Inmates of the Flesh by Alina Udrea - HTML preview

CHAPTER 6 — The Garden of Errors

They followed the strand through the afternoon and into a twilight

that came early, as if the day had been cut shorter to make room for what came next. The strand didn’t point. It drifted, a slow tug in Eryn’s palm toward a horizon that refused to stay where horizons belonged.

They walked in silence.

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At a rise where the land had been broken into steps by a long-ago

flood, Sera lifted her hand. The line behind her rippled to a halt.

“Don’t look straight at it,” she said.

Page | 26 “At what?” Kael asked. His voice was steady again. Nothing in it

confessed to implants, or leaks, or lies.

Sera didn’t answer. She angled them left. The strand tugged right.

Eryn followed the difference and felt her stomach drop, the way it does when you discover a stair where there should be floor. The world out there—just beyond the next step—wavered as if the heat had learned a new trick.

It wasn’t heat.

It was a gate.

Not a door. A gate is always about permission.

The Garden hung beyond it like a memory made physical. Trees

that had never grown on this version of Earth flung up darker leaves than darkness itself. Water braided through their roots, not flowing but thinking.

“It’s… beautiful,” someone said, as if the word were a question.

“Of course it is,” Sera said. “That’s how you keep the curious close.”

The gate wasn’t locked.

That, Eryn thought, is the lock.

The strand tightened until her fingers ached. Her implant whined—

the way old machinery does in the moment before doing something it was never meant to do. A message surfaced without her calling it.

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override channel open. author: privileges: administrative. warning: proximity to restricted substrate. warning: loop risk. proceed?

Eryn didn’t remember teaching her implant to ask permission.

Page | 27 “I go first,” she said.

“No,” Sera said immediately.

“You don’t have an implant arguing with God,” Eryn said. “If the Garden eats anything that thinks too clean, it’ll eat me before it eats you.”

“That is a terrible argument,” Sera said, but her lips were pale and tight and her eyes had flinched, a fraction, at the word “eat.” “Fine.”

“Fine,” Eryn said, and handed the end of the rope to Kael.

He tied the knot clean. Eryn looked him in the face as if the knot

might have left a mark there. If he was a leak, he was a leak who could tie a bowline under pressure. That had to count for something.

“Back in ten breaths or we cut,” Sera said. “Don’t make me choose the number.”

Eryn nodded. She stepped.

The Garden did not begin so much as remove her from somewhere else.

The first breath tasted like rain and iron; the second like the inside

of a book that had been closed for too long. She felt something reach for her through her eyes—something gentle and curious and hungry.

Names filled the air the way pollen fills the air in spring—too small

to see until the light catches them, then everywhere. She recognized none. She recognized all.

Her implant squealed and then went utterly quiet, as if someone had put their hand over its mouth.

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Eryn slowed. The path was not a path; it was an invitation. She

obeyed as much of it as she could without trusting it completely, the way you obey someone dangerous enough to be interesting. The trees

Page | 28 bent as she passed, their leaves whispering in a language that was all

vowels.

A statue waited at the bend. It wore her face. Not this face.

Another face she had carried once—cheekbones sharper, mouth harder. Warrior queen. The statue’s eyes were empty. The plaque beneath it bore no inscription.

“She was meant to break,” a voice said behind her, like a mother speaking in a library.

Eryn turned.

An old woman stood in the path. The woman had the kind of age

that makes time stop feeling like a count and more like a color. Her hair had learned to be white without going brittle.

“Are you the Forgotten?” Eryn asked.

“The Forgotten forget themselves,” the woman said mildly. “I remember what they dropped. That is my rudeness.”

“What is this place?” Eryn said.

The woman’s eyes were gentle. “What the system could not bring

itself to erase. Sins that were too useful. Virtues that were too dangerous. Every prison has a closet where it keeps what won’t fit the ledger.”

“And why show me?”

“Because you are made of closets,” the woman said. “Because you are a key that thinks it is a door. Because you keep asking the wrong mercy of yourself.”

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Eryn’s throat closed. “I don’t know the crime.”

“Knowing isn’t the same as remembering,” the woman said. “Remembering isn’t the same as understanding. Understanding is not

Page | 29 absolution. Be careful what you ask for at the Nexus.”

“You’ve been?” Eryn asked.

“Once. I came back because I couldn’t carry what I found,” the woman said simply. “I am braver now. Or more tired.”

Behind Eryn, the rope tugged twice: Sera’s steady demand. Time.

“I have to go,” Eryn said. “We’ll come back.”

“You might not need to,” the woman said, and reached out.

Her fingers brushed Eryn’s wrist. Cold swept up Eryn’s arm, bright

as melted glass. The Anchor’s pulse—far away on Sera’s back— stuttered and caught, as if the woman had plucked a string that ran through both of them.

Eryn saw an image, brief and merciless: a room full of light. The

Warden’s voice not above her this time but beside her, saying “We will be corrected,” and Eryn’s mouth answering, “We will be corrected,” because it was her voice, too.

The rope yanked hard. Eryn stumbled backward. The Garden

receded.

Sera’s arms were around her. Sand bit her knees.

“What happened?” Sera demanded. “You were gone nine breaths. One more and I—”

Her voice broke. She didn’t let it be a break for long.

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Eryn realized she was shaking because Sera’s hands were steady

around her, and the difference had to be coming from somewhere.

She caught a breath. Then another.

Page | 30 “There’s a keeper,” Eryn said. “Or a caretaker. Or a liar that felt kind.

She touched me. She showed me—”

She swallowed. The word lodged.

“—me.”

Sera watched her for a long moment. “You want to say you did this

to yourself,” she said finally.

“Or that the me who stood beside the Warden did it to me,” Eryn said. “Or that the system that is and is not me did it to me.” She barked an ugly laugh. “Systems love grammar.”

Kael had been very quiet. Now he stepped closer like a man who

wants a better view of the knife he knows is going to fall.

“What did the Garden ask for?” he said.

Eryn thought of closets, of trophies, of soft deletes. She thought of

mercy, of fire. She thought of the word “correction” spoken in two mouths with the same breath.

“It didn’t ask,” she said. “It offered. That’s worse.”

Sera lifted the strand. It glowed a shade brighter, as if pleased.

“Then we take the offer and shape it,” Sera said. “We can aim not to break what we don’t have to. We can aim to break what needs breaking.”

“And when we stand at the Nexus?” Kael asked, half-hopeful, half-desperate. “What will it be?”

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Sera’s eyes went to the horizon where the Veil’s shimmer met the

desert’s old bones. She didn’t answer for a long time.

“A mirror,” Eryn said finally. “And a door. And a knife you swing at

Page | 31 yourself.”

Sera nodded once—grim agreement.

“We move at night,” she said. “The Garden’s path will close when the Veil sweeps again. We’ll take its memory with us as far as it will go. After that, we trust our feet and whatever voices decide to ride your skull.”

Eryn touched the base of her neck. The implant had woken, quiet

and sulky, like a child who had been told to nap and had woken to find the party half over.

It offered her a single line, sullenly: nexus vector: updated. tribunal

attention: increased. recommendation: do not become what watches you.

“Working on it,” Eryn said, and stood.

The monoliths hummed. The Anchor pulsed. The strand’s glow leaned toward a horizon that always, always moved.

And somewhere above the ceiling they called a sky, a ring of stars

watched without blinking as an inmate and a keeper and a leak and a camp of the forgotten walked toward a mirror they might not survive and might not want to.