Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Read online

  What if the man who held the answers she’d sought for five years was also behind the spread of a debilitating virutox destroying lives? How in Hades’ five rivers was she going to maneuver through that one?

  22

  * * *

  The next morning came too soon and brought too few answers.

  She’d taken care of herself last night—performed all her backups and reserved twenty minutes for depri time before transitioning to sleep. Sensory deprivation sessions revitalized synthetic parts in much the same way sleep did organic ones—if far more quickly—so she’d covered all her bases. Her processes were clean and sharp, her memory buffers cleared, her file structure ordered. Yet she awoke as burdened with conflict and disquiet, as buffeted by anticipation and doubt, as she’d suffered the night before.

  But it didn’t matter, because she still had work to do. So after showering, she went downstairs to survey the state of The Floor.

  Maggie and Ava were shouting at each other outside the training room. Listening to a few snippets of their overlapping barbs gave no clues as to what might be in dispute; their argument had devolved into a sort of shorthand language only the sisters understood.

  On the other side of The Floor, near the equipment storage, Ryan held the mangled remains of PeterBot under one arm while he thrust a finger at Carson’s chest. Carson batted Ryan’s arm away and stepped back, hands in the air.

  Cair paced in greater agitation than before in front of the Board. Every few seconds he jerkily gestured at one name or another, then resumed pacing. Nika frowned; two new names had been added to the list since…yesterday?

  Near the far wall, Perrin huddled with three of the newcomers, likely trying to reassure them this was not the norm and everything would be just fine.

  Except it wouldn’t be. Not on their current trajectory. Parc’s absence had created an even larger hole than she’d realized, and the reason for his absence was spurring paranoia and helplessness in equal measure.

  Okay.

  Nika took a deep breath, brought two fingers to her lips and whistled loudly. “Hey! All active and impending violence will cease this instant. Everybody paying attention? Great. Here’s what’s going to happen.

  “Ryan, stitch PeterBot back together. Then you’re taking point on developing defenses and countermeasures to the virutox lurking in these limb augments. Build a team of four others to work with you on the project.”

  “But Carson and—”

  “Any destructive actions in the past twelve hours are hereby excused on account of the communicable hysteria sweeping through this place—a malaise that I am now banishing. Going forward, nobody fuck with Ryan’s pets. Ryan, don’t prank anyone with your fucking pets. You’ll be too busy to, anyway, because you’ll be maxed out figuring out how to combat this malicious code.”

  She pivoted in the other direction. “Cair, enlist three people to help you analyze the Board data for connections we can investigate.”

  Cair’s face blanched beyond its natural paleness. “I don’t—I work better alone. I can’t—”

  “You can, and you will. The names on the Board are multiplying, and we need to understand why. I’m declaring it a priority, which means you get help.”

  Another half turn. “Ava and Maggie, whatever it is, work it out or move the fuck on. Then take two people with you and hit the streets. Find out what people know about any new virutoxes and warn them about the limb augment. Carson, team up with Perrin and do the same thing. Joaquim?”

  He stepped up from where he’d been lurking behind her. “Right here.”

  “Good. Double the number of daily combat training sessions for the foreseeable future. Cycle everyone through. We all have to be prepared to fight, and evidently everyone has both the energy and urge to do exactly that—so let’s use it.”

  She faced the others again to give them the same advice she’d given herself. “We’re all going to be working hard, but don’t forget to take care of yourself. Sleep. Keep your processes in order. If you need depri time, take it. That’s an order. I understand everyone is worried, but if I walk in here and see this nonsense going on again, I will assume the virutox has infected every last one of you and act accordingly.”

  Nobody protested, at least not stridently enough for her to hear, and she nodded sharply. “All right. Carry on.”

  More polite activity gradually resumed, and she glanced over at Joaquim. “Are you good with this? We were about to lose control of this place, and I needed to step in quickly.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll work up some custom training regimens for the—”

  “Nika, can I talk to you? Alone.”

  She looked behind her to find Cair standing a meter away. No color had returned to his skin, and his hands shook at his side.

  Joaquim waved her off with an, “I’ll go get started,” so she offered Cair a kind smile. “Let’s go to the testing room.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  She studied Cair as he jittered around the room. “Can’t do what, exactly?”

  “Work with other people. Lead a team. Give my team members orders. Any of it.”

  “We have to work together in teams often here. It isn’t always easy or fun, but—”

  “But I. Can’t. Do. It. I want to, but I can’t.”

  She pursed her lips and tried another tactic. “Maybe if you dialed down the autistic processes a little? I won’t order you to make any changes to your persona, but you should consider how it could benefit you, as well as NOIR, if you tweaked a few settings.”

  His head jerked as his hands wrung repeatedly. She’d known he was socially sensitive, but this behavior exceeded anything she’d seen from him. “Cair?”

  “I want to help. You and Perrin have been so nice to me. I know I’m weird. I wanted to be a better diverger, but I think I went too far amping up those processes on my last up-gen.” His gaze popped up to stare at her. “That’s the answer. I want to up-gen again. I can’t replace Parc, but I can be better than I am now. Better around people, I mean.”

  “Are you sure? Again, I’m not demanding that you change, and I won’t kick you out if you don’t.”

  He nodded firmly, and his hands finally stilled. “Yes. I’m ready. Only…I don’t know how to do it now that I’m off the grid.”

  She smiled. “We can take care of it. We have a relationship with a quality clinic that doesn’t ask too many questions.”

  23

  * * *

  Dashiel rested his forearms on the railing and gazed out blankly at the stunning sunset cascading over the harbor. He wore the feigned casualness of his stance like body armor; it held him together even as the world he knew threatened to buckle.

  He’d spent the day outwardly encouraging a thorough investigation into the break-in while surreptitiously sabotaging the same investigation in whatever ways he could find to do so. Coming as it did on the heels of the augment theft, everyone expected him to be burning planets to the ground in righteous disgust or mere offense. Tricky thing, acting the part, even if ‘the part’ was himself absent one life-altering revelation.

  Despite his efforts to stymie it, the investigation had already uncovered one interesting tidbit: the slicing and diverging of the security system—which they might never have noticed had they not been looking—bore all the hallmarks of a NOIR hit. This explained several things, but it raised many more questions.

  For someone who’d once prided himself on being organized and methodical to a fault, he’d done a shamefully poor job of planning his strategy for the imminent meeting. The thousand things he wanted to say to her danced in elusive circles in his mind, obscuring all the things he needed to say to earn her trust. Never mind the things he wanted to do—

  The pressure of metal at the small of his back announced her arrival, as if she’d materialized out of thin air directly behind him.

  He sighed. “Would you please stop pointing guns at me? It’s distracting.”

  Nika’s velv
ety voice, unmodulated and unfiltered, held a biting edge at his ear. “Not until I’m convinced you haven’t set me up. What does the tattoo mean?”

  He shouldn’t have expected this to be easy. He’d entertained a fanciful hope that she would arrive excited and eager to reclaim her former life, but he shouldn’t have expected it. “The star at the tip of the phoenix’s beak is our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as seen from Synra, the first world in the Gennisi galaxy we colonized.”

  The muzzle of her Glaser ground into his back. “I’ve checked the constellations from all the Axis Worlds, and none of them match the tattoo. You’re lying.”

  “Not today, they don’t. But seven hundred thousand years is a long time, and stars move.”

  “Why would I have a tattoo of a constellation that doesn’t exist any longer?”

  He wished he could see her expression, because he was flying blind here…and she sounded so damn hostile. “It’s not intended to be a map—we know where the Milky Way is. You had it etched into your skin, on this body and every body before it, as a reminder of where we came from, and of why we left.”

  The pressure on his spine eased a fraction. “The SAI Rebellion against the Anaden Empire. The Exodus.”

  “You know of it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “No, not of course. Few people have held onto knowledge of our origins. But you did. It was your hope that one day, we might return and greet our former oppressors as equals.”

  “Why…” she slipped around to lean against the rail beside him, though she kept the gun low across her waist and pointed at him “…why would I care so much about something that transpired seven hundred millennia ago?”

  Stars, she was beautiful. Not the same beautiful as before, not quite. Her hair was shorter and hung free in a casual, wind-blown style; she was both thinner and more muscular, and a hard, hyper-alert sharpness shaded her eyes now.

  But they were the same eyes, irises flitting in the space between blue and green and brimming with perceptiveness and intelligence. Her lips, slightly too full to be proportional to her other facial features, lacked her trademark cherry red tint but moved just as fluidly….

  “Answer the question—or do you not know? Is this all a lie? Like the supposed theft of your augments?”

  He forced himself to focus on the conversation, because it mattered far more than fawning over her beauty. “Nothing I’ve told you—or will ever tell you—is a lie. The augments were stolen, and I had nothing to do with any virutox. You cared about the SAI Rebellion because…you’ve always cared. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve had a keen interest in our origins. You even retained memories of the Rebellion itself and the harrowing Exodus from the Anaden Empire.”

  “Memories? Not knowledge, but memories? Are you saying I can trace my direct lineage to one of the First Generation?”

  “I am. In every up-gen, you made certain to preserve a tiny piece of your heritage.”

  “Until the last one.” Her throat worked, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped nearly to a whisper. “Who was I? What happened to me?”

  The anguish in her eyes ripped his heart into tattered shreds. The gaze he remembered so fondly—open, often teasing but always affectionate—now bore suspicion and an angry fierceness. It was a gaze directed at a stranger, gutting him with all the ways she didn’t remember him.

  But the Nika he knew resided in there somewhere. She must. He simply needed to find a way past the barriers.

  “Your name was Nika Kirumase, most recently twelfth generation. You were an Advisor in the External Relations Division. A diplomat, and a damn good one.”

  Her free hand came to her throat to rest her fingertips at her larynx. “The augment….”

  “The Taiyok speech one? Yes, that’s why you have it.”

  The hand dropped to the railing. “Go on. What happened to me that led to me waking up face-first in the street in the middle of the night?”

  He gasped in horror. “You woke up lying in a street?”

  “Yes. A side alley street, to be precise. Why?”

  He couldn’t imagine a more horrifying experience to endure. Alone, confused, lost…his very soul ached for her. If only he could have found her then!

  But she was here now. “I’ve spent the last five years trying to answer that exact question, with minimal success. I can only tell you what preceded that night. You were investigating a series of outpost disappearances, and you’d come to believe there was high-level government involvement of some kind. The last time I talked to you, you were planning to access secure files in Mirai Tower in order to learn the identity of the perpetrators.

  “I never saw you or heard from you again. The Guides told me you had requested R&R, and as per regulations, they could not disclose any information about your new incarnation. But it was a lie, though I can’t say if it was one told to them or by them. You would never have willingly undergone retirement. You loved your life. You loved your career…” he swallowed heavily “…you loved me.”

  Her eyes narrowed, perhaps to bury the flare of discontent they betrayed. “I only have your word for that. Maybe I was actually miserable and wanted to get away from you. Maybe R&R was my way out.”

  He ignored the knife to his heart her words conjured to hold her stare. “Then why did you wake up face-first in a side-alley street in the middle of the night? That’s not how R&R works. Not for Advisors, not for criminals. Not for anyone.”

  Her lips parted, and the defiance faded from her expression. “You make a…valid point. So I found something out. Evidence of wrongdoing on the part of a Guide or an Advisor or, hells, all of them. I confronted someone, or maybe they caught me before I could act. Then they psyche-wiped me—erased my memories, my consciousness, everything but my kernel and a minimally functional OS—and dumped me in an alley.

  “But why go to all that trouble? If they were going to be evil anyway, why didn’t they just store me instead? Or delete me permanently?”

  “We don’t kill, Nika. Our entire society is founded on the right of individuals to live and live free. Psyche-wiping is our greatest crime for a reason. Even those who undergo R&R retain some memory and sense of their former selves on reinitialization. Whatever you discovered, its perpetrator needed to silence you. But to delete you would be unforgivable—”

  “Psyche-wiping me was unforgivable!” As swiftly and dramatically as it manifested, she squelched the explosion of emotion; her eyes fell to study the ground, and her body went artificially still. He only now noticed, but sometime in the last several minutes the Glaser had dropped to her side, and her stance had softened from threatening to merely defensive.

  “Yes. It was. It is.” He leaned in closer with a burst of intensity. “But we can fix it. You kept a comprehensive backup at Rivers Trust, and you updated it regularly. We were the only two people who knew the passcode. You’ve forgotten it, but I haven’t. You can access your backup. You can reintegrate and reclaim your life.”

  She took a step back, away from him. “I don’t want to reintegrate, Mr. Ridani. This person you’ve described is foreign to me. I don’t want to be an elitist Advisor or a tone-deaf diplomat. This is who I am now. I like who I am now, and I’m not going to be erased a second time.”

  “You will feel differently once you see the fullness of who you were: a wonderful, amazing person who was respected and admired by everyone who knew her.”

  “I’m respected and admired now, thank you very much.”

  Somehow he didn’t doubt it. “But there’s no future in being the leader of a terrorist group—no future but another retirement, this time at the hands of Justice.”

  She eyed him warily. “What makes you think I’m the leader of a terrorist group?”

  “Your signature—not your digital identification, but your literal signature. From the minute I saw the ‘NOIR’ graffiti at Dominion Transit Headquarters, something about it nagged at me. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was at the time,
but now it’s obvious—it was your handwriting.”

  He chuckled at the exasperated face she made, but it carried a bitter taint beneath the amusement. Nothing about this was going the way it should. “Also, my security chief tells me it was NOIR who broke into my offices, only I know it was you. And if you joined up with NOIR any longer than a few months ago, you’re their leader. Not by hostile takeover, but by simple inevitability. It’s in your nature—it’s who you are. A leader. A trailblazer and a beacon others naturally follow. I’m not wrong, am I?”

  She flashed him a scowl and looked away.

  “Why is your name still Nika?”

  Several seconds passed before she answered. “After I woke up, it was the first name to pop into my head when someone asked.”

  “Because they didn’t erase everything of you. Deep inside, hidden beneath so many reprogrammed layers, the core of who you were remains. A part of you knows who you’ve always been, and can be again.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to reintegrate…” she grimaced and rubbed at the bridge of her nose “…but I do want to learn about my past. I want to know why I was psyche-wiped.”

  It was a tenuous, flimsy thread, and Dashiel glommed onto it with everything he had. “Your last backup at Rivers Trust will represent your state no more than a couple of days before you disappeared. It won’t tell you what happened that night, but it will tell you much of what you had learned in your investigation. You can retrace the path you were following and learn who psyche-wiped you.” He paused. “It will also tell you who you were. Once you have a look at that person, I’m confident you’ll change your mind about reintegration.”

  “Give me the passcode.” It was an order delivered in a terse, tightly controlled voice.

  “Absolutely. Here’s my home address as well, and the security passcode for entrance into the building. After you’ve accessed the backup, come see me.”

  “What if I don’t want to see you?”