by Essa Hansen
Caiden met Threi’s gaze. “I’m never joining your kind.”
The Casthen shrugged and lounged back in his seat.
The door folded open and Sina entered, her complexion all black and pink patterns. “The Cartographers have decided that if the young passager was free enough to register without opposition present, he does not qualify as property, any brands, marks, or genetics notwithstanding. We Cartographers cannot enforce his free status among others, but we can respect it within our own policies and domains.”
The Andalvian’s face speckled periwinkle, and Caiden gushed relief.
“That’s a pity,” Threi said, rising. “Because I know something about him you don’t, Cartographer.”
She cocked her head.
Caiden burst out, “He doesn’t know anything about me.”
Threi closed his eyes and took a deep breath, armor rasping as his chest expanded. When he opened his ice-pale eyes again, they brimmed with new intent and intensity. “I’d advise putting the Den on lockdown for a while.”
Agitated billows strobed the skin of Sina’s wrists and fingers. Her expression grew wistful. “Enforcer?”
Frustration creased Threi’s flawless face. What was he expecting, she’d just say yes? He ambled over to the Andalvian until he stood less than half a meter away, peering down. “The passagers should be sent to their ships to avoid a riot against the Casthen until they can digest the memory jog footage and reach logical conclusions.” The man’s voice took on a melody. The same lazy enunciation, but wielded with purpose, like a carver’s blade.
“Yes,” the chketin boomed from across the room. They were already pulling up a holosplay.
Sina twisted to her companion, nonplussed.
“Cartographer,” Threi said, pulling her gaze back to him. He seemed to almost curl over her slight frame as he spoke. “You can do that for me, can’t you? And I should be returning to my ship as well. A little friendly fire isn’t my fault.”
Caiden was more confused than the two of them. “It was his fault! He should be punished!”
Pink glitters dusted around Sina’s eyes as she blinked, tension melting from her face. “To avoid a riot, yes. A lockdown, then. Do as you will, Enforcer.”
“Why does he get to go free!” Caiden shot from his seat. How was Sina falling for this shit?
Threi cast a dazzling smile Caiden’s way, then rolled his head back to Sina. “I love fiery spirits like his, they are ripe for tempering. I think he really should be coming with me. The Cartographers are done with him anyway, yes?”
Sina hesitated, brows knit together under the edge of her crown.
A tendon jumped in Threi’s jaw. He laid a hand on Sina’s shoulder. “Do it for me?”
She actually smiled. “Yes, of course …”
“Cartographer.” Caiden swallowed a lump and tried to organize firmer words, trying to match the intent and intensity Threi had used to throw orders around. “You just said I’m not property. You said I’m a passager who can handle his own business. I’m leaving.”
Caiden strode for the door but the chketin shuffled, and Sina raised a hand to stop them. Stripes crinkled across the middle of her face as she hesitated, mouth open to speak but silent.
Threi made a growl, and strode for the door, saying, “The boy should at least be locked up here for his own safety. His memories are out there flooding every passager’s public feed— even if they don’t know it’s him, he’s better off here during the lockdown. Keep him here. After all,” Threi drawled, voice deep and honeyed as he glared at the chketin, “it’s a Cartographer’s duty to see that all passagers are well and accounted for.”
“Yes,” the chketin boomed again, staring down with … admiration?
Whatever was happening, Caiden caught the implication: Threi meant to store him in this room for later, like a predator would cache prey.
“Sina—” he started.
“He is safer here, for now,” she said, as if Caiden weren’t standing there shaking. Sina turned to the chketin. “Seal the room. I’ll announce the lockdown and send passagers to their ships.” She strode out.
The annoyance finally smoothed out of Threi’s face. He retrieved his silvery weapon from the chketin and broke it open, poking at tiny rods inside. “You really are safer here,” he said to Caiden.
“What did you … do to her?”
“You really should ask that database what exactly you’re so bent on destroying. You might learn a little something about yourself in the meantime. Here.” Threi smacked the weapon back together and slapped it on the table. “Keep the glave as a souvenir. I do admire your bravery— or maybe it’s ignorance— for firing on a Casthen Enforcer.”
Threi chuckled and strolled out, giving a vague salute to the chketin. Caiden stared daggers at the man’s armored back as he melted into the shadow outside.
The chketin Cartographer exited and the door closed completely behind. Caiden raced for it but hit smooth wall, without any seam, panel, or button.
Crimes, what just happened? It would have made more sense had Threi intimidated them or convinced them with stronger logic. No one was charming enough to just change others’ minds on a whim.
Caiden shoved the weapon— a glave, Threi had called it— into his belts, sat, and fished the database cube from a pocket. In his palm it unfolded and projected the holosplay above. He needed to know more. Six years of accelerated age would be enough to sharpen his body and mind into someone independent enough to take down such a large force, but until then he couldn’t fight any of this head-on. Letting his anger burst out was getting him nowhere but trouble. He apparently couldn’t even interpret conversational nuance correctly in this convoluted multiverse.
“What are the Casthen?”
Opaque words of light particles congealed, strung like handwriting on the holosplay’s dimpled air grid: A free-course faction composed primarily of hybrids and genetic mosaics from the Paraborn interbreeding project for private military operations. The Casthen deal in registered inter-rind trade of rare materials and xenids under free-course license. The xenids utilized in the Paraborn initiative were sourced by the Casthen. The faction’s Prime is Çydanza.
The words needled him. “What do you mean ‘xenids utilized’?”
The answer resolved: Paragon specimens were acquired or purchased for breeding.
Caiden stared at the word “purchased.”
He was a “cur” like them, one of Threi’s crew had said …
“What’s a cur?”
A slang term for a xenid crossed of different breeds or types. Resistant to a variety of foreign conditions and universal parameters.
Had the Casthen tried to create the perfect workers? Endless batches of them grown like the bovine were? Caiden got up and continued pacing, expelling motion as his thoughts spiraled downward.
“What is my … makeup?”
He had never thought about his origin— he just was. His parents had been assigned to him when he was four years old, and they bonded so swiftly he never considered they shared no relation. Caiden would smash his finger in a hatch and his father would joke until the tears turned to laughter, and for Caiden that was enough to mean family. He would smile as he balanced atop the fences to help his mother count the herd, and he didn’t question that they belonged together.
Leta was cursed to see the truth but Caiden never stopped to listen, just asked all the wrong questions. “You’re always working,” she had said. “But I see and listen. Things are strange … like we don’t belong here.”
Words formed on the holosplay: USER PASSAGER WINN 8-116-244. A multi-pointed diagram appeared, strung with percentage weightings, webs of symbols, and red glyphs in a language he didn’t recognize. Classified? Unknown? En had mentioned most of him was unanalyzable.
“What does the Casthen Prime, Çydanza, look like?”
Undefined.
“Where is the Casthen headquarters?”
The location of the Casthen Harvest is unknown.<
br />
Harvest … a fitting name.
“Who is Threi?”
Query too vague.
“Why did Sina believe his stupid suggestions?”
Invalid query.
Caiden huffed and paced the room.
“What is the Dynast?”
Governing faction of Unity, the original universe prior to multiversal furcation, ruled by the Dynast endarchy. The Dynast are seekers of knowledge who claim direct descent from the Graven. Their centralized government is led by an assembly under control of an appointed Prime who can claim a nine-two rank pure thread of Graven descent. The faction’s current Prime is Abriss Cetre.
Being flooded by new terms wasn’t helping him. He lacked the right questions, and could spend ages looping through all the things he didn’t know. Meanwhile Threi was up to nothing good while the whole Den went under lockdown.
An acid fear trickled through him. He had to get back to the Azura.
He stopped where the door had been, but couldn’t even discern an outline. There were no ventilation ducts anywhere, just holes drilled through the vitreous walls. No subfloor. Nothing.
Caiden groaned and leaned his forehead against the wall. He cleared his mind. Listened to silence.
Break stuff.
When he’d been twelve and Leta eight, he laughed when she said, “They really … They want me to fail Appraisal. That’s why they leave and I’m alone.”
She scowled, cross that he’d laughed at her anguish, but he said with a smirk, “Break stuff.”
“Huh?”
“Whenever you’re running into trouble, break the machinery. I’m closest to this sector and always get sent out for the small fixes, I’ll come help you. And sometimes smashing feels good, you know.”
Leta smiled and shyly picked more flowers. She had never been the smashing type.
Caiden rose to his feet in the featureless Cartographer room and examined its seamless white surfaces. In the center of the table lay a strange pit of gel. Caiden poked at the thick, grainy substance. White and red particles fizzed inside. He plowed his finger in circles. Sparkles skittered away like frightened fish.
He raised his arm and gave the thing a solid punch. The surface material shattered, and his fist was engulfed in frigid liquid deeper in. He yelped and pulled back, flapping his wrist.
An alarm whined outside the room.
Caiden scurried to the wall and flattened himself.
Booming footsteps approached.
The door’s rods folded open. Alarms blared as the chketin Cartographer lumbered through.
Caiden was quick on his feet from working around large animals and vehicles. As the chketin’s brawny leg whooshed past, Caiden slipped out the door in a corkscrew motion and darted as quickly as stealth and darkness would allow. The chketin roared expletives behind him.
Empty hallways, causeways, and rooms split off the main course. Strips of light on the floor were the only illumination, leading around obstacles and marking doorways.
He scanned for features that indicated he was backtracking in the right direction. After several wrong turns into disturbing confines and vast, impossibly textured spaces, a causeway opened to the multi-leveled docking concourse. The backs of ships lined the base level and many tiers above. They looked like giant faces; sharp, gnarled, or stout. Spotlights oozed around each one.
Caiden spotted the Azura’s spiked, slanted tail three ships down— and froze.
A group of silhouettes studded in contours of tiny lights ambled down the row of ships.
Caiden dashed behind a series of holosplay panels in the center of the concourse, and snuck through them until he crouched opposite the Azura. He slid his fingers around his weapon— Threi’s glave— and pulled it from his pocket.
“ ’Nother one over ’ere,” one of the group said to another.
There was no mistaking that stifled voice. Casthen.
CHAPTER 13
GLASLIQ
Caiden counted three sets of light-studded suits in the murk of the berthing concourse. One was the height and shape of a man. Another had a small head and sloped shoulders, and the last svelte shape stood two heads shorter.
Between them was a creature on all fours, less than half a meter tall. It whimpered and ambled in sluggish jerks. One of the Casthen kicked it, sending it rolling to the end of a leash before it was yanked to its feet.
Caiden almost lurched out of cover. Electric adrenaline whipped his muscles, twisted his insides, propelled him to take action. The image of Leta on the end of a leash rampaged through his mind. The Casthen said they had something caged: this was it.
The creature weaved ahead, and the group veered to follow it.
Caiden dug his thumbnail into his skin to curb the boil of rage. His heartbeat ratcheted. They hadn’t reached the Azura, but were headed straight that way.
The group passed a swath of illumination, and their Casthen armor gleamed. The creature avoided the light, but it had paws, not feet or hands. Caiden’s relief that it wasn’t a child withered as he glimpsed its side riddled with needles and tubes. Its joints buckled every other step, pitching it into an ugly gait.
Eyes flashing, the creature jerked in the direction of Caiden and the Azura. He stiffened, afraid to shrink the last couple inches behind cover.
“Got something,” said the Casthen who held the leash.
The creature rooted through the air then lurched against its tether. It let out a piercing yip and stumbled on its side as it tried to pick up speed.
“Should hurry,” the stout one said. “Looks like it’s gonna die.”
“If you keep kicking it.” The leash holder walked through a spill of light. Threi. His mask was pushed over the top of his head, shoving back the short hair to frame his bored expression.
Caiden’s face twisted in a snarl but he stayed frozen, gaze locked on Threi’s face before he even noticed the creature.
Though small and sickly, it was unmistakable: a nophek. Even young, it had the same boxy face, flesh-tearing teeth, and wavy mane.
Caiden choked back a cry.
Nophek had killed everyone he knew. Killed and ate.
It hobbled on seizing legs and bit blindly to gulp in air. Sick— about to die, they’d said. Caiden’s horror sizzled against pity.
The group drew closer, following the sniffing pup. They were five ships away from the Azura. Threi appeared weaponless, while the other two held long glaves at the ready. Caiden had only the one glave and the element of surprise, which was about to be blown. He tightened his grip on the weapon, but his feet stuck in place, his arm shook, a sob clogged his throat. Coward. Shoot them … But what if the crew isn’t even in the ship?
The nophek’s luminous eyes danced through the dark. It whined and pulled in Caiden’s direction again. Threi jogged with it.
Caiden stifled his panting with his free hand, stuffing terror down. The nophek veered and pawed at the foot of a ship two spots from the Azura.
“In here.” Threi yanked the pup back. It bucked against the taut leash and whined.
Caiden choked on relief.
Threi’s companions flanked the ship. The shortest one attached small objects to the vessel’s tall, serrated tail, and stepped back. An electrical popping sound spread through the metal and ruptured seams, collapsing the ship’s back doors outward. A lanky figure darted out, hooked instantly by the saavee, who prodded a weapon’s muzzle into the figure’s jaw. “Give it over, tal.”
The xenid— maybe “tal” was its species, if not a slur— was made of a material that constantly moved. They squirmed in the saavee’s grip. Limbs folded and unfolded from their body, but their flowery head remained pinned by the long glave.
The nophek yowled, eyes bulging, tongue lolled. It flailed against the leash.
“Give it some lact so it shuts up,” Threi said.
The shortest Casthen chucked a vial on the ground. Pearly liquid splattered and the nophek scrambled to it, desperately lapping up the
fluid despite glass shards lacerating its tongue.
Caiden struggled to bottle up his tremors and hear through the pulse pounding in his skull. Every nerve crackled. Sweat slicked his grip on the glave.
Threi sauntered to the tal and held out a hand. “It’s mine, anyway, you understand. Give it here.”
Confident and intent, as before.
But the tal hissed while their body fanned and rippled. The material of their morphing flesh looked like starchy cloth and was all the gray colors of dense smoke.
Threi snarled in frustration and leaned in until his face was inches from the tal’s. He spoke in a language that fizzed with sibilance. The tal went slack and passive at once. Their lanky arm peeled from the trunk of their body and deposited an orb of gloss into Threi’s palm. He cooed in the same language, pointed into the ship, and backed away smiling.
The tal plodded obediently back inside, their whole body quivering, more submissive than afraid. Like Sina.
The scheme clicked in Caiden’s mind: Threi had suggested the Den lockdown so that all the passagers carrying gloss would be sequestered back in their ships. He was using the baby nophek as a detector to sniff out which ships had gloss inside, so he could cruise by and take it back, every piece of it. And the Azura was next. Caiden choked back a swear.
The short Casthen opened up a glowing satchel, and Threi dropped the gloss in. It clinked against more pieces. They’d been busy.
The little nophek quivered at full alertness and mewed until the satchel was closed. The saavee kicked the creature’s belly. It yelped, staggering up to resume its hopeless search.
The glave in Caiden’s grip rattled, slick with sweat.
The nophek’s bright eyes saccaded. It sniffed.
He didn’t have a plan. His heart rampaged, weight tilted to the balls of his feet, ready for something.
The nophek whined and tugged Threi toward the Azura. “Another in here.”
“Good.” The saavee hefted his glave. “Legs tire.”
The shorter Casthen started setting charges on the Azura’s bay doors, about to break it open.
This is my moment. Caiden rocked on his toes. The held breath throbbed in his chest.