World Shift

by K. Gorman

  When it came right down to it, she had no idea what the ones outside her compound represented. Maybe they were simply happenstance, existing apart from the compound and its experiments. With the way her research had flipped about and turned back on itself whenever she thought she’d cornered it, she couldn’t expect these ruins to have any sort of meaning. Even Dr. Takahashi, who’d worked on the project, hadn’t thought them to be very important—and he’d known about the Brazilian compound, too.

  Except… they were definitely related. Every single person in the system had seen them in dreams. The same dreams that warned of impending Shadow attacks. And Takahashi had been more brain-focused that interested in the compound or project’s archaeological significance. And definitely not any of the philosophical theories that may have led the Eurynome Project onto the course of committing mass infanticide.

  It hadn’t always been like that, he’d said.

  But neither had she, and yet, here she was. Surviving and with only vague explanations of how her powers worked and why she could do what she did.

  The wind howled around the tor, turning into a whistle as it sliced across the cracks at the side. On the inside, in the lee of the circle, another light breath of wind stirred the ends of her hair. A trail of goosebumps rose in a tingle at the back of her neck, unrelated to the wind, and she glanced behind her, already knowing she was no longer alone.

  He was there. Tylanus. Dr. Sasha’s indubitably genetically modified son, as much a relative to her as Karin was to Nomiki. He stood naked, prompting a rush of heat to her face—Gods, don’t let this turn into a sex dream—and the harsh, dark gray of the sky put a dull, soft blend of light over his brown skin.

  With another flush of heat, she jerked her head back up as she realized it was heading down and noticing the subtle markings of muscle underneath his skin. She focused on his hair, instead. Dark, with the same brown-black shading that both Nomiki and Dr. Sasha possessed, it hung loose from his head and fell past his shoulders in a slight kink, the frizz making it lighter on the wind and fuzzing its outline. As before, his eyes were jet black, like one of the Lost. They stared at her, their focus so intent on her, it would have been unnerving if she hadn’t had a whole lot of experience with the Lost doing the exact same thing.

  Actually, scratch that, it was still unnerving.

  “Hi,” she said, the word stuttering out of her in surprise. She cleared her throat, trying to get her faculties back into speaking order. “I hope you’re not dead, too?”

  He stared at her.

  For several long seconds, neither of them moved. Her heart thumped in her chest, slow and hard. She didn’t quite remember to breathe.

  Yeah, Lost eyes would never not be unnerving. Too unnatural, and now, with too much history behind it. Too many Lost that she’d dealt with. Too many Shadows bursting from them, or coming from dark corridors, or greeting her out of a dream with a nightmarish attack.

  She blew out a breath, starting to relax, thinking that he was just like the rest of the Lost, that he would simply be a creepy, symbolic fixture in her dream thanks to her fucked-up brain—thanks, Brain—but then, he lifted his head, and her heart jumped into overdrive.

  No.

  The word imprinted on top of her mind even as she flinched back, not spoken aloud but heard anyway, the voice of it striking with its resonance. She wondered, again, at his link to the Shadows. Her mind flashed back to times when Shadows had spoken to her before like this. It still happened from time to time.

  You sent back one of her creations. Why?

  He stepped into the circle, and she stepped back in shock as his gaze dropped and he looked around. His mouth pulled into a grim downturn, and the scene darkened and shifted. The distant rumble of thunder appeared to punctuate his mood.

  She backtracked. There’d been an accusation in his tone. Again, a prickle of gooseflesh slithered over her skin.

  “Well, if you mean the thing with scythes for hands, then yes, I did. It was about to slice through my boyfriend.”

  He checked the area down the slope. A footprint of trees prevented them from seeing the compound proper, but a few darts of the white buildings were visible in between. She had become hyper-aware of him, attuned to all the tiny movements that, despite appearing still, made her brain register him as a very active threat. The same way one would pay attention to an unaccompanied lion in the room, no matter how not-hungry the cat might seem.

  “What are you guys planning?” she asked. “What is your end game?”

  Like before, he didn’t give an immediate answer, instead staring down the slope—and, as the dream shifted, a blip that switched some of the settings—she thought she’d lost him and the connection. The sky flickered above, a flash of lightning that lit up an entire cloud followed by the more-recognizable forked strike. Thunder rumbled a second later, growing closer. Outside the circle of stones, dry brown leaves swept through the air. The trees appeared to pause for a second, growing still, only to sway back into a frenzy.

  Balance, the reply came. Home.

  “Where is home? Brazil? America?” It was a long shot, but she heard there’d been a compound there. So far as she knew, it had been abandoned even before the Brazilian one. “Where?”

  This time, when the thunder rumbled again, she felt its shudder and crack in the ground below her feet. The dream was starting to break apart.

  Tylanus seemed to sense it, too. He turned back, switched his attention to her, his liquid-black eyes flicking up to capture hers again.

  When he spoke again, it wasn’t his voice she heard in her head, but her sister’s, Nomiki’s, from years before:

  Don’t you remember, Rin? What we used to be?

  *

  “So, he showed you the beacon?”

  Pranav cocked an eyebrow as he led her down the first row of counters to the exam table she’d been sitting on yesterday. There was a cushion on it today, along with another blanket, folded in a neat square at the head of the table. Beside it was a plate of food and what upon closer inspection turned out to be a mug of tea with two tube-sticks of sugar next to it.

  Huh. Guess they did eat in the lab. Not that she was complaining. Already garbed up in the almost-naked gown, she heaved herself up when she got the table, crossed her legs, and leaned over the food. “Yep. Did you help design it?”

  Pranav carefully avoided looking at her as he replied, his gaze going to the far end of the room, away from her bare legs. “I pieced some of the parts together. Don’t know if that counts.”

  “It counts for something,” she said.

  After a careful study of the plate, she picked up a grape and popped it into her mouth, savoring the burst of tangy juice against her tongue as she leaned back and propped herself up with her arms.

  Today, so far, was better. Perhaps it was the result of the nerves and adrenaline from last night running through her system, but she’d felt relaxed after waking up again—even with the creepy dream. The lab felt nicer today, with better air. Warmer and less sinister. And she was determined to keep Pranav around for conversation since they’d denied her request for a netlink.

  “So,” she said, continuing on. “Tell me about yourself. How does a nice boy like you end up in a lab like this?”

  “Apart from them being desperate? Wrong place, right time, I guess.” He shrugged. “Most of my family became Lost in the first few weeks, then the food supply in my area started to get low. Then the military came, searching through the university dorms with a list of who did what, and my studies happened to tick all the right boxes. Well, sort of, anyway.” He waited a beat, seeming to consider, and his gaze traveled to a different part of the room, closer to her. “How’s Fallon? You lived there, right?”

  “I was only there for a month or so. My ship was based out of Enlil before then, and I lived on Belenus before that. But Fallon is all right. It’s doing all right now, anyway. I healed quite a lot of their people, especially military, so that’s given them a bo
ost.”

  His eyebrows scrunched together. “That’s right. You’re a pilot, right? I’d forgotten.”

  “Licensed navigator, actually.” She snorted. “And yep, my other talents seem to be taking the spotlight lately.”

  “You can help a lot more people with those talents than flying, I’m guessing.” His gaze flicked over to meet hers again, and she caught the movement of emotion on his face. When he spoke again, his tone wavered. “You and your powers are pretty much the only hope we have right now. Unless we can find something else that works against them.”

  She held his gaze, the laughter gone from her face. “Yeah. I know. I’m certainly not about to complain about what I can do—except the part where I keep getting abducted for it. That’s not very helpful.”

  He cast a quick, assessing look toward the two doctors, both of whom were working halfway across the room, then leaned closer, his voice going low. “Actually, I was hoping I’d be able to get you to heal my family, too. Or, at least, my friends. Would you mind?”

  She gave him a wide smile. “Get me and Marc out of here, and I’ll heal anybody you want.”

  It was a joke, and they both knew it.

  A mock-serious expression came over his face, his eyes narrowing and his breath hissing as he sucked it between his teeth. “Yeah… I’d get shot.”

  A clunk sounded midway across the room. As they looked over, Dr. Ma detached herself from her workstation and headed their way, a tray of instruments in her hand. It clattered as she set it down next to them, a set of test tubes and syringes clinking together.

  Karin smiled up at her as she grabbed a syringe, this one filled with a reddish-white liquid, and went for the crook of Karin’s bare elbow. “So, I hear you used to work for Seirlin?”

  Dr. Ma’s eyes flicked her way for a moment, then back down to her work. “Yes.”

  “Do you have any opinion on the massive child death rate of their Eurynome Project?”

  “No.”

  The needle bit into her skin. She tensed the fingers of her left hand into a fist, watching the plunger inject the serum into her. “What’s that?”

  “Caticoxpherone dye. It’ll make things show up better on the next scan.” She paused as she finished the dose, pulled the needle out, and pressed the dot of blood with a cotton ball. “I modified it to react to your light spectrum with a low dose of nanos. They’re programmable.”

  Somewhat surprised by the additional information, Karin watched as Dr. Ma turned back to the tray, put a cap on the syringe, and placed it on the opposite side from the other syringes. Before now, Ma hadn’t exchanged much more than a sentence with her, and then only to instruct her as to what to do. Usually in a monotone.

  Done with her work, she lifted the tray and walked it over to a separate part of the lab where she transferred the clean test tubes into a holder.

  Seeing Karin’s gaze, Pranav leaned in, dropping his voice again. “You know, she lost her family, too. Her husband and two daughters over in Adironback. They’re under government care now.”

  Oh. Okay. That made her feel bad for her comments.

  But not that bad.

  “I watched as more than two hundred children, all friends of mine, slowly came into and vanished from my life, all of them killed by Seirlin during the Eurynome Project. I can’t remember all of them because Seirlin also took my memories. Lately, the dead kids have been talking to me in my dreams, looking just like they did before they disappeared.” She bared her teeth. “So pardon me if I’m kind of a bitch about it.”

  Across the room, Dr. Lang looked up from where he’d been tinkering with a scanning machine, caught Pranav’s eye, and gave a sharp nod.

  “They’re ready for us.” Pranav cleared his throat, offering a hand to help her slide down, his gaze dropping to the floor—hard to tell if he’d forgiven her or not, but she’d caught at least some understanding on his face before he’d looked away. “Come on. Only a few more of these, and you can get out of here.”

  Chapter 17

  Karin smoothed her hands across her forearms, smearing light across her skin like glowing chalk dust and rubbing it in until it reabsorbed, then rolled her shoulders and stretched her back to ease the strain of working at a hunch.

  After an hour’s worth of tests and sitting around in the lab, she’d been escorted back to the gymnasium. Baik, apparently having taken the cues from their discussion early this morning, had arranged for another few truckloads of Lost to arrive at the complex that afternoon, which had, despite her situation, made her feel productive, at least.

  When it came right down to it, she didn’t care who she was working under—so long as she could keep healing the Lost and fighting back against humanity’s slow extinction.

  Well, maybe not so slow anymore, depending on what Dr. Sasha was doing with all those people who’d gone missing. Given that the whole weird eclipse thing was the presumed-aggression of a parallel world, Karin guessed that the good doctor was up to her pocket dimension shenanigans again, effectively spiriting people away.

  She wasn’t sure how parallel dimension physics worked—hells, she wasn’t even sure if they were supposed to work. So many of the Eurynome Project’s manifested abilities went against the laws of life and physics—but, by the things she’d heard from the soldiers who were assisting her with the Lost, it was undeniably creepy. Stories of people vanishing after walking around corners or other breaks in the line of sight, others who’d gone out for an errand and simply never returned. There were even reports of people vanishing in plain sight, there one second and gone the next.

  The military was collecting people into evacuation areas, places where they’d set up similar beacons to the one on top of the complex that at least provided some protection. A secondary evacuation had begun over the last few weeks, shuttling people into orbital stations then out from there, but it was a balance between how much a station’s life support could manage and how fast they could be transported farther out. A logistics nightmare involving people who, in many cases, did not want to leave the planet they’d been living on. Still more had dug in and evaded the evacuation sweeps, intent on staying.

  The cities must be a mess. Even the most well-behaved planets could turn into near-anarchy, and each population had its share of looters and opportunists. Nova Earth’s population had a tougher reputation than the other planets, a greater divide between the wealthy and the lower class, each with near-equal population sizes, and only a comparatively-small middle class in between. The system’s richest planet was also one of its most dangerous.

  But, according to the netdramas, Nova Earth’s organized crime knew how to love, at least. She and Soo-jin were following three such series, one a matchmaking drama and two others on star-crossed mob lovers. A fourth series of theirs floated close to the genre, except half the characters happened to be hot space vampires. Even Moon Sailor, the system’s most-beloved, had two entire season arcs dedicated to the topic.

  She wondered how Nova’s criminals were dealing with the Shadows. And the new, dimension-shifting, monster-making events that were occurring.

  After stretching out her shoulders, she gave herself a little shake and refocused. It had been a few hours since she’d started, but, perhaps realizing her normal speed, they’d brought triple the amount of Lost. About thirty remained, laid out in three rows in front of them, men and women all in various states of posture, clothing, and cleanliness, about half seated on a jumble of mismatched chairs that looked like they’d been scrounged from various parts of the building.

  She rolled her shoulders again and lifted her gaze higher, sensing that something had changed in the time she’d been busy healing. Most of the Lost she’d healed had been moved out, leaving empty rows of chairs behind her. Trucks and buses had parked right outside the gym’s doors, easy to load into, and a first aid station on the inside—made from a simple card table, a set of chairs, and two open medkits—had streamlined the former Losts’ exit. They’d allowed th
em to congregate in a group outside the door so as not to gawk or stare or disturb her, then trucked them out when they’d filled the vehicle to capacity.

  But now, even that hubbub was gone. The bus had left, and a low quiet had sifted into the room. Outside, a few scrapes and bangs sounded from soldiers moving things around—there were more of them today, which trounced her theory that only twenty-four worked in the compound, but there still didn’t seem to be that many. Thirty, perhaps. And as she looked around, she noticed that most had vacated the room.

  She turned to the soldier next to her. “Where is everyone? Did I miss something?”

  He held a knife in his grip, a big hunk of steel bigger than her hand and several millimeters thick, ready to strike at the next Shadow she drove out of the Lost—he’d switched in to replace another soldier some time ago and displayed a greater accuracy and efficiency from the last guy—but he lowered it a few inches when she spoke, probably so that it didn’t look like he was about to stab her.

  “It’s sunset,” he said. “They’re on the roof.”

  Oh, cripes, how long had she been there? Lunch didn’t seem like that long ago—but, yes, now that he mentioned it, she did notice that the color of the light coming from outside had changed. Of course, she wouldn’t have lost track of time if they’d had windows in the room. Or even a single clock. But the gym lacked both of those, which made part of her wonder just what the hell had been going through the architect’s head when they’d designed this place.

  As if on cue, the main door to the inside hall opened and Baik walked in, trailed by David a few steps behind.