Second Contact

by Guerric Haché, Keezy Young

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “I will once we figure out where he’s hiding.” She glanced at her hunter. “Hail, you remember the spot on the map as well, right?”

  “That’s not a plan.” Zoa’s frown deepened, and then she caught herself. “Er, apologies, Herald. What if Ada’s information is wrong? It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  What if it was? It would surprise Isavel, but she had to make room for surprises. If the information was wrong, they would likely just stumble into an empty wood. “Then we’ll figure something out.”

  “What if it’s an ambush?”

  She shook her head. She felt certain it wasn’t an ambush, though wasn’t confident in her ability to defend that certainty if pressed. What was she supposed to say? “Have faith. I don’t know what the gods are thinking any more than you do, but I have faith they’ve put us on the right path.”

  The coder didn’t seem satisfied, but she nodded nonetheless. Pacified was never as good as satisfied, but it would do in a pinch. Isavel needed to get this over with and figure out a way to get back to the army with another excuse for a delay; if killing another ghost walker would help her on that way, it would have to happen.

  Ren glanced down at something, and his brow creased a little. “What’s that in your pocket?”

  She jolted, her hand snapping away from the locator stone. She had barely realized her fingers were lingering there. “What?”

  “You keep sticking your hand in that pocket.”

  Suddenly all three pairs of eyes were on her. She froze, then slowly drew out the little black stone and showed it to them. “It… helps me keep track of where Ada is. So I know she’s not sneaking up on us.”

  Both the coders seemed to have a good idea of what it was, and their eyes widened. Zoa stepped closer and stared at it. “Gods, how did she make it so small?”

  Ren glanced between the stone and Isavel, and laid a hand on Zoa’s shoulder in a surprisingly firm way. “Come on, Zoa. We’ve got a long way to go, so let’s get going.” Isavel didn’t know the coders as well as she could, but she had always assumed Zoa was the dominant siblings. And yet, Zoa glanced at him and nodded, and they clambered quickly into the hauler. Isavel wondered about the unspoken message in that grip, but the hauler thrummed louder and she jumped up onto the flatbed with Hail, leaning against the cabin as it began to move away from the army, out over the salt water gently lapping against the rocky shore. She would need to pay closer attention to them.

  The hauler sped out across the water, leaving only faint ripples in its wake. She spotted birds flying over the strait in the distance, and found herself imagining how far away they were, seeing their trajectories through the air, seeing in the curvature of their descent the nascence of their rise after they skimmed the water. Hail seemed to be watching them too, and for a moment in silence Isavel enjoyed the richness of the motion.

  Then Hail looked at her, flexing a hand with the hunter’s gift towards the air. “Practice?”

  Isavel blanked. “What, on the birds?”

  “No, no, they just gave me the idea. Shoot and catch each other’s shots.” Suddenly Hail’s eyes widened a bit in understanding. “It’s a game I used to play as a youngster, with other hunters. To pass the time, test skills.”

  Isavel glanced at the birds, wondering if she hadn’t secretly been thinking of her hunter’s gift, too, watching the birds glide. All the more reason for her to get an answer out of the gods - what was she? What were the gifts? If her gifts had reduced her to a war machine, she deserved to know.

  She nodded at Hail, and in a few moments they were off, hexagons zipping through the air, knocking into each other with glassy cracks and flashes . With the hauler moving so quickly it was more a challenge to aim, but even so the hunter’s gift was not to be trifled with. Here, far from war and danger and death, there was even something pretty about the hard, geometric light of their shots as they burst in the air.

  The sun was starting to fall as they made landfall on the island, their crossing much more direct than the route the army would be taking. Nothing other than wedge-shaped flocks of seabirds shared the surface of the strait with them, but Hail visibly relaxed as they reached the shore. Clearly Ada’s secret weapons weighed heavily on her. Isavel was not afraid, though - as long as Ada knew where she was, they wouldn’t face any strikes. Her little locator stone worked well as a protective talisman.

  As they skimmed ashore, surrounded by towering forests and lush undergrowth that almost completely hid what ruins remained, they pulled to a stop and Ren emerged with a map, hastily rolling it out onto the hauler’s flatbed. The fabric was imbued with a carefully-dyed outline of the coast and the island. Where they had copied it from and how accurate it was, Isavel could only guess.

  He pointed at a spot along the island’s coast, then traced his finger inland. “Alright, so we passed those little islands on the way in. You said we should be going here, right?”

  Isavel looked across it, trying to remember what Ada’s ghost friend had told her. “I think so. There was an inlet that cut into the heart of the island, and the ghost should be hiding at the tip of the inlet. Hail, does that look right?”

  Hail bit her lip. “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Good.” Ren glanced at the hauler’s cabin, and Isavel noticed Zoa hadn’t come out. He lowered his voice. “Isavel, I know people tell you not to trust Ada. I sure as hell wouldn’t. But… We crossed that open seawater, and she knew where you were, with that locator you have, but she didn’t do anything. Hold onto that thing.”

  It was a bit of a strange thing to say, leaving Isavel puzzled as her hand drifted to her pocket again. “Of course.”

  He smiled feebly, and nodded towards the dense thicket of trunks devouring the world ahead of them. “Let’s be quick about this, then. I hope the place is easy to find.”

  He climbed back into the hauler, and Isavel glanced over at Hail, trying to figure out what he had meant. Hail’s pale brow was dominated by an commiserate frown, though; at least it wasn’t Isavel’s fault she didn’t understand. As the hauler slipped deeper into the forest, those thoughts faded from her mind as she focused on the myriad ways she might encounter this final ghost walker.

  When they found a significant patch of ruins, night was closing its arms around the island, and the structures poking out of the forest looked almost entirely deserted. The hauler slowed down at the crest of a hill, and the four of them disembarked together, settling the hauler down onto the ground. Isavel could make out the outlines of broad, squat buildings along the shore of an inlet ahead.

  It didn’t look like a fortified hideout. If there was anybody here at all, she would almost be surprised. Isavel sighed and pointed at the hauler. “Zoa, Ren, unless you two want to risk getting into a fight I think you’d be safest watching the hauler. Be ready to leave quickly.”

  The coders nodded, but Zoa reached into the cabin and pulled out two ancient weapons, smooth-barreled guns that looked matte grey in the twilight. She handed one to her brother. “We figured this wouldn’t be entirely safe.”

  Isavel nodded at them. It was a fair assumption, though if they stayed inside the hauler they should be reasonably well-protected. The two of them leaned against the hauler, letting their eyes wander the woods down to the inlet.

  She could only do so much for them. She pulled off her tunic, exposing more of her pathfinder-gifted skin and her dull camouflaging brace, and bound her wavy hair out of the way. “Hail, I’ll go in ahead. Keep your eyes on me.”

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  She glanced at Hail, whose face flickered between a smile and stern obedience. She wondered what she was thinking, whether she was re-evaluating Isavel the way everybody else seemed to have. She bent over to pick a few stray fronds to weave into her hair, and let her skin shift and melt to match in colour and texture the dim greys, browns, and greens of the evening forest. She crouched low, gifted senses knowing exactly where to find sure f
ooting, and began creeping downhill towards the ruins.

  It was strangely liberating to be on a wild hunt again.

  As they approached, the instincts of her gifts drew her eyes to things she might never have seen in her past life. Snapped twigs seemed almost brighter, footprints seemed clear and crisply defined, and a few rustling sounds on the wind were distinguishably animal. She soon started seeing details in the ruins, too. Her gifts were much more useful for identifying humans or animals than they were for looking at lifeless walls, but still she saw a stark outline of something deliberately painted onto the sides of the ruins.

  At first she thought it must be some kind of dragon, but she soon realized it was stranger. It was a dark human shape, what little colour it might have had drained away in the evening light, with two three-bladed black wings jutting out of its back. A dark angel. Isavel knew who that was.

  Somebody had been here and done that recently. Somebody who knew about Ada. There were ghosts nearby - she was sure of it. They could very well be in the ruin right now, though Isavel saw no smoke or light or signs of occupation.

  Silently, she crept back through the woods towards Hail, and when they met up she laid a hand on Hail’s shoulder and whispered. “I think they might be in there. Hail, I’m going to sneak in. Don’t follow me in until you hear fighting, okay?”

  Hail was keeping very still, her eyes on the old buildings ahead. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  Isavel tilted her head and smiled. “I’ve faced worse. But if you’re worried I’ve been caught or killed, don’t come after me.”

  The hunter smirked. “With respect, Isavel, in that case you wouldn’t be able to stop me.”

  “If you insist.” She hoped Hail wasn’t serious. If she was incapacitated in any way, the rest of them should definitely run. She hoped they understood that.

  She slunk through the undergrowth as fast as she dared, down to the side of the ruin. That angelic shadow loomed over her, and as the clouds in the sky moved it almost seemed it might fall on Isavel if she didn’t run away. It was an illusion, of course, but she decided not to risk disturbing the figure. She turned to the next wall, let the lightness of the dragon’s gift fill her limbs and her core, and with a twitch and a flex she brought to light blue claws on her fingers that easily dug into the ancient concrete. Right claw, left, right. She hauled her lightened body up the side of the ruins, easily reaching the top at a brisk climb, and in a single motion threw herself up above the rim of the roof.

  She landed as quietly as she could and looked around, but there was nobody here. An ancient door, locked, blocked her way deeper into the building. It proved surprisingly flimsy as she slammed her shoulder against it, tearing it off its fixtures and setting it aside. Down into the bowels of the building - and here, finally, she got a subtle sense that there were people here. She didn’t hear anything, saw no signs of occupation, but… she smelled something, she realized. Her nostrils flared. She smelled people. Or ghosts, as the case may be.

  She found six of them halfway down the building, in a room not far from the stairwell. Sleeping. She snapped a blade out from her right hand, a glittering blade of hard white light tessellated into tiny hexagons, and suddenly realised what she was doing. Not only were they sleeping as she prepared to send them to Elysium, but realistically, she had no way to know they were actually ghosts. What was she thinking?

  One of them noticed her, though, flailing awake with a telling cry. “White Witch!”

  She exhaled as the room burst into chaos. That settled that.

  There were hunters; she saw their shots coming. Shields up. Fragments burst against the white sheen of the hexagons on her forearms as she balanced back on her feet and drank from her dragon’s gift, feeling heat curl in her lungs and up her throat like smoke. She drew her two shields apart and roared dragonfire through the gap, red-gold swarms of hard light shards coursing into the room and bursting into hot electric dust against everything they hit. Screams. She stepped in.

  The thrum of a warrior’s blade found her ears and she folded, yielding the space she had been standing in even as the warrior lunged for her through the smoke. As he passed she jabbed her right shield down just enough to cut through his back. He fell with a thud; she was already looking ahead. From dragonfire had spawned actual flames and spouts of smoke, a black miasma seething crimson and gold in its depths, but through them she still glimpsed the shapes of ghosts looking to surround her. Three. Warriors’ body language on two. She shot the third through the smoke and heard a body thud against the floor.

  The warriors lunged, trying to flank her, but she stepped between them. Her skin rippled with roiling black blotches and lancing flashes of hot colour, her olive hue completely gone as she took the whorling sights around her into her skin. They couldn’t see her. One of them lunged close, but not close enough, and she jabbed a hand behind her back and struck the woman through the ribcage with a brilliant orange shot that got lost in the room.

  It was getting hot in here. Isavel could outlast him, the warmth just barely beginning to prickle at her skin, but the last warrior ran for the door, and through the smoke she saw a blue shield held awkwardly behind him. She gritted her teeth and sprang after him into the hall, light on her feet, throwing herself against the wall in her speed and then pushing off it with a bounce. He screamed and she fired. He collapsed, his calves sliced and cauterized, and she landed with a foot between his shoulder blades.

  “The walker. Is he here?”

  He winced, clenching his teeth. “Fuck off, Witch.”

  She ground her heel harder into his back. “I’ll make it quick.”

  He seemed not to breath for a moment, then exhaled, long and ragged. “He’s on the ground floor. You didn’t even need to come up here and kill us. Maybe if you kill him you can leave the rest of us alone.”

  A shot to the head was as quick as she could manage. He was gone, no doubt rising in Elysium, finally freed from a world that had never wanted him here. She stepped away from the body and made for the stairs, but for several moments she couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing. She had met ghosts in Campus, and they hadn’t been looking for a fight. These ones probably weren’t either.

  What was she gaining by killing them?

  What was she gaining by killing another walker? Just one more ghost sent to Elysium. One more enemy eliminated, if for no other reason than to pacify Mother Jera and try to get people to take her seriously again.

  How would they even know if she had really killed anyone, out here?

  She did not encounter any other ghosts on her way down the ancient stairwell, and when she reached the final door, as deep as it would go, she quietly opened it and looked inside.

  There, in the center of a large and dimly-lit room, was a small circular area where the world fell away. In its place was something entirely different, a vibrant room with lacquered white furniture and soft yellow fabrics, a golden sun streaming into the room filtered by the leaves of some foliage that lay out of sight and out of this world. In the center, sitting on a vast throne of cushions and pillows, lay a haggard-looking man with brownish skin and closed eyes. He rested in the arms of an otherworldly woman, her silver hair a startling contrast to her young face and smooth pearlescent skin, her ears oddly pointed at the tops and her ey es remarkably green.

  Neither of them noticed Isavel until she stepped through the edge of the world, into the walker’s bubble, and stood before them. Even then the walker remained immobile, eyes closed. Only the strange woman’s eyes fell on Isavel, holding in themselves something inhuman.

  Chapter 9

  Venshi had looked into a mirror in her human life, seemingly on a regular basis, and so Ada saw Venshi’s human face in the memories she had taken. A tanned woman whose skin retained its natural white pallor in only a few places, her blond hair hung knotted and strangely tangled in thick braids, laced with beads. Her mirror-gazing ritual involved painting her face a great deal, yet the memory of th
at ritual was tainted by a deep, alien irony. Venshi lived in a world where everything was so mundane, and something about Venshi’s plots gave her a sense of contrast that had once amused her, and now aroused Ada’s contempt.

  A man and a woman locked in a glass-walled cell, banging on the glass, trying to get out.

  In Venshi’s time, the vast city that would become Glass Peaks stood taller and more imposing, glittering brighter than today’s ruins had ever suggested. Watchers tended the city everywhere as throngs of people walked the streets and ships blasted off through the southern sky towards space. The world Venshi had been born into was crowded, loud, unlike anything Ada had seen before.

  Something gaseous flooded the glass prison. The prisoners shouted, screamed, clutched their heads in pain and fear.

  Most of Venshi’s memories of the ancient world were sunken into a pestilent morass of disgust and anger. Venshi avoided the open city, spending most of her time in laboratories with her co-conspirators. Anthropology, nanotechnology, evolutionary biology, neuropsychology - for years they plumbed the depths of sciences Ada had never imagined, looking for a way to wipe the Earth bare. Looking for a way to fix humanity’s flaws, as they saw it. And for years, they got nowhere.

  The prisoners didn’t recognize the simple written words in front of them. They cowered in fear. It would pass - their baselines would shift, and they would accept the dyslexia. But more testing was necessary. More confirmation, more attempts to falsify the hypothesis.

  After years of searching, one of their researchers made contact with a laboratory in the colonies. It called itself Shade, apparently a shortened form of some longer, less ominous name. It never revealed its home planet, though, and demanded absolute secrecy. Despite some investigation on their part, Venshi and her colleagues could never even begin to guess who was associated with it. But as they worked with Shade over the course of just six months, their research broke from its shackles and grew and grew, morphing into the final technophage.