by K. Gorman
Most had died.
She would have, too, if her sister hadn’t gotten her out of there.
She knew that now. Had realized it last month when they’d discovered Dr. Soichiro Takahashi, the brain surgeon who had been on staff at their project and who had, on numerous occasions, operated on her head, and sat him down for a chat.
He was hard at work, too—yet another doctor trying to figure out the rest of her files.
“Well, yes and no,” the man backpedaled, his brown eyes ticking up and looking like they were focusing inward—if she was any judge of expression, she expected he was replaying his most-recent sentence back through his head. “Sorry, I should have been more specific. We’ve measured it. You’re quantifiable.” The last word was emphasized with a bright grin, two even rows of white teeth showing past his thick lips. His gaze beamed at her as if he were presenting her with some grand epiphany. “Not magical.”
Her fingers twitched.
Magical.
It seemed, to her, that people had been throwing that word around an awful lot lately.
She resisted the urge to hit him. That was more her sister’s style.
“I have never been magical,” she said, forcing her teeth to ungrit from each other just enough to speak. “Scientists made me. Scientists can figure me out.”
To her right, Corporal Tian Adan Reeve, her pilot, bodyguard, and current military supervisor, gave her a sidelong glance. Okay, so she might be a bit crabby—but could anybody blame her? It may have only been one month since she’d arrived on Chamak Udyaan, the Fallon Empire’s largest planet, but it had been three since the Shadows had first attacked.
They lost more and more people every cycle, and even the thousands of Lost she healed every week made barely a scratch in the amount the Shadows had taken. Hells, even curing the affected population on a single planet was beyond her. She’d die before she finished. And while it was true that they’d found a near-clone of herself on a recent incursion, the girl had yet to show whether she shared Karin’s powers.
The girl was eight.
Regardless of whether she did or not, they still had to find a cure—even two healers weren’t enough. And, in the meantime, she’d prefer it if they didn’t waste her time while they did so. This little call-away had already shaved two hours off her regular healing shift, and if they kept batting her around with junior researchers talking bullshit, she’d be late for the next one, too.
Feeling the irritation build again, she let out a long, deeply-held breath and forced herself to relax.
It wasn’t their fault. Research took time. And they were already bending their normal fields of study to figure out what made the Shadows tick. At least, her powers were documented, and, as the man had pointed out, quantifiable.
Light was energy. Hers was no different.
Well, okay, it was a little different, in that they hadn’t yet figured out how she could use it the way she could, or how it could fight the Shadows the way it did—but, really, not that different.
“So,” she said, interrupting the awkward silence her last statement had made. “Down the hall and to the left?”
The junior researcher—the label on his lab coat read Naser, which she assumed to be his last name—cleared his throat. “Er, yes.”
“Great.” She strode forward, passing him. “Let’s get moving.”
Sol, I’m kind of a bitch today. The kid didn’t deserve that. He probably had five times the education she did and a family of unhealed Lost housed in one of the empire’s compounds.
But she had little time to waste and a large appointment to keep.
Beyond an unmanned reception desk whose dark base and sky-gray accents gleamed with an elegance that was both understated and hard-cut, the hallway opened up. Continuing the monochromatic theme, a series of rounded, dove-gray supports slanted down at varying angles, matching the lighter gray of the polished floor and contrasting against the darker, textured walls. Although it was empty except for them—likely a result of the Shadow attacks—the air had a light, warm feel to it. Within seconds, the humid dampness that had come in with them vanished, and Karin forgot her clothes were wet.
Reeve caught up with her after a few steps. After another second, Naser jogged back up to her side and began a kind of sidelong walk as he tried to engage her again.
“We’ve, uh, cataloged your spectrum,” he said. “It’s quite impressive. Each sample we take catches a different variation in color and frequency, but not that different, and we’ve found some patterns—”
“Can you recreate it?” she asked.
“Er… we can mimic it.”
Most of the places she’d been to could mimic it. There’d been a mad rush to scrounge every spectrometric and photo-emissions device from physics labs, observatories, and classrooms, and every scientific lab with even the barest relation to the fields was scrambling to figure her out. She’d been tested for radiation, body chemistry, toxins, electromagnetivity, blood composition and reactivity, brain activity and neurological stimulation, skin samples, lymph samples, bone marrow scans… everything under the system’s two suns and then some.
And she’d agreed to it, too. She wanted them to find out about her—to figure out how she ticked. She’d thought that finding her files would be the key that unlocked that particular secret, but scientific advancements did not progress as quick as they did in movies and netfiction, and there had been a lot of material to sort through, interpret, and test. The raid on Dr. Sasha’s continuation of The Eurynome Project had yielded more than seven hundred different files and dispatches, and pressure from both Fallon and Alliance on Seirlin Biocorp, the conglomerate behind the original project, had yielded more than seventy years’ worth of documentation.
She knew it was impossible to expect faster progress. That didn’t make it any less frustrating. Every Shadow attack lost them more ground that she couldn’t make up. If things continued like this, the system had little hope for recovery—or even survival.
“Well, that’s good,” she said, trying to keep the pessimism from creeping into her tone.
The words sounded vacant and false to her ears, but Naser’s attitude perked up.
“Yes, I—er, sorry.” He jumped ahead to cut off her path, his grin transforming to an apology as he directed her to a door on the left. “We’ve actually moved a bit.”
From what she could tell, the move had taken them exactly one doorway forward from where they had been the last time, a week ago. She could see the other door just down the hall.
Naser was already opening the new one. “In here. The doctors are waiting.”
And if that isn’t just the phrase to get a girl excited.
Ignoring the stiffening of her shoulders, she stepped forward and began shrugging off the light, airy raincoat she hadn’t bothered to take off yet. “Fantastic. Let’s get this over with.”
The room she entered had the height of a gymnasium. About half as tall as the outer hallway had been, it also employed a series of high-mounted windows in a small nook that raised the ceiling an extra half-meter, but these ones had been blacked out—using a type of auto-tone, she’d guess, by the shine that still reflected from their glass.
Changing between the rooms felt like going from day to night with the loss of visible clouds. It had also inherited a touch of color. A light, tan-colored woodwork had been paneled into the walls, complementing the monochrome base and matching several tables that lay arranged around the room. Six researchers, all wearing the same bulky, teal-tinged lab coat as Naser, looked up from their stations around the room and watched her walk in. After a few seconds, half of them returned to their work. The others put down what they were doing and began to walk toward them.
She rolled her shoulders and forced a long, slow breath out. At least, she wasn’t getting flashbacks anymore. Well, not every time, anyway.
She straightened the jacket into an organized shape and handed it to Reeve with a soft thanks—at some point, h
e’d become her temporary butler, as well—plastered a smile on her face, and moved forward to greet the approaching scientists.
She only made it two steps before a wave of static crawled up the skin of her back.
Adrenalin shot into her blood. She spun around.
There, in the corner that paralleled her door, stood a Shadow.
It was a creature straight from a nightmare. No matter how many she encountered, there would be no removing the second of absolute panic, shock, and terror that the sight of them evoked. The Shadows looked like people—they were people-shaped, anyway, upright and with a head, body, and four limbs—and, often, they even acted like them.
But that was where the similarities ended. Made of a dark, blacker-than-black substance that seethed and shifted, parts of them were almost impossible to perceive, giving them an impression of depthlessness. Like looking into the deepest caves on a planet and trying to see into the dark. And they could change, too. Their bodies shortened and elongated, or jerked to the side like puppets with their strings yanked, and they moved in utter silence with no regard for friction—or gravity, for that matter.
One of her most terrifying encounters with them had involved one slithering across the ceiling like some video-game demon.
This one was caged, at least—a fact she noticed only after her heart had jumped into her lungs. Thick, near-invisible panes of what she assumed were reinforced plastic-glass rose up about two and a half meters in a straight-sided coffin shape, with only the darker-tint along the joints obvious, and some kind of machinery that blocked the base from view. A series of wires snaked out from the bottom-left, organized in a careful bundle that led to a seventh, unoccupied workstation. Like with the others, a netlink screen hovered in view, two charts and what looked like a frequency monitor visible.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said, slipping into her Old Earth swears from surprise. “That wasn’t there before.”
“We acquired it the day after your last visit,” said a flat voice behind her.
A woman in her mid-forties, Dr. Nguyen had a round face, a stocky body, and a gruff, take-no-bullshit expression that looked hardwired into her face. She stood with her hands in her coat pockets, casting her stare toward the Shadow with a tired, over-worked look that gave Karin the impression of a bulldog after a long day’s run.
She didn’t ask how they’d acquired it—the container looked immensely small, and she’d thought the Shadows couldn’t be knocked unconscious, only destroyed. Another shiver slid across her spine. For some reason, the Shadow had eyes only for her, its bulbous head tipped in her direction, and its focus making her skin crawl. Its attention hadn’t wavered since she’d entered the room.
Dr. Nguyen glanced over, gave her a quick up-and-down appraisal, then turned her body and walked away. Her left hand slid out of her pocket to make a gesture to the center table.
“Over here. There’s an SHCT Container at the bottom and a receiver lens at the top. It would be preferable if you could aim your light for that.”
Hmm. Was that sarcasm?
Karin decided that she liked the woman—she hadn’t been there during her last visit. She didn’t recognize the cuboid device situated on the center table, but it looked high-tech and fancy. Black, like half of the building around them, but with a series of metal pieces and lenses breaking the sides.
“Sure,” she said. “I can do that. Through the… funnel?”
Dr. Nguyen grunted.
I’ll take that as a yes, then. She stepped back and gave her shoulders an experimental roll—a conscious tick she’d picked up over the last few weeks to focus herself—and activated her ability.
A tingling sensation flushed her hands. With a warm, creeping sensation that felt like she had somehow wet herself on her fingers, a flow of thin, mercurial light seeped through her skin and gathered on her palms, gaining strength as she summoned it.
Within seconds, she looked the very picture of one of the light-bearing saint figures she’d seen at some of the temples on Nova.
She was getting better at it. Before, when the Shadows had first attacked, she’d merely been out of practice, but healing so many Lost and having to use her light in defense… She hadn’t thought she could get better at it—as if it were some inane ability, like making a bed or sweeping the floor—but she had. It came to her with more precision now, stronger, sharper, with a body to it that she hadn’t felt before.
Like she could reach out and grab hold of it.
A good thing, that, considering what they were up against. As the only one who could cure the Lost, it wouldn’t do for her to get weaker, would it?
She exhaled and gave herself a little shake. Best not to dwell on that. Her ability was man-made, and these were the best researchers on the planet. They would find a way.
Tipping back up onto her toes, she lifted her hands and directed the light into the air. The rim of the funnel lit up white-gold as it poured inside, completely soundless. At the bottom, the SHCT—initials she only remembered since they were etched on the side of the box—flickered to life. By the green and red that lit up the gauge on its side and the sudden activity on the holoscreens at one of the workstations, she assumed it was working.
Lifting her gaze from the box, she glanced between the two researchers who had jumped into action the second the computers had started working and Dr. Nguyen, who had also fallen back to watch them. “Just tell me when.”
One of the researchers, a man with a broad chest, dusty blond hair, and dark circles under his eyes, gave Dr. Nguyen a short nod.
“That’ll be fine. We’ll probably want you back in a few days.” Dr. Nguyen’s mouth tightened into a thin line as she turned to Karin, the frustration clear in her eyes. “It’s… difficult to hold onto.”
Karin felt her own face form a similar expression. “Yeah. It fades after time. If I’m not here to maintain it, it just—”
“You can maintain it?”
“Er… yes?”
Dr. Nguyen’s face had changed. She took an unconscious step toward Karin, who recognized the hunger that filled her eyes—and the desperation.
Everyone had lost someone. Everyone. No one had come out of this unscathed.
“Maybe you should stay here,” Dr. Nguyen said. “It would be beneficial to us. We could work much faster. We—”
A soft shuffle of clothes sounded behind her, and Dr. Nguyen’s eyes shifted focus from her to the person who stepped up to flank her.
Reeve, her teal-blue rain jacket still held in his arms, cleared his throat, somehow managing to make the sound authoritative and apologetic at the same time. “I’m afraid Miss Makos has a civilian shift scheduled at People’s Park in an hour. Perhaps you could make arrangements for another time?”
Karin never had figured out exactly what it was that people saw in Reeve. On paper, he was just an enlisted space cadet who had worked his way into the pilot’s chair. His rank as corporal was, although impressive, not nearly enough to warrant the attention that was paid to him nor the missions afforded to him. Accompanying her around might be an easy job, but he’d been entrusted to oversee her sister, as well—and Nomiki had a skillset that made even the most accomplished badasses back off.
A small quiet filled the space between them. Dr. Nguyen gave Reeve a long study, her eyes scanning back and forth across what Karin presumed was his face.
Then, after a few moments, her mouth tightened.
“I’ll do that, then,” she said, her tone deeper than before, rougher. “Your people can expect insistence in the matter.”
“Good,” Reeve said. “I’ll let them know.”
He angled away from her and back toward the exit behind them. Karin took the cue. With a quick nod to both Dr. Nguyen, whose expression retained a calm, controlled determination as the woman watched her go, and to Naser, who had remained a quiet presence by the door, she turned around and followed Reeve’s lead out the way they’d come.
Dr. Nguyen’s stare bur
ned a spot into her shoulders until they were out of sight.
“Thanks,” she said when they were out in the hallway and away from the lab.
Reeve handed back her jacket and gave her a lopsided salute. “Just doing my job.” His grin faltered as he shot a glance behind them. “Sounds like she might be a pain in the ass.”
“I don’t blame her,” Karin said.
“Neither do I. These are hard times, all ‘round.”
Chapter Two
Public spaces made her cagey. Probably why she often found herself wandering down the smaller, lesser-used areas of the base’s main buildings after a shift. Yesterday, it had been the basement wards of the hospital; the day before, the interchanging corridors, grids, and catwalks of the aeronautics lab, which made her think it wasn’t so much the space that drove into her, but the people—which was weird. She’d spent seven years living in crowded cities before embracing the Nemina’s nomadic lifestyle. She’d gotten used to people.
But, back then, no one had cared who she was. No one had stared at her like they did now. And every day saw more and more desperate people wading into fields and stadiums, community halls and school gymnasiums, leading loved ones into chairs to be tied down and cured by her hand. Every week, she was trafficked to different places. This past week had seen her in four different cities, hauled overnight, and funneled through back alleys and side doors, always with a full military escort, always with a hovering team of physicians ready to check her for overwork. Always with the fear that, one day, she’d break.
She hadn’t. Instead, she’d grown stronger. Faster. More efficient. More determined to push herself—which was what her superiors were afraid of. In spite of her progress, she wasn’t a machine. And the subjects of The Eurynome Project were historically prone to breaking. The Fallon military now had all of the records that proved just how many the program had killed, as well as a helpful ex-Eurynome doctor to walk them through it.
