“I see. So until we can verify exactly how thinadeskite does what it does, it’s not hitting any factory floors.”
“Correct, General. And we have all kinds of industry muck-a-mucks clawing at our backs to get their own people in here to run their own tests. But I’m not playing babysitter for a bunch of damned tweedy civilians.” Nadar says the word with a surprising amount of disdain. “We have enough problems here. We don’t need academics or scientists getting gutted or shot on our back door as well. Not to mention the security risks that poses, letting industry get their say in military matters.”
“Any security issues with Arc Lightning?”
“No serious ones, at least.”
“Serious ones?”
“Well. Truth be told, there was one odd incident a few months back that now seems to have been somewhat harmless. Some of our operations crew noticed signs that someone had started a fire in one of the branches. Not as sabotage, it seems, because there’s not much to burn down in a tunnel underground, but…Something like the ruins of a campfire. A very small one.”
“That is odd.” Mulaghesh makes a note of it.
“Yes, I went and looked myself. It looked as though whoever had done it had been burning just…well, plants, I suppose. Leaves. Some cloth. Things like that. As if someone had camped out down there, trying to escape the rain, perhaps.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, months…Probably four or five months ago. We checked the fences, checked the security checkpoints, checked the tunnels, but found no sign of forced entry or tampering. It was strange, but it’s never happened again. It’s weak tea in comparison to the other issues pressing on us.”
“If you could have your way, Captain—what would you do with this project?”
Nadar blinks. Her heavy, dark eyes flick back and forth over the floor. “If I can speak freely, General?”
“You may.”
“I’d mothball this. Shut it down. Now’s not the time to play scientists.”
“And what would you do instead?”
Her response is immediate: “Arm and train the river clans, and coordinate with them to drive the highlanders out of the Tarsil Mountains entirely.”
“No more negotiations, then?”
Nadar scoffs. “It’s just a front. The highland tribes use the talks to stall just long enough until they can make their next move. They disassociate themselves from any conflict, of course. ‘That wasn’t us who did it, just people who happen to fervently agree with us—and how can we control them?’ Very convenient.”
“I see.” Mulaghesh clears her throat. “One last thing, Captain…”
“Yes?”
“I know you said that you’d used tests to confirm that this material was not Divine…but when they sent me here, I saw a record of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs representative coming here to do some additional tests.”
Nadar’s face darkens.
“But,” says Mulaghesh, “there was some kind of note that she went AWOL. Is that correct?”
Nadar thinks for a long time, her mouth working. “This, too,” she says finally, “is probably something that can be explained with a simple demonstration.”
***
She leads Mulaghesh to a small dormitory hallway. “This wing is for senior officers,” she explains, “as well as a few technicians and guests.” She comes to one room door and sorts through a ponderous ring of keys, procured from a maintenance worker. “We still haven’t cleaned it up, under my orders. I had a feeling someone would want to come looking for her.” She unlocks the door. “Though I suspect, General, you’ll want to just glance and move on until your pension’s earned out…with all due respect, of course.”
She pushes the door open.
Mulaghesh’s mouth twists as she looks into the room. “By the seas…”
Sumitra Choudhry, it seems, did a lot of redecorating before her disappearance: all the furniture has been removed except for a mattress, and a four-foot-wide black stripe with oddly fuzzy edges runs along the bare white walls. Mulaghesh notes that the stripe goes from about waist-height to shoulder-height…and as she looks closer she sees that it is not one solid stripe but writing, endless scribblings overlaid on one another until they become a dense, black fog, thousands and thousands of words running along the walls. Above and below this stripe, on the ceiling and on the floors, are drawings and sketches that leap out of the wandering black ribbon to stretch across the corners, until nearly three-quarters of the room is covered in black ink.
“She did all this?” asks Mulaghesh.
Nadar nods. Some of the writings must have needed censoring, for they’ve had whole bottles of black ink dumped out onto them, concealing their message. The ink has dripped down the walls in thin, tapered lines, reminding Mulaghesh of icicles running along a roof edge. In the center of the black-smeared floor is the bare, gray mattress.
“So,” says Mulaghesh. “She went mad.”
“So I would conclude, General,” says Nadar.
Mulaghesh walks in. The ink has puddled so thickly on the floor that it’s dried and cracked, like the parched ground of some wasteland. Some of the ink must have dried while Choudhry was still here, for Mulaghesh can see numerous tiny carvings of faces gouged into the calcified ink.
She stands in the center of Choudhry’s old mattress—which is nearly as ink-stained as the rest of the room—and looks around. It’s as if she painted her own nightmare, she thinks, and crawled inside.
The paintings and drawings have a handful of similarities. There are a lot of images of people holding hands, many of them standing on what looks like water. In some, one person—somewhat female looking—is wounding themselves, cutting off their arm or maybe their hand, while a second woman looks on in horror. There are countless images of weapons: swords, daggers, spears, arrows. Some drawings are less clear: one set in the corner looks like four chicken wings on kebab sticks, though there’s something disgustingly strange about them.
But one sketch is strangely arresting to Mulaghesh: it is a landscape, quite well done in comparison to some of the other drawings, depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed. Rising behind them is a tower, and though the outline is done in black ink, somehow it’s been drawn so that Mulaghesh feels the tower is purest white, reflecting the light of a cold winter moon.