When the train glided to a stop and the doors opened, I made sure to put myself between
the push of traffic and Hanna's belly as best I could so Isla didn't get bonked by a briefcase
or a bonesword hilt. Using my umbrella like an angry old man's cane to help make space, I
got us inside, and a woman in a pencil skirt gave up her seat for the pregnant lady.
After a twenty-minute ride, we arrived at Lumen Central Station and queued up for the
escalators. We hurried across the polished floor, past information desks and brightly lit
storefronts lined in accents of gleaming chrome. The station gleamed in the natural light
spilling through the domed glass ceiling above. Hanna steered me clear of a restaurant
wafting the heavy scent of curry, one hand on her baby bump and the other over her mouth
to stifle a gag. "Ugh, God I miss curry, but Isla thinks it smells worse than the BO on the
train."
She breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the fresh air of the sidewalk, the rain
pattering atop our umbrella once again. Across the street and two blocks over stood the
enormous Lightbridge Towers: two thousand feet tall, two hundred floors in total, and two
magnificent, illuminated buildings as ornate as cathedrals rising above the lowest rain
clouds.
They were the first buildings in the world to harness radiation energy, which they harvested
from an open rift that glowed like the setting sun between the topmost floors of the two
connected towers. Raden alone powered dozens of laboratories and server rooms, two
separate long-term cryogenic facilities, the armory where I worked, an advanced
broadcasting system, and hundreds of individual offices. Not to mention it kept the lights on
and the AC running.
It wasn't a long walk, but I still shot a questioning side-eye at Hanna's belly. She clucked her
tongue dismissively and waddled out into the rain. Her brisk pace was a swift reminder she
had no lack of raden, and we reached the building in minutes.
"Identification," a doorman asked once we approached the entrance of Tower One.
"Pregnant woman," she replied.
The doorman paused, blinked in surprise, and then finally rushed to help Hanna out of the
rain and inside the building. He looked at me expectantly for a title or badge I didn't have, but
Hanna clarified, "He's with me," which got me in as well.
A larger, more imposing security guard stopped us as we approached the lobby's many
elevators. "Name, position, department."
Hanna hooked the lanyard hanging around her neck with a thumb and lifted the security
card."Hanna Gray-Choi, Senior Researcher, Division III."
The guard approved her before turning to me with sharper scrutiny. "Name, position,
department".
"Torrin Gray, boneforger, the armory." Meaning no clearance for Tower One. But I held up my
card anyway.
The sentinel snorted as he leaned in to inspect it. "What are you doing here?"
I shrugged.
"It's classified," Hanna answered flatly.
That was enough to get me past the guard, but not without a large, embarrassing "VISITOR"
sticker pasted to my jacket. "Make sure that's always visible," the guard insisted.
I applied the label, and Hanna and I took an elevator to the tower's science center.
"Dr. Choi?" an intern exclaimed as we entered Hanna's research lab.
More than a dozen heads popped up from the cubicles around us. "Hanna!"
Within seconds, an entourage of colleagues swarmed my sister-in-law. "Good morning,
everyone!" Hanna chirped.
"Dr. Choi!" they prattled. "How are you?" "What are you doing here?" "You look fantastic!"
"How far along are you?" "When will you be back?" "You won't believe how badly corporate
is breathing down our—"
"Thank you!" Hanna said, laughing. "I'm doing well. Thank you! Just a few weeks left. We
won't be here long. I just wanted to… Dr. Long!"
A tall guy in a lab coat approached Hanna and happily shook her hand. The doctor's dark
hair had started graying at the temples, but there was no other sign of his age.
"Good afternoon, my dear," he grinned. "What brings you here?"
"Torrin had a run-in with a parabeast yesterday, and—"
"A parabeast?! Is he all right?"
"Yes," I answered through a tight jaw. I was raden-deficient, not invisible. Although I
sometimes wished the two were paired together.
Hanna smiled politely, glossing over my frustration as she placed a light hand on my
shoulder. "Oh yes. He's quite all right, thankfully. Anyway, he made some interesting
observations that I'd like to share with you. Do we still have those weaver wasps in the
labs?"
"Of course! Right over here."
Dr. Long took us past the cubicles and through a password-protected door into an enormous
room that resembled an exotic pet shop. The dim lab contained no windows, and bulbs only
shone overtop a handful of active workstations. This was where Hanna and her colleagues
studied lower-order parabeasts, the kind that were small and docile enough to be contained
safely. They couldn't survive beyond the rift for long, even in an artificial environment, but
they'd proven useful enough to warrant a continual harvest from the rifts.
The weaver wasps, which went by a variety of scientific names specific to the subspecies,
were wrapped in green, glowing, raden-rich cocoons. Inside each of these silky sheathes
writhed an ugly, lamprey-like insectoid that could grow into long-limbed parabeasts as large
as my forearm. The pupae housed within these protective glass enclosures, though, were
the size of my pinky.
They were fascinating creatures on their own, but I had always wanted to see one of the
enormous weaver wasp colonies that resembled weeping willows. The trailing cocoons of
silk apparently refracted light like prisms.
Someday, I thought.
"The Hokkaido Treaty bars us from breeding parabeasts in captivity," the doctor told me, as if
I were a total layman, "but we have successfully recreated the weaver wasp's habitat,
allowing these specimens to survive from egg to larva, pupa, and even adulthood. Long
enough for us to conduct almost any test we wish."
"Have you ever found a queen?" Hanna asked.
"Yes, but none of them are reproductive beyond the rifts. Whatever eggs they lay are empty,
and all our attempts to clone a native or even hybrid weaver wasp within unfertilized eggs
were unsuccessful. There's just something to their recipe that we're missing."
I approached the incandescent creatures sealed in glass, and Hanna's next question faded
as my mind flipped like a catalog through the countless applications of their silk: sterile
bandages that repelled moisture, scabbard linings that protected all known metals from
oxidation, threading with greater tensile strength than carbon nanotubing, fiber optic cables,
microprocessors…
It was remarkable that so much power could be contained and harnessed within a single
creature.
"Torrin?"
I snapped back to reality. "Yeah?"
"Would you please tell Dr. Long and my team what you told me about the rifts?"
"Uh…" I shifted my eyes anxiously to the scientists wearing white coats and wielding
clipboards. "It's nothing they don't already know." My shoulders hunched, sheepish, as I told
the doctor, "I'm a great admirer of your writing, Dr. Long".
"Oh? That's nice," the doctor said as though praising a small child. An uncomfortable silence
passed between us until he looked back at Hanna and asked, "Will that be everything?"
"Actually," I answered, taking out my smartphone, "could I take a picture?"
The doctor cast me a curious look beneath knit brows. After a brief hesitation, he gestured
toward the weaver wasp tank. "Of course."
"What subspecies is this?" I asked as my phone camera clicked.
A researcher replied, "Parabombyx vespa."
"That's what I thought. I use their silk in all my polishes. Are they all from the same rift?" I
asked while toying with the contrast of my image.
"No."
"But you're absolutely certain they're all Parabombyx vespa?"
"Of course," Dr. Long stressed. "They're identical at both the genetic and molecular levels."
"I'm afraid they beg to differ, doctor." I showed the image on my cellphone to the researchers
around me.
Only half the weaver wasps inside the cases appeared in my photograph. The rest were
completely absent—cocoons, glowing threads, and all.
"These parabeasts are dissimilar at the quantum level," I explained. "That's why only some
of them can be photographed under ultraviolet light. I'm guessing you don't take pictures of
these bugs in the sun that often."
Some of the newer researchers looked around the windowless room in shock while Hanna
beamed.
I gestured at my screen. "The weaver wasps visible in this photo won't appear to the naked
eye under infrared lights because of how electrons function in Rift 431 and 443. We
encountered the same problem when trying to harvest insectoid parabeasts in those
regions."
Dr. Long took my smartphone and studied the picture in disbelief. "That's impossible," he
said. "This image is doctored."
"You could take another photo yourself," I offered. "Just make sure you set your flash to its
highest UV settings. Or Infrared." I took my phone back, tapped it, and waved a dark red
light across the weaver wasps. As in my picture, half of the parabeasts vanished beneath the
light and just as quickly reappeared before our eyes.Hanna watched this display from over my shoulder. "Amazing!"
"Why weren't we told about this?" one of the researchers asked.
I passed the light back over the tank idly. "Lots of ardents and carvers know that there's
something erratic about the parabeasts' existence and development inside the… the rifts," I
stuttered, my eye catching a strange movement at the far end of the tank. I took a step
closer but continued to explain. "We just don't know what exactly, and the people with the
best understanding of them have no patience for scientific discovery." I squinted at the
wriggling form I'd found. "Hanna? What's that?"
Hanna hadn't even taken a step when Dr. Long nudged me aside, swiveling the light so the
weaver wasp pupa reappeared, obscuring the odd wriggling creature I'd spotted beneath.
"Gregory, get the forceps," he barked as he lifted the tank lid and plunged in a hand. He
flipped the pupa upside down to reveal a white worm the length of a fingernail and thinner
than a shoestring. It undulated like a sucking leech, and Dr. Long's lip curled in disgust. "I'm
not raising a parasite in this lab."
Gregory jostled me as he tried to hand over the forceps, and I backed out of the way, joining
Hanna out the outskirts of the researchers' tight ring.
"A raden-sucker," Hanna muttered.
I'd read about them but never seen one. They were as diverse as any other parabeast, but
from what little I'd studied, they were either useless or bad news. No in-between.
I saw the time as I turned off my infrared light and startled. "Hey, I've gotta go," I told Hanna.
"I'm gonna be late."
"Oh, okay," Hanna murmured, but Dr. Long had heard me and tilted his profile in our
direction.
Pinching the parasite's head with the forceps he said, "I hope you'll come back another time,
Torrin. I'd like to pick your brain."
"I hope you mean that figuratively." When he chuckled, I added, "Thanks for the tour."
As Hanna and I turned for the door, she gave me a quick side hug and whispered, "Nailed it".