Birth of Chaos

by Elise Kova

  “Yes, sir.” Madani straightened some and nodded before retreating just as swiftly from the room. Through the captain’s office window, Jo could see her bustling back towards a group of men surrounding another desk filled with papers, her job nowhere near done. Jo couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.

  But just as she glanced back to the files, the captain flipped to a new page, and Jo rushed behind him to make sure she was there to witness the rest. Wayne did the same just to the man’s left, and for the next few minutes, they all read in silence.

  After what felt like an hour, Jo’s brain threatening to drill its way out of her skull by the feel of it, the information in the documents became a little more enlightening. Jo perked up at once.

  “This is the third victim he’s looking at again, right?” Jo asked. After countless photos of identical monikers, similar displays of grotesque variety, detailing of event after familiar event, they all began to blend together.

  “Fourth, I think.” Wayne groaned, and Jo could see him rubbing at his eyes in her periphery. “Looks like this one was front-manning a sort of android fighting ring.” Jo scanned Wayne’s face, surprised by the disgust written there. Though not for long. “Says here he . . . he made them keep their pain receptors on full? I’m not too hi-tech, but even I can tell that sounds pretty low-lid.”

  She didn’t know exactly what low-lid meant, but she knew what pain receptors did, so Jo was in near instant agreement.

  “We’re not getting anywhere with this, doll, let’s move on.”

  “No, not yet.” Jo held him by the cuff of his sleeve. She was on the verge of something. She understood all too well how grating trying to absorb so much information in one sitting could be. But they had a job to do, and if the captain here could do it, she could too.

  “Every single victim has, in some way, shape, or form been involved in android related hate crimes,” Jo started slowly, her mind coming into clarity. She leaned in to gather some more information from the papers the captain had placed to the side. “Yeah, see here? This man was the head of an Artificial Care Act protest group. And this one? An anti-android slam campaign aiming to remove their syncing capabilities unless registered to an ‘owner.’” Jo cringed, her stomach roiling at the thought of such treatment.

  “We knew that it had to do with the androids and their rights already,” Wayne reminded her. “Snow said it in the initial briefing—or showed us the news reel that did.” He paused. “No, it had to do with that calling card? Or all of them. Doesn’t matter which, we knew all that.”

  “The latest calling card was the coordinates for N.A.I.S., Inc.”

  “That AI place . . . What was it? Prima Sangria?”

  “Primus Sanguis,” Jo corrected him quietly, her voice hushed by the rampant thoughts rushing through her mind. “Mister Burrows’s bone had N.A.I.S. coordinates carved into it. But why?”

  “The location of his next victim?” Wayne suggested.

  “No . . .” Jo wouldn’t have been surprised if Wayne could hear the audible click that just happened in her brain. “Look, here.” Jo pointed to Richard Burrows’ file. “He was a consultant.”

  “So?”

  “There’s a pattern here, a message,” she said, eyes scanning for any more tidbits of information she could grasp from the papers strewn about the captain’s desk. When he leaned back into his seat with a sigh, Jo took the chance to lean as far over into the literal pile of information as she could. “I think it’s more than the ACA. . . I think Primus Sanguis may be the true connecting thread.”

  “The thing you hacked?”

  “I didn’t hack it, I hacked information about it,” she corrected. “And it was one of the hardest—never mind, it doesn’t matter. The first victim, in Pennsylvania . . . I’ve seen her name before. She was all over the notes CBM had me dredge up on Sanguis as one of their chief developers.

  “The second victim was a higher up at CBM in New York—N.A.I.S.’s competitor and the people who pushed Primus Sanguis to market early once they got their competition software to market first.”

  “The third was that politician involved with the Artificial Care Act, but he was also closely involved with legalizing the Sanguis system for market,” Wayne interjected. “I see where you’re going, doll, but what about the fourth here . . . The one with the android fighting ring?”

  “Where do you think he sourced that many androids from?” Jo tried to find the file on the desk, but couldn’t. The captain had already sorted it away so she relied on her memory instead. “I saw he was an employee at Greenfield.”

  “So?”

  Wayne wouldn’t know, Jo realized. This was no longer his world, even if he had once been from New York City. “Greenfield is the largest contract manufacturer for androids. N.A.I.S. is their top customer.”

  “So number four just plucked androids with Sanguis in their heads off the line?”

  “Likely defectives, ones with minor issues in soft or hard design . . . but that would work for his purposes,” Jo surmised.

  “How do you know all this?”

  Jo allowed herself to savor the impressed tone of Wayne’s voice. “I told you, I had a job, once.” She swallowed. Had her work somehow led to the creation of the Bone Carver?

  “And what about Mr. Burrows?” Wayne tapped on the man’s file.

  “I’m speculating—”

  “So far your speculations have been the only thing about all this that’s made any sense.”

  “Given what was carved on his bone, I think he was consulting for N.A.I.S.”

  “You think?” Wayne stressed the final word. “Stakes are kinda high for guessing here, dollface.”

  “I’d bet my life on it.” She stared him in the eye, both of them knowing full well that if she was wrong, she really may have to put her life on the line. “This is the pattern we need to follow—looking for people involved with Primus Sanguis, and possibly, tangentially, how it relates to people in the anti-ACA movement. But again, I think this is much bigger than the ACA. I think this has to do with something none of us knows yet about SANGUIS, something the Bone Carver thinks is worth killing over. If I’m right about all this. . . I’d speculate there’s something about the Primus Sanguis AI infrastructure that’s not entirely legal. I think they’re trying to cover up code that’s going too far, and the Bone Carver is trying to expose it.

  “I can try to re-hack back at the Society and get more information—newer information—on the project. Then we can make a map of all people we can find who are and were linked to it, weigh those who have higher involvement and then maybe we can get to the person before—”

  “Get to the potential victim? Or help out the Carver?” Wayne cut in, forcing Jo’s whirring thoughts to sputter to a halt. She blinked up at him, one hand pressed into the desk though no papers shuffled beneath her touch. “Because it sounds like you’re trying to get to the next one before the perp does, and that’s not our job.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to think of a third way out,” she confessed, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  “Way out?” It took him a second, but Wayne finally connected it back to her earlier comments in the briefing room. “Doll, there is no way out.”

  “How do you know that?” she pressed. “Why not try to stop this? Maybe we can grant the wish—the Bone Carver could do this indefinitely—by changing his mind about doing it in the first place?”

  “Or maybe we end up wasting time chasing rabbits down holes.”

  “She said dismantled, Wayne. Dismantled.”

  “Who?”

  “Pan. She said the Society could be dismantled.”

  “I don’t think she meant it literally,” was what his mouth said. But his tone crafted a different story. One where he was considering what she was saying in a way that he never had before.

  “Why not?” Jo reached out for him, grabbing for his hands. “What if there is
a way out? A way to approach wishes—no, not just wishes—all of this, that no one has ever looked at before?”

  “There is no way out.” He took her hands gently in his.

  “Help me, Wayne.” Jo saw it again, as she worried circles into the sides of his thumbs with the pads of her own. She saw the same little magical tracings of the seams she had to rip to get him to agree with her. It was an identical sensation to their interaction in the kitchen except for this time she wasn’t about to let herself get lost in it. She would approach it with the precision of a surgeon. “The wishes, the Society—why is it like this?”

  “It always has been.” His words were comforting, placating, and almost confident. Almost.

  “It hasn’t.”

  “Doll—”

  “I know it hasn’t,” Jo said firmly, undermining his objections.

  “Tall words for someone who only joined the Society a few months ago.”

  “It’s been nearly a year,” she retorted as calmly as possible, even though it felt as though her intestines had become barbed, her stomach filling with acid several times too strong.

  “So what?” Wayne pulled his hands away and folded his arms, making the fact clear and apparent that he had no want of her comfort. They were back into the push and pull they always seemed to end up in during high-stress situations. “You’re practically a child compared to the rest of us.”

  “I know what I’m talking about,” she insisted.

  “You don’t know any—”

  “I see it in his eyes!” Her voice cracked and with the outburst of emotion her magic seemed to go haywire, hiding the path she’d been trying to follow moments earlier. If it didn’t mean wasting precious time, she’d jump back into reality just long enough to throw the captain’s mug against the wall. “I see it in the way he looks at me—or rather, doesn’t, when I ask him. I hear it in his voice when I know I’m getting too close to the truth.”

  “He?” Wayne paused, dumbfounded for a long moment. “You mean Snow? Why are you thinking of him now of all times? You’re losing focus, Jo, this is why I told you—”

  “Just, listen to me, Wayne, please.” She was pleading now, she’d sing it for him if that’s what it took to be heard. “Think about the wishes. You said it yourself, they’ve been getting more intense.”

  “Ever since you arrived.” He couldn’t let go of an opportunity to twist the knife.

  Jo used it to her advantage. She would break him yet. “Yes, me, the last member, the last lineage. Snow said there’d be no more after Nico. You don’t think that it isn’t just a little suspicious that Pan only starts killing people off once we’re all assembled?”

  Wayne paused, finally, at that.

  “There’s more to this,” Jo insisted, regaining her mental footing. “There’s something here we’re not seeing. It’s like . . . it’s like . . .” Her eyes drifted back to the captain’s desk, almost entirely forgotten. “It’s like the Bone Carver.” Her voice had dropped to a hurried whisper. “There’s a pattern here, there’s someone pulling the strings.”

  “Jo—”

  “And I would bet you anything that we both know who it is.”

  Wayne opened his mouth to speak, and then slowly closed it, opting instead to just stare at her. Jo held his gaze; she would devour him with a look if she could. She needed him to see what she saw, what was wearing her down time after time—what had been haunting her from the first moment she’d stepped in the Society, whether she’d realized it or not.

  “Even if we did . . .” There was a conspiratorial edge to what he was saying, a sort of harmony to the buzzing in her. She was winning; he was opening up to her line of thinking. “What could we do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I plan on finding out.”

  “You couldn’t do anything if you tried.” Fear settled over him, Jo could practically smell it. It rattled in him and made his hands tremble—barely, but she didn’t miss it.

  “I can, and I will,” she vowed.

  “How?”

  “I’ll do research. I can get information from Snow.”

  “That won’t work.”

  “Has anyone ever tried?”

  Clearly no one had, given how quickly he dodged the question. “I think all your focus should be on this wish.”

  “And wait for another one of us to be killed?” Jo grabbed his arm, tilting her head slightly to look up at the man’s eyes.

  Had Wayne always looked so tired? It was like he kept trying to find his resolve and build himself up and she just kept tearing him down.

  “Wayne, we can’t just keep spending our energy on this wheel, again and again and again, letting Pan toy with us like the puppet master we all know she is.” His eyes widened at this so Jo pressed further. “It’s her. . . we all know it. There’s a feeling about her, and her power to kill us.”

  “She’s trapped just like we are.”

  “How do we know that? I’ve thought it too, but. . . how can it not be her? Listen, listen. Did you really hear her in the briefing room? Not only did she say dismantle the Society, but she said you, not us. She doesn’t see herself in danger. There’s a way out and she knows it. There has to be.”

  “So, what do you propose?” There was a glimmer of something more there, a diamond in the dark coal mine they were all waiting like birds to suffocate in: hope.

  “Let’s stop it here. Let’s break this cycle of world-rebuilding and free ourselves instead.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I’m not. This is the first sane thing we’ve done.”

  “We’re just trying to stay alive and you want us to upend the system that keeps us existing? You don’t think that sounds a little insane?” He was raising his voice again as he shielded himself with anger.

  “I think it sounds like the only sure-fire method for survival.”

  “You’re talking about destroying our home.”

  Why wasn’t he listening? Why couldn’t he just understand?

  “The only thing I want to destroy is the cycle we’re chained to!” Jo slammed her palm down on the desk. . .

  And the impossible happened.

  In three seconds that felt like forever, several things occurred, almost all at once.

  Jo’s flat palm met the desk. A noise like a thunderclap echoed through her chest, setting her ears to ringing. From each of her fingers, impossibly, the desk splintered, cracking in fracture lines that split and met as different pieces pushed and lowered, tectonic plates after a seismic shift. The captain jumped out of his chair, shouting expletives and blinking in confusion. Papers went everywhere and the door to the room slammed open, Detective Madani rushing back in with gun drawn.

  There were words being said, but Jo couldn’t hear them. The ringing in her ears was too loud, her skin almost on fire with the energy crackling over it. She raised her hand, looking at her palm—it didn’t even sting.

  “H-how did you do that?” The whole sentence came out as one jumbled word; Wayne was pressed up against the back wall with terror in his eyes.

  Fear. There was that tangy sensation Jo was becoming familiar with. The sort of fear that could break a man down.

  “I . . .” The surge of energy evaporated the moment her focus left the possibilities of what her magic could do in the dust. Her own fear came crashing down on her. Her fingers couldn’t stay steady. Why couldn’t they stay steady? “I don’t know, Wayne. I don’t know!”

  Jo looked to him for answers he didn’t have, just as he looked to her for answers she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to conceive. Everything felt as if it was going to break apart.

  Wayne threw her a lifeline, pulling himself together and grabbing her shaking hand. The fear was gone and in its place was comfort and confidence. Jo clutched him so tightly his knuckles popped, but she didn’t relieve her grip. If she let him go now, it would all fall apart.

  “Time to make tracks, doll.” Wayne glanced over his shoulder to speak to her, but his
eyes shifted, lingering on the chaos in the room.

  Jo turned, barely getting a chance to see the two officers inspecting the desk, before she felt a tug, and the world changed around her.

  Chapter 7

  Special Place

  They stepped from utter chaos into nothingness.

  Wind rushed over her face, begging to tousle her hair, to pull at her clothes, like an invitation for her to be part of the world once more. It was cold, mostly due to elevation and wind. Unlike from the place they’d just left, this corner of the world was bright, warm, and filled with nature—everything the suburban police station hadn’t been.

  Jo turned in place, taking in the panoramic view of rolling hills covered in a lush carpet of greenery. A sapphire line cut through the landscape and white dotted the other side—some livestock, Jo presumed. Sheep, perhaps?

  Wayne had let her go almost instantly upon their arrival, taking a wide step away from her and the Door that was now fading—leaving a craggy opening in the rocks in its place. There was still that fear there. Worry, too.

  Could she blame him?

  “Where are we?” Jo asked before he could speak. If she let him get the first word there would be questions, questions she wasn’t ready for. Questions she had no answers for.

  “Somewhere very far from people.”

  “I can see that.” She nodded to the vast expanse of land. There wasn’t a home or city in sight.

  “Come on, this way.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked nervously. Jo looked back to the sheep. Was she nothing more than a lamb about to be brought to slaughter for asking questions about a possible wolf hiding beneath the wool?

  “It’s my special place.” He paused, a few steps down toward a narrow path that Jo could make out between the slopes of the hill.

  “Taking a lady to your special place?” Jo took a shot at levity; it fell flat even to her own ears. Still, she forced a casual tone through the awkwardness. “I didn’t think we had that kind of relationship.”