Nophek Gloss

  Çydanza extended a pale hand and dipped it into the rind. It blurred and dissimulated but emerged whole on the other side, inches from Caiden’s face. Just as he’d seen in the footage of the memory flood.

  “Prime—” Threi called, voice quavering.

  “Hush, Enforcer.”

  Caiden glanced sideways, eyes wide behind his mask. Threi’s worried gaze snared on Çy’s hand. And the nophek snarled behind him, strumming the tension in the air.

  I’m ready if she uses the memory flood now, I have to be.

  But then she would know he was immune.

  He focused on her fingers as they uncurled. She must have felt his artery pulsing wildly a half inch away.

  Caiden summoned Panca’s poise and focused on nothingness. Breathing, being present.

  Thoughts slide off and away.

  Çydanza’s pearly nails scraped the bottom edge of his mask.

  Imagine you’re wind. Nothing can snag it. It streams over and keeps going, because it’s empty. Nothing.

  Her palm cupped Caiden’s jaw, sliding under the mask and over his cheek, solid and warm. There was even a scent … a floral musk like violets in the field.

  Ah, here are the pheromones. Caiden measured a careful thread of air, sieving his anxiety.

  As Çydanza held his face, her gaze flicked to Threi. “Why so nervous? Come here.”

  Caiden’s heart skipped.

  She would find out.

  Her gaze glided back to him as if she sensed his doubts. Surely she felt his rapid pulse now, touching him.

  Threi drew near. Caiden slipped from Çydanza’s hand to clap Threi on the back as jovially as he could muster. Threi’s eyes widened in surprise. Caiden spoke hurriedly, “Jealous, not nervous, Prime. He’s sour that I’ve done something he never could, even with his accelerated years. I might win all your favor.”

  Threi caught on quickly, cleared his throat, and shrugged. He even managed a blush. “Proud, not jealous. You are what I made you.”

  A sick burst of relief lightened Caiden’s chest.

  Threi added, “I did worry you would reject his effort out of hand.”

  Çydanza drew her arm back through the rind. Her lips didn’t move from their frozen line, but mirth creased her eyes. “You two are a charming pair, but you’ve become quite lenient with what you have made, Threi, letting your probationer fail his task, even if he failed in a spectacular way.”

  Threi, recovered, shrugged again, and crossed his arms. “His research makes a good point, if we can produce gloss in a lab.”

  “It is a good point, and I do not reject out of hand,” she drawled, her gaze flicking back to the nophek, who lowered his stance and snarled so deep, the metal platform vibrated.

  Caiden took the nophek’s big head in his arms, his shaking soothed by the creature’s warmth. His cheek was still chilled by Çydanza’s touch.

  She continued, “And I am pleased by what Winn discovered about nophek; however, this nophek has exhausted its usefulness, and regrettably I am already late on delivering sweet Abriss’s mega-gloss. She has a fresh test subject for it, and no one makes an eager Dynast Prime wait. Towa! If you will.”

  In a blur, the tal lunged down the steps to the platform, landed, and sprang up at the soft tissue of the nophek’s armpit.

  A blade plunged to the hilt.

  The nophek screeched and reared up. Caiden was shoved onto his back, a scream seizing up in his throat. Towa ripped her blade out of the surprised beast, then mounted his shoulders and plunged the knife into the back of his neck.

  Caiden shook, armors jittering against the floor. It was too late in a flash.

  The nophek’s pupils dilated to startled moons. Tongue curled among gaping teeth. He moaned the saddest sound before a gurgle rumbled from his mouth.

  Tears blurred Caiden’s vision beneath the mask. His lungs ached with the stifled scream, anguish scraping his insides as he watched Towa brandish a diamond pick and spring-loaded forceps. She cracked the nophek’s huge skull open as his body slumped to the platform, violently twitching. She fished beneath brilliant, prismatic brain matter and hefted out a perfect sphere of gloss larger than her head.

  The tal fixed him with a triumphant glare. She bent to pluck the glass chicory flower from the collar on the nophek’s carcass, and turned it in her bloody fingers as she carried the gloss out of the room.

  Tears pooled on the bottom rim of Caiden’s mask, which hid his expression as he blinked furiously. His softness was being judged every second. He pushed up, averted his eyes from his dead friend, and clenched his fists to silence his shake.

  Çydanza would pay for this death. He had everything he needed to kill her now.

  Her gaze locked on him, eye line taking in the teardrops quivering on the edge of the blue.

  Threi cut in fast. “I’ll send a team for the carcass. Winn, let’s go.”

  “Threi,” Çydanza said, calm as a cloud, “it seems having a pupil has curbed your usual ruthlessness, and while you’ve been attending his probation quite closely, aren’t there other tasks you’ve been avoiding? I don’t leash you but I do tire of your wandering, sweet hound.”

  “Apologies, Prime, we’ve been having too much fun.”

  Caiden didn’t think the man’s face could blanch more, but it did. Ivory freckles stretched across his tight cheeks.

  “And Winn, to reward your efforts, I will allow you to finish your research: dissect ten of the nophek pups and five of the yearlings to develop your clarient hypothesis and start experimenting with an in-vitro culture.”

  The pups. A black sensation filled Caiden from his feet. Vertigo tipped the room and he closed his eyes, embraced emptiness, and said in his most even tone, “Yes, Prime.”

  They were just words, empty. And she would be dead.

  Soon.

  “Good child.” Çydanza smiled.

  Caiden marched through the glowing lily field into Threi’s room, his pace whisking priceless petals off their stems. Threi stalked at his heels. Inside, Caiden ripped off his Casthen carapace, tossing armor and straps on the floor. Beneath it, his body steamed, the heat visible in the chill air.

  “Winn.”

  He pried off the blue mask and squeezed it in his augmented fingers until the crystalline laminate shattered into rainbows. He didn’t care that Threi would see his tear-streaked face. “We’re killing her now.”

  “Cool down first.” Threi handed him a glass of water. “Sorry about the nophek. I didn’t think she would still harvest it.”

  “You’re not sorry.” Caiden took a gulp and doubled over hacking— it wasn’t water, it was liquor. He swore, then took another swig. The pups. Nine crimes, those little ones …

  He was ready: engine firing, heart aligned. There was one last thing to clear up. “What do you intend to do as the new Casthen Prime once Çydanza is dead?”

  “Involve the Cartographers, release the economic monopoly, meld Casthen with passagers so we can all work toward similar goals. The Casthen as an organization wields the greatest resources in the multiverse. But Çydanza doesn’t use them for any end goal or higher purpose.”

  “Let’s go. Now.” Caiden sat on the bed and smacked a fist into his other hand. He thought over the plan— and a realization slapped him. “If the Azura’s rind will destroy a vishkant, what’s stopping us from flying over and plowing the rind right through Çydanza’s universe before she can run? The ship’s rind is bound to touch her, then it’s all over. I won’t even need to endure the memory flood. Why didn’t you think of this before and just steal the ship?”

  “No. My plan, my rules. You exhaust her ability, then I get a moment with her after she’s defanged. We do it my way or not at all.”

  The man of nonchalance was now a hive of anxiety. He snapped his fingers repeatedly.

  “A moment,” Caiden repeated. “Why do you need a moment with her? You need to hiss some villainous one-liner in her ear before we chuck her into the rind?”

&nb
sp; “I have nothing to say to her.” Threi’s knuckles itched against the surface of the desk. He stared at the floor, eyes glazing.

  Gears tripped into place in Caiden’s brain. He looked over the mysteries populating Threi’s room: the Graven research, private accel chamber, sensory-dampening prototypes and chemicals, the rare genetics … and Silye. She was part of whatever his scheme was, engineered as a test subject and tool.

  Caiden still couldn’t grasp the bigger thing that Threi had been preparing for so long.

  “You’ve toiled for years itching to kill Çydanza,” Caiden said, hot and measured, “yet you act like she isn’t important to you.”

  Threi’s ice-blue gaze snapped up. The glassiness turned sharp and brittle. “ Çydanza has lived effectively immortal, taking voyeuristic pleasure in the memories of her subjects, and delighting in the growth of an empire. She’s predictable and fixed in routine.” Threi composed himself and straightened to unbuckle his armor down to the black garments beneath. Free, he stretched, rolling his muscular shoulders and tousling snarls of hair. Through the glass wall behind him, the greenhouse lighting set the white lilies ablaze and lent him a vibrating aura. His white freckles glowed in death-pale skin.

  Threi continued, voice rough and quiet, “She has no great aim, no diabolical plan to rule the multiverse, only to exploit it. As difficult as Çydanza has made it to kill her— with her species’s abilities and an impassible universe— she’s not the hardest person to kill in this multiverse. There’s a chance, and it’s past time such a privileged creature perished.”

  Caiden snorted. “You have a gift for saying a lot of words yet answering nothing.”

  Threi didn’t smile. He folded his arms behind his back, and had that regal look again, a cinch between his shoulder blades, a knot in his jaw and eyes gleaming as if he looked out over legions. “What is important to me is no concern of yours, soldier. We can destroy Çydanza now, but you have to agree to do it my way.”

  His way seemed to be to do nothing at all, to test and scheme endlessly, snared in research and convolution and the vast resources the Casthen possessed. It started to make bizarre sense. The Casthen system was madness and violence, and had corrupted even this Dynast creature, webbing him in a breed of obsessive complacency.

  Caiden couldn’t trust anyone’s judgment here. He couldn’t ever harm the pups. Couldn’t stay any longer. It was time to stop being Threi’s pawn.

  He rubbed his chest, remembering the weight and warmth of the big nophek’s head, the hum of the ineffable gloss.

  There was so much to avenge.

  Caiden headed for the door and said, “We’ll talk about this when you’re ready to really share.”

  “Winn!”

  Caiden strode through lilies and darkness, aiming straight for the Azura.

  CHAPTER 37

  ÇYDANZA’S UNIVERSE

  His ship was a gorgeous and fearsome sight, her slick black body glazed with reflected gold and purple texture. Her wings were preened back, vanes sharp, thrusters closed in like flowers for the night.

  Caiden’s neural link with the Azura veiled his mind in sunny serenity. The sheer familiarity of it in this dank and hostile place cracked a wellspring of grief.

  It was time. Not soon, but now.

  “Azura. Let’s destroy the heart of the Casthen.”

  He threw himself into the pilot’s seat and settled back, closed his eyes. Breathed. Nothingness, like the wind.

  The seat wrapped his tired limbs. Caiden rubbed his chest again, feeling the echo of the nophek’s pressure, the hum of its decades-old gloss. Shipped off to the Dynast now.

  The Azura’s idle engine whispered melodies to soothe him.

  “Let’s make sure there are no more losses like this. Ready?”

  The cockpit fogged up with bright air eager to coalesce into drive guides.

  Caiden would engage the Azura’s universe and fly her straight through Çydanza’s lair, killing the vishkant in the process.

  He raised his hands. Threads of light weaved around his fingers. He tilted his palms up and lifted. The ship rose, mini thrusters powering them past the facility’s ceiling. The megastructure on the planet’s dark side glittered with lights. Twilight formed a distant ring, and small universes blistered the surface and hovered above. Past the atmosphere was the faintest glisten of the lightseep fortress that turned space itself prismatic.

  Caiden’s heart flitted. It hardly seemed real after so much waiting. After sacrificing youth for power and abandoning his family in order to willingly be chewed by nightmares, now he was serene enough to endure whatever Çydanza threw at him … fast enough to chase her if she ran … strong enough to restrain her if she fought.

  He flew smoothly, without the small twitches and large sweeps of his earlier piloting. His body was a knit of tension and relaxation, more than powerful enough to direct wings and thrusters. The Azura responded instantly to his mental desires. Her moods were home and her song was where he belonged. He’d missed it.

  At the edge of the facility, he hovered. Çydanza’s universe lay below, shelled in by a half sphere of black megastructure over top. He had checked the composition of materials: the Azura’s rind would destroy them as he flew right through, and if he kept going, the ship’s universe would engulf Çydanza’s and she would be pushed through the rind and killed.

  Caiden reached up and pawed the florescer above his head. The universe blossomed outward in milky, billowing colors. The chorus of Caiden’s being instantly harmonized, instabilities dissolved.

  “She’ll be dead in one swoop. Be fast, Azura.”

  Caiden tilted sharply, nosing down to Çydanza’s shell. Dusty material kicked up as the Azura’s rind plowed through the black wall. Metal ripped and screeched. A mess of iridescent filaments slathered the view. Solid alloys crumpled into decreasing fractal particles as the rind chewed through.

  Then the Azura’s universe hit the edge of Çydanza’s. Colors rioted in the view. Caiden squinted against the light, as bright as the star’s heart had been, until he was through and the ship glided.

  In the chaos of disintegrating materials, he glimpsed Çydanza, cloudy and startled, thirty meters away.

  Caiden pressured his hands forward to drive the ship into her and crush her against the rind.

  The air around the ship locked up, stalling it in place. Pain slammed Caiden’s fingers in the drive guides, twisting them to claws as he strained. The thrusters howled but the ship didn’t move, caught in a defensive web of scalar gravity and electromagnetism.

  Caiden cursed. He hadn’t anticipated that. He couldn’t plow the ship’s rind into her— but he could grab her and drag her into it by hand.

  He charged from the cockpit, opening the bay doors and careening into Çydanza’s world. The space was pale sand and pools. Çydanza stood at a cluster of desks and huge holosplays. She grew solid and sprinted for the edge of her universe where the viewing platform’s frame provided an exit.

  Caiden ran. The pounding of his feet on sand felt effortless after countless dreams fleeing from nophek. He’d mastered speed.

  The vishkant stumbled, unaccustomed to threat.

  Caiden tackled her and pinned her to the ground. It was ten-year-old Leta’s throat he grasped. Her terrified eyes glittered with tears. Sweetgrass scent flooded his nose, and blue chicory blossoms spilled from her hair.

  “Cai! Please!” Her lips trembled.

  “I’m not fooled.” He yanked her to her feet. She squeaked and her hands flew up, twisting him with surprising strength. They both crashed on the sand. Caiden looked up and was on the nophek planet, sky black and horizon bright. Çydanza was a beast that leapt at him but he didn’t flinch. Jaws swarmed his face, yet every inch of him had been bitten before. Memories of pain radiated like old friends, unwelcome but familiar.

  He wrestled her to the ground. When the sand spray of her thrashing cleared, Caiden was back in her universe, splashed by a shallow pool, strangling his mother.


  Despite the kind eyes, the horrified gaping mouth, and the human pulse in her neck beneath his palms— this was not his mother.

  “Lies. Forger of lies.” He hauled her up by the neck and dragged her toward the ship’s deadly rind.

  The Azura blurred between two images: her real, rind-shrouded shape and the half-buried tower he’d found on RM28. When he looked back at Çydanza, he stumbled and fell. He was wearing Casthen armor, covered with the blood of beaten loved ones. They draped over his lap; his mother mangled, half a face, and Leta, only torso.

  This isn’t real. He pulled harder, pushing to his feet. Çydanza transformed. Caiden pulled his fourteen-year-old self, face streaked with tears and sand, speckled with his mother’s blood, hauling the innocent version of himself not to the Azura but into the maw of the black transport headed to slaughter.

  Çydanza dug her feet into the sand and hooked Caiden’s ankle, tripping him. He wrestled her as he fell, and was swarmed by a cloud of jaws. The nophek piled on, pincered his skull, ripped out his throat— he knew how each artery gushed, the familiar pang of tendons, how juicily his own clavicle snapped. “I’ve seen”— he gasped—“ this all … before.”

  Caiden grappled with the vishkant’s cloud-body until she solidified. He’d seen his parents and Leta killed too many times before. It was boring, infuriating. He locked his augmented hand around her ankle and pulled: only ten meters from the rind.

  Visions continued to assault. Flashing nophek eyes. Pearly jaws. A thousand punctures. Pain, terror, excrement, betrayal. A child’s feelings. They were the file that had whittled and sharpened him into more than a child.

  “Winn!” Panca’s scream.

  Caiden staggered.

  He glanced down, and he was dragging Panca by her upper arm. Blood drenched her, leaving a red furrow in the sand, skin chafing as he pulled.

  She squirmed and whimpered, her hands scrabbling at his arm.

  “Tricks,” Caiden growled despite the tears stinging his eyes. It felt real. And the crew, his new family— they weren’t anything he had dreamed of hurting.