by K. Gorman
Karin watched her go.
Gods, I don’t want anything to do with that thing.
She didn’t want to be near it, not even in the same wing as it. That part of her life had been over and done with when they’d left Old Earth; no way would she open the doors wide to let that crap get back in.
She turned toward the darkness. After a moment’s decision, she moved to a hallway on the right, going deeper into the building’s guts, and started walking. Once she was out of sight of the rest, she activated her light.
A hush fell over her. Even though she could still hear the murmurs, swears, and occasional clunk coming from the other room, it felt like she’d put a dimension between them as opposed to the corner of the hallway. The walls and floor lit in a soft, ghostly manner under her light, pale and with a muted, passive color that she imagined looked much better when lit by their normal illumination—in fact, judging by the high-wattage tubes along the ceiling, snaking to form a wave pattern in what must have been an expensive remodel, she imagined it would have what Soo-jin called an ‘obnoxious’ level of white, once it was cleaned. The kind of white found in high-end fashion stores or, closer to home, biomod facilities.
An image of one such facility came to her, taken from a cosmetics advertisement, of all things.
Here, the windows had a rounded edge to them and slanted in a way that formed tilted parallelograms rather than the usual rectangle. She pushed her light through, onto a classroom this time, which gave her another pang in her heart. She hesitated, glancing toward the door—not ajar, this time, so she’d likely have to call Nomiki over to manhandle it open—then pressed her face to the glass. Desks and chairs met her gaze, most in neat, ordered rows, though with some variance to them, the chairs pushed into place in such a way that suggested it hadn’t been one person doing it, but multiple. A bulletin board on the wall displayed a series of papers that, on closer inspection, appeared to be completed school assignments.
Students.
Her breath hissed through her teeth as she sucked it in, a stunned disconnect blooming in her mind as her gaze slid from the desks to the walls, taking in other pictures that were still taped up.
Yes. Definitely students.
“Suns,” she said, then upgraded as the realization hit. “Sol’s fucking child.”
Was there yet another slew of Eurynome Project kids around? Beyond the ones she’d grown up with, super soldiers like Lenora, and Dr. Sasha’s new brood? The horror drove straight through her bones. She’d known that there had been, since Lenora was a clear Sirius-system, Seirlin-born-and-bred Eurynome Project subject, but, given Lenora’s forty-year age and the statement Seirlin had given them about the program…
Her words from earlier came back.
You mean a company that tortured, mutilated, and murdered children lied to us?
“Fucking hells.”
She was so fucking stupid. Anything that company told them was suspect. Her entire childhood had been built on lies. To just blindly assume that they’d been telling the truth, even when the alternative had just seemed so comically absurd… That was on her. And yet, the betrayal cut and shook at the foundations of her mind—as if Seirlin had pulled a simple string and now she had to question all of her thoughts and beliefs.
Again.
Tears blurred her vision as a set of jagged memories crashed against her chest. She blinked them back and bared her lips from her teeth in a snarl that was reflected in the window. She saw her face, just for an instant—the pain, grief, and anger—before she backed up, turning her head back to call for Nomiki.
But, before she did, something else caught her attention. A small niggling feeling at the edge of her mind. She stopped, a shiver running through the top of her shoulders. That earlier tingling returned. The one that was not quite on par for her power.
Drawing in a shudder, and trying to ignore the cold creeping up her spine, she turned around and directed her attention back down the hall, into the darkness beyond the faint illumination of her light.
The silhouette of a Shadow stood out against the end wall like a jagged, human-shaped tear in reality.
Adrenaline crashed through her body like thunder. She jolted, one hand thwacking against the wall in her reaction, but managed to keep the surprised yelp confined to a strangled hiss in her throat.
Shadows weren’t all that scary. Not to her, at least. Her light power could rip through one like water through tissue paper. That didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous—close-quarters combat with them was a harrowing experience, and she’d gained at least one concussion from them that had needed nano treatment—but it did make them less of a threat than they had been.
That didn’t stop her reaction to them, however. Seeing one, especially catching a glance of one, was like picking up a rock in the forest and discovering an abnormally large spider right under it.
Swear-word-inducing, but not an immediate danger.
But, as she stared at it and the seconds ticked by, the roiling in her head slowed, and a part of her shoulders began to relax.
As strange and jarring as they were, Shadows were, at least, familiar.
Shadows weren’t just black, humanoid forms. There was a weird sense of depthlessness about them. Staring at them straight-on was like looking into a dark, depthless pool, except without the shine of the water on top—as if you’d already entered into it and were trying to see the bottom. They were solid, sure. Nothing that could crack her head against a wall wasn’t solid. But their state of matter had a flux to it that interacted oddly with human senses, and they always appeared to shift, as if their body wasn’t stable.
This one, for instance, had an extraordinarily large head in comparison to its torso, which made it look more like one of the alien beings on one of the old Novan netdramas than anything strictly human.
Their edges also appeared to blur, like seeing a meniscus in the surface tension of water or a censor strip on TV.
As if her brain couldn’t perceive them correctly.
“Sol’s fucking child,” she said, the words dull and distant. Retroactive.
It wasn’t attacking, which was good—sometimes, they didn’t. But it felt odd to her. As if something about the Shadow wasn’t quite right. It didn’t, she realized, face her straight-on. Normally, Shadows did that with her, attracted to her both being a person and a light wielder—light, children, and people: that’s the order in which Shadows were attracted to something. Unerringly, if she were in a room with a bunch of other people, any Shadow would eventually fix its gaze on her.
But this one didn’t.
It was always hard to tell with its lack of features, but this one felt like it was looking at something in the middle-distance to her left.
She resisted the urge to look over. She’d watched Soo-jin play enough horror netgames. She knew precisely how such an action ended—usually in the thing rapidly leaping at her.
There was also something odd about is blackness. It appeared to have a slight blue sheen—again like dark water. As if some of her light were catching it askance.
The tingling in her bones slid into a buzzing. The second energy, born from the Shift Events and separate from her light, rose and raked a claw of static down both of her arms.
She shivered.
Nope. Not going to happen.
Yet, as she made to tamp it down, a part of her resisted. She hesitated, feeling the energy pause under her skin, as it were listening to her.
If not now, when?
Her mind came up with several immediate, sarcastic responses, most of them along the lines of, ‘fucking never!’
But she didn’t have the luxury of ignoring her powers anymore. If she wanted to defeat Sasha, that meant growing as quickly as she could. She couldn’t keep running away.
Taking a deep breath—which turned into several, given the surge of adrenaline in her veins and the race of her heartbeat—she steeled herself and took another step closer. Static raked across her back ag
ain, but this time, she only gritted her teeth against it. A dull roar rose in her ears as she stared at the Shadow, feeling the energy cycle inside her.
Yeah, all right. Let’s try it.
Lifting her right hand as if she were reaching out to catch a spider’s thread hanging in the air, she twitched her middle and index finger, felt the motion click something inside of her, and pulled.
The entire corridor shifted. The floor changed, the corner behind the Shadow deepening then spreading, flattening, ghostly white walls turning in and out like a kaleidoscope. The windows, too, pulled apart, their dark façades looming in her peripheral vision—and, for a second, she thought she spotted some faces in them, but dismissed it. The air also seemed to split, as if one part existed on one plane, with that plane’s currents and movement, and the other part existed elsewhere, affected by something else. Darkness pulled in from the sides, along with a muted, pale light that diluted the colors in the hall to a dull, desaturated gray.
It reminded her of the Shadow world.
The Shadow itself had flattened comically—like taking a picture of a person and making it three times narrower through a photo editing program—but it popped back out a few seconds later.
A coil of nausea slipped through Karin’s stomach. She swallowed hard, forcing it back down, and stared at the sight around her.
Sol’s fucking child, is this actually happening, or am I just tripping balls?
Given the shit the Eurynome Project had force-fed her as a child, it wasn’t that much of a stretch to assume she could have tripping flashbacks—hells, she’d had quite a few of them over the years. But none of them had been quite this specific.
“Eos.”
The name, conveyed both in sound and as a mental imprint, snapped through her mind like a crack in ice. She jumped, breath catching in her throat.
This time, the Shadow stared directly at her.
“What the fuck?” Her voice was low, and she could feel it waver. Her body trembled.
“Come to me, Eos.”
Its voice twisted, warped, became recognizable. She caught a distinct image of Tylanus behind it, his tone raw and emotional.
“Come find me, damnit. I know you’re out there.”
“Tylanus?” She took a few hesitant steps forward, meaning to get a different angle on the Shadow. “Tylanus, is that you?”
She stopped on the third step.
Is this a trap?
“Karin?” His voice seemed more normal now, as if the connection had stabilized. “Oh, thank the gods. Where are you?”
She puffed out a disbelieving breath. “Like fuck I’m going to tell you that. Last I checked, you were threatening me and telling me not to interfere.”
The Shadow hissed and bent double, as if it were in pain.
“I don’t have much time. You need to find me. I—”
An unholy screech ripped from the Shadow. She flinched back. Touches of energy buzzed up her skin. A dull drone kicked up at the edge of her psyche, roaring closer like a wave.
The entire scene jumped, like a rubber band snapping into place. The walls and windows returned to normal, the dimensions of the hallway flattening out and back into their corners, ceiling straightening above her. The buzzing energy she’d felt before shot back into her bones like a squirt of caffeine.
Right before her eyes, the Shadow dissolved silently into a cloud of quickly-disappearing dust.
She watched it fall to the floor and disappear.
What the fuck?
A blinking light caught her attention then. It was red, and pulsated from a section of wall that had been behind the Shadow—which was weird. Wasn’t the power off? Squinting, she took another step, leaning forward to get a better look.
The entire section of wall shifted, and the sentinel which had up until that point been dormant unfolded out of its dock, rising smoothly to its full meter-and-a-half height.
Oh, you sack of shit.
Realizing just how blindly stupid she was, she skittered back. By the time it target-locked onto her, she was already turning into a sprint.
“Miki! Miki! Help—Oof.”
She ran straight into the rock-solid figure of Jon Patrim, bouncing off his tree-trunk thick arm in a movement that would have been comical were it not for the clunks and whirs coming from behind her—sentinels were usually equipped with blasters.
Calm and unafraid, he caught her and shoved her behind him, the push nearly knocking the breath out of her with its force—which she didn’t mind at all, considering his next move was to unholster his blaster and shoot the sentinel in the face.
Its target-lock shifted, head piece snapping to Jon a split second before the rest of its body and trajectory followed. With a face as placid as a slow river, he dodged its first strike, and when a port opened in its chest to fire at him, he slammed a kick into its side so hard that a dent appeared in its metal. The thing shot sideways and smashed against the wall in a scream of protesting hydraulics and a crash so loud that it momentarily deafened her. The reverberation shook the floor.
On the tail end of that crash, Nomiki skidded around the corner, blades drawn and their laser edges blazing. She didn’t hesitate, only sprinted—faster than any human could, save perhaps Jon and Lenora.
Without a word, she tossed him one of her blades, which he caught out of the air with ease, and they both squared off against the sentinel.
As they made to dispatch it, Marc joined her side, a blaster in his left hand. His right found her forearm and followed it down to her hand to squeeze. She squeezed back in reply.
The fight was swift, brutal, and unfair—a single sentinel up against two super soldiers who had, literally, been modeled after gods and goddesses. A series of crashes, smashes, and the high-pitched squeal and whine of straining mechanics came from the end of the corridor as they lit into it until, about a minute later, they’d managed to dissect its armored chestpiece and rend a laser blade through its power cell.
At the end, Nomiki stood over the broken pieces of robot on the floor, breathing hard, her body tense, and the laser edge of her knife aglow at her side as she surveyed the wreckage.
“It must have been in stasis. We activated the first one by proximity.” She glanced around, locating the closest security sensor, then back down. “The main security system is down, so…”
“I walked right up to it,” Karin said. “It was camouflaged into the wall.”
“Ah.” Nomiki directed her gaze to the wall, re-examining the niche it had come out of. “I guess that explains why half of it is painted white.”
Karin shook herself free from Marc’s grip on her hand and walked forward, swallowing the flash of fear that jumped across her mind as she approached the downed sentinel—despite being in literal pieces, it looked like it could spring right back to life again—and focused on Nomiki. “Why is it here, though? There are just a couple clinics and a classroom. Was it protecting something, or just coincidentally…”
She paused when she noticed a few heavy scratches on the floor—moving marks, like the ones in the front hallway. Her eyebrows drew inward into a frown, and she activated her light. It gleamed wetly on the inner spillage of the drone, then moved past to illuminate the heavy scratch marks in the floor just in front of it.
The other energy was there, too, waiting, but she ignored it with a grim clench of her jaw.
They could talk about Tylanus later.
“Those… look like they go through the wall,” Cookie observed, also stepping forward. “Is there another loading area or something?”
Nomiki took several steps back, looking up at the wall, then squinting at the rooms beside it. In the quiet, they heard her mutter something, her breath catching over her tongue.
Then, “It matches the two rooms here, but the main hallway goes deeper.”
“False wall?” Marc asked.
“False wall,” she confirmed. She grinned, a flash of teeth in the underlit gloom, and turned toward Soo-jin, who
still had her equipment bag over her shoulder. “Hey, Saw Lady, need you again.”
Soo-jin grunted as she stepped forward. “Find me a keypad, and I’m all yours.”
Ten minutes and one hot-wired secret door later—the keypad was in the middle of the wall itself, right next to the niche where the sentinel had been hidden, meaning that anyone who came up to the keypad would have had to move right beside the sentinel’s detecting nodes—and they’d found a hidden room about two meters squared, with long, broad metal shelves lining every wall, their empty surfaces gaping to the eye, especially when a light came on overhead, clearly hooked into the same backup power grid that the two sentinels had been charging their cells on.
“Fucking hells,” Soo-jin commented, her face an expression of pure disgust. “This is like trying to loot a dungeon that’s already been looted.”
“There’s nothing here,” Cookie confirmed. “Fucking nothing.”
Nomiki stalked about the small space, eyeing the shelves with her keen eyes, but soon, she, too, came to the same conclusion of disgust as the rest of them.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Chapter Three
Karin stared at the desert scrub as it flashed by the Nemina’s side window, leaning into Marc’s shoulder, the slight bump and vibration as the craft hit turbulence giving her seat the occasional jerk.
She wasn’t flying. Much to her disappointment, Sergeant Tian Adan Reeve, Nomiki’s handler and a person who seemed to slither through official ranks like a serial spy—and someone she actually liked—had taken over that assignment, and she, the Nemina’s usual pilot, had been put on the backburner. Something to do with new Fallon upgrades, being a valuable team asset, and operating in enemy territory.
Which was both funny and sad, since she had, after all, flown the Nemina to the Fallon cruiser they’d docked at before she’d been abducted. But she liked Reeve. And she realized that the order had come from somewhere up the chain of command, which meant that she shouldn’t blame or take it out on him, so she’d taken her grumpy ass into the aft sections of the craft and occupied a seat in a room close to the Med bay that Marc had, for the past few months, been attempting to restore back into a recreation area.
