by Essa Hansen
What a fearsome match you two would have been, Çydanza had said, wisdom and power together.
He tried to recall the girl’s voice, but it sieved through all the holes the incubation had made in his memory. His head was sand, blood, and teeth.
“Hey, daydreamer!” Threi patted his cheek. Caiden glowered back. “Eat, then we’ll get to more sparring. The incubation poured days of violence into you, and like Çydanza said, now you have to pour it back out. Sit down.”
They stopped in a large mess hall crowded with circular tables. Caiden sat slowly, every movement deliberate, shy of phantom pains. He’d used a scour, then dressed in compression gear and vibrational mesh to heal up the physical stress of the incubation. His Casthen armor fit over top, and fit better, curving along his lines instead of jabbing.
He eavesdropped on the crowd. Most Casthen were muttering about him, with refrains of “Paraborn” and “freckles.” It was easy enough to guess what story they’d put together: Threi finally recovered one of the lost Graven Paraborn kids. In passing murmurs they mocked how he wasn’t as strong or strange as they thought he’d be. The scientist groups unconcerned with Caiden discussed bigger problems: tourists had stirred the holobia and might’ve glimpsed what it was hiding. Casthen ships were chasing down the witnesses, fabricating a proper accident.
Threi’s crew of four sat down at the table, none of them appearing to be any one species. Silye sat next to him, herself too mixed to comprehend; spills of hair draped her, rippling pink to blue sheens as she turned.
“Yeh, size us up, pup,” scoffed the half-saavee, his musculature unusually gaunt and knobby. “I’m saavee ’n’ vhisilin, only one you’ll ev’r see.”
“Because it ain’t no good,” the chketin said, and roared a laugh.
“That’s Jet.” Threi introduced the stocky, dark-skinned chketin. He pointed to the saavee. “He’s Pinch. And the tal is Towa, she.”
Towa’s narrow body had a tal’s ruffled, smoky material layering her. A netting of rose-gold threads contained her morphic flesh around humanoid bones. Buoyant silver hair like cirrus clouds framed a hard face.
Pinch asked, “Yeh, ’n’ what is ’e?”
“He is half Threi,” Towa hissed. The saavee chortled and the chketin rumbled.
“I’m all me,” Caiden murmured. “Human.”
He felt a bit less human after the nightmares. More of a new, wild thing. He had been intimate with the nophek: tangled up with their bodies, flesh in their teeth, blood in their bellies. Maybe he’d devoured something about them, as well.
“Mostly human,” Threi replied, “highly Graven, and a bunch of other things you can’t see. His traits were micro-tuned: from metabolism to reaction time.”
“More than half Threi.” Towa sneered, baring sharp black teeth.
Threi waved a hand. “None of his Graven’s from me.Çy doesn’t use Dynast genetics. She has something she thinks is better.”
Not related to him— that’s a damn relief. Caiden met the tal’s dagger glare. But I’m clearly not Graven enough for these curs to like me. Except Silye.
He turned to her, and she swiveled, her cheeks grew pink, strange eyes stared, and she was a moth stuck in Caiden’s unintentional Graven web. He winced.
Threi winked. “You met Silye.”
“What are you?” he asked her, genuinely curious. Silye showed traits from the rarest xenids, which made it clear that she, like he, had been designed for an express purpose. Claircognizance, or something more.
She signed, I don’t know.
“His eyes’re goin’ one place,” Pinch jeered, and squinted diamond-shaped pupils at Caiden. “You grown that body up nice but not had time to use it, that it?”
“Not interested,” he said. Rage and lust weren’t the same fire. And now his rage boiled up in a place the nightmares had scooped out for it, a place where it could burn without catching the rest of him aflame. This was the control he had needed all along.
Pinch shrugged. “Well, she don’t make much sound, some people like that.”
Before Caiden could channel fire into fight at that remark, Silye whipped her arm out of her hair, unsheathing a flash of knife that she dug against Pinch’s armpit so fast he froze.
“Enough,” Threi said, volume raised, Graven-flexed. Silye wilted instantly at the order, her face cringing in shame. Pinch grumbled and curled back over his food.
Good for her. Caiden eased down but sank into a black mood. He wasn’t here to make friends, in the den of the enemy. He would find and chisel away the parts of him that were Casthen, and if there was anything that was solely him and not part of their machine, it would remain. Rock chiseled away— hopefully a diamond within.
Threi shoved a dish of food in front of him: tan cubes like the ration blocks of his homeworld. Hardly worth calling them food. They tasted chewy and bland, packed with salty mineral grains. He grimaced but ate as hunger won. What I would give for Ksiñe’s cooking now.
Shredded memories floated up. Snatches of detail he struggled to assemble. What had they eaten, that last meal? Treak, and some drink with spicy hisk. En’s laugh. The whipkin’s warm fur. Or was that all from before?
Caiden pulled the glass chicory flower from his pocket and squeezed its toothy lavender-blue petals. He frowned at his fist, trying to recall the color of Leta’s eyes.
The crew’s conversation at the table ceased. Jet snatched Caiden’s wrist and plucked up the flower before Caiden could close his fist again.
“Wha’s you hidin’?”
“Give it back.” Caiden swiped for it, but Jet dropped it into Threi’s waiting hand.
Caiden kept his palm extended and fixed Threi with a glare.
“Çy was right.” Threi turned the object in his fingertips. “You’re very sweet. See, slags? If he was half me he wouldn’t be half as soft.”
“Give it back,” Caiden repeated calmly.
“You have to fight to keep things here,” Threi said, and handed the flower to Towa.
Caiden curled closed his extended hand and held his spine straight.
It was time to pour out the eight days of violence dumped into him.
“Fight me for it.” He met Towa’s loathing gaze. The barklike substance of the tal’s body bristled with emotion, captured by the ring threads that circumscribed her all over.
The mood shifted in the Casthen mess hall. Sound roared as tables were dragged to create a clear space for the fight. A diverse crowd gathered around the edge, clotting into a din of voices: crowing and clicks, great bellows, hisses.
Caiden took up a defensive stance. Combat styles he’d trained with En branched out in his mind, alongside the sparkling instinct he’d gained from days of fending off nophek attacks.
Towa rushed in a blink. Fast— all kicks. Caiden’s blocks and dodges were a dance of preemptive instinct. He caught her leg with his augmented arm and pulled her to him in a takedown. Her back smacked the floor, but she whipped upright in a heartbeat. Caiden jabbed at her throat, missed, and was rewarded with a smack to his temple.
He staggered. His fire was loose— he could move, hit, control— and finally the fight was all real. Towa tried to hook one of his legs but he gripped her shoulders and pulled her into his rising knee, connecting with her windpipe. She gurgled and stumbled back. He landed a kick in the side of her face through a swirl of silver hair.
Caiden panted madly. A smile plastered his face.
The crowd— the room— roared with energy. Towa spit blood and closed the distance. Caiden grabbed her neck with his aug hand and tackled her forward. Her back hit the floor with a satisfying slap. She choked, blood foaming at her lips. Her knees dug into his back, trying to get a hold to roll him, but he was heavier, a steady, towering, sharpened rush of fire cresting like a wave and he had to move. He pummeled her sticky face, pushing silver streaks of hair into red. Her skull rebounded on the floor. Crack! A solid, juicy echo of each punch.
A shout or three needled through
the blood-rush roaring in Caiden’s ears. He wrapped his blue-muscled aug forearm around Towa’s windpipe as he curled against her back. She gurgled, black fangs bared, arms scrabbling.
Her morphic flesh slimmed and she twisted, joints dislocating to squeeze a shoulder through his hold and slam an elbow at his head. Stars exploded behind Caiden’s eyes. Towa laid into him, snapping his aug wrist and fracturing ribs. Pain and pain, like the stones of a cairn burying him. He was still conscious but a darkness pulped his vision. He grappled blind, rolling Towa so he was on top of her but she easily threw him. A kick landed above his ear, and the pain shoveled in, burying him.
“Enough!” Threi shouted. The audience was a mess of shouts and slaps, half-elated and half-outraged— their mush of sounds in Caiden’s ears died down in the wake of Threi’s shout. “He’s had enough. He’s just got out of that hellish nightmare, for crimes’ sake.”
The dark peeled away as Caiden’s pupils dilated, and his panting finally subsided like a tempest moved on, whisked away by some other wind.
Towa hacked blood beside him. Her weird eyes glared brightly, black around irises of concentric rings. She backed away, peeling no-longer buoyant hair off her bloodied face. Her ruffled material stressed against the thread netting.
Threi looked pleased. “I’d say the nightmares sharpened him up.”
Dripping sweat, Caiden crawled to his feet, still infused with the rush, the vigor, twice as alive as before. Guilt tried to stick in him when he saw Towa’s face, but he’d lost, and he had two choices here in the den of the enemy: dominate or be bullied.
Threi held his hand out to Towa. “Give it here. He’s earned a consolation prize for effort.”
Towa twitched, hesitating. Frustration carved a sneer in Threi’s face as he rounded on the tal, inches away, voice heavy with command. “Everything that’s yours is mine. I said, give it here.”
Towa resisted for a beat, her body ruffling, face tight as she tasted Threi’s breath so close. But the Graven resonance— or whatever it was— invaded her spirit with proximity. Her pupil rings constricted together and her expression smoothed to obeisance. She handed him the glass chicory flower before stalking away. Threi turned and dropped it into Caiden’s bloody palm.
The gathered Casthen’s cheers stuffed Caiden’s ears. Their previous refrain that he wasn’t as strong or strange as they thought was replaced with hollers of support. Threi clapped him on the back and said, “Rest up, fight more, eat. In a few days it’ll be time to anneal this blade you’ve become.”
CHAPTER 34
HARVEST
Caiden rested, woke, sparred— the same for days. His opponents were skittish, the nightmares were boring, the pain familiar, and ration blocks bland. Caiden’s fire pent up more and more. His complaints to Threi about all the delays were met with apathy, and Caiden wondered if the man was stalling for ulterior reasons. Or just trying to get Caiden feeling integrated in the Casthen routine.
The rumors about him settled down, replaced with fresher gossip: a new scientist had been assigned too high a security clearance, there was another external disturbance to the holobia requiring destructive measures, and one universe blister was too small for what the biology unit wanted to test.
Finally, Threi was ready.
“In here.” Threi crossed a darkly churning rind. His voice dissolved until Caiden followed through. “— a good little soldier if you want to pass for my probationer. Plus nightmares aren’t quite like the real thing.”
On the other side was a warehouse lit only by the rind, with aisles of stacked cages. Caiden slowed to peer through the mess of tubes that infiltrated each. Small beasts huddled inside. One gave a weak snarl, revealing sharp, pearly jaws: the miniature of Caiden’s dreams.
“Nophek.”
“From RM28. The passagers were raiding gloss from the mature nophek, while us Casthen focused on gathering up pups. These won’t live long outside a compatible universe— thus the chemicals— but we’ve located a suitable host planet elsewhere, to start the operation all over.”
“Start over?” Caiden’s feet stuck in place. “You’re serious.”
Threi peered in. “Aren’t they cute?”
“Threi. To start over—”
“You didn’t think Çydanza would stop, did you? She wriggled out of guilt. No one can stop her but us. There’s a freighter here stuffed with purchased convicts and dregs, ready to be processed then bound for a planet of green grass and juicy, fast-growing livestock.”
“How long do we have until they’re processed?” Caiden leaned to the cage. The sickly nophek startled inside, rammed the front, and snapped its salivating jaws. Caiden flinched.
Threi laughed and continued down the aisle. “The workers will be processed in twenty ephemeris days or so.”
“Slaves,” Caiden shouted at Threi’s back, stopping him. “Call them what they are. Don’t dress up the Casthen’s actions in apologetic language. Give it the weight it deserves.”
Threi’s always-ready smile stayed, but wrinkles curdled over the bridge of his nose. “Yet you don’t apply the same weight to yourself, soldier.”
Threi pivoted and carried on.
The young nophek in the cage convulsed on its side, snapping its mouth between each whimper. Its eyes were little moons in the dark. All around, a thousand moons in five hundred faces. The pups would be planted on another forsaken planet, as children like him had been; both humans and nophek used like cogs in a machine to produce the end result of the gloss.
At a door by the end of the aisle, Threi put his hand on a genetic code panel. “We’ve bred out a few fecund females and now they’re ready to harvest. The Dynast is impatient for delivery.”
“Did the Dynast buy all the gloss from the operation? What are they using it for?”
A tendon in Threi’s temple pinched. “Research. They use gloss’s high energy potential to power Graven technology and bioresearch.”
“What’s the part you’re not telling me?”
“I’m not obligated to share anything I don’t think will benefit me. Here.” Threi handed him a diamond blade.
Caiden stepped in and froze. Small reddish lumps— neonatal nophek pups— bobbed in fluid-filled cubes. Their tiny bodies were infiltrated with milky feeding tubes and intravenous fluids, though it seemed impossible that anyone could find a vein in a creature so small.
In the next room, three adult nophek stood in metal contraptions that squeezed their bodies in place, and their heads sat in vises screwed to bony ridges in their skulls. Blood dripped around their wild eyes, down their wavy manes to the floor.
“They’re in pain.” Caiden tensed. It didn’t feel real, after seeing so many of the beasts in his nightmares. They were slightly smaller in the waking world.
“They’re on painkillers,” Threi replied. “Gloss matures with the nophek and is only present in adults, but mature nophek become more resistant to sedatives and too wild to handle. That’s why so little is known about their species. Our research is mostly limited to glossless pups.”
Caiden approached the thing of his nightmares. Teeth two inches long. The jaws that had torn Leta’s lungs from her rib cage. The reek of metallic blood filled his head and he remembered the taste of it, how slippery it was coagulated. Caiden tightened his grip on the knife, ticking it against his thigh.
“Why knives?” he whispered, and regretted his shaky question the moment it left his tongue.
Threi leaned in, inches away from Caiden’s cheek with his own blood-and-lily scent, pausing to prolong discomfort. “Because knives are intimate. You need to be present with your thrashing fear, the stench of it, the slick of teeth. Fear needs to be wrestled with. If I thought you could harvest with your bare hands, I’d give you no weapon at all.”
“I did.” He’d grasped upper and lower jaws in his fingers, looked down the serrated pink flesh of the throat. Then he’d pulled, and rent the skull. “In a dream.”
“Good. Just use the damn kn
ife.” Threi strolled to one nophek and plunged his blade into the top of its skull. It shrieked, shrill and grating, blood spattering from its gaping mouth. The beast thrashed against clanging restraints.
The sounds drummed up terror still fresh in Caiden’s bones from the nightmares. The scent kicked his mind into a panic that he fought to restrain. This was different from the nightmares. This had meaning, it wasn’t going to reset, they weren’t phantom beasts. They lived.
Threi gripped his knife handle with both hands and pushed it back to the beast’s nape. “Shove it to the hilt. That’ll break up the liquid crystal matrices of the growing fluid.” He pulled it out and slammed it down to one side, making a crosscut, then he gripped the opening with both hands and thrust open the four parts of the skull. Pink and white brain matter jiggled inside. Threi dug his fingers in and fished around, emerging with the gloss orb.
“Your turn.” Threi beamed and walked to a basin on the opposite wall.
Caiden stared at the dead nophek’s gaping skull. Fourteen years old, he’d covered himself in that violet fluid, pleading that something would save him from the horror.
“Intimate, huh.” He measured his voice, each syllable a stitch keeping him together.
Threi chuckled and washed the gloss until it gleamed with inner colors, its structure perfectly clear. He dropped it in a containment box of coded light. “Knives are more fun than a laser.”
Caiden stepped to one of the beasts. Their unique blood scent sliced over his tongue as he breathed. His mind’s eye filled with flashes of biting jaws, his body crowded with phantom pains of countless teeth. The knife quivered, but it wasn’t fear that stalled him. His fear had dried up in the desert.
He pitied them. Hungry, captive creatures.
This nophek’s eyes were white pools filled with the same terror that had consumed him as he wormed his way beneath the desert rock, pissing himself, sure he was going to die.
“Winn.” Threi stood behind him.
Caiden raised the blade. This gets me closer to ending their oppression for good. This is how I kill Çydanza. Someone forgive me …