The only entrance was a large circular door, reminiscent of the photos of old bank vaults Hafi had seen on the SatNet archives. It sounded like one too, the creak and groan of the grinding metal was easy to hear from outside the organic fencing. His only advantage that he could see was that it did not appear to have an actual locking mechanism. The door did not move easily. Counting how long it took nearly twenty seconds for the door to swing closed, Hafi figured he could cover the distance from the fencing to the door in half the time it took to close. If he found a way to breach the barrier when the door was open, he could slip in before it closed.
He tried to discern what purpose areas of the building served, but the lattice windows hid most of the activity in the building. At night, there was one room on the back edge of the building, near the top floor, that had some sort of light inside of it. It turned off not long before dawn nearly every day, so someone was there, but he was unable to discern what they were doing.
He had tried finding former government offices in the small city to look for floor plans or surveys of the recycled building. He had been able to find a facility that had some offices, but all the paperwork that was still readable seemed to be about medical records and money. He spent a week making a round trip to a nearby location with stronger SatNet signal. He assumed the Xenai were monitoring access, so it also served as a cover to hide where exactly he was. He encrypted and sent photos and some observations on the facility to Ayna. If she still has Sat access. He should have been there for her. He had never heard back from Jo’s brother. I can only save one Shae at a time, he told himself.
He would need to make a return trip soon to see if she had sent any new information. Perhaps she had been able to dig up something on the town and the building where Shara was being held. He was trying to put off the return trip as long as possible to avoid any potential confrontation with Xenai who may have noticed his activities. A second access point would be better, but Hafi was afraid to wander for days to find one and miss an opportunity to get into the building.
With each day that passed without progress, the feeling of failure weighed more heavily on Hafi. Perhaps he should give up and return to Prin to try to devise a plan with Ayna.
He was pondering this at his fire pit, which had burnt to just embers, barely hot enough to cook a rabbit. He had dug the hole a foot into the ground to hide any light as best he could. So far he was either unnoticed, or the Xenai in the area did not see him as a threat.
The shadow at the edge of the small clearing shifted. Hafi immediately picked up his rifle and pointed it toward the shadow.
“Come out where I can see you.”
To his surprise, the shadow stepped out into the clearing. It was still hard to see in the moonlight, which filtered through the smoke around the Xenai, dissipating the light in a way that made the creature look like a gray blur. Hafi saw movement from its sides and tensed, until he realized it was putting its hands up. From a Xenai, the gesture seemed almost mocking. It was not something a Xenai would think to do, to raise their hands in surrender. Hafi felt his tension in his fingers, expecting more Xenai to step from the darkness and end him. He should just kill the thing before it was too late. He slipped his finger down over the trigger.
“Old man…”
The grating sound of its low voice felt like it scraped across the ground until it got to Hafi’s ears. Hafi lifted his finger off the trigger, keeping shaking in the air right next to it, ready to return to its position so he could squeeze.
The creature continued to speak with a halting cadence to his words, “I am Fur. I know Shara. I have watched her… since the cave. You were there, too. Your men… all killed. But you saved the girl. And I have watched her, too. To protect. I can… think. And… I can help. We both are… Watchers.”
Hafi was struck by the oddness of this Xenai. Usually the guttural tones of Xenai came out as nonsensical to anyone other than Xenai. Occasionally a Terran word was understandable, but would stand out of the sentence with no context. The most coherent sentence he had ever gotten out of a Xenai was a grating and concise, “Fuck you.” He had taken off the Xenai’s head shortly after that, so it was understandable that it had chosen that small part of Terran language to speak.
Hafi decided to test the Xenai with the biggest piece of the puzzle before him, “How can I get past the barrier to the building?”
The Xenai Fur shook his head. “You cannot. I show you—different path. Underground. I found. Need Old Man to open.”
Well, that was something. He hadn’t thought to look for access points from sewers or other underground paths. He would look into it more, either after he killed the Xenai, or found a way to keep him captive.
“Where are they holding Shara in the building?”
“Top floor. It is… large. They contain her.” He made a gesture around his neck, “She has… killed many. They keep her—source sleep.”
Hafi suppressed a smile at this information. Of course she was killing them. She was a fighter. He had trained her well.
He asked the question he was not sure he wanted answered. “What are they doing with her?”
“They make her… Xenai… Embed in her. Create a new Xenai from her. Stronger Xenai. Everything must be… fixed… improved. That is what they… think. No. Their coding? I do not have the right words.”
“Indoctrinated? Trained to do?” Hafi suggested.
Fur nodded. “No thought. Just action. Thoughts outside.”
It made an odd sort of sense. He had battled enough Xenai to see the sudden shift in behavior, like they all received a message at once—an updated strategy—and immediately executed it. Just like when they all retreated at once, even the ones that hadn’t seen what Shara had done.
“So, how do we get her out? How much of a Xenai is she?”
Fur shook his head. “She is strong. She will fight. But she cannot fight it forever. Voice will take her, make into mindbent. Even after we get her out. Inevitable.”
Hafi didn’t like the sound of that. He shifted towards the Xenai, pulling his rifle back up slightly.
“How do we get her out?” he repeated.
“Underground. Need more friends. Many Xenai. More men to find girl.”
“How many do we need?”
“How good... your men? I feel—hundred Xenai in there.”
A hundred. Far more than Hafi had thought. The building must be expansive underground, which was likely the reason why they had chosen it. Hafi knew he would need at least a few dozen solid soldiers—more if he could find them. He needed to get men out here from Prin.
“Fur, I need an access point to the SatNet. Not the old tower by the angel building. I used that one already and it’s likely being watched now.”
Fur nodded with abrupt, unnatural head jerks. “There is… north-east… another town… old points. Four days’ walk.”
Hafi could make that work.
“We will go in the morning.”
“We?”
“We.”
Fur made a sound that sounded like half growl and half purr, then sat down by the embers without another word. He curled into a fetal position and seemed to fall asleep. Hafi meant to watch him, but the exhaustion and lack of food took over and he drifted off to sleep.
83
Kingston
Kingston stood over Hunt. The Blight crystal project as it was when he took over from Ayna looked entirely different. Hunt was not happy about being moved to the smaller rooms at the back of the lab, but he put on a good face of understanding that the health of Prin’s ill came before exploring new worlds.
The young Inari, pulled from the jails, was more than happy to walk the worlds he found. It seemed to make Hurly happy to travel to other worlds through the Blight Crystal, however he seemed to have limited ability to control where he ended up. It had taken two weeks for him to end up back in the world that the other planet hailed from. They called themselves Speruvians, so Kingston and Hunt had taken to call
ing the world Speru.
“It’s here! It’s here!” Hurly yelled excitedly as he slumped on the comfortable couch in his containment cell, hands resting on the cushions at his side. He waved his hands in the air, as if grabbing an object. “Investigatory team vanishes—oh no.” He ran his fingers in the air, as if along an object they could not see on their end. “Two weeks into the trip, the ship reported some unexpected stress on the ship’s structure before vanishing entirely. No objects or Hawking radiation was observed in the area around their time of disappearance.”
Hunt squealed and started writing with vigor on his LightTab. He worked on a series of numbers and symbols, swapping from writing to reading.
“Nine years, 32 days.” He mumbled.
“What are you on about?” Kingston demanded.
“If they disappeared two weeks out, that means that the Sundering that started on their planet 82 years ago has traveled outward until now — we have 9 years and 32 days left until it reaches us. Roughly.”
“That doesn’t seem very rough.”
“I had to make some assumptions—like that they chose to launch when they did due to ideal planetary alignment—or you know... alignment between their planet and the empty spot where the other used to be. I also had to assume that their propulsion systems were somewhere in line with where ours were before the Sundering. With 82 years of advances on their side of—the uh—cosmic fence?—I can’t be sure that these aren’t wild assumptions. If they travel faster, we could have a much longer timeline. If they didn’t have the shortest possible trip at time of launch, we could have less time, as well.”
“So—this number is basically worthless?”
“Well, yes, and no—it means its close. I’d feel comfortable saying that there is no way we are looking at more than half that number or half that number in either direction. A fifty percent margin of error, perhaps? Maybe—it could be a little high—”
Kingston shook his head and sighed, “So we know it’s soon but we really can’t tell if it will be in the next five years or fifteen.”
“Precisely!”
Kingston figured that the shorter timeline was the best one to place his bet on. How on Sunterra am I supposed to find the answer and deploy people to solve this problem in less than five years? He thought about Tani—probably being wasted doing work that she could document and assign anyone medically trained to do. Or the weapons project, which she could easily oversee and guide without actively being involved. Ultimately, the Sundering was a collision of systems. Who better to solve it than the girl that sees through systems to where they interconnect? Her influence has already grown exponentially since she came topside. If I put her in control of all the important projects, could she harness power against me?
Kingston looked over Hunt, fighting to keep his face neutral to not give away his disdain, “Well, this is your problem now. You need to figure out what has happened to the Mars colony, why did we lose contact? Dig into historical records, or use your uh—whatever we are calling him—to get data. Anything.”
Hunt blinked back at him with a perfectly still face, as if trying not to be seen by a predator.
“You get all that, Hunt?”
“Uh huh, yeah. On it.” Hunt squeaked out as he turned to stare at the calculations on his LightTab.
* * *
Kingston looked out over Prin from the north facing balcony of his office—formerly Ayna Shae’s office. He had counted on the other council members’ former reluctance to run the city, and it had paid off. A few needed some massaging, but all it took for both Vitalus and Joreen was to explain the updates from the Blight Crystal project for them to lose interest. It was an unanimous vote by the other council members to name him Prime.
Between the small and rapid snowfall whipping around him, he looked at the walls surrounding Prin, the buildings within them and the newly re-inhabited homes outside them, scattered across the northern plains. It was all his now. And he had to keep it—to fix what he had broken. He balled his hands into fists, feeling the surge of strength in his forearms as he took a deep breath, enjoying the air filling his lungs without a cough following. He had managed to stay under Ayna’s radar, but in doing so, had exposed himself to Tani, whose influence was growing practically daily.
Ninety-eight years of struggle and mistakes. I can finally undo it all.
He thought of his former life—his first life, you could say—abandoned by his father, then left alone by his mother. Sent to the towers, because no one knew what to do with him. It was a punishment because he was weak. They expected him to die out there. And now, here he stood, with all of them long dead behind him. There was only one who he regretted leaving behind. The kindly old man, an enemy who crossed the tower lines, to teach him to survive the wild north around the towers.
“The old fight doesn’t matter up here,” he had told Olivier, “Every day the only battle worth fighting is for survival. Don’t make me kill you over a fight that isn’t ours.” When Olivier had accepted that the man could have killed him easily but hadn’t, he dropped his axe and the old man slung the deer off his shoulder onto the ground and showed him how to skin and cook it.
Wrek—did you die out there? He would have protected me. He was my real father.
And all he had done since, in his second life, and now into his third life, hadn’t mattered. None of it. Every attempt to help others, to protect them, had ended in death—as he had to assume his attempt to save Wrek had also ended. Only Marie had survived his meddling, and that had been because of her own strength of will.
The stories of the swarms of Xenai from James popped into his head. Even them. What had started as an attempt to heal himself had instead made them into Xenai. They had been healed; they had been strong. But, now, they were something else entirely. He didn’t know what went wrong with them, the first of his children. They had created so many of themselves, bent on destruction, but they were still his children. He could feel them, even now, across the vast distance to Shouding. They were angry, a sense of foreboding and doom permeating throughout them all. A single-minded hatred for themselves that poured out as violence around them.
At least, until she made it there. Now, there was a bittersweet tinge of hope—the kind that had been let down too many times before. Still, they believed Shara to be their savior. Why her? Left to themselves, they would make another Shae tyrant out of her, putting what remained of the world in danger. He had to bring them to the table—get them to see the truth that lay before him. Sunterra would die again, soon. Most of them would die with it, Xenai, Terran, Illara and Inari alike.
The cold air swirled around him as he let his mind wander. He had no plan on how to face what was coming, and it made him uneasy. He always had plans and backup plans. He needed Tani’s mind. She saw in days what had taken him years to see in his second life. He had posted the data to find someone like her, but had not expected someone so competent to emerge. Every time he saw her mind at work, he resented it as much as he loved it. He had to get as much as he could out of her before she turned her back on him, like everyone eventually did. She would be the true savior of them all, whether she wanted to be or not.
At least there was one problem he could take care of. The problem of the mercenary. Hafi would go to the ends of the earth to save Shara, not realizing there was no way to save her. The damned fool would just expedite the terror the girl would inevitably cause. At least that would be easy to take care of. Ceafield was always willing to help him out.
84
Tani
Tani looked up through the metal grating at the three floors of her former lab.
“Ahhh—full circle.”
“Falling leaves return to their roots.” Vin said quietly behind her.
Delilah turned from her position in the front and stared at him, as if shocked he could say anything that sounded remotely beautiful or deep. “What is that—?”
He shrugged, “Some ancient Terra novel title. Never read i
t, but I liked the title.”
Delilah laughed—everything was alright in the world now that she confirmed Vin didn’t actually read anything besides the social feeds.
Tani started for the ramp up to her cube before realizing it would be just as barren and uncomfortable, so she just sat on the floor at the base of the ramp. Delilah and Vin sat beside her.
“So—what now?” Tani asked them.
Vin was quick to chime in, “Well, we can do some good for other people and keep working for a murderer that may actually be Xenai—stealth Xenai—and hope he doesn’t kill us for knowing what he is. Or, we can get the fuck out of here.”
Delilah looked at Tani, eyes wide, but offered no other options.
“We could rig a full un-redacted release of all our knowledge. If he kills us, he will expose himself.” Tani offered.
“I like it!—except for the being dead part.” Vin replied.
Tani rolled her eyes, “The point of it is that he knows we have done this before he kills us.”
Delilah finally spoke up, “Can we really do that, though? I mean—if he has the power that Stateswoman Shae had now—how do we know he can’t tamper with our feeds? If he can revoke access, we are fucked.”
Tani blinked over at Delilah. It was a good point, but she had never heard Delilah cuss before. Her comparatively calm exterior was hiding turmoil Tani had never seen in the girl. “That would be a problem, but it’s only a problem because of systems.” Vin openly rolled his eyes at her. She glared at him and continued, “He can possibly control who has access to the SatNet, but he can’t control what people learn from each other. We need to move to another system.”
Delilah nodded, “But, if we tell anyone, we are already a threat. He would just kill us then.”
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