by Alex White
The twins both regained their awareness in tandem with her, and with a brief but meaningful stare, they agreed to continue the ruse of being drugged.
The Children had taken Nilah’s oral transmitter, but left her and the twins relatively intact, aside from a rough search. The three of them had been shut onto the top floor of the Pinnacle, though Nilah doubted she’d have trouble breaking the locks. The problem was: where was she going to go? The guards had burned all their cold-weather gear. She didn’t have a slinger, and there were no vehicles at the Pinnacle—at least none that she knew.
Imagers and other recording devices dotted the Pinnacle, embedded into sconces, statuary, stuffed animal heads, and anything else complex enough to confuse the eye. It’d taken Nilah a while to find the first one, but once she did, she couldn’t stop unearthing new lenses. Even if she wanted to try to hack the door open, the imagers would alert security before she could do anything.
They’d taken shifts resting on the various luxurious furnishings throughout the upper level. There were no bedrooms this high in the structure, only the rotunda and its accompanying study. Everything was ornate and gilded; almost nothing was comfortable. Soon, every bone in Nilah’s body began to ache from the many trials she’d suffered the day before.
“Do you think we should try to shoot our way out?” whispered Jeannie, picking up an apple from a serving platter shaped like a wolf’s head. The pair of women kept their backs to the known imagers, mumbling what little communication they could muster.
“With what?” Nilah sighed. “We’re not exactly armed here. They even took your shivs. And have you seen a slinger up here?”
“I won’t be taken alive,” said Jeannie as Alister wandered to her side, pantomiming the drunken stupor of the drugs. “Not again.”
Jeannie looked at Nilah with pleading eyes, and Nilah restrained a flinch. She’d helped them get out of one of Witts’s most disturbing installations, and she understood exactly why they wouldn’t go back.
“Then find something sharp,” said Nilah, her blood running ice-cold. “I’ll be the last to go down, if it comes to that.”
The twins shook their heads in unison. Nilah wished they’d be subtler about that. They might’ve pegged Nilah for the famous racer who brought home the Harrow, but they’d failed to recognize the pair of science experiments.
“Do you think the others are coming for us?” asked Jeannie.
Nilah’s heart sank. “Maybe. They might assume we’re dead.”
And there was no way to get a signal out to them.
The chunky growl of the stairwell doorway opening shook Nilah from her thoughts. The twins stood up and spread out, not eager to be caught in one of Osmond’s spiderwebs again. Instead, Sharp entered, followed by a retinue of dead-eyed spike thralls carrying steaming trays of food. The bastards may not have stocked the base with slingers and escape craft, but they certainly had knives in the kitchen, and maybe a few accelerators or radiators, too.
“Elder Osmond thought you’d be hungry,” said Sharp.
They filed into a small dining hall, where thralls placed the trays upon a mahogany table. A tableau of slaughter had been carved into the wood along the sides of the furnishing: predators of various planets, chasing down and consuming their prey. When the servants whipped away the silver shells covering the plates, there were three thick, bloody marpo steaks with pats of herb butter across the top.
Sharp took in Nilah’s disgust with an impassive expression. “The elder said you need to enjoy the kill.”
Nilah spoke slowly, with eyes hooded to emulate the stupor of a drugged target. “No … no animals to eat.”
The twins tucked into their meat.
The thralls left Sharp seated at the table and retreated to the exit, where they dutifully flanked the door, ready to attack anyone who tried something stupid. Nilah reminded herself that her entire mission qualified as something stupid.
“Are you really Nilah Brio?” asked Sharp, his expression unreadable.
Hiding her ire for the meddlesome captain of the guard was the second most exhausting part about getting to the Pinnacle. He watched her with folded arms and an obnoxious smirk.
“Go ’way,” she grumbled.
“The network is down for maintenance,” he said. “No imagers. You can stop pretending to be drugged.”
The twins both sat up straight, their expressions alert and wary. Instead of answering, Nilah strode to the nearest hidden lens and connected to it with her magic. He wasn’t lying—the whole network was down.
“What’s your game?” she asked, slowly turning to face him.
Sharp shrugged. “You look nothing like yourself. Judging from the images on the Link, I thought you’d be prettier.”
“Sodding hell, do you want an autograph?” she snapped at him. “It’s called a disguise.”
He was still staring at her.
“Don’t look at me like that. Why would you even ask such a stupid question?”
His eyes traveled to her arms. “I just wonder where your dermaluxes are. You’re supposed to be famous for them.”
“They’re also disguised, you twit.” She instinctively rubbed her forearm. “They’re in there, and if you don’t want me using them on you, you’ll back off.”
He scoffed. “Okay. Keep your disguise after your cover is blown, Nilah.” He said her name with such annoyance that it may as well have been a mouthful of salt. “Seems like a waste to me.”
Sharp was right. Hiding her dermaluxes wasn’t doing Nilah any favors, and they knew exactly who she was. She’d been foolish not to think of it before. But why give her any advantage?
Nilah rolled back her sleeves and focused on her forearms. When she’d fought the springflies, she’d forced the wavelengths of light in her arm into longer and longer frequencies to fool their infrared sensors. To clear away the veneer of skin from Doctor DosSantos, she needed to go in the opposite direction.
She traced her glyph, connecting to the nanomachines and reigniting them. They appeared at first as a dim, reddish orange—the color of sunlight through her eyelids. She shortened the wavelength, driving them upward through the colors of the rainbow, to arrive at the blurry violet. Then, she cycled the intensity, unburying the functions like stretching a muscle after a long time cooped up in a small place.
She began flipping the dermaluxes on and off, her skin flashing in slow beats, growing faster. She reoriented the nanoscale plates inside her arms to reflect outward, shaping the light. After a trial ramp, she closed her eyes and drove her dermaluxes past violet.
Her arms itched. Faster. Then came the burning as she crossed out of the visible light spectrum. Brighter. The neural circuit complained at the magic load, and still she forced more inside. Patches of light desynchronized from her arms in mosaic patterns as the system failed to keep up. The dermaluxes weren’t designed for this, but she was still a tuner, damn it all. Her eyes watered.
Burn.
Nilah threw her arms out wide and pushed a jolt of magic through them so severe, she thought she’d short out the nanomachines for sure. The skin on the surface of her forearms went up like flash paper, erupting from her in patches.
Alister put down his fork and clapped softly at the impressive light show. Jeannie gagged as the scent of burning arm hair hit her. For her part, Nilah coughed and swatted away the ashen flakes of skin that peeled from her body. Her arms would be disgusting for a while, and she could do with some lotion, but at least she had her tattoos back. Her pleasure radiated from her in golden waves.
She shut them off and pulled her sleeves back down. At least she wasn’t unarmed now.
“How long is the network down?” she asked.
He cut his eyes to the thralls. “Sixty more seconds. Your friends have to know you’re here. Do you have a rescue coming?”
She considered the question. It was entirely possible that they’d already isolated or killed the double agent, and Sharp was just there to mess with her he
ad. If she answered honestly, it might help lure her friends into a trap. She’d only been their captive for a short while, and her friends’ exfiltration schedule would be a valuable piece of intelligence.
Then again, what if he was the double agent, and he’d just exposed his secrets to them? If a rescue wasn’t incoming, she’d be nothing more than a potentially deadly liability to him. He could fake an escape attempt and blast her on the spot.
The truth might kill her friends. A lie might kill her then and there.
She waited out the clock, watching sweat form on his brow.
“No rescue if they think I’m dead,” she said at the last second, allowing her features to go slack.
Sharp growled and seized her by the arm, whispering in her ear. She very nearly clocked him, but that would’ve given her away. “I’ll be back the next time the system goes down. Be ready to talk.”
Then he took a few steps back, his smirk returning. “Don’t be naive about meat, little Miss Brio. Before long, you’ll get hungry enough to lick the steam from the plate covers.” He pointed to the silver domes, his eyes lingering on hers overlong.
Then he left, taking the thralls with him and securing the stairwell door.
Nilah eyed the marpo, gray lumps of fat congealing as it cooled, and her stomach churned. She’d never keep it down. If she’d known she’d spend this whole mission starving to death, she would’ve at least had a feast before departing.
You’ll be hungry enough to lick the steam from the plate covers.
It struck her as a stupid taunt, out of character for the security officer. But there had to be more to it than that. Nilah crossed toward the table, pretending at the last second to drunkenly stumble on the leg of one of the expensive chairs. As she did, she flailed her arms, knocking one of the lids to the floor, where it rolled underneath the table.
She muttered a curse, leaning under the table to where the lid had rolled bowl-up. It hummed like a bell, and she pushed a chair out of the way to get at it. Stuck in the direct center, molded like a piece of modeling clay, was a full-sized mycoprotein ration.
She might not know Sharp’s game for certain, but it seemed he was another player on the field.
The contract investigations had put a pall over the captain’s quarters.
“I need a lawyer,” grumbled Cordell, his smoky breath coming out in irritated little puffs. “What do ancient trees have to do with anything? This is like reading another language.”
“It is another language,” corrected Boots, taking a sip of her dark Morthan coffee. Its musky notes were an acquired taste, but at least it covered up the stench of tobacco flecked with eidolon crystals. “Why don’t you know programmatic contracts?”
He set the sheaf he’d been inspecting down across the top of the stack. “Because I’m not a doddering archivist. I’m a dashing starship captain.”
“You should try doddering sometime. At least then you’d finally be acting your age.”
Boots sighed and massaged the bridge of her nose, adjusting the bandage. She’d been having sinus trouble ever since raiding the med bay for supplies, which meant she’d probably done something incorrectly. She missed Malik.
Once she’d gotten over the shock of Stetson Giles’s signature—and the fury at touching something he’d held—Boots had dived in full force only to find a brick wall. The terms of the contract were deliberately obscured and encrypted. There were seemingly thousands of moving parts to it: escrows, money transfers, conditional terminations, severances, actions and reactions. Each paragraph was a coded function in legal speak, and instead of the variables having names like “Henrick Witts” and “Children of the Singularity,” they had names like “Succulent” and “Ice Peak.”
Armin would make better sense of it, but he was too busy working on the calculations for Orna’s stealth drop. Boots would have to go on her deductive abilities alone, just as she had done back in her Gantry Station apartment.
Every programmatic contract held a key somewhere inside it, and if she could just find a thread to pull, the rest of it would quickly unravel. She found a fee schedule for something large, something that might correspond to the “Ladder” variable class, but her brain ached as she tried to grasp the whole picture.
Cordell interrupted her train of thought for the thousandth time. “So you can’t tell me anything about where Giles might be hiding?”
She smacked her forehead against the desk. “You know the terms of the curse, sir. I can’t tell you his whereabouts. I can’t help you find him.”
He looked away. “Sorry, Bootsie.”
Boots put down the “Ladder.repeat” page and regarded him sidelong. He’d sprouted a few gray hairs since she’d gone to Hopper’s Hope and returned, and the crow’s-feet under his eyes had grown more pronounced. Maybe he’d always looked that much older and she’d only just noticed. Maybe he’d seen some things in her absence.
“You want to tell me what’s on your mind?” she asked.
He gave her a look like she’d reached out and booped his nose. Crew didn’t ask their captains to confide in them, and he’d never do it. Any fear he showed could damage morale. Any damage to morale could get people killed. The burden of an officer was to never share, and they both knew it.
He took a drag. “Can’t stop thinking about Nilah and the twins, is all.”
Boots blinked. She hadn’t meant it seriously. The galaxy was upside down if he was confiding in her. “They’ll, uh … they’ll be fine.”
“It’s just that, when I think of the magnitude of evil that we’re facing, I can’t even wrap my head around it. Sending twenty-year-olds into battle when you’re thirty is one thing.” He stubbed out his cigarette and the vacuum disposal on his desk sucked it down with a pop. “But in my fifties, it’s even worse. And those twins … they’ve been fighting long enough.”
Boots leaned back in her chair and took another sip of coffee, clearing the last of the smoke from her sinuses. She set down her cup and crossed her arms, suddenly awakened by Cordell’s worried revelations.
“How about you level with me, sir? What’s their deal?”
A characteristic smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth, but he couldn’t even muster that. “When the Harrow came home, there were a lot of good intel hits. A lot of work to do.”
“Yeah. I figured after I left, there would be some action. I, uh …”
Feel bad for disappearing, but I did my part.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You had your thing for the first time ever, and I was happy for you. But the Taitutians were in a rare sharing mood, and Armin and me, we found some stuff. Well … mostly Armin.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Cordell reached under his desk and fetched a bottle of cheap whiskey, the kind he liked in his coffee, and splashed a bit into his mug. He held it out for Boots, who took it and added some to her own. She wasn’t looking forward to the warm nap the whiskey would shove onto her, but she doubted they’d make any more headway on the contract during the night cycle.
He swirled his mug around to thoroughly mix it. “You know how unlikely it is that the twins would both have the same marks?”
“It’s a genetic impossibility,” said Boots. “The closer the gene pool, the more mutations in the cardioid.”
“Right,” said Cordell, “which means you basically can’t pick your mark … except Witts was working on a way to do that. The VanHoutens were some of the financiers of the Harrow, and when the Taitutians let us evaluate some of their holdings, we found a school on Blix, nestled into the mountains. At first, we didn’t think anything of the place, but the clan executor got his underwear all bunched when we started talking about it.”
“So you decided to check it out?” asked Boots.
“Yeah,” said Cordell. “Without the Taitutians. I’ve never fully trusted them. Nice people, but their intel services leak like a used jump dump. We thought about calling, but you were, you know, retired, and we wanted to get to
the chalet before the VanHoutens could close up shop.”
“And you found the twins there?”
“We busted in. It was a lab, but in total chaos. Most of the techs were dead—burned to bits by spellfire. We found a bunch of unconscious … uh … subjects.” He downed the rest of his beverage and refilled the whiskey, sans the coffee. “It was a breeding ground for spies. Puppeteer’s marks, reader’s marks, eyebreakers, jumpers, you name it. Every spell that could be used to infiltrate a place was on display. These people were genetic donors, spiked and forced to … I don’t know. But Jeannie and Alister’s, uh, parents had to be among their number.”
“Wait, the twins were spiked?”
“No. I’m getting to that.”
Cordell’s military history was the same as Boots’s: he’d seen so many soldiers die, the weak and elderly starve, witnessed all of the evils a war could inflict. So when he got that haunted look in his eye, her heart stumbled over its next few beats.
“They’d grown kids with accelerators and all kinds of dangerous crap. You couldn’t call these experiments, though, Bootsie. That would’ve been way too generous to these children. We got into the security archives and saw what they were doing to the ‘failures.’ They’d cut out the cardioids and test on the severed organs … before throwing the bodies in the incinerator.”
He reached over to his roller and withdrew another cigarette. The device clicked and whirred, depositing another stick into the newly vacated spot. He lit up, smoke drifting across his eyes, and sighed out a plume.
“The worst ones were the side projects—the attempts to graft a second cardioid onto a child. We called them banshees, just because they wouldn’t stop screaming at us. They roamed the halls like hollow-eyed ghosts, coming after anyone they saw, magic streaming off their fingers in long, sputtering wisps. We … we had to shoot them. Couldn’t save them. Don’t think they wanted to be saved.”
She couldn’t stop her mind from rendering his words in stark detail.
“Then we got to central holding and found our twins, bags packed, blood-spattered, standing cool as cold iron—no spikes in their heads, not even superficial damage. They were waiting for us. When we asked where the blood came from, they pointed to this … this lady on the ground. They’d sliced her up something fierce, Boots. Judging from the look on her face, she hadn’t known to put up a fight. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to. Considering all the awful things we found in that chalet, she might not have meant to live. And those twins … they were the only success of that godforsaken project. They’d been bred like a couple of animals to have identical marks.”