by K. Gorman
Just what is this power? Was I always supposed to have it? She directed her gaze down to her hand, where light seemed to collect and pool at its edges. Is this what I missed out when I didn't go through the tertiary and quaternary stages of treatment?
“You remember now, don't you?”
Karin didn't jump at the voice. She'd half-expected it. More than half-expected it. Layla was a common fixture in her dreams these days.
When she glanced back, the girl was stepping out from the shadow of one of the stones as if she'd been there all along. Layla's gaze fixed on her with a preternatural focus.
“Nope,” Karin told her. “Not at all.”
That put a frown on Layla's face—and halted her steps.
“What? But…” Her features pinched as she thought, wiping the unnaturalness right off it, and she turned her focus to the air slightly left of Karin for a few seconds before returning it to Karin's face. “Ah. I see. You're getting better.”
“Thanks.” Karin gave her a critical look. “Are you back to being you?”
“Er… I think so?”
“No threatening, aggressive body language?”
Layla's frown deepened. “No. I don't see why I would do that to you.”
“Good. I'll just assume the last time was weird because of Tylanus. Now, why are you here? Are you going to tell me anything useful?”
“What?”
“Anything that is going to help me out in the foreseeable future? Preferably in a way that isn't vague, in code, or assuming that I know what is going on?”
“Er…”
“I'll take that as a no, then.” Karin blew a loud breath through her lips and shook her head. “Clio. Are you my subconscious, or are you actually a dead child I knew fifteen years ago?”
“I'm not dead.”
Karin made a frustrated gesture with her arm. “Then what are you?”
“I'm here,” Layla said. “I'm waiting.”
“That's where, not what.” Karin rolled her eyes. “Before, you said you were waiting for me. Why?”
“We wait because you are one of us. We are incomplete without you.”
“Okay.” Karin ran her tongue under her front teeth, thinking. “Are you waiting for Nomiki, too? Is this some kind of post—” She almost said death, but cut herself off. “—reality dimension or something?”
Layla frowned at her. “This is Earth. Your mind is traveling.”
Old Earth, she meant.
“If I went to Earth, you wouldn't be there. You weren't there.”
Layla shook her head. “Not there. Here.”
Karin gave her a flat stare. “You literally just said this was Earth.”
“It is and it isn't. You'll find out soon.”
The dream took a turn, then. In an instant, the faded blue of the sky had shifted to light-gray cloud. The gold of the sunrise across the trees and field slipped into a colder, darker tint. Reality began to bend. It was an almost imperceptible change. On the surface, visually, everything remained the same. But it felt as though the space had multiplied itself, and, though she could see things clearly and in minute detail, and still hear Layla's voice, everything felt like it was a great distance from her.
“You're getting better.” Layla took a few steps toward her, a pitying look on her face, one arm lifting up as if to help—but the dream had already made the distance between them insurmountable. Though she only looked a few feet away, it felt like she would have to cross a mile to bridge the gap.
“Thanks again,” Karin said. “But it'd be better if you could tell me what I'm getting better at.”
“You're still not one of us, yet.”
She seemed almost ten miles away now, a tiny speck in the sea of clouds and rolling hillside, the ruins like sticks behind her, and the distance seemed to buckle, but Karin still managed to pin her with a scathing glare as the dream reality slipped away from her.
“Oh, fuck off.”
*
Hawkings-Navarro University, Five Days Later.
Karin sat back in the chair, closing her eyes to the limited capacity netlink she’d been allowed. Five days had passed since she’d fought Tylanus’ power with the machine, and, after spending the first three of them being knocked around to various parts of the university, spending extended lengths sitting at the sides of labs, lobbies, hallways, and, twice, both memorably, partly under the building’s large, boxy, inter-disc climate control system, she and Marc had been shunted to what looked to be a room modified from someone’s office.
The desk sat to one side—Marc sat at it, currently, leaning back in its chair with his long legs propped up across its middle, a limited netlink of his own striking a glow across his face—and the empty remains of someone’s fish tank occupied the corner next to her. A paper calendar on the wall above it, a thinly-printed souvenir from one of Belenus’ beach resorts, told her that whoever had occupied the office had been ousted recently. The number of crossed-out days only ended yesterday.
She wondered if he or she would ever come to get their calendar back.
If they did, they’d have to get through an in-house surveillance system and a hallway full of guards. They’d been stashed at the end of what appeared to be the rest area for soldiers and EMS personnel—not a permanent place to sleep and kick back, but something to fill in the gaps between shifts.
Although her cooperation wasn’t crucial to the Exis Termina Spectra Generator’s operation anymore, the scientists having since improved its output and energy signature to combat the encroaching otherworld’s energy independent of her, she made daily trips to various labs around campus to fine-tune their instruments and further their work. More and more generators of its kind were being built, the intent being to form a cross-globe network with them. And after all her time and frustration on Fallon waiting for breakthroughs, more and more of them were bursting through the woodwork every day. Now that the Generator had grown stable and sufficient, some of the teams had time to further their original projects. One in particular had come through just yesterday, and the news had set her into a euphoric high that she had yet to come down from.
She no longer had to heal the Lost.
Well, she did still need to heal them. There were too many of them for her to be out of that job, at least for a few years. But someone had invented a piece of eyewear that beamed her light signature straight into the eyes of a Lost and pushed the Shadow out within seconds.
Pranav had been the one to deliver that particular item of information. Like Dr. Lamond and the rest of those who’d slipped between worlds like she had, he’d returned. Not quite in the same spot he’d vanished in, as she had—technically, she’d never left but had been split, existing both in this world and in Tylanus’ other one—but on the eighth floor where they’d walked.
They’d been testing the device in bits and pieces since its invention, but had yet to test it out en mass. In the meantime, she’d been allowed out of the room to heal roomfuls of Lost in a classroom wing on the university’s main floor, her routine mapped out in a similar fashion to what she’d been doing on Chamak, albeit without the travel. And without the pay.
Perhaps her and Marc’s successful escape had squashed hopes of that for her, but she doubted it. Baik and his superiors, of which she had only met a few—and almost all of them more highbrow, either in charge of orbital operations or commanding far more than the city’s defense—hadn’t seemed inclined to offer her much of anything except nicely-worded orders of what she would and would not do.
So, still a prisoner. But at least, she was a prisoner in comfort. Well, relative comfort. The two inflatable mattresses they’d pushed against one wall and tossed sheets onto weren’t the most luxurious items, but she’d slept under a storage table that first night after the otherworld incident.
She opened her eyes again and stared at the light bulb in the ceiling above her. At the edge of her senses, she could feel the hum of its light matching hers, sliding into the back of her m
ind.
Eos, goddess of the dawn. She hadn’t considered herself that in a long time.
And she wasn’t going to start now.
Oddly, her thoughts ran back to her last day on Chamak. The words she’d spoken to the intern she’d decided to dislike.
“Scientists made me. Scientists can figure me out.”
She’d been right, hadn’t she? They had figured her out.
A rustling brought her attention down. Marc shifted, uncrossing and re-crossing his feet, adjusting the angle his slouch hit the chair. She let her netlink fall the rest of the way into her lap. For a second, its screen flickered, unable to cope with having to go through her sweatpants, then turned off as its pocket-detecting software kicked in.
“How’s it going on your end of the room?” she asked, her voice carrying in the quiet without the need to raise it. “Feel like switching to netdrama again?”
“Maybe. Give it another fifteen minutes, and I’ll have numbed both my legs under the ankle.” He craned his neck to meet her gaze, having slouched a bit too far for it to be comfortable to do so. “You got something in mind?”
They’d run out of Moon Sailor and its spin-offs. And as much as she’d offered to heal its cast and production team, Baik had ignored her requests. From the rumors Pranav had told her, some people suspected that the full season had already completed post-production and was simply waiting on company computers for distribution. Maybe she could get Cookie to look into it. When he wasn’t busy hacking Seirlin’s databases.
She curled her lips. Seirlin. That was a company she did not want to think about anymore. They had more than their fair share of representation here at the university, and she’d caught sight of their logo on more than a few things, ranging from grants and research job postings to donations and simple logo prints on company-made equipment.
“There’s this pre-Border Wars vampire space epic I’ve got my eyes on. The Dark-End Cycle. The trailer made it seem less cheesy than it sounds.”
“I think I’ve heard of that one. Involves some of the old Alliance royalty, doesn’t it?”
If he’d heard that much, he must have been reading the same synopsis she’d found. He hadn’t known about the Alliance royalty last week, anyway.
“Probably. If they won’t let us on actual networks to research, we can at least find things out about Baik through watching drama, right? I…” She trailed off, turning her attention to squint at the door as sounds of shouting—very familiar shouting—came from outside.
“Really?” she said when it became obvious that Baik was coming their way, and that he was not pleased. “Does he just have this sixth sense where he knows when we’re talking about him?”
This was the third time this week that he’d interrupted their speculation about him and his pedigree. It was beginning to become too much of a coincidence.
Marc slipped his feet off the desk and sat up in the chair, gaze also on the door. “Any idea what he wants?”
“I think he’s here to announce that it’s time for them to release us to the wilds and give me the backlog of all those wages they’ve never paid me,” she said.
“Ha, ha.”
But, as the door burst open a second later, the light mood snapped with a surge of adrenaline. She leapt to her feet as Baik sprinted in, Seras and Colahary, who had returned after the final shift, on his tail. They all spun toward the door, Seras and Baik backing toward the wall. Colahary, the last one in, slammed the door shut behind them and input a security key into the panel, which flashed a stark red.
As he scampered to the wall beside the door, his raised blaster and fighting stance ready to ambush anyone who came in, Seras and Baik raised theirs, as well, their aims steady and their faces grim.
Karin gawked. “What the fuck?”
Baik ignored her, instead lifting his wrist to speak into the comms link in his cuff. “Red Thirteen, Red Thirteen, come in.”
“What’s happening?” When he didn’t answer, she redirected her question to Seras, who seemed the least occupied of the three and the most likely to answer. Colahary, she’d found, still had a random hate-on for her. “Trouble?”
“Trouble,” she clarified. “And it seems to be coming for you.”
“For me?” She frowned. “As in for me in a potential rescue, or for me in a nutso cult serial killer rage?”
Colahary looked away from the door long enough to pan her a dark, cold-eyed stare.
“What? A girl’s got a need to know.”
She put her hands on her hips. Across the room, Marc had also stood. As she looked his way, he caught her glance and tilted his head up, eyebrows lifting in a silent question.
Nomiki?
Her guess? Probably. She didn’t think she’d acquired too much cultist hate on her in the week she’d been here.
She turned her attention back to Baik. “By any chance, is there a woman involved in this trouble?” she asked. “About my height, browny-black hair, very fit?”
Baik jerked his head up from his wrist and glowered at her. “What do you know?”
“Enough that I’m going to back up from that door,” she said. “I wonder if she brought friends.”
Down the hall, someone—several someones—shouted. Doors slammed open, blasters cracking. Her heart jumped in her chest, and she skittered back, nearly stumbling as the back of her knees bumped into the chair she’d been sitting in. Marc gave her a sharp look from across the room. Then, with a quick glance to the three armed soldiers and the room’s single door, he slid down behind the desk and vanished from sight.
Outside, someone’s yell cut off mid-breath. Something slammed into a nearby wall hard enough to make the floor shake, and the sound of a weapon clattered to the floor. A strangled scream started, then stopped. Following Marc’s example, she crept in behind the chair she’d been in—the only source of cover on this side of the room except for the fish tank in the corner.
“Golly,” she said to the room at large. “If only someone had thought to put me in a room with more than one exit.”
She couldn’t tell if it was Baik or Seras who shot her the glare this time, but her shoulder itched from it.
“Shut it,” Seras said.
The sound of blaster fire came to a slow. Then a stop. Light footsteps echoed on the outside, and there came a scratching at the door panel. When that stopped, voices.
Baik, Seras, and Colahary stood stock still, their entire focus on the door.
Nomiki didn’t bother to hack the door panel. She didn’t need to, not with this door that had originally guarded an office. There was a few seconds’ worth of more voices, then they went quiet. Karin heard footsteps, thick, heavy, not the ones she’d heard before, backing away. Outside, someone laughed and said something—a joke? The person down the hall gave a grunt.
In the next moment, they were sprinting.
The door broke in a crash of wood and metal. Blaster shots cracked as the door panel screamed.
Project Ares—even through the mess and heart-pounding chaos, she could recognize his thick, muscled form—smashed through and landed in a crouch, hoisting a metal card table he’d picked up from somewhere as a shield. Five bolts hit it, and one skipped over, sailing past his head and through the broken doorway. He ducked into another crouch, recovered his balance, and sprang into action again with a throw that launched the table into the air. The table flew toward where Baik and Seras stood, its edges spinning like a discus.
They stopped firing and threw themselves to the sides.
Colahary, recovering from the violent implosion of the door, jerked his blaster back up. Ares, somehow sensing this, whirled.
Two shadows slipped through the door in unison. A second later, Nomiki and another woman slammed Colahary against the wall. With a quick series of strikes, Nomiki grabbed him back down, punched him in the gut, and disarmed him with a ringing slash of her knife. His blaster clattered to the ground, a great score cut into its body from the laser-edge of her knife.
His secondary weapon, a smaller gun he’d kept in an ankle holster, followed a moment later.
The second woman went for Seras on the other side of the room. The soldier twisted and brought up her blaster, but the unknown woman disarmed her with a quick slash of a—Sol’s child, was that a spear? Like Colahary’s blaster, Seras’ weapon clattered away. A second strike with her—yes, she was going to have to call that a spear—sent it skittering across the floor and behind the desk to where Marc was hiding. She heard a surprised yell from his direction, but the woman didn’t react to him. Instead, she only cocked her head, gave Seras an assessment, then slipped to the side where she could watch both Seras and the rest of the room.
Nomiki, standing about a meter to the right of the door with a shocked and crumpled Colahary at her feet, turned her head. Her gaze paused at the point where Karin was hiding, then moved on. When she caught sight of Baik, who’d recovered and was aiming a blaster at her, a smile tugged at her lips.
“Sis, he’s got a quicksave,” Karin said as Nomiki stalked by, her modified twin blades rising at her sides.
“I know. That’s what makes it fun.”
The fight didn’t last long. Although fast and brutal, the two of them knocking around into the corner of the room, it became quickly apparent that Nomiki’s genetic enhancements and aptitude for violence far outmatched Baik’s. He ended up slammed into the corner, bleeding from various wounds and defensive marks, with one of Nomiki’s blades pinned through his shoulder and into the wall behind him. His blaster lay on the floor several meters ahead, long gone. As was the knife he’d pulled out a minute into the fight.
“So, sis,” Nomiki said, her voice casual. “How they been treating you in this place?”
As if to punctuate her meaning, her blade slid another inch into the wall, cutting further into Baik’s shoulder. Pain flashed across his face as more blood stained the white of his high command uniform—the uniform which had probably cued Nomiki to single him out from the other two more-commonly dressed soldiers.
Gods alive, that’s got to hurt. Although she assumed his quicksave would take care of it, she doubted it was helping much. There was only so much one could do about the feeling of a blade sliding into one’s body, especially the bone and ligament-rich area Nomiki had picked to slide it into.
