Vin scooped his morning mush with a ton of sweetener into his mouth as he sat hunched over it on the extra chair, “Don’t you check the Feeds?”
Delilah shrugged, “I usually spend more time reading...” she trailed off as she watched a glob of the food fall from his mouth, sliding down his chin, “Um—reading textbooks and studying for our work here.”
Tani sighed at Vin, “If you’re going to eat in here, at least use napkins and take Terran sized bites.”
“I am a Terran, so all my bites are Terran sized.”
“If you choke on that shit, I am going to watch you die with a smile.”
He rolled his eyes at Tani and said nothing, but he wiped the glob off the bottom of his chin with a finger, then scraped it onto the side of the bowl.
“Thanks, but please, don’t touch anything in here.”
He shrugged, “Okay, but we sanitize it before each operation anyway.”
Tani ignored him and turned back to Delilah, “Vin and I talked after it happened. And then slept on it. I think I’ve decided to take a week’s supply from the BloodSmiths, enough to get through our most critical patients. They need it. But, we need to start our own supply—get donations. I don’t want anything to do with them if we don’t have to.”
Delilah looked shocked, “I—yeah—we can do that. We’ll definitely have plenty of volunteers we can train to take the donations after last night. But, even with a last batch, we’ll have to suspend operations for a while.”
“That’s fine. We can use the time to study up and see if we can improve our process at all.”
Delilah shifted in the seat she sat on next to the table, then whispered with a conspiratorial tone, “What about the—uh—imaging? Are you guys still doing that?” She looked at Vin after Tani.
Tani sighed, “We need to, but with Mrs. Tatlock’s accident, we don’t have any patients that have displayed such great adaptation to study. Maybe we should put it off until after we get this blood stuff handled.”
Delilah took a deep breath and stood, looming over Tani, but still somehow appearing small and frightened, “I don’t uh—think we should wait. Just because our other patients have not had the high levels of improvement that Allyn and Mrs. Tatlock did, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they aren’t experiencing the same physical side effects. Perhaps, like normal source attunement, some of the patients will just take to it more naturally. But, inside it might all be the same.”
Tani considered the argument then shook her head, “No matter, it doesn’t change the fact that with the blood situation we are going to have to do multiple surgeries a day and take donations. We’re going to be working twenty-hour days, Delilah. Sleep deprivation and tiredness aren’t ideal for performing crimes Topside.”
“We need the imaging, Tani!” Her voice shook as she got louder. It was the closest to yelling Tani had ever heard Delilah get, even though it was still barely matching Vin’s normal speaking voice in volume, “Especially if we are going to power through so many patients in a week’s time. It makes it more important, not less!”
“What would you have me do? Make time to steal first? Suspend the operations while we get our supply up and do the heist? Any option where I make time to work in the theft, people die, Delilah. We can image them later, when they’re healthy again.”
Delilah glared at her, but nodded. “Fine. But, its not like our patients are living long lives after our work, anyway.”
The statement was like a slap in Tani’s face, “Neither of their deaths were our fault... Maybe Allyn’s was a little. But, Mrs. Tatlock was a freak accident! And, at very least, they were happy after their surgeries. They died happy. Not many people can say that around here. Around anywhere.”
Delilah didn’t respond or look at her as she left the room.
Vin started scraping his bowl for the last bit of his breakfast sludge. “She’s just concerned, Tani—for the patients and the project. I see both of your points, but we have to carry on with what we can do—and do the most we can do. She’ll come around to your plan.” He shoved the spoon into his mouth, then licked it clean. “Uh—mind opening the door for me? I’m not supposed to touch anything.”
Another day rose with another fight between the factions. It seemed the brief reprieve when the Artificers split into a Topside Guild was over. Already, Tani’s plan to extricate herself from the Blood Smiths was failing. Two of her patients wouldn’t be able to reach the lab for their operations until the streets were clear. Her morning was suddenly not busy. Even their efforts to get blood donations had dried up: they’d gotten what they could from nearby supporters, and no one else would risk the journey.
Tani settled into her cot and decided to do what she does best: analyze systems. She started compiling histories of the BloodSmiths and the Artificers, grabbing any important feed headline as a data point, starting back one year. She wasn’t going to solve their war—she’d been the one that sparked it again, even if indirectly. But perhaps she could find neutral ground by allying with both, somehow.
She realized after an hour that she could have saved herself a lot of time by working backwards from current times to older feeds. After documenting nearly a year of histories, she found the feed that gave her a small chance with the Artificers:
“Artificer Blight crystal team kicked out of U Labs.”
They had been working with Ayna, then they’d been thrown to the curb. Perhaps, if they knew her own work involved the crystals, they’d want to work with her. A quick search for a Bobi returned with information on his death. A robbery for a fortune in books that hadn’t resurfaced.
She would have to find another contact—which would be difficult, given how much they kept to themselves. Unless she wanted to grab one of them off the streets in the middle of a fight. No one would be crazy enough to help her do that. Even Vin was staying inside, eating leftovers.
She dug in, pulling up every Artificer from the articles and finding every scrap of information she could on them. One stuck out: a young woman that had been Ayna’s protege until she left the States House to join the Artificers. There were rumors of her meeting with a lot of the Artificer leadership, like Conlan, as well as still having a connection to Ayna Shae. But she was relatively lower in their organization, and so would be easier to seek out.
With the fights outside, Tani didn’t want to wait to find her in person. She pulled up the official LightTab register and located her name, then started to compose a message. It was strenuous, trying to appear more experienced than she was with brokering deals. She ended up pulling a great many articles up from the feeds that talked about new alliances that formed and copied some of the wording used.
Dominna: my name is Tani. I have been working to provide care for some of the Underground’s ill for a while now. You can easily find records of my work on the feeds. I am contacting you, because with the recent developments down here between the Artificers and the BloodSmiths, it has become apparent to me that I must make more alliances to keep my project alive. I have some interesting data on the Blight Crystals, and a large collection of samples. I would love to speak with whoever in your organization has worked with them and perhaps find a way for both of our teams to move forward together.
She re-read the message several times, then scratched out the reference to her samples. The message would be unencrypted, and there was no way to tell who might be watching Dom’s communications. She did have close ties to Ayna Shae, after all. She changed the sentence to “I have obtained interesting data on the Blight crystals”, hoping that was vague enough to not be incriminating, but also specific enough to pique Dom’s interest.
It would have to work. She hit send.
62
Ayna
It can always get fucking worse, Ayna thought as she looked at the feeds. She had slept at home last night and Jo was happily humming around the kitchen as he brought her coffee and food. He dropped off a plate of bacon and gave her a kiss.
“I h
ave missed this,” Ayna said with a smile, looking up at Jo’s mouth rather than his eyes.
“So have I. But, I can always tell when you’re hiding things. What has happened now that’s threatening our blissful breakfast?”
“BloodSmiths. They raided the Underground last night—Took a bunch of kids.” Ayna paused as she watched Jo stop moving, bacon suspended midair before he placed it on his plate. She continued, “It’s unprecedented for them to show so much force. Or to risk turning the Underground against them. They must think with Tani on their side, they can do anything.”
Jo placed the bacon on his own plate and came to the table, sitting and looking at her thoughtfully, “Does she have to be? On their side, I mean. From what you’ve told me about her, it seems like growing up alone as a kid down there would make her hate anyone taking advantage of kids.”
Ayna took a bite of the eggs and ripped off a small piece of bacon to pop into her mouth with them. She could be just as valuable up here as she is down there—more valuable. But how could I convince her to join us? “That’s a good idea—ripping her away from them would weaken them. They’d just be fanatics, again. If she turned her back on them, the rest of the Underground would go with her. They’d still be dangerous, but they’d lose their influence.” The Hierophant will be the real problem. I am sure he already has a dozen plans in motion to start tipping influence from Tani to him.
Jo smiled at her and sat down with his own plate of food and began to eat. They kept the comfortable silence until they finished.
Ayna groaned, “I don’t want to go to work. Don’t make me go.”
“We could run away. Go to Ceafield or Shouding!”
Ayna laughed, “Hm, work or certain death? I guess I can go to work.”
Jo stood, grabbing his plate and hers as he bent over and kissed her forehead, “Your work hasn’t killed you, yet, so you do have that going for you,” he joked.
Ayna expected the crowd outside the States House to be bigger. It was filled with families, although she didn’t see a single older teenager or a child over ten in the crowd—an oddity. The lack of teens was normal at this point. Any unregistered teenager of conscription age was sent to the front. If these families had a teenager at home, they would have left them there. The records were so incomplete for Undergrounders that it wasn’t uncommon for a younger teenager that looked older than their age to be grabbed by the Prin Guard and conscripted.
Ayna also knew for each of the families here, there were more that wouldn’t bother coming, and even more kids that didn’t have families. This is not going to be a good day. She started ascending the steps. Captain Hassan stood at the top, saw her, and rushed down with a small group to bring her up into the States House.
When she reached the top, she turned and faced the crowd, “I am sure most of you are here about the horrible events that transpired in the Underground last night. We need to talk to every one of you that had a child taken. We need to document them all. The Prin Guard will be sent to find them. We will get your children back. Please, line up neatly on the right-hand side of the stairs; Captain Hassan and her team will start making records for all your children. We will need names, photos and any other details you can provide. If you know of any children that got taken who were not yours, please let them know about those children, as well.”
Nearly the entire crowd started moving to the right side.
“If you are here for another purpose, please understand the issue involving Prin’s children is going to take precedence. If you would like to wait, you are free to do so, but I would suggest coming back this afternoon.”
Two men turned and walked away. Ayna retreated through the States House doors. Kingston Cross stood near the window, looking out at the crowd.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.
“Sure, if you want to spend your morning doing grunt work, go help the Guard document the missing children.”
He nodded and, to Ayna’s surprise, walked out the double doors and up to Captain Hassan. A moment later, he waved for a couple at the front of the line to come speak to him. Ayna watched for a moment as he actually gave the woman a hug and then started taking information from the man. Perhaps I’ve been too hard on him. She turned and headed towards the enormous curving staircase at the end of the foyer.
Settling into her office, Ayna noticed the database Hassan had made for the kids was exploding in size: one new entry for each of the five guards popped up every minute. It looked like large groups of red clothed men took children from three separate locations. She pulled up the schematics of the Underground and put markers at each spot. All of them were heavily trafficked night locations, and more interestingly, all of them were close to the edge of the inhabited Underground. There were plenty of locations near the center that would have had more children to pick from, but they had chosen these spots for a reason. To get away quickly makes the most sense. But eventually they’d have to take them back to the Temple. She dropped a marker onto the display for where the Temple was. Together, the four markers made a nearly perfect square, each marker close to the edge of the used space down there.
She pinged Erde, her new assistant. “I need more extensive Underground schematics that include the abandoned sections.”
A knock came at her door and Erde popped her head in. “Um, where would I get those for you?”
Ayna sighed, “Archival records are kept on the Prin database. You’ll easily find them if you look under the Archives category. Once you find archival records, you can filter by schematics. Send me anything that comes up for the Underground. Most of it was mapped when Prin was founded, I believe.”
Erde nodded, “I’ll get right on it.”
A few minutes later than she would have liked, the message from Erde popped up with all the schematics. The database was still filling up, but so far all the locations of the kidnappings stayed in those three areas. She decided she’d continue mapping locations later, just to make sure a fourth spot didn’t pop up. She switched to the message then started compiling the schematics together. The old maps, created with the Nagata tech before it had stopped working, were very accurate. She could find the dimensions of a passage down to a millimeter. On the other hand, their new schematics of the Underground that showed all the living quarters were lucky to be accurate within a foot. It was not as simple as overlaying the new map over the old ones. She had to transcribe the new map data onto the older, more extensive maps.
Once she finished, she marked her four locations again. The tunnels on that level extended outward, occasionally branching into paths that crossed the others, but nothing distinctive stood out. She tapped the markers, copying them and moving down to the next layer of the schematic.
Most of this layer was utility piping, which was not good to travel through. At least, not for adults. She pasted the markers onto this new layer and the pattern immediately emerged. There was one passage on that level that was easy to traverse, and all four markers lined up with it. The old loop. Originally designed to house a train, it was abandoned long before the Sundering. The old city had outgrown the areas it covered, and so they built the upper transit layer, which expanded even past the city itself, connecting other cities that had existed to this one. The upper transit network was now their Underground, the lower passages forgotten by most.
She pulled up the roster of Prin Guard, looking at the numbers without an active assignment guarding the walls, the Labs or patrolling. There were six off duty that she could send. It’s not enough. Can I afford to pull some off of other assignments?
She pinged Captain Hassan, “When you can break away, come to my office. I found something.”
She looked again at the roster. Even if the Captain decided she could spare a few from other assignments, it just wasn’t enough. Reports indicated at least sixty men had taken the children between the three locations. The BloodSmiths were crazy, not stupid. They would be guarding the Temple tightly. She clicked over to the d
atabase where the names of taken children filled up over a hundred rows and it was still expanding. I will find a way, but right now, you are going to have to survive on your own.
63
Shara
Her hands shook and her heart pounded as she reread the words on her LightTab. She barely noticed the force with which she hit the ground. She needed to sit—to have something solid beneath her. She felt the jolt and a crack from her wrist as if it was happening to someone else. Her back has a spasm and cried in pain, but that was miles away. She read the words a third time.
James!
You told me you’d come back—turns out, I’m the one that won’t be back. More Xenai reinforcements arrived. A fuckload of them. We are retreating to the Stone Divide Pass for a last stand. Get back to Prin. Be safe. I wish I had more time to know you.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. The pain echoed down her back, her muscles still inflamed and sore. The small and clean hand gave away that it was Sabeen that stood over her, “We all got messages like that one. From the General?”
Shara shook her head, “No,” she choked back a sob, “from a boy.”
Mystics, I sound like a pathetic teenager, not a leader.
Why didn’t Hafi send me a message?
She felt her anger flare as she realized he was trying to keep her from returning to the army. The damned fool was going to risk Prin to keep her safe—to keep a promise he had already broken.
She straightened her back and turned her head the other way, trying to push the tears threatening to fall from her face before anyone other than Sabeen saw her. “Who was your message from?”
Song of Sundering Page 37