by Gorman, K.
“Badabing, badaboom.”
Indeed. Tia paused. Where are we going, anyway?
Karin looked around. The trees were silent, leaves catching in the light from her suit arm. A heady, moist scent permeated the air. Even here, in this dark world, the air had a heat and humidity to it, though not as much as in the other world.
“The slightly brighter area I saw. I think it’s the Centauri camp.” There hadn’t been any villages close by―at least, none that would have made that kind of light pollution. “I figured that, if nothing else, I could snoop.”
Checking out our assets.
“Basically, yes. Of course, I’m hoping that something other than snooping happens on this trip.”
She looked down at her gloved hand, splaying the fingers. With a thought, she pushed at her light power. Globs of white-gold bubbles slipped out of her skin like droplets of glowing oil and lifted into the air, shivering. She felt more of her power shiver within the flesh of her arm, its touch sliding through her muscles and tendons like the fingers of a Shadow―except this was familiar, not foreign.
You’re hoping something will happen, Tia said.
“Yes. Otherwise, we’re kind of wasting our time here.” She blew out a breath and looked around at the trees. “I mean, as interesting as the Shadow world is, it’s not exactly telling me where Sasha is. Or what to do.”
Huh. In her mind, she felt more than saw Tia’s eyebrows lift. And you’re just going to…walk?
“Well, yes.” She narrowed her eyes. What was Tia on about? “Why? What else is there to do?”
Well, wasn’t it you who was bitching about Fallon not utilizing your full potential? Tia barely paused. It seems to me that you’re doing roughly what they were doing, just in a different world.
She rolled her eyes.
You have the power of Eurynome. And I’ve been waiting a lifetime to find out what, exactly, she can do.
She frowned. “You’re the one who programmed her. Shouldn’t you be the expert?”
In genetic coding, yes. But I never got to test-drive the abilities―I never had a fucking chance to. That’s all you. I―
Tia stopped suddenly, whipping her head around. A second later, Karin felt it, too.
As they’d been walking, more and more Shadows had gathered in the wings, keeping pace at a distance. Some had moved in closer, wandering in and out of the trees.
“Getting crowded in here,” she observed.
Yes. So you better hurry up.
She let out a breath. Tia was right. They hadn’t come here just to explore, and the growing number of Shadows was a concern.
She shifted, turning her stance, and took a deep, stabilizing breath.
Then, she closed her eyes and pulled on her powers. Carefully. Slowly. Savoring every zip and tingle the quantum field caused. Light flashed against the back of her eyelids. She caught a whiff of humidity―the jungle―along with the telltale aroma of burned air from the lingering ion trails that a massive amount of ships coming and going would leave.
Now, one of the Shadows stood right behind them. And it recognized her.
“Eos.”
The thought-voice cut through her body like a rake of static. She felt it go through her. Felt it echo in her mind.
Slowly, she turned.
The Shadow was roughly her height, standing at about a meter’s pace. As she turned, her light―both from the suit and the droplets in the air―skittered its shadow across the path behind it. It was odd to see, given the Shadow was actually darker to her eyes than the shadow it cast behind it. Like a piece of the universe had been cut, letting part of the abyss leak in.
Except, somehow, this was a being.
This is the one that’s been following you, isn’t it? Tia asked.
Yes, Karin answered inwardly.
For a moment, she stared at the Shadow, regarding it. Then, she shifted forward, opening the angle of her body to it.
“Hello,” she said.
The word seemed to make the Shadow waver. It rocked back, its borders seeming to shiver for a second―like the edges of flame, except in abyssal black and with the weird, blurred, turned-in effect that made them hard to look at.
Though, now that she was trying, she found that she could look at them.
“Hello,” the Shadow repeated. “You’re the one who programmed her. Shouldn’t you be the expert? Well, yes. Why? What else is there to do?”
Ah, yes. A memory twigged. She remembered this. The weird repeats it had done in Macedonia. It seemed to have read something from her mind, back then―a memory of Tia.
That had been before she’d gone into the tank.
The Shadow shivered again, this time seeming to rear up. Then, it took a step. Its arm lifted, raggedy fingers outstretched.
She eyed them. Then, after a slight hesitation, and with a lot of misgiving, she lifted her own hand to meet it.
Its fingers clasped around her forearm and slid deeper, feathering her bones with a light touch.
Inside, something in the back of her nervous system changed, like a long-forgotten door fashioning itself into shape. Instinctively, her eyes began to close. Her mind opened, reached out, found something waiting.
“Eos,” the Shadow said again, and the voice shivered straight through her nerves.
A connection sparked and fused. For a millisecond, she got a brush of intellect, of opinion, of assessment.
Then the Shadow retreated.
It still kept a light touch on her arm, but its psyche pulled back.
“Is it reading my memories?” it said. “It is reading my memories.”
“Yes, yes, I think I get it. A little bit, anyway.” She took a breath, repressing a shiver―its fingers were still inside her arm, brushing against her flesh. “And yes, I am Eos―or at least I was. Who, or what, are you?”
It didn’t immediately answer. She felt it was thinking. Gods, she hoped it wouldn’t just repeat her words back to her―she was getting so gods damned tired of it all.
But, it only shifted again.
“You call us ‘Shadows.’ It is how we are perceived. You cannot perceive us truly.”
The words were stilted and odd, the cadence off―as if it were still piecing bits of a recorded language, but half of the words had strange stresses within the context.
But they were words, and it was speaking.
Considering the Shadows had been just madly attacking only a few months ago, this was huge progress.
Her brain flicked back to that end bit―You cannot perceive us truly. She’d always figured something of the sort. The Shadows weren’t really Shadows, not truly. They weren’t just black demonic forces sent to raid humanity. They were much more complicated than that.
She gestured around.
“This is your world, isn’t it? How did it come to be? Do we belong to different dimensions?” She paused. “Why is everything mirrored?”
“It is complicated,” the Shadow answered. “At first, we were cast-offs. Anomalous. Feeding off of human minds to create individuals over time. We existed like this. Then, we changed.”
“Changed?”
“Yes. Changed.” The Shadow paused, as if thinking. There were no emotions to it―it was as if a computer were compiling an answer. “She changed us. You are changing us.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it.
Okay, that was a lot to take in.
“She changed you?” she asked, deciding to focus on the first part. “Sasha?” Then, remembering that the Shadow had used project archetype names rather than given names, “Chaos?”
“Yes. She allowed us to reach across the barrier and explore.”
“You attacked us,” she said.
“She forced us to. We were angry. Confused. Lost.”
Her arm tingled where the Shadow touched her, and she repressed the urge to snatch it away. There was a connection between them. She could feel it. Like touching a wire and feeling the current.
“Are y
ou still angry?” she asked.
“No. Now, confused.”
Join the club.
As far as she knew, Sasha might be the only one of them that wasn’t confused.
“I’m sorry that happened to you. She shouldn’t have done that. She hurt us, too.”
Oddly, the Shadow hadn’t mentioned the large amount of death she’d dealt out to the Shadow population.
Maybe they didn’t die when they were ‘killed’ in the other world?
“She’s in our head. We can feel her.”
“It’s only going to get worse,” she told the Shadow. “She’s planning to push parts of my world into your world, then replace my world with her own world.”
“Not her world,” the Shadow answered. “His. Tartarus, the deep one.”
Huh. So they knew about that. And knew, specifically, that it was Tylanus that Sasha would be piecing apart to make her new universe.
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Not spoken, no, but we know him.”
Ah. She supposed that was logical. Like Sasha, he had shown an ability to control Shadows, too, though his ability seemed friendlier than hers.
The one time she’d seen it, he’d told a Shadow to lead them out of a labyrinth in a pocket dimension.
“He tried to talk to me, I think,” she said. “But he just collapsed.”
Maybe something happened to him. Maybe Sasha did something.
“Maybe,” she agreed. “He used to come to me in dreams. Once, he said that it was something that we used to do, back when we were both in the compound, but I don’t remember it.”
Shared dreams? It’s possible. We were all meant to be a hive mind.
“If he’s being kept sedated, do you think he’s dreaming?”
Have you done it while you were unconscious before?
Karin snorted. “Yes. That’s usually when it happens.”
Come to think of it, she’d spent an inordinate amount of time knocked out lately.
I read this book once. Fiction, but it touched on many more meta-physical concepts. Some of the characters could do a telepathic communication that the author called ‘kything,’ which not only allowed words, tone, and speech to be conveyed, but physical sensations and images, as well.
She shook her head. “Possible, but it felt more direct than that.”
I did say it was fiction. Like I also said, you were both genetically wired for connection. I coded part of Program Delphi into the base, and both of you would have that code.”
“The Delphi code as opposed to the Eurynome code?” she asked, teasing.
Fuck. Here I am, Grand Regent of a large military, chimeric mix of creation gods, arguing about telepathy in a literal Shadow realm.
She sighed. She hadn’t meant that last one as a response to Tia, but she knew the woman had received it all the same.
They shared a brain, after all.
“If Sasha is in your head,” she said to the Shadow, “do you know where she is?”
The Shadow had kept silent throughout her entire side conversation with Tia. Briefly, her mind flickered down to the sensation of its fingers inside of her arm, and she wondered just how much it ‘heard.’ It had, after all, already demonstrated an ability to connect to her mind.
The entity shifted, its middle rippling.
“Yes.”
A shock spiked through her system, and a shot of adrenaline jumped into her blood.
Holy shit.
“Where?” She twisted around, taking a half-step closer to the Shadow. Power shivered through her, licking her nerves like a whip. “Show me―where is she?”
For a few seconds, the Shadow was silent. She became aware of just how many other Shadows stood around them, watching. Tens upon tens of them, solid silhouettes in the trees, their attention all on her and this one Shadow.
Then, it rippled. Her mind reeled as its darkness seemed to writhe and undulate, constantly moving. It was like looking at one of those trick images that never appeared to stop moving, though the lines in the image itself were still, except instead of lines on a screen or colors on paper, it was an abyssal blackness.
The Shadow’s words from earlier came back to her.
‘You call us ‘Shadows.’ It is how we are perceived. You cannot perceive us truly.’
This was not what the Shadow looked like, only how her brain managed to interpret it.
The Shadow shuddered. When it spoke again, its voice had gone off, like a robot that was malfunctioning.
“She is…inside…us…”
The next thing she knew, it struck out.
She went reeling over backwards, the alarms on her suit beeping. Everything went black. She felt the Shadow around her, smothering her, pulling itself in. It sank into her skin, sliding through her flesh and bones even as her light exploded out.
Then, it was gone. And she was standing alone in a jungle that was quiet as death.
The other Shadows had left, too.
That was weird. You still there, Tia?
Yep.
Notice anything different?
Other than an elevated cardiovascular rate and adrenal levels? No.
Where the fuck did it go?
I have no idea.
She sighed. “I should probably go get that checked out, shouldn’t I?”
Probably. I don’t trust it.
“All right. Well, at least it’s not like they can hold me. I can still come back to the Shadow world and fuck around with our powers.”
Yep.
Shaking her head, she warped back to the other world and hiked back up the hill to the compound.
Chapter Fifteen
“So, you just decided to go out in your klemptas suit and play soldier girl?” Nomiki arched an eyebrow. “I mean, I get it.”
She rolled her eyes. “I thought you were off on some fancy mission.”
“It got postponed. That specialist team arrived sooner than expected.”
“Ah, yes, they must have caught that fabled trade wind out of the gate,” she said, a sharp edge of sarcasm to her tone―with space travel, there was no way someone could arrive ‘sooner than expected.’ Unless they were sporting some serious stealth tech, both Fallon and the Alliance would have painted their ship the second they transversed the gate and, given their origin and the fact that this was their team of specialists that was operating under their scope and permission, they would have been communicating every inch of the way out of Nova.
Gate comms only had a minute’s delay.
“Maybe they canceled an appointment on the Manila or something.” Nomiki shrugged. “All I know is what I’ve been told. Also, I know this suit did not come from the Courant. Yours is still hanging in the team room.”
She reached out a finger and flicked it against Karin’s armored shoulder, making a tock sound.
“Those last statements are contradictory,” Karin said. “Unless someone told you my armor was in there.”
Nomiki aimed her next flick at her head. Karin swatted her hand away.
“Hey, Doctor, can you hurry up with this check? My sister’s getting grabby.”
“It would be helpful to know what I was looking for,” he said, squinting down at the diagnostics crown in his hands as he unfolded its last node and took a step toward her. “Did you have another fit?”
“No. Just a weird Shadow encounter. It felt like it went inside me.”
“Sounds dirty,” Nomiki said. “Just what the hell have you been up to in this armor?”
She moved aside to let Takahashi set the crown over Karin’s head. Karin grimaced as the arms and nodes slid into place.
“Nothing special. It just went inside me―you know, like they normally try to do when attacking?”
“Can’t say I’ve personally experienced that, given I’m such a badass,” Nomiki said, making a show of checking her nails. “But yes, I know what you mean. Didn’t that happen to you before, too? Back on Enlil?”
It had. Back in the
beginnings of the Shadows’ attacks, when the crew of the Nemina had been staging a rescue at Songbird Sanctuary, a Shadow had attacked her and pushed itself into her mind.
For a few seconds, her consciousness had disconnected. She’d been lost in darkness, all of her senses gone, unable to feel her body, unable to feel herself breathing.
Then, the Nomiki she’d been seeing in her dreams―a version of Nomiki that she later learned existed in the Cradle―had woken her out of it.
Or so she’d thought.
“Yeah, but it didn’t take. Whatever they do to other people, it didn’t happen to me.”
But the last Shadow had clearly done something. She’d felt it.
Plus―where had it gone? Was it still inside her?
Tia, please tell me I didn’t imagine it. It went weird at the end, right?
It did.
The diagnostics crown beeped. She looked up at Takahashi as he scanned the data on his eyepiece. “Anything?”
He didn’t reply immediately, likely still reading the results. She was just impatient.
They’d done this dance before.
“Nothing more than your new normal,” he said finally. “Were you speaking with Tia during this test?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “I thought so. There were a few…hills in the activity scan.”
She raised her eyebrows. “‘Hills?’”
“They aren’t as sharp as ‘spikes,’” he said. “More of a rolling slope.”
“Good to know.” She scrunched her head down and pulled the crown off, squinting as a few hairs caught in its arm joints. “’Miki, you said that team is here?”
“Yes. They should be downstairs right now. They wanted to look at the Cradle first.”
She rolled to her feet. “Fun. Let’s go meet them.”
Nomiki arched an eyebrow. “In that suit?”
Karin shrugged and led the way. “Why not?”
“I will accompany you,” Takahashi said, folding the diagnostics crown back into his pocket. “I, too, would like to meet them.”
* * *
With her mix of memories, it always felt odd to walk through the compound’s halls. Tia had memories of running and laughing kids, and long nights poring over data in her office or lab, or watching the sunset slant a golden light across the halls while she waited for an experiment to run or took a meal break in the upstairs kitchen.