by K. Gorman
“No.”
She flushed again. Right. It's not like he'd had any reason to dig into the Sol system's history. She cleared her throat. “Basically, people started creating their embryos and manipulating genes based on desirable traits.”
“Ah. Yes. I think I've heard about that before. There's some places on Belenus and Nova that do that. Same with Ganesha and Tala. Kind of a back alley rich person game.”
“Exactly. Except replace rich people with rich biomedical corporations, and you've got me, my sister, and a whole slew of other kids.”
His eyebrows rose. “All with powers like yours?”
“Well, with powers, anyway. Not like mine.”
She rolled her shoulders, easing some of her sleeptime stiffness out, then opened the book. Nomiki's note flicked at her fingers on the first page, and she pulled its bottom edge up so Marc could see the picture underneath, taking care with the paper.
“This is the team that worked on us, I assume. I only recognize one of them.” She moved her finger to where Dr. Sasha bent over a table. “I just remembered her now. I couldn't before.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Well enough. She was there every week. I should have remembered her before, but...” She shook her head.
“Bad memories?”
“Maybe. Nomiki thinks they were doing something to our heads.”
She swallowed, pushing back the pang that threatened to pull on her barriers. In her mind’s eye, images of the compound flicked by. The spindly trees and dead vines in the courtyard in mid-winter. Cracks in the brickwork mosaic that made the front parking lot. A low-set concrete building with a smoothed, welcoming face and bright white paint, examples of classroom art projects scattered across its façade. The egg and snake emblem of Seirlin Biocorp, the same one that had been tattooed on her wrist until seven years ago, frosted into the glass of the sliding front doors. The smell of bleached linen in the hospital ward.
She winced. It had truly felt like they were doing the right thing in there. That everything that happened was all right.
“Do you ever lose memories?” she continued. “Like, one day it’s there, and the next day it’s slipped out? Entire segments of your memory that your friends remember, but you don’t?”
Marc shifted back, a hand on his knee. “Yeah, I think so.”
“It’s not really something we keep track of, right?” she said. “It just happens, and we assume it’s normal, and then sometimes, the memories come back after a while and you think, ‘Sol, how could I have forgotten that?’ and dismiss it. That’s how it goes?”
“Er… yes.”
“Well, that’s what we thought, too, but it started happening to a bunch of us. We’d just lose time, but we wouldn’t get it back. Maybe we’d forget what we’d done yesterday, or maybe something that happened back when we were ten. Others remembered, but then, they forgot other things.”
“And the memories didn’t come back?” he asked.
“Some of them did. Most of them didn’t. And the doctors didn’t do anything that helped it.” She flipped Nomiki’s note back down and pressed her finger on the list of names. “Look at them. Three neuro-specialists, and they couldn’t fix it?”
At the time, she hadn’t known they were neuro-specialists. To her, they’d just been doctors. She’d been raised by these people, and they’d passed off her concerns as normal. Anger flashed in her chest as the shame dug in. She’d been so naive. A child. They’d gaslit her, and she’d believed them. Trusted them.
Good thing Nomiki wasn’t such an idiot.
“What…” Marc hesitated. “What were they going for? Superhumans?”
“I dunno. I—” She shook her head. “They didn’t actually seem that interested in our powers. They had this pseudo-science religious thing going, but I think they shielded us from what they really were up to. The powers seemed more a symptom of what they wanted rather than what they were actually wanting, if that makes sense.” She blew out a breath. “I dunno. It’s all kind of muddled. I gave up looking for answers a while ago.”
“Ah.”
Silence ticked between them. She didn’t look at him, focusing instead on the steel wall on the opposite side of the small room and the rumpled sheets of the bed that was folded out on the other side, but her skin heated under his gaze.
His stare lingered for several seconds. Then it dropped to the notebook in her hands. “I take it Nomiki kept looking.”
“It would seem that way.” Her jaw tensed, but she forced it to relax. “She didn’t tell me she was.”
“Ah,” he said again. Then, “May I?”
He lifted his hands tentatively, fingers hovering over the book.
“Yeah, sure.” She handed it over. “Have at it.”
The plastic sheets caught the light as he flipped through the pages, angling it toward the door so he could see. Idly, she reached over and flicked on the light embedded into the side of her locker, blinking at the brightness. A dry, heavy feeling itched at her eyes, and she glanced at the clock. Six hours. A pretty decent amount of sleep, despite the way her body felt. With the way the Shadows attacked, they’d been rotating sleeping shifts, making sure there were enough on watch to outnumber and outfight any Shadows that came in. Everyone had a case of red-eye these days.
She leaned back, using the heels of her hands for support. Nomiki. What are you doing right now, sister?
“Where are these?” Marc asked.
She peered around his shoulder. Ah. The ruins. He’d definitely been interested in them before. Hell, who wouldn’t be? They were a recurring theme among humanity’s dreams. Excepting Karin, who had memory-dreams entwined into the other dreams, every time someone dreamed about the ruins, it was a guarantee that they would wake up with a Shadow in their face.
That, more than her light, was what connected the current catastrophe to her past. As much as she wanted to deny it.
“Earth,” she said. “Somewhere around the Mediterranean. Old Greece, maybe Italy.” She never had found out where. Nomiki knew, though… and there were some coordinates in the book that, she suspected, might lead back there.
Except for the fact that she’d found about five sets of coordinates, all leading to different places.
That was next on her to-do list. Now that she had a working navigation menu, she could plunk them all into the historical planet data on the Nemina’s drives.
“Were they connected to where you grew up?”
“They were in a field nearby. I don’t know how connected to anything they were. The scientists didn’t seem to pay them much attention, although…” She frowned, a memory twinging at the back of her brain. “Actually, I’m not sure of that.”
“Lost memories?” he guessed.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
He stared at the picture. From what she had heard from the others, the dreams they shared were all accurate. Five stone slabs, reaching between two and three meters into the sky, weather-worn and seemingly abandoned. Hand-etched lines carved across their surfaces, loose and primal, a mixture of light and dark, but the stone was so worn that one couldn’t make them out. Karin had spent years trying.
“You should show this to the others,” he said.
“I’ve been meaning to. It’s just—”
“I understand. Private, right?” His eyes lifted up and caught hers.
Her jaw clenched shut. His eyes pierced into hers, and a part of her shied away from the contact. Her heart twisted.
“I’ve been hiding,” she said. “I can’t—these are things I haven’t told anyone about.”
“I know, I know. It’s just—Karin, we’re all in this now. You’re going to have to trust us at some point.”
“I do.” Heat flushed her skin. “I just—”
A shadow moved at the door. They both glanced up as Soo-jin leaned around the doorjamb and poked her head in. Her loose dreads hung around her face in a rough framing as she lifted her eyebrow from one
to the other, taking in their position on the bed. “Lookin’ cozy.”
Silence filled the air. Karin’s shoulders tensed. She threaded her fingers through the loose bedding at the edge of the mattress.
“Riiiight,” Soo-jin said after a good look at them. “Well, we’re picking something up on the scanners.” She tilted her head toward the bridge. “Might want to have a look.”
“Sure.” Marc’s voice rumbled as he cleared his throat. Turning his gaze back to Karin, he raised an enquiring eyebrow and lifted the notebook. “Shall we…? We can get more people on it. Different angles. Different brains. More manpower.”
“I was planning on it, anyway. It’s not private anymore. Not if we’re all dreaming it.” She took the notebook from his hands and stood, wobbling a bit.
“Oooookay.” Soo-jin took another look between them. “Well, I’ll just be on the bridge, then.”
She vanished from the door. Karin blew out a breath as her sock-clad feet padded softly up the hallway.
Well, that could have gone smoother. She crossed her arms over her chest, the notebook hanging from her left hand. After a few seconds, she looked down to Marc.
They exchanged a look.
“All right,” she said. “You go first. I’ll meet up in a few. Then we can all hear my origin story.”
Chapter 9
“We think it’s a ship.” Soo-jin leaned her hip against the back of the pilot’s chair as Karin came in, a hand on her waist. “It’s beaming back some ion ratings.”
“Ion… ratings?” Karin squinted at the screen. Although her normal, reliable starmap route still displayed on the bottom, the rest looked as though someone had taken a magnet to the holo projector. Patches of color pixelated across a black backdrop in smears, ranging from neon green and yellow to a kind of puke-inducing, rave-club purple. The colors followed in retinal burn as she forced her gaze from the screen and to the dashboard down.
Cookie sprawled across the pilot’s chair—her chair. Once again, he had connected his computer to the ship, the thick cables linking them from beneath the desk attesting to just how old the ship’s hardware and processors were.
“Cookie has taken some liberties with our scanning equipment.” Marc drummed his fingers along the edge of the dashboard from the co-pilot’s seat. Ethan sat on his lap, looking stiff and wide-eyed.
“Along with our dining arrangements, so I see.” Her lip curled back at the food bowls from Mess balancing precariously across her dashboard. Did he ever clean up?
“Hey, now, I’ve been working. I’m going to clean them soon. Just wanted to show you guys.”
“And what are we looking at?” She made a broad gesture to the screen. “A live feed from the abstract section of BelenArt?”
“It’s radio, actually. I sampled the image through a processor I found.”
“I think your processor needs work.”
“Shush. Here.” He pressed a few buttons, and the image shifted. “I’ll zoom back. Maybe you’ll recognize it.”
She folded her arms across her chest and scrutinized the new image. “What am I looking at?”
“System image. See? This bright patch is Aschere, the next brightest is Enlil. The rest are either not in the frame or too far in orbit.” Cookie pointed up at a patch of pink in the upper right corner. “That ought to be Belenus. And Nova…”
“Oh.” Now that she knew what she was looking at, everything started to make sense. She pointed to a green flash next to Aschere, the closest star. “Nova’ll be that green flash there.”
“Right.” Cookie shot a white-toothed smile at her from the chair. “I knew you were both beautiful and smart.”
“What’s the image you had before?” she asked.
“Well, we detected a short-burst signal earlier. Thought someone might be locking onto us—”
Soo-jin swatted him. “Don’t lie. We were bored.”
“Okay, we were bored, and we detected a short burst signal that some people sometimes have been rumored to use for tracking, so I decided to kill a few hours tracking it back.”
“I did most of the tracking.”
“You were a great instruments’ girl. Your work has my highest esteem. Anyway—”
“It might be a ship. It might not be.”
Cookie leaned his head back and squinted up at Soo-jin. “You literally just said you think it’s a ship.”
A shrug rolled off her shoulders. “I’m a pessimist.”
“Even if it is a ship, that doesn’t mean anything.” Karin raised her eyebrows toward the screen. “There are a million ships in the system.”
“Yeah, but a million of them aren’t beaming short burst signals in our direction.”
“Short burst isn’t unheard of.”
She ran her tongue across the tops of her teeth, chewing slowly as she thought. Short burst radio had come up in her studies, but not that often. As a communication tool, it sucked, and there were much better ways to get someone’s attention than firing a radio signal in their direction. Even for locating something, there were better ways.
Especially if one wanted to identify the thing they were trying to locate.
“Do you even know if it was pointed at us?” she asked. “They’re usually wide, right?”
“Actually, Fallon’s been using directed bursts for a while now.” Marc shifted upward in his seat, his hands going to Ethan’s shoulders to stabilize him. “Mostly spec-ops stuff.”
Except for Ethan, they all rounded their stares on him.
“Why?” Soo-jin tilted her head and raised her eyebrows.
She didn’t need to explain her question. Short burst was an old, unreliable, inaccurate tool. The most anyone could send were strings of numbers or text files.
Marc shrugged. “Maybe they found something special in them? Tweaked them to make them more accurate? I dunno. Spec-ops is full of secretive, cultish people.”
“Fallon is full of secretive cultists. To even think they could stand up to the Alliance…” Cookie shook his head. “No offense, cuz, but… Clio.”
Fallon had been the first trans-planet empire in the system. Still technically was since it had two planets under its care. As far as Karin knew, they’d signed with the Alliance some twenty years ago after the Border Wars, but the signatory had been tenuous and fractious at best. They’d pulled out just before Karin and Nomiki had come through the gate, causing a series of minor scuffles on border planets, but nothing too serious. With some of the most well-established infrastructure among the planets and an enormous military sector, none of the major system players gave them much hassle. But they’d become a hotbed of black market trade and had the largest quantity of mercenary brackets coming out of their space.
“Fallon is standing up just fine to the Alliance. All they wanted was jurisdiction over their territory, which they have.”
“Yeah, but if they tried to take anything else, infringe on Alliance too much…”
“But they don’t care about that. And it’s more equal than you think.”
“Whatever, cuz. You guys always lose in the system tactics rpg.”
“And just where do you think that game was made?”
“Okay, okay, guys, enough. We get it.” Soo-jin raised a hand and pushed it down through the air in a vacillating motion. “Let’s just keep an eye on this green blob that may or may not be a ship, see if it changes, and move on with our day?”
“Agreed. Besides, Karin’s got something to put our minds to.” Marc swung his seat around and lifted an eyebrow toward her. “Karin?”
All eyes turned toward her expectantly. She sighed and held up the book.
“It falls right in line with secretive cultists, actually…” She held up the book for them to see. “Nomiki had this under her bed. I guess she’s been doing extra digging on where we’re from.”
“Wait. Where are you from?” Cookie sat up straighter in his chair. “I thought you were Belenar, but Soo said you came through the gate?”
&
nbsp; “I’m from Earth. The short story is that Nomiki and I were test tube experiment babies created in a lab somewhere near the Mediterranean, then fed a bunch of drugs, treatments, and likely a lot of brainwashing in our childhood before we escaped.” She held up the notebook. “The long story is somewhere in here.”
Soo-jin lifted her eyebrows. “Damn. Now that’s a comic book origin story if I ever heard it.”
“There’s more.” She paused. “You know those ruins we all see in our dreams?”
“Yeah?”
“They’re right up the hill from the compound I was raised in.”
Soo-jin’s eyes didn’t widen, but Karin could tell when the woman’s face went dead serious. It was like a mask slid over, putting one layer between her and the outside world. One more layer between them. “They’re real?”
“There are pictures of them in here.’
“And you didn’t tell us?”
Karin’s jaw tensed, and a hot flash of shame rolled through her chest, but she straightened her back. “No.”
Soo-jin’s nose wrinkled. But Marc beat her to the punch.
“If the ruins are real, then that means Karin’s past is connected to whatever is happening to cause these Shadows. And that means that, if we can figure it out, we will be one step closer to figuring them out.” He paused. “I don’t know about you, but that’s kind of a priority for me.”
Soo-jin narrowed her eyes. “I did not sign up to save the system.”
“No, but Chariday won’t be having many auctions if its patrons are all Lost.”
“Fine. Whatever. I’ve got nothing better to do.” She threw her hands up and walked away. “Sure would have been nice to have known this shit before we’d left Enlil’s access networks.”
“Yeah, well, next time you want to lay out your traumatic childhood on the deck for everyone to poke through, be my damn guest.” Karin blew out a breath, then flopped the book on the dashboard before turning for the hallway. “I’ll grab a table. Might as well have a proper set-up in here.”