Chapter 10
Further Down
The service hallway behind the subway’s shopping section led to a narrow, steep stairwell where the blood droplets stopped. Saan walked carefully down the single flight to a section of the first level not accessible any other way. The passage from there was only ten meters long, a hazy-aired passage where the footprints and drag marks continued until the trio reached a rotting wooden door. Saan thought the dingy thing looked like it was stolen from the front entry of the oldest suburban home possible, one that hadn’t been automatically maintained in a very long time.
“I’ve never been here before,” admitted Trenna. “I never heard anyone mention a a way down from the upstairs hall.”
Nes touched the out-of-place door, knocked on it, shrugged, and then knocked very hard, causing wood to audibly crack and splinter. “The Cypher doesn’t let wood get this bad,” he said. “It looks like natural rot, too, age and exposure.”
Saan, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with Nes in the tight space, touched the doorknob and found it very loose. She pushed down on it without turning, heard wood crack, and pushed harder. The knob was ripped out of the door, the opposite half of it hitting the floor on the other side with a tinny clang. Nes shrugged when she glanced over at him.
“Push-ups?” he asked.
“And Pull-ups,” she said while pushing open the now-unlatched door.
Saan took two steps beyond the door and halted, stunned by what was next and sure that the others had the same reaction.
“There’s not a chance that... what?” Nes whispered, confusion fumbling his question before he could figure out how to ask it.
“I think I should have explored the place where I lived,” Trenna said.
Beyond the door was a metal spiral staircase with wide steps, lit oil lamps hanging on the central banister at regular intervals. Those lamps illuminated the way down, revealing a brick-encased silo meant only for travel between the subway hub and whatever was at the bottom of these steps. The haziness of the short secret hallway was due to some of the smoke from these lamps getting in, though most of the exhaust escaped into three big vents above eye level.
The oil in the light fixtures was about halfway gone on all the ones Saan could see, meaning someone had turned these on within a day if they were left burning all that time, which the smoke suggested was the case. The weak, yellow-tinged illumination was enough to reveal more footprints to follow and parallel marks in the dust on each step, but no more blood.
Nes clicked his tongue, thinking, then stated the obvious. “Sarge, someone was dragged down these steps.”
“Clearly,” Saan said. “These oil lamps will give us away no matter what we do, let alone the sounds of walking on metal steps. We will keep our lights on,” she ordered, “to possible adversely affect the dark-adapted vision of any enemy further down. Move stealthily, but we need not keep quiet, a slight echo traveling up and down this cylinder will mask our distance.”
That did not have to be explained to her fellow agent Nes, and was more to keep Trenna appraised of how to act. This was one of the few times they’d have a guest along on a mission, Saan assumed, and it was difficult to know how the girl would behave.
The trio started down the newly discovered stairs, staff sergeant in front, corporal at the rear, civilian between them. As they went, Saan looked back a couple of times to see Trenna sticking close to the brick wall bordering the spiral. Was she afraid of heights? It took Saan a moment to remember that such apprehension was actually normal. It was drilled out of DSF agents thanks to being forced to climb the massive hundred-story tower in the middle of Davranis Central, near the Academy, on a regular basis. There were several standard fears that Dastou could hypnotize out of someone, but one of heights was something that had to be beaten out of your system. Saan did not want to slow down too much to give the girl time to adjust, and hoped the steps and her position between two more confident people helped. Halfway down, Trenna seemed to decide that distracting herself might be easier, and she was told that noise did not matter.
“I’ve been wondering,” Trenna said in a half whisper, enough volume that the echo didn’t make what she said indistinct, “what is that piece of paper that Mr. Dastou put on the ground earlier? It had a bunch of weird symbols on it that I couldn’t read.”
Nes hesitated, cleared his throat, and answered: “You saw that?”
“Uh-huh,” Trenna said, oblivious of Nes’ trepidation about giving away an Academy secret. “I was looking away when I was ducking from the shooting, and saw this thing on the ground. Then you put one on my shoulder that got ripped off on the escalator, the one you went and grabbed when we couldn’t find Mr. Dastou.”
Apparently, Saan realized, they had quite the story to tell about what happened before she arrived on the scene. Moreover, it was surprising that Trenna noticed the special “piece of paper” as she referred to it. Naturals, immune as they were, would not be affected, but they typically didn’t notice them, either. The tools had a sort of emptiness in their view.
“It is called a ‘Stitch,’” Saan answered, the secret essentially out in the open already. “They are essentially portable, direct hypnotism, one of the most powerful tools at our disposal, and Dastou tends to carry some most of the time.”
“Really? Is that why no one shot at us from above when it... started?”
Saan was impressed. Not only was Trenna Geil able to see a Stitch as what it was, but she figured out its use in the combat scenario during which she’d have been hiding most of the time.
“Exactly right,” Nes said, his voice cheery with respect like a teacher proud of a student. “I didn’t notice when he did it, but that first piece of paper saved us.”
Thanks to the oil lamps further along, Saan could make out the landing that meant the end of the spiral staircase, and estimated that they had traveled down three stories. Not a terribly long distance, but still unexpected. Outside of the conversation, a part of Saan’s brain was occupied with making sure to notice sounds that were not their own in case another trap lay ahead – the same would be true for Nes.
Letting her curiosity overtake the logic of asking DSF agents for secret information, Trenna continued her queries. “If he carries them around all the time, does he use them for anything else? I mean outside of a fight.”
“That would not be prudent,” answered Saan, noting the defensiveness in her tone. She let that go, and decided that there was no point in hiding much from the girl at this point. Trenna saved Nes, her closest friend, according to the short recounting of the ambush he gave, so the girl had earned a right to have anything she asked answered. If anyone else could hear them, they were part of an ambush and would be killed in any case.
“Dastou is not the type to be selfish in terms of his own needs,” Saan continued. “He can already gain anything he wants by asking for a favor he will return or making it himself. Using hypnotism in anything but a defensive capacity is against what he stands for and entirely unnecessary in any case.”
“Honestly,” added Nes, “he’s barely had reason to use it defensively, either. I’m thinking... six times in his life that he’s told us. That’s less than a lot of previous Saints, who used them to make sure people forgot they had visited someplace if they wanted to keep their presence a secret.”
“I see,” whispered Trenna contemplatively. “That might explain the historical confusion about whether a Saint was one place or another.”
“Correct,” Saan-Hu said, noticing they had gone down about another flight, and that Trenna was again revealing how much she had religiously studied the Saints. “People might have seen one of them in an area, but no one nearby could ever corroborate unless the Saint allowed it. A basic ignore me command written on a Stitch and adhered or sewn onto clothing takes care of that with few issues if one of their kind was just passing by.”
“Was that written on the one Saint Dastou left on the ground? It was the same as the one Nes put on me.”
A couple of meters from the end of the staircase, Saan put her hand up to call for silence. The order was obeyed. The cylindrical downward route they had traveled ended hereat a flat landing paved with slightly redder brick. An arched exit big enough for only one person to go through at a time was the only way out. She craned her neck to see behind and up, made eye-contact with Nes, and signaled him to step down alongside her. He complied.
When he was very close to her, she whispered in his ear using as low a volume as she could. “Blind with the lights, then proceed. We must not be slowed for long.”
Nes simply nodded in agreement, worry combined with a quickly disregarded apprehension creasing his brow before he followed her to the landing. He had already taken several lives not an hour ago, and there is no chance he was looking forward to more. Saan honestly wanted the same. Despite none of it being on her hands, enough blood had been spilled for a day and she hoped no more trouble would come to them before reaching Dastou. She almost laughed at the thought as she took up her position at the exit from the stairwell.
On her signal and in perfect execution of breach protocol, Saan and Nes went through the archway one at a time, scanned one side each, and found no one waiting for them. Saan was not surprised – the service hallway in the station’s shopping area, the same place Dastou was attacked, would have been a better spot for another assault. It did not, however, lower her guard for the moment. She still expected something more to come their way, and soon.
“Alright, Trenna,” Saan-Hu called from the archway, “you can come down.”
As the clinks of Trenna’s steps echoed back up the cylinder, Saan studied the beginnings of a narrow brick-lined path in front of her. No, not brick closer further inspection, more like chisel marks meant to emulate brick; these tunnels were carved out by hand, with the artistic choice to make them look like patterned brickwork via a relief effect. The ceiling, which featured the same relief but with a milder touch, was only a meter above her, and Nes’ taller frame meant he would be close to scraping the top of the passage with his wavy-haired head.
“This is the absolute definition of cramped,” he said following a sigh.
The liquid fuel-burning oil lamps stopped on the staircase, replaced here by smaller lantern-shaped electric devices using bright, blue-white diode bulbs, all placed on stone ground flatter than in should be. A close look at one of the lanterns showed that it ran on a pair of thumb-sized batteries, ones that would have to be seldom replaced. Recognizing the basic design, Saan reached up, held a button, and saw three of four small green indicator lights come on, meaning the batteries were mostly full.
“If the batteries haven’t been replaced recently,” Nes said after seeing the three green lights, “those efficient little things could have been on for four full days to have the minimum power needed for that level. As if we needed more proof that someone had been planning today’s excitement for a while.”
Footprints of varying sizes not covered in layers of dust at the beginning of the excavated tunnels signaled that stealth would continue to be beneficial, this time without the talking. The higher intensity of the diode lanterns made it much easier to see, and their own lights would not partially blind anyone as they would have in the darker spiral staircase silo. All that in mind, Saan turned to her travel mates and put a finger to her lips, giving an order for quiet. Nes and Trenna understood, nodded simultaneously. The corporal turned off his white shoulder light and flashlight, and Saan did the same.
They moved noiselessly, carefully, Saan taking corners with care. The trio traveled past a few gaps in the serpentine stone tunnels, and then the drag-marks disappeared, though the footprints were still easy to track. Following those, she realized they stuck to the wider pathways, where it would be easier to carry the Dastou-shaped load.
The stale air, another hint at the area’s age, was something Saan did her best not to think about. She’d had asthma as a child, a constant concern for her and her family as she would have about five minor attacks a year. Specialized physical and medicinal therapies when she became a full-time Ornadais Academy student got rid of it for the most part, lowering the occurrences to one a year, and those never strong enough to worry about. The air here smelled the way she always imagined it did when she tried to breathe and failed – musky, grimy, moldy, greenish-yellow if it had a color – and it was distracting. Well, no it wasn’t, really, but there was not much else to think about. No enemies to fight, nothing to figure out, no strategies to make or remake. She was a planner by nature and training, and stealthy walking around was starting to aggravate her as much as the stale atmosphere, the tension that she was sure would break in time tightening her nerves.
The trio finally reached an exit to the tunnel paths, a larger section marked with diode lanterns on the floor that were the way out. Saan paused, listened. This would be a good place for someone to attack, but if they didn’t when her group got here just now, it likely meant no one awaited them.
Saan kept going after her pause, leaving the tunnels behind and instantly pausing at the size of this next area. She had walked into an absolutely humongous cave, with a sheer limestone wall on the other end, carved flatter than nature could typically manage without a waterfall. Set into that limestone wall was a three-meter-tall ornate wooden double-door.
“What the f...” Nes whispered low, the last syllable was lost to the dark.
The massive double-doors were lit by candles on short tables to either side of them, most of them close to burning themselves down in their short glass holders. The candlelight created an inviting pool of yellow-orange, the bouncing, energetic radiance helping show off the hand-carved patterns all over the light wood. The doors were shaped as a sharpened arch, going from wide at the bottom to a point at the top, like a curvy letter “A” without the horizontal slash. Smaller doors were built into the larger ones, and missing dust or dirt and continuing footprints suggested that people were using these entrances recently. The electric lanterns placed on the natural stone floor continued past the tunnels, indicating a very wide walking lane straight to those big doors.
“This looks very well-made and entirely out of place,” Saan said of the wooden doors as she walked further into the cavern, still amazed by the spectacle. She was thinking out loud, speaking in a very mild voice because the echoes made her feel incredibly small yet far too loud. “The materials must have been brought from the surface somehow. Hmm.”
“That’s a lot of wood to carry,” said Nes. “Not to mention the tools and supplies needed to make the doors, chisel that wall smooth, and carve out those tunnels behind us. I can’t tell how high the wall goes flat since its void black in here away from the lights, but it’s obviously way higher than the doors. That’s a crazy amount of work, and it all looks older than the oldest book Dastou has in the depository.”
“You have been inside the depository?” asked Saan, wondering how a corporal got permission to visit the school’s extremely private library.
“Dastou lost a bet.”
“I do not understand how you can so easily manipulate him into betting against you.”
“Lacking true challenges, a Saint finds them where he can.”
“And fails, of course,” Saan said as she bent over to scour the ground.
She found a pebble, tested its minuscule weight, and then picked a heftier one. Saan reeled back and flung it toward an imaginary point very high in the air, putting a hefty amount weight and power into the throw. She angled the pebble steep, almost straight up, expecting to hear the crack of it hitting the cave
rn ceiling. It didn’t make a sound. Instead it disappeared into the deep black above for too long.
“Uh...” Nes said.
The pebble’s steep angle reached an apex without striking anything on the way and finally fell, Saan almost missing the small thing as it entered the lit area near the candle-filled tables. It bounced twice and hit one of the wooden doors.
“Uh...” repeated Nes.
She knew how hard she could throw, and the stone went at least four stories up, meaning the ceiling was at least as high as the subway floor. All three of them were speechless, again.
Trenna drew closer to Saan, and the younger woman’s view went from the doors, to the wall, to the tables with candles on them. “You know, this almost looks like a tribute and trade point,” she said, breaking the stunned silence by mentioning the barter system used by eastern nomad groups. “A way, way bigger one. Usually tribes will leave a permanent message carved into a big rock or something else that won’t move to say ‘hello, people were here and will be here again.’”
Saan knew exactly what the girl was talking about. “Those spires and markers delineate a traveling path for nomad tribes, with times of year carved into the stone to tell others when a specific group will return to trade. I doubt nomads will be here any time soon, but I see the similarity.”
“Oh! They carve times of year into those things? I always wondered how anyone ever found anyone else in those big expanses.”
Saan and Trenna traded an is he serious? look with each other. The uses of tribute and trade points were common knowledge. The corporal caught their wordless exchange and brushed it off.
“Bah, we have diplomatic types who study this stuff so I don’t have to. I passed the class, that’s all I need.”
“As I recall, you barely passed Eastern and Isolationist Studies,” Saan reminded him. From an isolationist tribe herself, she easily excelled, with most of what was taught as new to others having been ingrained in her early on.
“I don’t see your point in bringing that up,” Nes said. “I’m just more into mechanics and metal than cultures.”
“Or acting cultured.”
He picked at his teeth with a fingernail. “Again, I don’t see why that’s an issue.”
“Ew,” Trenna muttered. “Your hands must be filthy.”
“Yeah… not my most well-thought-out goof.”
Saan-Hu sighed, but did not delay any longer in walking the other half of the way to the big doors, heading for the smaller doors inset in those. The others followed, and when she tested the standard metal knob next to an oversized, decorative knocker, it turned completely. Without letting the knob go, she signaled to Nes with her eyes that they would breach. He came up to her, nodded his readiness, and they rushed through the door when ready.
Disciplined as ever, the two DSF agents opened the door and rushed in, Saan going left and Nes aiming right. A pair seconds later they confirmed no enemies nearby.
“Clear,” she said.
“Clear,” he confirmed.
Trenna took the all-clear as a sign to walk in after them, and almost tripped over her own feet when she got a good look at where she was. Another incredible room, Saan thought, this one stranger and more compelling.
Nes took a deep breath and whistled loudly. “Are you kidding me? I should be getting real used to being real surprised at this point.”
A shallow dome ceiling, connected at its edge with the taller decorative doors behind her, was lit by high-powered diode lanterns hanging from chains at regular intervals. Those lamps actually made the whole room fairly visible, with a cozy softness to their off-white glow. The dome ceiling had patterns of plant life, mostly flowers, carved in relief all over it. At ground level the trio was in an entryway that turned into a path with six rows of wooden benches on either side. On tables and tall holders past the benches were no less than a hundred burning candles, half on each side of a semi-circular alcove near end of the room, which created a similarly eerie orange glow to the ones outside in the cavern. In the alcove were dozens of marble busts, carvings of heads made of a rare, beautiful, expensive stone and placed evenly on four tiers. At this distance they couldn’t tell who the carved figures were. As they talked, none of the three new arrivals looked at each other, taking in this odd location as much as they could.
The recent reference to the Eastern and Isolationist Studies class put Saan’s mind in the right place, and she realized that she had seen something like this area before. She thought back, trying to connect the dots, and remembered that at some point she put the idea forward of making changes to the cultures class, suggesting that they add in personalized opinions from Saints about certain peoples, all based on journals left behind by the more exploration-minded of their kind. The idea came after a dozen students from the Tribeslands were brought in, resulting in numerous misunderstandings and accidentally unkind pranks.
To avoid more troubles involving new Tribeslands recruits, she sought those changes to the class, and ended up finding a strange tome full of drawings from cultures that did not actually exist. One of the hundreds of beautiful renderings was a room similar to where she stood now.
“I know what this is,” Saan said. “There was a drawing in a book by Saint Dewark that was near exactly the same.”
“Lord Hyral Dewark?” asked Trenna.
“Yes, him,” Saan replied, no longer thrown by the girl’s breadth of knowledge. “He illustrated this interior, saying it came to him in a drug-induced trance.”
“Oh, right, that Dewark,” Nes said scratching his chin, looking up while remembering. “That guy developed some pretty good recreational concoctions, a bunch of them so high-quality we use them to this day.”
“I’m inclined to agree” Saan said, having partaken in some of those same drugs alongside him more than once. “Zedhani’s newer drinks are impressive. In any case, Dewark called this place a ‘cathedral.’ He claimed that it was a place of worship. Those carved heads may suggest he was correct.”
Saan took the lead again and walked down the center aisle between the uncomfortable-looking wooden benches. Dust and cobwebs ruled here, with only the center aisle showing the telltale footprints of people having been here of late. The air was a little more breathable somehow, maybe because she was getting used to it. After passing the seating area, Saan noted a pair of diode lanterns that marked an open door at the far left corner of the cathedral’s inner area which should be their way out, but continued directly forward for now. She walked past an empty space, an orator’s position according to Dewark’s drawings, and then up a single step to the niche at the back of the room, which she remembered the man named an “apse.”
There were twelve carvings on each of the four open display levels, totaling forty-eight, spaced around in a half-circle. A cursory glance revealed that there was a narrow path on each level behind the busts, likely accessible via a ladder or stairway. Each sculpture had a blank name plate below the neckline. Saan heard Trenna draw in a short, sharp breath as the girl realized who the figures were.
“Yes,” Saan agreed as she got close enough to touch the marble carvings on the lowest level, “they look like Saints.”
“It looks like all the Saints,” Nes said. “Every single one, right from the beginning.”
“The realism is incredible,” added Trenna. “I’ve never seen a display like this.”
“They are partially out of birth order,” Saan noted. “And some of the likenesses are imperfect. That one there, third level, fourth from the right. That is Hyral Dewark himself, but the carving is missing a scar below his left eye.”
“You’re right,” Nes said. “On the second row, Saint Folsteed. His nose was kind of offset thanks to being broken so often boxing his brother and father. He was around when they figured out cameras, there are lots of pictures.”
“Um, Mr. Dastou has hair,” Trenna said.
The others faced where the girl’s eyes were focused, the last statue on the right, first
level. Nes laughed out loud.
“You’re right!” said the corporal, jogging up to examine that bust. “It’s super-short, but it’s there. The guy started losing his hair years ago and said he figured to go bald with some style. This version of him looks about ten years older, too, a few deeper wrinkles.”
The differences in the visages of the Saints were odd, but Saan put it together without much thought. “I believe I see a pattern. The imperfections are missing. Scars, broken noses, a burn or birth mark.”
Nes caught on. “The busts are genetically perfect somehow. Same age range for all of them, too, around mid-thirties.”
“I’m sorry, what does that mean?” asked Trenna.
Right, she wouldn’t know – genetics as a field of study is new, filtered completely out of the Cypher’s educational system. Dastou has never bothered to incorporate it into Ornadais Academy’s lessons, especially since he barely has time to meditate deeply enough to get the textbooks started. The only reason Saan and Nes know about it is because he has launched into more than one long, excited speech on the subject.
“It means,” Saan explained, simplifying greatly, “that these carvings are based on the person’s inborn physical attributes. Therefore, what is not represented, what is filtered out, is anything they gained from living their lives, or from incredibly minor defects.”
“I think I understand a little. It’s a perfect best guess, basically. Say, if I lost my nose in some terrible accident right now, these statues wouldn’t show it because that was part of my life, not the way I was born?”
Nes quirked an eyebrow at her correct but macabre interpretation. “Gross, but, yeah, you’re on the right track.”
“And,” the girl continued, “several Saints died before their mid-thirties.”
Nes was pondering that, it seemed, glancing around, but Saan only saw him in her periphery. For now, she was focused squarely on an odd groove on an unmarked name plate below a bust’s neckline. She tried to trace it with a finger, and the moment she touched it a tiny click caught her off guard. She took a step back as a small door concealed in the sculpture’s stand slid out.
“Well now, what is that?” asked Nes as he and Trenna stepped toward Saan.
“I am not sure,” replied Saan. “I believed I saw something similar to how Dastou hides things like fingerprint scanners in plain sight. I see I was correct.”
She went back to the statue and looked in the drawer. Inside was a small, rectangular cuboid made of a cloudy, semi-transparent plastic-looking material. As long as her index finger and four-times the volume or so, easily held in a palm, and there was something sealed inside of the perfectly-shaped item.
“Is that a lock of this Saint’s hair?” asked Trenna, who was next to Nes and looking over Saan’s shoulder along with him.
“It is hair,” Saan confirmed, “whose it is can be figured later on, though I would agree to there being a strong chance it belongs to this Saint. A hair sample could have been used to determine the genetics used as a basis for this bust.”
“Oh wonderful,” Nes said, “I feel dumb enough on a daily basis as it is, I don’t want to think about how much dumber I am compared to someone who made a machine that can accurately predict appearance based on a hair sample.”
Saan inwardly agreed. If Dastou with all his skills couldn’t get started on that science, someone who had it mastered was easily a match for him, let alone her and Nes. The problem was that she couldn’t guess if that person was the citizen mentioned earlier or someone else entirely.
“Hmph,” Saan muttered softly, looking at the object in her hand and the lock of hair within. “I have an idea.”
She went to the next bust over, tapped the same area with a finger, and it opened to reveal another plastic cuboid holding another lock of hair. Saan backed away, bumping Nes accidentally, who raised in eyebrow in disapproval at her abnormal clumsiness. She unclipped her backpack and rummaged inside, then pulled out a square of synthetic cloth and unfolded it. It was another bag, a thin one with string-style shoulder straps meant to be used for items brought back during a mission, and she handed it to Trenna.
“Here, take this,” Saan told Trenna. “Myself and Nes will search the sculptures and toss you the objects we find, keep them together for us to take.”
“Sure, I’ll take care of it,” replied an eager Trenna.
They were in a hurry to find Dastou, obviously, but this was too strange a find to pass up. If they could not return to this place, they will have missed something potentially important, and their boss would be let down at such a wasted opportunity. Nes was already moving toward the statuettes on the far side of the first level to start with Dastou’s bust, the last in that direction. Saan-Hu rushed to find how to reach the carvings higher up. Her earlier assumption was correct, and there was a rope ladder hanging down the side of the alcove, nailed into stone for stability. She climbed it, getting off on the second level’s small landing, itself part of a walkway barely wide enough for her to stand on. To touch the spot needed to activate the hidden drawer, she had to reach over the busts.
When the compartment opened on her first marble figure, she saw a clear, rectangular item that looked identical to the first, but did not look closely before grabbing and tossing it down to a waiting Trenna. The girl was going to put it down next to the first handful she had already – from Nes since he started on the easier to reach ground-level busts – but paused to study it.
“There’s something different in this one,” Trenna called. “It’s not hair.”
“Understood,” Saan replied. “We will have a look at them all for a moment when finished with the collection.”
“Yes, Ms., uh, Ma’am,” said Trenna.
The girl’s delay was because Saan never said what her own last name was. Well, she didn’t have one anymore, so the mix up was not unexpected. She was simply ma’am or staff sergeant to lower ranked recruits – there was no way they’d call her by her full first name of Saan-Hu. Some attitude-filled young lady casually did that once. Once. The bruise that followed the mishap made sure she respected her superior in public from then on.
During the grab-and-toss of the hurried search, plastic occasionally clinked on the ground from a missed catch by Trenna, but it all went quickly nonetheless. In less than five minutes they were done, and Saan and Nes got back to Trenna. Saan had not been paying attention to what the girl was doing, and was surprised to see three separate groupings of little rectangles on the floor, the girl thinking hard about them.
“What’s up with the filing system?” Nes wondered.
“Um, let’s see...,” Trenna said, thinking. “I organized them by generation first, and each group is that way even though I had to add another type of arrangement.”
“Oh?” said a curious Saan.
“Yeah. Uh, you can tell there’s different stuff inside each set. Twenty-eight are locks of hair. Fourteen are skin, or what look like flakes of skin. The other six look like saliva, maybe. I don’t know.”
Saan and Nes stared at the girl in amazement. Trenna was suddenly nervous, though, after looking up from her work and noticing the gazes.
“Oh, no. Did I do something wrong? Was this not what you wanted?” asked the girl.
Nes laughed. “Are you kidding? This is amazing! I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“I expect not,” added Saan in a light-hearted monotone.
Trenna snorted at the friendly teasing. Saan smirked, figuring that things would not be any easier from here, and she was glad that Trenna was turning out to be smart and capable rather than a burden in need of bearing. Looking at the gathering of the odd items on the floor, the collection of which slowed slightly, Saan was eager to return to tracking down Dastou.
“Can you redo this organization later?” Saan asked Trenna.
“Sure. It’ll be pretty easy.”
“Good. Pack it up and we will leave.”
As Trenna bent to hurriedly stuff the lit
tle plastic cuboids into the sack she was given, Saan checked her mic and confirmed that there was still no signal to the Caravan.
“The radios are either broken,” Nes said, “or something is preventing our signals from getting through properly. We already know there’s not a lot of iron or other radio wave impermeable material around here from ground tests made decades ago. Something is purposely stopping them from working, I think.”
Trenna had finished packing the cuboids up, and now she was the one to gawp after Nes’ speech about the radios. She might be confused by what he said.
“What?” he asked.
“There’s a spider web on your cheek,” Trenna said, pointing.
“Ah!” cried Nes and flicked at the side of his face to get it off.
“She was joking,” Saan said.
Trenna snickered, but her mirth was interrupted by the angry growling of animals that echoed through the cathedral. The peach fuzz blond hair on Saan’s arm and the back of her neck stood on end, and she felt an apprehensive chill overtake her momentarily. She couldn’t tell at all what these animals were, the sounds ominous, frightening, deep, and multiplied in their fear factor for not having an exact location of where they came from. They sounded like some kind of wild bear with a slightly higher pitch to their rumbling yowl. The trio gathered together back-to-back-to-back in a heartbeat, the DSF agents with their weapons at the ready.
“Holy void, what is that?” Nes asked.
“I am not familiar with these sounds,” Saan said uneasily. “They are clearly animals, but I do not know what species. It is hard to tell their distance, but I venture to say that they are close by.”
“Will they come after us?” asked Trenna, her voice revealing that she was breathing a touch faster.
Saan was looking around, her head on a swivel. A fight with wild animals in an enclosed space would end very badly for them if they couldn’t tell where the things were to begin with.
“I cannot be certain,” replied Saan to Trenna. “The safest assumption to make is that they mean us harm and we must be ready to deal with them.”
“Charming,” Nes said. “In that case I propose we leave like my own animal instincts are telling me.”
“Yes, let’s.”
They split from their outward-facing huddle and Saan went in to the open, lantern-marked door she noticed earlier, the trio in the same formation as earlier with Nes in the rear. They left the cathedral on the last echoes of the growl-yowl-snarls, and somehow knew she’d find out what those things were long before she was back on Blackbrick’s surface streets.
~~~~
Chapter 11
Heartbreaking Body Art
Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 14
