Page 96 of Echoes of the Tide

Anya stepped up to another portion, her gaze narrowed in concentration as she pulled a separate square over to her side of the glass. “It’s worse than that. Look at this.”

She tapped the glass, and suddenly there were pictures thrown up on the wall. Photographs of his own people, torn apart with their guts hanging out of their bellies and notes all along the sides. Dead People of Water. Murdered in cold bloodwith far too much knowledge about their species spread out on metal tables.

Fortis hissed and a faint sickly yellow illuminated the images in front of them.

“It wasn’t just my father experimenting on the undine,” Anya said. “These documents are from a much more advanced facility. See the tools? I haven’t seen tools like that ever, and I lived in Alpha.”

But then Ace spoke, and he felt his hearts leap into his throat. Because she had pulled a square over to her side and tapped on it. All the other projections disappeared, and in their wake was the image of two achromos.

A man and a woman. A man with a sharp jaw and a hard expression, with a scar on his cheek that looked like a knife wound. The woman had her dark hair severely pulled back, but even her gaze was cruel. Suddenly, the image of them moved.

“Anyone who is in possession of this keycard needs to be aware of two things,” the man said. “First, you are now in service to the city of Tau. If you deny being in service to us, then we will find you. We will replace whoever owns that keycard and we will dispose of your body. Second, we already know where you are, who you are, and every detail about you. Third, we will give you unimaginable power if you work with us.”

The woman leaned a little closer, her hand coming up and tossing markings out from their projection to hover before them. “These are our coordinates. Don’t think for a second you can attack this city. We have weapons unlike any you have ever seen before. We are the originators. We are those who built this city. Defy us, and we will come down on you with all the knowledge of more than two hundred years of life.”

The projection disappeared, leaving only the strange squares again.

“The originators?” Mira repeated. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Ace clicked the next square that was beside her and pulled up a document. The women read it together, their faces growing paler and paler the longer they took.

“What?” Arges snarled. “What is it?”

“The originators,” Ace finally replied. “They’re the original people who created... all of this.”

“That’s not possible,” Anya argued.

“You’re looking at it, Anya. You’re looking at it!” Ace yelled the last piece, her hands shaking as she set the cup in her hands down. “They cloned themselves. They replaced their broken bits with the fucking remains of those clones. They’ve been here the whole time, because they never let themselves die.”

The words hung before them, and he couldn’t fathom what that meant.

Tapping on the glass, he had all the women look at him. Then he asked, “What does that mean? They didn’t let themselves die?”

CHAPTER 38

She stayed in that hidden research facility for hours with the other two women. The undines were quick to get them food and Arges apparently had some idea of transporting blankets to them so they could continue working. Fortis was the only one who remained behind, and she swore he was reading through the glass even though the others assured her that none of the undine could read their language.

Not that it mattered. The documents that were on this keycard were so horrific, it was hard to think straight.

The undine deserved to know what was here. They deserved to know who their real enemy was and that their battle wasn’t over yet. But she thought the rest of her people deserved to know, too.

So while Anya and Mira gathered all the useful information they could, Ace took her droid aside and worked with Byte. Together, the three of them ripped apart all the documentation and historical information that would sink the people who were tied with Tau.

At least, she hoped it would.

Anya staggered over to her, Bitsy now affixed to her face. “What are you up to over here?”

“Making a video. Just like we had planned to do for your father,” Ace muttered, making a few tweaks to what Byte had already suggested.

“Do you really think that’s going to work?”

“It has to.” She warped a bit more of the video, using more of the images that were attached to the keycard. Ripped up undine. Torn apart human bodies. All the terrifying things that no one should ever do and yet, somehow, these people thought it was okay that they had done so. They’d even recorded it.

Anya’s hand came down over hers, stilling her fingers as she worked on the projection. “Ace. I don’t know if this is going to work.”

“You don’t understand. If this doesn’t work, then it means there are no good people left. If anyone can look at this video, this massacre of the human and undine form, and still feel like it was the right choice, then what monsters have we become?”

Ace felt the weight of everything they had discovered sink onto her shoulders. Because there was so much of it.

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