by K. Gorman
“I’m fine,” Karin said.
“You’re not fine. You’re bleeding.”
She stiffened her shoulders and rooted her heels into the ground. Stubborn. “I’m fine. We need to figure out what to do.”
A tramp of boots came from the hall, making the space between her shoulders pull together. Heavy boots. Similar to Leisler’s tread, but not as large, nor as striking. The face of his second flashed in her head, a woman—Tillerman—brown hair, older cybernetics, age a hard-to-place weathering between forty and sixty, her expression neutral and guarded in the crowd as she watched the fight.
Nomiki, too, had cocked her head, listening. Her eyebrows drew up as she glanced to Karin for confirmation. “One, alone, older cyborg?”
She nodded and turned to face the bank of glass walling that separated the lab from the hallway, wincing slightly as she saw the smears of blood and the mangled half-corpse of one of the Centauri slumped against its left side.
The footsteps halted just out of sight, hidden by the bundle of venting that obscured the left-hand corner. A voice called out, speaking a slightly stilted, accented System.
“I’m unarmed and have no intention of attack. Are you going to kill me if I approach?”
“I could have killed you up the hallway,” she called back, keeping her voice soft, knowing the woman would hear.
Nomiki gave her a light smack. “Suns, Karin.” Louder, she said, “Come on in. I’ll make sure she doesn’t do anything.”
Karin quirked an eyebrow, as did Tia, inside her. If she wanted to do anything, she was pretty sure Nomiki wouldn’t be able to stop her. And, by the second’s worth of silence that came from the hall, she was pretty sure that the woman had come to the same conclusion.
Nevertheless, metal whirred, tapped down. Tillerman appeared in the window, her eyes immediately taking in the room. She paused a moment to assess Karin, then Nomiki, a heavy burst of calculation running through her expression, before her gaze slipped over the carnage of the room, lingering on the mangled forms of bodies that slumped in varying places.
Her soldiers, Karin recognized. People that this person had known.
She halted in the doorway, seemingly reluctant to get any closer, her focus still on the dead bodies.
Nomiki cleared her throat. “Two still live.”
At her sister’s gesture, Karin snapped her attention to a surprisingly-intact form hunched next to the computer end of the Cradle. Burns and acid-like traces coated his arms, chest, and neck in an angry mix of blackened clothing and burned and bleeding skin. A memory came to her—herself slicing the blaster in his hands, making it burst. Her gaze dropped to the floor below, tracking the spill of now-cool blaster fuel that slicked the floor in an orange tinge and traced a glistening trail over parts of his clothes.
Yes, he was still breathing.
The second was fully conscious, on his stomach next to the tank, and wisely staying down. Wide eyes met hers when she glanced down. Nomiki had tied the man’s hands with a chain of lab elastics.
Tillerman assessed them, her expression sharp and tense. Then, she drew her attention back to Karin and Nomiki, a muscle in her jaw tightening.
“My name is Commander Sarah Ursule Tillerman of the Menassi Tri-Quad Alliance of Expeditionary Forces. I am here to negotiate the surrender and handing over of our people and armaments.”
Karin lifted an eyebrow. “I thought you guys couldn’t surrender?”
Tillerman flinched, then gave her head a short shake. When she spoke, her words were curt and clipped, but strong—avoiding the emotion Karin saw reflected in the rigid line her shoulders made.
“Grand Regent Leisler, as an individual, could not surrender. We, as a group, are exempt.”
Karin frowned. “Then why—”
Nomiki cut her off. “Let’s not bring up fresh wounds,” she said smoothly, clasping her hand over Karin’s bicep in a placating gesture as she addressed Tillerman. “Negotiation is better done with Fallon and Alliance. For now, how about you just leave us and the Cradle alone, and we’ll leave you alone.”
Tillerman’s eyes flicked to Takahashi and back, then down to the lone Centauri survivor who lay in an unconscious curl on the floor.
“You can, of course, have your wounded,” Nomiki hastily added.
The muscles tightened again in Tillerman’s jaw and neck. Then, she nodded.
“We have medical packs,” she said, addressing Karin and Nomiki. Her attention lingered on the long, shallow bleed in Karin’s thigh, and the thicker run of blood that washed down from her hip. “We will send one in for your—”
“No,” Karin said. “I don’t trust you.”
Nomiki’s eyebrows twitched. She forced a smile, drew her hand over Karin’s shoulders under Tillerman’s wary expression. “We’ll just scrounge some stuff from the area until Fallon arrives—this is a medical lab, after all. We—”
“There’s an emergency kit in Tia’s old clinic,” Karin stated. “Gloves, sutures, biocleanse, hot gel.”
“—that’ll do.”
Tillerman’s face had opened in shock. Every item she had just listed was, at best, fifty years outdated, even by Sirius standards, and likely bested by whatever kit the Centauri used in their field operations.
But she didn’t say anything.
Karin sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s you lot who are responsible for the planet-wide comms jamming, isn’t it?”
Tillerman hesitated. “Yes.”
“Take it down. We need to talk to our people.”
She nodded. “It’ll be done.”
Surprise flickered through her chest, but she was quick to hide it.
She didn’t think they’d actually do it. Actually, she hadn’t thought this particular branch of the Centauri could actually do it. It seemed like a bigger thing. Planet-encompassing.
Tillerman paused for another moment, gaze darting back to the man on the floor. She hesitated, posture stiff and uncertain, cautious. “I’ll… send a stretcher. Two people on a med team.”
“Sounds great,” Nomiki said. “We won’t kill them.”
Tillerman gave a stiff nod. “I’ll get the message out to your people.”
She made to turn out the door, but hesitated, her stiff body rocking in uncertainty. She glanced back, a deep frown on her face.
“Is there really someone trying to replace the universe?”
The question was spoken with a quiet tone. Breathless. Something inside of her shaking.
Nomiki gave her a solemn nod, meeting her stare. “Yep. And it’s not us.”
Breath inhaled slowly, expression shifting toward neutral as she processed that. Then, she gave another nod and left down the hall. A few seconds later, after she had vanished behind the ductwork and walling that blocked the rest of the route from sight, they heard her voice call out, issuing commands in Centauri.
Karin slumped against the side desk, one hand going down to its edge for support.
“Parking lot’s about to get crowded,” Nomiki observed.
“They can land on the slope at the back,” she grunted. “It’ll be good terrestrial practice for them.”
Nomiki laughed, the sound bright and surprising.
“I’ll make sure to tell General Ramesh that.” She gave Karin an amused grin, taking in her blood-soaked form once more. “Now, sister of mine, blood of seventy-eight-percent of my genetic material blood, can I finally convince you to take a shower? The Cradle’s protected.”
She hesitated, resistance rising in her like a physical wall.
Nomiki eyed her. “How much blood have you lost?”
“Two and a half liters,” she said automatically.
She frowned. Now that she thought about it, that seemed like a lot.
Her sister’s eyebrows rose skeptically. “That’s straight into hypovolemic shock territory.” She gave her a once-over. “Were you hoping some of the stuff on your skin might go inside?”
“I… There sh
ould be modifications to my metabolism. Tia said…” Her frown deepened, running through the calculations. As she did, she began feeling the dull throb of pain in her body, the fast, shaky beat of her heart.
Huh. Maybe that’s why she felt so frenetic.
Nomiki was right. That was too much blood to lose. And keep losing.
“Come on, sister.” Nomiki pulled her gently toward the door. “Pretty sure I saw some trigger bandages in a kit down the hall.”
She nodded and relaxed, and allowed Nomiki to lead her away.
It took Fallon less than fifteen minutes to show up after Centauri sent the message—three massive ships descending on the rainforest like an alien invasion. Several scouts arrived, an Alliance model first on the scene, followed quickly by two Fallon vessels that looked like modern twins of the Nemina. Their black, gray, and white pattern, darted through with blood red, marked them as having hailed from the Manila.
On their tail, as Karin predicted, a Fallon Nighthawk set down on the downslope side of the compound. Within a few minutes of communication, one of the Centauri corvettes lifted off the parking lot, nose tipping forward like a helicopter, to give a second Fallon ship its spot.
Karin watched it all from the front left entrance of the compound, sitting quietly as Nomiki directed the haze of military traffic around her, the spare change of clothes she’d packed sitting loose and comfortable on her, her hair pulled back and cleaned as much as it could be without a long shower or dedicated hose.
She looked… normal.
From a distance, anyway.
Up close, she still carried flecks of dried blood, and a myriad of bruises from her fight were beginning to show. The wounds throbbed under her clothes. Her skin was still tacky from the blood and drenched with the distinct smell of rubbing alcohol.
They’d found a shower, but had not figured out how to turn the building’s water supply on. Instead, Nomiki had scrounged every cloth, napkin, and piece of tissue she could find—finding an impressive amount, given she had only one functioning arm—and attacked her wounds with a bag of alcohol, a surgical staple gun, and a pack of hot gel that would form a protective layer overtop of any wound—like CoolSkin, though not as effective.
The wounds ached, off and on. Fearing her substantial blood loss, they’d decided against pumping her full of drugs, but whatever biological battle arrangements Tia had gang-piled into her body turned the pain into a fraction of what it should be while her tolerance to withstand it had inversely elevated.
In all, not a terrible change for her body.
Her mind, however…
She gave a dry swallow and glanced at the netlink in her hand—the one she’d hidden in the Shadow world for her plan to escape and walk to the village. True to her word, Tillerman had disabled the planet-wide jamming signal. Marc was talking to her, messaging her. The Nemina was on its way, speeding a backtrack of the route she’d sent them on. At a guess, Soo-jin had recoded the flight route, but she couldn’t be sure. Marc was certainly not flying. Not with the amount of messages she was receiving.
She dropped her hand as another came in, making her bones vibrate with the notification, and looked up to the sky. With the renewed glare that was the parking lot, it was harder to see the cold twinkle of stars, but she could see the darkness, the deep. Smell the scent of the trees. Muggy wood and dry, sharp leaves. The sweet tang of fruit, even flowers. Seasons didn’t hit the Brazilian rainforest like they did in other parts of the world. No winter snow like Tia remembered in Maine, nor also the brown, teasing grass that marked her memories of the Macedonian compound.
Climate was more a constant here, the seasons dictated by water fall instead.
After a few minutes, she dropped her head and angled the netlink screen for her to see what Marc had said.
“I love you, Karin. I’ll be right there.”
She stared at it and felt… something.
But it wasn’t what she was supposed to be feeling. Instead, it felt like something small and fragile had broken inside her chest. A drop of ice, smothered pain, nothing more. A cry at the loss of what she was supposed to be feeling, but not the feeling itself.
A familiar engine shifted overhead. She looked to the west, past the arched glow of the Fallonian ship Courant, and caught sight of an approaching thrust flare.
The Nemina banked over the trees, switched smoothly into hover, and lowered herself down like an automated rocket, only a small clunk and scrape rocking her frame as she landed on the lot’s crumbled concrete.
Almost immediately, the ramp began to lower. She didn’t see movement through the tinted windows of her front viewport, but she could feel someone’s attention on her.
She glanced down to the message on her screen and let out a long, slow breath.
He found her quickly. Too quickly, given she was a small, hunched form at the edge of all the action, and there were close to five hundred people swarming the compound site. Either someone had tipped him off, or he had eyes like a hawk.
“Karin?” His voice was low, cautious. Worried. He could already tell something was wrong. His shoe stepped into her line of sight, an old Fallon combat boot, worn gray around the edges. “Are you… hurt?”
His warm hand slipped around her fingers, paused when it found the finger splint. He hadn’t yet noticed the remnants of blood in the grooves of her nails, but she did. She stared at them, then at his clean ones. Slowly, she brought her gaze up, following the smooth, rich brown skin of his arm until it disappeared under the bicep cuff of the textured Fallonian under-armor—he must have kitted out while they’d been gone, ready to charge back into a fight even while she’d sent him into hiding. His face was smooth, concerned. Taut around the back of his jaw and the corner of his lips. Intense, but stoic, though she could see the way he was breaking inside.
“Karin! You’re all right!” someone called behind him. Soo-jin, it sounded like, with Cookie by her side, eyes round, a cautious smile tipped over his lips.
As they drew closer, and the cold, tense mood hit them, their expressions faltered.
Neither she nor Marc moved.
Finally, she feigned a smile.
“I’m fine. Everything’s all right.” She hitched a shoulder, forcing a slip of a smile to catch the edge of her mouth. She felt like a puppeteer, moving parts to create the facsimile of an expression. She didn’t move the hand that Marc held, but brought her other hand up to make a vague gesture to her legs. “Just a few stitches—er, staples, technically. They’re promising me nano soon. Lost a lot of blood, though.”
The last sentence, she added as an afterthought—an excuse to wave away any odd behavior on her part—and it worked. She could see Soo-jin connecting the dots. Concern tightened her jawline. The woman hesitated.
“We could nano you right now. On the Nemina.”
“Nah, I’ll be fine.” She waved the bandages on her other hand at her. “Just find me some good reading material to lose myself in. I’m having trouble concentrating.”
“Sure thing. I’ll, uh… I’ll go do that, then.” Her eyebrows twitched as she took in Karin and Marc, and the hand he held between them, fully aware that she was being dismissed. “Come on, Cookie. I want to explore the shit out of this lab.”
Cookie gave one eyebrow-raised glance at them as he was being dragged away, then allowed himself to go. Their steps scuffed away, forms making the light in front of them dance in a way she was hyperaware of.
Beside her, Marc had gone absolutely still. Rigid. She could feel his attention crawl over her, intense and wary.
He hadn’t believed a second of her false front.
“You’re not all right,” he said eventually, voice smooth, though its rumble carried it deeper than normal, close to rawness. She felt him struggle to maintain himself. A scrape of fear rode into the bottom of his tone, pushing it close to cracking. “Everything’s not okay.”
The muscles of her neck tightened. There. Finally. A genuine symptom of emotion.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“Yes. Severely. If I were a normal person, I would be in deep shock, probably getting several blood transfusions.” She did a quick calculation in her head. “Five units, maybe more.”
Of course, if she’d been a normal person, she’d already be dead. Or, if not dead, then enslaved on a Centauri warship with the execution of her sister echoing through her mind.
“I got cut up pretty bad. Stab wound to the hip—five staples. Ten for the wound on my thigh, but it was long and shallow. Not serious.” It had been serious. To a normal person, it would have been very serious. But for her, now, anything less than a mortal wound was considered not terrible. “I scraped up my shoulder. Broke a finger.” She wiggled it under his palm. “Burns from blaster backsplash.” A smile peeked across her lips. “The old blaster wound wasn’t damaged.”
His eyes lit up to her shoulder, where that particular wound’s bandage lay under the light jacket she wore. He stared at the wound, his eyes hard. He was thinking of something else. It wasn’t hard to tell.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
“You knew I would.” She cleared her throat, fighting the sudden heaviness that held her sternum. “We both knew it was a possibility.”
He smoothed his hand over hers. Gentle, nice. “It’s fine. You came back.”
Her jaw tightened. “Not entirely.”
He knew it, too. She could tell by the look in his eyes. His hand swept over hers, engulfing it in warmth.
“Oh, Kar…” he began.
“Did Nomiki tell you how many people I killed?” She felt some part of her rush out with her words, like a dam bursting. She hissed a breath, feeling the collapse, the ache in her chest. “I don’t even know how many it was. I lost count. And I didn’t care. Not really. It was—” She hissed. “It was easy.”
“Kar—”
“No. Listen.” She clutched her hand around his, fingers digging in—not enough to hurt, but enough that he felt her new strength. “A part of me, it can feel. It comes in waves, but it’s not strong. And the rest? I’m a psychopath. A violent, bloodthirsty psychopath.”
