Chapter 12 — The New Normal

The blue light of BNCY didn't cast shadows so much as dissolve them.

Amy had noticed this on day one, and had spent several days afterward trying to identify what type of light source produced this quality, and had concluded that it wasn't a type of light source at all — it was an architectural decision. The facility had been designed to eliminate shadow, which eliminated the sense of depth, which eliminated the sense of time. You couldn't tell from the light whether it was morning or evening, which Amy had come to understand was not an oversight.

She sat in the processing chair and let the scanner arm move around her head for the fourth time this week. She kept her hands folded in her lap and her breathing even and her eyes on a point slightly above the technician's left shoulder, which was far enough away to look at nothing while appearing to look at something.

Commander Fredrick stood by the door.

He always stood by the door. Not aggressively. She'd watched him closely enough to know that. He stood with the posture of someone who understood exits as a professional category, which was different from wanting to block them. He was a careful man. He'd built a careful career. He had the kind of face that comes from years of making decisions that other people had to live with — not cruel, just used.

"Any discomfort?" the technician said.

"No," Amy said.

This was a lie in the narrow technical sense. The discomfort was her pyrokinesis running at a temperature she was spending considerable energy managing — the heat behind her sternum, the work of trying to hold something very large in a very small container. She'd been doing it for six weeks. Her hands looked the same. They felt different.

"Clean signature," the technician said. "Integration complete for the week."

Fredrick smiled. Not a bad smile. She'd studied it extensively. "You're doing well," he said. "Both of you."

He looked at Eevi in the chair to Amy's left, who was performing cooperation with the expression of someone who had done many things she hadn't chosen and was getting good at performing them.

"We're trying," Eevi said.

Fredrick nodded. He moved from the door to the window. The processing room had one window, looking out at the glass bridges. He stood there for a moment, looking at something outside Amy's angle of view. Then he turned back.

"The integration period," he said, "is almost complete. After this week, the structure changes." He said it with the ease of a man delivering information he believes is good news. "More autonomy. More access to the facility's research."

"What kind of research?" Amy said.

He looked at her. "The kind that matters," he said.

It was not an evasive answer. It was the answer of a man who believed what he was saying, which was more concerning than evasion.

He left.

Amy watched the door close. She breathed.

She thought about the kind of research that matters, said by the kind of man who meant it.

She thought about Siefr's hands.

Four hundred kilometers south, Rad Albert found Chrys's temperature professionally unacceptable.

"His Hydrolysis Engine is rationing," he said, not looking up from the console. "Which means it's burning reserve. Which means eventually there won't be a reserve."

"What do we do," Marcus said.

"I'm doing it."

Marcus was at the shelter entrance, half in and half out, watching the brush to the south where Sam had gone an hour ago. He hadn't moved from the doorway since she left. This was a fact about Marcus that Rad had observed over many years: the man was incapable of making a decision to stand still when someone he was responsible for was out of sight. He stood in doorways instead. Technically moving. Technically not moving.

On the cot, Chrys breathed. Shallow. Measured. The conduit burns on his arms were dark against his skin, and his color was wrong in the way that Rad had learned, over the years, to distinguish from other kinds of wrong. This was the wrong of a Hydrolysis Engine that had given more than it had.

"The perimeter?" Rad said.

"Extended twenty meters east. Sam and Eon did it this morning."

"Good."

The monitor beeped. The plateau wind moved against the shelter walls, its patient pressure. It was always there. You stopped noticing it and then you noticed it again.

"Rad." Marcus still didn't turn from the doorway. "The device we found in the cache."

"The Predator Eye."

"BNCY manufacture."

"BNCY-adjacent." Rad pulled up the scan on the secondary console — the image he'd been looking at for three days, rotating it, reading its structure. "Standard issue has a stamp. This has nothing. And the frequency signature–" He found the notation. "I've seen it once. Three years ago. Equipment belonging to someone who wasn't authorized to be at the first shelter." He looked at the back of Marcus's head. "Someone ran a parallel operation. Six months before we arrived in this region. Maybe longer."

The monitor beeped.

Marcus was quiet for a long moment.

"Does Amy know?"

"I sent the signature data two nights ago." A pause. "She hasn't responded. She's in the blue building."

"I know where she is."

Outside, in the brush to the south, something moved. Marcus was angled in the doorway before the sound completed itself.

Sam came through the tree line. She was carrying a bird — three wings, bright feathers, which meant she'd gone further south than they'd agreed. Her Sage73 was on her back, barrel-up. She stopped when she saw Marcus's face.

"What," she said.

"We need to move the perimeter. Tonight."

She looked at the bird. She looked at the shelter door, beyond which the monitor beeped its steady rhythm.

"I'll eat first," she said, "and then we'll move the perimeter."

She went past him. He stepped aside. He went back to watching the south.

She sat down across from Rad at the secondary console and looked at the device scan.

"This isn't standard issue," she said.

"No."

"Who builds something that doesn't have a stamp."

"Someone who doesn't want to be found."

She looked at it for another moment. "Or someone who was already found," she said, "and is taking precautions."

Rad looked at her.

"If your cover is blown," Sam said, "you stop putting your name on things."

The monitor beeped.

Rad had no argument for this.