by Essa Hansen
The purple thread streaked cheerfully into another atrium that had more passages shooting off from it. At the entryway, Taitn riveted to a stop. Caiden ran into his back. A crowd of humans and xenids clogged up the space.
Laythan’s eyes widened in shock before he halted too. His whole posture cringed.
Caiden frowned up at them. There were displays pasted upon the walls of the space. Some showed footage streamed from passagers investigating the remains of his agrarian planet and RM28, the desert of death. Others showed footage from his memory jog. The imagery came in snatches and zips of detail, mosaicked from neural firing and painted by algorithms. A tightness screwed into him at how wrong it was to see his memories outside of himself, where they shouldn’t be.
But Laythan and Taitn weren’t looking at the footage. The whole crowd had their backs turned on the displays to look at a real person standing in the center of the room.
Taitn’s cross expression melted into adoration. And Laythan’s look of terror grew more complex, laced with yearning.
Caiden frowned and arched on tiptoes to see over the murmuring crowd.
Then a beaming female voice cast to him like a ray of light, and instantly, he understood.
CHAPTER 17
PRIMES
The voice was so compassionate and compelling, Caiden had to close his eyes to contain what he was hearing.
“— assure you, wholly unaware of the vulgar origin of the gloss and the violence that enabled its production. We are likewise dismayed to hear the response of the Casthen Prime, Çydanza. My stars have told me that patience and distance is the safest course until investigations are complete. Thus, all Casthen detachments in Unity are henceforth expelled by Dynast order, with ten ephemeris days to vacate before enforcement.”
The reverberation of her voice stilled in the quiet atrium. Caiden exhaled and opened his eyes. Dynast officials formed a circle in the middle of the atrium’s crowd, clearing a space. Their faces were masks of rapt admiration, the look of devotees. When Caiden finally spotted the figure in the center of them, he felt his expression melt into the same. Contentment blossomed in his chest; the warmth of an embrace, the delicate flutter of connection, excitement, willingness, the same complicated emotion that had overcome him when they’d flown in the heart of that magnificent star.
“Who is she?” he whispered.
Long brunette hair collected in a braid on one side of her head, pulled away from features that were at once mesmerizing and ordinary, imperfect but beautiful. Legions of freckles both light and dark stardusted across her tawny skin. She didn’t smile, and wielded no charisma, but Caiden was fixated as if he knew her but couldn’t place from where, and she might as well have been wreathed in an aura of warm light, a beacon of complete serenity. A star heart in the flesh.
“That’s …” Taitn struggled, so fixated that Caiden had to tug the man’s sleeve to remind him of words. “That’s the Dynast’s Prime, Abriss Cetre.” His voice hushed, his eyes still wide and riveted, every cell of his body caught in her gravity.
“Why is … why.” Caiden struggled too, trying to question everything about her in one statement.
“Of anyone,” Taitn said, “she is the most Graven of all, claiming the purest, highest rank of descent. It is in the genes of all creatures to love that which is Graven.”
Caiden looked back over the crowd, recognizing love in their expressions. In Laythan’s, love battled with fear.
The people clogging the atrium orbited Abriss, inexplicably arranging into rings of species, some xenids only partially physical, some airborne, all organized by the same strange feeling that arrested Caiden too: a primal reverence that kept him at bay, and a burning attraction that called him in.
Is this what my freckles mean? How much of this do I have, and how would I tell?
The Prime wore a sheer black overdress embroidered with copper constellations. Beneath, she was clad in a dark, fitted flight suit, hemmed in bronze and lined with blue, woven of an expensive exotic gossamer he’d read about, called starspun silk armor.
“What’s she saying?” Caiden asked. “The Dynast disagree with what the Casthen did?”
“The Dynast,” Laythan began, his rigid jaw mashing up the words, “is pretending they weren’t buying gloss from the Casthen. It’s used to make starship fuel, valuable to all passager economy, but it’s even more integral to the Dynast’s research into Graven technology, which requires phenomenal energy loads.” Laythan squeezed his eyes closed, face snarled with wrinkles as he struggled to focus. He raked fingers through his white beard. “The Dynast looks pristine on the outside, but they don’t care how they procure things, as long as they get them in the end. The Dynast acknowledge that the Graven created the stellar egresses but not that the multiversal furcation was a Graven design in the first place. They believe it was a mistake, a catastrophe, but they profit from it like everyone else, since the Graven remnants they lust after are all over the damn multiverse.”
Laythan flinched as Abriss spoke again: “To remedy the repercussions of this transgression, the Dynast will openly purchase gloss from any passager without inquiry or discrimination. My stars have told me this is the path of least conflict.” The Prime spoke slowly, monotone, and enunciated with delicate precision. Her voice grooved shivers through Caiden, familiar …
His spine snapped rigid as he realized. This Graven effect was what Threi had used on Sina: her perplexed expression, clashing between obeisance and confusion. It wasn’t intimidation Threi had used, it was love.
The Dynast Prime was only conveying information now, but if she had spoken an order, Caiden’s heart would move worlds to obey. Threi had struggled to convey his orders, but even if the man was immensely less effective than Abriss, it was a terrifying thought. How many more Graven monsters did the Casthen possess, able to twist and fracture wills at their whim?
“Let’s go,” Laythan said. “We have to leave, now.” He hooked Taitn’s and Caiden’s elbows, but Taitn was leaned against the Prime’s gravity, his blue gaze still transfixed and mouth agape.
Serenely composed, Abriss showed no emotion, but every detail was a well of hidden secrets, every freckle a galaxy. Caiden leaned in, too, as she spoke more softly to the Dynast sentinels encircling her. They were all human and dressed in fitted black, midnight blue, and copper garments that looked like they would take ages to peel out of.
A broadcast crackled, coming online. The wall displays blunted to black. Caiden snapped from his lull. A symbol dominated the displays: a circle with six rays below. Caiden’s hand drifted, shaking, to the back of his neck, his coat collar hiding the same mark.
Sound narrowed down in his ears. His mind fogged, turning the crowd into the masses at the Flat Docks, their brands all alike, herding in.
The voice piping through could not have been more different from Abriss’s: female, but sandy and strained, a voice atrophied by disuse. “The Casthen adherents are actively rescuing resources and refugees from CWN82.”
“ Çydanza,” Laythan spat, broken from the spell. He hauled Taitn and Caiden sideways. “Let’s go, we don’t need to hear whatever lie she’s weaved up in response.”
Where the Dynast Prime had bewitched Caiden’s attention with love, Çydanza’s voice snared him with spite and pain. His feet stuck in place.
This being was the orchestrator of his trauma. This was who he had to reach.
“I assure our dissidents that my adherents had nothing to do with the gloss operations discovered on RM28, and the footage released by the Cartographers— a supposed memory jog of a survivor— is entirely falsified, and we will prove it so.”
“That’s bullshit,” Caiden whispered. Hatred threaded his ribs and throbbed like a kicked-up hive. He slipped from Laythan’s grasp, but Taitn clamped onto his sleeve.
“It’s just words,” Taitn said. “Your memory jog paired with what the passagers recorded afterward incriminate the Casthen clearly.”
“ Çydanza said
‘refugees.’ Did others survive? Or they found more planets of people? And everyone’s just letting the Casthen take them again!”
Laythan bent his face close, words hot beside Caiden’s ear. “The Casthen are under everyone’s scrutiny now, thanks to you. Not everyone cares, and many who do care never take action, but a good number of passagers will be outraged enough to detangle the Casthen’s permissible actions from their illicit ones. You have to accept that justice will come over time, through your memories that you’ve already provided … at immense cost. Let’s get your reward so we can leave Unity for good.”
Laythan dragged Caiden through the dense crowd. Çydanza’s voice continued to grate his ears. “It’s unfortunate that neither the Dynast nor Cartographers see eye to eye with me or agree to conjoin our reclamation efforts, a decision that will make all suffer a slower resolution, and who is to say that the Dynast isn’t behind the gloss operations themselves, being now so eager to reclaim it from free passagers, so eager they’ve been putting a little worm of encouragement in the ears of Cartographers outside of precious Unity, so why don’t you all think about that before you choose sides.”
Caiden’s fury flexed, but Abriss’s clear voice cleaved his tension instantly. “Any gloss acquisitions freely sold to us will be used exclusively for glossy research and existing Graven programs of intent. These, as all denizens of Unity know, are for the benefit of all, and the comprehension of our reality manifesting from luminiferity.”
There wasn’t a single note of combativeness in her. Just serenity, which sounded a great deal like truth. Having said her piece, Abriss turned her back on Çydanza’s broadcast display with the red Casthen brand, and drifted from the atrium with all the Dynast sentinels in her wake.
The spell broke when she left, and a warm veil peeled off Caiden. When that inexplicable love left, his temper lay raw and vile beneath.
Taitn helped push him through the crowd. “Words and promises are cheap. Let’s get you moving forward, not looking back.”
I’d promised Leta I’d come back for her. Cheapest of promises.
Around them the crowd came to its senses, half beginning to disperse. Çydanza kept talking, her raspy voice a file re-carving the shape of Caiden’s hate. He dug his heels in and said, “I need to hear this first.”
Laythan snatched Caiden’s wrist. “To your acceleration. Now. We are leaving.”
“You have nothing at stake!” Caiden tried to wrest himself free, but Laythan’s grip only tightened. “Why is leaving Unity so important to you?”
“You’re hurting him.” Taitn intervened, planting a heavy hand on Laythan’s shoulder and glaring until the man let go. “Laythan used to be a security pilot for the Dynast family. He was betrayed … and Prime Laureli, who he was protecting, was murdered.”
Laythan’s face changed at the name, wrinkles deepening, distress sparked into pain. A momentary softness passed through his eyes, a wisp of the sort of love Abriss had evoked. Then it was gone, and Laythan straightened, a tower of wrath. “I was blamed and tossed in a Dynast prison with an eternal sentence. I broke out and decades passed, but time moves differently for the Dynast’s Graven family, and I’m still a fugitive in Unity. Boy, you don’t seem to grasp how common it is for someone to feel aggrieved or betrayed, for someone to want revenge and never get it. We all learn to deal with it and move on.”
“It sure doesn’t look like you’ve dealt with it. Just ran away.” The hurtful words were double-edged, and Caiden cut himself saying them. His body was still too small to contain his grief, and there was nowhere for his frustration to go but lash out at the people around him, as Laythan had warned.
Acceleration. I’ll grow to contain my grief.
Laythan’s voice rushed, clipped. “Abriss is a master astrologian. She has skills and technology to predict events before they happen, and divine information about the past and present anywhere in Unity. But only in Unity. If her ‘stars’ haven’t already told her I’m here, it wouldn’t be hard for her to find me. We need to get you accelerated, then leave. And if what I have at stake isn’t enough for you, remember that the Dynast would kill to get their hands on your Azura if they learned of it.”
Caiden sucked a deep breath. Pangs stabbed his ribs.
“You take him, Taitn,” Laythan finished gruffly. “I need to track down En.” He pulled up the hood of his coat and strode from the atrium.
Taitn laid a comforting arm around Caiden’s shoulders and said softly, “Growing up well is your best revenge against the Casthen. Don’t forget that.”
Growing up … His body would become six years older, but his heart and mind wouldn’t be six years removed from the slaughter.
He’d heard Çydanza’s voice. He had a target now.
Revenge was the best revenge.
“Let’s go,” Caiden said, and marched on.
CHAPTER 18
ACCELERATION
Caiden and Taitn carried on through Emporia, following the purple thread of light through an open market. The dazzling sights projected into the lightseep walls and columns didn’t hold his attention anymore. They were flat lies. Approximations of worlds that so many trapped and exploited souls would never see.
The thread eventually ended in a huge hexagonal cavern of the Graven ruin. The Cartographers’ luminous white material made up a circular platform thirty meters in diameter. Walkways speared out to reach openings on the far walls. The platform was rimmed in long counters and consoles, with maps and other data in three-dimensional holosplays.
The lightseep obsidian walls of this cavern were not dramatically landscape-filled but showed a modest vista of cloud.
They stood there for a long moment while passagers and xenids milled about. All the Cartographers dressed in fitted, angular layers of a light-gray and purple material, which softened up even the imposing xenids like chketin and saisn.
Caiden urged, “Taitn?”
The man took a determined sip from his flask before tucking it away. All the softness had left his face, and its natural severity took over. His rigid jaw sank his cheeks in, and his dark brows pinched together. He was much younger than Laythan, but wrinkles were beginning to betray Taitn’s history: smile rays by his eyes, grimace lines peeking from his beard, anger grooved into his forehead. It was the grimace that deepened now.
“Which desk?” Caiden asked.
“Right. This way.” He led Caiden to one of the desks without a Cartographer at it and placed his hand on the glassy white surface. Luminescence traced his palm until he pulled away.
Taitn fussed with the little buckles and snaps on his blackbird-green jacket, making sure they were tight. Everything in order. The nervousness wasn’t lost on Caiden, but he wasn’t sure how to interpret it except to be nervous as well. Maybe the acceleration all at once was as dangerous as Taitn claimed.
A female Cartographer approached the counter. Long platinum ringlets sprung around her torso as she walked. “Passagers Taitn and Winn, welcome. You are here to use Winn’s acceleration credits?”
She appeared human from afar. Up close, her pale skin was semi-translucent, giving hints of anatomy beneath: a white ghosting of her teeth around her smile, the blue of woven arteries in her neck, and the faint gush of a heart above the low cut of her garment. Stars of data danced over her piscine irises.
Caiden waited but Taitn didn’t speak. The man’s mouth was parted and he had a blank look, frozen in recognition, almost as severe as Abriss’s trance, but this woman had no freckles.
Caiden stammered, “Y-yes, my— the acceleration, please.”
The stars swam across her eyes. She smiled. “I see. Six years. These can be distributed as finely as thirty-six installments. Thank you for sharing your memories, Passager.” The Cartographer bowed her head, silvery curls bouncing over her shoulders.
Taitn’s throat bobbed. “Lyli …”
“Hello, Taitn. I will be Winn’s acceleration technician and rehabilitation counselor.” She looked to
Caiden and smiled, her purple lashes shivering like butterfly wings. “I can answer any questions you may have about the procedure. While your life span will be shortened by the acceleration, there are many practices that prolong human longevity, dependent on genetic-resonance factor.” Her eyes refocused from the sparkles occluding them. “And I see here you have fine genes, young passager. Six years will hardly chip away at the long life ahead of you.”
Caiden managed a smile back, disarmed by her clinical manner. He kept his gaze off the slender bones and lacy veins ghosted into her strange white flesh.
Lyli asked, “First, in what increments will you be accelerating?”
Caiden avoided Taitn’s pained expression and said, “All six. All together.”
“Certainly, Passager Winn. Have you been made aware of the risks and recovery involved?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
“Wonderful. Please follow me.”
She led them across the causeway stretching over lightseep clouds, and through a doorway into a warren of halls.
Taitn trailed behind Caiden’s shoulder. Caiden glanced back once. The rays at the edges of Taitn’s eyes crinkled in a steady wince.
When Lyli pressed her hand on a blank wall, light cracked around the frame of a door, which dissolved in a cascade of particles. Caiden followed her in, then stopped cold. The biodata chamber for acceleration was the same type he’d entered for the memory jog. He stared, loosening the reins on his doubt.
The memory jog had ripened his terror into fury. What would the acceleration do to his mind?
He looked back at Taitn for reassurance, but the man’s eyes were glassy and a rapid pulse thumped in his neck. He rubbed his knuckles over his jacket— where the flask lay in the pocket beneath.
“Taitn?”
“Yes. It’s fine.” He marched into the room.