Cosmosis

Shatter

“Vein or artery matters, Caleb,” Dyn said.

“You’ve stuck me a hundred times,” I hissed. “Why can’t you tell?”

“They’re a different person!” Dyn protested. “I know how to draw blood from you not just any human.”

“Stop yelling,” Nai chastised. “Getting angry helps no one, least of all…her.”

Dyn held Nora’s arm, carefully examining the veins below her elbow.

“Nai, help me get her out of the voidsuit. Caleb, take a step back and breathe for a minute or you’re going to pass out.”

Dyn insistently put himself between Nora and me, forcing me to back off. My heart was pounding harder now than when I’d been fighting.

Every second was agony.

Nai and Dyn stayed calm, undoing the clasps on the spacesuit the Vorak had put her in. It didn’t take them long to get the helmet and torso portion off.

My gut wrenched.

Her long-sleeved shirt was from the San Diego Zoo, and it had bullet holes in it along with being totally caked with blood.

The arms were the crucial part right now. I wanted to object when Nai tore the sleeve completely away rather than deal with the hassle of rolling it up.

She was right, of course. Nora’s life was at stake. But I wasn’t in a stable mind right now.

Progress stalled though.

Nai prodded me psionically, beckoning me to come back with a jut of her head.

“You need to cascade her arm, figure out vein from artery,” Nai instructed. “I can’t get enough detail.”

Nora was unconscious, and I was paranoid she’d lost too much blood.

The concept of a blood transfusion was not too hard to grasp, but Dyn insisted that the direction of the needle mattered too.

A needle in the donator’s vein needed to go into the flow, while for the receptor it needed to be with the vein’s flow.

I wasn’t sure if that was the case in humans, but what else was there?

Weeks ago, I’d cascaded Nai’s head trying to diagnose her psionic troubles. The complexity of flesh had made it nigh impossible to make sense of what I felt.

Cascading an arm was not much better. I nearly screamed in frustration, but I knew it wouldn’t help. So I bit my tongue harder and focused.

Shortcuts then.

I already knew what I was looking for: essentially a tube with blood flowing up her arm toward her heart and lungs rather than away from it.

The cascade needed…reformatting, of a kind. Instead of a mass inquiry like ‘what is this made of, & how is it structured?’, the cascade’s information shifted as I focused on what I wanted it to find. ‘Show me what is structured like this’.

I knew what I wanted to find, and how it was structured. I needed to find it.

The picture sharpened, and a few lines running up her forearm lit up to my mind’s senses.

“I think I have a vein,” I told Dyn, pointing out the largest and most visible vein.

“You’re going to have to make me a needle,” Dyn said. “Unless Nai can make one.”

“A needle small enough for a vein would take me an hour. Maybe more,” Nai said. “But I can give you gloves.”

“Gloves,” Dyn confirmed. “Bandages too. A pad and tarp to lie her on, if you can.”

Nai bit off a complaint and went about creating what Dyn asked for.

She was focused on the goal.

It was hard for me to do the same. I was overwhelmed.

Ignore it for now. Shove it…don’t shove it down, but shove it aside. Just for now. I needed to focus on making the needle.

So many had poked into me recently and contacted my cascade as a result, so I had a crystal-clear picture of what I needed.

Hollow steel cylinder with a tapered point.

It was hard.

The needle needed to be both ultra-thin and empty. I was a precise Adept. More precise than Nai.

But six tries didn’t make a bore that was hollow all the way through.

On the seventh failure, I screamed and smashed a hand into a wall. The panel cracked and it only made me more upset.

Nai yanked a hair from her head, handing it to me.

“Stop,” she instructed. “Breathe and ignore everything that isn’t your goal. Cascade this.”

I had no alternatives nor suggestions, so I did.

It was a hair. Slightly thicker than a human one, but then again, maybe only slightly thicker than mine.

“Make a copy,” she instructed.

I did.

“Now leverage your weaknesses. Your force of emergence is poor. It means if you already have a thin strand—” she indicated the thin hair I materialized, “—then you can materialize something atop and around it.”

“Then dissolve the fiber,” I realized. “Make it in stages.”

I encased the fiber in something akin to my previous attempts, and this time, when I dissolved the facsimile hair, I had a neat hypodermic needle. Slightly wider than what I had in mind, but I had not luxury to be picky.

“Got it,” I said.

“Sterilize,” he told me. “And we need two.”

I made a second needle, and a tube to connect them. Nai made a rough improvised tub and filled it with what smelled like sterile alcohol.

I said, dunking the needles and tube before handing them to Dyn.

“Hurry,” I asked him, failing to keep my voice steady.

He slid one into my arm with speed that only came from practice. The other needle went into Nora’s arm a moment later.

“You’re sure your blood is compatible?” Dyn asked. “Farnata have different proteins, and it makes transfusions—”

“[O negative,] universal donor,” I said. “I got asked to donate blood once or twice back home because of it. Usually you have to be eighteen, so my parents even had to give their approval. But I’ve done this—”

I was babbling. My mouth clamped shut, and Nai read my face.

“She’ll live,” she insisted.

I shakily watched my blood flow out through the tube into Nora’s arm.

But after only a minute, Dyn pulled the needle out of her arm.

“No more,” he said.

“What? That—” I started.

“You don’t have an endless supply,” Dyn rebuked. “And her wounds are patched for now.”

“…She’s unconscious,” I noted. “Do you know how long…”

No. Of course not.

“Lie down, Caleb,” Nai said. “We have plenty of time.”

“Not feeling restful right now,” I said.

“Then go poke around the ship,” she said. “Familiarize yourself. It’s a few days before we arrive.”

I was venomously reluctant to walk away from Nora, but Nai and Dyn shooed me away.

“Go find us some water,” Nai asked. “We’ll keep her stabilized.”

This rocket was the smallest I’d ridden. I wasn’t counting the tiny pod we’d taken to escape Korbanok.

From Ramshackle, we’d launched two ships that were barely that. They’d been hulls with seats and harnesses but little more. It hadn’t even had water recycling, only a reservoir supply and disposal. Everything about the rockets had screamed ‘single use’.

This one was smaller, and a lot more livable.

It had carpet in some spots, even.

The whole thing was unexpectedly posh. The lavatory wasn’t large, but it wasn’t cramped either. There were only four beds—eight, if you counted the cots that unfolded from the walls. And for a ship this size, that gave a very high ratio of space to people. The Casti who’d been with Dyn were settling on the upper levels of the rocket. Unlike the Ramshackle rockets, there was a dedicated piloting space at the top of this ship. The seating was spacious and even reclined to look up at the stars through a dome.

It had been in a hangar attached to a house that I hoped was upscale. Had we stolen some rich alien’s yacht-rocket? Or had it been lent to us? Given?

Exploring the rocket was a cold reminder. The layout and design were completely different, but it was all too similar to crawling through a certain other ship with Daniel.

I didn’t know if I should feel dread, joy, gratitude, or shame. I’d killed Daniel. And today I’d come within inches of killing another human.

I hadn’t though.

At the last second, I’d made the connection.

The horrible part was…I knew I couldn’t ask myself to do any better than I had.

There was absolutely no way I could have known.

Every decision made sense, even now, looking back.

I wanted to throw up, but I hadn’t found a sink on this stupid ship yet.

…

…No, I had. The lavatory on the fourth level had a sink. I was scattered, barely paying attention to what was in front of me.

I made my way back toward the bottom level, only to find Nai and Dyn had somehow carried Nora up the ladder one level to the dormitory.

Dyn had a finger on Nora’s neck, measuring her pulse.

“You didn’t need water,” I accused. There was a tiny spigot and basin in the corner.

“Nope,” Nai said. “You needed a distraction. Still do.”

“Then distract me,” I said. “Don’t just send me after nothing.”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Dyn, is she stable?”

“…Yes,” he said. “She’s not bleeding, and her blood pressure isn’t dropping is it?”

“No,” Nai confirmed, her cascade washing through the floor into Nora. “If she’s okay for now, can you give Caleb and I some time to speak in private?”

“Couldn’t you use psionics?” he asked. “I’d never know.”

“It would be rude,” she said. “Now shoo. Go see if anyone else was injured.”

“If anything changes at all…” Dyn started.

“We’ll yell,” Nai assured him.

Dyn left Nai and I alone with an unconscious Nora.

“First,” Nai said, “you need this back.”

She psionically lobbed a construct—my receiver—to me.

“It was entangled with the radar,” she explained.

“I figured it was something like that,” I said. “I could still receive signals from you though.”

“But only when we were close enough. My best guess is that you were still accessing the receiver even when it was in my head.”

“How?”

She shrugged.

“The absolute limit of my Adept range is just shy of a hundred meters. Now, my effective range isn’t even half that. My precision isn’t great, and it only gets worse the further away I’m trying to make things. But since your effective range is about ten meters, I’m going to guess your absolute limit is about thirty. Care to estimate about how far away I was before you stopped receiving me?”

“Somewhere near a hundred-thirty meters?”

She nodded.

“No proof right now, but it seems like you could somehow still access the receiver directly as long as our Adept ranges were overlapping.”

“That could explain how I received your signal in the Green Complex when Vather was disrupting it. You got close enough during my biopsy. Vather’s field must not be able to suppress the connection if we’re near enough. Something to keep in mind.”

Nai gave a nod. “We’ll explore it,” she said. “But we don’t need to worry about Vather.”

“You got him?” I asked.

“Megatherium too,” she said.

“…Told you so,” I said.

“Yes you did.”

I pulled at the edges of the receiver Nai returned me, tying it back into my transmitter. As the pieces slid back together, they shuddered, and I felt a pull toward Nai’s mind.

On the rocket to Archo, I’d glimpsed part of her mind and I could feel the same thing about to happen. I clamped down on the connection, halting it on the spot.

I sensed Nai had done something similar. And she didn’t look surprised that she’d needed to.

“I thought so,” she said.

“I—I don’t know what that was,” I said.

“It happened before,” she said. “I saw…I saw your memory of getting abducted. I think I saw your friend too.”

I could only pray she hadn’t seen me fight Daniel.

“And you saw me,” she said, “before the Razing.”

It seemed like she was prompting me, inquiring how much I’d seen.

“…You didn’t know what was happening. In the moment, you just knew you were going to space. You were happy. But the memory is entirely a bad one.”

She nodded. “If my mother had just been keeping it from me, to keep me calm, I don’t think I would look back on that flight so poorly.”

“But she didn’t know either,” I gathered. “The Razing started after you launched.”

She nodded again. “My mom worked on one of the super high orbital platforms over Farnata. She was going back on rotation, and there was an opportunity for her to bring someone along for a week or two. It was initially going to be my older sister Nak. But she knew how much fun it would be for me and Nerin. So she did the math and read the flight parameters. Seating wasn’t restricted on this rocket; it was by weight instead. Nerin and I were still small enough that we only counted for one adult passenger. So my mom, my little sister, and I all flew up into space. And an hour after we left the ground…”

She quieted, choking up.

I suggested from experience.

She nodded, taking a few moments to steady herself.

“…Someone…something suppressed the planet’s magnetosphere. The atmosphere didn’t just lose its shield, something made it slough away from the planet a few billion liters at a time. In just a few hours, pressure dropped across the whole planet. Everyone died. There was the odd pressurized bunker in a few places, submarines and the like, but it was an entire planet. There was no way to get everyone to safety. I was just a kid, but I smiled as my father and older brother and sister suffocated to death. We didn’t even learn about what was happening until we reached the station…I had so much fun getting to see space for the first time and…”

As she spoke, images I had no basis for drifted into mind. A young Farnata carrying a trunk out an eclectic apartment building with a parent. Two young girls goofing off while their mother tried to wrangle them toward their shuttle. An electric roar as the rocket pushed off the ground.

For that, I didn’t dare apologize. It would have been empty words next to the enormity of what had happened.

“I don’t know how much you actually saw,” she said. “But I thought you should know.”

“…How much did you see…from me?” I asked.

“Not much at first,” she said. “For the first few minutes after, it was just snatches. But then I reviewed what I remembered you telling us. Details…filled in. I saw you doing the math on your food. I saw your friend’s Adeptry. I’m sorry too. No one should have had to go through that.”

“Nai, I know you don’t like the idea of anyone else in your head—” she held up a hand to cut me off.

She held out her palm, and dark metal twisted itself into existence.

A simple handle with a hammer by the thumb, a small cylinder with just enough space for six rounds, and a blocky barrel.

She’d examined the revolver she’d made like she was seeing it for the first time.

“I think I got this from your mind,” she said. “It is…similar to old guns from Farnata…but not the same. It is not from my planet. I can feel it.”

“It’s called a [revolver],” I told her.

“Somehow the idea got from your head to mine,” she said warily.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sounding more exasperated than I meant to. “I…I don’t know what I’m doing. And I keep finding out about mistakes after—”

“Stop,” she said. “Stop apologizing. I’m not upset.”

“I don’t know why or how anything from my head could wind up in yours,” I admitted. “Or vice versa.”

“I am worried,” she conceded. “But not upset. After all, I’m the second best at psionics in the known universe, and I’m stumped too.”

I snorted.

“When I caught up to you on Korbanok, when you were already with Tasser,” she said. “I told him if you didn’t give up your gun I was going to kill you to be safe.”

“And then…I did,” I recalled. “…And there must have been some part of you that was sure it was because I understood what you’d just said.”

Nai nodded.

“I-I’m…paranoia comes easily to me. I’m not proud of that.”

She flipped the gun in her palm, holding out the grip for me to take.

“You told me on your planet bumping fists was about trusting the other person. To let them be ready to do harm, trusting that they won’t attack you.”

“I was guessing,” I told her. “It could be a lot of things.”

She gave a conceding nod. “True, but then it can mean this: you once gave up a weapon. Now I’m giving you this one.”

I took the revolver.

“So survive?” I asked. “I almost killed another human today.”

“I know,” she said. “You skirted disaster, but…”

“…I keep trying to tell myself I should have known, or recognized the signs sooner. But if she really had been a Vorak, everything would still apply.”

Nai nodded.

“How am I supposed to keep it in balance?” I asked. “There are people I don’t want to see dead, whether I’m the one killing them or not. And I know there’s people that I need to be ready to kill if I want to make it home—even if I find a less lethal option, I need to be prepared in case there isn’t one.”

“I could tell you about the countless people who do die every day. How they’re some of the ones you don’t want to die, and how you’re not the one killing them,” she said. “How we’re not going to divert our flight trajectory to go help refugees back on Yawhere. We can’t do everything.”

“…We’re only Enumius,” I said. ‘Super able’, it meant. Not ‘all able’.

“You don’t keep it balanced,” Nai admitted. “Not alone. You pick the right people, and you depend on them to help you from being too hard or too soft. Tasser is one person for me, probably for you too. And…I didn’t want to admit it, but I think you’re a good influence on me too…Friends?”

I nodded, wiping tears from my eyes. I couldn’t tell which part of the conversation had brought them on.

“Friends,” I confirmed.

“…Anyway, you should cascade that quickly,” she said, indicating the revolver. “I can’t keep that materialized forever.”

“I already did,” I told her. “And don’t think I didn’t notice it’s not loaded.”

“We’re on a pressurized spaceship right now, and you think I’d give you a loaded weapon?”

“That wasn’t criticism,” I said. “It was approval of good gun-safety.”

“I can teach you to actually shoot when we get to Lakandt.”

“How do you know I can’t already?” I asked.

“You didn’t remember the safety on that first gun,” she replied easily.

“It was an alien gun,” I protested.

“Typical prospecies arrogance,” Nai joked, “assuming Humans were the only ones to come up with gun safeties…”

“I suppose this is a fitting turn,” I said, examining the weapon. “I don’t quite trust myself with a gun, you didn’t quite trust yourself to beat those Vorak…and now here we both are encouraging each other to trust ourselves and [kumbaya].”

“I’d be lying if I said your encouragement didn’t help,” she said.

“I know, I was bragging,” I smirked.

It was her turn to snort.

“So this is what trust feels like? A pound of gunmetal in my hand?” I asked.

“No, that’s about…experience. Surety. Trust is…harder.”

“I trust you, Nai,” I said.

“I know, and I’m going to put it to the test,” she said.

“Incidentally, I hope.”

She nodded. “I want to try and connect our minds again, learn more about it. Is it a bridge? A series of connections? What all can go through it without our notice? Can we learn how to notice it?”

The look on my face spoke for itself. She didn’t miss the expression.

“Nai, if we misstep…Daniel’s consciousness was torn clean out of his body—scratch that, not clean. It was a very messy, rough affair.”

“I know,” she said. “I am not Daniel, though, even if for no other reason than I’m more familiar with psionics than he was. In fact, I know more about it now than you did when you first had him in your head.”

“Why then?” I asked. “Do you really think the benefits are that worth the risk?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “You’ve only just begun to scrape the surface of Adeptry, so trust me when I say psionics are going to shatter conventions left and right. What you’ve built is revolutionary, even if all development stopped right here and now.”

She wore a guilty expression, struggling to look directly at me as she continued.

“But that’s not why. Not really,” she said. “You once guessed it was hard for me to be the Warlock. You realized I don’t like needing to be her. You stopped calling me Torabin after you learned what it meant. You’re the only person to figure it out without me telling them.”

“I might have gleaned that from your own mind without realizing,” I pointed out.

“I thought of that too,” she said. “But that’s not the point. I want to do something more than just being a soldier. I…I just want to be part of something that I know is going to be special. Maybe it’s selfish, but if so, I accept that. I know there’s risks, and I know the last time things went psionically wrong, you lost a friend. But… Hivivi,”

“Doesn’t that mean trust?” I asked.

“Yes, but I mean…” she floundered. “It’s more than just blithely asking you to trust me… Tasser and I, we use the word as a reminder too, an affirmation of trust, despite its risks.”

“You said it was a complicated word.”

“It has connotations of pain too,” she admitted. “When Tasser and I say it to each other, we’re saying, ‘I know it might be painful, and it might even get more painful if I’m wrong, and I could be wrong’…” she trailed.

“…but please trust me anyway,” I finished, following the trajectory of her words.

She nodded.

“Hivivi,” she said. Asked.

“Hivivi,” I echoed. Answering.