Somewhere in the reflections of the floor and her own eyes , in the words etched into the polished stone, in her swirling memories and the visions Crimson had gifted her with, she saw another face. Warm, subtly golden skin in arresting contrast with jet-black hair. Sharp, vivacious eyes nestled below smoothly creaseless eyelids, fixed intently on Isavel. Just like that first time.
“Ada.”
Ada was wearing something red wrapped around her body. For a moment Isavel’s mind twitched to wondering why and what she was seeing, but she let herself see. It felt real. Why was Ada wearing red, though? It might be some light’s reflection from the floor. Isavel reached out and put her hand against the cold, polished stone, and in her reflection Ada did the same, matching her look for look, hand to hand. Her eyes drifted down from Isavel’s eyes to her lips, then back up to her eyes again.
There was so little left in this world that seemed real, but here Ada was. She was real, more real than any stories about gods. Isavel felt that welling in her core, that warmth, that flitting lightness that had nothing to do with the dragon and everything to do with a primal urge to jump and leap and grasp and squeeze.
She rested her head against Ada’s, against stone not as cold as it should be.
Ada had left her physically, but would not leave her heart. And that heart kept reaching for something missing, and floundered and grasped what it could.
Blood, blood all over her hands. Coughing. Stasis, injuries frozen in time.
Hail was Isavel’s best friend, but she was not Ada. Hail would never be what Ada was, the irreverent, dangerous, fiery creature who softly melted and cooed in Isavel’s arms. To play into Hail’s own expectations or desires under that pretense, to leave everything unspoken and uncertain, was painful. It hurt Isavel, silently and in ways she wanted to ignore. It would hurt Hail more, one day soon if it had not already.
If Hail didn’t die first.
If she died, this would be so much simpler - Isavel wouldn’t have to tell her anything. And that sentiment was repulsive, and Isavel winced and shook her head. Hail was her closest remaining friend. Ada looked back at her in concern, and nodded.
Ada understood she had to do this.
Something loomed behind Ada, some amorphous and sinister silhouette, and Isavel’s eyes widened as she pulled her head away to stare up at it. Ada’s eyes seemed to follow her in surprise, then grew wide as she spun around.
Isavel jolted backwards. It was… as though, for a moment, Ada’s reflection had gained a life of its own. But now she was staring at herself again.
She spun around, but there was nothing behind her, no dark shape and no silhouette. Perhaps she was tired, or going mad, but she felt strangely soothed and… not alone . Perhaps she was imagining things. Perhaps not.
She took a deep breath, feeling her nerves calm. Ada would understand what she had to do. That much was obvious, but now that same knowledge now felt less bitter and more… reassuring. She walked away from the reflection with one last glance, down towards the end of the hall that would open onto the wilds of Mars. Crimson seemed to anticipate it, and no longer pretended to keep Isavel here; if this girl without the technopage couldn’t help, maybe there was nothing to gain by protecting her from Azure. The door began creaking open for her.
Her fingers gripped the locator stone tight as she watched the warm light spill in. Ada would understand what she had to do now. Nobody else would, but one was enough. She held up the white strip of cloth back over her neck, letting the stone hang against her chest again.
She stood on the threshold for a moment, looking out at the pillar of dust and smoke where Red Rise had fallen, at the distant peppering of the face of Olympus with refugees and red-flagged barges flying alongside them towards some unknown salvation. The world was eerily quiet. She didn’t see a single flash of blue.
For a moment, she wavered. This was madness. But she found that kernel of frustration and urgency and bounded forward with it, running straight down the mountain. She had time, but she wasn’t trying to be fast - she was trying to burn through what she was going to do, to chase the certainty, to run from what might happen if she failed. To leave behind every part of her that craved direction and assurance, so she could stand in the wasteland and begin to build. Hail did not deserve to die, and she did not deserve to be mislead. Everything had to be fixed. Her chest pounded frantically, urging her on. She had to fix this, all of this.
The door groaning shut behind her, the open skies of Mars spread out in front of her like endless possibility, she ran, bounding down Olympus towards the vast cliffs that overlooked the plains below. She knew them, now, with Crimson’s own familiarity. She knew the world, and though her knowledge of it might yet fade like all such vastly detailed knowledge must with time, for now that knowledge of the land and the skies was fresh, and her wings would feast.
She reached the edge of the cliff and jumped, and the dragoness in her roared.
Until now, she had not truly tested Mars’ feeble pull. Spreading glimmering wings of red blades, mustering all that dragon’s unnatural lightness, vaulting into the sky from a cliff that dominated the horizon from klicks and klicks away, she soared.
The wind quickly blinded her, and she closed her eyes and focused, forcing a warrior’s shield like a visor in front of her face to cut the wind. Then she opened them again, and through the white glow she saw Mars laid out before her, grasses and lone trees fluttering past at speed beyond perception far below her. Familiar hills rose and fell in the quickly shrinking distance. She didn’t retrace their steps - she knew, through Crimson’s memories, where she was headed. It was almost the same path from the northeast that Azure’s punitive fleet must have taken on its way here.
She changed the colour of her wings to match the slowly bluing olive sky, but it was hard to hide the sight of someone practically flying through the air, and that thought tickled at her brain a little. Flying. Or at least gliding so flat, from such a high jumping point, that she couldn’t rightly guess when Mars would properly pull her down. So far up, without any supports or anchors, she felt dizzyingly free.
And this was the power of the dragon , none other. The one blood she had not been gifted by dumb luck. The one she had taken for herself, in the splattered snows of a doomed mountain peak. None of them were truly gifts, she realized, but this was the least gifted of all.
She wove hunter and dragon into the same muscles and burst dragonfire from her palms, shoving herself forward and upward through the sky. It could exhaust her in the long haul, but even simply maintaining her wings and her lightness would be enough to carry her far, far indeed.
She looked across the surface and recognized the mountains, the ruins, the villages. Underneath the skin of Mars was a history forgotten but not yet gone. Ancient tunnels and bunkers hid just under the surface, some built to hide martians from ancient invasions, some for watching the world above - and some, the oldest of them all, had once been the only places martians could live without the wasteland killing them.
As she coasted, she quickly understood she wasn’t going to reach her destination in a single absurd leap, or indeed before nightfall at all. Her slow descent might bring her a long way, especially if she boosted herself up, but one way or another she would have to rest before continuing. So be it. Herds of galhak and other animals coursed through the fields below, and she wondered whether they might have deigned to carry a stranger, if she had ever learned to ride.
When she knew she wouldn’t get much farther, she let her wings fade and landed softly in the red soil. When her hands touched it, she paused, and knelt down for a moment, pressing her forehead against the ground and smelling, digging her fingers into it and pulling up a fistful of the dirt. Rich, moist, full of little roots and crawling with life. She smiled, knowing that fifteen hundred years ago everything had been empty and hateful, and that humanity had looked upon the desolation and said no .
The thought filled her with a strange, iron pride she knew
she would need tomorrow. She hiked her way up the gently sloping hills as evening began to creep across the sky, stopping to chew on especially fleshy leaves or unusually plump insects as she went. Her ancestors had done so much. She could certainly do the smaller, simpler things that lay before her.
As night fell and she hiked on, looking for another height to jump from, her senses cast out to the growing dark around her. She was alone, aside from the scurrying of small animals and the rustling of plants in the wind. It was growing colder, but the cold didn’t bother her, and she didn’t pull her clothes in closer around her arms. Her father claimed to have once travelled so far north he saw plains covered in snow and ice for all but three moons of the year; Mars, and whatever mild season it was throwing at her now, did not frighten her.
She thought of her father and her mother as she trekked east across the highlands. She thought of what Crimson had said - that they had died for nothing. In a terrible way, it was the explanation that made the most sense. She tried to remember them as she looked for shelter for the night, but found their faces were indistinct in her mind. If she focused she could imagine what they looked like, but the memories were no longer certain. Like language, they faded with time.
It hadn’t even been that long.
After what felt like hours she found a knotted tree in the open, and climbed it to a thick tangle of branches were she thought she might sleep. She had yet to see any large predators on Mars that didn’t fly, but she was not in a mood to test that theory yet.
She looked up at the stars, at the great celestial path of stardust that crossed the darkest skies here as much as it did on Earth. The world was vast, but left alone, there were remarkably few things she felt bound to. Just three, really. She fell asleep, mulling the three things she knew she had to do, gods be damned.
She rose before the sun, unharmed, and made for the northeastern horizon.
Before long she found a massive boulder half-buried in the martian scrubland, climbed to the top, and jumped again with a fiery push out over the red. As her wings carried her up into the winds, the world rolling effortlessly past below her, she saw black pockmarks and scorches at the intersections of rivers and long-trodden trails. Azure’s bloodlust, it seemed, had cut an ashen path straight from the City Azure itself all the way to Red Rise.
All because Amber was hiding her from his gaze. All because they had seen in her Ada’s work, and thought it had mattered. All because it hadn’t.
The land became more and more rugged, and she began to recognize formations from her own memory as well as from Crimson’s. She landed on a mountain ridge, scrounging for food that didn’t have a face mammalian enough to evoke pity, and once she had sated that hunger she clambered high up and looked out towards the horizon.
Something caught her eye in a basin cradled by the mountains, something her intuition told her was just what she was looking for in the distance. Though she wished it were, it was not just the dragoness she caught smiling as she dropped into a glide from the mountainous ridge.
Chapter 15
The wind rushed past her face. The three vows she was kneading in her mind kept her from brooding over what was to come, and the locator stone warded away her fears. She closed the distance in a long glide, letting herself fall slowly, landing with a thud in the very same dusty square where she had first set foot on Mars. The sun was directly above her, her own shadow cowering by her feet.
She heard shouting and scrabbling, and this time she understood it.
“Who approaches?” An angry male voice. “The fargate is protected by Azure! You -”
She turned and met eyes with the man in blue-woven armour; recognition shot through his eyes and hunterfire through his heart. Dragonfire filled the square again, hexagonal shots striking down any Azurites who exposed their positions, her blade or claws lashing out if any god too close. She advanced on the alleys, and did not stop to look at what she was leaving in her wake. What gods would judge her lack of mercy? What did their judgement matter?
She rounded a corner, white sword snapping out for two martians who lunged too close, and suddenly the rest decided to flee. When she had nobody else to keep alive, it was so much easier to throw herself at the enemy. She leapt through the air and grabbed one by the scruff of the neck, hissing in her ear.
“If you don’t want to die, show me your earthlings.”
The woman gaped at her. “We will not allow you demons -”
“Take me to them.” She shoved the Azurite woman forward and shouted at the ruins. “The rest of you, run back to your god while he still lives.”
“We - we only have one left. The one with the healing hands.”
The medic, and the bodies… but of course. Isavel felt an uncomfortable chill when she realized what must have been done with Ren and Lorra, and she fought it off by shoving the martian forward. “Whatever. Go!”
The martian scrambled ahead, wisely leaving her weapons at her hips, and Isavel followed, palms at the ready. One of the few buildings that seemed in use was surrounded with boxes and supplies; an orange light flickered within. The soldier glanced at her. “In there. We - when your scouts come through -”
“We’re not scouts, you idiot. This isn’t an invasion.” If only it was. Isavel grabbed the woman’s bronze sword from her belt, yanking it off her with a tug that almost threw the martian over and throwing the sheath aside. “I’ll take this. Get out of here.”
After a blinkering moment the pallid woman turned and ran east. Somewhere out there, Isavel knew the City Azure cowered in the shadow of its god. The soldier might be desperate enough to make the trip on foot, but none of them proved desperate enough to attack Isavel one last time before fleeing - not after the chaos she had left behind her. Maybe they could learn.
She turned towards the house where the medic was being kept, and took a deep breath. She doubted he would be happy to see her - but Ada would understand. Isavel stepped into the ruin, saw him, and immediately the man took a sharp intake of breath. “You.”
She looked over at him, firelight dancing across her skin as she let all her gifted weapons and armors fade. She hoped she hadn’t forgotten his name. “Tellac.”
He ignored the name as though he had expected it; in that, at least, she was right. “You got Lorra killed for nothing . They don’t murder everyone who comes through - they usually keep us around. If you had just listened -”
Tellac was bound to a wall with one hand. He was a medic, so he probably wasn’t much of a threat, but perhaps martians didn’t understand that. She shook her head, taking a step forward. “We were being shot at, on an alien planet. What do you expect?”
He spat on the sandy floor. “Too much, apparently. Lorra tried to tell you. Hope you’re enjoying this shithole of a world.”
She let her lip twitch, and straightened her shoulders. “My best friend is almost dead. She needs a medic. You’re the only one around.”
He raised an eyebrow, deliberately crossing his arms. “If you didn’t drag her in here with you, I assume she’s too far for me to get to in time. Too bad. Fuck off and cry somewhere else.”
He sneered at her, and Isavel winced. She had known this would happen, but still. She crouched down in front of him and stared him in the eye, and felt the anger and danger of her blood swelling through her muscles. “She has time. And you’re a medic! You have the power to help people - why wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t feel like it? What, are you a slave to your gifts? What the hell are you, even?”
She felt stung - he was right, of course. There was no word for what she was, but she wasn’t made to do anything at all. It was not an easy thing to accept, but it was true. She was too many things to have a clear path, wasn’t she?
Or was that just something she told herself, to make the base decisions easier? After all, here she had come, weapon that she was, and she had killed her way in. All for the sake of a tool she wanted to use, not a human being she cared for.
; She shook her head. “I need to heal my friend, one way or another. What can I do to convince you? I’ll cut you loose. I’ll -”
“Oh, so you’ll help me not die, but only if I help you? So this is a death threat. You can fuck off.”
She cast her eyes down to the bronze martian blade she had taken, twisting its hilt in her right hand and gently resting the blade in her left. Fear suddenly began to simmer in at the edges of her mind - she didn’t know how to do this. She didn’t know what to say.
Hail might have known. I’ve done bad things, and I’m not afraid to do them again. Isavel didn’t know the full extent of Hail’s violent past, but she might have known how to make someone talk, spill the location of some secret cache or relic. I don’t want this any more than you do, but you’re giving me no choice. If you don’t help me, I can make your life hell.
She sighed. “Let’s not make this difficult, Tellac.”
He eyed the blade. “What, are you going to torture me?”
She looked him in the eye, tapping the flat of the sword against her palm. “I’ll kill you. Eventually.”
“Go ahead.”
She tightened her hand around the hilt, knuckles growing pale. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Nobody’s making you. And the martians weren’t exactly promising me a bright future. If I can take your stupid friend down with me -”
She stood up and held the metal against his neck.
Ada wouldn’t have cared. Fuck this - I’m not going to stand around listening to this guy complain. He might have complied just at the sight of how easily she decided to end his life. Or with a run or a whip of code, she might have done irreparable damage before even considering what she was doing. So what if he’s dead? Crimson said she doesn’t have the equipment - that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Let’s go. This body stinks.
She needed to scare him, to terrify him. If he wasn’t going to cooperate… “I’ll start with your feet. Then your hands.”
“I need my hands to heal, you dimwitted bruiser. Do you have a clue what you’re going? You need me, you’re not going to kill me.”
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 25