Nophek Gloss

  Cartographer Lyli paused by a holosplay next to the chamber. “Please select what preprogrammed networks of synaptic stimulation you would like to employ during the accelerated years. These will be arranged in the noetic processing module and sequenced to condition your individual brain.” Caiden glazed over. “Both static knowledge and physical experience may be implanted, with the success rate dependent on the individual’s mirror neurons. I will meanwhile design the neural architecture while you prepare for the procedure.”

  “Synaptic …”

  Taitn translated. “The skills and knowledge you want. I’ll handle it. They have to be chosen carefully, or could conflict and damage the … Well,” he said, restarting, “you need more mechanical knowledge to help Panca with the Azura’s repairs, as well as piloting skill and the sciences necessary to understand neural control systems. Combat, so you can take care of yourself. Languages, reasoning, philosophy …”

  Taitn sidled to the very edge of the holosplay and kept his gaze away from Lyli and the chamber. He blinked hard and frequently while navigating the glowing purple words, throwing them to a separate display, where Lyli poked at a console, her own eyes flickering with stars.

  She smiled at Taitn’s choices. “Physiology, neuroscience, molecular biology, harmonic neural networks— my expertise as well.” Taitn’s blush crept above his beard. Lyli turned to Caiden. “Please undress to your undergarments, Passager.”

  Caiden sat on a bench and peeled off his clothing. The cold air probed beneath his skin. “Taitn … What’s it like?”

  Taitn reached for Caiden’s clothes. “We’ll get some new ones. These won’t fit … after. And the accel is mostly sleeping.” A tiny strain in his voice stood out like a black thread in a white skein. “Your consciousness will be inhibited by harmonics while your brain and body are activated. Then there’s a cooldown while your body adjusts. Your consciousness will recombine, and you’ll be moved to a nutrient bath for sleep incubation.”

  None of that description told Caiden what it would feel like.

  “When you get in there …” Taitn paused. “Don’t think about who you were, like you did for the memory jog. Think about who you want to be.”

  I want to be like you. “What happens if I can only think about who I was?”

  The wrinkles fanned around Taitn’s eyes again, mapping pain and bravery in the same strokes.

  “Excuse me.” Lyli crouched beside Taitn, brushing his shoulder— he stood abruptly. The Cartographer held a handful of the same tiny cubes Sina had applied before the memory jog. “May I?”

  While she applied the nodes to his body, Caiden had nowhere to look but at her face, and was thankful that the brightness of the room filled her with light, minimizing her translucency.

  Finished, Lyli rose and hooked her long hair behind an ear. She asked Taitn, “Are you taking care of him?”

  “And Laythan is too,” he replied stiffly, “taking care of him …”

  “I will require you to remain with me and observe the procedure.”

  “I shou— yes … Of course.” He turned to Caiden. “You ready? I’ll be here the whole time.”

  Caiden straightened and marched into the chamber dressed in underclothes and shivers. This was his portal to revenge. The copper-colored gills of the floor scissored his soles. The bubble eyes spotting the walls would be his witnesses.

  Lyli signaled the door shut. She and Taitn blurred past the chamber’s thick glass.

  “I’m ready …” Caiden’s voice bounced off the sealed walls. Could they hear him if he screamed? Sina hadn’t heard him— or hadn’t cared.

  He closed his eyes. This was it. Six years in a flash.

  The pressure began in his ears, crushing his brain between. Just like the memory jog.

  Think of who you want to be. Kind. Brave. Strong. Smart.

  He had been kind to reassure Leta, but awful to leave her behind. He’d been strong enough to make it through the massacre alive, but too weak to save anyone but himself. Smart to make a deal with Laythan but stupid to break the crew’s trust later by venting his wrath against Threi.

  The chamber went dark and the pressure equalized through Caiden’s skull. Redness in his vision cooled to black. A thrill rippled up his body as gravity peeled away like old clothes, and his feet rose off the floor, suspending him in the middle of the space.

  I want to be stronger, independent, capable, and compassionate. Someone who can annihilate injustice.

  Warm, purring waves filled in around him. Beads of air burrowed in and out of his skin.

  I want to be worth something. Someone who belongs in this world.

  Dizziness rippled up his spine. Sweat trickled down it. The growl of a machine kicked up, buffeting him with vibrations that knit through his bones and organs. His consciousness was a puff of smoke swirling inside his skull.

  The vibrations rose to a gale and blew it apart.

  Unshackled from time.

  “Light willing, please …”

  There were two voices, one filtered to a low rumble and the other to a hiss. Caiden teetered and was grasped with a blanket or cloud or satin sea that he plunged into and floated on. He was carried away, and washed up on some shore.

  He vibrated in and out of himself, and bounced off his own edges; jagged rage, silken need, iron valor, and a soft, swampy feeling he chased after.

  “Hey.” Taitn’s voice quavered.

  Caiden opened his eyes to a blur. Is everything all right?

  Idiot. You’re dying.

  He lay flat in liquid with his head supported on glittering crystalline folds.

  “You’ll be all right.” The quaver was still in Taitn’s voice. “You’ll be fine after this. Safe. Everything’s fine.”

  Caiden reached out. A skeletal hand. Knobby bones showed beneath skin stretched too tight, too white and flushed with dark-mauve veins, freckles stark.

  “Taitn?” he choked.

  “It’s t-time to sleep.”

  Sleep? Oh, crimes … He tried to move but the liquid claimed him. The light dimmed.

  Sleep would mean nightmares. His brain knew no other dreams.

  Caiden’s consciousness drifted, relieved as the dreams began sweetly with memories of muggy days fixing dusters surrounded by the smell of grease and crushed herbs. A long soak in a bath after hard work. Leta wearing a crown of blue chicory flowers in her soft brown hair. She was too short to see over the grass as they trampled to a shady oak. In its tall branches, they peered through optics to count the livestock. A herd of yearlings was ready to go to the Docks.

  The vapor above ripped open. Had he known that was his first glimpse of the real sky, he might have been more curious than terrified. The orange light was from a sun they’d never seen.

  The dream ricocheted into nightmares. Inside the transport, he was smothered with tangled limbs and faces, every inch of the space stuffed into a solid mass. The churning bodies mired into sweat, piss, and feces. Caiden suffocated on reek and tried desperately to ball up, away from the undulating skin.

  The writhing turned to panic and screams. Fingers clawed Caiden’s hair and wrenched his skull back. His limbs pulled in all directions as the soup of human terror boiled. He plowed his limbs against flesh. His scream was eaten by other screeches.

  Then darkness drained to desert. The horde scrambled out, stampeding him away from Leta. The beasts seized and chewed. Caiden didn’t have a glave in this nightmare, and he didn’t escape. Tackled and too exhausted to fight, he lay screaming as a nophek tore into his belly.

  More rounds of stench and roar, more teeth and teeth and teeth. Pain chewed him up and spit him out.

  Caiden jerked awake into a rigid, thrashing body. The back of his head cracked against crystal, over and over. He was upright, restrained in place while the nightmares scrabbled through his skin and spurred convulsions. His heart was a butterfly in a web, tugging every direction to get free.

  Magnetic restraints. He tried to relax. He squee
zed his eyes shut, spilling hot tears of agonized relief. It was over. Awake.

  He tried to look over his body for the bite wounds. His left arm had been hanging off his shoulder. He’d run a kilometer on a shredded foot. There would be a stump of bone left.

  Smooth hands touched his face.

  Silken speech grazed his tender mind.

  There were new words in his head— an edifice of language.

  “Am I … whole?” he asked in Andalvian, a rolling tongue of layered meanings; he’d said seven things in that one phrase. He could be done with slaver speech at last.

  “Yes.” Lyli ran a wicking cloth over his cheeks and neck. “You are twenty years of age, and located in Emporia in Unity. How do you feel?”

  Caiden blinked away fresh tears. “Broken,” he rasped, “and put back together.”

  His voice sounded strange. Deeper and coarse. Not just raw from screams.

  His brain felt scoured, filled with tingles that twisted away like a flock of starlings each time his thoughts approached. What bugs were they picking at in there?

  Accelerated concepts bubbled in Caiden’s mind; brain plasticity, cognitive development, emotional utility. New modes of thinking that had been involuted into his mind during the accel would begin to differentiate outward as he utilized them, the liquid crystals of his brain reoriented. Even the way he appraised his condition was different. As if by leaving youth he had taken a step back from his own mind.

  With a snap, the magnetic restraints opened, and Caiden fell off the frame. Growing pains flowed through him like waterfalls over shifting rocks, and he wailed as he fell into the Cartographer’s arms. His body was too heavy and she crumpled to her knees, arms around his torso. He was taller … so much taller than her now.

  “Sorry …” Caiden whimpered as he stabilized on all fours. Vicious ache vibrated every bone. His vision mushed up, everything over-bright, but he didn’t need to see to know something was wrong.

  Waves of ashy hair cascaded around him and brambled off his face. His skin was taut, muscles brittle, bones rubber. He was more pain than flesh. Caiden wept, which blurred his vision more.

  “I understand this is very strange for you, Passager.” Lyli tenderly helped him crawl to a standing position. “Your acceleration appears to have been successful, but your emotional distress exceeds even the effects of compounded adolescence.”

  “A dream.”

  “The incubation should not stimulate dreams.”

  But the memory jog nightmares would hound him everywhere.

  “Passager Endirion!” she called.

  Footsteps thundered in from the outer hall.

  Caiden blinked away more tears. His lungs were two clouds of pinpricks.

  A stronger, taller set of arms encircled his torso and supported him, guiding his feet forward. “Hi, kid.” En’s voice wavered. She started to lead him to a bench by the wall, but a full-length mirror caught his eye— the shock slammed him so forcefully, he tripped to the floor.

  A strangled sound lodged in his throat as he recoiled from the wretched thing looking back.

  CHAPTER 19

  FORGED

  En clutched Caiden as he rocked in horror before the mirror.

  Taller by eight inches. Hair down to mid-back, and a beard trailing with it. Scrawny muscles stretched on spindly bones, frame too large for his skin, tendons too tight for his bones. Every movement strummed bands of ache. His face was drawn and pimply, with pronounced freckles over his nose and cheeks looking like the spots that appeared on a diseased creature just before it died.

  He felt injected into a new version of himself, shoved into a doll that was his property, his slave to drive with his will.

  This was everything he’d wanted. He couldn’t hate it now.

  This is the body, the blade, that will end the Casthen.

  Loathing swelled up, but he closed his eyes and probed for the familiar anger deep in him. It was there. Quiet, and differently shaped. Gone was the hot, biting rage of his fourteen-year-old self. The accelerated years had packed it into a brightly smoldering ember laced with meaning. Caiden still had the same thoughts and feelings about the Casthen, but they linked up and arranged, where before they’d just been fuel tossed into that inferno of hate.

  En guided him to the bench and made him sit. “Lyli, dear, some slickpads and a flamecomb, please? And the other items I brought.”

  Caiden wobbled, dizzy and vibrating.

  “Six is a lot of time for what a small body you had. Adolescence is meant to be gradual. I rarely agree with Taitn, but … I wish you’d chosen slow.”

  “Taitn …” The voice wasn’t his own anymore. Time and nightmares had chewed that up too. “Where?”

  “He … couldn’t bear to look. And he started to— well.” En sighed. “I’ll get you fixed up. Just sit and rest.”

  Lyli returned and deposited a stack of items beside En. “I apologize for my oversight.” She bowed. “I should have inquired what areas of keratin suppression to employ since it was so many years. I should have anticipated the shock. Most patients accelerate amounts less than six months.”

  “Just as well,” En said, mustering cheer. “I’ve been dying to braid his hair.”

  Caiden raised a trembling hand to comb through the tousled mess of his long locks. His claws snagged there, and En gently untangled him.

  “Take your time, Passagers.” Lyli’s lips curled, the kindness in her smile undermined by a ghostly jaw. She bowed again, then left the room.

  Disappointment shut Caiden down. His crooked body hunched forward and he closed his eyes, attempting to focus on nothingness as Panca had taught him.

  While Caiden steeped in his daze, En fussed with him, wiping his sweat with a tingling cloth. She wielded a device like a brush with teeth of tiny flame, and stroked this over his face and neck, then through fistfuls of his hair. Finally she pulled all his blond locks back to make a tight weave, combing her fingers over his scalp, a sensation that soothed him half to sleep before he remembered sleep was sand and blood and teeth. He jerked alert, and she caught his face in her hands.

  “All right, easy,” En said, and backed away. “Here, I bought these for you.”

  She set a stack of clothing on his lap. New colors and textiles: rich blue, rosy gray, black— and many belts. Embarrassment tugged at him distantly; he was only clad in underclothes, much too tight.

  En sat nearby, turned away to give him privacy, and shifted form: shorter, skin darker, and hair lengthening so he had something new to braid while giving Caiden space.

  Caiden stood weakly, peeled off the underclothes of his younger self, and dressed awkwardly, constantly misjudging his new strength. Too soft, too hard. As if he needed another learning curve. He worked raw ligaments, stumbling over his bones, wincing through twinges.

  The new clothes hugged his skin. The morphcoat slicked into tiny iridescent black feathers, sculpted around his shoulders. His gray undershirt’s dense gossamer mesh captured and dispersed heat. The overshirt was a thick, soft material he’d seen En wear, with angular seams in a Cartographer style. The baggy black trousers— matte leather but as soft as everything else— hid his ungainly legs.

  Caiden rubbed at layered growing pains in his shoulders. His fingers grazed the brand, and he recoiled, grimaced, then quested his fingers up the complex braid En had fixed against his skull.

  He snapped up his boots and straightened.

  “Ready to look again?” En asked, drawing close, but as Caiden pivoted to the mirror, En snatched his shoulders and pinned him with a fiery gaze. “Your body will fill out fast with correct nutrition and exercise. I have a whole regimen of combat sparring lined up for you, and I can blackmail Ksiñe into cooking whatever you want. The accelerated time is still bundled into your cells and will blossom as you get used to your body and mind. Right now you’re dismayed but be gentle to yourself.”

  There was a buzzing in him, as if a little exertion would floresce the bunched capabiliti
es and plump out his skinny, hollowed new self.

  En nodded firmly and twirled Caiden to face the mirror.

  This is it. This is me.

  The dashing clothing hid some of his frailty. His mind felt more capable but this new physique looked like the acceleration had stretched more holes in him.

  “So much for being stronger.” Even his voice was so brittle it broke. Not the voice of a hero.

  Thanks to En, he was clean-shaven, hair half the length and smartly weaved away from his face. There was a hardness in his features that wasn’t just his frown. His skin was too pale and the freckles too stark. Even his hair wasn’t as bronzed as it had once been. He looked fake, artificially ideal, like a piece of metal too smooth and shiny to have been around for long.

  It looked like Threi’s skin. Too perfect and new.

  The thought intruded, unwanted.

  Did the Casthen have acceleration chambers too? Accelerated, Graven Enforcers. Was Threi the only one?

  En said, “We’ll get muscle on you, don’t worry. Skin’ll clear up too.”

  “You don’t have to use slaver speech with me anymore,” Caiden told him in Andalvian, conveying gratitude and many more thoughts in the same words. “What do you use?”

  “Shihl is what most passagers speak,” En said in a new tongue, crisp and melodic.

  “I get to fly now,” Caiden said in Shihl. He tried on a grin, not as ragged-looking as he imagined. “For justice, I need wings as much as I need muscle.”

  “Justice, huh? Come on, I bet gallant’s waiting.” En signaled the doorway’s dissolve, then led Caiden through.

  In the Cartographers’ hall outside, Taitn sat against a wall, face in his hands and fingers twisted into his hair.

  Lyli stood at a safe distance, knuckles kneading her lips. She looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to comfort Taitn or not. When she spotted Caiden emerging, she straightened.

  Taitn shot to his feet, expression glazed, processing Caiden’s put-together look. Then he blinked and fumbled in a satchel. “Here, I got— Here. Eat.” He handed Caiden a ramia.

  The scents awakened a ravenous hunger. Caiden tore into it, crunching the salty flakes, tender meat, and luscious sauces. He moaned and had to force himself to slow down.