Chapter 5: The Breach

The dream came again, and this time it did not let him go.

The forest. The burning violet sky. The girl's hand closing on his wrist and her voice cracking on his name — Eden, what are you doing?! RUN! The bridge of old stone. The root. Her fall. Her arm stretched up out of the moss with the fingers spread, and behind her the grey thing rising out of the treeline on all fours, unfolding, opening a mouth that went back and back.

Move. She is one step away. One step—

He did not move. He never moved. Eighteen years of not moving.

But tonight the dream did not end at the teeth. Tonight, as the jaws came down, the whole world rang — a single pure note, struck somewhere underneath everything, the sound of a wet finger drawn around the rim of a glass the size of a city — and the forest came apart into white.

Eden woke with his hand in the air and that note still in his teeth.

0600. Rusted ceiling panels. The hum of the recyclers. The weight of Antaria settling onto his chest like a palm.

He lay still for a long moment, and for the first time in his life the thought arrived whole, absurd, and unshakable:

That is not a dream. That is a place. And it is getting closer.

He moved through the morning routine like a man underwater. The chip Sophia had given him was where he had hidden it, sewn flat into the lining of his left boot; he felt its tiny hardness against his ankle bone with every step, a stone of secrets. Today was the day. Shift change, the maintenance alcove, Marcus. He would lay it all out — the Genesis Protocol, Project Reset, the counter falling — and together they would decide what two workers at the bottom of the world could possibly do about the end of it.

"You look like you slept in a conduit," Luna observed over her synthetic porridge.

"Good morning to you too."

"Was it the dream again?" She said it lightly, teasing — she had caught him talking in his sleep once, years ago, and had never let it go. The lake boy, she had called him for a month, because that was the only word she had caught.

"Eat your breakfast," Eden said.

His mother touched his forehead on the way past, the old instinctive check for fever, and frowned at whatever she found in his face instead. "Head down today," Vera said quietly. "Whatever it is you're carrying — put it down before it gets heavy."

It's already heavier than the planet, Ma. "I'll be home by second bell," he said.

He reached to ruffle Luna's hair. She ducked away laughing, and so he missed her, and the door hissed shut behind him, and that was that. He did not look back. There was no reason, that morning, to look back.

The power distribution centre hummed its eternal hum. Kane grunted his greeting. The overnight boards showed the usual larceny — Ships 1 through 3 gorging, Sector 12 shivering — and Eden settled into station 7 with his eyes on the numbers and his mind on a stone bridge that did not exist.

The anomaly began at 0842.

Later — much later, in another age of the world — Eden would try to reconstruct those ninety seconds, and fail. What he remembered was this: the flow readings on the main conduit trunk did not spike. They inverted. For an instant the display insisted that power was flowing the wrong way — not up from the planet into the ring, but out of the ring, out of the ships, out of the walls, into something that had no coordinates, as if the entire colony had sprung a leak into a direction that did not exist.

"Kane," Eden heard himself say. "Kane, are you seeing—"

Every holographic display in the chamber stuttered at once. The great conduits threading the ceiling began, very faintly, to sing — one pure harmonic tone, the sound of a wet finger on the rim of a glass the size of a city.

Eden's skin went to gooseflesh. He knew that note. He had woken with it in his teeth three hours ago.

His work tablet died. And on his wrist, the band — the grey CE-issue regulator he had worn since his sixteenth year, so familiar he felt it less than he felt his own pulse — grew warm. Then hot. Then it lit every indicator it had, all at once, in colours it was not supposed to have.

"Eden!" Kane's voice, far away, tinny, wrong. "Eden, step back from the station, what did you—"

The weight let go of him.

That was the only way he could ever describe it. For eighteen years Antaria had pressed down upon Eden Reeves with its patient, crushing, ten-percent-too-heavy hand — in his sleep, in his bones, in every step of every corridor of his entire life — and in that moment, between one heartbeat and the next, the hand simply lifted. He weighed nothing. He was nothing. He was a thought, falling upward through a whiteness that sang.

The last thing he heard from the year 8760 was Kane shouting his name at an empty chair.

Softness.

That was the first fact of the new world: something soft was pressing against Eden's palms. Soft and cool and very slightly damp, made of ten thousand small yielding blades that bent under his fingers and sprang back. His mind, rebooting, offered the word from the schoolbook files.

Grass.

He opened his eyes to a sky that had no ceiling.

Eden lay on his back on a green slope under a blue immensity so deep and so absolute that his balance fled and his hands fisted in the grass to keep from falling up. A single molten-white star hung in that blueness, too bright to look at, and its light lay on his face with weight and warmth.

He sat up too fast — and nearly threw himself over, because his muscles heaved against a weight that was not there. He felt light. Loose. Subtly, alarmingly strong, like a man who has set down a pack he has carried so long he forgot it was on his shoulders.

Below him, down the slope, a lake held a second sky inside it. Reeds bent at the shore in a wind he could feel on his own face. On the far bank the ground rose into a wall of vast green growths taller than habitat blocks — trees, his stunned memory supplied, those are trees.

Not the forest from the dream. Not the burning violet sky, not the bridge. Somewhere else entirely, somewhere quiet, somewhere so beautiful it made no sense.

"No," Eden said, to no one, in a world with air that tasted green. "No, this is—"

His band chimed. An ordinary, absurd, workday chime, and he looked down at his wrist as if discovering he had one.

NETWORK NOT FOUND. SEARCHING...
COLONY GRID: NOT FOUND.
CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE: NOT FOUND.
SOLAR CALIBRATION: ANOMALOUS — LOCAL DAY LENGTH 24.0 HRS.
RESERVE: 47%.

Twenty-four hours. Eden stared at the small amber figures while his mind performed a slow, grinding rotation. Every child on Antaria learned the number in their first year of schooling, the way you learn the name of a dead grandmother. The old day. The lost day. The day length of—

Birdsong stopped.

He had not even registered that it was there — a bright scattered chittering from the treeline, the sound of small living things — until the moment it cut off, all of it, everywhere, at once, like a switch thrown. The wind moved the reeds. Nothing else in the world made a sound.

Then the far shore of the lake began to bulge.

The earth there rose in a long blister, soil and stone shedding off it in sheets, and something came out of the wound in the world on all fours.

It rose as it came. Grey — ashen, the grey of meat left out of the light for a century — and it kept rising, unfolding past two metres, past three, on limbs a great deal longer than limbs should be. Its skin drank the sun instead of giving any back. Under that skin Eden could see the shapes of ribs and a collarbone and the long ridge of a spine, and the terrible thing, the thing that turned his stomach over before his mind caught up, was how much of it he recognised. Two arms. Two legs. One head, tipped slightly, the way a man tips his head when he hears his name in a crowd.

Then its eyes opened, and they were red, and they were lit from inside.

Eden knew that shape. Every child of the colony knew it. It hung in murals in every school corridor on every ship, rendered in warning red beneath the words THE ENEMY OF MAN. It stood in the reliefs of the Salvation Arch on Ship 1, being trampled beneath the heel of Zeus the Deliverer.

Enger.

The word every history book used in the past tense. The monster from a dead world. Standing on a green shore, dripping soil, five hundred metres away.

The head turned. Eden felt the attention land on him — no, not on him. Lower. His band chose that moment to chirp its network search again, indicators pulsing, and the red of the creature's eyes brightened in perfect answer, like coals breathed upon. Something ran up the veins of its throat, a faint travelling glow, there and gone.

It sees the band, some cold clear part of him understood. It doesn't see me at all. It sees the power.

The Enger came across the lake.

It did not swim. It did not go around. It went through — hitting the water in a long low surge, a wake tearing the second sky to shreds, and it was fast, it was so much faster than anything that size had any right to be, and Eden was already running.

THREAT KINETICS EXCEED HUMAN BASELINE, his band announced with obscene calm, text strobing across its face as his arms pumped. SURGE MODE AVAILABLE. RESERVE: 47%. AUTHORIZE?

"Yes—" Eden gasped, "yes, go—"

Cold fire went up his arm and burst through his chest, and the world downshifted.

His next stride ate four metres. The one after ate five. Air turned solid and poured over him; the green slope blurred; his heart was a drumroll and his lungs were bellows and his body — his light, unburdened, gravity-cheated body — did everything he asked of it a half-second before he finished asking. He crested the ridge above the lake at a speed no human being had ever reached on foot and did not slow down.

And some distant traitor part of his mind said: it feels like the dream. It feels exactly like the dream.

Behind him, the world came apart in rhythmic concussions. It had reached his shore. It was climbing.

Eden ran through a city that had been left.

That was the thing he could not fit into his head, even at that speed: it was not a ruin. It was too new to be a ruin. Towers still stood, leaning, their windows out and vines pouring down their faces, but they stood. Paint still showed on the walls in patches. A dead avenue opened before him, its surface broken and shoved sideways by two centuries of roots, and a sign at the corner still held enough of its letters to almost be a name.

People had lived here. They had lived here recently enough that the buildings had not yet finished falling down.

Along the avenue lay the rusted carcass of a machine the size of a habitat block — treads taller than a man, a great drilling arm collapsed across the road like a felled god. The corpse of the war. He hurdled the drill arm without breaking stride and heard, one heartbeat later, the Enger go through it.

RESERVE: 31%.

It cut his angles. That was the terrible thing — it was not only fast, it was smart, flowing wide on his turns, hunting the geometry of him, and every time the band flushed a fresh surge through his blood the light behind the creature's eyes came up brighter, as if he were shouting his position in a language he had not known he could speak. Using the only thing keeping him alive made him easier to kill.

RESERVE: 19%. WARNING: RESERVE DEPLETION IMMINENT. CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE: NOT FOUND.

"I know—"

He needed walls. He needed a door that closed. He broke left through a curtain of hanging green into a sunken plaza — and there it was.

The building crouched at the plaza's end, half-buried, and it was intact: hard grey alloy where everything else was rot and rust, lines still square, built by people who had wanted it to outlast whatever was coming. Two hundred years of weather had barely marked it. Lichen furred its face, and beneath the lichen, above a sealed blast door three times his height, ran a raised emblem that Eden knew better than his own reflection.

A circuit board, formed into the shape of a crown.

There was no time to feel what that meant. There would be — later, if later existed, the sight would come back to him and take the floor out from under everything — but now there was only the rent in the structure's flank where some ancient violence had peeled the alloy back like skin, a gap the width of a coffin, and Eden hit it at a slide as the plaza behind him exploded.

Darkness swallowed him. He tumbled down a slope of debris into cold still air and lay for one heartbeat on smooth flooring, chest heaving.

Ceiling strips flickered awake around him, one by one, running on the dregs of some patient emergency cell — waking, after two hundred years, for motion.

RESERVE: 12%. SURGE MODE DISENGAGED.

The light was the colour of old bone, and it fell on a long room that had been a laboratory. Workstations under grey drifts of dust. Cabling in ordered runs along the walls. And down the room's spine, two facing rows of upright pods — human-sized, human-shaped, with couches inside and restraint yokes at wrist and throat, their glass faces starred and shattered.

Shattered, Eden noted with a distant crawling horror, from the inside.

He limped down the row, one hand pressed to the stitch tearing at his ribs, past a pod, past another — past the small anonymous huddle of bones in the corner of the room that he made himself stop looking at — to the master workstation at the far end. Its screens were dead. But lying on the console, square in the middle, deliberately placed, was a book.

Paper. Actual paper, in a hard cover, because paper needs no power to remember.

The pages crackled like frost as he turned them. Diagrams. Vitals charts. Column after column of subject numbers with lines drawn through them. And on the last written page, in a cramped exhausted hand:

...Subject 44 expired at 0311. Same presentation as the others. It was never a question of strength — the essence takes faster than the flesh can yield, and we cannot govern the rate of integration. No dosage works because dosage is not the problem; the problem is control, and we have none, and I will not sign for a 45th.

Project Chimera failed.

Seal the SS stock. Forgive us — or burn this place.

Below the console, half-open, an armoured case.

Eden crouched. Inside, on a bed of moulded padding, lay a row of injector tubes, each the length of his hand, each throated in glass, each stamped along the barrel in machine print. POWER–D. Empty, plunger down. POWER–C. Empty. POWER–B. POWER–A. POWER–S. Empty, empty, empty — five spent syringes, five columns of crossed-out subject numbers, five ways to die.

And in the last cradle, alone, intact, full:

POWER–SS.

The liquid inside was not dark so much as it was deep. It sat in its glass like a held breath, and threaded through it, faint and slow, moved veins of ember-orange light.

The same light that had come up in the creature's eyes.

Eden reached for it — he would never be able to say why; to look, only to look — and the wall of the laboratory caved in.

Alloy shrieked. Dust erupted in a grey wave, the bone-coloured lights swung and stuttered, and the Enger came through fifty centimetres of armour like a man shouldering through a curtain. In the enclosed dark it was a long grey shape on too many joints, the red of its eyes the only true light in the room, and Eden was already moving, already diving aside, and he was fast, he was still so fast—

It was faster.

He never saw the limb that hit him. The world simply broke — an impact across his left side like being struck by a falling door, and then flight, and then a workstation shattering around his body, and then the floor, and then, arriving late and all at once, the pain.

Eden lay in the wreckage and could not scream because screaming required breath and his ribs had become a cage of white-hot wire. Something deep in his side was torn. He could feel warmth spreading under his coveralls, too much warmth, far too fast, and when he tried to move his body answered slowly, from a great and increasing distance.

His band was shrieking. Not chiming — shrieking, an alarm he had never heard in his life, its face a wall of red:

CRITICAL TRAUMA. INTERNAL HEMORRHAGE. VITAL ENERGY LOSS EXCEEDS REGULATION CAPACITY.
RESERVE: 6%. UNABLE TO COMPENSATE.
EXTERNAL POWER REQUIRED.
EXTERNAL POWER REQUIRED.
EXTERNAL POWER REQUIRED.

Through the tunnel his vision was becoming, Eden saw the Enger turn toward him — unhurried now, the glow in its eyes rising and falling with something that looked horribly like breathing — and he saw, three metres away across the debris-strewn floor, giving off its faint patient ember light in the fallen case:

Power.

The band demanded power. The syringe was labelled power. It was madness. It was a word printed by dead people on a poison that had crossed out forty-four names.

It was also the only sentence left in the world that ended with him alive.

Eden crawled.

Three metres, on a torn side, through his own blood, each reach of his arm a war and each war costing more than the last, while the grey shape crossed the room behind him with the leisure of the inevitable. Its shadow fell over him — and the red light of its eyes lay across the floor, across his hands, across the armoured case as his fingers closed on cold glass.

EXTERNAL POWER REQUIRED, begged his band.

"Then take it," Eden whispered.

He drove the syringe into his forearm, above the band, and slammed the plunger home.

The world went white, then red, then molten. It was not like injecting a liquid. It was like opening a door in his arm onto the inside of a star — something vast and ancient and hungry poured into him, shrieking up the map of his veins, and in the first half-second Eden understood with total clarity why forty-four people had died: no body could hold this; it was not a substance, it was a flood, and flesh was paper before it—

Cold.

A ring of absolute cold clamped around his forearm — the band, its face strobing faster than thought:

FOREIGN AGENT: UNINDEXED. INTEGRATION RATE: LETHAL.
ANALYZING—
ENERGY SIGNATURE: COMPATIBLE.
REROUTING. GOVERNING INTEGRATION.

And the flood narrowed.

The star pouring into him was throttled to a torrent, the torrent to a stream, the stream to a burning metered thread — the little machine on his wrist drinking the deluge and dealing it out drop by rationed drop, closing gates, opening them a hair, dying reserve climbing even as it fought — 9% — 15% — 24% — a problem two centuries old being solved, at last, by a device that would not be built for another forty-five. The pain did not lessen. The pain became survivable, wave after governed wave, and Eden burned on the laboratory floor and did not die.

The Enger stood over him.

It had stopped. Through the closing tunnel of his sight Eden watched the grey head tilt — slowly, almost gently, the way a man tips his head when he hears his name — and the red light in its eyes dimmed, and shifted, and began to pulse in a new rhythm.

In my rhythm, he thought, from very far away, feeling his own heart slam and the creature's light answer it, beat for beat for beat.

And it had a face. Now that it was close, now that it was still, he could see that it had a face, and that the face had been somebody's.

The grinding-stone voice of it rose around him — up out of the floor, out of the walls, out of the deep places of the world — and folded, and turned over on itself, and just before the darkness took him it stopped being noise.

It had edges. It had shape.

It was almost a word.

And in the black, faint as breath and warm as sunlight, someone finished it for him.