Blood Ties, page 19
They gathered around the pod and looked in the small window.
“Huh. She’s kind of cute,” Soo-jin said after a bit, tilting her face up to catch Karin’s eyes. “Clone or daughter?”
“Clone is my guess.” Nomiki snorted, glancing around at the other, dormant pods. “I’m also guessing they didn’t make another one of me.”
Karin flashed her a grin. “They made Ares, didn’t they?”
Nomiki’s expression soured. “Great. I got replaced by a muscle-head.”
“Probably didn’t want another troublemaker. Or a repeat of what happened to the Earth compound,” she said. “They’d have to add an unhealthy dose of Xanax to the treatments to keep another one of you in line.”
“It’d take more than a load of Xanax to keep me from sniffing through their bullshit. Besides—” she nodded back to the face in the window. “I notice they made another one of you.”
“Probably thought I was safer,” Karin said.
“Well, they’re wrong. You’re no dummy.”
“No, but I was gullible. And afraid. And passive. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have gone right along with them. Let them feed me right through whatever brain-eating shit they had in quaternary stage. I saw through their bullshit, but went along with it, anyway.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did. Trust me. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.”
A small silence took the room. She continued to stare at the small face through the glass, feeling Nomiki’s eyes on her.
After a while, her sister dropped her stare. The side of the pod gave a metallic thump as her knee bumped into it. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t a dumb, gullible kid person who got those scissors for me.”
Karin hid the wince as the memory came back to her. Shortly before her tenth birthday, Nomiki had been banned from handling scissors outside of school projects. For very good reason. An afternoon of blade modification later, and she’d had her second set—the first set had been what had got her banned—of dual knives. Karin had a vivid image of her standing in the compound hallway, the body of a fallen guard in front of her, blood slicked up her arm and smeared across the nightgown she’d worn to keep suspicion down.
“Don’t worry, we’ll save her. Or, well, Brindon will.” Nomiki gave her a lazy half-smile. “It’s nice having resources at your back.”
“What if those resources turn on us?” Karin asked.
“Then we turn on them,” Nomiki said, the response automatic. “Simple as that.” She glanced at Soo-jin. “And you didn’t hear anything.”
Soo-jin raised her hands. “Hey, I’m the most anti-establishmentarianist person there probably is on this crew.”
“Good.”
“Plus, you could kick my ass.”
“There is that. But, as a friend, you get a free pass for me to kick the ass of anyone you want. I enjoy doing that, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”
“Everyone except the person whose ass is getting kicked.”
“True. But we probably don’t like them, so it doesn’t matter. Now—” Nomiki tilted her head back. “Let’s go.”
Another hallway took them past more labs and offices. No more active pods, and the computer they checked also did not have access. After that, the offices appeared to have been converted into makeshift, haphazard storage rooms. One held a load of stacked chairs and folding tables; another had heaped its shelves with older, cast-off lab equipment. Paper labels with notes like ‘broken’ or ‘missing part’ or ‘cord fried’ were tagged on their fronts, some of them with a thin layer of dust.
They encountered a Shadow in one of these rooms. It didn’t try to talk, and Nomiki ended it with a stab to the face. The next two, encountered by surprise in the hallway, died in a similar fashion.
Down the next hall, they spotted another two exit signs glowing in the wall beyond the next junction.
Their arrows faced each other.
Soo-jin spoke first. “Well, okay, then. What the fuck?”
“Yep.”
“Any chance they’ve been pumping hallucinogenics into the air here? This is a crazy science lab, right? With extra fucking emphasis on the crazy?”
“It’s possible,” Nomiki said. “They did use some in our treatment programs.”
Soo-jin shot her a disbelieving look. “Seriously?”
“Yep.” Nomiki slid her knife back into its sheath, securing it with a small loop. “Don’t remember the hallucinations being quite so tame, though. Karin?”
“I get flashbacks. Takahashi was there.” She fixed her sister with an even look. “We should ask him. He’s the brain guy.”
Nomiki made a tsch sound with her tongue, then bent to adjust a strap on her leg. “You can ask him. I want nothing to do with him.”
Which was why her sister had been coming down to his holding cell and glaring at him through the windows five times a day. And wasn’t allowed in. And wouldn’t answer direct questions about him.
“Maybe I will,” Karin said. “After we get out of here.” She tilted her head. “And what is up with those? Just a coincidence? Are we even going the right way?”
“I have no fucking idea. Everything is crazy train.”
“I only ask because it feels like we keep going farther in rather than out.”
Nomiki held up her arms in defensive, mock-harmlessness. “Hey man, don’t blame me for bad building design. It’s got fire code infractions written all over it.”
“I’m not even sure we’re in the same building anymore,” Soo-jin said. “The place feels too big. Could be that we’ve been wandering across multiple levels, but I didn’t think the place was that big from the outside. Certainly didn’t look like it on the overhead drone.”
“And where did everyone go? Apart from Mr. Sleepy and my twin, we haven’t seen anyone.” Karin shook her head. “I’m not crazy, right? Our squad was wandering around as Lost after the fight, right? Shouldn’t we have run into one of them by now?”
“They all wandered in the same direction,” Nomiki said. “I tailed them for a bit before I decided to go find you. They were slow and unorganized, like normal Lost—kept closing doors on each other—but definitely heading in the same direction.”
Karin waited a beat. “And… which direction would that be?”
Nomiki pointed to the right. “Over that way.”
Soo-jin lifted her eyebrows. “After turning down all these random hallways, you still know? Your sense of direction must be amazing.”
Nomiki shot her a grin. “Just one of my natural talents.” Then, on a more sober note, she continued. “I’ve also noticed that the hallways are getting shorter. Tapering a bit on the long side. I’ve been moving us in a decent zig-zag, but it’s getting shorter and shorter.”
Karin frowned. “That’s not what the overhead drone caught. It’s supposed to be a square.”
“It’s more than ten meters out on the long side, by my estimate. So, either we’ve moved to a completely different building somehow, or…”
Karin waited for her to finish her thought. When she didn’t, her frown deepened. “You think it’s part of her powers?”
“Maybe. It would tie into what Takahashi told us about Eurynome—you know, that ‘genesis point’ shit? We don’t know what Sasha’s program was, but… genesis means beginning, or start. What kind of beings would you want to tap into if you wanted to know about genesis?”
A leaden feeling settled in her gut as she realized what Nomiki was saying. Suddenly, she noticed the sweat on her palms. The wired, almost frantic wave of her brain as a part of the puzzle clicked into place. As the implications began to spin, a light, jittery sensation took to her bones.
“Creation gods. I would tap into creation gods. Chaos, Shiva, Enki, Izanagi, that Celtic bull…” She shook. “Sol’s child.”
“Well… not quite Sol’s child. But the others…” Nomiki had done her research, too, right along when Karin had been doing hers. “I don’t know what Sasha’s program was, but if she’s modeled off of one of the creator deities, then… well, it would make sense that she could create, right?”
Karin frowned. “Create what? Shadows? We’ve already seen her do that.”
“Well, yes, that, but she’s been alive for at least fifty years and the Shadows have not, so I have to assume that something changed recently—but this place is older than a few months. Think about the stuff we’ve found. That’s years, at least. So she has been up to something, not just the Shadows.”
Karin scoffed. “Maybe all her up to somethings were just practice for making the Shadows. You don’t know what—”
“Hey,” Soo-jin said. “You said the dimensions are off, right? Building dimensions?”
“Yes. By ten meters, at the start. Conical design rather than rectangular.”
“And the exit signs have been running us around. None have led to an exit yet, anyway.”
“They’ve doubled back three times now.”
“And our radios don’t work. Computers in here don’t have an outside network.” Soo-jin made a vague, frustrated gesture. “Even my netlink isn’t connecting, and it’s set to satellites.”
“They cut right after that wall went into place.”
“Which means that Sasha’s separated this place, somehow. In a way that makes all signals disconnect. I mean, someone can do that with the right equipment, but given how freaky this building is turning out to be, and how freaky you people are—no offense—then I’d say it’s definitely some kind of weird power at work. Why go through the trouble, otherwise?”
“There is no reason,” Nomiki agreed.
Soo-jin narrowed her eyes. “You’ve already figured it out, haven’t you?”
“I have a working hypothesis,” Nomiki said. “But I wanted to see if Karin came to the same conclusion.”
Soo-jin snorted. “Spit it out.”
“All right.” Nomiki shrugged. “I think Sasha created some sort of pocket dimension. We entered it through the tunnel, when we still had reception, then her wall went up and everything cut off. That’s when the dimensions went all… fwoopy.”
A small silence passed through them. Karin lifted an eyebrow. “Fwoopy?”
“That’s the technical term. Very technical. Snockered is also good.”
Another small silence. Then, Soo-jin broke it in with her usual blunt, foul-mouthed flare.
“Well, fuck us, then. Does that mean there’s no exit?”
“Not unless she opens one.” Nomiki frowned. “Well, actually, I have no idea. It’s not like I run through pocket dimensions every day.”
“Yeah, I hear they’re more a weekend sport,” Soo-jin said, tone rich with raw sarcasm. “Video games and movies usually make them have a puzzle to get through. A challenge to surpass. One exit. I expect that logic won’t hold up here, though.”
“No. Sasha’s neither stupid enough, nor sadistic enough, to add that in. If this is a pocket dimension she controls, or something of the like, then we’ll probably have to go talk to her if we want out.”
The third small silence ran the longest. Karin exchanged several looks with each of them.
Then she laughed.
“Well,” she said, echoing Soo-jin’s earlier words. “Fuck us.”
Chapter 20
As they went on, Karin kept careful track of their surroundings, suddenly hyper-aware of every sight, sound, and sensation. If this were a pocket dimension, did that mean the hallways weren’t real, or was she confusing the terms? With the exception of ERL gate mechanics, which still went well over her comprehension level, all her mythological research and obscure net browsing had not included information on other dimensions or dimensional boundaries.
Everything felt real. Right down to the macro. Tube lights flickered, some with an audible hum, the newer, inset ones burned with a slight hiss, and a smell of burning dust mixed in with a growing cold that had begun to creep into the air. Even their light pulled at her senses, the same way light did on the outside—something she largely ignored, but that caught up to her every so often, as it did now.
She pulled at it on the next corner, causing the light to blink out and both Nomiki and Soo-jin to give her a hard stare, the incriminating glow obvious as it faded into and warped the air around her hand.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just checking.”
Eventually, after dropping down a series of stairwells—following Nomiki’s sense of direction rather than the conflicting exit signs—the section changed. The walls roughened, transitioning from smooth, warm drywall to a raw pour of concrete. The floor similarly switched, cutting straight from the hallway’s previous worn linoleum to the type of cement she used to see in multi-level car parks on Belenus. Smooth, with a tendency to scuff. They made tires squeak when vehicles turned on them.
They paused at the divide, exchanged a glance with each other, then stepped over.
In an instant, the smell of the air changed.
Gone was the warmth of the hall behind them. The temperature dropped a good five degrees—eleven or twelve instead of seventeen—and a clammy, damp feeling dragged at their skin. The smell of stale water rose, along with a distinct aftertaste that lingered in the back of her throat after she breathed out.
Ahead, an odd contraption of what looked like ten metallic, tube-shaped colonial cryopods stood off-center from their path, a bevy of pipes and cords trailing up its length and into the ceiling more than five meters above their head. Though their viewing windows were uniformly dark, a few standby lights were on at their ends, pulsating a dull orange.
Soo-jin folded her arms over her chest and took it all in. After a few seconds, one of her eyebrows arched into her forehead. “You know, if this chick is in control of creating this dimension, she could have at least watched a few interior decorating shows.”
“Yes, and those pods are so last millennium,” Nomiki commented.
“If she is indeed creating this, maybe she had to build off what she already had,” Karin said. “This had to function like a research lab. And, considering that Ares guy we saw, along with all those other people in the pictures, she had to keep the physics the same. If she’s still following the Eurynome Project, then all her research had to be done within the constraints of known universal law.”
After a moment, she realized the other two were staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re over-thinking this,” Nomiki informed her. “Sasha’s the bad guy. We insult bad guys, not logic them.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Karin cleared her throat. “I mean—wow, that color of gray with that… other color of gray? What was she going for, Existential Boredom 101?”
“Right?” Soo-jin said. “It’s a crime against humanity.”
“There’s labels on those pods,” Nomiki said. “Maybe she skipped Basic Villainy 101 and left us some more clues.”
“Or an exit solution where we don’t actually have to talk to her,” Soo-jin said. “I’m quite in favor of that.”
Two of the pods lay open, their arched doors swung on a simple metal door hinge. The brushed aluminum siding reflected the room’s drab, shadowy grays—the lighting came either from the embedded ship-style lamps on the walls or an odd bundle of tubes overtop a platform near the corner of the ceiling.
Karin activated her power, letting a whisper of a glow trail over its surface and into the gel-laden bed within. Though the outside resembled the colonial transport pods of the first settlers, the insides proved quite different. Clear gel, as opposed to the blue-green cryo of the early days, and a bed made of regular fabric cushions that would not have lasted the trans-system pilgrimage. A shudder went through her as her light gleamed on a set of metal clamps, adjustable for fit and positioned for holding six points of the human body.
“Kinky,” Soo-jin said, looking over her shoulder.
Nomiki touched the screen above one of the active pods. A monitor of the person’s vitals showed up on the screen. At a swipe of her thumb, the viewing window in the pod’s upper half lit up.
The face inside caught her breath.
“Layla,” she breathed, then flicked her gaze up to Nomiki. “Program Athena.”
“Yep, that’s what it says on here. Looks like your dreams are coming true.”
The face in the window looked smaller than she remembered. Younger, with smoother skin, her frizzy hair pulled back from her curved features by a series of colorful, fuzzy hair bands. Her closed eyes and slack expression gave her face a kind of peacefulness that contradicted Karin’s memory of her personality. She’d been sharp, back then. Confident. Smart in a way that had her attack problems from several angles at once, and well beyond the solving capabilities of any normal kid.
Here, she looked like a model shot from one of those religious pamphlets she used to get on Belenus. Enlightened. Transcendental. Free of worldly concern. Especially with the pure white glow of the pod’s interior lighting framing her face.
“She died,” Karin said.
“So did you, yet we saw your twin upstairs.” Nomiki tapped on the next screen, peering into the viewing window when it lit up. “Gaia, over here. Looks like they were dipping into some of my gene pool with her.”
“Oceanus, over here,” Soo-jin said, moving onto the next. “Kind of handsome, if you like chiseled jaws. The rest are empty.”
Karin swiped her screen, just in case, but was unsurprised when it came up empty. “Well, at least we know what pantheon she’s going for.”
“Greek, right?” Soo-jin asked.
“Yep.”
“Damn. I would have really liked to see a real-life Gwa-eum.”
The goddess of mercy. She’d explained as such back on Enlil when they’d been clearing out Songbird Sanctuary, which doubled as a religious retreat for a sect of Korean Buddhists.
“We’re not gods,” Karin said. “Just people with mutations.”
“Mutations that can create pocket dimensions.” Soo-jin chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all religious convert on you. We’ve been shipmates too long for that. Plus, I’m kind of religioused-out. Bad parenting and all that.”
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