by K. Gorman
“No, not at all. I’m happy to help.”
A slow, cool breeze trailed across the causeway, pricking against the sweat under her shirt. Night had fallen in the six hours since she’d left General Brindon’s office, which may have made a difference somewhere else, but the base had enough security lighting to fill a gravball stadium. More, probably. A normal thing for bases, or had the Shadow attack made them amp up their game? The prison on Enlil had been lit up, too, if she remembered right.
It was a little darker on her side of the building, at least. A small door stood open behind her, the inside lights slanting onto the concrete pathway in a crooked trapezoid, catching the white ‘emergency exit’ sign on its slate-gray surface. Someone had propped it open with a wedge at its bottom, probably to let the inside air circulate. As an older storage space, the building’s ventilation hadn’t quite kept up with the volume of people they’d moved through. By her first hour, the air had grown thick and moist, and the smell of used gym clothes had started to mix with the rancid stench of urine. Not all former Lost wet themselves when she removed the Shadows, but it only took a few.
It smelled nice out here, though. Cool, with the kind of wet cleanliness that came after a rain. A soft, rattling sound came from the trees at the building’s edge, rising and falling with the breeze. She closed her eyes and listened to it. Listened to the sweep and scrape and murmurs of the soldiers in the building behind her as they cleaned up the floor.
She’d healed over three hundred people today. In all, a good shift. And a pleasant experience with the Fallon military, once they’d gotten over the awkwardness of what she could do and actually got down to work. The prolonged stares would probably last a few more days, but that was all right. So long as they didn’t impede with the job, they could stare all they liked. It was nice to finally be helping, for a change. Guilt-free helping, now that she had found Nomiki and didn’t have Charise’s judging eyes following her every move.
Charise was dead now, though. And there were a lot more Lost—though they called them Hosts in Fallon, she couldn’t quite stop using the Alliance term—out there. In the grand scheme of things, three hundred was barely a drop in the ocean.
But it was something, at least. And, since the Nemina was parked and other people were looking for Dr. Sasha and investigating Seirlin, her only responsibility.
The soft shuffle of shoes sounded behind her. A moment later, the light from the door faltered as Marc peered around its threshold. “They told me I’d find you here.”
“And here I am.” Her gaze slid down to the two cans of beer in his hands. “Is this a social call, or did something happen that I’ll need alcohol for?”
He frowned down. “What would you prefer?”
“I’ll take the social call.” She grabbed the beer from him, glanced at its label—Quezon, the standard Fallon brand found in all system bars—and popped its tab. “What’s the word?”
“Your sister is a beast of a fighter.”
“She beat you up?”
“No. Brindon fined her ten kay for the orders she didn’t quite follow, and she took it out in the training facility.”
Karin raised an eyebrow. “Picking fights? That sounds like her.”
And like she was enjoying one of the perks of this place. Fallon already knew their story. No need to hide anymore. No need for Nomiki to hold herself back.
“She picked a fight with five muscle-heads at once, then took down the head spar instructor. I’m not sure she broke a sweat.”
Sounds like he’s in love. She hid a smile as she raised the can to her lips, watching him as the bitterness washed over her tongue. Quezon followed up with a faint aftertaste of orange that, though disgusting in any other beer, strangely worked. “Maybe she didn’t. Have you heard anything about Sasha?”
“They found her course. Still tracking it.” He fingered the visitor’s pass around his neck and gave it a little wave. “I’m a little restricted here. Can’t get as much info as I’d like.”
“Ah.” She wore the same pass, albeit in a different color—to signify their different backgrounds, perhaps? If he couldn’t get the information, she doubted she could, either.
“Cook and Soo are back on the Nemina. Waiting for word from you.”
“For Takahashi?” she guessed aloud.
“Yep.”
Takahashi had not been part of today’s shift. Brindon had him in a cell in a different building, separate from the other Lost. Her first break had come with a memo on where to find him and who to contact about doing so. Brindon wanted to oversee their conversation personally.
“Think he knows about Dr. Sasha? I mean, it’d be weird if he didn’t, right? They’ve known each other for at least thirty years, if not worked together.”
She’d done the math. She was twenty-seven, and Nomiki a year older, but Takahashi’s involvement had started at least a year before, based on the picture Nomiki had found.
“Shall we find out?”
Karin paused. The tension that had started up in her shoulders over the length of her shift had turned into a dull, forgettable ache, but when she looked inside, the light pulled at her eyes like the Nemina’s flood bulbs—a sensitivity she hoped would settle down now that she wasn’t using her power. She’d experienced photo-sensitivity before with her powers, but not in her most recent usages. Another reason she was standing outside rather than in.
As if the cool air wasn’t enough.
She gave her can a little shake, hearing the beer slosh against the side. “After our beers.”
He tipped his can up to her. “Good idea.”
“And we can find out if he knows anything about talking Shadows, too,” she said. “Or Shadows at all. Or my childhood.” She snorted. “You know, for a man I don’t remember, there’s an awful lot of personal shit I want to ask him.”
“Not a comfortable feeling?” Marc guessed.
“I’m not sure yet. Ask me tomorrow.”
Chapter Twelve
The cell sat in the basement level of the base’s main building and, at first glance, seemed styled more for comfort than captivity. A low bed with a thick mattress and a blanket in Fallon’s red and blue military colors slung against the wall, accompanied by a free-standing desk and a nightstand, both made of the same kind of smooth, dark wood. There was even a carpet—more red than blue, its pattern muddied together from wear—and a simple-looking comms device on the wall. Take away the sink and toilet that sat in the corner, and this place could have passed for one of her old dorm rooms, concrete walls included.
Ten minutes had passed since she’d driven the Shadow from Takahashi. He lay on the bed on his side, his heart making a steady beat on the medkit that Private Gawain, a medical officer, had hooked him up to. He stood in front of him, followed closely by General Brindon who leaned against the desk on the back wall with her netlink out and a neutral expression on her face.
Wonder how the Shadows have affected her hours. The official system conversion rate for Lost stood at around fifty percent. Though Karin suspected military operations skewed toward having more survivors, there was no question that they’d been hit hard. And a person in as high a position as Brindon likely didn’t have immediate replacements.
Fallon’s survivors had probably seen a lot of promotions in the last month.
Most of their group were present. Only Reeve and Cookie remained absent. Karin leaned against the other corner of the desk, close enough that she could almost see the general’s screen—some kind of report, she guessed—and Nomiki stood next to her in a splayed-leg stance that Karin had thought to be a military ‘at ease’ position, but Nomiki’s cross-armed attitude had turned into anything but. Her face wore a similar neutrality to the general, but her tense back, raised shoulders, and slow, subtle fidgets betrayed the anger that simmered below the surface. Once or twice, her lip had twisted as she’d looked down at Takahashi.
Marc and Soo-jin proved less conspicuous, him a quiet, overlooked pres
ence and her the image of focused inner-city woman, her face cold and intense, eyes staring hard at a patch of air in front of her. She’d checked in on Karin earlier in her shift, stepping inside the door to observe for a few minutes before she’d left again. No words. Barely even a wave. Just as if she were doing a job.
She was a good friend.
A second series of beeps sounded as Takahashi groaned. A few seconds later, he began to move.
It had been a while since she had stuck around after curing a Lost. Time had not dulled the effects. Gawain knelt as Takahashi came to, an empty pail already prepped. The sound of vomit hitting its bottom, and Takahashi’s raw, panicked gasps, made her hold her breath and unfocus her eyes on the wall, as if not looking at him gave him some comfort of privacy.
Did he ever give me any privacy? Nomiki still hadn’t answered her question about the doctor’s niceness. In fact, she’d been rather tight-lipped since they’d gotten on base. Should she be worried about that?
The room seemed to ripple as Gawain helped the doctor recover, people shifting position. Soo-jin came off the wall, and a warmth behind her suggested that Marc had taken a step closer. Nomiki uncrossed and recrossed her arms and swayed. General Brindon’s netlink vanished, her gaze unmoving from Takahashi. After a few minutes, Gawain backed off, leaving Takahashi sitting alone on the edge of the bed, wiping at his mouth with a cloth.
He looked older now that he was awake. She’d guessed him sixty at the minimum, but there was something about the calmness in his eyes and the gentle, delicate way he moved that suggested a higher age. She wondered if he’d done anything to his hair. Colored it, made it thicker, filled in the patches that had gone bald. She used to run into advertisements for that all the time when she’d lived on Belenus. Enlil, too, now that she thought about it.
But maybe that was her bias talking. Projecting more onto the man in his moment of weakness than was actually there.
No one looked good in recovery.
General Brindon cleared her throat. “Dr. Takahashi, you are currently in custody at Nova Kolkata Forces Base on Chamak Udyaan. Do you remember what happened to you?”
No panic showed in his eyes. Still recovering, but his mind had begun to work. His right hand moved to a patch of air four centimeters above the mattress, then stopped and returned to his lap, as if he’d just cut off a habitual motion. The silence built as he reoriented himself.
“Chamak?” he asked. “I was on Korikishiko before.” His brow furrowed. “Was I abducted?”
“You were attacked,” Brindon said. “Are you aware of the Shadowmen?”
“No. Some kind of criminal organization, I assume?”
Brindon paused. “Not quite. As far as we can tell, they’re extra-dimensional entities that cohabit our space only when certain conditions are met.”
Some of the vulnerability left Takahashi’s expression, replaced by a grim, laser-focused attention as he pinned the general with a hard stare.
“Is this a joke?”
“I wish it were. They’ve wiped out over a third of our defenses, and even more of our population. Do you know anything about them?”
His grim stare remained on Brindon’s face for another several seconds, but he dropped it after, frowning down at his hands on his lap. “No, I…” He shook his head. “You said Shadowmen? I thought it was a dream.”
“I’m afraid not. What day do you last remember?”
“Ren Seventh. Day of Wood.”
Thursday, Renmin Seventh, Karin translated. The Fallon calendars ran on the same bases, but different names and days that had been based on the old Japanese system. He had been taken in the first attack.
Gods, he looks so normal. So human and vulnerable. She had spent so much time second-guessing her life that seeing him here, now, in the flesh… it shook everything she believed.
This is a man who operated inside my head.
She froze as his gaze slipped away from Brindon and onto her.
“You look familiar. Do I know you?”
He seemed to be asking the question more to himself than her, his brows drawing further down on his face.
“Think harder,” Nomiki said, her voice cold and hard. “I’m sure it will come to you.”
His frown moved to her. Nomiki met it unwavering, her expression giving nothing but the slow anger not quite buried beneath her features.
“Oh.” In the next instant, his eyes shot wide. He gave a short, sharp gasp. “Oh. You—” His eyes slipped back to Karin, his shock mixing with a growing awe she hadn’t expected. “You’re from Earth. The ones who—”
He cut himself off, and his gaze jerked back to General Brindon, who watched him without a change in her expression as he gave her a sudden reassessment.
“Ah,” he said, the clarity brightening his expression, though the grim downturn of his mouth didn’t change.
“I’d like you to tell us everything you know about the Eurynome Project, as well as your colleague Dr. Evangeline Sasha.” The general unfolded a second netlink from her pants pocket, turned it on to an audio app, and handed it to Gawain who placed it on the nightstand. “Take your time.”
The Eurynome Project had started eighty years ago as an offshoot of the then-coming-into-its-prime Seirlin Industries, a kind of brainchild spawned from the paramilitary super-soldier genetic programs running at the time, but with a more whimsical, idealistic bent. A way of playing with humanity to see how far they could go, as opposed to Seirlin’s other, for-profit ventures.
Harmless at first, merely reconstructing genetic sequences from damaged records in a single, closed lab, it pottered on as a casual hobby project for some of Seirlin’s biomedical engineers. For-profit jobs had a tendency to become monotonous and repetitive. Eurynome offered them a chance to explore their creativity. With a bloated company surplus, and taking little more than a penny in the company’s servers, the program served its purpose and no more.
About sixty years ago, it grew a little more ambitious.
Dr. Erin Kowalski had come into the company as a guest sequencer, a role which turned into a more permanent position closer to her specialization in genetic evolution. Eurynome became an off-hours creation project for her. Then it became more. Seirlin was in its height, growing every minute. Kowalski submitted several finished genetic maps and a grant proposal, and Seirlin gave the go-ahead.
Twenty years of development later, and programs 001 through 009 were born.
Karin and Nomiki were the tenth generation.
“They were trying to create gods,” Takahashi said.
“Gods don’t exist,” Nomiki said.
“Maybe not, but something like them did. In our psyche, at least.” Takahashi tapped his head. “Those stories didn’t come from nowhere.”
“They came from our minds,” Nomiki said. “Human minds, not gods. I mean, Sol—”
“Miki,” Karin said. “He’s a brain surgeon. They were looking in our minds.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. They could—”
“It means everything,” Takahashi said. “Their research focused on the mind.”
He was sitting up now, leaning into the conversation from the edge of the bed. Still looked like hell, with a dark tinge under his eyes and a slick, pallid cast to his skin, but the topic had proved a clear distraction from whatever effects he felt. He hadn’t been lying, as far as she could tell. Parts of it rang true. Ebbs and oddities of her childhood, seen from the other side of the glass. The doctor had started as a contract worker, someone on Seirlin’s payroll who the two Corringham brothers had befriended on different projects. Seirlin hadn’t yet faced the economic downturn they’d seen toward the end of the last decade.
She and Nomiki had gotten lucky to find him. Doubly lucky that he happened to know so much. She hadn’t expected the history part.
“Okay, well,” Nomiki had been half pacing in the small room. She’d stopped, but revolved on one spot to turn back to Takahashi, the movement wild, an echo of her
more violent tendencies. “How? And why?”
Brindon watched her with a lazy eye. For her part, she had stood in the corner for most of the conversation, her netlink back in her hand and the occasional casual gaze lifting up to the two.
“It was an exploration of the subconscious. Regular conscious is only the top fraction of the mind, but the subconscious holds a greater mystery and was an unsuccessfully explored link with our ancestral past.” Takahashi paused, seeing Nomiki watching him. “As for the god thing… I think it started out as an exploration of human archetypes. They’re found across all three systems and in all of our stories, old and new. Every culture. A common link. Old gods are basic archetypes. Natural events or abstract concepts shaped into a being recognizable to our mind.”
“Gods don’t exist.”
“But they did for us at least once, back then. People thought they were as real as the sun.”
She almost snorted. They hadn’t thought they were as real as the sun, they’d thought they were the sun. Eos, bringer of the dawn. That was her.
Gods don’t exist.
But something did. How else could she explain her light? Or what Brennan had done? Or Sasha, for that matter? Nomiki’s skill and athleticism could be parsed away as the result of some sort of super-soldier program, but the rest of them ripped huge anomalies in the known world.
“That’s plausible.” A twinge of pain tugged through her shoulder as she stretched it, a symptom of the day’s work. “The subconscious thing, anyway. Explains the memory thing.”
Nomiki pinned her with a long look. Behind her, she could feel some of the others do similar. She caught the Private’s—Gawain’s—stare, and he looked away a second later. Takahashi met hers without flinching, the room’s lighting giving the brown in his eyes a kind of brindled warmth. The borrowed Seirlin cottons sagged against his body like a comfort pajamas commercial. The effect made him look soft and vulnerable. Old.
