Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  Slowly, slowly, I tested my arm. The drug still had its feverish claws hooked into me. But the stormtech was slowly eating it away, coiling its energy inside me in preparation. Heat lashed against my inner chest. ‘On the plus side, if there’s a hell, you and Sokolav will have all the time you want together. You’ll make a great pair.’

  Jae turned around. Her black eyes were empty as vacuum. ‘Artyom,’ Jae said, not tearing her gaze from me.

  ‘Yes, Jae?’ Artyom asked.

  ‘Kill him.’

  Something in me turned very, very cold.

  ‘What?’ Artyom asked, like he couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly.

  ‘It’s a perfectly simple order, Artyom.’ She turned to him. Unblinking, unwavering. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever stuttered. Or perhaps I did, and you didn’t understand me.’

  ‘I understood you,’ said Artyom quietly.

  ‘Then we are in agreement. It’ll be your final step to ascension. You will become one of us.’ Jae’s voice was as soft and calm as the wind across a Harvest battlefield. She dropped a thin-gun into his hands and stepped back, hands held behind her back. ‘Kill him.’

  Artyom’s hand was shaking as he held the thin-gun between my eyes. The small cold barrel pressing into bone. I looked up past the length of the gun and into my brother’s eyes. We were closer together than we’d been since he’d betrayed me to the Suns. His cold breath plumed in the air. I saw the boy who I’d grown up with, who’d walked the midnight streets with me, who’d climbed mountains by my side. The shared memories strung between us like manacles.

  No matter what, I’d said, you’re still my brother. You always will be.

  Artyom swallowed. Tears beaded in his eyes and made furrows down his grimy cheeks as he looked at me. His trigger hand wavered, then fell. ‘I can’t.’ His whisper seemed to fill the room. ‘He’s my brother. I can’t. I can’t do it.’

  Jae nodded in understanding. ‘Very well,’ she said. Her face was expressionless as she fired six bullets into my brother’s chest.

  49

  Brother

  Blood sprayed from Artyom’s chest. His legs gave out under him, his body crumpling to the floor. Gasping for air as he clutched at the gaping holes in his chest, right below his heart. His limbs pawing helplessly at the ground as he tried to right himself. But he couldn’t. His body shuddered.

  ‘No, no, no, no.’ I managed to crawl next to him, holding his hands over the wounds. But there was so much blood leaking out of him from so many places. His breathing turned frantic, more blood bubbling out his mouth and dribbling down his chin. ‘Please, don’t die, Artyom. Stay with me, stay. Please, please stay. Look at me, Artyom! Look at me!’

  He did. His eyes swum in fear, darting back and forth, as if he’d felt himself slipping and was desperately searching for some way to hold on. He shivered in my arms and his hands flopped to his sides. His mouth opened to tell me one final thing, but he made a small gasp and his eyes glazed over. His pulse faded away as his body went limp.

  The boy who’d walk with me through the snowfields on winter mornings, who’d climb to the observatory at night to listen to music and stargaze was gone, along with everything he could have become if I’d be a better brother, spreading across this cold, cold floor and pooling at his killer’s feet.

  A sound of pure anguish tore out of my throat. My body racked with sobs, my vision drowning in tears as I hugged the body of this lost, confused soul. This boy who’d deserved so much better in a world so full of evil and hatred.

  ‘You want to be with your brother? His body will join you in the Blind Room. Traitors have no use here,’ came a demonic little voice from far away.

  A rage-filled hatred like I’ve never known, that I didn’t realise someone was capable of possessing for another human being, screamed inside my chest. With a sobbing snarl, I swung my fist towards Jae. I punched empty air as Jae daintily sidestepped and I collapsed on my face. Hideko swooped down and punched me hard in the side of my head. I struggled upwards, barely feeling the blow, barely feeling anything. The electropole crackled against my flesh, frying something in my body. I feverishly tried to struggle to my feet, pushing against the pain. Hideko landed another three blows against the side of my head as I got to my knees, then smashed her fist into the side of my ribcage so hard something in me ruptured. Blood poured down my face and I gritted my teeth, internally screaming, desperately trying to claw for Jae. My fingers were inches from her before Hideko kicked me in the jaw. My head whiplashed backwards with a sharp snap, thunking against cold metal as I hit the floor.

  The world flashed with sharp, stabbing pain. I watched helplessly as Hideko kicked my brother’s body to make sure he was dead. Her face twisted in mock sorrow, hands pressed to her cheeks, her shoulders shaking as she mimicked my tears with little weeping noises. ‘“Don’t die, Artyom. Please.”’ She cackled with laughter as the world dissolved with tears again. She spat in my face before driving her boot into my testicles. Pain exploded in my abdomen, spraying into every part of me. ‘Worm.’

  She locked her arm tight around my neck, hoisting me upwards while the other hand jerked my hair back until my scalp stung, tilting my head up towards Jae. I was shaking so hard I could barely see. My grief slowly collapsing me. Everything inside my body going numb and dead, swallowed by a writhing dark nightmare I’d never wake up from.

  ‘Are you listening, Vakov? I hope you are,’ Jae said calmly. ‘Your little brother died like a mangy dog. But you don’t understand true pain. You don’t understand what every innocent Harvester felt. But you will. Over the coming decades, we’re going to teach you a lesson in suffering.’ I wasn’t in my own body anymore. I was somewhere far away, watching whatever remained of the person I’d been crumble. Jae started to walk away to the cycling chamber. ‘Hideko, strap this little worm into a restraining harness and dump him in a crate with his brother and seal it. Let them have their time together.’

  Hideko made a face. ‘Artyom’s leaking everywhere. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to touch him.’

  ‘How you do it doesn’t concern me. Just get it done.’

  Grief still smothering all logic and all senses. Even so, something warm and familiar was trickling through. Feeling in my legs, the stormtech massaging the immobilising agent away. Hideko dragged me by my hair away from my brother. A tinkle as she retrieved a restraining harness webbed to the wall. She cursed, reaching around with both hands to tug the buckle free. She leaned down towards me, trying to loop the straps over my shoulders. Energy born of some mad, animal fury burst through me as I surged to my feet, grabbed her by the back of her neck and brought her face smashing down on the terminal, once, twice, three times, the glass splintering and cracking louder with each smash, leaving bloody stains. She reared back, whipping a burning stripe across my back with the straps. I ripped them out of her hands and scythed her legs out from under her, sending us both crashing to the ground. I wrapped the straps around her neck in three overlapping layers, tightening the buckles until the mechanism threatened to break, then jerked back, my teeth clenching.

  Hideko’s eyes bulged, her hands clawing at her neck. Her face slowly turning the colour of a bruise. Her legs thrashing against mine. Body jerking back and forth. I stared at my brother’s corpse and empty, dead eyes. Called on every untapped nugget of strength in my body and pulled so hard I felt my joints straining, my muscles aching. The buckle’s edge clawing bloody furrows in Hideko’s cheek, the leather straps creaking and groaning, slicing into her neck, her arms shuddering like a flopping fish.

  And then they didn’t flop at all.

  I stood. Jae had emerged from the cycling chamber. Her eyes went wide with horror as she surveyed her dead friend before snapping back to me. I bared my teeth, and for the first time I saw something silently ignite in Jae’s eyes. The very thing that she was instilling in so many others.

&nbs
p; Fear.

  She tore for the desk. Maybe looking for a weapon, I didn’t know and I didn’t care. My legs were soggy cardboard under me as I surged after her, but blue lanced down my spine and spread to my limbs. I drew on it, letting my grief and anger burn through me.

  She clawed up a slingshiv, placing her body between me and the Surge machinery. I wobbled left, her stabbing blow shearing harmlessly past me. I smashed my elbow into the side of her head and kicked her flailing to the ground. I tore towards the machinery, clawing something off the table. But I heard her running up behind me and spun sluggishly, the residue of the drug slowing my reaction. I held my arms up in defence as she slashed downwards, slicing open my left arm. The metal edge of the table jarred my spine as I retreated and she swept forward, slashing open my right arm and nicking bone. She reached out to stab me in the face. I caught her arm mid-strike, the slingshiv’s serrated edge inches from my eye. Vision smeared with sweat, muscles creaking, I slammed my elbow into the side of her head. She staggered backwards and I ripped the slingshiv out of her hand, lunging forward.

  She didn’t so much as gasp as I drove the slingshiv hilt-deep into her belly. Our noses were touching. Chests inches apart. Her eyelashes fluttered with confusion, even as I stabbed her four more times, before twisting the blade up towards her sternum. Hot blood spilled out, spattering the floor. Her black eyes watched me from underneath her black hair, the furnace fire in them slowly guttering out. She was a cult leader, The Killer Chemist. But she was also someone who’d lost her home and everyone she knew and loved.

  Heaving, I tore myself away from her. She took one, unhesitant step forward, and crumbled at my feet like a building falling into the sea.

  Blue thrummed down my arms and legs as I scooped up the thin-gun and levelled the muzzle at the device transmitting the Surge, blasting it into a smoking pile of scrap.

  On-screen, skinnies and Reapers stopped, one by one, looking around as if collectively awakening from a deep, deep sleep. They began collapsing in shock and horror at the things they’d done, the things they’d witnessed. The result stats showed the reports of chaos across Compass waning, dots vanishing.

  My shoulders sagged.

  It was done.

  I lurched over to the second device intended to summon the Shenoi so I could shut it down …

  … and felt something. A thud from the infinite depths of a cavern, echoing in the periphery of my senses like a ghostly shadow. Something too vast and terrible to be understood, brushing against me. My skin turned to ice and my muscles contracted, my breathing becoming slow and deep as if something else were breathing with me.

  Slowly, slowly, I looked down. Every drop of stormtech inside my body was being drawn to my torso like magnets. It strained against the front of my body, held there to form one long, uneven shape, pushing out.

  It looked like a claw.

  I reached up to touch the veins in the asteroid rock, once filled with stormtech, now long mined-out. Compass had once been striated and honeycombed with stormtech, turning the asteroid into a Shenoi body. We’d entered through its pores to live among its organs, building structures between the geometries of its bones.

  How many other places across the Common had once been like this?

  I glanced past the viewport. The geometries of space peppered with glistening stars and celestial bodies and untapped worlds of wonder. And crawling and writhing among these worlds were horrific creatures of fury and rage, creatures that had consumed galaxies. Creatures trying to communicate.

  Well, I had an answer for the vicious bastards.

  I picked up the device and brought it crashing down, toppling over the signal booster, then gasped, sinking to my knees as if something had been ripped out of me. Slowly, the stormtech spread back across my body. My breathing returned to normal. I shrugged off the presence like a physical thing.

  Then I remembered Artyom.

  His body was cooler to the touch. I reached out and closed his empty eyes, once so full of fire and life. I’d brought down a cult, stopped a massacre and killed a tyrant. But I couldn’t do the one thing that mattered. I’d been unable to save my brother.

  Tears smeared my vision as I held his hand and remembered our last moments before I’d departed New Vladi. Come back for me, he’d said as we’d hugged one last time, the snow blowing and whiplashing around us. He’d wrapped his arms tight around me, as if he could stop me from leaving.

  I will, I remember saying, biting back tears. I swear I will. Dark wind howled across the mountains as we pulled apart. I remembered walking to the waiting chainship and not daring to turn around, because I knew I’d stay if I did.

  Would Artyom have left me, if I’d been the one whose body was incompatible with stormtech? Or would he have been braver than me, and stayed? I would never know. All his love, all his dreams and all his mistakes, all his scars and wounds, everything we’d gone through together, was ash and blood lost in the wind.

  I blinked. Sat up a little straighter.

  No, no. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t. The results had been absolute: Artyom Fukasawa’s body was incompatible with stormtech.

  But what about Jae’s altered and improved stormtech?

  I was at the desk before I could think it through. They’d packed everything up when they left. There was nothing here. But I couldn’t give up. I could almost feel my stormtech guiding me around the bench and between the crevices of the metal grating where a single jar of stormtech had fallen.

  I picked it up. How much do you give someone with a hole in their chest? It was crazy to even think it could work. But me and common sense haven’t been friends for a long time. I found a hypodermic in an emergency med-pack and filled it with stormtech before kneeling over my brother’s body. My hands were shaking. I breathed deep and thought of snow drifting along the New Vladi mountains. The crisp air filling my lungs on the predawn streets. Lending me control.

  I injected the stormtech into my dead brother’s veins.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  I sagged on the floor, warmed by my own blood.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  My little brother was dead.

  I closed my eyes. Swallowed my tears as I slid my hand over his one last time.

  A twitch. A muscle memory.

  Artyom’s body jerked like it’d been electrocuted, his spine arching as his legs thrashed.

  The stormtech was trying to jumpstart my brother back to life.

  Artyom slammed down again, gasping and spluttering, his eyes bursting open as he clawed for air. I ripped his underskin open and saw the faintest sliver of blue curling under his chest, followed by more and more, like patches of bright-blue sky opening up as clouds evaporated, until a steady blue stream was cycling through his body. His eyes were wild and confused, entering a seizure. Cold sweat ran down his body as I wrapped my arms around him, rocking him back and forth. ‘It’s okay,’ I whispered through the tears, rubbing warmth back into his body. ‘You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay. I’m here. I’m here.’

  I don’t know how much time had passed before he managed to croak out, ‘How?’ he rasped.

  ‘Jae’s little concoction,’ I said.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he gurgled, wiping snot from his nose. ‘This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I lied, my throat tight as I held him closer. ‘You’re going to be okay. I’m here. I’m never leaving you again.’ As I drew him close I felt something beneath his underskin. I drew it out and held his pendant in my palm. The other half of what he’d given to me on the mountains all those years ago. ‘You kept it on all this time?’

  Artyom nodded. Something deep in his chest cracked and shattered like a pane of glass, his face dissolving in tears as he broke. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Vak. For what I said to you. For how I treated you
. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I’m—’ He was shaking and sobbing so hard he couldn’t get the words out. He buried his face in my chest, all his sorrow and lies and regret gushing free. Tears trickled down my cheeks as I closed my eyes and crushed him in a hug. Holding him like I had when we’d learned Kasia had died and we only had each other.

  Harmony would not let him escape without repercussion. He’d be arrested and tried as a member of the House of Suns, an active participant in their atrocities. I could let him escape. There was an escape pod outfitted with a warpdrive we could leave in together. Never return to Compass.

  But we couldn’t run from this. I loved Artyom more than anything, but he would have to face the consequences of his actions. As would I. I was not going to run anymore. And neither would he. Because loving someone means you do what’s best for them, even when it hurts, even when it scars.

  Because that’s what being his brother meant.

  50

  Sleeping at Last

  No matter how many funerals you attend, no matter how many times you swear it’ll be the last, you know it never will be.

  We gathered together in the dimly lit hangar bay. My body was still recovering from the bombardment of damage it had sustained, aches and pains rippling through my flesh like occasional speedbumps. Saren, Jasken and Katherine stood close by to stare down at the bodies of Kuen, Arya, and the other men and women who’d given their lives to protect others. We’d laid them down in their armour with their dog tags. Just like in the war. We bared silent witness as their bodies were encased in gel-padding and sealed up in little memorial pods, each of us carving our initials into the gunmetal hull. Didn’t matter that I’d barely known them. We’d fought together in battle, saved each other’s lives. Alcatraz taught me that’s a bond, a debt that transcends all other debts. One that can’t, and shouldn’t, ever be repaid.

  Reapers crossed their arms over their chests in silent respect. I found myself doing the same. We stood watching as the pods were launched into the dark of space to be slowly swallowed up by the bright constellations of stars. For ever a part of the universe they’d given everything they had to protect. Gone, but never forgotten.