothered attempting.
A description would serve better than a taxonomy lecture.
Briar Flint had bark-brown skin and close-cropped copper hair that she kept short because it had no business being otherwise in a field operation helmet. Her eyes were the amber-hazel of old forest light. Her nose had a pronounced hook and her mouth was full in a way that people occasionally found disarming until she opened it, at which point the disarming quality tended to dissipate rapidly.
Her great-grandfather, according to family records she had read once and found implausible, had been the Deep People's legendary Binding specialist, whose mana-affinity had been so oriented toward connection and attraction that later generations had mythologized him into something resembling a deity of interpersonal entanglement. Her mother was a surface-adjacent channeler with a temper that moved fast and a frame that was mostly willowwood and purpose. Briar had inherited both the frame and the temper, along with fingers that were long and tapered and ideally shaped for wrapping around the grip of a resonance baton.
Her ears came to distinct points, as all Deepwalker ears did.
At exactly one meter and two centimeters in height, she was precisely one centimeter below the Deepwalker field average, which would not have mattered except that the field average was the threshold the LEPfield used to calculate standard equipment sizing, which meant that Briar's kit had been coming back from the requisition office slightly too large for eleven years and she had been making unofficial adjustments to it with a seam cutter for eleven years and no one had ever updated the requisition threshold.
One centimeter. One centimeter could constitute an enormous inconvenience when you were already working with limited margin.
Commander Reeve was the proximate cause of this particular morning's irritation, though if Briar was being fully accurate about it, Reeve had been the proximate cause of most of her irritation since the day she had been assigned to his division. Reeve commanded Deepfield Recon, the LEPfield's surface-operations unit, which had a fatality rate that the recruitment documentation noted in very small print and which attracted the specific variety of field officer who either thrived on the pressure or didn't survive long enough to develop an opinion about it. Reeve had made his position on Briar's assignment clear in the way that commanding officers with entrenched views made their positions clear: without directly stating it, so that it was also impossible to directly challenge.
The first female field officer in Deepfield Recon's history. Reeve had decided this was a problem that had been administered to him rather than an outcome that reflected well on his division's recruitment standards, and he had been waiting, with the patience of someone who had managed people for a long time and understood that patience was a form of pressure, for Briar to give him a reason to process a transfer request.
She had not given him one. She had no intention of doing so. She would retire from this position at a time of her own choosing, and Reeve would be required to process her retirement paperwork, and she found this image genuinely sustaining on difficult mornings.
Though if she was being accurate about the full picture, which she was capable of when she chose to be, there was a secondary source of tension that had nothing to do with Reeve. The Renewal.
She had been meaning to perform the Ritual for several lunar cycles. The Renewal was a foundational practice, the regular ceremonial replenishment of a channeler's base mana from a sanctified natural source, and without it a Deepwalker's cultivation base slowly depleted in the way that any reservoir depleted without inflow. Briar's reservoir was not empty. It was, however, lower than it was supposed to be, lower than it was supposed to be known to be, and if Reeve ever found out she was running a cultivation deficit she would find herself processing vehicle violations in the Transit Division before she had time to file a formal objection.
She rolled off the sleeping mat and walked into the wash-chamber. This was one of the genuine advantages of living at the deep levels, the geothermal water supply ran hot without any cultivation assistance and without any metering costs. No natural light, obviously, but Briar had reached an accommodation with that a long time ago. The surface world had light in abundance and she was welcome to visit it professionally. Down here she had privacy, which was worth considerably more.
Underground. The last remaining human-free zone in the known world.
There was nothing quite like returning from a long surface deployment, disengaging the shimmer-field that kept you invisible to human senses, and sinking into the residential slime baths that were maintained at the deep levels for exactly this purpose. Briar allowed herself a moment to look forward to this evening's version of that experience before beginning the process of getting her kit on.
The LEPfield uniform had improved significantly since the era that the deep histories described with a mixture of embarrassment and dark humor. The current field kit was a close-fit mana-reactive jumpsuit in a shade of green that absorbed ambient light rather than reflecting it, sealed to the chin, with integrated shimmer-field anchors at the wrists and collar. The helmet had a full-spectrum sensory array and a heads-up interface that projected key tactical information across the inner visor. The whole assembly was, by any reasonable standard, a professional piece of equipment.
The old uniforms, the buckled footwear and the voluminous short-trousers and the wide-brimmed hats with decorative shamrock detailing, had been retired for good reasons. They had also, Briar suspected, been the foundational error that explained why surface-world human mythology depicted Deepwalkers as comedic rural spirits with geography-specific accents who granted wishes in exchange for the return of their footwear. The humans had encountered field officers in those uniforms and drawn what were, under the circumstances, reasonable conclusions.
Probably better, all things considered. If the surface-worlders ever understood that the word leprechaun was a phonetic corruption of LEPfield, the acronym for the Lower Elements Police field division, the diplomatic situation would become extremely complicated extremely quickly. Better to let them keep the mythology. Surface-worlders were deeply attached to their misconceptions and considerably more manageable when those misconceptions were left undisturbed.
The moon was already registering on the surface-sync readout mounted above her door by the time Briar had her kit secured, which meant the optimal window for the surface transit she needed tonight was already shrinking. She grabbed the remains of a thornroot smoothie from the cooler unit and drank it moving, heading into the main thoroughfare at pace.
The main thoroughfare was, as it always was at shift-change, a managed disaster.
Airborne sprites jammed the central avenue in both directions, hovering at inconsistent altitudes and creating the kind of navigational chaos that the transit authority had been attempting to regulate for forty years without measurable success. The gnome population, which was large and moved at its own pace and had a cultural relationship with personal space that did not account for shared infrastructure, occupied the ground-level lanes in shifting aggregations that blocked two full lanes at a time through sheer mass and indifference. Swear-toads, a cultivated species that had been developed as a gag by an apprentice pharmacist three decades ago and had subsequently escaped containment and established a self-sustaining population in every damp corridor in the lower levels, colonized every drainage channel and contributed a continuous, layered commentary of profanity to the ambient noise of the thoroughfare.
Someone had lost their cultivation license over the swear-toad incident. General opinion held that it had been insufficient accountability.
Briar pushed through the crowd toward the LEPfield station, using her elbows with the professional efficiency of someone who had been doing this commute for eleven years and had stopped apologizing for it around year three.
Outside the Spud Emporium, Ashenmere's most popular root-vegetable establishment, there was already a disturbance of the kind that defied easy categorization. LEPfield Corporal Newt was attempting to manage it with the expression of someone who had made peace with the fact that management was not going to be the right word for what he was doing.
Briar noted this as she passed and did not slow down. Newt was capable. The situation was above average in difficulty. The outcome would be whatever it was going to be, and she had her own morning to contend with.
The station came into view ahead, its entrance marked by the blue resonance-light that served as the LEPfield's universal identifier, and Briar lengthened her stride toward it.
Whatever Reeve had waiting for her inside, she was going to handle it.