VII - The Chain
Kaodin's POV
The shutter door at the B-2 east corridor junction held its seal, its blast-lock indicators burning crimson in an unbroken line from floor to ceiling mount. The kind of seal that made brute-force a short conversation with a bad ending.
Wawa held his stride.
His luminous body crossed the threshold and disappeared into the alloy. Through the seal itself, the way heat moves through stone. A streak of refracted color clung to the metal where he'd crossed, visible for maybe two seconds before it dissolved entirely.
Kaodin scanned the shutter from floor to eye level, then swept left and right, checking the junction walls for an access panel, a comm relay, or anything he could use to signal through. The blare of the Crimson Veil Protocol's engagement tone had stopped registering as noise. The siren had become background. He'd stopped hearing it somewhere between the Mrs. Hong home workshop and here.
Wawa phased back through, emerging on Kaodin's side with his head tilted at a slight angle, ears forward. The posture of an animal that had already assessed the obstacle and found it irrelevant, now waiting to understand why the same conclusion had not been reached by his master still standing in front of it.
Kaodin looked at the shutter. Then at Wawa. Wawa looked back at him, ears held forward, waiting.
Suddenly, his heel pivoted. Both of them snapped their attention to the shutter as Wawa's ears pulled back sharply and it began to rise.
The shutter punched upward without hydraulic grind, the kind of immediate lift where air pressure popped behind it to fill the gap. The corridor opened in a single frame: crimson overhead ribs and militia in full gear moving at a quick pace from the far end.
"Now we can go, Wawa."
He didn't wait to see if the system would reconsider. Wawa was already moving. Kaodin followed, and the shutter rammed closed behind him, the impact carrying through the floor and up through his boots.
His mind turned over the fact that the shutter had risen without him touching it. Maybe the autonomous system had recognized him. Maybe it hadn't, and maybe Director Zhang had cleared him through.
He left it at the back of his mind as the earlier noticed militias now already reached him.
Fully geared militia moved through the corridor in pairs and threes, blaster rifles slung across their chests, pace measured at the particular tempo of people past the preparation stage.
The militiaman broke from the flow alongside Kaodin, glancing down at him, then at Wawa. His gaze settled on Wawa and held. His face was sealed behind a black composite mask, goggled lenses where his eyes should have been, the kind built to take CC acidic saliva, biting, and claws. "Hey, kid. How'd you get through the shutter?"
"The door opened on its own, sir. I have to get somewhere." He gave a short, polite nod, the kind that said sorry without stopping, and kept moving before the militiaman could answer, but then he was pulled by another, the mercenary girl grabbed Kaodin by the shoulder.
"You're the kid," she said, eyes going wide. "Cee-Ar-Tee's been talking about a new scavenger boy, his son's friend, who handles himself with CCs and raiders using some kind of weird combat style.", then she turned to the man beside her, short spiky hair, cut-sleeved leather jacket over a white shirt, he had a blaster at his shoulder and a blade at his right hip. Clean, but the surface still carried brownish staining and rounded whitish patches across its surface. "Em-Jay, you recognized him, eh?"
"Oh, you're that kid. What's your name again?", The spiky-haired man shot the question at Kaodin, looking straight at Kaodin, but his eyes felt a bit weary, similar to a drunk man, but no liquor smell, but before he could open his mouth, the earlier militiaman cut in.
"Hey, look, kid—take care, alright? If you know what you're doing, I hope we can talk later. We've got to get to the upper level now. Director Zhang's order on top of the Crimson Veil. I'm guessing it's nasty on the overground level."
"Thank you, sir," Kaodin said, bowing quickly before turning toward Em-Jay. "I'm Kaodin. Hi. I'm in a hurry, so I need to—"
The girl stepped forward. Dark shading outlined her eyes and lashes, spiky mohawk-styled hair. She has a blaster by her shoulder and her hand gripped a bolted baseball bat which looks extremely cleaned, almost like new thing. Her face shifted, serious now. She glanced back toward the militia group already past the sealed shutter, then returned her gaze to Kaodin. Tension pulled at her expression, nervousness threading through her voice despite the almost-begging quality in her eyes.
"When the power dropped, the eastern wall lost the auto-turrets," she said. "Photogenic veil is down. The above ground was crowded with CCs right now—moving on anything that makes heat or sound, or the moment they catch movement…"
"Hey, you shouldn't be scaring him like that," Em-Jay cut in. "What are you doing, Gee? We need to go up too. Our friends are already up there, you know. You'd risk getting them swallowed by this place and losing everything we built with Nash and Jean?"
"I'm sorry boy, my girlfriend's a bit scared is all, it's cool, thanks for taking your time to listen anyway."
That time, a stranger had helped him. Now someone else was in jeopardy.
He looked up at the girl's face again. Then at the boy beside her.
If I don't help now, then when will I?
"I think I know what you were about to say. I want to help, but give me a few minutes. I'll get up there as fast as I can."
"Thanks, kid, but honestly, I don't want to bother you. We're already sixteen. I think we can handle ourselves." Em-Jay turned to the girl and clasped both hands on her shoulders. "Look, even this boy, five or six years younger than us, isn't afraid to fight. You shouldn't be afraid of some creepy corpses that decided to come back from the dead. Easy enough, just cut their heads off and it's done. Now let's go, alright."
"Umm…."
Gee turned toward him. Her lips pressed flat, then shifted into something small and uneven. The smile didn't quite settle. Her hand lifted in a short wave, fingers curling only halfway before dropping again.
As the two walked toward the shutter door, their pace quickening, Kaodin turned back to Wawa. "What are you doing? Someone needs help."
Wawa's eyes caught the light. His shoulder pressed against Kaodin's leg, then pulled away.
Kaodin sighed.
If Wawa came during meditation, maybe that's how I'll understand him.
He sat. Legs crossed. Hands stacked. and he let the corridor crimson-filled light dimmed and air slowed down, as he closed his eyes, and let his position settled into an appropriate-and-familiar tune.
His breathing slowed. The corridor noise slowly faded.
In that emptiness moment.
His concentration settled at the center of his body. A faint blue-threaded line appeared at the edge of his awareness. He followed it. Not far along, Wawa was already there, and the cub glanced back at him, something bright in the way he held still, patient, as though he had been waiting for exactly this. Kaodin pressed his focus toward the line and reached out, his hand finding Wawa's side. The fur met his palm with full weight, dense and warm, no longer spectral, Wawa leaned into the contact, weight solid against Kaodin's palm, then eased forward along the line, head angled toward some unseen point ahead. Kaodin let his focus stretch after him, pushing deeper into the concentration.
And when the silence fully settled.
The cry reached him through the stillness, threading into his meditation the way heat presses through cloth too fast to identify its source. Kaodin's breath suddenly caught. His monk teacher's words surfaced from memory: The mind creates what it fears most. do not trust anything your mind may send for, only the emptiness, so trust the stillness within.
He pressed deeper into the meditation, following the thread where Wawa's presence pulled was presence. The blue thread in his awareness pulsed, steady as a heartbeat, leading somewhere his conscious mind couldn't map.
Gasping hitched between sobs, each one cutting shorter than the last. The voice thinned, scraped raw at the edges. Every sound landed inside his ribs before his mind could name it. Pain without words. The kind that didn't ask for help because asking required hope, and hope had already bled out somewhere the body couldn't follow.
Liara
The name just suddenly crossed his mind.
Wawa hadn't led him toward the eastern wall for nothing. He'd somehow sensed her collapse.
Kaodin shifted his focus by the feeling toward the sound alone, and the vault room surfaced in his mind: composite racks in tight rows, leather spines browned to bone, film reels and memory boxes stacked in various sizes across various eras. Copper-edged shadows fell across film canisters, dust settled in the labels, the air tasted of old paper and oil; beyond the last shelf a narrow corridor opened onto a small residence. At the far end he could make out the pod, its glass was fogged unevenly along the lower third. Graphic-moving lines on the monitor he couldn't understand the meaning on the side panel, but he knew they seem to be lower than the last time he was here.
Liara curled inward, knees drawn tight, her breath breaking into sobs between shallow gasps. Across the pod glass, Wanchai stood with one hand pressed flat against his mouth, shoulders rigid, eyes fixed on the monitor instead of her face.
"The medical section is sealed," he said. "Shutter access requires the primary line. The primary line requires the photogenic mechanism to recompose. The photogenic mechanism requires the outer sensors to reestablish baseline." He paused. "The outer sensors cannot reestablish baseline while the overground"
This isn't normal. But I know what might help.
The cold nights came back—sitting with the monk teacher under open sky, each sat under a single brownish-red umbrella with its thin mosquito net doing almost nothing to keep out the smaller ones. They still got through and fed on, but after that night, he knew, he had changed.
He pressed his concentration down toward his Dantian and he began threading along.
Liara watched Wanchai at the console, both hands flat on the surface, eyes locked on the display. The numbers remained unchanged for a while. Her body twisted inward, pain pinching her ribs; She kept her hands curled against her chest. Wanchai's shoulders rose; his eyes widened, the whites showing around the dark pupils, and his breath hitched as her ribs folded inward. He shifted his weight as if to cross the room and stopped, almost as if he knew even if he went to call for help, or contacting Zhang Bo, there wasn't anything they could do. His mouth worked, lips parting and closing. He pressed his palms harder to the console until his knuckles paled, as if trying to push the pain through the metal. Distance remained between them, but every small movement of his said he would take it for her.
But, then, something moved at the edge of his peripheral vision.
He turned. The stair access to the second floor archive and the stacked terminals threw faint reflections against the pod's white foundation and fogged glass shell, but nothing else moved.
He returned his attention back to his daughter.
His heart dropped to his knees, startled.
The spectral cub sat a meter from the cultivation pod. Blue light pressed outward from its outline, blurring the crimson wash that filled the rest of the chamber. The form held the size and proportion of a house cat. Ears angled forward. Tail settled along the floor without tension.
Liara's POV
The thorium conduit hum had been with her entire life. She had learned to sleep inside it, to eat inside it, to read inside it, to measure the quality of her own breathing against the steadiness of its frequency the way other people measured time against a clock. She had never needed to separate herself from it because she knew there was nothing much anyone could do to help, she just didn't want her father to suffer with her.
But the rupture had made it felt louder, excruciating painful. She had read books in the archive, movies, or music, many were trying to describe all sorts of indescribable types of psychological or physiological symptoms, either self-harmed or substances abuse, the creativity was always beautiful, the imagination give her a way out of her every day boredom and the same painful routine she had became frequent ever more recent. But this... thing was not poetic or metaphorical beauty, she thought; it offered none of that. And that she urged that there must be something else to ease her agony.
Her sternum pulled inward with each inhale. The breath cut off before her lungs filled. Her hands had drawn toward her collarbone, as if to cling to something to ease this suffocating routine. Thin fingers curling loosely against her throat, the body reaching for something to hold as each breath arrived shorter than the one before it.
"Baby, please hang on….I'm trying to find a way to help….don't give up, you can't give up….", Wanchai shouted through the glass, his hands trembling as he tapped through the pod's recommended setup. Diagnostic windows flared: missing-module flags, depleted-stabilizer warnings, reagent levels sliding into red. One alert repeated itself, naming a medical compound and its storage location in the Medical Section on Upper 1-B, the floor sealed above them. The one he had been hoping Zhang Bo could help with, though that hope had thinned with every minute that passed.
Her lips shaped toward a smile. The effort cost breath she could not spare. Words would have cost more.
From the angle of his reaction, she read what the console could not tell him. His eyes carried the answer before his face did. She had learned long ago that his body spoke truer than any readout, and right now it was saying the numbers were lying.
Crimson guidance strips overhead pulsed. Each flash arrived behind her eyelids even when they stayed closed, light and pressure occupying the same path. It hurts…..even with my eyes shut, it hurts. A small drip of tear from the corner of her right eye.
Then Wanchai suddenly moved backward.
Almost like a short involuntary recoil, one arm pulling back against his chest. She couldn't hear anything, she couldn't even tell what was wrong with his elbow as he rubbed it with his hand as if he had hit it with something.
If it was the console, she must have felt it, if his elbow hit the pod, she must have seen it.
Her fingers twitched against the pod's glass, nails scraping faint lines before curling inward. The clearer panel reflected only blur, every shift in focus sent fresh tremors up her spine, vertebrae grinding like misaligned gears. She locked rigid halfway through raising her chin, breath hitching wetly behind clenched teeth.
He said something she couldn't make out the words. Addressed to something in the room that was not her and was not the console.
The warmth pooled at her feet, steady now, unwavering. A slow current climbed her skin, lifting the fine hairs along her arms and scalp. Static prickled against the back of her neck, the same charged stillness that lingered in the air before a storm, the same sensation she'd known when Kaodin stood too close.
She opened her eyes, there was nothing to see. Only a change in the quality of the space near the pod, the particular shift in density that preceded presence, the way the air in a corridor changed before the person walking through it arrived at your position. Warmth without a source. The sensation of being observed by something that had oriented toward her and moved closer and closer without her seeing.
Liara…
"Who called….?", she just blurted out. Her father startled, quickly leaned close to look at her, "did you say something, did you feel better?", her father asked.
"No…one came right?, father?", her confused face asked as she gazed to her father.
"No one, except this tiger cub, he came to sit there a while now.", she tried to look, but the pod lid was covered.
"I…I couldn't see."
"Ugh…it hurts, my heart, it hurts….so much"
Liara, if you wanted to see Wawa, follow my way…
Control your breathing….slowly
Liara, to not feel pain, is to not acknowledge it….
Focus your everything with your breathing
The pain in her chest burned like a hot wire, twisting tighter with each breath. The voice: Kaodin's voice, she was sure, the sound drifted through her thoughts like smoke through cracks. She wanted to ask her father if he heard it too, but the fire in her ribs was too much to fathom, scattering her focus. Better to follow the familiar thread than wrestle with questions. Better to move than to think.
Breathe slowly, she tried, following the voice.
And slowly, the silence that followed was the first clean thing since the emergency protocol was sounded.
Find your breathing, and slowly, constantly, find your balance
Talgat's POV
When Talgat tried to pull himself up toward the ventilation shaft, the same path he came with, it was too late. The thorium-energy conduit that connected to the console where he had tweaked, but eventually decided not to, had ruptured. The detonation shattered the ceiling, and a jagged pipe impaled him from above. Blood sprayed, the metallic taste coating his tongue. Talgat's palm flattened against the pipe jutting from his abdomen.
He dragged himself forward, fingers scraping along the reinforced steel bulkheads. The emergency lights pulsed crimson, their low growl reverberating through the shaft. So this was the 'Crimson Veil Protocol', as the alarm blared through the speakers.
"Then I'll try to break your protocol and get out of here," Talgat smirked.
The connecting corridor stretched before him, its dim crimson glow flickering over the 'maintenance vault's B-5 level' sign. The elevator panels at the center remained dark. Talgat did not aim for the elevator, but instead turned toward the wall to his left, where racks of relay boards and air filter controls stood. Static-blackened terminals were spaced between rusted ventilation panels.
This spot will do for now.
The place seemed decent enough to lay low for a bit. Just need to catch some breath.
He could settled inside the narrowed slit, his fingers fumbled in the pouch, slick with blood. Two injectors clattered together before he trapped one between his teeth. The light-gray IHH gel: Injectable Hemostatic Hydrogel, hissed as it met torn flesh, expanding into the wound with a wet crackle. Strands of hydrogel spiderwebbed through the injury, binding the ragged edges. He pushed air through his nose as the bleeding slowed to a thick ooze.
The second injector clicked against his teeth when he bit the cap loose. OCC solution hit his bloodstream cold. His pulse slammed against his ribs a moment later, vision sharpening as oxygen flooded starved tissue. His fingers twitched around the empty casing before he shoved it back into the pouch.
"CSDS IHH and OCC are good stuff," he mumbled. "Wish they didn't ration the emergency kits so tight."
Now, just a little farther, i should be able to use tinker something with the air shaft in order to get me off the camera grid again.
Nyla.
The name echoed in his head, a prayer and a curse. Have to reach her. Warn her. But the short-range low-frequency comm implant nestled behind his molar, the same one Korren had embedded in every child under his control, only responded to Korren's frequency. Can't call her. Not from here. His fingers twitched toward his jawbone, useless. Not until I'm out.
Korren's voice slithered through his memory, cold as the pipe in his gut. You were always mine. The realization coiled tight around his ribs, they'd known. They'd known all along.
Talgat's fingers traced the ventilation panel edges, lingering on streaks of rust bleeding downward from the seam. His heel tapped the grate beneath—the metallic ping resonated hollow where surrounding plates thudded solid. Warm breath fogged the cold metal as he leaned closer to inspect the corrosion patterns, But before he could, his breath caught as the metallic clanging echoed. He knew he couldn't linger—several androids or perhaps more were advancing from the emergency stairs by the end of the corridor left no room for escape.
"Damn, if they come this much, I'm not going to be a sitting duck inside the ventilation shaft." he mumbled to himself
His eyes darted, searching for any opening, any chance to slip away before the unblinking machine reached him.
No matter what he will escape this place.
His eyes swept the area, searching for escape routes beneath the crimson light strips. The only sound was the persistent emergency alarm; no other movement registered. He blinked, forcing his vision to sharpen, catching only the brief dimming of flickering lights reflecting off the damp steel. His hands slid to the back of his waist, closing firmly around the hilts of his double daggers.
Talgat spun, and immediately flunked back, blades crossed in guarding position, as Mark Tu-Lee emerged from the corridor's shadowed bend, silent footsteps landing soundlessly before him.
"Mark Tu-Lee, the combat-grade militia android dispatched by Director Zhang," the synthetic voice stated, its words carrying a heavy weight despite the lack of inflection. Talgat sensed the gravity behind each syllable, like the strike of a hammer. The android's optic clicked before flashing a blink—target lock confirmed. "Surrender now, and you may receive favorable treatment."
The android's foot settled on the metallic floor with deliberate precision, swallowing the corridor's fading crimson glow.
"Resistance is inadvisable." The words emerged flat, synthesized vocal cords vibrating without inflection.
Talgat's knees flexed, his weight settling lightly over the balls of his feet. Both daggers rose into a crossed guard before his chest, steel edges angled outward. The blades separated slowly, drifting apart into a wider frame as his shoulders turned slightly off line. His stance lowered, feet shifting into a triangular base ready to move in any direction.
Across from him, the android adjusted as well.
Mark's feet slid across the steel floor and came to rest wider than before. His knees bent, hips settling lower. Elbows drew tight along his ribs while one hand extended slightly forward and the other hovered near his cheek.
The posture looked wrong in the machine's rigid frame.
Yet the silhouette was unmistakably familiar.
The ventilation system cycled off. And only the emergency sound was echoing along the narrowed corridor.