Song of Sundering

by A. R. Clinton

  “My appetite has been fine. Perhaps even slightly improved.”

  “Define ‘slightly’.”

  “I am finishing meals and eating occasional snacks. I have been keeping up on the walks in the mornings, adding an evening walk as well. It is about the same length, from my residence in the states borough, around the Nagata and States hill. And of course, generally increased activity from sitting less throughout the day—”

  “And the pacing? Is that something you are doing a lot?”

  “A decent amount. I do it when I am thinking. It’s an old habit, really. I had given it up when the illness first started, but it’s reappeared. The unsteadiness while walking and occasional bouts of dizziness have gone away. My peripheral sight has come back. And as I already reported, the cough has entirely gone. I can’t even remember the last time I had to use the apparatus you gave me.”

  Tani nodded, rising to her feet and motioning for him to sit. She noted the precision of his movements as he took her place in the chair. He stepped to it, turning on the toes of one foot while simultaneously removing his light jacket with both arms and dropping it into one hand, from which he launched it onto the table as he finished the motion to sit on the chair. The maneuver would have sent him toppling to the floor and into a fit of coughs a few weeks ago.

  She checked his heart and lungs, as usual. The original implant remained unchanged, as always. She kneeled on the ground and rolled up his trouser leg to where the incision had been made for the Blight implant. The implant itself was actually a series of small gems she had spread throughout his bone marrow. But she regularly checked the site to make sure that there were no growths or evidence of changes outside the area. Despite her continual encouragement, Oliver refused to come in for full body scans to see what systemic changes may have occurred. She was certain they were there, and she was certain she had to find them, especially in light of the changes she was seeing tonight.

  “Same results as last time for the physical exam. Olivier… I know you won’t come in to the U lab. I want to ask, however… Given the extraordinary results tonight, I want to publish these findings. We can keep your identity anonymous. But the only way we can do that is if we do a full exam.” He was already shaking his head, but she continued, “What if we set up a secret lab in the Underground? It’s nearly empty these days with so many people moving outside the walls, and with our new resources, I could manage that with just Vin. I could get you there after it’s set up without even him knowing you’re there. We could get all the data I need and keep you a secret.”

  He was looking at her more intently. “That could work. Have you mentioned it to Kingston?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  He smiled. “Good. I’ll talk to him about it. He will reach out. I did have a question for you — and maybe your lab could help answer that, too.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him and he continued, “I — I saw some of the other Blight projects, recently, that Kingston was reviewing before they were destroyed. Some of the illegal ones. And I felt them — like how the Source-casters describe feeling others of their kind or Xenai—like a presence. Could these procedures have unlocked powers? Is that something we could test in a controlled and safe way? I have seen the videos of the uncontrolled experiments and I don’t want to do anything like that. I just don’t want any surprises.”

  He seemed concerned, but his questions made Tani uncomfortable. She remembered her dream. How, against all logic, her dream had been in the back of her mind when she had chosen to place his Blight implant in the marrow, as far away from his original implant as possible, despite the fact that it was going to cause a systemic effect if it didn’t kill him. She had to know what she had created.

  “Yes. I can create some controlled tests. First, reactions to the base materials, then manipulations of them, then of other materials.”

  Olivier’s smile was brighter than when she had entered the hut and she thought she could hear him humming as he stood and put his jacket back on.

  Each time Tani tried to sleep, she saw images of what she would find when she walked into the new Underground lab. Now that she was here, all she wanted to do was lay down and sleep. She had been working on limited sleep for months. She was enjoying her work. Now, she was working on limited sleep because she could only see a lab, growing tendrils of black from shimmering lights of red and gold — the only end that her work could be leading her toward.

  She rolled the sealed vault on the door until it clicked open and pulled with both arms, her feet planted before her as she strained to start the door moving. Olivier would be there not long after her.

  Her old boots were worn and scuffed and near-black, just like the bottom and sides of the old scrubs she wore. The only parts of her attire that were part of her new life were carefully packed in the sack on her back, until she reached the cleaning chamber before entering the lab, where she would put on the overcoat, gloves and glasses. She closed the door behind her, turning the seal until it clicked back into a locked position. She turned and scanned the room, half expecting the lights to change color from the clear, twinkling white before going black.

  She set down her sack, unpacking her clean clothes from the protective plastic wrap only after removing each wrapped package and setting it down away from the dirtied sack. She put on the garments and piled the remaining wraps in a precise order next to the last door. She began the process of unlocking and swinging it open. She picked up her bag, throwing it into the corner as she stepped through and deposited the clean items—wraps and tools—on the metal table before turning to close the door behind her.

  Olivier would come in through the other entrance, which had a stronger quarantine system, including a decontamination shower for which he would have to fully strip. She would be fully isolated from him throughout all the tests, to maintain the integrity of the testing procedure itself, as well as for her own safety. She had sent one of her Inari helpers, a former BloodSmith, blindfolded and misdirected several times when she was guided on the way down, in with two pairs of the samples for Olivier to manipulate later. The containment held the worst the Inari had been able to do with Blight.

  She started to unpack the remaining items. She laid out several vials on the metal table, and loaded two larger vials into one of the machines that fed into the containment system she had built.

  An alert popped up on her LightTab. The decontamination shower was running. Olivier was here.

  Once Olivier had left the Underground lab, Tani had left through her own door as fast as she could move the heavy doors and hit the decontamination button. She could hear the flames burning everything left inside the containment cell, as she had designed them to. She had the data in her bag and had already sent a message to Delilah. They would begin work on constructing the case study to publish as soon as she got back to the lab.

  Vin was waiting with Delilah. He stepped toward her as she entered the lab, leaning in to ask, “How is Olivier today?”

  “Fine. Perfectly fine.”

  Vin’s eyebrows furrowed, and he left the lab as Tani plugged her LightTab into the servers to start to share all the data with Olivier’s name and background redacted. They had briefly fought over whether to redact the unknown implant information. Tani had finally convinced him that she had to include that data, but would leave out the side effect: the glowing. It hardly seemed relevant, and it was the only externally identifiable aspect of the implant. Since they would not be including any other external identifiers, there would be no way to identify him from the data, other than cutting him open.

  Tani began to organize the data in a way that seemed to make the most sense to people that would be entirely unfamiliar with the scenario as it began to appear on the server. Delilah and a few other assistants had their LightTabs hooked up and syncing, and began reading through the files in order. Tani found herself smiling as she watched Delilah work her way through the documents. It
was like when she had read the Xenai documents on the SatNet, redone by Tani, all over again. At first she stared, eyebrows together, and pulled the LightTab closer and closer as she read. Then her eyes got wider as she held it an inch away from her face and lifted her chin slightly. Then she moved toward the Tab again, but with a hunger.

  This time, it was not just Delilah. They worked for the next week straight, putting together the case study and preparing the data to be released to the public on the SatNet.

  The release produced immediate results across the scientific community, and then across the rest of the survivors as a whole. Within hours of releasing the document, the SatNet was talking about what the results would mean for them as people. Kingston Cross released a statement.

  Prin, The Pact, and our greater Communities of Sunterra,

  I was not afraid to send this interesting case to Tani because I knew she would be the brilliant mind to find us a path. However, we have a long way to go before discovering what this path means for us. We will continue down this road with caution and with the tenacity and curiosity that has made us the survivors we are today.

  “Vin? Where are the new rats?”

  Tani asked the question two more times before she looked up and realized that her assistant was not in the lab.

  “Delilah, where is Vin?”

  The girl shrugged, staring alternately between her LightTab and her own cage of test subjects. Tani slid her LightTab into the front pocket of her coat and walked away from the raised platform in the center of the lab room. Vin had been acting strangely the last week, but disappearing without saying anything was unusual. If he was going to nap on lab time, he could at least make an excuse. She wandered the lab checking every napping cubby, the kitchen, and peered into the patient ward. She walked back into the main lab.

  “He isn’t here. I checked everywhere.” She pulled up the security logs, kicking herself for not thinking to check those first. “He didn’t even Tab in today. Did he message you or anything, Delilah?”

  Delilah shook her head.

  “Anyone heard from Vin?” Tani said, a little louder. A few heads looked up, a few also shook their heads, but Tani knew that most of them barely spoke to Vin at work, and it was safe to say they avoided him outside work. “I’m going to go check on him.”

  Vin’s place was small, but well-furnished. Tani had opted for sparsely furnished with wide open spaces. Vin had gone for a single small room, but with large and plush furniture. The closet-sized kitchen had a single smooth, glossy, black countertop, and a stove piped for gas rather than electricity. Vin looked like he had not slept and wobbled over to the couch, where he sat at an awkward angle after letting Tani in.

  “Sorry, I just didn’t feel like coming in today. I figured you didn’t really need me to lug stuff around, anyway.”

  Tani looked at the boy, slumped over on his side on his velvety red couch, which made him look smaller than he was. For the first time she remembered that they both were not much more than children. She sat next to him and put her arm around him in a stiff motion. He laid his head down in her lap, making his neck bend forward in a more awkward way, “What’s been bothering you lately, Vin?”

  He shook his head. “I — You have done these things. Great things. And I move things around. I see things sometimes, you know, things you don’t see. I am not smart in the way you are. But I still see things.”

  Is he drunk?

  He shook his head again, snuggling up closer to her and getting more comfortable. A few minutes passed in silence and he seemed to weigh more against her.

  She heard a chime from her LightTab, but she let him stay there against her, asleep, for a few minutes more.

  When she got back to the lab, Delilah was pacing at the base of the stairs to the platform. “Tani! Why didn’t you answer my message?”

  Tani tossed her head back as if she had slapped herself. “I’m sorry, Delilah. I heard the ping, but couldn’t check it right at that moment. You know how I am.”

  Delilah glared back at her. “I assume you didn’t see the announcement either, then.”

  “Nope.” Tani pulled out her LightTab and started opening messages and tabbing through headlines. “Great,” she said, half in sarcasm and half with interest. It had been a few days since the release of the Olivier document and Kingston Cross had just announced an expansion program. Their beautiful lab would be dedicated solely to the weapons and defense program, and a new lab would be set up for medicine. The transition would take time, but he was aiming to have everything done in… nine months? Tani shook her head. “What the hell? There is no way they can build anything that fast, even if they had the filament to make the Nagata do most of the work, and the Scavs to do the rest!”

  Delilah was nodding at her, with five assistants standing behind her, mimicking her motions. Tani tilted her head, watching them bob up and down, wondering if they were as upset as she was. “That’s not all.” Delilah waved at Tani’s LightTab.

  Tani rolled her eyes and kept scrolling through the notifications she had missed.

  A message from James Cross, Kingston’s son.

  Tani,

  With recent changes in Prin’s structure, I am stepping in along with Druva to help plan some defensive measures. I would like to meet with you regarding possible applications of the Blight crystals in weaponry. I am at your disposal. Let me know what time would work well for you and your assistant, Delilah, to come.

  Tani snorted at her LightTab. “So, we’re heading up the medical program and consulting on the weaponry program? At least this guy is more polite than his father.”

  Delilah just stared at her. “What? No, we… What? I was talking about the rat data. What?”

  Tani was about to laugh at Delilah, until she realized there was only one piece of rat data that would have agitated Delilah: the hybrid rat, Rat-livier.

  Tani had tried to mimic the conditions as closely as she could. The single major difference was that, rather than keeping the two implants separate, she had immediately placed a Blight crystal into Rat-livier’s wound from the initial implant, then allowed it to heal. It had healed and the rat had acted normally. There was no noticeable change in any metric, from his diet to his maze completion times. He was a plain, average little rat.

  Tani slid open her LightTab as she began to make her way toward Rat-livier’s cage. She did not find a black rat, sprouting tentacles, waiting to devour her. He was just dead. Delilah’s data showed that he had passed his last exams, given each hour, with average scores. She had walked by the cage and noticed he was lying still twelve minutes later.

  “Well, I guess we should do an autopsy. Go grab me some gloves and a mask.”

  She cursed herself for not paying attention to her LightTab sooner. The poor little rat had been dead just long enough to be annoying to work with. She gave up doing the work freehand and strapped him down as hard as the straps would go, not caring if it broke a few bones. She only cared about what she found at the implant site. She peeled the skin back, working through flesh and muscle until she finally got deep enough to pull out a hard lump of growth that had surrounded the implant.

  She handed the growth over to Delilah, who was more precise freehand, and watched as she started to cut chunks of flesh off the implant, revealing a single chunk of black that looked like obsidian but couldn’t be.

  78

  Hafi

  Hafi grunted to himself and adjusted his position on the cot; the soreness of the intense battle had set in. Ayna hadn’t returned any of his messages since the army had started back to Prin. Hafi cursed again, staring at the icons on his LightTab that showed no new messages.

  “Bitch,” he muttered, feeling better as he swiped over to reread his messages with Jo. Jo wouldn’t give him any personal updates about Ayna, but he was keeping him appraised to the general tone of things in Prin. Every feed seemed to include some debate about Ayna and Shara. Had Shara’s existence been the cause of the war? Anonymous SatNe
t users went so far as to suggest that every hardship Prin ever faced could have been avoided if Ayna had just killed her baby sixteen years ago, an eighty-year history of struggle and skirmishes be damned. General opinion seemed to accept that Ayna’s statement was to be taken at face value, and that while this had been a victory, they need to accept it was temporary and prepare for whatever may come after.

  He heard footsteps behind him and stowed his LightTab. Coilsen already had his pack. The poor kid had felt responsible for what happened to Shara and insisted on accompanying Hafi. Hafi had given in, with the caveat that if Coilsen slowed him down, he would leave him behind—and now he was the one loitering in his cot, concerned about Ayna.

  “You see any tracks?” Hafi asked the boy as he started untying his cot from the trees.

  “Nothing still.” He leaned against a tree, watching Hafi roll his cot and strap it to the top of his sack. “How much farther are we going to look?”

  “As long as we need to. If we can’t find their tracks—or a body—then we will have to assume they took her to Shouding. I don’t care if we have to go to Shouding. We go until we find something.”

  Coilsen shrugged. “Lead the way, General.”

  Hafi turned west. He hadn’t taken many steps before he heard Coilsen unstrap his rifle. Hafi instinctively put his hands up.

  “Why, Coilsen?”

  “I had my orders. More than you got now.”

  “I’m the fucking General. I make the orders, son.”

  “Not anymore.” The rifle whirred, preparing to fire. Hafi threw one leg out from under him, falling down and to the side. The bolt hit him in the ribs and he felt them shatter and his blood begin to spill.