by K. T. Hanna
And she knows, no matter how long it might have taken her, Dom would never risk being the one to hurt her again. Sai makes a note of it for the future, just in case that crunch time ever comes.
“I’m so tired,” she says, weariness making her eyelids droop. “She’s safe for now.”
“You’re not.” He hoists her up in his arms before she can protest and puts a finger over her lips. “Keep an eye on Ash for me, Iria?”
Sai didn’t even see the other girl in the room, and the comfort of Dom’s chest against her detracts from her worry at not noticing. The usually jovial guard looks subdued, sort of sad. All she does is nod, her eyes never leaving Aishke’s slumbering form. It takes a moment for Sai to realize that Iria is projecting her shields, keeping all four of them safe. She’s come a long way since they began training.
“Thank you, Iria.” Sai means it, for a lot of reasons.
Iria manages a slight smile in response, a bead of sweat on her brow the only giveaway that she’s straining. “You need to rest, Sai, and your room is currently a heaping pile of ash.”
Sai hadn’t really thought of that. Her head is a little fuzzy.
The bed he puts her down on is softer than her old one but vaguely familiar. She forces her eyes to open and realizes she’s back in the now-expanded hospital wing she came to all those months ago, when she first left Central with Aishke. Dom’s expression is blank as he sits on the chair next to her bed, eyes searching her face.
She takes a breath. “What’s the bad news?” Because she knows it’s coming.
He sighs. “They have something to pinpoint their search on now. There is no way Central and the Damascus didn’t feel that burst of power.”
Sai thinks for a few moments, with a growing feeling of impending doom. “Well, hell.”
Dom closes the door to the infirmary behind him and heads toward Mathur’s lab. That shockwave may as well have been a neon arrow hanging down from the sky, pointing right on top of the Mobile. Even with the distance he could cover in Mele, it’s not enough time to arrange a complete escape. The Damascus have a homing beacon now.
“Are they okay?”
Mathur doesn’t even look up from his attempts to recreate Dom’s efforts. “They will be fine. We, on the other hand, not so much.” Dom leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms. That such a human gesture comes naturally almost takes the edge off the gnawing disquiet settling in the bottom of his stomach. He watches the man make minor adjustments his almost gnarled hands shouldn’t be able to manage. It appears his learning curve is still sharp despite his age.
“She is strong, that one.”
Dom has no doubt he’s talking about Sai. “But Ash is volatile. We really need Bastian here to help control her. Sai can only do so much. She’s not as experienced and sometimes...she seems so lost.”
“Lost or not, she bites the bullet.” Mathur stops and glances up for the first time with a frown on his face. “Fine.” He wipes his hands and sits down in his chair. “You are going to tell me what that deafening surge meant?”
“Ash lost what control she had, and now they have a line straight to us.” Dom uncrosses his arms and pushes himself away from the door. For a moment, he loses concentration on his form and has to steady himself, re-solidifying what passes as his hair. He pretends not to notice Mathur’s raised eyebrow. “That noise was deafening to you and anyone else who can sense psionic abilities. But to creations like the Damascus? It’s a flaring beacon guiding them to our spot. I can only hope it gave them a general area and not a defined one. It’s the only hope you have of getting any of the Exiled to safety.”
“What can I do?” Mathur stands up and cracks his knuckles. Some things about age can’t be reversed.
“Fix them. We need them.” Dom’s already running through time calculations in his head. How fast Mele can get to Central, how quickly he can get inside. If he’s got any chance of contacting Bastian and figuring out tactics to delay the Damascus as long as they can, they may at least give the Exiled a chance to disperse.
“I’ll buy you time. But we need them. They’re the only ones with the physical strength to go one-on-one with the Damascus.” He carefully doesn’t mention that dominos won’t be much use if they’re outnumbered in a fight, either.
“You have no faith in Sai?” Mathur sounds surprised.
“I only have faith in Sai. An ability which may very well wipe out all Damascus in front of her, yet render her useless for at least a few hours afterward is not something I want to trust anyone’s lives to.”
He doesn’t wait for Mathur to answer. He has so much lost ground to make up for. Their current location is far out from Central, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. He’ll never make it in time.
Although Mele’s never been pushed to her limits. “No time like the present, right?”
Night is falling when Dom finally makes it to Central. He’s not sure Mele will recover fast enough for the trip back. At least, with her adrium heritage, she’s not broken.
The desertion of the streets is worse than the last time. They’re empty, except for the occasional patrol. Dom leans against one of the concrete skyscrapers and allows himself to blend. It’s so much easier to observe when they don’t know he is.
He weaves his way in and out of two separate patrols on this part of the main road through town. The soldiers lumber through the streets, footfalls resounding in their finality. Their hinges whir as they move, like the constant buzzing of insects in the poorer quarters. Yet there is no lieutenant to be seen, no towering version scanning in front. Dom frowns, not sure how it’s possible for a lieutenant to be away from his unit. Perhaps his understanding of the Damascus isn’t quite as thorough as he thought.
Scouring them for information doesn’t work. Their minds aren’t minds, but a complex myriad of programming with a regenerative power core that fuels the adrium parasite into requisitioning the whole thing. It’s the perfect host for it, even if it’s the worst use possible. A glancing sweep of their mainframes leaks malice and greed. They take what they need to evolve without considering consequences. Such an alien feeling to him, and yet so familiar it makes him shudder.
Each patrol has two soldiers and one Hound. He frowns, quite certain the ones patrolling for the Exiled had six per group. Perhaps they divided the city up differently. After all, with the time that’s passed, it’s unlikely only full patrols survived the war. It’s amazing the Hound can’t smell Dom or see him, but he’s not about to question why. The patrols meet at a central point every eight and a half minutes before walk on and eventually turn to meet back in the middle.
Dom checks himself, the pack on his back only loosely blending in. Modulating the camouflage abilities of his skin takes a lot more concentration than he’d like to admit lately. But if he wants to get into the building, he’s going to have to take his old and trusted route through the sewers and via the psionic web fueling labs.
He eyes the patrols just as they turn and waits three and a half minutes before dashing out, lifting the manhole cover with practiced ease, and pulling the entrance softly shut behind him as he drops into the depths below.
Dom crouches on the ground, heedless of the stinking quagmire around his feet. It’ll come off. Nothing actually sticks to adrium. There’s a sound just off to the right. Dom stiffens and dives left into a side roll. He lands covered in muck, only narrowly avoiding the cleave of a nasty-looking knife.
His movements are fluid as he rises again, allowing himself to blend into the darkness, retreat to the shadows away from the grate. Mind racing, he has to consciously control the parasite as it tries to seep through him from the edges of his vision. Someone is hiding off to the other side, in the same shadows that now conceal him—waiting.
Two patrols, no lieutenants. Dom kicks himself for not thinking of it sooner. There were other soldiers, but none of them the taller, more sleek lieutenants. All of them just soldiers and Hounds. It only stands to reason that they were
on the outskirts, observing and waiting for the right moment to strike, regardless of the cause. He walked right into their trap—or, at least, dropped smack-bang into the middle of one.
On the bright side, it also means a lieutenant separated from his patrol. Where there’s a lieutenant, there is a kernel. And where there’s a kernel, there’s a way for Mathur to recreate the pulse-device and hopefully shut the abominations off. Maybe.
Subtle movement interrupts Dom’s line of thought. He files his reasoning away for later on and focuses on blending, on being a part of his surroundings. His body shifts subtly, hardening, flexing, and strengthening. The Damascus don’t have minds susceptible to usual forms of thought manipulation—a large part of Dom’s ability to camouflage himself. Right now, he has to rely on the natural abilities of the adrium.
He hasn’t killed anything in a while, and if he can let just enough of that darkness in and channel it, maybe it’ll sate the parasite for now. The extra strength and precision it lends him is an added bonus. A Damascus lieutenant sounds like the perfect test, because if he loses control here, it doesn’t really matter.
He takes a step back just as the first lieutenant steps across the small shaft of light beaming down from the grate above them. Immediately, it’s obvious that the earlier knife was actually an oddly modified forearm, but Dom can’t dwell on it. Lieutenants don’t lumber like a soldier; they dance lightly by comparison. Marginally taller than Dom, its movements are fluid, and the swipe at his head barely misses—enough to throw the lieutenant slightly off-balance. But just as it stumbles, the second one moves in. As if they planned it, execution-style. Its grip is solid as it grabs the back of Dom’s head.
He drops down, morphing as much of himself as will conform, and narrowly slips away. His body churns through several stages of camouflage as the hunger inside him spikes with the desperate transformation, difficult to control. There’s only so much leeway his true form allows, but at least it worked, even if it jolted the parasite to the fore.
The first lieutenant has since regained its balance and circles its prey. Its arms flow into positions metal shouldn’t be capable of twisting into, oddly captivating. Dom shakes his head, switching the focus in his eyes so he’s no longer as easily distracted, and barely reacts in time to the second closing in from the rear.
He ducks and rolls, the sloshing of the muck he disturbs only a faint background noise as he sweeps a leg out in a quick, uneven beat that catches the second lieutenant off-guard and sends it crashing to the ground. Up on his toes again, he pulls from the fighting drills he and Sai used to do. Light on his feet, focusing through a filter that helps with the dim light, Dom barely ducks an oncoming swing aimed at his head. He reaches out as the Damascus attempts to dance out of his way and grips the first lieutenant by the neck, extending his fingers to as razor-sharp as they’ll go. His makeshift steel nails get caught in the wiring behind the protective plate at the front, and he grips hard, cutting into them.
The second lieutenant drips muck, warily circling around as Dom holds the other out in front. The huge form hanging from his hand is unable to move anything but its arms, which flail in Dom’s direction, a whirring and feeble attempt now that its main motor functions have literally been cut off. Apparently there’s a downside to being a parasite-driven robot. Dom sneers.
The first wires to go controlled lower movement—a lucky cut. Dom tracks the second as it moves through the gloom. It can’t camouflage itself. The adrium only lends a Damascus strength and the parasite; there is no psionic gene to grip onto and twist reality with. Dom won’t lose his prey again, and the darkness moves in ever so slightly, suffusing more of his thought process.
Steel crushes beneath his fingers, and the remnants of the Damascus dangle helplessly. Disgust rises up so quickly it threatens to choke him. Not only is this one stupid, but he realizes it’s only a modified grunt—an experiment of sorts. He frowns and casts his attention toward the real lieutenant that’s now prowling like a tiger, circling him and trying to spot his weakness.
As it launches himself from a dark corner, Dom throws the huge body of the soldier at it, ripping the wires and the protection plate out in the process. Sparks fly, and its screech cuts off abruptly. The lieutenant scrambles back, a frustrated expression crossing its excuse for a face. Dom doesn’t wait, but instead launches himself after his distraction, fist focused into a sharp trowel-like implement.
But the lieutenant is impressively stronger than the solider. He deflects Dom’s initial attack at the elbow and avoids the sharp point to his face. As Dom lands, he has to jump over the leg that tries to sweep him off his feet and regain his composure for a renewed attack.
Barely dodging a flurry of punches, Dom backs away, blending his body to his surroundings, masking himself with the shadows so he can regain his bearings. But the Damascus’ eyes never leave his face. Stepping forward, Dom launches a slew of his own punches and kicks, leveled at driving his opponent back, but each blow to the chest plate is met with a renewed density, as if each hit causes the adrium to reinforce that one spot.
One step back and the tide changes as the Damascus presses forward again. It aims for specific parts of Dom’s body, and he narrowly ducks the first few hits. With only a moment to take advantage, Dom rolls to the ground and slides beneath the hulking figure of the lieutenant, who looks down just a fraction too late with a bright spark of what probably passes for surprise in his mechanical eyes.
With exact precision, Dom punches a hole in the groin of the machine and hopes against hope that he’s right. He reaches up, grabs the neural center for the lower extremities, and yanks it out.
The lieutenant focuses on him as its legs give way, and Dom barely rolls away in time. It crumbles to the ground, arms flailing, fingers digging through the muck and sewage to gain leverage.
The tiny yellow light on the side of its head tells Dom it’s already transmitting. But with the conditions down here, it’s doubtful any of the sensors are working properly and Dom’s organic signature could just as well be rats.
He jumps on the left arm and holds it with his foot as he reaches forward and pulls the right arm out of its socket. He doesn’t say anything—no reasoning, no wisecracks—because he realizes any type of imprint other than the dim reception they’ll have of him is enough to get both him and others killed. The GNW can’t track him; for all they know, he’s defunct. Can’t hurt to let them think that a little longer.
He kneels down slowly, uses his fingers to cut away at the rear of the Damascus’ skull, and then delicately removes the kernel, severing both visual and audio centers as he does so. When he removes the perfectly preserved specimen, the limb beneath his foot stops its frantic and futile attempt to break free.
He stands for a moment and looks at the Damascus, hating it for the damage its kind did to the Exiled. For the damage they almost did to Sai. She’s the one thing in the world that matters more than Mathur. Her ability to forgive, her ability to see past people’s faults and find something in them that warrants care.
Those thoughts cause the tendrils of the ever-present parasite to pull back, as if they’re sulking.
For a brief moment, he wishes someone had been there to record his actions, but he’s quite sure he could easily remember to instruct the dominos on how to disable a Damascus. The tidbit of knowing the adrium can flow to reinforce an area is a great little discovery.
Dom checks his backpack carefully, glad to find he’s not crushed its contents or hurt it in any way other than to putrefy it. He places the kernel inside a padded pocket and pops it on his back before heading away from the scene of the carnage. He won’t be able to use the sewers to gain access again. Now all he has to do is make it to Bastian.
The lower level laboratories do not share the same fate as the streets above. Sadly, it seems the GNW are not happy with their current Damascus numbers. People scurry back and forth, experimental Damascus left lying on the same tables that held dying psionics months ea
rlier. The stench of death still lingers, but there’s a strange metallic overlay to it now that makes the scent more of an impending doom. Bits and pieces of machine and adrium lie around like severed limbs in a mad scientist’s lab.
Machines beep with a different cadence than when attached to humans, like they’re humming a language only the Damascus and their cronies understand. Some of the scientists tend to the machines with a strange wand that fuses metal together before testing the electrical pulses in the open conduits, all of which must work together for the adrium to fuse.
Dom shudders at their eyes, sunken and frantic, the fear rolling off them in waves, and yet these revived Damascus are born. Slowly for now it would seem, but frightening because of what it could mean for the future. If the state of some of the constructions is anything to go by, time is truly of the essence. With a revitalized supply of soldiers, the Exiled stand no chance, and once the Exiled are gone, neither will the people of the United Conglomerate.
It takes longer than he thought to navigate the passages. None of the laboratory corridors are deserted anymore. As he makes his way to the stairwell, he notices not even one darkened corner remains. No chance to hide himself easily, so he has to move slower than usual. With so many people and Damascus hovering around, it’s dangerous for him to try and keep up his usual pace.
His progress slows to a crawl as he nears the stairwell, and he slips gratefully inside after a lab-coat-clad woman who nervously twists her hands.
The stairwell is a welcome change to the well-lit and bustling labs. It’s gloomy and darker, lights flickering ominously. As he passes the woman on the way up the stairs, he understands her nervousness. With every step, he wonders if something is waiting for him that he can’t see.
Dom suppresses a sudden laugh and wonders when he became susceptible to his own form of nervousness. It’s a long way up, and the stairway isn’t deserted like it was the first few times he used it. People walk down in twos and threes, casting strange shadows onto the walls that make it difficult to blend in.
