by K. Gorman
Karin shrugged off the rest of her backpack and put it on the ground. She met her sister’s incredulous gaze. “I’m going with you.”
“No, you aren’t.” Nomiki frowned. “Karin, I’m going to kill them.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “And I’m going to help you.”
They stared at each other for a long minute. Around them, the forest remained still and silent. Only the faint light of the compound illuminated the trees.
Nomiki turned away. Her brow knit as she put her attention back on the compound, studying it anew. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Nomiki said after another pause, the word somehow more genuine than when she’d been speaking before. More awkward, reflective of their age and humanity.
Nomiki glanced down, both hands pulling at her nightgown before she remembered to keep the blood-seared scissor blade away from the fabric. With one hand, she untied the knot she’d made at her hip and let the fabric fall loose around her knees. “Okay, yeah. Let’s do this.”
Chapter Four
“Reeve’s higher-up than he puts out. He just hides it.”
Nomiki sat on the bunk opposite her. With her fingers cupped over the side of the mattress and her arms rigid as she leaned forward, she looked more like the girl Karin had grown up with rather than the soldier that had met her at the Nemina’s hatchway. She rocked a little, too. An unconscious tick that only surfaced when she had the wherewithal to relax. The movement, and her sister’s closeness, brought a sense of immediacy to her mind.
Nomiki was really here.
As her sister’s gaze wandered around her bare cabin, a small, tight part of Karin slowly began to unwind.
Her search was over.
“He’s a sergeant, but he’s got inroads to the brass. Like he’s secretly a captain or something,” Nomiki continued. After a few seconds, she took her gaze off the edge of the locker on the wall and met Karin’s stare. “How about yours?”
“Marc? I think he was a lieutenant when he served. Doesn’t really talk about it.”
“And the others?”
“Soo-jin’s the engineer, Cookie’s a tech head.”
“Cool, cool. They treating you right?”
“Fine. We’re friends.”
“They seem rather protective of you.”
“Yes. We’re protective of each other. I don’t want to leave them behind.”
A hint of a smile caught the edge of Nomiki’s mouth, putting a tense ripple in her cheek. “So I gathered. We were asked to bring you all in, anyway, under the geas of asylum.”
Unbidden, she felt one of her eyebrows arch higher into her forward. “The geas of asylum? Not guise with a ‘u’?”
Nomiki’s teeth flashed in a grin. “Right? Weird choice of term, isn’t it? Like they’re casting an asylum spell to lure you in or something. It is what they use, though. I confirmed it with Reeve. If you want to piss him off, just start referring to everything as the ‘geas of’ something. It’s good fun.”
“I take it you two’ve become friends, as well, then,” Karin said.
“He’s supposed to be my handler.” Nomiki’s grin widened. “Very good person to befriend.”
“Ah, so it is a tactical befriending. Understood.”
“Yes. Now, tell me about this almost-dying stuff. Are there people I need to kill?”
Nomiki had put on a mock-professional pose, straightening her back and folding her hands over each other on her lap in the image of some secretarial assistant ready to take notes, but, behind her sister’s humor, a kind of dark seriousness shone in her eyes. It ran subtle, invisible except for someone who’d known her as long as Karin had. It rang of the dead, dark reality that sat behind Nomiki’s every action.
Her abilities didn’t manifest as obviously as Karin’s. She didn’t have a magic light to point to and say, ‘there, that’s what I can do.’ Instead, hers spawned as a more insidious variety. Stronger than normal people, and much faster, with a host of instincts and mannerisms that always made her seem like the unsheathed blade in the room, as if the blood of her namesake war goddess really flowed in her veins.
As the older sister, she’d gone farther in her treatments than Karin had.
Briefly, images of their escape flashed through her mind. Blood on the floor. The bodies of guards slumped, out of their path. The small blade glinting in Nomiki’s hand as she reached down and unhooked the keycard from one man’s belt, along with a set of more normal keys. They’d stolen his personal car that night, a small sedan reminiscent of the Sirius system’s Senescals, except re-purposed from the last century. She remembered watching the road go past outside the car windows, the hard seat pressing into the underside of her thighs as she kept looking back, sure they’d be caught.
Of course, there’d been no one left to catch them. Nomiki had made sure of that before they’d left.
A grim smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “Maybe. Could have used you in Caishen.”
She sure would have been helpful in their escape.
“I’m here now,” Nomiki said. “Tell me what happened.”
She held her sister’s eyes. Nomiki still sat poised, but part of the act had dropped, and her earlier smile had gone into a grim, serious cant. The moment drew out between them, stretching and silent. For a second, the room was so quiet, she could hear the vibration from the Nemina’s engines.
Then she dipped her head.
She started at the beginning, with her dream. With Nomiki and her quick, sharp knife, and Karin’s blood wetting the scene like the liquidized glow of a moon. With the field stretching out between them, and the stars glimmering down on the ruins. Then with the attack of the first Shadow, and everything that came after.
At some point, her sister slipped off the opposite bed and joined her on her bunk, the mattress dipping with her weight. The light never wavered in the room, spreading from the even texture of the embedded bulb above her nightstand. Though the sound of footsteps passed the door to the room outside, no one interrupted them.
Eventually, she came to the end.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, backs against the metal of the wall next to her bunk. Nomiki’s head angled upward, resting upon it. The light spread over the curves of her smooth face, making the skin seem tinted and shadowed. As Karin watched, Nomiki’s eyes opened into slits.
“The Shadow inside Christops Grivas spoke?”
She shifted. “Yes.”
Nomiki let out a breath. Her head turned away, giving her face a more open angle to the light on the wall and the shadows it cast on that surface. “You’re sure of what it said?”
“Yes.”
Another silence. This time, though, it had a more torpid feel to it. She swallowed, the sound loud in the room. The memory of Christops reaching for her, speaking, the Shadow inside him bleeding from his eyes and mouth, her project name on his tongue slipped into the forefront of her mind. Eos. She leaned forward. “There’s no way I could have mistaken it. I—”
“I’m not doubting you, Karin. I know.” Nomiki’s tone cut her short, surprising in its rawness. “It’s just…” She trailed off, angling her head back against the wall and closing her eyes again, squinting them shut hard this time, making wrinkles of tension appear around her brows. “It’s all pretty fucked up, hey?”
Karin snorted. “I think that’s the only sure thing about it, at this point.”
She paused, her next question making her hold her breath in hesitation.
Nomiki hadn’t re-opened her eyes, and Karin took the opportunity to study her sister’s face again, recounting the smooth contours of her face, the delicacy of her nose—the one trait they truly seemed to share. She seemed so peaceful, now that the tension had faded, and that peace ebbed over her.
Out here, away from the hustle of planet-or-station side traffic, it was easy to push the rest of the worlds away, easy to ignore them.
That’s why so many came out here, into the B
lack.
But they couldn’t ignore the Shadows forever. Not even out here. And Karin couldn’t ignore her past. Not when it kept knocking on her mental door and barging into her dreams. She’d told Nomiki about those dreams. Most of them, anyway.
“Just… what did they do to us?” she asked finally. “What—what have they done?”
Nomiki’s eyes slid open and focused on her, their irises dark in the room’s subdued lighting. After a few seconds, their stare softened. Her sister straightened up, one arm reaching for Karin’s shoulder. “Hey now, it’s not all bad. We get to do some good, too. Especially you, now.”
“Yeah, but—why?”
Nomiki paused, her hand light on her shoulder. Her thumb brushed over its curve as her eyes drifted over Karin’s face, the movement absent and idle. “I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t. It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. And why now? Did something happen?”
“I don’t know. But I know they were definitely playing a long game—with us, anyway.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She paused. “Karin?”
“What?”
“I lied earlier. About not knowing. I didn’t want Reeve to overhear, but there’s something I have to tell you.”
A stirring of unease trickled through her gut, and her frown drew down into her face. This sounded like the old Nomiki she knew. The one who’d pick fights and keep secrets and hatch plans. She was just glad she was on the secret-keeping side now. “Are you planning to get us in trouble?”
“Only a little trouble, but he won’t let us go if I tell him ahead of time. Better to ask forgiveness later, right?”
Karin had heard the saying before, but, for some reason, it didn’t hold up under scrutiny just then.
Nomiki must have sensed it, because she appeared to consider the air in front of her, dark brows drawing inward in a frown. A moment later, she made a vague gesture for them to lean against the wall behind them.
“Settle in. I’ll tell you what I know.”
Dreams had a strange sense of time, and memory-dreams more so, apparently. After her last flashback to the night of their escape, her sudden reappearance back in her bedroom at the compound came as a cold shock. The click of the door jolted her dream-self awake, and Karin opened her eyes just in time to catch her sister’s shadow on the panel before it closed. The brief, blue-tinted light from the compound’s hallway that had briefly bisected her room cut out, reduced to the familiar line at the bottom of the door.
She stared at it for a second, her thoughts slow, muddled by sleep. Then her brows drew together in a frown, the residual memories from her dream-self funneling into her head.
September. Three months before their escape. Brennan had left—been killed, more like—and her sister’s visits had grown infrequent. Several months had passed since Nomiki had come to her. She’d likewise been ignoring her during the daytime, the two of them going about their activities together, but with little interaction. Nomiki didn’t speak unless she had to, and she rarely acknowledged anything—something their teachers seemed to attribute to sullenness. A natural response, owing either to her teenage years, the increased schedule of her treatments, or Brennan’s departure.
Karin knew her sister better.
Cool air touched her knees as she slipped out of the blankets. She tensed against the change in temperature and the sense of security she left behind as she made her way toward the door. Her bare feet stuck to the floor a little as she walked. When she got to the door, she felt for the knob, stubbing her fingers into it almost immediately. Light reappeared as she opened it a crack, and she paused for a few seconds with her eyes squinted into slits, waiting for them to adjust.
Then she opened it further, stepped into the hallway, and closed it behind her.
It shut with a thump that sent a jolt through her system. Both her systems. A sudden image of her cabin on the Nemina, and her under the covers of her bed, flashed through her mind. Her eyes narrowed on the door. The blue-tinged hallway light glinted in a semi-circle on the knob and put a diffused cast on her skin. With the lucid awareness she had in this dream, she felt free to notice more things. Already, a vague recollection of this memory was coming to her.
She turned her gaze down the hall and narrowed her eyes further.
There. Her sister had gone there.
Their living quarters in the compound had varied between the years and seasons. The young children, those more prone to reactions from their treatments, slept in pairs along the inner parts of the living areas, close to where the night nurses and clerks worked, along with whichever doctor had picked up the night shift. The rest lived in separate rooms near the outer walls along one side of the building, close to both the classrooms and the laboratories.
Which, in the hindsight her new dream lucidity gave her, seemed like a terrible idea on the compound’s part.
Who in their right minds put someone like Nomiki near their super-secret experiment lab?
But then, who in their right minds experimented on children, anyway?
A cloudy, green-tinted tile, a sign of the building’s older origin, took over the floor as she reached the end of the corridor. It made the floor both smooth and sharp, some of the grooves pricking into her feet where the grout had worn away or they didn’t sit right. Although they’d remodeled twice, the newer, more active sections always received more attention. The back parts, along with the sub-basement, never got more than the bare minimum. And, considering their original steel-and-concrete base… lately, the ‘bare minimum’ seemed little more than fixing leaks and shutting the doors on dead rooms.
That, in itself, struck her as odd. After their escape, she’d realized that something had been changing in the facility over the last few years. Less staff around. Fewer deliveries. Before, they’d meet guest doctors, nurses, education and janitorial specialists—but at the end, the facility was running on little more than a skeleton crew. Dr. Sasha was the only doctor she’d seen in the past year, and even then, she was frequently absent. And the number of children had dwindled, too. Just her, Nomiki, and a handful of others.
The hallway drew to an intersection, and she slowed, quieting her thoughts. She paused to peek around the corner, checking for security—they, too, had dwindled—then darted across the hall and down the next.
A change in the air pricked her skin. Her body had gone tense, aware of the empty space around her and the chance of discovery. Her nightgown made her feel exposed. Too loose, letting too much air up into parts normally covered by pants and sleeves. She repressed a shiver. At the next junction, she peeked around the corner, then held her breath and skittered across to the door Nomiki had left open.
A crescent moon hung above the treetops, along with a few clouds that trailed across the stars. For a moment, she paused, staring up, watching. A trace of her power stirred inside her, called away by the suddenness of the natural light, and a verse from an old poem slipped through her mind.
Oh stars and gentle night…
But her power ebbed a second later, settling back within her. She dropped her gaze from the sky to the area around her, shivering as her body adjusted to the change in temperature. The hallway’s line of windows threw rectangles of yellow light across the ground, making clear delineations of light and shadow. From outside, the hallway’s smooth colors were clearly visible through the glass—but it felt somehow alien, as if the change in perspective made it into a whole other world.
She snorted at the thought.
God, how melodramatic.
But, even with the lucidity of her dreaming, she couldn’t change its alien-ness. She moved further from it, drifting across the roadway and onto walking paths. Rough concrete changed to fine, hard-packed dirt, and after a few more steps, the first bristles of scrubby grass pricked against her feet.
The night quieted as she entered the shadow of some trees. Pines and cedar grew in small stands next to the compound, a part of the for
est edging in. She veered around a close-range vehicle—similar in shape to the gold carts she’d seen in old movies, though lacking a roof—and toward the corner of the compound. Except for the two red security lights in the upper floors, the building’s lights had stopped around its midpoint. Its back compartments rose up into the night, gray and boxy, riddled with shadows. A scattering of stars poked out over its top, giving her some reassurance. With a quick look back toward the squares of light on the ground and the hallway she’d left behind, she crept past the stand of trees and looped around the back of the facility.
After a few minutes, she found her sister near a bank of narrow windows, staring down into one of the basement rooms.
Light underlit her from the pane, giving her front a golden tint. She hadn’t changed for bed, instead wearing the same jeans and loose navy blue T-shirt she’d had on all day, and her hair hung in a coarse wave on either side of her face. She didn’t look up when Karin approached, but neither was she surprised.
After a few seconds of studying her sister, Karin bent down to a squat next to her side and peered in through the window.
She’d been in the room before. One of the many places they’d received treatments in, though that hadn’t been for at least a year now. Most of it remained unchanged, the floor and walls a victim to the same lack of remodeling as the rest of the older building, but a section of new equipment and work stations jutted out from the left-hand side, along with shiny new metal installation brackets mounted high into the concrete to hold a series of new wires. A new section of curtains obscured half of the space, but the end of a hospital bed poked out enough for her to see lumps in its blankets.
She perked up. “New person?” Her eager eyes spotted an empty life-support transit pod in the corner, its neutral sides nearly blending in with the dingy walls behind it. “Boy or girl?”
Nomiki didn’t immediately answer. For a second, she wasn’t sure if she was going to. Then, “Boy.”
“Our age?”