by K. Gorman
“The ships, most likely. Maybe a tree or ten, in case we need a distraction. Actually—” Soo-jin’s gaze dropped to hers. “I’m hoping to meet up with your sister. But blowing things up would be a nice, therapeutic bonus.”
An image popped into her head—the main Centauri ship, whumping out of existence in a concussing pulse of light.
It was satisfying… until she remembered all the people who’d been on board.
Fortunately, she’d never heard of a standard army grenade having that kind of power. More likely, Soo-jin could disable their engines or steering. And, if she destroyed a few trees around the perimeter, perhaps it could create enough confusion that Karin could warm-up the Nemina’s engines and get them the fuck out of there?
Well, she doubted that. For one, it would take at least ten minutes to warm them up—and probably closer to fifteen. For another, this place was absolutely crawling with Centauri. And they’d likely noticed Karin and Soo-jin’s absence by now.
They also had to get everyone out.
“Yeah,” she said. “We need to find Nomiki.”
“Yep. She’s the smart one.” Soo-jin’s gaze darted up to the clock on the nano read-out, then gave a nod. “All right. You’ve got another seven minutes to cool your heels, then we’ll head out. My plan is to get as much medical and arms as we can carry, find a place in the forest to hunker down and figure out a way to contact your sister, and find out whether or not you can transfer stuff over.”
“There’s a small cave the kids used to meet at. Nomiki might be there.” Karin popped the top of Cookie’s coffee canister. “We will also find out whether we’re actually physically moving around and not going through some weird fucking astral projection shared dream experience.”
Soo-jin flashed her a thumbs up and a wink. “Love your optimism. I’ll run a quick systems diagnostic, see if them Centauri brutes fucked with my engines while they were here. Back in a tick.”
“Fucking hell. Never let me lead an expedition again.”
Soo-jin grinned. “Hey, at least you found the place.”
The cave was at least a kilometer into the forest. Good enough to hide from thermal sensing equipment, unless the Centauri had drones flying through.
Which was entirely possible.
Fortunately for them, though the forest’s large population of evergreens provided a good canopy, it wasn’t all that thick on the ground. They’d had to clamber over a few fallen logs and navigate through a small spring—and backtrack twice when she’d gotten lost—but the ground cover was oddly shallow and relatively navigable. Especially since they didn’t mind crunching their merry way through the plants.
Soo-jin had found her a different chest brace. It restricted her breathing a bit, which twinged at her memory—weren’t people with broken ribs encouraged to breathe deeply, despite the pain?—but she shrugged that off.
If all went well, it wouldn’t be on all that long.
If all didn’t go well… she’d have way bigger problems.
The cave was smaller than she remembered, likely due to it being a child’s recollection. Cut out of the hillside like a half-open mouth, strings of dirt, moss, and Old Man’s Beard hung down from an entrance nearly choked by groundcover. The air shone with a dull, blue-gray tinge as Soo-jin’s light caught some of the dirt and stone inside.
The kids from the compound used to play in and around here. Mostly in the winter after it had been overrun by ground wasps one year, but they’d still used the area as a meeting place.
“You know, Karin, I’m flattered, but I think you underestimated my hip size there.” Soo-jin flicked the beam over the entrance again, head tilting to the side, taking a few steps closer to get a better angle on it. “We might fit in there.”
“It widens out inside.” But, even as she said it, her tone slid up with doubt. It did widen out farther in. Not by much, but enough. “It used to fit like three kids.”
Soo-jin squatted down, angling the light and squinting in. She blew out a breath. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re fitting in there.”
Shit. Karin gritted her teeth and held back a swear, glancing up into the trees. The underside of the lowest branches caught her light with a pale, gray-brown gleam, the bark on the nearest one mottled by a pale fungus and its leaves non-existent, bare twigs sticking out like awkward fingers. Above, the shaggy bough of a thick cedar leaned into view, its beard-like needles hanging down in swathes.
She’d been planning on using the cave for cover when they transferred back over, but that wouldn’t be possible now. Granted, she wasn’t sure if it had been possible before, given that her wrist and ribs were still broken and the cave would require a certain amount of shimmying to get in, but…
“You know…” Soo-jin swung her flashlight around, catching the boughs of several other evergreens that stood around them—cedar and pine, mostly. “The trees will probably hide us well enough. The cave would only block heat-sensing, anyway. All other scans would get through.”
“Are you saying we’re going to get caught anyway?”
“No, I’m saying that they’re not likely to look in this specific place for us. I mean—think about it. We would have vanished from our fucking rooms. With our ship compromised, wouldn’t we have footed it out for the nearest town?”
“Maybe,” Karin said. “I’m pessimistic, though.”
A whispery rustle caught her attention. They both spun, Soo-jin’s flashlight beam zipping around to a spot behind them.
Five Shadows stood amid the trunks and underbrush, their bodies visible as dark blotches in the flashlight beam—she could feel them suck at the light. The front-most one, standing a meter ahead of its comrades, was the same one that had followed them from the ship. She was starting to get a sense of recognition from it. So far, it projected as female. It was also about her size and shape.
She didn’t want to ponder that too hard. Especially since its—her—stare hit her in such an eerie, precise way. And, as the rest of them continued their stares, she was beginning to get a similar feeling from them.
They only stared at her. Never once did they move their attention to Soo-jin. Karin hoped it had something to do with the magic ball of light she was waving around—Shadows were attracted to it—but the familiar pulse of that other energy was leading her to think otherwise.
She really did not want to think of the implications of that right now.
We need to cross over. Find Nomiki.
She straightened and turned her back on the Shadows, moving toward Soo-jin. “Let’s just do it. Hold onto my arm.”
Like before, Soo-jin circled around to her left side and took hold of the crook of her arm. Karin took the bag full of grenades in her right.
She eyed it.
Hells, hope these aren’t about to blow up in my face.
With a quick breath, a mental shake, and a glance back to where the Shadows watched—they still stood there, staring and eerie—she relaxed her shoulders and focused, calling on that second energy that twinned her light’s touch.
It unraveled itself from her bones and fled through her skin like a snake.
The muscles of her jaw clenched. Her heart beat faster, a slip of adrenaline feeding into her system. Suddenly, the quiet of the forest seemed focused on her, attentive, waiting—expectant. The Shadows stared.
Then, she pushed.
The world flicked and shivered, pinching together. The forest bled into itself. The blackness, the grimness, the pale spokes of the tree above them, and brown-gray smudge of the ground all blurred and scraped, and she could feel it, too—as if the particles in the air around her slid like the track of a motion blur. A buzz of noise scraped up her arms and chest, skipping the nano-numbed parts of her body, and continued in her legs and feet, filling them with pins and needles. She gritted her teeth and pushed against the feeling, willing that second energy to send them through, mentally focusing on the pressure Soo-jin’s grip made on her arm as a pulling sensation came over he
r and clinging harder to the bag of grenades.
By the gasp of breath next to her, she guessed Soo-jin had felt the pulling, too.
But, just as quickly as it came, it left.
Everything settled.
When she breathed in, the smell of the forest had changed. More moist, closer.
Soon, the sound of insects rose around them. Not many of them, not at this time of year, but more than had been in the Shadow world.
When she looked up through the trees, she saw a faint hint of light from the compound. The sounds of people working.
And, from behind her, a familiar voice spoke.
“You know, sister, you’re getting weirder and weirder every day.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nomiki and Jon sat on the edge of the cave mouth, looking like they were taking a paramilitary smoke break with their klemptas armor on and their legs dangling below. Nomiki leaned back on her palms, eyeing them with her head cocked in a familiar, calculating tilt. The grim furrow of her brows cast doubt in her expression, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing, despite all of her advanced sensory perception.
Jon, too, looked as though he’d been hit by the WTF bus. Karin had never seen him look at her with such focus.
Soo-jin gave a small wave. “Hey, sitla. Shit was getting whacked in there, so Karin decided to play with reality. She’s getting pretty good at it.”
Sitla, short for sitlaminen, was Fallon slang the crew had picked up during their tenure on Chamak. It was a friendly, sarcastic combination of bitch, asshole, and best friend.
Karin held up the bag in her hand. “Brought you some bombs.”
“Grenades,” Soo-jin corrected.
That seemed to sway whatever Nomiki had been weighing in her head. Her brows were still furrowed when she slid down from the top of the cave, her suit making a grind and rustle on the dry dirt like hard plastic, but, as her sister came up to her side, Karin got the impression that the frown had changed topics.
It was sharper, anyway.
Her fingers brushed Karin’s as she twitched the bag’s mouth open and peered inside. This time, the eyebrows rose.
“You bring me the best presents, sis.”
“They’re Baik’s, actually. Soo-jin found them.”
“I don’t think he’ll mind what I want to do with them.”
Nomiki’s voice deepened to a mock purr. Her gaze flicked forward. She studied Karin’s chest for a minute, likely noticing the brace hidden underneath her clothes—Nomiki noticed these things—then shifted upward.
Belatedly, Karin remembered to turn her light down. The orb floating near her head dimmed with a dramatic motion, giving the scene only the basest light.
Nomiki gave her shoulder a pat, then, gently, took the bag from her hand. “How did you get these?”
“Baik stashed them in second storage, right behind an old drone unit I’ve been meaning to restore,” Soo-jin said. “I didn’t know exactly what they were until I looked, but—”
“No, no—I know that part. But the ship’s absolutely crawling with Centauri. Did you pull that teleportation gig into the aft and get lucky?”
Soo-jin and Karin exchanged a look. In the dimness, the paleness of Soo-jin’s face and neck registered as an oblong slash of white. Her eyes glimmered slightly in the gloom.
“We took them from the Shadow world.”
Nomiki halted. Her head came up, sharply. “What?”
Karin knew perfectly well that she’d heard Soo-jin correctly.
“Yep. This brace came from there, too. Both of them, actually. We also healed ourselves on the Nemina’s nanos.”
And, considering she could still feel the buzz of activity in her wrist and side—plus the scurry around the side of her temple—she was guessing that the nano-machines had made the dimension-switch as well.
Nomiki opened the bag and peered in. Though the light was almost non-existent, she doubted her sister had any trouble seeing the sex-toy-shaped detonation devices.
“Really?” Nomiki said, turning back toward them. “You’re sure?”
Soo-jin raised an eyebrow. “Yep. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s where they came from.”
“Huh.” The frown came back.
In the background, Jon had managed to wipe the shock off his face. His gaze had taken on a more calculating bent, similar to Nomiki’s. “Does this mean we could get double the explosives?”
“Precisely my thinking.” Nomiki straightened, pulled the bag closed, and—in a move that made Karin jerk and flinch—tossed it over to the side of the cave’s mouth. She pivoted, a broad grin slicing open her face as she stepped toward Karin, arms opening wide as if to give her a big hug. “Sis, show me what you can do. Jon, get down here.”
Next thing she knew, three sets of hands had grabbed onto varying parts of her arms.
Great. Now I’m a theme park ride.
Good thing she’d left the wrist brace on.
Nomiki gave her another pat. “Okay, go.”
With a pull that sparked an unraveling in her bones, she called on her second energy. The world bent around her almost immediately, the motion sliding through her like car oil. The pulling sensation returned, as if her mind were being sucked through a tube.
Then, the night grew thicker. And colder.
When she made her light glow brighter, the colors in the soil weren’t quite as bright as they had been before. And all the sounds had stopped around them.
“Ho-ly shit!” Nomiki’s hand tightened on her, head jerking around. A second later, it locked on something behind her. “Shadow.”
Karin glanced back. Of the group that had been there before, only the one Shadow remained.
“Oh, that one,” Soo-jin said, casting her a look. “Don’t mind her. She’s cool.”
‘Her,’ huh? Looks like she wasn’t the only one who was beginning to recognize it.
Maybe the weird familiarity she felt with it was just happenstance? And maybe Soo-jin was feeling personally copied by it, too?
Except, on the ship, Soo-jin had referred to it as Karin’s friend.
There went that theory.
“Actually, none of the Shadows here have attacked us,” Karin said. “It’s kind of weird.”
“Well, maybe not. I think it’s their world. Maybe they’re more comfortable here?”
Shit. She still had to tell Nomiki about her Tylanus dream.
“Uh huh. Well.” Nomiki slid her gaze to the space behind Jon and gave a nod. “Jon, snap that twig off, will you? No, the bigger one. With the leaf.”
Karin felt a motion behind her as he did so—funny, he’d been so still before that she hadn’t even noticed him look around—and a small crack broke the quiet.
“Cool. Hold onto that. Sis, take us back.”
Jon’s hand came back. The end of the stick he held poked briefly against her neck before he turned it away, the leaf on the end making it tickle.
With a quick glance around to the Shadow that watched her—she felt its attention on her as keenly as she felt Jon’s hands on her shoulders—she pulled on her power again.
The world warped, spun, smudged together. She caught that pulling sensation in her chest this time, squeezing her lungs like a partial vacuum, then they were through.
The sounds from the compound came back, along with the insects.
She dimmed her light again.
Nomiki’s grip left hers, making her skin prick with the cool air. There came a snap from behind them. A few seconds later, Jon’s hands had left her shoulders, and the two of them were comparing sticks.
In the dim glow, Nomiki flipped hers over, a growing grin on her face.
The branches were a perfect match, down to the lone, dry leaf on their ends.
“Oh,” Nomiki said. “This is going to be fun.”
Karin warred with her emotions as she climbed back up the Nemina’s ramp, leaving the dark world outside behind for the sterile lights of the familiar hallw
ay. Her arms shook, exhaustion weighing down her brain like buckets of cement, and everything around her seemed to spin in a slight, dizzying haze.
It was like she could feel the Hyperspace Mouse stimulants warring with the nanotech soporifics to keep her afloat—like the drink had laced little hot wires through her brain and was determined to keep her awake, no matter how shitty the experience was or how dissociated she became.
Good. Because she was starting to crumble, and she had to get through this.
She clenched her jaw as she turned up the hallway to the bridge, sucking a quick breath through her nose as she passed the place where Marc had been beaten. Soo-jin had been careful to lead her past it last time—to shield the scene with her body as they turned away toward Med—but the dark, red smears seemed to leap to her attention, drawing her gaze like magnets.
Raw nausea churned in her stomach. She stiffened, fought with it, smelled the acid. In her mind, she saw the raw-meat mess that had been Marc’s face, the way his head had flinched back from the Centauri’s brutal blows.
After a few seconds, she became aware of a dull pain in her hand. She realized that she’d clenched her fist so tight that it had dug her nails deep into the flesh of her palm.
She drew a rough, ragged breath, fighting to get herself back under control. When she turned her gaze up toward the bridge, a second, much larger patch of smeared blood sat on the floor—a reminder of Baik’s defeat.
Behind her, Nomiki and Soo-jin thumped up the Nemina’s hall, heading for the back. The excited machinations of her sister’s schemes jumped through the air.
“—but, like, how far does this thing go? I mean… Rin! Rin!” Nomiki’s tone switched to a shout. “Can you, like, take the entire ship with you?”
“I don’t know,” Karin replied back. “Never tried it.”
Her voice had been quiet, subdued, but Nomiki’s keen ears never had trouble hearing her. She just hoped they hadn’t caught the quiet hitch of a sob that she hadn’t been able to suppress.
“—and how would that even work, anyway?” her sister went on, her voice growing more distant as she and Soo-jin turned to the back. “Would we have to fly it into a different spot, first? I mean, obviously, she can’t just heft the fucking thing, and I’m just guessing, but I doubt we could materialize shit on top of its real-world counterpart, or vice versa. But like, where does the distinction end. It’s not like one could simply warp an entire world onto… wait.”
