by Essa Hansen
“Scream louder,” he hissed, laced with a Graven order. “Fight against me with everything you have. Beg for your life. Tell me again you love your dear brother, Abriss.”
Çydanza-Abriss shrieked, and even though she was an illusory copy of the real woman, Caiden felt a kick of Graven response, every cell of him urged to respond. He almost missed registering the word “brother.”
Abriss screamed, “I loved you! Please! You can’t—”
For a heartbeat, Threi paused. Çydanza rolled beneath him but he caught her wrist and jerked her back. “You’re the only person who could, but we didn’t love each other. We affected each other.”
Her face screwed in confusion. “You can’t kill me,” she choked. “I”— she garbled the words, wading through his memories for lines with meaning—“do not hate you for your greed …”
She stopped fighting and pushed into him, hugging her arms around his neck and shoulders. He stiffened, eyes glistening.
“This has to happen,” Threi said, “for the multiverse to survive. I have to be able to do this.” He bore down on top of Çydanza-Abriss, fingers shoveling into her neck.
Caiden gathered his strength and lurched up but stumbled as vertigo slammed into his head. He screamed through the pain roaring between his ears. “Threi! Get her to the rind!”
Threi’s fingernails dimpled skin. Abriss’s scream whittled to silence as he crimped her windpipe shut. Her beautiful, mesmerizing face contorted with horror while Threi breathlessly levered his full weight on her throat. “Your blood is just as blue as you believe it to be, sister.”
Caiden forced himself up and shoved Threi’s shoulder away as Çydanza-Abriss slumped, collared in bloody gashes. Çydanza’s morphic body was wounded enough, and she exhausted enough, that her particles struggled to recalibrate. Flesh sizzled around her neck injury, healing and re-forming, which only made her choke more. She felt real pain. Purple lips agape for air, she attempted to crawl away but fell in convulsions.
Threi sat back and ran shaking fingers over his face, through his hair, and down his neck, panting ecstatically. “That was more satisfying than I’d imagined. I can do it. I’m ready now.”
“Nine crimes, what is wrong with you?” Caiden wrestled his disgust. Tests. It all came together, and he reeled at the absurdity. “You … you’ve been orchestrating Çydanza’s demise— test after bloody test, and all that weird shit in your room— for how long just to simulate your ability to kill someone completely different?”
Threi closed his eyes, tilting his head back with a soft, cathartic smile. “I’m just getting what I’ve earned. Confirmation.”
That was why Çydanza had never seemed important to Threi. He didn’t need her dead, he needed her to take the form of someone else.
To pretend-kill this vishkant version of a person.
The Graven research. The patience. The suffering he wrought. Silye. The entirety of her.
Even the damn Dynast-colored blanket on his bed.
“You intend to murder Abriss, but she’s too Graven,” he quested. Admission sparked in Threi’s eyes, and Caiden hissed, “All this, for … Why not abuse a random vishkant somewhere else if you’re just lusting after the idea of murdering someone you hate?”
“It’s not lust.” Threi stood, wreathed in twilight and petals. He looked down on Çydanza’s spasming, misting body as the vishkant tried to recongeal. His voice quieted, breathy. “It’s necessity. Most vishkant don’t fear for their lives, and I needed the fear to be real. Only Çydanza— thinking herself impervious for so long— would fight with everything. Only she would scream at me to stop.”
“Crimes, this is messed.” Caiden grabbed Çydanza. The vishkant’s body morphed into neutral vapor and spongy bones, so weakened from the damage that she couldn’t take a form, couldn’t draw from Caiden’s memories enough to become anyone he knew. Caiden slogged through the lily field toward the ship, panting and blinking hard.
He hauled Çydanza to the Azura’s rind and threw her into it.
Explosive waves of force dropped him to his knees. The rind convulsed in lightning bursts and splashes of riotous color.
Çydanza’s scream modulated as if a thousand voices cried out of a mutating throat. Her face engulfed in the universe edge flickered between his mother, his father, Leta, and everyone else he cared about, living or dead.
Caiden balled up the thick mess of his emotions and threw it into his fist to hold the vishkant’s body in the rind. “This is for Laythan. For Taitn. For En. For Ksiñe. For Panca, the Azura, the whipkin and nophek and every being you’ve ever hurt or tried to break. Some of us don’t break that easily.”
Her screeches ceased and only a roar and hiss remained.
Threi stepped over Caiden and planted a boot on the vishkant’s chest to shove the rest of her molecules into the rind. The pores in Çydanza’s bones widened until no material remained. She effervesced from squiggling vapor to light to filaments of air wriggling back under the world.
Overwhelmed and wrung dry of all his past, Caiden slumped over the dying tangle of her.
The rind sputtered haze and hateful colors before settling back to a docile opaline curtain.
Threi’s panting was stark and ragged in the silence.
The air smelled of their sweat and desperation, getting whisked away by perfume. Flowers whispered in the breeze.
“Congratulations,” Threi said between vigorous exhales.
Caiden toppled onto his back, chilled by the reality of everything it cost: six years off his life and sanity, the Azura’s integrity, his family’s torture.
Murderer.
He raised his palm. There wasn’t even blood on his hands. Vishkant didn’t really bleed. No evidence, no guilt— the Casthen way.
His breast numbed with fading adrenaline, and as tingles of elation cooled to simple exhaustion, Caiden felt filthy. He was the monster the Casthen had bred him to be all along, even though he’d done good with it. Unfathomable future pain had been relieved from the world with Çydanza’s demise, but in the moment, he could only see the dirt of it, not what would grow.
I forged myself after all into the blade sharp enough, the trowel keen enough to dig under the taproot and upheave the entire thing.
“Now what … ?”
Threi replied, “Some of the Casthen main command are dead, but the others I need to speak with.”
Caiden hadn’t meant the logistics.
What am I now?
He had been devastated by the realization that he’d been raised with only one purpose: a mechanic. But in re-creating himself, he’d become another creature with just as singular a purpose: killing Çydanza. He thought again of all the evidence in Threi’s room, an obsessive theme so familiar to what Caiden was doing to himself: Threi was forging himself into a weapon sharp enough to cut the Dynast Prime. Just like Caiden, through the acceleration, the nightmares, the sparring. A single-minded design, oblivious to who or what it hurt.
Threi’s cheery voice itched the wrong way against Caiden as the man maundered on. “Now the Casthen actions can be held before an ethical council. The operations can be clean— as much as that concept exists in the multiverse.” Threi fussed over a small holosplay. His body steamed, and he all but vibrated with excitement. Whatever he’d chugged to enhance his Graven effect and snare hundreds to his will had worn off. His pale, hawkish face didn’t inspire love, his voice was rich but didn’t build a gravity into the world, and his body wasn’t burdened with an aura.
“Sister?”
Threi eyed Caiden sideways. “That’s right.”
Caiden tried to grapple that idea, but a headache reared in his skull. The drifting lightflies confused with sparkles foaming across his vision.
Threi was Graven enough to have more resistance against Abriss than most, but— as evidenced in her order to kneel, which he hadn’t been able to disobey in Emporia— he wasn’t Graven enough to exert his own will in her presence.
Caiden sa
id, “The sensory-dulling experiments— you’re trying to minimize the sensory pathways through which Graven effect is received? You engineered Silye to be extra susceptible so you could test the devices on her. And the substance that temporarily boosts your Graven rank. You’re trying to match Abriss so when you plunge a knife her way she can’t shout ‘stop’ and fix you in your tracks?”
“Vishkant can’t simulate the Graven effect Abriss will have, but she felt real enough. I proved my emotional capability.”
“You don’t seem like someone who finds murder hard.”
Threi fixed him with an icy gaze. “There is no one in the entire multiverse as hard to murder as Dynast Prime Abriss Cetre in Unity.”
Swelling with great breaths, Threi looked across the stars, bent by lightseep fracturing the heavens. He gazed along the horizon blistered with universes.
The new Casthen Prime.
Caiden batted at lightflies and dizzy sparks. A hollowness gaped in him again, drained of the fury he’d filled it with. None of this revelation fit either. I need family. They’ll knock sense into me.
He rolled onto his stomach and pushed up to his feet. His vision foamed black. Çydanza’s attack had an unknown toll, and it wasn’t good. Threi had only ever tested the memory flood on people who had died, not documented the neurological effects of survival.
“I need …” Caiden’s voice ebbed in and out of a static foam in his ears. Flickers teemed in the corners of his vision, leaving black dimples in their wake. “I need to get to my crew.” And get the Azura away, get myself away, everyone safe and together.
Threi had murdered hundreds with a few words. The image of it lurked in Caiden’s weary mind.
Threi dusted lily petals from his clothes. “When you’re done, meet me at Çydanza’s universe with the Azura. We need to bridge into it with the ship’s universe and transfer data out from Çy’s servers.”
Caiden nodded and limped into the ship, closed the iris, and slipped into the pilot’s seat. His brain filled with wool and slithering. Perhaps the gray matter had uncoiled and was squirming in there.
“One last flight,” he muttered to himself. “Make it to the infirmary. Everyone safe.”
He deactivated the universe bubble and took off. The Azura was serene, her engines singing. Stars peppered the view as Caiden banked to the dark side of the planet.
Slow. He took it achingly slow. Arm cramping. Vision as gray as the vapor of his old home.
Ksiñe will patch me up. I’m not alone.
At the Enforcer’s pad, he descended gently.
I’m worth something to them, even when I can’t identify worth in myself.
Caiden cut the engines and dithered in the seat, gathering clarity. A serrated ache roamed his head instead.
He groaned and rolled up, pushing this one last length, one more task. In the engine room, he scooped Panca up from where she was medicating against the engine block. Unable to bear her weight on his shoulder, he looped his arm under hers and murmured at her to help, to walk.
Up and out of the ship. Slow. Hallways tenebrous. A seizure slammed him. Caiden skidded on the slick floor, Panca sprawled. He scrabbled at consciousness as a migraine doubled him over.
Then hot, fanged void chewed up the last of his strength.
CHAPTER 45
SAVED AND SALVED
Consciousness seeped in. Murmured sounds, gentle touches, spicy scent. Caiden blinked one eye at a time. Gray as the vapor sky, above. A ceiling.
He tried to move and groaned, body like a bag of rocks. He lay on a plush, raised medical slab, head pillowed and body covered with a blanket of heated gossamer.
Panca tinkered on his augmented arm with a tiny awl. She looked up, and a brilliant smile creased her face.
“Pan …” he rasped. His own smile hurt— a lot. He winced and closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ll never have enough apologies for all of you.”
Panca laid a soft, soft kiss on his forehead. She patted his left arm. It reactivated in a rigid flurry. He gasped and curled his arm tight. Thank you, he mouthed, and laughed— even more painful than the smile.
“Hey, hero.” En sat on the edge of the next bed, repairing her shoulder. She still looked like shit. Pigmentation was only back on her face, and splotchy at best, but her smile was less gruesome, and her jumble of materials had been strapped back into a human figure.
Panca walked over to help with En’s shoulder. En passed her the tool and beamed.
“Layth, get in here!” Taitn shouted as he approached Caiden’s bedside. He walked gingerly, fitted in compression gear that oddly bulked his thin body. Hair and beard were neatly trimmed— the former even sported En’s braidwork down the top.
“You look … good.” Caiden meant it. Despite the gaunt paleness, something fit Taitn as it hadn’t before. His softness fit better, perhaps.
Taitn shook his head. “Bone density’s off. Organs failing. But I’ll last to Emporia and the Cartographers’ clinic. We need to get you there too.”
En didn’t look up, but simpered. “Lyli will help for sure.”
Laythan entered. Temporary prosthetics replaced both eyeballs: eerie glass surfaces, forest green glistening over silver. He blinked at Caiden, eyelids and temples pinched by stitches right over the old scars from the last time he was blind. “You look horrible.”
“So do you.”
En slapped Laythan’s arm. “Be nice. You’re looking at a hero.”
“How’s …” Caiden tried to move but the signals were all jumbled up. “How’s my head?”
Ksiñe slid off a bed at the far end of the infirmary and hobbled over. His countless wounds were stapled, stitched, and taped up as if the infirmary had run out of materials to patch him with. The barest amount of spotty pigment returned to his skin. Honey-colored wisps gathered across his face as he neared.
Caiden’s smile was half sob. Who knew a color could be so heartening?
Ksiñe handed back the morphcoat. Its down slicked into aged leather.
Caiden nodded thanks and crushed the coat in his hands. The whipkin bounded off Ksiñe’s arm and sniffed around Caiden’s ear, licked his temples and eye. He reached up to scritch her head. “Love you too, little girl.”
Ksiñe said, “Head will improve. Temporary brain damage. Lyli can fix.”
En chuckled, then shut up when Taitn glared and Ksiñe’s skin rippled irritated orange.
Caiden laughed. Sparks of pain filled his lungs. “I don’t expect any of you to forgive me, but most of the stupid is wrung out of me now, if that’s any consolation.”
En picked up Caiden’s black wrist in her jagged, glassy hand, two fingers missing. “Brave and stupid are sometimes the same thing.”
Caiden sank back to the plush bed. “Thanks for coming.”
“We don’t leave family behind.” Laythan leaned against the door frame. “And you already earned a fist for running off. Killing Çydanza … that will ripple, and make others rethink their own regime. You were brave to do something so huge. And damn stupid to waste yourself doing it.”
Caiden felt both empty and overwhelmed. Exploitation was an inevitability of the multiverse, and the Casthen were in Threi’s hands: a man massively accelerated, acquainted with all the Casthen’s secrets, Graven enough to command hundreds to die at a whim, and singularly fixated on killing his own sister, the Prime of the ruling organization of Unity. An absurd cocktail of complications. Caiden’s fourteen-year-old self hadn’t realized removing one problem created space for new ones.
“I have to talk to Threi, decide what to do … Need to release a freighter of slaves to stop the re-initiation of the nophek farming.”
The nophek …
“Laythan.” He hesitated. “There’s something I really need to do and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“What have I liked that you’ve done so far?”
Caiden laughed. More twinges. “Let me think it through, and then … let’s talk.”
; “Thinking things through is a good start. So is talking.” Laythan nodded at the door, where Silye padded in. “You taking in strays now too?”
Caiden craned his neck to look at her, and she stopped dead-still, staring with a mix of fear and awe. He frowned. “She’s just back here becau—”
“Because you’ve been kind to her,” En cut in. “Don’t forget that. Amidst it all … you were kind to her.”
He shook his head. “Silye was engineered to be heavily influenced by Graven genes. Silye …” She snapped to attention and drifted over. Caiden winced. He hadn’t been trying to prove a point. “You deserve opportunities and socialization free of Threi’s web, so you can find out who you are, give your personality room to breathe. A chance to have your own experiences, not just watch or read them in media.”
She blushed. Her long hair whisked a multitude of pastel colors as she looked away, and murmured signs, I have a function here.
Grief paved over Caiden’s smile. “Function doesn’t tie you to a place or a people. We could use your weaponry and coding skills fixing up the ship. Will you—” Come with us.
Caiden mashed his lips together and stared back at the ceiling.
This miserable Graven force. No off switch, no way to interact without everything being a subliminal command, no such thing as consent, no way to know if care was genuine or coerced. Threi’s words kicked around his skull: Welcome to a life of lies, Winn.
“Oh, crimes’ sake, this again, Winn?” En slid off her bed. She took Silye’s shoulders and peered down earnestly. “What’s your favorite media?”
Silye’s eyes widened. Her reflective pink gaze saccaded, assessing En’s face. She signed a reply.
“Excellent,” En said. “Want to see that setting in person? Go swimming? Fly cloudforests? Ride haripeks through glittering Graven ruins overgrown with magenta sorrelvines, like in the opening scene? Let’s do all the fun stuff. Come with us.”
Silye blinked, then shook her head and signed, I’m comfortable here.
“You might be even more comfortable somewhere else, but you won’t know that until you leave and stretch yourself.”