We ignored him.
All at once, the tight passage opened into a massive chamber that seemed to be the width and breadth of the entire temple. The ceiling went up so high that I couldn’t even make out the top in the near darkness. The vast room was completely clean and empty. No furniture, no sculptures, not even the Ark of the Covenant, which I knew H’Jossu had been hoping for.
There was only one thing. A pedestal in the center of the room. Or maybe an altar. A simple obsidian protrusion with a single button atop it.
Vanceval slouched against the pedestal, clutching its sides to stay upright. There was a dark stain near his hip. He’d probably been grazed during his dash to the temple. His metal-encased hands glinted in the half-light. He watched us coming, strangely out of breath. In the eerie silence, our footsteps echoing against the stone floor, we fanned out around him.
“Decades of theories, searching all across the Vastness . . .” Vanceval’s voice was hoarse, nearly a whisper. “And all along, the Lost People were with us.”
I edged closer, not sure I understood what the old Denzan was saying. Reno stepped forward first.
“Vanceval! Step away from—from whatever that is.”
He chuckled and put a hushing finger to his lips, ignoring the captain. Instead, he focused on me.
“Your father was a hero, Sydneycius,” he said.
I instinctively glanced over my shoulder at shabby Ool’Vinn. “If you say so.”
“We should’ve listened to him,” Vanceval continued. “I should have listened. Now—now it is too late. Knowledge is like a sickness.” He flicked a look at Reno. “Even if you turn back—and you should—others will come. I’m sure they already know the way. You will be followed. And then . . .”
His hand hovered over the button.
“Probably not a good idea to let the crazy asshole press that,” Darcy muttered. She and Reno edged forward, while Zara slowly raised her blaster. A quick mental calculation told me that we wouldn’t be fast enough to stop him.
“What happened here, Vanceval?” I asked, trying to keep him talking. “Why is everyone so afraid?”
He laughed again. “The Merciful Rampart. The worst among us, I always thought. So xenophobic. But they were right, Sydneycius. Arkell’s people were right.” He paused, looking first at me and then at Darcy. “Remember, Sydneycius, and you, Darcykunn, that you are half-Denzan. Remember that. You will be our best hope against what’s to come.” He glanced then at Zara and H’Jossu. “Warn your people. Warn your planets about what you’ve seen.”
Three things happened all at once.
With a feral scream, Nyxie made a run for the exit. Zara spun and trained her blaster on the Vulpin, but Nyxie shoved Batzian into the way, blocking Zara’s shot. Nyxie escaped down the hallway.
At the same time, Ool’Vinn lunged toward Vanceval. With his arms and ankles tied, he didn’t stand any chance of reaching the Denzan, but that didn’t stop him from making one last desperate try. H’Jossu stumbled forward in surprise, recovered quickly, and tugged the rope with enough force to send Ool’Vinn stumbling to the floor face-first.
And finally, Vanceval hit the button on the pedestal.
An obsidian panel slammed shut over the exit, sealing us in. It probably sheared off a bit of Nyxie’s tail fur in the process, but she made it out just ahead.
Darcy launched herself at Vanceval, tackling him. Too late.
With a grinding of ancient gears, something shifted on the shadowed ceiling. It sounded like a gate opening. We all looked up. Tiny bolts of electricity flared in the darkness.
A dark cloud of smog rushed into the room.
“Gas!” Reno yelled. “Get low!”
Aela raised their hands toward the aggressively spreading tendrils of mist.
“How?” they said, confused.
Because it wasn’t gas at all.
It was Ossho.
34
I lost track of the others as the rapidly expanding Ossho fog filled the chamber. There was no escaping it, no keeping it out. The Ossho flowed into my nostrils and mouth, its smell acrid and burned, the taste like sucking on an exhaust pipe.
And then I was somewhere else. Memories that weren’t my own fired in my mind. I’d bonded with Aela, but never like this. I had no willpower, no control. The Ossho showed me what it wanted, and I was powerless to stop it.
The Chronicle of the Great Shame.
The voice in my head spoke in a language I instinctually recognized as an archaic version of Denzan. I’d never heard it before, but I understood it perfectly.
They called themselves the Tyton, and they were our gods.
A mountainous planet with pockets of jungle and crystalline ocean. Zoom in. Bronze-skinned and broad-shouldered humans, males and females, muscular and beautiful, like statues made flesh. They were proportioned like comic book characters—larger-than-life, cut as hell, intimidating to even look at.
The Tytons made themselves masters of their world. Careless and certain of their power.
Time went into fast-forward. The mountains were slowly flattened, great towers rising in their place, the spires slicing into the clouds. The jungles receded and disappeared, lush green replaced by choking smog. The oceans grew dim and dark, reefs of garbage piling up into man-made archipelagos.
It was not enough.
Rockets flared into space above the Tyton home world, blasting into the Vastness. The ships cut through space at high speed, the Tytons inside nestled into stasis pods, awakening only when the vessels reached new planets.
They discovered new worlds. New species.
A race of pale-skinned aliens with dull black eyes, sharp teeth, and ceremonial tattoos drawn across their scalps. They gathered in the center of their bustling city to watch the Tytons arrive.
And found them lacking.
The city burned. The tattooed aliens fled in droves as the Tytons moved among them with impossible speed and strength, tearing them limb from limb, laughing like the massacre was a game. The sensations were so real—I could feel the hot blood splattering my face, the crunching of bones. It went on for what seemed like hours. No wonder Nyxie had been so shattered when she came out.
We were spared this fate because we were useful. We could speed up their conquest.
A Denzan—or more like a Neanderthal version of one, its coral hair a tangled mess, gills on its neck, translucent webbing covering its huge eyes—was cradled by a Tyton, lowered gently into an angular chair, and strapped down. The Tyton then thrust a set of lenses over the Denzan’s eyes, searing light pouring forth. The Denzan thrashed and screamed.
It was a Wayscope.
They enslaved us. All for the way that we could see between the stars.
A Tyton ship—bigger than anything I’d ever seen on Denza, like a world unto itself—blasted a massive tear in the fabric of the Vastness. A wormhole. Their ships flooded through, flowing into new galaxies, taking new planets.
An empire grew. Nothing stood before them. But an empire requires resources.
A Tyton stood atop a pile of bodies belonging to some creatures that looked like walking mushrooms. He held out his massive hands and caught drops of sizzling acid rain in his palms.
As with their home world, the Tytons were careless with their destruction. It was unsustainable. But rather than change their ways, they sought to master time itself.
The view switched to a massive open-air space the size of a stadium. Hundreds of Denzans were clamped to Wayscopes around the edges. They writhed in their seats. Some of them caught fire. At the center of this—the object of the Denzans’ focus—was an unstable wormhole. Tytons in protective suits worked at the edges of the gash in space-time, using what looked like high-tech funnels to pull energy directly from the in-between.
Time passes differently between galaxies. The Tytons learned to harness this chaotic energy.
An egg like the pit of an avocado cracked—blinked open—and an eye was revealed beneath the carapace.
It was just like the abomination I’d seen at the center of Goldy. Rippling purple energy surged forth from the eye.
And the Tytons breathed life into it.
That wave of purple energy coalesced into the shape of a serpent. It raced across the surface of a ruined planet, restoring trees to the scorched land. A Tyton followed in its wake, plucking fruit from the remade branches and eating, juices streaking the Tyton’s square jaw.
The Etherazi. Pets to the Tyton.
A view of the universe so expansive that it would’ve shattered my mind if I had taken it in through the Wayscope. Across the galaxies, worlds lit up as the Tytons spread like an infection, until hundreds of planets fell under their sway.
Millennia passed. The Tytons grew proud and lazy.
A Denzan woman watched from the shadows of an alleyway as a crowd of Tytons roasted an elephant-size creature over an open fire, swilling wine from goblets, dancing and licking hot grease off one another. Her eyes narrowed.
We plotted our liberation.
That same Denzan woman. This time, she held a curved dagger coated in the same black substance as Ool’Vinn’s ammo. She slithered in a window, crept across the floor, and slashed the throat of a Tyton asleep in his bed.
Centuries of study. We devised a chemical that could harm them. We knocked them from the heavens.
A Tyton woman stumbled out of a doorway, a baby cradled in her arms. Denzan ships streaked by overhead, discharging tanks of the hot oil, melting the Tyton city. She died screaming, trying and failing to shield her child.
The war was long and bloody. But we were victorious.
Dozens of Denzans, all of them tired-looking and many of them scarred or missing limbs, gathered in a Senate chamber. They shouted at one another.
In victory, we were divided. Some felt shame at what we had done to cast off our oppressors. They called it genocide. They wished to create a habitat for the surviving Tytons. A prison where they would be weakened and rehabilitated. The wise among us knew we had not yet gone far enough. We could suffer no Tyton to live. For the good of all, we must take matters into our own hands.
Out in the Vastness, a squadron of Denzan ships came screaming out of a wormhole, firing away at another group of Denzan vessels. More destruction. More killing.
If you are experiencing this communication, then we have failed. The Tytons live.
A Tyton, no longer bronze-skinned and muscular, not at all proud or fearsome—bearded and wearing a loincloth, scrabbling around in the dirt, trying to make fire.
A human.
For the safety of the universe, the Tytons must be stamped out. The shame-filled weaklings among us have trapped their survivors here. A prison planet that will permanently weaken them, unless they prove capable of changing their ways.
A blue-and-green planet with a single moon.
The Tytons offered no such chance at redemption to a thousand races across the galaxy. To let them live is to simply wait for their return.
A mental block, Aela had told me. Something in the Etherazi’s vision that I wasn’t allowing myself to see.
The planet that I watched burn—the one I was supposed to kill—it was home.
Earth must be destroyed.
35
With its message delivered, the Ossho cloud receded, sweeping back up into the ceiling. The obsidian slab that had blocked the exit lifted up, releasing us, if we weren’t too stunned to move.
Everyone reacted differently to receiving the secret origin of the universe. A secret origin that was filled with multiple montages of genocide that were impossible to look away from.
Batzian covered his face with his hands and sobbed.
Zara put her back to the wall, blaster in front of her, like she didn’t know who to aim at.
Tycius looked down at Ool’Vinn, a calm sort of understanding on his face, like my uncle could finally wrap his head around why my dad had stranded himself here.
H’Jossu, for the first time at a loss for words, simply dropped the rope tied to the other Panalax.
Reno knelt on the floor in front of the pedestal with her forehead pressed to the ground. She lifted her head up for a moment, but only to bang it against the cold stone beneath her. So that wasn’t good.
I turned to check on Aela, and my breath caught.
The faceplate of their exo-suit hung open. The wisp was gone.
“Aela?” I yelled, looking up at the ceiling. “Where—?”
Darcy disentangled herself from Vanceval, the old man prostrate on the floor, staring into space. Her hair was damp, stuck to her forehead.
“Syd,” she said, her voice quiet, an edge to it. “Was that real? Was that true?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, but that was a lie. I could feel the truth in my bones and muscles, in the power that coursed through my body.
“Of course it was true,” Ool’Vinn said, scrambling to his feet now that H’Jossu wasn’t holding his rope. He pleaded with my uncle. “Do you understand now why Marcius did what he did? He was working with the humans when we came here. They were expecting a cure. Already plotting an invasion of their own planet. Don’t you see? Don’t you see what they’ll do when they find out what they truly are?”
My uncle massaged his temples. “Stop, let me think—”
My mind raced. There was no cure for the Wasting because it was caused by Earth itself. My home world was a prison. The Lost People who my father had been searching for—the masters, as Goldy called them—were actually the ancient ancestors of humanity. And they were nasty as hell. What would Rafe Butler do with that knowledge? What would the Denzans think about their onetime saviors if they knew the truth? I thought I finally understood Goldy’s angle. The Etherazi had been pets to humanity, basically slaves likes the Denzans. He wanted me to stop humans from coming back to the galaxy. He wanted me to be his world killer.
“It doesn’t have to happen . . . ,” I mumbled, then spoke louder when I realized the others were listening. “That was like millions of years ago. It doesn’t mean—”
“History repeats itself!” Ool’Vinn shouted. “You’re Marcius’s son—you can’t be this naïve.” The Panalax spun toward Reno. “Now, while she’s still distracted, we must stop her from telling the rest of her kind. Just like we did with Alexander—!”
Reno was on her feet in a blur. In a heartbeat, she was standing right in front of Ool’Vinn. Her fist moved with impossible speed. When her punch landed, it sounded like drywall getting broken by a sledgehammer or like a piñata getting caved in with a bat.
She’d punched right through my dad’s head.
“Marcius!” My uncle screamed instinctively, lunging forward to catch the Panalax as he crumpled to the ground.
I looked down at my shaking hand. The cosmos contained in my ring’s jewel faded and disappeared. The cosmological tether now showed nothing but a blank expanse of space. I felt like I needed to double over, the wind knocked out of me.
It wasn’t him, I told myself. My dad was long gone. There would be time to mourn him later, when it was safe.
Behind me, Batzian screamed in terror.
Because it definitely wasn’t safe now.
“C-captain?” H’Jossu was the first to speak. “What did you do?”
“He was threatening to kill me,” Reno said, her voice cold and distant. “You heard him.”
I stepped back so I could whisper to Batzian. “You aren’t safe here. Get back to the Eastwood. Get her ready to fly.”
At first, I wasn’t sure if Batzian heard me; he was staring aghast at my father’s body. But then he swallowed and edged toward the exit, only freezing when Reno’s eyes swept across us.
There was a spot of blood on her forehead from where she’d been pounding her face against the floor. Her eyes went in and out of focus.
“We have to report this,” Reno said.
“Report,” Tycius said, kneeling next to my dad, “that you just murdered a Panalax in cold blood?”
R
eno gazed down at him, and for a moment I thought I caught a glimpse of a Tyton like I saw in the vision—the power, the casual violence, the lack of real humanity.
“There’s no cure,” Reno replied. “You used us. Your people used us. Kept us imprisoned on a planet that dooms us to a life of suffering.”
“We didn’t know,” Tycius countered. “The cause of the Great Shame was lost to my people ages ago.”
“And now we can enlighten them,” Reno said.
“Captain, please.” My uncle didn’t bother getting off his knees. He knew there was little he could do to physically challenge Reno. “Think about what could happen to Denza. The innocent lives . . .”
“Think about what’s been happening to Earth,” Reno replied. She looked down at her hands. “Imagine what we could’ve been.”
“I don’t have to,” Tycius said. “I saw what you were.”
“Hey!” Suddenly, Darcy was on the move, pointing her finger at Zara. “Don’t you dare aim that at her!”
I glanced over my shoulder to where Zara had trained her blaster on the captain.
I stepped into Darcy’s way, my hands up. “Take it easy.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m some savage, Earther,” Darcy said. “You think I haven’t noticed how you look at me and Hiram? The judgment in your eyes? You’re on their side.”
“I’m not on anyone’s side,” I said. “There are no sides.”
“Of course there are!” She glanced at my father and, in that moment, I knew Darcy was thinking of her mother back on Denza and the Merciful Rampart. “They treat me like shit! Only Rafe—only Rafe was kind. He told you that you’d have to choose. He—”
At that moment, Batzian decided to make his break for the door. Reno barely noticed him go, but Darcy was another story. She was all keyed up, on a razor’s edge, not thinking straight. She lunged after Batzian, so I stuck out my leg to trip her.
Batzian escaped down the hall. But only because Darcy was now focused entirely on me.
She dropped her shoulder and unloaded with a right hook from the hip, the force enough to rattle my jaw and vibrate my teeth. I fell onto my back, banging my head on the floor.
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