by K. Gorman
“Not that I know of.” Manoj shifted, a frown drawing down his eyebrows as he exchanged a glance with the other man, mouth open as if lost for an explanation. “She comes down here sometimes. Just to glare, I think.”
A smile quirked at the side of her mouth. That sounded like Nomiki. Where Karin had been keeping away from her problems, her sister had been coming down to give them a good scowl.
“Does she?” she asked. “Maybe I should give it a try.” She crossed her arms over her chest as she gave the doctor’s back a second look. He either hadn’t noticed her or was playing a really good ignoring game. “Do you think he cares?”
“He’d be stupid not to. If she glared at me like that, I’d be on the next shuttle to Clemens.”
Karin gave a little snort. “It wouldn’t help you. Might as well face your fate.” She glanced back to Manoj, then nodded toward the window. “What’s he been doing? Are you allowed to tell me?”
“Not much to tell, really. He’s just been at that computer, typing away.”
“He talks sometimes,” the other man cut in, pointing to a speaker panel Karin hadn’t noticed in the doorframe—just what did Chamak use this room for?—and went on. “Mutters, mostly. Hard to make out.”
“That’s because it’s in some weird Japanese patois,” Manoj said. “General’s recording everything, anyway. They’ll have people translating anything he even thinks of saying.”
Karin’s eyebrows twitched. That sounded ambitious, considering thought-readers hadn’t been invented yet. She studied Manoj for a minute, then turned her attention to the other one, giving him a long stare. “What’s your name? I feel like we’ve met.”
“Cary Avan, Private Second Class, ma’am. You, ah…” He looked down and shifted, an awkwardness stumbling between his words. “You healed me yesterday.”
“Oh—sorry, I… didn’t realize…”
Shit. Well, could she be expected to remember faces? He had looked familiar. But she had gone through around four hundred people yesterday, give or take, and she was starting to go through the shifts more or less on autopilot.
She stepped forward and held out her hand to him. “Sorry. Nice to meet you. I’m Karin. No rank.”
“Will you be going inside?” Manoj asked.
“Could I? Am I allowed?” She flashed them a guilty smile. “I hadn’t honestly thought to check.”
“Brindon said you could have access. Didn’t say the same for your sister.”
Yeah, Nomiki might accidentally kill him.
“I’d like to go in, if that’s all right.” She eyed the guards’ blasters. “He’s not dangerous, is he? I mean, obviously, everyone is dangerous, but—”
“He hasn’t shown any sign of dangerous behavior.” Manoj gave her a reassuring smile and patted his blaster. “Don’t worry. If he tries anything, we’ve got your back.” Then he paused, hesitation in his body before he dipped his head, holding her eyes. “And the second you want to get out, we’ll have this door open in a heartbeat.”
That gave her pause. Had she been that obvious? The smile froze on her face as she studied him for a few seconds longer than she should have, feeling the past minutes’ jovial atmosphere drop off her face. He must have put two and two together. Not hard, in hindsight. Between her powers, Nomiki’s glaring visits, and the mad scientist locked up on the inside of the room, the whole triad had to be the least-kept secret on the base—but he’d gone beyond that. Seen the human side of things. Her side.
She hadn’t expected that.
“Thank you,” she said. “I… appreciate it.”
“Anytime.” He pulled a key from his pants pocket. “Are you ready?”
Her jaw tightened. As did her fists. She balled them at her sides, the fingernails digging into her palms with a spear of pain. The cold from before threatened again, threading up through her feet, along with a trickle of fear as she looked to the door. Its lock was new, but its antiquated bolt and tumbler design stood out from the rest of the building’s smooth touchpad interfaces. Beside it, the window gave the inside of the room a pale tint, like in some of the netgames she’d seen played.
Takahashi had noticed her. He stared at her through the glass.
She stared right on back.
“Yeah,” she said. “Open it.”
Chapter Fifteen
Takahashi stood when she entered, and little prickles of fear raced through the inside of her stomach as he held her stare, never moving from the side of his desk. She couldn’t help the hunch that came over her shoulders, nor the way her arms closed over her abdomen. The memories, this morning’s dream—they were too close. Flashes of a green-lit hospital room floated at the edge of her mind like crab traps in a bay, moored by the man who stood before her. Briefly, the smell of antiseptic rose in the back of her awareness.
Only three days ago, she hadn’t cared about him. Hadn’t known who he was beyond the picture Nomiki had found.
Now? Everything had changed.
Sol. This was a bad idea.
“You’re different,” he said, watching as she wandered to the left, putting the table between them. “Did something happen?”
Hah. What a question. She almost snarled in reply, the anger flashing so fast, it felt like a rush of blood through her chest and neck, but she held it in. Barely.
She should confront him, then and there. Accuse him. Lash out. That was what Nomiki would have done, wasn’t it?
Except… she wasn’t Nomiki. And lashing out had never really been her style. Her style had been avoidance. Avoid conflict, avoid consequences. For the past seven years, she’d avoided the authorities. Running had been her first choice for so long, it was ingrained in her psyche. Even now, the urge to leave the room made her itch. To get on her ship and never come back.
But there were some things that you couldn’t run from, and she had a feeling this particular encounter had been in the making for quite a while.
So, she would confront him.
Instead, she said, “What do you know about Brazil?”
“Brazil?” Takahashi’s surprise drowned out in the frown that bent his brow in the next second as he worked through the puzzle. “Is this about Sasha?”
Oh, yeah. Dr. Sasha is from Brazil. She hadn’t forgotten that, but it had slipped her mind.
“No. Well, sort of,” she amended herself. “I remembered something about it, but not enough of it, if that makes any sense.”
The room seemed to hold its breath as they stared at each other. For some reason, Takahashi appeared to be smaller now. Less imposing. Maybe the dark backdrop of the room’s walls had made him seem taller before. Some trick of his hair blending in.
It was probably her fear, though. The earlier rush had retreated back into a hard, wriggling mass in her abdomen. Her fingers tightened over it, willing it to stay put. With it there, the room, and the doctor, didn’t seem quite so scary.
“You’re the one who’s missing memories, aren’t you?” Takahashi’s tone seemed almost sympathetic. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
We’re both missing memories, she almost said, but held the thought back—if Nomiki hadn’t told him about her missing memories, then that wasn’t any of her business to divulge. His tone pissed her off, though. And his face. His expression had gone soft, full of concern. An act she assumed helped him with his well-paying clients at Seirlin Genomics.
More anger flashed. She stopped walking.
“No,” she said. “I want you to tell me about it.”
“Ah,” he said. “I see.” His gaze dropped from her to wander around the table. He made a gesture to a chair at the end of it. “Would you care to sit?”
He turned his back to her and left the table, making for the few bags of his personal belongings that sat on one of the empty bunks. “I have some tea, if you’d like. Wonderful stuff. They brought it from my house on Korikishiko, but it’s actually Chamaki. They’re very big on their tea, here.”
“I’m not taking anything
you give me,” she said, her voice caustic.
“Then I hope you don’t mind if I make myself some,” he said, continuing as if she hadn’t said anything, taking a kettle over to the small sink in the corner. “What do you want to know about Brazil?”
“What happened to it?”
“It was destroyed. The Americans dropped a nuclear bomb on Sao Paulo during the Los Lupus riots. Two megaton. By then, most of the people had left, of course, but with the radiation… well, you could take the fight to the jungles, but… between the bomb and the riots and the civil war, it wasn’t so much one country as twelve, and half of it on fire. Changed the entire planet’s temperature by three degrees that year.”
“Why were they fighting?”
“For a million different reasons. Crops had failed. The government had done crackdowns. Didn’t want people leaving, didn’t want people in the streets. Hell, didn’t want people out of their houses in the end. They locked down the hospitals, shops… The smaller towns ran all right, but the bigger ones…” Takahashi shook his head. “Why do you want to know?”
“Was there a set of stone ruins at or near Seirlin’s Brazil site? Similar to the ones in Greece?”
“Macedonia, actually. Just over the border. And yes, there were ruins. The brothers liked them, if I recall.”
The Corringham brothers, she remembered. “Do you know much about them?”
“The brothers, or the ruins? All I know about the ruins is that they were large pieces of rock. I’m a neurosurgeon, not a paleontologist.” He switched the water and came back to the table, the cordless kettle already heating in his hand. “I can help you with your memory problems.”
“My memory problems are that you took them,” she said.
“You can’t just take memories. It doesn’t work like that.” He paused, narrowing his eyes at her. “You’re getting them back, aren’t you? That’s what happened. And please, sit down. I’m not going to do anything.”
“Of course you aren’t. There’s two guys with guns outside preventing you from doing anything.” She lifted her head. “It’d also be damn ungrateful, considering I’m the one who brought you out of zombie Shadow mode.”
He stopped where he stooped, ready to pour his cup, and gave her a narrow-eyed study. “Was that a joke? Good, we must be making some progress. You are more relaxed than when you came in.”
“Yeah, well, you try confronting your childhood mad scientist and see how you react.”
“Fair point. I’m not a bad person, though. I hope you will see that at some point.”
Her lips twisted. “Let me guess—you were just doing your job, right? Well, Nomiki was just doing hers when we escaped.”
“I’ve never killed anyone,” he said.
That startled a laugh out of her. It had a hysterical edge that she couldn’t stop. “Really? No one? Do you want me to start listing names? I remember enough of those.”
“I never killed anyone,” he said again.
“Layla Jibril, Project Athena. Einine Masters, Project Scathatch. Terrance Daniels, Heracles. Callen and Jiayi Zhang-Lin—”
“I didn’t kill them—”
“Project Gemini,” she said, bringing the name down like a hammer. “Are you seriously going to keep denying it?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I didn’t kill them. I gave them a better chance at survival.”
“A better chance—” She almost shot from behind the chair. “Is that what you call what you did? You cut into our heads to give us a better chance?”
“Absolutely. The tertiary phase is a brutal path. No one could make it without modification.”
Another laugh escaped her. She leaned back, tilting her head up toward the ceiling. “Holy fucking hell, you are unbelievable.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Even if it is the truth, that means that you just sat around, doing your job, complacent, while the rest of them fed children into the metaphorical maw of whatever-the-hell-it-was-you-people-were-doing.” She laughed again. “You know, I think they invented a word for that around the time of the holocaust.”
Silence returned to the room. She stared at the ceiling, noting the divets in the concrete. The light from the edges made the shadows look like the face of a cratered moon. For a minute, she wished she were back on the Nemina, that she was flying, that she’d never heard of Shadows and Lost, that she could go back to the obscurity and isolation of the outer edge.
It may have been lonely, but at least, she wouldn’t have to talk to Takahashi and relive her past.
“I don’t care what you believe. I did what I thought was right.”
She only laughed. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I read that somewhere. And besides, you may not have directly killed us, but you sure as hell fucked with our heads.”
With the relative silence of the room, his sigh sounded loud to her ears. As if he were right next to her—though, in the next second, she heard the shuffle of clothes and scrape of metal that told her he had sat in the chair.
“It wasn’t supposed to be that way,” he said. “Something changed within the program.”
“Oh? And how was it supposed to be? What was the end goal of all those decades of child experimentation?”
“You were supposed to be perfect. After they had what they needed, you could have lived your lives.”
“Right. I’ll just believe that, then.” Her lips twisted into a disgusted sneer, and, as she brought her gaze back down from the ceiling, her sight caught on the open netlink screen. She jerked her chin toward it. “Are you writing a novel, then? Or are parts of it true?”
“Everything I’ve said is true,” he said. “The program was working. People went through it, lived, and went on with the rest of their lives. It worked—”
“It had an incredible mortality rate for something that worked,” she commented. “How many of us died, anyway? Hundreds? Thousands? I had thirty friends that just fucking vanished.”
Another silence. The screen of the netlink shivered, as if it had a power fluctuation. Takahashi’s mug of tea sat forgotten on the desk in front of it, a ripple of steam lifting into the air. Beyond it, the wrappers of what looked like some kind of rice meal lay crumpled near a keypad.
“I can’t change the past,” he said. “I can only make amends.”
“You can certainly admit your mistakes,” she said. “It makes the victims feel better about themselves. I read that somewhere, too.” She shot him a look. “You’re a neurosurgeon. I thought you’d be up on all that stuff.”
“I know how the brain works on a scientific and anatomic level. Psychology and Psychiatry are different fields, with which I have only an above-average familiarity. Talk to me about chemicals and impulses, not about grief counseling.”
“My sister has an impulse to kill you.”
“Yes. She has expressed it a few times to me.”
“I’m not sure what you people expected when you created a program named Enyo. Why not stick to the nice gods and goddesses? A few more like me, and you may not have ended up with a compound full of corpses on our exit.”
“Perhaps, but that wasn’t my decision to make. I didn’t design the programs.”
“Who did?”
“The Corringham brothers.”
“I don’t remember them.”
“You may not have met them. They tended to spend their time in the gene lab, or reading the update reports. They came back to witness tertiary and quaternary phases, though.”
“Oh, goodie—so if we survived that long, we got to see our godly designers again. What a treat.” She paused. “Wait a minute, you said before that the program worked, right? Do you mean that people actually made it through?”
“Yes. Plenty of them did.”
“So, more than Dr. Sasha?” She frowned. “In a loose estimate, how many would you say passed through the program, left, and went on to have their own lives? Ten? Twenty? Two hundred?”
“A hundred, at least. P
robably more. Seirlin will have records.”
Karin opened her mouth, but paused again.
Does that mean there are at least a hundred other people like Sasha, Nomiki, and me around? People with powers? People that remembered what had gone down in the compound?
“Where are they? Earth?” That might explain it. With Earth as busy with its own affairs as it was supposed to be, who would care much to chase down people with special powers? But it was hard to accept that none of them would have gone on revenge quests after passing through. “What happened in quaternary? Did you guys mess with their memories? I mean—”
A loud knocking sounded at the door. A second later, it opened, and Nomiki stuck her head in. “Karin. Time to go.”
She half stood. “What’s happened?”
Her sister gave the doctor a dark look for a few seconds before she answered. “They found Sasha’s ship. She’s on planet.”
Karin’s heart stopped. She was still here?
In the next instant, she’d risen and crossed the room. Her shoes brushed softly on the concrete floor. Behind her, she heard the sound of Takahashi’s chair scrape against the floor as he stood.
“Karin?”
She paused and glanced back, meeting his eyes.
“I can help you with your memories.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and closed the door.
Chapter Sixteen
“She’s on planet. Indus-Yamato, the next continent, close to Yokohama City in the west.”
The hallway around them bustled, soldiers coming and going. More activity than she’d seen on the base since her arrival. Announcements sounded over the internal comms, the speech murky and distorted by an electrical tinniness that made her frontal lobe twinge.
Nomiki walked beside her, weapon harness fully visible and loaded—both knives in long, downward-pointing sheaths, three guns, and some kind of small utility at her hip. She’d exchanged the street clothes for a more combat-practical, stretch-fit armor, a kind of midpoint design between the solid metal armor Karin had seen in military advertisements and the thin, tight-fitted costumes worn more popularly by fighting women in movies. Too blocky and practical to be completely sexy, but it did hug Nomiki’s shape very well.
