The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  Marcel gripped the railing and let his breath out. He had done well by his own reckoning, he had stolen Verus’s trust, or at least a something could be called vaguely analogous of trust. The man had thrust Marcel into the back corner of a mutant camp, the place least likely for Roache’s men to find him, and where Verus believed (with some prompting) that Marcel would be the least able to get into trouble. The lodging was unpleasant, doubly so since Crat had chained his leg to piping during the daytime, but it had given Marcel direct access to the mutant resistance, and, honestly, the company wasn’t bad. The news of the schematic heist had spread fast, and though being chained in a foul-smelling subbasement wasn’t much akin to the parades of the past, the hushed cheers, the awed whispers, and the wide-eyed stares felt all the grander.

  Marcel had done his part, more than was expected of him, now it was up to Sylvaine. That seemed to be the nerve-racking part, he had done all he could, now he just had to wait.

  Sabyn jabbed him with his elbow, and pointed down. A mutant was waving up. Marcel listened and could make out footsteps below, the hot glare of torchlight cutting into one of the side doors of the complex. He nodded and moved swiftly but silently back towards Sylvaine.

  A mutant beat him to it, whispering to the engineer. She grumbled, and slunk back to hide in the crate, while Marcel took her place.

  A minute later Crat stepped up the walkway. He moved with soft steps. Marcel wouldn’t have heard him if it weren’t for him cursing out a nearby mutant.

  Marcel turned, wrench in hand. “Yes?”

  “Work?” the man asked, as if it were a complete question.

  “Ongoing,” Marcel said, turning back to the inside of the machine. His answer did not satisfy the man, who grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back.

  “It better be,” Crat said. “If you’re trying to deceive us to extend your life, trust me, it is not worth it. There are slow ways to die.”

  Marcel kept the man’s gaze. He reached into the machine and lifted out a piece of something. “Do you know what this is?” Marcel said, lifting a small box decorated with a variety of wires. “Or this?” He pointed inwards at some sort of pipe-thing. “No? Then let me do my job.”

  The man let go but continued to watch Marcel. “What have you discovered?”

  “I believe I was hired by Verus, not you,” Marcel retorted.

  “Hired?” The man snorted. “Do I have to remind you of your position, Talwar?”

  “Here you go!” came the shout of Sabyn, who handed Marcel a screwdriver. Marcel inspected the tool, grateful for a second to think. “I asked for a slotted head, not a cross slot.” He shoved it back into the mutant’s hand and kicked him in the shins. “Go on, do your job right!”

  Marcel thought he heard Crat chuckle as Sabyn ran off, but the man’s face was grimly stolid when he glanced back to him.

  “As you can see, Crat, I’m busy here, but if you want to waste my time chatting about stuff I’m going to tell Verus tomorrow anyhow, well, I can include our useless interlude in my report to him, so he’ll know what help you’ve been.”

  Crat sneered and shook his head. “All right then, work. But be damn quick about this, we can’t be sneaking you in here night after night.”

  With that he left. Marcel stood beside the open module, until a mutant gave him the thumbs up. He wiped nervous sweat from his forehead, and stepped back, as Sylvaine returned and took up her spot.

  Sabyn walked by, thrust another screwdriver into his hand and gave him a quick kick to the shin.

  “Hey!” Marcel said. “I was just trying to play my role.”

  Sabyn shrugged. “I was just playing mine.”

  The excuse didn’t make sense, but Marcel didn’t press it. After all the horrors, atrocities, and just plain shit the mutants went through, they had earned a shin kick or two.

  * * *

  Sylvaine was more than eager to get back to work. Her brief separation from the machine had only increased her excitement to plumb its depths. She knew she should be more afraid, they were one mistake away from attracting an armed guard, or horrified, at either the machine or Lazacorp in general, but in truth she was exhilarated. She had been too long left with only abstract diagrams and shards of shapeless scrap. Now she felt around the many complicated organs of the module, each one its own fascinating mystery.

  Someone said something behind her, but the tone lacked urgency, so she ignored it. She was working through several competing theories on the function of the module, each heavily supported by some parts of the machine, and completely disproven by others. Individual pieces made sense, but as a whole the module was senseless.

  She had a moment of near-eureka when she noticed that several components of the machine, recent additions by the look of them, matched many of her æther-frequency modulation designs, but she quickly deflated when she realized that several of the additional æther-circuits, if powered, would only serve to disrupt the delicate task of æther modulation, making the purpose of the machine again incomprehensible.

  Sylvaine dug deeper, removed some piping, and inspected a strange canister. It was glass on one end, revealing half-a-litre of empty nothing. Sylvaine unscrewed the canister and tried to make sense of its purpose. It was an irregular design, a small needle spiking from one end into empty space. She shook her head, perhaps she was going about this wrong.

  She stepped out and pressed her glove to the edge of the machine, closing her eyes and focusing in. With each micropulse of æther she could feel out the gargantuan complex, senses its layers of pipework. So much of it was a beautiful interwoven masterwork, but the module seemed like chaos, a screaming child clanging spoons in the middle of a grand symphony.

  “Find anything?”

  She jumped back, and turned to see Marcel glancing over at her.

  “I didn’t know you were still here!” she said.

  He stepped back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, I was just asking again if you found anything.”

  She shook her head. “No, just, I don’t know, maybe?”

  “Just something I can tell Verus, it doesn’t have to be important,” Marcel said, a hint of anxiety in his voice. “Well, it might help if it sounded important.”

  She went back to the open module. “It’s a strange one, I can tell you. There are components here that don’t make a millilitre of sense. Some seem to fit with the injection hypothesis, but other parts seem like they would be better suited to an ætheric neutralizer, or some sort of industrial filter, but some of those aren’t even installed correctly.”

  “Okay,” Marcel said, eyes upwards, his fingers tapping together as he tried to memorize her words. “Strange mess. Injection hypothesis. Pieces of filter and ætheric fertilizer. Wait, no, did you say neutralizer?”

  “You don’t fertilize æther,” Sylvaine said. “I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe they made a mistake, but some sections seem almost genius in their design… And then…” She pulled out the canister. “There’s things like this.”

  “Hey, be careful,” Marcel said, “Remember we can’t leave a clear mark, don’t go damaging things.”

  “It’s okay, Marcel, I got it,” she said, turning the canister in her hand. “It’s a odd design, wouldn’t be able to handle the corrosive effects of sangleum, seems overly complicated for water, maybe it would hold some sort of catalyst.”

  Sylvaine twisted the lid opened and sniffed inside. She expected the smell of sangleum perhaps, or some industrial strength coolant or other chemical. Instead a horrible odor hit her, metallic yet biological, knocking her back with shock. She shuddered violently and dropped the canister in a blind panic. It bounced on the walkway, with an arc heading straight past the railway. Marcel lunged, grabbing it right in mid trajectory, above the clanking abyss. He gripped it tight, inspected it, then showed it to her, uncracked.

  “Demiurge, Sylvaine,” he muttered.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, pan
ting, leaning on the side of the machine.

  “Something toxic?” Marcel asked.

  She shook her head. “It… I think there was blood contained in that. A while ago perhaps, cleaned since then, but still the hint of it remains. I just…” her voice faded. Blood was not that shocking, but it was not often that she could tell the source. Lazarus Roache. The scent of his blood ripped into her, as if the man himself were here, trying to cut into her brain with his words.

  Marcel grabbed her shoulder and handed back the canister, which she quickly implanted back into the machine.

  “That’s not the only oddity,” she said, when she had calmed herself well enough. “Parts of this machine seem familiar, very familiar. Things I worked on.”

  “Some… machine you fixed in Icaria?” Marcel asked.

  She shook her head. “My school project. A negative-density generator.”

  “A negative—”

  “For æroships,” Sylvaine cut in. “Helps them float.”

  Marcel furrowed his brows. “So they’re trying to make the machine… float?”

  “No,” Sylvaine said, retreating to the open cavity of the machine. “That would be… very dumb.”

  The engineer went back to her work. She examined interwoven piping, compared ætherflow readings with quick pulses, disentangled æther-circuits from their wiring, inspected them, then reentangled them. Minutes passed, maybe hours, she wasn’t tracking. At times she noticed Marcel’s nervous pacing, his occasional glances over. Progress went slow. The more she understood the workings, the less the machine made sense, some parts weren’t even hooked up to a power source, and a few of the pipes led only back to themselves. It was no surprise to her that Gall had completely failed to make heads or tails of this module. It was excessively strange, as it the point of the machine was simply to confuse her.

  “Ah!” Sylvaine said suddenly. Marcel rushed over.

  “What is it,” he asked.

  She shooed him away with a free hand. “Shh. Breaking focus, you’re… just shh!”

  Sylvaine frantically glanced through the machine, inspecting with her ætherglove each individual component, making quick mental notes of which hooked up to one another, which she could make sense of, and which were placed in nonsensical places.

  It took well over twenty minutes, but finally Sylvaine pulled her head out, leaned on the wall, and let out a long breath.

  “What is it?” Marcel asked again.

  Sylvaine started to chuckle, and then shake with quiet laughter. “Nonsense…” she said. “Of course it is nonsense…”

  Chapter 33

  “Our initial hypothesis about the injection of some sort of sangleum substance are correct,” Sylvaine said.

  Marcel sat in the back of the crowded storage tank, in the midst of a dozen mutants, and Kayip, watching Sylvaine explain her findings from the previous night. His legs were still heavy with the leg iron cuffs that Crat had latched onto them, but Sylvaine had at least undone the lock, so he could stretch them as far as the cramped space would allow.

  The mutants whispered among themselves. They were nervous as day meetings, even those held in early mornings, were rare, and required considerable effort. Other mutants needed to cover extra shifts, meals were missed, lies and cover-ups had to be crafted, the chance that they’d all be discovered was significantly greater, but the time of their revolution was approaching, risks had to be taken. Desct listened to the chatter, scratching the end of his chin, and then nodded solemnly to Sylvaine.

  “So they’re planning to commit the violations they brought upon us to the whole damn town?” Desct asked.

  Marcel rubbed his eyes and forced himself to stay awake. Despite the dire situation, the localized apocalypse Sylvaine was outlining, the simple truth was that he had had little sleep in the last couple days.

  “Sorta,” Sylvaine said. “Slickdust is comparatively mild, a low dose of sangleum, and more importantly a dose that is at a weak frequency. Not the case with what the machine could pump into the water, it’d be high frequency, heavily activated.”

  The mutants’ confused looks spoke for themselves.

  Sylvaine shook her head. “Listen, in simple terms, higher frequency equals more mutations. Slickdust only really mutates when injected in high quantities over a long period of time. The stuff this machine makes…”

  “Will mutate its victims damn more expeditiously?” Desct offered.

  “If it doesn’t just straight up kill them.” Sylvaine nodded. “With this infused into the water, it would take less than a week to turn all of Huile into…” She shook her head, “those poor men and women who you hide in your infirmary. Bags of flesh barely able to move.”

  Marcel held down nausea. What purpose could such cruelty serve? The mutants murmured with an intense focus on that exact question, with wild theories tossed about. Some suggested it was revenge for some unknown slight, others hypothesized that it was all part of some mad experiment, and there was even talk of a rumor that the mutated corpses would be grinded up to make slickdust. The arguments circled round and round each other, with no progress and not a hint of resolution.

  “What does this matter?’ Celina interrupted. “We’re here to discuss the clockbomb plans, the revolution, not to get the technical readouts on some new Lazacorp product. We don’t have the time to waste on dissecting their schemes, it doesn’t matter. Let them poison this shitpit, it deserves no better.”

  This spurred intense shouting. ‘What!’s, ‘How dare you’s, and ‘let the engineer speak’s were flung around, echoing off the wall. One older mutant stood. “City Hall may be corrupt, but I still have family in Huile, many of us do.”

  A few tried to defend Celina. “If they don’t care about our lives, why should we waste a moment caring about theirs?”

  Desct stood suddenly and silenced the crowd.

  “Continue Sylvaine,” he ordered.

  “Right,” the engineer said, looking through her notes. “Well, this module is somewhat strange within the overall structure, at odds with, really, the machine’s general purpose.” She pointed to a sketch and the technical gibberish she had written. “The module is filled with many distinct subunits, whose purpose I won’t get into, because they don’t exist. They’re superfluous. Fake. It’s why Gall’s notes were so damn confusing, he was being misled by the very machine he was trying to study.”

  The mutants murmured again, unsure of what to make of this.

  “Roache is putting one over on Verus,” Marcel said.

  “Why?” asked one of the mutants. Marcel could only offer a shrug. That Verus and Roache hated each other was as evident as the earth, but what divergent goals they could be fighting over, Marcel still couldn’t deduce. He glanced over to Kayip, who was intently staring forward at nothing in particular, fist over his mouth.

  “I don’t know the reason for the deceit,” Sylvaine said. “All I know is the only half-functional piece of the module is this.” She pointed to a bunch of scribbling what Marcel could only assume was a detailed schematic. “It’s an æther-modulator,” she explained. “I worked on something similar for my own project. I had assumed it was my whole invention Roache cared about, but it was really just this technology, one that is far from efficient in this implementation. What this unit does is that it changes the frequency of the sangleum, lowering it significantly. It accomplishes this by comparing the frequency of its purposeful sangleum effluent to some other material, I think, in this case, blood.” She paused. “Roache’s blood, if I had to put frascs on it. This would allow it to exhibit the same mind-altering effect slickdust has, specifically attuned to a certain individual, i.e. Roache.”

  “So, then they are pumping slickdust into the water,” Marcel said.

  “Yes, effectively.”

  More whispered discussion. Several independent debates broke out before Desct silenced them all again. “So there is some malign rationality to their shit-stained bru
tality. Why didn’t you begin with this revelation?” he asked.

  Sylvaine rubbed her arm as she stared down at her notes. “Well... because… it’s backwards. If they just wanted to inject slickdust into the water, there are far easier solutions, ones that don’t require this initial hyper-activation, don’t need this re-adjustment and these fake structures. It’s clearly meant to pump this first product, but it is changed at the last minute to instead inject slickdust.”

  “Could this first product be like slickdust?” Marcel asked. “A mind-controlling drug, but for someone else, maybe?”

  Sylvaine picked up a piece of paper, and pointed to her equations, which added little to Marcel’s understanding. “No, no, the frequency is hitting a ceiling. I mean, it could function like that, but only if the person in question had sangleum for blood. And sangleum for organs. And sangleum for skin, for everything. If that person was literally a pool of raw æther, then yes, sure, it would have a similar effect, but I doubt a puddle of oil is going to be doing much mind-controlling.” She sat down, clearly exhausted by the questioning.

  Well, that was one dead end. The way Verus had spoken of his plans had made them seem less like some grand manipulation, and more like blatant mass murder. For what reason, Marcel could only deduce insanity on the foreman’s part, though that didn’t strike him as a satisfying conclusion. Roache’s alterations at least had a logical goal, control, though being a complete thrall to Lazarus Roache didn’t strike Marcel as that much better than being dead.

  Kayip tapped his boots. The echoing thuds grabbed the mutants’ attention, and the monk turned to Marcel. “This is good,” he said. “Marcel, you are to tell Verus of this. Of Sylvaine’s discoveries.”

  “What?” Marcel said.

  “What?” Celina repeated, with more venom. “You are going to give these secrets to our enemy? See! See what these outsiders are—”

  Kayip slammed his boot down. “These are two machines, do you not see? They are at odds and at separate purposes. One machine to inject this mutagenic poison, one to inject the lesser poison of slickdust.”