by K. Gorman
Her eyes widened as she took in their faces.
Kids. They’re all just kids. Just as she had been. Just as Nomiki had been. And Brennan and Layla and Terrance and Jiayi. The same smiling, happy kids that had been in the bulletin board at the front of the building. The ones who had made the science projects on the walls.
Everyone paused to take them in.
“Think we can get past them?” said a soldier near the front. “I mean, they’re kind of—”
That’s all he managed to get out. As if someone had flicked a switch, every Lost on the stairs looked up at once.
Then they came down in a silent flood.
Swears erupted around her. Those at the front managed to meet the wave with a line of defensive postures, and there came several near-synchronized smacks of flesh meeting body armor. Then the growling started. The light skittered over one woman, face contorted in rage, a shriek ripping from her throat in an almost animalistic sound as she lunged for the soldier blocking her path. Caught between the stairs and the door, with the disadvantage of the lower ground, the line faltered.
Hands grabbed her. She jerked at the contact, then stumbled as Marc hauled her back through the double doors. He steadied her and let go, putting himself between her and the action. An instant later, he had his blaster raised and ready to fire, the whine of its warm-up lost among the commotion.
Soo-jin slipped her fingers around her bicep. “Come back a bit, give them some room.”
A static-y numbness had risen in her brain. It took her a few seconds to register what she’d said, and even longer to will her feet to work. A cacophony rose from the front of the hall, screams and growls, the sound of nails scraping over armor, more than a few startled shouts.
Then, as she shuffled back, the sound paused for a beat. Movement caught her eye—back up the hall.
She looked back just in time to see a Shadow catch a soldier around the neck and toss him down the hall like a doll.
“In the back!” she yelled. “Shadows!”
Light flared. She bared her teeth and crouched into a fighting stance, fingers glowing like stars.
In the next instant, three blaster bolts took the Shadow in its chest. Another two slammed into one she hadn’t seen, farther down the corridor. Their bodies shredded like wisps in the air.
After a moment, she realized that the sound from behind her had stopped completely.
The people on the stairs lay unconscious, slumped where they had fallen. Blood smudged across skin and clothes, but not as much as she had expected, and the few bruises she saw looked old and semi-healed. In their midst, Nomiki was looking down at them, the stunner in her hand glowing a pale blue at its end.
“Right,” she said. “Well, that’s some excitement.”
“Someone check Singh,” General Brindon said into their comms. “His camera’s showing the floor.”
Up the hall, another soldier bent over the man the Shadow had thrown, who lay slumped next to the wall. They waited a few beats, everyone watching.
“Dead.”
The word struck her with a douse of cold. An uneasy feeling slithered through her stomach.
He’d just been there. Right behind her. If they’d seen the Shadow…
“Everyone remember to check your backs,” Nomiki said. “If she’s got control of the Lost, maybe she’s got the Shadows, too. Or maybe they’re just assholes. Regis?”
“It didn’t take him,” said the man down the hall. “Well—obviously, since we got it, but his eyes are clear.”
“Good.” Nomiki turned back up the stairs. “Let’s keep going, see what our welcome committee prepared for us.”
“Uhh… ma’am?” The voice came from a smaller woman, bent over one of the unconscious Lost. “This one’s got a note.”
Nomiki frowned down. “What?”
“In her lanyard.” The woman pulled it off the unconscious man’s neck and tossed it to Nomiki. “All folded up.”
Nomiki dropped a couple of steps to use someone’s flashlight beam. The plastic of the lanyard casing gleamed in the light as she fiddled with it, pulling a piece of paper from inside and squinting down as she opened it.
Her eyebrows rose. “Our quarry is sending us notes, now?”
She flipped it over, and a stony expression came over her face.
“What is it?” Karin asked.
“The front page of my Eurynome file.” Nomiki flipped it over again. From this distance, Karin could see what looked like a single, hand-written script on the back of the page. “What the hells?”
The man holding the flashlight bent forward. “Can you read that?”
“Yeah, it’s French. Says the equivalent of ‘bring the dawn.’” The flashlight underlit her face as she looked up, finding Karin across the distance. She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t need to.
Shit. She knows. She knows what I can do. Karin sucked in a breath. Had it been a secret before? She wasn’t sure—Alliance sure hadn’t kept it a secret, and Sasha had more access than they had to Karin’s records. As far as she knew, Sasha hadn’t designed her program, only implemented it.
Soo-jin’s fingers tightened on her arm. In front of them, Marc straightened, his silhouette limned by the flashlights at the end.
General Brindon’s voice crackled over the comms. “Tanaka’s not responding. Get the civvies out of there. Head back.”
Nomiki bent her head to her comms link. “What’s happened?”
“Get out of there. Now.”
But, just as Brindon responded, the air in the hallway gave a noticeable shift. A shiver crawled up Karin’s skin. She looked around, suddenly not trusting the hall’s dark walls and pitch-black flooring. A rawness pulled at the bottom of her stomach. Her light still glowed on the pads of her fingers. A couple wisps drifted through the air at her unease, as thin as skimmed milk.
Nomiki twisted her lip at the bodies around her, then turned with a sound of disgust, stepping back down the stairs. “You heard the lady. Let’s go.”
The sound of boots filled the tunnel hall a second later. With a glance to Marc and Soo-jin on either side of her, Karin turned back the way she’d come.
Then she stopped dead.
The door had vanished.
“The fuck?” A flashlight clicked on in Soo-jin’s hand, its beam skittering across the walls and floor, and then… nothing?
Karin leaned forward and squinted. It was like looking at a matte painting. The wall of black didn’t appear so much solid as hard to decipher. A trick of the eyes that made it difficult to pin down its exact distance. Soft enough for the flashlight to pierce into before it faded, but definitely there and definitely… immovable.
“Shit,” Nomiki said behind her. “What the hell?”
Hell, singular this time. A reversion to their Old Earth slang.
“It is Hell,” came a voice behind them. “One version, anyway.”
Karin whirled—but, wherever Dr. Sasha stood, it was out of sight.
“Walk into it,” she continued, the voice fading now. “I’ll show you what it looks like.”
A hush sounded behind her. She jerked her gaze back to the blackness as a thrill of unease crawled up her spine. Nothing visible had changed, but her instincts had started screaming at her. She stumbled back, eyes widening, breath drawing short.
We need to run.
“What’s wrong? Scared of the dark?”
The sound came again. Louder this time, at least to her. Her wrists shivered, and the light grew on her fingers like a beacon. The bottom half of her vision whited out like the flare of a star in a camera lens. A warm, tingling sensation crept into her palm and wrist, then traveled up the center of her forearm between the bones, stopping only when they got to the cuff at her elbow. She didn’t need to look down to know her arms were completely covered in white.
The briefest shift in the black, as small as an eye focusing, was the only warning they got. In the next instant, the hall was filled with Shadows.
/>
They didn’t just come from the black. Everywhere she looked—walls, floor, even the ceiling—Shadows sprung into being and attacked. She threw her arms up. Light screamed through her hands. As the first blaster bolts cracked in the corridor behind her, everything went full, blinding white.
When it faded, only wisps remained of most of the Shadows. The two her light hadn’t blasted, out of reach beyond the threshold to the stairs, struggled for a few moments. Five blasters cracked in unison, parsing them into smoke.
“Nice going, Rin.” Nomiki stepped over one of the fallen Lost on the stairs, pulling a piece of hair behind her ear. “How about—”
A soldier in the middle of the corridor let out a gasp. Then he jerked, bending at the waist. His blaster clattered to the floor. Above his grasping hand, clearly visible in the focus of the flashlights, tendrils of black fog drifted into the air.
Next thing she knew, something was pulling at her body. Her breath caught in a choke. A force pressed her down, bending her forward. Images snapped through her mind like static—darkness, the ruins, the raw scrape of breath at the back of her throat. Fingers of blackness bled from her skin like liquid soot, hissing where they touched her light. Her skin tingled like the buzz of a hummingbird’s wings.
For one, terrifying second, the whole room blotted out of her vision.
Then, with one final wrench, it came back.
Wisps of darkness rose in front of her. As she looked up, the Shadow they formed looked down on her. A misshapen hand, pieces still collecting from the atmosphere, reached for her.
She yelled and charged, bowling straight into the thing’s long, too-slender legs. They went down in a hard fall, pain shooting from her wrists, hips, and elbows as she failed to roll. The Shadow struggled on the ground as she scrambled to rise, a different kind of tingling hitting her arms.
Her light slammed into its chest like a silent meteor.
She staggered to her feet, only to be knocked down again as Soo-jin and her Shadow ran into her. A blaster clattered to the floor and skipped away from them, the noise lost in the roar of fighting that had erupted in the hall. Soo-jin squirmed, a hand going for the knife poking out of her pants pocket.
Karin hit it first. The light skittered across the hallway in a strobe and caught the Shadow where its neck would be. Though its edges disintegrated as it died, its ghost lingered in the air, creating a black smudge where its body had been.
Soo-jin scrambled back on her heels. When she reached Karin, they pulled each other up and huddled against the wall.
The rest of the corridor still struggled. Eight soldiers were down—more than half the group. As her eyes found Nomiki at the far end, dancing and slashing with her knives, she understood.
Not normal Shadows. Smart ones. Well, smarter, anyway, since they had never exactly been stupid to begin with. Weird, yes, and occasionally unpredictable, but always dangerous. Even in the controlled places she’d healed in, they’d still managed to hurt her, either getting in lucky shots or bursting out at such perfect awkward angles that it felt strategized. She’d always told herself that it was blind luck—kind of like swinging a bat in hopes of hitting a ball—but there had always been a few Lost watching her as she healed, and she’d always felt wary.
The soldier closest to them went down, thrashing. In an instant, his Shadow crouched over him, its hand pushing inside his head. Before she could raise her arms and summon her light again, it had vanished.
The man stilled.
A second later, with all the calmness in the world, he got to his feet again. After a pause, his head turned to her. She froze as dark eyes found hers, staring into her mind as only the Lost could do.
“Oh, Gods,” Soo-jin breathed by her side. “Marc.”
He lay facedown on the ground a few feet from them. Her heart stopped as she caught sight of the blood that dotted the area, visible only as a gleam of wetness that caught from the reflection of a flashlight farther up the hall. A blaster cracked up ahead, the flash of its bolt turning the corridor into a brief strobe of red, and she flinched down. Another soldier went down with a cry. At the end of the hall, Nomiki fought with fury, her Shadow backed into a nook on the other side of the door.
Fear rooted her to the spot. She could only watch as Soo-jin crossed the few steps over and bent over Marc’s limp body, obscuring his face from view.
“Alive,” she announced. “But taken. Black eyes.”
Thank you, Sol. Ignoring the battle, Karin started forward, light flaring on her hand—but Soo-jin put up a hand.
“Wait. We don’t know internal damage. Better leave the Shadow in.”
“What?”
“The stasis’ll keep him stable until we can come back. Without help, he might bleed inside. He hit his head pretty hard.”
Her jaw dropped. “You want to leave him here?”
“What I want and what’s logical are two separate things. This is better for him.”
“This is stupid.” The words choked in her throat. It felt like someone had sucked all the air out of her lungs. “That thing inside him is going to get up and walk away.”
“You think I don’t realize that? I’ve played enough survival horror. I know, believe me. But being Lost is better than being dead, right?”
Karin opened her mouth. But, before she could argue more, a commotion sounded up the hall. One of the remaining soldiers shouted in their direction, lifting his weapon. A second later, Karin felt a distinct shift in the air behind her. Even before Soo-jin’s eyes widened, her instincts went haywire.
She whirled, ducking the swing of a new Shadow that had appeared in the corridor. A blaster bolt took it in the chest as she stumbled back, sending a jolt of adrenaline straight to her heart. Beyond, the depthless black of the wall seemed to writhe.
I know where I’ve seen that before. A sudden flash of memory took her to the eyes of the Lost, and the way her light pierced only a little into them.
It was the same texture, except on a much larger scale.
Nomiki’s Shadow slammed her into the doorframe, and she bounced off, knives clattering against its metal. She jerked back as the Shadow lunged again and slashed at it on the backstroke, looking less like a human than a mannequin in her movement.
The first knife missed, but the second, thrown a split-second after the swing, sliced straight through its head.
Her sister retrieved it before it fell, flipping it back into position as she sprinted up the hall.
“Go! Get moving!”
Soo-jin, already up, jerked her arm forward. A rush of blackness erupted into the corridor behind them, and a soldier’s blaster opened fire. The walls flickered with a chaos of neon strobes, blaster pops echoing around her head like a double-string of firecrackers at a new year’s celebration. They paused only to scoop up a spare blaster that had fallen, and then, they were away, leaping over the unconscious bodies of the Lost on the stairs.
It was only when they’d got to the second hallway, and the chaos of the fight had faded from their ears, that they realized no one had followed them.
Chapter Eighteen
“Brindon, can you hear me?” Soo-jin flicked at the comms unit in her ear. “Hellooooooo? Brindon?” She swore, shaking her head as she pulled out her netlink. “Sol, I think comms are down. Netlinks, too.”
“Or maybe the Shadows got them, too.” Karin twisted her lip. “That’s a possibility, as well.”
Soo-jin gave a snort. “Don’t be such a pessimist. I’m sure they’re all right.”
“Yeah, Marc looked really all right to me.”
“Hey, man, for all we know, Marc’s having the time of his life right now, high as a fucking kite. Gods know what goes on in their brain when they’re Lost. At least his brain is still braining, and will still be braining when you heal him out of his current state and we get him checked out.”
Karin paused. “You… have a way with words.”
“It’s a talent, I’m told.” Soo-jin gave her a si
deways glance. “You better now?”
“Yeah, I think you distracted me enough.” She blinked hard. After their run, they’d found a small, inconspicuous room—electronics storage, by the stacks of labeled cords, bundled AV equipment, spare netlinks, and other paraphernalia that occupied the shelves. No light except for the glow of their comms sets and the few drops of white she’d kept cradled in her hand, its light hidden from the door they’d closed behind them. Soo-jin’s face shone pale next to her, though not as much as her own skin did. Hers looked almost translucent. “Fuck us.”
“Right?”
“Isn’t this the second time we’ve been skittering around in the dark, running and hiding? Third, counting Songbird?”
“Definitely the third.” Soo-jin shot her a grin. “You think I’d learn. Going along with you to visit crazy is definitely not a great idea.”
“Yeah, you definitely shouldn’t have come along.”
“But you’re glad I did, otherwise, you’d be here, skittering around in the dark, running and hiding by yourself.”
“Fuck.” Her jaw tensed, and she took a few moments, calming the sudden shallow panic in her breath. “I hope Marc’s all right.”
“And your sister, too.”
“I’m sure Nomiki’s just fine.” Karin leaned her head back, taking in more of the storage room. “We should probably worry more about ourselves.”
“Yeah, we should.” A smile peeked through the edges of Soo-jin’s lips. “Man, though, that lady literally told us to go to Hell.”
Karin paused. She hadn’t actually seen the doctor, only heard her—another ability, perhaps? Though the disembodied voice could be explained through mundane means, the setup felt a little too complex for the effect it had created. She doubted the old factory had built in more than a simple AV system, and based on the outdated quality of the equipment they currently shared space with, it seemed unlikely that Seirlin had provided them with more than the basics. She certainly hadn’t seen any fancy holo-ads on her way up, like she had at Seirlin Genomics.