Present day
Ariadne stared down the long hallway of endless white tiles. The records room there was a copy of the command center in the Temple, which was deep in the ruins of the original generation ship brought from the Old World to Tholos with its first humans. Ariadne had helped design the security for this room, as the Oracle instructed her to do the things One could not. The things that required a small, undernourished body. Clever little hands. Her engineered, brilliant brain.
The Oracle and One’s daughter had worked well in tandem. Ariadne still knew how One processed, where One focused attention and data. She knew how to move between the cracks.
Or she hoped so.
If the Oracle found Ariadne in this command center—just a single lesser temple of many outside of the main Temple on Tholos—she would never escape. She had to hope she could find the information for the other women first.
Ariadne moved on the balls of her feet. All was silent. Halfway down the path, the sensors triggered, the hallway filling with a buzzing hiss as the lasers snapped into being. Ariadne still had a deep scar on her leg from a past misstep. She could feel the heat of them against her skin. They moved almost lazily in their circular pattern, but they’d kill so easily. There were three different patterns, one for each of the Three Sisters.
If she’d triggered the program, Ariadne could only hope that her patch was still holding on the cameras and other sensors. She couldn’t worry. She had two seconds to remember where in the pattern the lasers were before they sliced her into pieces. She let her mind go blank, reaching for muscle memory and rote memorization. A large puzzle she only needed to slot into.
She fell to the ground just as a laser went over her head, close enough she smelled the acrid burning of the tips of her hair. Her nose just had time to graze the polished tiles before she pushed up with her hands, flipping over another laser. She danced to the side, gave another little hop, and then did three backflips in quick succession. She was out of practice; her lungs hurt and her muscles were already shaking.
No time to think. She could only follow that pattern that’d been drilled into her more times than she could count. Up. Down. Left. Left. Half-twirl. Diagonal cartwheel. Right. Right.
Right.
She reached the other end of the hallway, her lungs working hard. She darted in to the main control panel, fingers already itching to manipulate the raw code.
She hoped Clo was holding up out in the hallway, but she couldn’t spare more than a thought for the mechanic. The muscles in her back were so tight, she thought they’d break. She could feel One’s presence behind the code. As long as she didn’t trigger an anomaly, she should be able to slip in and out.
But had the Oracle already noticed that the sensors had triggered there? Would it drive One’s attention away from training on countless planets, on the millions of cameras dotted through the Empire?
Ariadne’s hands kept shaking.
Rhea was still helping her to unpack her childhood with the Oracle, but when would there be time for any of them to heal from their pasts? Ariadne was supposed to be living her new life by now, fixing odd things to get by on some quiet, faraway planet. Far from the Temple, far from the Oracle’s tendrils. Not here in the depths of One’s domain.
Her eyes scanned the information, all of it storing deep in her brain. No time to make copies, no time to even think about what her eyes were seeing. She had it.
“Ismara,” she whispered, scanning the text. “Ichor mines.”
Josephine was a rock called ichor from the planet Ismara. Frustrated, Ariadne tried to read more, but the whirring of the mechanisms in the Oracle’s mainframe stopped her. Though she had an eidetic memory, there was only so quickly she could scan the information in front of her. It would have to do.
She’d lingered long enough already.
She slid a small drive into the slot on one of the screens. The virus would enter the Oracle’s interface as if it were a routine process to streamline code, and there it would sit until Ariadne needed to activate it.
From farther away, she thought as she quickly entered information into the report logs. Way, way farther.
If the Oracle did pay attention to the logs on the smallest of the Three Sisters, it should say that Minoa Katrakis-1, one of the chief engineers, came to check on shipment records. Ariadne made sure to look up other ships’ manifests as well as Zelus’s, and Minoa had been assigned to work on that ship, as well. She was another small woman, though not as tiny as Ariadne.
She had to hope this desperate patchwork quilt held. Engineers would know how to pass through the maze, though Minoa would only work this one. If any heat came down on the engineer, it would be Ariadne’s fault. She didn’t want to risk another’s life. She’d already caused so much death.
Now to find her way back. She was ready to dance.
“Goodbye, Oracle,” Ariadne whispered.
She thought of the Oracle’s cruelty. The long hours. What she’d had to do. But she remembered the stories the Oracle would tell her—those she deemed safe enough to tell a little girl. Fables and Old World lore, the offerings, the Named Things lined up in her room. A dried rosebud. Purple amethyst. The doll with the china face and yellow hair.
I love you, she thought.
Clo jumped a little when Ariadne opened the door.
“All right?” Clo asked.
“Done. Let’s get out of here.”
“What did you find?” Clo whispered as soon as they reached the claustrophobic air ducts again.
“Not now,” Ariadne said. “First, we go back up the elevator shaft.”
Clo let out a groan and a very soft “Silt.”
Ariadne busied herself, turning off the shifters to save energy in case they needed them later. Once again, they looked grimy, and they only grew dirtier as they crawled back through the ducts.
“Right on time,” she said as the elevator sped past them, blowing her hair back. Clo wiped her hands on her filthy clothes, and Ariadne did the same. Neither of them would slip again tonight.
After climbing up, they kept crawling. Ariadne’s neck and shoulders burned, and memories of countless hours spent in the dark innards of ducts just like these haunted her. Sometimes, Ariadne would have to stop and close her eyes, mentally bringing up the map she’d studied. The Oracle was all around her, and even now, One could be turning One’s gaze inward, sensing the anomaly.
Finally, they reached the edge of the building. Ariadne and Clo climbed out into the empty room.
Ariadne pointed at the small window. “We’re out of the basement levels, so we jump out. If we time the drop, the hedge below should hide us from cameras. Then it’s right back to the ship.”
“How big is this jump, exactly?”
“Only a story.”
“Only?”
Ariadne grinned. “You’ll be fine.”
“What if I crack my head open?”
“That would be bad. Try not landing on your head.”
Clo scowled. “Thanks, that’s fluming excellent advice.”
Ariadne laughed, because it was that or sob. She took out the shifter and started going over their clothes again. “Damn it,” she muttered.
“What?” Ariadne shook the shifter, but no luck. They both looked as dirt-streaked as before.
“Signal’s jammed.”
Or the Oracle has found us.
Clo exhaled hard through her nose. “So, now we have to jump out a window, hide behind a giant bush, and then walk into the loading bay and into our ship absolutely covered in dirt and hope no one will notice. Great. So great.”
“Optimism, please!” Ariadne wished she had someone to reassure her. Someone to say everything would be okay.
Ariadne’s breathing was quickening, fast and shallow. The panic rose up within her, threatening to overwhelm. The Temple. The tasteless gruel. The endless hours of work, her fingers twisting so many wires, typing so much code, that they almost bled. The Oracle will hide you so deep in the Temple that no one will ever find you again. You’ll be alone, forever and ever.
“Ariadne.” Clo’s hands gripped her shoulders, hard. The pain helped bring Ariadne back. “Ariadne. Breathe slower. Sit.”
Ariadne let her legs give out from under her.
“Lean forward, head between knees.”
Ariadne complied. Clo rubbed her back while she forced her breaths to slow. Like Rhea did. It wasn’t as good, but it was nice. “Are you okay?”
“Memories,” Ariadne managed between breaths. “I’m afraid of going back. I’m afraid—”
“Shhh,” Clo crooned. The hand on Ariadne’s back made soothing circles. “Look at me.”
Ariadne dragged her head up, her vision blurry with tears.
“You’re never going back to Tholos. I swear on my life.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Then I’ll believe it enough for the both of us.” Clo gave her shoulder another squeeze before looking down at their disastrous jumpsuits. She paused, frowning. “I think I have an idea for how we can make it back to the ship. Once we get down, follow my lead.”
Ariadne dug deep to find strength and banish her fears. She opened the window and climbed out onto the thin ledge on the building’s facade. They had to hold on to the bones that made up the outer facade of the building. Ariadne tried not to think of how many murdered creatures it had taken to make this palace.
Just get down to the hedge. Keep going. Just a jump.
“Let’s do this,” Clo said. There was sweat at her temples, and her hands shook.
Here goes. She flung herself from the window, hoping Clo would follow.
Ariadne’s stomach dipped, but falling through the air was almost freeing. Gravity pulled her down. Her legs took the impact on landing, the force reverberating through her body. She rolled out of the way for Clo. Would the other woman’s false leg take the jump?
Clo landed hard and rolled twice. She let out a short hiss of pain, her hand going to the flesh above her prosthetic.
“Are you all right?” Ariadne asked.
“Fine,” Clo ground out between clenched teeth.
Ariadne held out a hand to help Clo up. The other woman rose, favoring her good leg, and limped alongside Ariadne. They hid from view behind a hedge, narrowly missing discovery by a passing drone, its little beady camera eye swishing back and forth.
“That was closer than I’d like,” Ariadne whispered after it sped away.
They crept back to the palace’s loading bay and long-term storage of other visiting ships. Security was present but not as tight as back near the palace or at the Myndalian base.
Clo crouched down and picked up a handful of dark mud, smearing it on her already-filthy jumpsuit.
“What are you doing?” Ariadne whispered.
“Follow my lead, remember?” Clo started drawing designs on the muck on her face, hoping it was vaguely symmetrical. Almost like tattoos. Two winged scythes down her cheeks. A circle of a dark moon on her forehead. Ariadne caught on.
“We’re pretending to be gerulae?” she asked.
Ariadne had helped create those ghosts in human form. She knew how deep the Oracle’s programming went. She’d checked the code. Unlike an average Tholosian citizen, there was no way to break it and bring them back. There was nothing left.
It would never occur to someone raised in the Three Sisters to impersonate a gerulae. Nyx would have recoiled at the thought. Even Ariadne hesitated.
Clo’s expression gentled. “Impersonating a husk is no worse than pretending to be guards. It’ll get us back to the ship and that’s all we need.”
“Don’t call them that,” Ariadne said sharply.
She didn’t like that casual slur, the implication they were too stupid to be human. They had been, once. She’d watched the humanity leak out of them. On some level, she’d been responsible.
“Sorry,” Clo muttered, as if she hadn’t realized what it meant.
Maybe she didn’t. From Rhea, Ariadne knew that Clo had grown up on Myndalia.
Ariadne just nodded and let herself turn the idea over in her head. “It is a good plan, though.”
Clo said nothing as she finished the last touches on their impromptu disguises. Clo dipped her fingertip in the mud and drew scythes on Ariadne’s cheeks. A brand to the world that they were nothing more than biological machines.
They stood and made their way to the visitor ships’ hangar. They held their faces down and turned away, subservient. They kept to the edges of the rooms, close to the walls. They needn’t have worried: No one said a word to them. No one even glanced their way.
Mud-splattered, tired, and cold, they walked right up to their ship, slipped behind, and climbed into the small service hatch on the hull. Ariadne’s stomach twisted as they crawled through their stolen ship.
Citizen or gerulae—they were all the same to the Empire. Expendable. Unfeeling.
Not even an echo of an echo.