by Cindy Zhang
*~*~*
Sabine wakes up in a locked room.
At least, she assumes it's locked because she's not tied up. Sabine finds and peels off a sedative patch on the inside of her arm, and the grogginess lifts a little. When she looks around, the room doesn't show any signs of a place that someone would keep kidnapping victims. It's a simply furnished standard room, cubical with a bed and a desk. The dresser was removed, judging from the dustless square by the door. Sabine hears a sound to her left, and sees Eirlys, up and about. She seems agitated.
Eirlys is hunched down, eyes wide and fingers curled into fists in front of her. Pacing in tight circles on her side of the room. Sabine finally pinpoints what feels so wrong about this whole situation: with how distressed Eirlys looks, there should be at least some emotional leakage happening. Sabine feels nothing but her own worry.
"Eirlys?" she tries, tentative. "Are you okay?"
Eirlys stops pacing and looks at her. She opens her mouth, but only a whine comes out. She grimaces at that, but the gesture looks more like a wolf baring its teeth than any human expression of frustration.
Sabine realizes all at once what must have happened.
There's something called a disruptor, invented fairly recently, that can scramble a set's empathy temporarily and keep them from connecting with anything. It's only supposed to last for a few minutes at most, and Sabine is sure that she's been out longer than that. If that's true, Sabine can't communicate with Eirlys until one of them figures out how to fix this.
She struggles to her feet and reaches out.
Eirlys flinches, but she seems to recognize the potential need for contact. She extends her hand, but when Sabine moves to meet her, she cringes again and backs up all the way until she's against a wall. Sabine takes one step forward, two, before Eirlys snarls at her with all her teeth bared. There's a little bit of blood on her teeth, and suddenly Sabine sees again just how not-human her body is built. It looks right from a distance, the same number of limbs and all the facial features in the right place, but in closer proximity, Sabine sees that Eirlys's teeth are too sharp. Her muscles clench in a way that makes it clear that her tendons connect in completely different places. She suppresses a shudder.
Sabine backs up to the side of the room that she'd woken up in, to give Eirlys more breathing room. But as soon as there's a clear path between her and the door, Eirlys rushes it, slamming into it with all the velocity of her sprint. Sabine, shocked, doesn't move fast enough to intercept her until after the third time she throws herself into the door. She tackles Eirlys, their legs getting tangled together so that they both fall. It's not a graceful landing.
Eirlys struggles. Sabine can feel more than hear a growl rumbling from her chest, and her teeth snap shut too close to Sabine's ear. Sabine frees one of her hands to lay it on Eirlys's face, and the instant their skin meets, Eirlys goes limp. Sabine lies there on top of Eirlys for a few more moments, just catching her breath.
"Eirlys? Can you understand me?"
Eirlys hesitates before nodding, stiff, like she needed a second to remember how.
"We have to get out of here. Do you know how to get around that lock?" Sabine's hoping for maybe some hidden hacking expertise, because Eirlys keeps surprising her.
But the concept that Eirlys conveys shows that she's thinking along different lines: you ("Eirlys", sky grass rocks) pull out of this body, slide into the door, inhabit its mechanisms—
"But wouldn't that hurt you?" Sabine pulls back, eyes wide, but her hand has to stay where it is.
— drop pieces of yourself, slice them off the edges, reduce by however many fucking decades it takes to get out get out getoutgetout
"No." Sabine nudges Eirlys, with her hand still on her face, so she has to look Sabine in the eyes. She tries to keep the horror out of her voice, a futile effort because Eirlys can feel all her emotions anyway. "No, we're not doing that. We're going to get out, but we're going to both work together, and we're leaving in one piece."
*~*~*
okay.
Sabine rolls off, careful not to elbow her, and offers Eirlys a hand up. Eirlys, for her part, slips off her glove and takes Sabine's hand.
"Come on. We've got this."
Before they can do anything, though, the door slides open.
It's a tall, slight human, about age thirty, wearing a black leather jacket, grey cargo pants, and black combat boots. She has dark brown skin and black hair in curls that bounces at shoulder-level. "Hello," she says as the door slides shut behind her. "I'm Naomi Caro. It's nice to meet you both."
Eirlys bristles as soon as she starts speaking, her grip on Sabine's hand tightening and a strong sense of distrust flowing through the link. Sabine blinks in surprise, looking over at her, and Eirlys lets go.
"I'm Sabine," she says, falling back on manners because she still doesn't know what's going on. "Where are we?"
"That doesn't matter right now." She smiles and crouches down as if to seem nonthreatening, but she stays by the door. "We're just going to ask you a couple of questions about the attack, and then we'll let you go."
"Somehow I doubt that," Eirlys mutters.
"Who are you working for?" Sabine's still trying her best to make sense of the situation, before she makes any judgements, but it's hard to focus with Eirlys next to her radiating resentment.
Naomi's smile doesn't slip. "How about we trade questions? You can answer one of mine, and I'll answer one of yours to the best of my ability." Before Sabine can respond, a communications beep interrupts them. "Oh, I'll have to take this. Please stay put, I'll be right back."
It's not the polite request that she framed it as, because the door light blinks red for locked as she leaves.
*~*~*
"We have to go." Eirlys stands up as soon as Naomi's gone, running fingers along the doorframe and casting her gaze around the room. "We need to get out of here before she gets back."
Sabine doesn't disagree, but she still watches Eirlys, as if looking for traces of the breakdown earlier. "Are you sure you're okay?" she asks, radiating concern so warm that Eirlys feels like she's standing next to a heat lamp.
"I never said I was?" Eirlys is confused. "Why do you keep asking that? I'm not injured."
"No, I mean—never mind." Sabine changes course when she sees something in Eirlys's face. Not for the first time, Eirlys wishes that there was some truth to the rumour that sets can read humans' thoughts. If only it were that easy. "Let's work on the lock." She steps up next to Eirlys.
Eirlys takes the chance to examine Sabine's physical state. She's of average build, more academically inclined than muscled. Her uniform shirt is a plain button-up and her loose pants tuck into her boots. Her cuffs are rolled up a little on the sleeves. Her black hair is cut just above the shoulder and worn loose. Her eyes are brown and her skin is pale, as Eirlys is supposed to guess from her name, probably. Eirlys took the same human culture classes as everyone else, but she barely grasps set relationships, much less this thing called family, this concept of ancestor.
"It seems pretty simple," Sabine says, sitting down in front of the door. "I've read books about how these kinds of locks work. They're supposed to lock in the other direction, because this room looks like it used to be passenger accommodation, but they've just reprogrammed it to act the opposite way." She pats herself down and pulls out a notepad from one large pants pocket. "Oh, good, they didn't take this," she mumbles, more to herself now. "So if it auto-locks from someone's remote device…"
She starts making notes and trails off, and Eirlys would watch her work, fascinated, if this was any other situation. There's no time to stand around, unfortunately.
"Do you think you can get it to open without an alarm going off?" she asks Sabine, just to make sure.
"Hm?" Sabine looks up and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "No, I don't think so. Sorry."
"That's fine." Eirlys thought so, which means she needs to start on her own job. She sits down in front of the bed, pressing her ba
ck against it, and closes her eyes.
She pulls herself out of her senses; she loses the feeling in her fingers first and her hearing fades out last. Eirlys hovers in the space between being in and leaving her body, giving her the ability to look into the network on this ship without being completely linked to it. It's taken her practise and a significant period of time to be able to strike this balance—and carry it further—and she doesn't think most sets would invest the effort unless they were compensating for something.
She takes it further now. Still careful to stay connected to her body, in case someone notices her, Eirlys reaches out. Sabine is closest, all worry aquiver hanging off rules, familiar. The presences of everyone else on this ship glow as she brushes past them, searching. Finally, a few twists through the corridors later, she finds who she's looking for. The same ordered mind on the law enforcement ship, dealing with the captain. Naomi Caro.
Eirlys waits, confirming with the patterns of movement that these are indeed hallways. She can't sense nonliving material when she's half out of her body like this. She shouldn't be able to do any of this at all, according to the official sources from both species' governments, but that shows what they know. And what she'll never tell them.
It takes her a moment to settle back into her body, all its intricacies and quirks that she has to reassert control over. She blinks her eyes back into focus, and finds Sabine watching her. "She's still too close right now. We should wait a few more minutes before we trip the alarm, in case her destination is on the opposite end of the ship."
"That's smart." Sabine twirls her pencil. "How do you know?"
"Just… trust me." Eirlys says it without thinking, deflecting by habit, but then she winces through a wave of embarrassment. She hopes Sabine doesn't take it the wrong way. Asking her to trust Eirlys is inappropriately intimate.
Sabine doesn't hesitate. "All right. So what do we do next?"
"We wait. Do you have the lock worked out?" Eirlys keeps half a mental eye on the rest of the ship, people moving in and out and around, her target walking steadily away from the two of them.
"Yeah, it's fine, it's pretty simple." Sabine sets down her notepad. "I wanted to kind of… compare notes on what brought us here. In case the attack had something to do with the ship's mission."
"What brought us here." Unwillingly, Eirlys's attention is pulled back to where her body is sitting.
"Yeah." Sabine's nervous, and Eirlys can't tell why. "After I dropped—took academic leave, from university, I just thought I'd work for a few years while I sort myself out." She keeps her gaze directed at the floor and her sketch-diagrams of the lock's inner mechanisms. "My dad's a high school teacher and my mom's a cop, so I didn't want to disappoint them, you know?" Eirlys doesn't know. More of this "family" thing. "I didn't really think I was getting anywhere, or going in the right direction. So I filled out some job applications and came to space. I didn't think any of this would happen."
"I don't know much more than you do." Eirlys sighs. "We both had about the same role. Supplies, right?" After Sabine's nod, she continues. "We were all just there as extra hands, move stuff around, keep everything working. I don't know if there was any underlying political motive on that particular ship, but I think the other sets would have at least noticed if there were humans actively trying to hide things from them."
"The other sets? Why not you?" Sabine taps her pencil against her knee. She's shifted into a cross-legged position on the ground, and she's watching Eirlys directly now.
"I'm not… I'm different. Not as familiar with the systems in place." Eirlys frowns. Something about Sabine's earnest gaze—and its incongruency with the anxiety that Eirlys is picking up from her, underneath—makes her want to say more than she should, just to prove she doesn't need to hide anything from this small human girl. "Do humans have people who live alone? Isolated-alone."
"Hermits?" Sabine chews on her lip. "Monks? Do you mean by choice?"
"More like from, uh." Eirlys filters through the ideas that Sabine floats her way, picking at the meanings. "From childhood. Feral children?"
"Oh, I. Did—?"
"Yeah." Eirlys tries to recalibrate the heart rate of this stupid organic body. "Sets like that usually form away from the rest of society," she continues, trying for a flat educational tone. "Most of the time where something violent occurred, forming from the scraps of the casualties. They're very, uh. Frowned upon. Distrusted. Because they grew up without any connection to the Network, and when they reintegrate it's difficult."
"Oh," Sabine says again. "Was it—? For you?"
Eirlys never wanted to say any of this. It's not relevant, and even with other sets, who can tell, she doesn't advertise it. "I didn't want to integrate," she blurts, because apparently telling herself to stop means "tell Sabine the thing you've never told anyone, and start leaking all over the place"—you are terrified—clustering around you—ask you to come with them—Wasn't aware I needed to be helped, you think, and one of them laughs like they heard you—you never thought you'd have the chance to ask—You flee.
Sabine reaches out. Just a touch on the arm, maybe a pat meant to comfort, and certainly not anything more than what already happened on the wreck of that spaceship.
"Don't touch me," Eirlys snaps, and jerks back.
Sabine freezes.
There's a long pause. "…Okay," Sabine says eventually. "Okay."
Eirlys thinks about leaving. She thinks about the last time she did, and how she had nothing to do, and about people who work for whoever hired Naomi Caro maybe waiting outside.
"Do you think," Sabine starts, slow and cautious, "that might have something to do with whatever attacked us?"
Eirlys holds her breath. "You think it might be a feral set?"
Sabine flips to a new page in her notepad. "It could be. That would explain the randomness of the attack. You're right that we didn't seem connected to anything political, anything that might motivate someone to act on us."
"I was thinking the same thing." Eirlys doesn't add that she's a little bitter about how even she herself immediately went to the conclusion that ferals are inherently violent.
"It would make a lot of sense. It could have found something to inhabit drifting out there in space. I'm sure there are pieces of wrecked ships out there, from first contact even." Sabine's scribbling more, her entire body curved around her hands, notepad resting against her knee.
Eirlys checks back in on Naomi again, and waves for Sabine's attention. "She stopped moving. Get ready to break the lock."
CHAPTER THREE
"The Expedition Force was formed by a group of passionate individuals who were curious about other emotional and sentient creatures in the universe. As a naturally social species, they were more interested in forming relationships than the scientific angle that human researchers pursued. They created technology that allowed their empathic senses to reach out, and it turns out that although humans have no receptive abilities when it comes to empathy, we project just fine.
The first human the Network noticed had looked up at the stars and thought, God, don't let us be alone in this universe.
That human probably wasn't the first or last to think that. This aching for company in the vast expanse of space is almost a theme in our species, and so this thought grew ripples and waves. Please let there be life out there—and when humans reached out with this hope and curiosity, the Network listened."
- Excerpts from The Unofficial Guide to Sets, Piper Patel, Chapter V. History of Interaction and the Force.
The alarm doesn't blare out across the entire carrier when the door finally slides open, which supports Sabine's suspicions that the rest of the ship isn't in on the kidnapping scheme. The corridor only stretches down one way, and it's bare. There's nowhere to hide, and if anyone came down from that way they'd see them immediately.
"Move fast," Eirlys decides, and Sabine nods, content to let her take the lead.
Her heart thumps in her ears the ent
ire way down to the first corner, so she can barely hear their own footsteps, much less if anyone's coming. She hopes Eirlys is being alert for both of them.
She bumps into Eirlys, and catches the tension across her shoulders for their meaning: she sensed somebody. Sure enough, five seconds later, Sabine can hear footsteps echoing down the corridor, getting closer much faster than either of them would like.
Eirlys backs up, brushing the back of Sabine's hand with her fingertips. Stay behind me.
Someone rounds the corner, dressed in the uniform of one of the carrier's crew. He frowns when he sees them. "Are you two supposed to be down here?" One hand reaches down for his pocket. Eirlys doesn't wait to find out if it's a weapon or a communications device. Sabine watches from around the corner as Eirlys sweeps his feet out from under him. He lands in front of Sabine, and she digs out a sedative patch and slaps it on his neck.
Eirlys stares at her.
"I found the standard first-aid kit in the desk and raided it while we were working on the lock." Sabine shrugs. "I thought we might need it."
"Well. Good job."
Eirlys beckons Sabine forward. They continue along the hallway, Eirlys checking ahead mentally before they turn corners.
"There's someone up ahead," Eirlys whispers after an uneventful while.
"Is there any other route we can take?" Sabine slows, but catches back up when Eirlys shakes her head. "Can we get around them?"
"I… don't know. I can't tell who they are." Eirlys changes course to walk closer to the wall. "I don't like it, but keep walking and act casual. They have to have heard our footsteps by now."
Eirlys turns another corner, in front of Sabine, and almost walks into a tall figure. The stranger steps aside and pulls Eirlys past her with a hand on her wrist, all in the space of a blink. Eirlys stumbles, taken off guard, and her opponent takes the opportunity to pin her up against the wall with one forearm against her throat. All one movement.
Sabine steps forward without thinking, but someone melts from behind the first person's shadow and slides between Sabine and the other two.
