I moved to my seat at the console, staring at hundreds of ‘foreign breach’ messages that scrolled across the side-screen. My legs were wobbly and I nearly fell trying to sit down. I was still reeling from everything that had just happened, and was slightly irritated that he expected me to compose myself so soon. There were points on our Sim maps that weren’t ours. We had found several from the portal systems, but that had been in Dra—Cassima’s (I was never going to get used to this)—private thread for research purposes only. These points were broadcast to anyone who looked. Everyone.
Not only that, but there were countless fragments of information on worlds across the twelve Sims. “Why would they do that? They just outed themselves.”
“They just outed us, too. Any public information about us on grid is accessible to them now. Honestly this couldn’t have come at a better time.”
I looked at Cassima, taken aback by his glee.
“Authority and Inspection—all of the pulsing Sectors, actually—will be so preoccupied by the foreign breach that it will give us some more time,” he explained, catching my look.
“Time for what?” I asked.
He nodded toward the public map and I followed his gaze. A world in Eversae Major blinked like a beacon, revealing current Vel’Haru activity. Gantzt, it was called.
“Time to talk to them,” he said.
On cue, I received a ping from Authority to report to the IQD immediately. A very long, very panicked meeting was in store. “Talk to them? Do you not remember the last time we tried to talk to them?”
“I saw Lelain’s feed. You didn’t try to talk to them, you tried to kill them,” said Cassima, giving me an accusatory glare.
“That had nothing to do with me. Lelain disregarded our directive and—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “You’re being summoned. Go to Authority. Distract them. And whatever you do, don’t go to Engineering.”
X
THE FEELING’S MUTUAL
Qaira Eltruan—;
AS MUCH AS I’D HAVE LIKED TO SAY that I was going to miss Gantzt, I was probably the least angry of us over having to pack-up and flee. I’d lived in cold weather for most of my life, but fuck this place. I couldn’t wait to feel my balls again.
Leid and Adrial were having at it downstairs. That was all they ever seemed to do anymore. Leid wanted to go, while Adrial wanted to assess the situation. He wasn’t convinced her shield was inert, and the only one who actually knew for certain was laying in his cot, staring at nothing, mumbling incoherently about some kind of shard. Hopefully Pariah wasn’t broken forever. Yahweh didn’t seem to think so, but who knew.
I was throwing our shit into sacks, banking on Leid to win the fight. She always did. Zira and Aela were packing, too. We didn’t take much stuff with us, so I was done in an hour. Leid and Adrial summoned us just as I was finishing up.
“We have no choice,” Leid was saying as I met with the rest of the group in the Fortress main ground.
“If they can find us here, couldn’t they find us there?” said Adrial, evidently angry.
“Where?” I interrupted.
“The Atrium,” said Yahweh.
Oh, shit. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. I don’t think Belial and Seyestin would appreciate us bringing them our mess. Can’t we make an impromptu survey mission?”
“I’m not doing that again,” said Zira, frowning. “It’s not as easy as you’re making it sound.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
“A survey mission will be in order,” assured Leid, huddling into her shawl. “But we need better equipment, and we won’t be able to just drop in on some deserted world and hope to find it.”
I raised a brow. “Equipment for what?”
Everyone looked at Yahweh. He cleared his throat.
“I think I’ve found something significant,” he began. “But I’d need more advanced instruments to test my theory. Since the hourglass has turned, so to speak, the easiest method of acquiring the instrumentation would be returning to The Atrium.”
“So you’re for this idea?” I balked.
Yahweh sighed. “Not really, but Leid is right; we have no choice. If we stay here I won’t have enough time to assemble what’s necessary. And with Pariah down, the time it will take has doubled.”
“Why not have someone go to The Atrium and fetch the equipment?” I asked.
“Yes, let’s have someone fetch very heavy, very delicate equipment,” Yahweh deadpanned. “I can’t see anything going wrong there.”
I said nothing for a moment. Everyone waited for a rebuttal. I pointed over my shoulder with a thumb. “Well, I have everything of mine packed. When do we leave?”
*
Pariah’s eyes looked like they were going to burn out of his head. I studied him while Yahweh rifled through a stack of data. We’d made him a makeshift cot in the corner of the lab, too afraid to move him any further than a few feet. He was unresponsive and exactly how we’d left him. Every now and then he would twitch, kind of like those bald things back at the Framer prison. Other than that he stared unblinkingly at the ceiling.
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked, seriously wondering. He didn’t look good at all.
“I don’t know,” said Yahweh. “I want to believe he’ll be. If he absorbed part of Lelain, then it’s only a matter of time until his body uses up that energy. Until then he’s given the Framers access to attica, and us to whatever their conscious stream is called.”
“They called it grid, I think.”
Yahweh blinked. “Well, that’s very uncreative.”
“He’s basically an integration device,” I thought aloud. “Which means there’s something comparative between us.”
“Hold that thought,” said Yahweh, bringing over a stack of data files. “I haven’t had a chance to upload these to attica, so we’ll have to look at hard copies.” He set the stack down and pulled a few sheets for me to review. A thousand years ago I’d have told him to give me a summary.
After looking it over, I found what Yahweh had discovered before he even had a chance to explain. “There’s a refractive discrepancy between our petrified tissue and theirs.” I calculated the difference between them, and then compared it to the other spectrums from which he’d tested. It was the same number throughout all wavelengths.
A constant.
A fucking constant.
“We can’t go yet,” I breathed, darting out of the room, leaving Yahweh confounded in a whirlwind of data sheets. He wasn’t even able to get a word in.
Back to that wall for me.
Hopefully working this out wouldn’t push me over the edge.
***
Leid Koseling—;
Adrial volunteered to go and warn the Celestials of our intrusion. He had the most tact of all of us, I’d give him that.
He was angry at me, again, though there was nothing I could do about it. I loved him, more than he realized, but his ambivalence during pressing matters made things difficult. We needed to act now—not have an hours-long forum to discuss our next steps. I’d told him such and in return he said I was reckless and uncaring before storming off.
Sigh.
I appreciated him; I really did. He dealt with all the social aspects of leadership that I despised. Adrial was cordial and intimate with the court. He gave them a voice; turned tyranny into diplomacy. But he was too afraid to make the wrong decisions, and for that Adrial faltered. Wrong decisions were better than no decisions. This had been true on Midea, and it was true now.
Adrial and I first met when he was the youngest son of an Erkhan King, their world Midea being an odd conglomerate of midciv tech and lowciv politics. Their borders were breached by a warring army from the north, and Calenus had contracted me as their tactician. It was punishment, really—the first contract after Sanctum, and the circumstances were exactly the same. Adrial’s people were up against a more advanced and brutal army. His brother, Ren, had been slain weeks prior an
d Adrial was set to become their army’s Captain.
Except he was neither soldier nor captain material, and he knew it. That was why I was there to teach him war philosophy. But I never could. He was too indecisive, too anxious—
So his continent fell. His entire nation went up in flames. His family died.
He would have too, if not for me.
And here we were again. Adrial had been forced into leadership for a second time, but at least now he had me to make the tough decisions for him. I would take the brunt of them, too.
“Leid.”
I turned from my seat on the log. Yahweh watched me from the shoreline’s edge, the shadow of the midciv ruin rose behind him from the distance. With him standing there, it looked like a black throne.
“Qaira’s solved his equation,” he said. “You’ll want to take a look at it.”
*
“Sarine called it the basewave,” said Qaira. “She didn’t really explain it to me, but from other things she said, it seems like some kind of resonating frequency that unifies the Multiverse.”
All of us were crammed into the empty room, staring at a sporadic cluster of symbols and numbers scribbled across the wall. I’d have suggested moving it to attica, but didn’t want to steal his thunder.
“Unifies the Multiverse,” repeated Zira, blinking. Beside him, Aela frowned and crossed her arms.
“Think of it like a string,” said Yahweh. “It’s a string that connects all the universes together. The Framers presented Qaira with this equation to see if he understood basewave mechanics. They wanted to know if we were like them.”
“We are like them,” said Qaira. “Except there’s a deviation in our energy refraction. Alpha-Insipia’s universal matrix places too much tension on our resonance. Tensor, it’s called. Yahweh and Pariah’s research shows that the material of dead Framers refracts light at a—”
“Annnnd I’m lost again,” said Zira.
“For the oldest scholar here, you sure aren’t very quick,” snapped Qaira.
“I’m the oldest scholar here,” I corrected him.
Zira opened his mouth to angrily retort, but Yahweh intervened. “All you need to know is that we’ve found a way to fine tune our resonance to the Framer basewave. Hypothetically.”
“Pariah gave us a shining example,” said Aela. “Does fine-tuning our resonance turn us into that?”
“No,” said Qaira. “What Pariah did was snort a pure substance. We’re just rubbing it on our gums.”
Yahweh sighed into a hand. Everyone else stared at him, utterly confused.
“Metaphorically,” he added.
“We’re going to rub Framer corpse-dust on our gums?” asked Zira.
I resisted a laugh. “Qaira, well done. Yahweh, please work with Qaira to make a coherent fragment on the basewave theorem.”
“That’s not safe,” said Qaira. “The Framers will see it.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Let’s inform them that we’re evening the playing field.”
“We’ll definitely need better tech now,” said Yahweh.
“Good thing we’re going to The Atrium,” I said. “We depart when Adrial returns. Have the fragment live before then.”
And then my senses pricked. The shield around the fortress had faltered for a fraction of a second, yet long enough to warrant an alert. I turned and approached the window with caution. I felt something else now. Something…
Dangerous.
“What is it?” asked Qaira, having noticed the shift in my demeanor.
I didn’t move; only stared out the window.
“We have a visitor,” I said, in barely more than a whisper.
XI
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE
Cassima Shard—;
THE SHIELD WAS STRONG, AND I was very impressed with its weaving. Nevertheless I was able to slip past its threads, effervescent to my (and her) eyes only, and then it grew extremely cold. I came underdressed.
There was a body of water and a rotting piece of vegetation on the shore, covered in frost. Beyond that was a walkway arching over the water, which then led into an even larger construct made of contour-less stone. It was three stories high, with a spire that reached double that height. The entire area was surrounded by tall green flora and a mountainous terrain in the distance. This world had had some advancements once, judging by the hanging, lithic tech on the horizon. Intriguing.
She had felt me; I knew because I felt her. I dared not cross the arched walkway, knowing it was best to wait on the other side. Perception was key, here.
And so I waited, conceding to wrap my arms over my core. In Alpha-Insipia the cold would never be a problem, but out in the sims I shivered like a mid-civver.
Movement wicked across the windows along the front of the construct. Two figures appeared, watching me from the upper floors, within adjacent rooms. Their resonance burned brightly, one silver, one violet. And then the doors across the bridge opened. Out came another violet.
Male, dark hair, pointed ears, mean eyes—Sarine’s captive. One of his hands had morphed into a sickled blade, its surface glinting from the weak rays of sunlight. He stopped in the middle of the arched walkway, looking me over.
“Can I help you?” he asked, although it did not seem like he’d really meant that.
“Greetings,” I said, taking a step forward with my hands raised—that was how beings like them gesticulated non-violence. “I’m here to see the one called Leid Koseling.”
Sarine’s captive smiled, but like his eyes, the expression was mean. He looked around, and then past me. “Where are your parents?”
“This is only a carapace. I am four million years old.”
The smile waned; his eyes narrowed. “What do you want with Leid?”
“To speak to her,” I said. “There’s no ulterior motive. Not from me.”
His gaze strayed; he was tracking something behind me. He caught himself a second later but it was enough warning for me to sidestep as Leid Koseling appeared right where I’d been, in mid-swing. Our movements were executed in a millimoment’s blur, and then she was on the ground, my hand encasing her fragile neck.
I shook my head.
The one on the archway took a step forward, evidently distraught. I held out my other hand, motioning for him to stop. Leid lay still. I’d made it so she couldn’t move; thousands of volts penetrated her body through my palm, tensing her muscles to the point of complete immobility.
Or so I’d thought. She gnashed her teeth and sent a burst of energy at me. It felt like a slap to the face. Quite annoying, but that was all.
I was not a Regal. I was not an intermediate Framer. They knew that now.
“I’m not here for violence,” I said, staring down at Leid, and she up at me. Her expression was ice. “Because if I was, you and all of yours would be dead. I am going to let you go now. Please consider what I’ve said before you try to strike me again.”
My grip loosened on her neck and I stepped back, giving Leid space as she shakily rose to all fours. Sarine’s captive—Qaira, that was his name—watched us both; silent, alarmed.
“You’re much stronger than you look,” rasped Leid, glaring up at me in contempt.
I smiled. “You as well.”
Back on her feet, she smoothed her hair and studied me. Her eyes were as voltaic as mine, a mix of violet and chrome.
Ah, I understood now. The other violets were hers. The Vel’Haru had found another way of shattering themselves.
“What do you want to speak about?” she asked, incredulous.
The excitement had worn off and I shivered again. “Can we go inside? It’s very cold.”
Another violet appeared from the southern mass of flora. It seemed all of them were hers, except for one. This one was larger than Qaira, with tanner skin and darker hair. A smoking stick was dangling from his mouth. He froze upon seeing us.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. I was only gone for an hour,” he said.
**
*
Qaira Eltruan—;
I felt it wise not to trust a framer dressed as a little boy. That seemed like a good rule to live by.
Still, I was curious to know why he’d come here if not to kill us, like Sarine’s previous envoy. It was also clear from his speech, gestures and expressions that he was not a young child, so why masquerade as one? I asked him that very question once we all were gathered in the fortress grounds. He looked at me with those electric eyes and a knowing smile.
“I didn’t choose this carapace,” he said.
And that was it; nothing else. I stared at him, and he at me, unblinking. Framers looked like us—some even acted like us—but it was evident that their long (long) existence had pitched them much closer to an androidal or machine race. He studied the grounds, then us.
“We all are here,” said Leid, crossing her arms. “What is it that you’ve come to say, Dracian-786?”
His shifting gaze rested on Leid, and he smiled. “My name is Cassima Shard.”
“Your grid says otherwise.”
“Grid is lying. You shouldn’t trust it.” Cassima raised his painted brows. “But I am impressed you can access Grid as we do, even without a shard.”
A shard. Pariah had mumbled something about that.
“Why do you have a pseudonym?” asked Leid.
“I don’t. I have a pseudo-carapace,” said Cassima.
Leid tilted her head, not following.
“This was Dracian’s body. I’m borrowing it,” he elaborated, surprisingly able to pick up on her cues. Leid opened her mouth, but Cassima added, “It’s a long and complex story; one that I’d love to tell you, but not now. There’s not enough time.” He turned to address the rest of us. “The Insipian Qualification Directive of Halon IV knows of your location. The shield you’ve raised still holds, so they can’t pin-point your exact coordinates, but it’s only a matter of time. I suggest you leave immediately.”
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