Chapter 73: The Library of Shadows (Patreon)

How long are you gonna sit there staring at Mordran?

The Operator sat in one of the library chairs Mordran’s power had built, eyes locked on him, on the open eye and the dried drool down his chin.

She’s right. How many hours have I been watching him, waiting to see if he wakes up or comes at me again? And what the hell would I do about it with my hands this injured?

She’d been so fixed on him, so on edge, she hadn’t taken a second to look around the place she was in. “This is ridiculous,” she said out loud. “What am I getting out of watching him? He wakes up, my strength’s worth nothing in here, and my hands are fucked anyway.”

Good. Glad your little anxiety is over. Give him one last shove, then we can start checking this place.

The Operator stood, crossed to Mordran, and drove her knee into him. He tipped onto his side without reacting. “I’m no doctor, Tera, but my best guess is brain death.” She looked down at him. “Emphasis on guessing. And I’m praying I’m right.”

She dropped back into the chair ringed by books on the floor and pulled in a long breath. Outside this place, everything had stopped. The creatures. The mission the Guardian gave her to find Kanryx. All of it frozen in place while she sat here. Past the barrier, on the far side, she could see Napoleon, held in that thick, viscous mass, not moving.

At least he’s safe. No hits, no cuts when I saw him. Just stuck.

She’d been running since she landed in the evolution zone. Hunted, run down, betrayed. And now, nothing was moving. The silence reached her before anything else did. No alarms, nothing climbing toward her. Time outside had stopped, and her body seemed to take that as permission. The adrenaline that had held her up this long started to fade, and she couldn’t stop it.

She fought it. Her eyes went back to Mordran, then to the dark past the line where the creatures stood frozen “Tera, I don’t like this either. But I can’t keep going.”

Then we shouldn’t stop. We don’t know how long this space stays active. We don’t know if Mordran wakes up. Are the shadows that held you still active? Operator, we know nothing.

“I know we don’t.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I know. But I can’t, Tera. Not right now.”

Operator.

“He was inside my head.” Her voice came down lower. “He went through everything, and I couldn’t stop him, couldn’t even feel where he was. That took something out of me I can’t explain. My body’s running on nothing, and the second it got quiet in here, it started shutting down on me.”

There are a lot of variables in this space.

“I know there are. My hands and a leg are still messed up. The creatures outside, maybe I have an idea on how I’d handle them, just not like this.” She let it sit. “But look at it. Nothing’s coming. First time since I got here that the whole world stopped, and I’ve got nothing left to fight it with, anyway. No Great Realm Portal. No missions. No explosions. Nobody trying to kill me.”

She pointed at Mordran. “Just him. Catatonic, vegetative, whatever the hell this is.”

And we’re going to talk about what happened. Why Mordran’s like this? What this place is?

“We will. I’m not walking away from any of it.” Her head settled back against the chair. “But I’ve got nothing left, Tera. Just let me shut down for a while. Who knows when I get this again.”

She closed her eyes and breathed in deep, the first time she’d loosened up in longer than she could remember. The exhaustion landed all at once, the tension and the adrenaline bleeding out of her. Her eyes drifted to Mordran, then out to the huge library behind her.

“How big is this place?” She said, half asleep, and was gone.

The Operator’s eyes opened. The second she realized she’d fallen asleep, she jerked upright in the chair. “Shit, Mordran!” She spun around, looking for him.

Same spot she’d left him. She let out a breath and settled back. “Tera, how long was I out?”

Eighteen hours. I couldn’t see anything, so I went by sound. Nothing moved. No noise, nobody else in here. Total silence.

The Operator looked at her hands and flexed them. Better already, a little stiff. She knocked her bad leg against the floor. The pain was gone. The changes from the evolution zone, plus the mutations, are healing me faster.

She took in the library now. Before, she couldn’t, too much happening, too tired, too close to sleep. With her senses back, the only thought she had was simple. God. This place is huge.

“Tera,” she said. “How is this even possible? Scientifically, how is any of what he did possible? Pulling a strap out of nothing to gag me, building a library out of this. There’ve gotta be thousands of books in here.”

While you slept, I was trying to work it out too. What I’m about to say is only a theory.

“I’ll take any theory. This looks like magic.”

Magic’s just the name people give things they can’t explain. Whatever this is, it isn’t that.

“I don’t care what it is,” the Operator said, her eyes moving across the walls, the shelves, looking for a door, a gap, any way out. “I care how I get out of it.”

Then let me think out loud, because the two might be the same question. We both saw his eye change every time he activated something. Whatever he is, the eye is the catalyst. My guess is it finds weak points in spacetime and pries one open, and that’s how he makes a space like this.

“So there’s an opening. Where?”

That’s where it falls apart. If I’m right, it isn’t tied to the place. It’s tied to him.

She stopped scanning the walls. “Meaning what?”

Meaning the books, the chairs, I don’t think any of it is real the way you want it to be. Inside a space like this, matter probably bends to him. He’d reshape what’s already here into whatever he wants. The library lives in his head, and he projects it. That’s my theory, anyway. Move him, and it all forms again somewhere else.

The Operator looked at Mordran. “So the way out isn’t a door. It’s him.” Her eyes moved up the shelves climbing past the light. “And he’s vegetable. Great.”

Which is the one thing my theory can’t cover. He’s not responding. By everything I just said, this should have collapsed the second he stopped thinking. It didn’t. We’re still standing in it, so either I’m wrong somewhere, or something’s holding it open without him. I don’t know which yet.

“Let’s go over this place first, see if anything here helps, then we make a plan.”

Ahead of her, past where the black floor turned to brown, the library stretched out. She didn’t rush it. One step, then another, her eyes moving over everything before her feet followed, taking the place in. The entrance was the messy part, books in loose piles, broken chairs, things stacked and forgotten. The farther in she walked, the more the space opened around her.

The middle was a broad path with a red carpet. Five floors climbed around her, each ringed with walkways and shelves. She slowed near the circular desk at the center, the heart of the place, a great round chamber packed with books, scrolls, and loose writing.

Those books flying around him earlier, when he was looking for the First Alloy, those were his notes, and this whole library is the rest of those notes, maybe thousands of years of information.

“Nobody builds something like this without a reason,” she said. “Too many secrets for one head.” Her eyes went up the shelves. “If I had to guess, whatever he forgets ends up down here somehow. Which shouldn’t be possible.”

She reached the desk and stopped. It was circular and wide, ringed with stacked books and loose pages. She picked one up. The marks on the page meant nothing to her, and she couldn’t read a word of it. She set it down and tried another, then a third. The same. Whatever was written here, she couldn’t make sense of any of it.

Standing in the center of the library, she turned and looked around at all of it. The books, the light, the furniture. She ran her hand along the edge of the desk, and it felt real, solid under her palm. None of it had any logic to it. Her mind kept analyzing, but she couldn’t understand how something like this was possible.

What caught her eye was an opening in the floor beside the desk, a stairwell cut straight down into the black below the library. She stood at the edge and looked down. The dark gave her nothing back, no bottom, no end to it. She waited there a moment, listening. Nothing came up from below, no sound, no movement. Only then did she start down.

One hand flat against the wall, she took the steps slowly, testing each one before she stepped down. The light from the library didn’t follow her far. By the bottom it was almost gone, and then a softer light came on ahead of her, and she kept going toward it.

The stairs put her in a room. She stopped at the bottom and took it in before she stepped inside. A bed against the wall, the blankets turned down at one corner. A table with food, plates set out in order, steam still rising off some of it. A second doorway in the far wall, the light past it dropping into another space.

She went to the second doorway first, before the table. The door was already open a crack, and she pushed it the rest of the way, slow. It was a bathroom, though calling it that didn’t fit. The air inside was warm and carried a smell she hadn’t expected, something soft and floral, oils or incense, a scent that belonged to a place someone lived in and cared for. A tub sat sunk into the floor, already full, steam rising off the water. A toilet beside it, set into the floor instead of standing off it.

She stepped back out into the main room and took the rest of it in.

Robes hung along one wall, long ones, the same Mordran wore, arranged in a neat row. In the corner stood something that looked like an altar, candles set across it, a place made for prayer. The walls weren’t bare either. Paintings hung across them, framed works, art she didn’t recognize, some of it old, some of it strange.

Back at the table, she leaned over the nearest plate. Some kind of soup, still steaming. She dipped one finger in, slow, ready to pull back. Hot. She brought it to her mouth and tasted it, and it was food, actual food, better than anything she’d eaten since this whole nightmare started.

Operator. There’s a whole library here. Better to start digging. Journals, whatever we find.

“Tera.” She was looking at the food, then the bath, then the bed, and back again. “I know what you’re going to say. I know we need to dig through all of this and find a way out. But I need an hour. Just one.”

She braced for the pushback, the reminder that Mordran could wake, that time mattered, that she couldn’t afford it.

Take it.

She blinked. “...What?”

Take the hour. Take more if you need it.

That wasn’t what she’d expected, and it landed harder than any argument would have.

Look at yourself. You’ve been hunted. Days of it, with no real sleep, no real food, running the whole time. You broke your own hands killing that thing, and you kept going anyway because stopping meant dying. And I wouldn’t count working for days on Napoleon under the pressure of a mission as rest either.

The Operator didn’t answer. She looked down at her hands, the bones still stiff under the skin, and felt all of it at once, the days catching up, the exhaustion she’d been holding off because she hadn’t been allowed to feel it yet.

Your body is past its limit. Your mind is worse. An hour to eat and wash and breathe isn’t you being careless. It’s the most sensible thing you’ve done.

Her throat tightened. She swallowed it down. “The food,” she said. “We don’t know what it is.”

It was set out for him. If it were poison to anything living, it wouldn’t be sitting here. Eat it.

She sat down and started working her boots off, her hands slow and clumsy, and the first one hit the floor. She got the second boot off and pulled the plate toward her.

The soup first. She brought the bowl up with both hands and drank straight from the edge, and the taste hit her before she’d even swallowed. Her eyes filled fast, and she let them. “Oh my God,” she said, mouth still full. “This is so good.”

She couldn’t remember a single meal from before any of this, not one, but nothing could have been better than what was in front of her right now.

She tore into the bread, ate it in big pieces, and used it to mop the bowl clean. The meat she took with her fingers, no knife, no thought to how it looked, pulling it apart and pushing it into her mouth until her cheeks were full. “It’s so good,” she said again, quieter, and the tears were coming down her face now while she chewed. “It’s so good.”

Grease on her hands, broth on her chin, and she didn’t wipe any of it away. She ate like someone who had been starving for a long time and only now let herself feel it, crying the whole way through, and underneath the crying she was happy. Maybe for the first time since she’d opened her eyes on that green field with the giant beside her. Alone in that quiet room, eating with both hands, tears running down her face, and happy. After everything, after all of it, she was finally happy.

The water came up to her shoulders, steam hanging over the surface of it. She sat with her back against the side of the tub, her arms resting on the edge. The heat didn’t do much for her anymore, but the feel of the water did, that and the quiet, the first quiet she’d had in days. Her clothes lay in a pile on the floor where she’d dropped them. The dirt and dried sweat and whatever else she’d been carrying was lifting off her, clouding the water, and she didn’t care.

“God, I needed this. Scented wipes out of a pack, that’s the closest I’ve gotten to clean since this whole thing started.”

All that skin is new, remember?

“Yeah, I know.” She sank lower into the water until it reached her chin. “Doesn’t change how it feels. Let me have this one.”

For a while there was only the water, the steam, the quiet. Her eyes were closed, her head back against the rim, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, nothing in her was bracing for anything. Then something moved through it. A sound, low, like wind with no reason to be down here. She didn’t open her eyes right away. Half of her wanted to believe it was nothing, the water, the room settling.

Then it came again, and under it a second thing. A shift in the air. The sense of something close that hadn’t been close a moment ago. “Tera,” she said, eyes still shut.

I heard it too.

She opened her eyes. Two shadows stood over the tub, looking down at her. The same two Mordran had pulled out of the floor when he’d pinned her down and gone digging through her head.

“What the f…”

She threw herself sideways. The tub went with her, tipping off its base and cracking against the floor, ceramic splitting, water sheeting across the stone. She came down hard in the middle of it and spun to face them from the ground, soaked, chest heaving.

The shadows didn’t move. They just stood there, facing her. Then one of them spoke. The voice was deep and hard to understand, and she had to focus to catch the words.

“Mordran is waiting for you in the library. He would like you to join him.” Then it went still again.

Something’s off. He told you himself, his way is control, not kindness. So why this?

The Operator gave a small nod, eyes locked on them. “I have to get dressed. Then I’ll come up.”

One of the shadows turned, crouched, and picked something up off the floor. Clothing. “Mordran says what you’re wearing is ruined. It’s scarred from battle, it reeks, and the gunfire tore through it, so he made you these. An exact copy of what you had before.”

The shadow set the clothing down at the edge of the water. Neither of them said anything else. They held where they were a moment longer, facing her, and then they began to come apart, the dark of them thinning at the edges, breaking up and sinking back toward the floor until there was nothing left where they’d stood.

The clothing sat in the wet at her feet.

She didn’t move right away. She stayed where she was, watching the spot where they’d been, making sure it stayed empty. Only then did she rise, crouch, and gather the clothes up.

“He doesn’t do kind,” she said. “So what is this?”

He controls everything down here. The only way to find out is to go up.

The new clothes sat there at the edge of the water, the leather Mordran had made for her. She looked at them a moment, then kicked them aside into the wet.

Her old ones came back on instead, stiff and torn and filthy, and she said nothing the whole time. They were hers. With the torch fixed at her hip and the revolver holstered, she stood ready. It wouldn’t do a thing against Mordran, but she kept it on her anyway.

The Operator started up the stairs, slowly, one step at a time. As she came up to the main floor, she saw them down the red-carpeted path that led to the central desk. Two shadows, one on the left, one on the right, and between them, kneeling, Mordran, his eyes already on her. What happened to him?

He knelt bare in front of her. A knife floated around his body, moving on its own, carving runes into his skin one after another. The cuts went deep, opening long lines across his chest, his arms, his shoulders, the blood running down him and pooling under his knees. The blade didn’t stop. It pulled out of one mark and started the next, working him over inch by inch, and every cut stopped short of his face, leaving it untouched while the rest of him came apart.

The Operator had no idea what to say. Her mind went blank. This wasn’t the arrogant man who had looked at her like a science project. This was someone else. Desperate. His face terrified. She stopped at the desk and looked at him, and through all of it Mordran smiled. One shadow reached out and closed a hand around the knife that was cutting him, stopping it midair.

“I’ve tried everything,” he said. “I can control my body better than any living thing alive. So I shut my brain down. Cut off my nerves, my mind, all of it. I thought if I went dark, they couldn’t see me.” His breath caught. “I hid using methods older than most living civilizations. And they still found me. Every technique we’ve stolen over the millennia, I’ve run through all of them.”

His eyes dropped to the runes opening across his chest. “And now I’m carving marks I already know are useless. Marks that won’t hide me from what you showed me.”

The Operator moved closer, not too close. “What did you see?”

“When I looked under the surface of your mind, something went out. One signal. A single wave, pushing out through everything.” His eyes came back to her. “And it showed them where you are.”

“Tera.” She didn’t look away from him. “You getting any of this?”

While he was in your mind, the nanobots and I were reading your body. All we caught was stress, a spike in your blood pressure. Nothing else.

“What’s tracking you isn’t in your body,” Mordran said. “It’s in your mind. And you buried it well. I looked once. Once was enough. Now my race is in danger of carrying the same mark you do.”

“What does that mean?” She held still. “What did you see?”

“DON’T ASK ME THAT AGAIN.” Something in him broke. “I’m trying to forget it. I saw it. I felt it. I loved it and hated it in the same breath, and now I can’t stop seeing it. That’s what makes me a beacon. The remembering. A light pointing right at me, and nothing I do turns it off.”

His eyes came up, wild. “How did you hide yours? You buried every trace of it. How? Tell me.”

“You were in my head,” the Operator said. “You already know I don’t remember anything.”

He stopped pushing for answers. “Then let me make a deal with you. To save my people.”

“A deal?” She stared down at him. “Why would I make a deal with a race of mass murderers? Why would I lift a finger for killers like you?”

“Everything we’ve done, we did for our own race, and it was right. I’d do all of it again without a second thought. You call us murderers. I call it the price of keeping my people powerful. But if saving them means lowering myself in front of you, then I’ll lower myself. I’m offering you something for it.”

He kept going.

“This planet is already gone. What’s coming for you can’t be stopped, not by me, not by anything in this universe. And if I leave this library to warn my people, I bring it down on them too. We’re bound to each other. In a way you wouldn’t understand.”

“Once you’re out, I’ll give you the codes to reach our ship. On my command they’ll know it’s an alpha-class threat, and they’ll run. They’ll live. That’s all I’m asking for. That one thing.”

“So you stay down here. Alone. For the rest of your life.”

“Down here, I’m still a beacon, not as strong as outside this place. There’s no version of this where I walk out.” His eyes stayed locked on hers, and the pride was gone from them now, only a man who knew he was already dead. “And in return, I give you my head.”

The Operator didn’t move. “And what the hell am I supposed to do with your dead head?”

“Control over my eye. Over this library. Everything I spent thousands of years building becomes yours. The space, the time it buys you, all of it.” His voice cracked. “I’m handing you the only thing that ever kept me alive. Take it and save my people. That’s the trade.”