70. Stilla

stilla ~ae, f.

1. a drop of liquid

in the heart of the world, there are whispers.

The new scientists come in on their first day and settle quickly; there is work to be done, and all of it rather strange. They were given no explanation for their sudden deployment, though it is not uncommon to rotate the highly specialized in steedcraft. But an entire team all at once? Some of them whisper of an information leak, a mole, but for whom? Competing steedcraft companies, they could understand, but the core of the Station is its battery. All the power generated here is pumped to every substation, every ward, every water purifier, every grav-gen and ventilation system. Who would dare to interfere with what keeps them all alive?

They don’t know the manifestations will begin on the third day, but a woman named Ysolde knows instantly that something is wrong.

She is the new head of the core team—freshly twenty-eight and yet the brightest steedcrafting star the Station has seen in years. She shuts her vis on her first lunch break with a vicious sort of gusto—Mother is pressuring her into settling down, and Ysolde’s best defense is reminding her again and again that an obsession with marriage is for nobles, not a Mid Ward farming family. She’s alone in the control room—the rest having gone to explore the kitchen options—and she’s in the middle of opening her vacuum-sealed mince pie when she sees it.

At first, she thinks the bloodstain in the aft seam of her console is an illusion—a trick of the core’s massive light waves that wash everything in periwinkle. But then she touches it, and it flakes. Knowing better than to alarm her team on their very first day, Ysolde pretends she hasn’t searched every inch of the control room when they return. She smiles and feigns interest in the idea of fondue and grips the bloodied swab in her pocket. She runs it on her own time, in her own living room, in her own machine. By the light of the artificial moon, she reads the resulting match twice, then thrice.

TRAKE CALODOS

His name is familiar—a man she wrote papers on, a man who wrote the very textbooks she studied on xenotrophic spongiform encephalopathy, and a man who would not be out of place leading the core team himself; a man who dropped abruptly from corporate steedcrafting to go private. A man with his blood now on her console.

She asks someone she knows—an ex, a fling, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s better at security than she is, and he warns her: Trake Calodos’s vis hasn’t been active for a month, and the implication hangs in her mind—a vis is not inactive unless its user is dead. He warns her again: core command is the most highly monitored scientific wing in the Station. And this implication hangs heavier: they are watching her every move.

When Ysolde comes into the core on the third day, her team is gathered in a gaggle at the foot of it, staring up at the extruders. They aren’t supposed to be here, ever, and yet there are seven of them. Eight. They are a beautiful sign of failure. She’s only ever seen them once—and never so many—during her doctorate studies in the king’s containment units rife with gold dragon sigil. Her mind spins; the most dangerous thing about them is that, if allowed to, they grow exponentially. And yet they are not allowed to. Not fully. Not like this. That’s why the king’s steed exists—to command, to redirect the unfathomable energy of their attempt at regrowth into the Station’s pylons and refining systems. But now they seem to be ignoring it. After four hundred years of obeying quietly, they are…

This is not just failure. This is catastrophic failure. A failure that, apparently, the previous team could not fix. Even Trake Calodos could not fix it—and he was killed for it. Ysolde doesn’t know by who, or how, but she knows if she fails she will be next.

“Contact the Westriani fuel depot,” she says into her vis. “Tell them I need all the heads they have. Immediately.”