Chapter Thirteen
The soft cries of the baby woke Marigold from a fitful sleep. The nurse was still sharing a small recovery room in the strange clinic with the child she had saved, though it wasn’t by choice. The Deep Scan that Alexander had performed, while not lethal, had caused strain to her heart which had long ago been damaged by a childhood fever. The stress and weakness had left her bedridden for several days.
As she rose, stiffly, from her cot she admitted she likely should stay in bed, crying child or no crying child. Still, the small pleading voice called to something deeper in the nurse than a desire for her own comfort, and she stumbled on weakened legs to the crib.
“Shhh… what’s wrong?” Marigold asked, reaching out to rub the little one’s tummy comfortingly. “You hungry? Or maybe you need… changed…” Marigold frowned, feeling warmth through the pajama’s the child was wearing. She moved her hand from his stomach to his forehead and felt the heated skin under her fingertips. “You’re hot, little one. Are you not feeling good?”
“It’s probably a mild allergic reaction or cold caused by the molds and fungi down here.” Kay’s voice startled Marigold, causing her to try and turn towards the sound. She stumbled and nearly fell, but the surprisingly strong Kitsune doctor caught her and helped her settle into a plastic rocking chair next to the crib. “Whoa now. You’ve been stuck on your back for a while. Let your legs remember how to work.”
Kay turned to the baby, and performed a swift but gentle examination. “Yeah, just a bit of congestion. He’ll be fine. The atmosphere down here is thick with stuff you don’t find up-side. You’re congested too, I’d wager.”
Marigold nodded. “I assumed it was just a cold from running around in unheated tunnels with Rei.”
“That didn’t help, I’m sure. Still, you’ll both be fine given a few days to get used to the Deep.” Kay’s tone turned chiding. “That is, assuming my new heart patient doesn’t kill herself before then. Did you hurt yourself, disobeying your doctor’s orders?”
“No! No, I’m fine.” Marigold reassured Rei’s sibling.
Kay frowned, raising an eyebrow in obvious disbelief. “Fine, eh? Did you feel any blurring of vision, or sudden dizziness?”
“No, and no weakness outside of my legs, which are probably just stiff anyway.”
Kay nodded, taking a hold of the other woman’s wrist to check her pulse. A flash of a pocket light, and a few other quick tests followed before the Kitsune nodded. “You’ll live… and if you are going to be getting up for the little one anyhow, I think you’re strong enough to feed him.”
Marigold took the baby as Kay lifted him from the crib and offered the child to her. A pre-readied bottle quickly followed, and Marigold found herself rocking a hungry, eating baby. “I still can’t… you know.”
“Believe what happened to him? I can’t either, but that’s because we’re decent people.” Kay growled, leaning against the wall and watching the nurse with the child. “So, have you thought of a name for the boy?”
“Me? But he’s not my baby.” Marigold argued, only to receive a shaking of the head and a smile from Kay.
“You saved him from an incinerator. I reckon that makes you as close to his mother as anyone has a right to claim.” Kay stated frankly. “And if you don’t want to take care of him, that’s no problem. There are plenty of folks down here who’ll take him in, but I think he’ll need more of a name than ‘Pinky.’” Kay shook her head at that tidbit of her brother’s wit.
Marigold nodded, sighing. “I guess I’ll have to think about it.”
“I suggest Rei Junior. It’ll annoy my brother to no end, and I live for stuff like that.” Both women giggled as the baby pushed the bottle clumsily away and burped. “Okay, Rei Junior it is, but we’ll call him RJ for short.” Marigold stated with a chuckle. “I think he’s done.”
Kay nodded, reclaiming the baby and settling him in the crib. “Polite little thing, isn’t he, burping himself.” Kay winked back. “Siren babies actually do that a lot, for some reason. I think they sense we women really don’t want to deal with the hassle.”
“So around two years old, Siren children are nightmares, huh?”
“Good guess.” Kay nodded. “God help me, I might have trouble finding my children when they want to keep playing with the other kids, but at least I can surprise them!” Kay turned back to Marigold, and watched as the other woman carefully pulled herself to her feet. “No shakiness now?” She asked.
“No. I think I just needed to get up.”
“Well then, I suspect a walk will do you more good right now than lying back down.” Kay commented. “Would you like a look around your new home?” She smiled as Marigold nodded eagerly. “Good. I’ll grab you some clean clothing.”
“Thank you!” Marigold said eagerly.
She was less eager a few minutes later, as she looked over the outfit Kay brought her. “Um… where’s my clothing… if you don’t mind me asking?”
Kay struggled to hide a smirk as she watched the human woman. She was sure Marigold thought she was hiding her distaste for the mid-rift length shirt and loose fitting pants she’d been offered, but for a Kitsune as skilled at reading micro-expressions as Kay she might as well have been yelling about it from the roof tops. “Unfortunately they got some of the lubricants the engineer’s use on the maglev track’s moving parts. It’s a little hard on fabrics so… your dress disintegrated when I washed it.”
“Oh.”
“As your doctor, I can assure you that there’s no way someone is going to think a fit girl like you is pregnant. And even the human women dress more or less like I do down here.”
The truth was Kay had more modest, by human standards, clothing but she’d decided that Marigold needed to acclimate to her new home quickly. The fear of even looking pregnant, caused in human women by the spontaneous appearance of Kitsune, Sirens, and even more startling mutations in their children, was absent in the Deep. Even surface Kitsune wore more practical garments, wanting freedom of movement, in comparison to the modest, almost Victorian dress preferred by up-side human women.
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“I’ll… just go change then.” Marigold declared, causing Kay’s smile to widen even further. She visibly set her shoulders and marched into the tiny bathing area off of the recovery room and shut the door.
“Poor humans.” Kay whispered to the drowsing Siren baby in the crib. “They think they hide their feelings so well, don’t they.” She grinned as the baby smiled, before drifting off to sleep.
Soon, with a quick admonition to Kay’s assistant in the clinic-cum-lab to listen for the baby, the women were off. Marigold eagerly looked around, even looking down in wonder at the gravel path on which they walked. A child of plasticine and concrete, the simple path was a novelty for her. “What exactly is this place?” she asked.
“Well, we call it, as you’ve probably already figured out, the Deep. Mostly, I suspect, because it’s under just about everything else.” Kay replied, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling of the cave. “Alexander found the original cavern shortly before he left the ISF, something about an apocalyptic terrorist cult that was using it as a training facility. He reported the whole thing collapsed in the process of his team destroying the cult when in fact only about a quarter of the original chamber was destroyed.”
“He must have been planning to leave already.” Marigold observed.
“He had been planning his escape for about a year or so, from what he’s said. He’d been hiding away caches of weapons and equipment for about that long before he found our cave, intending to start an armed revolution that never actually got off the ground. He’s never told me exactly why he abandoned that plan.”
“Instead, after he left and let the heat die down, he began recruiting likely families from the Undercity. He was actually targeting all the Kitsune and Sirens he could find and thought he could trust, though he never suggested refusing their human relatives refuge among us. Over several years the foundation of our little community was created.”
“Was the glowing moss already here?”
“Oh hell no.” Kay chuckled. “That’s my creation. Before I whipped this stuff up they were trying to maintain electric lighting through out the cavern, with unreliable results.”
“You gene spliced this moss?”
“It’s lichen, actually, and yes I did.” Kay said with a small hint of pride in her voice. “It was my first project after I returned from schooling upstairs. It really wasn’t that hard, since similar plants already existed. I just increased it’s luminosity a bit, and made it a bit more robust.”
Kay gestured at a chicken coop as they continued walking. “Actually those are my creations too. For decades we struggled with whatever livestock we could manage to raise down here, and whatever surface supplies we could steal to supplement our unhappy and unproductive animals. These guys, all clones of my originals, don’t care about light and lay eggs faster than their naturally born relatives. Granted, their life span is a fraction of those same relatives, but it’s not hard to force grow new batches and we can eat them when they get to old to lay.”
“But why bother? With vat grown meat and hydroponic farming it seems overly complex.”
“Oh, we use those technologies too, don’t get me wrong.” Kay said while gesturing at another well-lit building off in the distance. “The problem is, frankly, the Kitsune.”
Marigold looked at Kay surprised, causing the woman to chuckle. “Surprised to hear a Kitsune say that, aren’t you.” Kay teased.
“I am.”
“I’m a Kitsune, but I’m also a scientist, and science demands honesty.” Kay stated. “About seventy-five percent of our population down here are Kitsune and we need about twice the protein allowance that a normal Human or Siren. We also process meat and eggs much more efficiently than we do plant based proteins. Tuning and Shape shifting take their tolls.”
“Rei used that term too. Tuning I mean.”
“Its slang for small physical alterations to Kitsune bodies, meant to improve some specific ability. Most commonly that means altering our eyes and ears to be more sensitive, or our fast twitch muscle profile to allow for faster reaction times. If you talk about a higher dan Kitsune like Rei it can appear down right magical when he gets going.”
“Sorry for interrupting, I was just curious.”
Kay waved her off. “It was an honest question. But that very tuning is what causes our dependence on meat. All the chickens you see are actually owned by Kitsune families, who keep them and use their eggs to lessen their pressure on the community’s resources as a whole. In the end it takes about as much effort for us to create a chicken, who lays eggs for a year, as it does for a few dozen pounds of vat-beef.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Marigold admitted.
They’d been walking down the path, following the subtle slope of the cavern, as they spoke and came to a thick pillar of living rock which had formed as part of the original cavern. When they walked around it Marigold gasped, her eyes falling upon a waterfall.
It looked magical, glowing lichens of green and lavender surrounding the small but happily bubbling fall as it poured into a large pool. “How lovely!” She exclaimed, half jogging towards the feature, wanting to get a better look.
She gasped as Kay’s hand snaked out and grabbed her by the arm, forcing her to come to an abrupt stop. “Whoa there, let’s be careful shall we.” Kay chided, as she scooped up a stone from the path and hurled it into the pool.
The splash caused by the stone disturbed several of what Marigold had taken as simple boulders, the sharp teeth of one of the small crocodiles snapping at the disturbed water in search of food. “Wha… what are those? What are they doing here?” She demanded.
Kay led her to the short fence surrounding the pool. “They’re small, fresh water crocodiles, genetically re-engineered of course. Primarily, they serve as biological waste disposal since I tweaked their stomach and intestines to digest almost anything not completely toxic. Periodically we stun one, and cut off their tails which I engineered them to re-grow. When one of them gets to big, we fish it out and butcher it, processing the meat.”
Her hand pointed out the lip of the pond, which rose nearly a foot above the surface of the water. “The ledge generally keeps them trapped in the pool, but every now and then one manages to find his way up behind the fence. It’s best to approach with caution, just in case.”
“I’ll… I’ll keep that in mind.” Marigold swallowed, turning to look back up the caves shallowly graded length. “It seems almost idyllic down here.” She commented as she gazed over hundreds of houses and dozens of people going about their day.
“That is, sadly, an illusion.” Kay sighed. “Only a few buildings have electricity, for example, and even fewer have running water. Those that do have to have cisterns which need to be refilled by hand on a regular basis.” A gesture pointed out a communal latrine made of plastic and settled into a carved groove in the ground. “Unless you’re a person with specialized skills you get stuck on a waste disposal detail to empty the outhouses at least once a month.”
“I don’t think I want to do that job.” Marigold admitted, causing Kay to chuckle.
“Frankly I suspect those are what keep Rei in Undercity.” She admitted. “But you, fortunately, are a trained nurse in a community of a thousand who had maybe five such people before you arrived. Add in only two medical doctors, and you’re fairly safe from such duties.”
“Thank Gaia.” Marigold sighed before she frowned. “What else is bad down here?”
“A wise question.” The gravelly voice of Alexander was soft enough not to startle either woman. Instead it just drew their attention to the Siren as he walked slowly towards them with a grim smile. “The threat of wide spread illness among this tightly grouped mass of humanity is on top of the list, as is the potential for the Australasian Council finding out we exist and ordering us destroyed.”
“I… I guess I’ve made that worse for you, haven’t I.” Marigold quietly admitted.
“Not fundamentally.” Alexander assured her. “But they are looking for you amazingly hard, so I’m going to have to pull back some plans. Still, I can’t blame you for doing the right thing, now can I?”
Even though the man smiled, Marigold suspected he could easily hold it against her, if he chose to. She managed to contain a shiver as the Siren turned his attention to Kay.
“Have you showed her the escape tunnels?”
“Not yet.”
“Do. Then, if you can, send a message to Rei from the hotel and tell him I need to speak with him. Immediately.”