"Black, 5th Moon, Female, Egzardian, 6 years of age. Referenced by experiment A-67."
"Deceased. Failed testing 9b."
"Green, 19th Moon, Female, Daedalian, 5 years of age. Referenced by experiment B-301."
"Deceased. Failed initial inoculations."
"Hell," sighed Dineer, falling back into his chair, "there's just too many of them!"
They sat across from each other at a table illuminated with over a dozen energist-powered lanterns. It was two hours past midnight, and at such an ungodly hour Dineer's friend's attitude fell far below cordial. The unfortunate boy was now indebted to pay two cases of Asturian wine and a bottle of good Basramlic vodka. However, what the rather uptight, antisocial young man planned to do with such a quantity of alcohol was something that eluded the both of them.
The library's architecture had been designed to be primarily functional rather than decorative, and so the long lengths of stone and metal bookshelves were cold and uninviting. During the day, students were often hunched over peering through scrolls or leather-bound archives of past experiments, hoping that somewhere in the ancient writings was a clue to their predecessors' mistakes (subsequently their success). At the late hour, though, the library was silent, the students gone. The Senior Sorcerers were fanatic, though remarkably careless, in the safeguarding of the school's research. Most of them were under the superbly confident belief that there was no one who would even bother with thievery; after all, to be discovered meant public prosecution, and public prosecution meant that you were barred from furthering entry into any Zaibach school. A student would go from prestigious to impoverished in a matter of days.
Folken and Dineer had agreed early on to minimize their time in the library. Just looking at the three, room-length, cramped shelves of books that were dedicated to past failed Fate Experiments tended to fuel discouragement. Since their own research and new techniques had birthed results, they only resorted to the books when all other resources had been exhausted.
One particular section of the library had been specifically cordoned off for only the Emperor and the Senior Sorcerers. A key was kept in the hands of a single, honored student librarian (who they were unaware had a weakness for cases of fine beverages) under the possibility of an emergency. Dineer had befriended the man during their series of Biochemistry courses, though Folken speculated that the other boy had merely crumbled under Dineer's unrelenting merry charms. When he was appointed keeper of the key, their mutual cheerful friend had delivered to him a bottle of his beloved vodka, which he'd drained in less than an hour.
The boy, Wen, had eyed Folken suspiciously, knowing the rumours as well as any other student. It took the promise of the extra case and extra bottle, as well as a hard reassurance that if they were caught they were to under no circumstances place even an iota of blame on him, to get him to open that door in this late hour. Dineer was forced to sign a slip of paper sealing the agreement, which Wen stuffed greedily into his uniform.
A long flight of stairs led down. When they got there, they discovered a smaller room with similar decor, with two lines of books and a set of tables in between. There were also doors on all walls at regular intervals labeled carefully with a series of numbers and letters. Dineer pulled a book off the shelf to behold a detailed listing of names, dates, and locations referencing specific experiments that correlated with the numbers on the locked doors. They'd walked up to the first one mentioned and pulled hard on the handles.
Dineer had peered at the lock. "No good, and I know that wino doesn't have the keys to these."
Folken had the answer to their problem. He lifted the index and middle fingers of his metal arm. After a sharp click two small, thin needles appeared through the fingertips. It took what seemed like forever to pick the lock, since neither had any experience doing so, but they were eventually rewarded. Both boys pulled hard at the heavy steel door.
"Good God."
The room reeked of a horrid combination of chemicals, making their nostrils flare in response. Three rows of different sized glass cylindrical tanks were neatly kept in the dimly illuminated room. An eerie, bluish light emanated from the bottom of each tank, awkwardly clashing with the flickering yellows and oranges of four enclosed torches. The tops of the tanks were capped by a metal dome that was riveted shut. At the bottoms were panels that held a series of buttons and levers. Attached to the front of each cylinder was supposedly a description of its contents, but both of them were too far away to read the tiny handwriting. They were, however, close as they ever wanted to be to the things that were floating inside.
Failed experiments.
Some of them were whole, some of them not. Boys, girls, all under the age of 10, and animals of all sorts.
The closest to them was a young human male, put into five similar containers. The middle contained his head and torso, eyes and mouth stretched forever in a horrific scream. Whether it was in defiance or terror they couldn't tell. He was tied to a pole that ran from the floor to the ceiling, puncturing through the dome at the top. His arms and legs were floating in the remaining four, secured to poles that were half the height of the container. Thighbone could be seen, the edges jagged and split. Bits of skin and sinew floated around them, slowly and aimlessly waving in the thick liquid. More disturbing was the boy's groin where the area was inverted, leaving deep, dark hole. Webs of red, angry lines burst out to form a macabre decor on the surrounding area.
The next was a girl, pale hair flowing angelically around her body. From the belly up she was a peacefully sleeping child, eyes closed in dreams, lips slightly open, hands lazily waving against the glass. From the belly down she simply ceased to exist. Her liver and stomach had been given an unnatural view of the world, peeking out from the torn flesh of her abdomen. Her intestines were completely missing, and so was anything below that. A long, ragged, snake-like figure waving in unison to her hands turned out to be the remains of her spine.
The figures beyond bore various similar forms of evisceration, castration, and separation. Dineer had turned and gagged violently, clutching his stomach and clenching his teeth to prevent himself from retching. Folken paled and quickly slammed closed the door that had taken the both of them to open.
After that, they concentrated on the books, fearing what might lay behind the other doors. It turned out that one book on the first shelf correlated with a numbered book on the other shelf. The only rhyme or reason in the order of the books turned out to be the time that the specimen had been originally acquired. Estimating Celena to be at about fourteen years of age, they started near end, where the relatively more recent experiments were catalogued.
Dineer leaned forward and began flipping through the book, having encountered a series of male-only specimens. "Basramlic male, Asturian male, Basramlic male, Egzardian male, Basramlic..." he looked up at his friend. "Not too keen on competitive scientists." He resumed looking at the book. "Basramlic, Basramlic, Freidian, Asturian, Basramlic, Fanelian --"
"-- Fanelian?"
"Yes, though what they were doing so far out there I couldn't imagine. Wait." He peered closer. "This is an old child. Fifteen."
Folken's breath caught in his throat. "Experiment number?"
"F-19. Folken, you don't suppose --"
Folken dove for the appropriate log, tumbling a stack of books in the process. "F-19, Subject: Male, purportedly one-half human, one-half Atlantean."
"Hold on one second," Dineer interrupted. "One-half Atlantean? What sort of fictional --"
"Appropriation incomplete," continued Folken. "Initial subject unattainable, secondary subject detained. Missing appendage reconstructed (referenced exp. F-19Y). Hereditary supposition confirmed. Fate experimentation on subject delayed, per Emperor's order." He flipped a few pages. "F-19Y, Subject: Male, one-half human, one-half Atlantean. Reattachment of missing right arm. Organics substituted by complex neurologically infused artificial appendage (referenced exp. E-398)."
"It makes sense," murmured Dineer, eyebrows raised from this new revelation regarding his mysterious companion. "I mean, it's one thing to be here trying to control Fate particles, it's another to be a being that's virtually one with them. Why didn't you tell me?"
He shrugged in response.
"Folken," Dineer said carefully, "who were they initially after?"
His sharp, metal fingers scraped deeply into the leather outer covering. A forgotten anger resurfaced.
"My brother."
"What?"
Van's soft, horrified inquiry drew everyone's attention away from the Strategos. Dineer took the momentary lapse to wipe his brow and down another gulp of vino. "As I'd said to him, even the possibility that a living Atlantean, a thing that was practically composed of Fate particles, was alive and available was probably too sweet a prize for the scientists to pass up. Most of the children had apparently been purchased, or stolen and the son of a King, hoarded within a castle full of soldiers and loyal citizens, was almost impossible to obtain. Fate, luck, whatever you want to call it placed your brother dying on the forest floor when Zaibach soldiers arrived to attempt your abduction."
"Then," whispered Van, his eyes sliding towards the boy in the bed, whose fingers clenched in anger now even in sleep, "I could have - "
"No," Dineer interrupted, a bit of old frustration emphasizing his words. "I remember, once, when everything was over, I attempted to rationalize the possibilities: Could Folken have been King? Could you have survived the experiments? Would Celena been left to live a normal life? In the end, I believed, Folken would have died on the forest floor, a victim of the dragon's maw. You would have become the beast, so to speak; in fact, I almost believe that your presence could have won us the war. Celena would have met her end in Zaibach, a torn, broken body encased in chemicals and glass.
"Celena, you see, was not part of the experiments by chance, but by
design."
Folken refused to elaborate, gently placing the book aside and picking up another. Dineer waited a moment, wrought by curiousity. After a while, his friend sighed.
"I can no longer live the life of Folken Lacour de Fanel," he said, his voice a blend of regret and determination, "and my brother is well taken care of. It is better this way, that I was given this life, rather than risk what might have become of him." Pointedly, his eyes shifted towards the heavy steel doors.
Admirably Dineer stared at his friend. To accept the hardships he'd experienced on the basis of a brother he'd not seen in over seven years... If only there were others that could share what was beneath this foreign boy's cold exterior. He resumed reading down the list. "Freidian, Basramlic, Freidian, Asturian, Daedalian, Basramlic - ah! Asturian Female. Hm." He hesitated, then suddenly flipped back and forth between several pages.
"What is it?"
"This entry," he slapped the paper with the back of his hand, "it doesn't make any sense."
"What?" Folken reached for the book. Immediately his eyes were drawn to the final entry on the page, where the handwriting, bold and flourishing as it was, stood out amidst tightly packed letters and digits. The final column had the usual set of letters and numbers in the usual handwriting but alongside it, in the same flourishing script, was "Atlan/Sch."
"There was a book around here," Dineer mumbled, shuffling noisily through their piles, "I think it said - Ah! Maybe this one?"
In his friend's hand was a worn, compact book, looking as important as a torn paper amidst the heavy leather-bound tomes that made up the rest of the archive. However, this book had been marked quite distinctly with the Emperor's seal in his own gleaming golden wax. Scrawled on the inside were the corresponding markings that had been found in the ledger. Whatever was inside had been meant to be seen by the Emperor and his Strategos, if even the latter had been permitted to know of its existence.
The two friends exchanged baffled looks. Had this been placed here by accident, or...?
"Hiding it in the open you think?" Dineer offered.
"Possibly," Folken replied, cracking open the book carefully with his metal hand, hoping to leave the least amount of evidence that the book had been disturbed by a human being. While his companion scanned the small journal (for indeed, what had been written inside turned out to be quite personal), Dineer set about to looking for the appropriate logbook that matched the girl's experiment number.
A few quiet moments passed, though finally Dineer located the volume at the bottom of one of their stacks. He sighed as he placed down book; the lack of a night's rest starting to wear on his reserve. He looked at his friend, in the hopes that his predicament would strike some sort of sympathetic nerve, to find an expression that was darkening by the moment.
"'The man chooses to die,'" Folken read, the journal turned to the last written page, "'bleeding in the snow like a dog, rather than give me the key to my dreams, rather than give me the key to everything that I have ever lived for! The pages missing from his journal are the most important! Precise directions into Atlantis itself! I can no longer make him suffer, but his family still remains.' It ends there."
"What man?"
"A man named Leon Schezar." He frowned, flipping backwards through the book. "The Emperor knew of his attempt to find the city of Atlantis, thus devising a plan to befriend and follow him there. Apparently the Emperor was cheated out of what he desired. What does this have to do with a Fate alteration?"
Dineer, in the meantime, had begun to flip through the details of the denoted experiment. Engrossed and alarmed as he was at the terrifically maniacal particulars, he missed Folken's question. Worn by the late hour and uncharacteristically impatient, Folken slammed his metal hand on the pages his colleague had been looking at. The boy nearly leaped from his skin, sending several books tumbling to the floor.
"F-Folken," he stammered, "maybe you shouldn't see this..."
The tired, cold look the sky-haired boy gave him rattled his nerve. He sighed and held out the book. "Just... look."
Gently Folken took the tomb, pushing aside the Emperor's journal to make space. At the end of the first page, he slowly turned to the next, the expression on his face unreadable. Long minutes passed as he read the entries from beginning to end, and Dineer looked warily at the exit, the lack of windows making it impossible to estimate how many hours of the night had passed. His gaze lingered at the heavy metal door they'd opened when they first arrived, feeling the sorrow and revulsion that he'd experienced when he first saw the children's' remains. Yet, no matter how horrifying the ends, the means had paled in comparison. He fought the urge to vomit.
When Dineer looked at his friend again, he swallowed his despair. Though Folken's face hadn't truly changed, his eyes betrayed the turmoil inside, and a few tears had escaped their depths. "It might not be her," Dineer consoled softly, compelled to draw the book away from his friend.
"It is," Folken replied dully, swiping the long sleeve of his left arm over his cheeks. "The physical descript could not fit anyone else. Plus there is… that name."
"So that is what he meant by Select - " Dineer clapped his hand over his own mouth.
"'Select'? Who? What are you talking about?"
Dineer grabbed several books, hands shaking. "Nothing! Nothing! Maybe we should start cleaning up before Wen decides I need to give him another case of Basramlic Vodka." He laughed nervously.
Disconcertion and misery created by what he'd discovered fed a growing fury. He reached across the desk and grabbed the other boy's arm with his artificial hand, squeezing hard enough with its cold, sharp fingers to illicit a gasp of pain. "You know something. Tell me now."
"You're hurting me, let go!" His protest ended in a squeak. Though the two matched enough in wit, if the confrontation turned physical Dineer was sorely outmatched. He attempted to pull away, only to find that the effort caused the layers of metal that composed his friend's fingers to bite into his skin.
"Tell me!" Folken barked, grabbing hold of his colleague's neck with his spare hand. Dineer gasped for air, desperate to be free. Their struggles caused most of the books to tumble noisily off of the table.
"Jajuka," he croaked, "told me... she'd been Selected."
"How long ago?"
"Almost four years."
Shocked, Folken threw back the boy, who sat hard into his chair then bent over coughing. "Four years," he repeated coldly. "You knew for four years."
"I couldn't tell you," Dineer choked out, his speech garbled. "I was afraid - cough - you'd run to save her."
"You see what she's been through!" he shouted, slamming shut the tome.
"And I know we couldn't have saved her!" Dineer threw back. "She would have died, we would have died trying! At least we know where she is now and that she's still alive! Folken..."
"Just shut up."
He threw the Emperor's journal at his friend, which jarred his shoulder and clattered to the floor. "Clean this up," he snarled, using a royal tone of voice he hadn't sought to use for over ten years. Dineer released a shuddering sigh, too afraid to look up as the angered boy walked out, slamming open and shut the door at the top of the stairs. A few moments later, Wen opened the door, a flickering torch highlighting an unnaturally red face.
"Fu... Fuck!" he slurred, discovering the mess left in their wake. "Upupup!
They'll be here any m-minute, Shorshers. Who knows wha' kinda crap you
two have been getting into..."