by KT Belt
He said nothing. He didn’t even seem to hear her, except for one sign. It was ever so slight, but he gave a small smirk. Carmen grinded her teeth.
“This is not funny!” she spat.
Rauon and Mugal, who walked in front of them, turned to look at her. Mugal’s face rivaled a stone statue’s for hardness. Rauon simply looked confused.
“Pardon me, Psyche, but what isn’t funny?” he asked.
Inertia smirked again, and Carmen could only sigh. “So many, many things,” she said dejectedly. Rauon looked even more confused, but he questioned no further. After a few seconds of awkward silence, the group continued on.
Carmen, unfortunately, had to divide her attention between Inertia and the sortens. The layout of this place would never allow anyone to walk aimlessly and get to wherever they intended. She had learned that the main corridor really did continue on forever, subtly doubling back and curving in on itself in one continuous loop. Rooms and secondary corridors were hidden behind doors built into the walls of the main corridor to be as nondescript as possible. If she and Inertia didn’t follow closely, they’d be lost in a matter of moments.
“Why did you say we were married?” Carmen asked again.
Inertia glanced at her. “So, what now?” he teased.
Her eyes narrowed and she pressed her lips together. She didn’t ask that question that much. “Now you’ll talk to me,” she responded.
“Yes, we can talk now,” Inertia said after a thoughtful nod.
“So, why did you tell them that?”
“Edge, if you thought Last Resort was bad, you need to look around,” he spoke. “No matter how strong we may be, if we get lost here, we’ll never get out. I want to make sure they don’t separate us.”
“All right, I get it,” she said back. “But why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
Inertia paused for a moment. “If you could have seen your face when I said it, you wouldn’t ask that question,” he responded simply.
Ha ha ha, Carmen thought, but even she had to admit it probably would be funny if it were happening to someone else.
As they went through another door hidden in the walls, she thought about their current situation. The seriousness of it all made her eyebrows scrunch together as her mind was invaded by one and only one thought.
“Married? I don’t even know your real name,” she said as she fought a dry smile.
Inertia gave her a quick glance. “That’s what my ex-wife said too.”
Carmen laughed lightly. It was nice to be able to laugh in a time like this, in a place like this. And it was now that a place like this finally stood at the forefront of her attention. This new corridor was no different from the last one, the one before, or the one before that. She looked at the two sortens in front her, walking as if this were a pleasant stroll through the park.
“Excuse me, Rauon,” she began. He seemed the more reasonable of the two. “Where are you taking us?”
She waited for the inevitable remark of, “You don’t already know?” She wondered why everyone thought Clairvoyants were omnipotent, all-knowing gods, but this time the comment never came. Neither Rauon nor Mugal seemed surprised by her question.
“Excuse me?” Inertia asked her telepathically before Rauon could respond.
“What? I shouldn’t be polite?”
“And if they took Phaethon?”
Carmen shrugged but said nothing else. There was no real reason not to be polite, at least for now.
“We are taking you to our medical center for an examination,” Rauon answered simply.
“Why?” she asked without really thinking.
Mugal abruptly looked at her over his shoulder and Rauon paused. Carmen wondered why they reacted as they did. It was a perfectly legitimate question, as far as she could tell.
“We want to make sure that neither of you were injured from your fight with our copy,” the head technician eventually said.
“Oh…yeah,” Carmen muttered, rubbing her bruised chin. She’d forgotten all about that. She looked at Inertia and examined his large cut. He gave her a thoughtful nod, apparently knowing what she was thinking, so she assumed he wasn’t badly hurt either.
“They’re even more formidable than I first assumed,” Mugal growled under his breath.
Carmen ignored him, there were other things on her mind. She looked up and down the corridor, unable to contain her curiosity now that they were talking.
“Rauon, why is this place designed like this?” she asked. “It’s so…vexing,” she eventually added when she found the right word.
The security director responded, even though the question wasn’t directed at him. “Of what you speak, of everything around us, it is all a personal touch of our project leader,” Mugal said. “Caelus is utterly obsessed with what your kind calls the Dark. He’s been studying Clairvoyants since before the first war. He says this, all of this, gives him focus. We’ve taken to calling this facility Solitary.”
“Is that its actual name?” Carmen asked.
“No,” Mugal said simply.
“What is it called?”
“No one can remember,” he said. “It has had many names in different eras.”
She frowned but didn’t challenge the statement. He wasn’t lying.
Rauon chose that moment to cut in. “That’s completely true. No one knows anymore. But the last Clairvoyant here said the architecture was…fitting,” he added.
The conversation ceased being a casual means to satiate Carmen’s curiosity in that moment. “Last Clairvoyant? What last Clairvoyant? What was his name? Why was he here?” she asked breathlessly.
“Interesting,” Mugal said to himself, still loudly enough to be heard clearly. “The Clairvoyant doesn’t even know why she is here, yet she is at attention about the purpose of another.”
Carmen looked at Mugal, who calmly stared back at her as he walked. “Are my questions a problem?” she asked Rauon, though the words weren’t aimed at him.
“Questions? No, never. As always, the only potential problem is why the knowledge is sought and what you plan to do with the answers,” Mugal said. “What is your plan, Psyche?”
Carmen looked the sorten in the eye. He made no attempt to hide his lack of trust. Every fiber of his every muscle stood at the ready, waiting for the call to action. She didn’t doubt that he had spent countless hours studying how to fight and defeat someone exactly like her. But she didn’t need to lie for this test.
“I wish I knew,” she said simply, and then she looked at Inertia. Mugal’s eyes swiveled to him like turrets on a battleship, but Rauon spoke first.
“With respect to the security director, if our new guests were set against us, I doubt we would be standing here right now. Am I correct?”
“Yeah,” Carmen said almost immediately.
Mugal stopped and looked at her. He then looked at Inertia. Inertia stared back. Despite her Clairvoyant senses, Carmen could only guess what understanding was exchanged in those few wordless moments. Mugal broke contact first and turned to the head technician.
“It’s always cold in the deep dark places,” he said quietly. He pressed an unseen button on the wall. A door opened and he stepped inside. “Remember that, Rauon,” he added before he disappeared from view.
Rauon watched him leave. Carmen still didn’t have a full read on sorten facial expressions, but she distinctly registered disappointment before he turned to face them.
“I apologize for the security director. I hope you understand that he’s spent most of his career as a soldier, training to fight Clairvoyants,” Rauon said. Carmen gave a nod, but Inertia made no response. “This is the medical center. If you’ll please step inside, the examination won’t take too long.”
She nodded again and entered the room. She was instantly reminded of the medical wing at the facility. The layout was quite similar, with rows and rows of beds in a large central room. Doctors casually roamed the room, poking and prodding where needed. And
that was where the similarities ended.
The place just didn’t feel right. It looked like a war was happening and that whatever side was being cared for here was losing. Healing didn’t appear to be the main priority, though. Almost every bed was taken by dead or badly maimed Clairvoyant Constructs. The smell of it all made Carmen subconsciously raise her hand to her face while she consciously kept the most offensive odors at bay by telekinesis. But the plight of the Clairvoyant Constructs didn’t seem to be anyone’s real concern. One of them died right in front of her, and his doctor simply took notes. Piles of corpses were carted out as unceremoniously as one would take out the trash. She could only assume the bodies were on the way to some sort of disposal.
She looked around the room with a thought and a wonder in her mind, but the grim truth was quite easy to see. No sorten reacted whatsoever to the horror around them. She could neither see nor sense any emotion when one of their test subjects expired. Deafening cries of pain from the suffering were heard by the sortens as loudly as a boulder dropped into a bottomless pit. She looked at Inertia and, when he returned her gaze, she could see seriousness mount in his features.
“Psyche, please sit here,” Rauon said.
Carmen nodded and sat on the bed. Inertia sat next to her. A doctor came for each of them soon enough, while the head technician waited a little way off. The Clairvoyants waited for the doctors to begin their work. And they waited…and waited. Carmen’s doctor didn’t say anything, which struck her as odd. He simply scanned her over and over again with his PDD. It was like she wasn’t even there. She leaned forward and cocked her head to the side to give her healer a hard stare.
“Don’t move,” the doctor said tersely.
Carmen sat up straight by reflex before she wondered why she was doing it. “Umm, what are you doing?” she asked.
“Don’t move,” the doctor said again.
All right then, I won’t move, Carmen thought. She sat as still as humanly possible, staring at the doctor while hesitating to blink. It was then that she heard someone approach. It was hard to sense who exactly it was. They weren’t a Clairvoyant, but they were quite hard to read nonetheless.
“The Clairvoyant beast doesn’t like our methods. I remember when we used to be more…invasive.”
It was a pretty easy guess as to who it was now. She turned her head to look without even thinking about it.
“Don’t move!” the doctor said again.
Carmen sighed and turned her head forward again. Caelus chuckled lightly. He walked in front of her, and she looked up at him while he looked down.
“Is this better, monster?” the sorten asked. She said nothing. She was tired of the doctor snapping at her. “It’s fascinating how the beasts often prefer to use their primitive eyes instead of their extrasensory gifts. Our tests with the copies prove the same.”
Carmen’s primitive eyes narrowed, yet her lips stayed still. Her thoughts turned to Inertia. “How should I react?” she asked him telepathically.
“I’m not sure,” he responded as a doctor tended to the cut on his head. “Run with it.”
“Run with it?”
“Keep him talking,” Inertia explained.
She didn’t think she’d be able to get him to stop talking, even if she snapped his neck. It certainly didn’t take long before he continued.
“Are you angered, terran?” Caelus asked with a mocking tone.
She was not. He made her more annoyed than angry, but she ran with it by pressing her lips together into an obvious but not exaggerated sneer. Caelus looked her in the eye, and she looked back. But then his condescension and arrogance broke to allow the keen intellect of the scientist to show through. He looked quickly at the PDD.
“Psyche, is it? I will have to research that name,” he said. Carmen was surprised by the rapid change in his demeanor, and her eyebrows scrunched together. “Oh no, terran, don’t think you’re special, just unexpected. You have my attention.”
She could only agree that she wasn’t special, but that still didn’t answer why he was suddenly so interested in her. She was about to ask more directly when Caelus continued.
“There is an incongruity about you that’s hard to place,” he said. “I cannot tell if that is a natural occurrence in you or evidence of some conscious subterfuge that you’ve failed to conceal. No Clairvoyant beast that I’ve ever known has bothered with the effort of a self-cloaking ruse, though. It is superfluous, isn’t it?” he asked. “You cannot hide your true nature with itself.”
Carmen made no response other than a nervous subconscious twitch of her eyes in Inertia’s direction.
The sorten didn’t seem to notice the tell. In fact, he appeared lost in his own thoughts. “Yes, yes,” he muttered to himself. “Your time here will be fruitful indeed.”
“Analysis complete, Project Leader,” the doctor said.
“Very well. I’ll look at the findings later. You may go.” The doctor left, and Caelus turned his attention back to Carmen. “Speak,” he said simply.
“Analysis?” she asked.
“Yes. We were studying your bioelectric field. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have many…natural baselines to work from. I hope that, with enough data, we’ll be able to completely map the Dark, as your kind calls it,” Caelus said. “The Dark,” he repeated. “We came up with many designations for that unknowable void but produced nothing so accurate. Terrans, at least, can be credited with a degree of creativity among their many vices.”
He didn’t speak again, at least not right away. Instead, he reached out and casually gripped Carmen’s chin with his artificial hand. Clairvoyants didn’t feel heat and cold like normals did, as their bioelectric field shielded them from changes in temperature in the air. That was not the case, however, with direct contact. She shuddered as the cold metal pressed against her soft flesh.
“Terran genetic messaging is most interesting to me,” he said. “Generation three,” he added as she allowed him to turn her head. “I wish I could have seen a terran before you began fiddling with your construction. The baseline would probably be useful.”
“If I remember correctly, sortens did some fiddling of their own,” Carmen pointed out as he turned her head the other way.
She was quite tired by this point of him holding her face. It was probably the longest time that anyone other than Michael had ever touched her. But his artificial limb prevented him from getting shocked.
“Yes, quite right, beast,” Caelus said. “I even made some contributions myself while we were in possession of your kind. However, I campaigned quite strongly against it until I was overruled.” He then ran a finger through her hair, which particularly made her shudder. She almost vomited when he leaned in close to get a good look at the individual strands. “Hmm… So there are some differences,” he remarked as he let her go.
“What do you mean?” she asked, putting her hair back into a ponytail.
Inertia watched the back and forth between her and Caelus more intently than she ever could and even answered for him.
“On average, we have clearer skin and healthier hair than generation two. It’s very, very slight but quite visible if you know what to look for. Almost nothing else is as readily apparent,” he said.
“Oh, so he can speak,” Caelus said. “And this one appears to have a mind as well. What else can you say?”
“Lots, when it suits me,” Inertia remarked.
“Indeed,” the sorten muttered to himself. He looked at Carmen, who stared back at him. He was completely undeterred. “And what secrets does your more powerful companion hold?” he asked rhetorically.
“You’re so condescending that I imagine you know them already,” she blurted out.
She just couldn’t help herself. Being called a beast all the time, him touching her hair, he was still only annoying her, but that didn’t mean it was painless. After that brief moment of emotional self-defense, the gravity of what she did made her eyes grow wide. The ruse was ove
r now. They were no longer the naïve or desperate Clairvoyants seeking the employment of their enemy. The low level of their commitment was obvious to all. Mugal would be attacking them any second. She had just enough time to give Inertia a hesitant glance.
Yet Caelus laughed. Or at least he gave the sorten equivalent of laughter. In fact, he laughed quite hard.
“Clairvoyant,” he began, “your appraisal falls short. There is more collected knowledge on the Clairvoyant scourge here, in this place, than in the rest of the galaxy combined. I’ve dedicated almost my entire life to studying creatures like you. Nonetheless, I would never dream, even in my wildest, most awe-inspiring fantasies of having a single clue about the nature or magnitude of your secrets,” he said, laughing again before he continued. “I condescend to you? You, who engage me in such petty talk when you could rip your answers from my mind and crush me to pulp with but a thought? Is that the joke you wish to mock me with?”
“Umm…” Carmen muttered, at a loss.
“The Clairvoyant beast is suddenly unable to speak. She never even thought of any perspective but her own, always a curious happenstance,” he added with a sneer. Carmen sneered back despite her best efforts not to. Caelus observed that tell quite easily, and his sneer morphed into a wry smile. “I like the truth in your eyes, Psyche. All else about you may be a lie, but your eyes can’t hide their purity. There is a simple efficiency to what they express that would be a waste of so many words. But let me tell you of another truth. Terrans, all of them, are at their most dangerous when they feel they are powerless. For my safety and that of my team, I will continue reminding you of your reality for the entirety of your stay here.” With that, he turned and left.
Carmen watched him leave. She had never really met a sorten until today. She didn’t know what to think of Caelus, other than to be wary. Her attention turned to Rauon, who began walking toward them.
“Once again, please forgive—” he started saying, but she stopped him by raising her hand. Clairvoyant or not, she well knew what he was going to say.
“Is he like that with everyone?” Carmen asked.
“As I said, only one other Clairvoyant has volunteered to work with us,” the head technician said. “And it was worse with him. That one always threatened to kill us all for even the slightest annoyance, which only seemed to make Caelus more eager.”