Dawn started to shake as her lungs and brain cried out for air. Some of the others had already given in, though she couldn’t tell. The edges of her vision blurred into an oxygen-deprived kaleidoscope of color to hide her fellow Slayers clutching their throats or seizing on the floor. No… no… no more…was the last coherent thought Dawn had before she had to take a breath. The second her airways opened, they flooded with darkness. Streams and rays of the black stuff from the vent fired up her nostrils, then dispersed throughout her. She felt it infect her every cell, somehow as a whole being and each isolated piece. It seeped through the pores of her bones, where marrow was meant to be. It coursed in her veins. It darkened the synapses of her brain. It clutched her lungs, heart and stomach in black, branchy grips.
Suddenly, Dawn could breathe. She was on her knees. One of her hands pressed into the glossy wooden floor to keep her up. The other reached down for the floor beside it, but could not touch it. Dawn found, when she tried, that she could not touch anything with that…hand. Hand wasn’t exactly the right word for the jet black appendage at the other end of her left arm anymore. It was something more like a claw, with elongated fingers that burned away to dark steam and recondensed every other second. She closed her eyes to focus on keeping it as one or the other. Somehow, she knew she should do that. Then Dawn realized - it was because she remembered.
“Machaeus…” Dawn mumbled to the floor.
“What was that?” Marcus chirped. He rushed to the edge of Dawn’s glass cell with an excitement that inspired equal and opposite rage in his patient. Her head snapped up. Her eyes, once so bright of hazel and greenness, were edged with dark tendrils that grew and shrunk with her focus.
“You’re…injecting us with particles from Machaeus?” Dawn rumbled. She folded in the five fingers of her claw, which merged into something like a hammerhead made of blackened flesh.
“Remarkable. One shot of the serum and you remember everything. Tell me, while you still can, is there some sort of resonant consciousness? Like an echo in your brain?” Marcus asked, his face only inches from Dawn’s. “That was my theory. That the human brain can only handle the thoughts and memories of one consciousness at a time. In other words, are you the same Dawn I’ll visit in your cell later? Or are you an entirely different entity, sharing her body?” Dawn clenched her teeth hard enough that the points of friction shifted to something sharper, more like fangs. She’d rip every one of her own cells from every other before she gave him the satisfaction of an answer.
“Why?” she growled instead. Dawn pulled her misty black hammer back to solidify the wordless thought.
“All of you are so concerned with why… You miss the miracle right before your eye-”
“Why!?” Dawn slammed her hammer into the glass. It flattened into a wave of darkness that rattled her entire cell. Marcus strafed back an inch. Even if it was only for a second, the look of real horror on his face was medicine for Dawn’s soul.
“Machaeus was - is - a being beyond matter. It shifts and changes at its own will. It is somehow conscious, down to a subatomic level, without what we define as organs. Think of the implications, for SkyLine technology! For weapons! The Dragons have, which is why they will win a war between us unless we do something. Not to mention how easily Machaeus itself could destroy us all. It would be irresponsible not to study it!” Marcus told her.
“So…this study is your responsibility? Like my mission to Mukurus?” Dawn growled. She wound her unraveling limb back for another strike. She tried to focus the particles, to will them into something - anything - that could break the glass.
“Forget the coin and the cup,” Marcus challenged her. He smirked but his eyes betrayed his fear. “There’s a small opening at the bottom of your cell. Reach through it with that arm. Go on. You hate me that much? Make a noose and hang me. Either my life’s work will have meant something, or at least my death will.” Dawn clenched her fang-toothed mouth to hone control of the particles bleeding from the end of her arm.
“Or swing like you mean it,” Morgan said. Dawn’s focus broke entirely, and her arm swirled out to a loose, dark cloud. She turned to the cell beside her. Dawn’s stomach flipped completely upside down - she almost launched bile everywhere at the sight of the others. Adrenaline pumped an incomprehensible level of detail through her brain in a mere second.
Only Morgan was upright. The others were splayed across their cells, their backs, fronts, necks or stomachs peeled back like a blooming flower where the blackness had burst from them. The formless, swirling darkness collected around the wounds of those who would recover to test another day. Those that would not included Michael and another young woman around Dawn’s age. Their entire upper bodies had flayed themselves from the inside. The black mist of Machaeus had long-since fled back through the vents from whence it came. A fluid the consistency and color of tar leaked from their open mouths.
Then Dawn’s second of intense clarity ended, with a deafening crack. Morgan’s pitch black, glossy fist pressed deep in the crater she’d put in her cell. She’d grown a sleek, perfect new appendage around her mechanical prosthesis. Unlike Dawn’s, Morgan’s arm kept its rigid shape. A single shard of clear crystal popped out of place on Marcus’ side of the gym. A quarter-inch window had opened between the worlds of researcher and research.
Through that window, Morgan bled a tiny string of blackness. It ventured out from her arm and grew across the floor, like a branch of ivy. By Morgan’s will, the little tentacle snagged the coin from the floor. It snaked up the legs of the stool while the nurses backed away, pale and panting. Morgan plunked the quarter in the cup. The very next second, her body fell limp. Her black ivy dissolved to smoke. The dark new arm she’d grown for herself, however, remained long after she slumped against the glass and passed out.
The next Dawn knew, she was on her knees again. Everything was fading. It faded from her vision first, then her mind. The blackness returned, to swallow everything she wished she could hold onto.
Drogan… Miller… Alice… she recited, until the withdrawal of Machaeus’ particles sent her into a deep, cold sleep.
Chapter Seven: Real Cold
“S-so-so, this place is ca-called Calliope?” Kalus chattered, primarily to get some newer, warmer blood in the veins of his face. He and the others had stepped out of the planetary elevator from the acclimation station only ten minutes ago, and already he could see ice crystals caught in the tiny hairs on his face. For the first time, he envied the supporting crew for their warm rooms in the Cerberus. The passing name of the settlement, a series of steel piers and silver storefronts, on a sign, just happened to be the closest topic on hand.
“That’s what they call it now,” Wagner answered without turning back. He kept his squinting eyes forward, his hand a shield against the whip of the fine crystalline wind. “Folks are still getting used to it. Didn’t used to call it anything, before there were two settlements. Now, suddenly, it’s Calliope. The place across the steel bridge is Marre.”
“And that’s…where we’re going?” Lilia called out over the rising howl in the storm.
“You got it, Commander,” Wagner called back. That ushered in an era of truly uncomfortable silence which allowed the crew ample time to feel the cold in their bones.
Kalus had long since abandoned counting the storefront windows to keep himself occupied. Iron strips of shops, bars and even the occasional residence had lined the sides of the piers wall-to-wall when they started. Now the Dogs and their guide could hardly see past the solid wall of the storm swirling around them. It seemed to get worse with every eye-covered step Wagner ventured.
“Are we still inside the terradome?” Sophia called out.
“If we pass out of it, you’ll know!” Wagner shouted back.
“I thought the point of terradomes was to make conditions comfortable!” Kalus jumped in. Behind them, Captain Demi cocked an eyebrow at the rare gem of a moment. His Arms Master and his Artillery Specialist - on the same page about something. If he knew all he had to do was freeze them out, Demi would have dunked the two in ice long ago.
“Normally, we would,” Wagner told them, “But this isn’t Mars. Planning out terradome positions so they overlap isn’t so easy when you don’t have a solid surface to develop on. Settlements on Neptune have to be built on some intense engineering. We’re talking two-hundred-meter support pillars driven in the deep ice layer.”
“Right, right, the horrendous inconvenience for architects and engineers,” Kalus droned, complete with dramatic arm swings, “What does that have to do with the weather inside the dome?” Wagner let out a rattling chuckle at the crass question. He’d demanded the same thing of his supervisor in his first weeks stationed on the ice giant.
“Well, when the terradome around Marre was deployed, it didn’t reach all the way to the one around Calliope. So there’s an unprotected gap between them. The suit-up stations on either side of the steel bridge help, but people were going into shock from stepping through such a dramatic change so fast.”