The Last Dainv-Chapter 105

The Last Dainv-Chapter 105

The steel door held a nameplate labeled as "ROOM 416." Gale stood behind Ollie who held his palm against the panel beside the door. Blue light glowed under his palms and the panel slid open, this time with keypads. 32 beeps in total, and the door shuddered open.
"Sorry about last time," Ollie said. "Ready for the full tour?"
"After sending my classmates home with NDAs and security escorts? Sure, why not."
Blue light enveloped the door. The steel door grated against the metal frame, slowly opening. Cold air exhaled from the room. The smell of rubbing alcohol and something else hit Gale right away.
"Welcome to the heart of dust modification research," Ollie said, stepping through. "Where the magic happens. Metaphorically and literally."
Gale followed through the corridor. This one was dimly lit compared to the other ward where Lily had taken him through. Equipment and machines with probing sticks were different, etched with markings or glyphs that he didn’t understand. Tables by the corridor had the same looking vial that Rachel had shown him, except containing a different coloured liquid, purple mostly, and duller grains of dust.
"Dust production?" Gale asked.
"Modification." Ollie took a vial and held it up for Gale to see. "Regular dust is just the starting point. We refine it here, try to remove the crystallization properties while keeping the power boost."
Putting the vial back, Ollie led him past the door that read "main lab" and toward a completely black door with a panel smack-dab in the middle.
"Most people don't understand what dust really does," Ollie put his left hand in front of the panel. A green laser shined and passed a horizontal line on his retina. "They think it's just a drug that gets you high if you're Aurian and kills you if you're mundane."
The door clicked open. "It's so much more than that."
The room they entered only had one dim ceiling light at the centre. Rows of hospital beds lined either side of the walls. Each bed had a person, man or woman, connected to an IV with the same purple liquid in the vials. The colour looked to be diluted, and the grains far fewer. The people on the bed, on the other hand, had dull crystal patches on their skin, not jutting or bleeding like the mundanes, just patches. Based on the ether signatures from each person, all of them were Aurians.
"All Aurians," Ollie said, walking between the beds. "Path members and criminals who volunteered for the research program."
"Volunteered?"
"Most of them." Ollie held his head lower to look at an IV. "Some voluntarily
volunteered
while some were caught doing illegal things. For the latter, this was their alternative to execution."
A woman on the bed twitched in her sleep. Her arms jerked against the restraint. A dim blue glow emanated from the veins that originated from her spine, tracing the lines of her veins across her whole body that peeked through the hospital gowns.
"The thing about dust," Ollie continued, "is that for Aurians, one hit is all it takes. That feeling of your ether cranking up to eleven and the full body orgasmic state it gives you. Your body starts to crave it and need it.
"So they get addicted after just one use?" Gale asked.
"Dependence, not addiction. Similar, but there's a difference." Ollie stopped at a monitoring station. "Addiction is psychological. Dependence is physical. Their bodies physically need dust after first exposure, or they start to crystallize. Similar to the mundanes, but less lethal. It takes longer for Aurians to go through full crystallization. It stops if they take a hit."
Gale looked down at a man whose chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. Prismatic patches of crystals had formed across his collarbone, invading his neck and almost touching the carotid artery.
"If they don't keep using it, this happens?"
"Exactly. These patients are in induced comas. We keep them under while administering micro-doses of modified dust through the IVs. Just enough to slow or stop the crystallization."
They moved to another section with reinforced windows looking out on what seemed like normal hospital rooms. One woman sat on a bed. She read a book in the dark. Her hands were normal, but her feet were covered in a scale of prismatic crystals. She had the same ether density as Ollie and Rachel, a Resonant.
"Full disclosure time. Remember what Rachel brought in?" Ollie asked.
"Yeah?"
"For mundanes, we might've found a way to halt the progress. Not cure it, but stop it from spreading further."
"That's good, right?" Gale asked.
"It's a start. But the real goal is reversal. Breaking down the crystal formation and converting it back to normal tissue."
They kept walking. The corridor opened into a large circular room with computers and monitoring stations. A massive screen on one wall showed a map of Toronto with red dots all over it. It was similar to the map that Rachel showed him. Looking at the Eglinton and McCowan streets, this map also had multiple red dots on that place.
"Dust incidents," Ollie said. "Each dot is a confirmed case of dust exposure in the last three months."
Gale's eyes caught the Yorkdale area. One dot appeared that wasn't there before. It wasn't as bad as others, still, can't hurt to be more careful with his friends.
"It's getting worse," he said.
"Much worse. And not just dust." Ollie walked to another screen showing a different map with blue triangles littering the map. "These are recorded rift incidents over the same period."
The blue triangles overlapped many of the red dots.
"You think they're connected?" Gale asked.
"I know they are." Ollie pulled up a third screen showing footage of a park.
Trees swayed against the wind. A person on his phone was walking the dog by the park at dusk, where the streetlight barely covered the path. Then all of a sudden, thick red roots spread out everywhere in an instant. The roots themselves didn't touch the material world. However, the man and the dog disappeared from sight after the red roots dissipated.
"This is from ten years ago," Ollie said. "The orphanage you came from. And the place I was at. Security camera from a nearby building caught it."
The screen flipped to a different camera point of view. This time, it was the street just by the entrance of the park. Ollie backed up the footage and played it just before the red roots stretched out.
Children ran along the sidewalk. One of them even bumped against a woman walking while she looked at her phone. Once again, the red roots covered the entire footage. Once it dissipated, there were no signs of anyone. No damaged buildings or trees. Just void of people.
"What is that?" Gale asked.
"The Path higher ups calls it a rift explosion. It's usually when a rift stays open for too long. It explodes and spills into our world." Ollie's eyes stayed fixed on the screen. "But did that really make sense? Those red roots took all of us somewhere and just dissipated. Every mundane and Aurian in a kilometre radius, gone. They call it the Red Death Incident of '59. The only ones that ever came out of this place? That was us, and they named us
Red Hollows.
"
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The video kept playing. Soon, red and blue strobed the pavement everywhere. When firefighters broke into a house, they came back out with nothing to show for. Police and journalists started pouring in after that.
"Media covered it as a mass gas leak and conspiracy theorists say it's a bioweapon from terrorist countries. Some say a bio-industrial accident. Case closed." Ollie shook his head. "But if you go there now, you'll see apparitions. You can think of them like ghost-like things floating around. Harmless, but they're there."
"Ghosts are real?" Gale asked.
"No, they're not," Ollie said. "They're just the byproduct of whatever rift that was that exploded. Probably."
"We still have to fight against the rifts, right? That's the whole point."
Ollie took a deep breath before speaking. "That's what Aur is supposed to do. Protect the mundane world from all this. But recently, it seems like mundanes are just collateral damage."
"I'm sorry about what happened. I didn't know."
"It's okay." Ollie said softly. "I was planning to tell you eventually, it just... had to happen that way. With that husband and wife..." He stopped, then shook his head. "Someone has to do something, even if that's me."
"It's not your fault," Gale said.
Ollie didn't answer. He walked to a window over the lab below, not saying anything as he watched the woman read the book. They stood in silence while the monitor beeped behind the reinforced glass.
"Why was the research on rift containerization halted?" Gale asked. "The asylum documents showed they were making progress."
Ollie forced a laugh. "The Arcanes ordered it so. Their word is absolute. Fuck them, though."
"The Arcanes? Who are they?"
"I really don't know." Ollie turned to face him. "That's the truth. Nobody does. Each major faction has at least one, but they don't show their faces. They just issue orders and expect them to be followed."
"Sounds like a bunch of stuck up adults." Gale said.
Ollie laughed, a full bodied one. "That's right. Stuck up adults. That's the word for it."
Gale's face flushed, looking down. He didn't mean to blurt that out. That was supposed to be kept in his head.
Ollie put two hands on Gale's shoulders. "I'll ask you one more time. I know we talked about it before, but after seeing all this filth, do you still want to go through with what you said? That you'll help me with stuff that's not part of the Path? The gray area?"
Huh? What was there to think about? Ollie helped him with his friends. Of course he had to help. At least he'd do something. There was a comic book that he read in the orphanage library. With great power comes great decisions. This sounded like one great decision to him.
Besides, Ollie's heart was in a good place. There were also bigger issues than whatever this was. If there was anyone Gale wanted to fight with against the incoming tide, it'd naturally be the person in front of him now. No need to think so much about it.
"Dirty, gray, black, white, orange, blue," Gale said monotonously. "Everything you have here, and everything you're doing is to create a cure for
survival
, right? I'll do what you need me to do. Just say the word."
Ollie looked at him for a moment, then his lips turned into a soft smile.
"Still the same Gale from the Eclipsed, eh? Moving forward without hesitation." He turned back to the window. "First time I ran a black market dust lab, I threw up for three days after. Now I sign the paperwork without blinking."
"Dust. I need it too," Gale said suddenly. Kind of true. At least he'd need a supply of it in order to beat things he couldn't otherwise naturally beat. The knight was one of them.
"What? You're dependent on dust?"
"No." Gale spotted a tray of vials on a nearby table. Enhanced dust, according to the label. He grabbed one of the blue tubes and popped the cap before Ollie could stop him.
"What the fuck are you doing!"
Gale tipped the vial back, dust and its liquid sliding down his throat. It hit his system seconds later. His veins lit up, power flowing smoother, but less potent than the one he found in the storage box.
"Shit," Ollie whispered, stepping back. "Gale, what the fuck…"
"I'm special." Gale wiped his mouth with his hand.
"Right… you're special. But this..." Ollie stared at him, eyes wide. "What exactly are you?"
A Dainv, though Gale wasn't so sure about what the hell that even meant.
"I'm not exactly sure what I am too…" Gale flexed his hand, watching white glow on his veins pulse. "But with this, I think I'm pretty safe as being your 'secret weapon', right?"
Ollie grinned. "Well, Gale, do I have a proposition for you!"
"What kind?" Gale asked.
"How does a proper salary sound? Plus all the dust you can handle and a place to stay if you want it."
"A salary?" The prospect of a salary. Being an adult with financial independence. Gale imagined himself licking his own lips, but didn't actually do it for real.
"You think I'd ask you to work for free?" Ollie laughed. "Come on. I'm a businessman. I know talent when I see it."
"And what would I be doing?" Gale crossed his arms.
"Nothing you weren't planning to do anyway." Ollie walked to the end of the patient ward. To the end where the heart rate monitor was a tablet. He picked it up and said, "You wanted to track down that dealer, right? Well, I want you to go bigger. I want you to find the entire criminal ring behind the dust trade in Canada."
Gale looked over Ollie's shoulder. He zoomed out, showing the red dots littering the major cities of Canada. From Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, to Quebec City. Smaller dots scattered throughout the whole country. The dots even appeared in the most remote areas, such as the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
"Sure? That sounds like a wide area."
"You'll have resources." Ollie zoomed in on Ontario. "I've been investigating these leads myself for months. I wouldn't really mind it if they're not causing such a big ruckus. Now Jiuling and United Knights are hot on my ass."
"And the dust supply?" Gale asked. "How much are we talking?"
"As much as you need." Ollie pulled a small case from under his desk. He opened it, revealing rows of vials, each with a different label. Some slightly more greenish while others were more purple. All having the same grey grains in the liquid. "Whole R&D department. Custom blends. Anything that works for you. Pick your literal poison."
Gale stared at the vials. Each one could provide a small amount of replenishment for his essence in case of dire scenarios. And it's certain those scenarios would come up eventually.
"What about you?" Gale asked. "What will you be doing while I'm running around hunting dust dealers?"
"I'll be picking up where Project Threshold left off." Ollie closed the dust case and put it back in his pocket. "Those asylum documents might be the key to rift generation. I'm going to finish what they started."
"Dangerous work."
"So is yours." Ollie smirked. "You'll probably attract attention from both the Path and the United Knights. Especially with your... unique fighting style."
Gale frowned. "You want me to be a distraction?"
"I want you to be effective," Ollie said. "But yes, if you're out there making noise, they'll focus on you instead of what I'm doing in my labs."
What could possibly go wrong? He was already planning to get back at that stupid Red Jacket Woman anyway. This sounds more like a bonus than anything. If it took away some attention from Ollie, all the better.
"I'm in," Gale said. "But I want something else too."
"Name it."
"Information and also keep me up to date with your research, I guess?" Gale looked back toward the patients in their beds. "I want to know where this is going."
Ollie nodded slowly. "Fair enough. Partners should share intel."
"Partners?"
"What would you call it?"
Gale shrugged. "Just never thought I'd be partners with a gajillionaire."
"Lucky you." Ollie clapped him on the shoulder. "I'll have HR set everything up tomorrow. Private account, company credit card, the works. No more of that shitty protein bar from the Path."
"So what's your end goal with the rift research?" Gale asked. "Why pick up where Project Threshold left off?"
Ollie's smile disappeared. He walked to the window again, looking down at the researchers below.
"I got a feeling the Arcanes are keeping the origin of dust a secret, and I'm betting all my stuff that it's the rifts," he whispered. "Everything comes back to them. The power, the crystallization, all of it."
"How do you know?"
"Chemical analysis shows dust emits similar energies as open rifts." Ollie opened up a PDF file on the tablet. "The Arcanes hide a lot about rifts. They classify most research, restrict access. But I've pieced enough together to know we're missing something big."
"And you think finishing Project Threshold will help find a cure for dust corruption?"
"A hunch." Ollie turned back to him. "But my hunches are usually right. If we can understand how rifts work, really understand them, we might find the key to reversing crystallization,
not just halting it
. And I didn't lie about private rifts being a gold mine."
"So I hunt criminals, you build a rift machine and research dust."
"That's the simplest way to put it, yeah." Ollie checked his watch. "And Gale, try not to destroy too much property. That'll put you in the Path's crosshair even more."
Gale nodded. "What about hurting?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, like hurting someone really badly. Like that brass knuckle guy."
"Brother David?"
"Yeah."
"Word of advice. Do not hesitate to kill.
Anything
and
everything
is also trying to kill you in Aur."
Gale gulped. They'd have to really piss him off for him to want to kill them, but sure. He'll take that advice to heart.

Chapter 105