Goddess in the Machine

by Lora Beth Johnson

  After several woefulish wrong guesses, Zhade took pity on her and began to lead her in the direction of the Yard. It was where all executions took place. Including his mother’s.

  It was also, not by accident, the same place the goddesses were held agrave.

  The angels and servants ignored them as they wended through the palace. The diplomats stared. It probablish had to do with the bloodstains on the Goddess’s shirt, but also, Zhade’s new uniform was brill.

  He wasn’t for certz why Maret had made him a guard. Like the Goddess had said, it would have made more sense for Maret to have killed his half-brother long ago, and now, he was not mereish not killing him, but he was trusting Zhade to protect him. Maret had a thing in his sleeve.

  But Zhade had several.

  He took the Goddess down to the base floor on the westhand side of the palace. A small, unassuming door was tucked beneath a stair. This was mereish a side entry to the Yard, but Zhade certz as sand wasn’t going to take her through the main entrance.

  “Are you certz you want to do this?” Zhade asked, recking the answer.

  She glared.

  He shrugged. “It’s your fate to decide.”

  The First had been too powerful—a leader, rather than the servant the people wanted in a goddess. The Second had quiet ire and uncontained passion. Neither had decided their own fates. If any of the Goddesses could be what the people wanted, what Maret wanted, it would be the Third. It had to be.

  He opened the door, revealing the Yard beyond.

  The side entrance opened to an alcove behind the alters; so firstish, they didn’t see anything, mereish heard the murmur of the crowd. Fraughts. Zhade hadn’t been expecting an audience. It was one thing for the Goddess to confront Maret with a handful of guards present. It was full another for her to do it with citians there. This was suddenish full bad magic.

  The people had already started praying, and Zhade felt the stardust circling round them. It reminded him of cathedzal with his mam when the dust would swarm thick enough to see. Evens. Maret had turned this into a religiful ceremony. Zhade should have been expecting this. A religiful execution prepped Maret’s intro of the Goddess tonight. Zhade would have to imagine this through at care. If he couldn’t convince the Goddess to give up trying to save her maids, maybe he could skool her the right words to say to prevent her from joining them.

  The Goddess took a deep breath and let it out. That was the mereish warning Zhade got before she marched out of the alcove. She stopped short when she saw the graves.

  On the other side of the wall were three daises, one for each Goddess. The First’s was decorated with Coils, the Second’s with Crystals, and the Third’s with Celestias. The graves of the First and Second still stood on their platforms, shining in the moren light. There was a darkened outline in the stone where the Third’s grave had sat before she disappeared.

  Zhade put a steadying hand on the Goddess’s back. She was breathing too quickish.

  The crowd beyond were faced away, packed shoulder-to-shoulder, dressed in Rock uniforms and the bright fabrics of Southwarden and the fraying threads of the Hive. Maret must have wanted as many people present as possible. But without the Goddess as witness, what charges was he executing the maids on? Or did it meteor? Maret didn’t even have to play benevolent ruler with the Silver Crown on his head. Fear ruled.

  Without the crowd, the Yard was full charred, a perf place for honoring the goddesses. The outer walls of the Rock hid behind ivy and crawl-plants. The floor was tiled in mosaics, and rare flowers sprouted from every corner. The garden fitted itself round the Yard’s centerpiece—a three-tiered fountain featuring a mythic swan. It had been his mam’s favorite.

  This should have been a place of peace, but Maret used it for displays of power. In front of the crowd was a metal platform. On it, the three maids stood, hands bound behind their backs. They were surrounded by angels ready to follow the command of the Silver Crown.

  A sandstorm of memories swept over Zhade, and he tensed. He couldn’t let them blow him over soon and now. He had to stay focused on the full alive Goddess afront of him. He had to make certz she stayed that way.

  Maret stood to the side, his face flushed and grim. It was the same expression he’d had when he’d ordered Zhade’s mother’s execution. It almost looked like he didn’t want to do it. As though this were all for the good of the people, a necessary burden he would bear.

  The maids were still in their white servant uniforms, their faces streaked with dirt. Zhade bet they had spent the night in the cells below the Rock. When his mother had been executed, they had done it quickish. They’d dragged her straight to the Yard, angry mobs of people already pressing at the gates, prepped to watch her final moments. She’d recked it was coming and had taken the time to braid her hair. It was an odd detail to have memory, but Zhade held on to it like it was the answer to every question he’d ever had.

  The youngest maid was crying. She was mereish a few years younger than Zhade. Her fam was probablish from the Hive and sent her to the Rock to earn a few extra Silver Seconds. The others were more stoic. Nearish resigned. The oldest was trying to chant along with the people, her chapped lips bareish forming the words.

  “What are they saying?” the Goddess asked, breathless.

  It wasn’t a prayer Zhade had heard before. He hadn’t memorized . . . any of them, but he could have easyish translated a standard prayer into High Goddess. Instead, he had to strain to listen, to make sense. He’d grown too used to Wastern dialects. It had been time and a half since he’d spoken Eerensedian.

  “These are punished . . . neg, to be punished. The goddesses will it. Sunk into stardust. The goddesses demand it. Sunk into sand. Just like the sacrifices—”

  He cut himself off, not wanting to translate the rest.

  The Goddess frowned. “That’s . . . really creepy. Why are they chanting?”

  Zhade had memory of his mam first explaining the chants to him. That was when he stopped saying them. “It’s a ritual. They believe when they get enough people saying the same thing, imagining the same thing, they can control the stardust.”

  “The stardust?” The Goddess held her voice low, following Zhade’s example.

  “It’s . . . a bit the essence of things? It surrounds us and responds to High Magic—like yours or the Guv’s. Most sorcers use Low Magic. We need a conduit. But High Magic bypasses that and works through the stardust.”

  It wasn’t odd that she was asking—the first two goddesses had different names for everything too. It was odd that except for saving herself from the grafter, she’d done no magic at all.

  The chanting got louder, covering whatever the Goddess said next. Zhade tensed, prepped to stop her if she made a move toward the Guv. She should see this, maybe even fight Maret bout it. But later, without an audience. When Maret felt in control.

  The air above them thickened. Zhade had always imagined stardust had a cloud-like quality, but now that he’d been adesert, he recked it looked more like a sandstorm. The dust glittered, and as the people looked up in awe, they chanted louder.

  Three angels stepped forward, one for each of the maids. They were bright white, polished for the occasion. Zhade imagined he could see magic sparking the coils in their skulls, though they were too far away to see crystal. They stood behind the maids, holding them aplace. Maret controlled them, standing tall, arms outstretched. It was mereish flash, not full necessity. High Magic was done with will, not movement. But Maret was always trying to prove his power, rather than mereish use it.

  “What are they doing?” the Goddess whispered, her face close to his, her breath warm. She hummed with energy.

  “You’ll see.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Then, “No. I won’t.”

  She darted forward before he could grab her.

  “Wait!” she screamed over the chantin
g voices, and firstish no one heard her. “Stop!”

  It was too much to ask that she would mereish be ignored and give up. She pushed through the crowd, yelling for them to stop. Zhade tried to follow, but though he was thinner than her, he was taller and broader, and the people were too tightish packed. He edged along the side of the Yard, hoping to cut her off.

  He recked better than to hope. Fishes and wishes.

  She made it to the edge of the platform, knocking into a plant pot, spilling its contents on the ground.

  “Stop!” she screamed, and Maret’s eyes met hers.

  He held his expression surprisingish blank as he willed the stardust to coalesce into three ghostish spears, suspended and sparkling in the moren light. He paused mereish a second. Then plunged the spikes into the maids’ chests.

  The crowd silenced. There were no cheers at an execution.

  Nausea roiled Zhade’s stomach. He steadied himself against the ivy-covered Rock wall but couldn’t block the memories.

  Zhade’s mam on her knees.

  A spray of blood.

  Her blank stare as she toppled forward.

  She hadn’t seen him in the crowd. Her last words to him had been the turn before. Find the Third, protect her, don’t let Maret have the crown. It was sole later that Zhade realized his mam had been talking bout the strange Silver Crown, not the gold one his father had worn.

  She would be so disappointed. The Crown on Maret’s head, and the Third marching forward into disaster.

  The silence was broken by the Goddess’s scream. Zhade shook himself and pushed ahead. Her scream cut short, her eyes fixated on the dead maids.

  An excited hum rose through the crowd. Zhade heard the words Third and Goddess amid the murmurs, and recked it was too late to move anywhere but forward. It seemed Maret had come to the same conclusion, as he reached the Goddess before Zhade and pulled her onto the platform. It groaned beneath them. She stumbled, but Maret’s grip held her upright.

  “People of Eerensed, our Goddess has returned!” he shouted in what was bareish a passable imitation of excitement.

  The crowd roared. This is what they’d been waiting for. The Third Goddess. Their last hope. The other two had failed them, but for certz this one would not. Maret pulled her closer. She cringed at the contact, but her body was moving as if by rote. It wouldn’t be long before the shock and politeness were blunted, and Zhade needed to be there before she did something stupid that decided both their fates. He rushed forward, at care not to sprint and pose a threat. But his guard’s uniform let him be both ignored and feared, and no one stopped him as he mounted the platform and stepped behind the Goddess.

  “Whatever you do,” Zhade whispered in her ear, “do not confront him here.”

  He expected a fight, but she mereish nodded. He felt her shallow breaths, saw her hands shake. Maret met his eyes over her shoulder, and his expression was carefulish blank. He was getting better at hiding his emotions.

  The crowd’s cheers didn’t wane, mereish got louder and stronger, til the full mob was in sync, crying the same word over and over.

  “Goddess! Goddess! Goddess!” The stardust swirled round her.

  She was grubby and dirty from days adesert. Blood soaked her clothes and even congealed in her tangled dark hair. At her feet were three corpses. This was not the intro Zhade had hoped for. But the people cheered on.

  THIRTEEN

  mask, n.

  Etymology: perhaps from Latin masca: evil spirit.

  Definition:

  anything disguising or concealing the face.

  a pretense; a masquerade; subterfuge.

  colloq.: when preceded by an apostrophe, refers to a bionic facial covering that allows the wearer to enhance or change facial features; short for cosmetic mask, or cos’mask.

  Andra numbly followed Maret through the halls of the Rock, his midnight robes swishing against the marble floors. Zhade’s grip on her arm was tight—not so tight as to hurt, but enough to warn her she was in dangerous territory.

  As if she needed the reminder.

  She’d just seen three people killed in front of her. Because of her. She’d never seen anyone die before, but even more disturbing was the manner of their deaths.

  They’d been murdered by nano’bots.

  That should have been impossible. In Andra’s time, there were overrides that prevented nanos from acting on commands that caused humans harm, barred ’bots from using dangerous objects, required special ’implant software for weapon use. There were accidents of course—technology was never perfect; there was always human error. However, they were few and far between, and there had never been an account of intentional harm.

  But as Andra had observed, the tech around her had been updated countless times in the past thousand years until it had morphed into something else. Something not quite right.

  The Guv had used his crown to command the nanos to kill.

  The maid’s faces were permanently etched in Andra’s brain—the way the oldest welcomed the blow, the grimace of the one Andra’s mother’s age, and the surprise on the youngest’s face as she died. There’d been a moment Andra felt something rise inside her, and she thought maybe, just maybe, she could turn the coalesced nanos to healing tech and bring the women back. But it was a ridiculous thought. Even if her ’implant had been compatible with the nanos, she couldn’t reverse death.

  So Andra had watched them die, watched the spears disperse back into an invisible force in the air, watched Maret use her presence to unite the people, watched the hungry expressions in the crowd.

  Behind the horror, she was starting to piece together bits of how this society functioned. They no longer understood the tech left over from the original colonists, so they’d created a religion around it—around the nanos they called stardust, and the ’bots that seemed all-powerful and immortal, and the three colonists who had slept unchanging in glass coffins. And it was more than just Andra’s and her predecessors’ perceived immortality that gave them god status. Zhade had said the others could do magic with no more than a thought, which meant they were cognitively interfacing with the nanos rather than manually coding the ’bots. They could use the nanos to perform what the people would see as miracles. So why couldn’t Andra? What was different about the first two goddesses that made them able to use their ’implants while Andra couldn’t?

  She shook off the thought. She could worry about that later, but right now, she had to focus on how to keep the Guv from killing her like he’d just killed her maids.

  “Goddess,” Zhade muttered under his breath. A warning.

  They were at the far end of a long mirror-lined hall. One wall was entirely made of windows, and the late-morning sun shone in, bouncing off the reflective surfaces. Ahead of them was a door painted a violent shade of red. Dark tapestries lined either side, and Kiv took his post next to it, eyes straight ahead, spear held tightly in his fist.

  “Welcome to my suite, Goddess,” Maret said, and she felt anything but welcomed.

  If she had been in her right mind, she would have run, but she was too shaken by the maids’ executions to think straight. And besides, it was probably best to do as the Guv said, or she would be next.

  He pressed his finger to a small pad by the door and winced. The space he’d touched glowed red, then green, and the door slid open. A crude DNA scan, but something these people probably saw as blood magic.

  He entered the room, and Andra followed.

  “It’s peaches, Kiv,” she heard Zhade say behind her.

  The room beyond was a cave. The walls were a black marble, streaked with red. The furniture was overlarge and brutish. A dozen upholstered chairs were situated around the room, all facing a single velvet couch the same color as the blood-red veins in the marble. Maret gestured for Andra to have a seat. Zhade sat beside her,
and Maret took the couch.

  “Would you like something to drink, Goddess?” a voice said, and it was only then that Andra realized Tsurina was in the room. Her dress was a royal blue and it matched her long, pointed nails. She was pouring a dark liquid into a cup, steam rising from the rim.

  “No, thank you,” Andra croaked, her heart hammering.

  “I’ll take some of that,” Zhade said.

  Tsurina ignored him and handed the cup to her son.

  Zhade leaned closer to Andra. “She probablish would have poisoned it anyway.”

  Tsurina’s eyes cut to him. “Probablish.”

  Maret took a sip, looking over the rim at Andra. “I was surprised to see you at the ritual today, Goddess.”

  “The ritual?” she asked, her voice flat. “That was murder.”

  She heard Zhade suck in a breath, but he made no move to stop her.

  Maret groaned. “They were executed.” He set down his cup, eyes flicking to Tsurina.

  “No,” Andra said through gritted teeth. The passive voice set her on edge. They were executed. As though it had been an accident, or their own fault. “You killed them.”

  Tsurina made a noise in the back of her throat and sat in a nearby chair. Her posture was stiff, a sad smile tacked to her face. Maret abandoned his cup of tea, moving to an ornate liquor cabinet Andra noticed was out of the advisor’s line of sight. It also brought him closer to a plasma’dagger. A few laser’guns were mounted on the walls, and Andra didn’t understand why guards carried swords and spears when they had technology like that. Unless, of course, they didn’t have ’implants. But Maret had a crown, so it would only take a thought to bring the ’gun online or the ’dagger crackling to life.