The Spell of Rosette - Kim Falconer [31]
I should have been an entomologist…much easier than turning tricks.
Kreshkali survived by selling her body on the streets. It wasn’t the most pleasant work, but it kept her hidden. It also connected her to the underworld and a wealth of contraband, including quantum computer texts, grimoire and other occult tomes. If she could elude ASSIST long enough, she’d find a way to destroy the worm and the Allied States with it. If it wasn’t too late to restore Earth’s ecosystems, it would mean freedom for herself and any who cared to join her.
But not you, eh, Jaynan?
She would have to move again. It wouldn’t take long for ASSIST to send more trackers, even if Jaynan hadn’t gotten a message through. Kreshkali closed her eyes, rubbing the back of her neck. She was on her own now.
I trusted you, Jaynan. I showed you the portal, gave you a new life…
After being trapped in a world choking on the entrails of its failing technology, polluted oceans and sadistic government, Kreshkali had found a way out. She’d discovered one of the portals to the many-worlds, and it still worked.
As a child, always in secret, she’d been taught about these doors, her instruction coming to an abrupt halt when her mother was ‘taken’. She was too young to recall the details, but not so young she would ever forget the look on her mother’s face when they dragged her away—entombed for being a ‘witch’. Kreshkali spat.
Raised half-heartedly by a distant relative, Kreshkali had educated herself with the aid of her mother’s secret library. Hidden behind a wall, the shelves were arranged in ascending order, as if the woman had known her daughter would be learning on her own. Eventually Kreshkali came to study the physics of multiple dimensions in earnest, adding to the library black-market texts that had cost her a small fortune in water-credits to obtain. She’d also learned to practise the arcane arts and the mystery traditions—at great risk to her life.
Everything she did in this world was a potential crime against the Allied States. She was a witch, and for that she’d be killed. Growing up, her main goal in life was to not get caught—not be taken like her mother. That was before she’d found the box. Hidden inside a great tome, a Cantonese-English dictionary, was a message from her mother, written twenty years before. It told of her inheritance, of Docturi Janicia and her charge to continue the work—to find a way to delete the worm and bring the quantum sentient back, if he still existed. There was a horary chart, a map to the portal in the sewers under Half Moon Bay, and there were pages of drawings about the genetic changes in her DNA. She’d found the portal and she’d crossed over to Gaela, but in all her searching, she’d discovered no trace of JARROD.
Had he survived?
She didn’t have the resources or the methodology to build another quantum sentient, even with his backup CPU. If JARROD was gone, that was it until she could find the original Richter journals. Rumour had it they’d all been destroyed at the turn of the century, before the major plate shifts. Her lips twisted into a half smile. Journals or no, she’d need a more sophisticated laboratory than her apartment kitchen to build a quantum computer—not to mention a steady power supply.
She lit another candle, shaking her head. Her only consolation was that no child of hers would ever see her dragged away. She damned ASSIST and the Allied States in her mind. She’d learned the hard way not to do it out loud.
The Allied States—the remaining lands of North America, fragments of the Euro-community, and a few settlements in what was left of India and Japan—competed with each other for every scrap of food and every drop of water left on Earth. The only thing that held them together was military-enforced domination and the threat of attack from any nation not bound by the original constitution.