by K. Gorman
“Easy now, all’s not lost. I’m checking your status.” Tia didn’t even look back when she spoke. A scanning graph jiggled up on the screen in front of her, eventually settling down into a wave pattern that was a close match to a second graph in a different color below it. “You’re coming in at a similar wavelength, so I assume that the little seed I planted in the program has come to fruition—at least within you. A straight Eos-build wouldn’t be able to do this.”
Karin opened her mouth, suddenly confused. “What little seed?”
“About thirty sequences of genetic code, hidden with a Myerlin body, that fuses the relevant parts of Maya’s—Program Delphi’s—development into my own,” Tia answered. She folded her arms across her chest. “I reworked it into my own program. And, since you’re not in the Cradle and we are still talking, I’m guessing Elliot and Bernard continued on with their plan to use my program as the base. That’s likely how you’re able to connect so well.”
“…base?” Karin asked.
“Yes. Like a base mold, except for genetic modification.” She tucked an errant lock of brown hair behind her ear, frowning into the space between them. A few seconds ticked by.
“So, I am part of a creation mold? But you said—”
“You misunderstand. Every program uses Eurynome as a base mold—then, things are tweaked, stripped, and modified, and they are no longer that. The seed I planted merely opened the door for reversion, which allowed you to access Eurynome’s settings. You’ll have changes, yes, but if you want the full power you need to oppose Chaos, you’ll need to find my Cradle and complete your transformation with me.”
Karin’s mouth dropped open. She closed it.
This was good news, wasn’t it?
“Okay. Where are you?”
Tia gave her a small, sad smile. “That’s the problem. The Cradle was designed as an isolated system. I don’t have access to anything beyond its system, with you being the sole exception.”
Fuck. Of course. It couldn’t be that simple.
“I doubt they would have moved me from Earth.”
“Well, that narrows it down.” She didn’t know the surface area of the Earth, but her brain told her it was one of those blindingly large numbers that humans had trouble comprehending.
Tia gave a small shrug. “If it helps, I last remember being in Brazil. I suspect I’m still there. It was hard to move.” Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Elliot would have liked that.”
The Brazil compound, then. Perhaps Cookie could get the address.
“Why are you in the Cradle, anyway? Why were any of us put in the Cradle?”
She assumed that’s what was happening, anyway. With the setup they’d uncovered, and Takahashi and Tasuhada’s theories about the device, along with her flashbacks and missing memories, it wasn’t hard to piece together that conclusion. Tia had been surprised that she wasn’t in the Cradle, after all.
Tia laughed. “I’m here because two narcissistic brothers thought to pluck my memory and lock it in a cage because one could not bear to get over it and find another girlfriend, and the other so desperately needed a structure for their little world.”
A smile ghosted across her lips, brief and saccharine. She stretched out a hand, and power radiated from it in a wave, a mature twin to the second energy that burrowed and entwined itself in Karin’s nerves.
The world shuddered around Karin. It felt so close, so recognizable. Like watching a puppet and realizing its strings were just within your reach.
“So, I find you, you complete my transformation, and I can beat Chaos?”
Provided this all isn’t just some acid trip I’m imagining in my head.
“That last part will be up to you,” she answered. She closed her hand, and the world stopped quaking. “I also have a price.”
Of course you do.
“What is it?”
“I want to kill Elliot and Bernard Corringham and break down whatever little echo-chamber monstrosity that they have created.”
Tia’s face had turned dark, her upper lip curling back. Her hands had tensed at her sides—not into fists, like hers usually did, but claws. Her jaw muscles worked, as if she were grinding her teeth.
“What a coincidence,” Karin said. “I think that’s on my to-do list, too.”
Tia glanced up at her, seeming surprised. “What? But Eos…”
“You’d like my sister, I think,” Karin continued. “Program Enyo. I think she may have some ideas for murder that you might not have thought of yet, though I’m guessing you’ve had some time to dwell on it.”
She glanced around to the lab’s outdated features.
Hells, some of this stuff is more than fifty years old. We’ll be lucky if the Corringhams are still alive at this point.
Hopefully, they’d gone for the medical gene extension programs. Working for a company like Seirlin, she couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t.
“So, we have a deal?” She held out her hand as she asked, raising it to Tia who was still across the room.
The woman stared at it, an intense, unreadable expression on her face.
Then, she shifted. In the next second, she was right in Karin’s face.
Karin didn’t even blink as Tia’s hand slipped into hers, the grip surprisingly strong.
“It’s a deal.”
A draft whispered across her shoulders, and Tia’s gaze shifted to something behind her. “Your hold is weakening.”
“My hold?—Oh.” While she’d been looking away, the rest of the lab had vanished behind her, replaced by darkness. There weren’t even any walls.
Ice crawled through her gut as she looked into the blackness.
“You’ll lose it completely, soon,” Tia predicted, her voice much closer to her ear—but, when she snapped her head back, the doctor was in the same position, neither closer nor farther.
The world shivered around her. She sucked in a breath as the light tripped, the screens and surfaces sliding into each other like watery ink across a canvas. A hint of nausea curled up in her stomach, triggering an acidic smell in the back of her throat. She was aware of something coming up behind her, but she found herself unable to turn. Tia’s gaze tracked it.
“Come find me, little light.”
Inky-black hands slid around her side, reaching up to her collarbones. Every hair on her back rose in a wave as she tipped back into the Shadow, feeling its body both as a strong grip and a tingling fog. The scene snapped. She felt her own power rise up, intermingle with it, weave through the world like a strand of ivy—
She jolted awake, sides heaving, eyes snapping to the corners of the room. Beside her, Marc also jumped.
“Karin?”
She stared at him, eyes wide, breath sputtering. He sat in the chair Soo-jin had abandoned, a netlink in his hand, dark eyes flecked with concern.
Okay. So all that was definitely a dream. Or something.
“Hi,” she said.
Then, her stomach rocked.
She had just enough time to suck in a breath and lunge for the other side of the bed before the nausea bubbled through her guts and she threw up.
Chapter Seven
Nomiki passed the waste bin over. “Well, I did tell you—”
“Oh, shut up.” Tremors wracked her, making her teeth chatter together. She wasn’t cold—not really—but the treatment had done a number on her.
As she’d known it would.
She’d already hit the bed on her first bout of nausea—in front of Marc, no less. Those sheets were currently in the ship’s linen service. The new set felt scratchy, as if they’d been bleached too hard, but they provided a warm weight along with the blankets.
She shivered again. This time, when it grew into a prolonged shudder and that slivery slickness returned to her stomach, she grabbed for the bucket.
Just in time.
“Ugh.” She coughed, spitting out the acidic-tasting mucus that was coating the back of her throat. As a warm, tangy scent
came to her nose and muggy air pressed against her face, she decided she didn’t want to look down.
Why did I do this, again?
On the flip side, it seemed like a really bad idea—but then, she had seen that woman again, hadn’t she? And she had gotten some very useful information, and even a direction to take against Sasha.
It had worked.
Except Nomiki didn’t seem at all interested in what she’d seen.
Marc had stayed with her a long while, but someone had called him away. Soo-jin, too. They had watched a couple of dramas together. Now, it was just her and Nomiki. Her sister had changed into the shipboard casual uniform—a gray and black ensemble that looked like a mix between exercise sweats and hospital scrubs, with a red threading that highlighted the Manila’s colors. She stood by the bedside, face neutral, one finger tapping against her thigh as she slid her gaze from Karin to the bag that hung on a hook above her.
“That’s almost finished. Maybe another five minutes. We can take it out, then.”
Both doctors had been around when she’d woken up. But, with her out of the proverbial danger zone—she hadn’t technically been in one, but Takahashi had stuck around to watch her brain’s rewiring—they had left. To give her privacy, Tasuhada had said, but she suspected Takahashi had tipped him off about the impending vomit situation.
“Fuck me,” she said as another set of tremors wove through her body. “Why did I do this?”
“Desperate people do desperate things.” Nomiki lifted a hand up and squeezed her shoulder, giving Karin a slip of a smile that echoed her earlier ‘I-told-you-so’ manner. Then, the humor dropped off her face again, and that assessing look returned. This time, Karin realized it was for her.
“What?” she asked when Nomiki had been quiet for a few seconds.
“Nothing.” Nomiki hesitated. “Well, no, not nothing. I thought it over—your reasons for doing this. It wasn’t illogical.”
She gave her a flat stare. “Gee, thanks, sis.”
“No, really.” Nomiki made a waving motion with her hand. “I understand what thought process went into this becoming an answer. But I can’t understand why you would go back to something that hurt you so much.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I feel like there’s a domestic violence parallel in there that I don’t want to touch.”
“There is. It’s a cycle. And yes, I thought about that, too, along with your history of childhood trauma.”
Your history? That’s our history, sis.
But Nomiki was in analysis mode. It wouldn’t be good to stop her now.
“You’ve thought about everything, haven’t you?” Karin asked.
Her sister tapped the side of her head with a forefinger. “That’s what I do.”
She meant it as a joke, Karin could tell, but her expression remained dead serious. That’s how Nomiki was around her—she didn’t try to pretend, didn’t try to fake the normal expressions when they were alone. Not anymore, anyway. And Karin knew her well enough not to double-guess the context too much.
“I know.”
The room was silent for a few moments. A shudder ran through her again, and her grip tightened on the sides of the waste bin. There wasn’t much left in her stomach. Some juice, perhaps, or what remained of the soup Marc had been trying to feed her.
Despite herself, she peeked inside.
Gods. The vomit had an orange tint to it.
She almost lost it at that, but managed to rein it in. When the shivers and the quaking threads of nausea passed, she allowed herself to sink back onto the raised portion of the bed. She let out a breath as her back relaxed, her lower spine achy and stiff from hunching over the bucket and heaving.
“What would you have done if you were in my shoes?” she asked. “Would you have done this?”
“Yes, but I’m different. I don’t feel those things. Not like normal people do. The treatment isn’t as risky for me.”
That’s true. Even Takahashi had implied such, in a roundabout way. Seirlin had adjusted the way Nomiki’s brain processed things as part of her super-soldier modifications. She didn’t feel fear, for example. Not in the blind, all-encompassing way normal people could.
They hadn’t done that for Karin. Not with emotions, at least.
This new thing…
“That woman said she was Eurynome, though,” she said. “And it didn’t feel like a dream.”
“You have a weird relationship with dreams,” Nomiki said, “You also just basically tripped a boatload of acid.”
“Yeah, well.” Karin threw up her hands. “I’m just trying to stay sane. That one, at least, was controlled. If this vision shit happens again like it did earlier—”
“I hear you. And I am listening.” Nomiki paused, her brows coming together. “Do you think it was real?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll have Cookie search for her in the records. I’ve never come across her before, but that could mean that she’s been hidden. Which, in case you were wondering, would make me really want to find her.” Nomiki gave her a smile.
“Ask Takahashi,” Karin prompted, catching her sister’s forearm with her fingers. “Harder to rewrite brains.”
Nomiki snorted. “You have a better relationship with him.”
“Yeah, but he’s afraid of you. Less likely to lie.”
Her body gave a hard shake. Nomiki gave her a pitying look. Then, with a gentle hand, she pried Karin’s grip from her and replaced it on the bed, smoothing her other fingers overtop. She held it there, falling into silence.
Dr. Tasuhada’s half of the clinic-lab was shut off, leaving it dark and shadowy, and Dr. Takahashi’s side had only the main overheads on. Her stomach rumbled, and she tensed, breathing in shallow breaths, but this time, it didn’t do anything. As the activity in her stomach subsided, she relaxed, letting go of a deep breath.
After five minutes, Nomiki reached over. Karin held still as she fiddled with the I.V. in her wrist. There was a quick jab of pain that she gritted her teeth against, and then a slow, throbbing ache filled the space under her skin. Nomiki hung the end of the I.V. back through the hook above and applied a sticky bandage.
“Sleep it off, sis.” Her sister gave her a pat on the arm, then made to leave. “We’ll be at the gate in twelve hours.”
Eleven hours and a hot shower later, she was feeling much better. Still shivery, but she suspected that had more to do with hunger as opposed to any ill after-effects from the treatment. As far as that went, she was doing well.
And the ship, at least, was keeping her peppy.
She’d been on it once before, but not for very long—well, at least, not when she wasn’t walking through it in a dream-state, tripping acid. The Alliance had taken that opportunity away from her by kidnapping her with a transporter, last time.
Now, unsupervised, she allowed herself to stop and investigate every little thing that caught her eye. The corridor had a red and black pattern entwined in bands along the ceiling and visible in the accent color schemes along the gray base of the hallway, modeled after a variety of venomous snake from Tala, Fallon’s smallest planet. The whole ship had been, she understood, despite it serving as an orbital defense for Fallon’s largest planet, Chamak Udyaan, instead of Tala. A way to keep them both aligned, even when they looped to opposite ends of their orbit as they were starting to about now.
People passed her in the hall, the occasional soldier giving her a wave or a hello. She stopped in for coffee and five pre-packaged fruit buns at one of the cantina break rooms—three more than her usual, but treatment had made her hungry—and re-emerged feeling fortified. Then, she followed the signs on the walls to the bridge.
Even before she entered, she knew they were at the gate.
A tremor rushed through her when she caught sight of the silvery light through the bridge.
It had been seven years since she had seen the gate. Giant, it loomed against the starfield as if the space behind it had bled all its w
ayward light into a vertical petri dish and stuffed it on its end—smooth as a bowl of mercury, and contained by the gate’s more mundane metal and pre-fab restraint and generation barriers. The Manila approached it dead-on, as per gate navigation protocol, which put the control station at the top of the loop. A light flashed on its right side, indicating that the gate was active and under operation.
Just in case the giant glowing circle, large enough to swallow even the most massive colony ship, wasn’t obvious enough.
As tempting as it was to continue staring at its alien glow—and the odd light effect it created across the Manila’s bridge—her attention slid back to the rows of activity below.
She was a pilot. She couldn’t help herself. And, after getting such a brief glimpse of the area last month, she’d been itching to let herself down and poke around at the displays. The Manila’s bridge was massive. Easily twenty times the size of the Nemina’s paltry bridge—hells, the Nemina’s was so small, it could hardly be called a bridge. Desks and tables spread out, seven rows deep, each bolted to the floor and with panic station seating available. Holodisplays and netlink screens glowed in varying hues, color-coded by function. Everything was top of the line. Military. Cutting edge. Light years better than anything she could find herself, retail or otherwise. Even the holographics looked nicer than she was used to, and Cookie had a twenty-thousand-credit netlink she’d borrowed a few times.
She eyed the floor below. There was an obvious railing to prevent random people from going below, with the only way down guarded by two soldiers on either side of the stairs, but she wasn’t just some random person.
General Ramesh would let her poke around. She was sure of it.
Hiding the grin that wanted to spread across her face, she pushed herself forward, angling along the curve of the back wall that led to the bridge’s command square—an open booth of holographics and standing desks located next to the manual override wall that allowed the commanding officers several interactive views of the ship’s varying dashboards without interfering with the technicians below.
But, just as it came into sight, a white uniform caught her attention, sticking out among Fallon’s dark gray base colors like a lawn bowler at a Chamaki ringball tournament.