by K. Gorman
Karin snorted. “Soo-jin, I’m the last person you’d have to explain difficult family situations to.”
“Shit, yeah. At least my family aren’t a bunch of child torturers.” Soo-jin winced, the skin around her nose crinkling up. “You know, I suppose my people aren’t so bad, after all.”
“If it takes comparing them to people who raise, brainwash, torture, and kill kids in the name of science to come to that conclusion, maybe they are,” Karin pointed out.
She nodded to the rest of the room. More and more people had shown up over the last few minutes, funneling through the door in ones and twos, helping out. Three medical stations had been set up, manned by people who looked like they knew what they were doing, and she recognized some higher-end medical equipment, more than just the typical medkits and monitors available on most ship and planet-side facilities.
Most everyone wore similar clothes, which spoke to a certain amount of bulk-buying or, perhaps, an in-house manufacturer somewhere in the city, but she picked out a few more urban-Nova outfits, likely from people who went to neighboring Pomona for work. Although a few looked their way, most ignored them.
“At least I got a clean break,” she added. “You’ve got a conflict going because you actually love them.”
Soo-jin nodded, also turning her gaze to the rest of the room. A quiet atmosphere had settled into the space, with most people murmuring to each other or providing medical care. Karin leaned against one of the banquet hall chairs, and Soo-jin had adopted her normal stance—feet splayed, back straight, arms crossed over her chest—as if she were about to spring into action and do something.
Karin opened her mouth, intending to say something more, but movement from across the room drew their attention to the door before she could.
Two people came in, a woman and a small girl. Soo-jin glanced over to them, twitched her head as if she intended to come back into the conversation with Karin, then stopped dead. The muscles in her jaw and neck tightened, along with the ones in her shoulders and the tendons in her hands and fingers.
For a moment, she held so stiff and still, Karin doubted she even breathed. The points of her fingers made indents on the skin of her arms.
“That’s my mom,” Soo-jin said, her tone vague and distracted, as if half to herself and half as an afterthought to Karin. It trailed off in the next part, deepening as her brows furrowed. “And that’s…”
A tightness moved into her cheeks. She closed her mouth, lips pressing tightly together.
Across the room, her mother had found her. She met Soo-jin’s gaze, and a smile flattened across her face, followed swiftly by a careful, shuttered look. The two had a silent exchange in their expressions, and the mother’s hand went to the girl’s shoulder. The other petted her hair in a protective, securing motion.
“Oh, fuck me,” Soo-jin said, her spine rigid. She blew out a short breath and stepped forward. “I’ll be right back.”
Er. Okay. That wasn’t quite the reaction Karin would have expected, given her mother’s apparent friendliness. And was that Soo-jin’s sister? She looked about four years old and did bear a striking resemblance to both women—the same sharpish jut of their cheeks, a similar shape and height to their eyes, though the rest of the girl’s face appeared more rounded and filled out. Baby fat?
As Soo-jin approached, the girl caught sight of her, and her hand went up, catching her mother’s wrist in a grip as her eyes widened. She took a few steps back when Soo-jin came even with them, her small mouth open, gaze dropping to take in the long strings of dreadlocks that fell over Soo-jin’s shoulders.
Soo-jin looked down at the girl for a long time, silent. Then, she said something, glancing up at her mother.
Her mother said something back, and Soo-jin’s face went stony. With visible effort, she made to relax it, then squatted down to the child’s height, a new, happy smile on her face as she spoke a few words.
At first, the girl seemed hesitant and cautious, her face unhappy and staring. She kept glancing back and forth between Soo-jin’s face and her dreads. Then, when Soo-jin pulled one of the locks forward, showed her the rings, ribbons, and other decorations she’d tied into it and offered it out for her to touch, the girl made a hesitant lean forward, her left hand reaching out, the right still gripping her mother’s hand.
Her face broke, and Karin heard the giggle from all the way across the room.
But, behind the happiness on Soo-jin’s face, she could still see her tension. And it seemed directed at both her mother and the child.
Right. I’ll have to get that story out of her later.
Blinking her eyes shut hard and rubbing the right one, she turned away, shifting her attention from the room to the city outside. A set of windows, coming from half a meter below the ceiling to about chest height, ran along the outer wall of the room, and a view of the buildings opposite put a picture of gray metal and prefab blocks in her head. Inside, and up on the tenth floor, the city no longer felt so large. The scale wasn’t so mind-boggling to her brain. She felt more like she was part of it rather than an ant walking down the street with everything dwarfing her.
It was a false sense, both the height and the belonging, but she appreciated the view. Especially when she stepped into close range of the nearest window and a square of actual sunlight touched the back of her hand.
She let her shoulders relax down and blew out the remaining breath she’d been holding.
Sunlight. It was wonderful to be under it after spending the past week and a half under the disc-light of Pomona. Disc-light was great and all—and exceptionally pretty at night—but it was a half-measure to the real thing.
But, when she relaxed, that tingling feeling from earlier slid back into her bones.
She resisted with a grimace, teeth clamping together as the sensation marched up from her fingers and into her wrists and forearms. But, when it slowed to her command, she paused.
A pocket of quiet had formed around her. Without Soo-jin by her side, it was like a thick, invisible curtain had slid between her and the rest of the room, slicing her neatly out of it. She could see others from the Nemina—Cookie and Reeve stood by the door, the former not quite hiding his quiet curiosity while the latter posed a more professional, attentive stance, and Nomiki had taken a position close to the more leaderly members of the family. Marc was close to her, also watching, his expression one of quiet, stoic attention that she had come to recognize.
She watched him for a moment, studying his face, the downturn of his mouth that meant he was thinking, the slight lopsidedness to his posture as he leaned to the left, the way his dark skin and clothes stood out from the dove gray backdrop behind him.
Then, she turned back to the window.
The energy tingled in her bones, waiting. Outside, the sunlight called to her.
Well, she thought, shall we try this again?
With the sun directly visible, and people all around her, it’d be easier to identify if she really did go into another dimension.
Careful, with a frown creasing her brow when she looked down at her hands, she gave the energy a little mental tug—the same way she called on her normal powers.
At first, it was sluggish to respond. The tingling stayed in her hands and wrists, little ant feet stamping on the insides of her marrow.
Then, with a dizzying sensation, something dislodged—like opening the upper door of a hangar or the roof of a levi car. And, after it had settled, the energy came together, rising up high and gathering to fall down on her, as if the city didn’t exist and she was the only one for it to fall on.
Her heart stuttered. A jolt ran through her, and a cry rose in her throat—but stuck fast.
The light grew stronger. Hotter. Brighter. Urging her to turn and look, like she was a magnet and it was her opposite pole. Unable to resist, as if someone else were pulling the strings, she lifted her gaze from the window to the lip of the high overhang across, then above that to the edge of the corrugated old p
re-fab roofline, the shine and glint of the solar array on top, past the first faded shades of blue that marked the haze of the sky, and locked her stare on Aschere, the brightest sun, which burned through her vision with a searing white light.
A shock zipped through her body—as if she’d touched an electric fence. Her breath seized. Every part of her stiffened, muscles turning rock hard, and every single tiny hair on her body lifted at once in a wave. She choked a small sound, a sucking breath that cut off halfway through as a voice spoke into her head.
“Tia, did you send the E-Twenty reports over to CC, yet?”
“No. We’re still waiting on your brother. When is he going to finish with the subject twenty-three exam cloud?”
The voices sounded like they were coming from right beside her—but they were also warped, as if a wall of rippling water stood between them. A man had spoken first, his voice a middling treble—and familiar to her, though from where, she couldn’t quite say.
Her hand had begun to shake, vibrating against the windowsill where she’d been resting it. Every muscle and tendon beneath her skin was tense, pulling against each other. She heard a rustle of something—cloth rather than paper—and caught a brief flicker of movement.
A heavy ringing filled her ears, and the sides of her head heated up. It felt as though the message were being transmitted straight into her brain by the sun, as if the auditory processors in her mind had been hit by a tight-beam message sent by a strong transponder.
Her breath came fast and shallow. Though she could still see the room at the edges of her vision and the city compound through the window to her right, the entire middle of her sight was taken up by the blinding light of Aschere. Tears streaked down from her widened eyes. The bones in her hands ached from the pressure her stiffened muscles put on them. She tried to retract, to pull back, to speak, to find Nomiki—to find anybody—but nothing would move.
“He’s been busy,” the man’s voice continued. “Something about corporate ass-kissing. He’ll be back next week.”
“CC will get the reports next week, then.”
There was a beep, this one a lot closer and louder than the voices, and she flinched, an image briefly flashing across her sight—a hospital-style lab set-up, the plastic railings of a bed, and a woman, not Dr. Sasha as most of her memory-dreams turned out, but a different one, with pale olive skin, strong features, and dyed brown hair pulled back into a loose, low ponytail at the back of her neck. The man stood behind her a ways, close to the glass doorway of the room, the outside windows of the building putting a bright glare behind him and an odd shine on the white labcoat he wore, but she could see the look on his face. It was conflicted, a frown building in his eyebrows even as a different emotion shone from his eyes—loss, sadness, need—when he looked to her.
She didn’t look to him. Instead, her back was turned, facing Karin’s viewpoint instead, looking down over the patient on the bed, her thin lips pursed together as she skimmed through the data on an older model netlink in her hand.
Behind her, the man made a gesture as if to clasp his hands together, then cut it off. His hands fell back at his sides.
“We should talk,” he said.
“No, Elliot, we shouldn’t.”
“But—”
“What’s there to talk about? You got what you wanted, didn’t you? Do you want me to absolve you?” The woman’s face twisted suddenly, a sneer baring her teeth, and her shoulders tensed up. The hand holding the netlink clenched. “Go find a fucking priest.”
He didn’t flinch, but Karin saw the blow. One hand came up again, hovering around the midpoint of his abdomen, fingers catching at the front of his coat, but, like before, it dropped a few seconds later.
Then, he left.
The woman twitched when the door swung. After a moment, her head turned to the side, eyes narrowing as they checked to see that he was gone. The hand gripping the netlink dropped to her side, taking the datastream with it. Then, it was like a great emotion overcame her. She sucked in a breath, as if she’d been hit, and stiffened, rolling her head back. When it came back down, a tear slipped down her cheek.
“Saints and sinners, they won’t even let me die in peace.”
Karin felt movement, as if the person—whoever it was—that had witnessed the entire exchange had shifted. A bandage-wrapped arm came into view, along with a blurring of straight, spiky black hair over her eyes, and Tia’s attention snapped downward. A smile slipped over her lips as she bent down, catching the injured arm in her free hand. Karin felt the touch on her own arm, light and tingly, like a dose of power that trickled into her veins.
“Don’t worry, they don’t know that you’re awake. But then, they don’t know much about you at all, do they? Which is entirely their own fault.” She sucked in another breath, and Karin heard a roughness in her throat. Her jaw muscles tensed, rippling the skin of her cheeks. She cleared her throat. “We’re going to be sisters soon. Did you know that?”
Then, she seemed to freeze, her arm on Karin’s, and the last word she spoke kept repeating in her mind—
“That? —that? —that? —that? —that?”
Then, slowly, Karin was aware of other noise. Voices shouting to get her attention, calling her name.
At last, someone shoved her. Hard.
She toppled sideways, the stiffness of her body finally broken as her middle ear registered the change in gravity and overrode whatever had kept her locked in place. The cry that had been stuck in her throat squawked out like a high-pitched parrot.
A hand steadied her, and she rocked on her feet. Sweat wicked parts of her skin. Most of her vision was blotted out, the angry result of staring into the sun. She took a dragging breath, her arms and legs shaking, and touched her hand to her face, freezing when she felt the skin. It was hot to touch, and the trails of her tears made a salt-water mess on the cheeks. Below, her bones were even hotter. The area behind her eyes felt worn, like the cord of an old lamp after it had been plugged in for a while.
“Karin? Are you okay?”
She felt more than saw Nomiki step closer, her sister’s hand coming up to rest on her shoulder. At the right-hand edge of her vision, before the retinal burn blotted out the rest, she caught a brief glimpse of her sister’s face, then her shirt. Other concerned faces crept in from the sides. She didn’t see Marc, but she felt him on her other side, one hand around her elbow, the other on her shoulder, steadying her. She smelled him, too, the mix of the same fabric softener they all used aboard the Nemina and the spice of his deodorant, along with a hint of sweat.
Her eyes squeezed out more tears, and she suspected these were more from the sun than any emotion she felt. She blinked hard, trying to clear the retinal burn, her eyes squeezing out more tears, and gave her head a shake.
“Sol’s Children,” she swore. “I… I don’t know.”
“What happened? Tylanus? Another flashback?” Nomiki’s voice was steady, even, close to her.
“Yeah, but this one was different. It felt like…”
Like what? She had no idea. Usually, memories like this happened while she was sleeping—and this didn’t feel like a memory. No, this was something different. Her arm had never, to her memory, been covered in bandages, and she’d never seen that doctor before. She frowned, giving her head another shake, then bowing it down to rub at her eyes—as if that would help.
When she finished, she straightened and shook her head again. “I think I need to go to a doctor.”
“Well,” Nomiki shifted, changing the light. “We’re done here. No use hanging around. Soo-jin, are you…?”
“Nope, I’m done. Let’s go.”
Chapter Five
“Of all the doctors, in all the clinics, in all the system, why do I get stuck with you?”
She halted just inside the threshold of the more-specialized medical clinic deep inside the FSS Manila’s warship bowels, her lip curling back half in amazement and half in irritation as she took in the sight of Dr
. Takahashi standing under the lights of the laboratory side. He looked thin and old in his labcoat, like an elderly stick insect. Not much different from the figure she remembered from her childhood—he’d always been thin—but age had erased some of the hardness she remembered in his features.
She’d known he’d be here, of course. Cookie, Soo-jin, Nomiki, and Reeve had all thought to mention it.
But she still found it incredible. She’d left him on Chamak Udyaan, for saints’ sake!
“Well,” he began, regarding her through the holoscreen he’d been reading. Charts and tables, facing backward in her perspective, glowed on the semi-translucent board, some of them moving from side to side like a marquee. One, close to the bottom, looked suspiciously close to a heartbeat. “Despite what you think of me, I am a brain specialist who worked closely with Project Eurynome’s programs. I was also, as it happens, on the closest planet when the Alliance abducted you, and thus very easy to fetch.”
Okay, so that was accurate. Chamak Udyaan was the closest planet to where the Manila had been, and it had likely been a convenient grab for them, since he’d been under house arrest in a basement lab of the Nova Kolkata base. She wasn’t sure he’d noticed the whole ‘house arrest’ part, however. He took a somewhat singular focus on his work. From what she’d both seen and heard, he’d spent over twelve hours a day piecing their program science back together, a schedule that had increased to sixteen once they’d re-discovered their varying program files in another lab’s network system.
She really couldn’t fault him for that. Even if he seemed to do it more from scientific curiosity than inherent altruism.
But suns, it just seemed so bloody impossible.
And—Dr. Tasuhada was here, too. She narrowed her eyes to where he stood behind a worktable on the far side of the room, a set of headphones half-cocked off his head so that one ear lay exposed. With his short and wiry stature, and the reproachful look he gave her, he looked more like an undergrown teenager than an actual, certified adult.