by Gorman, K.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘I have to stop him.’ What did she mean by that?
The thought had been nagging at her brain for a while now. The comment had been so offhand, tagged on like an afterthought, or a mantra.
And Sasha’s actions had been…
Well, it didn’t look like she was particularly happy about having to trap children in tanks and connect them to a giant hive mind.
For someone hellbent on rewriting the world, she sure was going about it a strange way.
“There’s something more to this,” she said. “There’s gotta be. No one just up and decides to rewrite the world on a whim. She said she was protecting herself before, said that I’d understand.” She frowned. “Do you think she was referring to one of the Corringhams?”
By Tia’s memories, she’d bet it was Bernard Corringham. Of the two, he seemed more…ambitious.
Plus, it was him who’d intended to create some sort of weird monotheistic deity by running every single one of the mythological archetype programs into a single mind together.
For himself.
“Fuck, do you think he actually managed to do it?”
I wouldn’t put it past him. He was patient, methodical, ambitious, and had no care for human life other than his own. He’d even throw his own brother under the bus if it suited him. He hid it well, but he was a monster.
A few memories flashed across her mind. As far as she could tell, nothing overt about Bernard Corringham’s speech, manner, and actions set off any alarms, not at first. It was only after the fact that Tia had discovered things weren’t all that he presented them to be. Little things, like slightly off-base purchases for the Project that didn’t have immediate connections to the Project goals, or a discovery of a different set of funding arrangements and experimental prototypes that he had been working on.
But Tia had been well into her illness by that point, walking around with a cane and knee supports, and he had been dangling Program Eurynome in front of her like a silver lure in a trap.
She was just as guilty of putting her own life first as he was.
Then again, she’d never actually killed anyone. Not until recently, when she’d transferred into Karin’s body.
“Fuck,” Karin said. “If that’s the case, we need to sit down and talk with her. There’s more going on than we presumed.”
If she’s gotten to this point, she may be stuck on her course. It looks like she’s been at this ten years, maybe even twenty. She may not want to talk. She may just want this to be over.
“Yeah, well, she can join the club.” She shook her head. “I hate to sound cliché, but―we will make her talk.”
If there was something else going on―if Bernard Corringham was responsible for Sasha’s drastic change in behavior―then she was going to get to the bottom of it.
He was already on her kill list, anyway.
Following the cable, she turned a corner. A second later, a child appeared at her side, walking along as if she had always been there.
She glanced down. “Einine?”
Einine was a small, slender girl. Caucasian, with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. The Project had killed her when she was twelve.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said.
She’d been Program Scathach. In the war pantheon, like Nomiki.
Which meant that, most likely, she’d been helping herd the living Eurynome Programs toward the Centauri.
“Are the kids safe?” she asked.
“Yes. Tylanus made five trips. Everyone is across, except for the five who were taken into tanks.”
Karin gritted her teeth. She’d been afraid of that.
Anger grew in her.
This had gone on long enough.
“Your sister’s still here,” Einine said. “And your boyfriend. Tylanus left them.”
Tylanus…left them.
She frowned. “What about the Centauri?”
“They’re gone, too.”
Huh. Gone without her. That was…That shouldn’t be.
Had something happened?
“Just as I predicted,” Layla said, slipping into sight just up ahead. She turned to match Karin’s stride and nodded to the cable on the wall. “You’re almost there.”
She’d gathered that. As she’d been going, the cable had thickened. It was almost the size of a fire hose now.
It had also started glowing. A faint gold color.
“What can I expect? What is up there?”
“She’s set up her own Cradle.” Layla turned to regard her, giving her an obvious look over. “Are you okay? Your suit seems…broken.”
She flipped her wrist to trigger the transplanted HUD. Sure enough, several fault notifications scrolled down the left side of the screen.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just a few broken shocks and a disconnected comms chip.”
Likely from when Sasha had presumably thrown her through a pocket dimension and back out into Tartarus.
Either that, or Tylanus or her Shadow had intervened to prevent her from getting completely booted from the dimension.
Tartarus is not her dimension. She does not have all control here, Tia reminded her.
Neither do we.
No, but we punch harder.
They turned another corner and found another set of stairs.
This time, however, there was something different about them. Instead of just an endless continuation of opulent stone and ancient inspiration, the room above had an airier feel coming from it. Through the door, she could see large gaps in the walls where the room flowed into a balcony. And the beginning of some sort of construct in its middle.
The Cradle.
She paused, anger and determination pulsing in her blood. Noticing it, she forced herself to relax. Pushed the anger down. Let the logical side of her brain slip in and take control.
Going in there angry wouldn’t solve anything. They needed to get to the bottom of this.
“This is where we leave you,” Layla said. “Good luck, Karin.”
She nodded, sparing a moment to allow her gaze to flicker over the two ghosts that stood only a few feet away, taking in the serious expressions on their too-young faces.
She took a breath and called on the fragments of her old personality that were still left. Marc’s face floated to her mind, then Nomiki’s, then Soo-jin’s. A facsimile of emotion slid through her, rippling at the bottom of her chest.
She was doing this for them. For all of them. And everyone else who would vanish at Sasha’s hand.
Then, she touched the cold stone on the wall and scraped her armored glove down its surface, using the vibration of its rough texture to ground her mind into her body.
Eurynome’s sharpness returned, and emotions grew distant.
Leaving the kids behind, she climbed the small staircase and entered a room where the light danced and shivered.
The walls on the mountainside were open, providing a view of the deep tint of dusk and the encroaching stars outside punctuated by the dusky silhouettes of carved support columns. A strip of cloud slid up from the bottom, slowly moving down and to the side. Beyond, the wrinkle of landforms appeared far, far below, obscured in a haze of distance.
It felt like she stood on the top of the world. As if, looking down, the rest of the world was far away from her, under the surface of a pond. That there was something between her and the rest of life.
This, she thought, was the control room.
In the center of the room, void of any other decorations except for a mythological frieze on the wall, sat a large, carved stone bath connected to what she could only assume was Sasha’s version of a Cradle.
It was larger than most, with multitudes of cables sunk behind raised stone channels on the ceiling, all layering and connecting into a massive trunk that twisted down into the computer’s top like a thick branch of wisteria vine.
Sasha stood inside the tank, the water lapping at her thighs, watching her. A nanoinjector
crown, larger and with more arms than she’d seen on any of the others, already sat on her head, its needles buried deep. Light from the tank caressed her skin, rippling upward. A current in the water dragged at the thin, semi-transparent dress that draped from her shoulders and hips, pulling part of it away from the skin of her thigh.
“Awake, are you?” she asked. “Am I going to have to kill you?”
Karin snorted. “That’s the question I should be asking you―what in the actual fuck are you doing?”
Sasha’s lips twisted. “So crass. I thought I taught you better than that.”
“Yes, perhaps I rebelled in my later years. So―really, I want to know. What are you doing, and why?”
Sasha didn’t answer immediately, but her eyes narrowed and her lips stretched into a thin line. She definitely looked older, now that Karin took the time to examine her. Gray streaked through her hair, and her face and skin had a weathered look to them. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth were more pronounced than they’d been the last time they’d met.
A side-effect of living in a pocket dimension.
She frowned when Sasha didn’t speak. “Please. I want to know. Does it have to do with Bernard Corringham?”
Sasha’s lips twisted, the muscles in her arms tensing up, the fingers of her right hand forming into claws.
“So, you know about him. I thought you didn’t remember?”
“I’m remembering some things,” she replied. “I remember him and his brother putting me in a tank. They’re the ones that took my memories, right? That’s why you didn’t know about it before?”
Sasha flinched. “I wish I’d known. I would have stopped it.”
“But you didn’t, and here we are.” Karin let out a breath, shaking her head. “Tell me, did he manage to make himself a god?”
Sasha frowned. “You know about that?”
Karin met her stare. “I’m not Eos anymore. Not just her, anyway. I am Eurynome. And I am Dr. Tia Sarayu, the Project’s former head geneticist.”
“Tia Sarayu…” Sasha’s frown deepened, and she looked down, searching her mind. “I found that name once, among some papers.”
“Just once? So, they erased me from my research? That’s typical, isn’t it?” Tia slipped her control through Karin’s limbs, shaking her head as her lips tugged into a sardonic grin. “Regardless, I was there, and I and my body set the groundwork for the Project.” Her expression turned into a sneer, baring teeth. “I literally wrote the Chaos Program. And Ares. And Aphrodite, though I notice they never pursued that one―I suppose Bernard never had time for love, did he?”
Sasha was looking at them peculiarly, her head at a slight tilt and her frown in a lighter, more puzzled turn.
“No,” she said. “He did not. He only had time for himself. Anything else was simply lip service to furthering his own goals.” She paused. “You are Program Eurynome?”
“Yes, I am. And the base of all the other Programs who followed.” Her tone dropped like a stone through water. “And he and his brother left me to rot inside my Cradle for seventy years while they built the Project off of my work.” Her lips tugged into a smile, and her tone turned sickly sweet. “So, tell me, what has dear Bernard been getting up to? Don’t tell me he actually managed to make himself a god?”
Sasha hesitated. “It’s…Yes, he did.”
And, with that, the whole situation changed.
Tia crossed her arms. Karin’s brain whirled, accessing memories and running them down logical paths. A headache started to throb, then dissipated. A tickle in her nose, and the smell of rust, suggested an imminent nosebleed.
“In which case…you could see it, couldn’t you?”
Sasha hesitated, emotion shuddering over her face. “How do you know that?”
Tia smiled. “Let’s just say I’ve had a lot of experience being a Cradle base, shall we? I remember when he used to mess around with me in the tank, changing things. It felt…It felt like I was being violated. Like everything was being violated. Codes were being changed from the outside, my programming was being limited―everything I could control was being removed from my grasp.”
Watching this, Karin shivered.
Tia hadn’t shared those memories.
“When he was finished,” Tia went on. “I couldn’t even build my own world. Only pockets.”
Pockets.
Suddenly, it clicked.
The reason Sasha wasn’t using Chaos as the seat of her new world was because she couldn’t.
Chaos and its creation weren’t open to her. Only pockets of it.
Everything she’d done outside of Tartarus, the real world, and the Shadow world, had been done in smaller pocket dimensions.
She should have had access to entire worlds.
But she didn’t.
Before her, Sasha was beginning to break down.
“That’s why I have to do this. I have to stop him. It’s so wrong―everything has his touch on it. Only here can he not reach. I―I―” Her jaw shook, emotion crumpling her face. “I gave him my daughter.”
Tia crossed her arms over her chest. “He asked for her, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” Sasha swallowed. “If I hadn’t made her, he would have used my son. It’s no excuse, but it’s what happened.”
“We found her,” Karin said. “Fallon has her.”
Inside the confines of their mind, she thought, We need to get that Cradle back from Fallon.
Yes, we do, Tia replied.
“We have your son, too,” Tia said. “He came to us for help.”
“Yes, I realize that. I felt him here earlier.”
A small silence passed between them. Sasha turned her head to where the violet sky was deepening softly outside. It looked as though you could simply step off the balcony and bathe in the night.
Tia stirred. “How complete is it? Did he manage a full Cradle? I can’t imagine how, given what I’ve heard. You, sure―you have the advantage of being Chaos. But he was merely human.”
“He first floated the idea twenty years ago,” Sasha said. “I thought he was joking―he only said it in passing. Then, fifteen years ago, he just suddenly shows up at the compound and goes straight to the Cradle like he’s found something.” She hesitated, eyes shifting between hers, trying to read her face. “That’s…that’s when he asked for a new Cradle base.”
And that’s when she’d made and given him her daughter. To protect her son.
“So,” Karin said, emerging from within. “Let me get this straight. The reason you’re aiming to completely destroy civilization and rewrite the universe is because Bernard has already done so?”
“Yes.” Sasha’s lip curled. “He’s turned everything. You can’t see it, but I can. He…It’s like everything’s turned alien. It doesn’t belong. I need to make it belong again.”
Ah. And that’s where her programming is faulting, Tia thought. She literally can’t stop herself.
“I’m not sure that’s the best way to go about it,” Tia said.
She flinched, then drew herself up, sliding her dark gaze onto her from across the room. Her lip twisted. “It has to be done. Besides, this world has its faults. I can start again. I am Chaos.”
Yep, that’s her programming tripping. I recognize the pattern.
A tear slid down Sasha’s cheek. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and knelt into the tank. “Good night, Karin, Tia. Thanks to you and your efforts, this new world will be incomplete, but it will be better than what exists now.”
And, as she watched, Sasha reached a hand up, activated the crown on her head, and pulled herself under the tank’s surface.
Behind her, the Cradle began to activate.
Yeah, fuck that.
Adrenaline surged into her blood. Karin tugged on her powers. Reality warped, bent, shivered. The Centauri suit screamed a warning, notifications of faults scrolling down the screen on her forearm. Sasha’s blackness opened up in front of her again, but she dodged it this time,
slipping between dimensions.
In less than a second, she’d crossed the room, thrust her arm into the water, and pulled Sasha out by the throat.
Sasha’s arms flailed out, smacking her. She jerked her head when one came too close to her eye, the others glancing harmlessly off her armor. Reality warped, Sasha’s Chaos powers coming into play. This time, she felt her own powers rise in defense, canceling them out.
She lifted her up and slammed her into the back of the tank, careful not to interfere with the nanoinjectors.
They’d need Sasha’s mind intact after all this to help fix things.
“Nope. You’re coming with me. If Bernard’s used the Eurynome base like I suspect he has, then we have options. Save your plan as a backup.” She tilted her head, lifting Sasha up and slamming her into the tank again when she felt her powers activate. Darkness whispered around her arms like a caress. “You don’t really want to kill your son, do you?”
At her words, Sasha went still.
“You―”
She choked around her hold, hands grasping at her wrist, but she might as well have been fighting against a wrench. The darkness powers came again, but Tia batted them aside with a snarl.
“You―you really are Eurynome,” Sasha said.
“Yes, I am.” She pushed her face closer to Sasha’s, snarling the words. “And believe me, I am going to take down Bernard Corringham and peel his ill-gotten powers off, one by one.”
With that, she opened her mind and pushed. Dark and light swam together, and the entire world around them shivered at her touch. It was like an earthquake had hit. Wings appeared, pure white and flexing wide in the room, and a coldness slithered into her mind.
She could make the whole world burn.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The halls of the temple were quiet when they walked back through them, only the soft gurgling of water and the occasional shift and whisper of wind audible. She made Sasha go to every child in every tank that she’d put them in and take them out. Some of them were still aware and woke up almost immediately. Others had fallen unconscious, the trauma too great for their young minds.
They waited, and Karin carried one of them. A few minutes later, Brennan showed up and put another young one on his back. Several other old Eurynome Project victims, ones who had died long ago, appeared around corners like ghosts, joining to help.