by K. Gorman
“Younger. Seven. Maybe eight. Not sure.”
“How long’s he been here?” Hell knew this wouldn’t be her sister’s first visit here. It was a wonder she got any sleep with the amount of prowling she did.
“About a week, maybe more.”
“You think they’re trying to replace Brennan?”
For the first time since she’d sat down, Nomiki looked at her. Even without seeing her, she felt the sharpness in her gaze, and its rawness.
Nomiki had been holding back from her. That much, at least, was obvious.
“Brennan can’t be replaced.”
She clicked her tongue. “Yeah. I know. And I’m sorry.”
Nomiki turned away again. Karin gave her a quick glance. Nomiki’s face had a straighter slope to it than hers did. It caught the light from the window more evenly. Her eyes glittered in the glare. This close, she could make out the thin brown ring of her irises.
Nomiki narrowed her gaze on the window. “You don’t seem sorry.”
Though her face remained hard and stoic, it wasn’t unreadable. At least not to her, who’d grown up with her. Others wouldn’t notice, but Karin could still see the emotion she hid. And, despite her words, the tone of her voice had dropped.
More of a half-hearted rebuttal than anything. Like a grumpy dog snapping at its friend.
“Well, what do you want me to do? Cry? Throw a fit? Skip my classes?” Most of those were things she was sure Nomiki had done. “None of those will help.”
“They killed him, Rin. He’s dead.” Nomiki dropped the last part into a whisper with a distracted glance around them. “He’s not coming back, either. Not like his birds.”
Karin tensed her jaw. That had been his talent. Where she had her light, and Nomiki had her fighting skills, Brennan could reanimate things. Mostly, he’d practiced on birds he’d found in the forest. Easiest to come by. She still saw the red-tailed hawk that had been his first, which was just odd. It had been a taxidermy—all skin and feather, no meat. Logically, it shouldn’t have been possible.
But then, everything they did shouldn’t be possible. Not Karin’s light, not Brennan’s reanimation, not Nomiki’s aptitude for violence.
“I know, ‘Miki. I know.”
This time, Nomiki didn’t look at her. She stared hard down through the window, a small twist forming in her top lip as if she wanted to peel it back into a snarl but was resisting.
“Really,” she said. “Do you?”
Karin stayed quiet for a moment. A low disquiet slithered through her shoulders as she studied her sister.
“Nomiki, I may not have spent the last two months throwing a suspicious, skulking fit, but I am not stupid. I know.”
A moment of quiet passed between them. Nomiki’s eyes remained narrowed on the room below them, her dark eyes glittering from the underlighting. Her mouth pressed in a thin, tight line. Karin watched her for a few seconds. When she didn’t move, she turned her gaze back through the window.
Then, Nomiki was giving her shoulder a light smack. “Hey, hey—he’s moving.”
Down below, in the room, the lumps in the blankets had shifted. Something poked the curtain from the other side, making it jerk, then sway. The doctors hadn’t been so kind as to put illumination on the other side of the bed so that they would have seen the movement of his silhouette on the fabric, as seemed to happen in some of the movies they’d watched, but a pair of brown feet appeared in the gap between it and the floor. They stayed put for a moment, and the curtain swayed again. Then, they turned toward the end of the bed and started walking.
He appeared a moment later, head tuned toward the door at the far end. Wearing the same kind of one-size-fits-all hospital gowns they all donned for their treatments, the way it dropped past his knees made him seem smaller than he should be—as if he might reach only her waist instead of her chest in height—and the I.V. catheter on his wrist likewise looked too big. But maybe it was due to the hunch that arched his back. She narrowed her eyes as he took another two slow, tentative steps, recognition kicking in.
She’d moved in a similar hunch before. Usually when she was sneaking places.
He’s not supposed to be out of bed, is he?
“You think Dr. Sasha will let him come up with the rest of us?” she asked.
“Doubtful. I think he’s a special project.”
She gave a small snort. “We’re all special projects.”
“More special, then. But I don’t know why. You see all this equipment? Have you ever seen it before?”
Karin followed her sister’s gesture to the workstations on the walls, which she’d only given a passing glance to before. The compound had bought, upgraded, and switched machinery on semi-regular basis, and only a few specific machines were used for her check-ups and treatments. Nomiki’s program required different ones, which, in hindsight to the doctors’ earlier story about them being there due to the diseases they had, seemed kind of redundant since, as sisters, they should have had similar physiognomy and probably the same disease, but the story had switched as they’d grown, and she’d found out that she and Nomiki were only seventy-eight percent related.
Test tube siblings made the family dynamic a bit challenging, but they’d made it work.
She squinted, trying to make sense of the room’s new upgrades. Three machines stood against the wall, and only one looked familiar—something like the CAT scan machine they’d imported several years back and used on her. The second seemed some variation of a life pod, but the third looked more like what one would see at a dialysis clinic. Their last TV show binge had used one in a scene, though this one had to be much newer. Less blocky, more white, and with curves. A discreet, elegant Seirlin swan decorated part of its front, next to a dormant computer interface.
“I don’t know them,” she said.
Her sister made an impatient noise. “I’ve been trying to find out more about him, but there’s nothing in the files. Not in the front computer, anyway.”
Karin’s eyebrows shot into her forehead. “You’ve hacked the office computer? Holy hells—”
“It’s not hacking. She used her birthday.”
“And how did you find out her birthday?”
“Saw Sebastian and Ariel giving her a present three months ago.”
Huh. Usually, it was Karin who noticed things like that. Birthdays, anniversaries. As the nicer sister, people tended to relax around her more—but then, she’d seen Nomiki hang out with the guards before. They’d been wary, at first, having likely been informed of her peculiar abilities, but that had been over a year ago. Nowadays, they regarded her more as a cute, rebellious pet.
Karin had no illusions that they wouldn’t shoot her if they needed to, but they’d definitely warmed up to her.
“Is there anything in the front computer?” she asked. “Anything useful?”
“A couple things. Maps, phone numbers. I didn’t want to print them out, ‘cause they could trace that it had been done, but I wrote down a few things. One of the new kids started coming up, so I had to get away.” Nomiki breathed a heavy sigh, her shoulders sagging as she rocked forward a bit. “They can be such blabbermouths.”
Five kids lived in the other part of the building, kept separate from the teenagers, some who’d been there since birth and others who’d come as new arrivals last fall. Though a few of them were happy enough to hang around Karin, the rest avoided Nomiki. She wasn’t sure if the adults in the compound had said something or if it was some innate sense they’d gotten from her.
Nomiki, for her part, hadn’t exactly encouraged them to be her friend.
Down below, movement caught her attention again. The boy, having paused for a minute to stare at the door, was walking once more. Each hesitant step further pronounced the hunch of his back and the way his shoulders pulled forward. The back of his hospital gown draped across the surface of his back. Through it, Karin could see the top ridge of his spine and the jut of bone from one of his shoulders.
Gods, is he underweight or something?
The bottoms of his legs certainly looked it, though she’d be the first to admit she hadn’t actually studied pediatric growth patterns. She squinted her eyes into slits, blinking as she stifled a yawn. “So we don’t know where he’s from, or what program he’s on. Do we even know his name?”
“No.” Nomiki scrunched her nose up. “All we know is what we can see right now.”
“Maybe we can find out what that equipment’s for,” she said. “If we can get back to the computer…”
“Yeah, I’ll try. I—shit.” Her voice turned into a hiss at the end, and she grabbed Karin’s forearms, more an instinctual action than anything conscious. “Shit.”
Karin repressed the snort that threatened to leave her nose. Below, as Nomiki had been talking, the boy had turned around and spotted them in the window.
She turned a lazy eye to her sister. “Well, we are right in the window. What did you think would happen?”
Her sister gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Shut up.”
A smile crept across her lips. She lifted a finger. “And look—I think he’s more scared of us than we are of him.”
Word for word, that was the exact thing their teachers had told them when they’d been squeamish about spiders and insects. And, by the way Nomiki’s mouth drew into an even thinner line, her sister well recognized the jab.
“Shut up,” she said again. “You think he’ll blab?”
The boy was walking toward them. Now that he’d gotten over his initial shock, he seemed to have gained confidence. More confidence than he’d had when facing the door, anyhow—just what had Dr. Sasha told him? That she’d bite his head off if he left the bed?
Karin shuffled forward, closer to the glass. The boy’s mouth had formed a distinct ‘o’ of surprise, but he was fast getting over it. With a quick look back at the door, he shuffled forward to get a closer look at them. His mouth moved as he waved up at them, but no words came up to them.
“It’s soundproof, you idiot,” Nomiki said.
Karin gave her a smack. “He’s seven. And new. He probably doesn’t know that.” She leaned forward, laying a finger across her lips to shush the boy inside. “You got any paper?”
“No. He wouldn’t be able to see a note from this distance, anyway. Not unless you wrote it in permanent marker or something.”
“The front desk has a few,” she said. “It’s not impossible.”
“Sebastian is currently guarding the front desk’s TV monitor, so I wouldn’t try it.” She flashed Karin a grin. “Moon Sailor’s on. You know how defensive he can get about it.”
Actually, she didn’t. Befriending security people was her sister’s specialty.
In the room, the boy had faltered. He looked around, as if searching for something—what, Karin couldn’t guess, since his gaze seemed to go both to the machines and the bare walls. Then, after a minute, he closed his eyes and stilled. His hands wrung together in front of him, as if he were praying.
Nomiki leaned forward. “What the…”
“Manifesting, maybe?” Karin joined her, gawking through the window. “Wonder what he can do?”
A subtle pulse of energy tingled across the back of her hand. She looked down, seeing her sister mirror the action. When they were distracted, every light in the room switched off.
Nomiki glanced up, eyed the dark window for a few seconds, then snorted. “You know, I think your abilities are more useful than that.”
“Hey, now, that’s not nice.”
She only laughed, brandishing a hand toward the window. “It’s the truth. This was supposed to be some super-secret project, and then I find out that he can turn off lights. Wow. Great job, Dr. Sasha. Really hit the nail on the head with that one.”
“Whatever.” Karin rolled her eyes and turned back to the window, cupping her hands to see past the reflection. “You don’t know that’s all he can do. Maybe he can turn off anything, not just lights. That’s useful, right? Like a harmless EMP?”
“Yeah, sure—but why did he even do that in the first place? He wanted to talk to us, right? What’s turning off the lights going to do to solve that problem?” Nomiki shook her head. “Kid’s daft.”
“Where’d he go?” Karin asked, frowning. “I can’t see him.”
In fact, everything she saw was black. No bed, no equipment. And, as far as she could tell, no room.
“Is he hiding now? From the scary girls at the window? Eesh.” But the humor dropped from her voice as she joined Karin in her search. “What the… I can’t see anything.”
Karin thought it had just been in her head, or her eyes not adjusting to the dark. Nomiki, however, had excellent night vision. It was part of the reason she could avoid guards so well, and how she could run around in the forest at night. If she didn’t see anything in the room, there was nothing to see.
The dream began to ebb, then. Aware of its end, she grabbed for it, scrambling to hold its threads together, but she was already backing away from the version of herself who pressed her body into the window and looked through the glass. Reality jumbled.
As she awoke, a faint tingle of light drifted across the base of her thumb, fading as it lifted into the air.
Chapter Five
Karin squinted her eyes into slits. Grogginess weighed down her eyelids, but she forced them to remain open, deeming it long past due that she got up. By her count, she’d been down for ten hours this time—way more than her share, given their current situation, even if she had almost died.
Nomiki had vanished from the other bed, but the door to the room remained open. Light from the hallway fell across the floor and the smoothed, tidy spread of blankets on the other mattress. Her sister hadn’t always been a neat freak, but her life on this side of the gate had more than made up for any slack she’d had in her childhood. The neatness of her apartment when Karin had visited hadn’t just been a one-off thing. Nomiki lived that way.
Her attention dropped to the two weapons cases that had appeared below her sister’s bunk. Both matte-black, with rounded sides and raised edges, they sat next to each other in perfect alignment, taking up maybe a meter of space under the foot of the bed. No lights flickered over their surfaces, but, after seven years of visiting her sister on this side of the gate, Karin knew enough to find the two levers on the sides that indicated they had been magnetized to the cabin’s metal floor.
Her sister owned an assortment of weapons, but preferred only a handful of favorites. Two knives stood out among those, each the length of her forearm and modified with both charges and laser-edging, made of a kind of reinforced carbon steel base that shone black under lights. They would be in the first case, closest to the door. The other would hold Nomiki’s choice du jour of guns.
She studied where the light shone on the rounded corner of the first case for several long, quiet seconds, then ticked her gaze up to the bed. Ethan used to sleep there, all bundled up in the nest of blankets that had seemed to follow him around the ship. He’d be back on the Ozark now, with his dad and the rest of them. She missed him, a little bit.
But there was no use dwelling on the past.
He’d be fine. Christops would take care of him. And she’d healed enough people in Caishen to ensure everything could run smoothly. Hopper had seen to that, at least, handing his people over to her healing in order of practicality. It hadn’t been until after she’d healed the pilots, nursing, and engineering staff that he’d pulled the higher administration in.
She blew out a breath and rolled out of bed.
Time to catch up with the rest of her small world.
A kind of casual silence filled the ship. Their small crew filled less than half the ship’s official capacity, and though the Nemina ranked as tiny relative to the rest of its peers, she still had enough space for the four of them to lose themselves in.
The shock of cold came through her bare feet as she got out of bed. For a moment, she contemplated the drawer in
her locker where her socks lay.
No. They were all friends here. She doubted Cookie, Soo-jin, or Nomiki would care about any barefooted-ness. Gods knew that Ethan had spent most of his time on the ship as such.
Though the Mess existed only a few paces from her door, the way the hall angled put it out of sight. Its lights splashed on the opposite wall, a square of yellow over the hallway’s otherwise muted lighting.
A clicking noise caught her attention as she drew closer. When she got to the door, she paused to examine the scene, gaze flicking over the room. Like most of the Nemina’s compartments, it didn’t host a large space, but it was tidy and perhaps the only part of the ship apart from Cargo that carried a strict organization to it, albeit a complex, packed-in type. The main feature of the room was its table. Wide enough to turn the bulk of the Mess’ space into a series of tiny, squeeze-through-able passages, it provided the largest flat working space on the ship.
Soo-jin currently sat at it, the parts of a metal ball spread out in front of her and gleaming in the overhead light.
Karin supressed a shiver as she recognized it.
The metal spheres had followed them from Enlil. A kind of undiscerning enemy, they had a knack for tracking, having followed her across several kilometers of tunnels and overground paths—and through an entire space station. She didn’t believe they’d actually followed her to the station, but they’d had an uncanny ability to find her when she was there.
One had showed up just as they’d been leaving, on their way to the Ozark’s hangar deck. They’d managed to disable it, but it had taken very nearly the last of her energy and a vacuum-certified welding kit employed by Soo-jin.
The parts shone on the table, dismembered and organized into small piles that, to her untrained eyes, seemed illogical and random. By the looks of things, Soo-jin had gutted the shell and taken out the inside, which left a mess of wires and parts that looked not unlike a cyberized version of a jellyfish.
Soo-jin glanced up when she paused at the door. A pause fell between them as she gave her a quick study.
