by Essa Hansen
He trudged on, staggering madly through a cerulean pool, dragging his heavy burden. His boots filled with water. Çydanza screeched and flailed. The sound joined his headaches, burned behind his eyes, blinded him with searing white. He felt his scream but didn’t hear it. Memories bit him, rapid-fire, striking his brain like an electrical storm. These weren’t the visions he’d seen so many times. The physical impact was real and unexpected. His nerves gnashed. Muscle spasms jerked him to the ground. He was reduced to a crawl but could still drag her.
“Stop, brother, please,” a tender voice whimpered.
Caiden froze, quaking as he turned. Taitn’s voice.
Bones of one mutilated arm glistened through Taitn’s flesh, and his other hand clutched his throat, which an energy blast had tunneled through. Caiden was armor-clad and bloody again in the vision, a glave in his other hand thrumming with the shot that had hit Taitn.
Brother.
“Not real.” Caiden choked on heartbreak and tried to turn away. Four meters from the rind, he had to pull. His legs jellied as he kicked to propel himself. Çydanza’s body twisted and re-formed in his grasp.
Ksiñe’s whipkin squealed. Caiden flinched and dropped the creature. She scurried away to cower around a vision of Ksiñe’s battered corpse, black and half-buried in the sand.
“No,” Caiden cried, tumbling over himself to crawl to his friend. But the illusion dissolved, and the vishkant was up and sprinting away.
Chemicals sawed Caiden’s veins. Vision crumbling, he couldn’t see which way the Azura was, where Çydanza ran to; there was just sand everywhere and the crew, his family: crimson corpses splayed across the desert.
He had prepared for nophek, but this …
His heart wouldn’t ever be ready for this.
Caiden fell to his knees, racked with sick. Numbness rooted in. Panca, flayed; a knife in his hand.
Someone heaved him to his feet— Laythan?— pushed him then kicked him in the chest to send him sprawling through the Azura’s rind. He slammed into the bay floor.
Convulsing, he blinked away blood and tears for one final view: Çydanza stood safe and triumphant on the other side of the Azura’s rind. The defense beams that had captured the ship in place now levitated it up and out of her universe.
Caiden had failed.
He’d been prepared to see his first family die and all his old world swallowed. But his second family … he still cherished them.
The Azura was lifted away. Caiden lay broken on the bay floor as the memory flood continued to bite him, building into a new nightmare. He could endure any torture but the crew … the sight of them slaughtered because of him … in danger because he’d survived and they’d taken him in. He was vile poison.
And now Çydanza knew he intended to kill her.
And knew the Azura could do it.
CHAPTER 38
MERCILESS
A chketin foot barreled into Caiden’s ribs, breaking two or three and sending him sprawling. Pain rained in a storm of hate. A kick in the hip, the groin. His fingers bent until they snapped one by one. The Casthen mob descended before he got far from the viewing room and his audience with Çydanza— who was very much alive and alarmed.
“His breeding is too valuable to destroy.”
Çydanza had spared him, but gave no firm order for others to do the same.
Someone lifted him by the throat. A punch cracked into the back of his neck, and would have shattered the vertebrae again if it weren’t hyperdiamond.
Caiden fought back with everything left in him. He had to get to the Azura.
“Dismantle his ship, down to its marrow.”
Bruises pulped. Skin split. Agony was a familiar sea.
“There is no one I can’t break,” Çydanza had said, “and now that I’ve seen his greatest fear, he will shatter. Do you all know the rumors? Follow them, these many whispers scratching at our gates.”
The rain of violence whisked away. Caiden’s face was plastered on the grate floor, chevrons digging into a swelled cheek.
“Threi, I’m disappointed over what a light leash you have. If your probationer cannot become a perfect Casthen soldier, I’ll be forced to discard him for his insolence— and will make an example of his demise, a dramatic one … you do love drama, sweet hound.”
Consciousness came and went, a fickle commodity. Days might’ve passed, he wouldn’t know inside the megastructure, on the dark side of a planet.
Distantly, he sensed all the sort of care he’d given the big nophek: salve, analgesics, antibiotics. And someone tinkering. His augmented fingers were popped back into place. Skin re-polarized. He was rolled onto his back.
Silye. Her gorgeous hair spilled over him like a blanket as she worked. Jet, the chketin, gripped Caiden’s arm in two-inch-thick fingers and wrenched it back in the socket. He was then lifted up completely, dangling.
“Prop him there,” a voice said. Crisp and savage, beautiful, alluring: a dark, Graven voice. “Crimes, they gave him a thrash.”
The bite of a needle. Soft adrenaline, cinching him up. He opened his eyes, over-dilated, the light seeping all over.
It had been Threi’s voice. The man stood in front of the Azura, tall and regal, like he owned her.
Caiden tried to speak but just mushed words.
Threi marched over and crouched. He grabbed a fistful of Caiden’s sweaty hair and plowed Caiden’s head against the metal wall. The man leaned in, cheek to cheek, hissing ire in Caiden’s ear. “Your stupidity ruined years of planning. If Çydanza hadn’t ordered the Azura dissected, I would take it for myself and give you a convenient little accident.” He paused, breath warm. “What was it?”
Confusing question. Caiden rolled his head away and met Threi’s ice-blue gaze.
The man asked, “What did she use against you, your real fear?”
Caiden’s mind churned that thought around. The memory flood had ruined him, but it wasn’t fear of nophek …
“Love.”
She’d used his fear of loss. Losing the only family he had left.
He whimpered, head swamped and dizzy. He’d thought he was being selfless by sacrificing his happiness to liberate the multiverse from Casthen rule, but somewhere along the way he’d simply convinced his subconscious that he was deserving of suffering. His fixation on revenge cost everything— and he’d been too self-destructing to see.
Threi said, “Do you remember what she ordered you to do? The test and punishment?”
His brain swam through adrenaline, recalling more of Çydanza’s judgment. “Process the slaves that will restart the gloss production.” The words lined up dry and sour in his mouth. He was too thrashed to imagine what that meant.
A perfect Casthen soldier …
He whispered, “What do we do now?”
“You, obey.” Threi leaned in again, breath strained against Caiden’s ear. “I’ll take the Azura. It’ll be dismantled but not destroyed: like you, it’s too valuable to discard. Çydanza will try to sell it to the Dynast. I’ll do what I can. As for you …” Frowning, Threi drew back, both hands on Caiden’s bloodied shoulders, assessing him like a faulty part. “There’s only one way you’ll survive. Trust me. It’ll make it easier.”
He wrapped an arm around Caiden’s waist and wrenched him to his feet, pinning him against the wall and gesturing Silye over. Threi draped Caiden’s weight onto Silye’s slight frame then backed away. Caiden strived to stand taller and relieve her burden, but his body was a monument of pain.
Threi peered at him intently and said, “Graven Winn of Casthen, you have to embrace your engineered nature. Sort out your shame. Develop your Graven gift— it’s like a muscle, stronger with intention and practice. It’s what will keep you alive now that every Casthen fang is sharpened and turned your way.”
Threi paused, looking haunted.
Graven.
“Abriss,” Caiden slurred, his thought process jumbled. But Threi drew up as if pulled by strings, posture predat
ory and regal. Caiden frowned. “What did she do to you?”
The world broke for a heartbeat, black and raw.
“She loved me.” A lump twitched in Threi’s throat. He blinked and shot his icy gaze to Silye. “You’re assigned to him while he completes Çy’s task. Watch him closely and catch every Graven sound he speaks— he needs to learn what he is, once and for all.”
Silye nudged a triple-rail glave into Caiden’s armored hand. He followed her, dazed. Waves of twitches still hounded him, his body barely recovered from the beating despite the scour, advanced treatments, and rest. Even the Casthen’s resources couldn’t salve the results of a one-target brawl.
And his breast ached with something pent-up, growing stale. His compassion, perhaps, drying up at last.
Silye slipped her hand in his to lead him on. Her fingers quivered. He squeezed.
She led him to a large platform on the outside edge of the megastructure. Huge beetle-like freighters hunkered where metal met dirt. Their backs split open like wing casings, and human shapes spilled out in rivers of black motion. Casthen enforcers herded the river tributaries into one large flow to a massive scour chamber. People pooled inside, were cleansed, and filtered to rooms beyond.
“Were they bought from all over the multiverse, like my people were?”
Silye squeezed his hand: Yes.
The throngs of people reeked of mud, sweat, and urine from being cramped in the freighters. This was a scene of nightmares: throngs on the Flat Docks, the transport, the desert. Caiden forced a chuckle. They were all just meat from this elevated perspective, as he’d been, once. Meat for something to chew.
He made his way down to ground level. His mask hadn’t been repaired after he’d shattered it, and the glassy cracks cleaved his view, seeming to double the crowd.
From slave to slaver, simply because of biology, an error.
Armored Casthen prodded the throngs to the scour. One of them— a burly chketin— barreled in, shoving with enough force to break skin and trip the crowd into knots.
“Stand down, overseer!” Caiden shouted, pouring focus into the sound. It squeezed from his diaphragm and vibrated up, cast from his tongue as a Graven order as clear as he could make it. The chketin Casthen halted instantly. The slave made to spring like a wild animal, but Caiden brought his glave up into the man’s gut and said, “You too. Be orderly. Everyone.”
Terror rippled over their faces, curses hissed out, then most of them soothed into awe. They shuffled on, orderly, and the overseer herded with a gentler hand.
Caiden balled up a wretched feeling. The Graven effect really was stronger with intent, and his face wasn’t even showing. It would have been even stronger had they seen him.
It was better this way. No one hurt. Orderly.
He followed Silye to a large chamber freestanding on the dock: memory-obliteration tech, which the crowd would filter through, wiped and ready for a world of lies. The chamber resembled the Cartographers’ biodata chamber, but dark and rusted instead of bright and polished, as if trying its best to embody despair over hope.
Armored and masked, a faceless Casthen Enforcer, Caiden numbly ushered slaves in one by one. They looked up at him, rapt or alarmed, as he had that day on the Flat Docks. “Move on,” he said. “Don’t be scared. You’ll be taken care of.”
Their fear melted at his Graven words. They trusted him. Was it wrong to lie if it healed? Was it merciful to give them relief?
Caiden tried to remember if hope had dampened his suffering in the transport. A little, he thought. Or maybe he could tell them it would all be over soon.
Faces streamed by. Mostly human, some xenid or mixed. Some were elder and hardened, others as innocent and fearful as Leta. Tear-streaked. Furious. Bewildered.
Caiden couldn’t whisk them all back on the transport and jet away to safety. Even if he did, the root of all this misery remained. He’d failed to pull Çydanza from the Casthen soil like a weed. He’d lost his chance and the Azura with it.
Silye stood beside Caiden at the control panel, while he hit EXECUTE as each person stepped into the machine. He absolved their past. Would their new world be vibrant green? If it was like his, at least they wouldn’t be tortured or overworked. Their only chains would be ignorance. They would be happy.
Numbness set in with the monotony of the droves, and with nothing else to occupy his mind, it kept replaying the big nophek’s death. His brain knew nothing but repetition.
Sweat slithered beneath his armor. The droplets found the same paths down his back, repeating, his posture throbbing with cramps.
Caiden felt unreal. All of reality unreal. A lucid dream. He shoved his mask up to the top of his head, yanking pale hair back.
“All of you, stop,” he said, pouring out his desire with heartfelt Graven intent.
The crowd of hundreds halted.
Partly because of fear, confusion, or youth. Mostly because he was a Graven cur.
Silye stopped too.
“Sil … did you know you were designed? Made here for a purpose?”
She blinked at him, and signed, I serve.
Silye needed to be free to decide who she wanted to be, within the limitations of the genes the Casthen had given her.
Though freedom felt far away, for him and her both.
“Continue, orderly,” he called, and the rivers of bodies flowed.
The monotony continued, Caiden locked inside it, hardly realizing when the processing was over. Silye poked him. He looked at her through his haze. She grabbed an edge of his armor and tugged him to the side of the deck where several Casthen had cornered a score of slaves.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Faulty ones,” a tall saisn told him. “Memory wipe didn’t take. Boss said you’re to guide them to the N-Sector Servicer containers.”
Ah, the horror can get worse. Caiden nodded and swung his glave around to shepherd the group into the facility. Silye took the opposite side.
N-Sector swamped them with a dense hum the moment the big doors opened— a sensory ordeal even for him. He thought of Leta, a neurotype more attuned to space, for whom this would be incredible torture. Did the Casthen consider that as they threw whomever wherever? One of the slaves was tremoring badly already.
Aisles stretched to darkness and shelves shot out of sight. Caiden goaded the unfortunates down an aisle. He stopped at a lit section where Casthen waited with containers already pulled out, like the one Caiden had been in to incubate his nightmares. These slaves would simply sleep, their biology part of the computers, or linked in for medical research or human testing of products.
Numbly, Caiden assisted. The slaves were undressed, then fitted without dignity into the coffins inside each box. Thread wires and spider nodes infiltrated their skin— Caiden knew that violating sensation.
Then the containers were slid back in, and the wall of shelves looked all the same. More bits of a machine, nothing to mark that a body lay within, a person with a heartbeat and dreams. The other Casthen left, and Caiden stood alone with Silye.
She tapped his vambrace, and gestured when she had his attention: They are watching you. Time for the next task.
He wobbled, bone-weary, and fantasized about lying in the Azura’s pilot seat and resting, letting the crystal cradle him, her lullabies heal— but by now, she was being ripped apart from shell to spine.
I don’t deserve rest; I just ushered thousands into misery.
CHAPTER 39
REAL
Before Caiden’s bruises and breaks had mended, the Casthen mobs came for him once more, defending the murder attempt against their Prime. He walked to the mess hall for food, starving, and three hundred soldiers rose up again.
He summoned his rage and grief and fought back. Between his augmented strength, combat skills, En’s training, and his dream-time battling nophek in the desert, he demolished half the group, which only served to prove the effectiveness of his Casthen breeding. He had become the honed and pol
ished blade Çydanza had wanted him to be.
Caiden belonged here.
His body buzzed with instincts, hot and frenetic. He fought with tooth and claw— and Graven pleas, but the mob was a mix, too many immune to him. The ten allies he gained by screaming, “Fight with me, you curs!” only lasted a few arcminutes before they were broken too.
He spilled more blood than had been in the nophek’s whole body, but it wouldn’t bring that sweet beast back. He succumbed to the void that the nightmares had hollowed out of him, the part that admitted the violence was fun, the crack of bone rewarding, his Graven charm refreshing after a life of struggling to feel like enough.
Compassion wasn’t big enough to fill that hollow.
The mob ripped armor off Caiden. He was kicked and bludgeoned with chairs, hip fractured from a chketin fist, hurled across the mess into a choke hold and talons, and they re-injured every bone that Threi’s crew had tried to patch up in him from the last time.
Eventually, the mob grew bored and ebbed away: some said Caiden had learned his lesson, others wanted the toy to heal up for another round later. Caiden lay wrecked on the mess-hall floor.
Fourteen years old, he’d gotten up from a similar beating, dizzy and hot-tempered, ready to march after the older boys who’d hurt them. But Leta grabbed his arm.
“Let them go,” she’d said. “If they stay away, who cares.”
“I care. You’re hurt.”
Her fawn hair almost covered the blood on her scalp.
“So, why hurt them back? They’ll just hurt you more, nothing will change.”
She was wisdom and he was power, but power had done him little good against Çydanza, and Leta was dead forever.
It wasn’t “sacrifice” if nothing good came of it. Caiden was just a man in pain.
He moaned and rolled onto his side to retch again. Blood dribbled through the fine sieve of the grates. A pipe somewhere hissed. Distant machinery grumbled through kilometers of metal.
Silye found him once the blood had cooled.