The wailing of the storm was all but gone, and the hovel filled with an acrid smell of burning gas. Zira had already taken notice of the change and was halfway to his feet. “Clear. Time to go.”
“It’s your turn,” said Sapphire.
Zira frowned. “We’re on a time-sensitive mission.”
Sapphire didn’t move. “It’ll take less than a minute.”
He looked to me for support. I gave him none. “You agreed to immersion. As Sapphi said, it’ll only take a minute and then we’ll be on our way.”
Zira’s eyes drifted from me and toward the ground. “You don’t want to know. Trust me. No form of bonding can be gleaned from my memories.”
“That kind of makes me want to know even more,” said Sapphire.
“The bonding portion of this exercise isn’t formed from our memories,” I said. “The point is to make yourself vulnerable to us.”
“This isn’t a cognitive session,” snapped Zira. “This isn’t an exercise. This was us waiting out the storm and now the storm is over.” Before we could object, he turned and marched out of the hovel. “Let’s go.”
Sapphire looked at me, and I at her, and then we both got up, having no choice but to follow him.
XIII
FINDINGS
Yahweh Telei—;
MY LIMBS WERE SHAKING WITH exhaustion. I had to lean against the desk to keep my knees from buckling. Although I tried my best to look fine, Adrial knew I was anything but.
“Yahweh, sit.”
I surrendered to the fatigue and collapsed on the chair. My shoulders were stiff and achy. I hadn’t used my wings for years prior, and likely wouldn’t again for just as long. I kneaded an Archaean stone, using it to massage my palm as it shrunk smaller and smaller, its particles turning into my own. “Do you have something to drink?”
Adrial looked insulted. “Of course I have something to drink.” He threw a package of malay cigarettes at my desk before he left, probably toward his office. I only stared at the pack until he returned to the pharmacy with a bottle of spirits and two oval cups. Aela remained in Euxodia to monitor the attica threads and comb others in an attempt to glean new information.
Leid was recovering in her room. I’d coated her wounds in medicinal balms and left a replenishing tonic beside her bed. It was hard to look at her. She had woken up as I’d tended to her and then sat silently, a defeated expression fixed on the door. Her knees were curled to her chest, hiding the bandages across her torso. I’d wrapped the stumps where her hands had been in breathable cloth, already stained pink as the regenerative process resumed.
I’d gently urged Leid to drink the tonic and then vacated the room, knowing good and well to leave her be. She didn’t like anyone seeing her in such a weakened state, and had even refused to see Adrial.
Adrial poured us our drinks as I lit two malay cigarettes, handing one over and receiving a half-filled cup of spirits. The only background noise was the repetitive tick of a momentum cradle on a shelf behind us. I wanted to sleep forever.
“At least we’re all still alive, I guess,” mused Adrial. “I’m not sure how long Qaira has though.”
I refused to believe that, even though logic said his outlook was bleak. After all this time, everything that had happened, now Qaira’s life would end? “He’ll pull through.”
Adrial smirked. “You think? I give it another day before he insults them or tries to kill them and they put him down like a sick animal.”
I froze, the glass halfway to my lips. “That’s rather insensitive, don’t you think?”
“I’m kidding. Sort of. I tend to hide my fear behind humor.” Adrial ashed his cigarette. “But you have to admit there’s at least a fifty percent chance that my prediction is accurate.”
I shrugged lightly. “In terms of universal-causality, Qaira’s an anomaly. For some reason, odds don’t work against him.”
“Everybody’s luck runs out.” Adrial sagged in his seat. “His idea was fucking stupid, and I told him so. I should have stopped him.”
“There’s no stopping him.”
“Enigmus is less of a monarchy these days,” sighed Adrial. “More like a … committee.”
I nodded, saying nothing, re-analyzing Qaira’s most recent attica update.
It was chilling; not much was comprehensible. Our collective data-stream had apparently glitched. Entire thought-captures were illegible, marred with strange distortions that fractured our stream and scrambled our thoughts. No one was able to focus on the update entirely.
All that Qaira had managed to relay was something about universal theories and a shock collar. Needless to say, everyone was very confused. It didn’t help matters any when he fell into stasis right after the archival. Either he was unconscious or dead; hopefully the former.
“Framers,” I thought aloud, a soft whisper.
Adrial blinked. “What?”
I puffed on my cigarette, thoughtful. “They compared Leid to a group of people called Framers. They wanted to take her in for questioning, because they said she looked like them.”
“The hunters?”
I nodded.
Adrial stared at me. “… And what?”
“You don’t find that to be an odd thing to say?” I asked, quirking a brow.
“Of course I do. I thought you were going to follow that with a train of thought, is all.”
“Mm.” I ashed my cigarette and took my last sip of spirits. “I don’t have one. Yet.”
Adrial leaned back in his seat and rubbed his chin. “Well, I might have something.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s established that Oraniquitis knew there was more to Exo’daius than our little island,” he began. “She knew she needed wings to reach the rest of the world.”
“Correct.”
“But why?”
I tilted my head. “Is that rhetorical?”
“It’s not rhetorical, since nothing’s fact yet,” he said. “However, I don’t think she was in search of our progenitors. I think she knew our progenitors, and planned to kill them.”
I leaned forward in my seat, the exhaustion all but gone. “You think we’re descendants of the Framers.”
Adrial shrugged. “The hunters said Leid looked like them. Our resonance is of this world, or universe, or whatever else it may be. We’ve spent eras trying to determine a match to the other half of our genetic code. Perhaps it wasn’t in the Multiverse at all. Perhaps it was here.”
“How would Framers manage to crossbreed with Rhazekan? From what I’ve seen and heard so far, they’re a segregated bunch.”
Adrial shook his head. “Haven’t made it that far yet. All I know is that Oraniquitis was never the curious type. She was the vengeful type.”
“Vengeful of what? The slaughtered anthropoids across the gorge?”
Adrial hesitated, lingering on that thought. He exhaled, slowly. “Yahweh, I think something like this has happened before. Oraniquitis must have run into these hunters, or Framers, and she planned to reclaim the Court of Enigmus and enter war with them.”
I wasn’t following his logic. “That’s like an insect declaring war on a giant.”
“At her strongest, Oraniquitis may have been something to fear. Proxies weren’t the diluted types we are now.”
“Neither is Leid,” I said.
“What do you mean?” asked Adrial, furrowing his brows.
“She pulsed, here.”
He said nothing, absorbing the news.
“Her metamorphosis has not only changed her eye color, but given her the ability to manipulate our environment.”
Adrial looked away, bereft.
I prodded. “Were the proxies able to manipulate the environment, too?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “They didn’t leave much before their children murdered them.”
I sighed, the exhaustion having flooded back in. There was so much to postulate, yet my mind was having trouble linking thoughts. Adrial sensed t
his, easing up. “You should sleep,” he said. “We can talk again when you’re clear-headed. Take what you want from the kitchen. There’s some salas and foche still left.”
As I murmured thanks, a subtle flash behind my eyes signaled an update from the data-stream. The storm on Niaphali-X had ceased and Pariah’s group was on the move once again.
***
Qaira Eltruan—;
And then I was back.
Someone had stuffed my mind with razorblades. I grimaced, craning my neck in an attempt to lift my head. The area where I was (repeatedly) shocked was radiating pain like a third-degree burn. That collar was still there, its heat was still there. I thought to hold my head—to just curl up and die from how horrible this all felt—but then I realized that my hands were gone.
My hands were gone.
My fucking hands were gone.
“Please don’t panic,” said a female voice somewhere on my right. “Your situation is only temporary.”
My eyes moved toward the sound. A slender woman was knelt at a type of furnishing that my multiversal dictionary had no term for. It was round and hollow, with buttons, or glyphs, or something. She was peering into it, seemingly at nothing.
The room was white and featureless, save for an intermittent cloud of what looked like butterflies with electric wings evanescing in and out of reality. Spheres also flitted into view, translucent, gelatinous. Inside of them were sparks, same as the butterflies.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, having been slumped over and unconscious until thirty seconds ago. These people didn’t like furniture, whoever they were. The room was open, yet sparse. Nothing but us, butterflies and floating blobs.
The woman turned and gave me a smile. It was the kind of smile a hungry predator might make once they spotted a potential meal. The smile wasn’t at me. It was for me.
She looked remarkably similar to us and other anthropoid species by which we were employed. Her eyes were catlike, each noble-silver iris streaked with blue lightning. She wore a black robe that was open at the front, a white and blue embroidered dress revealed her mid-rift. She was very slender; skeletal, almost. But bones didn’t protrude through her skin like they would mine. Her bone density must have been non-existent. It looked so easy to snap her in half.
If only I’d had hands.
She walked toward me, but her movements made it look like she glided across the floor.
I didn’t bother moving, only watched. She knelt several feet away, now close enough for me to see her teeth shine fluorescent, giving that smile a whole new level of fright. Her glittery eyes scanned my handless arms, severed halfway to the elbows. There was neither blood nor pain, as if reality itself had been hacked to edit out my lower extremities.
“You were dangerous without the modification,” she explained.
Finally, I spoke. “What do you want?”
Her smile widened, nearly blinding me. “To learn.”
“Learn what?” I demanded, feeling my upper-lip curl.
“How we affect you.”
To this, I said nothing.
“I am Regalis Sarine-375, from Halon IV. My job is to keep your kind on the other side of our door. But you keep knocking, each time in a different form. It’s like a fascinating arms race.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. My expression gave my thoughts away. She frowned in evident disappointment.
“Do you not know where you’re from?” asked Sarine.
“Not really, no.”
Sarine blinked, although I nearly missed it because she lacked eyelashes. “What were you doing in the hunting grounds, then?”
“Okay, let’s start this over,” I said, aggravated. “What are you, what door are you going on about, and what do you think I am?”
She hesitated, studying me. The confusion in her expression melted slowly. “Your people don’t teach your history?”
“I’m not talking until you answer my questions.”
“You’re not really in a position to make demands. I could deconstruct your consciousness, find out everything about you that way, though I figure you’d rather not have me excise your head from your shoulders.” She gestured to the hollow circle thing in the corner. “But I’ve brought the instrument just in case.”
Fuck.
“They’re all gone,” I said. “They died way before I came on the scene. We don’t know where we came from, or how.”
Sarine touched her right temple. Script appeared out of thin air beside her. They were codes that for some reason were indecipherable to me. Perhaps a higher-level form of encryption, or a data-integration device that translated brain waves into something tangible. “Who are you referring to when you say they?”
“The first ones,” I said, watching the scrolling script with trepidation. “Our history died with them.”
“How did they die?” asked Sarine.
“We killed them.”
Sarine looked intrigued. “Why did you kill them?”
“Something about them being crazy and wanting to destroy everything they touched.” At her befuddlement, I added, “I don’t know, really. I wasn’t there.”
“Is your kind organized?” she asked.
“Depends on the context.”
“Do you live in groups or are you scattered?” she elaborated.
I hesitated, unsure of whether or not this was information I should share. Then I glanced at the decapitated head trophy case. “Both,” I said, and that was entirely true.
“How many of you are there?”
Time to blatantly lie. “Not sure.”
A line in the script beside Sarine’s head flashed brighter than the others. Her expression fell. “Who was the woman with you?”
“What woman?”
Another line flashed amid the code. I was starting to understand what was happening.
“The scouters that brought you here said a woman managed to kill four members of their team. A woman who you were protecting.” Sarine wasn’t smiling anymore. “Who is that woman?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was alone.”
Another flash.
Sarine’s hand fell to her lap. At the precise moment that her finger left her temple, all the coding disappeared. She leaned forward, lowering. Another screen blinked into reality, this one a videographic replay of the scene at the ruins from my point of view. It was like attica.
Just like attica. My eyes were cameras. My senses were script. My memories were telegenic.
And there was Leid on her knees with the spear through her stomach, screaming and reaching for me, with-scythe. Yahweh held her back, and she fought him. “Clearly she is important enough to protect,” said Sarine. “I will ask you again. Who is that woman?”
“Kindly fuck off. Just take my head and get it over with.”
And although fuck was not an actual word in the Exodian language, our lingual skills gave us the ability to translate communications based entirely on the meaning of words. Technically I was fluent only in Earthen and Nehelian languages, both of which were learned before my induction into Engimus. I spoke in Nehelian—and to me it sounded Nehelian—but what I said would be received fluently to another being in their native language. Needless to say, Sarine got my message loud and clear.
Sarine’s expression went blank, and she stood. “This was disappointing. I was hopeful you’d be more complicit.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. Now give me back my hands.”
A tiny smile. “So you can use them on me?”
“Yes.”
Sarine turned and headed to the other side of the room. A door carved itself into the wall in front of her. “You just need some time to think, is all. Yes, let’s try that. Time is all you have now, anyway.”
I started to rise but realized I couldn’t move. Without hands, pushing against the crushing force that kept me seated was impossible. It was probably impossible either way. Sarine slipped out of the door and its outline disappeared.
Everything went dark. Everything.
I was awake, but everything around me was… gone. I was in nothingness; a void. It felt like I no longer existed.
And that was terrifying.
XIV
DEATH OF AN OLD MACHINE WORLD
Pariah Andosyni—;
WE REACHED HERSTI, AN ALTRIAN TOWNSHIP to which Zira had led us by attica coordinates as the sun began to rise. We had trudged through the serrated forest all night, breathing the gaseous acidic air that smelled like rotten food, shivering in our armor as this backwards environment maintained a steady cycle of sublimation and condensation. The trees glistened with moisture as the air filtered the acidic gas, leaving aqueous liquid; remarkably the storm had nourished the flora. Not so remarkably, that meant the storms were frequent here.
Another oddity of this world was that the hottest point in the day was dawn, partially because of all the captured heat from the gases of the evening storm. Another factor was that its rotation around the sun was very elliptical and its axis was tilted on a leftward angle. Despite the abundance of frightening flora, we still hadn’t come across any fauna, for which I was slightly thankful.
We arrived at Hersti uncomfortable and damp with sweat. There were no longer people here, that was expected, and the extreme erosion suggested their architecture wasn’t accustomed to this weather. Since the township had been here for roughly two millennia, it was probable that the climate changed only within the last several hundred years. Any longer and this place would have been completely devoured by acid showers. I logged all of this into attica, marveling at what remained of murals on ceilings and walls of corroded abodes. The heat became too much and we took shelter in a relay tower by a crumbling transport station.
My skin welcomed the shade and I slumped on the remains of a stone bench as Sapphire and Zira scoured digi-feed monitors, buried in thick layers of dust.
“What are you doing?” I asked them.
“Trying to get some backstory,” said Zira, checking dials and wiring below the panel.
Dysphoria- Rise Page 11
