Karina opened the toothbrush. She would brush her teeth, locate her jeans, and check on her daughter. And then she would go out there and make a chocolate cake.
Emily seemed to have no memory of Lucas and Daniel’s fight the previous night. She slept well and when Karina had come to get her, she got a hug. The violent episode had passed her daughter by completely. Karina held her for a long time, breathing in the scent of her hair. They were both alive. She would get to keep Emily with her. It would be okay. It would be hard and painful, but it would be okay.
Karina took Emily to the kitchen. Sunlight poured in through the open window. Nobody waited for her. Nobody demanded breakfast. The house was quiet and serene. Karina exhaled her tension, pulled the ingredients from the pantry, and started mixing the cake batter.
Henry walked into the kitchen, looking a bit lost. “Good morning!”
“Good morning!” Emily chirped.
“I have something for you.” Henry put a drawing pad and a set of watercolor pencils on the table.
“For me?”
“For you.”
Emily pried at the pencil case.
“What do you say?” Karina murmured on autopilot.
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.” Henry offered her a small smile.
“Where is everyone?”
“They’ve gone to check the perimeter net. What is it you’re making?”
Karina glanced at him. “A chocolate cake. Did they go to check for signs of those people who sent the lizards to spy on us?”
Henry nodded.
“Lucas called them Ordinators. Henry, who are they? Who are you?”
Henry smiled again and slid his glasses up his nose. “It’s a long and complicated explanation. It’s better to wait a couple of days. Too much new information too fast will only make things worse.”
“I’d like to know.”
He shook his head. “You’ve been through a great deal of violence in the past two days and you’ve been exposed to things that conflict with your worldview. I don’t want to be the one to add to it.”
“Henry, not knowing is worse. All I’m asking is that you don’t treat me like a slave who is told where to be and what to do and isn’t owed any explanation.”
“No,” he said quietly.
They looked at each other over the table. Karina held his gaze. It might not have been wise, but she wouldn’t back down now.
“Look, Mom, I drew Cedric!”
Karina looked down at the ball of brown fluff that looked like a sheep with a sabertooth’s fangs. “That’s looks very nice, Emily.”
When she looked up, the kitchen was empty. Henry had escaped.
The cake smelled of chocolate and vanilla. When Karina took the two round pans out of the oven and set them out to cool, the familiar scents floated through the kitchen, so reminiscent of home and happy times, she almost cried.
A door banged. She looked up just in time to see Lucas loom in the doorway. His face was grim. He glanced at the cake, then at her. She stared back, suddenly terrified that all her thoughts would pour out through her eyes.
He didn’t seem to notice. “Would you like new clothes?”
“Yes.” Oh, God, yes.
He jerked his head toward the door. “They have some things prepared for you at the main house. I didn’t know what size, so you have to come and try them on. Come on, I’ll walk with you.”
“Can I come?” Emily slid off the chair.
“Yes,” Lucas said. “They have clothes for you, too.”
“And Cedric?”
“Cedric doesn’t need clothes,” Lucas said.
“Can he come with us?” Karina asked.
“Sure.”
Karina washed her hands, wiped them on a towel, and followed Lucas out. The sun shone bright. Cedric already waited for them at the foot of the stairs. Emily stepped down and the bear-dog rolled to his feet and trotted next to her, nearly as tall as she was.
Lucas led them out of the yard and down a dirt path. It wound around the hill, flanked on the left by stunted oaks and shrubs climbing up the slope and rolling off to the prairie on the right. Cedric and Emily pulled ahead a couple dozen yards. Karina watched them, aware of Lucas striding next to her, like some tiger who had learned to walk upright. The air was dry, and the heat beat down on them from the pale, burned-out sky, painting the path in stripes of bright yellow sunshine.
“We’re in a fragment of reality,” Karina said.
“Yes,” Lucas said.
“Why is the sun shining? Why is there air?”
“Because the fluctuation occurs on the universal level,” Lucas said.
“So it’s a duplicate sun?”
“No, it’s the same sun the Earth has. We just get access to it on a different level. Think of a house with many rooms. We walked out of the main room into a smaller side bedroom, but we’re still under the same roof.”
Karina sighed. “It makes my head hurt.”
“Don’t talk about dimensions to any Rippers, then,” Lucas said.
“Rippers?”
“They make inter-dimensional rents that let people like you and me travel back and forth. You get one of them started on the subject and the insanity pours out until you want to stick your head in a bucket of water just to wash it out of your mind. When a man has to continuously cut himself, because pain helps him punch through dimensions, you can’t expect him to be lucid anyway.”
Karina glanced at him. “You seem irritated.”
Lucas’s thick black eyebrows knitted together. “We found out how the lizard got through the net. It tunneled under it. A long, deep tunnel, almost twenty-five meters.”
“And?”
“There was more than one tunnel,” Lucas said.
More than one tunnel meant other lizards. “Did you track them down?”
Lucas nodded.
“Did they transmit what they saw?”
Another nod.
“So the enemy knows where we are?”
Lucas grimaced. “Difficult to say. The Rippers are saying there was too much inter-dimensional interference for the transmission to have gone through fully. But it’s possible.” He clenched his teeth, pondering something, and said, “We had perimeter alarms, infrared, microwave, and frequency sensors. The sensors are very specific: if you look on Cedric’s collar, you’ll see a transmitter. The transmitter broadcasts a code. The sensors check this code against the database and if the code is active, the sensors don’t register an alarm. For some reason someone loaded an old set of codes into the system. The lizards came through fitted with transmitters of their own and when they broadcast the outdated set of codes, the system didn’t flag them.”
“How did they know which codes to load?”
Lucas’s eyes turned darker. “There was a woman. Galatea. She was a donor like you.”
He said her name like she was a plague. “Was she your donor?”
“Yes. She defected.”
He’d clenched his teeth again. There was more to this story. “Were you lovers?”
Lucas stopped and for a moment she thought she might have pushed him too far. “We f**ked,” he said.
Aha. She kept pushing. “For how long?”
There was a short pause before he answered. “For four years.”
“That’s some long f**king,” Karina said. He’d loved Galatea. He was in love, and she betrayed him, and now he wanted to kill her. Any woman past the age of fifteen would’ve connected these dots. He must’ve been young—it had obviously left a deep scar. “What was she like?”
Lucas took a step toward her. A wild thing looked back at her from his eyes, the thing full of lust and aggression. She realized that in his mind he was peeling off her clothes and thinking of what it would be like, and suddenly she was back in the tub, na**d, sitting two feet away from him and afraid he would cross the distance.
He stared at her. “Would you like me to tell you about it?”
She squared her shoulders. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then.”
He turned and they sped up to narrow the gap between themselves and Emily. Karina kept the pace, exhaling quietly. He had no brakes, at least not the ones she was used to as a woman. Ordinary men didn’t end dinners by breaking the table with their brother’s spine, they didn’t kill lizards by caving their heads in, they didn’t turn into monsters, and they didn’t feed on women. Ordinary men didn’t behave like this outside of movie screens and when they did it on the screen, other men ridiculed them for it. This was a game she couldn’t afford to play, because he held the best cards. She had to survive this.
Karina chanced a glance at him. The wild, hungry thing in his eyes was still there. “Since someone had to have uploaded this old code, someone on the inside is helping Galatea,” she said, trying to steer him away from whatever he was thinking.
“Looks that way. And when I find them, they’ll wish they were never born.” His voice contained so much malice, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
If this enemy was coming, Emily would be in danger. “Should we evacuate?”
“That’s up to Arthur.”
“Do you think we should?”
Lucas glanced at her. “It depends on how many people they bring to the fight. This is an old base, and we are actively mining this fragment for aluminum and beryllium. If the Ordinators are coming, they’re coming fast. So even if we begin full base evacuation now, we’ll take a hit in equipment. The base is run by means of a fiber network. It’s a sophisticated computer system that coordinates mining operations, bio-support, communications, and so on. It also has the locations of the nearest bases. If the Ordinators gain access to it, a lot of us will die, which is why the network must be destroyed before the evacuation is complete. Detonating it will make this base uninhabitable. Fragments like this, with a stable climate and ecosystem, are rare. Most fragments we find are dead: no plants, no animals, often no atmosphere. You have to wear a suit and live in a hermetically sealed bunker. And popping back and forth through dimensions leaves a trail. If the Ordinators don’t know where we are, they will once we start ripping.”