Ava hummed in satisfaction as she looked around the Highest’s secret room in the facility. After a long, arduous bargaining session with the Tribunal, she had managed to secure several concessions that would, in theory, help keep her protected from them. She eyed Irric, who had been out of sorts since they’d been reunited to continue their work together.

  She wasn’t the only one who had noticed his odd behaviour. Tassie’s concerned voice rang out from the data slate, asking him what was wrong. The three of them had been sent back to work uncovering the Highest’s secrets on the master terminal, but only two of them were actually doing any work.

  Irric jolted when Ava called out to him. “It would really help if you at least did some work,” she said. “I might be done my strike, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do everything for you.” Truthfully, she didn’t mind being kept preoccupied with the work and no longer fretting over her dealings with the Tribunal, but she didn’t appreciate doing all the heavy lifting. Tassie was of some help, at the very least. Together, the two of them had modified their code once more to search for new aspects of the experiments that were performed on Adrian.

  “I’m sorry,” Irric apologized. “I’ve got a few things on my mind. What is it you need me to do?” He glanced down at the data slate he was holding, his trained eyes flicking over the changes made while he wasn’t paying attention.

  “Literally anything but stare off into space,” Ava huffed. “I’m not obliged to do everything for you, nor does your Tribunal want me to be the one handling all of the information. You’ve been spacing out ever since we started working today.”

  “Ava’s right,” Tassie chimed. “You’ve been acting off and haven’t done very much, which is unlike you. Mind telling us what the issue is?”

  Irric blinked, his worry and guilt eating him alive. He couldn’t tell them the ramifications of the Tribunal learning of the Mandate. Nor that they were at war, and it was all his fault. He did his best to keep his expression schooled. “I can’t talk about it,” he said.

  Tassie cocked a brow at his declaration. “You mean there’s still information the Tribunal is keeping hidden from me?” she asked darkly. “Given the work I’ve been doing for them, I don’t appreciate being kept in the dark regarding the facility.”

  “It’s more complicated than that and doesn’t strictly have anything to do with what you’ve worked on. I simply found out by happenstance,” Irric replied.

  “Fine.” Tassie sighed. “There’s nothing I can do if the Tribunal ordered you to keep a lid on it. Is it something I’m going to learn about eventually?”

  “Definitely,” Irric replied. “It’s a sensitive topic and I’d wager they’re still working on it, but it’s not something they’ll be able to keep a secret.” Not when the entire populace will be involved, he thought morbidly. Just imagining the death toll was enough to make him depressed. So many lives were going to be lost if the Tribunal went through with their war.

  Yet he couldn’t fault their decision.

  There was no way their species would be able to have an amicable relationship with the gru’ul after what they’d learned. Had it not been for him, they could have remained blissfully ignorant and continued their lives the way everything had been before his discovery.

  Now they faced annihilation.

  “Why not tell me now if I’m going to learn eventually?” Tassie asked.

  “Now’s not the time,” Irric said forcefully, shutting down the conversation on the topic. “Why don’t you walk me through the modifications you made to our code instead?” Tassie knew she wouldn’t get any more information out of him and instead did as he asked. Together with Ava, he was brought up to speed on the work they’d done without him. “Is it ready to run?” he asked once he had a grasp on the situation.

  “Almost,” Ava said. “It still needs a few more minor tweaks, but that shouldn’t take too long.”

  True to her word, the three of them finished their work within the hour and soon the code was running in the background. With nothing else to do until it was done running its course, they continued their work, readying the next iteration of code to be run using some of Ava’s ideas.

  Several hours later, a soft ding went off on Irric’s data slate, alerting him that they had their results. A massive data packet was available to them, stunning him. He immediately shared it with Tassie so she could go over it at the same time as him and Ava.

  This time, they wisely avoided the videos that came alongside their discovery, preferring to read first what horror they were going to bear witness to rather than learn the hard way. What Irric saw perplexed him. “Organs?” he asked. “Why would the gru’ul have so much information on organs we’ve never seen before?” The more they progressed, the more he had the feeling he’d seen them somewhere before, but he dismissed the thought.

  “It could have been for Adrian,” Ava suggested. “Even then, their complexity is astounding.” She continued reading the report they’d opened. “This document looks like it gives a brief overview of what they all do.”

  The three of them fell into their research and after quite some time managed to gain a rudimentary grasp of what the organs were trying to accomplish. “This doesn’t make sense,” Tassie stated, rubbing her temples. “The only way for any of these organs to even remotely do what the reports suggest is if there’s an external component working in tandem with them. Otherwise, they’d fail entirely, killing the host.”

  Ava hummed thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t the nanites in Adrian’s body be able to perform that function? They’re technically an external component, even if they’re integrated in his body.” They hadn’t discovered everything the gru’ul had done to him, but she figured that there was a possibility that at least some of the nanites had specialized in keeping the organs alive, if what they’d found so far was any indication.

  “But these organs help produce the nanites!” Tassie exclaimed. “Without the organs, those nanites wouldn’t exist and without the nanites the organs wouldn’t function.” She drummed her fingers in thought, piecing together their newest puzzle.

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  “Adrian was modified bit by bit,” Ava pointed out. “It’s possible the gru’ul did something to him that would allow for him to support the organs before they were put inside him.”

  “That’s assuming he even has these organs,” Irric said. He received two flat stares in return. “Him having them would require a complete organ transplant. I’m certain human organs aren’t even remotely similar to these.”

  “They’re not,” Ava confirmed. “But given that everything we find here somehow points back to Adrian, I think it’s safe to assume that what we’ve discovered here also relates to him.”

  Irric continued reading the reports in hopes of finding confirmation for their theory. “If this is true, he must have an entirely symbiotic relationship with the nanites for this to occur. This is an incredible discovery! It’s not just the nanites making changes to Adrian, but also him affecting the nanites. How did the gru’ul accomplish such a thing?”

  “There’s a video attachment,” Ava said. “Should we watch it?” She’d only learned of the discoveries they’d made in her absence through the reports given to her by Irric, which weren’t the originals. She had yet to see what one of Adrian’s experiments truly entailed, aside from learning of the strange food he’d eaten.

  Perhaps now she finally would.

  Tassie and Irric exchanged an uneasy glance. “I really don’t want to,” Tassie said, shuddering involuntarily, causing Ava to wonder what warranted such a reaction at the mere thought of making a new discovery. “You’re the one that condemned Adrian to his time with the gru’ul. What will you do once you know what his fate was?”

  “I need to know,” Ava said, her eyes hardening. “I did not know what exactly the gru’ul were trying to accomplish with their experiments before I was sentient.” She shot Irric a nervous glance. “Now that we know more about their purpose here, I want to see how they accomplished them. What did I truly condemn Adrian to?”

  “We’ll watch the video.” Irric sighed. “I sincerely hope it’s not like the others we’ve found.” Reluctantly, he shared the video with Tassie and prepared to watch it on his data slate. He frowned when he saw how long it was. “That’s going to take us all day to watch.”

  “All night for me,” Tassie grunted. “Looks like I won’t be sleeping much. I’ll inform the others not to expect me back anytime soon.” Using her comms, she contacted Rann. After a brief conversation, she was ready to start.

  Irric pushed play.

  They all bore witness to the grisly operation that confirmed their theory of a full organ transplant. For hours, they watched with morbid fascination as Adrian was gutted like a fish and stitched back together with the new, alien organs they’d learned of during their research. The graphic documentary of his suffering finally drove home to Ava just what she’d been complicit in. While she wasn’t squeamish by any means, a sick feeling churned in her gut that only got worse the longer she watched.

  By the time the video was done, hours later, the three of them had no desire to continue their work for the day. A very pale Tassie bid Irric and Ava goodbye and promptly hung up, unable to handle making another discovery so soon.

  Irric closed the program on his data slate and glanced over towards Ava, who was watching him blankly. “You were right,” he said. “I have no idea how he survived such a massive operation without any complications.” Still though, he had a nagging feeling that the organs they’d discovered were familiar to him. Frowning, he tried to remember where he might have seen them before.

  “In a way, I was hoping I was wrong,” Ava said. “What we’ve learned today still leaves us with many questions regarding the experiments. What they’ve done is horrifying, and I can’t help but wonder what their definition of success was.”

  Irric wisely kept silent about his conversation with the gru’ul prisoner that had confirmed that the gru’ul had succeeded in transforming Adrian into the next step in human evolution. Ava was keenly aware of the facility’s goals, but not the existence of their captive. And it was to stay that way. “I don’t even know anymore. I was wondering how the nanomachines we discovered previously fit into the equation, but after today, I can’t help but feel that they were going for some kind of symbiosis between Adrian and the machines,” he said, sticking strictly to the topic of conversation.

  Ava hummed in thought. “We’ll have to keep reading the documents to make sure. Is it just me, or have we seen those organs somewhere before?” While she’d never worked with those organs in her lab back on Earth, she was certain she’d come across them before. It aggravated her that she couldn’t place where.

  “You too?” Irric said, surprised. “I thought it was just me. I don’t recall there being any rooms in the restricted section that had those organs in them. Is there one we overlooked?”

  Ava stared at the terminal, deep in thought as she accessed her memory banks. “We learned of them on the Highest’s terminal. What if they’re somewhere only the Highest could access?” A thought struck her. “The room we found Stanley in!” she exclaimed, pleased that she’d made the connection at last. “There were plenty of things in the pods there.”

  “We should go check,” Irric said excitedly. The thought of having an actual sample to work with and study filled him with energy, despite how drained he’d been moments ago. He quickly packed up his equipment and together they made their way towards one of the other rooms restricted to the Highest only.

  The engraving on the wall melted away as they approached, and they entered. Rows upon rows of pods greeted them when they exited the small corridor that led into the room. The bodies were just as hideous as the last time they’d been there. Irric suppressed a shudder, trying to avoid imagining what must have caused such horrifying mutations. He remained focused on his task, scanning for the pods that contained organs. They made their way to the back wall of the massive room and found what they were looking for.

  The pair studied the organs suspended in the pods, one at a time. Halfway along the wall, Ava called out. “I found them!” She pointed at the small ones right off the floor. Bending down, she inspected them closely. “They’re a perfect match to what we found on the Highest’s terminal.” She looked at them for several seconds before frowning. “These ones seem slightly smaller than what was transplanted into Adrian.”

  “Are you certain of that?” Irric asked. “These could be an earlier version. Maybe they misjudged the size of the organs Adrian needed and created the ones he got later?”

  “I’m not sure of that, but it’s certainly a possibility,” Ava said. She eyed the only terminal in the room — the one that would allow for her to access the pods and take the organs out of their stasis. “We have access everything in this room, so unfreezing them won’t be a problem.”

  “We can study them physically?” Irric asked with barely contained excitement. Reading about them in a report was one thing, but that was the first instance where they had something tangible to study. Apart from those horrid chemicals, of which he blatantly refused to study further. Ever.

  “We can, but I’m not sure taking them out of stasis yet is a good idea,” Ava replied, dashing his hopes. “We still don’t know enough about them and how long we can expose them to air for without degradation. In the videos, they were removed from their pods and immediately transplanted into Adrian. Granted, they were still exposed to air for a little bit, but they were connected and functioning relatively quickly. We don’t know how to preserve them after we remove them from stasis.”

  “Do we have enough information to simulate a body and connect them artificially?” Irric asked.

  “I could probably recreate the surgery and do that — the video we have shows how and I’ve done my fair share of surgeries. What concerns me is that they most likely need Adrian’s modified blood to function, which we don’t have.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be getting any of it any time soon,” Irric said, “unless we manage to discover a physical sample.”

  “We’d have to be extremely lucky,” Ava agreed.