by S. S. Segran
Mariah grimaced. “I think I’m gonna pass on this whole thing.”
He gave her a one-armed hug. “That’s alright. Get some more rest.”
“My sense of smell is super sensitive even when my abilities aren’t activated, so I’m gonna sit this one out too,” Kody said, placing his hands on Mariah’s shoulders and guiding her to the door. “Holler if y’all need drinks or something.”
As they left, Deverell sauntered in. “Oh, good, you haven’t started yet. I’d like to help.”
Once the twins, Aari, and Tegan were appropriately garbed, Gareth picked up a scalpel and drove it into the beast’s head. The blade snapped, spinning across the room.
“What was that for?” Deverell exclaimed, hurrying to dispose of it safely.
“Testing,” Gareth replied. “Hand me another.”
He pressed the next knife into the beast’s flank. This was more yielding though not by much, like stiff leather. He worked the blade in slowly, finally feeling it penetrate, but only by a couple of millimeters. Deverell took over, using an array of surgical power tools to slit the creature open. It was a long, arduous task and resulted in a few more blades breaking.
On the other side of the table, Aari and Tegan emitted small sounds of disgust. Gareth quirked a grin behind his mask. “Sure you two are alright here?”
“Yes,” Aari groaned. “It’s just that the biggest thing I’ve ever dissected was a rat in school. This is . . .”
“Considerably bigger than your everyday rodent?”
“Very.”
“Well, here, come take a look at what’s inside our friend.”
The friends rounded the table and peered in. “It’s got organs and muscles,” Aari said. “So it’s definitely a living creature, not a machine.”
“And it’s got the same circulatory system as any other warm-blooded animal, as far as I can tell,” Gareth said.
Tegan prodded one of its hind legs. “What’s up with this, though? Why’s it sorta angled backward?”
“If I had to wager a guess, it probably helps them gain more distance when running and jumping.”
Deverell, who’d moved to a side table to observe a piece of the Scourger’s skin under a powered microscope, invited Aari and Tegan to join him. “Look at this.”
Gareth continued working on the beast, spreading its tissues open with retractors, but kept his ear trained on the conversation.
“What in the world?” Tegan said. “It’s skin, but . . . infused with something?”
“Aye. We’ll have to run some tests to confirm what it is.” Deverell carefully picked up the skin sample on its rectangular slide. “Want to see the other toys we have?”
Aari was at the door before Deverell made his way there. “Heck yeah!”
“I’ll stay here and help Gareth,” Tegan said, waving as they left.
Now that it was just the two of them, the unsettled feeling scratching at the back of Gareth’s mind worked its way to the front. They have the right to know about Ashack. They need to know, Aari especially. But what if Victor’s right, that it’ll shake them too much?
“Hey, this is pretty light for a bone, I think,” Tegan said, startling him. He looked down and saw that he’d drawn out a piece of the Scourger’s rib cage and passed it to her without thinking.
“Light?” he repeated, coming back to himself.
She bounced the unnaturally black bone in both gloved hands, then held it up to the light. Without a word, she went to the small sink and washed it off. “Weird. It’s got a matte look to it. Let’s cut it open?”
Gareth had to try out a few different power tools before the bone finally gave way. He inspected it under the microscope and, after a few moments, leaned back. “Uh, so, this explains the weight. There’s not much here in the way of marrow. It’s mostly a spiderweb-like structure inside the bone. Actually, I’m not even sure if it is bone. Feels more like carbon composite.”
“Makes sense. Reyor would want these things to be nearly indestructible.” Tegan placed the bone on a strip of paper towel. “Come on, let’s get to the collar. I want to see if our hunch is right.”
Gareth extended his hand. “Do the honors.”
“Without damaging the collar? How?”
He smiled and made a slicing motion across his neck.
Tegan hopped away. “I’m not cutting its head off!”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. But only because we might end up severing the collar’s connection to the brain if our theory hits the mark, and that’d set us back.”
Together and with great effort, they worked to wrangle the collar off, eventually having to sacrifice the metallic band by cutting it with a handheld circular saw. As they pulled it loose, they found two electrodes sticking out of the inner surface and two input sockets in the Scourger’s neck.
“Aha,” Gareth said. “So the collar isn’t just a shiny thing to pretty up the beasties.”
Tegan tapped a scalpel against the collar. “But still, like Victor said, we don’t know if these things are preprogrammed or actually receiving orders.”
“There’s only one thing left to do, then. Let’s open the collar up and see what we can find.”
They spent the next twenty minutes delicately sawing through the band. Peeling it open with great care, they discovered circuit boards and microchips. Positioned away from the circuitry was a tiny, black rectangular block with silver wires protruding in all directions.
“There you are!” Gareth carefully pried the cube free with a tweezer; it was the size of his thumbnail. “This is a satellite receiver. Let’s keep this somewhere safe. I’d like to analyze what’s in there.”
The door burst open, making them jump. “Do you mind?” he yelled. “That is not how you enter a room during a sensitive operation!”
The culprit—Aari—stood sheepishly in the doorway. “Sorry. But we finally found out what’s infused in the Scourger’s skin. It’s graphene!”
Gareth’s exasperation abated and he let out a low whistle. “Graphene? Very smart.”
Tegan looked from him to Aari. “What’s that?”
“It’s a relatively new super-material,” Aari said as Deverell appeared behind him. “It’s crazy thin, basically a single layer of carbon atoms, but a hundred times stronger than steel.”
“Let’s not forget its flexibility and the fact that it’s impermeable to almost every kind of liquid and gas,” Deverell added.
Tegan stared down at the Scourger with big, unbelieving eyes that bordered on comical.
Gareth peeled off his gloves and threw them into a rubbish bin before washing his hands. “Good find. On our part, we can confirm that the collar is a satellite receiver. We’ll have to take a deeper dive into the circuitry and chips. I’m hoping to decode any information still in there.”
“Why don’t you two take a break?” Deverell suggested. “Aari and I will carry the baton for this.”
“Sounds good to me.” Tegan cast off her sullied vestiture, careful not to transfer any gore to her sweater and jeans, then swept out the door. “You guys have fun.”
Gareth hurried after her. “Tegan!”
She stopped, waiting for him to reach her. “What’s up?”
“I’m not—I’m not supposed to say anything. But I think you should know . . .”
“Yeah?”
A shadow moved in Gareth’s peripherals. He flicked his gaze to the top of the stairs. Victor was leaning over the side, arms folded, resting on the railing. His face was blank, but a warning burned in his eyes.
Gareth swallowed, then looked back at Tegan. “You should know that you may not like the way Victor does certain things, but he’s doing it for the greater good.”
She nodded, seemingly a little confused. “Sure.”
When she left, closing the door to her bedroom behind her, Gareth glanced at the stairs again, but Victor was gone.
“Kenzo, what are we doing?”
“Shh, give me a moment. I need to f
ocus or the calibrations will turn out wonky.”
The blue-haired girl seated in the reclining chair in the CUBE sighed. “So was this your plan all along? Find excuses to talk to me for a few days until we’re a little better than acquaintances, then get me down here and put this thing on my head again?”
“You make it sound like I kidnapped you.” Kenzo spun his stool around to give her a dry smile. “I’m the head of the Counselors, Piper. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“But our evaluations were already done last week. The next one isn’t scheduled for another month.”
“It’s not an assessment. I’m running diagnostics on the system.”
“You could have asked anybody else to help you.”
“Piper—”
“Your cousin, for one.”
“She’s busy at the seed bank.”
“Okay. But why me of all people?”
Kenzo turned back to the monitor. Jeez, she’s relentless. I should have picked someone else from the pioneer batch.
It was midafternoon and a slow day for every echelon except the Vanguard, who were always running drills or sparring or learning to use an array of weapons. That was the problem with being a top Sanctuary—when everything was going smoothly, there was less to do.
Piper sighed again. “I’m not trying to be annoying, you know. I’d just hoped . . .” She trailed off.
“Hoped what?” Kenzo asked distractedly, eyes darting across the data points on the screen. Her results appeared to be about the same as they had been the first time he’d seen them, which was encouraging. No relapse. That’s good.
Piper’s tone descended to a heady register. “That this wasn’t just a work thing.”
It took all of Kenzo’s will to not freeze up. Oh, she’s definitely breaking from her programming. SONEs within the safe zone would never be so bold showing their attraction to each other.
He slowly swiveled to look at her again. She wasn’t smiling, but there was a sultry gleam in her aqua-blue eyes. “Ms. Whittaker,” he said, “as you are well aware, this is not appropriate.”
She drew back at his formality. “Right. Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
An awkward stretch of silence proceeded as he returned to the screen. He tried to keep his attention on his work, but his mind circled back to the incident like a stubborn, eager dog. At any other time he would have been ready to entertain Piper’s advances. When was the last time he got hit on? Certainly not during his stint in the Sanctuary. Or ever, really.
The last two years before his abduction had been consumed by a need for academic success and getting himself and Ren emancipated. With the stress of fleeing an abusive home, finding accommodation, and graduating high school early on a full scholarship, he’d been too preoccupied to think of anything else. When he and his cousin entered university in their home state of Oregon, much of his time had been spent trying to find a way to jumpstart his mother’s memories through the study of leading-edge neuroscience. The bullet she’d taken to her head in what the authorities had called a robbery gone wrong had done life-altering damage. She didn’t even recognize her own son when he’d visit her at the care home.
At least she was alive. Kenzo’s father hadn’t been so lucky. Finding them both on the floor as he’d stepped through the front door of their house was a memory he would never be able to forget. He still had nightmares about it.
He swept his silver hair back. “Alright, everything’s in order. Now comes the fun part.”
“Making out?” Piper quipped.
He gave her an exasperated look. She smiled back with a shrug. The girl was incorrigible, but he had to admit the thought of having some fun with her definitely had its appeal. He took a syringe from one of the drawers in the counter and filled it with colorless liquid from a vial. “Just relax. You’ll be asleep within a minute.”
She settled comfortably into the chair as he prodded around for a vein in her arm. “Hey, Kenzo?”
“Yeah?”
“Isn’t it kinda funny thinking how it’s business as usual down here, but up there, the world has basically gone dark?”
Funny wasn’t the word he’d use. He gave her a smile in response and thought about the cell phone Victor had given him, his precious lifeline, now utterly useless. Had it not been for the stroke of fortune that put a Phoenix satellite phone in the man’s hands, Kenzo might have fully lost his mind. Communication would still be difficult; he would have to sneak into the administrative building to use one of the phones. And unless they wanted to draw attention to their little ploy, Victor and whoever else could never call those lines. It had to all be on Kenzo’s terms.
“What do you miss about your old life?” Piper asked suddenly.
Kenzo was supposed to behave as a repurposed Steward, and a repurposed Steward would say they didn’t miss anything. But Piper was looking up at him, eyelids starting to flutter as the drug took effect; as he had with Arianna, he decided to give an honest answer. “A few things. Going to the movies, catching the latest editions of comic books, freewheeling around town with friends. Basically not being stuck down here with no sign of the world going by.”
“Me too,” she whispered, drowsy. “We should talk about comics sometime. There was an issue of Batgirl before her Oracle days that I really . . . that I . . . I . . .”
She slipped into unconsciousness. Kenzo watched her, profound sadness seizing him. He lightly brushed the back of his fingers against her cheek. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured. “I’ll break you out of your mind-warping.”
He returned to the monitor and rolled his head to loosen the tension gathered in his neck. He’d spent the last several nights thinking about ways to reverse Dr. Nate’s intricate work. He’d barely slept and had no idea how he was currently able to function past a minimal level. Arianna had regarded him with concern earlier in the morning and he’d offered some desultory response to her questioning, quickly slipping away before she could probe further.
The only possible answer he’d found for this conundrum was to reverse the amplitude of the NEO unit’s electromagnetic radiation while maintaining its other values. Even if that worked, it would only be the first part of the equation, the one that handled the physical component of the reprogramming.
The auditory aspect would have to come into play right after. Kenzo remembered all too well the hours upon hours of dialogue hypnosis he’d been forced to sit through in a darkened room, the honeyed voice speaking into his ears about his role as a Steward of New Earth, about the decrepit, decadent old world that needed to be cleansed, and the grand future they would build. But how was he going to reverse that? He had no idea what components constituted proper aural programming and, even if he did, he’d have to record hours of script which just wasn’t feasible.
I’ll probably have to talk them through it live, he’d concluded. Remind them about good things in their past, the people closest to them if they had any, all of it. Sprinkle in some hope for the future or something. I’ll have to look through their files to see what I can use from their prior lives.
Kenzo looked down at his clandestinely photocopied dossier. Piper Moira Whittaker, aged eighteen, from San Bernardino, California. Acquired after forcible separation from younger sister in foster care—hm, this might be something. With some reluctance, he pushed the papers aside. One step at a time. Don’t get ahead of yourself.
He minimized the assessment program on the screen and opened a different one. A bank of virtual controls sat below a chart displaying various waveforms taken from the NEO. He tapped the first one and enlarged it until it filled the top half of the wide screen.
Here we go. Time to test out my idea. He noticed the tremors in his hands and curled them into fists. If this worked, he’d have solved part of the problem. If it didn’t, he ran the risk of damaging Piper’s brain. He could turn her psychotic or vegetative or who knew what else. It was a daunting responsibility he now had, someone’s entire being as his playth
ing. He would not treat it carelessly.
Kenzo waited until his hands had steadied, then raised a finger to the screen and rotated one of the dials, carefully watching the crests and troughs of the wave switch positions. A detached part of him was suspicious about how easy this seemed.
But I guess that’s just how it is, he thought. Dr. Nate spent years figuring out the correct frequencies and whatever else was needed. He did the heavy lifting. All I’ve got to do is reverse it. In theory, anyway.
Once he was finished, he reopened the program measuring Piper’s neural activity. The NEO unit usually worked within a couple of hours. Would this require more time since he had to counter programming that was already embedded? Hopefully no one would walk in as he was experimenting.
The two-way pager attached to his belt beeped. He glanced down. It was a message from Arianna.
WHERE ARE YOU?
He typed back.
DOING SOME WORK STILL. EVERYTHING OK?
YOU ABLE TO COME TO MY OFFICE?
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he groaned. He gave a swift response:
CAN’T RIGHT NOW. MIDDLE OF SOMETHING.
For the better part of the next hour Kenzo kept his tired gaze glued to the monitor. No change. He tapped the countertop nervously, then got to his feet and began pacing, glancing over at Piper every few minutes. She seemed perfectly at peace.
His pager beeped as several more messages came in from Arianna wanting to know where he was, but he ignored them. If he needed to risk her frustration later, so be it. This was the most important thing to him. Should this work, he could eventually use it on the other SONEs and, more significantly, on Ren. She was grasped firmly within the repurposing’s safe zone but if his test proved successful, maybe he could risk tinkering with the NEO unit to break her out of it.
A quiet chime reached his ears. He rushed over to the monitor, scanning the new data points. A grin spread across his face as he pushed his hands into his hair and danced around the room, whisper-shouting in triumph. It worked! It worked!