by Essa Hansen
“We need gloss,” Towa hissed, her gaze flicking to track the nophek’s every twitch. “A heart of gold won’t impress Çydanza.”
“I’m not afraid of her.”
“You should be,” Threi replied delicately. “I am impressed, but you need a reason— a good one— to keep this nophek alive.”
The monster purred against Caiden’s palm. He looked over and smiled wider. Despite everything he still had to overcome, this felt like a victory: his first true connection in this wretched place. And proof that his memories didn’t control him anymore.
Compassion wasn’t a strategy within the Casthen machine. He needed reasoning that increased Casthen profit. Swallowing butterflies, he thought fast and said, “Research on nophek has been limited because adults are volatile, powerful, and resistant to sedatives, and there are few universes where any of them survive long. Isn’t that why you devoted a whole environment to this one?”
And why none of his ghastly ingrown equipment had been tended to. Caiden patted the monster’s rippling shoulder: he growled low again and leaned into Caiden. “Now look. A chance to study a mature one in detail. Maybe there’s something about their maturation that makes them incompatible with so many universes … If we figure it out, you might not need one rare planet in a billion in order to cultivate gloss.”
Threi crossed his arms and inhaled slowly.
“Threi,” Towa warned.
The man flipped a hand to shut her up. “Fair. I can convince Çydanza to be lenient. The gloss order is due in eight ephemeris days, and that’s probably as long as the nophek will live outside the universe it was in. You have that long to convince us that the nophek is more valuable alive than the value of the gloss in its brain.”
“You’re allowing this?” Towa yelled.
Threi kept a generous distance from the nophek, but beamed with pride. “For now. He’s done what no one else has managed, all this time. A mature nophek’s energetic physiology is different from a pup’s; he might have a point about their survivability.”
“You’ve gone soft.” Towa backed up at Threi’s vicious glare, then flinched as the nophek’s jaws snapped.
“And you’ve gotten a little too sharp.” Threi held his glare and turned to her intently. He drew himself straighter, spine curling at his neck, eyes glittering with that distant look he got when he tried to summon more of his Graven influence.
Towa’s hard jealousy melted into obeisance. The constant motion of her tal’s body material calmed into a drape.
Graven cur.
The nophek growled too. Caiden patted him. He would reoutfit the beast, adjust the chemicals, add painkillers. Caiden would give back the second chance he’d been given by Laythan’s crew, even if that care had been Graven-bought.
He would give life, not take it.
Caiden worked tirelessly, energized by a straightforward task. He shed the Casthen armor and wore soft trousers and a shirt. His morphcoat turned to a breezy plaited silk. The mechanical know-how from his childhood mapped easily onto his newer bioscience knowledge, and he whisked around the Casthen lab doing the work of a whole team alone.
Almost alone. Silye was the only one not terrified of the nophek.
He cleaned out the final abscess, the nophek growled low, and Caiden chuckled. “Last one, big guy.” He patted the nophek’s rump. “Silye, test this one too. Please.”
He reached over with a pus sample in a dish. She rushed from the lab desks. Her long hair wrapped her body in sheaves and braids, tied or clipped out of the way over her clothing.
“Syringe, please.”
He didn’t need the please. It didn’t soften the Graven blow. Didn’t dull his shame. Silye jumped at his every command, and glanced over often to anticipate his needs, and stared adoringly when he gave her attention. Caiden accepted the syringe with a thank-you and a smile— softening those blows however he could. Silye blinked each time, as if politeness confused her.
He turned back to the nophek and drew another blood sample, then collected the drip-filled vial of cerebrospinal fluid. For days he’d moved methodically, gathering test tissue and fluids and tending to wounds in the same sweep. The beast was compliant through a mix of a fatigue, chemicals, and the universe parameters gradually breaking down his body. Caiden hurried.
Silye tapped her chest and reached out. Caiden nodded and handed her the samples for processing. Now: they wait.
He stretched, cracked his back, and rubbed tired eyes. Humming vigor pooled in him once his momentum stopped.
The weary, heavily drugged nophek lifted his muscular neck and pressed his wide forehead into Caiden’s chest— head so big it dwarfed him. Caiden’s mind stopped. He closed his eyes and leaned in too, wrapping his arms around the monster’s head and feeling the weight of the gloss: that pit of raw energy pressuring against his heart. Exhausted calm poured into him. And deep respect: decades had grown this power in the nophek’s brain, spark by spark, crystalline particles aligning in quantum glitches built by the flowing of time.
“You’re tired like me,” he murmured. The nophek’s exhale fluttered hot against Caiden’s chest. He bent over that big head and scratched his fingers into the maned neck, careful of stitches and bandages. “I encountered a little one, once— was that yours? I did wrong by it. Somehow, despite all the visions of nophek eating me, I can’t get over seeing that baby dying.” He turned his cheek, downy fur grazing it, an earthy scent beneath the sting of chemicals. “Let me do better.”
The nophek shoved Caiden away playfully, his force massive despite weariness. He shook gently— aware of the tubes and patches— before settling on his front paws. He wheezed a soft breath and flattened, claws as long as Caiden’s fingers splaying on the lab’s white floor.
Glass jingled against the pack of vials around the nophek’s neck: Caiden had strung the chicory flower there. Hopefully he could keep the good part of his heart alive, one good choice at a time.
Caiden smiled. Çydanza couldn’t use the horror of the nophek against him— not being shipped to them, not his family dying in their jaws, not his own death. The nophek weren’t at fault for his suffering. Çydanza was responsible for the enslavement of them both.
He had to be ready to face her, make her accountable.
Soon.
Caiden sat, leaning against the nophek’s side. He pulled up a holosplay to finish collating the data they’d collected. It was promising.
His stomach grumbled. He’d been sleeping in the labs, but still had to expedition to the mess hall for food. Rumors sprang up about him and the nophek each time he was seen, but otherwise the facility gossip shifted on like seasons: the young scientist had been reassigned and not seen again, the security fleet destroyed another tether-pod someone sent through the Casthen’s impenetrable universe rind to try to gather data about the inside, and one of the Enforcers was missing in Unity. Towa had glared at Caiden and hissed, “All these problems since he got here.”
Thankfully, he’d dealt with Threi’s crew less while in the lab.
Silye glided between machines and surfaces, engrossed in her tasks.
“Take a break,” Caiden called, before he realized it wouldn’t reach her as a friendly suggestion, but as a command. Her pale eyelashes fluttered as she swirled around and drifted over in his gravity.
He shut up. Whether it was through symmetry, pheromones, cosmic alignment, or some inexplicable quantum entanglement— every word he ever spoke would be Graven whether he wished it or not. And every charmed word carved her will into submission.
She found a seat to “take a break” on, sitting obediently, and Caiden flushed with shame.
How much of her world revolved around Threi’s silver tongue and Graven face? No wonder the man was so messed up, accustomed to his will cutting through life like a hot blade through tallow.
“How long have you been here?”
She gestured two fingers in a circle: Always.
Caiden’s heart chipped. She hadn’t s
eemed unhappy, just aloof and focused. Caiden had been happy as a mechanic, fixated by routine, calmed by order and knowing exactly what his job was. He hadn’t known better.
“What do you do here?”
Her slender fingers flicked. Help the Prime.
Caiden frowned and sat upright, closing his holosplay. “Threi. Have you always been by his side?”
She tapped yes.
“Is he a father to you or a …” A lover. The idea saddened him before he could ask. There was no such thing as consent, with someone as Graven as Threi and as susceptible as Silye. Or with me, the same kind of monster …
Her appearance was strange and alluring, and Caiden had glimpsed, in his short stroll through Emporia’s red district, more than enough fetishization of the unusual.
Silye shook her head at both.
“Does he keep you isolated? What do you like to do?”
Her bruise-dark lips twitched, half a smile, and she sprang from her seat to walk over. Silye sat on her heels in front of Caiden. He noticed for the first time the white stubs jutting from her shoulder blades and along her spine, pushing through her voluminous hair. They were undeveloped bony angles with plush, petal-like material curling white against her back. Mutated mauya wings.
A holosplay sprung over her gloved fingers. Light laced the dimpled air as she fanned through a server database with a hacker’s speed, eventually settling on a dump of media listed by name and type. She leaned toward him with it, to answer his question, and scrolled slowly.
Footage of distant places, travel logs, entertainment shows, things not Casthen.
Caiden’s heart chipped more. “You like stories, reading and seeing things?”
She nodded and closed the holosplay. Her soft gaze sought across his face before meeting his eyes and instantly dashing away.
Like Leta. Maybe simple discomfort in Silye’s case, but in Leta’s, abuse had punished eye contact. On one bad day, six-year-old Leta had arrived on his doorstep late. Her bruises were nothing new, but she was cold from the walk, and cold from the ice her parents had used to minimize the visibility of their scorn. He wrapped her up in blankets and hugs, and held her convulsions until the temperature equalized.
“I won’t pass Appraisal,” she said.
She’d been set up to fail.
Caiden squeezed her tighter and replied, “The overseers know everything about us, they can see what we’re meant for. You’ll have a task that’s perfect for you, and you’re perfect for it. It’s all right to struggle, you’ll get through.”
Back then, he had believed in the Casthen system.
Silye had no visible signs of harm except the faint purple on her cheek where Caiden had hit her in his nightmare daze. He burned to apologize, reach out, fix— but who knew what Graven touch did to someone so sensitive.
He steeled himself and asked the hard question. Perhaps his Graven voice would be useful for once, and demand truth. “Does anyone hurt you? Make you do things you don’t want to?”
Silye shook her head and patted the knife hidden against her hip. She signed, Too valuable. He keeps me safe.
Caiden sighed relief. But something still didn’t fit. Threi didn’t act like she was a companion. Was she a mere assistant, an obedient body to fetch things and answer questions with claircognizance?
“Do you ever visit the kind of places that are in your media?”
Not allowed.
“You were with Threi in the Cartographers’ Den, weren’t you? And Emporia? He hasn’t taken you anywhere else, like planets?”
She signed, I am useful enough for some missions. Too expensive to risk on others.
It hit Caiden like a punch. “Useful enough,” nine crimes.
“Can you speak?”
Silye shook her head and signed— power— tapped her throat and made an explosive motion with her fingers. She opened her mouth, small pearls and pale gums, and a jaggedly cut stub where her tongue had once been.
Caiden flushed with an anger that was webbed in sorrow. “Threi did that to you?”
She shrugged.
“This isn’t a matter to shrug about, Sil. Are you … happy here?”
She blinked as if the word “happy” were new.
“Crimes, Silye,” he cursed, and dropped his forehead into his hands. “You can even see what you’re missing. You deserve better.”
Caiden’s shame fissured deeper. Whether Silye understood or agreed with the morality of all her actions, there was no question her loyalty was involuntary. He’d thought that no one could be part of the Casthen machine and not willfully buy into the immorality of it, but Casthen adherents could be oblivious to the harm of their work. A will-less ignorance— like Caiden in his childhood— good hearts turned to bad deeds because of a narrowing of their worldview and beliefs. Leta-vishkant had tried to tell him as much: Judge individuals as individual: there’s too much variety in the multiverse for broad statements to ever serve us well.
He pushed to his feet to stride to the lab holosplays. This was the Casthen’s main lab, which housed all biological studies and a complete genetic-engineering database. He dug around, and it took a while to link up names with numbers. Nothing was a name to Çydanza— everything was defined by numeral.
Paraborn. Caiden ran into his own brood files first, blatant by the red flag: MISSING. He didn’t know which number he was out of the twenty that had become slaves due to one numeral of error. But they were all the same mosaic makeup in slightly different weightings, constructed around one unwavering Graven factor that was simply named “the dominant”— all details security-encoded at the highest level. The overall cocktail of genetics was too complex for Caiden to memorize, and his throat seized up at the sight. He offloaded the data to his personal database for later, and combed back to Silye’s records.
She’d been bred with a mash-up of traits that amplified her response to Graven control. Human, mauya, some sopheids and syncrasids. Some people believed that the Graven once designed or conditioned certain species to respond even more strongly to the entanglement, in order to evoke loyalty from those beings on a genetic basis. Silye was all of this sort, predisposed to love Graven things even more than other species. The perfect companion for Threi.
Acceleration chamber. Graven research. Prototype sensory-blocking devices. Genetic engineering. Threi’s Dynast affiliations … Had she been created as a test subject for something?
“Silye, does Threi—”
The door opened and Threi strode into the lab, stopping abruptly to take in the scene— Caiden and Silye and nophek. “Time’s up.”
CHAPTER 36
APPRAISAL
As he and Threi descended to the rind of Çydanza’s universe, Caiden fastened the blue Casthen mask over his face. He never imagined it would be a comfort, but facelessness felt secure.
Towa hung back in the control atrium above, inputting commands to clear the rind for viewing.
Caiden wrapped an arm around the nophek’s neck, petting a nervous rhythm. Mercy was his decision, and now he had the data to back it up. He glanced at Threi, who didn’t meet his gaze but betrayed a stitch of worry. A crinkle in his perfect brow.
The resplendent rind threw reflections across Caiden’s mask in lurid splashes and waves. Çydanza materialized from vapor to flesh. Her pale billows congealed into a womanly shape, long blond hair and cerulean eyes, an angular, unmotherly face. Fitted white lace clothed the vishkant’s body. Caiden’s hatred electrified at the sight of her, but he could lash it down now instead of lashing out.
The nophek growled against Caiden’s arm wrapping his neck.
Çydanza’s lips curled in a hollow smile. “I sometimes admire and even delight in disobedience, when it produces a gainful outcome I didn’t perceive, or reveals an effective trait in one of my Casthen. So, explain your findings to me, Probationer.”
Compassion wasn’t an “effective trait” to her. Caiden straightened and nodded to Threi to pipe the data into Çydanza’s world
. “Have a look. I mapped how the gloss development changes the nophek’s neurochemical system and morphology through adolescence. Without a specific universal parameter, the gloss poisons them as it develops, and then corrodes the gem upon their death. My data, with more comparisons and live tests, using the Casthen Harvest’s variety of universes, might result in either a regimen of treatments through different growth phases to counterbalance the environmental conflict, or lead to a plan of migration between universes. You’ll be able to broaden the possibility of where the nophek can survive— or even thrive— based on their age. A sort of pasture-rotation system, but with universes.” Caiden’s words sped, his two days of concerted effort rushing out. “And there’s evidence, in living brain tissue this old, that clarient— incorporeal sopheids, merged with quantum consciousness— might actually be the parasite responsible for triggering gland crystallization in adolescence. As it grows, they expire, leaving behind luminiferous catalyst energy. If this is true, there could be a way to cultivate gloss in vitro.” Without harming animals.
Caiden was panting lightly by the time he’d finished his defense. His nophek watched Çydanza with analgesic-dulled but feral eyes, brilliant pupils thinned to slits. He head-butted Caiden and tensed. Caiden pressed his palm against the nophek’s chest.
Çydanza’s smile twitched. She watched him for a long moment, then looked over what he’d done to the nophek: patched wounds and humanely fitted chemical packs. Silye had even helped him bathe the monster, whose coat was satin-soft and rich reddish-black without the mud.
“What a fascinating proposal.” Çydanza stepped inches from the rind. “How special you are, soldier-scientist; come closer.”
Had enough time passed to push his recent memories into her range of perception? The deal with Threi, the nightmare incubation, the whole plan …
Caiden stepped near, pruning his thoughts, focusing on how black her pupils were in the ocean of her irises. There was something dead in her eyes and she didn’t appear quite as real as the vishkant in Emporia had. Because of lack of pheromones, with the rind separating them?