It wasn’t far from where we met Tersine’s scout to the bottom of the mine. And how sudden it was. One moment, we were hurrying down another anonymous passage, and the next, we had rounded a corner, and all the claustrophobia and tension released at once. Directly ahead of us was one of the large chambers.
Right in front of us the tunnel opened up into void. It was just a large chamber, we all knew that, and yet it was impossible not to see it like a moonless night, or a lake of black oil. We slowed down; there was no resistance visible, but that didn’t mean much of anything. There was a brief pause as, all at once, all of the police decided then was the time to reload their weapons, check for jams, adjust their grips. Then we began to advance, step by step, moment by moment. Pre-battle tension saturated the air… until it was broken by an all-too familiar, thickly accented voice, echoing down the passageway.
“I know you’re there, alraune, I know you’re coming. We need to talk.”
Tersine didn’t sound like she was shouting, more like she was speaking at a typical volume and being magnified by some device. I looked back at Laura, who raised an eyebrow in curiosity. I decided, well, the scout had escaped, so might as well respond; every second Tersine spent talking was one second she wasn’t planning an ambush.
“Unless you’d like to surrender,” I shouted back, “what’s there to talk about?”
“Lots of things,” Tersine said. “My friend here says you had an escort with you when she saw you. Are they still with you, or have you come to settle this one on one?”
“It’s just me.”
Why reveal more information than I had to?
“Good, good. I don’t particularly hold to such ideas as ‘honor’, but I must admit that I do feel some slight sense of respect for those who put ideals above everything, even success.” Tersine said it as though we were friends going through a rough spot, all honesty and compassion.
We were still advancing down the hallway, the cops around me looking increasingly disconcerted by the conversation. “So what did you want to talk about?”
“Peace, of course. Putting an end to this pointless war between the two of us. It feels unjust that a creation and a creator be so at odds with one another.”
I rolled my eyes and tried not to say anything too insulting. “You act like this is some personality thing we have going on, and not that I’m a person with a moral core, while you’re a fucking monster who kills anyone who gets in her way!”
“This is war!” Tersine snarled. “You think any of these people around you would hesitate to kill as many Cassandrans as were necessary? I, at least, intend to share my discoveries with the world once this is all over. You only care about victory and your idealistic notions of morality.”
“You’ve already discovered how to make people immortal, Tersine. You made me! Why continue when you’ve already made your perfect alraune?”
“Because you are not perfect,” Tersine said, sounding for just a moment like a professor correcting a too-arrogant student. “Physically, perhaps, but the very fact we are in conflict shows that the mind is far from flawless.”
I was close enough now to where the tunnel opened up into the huge chamber beyond that I could begin see its contents. It was definitely a laboratory, though not quite the same as the last one I’d seen Tersine using. This one was more… arcane. She’d yet to be able to replace the enormous chemical vat that she used to manufacture her wolf-creatures, though some of the steel armatures I saw seemed to resemble parts of that enormous machine. The largest part of her setup was more electromagnetic. Spiraling pathways of wire and metal mesh hung heavy over the room like a shroud. I actually recognized some of the arrangements from my studies of electromagnetovitalics, and the more I looked at them, the more I felt a strange sense of disconcertment. Even deactivated, there was something very wrong.
Tersine was standing in the center of it all, though even she was smart enough to keep a low barrier between herself and the tunnel entrance. She crouched behind a piece of steel plating, her head just barely peeking out so that she could press her lips to the cone she’d been using to magnify her voice.
“What compromise could you possibly even make, then, if you think the fact that I’m even opposing you is some sort of mental flaw?”
“I could fix this all,” she said, now no longer bothering to use the megaphone. “Undo the mistake I made in bringing you here in the first place. I can admit when I have erred, as any good scientist does, and it is my duty to undo that mistake.”
I’ll admit, that one made me chuckle. “That’s your big offer? You’re just going to kill me?”
“Of course not!” Tersine said. “But considering you’ve brought twenty armed police to kill me, I think I can agree you have failed to negotiate in good faith.”
“That was never going to work,” Laura said softly from just behind me.
“Of course not,” I muttered. “There’s no cover here in the tunnel and this is almost certainly some kind of trap. Our best chance is to go on the offense, rush forward, and either take Tersine out immediately or find cover deeper into the room. Got it?”
Silence, interrupted by a few soft clicks as rifles were loaded and revolvers cocked.
“I’m serious,” I hissed. “There can be no hesitation. No cowardice. If Tersine puts us on the back foot for even a second, we’re had.”
But there was no more time to give orders. With my sword in hand and my revolver in the other, just as it always had been, I did the thing I was born to do. I rushed headlong into the chamber. And for once in their damn lives, the police did a half-decent job of actually following me. Not that it did a single thing to help.
I’d expected to see a bunch of wolves hiding off to either side, waiting in a pincer maneuver just out of sight of the tunnel itself. There wasn’t. Most of the room was remarkably calm, though it was far from empty; but there were no enemies visible aside from Tersine. I moved as fast as I could, but she’d made sure that there was no straight shot. Every time I had to weave around some obstacle, that added a fraction of a second to the time it would take me to get within bullet and blade range. I made it about three-quarters of the way there before I was stopped in my tracks by the overwhelming sound of surprised, shocked, and pained screams from behind me.
We were in a salt mine. Above us wasn’t the open sky, but a solid mass of rock and salt, a high dome eighty feet high at the center and sloping down to the edges. Which meant that the expected ambush could come from the one angle that none of us had expected, that being directly above. I turned around just in time to see the last of the wolves dropping down from their metal perches driven into the rock. Only a handful of the police managed to fire off a shot before the wolves were already cutting them apart in the melee.
I needed to get to Tersine. The loss of lives was already inevitable, but killing her would mean the mission counted as a success regardless of lives lost, and there was a chance that her death would stop the wolves. Tersine reacted with remarkable speed. A button was pressed or a switch flipped out of my line of sight, and all at once the room was filled with the deafening whine of charging capacitors, like a camera flashbulb recharging but multiplied by a million. The sound didn’t stop me, though; a moment later, I had Tersine in my sights. I aimed. I pulled the trigger. And I was just a second too late.
Falem was Tersine’s ultimate ace in the hole, the one bludgeon that she could bring to bear no matter the situation, and one that nobody knew how to deal with. She was an automaton, but like nothing anybody had ever seen before, able to think for herself without programming and move with incredible swiftness yet at the same time utterly loyal to Tersine. Her frame was about eight feet tall and bone-thin, with an insectoid appearance usually covered up by a blank mask and a body-clinging white dress. In a fight, she was essentially unstoppable, with bulletproof skin, immense strength, and speed that could keep up with me.
So it only made sense that she had been able to place herself directly in between me and Tersine a fraction of a second before I pulled the trigger. The bullet bounced off of her with a clang, then clattered uselessly to the floor. Falem wasn’t even armed, but she hardly needed to be.
“Storm-child. Sleep now, like death.”
I felt the wave of the psychic command come over me. Falem hadn’t even stopped to let it take effect, probably knowing that the wave would break over my rage like water against a rock, and instead hoping that it would only slow me down long enough for her to take me out bare-handed. It didn’t work; my blade rose up in front of me, clattering off of her hand as it reached out.
Falem was only a distraction between me and Tersine. I rushed around her, firing off another shot, and took a metallic fist to the side of my head. I fell, the shrill whine of the charging device reverberating through my skull, catching myself in a roll. Falem reached out again, not sure to what end, and again my blade rose up to deflect her blow. We duelled for a few seconds, her long limbs and terrible strength against my sword and speed, and while I held my own, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to be able to win. The air was full of electricity; the capacitors were at more than half charge, almost ready for whatever madness Tersine was prepared to unleash. I needed to get to her. So I resorted to one of my classic tricks.
Ducking away from Falem’s bone-shattering jab, I leapt up onto one of the crates nearby. For a second, neither one of us was willing to strike; Falem must have known that time was on her side. So instead of letting her attack me, I feinted to one side, and when she moved to block, I leapt. My torso slammed fully into Falem’s face, which must have been rather disconcerting given the way she flailed. With my legs, I kicked off against her chest, propelling myself upwards until I could get a foot on her shoulder. She bucked back to get me off, which gave me just the momentum I needed to leap over her back and resume my rush towards Tersine.
I had four shots left, or maybe five, and I didn’t wait to start using them. The moment I saw even part of Tersine’s body behind all of her equipment, I fired, then cocked the revolver and prepared to fire again. I fired the first three shots while still running, and missed. Then I rounded a corner, and she was right there in front of me.
Tersine looked at me directly, eyes brimming with hatred and fear. She was wearing something odd, a cowl of steel mesh covering her head, a few strands of hair slipping out of it after she’d put it on in a hurry. For just a moment, I stopped seeing Doctor Nika Tolva Tersiněvka, my hated enemy, and just saw a slightly older, skinny woman leaning against a large machine, panting for breath. For an instant, I hesitated.
Tersine pressed the heel of her palm into a button on the side of the machine. The capacitors discharged all at once, and there was a flash of light that burned the outline of the metal wiring into my eyes.
“Goodb—”
And then I was gone.
…
How do you even describe the void in words? It’s a sensation, an overpowering sensation, but not one that lends itself well to verbal conceptualization. You feel it, when you’re there, you know where you are and what is happening, but where you are is nowhere and what’s happening to you is on the very edge of understanding. That’s only to be expected, of course. By definition, the void is that place which does not exist, it is that which lies outside of the world, the universe, the place in existence where Things Are. I’ll try anyways.
Imagine floating in deep water. You don’t need to breathe, you’re not suffocating, and even though you’re so deep below the surface that there’s no visible hint of the sun, no difference at all between up and down, you don’t feel any pressure. You’re floating, immobile, feeling the resistance of the void-stuff around you, unable to move or orient yourself at all. You also can’t see. Maybe your eyes are closed, or there’s so little light that there’s no difference between your eyes being closed or open. Except, normally, when you’re in absolute darkness or your eyes are closed, the color you see is black, by definition, black is the absence of color.
Now imagine that the absence of color was red. Vermilion red, to be precise. Even though it’s still dark, too dark to see, that darkness, the darkness that should be black, that by its very definition can’t be anything other than black? It’s red. Despite the impossibility of it, the void was red.
But I’m getting away from the metaphor. You’re floating at the bottom of a red ocean, not drowning or being crushed by the pressure, but unable to swim, and blind. You’re also not alone. Don’t ask me how you’re supposed to know; maybe you can hear it as a sound or feel it as some kind of subtle asymmetry in the pressure around you, the metaphor gets kind of flimsy there. You know you’re not alone in the void, and more than that, you know that the other thing that’s in there with you is absolutely fucking massive. It’s bigger than a blue whale, bigger than an aircraft carrier, bigger than anything, the largest creature you can possibly conceive of, and it’s in the water with you. Not passively. It might not know you’re there, not yet, but it has an opinion. It wants you dead.
And then I made it to the far side of the void. The dark-that-was-red blinked back to normal dark, and I forgot where I was. After that, I woke up.
…
Being awake wasn’t much better than being dead. I was barely mobile. My flesh felt absent, hollowed out, and my skin had dried out to the consistency of leather, wrapping tight around my flesh. Pain and other, worse sensations coursed through my nervous system, from my razor-sharp fingers to my too-large feet to a core that felt like it had had pieces of it pulled out with hooks and left to go rancid out there. I was breathing. There was something soft over me, only making it all the more difficult to sort through the awfulness that was happening below.
I opened my eyes, or at least I was fairly sure I did. The only thing I could see was a pale blur, shining blinding in my face. I tried to move, to lift my hand, but it could barely support its own weight, let alone that of the soft, smothering material. Even breathing was arduous, my lungs pumping steadily but incapable of fully satiating my need for air. There was something over my mouth, not blocking the airflow but disturbing it, something fibrous like dry grass.
My sight was useless, my taste and smell capturing nothing but stale skin, my sense of touch was blocked off by the all-encompassing fabric. But I could hear. If I closed my eyes, I could hear distant sounds. There were voices, I was fairly sure, and I could hear the muffled sound of wheels trundling over a hard surface. The whirr of an air conditioning system was omnipresent. Close by to me, on my left, I could hear the action of some kind of machine, all but drowned out by the beeps and trills of an alarm going off.
All of a sudden, I heard another sound, the sound of a door being unlocked and shut, followed by rapid footsteps, soft shoes on hard tile. It was definitely hard tile. Someone stood by the machine, doing something to it that I might have been able to identify if I could see, and I turned to try to make it out.
There was a gasp. “He’s awake!” said the voice. A deep, male voice. “Marcus Farrier is awake!”