by Essa Hansen
“You’d still be the closest anyone has come to ending her. Trust me, I’ve tried, searched, struggled for years.”
He recalled the murky research, genetic data, and strange sensory devices in Threi’s room. All in an attempt to survive the memory flood?
Eager, almost breathless, Threi pressed on. “There might not be another person like you in this whole damned multiverse, ever. Young, wronged, uniquely haunted, and full of temper. You’re a magnificent cocktail of hate, Winn, and this is your chance at revenge, once and for all.”
Exhaustion clawed Caiden to the floor. He sat and slipped his legs over the roof’s edge, peering down the dazzling height.
I would be suffering to ensure the liberation of many.
Countless small universes glowed with resplendent color across the landscape. Inside them, a host of captured lives grew, were tended, harvested, sold. The sentient ones might not even know they could be more. There were easily several hundred rinds bisecting the planet’s surface, filled with unknown treasures and terrors.
Caiden flicked his augmented thumb against the blue Casthen mask’s inner edge, fraying its crystalline laminate. Ksiñe had warned him that a blade could be sharpened until there was no material left. But if he came out the other side intact, he would be stronger than ever before, ready to live a free life. Absolutely free.
He’d need to survive the desert again. And again.
And he’d need to find his footing among the Casthen. The more he fit in, the better.
Caiden rose to his feet and fastened the Casthen mask over his face, combing his hair around the magnetic buckles. “Once we’re in and her memory flood is exhausted … how do we kill Çydanza?”
Threi grinned. “The Azura’s rind.”
“Vishkant physiology is incompatible with it? What, we just throw her at it? How can you be sure that—” Ice shot up Caiden’s spine. “How many vishkant did you torture in different rinds to deduce which kind will destroy their physiology?”
Threi’s smile lingered. He shrugged apathetically and folded his arms.
The man was violent, powerful, and deeply disturbed. And Caiden’s only option.
CHAPTER 32
DREAMS
Several days of waiting and “soon” passed while Threi set up the incubation system he had planned. Caiden spent the time sequestered in the probationer sector, hatefully participating in Casthen things: combat drills and sparring, lectures, economic overview, flight sims, bland meals.
Every time he slept, exhausted, in his aerator-like Casthen quarters, the nightmares crept up from his past, making him impatient to get the whole ordeal over with.
Now as Caiden stood looking down on the coffin that would trap him in horror for two hundred ephemeris hours, he wasn’t concerned about terror or pain.
He worried about the trust it meant.
He could be trapped forever in nightmare. Threi had access to the Azura.
“What did you say this place was for?” he asked. “Biological computing?”
Threi’s whole body flexed to haul the generator crate farther out into the aisle. The warehouse stretched tall and wide into darkness. These containers were stacked like huge rectangular drawers— big enough to fit most xenids— in rows and columns, the shelves infinite along interconnected halls. The entire mass hummed, amplifying into a sickening din of dissonant tones.
“You won’t like the answer,” Threi said.
“When have I liked any of your answers?”
A memory sprung at him: Laythan’s voice, When do I ever like your plans? Then Taitn had flown straight into the core of a star.
Caiden’s heart tripped. The crew was freed of their Graven-induced obligation to him now. They could go on with their lives not snared in his. How long would it take them to forget, with his Graven face out of sight?
He hugged his bare arms as shivers set in. He was stripped to underclothes, skin stuck with nodes and viny wires. The cracked-open container was a tank of photonic liquid, crowded nano-organisms, power manifolds. A machine within a machine within a machine: that was all the Casthen was.
Threi replied, “The N-Sector Servicer sustains living systems and utilizes them. Depending on species, this might be biocomputing, testing physiology, or harnessing psychosomatic states. A versatile biohijacking network.” Threi straightened and frowned, peering down the aisle. “Once we can hack in and make modifications, we can keep you in a sustained delta brain wave state, while maintaining your bodily functions. Ah— here’s the girl.”
A short, human-looking young woman emerged from the darkness, with little pin lights dotting her Casthen armor. Caiden recalled the smaller member of Threi’s entourage in the Den, holding the bag of re-collected gloss. Her blue mask was strapped across one shoulder. Over her minimal Casthen armor and clothing, floor-length hair spilled and braided elaborately around her body. Hair that long and thick was a mauya trait— the strands more like axons— but she had animal eyes like an Andalvian, huge pink-white pupils nestled in black, reflecting light. When she bowed, her falling hair changed color: the pleochroic strands were silvery cream with casts of pink, lavender, azure, and shadow, shifting by viewing angle. That feature wasn’t mauya. Neither was her short stature, barely up to Caiden’s shoulder— mauya were tall and wispy. What creature had the Casthen made?
“Hack it, Silye, and make sure you account for his hybrid biology, I don’t want him brain-dead or paralyzed.”
Caiden winced. “Cheery thought.”
Threi handed Silye a tablet. She took it, signing to him with her fingers, Yes, Prime, and Caiden raised an eyebrow. Threi’s acceleration-bleached skin actually showed a blush. The man curled back over his holosplay and fussed with wiring he’d torn out of the container.
Silye pursed lips that were the color of a bruise, and pulled up a projected garden of code hovering over the tablet. The rings on her birdlike fingers let her prune, transplant, and sow. She paused once to sign to Threi; The stabilizers … offline but connect … separate? The words in the middle, Caiden didn’t know.
Had they bred out her voice? Or a biological compromise, to gain some other mutation? If fostered ignorance was slavery, if a whittling of function was servitude … even one’s own genes could enslave them. The gravity of the idea sank Caiden as he watched the mauya-hybrid pluck at code, her strange eyes flicking rapidly, engineered mind at work. The Casthen didn’t just enslave people, they created people enslaved by their own biology. A sort of thralldom that determined— unalterably— the ability to heal, the regulation of hormones and chemicals, neurology, drive, intelligence, procreation.
Mutilation, pre-womb.
“Get inside,” Threi said.
The tank liquid was bright blue and purple, a riot of bioluminescent movement. Caiden stepped in, swarmed with tingles. Careful of the gossamer wires dangling off his body, he folded himself awkwardly inside. Vibrations organized particles in the liquid into shifting geometric patterns. Submerged up to his neck, he shivered.
Silye nodded at her screen as she rotated the projected code structure, then handed the tablet to Threi. He pushed it back into her hands. “You’re going to stay and monitor him for the eight ephemeris days.”
“What if something happens?” Caiden asked.
“You’ll be fine. Right, Silye? Tell us.” Threi faced her intently.
She swiveled, her eyes flicked up to meet Threi’s Graven blues, and the change was clear: her bright pupils dilated in a black sclera, her lips parted in adoring awe. The rise and fall of her chest stopped and the tightness in her expression softened around her eyes as she stared.
She was completely entrained by his Graven wishes, and Threi was a spider casually oblivious to the moth he constantly caught.
Silye signed, Survive— yes.
“See?” Threi wagged a hand in the air. “Silye is claircognizant, she knows truths spontaneously, intuitively.”
That’s what they bred her for. Caiden gripped the edges of th
e tank.
Silye added, Emerge the same— no.
Threi shrugged. “He’ll come out better than he went in. Let’s start the clock ticking.”
“What do you mea—” Threi planted a hand on Caiden’s skull and shoved him down.
The fluid grew heavy then solid, snagging his limbs as he thrashed upright. A bubble of air formed around his face. He gasped. With his eyes open, the congealed liquid was too brilliant and frantic to see, so he closed his eyes again and tried to relax.
Numbness turned to hypersensitivity. The wires that attached at the surface of his skin started to burrow beneath, scouring raw nerves, snaking through his bloodstream. Caiden shrieked into the air bubble. His body flinched at the sensory chaos of temperature and touch, his ragged panting itching his ears, pulsing red searing his skull. A vise squished his brain until sleep clobbered him hard.
Darkness, warm.
A low vibration split into harmonics and became needles of frequency, perforating him with stings of pressure. His consciousness dilated. Sparkles multiplied into stars into grains into sand and Caiden was returned to the desert of death.
All the bravado he’d prepared vanished.
He sprinted from a nophek. His boots pounded sand. Behind him, the beast’s hot breath tickled his heels but he was fourteen and couldn’t run any faster. When it leapt onto his back, his small arms couldn’t push it off. Its foreleg was as thick as his torso, which it crushed into the sand. Air rattled out of Caiden’s little lungs.
The nophek’s wet mane coiled over Caiden’s neck and cheeks as it bore down and ground his face into the desert. Teeth filled his vision. They clamped his shoulder: perforating skin, meat, snapping bone. Saliva sizzled like acid.
Mouth agape, he squeaked. If only the beast’s weight would suffocate him away from the pain.
Suffocate.
He flailed out of the dream, into a clogging darkness. The impression of every razor tooth stuck in him. The crunching repeated, on and on until the darkness vibrated into the roar of the stuffed transport.
This time, he was a tall, muscular fighter of twenty. He held a glave in his hand and joined the deluge of bodies spilling out. He fired through the crowd, piercing nophek vitals but still failing to save. His people were rent to shreds. A nophek slammed Caiden’s back, squeezing him between desert and claws. He shoved the glave in the beast’s chin and shot up, spewing brains and rainbow fluid.
This isn’t real. It’s just a test. The glave shook in his hand, but this time, he wouldn’t run.
In front of him, his father stumbled and hit the ground, face engulfed by teeth that crunched through cheekbone. Caiden screamed and shot over and over, but the teeth had already punctured brain. He jerked his head from the sight, only to see his mother pulled apart by two nophek. Her shriek peeled a layer off his soul.
This isn’t real. Caiden fired the glave, sending blinding beams through the monster’s flesh.
More nophek charged.
Thirty paces away stood Leta, ten years old and bawling. Fleeing adults knocked her to the ground. Boots smashed her neck as she wailed. Just as Çydanza had said.
“No!” Caiden screamed, and sprinted to her as a nophek plowed toward the easy meal.
The glave clicked when he fired. Out of fuel. Glistening teeth like a hundred daggers bit Leta’s chest whole. Caiden rammed his augmented fist straight through the nophek’s skull. Spasming, he gathered up his sister’s gruesome body. Limbs draped over his arm like a waterfall of blood. The scarlet seeped, spreading as it only could in a dream, until the entire desert lay red.
Caiden closed his eyes. Let me die like I should have then. Just meat, in the end.
The darkness chewed up his misery and spit it out anew. In this dream, countless footprints stamped the sand red. Thirty muscular nophek circled him. Nostrils fluttering. Eyes flashing. Their hideous appearances weren’t surprising anymore. He even had a little sympathy. Hungry things.
One squealed and lunged, biting Caiden’s leg from behind. His severed hamstring whipped back, shooting jolts of pain. He bellowed and fell forward, cueing the pack to pounce. He curled his arms around his head, bit his sleeve to keep from screeching as jaws ripped chunks from him, splintered bone, uncoiled organs. He let them eat. The pain consumed him.
He became nothingness once every bit of him was swallowed. The darkness spit him back out into more savagery, which chewed him up anew.
Caiden tumbled down a dune and fell on his face. His limbs were asleep, too heavy to wield.
A pack of nophek charged for the kill.
“Free meal, pups.” His voice was as rough as Çydanza’s, broken by a cackle that he couldn’t stop. It was humorous, being eaten so many times. Crunched and torn and gulped. A nophek’s coarse mane grazed his face, hot breath dewing his cheek with saliva. It yawned, mouth lined with the sharpest pearls and a huge serrated tongue.
Darkness. One nightmare made him Casthen, in armor, ushering his own child self into the transport box.
“Everyone will be provided for,” he promised hundreds.
And then he was the little boy in utter darkness alone.
When forever was over, he dreamed again, and was lucid. He picked what moment he started in the slaughter, and threw his energy into all the choices he might have made.
Leaving Leta and fleeing with his parents— both killed twenty meters from the door.
Convincing his parents to stay in the transport too— the nophek rush in for trapped prey.
Taking Leta with him as he runs— she can’t keep up, and gets trampled by the crowd.
Shoving Leta under the rock instead— the nophek dig her out after they eat him.
Caiden tried everything different. Each outcome was immeasurably worse than him surviving with shame.
His imagination grew as exhausted as he, unable to conjure fresh nightmare scenarios. The meaning peeled off, washed clean, inert: a test he’d passed over and over.
The darkness chewed him up and spit him out to a nightmare that was tame. Caiden walked from the transport while being smacked by the stampede. He craned his neck to the top, fifty meters tall.
Tuning the screams from his ears, he scaled the cube’s girders and pipes. He sat on the edge and watched the slaughter. His heart set a calm pace, his breathing long and slow. The wind grazed him, warm and ionized. The horizon was a bright ribbon, buttoned by stars. He smiled experimentally. His mind had exhausted the horror of his youth. It became funny, everything he’d been through. The absurdity of the ordeal. Something no one should survive once, much less so many times. He laughed, and couldn’t stop.
The tank he lay in cracked open.
Brilliance speared every cell and chopped up the dark. Caiden was hauled out of fluid, hacking and crumpled, dropped onto frigid metal. He lay whittled down, muscle carved tight on wobbly bones, all of him wrung out and re-sopped and wrung until he’d become a wretched, starving creature.
A chketin’s enormous hands clamped his upper arms and lifted him clean off the ground, dangling like a doll. Someone stabbed at his chest with strangely colored fluids in pen cylinders. Reddish hues fanned beneath his skin.
The chketin’s fat fingers uncurled, and Caiden fell.
“Easy, Jet!” a familiar voice barked. “Back off, slags!”
Bare hands grazed Caiden’s torso. He flew into motion on reflex, crushing his fist into something bony. A throb of afterimage mobbed his vision. His augmented hand grasped a soft thing and he flung it away, then he shuffled back and blinked hot tears. Breath, pulse, thoughts all churned, failing to assemble a sense of this new darkness.
The chketin’s boisterous laughter filled the room. A couple other Casthen mocked him in languages he was too exhausted to parse.
“Hey.” Threi reached out. Caiden scrabbled him away with shaking hands, but Threi’s fingers locked around Caiden’s wrists and hauled him to his feet. “Hey! You made it. You’re out.”
Fight instincts surged up. Caiden flick
ed his wrists down and around, throwing off Threi’s hands, following up with a jab that caught a white cheek. Threi stumbled back, clutching his face and covering half his smile.
“Still spirited, our soldier.” Threi chuckled. “A little more Casthen than before. Bring him along, Sil.”
Caiden panted madly. No sand here. This darkness was wild and hostile.
Silye slipped her hand in his and pulled him with the group. Black flowers bloomed across her cheek: he’d punched her. She had been the soft thing he flung away.
Caiden stared at that bruise as they walked, and a shadow coiled in him.
Threi said, “You’ve been dreaming for eight straight days. Let’s get you nourished and settled. You can finally meet your new family.”
Starving. He croaked out a chuckle. He’d been nophek food for days. Strange— now the food was hungry.
CHAPTER 33
BORN AND BRED
He followed Threi’s crew through the facility past labs conducting obscene research, training halls with soldiers sparring, and all the while he witnessed casual discrimination in the corridors, but his anger didn’t flare like it used to. His new self had walls thick enough to contain all his fire, and finally, even as the teeth of injustice bit him, he could choose whether to swing a fist or wait.
“You watch yer back ’n’ sides when the boss’s not lookin’,” said the dark, mauve-skinned chketin. They bent to rumble hot, musky words in Caiden’s ear. “All the freckles in the world won’t keep yer little bones from snappin’.”
The words wafted harmlessly over him. How many beasts had he faced down?
He was numbed from days and days of brutality, and wondered if the same numbness would have grown if he’d lived and trained in the Harvest since infancy. The Casthen’s garden would have sprouted him into a choking vine, flowerless and cruel. A boy who hadn’t grown up with Leta’s wise lessons.