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The pipes crossed and climbed above him like the roots of stone trees, vast and many, their limbs tangled in silence. Each one was black with rust and the weight of years. Through them ran water, and heat, and voices that no longer spoke.

Rain fell always in that place. It hissed along the metal, slid down the curved iron ribs, and gathered in pools that never overflowed. There was no sky to speak of, only a ceiling of shadow, far above, where the lights of the high catwalks blinked and died like cold stars.

He looked up at them and sighed.

“One more time,” he said.

The words had no power in them, only habit. He had spoken them before. He would speak them again.

His fingers closed around the wet pipe. It stung where the rain had chilled it, and the iron cut against old scars. Still, he climbed – hand, foot, hand, foot – slow as frost, sure as rot.

He had climbed before. He would climb again.

Long ago, when the task was new, he had sung to himself as he climbed. A child’s rhyme, twisted now in memory:

The itsy-bitsy spider, 

Climbed up the water spout.

The poem was long forgotten now, he had not sung it in a long time. The words clung to him like cobwebs, old and useless.

The climb took him through the same chambers as before – vaulted spaces lit by flickering relays, and others so narrow he had to twist sideways to pass. Sometimes the walls whispered. Sometimes they wept.

Once, he had fallen. The fall had taken a long time. He had awakened at the bottom, in the dark, beside the same rusted ladder, the same dripping pipe, the same words on his lips.

“One more time.”

Now he came again to the hatch. Its seal was a broken circle, mended twice. A glyph of recursion. He had opened it before. He would open it again.

His fingers traced the sigil, and the hatch sighed open like a dying breath.

The chamber within was unchanged.

Dim light crawled through the walls. At the center stood the figure. It did not move. It never had. It had been a man once – perhaps. Or never. Its limbs were too long, its hands too many. A lattice of bone and wire crossed its face.

It tilted its head, just slightly, as he entered. A greeting, or a curse.

“I have come,” he said.

It did not answer. It never did.

He passed it, as he always did, and laid his hand on the Heart.

The warmth came. The light. The hush. And the voice, soft as ash on wind, spoke into the hollows of his thoughts.

“You are the last.”

He did not answer. He had no need to. He had heard these words before. He would hear them again.

Above, the pipes stirred. The deep machine turned in its long slumber. Lights kindled like dying stars. The city exhaled. The engines whispered.

It would sleep again. It always did.

He would fall again. He always did.

And somewhere, high above, rain would fall. It always fell.

The spider climbs.

The rain comes down.

And the spider climbs again.