by K. Gorman
Everything felt real. Right down to the macro. Tube lights flickered, some with an audible hum, the newer, inset ones burned with a slight hiss, and a smell of burning dust mixed in with a growing cold that had begun to creep into the air. Even their light pulled at her senses, the same way light did on the outside—something she largely ignored, but that caught up to her every so often, as it did now.
She pulled at it on the next corner, causing the light to blink out and both Nomiki and Soo-jin to give her a hard stare, the incriminating glow obvious as it faded into and warped the air around her hand.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just checking.”
Eventually, after dropping down a series of stairwells—following Nomiki’s sense of direction rather than the conflicting exit signs—the section changed. The walls roughened, transitioning from smooth, warm drywall to a raw pour of concrete. The floor similarly switched, cutting straight from the hallway’s previous worn linoleum to the type of cement she used to see in multi-level car parks on Belenus. Smooth, with a tendency to scuff. They made tires squeak when vehicles turned on them.
They paused at the divide, exchanged a glance with each other, then stepped over.
In an instant, the smell of the air changed.
Gone was the warmth of the hall behind them. The temperature dropped a good five degrees—eleven or twelve instead of seventeen—and a clammy, damp feeling dragged at their skin. The smell of stale water rose, along with a distinct aftertaste that lingered in the back of her throat after she breathed out.
Ahead, an odd contraption of what looked like ten metallic, tube-shaped colonial cryopods stood off-center from their path, a bevy of pipes and cords trailing up its length and into the ceiling more than five meters above their head. Though their viewing windows were uniformly dark, a few standby lights were on at their ends, pulsating a dull orange.
Soo-jin folded her arms over her chest and took it all in. After a few seconds, one of her eyebrows arched into her forehead. “You know, if this chick is in control of creating this dimension, she could have at least watched a few interior decorating shows.”
“Yes, and those pods are so last millennium,” Nomiki commented.
“If she is indeed creating this, maybe she had to build off what she already had,” Karin said. “This had to function like a research lab. And, considering that Ares guy we saw, along with all those other people in the pictures, she had to keep the physics the same. If she’s still following the Eurynome Project, then all her research had to be done within the constraints of known universal law.”
After a moment, she realized the other two were staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re over-thinking this,” Nomiki informed her. “Sasha’s the bad guy. We insult bad guys, not logic them.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Karin cleared her throat. “I mean—wow, that color of gray with that… other color of gray? What was she going for, Existential Boredom 101?”
“Right?” Soo-jin said. “It’s a crime against humanity.”
“There’s labels on those pods,” Nomiki said. “Maybe she skipped Basic Villainy 101 and left us some more clues.”
“Or an exit solution where we don’t actually have to talk to her,” Soo-jin said. “I’m quite in favor of that.”
Two of the pods lay open, their arched doors swung on a simple metal door hinge. The brushed aluminum siding reflected the room’s drab, shadowy grays—the lighting came either from the embedded ship-style lamps on the walls or an odd bundle of tubes overtop a platform near the corner of the ceiling.
Karin activated her power, letting a whisper of a glow trail over its surface and into the gel-laden bed within. Though the outside resembled the colonial transport pods of the first settlers, the insides proved quite different. Clear gel, as opposed to the blue-green cryo of the early days, and a bed made of regular fabric cushions that would not have lasted the trans-system pilgrimage. A shudder went through her as her light gleamed on a set of metal clamps, adjustable for fit and positioned for holding six points of the human body.
“Kinky,” Soo-jin said, looking over her shoulder.
Nomiki touched the screen above one of the active pods. A monitor of the person’s vitals showed up on the screen. At a swipe of her thumb, the viewing window in the pod’s upper half lit up.
The face inside caught her breath.
“Layla,” she breathed, then flicked her gaze up to Nomiki. “Program Athena.”
“Yep, that’s what it says on here. Looks like your dreams are coming true.”
The face in the window looked smaller than she remembered. Younger, with smoother skin, her frizzy hair pulled back from her curved features by a series of colorful, fuzzy hair bands. Her closed eyes and slack expression gave her face a kind of peacefulness that contradicted Karin’s memory of her personality. She’d been sharp, back then. Confident. Smart in a way that had her attack problems from several angles at once, and well beyond the solving capabilities of any normal kid.
Here, she looked like a model shot from one of those religious pamphlets she used to get on Belenus. Enlightened. Transcendental. Free of worldly concern. Especially with the pure white glow of the pod’s interior lighting framing her face.
“She died,” Karin said.
“So did you, yet we saw your twin upstairs.” Nomiki tapped on the next screen, peering into the viewing window when it lit up. “Gaia, over here. Looks like they were dipping into some of my gene pool with her.”
“Oceanus, over here,” Soo-jin said, moving onto the next. “Kind of handsome, if you like chiseled jaws. The rest are empty.”
Karin swiped her screen, just in case, but was unsurprised when it came up empty. “Well, at least we know what pantheon she’s going for.”
“Greek, right?” Soo-jin asked.
“Yep.”
“Damn. I would have really liked to see a real-life Gwa-eum.”
The goddess of mercy. She’d explained as such back on Enlil when they’d been clearing out Songbird Sanctuary, which doubled as a religious retreat for a sect of Korean Buddhists.
“We’re not gods,” Karin said. “Just people with mutations.”
“Mutations that can create pocket dimensions.” Soo-jin chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all religious convert on you. We’ve been shipmates too long for that. Plus, I’m kind of religioused-out. Bad parenting and all that.”
Karin had often wondered about Soo-jin’s past. From the way she spoke about Songbird, it sounded like she’d spent perhaps the latter part of her formative years there, or at least her early twenties, and both she and Marc had alluded to a troubled past with her parents. It felt too sensitive a subject to broach, though. Too private. They’d only just gone beyond that level in their friendship where they’d hunkered down to watch netshows together. Some people took years to talk about their past—if they ever did—and now certainly wasn’t the time to start.
They had a pocket dimension to escape.
“Guys, quiet down.” Nomiki threw out an arm in warning, the tone of her voice low and serious. “I heard something.”
As if she’d thrown a switch, everyone froze. The metal of the pod felt cool under Karin’s finger. She breathed slow and shallow, head still, turned between the two exits with her eyes unfocused, listening hard for a change.
Somewhere in the background, the building’s baseline electric hum continued to resonate through the walls and floor. It had taken on a different tone when they’d entered the room. Something to do with its relative spaciousness compared to the rest of the complex, she suspected. But, as she paid more attention to it, she couldn’t help but question the difference.
Then—there. A shuffle.
Her focus snapped back the way they had come. Light from the more modernized hallway spilled in an even pitch across several feet of the smooth, stained cement. The shuffling sound came again, closer, sounding lopsided. A trail of goosebumps lifted from her arms, ticki
ng under the fabric of the suit. Beside her, Nomiki drew her knife in a smooth, silent motion. The light from the other hallway marked it in silhouette like a long, slender tooth.
A shadow slipped into view past the threshold of the door. Karin’s fist clenched itself tight as it dipped and swayed, growing larger and closer.
Then the person stepped into view.
She frowned. “Is that Marc?”
“Yes.” Nomiki leaned forward and stood, already making her way over. “Get him.”
“Heal him? Now?” A tingling shot through her leg as she made to follow. She cast a glance to Soo-jin as she limped to catch up. “What about his head?”
“What about his head?” Nomiki asked.
“He hit it. We worried about concussion.”
“I think he’d prefer risking concussion than eternal imprisonment in another dimension,” Soo-jin said. “Besides, he’s up and moving. A bit less risky than being unconscious. And we’re not being attacked at the moment.”
“We’ll wait for him to wake before we continue.”
Well, she thought, all right, then.
He didn’t struggle. By now, she’d gotten good at it. Quick and efficient, the curing motion programmed as habit from her shifts on base. Plus, he didn’t appear to see her coming—something which did make her wonder about his potential concussion, given she’d been glowing by the time she’d reached close enough to strike.
But all that didn’t matter. Ten minutes later, he stirred to a groggy, pained kind of consciousness. In another five, he regained his feet.
“Good,” Nomiki commented. “Let’s go.”
The passageways brightened as they continued. They passed more offices—tile and concrete instead of drywall, with an older, damp, closed-in smell—but a quick search of the computers revealed no new net connections. Soo-jin added a few other files to her netlink. She held it out as they walked, browsing through what they’d found in the off chance they’d discover Sasha’s records. A few clinic stations appeared every other hall, painted a kind of stained, pale beige that would have had her questioning Sasha’s interior design work again had there not also been a few roman-lettered—Spanish or Portuguese—signs tacked at the midpoints of walls and above doorways.
A recreation of the Brazilian compound, she guessed. It somewhat explained the dampness, though not the chill. Brazil was tropical, wasn’t it? The humidity, she understood, but shouldn’t it be warm?
Then again, the Macedonian compound had grown chilly during its winter, too. More than chilly, actually.
Marc kept pace with them. Nothing about him looked strictly healthy. His face had a drawn, tense look to it, as if in pain, and the deep tone of his skin had turned paler than she’d ever seen it. The sheen of sweat that shone under every tube light they passed had the look of something old and stale. Used. Tired.
But, when he caught her looking for what was probably the fifteenth time, the snort he made, and the accompanying smile, broke the image.
“I’m fine, Karin. Really. I’ll make it.”
Behind him—both because of her reading-while-walking ploy and to ensure he didn’t fall behind—Soo-jin caught her eye around his sleeve. She flashed a quick, amused grin.
Paying attention to them both, Karin didn’t notice when Nomiki stopped. She ran into her sister, biting back a yelp as her shoulder and upper arm smacked into the hard metal of the sheaths that criss-crossed her back.
When she glanced past, following the corridor up to where it crossed the next junction, her breath caught in her throat.
She froze, suddenly very aware at how much they’d been talking.
One of Brindon’s soldiers had wandered into view, his path intersecting theirs. Though the puffy combat uniform and sheer-faced helmet obscured his features, the casual, almost whimsical quality of his walk gave away his status as Lost. He hadn’t looked their way, instead focused on whatever had him walking into the adjoining hallway, but the sight of the rifle dangling from his shoulder made her blood chill as she remembered how the other Lost had turned on them.
And, now that they’d stopped, she realized something else: the thrum had gotten louder.
Whatever powered this place—they were getting closer.
When the soldier vanished from sight, Nomiki turned back to them, eyebrows arched high into her forehead, and jerked her head in a movement that said, Hey, let’s follow that guy.
Soo-jin gave her a solemn nod and put her netlink away. The blaster she’d stashed in her back pocket came back into her hand, the quiet whine of its warm-up mingling with the subsonic thrum of the building’s base systems before it faded and the light at its end glowed green.
Marc, having lost his blaster, straightened.
Nomiki watched them. Then, pulling her own blaster from an ankle holster, she transferred it to her empty side holster—Karin didn’t ask how she’d lost the other one—and slid out one of her knives. Switching it to a backhand hold, she dropped lower, her right arm reaching out to run close to the wall. Waving for them to stay back, she stepped away, creeping up the hall in a practiced, near-silent creep.
But, just as she reached the corner, a voice split through the air.
“You don’t have to do that. I know that you’re there.”
Karin froze.
Sasha.
Clear, resonant, and with more than a tinge of amusement underlying it—as if she’d just been laughing—the doctor’s voice seemed to come from the air itself. For a moment, Karin wasn’t even sure it hadn’t come from her mind.
Perhaps another tidbit of evidence for Nomiki’s increasingly-believable pocket-dimension theory.
Up the hall, Nomiki had gone still.
“Come on down,” the voice continued. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
As she stopped speaking, a sound echoed from up the next corner. The shuffle of boots. The rustle and click of uniforms and gun straps. She had a sudden flashback to the noises the Fallon soldiers had made on their way in, before they’d been made Lost.
Nomiki unfroze. Knife at the ready, she completed the final two steps to the corner and peeked around. Then she threw her head back and let out a loud sigh.
“She’s got them lined up. Everyone we came in with, save Singh who I think was on the other side of the barrier and dead, anyway. Too organized to be uncontrolled.” From the way she called this out to them, whatever she’d seen must have convinced her there was no need to be sneaky, and when she turned around, the expression on her face confirmed it. “I’m guessing either we go through and talk to the lady, or try and out-attrition her in her own lab.”
“No,” said Sasha, speaking in the air again. “You either go through and talk to the lady, or the lady gets her new guards to make you go through and talk to her.”
Her diction had changed from the lab. More casual, as if she’d relaxed—which made sense, considering they were definitely on her home turf now—but she still retained the same anger as before. Low and smooth, like a smoldering bed of coals pushing a pure heat under the surface of her words.
You two were always ruining things, she’d said before.
Somehow, Karin doubted she’d forgiven either of them.
For a second, a twist of anger flashed across Nomiki’s face—she carried a different anger from the doctor’s, more present and vivid—and Karin caught a glimpse of the old rebellion in her sister’s expression.
Then she schooled it. Got it under control. Adopting an expression of mild irritation, she twitched an eyebrow up at the air around them before turning her face back to them.
“Guess we’re going in, then. For a talk.”
Soo-jin twitched an eyebrow of her own. “Seriously?”
Nomiki shrugged. “Might as well. Free pass to get us in. Plus, since we’re in the clutches of a supreme being—” she shot this emphasis toward the ceiling with a scowl, “—we might as well see what she wants.”
Karin narrowed her eyes. Nomiki, seeing her expression, met
them, her face nonplussed.
Yeah, that wasn’t the real reason. Nomiki just wanted to get close enough to attack.
After a moment, Karin nodded. She could support that.
Behind her, Soo-jin’s voice took on a more exasperated tone. “Seriously?”
“Yeah,” Karin said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-One
More than two troops of soldiers stood in formation near the walls in the next hallway, some Karin recognized, but most she didn’t. Hard to tell with the faceplates on. Some had managed to lose their helmets, but most hadn’t. The Shadows didn’t need skin on skin contact to get through the brain. She’d seen plenty of people who’d been taken in both environment suits and exoplanet helmets. Whatever laws of physics the Shadows obeyed, they didn’t have a whole lot of respect when it came to head coverings.
They shuffled as the four of them walked down. Beyond the visors, she caught sight of a few pitch-black eyes following them along, their heads turning without shame as they continued. With most standing taller than she did, that amount of attention made her skin crawl—and they all seemed focused on her rather than the others, even though she’d kept her light inactive and out of sight.
The hallway lost its normalcy after they rounded the next bend.
If she’d doubted Nomiki’s pocket-dimension theory, the next room removed any shadow of that doubt from her mind. Filaments of metal bent over the room’s opening like the slender, upright petals of some of Enlil’s more exotic flower species, or, oddly, of a hand-drawn diagram she’d studied of a woman’s reproductive tract when she’d been in the compound school, the fingers at the end of the uterine tube that extended to the ovary. The thought was just a passing impression. Upon closer inspection, the metal had a smooth, inorganic finish and rounded the corner like the slope of a turning racetrack, leading them inside. But, as she stepped over the threshold and into the next room, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just walked into someone’s womb.
