A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  Then he was gone—fled, routed, retreating through the torn-up lab around us like a lost bolt of lightning, desperate to be anywhere but close to me. He found the exit, staggered through and went out, and up; I stayed where I was for a moment, panting. I wasn’t in any rush to catch up with him—he’d taken the knife with him, still sunk into that organ. He was dying now. It was only a matter of time.

  Plus, I was pretty done in. Shit, that had taken it out of me. And to top it all off, with the Cyn gone, I couldn’t see a god damned thing in all the darkness.

  I really needed to get a HUD installed.

  CHAPTER 18

  Eventually, I found the door out of the labs on the second floor, made my way back up the stairs, through the curtain of mists rolling off of the upper level like a waterfall of fog. That’s where I found the Cyn, kneeling in the shattered window, staring out into the storm, dying.

  Good.

  I triggered my comms on as I approached; I could hear him . . . not breathing, exactly, but transmitting random waves of static, the Cyn version of a death rattle. Over the broken glass of the window and the atmosphere beyond, we could see the bright, shining light of the system’s sun, a single crescent of a dawn. The last one he would ever see.

  I picked my way through the ruined factory floor, over the torn-up decking and past the ancient, silent machinery. Behind me were the bodies that still hung from the gallows tree, a grisly reminder of all he had done. I checked the pistol underneath my arm, made sure there was a bullet in the chamber. Then I approached.

  I stood behind him for a moment, watching the light slowly fade from his being; he was on his knees, and that wouldn’t last for much longer. His extremities were . . . fading, as the organ at the center of him lost its ability to feed the energy that gave him form. His feet and hands were already gone. The rest of him would soon follow.

  All the same, I commanded him: “Turn.”

  A long, drawn-out burst of static in my comms, and then he did so, slowly, still on his knees. He’d pulled the knife free of the organ in his chest—it lay before him; I could see it through the mists as he turned, almost like an offering to some distant god held captive in the rising light of the day.

  He stared up at me, holes beginning to form in the blank nothing he called a face, his very being dissipating, finally a victim to the entropy he’d claimed to exist beyond.

  “So,” he said, and there was nothing in his voice—no weakness, no anger, no pain. It was the same haughty tone of command, of surety, that he’d always used. I’ll give him that: even in the face of the end of his existence, an existence that stretched back who knows how long—I had no idea if Cyn even aged—he showed no fear. A zealot to the end. “You braved your own fall. Managed to ascend, instead. I was wrong.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I told him. “I don’t know what any of it means. What did you want with me—what did you want with any of it?” My voice was rising, and I knew it was pointless, I knew he wouldn’t answer, but I didn’t care. “Why did you attack this place—why steal the data on my birth? How do you eat the pulse radiation? Is it you—or those like you, those that share your beliefs, your sect—that have been stealing gifted children before the Justified can reach them? What have you been doing with them? Is this goddess of yours real, or just some figment your people have conjured, a lie you’ve all agreed was necessary? If you’ve been looking for me all this time, why didn’t you show up sooner? Where have your people been? Are you the last of them, or are there more? If there are more, are they all like you? Why did they leave in the first place? If they can all eat away at the pulse, why keep hiding after it appeared? Why torture and murder to get what you want when you’ve already got something more precious than any level of violence? How could you kill so many people?” I don’t know when I’d started screaming at him, but that was the question at which I finally stopped, just stood before him, panting, gasping for air, like I was the dying one.

  Slowly, the nimbus of light that was his head twisted and shimmered, until finally he had features of his own: eyes for me to stare at, lips to speak—or at least borrowed ones. It was my own face that looked back at me, the expressions I recognized from the mirror reflected instead in the Cyn’s skin made of fire. “You have your destiny,” he told me, “speaking,” now, with my lips, even though the words still came from the comm bud in my ear. “I had mine. Mine, it appears, ends here. I believe . . . I believe I have fulfilled it. Earned my end. Set you your path.”

  “And it took the deaths of thousands to do that?” I asked him. I don’t know when I’d raised up my pistol, pointed it at his face, but I had, and my finger was inside the trigger guard, tightening around the trigger itself. All the dead flashed before my eyes, on Kandriad, on Valkyrie Rock; the girl in the cage, Sho’s mother, in the tunnels. Mo.

  The steel of the gun’s grip was cold in my hand. God, I wanted to shoot him, even if it wouldn’t do any good—even if he was dying already. All he had done. “You psychotic, self-absorbed fuck. How is your destiny—how is mine—that much more important than all of those that you tore away? How fucking dare you say that this was worth it?”

  “Because it means . . . it means you can challenge her now,” he said, his features struggling to hold their form, his nose running like wax, dissolving back into the heat and light of his head. “And that’s all she ever wanted. To be able to prove . . . to prove her own worth. And when she cuts you down . . . and when she finally transcends . . .” His eyelids—mine—fluttered, his expression one more of ecstasy than of agony, as though in the grip of some awesome revelation.

  Staring at that slavish devotion, I felt nothing more than disgust; I came back to myself, the gun still trembling in my grip. My questions, the answers I was desperate for—they didn’t matter, not any more than his own need for closure, for deliverance, did.

  Past his kneeling form, in the atmosphere of the planet, I could see motion, and not just the storms: we were low enough now that I could make out the distant shadows of the strange obelisks, rising and falling in the fog like hints of ancient leviathans in a misty sea, lost to time. Whoever had built them, why—none of that mattered. All they were now were monuments. Whatever gods they had been raised to venerate, whatever machine they’d been meant to power—all gone, the obelisks all that were left, waiting to be discovered by beings like us, beings that had no idea what their significance once had been. As one day Odessa Station might be, lost and crushed in the gas giant that was swallowing it up.

  Whether we acted for gods or ourselves or in the name of some ideal, ultimately it was the actions themselves that mattered, that we would be judged by. Regardless of whether it was some higher being that had set him on the path of bloodshed and chaos he’d followed all his life, or if he simply needed to believe that, he was the one who had chosen to walk it.

  I lowered the gun.

  In some ways, taking that final shot might have been a mercy; he was dying, the fires of his very being flickering out. But that wouldn’t be why I’d be doing it—I’d be doing it because I hated him, and that was all. One more life on the altar of my own conscience, one more life I’d taken out of this universe that would never come back. Even a being as brutal as he was still unique, individual, even if just by the resolve and dedication he’d shown to his own hate.

  I didn’t shoot him, because Mo wouldn’t have wanted me to. Not to save the Cyn, who would be gone soon enough, but to save myself. Violence haunted Jane; it had haunted Mohammed, right up until his end. There had to be another path. For myself; for Sho; for our generation.

  There had to be another way.

  My “face” was almost entirely gone from the Cyn’s glowing features now; he could barely hold his body together. In the wash of the dawn pouring over the edge of the planet, spreading toward us over the tops of the distant storms, he looked more ghost than being, translucent and fading as he knelt in the mists. Even still, he saw me lower the weapon, saw the resignati
on on my face, and the fires in his own shifted, just a bit. I couldn’t read the expression, didn’t really try. I was beyond trying to understand him. But still: I had to ask. One last time.

  “Tell me,” I said simply. I wasn’t begging, nor was I threatening—didn’t draw the gun again, not when he’d already realized I wasn’t going to fire. I just didn’t see the point of it. Of any of it. “What you do—how you do it—you could save . . . so many. The pulsed worlds. The Barious. I’ve won; give me that, at least. Tell me how to save them. Let me save them.”

  He shook his head, once. “You cannot save the damned.” The words were almost sorrowful, as he spoke them. Then he leaned backward—the last of his features vanishing in the dying fires of his face—and he fell. Dropped backward from the window ledge and into the abyss below, his fading form indistinguishable from the blue glow of the lightning-streaked clouds, vanishing into the deep nothing of the storm.

  I stood in the light of the new dawn, and stared at the point where he had vanished, stared for much longer than it had taken him to disappear.

  Then I holstered my gun, and went looking for my friends.

  CHAPTER 19

  I still couldn’t raise Jane or Scheherazade—I hoped that was just interference from the storm lashing up against the station. I checked on Marus; he was deep in cort, so I headed back down the stairs, through the swirling atmosphere still spilling over the factory level, to see if I could find Javier. He found me, instead; he was pulling himself up the stairs, tread by tread, muttering a slow string of curses under his breath. An impressive feat for a man with a shattered ankle and a broken arm.

  It helped that he’d dosed himself with a fair bit of morphine from his emergency medical kit.

  He took one look at me, standing on the landing above him, then grinned. “You got the fucker,” he said, making it a statement—I guess he figured if I was standing there with my guns holstered, rather than running or shooting or dodging energy blasts, then the fight was over.

  “I got the fucker,” I agreed, helping him to his feet. Well, foot, anyway. “He’s super dead.”

  “Good girl. Well done, and all of that. Jane? Marus?”

  “Marus is up top, in one of the labs; he’s hurt . . . pretty bad, Javier. He’s slipped into cort. Jane got thrown off the station. Schaz went after her.”

  “Right. Okay.” He took a deep, shuddering breath as we made our way—slowly—back up the stairs, his arm over my shoulders. “Schaz’ll get to her. Don’t worry. In the meantime, we need to get the hell out of here. I don’t know how much longer this place will last.” As if to punctuate his words, the station around us gave a groaning, twisting kind of a sound, the pressure of the atmosphere beginning to bend and compact the rigid superstructure.

  Javier activated his comms and reached out to Bolivar and Khaliphon both, told them to get themselves out of the docking bay, to come and meet us at the shattered window. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of that. It had been a long day. Week. Month. However long it had been—I honestly wasn’t sure anymore.

  By the time we made it back up to the factory floor—and it took a while; Javier was barely up to limping, and he was significantly heavier than me, not to mention taller, making it somewhat difficult for me to be much help supporting his weight—we could see the sweep of a spotlight, playing through the mist. It wasn’t Bolivar or Khaliphon, though; Schaz had returned, and Jane stood on her lowered ramp, crouched behind the hidden .50 caliber machine gun inside the airlock.

  She shifted the barrel toward us as we came into view; Javier held his shotgun up over his head, though since he’d been using the damn thing as a crutch, the action almost made him slip and fall again, which would have been . . . bad. Jane relaxed on the gun. “You got the fucker,” she shouted across the top of the rolling fog.

  Javier just pointed at me, using the finger of the hand still wrapped around his shotgun; Jane grinned. “Well done!” she shouted.

  Yes, yes—everybody was very proud.

  Together, we got Javier on board Scheherazade—he was so doped up, he passed out almost as soon as we got him to a chair—and then Jane and I went back for Marus. We could worry about transferring everyone back to their respective ships later—for now, we pretty much all needed medical attention, and it would be safer to have everyone on the same craft. Jane was careful—even gentle—as the two of us lifted Marus, Jane taking most of his weight. “He’ll be all right, Esa,” she told me softly. “We’ve still got Tyll compounds on board that can supercharge the cort.”

  “He’ll be scarred for life,” I told her. “He was only here for me, and this . . . his eyes . . .”

  “He will,” she agreed. “The eyes . . . the doctors at Sanctum should be able to fit him with prosthetics. He won’t be able to infiltrate pulsed worlds anymore, but he will be able to see again. And that guilt—it’s not yours to carry. You didn’t do this to him, and you made the one who did answer for it. Marus was here for you, yes, but he was also here because the Cyn was an enemy of the Justified, and that’s what we do—we fight the enemies of the Justified, and we protect the next generation. Marus will just have to find another way to go about that. He was due . . . due for something like retirement anyway. Whether he’d admit it or not, he was getting too old for intelligence work.”

  “And you?” I asked her. “I heard you and Mo talking, you know. Back on Jalia Preserve. About how you feel . . . about how you think there’s only so much longer you can do this.”

  She shook her head as we struggled up the ramp, Marus still held between us. “Come on, Esa. I’m never going to take a teaching job at the university; I’d be shit at it. You know this.”

  “You really wouldn’t.”

  “Well, I’m not going to, regardless. This is what I do. Like it or not, kid—you’re stuck with me.” We’d made it into Schaz’s living quarters; we strapped Marus down to the medbay table and let Schaz’s medical protocols take over. Jane and I retreated back to the ramp, staring out through the shattered window at the torn-up factory floor where we’d waged our war against the Cyn. I should have felt something—anything—looking out at the rolling fog still pouring inside the station, taking what would be my last glimpse of the place where I’d been born before it was swallowed up by the gas giant’s atmosphere, lost to the depths along with the hidden monuments of the ancient race.

  I didn’t. Maybe I would, later, but for now, I was just too goddamned tired.

  “I was born here,” I said, just a basic statement, more because I felt like I should say something than because I actually had anything to say.

  “Well, at least you didn’t die here, too,” Jane said. Jane wasn’t . . . great . . . at expressing her emotions. “Esa. It doesn’t matter.”

  I turned to her. “What?”

  “Whatever—any of it. All of it. Why the Cyn wanted you. Why he was studying your birth. Whatever the hell his ‘goddess’ is, or wants. If she’s actually out there—and that’s a big fucking ‘if’; I’d still lay odds on her being the creation of a diseased mind and nothing more—but if she is, we’ll deal with her when she comes, just like we would any other threat. Ultimately, all this chaos, all this pain . . . we got Sho out, Esa. We got him back to Sanctum. We did our jobs.”

  “And the Barious?” I asked softly. “The ‘cure’ for the pulse?”

  “If we can save the Barious, we will,” she agreed. “And maybe we can learn something, from the Cyn’s data, from his maps. But the pulse . . .” She shook her head. “This is our universe, now, Esa. This is what the galaxy is. Saving those—helping those who are just trying to survive in it . . . that’s what the Justified do. What the Justified were always supposed to do. That’s what matters.”

  “That’s what matters.” I echoed the words, and I tried to believe them.

  “It’s all that matters.” She looked out, across the station, as the light of the dawn cut from behind Scheherazade, making the fog of cyan mist still spilling across the
combat-ravaged laboratory glow like it was lit from within by incandescent fire. “So take one last look”—she nodded at the place where I was born—“and say your goodbyes, and don’t think about the Cyn, or whatever the hell he was after. Don’t think about the pulse, and don’t think about what comes later, what happens next: think about your parents, instead. Think about your mother.”

  I tried, and for just a moment, I succeeded. The broken machinery and the rolling fog faded away in my vision as I slowly closed my eyes, and it wasn’t just the hologram we’d seen at the laboratory entrance that came into my mind’s eye then: that was part of what I saw, but I saw more than that too, not just glowing lines of light, but an actual face, a woman of flesh and blood smiling down on me, holding me, supporting me when I was too tired to stand. What I’d always wanted.

  It took a moment for me to realize what I was looking at, the face I’d inadvertently called up in my mind’s eye; not the face from the hologram at all, but an entirely different woman, the woman who’d actually done her damnedest to keep me alive, to keep me safe, to keep me happy and sane and free—who’d taught me what she thought I’d need to know, and struggled to hold the rest back, to rein in her darker impulses so they wouldn’t creep across the bond we shared and settle into me. She hadn’t always been successful, but maybe she didn’t always need to be; so long as she let me make my own choices, let me decide what was wrong and what was right, I could take that darkness, use it as a tool, and maybe keep it from consuming me—the same way she always had.

  I laced my fingers into Jane’s own, and squeezed her hand. All we’d been through, together. All we’d seen. A hundred suns rising over worlds so different I could hardly believe they were all in the same galaxy—suns whose light was diffused by thick canopies of blooming trees, suns hidden behind shimmering shields of atmospheric energy, suns of orange or red or blue or green. The sun on Jalia Preserve, rising up past the twisting arches of the rings circling the planet; the sun descending behind the abandoned, crumbling factories of Kandriad, its light finding every tear and hole in the metal structures and making tiny pinpricks of brightness within their darkened facades. The glow of the dawn striking the mists on the factory floor before us, making a sea of shimmering color, a veil of beauty even in this damaged place. So many sunrises; so many worlds. And we weren’t nearly done.