Blood Ties, page 8
Beside them, Marc's eyebrow had lifted. Karin met his questioning gaze with a raised eyebrow of her own, then nudged his arm with her shoulder. She hadn't told him about the gate incident—hadn't told any of them yet, actually—but she would. It wasn't as important as the rest.
“Maybe,” he said. “There was a lot happening around that time, though—but if anything's in the system, Gretchen can find it.”
“They trust a secretary with that kind of information?” Soo-jin raised a brow. “Isn't that a bit risky? I assume you guys have some competitors.”
“Gretchen isn't just a secretary. She used to manage the IT side of things for Headquarters. Then she met her husband in Fallon and settled down.” He gave her a polite smile. “If anything came through, she'd know where to look.”
“Sounds like someone I should be talking to.” Cookie backed away, saluting them with his netlink. “I'll catch up with you guys later.”
Karin kept her features neutral as he left. She’d seen him eying the front computer before. Just what was he planning?
“You mentioned being short,” Marc said, likely to distract from Cookie's exit. “Has the attack affected your operations significantly?”
“Oh, yes, we're down over thirty staff now.” Dalajit sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with his index finger. “Of course, with all the automation and subsequent client no-shows from the attack, we've been managing to run all right.”
“So, business as usual, then?” Soo-jin asked. “You just gonna keep enhancing people while the rest of the system slowly dies to Shadow attacks?”
Dalajit raised his hands, defensive. “Hey now, I'm just the security. They do have doctors here working on a cure—we've lost many of our own, of course—but we can't disappoint our clients.”
As they'd been walking, they had entered a new part of the facility. The cuboid edges continued in the corners and over the thresholds, but one side of the hall had dropped away, ending in a handrail of frosted glass. A set of indoor gardens framed a rugged, carefully sculpted koi pond. Over a dozen fish languished in its clear waters, their pale white almost glowing against the dark backdrop.
Several offices opened up on the right as the hallway curved around. As high-tech as the rest of the building had been so far, Karin recognized the modified auto-tone glass that frosted the inside of the window, providing a dose of privacy to those inside. Only a few vague shapes came through the window.
She froze when she read the name on the door.
Dr. Soichiro Takahashi.
One of the names from Nomiki's journal.
It couldn't be the same one, could it? Japanese names had a lot of repeats, but how likely was it that Seirlin happened to have more than one Dr. Soichiro Takahashi working for them—and how likely was it that they'd run into his office?
“Miki,” she pointed up to the door. “Do you remember him?”
Nomiki didn't even need to say anything. The look on her face was answer enough. She turned on her heel, hiding the anger behind a neutral expression which she turned up at Dalajit. “Where is Dr. Takahashi? Is he available?”
He hesitated. “Ah, well… he didn't make it.”
Karin's eyes widened. “He's dead?”
“What? No, no, but… he's a Host of the Shadows now.”
She let out a breath. “Oh, so he's Lost, then? Black eyes?”
His eyebrows drew together in puzzlement as she relaxed. “I believe that's one term for them. Here, we call them Hosts.”
Ah, yes. She'd glimpsed that on some of the feeds coming in. An apt name, and a wee bit more accurate than the Alliance term, in her experience. Curing them felt more like an exorcism than any actual healing.
“Is he here on site?” Nomiki asked. “Or did you take him to one of the shelters?”
“No, no, he's here. The company owes him that, at least.” A brief smile split his lips. “I doubt they'd give me that treatment, but so far, I've held my own and survived.”
“Can we see him?” Karin asked. “I might be able to help.”
He paused, considering. Then, after a moment, he shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
After radioing a message to the doctor they'd been going to see, he led them down a different path, backtracking and passing down through the garden they'd been overlooking. A set of elevators sat in a widened area ahead, hemmed in by another not-quite-full garden that curved in a semi-circle. Going down was a nice refresher. It was an odd thing, perhaps, but she found the smaller spaces more comforting nowadays. Something to do with being in space so long. And, as the building's expensive aesthetics stripped back into more-recognizable concrete and cinderblock construction, she found herself relaxing.
It made sense to keep the Lost—Hosts—down here. Not the most comfortable place, perhaps, but it meant that they wouldn't be punching through expensive drywall if they decided to get feisty. Unlike the station, or Archin, or any of the other more-industrial places she'd visited recently, most of the pipes and wires were hidden away behind the walls, and the ventilation had little more than a passing presence. The vent covers looked new, at least, which suggested the inner workings might have seen some upgrades, as well. Laboratories needed that, right? Especially expensive laboratories like Seirlin Genomics seemed to have? Even the most innocuous chemistry kit could become deadly under the right circumstances.
The hallway narrowed ahead, forcing them to walk two by two. Marc and Reeve brought up the end, the latter having lagged back to check his netlink. When she glanced back, she saw him frowning at the screen. Had he actually managed to find a connection down here? And how much of their hour had already passed? He didn't look like he was about to use force on Nomiki—Gods help him if he tried—but he didn't look too pleased, either.
Hopefully, he was more pissed about the drones dropping on their heads from the ceiling, and his serious frown was just him thinking of how he was going to compose his report on that particular incident.
She still didn't remember Takahashi, and she didn't expect to start anytime soon. Nomiki, on the other hand… if she remembered him as much as her sullen expression said she did, then wouldn't Takahashi recognize them, too? It was good that he was Lost, then, but what about the other doctor? It didn't sound like she'd been a core member of the team—the only woman she remembered was Sasha—but even a visiting specialist would probably recognize them. They'd been prominent in the compound. Its star residents, due mostly to their ability to survive their treatments. She doubted their recognisability had diminished after they'd murdered their way out.
But Nomiki didn't seem worried. So she shouldn't be, either.
The sound of jangling keys made her look up just in time to see Dalajit pull them out of his pocket. He'd used the keycards to work the elevator, but the lock on the door had a simple bolt and tumbler design she didn't see very often.
“Most of them have clearance access to security scanners, so we had to lock them up with more conventional means,” he explained, catching her look. “They kept opening doors and wandering around.” He smiled. “You should have seen the look on Gretchen's face when some of them wandered into the lobby with a client.”
“Have you managed to find out much about them? Or about the Shadows at all?” Marc asked. “Any idea what they're made of?”
“I'm afraid we're not set up for that kind of experimentation. More dimensional than biological. But I hear one of the Chamaki quantum labs had made a partnership with the military?” Unlocking the door, he grabbed it to hold it shut, pausing to glance up to Reeve with a question in his raised eyebrows.
Reeve shrugged. “If they are, they haven't told me. I'm just a pilot.”
Yeah. Right. Just a pilot trusted to babysit Nomiki. Just how good was he? When he'd mentioned force, Nomiki hadn't laughed.
Not that she usually laughed. When fighting, she always took her opponents with the utmost focus. Probably why she'd decided to break through the wall instead of staying with them in the hallway's kill zone. She wasn't just all about fighting. As per her treatment, she was smart, too.
In the compound, they'd half-expected them to sell her off to one of the wars. But that's not what they'd wanted from them, in the end.
The memory of dream-Nomiki's resurfaced in her mind.
They're stealing our memories, Rin.
“Well, you can't blame me for trying,” Dalajit said. “We don't get much news, nowadays.” A click of the handle and a slight scrape as the door cleared the lip of the floor, and he pushed the panel open. “We have fifteen of them in here. Would you mind seeing that none of them get out while I fetch him?”
Marc and Reeve moved to the front as Dalajit disappeared inside. A light turned on, and a whisper-hush of sound came to her ears as the Lost adjusted. Like most of the empire's population, the people in the room collected in a variety of skin tones and shapes, few of them white. Most had black hair, but it varied in style, texture, and tint. The closest, a woman, had cropped her hair in a close-shaved band around the base of her head, with the rest flipped into a loose, frizzy ponytail that had lost its style over the month she'd probably been in here. Farther in, another woman had let loose with a few streaks of pink, purple, and green that had grown out. A man on the other side had a curtain of long, trailing russet that fell down past his abdomen.
But they all wore the same clothes—a soft-looking, off-white sweatpants and shirt combo stamped with the Seirlin swan on the right breast.
A few seconds later, Dalajit came back into view from around the corner, dragging an older man along with him.
A ripple of shock went through her as she saw his face.
I know him.
But that was impossible, wasn't it? How could she recognize someone she didn't remember? Unless… Weren't memories and facial recognition different processes of the brain? Lots of people remembered faces but forgot the names attached to them.
Beside her, Nomiki did not share her memory conundrum. “That's him.”
So he had been on Earth, then. And more than that—he had been a core part of the Eurynome team, not just some visiting scientist who’d stayed for a day and never returned.
“I still don't remember him,” she said.
“He was there. Used to work with Brennan a lot.”
Ah. That would explain the expression on her face. Even now, Brennan was a sore subject for her.
“Then he can help us. I can heal him. Actually—” She did a quick survey of the room. “I could heal them all, then…”
“You want to help them? After all they did?”
Karin rounded on her, arm raised to point at the Lost through the door as she hissed at her sister. “Those people didn't do anything to us. This place didn't do anything to us. You saw the posters. They're modifying consenting humans. Rich ones, yes, but still consenting.”
“Probably used all the experiments they did on us to make it possible for them,” Nomiki grumbled.
They'd been talking in a whisper, and Nomiki cut off her reply as Dalajit led Dr. Takahashi through the crowd. He stood out like a sore thumb amid the rest, the only one still wearing what looked like his regular clothes. Had he been caught while awake, or did he sleep in his lab coat? Come to think of it—what about the rest of them? They couldn't all have been wearing company-approved pajamas when they'd gone to bed.
A few Lost tried to follow Dalajit and Takahashi out, one grabbing hold of his sleeve as he moved past, but Dalajit shrugged them off, pushing them back in a gentle motion as he steered Dr. Takahashi to the door.
Tall, and with a thinness that looked almost unhealthy, the doctor's hair had grown into a scraggly mop, strands of it turned greasy from lack of showering. With fine features and a square jaw, he had a skin tone that placed him a couple shades darker than what she'd seen on normal Japanese people—maybe he'd spent some time outside during the moon's last actual day cycle? The shadow of his eyes made it hard to tell where he was looking, but, as he stepped into the room in front of Dalajit, she felt the exact moment his eyes met hers.
She still didn’t remember him, but she definitely knew his face.
Nomiki, on the other hand… Her sister stared hard at the man, her expression contorting into something hard and angry. Shoulders stiff, it looked like she were holding herself back, like she wanted to rip right into him.
Even Dalajit was beginning to notice. A wariness had crept into the guard’s eyes, and Karin hurried to defuse the situation, moving to bring his attention to her.
“He worked on our project, right? One of the project coordinators?” She flashed a quick smile to Dalajit. “I worked back-end Eugenics, so I didn’t see a whole lot of the bigger-wigs, but I definitely remember him. I—”
“Karin, stop.” A muscle shivered in Nomiki’s neck, and Karin got the distinct feeling that she was still holding herself back. She seemed calmer than before, but the rigidity and tension in her body belied that façade. “You don’t understand. He went into our minds. He was part of the treatment. He’s the reason we can’t remember.”
A chill seeped into her chest, and she got a flash of… something. Little more than a blip of static on her mind, or like the afterglow of an image. She couldn’t see its details, but she could feel its direction. Suddenly, the air felt cold to her skin. A smell of dampness and antiseptics came to her, and the feel of bare feet against hard, bare concrete.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed the feelings away. When she opened her mouth to speak, her lips had a kind of numbness to them. She was aware of everyone staring at her, but she grounded herself and made herself hold onto the calm that she could feel slipping away. Her hands shook.
“Then he can help us,” she said. “If he knows what he did, then he can undo it.”
Another silence filled the hallway. The guard shifted behind Dr. Takahashi. By the shuttered, neutral expression on his face, he had apparently come to some kind of decision.
“I think you should leave,” he said. The shoulder of Dr. Takahashi’s lab coat warped as he put pressure on it, ready to steer the doctor back into the room.
“Wait,” Karin said. Light flared on her hands. Immediately, all the Lost looked to her. “I can help him. At least, let me do that much.”
“What the—?” Dalajit’s eyes broadened at the sight of her light. Some of the Lost shuffled forward, and he was forced to back into the doorway to block them from leaving, but his eyes never left her hands, his guarded expression turning to confusion. “What is that?”
“It’s something Seirlin programmed into me. I doubt it’s in your systems. I—”
“Stay away from him.” Dalajit pulled Dr. Takahashi away from her, reeling him back into the room. “You need to leave.”
Nomiki shifted. But, before she could do anything, movement from down the hall caught their attention. Around the corner, the elevator announced its arrival with a subtle, easy tone, and its doors opened with a whooshing sound. A shadow shifted on the wall, barely-there.
“Dalajit? You down here yet?”
Karin froze as she recognized the voice.
Dalajit’s doctor hadn’t been one of the visiting specialists. She was Dr. Sasha.
For a second, she struggled to remember what Dalajit had called her—Linnet?—but it didn’t matter how the mix-up had happened. Either she’d married and changed her name, or had just done it for posterity. It didn’t matter.
She was here.
Beside her, Nomiki’s eyes had widened. One of her arms twitched—looking for a weapon?—but she restricted the motion as a more-defined shadow played across the end wall and Dr. Sasha walked into view, frowning down at a netlink in her hand.
She halted the instant she saw them. By the sudden sharpness in her eyes and the cold intensity that came to her expression, she definitely recognized them.
Chapter 9
She looked like she’d just walked out of one of her dreams. Thinner than she remembered, Dr. Evangeline Sasha wore the same Seirlin Genomic-branded labcoat as Dr. Takahashi, though hers had a fresher, less limpid look to it. Her hair had grown longer, and she still used highlights throughout it, but their shades shone different from what Karin remembered at the compound. Sleek and vibrant, with more definition.
Gods. They had been living a life in hiding, and Dr. Sasha had kept up with her regular hair appointments.
For some reason, the thought stuck with her.
The doctor’s face faltered for a few moments, a run of emotions too fast to identify, though Karin did catch the brief hitch of shock and surprise in her eyes.
“You,” she said, followed by a small sound, as if a tiny, hysterical laugh had hiccupped from her gut and then been cut off. Her gaze slanted to the side, where Dalajit stood with Dr. Takahashi, as if just remembering them, then returned. “How did you find me?”
Find her? Karin glanced to Nomiki. What is she talking about?
But if her sister knew, she was keeping that information close to her heart. Nomiki’s expression had somewhat returned to what Karin called her ‘working face,’ the emotions on her features schooled except for the bright anger that shone through her eyes.
“We didn’t,” Nomiki said. “This was a coincidence.”
Marc shifted in her peripheral vision. She glanced over, remembering what he’d said to her weeks ago, just after the first Shadow attack.
I don’t believe in coincidence.
Neither did she. Not anymore, anyway. Not after what she was starting to remember.
“I take it you know these people.” Dalajit moved his gaze between Sasha and Nomiki.
Takahashi still stood behind him, anchored in place by Dalajit’s grip on his forearm. He was probably wondering who he needed to protect. In his eyes, the situation must have changed quite fast.
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