Deus: The Eurynome Code, Book Six

by Gorman, K.

  Memories popped up like bubbles from the deep, floating briefly through her mind, then vanishing again as they rose. Tia, arguing with Bernard from a wheelchair in her office, the sound muted, the emotions vibrant but brief―like heat from a stove. Herself, the cool water of a tank lapping at her naked body, the full-spectrum shock of pain as the nanoinjectors stabbed into her brain and she connected to the Cradle. Herself again, standing among the ruins in Macedonia, watching the sun crawl its way down toward the Western horizon, feeling the light fill her skin.

  Then, voices were calling her, and the darkness in her mind began to ebb.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “Karin? Karin!”

  The sound of her name came from a distance.

  She choked back a breath, blinking as consciousness returned. Pain screamed from her right arm, bright and angry, blinding. A rough wind tugged at her hair and jacket, and she got a sense of openness from her back, as if the sky could just lift her off and suck her up. Rough, uncut rock scraped at her skin when she tried to move.

  A mountain. I’m on a mountain.

  The scrapes of rocks and scree came to her. She lifted her head, shivering. Blood burned bright against the pale skin of her arm, smeared like a clump of red paint. Several people came toward her. They were still wearing the house slippers from Bernard’s, which made for an odd image. She stared at their feet as they slid down the hill.

  “Stay still, we’re coming to you.”

  Marc’s voice, strained with stress and worry. Slowly, her mind adjusted. She shuddered, her good hand clenching at the pain. A metallic clink sounded below her, and she turned her head to see she was still holding Bernard’s fire poker.

  Her upper lip twisted, baring teeth.

  It felt wrong.

  With a pull of her power, she sliced it into seven equal pieces, then worked to bury them in the scree.

  She only managed with three of them. Her arm hurt too much.

  With a crunch and slide of loose rock, Marc, Baik, and Reeve reached her side, Soo-jin and Tylanus trailing after them. Takahashi was farther up the hill, following at a slower pace.

  Good. They’d all made it over. To wherever ‘over’ was.

  “Easy does it. Turn her. Careful with that arm.”

  Pain smote through her nerves. She yelled. Her power rippled, but she resisted, clamping her teeth together to cut it off. Then she was on her side, and Marc was above her, supporting her shoulder and back. The light of the sky gleamed a golden white against his head and neck, and his brown eyes crinkled as they looked down on her.

  “It’s okay, Karin, we’ve got you.” He glanced up. “Soo?”

  “He broke it. Badly.”

  “Well, I knew that,” she hissed. “Fuck. Give me a sec.”

  She closed her eyes, focused inward, and breathed.

  Tia, you in there?

  Yes. Hang on. Your pain blockers should kick in soon.

  They did. Slowly, the pain in her arm ebbed, replaced by a light, dizzying sensation. A metallic smell came from her nose, and something dribbled down from her lip.

  Marc glanced down. “She’s bleeding.”

  “It’s normal,” she grit out. “Does anyone have anything to stabilize the arm, or shall we just hike up? Where are we?”

  “Back on Olympus,” Soo-jin said.

  “My mom has a number of medical stations in the temple,” Tylanus said from close by. “There are nanos.”

  “Good. Let’s get her there.” Marc shifted, and more of the sunlight hit her. His arms came under her armpits. Someone else―Reeve? Baik?―supported her back. “Ready? One, two, three―”

  She scrambled up as he pulled, gritting her teeth to get a knee and arm under her and push herself upright. Marc and Reeve caught her before she overbalanced, and she planted her feet.

  The pain from her arm was still there, but manageable now.

  Gods.

  Steeling herself, she looked down.

  He had really done a number on it. Her arm looked mangled. Her shoulder was out of its joint, likely with the rotator cuff fucked and part of the bone snapped―she remembered that bit, the speed and strength with which he’d pulled, the blinding pain and grinding crack. He’d also taken part of her humerus and crunched the bones of her wrist. The joint was swelling like a balloon.

  And he’d broken one of her fingers.

  “Carry her,” Marc said. “Be careful with the shoulder.”

  “No,” she said, gauging the slope and distance, then swinging around him and starting the hike. “Don’t bother. Just make sure I don’t fall on my ass.”

  Ten minutes later, Tylanus had led them to a small, discreet room inside the temple complex, and Baik, Soo-jin, Takahashi, and Reeve had tag-teamed the Med unit to cut her shirt off, ream her arm with a dose of anesthetics, straighten out the bones as best they could, then inject her with a large dose of nanos.

  Everything in her arm that hadn’t already numbed turned to ice.

  Her shoulders slumped against the bed.

  Fuck. I should have brought that armor suit.

  Quiet fell over the group. She closed her eyes and just breathed for a few moments, reveling in the lack of pain and distress. The air outside had that slightly burned smell that it got in the summer fields, as if a high wind had dragged its fingers through the baked grasses on the mountain’s lower slopes before rising up to the temple. Closer, a breeze pushed through the open doorway, slipping over her skin with the cool touch of a pond, and she caught a scent of lilac from one of the manicured gardens outside.

  The winds were Eos’ children, she thought, mythologically speaking.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Okay, so we found Bernard and I’m not dead. That’s good, right?”

  “Yes, you being not dead is very good,” Marc said. “I’d like to keep you that way.”

  She dragged in a breath. “Fuuuuck.”

  How had that gone so wrong? What had he done to get that power?

  Well, that was easy to answer. He’d killed a fuckload of children and stolen their powers.

  “Why aren’t I dead?”

  “We’re in Tartarus,” Tylanus said. “He can’t follow us here. Not unless I allow it. I control this world.”

  She winced as a random spike of pain crept up, this time from her knee.

  If Sasha’s actions were anything to go by, she doubted Tylanus’ ‘control’ over Tartarus was as extensive as Bernard’s hold over the real world.

  “Fuck,” she said again. “How the fuck are we going to beat him? He literally can control everything.”

  Not us, Tia said. We are exempt. But the others, yes. And every molecule in that world. You can defend against him a little, depending on how much power he’s gained, but not by much.

  “We need to find his Cradle. If we destroy it, his power will be gone.” She turned her head to Tylanus. “And we need to get your mother. And my sister. We need to get everyone.”

  “I called an SOS into the Alliance,” Baik said.

  “I did the same for Fallon,” Reeve said. “Gave them the basics.”

  “And if Specialist Malouf followed through, he will have done the same for the Menassi Tri-Quad, which will also bring in Finlai Center Core.”

  Fuck. Malouf and Seki were probably dead by now. Even if they could fly, the Nemina was a Fallon craft, not Centauri, and Bernard could slice into it anyway.

  And she wasn’t sure what all anyone could do about Bernard. Nuke him from orbit?

  Given that he lived next to one of the most populous regions on the planet, that wasn’t a great Plan A.

  She slumped her head back against the bed. “He’ll feel me if I go back. He’ll know I’m there. And he’ll rip me apart.”

  “You’re not going back,” Marc said. “Don’t go back.”

  “I have to. If I don’t, everyone will die.”

  “What if we just left it?” Reeve said. “If he hasn’t done anything by now, will he? How much of
a danger is it to let it stay this way?”

  “Do you really want a self-divinated asshole to have complete control of your universe?” she asked. “You can’t see it, but he’s literally inserted himself into every atom. When even you go back, you’ll have his touch all over you. He could manipulate anything he wanted from it. Kill you at a whim. Turn the world inside out. Erase an entire genetic pool―and who knows if he hasn’t done so already? The whole point is that he has the control to do it so intrinsically that you would never know. The man can literally rewrite things. You didn’t want Sasha doing it, so why do you want him? Because I can guarantee you, Sasha is much nicer.”

  She took a breath, her mind whirring.

  “Besides,” she continued. “He isn’t a god. He’s just a man with false powers. There is no way he could have acquired a completed Cradle. Even Sasha was going for a partial one―a single pantheon only. He had a hodgepodge. Therefore, he is incomplete, and that in turn makes every single part of your universe incomplete―like running a computer with only seventy percent of the OS. That’s why it is a problem. He’s literally overtaken it from its natural course and inserted himself in it instead.”

  There was a small silence. The others in the room glanced around at each other.

  “If so,” Takahashi said, his voice calm and considering. “It would be highly unstable.”

  There was another small silence as they all considered that.

  “Yeah,” Soo-jin said. “Sounds like he has to go.”

  “Yes,” Karin said. “He does.”

  “I told you before, you need to bring him here,” Layla said.

  She didn’t jump, and neither did Tylanus, but the others in the room did. Program Athena stood by the side of the bed as if she’d always been there, glancing up at Karin’s holochart.

  “That looks nasty,” she commented.

  “It felt nasty,” Karin said.

  “Unfortunately, Apollo is in the real world, and Chiron is in a tank. No one can heal it.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll just suffer through modern medicine.” She let go of a breath. “Any bright ideas in that head of yours?”

  “I like your idea of bringing back Sasha, though I worry that her program will re-trigger once she is back inside this place, and Bernard Corringham is still a threat.” Layla turned her dark, ancient eyes on her. “You should try to bring him here, first.”

  She groaned and set her head back on the bed, staring up at the vaulted ceiling through the Med holos.

  Of course. Bring a guy who had literally outgunned her in a second flat over to this world for another fight, where he would likely outgun her in two seconds flat.

  And they’d already tipped their hand with warping. He’d likely be expecting it.

  Plus, there were likely oodles more fun and exciting powers he had that she didn’t yet know about. He had literally pieced himself together with a Cradle, Frankenstein-style.

  She sighed and glanced to Tylanus. “Can I even do that? Warp into here?”

  He nodded. “Yes. You and my mother are allowed. And all of the Cradle children.”

  Well, that made it partially possible, at least.

  She closed her eyes. “He’s literally turned himself into a god. I’m not sure what I can do against that.”

  But, even as the words left her mouth, she was frowning. Something twinged in the back of her mind. Something she’d said before.

  The others glanced at each other again.

  “What about the other Programs?” Brennan said, appearing from behind Soo-jin. The Cradle version of Nomiki stood behind him, her face severe in the light as she pushed to the front and gave Karin’s injuries an assessing look.

  Good to know that her Cradle sister still cared about her. Either that, or she was simply curious as to how much damage a person like Bernard could inflict.

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “Are any of them useful? Maybe some of the Titans? I know I saw a Nyx hanging around.”

  “She was six years old,” Nomiki said. “I don’t think she’ll be up to fighting off supreme evil anytime soon. I agree with Layla. Your best bet is to bring him over here. Outside of his world, he’ll only have control over himself.”

  “No,” Karin said. “We’re forgetting something.”

  “Oh?”

  With great effort, and more than a little pain that slid through the numbness, she pushed herself up on her good arm and levered herself into a sitting position. The world tilted as she leaned forward, curling over a bent knee for support. She took a moment to breathe, then slid her legs over the side of the bed and let them dangle.

  Marc came to her side for support. With only her camisole on, it was easy to see where the damage started on her arm.

  “He’s not a god, he is just a man. And he is not magic. His powers, whatever they are, come from a source. If we can find his Cradle, we destroy the source of his powers.”

  Layla arched her eyebrows. “Really? Then how come you’re so powerful, walking around without a Cradle. What if your Cradle was destroyed? I don’t think it would kill you.”

  She frowned.

  She has a point, Tia said. Killing our Cradle would only be killing our back-ups, so to speak―my Origin, and the fragments of your personality that we stripped off. I don’t know how Bernard is running his, or what discovery he made fifteen years ago that allowed him to do this. It did seem more Cradle-oriented than our setup.

  Yes, it did. Why else would he have asked Sasha for a new Cradle base? If―

  She frowned. Wait a minute. They had found the Cradle that Sasha’s daughter was the base for.

  “Reeve, remember that Cradle from Macedonia that you guys took?”

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “If you get a chance, tell them to get Sasha to switch it over to Tartarus or the Shadow world. It’s possible he’s using that one―or that he was using it as a prototype.” She couldn’t see how he would have been using it, given it was likely in orbit at the moment, and it had been dormant and empty except for the baby, so it was more likely a prototype. “I’d still like to find his Cradle. I feel like it could give us some answers. Plus, there’s also the chance that he is hooked up to it and then I can just kill him.”

  “Yes,” Marc said. “That would be nice.”

  She nodded to Soo-jin and Takahashi. “Splint this for me. We don’t have time to wait for it to heal.”

  “Then get back on the bed, genius,” Soo-jin said with an eye roll. “You’re hampering our medical efforts.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Bernard Corringham’s house looked different in the Shadow world. Quieter. Dormant. Without the sun outside, several of the lights had turned on, casting a bright, multi-spectrum illumination around the kitchen and its gleaming floors and counters, but leaving unexplained splotches of darkness where the lights hadn’t turned on.

  She swallowed, moving carefully through, the boots Layla had lent her tapping on the smooth wooden floors. The golden sword she held was sharp and light, well-balanced, and molded to her grip as if it had been made for it. Layla had picked it out of an armory at the temple. She held it in her good hand, ready to stab and slash at anything that moved.

  She breathed in a shallow breath and let it back out, her gaze darting around, alert for any sign of change.

  Fuck, this is nerve-wracking.

  The Shadow world was the closest one to the real world. With Bernard’s powers, it felt like even the slightest noise might give her away.

  Then, everything would be fucked.

  But the Shadow world was also familiar. And, as time ticked on and its mood slid through the house around her, she found herself relaxing.

  But only a little.

  Slowly, she eased herself through the house.

  It was a simple layout. A single story with a largely open concept and one hallway. After the living room and kitchen, the next set of rooms was a dining room on the right and a reading room on t
he left. She cast a light after that, drawing on her Eos powers to help search. The house branched off into a master bedroom, a guest bedroom, an office, a large, exquisite bathroom, and a laboratory that she caught a glimpse of, extending off the back left of the building.

  She frowned as she peeked into the guest bedroom. A Shadow met her inside, standing just to the side of the bed. Its presence gave her a slight jolt―even modified as it was, Tia hadn’t managed to erase a millennium of built-in instincts―but then something moved inside of her, and her mind shifted with the brush of soft darkness.

  Her own Shadow, still within her, and still very much active.

  Good to know.

  She turned her attention back to the room. The blankets here were mussed, and there were belongings in here and clear signs of use, but they looked to belong to a woman rather than a man.

  So, Bernard and Grace weren’t sleeping together. That was interesting.

  But―where did Elliot sleep? Bernard did say that Elliot lived here. Was there another building?

  It didn’t matter. She needed to find the Cradle.

  “Eos,” said the Shadow.

  “Yes,” she replied, ducking out of the room. “Hello to you, too.”

  She backed out of the room and continued her search.

  The master bedroom didn’t bring up any Cradle. She searched through it, just in case. A king-sized bed sat on a wooden frame at the middle of the wall, set with a duvet that resembled the blankets on a traditional Japanese futon-styled bed, and the floor was a mixture of wood and stone, the latter cutting across in a curve like the shore of a shallow river, leading to a small en-suite and a frosted glass door that led to an outdoor bath.

  She checked the walls, ceiling, floor, and even flipped open the lid on the outside bath, just in case there was a hidden door or Cradle.

  Maybe she’d watched too many netdramas, but she wasn’t about to let that slide by her.