The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  There was a sound like ripe fruit hitting concrete, and then wetness on his hands, seeping into the sleeves of his jacket and leaving an oily residue on his fingers. Vivik tore at the suddenly limp tentacle around his neck, gasping for air through his bruised throat. Katya arrived a moment later, still wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a backwards t-shirt, and helped to free him.

  “Fucking hell!” Katya put a hand on Vivik’s shoulder to keep him from standing. “Stay down, already.”

  “Sorry,” Vivik said, his voice hoarse and hardly audible. “I was…”

  “I saw. Horrors. What the fuck?”

  “I don’t know! I just woke up, and…”

  One of the Horrors emitted a horrible shriek, shuffling between ear-splitting shrill tones and infrasound, tonal fluctuations synchronized with the disquieting biological pulses that regularly deformed the Horror. Serpentine arms the pinkish color of internal organs burst wetly from abdominal recesses, each crowned with a single cruel point of bone the width of Vivik’s index finger. The Horrors writhed and cried out, pummeling his eardrums and tainting the sky.

  The air shimmered and danced at the edge of Eerie’s outstretched fingers. The Changeling’s face was red and beaded with sweat. Vivik watched her mouth move, the sound lost to the wail of the Horrors.

  The Horror’s scream was abrasive, the sound ringing in Vivik’s ears and exciting the nerves at the roots of his teeth, recalling the sensation of chewing on a piece of aluminum foil. Each of the clawed arms tore itself free of the Horror’s belly with an individual struggle, mutilating the leathery underside of the creature and unleashing a downpour of blackened pus that smelled of molding hops and burned Vivik’s skin on contact.

  Dimly, Vivik realized that Eerie was singing.

  The combined sound was enormous, even with hands clamped over his ears. As the air steamed and smoldered, bearing the burden of the shrieking horrors, toothed limbs multiplying from distended bellies, shrinking like punctured bladders as substance drained from them. Eerie dug in her heels, squinted, and raised her hands until it appeared she was holding the Horrors aloft, mouthing words that Vivik could not hear, but almost understood.

  Vivik thought he could make out a faintly glowing framework about the Changeling when he strained his eyes, oriented toward the far horizon like an illuminated compass. The Horrors went silent, and the only sound was that of Eerie’s song. Vivik knew, instantly and with conviction, that he would spend the rest of his life trying to recall those few seconds of melody, the words in a foreign language that was as familiar as his mother’s curry. Even as he listened, the tune drifted away from him, leaving behind a premature ache in his chest, and a painful sense of unspecific nostalgia.

  Around Eerie, the faint golden lattice meshed together like clockwork.

  “What the hell is happening here?”

  Vivik turned his attention shortly from his panicked attempts to wipe the noxious fluid from his skin to glance at Katya, who watched the scene with a puzzling thoughtfulness. There was no trace of fear or caution in her posture or stance, no visible reaction to the ear-piercing wails of the thwarted Horrors. As far as he could tell, her question was rhetorical; it wasn’t in Vivik’s nature, however, to allow a question to go unanswered.

  “I don’t know…but I don’t think anyone knows very much about Eerie at all.”

  Katya spared him an amused glance before she returned to her contemplation of the Horrors circling overhead like impatient vultures. The furthest extension of the ghostly golden structure now scraped their distended bellies.

  “What makes you think that?”

  Vivik was about to say something about the Changeling’s physiology, and the classified work that the Academy’s Biology program had done with a sample of her blood, which indicated the presence of an organism whose properties closely mimicked those of inert nanites. That was all swept away before he could verbalize it; as Eerie’s song swelled into a crescendo. There was a great sound, like the sky had been struck a resounding blow, followed by a deafening rush of wind as the atmosphere rushed to fill a void. A metallic radiance that temporarily dazzled Vivik was followed by a sensation of radiant heat that left his skin aching with an instant sunburn. He did not realize that he had closed his eyes until after he had opened them again.

  The song ended in a drawn-out harmony, that drew the scream of the Horrors and Eerie’s melody into a graceful concordance. The golden matrix moved about the Changeling like a vast clockwork engine. Then, as sudden as they arrived, the Horrors were gone, seeming to deflate and flatten, moving along an invisible plain as they receded into the Ether.

  Eerie dropped to her knees with a small noise, and then toppled over and lay motionless. Katya and Vivik exchanged a look, and then hurried forward to her aid.

  “The Horrors!” Vivik shouted, earning a glare from Katya. “Sorry. They’re gone!”

  Katya shook her head, fighting a smile that made it through anyway.

  “Christ, Vivik!” Katya slid down the dusty slope to where Eerie had collapsed. “With you here to point out the obvious, maybe we don’t need to rescue Alex at all.”

  “How did she do that?” Vivik scrambled to keep up with Katya. “Was that a protocol?”

  “I’m not sure,” Katya said, skirting a thorn bush. “Hopefully Eerie is still alive, so we can ask her.”

  Vivik tried to evade the thorn bush and failed spectacularly, gravel rolling beneath the soles of his hiking boots and sliding him into the barbed branches. He extracted himself carefully, grimacing as he tore his skin free of the thorns.

  Eerie lay on a small island of scorched grass in the center of the clearing, the remainder coated with ash and reduced to bare land. Katya hurried to Eerie to check on her with Vivik limping after her, pulling thorns from his hands and feeling sorry for himself.

  “Eerie? You okay?” Katya sat down beside Eerie, sliding an arm beneath the Changeling’s neck and helping her into a sitting position. “Not to be ungrateful, ‘cause I’m glad they’re gone, but what the fuck did you do to those Horrors?”

  The uncanny illumination was gone. Eerie appeared drained and even paler than normal beneath an even dusting of black ash. Her arms hung limply, but Vivik could clearly see a reddening burn on the palm of her hand, already sprouting a corona of tiny white blisters. Eerie needed Katya’s support just to keep her head from lolling back, and her eyes were dull and flat with pain.

  “Oh. Uh. Oops,” Eerie hummed quietly. “Did you guys see that?”

  Vivik was initially relieved to hear Eerie’s odd, melodic voice. Then he wondered what he had expected instead.

  “Uh, yeah,” Katya said, brushing Eerie’s hair from her steadily leaking eyes. “Hard not to see it.”

  “That’s too bad,” Eerie said, with a weary bob of her head. “Let’s never talk about it again, okay?”

  Then she tumbled out of Katya’s arms and into the dust.

  Six.

  “Maybe this is something we can work out?” Alex was surprised by the optimism in his tone, likely emotional residue of his time in the simulation. “You haven’t even told me what you want to know.”

  Samnang made no response, her eyes gleaming like gelled spotlights.

  “Look, you can’t make me say anything,” Alex continued, with considerably less self-assurance. “I didn’t say shit when the Weir captured me. You know that, right? Not a word.”

  It was technically true, even if that was mostly because he had not known the answer to the only question they asked him, and had spent most the experience with his head held underwater. In his opinion, all that mattered was he had kept his mouth shut.

  “I didn’t know that,” Samnang said dully. “I am not of the Anathema. The activities of the Weir and their ilk are none of my concern.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well…”

  “There is nothing you know that I wish to know as well,” Samnang said, never blinking. “You do not consciously hold the memory that I seek, and it seems unne
cessarily complicated to inquire with you directly. Even if I were to make you talk, how could I believe anything you said?”

  “That’s, ah, a fair question, actually.”

  “Interrogation of the sort to which you are accustomed is inefficient and barbaric theater.” Samnang sniffed. “You have nothing to fear along those lines.”

  “That’s good. Right?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Samnang said, her body language disconcertingly still. She lacked even the most basic of mannerisms. “I have no intentions of doing you any kindnesses, Alexander.”

  “Alex.”

  “You are dating my little sister, are you not?”

  “I thought you said you weren’t asking me questions?”

  “Fair enough.” Samnang’s face was nearly inanimate; Alex found himself hunting for signs of respiration. “I will satisfy my own curiosity.”

  He lacked the vocabulary to describe the transformation. The trappings of the simulation, the rooms and the bodies, disappeared without any lingering sense of presence. There was a befuddling shuffle of sensory data, a kaleidoscope of sights and sensation, blurring with a mutability that seemed unremarkably natural. There was a sense of rapport as he became aware of how intimately their minds were intermingled. Alex tried to recoil, to flinch reflexively from the exposure, but found himself helpless.

  Samnang riffled through his memory like an overeager collector at a record sale, not worrying about leaving the stock in disarray. Alex experienced the oddity of involuntary memory recall.

  Entangled on the couch in her room, strands of her dyed hair in his face, the weight of her thigh thrown over his leg. He breathed in the smell of sandalwood and the spray of the ocean, felt her cool fingertips on the nape of his neck. Beneath her shirt, he tentatively ran his hand across the arc of her lower ribcage, gradually creeping upward when she didn’t object…

  “Stop it!” Alex demanded. “This is private.”

  “Eerie is my sister,” Samnang reminded him. “I don’t recall you asking the family for permission.”

  “What family? She never even mentioned you!”

  “Well, we’ve only really met the once,” Samnang admitted. “She is very young, and I have been dreaming. Propriety is less flexible than you believe, however, circumstances aside.”

  “What?”

  His awareness was muddled, his mind and senses in conflict as to his status and position. A darkness that was not the night, a cold that did not chill him, the gleam of his interrogator’s eyes – there was little else, even of that which he called himself, save only the memories, like slides placed before an invisible projector.

  “Do you love her?”

  Alex remembered his conversation with Therese, on the balcony at the Muir residence in Central, and felt a dizzying rush of déjà vu. Then he remembered the bitter ending of that story, and felt sick with guilt.

  “I see that I am not the first elder sister to become involved in your romantic life,” Samnang observed, without a hint of warmth. “My concern is not with Ériu’s well-being, however, or whatever tenuous virtue she might still possess. I am simply concerned with something she has hidden, and her relative value to you.”

  “What do you…?”

  “I have come to retrieve Ériu’s consciousness for the Outer Dark,” Samnang said. “She has hidden it, to delay her return.”

  “Huh?”

  “The core of her. My sisters and I are not at all like you barely-evolved apes,” the Yaojing explained, her voice flat to the point of preternatural boredom. “We can choose to store our important bits elsewhere, for convenience or security. You might consider what I’m looking for to be Ériu’s soul, if you are religiously inclined…”

  “I’m not,” Alex said, shaking his head. “This all sounds like a bunch of crap to me.”

  “Your opinion on the matter is not my concern,” Samnang said. “I knew from the moment that I saw my sister that she had hidden it somewhere. Could you not see the hollow in her head?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “It is so large that I would expect the light to shine through,” Samnang said. “As I said, I knew she had hidden it from the first. I have begun by looking in the most obvious place.”

  Alex glanced around him, like he expected to find it sitting beside his feet.

  “Okay…and?”

  “You are the obvious place.”

  “You know what, Samnang? You’re fucking crazy, and I have no clue what you are going on about.”

  “Eerie destroyed your original memories, and then manufactured a new identity for you, whether you realize it or not.” Samnang’s glowing eyes were so close to his face that they were like two great planets illuminating the night sky. “It would have been a small thing indeed to hide a single piece of herself in the process. Tell me truthfully, Alex – do you have any memories that are not your own?”

  Alex laughed ruefully.

  “You’re kidding, right? I barely remember anything, and what I do is all…”

  “There is something you remember,” Samnang insisted. “Something you know does not belong to you. A memory of someone you do not know, perhaps? Or, perhaps a place you have never been…”

  He was about to answer contemptuously, to snarl, to remind her that this was all nonsense…and a passing thought drifted through his head. A great orange butterfly, buffeted by coastal winds, against a backdrop of cerulean sea, crowned with rolling white breakers.

  Trying not to panic, Alex employed the self-defense routines that simulation-Rebecca had implanted, filling his head with competing nursery rhymes and commercial jingles, meaningless psychic noise.

  “You thought of something,” Samnang stated, studying him closely. “What is it?”

  “You’re wrong,” Alex said, scrambling. “I was just thinking that you were talking a bunch of bullshit, honestly.”

  “You are a terrible liar,” Samnang said evenly. “Have you ever recalled anything in a dream, Alex? Memories lost to you in every other way can reemerge there, you know, from the depths of a sleeping mind. Give proper direction, who knows what you might remember in sleep? Let us began, then. Perhaps with the first time you met my sister?”

  Alex was braced for pain, but none came. He did his best to seize what felt like an opening.

  “Ah, okay. I can do that. Let me see…oh yeah! We were in the dining hall, and Steve…”

  “Not that rather crass reintroduction Ériu stage-managed,” Samnang said contemptuously. “The first time you met.”

  “I don’t understand. That was the first…”

  “You do understand. You don’t remember, but that isn’t much of an obstacle.” Samnang brushed her fingers lightly across his eyelids, which obediently closed. “Sleep, Alex. Let us explore the matter in a dream. Or, perhaps a nightmare?”

  ***

  The girl settled on the bed beside him. He stared in disbelief as she took his hand between her own, warm and small. She is deeply familiar; Alex knows that she has been here before. He also knows that he forgets, every time, right after she leaves. Her eyes peaked through the strands of her straw-colored hair, and Alex fancied that he could see golden lights dancing in the engorged black of her pupils.

  “Have you missed me? Have you counted the days?”

  “I…I think I forgot your name. Do I always forget your name?”

  “My name is Ériu, but you have trouble with that, and this isn’t really about me. Not yet, anyway. Call me Eerie, please.”

  She gave him a sly look.

  “You always do.”

  He smiled hesitantly.

  “Eerie, then. Who are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, but it is far too soon for that sort of talk. This is both a favor and a selfish act, for the sake of a child and her whims. I apologize; then again, I believe you will find the experience satisfactory.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I am sorry, Alex,” she said, r
uffling his hair. “This is very difficult for me, being here, right now. We are still very far apart, and it is hard for me to reach across such a distance. I’m afraid we’ll have to make do until things are properly different.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you here to question me about the fire? I can’t tell you anything, because I don’t remember.” He pulled his hand away, and felt instant regret. “I don’t care what you do to me.”

  “You don’t?” She blinked in surprise. “Oh, good! Then that will make this so much easier.”

  ***

  “You know that’s just an expression, right?”

  “I know that now.”

  “That’s a very convenient misunderstanding. One of many.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your deficiencies. The language issues, the confusion, your cute little speech impediment – it all seems to work out in your favor, doesn’t it?”

  Eerie shrugged.

  “It isn’t easy, walking forward while looking backward. I’ve messed up plenty of times.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Katya smiled to herself. “Always at somebody else’s expense, though.”

  Eerie was quiet for a while, watching the water the way an infant watches television. They had taken refuge from the brutal midday sun beneath something that looked quite a bit like a willow tree, deep red leaves aside, adjacent to a burbling creek that Eerie proclaimed safe – based, as far as Vivik could tell, on nothing at all. Only Derrida trusted her enough to drink, wading in until his blue-toned nose was just above the level of the water.

  “You don’t know what this has cost me,” Eerie hummed quietly, eyes on the creek. “You can’t.”