Song of Sundering

by A. R. Clinton

  “Um, sure, I can. But, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

  Tani broke off from her intense stare at the ceiling and looked at Delilah for the first time since she entered the room, “What do you want to talk about?”

  “There is only so much we can know from the data we can gather from our patients. I am not sure we have the proper facilities to test as thoroughly as we should for moving forward with more patients, especially when we are concealing so much from them. Without them knowing what we are doing, they may not think to talk to us if they experience unexpected side effects. They may think they have gotten sick from something else entirely and think nothing of it until its too late. It’s an enormous risk to them and to our project.”

  Tani heard the quiver in her voice as she spoke, and noted how she looked at the floor and not at Tani. It had likely taken her the hour since their meeting to come up with this argument, but it was a good one.

  “We are helping many people who just can’t get treatment for their illnesses elsewhere, Delilah. Assuming we want to continue doing that, what is the minimum amount of testing you think we would need to add to our facility?”

  Delilah paused before answering, “I’m really not sure. Something to get a better idea of what’s going on inside their bodies, not just the powers they are gaining. Imaging of some sort. But, there isn’t any way for us to buy, let alone build, anything like that. It’s all Topside.”

  Tani nodded, “I agree, we could use the data. And the point about patients not knowing to tell us valuable information is a real problem that I have been worried about myself. Maybe we could steal something from the Topsiders.”

  Delilah gasped, “Tani!”

  “What? The Topside hospital has multiple imagining machines. They may miss it if we can figure out how to steal one, but they won’t be crippled without it. Their doctors may just have to have stricter scheduling to use the rest of the machines. In the meantime, we’d be saving lives. How horrible.”

  Delilah let out an exasperated sigh that made Tani smile. Delilah only sighed like that when Tani won a disagreement. Tani continued, “Alright, so I’ll talk to Vin about our crystal supply and imaging hardware tomorrow. If we can figure something out to get imaging, are you okay with moving on to Phase Two?”

  Delilah nodded, “Yes, I think that along with building a list of side effects as we go so that we can prepare patients and minimize their risk, that’s acceptable.”

  Tani smiled, “Good. Go get some sleep. Apparently, we have a heist to plan.”

  Delilah rolled her eyes and left.

  Tani squinted in the low light. The cramped stone room with its low ceiling and the small flickering lights made it impossible to see the entire map at once. She crawled across the floor, working around the spots Vin had just painted. They used all their free time in the past two days to create this map on the floor with different colors to represent the layers of Prin. The hospital Topside wasn’t directly over the Underground, but between the Underground and the surface lay a network of service tunnels that connected them both.

  “Blue,” She held out her hand and waited for Vin to place the bowl in it as she continued staring at their map. She felt the weight of the bowl and brought it to her face. Spitting next to the azure powder, she dipped her finger in and mixed it with the edge of the powder until the spit turned a brilliant blue. She started placing a series of dots from the hospital’s surgery suites. “This will be the best mark. The laparoscopic tools from the Nagata are easy to disassemble and move and we can actually repair a lot of its parts if we ever have issues with it.”

  Tani continued creating her dots to mark a path for them to take, veering her dots into a closet. Vin smiled, “That route will limit who can go. Those shafts are pretty small.”

  “Who else needs to go? I can do it alone.”

  Vin laughed, “No way you’re going at all, let alone by yourself.”

  Tani jerked her head up to glare at him, “Who the fuck else can do it? I know how to take the machine apart. No one else is going to be able to do that. Even if we take another route so other people can accompany me, I still have to go. Why take a riskier route and more people if I can do it alone?”

  “Because, if you fail and get caught, all this work stops. If someone else does it, and they fail, we can try again later and everything you’re doing now keeps going.”

  Tani rolled her eyes, “If I get caught. I’ve never been caught stealing anything.”

  “There were several times you would have been without me.”

  Tani waved her hand in a dismissive motion and continued making her dots, “Yes, yes, you’re very good at making loud distractions.”

  “That’s right, lady. You need me. And a lot more people need you and the things you’re doing. So, I’ll put together a small team and you should stop painting dots that way.”

  Tani glared at him, then continued to make dots, “You still haven’t solved the problem of the machine itself. Your team still needs me and I don’t need a team.”

  Vin sighed, “You’re a stubborn bitch.”

  She smiled at him, “Yes. And both of us have a lot of credits now because of it.”

  “I’m sure someone can learn to take apart the machine.”

  “It’d take weeks, assuming the person has a good mechanical understanding to begin with. Do you have any scavs as good as I was that are willing to put in two weeks to learn this?”

  “I do.”

  Tani stopped drawing and looked at him again, “No. No way in hell is he getting anywhere near what we do.”

  “He doesn’t have to know anything other than that we are lifting something. Darreon only ever cared about getting paid and we can pay him.”

  Tani groaned, “Yes, but we don’t have to. We shouldn’t spend the credits if we don’t have to. Especially, if we don’t know someone else won’t pay him more.”

  “Well, like I said: If we fail the first time, we can try again. Let us try with Darreon. If anything goes wrong, then we do it your way.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Tani said, and kept making her dots while swallowing down her rage.

  Tani looked over at Alynn, laying out on her bed. The last and only time Tani had met her, she was in a wheelchair, and while she had a constant air of exhaustion about her, she still did what she could with the use of her arms. Today, she laid still, her eyes watching Tani, Delilah and Odi walk into the room. She had lost a noticeable amount of weight. Tani saw her lips move slightly as she made eye contact, but heard no sound come from her mouth.

  Odi walked to her side, slipping an arm beneath her head and lifting her as he raised a cup to her mouth for her to drink. It wouldn’t be long before the muscles she needed to swallow stopped working, and Alynn would wither and die.

  “We have had some progress, in our work, and we think Alynn would benefit by being our next subject.” Tani said to Odi. She paused and glanced over at Alynn, whose eyes were on her as Odi laid her back on the bed, “I am sorry it took so long.”

  Alynn blinked her eyes and Odi turned, “I am glad you came. We are ready whenever you are.”

  “We can start today, if you want, but we need to talk about what we are going to do first. We found with another patient that by mixing the implants—using two elements—we had much better success. The other patient had chronic pain and muscle weakness, problems with routine tasks and even chewing. Now, she is able to do all these things with ease and without pain.”

  Odi smiled and looked at his mother, who blinked again, “We are ready, Tani.”

  “Odi—the second element—the one that makes it work so well, it is the Blight Crystal. We don’t know why it works, but it does. There is a lot of risk here because we don’t have much information about it. You’d also be getting more than you signed up for. If Alynn has as much source ability manifest as our other patient, being untrained presents dangers. If it works, you both need to understand, you have to stick to a limited s
et of abilities that are safe and tell us everything. Things Alynn may notice that don’t seem related, we need to know.”

  Odi looked stunned, “The Blight crystal?” He glanced again at his mother. Her eyes drifted down to her arms, lying motionless, then back to Odi. She blinked. He looked back at Tani then to his mother. “How long has your other patient had the implant? Have they shown any side effects that are unexpected?”

  Tani shook her head, “Nothing strange, so far. It’s been five days, so she’s had amazing progress in a short amount of time.”

  Odi looked again between his mother and Tani, “Five days doesn’t seem very long to determine if its safe.”

  Tani looked at Alynn then at Odi, “No, it’s not. But, remaining untreated is far more dangerous at this point.”

  Odi looked at his mother again. She blinked at him, squeezing her eyes shut so hard that Tani could see the strain in her cheeks.

  He nodded and gave a gentle rub to her upper arm, “Alright. We’ll do it.”

  35

  Hafi

  Hafi was painfully aware of the shrinking space between where the armies now prepared to fight again and the last mountain passes before Prin. His dreams of whittling down the Xenai forces before he reached the best terrain to bottleneck them had fallen away. Too many soldiers were lost, and he needed to keep as many alive as possible to hold the passes.

  He watched from the hilltop as his troops moved into position below, tapping the legs of his armor with his gloved hands—counting the troops. Just over six hundred remained after the last battle. The lines were sloppy, and he could see the restless movements of the men below as he tapped out his own anxiety. He was flanked by a small troop of runners, ready to pass along his orders in the battle to the officers, who couldn’t afford to look away from battle to read LightTab messages.

  The runners shifted their weight from foot to foot, rubbed their hands together and craned their necks to see into the distance, an echo of the larger army’s movements at the bottom of the hill. The rumor that the runners were chosen because they were disposable Underground children was preposterous, of course. It wasn’t Hafi’s fault that the Underground bred children were nimble and skilled at going unseen. Among them were only a few Topside orphans who had developed the same skills—it also helped that the children had no parents to refuse Hafi’s request to take them to the battlefront. Most of the runners understood their importance, even if it made others talk about Hafi as if he was heartless.

  Hafi grabbed the shoulder of the boy next to him. If they lived through this, maybe he’d learn his name. It didn’t matter at this moment. He grabbed a second boy with his other hand, pulling both in front of him as he leaned down close their faces. He freed the boys from his grip and pointed down to the field, then turned his head slightly to the first boy.

  “You, go tell the left flank to initiate the charge. The right flank is to charge with them and you—” he nudged the smaller boy on the right, “—you will tell the right flank to be ready.”

  The boys nodded in understanding, both offering a “Yes, General,” out of sync with the other.

  “Go on, now.”

  The boys ran down the hill, sliding down the loose dirt and dragging their hands to catch branches to control the slide. Hafi turned his attention back to the army beneath him. At the base of the hill he stood on, his casters were ready. The flat dirt section of old road was a good perch for the casters before the last drop into the valley below, which was covered with their soldiers. Their scouts reported the Xenai were not far into the foothills that sharply rose on the other side of the open terrain. Hafi had retreated farther than necessary just to claim this high ground. They needed any advantage they could get to keep his men alive.

  Hafi saw the chain reaction from his runners start. The horses of the officers began to make their way up the lines, shouting orders at the men that Hafi couldn’t hear, and the ripple of attention radiated out from the horses as the men heard and understood the time was near. The restless movement stopped in the same abrupt matter that a cornered creature holds their ground with absolute stillness. As each row of men took a step back and braced for battle, the uneven lines of the army came closer together in a loose formation. It was something, at least.

  The small forms of his runners had reached the back of the men to start the climb back up the last hill. He couldn’t wait for them. He waved the runners near him to come in closer, “As most of you know, things are about to start moving quickly. I give you an order, you repeat it back to me. If I don’t correct you, you got it right and you run to deliver it. No time to second guess. Do not stop to help anyone, do not stop to fight. Anything comes at you, you get lost in a group of soldiers. They have their jobs and it depends on you not fucking up. Get ready.”

  He glanced down to the right of his perch, where Shara stood, peering through binoculars at the battlefield. Her guard flanked her, including James. Hafi had put Taeri with the Source-casters below. He regretted not having Shara’s guards for the fight that was about to happen. Hell, he needed Shara for it even more.

  There was no time to reconsider keeping his promise to Ayna. The familiar howl echoed through the valley. High pitched cries rang out in all directions, it seemed, from every side of the foothills. More and more voices joined the grating call until it echoed around the entire army. It was a frightening trick of acoustics-- Hafi knew the Xenai had not surrounded them, but it worked. The lines of his own men moved as they began to look around for Xenai from every direction.

  The Xenai were exactly where Hafi’s scouts said they were coming from. Hafi watched the far edge of the field fill with darkness, like a deep chasm just split open in it. From the illusory chasm, small dark figures swarmed out in every direction, forming tendrils that sprouted off the growing pool of darkness in the center. The fingers of Xenai figures thickened and lengthened until they reached the edges of the valley. From there, they appeared to split again, forming new tendrils that grew toward the Pact. There were a dozen smaller branches growing from one edge of the field to the other, making Hafi’s planned pincer move useless. He yanked the boys closest to him, “Go to the flanks. Tell them we need to hold, not charge”

  The boys repeated the command and ran. Hafi felt the knot in his stomach tightening as he watched the boys move. He could see the urgency in their movements—how little they slowed themselves on the slopes—and yet, the weight of time was crashing down on him as he watched the Xenai swarm, getting closer to the halfway point of the valley. If the army didn’t have the order to hold by the time they hit that point, it would be too late. He searched for the boys, weaving toward the officers, finding their locations by the occasional glimpse of a short figure.

  They’re not going to make it!

  Perhaps his officers would see the situation and issue the order to hold themselves.

  If Lee holds on the left, then Bolos will, too.

  The runner on the right heading towards Bolos didn’t matter to him anymore. He alternated between watching the tiny figure on the left weaving toward Lee and the progression of the Xenai. The Xenai hit the halfway point right a few seconds after Hafi’s runner reached Lee and Hafi watched as the orders spread. It was visible from both the front and back of the left flank, reaching toward the center. The front lurched forward in a charge while the back half received the order to hold. The men caught in the middle moved in chaotic ways, some joining the charge despite hearing the order to hold, and some holding.

  Haft felt his stomach fall as the right flank followed, the front charging alone, although more men seemed to have gotten the order to hold. On both sides, the Xenai tendrils immediately reacted, spreading forward to the groups that had charged and encircling them on each side of the battlefield. More and more Xenai ran to the circles around the troops and Hafi watched the black lines around the trapped soldiers thicken. The circles of Xenai around his men contracted until the white and blue armor of his officers and the patchwork of co
lors on the men disappeared, and it was only Xenai remaining.

  The Xenai spread back out, reforming circles around where the men had been slain. The charge stopped and the wall of Xenai moved forward together. As they moved forward, the field behind them looked as if it was consumed by smoke. From the front of the swarm near the middle of the field, two figures emerged. Each one moved toward one of the two circles. The tendrils of Xenai collapsed into the growing crowd of Xenai. The army came to a halt a few dozen feet behind where the circles of Xenai stood around his fallen men.

  Hafi grabbed the runner next to him, “Go to center. They need to divide to fill the flanks and hold.”

  The girl repeated and ran off.

  He grabbed the next child, “Casters need to send three close enough to protect the front while the men reposition.”

  As the boy ran off, he watched the Xenai circles part to allow in the lone Xenai that approached each side.

  He motioned to the next child and pointed to Shara, “I need her binoculars.”

  A few moments later, it was not the child who handed them to him, but Shara herself. She stepped to the side and continued to look at the field as Hafi looked through the binoculars.

  The figures that entered the protective Xenai circle around the bodies were robed and each carried a staff with a circular medallion at the top. They now stood in the center of the circle, casting source to move the dead soldiers around. Bodies levitated a few feet off the ground, several at a time, each one moving from where it had fallen to a point near the edge of the circle. It almost looked like the Xenai was sorting the bodies. They made five piles. When the sorting was finished, the edge of the circle rippled and moved and four more robed Xenai stepped into each circle. They took up positions between the five piles, evenly spaced and closer to center. They reached into their robes and took out circular stones with strange markings on them then placed the stones at their feet.