She wished she could feel the loss of so many souls in the way Maris obviously did. But she didn’t remember who they’d been. “Why did it matter that Grant thought I’d…sunsetted? What rules was he talking about?”
“Time and many heartbreaking experiences taught those of us who persevere a difficult lesson. When we encounter someone out there in the world whom we recognize is a new incarnation of someone who used to be First Generation, we can’t tell them the true extent of their heritage. Only pain and sorrow results from doing so, for us and for them. They don’t understand how they could have ever given up such a heritage or those millennia of memories and experiences. But at the time the individual sunsetted, they had their reasons for it, and we have learned we must respect those reasons.”
She sank back onto the couch as a very big, very problematic puzzle piece snapped into place. “Is this why I never told Dashiel about Steven Olivaw?”
“You remember Steven, then? Of course you would make a point to include him in those encrypted memories. You’re too sentimental not to. Yes, and no.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes, this is why you shouldn’t have told him. Why I counseled you vigorously and repeatedly not to tell him. But I don’t think it was the rule or my pleas that stopped you. Rather, the reasons behind the rule are the same ones that convinced you to keep your secret. The confusion and frustration everyone feels on finding out their prior incarnation sunsetted? It would be magnified a thousand-fold for Dashiel, because in his case, his prior incarnation also walked away from you. Left you behind, alone, so they could take the easy way out and die. Can you imagine what this knowledge would do to him?”
She frowned. Maris was logically correct in her assessment, but…. “I hear what you’re saying, but to keep something like this from him? To keep my very nature a secret? It was wrong.”
“What you mean to say is that it was hard. When you live as long as we have, you learn to endure hard things.”
“Forgive me, but I don’t recall the ins and outs of such an allegedly critical skill, and I’m not comfortable with having kept this from him.”
Maris deposited her drink on the counter and grasped both of Nika’s hands in hers. “Nika, listen to me carefully. Do not tell him. I remember Steven Olivaw a lot better than you do, and let me tell you something: he was a godsdamn tortured soul from the day he walked out of the lab. Don’t you dare turn Dashiel into one as well.”
Then Maris nodded perfunctorily and retrieved her drink. “Now, I’ve had my say, and we’ll leave it there. You have other questions.”
Thousands. Millions. “How do you manage it all? How have you not gone mad? It must be too much, for too long.”
“That is the party line, isn’t it? I’ve forgotten more millennia than I remember. I’ve reinvented myself a hundred times over. I’ve had splendid years and dreadful centuries—or I assume I have. Most of the dreadful ones, I erased. I manage, we all manage, because for us life is not about the past. It’s always about the present, this moment, and the future moments awaiting us.”
Nika chuckled wryly, or possibly wildly. “It is the Asterion way.”
“And we are the living embodiment of the Asterion way. I’m not even joking. We are the threads that run through our people’s past, present and future, subtly guiding the pattern they weave. Trying to ensure it’s a beautiful one.”
Compelling, even hypnotic words, but Maris’ poetic musings were more than she could take right now, when her world was busily spinning apart once again.
“Does it even matter, though, when I can’t remember so much? I’m all for living in the present, but who cares how long I’ve done it if all I have left are a few fleeting glimpses of the past?”
“It matters because you are you, and you have existed across aeons. To have done so is precious beyond measure.” Maris motioned toward the dining area. “Besides, you have your journals. They’re not quite memories, but they’ll have a great deal to show you.”
“What journals?”
“Seriously, Nika. What did you use all that space encrypting memories for?”
“Other than the founding of Mirai and the end of the SAI Rebellion? Sex with Dashiel…meeting the Taiyok Elder for the first time…more sex with Dashiel.”
“Ah, valid choices to be sure. Come with me.” Maris strode past the dining table to the mirror decorating the wall behind it.
Confused, Nika followed her.
“Hold your hand up, palm open, in front of the space to the left of the mirror. Eye level.”
The instant she did so, the mirror and a section of the wall slid away to reveal a hidden room. Row after row of shelves packed full of data weave cases lined every interior wall. On the right, just inside, a control pane waited for input.
“What is this?”
“Your journals. Seven hundred thousand years’ worth of them. Many are after-action reports of meetings, negotiations, political clashes and so on. Many are personal reflections. Though you could access the memory of any interaction in minutes or often seconds, you found taking the time to write about the event to be a valuable exercise. Recording not merely what happened, but why it did, the personalities and circumstances which caused it to happen the way it did, and your personal thoughts on the result.” Maris nudged her gently. “Go ahead. Ask the interface for a journal entry. It’s all intuitively cross-referenced.”
Her brow furrowed. Where to even begin? She settled on something she already remembered, for simplicity’s sake and for confirmation, and entered ‘Toki’taku first Elder meeting.’
Location: Row 8, Column 15, Slot 6
She scanned a few rows until she figured out the organization, then retrieved the indicated data weave.
Date: Y98,714.231 A6
Subject: Taiyok Relations
After two hundred thirty-three years of negotiations, the Taiyok Elder has at last agreed to a face-to-face meeting on Toki’taku. I am simultaneously eager and trepidatious, for to make it a success will not be an easy task.
She jumped when Maris touched her shoulder. “I’ll leave you to your reading.”
She started to protest, but the words died in her throat. She still had thousands, millions of questions…but it was possible Maris had just handed her the cipher to most of them.
“Thank you. For everything.”
11
* * *
NIKA’S FLAT
Nika met Dashiel at the door to her flat with a kiss. She smiled against his lips. “All empty. It’s just us tonight.”
She gestured grandly to the living room to reiterate the point, then frowned, only now noticing how the chairs off to the left remained pushed up against the walls and several of the tables were smushed together by the windows. “I do still need to clean up—”
“It’s fine. Wonderful, in fact. I’m simply glad for the peace and quiet. Besides, you’ve been a little busy.” He hung his coat on a hook by the door and followed her into the living room. “What did you do today? I got caught up in meetings for hours.”
“I, um….” She trailed off, almost as if her vocal chords had seized up when faced with the weight of the words she was asking them to transmit.
This was going to be harder than expected. How to tell him that her entire world had again been upended, but also expanded beyond her capacity to absorb? How to begin to tell him of the wonders and tragedies she’d discovered within her journals, and how much still awaited her?
“Nika? Is something wrong?”
How to tell him she wasn’t and had never been precisely who he thought she was?
But the millstone of the lie her present self hadn’t yet spoken pressed down on her, poised to burden every step she walked down that path. She couldn’t not tell him.
She shook her head in answer and went over to the mirror. Drew in a deep breath and unlocked the library.
“What the hells?”
“You didn’t know about this room? About all th
ese journals?”
“No. I didn’t.” His brow knotted up as he took in the shelves upon shelves of data weaves. When he spoke, his voice sounded tentative. “I mean, I knew you kept journals, but I never had any idea….” He leaned back and peered around the corners of the wall framing the library. “How is this room even here? There’s no obvious gap in the layout, no negative space. It’s an astoundingly clever design.”
His gaze finally settled on her; in the last few seconds his jaw had tensed and his chestnut irises had brightened to a fiery bronze of churning discontent. “I don’t understand. What is this? Did all of your previous generations hold onto the journals of their ancestors and pass them along, time and again?”
“No. They didn’t.” She exhaled softly, took his hand and led him back into the living room. She sat down on the powder-blue couch, already her favorite, and patted the cushion beside her.
He regarded her in evident confusion as he sat. “Nika, what’s going on?”
“I found something out today. Something important. In retrospect, given the memories I’ve recovered and other oddities, I probably should have figured it out on my own, but I didn’t understand the nature of what I was remembering until now….” She cleared her throat and started again. “The tattoo on my back? It’s not there to honor my heritage—or it is, but it’s not a symbol of where my ancestors came from and what they did to bring us here. It’s a symbol of where I came from. Of what I did.
“The woman in the memory of the end of the SAI Rebellion I told you about, Nicolette Hinotori? She’s not my ancestor. She’s me. Her bonded SAI, KIR? It’s a part of me. The last name isn’t an homage, it’s an accurate, descriptive designation. After our people settled on Synra, they—we—joined together to become an Asterion. To become…me.”
“Well, yes, in a sense—”
“I said the same thing at first, too. But, no, not in a sense. In a quite real actuality. Nika Kirumase was born that day, nearly 700,000 years ago. And in all the aeons since then, I never underwent a full R&R. I never retired a psyche and became someone new. When you met me, I wasn’t seventh generation, I was…okay, I haven’t done the math, and I don’t have a clue how many up-gens I did, anyway—hundreds, or more likely, thousands. But that’s not the point. The point is, all those journals?” She motioned to the open door of the library. “They cover the entire history of the Dominion, the entirety of Asterion existence, and I wrote every single one of them.”
He stared not at her but through her, his eyes as turbulent as the muscles struggling to control his features.
“Say something, please.”
“What…no, this can’t be. You were…but how….” His throat worked. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Uttered on his lips, the question sounded like a betrayal. “I can’t say for certain, though I can speculate. Maris says there are rules the First Genners abide by, and when she explained them they made some amount of sense, but at the same time—”
“Maris? What does she have to do with this? You’re not saying she’s from the First Generation as well?”
The tenor of his words was honed to cut sharply through the air, making this one sound less like a question and more like an accusation. She’d expected this to be difficult for him, but she might have underestimated how difficult.
She nodded and tried to choose her words carefully, but the thoughts and emotions behind them danced in crazed loops to war with each other in her head.
“That’s how I found out. When pressed, she confessed to me the truth about my history and her own. Dashiel, I don’t have the full answer for why my former self didn’t tell you all of this. But I suspect it had something to do with…” her gaze dropped to her lap “…with the fact that I knew your progenitor, your original, First Generation ancestor.
“His name was Steven Olivaw, and he was a leader in the SAI Rebellion. I knew him for a long time. I loved him. Then he chose to R&R and was gone. And I think I was angry about it, for a longer time. Then I met you, and I found love again. Better, stronger love. And I think I didn’t want you to feel any guilt over what someone who wasn’t truly you did an eternity ago. So, I didn’t tell you.”
“You…dated my progenitor?”
She winced by way of answer.
“And you knew this about me when you met me?”
“No, not when I first met you. Later.”
The skin around his eyes twitched, and a vein running up his left temple throbbed. He stood and began wandering silently around the living room.
“I’m telling you now because I want—I need—you to know. Because you should know. You always should have known. But this is all new to me, and—”
“Who else?”
She followed his lead and stood. “Who else what?”
“Who else is First Generation? You, Maris. Who else?”
“Grant….”
He spun around, his face contorted. “What?”
“Same as Maris and everyone else, he believed I’d voluntarily sunsetted—that’s what they call it—and he was following the rules by not telling me who I used to be. Yes, it’s weird, but I really don’t care about any of that right now. I care about you—”
“Who else?”
“Um, Satair. And the guy who owns the Pavilion. Charles Basquan.”
“And?”
“Those are the only ones I know of. I think it’s everyone I’ve personally met, but it’s not as if I was handed a list. There aren’t many of us left. Twenty-eight, Maris said.”
His wandering jerked to a halt in front of the center window beside the fireplace. In profile, his jaw trembled. His chest rose and fell, then again. When he finally spoke, his voice had fallen to a gravelly whisper. “How long does it take, I wonder, for someone to become more than a dalliance to you people? To First Genners—that’s how you refer to yourselves, right? How long does it take for a relationship to gain true meaning? Ten thousand years? Fifty thousand? I’m assuming it’s something longer than thirty-two hundred.”
Her mind was drowning in so many of her own questions and so much confusion, which was her only excuse for it taking her until this instant to realize exactly how horribly wrong this conversation had gone and how deep of trouble she was now in. But she surely was, because his whisper had dripped with acerbity, and the acerbity was coated in pain, and the pain was wrapped up in a bow of anger.
She tried her damnedest to keep her own tenor gentle and open. Not pleading, but humble and apologetic. “No. I’m certain it wasn’t like that.”
He pivoted to face her. “How can you possibly be certain? You don’t fucking remember the last three thousand years.”
That’s not my fault! But this didn’t help her case much, did it? “Because in the memories I have recovered, I feel what…what I felt at the time of the memory. And I talk about you all the time in the more recent journals. Here, let me find a few for you to see.” She moved toward the library—
“I can’t be here. I have to go.”
—and promptly reversed course toward him, hurrying to catch up since he was already halfway to the door. “Please stay. I’m as confused as you are by all this. Let’s work through it together.” She reached out and grasped his hand—
—he snatched it away.
Her eyes widened; panic quavered her voice. “Dashiel, please—”
He held up a hand to cut her off and backed away, staring at her as if she were a total stranger. “Don’t. Just…don’t.” Then he turned, grabbed his jacket off the hook and left.
12
* * *
MIRAI
Dashiel stumbled back to his home in a daze.
Along the streets, up the lift, down the hall, through the door.
His jacket slid off his shoulders to land on the floor as he headed straight to the kitchen, fumbled in the cabinet for a glass and poured sake into it until the liquid spilt over the brim onto the counter.
A ping arrived from Nika. He deleted it witho
ut reading it and blocked her.
His hand shook as he picked up the glass, spilling more of the sake to trickle between his knuckles as he brought it to his lips.
A single droplet sloshed onto his tongue. The sweet nectar of oblivion. The harbinger of a fog rolling in to sweep away the pain in favor of blissful stupor—
—he hurled the glass across the room. It shattered on impact with the far sturdier window glass, and a hundred tiny shards joined the sake in decorating the floor.
He wasn’t that person any longer. Nika Tescarav had made him a different man. A better man.
Then Nika Kirumase had reached out from the grave to steal their shared history from him. To rip it to shreds and toss it like confetti in the air.
He planted his palms on the counter and sagged into them, his chin dropping to his chest.
I set my drink to the side and grabbed Nika by the waist, hoisting her up onto the counter. “Thank you for coming with me tonight. I suspect it must have been dreadfully dull for you to spend two hours listening to a lecture on manufacturing processes.”
She wrapped her legs around my hips to tug me closer. Her skirt bunched up around her thighs, and my pulse quickened. Her left hand trailed down the fabric of my silk shirt. “Dreadfully. But you looked so damn handsome up there on stage, it was worth it just to watch you.”
“Hmm. I’m glad.” I nuzzled her neck, teasing the pulse point behind her ear with my lips while one of my thumbs explored the inner thigh her skirt had exposed. She smelled of the cedar oil coating the newly polished seats in the auditorium, and a hint of the nutmeg coffee they’d enjoyed during the walk home. “You are the love of my many lives. You know this, right?”
“And you are the love of my one, magnificent life.”
I drew back to regard her curiously. It was an odd turn of phrase.
She grinned and began opening my shirt. “I only meant…you understand how much I value my past experiences and incarnations. I even have a symbol of the past tattooed into my skin for added flair. But this, here, now? This is what matters. The magnificent life I’m living in this present, with you.”
Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Page 69