by Essa Hansen
He’d answered instantly, “We’re family.”
“But we don’t belong.”
He stopped braiding grasses and looked over. Her gaze fixated on the distant herd.
“That’s silly,” he replied, “we trained in the Stricture to belong. The Appraisal will show you you’re worthwhile, don’t listen to your parental unit. You’ll see in a couple years, you’ll pass, don’t worry.” She was scared.
“We don’t fit each other,” Leta said, “can’t you tell?”
“No?”
“The bovine. The little ones look like the parents, and they … all of them look alike. But we’re all nothing alike.”
He hadn’t considered it. But Leta was always right, always observing patterns that no one else saw; even at eight years old she knew. He thought she just felt outcast, and had said, “So what if we’re mismatched. You’re still family to me.”
All along, Leta had been right. They didn’t belong.
En hummed, drawing Caiden back to the moment. “Whoever it is …” She read his face intently. “Ah, sibling?”
Heat flushed Caiden’s cheeks. Quietly, he asked, “What’s a sibling?”
The crew all paused again. Taitn blew out a long breath and accepted the flask for a swig.
En spoke. “Someone you grew up close to in your family. Did … did you have family?”
“Sort of,” Caiden replied.
“Nine crimes,” Taitn swore. “En, don’t poke at him.”
Taitn and En glared at each other across the table.
“Thank you,” Caiden said, turning himself back to the meal. “But she’s dead.”
He ate and chewed, trying to find the flavor again.
Taitn nudged him with a shoulder and offered the blue-lacquered flask.
Caiden took it and sipped: bittersweet water, minty and crisp. It flashed down his throat and warmed in his breast. He took one more sip before handing it back, and nodded: he was all right.
He ate another puff of flavor, and held out a morsel for the whipkin, still as he could be while she sniffed around the table and considered him. Her rippled mass of black and blue fur stretched sleek as she rose on her hind legs and reached for the piece, her fingers splaying out huge and whiskers springing from her muzzle. Ksiñe tsked at her and she darted back to him, the morsel prize in hand.
Caiden smiled, which eased the sad mood that had fallen. The glorious tastes and textures returned as he ate. He relished the food as well as Ksiñe’s generally softened demeanor, and the crew grew animated again, conversed and joked, slipping more and more into languages he didn’t know. The whipkin discovered every scrap of food on the floor, and climbed each crew member to root for crumbs in their clothes before returning to Ksiñe and curling around his neck.
Caiden sat back in a pleasant daze as a toasty feeling spread through him. His morphcoat mimicked it as a downy fur the same blackbird green as Taitn’s jacket.
He wanted the crew’s happiness, their banter, camaraderie. The laughter and hugs and messiness. He felt left out— but that was to be expected. The crew was kind, but Caiden didn’t belong.
So what if we’re mismatched …
The meal wound down. Ksiñe packed things away with the little whipkin’s help, then settled against one wall. Above one of his palms, four dimples of air formed a box filled with text that rewrote itself as he read. His pet cheeped sounds as she crawled around in his layered garments, looking for somewhere to snuggle.
Taitn nursed the lacquered flask and ambled to the pilot’s seat to recline. In moments his breathing slowed to the husky rhythm of sleep. Caiden smiled. His mother had known that same trick, able to instantly sleep.
He worked a lump in his throat. Sawtooth nostalgia lurked in every moment. He didn’t want to lose the lovelier memories, but they were twisted up with the bad.
“That look again,” En said, “I used to wear it every time I looked in the mirror.”
Caiden cocked his head.
En gestured him up and led him to the lower hallway. “Let time do its work. You’re still raw. And focus on the balm, not the sting. Did you like the pakra or the efsä better? The Cartographers’ Den will have so much to eat, I’m not sure where I’ll take you first. No— new clothes first. And pillows.”
She steered him to one of the two sleeping chambers, each on a different end of the hall. The door opened before they reached it and closed after they’d passed through. Caiden twisted to marvel at the door, then at the unlit room of steel-colored walls and geometric seams, functional and logical: the inside of a machine.
“Listen, Winn,” En said, voice rougher. Caiden looked up to En’s male face and physique: skin lighter, nose harder, brows deeper, and lips thin-pressed into a smirk. “There’s gonna be a lot of weird in the Den, a lot of tech and a lot of xenids. What we’ve explained and what you’ve seen is nothing in comparison. You need rest if you’re gonna handle a Cartographer Den.” He sat Caiden on the bed and gently pushed him over. “I’m serious, kid. Rest.”
Caiden crumpled gratefully on his side. The cushions heated beneath him. “Do you only have two faces?” he asked.
En’s chuckle bounced off the walls. “As many faces, shapes, or colors as I want, of whatever kind, but I prefer these two and everything in between. Many options, in my professions, are a good thing.”
“Why are you all helping me?” He meant to phrase it better but his mind mushed in spicy flavors and leaden fatigue, and Leta’s voice still echoed, Why do you help me?
We’re family.
“Because time goes on,” En said softly. “And right now we’re glimpsing a ghost of our pasts.”
“Laythan said you all lost something.”
“Laythan lost a prestigious position and the person he was sworn to protect … Taitn lost his ‘family.’ Panca lost her culture. Ksiñe lost so many things, I’m not sure what meant the most. Maybe his pet.”
“The whipkin?”
“No … different creature.”
An electrified silence settled in the dark and the warmth. It itched at Caiden until he voiced it: “And you?”
“Sharp thing, aren’t you?” En clicked his tongue. “I started out human like you. I loved fights. Lost a lot of limbs and organs. I replaced them with machines, which I loved even more, so I bargained and gambled my way to completion. Now I’m whatever I want to be. Only my spinal cord and brain stem are the last history of who I was.”
“You lost yourself.”
The next silence stretched icy and void as En got up to leave.
Caiden curled into the blanket and ground his jaw as if the words could be chewed back and swallowed.
Mercifully, En’s voice wafted from the doorway, “That’s right, sharp thing. But I gained so much more. Now, get some rest.”
Caiden balled up in the heavy morphcoat. Like the ship and the starry sky, its dark weight made him feel small and insignificant, but safe, and he relaxed into the knowledge that whatever new things awaited in the Cartographers’ Den, they couldn’t be worse than what he had already survived.
Nothing could.
CHAPTER 8
GRAVEN WINGS
When Caiden woke, warm and comfortable but alone, he stared up at a gray much darker than the sky of his old home.
Tears rolled down his temples. Free from the crew’s momentum and scrutiny, he let the memories play. The rough limbs of the oak tree he and Leta would lie beneath and question the origin of the wind. The grass blades whispered. Laden seedpods chattered like insects. Their first glimpse of the ocean, dark and empty, which Leta had sketched so they’d remember. The rock ledge, like a mouth, which his mother had shoved him under to keep him safe from the sharper jaws of the beasts.
The visions grew bloody. He had to move. Caiden wiped his cheeks with a sleeve and made to shove off the bed. But beneath him was only air and the bed a full meter away. Caiden yelped and scrabbled for it, swimming midair, his limbs flailing and the blanket knotting around h
is legs as he levitated. His back hit the ceiling and he bobbed there, heart pounding. Everything seemed normal except this. He scrambled to grasp the door rim, glided carefully out, and almost ran into Panca, the mechanic, emerging from the engine room.
She snatched his arm and pulled him down as he spun. Her long, slender fingers were dense with weaves of muscle, surprisingly strong.
“What’s happened?” he croaked. “Why are we weightless?”
Caiden’s cheeks were damp, eyes puffy. Confused and panting, he scrubbed at his face again, and a teardrop flicked away, levitating impossibly in the air.
“Scalar gravity’s off to conserve fuel,” Panca said, her voice airy in a way Caiden suspected a bird might sound if it spoke.
“Scalar gravity” made no sense to him. Another new concept to struggle with.
Panca cocked her head to the side. The jeweled black circle in her forehead flushed with light and reflections, stark in the veiled blankness of her face. Hues of ocean and summer green swam through white.
“Is that … an eye?”
“To feel, not see. Your eyes’re for solid things. Mine’re for numinous things. Saisn exist in sense-sea. A textured world with broader sensory detail than yours.”
Panca unwound her veil. At her forehead, her skull folded open around the embedded black core, sheeny and multifaceted like an insect eye. Her two real eyes beneath it were entirely black except for white limbal rings around each iris, which flicked as she examined wide-eyed Caiden. The fine muscles in her face scrunched like a fixed scowl under her velvet-soft, grayish-purple skin. Her flat nose had tiny teardrop nostrils, and her wide ears lay tight against her scalp. In place of hair, chevron ridges at the top of her forehead swept over her skull and down her neck like plaits. Eerie but beautiful in her own way, the saisn was not nearly as dangerous-looking as the veil had let his imagination assume.
She left him and launched off the ramp, gliding through the air to the bay ceiling. She spun right side up and grabbed a rung there.
Caiden tried to follow but his groggy instincts fired: he was falling. He flailed to catch onto a surface and stop himself, but swam in air until his hip finally bumped the bay floor and he could spider himself onto it.
“Panca?” Ksiñe said, worried, from across the bay. His skin was dark mauve with lightning patterns darting through. The whipkin clung to his upper arm, chittering grumpily.
Laythan and En were in other rooms, and Taitn lay fast asleep in the pilot’s seat, snoring lightly.
Panca pulled herself along the ceiling of the ship, palpating the seams with her long fingers. Scaly material plated the surface, scored with gaps that glinted a crystalline material inside. She called to Ksiñe, “There’s lightseep obsidian in this ship’s spine, like I found in the engine.”
“Impossible.” Ksiñe floated up to the ceiling while raising his hand. His glove projected a field of dimples in the air, and a readout of symbols and numbers. The data shifted as he glided the scanning field across the ceiling to the swell of crystal over the pilot’s head, the thing Caiden had touched that made the ship generate its universe bubble.
“Don’t touch that,” Caiden warned.
Ksiñe’s gaze darted over. Crimson hues scowled across his cheeks. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t, it—”
“Ksiñe,” Panca said, “it’s got a central seam.” She probed the complex plating, then slid her arm beneath a panel. Something activated, moaning inside the walls. The ceiling panels and scales pleated open down the length of the ship, revealing a crystalline mass that had been hidden beneath it the whole time. It stretched from wall to wall and extended over the cockpit as part of that glassy swell Caiden had touched to emit the bubble universe around the ship.
A smoky lavender glow emanated, filling the bay. Not a digital light— something cellular, bioluminescent. Scintillations spread along branching pathways within. Inner facets shifted and flashed organically from different angles. Like so many of the new materials Caiden had seen, this spine existed between qualities and phases: glass, metal, jewel, and liquid.
Panca placed a hand on its surface and closed her eyes. The core in her forehead absorbed candescence. “Hybrid organic.”
“Laythan!” Ksiñe shouted.
Taitn roused awake, anchored in the pilot’s seat, blinking and scrubbing a hand through his short hair. “Kis, what’s goin—” He cut off as he looked up.
Laythan glided up from a sleeping chamber, grumbling, and was also shocked still by the sight. He slapped a hand on the edge of the floor to steady his weightless momentum. “Taitn, get scalar gravity back.”
“Right.” The pilot’s hands shot up, and the cockpit’s bright displays sprang into the air.
Weight slammed Caiden. Every direction pulled his body, pummeled his guts, wrenched the air from him. Then everything snapped back to normal. His body stuck to the floor and he grew weighty again as he wobbled to his feet. The crew regained their footing like they’d done this many times before.
There was a loud thump in the engine room and a string of swears as En marched out, rubbing her hip. “All damned, warn a person before you— Oh.” Her hand flew over her mouth, eyes wide.
All five seasoned veterans of this new world gawked up at the crystalline spine with as much dumb awe as Caiden.
“Explain,” Laythan ordered.
Ksiñe’s usually sharp posture drooped, and his skin’s patterns curdled into uncertain swirls. His gloved palm still emitted a grid of air dimples, on which luminous data was strung. He read through it. “A holotropic resonator? Glossy technology, some lightseep, definitely Graven tech.”
“Called it.” Taitn grinned. “How much of this ship is shell? How much is crystal, lightseep obsidian, hybrid organics?”
“Cannot tell without full scanner.”
En whistled as she ambled up the ramp into the bay, craning her neck back. “Winn, you found this ship in the sand before the raid started?”
“More importantly,” Laythan butted in, “we approached this ship in the desert because we glimpsed a small universe from a distance. And we saw that universe shrink, which is impossible.”
Caiden blinked. “You mean it really did create a universe?” He pointed to the cockpit ceiling where the spine’s material swelled downward like a limpid eye embedded in the milkier quartz of the mass. “When I touched that, a bubble expanded around the ship. When the fuel ran out, it sucked back in.”
Laythan squinted at it, his scars wrinkling more, then he shot Panca a quizzical, dread-filled look.
“Plausible.” White rings in Panca’s eyes flicked as she scrutinized it. “I’ve never seen such an engine, or material combination like this, or Graven tech in a ship. Possible this florescer can generate a small universe of its own.”
“Florescer?” Caiden asked.
“Universe is bloomed like a flower, then closes like flower; fold, unfold. Implicate, explicate realities.”
The ship was special, powerful. And it was Caiden’s. He stood transfixed, bathed in light. Even if he had nothing else in the world, he had this— he could take on anyone.
“Amazing,” Taitn exhaled.
“It’s not amazing, Taitn,” Laythan snapped. “It’s terrifying. Have the damn sense to be wary of something so new, in a multiverse so vast.”
Caiden frowned. Everything was new to him. How would he know what to be wary of, if even these people didn’t? He would have to ration his questions. “What does Graven mean?”
“An ancient species,” Taitn replied. “Some say they created the multiverse. Something wiped them out, but their technology remained. Like lightseep structures, stellar egresses, and devices hoarded by the Dynast, who govern Unity. Most of it we don’t understand.”
En nudged an elbow into Laythan’s ribs, then motioned her head at Caiden. “Speaking of. Freckles.”
Laythan’s brow creased. “Not definite.”
“But what do you think? You and Taitn should be
able to tell.”
Annoyed, Caiden scratched his freckled cheeks. “I’m standing right here. Is it a mark of poor quality? You’re sizing up what to sell me for, in the Den?”
En winced. “Of course not.”
Ksiñe’s eyeshine flashed red as he looked over. “Children fetch higher price as parts.”
“Ksiñe!” Laythan snapped. “No one’s turning anyone to parts. The Cartographers can take him and answer all his questions. We need to avoid scrutiny. A vessel that can generate a new universe around itself could cross over into any world. That’s a power that can be abused, and if the tech can be replicated for other ships, it would change how the multiverse is navigated. If anyone sees this tech, we’ll have more than slavers on our tail.”
Fear leached into Caiden as he tried to wrap his tired mind around it all. Maybe the ship wasn’t such a good thing to own.
“Hurry up and make a plan,” Taitn said, “we’re here.” He slid his hands into the twitch drive panels.
Light streaks marring the cockpit view slowed into a sudden vista.
The Den’s blocky, light-studded mass filled space in front of them, growing larger as Taitn cruised the ship through an opening. The gigantic interior was crowded with walls and floors, up and down confused. Their ship glided through a narrow passage into one large “room” bigger than the combined area of all the pasture blocks of Caiden’s old home. His mouth hung open and he leaned over the console to take it all in.
Vessels of various shapes flew past. Some were brightly colored, others reflected images around them or morphed shape and texture as they moved. Many were so fast they were mere streaks of afterimage. The slower ones were so huge they may as well have been vast walls.
Taitn chuckled at Caiden’s expression, then aimed the ship through a membrane of light and nosed down into a tight canyon filled with haze. Cyan and orange luminescence frothed up. Walls blistered out in glass, with blurry activity swollen inside. Rows of ships docked at flowery airlock openings that stretched shimmering membranes across. The cockpit guides labeled it an “atmoseal” membrane.