by Essa Hansen
Caiden’s frenzied breathing was the only sound as he watched the maw gaining, wider, mucus gleaming. He twisted around and grappled with the tether line, climbing hand-over-hand and hoping his augmented strength could haul him away faster than he could be swallowed.
The Azura pitched up to head back to the egress. Caiden was flung around. The holobia’s body whipped out and gases jetted from its side. In a burst of speed, it lurched, mouth gaping on all sides of Caiden. The saliva sheets pummeled him. His cloudsuit condensed back to a second skin but wasn’t thick enough to armor him from the slap of the mucus membranes or the shock of sound as it roared back, inner atmosphere surging around him.
He balled up and bulleted through as something sucked him deeper into the holobia’s throat. He struck a tissue wall, bounced off, spun. He flailed out, grabbed something, but it slicked through his fingers. Glowing, fleshy pink fronds surrounded him as he was pulled deeper in. The space was cavernous and bioluminescent but he couldn’t tell if he was seeing the inside of a body or a bizarre jungle. Screeches ripped his ears, something gurgled, the rush of blood flow or waterfall. Caiden gulped air in the tight little pocket of his suit and tried to find footing and handholds as objects rushed past. He was slapped by frilled cilia as long as trees, indigo mucus smearing against him.
Then whoosh.
Hot pressure dug between his shoulder blades. The tether wrenched him away. At terrible speed he hurtled out of the gullet back through the throat, barraged by a mayhem of colors and impacts and howling tones. He zoomed through the mouth of the thing and pounded through saliva curtains. Sounds cut off as he reentered the vacuum. His cloudsuit burst into its puffed form, which threw off all the mucus shit on him.
The Azura glinted into view.
“Finally, you bastard,” Caiden whimpered.
The holobia’s mouth still gaped, its enormous body unrolled in space, but the Azura’s speed pulled Caiden away. The ship arced toward the ring of the stellar egress, swinging weary Caiden along behind.
The ship dived into the black pit of the egress, and Caiden was too damn exhausted to panic as he passed through next, chewed up and wrung out. Every cell of him felt separated from the next, attached by tenuous electricity, and there was a beat of blissful time that felt eternal, as if he were back in the heart of that star, the eye of a plasma storm. The world was white and void, and a gentle oblivion swallowed his worries. He thought he had a name for this place, but couldn’t grasp it among the strange whispers grazing his soul. Voices of dead loved ones kissed his mind.
Then he was snapped out the other side of the egress, smothered by space and time and a new gravity— at least he wasn’t in the luminous jungle belly of a colossal monster, covered in juices and saliva.
In the new universe, Threi cut the engines. Caiden kept drifting toward the illuminated bay. Threi gathered up the slack of the tether and hauled him in through the atmoseal. The scalar gravity inside draped over Caiden like a blanket of velvet force that instantly said, You’re safe.
“Nice job being so tantalizing,” Threi said. “But maybe tone it down next time.”
The cloudsuit fizzed and glitched as it struggled to manage Caiden’s heat and sweat, his temper flaring as he ripped at the harness buckles and tether and clawed himself free of the suit, then rolled on his back. “Bastard,” he exhaled. “You did that for fun, didn’t you?”
“Actually no, the holobia’s never been that aggressive before. Usually it rouses and drifts away a bit and we fly through when the egress is exposed. Maybe the Azura’s crystal is like some kind of candy to the thing. See anything cool inside?”
Caiden glared and pushed up. His morphcoat thinned to an airy silk, and his body steamed. Bruises ached all over. “That’s why no one’s found the Casthen Harvest?”
Threi signaled the bay doors closed and the atmoseal off. “Not just the holobia. The stellar egress we just went through is like a trapdoor to get into this universe, which has a rind that’s impassible to all electronics, ships, mechanics, most species. The only way in is the egress we went through.”
Caiden dragged fingers through his drenched hair and wobbled over to the cockpit. Starry space filled the view in all directions. There was one small, languid star nearby. No planets. No station. “How far away is the Casthen Harvest in this universe?”
“It’s right in front of us.”
CHAPTER 30
HOME
It’s right in front of us?” Caiden gave Threi a scathing look. He squeezed self-consciously at bruises swelling up everywhere, sweat clinging his shirt to his body, and a smell— the holobia’s cloying saliva. “Is my surprise that entertaining for you? I’m fresh out of patience, slaver.”
Threi ambled up beside Caiden in the cockpit and thrust a hand into the foggy light of the idling drive guides. Bright lines twined around his fingers and he flew the ship forward, conducting motion with only one hand. How many years of piloting had he accelerated for that level of skill? And delicacy: Threi’s slim fingers twisted and hyperextended to bring the Azura’s nose up to a fist-sized hunk of quartz floating in space, so small and transparent it would easily go unseen.
Threi said, “The Graven left keyholes all over the multiverse. It took us a while to realize that’s what they were, longer to rebuild the rest of the door, and the longest to figure out the key.” He pulled a complicated little device out of a pocket and raised it in the air. “The key is song.”
Threi inputted code into the device. Nothing changed in the normal range of Caiden’s senses but he felt instantly unsettled. Prickling, like a frequency a little too high or low to hear, like eyes watching your back or the sense of a loved one on their way home.
The crystal out in space turned solid white.
It sang, just like the Azura did when she flew: a weave of vibrations, a tapestry of tones, telling a story in words that Caiden’s body tried to convince him he understood. Perhaps it was the Graven part of him that resonated.
Across uncountable kilometers out in space, more crystals became visible as they responded to the first. In the middle of this array, a transparent structure emerged.
It was lightseep obsidian, phasing from another dimension into reality. This Graven ruin stretched thousands of times larger than Emporia, as if space itself had hardened into a labyrinth jewel. So vast, it even encompassed the languid little star closest to them. Threi guided the ship along the side of the structure, shifting the viewing angle to reveal more vertices and iridescent lines sliding like a glass blade from a sheath of space itself.
“A hollow fortress, I like to think,” Threi said. He headed the Azura inside. Translucent walls folded in around them, refracting starlight, making a maze of space.
Caiden said, “It doesn’t look like Emporia.”
“This lightseep’s less physical, more like a distortion of space than a material surface. Whoever the Graven were, they discovered how to manipulate matter and energy in ways even the Dynast still can’t comprehend. Lightseep exists on multiple planes at once, and at an absolute-zero-type phase, it practically doesn’t exist. The Casthen Harvest is buried here inside. Without the key bringing this whole area to the perceivable plane, we could have flown right through and never known it existed.”
Caiden gaped as more gorgeous surfaces slid past. The holobia, the song key, the hidden lightseep fortress— he would have never found this place alone. I made the right decision. I’m where I need to be.
Even Threi had a gentle, admiring gleam in his eye as he marveled out the window. “Abriss would kill for this, to know something like this exists.”
“Why don’t you tell her? You two are acquainted.”
The gentleness burned out of Threi’s eyes. “I don’t sell things for free.”
“What were you handing off, in Emporia?”
“Merchandise. We have a lot of that here.” Threi gestured out the windows.
Within a hollow of the vast “fortress,” and at the edge of the star-sun�
�s habitable orbit, lay a misshapen planet clad in megastructure, knobby like a hand gripping a green-and-purple orb. Small universes of various size blistered the sunny side like dewdrops of strange light, most scooping into the planet itself, some hovering just above it. Vast troughs of greenery crisscrossed through lavender dust. Scaffolding structures jutted out of the ground and skewered the many universes with walkways and tunnels.
“Welcome home, Winn of Casthen.”
Caiden flushed and bit back his retort— Threi was a bully, rewarded by response. Instead, Caiden said coolly, “I didn’t know a planet could be covered in so many universes.”
“That’s because there’s no other planet like this in all the charted multiverse. Those universes are different climates, micro-differences in physics, and the planet in a habitable zone and tidally locked. The megastructure is ours that we built on, but the planet … I suspect the Graven created all those little universes somehow, some testing ground. If a ship like yours can create a world, we now know they’re not just an emergent phenomenon, they can be controlled.”
“And the Casthen repurposed these universes. Keeping slaves and animals? Growing materials to sell?”
Threi snorted. “It’s not all bad. We rehabilitate the endangered, reverse extinction, develop, cultivate. Good things happen here. Casthen are the matchmakers of the multiverse. Environment to species. Product to consumer.”
“Misery to innocents.”
“That’s because Çydanza isn’t one of the good things here.” The ship entered atmosphere. Heat roared. The Azura’s metals sang as the engines switched to planetside flight and Threi cruised to the dark side of the planet. “ Çydanza is completely isolated. She never sees the real physical or emotional impact of her choices. She plays economic operations like they’re games, just data, earnings, and progress on a screen. Not people, not physical goods— just numbers, ratios, and percentages she can move.”
Caiden still wondered if she was real. “How can she have that much power if she never leaves?”
“You’ll understand soon.”
Soon. Caiden folded his arms to buckle down the urge to punch.
They glided low over a medley of universes like different styles of garden. Some lush, others spare. One caught his eye: crystalline water, knotted trees, bluish sand.
Like his picture in the aerator.
His mother’s voice, close by his ear in the roar of the transport; Soon. Imagine where we could be going. Green, do you think?
He’d suggested, Maybe the place everyone gets retired to?
Maybe …
It was here. A snapshot lie of a place no slave would ever go.
Now Caiden was twenty, but so little time had passed since the eternity that was that transport ride, he was still waiting for it to be over. For the promise of soon. For his mother to come and get him and say, “It’s time now, Caiden, let’s go.”
His vision glazed and Threi’s voice mashed up in his ears.
“Now,” Threi said, “ Çydanza thinks I’m acquiring the ship for Casthen operations. I’ll introduce you as my probationer. She’ll enjoy that. Always tells me I don’t care about things. Now I’ve picked up a stray. Quite softhearted, I am.”
The megastructure on the dark side of the planet was encrusted with lights in a web of lines and circles. Threi slowed on approach to a bright, circular building nestled into the structure’s crust like a knot in wood. Green and gold hues rippled on the facility’s pleochroic surface as the ship moved by.
“Enforcers’ pad. Remember, not a squeak to anyone. No one here is a friend.”
“Right. You’re not.” Caiden checked his two glaves and other hidden weapons.
An iris folded open in the facility’s ceiling, and Threi descended to settle the ship on a parking pad. He peeled from the seat and cracked his neck, then nodded to the bay doors. “Open ’em.”
Caiden obliged, the back panels unfolded, and a score of Casthen swarmed in. Caiden whipped up his glave, but twenty glaves pointed at him.
Threi marched ahead. A scratchiness in the Azura’s idle energy— Caiden sensed through the link— smoothed out once Threi left the bay. Curious.
“Cool it,” Threi said to the group, “this is my new probationer.” The crowd parted around him. Here, the man wielded a dual blade of Graven presence and rank-based loyalty, but among a people so mixed, his effect had to be unreliable. Caiden noted the man’s shift in physical bearing, the way he threw his energy around.
Threi wagged a hand at Caiden and led the way into a dark passage.
Caiden’s neural link with the Azura severed as he walked out of range. A muggy sluggishness settled in his brain instead, and after a while he realized the origin of his rising unease: this place was home.
At least in appearance it was. The walls were familiar manifolds of lattice, panel, and piping: the inside of a giant machine, the familiar gills and ports and rivets from his childhood. The grate floor sang with every step, wafting up heat and a moist, sulphurous scent identical to the aerators. Doors and halls were marked in the same stenciled script that had labeled the dusters of Caiden’s home planet. The large warehouses they passed through were models of the huge pasture compounds.
The world he’d grown up in was Casthen through and through.
Threi navigated a labyrinth of self-similar passageways, finally unlocking the entrance to an indoor greenhouse: the ceiling was all golden, milky light, and the ground was an inch of water thick with rootlets, from which sprang a field of spidery white lilies. Threi led the way across a flowerless strip of floor to a single glass-walled room in the greenhouse’s heart.
“My room,” he said.
Caiden hugged his arms. Odd and suspicious, intimate, being led straight to the man’s private space. Candescence reflected off petals, filling the greenhouse with a glow. Sweet, waxy fragrance laced the air. Caiden said, “I didn’t take you for someone who liked pretty things.”
“If you stop to think about it, you know nothing about me at all.” Threi hauled open the glass door and flourished his hand to invite Caiden inside.
A messy bed, a blue coverlet, several desks littered with gadgets and chemistry, cases of paper books, a large projected holosplay, a scour, a large mirror, and— bright copper, filling up all of one corner— a biodata chamber for acceleration.
Caiden took it all in and realized he really did know nothing about this man. “This is the part where you tell me our murder plan.”
“Not quite. You’ll need to meet Çydanza and be approved for probation. Don’t worry. She likes feisty.” Threi’s smile returned, stretching the corner of his eyes. “Scour and change into uniform. I’ll come get you soon.”
Soon. “Uniform?”
“You need to play the part.” Threi shoved at him a bundle of mismatched armor like random pieces restitched together off a machine. And the mask, metallic blue and faceless.
A lump swelled in Caiden’s throat.
Casthen through and through.
Threi pushed the door open. And smiled. “Stay put.”
The man was gone for hours, long enough for Caiden to thoroughly snoop. Threi’s possessions were impersonal and his databases vast. He had collated all of the Casthen’s research on Graven ruins and biotechnology, and stored an old backup of the Dynast’s data about the same. Nearly all of it was past a security wall Caiden couldn’t hack.
The acceleration chamber also functioned for desenescence— reverse aging— and had been used a recorded total of eighty-nine times. The tinkering on his desks were all sensory-blocking prototypes and Graven research. The paper books were Dynast fables, philosophical treatises, and first-contact records of various species. He felt he knew even less of Threi than before.
Caiden sheathed himself in full Casthen armor. He gripped the mask. The outer side was the color of a bluebird, riddled with white scratches, minimally contoured. Thin slits slashed eyes and nostrils, perforations over the mouth. The inside was mirrorlike wi
th a pleochroism that waved between orange and purple as he raised it to his face, meeting his distorted reflection.
He expected it to be dark, with only the eye slits to see through, but inside, the mask turned translucent to his vision.
“I’m one of them. A cur,” he said, listening to his voice both muffled and amplified in his own ears. One of their voices.
I can endure and pretend. He laughed. All his life he’d pretended. A mechanic, he thought, but really just a slave. Or worse: a mis-shipped child soldier, pretending to be a slave.
The leathery underlayers were skintight, stretching as he moved. The armor plates clung and added considerable weight. When the glass door of Threi’s room opened, he swiveled— then stumbled to catch his momentum, his limbs grating together as the plates jabbed him. Just when he’d gotten used to his new body, it was ill-fitting once again.
Standing just outside, Threi wore the same armor and mask. “You look good,” the bastard said.
“Shut up.”
“It suits you— the anger and the mask. Come, Çydanza waits.” Threi stepped away from the door with a bow.
“How are you going to stop me from killing her the moment I’m there?”
“Oh, you’ll see.”
The mask hid Caiden’s snarl. All his decisions led here. Now he would see what Threi had been so secretive about. Çydanza, the creature who built his misery, owned him, enslaved him; the orchestrator of the end of his world.
Out in the sterile megastructure, the other Casthen gave way as Caiden and Threi passed through. Some wore the uniform armor and others were dressed in prim outfits that evoked an air of research.
A set of scans led up stairs to an atrium filled with holosplays and monitoring equipment, where Threi inputted commands. He shoved his mask to the top of his head, pulling back messy hair. His skin was flawlessly smooth, pallid, and matte; not shiny like a newborn, not waxy like the dead. The mix of freshly reborn and long-deceased gave the accel chamber in his room more meaning. A man of haste.