“Time’s up. I have a few special songs to request.”
“It’s not much of a request, is it?”
“Nope!”
“Don’t bully me.”
***
“E-Eporsa?”
Cora’s whole world falls apart. A sickly, ugly feeling twists inside her chest and strangles her. She grates her teeth and jams her finger into Raezu’s head.
“You’re lying! You did that to bother us, didn’t you? It’s the only way you can affect us since your partner is dead and we’re ready to kill you.”
“I’m not lying.” Raezu gestures at Liam. “He can tell you.”
He shakes his head. “He’s not lying. Eporsa did…” His eyebrows crease. “Eporsa did shelter them. He was their contact inside the hospital.”
“It can’t be. Eporsa helped all of us. He wouldn’t do something like that.” Cora takes a deep breath, then exhales, counting out the seconds mentally. “I want you to tell me why you and that piece of shit over there stayed here. You better not lie, or I’ll impale you.”
“We were told to spy on you. Keiro’s job is–was–running tallies of any slips you may have had. He scanned Callista’s mind several times and made her forget the encounters.”
Cora snarls and sweeps shards of porcelain with her foot. Her logic tells her there’s little point in tearing apart the monster. He’ll regenerate, he’ll babble about anything to deflect her wrath, he’ll retaliate somehow. Her emotions, though, betray her. They betray everything that she stands for.
Somehow, she feels sorry for Raezu. Sympathetic.
“It’s not worth it,” Liam says, but that does little to calm her fury. If she’d had Callista’s strength, she’d rip Raezu apart in a heartbeat. “Cora.”
His stern tone snaps her to attention. She releases control of her metaphysical self and crosses her arms. “Fine. Whatever. Let me guess. And then Keiro tried to do the same to Liam and it backfired.”
“We never expected him to develop a gift of his own. That should be impossible. You’re either born with them or not at all. That’s when we realized the assignment wasn’t just meant to risk our capture, torture, and execution.”
“Your assignment?” Liam’s tone hardens. “You said you were given a contract. Elaborate on that.”
Raezu stares off blankly into space. “Like I said, they wanted us to spy on Cora. They didn’t say why. They just told us to do it, and we had no other choice, because otherwise we’d be discovered and captured. We thought it was a prolonged suicide mission just to spite us. Pair two Transients with the perfect gifts to hide and place them inside one of the most well-defended parts of the city. That’d make a great comedy for the Allies, wouldn’t it?”
Cora struggles to keep her breathing steady. “And to get you in and get you the resources you needed, they gave you Eporsa.”
“Yes. He helped us a lot. More than he should’ve, I think, but I didn’t complain.”
“You said you’d been expecting us.”
“After Liam received his gift, we knew it was a matter of time before all of you discovered us. We couldn’t leave because the hospital is too heavily patrolled at the ground entrance. We stopped our monitoring and waited.”
Liam cracks his knuckles. “Wait. If you were sent here to spy on Cora, then who were you sending the information to?”
She doesn’t want to hear it, but Raezu confirms the dreadful suspicion that’s been growing since the moment Liam confirmed he wasn’t lying. “Eporsa, of course. He’s the one who provided us food here while we waited.”
Cora slumps against the wall, holding her head. A headache threatens to build near her temples. “So, Eporsa, huh?” She drags her hands down her face and stares at the ceiling, letting her arms go limp at her sides. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t. He’s not lying, right, Liam?”
“He’s not lying.” With a huff, he adds, “Unfortunately.”
“Then we have to break into his office. We have to see what’s all the data he’s been getting about… me.” She feels sick. Nauseous. Eporsa probably collected all types of physical information and stored it. She hadn’t questioned the routine weight measurements, the physical exercise regimens, or the cognitive tests. Those are the types of things doctors back home do, and clearly medicine is a universal concept.
Eporsa had her full faith and trust and he broke it.
“May I accompany you?”
They stare at Raezu. He sheepishly raises his arms in surrender. “I mean what I said. I can disguise myself well enough. Give me a moment and I can return to being a Cenarian accompanying you.”
“That is just–Liam, no!” Cora exclaims, as he strokes his chin in deep thought. “You can’t be serious. He’s a Transient, for fuck’s sake.”
“We have to, don’t we?
She gnaws on her bottom lip. Already, the skin is raw after the governor’s healers healed her, and tingles of pain shoot beneath her teeth. “How are we gonna control him?”
“I hold power over his mind.” Liam waggles his fingers, and Raezu shrinks back, his beady eyes glinting silver from Liam’s glowing own. “If he tries anything, I’ll know.”
“What about Callista?”
“I never left.” Cora jumps. Callista pops into the remains of the room and hardens her face. “I don’t want to believe that Eporsa is capable of treason, so I will ask you a question, and you better answer it right or I’ll splatter your brains on the wall.”
Raezu flinches, though he blinks and opens his mouth. “What is it?”
“Did Keiro influence Eporsa’s mind to aid you both?”
“No. The doctor was loyal from the start.”
Liam frowns. “He’s not lying.”
Callista sighs and throws her hair over her shoulders. “Then that leaves one choice, then.”
“It’s on our floor level in this hospital wing. I’ve been there a few times,” Cora says. Her stomach is hollow. Her hands shake as she pushes back a stray lock of hair. “What if he’s there?”
“The only thing we can do,” Liam says quietly.
“The information we gave him was through written pages,” Raezu says. “They’re in my drawer.”
Callista yanks the bedstand’s drawer out and grabs a tattered brown journal. They’re similar to the ones Eporsa has, though this journal is particularly beaten, missing a sizable chunk of papers at the top, and stained dark with some unidentifiable fluid.
“Open it,” Cora says, voice strangled. Callista does, and the first sight that greets them are pages of a sprawling alien language. Quick sketches made at the margins resemble head-shots of her, though tiny words are scrawled beside her head, and labeled lines lead to where her eyes would be.
“Day twenty-nine. Cora showed a lot of progress recovering from her old injuries. She was bright and alert without any sign of insanity we were told to watch for. Today, she listened to many veteran war stories and showed remarkable empathy. I told her one of my own war stories, and she empathized with me, too. She then went on to tell us a story about the loss of a few friends and the emotional hardships that followed after an accident claimed their lives–”
“Stop.” Cora grimaces and stares at the floor, trying her best to stay calm, stay rational, to not seize control over the shattered porcelain and shredding Raezu to ribbons. The last thing she wants to hear is a retelling of what happened in the mine.
“Are you doing okay, Cora?” Callista’s voice is soft. She reaches out and Cora gladly takes her hand, threading her fingers together.
“I should be asking if both of you are okay. Both of you looked like you were being tortured.”
“It’s hard to describe what it felt like, but yes, it was.” Liam clenches and unclenches his hands. “But we’re here. We’re okay now. The question is if you are.”
“I don’t want to think about it right now.”
Cora doesn’t want to think about anything. She wants to throw herself back in bed and pass out, then wake up and find everything returned back to normal, and the confrontation with the Transients was nothing more than a bad dream. She wants to hug Liam and go gardening with him, joke with the guards, listen to war stories, and be alone with Callista.
“But we have to break into his office,” she says, echoing her own thoughts.
“Am I allowed to transform now?” Damn it. She’d almost forgotten about Raezu. He rises and pats his arms. “It’ll be quick.”
“Go,” Callista grunts, and his eyes blaze gold. Flesh sloughs off his torso and balloons. His face squishes, his scalp grows outward, his arms thicken, and his legs follow suit. Scales melt back into skin and skin hardens like a real Cenarian’s. The mushroom cap finishes growing, a stout, yet very much real, mimic of a mushroom cap. Purple swirls lick his torso and reach toward his shoulders. Thick feet plod on the floor. Apart from the lack of clothes, Raezu is indistinguishable from any Cenarian wandering the hospital grounds.
“My clothes are in that other drawer,” he says from the flapping slits at the base of his neck. “The coveralls should be enough.”
“How long can you hold that form?” Liam asks.
“Around four hours before I lose integrity and revert to myself. It should be more than enough.”
By silent agreement, they line up by the door, with Callista leading the front. Raezu is next, Liam stands beside him, and Cora stands at the back, dreading the confrontation to come.
Eporsa had her trust and he broke it. Some part of her still wants to believe it’s all a big misunderstanding and he did it to protect her. Another part of her wonders about the governor and if he might be connected.
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He probably is.
It’s so hard to trust any of her thoughts anymore. The parasite is quiet for now, or at least it gives the impression that it’s quiet. But that doesn’t mean she’s not exerting her influence otherwise, like making Cora question why the parasite said the box last appeared thirty-six years ago.
The parasite would know, wouldn’t she? The hallways are clear. A few nurses give them cursory glances, but somehow, the brief fight failed to attract any attention. Callista leads her unconventional posse up the first of many flights of stairs, their footsteps echoing in the cramped space.
The parasite is linked to the box. She comes out of it like a curse and latches onto the person that uses it. Cora grips the railings and pushes her bangs back. For some reason, the parasite keeps taking the form of a girl Cora’s never seen before. Identifying as a she?
A nurse pauses and watches their group curiously on the next floor. Callista offers a palm over her chest, the standard Cenarian gesture of respect, and the nurse returns it in kind. From the corner of her eye, Cora notices the nurse stare at them a moment too long to be comfortable, but still the nurse descends the stairs.
The parasite is an alien consciousness packaged into a form Cora can comprehend. Something that comes from the box and attaches to users, then either convinces them to surrender their bodies or slowly embeds herself into the user until it’s too late to fight her off.
Of course, Cora’s ignoring the fact that the parasite could be lying. The parasite is probably lying. But it’s such a specific thing to lie about. She could’ve lied about the worlds that were destroyed, or about the box, or fed answers Cora needed to hear.
So many other possibilities, and the parasite focused on that specific fact.
Thirty-six years ago.
“Stay behind me,” Callista warns. They exit onto the final floor. At the far end of the hospital wing is the sharp turn into the main building, and a few hospital staff mopping the floors. They don’t pay any attention to the four of them, paused before Eporsa’s door, hesitating at the boundary between a comfortable old existence and a new, more dangerous world.
One well-timed blow of Callista’s hand will break that barrier. There'd be no going back. Cora stuffs her hands into her pockets as she watches Callista place her palm over the handle. Her eyes flare purple, her arm thickens, and she shatters the final barrier.
Sickly hospital light trickles into the room. The door yawns wide open, exposing Eporsa’s wide desk and numerous sheafs of papers stacked on either side. Between the mountains of papers, a few journals are displayed, one with the pages wide open, showing a rough sketch of a Cenarian’s organs and scribblings beside it.
Otherwise, his office is empty. Callista eases the door closed and raises the blinds. Daylight breaks into the room. Motes of dust swirl within shafts of sunlight. Several bookshelves sit flush against two walls, holding folders, journals, binders, and textbooks. Twin sconces mirror each other at opposite sides of the room, though their lights are dead.
His chair, large and cushioned, sits off to the side. Raezu eases it toward the desk and plops down. The chair briefly complains, its legs squeaking against the porcelain floor, before his body slims and he becomes a Transient again.
“I had to,” he says, answering the rest of their incredulous looks. “The bigger the form I take, the more it taxes me. I needed a break.”
“You don’t deserve a break,” Callista huffs, though she doesn’t move him.
“We gave him a small journal and some pages with the data. Wherever he put the data may be where he has other information about Cora.”
Liam gets to work immediately, pulling out binders and folders and setting them before Raezu. He scans the material Liam gives him and digs around the desk for more journals and papers. Callista focuses on the other bookshelf and thumbs through packets of paper stuffed into folders.
Cora, mostly, stands next to the window, rubbing her wrist, absorbing the scenery outside. Miles and miles of mushrooms extend off into the distance. If she squints, she can just make out a hazy speck on the horizon, floating amidst clumps of cotton candy clouds.
“I think I found something,” Callista says. She pulls out a yellowed page and holds it up for everyone to see. The text is composed of hundreds of loops and swirls. “This references c-nodes. It’s a technical explanation of how the Allies and the Empire maintain their nodes.”
She flips the page around, and on the back is a detailed picture of the most bizarre structure Cora’s ever seen. A circular platform spans the bottom. Two more circles hover above the platform at opposite ends. A crane-like machine is positioned at one side of the platform and extends several tri-pronged arms toward the skies, seemingly for no reason. Grooves are etched into the platform and circles, and the grooves on the circles are bright, while the platform’s grooves are dark.
Scribbled in the margins is the same alien handwriting. It’s a dense, scratchy composition of loops and swirls, though they mesh into each other while the front doesn’t.
“Pass me the journal over there,” Callista says, and Raezu complies. She flips it open to the anatomy page with the displayed organs and alien writing beside it. “Yes, it’s a match. It’s his handwriting. Eporsa was writing notes about nodes.”
“Why would a doctor need to do that?” Liam says. He pulls out several folders and mindlessly thumbs over the pages.
“What do the notes say?” Cora says quietly, continuing to stare out the window.
“They don’t make a lot of sense. They talk about using a conduit to activate nodes. He wrote about massive energy inefficiencies in the current designs and mass limitations. The rest is about materials, ley lines, operating capabilities, and other technical nonsense I don’t understand. It’s all regurgitated stuff from the front page.”
“Nodes are machines?” Cora turns back to the rest of them.
“They’re called c-nodes.” Raezu makes good on his unspoken promise to remain calm. He clacks his teeth and pores over several papers before discarding them aside. “At least in the Empire, that’s what they’re called. The machines, I mean. Nodes are the gateways themselves between worlds.”
“Well, Eporsa here wrote about nodes. Not c-nodes.” Callista scrunches her nose and flips the page, eyes rapidly scanning the page. She frowns. “Only the front talks about c-nodes.”
Cora’s blood chills. Gateways? Somewhere within the confines of her mind, the parasite stirs and encourages her. “So Eporsa’s writing about the gateways and how they need a… a conduit?”
“I don’t know what that means, either, I’m afraid.”
“I do.” Liam squares his jaw and pushes several folders back into their spaces on the bookshelf. “If the gift of language or whatever bullshit that’s working didn’t mess up the translation, a conduit is something that transfers something. Like a pipe acts like a conduit for water, for example.”
“A transfer of power to activate nodes to circumvent the need for c-nodes,” Callista mutters. Her eyes go wide. “An object that can transfer massive amounts of energy to activate nodes. He calls it a conduit.”
A conduit. What else fits that criteria? A limitless source of energy, transferred through a single object, capable of managing nodes–portals, really–without requiring complex machinery and the crushing vice of thermodynamics.
The box.
The parasite’s voice slithers into her consciousness. Cora shudders and clamps down on the connection, silencing it. The box. The thing she spent months agonizing over, trying to figure out its secrets. Evidently, despite having it on her nightstand, on another world, in another time, somebody else drew parallels to it.
The governor knows.
He’s the one who had that book that mentioned the box. The text may be a bunch of garbage for all she knows, but the drawings very much showed the box in its plain glory and the light that bursts out of it when activated and opened. If Eporsa himself wrote about another way to open portals, and if the governor or other higher powers sought that other way to open portals, and three foreigners mysteriously appeared smack in Cenari without being near one of those bizarre machines called c-nodes…
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Cora digs her nails into her palms and tenses her muscles.
“We still don’t know everything,” Callista says, setting the paper on the windowsill and holding Cora’s shoulder while she starts shaking uncontrollably.
“I told him we still had it,” she says, fingers turning white. The pain in her palms does little to distract from the horrible, stupid mistake she made. “He knows we have it. He knows.”
Raezu turns around and holds up a sheaf of papers stuffed into one of the folders Liam pulled out. His other hand holds a journal. “I found Cora’s information. Both medical and what we observed.” His eyes crinkle when they land on her. “There’s nothing here that tells me why they chose you. Why did he choose you? You’re nothing special. You’re just another Magaraman. No offense.”
“Keep reading. You might’ve missed something,” Callista says, and he silences himself and continues reading. She holds Cora by the shoulders and looks at her eyes. “You’ve done nothing wrong. We don’t know if he’s even aware of anything else. We’ll figure it out, okay?”
She nods, and Callista releases her hold. They won’t figure anything out because the governor knows. He holds control over the city. The city once seemed so friendly, but she realizes that it’s overrun with guards.
Guards that could, with the right words, be commanded to fight.
Callista joins Raezu in sorting out the papers and reading through them. Cora leans against the windowsill and sighs, pushing her bangs back. “Tough spot,” Liam says, flipping past pages of random anatomy. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted that bastard.”
“We still don’t know if he’s connected to all of this.” Cora gestures at the endless amounts of papers. “There might be other people working with Eporsa and the governor was kept out of the loop.”
A stray sheet of paper catches her attention. It’s buried beneath a mound of journals heaped on a shelf, dusty and cracked with age. The corner peeks out just enough to reveal a bold line stretching deeper.
Cora tugs on the paper until she slips it off. “What the fuck…” The bold line connects to another diagram of the machines called c-nodes, but another element was hastily added at the side. A stick figure, with two arms and two legs, kneels at the edge of the platform while wavy lines go from the figure to the grooves on the platform. Where the floating circles should be, pencil marks are scribbled above the platform, and a vaguely diamond-shaped sketch is positioned over the platform. Like the other papers, lines of stray alien language are scrawled beside the c-node.
“Hey, Callista,” she says, her voice meek. “What does this say?”
She leaves Raezu reading over the notes and does a double-take at seeing the paper in Cora’s hands. “That is strange. It talks about the results of an experiment… I can’t read that.”
“Allow me,” Raezu offers, rising from the chair. Never mind that he’s a Transient and their supposed mortal enemy. Cora mutely offers the page to him, and his scales flex and press into each other, eyes scrunching. “Thirty-six years ago.”
The door crashes inward. Raezu plasters himself against the wall and immediately starts melting. Liam jumps and turns toward the entrance, his eyes glowing silver. Callista storms forward and holds her arms up, light flashing in her eyes. Cora stares at the page held in her trembling hands. The figure is nothing more than a stick figure, but she keeps replaying what Raezu said, even as she hears shouts and the distant rumble of an inevitable fight.
“This isn’t what you think it is,” a familiar voice says. She peels her eyes away and stares at the doorway, where a group of guards are standing at attention. Resma is leading the front, and his tendrils are droopy, mushroom cap sagging. Obuch is standing near the back of the group. Aspa and Tere are nowhere to be seen, though the guards standing together aren’t many. The hospital is vast, after all.
“Resma.” Cora lets the paper drift onto the floor. “Why?”
“Believe me, we tried. We had to get information from you because we had no choice. Do you know how dangerous the box and its inhabitant is? You appeared blindly in the city and we had to prepare for the worst.”
She clenches her hands. White-hot fury slams adrenaline into her body. “The governor told me everything.”
“Not everything.” Resma straightens his armor plate and stands taller. His tendrils gain a little life, wiggling aimlessly. “We had to keep you misled because of her.”
“Who?”
“You know who,” Resma says quietly.
“Enough of this bullshit. Why the fuck are you here?” Liam snaps, raising his knife.
“We came for the box and for Cora.” Resma recoils at Callista’s sudden break in movement, though she simply positions herself in front of Cora. “You found our spies and killed them,” he says carefully. “You found Eporsa’s office and the reason why we need the box. Now, we have to purge her before she controls you, Cora.”
“Like hell I believe that,” she snarls. “You lied to me! All of you lied! And you expect me to believe that’s true?”
“It is true,” Obuch says warily. The guards part to allow him to step forward, standing beside Resma. “For once, I am not sarcastic about this. We misled you because we feared if she knew, she’d control your body and break free. We arrived here with the best firepower we could muster because we feared the worst. But you are still in control, Cora. Help us by allowing us to purge her before the worst comes to happen. Help us by telling us where the box is.”
“No.” Cora clenches her teeth and glares at Resma. Good, the parasite purrs, and it only adds to the mounting fury leaving Cora a shaking mess. “I don’t trust any of you.”
He shakes his tendrils and adjusts his armor plate. “Then we have to assume that she has influenced your mind too much for us to let you walk free.”
“We will get out of the city and never see each other again,” Callista says. “We don’t have to fight.”
“If you tell us where the box is, both you and Liam are free to go. Our concerns lie with Cora.”
“Let all of us go.”
Resma slowly twists his tendrils together. “I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.”
“Then you’ll have to capture us first,” Cora says, and she slips into her metaphysical self and turns the first gear of reality.