by K. Gorman
Her jaw tightened as his face appeared in the forefront of her mind. She hadn’t remembered Dr. Soichiro Takahashi until very recently, but what she did remember left a nauseous taste in her throat. She’d seen him again today, just after her shift. He was apparently redeveloping a treatment plan that would improve upon what they’d done to her as a child. A modified version to unlock the goals that had been seeded into her genes and coded into her brain, assisted by Fallonian doctors from other fields—some of whom she’d healed—to thread the pieces of her history together.
She wanted zero part in that. Which was why she’d taken a hard left the second she’d gotten out of the vehicle and veered away from where Takahashi had been waiting for her on the stairs, a netlink glowing in his hands.
Fuck him. She didn’t have to deal with him. And Fallon should respect that. They knew her feelings on the matter—and they knew just how far she’d go to avoid those feelings. Her run from the Alliance hadn’t been for funsies. Plus, Nomiki had made it clear where her loyalties lay, and no one wanted the kind of bloodshed that would happen if Fallon started threatening Karin.
Actually, Nomiki was the reason she’d wandered in this direction in the first place. Normally, she wouldn’t come anywhere close—for the same reasons she avoided Takahashi’s work area.
The J-ward was an off-branch of the base hospital. An older building, meant more as a long-term residence than the typical medical ward, it had been put into service to house the many they’d recovered from their raid on Dr. Evangeline Sasha’s pocket-dimension-laboratory the previous month. Or, well, at least the ones they’d deemed as potential threats. Of the six hundred that had been carried out, more than five hundred were bona fide Fallon citizens, with certified underskin chips and verified contracts.
They’d wanted Dr. Sasha to modify them. Had even paid for it—which at least explained where she had gotten the money.
Of course, they hadn’t agreed to being locked into stasis tanks and connected into a hive-mind experiment for a couple years. Most were on missing persons’ databases, or overlooked.
And now, they’d woken up to an apocalypse caused by the woman who’d imprisoned them.
Yeah. She’d avoided them, too. From what she’d heard, they’d all moved off-base by now, and, mostly, returned to where they’d come from.
This building, though… This housed the continuation of The Eurynome Project. Clones of those she’d known in her childhood, walking around with a better survival rate thanks to advancements in the project—but to her, it felt like seeing ghosts, or doppelgangers. Especially since she’d also been seeing the long-deceased versions of them in her dreams.
But Nomiki was hanging out in here, and she’d called her over. It was time to face her discomforts.
At this time of night—she’d arrived back to base well past nine—the halls had a calm, subdued feel to them. They were older, constructed with the same kind of smooth, mottled brown pre-fab flooring and simple concrete walls that dated them back to Fallon’s Alliance days. The walls kept to a plain-but-dingy white, but a mural had appeared in an upstairs hall, its depiction of a traditional orange-coated tiger making her wonder if General Brindon, who had a large, antique tiger painting mounted prominently in her office, had spent much time here.
Most doors she passed were closed. The occasional netlink could be heard playing behind them—all offline, but Fallon recognized that cooping up a hundred people with magical abilities and nothing to do was a stupid idea. The multimedia library had been downloaded to an old-school storage chip and passed around. They’d also been given art supplies, paper copies of textbooks—with a heavy leaning toward subjects that hadn’t been included in their schedules, since Dr. Sasha’s little ‘school’ had all the data on that, as well—and about fifty civil servants that came and went every day to meet and exceed any requests from the clones. All attempts to appease them since Fallon kept them under lock and key, on base with a twenty-four hour guard that Karin had bypassed on her way in.
So far, it had worked. At least for the non-lethal ones.
For the rest… they were in the basement. A fact that made her pause at the lip of one stairwell, her hand resting on the rail. Rain still dampened the ends of her sleeves, leftover from the walk to get here, but the building’s central heating had already warmed her skin.
As the stairwell door, slow on its hydraulic arm, shut behind her, a hush filled the air. She hadn’t noticed there had been so much background noise until it had stopped. She closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath, held it for a count of ten, then exhaled.
After a few seconds, everything ground into place.
Her light came to her senses first—its energy ran through her blood, neither warm nor cold, but registering in a similar fashion to both the way she felt the central heating and the way she could sometimes feel her blood. Ever-present, essential, and always at the back of her mind, ready to call, and noticeably stronger than it had been a month ago. Like comparing a pond to a lake.
Definitely a good thing.
A door opening on the upper landing made her jerk.
Smothering her sharp intake of breath, she listened to the quiet slap of footsteps as someone headed down her way. The door closed again as they got halfway down, and a few seconds later, a teenage girl appeared in a set of blue and pink pajamas, a towel around her shoulders and her head bowed down, hands up and busy managing the mass of thick, coiled hair that sprung out from her scalp. She gave a quick, surprised side-step when she noticed Karin, and her head snapped up, but she kept going, her bare feet navigating each step toe-first.
But a shock had gone through Karin the second she’d seen her face. Her breath caught. The girl, noticing this, slowed to watch her.
“Are you… Project Athena?” she asked.
She didn’t look like Layla, not exactly. And, last Karin had checked, the current Project Athena was younger than Layla had been. Her face had been visible through the window in a cryopod in Dr. Sasha’s laboratory.
This girl… she looked similar, but not the same.
“Artemis, actually—but close. Athena’s my sister.” She snorted. “You must be that chick everyone’s talking about. Light-lady?”
“Yes,” Karin said, her tone taking on a flat, deadpan quality. “I’m the light lady. And I don’t remember Athena having a sister.”
Project Artemis grinned. “Maybe not before, but she does now. My name’s Genevieve, by the way. And Athena is actually Toriana.”
Genevieve—did anyone call her Genie?—gave her an obvious up-and-down assessment, one hand dropping from where she’d wrangled her hair to the side, and Karin had a striking image of the differences between them. Both a little damp, she from the rain and Genevieve from a recent shower, both survivors of the Eurynome Project, and both under the protection of the Fallon Empire, but where Fallon’s hospitality had provided Karin armed protection escorts, gourmet meals, and a whole new line of clothing, Genevieve was under lockdown. A polite one, perhaps, but that didn’t make a difference. The Eurynome Project’s lockdown had been polite, too.
“Did you—” She faltered, cleared her throat. Her feet had still been poised on the top stair, one toe tipping toward the next step, but she pulled herself away to turn her front to face Genevieve, fiddling with the light-blue rain jacket she still held in her left hand. “Are you guys okay here? They treating you right?”
Genevieve’s eyebrows shot up. “Should you be asking that? You know there’s a camera behind you?”
Karin glanced back, locating the tiny black bulb in the ceiling, and shrugged. “Pretty sure I can ask anything I want. I am the light lady, after all.”
Plus Fallon hadn’t given her any indication that she needed to censor herself. Reeve made direct reports to both Generals Brindon and Crane, and she’d asked him more than once about the people housed here—as much as she avoided the place, she still had a need to know what was happening.
“Why? Is there so
mething I should know?” she continued.
“No. Not really. They’re treating us pretty nice here. I mean, some of us are getting these super paranoid theories that everything we’re being told now is a lie, but the smarter of us…” Genevieve shrugged. “There’s only so much bullshit we can eat, and we’d had our fill long before Sasha stuffed us into those pods.”
At her words, a tightness released in Karin’s chest. She’d been holding these new Eurynome subjects at arm’s length, seeing them as somehow alien from herself and Nomiki—as flat, brainwashed clones rather than fully-realized kin with their own thoughts and dreams—but by the sound of it, they’d been going through similar thoughts that she, Nomiki, and most of their classmates had been going through when growing up.
“Is there anything I can do to help with the paranoia?” she asked.
Genevieve bit her lip as she considered, her eyes rounding to the side. “Maybe. You got a netlink?”
Karin frowned, then fished the one out of her pocket and held it out. “I can’t give it to you.”
“I know. I just want to look a few things up.”
Genevieve let her right hand drop from her hair, wiping it on her pants before she took the netlink in both hands. Her brow furrowed as she slid the screen up.
Karin recognized her e-mail app briefly on the back, before it switched out for a net browser and a search function. She leaned back against the wall as Genevieve brought up what looked like news feeds, then made a quick scouting trip to an online dictionary app.
Things were difficult to verify when one had been as isolated and brainwashed as they had. Even though she and her old Eurynome colleagues had acquired a good deal of skepticism during their final years at the compound, they’d still launched themselves into the world beyond its walls with little knowledge of how it actually worked. The media they’d been allowed had been outdated by more than a century, and except for their science curriculum, their education had been blotted out by large blocks of censors.
Add to that the whole language barrier—System Trade standard had been their second language rather than a mother tongue, and many of the colloquialisms they’d learned had been either severely localized or, again, outdated—and their first two years of freedom had been spent in a frenetic state of paranoid linguistic catching-up.
At least these Eurynome Project survivors didn’t appear to have that challenge. Genevieve was either bilingual or spoke System as her mother tongue.
After a few minutes, Genevieve let out a low whistle. “Damn. You know, I’d kind of hoped this whole Shadow thing was a lie.”
“You haven’t been attacked?”
Karin lifted an eyebrow in surprise. That was unusual. They may have only been awake and out of their cryopods for a month, but the Shadows were indiscriminate and persistent. She shivered. And there’d definitely been Lost at Dr. Sasha’s new complex. They’d greeted the army when they’d arrived, along with Sasha’s disembodied voice telling them to go to Hell.
Besides, she didn’t think Sasha would let these people off the hook. If anything, she’d be more inclined to attack them. They knew about her and her new Eurynome Project.
But Karin hadn’t heard any reports about abnormal attacks, and Nomiki would have kept up on that sort of thing, so she assumed everything was normal here. Or, well, as normal as Shadow attacks in a building full of people genetically coded to wield magic could be. Which made her wonder—did Sasha have a range limit on her ability? She could control Shadows and Lost, but they hadn’t experienced anything abnormal with either since she and Tylanus had taken their ship from the rooftop of their lab and escaped from the face of existence into another of her pocket dimensions.
Maybe she was just busy with other things.
“Oh, no, we’ve been attacked—it’s more the statistics I was talking about. Is it really half the population that’s been hit?”
Oh. That. Karin gave a grim snort. “That’s an old estimate. It’s closer to seventy percent now.”
It still staggered her just how many people had succumbed to the Shadow attacks. She’d been used to math before, but seeing ten billion nine hundred million on a netlink screen and actually comprehending the scale of that number in terms of humanity were two different things. She couldn’t think too hard about it anymore. It just made what she was attempting to do seem even more impossible.
At least, the rate had slowed, in part due to her healing efforts, but mostly from the effects of governments and civilians to organize themselves against the Shadows.
Apparently, Genevieve’s thoughts had come to the same conclusions as hers had, because she gave another low whistle. “And you’re the only one who can heal them?”
“Yep.”
“Damn. We’re screwed.” Genevieve gave a short laugh as she handed back the netlink. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Hey—so, this is the first time I’ve seen you here. You been busy or something, or have I just been unlucky?”
“Yep. Busy.” She added a tight smile to placate the half lie.
“Ah. Well, come by more if you can. There’re plenty here who want to meet you.”
Karin nodded. Genevieve was already leaning toward the door, so she began to turn back to the lip of the stairs. “I’ll try.”
“Oh—one more thing.” Genevieve paused, her fingertips hovering above the door’s bar handle. “Is there a reason we’re all Greek?”
Karin frowned. With her brown shade of skin and coiled black hair, Genevieve was more visibly African than Greek—but then, they were all a hodge-podge of genetic mixes, which made her question even stranger. “What do you mean?”
“Our projects,” Genevieve clarified. “Artemis. Athena. Eos. We’re all named after Greek deities. What’s with that?”
“That…” She opened her mouth, then closed it again, her frown deepening as she flipped through what she knew of the new Eurynome projects—yes, they were all from the Greek pantheon. “We didn’t used to be. Nomiki and I are Greek, but Brennan was Celtic, and there were others, too. Aztec, Sino, Indus…”
“Maybe Dr. Sasha’s a theistic racist?” Genevieve suggested.
“I don’t think that’s it.” Karin chewed her cheek as she thought. “I think she’s going for something different than what the directors of my Eurynome Project were going for, if that makes any sense.”
“What were they going for?”
And here, she smiled. “Oh, hang on, what was it…?” She lifted her finger. “Oh, yes—they wanted to create a microcosm of old god and goddess stereotypes in order to tap into the higher pieces of human thought and find the genesis point of the human worldview.”
Genevieve gave her a dull stare. “Wow. Okay. Definitely wasn’t prepared for that.”
“Yeah. I had about the same reaction.” She cocked her head. “Did you guys lose memories?”
“What?” Genevieve frowned. “No. I mean, maybe, some of us, but—why? Did you?”
Hmm. It sounded like Sasha was definitely going for something different from what the other directors had wanted. That also fell in line with her surprise that Karin had lost memories.
“Yes, we did. And don’t worry—you’d notice if it happened. Huge blocks of missed time. Conversations not remembered. Friends you forget that others remember. That sort of thing.”
“Yeah, no, definitely none of that.” Genevieve shook her head. “I’m guessing that happened to you? That’s fucked up.”
“Yep. It is. Anyway.” Karin dropped down to the next step. “I’ll see you around?”
“Yeah. Come back soon. I’ll introduce you to everyone.” Genevieve flashed her a grin. “And bring your netlink.”
“Will do.”
With one last waggle of their fingers, they parted ways.
Chapter Three
Halfway down the flight, Karin heard the door close behind her, its sound softer than it had been before, and the hush of the stairwell fell over her again.
&
nbsp; Well, that went well. Her first proper introduction to one of the new Eurynome Project survivors, and it had turned out friendly. There was something to be said for facing one’s… well, not quite fears so much as uncomfortable situations that she wanted nothing to do with.
She’d never been good at socializing.
The light changed as she descended, and the smoothed sides of the hall switched to a kind of stubbly, painted concrete with a stark box light that sat partway up the wall—a signal that she’d gone below ground. The switch was a common theme in buildings on the base, she’d found. Almost like the other cues she could read in the designs now, here a patched modification to remove ductwork or rescale pipes, there a static remnant of Alliance-era relics covered over with paint. They’d had—and technically still did have—an entire hardwired communications system throughout most buildings in case of lockdown or a need for added secrecy.
Here, only a set of three slender pipes disrupted the smooth continuity. Painted a chalky white, they lowered from the ceiling and bent at a ninety-degree angle to funnel into the wall where a portion of quick-fix cement had been smoothed over to cover the patch.
Her footsteps made quiet taps on the stairs as she descended. At the bottom, it felt even quieter, as if all the hush in the stairwell above collected there. When she pressed the right-hand bar of the double-door, the resultant click startled her with its loudness. Warm, dry air blew against her face from the overhead vent. She paused to shrug off the light jacket she’d been wearing, added it to the rain-proof she’d kept draped over her right arm, and gave the hallway a quick skim.
She’d never been the greatest at directions. A strange thing, considering her chosen career as a licensed navigator, but outside of the cockpit and without course-plotting software, her skills were strictly standard. Especially compared to Nomiki, who seemed like she had a built-in, instinctual GPS-locator-tracker hybrid attached to her brainwaves.