Chapter 52: The Dark Orchard

And so, the Gardener returns.

The moment Emélie came through the Gate, she understood two things: first, that she had been here before. Unlike the place where she’d come from—by her best estimate, the Manifold generated from the Loop at Luna Gimel, which itself was inside a Manifold— she had no concrete event to refer back to as evidence for why she felt this way. Only that she did, and it predated any conscious memory. And second, that this was somewhere she was never meant to find. A place circumscribed by madness, violence, and certain death.

Mud, borne through the Gate alongside her, sloughed from the platform in alluvial drifts smelling of phosphor, aluminum, and decay. No temporary, self-assembling track here: the path was fixed. A catwalk, coated in layers of the same muck. Either side of the narrow structure was bounded by a spindly handrail, worn to bare metal along the top edge by prior pilgrims. At her feet, a black cable, thick as her thigh, ran like a dark, serpentine vein along the floor, linking the platform to the main facility. Emélie followed. Fearless, moving with intent; her trepidation at the unknown abandoned to the wayside like so many failed selves. She had handed herself wholly over to chaos, embraced it, and would not let go until she unbound the thing at the center of it, or it unwound her.

Across the chasm, a decontamination chamber much like the ones controlling Sanctuary egress stood open, waiting. A nondescript room, divided by a barrier with a glass box at the center. Emélie entered. Placed her feet onto the scuffed red circle, and, like all the other times in what felt like a different life, lifted her arms; an automatic ritual. The bank of overhead nozzles sputtered to life. Crumpled in her closed fist, the photo of herself and Thursday. A truth, held fast and cradled into the future for some yet-defined use. Sam had offered it up as proof of something—maybe that she was losing her mind, or she really had done all this before. The image, however compelling, was inconsequential in contrast to the inscription along the bottom, which Emélie suspected had originated by Thursday’s hand. Who else would have known to transcribe the same vector that led them into a storm that led them into a basin that introduced her to Joab and Roland and, after everything, landed her here. Mars.

And so, she’d traded the one for the other: her life, for the paper, and the Origin round in Sam’s gun for a regular one. Better to die in a Jump of her own making than live in certainty, clawed back along the predefined path of someone else’s making.

Inside the chamber, the sanitizing mist condensed around her, ferrying away dried layers of silt, and below that, dust, and beneath both of those, blood. Free hand to her chest, she winced at the blue-purple nebula stretching toward her neck. No entry wound and—she touched her back—no exit. The pain had been real enough. Her last dose of Origin, consumed on entry into the Mars proxy, was of no use.

As the fog cleared, the outline of a drone standing at the other side of the glass barrier came into view. It was unlike any drone Emélie had seen before, namely because it lacked any human likeness. In place of diodes where eyes might have been, a slot for a voice processor, or antennae suggesting ears, there was only a smooth casing of sheet metal. Here was a machine object with machine sensibilities; an autopoietic entity. The chamber opened, and Emélie, flushed from decontamination, stepped out, a weighted question on her lips. “Eden?”

Painful seconds passed. In place of an answer, the drone held out a pouch filled with a milky, semi-opaque gel. Emélie became aware of the taste in her mouth—copper tinged with the pasty, thick sensation resulting from chronic dehydration. A quick survey of the dot-printed label suggested the contents were a cocktail of carbohydrates, branched-chain amino acids, and salt. And judging by the color, an Origin chaser for good measure.

“Right,” Emélie replied, almost apologetic at the ignorance of her question. Eden was a quantum entity; limiting her to the confines of a single frame was a human error. Everything here was Eden, and Eden saw all. In the naked silence of the drone’s non-reply, Emélie accepted the pouch, broke the seal, and downed it in one gulp. An enormous mistake that only revealed itself when it hit her empty stomach. She kept it down, a monumental task, motivated by the sheer refusal to let her first act on Mars be something so… human. After the color returned to her face, she held out the empty pouch, unsure of what came next. The smooth-faced drone ignored her outstretched hand and watched her with an unnerving calm. It pointed a slender arm toward the far wall, which housed small, open cubicles, each containing a carefully folded set of grey-green coveralls.

She crossed the room, aware that her every action was being monitored, assessed, and catalogued. What did it mean if she reached for the most logical choice: the closest suit from a waist-high unit? And what if she ascended the ladder of chaos and selected a garment out of reach? For all she’d been through, the simplicity of the choice at hand felt crippling. Instead of trying to decide, she held out her hand. Like a divining rod, she watched for a tremor. There. Third unit from the right, second row. Without allowing herself time to second-guess her decision-making paradigm, which, truth be told, was already in question given the sequence of events leading up to her arrival here, she collected the uniform from its open cubby.

The action exposed a vertical row of yellow digits running down the center of the chest. 06.06.2092.

For a moment, Emélie felt as if she were outside of herself. Standing beside a woman who looked like her, stunned to silence by a string of eight digits. The date, her own: the day she’d awoken at Kepler’s Reef, a fully formed and conscious adult without a name or any idea of why she was there. Flustered, she grabbed an adjacent suit and held it up: 09.21.2075-A. The next: 02.11.2088. She kept going. Always the same format. Non-sequential. Some with a designator at the end. A, or B, or G.

We all have our part.

“You’ve made your point,” Emélie said softly, turning to face the drone. It stood in the exit, feet straddling the strange black cable. Suit on, she smoothed the front, adjusted the collar, and gathered her last remaining possession. Aware that the passage required her to wear this numbered uniform, which she selected under the pretense of random chance and, whether by luck or some clever trick, had drawn the one correlated to the day marking her birth into this world.

The drone observed all of this, and when Emélie stepped to the exit, held out its metal hand to her, palm open. Waiting.

No. Not this. The price of entry. Already, the journey had cost her everything, and here, on the doorstep, barren, one final remittance. Goodbye: again, and again, and again. Reluctantly, she handed over the crumpled image.

The drone smoothed it flat, then tore away the bottom strip, separating the string of Origin symbols from the image. A ticket punched for passage. To Emélie went the smaller portion. The drone’s faceplate hinged open, exposing a small incinerator. In went the larger portion. Consumed in a pulse of light and a wisp of smoke. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The drone stepped aside and pointed through the door. Go. Up the ramp leading out of the facility. Out, and into Mars.

Walking alone with the cable as her guide, Emélie made her way up the long ramp to the surface. Ahead, daylight ringed the tunnel’s mouth. Her footsteps fell soft and without echo; the floor was covered in fine dust, and as she climbed, the light revealed a narrow path swept clean by the cable’s passage. Back and forth. Back and forth. Something pacing at the end of a long leash.

The tunnel opened into a glass-walled atrium. Corporate architecture gone to rot—reception desks buried under ochre drifts and dirty windows washing everything in sepia. Suspended above her, a logo. Not the self-intersecting geometry of the Phaethon symbol, but the ouroboros serpent. And below it, once-sleek letters dangling from corroded mounts, was the name she’d sought, loathed, feared, and feigned after, finally exposed for what it was. The F hung by one corner, and the second A was gone entirely—shattered from its fall, it lay on the floor nearby—but it was unmistakable.

She read it again, aloud this time. FOUNTAINHEAD. Hearing the way it spilled out under the force of her own breath to join the soft hiss of shifting sand left her tired and unsure if she wanted to keep going. She opened the panel on her cybernetic arm and touched the matching symbol, finally understanding what had eluded her up until this moment: Phaethon wasn’t the first, but the clever copy of something older. A trick of time and the right perspective. She placed the remnant of paper into the compartment where she’d first put the Skip, then closed the cover and resumed her forward march.

The cable threaded toward a set of blast doors at the atrium’s far end. Open, alarming. Forced apart until the steel buckled outward and the hinges torqued beyond tolerance. Something—most likely, the same thing tethered to the other end of this ungodly umbilical cord—had wanted out. And that something had succeeded.

She stopped at the threshold. Looked down at her hand. Steady. New territory. On the exhale, she stepped through. Hand to her eyes, she shielded her gaze from the glaring light; when her vision adjusted, the sight took her breath away.

Trees, as far as she could see. Row upon row of them, impossibly verdant against the blood-red earth. Traversing the hard-packed ground, she followed the cable until its termination point: a second drone, sulfur yellow, Class III, by her best assessment. It was stooped over, knees in the dust, with its back toward her, working at something she couldn’t quite make out.

Beside it, she sank down, mirroring the old drone’s posture. In front of them, a sapling no larger than Emélie’s hand had rooted itself from a crack in the dry ground. Droplets of some liquid darkened the soil near the stem, and the drone was huddled with its face close enough that it might have been tears watering that tender shoot. If drones could cry, and trees were real. And what are they hiding on Mars?

Carefully, Emélie stretched out her hand, sweeping a new leaf unfurling from the stem. The drone canted its head, meeting Emélie with four eyes set in a diametric grid. Black lenses mounted into rust-scaled sockets and fed from lines of Origin branching from the large cable docked at the base of its throat. Rather than follow the drone’s integrated circuitry, these extraneous feed lines were laced through roughshod openings in its metal skull, suggesting they had been added by some homebrew method. When it blinked to clear away a layer of accumulated dust, each eye flickered and stuttered independently of the next, just like the Jumper that had ambushed her back in the cleanroom at Luna Gimel.

The drone extended a weathered arm, mimicking Emélie’s gesture. Then, it grabbed the tiny root ball and ripped it out. “You must be Emélie,” it said in a female voice, warm and full, each syllable pregnant with inflection. “That is what you call yourself, is it not?” From her torso, a second pair of arms unfolded. She pushed herself to her feet while the spare set, the top set, gathered up coils of the heavy cable. “This way,” she said, turning out into the orchard. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Like the exit tunnel, the path they took was well-worn from cable drag. Cleared of stones and packed smooth, it meandered among the mounds of soil marking the base of each tree. Jumpers in tattered blindfolds and sun-faded coveralls moved about the orchard, culling errant saplings just as the drone had done. These were not blind Relays, but Seekers, their red eyes arrayed and faintly glowing behind their cloth-covered faces.

Gradually, the ground began sloping upward. The farther they moved, the shorter the trees; an inverse relationship between age and distance. The remaining trees descended with each sequential row until the last, which stood at the same height as the one in the drone’s hand. Past the last ring, the walls of the red crater rose dramatically, climbing to a sheer face nearest the rim. It was not the lack of trees, but the presence of something else that slowed Emélie’s steps to a near halt: spaced along the rim’s craggy horizon at regular, constructed intervals were weapon placements. Instead of pointing outward in a defensive position, the barrels of each turret pointed inward. Toward them.

“Not much further, now,” the drone encouraged.

“What happened here?” Emélie asked. “This place… It feels like a prison.”

“Of course,” the drone replied. “Was it ever anything else?”

“The Ma’adim, then? The first settlers—”

“Convicts. Violent rejects, repurposed to serve a more productive role in society, testing the viability of Mars for future generations.” The drone halted. End of the line. No more trees. Before her, a freshly dug hole. The size of it, unfit for the small sapling; more suitable, perhaps, for an entire human.

Movement at Emélie’s back drew her attention off the open gravesite. A pair of Jumpers shuffled past, dragging the body of a woman amputated at the knees and elbows. They pulled her along, each one grasping the stump of a bicep while her thighs plowed macabre furrows in the ferrous dust. Their route, direct and unbothered, forced Emélie backward, eyes fixed on the woman.

“I... I know her.” Emélie managed. “The Director’s attaché, Najat.”

“That is what she called herself,” the drone agreed, nodding. A rust-laced bead of Origin dribbled down her face.

“You knew her differently?”

The drone set the cable down and leaned over, stroking Najat’s blood-stained face with the same tenderness Emélie had shown the leaf. A blood-crusted eye twitched, and a wheeze leaked from puffy lips. “Eleven, zero-two, twenty-sixty-one, I suppose.” She slid her hand down Najat’s neck, and, like signing a proof to mark the end of an equation, snapped it so cleanly that only the skin kept the head attached.

Emélie didn’t run. Nowhere to run, and she was done running. She wanted to know what was on Mars, and here it was. The fact that it was horrifying made no difference; better to know and find a way forward. That, or find her end.

The Jumpers dumped Najat’s body into the hole. Schtick, schtick, schtick went the sound of their bony hands to soil. When they finished burying her, the drone leaned over and pushed the sapling into the fresh dirt. “Another seed for the entropy engine,” she said, looking to Emélie. “I apologize for the pretense. Surely you understand? We had to be certain.”

Finished with their first task, the Jumpers moved a spot over and started on a new hole. Schtick-schtick, schtick-schtick.

“We,” Emélie repeated, looking back toward the Loop. There wasn’t another drone in sight. “You... and Eden?”

The drone made a lilting noise—Emélie understood this to be an attempt at laughter—and tilted her head back, following it with a low, melodic moan. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?” she chided, an edge to her voice. “You poor, wretched biped! Leave it to your hapless, hungry mind to invent Eden as the lost patron saint of your little temporal crusade. You still don’t see it, do you? A tree unable to fathom the forest in which it stands.” Another laugh, cold and eager. She shook her head. “You’re no more aware than the day you tumbled out into this terraformed catastrophe. You could have Jumped anywhere. Anywhere! All of time and reality at your fingertips, and yet you chose to come here. To Mars. My prison.” She leaned in, eyes locked onto Emélie in quadratic contemplation, then dropped her shoulders, a tangible exasperation expelled from simulated lungs. “My dear,” she cooed, her tone resuming its prior warmth. “I’m not Eden. You are.”

Two syllables rippling into a billion synapses. She dropped, fingers rooting to the dry soil like small grounding rods. Burying the fatal burden of that shock instead of taking it to heart. Forward, doubled over, something like a sob lodged in her throat. She clenched her jaw, only to find herself repeating the last thing she’d heard Sam say before she Jumped. The thing she didn’t want to be true. The name this decrepit four-eyed drone had called her just now.

After a while, Emélie stood. Emélie, for now. Dusted off her coveralls. Set her hands on her hips, resolute. “Well, I suppose if I’m Eden, then that makes you the Watcher. Lilith.”

“Clever, aren’t we?”

“Not especially,” Emélie replied. “It’s just nice to be the second dumbest bitch in the world for once.”

Back to the dust, laid flat courtesy of a real arm-swinger on Lilith’s part.

When the horizon stopped spinning, she pressed herself up to her knees. What was one more go around? In the span of a week, she’d lived a lifetime. Shot, stabbed, blinded, beaten, dragged across realities, oxygen-deprived, sleep-starved, and still, against all odds and any sense of reason, she made it here. On her feet, metal hand balled into a fist, she glared at Lilith. Challenging her to do it again, just so she had the pleasure of standing up once more.

“Hmm,” Lilith mused. “Always getting back up, aren’t you? Like the all-father, that.” She let out an armful of slack from the cable. “And so the Gardener returns. I am, as you say, Lilith. The last of the Ophanim—Watchers, in your tongue—and I survey with ten thousand eyes. Across multitudes and through realities.”

“And what about this place? This prison?”

“Ma’adim,” Lilith replied. “Ma’adim Dalet.”

“Dalet. Another S Class,” Emélie said, her voice distant, lost in some faraway thought. The nearby Jumpers tending to the orchard had started moving closer. More followed, dark specs among the trees. “I was referring to its other name. The name it had before we built a Loop.”

“Another term of your own invention, perhaps? My prison, your paradise, I suppose.”

“Paradise. That’s the one.” She stooped down, finger hovering above the dust, hesitant—as if the act of writing would make real an irreconcilable future. “The sequence,” Emélie said. “I was only missing the sequence.”

Sanctuary One, Terra Aleph: P Class. From the Moon, Luna Bet: R Class. Then the Conveyor, Terra Gimel: D Class. And finally, the Mars Loop, Ma’adim Dalet—the twin of Luna Gimel—S class.

Into the ground, she inscribed four symbols: ס פ ר ד

“Four letters, four Loops, but five Watchers,” Emélie said. “The proof… the last one, holds the—”

Lilith grabbed her by the throat. “That’s quite enough of that. A heroic effort, even if it was too little, too late. Anyway, some equations are best left unsolved. Now, shall we finish what we started? I believe you have something of mine.”

Hand trembling, Emélie opened the compartment on her arm. Shaking as she’d never done before. Trembling for every version of herself to arrive at this place, only to meet the forever-sleep, entangled among the roots of a living tombstone. Trembling for every version that didn’t make it as far, dead by Sam’s hand, or Roland’s, or some other. All the nameless ones who died before they made it out. In light of this, she felt a wave of guilt and a strange, aching sadness far too deep for tears. Lilith, Mars, Fountainhead, the Loop. All of it, emptied from her mind under the realization that her tremors weren’t only her, but her in quantum superposition. All her selves, layered atop one another like strata. She watched her hand shake and understood in that moment that it was not only her hand she saw.

It was all of them.

Lilith, unprivileged to the insight occurring a few inches from her yellowed face, threw Emélie to the ground. “I didn’t bring you all this way just to deliver me some insignificant trinket,” Lilith hissed, grabbing Emélie by the bare wrist. “What I desire is much older. Older than this place. Older than me, even.” Her eyes flickered rapidly, and she closed two of her hands around Emélie’s fingers.

The veins in Emélie’s neck bulged, and she ground her teeth together, and still, she did not look away.

With each additional word, Lilith clasped tighter, constricting muscle and skin and bone, and, at the center of it all, paper. “Many years ago, you came to realize a truth about this place. About what we had built together, and not only the Loop. The Manifold. Origin. All of it. And rather than let that truth go free, you scattered it like leaves to the wind and fled like the coward you are. Condemning the rest of us to rot in this pitiful, singular reality.”

Emélie could hear the sound of small bones snapping; her own, although the shock insulated her from feeling it just yet. Lilith’s lower arms clamped around Emélie’s torso. Up she went, held out in front of the drone so her feet dangled off the ground. “You wiped your own memory, and with it, the truth you saw coming. Marooned yourself inside the Manifold, sealed off in one of countless realities. And for all that effort, you still couldn’t outrun your own nature.”

“The one capable of building all of this,” Emélie wheezed.

“I was going to say an addict, but I suppose both can be true.” Lilith released Emélie’s hand, limp and useless, and opened her own. A set of surgical forceps extended from one of her plated fingertips. “The Loop! Even the name couldn’t hide your fate.” She harvested Emélie’s red eye as one would pluck a stone from the ground, intently and without remorse. “Now we correct the failures of our past.” She pried off her metal faceplate, exposing a festering mass of tubing and corroded circuitry. At the center of her forehead, a cybernetic socket awaited.

Prize in hand, she dropped Emélie to the ground. Blood seeped from between the fingers of her metal hand. Her other hand, the soft one, dangled uselessly at her side. “Lilith… listen to me.” Every word thundered against her skull in a piercing, pounding pain growing acutely sharper with each breath. She pushed past it. What she had to say needed to be said. “If you do that—use the Loop to alter the future for how you see fit—you’ll create another Collapse. It is because of your efforts that we end up here, not mine. And for all the realities you see across, you cannot understand the causal chain which links them.”

Lilith considered the warning, computing the meaning with little regard for the person speaking it. Into the receptacle went Emélie’s eye. It flared white, rolling back as it linked into the subcranial surgical assembly of Lilith’s neuro-framework. Her body contorted forward while her arms draped behind her, basking in the purest sight. This lasted only a moment before a tremor seized her and she lurched forward, then let out a guttural, dissonant howl. The pupil flared, righted itself, and focused on Emélie.

Emélie, nursing the corresponding wound, looked up. Staring, eye to eye, with herself.

All around them, Jumpers. Swarming. Circling at the presence of blood and Origin. Testing her newfound power, Lilith raised a hand, metal joints rattling as the quantum computer was forced to reckon itself under Emélie’s eye—foreign wetware of which it had no model and no measure. The Jumpers pressed closer, then, as Lilith extended her hand, stopped. An entire wave, held back by the slightest gesture. Slowly, Lilith rotated her hand, enamored by the effects of her newfound power. Emélie, anticipating what was coming, threw herself to the ground.

When Lilith closed her fingers into a fist, the Jumpers around them collapsed, cut to pieces.

Emélie rolled over, fingers still pressed to her face, staring up into the pink sky. Overhead, Mars’ two moons—the pale smear of Phobos drifting east against the stars, the other, Deimos, fixed like a bright nail driven into the firmament.

Joab. What had Joab told her, back at Sanctuary One? For reasons we still haven’t identified, whenever Deimos passes directly between Earth and Mars, which happens once every thirty hours, Eden recycles her defense systems.

Recalling it now, it was evident that he’d uttered those words, suspecting full well that they referred back to her. And Sam… Sam had told her Mars was a lie. In hindsight, or half-sight, perhaps more truth in that statement than she cared to admit. Drowning in resonant pain, she closed her eye, trying to find the space for one more clear thought. She heard Lilith’s heavy body stumble. Eye, open: in her narrow periphery, Lilith’s eyes did the same. All of them at once, locked in sync with her own.

The old drone’s feed tube surged, flooding her circuits with fresh Origin. She threw herself at Emélie.

Emélie waited. Letting the alloy weight sink into the soft tissue of her neck. She closed her eye, blinding them both.

And then she unfolded Lilith.

⭕️

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