Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Ash crossed her arms. “And what happened after the attack? Did they know you were missing?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I couldn’t find you guys, couldn’t stay in the city. When I got to the shuttle, it was gone. I found a ranger station on the edge of town that was running its own solar equipment. Connected to the colony systems. That’s how I found out the atmospinners were still rolling out here, so I thought there might still be food, too.”

  “Was the maglev working?” Natalie said.

  Len paused. Coughed. “I walked the track. Twelve miles.”

  “Without atmospinners.”

  “I’m not going to assume I came out of it all right,” he said. He coughed again. His hand came away spattered with red blood.

  Natalie closed her eyes and turned away.

  “Nat,” he said, turning toward her, “you have to forgive me.”

  Natalie placed the top on the crate and pushed it back to a stable position, rolling her eyes, moving on to the next one, checking the interior with her flashlight and her munitions-steady hands. “Fuck off. Before I shoot you. Because I sure ain’t forgiving you. How many years are you going to have to give to pay for those lungs, Len?”

  Len narrowed his eyes. “Did you hear me? I was afraid for my life.”

  “You could have stayed in town,” she said.

  “I’ll have to put a few more years on my account, yeah. But, Natalie—”

  “You kill all of those people, then you kill any chance you—you and me—”

  Ash stepped between them. “Stop. Both of you.”

  “Says the fucking liar,” Natalie said. She was shaking. Incandescent.

  “He’s family.”

  “He’s not acting like it.”

  Ash sighed. “We’re all just going to calm down for a minute,” she announced. “Natalie, take a walk. Len, once both your tempers are back in control, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Natalie stuck her head back in the crate. Len’s eyes misted, then he turned back to Ash, blinking quickly. “I knew you’d—”

  “I didn’t do it for you.”

  He paled.

  “I want to believe you,” she said, then pushed off, walking over to the machine. She squatted, then poked at the innards. It was Aurora-standard and missing a few parts; nothing Len couldn’t fix with spit and glue and luck and a few more days. “But there’s a problem, Len. You lived through that screamer—”

  Her voice caught on the words like me, on the terror they implied, and she did not say them.

  “Oh. That, I can explain,” he said, picking up his flashlight and pointing it to a dark corner of the barn. He tilted his head, and Ash followed, and Natalie, too, picking up the rear, an angry, walking thunderstorm. He kicked away a piece of plywood. It covered a machine-cut hole in the ground, dripping tiny roots in a well-packed wall. Natalie leaned over and hauled the plywood completely aside, revealing a set of metal stairs clambering down to a second set of crates and, like a urinal in a ballroom, a metal, card-locked door embedded in the wall.

  “You escaped the screamer’s dome dispersal by going down,” Natalie said. She sounded oddly touched. “You were listening to my stupid lectures.”

  “I found the ansible parts there. I’m thinking we should check out the door, but I didn’t want to go down without backup,” he said.

  Ash wanted to say, No, we need to wait for the Company, they can sort it out, we can’t go below—I can’t go below, but Natalie was already heading for the stairs, her jaw set in quiet assurance.

  “Come on,” she said. “You need a crapload of credit for your cit account, Len. Let’s go find out why a bunch of farmers had enough Vai shit to kill an entire squad.”

  18

  Len and Natalie clambered into the basement, their boots making a loud clatter on the dusty metal stairs. Ash found herself hovering near the top, her knuckles white with a sudden, clawing fear.

  “You coming, Ash?” said Len.

  “Just a second,” she managed.

  She’d spent enough time underground to pause at the soaking humidity of the room, the tight-packed dirt floor, and the rotting joists in the ceiling, made of local wood. There were crates here, slicked in moisture and mildew. She’d lived in rooms like this. She’d lost Christopher to a room like this. Going back into a room like this was the last thing she wanted to do.

  From her perch at the top of the stairs, she could see the shine of the steel door in the blue-edged light, and the two engineers squatting nearby, poking at the lock.

  “Typical gene-coded citizen bullshit. Auroran as hell, though, and that means we can use the Christie hack on it,” Natalie pronounced, then slid a slim tool she’d once called an uncoupler into the works. Ash blinked at the resulting sparks, but Natalie looked like she’d been expecting them.

  “You never tried to get in?” she asked.

  “I was curious,” said Len. He peered over her shoulder. “To be honest, though, I was more concerned with getting the ansible running.”

  “Yeah, I know how that goes,” muttered Natalie.

  Ash took a deep, shuddering breath of the sulfur-scented air, then descended, one step at a time, keeping her eyes trained on her toes. She made an attempt to banish the irrational fear to the place she’d put everything else. It’s no different than being in space, she reminded herself. You go outside the room, you suffocate. No different at all.

  It somehow made her feel worse.

  Len nodded. “This was where I’d found ansible parts—in the crate over there. It’s all high-level electronics, spaceflight components, nothing an ag-center should have really needed. Oh, and baby blankets.”

  “Baby blankets?” said Ash.

  “Laid right out on top.”

  “Like they were hiding what was inside.”

  Len tilted his head. “That’s certainly one explanation.”

  Natalie swore at the lock while Ash crossed to the crate, flipping open the lid. She couldn’t identify the parts by sight, but she could tell some weren’t Auroran. Some were painted with half-faded InGen logos, while others sported the far too familiar Wellspring moon and fountain.

  The textiles in question were nearby; they resembled the rough, uncitizen-issue blankets of her childhood. These were printed with Auroran logos and embroidered with rough black thread in a mean attempt at personalization: stick-figure children with simple, black-thread smiles, and below them, the words Arcadia Birthright Orphan Wellness Center 1.

  She shivered and dropped the blanket back on the crate just as Natalie crowed her victory over the lock. Len pushed the door open, and a rancid stench rushed into the storage space. Len gagged, while Natalie pinched her nose, stumbled to her feet, and shone the flashlight into the dark space beyond.

  It could have been any waiting room for any Company, with prefab plasteel walls and plain white paint. Ash saw chairs installed against the near wall, and a thick metal door on the opposite end with an unfamiliar locking system. In front of that was a plain white receptionist’s desk, the kind that were shipped on supply runs in their flat-packed dozens.

  Behind the desk was a dead receptionist in a black jumpsuit, his jaw akimbo, his bony hand still wrapped around a dead boltgun.

  “Waiting for Rio is a shitty game with way too high a body count,” Natalie whispered.

  They shuffled in place for a moment.

  “Let’s find out what he was guarding.” Natalie broke the silence, brandishing the uncoupler and heading toward the door. Len’s eyes lingered on the body, and he picked up the flashlight, moving to join her.

  Ash turned back to the dead man, feeling a strange compulsion to ensure that he was dead of a clear and explainable cause, that he’d been shot or stabbed, or that he’d fallen asleep from some kind of gas exposure, that he had no jagged crack in his rib cage. She couldn’t tell until she was entirely too close for comfort.

  “He still has a heart,” Ash said.

  “Figuratively?” asked Len. “
Or, um, you don’t mean…”

  He trailed off, like he didn’t want to know the answer, and Ash obliged him. She drew a finger across the desk, tracing a line in a thick layer of dirt. Her nail caught the corner of a half-buried flimsy, and she shook it free. It was a shipment manifest for medicines and isolette supplies, topped by an unfamiliar black logo: an arrow crossed with a palm branch on a field of stars.

  “This should be working,” Len said.

  “Well, it’s not.” Natalie’s voice was tight and angry. “Just give me the uncoupler.”

  “It’s not either of us,” he said. “It’s the nonstandard wiring.”

  “Gimme. And hold the light steady.”

  Len adjusted his grip on the flashlight, and Ash’s eyes were caught by a sudden glimmering around the dead man’s neck—a plain silver chain with a pendant dragging at the bottom. Curious, she trapped it between two fingernails, fishing it out from underneath his black jacket, managing to avoid his rotting skin.

  She flipped it toward the light, and recognized a twin of the necklace Natalie had left on the captain’s body: some variety of female saint, holding arrows in one hand and palm branches in the other. Ash turned it over to check the lettering, and found the logo on the manifests below, and block-letter capitals: SACRAMENT SOCIETY.

  “It’s not going to work,” Len muttered, breaking through Ash’s reverie. “You’re thinking about gene-activated circuits. That’s a tri-d pattern lock, and it’s wired into a system on the other side.”

  “So we should be able to fuck up those circuits and—”

  Len sighed. “You can take down the lock, but the door still won’t open. You need the pattern it wants to recognize.”

  “And it could be anything.”

  “Absolutely anything.”

  Ash ran her finger over the pendant, feeling the rough pattern of the woman and her strange load against the pad of her thumb. “What about an oval, say, the size of your thumb?”

  Len tilted his head, shone the light into the lockworks to check, then nodded. “Yeah. That’ll do it. Why do you ask?”

  Ash reached behind the man’s neck, undoing the clasp. It popped with unexpected ease, and she crossed the room in two quick strides, sliding the pendant into the open mouth of the lock. The red light flipped to green, and she heard tumblers moving behind the door.

  “Because he was the guard,” she said. “He stayed here until the end. He probably did that for a good reason.”

  Len tried the door handle, and the door opened with a deafening creak. Ash and the others walked onto a small metal balcony set at least one story above a massive dirt cavern. Long and deep, the massive cathedral ceiling was supported by prefab rafters that curved like the ribs of a dead whale. The whole place was lit from below in shades of sunshine and blood.

  The light was coming from dozens of pulsing isolettes—similar to the ones they’d brought to Tribulation, but in different sizes and colors, arranged in lines like benches in a mess hall. Empty protein wrappers lay scattered hither and yon.

  Ash paused just inside the door, letting a sudden assault of dizziness settle into her bones, battling a sudden, blank dread.

  “Wait,” Natalie said. “Are those InGen isolettes? Awesome. I haven’t seen those since we salvaged Aucrin Station. I keep on telling R&D we need to reverse-engineer their signal-blocking code.”

  And then she was down the stairs in a shot, with Len behind her. Loath to let either of them see her waver, Ash picked her careful way down the staircase. Isolettes were as crucial for salvage work as they were for medical purposes, and she recognized Aurora’s bright blue light among the other colors—purple and orange, chartreuse and ocher. Each isolette was connected to snakelike power cords that bunched together and ran underneath the lines to several unfamiliar generators and—probably, if she was remembering right—a server. They whirred along as if there had been no Vai attack, no war, nothing to see and nothing to worry about.

  “Guys,” said Natalie, her fingers trailing across the plastic covering of one of the InGen Company isolettes. “This is the Christmas list. The entire Christmas list.”

  Feeling weak and dizzy, Ash walked toward the first row of light-splayed isolettes and peered inside, lingering just long enough to recover what was left of her equilibrium. Here in Auroran isolettes, purring and clicking and breathing, were unfamiliar Vai molecular weapons in configurations Ash had never imagined. She saw pulsing red cords, breathing fire that did not catch; moon-shaped crescents with razor-sharp edges that crackled with an absinthe glow; crooked assemblages that resembled guns and crosses and computers and goats; smooth white capsules and rough silver boxes; acoustic squares that could crush bodies like drink tubs, all contained in boxes spitting angry light like an intensive care for the devil’s newborn children.

  Len shook his head. “What’s the Christmas list?”

  Natalie’s mouth twisted at that, and she went to speak, but Ash jumped in first. “If this were the Christmas list, none of us would have gotten within light-years of this place. We’d be picking through mech guts on Glaive,” she said.

  “Right. It’s obviously not Mr. Solano’s.” Natalie waved at the isolettes. “Half of these are from other companies—InGen, Rimworld, even some from Bay-Ken. Aurora would rather go belly-up than partner up. With anyone.”

  “Still, though. This must have taken years to arrange,” Ash said, surveying the expanse, its flickering lights and fat cables tied together like taut muscles. “Like, ‘back when the colony was founded’ years. That’s the only way they’d get away with this kind of construction project.”

  “Unless everyone noticed,” Natalie said.

  “Everyone?” Len said.

  Natalie paused in front of a InGen isolette, peered in, and shuddered at what she saw there. “If the entire settlement was in on it, I mean.”

  Len blinked. “That’s a huge accusation. The level at which you’d have to suborn an accountancy to hide such a massive conspiracy—it’s just mad how hard that would be.”

  Ash looked back down to the necklace still in her hand. The cavern reminded her of the great halls in the catacombs of Bittersweet, carved by decades of indentured workers with mining lasers and massive machines, curled back vein by vein and stone by stone. She still felt the rumble of it in her dreams.

  Some of those new halls had been sealed off and devoted to projects with dramatic names. One of them had taken Christopher, had sent him back with tremors and hallucinations and dreams of death. And still she hadn’t thought of asking.

  No. She’d thought. She’d just been too scared.

  “They knew,” she said, finally. “You don’t excavate a place like this and chalk it up to earthquakes. But they were all indentures. When the alternative is losing progress on your indenture, you learn to stay quiet. You learn to stop asking about the weird shit.”

  Len nodded, suddenly solemn. “The people that knew, then. Why didn’t they come back?”

  Natalie hummed. “We’re assuming they got away when Manx-Koltar showed up. They probably died in the war. They obviously had accomplices elsewhere that left clues about Tribulation—otherwise, Ramsay wouldn’t have bothered us, right? But she didn’t know shit about this place. We’re the only ones who know.” She paused, and her eyes went wide. “We’re going to be so rich.”

  “If we get out of here alive,” Len said.

  “I’ll make an inventory.” Natalie’s voice held an eager, almost religious reverence. She looked around, picking up a crumpled paper from the floor while Len fished a marker out of his tool belt.

  Ash turned back to the weapons, fighting off the beginnings of a headache and a faint whispering of anonymous voices. She wondered if the others could see the weapons breathe, or if that was her own celestium-damned problem. The one closest to her was a pulsing, shimmering golden crescent, laid out in an isolette with the bulky curves of the transport crates she’d seen on Bittersweet. She leaned in, and the voices grew louder. They
were joined by nervous visions, of flickering colors in the darkest parts of her mind, screams that stank of sulfur and loam and blood. Memories. Bittersweet.

  She staggered back, caught in a wave of fear and exhaustion.

  “You all right, Ash?” Len said. He stood next to Natalie, six feet away.

  “Fine,” she lied, swallowing against a dry throat. “Just some memories. This one looks like it might be from Wellspring, that’s all.”

  “See if you can get in,” said Natalie.

  Ash placed her fingers on the interface, which popped up on contact, and was comforted by the familiarity. She couldn’t forget this orange color, this familiar, stabbing memory: the color of the Bittersweet sun reflecting off the desert sand, the shade of refined celestium, the moon and fountain that was emblazoned on every Wellspring uniform, stitched in orange above every indentured heart.

  She’d used this interface to label hundreds of canisters of raw celestium on Bittersweet. The full metadata was easy to find: Unnamed Crescent Weapon. Origin: Baylor-McKenna 8-A sample 124. Found unused at Bittersweet. Ship to: Main Lab. Director: Dr. Reva Sharma.

  Wait, she thought.

  Blood rushed to her head, throwing her into a dizzy swirl. She felt anger—no, not anger, something else, a deeper kind of pain, the same sort of inchoate agony she’d felt when Ramsay first played her hand, when she’d clutched at dead Christopher while the fighters wailed above, when she’d still thought that decency was something to be found and cherished.

  Ash’s head ached with sudden dark conspiracies.

  “The doctor,” she said. “What was she doing before she joined up with Twenty-Five? Before you came to help with the wreckage at Bitter—”

  She looked up. The others weren’t listening; they stood over a set of isolettes bathed in white, two stark, silent statues clothed in glaring light. Something was wrong. They never acted like this, never lingered so long in quietude. Len’s hand was shaking where it barely held the marker; Natalie’s covered her mouth. They stared dizzily into an isolette, their faces white from the glaring light. Ash pushed off the table where she was and walked closer.