by Maura Milan
Knives twisted the cap and ran his thumb against the golden nib, watching as the ink bled into the surface of his skin.
He still didn’t understand why Bastian loved these things. They just made a huge mess. He unscrewed the lower half to see how much ink was left but then blinked at what he saw. There was something strange wrapped around the ink canister. It looked almost like a data coil, a thin fiber capable of storing immense amounts of information within its circuitry.
He turned the canister around, stopping when he saw the activation crystal embedded at the base.
His hands trembled at the thought of what he had just discovered. Could this be Bastian’s records, the ones they never found even after turning his office upside down?
His chest tightened, the oxygen swirling heavy inside his lungs. Could this be what they needed to stop Einn?
He pressed down on the crystal. Holographic lights sparked in the space before him, piercing through the dark and still air. He expected to see a simple square holoscreen linking to all the information the data coil held. Instead, a series of light pixels assembled in the space in front of him, creating a holographic image of a man, all the way from his leather oxford shoes to his white, wrinkled lab coat.
A familiar face, made of light, made of happiness and memories, stared back at him.
“Good day,” the hologram said. “I’m Bastian Weathers. How can I help?”
“Hello, old friend,” Knives said, blinking away the tears from his eyes.
CHAPTER 45
IA
IA WANDERED through the streets of the merchant town, the dust swirling through the alleys. She knew this location well. It was part of a desert star system with three suns, so hot that all the planets were scorched. The people who grew up here had extra sweat glands to deal with the insufferable heat. That was the only way they could survive on the surface. For others, the planet was livable if they tunneled underground.
Not a lot of people visited, and if they did, they didn’t stay long. As she walked the cramped alleys that formed a maze through the underground, she noticed a refugee colony had settled here. None of their structures bore the symbols of the White Hearts, so her brother’s reach hadn’t come this far.
As she turned the corner, she heard a child’s voice singing the Half-Man’s familiar nursery rhyme. Watch out. Watch out for the Half-Man. He lives neither here nor there. The Half-Man comes from nowhere. He’ll take you and break you. Watch out, watch out. Before you disappear.
Ia hummed along until she came upon the child playing in front of a house made of scrap. The girl’s hair was pulled back in a messy twist, and there was a smudge of dirt across her right cheek. Despite this, she wore a tan jumpsuit, much like the ones the Commonwealth forced on refugee populations that they shipped around. The suit was fairly new except for a tear in the back in the shape of a shield, the Commonwealth emblem. It was obvious she and her group had escaped.
The girl stopped when she noticed Ia watching her, and she inched away.
Ia pulled down her face mask and smiled. It made the child relax just a tiny bit. Ia opened her hands, motioning for the ball. The girl’s eyes brightened, and she tossed the Poddi over to her.
Ia caught it and spun it expertly in her hands. The girl’s smile spread from ear to ear. Ia tossed the ball back, and the girl immediately attempted to mimic Ia’s Poddi trick.
“Did you just move here?” Ia asked.
The girl nodded as she continued to fumble with the ball.
Things in Olympus must have gotten bad for anyone to seek refuge in such a remote place as this. “Where are you from?”
“Nova Grae,” the little girl said.
Ia paused. That was the same planet where Brinn grew up.
“What happened there?” It was hard to mask the urgent tone of her voice.
A woman wrapped in a gray shawl leaned out of the window. She glared at Ia. “Juna, come here,” she ordered.
Juna sulked off to receive her mother’s scolding. Ia stood in the now empty alleyway, the little girl’s words still echoing in her ears. It was no mistake. The girl had said Nova Grae.
Ia’s thoughts jumped back to the day of the Rigel K attack. The look on Brinn’s face was seared into her memory. The sadness seeping into every line on her face, holding her expression together and ripping it apart at the same time. When Ia had seen her on that rooftop before she walked off with Einn, Brinn had been despondent. Numb.
Ia cursed to herself. She knew something bad had happened.
A swirl of steaming air flooded toward her from vents jutting down from the low ceilings. Ia pulled up her face mask, remembering what she was there to do. She wandered down the alley and took a left into a narrow back passageway. The walls were made of thick cloth-like paper, its fiber strong and fire-resistant. As she passed, she saw shadows of the residents moving inside their homes. A mother rocked her baby to sleep in one. A grandmother pounded chupka flour in another house. In another, a man was counting his money.
That was where Ia stopped.
Finding the part in the center of the wall, she pulled it aside and stepped in.
A red rug was spread across the floor. From the details, she knew it was Narion-made, from an old nation known for their textile exports and the artisans who produced them.
While the walls were made of paper, the interiors were more like a cage, metal bars separating one half of the room from the next.
The man inside matched his shadow. He sat on a high stool, counting the shiny gold disks that were the currency on that planet. Gold was always easy to use for physical transactions, for buyers and sellers who absolutely wanted no digital footprint.
The man was a banker, good at keeping tabs on currency values, loans, and transactions. But bankers were also known for the information they held and the secrets they kept.
He glanced up from his pile, looked her over from her threadbare shawl to the red mask fastened around the lower half of her face, and then resumed his attention on counting his coins. She clearly wasn’t worth his time, which meant he didn’t recognize her.
“I don’t deal in penses. You can go to a local merchant for an exchange like that,” he said, assuming she had only a few cents to her name. It was quite the opposite. Her personal account was loaded with NøN, Zeroes, and even the most valuable of them all—century coin—from all her past crimes plundering the Commonwealth. She even had gold stored in an anonymous vault in the Favadine financial district, if she ever needed it. It was way more than the measly pile he was counting out in front him.
“I’m not here for an exchange,” Ia said.
“Oh?” He placed the coin in his hand back down on the counter. He stared at her as if he was doubting his first impression of her. “If you’re from the Albat clan, I already told your leader that I don’t believe in loan forgiveness.”
“No.” She took a step toward him. “I heard you’re good at tracking people down.”
“For a price, yes.” His eyes shone greedily at her from behind the bars. “Who are you trying to find? A sister lost to the White Hearts? Or maybe a deadbeat father who left you with debt?”
“I’m trying to find the Half-Man.”
He burst out with laughter. “I won’t charge you for that information, kid. The Half-Man doesn’t exist.” He propped his hands on his knees and leaned an ear toward her. “Though you’re not the first person who came to ask me today.”
Today? Could it be possible that her brother was just here?
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“My memory is a bit foggy.”
Ia reached into her pack and tossed him a few platinum coins through the bars.
His eyes brightened at the sight. “It was a man,” he said finally.
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“I’m gonna need more than platinum to remember details.”
She reached into the folds of her shawl for the holodeck t
hat Eve had given her. It was an older model, but she only needed it to access her funds, and possibly contact someone on Myth if things went wrong.
She tapped on the C icon and brought up a transaction for 5,000 NøN. She sent the screen over to him. The banker drew his thin lips up into a smile.
He tapped on the screen, accepting her transaction. “Yes,” he said. “I remember him now. Large fellow. Had to slouch because he was too tall in here.”
That was strange. Einn was taller than she was, that was for sure, but not tall enough for his head to brush against the canvas ceiling.
“And?”
The banker sent the transaction screen back to her, and she glanced down. It was a request. For 10,000 NøN.
She didn’t want to argue. Information brokers loved to gossip about people who were out to kill them, and people who were cheap. She accepted, and then he clapped his hands together in delight.
“What did he look like?” Ia demanded.
“You’ve seen him before, I’m sure. A lot of people have.” He waved his hand across his pointed visage. “It’s hard to forget that skull on his face.”
Goner. Her brother had sent Goner.
Too bad he wasn’t good at actually finding things out. She was sure he was in the same boat as she was, with little to no information on the Half-Man.
“Anything else?” the banker asked.
Ia had dismissed her holoscreen when a thought popped into her head. Not just a thought. But the face of a girl who was haunting her. “Actually, yes,” she said. “The Tarvers of Nova Grae. A young man named Faren and his parents. I’d like to know where they are.”
The banker squinted an eye at her. “A whole family. That’ll cost you.”
All of the nerves inside her snapped. Her hand whipped through the thin space between the iron bars, just large enough to fish her wrist through. She was done negotiating. She clutched the man’s throat before he could snake away and yanked him forward so his forehead crashed into the metal separating them. Her gaze remained on his face, watching as his eyes bulged out.
“Let go of me,” he choked.
She sneered. “That will cost you.”
He let out a final gasp before sputtering, “Fine.”
Ia’s fingers relaxed, and he slipped out of her hold, stretching his neck from side to side while gasping for more breath.
“Now give me the status of the Tarver family.”
He pulled up a screen of an updated Citizen database, and he made a humming noise as he scrolled through the lists. Until finally he stopped. He cast a hesitant glance in her direction and then looked back at the page.
“You better not lie to me,” she said, her voice low.
He swiveled in his chair to face her. “Faren Tarver, age 15,” he said. “Deceased.”
Her throat grew tight. This was what had caused the expression on Brinn’s face, the same anguish she saw in the footage of Brinn shooting Queen Lind.
This was why she’d joined Einn, Ia realized.
“What about the rest of the family?”
He pulled up a screen of an updated Citizen database. “The two adults are”—he tapped a line of data—“alive.”
Thank Deus, she thought, and she felt like she could once again breathe.
The banker passed her a screen of information with the location of a send-off camp.
“Nasty places, those are,” he commented. She knew what they were. That was where the Commonwealth had sent all the refugees, even the ones who had successfully claimed citizenship. No one knew what happened at the camps, except people rarely came back from them.
Ia turned, her feet dragging back toward the tent entrance. As she pulled open the flap, the banker called out to her. “Wait. Who are you?”
Ia stopped at the tent’s opening, the cyan lights from the alley slashing across the floor. “Do you want to die?”
The banker shook his head.
“Then you don’t want to know.” And she took off into the alley, the fabric flapping in the ventilated wind.
Back inside Orca, Ia placed a hand on the glass and gazed into the All Black. She had powered down her engines and enviro systems to save on fuel. The ship was adrift. She had unstrapped, her body curled up on its side, floating somewhere in between the floor and the curved top of the cockpit glass. To keep away the chill, she threw on Knives’s leather jacket. Its insulation offered very little warmth, but in a way, it comforted her. It made her feel a little bit less frustrated, a little bit less alone.
The glow of the holoscreen illuminated the vicinity. She stared at it. The banker was the last on the list of names to tap. No one had any information on the Half-Man. He was nothing but a memory from their childhood, a lullaby.
Einn had always been obsessed with these things—pieces of data that seemed unimportant to everyday people, but for some reason meant everything to him. She wanted to believe there was more to the Half-Man. There were times, hopeful fleeting moments, when she thought the search was for someone real. Someone she knew. A father who’d been lost to them years ago. Perhaps he was the Half-Man, and this was all about their father after all.
Or maybe not.
The people on the list were the best information brokers on this side of Dead Space. If they didn’t have even a hint of information, then who did? There had to be some clue that they had overlooked.
Whatever she had to do, she needed to do it fast, especially with Goner on her tail. If they crossed paths, who knew what would happen. Well, one thing was for sure: she would unleash all levels of hell on him for shooting her point-blank that day. Maybe she’d get shot again, but it’d be worth it. She had to pay him back for breaking a promise and for all the damage he’d done.
Frustrated, she shoved her hands into her pockets and sulked. At the bottom of one of the pockets was a crumpled piece of paper. Odd. Paper was such a rare and useless commodity these days.
Ia fished it out, picking apart the wrinkly ball gently with her fingers. It unfolded like a kothra moth’s wings after it pushed itself out of its chrysalis, the wrinkles forever there no matter how much she’d wait or even attempt to iron it out.
She let the somewhat flatter piece of paper float in front of her. Gazing lazily at it, she read over its contents. It was an old handwritten receipt from a ramen joint.
And Ia almost snorted from inside her helmet. The universe was about to end, and Knives still had found the time to feast on a 10 NøN bowl of ramen.
Her eyes zeroed in on the heading on the top, and she nearly did a backflip. The name of the restaurant—
Nowhere Ramen.
It was a long shot, but it was the only lead she had.
Ia extended a leg, kicking it against the wall so she could get back to the pilot seat. The engines started, and her voice trilled up and down as she sang.
The Half-Man comes from nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere.
CHAPTER 46
BRINN
BRINN STOOD at the control panel, a line of Sino Corp investors staring over her shoulder, ready and waiting for her to flip the on switch. As if it was that easy.
Penance wasn’t even ready. She still had to address a slew of problems, but that didn’t matter when the Sino Corp ships arrived in their pocket of the galaxy.
So there she was, turning on the modulators, checking the gauges, and keeping a close eye on the power intake because that was where things got rough.
They had enough power on hand for Penance to open wormholes to other places within the galaxies, but not enough to generate a bridge to another universe. That would take an enormous amount of energy. But what worried Brinn more was the unknown. No simulation could ever predict what would be across that bridge when it opened. That was another reason she had insisted on attempting the experiment on a smaller scale, using the replica she had built in the labs. This unit was kept in a controlled and quarantined room, made of four walls of thick, reinforced glass. If the bridge opened, anything could come through, a plethor
a of unknown atoms and matter—things that no one in this universe had ever seen or studied, but at least it’d be contained.
“Are you ready to start?” Einn asked, his voice low.
Brinn nodded, her hand moving from one screen to the next. Typing in commands. Checking on a million things at once.
Einn turned toward the line of Sino Corp partners, all suited up in high-collared jackets with brushed silver notches, their eyes gleaming with interest. Or was it greed?
Everything was ready to go. Brinn pulled up the activation screen, her hand hovering over the start button. Whispering a quick prayer to Deus, she tapped it.
There was nothing at first. A slight humming that soon switched frequencies. Lower this time, so low and thick that it vibrated the ground underneath their feet. Her eyes flicked to the structure as the arches rotated in a blur, so fast that they no longer appeared to be there. A reaction would have produced a flash of light or illuminance, but instead the whole quarantined room was shrouded in swirling shadow.
A loud noise warbled throughout the room, and everyone gasped. Brinn turned away from the screens, looking past the thick, multipaned wall of indestructible glass, her eyes trained on what lay between the rotating arches.
It was faint, but a light-blue shimmer flared within the ring’s perimeter, like a thin veil draped upon the unseen.
She heard murmurs behind her.
“Is that it?”
“Did it work?”
Einn stood so still that she thought time had stopped. It very well could have.
“Congratulations,” Einn whispered so only she could hear. “I knew you would succeed.”
A flitter of pride took hold of her. But then a churning rumble sounded from beyond the glass, as though something was coming toward them. Her eyes locked onto the ring, and she saw a shadow of black beyond the shimmer of blue.
“What on Ancient Earth…” she whispered.
It pushed against the glistening blue veil, that thin boundary between their universe and the next. The bridge wasn’t completely open, she realized. Not yet, at least, and she watched in horror as the plane flexed before them, ready to crack.