by K. Gorman
They’d been polite since she’d given up her youngest child―well, she had been polite, and he had carried on as usual. She tried to avoid him where she could. Not the easiest with him almost constantly at the compound, these days, but he tended to keep to his secret basement.
He’d been doing a lot of work on the Cradle.
“You were looking at the plant?” He stepped forward and made a gesture to the ficus. “What do you see?”
Ah. So they weren’t going with pretenses this time.
She steeled herself, jaws clenching together as she turned back to the plant. Now that she was aware of it―aware of its wrongness―it grated at her senses like a bad void.
Her powers longed to tear it apart.
Aware of Bernard’s attention on her, she forced herself to relax. “Did you do this?”
“Yes. What do you see?”
He sounded breathless, excited. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen him like this. He’d come closer, slipping silently across the floor, his body blocking her in now.
She picked up one of the leaves and examined it. “It no longer belongs to this world. It has a different…dimensional material to it. What did you do?”
“Just a small experiment with the Cradle.” He stepped forward, and she shifted away before he crowded her too much, moving back. “It really doesn’t belong anymore?”
“Really,” she said. Her teeth gritted together. Again, she forced herself to relax. A deep part within her, one she’d long suppressed, was rebelling―it did not like the ficus at all. “What did you do?”
“Just a little experiment,” he said again. “I didn’t expect it to work.”
She’d known him long enough to tell when he was lying. But it didn’t matter. She already knew. Both him and his brother had given enough clues over the years for her to piece it together.
He’s figured a way to connect this world to a Cradle base, and he’s going to change it. This isn’t about making a hive mind anymore. It’s about using that hive mind to change the world to his liking.
Her jaws clamped together again, the muscles rippling in her cheeks.
This is wrong. Everything about this is wrong.
Watching his back, she felt the Chaos side of her slip forward, once again triggered by the wrongness of the plant.
I have to stop it. I have to stop him.
She swallowed, taking another step back.
This time, though, her attention caught on Bernard himself.
As she studied him, the static came back, etching over her vision in stops and starts, like watching a puzzle put itself together, piece by piece.
Except that this puzzle was very, very wrong.
I have to stop him. I have to protect my son.
“I’m conducting some examinations today,” she said, changing the topic. “Brennan and Nomiki. Will you be joining us?”
There was a pause.
“Brennan? Project Arawn?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to inform you―he died this morning, during treatment.”
She frowned. “He wasn’t supposed to get treatment until we got a look at his head. He was having trouble with the treatment after his concussion.”
“Unfortunately, our schedule couldn’t allow for it. Don’t worry. We managed to archive his data.”
Cold flooded her chest. Since when did they have a schedule?
Of course, she knew the answer to that―ever since she’d sacrificed her daughter to him.
I have to stop him. Whatever he is doing, it’s not good. I have to protect my son.
But, to do that, she’d have to play along. And she’d have to explore as much of the Eurynome Project’s end game as she could.
The gods of this world are dead. If I want to change it, I need to make new ones.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Evangeline stared out the window. The two suns were little more than large, particularly bright stars this far from Sirius’ center, but the magnification and thermal atmospheric tech worked well to keep the atmosphere outside of her office a balmy twenty-five degrees, even in this region’s supposed winter.
It reminded her of Hawai’i, that way. The one time she’d been there.
She sipped at the rim of her coffee, watching Chamak Udyaan’s perpetual cloud-cover shift slowly above the compound. It was quiet today. Streaks of rain pattered the windows, the outside storm occasionally making the panes rattle. The office, at the top of the building, just next to the access for the roof, lifted her largely out of the way of student intrusion. In the distance, she heard several of the girls talking loudly, their voices carrying up from the yard―under the eaves, she suspected―and a part of her chest contracted.
She used to like visiting with the children. Being among them. She was a creation goddess. It was in her programming.
Now, she was just tired.
She closed her eyes. Even now, in her office, this far from him, she could feel him in the background, inserting himself ever more and more into the DNA of the universe.
His touch was like a cancer, turning everything alien right before her very eyes.
It ate at her constantly. Everywhere she looked, it was wrong. Off. Like looking at your mother’s face and realizing that it was a stranger wearing her skin and moving her body and thinking her thoughts. Violating her being.
And the whole of the universe was just going along, living through its motions, unaware that a puppeteer had cut a hole in its back and changed its strings.
She felt like a rogue ant, walking on its surface, watching it happen, and tasting the wrongness beneath her feet.
I’ve already given you one of my children. Must I sacrifice another?
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘I have to stop him.’ What did she mean by that?
The thought had been nagging at her brain for a while now. The comment had been so offhand, tagged on like an afterthought, or a mantra.
And Sasha’s actions had been…
Well, it didn’t look like she was particularly happy about having to trap children in tanks and connect them to a giant hive mind.
For someone hellbent on rewriting the world, she sure was going about it a strange way.
“There’s something more to this,” she said. “There’s gotta be. No one just up and decides to rewrite the world on a whim. She said she was protecting herself before, said that I’d understand.” She frowned. “Do you think she was referring to one of the Corringhams?”
By Tia’s memories, she’d bet it was Bernard Corringham. Of the two, he seemed more…ambitious.
Plus, it was him who’d intended to create some sort of weird monotheistic deity by running every single one of the mythological archetype programs into a single mind together.
For himself.
“Fuck, do you think he actually managed to do it?”
I wouldn’t put it past him. He was patient, methodical, ambitious, and had no care for human life other than his own. He’d even throw his own brother under the bus if it suited him. He hid it well, but he was a monster.
A few memories flashed across her mind. As far as she could tell, nothing overt about Bernard Corringham’s speech, manner, and actions set off any alarms, not at first. It was only after the fact that Tia had discovered things weren’t all that he presented them to be. Little things, like slightly off-base purchases for the Project that didn’t have immediate connections to the Project goals, or a discovery of a different set of funding arrangements and experimental prototypes that he had been working on.
But Tia had been well into her illness by that point, walking around with a cane and knee supports, and he had been dangling Program Eurynome in front of her like a silver lure in a trap.
She was just as guilty of putting her own life first as he was.
Then again, she’d never actually killed anyone. Not until recently, when she’d transferred into Karin’s body.
“Fuck,” Karin said. �
�If that’s the case, we need to sit down and talk with her. There’s more going on than we presumed.”
If she’s gotten to this point, she may be stuck on her course. It looks like she’s been at this ten years, maybe even twenty. She may not want to talk. She may just want this to be over.
“Yeah, well, she can join the club.” She shook her head. “I hate to sound cliché, but―we will make her talk.”
If there was something else going on―if Bernard Corringham was responsible for Sasha’s drastic change in behavior―then she was going to get to the bottom of it.
He was already on her kill list, anyway.
Following the cable, she turned a corner. A second later, a child appeared at her side, walking along as if she had always been there.
She glanced down. “Einine?”
Einine was a small, slender girl. Caucasian, with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. The Project had killed her when she was twelve.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said.
She’d been Program Scathach. In the war pantheon, like Nomiki.
Which meant that, most likely, she’d been helping herd the living Eurynome Programs toward the Centauri.
“Are the kids safe?” she asked.
“Yes. Tylanus made five trips. Everyone is across, except for the five who were taken into tanks.”
Karin gritted her teeth. She’d been afraid of that.
Anger grew in her.
This had gone on long enough.
“Your sister’s still here,” Einine said. “And your boyfriend. Tylanus left them.”
Tylanus…left them.
She frowned. “What about the Centauri?”
“They’re gone, too.”
Huh. Gone without her. That was…That shouldn’t be.
Had something happened?
“Just as I predicted,” Layla said, slipping into sight just up ahead. She turned to match Karin’s stride and nodded to the cable on the wall. “You’re almost there.”
She’d gathered that. As she’d been going, the cable had thickened. It was almost the size of a fire hose now.
It had also started glowing. A faint gold color.
“What can I expect? What is up there?”
“She’s set up her own Cradle.” Layla turned to regard her, giving her an obvious look over. “Are you okay? Your suit seems…broken.”
She flipped her wrist to trigger the transplanted HUD. Sure enough, several fault notifications scrolled down the left side of the screen.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just a few broken shocks and a disconnected comms chip.”
Likely from when Sasha had presumably thrown her through a pocket dimension and back out into Tartarus.
Either that, or Tylanus or her Shadow had intervened to prevent her from getting completely booted from the dimension.
Tartarus is not her dimension. She does not have all control here, Tia reminded her.
Neither do we.
No, but we punch harder.
They turned another corner and found another set of stairs.
This time, however, there was something different about them. Instead of just an endless continuation of opulent stone and ancient inspiration, the room above had an airier feel coming from it. Through the door, she could see large gaps in the walls where the room flowed into a balcony. And the beginning of some sort of construct in its middle.
The Cradle.
She paused, anger and determination pulsing in her blood. Noticing it, she forced herself to relax. Pushed the anger down. Let the logical side of her brain slip in and take control.
Going in there angry wouldn’t solve anything. They needed to get to the bottom of this.
“This is where we leave you,” Layla said. “Good luck, Karin.”
She nodded, sparing a moment to allow her gaze to flicker over the two ghosts that stood only a few feet away, taking in the serious expressions on their too-young faces.
She took a breath and called on the fragments of her old personality that were still left. Marc’s face floated to her mind, then Nomiki’s, then Soo-jin’s. A facsimile of emotion slid through her, rippling at the bottom of her chest.
She was doing this for them. For all of them. And everyone else who would vanish at Sasha’s hand.
Then, she touched the cold stone on the wall and scraped her armored glove down its surface, using the vibration of its rough texture to ground her mind into her body.
Eurynome’s sharpness returned, and emotions grew distant.
Leaving the kids behind, she climbed the small staircase and entered a room where the light danced and shivered.
The walls on the mountainside were open, providing a view of the deep tint of dusk and the encroaching stars outside punctuated by the dusky silhouettes of carved support columns. A strip of cloud slid up from the bottom, slowly moving down and to the side. Beyond, the wrinkle of landforms appeared far, far below, obscured in a haze of distance.
It felt like she stood on the top of the world. As if, looking down, the rest of the world was far away from her, under the surface of a pond. That there was something between her and the rest of life.
This, she thought, was the control room.
In the center of the room, void of any other decorations except for a mythological frieze on the wall, sat a large, carved stone bath connected to what she could only assume was Sasha’s version of a Cradle.
It was larger than most, with multitudes of cables sunk behind raised stone channels on the ceiling, all layering and connecting into a massive trunk that twisted down into the computer’s top like a thick branch of wisteria vine.
Sasha stood inside the tank, the water lapping at her thighs, watching her. A nanoinjector crown, larger and with more arms than she’d seen on any of the others, already sat on her head, its needles buried deep. Light from the tank caressed her skin, rippling upward. A current in the water dragged at the thin, semi-transparent dress that draped from her shoulders and hips, pulling part of it away from the skin of her thigh.
“Awake, are you?” she asked. “Am I going to have to kill you?”
Karin snorted. “That’s the question I should be asking you―what in the actual fuck are you doing?”
Sasha’s lips twisted. “So crass. I thought I taught you better than that.”
“Yes, perhaps I rebelled in my later years. So―really, I want to know. What are you doing, and why?”
Sasha didn’t answer immediately, but her eyes narrowed and her lips stretched into a thin line. She definitely looked older, now that Karin took the time to examine her. Gray streaked through her hair, and her face and skin had a weathered look to them. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth were more pronounced than they’d been the last time they’d met.
A side-effect of living in a pocket dimension.
She frowned when Sasha didn’t speak. “Please. I want to know. Does it have to do with Bernard Corringham?”
Sasha’s lips twisted, the muscles in her arms tensing up, the fingers of her right hand forming into claws.
“So, you know about him. I thought you didn’t remember?”
“I’m remembering some things,” she replied. “I remember him and his brother putting me in a tank. They’re the ones that took my memories, right? That’s why you didn’t know about it before?”
Sasha flinched. “I wish I’d known. I would have stopped it.”
“But you didn’t, and here we are.” Karin let out a breath, shaking her head. “Tell me, did he manage to make himself a god?”
Sasha frowned. “You know about that?”
Karin met her stare. “I’m not Eos anymore. Not just her, anyway. I am Eurynome. And I am Dr. Tia Sarayu, the Project’s former head geneticist.”
“Tia Sarayu…” Sasha’s frown deepened, and she looked down, searching her mind. “I found that name once, among some papers.”
“Just once? So, they erased me from my research? That’s typical, isn’t it?” Tia slipped her control
through Karin’s limbs, shaking her head as her lips tugged into a sardonic grin. “Regardless, I was there, and I and my body set the groundwork for the Project.” Her expression turned into a sneer, baring teeth. “I literally wrote the Chaos Program. And Ares. And Aphrodite, though I notice they never pursued that one―I suppose Bernard never had time for love, did he?”
Sasha was looking at them peculiarly, her head at a slight tilt and her frown in a lighter, more puzzled turn.
“No,” she said. “He did not. He only had time for himself. Anything else was simply lip service to furthering his own goals.” She paused. “You are Program Eurynome?”
“Yes, I am. And the base of all the other Programs who followed.” Her tone dropped like a stone through water. “And he and his brother left me to rot inside my Cradle for seventy years while they built the Project off of my work.” Her lips tugged into a smile, and her tone turned sickly sweet. “So, tell me, what has dear Bernard been getting up to? Don’t tell me he actually managed to make himself a god?”
Sasha hesitated. “It’s…Yes, he did.”
And, with that, the whole situation changed.
Tia crossed her arms. Karin’s brain whirled, accessing memories and running them down logical paths. A headache started to throb, then dissipated. A tickle in her nose, and the smell of rust, suggested an imminent nosebleed.
“In which case…you could see it, couldn’t you?”
Sasha hesitated, emotion shuddering over her face. “How do you know that?”
Tia smiled. “Let’s just say I’ve had a lot of experience being a Cradle base, shall we? I remember when he used to mess around with me in the tank, changing things. It felt…It felt like I was being violated. Like everything was being violated. Codes were being changed from the outside, my programming was being limited―everything I could control was being removed from my grasp.”
Watching this, Karin shivered.
Tia hadn’t shared those memories.
“When he was finished,” Tia went on. “I couldn’t even build my own world. Only pockets.”
Pockets.
Suddenly, it clicked.