by K. Gorman
Well, he was old. Relatively speaking, he was the oldest person in the room, and by the picture in Nomiki’s book, the oldest on the team.
“They weren’t interested in what we could do. Beyond security assessments, our abilities barely made a footnote,” she continued, holding his gaze. “What did they want with us? The archetypes?”
“Like I said, it was a consciousness exploration. Archetypes were easier to build from. Or shape. I’m not certain. The building part wasn’t my department.”
“Whose was it?” Nomiki said.
“Linnet’s. She took over after the last team retired.”
“Linnet is your Sasha,” Brindon said. “Intel came in a while back. She changed her name when she landed here.”
“On Chamak?” Nomiki asked, interpreting something in the general’s words that Karin hadn’t seen. “How long was she here?”
“Several years. Bounced around a bit. Put down in Korikishiko several years ago.” Brindon caught Nomiki’s eyes. “We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”
Karin resisted the frown that threatened her face. That exchange had been a little friendlier than Nomiki normally let her business contacts get. And the general had helped them a great deal. Just what bargain had they struck between each other?
“You killed a lot of people when you left.” Takahashi lifted his gaze to Brindon. “Did you know that? She killed everyone. We heard about it, even on this side of the gate.”
“Yes, she told me.” Brindon gave a brief, polite smile. “It’s part of the reason I hired her.”
“Well, what did you expect from someone named Enyo?” Nomiki’s lip curled back. “And it’s not like your hands are clean. How many did Eurynome kill? How many children did you poison out of existence?”
“You weren’t children. You were subjects. It was perfectly legal.”
It was a blow to the gut. The calmness with which he said it, and the certainty of the words, made a writhing shock rise up through her stomach and lock up her lungs. She ground her jaws closed, a sudden nausea threatening the back of her throat.
How many children? How many kids had they seen? How many had she forgotten?
And he treated them as mere subjects.
A hand wrapped around her shoulder, warm and comforting. Marc. She forced herself to breathe as his grip squeezed.
“Yes, so legal you had to do it on a near-abandoned planet, in places where the laws ran a little bit looser,” Soo-jin commented.
Nomiki’s lip curled back even more. “How the fuck do you justify this? How do you sleep at night? Do you ever remember them?”
“Without Eurynome, you wouldn’t exist. And, believe it or not, Eurynome’s research helped develop many advancements for mankind. Deaths were inevitable, with what they were trying to achieve. Those who couldn’t handle the tertiary or quaternary stages.” He fixed Nomiki with a stare. This time, it held emotion—defiance, next to the calm. “But you could. You did, didn’t you?”
Nomiki’s face shut down.
Karin frowned. “What do you mean by ‘quaternary’ stage?”
Takahashi, who had thus far kept his focus on Nomiki, turned to give her a look, mild surprise in his eyes. “You don’t know?”
“I’ve been forgetting a lot,” she said. “Memory’s not my strong point.”
“You’d remember this. I…” He hesitated. “You were about to start them, last I’d heard. I’d already prepped the charts.”
A memory flashed through her mind. Nomiki, sitting on her bed when she’d walked into her room one afternoon, waiting for her. The dark, serious flash of her eyes. The determined set of her speech.
They’re taking our memories, Rin.
She’d seen the memory before, but this time, it seemed poised. As if her brain was answering the question she hadn’t quite asked.
We’re leaving, Nomiki said in her memory. Tonight. We can’t stay here.
Then, in the real world, Nomiki said, “We left before the end.”
Chapter Thirteen
Water built around her like a torrent. It howled in her ears, screamed at her eyes, and pulled at her senses in a thousand different colors, twisting, reeling, raging.
Two worlds existed on either side of her, and they both spun faster than she could handle. In between, flickers of needles and blood drove like bursts of static across her vision. Clips of sound snapped around her. People yelling, the wail of a machine, the whining squeak of the medical trolley’s slipshod wheel.
Takahashi was there. Younger, the blackness of his hair not out of place with the age of his face, a set of thick-framed glasses giving him a harmless look even as he frowned behind their lenses. He shot a syringe of liquid into the tube of her I.V., and a few seconds later, the scene seemed to flicker around her. The roar in her head grew stronger. Dr. Sasha looked in from the window to the hall, her expression an immovable face of stone barely visible through the reflection. Briefly, Karin saw the room she was in, herself strapped to the bed, three nurses and the doctor working around her. The monitor next to her beeped an unsteady rhythm.
I’ve been sick, she thought. Something went wrong.
A hand pressed her back down to the bed. Only then did she notice the flare of light. It leaked from her skin like sweat and rose like a shimmer. Two or three wisps of it had already floated around her, cutting into the room’s cheap tube lighting as if she’d sliced into another world.
The machine beside her screamed. Acid sputtered against the back of her throat. She jerked up, and the light ebbed. Darkness encroached on the edges of her vision. The nurse’s hands were back on her, pulling her down.
As the black took over, the colors returned, swimming up through her consciousness like fish in the sea. Darting, glittering, racing for the surface.
Drugs. Not the best thing to give to children. But then, the people on the Eurynome Project had not overly cared about their health, at least when it came to their experimentation. All they’d cared was whether or not they could survive long enough to get through their program.
The back of Karin’s mouth burned. She cleared her throat, dry lips peeling apart as she rolled over and reached for the bedside table. They’d given her a room on base to rest, and, even in the dim light, the flat, white-colored walls and unfamiliar bunk jarred at her senses. She ignored it, then sat up when the images of the dream didn’t leave her as immediately as she’d hoped, and found the bottle of water her groping hand hadn’t quite discovered.
Her wrists shook as she twisted the cap off and took a drink.
Takahashi had provided a list of pharmaceuticals they’d been given. It had been incomplete, him skimming off the top of his head to what he could remember, but the names had been enough to shake her. A lot of hallucinogens. Mind-alterers. Things meant to break the restrictions of the human brain, and few of them safe. The surgeries he’d done had been few, relative to her other treatments—one at ages three, six, eleven, and seventeen—and done mostly with Nano-technology. That didn’t make her feel better, but at least it dispelled the images of him cutting into her brain.
She let out a long breath and sagged, bowing her head as she leaned on the mattress. Below, her legs looked too flat in her thin jeans. Not flabby, but not muscular, either. One knee ached. Her wrists and shoulders did, too, come to think of it. The base ought to have a gym somewhere, right? She’d been working out ever since Nomiki had come aboard the Nemina, but it’d be nice to have a dedicated space for it. Even nicer if that space included a pool where she could work out the kinks.
Her swimsuit was still on the Nemina, right? She remembered packing it.
Before she could ponder further, a soft knock sounded on her door, followed by the slide of a hand across its surface.
She glanced down, checked her shirt and the fly of her pants, then cleared her throat. “Hello?”
The door opened with a soft scuff. Nomiki poked her head around its edge, her face limned with the outside hallway light, and caught sight of h
er. “Hey.”
“What’s up?”
“Not much. Taking a break from Takahashi.” After a quick glance around the room, Nomiki shuffled the rest of the way into the room and closed the door. “Thought I’d pay my sister a visit.”
By the way she sauntered over to the bed, it looked more like a relaxation than a formal visit. As if being alone with her gave Nomiki leave to drop any pretense of professionalism. The smooth, catlike movements fled, replaced by a denser, blockier gait. She dropped down on the bed, pulled her shoes off, then cranked her head to one side to work the elastic out of her hair. “Doctor’s been talking.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Can’t stand it. Like he’s got us all figured out, you know?” Her face scrunched up as the elastic came loose. She snapped it over her wrist with one hand and shook her hair out with the other, finally turning her head back toward Karin. “What a fucking cunt.”
Ah, cunt. Of all the Old Earth swears, it was perhaps her least favorite, but she could see where Nomiki was coming from. The usual system swears didn’t quite cut it. Tocker came close, referring to someone who messed with their or others’ minds, but didn’t have a strong enough impression.
“He give any more stuff on why Eurynome wanted to mess with our heads?”
Though the drug information was nice to know, that’s what really piqued her interest. They’d already survived the drugs. She wanted to know what they’d been for. What, exactly, lay under her ability to create pretty lights. What they had plucked from their heads.
“Yeah, sort of.” After a brief, narrow-eyed assessment, Nomiki reached over, took Karin’s water bottle, and twisted off its cap. The liquid reflected in the dim light from the night-time wall mount as she swigged a drink, then handed it back. “He keeps talking about a ‘genesis point,’ whatever that is. A creation event for the human worldview.”
“Uh…” Karin’s eyebrows shot into her forehead. “What?”
“Right?” Nomiki pulled her hair back behind her ear, then kept her hand there to massage her head, squinting her eyes into slits. “Fucking weird.”
“This whole thing is weird.” Karin let out a breathless laugh. “We’re weird.”
“You’re weirder.” Nomiki shot her a grin, her teeth flashing in the dim light. She lowered her hand back down to the mattress and leaned forward.
Karin fingered the bottle in her hands, pressing her thumb into its ribbed indents.
Genesis point. A creation event for the human worldview. She’d read a bit about the evolution of the brain, but it was admittedly a weak point for her studies. Too much talk with complex Greek or Latin names, tons upon tons of theories, things that were, by definition, too hard to prove or conceive of. The human worldview itself had changed. Broadened, first with globalization, then with their exploration into other systems. Alpha Centauri came first and had crashed hard on its course. Sirius had expanded with more success and less warfare. The Gliese system existed on the periphery, still being built. Up until recently, travel and communication between all three had been done with relative ease, but they still tended to keep to themselves. Few companies transited more than one system. Even Earth had lost its pull.
Not that she had known that, back then. She hadn’t known anything about other systems until she’d landed in one.
Another symptom of Eurynome’s selective education program.
“He keeps saying we’re gods,” Nomiki said after a few minutes had passed. “And he keeps sneaking me this look, like I’ve got the secrets of the universe in my head or something.”
“Maybe he gives everyone that look,” she commented. “He is a brain surgeon. Maybe he sizes people up by skull shape.”
Nomiki snorted. “Oh, yes, very sexy.”
“Did he say anything about the files?”
“Yeah, he said he could get some of them. Or help us get them. Whatever’s left of the project. It’s not running anymore. Got shut down just after we left.”
“Hmm, wonder why.”
Nomiki didn’t smile, precisely. She never did when the conversation took a turn like it had—only sobered, her mouth turning to a grimmer line. Not from regret. Not when it came to the things they’d done to escape. Every death, in Nomiki’s eyes, had been thought out, judged, and justified. That was part of her program—part of the way she’d been made different from others. But death rarely brought her joy.
“One good thing that came out of that body count,” she said after a few seconds’ delay. “Apart from us getting out, anyway. Hope they still have the files. Eurynome liked its hardcopy paper, as I remember”
“Takahashi worked with nanotech. If nothing else, that data should be backed up to something electronic. Might take a bit to reconstruct what, exactly, had been done through it, but…”
“He’s in full cooperation. Brindon’s given him a couple terminals to play with. I watched him for a bit. He’d typed up a couple dozen pages, at least, all of them backed up on cloud drives in case he decides to delete things.”
“Maybe he’ll be able to parse out what a genesis point is and why it matters.”
“Maybe.”
“I had a dream about him just now,” she said. “Not a nice one. Was he on site a lot, or just when he needed to operate?”
“Not a lot. As far as I remember, he was everyone’s surgeon, so frequency of operation would have put him there at least once a year, but he came more often than that. Twice. Maybe three or four times, depending on what was happening. What do you remember?”
“Nothing good. Felt like a flashback more than an actual dream or memory.”
Nomiki would know what that was. She and Karin had experienced more than their share of side effects since their escape. The first few years had been the most difficult. They’d been pretty tocked up for a while. Unable to hold down regular jobs. She flinched as an image came to her—curled up against the unfinished concrete in the bathroom of her second retail job, shivering from a reaction, choking down the sounds of her panic as she hid from her coworkers. For a second, the damp mix of chlorine and mold came to her nose before she pushed it away.
“What were the phases he was talking about? I don’t remember them.”
“They’re what killed Brennan. I made it through tertiary and partway into quaternary. That’s when I decided to pull us out.”
She thought for a second. “Before they could put me into it?”
“Into quaternary, yes.” Nomiki gave her a quick glance. “You had some preliminary treatments. They didn’t go well.”
“Ah.”
She’d thought so. After Takahashi had brought it up, the timing just seemed to fit. They hadn’t told her about the phases—she’d found out about those later, but even then, she’d thought there’d only been three phases, not four, and she remembered some of her later treatments. Her most recently acquired memory of Takahashi had been one of them. And, now that she remembered it, she found herself remembering other things, as well. Thoughts, feelings. Snippets of conversation.
She had a feeling her dreams would not be very nice for a while.
“Thanks,” she said. “You saved my life again.”
“It was a tactical decision.”
“A tactical decision you made because you love me.”
“Yes. A tactical decision made because I love you.” A smile quirked up the edge of Nomiki’s lips. “It would have been too big a blow to lose you, sister. I think I would have been a very different person.”
“I’m not sure Seirlin would still be standing if they’d killed me. I like to think you’d have gone on an extended revenge trip on my behalf.”
“Well, yes. I’d have painted the walls with their blood, but it wouldn’t have replaced you.”
“I’m sorry about Brennan.”
“It was a long time ago.” Nomiki’s smile tipped up again. “But thanks.”
“Maybe this’ll expose what they did. Make them have to pay.”
Nomiki snorted. “Oh
, yes. They’re connected to the Shadows. Fallon’ll make them pay in spades, once all this gets out. Alliance, too. Brindon’s not so tactless she wouldn’t share it. It’ll probably stop the war, once it hits. Then Seirlin will have two governments shaking them down.” Nomiki’s teeth flashed at the thought. “Won’t that be fun.”
“Yes,” Karin said. “Fun. So long as we can find Sasha and figure out what she’s up to.”
Before she could go on, a knock sounded on the door, followed by Soo-jin’s quick, direct voice. “Yo, can I join the party in there?”
“Yeah, sure,” Nomiki called. “Not a party ‘til it’s three.”
“Damn, dude, you guys hate light or something?” Soo-jin poked her head inside, then shuffled in. She still wore the inner-city mesh she’d had on before, the tail of her dreads falling high from the back of her head, some of the metal rings catching the dim nightlight.
“We’re just a pair of dark souls,” Nomiki said.
“Yeah, yeah, just tell me if I’m gonna walk into something.”
A smile tugged at Karin’s mouth. Good that she and Soo-jin got along. She’d thought they might, but both women had odd quirks of temper. Before they’d warmed up to each other, she’d been Soo-jin’s favorite sniping post, and she got a feeling that the woman was selective in who she befriended.
Nomiki carried an even more capricious bent. Though she could slide in and trade friendship like business partners, it was rare those relationships ever went beyond their usefulness. Brennan had slipped past. Karin, too, though it had taken a long time for her to realize it.
Despite her comments, Soo-jin found the opposite bunk with little difficulty. It creaked on its hinge as she sat down, roughing up the flat, made surface. Shin-high boots that Karin hadn’t noticed before gleamed in the light as she crossed her legs, resplendent in her layers of dark clothing. A floral smell, subtle in its deepness and not overpowering, caught her nose.
“I found something. Finally cracked that ball’s innards. It’s got a secondary tracker hidden up in its wires. Tiny.”
