by Essa Hansen
Ksiñe’s scarlet eyeshine fixed into a glow as he stared. “You will learn to be vicious to survive. Multiverse has many tastes, and chews us up differently depending on species. Andalvians are a game to some; a thing to break and make our skin show pain, grief, arousal, shame. I broke into something so sharp no one dared touch me.” The whipkin burrowed into his jacket. He hugged her, and his skin blanched. A tiny snarl wrinkled the bridge of his nose. “Casthen slaughtered and I slaughtered them all back, but they are too immense to stop forever.”
Caiden said, “I’ll be even sharper. The nightmares are sharpening me into a blade, a trowel that can dig up the Casthen’s deep roots for good. I’ll figure out how to get to the Casthen Harvest and to Çydanza. The Cartographers or Dynast must know.”
His aim sounded childish and the logic had holes, but the breadth of choice in a multiverse so vast paralyzed him whenever he tried to think about what else to do with his life. Justice was simple, straightforward, and good.
Ksiñe petted the whipkin’s back as she flattened against his chest. “Each time a blade is sharpened, material is lost. Sharpen too many times and there is nothing left. It becomes thin and brittle, easy to break.”
“Then I’d better sharpen up fast.” Caiden rose to his feet. He probed the new neural link with the ship, which glowed warm and strong. “These wings are patched up. It’s time I learned to fly.”
“Winn!” En called across the bay. “Not a great time to ask about flight. Laythan’s trying to rush his new ship’s— the Second Wind’s— configurations to get us far away while also potentially exploding, and Taitn is arguing for an initial test run of crossover and egress. Let their dust settle and blood cool for a bit.”
Panca was still repairing, and chastised En. “You let the biomineralization get beat to pulp, it’ll need replacement code. Is this where Taitn—”
“Don’t.” En untangled and stood, rushing to close up the machinery of her chest and rebuckle her clothing. Huffing, she turned to Caiden. “I have somewhere I want to take you before we leave.”
“Where?” Caiden asked, suspicious.
“Oh, it’s better to be shown. Trust me.”
“Tell me plainly, or I refuse.”
She grinned. “Laythan thinks you need control, I think you need release. Taitn thinks you should go slow, I say you should hit something. Your altruism is admirable, kid, but it comes with a temper you need to get a handle on, and you need to realize that not all memories have to haunt us.”
Caiden’s nightmares weren’t just memories but all permutations of the event, as if his mind struggled to freshen the horror each time. He narrowed his eyes and scratched at his morphcoat’s feathers.
“Come on.” En strode over with a bounce back in her step, and offered a hand. “Need to get you cleaned up first for this, your hair looks horrendous.”
CHAPTER 21
LETA
Fidgety and unsure whether to be intrigued or terrified, Caiden tousled his freshly cut hair— a couple inches long on top, cropped shorter down the sides— and ran a hand over his jaw and the shadow of facial hair.
A vibrant red navigation thread twined the air, leading him and En into cramped and intimate hallways. There was less lightseep obsidian visible here, where the Graven bones of Emporia filled in with the muscle of shops, bars, and sport rings.
“We’re meeting a friend of mine,” En said as he stopped in front of a nondescript door. “These are private quarters, not working. Well— sometimes working. But not today. Anyway, there are words you need to hear and things you need to say. So, whatever or whoever you need, that’s what’s here.”
“Your vagueness isn’t boosting my faith in your intentions.”
En softened with a smile that was new: delicate and genuine, without the coy edge. “I keep my stories and try to grow from them. The right reflections at the right time did wonders. Maybe they’ll do the same for you.”
A tender look still on his face, En placed his hand on the door’s surface. A red glow frothed around it, shooting off particles of information.
“Daylight?” said a female voice from within, projected by the door.
“I brought him, lovely,” En said.
The door opened, Caiden dithered, and En shoved him forward.
In the middle of the mostly empty room stood— levitated?— a fair, lavender figure. The shape was vaguely human, composed of diaphanous gauze like countless layers of spider-web veils draped over a porous, transparent skeleton.
It was a vishkant, a mnemonid, like the one he’d seen in the Cartographers’ Den, the creature that had changed appearance as his mind began to see familiar things in their features, conforming to his thoughts and desires.
Vishkant were powerful. Often predatory.
“All right. Play nice.” En smiled, backed up, and signaled the door closed.
Caiden smacked into it as he turned to follow. He patted the surface. “En? Hey!” He turned to the vishkant, apologetic. “I should—”
As his gaze moved over them, they grew more solid, their gossamer cloud condensing into an undecided human shape.
Caiden frowned and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, I have to … t-to go.”
Vishkant could perceive memories and mental activity. This one’s vapor form flickered like static while Caiden’s thoughts flailed, reflecting his discomfort.
“You’re safe here,” they said in a feminine voice at once familiar and strange. “Relax.”
Caiden had more than enough of his memories every time he slept, he didn’t need them in the flesh. He pressed his back against the door. “I’m sorry if En promised you something. I really … should go …”
Her face was a blur of various pretty features as she stared at him, into him in a way that was both hypnotic and disconcerting. Her body solidified, dewy gauze slicked into skin and a simple tunic dress.
“You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?” Her voice grew sweet and quiet like a shy voice he’d heard before. “Relax, Caiden.”
“My name’s …” His voice diminished until he couldn’t hear it over the roar of his bloodstream as the vishkant’s face settled. Large hazel eyes in thoughtful features. Flower-pink lips. Fawn-brown hair rolled over her shoulders, bleached from sun and disheveled as if straight from a breeze.
She was Leta, but somewhere around Caiden’s age of twenty.
“I— I …” Caiden stammered as she walked up, inches from him. “But I left—”
“I know.” The girl’s features crumpled in a frown, her lip quivered, and she wrapped her arms around him, fitting softly against his chest. “You were always so sweet to me, Cai.”
It really was her voice. Airy, tranquil. She smelled of sweetgrass, clover, and wildflowers. She squeezed him harder— solid and real.
“You survived?” Caiden buckled, wrapping his arms around her. Her warmth seeped into him and he was instantly back in a sunlit field, home, where the air was sweet and nothing demanded of him. A lump lodged in his throat but he managed to say, “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t blame yourself for what happened. You’ve been through so much and haven’t stopped running since that day. Please stop here with me for a moment, I promise you’re safe.” She nuzzled his shoulder.
Caiden’s misery cracked open, flooding the canyon that relief gouged into him. He tilted his forehead into her hair and held her tighter, but this wasn’t the Leta of his memories. Like him, she was older, taller, composed, and he had abandoned child Leta to the stench and the darkness, the beasts and their insatiable hunger. He’d run, never the hero she’d thought he was.
“I need to leave,” he whispered. “I’m very sorry. But this is … You’re not her.”
Leta is dead.
His body felt poorly built again, ravaged by the thundering of shoved-in years and compacted adolescent emotions. Had he been brought here just to feel miserable at the reality of his failure? Leta could not have survived, and even if she had, she’d b
e impossible to find in this vast multiverse. The very nature of freedom threw her far from reach.
“It wasn’t your fault.” She looked up and disarmed him, her eyes so warm. Her appearance was pruned by his thoughts, accentuating features of the compassionate and analytic Leta he knew when she was happy alone with him, rather than the shelled-off and abuse-tender girl he’d comforted so often. “Nothing that happened was your doing. Your bravery made me feel brave.”
Brave to sit and wait for death. Caiden wanted to pour apologies into her. His mind burgeoned with nightmare scenes. “I’m sorry.” He pushed her away. The void between filled with cool air.
“Don’t be.” She smiled, sunshine. “You don’t ever need to be sorry for what was done to you. You’re still as wonderful as always. I can see how soft your heart really is under all that temper. Revenge isn’t the answer, it doesn’t suit you.”
Those little sparks of denial lit the inferno of Caiden’s temper. “Everyone is trying to talk me out of justice, as if it’s so simple to move past slaughter.”
Before him stood the memory of a precious life snuffed out. His righteous rage, which everyone was trying to extinguish, was exactly the determined fire that could destroy the Casthen. Over centuries, no one else had done it.
“I’ll make revenge suit me. I can make sure no one else loses as much as we lost. I survived, plagued with remembrance, so I can do this one immense thing.”
Leta shook her head. “You’re taking responsibility for events that weren’t your fault. The nophek operation, the genocide, the side effects of the memory jog. Caiden …” She hugged him fiercely, fitting her sunny warmth against his frustration. He didn’t pry her off but wasn’t sure what to do with his arms, and his head filled with the scent of sweetgrass. Voice muffled against his coat, she said, “You don’t have to let go of your reasons for wanting justice. Those are what make you who you are, the person I loved. But you have to start forgiving yourself for the things that are out of your control. No one expects you to be infallible and indestructible so quickly. You are spirited and kindhearted and self-sacrificing, and that is so much more powerful.”
The pressure of her embrace and the salve of her words wrung Caiden’s temper dry. He crushed her close. She knew everything, even what he wouldn’t admit, but it didn’t change the mountain of struggle ahead. His eyes teared, and he let the sobs find their course, and Leta pulled his wrist back with her as she uncurled from his arms. Behind her stretched a plush bed the color of clouds.
“Rest,” Leta whispered. “No one from your old life would want to see you always in pain for their sake. You deserve care too. And how are you going to help anyone if you push yourself till you break?”
Laboring under the heft of Leta’s wise words, Caiden sat on the bed. She settled next to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, snuggling into his side. If he was to be thrashed with nightmares all his life, at least he could be balmed by one sweet, healing, affirming cloud of a dream for a moment.
“Memories or not,” he said, weary, “I know your nature lets you understand. Thank you for that.”
The vishkant’s eyes twinkled as she gazed across him, observing the invisible. “Endirion won me out of a life of service. I’ve owed him since, and I’m so happy that favor was you. And of everything your thoughts might have evoked from your past, I’m glad it’s someone you missed.”
An electric shiver ran through him. He fell back on the bed and rolled on his side. Leta bunched in his arms and pressed her forehead against his collarbones, releasing a whimpering sigh. Caiden inhaled the sweetgrass scent of her hair and imagined, guiltily, that things hadn’t changed, they had lived on, family unbroken. Orchard grass and leafy alfalfa swayed around them in ripples, purple flower heads bobbing in the breeze. Spicy fragrances baked off a sunny oak shading them, and Caiden’s worries were mundane and few.
Mind raw from grief and stuffed with warm visions, Caiden didn’t have nightmares as he fell asleep with Leta’s living weight in his arms. When he finally woke, he felt rested for the first time since the desert. Dim light bathed him. The bed radiated heat. His aged body was untangled of tense knots and growing pains, and every sense of not quite being his own.
The vishkant lay beside him in a neutral state: a velvety cloud, face vague through a thousand particle veils. Caiden reached for her gauzy shoulder in fascination and touched cool air before she turned and his hand buried into waves of solid, fawn-colored hair. Chicory flowers scattered in the curls.
Caiden raised his hand to stop her. “You don’t have to change. I know you’re you, not … not the girl in my memories. And I want to thank you. You, not … Do you know what I mean?”
Idiot. He growled out a sigh.
“I know.” She chuckled. “But you need her.” The vishkant’s diaphanous folds waved over her transparent skeleton to clothe it in Leta’s body, dressed in the creamy tunic with a chicory-blue sash. She smiled sunlight. “And I’m young, I can’t always choose what I become.”
Caiden took her hand, at first featherlight and downy before his memories coaxed it solid. A vishkant’s appearance was partly an individual hallucination elicited by pheromone, and a reflex on the part of the vishkant, molding their molecular constitution. “Can you tell me about your kind?”
Leta giggled. “You’re wondering if I’m real or illusion. They’re identical. Your brain fires the same way whether you’re remembering an event or living through it the first time.”
“Can you see all of my memories?”
“Young vishkant can only see recent memory and thoughts. As we age, we lose that ability but can see the deeper past. We are very fragile, yet almost impossible to destroy. We are shy and insecure but suited to commanding others. Coveted and dreaded.”
“You’re another species this multiverse conspires to exploit because of your abilities. The sort of slavery I want to end.”
“Judge individuals as individual: there’s too much variety in the multiverse for broad statements to ever serve us well. This multiverse also has goodness— like you and Endirion Day.”
She sat up and circled her thumb over her palm, spinning a purple-blue hue that hardened into a glassy replica of a chicory flower. She handed it to him. “I recognize the wonderful side of you. Anger abrades it, but also polishes: the true, shining core of you, Caiden.”
The flower was perfectly detailed, down to the serration on the petal edges and the white tips on its inner rays.
“Would Leta forgive me for running, if she’d lived? I wasn’t wonderful then—”
“But you can be now.” She smoothed out the hair by his temples, pasted by dried tears. “Your choices don’t have to stem from what happened in the desert. You’re not the boy who ran.”
CHAPTER 22
FLIGHT
His steps were lighter as he made his way back through Emporia toward the lift concourse. He’d been gone a few ephemeris hours, hopefully long enough for Laythan and Taitn to have settled their argument about whether to leave Unity quickly or first do a test flight with the new ship, the Second Wind. If Taitn could show Caiden the basics of the Azura, he could fly alongside them on the test cruise— perfect.
Trekking back, he soaked in the diversity of Emporia. Projections filled lightseep walls with artistic holo-renditions of nebulae and kelp forests and snowy peaks. Landscapes blurred in and out of phase or one into the other as his viewing angle changed. The variety of realistic biomes amazed him, while also reminding him of all the experiences he had grown up without.
He followed the navigation threads while dodging the larger or stranger xenid types. He was now able to spot semi-corporeal xenids like sopheids, nareids, and syncrasids.
Caiden entered the vast concourse painted in waterfalls. The crowd flowed about their business— but in one spot, it eddied. People turned to look the same direction, some stopped, uneasy, others slowed their pace.
Caiden almost missed it: striding away from the concourse to follow the
Dynast’s copper navigation thread … dressed all in fitted black clothing, without Casthen armor, marched Threi.
The bastard’s face was unmistakable: too pale and perfect like a portrait blanked and redrawn too many times, and his thick, short hair was mussed into dark snarls.
Something was slung over Threi’s shoulder, handled like property. A child? A slave? The body was hooded, a few trickles of hair spilling out.
Dizzy fire lapped in Caiden’s breast, burning up the softness Leta had left there.
More of the crowd around Threi snagged and took notice as he passed by. Given how he’d affected Cartographer Sina with his suggestions— albeit with difficulty— he had to be fairly Graven, and those he passed were snared in a much smaller wave of the same awe that the Dynast Prime had evoked.
Nausea heaved in Caiden’s belly and his morphcoat bristled into quills. How quickly his good mood and clear thinking muddled. He wasn’t the impulsive child who would have fought Threi head-on, but maybe if he followed, he could see what Threi was up to. He picked a safe distance and followed the Casthen Enforcer. It couldn’t hurt to see where that copper thread led, or why Threi wasn’t wearing any armor.
The smoky quartz corridor to the Dynast’s district was teeming with Dynast sentinels. They bristled at Threi’s passing, polarizing toward him before their shoulders relaxed— some bowed— heads swiveling to trace him until he’d gone. Caiden used their distraction to slip by with other xenids, walking with purpose and using lightseep columns to shield himself from view. This was still public space, and he was breaking no rules, but his racing pulse choked him, heat turned to sweat. If he’d left his hair twenty inches long, he might’ve had a better disguise.
Threi turned through a doorway. Caiden hung back for a beat, then followed.
Straight into a palace.
A massive space one kilometer across hollowed out Emporia’s lightseep ruins. Where the rest of Emporia’s lightseep was simple: hexagonally walled hollows, straight columns, angular joins, and big flat facades … this space had fluted columns and daises and stairs and archways puzzled together like masterfully cut jewels. On every surface in every direction, the lightseep obsidian’s colors slithered between translucent and solid, light-filled or shadow-soaked, tricking the eye with reflective angles and invisible alignments.