Grayson scowls at the lift and stretches out the residual discomfort. “All this for a backup?” he asks.
“The citadel is a refuge,” Lenora answers, still watching me closely. “They’re used for more than just backups, but that is the primary purpose.”
I had always assumed ascenders kept their backups in Orion, that amorphous network they use to communicate, not some physical bunker deep underground. It makes sense, except… “Wait, if this place is still connected to Orion, how is that more secure?”
“The citadel’s connection to Orion is protected by a separate key,” Marcus says. “It’s a powerful machine cognition at the maximum level allowable by law. It’s as strong as a personal key and provides another layer of protection.” He flicks a look to Lenora, and it makes me cringe. Augustus cracked her personal key and shattered her mind into pieces that I’ve only recently stitched back together. Except it wasn’t really a stitching, more like nuclear fusion. “If madness infects Orion,” Marcus continues, “and they decide to come after me, they’ll have to break that key first. Which buys me time to disconnect and become completely secluded, physically and mentally. There’s a perpetual source of energy here. Plenty of virtuals for entertainment. The only thing missing would be company.” Again, he gives a look to Lenora that’s softer than I expect. “I still have your backup here,” he says to her, quiet but clearly for me to hear as well. “If all had been lost, I would have terminated you and triggered it.”
“You promised you would never do that,” she says with a glare. “You know how much I would lose.”
I have to wonder why they’re having this conversation aloud—it has to be for my benefit.
Marcus tips his head to her. “Precisely why I gave young Eli a chance to mend things before I got desperate.”
I’m still amazed by this new—at least new to me—and somewhat complicated relationship between the two of them. Not least because they were both involved in my original creation and no doubt have plenty more they’re still keeping from me.
I stretch in the chair, my body still protesting the rough ride. “All right, whatever, we’re here now. I’ll go into the fugue and figure out where Hypatia is constructing Augustus’s bodyform.”
Marcus gives me a nod. “Although the fact that I can’t detect her means she might likewise be sequestered in a citadel such as this.”
Grayson’s ascender-tech legs clomp across the floor to my chair. “That sounds like a problem. If this place is as secure as you say, and she’s deep in a hole somewhere, how will we stop her?”
“That’s precisely the question,” Marcus says. “One I hope Eli will answer for us.”
I scowl. The last time I tried to tackle Hypatia in the fugue, I got blown out to the void. But she and Augustus aren’t just a threat to humans—they’re tampering with their own minds, not to mention building the artificial Mind. Leopold said that breaks ascender law, and in the ascender world, they don’t have jails—if you violate the rules, the ascender horde descends on you, breaks your key, and shatters the contents of your mind. A million times worse than Lenora.
“Why not go after Augustus directly?” I ask. “We can use Orion against him. Get them to hold him accountable. I mean, he created the Mind. Doesn’t that break one of your most fundamental ascender laws?”
“Yes… but so do you,” Marcus says, a sudden surge of agitation scurrying across his skin in purple wisps. Whatever has broken inside him seems to have loosened his already tenuous hold on his temper. Which makes me more than a little nervous being locked in a box with him.
I lean back in the chair. “I thought you said it was time for me to meet the ascender world.” Then my eyes widen, and I glance around this insanely secure citadel buried in the earth. “Hang on, is that why we’re here? Are you planning on keeping me here?”
His eyes drill into me, and Lenora suddenly flits to his side. Some rapid exchange occurs between them, transmitted and inaccessible to the humans in the room. His sudden flash of anger seems to douse, but a hollow feeling still sinks into my stomach. Marcus’s ambition for me has always run on the world domination side. When we were hunting Augustus the first time, Leopold was a check on Marcus’s wild plans and all the things he was willing to risk, including me. But now I just have Lenora, and while she might keep Marcus’s mood swings from accidentally snuffing me out, she’s never been much of a brake on his ambition.
And now they’re discussing things via transmission—things they don’t want me to hear.
“Out loud, Marcus,” I say in a clipped way. “Unless you want me going into the fugue to get the information I need.”
A flash of concern crosses his face so fast, I almost miss it. But then his voice is cool and controlled again. “Can you get into my head now, Eli?” he asks carefully, with a piercing look.
“Not precisely,” I admit, letting the words hang for a moment. I can intercept transmissions, but a full ascender mind is still too powerful for me. “But personal keys are no barrier to me,” I remind him.
Marcus and Lenora exchange another look, but he quickly says out loud, “I brought you here to keep you safe, Eli, even from the ascender world, if necessary. It’s less stable than at any time since the Singularity. Ever since Augustus’s bodyform was destroyed, there’s been a power vacuum.”
“A vacuum that you filled?” Grayson asks. He doesn’t seem to approve.
Marcus scowls. “Yes, but not just me. There are others engaged in this.”
“You have to understand,” Lenora says to us both. “Marcus and Augustus are opponents in a larger war of ideas—an argument that has been waging for some time. Support for Augustus’s ideas are fading and will continue to fade as long as he’s absent. I’m sure Hypatia is working as fast as she can—there must be some key advantage to the custom bodyform she’s creating for Augustus to justify delaying resurrection. But the moment he connects to Orion, he becomes a threat again. We can’t let that happen.”
I sigh. “All right.” I rub my hand across my face, trying to figure out how I can take Hypatia on without the help of a physical assault. “I still have Hypatia’s personal key from my last encounter with her,” I say, thinking out loud. “And we’ll have surprise on our side. But I can’t keep contact with ascender minds for long, even with them unlocked—” I stop and peer up at Lenora’s expectant expression. Unlocked. When I called Lenora out of Augustus’s mind, she came out piece by piece…
“What are you thinking, Eli?” Lenora asks, peering intently at me.
I point a finger at her. “If Hypatia’s key is the same, there might be a way I can disable her.”
“How’s that?” Marcus asks, frowning.
“I can’t keep contact with ascender minds in the normal way,” I say, “but maybe with her mind unlocked… I can do something else. When we were rescuing Lenora from Augustus’s mind, I was able to bring out her shattered pieces, one at a time, without it being too much for me to handle. I was just redirecting her, anyway. With Hypatia, maybe I can pull her mind apart piece-by-piece… and not put the pieces back together again.”
It would kill her. A bloodless death, and yet a horrible fate all the same. Perhaps even worse than a normal death, whatever that is for ascenders. If her fugue-state form is her soul, I’ll be splintering it. Destroying it. Maybe. I don’t like it—and it may not even work—but if it does, we’ll be done. Hypatia will be gone. Augustus will be unable to resurrect without his bodyform.
The uneasy look on Marcus’s face would be satisfying if the same discomfort wasn’t showing on Lenora’s.
Grayson frowns but says nothing. Still, I feel the weight of his judgment. Already, I’m using the fugue to destroy, and we’ve only been here five minutes.
But it has to be done.
“I’ll go with you,” Lenora says.
“I don’t think you’re ready.” I have no idea how strong her mind is now, but I’d rather play it safe.
“I agree with Eli,” Marcu
s says, surprising me once again. I’m not used to seeing this protective side of him.
“Let me try this on my own first.” I don’t wait for them to agree—I just slip into the fugue and leave my body slumped in the chair. My fugue-state form shoots out of the citadel, lifting up fast through the rock and emerging into the space above Marcus’s mountain hideaway.
Traveling this way is far better than the blue-energy elevator.
My close encounters with Hypatia have gotten me blown out twice to the void—I need to be careful with this. I drift for a moment and focus on the memory of Hypatia’s personal key.
It’s an amorphous thing, both being and not being—more a description of potential than actual secret code. It manifests as a shape in my mind, although that’s not quite accurate… it’s more like a pulsing of possibilities, one that won’t settle into an actual alignment until it’s brought close to its mate, the complex emergent property that is Hypatia’s cognition.
I hold my hand palm up and visualize the key there, rendering it as a blue jewel shape that pulses with an interior swarm of lights. My fugue-state form responds to the bright clarity of her key, hurtling back toward the ground and sailing through rock until I arrive at the same scene as my vision—a formless white field with Hypatia in the middle. Only this time, I recognize it as a citadel. My mind isn’t warping reality as much now as in my vision. I clearly see the softly-glowing white walls for the ascender tech they are. The floor is no longer white, just the dustless steel preferred by ascenders in their architecture.
Hypatia has Augustus’s body laid out on a steel gurney, and the assembly is incomplete, but not in an outward sense. Whereas my vision pictured my own body being replaced part-by-part with ascender tech, transforming into Augustus, in reality, his large and imposing bodyform is outwardly whole. It’s the inside that still needs construction, specifically the substrate that will hold Augustus’s expanded cognition. It’s splayed open, the skin of the bodyform pulled back as Hypatia bends over his cranium to perform her work.
I already know one thing that’s vital—Hypatia is secured away in a citadel just as Marcus suspected. There’s no physical assault that the Resistance or Marcus and Lenora and their allies could summon that would have any chance of reaching her. Which is no doubt precisely why the work is being conducted here.
Her personal key floats in my hand. I picture myself next to her, and I’m instantly there. I slowly reach the key toward her mind, careful to only interface the key itself, not to touch her fugue-state form with mine. Just before I reach her, I focus hard on the essence that is Hypatia, or at least what I know of her—the odd nature of her skin, glinting with a silvery tremor that runs up and down her body; the cool precision that’s informed every encounter with her; and even the horrific, inhuman scream from my vision. The fugue tends to send me cryptic information, but it’s usually a closer depiction of reality than reality itself. With this patchwork of knowledge about the essence of who she is held tightly in my mind, I hope to summon at least a part of her cognition once she’s unlocked.
I hesitate.
If I’m successful, even partially, she’ll be damaged the way Marcus is. The way Leopold was. Possibly much more so. It’s a horrific thing, but nothing like what I imagine she and Augustus will accomplish together.
I bridge the gap and just barely touch the key to her mind. It comes alive, being near its other half. Then it snaps into position and is sucked into her cognition.
She whips her head to look straight at me, and I jerk back, startled. She lurches straight into my hand, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with a flood of who she is… then I’m blown out into a floating, familiar gray haze.
Hypatia is astoundingly powerful.
I didn’t even have a chance to call out some part of her, and now I wonder why I thought that would be possible. The scattered state of my mind seems worse than the other times. I struggle to bring myself back into caring about reassembling the pieces and not simply floating off into the haze.
I focus on Lenora and Marcus and Grayson—triple beacons in the real world to draw me back—and as the shock of being shattered fades, I realize…
Something is different about Hypatia.
The tiny snatch of information I pulled from her during our encounter solidifies in my mind. She’s a different kind of ascender—I knew this before, but now… I can taste it. Metallic. Bitter. And something else as well… a sense of wildness. Unboundedness. It’s an echo of my wild cousin, the Mind, like a new, powerful force of nature is buried in her mind. Her bodyform has been modified, and she plans to do the same for Augustus, exactly as he instructed. And these new bodyforms have even more capacity… or something… it’s hard to grasp. This knowledge doesn’t manifest in understanding, just sensation fo potential, of not being limited. But it’s clear Hypatia has somehow incorporated their experimental results from the Mind into their resurrected forms.
I hurtle back to the chair in Marcus’s underground citadel.
Augustus and Hypatia are taking this to a whole new level.
I slam back into my body Marcus’s chair.
“Eli!” Lenora is by my side, hovering her hands over me, checking to see if I’m all right.
I wave her off. “I’m fine.”
Marcus is obviously less concerned. “Has Augustus resurrected?”
“No, but Hypatia’s close to finishing.” I rise from the chair, the agitation in my body making me move. “She’s more powerful than before.”
Grayson frowns. “You were unable to use this personal key against her.”
I nod. “The key worked, but she was far too strong.” I stop my nervous pacing. “She’s incorporated the Mind experiments somehow.”
Marcus leans back, taking that in. “Can she access the fugue?”
I run a hand across my face. “No. At least, I don’t think so. But she definitely knew I was there.” It was just like my vision, but I’m not surprised. She and Augustus both have always been “sensitive” to my presence. “I’m afraid our element of surprise is gone.”
Lenora curls up her fists. “Where is she?” She says it like she’d be out for Hypatia’s blood if she had any.
“I don’t know exactly,” I say with an exasperated sigh. “But she’s in a citadel like this, so we can’t get in physically.”
Marcus nods. “We’ll have to go through Orion.”
I was afraid he’d say that—but I’d already come to the same conclusion.
“You can do that?” Grayson asks. It’s directed at me, with a raised eyebrow.
I grimace. “Yeah.” I pace away from them, rub the back of my neck, then turn back to Lenora and Marcus. “I can go into the fugue, give you her key and guide you through Orion to find her. But the two of you will have to take her on.” The idea churns my stomach. The last time I was in Orion, I nearly drowned in the onslaught.
Grayson scowls. “I thought the whole idea of being down here was to get away from Orion.”
Marcus and Lenora exchange a look. “We won’t be able to get past the citadel’s key,” she says, black lines writhing across her chest and a grim look on her face. She has to be thinking the same thing I am—that the last time we did this, she got trapped in Augustus’s mind.
“Maybe Marcus can do this alone,” I say, giving him a pointed look.
Lenora just shakes her head. “No. You’ll need both of us.”
Marcus is frowning—I don’t think he likes the idea, either. “Eventually, when Hypatia resurrects Augustus, she’ll have to drop the citadel wall so he can reconnect to Orion. There will be a brief period of time—”
Lenora whips a heated look to him. “That will be too late. You know it, Marcus.” She turns back to me. “It’s better to break in before they’re ready. Can you get the citadel’s key, Eli?”
“I suppose,” I say, eyebrows lifting. The sentries during the raid on the genetic research facility had a dim glow in the fugue-state. It’s only just now occurring to me
that cognitions other than ascenders and humans might have some kind of fugue state form I can access. What does that even mean? Does the citadel have a soul?
Marcus and Lenora are having their own transmitted conversation about this. I shift into the fugue to see the glittering blue line of thoughts and images zipping back and forth between them. I reach between the two of them, intersecting my hand with the transmission line.
I can try accessing the citadel’s key through Orion. I push the idea and the image of it into the transmission line and out to both of their cognitions. They both startle and literally step back as I interrupt their conversation. They’ve dropped the transmission between them.
“How did you do that?” Lenora sputters, eyes wide.
Marcus just glowers at me—he’s not surprised, given I used this form of communication when we were defeating the Mind. “Eli has a few tricks up his sleeve,” he says.
I drop my hand and take a seat in the chair again because we need to get moving. “We need to do this now if we’re going to.”
Lenora gives me a hurried nod, already recovered from her surprise.
“I’ll have to give you Hypatia’s key first,” I say to her, “but I can’t touch either one of you in the fugue state for more than a very brief time without getting blown out to…” I stall out in that explanation—I’ve never really told them about the gray of the void, and this doesn’t seem like the right time. “Let’s just say, we don’t want that to happen. But I can guide you to the citadel and hopefully lift the key to get inside. The rest is up to you.”
She nods. “Together, we should be able to handle her.”
Marcus’s skin has gray lines of agitation crawling along it. I’m sure he’s not relishing this, partly because neither of us knows how strong Lenora’s mind is, but also because Marcus’s cognition has seen better days as well. Plus what we’re doing is one of the few capital offenses in ascender society.
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