Ayna swung the doors open wide and crossed the open room to her desk, where she sat with a balletic motion, leaning forward and crossing her arms on the desktop.
“What can I help you with, today?”
Again, Conlan took the lead, with Dom sitting idly beside him like some strange ornament, “We have a very serious topic to discuss, but first we wanted to inquire about the investigation into Bobi’s death, and, of course, the missing books.”
Ayna responded, perhaps too quickly, “We are doing everything we can. The books have not shown up yet. When they do, of course, there will be some dispute as to where they belong. Bobi had no heirs, and the Source Academy has already put in a petition for them. If you’d like to do the same, I will have my assistant forward you the required forms.”
Conlan couldn’t hide the glare that popped onto his face for a moment before he regained control of himself, “Yes, please do have them sent over. I think you’ll find we have a very strong claim to them.”
“I am sure you do. The matter will be voted upon by the council if they are found. Now, what else did you wish to discuss?”
Conlan smiled, “Well, unfortunately, it’s the same issue that has plagued us for years. The BloodSmiths. With their new found—help—they have gained a much larger following than they have ever had before. Their need for source-casting elements has grown, and their large body of followers has emboldened them, so much so that they are raiding, again. They broke into our Upper Crafting house last night. Everything we’ve created and not sold over the last month was taken.”
Ayna sighed, “We can start an investigation, but unfortunately, with the war, we do not have the men to spare to place guards at the building. I’d be happy to explore alternatives to get you the support you need, as long as it doesn’t involve extra men I just can’t spare.”
Conlan’s anger resurfaced, and Dom leaned over and whispered something in his ear. This time he did not hide the anger, “For saying you have no men to spare, you seem to have an awful lot guarding the U Labs. I have heard rumors that you are conducting your own experiments into the Blight Crystal, now. In fact, some have said you are practically living there.”
Ayna found herself glaring at Dom. She pushed herself up to a standing position to glower down at Conlan, “As the Prime Stateswoman that I am, I am entitled by our bylaws to use up to twenty-five percent of the active guard in Prin as I see fit for my own safety as well as any States issues that arise. That is what I am doing. Whenever you become the Prime, you will be free to do so as well. Until then, I am open to hearing alternate solutions to your problem, if you have any. For now, I have other things to attend to.”
She retreated to her balcony, closing the double doors behind her. She shivered at the cold and hoped the effect of the biting wind on her was not visible to them. Slipping her LightTab from her dress pocket, she tapped into messages. Captain Hassan was waiting outside her office.
She typed a quick message to her.
Remove them all.
* * *
After the Artificer mob had been removed, Ayna reclined back into her chair, grateful for the warmth. She had her own research to do. The thought of fleeing to the safety of the lab, where no one could bother her without permission, was alluring, but after Conlan’s accusations it seemed pertinent to remain in the States House.
She began to research Tabitha. The dolts in the lab hadn’t realized that Jahwo had been talking about her when he spoke about the painting. She pulled up the family trees of Prin, grateful that Tabitha had always lived in Upper Prin, where the records were thorough. If she had come from an Underground family, Ayna might not have any files on her family at all.
It didn’t take her long to find that Tabitha had a younger brother. Aaron Shrive. He had been in the company that guarded the mountain passes—the company that had been obliterated when the Xenai horde rolled through.The name sounded familiar, but Ayna couldn’t quite place it. She tapped into the parents’ profiles. He was an engineer, and she was a doctor. Affluent enough, she likely ran into them from time to time, but not so much that she knew them well.
She thought about tapping into the archives, to see if any communication data between Tabitha and Aaron had been recorded, and if so, did it confirm they went to that spot? But she felt like this was enough to take to Hunt. It was time to reenter the labs.
As she slipped out of her office and left the wide doors of the States House, her LightTab chimed. She opened up a new message from Hafi.
You were right; they are after Shara. No idea why. We shouldn’t have brought her here. Should we use her to bait them or send her home? They have thousands of new reinforcements.
Ayna stopped walking, just next to the fountain at the U where she had talked to Kaiban. It felt like months had passed, not five weeks. The usual late morning crowd of students and teachers walked around the open area or sat on the nearby benches.
She knew, just as much as Hafi did, that if they brought her back to Prin and she was what they were after, they would come here to get her. Even with Prin’s defenses, holding out with what was left of the Pact Army would guarantee Prin would fall eventually—quickly if they kept sending batches of thousands to reinforce their own army.
“God fucking dammit!” Ayna screamed, ignoring the looks of those around her. Several pointedly turned their faces away and strode out of the clearing.
Can I bring her home and bring all the Xenai to Prin? We might be able to deal with it.
She shook her head and pushed the problem to the back of her mind. Hafi didn’t need an immediate response—her current posting had her east of the Pact camp and away from the bulk of the Xenai army. It would be easy for her to come home from there—as easy as traveling the mountains in a war could be.
She shoved her LightTab back into her dress pocket with a trembling hand and strode toward the lab.
* * *
Hunt objected to Ayna’s discovery, holding the pot of coffee in the air over the cup he held in his other hand. “Are you serious? I mean—maybe Tabitha knew them, somehow. It’s possible her family could have been friendly enough with theirs.”
Ayna shook her head, “Possible, but unlikely. The Shrives are Terran, through and through. No Illara blood runs in their family whatsoever, not even distant relations. Neither of the parents have jobs that would come into contact with many Illara. Kaiban and Jahwo have no children that could have been a point of contact between Tabitha, her brother and them. There is no way he knew them or of them well enough to know that Tabitha is a painter and the younger brother died in the passes.”
Hunt squirmed, “I don’t like it. Its like Intuition, but super-charged. What else could she know?”
Ayna didn’t like the idea either, “Likely, everything she wants to about anyone that she gets close enough to.”
No, Ayna didn’t like that at all.
“We should stop the experiment. We can sanitize the cell and pretend this never happened.”
Ayna looked over Hunt carefully, “Do you want to go in there and press the control that will incinerate two people?”
Hunt tried to hide the discomfort he felt, but his eyes shifted down to the ground, “Well, no. But, I bet the guards would do it if we told them they had developed dangerous abilities.”
“We aren’t pawning our dirty work off on the guards,” Ayna said with a pang of guilt charging through her, “If you think it needs to end, then end it. I won’t stop you, but if you make the decision, you need to take the action yourself.” I’m sure as hell not doing it.
“I’ll, uh, think about it. Perhaps a few more experiments, to see if we can figure out the extent of their abilities?”
“Kaiban just seems high all the time, I don’t care about that so much. Go talk to Jahwo. See if you can figure out how he senses things and what he can sense.”
Hunt seemed to realize he was still holding the pot and hadn’t put a drop of the caffeinated nectar into his mug. He turned from A
yna, pouring the cup and putting the pot back on the stove. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe we should pick someone who is a younger—less experienced—person, to go in there.”
“You don’t know any of your assistants well enough to be able to accurately judge the truth of what he says. If something embarrassing comes up, they could lie. It needs to be you. Turn off the comms, if you need to. Just make sure you take good notes, even if the exact things he gets from you are not recorded in detail.”
Hunt nodded in a manner that was an obvious attempt to comfort himself, “Yeah, no comms. I could do that. Without comms, it wouldn’t be too bad. Just between him and me—but—not.”
Ayna gave him a gentle hug from the side, “Just this once.”
“Okay.” He was pouring honey into the coffee as he looked over, and just kept pouring, “Just this once. No matter what we find or don’t find. This is it.”
“This is it.” She patted him on the arm, hoping to remind him of the honey before it made the coffee spill out the top. He jerked his hand up, pulling the canister away. He began to stir, “Well let’s get it over with.”
He put the coffee to his mouth, slurping from the top without tipping it. He scrunched his nose in disgust, but kept the cup as he walked out of the kitchen in front of Ayna. She tapped into the feed of the chamber, setting up the audio to record and be stored in a hidden partition of the Prin database.
* * *
Ayna sat with the minions as Hunt double checked the comms were turned off and locked down. He walked towards the double doors into the accessible entryway of their chamber, hesitating and looking back at Ayna before he reached out and closed the doors behind him.
Ayna waited for several minutes, watching the monitors with the others. Hunt stood, not sure where to put his hands. He kept moving them from his lab coat pockets to his pants to behind his back as he spoke to Jahwo. After a few more minutes, he stepped back from the panels that separated them, his jaw dropping in surprise. He said something quickly then turned, charging out of the secured section and closing the doors behind him. He latched them shut.
He didn’t look at any of them, sitting in front of the monitors, he just walked up to the large Tab, sunk into the top of the table, and hit the series of commands to initiate the purge. The team all looked at the screen in shock as fire billowed through the room. Jahwo and Kaiban were consumed in an instant, then the flames destroyed the LightTabs they were watching through. Ayna just watched Hunt. He was shaking, but hadn’t shown any hesitation.
* * *
Ayna said nothing to Hunt before retreating to her apartment, although she tried to offer a reassuring smile. She couldn’t wait to play the audio from the meeting. She locked the door behind her and lowered the volume to near nothing, placing her head next to the pads that produced sound. She was about to press play when an urgent alert popped up from Jo.
“Have you seen the Feeds? There is going to be riots over this.”
She nearly responded to ask which feeds; there were a lot of them, when another message popped up from Captain Hassan, also marked as Urgent.
“It’s on all the feeds and people are already gathering outside the States House.”
Ayna hurried to the feeds, a similar headline ran across all the updates in the last twenty minutes:
Mass Murder in the BloodSmith Temple
Artificers Retrieve Stolen Goods—Many Lives Lost in the Underground
Dozens of Children Confirmed Dead in Artificer Raid
The last one had images attached to it. She opened it, scrolling past the text at the top until she got to the images. A dark room made of stone was filled with people. It looked as if they were floating, but Ayna could tell it was just the angle of the camera, giving the illusion. It was unmistakable, however, that they were pale and dead, surrounded by a couple inches of blood. Tubes came out of their arms, attaching to cisterns that appeared to be smashed open. Many of the forms were small. Ayna was glad that the photographer had not gotten any closer, it was horrible enough. She shut off her Tab, her hands shaking as she lowered it to the bed. She continued to stare at the blank screen. Sorrow rose up within her for all those children, but all she could picture was Shara, dead in a pool of blood like them. The dam burst, tears and sobs pouring out of her.
She grabbed her Tab with frenzy, opening her messages and replying to Hafi.
Send her home.
58
Tani
Tani knew a dream was a dream. She always had. Nightmares had plagued her when she was a child, living in dark corners of the Underground, alone and trying to remain unnoticed. She learned to wake herself up from the nightmares in her mind as well as when she heard the monsters of the Underground getting too close. As she grew and couldn’t hide in small spaces that grown men couldn’t get into, she slept lighter to avoid both types of nightmares.
But, now, here she was, trapped in a dream, small and insignificant, hiding from greater forces, but they found her. Even curled up in the hollow she had made in the engine of an old, broken down and decaying train car, she felt that they were just outside. She had spent what felt like a whole day removing parts, replacing them in new ways and putting the extras into the luggage compartments. It was just enough space to slither in and sleep where no one would think to look. She thought she would be safe. It had been a lie. She could feel the eyes on her, as she often did when scavenging for parts to sell for food.
She rolled around in the tight space and swatted the tickling sensation away from her legs, but it swarmed. From her dirt-smudged ankles, it moved upward and around her legs, like a nest of spiders ascending. The tickling became small pin pricks, which grew into slices of pain, cutting into her. She could feel the creatures pushing their way through the cuts in her legs, burying themselves in her flesh as she began to scream and pound on the metal sheeting she had placed as a hidden door into the engine compartment. It broke open with a crash. She heard someone curse somewhere in the distance, but it didn’t matter. She slid out of the compartment, coming out below the conductor chair. She pushed up on the chair seat and scrambled to her feet. The sharp pains that shot up from her feet to her stomach seemed far away now. She looked down. Her left leg was covered in pulsing spots with a deep red glow. Her right leg was filled with gold bubbles. The lights refracted and danced over the walls of the small driver compartment as they moved upward.
The red bubbles moved up her leg and into her stomach until they seemed to run out of space as they collided with the glowing gold from her right leg. The two colors began to fill her legs with their shine, from the top down. She could feel them, burning against each other, clawing and scratching in the battlefield of her abdomen. Then she felt a prick of coldness, right at the center of the fight. It spread outwards. Black lines spread from the center, down her hips, through her thighs and down to her toes. The beautiful glow of red and gold on the shimmering walls of the train around her was stifled by the black lines growing over her skin, casting shade everywhere, like choking vines. Where the lights had burned inside her body, the growing blackness turned icy.
She remembered the glow… the control… Olivier had shown her. And in her dream child mind, she closed her eyes and begged the lights to stop.
Go away and take the black with you!
But she felt the coldness gaining strength in her center. It shifted and swirled like she had seen the gold inside Olivier move. And then it grew. From her stomach, it swirled, picking up speed and expanding until her stomach and chest looked like a slow whirlwind of gray marred with specs of black decay. It continued to grow, and somehow she knew that once it got to her mind, she was done. Tani would be no more.
She woke up to Vin in her face, cursing at her and telling her to wake up and stop screaming. He was shaking her with one hand, the other holding onto a chunk of some melon. She slapped him away, but was glad to be awake and not trapped with some unknown horror.
Systems, it’s all systems. She reminded herself befor
e sitting up in her cot. She looked at Vin, whose eyes were wide with concern and fear.
“Are those rats here, yet?” She asked, as if nothing strange had happened.
“Um—yeah. A few.”
“Bring them.”
Vin dutifully left the room, and she pulled out her tools, laying them out on the metal table next to her experiments’ cage. He returned quickly, holding a container of two rats. She filled a syringe with a few drops of sedative and pulled on her gloves. She opened the cage in Vin’s hands and jabbed one rat with the needle, pushing the liquid into it in one fluid motion, then jerked her hand out and slammed the door shut.
It took seconds for the rat to collapse into a deep sleep. She pulled open the door again, grabbed it and then shut the cage, just as the other rat was preparing to lunge out of it. She laid it out on the table, slicing it open on its back, close to its front right arm. She pushed in a sliver of Blight crystal and then followed it with a small chunk of the samples she took from Olivier.
Deftly, she sewed the creature back together before placing it in the cage with its new friends.
“Take that one away, just need the one—for now.” She turned to Vin, who was looking at his melon with questionable eyes—he was always squeamish around their work. “Do you want to get out of here? Go get an enormous meal. My treat.”
His eyes lit up, his lost appetite forgotten, “Yeah! Lets go!”
* * *
They sat in the corner private booth at one of the Topside restaurants. Tani had been tempted to go to the market, like the old days, but she couldn’t resist the good food Topside. They still made them pay upfront, but Tani didn’t even bat an eye as they ordered some of the more expensive items on the menu and she swiped her LightTab to pay for it. The server couldn’t hide the surprise on her face. The food came quickly, as if the server had told the kitchen it was for Undergrounders, and the sooner they ate the sooner they’d leave.
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