Nina’s mind surfaced as she was pulled from her sleep only to find herself surrounded by brilliance. Even with her eyes closed the brightness was painful, and while she wanted to raise a hand to shield them she quickly found that it wouldn’t be possible.

So white, she thought as she opened her eyes a fraction to examine the bindings around her wrists.

Everything around her was white. The floor, the ceiling, and all four walls were the same slick colour, glossy like plastic as the surfaces reflected the bright lights that hung above her. It was a clean, almost sterile feeling that she got from the cold room as she tried to piece together her surroundings. Not finding a single speck of dirt on the floor or detecting any particular scent in the air, she frowned as the drowsiness from her sleep was quickly pushed from her mind by the chill.

Her chest began to throb as the events from before came rushing back to her. Rucille’s smile, the sudden attack, and then how Selius had held her still before she had drifted away into nothingness. The scene in the carriage played through her mind on repeat as she tested her restraints, a newfound sense of alarm rising as the pieces began to fall into place. She was seated, but her wrists were tightly bound to the armrests by metal cuffs while her ankles were shackled to the base of the chair. Both her shirt and cravat must have been removed because she could feel the chill of steel on her back, while a loop of leather around her neck prevented her from inspecting herself. She shuddered with a deep breath, partly in response to the cold on her bare upper half and partly to steady herself as she thought about how she was essentially pinned in place.

She had no idea where she was, or even how long she had been out. Her neck had almost no movement due to the strap, but she also found it strange how her surroundings were such a stark contrast to the stone and wood that she was used to. The chair she sat on was mainly comprised of cold steel, while she could have sworn that the walls were some kind of plastic or other synthetic substance. It was unlike anything she had seen before, and if she had to draw comparisons to something, she thought of the sterile atmosphere in her office building from Caecus.

Just what had she been dragged into?

She received her first answer as she heard a door opening behind her, listening to it close before she heard footsteps cross the floor in her direction. When the smiling face of the person behind the footsteps appeared in her vision, she didn’t know whether she was really surprised or not. She had always known that there was something different about her, but this certainly wasn’t something she could have predicted.

Wearing a thin white coat that ran down to her knees over a blue shirt and a black skirt, Rucille gave her a quick eye over before a look of surprise crossed her face. “You’re awake,” she smiled as she opened Nina’s eyelid with her thumb before peering at her pupil. “Not bad to only be out that long, that was some pretty strong stuff.”

“Why are you doing this?” Nina asked as she fought to control her voice. What had she ever done to deserve something like this? First it was getting thrown into Luem with nothing but the clothes on her back, then it was having wanted posters with her name on it circulated around the city making her look like some kind of criminal. As if that wasn’t enough, she was chased through a desert prison by one of the scariest groups on the seven plates, and now just when she thought she had found some temporary peace and quiet… this?

“Nina,” Rucille said softly as she watched a tear roll down her cheek. “Nina, it’s alright.”

“It’s not alright!” Nina sobbed. She wanted to wipe the tears from her face but she couldn’t because her hands were bound. She wanted to look at the ground so that Rucille couldn’t see her face in such a mess but her neck was strapped to the seat. She wanted to run, to hide in a dark corner where nobody could find her, to hide under the blankets in her apartment on Caecus and never come out. Instead she was here, vulnerable and weak while being surrounded by bright lights and shackled to a chair with nowhere to hide.

It was humiliating.

“I’m here for you Nina,” Rucille said as she straddled her, sitting on her legs while staring deep into her eyes. “You’re special to me, you know? Ever since I started working on this project I’ve been waiting for you.”

Nina could feel Rucille’s breath on her face. It was moist and slightly erratic, slowly accelerating as she examined Nina’s features from only a few centimeters away.

“I was told that you were like a unicorn from a fairy tale,” she whispered as she licked a tear from Nina’s cheek. “Just like the people who worked here before me and then the people that worked here before that, I was told that you were something we could only dream of, the key.”

Rucille pressed her chest against Nina’s as her face snaked around to her ear. “But then I found you,” she said slowly as she hung on the words, her heartbeat steady against Nina’s own. “When I heard that you were from Caecus - that you were my unicorn… I knew that you were mine.”

Nina’s sobbing had stained Rucille’s coat as her shoulder was pressed against her face, her legs weak as Rucille’s weight pressed down on her. Listening to her words, she paused for a moment as she processed Rucille’s comment through her intermittent sobs. “This is all because I’m from Caecus?”

“Of course!” Rucille replied as she jumped off her before a sly grin appeared on her face, her mood turning chirpy at the flick of a switch. “You’re the final piece in the puzzle that is the future of Zaffre’s Moat.”

“Why me?” she asked with a sniffle, trying to ignore the mucus from her nose that was now running down towards her lip. “I have nothing to do with Zaffre’s Moat.”

Rucille locked her hands behind her back as she shook her head while casually strolling out of sight. “It isn’t about you in particular,” she said as Nina heard her rummage around on what she assumed was some kind of desk for a moment. “It’s about this.”

Nina cried out as Rucille stuck a syringe in her defenseless arm without warning. Before her shock had even subsided, Rucille was already drawing on the plunger, the pair both watching as the tube began to fill with blood.

“This is the final piece of the puzzle,” Rucille smiled as she withdrew the syringe before displaying it to Nina, pointing at her blood inside. “Let me ask you; has anyone ever asked you about how the plates work? About how you can go down, but not up? About how even though you seem to always go down, it ends in a loop?”

Nina thought back to her first night in Luem when she had ended up drinking with Hala and Cross. Hala had suggested that the plates were like the blades of a waterwheel, and that people could only travel in one direction in the same fashion as a wheel can only turn with the current. It hadn’t been a particularly solid theory, but it had helped her understand a little about how the plates functioned together.

“To be honest, I don’t think that any of that matters,” Rucille said as she examined the blood in the syringe. “Nobody will ever find the answer, so what’s the point in wasting your time?”

“Are you going to let me go?” Nina asked.

“Instead we thought about differences that we can measure,” Rucille continued while ignoring Nina’s question with a wave of her hand. “How am I different from you? How are you different from my research subject next door? He’s from Terminus by the way. Doesn’t talk anymore, but being braindead tends to do that,” she sighed.

Braindead?

“You see, we can’t make artillery like the people on Terminus can,” she said as she walked behind Nina again before rummaging around on the desk. “We don’t have as many people as SuTSU do either, and we’re not in a shielded position like Caecus is.” When she entered Nina’s vision once again she saw that she was carrying another empty syringe. “But secretly, we’re quite good at something Nina. We’re good at figuring out how different people work. I don’t want to brag, but we’re even better at it than SuTSU are.”

“I asked if you were going to let me go,” Nina repeated.

“Do you know what’s so valuable about understanding how different people work?” Rucille asked as she continued to ignore the question, sitting herself down on Nina’s lap before tracing the veins on her arm with the tip of the needle. “It’s because if you can understand what’s different, you can work out ways to attack that. Take my subject next door – it took a while, but he helped me create a virus that only infects people from Terminus.”

Nina winced as Rucille plunged the second needle into her forearm.

“It’s because I found a weakness in them,” she smiled as she slowly drew a second round of blood from her arm while savouring the moment. “It’s hard to make a lot of the virus, but that’s a problem I’ll work on later. The problem I have now is how to attack everyone else.”

“You’re insane,” Nina murmured before grunting as Rucille unapologetically pulled the syringe from her arm. “You’re talking about genocide.”

“No, no, no, I’m talking about national defense,” Rucille waved a finger before placing her elbow on Nina’s shoulder, staring down into her eyes. “Why do you think Selius was there today? It’s because this is bigger than me, and it’s bigger than the Inin Estate too. It’s a royal project sanctioned at the highest level, you know?”

“It doesn’t matter how you sugar coat it,” Nina spat as she glared at her. “It’s still genocide.”

“We’re not attacking anyone with it,” Rucille shrugged. “We just want to ensure that we can protect what we have. The problem with having such a backward culture is that it’s not very good when it comes to defending yourself. It might seem like desperate measures to you, but it’s the easiest solution when you think about it.”

“You would still be attacking people if they came down from above.”

“In fact it’s perfect,” Rucille continued as she ignored the comment. “All we need to do is make it waterborne, and then when the time comes we just dump it in the moat.”

“The rain,” Nina frowned.

“Bingo,” she smiled again as she hopped off Nina, much to her relief. “I didn’t think you’d get it though, considering I already told you that I studied people and you didn’t catch on to that. One out of two isn’t bad I guess.”

Nina recalled how Rucille had indeed said that she studied people from the different plates. This certainly wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she had heard it though. She thought that Ormain’s group had a few screws loose, but this was far worse. Despite everything Rucille had said, however, there was still something that didn’t quite seem to add up.

“Why do you need someone from Caecus then? Why is it not someone from Neo Luesa?”

“Luesans are the easiest to find,” Rucille chuckled as she dismissed Nina’s comment with a wave of her hand. “But they’re annoyingly resilient, unfortunately. I needed someone from Caecus because the current theory is that people from Caecus have a makeup which is somewhere in between those from Terminus and those from Neo Luesa.”

“How can you make such a theory if you didn’t have a research subject?”

“Deduction,” she answered like it was obvious. “People from Zaffre’s Moat have similarities with people from Areinis and Rimeria, just like how people from Areinis share their own similarities with people from Zaffre’s Moat and Terminus. Parts of your makeup, your… race, are generally shared by people from the plates above and below you. Considering that the Skywall has always been uninhabited, people from Neo Luesa should share similarities with people from Caecus and Rimeria, but the problem is that SuTSU wiped all the Rimerians out centuries ago.”

“And so you want to use me to work out how your Terminus virus can be modified to work on someone from Neo Luesa, like a bridge.” Nina concluded.

“I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, but that’s right!” Rucille said as she raised a finger. “But finding someone from Caecus has been impossible so far. They’re so ignorant to the concept of the seven plates that very few of them fall through to Neo Luesa in the first place, and even fewer fall this far down. That’s why you’re my unicorn Nina.”

“Why didn’t you just go and kidnap someone yourselves?”

“It’s forbidden by royal decree to leave the plate if you are born on Zaffre’s Moat,” she shrugged. “I told you already, they cling to history and leaving the plate is seen as abandoning our way of life. Selius said it was taboo, remember?”

“Then pay someone to bring one down for you, or even bring a limb down.”

“I need a live sample, and getting someone from Caecus is apparently too expensive,” she scoffed. “Even on national defense, the Royal Family cuts corners. Network is the only group that could do it anyway, and they don’t seem to like human trafficking so much.”

“Surely I’m not the first person from Caecus to drop through,” Nina continued. Why, out of every possible scenario, had it been her?

“You probably aren’t,” Rucille agreed. “But people don’t usually announce that they’re from Caecus, and they also don’t end up in the Royal District either. On top of that, they certainly don’t give us an excuse to get away with it. You’re just lucky Nina, it all lined up perfectly.”

“You mean unlucky,” Nina retorted. She had calmed down a little due to their conversation, but her mind was still frantically working overtime as she tried to think of a way to escape the situation. She had tried to wiggle in her seat a little but found that she couldn’t feel the pistol in her pocket when she moved her hip against the side of the chair, concluding that Rucille had confiscated it. “What do you mean an excuse?”

“It’s perfect! Your SuTSU friends were looking for you right?” Rucille grinned. “Think about how poorly it’s going to look for Reina when you go missing with a noble daughter and a prince,” she added as she looked at the silver watch on her wrist. “In fact, they’re probably being kicked out of the Royal District as we speak. Even if they did somehow work out that you were actually sitting right under their noses, they’ll never be allowed back in to prove it.”

“People would have seen you returning.”

“We changed carriages in the Merchant District,” she said as she disappeared from Nina’s vision as she strolled to the door. “Selius is hiding in the castle until your friends give up and leave, and honestly I don’t feel like leaving the lab anytime soon now that I’ve got my hands on my unicorn.”

“You’re insane,” Nina glared at her as she felt the tears returning. “You can’t do this to me.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is genius,” Rucille laughed as she opened the door. “I’m going to go and run some tests on your blood because I really can’t wait, I’ll be back for more soon.”

As the door closed behind her and left her in silence, Nina shut her eyes as though it would help block the returning tears from pouring down her cheeks.