by JY Yang
Despite my horror, I still had to examine the upper floor. These were the dormitories, stacked with closets full of clothes and washbowls and handheld mirrors. Things had been scattered across the tops of tables and beds, the way busy people often will. Someone’s innerwear was still draped over the back of a chair. Death came too swiftly for them to react.
Strangely enough, I found no personal writing. There were plenty of books: academic scrolls, tawdry novels, copies of the Instructions. But no journals or letters of any sort. Perhaps this is deliberate; maybe they were forbidden from communicating with the outside world or from writing their thoughts down.
In one of the rooms I found a light capture that had gotten caught under the edge of a closet, face down. It showed a group of Tensors in two rows, one seated and one standing, in the courtyard that is now a boneyard. They were smiling in this light capture, these sixteen people; it looked like genuine happiness. They were proud to be here, excited to do important work. I studied the black-and-white lines of their faces and wondered which of them were the corpses collapsing into stringy pulp in the corridors. Or which of them lay scattered in the courtyard in tooth-marked pieces.
There’s another presence in the compound. Something big that moves with sibilant noises and sharp clicks. I haven’t seen it, but I can hear it, distant but distinct. Sometimes, I can feel it in the Slack, as though glimpsed between wind-teased layers of bedlinen. Once, I thought I heard loud breathing in the courtyard, and ran to the window to look. But there was nothing. Am I just imagining things and inventing a monstrous beast where there is none? But the bones do not lie. The copper smell of raw flesh does not lie. Something else lives here.
I must investigate the other buildings now. I am plagued by a heavy sense that the compound has more unpleasant surprises in store for me. I must stay vigilant.
* * *
The building on the far right of the compound is a laboratory. It is a long building, a single story like a factory or a tanning shed, with low partitions between the experiment rooms and a shared roof peaked high overhead. Half of the building is occupied by what looks like a series of trials: obstacle courses, cages, tanks of stagnant water gone cloudy with neglect. There are markings on the floor where large pieces of equipment have clearly been moved away.
In the other half are rooms equipped with buckets and drainage systems, and long metal tables with lips around the rims, still bright and sharp. Metal implements line the walls and cabinets in neat rows. More ghosts of missing machinery. This is where they conducted their experiments on animals.
From the books and charts left behind, I know what they were doing. Mixing animals of the earth and the skies, of the jungles and of the waters, hoping that in their furtive kneading, they could do better than nature. The Tensors would test the abilities of these animals, shocking them with electricity, submerging them in water, testing their heat endurance. Did these poor creatures, pushed to their limits, turn upon their tormentors and wreak the carnage I see here? I could hardly blame them if they did.
Where are the pens for these animals? There must have been dozens of them, yet I do not see a place for them to live. They must have been caged up, at least.
I still have not found any evidence that my twin was ever here. I can only pray that they were not subject to the same tortures as these poor animals.
* * *
I write this from the relative safety of the courtyard, having fled from a building next to the laboratory. I could not stand to be in that building a moment longer. I had mistaken it for a grain mill, which left me unprepared for what I would discover inside.
The building was in fact a massive pen. The moment I entered, I stopped breathing from the foulness of what was within. I’ve lived in the slums of Chengbee. I have seen death, I have lived with it, I have smelt it on the fifth day when the skin starts to blacken and the organ-fat bubbles upward in clumps of curdled white. It is a smell that dives down your throat and threatens to lodge there and never leave. But none of it could compare to the intensity of the stench that assaulted me the moment I pushed those doors apart. It was like a physical blow, one that punched the air out of my lungs and replaced it with a miasma of putrefaction. I nearly swooned; I might have relieved my stomach of its contents. Still, I stepped inside. I wanted to see. I had to know.
The creature was indeed as big as Phoenix. It had been dead long enough that its form had melted under the hand of decay; what remained lay scalloped and mottled, sliding off the bone. Its abdomen had burst, the contents spilled across the ground in black gouts. The jaw had come off the skull, exposing rows of serrated teeth. The arms seemed to be partly winged, with some kind of rotting membrane between fingers as long as I am tall. Was this some sort of hybrid between a raptor and a naga?
I noticed that the carcass hadn’t been scavenged. Of course, my first thought was that this was the creature responsible for the carnage outside. But if it had been dead for days, then what killed the buck-thing out on the plain? The building was large enough to hold two of these creatures. Maybe more. I saw chains hanging from the ceiling, heavy enough to hold up a bridge. And then I could not stay within those walls and breathe in that rot a moment longer.
So, here I am, in the courtyard, surrounded by the chewed bones of the dead, sucking in air and trying to clear my mind. I hate this place. Why did I come here?
* * *
I found the animal pens at last—they were behind the main building, row after row of long sheds with corrugated tin roofs. Each was split into a dozen pens by high walls, and barred with iron alloy gates. The animals were gone, more or less. Some of them left bones behind. Their pens had been broken into, the bars wrenched from their hinges and thrown upon the ground. The smears of blood on the walls and the grizzled clumps of protein within told the rest of the sorry tale. I counted any pens without remains in them as lucky escapees. Lucky enough to flee and be hunted down later, I presume.
I would have explored further, but I heard something moving along the rows—terrifyingly close, a slithering, clicking noise, and then I was struck by a wall of foul odor. All my courage deserted me and I fled. I fold-jumped, of course, but with the Slack here so warped, I couldn’t control it. I was lucky. I could have ended up buried in a wall, but instead I ended up in the courtyard, next to the central building. I stumbled through the double doors and found myself in a high, wide receiving hall, interrupted near the back by a floor-to-ceiling tapestry and a marble counter before it.
It is behind this counter that I am crouched now, trying to coax breath back into my lungs. The building has long, graceful windows covered in painted silkglass that looks so fragile, so terribly breakable. I can see the courtyard through them, and it looks empty.
I am keeping watch. I have not seen the creature yet. I can only hope it has not seen me. But my mind keeps saying it is in here with me.
Chapter Twenty
Rider’s Writings, Part II
And here it is: the answer to “What the fuck was in those caverns, anyway?”
* * *
I suspect I have discovered why the Tensors built their laboratories on this mountain plateau. After my last entry, I waited until my heartbeat had slowed and my limbs had stopped shaking. The creature that stalks these buildings still had not appeared, and I felt that the danger was over for now. So, I began to explore the building instead.
Behind the tapestry I found a massive set of stairs, wide and deep enough to admit an invading army and their siege engines. They led downward, deep beneath the skin of the mountains. They built their institute over this fissure. There’s an entire compound down here, spreading deep and wide like the roots of a tree.
I now find myself in a chamber large enough to swallow a city. There’s a lake here, long and wide enough I can barely see the other end. Light comes from above, but I can’t see the source. It has a strangely incandescent quality that tells me it’s not daylight. I don’t know what it is, but it feels oddly peaceful. A
fter the horrors upstairs, the calm here feels like a gentle river, cool and enveloping. There are no bones here, no smears of death, no smells of despair. If I could, I would remain here indefinitely, resting my weary limbs in the gossamer light and listening to the lake whisper to itself.
But I cannot. There are openings carved into the walls of the chamber here, and I must examine them. If this is where they took my twin, there is hope yet. It seems better down here than it was up there.
The deformation in the Slack is even stronger here in the heart of the mountain. It’s not safe for me to travel like I usually do—not when the shape of this place’s geography is alien to me, not when the glossy black of the lake’s surface hides untold fathoms. It would be far too easy to consign myself to a watery end. I will walk. Slowly.
* * *
The first chamber on the left yielded a warren of what seem like Tensors’ offices, thoroughly cleaned out. I have found nothing: no equipment, no carelessly discarded logbooks, no signs of whatever life previously occupied these premises. Just a series of neat rooms carved into the rock, floors punctuated by smooth blocks of tables and blameless columns to sit on, walls interrupted by the carved-in ribs of cabinets and shelves.
Everything has been scoured clean, as though with acid, with lime. Did those who worked here have more time to evacuate than those who worked on the surface? I wonder what they wrote on these desks. I wonder what they kept on those multitudes of shelves.
* * *
The next chamber over is far larger, high and wide as one of the receiving halls in the Great High Palace. A narrow corridor opens out into a yawning space like an assembly area, studded with pools of fish in a deliberate pattern. Everything down here is lit with sunballs that still function, but not for much longer: the light in them is dying, turning brittle and yellow and flickering. Some have already gone out. The ponds certainly needed constant maintenance: in abandonment, the grey water is foul with dead carp, their white bellies floating, long as one of my arms.
Dozens of rooms branch out from the central chamber. Like the offices, these were also picked clean. If not for the furniture carved out of rock, I would be looking at blank rooms, unreadable and inscrutable. But I’ve found rooms with chairs clustered in groups, and rooms with a single pair of chairs facing each other. And then there are broad rooms with no chairs but with shelf-gouged walls and floors etched with dust, marking the positions where chests and cabinets must have once stood. Everything in these chambers is shorter, the chairs stooping low. When I tried sitting in one, my knees folded to my chest, and I am not a tall person. These were made for children, my love. They kept children here.
They must have been experimental subjects; I am certain of that much. Buried deep within the remote mountains, masked by the bizarre warping of the Slack, held in the thrall of the Tensorate. Did these children ever see the sun? Did they live and die here, their bones sunk at the bottom of the lake? I cannot tell.
My guess is that this chamber was some sort of academy, a place where the subjects came to learn and play. Learn and play, as though they were leading normal lives. My mind conjures images of happy children, smiling and well fed, walking at leisure between these rooms, exchanging jokes amongst themselves and laughing. The stone walls echo with laughter. Right now, these hollows tower over me, passive and inert, their secrets locked behind their unbreakable silence. If they could speak, what might they tell me?
Wait. I think I hear someth—
No. It is nothing. There is nothing. Just the lapping of water, echoing oddly upon these hewn walls. My mind plays games with itself, scaring me like that.
I must continue.
* * *
I have found where they kept their subjects. Sixteen cubbies hidden behind a door in the rock, arranged in two rows, back to back. Each square of chalk-white rock is the same: a narrow bed, a desk, a rack of shelves on one wall, and little else. The cubbies are small enough that there is no space to walk or run or jump inside them. The imprisoned children could only sit at the desk to write, perhaps, or lie down on the bed to read. Were they given books to read?
Each cubby had bars across the front. Of course, if these children were adepts—as I’m sure my twin must have been—the bars could not have held them if they truly wanted to escape. But the barriers to leaving a place are not merely physical: this I know better than anyone.
There are doors set into the bars, each one unlocked. I went into one and lay on the bed’s flat surface, letting its hardness press against my bones, trying to imagine the life my twin must have led. Staring up at the pockmarked white ceiling, confined to the tiny bounds of this unhappy world. How long were they kept here? What did they know of the world outside? Have they ever seen the pink and lavender of the falling sun, or the dapple of leaves across a summer’s forest path? The fear that has dogged me dissolved in the wave of sorrow as I contemplated the misery their life must have been steeped in. By comparison, I have been unfairly fortunate.
At least I found no bodies in the cages.
* * *
There is another chamber beyond these, a great oval with pillars of stone holding up the roof, ringed by staircases connecting several floors of recessed cubbyholes. In the center, on the ground floor, a series of laboratory tables, like the ones Khimyan had. I do not know for sure if it was the children who were being experimented on here. As before, those who worked here left nothing behind. But the examination tables are small—they will not fit a child older than ten or twelve—and arranged in pairs.
I have examined the tiers of cubbies above the observation area. And what I found there, I cannot explain. I am not even sure what it is I stumbled upon. There were dozens and dozens of machines welded to the stone, oblong boxes of metal with glass lids. These were slackcraft-operated; I could feel the residual charge in them. But I could not activate the devices or fathom what they were used for. They were meant to hold human beings, but for what purpose? And for how long?
Then I noticed that, like the examination tables, many of these machines were in pairs. Not all of them, but in sufficient numbers for it to be strange. Upon closer examination, I saw that the boxes were labeled, a series of characters and numbers on each. The ones in pairs were labeled in pairs: upper and lower. These boxes held twins. They conducted experiments on twins.
And then I was overcome by exhaustion from having to climb so many flights of stairs, so I sat down to write. I have been steeped in troubled thought, trying to justify why whoever kidnapped my twin from the Quarterlander vessel only took one infant. Why did they leave me behind? Was it the weather that stopped them? Was it their orders? Or did they just decide to leave one child for the Quarterlanders, in hopes that the theft would not be reported?
How cruel are the fortunes! A different knot in their tangled strings and I could have been the one imprisoned here in this house of stone, subject to the whims of those who do not see me as human. But it was my twin who was taken, while I went free.
I know what Mokoya would say at this juncture: “Cruel as the fates might be, they cannot match the cruelty of humans.” And she would be right.
She would probably also ask why I still linger in this place, when it is clear it has been abandoned, when it is clear that I will never find what I came looking for. Why do I stay in this hellpit full of death, patrolled by a dangerous, ravenous beast? Because I am not satisfied. I will not leave until I find something of my twin to take back with me. There must be some trace of their existence here. They cannot have vanished without leaving something behind. I want to find it. I want to excavate it from these forsaken walls.
* * *
I’ve found the crypt. The chamber full of the bones of the children who perished here. A long corridor drilled through the rock, honeycombed on either side with alcoves for the dead. Many of the children were buried in pairs, but perhaps a third of the alcoves contain a single skeleton. A lot of them died young, their skulls still soft and their wrists narrow.
&n
bsp; Even the air here is muted. I walked back and forth, looking at the rows and rows of remains, trying to guess if any of them might have belonged to my twin. I wonder how Mokoya feels. If Akeha had died in a disaster far from her, would she be able to pick their bones out of a pile of the dead? Would the Slack point her in the right direction, telling her, there, that is the one who lay by your side as you were slowly put together in the womb?
I felt nothing, and I do not know if it is because my twin is still alive, or because I don’t know what they would feel like, in life or in death. I never knew them.
Wait. I hear something. What
* * *
Mokoya, if you are reading this—if this gets to you somehow—I am sorry. The creature found me. It followed me down the steps.
Now I know what they look like when alive. I was right, I guessed right: they crossed a raptor and a naga. Raptor-shaped but with elongated, membranous arms. The carcass upstairs must have belonged to a juvenile; this one is far larger. And fast. It can turn invisible. One moment it was a sharp white thing standing alone on the shores of the lake, and the next it was gone. I thought at first it had folded away—but then I heard its feet. It was charging toward me. I ducked into the closest opening I could find—it was the row of cells—and barricaded myself in one of the cubbies.
I have escaped the creature’s jaws for now, but for how long? I hear the hollow sounds of the beast running itself into the door barring this corridor. Eventually, it will fail. That thing knows I am in here, and it won’t let me escape. I am trapped. Even if I could escape this room and find my way to the stairs up, it would be hopeless. I cannot outrun this creature. Already my bones are aflame with exhaustion. It would be faster and simpler to seek death in the clutch of its jaws.
My mind conjures light captures of the last terrifying hours here, the creature breaking loose from its torments, its keepers struggling to restrain it as the others flee. What happened to the children? The Tensors working down here clearly knew they had time to evacuate properly. Somehow, they knew what was about to happen. I can only hope that my twin, if they were even here, was spared all of this horror.