by K. Gorman
“No way in Hell,” she said. “I’m coming up with you.”
I’m not missing this. Not now. Not when we’re so close.
A pause. Nomiki had slowed. Karin thought she could hear some kind of second-language swear tumble down the stairs, then her steps picked up again.
“I’m not waiting.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t expect you to,” Karin said, more to herself than her sister.
She had not been raised for athleticism, and she was certainly not in the fittest shape right now. The last few weeks, she’d learned her lesson from her runs on both Enlil and Caishen and picked up some of Nomiki’s exercise routine, but to think she could catch up to Nomiki and keep up with her would be like thinking she could keep up with one of the exoplanet Olympians. Where Karin had been designed in an image to reflect a dawn goddess, Nomiki had been crafted in the image of a warrior. Stronger than she looked, and faster than anyone could think at a glance. By the time Karin had jogged up one flight, Nomiki had gained three.
As she made the second flight, the door burst open below her. She jerked and spun, light flaring across her hands, then put them down as she recognized Marc’s quick breath and long, sturdy stride. His head poked around the stairwell a second later, caught on her, and skittered upwards to Nomiki before glancing back to her.
They didn’t need words. She gave him a curt nod, and they both started up the stairs. His long legs and considerably muscled frame caught her up after a couple of flights.
“So, this doctor, what can she do?”
“You’ve seen as much as I have,” she said, pausing for breath. “If she ever showed her powers to us before now, I can’t remember it.”
“Okay, well so far, she can turn the Lost into aggro mode. Maybe do other things with them, too?”
“And whatever black stuff she threw at Nomiki,” Karin said, remembering her sister’s words.
She reeled herself around the railing at the end of the landing and launched herself up another stairwell. Several flights above, Nomiki must’ve found the door. She burst through it with a squeal of metal, and her footsteps vanished when it closed.
Karin paused for a few seconds, laboring to keep running up the stairs. Sweat pricked her skin, not quite wetting it yet. With every breath, her heart jumped in her throat.
“We’ve got to stop her,” she said. “If she gets away…”
No telling what she could do, with the amount of Lost in the system.
Marc kept pace with her, rising up to her level, but keeping to the outside of the turn, allowing her the shorter route. She saw him glance to her in her peripheral vision, but he didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to. They all knew what was at stake. Even if the entire implications of it were just beginning to blossom across their minds.
The door at the end of the stairway led into Seirlin’s more refined, renovated levels. A curved hallway met them on the other side, cast from a mix of smooth drywall and gleaming metal accents. Expensive-looking artwork lined the walls, spotlighted even at this hour and labeled with the kind of discreet title cards that made her think she’d walked into an art gallery rather than a genetics lab, although the paintings did seem to have a DNA theme about them.
A hush flowed over them as they entered the hallway, the walls seeming to absorb sound.
Then, a blaster shot cracked.
She tracked its flash to an open door she hadn’t noticed at the end of the hallway. As she and Marc ran up, a string of expletives rolled out of it, along with the sound of metal striking stone.
Then Nomiki stepped out of the door and motioned them over.
“Karin, need you.”
Ignoring the pain that still twinged her shoulder and had now moved into the top part of her legs, she picked up the pace again, feeling Marc doing the same beside her.
The door led to another stairwell. Although this one neglected to provide a map of where it led, it didn’t need to. The wall of pulsing, black matter that stretched from one side to the other was answer enough.
Nomiki stood several feet from it, bristling with anger.
“I almost had her. I almost fucking had her.” She made a violent gesture toward the black wall, pointing her sword at it. Part of it responded, wisps of smoke following its tip like iron filings drawn to a magnet, but she didn’t seem to care. “Don’t know what the fuck she was doing down here, but I almost had her. Karin, can you…?”
Karin gaped up. Whatever Sasha had conjured, she’d covered her bases. Not only did it block the bottom of the stairs, but it sealed in the sides and top, as well. Most of it was solid, a kind of moving obsidian whose rough sides caught the light as it moved, but parts of it seemed made of the same material as the Shadows. Blurred, yet somehow connected to the solid crystal parts with at least some semblance of physics, they looked like someone had deleted part of the world and forgotten to fill it back in after. An elongated corner where the left wall met the ceiling had extended out overhead, reminding her of the foot of an amoeba.
“I dunno if my light will get it. It’s… bigger than I’m used to dealing with.”
Yes. Bigger. We’ll go with that. No need to mention it was unlike anything they’d ever seen before. A flicker of light shivered onto her palm, gliding seamlessly to pool on the pads of her fingers as she looked up, giving the wall a questioning gaze.
“Try anyway.”
“Where should I shoot it?”
“I don’t fucking care,” Nomiki snapped. “Pick a place. Jab it.”
After a moment, she made her decision. Light swirled in front of her with a thought, pulling from her fingers in a stream and collecting into a shape that resembled an Old Earth basketball. Streaks of translucence pulsed and pulled through its layers, and the walls of the room filled with spikes and fractals.
For a second, the whole room shivered like a kaleidoscope.
Then she threw it.
Her light had no physical presence, but it crashed against the wall all the same and rolled over it like a wave of storm swell. The entire scene rippled in front of them. The wall and light seemed to invert, switch places. A series of cracks and pops echoed in the stairwell, along with a loud, primal hiss.
Then a scream—sublime, full of rage—crashed across her brain.
Marc jerked her back just as the wall attacked. She fumbled into him, and he caught her, keeping her balanced as he pulled her out of harm’s way. His blaster cracked next to her, its red flare adding to her light. Nomiki raised her knife and lunged forward, plunging it straight into the heart of her attack and forcing it through the contorting mass on the stairwell.
As the light faded, the wall sucked inward like a scab over a wound.
Not enough, she thought. It’s not enough.
She drew a quick breath and pulled on her power again, the strength of her call almost staggering her as another wave of light rode through the room. Closing her eyes, she didn’t see what happened, only felt Marc’s steady hand on her shoulder, catching her when she stumbled.
Then it faded, and the noise with it.
When she opened her eyes, Nomiki was cutting through the last parts of the wall like an adventurer through cobwebs, the last pieces clearly dying around her. The largest part of it hung above, sagging and pulsing. It still lived, but not enough to provide a threat. The hole in its middle gaped like a ripped piece of flesh.
Nomiki glanced back, took a quick assessment of them both, then threw herself through the hole they’d made and launched herself up the stairs. Her footsteps echoed back toward them, racing upwards.
By unspoken agreement, they didn’t follow.
After a few seconds, Marc shifted. His hand dropped to her shoulder, and she felt him give her his own assessment. “You okay?”
“Yes.” She gave herself a little shake, gritting her teeth together as the movement triggered the pain in her shoulder again, almost making her wince, and squared herself. “Fine. Let’s go.”
But, even as they stepped through the still twitching mass of the black wall, she already knew it was too late. The last two years had attuned her to the sound of ship engines. Even from this distance, muffled by the walls of concrete and steel, she recognized the whine of thrusters engaging above her. Sasha had gotten away, even as Nomiki burst through the door at the top, no doubt the picture of the vengeful demigod.
Karin stopped on the first stair and ticked her head back. “Fuck. She’s already gone.”
Chapter Ten
The flashes of military and police strobes broke the twilight of the district. Most gathered inside Seirlin’s secluded laneway and parking circle, though two land-to-air garuda vehicles plugged up either side of the entrance, their bulky, squarish frames sitting lopsided where their wheels slouched across the curbs. A few men and women hung around in two small groups, their blue uniforms—a mix of the light-and-dark police colors and the navy of the military—looking crisp and clean even from across the street where Karin watched them. The muscles in her cheeks were tight and rigid enough to make her back molars grind together as she fumed, her anger cold and internal.
We almost had her. Almost. If I’d been a little faster…
But that wasn’t right, was it? She might not have gone pell-mell down that last hallway, but she’d kept quite a pace beforehand. Nothing like Marc or Soo-jin could do, though. And she was miles behind Nomiki.
I need to get stronger.
The rest of the group spread out across the sidewalk, loitering close to the window of a wine store, their faces a varied mix between stoicism and grumbling anger. Soo-jin and Cookie stood by themselves off to the side, a netlink between them as they talked in low tones. Nomiki had put herself into a crossed-arm, stiff-backed pose that looked the very stereotype of an action movie star, her face a cold sheet that showed none of what she was thinking. She didn’t even glance at Reeve, who stood beside her in a hunched posture—legs straight, back and shoulders bent, attention glued to the screen of his netlink as he thumbed through the holokeys.
They’d been in contact with his superiors since about a minute after Karin had run away from the basement after Nomiki, and they were trying to put a trace on the ship Sasha had used to escape. But it would take time. Net-movies might make military operations look like efficient, star-spun machines that could retrieve data in nanoseconds and track the butt-end of a ship by license drives and schematics alone, but the real world was much more complicated than that. And, if they were anything like the Alliance, they already had their hands full with the Shadows.
They’d find it. Unfortunately, Sasha might have scuttled it, anonymized herself, and jumped into an out-system haul rig by the time they did.
A dull pain rose from her jaw. Closing her eyes, she took a slow breath, let it out, and forced her jaw to unclench, relaxing the fists she’d made at her sides, too. Worrying wouldn’t help now. Might as well focus on the silver lining.
They had Dr. Takahashi. And, by the few comments Reeve had made, it looked like Seirlin would be opening their records for—well, not for them, technically, but for whoever Reeve was chatting with that had enough clout to do that.
They’d also learned about Sasha’s abilities and solidified the connection between her, Seirlin, and the Shadows.
Maybe Takahashi could further that angle. He had still been working with Sasha when the Shadows first attacked. Maybe he even knew what her treatment plan was.
Hell, what if he had still been giving her treatments? Karin never remembered Sasha getting treatments back at the compound, but what did she know? Even if her memories weren’t faulty, who in their right mind would show that to a kid? If Sasha’s treatments affected her anything like they had Karin, Nomiki, and the other kids, she doubted Sasha would have wanted anyone around her who wasn’t involved in the administration.
She glanced over at Takahashi, giving him what must be her third or fourth long study. He stood by Marc, still black-eyed and dressed in the Seirlin comfort clothes, though Dalajit had tucked him into a borrowed jacket before he’d released him. He had an irregular sway to his stance, seeming to drift to the edge of his balance without conscious acknowledgment, giving Marc the occasional bump when he overdid it, but that was nothing new to the Lost. He was most of the reason they still stood there.
Maybe he could restart her treatments.
She shuddered, curling her lips back from her teeth in what was definitely not a smile, pushing back the sudden cloying, antiseptic smell that came to the back of her sinus at the thought and warding off the vision of green-lit medical wards and beeping machinery that threatened to take over. She’d spent enough time in the compound’s wards and clinic rooms to count for several lifetimes. Why in the ten hells would she even want to go back? Why would she even think it?
Giving herself a little shake, she forced the thought away and blinked, re-forming the fist in her left hand to give her something to ground with. Another vehicle was joining the two at the mouth of the alley. In the quiet of the morning, she heard the bump of its wheels as it lurched over the curb, the chassis giving an elongated sway before it settled. Four more police officers climbed out, and as they shut the doors, the headlights of three other vehicles, all civilian, slid into view from the opposite direction.
The neighborhood was starting to wake.
“Can we go yet?” Nomiki asked, her gaze also on the approaching vehicles. It had narrowed somewhat, breaking the cold neutrality of her prior expression with a crinkle of irritation. Her closest forefinger flexed, creating a divet of pressure in her jacket.
“Almost. Boss’ organizing a few things.”
“S’ that Crane you’re talking to?”
“Brindon. Crane’s on Shiva.”
“You’re probably not supposed to be telling sensitive information like that. Military secrets and all.”
He snorted. “Yeah, well, I think we’re all one big military secret right about now, what with everything.”
“Good to know Fallon believes in transparency.” Soo-jin pivoted on her heel to include Reeve in the angle of her body. She stretched her neck and shoulders, making her mesh shirt hike up on her abdomen. “We leaving soon, or do I got enough time to grab coffee from that vending machine over there?”
“Nope, no time.” Reeve’s netlink beeped. He fidgeted with it for one last minute, then dismissed it and tucked it into his pants pocket. “Back to the ships.”
“Oh, goodie.” She started to swivel back the way they’d originally come, but paused to give Takahashi an irreverent study, lips pulling back from her teeth in an expression that wasn’t quite a smile. “I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.”
Karin felt her own lips pull back, too, but as she started into a walk, the sneer she wore felt more like baring her teeth.
Yeah, me, too.
More people dotted the streets on their way back, most of them service workers bundled for work in the morning chill, though Karin saw a couple of businessmen and women among them, totes and briefcases carried alongside heavy, dark, expensive-looking coats that reminded her of the kind of neo-belle-époque-bourgeoisie that came out in Belenus’ winters.
Two bakeries had turned on their lights and had people moving inside, and the convenience stand sandwiched next to the subway line had rolled up its shutters. Ellora had looked little more than a plain grid of buildings and roads as they’d flown over it, but the city took on a strangely ephemeral beauty in the streets. Lokabrenna’s light gave the horizon a blue-ish cast, muddled only by a tinge of yellow from Aschere—the two must have been just about in alignment—and the effect separated the city into delineations of shadow and light.
Though she’d done her reading in school, this was her first actual experience on a moon. Everywhere else had been a planet or a station, with the odd asteroid thrown in from her flight school trip to Tianjin, a station which had tunneled into an asteroid.
The park they’d passed before had opened for the day. Korikishiko’s
light and temperature imbalance meant that planet-originated flora—or at least the ones pretty enough to warrant decorating recreational areas with—needed an extra boost to keep growing. They’d passed several biodomes on their way in, but they’d looked more like farming or forest operations. From what she’d seen advertised, rich moons like Korikishiko typically housed private garden areas or domed pathways for their inhabitants, kept up by a mix of donations, entry fees, and memberships. This park seemed more experimental. A symptom of the rich neighborhood rather than a product. Small, closed tents had closed off the plants the last time they’d passed through, their white sides glowing with light. Not the most attractive sight, but practical. The park’s two trees had received a more up-scale version in the form of a shield generator and suspended lighting.
It seemed like a lot of effort for just a few trees, hedges, and flower patches, but, as she rebooted the Nemina’s drives and sent them up, more than a few people were winding through the green-leafed paths.
How many would there be if the Shadows hadn’t attacked?
With an estimated half the system having succumbed to the attacks, the damage had been done. Even if they did manage to locate Dr. Sasha, uncover what connection she had with the Shadows, and find out how to stop them, she could spend the rest of her life healing people and it still wouldn’t be enough.
And that was provided her powers remained in effect. Before the attacks, she’d never given a thought to them being a finite thing, but after what had happened on Caishen…
Maybe Takahashi would know.
Whatever the case, there was nothing to be done about it now. She let the thoughts fall, focused on the controls, and followed Reeve’s path as he led them out of the city and into the sky, rebalancing as they hit a patch of turbulence across the moon’s terminus. Dr. Takahashi had gone with him, along with Marc, the first for legality—healing Takahashi would put him outside the military’s reach—and the second for safety. They didn’t know where Dr. Sasha had gone, nor how far the range of her abilities extended.
