Blood Ties, page 9
I doubt he’ll ever be so trusting after this. Sasha and Takahashi should have told him about their shady past, or at least alluded to it. She’d thought this branch of Seirlin had little to do with the Earth facility—they’d only come to access records, after all—but now, with two of the Earth team working inside?
It was no secret that she and Nomiki had escaped. They should have been more guarded.
Of course, maybe they had been. Something had triggered that bioscan of Nomiki in the front hallway. And Dr. Sasha knew everything. She’d raised them, after all. She knew exactly how dangerous Nomiki was, and she hadn’t forgotten. The doctor hadn’t taken her eyes from Nomiki in a full minute.
“Oh, yes, I know them very well. These two were single-handedly responsible for the slaughter of everyone in the Earth facility. Everyone. Including guards like you, who had loved ones. Families. Friends.”
Karin’s jaw clenched, tensing at the memories that flashed through her. Bare feet. Security lights. Blood. Nomiki with a set of modified scissors. For a moment, the doctor’s gaze withered on her, and a dark emotion rippled across her face.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have been experimenting on children,” Soo-jin commented, her voice dry as she surveyed Sasha with her arms crossed over her chest. The upper part of her lip pulled back, turning her previous saccharine smile into a disgusted sneer. “As I understand it, you people made quite a few children disappear over the years.” She glanced to Karin. “She’s the one you’ve been talking about, right? Her picture was in that book of yours.”
“And he’s another one.” Karin jerked her chin toward Dr. Takahashi, never taking her gaze from Dr. Sasha. The sight of the doctor made her feel cold, as if a slow, creeping chill were seeping through the inside of her bones. “Nomiki, what would you suggest?”
“I say we take them both and let the military sort them out.” Muscles in Nomiki’s jaw tensed, as if she were chewing on a particularly distasteful thought, then she ticked her head from the doctor and toward the rest of them. “Reeve?”
His eyebrows twitched upward. “Kidnapping? I’m not sure I could support that.” He nodded toward Dr. Takahashi. “Him, maybe, considering his state, but—”
“Dr. Takahashi is a respected employee of Seirlin Genomics and—” Sasha started.
“And currently falls into Emergency Bill C-587, passed last week, which puts him under my jurisdiction.” Reeve made to fold his arms over his chest, copying Soo-jin, but cut off the gesture, pulling at the cuffs of his jacket instead. “I’m under full legal authority to take him in for holding.”
Dr. Sasha’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll be hearing from our legal department.”
“You can send any complaints to my superiors on base. I’m sure they will be happy to follow up.” He gave her a polite half-smile, then made a gesture at Dalajit. “Are we going to have any trouble?”
“No. Not from me.” Dalajit's jaw worked. “I don't like it, but I read the bill. You have full legal authority.”
“Good.”
A small moment passed between them all. Then, Nomiki blew out a disgusted breath. "Guess I'm on my own, then."
She reached behind her, her hand angling up to the back of her jacket and withdrawing the long, black blade she carried. Slender on one side, it had a heavy, thick, sturdy base that tapered down the slight curve of its edge and ran the length of Nomiki's arm from her elbow to the tip of her middle finger. Karin remembered when Nomiki had first got it, special mail order from a weapon's dealer on Tala, Fallon's other planet, the blade flashing through visual cues as she'd set up its inner programs.
Since she only drew the one blade, Karin guessed she'd left its twin on the Nemina.
The guard started forward, abandoning Takahashi at the same time Reeve jumped into action. "Hey, you can't—"
Sasha kept out of reach of Nomiki's slow approach, her eyes dancing in the light as she retreated up the hall. Anger and irritation sharpened her features into hard angles and put a shrewd line in the frown on her forehead.
Nomiki rotated her blade, playing with it the same way a tennis player might flip the handle of a racket before a match. “You know me, Doctor. You know exactly what I can do. I'd advise cooperation on this one.”
"You two were always ruining things." Sasha's hot, furious gaze turned to Karin as she glanced her way, then to Nomiki who had paused, eyeing her. A wicked grin split her lips. “You forget, though. I'm like you.”
Karin tensed as her posture changed, the rounded shoulders and stoop of her back rolling up into a stiff-shouldered, confident, aggressive pose that rivaled the sudden venom on her face. Her hand lifted, and Karin had a sudden glimpse of an image from her memory, of the tattoo on the doctor's wrist and the double digit number that made her one of the first few successful experiments, reassurances of the program's methods and research using herself as the evidence. Nomiki leapt forward just as the doctor's fingers twitched.
A roar rose up from beside them. Dalajit yelped, as did Reeve and Soo-jin, the sound cut off by a sudden shuffle of footsteps.
The Lost.
Karin was shoved into the wall as Marc jumped back, but not before she caught a glimpse of Takahashi's face contorted in rage, his arms taking wild swings that Dalajit and Reeve defended against. Beyond, the rest of the Lost were now surging into the hallway, their faces livid with similar expressions.
"Holy shit." Soo-jin jostled her from the side, urging her forward.
Karin bumped into the wall again as a Lost knocked Marc into her, harder this time. Pain ground up from her shoulder as she scrambled, almost tripping as Soo-jin wormed past her side. Marc blocked her view of the mob, but by the noise of footsteps and growling shouts of people, she could tell that the Lost were out of the room and attacking.
When she broke free, the hallway had descended into chaos. Lost lunged through the doorway. Reeve tried to hold it back, but the force of people on the other side made it impossible to close. Arms and legs stuck out of the gap, and the door wavered on its hinges. Marc had two Lost coming after him, and three had pinned Dalajit to the wall. Two others squeezed through. Then, as she watched, a sudden force of pressure on the door shoved Reeve back several steps and swung the door open so fast, its knob cracked into the wall.
Lost roared out. Their eyes locked on her and Soo-jin.
Light brimmed onto her hands, sending a scattering of fractals darting across the wall like electric fish. She pulled on her power, the luminosity increasing as she focused her energy.
Soo-jin glanced down. “You got this?”
“Might want to get your fists ready,” she grumbled. Adrenaline spiked her blood with energy, and her heartbeat roared in her ears. Light spread and grappled upward in the air, climbing like a tree.
As the Lost came charging toward her, she lifted her hands and used the motion to throw her light, slamming it into their bodies.
Unlike the Shadows, her light didn't have a very physical presence. She could stick it to objects, like the metal ball that she had helped Soo-jin disable, and she could make it into different shapes, like the light puppets she'd used to lure threats away, but she couldn't harm things like the Shadows could. Her light couldn't pick up a human and throw them across the room.
As such, the two Lost simply jerked when her light hit, nearly passing right through it. But she made it stick like jelly.
Soo-jin wheeled them both out of the way as the two careened by, blind and looking like people who'd just run into a couple of sheets hung out to dry. If sheets happened to be made out of the same light as a moon gave.
Karin gritted her teeth and lifted her hand, pushing more energy into it. With a thought, she directed her light to thrust into the people's minds and drive the Shadows out.
It worked.
And, a second later, as the two people collapsed and their Shadows leapt out, tall and wild, she completely regretted the action.
They surged upward, billowing to the full height of the hall, then stooping as if it weren't enough. Humanoid, in a vague, distorted, long-limbed way, their heads seemed too large and drooped off their necks in a manner that sickened her stomach.
By the time she'd rekindled light in her hands, they were on top of her.
A sharp pain cut into her ribs, and she had a vague sense of the world turning. Her vision went black. The sickening, familiar sensation of ghost fingers slid in between her ribs, as if they were touching through to the organs inside.
Then, the hallway returned, and she was flying through it.
She landed on the floor and skidded, going down several meters from where she'd been. Numbing pain drove up her arm, and her head smacked against the ground. She had a moment of panic as the wind smashed out of her lungs. She couldn't breathe.
The Shadow returned, looming in her vision. It reached down, quick and sharp with its movements, and grabbed her arm. She yelled as pain split through her nerves.
Nomiki slammed into it.
Karin coughed and scrambled to her feet, sucking in breath. By the time she turned around, the Shadow had been cut into fading tatters, and Nomiki had already lunged for the second. Beyond them, several Lost still fought with Marc, Reeve, and Dalajit, but she noticed several bodies already on the ground, all wearing the same Seirlin clothes.
For a second, her insides seized, but she forced herself to breathe through it and the memories.
Unconscious, not dead. No shots had been fired, and upon closer inspection, the rest of them seemed to have gained the upper hand of the fight. Reeve had one in a headlock and was lowering them to the ground, Dalajit had taken out some kind of weapon that looked almost like Nomiki's blades, but then, as her breath caught up to her, she realized it was thinner and straighter, and that it pulsed with electricity.
Lightning-stick, then. Standard incapacitor.
Nomiki cut through the second Shadow. A few seconds later, the fight was over as Dalajit put the last of the Lost to the floor with an electric hiss.
The air smelled like a hot oven.
The room seemed to pause, everyone taking stock of each other. But Nomiki whipped around and sprinted back up the hall, to where the doctor had disappeared.
"She threw some black shit at me," she yelled behind her. "And I think—yes, she took the elevator.”
She came back around, her lip curling, and barely pausing her sprint as she moved toward Dalajit. “Where'd she go? How many exits?”
"Three, including the main." He looked shaken. Karin didn't blame him for that. “She keeps her ship on the roof."
She bared her teeth. "Which way?"
"Access in the stairwell.” He pointed down the other side of the hall. “Maintenance stairs, that way.”
Nomiki took off running.
Karin shook off Soo-jin's grip and ran after her. She heard someone call her name behind her, and the sound of footsteps, but she was too focused on her sister to pay attention. Memories pulled at her mind, screaming from the sidelines. Images of the labs, the compound, the many times she and Dr. Sasha had been alone in one of the clinic rooms, administering her treatment. Her fist tightened at her side.
She followed Nomiki through a second set of doors. Pain prickled through the bones of her wrist, and she kept her right side forward, slamming it against the bar to open the door to get in and catch it before it closed after her sister. Another cinderblock hall met her, stretching up into the distance. She paused in the next junction and turned. Nomiki's footsteps seemed to bounce around in the hall—impossible to tell where she'd gone. She paused, taking a quick stock of the area, and found a small sign at the end with an ideogram for stairs.
She jogged toward it.
As soon as she went through the next set of doors, Nomiki's footsteps came back into earshot.
"Miki?" She called up. No sense hiding it now. If she could hear her sister, then Nomiki was not going for stealth—and who else would be after Sasha?
"You shouldn't have come," Nomiki called back down, her words a little breathless. "You should stay back with the others."
"No way in Hell," she said. "I'm coming up with you."
I'm not missing this. Not now. Not when we’re so close.
A pause. Nomiki had slowed. Karin thought she could hear some kind of second-language swear tumble down the stairs, then her steps picked up again.
"I'm not waiting."
“Don't worry. I didn't expect you to,” Karin said, more to herself than her sister.
She had not been raised for athleticism, and she was certainly not in the fittest shape right now. The last few weeks, she'd learned her lesson from her runs on both Enlil and Caishen and picked up some of Nomiki's exercise routine, but to think she could catch up to Nomiki and keep up with her would be like thinking she could keep up with one of the exoplanet Olympians. Where Karin had been designed in an image to reflect a dawn goddess, Nomiki had been crafted in the image of a warrior. Stronger than she looked, and faster than anyone could think at a glance. By the time Karin had jogged up one flight, Nomiki had gained three.
As she made the second flight, the door burst open below her. She jerked and spun, light flaring across her hands, then put them down as she recognized Marc's quick breath and long, sturdy stride. His head poked around the stairwell a second later, caught on her, and skittered upwards to Nomiki before glancing back to her.
They didn't need words. She gave him a curt nod, and they both started up the stairs. His long legs and considerably muscled frame caught her up after a couple of flights.
"So, this doctor, what can she do?”
"You've seen as much as I have," she said, pausing for breath. "If she ever showed her powers to us before now, I can't remember it."
"Okay, well so far, she can turn the Lost into aggro mode. Maybe do other things with them, too?"
"And whatever black stuff she threw at Nomiki," Karin said, remembering her sister's words.
She reeled herself around the railing at the end of the landing and launched herself up another stairwell. Several flights above, Nomiki must've found the door. She burst through it with a squeal of metal, and her footsteps vanished when it closed.
Karin paused for a few seconds, laboring to keep running up the stairs. Sweat pricked her skin, not quite wetting it yet. With every breath, her heart jumped in her throat.
"We've got to stop her," she said. "If she gets away…"
No telling what she could do, with the amount of Lost in the system.
Marc kept pace with her, rising up to her level, but keeping to the outside of the turn, allowing her the shorter route. She saw him glance to her in her peripheral vision, but he didn't say anything.
He didn't need to. They all knew what was at stake. Even if the entire implications of it were just beginning to blossom across their minds.
The door at the end of the stairway led into Seirlin's more refined, renovated levels. A curved hallway met them on the other side, cast from a mix of smooth drywall and gleaming metal accents. Expensive-looking artwork lined the walls, spotlighted even at this hour and labeled with the kind of discreet title cards that made her think she'd walked into an art gallery rather than genetics lab, although the paintings did seem to have a DNA theme about them.
A hush flowed over them as they entered the hallway, the walls seeming to absorb sound.
Then, a blaster shot cracked.
She tracked its flash to an open door she hadn't noticed at the end of the hallway. As she and Marc ran up, a string of expletives rolled out of it, along with the sound of metal striking stone.
Then Nomiki stepped out of the door and motioned them over.
"Karin, need you.”
Ignoring the pain that still twinged her shoulder and had now moved into the top part of her legs, she picked up the pace again, feeling Marc doing the same beside her.
The door led to another stairwell. Although this one neglected to provide a map of where it led, it didn't need to. The wall of pulsing, black matter that stretched from one side to the other was answer enough.
Nomiki stood several feet from it, bristling with anger.
"I almost had her. I almost fucking had her." She made a violent gesture toward the black wall, pointing her sword at it. Part of it responded, wisps of smoke following its tip like iron filings drawn to a magnet, but she didn't seem to care. "Don't know what the fuck she was doing down here, but I almost had her. Karin, can you…?"
Karin gaped up. Whatever Sasha had conjured, she’d covered her bases. Not only did it block the bottom of the stairs, but it sealed in the sides and top, as well. Most of it was solid, a kind of moving obsidian whose rough sides caught the light as it moved, but parts of it seemed made of the same material as the Shadows. Blurred, yet somehow connected to the solid crystal parts with at least some semblance of physics, they looked like someone had deleted part of the world and forgotten to fill it back in after. An elongated corner where the left wall met the ceiling had extended out overhead, reminding her of the foot of an amoeba.
"I dunno if my light will get it. It's… bigger than I'm used to dealing with."
Yes. Bigger. We'll go with that. No need to mention it was unlike anything they'd ever seen before. A flicker of light shivered onto her palm, gliding seamlessly to pool on the pads of her fingers as she looked up, giving the wall a questioning gaze.
"Try anyway."
“Where should I shoot it?”
"I don't fucking care," Nomiki snapped. "Pick a place. Jab it.”
After a moment, she made her decision. Light swirled in front of her with a thought, pulling from her fingers in a stream and collecting into a shape that resembled an Old Earth basketball. Streaks of translucence pulsed and pulled through its layers, and the walls of the room filled with spikes and fractals.
For a second, the whole room shivered like a kaleidoscope.
Then she threw it.
Her light had no physical presence, but it crashed against the wall all the same and rolled over it like a wave of storm swell. The entire scene rippled in front of them. The wall and light seemed to invert, switch places. A series of cracks and pops echoed in the stairwell, along with a loud, primal hiss.
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