Song of Sundering

by A. R. Clinton

  “I’m sure that is in the works. Does any of it make sense to you?”

  Tani tapped back into the digital copy of the schematics, flipping back and forth between the layers, comparing them to her visual memory of the original schematic for any transcription errors. It made some sense, but she would have to study Terran systems to piece it all together. She looked up to Vin and found his seat was empty.

  “Table cleared out, you dunce.”

  Looking to her right, she found Vin seated now at the far end of the table and eating leftovers from a bowl of noodles. She returned her focus to the schematic, putting a hand out as a barrier as she heard the grating sound of a bowl sliding on the old splintered table top. Feeling the pressure of the bowl that Vin pushed down to her tap her palm, she felt around for utensils to eat with. Not looking up to check what the dish was, she continued examining the schematics as she put the food in her mouth.

  Tani could smell the walls. As each droplet of water rolled its way down and joined the stream on the floor, Tani felt as though the taste of the room became stronger. The smell crept into her mouth, the resulting dryness seeming to exaggerate the taste. She felt like she was being gagged with old fry bread covered in that terrible powder of spores that coated every corner of the mouth on the way down. It was a sensation that most Underground children knew and loathed, but the moldy bread at the supply banks had always been a special horror for Tani. She hated the walls for reminding her of it, but other than the smell, she loved this room.

  It was small and cozy—just enough space for her and her few belongings, and it didn't add any burden to her life to keep it tidy. Not just because it was dirty before she moved in, but because it had no windows. She navigated the space by memory and feel. The darkness in the room was like a blanket wrapped around her.

  She inched further from the wall and pushed back the knowledge it was likely the bed itself that smelled. Refocusing on the words in front of her, a small amount of light reflected from the LightTab she borrowed every day from her landlord. He lived in the room next to hers—the one with windows. Her own LightTab barely held a charge, so she saved it for nighttime when she did her work.

  She felt like a slug or some sewer-dwelling creature. Maybe a rat? She lived her life in darkness, eating what was leftover and building things from scraps that no one else would miss. When it became dark above ground, she would go to the Ditch, the large gully to the north-east where everyone dumped things they didn’t want to keep.

  It was mostly junk; various parts from motos and bots that didn’t work anymore. Their parts sat neglected beneath layers of garbage that Prin had tossed into the Ditch for decades. Sometimes she got lucky and someone had tossed their leftover lunch out with a cartful of other waste. Sometimes, a local restaurant had made a deposit. Those were the good days. Tani would sit in the dirt with her feast spread out on both sides of her hips, legs splayed open with the salvageable parts from a bot in front of her. With her LightTab propped up wherever she could find a spot, she scrolled through schematics from the SatNet with one hand while she shoved food into her mouth with the other hand, pausing from her frantic consumption of information and food only to disassemble and reassemble parts.

  The problem with people was that most of them didn’t actually do the work. What was that phrase her landlord liked? Miss the forest in the trees?

  The Ditch bore witness to this. Most people threw away the forest because a tree wasn’t working. It was easier for people to survive these days since basic manufacturing was abundant. No Topsider had to scrounge for scraps or parts anymore. The reality of it was that many people in the Underground still did, just the Topsiders didn’t see it. That’s what the phrase means, right? Tani smiled to herself. She was always missing nuances of phrases that people used, and she was certain this was being exaggerated because she hadn’t slept in a week. Not meaningfully, anyway. Any rest period of longer than an hour at a time seemed wasteful. She never felt that sleep was necessary unless she was in danger of falling asleep standing up.

  The SatNet had always been weak, and mostly filled with things like schematics, with a spattering of history and art from the old world. The pre-Sundering Terrans had stored what they deemed to be vital information in the SatNet infrastructure itself. They had just forgotten to update it in the last hundred or so years before the Sundering. Tani didn’t care. She could use the broken technology to figure out the gaps in knowledge, just like what she was doing with the Xenai document. There was a new movement in the Underground to make sense of this new schematic on the SatNet. So many people struggling in their daily lives had latched onto it, hoping they could build something new. For Tani, that mostly translated into the possibility of being able to buy her own food if she was the one to figure it out.

  A new system emerged around her. At night she analyzed schematics of wires and cables woven into metal and ceramic so she could repair and reconfigure ancient machines. During the day, the wires became veins and the ceramic and metal became flesh and bone. She learned all the unknown parts and the things she could do to improve upon the millennium-old Terran forms.

  When the Sundering had happened, Terrans had found out their world was odd. Most of the Others had not chosen to build machines or motos. They had improved upon themselves. Their bodies and minds were their technology. And now they knew the Xenai cut themselves open and placed materials in the wounds so they could grow new powers inside of themselves through the materials. Some might think this method was like a horror story, especially compared to the Illara's beautiful process. The Illara Source-casters all wore necklaces that looked like old engraved jewelry from the bygone baronies the SatNet taught her about. They could shape the world with sparkling jewels.

  To Tani, there was equal beauty in the Illara way and the Xenai way. Even the poorest of their kinds hadn’t suffered the way the Underground Terran rats like Tani did. They could manipulate the world around them to always provide food and shelter. Tani couldn't even imagine the power the lowliest Illara wielded — but she wanted to. And here it was. Right here on the SatNet. The process. How to give power to the powerless. Tani didn’t bother to sleep because even the best dreams paled next to the chance in front of her: the chance to change reality.

  6

  Ayna

  Ayna shifted in her chair. Hafi sat before her in a state she had never seen the old sword. Sweat clung to his face, his hair and the edge of his armor's under-suit where she could see it peaking out with his helmet off. Ayna could smell the intensity of the fields he had crossed. The red tinge to his armor and boots from mid-thigh down to his feet was enough to convince her he was not embellishing or exaggerating the tale—not that Hafi would do such a thing, but she sorely wished he had chosen this moment to start.

  He had not thought that cleaning himself up was more important than getting information to Ayna. She questioned the impulse, not because she desired for the sweaty, trembling man in front of her to be less fragrant, but because she thought a good shower might have calmed him down. The terror and exertion had built up within him, and Ayna could feel it as real as if the field itself had climbed across the table and rubbed up against her, leaving a trail of blood and body parts.

  “Hafi? Hafi.”

  He met her eyes reluctantly. Ayna could see the shame in them. He had never panicked over anything in the years that Ayna had known him. Ayna suspected that half of his remaining fear came from the ability of this anomalous event to cause him to be afraid. For Hafi, abandoning his fighter’s caution and running away from the perceived danger was akin to rejecting everything he was as a soldier and as a person. “We will get someone out there to take samples and figure this thing out. Let’s get together a group of soldiers to meet Lee and the refugees on the north paths.”

  He nodded with a dazed expression, visibly relaxing his shoulders as she took the burden of the field from him and pointed him back towards thoughts of his own work.

  Ayna’s own mind was
spinning through all the possibilities, from Xenai weaponry and experiments to an accident in the illegal Underground power labs. The Xenai did not waste parts, however. The labs were dumping more and more bodies every week, but always to the east side of Prin, tossed in uncovered mass graves in the endless field of ruins, and she was aware of their movements.

  I couldn’t have missed something this big, could I?

  She needed data.

  She tapped the back of Hafi’s hand gently.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She stepped out, carefully sliding the door shut to leave Hafi to his thoughts peacefully, even knowing that they were not peaceful thoughts. She glanced around at the empty series of desks outside the door.

  Where is that damned boy?

  She sighed at the inconvenience, but also found herself grateful for the time alone. She walked down the hall to the cafe and started making coffee for herself and Hafi as she let her mind wander over the data she knew.

  The consensus was that the Xenai documents gave insight into their initial creation. However, it didn’t explain their ongoing experiments. Ayna was aware of two facilities in a small town on the outskirts of Shouding, the Xenai city to the west. The Xenai constantly replenished the two labs in Tawee. One seemed to have a variety of animals taken to it, and another that had a lot of staff that entered and exited, but a supply chain that consisted only of food and water—the Xenai hid anything else coming into the building from the satellites. Neither facility had any waste. One produced a steady stream of animals that the Xenai modified to be like them, for what purposes Ayna still was horrified to find out. The other seemed to produce nothing at all. Scouts and satellites verified each other’s findings, and Ayna was certain that this pattern of behavior that had held for decades would not suddenly change. She made a mental note to double check the most recent reports, anyway.

  The Underground power labs were always chaotic and dangerous. Ayna did her best to educate the people of Prin on their dangers, which meant staying up to date on what they were doing. The BloodSmith lab, which their cult following called the Temple, was not as focused on imbibing blood and placenta as they used to be, and had moved toward transfusions. It allowed Terrans to gain temporary and limited use of source when transfused with the blood of Illara or Inari—at least until their bodies broke down the blood and it made the Terran sick. The source sickness was temporary and passed, assuming the source of the blood was a close enough match to the Terran's blood type to begin with. If it wasn’t, which was mostly a matter of trial and error for the BloodSmiths, the end result could be fatal. They discarded the bodies. Families of the missing people rarely even reported them missing, if they knew they were a BloodSmith, for fear of reprisals. They just became another corpse in the Ditch. Never did they become part of a blood swamp.

  That left the Artificers. They rarely did anything illicit. But when they did, they certainly did it with style. A sudden field of blood and body parts would fit their theatricality, in that sense, but was not in line with any of their current projects. They had shifted their focus away from giving Terrans the ability to work with source, their principal cause of contention with the BloodSmiths, and started working to reverse engineer some old Illara source powered technology to retrofit it into what was left of Terran technology. Not every Artificer had dedicated themselves to this new effort, but the fighting in the Underground had only gotten worse and the Artificers had seemed to want a way out. And this was what they had decided on. They saw the BloodSmiths in the same way that the Old World docs talked about alcoholics or trippers, and being killed off by them was insulting to an order that inherited their knowledge and standing from the original Illara Artificer Guild. Ayna added them to list—it couldn't hurt to check recent reports of their activity.

  She dropped a pat of butter into Hafi’s coffee, whipped it up as he liked it, and started making her way back toward her office, still lost in thought. She felt it, somewhere deep inside her, as she went over each possibility and felt certain that each wasn’t really a possibility at all.

  This has to be something new.

  Ayna hated that word. New. A tendril of cold crawled up and wrapped itself solidly around the buzzing thoughts in her brain. There was nothing else it could be but new. And being new made it more terrifying than any known threat. In place of swords, armor, guns or ‘magic’, Ayna had dossiers, recordings, maps and spreadsheets for every single possibility that threatened Prin. Now, something had landed on their doorstep, and she stood armed with nothing.

  It took barely an hour for Hafi to clean up himself and his armor. It was barely dusk, and he was already prepared to head back out to meet the evacuees and their escorts. Ayna was glad he had not wasted time. Staying still was the last thing he needed. Ayna had to pull a few strings to get his armor cleaned properly in such a short amount of time. However, she had known the General long enough to know that armor was the closest thing he had to a lover. He had repaired the pieces by hand repeatedly. She wondered if it really could qualify as the same set of armor she had originally bestowed upon him when she recruited him into the Prin Guard. Perhaps it was its own thing, now. She made sure that Hafi had all he needed to keep the armor repaired, and quickly.

  Ayna watched the General exit the gates of the state house from her office balcony. Her assistant returned with photos of the field. Apparently, a sniper in training at the west fort was also a budding photographer. The poor boy had eagerly accepted the assignment, with no idea what he would take photos of. He had sent them to her assistant via the SatNet and so Ayna did not have to see the shaky terror she knew the amateur photographer must still have dripping from his face. Job well done. The state is indebted to you, fine young soldier.

  She ached to look at the photos, but waited to see off Hafi properly, as she always did. Some traditions were worth the time they took to instill loyalty in those around her.

  She stood, letting the wind blow the bottom edges of her dress across the floor of the balcony. She was perfectly aware of the romantic elegance at that moment. She also did not care in the slightest. Any image or impression that helped those in her employ keep their wits about them was a necessity. She played to them all well. The doting mother. The loving ruler. The fierce champion with her arms full of papers and folders and her mind full of information she could fashion into a sharp weapon with no notice…

  Once Hafi had faded from view, Ayna slid her weight back onto her back leg, turned and took the few strides back to her desk to sit before her folder in a smooth motion. She ran her hand over the cover and opened it slowly, as though the photos had become real since her aide had handed her the folder. She knew the folder was filled with flat sheets of dry and glossy paper, but from Hafi’s description, she half feared a spray of blood would shoot from the crease of the folder and drench her the moment she opened the file, filling her office with the smell of rotting, old blood.

  She ended up experiencing something in between. She remained dry. Her hair remained where she had placed it in the morning. The scent of her perfume was light, but still the most prominent smell in the office. It was something inside her that changed. She had listened intently to Hafi’s words. She understood the words and sentences, and even the bigger picture painted by the strings of sentences. But now, looking down at the first photo in the pile, she felt the words. They were complex and their texture seemed to crawl off the page, up her arms, and into her eyes. The depth of the swamp pulled her in, setting her adrift in the images, as if they surrounded her and encased her in a dark womb filled with thick, inTerran amniotic fluid made of partially congealed blood.

  Ayna faced each picture on its own. After looking at each photo, she flipped it over so she could no longer see it. Forcing herself to look at the next photo, she took a deep breath. Like this, she went through the pile. It took her an hour to look through what had likely taken the photographer less than 20 minutes to photograph.

  Every detail stuck in her
head, as she felt it should. She did not just see an independent forearm, but noticed the clean cuts where the missing fingers had been severed, compared to the rough edges of ripped-apart joints and sinews that composed the other end of the limb.

  She could not reconcile all the things she saw in the photos with her knowledge of her world. The threat of the unknown loomed over her as she flipped over the last picture. She needed new knowledge before she could move forward. She scooped up the folder, slung it under her arm and headed towards the U labs in the States Quarters to send her scientists into the field. She paused only long enough to send a message to the head of the Prin guard to block all routes that would lead into it through the mountain passes around it.

  7

  Tani

  The world was still arguing over how the Xenai documents could have appeared on the SatNet. Authenticated as being genuine and from Psylliss—the Illara home world. Tani didn't care. That information was barely relevant to her purpose. Exhaustion spread into every corner of Tani's mind, but she couldn't stop quite yet. She was almost there; almost to the depth of understanding she needed to change things. Over the previous two weeks, dissecting and reconstructing the Xenai docs off the SatNet, her mind felt stretched—as if it was also being restructured, along with her viewpoint of the world and who she was.

  Each experiment grew closer to readiness for her first Terran patient. At first she had simply dumped her findings on the SatNet, but not long after that the direct messages started coming in. Now, she had to put out structured updates and take the time to have discussions with others on the feeds. Some messages were from people far away who couldn’t help her get her project started in Prin. She answered their basic questions and then stopped investing time in them. But many messages were from others in the Underground. They could help her and were eager to do so. She found a network of support she had never known before in her life. As basic survival became easier, she was free to invest more and more time in the project.