by JM Guillen
You doing paperwork now?
Telemetry is stable. There are no energy snarls or evidence of a latent signal from Liaison Stone’s Crown. She shrugged. Perhaps there’s something here.
Wyatt reached for one of the papers. Intel about the conduit tech?
I took a single step in their direction.
Thump!
All three of our faces jerked to the ceiling at the muffled sound.
Interesting. Wyatt glanced from the ceiling to me.
On it. Jogging softly, I took the stairs two at a time.
Um, Anya patched in. I would be remiss if—she stopped as I halted in place, turning to her.
Yes?
—if I didn’t point out that there is likely nothing of import upstairs. Locale One is Stone’s location, which remains several floors below us. Moving upward is not necessarily valuable to completing our mission, Michael.
Agreed. But we have dogs on our heels; it’s not necessarily valuable for us to leave this office until they’re gone.
We have no record of Sadhana using trained canines. She gazed at me, her eyes twinkling.
For once, I didn’t respond. Anya… teasing with me? It made me wonder how often she actually got our jokes.
Did Anya enjoy teasing us?
The mercenaries, princess. He meant the mercenaries. Wyatt saved me the effort of replying.
I gave her a grin as I continued up the stairs.
15
The next room surprised me with the thickness of the shadows that lurked within. I slowed my pace and switched on my optics.
They revealed the large lump to the right as a platform bed with its plush comforter thrown invitingly back. No less than four pillows lay plumped up against the incredibly tall, bamboo-lined headboard.
Tall but thin rectangular lamps guarded each side of the bed with small nightstands in front of each. Another thick flotaki rug lay at the foot.
I waited a long moment, but no one continued to be there.
I flipped off Spectre just as Wyatt patched me.
So what’s up there?
Nothing. It looks as if it’s someone’s quarters, I replied.
It’s a bedroom? he asked, disbelieving.
I sent him and Anya a quick visual patch of the room.
I must amend my earlier statement. Anya’s mental voice came slightly quieter than usual.
Yeah? What do you have, Anya?
There are faint fluctuations in Rationality coming from the room you are in, she continued. Approximately eight steps to the northwest of your current location.
A pink indicator appeared in my vision.
My hand dropped to my disruptor as I approached the indicator. I felt… something there. Peering into the dark, I was unable to make out any specific shapes, yet the air in the room felt heavy. Difficult to breathe.
As I drew closer, I could see more clearly. In the corner of the room sat a low table topped with a small dish, two half-melted pillar candles, and a humanoid statuette nearly thirty centimeters in height.
An Irrational… statue?
I crouched in front of it for a closer look. I’m sending a patch of my visual.
Roger that, Hoss.
A tall figure with long, shapely limbs—all six of them—posed on one foot. While the other leg bent at the upraised knee, three of its arms had been thrown wide, palms up, nearly forming a halo. The fourth arm held a pure human figure, half the size of its captor, above its grotesquely canine head. Elegantly crafted blood dripped from the human’s mangled throat toward the dog-headed monstrosity’s gaping, fanged maw. More dripped down its bare chest, pooling down on the floor.
It was captivating.
I couldn’t catch my breath. Dizzy.
I blinked, cocking my head. I thought the room might be… getting darker? The darkness of a looming storm rolled at the edge of my vision. Yet when I turned—
Nothing.
Michael, Rationality is shifting in your vicinity.
I’m fine. I tried to push confidence I didn’t entirely feel into my link. I’ll link if things change.
Understood, Michael.
Even as I received her link, the icon’s eyes caught me. They whirled worlds within worlds, filled with tiny flecks of purple and green that twirled together in those infinitely deep orbs.
MICHAEL BISHOP.
My name, that most intimate part of my psyche, echoed from the statue, as if from a great bell that only I heard. It sang to a primal part of me, and in that instant, everything fell away, revealed as some foolish, weak façade.
This whole thing, the mission, Sadhana’s technology…
Wasn’t it all a bit ridiculous?
Yes. It was.
This, this statue embodied truth wrought in form. It echoed with true strength, with blood. Here lay power and fury and lust and red desire, everything that society called insane and locked away in hidden, forgotten places.
Your heartrate is going nuts, Bishop. Rachel’s link held a trace of concern. You find some Sadhana hottie over there?
Just a lil’ tense, Rachel. All is well. The link came almost automatically, but that part of my mind felt very distant indeed.
In actuality, at that moment, images of Rachel swarmed through my mind, the curve of her, her scent—Oh GOD, her raw, delicious scent.
I hadn’t ever truly paid attention, but now the memory of it struck stark, like a stone in my face.
“For your own good.” The gravelly growl came crafted of shadows and teeth and ravaging lust. “You tell yourselves it is for your own good, denying the secret truths that dwell deep beneath.” The anger and fury and passion in those words beat at my heart, like a great and furious drum.
“Yes.” My eyes narrowed to slits as I stared into the darkness. How had I ever been so blind?
“You don’t want to see yourselves for what you really are,” the growl continued. “You want to refute your animal nature. You’ve renounced it so defiantly and for so long that when faced with it, all that you can do is collapse to your weakened knees.”
“We should be on our knees.” Clarity came to me. “We should show respect—awe, rather, or even adoration—and worship such power.”
Fluctuations steadily increasing. Anya’s link blossomed like a rose of color in my mind, and for an instant her eyes and the softness of her voice thundered in my mind.
My body responded eagerly to the thought of her. How had I never noticed how supple and shapely she—
Wait. I shook my head.
No.
I stepped back, wrenching my gaze from the eyes of the statue. As I did, I gasped.
A cyclone of amethyst and jade glimmered everywhere, a tempest of oscillating light and sound and taste. The barest hint of sour bitterness caught in the back of my throat. It coated my tongue with a taste like copper pennies, and my nostrils flared, seeking the bitter foulness, the reek of rot and rust, salt and blood.
My breath hitched, caught on the metallic spike of that taste.
“This is the only Truth.” The growl came again, echoing through the room from a direction I couldn’t see. In the periphery of my vision, movement; black shadows—fur? claws?—moved toward me, stalking its rightful prey. Bloody claws clicked on nothing.
There weren’t any words, not truly. The deepest passions of lust for both body and blood dug into my mind, and I heard the secrets they held.
Those claws came again, clicking on hardness as they stalked me.
My eyes flicked up.
Stillness, shadows, static. Nothing.
A recently emptied nothing? Something there.
Something.
Had something beyond the ken of my conscious mind—something of viridian and violet light, something of strength and sand, something of darkness and destruction—slipped into the hidden nooks and alcoves of the room?
Darkness swathed me in velvety watchfulness.
“Blood is inevitability.” Darkest hunger laced the words. “Sacrifice for
the strong. It is written into the being of every mortal creature.”
“Yes.” On my knees on the hard floor, my hands rested on the altar, palms up, numb and clammy. Adrenaline flooded my system; sweat beaded on my forehead.
The statuette loomed ever larger before me, and I knew my place, understood my purpose with a clarity I had never experienced before.
Disconnected from myself, I watched my hand float up through the air to hover over the sharpened teeth in the hell pit forming the statuette’s living mouth. My hand trembled as it hesitated above those jagged spears built of pain and suffering.
“You shall be one with me. I shall drink the holy communion of your essence, and you will know mortality no longer.”
The breath of it huffed, hard and hot on my fingers, impatiently waiting for my redness, my liquid, my refreshing life-blood. My very being would coat the surface, moisten it like clay, rejuvenating, strengthening.
My will fluttered inside my chest on frantic bird wings, fragile and weak.
Michael? Anya’s link felt heavy with worry. Are you coming back down?
Need you to peek down the hallway, Hoss, Wyatt sent. See if it’s all clear.
It’s already too late for me. I’ve seen its gaze. Even as I sent the words, I knew they couldn’t possibly understand. The glistening violet-violence maelstrom, the jaded-chartreuse voracity, they waited for me, for my agony, for my ecstasy and my essence.
I can’t explain. As I linked, my growled, guttural words echoed around me again, rambling into a mantra of crimson hunger.
Can’t explain… what? Wyatt’s link came suddenly, intent.
It’s everything. I explained. Pain. Sacrifice. Bloodletting, the giving and the taking. I felt delirious with longing. You are just breathing it in, breathing it out, life and death, night and day, sustenance and sustaining, blood and flesh, the two made… I lost the thought in the hopelessness of my wonder.
Oh. I see.
You do? Elation burnt in my breast, like the shadow of a distant star.
Yep. You’re fucking crazy. You should have said so. He paused. I’m coming up there.
My ears filled with a howl that my mouth could not utter, a roaring, warping, splintering rank stench of pain.
Wyatt. You shouldn’t—
Primal desire washed over me like a warm ocean of lust and triumph. Inside my skin, the urge to run, to hide, to flee the hunter in the dark flooded through every cell of my body.
“It’s all I am.”
An eternity away, I heard Wyatt trying the stairs. Blood, meat, red heat in flight, a sacrifice willing or unwilling.
And oh, fuck, I wanted it. Wanted it like I wanted Rachel’s panting cries, and to smell the musk of Anya’s passion. I needed to hear her scream and moan and beg—
“What I am, you shall be.”
Vaguely aware of Wyatt’s movement, I smelled his blood, heard it singing through his heart. For the first time, I wondered if the growling voice had been my own the entire time.
The more I tried to escape, the less I could breathe, the less I could focus. Parts of me fell to the floor.
Falling through the floor.
Falling through the world.
Into shadows out of time.
Descending into sharp, into pain, into jagged cold, into desiccant heat.
I disintegrated, becoming not, becoming meat, becoming food, being blood, red and salty and hot and spicy and thick and delicious.
Rivers of blood, the salt of my body, the sand of my eyes, all the mad meat of the universe, the everything all pounded down on me, around me, through me, demanding, wanting, needing—
Then, screaming.
A wail of a brittle break, a shriek like that of a hawk far beyond reason.
I whirled, still on my knees, and light like a sword spilled over me, slicing me, bleeding me, freeing me.
Motion?
A man, average height and weight, dark of hair and eye, wearing a suit but for his legs. Something about his pale legs…
His pants. His pants should have covered his legs, but they didn’t. They bunched around his ankles, hampering his movement as he hobbled out of a restroom I had not seen.
He babbled.
I didn’t understand. I couldn’t hear him. Too much noise.
I pawed at my ears to rid myself of the high-pitched sound. It pierced the air and turned my ears as raw as my throat.
Why is my throat raw? I wondered.
Because I had been screaming; screaming and screaming, the sound pouring out of me like tea from a broken cup.
I stopped, choking back the sound, gagging on it.
Another man, one I knew, yelled. Yelling in my head. He had demands, concerns, but I couldn’t pay attention to that.
The man standing in front of me—the executive Mr. Katsuo Fukui, a strengthening part of me insisted—drew his gun.
The barrel, so big and round and important, snapped me into action.
I dove to the side as Mr. Fukui fired, the bullet streaking just past the edge of my shoulder, striking the statuette.
Shards of shattered obsidian exploded through the air, tumbling like black diamonds to the floor.
I engaged Spectre just in time. More bullets struck the wall behind me, the floor at my feet, the bed.
Mr. Fukui fired erratically, panicked at the intruder in his suite.
Before my disruptor cleared its holster, Wyatt had made the top step and shot a spike into the floor.
Katsuo Fukui slammed to the ground. Now, he screamed as fantastically increased gravity slowly flattened him.
Yeah, okay, he’s stopped firing, but now what? I groused as I got to my feet and switched off Spectre.
Wyatt shot me a glare. Care to tell us what the fuck happened up here?
As it happened, I didn’t.
Got careless, I admitted. Those Irrational blips came from a statue of some sort. I nodded at the writhing executive. He destroyed it
But yer good now? He hesitated. As good as you ever are?
Fine. I’m fine.
He dialed down the gravity to keep from crushing his captive.
True.
As soon as Fukui stopped panting, he began a litany of his terror at the top of his voice.
His screams’re going to draw attention we don’t want, even if mine didn’t. I holstered the disruptor but hesitated to draw a katana. If I kill him, as soon as those goons downstairs find his body, they’ll know someone’s been here.
But if we leave him alive, he’ll squeal, countered Wyatt.
It’s a non-issue, Anya linked as she came up the last step. I am completely prepared to handle this situation.
Wyatt and I shared a glance of stunned surprise.
Anya gave her tiny smile. Reaching into one of the many squared pouches hanging from her belt, she pulled forth something white with a shiny, plastic surface. Delicately, she unfolded a white glove with a circle of silver and blue around the wrist, covered in system input controls. Delicately, Anya pulled the glove onto her right hand, looking almost like a nurse prepping for a patient.
Um. I don’t think he needs an exam, princess. Apparently Wyatt caught that drift as well, but he looked to me, still a touch irritated over my apparent loss of sanity a few moments before. Although Brooks Brothers here might.
It’s a neural lacuna, she explained, as if we didn’t recognize the memory modification device. Please resolve all algorithms in play as soon as I initiate it, Asset Guthrie.
Roger that. Wyatt tapped a couple of keys on his crescent shaped input device.
“[Who are you people?!]” Fukui yammered wildly. “[I have money. Let me—!]”
Anya had stepped close to the prone man, and his panic went silent as soon as she applied her gloved hand to the back of his skull, touching him with all four fingers but not her thumb. With her other hand, she depressed a small button at her wrist.
In the same moment, Wyatt disengaged his spike. Rational gravity resumed.
A scarlet flash of light emanated from the glove. Mr. Fukui’s arms and legs leapt spastically, as if he had been hit with a defibrillator.
Then he went still.
The Crown prompt came immediately and simultaneous for Wyatt and I.
Crown Augment detected. Do you wish to connect to Petrov-12-89NL?
You should connect, Michael. You were up here the longest and know the most about the incident.
Um, okay. I logged into the Crown Augment, feeling a subtle snick behind my right ear.
In the upper left hand corner of my visual range, a small blue light blinked once, twice, and then held steady.
We first noted the disturbance at 14:37:12 JST. Is that approximate with your experience, Michael?
Uh, I’m uncertain. I pulled at the threads of my own phaneric record, looking for the time of Fukui’s appearance. Unfortunately, I became engrossed in a bunch of data that showed me standing still, staring, and muttering into the darkness like a loon, then falling to my knees. That seems about right.
The blue dot that indicated my connection to the lacuna pulsed twice, resolving into a fuzzy image of the inside of Mr. Fukui’s restroom. He sat there, nearly immobile, simply taking care of business.
Here. Anya adjusted the timeframe just a bit. It seemed that he listened to something. Let me adjust the amplitude of this engram.
The blue dot grew sharper and resolved into a perfect, miniature version of the image, as if we perceived the world through Mr. Fukui’s senses.
He heard me say, “For your own good.” My own voice echoed oddly. It sounded all gravelly and low, a ragged growl of sound. “You tell yourselves it is for your own good, denying the secret truths that dwell deep beneath.”
What the fuck were you doin’, Hoss? Wyatt looked at me as if I’d just tried to straighten an electric outlet with a butter knife. Your voice was so husky it could pull a dogsled.
Shut up. I scowled at him. My skin itched on the back of my neck.
Crown Command: Initiate engramic modelling. Ported into the lacuna, all of us felt Anya’s command. Begin at 14:37:17.
Compliance. The system replied.
Anya nodded and then set to work.
I had never side-geared the lacuna personally, as most of my problems got solved by stabbing or shooting them. That typically made up my choices regarding the baddies.