Her fingers tighten on mine, and that red fug is oozing over her flesh, wrapping around my fingers, extending over my knuckles, creeping up my wrist. Digging in.
The pain is sharp, hot, and behind it, seeping in through the blood trickling from the slices in my skin, is that thing, that thing I'm not going to touch because if I do, Grea won't be Grea anymore and I won't be able to pretend.
She pulls me close so our noses are touching. 'Why?' she says.
'Why what?'
'Why pretend? Am I so terrible as I am?'
I jerk back, as far as my captive hand will go. 'You read me.'
She cocks her head. 'You're my brother. The other half of me.'
'What happened to you?'
'You did. Or you happened to Aeotu and then Aeotu happened to us and then Euiva happened to me.'
Everything stops. Me. The awareness. Aeotu.
Euiva. The name echoes, brings memories of a pulsing metal shield hidden in a bulkhead, of sharing Aeotu's mind as she recalled the last time she saw the sister ship. The flat-nosed aliens the kin called Them scurrying through emergency docking tubes, evacuating Euiva as her internal systems turned against them, her airlocks leaking atmosphere, her engines failing. Their hands on Aeotu's controls, releasing the tubes, forcing her away, leaving her crippled sister-ship to die alone in the void.
Sister, Aeotu whispers and for once she's not referring to me.
I shiver. 'Euvia? As in the beacon in Dad's lab?'
'Who else would I mean?'
I shake my head. 'But… it's just a beacon. From a dead ship.'
'No, not dead just not…' Grea shrugs. 'Not close enough. When you found the beacon, Euiva was too far away to communicate but then Aeotu began moving, and as we got closer I felt it. I saved it. '
A pause and then, 'Why?'
'Because she's in pain. Can't you feel it?' She presses her other hand to my chest. 'Don't you want to help?'
The red rushes over her hand, long wicked tendrils aimed at my heart. I wrench myself out of her grip. She lets me go and I stumble backward, eyes glued to the red barbs twisting around her wrist.
Grea cocks her head to the side. I've never felt like a bug under a microscope before. 'It's okay, baby brother, I understand. Aeotu got her hooks in you first, or was it you who got your hooks into Aeotu?' She shakes her head. 'It doesn't matter, it's all the same in the end.'
There's a war going on in my brain, between the half of me desperate to find my sister, and the half that's telling me the person standing before me isn't her. If I run, twist around in the dark and sprint, can I get the hatch open before the thing behind Grea's eyes gets me?
Dude is silent, invisible, and the awareness whispers: no.
It wouldn't matter if it whispered yes, I tell it and the half of myself that is scared shitless of the red, of Euiva. I have to save Grea.
I stop shuffling back, stand straight. 'So, you're saving a spaceship. How? When?'
'You woke me up, and then I heard Aeotu. After Stasis separation, when Core ejected you into space; the fug held the deck together, and I managed to get out and find you.' Her face darkens. 'I knew what I had to do when I saw what it was doing to you and Mac, what it had done to everyone else. I was going to try and restart Core, get the drones back online but…'
Remembered pain stains the air around Grea. 'Core was gone, and Ag… Ag was crazy. The Lab AI was okay for a while, and Med. We did what we could, but with Core gone everything just fell apart, and then Aeotu jumped to FTL and I still couldn't get Mum or Dad out of their pods and—'
She breaks off, and I watch her chest rise as she takes a deep breath, watch her control herself. 'But it was okay.' Grea smiles, the expression is big and bright but I can see the lie, the pain dogging her heels. 'Because that was when I heard Euiva, and together we did this.' She gestures down at herself, and then the red.
'I don't...' Don't see it. Don't like it. Would have freaked the fuck out already if it weren't for Dude on my shoulder and the stubborn insistence that this was Grea.
'That's okay, baby brother. I get it. I do. Besides, it's a bit dark in here. Let me put all the lights on.' Red, a bright candy-coloured blood lights up the darkness. Thick veins of it, pulsing on the walls, trailing over the deck, twining around Grea's ankle...
'Red fug.' There's so much of it, enough to swim in, and all of it leading back to my sister.
'Viyusa actually.' Grea picks it up, and the tendril curls around her hand. Lovingly. Gently. Like a puppy trying to get closer to her skin. 'There wasn't enough left in Euiva's beacon, not to do what we needed, so we adapted Aeotu's viyu.'
My confusion must show on my face, because Grea tilts her head and gives me that smile, the one I hate, the one that says I'm a little slow but that's okay, because she's there to fix shit for me.
'The stuff you call fug?' She points at me, taking in my fug-feet and hands. 'The nanites that form your armour? It's called viyu. Aeotu grows it the same way our bodies make blood cells. It's part of what she is.'
'It's a spaceship.'
A hand on her hip, a shift of the light, and suddenly the old Grea, my Grea is standing before me. If I just ignore the tendrils. 'Really? Four years in the grow field and you haven't figured it out yet?' She bops my forehead, palm pushing my head back on my neck.
I push away, feel the scowl creasing my brow and the same old anger that always came after she did that rises in the air between. 'Don't—' That's when it hits me. The number. 'Four years? What do you mean, "four years"?'
'What it sounds like, Kuma.' She says it slowly, holding her hand up, lifting one finger and then another. 'One. Two. Three. Four revolutions around Jørn's solar body. I mean, I think so. The chronometers have been a little screwy ever since we hit FTL.'
'FTL.' Grea mentioned it before, but it hadn't really sunk in and now… Now I nod, because really, nodding's the only motion I'm capable of while my brain scrambles to catch up.
'Yeah. Aeotu powered the engines about a year after the merge.' Grea's not looking at me anymore, she's turned to the command console, her hands working at the boards. 'I tried to stop it, but I couldn't fix Core's connections with the sub-AIs and there's only so much you can do with a Franken-thrower. Seriously, fathead, cool invention but next time maybe make it a little less bulky, 'cause it sucks carrying three of those things around.'
'Try crawling through an air duct.'
'Oh, I did that. It's almost as bad as dragging them through the cyclers, that recycled goop gets everywhere.'
Grea's still not looking at me, fiddling with the control board, hands passing through the symbols projected above it, moving smoothly, as if she knows what she's doing.
For a long, tense minute neither of us speak.
Grea's the one to break the silence. 'I tried to find you after Aeotu brought you in, but there was so much viyu in the way and half of Citlali was vacuum, and then, when I got there, and saw what she was doing…' The blood drains from Grea's face, all the warmth leaving her skin, leaving it grey under the gold. One moment I'm looking at my sister, the next… The thing that made me step back from her in horror is looking out at me. It has Grea's eyes, her hair, her mouth… It reminds me of Aeotu under my twin's face but the look is cold. It's rage. It's calculation. All the things Grea has never been. Until now.
I can't help it, I slip into the eter, just a little. I have to know. Peeking under Grea's skin is the only way.
The psionic plane seethes with darkness. Not the black of lies but true darkness, like a piece of the ora is bleeding through reality, staining the endless white, but then... it's not that either. There's no sense of possibility, of creation. It's just... blank. Nothing. I don't want to touch it.
The darkness spreads behind Grea, a shifting cloak blowing on an invisible breeze. Grief, the remembered kind, muted by time, twists around her feet, and something else. Red strands that remind me of the gold veins under my own skin, the ones that connect to Dude, they snake around Grea, not
quite touching but hovering. I follow it, away from Grea and into the darkness, a line of blood trailing into the shadows, connecting to another presence.
Following it further means touching the shadows. And Grea is looking at me, not the fleshy me, but the psionic me. Her head tilted in a not-quite human fashion that makes my skin crawl.
She frowns. 'I told you that wasn't nice, baby brother.'
'Sorry,' I say. Although I'm not, not really. It's just... I'm staring down a predator and there's this feeling that if I make the wrong move, she's going to pounce.
'Euiva got the idea from you.' Grea glides closer. 'From what Aeotu was doing to you. I burned my way into the grow field.' The space between us fills with the smooth walls of not-Citlali, the off-white flowing into the dark grey of what I guess is the place I woke up. I guess that, because in the middle of it all, on the other side of memory-Grea – feet braced, a dozen drones hovering around her, shooting lasers into the fug even as the Franken-thrower spews a solid beam of hard light – is a memory of me. As Grea lowers the Franken, the memory zooms in, focusing on my face, on the mounds of fug layered over me, on the golden flesh of my feet, toes swallowed by the beginnings of a talon.
'I tried to get you out.' Desperation colours the memory, casting it in shades of violent green, as memory-Grea rushes forward, a multi-tool appearing in her hand. 'But I was in Aeotu's heart, the place where she's strongest. Where the viyu is strongest. I burned and I burned and I burned, but it just kept coming back.' Between us, Grea cries and shouts, as she points the multi-tool at the fug holding me down, the hot line of the laser eating at the nanites. And the nanites grow back as fast as she burns. The desolation in her voice stabs me in the heart. Over and over.
Around us, the drones dodge and weave, holding back the wave of fug launching itself at her back. One explodes and then another and another, until there's just two left.
'The drones couldn't hold it off.' Grea, the real Grea, walks toward me, the memory moving around her. 'We had to go.'
Memory-Grea runs.
'I was angry with Aeotu, after. Why was she doing this to you? She had stopped talking to me, and so I had to find out on my own. It took me awhile, a few months maybe, until I found the beacon.' The memory changes. Grea is on Lab Two burning fug with the Franken, another drone bobbing behind her. Grea looks different, her hair longer, her face thinner, and her eyes... There's a coldness in them.
One moment she'd been burning fug, the next a familiar bulkhead is sliding aside, revealing a shield, pulsing like it's alive. Memory-Grea touches it and red fu— viyusa spills around her hand.
'I heard her,' the real Grea says. 'Heard Euiva as I had heard Aeotu. The distance between her and the beacon made her weak and the only way she could help me was with the viyusa.'
Red swallows memory-Grea, crawling up her arm, over her shoulder, plunging into her skull—
The memory ends, leaving the real Grea a hairsbreadth from my nose. 'I knew what I had to do after that; fight nanites with nanites.'
Grea spreads her arms. Light gleams on her nanite skin, all the colours in the universe rippling under the surface. 'Med helped, before she went offline. They're just nanites after all, but it wasn't until Euiva became stronger that I really figured things out.
'There's more to this than just me, than us,' Grea continues. She's sharing my breath, her aura mixing with mine. 'She needs us, Kuma. They need us. Arthur Tudor knew it, felt it when he found the beacon and then the kin killed him when he tried to do something about it.'
'What do you know about AD Tudor?'
'Everything.' She leans in close, not just physically but psionically, slipping into my memories, finding the confrontation with Onah, the memories I'd stolen. 'He wasn't just an empath, Kuma, he was a Regan-level empath. We might not be able to cross lightyears to touch another mind, but he could and he did. He slipped out of stasis/sleep and tapped into Citlali's generators not to blow us up, but to use Euiva's beacon and reach across the stars.
'It's working, Kuma. I'm pushing back Aeotu. I even got into her systems. I haven't been able to alter anything yet, just watch, but we're working on it, and soon...' She turns away, suddenly, her eyes focused behind, on something in the darkness, and her lips... they move. No words come out, but she's speaking. Speaking to the darkness.
'What's in there?'
'Just Euiva.'
'The beacon?'
'No.' She draws the word out, like she does when she thinks I'm being particularly thick. 'Euiva. I told you.'
'Euiva's a ship, Grea, and even if it's not dead, we're not Tudor, we can't reach across lightyears; trying to reach her psionically would kill you.' I point at the darkness, at the thing I can almost sense within it. 'Whatever you're talking to, it can't be Euiva.'
Her eyes narrow, turn to slits. I know that look, or a version of it, a version without the malice dripping like acid from her pores. 'Are you calling me crazy?'
'You're talking to a dead thing.'
She stalks forward. 'Why are you doing this?'
'Something's wrong with you.'
'Something's wrong with you too, baby brother. Or haven't you looked down lately?'
Her hand's on my arm, those too-long fingers wrapping around my bicep, pulling me close physically and psionically. Wrapping under my skin. I can't move. One second, I'm my own person, the next that sick thing within Grea is winding through my blood, seeking out the golden threads that connect me to Dude and—
Rage hits me. A fine web of gold sweeping over my shoulder, drawing power from the other in my gut. A tidal wave crashing through my blood, my bones, sweeping over the darkness with fire.
A scream. High. Piercing. Like burning fug. It dives into my ears, a dagger carving up my grey matter, slicing through thought and reason until the only thing I feel, think, know, is that I can't let the thing within Grea touch me.
I rip myself away. Stumble back, fug-feet tripping over themselves, shock and that lingering darkness making them clumsy. The viyusa is still burning through my skin, making the armour loose. Numb.
Grea's on the deck, still screaming, the sound piercing my eardrums, clawing at my chest. Red pulses under her skin; violent, crazy flashes of lightning cracking down her arms, over her back, and behind her... The red fug— The viyusa roils, tendrils and veins writhing in the shadows, slapping the deck, screaming on their own. But it's the thing on the eter, the stain, that stops my heart and has the first icy skewer of real fear, the kind that creeps up on you, that your mind tries to push back, to cover up with denial. The kind of fear that comes before everything, everything changes, and not for the better.
The thing is looking at me. There are no eyes, no face, nothing but an intense focus, an attention reaching through the rip between realities. There's familiarity in it, in the tiny glimpse of vastness, the multi-hued alienness that reminds me of Aeotu. But it's not Aeotu, doesn't have the same welcome. No, this thing is cold as the void, driven and merciless in the way few things truly are.
Euiva.
Sister. Aeotu is standing in front of me. Not just the sense of her, or her voice, but her, a solid humanoid form in the eter, shielding me from Euiva. She looks like Mac in his fug-armour, the same sleek body and featureless head, hands ending in talons, but where he is solid black, Aeotu ripples with colour.
No other words pass between us, but knowledge, images, memories wash over me, things she's never shown me before, things that shake me all the way to my anima. They find places in my brain, and now… Now I understand. Now I know, and that fear, that sense of changing, of doom, solidifies in my gut.
I take one last look at Grea, and run.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Running away from my sister doesn't make me feel good. Doesn't make me feel like a hero or a brother or a decent, everyday person. Running away when she's in pain, screaming her guts out on the deck, makes me feel worse. A coward, a heel, a right fucking bastard. The self-loathing is rich, winds its way up through my stomac
h and curdles the acid, makes me want to vomit.
It doesn't stop me sprinting the other way though, back through Aeotu's ovoid hallways to the crumbled husk of Citlali. Doesn't stop me from scrambling down access tubes, using the ladders where I can, using my fug-claws where the rungs built into the tubes are eaten away to nothing. I use the claws more often than not. I've gotten good at it.
The first time the side of a tube crumbled under my hand, sending me sliding all the way down, only reflex saved me. That, and a little help from Dude. I'd shot arms and legs out, trying to find purchase on the smooth sides, grabbing at lower rungs, at air, at anything that might slow my meeting with the deck twenty metres below. Dude had done the rest, his smooth, calm gold shooting through the web under my skin. I'd half-sensed the command he used, the image of a critter climbing a bulkhead, and then my fingers were plunging in the steelcrete, shredding the metal like skin, and slowing my headlong rush into broken bones.
Coordinating feet and hands had taken awhile, retracting claws and griping with them. Now, the muscles in my arms and back screamed, while the ones in my thighs, where the armour was thickest, felt like they could go on forever. If I was lucky, forever wouldn't be required.
A light on the top of my head picks out the junction ahead, just a few more handholds and I'll be on Lab Two, or what's left of it. From what I've seen of the rest of the ship, Aeotu hasn't been kind to Citlali. The signs of fug are everywhere, and I wonder what the alien ship has in store for the thing it thinks is home. Or does it?
Before Core shot me into space in an escape pod, the AI said Aeotu was repairing Citlali. So what changed?
The thing in my gut, the knowledge that passed between Aeotu and I in the eter, tells me it was Grea, the part of her that touched Euiva. If Grea hadn't woken up, hadn't tried to save me from the grow field, then this wouldn't be happening.
I'm climbing into the junction, my arms strings of old biogel, legs powering me along. There's no time to stop. I have to save Grea, and there's only one way I know, that Aeotu knows to do that.
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