[b]Canada![/b]

When the door opens, five janissaries enter, all of them in the white-and-gold of troops on a long-term loan from the Marduki. The next to enter is a Thornback in loose, flowing robes, and then one of the Annunaki. Of course, you think, as you recognize her. She’s both a hail mary chance at escape, and the promise of a terrible fate if you can’t play her.

Arákh ab-Ishtar is better known as the Puppeteer in Caphtor Below. She’s not just rumored to be in charge of the Cult of Ishtar’s counter-intelligence wing, despite being merely a chief breeder by rank, but she’s a [i]playwright.[/i] And she mostly writes very, very blue bodice-rippers. No, that name doesn’t translate to the “if you’ve got them, flaunt them” Annunaki. Veil-tearers?

Her marionettes flaunt themselves in exciting outfits and play out these stories as entertainment, sometimes just for her household, sometimes for exclusive feasts, as her readers sitting in front provide dialogue, stage directions, and reactions. The marionettes spin and gyrate and grope each other, the chains attached to their limbs and collar rising up into a vast and intricate mechanism that makes up a large part of any stage she chooses to grace with her stories. (They say it gives Caphtor instructions on how to move the chains, constantly, so she cannot forget. They say that there are almost never accidents.) And their thoroughly muffled groans of effort and yearning are almost impossible to hear, even if the audience were to try; her prose is too fine to let some barbarians ruin it with an ill-timed word, just as her choreography must be perfect, perfect, perfect!

She’s here to decide whether she wants to turn you over to the Ereshkigali or keep you as her own prize. Which one is worse, do you think?

“Have her displayed,” she says to the Thornback. Her nails are encrusted with powdered pearls; her veil is a deep, dusky blue, and the many layers of her sheer top make it look as if she’s wearing a wave. “I want to see what I’m working with.”

***

[b]Marianne![/b]

You open your eyes. Then you open your eyes again.

The feedback is stinging and hot, pressure building up in your skull, behind your burning eyes; you squeeze them shut a moment later, the tangled cables of interconnection burning beneath your eyelids like electric lights. There, that thick and tangled knot; that is the Index. It must be.

You are there in two steps. Glyphs indent themselves into its sleek surface as you lift it; you sink the stylus into the tablet and draw your query with a flourish. The glyphs are filled in, and then a new sequence carves itself: the location of the few tablets concerning TIAMAT. You toss it down to Set easily, trusting her to take it with her. Let the tyrants puzzle out what has gone missing the slow and painful way.

Then you launch, fall upwards, drag a screaming Jerry with you as tablet after tablet becomes yours: all the dirty laundry of Caphtor.

***

[b]Set![/b]

Frustratingly, digging into the tablets concerning the ab-Enkiji reveals mostly heretical treatises and blueprints. One of the small advantages you have up your sleeve is that the Annunaki hold dogma and divine revelation over personal innovation, at least publically. There’s a story emerging here, or at the very least a narrative.

Like, look at this! A transmatter receptor that could, with some development, lead to tech like your Rift Generator; SEALED BY ORDER OF THE HIGH GODS. They don’t want any of their oh-so-loyal servants having access to your toys. Instead they rely on vast, power-hogging teleportation circles, wasteful and dangerous.

But the medical records that the ab-Enkiji are doubtless producing, the experiment logs: those are absent, save for a recent treatise arguing that Earth is inherently corrupting and that the profane powers of mankind are signs that it is a knot of cancerous flesh in the skin of the universe we know.

A miscalculation. If he is right, then the High Gods were wrong to return. This is not just impossible but impolitic. How fortunate that he was silenced: his solution was to “purge this mire of corruption through holy fire, until it splits open and by the grace of the High Gods, we may excise its ill-being from existence.”

Wait. Hold on. What’s this here? A footnote scrawls its way along one side.

“(cf. the sightings of the blind child, harbinger of the corruption of those impious few among our peers who are given to the graces of our caretakers)”

A chill runs down your spine. An implication is unfurling in your heart. The corruption this treatise refers to is [i]superpowers.[/i] You could very well read that note as an admission that Annunaki have developed superpowers and then been handed over to the ab-Ereshkigali. But [i]how?[/i] What does the blind child have to do with it? And why haven’t... well, of course. Because any pious Annunaki would turn to confession, and being “disappeared” for re-education by the secret police is a common enough occurrence.

(Your sibling could just vanish one day, and the only recourse you’d have to find out more is passing a request to your superiors, who then would ask their peers in the Cult of Ereshkigal for more information. By law, they’re required to pass that information to your head of house, but little more.)

Your eye drifts over to the mural of the Shutting of the Sarcophagus; the mummified sinner, frozen in writhing as the lid is set into place. If any Annunaki might deserve sympathy, it would be one who suddenly, through no fault of their own, finds themselves an unacceptable state secret...