A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “Of course I can!” Jane roared the words; both of them were stunned into silence for a moment by the vehemence behind them. “Of course I can,” Jane repeated, softer this time. “You think I don’t know, Preacher? You think I can’t see how the lives she’s taken haunt her? How every single one haunts her? No, Preacher. I can see. You’re right—she’s not like me. She gets that there’s a cost; a cost paid not just by those she puts down, but one that comes from inside her as well. It took me way too long to realize the same thing. But ignoring that cost—doing the hard thing anyway, and making sure that you’re the one that pays, not someone else—that’s the right thing to do. That’s what I’m teaching her.”

  “And ruining her, in the process. Why isn’t she worthy of your protection, Jane? Why isn’t she—”

  “Because she’s capable of protecting others, Preacher. Because she’s stronger than me. Because she can bear that cost, better than I can. In the long run.”

  “So she eats your sins. That’s how it is.”

  “There’s no life without sin, Preacher; that’s how it is. Finding a way to deal with what that means—learning how to stomach the . . . wrong living sometimes requires—that’s part of what staying alive means, in this galaxy, in what it is now. And that’s how you learn it—by putting on a brave face, wearing that mask until it’s not a mask anymore. You learn it by pretending it doesn’t bother you until . . . until it just doesn’t anymore. At least not as much.” Jane sighed, more exhaustion, more weariness, in that simple noise than in any of her shouted words.

  “You remember you’re talking about murder, right?” There was spite in the Preacher’s words, but also kindness, too. Or at least grief.

  “I’m talking about survival, Preacher. There’s a difference.”

  “But can you still tell where that line is drawn? Have you ever actually known? And now you’re teaching her to erase it, just like you learned to do. Just like your sect taught you. The sins of the mother only stop being passed down when the mother puts a stop to it, Jane. It’s not the child’s duty. It’s not her weight to carry.”

  “Neither is your redemption, Preacher. We’re neither one of us her mother. And who’s fucking fault is that?”

  For a moment, I was entirely sure the next thing we’d hear would be the Preacher throwing Jane through a wall. I think it came damn close. Then the moment passed, and the next after that.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said quietly, finally, a real apology in her voice. “You didn’t deserve that. But you don’t get to make decisions for her, not any more than I do. All we can do is try to keep her safe. She’s the one who gets to decide what that means. It’s her life. Not ours.”

  “And if you have to sacrifice a part of her, in doing so?”

  “She’s paying the cost, Preacher. Like you said. If she thinks it’s too high, she’ll stop paying it. It’s that simple. And it’s her choice. I’m gonna walk away now. We’ve already said more than we should; things we both will likely end up regretting. For what it’s worth—again—I’m sorry.”

  We heard the sound of a door shutting, and then that was that.

  Sho and I stepped out of the maintenance area; I sat on one of the hard cots the servants here had slept on, undecayed by the simple fact that it had never been made of soft enough material that it was at risk of decay in the first place. I didn’t say anything for a while.

  “I’m sorry I suggested we listen to that,” Sho said finally. I looked at him and shook my head, brushed tears away from my face.

  “They’re wrong,” I said, as much to myself as I said it to him. “Helping people, doing what Jane and I do—it’s not turning me into a monster.”

  “I don’t think you’re a monster,” Sho told me, wheeling closer so he could take my hand in his paw. “I could never think that. You saved me, Esa. And I know . . . I know you would have saved my mother, too. If you could have.”

  “But I couldn’t. And Sho—I didn’t even try.”

  “You did what good you could, with what options you had available. That’s all anyone can ask. Your Sanctum—no matter what the Preacher says, how good it’s supposed to be—they wouldn’t have let my mother in, would they? She never had that option.”

  “But we could have at least gotten her out—”

  “There were only two masks, Jane. To protect us from the gas. You could barely make one for yourself; you couldn’t have managed another. No matter how much pressure the two up there are putting on you, there are boundaries to what you can do, limitations. Asking you to reach beyond them, expecting you to . . . it’s cruel. I wonder if they realize how cruel. Only a fool thinks he has no limits.”

  “And only a coward never tries to reach beyond them.” I’d forgotten who’d taught me that. Criat, maybe.

  “You didn’t kill my mother, Esa,” Sho told me, something like finality in his voice. “Not any more than I did. You made sure I knew that, and what you said is still true: it was the Cyn. All of it, him. The rest . . .” He shook his head, then gave me something close to a smile. “Now come on. After being cooped up in that closet with you, I can tell you that your Barious friend is absolutely right about one thing.” He wrinkled his muzzle at me. “You really could use a shower.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It rained that night; I hadn’t thought the world was capable of rain, thought maybe the flora and fauna fed off of some sort of buried irrigation system instead, but apparently the Jalia monarchy liked variance in their weather. At least the atmosphere matched my mood.

  It wasn’t any quiet drizzle, either—we were still in the tropics, and when storms hit, they hit. It sounded like something alive, pacing outside the villa’s walls, the thunder crashing and the wind roaring and the downpour making a constant drum on the roof and on the ocean outside.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  Finally I gave up, tossed off my blanket and crawled into my clothes. I padded through the long-emptied halls, past ancient sculpture designed to represent who the hell knows what, until I stepped out onto the deck overlooking the sea, and stood just under the eaves of the roof, looking out into the downpour.

  The crimson flashes of lightning stretched from cloud to cloud, giving the storm a violent vermillion tinge that almost made me queasy. The seas were lashed into chaos, tides and waves and wind all working against each other, making whirlpools and walls of water I could barely make out in the dimness.

  I took a breath and stepped out into the rain. Let it wash over me.

  It didn’t matter what the Preacher said; Sho was right. I wasn’t a monster. I was trying to do good. And whatever this galaxy threw at me, I could take it. I wasn’t some child, ready to shut her eyes and try to look away as the real monsters reached for her from the dark, able to do nothing as their claws caressed her skin: I would fight and claw and fucking bite if I had to, to stay alive, to do what needed doing.

  But I wasn’t stronger than Jane, either. I didn’t have her training—I hadn’t come howling out of a world at war, full of grief and rage at all the wrongs that had been done to me. I didn’t enjoy fighting, not really. It felt good when I was alive, when I survived against impossible odds, and it felt good to do good, but the fighting itself; that wasn’t what made me, me.

  I wasn’t their fucking messiah; I wasn’t their chosen one. I wasn’t going to save either of them. God damn them both for putting that weight on me. I hadn’t made the Preacher choose the paths she had, choices that had doomed my parents, choices she now felt wracked with guilt over; I hadn’t made Jane into a tool for violence, hadn’t made her so that violence was always the first option she reached for.

  Whatever was coming next—whether that was dealing with the Cyn, still trapped in the halls of the dead on Valkyrie Rock, or whether this galaxy was going to throw something else at us, something horrible and new, or maybe even something beautiful—I’d meet it as me. Not as the Preacher’s delicate hope for the future, and not as Jane’s soldier-in-training. If they wanted to
hold me to two completely different standards, they could try all they wanted: the only standard that truly mattered was my own.

  What that was, I was still evolving. And that felt right. I was, after all, just a child. Like they’d pointed out, repeatedly. I didn’t have to know everything—I didn’t have to have everything figured out. There’d be time enough for that. Assuming I survived that long.

  I pulled myself up onto the railing of the deck, and never mind the storm. I just perched there, staring out at the lashing sea, let the rain pour over me, and let myself not care. It was just water, falling from the sky.

  I sat there until morning.

  Mo emerged from the villa to say his prayers; when he was done, he brought me a cup of coffee, and together we watched the sun begin its rise. The storm had broken just before the dawn had begun; the storm clouds had drifted away, no longer heavy with the red-streaked signals of the thunder, and we faced the unbroken empyrean vastness of lavender watercolor wash above, varied only by the twisting ribbon of the planet’s rings, those impossible Möbius strips of billions upon billions of pieces of stone and crystal and ice. They rose up from the horizon like some distant tower thrust up from the sea—or maybe the supporting suspensions of the sky itself.

  As the sun rose, making its way past the rings, the glowing blue orb was bisected by those bands of orbital stone, the descending light reflecting off the shimmering detritus. The rings themselves were a shadow across the azure circle of fire, drawing a line taut over the horizon as if they were a chain across the dawn, trying to hold the rising sun in place, trying to stop the new light from spreading over the surface of the calming sea. But nothing could stop the day from coming—not even a metaphor.

  “Thanks,” I said to Mo, taking the coffee cup from him.

  “Of course,” he said. “I heard that you overheard a conversation last night that you might need some recovery from. Coffee works as well as anything as an agent of respite.”

  “Sho?” I asked, smiling slightly, still staring out at the sun’s new light, shining down through the tiny—and also huge—gaps in the rings.

  “Sho,” he nodded. “That boy gossips like a grandmother on market day.”

  “Any advice?” I asked him.

  “You’d ask the advice of a man who’s spent a century looking for God, and hasn’t found Him yet?” he asked mildly.

  I took a sip of my coffee. “Sure. At least it means you haven’t been fooled.”

  “Or maybe I have found Him, and I just fooled myself into thinking I hadn’t. Sometimes not knowing something is better than knowing, in its own way. Or at least easier.”

  “I don’t think so.” I shook my head. “I think if you’d found God, you’d know.” Just like once I found the person I was supposed to be—not just the person the Preacher or Jane needed me to be—I’d know. I wasn’t there yet. But I was trying.

  “I suppose. Otherwise, I couldn’t really be said to have ‘found’ him, could I?” Mo took a drink from his own coffee cup.

  “So I’ll ask again: any advice you want to give?”

  “Plenty I want to give,” he said, taking a look at me. “But that’s just me being an old man, one who wants to feel useful. None I think you actually need. It seems you’ve come to a few conclusions on your own, sitting out here in the rain for hours. Plus, I think you’ve already got two too many people telling you who you’re supposed to be; that’s part of the problem.”

  “And you’re not going to say that I should just listen for God instead?”

  “I think if you can hear yourself through the din of their voices, Esa, then you are already hearing Him, quite well. Alhamdulillah. That is something of a minor miracle in and of itself.”

  I smiled at that, shaking my head softly. “What was Jane like?” I asked him then—it seemed like a change in direction, a non sequitur, but it wasn’t, not really. “When she was asking herself these sorts of questions, I mean—when she was my age. You knew her when she was that young, right?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “But I don’t think I should tell you very much. She wouldn’t want me to. And unlike our young Wulf friend, I am not a gossip. Besides: we have both changed, much, since then. I made different mistakes when I was trying to teach her than the mistakes she is making now, with you. There might be some good in that, some hope for the future: the mistakes she is making are . . . much less severe than the ones I made with her.”

  “You took her from her sect. You said that the other night.”

  “I didn’t just take her, little one; I used her, like firing a bullet from a gun. Gave her the tools she needed to tear them down, and then let her see, in a way she’d always been blind to, exactly what they’d done to her. I knew exactly what she would do with that knowledge, with those tools; I knew what she had within her. And I was right. When she was done, that sect was no longer a threat to the Justified. Or anyone else. Or anything at all, really.” He stared out at the ocean; listened to the sound of the water, lapping against the beach. Or listened to something else, in the halls of his memory, but what it was, I would never know. “As I said”—he shook his head finally—“it was not my proudest moment. I had turned my face from Allah during that time, and did many things I have since come to regret.”

  “And taking Jane from her people—that’s one of them.”

  “No. Using her, yes; I regret that. But she was always better than they were. She did not belong with their simple dogma, their dangerously reductive creeds. I have no doubt that I gave her a longer life with the Justified than she would have had otherwise, a life where she could do more good. Was it actually better—is it better to be shown the truth of the lie, even if the lie is a comforting thing?”

  “Yes,” I said, immediately. I didn’t even have to think about it.

  He smiled at that. “It is good to hear you say so.” He turned from the railing—could evidently hear something I couldn’t. After a moment, it became clear to me as well: the sound of a ship’s engines, firing up. “Ah. It appears the Preacher has finished her consultation with Scheherazade. Shall we go find out what they have to say?” He offered me a hand; I took it, and hopped down off the rail.

  “Hey, Mo?” I said as Schaz lifted off from the beach and disappeared toward the jungle, heading back to the clearing where she was making her berth.

  “Yes?”

  “She misses you, sometimes. I didn’t know it was you she was missing before I met you, but . . . I think it’s true.”

  “As I miss her. But our paths through life took different roads; that is the way of it, at times. Still. I am glad she came to see me. It has been good to speak to someone who knew me when I was a worse man, and can still abide my presence.”

  “Despite the fact that she thinks your search for God makes you a crazy person.”

  “Despite that, yes. Not one of us is perfect, little Esa. And Jane even less than most.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Well, that was a great deal of work for nothing,” Jane was saying as we entered the dining hall, her voice drier than a desert.

  “Not nothing,” the Preacher replied, some asperity in her tone; at least they weren’t yelling at each other again. “Just not as much as we might have hoped.”

  Jane looked up as Mo and I approached; Sho was wheeling in from another room as well. “The Preacher finished decrypting the drive you took from the Cyn’s ship,” she told us. “Apparently, most of it is in some kind of ancient language, one neither of us has ever seen before. It’s not a problem of decryption, it’s one of translation.”

  “May I look?” Mo asked. Jane nodded at the screen, and let him take her place at the chair; he stared for a moment, then shook his head. “It must be an ancient Cyn text,” he said. “I don’t know of any way you might translate it; I’m sorry. Maybe one of the lost Golden Age core worlds, perhaps a museum or an archive there . . . that’s all I can think to suggest. And of course, ‘lost’ is the operative term there.”

  “Th
e longer we leave that . . . thing . . . locked on Valkyrie Rock, the longer it has to find a way to escape,” Sho shook his head. He turned toward Jane. “Have we heard anything from your friends?”

  “The Preacher was already on her way toward us when she intercepted the message,” Jane replied, running a hand through her hair, obviously a little frustrated herself with the enforced idleness—of all the traits Jane had picked up from Mo, “an excess of patience” was not one of them. “It hasn’t been long enough for it to actually reach Sanctum yet, let alone for the rest of the Justified to mount a response.”

  “It’s not like there was nothing useful on the drive, though,” the Preacher interjected. “There was this, tucked away in the data.” She tapped at one of Mo’s many keyboards, bringing up an image on one of the screens. “It’s a map of the galaxy.” No shit—even I could tell that for myself.

  “We . . . already knew what the galaxy looked like, Preacher,” Mo said doubtfully, clearly trying not to give offense, but, like me, not really sure where she was going. “Most of us, at least.” He smiled at Sho, who gave him a tired smile in return.

  “Yes. Obviously. But this map is marked, keyed.” She bent over, typed in another few keystrokes; suddenly there were highlights and markings on certain systems. “Different worlds—most of them settled—annotated in the same script—”

  “Which we can’t read,” Jane reminded us all, unnecessarily.

  “—and also time stamped.” The Preacher glared at her, finally getting to her point. “Based on the entry for Kandriad, it’s a record, a travelogue of sorts. There are blank spots—spots where his ship wasn’t inputting data, where he headed ‘off-grid,’ so to speak—but of the worlds he did visit . . . there must be some sort of correlation, a pattern of some kind—”

  Jane retrieved the keyboard from the Preacher, started flipping through the galaxy, seemingly at random, jumping from entry to entry down the list of worlds the Cyn had visited. “Dead ends,” she said quietly, mostly to herself.