by Essa Hansen
Taitn seemed heartened, and smiled. He draped an arm around Caiden’s bony shoulders.
As they left the Cartographers’ warrens, Lyli said, “Farewell, Passagers. Please return if you require further medical treatment or rehabilitation.”
Caiden waved farewell, but it dawned on him that he wouldn’t see Lyli again. The crew would be fleeing the dangers of Unity as soon as Caiden could pilot by himself and Laythan had his own ship ready. Caiden was keeping the Azura, and he would find a way to Çydanza, with or without the crew.
En hummed. “You’re gonna be pretty handsome when we get you filled out and muscled up. I have an idea where to send you when—”
“Don’t,” Taitn snarled. “Acceleration is aging and synaptic conditioning, not experience. He’s still a child, and will be for a while. Maturation isn’t a matter of shoving time into a body.”
The conviction in that statement stung. Caiden mulled it over while the electricity between Taitn and En turned vicious.
En halted. “And you’re a grown man, but your experience is still—”
Taitn threw a punch at En’s jaw, but En blocked it with a wrist and stepped in closer. His playful expression grew earnest, and his face and physique changed, smoke spilling around her gray eyes, skin paling, musculature toning lean. The change seemed intended as an insult. A statement, at the least. “Maturation means discovering all the different facets of who we feel right being and how we fit into a complex world. Winn has the benefit of a family of misfits; each of us can point him in the right different directions to figure things out for himself. Stop assuming my intentions are harmful just—”
“What would you know about discovering yourself?”
En’s jaw flexed as she chewed on a retort. “I know there was a time when you didn’t think my intentions so foul.”
“Hey,” Caiden barked, hoping he had the merit now to break up spats like this.
En glanced over, apologetic, then mustered back her usual cheer. “The most important question is …” She turned back to Taitn, letting a somber glare drag out uncomfortably long. “Did you talk to Lyli?”
Taitn rolled his eyes. Pink spread through his cheeks.
“That’s a no.” En smiled and swiped her hair away from an expression of forced nonchalance as the three of them resumed walking.
A puzzling forest of birch and iris filled up the lightseep walls around them.
Caiden cut the simmering tension. “What … Excuse the phrasing, but what was Lyli? Her skin, it …” What would be rude to inadvertently imply? He’d noticed raciation in both humans and xenids. And who knew what sort of “mosaic” he himself was.
“She’s a survivor,” En said. “Flung into a particularly bad universe for humans. It’s filled with radiation and screws with scalar gravity nodes. Some crew survived and were rescued, but their white blood cells were wiped out, bone marrow problems, others had their skin and muscles melt—” En waved a dismissive hand. “Anyway. Lyli is still healing; the treatments give that diaphonization look, but I’d say it’s working in her favor.” He winked at Taitn. “You should talk to her. I saw her hair is still—”
“Why don’t you talk to her.” Taitn strode faster, pulling ahead.
En merely laughed, but the sound was tight. “Oh, I did. She was dismayed that you left so early. Then she had to call me. And now I need to impersonate some people and exercise some fists to talk with some potential gloss-buyers. I’ll see you two back at Pent’s.”
En split off with a wave and a happy jog that Caiden could now tell was half-forced. Minutiae of body language he had missed before were brighter to his grown-up brain.
He continued on with Taitn through parts of Emporia that looked familiar due to the vistas projected in the jeweled walls. It made sense to paint such a vast place for easy navigation, rather than everywhere looking the same.
The rhythm of Taitn’s breathing ratcheted up, until he let it all out in one go: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left.”
Caiden shrugged. “I didn’t want to see myself either.”
“It’s not that …”
The man didn’t elaborate, and Caiden let it go.
They passed into a huge concourse projected with gigantic waterfalls, close to Pent’s depository. The scene had shifted to artificial night. Water cascades glittered like nebulae.
“You screamed.” The dim light obscured Taitn’s face. “A lot. I couldn’t interrupt the incubation phase. And the night before, on the ship … you screamed then too.”
Caiden took a moment to arrange his new thinking— gone was the shame, secrecy, and stumbling of his youth. “Panca said my brain will perseverate nightmares about the memory jog every time I sleep.” The words came out quieter than he intended, husked raw by his new voice.
Taitn stopped walking. “If I had known—”
Caiden shrugged again with a wry smile. “I wouldn’t have let you stop me doing the memory jog. I was brash and furious, remember? Now I’m shrewd and furious.” He chuckled. “I feel good about it. Even if those memories keep cutting me for the rest of my life, people will see what the Casthen have done, no matter what the Primes say. That’s all I can rely on right now. I can’t save my child self from what I endured, but I can do something for others who are in that same place.”
Worth any cost. He’d been a seed set adrift on a strange wind just before the field was torched— it was time to sprout now.
“Brave.” Taitn continued walking. “Just don’t let bravery become stupid overconfidence. Like En.”
“His fighting? He told me he likes fights.”
“He likes to punish himself. It’s different. His surface cheeriness is a smokescreen.” Taitn’s feet scuffed as he walked. “People punish themselves when they hate who they are: saying foul words about yourself, or fighting until all of you is a pulp. We hope our words will push us to be stronger, or a better self will walk away from a bloody mess, but you can’t smash yourself into shape. Own what you hate, and polish the rest of you until that hated part is outshined completely.”
Caiden had certainly been a bloody mess in the nightmares he’d endured to pay for his new body. Hopefully a better self was walking away, even if it didn’t look it.
He said, “You’re awfully hard on En.”
Taitn winced and raked his fingers through his hair and down his bearded cheeks, frowning. “He— she and I got off on the wrong foot. I never knew him before all the augmentation … Maybe that— Maybe I’d be nicer to him if I had. I don’t know.”
“I have a very important question,” Caiden said. The pause stretched out the sullen mood. He asked, “Did you only bring one ramia?”
Taitn guffawed and rummaged for two more in his bag.
Caiden relished them in happier silence during the lift ride to Pent’s vast depository.
The Azura rested inside the “shielding hollow” blister in the lightseep obsidian wall, a quiet black bird in a nest of white glow. She needed repairs and tuning. The acceleration had shriveled Caiden’s body, but his mind was filled and eager.
Taitn smiled and stayed outside as Caiden strode into the hollow through its milky membrane of light. Breath caught in his throat. He circled his starship, gaping like a fool. Panca walked out of the bay and watched him.
“Panca, you and Taitn were right. She’s unlike anything out there.”
He had words for the ship’s various parts. He recognized the style of her thrusters, and could tell from the lattice abrasions that she had wave-collapse resonance shields. But what stunned him were the stark gaps in his knowledge. There were no known words or concepts for so many parts of her. She was unique.
“You don’t speak slaver anymore,” Panca said in Andalvian. Her words also meant, You’re free.
Caiden beamed and followed her inside to the serene new world of the engine room. His brain assembled words and ideas into flowing constructs as his gaze swept across the engine and auxiliary machines. “It’s almost … a t
iny stellar engine, but it uses glossy power.” He ran his hand over the striated back of an energy resonance chamber to a cylinder fowling that glittered with inner particles. “This is the housing for the orb guidance?”
Panca nodded and perched her hands on her hips. “Controls mini thrusters.”
Replacement parts that Panca had gathered were collected on the floor, and Caiden had names for most things now: capacitors, malta coils, dielectrics, braided glossy clusters.
Soon he was dashing, crouching, and crawling between units. “The bleed air off the Loran cowl recycles back into the ramjet!” He laughed as concepts and words sprang to mind, filling out a rich field of knowledge. He was stumbling over his own feet and looked like a creature ready for death, but the acceleration had filled him with the knowledge and capability he’d lost during a childhood of slavery.
Panca’s gray face softened in mirth. “See why neural crown control doesn’t work?”
“The stagger’s broken. What’s this?” He grazed a hand over a glassy encasement. Its vibrations greeted his palm and quickened his pulse.
“I think responder for universe florescer.”
“Right, to maintain the rind, drawing on the same fuel as the engine.”
He ran a finger down the draw-strip of the fuel tower, a pyramid on which the fuel prism rested. Braided tubes held energy the blue color of sulphur fire. Pink stars zipped through and fed tucked-away chambers.
“Quantum feedback loops … Do these only work in the Azura’s universe?”
“Haven’t seen ’em run,” Panca said.
Caiden stood. His grown heart raced, hardly big enough to contain this new excitement. Once the repairs were done, he would finally have his wings. “There’s a lot to fix.”
Panca smiled. “Let’s start.”
CHAPTER 20
SHARPENED
Hold still.” Spots of concentration bubbled over the bridge of Ksiñe’s nose. He gripped Caiden’s skull with a coppery-gloved hand, and maneuvered it at painful angles.
Caiden stopped fidgeting in the pilot’s seat. Dimples of air blossomed around his face while data arranged along those nodes to map his extended nervous system and coupled quantum states.
Every pilot required a neural implant for direct mental contact with ship controls, rather than the more difficult physical twitch drive. It would also bond his consciousness to the Azura’s functioning over time, entangling their mirror neurons, letting her learn his intentions and proclivities. For the implant, ultrasonics would create a nanostructure inside his pineal gland using local material— giving Ksiñe direct access to his brain, where one “accidental” slip could kill or impair him.
Ksiñe hadn’t softened up since Caiden put everyone’s lives in danger at the Den. Caiden needed forgiveness. The implant did double duty as it forced the medic to spend time with him; maybe long enough to bridge some conversation.
Ksiñe’s posture lost its keen edge, becoming elegant as he worked. The red eyeshine in his pupils was less ferocious and more surgical, focused. On his shoulder, his whipkin pet watched with big eyes and pert little ears.
Caiden cleared his throat. “How long have you had her?”
Ksiñe’s posture sharpened. Vexed scarlet freckles swarmed over his cheeks and neck. “Hold still, if you want to live.”
Caiden sighed and reminded himself that the Andalvian’s sour attitude had a valid source, just as Caiden’s anger had been born from slaughter. How many awful or closed-off or ignorant people were the result of a prior hardship for which they shouldn’t be blamed? And how many, like Leta, were simply misunderstood or struggled to connect?
Andalvian culture was stoic, yet they were expressive by biological nature. The dichotomy, as Ksiñe exemplified, often led to unhealthy repression. Although Ksiñe’s malevolence dimmed considerably in his native Andalvian language, now that Caiden could speak it.
Heat boiled in Caiden’s brain as Ksiñe began to maneuver laser sonic frequencies to build the implant.
One step closer to flying. Then I hunt Çydanza.
His consciousness foamed, thoughts indistinct, and a purr slithered from one ear to the other. Weird senses slipped through: the cold armrests, rogue infrared content in the overhead lights, Ksiñe smelling like plants and rain.
The whipkin crawled timidly into Caiden’s lap. Her furry body stretched long then bunched up round, with folds of extra skin piling around her. Caiden couldn’t move his head to look down, but he smiled and reached up to stroke her. She nipped once, and chittered, then rubbed her forehead into his palm.
“Done.” Ksiñe shoved Caiden’s head away. “Test now.”
Caiden nestled his skull into the headrest cradle. His brain expanded, knitting with the Azura’s data cloud at the edges. His proprioception expanded to include the ship’s hybrid musculature, its inner hums, and the glossy lightseep spine of it, which lay in his awareness like a lightning bolt dormant in clouds. “I can feel the perception control and memory structures.”
“Good.”
Ksiñe noticed that the whipkin had defected onto Caiden’s lap. Blue bands like hot flame slashed his temples. He kissed a sound between his teeth, and she scurried up to cower around his neck.
Caiden stifled a chuckle and peeled from the seat. His body was rubbery, but the new mental connection with the ship glowed strong. In the clouded cockpit windows he caught his reflection and the promised results of the accelerated years. Combat sparring and nutritious cooking had filled out his emaciation and remedied his clumsiness. His gangly limbs of fourteen had evened against his height, and with lean muscle padding him he appeared finely chiseled rather than carved out. His face was a clean shave, but his shoulder-length hair sprung from a lazy tie. The braids En made were impossible to replicate.
He glimpsed a stronger, more mature self, someone who could throttle his temper. Someone good enough to destroy the Casthen.
Someone who wouldn’t have left Leta alone in the transport.
Ksiñe said quietly, “Twenty months, ephemeris time.”
“Huh?”
“How old whipkin is. You asked.” Teal clouds wafted across Ksiñe’s collarbones, even as he looked away and fussily organized his tools back in a case. “I have had her since she was in egg.”
Caiden suppressed his smile. It seemed the pet’s approval was worth something. She wrestled out of Ksiñe’s shirt and circled his torso. Her webbed fingers gripped and her body flattened, smoothing out the white and indigo patterns in her fur.
“A forest species? Built to climb?”
“And glide and swim. From saline woodland.”
Her little nose sniffed in Caiden’s direction.
En strode abruptly through the shielding hollow’s milky membrane, clutching her chest. Several hues of blood streaked her. She grinned and sucked on a split lip. “Caused a bit of trouble selling the gloss. The Dynast is ravenous for it, have some special project going on that requires loads.”
Panca stalled her work nearby and headed for a roll of tools. It made sense that a mechanic would repair injuries to someone as augmented as En, but En scowled as she plonked down against a wall and opened her shirt, looking away. Her skin un-pigmented, and the inner mechanisms and materials opened up in petals or scales or dissolved entirely, to expose En’s beating heart and pulsing lungs in a vivid tangle of components.
Panca investigated. “The dilatant layer’s glitched again. Frustration?”
En’s lips tightened. She scraped at a streak of blood on her cheek and shrugged.
Caiden asked Ksiñe quietly, “What’s with En’s shift in mood?”
Ksiñe delivered a reliably unadorned answer, “They joined Laythan to figure out who they wanted to be, but now cannot patch things with Taitn or sit still with Panca, so make no progress. Multiverse is full of distractions. Fighting, flirting, and … En loves all the F’s. Distractions.”
Caiden watched the pair struggle. Panca probed a tiny awl into En’s mangled chest. “
Heart leaflets obstructed again. Holding in resentment.” She withdrew her tools and placed slender fingers over the blue bulge of En’s heart, focused in her sense-sea.
En flinched hard, jarring Panca away. “I can do without the leaflets. Just fix the mini-actuators, yeah?” She looked over at Caiden. “You getting any sleep? Those are some dark circles around your eyes, kid. You need rest to integrate the acceleration.”
Caiden had hardly slept at all, but he would have to face the nightmares at some point.
Soon.
He exhaled and turned to Ksiñe, trying to soften up an accusation that had been festering in the corner of his mind: “When you inspected my brain and makeup right before the memory jog … did you see I would have this side effect, that it would twist my synaptic firing and perseverate the event in dreams?”
The Andalvian’s eyeshine flashed as his gaze darted away. He stroked the whipkin’s back and didn’t answer.
About as good as a yes.
Caiden hesitated. Andalvian was a language of interweaved implications. He laced blame in where it was due, and said, “I’m sorry for what happened in the Den. The nightmares are why my fear is still raw and biting. They’ll remind me for the rest of my life that when the slaughter started, I hid and ran. I let everyone die, to save myself.”
Ksiñe moved brusquely, stowing his case in a wall compartment. “Running might have been best choice.”
“Nothing about my sister’s death is best,” Caiden snapped as some reflex jerked in him. It was the first time he’d called her sister, after learning what siblings were. The new label, by giving meaning to their relationship, made his heart ache a thousand times worse.
“Immoral choice can lead to morally positive gains.” Ksiñe scooped up the whipkin and petted her belly. Black frustration drained from his features. “Running made you stronger. What you do with strength matters and validates. Violence done to you is painful— transmute pain back into violence.”
Caiden recalled something Taitn had alluded to. “You have history with the Casthen, don’t you?”