“What part of the . . . the fossil are we in now?” Rosie asked.
“I estimate that we are approaching the brain.”
“Is that the direction we ought to be going?”
Canary looked thoughtfully at the floor. “It is most likely the proper way to go. There is very little to be accomplished elsewhere. However . . .”
“I don’t like that however,” Trall muttered.
“It will be difficult. The brain is the part of him that is still the most active. You will likely find you will want to turn back more and more the farther we progress.”
“How do you know so much about this?” Trall asked, folding cir arms.
Canary shook her head. “I am simply picking up cues from my environment. As I was designed to do.”
“Mmm.” Rosie rubbed her bare arms, looking around the room. It was empty, but the ossified walls seemed more of a warm pink than the cold bony color of before. “Mind you, it’s kind of nice here. I wouldn’t mind just hanging out here for a while.”
“Same.” Trall inhaled deeply. “This is the calmest I’ve felt since I saw this thing.”
“I would advise that we continue to move,” Canary said, her voice taking on only the slightest of edges. “This room may be as comfortable as it is on purpose . . . if you take my meaning.”
Rosie blinked. “Oh.”
“Uh.” Trall winced. “Yeah. No. Point taken. Lead on.”
Canary led the way down another hall. They walked in silence, save for the crunching of sand and rock beneath their feet, for perhaps twenty minutes or so. Neither Trall nor Rosie felt particularly threatened anymore, and Rosie found herself wondering if they had been worked up for nothing. Perhaps, this would turn out to be a fine final exam.
“I recommend that you do not look down,” Canary said matter-of-factly.
So Trall looked down.
“Aigh!!!!”
“What?” Rosie stopped.
“Th-th-those . . .” Ce pointed a shaking finger at the floor. It hadn’t been sand or rock under their shoes. It had been . . . people.
Shards of what seemed to be people—either petrified or frozen and shattered into pieces—paved the way ahead of them. Here and there a piece of an agonized face would cry out silently underfoot. Trall pressed cirself against a wall, shuddering.
“I did recommend not looking down,” Canary said.
“I-is that . . . are those real?”
Canary reached down and, much to the disgust of the other two, picked up a lone finger and sniffed it. “The remains do appear to be genuine. However, they also appear to have been petrified in some way, much as he has.”
“H-how new are they?” stammered Rosie.
“I am afraid it is impossible to tell. They could be five minutes old or five thousand years old.”
Rosie squinted. “Come on. Let’s just suck it up and move. It’s not like we can hurt them anymore.”
But as she said it, she heard a wail underfoot.
“Canary! They’re crying!”
Canary looked down dispassionately. “I was mistaken,” she said quietly.
“I’ll say!”
“These . . . are not genuine remains.”
“How do you know?”
Canary looked at Trall. “Did you hear a cry?”
“N-no.”
“Nor did I. It affected only the one of us concerned about causing them pain. I believe it has begun.”
“What has begun?” Trall asked.
Canary looked over her shoulder, “The closer we get to his brain, the more disturbing things we will see.” She looked at the finger she still held in one hand; it crumbled away into dust. “What is distressing is that I am as susceptible to the tactics as you are. This should not be.” She seemed to ponder this silently for a moment, shrugged, and continued.
* * *
“We’re close.”
Rosie held her arms tight against her chest. “I hope so. I can’t take much more of this.”
Trall kept cir eyes forward, staring at the top of Canary’s head. Ce didn’t glance at the walls . . . slowly fading from stone into purple, pulsing veins. “What in the hells . . .”
“There is an artifact ahead,” Canary said calmly. “It is half-sunk into the center of his mind. It seems someone before us was in much the same predicament. Finish the job, and we are free. Let nothing stop you—no words, no thoughts. Do what you must, cleanly. The mind’s contents will spill into the next readily available vessel.”
“I . . . don’t understand.” Rosie took a deep breath. And another. The voices coming to her during the walk had been unpleasant—a long string of them—her father’s, her mother’s, a cabbie she’d met once who’d terrified her, a priest, a politician . . . all a jumble, all saying all the words she thought she’d buried.
“Trall?” Rosie asked quietly.
Ce shook cir head. “I’m fine. I promise.”
“Who are you hearing?”
“No one, okay? No one.”
“Trall—”
“No. One.” Ce looked away.
Rosie tried to shut her ears against her own voices. “I’m just trying to see if you’re okay.”
“You’ve seen. I’m okay. Now please. Let’s finish this and go home.”
“We’re here.” Canary clasped her hands together and stepped to the side.
It didn’t look like the inside of a skull or the housing of a brain. It looked like a dimly lit room, a large mahogany table in the center carved with schoolchild graffiti. From the walls hung various grotesqueries: mannequins, torn clothes, bloodied book pages, red-stained metal hooks that may have once held something. And in the center of the table itself was a book, a great curved knife plunged into it.
“Is . . . is what we’re all seeing real?” Rosie asked.
“I’m afraid I do not know,” Canary said quietly. “In a normal exercise, if there were mental tricks at play, I would see through them. But everything you have seen, I have seen. I . . . do not understand.”
Trall felt cir stomach lurch at this admission. The idea of this strange little girl admitting confusion was more terrifying than anything else they’d encountered.
“But we . . . we use the knife, and we’re done, right?” Rosie stepped toward it. “We, what, cut the book in half? Is that it? I can do that. And then we get out, and hells, maybe we can take the knife home for our final. How would that be?”
She gripped the knife handle, pulling the weapon from its resting place in the table.
“No!!!”
Rosie and Trall whipped around. Canary was reaching a hand out, screaming, eyes wide with . . . terror. Actual terror.
“Canary . . . you said I had to—”
“Don’t do it! Please, no, don’t!” Canary scrambled forward, tears spilling from her eyes, and she wrapped her arms around Rosie’s legs like a terrified child. “Please, no, don’t do it. Do you know what will happen if you do?”
“Canary . . .”
“It’s another of those mind tricks,” Trall said breathlessly. “Ignore her. It’s this thing messing with us. She said it can affect her, too. Maybe it’s just—”
“Trall . . .” Canary raised her huge eyes, brimming with tears. “Trall, why would you let this happen to me?”
Trall shook cir head. “I . . . I don’t understand . . .” Ce gritted cir teeth, raising cir head. “Hey, no. Look, whatever you are, she’s our canary, and we don’t appreciate you messing with her like this.”
“No,” Canary whispered tearfully. “No, it’s not . . . it’s not him. It’s me. It’s really me, the real me. I-if you do this . . . if you do this . . . I’ll be gone.”
“What do you mean?” Rosie still held the knife ready.
“I-I made my plan. I made a really, really good plan for you. You’ll get home, and you’ll be safe and happy and . . . and I’m scared of my plan. I don’t want to have made it. I want to change my mind. Please. Please, let me change my mind.” Her e
yes lit up, and for a moment, she looked like any other normal little girl. “Now that I know, now that I can . . .”
“Rosie,” Trall snapped, cir voice strained, “Canary said do what you have to, no matter what. Remember?”
“I-I remember.”
“No!” Canary cried out. “I was stupid back there. I didn’t understand what . . . I didn’t . . . I can’t explain.” She shook her hair, her curls whipping across her tearstained face. “Please, Rosie. I’ve helped you so much. Can’t you do this for me?”
Rosie took a shuddering breath . . .
And plunged the knife with all her might.
The book—and the table—split apart.
“No . . .” Canary’s voice was weak. “No, no . . . why . . .”
A deep, swirling, red and black mist emerged from the two halves of the book, plunging into Canary. She fell back against the wall and righted herself, her huge eyes glowing a deep red.
“What the . . .” Trall winced away.
“I . . . I can’t.” Rosie lowered the knife, staring at Canary—or whatever was now within her. “I don’t care who you are. I can’t do it. I just can’t.”
The creature simply stared through Canary’s wide eyes.
“Trall . . . what do we do?”
“He wants to rest,” Trall whispered.
“Huh?”
Trall grabbed the knife from Rosie and handed it to Canary. “Here. You . . . you do what you want. You’re free to do that now. All right? Just . . . be quick about it. Our little canary’s been good to us.” Ce glanced at Rosie and then at the door. “Come on.”
“But . . .” Before Rosie could protest, Trall grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her out.
“Canary knew,” Trall muttered, pulling cir spacesuit on. “There was no way she didn’t. She had a link. And she knew how to fix this. She decided.”
“But her face just now . . .”
Trall smiled helplessly as ce clicked cir helmet into place. “We all have our moments of clarity before we do something stupidly heroic, right? Now, come on. Let’s get dressed.”
And just as Trall finished stuffing Rosie into her suit and fastening the helmet, the walls around them began to crack as though put under an intense strain. There was a creaking, a groaning . . . and the walls exploded.
Rosie and Trall felt themselves flung up and out . . . and not far, shockingly not far, was their spaceship. Trall grabbed Rosie by the arm and kicked cir emergency boosters into gear, propelling them toward the ship.
“Hey . . . Trall.”
“Mm?”
“We don’t have anything for the final, do we?”
Trall laughed. “If Professor Fernandez sees all the shards of weird giant space monster bone in our suits and really wants to fail us after this, let him.”
Rosie managed a weak laugh in return as they grabbed the outer bars of the spaceship and pulled themselves inside.
Kara Dennison is a writer, editor, illustrator, and presenter from Newport News, Virginia. She works as a blogger and interviewer for Onezumi Events and as a news writer for Crunchyroll, Viewster, and We Are Cult. Her work can be seen in Associates of Sherlock Holmes from Titan Books, various Doctor Who spinoffs from Obverse Books, and the light novel series Owl’s Flower, which she co-created with illustrator Ginger Hoesly. She works from a converted NASA lab, which she shares with four guinea pigs and a bass guitar.
Song of the Seirēnes
Brandon O’Brien
Illustrated by Yves Tourigny
Confederation of Allied Planetary Territories
Exoplanetary Expansion Committee—Carmel
Documentation on the Rescue Process of the SRN227 Envoy
09/13/3212
Transmission Recordings: Dr. Persephone Khan
Orange,1 10300 Launch Minutes (LM):
We have finally arrived at the edge of the Seirēnes system. Update on travel: the binary wormhole relay at coordinates [redacted] at the outer edge of the Troia system did indeed place us within continued travel range of the system, and arrival was safe if a bit off schedule. Research on SRN227 and investigation into the whereabouts of the “Greyville Six” will begin soon. We would begin right away—the loss of EEC colony researchers in a new system is obviously worrisome, not to mention the value that the Carmel branch places in the unnamed mineral the Six mentioned in their comms—but we have to push the actual investigation back a few hours.
There’ve been technical difficulties, you see. The first is that the technicians neglected to re-calibrate all of our equipment, primarily the rover, which we were at least planning to launch in the interim. And the second, and equally if not perhaps more important, a pipe apparently burst in the storage bay. Technicians are moving the equipment and rations before they get ruined and repairing the leak before it affects some of the ship’s other systems. I don’t know anything about astronautical engineering, of course, but one of the hands said, if they didn’t plug it, we may have whole rooms covered in frost, let alone irreparable damage to the life support structure. So we’ve all endeavored to rest and leave the techs to it, and we’ll begin anew as soon as we can.
* * *
Blue, 10324LM:
Baby, I know what you’re thinking. “Percy, is your first message back literally that a random accident might leave you to starve to death in space?” And I see your fear and raise you my own. Not of starving—the food’ll be fine. I damn well can’t eat most of it anyway.
But . . . I thought you would be coming with us. I wanted you to come with us. I wanted you to be with me. And now I’m here alone with a handful of researchers I have never met before and a handful of shiphands that were legit given the job the week before takeoff, and we’re staring into the dark hoping that the Greyville Six aren’t dead yet.
Which, let’s be honest—and I’m not trying to be a downer or whatever, but . . . come on. It’s been . . . how long, even? The chances are slim. I was just hoping we’d at least be together the whole time.
This sucks. Let’s at least hope I can find evidence of something useful as soon as possible.
* * *
Orange, 13830LM:
Research has finally begun on the surface of SRN227, the largest planet orbiting the system’s primary star Aglaope. Our shipborne observation tools can already determine some manner of historic civilization—the remnants of large monuments and structures of varying kinds can be seen by the onboard telescope.
Our initial concern that there would be no portable short-form documentation in the culture’s language may be assuaged. We are sure that there are texts in both pictographic and what seem to be abjad writing systems etched into some of the monuments we have already seen.
Further observation will have to wait on the rover’s photographs and samples; it has already been sent on its way, and deeper research will follow. We’re hopeful that it will tell us a great deal—not only about the culture of the planet’s first inhabitants but also about the curious properties of the minerals on its surface.
I am hopeful that the Six obeyed Breadcrumb Protocol and that the rover will be able to determine their whereabouts before they succumb to the peculiarly intemperate weather conditions on the surface.
* * *
Blue, 16009LM:
Y’know, if it wasn’t for you working at the EEC, I wouldn’t want anything to do with this job in the first place? Is . . . is that cruel? But this isn’t my thing. I mean—like, xenoanthropology is my thing, but I didn’t think I’d have to be in the field to get the work done. Or at least I imagined I’d be “in the field” in the field—not “suspended in a metal box hovering in the cold vacuum above the field” in the field.
Why do we even still send humans to do this kind of shit, anyway? I get it, an android can’t make determinations as reliably as we may like: fine—but at least when one breaks, we are accustomed to leaving it to rust. If we know that people die—if we know that we’ll have to send a crew to find out what happened once th
ey do—maybe we should just forgo letting fragile little Homo sapiens sapiens do this kind of work?
I mean, worst case scenario, the Greyville Six could already be dead. Hell, we could die right now.
Jah . . . I’m doing it again. Okay. Lemme say it. We could die. Right. Now.
I need a drink, just—
Dammit. Forget I said that. Any of that. It’s just . . . I’d feel a whole lot more grounded on this mission if you were here, Mari. Because otherwise, I’m just being painfully pragmatic. All the goddamn time. Weighing the costs of everything. Of whether I still make it.
We should be honest, after all. The Six are just a loss of information. Someone who signed the paperwork is hoping this could be a human-interest-piece if we make it back alive, sure, but the bigwigs? This is just data to them. Data they don’t feel comfortable going back for on their own. And if we die? Who knows, maybe it won’t be worth it after all.
I can already hear you saying, “Don’t be like that, Percy,” but I can’t help it. The only thing keeping me sane out here is the knowledge that if we were so foolish to spend time, money, resources and warm bodies just to pick up the Six, maybe they’ll be foolish enough to come looking for me if it still goes wrong. Maybe you’ll kick up a fuss—I’d love to think you would. For me.
Would you?
* * *
Blue, 17930LM:
Oh, God, Mari. I just had the worst dream . . . It wasn’t even, like, scary. It was just . . . I don’t know . . . foreboding? Overbearing? I . . .
Do you mind if I . . . talk about it? I know you can’t comfort me, but I’m hoping . . . if I know you’re still hearing it . . . maybe you can . . .
So I’m sitting at the dinner table at home, and you made pelau just for me, just like you did before I left. And before I can even take a bite, I’m falling—through the chair, into the floor, into nothing but black for a long time until I see this small blue light below.
And as I keep falling toward it, it starts turning into many smaller, bluer lights, not far away but close up to me, like little blue fireflies. And now I feel like I’m no longer in air but in the middle of an ocean—but I’m not drowning, I’m just falling, falling lightly, pressure all around me, swimming in it but not worrying about breath or movement, and still falling, always falling. And the lights are kind of . . . dancing around me, like they want to touch me, but they can’t.
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