Chương 11: Going all out

It has been agreed that each Area would be allowed one city, centred around a University. These would be the only physical Universities in the world, accepting only the best talent, with the best facilities. Each University would be autonomous, and healthy competition between them encouraged. The question of location remains open - but wherever they are placed, they will serve as the singular fixed points of a world that has otherwise learned to keep moving.

- From the memoirs of Trahom Macbeth, Chief Secretary of the Progenitor's Faction Kara was, to his exasperation, running low on credits and high on problems, which was not a combination that rewarded careful thinking. He did careful thinking anyway, because the alternative was worse. His Fluid State skill really came in clutch in such moments. His family was alive. The interface connections confirmed it, thin but present, the digital equivalent of a pulse. But they were not here. The merfolk had told him to leave.

He had stayed instead, which was a decision he had made and which he was not revisiting. What he needed now was information, and the city was below him, and his credits were almost gone, and he had one tool left that was worth exploring. He spent nearly all of what remained on a gel cartridge, which arrived by drone with the promptness of an Area that had its logistics well organised. He took out the invisibility suit and put it on, covering himself fully.

Then he applied the gel to his face, breathed out slowly, and watched the bubble form, thin and transparent, the size of his body, sealed. Pushing the boat off the shore, he took a breath, tipped forward over the side of the boat, and dropped into the water. The underwater city spread out below him in every direction for dozens of kilometres, lit from within by the bio-engineered corals that covered every surface in shapes and colours that had no natural analogue.

The engineers had clearly decided that functional and beautiful were not mutually exclusive, and had been right. Layers of enormous bubbles stretched over the city in concentric domes, each layer a different thickness, the whole structure designed to let authorised entry through and nothing else, including the surrounding water. Inside those domes, buildings rose and connected and branched the way architecture does when it never has to account for weather. He had been here once before, years ago.

It still hit him the same way. He oriented himself and began moving away from the merfolk pair he had spotted earlier, keeping his movements small and his profile low. The guards and their partners were distributed in patterns he could read after enough observation, regular enough to have logic, irregular enough to require attention. He paid attention. He watched the sightlines and moved between them, taking the slow, careful approach three years on the island had drilled into him. The swordfish found him anyway.

It was about two hundred metres out when it turned. He felt it before he saw it, his Sixth Sense activating, something dangerous recalibrating its direction. He went completely still. Still was not sufficient. The swordfish began to move toward him, slow and precise, the deliberate course of something that had registered an anomaly and meant to investigate it. He assessed his options. The swordfish was faster than him in open water by a margin that made running a theoretical option rather than a practical one.

His bubble was not going to survive its snout at any velocity worth worrying about. Still was no longer sufficient, and moving was worse, and he had perhaps thirty seconds before the gap closed enough to force the situation. There was a group of four people descending to his left. He moved toward them. Slowly enough to avoid attracting attention he didn't want from the guards or their partners.

And well, fast was also not possible in a bubble, which moved with the hydrodynamic enthusiasm of a large soap bubble, which is to say not much. He moved with purpose and kept moving, and the swordfish accelerated behind him, and the group ahead began to notice the swordfish accelerating behind him, and what followed was the rapid chain reaction of a security situation becoming a public situation. The group panicked.

The guards of the swordfish panicked, because an accelerating swordfish near a group of civilians inside individual bubbles was exactly the scenario their training had been designed to prevent. The swordfish itself, presented with a target that had moved inside the protective radius of a civilian group, did what its training had spent years establishing. It stopped. Close enough that he could see the eye tracking. He breathed. The guards reached the group.

There was shouting, and apologies, and the social performance of a security incident being managed into something that would not appear in any report. Kara drifted along with the group as they resumed their descent, one bubble among several, unremarkable, and let the city's enormous bubble layers receive them all without distinction.

Inside, he steered away from the group toward a quieter section of the city, found a narrow alley between two buildings where no one was moving, and released the bubble with a soft pop. He stripped off the suit quickly, folded it into the bag, and straightened his toga. An ordinary visitor, arrived from above, nothing remarkable about him. He stepped out of the alley and into the street.

The city at ground level was a different experience from the approach above, less spectacular, more functional, the ordinary business of eighty thousand people going about their lives in one of the few population centres on the planet. Nobody looked at him. He moved through it with the ease of someone who had spent three years being invisible in a forest full of things that could kill him, and found a city of humans considerably less demanding. He needed a starting point.

He had the name, Gomot, and the broad shape of what had happened, which was nothing good, and almost no credits left and a suit in his bag and an egg in his pocket that was definitely growing. The veterinary clinic appeared on his left. He looked at it for a moment, then at the egg, then back at the clinic. He went in. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

The receptionist was middle-aged, with the kind of face that had decided warmth was its default setting and had stuck with the decision. She welcomed him with a kind smile that went beyond professional obligation, which he appreciated and which made what followed slightly worse.

"Hi. I'm visiting family. I found this egg in a forest outside. Do you know what it might be?" He took it out. It had grown again, he was certain of it now, larger than a chicken egg, the surface smooth to the touch. The receptionist took it, turned it, and frowned.

"It looks like a hawk's egg. But the feel of it is different somehow. If you leave it overnight, we can run a full analysis." He took it back with the speed of someone who had just remembered what the egg's source was and what a full analysis was likely to conclude. The receptionist's expression shifted toward the particular suspicion of someone whose professional instincts had flagged something and were waiting for an explanation. He moved on before the explanation could be requested.

"Actually, I had another question. I heard something happened to a student here. Gomot? What was that about?" The frown cleared. The receptionist settled into the comfortable posture of someone with a story they had told before and considered themselves reliable on.

"Gomot? Oh right, he went by Ghilim Habuza here. Bright student, apparently. Made the dungeon team last year, which is saying something." She shook her head.

"When they came out, one of his teammates was dead, others were badly hurt. Tomas - he's a prominent Progenitor - accused Ghilim of the murder, and of assaulting his daughter. He's been running ever since." She paused, with the timing of someone giving the next part its proper weight.

"Tomas dropped all the charges about a month ago. Mysterious, really. But Ghilim still won't hand himself in, which tells you something, doesn't it? His parents have vanished too. Honestly, I do wish the University had better screening. The poor girl." Kara heard all this. His brother.

Gomot, who had once spent three weeks nursing a bird back to health after finding it with a broken wing, who communicated everything that mattered without a single word, who had sat on a harbour wall with him in silence because silence was sometimes the most appropriate item on the menu. Rapist. Murderer.

He used the Safe Haven skill before he said anything he would need to account for, because the alternative was a response that would not help anyone and would cost him the information channel he was currently standing in front of. The skill did its work. His heart rate came down. His hands unclenched. He thanked the receptionist, which was the correct social response and which he produced through an act of will, and walked out.

The city went about its business around him, indifferent to the fact that he was standing in the middle of it with his brother's name in his ears and the charges sitting in him like something with weight. Tomas had dropped the charges. That was the detail that kept surfacing. No legal development, no new evidence to explain it. Could it have something to do with him? Not that it mattered any more. The question was where Gomot and his parents were now. He had changed his name.

He was still running, even after the charges were dropped, which meant either he didn't know, or he knew and didn't trust it, or there was something else keeping him moving that the charges had only been part of. Kara didn't have enough to know which. What he had was this - his brother was somewhere, running, alone, with a speech disability and a skill that had potentially made him a target and no family reachable to him.

And his parents were gone too, no one knew where, just that they were separated from his brother. How the receptionist knew that, he wasn't sure, but she sounded fairly certain of it. He thought about Tremble's parting words, which arrived when they were relevant in a way he was beginning to expect. He stood outside the veterinary clinic in an underwater city that had told him to leave, with almost no credits and a growing egg and his brother's new name, and made his decision. He was going to find Gomot.

His brother was out there, and Kara had been gone for three years, and whatever had happened in those three years had happened partly in the space his absence had left, and he was not going to let it keep happening from a distance. He put the egg back in his pocket, carefully, and started moving. He walked for the better part of an hour after that, asking careful questions framed as the idle curiosity of a visitor.

Not everyone shared the receptionist's certainty about Gomot's guilt, which settled him more than the skill had managed to. But nobody knew where his brother was. Nobody knew where his parents were either. The trail was cold by weeks and he had no institutional access and no plan beyond a direction. His stomach raised a point it had been raising for several hours.

He found a Takoyaki stall, spent the last of what he had, and sat down on a bench that appeared to be made of glass with jellyfish moving slowly inside it, which under any other circumstances he would have spent some time with. He ate and thought. He had three options. First, he could go back outside and search by word of mouth. Slow, unreliable, and he had the credit balance of a man who had recently returned from three years on a planet with no economy.

Second, he could surface, get to shore, and notify his skills to a ruling council somewhere else, another University, one without University 11's complicated relationship with his family. The problem was getting to shore undetected, and even if he managed it, University 11 would reach him before anyone else did. They were already here. And finally, he could notify the councils right now, from this bench, in the city that had told him to leave and had condemned his brother in the court of public opinion.

It was his least preferred option by a considerable margin. It was also the most efficient. First-hand information, immediate access, no travel. The people he needed to talk to were already standing on the same ocean floor he was. He sat with the Takoyaki and thought about who he had been before the island. The version of himself that had trained alone on a raft in the ocean rather than face the media attention his brother's epic skill had brought, that version had run from things. Not from fear exactly.

From the friction of being seen, of being the thing people looked at and talked about and formed opinions on. He had been good at managing that, at keeping things slow and quiet and unremarkable. Then he had spent three years on an island with a twenty-foot telepathic mammoth, a roc the size of a weather event, a lion-tiger hybrid whose approval felt like a significant personal achievement, and a man with violet skin who could kickstart a planet's rotation with a thought. He pulled up his interface.

Navigated to the skills tab. Selected the epic skill, then the unique skill, and held his finger over the notification icon for a moment. Then, before he could change his mind again, he pressed it. He was going all out.