Kivan, Eron 15, 5531

Tendakeo blinked. His eyes burned. He was forced to press the heels of his palms into them until colors swam. The discomfort faded. He looked around the darkened room. He didn’t know how long he had been sitting transfixed, but the room seemed undisturbed. The lab door was still securely shut, and he was alone.

He looked at the holo-field. It showed the simulation, continuing an endless loop. He stood on shaky legs, the chair skidding across the tiles. The world rocked, then something inside his chest shifted, and he could breathe again. He gasped, using the desk for support.

His mind formed simple, straightforward plans, then carried them out. Each one served to calm the panic trying to derail his thoughts. Delete the data from his terminal. Good. Check the backup routines…cleared. He set the terminal system to do a deep cleaning and shut down. It would clean up any errant bits of data on the off-chance they could be viral code-scraps. He stared at the terminal’s processor tower. A block of ultra-plastic and delicate silicate components. If he dashed it against the tile, would that break it?

The thought broke the chain, and he fell into his body once more.

Destroying the terminal would be insanity. It would set off every security alarm in the building and bring every guard holding a weapon to the room. That would earn a minor Mark at the very least. He had to trust that he’d been thorough enough.

No one could ever know that data had ever existed, let alone see it. If they did, Veshrin, whatever was left of him, was dead. If anyone from the Circle were to find out, they’d put everything they had into killing Veshrin and anyone else that knew what had happened to him.

He retrieved the samples from the desk drawer he’d stored them in and took them straight to the incinerator chute in the wall between his and Kamelan’s workstations. He tossed the samples in. They were sucked away with a rush of air, and he hit the close button with a grimace. He’d thought that perhaps he might want them for further study, but now, the idea of him knowing how to stop what was happening felt foolish. Besides, they represented an existential threat now. The less evidence lying around, the better.

With shaking fingers he dismissed the holo-field. He was left in perfect, depthless black. Colors continued to swim in his vision, his mind replaying the simulations. He reached out. His fingers brushed against the terminal and walked across it to retrieve his comm. He slipped it into his right pocket, where it dropped with a dull thud against his thigh. Solid.

He made for the door, his boots clicking against the tiles, the echoes fluttering against the walls like trapped insects. It sprang open at his touch, and the hallway’s brightness flooded the room. Squinting, Tendakeo stepped into the hallway, and found it empty. He checked his comm. It was a few minutes after the start of first shift.

Strange. Just twenty-four hours ago, the world had made sense.

He retrieved his thermal gear from the level’s common room and headed for the nearest lift, his arms and legs feeling stiff and uncooperative. He kept his gaze on the floor as he went. No one stopped him or tried to talk to him, thankfully. If they had, he would have sprinted away.

By the time he reached the lift area, he’d managed to calm somewhat. He stepped into the lift, hit the level panel, and leaned against the back wall. It only went down one level before the doors opened again.

On the other side a Silverbound using an overtly feminine humanoid chassis was standing with two Devotions. The younger of the two looked to be around eleven cycles, and the other at least seventeen. The Silverbound stepped into the lift first, and the cab adjusted to a sudden increase in weight. She stepped aside to allow the silver-haired children to come in.

“Good morn, Sīdus,” the younger Devotion said, looking up at him as she stepped into the cab. She had a strong High Terran accent, like most Circle-educated children. She stood between Tendakeo and the Silverbound woman. Her counterpart gave him a curt nod and stepped in, closer to their guardian.

“Ain’t morning yet,” The older boy muttered. His Germaine was seasoned by Nordique instead. His hair, thick and gleaming, hung about his ears. He was somewhat in need of a trim. “Sunrise is hours off.”

“It’s still a new solar!”

“Children.” A woman’s voice emerged from somewhere on the Silverbound’s form. It buzzed at the edges, like a shaky comm connection. She turned her head slightly towards the older Devotion. Her faceplate had been made of porcelain, and showed a woman with a permanently serene smile that did not match the voice he’d just heard. The brass panels of her chassis scattered light around the lift’s already semi-glossed interior.

“Forgive my flaws, Sīda Mellenè.” The boy seemed genuinely contrite, surprisingly. The lines of Silver crossing his cheeks stood out as he flushed with embarrassment.

“Master them before they can trouble others, and you will not require forgiveness, young Sīdus.” She turned and regarded Tendakeo fully. “I think that’s a sentiment you can understand, can’t you, good Sīdus?”

He swallowed painfully. Her tone wasn’t lost on him. She must have somehow realized he was an exile, not one of the doctor’s on staff. He forced a smile. “Yes, indeed.”

The Silverbound woman nodded in satisfaction. The soul-fire embers kicked off through the openings in her chest rose around her face, multi-colored motes of light that faded before they’d gone more than a few cems from her adopted form.

The ground floor arrived, the signal chime vibrating through the cab. The Devotions went first, then waited for their Silverbound minder to exit. As she passed them the youngest Devotion brushed her hair aside and gave him a huge smile, her Silvered irises glinting in the hallway lighting.

He smiled and waved in response, though he felt a ball of ice forming in his chest. He had to get out of the building. He started towards the reception lobby, heading for the exit. He didn’t look around when he heard his name called. He pushed past people with grunts, ignoring their outrage. He had to get home before Veshrin woke up. And he was going to wake up.

The simulation had run with both Veshrin’s original biometrics and the new ones. Veshrin’s body had become stronger, more efficient. He had always been fragile physically due his genetics. Not anymore. Whatever his cells had become after colonization, they were more resilient, with faster metabolisms, and an adaptability that defied all rational measures. If the rest of his body had already undergone the same transformation, then in a very real sense, he was healthier than he had ever been.

That wasn’t Tendakeo’s concern. He thought of Veshrin’s behavior. It all fell into place. It had been in his nervous system. In his fucking brain. No, it wasn’t killing him. It didn’t seem to kill at all. Every cell it touched thrived, even when producing more of the transmission cells. If he looked at it from a biological perspective, it obviously had a symbiotic purpose. It was ferociously, terrifyingly committed to the preservation of life. That of itself and its host. It changed, it improved. But what about the psyche? What did ‘improve’ mean to this thing in terms of the human mind?

He managed to catch a hopper headed towards the complex. The night sky was clear through the exterior feeds. The moons floated in a sea of stars, one full, and one a waxing slice of light just beginning the lunar’s dance. The colony main-ways hummed with life. It poured into the hopper at each stop. It strolled the paths in the colony, blissfully unaware of what could be coming.

He almost leaped from the hopper when it reached his stop. He ran, boots crunching down the foot-path, until the complex came into view. By that time, he was sucking in air with big, whistling breaths.

A large crowd had gathered in front. He recognized enough of them to understand they were residents from inside. He drew closer and a few people started calling out to him from deeper in the gathered mass. He forced his way inward, towards the voices. People moved aside with dazed expressions. He felt as if he were disturbing a crowd of sleepwalkers. They revealed a small group of people watching him intently.

A woman with very dark skin wrapped in a very bright blanket stood with her three shelter-aged children, each nearly round with layers of thermal protection. She nodded at him, her breath coming out in stuttering clouds of steam snatched by the night. Her family was in the apartment a few doors down from his. They had been out in the hall when Knight Verdaris had arrived.

The young pale-skinned girl standing with them was entirely unconcerned with his presence. She watched the night and crowd around them, her eyes making darting sweeps in every direction, trying to pin something before it could leap at her out of the shadows.

Next to her, a man every bit as round as the children and as dark as their mother wore a heavy coat and a scowl clearly directed at Tendakeo. “You! Where in the tarnished fuck have you been,” the man spat as soon as Tendakeo was in range. “I don’t know what you have going on but—”

“Me? What are you—” Confusion turned to dread. This was it. It had to be. Veshrin.

“The monster was real,” the Atlantican girl said, pale blue eyes huge and almost luminous in the exterior lighting holding back the night. “The screams, the g-g-growling. It happened. Didn’t it?”

“Be at ease, Caramina. We’re safe out here, for now. But you,” She pointed a shivering finger at Tendakeo. “You have explanations for the giving. What were you keeping in your unit?”

Tendakeo took half a step back before he could stop himself. The force in the woman’s presence and the fire in her eyes told him she was ready to attack him if provoked. “W-who are you? What happened?”

The girl turned to him, face red. “Don’t. Don’t pretend you don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about! There’s blood everywhere. Everywhere. I can taste it.”

The uncomfortable warmth that had followed Tendakeo out of the hopper was briefly overwhelmed by the wave of ice that rolled through him.

“There’s a creature, doctor. It’s killing some people in your Father-forgotten unit! We all heard it.” The man pressed forward, his gut protruding beneath the coat. Tendakeo recognized him after a moment. Wema Hadduma, the unpleasant man from the other side of the hallway. “First there was a massive explosion, like a bomb had gone off. Then there was this roar, it was like nothing I ever heard. I felt my skull rattle.”

“That’s when the shooting really started,” the woman said. Her children clutched at her tightly, their mittens gripping fistfuls of the dress peeking from beneath the heavy blanket she wore. Its blue was so startlingly bright in the night it bordered on neon. “I grabbed my babies up, got them bundled, and then we ran. We passed your unit, the door was wide open. I looked inside. Just a glance.”

Tendakeo stepped forward, his heart stuttering. Shooting? Blood? “What was it? What did you see?”

“Blood and light. Golden light that pulsed and flowed like a river over its bed. I didn’t see much else. That was enough. More than enough.”

Tendakeo was frozen in place. He couldn’t feel his legs. Could barely feel the wind against his face or the frost invading his lungs with each breath. Nothing made sense to him. Who were the shooters? Had Veshrin attacked them? Was it his blood?

“Someone called it in, told them everything. But no one has shown up yet.” The mother’s right hand rested on the heads of one of her children on that side, while the other held the third’s face to her thigh. “That was ten minutes ago, now. Maybe they didn’t believe us.”

“It’s real,” Caramina hissed. “It’s real, Sīda Ayoma. Look at his face. He knew about it.”

Tendakeo heard himself speak. His voice sounded hollow and small. “My friend is…sick. Very sick. I didn’t know what was wrong with him. But I was trying to find out. I…I don’t know who those men are. I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Sick? Is it catching?” Sīdus Ayoma’s eyes were hard, and Tendakeo felt she was about to make good on the promise in them. “Are my children safe?”

Catching? Oh, Moons above and tides below, yes it was catching. Give it the smallest opportunity and it would catch you and never let you go. “Your children should be safe. It isn’t airborne, whatever it is.”

Wema poked his chest with one thick finger. “And how do you know that? How sure are you?”

“That’s what the systems said when I analyzed it.”

The crowd around them had shifted at some point. The closest were paying attention while pretending not to. Tendakeo didn’t think it really mattered if they overheard. Everyone knew where he lived.

There was no time to waste.

Wema seized him about the shoulders, as if he had heard Tendakeo’s thoughts. “You analyzed it? So people smarter than you know about this then. What did they say?”

“They said you should stay away from it and anyone who’s had contact with it,” he replied, brushing Wema’s hands off him.

The older man held his hands before him, his face a mask of horror and denial. Tendakeo pushed past him, striding away from his neighbors, who shouted after him, demanding more answers. He headed towards the building. He scrabbled up the stairs, eyes intent on the front entrance.

The lobby and stairwell were empty, as he had expected. He approached the third level with slow, cautious steps as he neared the top. He pushed the hallway door open and stood there, listening.

Beneath his own breathing and the sound of his heartbeat, he heard something that seemed completely out of place. Not many people in Baytūs had had pets growing up, though some people kept medium-sized Elysannati mammals called kolits, with six legs that all ended in small hand-like claws. When they were pleased, they made a low, rumbling sound much like the one rumbling softly through the hall.

Tendakeo was called forth by the sound. When he turned the corner, he knew that the residents hadn’t been exaggerating. Blood splatters covered the floorplates in front of his unit. A puddle of it sat congealing on the threshold, dark red and glistening in the overhead lights.

His skin crawled at the sight. His stomach turned hearing the satisfaction in the purring he could hear between the cracking of bone and wet tearing sounds coming through the unit door. He shivered. A kind of insanity waited for him in that room. He wanted to turn and run, run out screaming into the night, towards the forest. Give himself to the predators and be done with it.

Instead, he took a step forward.

It took both an eternity and no time at all to cross the distance, but eventually he stood in the unit doorway, staring into the darkness. Copper filled his nostrils, and Tendakeo had to resist gagging.

Suddenly the shadows were banished by a wave of golden light tracing a form standing in the middle of the common room. At least three mitras tall. A golden mane hanging from its head. A pair of horns longer than his forearm swept forward, curving up at the ends. A broad, muscular frame covered in armored scales. Its fur-covered lower half had digitigrade legs with feline paws, and a long tail covered in short, dense fur. The head tilted back and a short muzzle emerged from the mane, dripping with steaming blood. At the end of one furry forearm it held what had once been a human torso in its massive right claw, dripping gore and fresh blood.

The light finished spreading. Glowing fur—that wasn’t really fur—began rippling. A wave of heat hit him in the face. The bloody copper scent on the air was subsumed by a wave of something sweet he couldn’t place yet found disturbingly appetizing. He only realized it was looking at him when he noticed three points of light aiming at him from beneath the massive horns and the curtain of hair. The purr, which had risen to such an intensity that Tendakeo could feel it rumbling through his chest, ceased abruptly.

Because he didn’t know what else to say, all other language having fled his mind, Tendakeo called out, “Veshrin?”

The muzzle opened, and a deep, rumbling growl emerged. The thing Veshrin had become turned towards him fully, a foot sending a hollow thud through the room as it struck the floor panel. It leaned forward, taking its weight on its left claw, muscles rippling beneath the brass-like scales.

Tendakeo didn’t move. He couldn’t, really. Fear and fascination had bound him with their conflicting impulses. He wanted to flee from the horror, from the blood and death. From the reality of Veshrin’s actions.

He was held captive by its beauty. The magnitude of the miracle before him and the enormity of its promise had left him stupefied and filled with awe. He stood in the presence of the unprecedented, a pioneer on a frontier no one else had even suspected.

The crack of a joint popping echoed through the room. The creature’s left leg shook, and began collapsing inwards on itself. The flesh itself undulated, and then began shrinking. Sizzling filled the air, and the appetizing scent grew stronger, as did his body’s reaction.

More wet crunching sounds emerged from within the creature. It shrunk in fits and starts. Its left shoulder shuddered, then fell in on itself, the flesh undulating and contracting. Its right claw shook and clenched, each time growing smaller. The fur retracted. Scales fell out and were replaced by smooth human skin. The horns cracked and shed flakes of bone as they shrunk. The muzzle collapsed into the curtain of hair, and moments later a human face emerged.

Veshrin’s much changed but nonetheless unmistakable face.

At some point Veshrin had dropped the corpse he’d been holding. It lay in a pool of blood next to his paws. He looked around, his face fading into shadow as he turned. He shook his head, and fixed Tendakeo with a look. A third eye had grown in the middle of Veshrin’s forehead. When he blinked, the third one followed suit, a horizontal movement that Tendakeo found slightly unnerving.

“What have you done,” Tendakeo asked at last.

“They left us no choice.”

Qarotti, Eron 14, 5531 – Second Shift

Laycia observed Sinner’s Landing from high above, on the back of her hover speeder. From her perspective, the colony seemed like a living thing laid bare. Traffic behaved like sluggish blood pumped through tired veins built from industrial alloys.

The wide lanes referred to as main-ways connected the inner core-rings to the outer rim of the colony. Down on one of the main-ways, small figures maneuvered around large snow-covered vehicles hovering on mag-lev coils. The people were obliged to trudge through the snow, shoulders hunched against the wind and the dust-like frost it kicked up. The vehicles were trailed by thin trails of exhaust and clouds of steam from flash-boiled snow as they hovered along.

Colonists left their ring’s footpaths, hurrying for the nearest hopper station along one of the main-ways. They were often nudged aside by those returning from shifts of their own. Interactions that repeated shift after shift, solar after solar. People living as part of a system they were too enmeshed in to get a clear view of.

Laycia marveled at the beauty in the interconnectivity on display and how much of it went completely unnoticed. The chem-worker that crawled up from the Pits beneath the colony didn’t care that her work in fertilizers meant that hydroponics in another colony would see a significant increase to their yields. She cared that she would earn enough rations to live to see the next span.

All eight hours of Laycia’s shift settled about her mind, her thoughts growing unwieldy and indistinct. What about herself? What purpose did she serve for the great industrial beast?

She laughed as she gripped the hover-bike’s handles and spurred it onwards towards HQ. Since she’d managed to get herself assigned to a purification colony, she served whatever function Knight-Captain Silvane demanded. The engine purred, the hum vibrating up through Laycia’s body until her teeth chattered pleasantly behind her helmet. The rings blurred past as her speed increased.

The skies above Sinner’s Landing were relatively empty, only a handful of vehicles ever needing the airspace at once, and most of them intended for shipping purposes. The solars spent cruising above the Silver City flashed through her mind—dodging transports and personal crafts, her targets blissfully unaware of her approach, the wind clawing at her armored coat as the city gleamed far below.

Through Lustrathīr’s atmosphere, the sun blazed with violet fire as it rose, banishing the last of the night’s shadows from the colony. The sky had lightened from a violent, deep magenta, towards the gentle lavender of early morning. The Core drew closer rapidly, bringing with it visions of Laycia’s quarters and the beckoning confines of her bed. She had just begun to imagine the feel of her heavy blankets closing around her when she was rudely snatched back to reality.

“Alert, Knight Verdaris.” The dispatch operator’s voice was seasoned liberally with annoyance when it emerged from Laycia’s comm. It sat in its socket near the steering handles, and its holo-field filled with the Knighthood’s symbol, a longsword contained within a ring of silver. Laycia throttled down fully, and the speeder cruised to a softly undulating hover. The thrusters sizzled in the frozen morning air.

Laycia sighed. “This is Knight Verdaris. Ready to receive, dispatch.”

“We have received multiple anonymous reports of a possible incident in a residential complex near the outer edge of the colony, in your sextant. Details suggest traces of blood and evidence of violence.”

Laycia counted to five before responding. Her shift was over, technically. This should be Bori Unit’s call, not Avo’s. “Understood, dispatch. However, I’m nearly—”

“The details and address have been sent to your comm, Knight Verdaris. Good luck on your investigation.”

The connection broke, and Laycia was left staring at her comm, its holo-field now crisply projecting the details. Her vision of bed faded to nothingness, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to keep a lid on her fury. She called her Silver and the lines of cold beneath her skin pulsed with calming energy. The roaring in her ears dropped in volume.

Retaliation. There was no doubt in her mind. Two spans ago Laycia had discovered an odd anomaly between the production reports of the colony’s Industrial Plants, and the shipping manifests of outgoing shuttles. The Pit wasn’t in her jurisdiction, technically, but she had been assigned some menial tasks, which included shipping security. The Knight on duty, Adamir Khatila, had gotten a reprimand for his negligence. That hadn’t won Laycia any friends.

She was primarily disappointed by the lack of foresight by her fellow Knights. Didn’t they understand how things could cascade out of control if left to their own devices?

If no one had looked into the discrepancy between the weapons shipment inventory and the manufacturing statement, they would have never found out about a dozen missing plasma rifles. Ones intended for miliskaria peace-keepers in Maqalbus. How many lives would that have cost, in the long run?

She turned the speeder around and headed towards the address dispatch had provided. She had been to the location on a few occasions, unfortunately. The first time had been to pick up a woman who had been accused of openly blaspheming the Circle. The report had been filed with HQ by the occupants of three separate units in the building. They’d each given their accounts to Confessors from the Circle, and they’d been found to be Truthful. The executors from the Circle of Judgement and the Authority of Justice had decided her punishment in less than an hour of her arriving at Central Admin. The extra rations-allotments for the reporters had been issued a solar later.

The next few times she’d visited the building had been to oversee the disposal teams from Central Medical as they collected the complainant’s bodies.

The woman’s Mark had been heavy, costing much of both her speech and sight, leaving her unable to care for her daughter or provide rations for them. With no other choice, she surrendered her daughter to the Circle and the Father’s care, and herself to the snow a few solars later. Unfortunately for the opportunistic reporters, she had been well-liked. Unsurprisingly, there had been no witnesses.

The residential complex came into view: Utilitarian in design, a three-level monument of bare or minimally painted metal, consisting of two symmetrical wings interrupted by a recessed central section that created a shallow notch in the building’s face. The building sat on top of a short hill just off the main-way, accompanied by three small sheds. She brought her speeder down, hovering a mitra above solid ground. She pressed down on her comm’s face, causing it to pop out of the socket with a satisfying click. She slotted it into place in a similar socket on her gauntlet. Data from the report that had been sent to the comm was added to the display in Laycia’s helmet.

Snow rose around her as she landed. She climbed the quick-stone stair-case carved in the hill leading up to the building’s face, forced to concentrate on her footing due to the layer of snow that had built up on them. It didn’t appear as if they were used very often, given the lack of other footsteps.

The quick-stone landing at the top of the stairs led directly to the main entrance. It was a double set of two-mitra tall doors that creaked when they opened, rusted hinges protesting apparent disuse. She ducked through them and into a decently sized and well-kept lobby.

Four hallways branched off from the lobby, two on her left and two on her right, and between both sets were a set of doors. One set sat open, and she could see a common area used for cooking through it. To her left, a single manual door labeled stairwell sat between two bathroom doors. Behind her on either side unit mailboxes equipped with bio-locks had been built into the wall framing the main entrance.

On the other end of the lobby, a smaller entranceway faced toward the outer edge of the colony. Curiously, she approached it. She only made it as far as the stairway door before she—or rather the cameras in her helmet’s sensor array—picked up on some faint bloodstains. They led directly to the stairway door.

That eliminated an entire floor for investigation. She pushed the door open, revealing a dim stairwell with an impressively low grime content.

Laycia’s luck continued as she entered the stairway; the display on her helmet showed small specks of blood despite the flickering and dim lighting in the stairwell. The trail continued past the second-level landing, where an boot-print had left a smeared brownish stain, and onto the third level landing, where it thinned. It led unmistakably through the manual door that opened onto the left-wing of the building.

The passage the door opened onto was narrow, with the facing wall festooned with more bio-locked mail slots, and the floor…completely spotless in both directions.

The blood stopped quite literally at the threshold. Past that point, the floor had been scrubbed so thoroughly it actually gleamed. A hallway stood to both her left and right. What now?

With no more trail to follow, she’d be reduced to going door to door and conducting interviews. She recalled the building’s layout from her previous visits. The hallways were connected, forming a loop that made up that wing. Either direction would bring her right back to where she stood. She reluctantly turned her eye to the left hall. She sighed. Might as well get started.

The first three doors she tried, there was no response, most likely the occupants—if there were any—had already left for the shift. She recorded messages on their holo-receivers, so if she didn’t find something in the other units maybe they could get back to her later. It wasn’t terribly likely, given how unpopular Silver Knights were in the colony, but better to try all the same.

At the fourth door, she was greeted by a man of slightly below-average height and enormous girth. He craned his neck and squinted up at her. When he registered her armor and the grinning skull of her helmet his eyes grew round as dishes. His dark skin grew ashen, and he brushed imaginary dust from the front of his skin-tight and sleeveless undershirt.

“Sīdu-, I mean, Equifār, what may I do to satisfy you?” The breathy, almost musical edge to his Germaine marked him as Saturnalian.

“You may refer to me as Equifār Verdaris. Were you in your quarters last night?” Laycia’s voice was distorted to her own ears as it passed through her helmet’s speakers, giving it an inhuman, artificial quality.

He paused for the briefest of moments. His answer came out in a rush. “Of course, of course, straight back here after my shift ended. I have a double-shift today, in fact. Not that I mind, of course. As my umma said, ‘the Beast preys upon the fingers of the idle, so keep him hungry.’ A wise woman, she did not allow the spirit of Laziness even a cem by which to invade her house!” He laughed, a rich sound that seemed to catch even him off-guard. He quickly sobered. “Oh, my name’s Wema Hadduma, in case there’s some sort of record. I want it known I did not attempt any obfuscation or some such.”

“So noted, Sīdus Hadduma,” Laycia replied. “Were you home before the start of first shift?”

He started to rub his hands together, one hand taking turns to massage the other, as he answered. “Nnnnot exactly, I work on the lower levels of the Pit, and decon from the toxic chem residue takes a little time with so many people having to be processed and declared safe by inspection scans. When I got home it was probably closer to 0100h than not.”

She nodded, though she doubted it was the entire truth. More than likely he’d stopped off at a local rec-hall for some home-brewed and blood-laced alcohol and had gotten home around 0300h. His face bore the half-stuffed look of a long-time and habitual bloodhound. “And on your return to the building, did you notice any blood on the floor, or going up the stairway?”

“Blood? Human blood?” From the shock injected into his voice, Laycia might have thought he had never heard of the substance, let alone seen it. “Can’t say as I did, though I did see a maintenance worker cleaning…something. That could have been blood, sure, but I can’t confirm that. ‘Don’t mind any business that does not fill your belly,’ that was another one of my Umma’s. You know, most people just keep themselves to themselves.”

Unless you get together and decide someone has earned an urgent audience with the Father. Then you can pry, and chop, and burn to your heart’s content, it seems. “We received a report of a blood trail leading through the lobby and up the stairs. We’ve already reviewed the surveillance footage and confirmed the presence of the blood, I am trying to determine if anyone saw the potential victim.” He didn’t need to know that the building’s surveillance system hadn’t worked for multiple cycles according to the reports Laycia had found.

The man hesitated. He struggled with a decision for a few seconds before finally speaking. “Alright. So, Truth in my heart, It was a little after 0230h when I got back. I didn’t see nothing, just like I’ve said. But,” he chewed his dry and peeling bottom lip, “I did hear something. I was still unlocking my door—the scanners in the building are notoriously slow to confirm your biometrics, so it takes a while to actually decide you are who you say you are and go green—when I heard a woman squawkin’ after someone, really pissed off, like. Next thing I know, the door to this side of the level bursts open and then someone started running through the hall. I didn’t stay to see who was running or why, because thankfully my door opened before whoever it was could come around the corner.”

“You didn’t check on the woman who cried out?” That was probably who called in the report in the first place. “What if she had been hurt?”

The man laughed, a single sharp bark. “If you’d heard the pair of lungs on her, you wouldn’t be worrying. No one could scream an obscenity that loud if anything was wrong with them. Maybe something very, very right, more like.”

Though he couldn’t see it, Laycia frowned. Openly bragging about extramarital sex? To a Silver Knight’s face? “And what experience is that?”

The man had the good sense to look mortified. Stammering, he answered, “Merely what I’ve been told over the cycles. By way of my friends married under the blessed Silver light of the Father.”

Laycia shifted her weight, the metal plates and synth-leather armor creaking as joints flexed with the movement. Laycia let the ensuing silence sit, fat and pregnant, until finally she said, “You should be careful that no one has cause to recommend you for an investigation, Sīdus Hadduma.”

Any remaining cheer fled his face. He bowed in a poor approximation of pious deference, his body hinging at the waist. When he did, Laycia noticed an empty bio-plastic bottle covered in grimy fingerprints lying on a table visible over his shoulder. It looked like hundreds she had seen tossed and scattered in various corners of the colony, hastily made by one of the plants in the Pit and filled with something foul fermented in someone’s toilet reservoir. It took very little imagination to speculate on what had been in that bottle. “Thank you, lord Knight, for your wisdom and grace in this matter, and for the opportunity to seek the highest Truth.”

She closed her eyes, counting slowly. Unlike the surveillance or the missing weapons, alcohol was a personal vice, at least when not taken to excess. He would hurt himself, and his own chances of being deemed potentially worthy of reintegration sponsorship, but no one else. She thought of the cursed mother.

The punishment of a Sinner’s Mark and loss of ration earnings for a span at the very least for indulging in blood-laced ‘wine’ would be far beyond the weight of the crime. The lessons of her childhood echoed in her mind. ‘Order must always be imposed in service to compassion, never in its absence.’

Fine. She turned away and started towards the next apartment. “See that you do. We will all be judged against the Father’s Truth eventually. Live accordingly.”

The investigation continued much as it had thus far. As did further pressures testing her uncle’s lessons. A couple living together—purely in platonic accordance with doctrine, they claimed—reported that they too had heard shouting and running, but not seen anything; A girl of nineteen cycles, a full two cycles shy of the age of responsibility, provided new evidence. She swore that she’d heard screaming around the start of first shift, and then much later, she’d heard growling echoing through the hallway in the middle of the night. She had been far too terrified to actually go look around the complex for its source. In addition to the growling, Laycia started to get off-hand mentions of power flickering or dying for short periods, and heating coils suddenly dropping in output or even cutting off entirely.

As Laycia progressed, so too did her mental model. At first she’d been thinking that someone had been hurt or killed, and the person responsible had slunk into the building, whether that was because they were a resident, or had a friend that was. The blood in that model was proof that they had just been careless with the evidence. Then she began to suspect that with so much blood spilled over such a long distance, she was looking for someone hurt, maybe someone that had escaped such an attack.

The growling and power issues seemed unrelated, but not unexplainable. She’d seen dozens of scavenged holo-projectors wired into power grids with no thought of personal or community safety. They could produce the same effects and could produce the same sounds. Especially if they were showing the right kinds of holos. Horror holos were especially popular due to their enhanced prohibition, after all.

Where the left hall ended, instead of more apartments, there was a bank of windows showing the tops of buildings curving away into the distance along the colony ring. This close to the edge of the colony, Laycia could see one of the tall repulsor towers. Its peak rose far higher than the building in which she stood. Her gaze was drawn upwards to the needle-like structure’s summit, glowing with bluish-white light. She imagined she could feel the calming waves of Truth from there. Smiling to herself, she turned to the right hall to finish up the rounds of questioning.

Coming around the corner, she was confronted with a strange sight: people, milling about in the hall, wrapped in heavy blankets and non-powered thermal gear. When they saw her, all of the residents stood up straight, eyes fixed on her armored form as she approached. Some people ushered their blanket-cocooned children into their units. The parents slid the depowered apartment doors nearly closed, leaving only a small strip of darkness beyond. Just wide enough for curious eyes to observe everything that happened, no doubt.

A heavy-framed man stood at the center of the crowd, and seemed to be addressing them. His arms were spread wide and he gestured placatingly with surprisingly large hands. His thick hair had been pulled back and tied with a simple string of some kind, left to spill down his back in voluminous ebony curls. The flashing of golden charms woven into his beard and hair drew Laycia’s eye as he moved.

One of the residents tapped his shoulder and pointed towards Laycia. He turned with a searching expression that shifted to relief upon seeing her. Well, that’s pleasantly odd. How often has anyone been relieved to see me?

Tapping forehead and heart by way of salute, the man—who Laycia noted didn’t have any kind of protection against the cold beyond a thick, long-sleeved shirt and similarly made pants—approached her from the tangle of people. The crowd parted for him with grateful looks cast at his back. As he walked, the golden charms clinked together musically. When he was within touching distance, she realized he was shorter even than Sīdus Hadduma had been but significantly wider at the shoulder. With the charms and his height, she suspected he was one of the Moon-folk.

The man offered his hand, must have realized his error, and dropped it, smiling nervously. He scratched at his beard absentmindedly with the other hand. Laycia was, despite herself, fascinated. She’d had many reactions to meeting her for the first time—respect, terror, hatred, and more recently since arriving on Lustrathīr, disgust—but she couldn’t recall anyone so…relaxed. Steady.

Shrugging, he decided to plow ahead. “What a blessing! I did not think they would get a Silver Knight out to us this quickly after the power and heat failed,” He said. His accent was surprisingly familiar, Baytusian, but with something else flowery tossed in. “I had just finished looking in on my neighbors to make sure no one was suffering any ill effects from the cold so far.”

She cocked an eyebrow, not that he could appreciate it. “That’s quite…altruistic of you, Sīdus…”

He started, eyes going wide with surprise. “Oh! Of course, my name is Tendakeo. Tendakeo Moyonao. As far as altruism, that is just professional instinct, as a doctor, I mean.” Something dark passed over his face, gone in a blink. “I work at Central Medical, assisting the…other doctors with whatever they need. I would not be very good at my job if I needed to wait for someone to ask for help in order for me to offer it.”

Moyonao? Now Laycia had an entirely different set of questions. The Moyonao family were the system’s most prominent family of medical experts and life-science researchers. Their reputations as doctors meant they were known across all Elysannati worlds. Tarnished Silver, how did one of them end up here?

Schooling her voice, Laycia responded. “Well, Dotakīm Moyonao, I appreciate the quick thinking. You may refer to me as Equifār Verdaris. If more people were aware of the suffering of their fellow souls, Sinner’s Landing would be a better place to live.”

A murmured response in the crowd was followed by a sharp inhalation. Angry grumbling followed from that direction. Tendakeo looked over his shoulder briefly before returning his gaze to Laycia’s helmeted visage. The skull with burning pinpricks of light in its sockets did not, on the surface, appear to unnerve him nearly as much as it had Laycia when she’d first seen it as a Knight-Cadet long ago.

“Do you have any idea when the repair crew is going to come out?”

The Doctor’s response shifted her thoughts abruptly. She blinked rapidly as her mind recovered. Repair crew? Did he expect someone to come out and fix things like they would back in Baytūs? Why did he think the windows that got broken, stayed broken? Repairs cost resources, usually resources that the building’s residents, not the colony administration, are responsible for. The only exceptions to that were during the repair cycles set by the government. If he didn’t know that, then he couldn’t have been in the colony very long.

“When I’ve finished my investigation, I’ll file a notice with Infrastructure and Admin. Now, who—”

“And that will start the process to get the crew out?” He paused, confusion crossing his face. “I’m sorry, your investigation?”

“…That will let them know the incident happened, if you should make an effort to remedy the matter later—by pooling your rations to hire a crew to come out and fix it. Now, if you would allow me to continue, Dotakīm, yes, I am here to investigate a matter that has been brought to Headquarters’ attention.” Laycia gestured towards the Doctor. “Since you are in such a talkative mood, I nominate you as point of contact for this assemblage.”

He turned to look at the crowd, who all shook their heads and took partial steps back, eyes dropping to the floor plates. He turned back to Laycia and smiled weakly. “It appears to be unanimous.”

Stand out from the crowd, and get left in the cold, that’s the truth of Sinner’s Landing. Best you get used to that in a hurry. She cleared her throat. “Headquarters received a report about blood in the lobby and stairwell leading to this floor. I saw evidence of it myself, but it disappeared as soon as it crosses the threshold to this level. Do you know anything about that?”

His golden brown skin grew ashen. Before Laycia could come to a conclusion about what that might mean, Tendakeo spoke, words coming out in a rush. “That much blood-loss would be a serious wound. Have you found any more evidence? Has anyone had any wounds that they couldn’t explain? They would still be quite weak if they were walking around now.”

That was pretty much the conclusion Laycia had come to on her own. She thought back over her questioning of the tenants so far. No one had been suffering any wounds, and most of them had appeared to live alone. She had already scanned the other residents behind the Doctor for signs of distress or discomfort. However, as far as she could see, everyone was seemingly healthy.

A thought occurred to Laycia. What if the wounded victim were hiding in one of these powerless units? “Dotakīm, can I speak to you privately?” She inclined her head at a corner behind her.

After a moment of apparent thought, Tendakeo nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the crowd, who was still watching him intently. He raised a reassuring hand, and then followed Laycia around the corner. She turned and lowered herself until the skull of her helmet was within cems of brushing his nose. He eyed her curiously rather than pulling back.

“Did you actually go inside of these people’s quarters when you were checking on them?”

His neatly maintained eyebrows knitted together. Then understanding dawned. “Yes, I did. The vast majority, anyway. None of them were harboring anyone in need of anything more serious than disinfectants and minor bandaging from crashing into objects in the dark.”

Pitted, tarnished Silver. Laycia turned away in thought. Going back over her interviews, none of the people so far had seemed suspicious, or overly nervous. Well, no more than people usually were in her vicinity. Was the Doctor trustworthy? She almost laughed at the idea. Whatever he had done to get sent to the colony, he was still a doctor. If someone were hurt beyond his ability to treat, he wouldn’t hide them if their lives were at risk.

“If that will be all, Equifār?”

She looked over at the Doctor, and sighed. “Yes, I believe that will be all for now. I’ll return with further questions if I deem it necessary, but for now, get back to preparations for the cold. Father watch over you.”

He bowed his head slightly. “And you, Equifār Verdaris.” He returned to the crowd, who seemed happy enough to have him back. Well, of course. They’re probably pumping the poor fool for free medical advice and services. Hopefully he learns to protect himself before they eat him alive.

She made her way back to the stairwell entrance. The pristine floor plates taunted Laycia, their surfaces nearly polished in the spaces where the black paint had worn away. Someone had come in this building bleeding to death. That much was all but certainly established. Afterwards, they had managed to disappear into the void. That was all she had to put in the report so far, despite nearly an hour and a half’s worth of work.

She thought about conducting a door-to-door search. She shook her head. She’d already seen enough to know that if she were to go through the resident’s quarters she would find dozens of minor violations that would add up to severe, permanent consequences once she was forced to report them. She had spent twenty cycles rooting out real evil in the Silver City, she had learned to recognize it. These were just people. Scared, desperate, vulnerable people. There were others far more deserving of Marks within the colony, she knew.

She sighed as the third-level landing swung closed behind her. That doctor turned out to be a great help at least. He saved me a lot of time hunting in shadows for nothing.