by D K Girl
A melodic shrill notified him of someone requesting access to his room. Eron strode naked back out into the main room. He brushed his fingers through the delicate fronds of one of the many plants dotting the living space before reaching the door’s video feed. The woman who waited outside his room was vaguely familiar: short-cropped black hair full of wiry tight curls, deep brown skin, and wearing a crumpled white jacket that marked her as a laboratory worker. He scanned her ID tag: Gwen Weylen. Biomechanic.
Clearly a lab worker with full security clearance if she was here, on this level. Talking to him.
‘Eron here.’ He released the communicator, careful not to allow reverse visual access.
‘Mr Eron, sir.’ Gwen’s gaze was a darting, wild thing moving from the camera lens to scan the hallway she stood in. ‘Mr Eron, sir, I was wondering if you could come with me.’
Eron glanced down at his naked self. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I know we haven’t met directly before, but Blake has sent me.’
Blake Beckworth, or as he and his kind called her, the Technician. Kira’s sister. For an inopportune moment Eron’s voice failed him. He swallowed, tried again. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Blake.’ Gwen leaned in towards the camera. ‘Blake asked me to come and get you. She needs your help.’
‘Help?’
‘Assistance.’ Gwen scratched at her temple with the corner of her ID. ‘She needs your assistance, just briefly. Seeing as the others are unavailable. The other –’
Aliens. Yes, he understood. Except he didn’t. Blake Beckworth had barely exchanged more than a handful of words with him over the years. Nothing personal – the girl spared little conversation for anyone. Including her own sister.
‘I will need to clarify this with –’
‘Your captain has given approval, Eron, sir.’ Gwen’s voice did an odd little jump. ‘You’re good to go. But we should leave now.’
The captain’s approval. Perhaps Lahar had listened to his prayers after all.
‘I’ll be with you in just a moment.’
Tamas - 3
Tamas Cressly eased his legs over the side of his king bed and stopped to catch his breath. Tinnitus hissed in his eardrums, and something in the room smelled foul. Gingerly sniffing his cupped hand, Tamas discovered the source of the odour. Vomit. His raw, burned throat confirmed it, and a glance down at his clothes revealed he no longer wore the white linen shirt he’d donned for the First Meld. It had been replaced with a black cotton T-shirt. Which meant someone had undressed him and cleaned him. Touched his skin. A river of goosebumps pierced their way through his warm body, and his empty stomach threatened to find something else to release. He glanced around the room, blinking against the morning light streaming through the windows, catching a blurry glimpse of the shoulder-high reeds in the garden outside. A replica of the marshlands of his homeland. War had destroyed most of the original beauty in Iraq, and it had taken his father’s life, too. But here, in the middle of a very different desert thousands of kilometres from the aggression, the natural beauty had thrived in the garden his mother had designed. It was six years since her death, and he still wasted copious amounts of water keeping the replica alive.
Not for her. For the garden. A place that always managed to soothe him. As did the realisation now that he was utterly alone. Whoever had played nursemaid was gone. Better still, the goddess was absent from her usual place in his head. Tamas sighed and touched his toes to the floor. The maroon tiles were refreshingly cool against skin that still burned from the night’s activity. His entire body ached with the remnants of the Meld’s force. The skin beneath his precisely shaven beard itched ferociously, and something caked his eyelashes like a layer of sand . Suffice to say, he probably looked as good as he felt, and that was not great at all. He pulled off the black shirt, grabbed a floral-print favourite that should have been laundered a few days ago, and tugged on a pair of jeans that lay in a faded blue lump beside the bed. He pressed his fingers to his lips and wondered if his ancestors, the ones who had received a Calling, had felt this rotten each time the gods moved through them. If breast cancer hadn’t taken his mother, she would have been the one bearing the burden. And she wouldn’t have been standing here feeling sorry for herself. She would have gloated and pranced and preened as if she were the goddess herself, looking down her nose, as she so often did, at Tamas. But she was a pile of ash sprinkled in the Tier, taking all her rage, knowledge, and self-importance with her. Did she see him? He often wondered. Did she feel any sense of pride that a son she’d branded useless for the most part was now Ereshkigal’s Messenger in her place?
He smiled at the mirror as he brushed his teeth. Spit, rinse, and a splash to the face. The burst of icy water cleared the fogginess a little. Tamas ran impatient fingers through his short dark hair, slapped on deodorant, and left his room, stepping out into the brightness of the glass corridor that linked his private quarters to the access elevator. It had one of the best views in the Facility, floor-to-ceiling glass panels that afforded a view uninterrupted even by the security fencing ringing the complex. Tamas’s room looked out across the desert, towards the low-level mountain range that curved around the backside of the Facility. Everything was dusty pink. Even the deep olive tone of his skin had dustings of the sun’s blush upon it. He pressed the call button on the elevator and crouched on his haunches, back pressed hard against the white marble wall. No expense spared. His mother’s taste had bordered on outlandish, and the income brought in by the Facility’s sought-after tech, predominantly Blake’s designs, had only fed her appetite.
Despite having just woken, Tamas’s body weighed him down. He wanted to rest. For a very, very long time. His blurred reflection regarded him in the glass panel work of the elevator doors: the dark mop of his hair, the smudge of stubble on his chin and cheeks. Movement at the far end of the hallway caught his attention. Someone stepped into his space. Granted, it was a lot of space. The length of the hallway stood between him and the man; at least a dozen paces separated them. But the way Tamas’s heart rate quickened and skin warmed with a blush, the man might as well have been holding a knife to his throat. Catching sight of Tamas, he raised a hand, a smile lifting his lips, adding further wrinkles to an already well-burdened face.
‘Oh, hey there, young man. I’ve gotten myself a little lost. There should be a conference room round here somewhere, I believe.’
Tamas’s mouth was parched as dry as the desert surrounding the Facility, and the dampness of sweat oozed beneath his armpits. Whoever this fool was, he was not only lost, he was oblivious too, with no clue to whom he spoke.
His boss.
One who didn’t like strangers. Didn’t like the way coming across an unknown person rendered him a speechless, trembling mess. Tamas pushed so hard against the wall his vertebrae felt fit to crack under the pressure. His breath escaped him in quick, sharp puffs. The man waited on a reply, went so far as to take a step down the hall towards Tamas.
‘Are you okay?’ he said, pulling a cleaning cart into the corridor behind him. Brooms and mops and other paraphernalia jutted out of it, like oversized porcupine quills. Just a cleaner. The guy was amongst the lowest paid of any on the Facility grounds, yet here Tamas was, huddling like a frightened child, willing the damn elevator to open and swallow him whole. Tamas forced a slow breath, digging his fingers into the woodwork beneath him.
‘Go . . .’ Only one croaky syllable escaped him.
But a reprieve came from elsewhere. A woman suddenly appeared behind the man, and her eyes widened at the sight of Tamas. She grabbed the man, the material of his sleeve bunching in her fist, and hauled him back into the corridor they’d stepped from.
‘My apologies, Mr Cressly. Samson is new.’ She stumbled over her own words, and over Samson, as she backpedalled them out of sight. Tamas caught the woman’s words as the pair hurried down the echoing walkway.
‘Idiot. That’s the boss. What the hell were you thinking?’
‘That boy? He doesn’t look old enough to –’
‘He’s old enough to sign your paychecks, and he doesn’t like to be disturbed. Ever. Don’t you ever . . .’
What the cleaner should never do was lost to Tamas as the couple moved out of earshot, leaving only tinnitus to disturb his peace. The elevator door eased open. Wiping sweaty palms against his jeans, Tamas jerked to his feet and stepped inside. By the time he reached level eleven, the anxiety attack was an embarrassing memory, added to the pile of embarrassing memories stored up over the years. It would not always be this way. Serve the goddess well and great things would come his way. He would be the one who caused people to tremble and stammer. Not the other way around.
Tamas stepped out of the reassuringly small confines of the elevator and into the corridor. The land the Facility was built on, and into, had once been a salt mine. After that, it had been a government facility, a testing base for secret initiatives, both airborne and biological, before being closed down. A few years later Tamas’s mum had decided the abandoned complex was where they would wait. Prescience, a gift from the goddess that so far Tamas had not been privy to, led his mother from their homeland of Iraq to here, the United States, a few years after Tamas had been born. Not to this particular place, in the middle of the desert, but she was too ambitious, too restless not to do something while they waited on the goddess’s next divine instruction. A human could waste a lifetime waiting on a deity who operated on an entirely different timescale. Tamas’s grandfather had, apparently. The man had been something of a monster to his mother as year after year passed and he did not receive a Calling. Probably explained why she was so good at being a bitch herself. Years of training. But she had been a damn good robotics engineer and had decided to continue a career begun in Iraq. She’d purchased the ruined complex and turned it into a formidable robotics and engineering facility, giving Tamas next to no choice on his own career path. He pressed his fingers against his temples, seeking to ease the tightness building in his skull.
‘Please, not yet. Just a little longer,’ he muttered to the empty elevator.
Tamas had always been curious about how much Ereshkigal had influenced his mother’s interests and drive. Had the goddess injected her with some kind of natural attraction to this work? Because it had become a very fortuitous choice of career, as well as venue. The Facility, perched and isolated in the desert, filled with top-secret projects – some military, some private – was the perfect place to hide the extraterrestrial visitors his mother had been told by the goddess to expect. Tamas tapped his finger against the wall. As much as he yearned for the answer, there was no way he’d ever try to satisfy his curiosity. Ereshkigal wasn’t exactly the high authority on small talk.
Level eleven’s sole corridor was one of the complex’s original tunnels, a massive, arching passageway where white rock was still exposed and the floor had not been covered in concrete like most of the rest. Tamas knew every dip and rise in the packed-earth beneath him. The air always held a heaviness down here, cool but not unpleasant, blanketing the space around him and muffling the sounds of his footsteps. The glow from the strip lighting along the floor didn’t reach all the way to the domed roof, leaving it in shadow. He passed through the spiderweb-like laser pattern that spread from one side of the passageway to the other. The security system acknowledged and accepted the presence of the Facility director, and he continued on. A bolt of pain seared through his right temple, and Tamas braced one hand against the rough wall. The goddess did not intend for him to see the results of last evening alone. She was coming. The prickling of his nerves and the heightening hiss of the tinnitus told him that.
His mother had relished the pain of a Calling the way Benedictine monks once embraced self-flagellation The more it hurt, the better. Tamas did not share her zeal. With Ereshkigal’s last visit so recent, her return was bitingly sharp.
Before long, the solid mass of steel-reinforced concrete which marked the entrance to the main chamber of level eleven came into view. Two people stood guard at the entranceway, both clad in forest-green uniforms starched to within an inch of their lives. The last of Tamas’s tension left him. He knew the guards, ex-soldiers employed by his mother. Tamas approached them, his cheeks as cool as the tunnel air, his heartbeat steady. He’d known the two people in front of him, a dark-skinned man named Reuben and a Korean-born woman called Nari, long enough that his anxiety had nothing to feed on here.
‘Good morning . . . ah, good morning to you both.’
His voice was a little husky, but there it was. Proof that he was not always the bumbling idiot he’d been reduced to in his own hallway. Nari betrayed nothing, keeping her eyes on the ground. Reuben regarded Tamas for all of a heartbeat. ‘Good morning to you, sir.’
The guard gave Tamas a deep nod, then pushed in the access code, opening a smaller door set within the greater panel that blocked off the passageway. The door swung open, and Tamas felt the prickling air rush out at him from the chamber, brushing against him like static electricity. Tamas curled his shaking hands into fists, straightened his shoulders, and stepped into the hollow enormity of the level eleven chamber. The goddess smashed into the back of his skull the way a rabid animal might throw itself against its cage. He stumbled, but caught himself before anyone might consider coming to his aid. Taking deep breaths, he paused. Gathering himself. Concentrating on the physical world around him while he waited for Her to settle.
The chamber was a huge naturally formed cavern, one that had been here since before the time of the ancient Sumerians, the very first peoples to worship Ereshkigal Herself. As in the passageway, there had been no attempts to conceal the natural rock here, something Tamas thought made it all the more magnificent. Awesome stalagmites rose from the floor at various intervals, some as thick as oak tree trunks, others no more than saplings. Stalactites dotted the cavern roof like hovering swords. These formations were not strictly natural occurrences. They had appeared in a matter of months, not thousands of years. Beginning to grow from the moment the Syranians emptied their payload of Waters into the man-made pool at the heart of the huge space five years ago.
The largest cluster of stalactites hung directly over the well at the centre of the chamber. Tamas hesitated. Even from this distance, a good twenty metres, the pull of the Waters lapped at him. The liquid lay dark and utterly still in a circular containment area, about half the size and depth of the average swimming pool.
Last night, Tamas had stepped into those Waters and provided Ereshkigal with the fragile connection she needed to guide a gallu from her realm of Kur into the corporeal world of the humans. In the times of the ancient Sumerians, when the bridge between Kur and Earth still stood strong, the people had called the preternatural creatures demons and devils. It was a generalisation that was unkind to at least some of the gallu but he could vouch that it was hellish enough to bring one of them here. Even now the residual energy from the Meld rubbed like sandpaper against Tamas’s synapses.
Someone waved to him from across the chamber, catching his attention. Tamas returned Blake’s greeting. She stood a few metres in front of the largest of three modular rooms that had been built up against the rock, jutting out like three giant shoeboxes from the jagged rock face. Tamas headed towards her, making his way around his favourite stalagmite formation, running his fingertips over the bumps and bulges of it. She met him halfway. The Syranians called her the Technician. The somewhat cold moniker suited her.
‘Blake,’ he said. ‘Have you been here all night?’
The rings under her eyes appeared painted on. Her black hair, deep as night, hung against her pale skin.
‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘I thought you were going to die last night.’
Tamas laughed. The movement hurt his ribcage, but he couldn’t help himself. Blake’s bluntness was reliably amusing. His voice never cracked with her, his cheeks didn’t bloom red.
‘I thought I might too, for a little while. But,’ h
e gestured towards himself, ‘I survived.’
She didn’t reply, just stared at him, her amber eyes never leaving his. He recognised the distant look she wore because she wore it so often. Even more so over the past few weeks. Tamas waited, staring back at her. There was a cluster of veins at her right temple he didn’t remember seeing before. Blake’s cheekbones were too defined. She forgot to eat far too often. Tamas made a mental note to speak with Rossiter and have him monitor her consumption.
The goddess, apparently not fond of silence, roared into his mind with a force that staggered him.
‘Are you sick?’ Blake’s nose lifted, ever so slightly.
‘Blake, can you take me to him?’ He touched a finger to his temple. ‘I didn’t quite make it till the end of proceedings, as you know, and the goddess isn’t too happy.’
Blake’s distant expression snapped away, replaced with the guarded mask she always wore when the gods were mentioned. ‘I won’t be withdrawing the inhibitors till the captain is done with service. The proper protocols need to be in place. Does your boss understand?’
The goddess’s reply roared like a brain freeze through Tamas’s skull. He held his breath, determined not to let the discomfort show. Ereshkigal was not pleased. Mostly at Blake’s impressively stubborn refusal to believe the goddess existed at all.
‘That’s fine.’
‘We should keep this brief,’ Blake said. ‘You need to rest.’
It was kind of impressive, the degree of scepticism Blake still maintained. She never called Ereshkigal by name, never mentioned gods and goddesses. To Blake the gods were some other alien species, ultimately knowable and understandable.
Tamas walked behind her, eyes down to avoid unnecessary eye contact with the smattering of personnel at work in the chamber. He kept his gaze on Blake’s purple steel-toed boots, a present from Kira a few Christmas’s ago. Blake had barely gone a day without wearing them since. After watching the sisters’ complicated relationship for so long, he was kind of grateful he had no siblings. Tamas lifted his head as they reached the steps to Tech Room One. The brighter light inside the room wasn’t kind against his raw senses. He squinted, focusing on what lay at the room’s centre. The buck of recognition coming from the deity inside his head caused him to sway. Tamas steadied himself against the door.