Kris:

  There had been an energy among the three of them. A certain measure of heroic euphoria that settled into Kris when her mother and Mari had settled on heading towards the Citadel to protect their home.

  That energy had abandoned her the moment she had seen the afflicted canine creature. If she were asked to describe where she felt that energy had come from, she’d probably have cited Mari’s confident stature and the firm grasp of her fingers around the cannon she carried. She might have mentioned Mari’s smirk. The passion that burned in the girl’s vivid red eyes.

  The confident stature was long gone. Mari stood with her feet spaced carefully apart, and her brows were knit together in concentration. The only expression her chosen partner cast her way was one of concern, hesitation, and guilt.

  Kris’ hands still shook. She’d killed something with such a simple action. It had never been something she had thought she might do in life. She’d aimed, squared her shoulders, set her feet, then pulled on the trigger. The weapon had kicked left and upwards in her hand. The bruised joint of her thumb ached with a renewed vengeance, too. The brief reprieve from the pain was nothing but a memory.

  As they descended the spiral stairs, Kris wondered where her life had decided to take her. Once, she had felt like her life was in her own hands, and those days hadn’t been more than a few months behind her. Everything had changed, and she felt like she was being dragged along by something way too big for her.

  The moment her feet landed on solid stone again, leaving the metal stairs behind, she slapped herself.

  Both of her companions stopped, looking back at where she undoubtedly sported a huge red mark across her cheek. “Sorry. My thoughts just kept spiraling. Needed to steady myself, I guess.”

  Mari, bless her soul, reached a comforting hand to take hers, and the warmth of those slender fingers filled her with a subtle reassurance. “I’m right here. You’re going to be alright. Focus on me, and we can talk when all of this is over.”

  With one last deep breath, Kris nodded, then wordlessly stepped forward, side by side with them.

  “I will take the lead from here. I know the path and my weapon is quieter.” Karin held up her glove, then turned away and strode into the first chamber.

  Kris gaped at the huge room. The pods had been left untouched for years, all seeing immense dust buildup, and desks covered with materials and old terminals were scattered among them. She knew what a genetic breeding facility looked like, and the room they’d entered wasn’t one of those.

  The common genetic facilities around Elitheen tended to be very personal spaces. A single pod in a room where a family would meet with their doctor to code their child’s genes in the very common absence of natural reproduction abilities. Kilthien could have children together, but only if their biology matched. Ravien had eggs, and those required careful supervision to raise until they hatched. Anvien, however, required complete genetic breeding assistance.

  What Kris saw instead? A room for the systematic and emotionless manufacture of slaves. That was what the Sylphariens had distilled their lives down to. It replaced all of her inner turmoil with a sense of anger and hatred. However, those feelings were more than familiar to her. She mastered them, whispering cold logic in her mind.

  Hatred leads to violence, violence leads to retaliation, and retaliation leads to death. Death leads back to hatred and anger. Break the cycle. Be the solution, not the problem.

  Her goals reaffirmed, she turned away from the sight, seeing Karin and Mari having had a brief conversation she had missed.

  “Something wrong?” Her question pulled their attention, and Mari’s scowl spoke volumes.

  “This whole room is.” The words were clipped and frigid.

  She nodded in agreement. “Let’s go. No sense staying worrying about the past.”

  They moved into the next room, and instead of the categorized work stations from the previous room, the pods of the chamber were organized into neat rows. It was a familiar room. To her left, a section of the wall was cracked and dented—evidence of Mari showing off her Remera the night before.

  The next moment, the overhead lights all went out, and she let an embarrassing squeak pass her lips before a hand took hers. Kris looked up into eyes that still glowed a faint red hue.

  “Stick close. Hand on my shoulder. I can see in the dark.” Mari’s whispered voice held steady, and Kris felt her mother’s hand feeling her way into position at the back of their group. So much for her mother taking the lead.

  “Ready.” At the whispered word, they half-crouched as they walked towards the wall that had been broken by the test shot the evening before. Then, with the wall beside them, they followed it towards the entrance to the magic lab.

  Kris marveled slightly at the genius idea for moving as a group, especially when Mari stopped a dozen meters later, and they didn’t all bump into one another. She felt Mari crouch low, and followed suit almost without thinking.

  “Alynne?” Mari didn’t speak in a whisper, but it also wasn’t a shout.

  There was no answer, but Kris strained her ears to listen for noise. All she heard was Karin’s metal sphere whirling up to speed behind her. The next instant, the sphere tore away, and after the sound of an impact and the obvious shattering of bone, an inhuman screech rang out. She hadn’t quite forgotten about her mother having incredibly acute hearing, but finding a target she couldn’t see was beyond the definition of impressive.

  The lights snapped on before they could react, and Kris squinted as she covered her eyes, fear clenching her heart.

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  BANG!

  The sound of Mari’s Remera broke the afflicted animal’s pained noises off suddenly, and when Kris’ vision cleared, there were three figures not far from them.

  Alynne held Mari’s rifle, the barrel still aimed for one of the new corpses between the rows of pods. With her was a single Anvien, holding a bloodied hammer, and Vilke, Mari’s friend in both of her lives, holding a longer rifle with a wide cylinder attached to the end of the barrel. Vilke had a thick vest strapped on, too. The moment Mari straightened up and stepped a little closer, the blood on the hammer and their clothes turned to mist and peeled away.

  Kris felt her chest constrict, worried about the possibility of the trio being infected, but it loosened when Mari breathed her own sigh of relief.

  She turned her attention to the corpses around them. The canine was easiest to identify, with its spine severed by her mother’s sphere and the head mulched by Mari’s Remera. After that, she thought one must’ve been a rather large many-legged creature, and the last had once been a snake of some kind.

  “Major.” Vilke saluted Mari stiffly while the bodies were inspected by Alynne and Karin.

  “Whatever happened to that ‘Captain’ bullshit?” Kris prepared to tune out the conversation once she realized it would be too depressing to know nothing about the jokes being made.

  Vilke gave up on whatever military doctrine they were mimicking, and the pair shared a hug. Kris felt her guts churn with a bit of jealousy.

  “I met Barclay.” Mari’s words instantly had Kris listening in again. She thought their interaction earlier had been odd. Vilke’s sour face didn’t disappoint.

  “Well, fuck me. What’s his story?”

  “He was kept in his pod for a while until some Sylphs defrosted him. Going off Marielle’s last memory of him, I’d say he’s about ten years older than he was. This attack has been a long time in the making.”

  “You’re wondering ‘why now?’”

  “Marielle is, yeah.” Mari’s response made Kris frown a little. Their conversation seemed to leap topics a little too fast for her to follow.

  “Split personality shit? I had a feeling she was too much. You don’t just download Marielle Smith into your head like that and come out fine.”

  Kris decided to cut in. “Um, so—what was that about that Barclay guy? Is he trouble?”

  Vilke looked over at her and chuckled—a low rumbling laugh that she saw in his shoulders more than heard. “You could say that. The man is a permanently lit fuse. A very short lit fuse. And when he’s in shit any deeper than his ankles, he becomes a lit short fuse on military grade explosives.”

  Kris wasn’t sure she liked the parts of that statement that she could understand. “Mari, you left someone like that guarding a school?”

  Mari held her hands up in surrender. “It’ll be fine. The moment he knew he was being sent to a school, it flipped him to our side entirely. I met Barclay when I personally pulled him for my team. I—Marielle—chose him for defying orders, standing on the rooftop of an elementary school in protest of a strike his commanders had deemed worth the sacrifice. He has a conscience, at least.”

  Kris tried to parse that, and generally came back with a cautiously optimistic view. “I guess I’ll have to trust you.”

  Mari nodded, flashing a bit of the old smile Kris liked, then turned back to her friend. “Vilke, what’s the situation like down here?”

  “Fucking monsters. We’ve seen a handful since Alynne’s tripwire alarm in the sublevels went off. I was here to empty out my own vault, so we had more weapons, thankfully.” Vilke turned and led them into the doorway to the lab. “We’ve found some of the creatures don’t adjust well to lighting changes. Alynne has rapidly adaptable vision, so it doesn’t seem to bother her much.”

  Kris then tuned out the report after that as she entered the lab to find four Anvien workers that all had their own guns, all of different designs. Off to the side, the wall panel numbered six was open, and scattered around it were a ridiculous number of the heavy cases, ranging from handguns to rifles of a few sizes. She made a mental note that Vilke had been some sort of gun collector.

  She turned her attention to the workstation she had set up near the plate of mana-rich metal. More of it had been cut off, and she moved to the fabrication machine next to her desk. It was a boxy thing, but it was taller than it was wide. Alynne had set it up to be able to take materials straight from the sample metal as needed.

  She opened the faceplate of the machine and stepped back as the interior vented some steam. Then, she carefully reached inside with gloves for the metal object within.

  The metal casing around the entire construction was pale in color. It had similarities to the hardening compound used in the stonework of their buildings, so it had a bit of the same blue hues. The overall design needed some work, but what she held was more function than art.

  Kris set it down on the table and held a scanning device over it, blocking out the world around her as she studied the etched geometric shapes and symbols along the elongated rhomboids suspended within the barrel.

  The grip had storage for four powering spheres, and she had no clue what the limits were on them. A sidelong glance spied the rhomboid she had made the night before, laying on the floor where it had fallen.

  Her first concern with the design was that the etched symbols might be damaged, so she had housed the whole weapon in a case of metal, but it was heavy. Heavier than Mari’s Remera. She turned away from the others in the room and aimed the weapon at the wall.

  Just before she could try pulling the trigger, a hand swiped through, snagging the weapon from her. “What do you think you’re doing?” Mari admonished with a disappointed tone.

  “I designed it all myself. I was testing it.”

  “And what if it exploded in your hands?”

  Kris reddened.

  “As much as you’re smart, this was pretty dumb.” Mari turned the weapon over, hefting it slightly as she got a feel for it. “What does it do? How did you prevent whatever hurt your hand last night?”

  Kris took it gently, then held it under the scanner. She pointed to different aspects of the etched symbols, naming them off as she went. “The issue last night was that all of the mana stored in the sphere entered the rhomboid at once. Instead, I needed a way to restrict that flow. I’ve got a control etching in the trigger to only deliver a small amount to the device at once. Then, I created directional guidance for the kinetic force with etchings directly on the rhomboid.”

  “Why a rhomboid, specifically?”

  “A square creates a perfect stabilizer. A rectangle creates a wider field of energy flow. A rhombus, though? That allows for a scripted directionality. In three dimensions? It allows you to control gravity within scripted variables. As far as the design for the gun, it fires kinetic bolts. I think I will eventually be able to make a design that allows the power to be changed. It should be quieter than your gun, but I designed the etchings to lower the power output.”

  Mari nodded along, then slid the gun toward her. “Test it safely, okay?”

  Grinning, Kris nodded, then passed the Remera copy to Mari. “I’m down some ammunition. I’ll run the tests later. Your gun will work for now.”

  “No. The counterbalances inside aren’t quite right. I think it hurt your hand earlier, didn’t it?” Mari wiggled her own fingers. “Not used to the kick or the power, so it numbed my hands, too. Let’s try your new one and see how it performs.”

  Kris felt something flutter in her chest. I think I’m in love, she thought, rather dumbly.

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