by K. Gorman
“Is it transmitting?” Karin asked.
“Yep. I left it on, too.” The smear of dark color that was her lips grinned wide. “I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see whoever-it-is send a tracking party out over here.”
“We could sell tickets,” Nomiki commented. “Get rich.”
“Yep. Plus, we can find out where its signal’s sending to. Cookie’s out doing something with Marc. I’ll point him at it when he gets back, see what his hacker hands can do. What are you two planning?”
“Not a whole lot,” Karin said. “I just woke up. Think I might get a walk, then head back to Nemina.”
“I’ve gotta move out of your room at some point,” Nomiki said. “Might as well do it now. Got nothing better to do.”
“I heard you beat up a shitload of people in the gym today,” Soo-jin said.
“Yep.”
Soo-jin held out her fist to Nomiki, fingers crooked in Nova Earth style. “Yeah, girl.”
Nomiki bumped it. “Damn right.”
“Gotta keep them in line.” Soo-jin flashed her a smile. “Now, you got a line on some Chamaki street food? I’m ready to burn through my last credits.”
Chapter Fourteen
After over a week since their last appearance, the ruins came as a surprise.
Winter this time, with frost brindling over the tufted ground like clumps of lace, and a nip in the air that sank through her skin and dug into the bones of her exposed fingers. The sun made a bleary dot low on the horizon. Clouds overlay the sky in a kind of dingy, pale haze that reminded her of spoiled milk. Pollution rode high in the air today, visible as a dim fog. It left a taste on her mouth like paper smoke mixed with exhaust.
It came irregularly, this time of year. Stuffed into the hills from a city that didn’t sit anywhere close to the compound. She hated the stuff. It always made everything feel dead. Granted, everything was dead at this time of year, but the smog had a way of desecrating it. As if, left alone in nature, the rot and freeze of last year’s brush growth was somehow cleaner, more pure. A false dichotomy, she thought, but one that struck her nonetheless.
Of course, it didn’t make a difference to the stones. Their patterns weren’t anymore discernible without it. She paused as she reached the first one, her hand coming up to feel along its gritty surface as she followed its edge. The pale markings looked like chalk, almost. As if someone had done a shoddy job of erasing the blackboard from yesterday, and she could still see a smudged, partial imprint of the equations there. A bent line rose up that might be a horse’s head, or a weird kind of flag or spear. Others intersected a weathered patch that had been rendered completely invisible, coming out the opposite side in a pattern that, to her, seemed familiar.
Probably because I’ve seen in a million times.
Her not-so-secret secret had gotten out to the rest of the compound three years ago. Nomiki had always known, of course. Hells, she’d been the pioneer, always ten steps ahead of her when it came to subverting the compound’s rules. If she asked, Nomiki could probably tell her all about the ruins. Height, width, length, approximate weight, longitude and latitude, shadows in relation to the sun and time of year… but Karin hadn’t asked, and she wasn’t going to.
To her, the ruins were special. A place for her to come to. Her place.
Let Nomiki keep her forest. She’d hang around the ruins.
Besides, they were interesting. And she wasn’t about to let her sister ruin interesting by telling her about them. Gods knew the compound didn’t have anything for her to do. Not unless she wanted to get ahead in next semester’s schedule, which she didn’t.
A cracking sound snapped her from her thoughts. Big and echo-y. Distant. A tree in the forest? That happened around this time of year, some natural and some not. Nomiki and Brennan were bored, too. She’d seen them go off with some of the other children this morning. Well, heard them, anyway. There’d been a more natural fog at that time, which had turned them all into ghosts.
She pressed her thumb into the stone’s surface. Cold pressed back. The stones seemed to radiate with it, the same way they did with the sun in the summer. As if they knew it was the dead season and had a hotline right down into the underworld for it.
A loose theory of hers. She suspected they served a more multi-functional role than that, but most days, she gave up the more-logical theories and went straight into gut-directed fantasy.
Today, with all the fog, they felt like a gateway. Not brimming with energy like the fictional gateways on their TV serials seemed to, but holding a more subtle power. Undetectable by all scientific instruments, but knowable to those select few who, like her, held a deeper connection to the planet. If she took another step, she would be in a different world.
Another crack sounded behind her. Softer this time. More footfall than treefall.
Shit. She straightened up, hardening her face. Company.
The smog wasn’t so thick she couldn’t see the buildings. That would have been… unhealthy. The fog part of it had cleared several hours earlier, and she could see straight over the downslope and across the instep of tree growth to the compound’s pale roofs. They just looked a bit gray and hazier today.
The girl coming up the slope was a new arrival, but she lacked the shyness that usually came with the newbies. Only a month in, and she was already going over the wall like the rest of them. The thick jacket puffed up her torso, making her look like an odd, pastel-colored stork with the way her legs poked out from under it. The deep shade of her skin stood out against the off-white collar. On her head, the knit cap she wore sat askew, and a frizz of black hair poked out on each side.
She paused a few meters out, meeting Karin’s assessing gaze with one of her own.
“I’ve seen you before,” she said. “You come out here a lot.”
Karin quickly amended her original opinion of the girl. If she’d seen Karin out here a lot, then she must have been going over the wall within days of her arrival.
“So?”
“So nothing. It’s just an observation.”
Ten, Karin decided. Maybe younger. Unless she was just short. Either way, she didn’t seem at all fazed by the stony, neutral look Karin had fixed her with.
“Okay, then,” she said, not sure of what else to say.
The silence between them lasted for a few long seconds. They stared at each other, neither moving. Then the girl started across the distance, swaying on the uneven ground. “I’m Layla. Program Athena. You?”
“Karin, Program Eos.”
Layla gave a knowing nod. “Same series, then.”
Once again, Karin had to modify her original judgment. Athena. Goddess of wisdom. Strategy. She’d long suspected they took after their program namesakes, but hadn’t had much to test the hypothesis with. Nomiki might have an obvious namesake to pick personality traits from—her project, Enyo, derived from a consort of the Greek war pantheon—but not all gods had such detailed descriptions, given that so few had any active worshipers. Karin and Brennan’s, Eos and Arawn, respectively, occupied only a few sentences in the books she’d read. A project name like Athena explained the surprising, mature intellect in Layla’s young form.
As she approached, she gave Karin one last assessment then lifted her gaze to the stones behind her. “You know anything about these?”
“Nope.”
“The staff don’t, either. Well, nothing they’ll tell me, anyway.” Layla let out a huff that might have held a laugh. “They don’t like to tell us much, do they?”
“No,” Karin said. “They like to lie to us.”
That snapped Layla’s gaze back to her. A startled smile flashed over her lips, and her eyes appeared to glitter in a way that reminded her of Nomiki. “Oh, good, you are with us. Thought you were a dud like the rest.”
Like the rest of the children, she meant. Apart from her, Nomiki, Brennan, and a few others, the children at the compound kept their heads down and their halos unbent. They were all younger than her. Compli
ant. She doubted they believed everything the doctors told them, but they either believed enough to keep in line, or had decided there was nothing else they could do. She was guilty of that, too. Dr. Sasha herself had told her three different variants about why she was here and what the programs were for. She knew the doctor was lying, but there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it. She’d been born here. The compound was all she knew.
Maybe that’s why she came to the ruins so much. A distraction. A way to make herself take control of something in her life, even if it was just a fantasy.
Except… the ruins felt more than a mere distraction. Like they were important somehow. An anchor of some hard, concrete mystery that juxtaposed against the compound’s litany of science like a gatecrasher to a party.
She realized she was frowning. And Layla, whose project name was Athena, was staring at her with that too-knowing look again.
“No, I’m not a dud,” she said. “What do you know?”
Layla grinned. “Well, did you know that there were ruins at the Brazil site, too?”
Brazil. It had been destroyed, she remembered. One of the wars, or something, except she was foggy on the details, and there was a nagging piece in the back of her mind that told her that destroyed was the wrong word for it. It had been too big, for starters. Even her mental map of it, out of shape and vague as it was, had trouble believing the destruction of the country in any form, and a few web searches on Fallon’s net confirmed her suspicions.
Layla was also a new piece of the puzzle. She hadn’t lasted long. Karin remembered that. Probably too smart to be kept around. Hard to hide that much intelligence in one person, or, at least, that much awareness. Athena’s mythos had the goddess emerging fully-formed from Zeus’s brain, no growing up at all. If Layla’s program had mirrored that, she may have been displaying a much-higher-than-average prowess for quite a long time. And Karin doubted she had been quiescent for much of it.
Nomiki didn’t remember her. At all. Not her name, not her description, not even a vague twinge of recognition. For once, Karin had a memory that her sister did not. It did not give her any joy. Nomiki had gone hard when she’d told her, her face becoming an immediate mask, but Karin hadn’t missed the vulnerability that had flashed in her eyes—that specific blend of frustration and helplessness that she recognized all too well.
They’re taking our memories, Rin.
Out of all the things that had been done to them, that had been the worst. Between the confinement, the surveillance, the constant ebb and flow of treatment and recovery… all that, they had gotten used to. The deaths might have put a deadline onto their need to escape, but the stolen memories had ramped it into overdrive.
Several days had passed since they’d arrived on Chamak. She’d fallen into a routine of sorts—rise, workout, breakfast at the base’s main Mess, heal a bunch of Lost in the old storage warehouse… They’d moved the Nemina closer in, a fact she’d discovered after her shift on the second day when she’d found its old landing pad empty and had had a moment of panic. Late afternoons and evenings included a few trips to Chamaki restaurants, both on base and out, even once in Nova Kolkata’s downtown district, but she had put in a few extra hours of healing non-essential staff in her off-time.
It made her feel better to help.
She hadn’t seen Takahashi at all. Not since she’d woken him up. And Cookie hadn’t come up with anything on the metal ball’s transmitter. Something to do with the differences between Fallon and Alliance networks messing with his programs. Karin never gave it much thought—networks were networks were networks, right?—but it made sense. Fallon’s wizardry with ship and weapon design came from decades of near-isolated development. Even if the Alliance hadn’t necessitated different network systems for the sake of defense—the simple history of the empire’s development more than made up for it. It’d probably take Cookie a while to overcome the differences.
Cookie, though, was at least working on his problem. She was avoiding hers.
She liked to think her avoidance was strategic—a way of prolonging the inevitable as an excuse to compile her thoughts and questions on the matter—but, as the days passed, the glaring falseness of that excuse pressed against the inside of her chest like a slab of rock. There was something else that kept her away. The more she thought of it, the more a light, panicky feeling hollowed out her guts and made her fist clench.
The dreams. They’re what’s keeping me away.
There’d been three of them now, most similar to the first. Strapped down, green-tinged hospital rooms, screaming machines, I.V. drips. The doctor himself never did the same thing, but he was always there, and she was always panicking.
The last time had been different. No hospital room. No straps. No drugs. Just her and Takahashi, sitting in what appeared to be his office at Seirlin Genomics, staring at each other.
Somehow, that had been worse. It had also tipped her into definitely-had-not-happened territory, which made her think her brain was doing what brains did and compensating for trauma, panic, and lack of memory by constructing its own interpretation of their relationship. It had been short, creepy, and though uneventful in either narrative or dialog, filled with a rising sense of dread that she just couldn’t shake when waking up.
Gee, thanks, brain.
As if she didn’t have enough problems to worry about without more psychological shit going down. But she supposed that’s what she should expect from a childhood full of drugs and medical testing.
An hour of aimless wandering had put her through most of the familiar parts of the base. She moved on autopilot, the routes already memorized by routine. Not much else to do, and the trip to Nova Kolkata took the better part of an hour on the rail shuttle. She also didn’t have any money yet. Last night’s expenditure had been on the meager advance she’d received ahead of her week’s pay. Given time, she’d be back on her financial feet, but for now, all her time would be spent on base.
Which meant that, sooner or later, she’d have to confront Takahashi. Or, at the very least, see him.
Not today, though. I’m not ready yet. Need to get the questions prepared. Need to get myself prepared.
She snorted at the thought. The last dream had rattled her. Her shift in the warehouse had provided a good distraction, but, afterward, the anxiety had settled back around her shoulders like a hard weight, and no amount of walking could alleviate it.
After a while, she realized she had cycled through the same hall five times.
Sol.
She stopped and ducked toward a screen bulletin on the wall, pretending to check something on her netlink—a pretense which fooled precisely no one. Any other person may have gotten away with random wanderings, but not her. Word of her abilities had spread across the base like the wind, touching everyone they came across. Even here, in the relative lull of the nearly empty hallway, the two men she’d passed earlier had stopped talking to watch her.
After all her years of hiding, even the harmless quality of their curiosity made her skin crawl.
Nomiki must deal with it better. She was more used to the spotlight, albeit for a different reason. A woman doing her kind of work didn’t turn the kind of heads it used to, but anyone would stare when they found out what she could do. And, if what she’d heard was true, her sister was no longer holding herself back.
But she was digressing. And neither aimless wandering nor staring at her netlink were going to solve her problem.
She had to confront Takahashi, and she might as well do it now.
A long, held-in breath shuddered out of her. She pocketed the netlink, rolled her shoulders, then flexed and unflexed her fingers, trying to shake the malaise. After a few seconds and a muttered swear, she readjusted her course and headed for the basement.
Might as well jump right in.
Takahashi had been moved from his original cell, but only into another wing. A brighter room, and much bigger, with several large netlink hubs on a central table an
d what looked like bunks enough for ten. She wasn’t sure what the Chamaki military had used it for—interrogation? Extra-creepy-surveilled dorm room?—but two long windows looked in on either side of the door, and she spotted Takahashi the instant she stepped into the hallway.
The sudden, blind rush of cold stopped her dead.
Don’t panic. He can’t even see me yet.
Fighting to keep her breath, she flexed and unflexed her fingers again. His back was to her. He’d acquired a lab coat, which seemed absolutely absurd for his current situation, but she could also see other groupings of his personal effects around the room. Clothes, piled neatly next to a bulging bag on the floor, along with what looked like a toiletries kit and a few bags of Chamaki snack foods. Three netlinks stood open in front of him, one big, one medium, and one small. The rest of the table contained a smattering of office supplies, both digital and paper, and a coffee mug.
He hadn’t moved as she’d been staring. For a few long seconds, she almost thought he was a statue—but then the coat pulled tight across his shoulders as he leaned forward over the table and activated the largest netlink’s keypad. The screen shivered, and, letter by letter, lines of text appeared, making the document shift upward as he hit the return.
Her hands had pulled themselves into fists at her side. When they started to tingle, she forced them to open, stuck them into her pockets, and moved toward the door.
Two guards stood outside the door, an improvement on the single one he’d had when she’d last left. They both looked up as she approached, and the closest gave her a little nod. He’d been on duty in her warehouse a few days ago, helping move and clean up after the Lost. His sharp blue uniform had a worn edge to it, which matched the darkness visible around his eyes. His companion, who she did not recognize, had a similar look.
“Your sister was just here,” the first one—Manoj, that’s his name—said, making a gesture toward the other side of the hall. “You just missed her.”
“Nomiki?” she said, then winced. Of course he meant Nomiki. What other sisters did she have? “Did she need something?”