City of the Falling Sky

by Joseph Evans

  Eiya slumped to the ground and hugged her knees, staring into space.

  “He was the only one that could have given us the answers.”

  “We’ve come all this way,” Seckry said. “We can’t go back now. Not without finding something out. We have to go in. We have to search for any information we can get.”

  Eiya nodded, and Seckry pushed the door open.

  The chamber was full of computers that were still running, and was lit by hundreds of blinking lights on components and panels.

  They made their way carefully around the skeleton. Seckry had expected the room to smell awful from the decomposing corpse, but in fact, the close air just smelled of hot computer fans and plastic.

  “Seckry, look at this,” Eiya called.

  Around the corner was an alcove, its walls covered from ground to ceiling in scraps of paper. As Seckry moved closer he saw that each bit of paper had a different sixteen digit number on it.

  “What do you think this is?” Eiya asked.

  Seckry shook his head. He had no idea.

  Seckry felt himself drawn to an old, square television set that was still switched on, and was showing white noise. Clustered underneath the outdated television was a mound of video tapes, and scrawled into the desk beside them were the words:

  EVIDENCE AGAINST DARKLIGHT

  “Eiya,” Seckry said hurriedly. “Look.” He picked up one of the tapes. A frayed white sticker labelled it as ‘The Stolen Child.’

  “It has to be Danney, doesn’t it?” Eiya said, a mixture of excitement and horror in her voice.

  Seckry saw that underneath the television was an ancient VHS recorder. He had never seen one in real life before, and hadn’t realised there were any still in existence, having gone out of use over a hundred years ago.

  He looked at Eiya and she gave him a tentative nod.

  Seckry placed the tape into the player and pressed play.

  There were two men on screen, one he recognised as Kan Darklight, and the other as an older Ropart Sanfarrow.

  “We don’t need to put him through any unnecessary suffering,” Sanfarrow said.

  “What are you talking about?” This was Darklight, storming around the room ferociously. The camera was shaking slightly from his pacing. “The idea is suffering. This project is based on suffering. Don’t you understand?”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Sanfarrow said firmly.

  “He needs to feel hate,” Darklight continued. “He needs to be so filled with hatred that the only thing he wants to do is kill.”

  The tape flickered and cut to black for a moment.

  Then a picture appeared again, and this time there was a young boy in the room, huddled in the corner.

  Eiya squeezed Seckry’s arm tight.

  On screen, Darklight entered the room, walked over and kicked the boy in the arm, making him begin to cry. Then Darklight kicked him again, harder this time, so that the boy toppled over and curled up into a ball, crying into his hands.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen, is our specimen. We’re calling him Project Suffer. Right now he is a weak, pathetic, worm of a child, but by the time the project has been completed, he will be the perfect assassin.”

  The tape suddenly fast forwarded of its own accord and stopped at a different scene.

  “Project Suffer log, good progression,” Darklight said. “Though the drugs have got to him. Doesn’t want to move today. If he keeps getting like this I’m gonna have to take some drastic action.”

  The tape cut again.

  “Still not moving,” said Darklight, now standing in a different position. “Like a slug.”

  The tape flickered and cut to a new scene once more.

  “What day is it today, Project Suffer?” Darklight said. He nudged Danney gently. “Hey, hey. I said what day is it today? It’s your birthday. That’s right. We know the date you were born, and we’re not monsters. We couldn’t not give you a present on your birthday.”

  Sanfarrow entered the room carrying a tray that was covered by a red cloth. He unsheathed it, and underneath laid a heap of rabbit shaped cookies.

  “Made them fresh myself this morning,” he said, smiling. “You like cookies, don’t you?”

  Danney shook his head.

  “Everyone likes cookies,” Darklight persisted.

  “I wanna go home,” Danney said, through tears.

  “Dear Gedin, Kan, what are we doing? We have to let him go. We have to give him back to his mother.”

  Darklight breathed in slowly.

  “Ropart, I’d like to remind you who’s in charge around here. I’m project manager, not you, and this little experiment is going to earn me a shot at being CEO of the whole company.”

  “Kan, do you really think this . . . this torturous experiment is going to sit well with the Endrin governing board?”

  “Well, Ropart, if it doesn’t, I’m sure I’ll find a way to change their opinions. Now, throw me one of those shapes.”

  “What?” said Sanfarrow.

  “The shapes. The cookie shapes.”

  “The . . . cookie cutters? Why?”

  “Just do it!” Darklight snapped.

  There was a pause before Sanfarrow tossed one of the metal rabbit shapes across the room.

  Darklight examined it for a moment, like a surgeon inspecting his tools. A peculiar smile appeared on his face.

  “You want a tattoo for your birthday, little boy? Mummy’s not around to stop you, is she?”

  Sanfarrow said, “Kan, no!”

  Darklight smiled and laughed as though he couldn’t believe what he was doing, and then he held up the cookie cutter with one hand, and heated the blade of it with a lighter.

  “The scar,” Eiya said, and she buried her face into Seckry’s arm.

  Seckry could do nothing but stare at the screen, transfixed and horrified at what he was seeing.

  Seckry’s stomach lurched as Darklight pressed the cookie cutter against the boy’s skin. The scream that was let out was so loud that the tape crackled and distorted from it. Darklight’s other arm was holding the boy down by the head, keeping him still as he violently wriggled in pain.

  There was a flash of light as the tape malfunctioned, and then it cut to a steady shot of the boy, looking older now. He was lying on a surgery table, completely naked, and his eyes were rolling around, deeply sunken into blackened eye sockets.

  “Time to begin procedure 203, the second step of amalgamation,” said Darklight. He began cutting a line down the skin of the boy’s forearm. The boy didn’t stir, his eyes just kept rolling around, and saliva was dripping from his mouth.

  Darklight picked up a strip of metal that was dotted with the green and black nodes of an electronic chip, and pushed it into the wound.

  “The glowing light under his skin,” Eiya said.

  “Plasmatic pulsers,” said the voice of Darklight, a hint of pride in his voice. “This is where the boy becomes the slave.”

  The tape crackled and flickered again, and in the next shot, Danney was standing in the corner of the room, his head hung and his hair dangling in front of him.

  Little balls of something were hitting him, and it took Seckry and Eiya a moment to realise that they were coming from the direction of the camera.

  “Come on,” said Darklight aggressively. “Aren’t you getting angry?”

  He screwed a piece of paper into a large ball and threw it at Danney’s head. It bounced to the floor and there was no reaction.

  “Come on you little piece of dirt . . . what makes you angry?”

  Darklight wandered around a bit more before saying, “Hey . . . I wonder how that mother of yours is doing without you.”

  At this, Danney lifted his head and launched himself at Darklight. In mid dive there was a loud crack and a flash of blue light and Danney fell to the floor, lifeless.

  Darklight laughed incredulously, seemingly impressed by his own invention.

  “Perfect,” he said, and the
tape distorted before cutting to black.

  Seckry pressed stop on the player.

  “We’ve seen enough of this,” he said distantly. Seeing Danney, as a child, being electrocuted like that made him want to vomit. He took a moment to compose himself before switching the television off at the mains.

  “He’s done nothing wrong, has he?” Eiya said, pained. “They basically forced him to murder all those people, and if he didn’t, they’d electrocute him from inside his own body.”

  Seckry couldn’t bear to think about it any longer.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s search the rest of the place. We have to think about the innoya who Darklight have captive. We have to save them. If we can find the key to the Divinita chamber, then maybe we’ll be able to.”

  They both began rummaging through more of Sanfarrow’s things, and after a few minutes, Eiya said, “Seck, there’s a door to another room here.”

  Eiya pushed open the door and led them into a smaller space in which there was a human sized tubular booth and what appeared to be a makeshift rope elevator.

  Eiya glanced back at Seckry. “This place has more than one floor?”

  But Seckry was more interested in the booth. Dozens of diagrams, charts and figures were tacked to the wall beside it, and it was connected to another formidable array of blinking computer equipment. As he peered closer at the mess of paper on the wall, his eyes widened and his heart began to race.

  Each diagram was labelled with the same prefix: Innoya Detection Device V 2.3.

  “Eiya, this thing detects if someone is innoya,” Seckry said, his eyes scanning everything in front of him rapidly.

  Eiya joined him. “I guess this must be a very early form of the white chip.”

  Seckry looked down at the control board of the computer. Stuck to the panel was a laminated sheet labelled ‘Usage.’ Seckry and Eiya exchanged knowing glances.

  “This is where we find out, isn’t it?” Eiya said. “I must be innoya, it all fits together. I must have escaped somehow from the Divinita chamber and that’s when you found me. But now . . . now we can know for sure.”

  “Are you certain you want to step into that thing?” Seckry said. “It looks really old and unstable.”

  “I need to know,” Eiya said softly, and Seckry nodded. In truthfulness, so did he.

  “Okay,” Seckry read. “It says that once you’re standing inside the booth, I’m to slide the glass door shut and secure it with the latch provided. Then I must flick these three switches in succession.” Seckry made a mental note of them. “Once the scan has begun, an image of the subject will be projected onto the wall. Humans will emanate a bright red, and innoya, due to the level of helitonic particles in their DNA, will emanate a bright blue.”

  “It sounds simple enough,” Eiya said. She took a deep breath and stepped inside the glass tube before Seckry slowly slid its casing shut.

  Seckry double checked he had his fingers on the right switches, and then one by one, flicked them on.

  A deep, mechanical whirr, like the sound of a motor, filled the underground chamber.

  Eiya gave him the thumbs up from inside the glass.

  After a few minutes the motor wound down and everything went quiet again. Then a projector that was hanging from the ceiling flickered into life and a picture spread across the wall.

  Neither Seckry nor Eiya said anything initially. Seckry narrowed his eyes in confusion.

  What they were both looking at was an image of the chamber and a very faint outline of Eiya’s clothes. But where Eiya should have been, there was nothing. No red light, no blue light, just blank space.

  “I . . . don’t think it worked,” Seckry said.

  “Let’s try it agai–” Eiya’s words died in her mouth as something made both her and Seckry freeze in horror.

  The rope elevator was moving.

  Someone was coming down.

  Chapter Thirty

  Sanfarrow Explains