Chapter Text
Long ago, in bright beforetime,
In the days of warm beforetime,
I was king of land and water:
I, who raised the great trees growing,
I, who set the rivers flowing,
And all the old ones sang my praises.
Then the planet slowly sinking,
Ever into darkness sinking,
Bound in ice the land and water
Bound me deep beneath the glacier
Slumbering beneath the glacier
Nevermore to see my kingdom
Until the wasps of sky descended.
“Ugh! Godminds, I swear, I am so fucking done with fucking icequakes!”
“So you’ve been saying,” Mikkel commented, though he did sound a little more annoyed about it than usual. Sigrun quickly freed her head from the damn bucket (Mikkel was not going to store it on a high shelf again this time, or so help her) to find him wincing, picking himself up off the ground with a hand on his tailbone.
Sigrun allowed herself a brief, petty grin. Hah! They’ve started knocking him down, too! Then she went over to make sure he was alright.
He was, with the exception of a possible bruise on his ass and a definite bruise on his ego. Good.
“We’re not storing the bucket all the way up on that shelf anymore,” she informed him. “If I find it up there again you’re going on the mutiny list.”
“So you’ve also been saying,” Mikkel replied, already back to his usual calm. Damn howlbear constitution. “I trust you’ve found somewhere else to put it?”
“Literally anywhere else!” Sigrun picked up the bucket and slammed it down on a lower shelf for emphasis. It was kind of precarious to have it stacked on top of the pile of small-vehicle hull patches like that, but whatever.
“Hmm,” said Mikkel. “Well, far be it from me to cast aspersions on soon-to-be-Captain Eide’s extremely well-considered judgment.”
“Damn right it is!” Sigrun yelled at the back of his head as he retreated into the side airlock of the Catspaw.
Ah, the Catspaw. Just a week or two more of finishing touches and she’d be spaceworthy. True, old Nordy had said to have her finished by yesterday, but old Nordy didn’t know the half of what it took to build an entire light transport cruiser, really. Even if they were the ones who’d sent her the specs. They never gave a shit about supply shortages, or ancient equipment that kept seizing up or breaking on her, or the fact that it was just her and Mikkel on this project. Or the damn icequakes.
Still. The Catspaw would be ready soon. And this time, this time, the one to fly her out of here, off of this stupid iceball and into a place with some real adventure, would be Captain Sigrun Eide. Nobody else.
“Nnngh,” Reynir said.
His alarm clock, unfazed, continued beeping and blinking in his face. It took…a while…for the beeping and the blinking to kick his brain into some semblance of gear, enough to realize that the concept of time existed. And that he probably didn’t have enough of it for a proper breakfast.
“Shut that fuckin’ thing up,” Hildur slurred from the bottom bunk. “We all had graveyard last night.”
Right. Rustcreeper crap. Reynir was the only one in the apartment who hadn’t gotten back here after work at…when, three in the morning? And he still felt like he couldn’t have managed more than two or three hours of sleep.
“Sorry,” Reynir said, though it got lost in a gigantic yawn. He slapped around in a direction. Somehow his hand landed on the alarm clock, but not before some muscle in the back of his neck pulled, sending a shock of hot liquid pain up his spine. Reynir grimaced.
Across the room, in the other two bunks, Ari grunted thickly and Thorunn groaned, only to lapse back into snoring after a moment or two. Reynir almost went back to sleep with her, but the back of his neck still hurt and he knew he’d be risking demerits if he was late to another shift.
As he dragged himself into something approaching verticality and prepared to climb down to the floor, his head started to hurt too. Which just wasn’t fair, really. Then again, nothing about his current position was fair. He’d just have to learn to quit worrying about what was fair and what wasn’t. Yep. Any day now.
Until then, he’d…keep on surviving. And helping other people survive. That was why he was here, wasn’t it? You didn’t become an apprentice medic at Sundithbru Base for the perks of the job.
Reynir took his morning shower - two minutes, freezing cold, as per regulation - and tugged on his work uniform. It wasn’t until he was already a couple steps out the door that he remembered he’d left his pad on his desk, and then he had to key back in to get it, and then he glanced at the schedule and discovered that somebody had swapped his shift location overnight. He was supposed to be all the way out at terminal C in…twenty minutes. It would take miraculous luck with the trams to make it there on time.
Reynir was starting to get tired of things not being fair.
“But—”
“The regulations are clear and clearly posted. Recent changes to the personnel permitting system dictate that—”
“Look, I don’t know anything about any ‘recent changes to the personnel permitting system,’” Emil argued. “I’m just here to blow stuff up!”
The attendant sighed through her nose. “No matter what you’re here to do,” she said, with clearly threadbare patience, “you must acquire a permit from Offworld Arrivals before being granted entry to Sundithbru proper. Do you have a permit already?”
“...Well, not exactly, but—”
“Then I’m going to need to see your ID, your face for biometrics, and your transfer order from an appropriate Nordynamics authority. And,” she gave his bright red carrying case a telling glance, “your declaration forms for any hazardous materials you might be trying to bring into Sundithbru Base.”
“These are Nordynamics property!” Emil exclaimed in outrage. “I’m supposed to have them!”
“You still need to declare them, Nordynamics property or not. That was part of the recent changes.”
“Fine.” Emil knew from experience that, past a certain point, there was no point in arguing with stuffy bureaucrats. “Just give me the forms already.”
The attendant held out a hand. Emil slid her his pad, as well as his ID card and the datastick containing his assignment to Sundithbru Base. Paramilitary, demolitions unit, 6-standard-month term of duty. Why they insisted on a whole separate datastick just for that and some head honcho’s signature, Emil had no idea.
After scanning his ID, copying the files off the datastick, and tapping something into his pad, the attendant handed them all back. “Once you’ve finished, get back in line so I can process your declaration and take you out the back to run biometrics. Next!”
Emil stalked off to one of the waiting benches, muttering about stupid red tape. The declaration forms were just as tedious as he was expecting them to be. He was lucky he knew his stuff around explosives, and had weighed them precisely before he shipped out, otherwise this would be even more of a headache. Somehow.
Someone was shouting at one of the other attendants. Emil looked up from his latest boring mess of checkboxes, curious. “This is discrimination!” the guy was saying, clearly incensed about something. “My cousin—”
The attendant said something about waiting one’s turn, and about medics being busy people. “My cousin,” the shouter shouted back, “has needed help since Pori V!”
So this guy and his cousin came from HelsinCo space, then. As Emil watched, the guy threw an angry hand in the air - and the ceiling lights glinted off the metallic seams in his hand and forearm.
Ah. Yeah. That’d do it, Emil thought. A HelsinCo subcon and a cyborg. Tough luck. Wonder what brought him to a Nordynamics base in the middle of nowhere?
Emil got up, still holding his pad and stylus, and wandered closer to the commotion. Shouty cyborg dude had his arm wrapped protectively around another guy’s shoulders. The other guy was much slighter-built, though his hair was the same color as Shouty’s, and wearing at least two coats. Leaning on Shouty. Shivering.
Emil felt a sudden spike of empathy for the other guy; this had to be Shouty’s cousin, the one who needed help. Medical attention, it looked like. Cybermedical? He couldn’t see which, if any, of the cousin’s parts were mechanical, or if any needed repairing.
“Hey,” Emil said, awkwardly, just loud enough to be heard over the rest of the room. “Are you…you know, alright?”
The cousin’s face snapped around to lock eyes with Emil. He was about Emil’s age, with thin pressed-together lips and cheekbones that could have cut titanium, but the most striking part was those eyes. Silver-white. Almost feline in shape. Glowing, with some sort of datastream that only he could see.
Emil couldn’t look away.
“No,” the cousin eventually said. “But I don’t need help.”
Onni was being loud. Too loud. He was shouting at someone from Nordynamics, despite telling Lalli for the entire voyage that they needed to be polite, and his anger and fear and desperation were leaking over the feed he’d forgotten to close, faster and faster. Too loud. Too much.
Lalli just barely stopped himself from hissing. The noise felt like scratching claws in his skull, on top of the lingering spacesickness and the shooting, sparking pain in his arm and ankle. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take—
—no. He could take as much as he needed to. He had to survive this. He wouldn’t fail Onni. He wouldn’t fail anyone, ever again.
“Hey. Are you…you know, alright?”
Lalli’s head whipped around. The person who had spoken was an ordinary human, blonde, young adult man like Lalli, wearing civilian clothes but carrying an explosives case with the Nordynamics logo. Lalli studied his wide blue eyes for any signs of augmentation and found none.
Onni was shouting about medics again. Stupid Onni. Stupid, stupid. If they couldn’t get a cybermedic at Pori V, they weren’t going to get one here.
“No,” Lalli forced out. “But I don’t need help.”
The blonde human frowned. “Your cousin seems to think otherwise…”
“My cousin is stupid. They won’t help me here. So I don’t need help.”
“You don’t know that!” the human protested. Was he actually concerned about Lalli? Lalli couldn’t tell. “They employ tons of…you guys…out this far, so I’m sure there’s a medic or a, a cybermedic who could—”
“No, not here,” Lalli said. “Not from Nordynamics.”
“...Oh.”
The human finally looked away, patting at his hair. He didn’t seem to have anything else to say. Lalli almost wanted him to keep talking, surprisingly enough. He was confusing and annoying, like all people (especially humans), but a much less agonizing thing to focus on than the noise.
Lalli breathed. He’d long ago given up trying to stop shivering, even though every movement hurt his arm and ankle; it was a surefire sign that there was a short circuit somewhere, that his stupid broken synth parts were draining energy from his biocore - from his organic body - faster than he could replenish it with food and sleep. It hurt, but it also didn’t matter. No Nordynamics cybermedic would help a sketchy drifter from deep in HelsinCo space, no matter how badly damaged. And this random human, however much he seemed to give a shit about Lalli (for some strange and very stupid reason), was definitely not a cybermedic.
It didn’t matter. He would be fine. He had to be.
He would be fine.
Reynir was just finishing up an inventory check when he heard the raised voices from one of the Offworld Arrivals intakes. He couldn’t tell who was shouting, of course, didn’t recognize any of the voices, but more than once he heard the word “medic.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Brynja advised him as soon as she spotted him looking. “Just some offworld fucker making trouble. Like as not nobody’s even injured. Not worth the AWOL demerit, anyhow.”
Reynir ignored her, frowning.
That voice didn’t sound like the entitled “offworld fuckers” any spaceport medic had to deal with, the rich old geezers who had just discovered that spacesickness existed or whatnot. That sounded…desperate. Cousin, the loudest of the raised voices kept saying. My cousin. A medic. Now.
“Hey! Where are you - well, don’t expect me at your funeral, then,” Brynja grumbled, as Reynir grabbed a medkit from his freshly inventoried stock and dashed off as fast as the crowd of people flowing in the opposite direction would let him.
“Who needed a medic!” Reynir called as soon as he managed to push his way inside, also ignoring the alarm from going the wrong way through a one-way security door. “Uh - let me through, please, I’m a medic, someone needed a medic!”
The shouting abruptly stopped. At least ten people were now staring at him; he froze up for a moment, unable to figure out which needed help, but then a man with a big red hazmat case - a boy, really, about Reynir’s age - waved frantically and called back, “Over here!”
Reynir wasted no time getting over there, ignoring a couple affronted glares from people he might have bumped into on the way. Man, he was good at ignoring things.
“You…are a medic?” asked a different man incredulously, standing close to the one with the hazmat case. Reynir noted the sleek synthetic paneling covering both his arms, almost like real skin except for the snow-white color.
“Yes!” said Reynir. Well, it was technically true. “Were you the one who needed…?”
“My cousin,” the cyborg bit out, indicating the much smaller young man huddled under his arm, and underneath the cyborg’s coat as well as his own. “Are you also a cybermedic?”
“Yes, I am,” Reynir said, on the same technicality - he’d had about the same amount of training in both organic and cybermedical practice, which was. Probably not enough. But enough to at least see what was wrong!
“Excuse me!” One of the Arrivals attendants had actually left their booth to come stare down the cyborg. “Even if this is a medical emergency, I at least need an ID—”
“My name’s Onni,” the cyborg growled, opening his mechanical hand to project a holo of an ID card in the attendant’s face. “Onni Hollola. This is Lalli Hollola. And his life is in danger, so I need you to move.”
Reynir looked at the card and…blinked. What…? No, that was stupid. And even if that weird little feeling was true, he wasn’t about to announce it, not here anyhow.
The card scanned fine when the attendant checked it with their pad. So clearly Reynir was just dumb or sleep-deprived or both. “Come on, this way!” Reynir told the Hollola cousins, trying to spot the badly limping Lalli in case he fell, a consideration which earned him a faint hissy noise of protest. He barely even noticed that the guy with the red hazmat case had slipped through the door behind him.
It all happened so fast. One minute, Lalli was suffering in the Offworld Arrivals room with Onni and the stupid blonde human and the crowd and the noise. The next, a strange medic with abominably messy red hair had bundled them all into the next room, a wider concourse. Fewer people. Benches on the side. Onni’s shock now bleeding over the feed.
The medic sat Lalli down on one of the benches. “Hi. Lalli, right? My name’s Reynir, I’m here to help. May I - I’m gonna have to get this sleeve off your arm to see how bad the damage is, okay? Can I take off the other jacket too? I’m sorry these aren’t the best facilities, but, you know, first aid, if you need help now you need help now, y’know? Oh Godminds ouch, that looks like it has to hurt…”
Reynir kept talking. On and on, only pausing to breathe. His voice was constant and grating and Lalli decided he hated it, but it wasn’t quite as bad as being back in there and anyway he had to tolerate it if he wanted to get his stupid body fixed.
Over Reynir’s head, as the strange annoying medic examined the damage to Lalli’s arm and kept talking, Lalli caught the eyes of…the blonde human. Why was he still here?
This didn’t quite feel real. Any of it. Suddenly getting…some form of treatment, anyway, from a Nordynamics medic who was just weird in a way Lalli couldn’t describe. The blonde human standing there as though he’d forgotten how his legs worked. Onni, processes working double-time on his end of the feed to make sense of it all, making Lalli’s own sense of time feel strangely skewed.
Was he dissociating? Was dissociation a bad sign? He didn’t know.
Everything still hurt.
“...So, uh,” Reynir said, “I can…do a little tiny bit here but we’re going to have to take you over to the spaceport hospital to really fix this up. These field medkits don’t have much in the way of…synth repair stuff. So yeah.”
Lalli realized Reynir wasn’t talking anymore. And that his boot was off, revealing the other ugly break in his synthetic ankle, all the way down to the titanium-alloy struts and servomotors that passed for bone. When had that happened?
“Uh…should I…?” said the blonde human.
“Go away,” Onni snarled, at the same time as Lalli said, in an uncharacteristically small voice, “Stay.”
He had no idea where that had come from. At this point he was past trying to find out.
Awkwardly, the blonde human stepped around Onni and Reynir to perch on the bench next to Lalli, still keeping at least twenty or thirty centimeters of distance between them. Lalli appreciated it, in a weird way. He thought if one more person touched him right now, he’d do something he and Onni would both regret.
Above, a PA system crackled to life. “Reynir Arnason,” Reynir jolted in surprise, almost bumping Lalli’s broken foot, “please report to the med station in sector C-twelve west—”
Whatever else the PA would have told Reynir to do, it never got to, because the whole world shook and sent it crackling back into useless static. Shook, rumbled, built pressure behind Lalli’s eyes until he wanted to scream, the noise had been bad but this was unbearable, he looked desperately at Onni, trying to press every distress code he knew through the overloading feed, a silent machine’s plea for HELP—
Onni crumpling to his knees, right alongside Reynir, Reynir managing to gasp out “Brace—”
Sideways. Falling. Only for a moment, but enough to send the stupid clueless human sprawling on top of Lalli. Lalli hissed, might have screamed as the human’s stupid shoulder collided with his sparking arm and the human tried to hang on to him for balance.
The human can’t hear this, he had just enough spare processing power to think. He can’t hear the planet howling. All he knows is the quake. Stupid. Stupid.
Lucky.
The howling went on and on and on and it made every one of Lalli’s metal bones want to shatter under the force. Until it didn’t - until the world stopped shaking and roaring and Lalli could almost allow himself to believe that his living hell was over.
(The howl didn’t stop. Not completely. Somewhere under the organic parts of his brain, he knew it wouldn't.)
The quake subsided. Reynir realized he was flat on his face on the ground, one hand clutching Onni’s ankle, the other clutching the edge of the bench.
“Icequake,” he tried to explain, as soon as he could find the breath. Had he been screaming? “Sorry, I’m so sorry, they usually don’t - get that bad, I don’t know what that was—”
His ears were ringing, throbbing with the pound of his heartbeat. The back of his neck was on fire. The quake sending him flying must have pulled that muscle again. Really badly.
His surroundings came slowly back into focus. Lalli was busy shoving…hazmat case guy?…off of him with his good arm, spitting like a cat in agony. The medkit had spilled during the quake; gel patches and antimicrobial sprays littered the floor. All the other travelers on the concourse were picking themselves up with shouts and curses. And Onni…
Onni was still lying on the ground, clutching at the back of his own neck, staring at Reynir. Direct eye contact. He hadn’t done that before. Onni’s eyes were silver, shining with projected data. Something about the gaze made Reynir feel shaky and brittle, like the quake’s quieter aftershocks would tear him apart.
“You heard that,” Onni said.
“The - quake?” Reynir guessed. “It’s an icequake, of course I—”
“No,” Onni cut him off. Out of the corner of his eye Reynir spotted another silver, staring glow. Lalli. “You heard. That. What’s below us. The planet.”
“The - ? I mean, you were screaming but I have a feeling that’s not - sure that felt horrible and I hated it but—”
“Look at me,” Onni hissed. “I don’t know who you are, but you are not just another godsdamn cybermedic.”
“Just like your name isn’t Onni Hollola?” Reynir blurted out.
Silence, in their little corner of the concourse. Onni stared. Lalli stared. The boy with the red hazmat case stared.
“…Holy Godminds I do not know where that came from, I am so sorry,” Reynir tried to apologize. “Of course your name’s Onni Hollola, you said so, your ID checked even though—”
“Even though it shouldn’t have,” Onni breathed. “What the fuck. What the fuck.”
Whatever else Reynir was going to say, it completely left his brain. Because he had known. Which was impossible. All of this was impossible.
Godminds, the back of his neck really hurt.
“Alright,” Mikkel grumbled, trying fruitlessly to ruffle all the powdered eggs out of his hair. “I owe you a thousand credits. Icequakes are officially more of a ‘royal pain in the ass’ than nosy Nordynamics auditors.”
“Told you so!” Sigrun yelled, in between loud and vitriolic curses. She…did not sound like she was on the roof of the Catspaw anymore. That was concerning. While the Catspaw was not a large vessel by any stretch of the imagination, getting thrown off her roof by an icequake would still have been quite the tumble.
Sighing, Mikkel shut off the stove and grabbed the emergency medkit from the hallway. He emerged from the side airlock to find his worries confirmed: Sigrun was sitting on the ground, one hand held tight to her other shoulder, still swearing a blue streak.
She snorted when she saw him. “You look ridiculous. No eggs for breakfast, then?”
“Sadly, no,” Mikkel said, walking over and opening the medkit. “The eggs have fallen victim to Isheim’s largest ‘royal pain in the ass.’ Any open wounds?”
“Fuck,” Sigrun groaned. “No, I don’t think so. My shoulder just fucking hurts. Ow.”
Mikkel examined it. Indeed, her injury seemed limited to blunt trauma only. And her head looked fine; like as not, she had managed some kind of shock-absorbing maneuver as she hit the ground. Sigrun was clever like that.
“Jacket off,” Mikkel said brusquely.
Sigrun glared. “Why? I told you, I’m not bleeding—”
“I’m not actually a trained medic,” he reminded her. “I cannot tell through a thick winter coat whether or not your shoulder is dislocated.”
She bellyached and swore some more, but stood up and let Mikkel help her out of her coat. With only a tight thermal sweatshirt over the offending shoulder, he could see the odd position of the joint clearly.
Mikkel frowned. Last time he had popped a shoulder back into its socket, it had been his own, years ago, and it had hurt for rather longer than he expected afterward.
“Oh for Godminds’ sakes,” Sigrun snapped. “Just shove the damn thing back in so I can get back to work.”
“It is not that simple and you know it,” Mikkel said, knowing he’d be ignored. He was…pretty sure the ligaments belonged that way, so he should push at this angle… “Warning, this will hurt.”
“Of course it will. Do your w - fuck shitting godsdamn!”
Sigrun continued her foul-mouthed tirade, but she did it while rolling her shoulder in what looked like a near-normal range of motion. Mikkel decided to count it a success.
Of course, that was when Isheim’s second largest royal pain in the ass decided to show up.
“Ms. Eide? Mr. Madsen?” said a cool, obnoxiously self-assured voice from a little further up the shipbuilder’s berth. “I do hope I’m not…interrupting anything?”
If looks could kill, Ragna Kristjansdottir, senior requisitions auditor for Nordynamics Inc. at Sundithbru Base, would have died slowly, bloodily, and creatively many times by now. And that was just counting Sigrun’s looks. As it was, the woman simply gave Sigrun and Mikkel one of her smug little half-smiles, taking their silence as permission to approach.
It seemed that, this time, it fell to Mikkel to be the diplomat. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said cordially, willing Ragna not to focus too hard on Sigrun’s death glare. “What brings you out here today?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Ragna said with an airy wave. It was always something, or she’d have commed them instead of making the trek from her office in person. “Merely a question of numbers. I take it the percentage completion on the NS Catspaw that you reported on Friday was…not a computational error?”
“Unfortunately not,” Mikkel admitted. “We are a team of two, and we are, ah - as they say, and as I am sure you can tell from our operating budget, flying by the seat of our pants.”
Ragna raised an eyebrow. “So you blame your operating budget for your consistent failure to meet expectations?”
Mikkel opened his mouth to say something about Nordynamics’ expectations and the relative realism thereof, but Sigrun cut him off. “Yes! What the hell do you think? That a synthbeast hunter and a, whatever Mikkel is, can build an entire godsdamn space transport from nothing but blueprints in three months??”
“Sigrun—”
“Interesting.” Ragna didn’t look the least bit fazed by the outburst. “As a suggestion, from one loyal Nordynamics employee to another, I’d be a bit more professional if I were you. Wouldn’t want someone with managerial authority, say, a senior auditor perhaps, to stroll by and decide to write you up for disorderly conduct.”
Sigrun seethed, visibly. In a desperate attempt to salvage the situation, Mikkel said, “While I…would not put it in so many words, Ms. Eide does have a point about our training and capabilities. We are almost through with needing a new-materials budget, on the Catspaw at least; if we could have a little bit of funding to subcontract a trained mechanic, even part-time, I’m sure we could—”
Ragna laughed. It was not a kind or humorous sound. “What you have is what you’ll get, Madsen,” she said. “Only so long before Nordynamics decides your team is a waste of time, after all. Better…how do they say, light a fire under that pants seat you claim to be flying by, hm?”
She walked off down the row of builder’s berths without waiting for an answer. Sigrun at least had the decency to wait until she was out of sight before spitting furiously at her retreating back.
“Godsdamned fucking ungrateful son of an Antarean jungle slug,” Sigrun hissed. “Thinks she can intimidate me.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that particular son of an Antarean jungle slug does control our purse strings,” Mikkel said heavily. “And at the rate we’re going…”
“We need a mechanic,” Sigrun said. Despite her protests about not having been intimidated, there was a hollow ring to her voice that hadn’t been there before. “We need a crew. We need more time. What the fuck were they even thinking, assigning us this much in this little time while dangling a promotion over my goddamn head. Again.”
Mikkel refrained from saying what he really thought Nordynamics was trying to do to Sigrun. Instead he said, “I know. But, unless you want to flee to Hunger and ruin your corporate credibility for a hundred thousand extra credits…”
“What we have is what we’ll get,” Sigrun finished. She looked up at the Catspaw and didn’t say anything more for a long, painful moment.
“We’ll get there. One way or another. You’ll have your ship,” Mikkel reassured her, with more certainty than he himself felt.
Emil officially had no idea what was going on anymore. First the medic had shown up, which was a surprise. Then Shouty’s cousin - Onni’s cousin Lalli - had asked him to stay, in that small broken voice, so what was he supposed to do but obey? Even if that meant blowing off the declaration forms and biometric scan he was supposed to be doing, which he would definitely catch hell for later?
And then, while the medic (Reynir, apparently) was looking over Lalli’s injuries and chattering way too much - the quake happened.
Emil had made a total fool of himself during the quake. Of course. The first sudden lurch ruined his balance, and then the entire world tipped on its axis and sent him sprawling all over Lalli, trying to grab Lalli’s shoulders and hair for support. You know. Lalli. The badly injured cyborg, and the only person who actually wanted him there, maybe.
And then, afterward, things got even weirder. Reynir and Onni almost seemed to be talking in code, while Lalli stared at them both and Emil wondered what the hell they were talking about. Apparently Onni’s name might not be Onni after all? Had Reynir just…guessed that, out of the blue?
Emil, not sure what else to do, had called an ambulance. Maybe he should have left that to Reynir, but Reynir had looked almost as out-of-it as the cyborgs at the end there. He’d half expected the paramedics to complain about having to treat Lalli’s injuries like normal human ones, but they didn’t. They just took the cyborgs and Reynir into the back of the ambulance and flew away.
Alright.
Emil took a deep breath. He found a tram headed to the personnel office so he could get his room assignment, sat down, and did not think about Lalli saying he didn’t need help, about the way he held pain in his body until he shivered with it and even his flesh-and-blood parts looked ready to crack, about the tone of his voice as he’d told Emil to stay.
More deep breaths. What a way to start a new life: by ducking spaceport security, completely by accident, in order to follow some random cyborg he’d never met, who now probably hated Emil’s guts. Amazing. Wonderful.
He heard a siren, somewhere far away, and didn’t think about Lalli’s eyes squeezing shut in pain as the medics and Onni lifted him into the ambulance.
Onni sat in the hospital room, rubbing a corner of Lalli’s blanket absently between his fingers, and did what he did best.
He and Lalli were not, technically, off-grid. Technically. They stayed as isolated as they possibly could, making only the bare minimum of contact with the wider network to avoid arousing suspicion, but if you asked the system, they were on-grid. Legal, documented, so who cared if the details of their names or histories sometimes…altered themselves a little, with no metadata saying how or why and nobody the wiser?
Apparently, Reynir did.
Reynir. Onni couldn’t afford to think too hard about the kid right now - he was too busy covering Lalli’s tracks, not to mention Reynir’s and his own - but… Reynir had actually caught the subtle forgeries in the ID Onni had presented to that security officer, and then the icequake had laid him out just as flat as Onni and Lalli both, and something was telling Onni that wasn’t a coincidence.
Whatever. That could go on his list of things to think about later. He had hospital records to fudge.
Lalli stirred. His eyes cracked open, still squinty with sleep, but there was a question in them.
“I don’t know what’s up with Reynir,” Onni replied. “Stay off the feed, I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Mrrr,” Lalli said. Which in this case meant I like the feed better, but fine. And then, still looking straight at Onni, “He’s latent.”
What? “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s a myth.”
“No it isn’t, stupid. I’ve seen others.”
“Really. You never told me.”
Lalli shrugged a little, movement still slow and hesitant despite his completely reconstructed arm. “Didn’t need to. We didn’t know them.”
Onni stuck the revelation, that Lalli had apparently spotted multiple latents before with nothing more than his eyes and faint threads of grid connection, directly on the ‘to think about later’ list. That list was getting longer by the minute now, it felt like.
After a minute’s silence for a particularly tricky operation (assuming direct command of a cleaning drone in order to access an isolated permanent-records system), Onni asked, “How do you tell, exactly?”
“I see it.”
Typical Lalli, vague and possibly nonsensical. “There’s nothing to see. That’s…kind of the point of being latent.”
“Nothing to see for you, maybe. Stupid.”
Onni sighed. “I don’t see how that’s even possible, Lalli. They’d have to be on-grid, and you can hardly go on-grid without knowing about it, can you?”
Lalli scowled at him, that peculiar expression that meant he would be calling Onni stupid in the less affectionate way now if it weren’t a waste of breath. “Non-grid connections exist. Especially on this planet. Something’s…weird.”
“That would be the city. I’m sure there’s plenty of off-grid folks living there—”
“Not the city.”
Onni stared at Lalli, even managed a brief poke over the feed, but Lalli volunteered nothing more. Without much attention to spare from his hacking - didn’t Reynir know those supply cabinets were monitored? - Onni couldn’t keep a close eye on Lalli’s status, assumed after a while of silence that he’d fallen back asleep, but then…
“It’s something else. Something big. That’s how I knew for sure about Reynir - he heard it in the quake, but the human didn’t.”
That was…as true as it was worrying. The human, the annoyingly clingy blonde one who likely hadn’t even meant to smuggle a crapton of explosives through spaceport security, had reacted to the icequake like any other moderate-level seismic event, where to Onni and Lalli (and Reynir ) it had been anything but.
I was king of land and water:
I, who raised the great trees growing,
I, who set the rivers flowing,
And all the old ones sang my praises…
Onni shuddered. That snatch of verse had been thrown at him on the Dreamweave last night, while the transport cruiser waited in a holding orbit over this godsforsaken iceball. He didn’t remember the rest of the poem, because that had been the bit that stuck in his head during the icequake, when he seriously thought the sheer overload would crush his skull like a ripe blueberry.
Something else. Something big.
Onni sank a little further into his chair, grabbed Lalli’s hand instead of the corner of his blanket, and feared.