The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  She found the source of the light after a nightmare two minutes—a square copper grate. Blueish light dribbled between the slats. She tried to see what was on the other side, but it was angled upward, so all she could tell was that she was close to a ceiling covered in pipes. A deep hum reverberated through the vent, louder than it had been. She spent another minute listening, willing herself to not cough, and somehow managing it. But she couldn’t hear anything except the reverberation of machinery driving the ship. If anyone was down there waiting for her, they were doing a fantastic job being sneaky about it.

  She pushed on the vent, but it was latched from the outside. Of course, there was no reason it would be latched from the inside, but that didn’t stop her from cursing whoever built it for not being more considerate.

  There was nothing to be done. She wouldn’t find a better exit than this. She punched at the grate as hard as she could with the flat of her hand, wincing at the clash it made. The vent bent outward, but it didn’t come off.

  She dreaded making that noise again and paused a moment to listen again. Still no sound except the thrum of engines.

  She struck again.

  The grate dislodged with a second cymbal crash. She snapped her hand out to catch it before it could drop but missed. Instead, her fingers struck the falling square of metal, causing a second crash before it fell out of sight. A second later, a third metallic clatter echoed up to her, then silence.

  Shit.

  Still no other sounds from below, but she decided she’d better hurry before someone came to see what all the noise was about.

  She dropped down among huge drums of bronze freshwater condensers connected to the copper pipes along the ceiling with yet more pipes. Cogs and valves ran in an elbow-high line connecting each drum to the next. The heat was intense, and the drums gleamed with condensation. Crates of what looked like bottles of water were stacked by the open hatchway leading to the hall.

  Perfect.

  Syrina teetered over to the nearest drum and began scraping off the moisture to scrub at the drying blood coating her body and face. When she’d exposed her tattoos enough to do their job again, she squeezed between the condensers, relieved to see there was enough room for her to hunker down in the triangle of space between them and the wall. Then she bit her tongue and reached two fingers into her chest, tearing open the freshly healed skin. Another blizzard of pain radiated through her as her index and middle fingers felt something sharp and loose. A spasm of coughing exploded from her she couldn’t suppress as they closed around it and pulled. Her throat filled with blood and she half-spat, half-vomited a stream of blackish-red ichor. It filled again, slower this time, and again she spat and managed to take a ragged breath.

  “…back to N’narad,” someone said, “just because some idiot deckhand thought he saw a Kalis.”

  Syrina froze at the voice at the door, her fingers still buried in her chest up to the second knuckle. Something inside her bubbled, wanted to force its way out, but she swallowed it and turned her face to the wall, biting her tongue, hoping the tattoos on the back of her head would conceal her.

  “It wasn’t a deckhand,” another voice said. “It was two cannoneers and a petty officer. Anyway, the captain seems to think there’s a—oh, shit!”

  A few seconds later, Syrina heard the scrape of metal as one of the sailors picked up the grate she’d smashed her way out of.

  “Look at this. It’s bent from the inside.”

  Syrina could almost hear them look at each other.

  More motion and tense silence as the two made a quick search of the room. She chewed on her tongue, her mind and every muscle focused on not coughing.

  “We’ve got to report this,” the first voice again, near the door.

  Footfalls faded under the drawl of the engines.

  Syrina allowed herself to hack a volcano of blood and phlegm onto the floor behind the water tank and took a deep, relieved breath. The air still burbled in her chest, but it was clearer for now.

  You’ll need need to kill them.

  “Who?” Syrina’s whisper was wet and harsh.

  All of them. Everyone on the Heaven’s Compass.

  “Why?” Syrina asked, even as all the pieces fell together in her mind.

  Because they’ve seen you. Even if you get off this boat and make it to Ristro, there’s a thousand N’naradin who’ve either seen you or know you exist. How’s that going to go over with Ormo? Or anyone else? If anything gets back to Ristro and the Astrologers find out about this, they’ll be looking for you before you even get there. Unless they’re idiots, which they’re not. You think they can’t put together where you were headed when a Kalis ends up on a N’naradin naphtha ship right after it blows up one of their airships? And within a week of anyone in N’narad finding out about a Kalis, it’ll be all over Eris, including Eheene. Kavik will put it together with all the other stuff you’ve been doing, and cover his tracks before you get back, making anything you learn in Ristro just more information that’s useless.

  “But if I can get to Ristro, I can still find something that’ll help me. Us.”

  You’re going to have to go back to Ormo if you ever want anything from him again, and he’s still the only one that can tell you what we are. You don’t think he’ll notice that you allowed a ship of N’naradin sailors see you, and then go home to talk about it? You think you’ve lost his trust now? Talk about a liability. He’ll kill you on the spot.

  “The Astrologers might know something.” She began squeezing out from behind the condenser, careful not to put any pressure on her chest, which still dribbled blood.

  You don’t know what the Astrologers know, much less what they’re going to tell you. Do you want to burn the only bridge you’ve got to spare a few lives you’ve got no use for? You’re a Kalis. Now isn’t the time to stop thinking like one.

  “It’s more than just a few,” she said, her tone defeated.

  The voice didn’t bother responding.

  It was right. The problem was, Syrina didn’t even know why she didn’t want to kill everyone on board the Heaven’s Compass. Not that she’d ever gotten any joy from killing. It was just something she did. Now, she couldn’t get the idea of them as people out of her mind. Hugging their wives, playing with their kids, taking their mothers out to dinner. Why any of that should bother her now, after a lifetime of deception and murder, she hadn’t a clue. A Kalis with a conscience. There was something grotesque about that.

  Whether or not she was ready to admit out loud that the voice was right again, she needed to at least stall the ship long enough to get off it.

  The engine room would be near the condensers. She slipped out from her hiding place and crept toward the open door, trying to ignore the burble that welled from her chest. There was no sign of the pair that had almost stumbled across her, but voices echoed down the humid hallway she found herself in. Copper pipes ran along both walls, but the floor was polished dark wood. She suppressed another cough and headed away from the voices. The ubiquitous hum of the engines grew louder as she passed another open hatchway. Stupid that they left all the hatchways open down here. It was no doubt because the passageway was cooler, but even she knew it was against protocol.

  The next room was almost identical to the condenser room. Eight brass tanks lined the walls, four to either side, much bigger than the condensers. Each bore a plaque with an engraved flame. Brass pipes as big around as her little finger, each fixed with redundant pairs of valves, led from them across the floor to the aft wall. Dim, flickering glow globes hung from the ceiling, rather than the bright naphtha lamps everywhere else. The fuel room.

  Syrina had a general idea of how N’naradin naphtha ships worked. These tanks fed naphtha to the burners in the boiler room, which would be on the other side of the wall from here. The burners heated saltwater from the bilge pumps, which then powered the engines. As much of the steam as possible was siphoned off to the condenser tanks, where it became freshwater f
or the crew. The rest went out the stacks.

  She’d been required to learn all of that during her training, but none of it helped her know how to blow up the Heaven’s Compass or even stall it for more than a minute or two. The naphtha was separated from the open flames of the engine room, for obvious reasons. That was the thing with real Skaald naphtha. It could be heated and still not catch fire. She could douse the tanks in fuel and ignite them, but unless any of that flame touched the goo inside, there was a pretty good chance they wouldn’t explode. And even if they did, well, that didn’t give her a lot of time to find her way off the ship.

  She peeked around the next corner, into the engine room at the end of the hall. A lone engineer monitored gauges on twin rows of giant copper boilers. Piping fed off the top of them, into the low ceiling above and into the turbines. The finger-width pipes from the fuel room ran along the floor here, under copper grates thick with verdigris. Each pipe ended at a wide burner beneath a boiler. Four were lit, but as she watched, one flicked out, and a moment later there was an electric flash from beneath the one next to it and a soft pop as it ignited. With a whir of gears from somewhere beneath her feet, the sound of rushing water began to echo from the first tank. Its gauge, leaning toward empty, began to edge upwards.

  Her breath was coming easier now despite the enormous heat, and the ceaseless driving need to cough had subsided to something she could ignore. She slid to a corner behind the nearest boiler. It was over thirty hands high and about the same across. Since she’d boarded the Compass, it was the first time she could pause and admire just how gigantic the ship was.

  A man and woman entered and questioned the engineer. The din of the turbines above her, the rumble of the boilers, and the high hiss of the burners merged into a cacophony that she couldn’t hear anything distinct over, but she could get the gist from their body language. They were looking for her, but no, the engineer hadn’t seen anything. It must’ve occurred to the whole crew that a Kalis, if they existed, could hide anywhere and never be found.

  They left, and the engineer went back to work.

  Syrina had an idea. She returned to the condenser room, grabbed a bottle of water from one of the crates, and drank it down on the way back to the fuel room. It was hot and brackish, but she hadn’t had a drink since the windstorm, and she only needed the bottle anyway. She trotted to the nearest aft fuel tank and froze. Voices again, and footsteps jogging down the hallway.

  Shit.

  Syrina slipped between the tanks, crouched down and watched the door from behind the maze of copper and bronze pipes.

  “You three here,” a woman’s voice commanded, in N’naradin. “The rest of you follow me.”

  A second later, two men and a woman armed with crossbows and ceramic long-knives crowded into the doorway and stopped, sweating.

  “It’s goddamn hot down here,” a ruddy man with a yellow beard and tired eyes said.

  A dour gray-haired woman with a crooked nose and wearing a blue officer’s uniform appeared and set down a crate of water bottles.

  “Here,” she said. “If you need more, you can get it from the condensation tanks.” She gestured vaguely toward the next room. “One of you can refill these and bring it back. One of you.”

  The three nodded without comment until their commander’s footsteps had faded down the hallway.

  “This is bullshit,” Yellow Beard muttered.

  A young nervous boy nodded, but the other one—a woman with short black hair and blue eyes shook her head.

  “If there’s a Kalis, an actual Kalis on board, you want her anywhere near the engine room?”

  The bearded man guffawed. “If Kalis are real and there’s one on board, you think us three are going to stop her? Like I said, bullshit.”

  “We’re not the only ones down here,” the woman said. “Anyway, you don’t know anything more than the rest of us about Kalis. Rumors and stories. That’s it. We have orders. You signed on to do what you’re told, so do it.”

  The man grumbled something lost in the drone of turbines, and the group fell into silence.

  Shit.

  I wouldn’t try the Door yet, either, the voice answered Syrina’s unasked question.

  Fine. There was nothing left to it, even as unfamiliar pangs of remorse welled up from somewhere she hadn’t known existed. She had nothing against these people. She didn’t have anything against anyone on the Heaven’s Compass. Syrina looked down the narrow tunnel of her future and saw an ocean of regret pouring from a conscience that was going to get her killed.

  You either need to do something about these people or hide behind this tank of naphtha all the way to N’narad. I don’t even know if you could live that long since they’ve got all the water. If you have a better idea, do it now. Otherwise, hurry up and decide whether or not you want to die back here.

  Shit.

  Syrina slid from her hiding place, biting her tongue against the sharp pain in her chest where her lung was trying to heal itself. Bad timing for a conscience. Bad timing for a lot of things.

  She slammed her elbow against the back of the head of the woman, which snapped forward with a wet crunch that caused a swell of nausea Syrina wasn’t prepared for. The woman crumpled.

  That would be the only easy one without the Door, she realized as the others turned from where they had been focused on the doorway, panic rising in their eyes. Syrina sidestepped one ceramic blade but couldn’t avoid the second, which sliced along her back just below her right shoulder blade. She grabbed the hand holding the first knife and twisted it free from yellow beard, then dropped and spun, still holding his wrist, and heard the arm pop as she jabbed the blade into the chest of the young, quiet boy who’d slashed her back. Really young, she realized with a pang of misery. Young and scared.

  With her thoughts still on the boy staggering away from her, dimming eyes staring down at the knife in his chest, she rose again, carried by her own momentum, and brought her forehead into the bearded man’s throat. He choked and fell backward.

  Shouts from the hallway.

  Shit.

  A figure dashed by, headed for the gangway and the upper decks as Syrina picked up the fallen boy’s dagger. She took a step out the door and hurled it into the woman’s back. There was a tearing pain in Syrina’s chest. She fought down the image of the boy staring at the knife hilt with dying eyes. The woman crumpled as the blade sank into the back of her neck.

  Syrina coughed and gasped for air, spitting a fresh wad of blood into the snarl of pipes while running down the narrow hallway as another eight figures rushed from the boiler room. They hesitated when they saw her stalking toward them, drenched in blood.

  Her breath bubbled—a sound she hoped they wouldn’t be able to hear over the engines—and she coughed again, which shot pain across her abdomen, from her throat to her thighs. Sounds around her were growing distant and echoed in her ears. The soldiers in front of her were talking, but she couldn’t make out the words. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the voice was taking over, and the pain in her chest and mind eased.

  Crossbow.

  Just as her brain grasped the word, it fired. She half-dove, half-collapsed and felt the edge of the bolt slice across her back in the same place the knife had slashed it a few moments ago, making an “X” with the first wound. Syrina hit the floor, rolled, and was up and running. She allowed her mounting panic to take over. She stepped around a knife point and slammed her shoulder into a body. Whether it was the one she’d just avoided or another, she didn’t know. The world had shattered into darkness except for a narrow passage at the center of her vision. She was an animal. Nothing left but instinct and a voice in her head. She spun, twisted, lashed out and kicked, her mind underwater, her breath caught behind a flood of fluids foaming in her chest, unable to escape.

  Motion ceased. Again, the only sound was that of the ubiquitous turbines. Bodies, unconscious or dead, scattered along the hallway. She had no memory of dealing with any of them. Even the e
ngineer who’d been working on the engine. She didn’t recall him leaving the engine room.

  A boy’s face staring down at his chest, wandered into her mind uninvited.

  Don’t worry about it. It’s done.

  Syrina knew she would worry about it, needed to worry about it, but she wasn’t finished yet. She hurried into the boiler room, found a wrench that had been abandoned next to one of the bilge lines, and stumbled, still wheezing, into the gangway.

  Back in the fuel room, she examined the pair of valves connected to a brass pipe leading from the tank to the wall. She used the wrench to unscrew the first one all the way, then unscrewed the safety bolt underneath it. A clear, blue ooze bubbled from the opening and dribbled on the floor. The smell of it, chemical and floral, filled Syrina’s nostrils and made her cough again. She let it leak into the empty water bottle, trying not to get any on her shaking hand and failing. It felt slick, cold, and itchy.

  Shit. She needed to be far away from the Compass before any fires started, or she was going to have more problems than a hole in her lung.

  When the bottle was full, she poured a thin line of it along the wall to the boiler room. It would keep oozing under the fuel tanks, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that except hope nobody came along to find it. She poured the rest of the bottle out on top of one of the unlit burners.

  The naphtha in the hallway and pooling in the fuel room was making the air pungent and oily, but she couldn’t do anything about that either. She fled up the gangway, toward the deck. Two levels up, she needed to duck into a hatchway at the sound of footfalls coming down the stairs and found herself in an unlit cargo hold. She grimaced as they passed. Six people. They’d no doubt come across the carnage. She could only hope they’d be too distracted to find the pooling naphtha behind the tanks. She needed to hurry. By her best guess, she only had a few minutes before the clockwork system would light the burner where she’d emptied the bottle.