by K. Gorman
A tingle started in her hands. She stopped and frowned down at the package, a single thought—fuck, is it poisoned?—crashing through her mind as the feeling intensified. Within seconds, her bones were humming with energy. She backed up as waves of goosebumps traveled up her arms. The package fell to the floor. “What the hells did you do?”
The next thing she knew, light was brimming to her skin. It rose up like pieces of dust magnetized to a point. She grabbed at them with a snarl and pulled them back, her hands making claws in the air. In the back of her mind, she became aware of a growing sound, like the lowest part of an electronic drumbeat forced to drone, or of a very large, subsonic engine drive starting up. A sound like rain sounded overtop of it, rising with it.
She rounded on Commander Baik. “Stop it!”
He hadn’t moved. He stood by the window, watching her, not speaking. From outside, the faintest touch of orange and gold lit his white sleeve.
“Look outside. Keep your eyes on the sun and the sky.”
Uncomprehending, she followed his stare as he turned his attention back outside. The original crackle of energy—whatever it was—had lessened, but that had not stopped the spread. Her ribs hummed now, along with every bone in her face and skull. The light nestled close to her, a solid glow that outshone the room’s lighting and hugged her shoulders like a second blanket. By the tingle at the back of her neck, she knew that this, whatever it was, was not over yet.
Outside, the sun continued to set, its warm hues spread through the city. The stars sparkled overhead. She watched the headlights of a vehicle, a truck, turn onto a road nearby and then vanish. Warmth still touched her skin from the sun, blending with her power.
Then, as if someone had flicked a switch, it shut off.
She sucked in a breath as she felt the connection between her and the star cut like a cord—and then a second as that baseline hum picked up in her bones. Her eyes widened, darting up to the sky as the rain sound from earlier amplified in her mind, pricking at her skin with precision. She caught sight of a dark formation, a band of blackness that swept across the expanse like a stroke from a painter’s brush, following the slow curve of the sky. The sound of rain amplified, coming for her.
She staggered when it hit.
Sound rolled over her like a force. It thrummed through her ribs, caught up in her lungs, turned her yell into a hoarse, breathless rasp. Buzzing filled her ears, like she’d stuck her head inside of the world’s busiest, angriest yellowjacket nest and they’d somehow managed to fly inside her brain. A bright burst of static, like the type she used to see on the compound’s old television screens, crashed across her mind, making her jerk, and then—images.
Blue sky. The ruins. A depiction of the mythological world-snake turned into the Eurynome ouroboros, biting its tail as it nestled around an upside-down egg. Golden light glowing on the horizon. The smell of the forest, then smoke.
She didn’t know when she fell to the floor, but her fingers had turned into claws on the carpet. As the buzzing passed and her vision returned, she registered just how dark the room had grown. All the lights had flashed out. Only her glow worked to illuminate the area, reflecting with a white-gold shine off the wood inlay of the desk corner in front of her. Beyond, a few scattered stars twinkled through the window.
Commander Baik was still there, his face barely caught in the range of her light. The black band drew a thick line across the sky. There were two of them, now that she looked, the other forming a slightly thinner parallel closer to the mountains.
“What… in the ten hells…?”
The attack had left her shaking and breathless and sorting through the afterimages that had come to her. Parts of her vision blotted out from retinal burn. She used her power to make them go away. The room sharpened to her eyes, the dimness and the shadows growing more defined.
Commander Baik, she noticed, was not on the ground. He was also not panicking at the appearance of the black bands. But he wasn’t smiling, either. He stared at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then, he spoke.
“I think it’s time for you to go.”
Chapter Twelve
The room came into focus slowly, the after-images of a dream swimming at the edges and the shadows pulling at her attention. Smoke. The ruins. Limp, gray grass. Clouds, racing overhead like a time-lapse movie. None of the dead children this time, but Tylanus had been there, watching her with eyes blacker than time.
She stirred, blinking the pictures away and focusing on the room. Marc lay behind her, one arm once again wrapped around her. In all, not a bad way to wake up. Warm. Comfortable. She shifted backward, wiggling around to get herself closer, and his arm came to life, moving up her shoulder and pulling her close.
“You’re awake?” she asked.
“Mhmm.”
“Anything happen while I was out?”
After leaving Baik’s office, she’d been escorted to a small gymnasium where a hundred Lost had been waiting for her. No one had given her an explanation for the strange incident that had happened, instead meeting her questions with stony silence—but they had given her clothes, a matching pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt that looked like it had been dredged from the army’s sleepwear selection. With the soldiers’ inexperience with her work, it took over two hours to heal every Lost. When she’d arrived back to her cell with Marc, she’d almost immediately passed out on the bed.
Not a whole lot of time to talk about things.
“Nothing too exciting.” His thumb rubbed the outside of her shoulder. “People talking in the hall. Change of guard, I think.”
She smiled to herself, the rumble of his voice comfortable in its closeness. “Think of a way out, yet?”
“That all depends—you happen to see a Line 45 Modular Tank while you were out?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“You’d notice it. Looks like a giant robot with cannons for arms.”
She frowned. “Does that actually exist?”
“I may have been browsing Cookie’s comic collections on Chamak.”
That made her chuckle. Between Cookie and Soo-jin, they had more than half of the system’s fiction narratives collected on the Nemina’s servers. “Did they have any cool escape plans?”
“Cool? Yes. Practical and actionable?” He gave a slight pause, his finger twitching. “No.”
She frowned. There’d been a hesitancy in that sentence that, combined with the finger twitch, made her think. Either he really meant ‘no,’ or he’d had an idea but couldn’t discuss it with the cameras watching.
She examined the cover on the opposite bed—at some point, their captors had added the second bunk to accommodate Marc’s unexpected arrival, which made the room seem like a weird echo of her room on the Nemina with its layout. He’d gotten clothes, too, which were folded in a neat stack on the floor.
She shook her head to clear it. If Marc did have an escape plan, she couldn’t push for him to tell her now, no more than she could tell him about the tracker Nomiki had embedded into her body. Not with the cameras watching.
She glanced around, stirring to rise. “This place have potable water?”
He grunted and lifted his arm to point to the counter at the back of the room. “Pull-out sink in the corner. Cups are above.”
She extracted herself from the bed with another huff and cleared her throat. In the dimness of the room’s night-lighting and the bleariness of her eyes, she bumped into the corner of the counter with her bare legs and felt along its edge until she found the dark groove of the sink. It rolled out with a yank, similar to ones she’d seen on ships before. After locating a cup—plastic, not glass or metal—in the small cupboard above, she tested the water with her finger for a few seconds before she filled it. All the while, she felt Marc’s stare on her back, watching her from his position on the bed.
She took a sip, swallowed, and paused, holding the cup to her collarbone. “Did I fall asleep in the middle of
a conversation last night?”
“Yes. Mid-sentence.” By his words, he meant it as a joke, but the waver of his tone betrayed his tension. He was worried—as he should be. Hells, she was worried.
“I’m sorry. Guess I was tired.”
“You were. How many did you heal?”
“Only a hundred.” She pursed her lips. “They seemed… ill-prepared.”
He looked at the walls. “Too bad they aren’t so ill-prepared with our imprisonment.”
“Mhmm.” She turned, giving him a thin smile that he probably couldn’t see in the dim light over the top of the cup. “You know… I hate to sound callous, but I’m kind of glad you’re here. Except for the part where you’re a prisoner, too.”
He chuckled. “What can I say? Can’t let Soo-jin have all the fun.”
Or the blaster shots. For a moment, the sounds and images of their last excursion flashed over her—the roar of engines, the dark wetness of blood soaking through Soo-jin’s shirt, smearing over Karin’s fingers as she’d tried to staunch the flow, the copper smell rising into the air, and the stinging numbness as her own arm got shot, the faltering, confused expression on Soo-jin’s face turning into a frown. It all came at her at once, sudden, out of order, raging with all of that day’s anger and fear and panic packed into one punch.
When she came out of the first hit, returning to the room with the barest of gasps, she found herself clutching the glass in a vise grip. She forced herself to breathe. Marc was talking again, his attention—thank the gods—not on her but the opposite side of the room.
“—she would probably have gotten that door panel open by now, though.”
Karin glanced up to where his arm was pointing. Apart from the dim lights inset on the bottom parts of the walls and cupboards, the door panel was the only other source of light in the room. Its bright red ‘locked’ status made a crimson square of light that held her attention for a few seconds as she struggled with the aftermath of her panic, working her mouth loose from the clench of her jaws.
When she spoke again, her voice sounded false to her ears, but it didn’t waver as much as she thought it would. “Don’t bet on it. We shot the last one with one of those floaty-electric-shock-spheres that was chasing me.”
“See? You two are quite resourceful.”
She eased her grip on the glass, transferring it into her other hand. The tendons under her palm had gone sore from the pressure she’d put on the cup. With one more breath, she shoved the rest of the panic down, grounding herself with a shake of her head. “There’s something weird going on here.”
“Oh?” His face squinted together as he turned back to her. “You said something similar last night, but didn’t get much of a chance to elaborate. What is it?”
“There’s not as many people here as I’d expect, for starters—both in the number of Lost they had me heal and in the number of people just around, period.”
Perhaps she’d gotten used to Nova Kolkata’s base, where it was nigh-impossible to walk through a hall without encountering another person, but this building’s emptiness dragged at her. Only two scientists were working in that giant lab, three if one counted Pranav, and the only soldiers she’d seen were the guards in her escort and the twenty that had surrounded them in the transporter room. Extras had come in to handle the Lost, but they still numbered less than twenty, which meant that, if they were cycling through the same people, then this place had about twenty-five, including David and Commander Baik. A little thin for what she assumed was a well-funded military option. “Baik alluded that we were being hidden on purpose. Do you think a lack of troops helps with that?”
“Yeah, it definitely does. And if they’re hiding us, they’ll probably move you soon.”
The rising spark of hope snuffed out in her chest. She’d been hoping that, with her tracking beacon leading the way, Nomiki would have an easier time of it with less people to deal with, but if she were going to be moved around…
Well, that skewed the tracking a bit.
She took another sip of the water. “There’s another thing. Did the lights go out for you while I was gone?”
“Yeah. About an hour after you left, maybe two? What was that?”
Her gaze ticked over to him. “Did you notice anything else, or was it just a power outage to you?”
From the way his back straightened and his eyes gave her a sudden scrutiny, he must have read between the lines. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” She bit her bottom lip, then changed the motion into another sip of water, organizing her thoughts. “It wasn’t a normal power outage. And Nomiki did mention that weird energy.” She’d told him about that before, back on Chamak. “Something happened to the sun, and there were these… things in the sky. Big, black lines like someone was putting something on the atmosphere. And I had some sort of fit while it happened. I’d kind of dismissed it as a trauma trigger, but in hindsight, I think it was more than that.”
Marc gave her a stiff look. “A fit? What kind of fit?”
She cringed at the term, her mind connecting it to old connotations of fainting women or epileptic children, which didn’t feel quite right, but she was having a hard time self-diagnosing herself with the proper term. So much shit had happened in both her distant and recent past that it could be any number of things. As she thought back, echoes of the sensations came back, traveling in pinpricks up the skin of her arms. She clenched her right hand into a fist to ward them off.
“You know the feeling when a part of your body falls asleep? Like you have a bunch of angry insects buzzing in the limb when you move it?” At his nod, she went on. “It was like that, except it went all over my body. And I got pictures of things in my head. I’ve been getting those weird memory-dreams of the ruins and the kids and stuff, and that’s what came back.”
“I can see why you thought it was a trauma trigger,” he said. “The image stuff is classic Anderson’s Theory. Did you smell anything?”
“Yes. Smoke.” She crinkled her nose as the memory returned, along with a flash of Tylanus’ face, his black eyes boring into her, angry in a way that the Lost never were—at least, not until Dr. Sasha had taken control of them. Then, they were verifiable rage zombies. She shook the memory off with a shiver. “When did you become an expert on neurological trauma?”
His shrug rolled of his shoulders in the dark, nearly invisible, but she caught the quick grin he shot her. “Haven’t had much to do this past month, so I thought I’d catch up on my reading. Been switching it out with the Seirlin stuff to give my mind a break.”
She snorted. “To give it a break? That stuff’s drier than Kokop’s moons.”
Another shrug. “No argument there.”
She pinned him with a scrutinizing stare, which he ducked, the connection forming slowly in her mind. “Were you reading that stuff for me?”
“That all depends—if I say yes, does that make me a weird creep or a good boyfriend?”
“Good boyfriend. Definitely.” She hid her smile. “However, Soo-jin’s been reading up on neurological studies, too. She’s been more focused on the mad scientist part, though.”
His eyebrows twitched. “So, does that make her a good girlfriend or a weird creep?”
Before she could answer, a bright shard of pain shot through her clenched fist, vanishing a moment later. She hissed, buckling forward. Water splashed on her thighs and shins. The plastic cup hit her knee before clattering against the floor and rolling away. As light flared from the spot on instinct, rising into the air, she caught a brief, vanishing splotch of blackness on her arm before the skin cleared again.
Marc was by her side in less than a second. “Are you okay?”
He kicked the cup out of the way, then hesitated, his hands hovering over where she’d clenched her arm.
“I’m fine. Just—hang on.” Still cringing from the aftermath of the pain, she turned her back to him, unfolding her arm and turning it toward the light to get a better look at
its underside. She snarled at the counter’s dim bulbs, pulling on her own power to bolster their output. “Is there any particular reason why we can’t get any decent fucking lighting in here?”
As if in response, they flickered and went out. She gave them a flat look, her light wavering in the air around her like plasma from one of those old, decorative heat lamps.
“Are you fucking serious?”
But, as the memory of the pain in her arm subsided and the buzz of the earlier sensation persisted, not an echo this time, her tone faltered and changed. Her eyes widened with realization as she whirled.
“Marc, it’s happening again.” Her gaze went beyond him, to the other side of the room, noticing the lack of light. “Door panel’s out. Should we…?”
Even before she got the words out, he was already on it, the furrowed concern on his face switched out to a grim determination. She stared at his retreating back for a few seconds, the bright white of his shirt catching in her light, then turned her attention toward the floor. Adrenalin shot into her chest as she bent low, snatching up her pants and hopping into them. Flutters of mixed fear and excitement rushed up through her stomach—Sol on a stick, could they actually get out?
As she pulled on the rest of her pants and located her socks and shoes next to the bed, she pushed extra light Marc’s way, realizing he was in the dark. It caught him in a stoop, working away at the panel’s edges.
“It’s still engaged. Not responding. I—”
A series of blaster cracks from outside shut him up. They cut off with a grinding sound. The door gave a hard shudder, its surface shivering in her light. As the sound culminated in a high, piercing shriek that splintered straight into her bones, both she and Marc froze to the spot. Quiet descended, then a series of clicks. Something soft thumped down on the other side of the door.
Marc backed away from the panel, his steps slow and quiet, hands half-raised to defend himself. By an unspoken agreement, neither of them spoke for a long minute. She didn’t dare to breathe, listening hard to anything outside of the door.
