The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 5:54 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day

"Let's leave no room for confusion," Kamrusepa said, casting her eyes from Linos to Seth, Ezekiel and Ptolema. "Setting aside the unknown gunman, you're admitting that the set of circumstances we faced, where we were driven by an ambush in the underground and a shadow from that spotlight," she once again pointed at it, "to flee to the top of the building, whereupon you attempted to have us leave you in that bedroom... Was all according to the design of yourself and the other remaining council members. That is correct?"

"I've already said so, miss Tuon," Linos replied emotionlessly.

"Again, just establishing things firmly, so that no mistakes are made," she replied, her tone once again becoming akin to a cat circling a rat it was about to disembowel. "Now, you just said a moment ago that Zeno was the responsible for the appearance of the monster in the underground. As he would have had access to the Power, that seems a reasonable assertion-- As arguably the most talented Neuromancer in the Remaining World, leagues above someone like, say, Ezekiel, it would have been within the realm of possibility - assuming everyone present lacked the presence of mind to sense the intrusion - to discreetly and swiftly disable the resistances of those present, and use a combination of the discipline and some ocular illusions to deceive them. The fact that there are subtle discrepancies in the ways the creature was described and that it was seeming not only invincible, but impervious to all attacks lends credence to this notion."

"Sorry to derail this for a second, but there's something I wanted to confirm once we'd swung back to this," Ran said, then looked over to her left. "Ptolema. You said that even though parts of it didn't your match thoughts, the observations you made in the account were all true. Right?"

"Yeah," Ptolema said broodingly, still giving Linos the evil eye. "I think so."

"In the account, you said that it was 'Anna' that was wounded in the arm by the monster," Ran said. "But when we met up with them on the 3rd floor, it was Fang that had the wound."

"Oh." The other woman frowned. "Uh, well, I did think it was Anna... But I might've got mixed up, I guess." She scratched her head, looking genuinely confused. "Could've sworn it was."

Ran glanced downwards, seeming to be considering something.

"Since Ran has brought us to the topic of your observations," Kam said, "was what you said about the creature looking completely implausible true, as well?"

"Oh, yeah," she said, nodding a few times. "I'm even more sure now that you've said all this stuff. It looked like it'd been dreamed up by some artist... I'm not even sure it looked exactly like the model one stuck up on the wall where you found us."

"And I'm assuming when you said that the monster 'came up the stairs' after you, that was based on sound alone, in line with the other accounts?"

"Yeah," Ptolema replied. "It was way too dark to actually see anything. I just hid until I saw Fang, then ran for it."

"Good to know," Kam said, and nodded once before digressing, looking back to Linos. "Well. Suffice it to say, all accounts seem to point to the creature - at least at that first instance - not physically existing. It's easy to see what you were doing there." She slowly raised her pointer finger to her mouth, biting the rim. "But then, once you consider the later elements, questions start to arise. Let me ask you something else, sir. Do you believe that Zeno, in his original body, is still alive?"

Linos looked like he was about to speak, but he hesitated, clasping his hands together.

"Thinking of lying to us again...? You're right to show caution," Kam told him, with an expression halfway between a sneer and a smile. "After all, the block on using the Power has been universally disabled, and with the eris pools re-enabled, we're no longer suffering from the scarcity which has forced us to be cautious so far. In other words, there's nothing stopping us from sweeping this entire facility with Divination. With a peculiar enough body, there are methods by which one might slip under the notice of the security center, but I shouldn't think they will hold up to that sort of scrutiny, mm?"

Linos let out a long sigh. "You're right," he said. "I very much suspect I am the last member of the Discretionary Council remaining."

"You 'suspect'?" She chuckled. "I think it's more than that. I think you know. Tell me, though: If Zeno was dead - precluding the possibility that his body encased in the box was more ambulatory than we'd otherwise believed - then who do you suspect was the figure that surprised the boys in the hallway? The one dressed as a monster?"

"I suppose I would imagine it was Balthazar," Linos suggested. "I didn't know the specifics of how Zeno intended to orchestrate his part of the plan... He was always a frustrating man. Enlisting him without telling the rest of us seems like the sort of reckless gesture he would do, and we know the boy was involved by the end, so..."

Kam seemed utterly overtly unconvinced by this idea, nodding with an almost bored expression. "And the bestial groaning we heard, while we were searching for the medication to offset the gas?"

"I don't know," Linos simply said, his tone growing distant. He sounded resigned, like someone sitting at the top deck of a ship that was slowly sinking into the ocean.

"And most importantly, the grand finale," she went on, ignoring his reticence. "The plume of flame at the stairwell, the supernatural ambush from below, and of course, the scene as we ultimately found it in that room, with Ptolema, Ezekiel and Theodoros pinned to the wall. This was your moment, so surely you knew what was to transpire."

I glanced between the faces around me. While Ptolema looked confused, I could see the anxiety in Seth and Ezekiel's expressions, even as they tried to hide it. This was it. Kam was about to throw everything out into the open. Since the moment I'd concluded this bioenclosure existed it had been obvious, but now it felt like there was only the thinnest of membranes keeping the implications from reaching our group.

But I was worried. Kam's biggest flaw, if you got past her over-sized ego... And her proclivity for sucking up to authority figures and social climbing... And her terrible politics-- One of Kam's flaws was that she tended to suffer from tunnel vision. If she got an idea in her head of how something was, or a goal to reach towards, she would pursue it relentlessly. It was the other side of what made her brilliant as a scholar.

Could she be overlooking something? Could I be overlooking something? What had Linos meant, when he said they they 'couldn't' abandon the plan--

"I don't know," Linos repeated quietly. "Zeno said he would prepare it. Again, it must have been Balthazar--"

Kamrusepa laughed for a moment, incredulous. "Really," she said. "A fascinating thesis. Why don't you talk us through what you believe he did, exactly? How exactly he subdued several people without using the Power or a firearm, while at the same time giving them the impression that they were being attacked by a supernatural beast? Before dragging them all down a long hallway, and setting up an elaborate prop complete with sound-effects, all over the course of a few minutes?"

Linos lowered his head further, again saying nothing.

Kam shook her head. "Fang was right, weren't they? You really were just left holding the bag." She turned her nose up at him with a furtive hiss. "The room we discovered the 'monster' in was the same one that Utsushikome first awoke, and where she returned on our brief sojourn to the upper part of the central building when we were obtaining weapons and searching for Mehit and Lilith. At that time, there was no sign of it whatsoever, and for the remainder the time since then everyone in the inner sanctum bioenclosure was completely accounted for - our group in the main hall and the security center, and Mehit and Lilith off to the side. The only exception is when Hamilcar briefly appeared from the underground to pose as the creature during Mehit's rescue." She hesitated for a moment. "Well, I suppose it's possible that Lilith got away from her mother somehow, but I expect her build would have made the task a little beyond her."

That was a reasonable statement on the surface of it, though so many of my fundamental assumptions about Lilith had been overturned over the course of the night, I wouldn't have been surprised if she was also some kind of... Construction savant? I don't know.

"That remains the case until we leave the security center upon the initialization of the escape plan," Kam continued. "Which is the only window in which Balthazar could have snuck in to make preparations. He would have had to retrieve the bird-thing from wherever it was stored, haul it over to that room and nail, tape, or glue it to the ceiling - no simple task without the Power to levitate then get downstairs in time to spook us and the boys in the other part of all this that we're blaming him for." She crossed her arms. "Once you factor in travel time from the research tower, it seems unlikely that it could be a one person job. And then you have the attack itself. Are we supposed to believe he, what, stunned everyone with a gas bomb? Perhaps hypnotized them? Convinced "

"But we know he was up there," Seth said. "He set off the prosognostic event."

"Do we? Know he was up there?" Kam smiled slyly, then digressed. "A prosognostic event doesn't require someone to be physically present to be triggered. All it requires is living tissue that's quite recently been part of their body."

Seth frowned. "What are you saying?"

She looked at him sardonically, her eyebrows raised almost in pity. "Seth."

He blinked. "...what?"

"Don't you think it's about time we stop this?" She tapped a finger against her arm impatiently. "This pretence."

"What the hell are you talking about?" he said, then hesitated, wrinkling his lip. "I get it. You're saying we set it up, right? That our whole story is fake, and we stuck that thing up there, nailed it to the ceiling, and stuck ourselves to the wall?"

Ezekiel's breathing was getting heavy. I wasn't sure if he was having a panic attack or if he was about to reach for his pistol. Honestly, that was good thinking-- With us all tightly together like this and sharing a barrier, killing someone with a gun was a far better option. I wanted to try and trace my own personal barrier, but there was no way someone wouldn't be watching my hands at a moment like this.

"Do you deny it?" Kam asked, eyes narrow.

"Of course I fucking deny it!" Seth exclaimed. "I mean-- I get why you'd think it, I guess, but that's not what happened! You think all four of us are in leagues with these assholes?"

"W-Wait," Ptolema said, her anger towards Linos suddenly turning to confusion and apprehension. "What are you trying to say, Kam?"

Kam sighed deeply, but kept her eyes fixed on Seth's face. "So you've no more dignity than Theodoros's father? I really expected better."

"That's not--"

Sharply, cutting him off, Kam raised her forefinger and pointed directly at his face, the fresh scars still red. "But then, perhaps I shouldn't have. After all, you've not exactly proven yourself observant. Or particularly diligent, apparently. You've been playing an aggressive strategy without even realizing you've been in check for the past dozen turns."

He leaned his head backwards. "Kam, I don't know what you think, but... Ugh, can you get your finger out of my face?"

"I'm pointing at you for an exceedingly good reason, Seth," she stated confidently. "Do you want to know how you messed it up? You'll honestly kick yourself."

Seth went quiet, just staring at her with a baffled expression, his mouth slightly agape.

"The records," she said plainly. "Weren't burnt."

What--

OH.

Oh my god. How did I not notice?

When we'd returned to Seth after Hamilcar's attack, he'd collapsed from the blast, the entire side of his face seared raw from the force of the heat and radiation. But the records of the Apega experiment, which Seth had been entrusted to collect by Zeno, had been completely intact. Even though some had spilled out over the floor.

It felt like a damning observation. Seth's eyes went sharply wide. In that moment, you could cut the tension in the air with a knife. Ezekiel turned his head towards him as well, staring daggers.

To his credit, Seth rallied quickly. "W-What do you mean," he asked, only stammering slightly, "the files were--"

"Don't insult my intelligence by trying to play dumb," Kam scolded him in an accusatory tone. "The ones from the underground. They should have been caught in the blast that seared your body, but they were untouched. The only conclusion to draw is that the blast never reached the room at all, and that your wounds were fabricated."

He blinked. "Oh, shit, right," he said, his tone a little stiff. "Look. You've got the wrong idea, Kam. When I-- When I heard the blast, I entered the combination, but the barrier didn't go up straight away, right? And I figured I was gonna have to take the hit anyway, so in the moment, I jumped on the box and tried to shield it from the blast." He glanced to the side. "When I slumped off, that must have been when all the files spilled everywhere."

It was a bald-faced lie, and not even a particularly good one.

"That's impossible, Seth," I said, feeling almost guilty to point it out.

He looked at me, frowning. "What?"

"Think about it," I said. "The burns on your body are all on your right side, all across the length of your body. With the box lying beside you." I fidgeted anxiously. "If you'd thrown yourself on it, it would be your back that was burned, or, well, maybe your butt. But there's no way you could have done it with only your side exposed to the blast... The only way that makes sense is if you were standing upright, facing the control panel."

"O-Oh, uhh." I saw his eyes quiver slightly as his mind desperately scrambled for an explanation. "That's, I dunno-- Shit. I mean, I don't really remember. I mean, maybe the angle was weird."

"Weird how, precisely?!" Kam demanded.

"I don't know!" he exclaimed. "If I knew, I'd say it! That blast basically knocked me off my feet! I can barely remember shit!"

"You 'don't know', because - if I may quote Ezekiel's refrain from a minute ago - it didn't fucking happen!" Kam yelled. "You're brazenly lying!"

"I--" Seth sharply cut himself off, shutting his mouth tight. He seemed to realize he was cornered. Ezekiel, to the side, ran a hand over his face.

"Here's what I think really happened," Kam declared. "You knew the 'script' for all this in advance, so you were aware, unlike the rest of us, that Hamilcar was going to create those ridiculous explosions and blow that whole facility to pieces. But for one reason or another - either because it would raise suspicion unto itself, or more likely because the plan called for you to be injured so as to give Fang, Su and I a distraction from Zeno and Hamilcar's play-fighting, preventing close scrutiny or attempts at involvement - you couldn't just explicitly raise the barrier beforehand and avoid injury altogether. No; you'd have to burn yourself to sell the illusion." She finally lowered her finger. "But for some reason, you wanted to have your cake and eat it, and weren't willing to destroy the files. So you just hoped we wouldn't notice." She snorted. "That, or you were just an idiot and forgot to destroy them."

Seth remained silent, making what was obviously an arduous effort to maintain a neutral expression, his jaw trembling slightly. This time, for whatever reason, Linos was staring at him with an open mouth. He almost looked angry.

"That's not the only obvious lie you'd told, either," Kam continued. "Right after I noticed that, I decided to test you a bit. Earlier, Su and I had been discussing the possibility that you and the other men in our class had been lying about just how you arrived in the sanctuary, so I went ahead and fabricated a story that I claimed to have heard from Theo about your trip on the Aetherbridge, which you happily confirmed." She looked towards Theo. "Theodoros, why don't you go ahead and recount what you told me again?"

Theo was obviously in no state to play along, his expression still almost catatonic since LInos's admission. He stared at the ground.

Kamrusepa didn't care. "That's right," she said, with a smug nod. "You didn't tell me any story at all."

Seth could have defended himself against this, especially if Theodoros was working with him to one degree. After all, it wasn't as though the story Kamrusepa had invented back then was implausible. Theo was afraid of heights to the point that he would almost certainly have had an extreme reaction in trying to ascend the Aetherbridge, and Seth usually was the one to step in when he was having trouble with something. So she could have guessed the truth out of pure luck.

However, he didn't, or couldn't, even try.

Ptolema, who up until a few moments ago had just been watching this latest part of the exchange with a kind of nervous bafflement, was starting to look at Seth with an expression of real concern. "Seth..."

"Of course, the reason we were discussing said possibility in the first place was how suspicious you've been acting since the very beginning," Kam resumed. "Honestly, have you just been pretending that the very reason we're standing here isn't because Su figured out exactly what you were doing, yesterday afternoon? Are you hoping that shoe will just hang above the floor indefinitely, in defiance of gravity?" She stared at him. "You've known you've been exposed. It's been written all over your face for over a half-hour now." She glanced to Ezekiel, and then Theo. "All of your faces."

Ezekiel was breathing heavily, his jaw clenched tightly. He was starting to look like a cornered animal. Theo, again, was unresponsive.

Kamrusepa, glancing briefly at Ptolema, then turned to me. "Su, why don't you go ahead and explain it, for everyone else still confused?" She lowered her brow. "You know what I'm talking about."

Ran eyed her. She looked annoyed at her for putting me on the spot.

I hesitated, clearing my throat. This did not seem like the safest way to approach this. "Uh," I said, "...After the duel you had with Bardiya... I, uh, saw Ezekiel signal to you, Seth. And during the duel..." I looked to him. "Tell me that if we go back and look at what you cast closer, we won't find that you were looking for the entrance of this place."

"Y-Yeah," Ptolema said anxiously, "tell her. This has-- It's all gotta be some kind of misunderstanding, right?" She frowned. "It's got to be some misunderstanding."

Linos, for some reason, had turned, and was looking up at his son, who was still avoiding everyone's gaze.

Seth opened his mouth, but stumbled. "I..." He stammered, trying desperately to grasp for words that might get him out of this situation. "T-This isn't what it looks like."

"Really," Kamrusepa said, "Because what it looks like is that, at bare minimum, you - along with the rest of the boys - were in on the Order's plan from the very start. That's by far the simplest explanation for what happened on that staircase, and the discrepancies in your recounting of events versus on your own. For example, you describe breaking out of the bathing room using a mechanical surgical saw. But tell me-- Would such a thing not be cacophonous? If we attempt to synchronize the timing of our respective accounts around the flash of light from the projector you supposedly beheld at the front door prior to your group being split up, then our party should have arrived at the second floor not too long after you and Ptolema did. But we heard no noise save for the 'braying' of the monster from overhead. And you didn't report hearing the sound of me having fired a gun!"

"H-Hey!" Seth said, holding up his hands. "Hold on, hold the hell on!"

"But suppose instead a scenario where events played out faster!" Kamrusepa persisted. "We were kept waiting for some time in the garden, after all, and the accounting of the flash of light in Ptolema's account is quite peculiar, don't you think? From the window overlooking the pond, she shouldn't just have seen the light, but the towering shadow the rest of us beheld. So what if the flash she witnessed wasn't the same at all, but rather one fabricated to cultivate an illusion, one which granted the three of you a useful alibi?" She pointed, but this time, it was with her scepter. "People who are drugged are notoriously poor judges of time passage. It seems a distinct possibility that, after subduing Ptolema, the three of you used that time to set up the scene we discovered in that bedroom!"

Checks out, part of me acknowledged, while most of me was filled with absolute fear as to what was going to happen next.

"Of course, Ezekiel noticed that, with the way that matters progressed and with these accounts laid out so elegantly on a silver platter, we'd notice a contradiction, so attempted to change his story," she added. "But unfortunately, you failed to pick up on it--"

"STOP!" Seth shouted, struggling to regain control of the situation. "Just shut up for a second and let me explain!" He took a sharp breath.

"Did you really drug me...?" Ptolema asked, horror drawing into her eyes.

"No, we--" He cut himself off sharply again, closing his eyes and wincing slightly. "Look, okay. Fuck it. I admit that I got dragged into some shit with Ezekiel. I--It's too much to explain, but I owe him in a way that's pretty serious shit, so he managed to pull me into this plan to steal some stuff from the Order."

Ezekiel turned sharply to him, eyes going wide. "What the fuck?"

"I didn't get anything but basic information," Seth continued hastily, holding up his hands. "What we were looking for and what I had to do. We heard about this bioenclosure - I lied about that, I'm sorry - and that it was supposed to contain a bunch of important records, and spent the first couple of days trying to look around for it. That's why Zeke wasn't around much-- I was trying to cover for him."

Ezekiel fumed. "You--"

"You absolute ASSHOLE!" Ptolema finished for him. She floated over sharply and backhanded Seth in the face, her features twisted with anguished rage. "You-- You piece of crap! You've been lyin' to me this whole time too? Through everything that's happened?!"

He recoiled, but didn't fight back, his features twisting with shame as he avoided meeting her eyes. "I'm sorry, Ema."

"You're sorry?! That doesn't even half-way cut it, you jerk! I-- I can't believe I trusted you! Theo's dad was one thing, but this...!" She hit him again, this time under the arm, with her whole fist. He grunted and recoiled in pain - again, Seth wasn't exactly the most built-up guy. I wouldn't have been surprised if Ptolema could beat him in an arm-wrestling contest. "And you seriously drugged me?! I can't believe it!" There was genuine betrayal in her voice.

"L-Like I said, it wasn't like that!" Seth stammered desperately. "I didn't know Ezekiel was gonna do it! I only heard the broad strokes - I thought he was just gonna, gonna..." He seemed to lose steam. "I don't know. Throw a net and cover your eyes, or something."

"Like that's any better!" She shouted. "God, I'd expect this from a creep like him, but from you... From you...!" She stared at him with furious anger. I wasn't sure if she was about to cry or burst a blood vessel.

"I swear," he said earnestly. "I didn't want to hurt you, and I felt like shit the whole time! But I-- I had no choice!"

"Maybe we should just leave you here! You, him, and Linos, for whoever the killer or monster or whatever to find!" The words were passionate and pained, but not fully sincere. She looked away, like she couldn't even stand to look at him.

Seth cringed. "Ptolema..."

"I'm loathe to interrupt this lovers quarrel," Kamrusepa interjected scornfully. "But are you trying to confess your complicitness while saying you weren't involved with the Order's conspiracy, Seth? Because I find that extremely difficult to believe!"

"I wasn't!" Seth insisted, taking another sharp breath. "Look, I get that this looks bad, but I swear, I've just been doing what I was told while trying not to get arrested! Most of this shit is news to me as much as the rest of you!"

"Like hell it is!" Kam shouted at him, her accent slipping. "How do you explain the damn files? We just went over that!"

"I just got instructions of what to do from Ezekiel! I didn't know what the fuck was actually going on, just that I needed to steal some of the files and not look like I saw it coming!" He spoke frantically, throwing open the outer cloth of his robe. "Here, these are the ones I took!"

He reached in, grasping something--

Kamrusepa moved - at least to my eyes, as a clutz who can't even stand on one foot for more than a few seconds - like a lightning bolt. She didn't bother to try and cast, despite already having her scepter pointed squarely at him. Instead, she reached for the rifle slung over her back. She grabbed it by the shaft and gracefully threw it over her shoulder, then caught the underside with the same hand, levelling it straight at Seth's head.

Ran's eyes went wide at this sudden escalation. She put her hand on her own pistol.

"You stop right there," Kam said coldly.

"AHH!" Seth cried out, recoiling. "F-Fuck!"

"Oh god!" Ptolema cried out, raising a hand to her mouth. "Don't do it, Kam!"

"I'm not going to do anything, so long as he doesn't act foolishly," she said with forced calm, her eyes focused down the barrel. "Seth, pull your hands back and hold them up over your head. And don't move your fingers. If I see your extensor digitorum so much as twitch, I'm going to assume you're trying to trace an incantation. I will not hesitate to shoot you."

"Okay," he said, his speech breathy with audible fear. "Okay. Easy, Kam. I'm not gonna try anything."

"We'll see," she said, her pupils dilated to points.

Seth gulped, then slowly, as instructed, withdrew his hand from the fold of his coat, before raising both of them in the air, palms exposed.

"Good," Kam said. She glanced to the side. "Su. I want you to float to his right side, and retrieve whatever it was that he was reaching for from the folds of his robe."

"W-What?" I asked. "Why me?"

"Because you're the only one other than Ran I'm confident isn't compromised," she asserted. "And of the two of you, you have slightly longer arms."

"That's a really stupid reason," I said nervously.

"Just do it," she instructed.

I bit my lip, cursing under my breath.

I floated over, and carefully reached out.