Mounted on the wall behind the equipment were Haan holoscreens that displayed a dizzying amount of information. The rows of alien characters overlapped one another several layers deep, in varying brightness and color, including blank areas that I suspected I just couldn’t see. I couldn’t read any of it, but popping from the clouds of haan text were images of human body parts… arms, legs, heads, various organs, then tissue, cells, all the way down to the DNA. They formed the jigsaw pieces of a broken-out human figure.
The worktables and trays were filled with equipment that included scalpels, bone saws, and hacksaws…Some were shiny and new, but some were old, like the rest of this place.
“There’s something behind them,” Vamp said, pointing at the haan displays.
I looked, and saw that there was an image behind them. A large diagram had been on the wall, now covered by the haan monitors. I stared at the fractured image, but there wasn’t enough showing to get a full picture, just disconnected glimpses of what appeared to be thick black strands, and what looked like bundles of worms. I couldn’t piece them together to form any kind of whole that made sense. Every edge I followed showed something unfamiliar, something that had no human correlation. Panic scratched at the back of my mind as I tried to connect the dots and couldn’t.
“Nix…”
He’d crept up behind me.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said in my ear. “You don’t want to see this.”
“What is that?” I asked. He didn’t answer.
I looked back to the surgical equipment, the blades caked with black tarry blood and spotted now with fuzzy blossoms of mold. A row of metal coolers ran along the far wall in the gloom behind them, marked 1 through 13-A, and 1 through 13-B. Spots of mildew had grown across the walls, finding purchase on the microscopic remains of something that had once been spattered there, and then later scrubbed away.
“This is from before the Impact,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You were here before the Impact.”
“Yes.”
“But how? You crashed…”
I looked down at the muck-stained metal tray. There were metal bands still rusting in there, restraint straps that were twisted and bent, but not broken. There were dozens of them.
“What did they do?” I asked.
“They didn’t know what he was,” Nix said. “They couldn’t have.”
“So, what did they—”
“The same thing Sillith is now doing here with your people,” he said. “They studied him.”
I shook my head, not wanting to believe it in spite of what I saw in front of me. No human could see something as sophisticated as a haan and then just strap it down and dissect it. Men like Hwong maybe, but even then for a reason, however twisted. Not just out of curiosity.
“Our young don’t recognize you as thinking creatures,” Nix said quietly. “Not at first. It’s why the surrogate program is so important. This was the same. You cannot form empathy for something you can’t recognize or understand. When our envoy stepped through the gate—”
“But you look so much like us.”
Something banged from back down the corridor behind us, and I jumped, knocking into one of the trays and sending surgical tools clattering down onto the floor.
“They’re in,” Vamp said. Something clanged farther in the facility, echoing through the empty hallways. “We’ve got to go now.”
“There!” I heard Ligong bark, her voice echoing through the halls. “It came from there! Move!”
“Sam, snap out of it!”
I was still staring at the crisscrossing streaks of black blood when Vamp grabbed my wrist and pulled, dragging me along through the doorway.
The haan couldn’t have been here before the Impact, I thought as I followed him. They didn’t come here on purpose. Everyone says so. All the official records, everything on TV, and in school, and on the feed says so. They didn’t come here on purpose.
Did they?
How could they not have? a tiny voice whispered, struggling to be heard from some deep place in the back of my mind. What would the chances be that they would accidentally come across us in a universe so vast?
Vamp tugged my arm again, and I looked back at the row of metal coolers one last time as I stumbled away after him with no good answer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
03:19:22 BC
I slid down the slick, soot-covered slope with Vamp and Nix close behind me. Vamp looked unsure about heading down into that hole, but he looked even less sure about the sounds coming from back down the corridor. There was no way they could have cut through the hatch so quickly, but they must have found another way around because the sounds were getting close. When I glanced back through the gap in the broken floor above, I saw a flashlight beam sweep past.
The tiles ended abruptly in front of me, splintered support struts jutting from underneath along with the broken ends of rusted pipe-work. There was a drop of maybe five feet down to the corridor below where hot, wet air billowed up like the breath of some giant creature. Vamp joined me at the edge, peering down.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “I’m taller. I’ll help you down.”
Back behind us, a burst of radio chatter echoed through the hallways, rising over the constant low rumble of machinery. Heavy footsteps, the unmistakable tramping of many boots, grew louder as they approached.
“This is crazy,” I muttered, looking back down into the darkness.
“I know,” Vamp said.
I glanced back at Nix. “Is she down there?”
Nix drew in a long, deep breath, then slowly released it. I felt it vent against the side of my neck, until it petered out into that soft bone rattle.
“Yes.”
“How close?”
“Close.”
He dropped from the edge, down into the shadows, and I watched him touch down on the floor below, where his eyes cast a mellow glow in the darkness.
“You ready?” I asked Vamp. He nodded, and I put one hand on his chest. “I’m sorry I dragged you into th—”
He touched my cheek, then leaned forward suddenly and kissed me on the mouth. His lips were full, and soft, and I felt his fingers move through my hair, cradling the back of my head. Before I knew it I felt the rough stubble of his face under my palms, and I was kissing him back. He let it linger just long enough, and then broke.
“Just in case,” he said, and jumped down to join Nix. I hesitated on the edge, my cheeks hot. Vamp was a good kisser.
I dropped down after him as a flashlight beam floated past the hole above. Two more joined it, casting through the room.
“Here,” a woman’s voice said. One of the beams stopped at the top of the slope, shining on the tracks we’d left behind.
“This way,” Nix whispered.
We followed him down a corridor that was nearly pitch-black until the dim light in the distance took on the shape of a doorway. Something slammed back behind us, and I heard the sound of voices accompanied by the jingle and clatter of equipment. I picked up the pace as we approached the light, and I was able to make out a white cinder block wall somewhere on the other side of the doorway there.
“Jesus,” Vamp muttered.
In the glow cast through the doorway ahead, I saw an empty set of clothing that was plastered to the floor. A pair of shoes lay empty in front of a pair of blood-drenched pants and shirt. A few scaleflies scurried over the sticky pile, and had formed a crawling mass above the empty neckline. Where the head would have been, the floor was painted with a slick of red-black, littered with bits of white and gray.
“It’s her,” I whispered, putting my arm in front of my nose and mouth to try and block out the stench. “Innuya, the woman from the recording. We’re getting close.”