by Essa Hansen
“Can you go get her?” En called, nodding to Silye, who stood at the water’s edge.
Caiden pulled off his boots and strolled over barefoot, wiggling his toes in the volcanic grains. He stopped at Silye’s side. The water was warmer than its icy blue suggested.
Her cheeks were wet.
“I’ve never seen anything like this either.” Stars speckled the lake-calm ocean surface. Despite the encroaching night and the dimming rose, the air was still bright, as if the atmosphere bounced a glow across the planet.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
She slid her arms around his waist.
“Sil … it’s time to go. You need experience away from Graven things. And I need to be alone, where I can think straight.”
She signed, You want me to go?
Every statement he made was an unwitting order.
“For your own good, yes.” He bent to kiss the top of Silye’s head. She looked up, and the kiss landed on her forehead. Caiden cleared his throat. “And follow En’s lead, but not too closely. Take care of Ksiñe and the whipkin.”
She might take that as a Graven order, too, but there was in goodness in it, and that was what mattered. Silye nodded and signed, I will.
“En, make sure she ends up somewhere safe?”
“Oh, I’ll convince our dear captain to take her in. You know he can’t help himself.” En chuckled and took Silye by the shoulders, leading her into the ship. She looked back the entire way.
Caiden watched the Second Wind lift off, stir the sea, and ascend until it was another speck among the pinprick stars.
He headed into the Azura to grab his morphcoat off the pilot’s seat. A starburst in the idle display pulsed to indicate a message. Threi’s voice filled the cockpit: “Winn, they found a food that crosses the rind of Çydanza’s universe. It’s sort of like a furry slug. Revolting but salty. Thought you’d be happy to hear.
“The Cartographers are setting up regulations for Casthen operations. I have no end of jobs for a passager with the best starship in the multiverse. One of those jobs might be to let me out.” The smile was even in his voice, but weakly Graven-edged. “You did say we’d talk ‘soon.’ It’s been so many days, I’m wondering what ‘soon’ means to you, darling soldier. Come let me out, let’s talk, and work together again. Or I put a bounty on you for killing Çydanza, and every passager hunts you down through the multiverse … Whichever of the two sounds more fun to you. Oh, and Winn …”
The recording stretched into silence. Caiden reached up to shut it off.
His fingertip was an inch from the message symbol when Threi continued, “I salvaged more than just nophek off RM28.”
The ring of light dissolved, message ended.
Caiden’s hand hovered in the air. More than just … What?
The ship prompted a callback option, responding to his elevated heart rate.
“No, he’s baiting me to contact him. That’s all. I’m not ready to talk yet.”
He still had the Graven and Dynast to investigate, both in Laythan’s databases, the content he’d copied from Threi’s private room, and in the paper book: Graven Intention of Prima Luminiferia, Volume One, Unabridged Edition.
Caiden shook his head and pulled on his morphcoat. As he ambled outside into a rapidly cooling breeze, the leather’s lining expanded into a thin layer of wool.
Without a surf, the planet was nearly silent. Cliff rocks dripped. Crunchy rumbles floated from distant landslides. The nophek made nasal whines as it pawed in a circle in the sand. Caiden sat beside it and rested his elbows on his knees, facing the sunset. His brain, his many thoughts, for once were quiet too.
“Caiden is dead. I said that when I became a passager.” He slid the leash bracelet off his wrist, deactivated it, and shoved it in a pocket. “I transformed that person. I’m going to name you ‘C,’ after the first letter of everything I hated.”
He watched the crystalline ocean soak up darkness and stars. He breathed sweet air and looked into the nophek pup’s big, moonlike eyes.
“You really are ugly.”
The beast snuggled into the sand and rolled on its back. With serrated jaws, it gently mouthed his wrist as he scratched its belly.
CHAPTER 50
BAIT OUR HOOK WITH HEART
Ten years later …
Weaved into the incorporeal, collective field of consciousness— that Graven place between the clouds of space and the ocean of time— she distinctly felt someone’s attention rivet on her. At first featherlight, her spirit grazed by a wingbeat, the sensation intensified from potential to reality and struck Leta so sharply, her mind was kicked from the remote body she inhabited.
Her awareness slithered off mechanical tendons, uprooted from organs, detangled from metallic exoskeleton. Leta grappled with the last sensations of her Proxy body slumping in place, inanimate. Her consciousness drained from it and whipped involuntarily back through the luminiferity, to re-condense within her real body suspended three corridors and five rooms away.
Her eyes snapped open. The scalar gravity field holding her hovering dissolved like shackles released. Leta toppled into her handlers’ arms.
Consciousness glowed back through her nerves and flesh, and her first sense was dismay. Her natal body was becoming a stranger the more time she spent away from it: twenty years old, a full twelve inches shorter than the Proxy she had just been entangled inside, her skin two tones drained, riddled with void-white freckles, and weak as a web-caught moth. Years of training and treatment had altered her genetic blueprint to approximate the ancient Graven, to unlock access to the chaotic, etheric collective— luminiferity— that she and the others were still learning to navigate.
Her handlers eased her bare feet to a frigid floor. Bones as sensitive as glass chimed with fresh pains while silken flesh stretched uneasily. Her breath snagged in her lungs. Deeper dismay pushed aside her worry of who had drawn her back to this weak vessel and why.
The hushed, low-sensory Away room was home but not homey, and the wretched memories here were slowly, thankfully dissolving with the rest of her past, like the whiteness that was now her childhood, her life before the Dynast. She’d forgotten how she arrived, or even if she had simply emerged fully formed. Old fears crackled off Leta’s spirit, and she swallowed a rusty dread.
“Leta Nine,” a handler said, gentle as the sough of a wave, but the sound still avalanched in Leta’s sensitive ears. “Move slow. Come back wholly. We are holding you.” The familiar, melodic phrase was like a spell. Leta eased into their hands. She attempted to stuff down the dismay.
At least the sight of family still made her smile. The spiritual presence of Leta’s fellow Graves hummed in the room as they levitated above quartz plates. They saw each other’s real bodies rarely now that the training trials were over, survived by less than ten of them out of more than twenty. Their minds now were away on missions within their own Proxies: those receptors handcrafted by Abriss Cetre from the geometry of stars. The Graves were as lightning arcing through dimensions, their Proxies were the lightning rods calling them down, coalescing their expansion into one stable nest of neurons. In her real body, Leta buzzed and shivered like a poorly contained bolt.
She sighed out the ache. “Why am I back?” Her atrophied voice broke, an instrument corroded and out of tune. Her purpose was to drive other, better instruments.
The handler replied, “The Dynast Prime has requested your presence in the orrery.”
The Prime. Awe blushed through her before the confusion struck. “I was just … near there …”
“In person,” the handler said. “Not in-Proxy. Just you.”
A rare summons … The primarily inorganic Proxies were immune to Abriss’s genetic control. Leta’s real body— with soft, fallible biology— was not. Which meant this summons was to deliver an order she would not be psychosomatically able to refuse.
Another phase of trials? More soul growing pains.
Leta hesitated, spl
ayed her hands against the floor. There was an ache still, in each freckle, the ghost of every treatment round she’d survived. One decade had faded it all to phantom pains but her skin was left a landscape of galaxies, layers of splotches and freckles and spots, palest on top, from star-white to midnight.
“Mistress?”
“Help me up.” Leta stood, wobbling, on the plate of her Away station. She pressed her soles into the cold, realigned her spine, sought gravity, banished reservations. She pried herself free from helpful hands into an ungainly gait, out into the hallway to leave— so rarely in this body— the Graves’ wing. She’d been all over Unity while in-Proxy, dashing on missions: infiltration, espionage, security. Another self, separate from this skin.
One of the handlers threw an ankle-length coat around her shoulders. It swished over her morphsuit and dampened a bit of the air, the flavors, the music and temperature and seizures. Unlike in-Proxy, the sensory world butchered her with dissociation. She was as raw as a nerve out here, but if the Prime summoned, it was important.
The side hallway soared a hundred meters, as tall as it was long. The Dynast hold colonized the massive skeleton of a Graven structure. Their lightseep obsidian, which vibrated and sang in frequencies only Leta and the other Graves could hear, drove deep into the planet’s core. Crystalline growths formed walls, ceiling, floor, like new muscle to pad out the bones of the ancients’ long-dead palace.
Leta choked on the cloying perfume of a garden. Something itched her spine: a roar echoing from far-off plateaus. They were streaked with Dynast soldiers and fleets— a drop in the ocean of the immense forces the Prime controlled. Leta squinted— no shadow today on the sun— at light blaring across salt mountains and steam clouds where hot springs gushed, and while in-Proxy she would have shrugged, bored and untouched, these surroundings were all manner of abrasive and disorienting now. Her mental map of her body rushed to become the flow of the springs, leaping into the sound of it, expanding as part of that distant, raging water, and as she started to lose sense of her flesh entirely, consciousness wanting to run, she darted to the Dynast Prime’s orrery-room door and braced herself.
Under the pressure of her palm, a section of the dissolve door vibrated in phase and opened a crack.
“Enter,” said the beautifully dulcet voice of Dynast Prime Abriss Cetre. Her very genetics encoded a loving demand in anything she said— to which everything obeyed.
Leta’s heart swelled with response, lifting her frail bones with a tender trinity of energy, fealty, and impulse. Though her genetic conditioning had made her more like the Graven of old, she had no loving effect on others— that was inborn, not acquired, and Leta didn’t know how or where she’d been born. Those years were erased by the glossy radiation of the treatments. But Abriss loved her and all the Graves, had the best ideals in mind for all of Unity, and Leta was overjoyed to obey.
She pushed through the doorway, drifted into the nonagonal orrery room, and balked at the sheer amount of input. The Prime stood on a central dais, in the heart of a perfect sphere map of Unity hovering in translucent lavender arcs nine meters tall. It outlined galaxies rife with stars and planets, conjoined by lines of relationship and necklaces of number. Zoomed sections filled the periphery. Statistics, orbits, and astrological glyphs flowed like cosmic winds around the diagram, which only Abriss could decipher. A master astrologian, she wielded unparalleled powers in Unity, able to divine information and glimpse past and future states through celestial motions.
In the middle of that web, like a slender spider, Abriss turned. “Leta. Come here.” She spoke in monotone, delicately enunciated. The syllables whisked shivers across Leta’s skin. Her cells aligned to Abriss’s gravity and she was tugged to the dais, through nebulae salted with data. The attraction was gentle, and the closer she approached, smelling petrichor and sage, the more relaxation threaded her tendons and joints, eased her nervousness, and blossomed an awed smile on her lips.
I would die happy for her.
Abriss had poise in place of charisma, serenity more than beauty, and an austerity sharp with energy, her movements as intentional as her speech. A leader who feared nothing, ever.
“Do not be scared,” the Prime said, though surely she knew fear could not exist near her.
“How do I serve?” Leta asked.
Abriss’s gaze saccaded across the luminous orrery. Freckles stardusted all her tawny skin in both paler and darker spots, a mirror of the star-peppered air. “My stars have told me that a sudden message will arrive regarding family, and if the youngest of my Graves is with me, that message will ripple into something …” In one of the fields, she cupped a little sun in her palm. “Extraordinary.”
Family. Abriss was the last of the Dynast family alive, as far as Leta knew. And Leta’s family were the Graves, seven corridors and three rooms away.
Abriss gripped the brunette braid slung over her shoulder. Gaze fixed on orbits stationing conjunct, she muttered, “One moment. A trine forming exact. Ipsa’s return on our natal—” Her eyes widened as she cut off. “I know who will call.”
At that moment, the call came in. A terminal pedestal flooded with symbols. Abriss stared at it for a heartbeat, beautiful in her rare startlement, pillowy lips parted and smoky eyes bright as amber. “Allow,” she said.
The comm system linked.
Part of the orrery sizzled away, replaced with the projection of a man’s life-size silhouette, vague behind the milky surface of a universe’s rind.
On reflex, Leta’s senses fuzzed and her mind sought him out across the luminiferous collective, which had no distance or time. Her expanded senses encompassed Unity, but couldn’t seek past Unity’s rind. Only tiny bits of knowledge made it through from beyond, sparkling in her brain. The man’s universe was a prison, and he was Abriss’s—
“Brother,” the Prime said. “We haven’t spoken in over five million arcminutes. Since Emporia.”
“Forgive me, sister, I’ve been … detained by matters.” The man stepped closer to his prison’s rind. Its iridescence billowed aside, exposing his crooked smile.
Familiarity sparked. Leta’s brow creased. She knew this silhouette from long ago, the memory frayed at all its edges. She had been in darkness and he had reached a hand down from the light. How did you survive, little thing? his same voice had said.
“No doubt,” he continued, “you have pawns to boss around and astronomy to read, so I won’t waste our time.”
“Patience was not ever your strongest trait, Threi.”
Even without the literal glitter of stars all around, the air sizzled between these two like a live wire, a volatile magnetism even more primal than Leta’s Graven fealty to Abriss. This was more aversion than love, which itched against Leta the wrong way, spurring her instinct to protect. She’d served in-Proxy as Abriss’s guard on many missions, but her real body was no fighter, and felt even more raw and tiny in the presence of these Dynast heirs. Two truly cosmic human forces were conversing in this moment. A mere slip of insignificant shadow, Leta shrank behind the Prime to the dais end.
“A man named Winn has been forced into Unity and will be hiding somewhere in your vast, incomparable, resplendent realm, dear Prime.” Haughty, sarcastic words, like syrup.
Abriss cocked her head. “Winn …” She pecked a finger at the terminal and more of the orrery sizzled into holosplays: footage of a memory jog recording, an attack in Emporia, the Casthen’s blood-red emblem. “I remember. He was the … Graven Paraborn.” A flavor of disgust clogged her words. “But all this occurred ten years ago. Why do you care of him?”
The holos settled on an image of the man and a block of text that was meant to chart his whereabouts over time. Instead, it tracked a ghost: wisps of velocity in the multiverse, a legend, a glass star shooting too fast to catch.
Leta’s gaze locked on the picture of the man, around her current age at the time it was taken a decade ago, when he’d dismantled the Casthen’s leadership. She had seen the
image back then, too, and recognized him at the time … hadn’t she? The memory was threadbare, fuzzed up by the abrasion of years. She’d been young, just beginning to be scrubbed blank by the Graves’ treatments, the glossy starlight injections like a bleach on her spirit.
Leta grew lightheaded, her consciousness unraveling at the edges, some of it trying to travel, some burrowing into her own history as she grazed the edges of a feeling, the sharp consonants of a name, a scent … “ Caiden.”
The sound came out a whisper, barely enough to tickle Abriss’s ear and start to shift the woman’s head, but Threi talked over her—
“He’s evaded me for all this time. There’s a bounty on his head higher than a pile of gloss, but—” Threi paused for a dramatic, conspiratorial smile. “It’s proven exceedingly difficult to catch a ship that has Graven technology never seen before. Technology that can create and collapse a new universe at will.”
His grin widened as Abriss gaped. She blinked at him before dashing her gaze back over the orrery, her lightning-quick mind gathering starlight and angles into knowledge that might confirm or deny her brother’s wild claim. In the end, she inhaled, lifted her chin, and squared her shoulders back at his projection, but Leta could make out the quiver infesting her shoulders.
What could Abriss Cetre— the most powerful creature in Unity— do with this new technology that could make even her tremble at the thought?
Dread stitched down Leta’s spine. She peered back at the image of the man with two names. Rage fired his blue eyes, short hair tousled like a pale storm, freckles dusting nose and cheekbones— was he family of theirs?
The threadbare memory re-knit some more. She’d been ten years old and he should have been fourteen but wasn’t. Why? she’d asked. The handlers said her memory must have been damaged, or a loose resemblance, and it was no matter: time was corporeal, and her training would bring her closer to the empyreal. Her past could safely be forgotten in the wake of such a bright, bright future.