Inner Sanctum | 3:46 PM | Third Day

Almost everyone screamed. It was such a uniform reaction that it was hard to tell who wasn't screaming.

The entire right wall of the room was covered in viscera, chunks of steaming-hot bone and hair and cartilage and brains, and blood had sprayed everywhere. The sheer immediacy of it - of the transition between something so recognizably human and, well, meat - made it probably the most disgusting event I had witnessed in the entire day. Flecks of it got in my mouth. My body managed to find some time between contemplating pissing itself to consider throwing up. I felt my body go cold as all the heat shot to my face, and my muscles went rigid.

A second shot came only a second or two after the first, failing to hit anyone, though it did manage to demolish the window frame to the point that some of the wooden framework caught fire and collapsed to the ground.

There was no time to even consider how to respond rationally. A few people standing by the window looked out to try to identify the assailant - Kam in particular was gripping her rifle tightly and seemed to reach with a more combative spirit than most - but quickly gave up and retreated from it. In the moment, my brain didn't process why, but in retrospect it was obvious: The shooter had the cover of darkness to shield them, while our torches, the only source of light in the entire area, probably made us stick out like the moon on a dark night.

A third shot came a moment later, but I didn't even see where it landed, as I was already running from the room. So many of us went for the door at once that we started bumping into each other; Linos's wheelchair clattered against the wall as Kamrusepa, Ophelia and I shoved past him at once, while Theo and Ptolema grabbed Seth and followed. Ran grabbed Ezekiel's arm, but when he failed to respond quickly enough, left him behind, though he managed to stumble forward a moment after.

...or at least, I think that's what happened. You have to understand that, at this point, it was more or less total chaos. All I can fully say I remember was a whirlwind of masks and lamps being swung every which way, and getting repeatedly smacked in the chest with other people's elbows.

We fled into the hall, still shouting, as the sound of another blast came from behind. It was only at this point that the shouts started to become half-coherent.

"What do we do?!" Theo - or at least, I'm pretty sure it was Theo - shouted from what seemed like the rear.

"Back to the stairs!" Kam commanded, already dashing that direction. "We'll cut them off, or get out before they can get to higher ground!"

"W-What if they're waiting for us?" he asked anxiously.

"There's more of us than them!" she replied, holding her rifle close to her face as she darted the corner.

"Who the hell are they?" Ptolema cried out. "I thought we knew where everybody was! I thought-- I thought Fang--"

"We can figure it out later," Ran spoke bluntly. "We need to get out of here!"

I ran, clasping my bag - and the echo maze within - tightly, trying not to lose all sense of myself. Light danced madly along the inside of the fish tanks as we fled, while also reflecting everyone's masks, giving the impression that I was surrounded by unearthly creatures that were closing in at all sides.

It felt like I was descending into hell.

My mind tried to understand what was happening, who could have attacked us. Who is unaccounted for? It was possible to hypothesize four candidates. Lilith and Mehit. We'd seen them on their way to the exit, but either one of them could have doubled back, tracked our movements from the exterior of the building, and taken a shot. Balthazar. He'd removed himself from the situation up until this point, but could he have been conspiring with the culprits? The final, indeterminate person picked up by the defense system. With Samium dead, we'd assumed it to have been Zeno's true body, but I never saw it with my own eyes. Could it have been a deception all along?

Three of those don't make any sense. Lilith would still be unconscious, and there was zero evidence to point to Mehit being an accomplice. And even if Zeno's body hadn't been in that box, it had to be somewhere in the bioenclosure, or the numbers just didn't add up. So was it Balthazar? Had everything he'd been saying been some kind of weird front after all?

Damn it.

I hadn't even realized anyone had been pushing him with us until this moment, but I heard Linos's voice to the side. "I... I tried to tell you!" he exclaimed. "You should've--"

Suddenly, there was the crashing sound from the direction we were heading, and the noise of someone - no, multiple someones - rapidly climbing the stairs.

No. 'Someone' was the wrong word. The footsteps were far too fast, far too light, to have come from a human.

"The Tui She," I said, my eyes widening. "I can hear them coming!"

"Fuck!" Ezekiel hissed, coming up from behind. "The window-- They must think we broke the window!"

"Stay calm!" Kam said. "With our masks, they might still think we're just bystanders!"

"I-I don't have my mask, Kam!" Ptolema cried out anxiously.

I double-taked. How had I not processed that? Had it been taken away when-- Well, when whatever happened? And if so, why hadn't that happened to the others?

Kam clicked her tongue sharply. "Shit. Fine! We'll make a fighting retreat at the other set!"

We turned, running in the opposite direction now. This felt almost futile. Even if we weren't slowed down by at least two only quasi-ambulatory members of our group, those golems were designed as hunt-and-intercept units. They'd be on us in a matter of moments.

"Get your father between them and us when they get close, boy!" Anna commanded. "He's of the council! They won't fire when he's close!"

Ptolema looked to her. "Aren't you of the... Oh, right." She trailed off as the other shoe dropped.

Theo looked to Anna, his gaze full of anxiety. "So we'll be safe?"

"From the Tui She," she said. "But the Serpopards will reach us in moments. And if we defend ourselves, more will keep coming. Fleeing the building is no solution."

"Then what the bloody hell do you suggest?!" Kam snapped.

"I might be able to disable them from one of the logic bridges," she said. "If not, make for the armory again! With the Power and a chokepoint, you might stand a chance, so long as they don't come all at once!"

Behind us, I heard the door to the stairway we were now fleeing burst open, and quadrupedal footsteps approach obscenely quickly, such that they almost sounded like gunfire. Within a second - as we approached the doorway to the western stairwell - two of the creatures turned the corner, their serpentine heads fixed squarely on us.

"Where's Ophelia?" Ran asked, seeming to realize something. "I don't see her."

Seth, who seemed to be slowly coming back to his senses, responded with anxiety. "Wait, didn't she go out first?"

"No, I don't--"

The exchange was cut off as the two of them realized what was happening, all speech giving way to garbled shouts as everyone panicked, trying to react.

I hadn't got a sense of it when I'd seen them on patrol or when we'd ambushed the set trying to scratch down the door of the printing room, but the way the Serpopards moved was... Well, it just wasn't right. Even though their lower bodies were that of cats, they didn't quite move like them when they broke into a full sprint. Rather, they had a slithering quality to them as well that was more evocative of their serpentine nature, their whole midsection almost spasming from side-to-side, like their spine was its own separate creature from the rest of the body.

And they were ridiculously fast for their size. They were like cheetahs. Once they broke into a sprint, their feet barely even touched the ground.

But they weren't the only thing in the room that surprised me with their speed. Kam spun and fired her rifle twice. The first shot missed, but the second hit the one approaching on the left square in the chest as it was about three meters off. Artificial blood sprayed all over the floor as it went flying backwards.

The second, though, was on us, bounding straight towards Seth's - at least, I'm pretty it was Seth's - throat. The hallway briefly lit up with refractor blasts as the others fired their guns, including one from my own, though I don't think I hit anything. Someone­ managed to blast off one of its legs, but that did frighteningly little to stop it.

Seth ducked just in time, and it only managed to rip off a chunk of his robe's collar, but it still landed squarely on his chest, rearing its head back to make another attempt. Before it had a chance, though, Ptolema pulled back her arm and punched it, screaming something in the process. This didn't knock it completely free, but it lost its balance, only holding on by a single paw. It butted into Ran's torso and she smacked it away instinctively, causing its neck to pivot and try to bite at her instead. I shot at its head again in response, eyes going wide with fear.

Once again, I missed, but it was enough for it to flinch backwards and to probably halfway-blind Ran, who stumbled a little, cursing. Seth fell backwards against the wall, and it slid along its back. It looked ready to leap at Ezekiel, who was also close by, but Ptolema sharply kicked it first, this time knocking it to the ground.

Seth turned and smacked it with the side of his foot too, shouting some curse in Mekhian I didn't recognize. Ezekiel, seeming to realize they had it pinned, raised his rifle and recklessly shot, coming inches away from burning Ptolema's leg off. It struck the creature in the chest - non-fatally, I think - but it still cried out and fell, and the three of them turned to run with the rest of us.

The Tui She appeared down the hall moments later. It was fast, too, if not to the same degree, galloping like two horses stitched together in strange but surprisingly elegant leaps. Theo turned his father to face it, who stretched out his arms, trying to cover as wide an area of the hall as possible.

What happened next was evidently not what Anna had predicted. Instead of holding back, it charged us, trying to get past Linos like its minions had. Kam raised her rifle and shot it twice, but she missed the logic engine on its back, and its body took the bullets like they were pinches on the cheek. It smashed into our group, knocking Theo to the ground and almost throwing Kam's rifle from her hands as it reared its hooves, causing her to accidentally fire another shot into the ceiling. Plaster rained down from overhead.

Again, I'd struggle to tell you exactly what happened at this point. Lamps fell to the floor, shots were fired in every direction, and people shouted conflicting commands. Later, I'd learn that Ptolema - apparently - eventually destroyed the golem by thrusting a candlestick she'd hidden in her bag into its control center, but that's a second hand account.

For my part, something hit me, sharply, in the side of my lower leg, and I cried out. It could've been someone's foot, or one of the golem's... Whatever the case, it fortunately wasn't too serious, but it was enough to send me flying towards the floor. I fell flat on my face, injuring my cheek. I was glad my glasses had already been broken earlier, as if I'd still been wearing them, my face probably would have been cut to pieces.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Someone stood on me - my ribs, specifically - and then a hand, which I realized after a few moments belonged to Ran, grabbed mine. She hauled me to my feet, shouted something encouraging, and then pulled me backwards, away from whatever was going on, and towards the staircase.

We threw open the double-doors, our shoes clanking on the metallic surface, our lamps illuminating the view through the tall window, and climbed at breakneck speed. I ignored the pain of what was probably a sprained ankle, peering over the side of the railing to see if any more golems were approaching as we went.

"Let's hold up at the top!" Ran shouted. "Keep watch for golems and wait for the others!"

"Leave them!" Kam, who I only then realized was also with us, yelled back. "We don't have time!"

"Fuck that!" Ran declared defiantly. "If another of those little bastards jumps in between them and us and Anna can't stop them, they'll be good as dead! Didn't you just say we'd make a fighting retreat on the stairs?!"

Kam cursed, but slowed, taking a position at the top of the stairwell and raising the sights of her rifle to her eye.

Thinking back on the whole situation, it was amazing how every cautious decision we'd taken had not only put us in a worse position, but hadn't even mattered. We'd gone to such lengths to avoid the gas, only for it to not even exist. We'd carefully avoided damaging the building to avoid alerting the security system, only for someone else to trigger it anyway. Hell, the only reason we'd gone back inside to begin with was to flee a gunman who, at this rate, was going to be waiting for us the moment we stepped out the door.

Where had we gone wrong? Should we have thought more outside of the box?

The others began to file in a few moments later-- Theo and his father first, who must have also fled rather than stay and try to finish the first Tui She off. Unfortunately, as Anna and now Ran had also predicted, another hunting party had appeared from below. In what was simultaneously a huge relief while also raising further questions about the Order's competence in their purchasing decisions, the Tui She didn't appear to be capable of firing straight upwards, its shots only managing to singe the walls some distance below us.

Unfortunately, the Serpopards had no such flaw. They began circling the loop of the stairwell like lightning; it was like I was watching a little whirlwind. Kamrusepa fired repeatedly, but even she couldn't seem to hit them.

A thought struck me. Now that it'd come to this, preserving the structural integrity of the building no longer mattered, and going down this way was obviously un-ideal compared to taking the passage in the armory anyway. So...

Though I barely remembered Zeno's instructions on how to set a refractor pistol to its highest level, I - starting to feel a strange tingle in my gut, but dismissing it as a symptom of, well, everything - fumbled the lenses to something I was pretty sure was right, took aim at the structure of the staircase itself, and fired. I was unprepared for the strength of the blast, flinching and almost dropping the pistol as the heat seared past by fingers.

It did less damage than I expected; a circular segment of the stairs about a floor below was eviscerated, turning to molten metal in a second, but all it amounted to in the end was a few dozen steps. Yet, for a moment, I thought it would be enough.

It wasn't even close to enough. The things practically leapt an entire level of staircase at once, scrambling over the banister with the dexterity of a rat.

Oh, god!

Within a second, they were on Theo and Linos, who'd been significantly slowed by Theodoros's need to haul his father's chair up something for which it was so ill-suited. Theo, obviously panicking, threw himself awkwardly over his father's chair and gripped it from the other side, trying to use Linos's body as a shield to stop their advance. But even as Linos screamed some kind of command at them, they simply clambered over him, their jaws snapping eagerly at his son.

Still, their scripting obviously commanded caution when it came to harming Linos, and that slowed them down significantly. Ran, taking aim with her pistol, managed to hit one dead in the head, and it slumped, smacking with surprising heft (I'd imagined them to be light, but it hit the floor like a brick) into the ground below.

But the second made it to Theo. He cried out, and tried to wrestle it away, but it was no good. It widened its jaws and bit him in the arm, and he screamed, letting go of his father - Linos desperately grabbed the banister, holding up his own pistol to try to take a shot at the thing. It snapped at Theo again, going for his neck--

And then, suddenly, it stopped. Seeming to forget Theo was even there, it jumped away, descending back to the side of the Tui She.

A moment later, I saw Seth and Ptolema come in from below, panting heavily, followed shortly after by an extremely rattled-looking Ezekiel, holding his rifle like it was about to leap from his hands. Seth cried out almost as soon as he arrived. "Theo!" He rushed up the stairs, Ptolema following close behind.

The Tui She seemed to have gone inactive too, the erratic shots having ceased. Does this mean Anna succeeded?

Suddenly, Kam smacked the side of my head. "Idiot!" she said, her tone scalding. "Perhaps you are trying to kill us!"

I flinched backwards. "What was that for?!"

"'What was that for'-- You could have collapsed the whole damn edifice!" she said, pointing accusingly at the damage I'd wrought. "What do you think we're standing on?"

I looked downwards mutedly, taken a little aback by my own stupidity. Obviously, though the staircase was attached to the wall at the entrances to the second and third floors, it was primarily held in place by its connection to the ground; a connection which I'd just come quite close to destroying. I've mentioned it a few times now, but it bears repeating that the floors in the inner sanctum building were steep. In other words, I could have trapped everyone up here, or worse, sent half our group plummeting to the stone floor below.

I opened my mouth listlessly, at a loss for what to say in my defense.

"...oh," I eventually managed. "Sorry..."

"Sorry?! For God's sake, Su, have some basic sense!" She glared at me. "You're supposed to be the cautious one between us!"

How had I jumped to doing something so stupid? Sometimes it felt like there was a second side of my brain that only woke up during intense situations. Something that made me have bouts of curiosity when I ought to have been wary, and made me act reckless whenever I was overtly in danger.

Maybe I was finally losing my mind. I hadn't even had a moment to process Fang's gruesome death.

"Theo, are you okay?!" Down below, Seth had reached Linos and Theodoros, the latter of whom seemed to be in the process of losing consciousness - either as a result of blood loss, or some property of the bite.

I couldn't see his face, but I could tell by his tone he was distraught with worry. I knew he and Theo were friends, of course, but this seemed like a surprisingly extreme reaction. Personally, I doubted his life was in danger; my understanding was that the security system was more intended to subdue than to kill.

"Take him, master Ikkuret!" Linos hissed painfully, even as Seth moved to support his grip on the banister. "I can't-- Just check the wound! If it got him in an artery..."

Seth struggled as he pulled Theo upwards even as he clung to the side of his father's chair in his disoriented state, looking like he was trying to say something. If anything escaped his lips, though, it was drowned out by Seth, who was shouting as he tried to manage the awkward task of simultaneously holding Linos's chair in place while also attempting to reach Theo. "Ema, I could use some help up here!"

She shouted something back, then ran up the stairs accordingly. While Seth stepped over to Theo and lifted him from the ground, she took the wheelchair and began awkwardly pushing it up the stair after him., stealing glances over the sides every few moments. I felt a twinge in the back of my neck, but it was so slight that I dismissed it as nerves.

"It's pointless now!" Kam shouted with exasperation, as she stepped back downwards herself. "Now that the golems are gone, it'll be faster to just head for the front door!"

"Are we sure they're gone for good?" Seth called out in response.

"You tell us!" Ran said. "You were closer to Anna! Did she say she managed to turn the security of?"

"I don't think so," Seth said, looking over his shoulder and frowning anxiously. "Did we lose her?"

Ptolema spoke up, sounding worried. "I saw her at the logic bridge when we came in--"

"Where's Ophelia?" Ran asked, suddenly frowning.

At this point, Anna stepped through the door. "I am here," she declared, her voice strangely hoarse. "I did indeed manage to disable the security-- The golems shouldn't attack unless there's another perceived breach of security."

"Let's fucking well go, then!" Kam said, bounding down the stairs. I moved to follow. "Before we get shot through the damn window--"

𒊹

It was like they teach in school, even if some part of me had always imagined it to be more dramatic regardless. It's like being shot in the head. You don't see it. It moves faster than your brain; all you can do is observe the aftermath, or, very often, not.

I wasn't sure how much time had passed, though I'd later learn it was only about fifteen minutes. I awoke with my face flat against the metal of the staircase, and the taste of blood so thick in my mouth that I wriggled my tongue to confirm it hadn't been cut off. After this, I started to think, and this was a terrible mistake. My head pounded like it was filled with lead. Each pulse of the ache was like being punched, and my vision spun. Even lying still, I felt vertigo, like I'd been left lying upside down.

My mind sputtered back to life just enough to enable me to move my body. I coughed violently, my eyes opening first widely, then squinting at the fight.

Even though every part of my body was telling me not to, I slowly forced myself to my feet, almost falling as I realized I'd injured my leg in the fall. Leaning against the railing, I tried to take in my surroundings, but my vision was so blurred I couldn't process much at first, though I noticed one thing straight away: Ran, collapsed just behind me.

I leaned down, touching her neck, too disoriented to even be worried. She wasn't dead, but quite a lot of blood had rolled down from her nostrils.

I held my hand to selfsame region of my own face, and they returned covered in red, far more than during the very worst of my dissociative episodes. I wiped it on the side of my robe, frowning.

"Ran," I said, nudging her slightly.

She groaned, but otherwise didn't move. Apparently, I was ahead of the curve.

My eyes ran further down the stairs. Up ahead, I saw the collapsed form of Kam a little further down the stairs, and beyond that, a heap around Linos's wheelchair - seemingly jammed in place - where Ptolema, Seth, Theodoros and his father all lay in uncomfortable positions. Someone was bleeding; blood was dripping down the metal. The lamps they'd been carrying had all fallen; I could see them lying on the ground far below. Beyond that was Ezekiel, his body half-sprawled against the railing.

Wait a minute, I managed to think. If they don't have lamps, how can I see them so well?

I blinked, peering around, and managed to process the fact that the lights were back on.

The lights.

It wasn't just the light within the building, either. Something resembling sunlight now cascaded from the tall windows at the side of the stairwell. The lamp for the entire bioenclosure had reactivated.

Something flickered through the murk of my muddled mind. As a test, I muttered the initiating word. "𒀭."

I felt the shift in the air that accompanied casting with the power; the sense of connecting to something, of one's senses subtly expanding and changing.

It must be working, a functioning part of me noted. The Power.

What? Another, less-functioning part responded, addled. Why wouldn't it have been?

It felt as though half of my brain was still asleep; some things about the situation I recalled and understood fluidly, while others were dark spots. In retrospect there was obviously something quite wrong with me - I was experiencing the kind of confusion you'd expect with a concussion, where the world felt more like a dream than reality. It didn't occur to me that the Power being functional again meant we must have not only missed our transposition window, but passed the time limit of 4'oclock, meaning that there was now a finite - if still considerable, for the time being - amount of oxygen left in the area. And, perhaps more pressingly, we were now within the period of time where the defenses of the sanctuary were completely unpredictable. The only reassurance that the ceiling wasn't going to explode at a moment's notice and crush me under billions of tons of seawater was the good word of the mastermind's threats.

It also didn't occur to me to use the Power to help any of the others, not that I was sure I could even if I'd been so inclined. I could barely stay on my feet, let alone do math.

Close by, I heard the sound of liquid dripping softly. Curious - if that's the right word for it - I wandered a little further down the staircase, until I could get a good view of the entrance to the second floor... And that was when I saw it, and finally began to process what had just happened.

Anna's heavy, conservative robes were lying in a heap, surrounded by a dark, thick, strangely-colored liquid, which was slowly trickling off the edge of the platform to the floor below.

This has all come up already at one point or another, but it's worth giving a proper explanation from start to finish. When two (or generally, quite a lot more than two) living human cells of the same seed physically touch, it causes an event called a Contact Paradox. As each person sharing the same seed is technically a temporal copy of one another - the 'same person' born multiple times, the iron within the embryo that begat them simultaneous instances of the same particles - their state of mutual coexistence in the same plane is unstable; dependent on a separation that does not contradict its physical impossibility.

When that state breaks down, the result is catastrophic. All the offending particles are instantly annihilated, and the universe over-corrects, a field which erases all iron emanating from the point of contact, spreading in all directions in a manner not dissimilar to the vacuum collapse which destroyed the old world. A new electromagnetic floor manifests, and drags everything nearby down with it.

This lasts for only a microsecond before the Ironworkers' endeavors forcibly re-assert the status quo, but depending on the amount of cells in contact simultaneously (the complexity of the event determining how quickly the Tower of Asphodel can do its work), it's been observed to spread anywhere from under a millimeter, to almost a quarter mile in radius. Further, iron particles outside that radius but still nearby are also slightly affected, becoming unstable and behaving anomalously, which leads to a similar outcome as a prosognostic event, albeit less lasting.

As for what remains of the people caught in the event itself... Neferuaten had put it well, though it wasn't quite "blue" sludge, but more a mix of various different colors other than red. There were hints of dark yellow, green...

I stared at the pool in morbid fascination and horror.

"Ughh," Ran said, shifting a little. Her face scrunched up.

I was conscious enough now to be relieved she was alive, but not enough to process this remotely normally. Instead, feeling removed from the situation and less urgent, I felt drawn towards what I can now say were likely Anna's remains, stepping further downwards.