Ayna shifted in her chair. Hafi sat before her in a state she had never seen the old sword. Sweat clung to his face, his hair and the edge of his armor's under-suit where she could see it peaking out with his helmet off. Ayna could smell the intensity of the fields he had crossed. The red tinge to his armor and boots from mid-thigh down to his feet was enough to convince her he was not embellishing or exaggerating the tale—not that Hafi would do such a thing, but she sorely wished he had chosen this moment to start.
He had not thought that cleaning himself up was more important than getting information to Ayna. She questioned the impulse, not because she desired for the sweaty, trembling man in front of her to be less fragrant, but because she thought a good shower might have calmed him down. The terror and exertion had built up within him, and Ayna could feel it as real as if the field itself had climbed across the table and rubbed up against her, leaving a trail of blood and body parts.
“Hafi? Hafi.”
He met her eyes reluctantly. Ayna could see the shame in them. He had never panicked over anything in the years that Ayna had known him. Ayna suspected that half of his remaining fear came from the ability of this anomalous event to cause him to be afraid. For Hafi, abandoning his fighter’s caution and running away from the perceived danger was akin to rejecting everything he was as a soldier and as a person. “We will get someone out there to take samples and figure this thing out. Let’s get together a group of soldiers to meet Lee and the refugees on the north paths.”
He nodded with a dazed expression, visibly relaxing his shoulders as she took the burden of the field from him and pointed him back towards thoughts of his own work.
Ayna’s own mind was spinning through all the possibilities, from Xenai weaponry and experiments to an accident in the illegal Underground power labs. The Xenai did not waste parts, however. The labs were dumping more and more bodies every week, but always to the east side of Prin, tossed in uncovered mass graves in the endless field of ruins, and she was aware of their movements.
I couldn’t have missed something this big, could I?
She needed data.
She tapped the back of Hafi’s hand gently.
“I’ll be right back.”
She stepped out, carefully sliding the door shut to leave Hafi to his thoughts peacefully, even knowing that they were not peaceful thoughts. She glanced around at the empty series of desks outside the door.
Where is that damned boy?
She sighed at the inconvenience, but also found herself grateful for the time alone. She walked down the hall to the cafe and started making coffee for herself and Hafi as she let her mind wander over the data she knew.
The consensus was that the Xenai documents gave insight into their initial creation. However, it didn’t explain their ongoing experiments. Ayna was aware of two facilities in a small town on the outskirts of Shouding, the Xenai city to the west. The Xenai constantly replenished the two labs in Tawee. One seemed to have a variety of animals taken to it, and another that had a lot of staff that entered and exited, but a supply chain that consisted only of food and water—the Xenai hid anything else coming into the building from the satellites. Neither facility had any waste. One produced a steady stream of animals that the Xenai modified to be like them, for what purposes Ayna still was horrified to find out. The other seemed to produce nothing at all. Scouts and satellites verified each other’s findings, and Ayna was certain that this pattern of behavior that had held for decades would not suddenly change. She made a mental note to double check the most recent reports, anyway.
The Underground power labs were always chaotic and dangerous. Ayna did her best to educate the people of Prin on their dangers, which meant staying up to date on what they were doing. The BloodSmith lab, which their cult following called the Temple, was not as focused on imbibing blood and placenta as they used to be, and had moved toward transfusions. It allowed Terrans to gain temporary and limited use of source when transfused with the blood of Illara or Inari—at least until their bodies broke down the blood and it made the Terran sick. The source sickness was temporary and passed, assuming the source of the blood was a close enough match to the Terran's blood type to begin with. If it wasn’t, which was mostly a matter of trial and error for the BloodSmiths, the end result could be fatal. They discarded the bodies. Families of the missing people rarely even reported them missing, if they knew they were a BloodSmith, for fear of reprisals. They just became another corpse in the Ditch. Never did they become part of a blood swamp.
That left the Artificers. They rarely did anything illicit. But when they did, they certainly did it with style. A sudden field of blood and body parts would fit their theatricality, in that sense, but was not in line with any of their current projects. They had shifted their focus away from giving Terrans the ability to work with source, their principal cause of contention with the BloodSmiths, and started working to reverse engineer some old Illara source powered technology to retrofit it into what was left of Terran technology. Not every Artificer had dedicated themselves to this new effort, but the fighting in the Underground had only gotten worse and the Artificers had seemed to want a way out. And this was what they had decided on. They saw the BloodSmiths in the same way that the Old World docs talked about alcoholics or trippers, and being killed off by them was insulting to an order that inherited their knowledge and standing from the original Illara Artificer Guild. Ayna added them to list—it couldn't hurt to check recent reports of their activity.
She dropped a pat of butter into Hafi’s coffee, whipped it up as he liked it, and started making her way back toward her office, still lost in thought. She felt it, somewhere deep inside her, as she went over each possibility and felt certain that each wasn’t really a possibility at all.
This has to be something new.
Ayna hated that word. New. A tendril of cold crawled up and wrapped itself solidly around the buzzing thoughts in her brain. There was nothing else it could be but new. And being new made it more terrifying than any known threat. In place of swords, armor, guns or ‘magic’, Ayna had dossiers, recordings, maps and spreadsheets for every single possibility that threatened Prin. Now, something had landed on their doorstep, and she stood armed with nothing.
It took barely an hour for Hafi to clean up himself and his armor. It was barely dusk, and he was already prepared to head back out to meet the evacuees and their escorts. Ayna was glad he had not wasted time. Staying still was the last thing he needed. Ayna had to pull a few strings to get his armor cleaned properly in such a short amount of time. However, she had known the General long enough to know that armor was the closest thing he had to a lover. He had repaired the pieces by hand repeatedly. She wondered if it really could qualify as the same set of armor she had originally bestowed upon him when she recruited him into the Prin Guard. Perhaps it was its own thing, now. She made sure that Hafi had all he needed to keep the armor repaired, and quickly.
Ayna watched the General exit the gates of the state house from her office balcony. Her assistant returned with photos of the field. Apparently, a sniper in training at the west fort was also a budding photographer. The poor boy had eagerly accepted the assignment, with no idea what he would take photos of. He had sent them to her assistant via the SatNet and so Ayna did not have to see the shaky terror she knew the amateur photographer must still have dripping from his face. Job well done. The state is indebted to you, fine young soldier.
She ached to look at the photos, but waited to see off Hafi properly, as she always did. Some traditions were worth the time they took to instill loyalty in those around her.
She stood, letting the wind blow the bottom edges of her dress across the floor of the balcony. She was perfectly aware of the romantic elegance at that moment. She also did not care in the slightest. Any image or impression that helped those in her employ keep their wits about them was a necessity. She played to them all well. The doting mother. The loving ruler. The fierce champion with her arms full of papers and folders and her mind full of information she could fashion into a sharp weapon with no notice…
Once Hafi had faded from view, Ayna slid her weight back onto her back leg, turned and took the few strides back to her desk to sit before her folder in a smooth motion. She ran her hand over the cover and opened it slowly, as though the photos had become real since her aide had handed her the folder. She knew the folder was filled with flat sheets of dry and glossy paper, but from Hafi’s description, she half feared a spray of blood would shoot from the crease of the folder and drench her the moment she opened the file, filling her office with the smell of rotting, old blood.
She ended up experiencing something in between. She remained dry. Her hair remained where she had placed it in the morning. The scent of her perfume was light, but still the most prominent smell in the office. It was something inside her that changed. She had listened intently to Hafi’s words. She understood the words and sentences, and even the bigger picture painted by the strings of sentences. But now, looking down at the first photo in the pile, she felt the words. They were complex and their texture seemed to crawl off the page, up her arms, and into her eyes. The depth of the swamp pulled her in, setting her adrift in the images, as if they surrounded her and encased her in a dark womb filled with thick, inTerran amniotic fluid made of partially congealed blood.
Ayna faced each picture on its own. After looking at each photo, she flipped it over so she could no longer see it. Forcing herself to look at the next photo, she took a deep breath. Like this, she went through the pile. It took her an hour to look through what had likely taken the photographer less than 20 minutes to photograph.
Every detail stuck in her head, as she felt it should. She did not just see an independent forearm, but noticed the clean cuts where the missing fingers had been severed, compared to the rough edges of ripped-apart joints and sinews that composed the other end of the limb.
She could not reconcile all the things she saw in the photos with her knowledge of her world. The threat of the unknown loomed over her as she flipped over the last picture. She needed new knowledge before she could move forward. She scooped up the folder, slung it under her arm and headed towards the U labs in the States Quarters to send her scientists into the field. She paused only long enough to send a message to the head of the Prin guard to block all routes that would lead into it through the mountain passes around it.