Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

14. The Scent of Dead Flowers

He remembered the night they had escaped. It was a night like this, just about fourteen months ago. Early summer on this side of the planet, not that that mattered, because the mansions were underneath individual canopies of an artificial atmosphere that could be controlled at the inhabitant's whim. A lavishly blooming carpet of spring flowers might dominate one garden, and trees ablaze with the fiery colors of autumn the next. The kind of people who lived here were used to controlling the world they lived in, and they weren't ready to give that up during their vacations. They could go through all seasons in a day if they had wanted to.

But the man who lived here had locked this garden into an eternal summer.

Null cast a glance across the white cobblestone path that wound through the garden towards the mansion. Lars could sense that she remembered what it felt like to have those stones underneath her feet during the rare occasions when she had been allowed to go to the garden. Deliberately unevenly placed, they evoked a feeling of forced imperfection. Like everything about this place, it was just an illusion – an artificial mask supposed to imitate nature, a mockery of something beautiful. Because truly beautiful things could not be grown by force.

Looming ominously ahead, the mansion lay dark and seemingly abandoned. There was dim light behind some of the windows, but they had double-checked security rosters and patrol plans, the mansion was currently not staffed with security personnel, not even any servants. Null let their gaze wander across the dark face of the building, until the far corner of the building. There, on the second floor, there was a single window that was not like the others - it was opaque, no light coming in or out through it, ever. Behind that window lay her personnel hell. On the dimly lit face of the mansion, it looked like somebody had torn a deep hole into it.

She continued to walk in the shadows, and passed a bed of white lilies, brushing past some of them on the way. Their brightly colored stamens should have cast orange streaks across their pitch black combat suit, but they didn't, because they were just as dead and fake as the rest of this place.

Getting in was easy. The back door was locked, but digital. Lars hacked it with little effort, blocking the silent alarm that it tried to send out when the breach was detected. Inside, she pushed her night vision scope up on her head and blinked a few times as her organic eye adjusted to the dim light of the corridor they found themselves in.

Useful little toy... she mused. Makes me consider getting our other eye replaced by an augment, too.

And what are we gonna do if we have to infiltrate a place like Hestia again? Lars asked. Wear two eye patches?

We could ask Dex to build something like that into the eye that Higgs found.

Higgs gave you an eye that would match your organic one perfectly, and instead of getting that pitch black augment replaced, you'd rather replace your organic eye? You're a strange creature, Null.

I'm an opportunist, she said. And I quite like our black eye.

Walking along the corridors of the house that used to be Null's prison was a strange feeling. She had been free to walk around, sometimes, at other times, she had spent days chained to the bed. There had been no sense or regularity to it whatsoever, it had just depended on his whim. Then again, perhaps it had also had to do with staff rotations. In all those years, she had never seen anybody else in the house when she had been allowed to wander, and it was impossible that this enormous place had been maintained without any staff all that time. And on their way out they had met some of those staff members, after all. Two very unfortunate security guards.

She had spent five years in this place. Five years of pain and torture and loneliness. He had only begun to wake up about a year and a half ago, and it had taken him some time to understand what had happened, where he was, and what he was. He had only really been with her for a brief period of her his existance, and yet he felt like they had shared all their lives. Perhaps because she had shared so many of his memories in his dreams. And while she hadn't shared much of hers, that was understandable. In the short time that he had to live in this place, watching through her eyes as she was abused, back when he was still unable to take control, he had learned what it meant to hate.