The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  Alex shook his head.

  “Not sure I know much about the female, honestly.”

  “Then you’ve learned quite a bit since I saw you last,” Emily said. “Well done!”

  “A male fey is barely sentient. It’s a great deal like a drone, the male honeybee. Oberon existed to breed, prolifically, for one season. One season, in this case, was a period of about seven years.”

  “Breed. You mean, like how Eerie is half…?”

  “Exactly.” Marcus nodded grimly. “Oberon blended and interacted with any local population effortlessly, or so they say, and his charm and biochemical manipulations made him irresistible wherever he went…”

  “That’s really uncomfortable. When did all this stuff happen, anyway?” Alex interjected. “Like Arthur and the Roundtable and stuff, or what?”

  Emily smiled into her tea.

  “I wish that I could tell you.” Marcus wobbled on his bench, a faraway expression on his face. “Firm records were not kept, and what is preserved is suspect, because we intentionally manipulated and obscured our history, to make the necessary sacrifices more palatable. This all happened before anyone currently living can remember – and my memory goes back a great deal further than it should, incidentally. My teacher – the founder of the Academy, as you may know him – claimed to have witnessed much of this personally, but then again, he was a notorious liar. Make of it what you will.”

  “This isn’t doing much for my credulity,” Alex remarked. “So you know.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Emily said, putting a hand over his, “but hear Mark out, okay?”

  Alex relaxed and nodded.

  “They couldn’t catch Oberon, until he had…expended himself, several years later. Most his encounters had no lasting effects…”

  “Babies!” Emily stage-whispered. “Changelings.”

  “…but a handful resulted in pregnancy.” Marcus coughed. “Three pregnancies were viable. All the infants were taken from their mothers at young age, for study.”

  “These are our predecessors?” Alex looked disgusted. “They sound like nice guys.”

  “Not in the least! They studied the infants and discovered that they were members of a distinct species, or at least a hybrid. They called them Changelings, for the Celtic legend of fairies stealing human babies, and replacing them with their own. All the infants were female, and their nursemaids reported them to be developmentally stunted and physically abnormal. Despite attempts at education, none learned to speak or walk. At some point, blood was extracted, and differences from the human baseline were noted. This is merely hopeful conjecture, but it is assumed that a live sample of human blood was mixed with similarly viable Fey blood…”

  “They were drinking blood,” Emily said. “Baby fairy blood!”

  “They probably weren’t drinking the stuff,” Marcus countered wearily. “Whatever the process, shortly thereafter, they took to transfusing the blood from the Changelings into themselves…”

  “What?”

  “Horrible, right?” Emily patted Alex’s hand. “They were beasts.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. The transfusion changed them, gave them abilities.”

  “Protocols?”

  “Not exactly. The ancestor thereof, perhaps.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Alex said. “I think I already know this story. I know that the nanites from the Source Well are mechanical imitations of whatever Eerie has in her blood.”

  “That’s not exactly wrong, but also not quite right.” Marcus spoke cautiously, but his eyes were lively. “It is hard to know another’s truth, however much you might care for them. I think, with experience, you will find this to be true of all your lovers…”

  “Hey!” Emily blushed. “What does that mean?”

  “No criticism intended. You are an exemplar of hidden depths, Miss Muir.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” Emily observed. “I’m going to take it as one, regardless.”

  “A good policy.” Marcus smiled at Emily, with seemingly genuine affection. “To continue my thought, Alex, you must not underestimate the complexity of biological organisms. The technology to replicate anything on a molecular level did not exist until quite recently, and even with that, an attempt to reproduce the miracles that proliferate in a Changeling’s cells would likely be futile. Our tools are crude indeed, even the most refined, when compared to those of the Maker.”

  “Is this gonna be religious?” Alex eyed both suspiciously. “If you are about to start talking about God, then I’m leaving.”

  “No religion, I promise!” Marcus laughed. “Let me be plain, and dispel any such consideration. A machine such as the one described to you – a self-replicating, Ether-powered nanite – is an impossibility. The wildest hypothetical designs fall far short of the reality inside of us, even for the engineers at the Far Shores, or the artificers here in the Outer Dark.”

  Alex was afraid to guess again.

  “If no one could build nanites, then what are they?”

  “I understand your confusion. The nanites are inorganic and highly organized, and mechanical in form and appearance. The nanites are not machines despite that. They are biological organisms, extracted from Changeling cells, sheltered by an inorganic shell that they extrude upon removal from their Fey host. The nanites are microscopic parasites afflicting every cell within the body of a Changeling. Implanted within humans, they are true revenants – they enter a state of suspended animation akin to death upon extraction from a Changeling, and then revitalize when implanted within a new host. They are not evolved to be compatible with human physiology and genetics, which accounts for the high fatality rate and overall uncertainty of the process of Activation, but the results are still remarkable.”

  “I…yeah. Don’t really get it.”

  “They drained the blood from like six generations of your girlfriend’s ancestors, extracted what they wanted, and then stuck the results in an underground reservoir for safe keeping, and called it the Source Well.” Emily smiled sadly. “Then they injected all of us with that unsanitary stuff, mostly just to see what would happen. It’s all just a big dumb gross experiment. Sorry!”

  ***

  “You look nervous.”

  “I am nervous.”

  “Why? What’s eating you?”

  “Dunno. The whole thing, I guess. That place. What I don’t remember.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “You’re an empath. Figure it out for yourself.”

  Whether she did or not, Rebecca seemed to lose interest, sinking down to her neck in the lavender-scented water, breathing in steam and sighing deeply. Alice finished showering, rung out her hair quickly, and then lowered herself into the other side of the tub, her grimace at the heat of the water transforming slowly into a smile. Alice leaned against the porcelain wall of the tub, letting her hair spill out over the redwood flooring.

  Rebecca must have been monitoring her, because she did not say another word until Alice was lulled into a state of relaxation.

  “Do you wanna check it out?”

  Alice glanced at Rebecca and nodded.

  The Director closed her eyes, and Alice did the same. Rebecca facilitated an uplink to the Etheric Network for Alice, who had no natural telepathic affinity. That only hurt a little. Alice felt an obscured sort of gratitude toward Yadiel, who was probably enjoying the psychic third degree at the hands and minds of the Audits Department’s auxiliary telepaths at this very moment.

  There was a brief pause before the memory replayed, installed for the benefit of the user. Alice thought of it like the warning siren on a submarine, going off right before the dive. Time enough, in abstract sense, to hold her breath.

  They watched a brief synopsis of the recovery process.

  The man was nearly a corpse when Yadiel began his work. He certainly was dead by the time the extraction was completed. Yadiel proved himself smart and capable in his efficient recovery of badly decayed me
mories. He proved himself even smarter by leaving the data completely untouched. He simply relayed the recovered information to the Etheric Network, and then quickly set about the preparations for the required psychic self-surgery.

  Yadiel drank a glass of water, and then wrote himself a short note.

  Instructions, Alice realized, with the benefit of psychic hindsight, to himself. For after, when he wouldn’t remember.

  Alice took a personal interest in watching the telepath deliberately excise a portion of his own memory. Despite the obvious discomfort and the sweat dripping from his wide brow, Yadiel made quick work of the process, preserving the memory of the procedure, and then uploading that to the Etheric Network as an attachment to a file that he no longer remembered creating.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Alice said, the hot bath slowly coaxing the tension from her sore lower back. “Where did you find that kid?”

  “He was a candidate for Audits four years ago, when you bounced him,” Rebecca said, with a smirk. “Not so much a kid, either – Yadiel’s twenty-six. He’s been working for us over at Admin since, and now you can’t have him.”

  Alice sighed and laid out more fully in the water.

  “I think I might’ve made a mistake there. Yadiel seems like he has potential.”

  “He’s not a combat telepath,” Rebecca protested. “Yadiel’s high functioning, I’ll give you that, but he’s still autistic. If he can’t hold a conversation when it’s too noisy, how’s he gonna work out in the field? Anyway, Yadiel is the only one who knows how to find anything on the Network, since Adel at Processing reorganized the server. You can’t have him.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “Don’t be a bitch, or I’ll make you forget about the bathhouse.”

  “That’s messed up! We’re friends, Becca! You’d do that to me?”

  “Would and have,” Rebecca said. “A couple times.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “That’s life, dear. I love you to pieces, but this place is special. So…you ready to see what John Parson thinks merits a diary entry, or what?”

  ***

  “I thought you said they only had, like, three Changelings?”

  “In the first generation. Shortly after the death of the last of the first three Changelings that were discovered, Oberon reappeared in the wild, and resumed…”

  “Fucking?”

  “Yes,” Marcus said, grinning at Emily’s eye roll. “He did a great deal of that! The second generation of Fey was larger than the first, and the next period of dormancy was shorter. As the stock of Changelings to experiment with increased, so did success at combating the Witches, who in turn were becoming an increasing menace. The first steps toward Activation – a physiological and psychological tuning, if you will – were taken, and the first protocols named and operated. The Ether was discovered and tentatively explored, and the Outer Dark carefully probed. You could, perhaps, begin to call them Operators. The agreement was signed…”

  “That’s it!” Alex slapped his palms down on the table. “Now I remember. In class, there was something about a deal, with the Fey, about dealing with students like Eerie…”

  “Oh, yes. That.” Marcus snorted contemptuously. “There was indeed an understanding, regarding Changelings, but it is better thought of as a concession to a monstrous reality. Changelings return to the Outer Dark, and the Church of Sleep, upon maturity. They could be sheltered and studied at the Academy until they neared maturity, but then they inevitably migrate to the Outer Dark, and Central did not tolerate or risk interference with that process.”

  “I don’t…”

  “They knew enough of the Church of Sleep to be afraid of upsetting it, or its claim on the mature Changelings. That was fine as far as the early Operators were concerned, however, absorbed as they were with the challenges of surviving the colonization of Central. At the time, they believed that the Outer Dark was a sort of monolithic entity. They knew that Witches, Weir, and Fey all drew common origin within the Outer Dark, but they were certain of little else. They hoped, by appeasing the Church of Sleep, that the remainder of the Outer Dark might be dissuading from preying upon them.”

  Alex’s eyes widened.

  “Wait. You said something about the Outer Dark and Witches and…the Fey? Does that mean that Eerie…?”

  “Oh, yes!” Marcus chuckled. “Where did you think Changelings came from? Fairyland?”

  ***

  If Yadiel’s appended memory was neat and congruent, then the memories he had recovered were crude and difficult to understand. To Rebecca’s trained eye, it was obviously a series of memories from different subjects, stitched together to form a crude narrative. The point of view shifted mercilessly and the perspective was always unfamiliar. Assuming their bodies had been involved in the process, it would have been unbearably nauseating.

  As it was, Rebecca kept such a tight grip on Alice’s emotional state, she felt like she was holding her hand.

  A room full of naked people huddled on an equally naked metal floor. The prisoner’s skin was periodically obscured by heavy purple bruising, and his fingernails were missing, raw pink, leaving bloody streaks on the floor as he crawled about, disoriented.

  Rebecca went to buttress Alice’s mental state, only to discover that she was, for all intents and purposes, fine. The memories of her own captivity by the Anathema were comfortably lost to her, the fangs of the trauma pulled by progressive amnesia. Rebecca felt a little guilty at her own relief.

  Not that it changed a thing. Rebecca still meant to have Alistair Pell brought to account for all his sins, including those committed against her friend.

  As the naked prisoners shuffled about, or screamed, or withdrew to cower in corners, the overhead speaker crackled to life.

  ***

  “Eerie is from the Outer Dark?”

  “Technically, I believe she was conceived somewhere in rural California, but yes, I suppose you could say she is original from the Outer Dark, in an indirect sense. At the very least, she will return there, like a salmon running upstream. Perhaps it says something about your dating habits, young man, that all your girlfriends end up here?”

  Alex stared. Emily clicked her fingernails on the tabletop.

  “Be careful, old man,” she warned. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “It’s nothing so terrible,” Marcus said hurriedly, looking abashed. “I simply meant that aside from the Changeling, Miss Muir also found herself in the Outer Dark…”

  “We both understood you,” Emily said. “It just wasn’t funny.”

  “I’m not sure about all this,” Alex said, with a sour look on his face. “Eerie is nothing like those other monsters!”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Marcus countered gently. “Witches and Fey are very similar genetically.”

  “Mark, stop…”

  “Lab results suggest that the major differences come down to the inclusion of human DNA in Changelings. A pure Fey might very well be genetically indistinguishable from a Witch.”

  “Mark, please shut up,” Emily said, patting Alex on the back. “I think Alex has reached his limit for unfortunate information today…”

  “No!” Alex brushed Emily’s hand aside. “I need one more piece of bad news. What do you guys want from me?”

  “Alex, come on.” Emily sounded hurt. “Do you really think…?”

  “I appreciate the rescue,” Alex said, not very convincingly. “I can’t imagine that either of you would do anything without a reason, though. There has to be something in it for you.”

  Emily’s smile flickered, and then went out. She rose quickly, opened her mouth as if she planned on speaking, and then hurriedly left without saying a word.

  Alex stared, dumbfounded, at the spot beside him on the bench where Emily had just been. Marcus chuckled.

  “You judged me accurately, boy,” Marcus said. “Miss Muir persuaded me to intervene on your behalf, by taking on some important – and risky – en
deavors from which I stood to gain. As for Miss Muir and her intentions, however, perhaps you were wrong? Or, at least, rude?”

  Alex crossed his arms and did his best to renew his skeptical expression.

  “Is that so?”

  “I would assign no particular importance or usefulness to you, Alex, if Miss Muir had not persuaded me otherwise.” The old man smiled a thin and somewhat cruel smile. “If you don’t mind me saying, I can’t imagine anyone else who might be so concerned. Emily told me your story, and I suppose an arrival at Central like that, with all the attention involved, could have given you an inflated sense of self-importance, but don’t fool yourself. My designs don’t depend upon the appearance of a flighty teenager with abilities he cannot control, and I would question any strategist whose plans did. While we may have given you reason to think poorly of our little societies, Alex, we are not dogs to scrabble over your services.”

  Alex remembered to close his mouth, eventually.

  “Oh.”

  “Since we are being direct, allow me to share one further piece of information with you. There is a hierarchy among protocol users – well, honestly, there are many, but only one pertains to our current discussion – based on the inherent usefulness of that protocol. Your catalyst ability exempted, the Absolute Protocol is a form of energy manipulation. Energy manipulators are at the very bottom of that hierarchy, I’m afraid. Flashy protocols, certainly, but in terms of function and utility, quite limited. It makes sense if you think about it. What would you think more useful – a man who can predict probable futures, or a boy who can freeze things?”

  “When you put it like that…”

  “I’m not finished! Even as an energy manipulator, you rank low, I’m afraid. The consequence of using your ability is all out of proportion to its effectiveness. You have no control, and you need time and concentration to operate…”

  Alex reached across the table and passed his hand over Marcus’s glass.