Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  Nova’s eyes widened. “That won’t be your sister.”

  “Maybe not in the same way she was before, but it’s enough.”

  Hearing my own voice say these things drove me over the edge. I wanted to grab Birke and shake her and demand to know what had happened to her to make her grow into . . . this. If my Nova had died, surely grief would not have corrupted me into someone like Birke. How could someone who shared my body be so alien? Was it the difference of a single synapse? One twist in the timeline, and this is what I would have been?

  “This is murder,” Tev whispered. “You’re going to murder them, just like you murdered the Adulans.”

  “I had to do that.” Urgency continued pushing Birke’s voice out of her body in desperate gasps, but then she paused, tugged on her suit jacket to straighten it. She wiped her hand across her desk, removing non-existent dust. “I couldn’t risk letting you hurt the Nova from your side. I need her. I would do anything for her.”

  “Then please don’t go through with this,” Nova said. “I don’t want to live in another body. And do you think Marre wants to be the catalyst in some gruesome transformation?”

  “She already is a gruesome transformation.”

  “Don’t say that.” I hissed. “If she’s gruesome, then we all are, in our own ways. She has a right to live.”

  Wild passion blazed on Birke’s face, devoid of doubt. “That’s the point! I’m going to give her that opportunity. She can’t stay the way she is. You said it yourselves: she’s dying. At least this way, she’ll have the chance to be part of something bigger than herself. I do care, and I’m trying to help everyone!”

  “Why don’t we let Marre speak for herself?” Tev said. “She’s standing right here.”

  Birke smiled, a terrible thing that spread across her face—my face—as if melting in the sun. Dread seeped in to my gut. “Yes, let’s do that. Tell them, Marre. Tell them what you’ve already told me.”

  Marre looked at Tev, and then me. Honey-scent surrounded us, melding with the song of the Tangled Axon. Marre’s buzzing heartbeat filled me in ways I still couldn’t explain. I felt her speaking into the deepest part of me with mute intention: It will be okay.

  My heart thundered. I almost wanted her to not answer Birke, to never move. If she never spoke, their lives would be like Tev’s leg when she was injured on the mining ship: full of potential to be whole or destroyed. If we just didn’t look at them, we wouldn’t disturb those possibilities. We wouldn’t shake one reality into existence, eliminating all others. We could just hold our breaths and live inside that moment, letting endless possibility eddy around us. All that potential would go on and on, and one day the glass leaves outside would fall, shattering around us like stars, but we would persist, frozen in time.

  But Marre did speak, deciding which reality would crystallize and which would fall away. She snapped all that possibility into one clean line that pointed inexorably forward.

  “I will do it.”

  “Nova,” I said immediately. My sister didn’t move her gaze from the floor. “Nova, don’t do this.”

  “Nova,” Marre said over me, though her voice was barely above a whisper. “It will be okay.”

  My sister took my sweat-slick hand and squeezed. “You’ve always been braver than me. More willing to take risks. I’ve always looked at you a little like a toddler stumbling toward a glass case, and now I’m doing to you what you’ve always done to me, running blindly forward while you watch on and pray. There’s no joy in scaring you, Alana, but you have to trust me.”

  I shook my head and felt like I was losing my mind. How could this be happening? “Why are you doing this? Why would you agree to something so horrible?”

  “Trust me,” she whispered, resting her forehead against mine. Jasmine circled us. Grief cracked open inside me, surging like an ocean swell, so she was right: I prayed to drown it out. Prayed to no one in particular—maybe to Nova. Prayed the way a dying woman does, with pure need and desperation. Those prayers shattered when she drew me into her thin arms and held me. Her warmth radiated out, ported into me—a transfusion of peace that warred with my fear, leaving me as confused as ever.

  “Don’t take Tev for granted,” she whispered. “There’s magic in recognizing a kindred spirit, and an even greater power in letting yourself love them. When it scares you, let it—that’s your ego letting go.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.” I was vaguely aware that, somewhere behind Nova, Birke impatiently shifted her weight. Fear coiled around my heart like a serpent, squeezing the life and breath out of me. How could this be happening? I was about to lose my sister, just as I’d lost my parents. Relentless images of Adul drowned out everything else in my head, all those bands of atmosphere fading into nothing.

  “Please don’t.”

  “Trust me. I love you.”

  “Where will we do it?” Marre said. Invisibility pockmarked her honeycomb tattoo, her cheeks, her bare arms. One of her eyes.

  “In the hangar.” Birke hurried to us and gestured at the enforcers to follow. She placed hands at the small of Nova’s back, my back, ushering us toward the wall. It was all I could do to not recoil under the touch of that woman who was both me and not-me—a me-come-undone. I wanted to put as much distance between us as possible, but I was trapped in this building with her, in this alien universe, where she would unravel the new life I’d found.

  Marre didn’t wait for Birke. She pointed a finger at the wall, tapped it once. The metal rippled, making a sound like something between a tear and the crack of a whip. She moved through the wall, slick and quiet, and for a moment her body seemed so slight that I was afraid she wouldn’t make it to the other side in one piece. I could feel her struggle to hold onto herself as she seeped further into the Tangled Axon.

  But when she stepped through, Marre remained whole. Or as whole as I’d ever seen her, anyway, with patches of skin and hair gone missing, fingernails flickering.

  As we joined her, feet stepping onto a slick, flawless quartz floor, I let my eyes chase the albacite walls of the hangar upward. They disappeared into what looked like an endless white nothing, until my eyes adjusted to the brightness enough to see luminous clouds swirling at the hangar’s apex. At the center of the hangar was our graceful old ship, the Tangled Axon, her engine cycled down completely, her dark, mottled hull more beautiful to me than ever while contrasted against this fake construct of a corporation. In front of her, three examination tables awaited us, topped by transparent casket-like enclosures. Two were empty, and one . . .

  Neither the enforcers nor Birke stopped me as I approached the farthest enclosure, cold and afraid of what I’d find, but unable to stop moving.

  Pale light illuminated the dead woman’s perfect, dark face, her long locs draped over either side of her still body.

  My sister.

  No—Birke’s sister. This version of Nova, who shared her face and body, but had become an engineer instead of a spirit guide, who had loved machines as I had, and suffered and died from Mel’s—or some version of it. Most of her was hidden by a sheet, but I could see that she’d been much thicker in life than my Nova. More inclined to hold onto her body, to live in it and nourish it and feel its presence. Like me. Had she worked as hard as me to anchor herself to the world? To eat and sweat and work and live? Did the Big Quiet know the shape of her desire as intimately as it knew mine?

  “Alana.” Tev touched my waist, startling me. I looked at her, saw how her expression froze momentarily when she took in the other Nova’s locs, her body, her eerily familiar face. Tev’s next words came slowly; her eyes never left the dead woman. “We have to go inside the ship.”

  I grabbed her arms and spoke quietly and quickly. “We can’t let them do this. There’s got to be some way to get Birke to understand how wrong this is, how . . . ” There was no word that could capture the horror of what she wanted to do.

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  �
��Don’t give me that.” I let go of her. “Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay when my sister is about to be killed, and what’s left of her is going to be shoved into a corpse. How is that okay?”

  “She’s going to murder my pilot, too. She’s turning her into some kind of fucking spirit glue. I have every reason to be furious.” She lowered her voice until I could barely hear her. “Which is why we’re not going to let her do this. Marre and Nova are shielding our thoughts right now so Birke can’t detect our intentions, just like Nova hid the Axon through the breach and disguised you on your way to the surface. You and I are going to make sure this spirit transfer doesn’t work, even if we have to destroy half the ship to prevent it. We’ll cycle up her engines for maximum speed, but keep her anchored. It should give Marre enough power to overload the system.”

  “What about Marre?” I said. “What about what we came here for?”

  “We’ll have to find another way—” Her eyes flicked up at something behind me.

  “All right, inside the ship,” an enforcer said, voice close enough to me that I could feel her breath. She jabbed her weapon into the small of my back. “Go.”

  I wiped my damp hands against my shirt and let the enforcer herd us toward the Tangled Axon’s repaired cargo hold. When we passed my sister, I stopped, grabbed her sweet-smelling, fragile body, and hugged her tightly. She all but disappeared inside my softer frame. “Be safe.”

  I felt her smile against me, cheek-to-cheek. “You too.”

  Just then, I noticed Marre holding Tev’s hand and watching us, eyes enveloping us like night. Her entire body rippled with translucence. The sight tugged at me: the woman I’d fallen in love with, hand-in-hand with the ship-human who had given me the sky. I opened one arm to Marre and beckoned her forward.

  I had so loved the Tangled Axon. I’d stumbled upon a found family inside her hull, created a life for myself there. Marre’s own red heart beat in time with that of the ship’s plasma engine, driven by the same haunting spirit. I wanted to know what had done this to her, where she had met Tev, and what she saw when she looked at me. The possibility that I could lose Marre now, just when I was beginning to understand her, was too awful to believe.

  A few moments passed with my arm lingering in the air. Just as I started feeling foolish, Marre disappeared and rematerialized with her arms around me and Nova, scarcely making a sound. Her touch was cold and light, like autumn. I cupped my palm around the back of her head and held her to me, feeling an electric charge between our skins. The Tangled Axon embraced me through Marre’s fading body. I pressed my face to the top of her head and breathed in her honey scent that mingled with my sister’s jasmine.

  I heard her voice inside me, layered beneath and above and within the song of the Axon: You have nothing to fear.

  But I was afraid.

  The enforcer nudged me with the barrel of her weapon. “Let’s go.”

  We marched toward the open cargo hold. Tev touched the small of my back as if to remind me that I wasn’t alone, while I looked back over my shoulder at Nova and Marre. Each were helped onto the two tables—the vitreous containers now floating above—by Birke and an enforcer, respectively. Marre seemed shockingly small from this distance, with the clear enclosure descending over her pale body.

  Before my sister lay down, Birke stopped her and placed her hands on her cheeks. Her lips moved as earnestly as if in prayer. What she said, I’ll never know.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Walking into the Tangled Axon now felt like becoming intimate with Marre. Each step was a step inside part of her. Each time my fingers brushed the ship’s bulkheads, I touched some piece of her. Moving deeper into the center of her, the closer I felt to her heart. Now that I knew the truth, it seemed impossible I could have missed it. Every corner, every centimeter of this vessel was Marre; I felt it with every breath. The ship’s pain, her song, her voice—they had all been Marre’s. This ship was part of her body as much as her own hands or eyes.

  We met Slip and Ovie in the mess hall, where the enforcer stood guard by the doorway and we took seats around the table. As I was about to sit next to Tev, she shook her head almost imperceptibly, then flicked her eyes toward the bench on the other side, near the entryway to the corridor that led to engineering. Next to Ovie.

  I watched Tev’s face as I moved into position, and she barely nodded. Then, slightly tilting her head toward the entryway, she glanced at Ovie and me in turn. It was the corridor leading toward engineering.

  She wanted us to find a way to get to the ship’s engine.

  “Sit down,” the enforcer said. “Don’t try anything funny.”

  Slip rolled her eyes and grabbed a nutrient bar. “Oh, we’re hilarious, can’t you tell?”

  She glared at Slip from under her black helmet. “Just be quiet.”

  “Status report,” Tev said, voice low as she leaned over the table.

  “Our lady is waiting,” Ovie growled quietly.

  “What are you talking about?” the enforcer said. “Stop it. Sit back; stop leaning over the table.”

  We each complied. Tev continued staring at me and Ovie, flicking her eyes toward the entryway again.

  I reached into my pocket.

  “Hey,” the enforcer said, stepping toward me. “Hands on the table.”

  “I have to take my medication.”

  “Hands on the table.”

  “Please.” I held one hand up, plaintively, while the other pulled out the Dexitek bottle. As I did so, the enforcer rushed me, but I quickly sat it on the table and put my other hand in the air as well. She stopped, surprised to see I was telling the truth.

  “See? It’s medicine. Please. I’m sick and I have to take it twice a day. Or do you want to have to deal with explaining why I’m passed out under the table from pain? You can even take the pill out for me if you want. But I have to take it.”

  She let out a sound of frustration, then gestured at the bottle with her weapon. “Hurry up.”

  “I have to take it with water.”

  “For spirit’s sake—”

  “Sorry my illness is so inconvenient for you,” I snapped, moving toward the water pump on the other side of the mess hall.

  “Stop. You there.” The enforcer gestured at Slip, who was closer to the water. “You get it for her.”

  As Slip stood and turned toward the pump, I reached for my bottle and knocked it over, pretending it was an accident. It rolled off under the table. I muttered something profane and bent down to pick it up, exchanging surreptitious glances with Ovie.

  “I’ll get it,” he said, standing and bending over, wolf-shadow hunting for the Dexitek with me.

  “Get up,” the enforcer said. “All of you, sit back down—”

  While the enforcer’s back was to her, Tev quickly stood, leapt up onto the table, and pulled an unopened crate of nutrient bars down off the shelf with an involuntary groan. As the enforcer turned away from us and toward Tev, she aimed her weapon.

  Too late. I quickly stood and pressed the three release buttons at the base of her helmet’s skull, removing it before she could turn around or understand what was happening. Tev shouted with the effort of lifting the box high enough to bring it down onto the enforcer’s head at an angle. At the moment of impact, the enforcer’s weapon fired in a plasma arc, barely missing Tev’s face, singeing her hair instead.

  The enforcer slumped to the ground. Tev plucked the weapon from her hands and got to work tying her up with electrical wire like a burt calf. She stirred a little and made a small sound. Slip pulled an injector out of her pocket, rolled up the enforcer’s sleeve, and administered a dose of something.

  “A hypnotic,” she said. “Should keep her out cold for a while.”

  “You two, go,” Tev said to me and Ovie. “Overload the Axon’s engines. Give Marre what she needs to fight back. We’ll do our part on the bridge.”

  I started to leave, but Tev caught my wrist. “Hey. I’m sorry I didn’t tell yo
u about Marre.”

  “That’s the last thing I’m concerned about right now.” I gently removed her hand from my wrist, then kissed the inside of hers. “I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about if we make it through this. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “Go. Be safe.”

  “We have to put her in full cycle,” Ovie said as I left the mess hall and ran with him. We hurried through corridors and swung into engineering. His shadow-tail seemed so real to me now that I dodged it when he turned the corner. “I need you to remove the waveguide modulator while I reconfigure the thrusters.”

  “Removing the modulator could completely overload the engines. Destroy her from the inside out.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? These are Captain Helix’s orders, surgeon.”

  “It’s just—”

  “You want to be part of a crew?” He gestured at the waveguide system panel with a bundle of wire, black fur running up the length of his arm. “Now’s your chance to prove you can take orders.”

  I looked up at the plasma heart beating above us, illuminating the space with a riot of flickering light. If we did this, the ship’s heart would become so engorged and angry it could eat away at the bulkheads. She’d be like a beast gone mad, terrible and wild. How would it affect Marre?

  I grabbed the extra toolkit from a wall compartment and got to work uncoupling the waveguide modulator coils from the waveguides. It was tedious, grueling work that coaxed out the symptoms of my disease. Muscles tightened along my neck, turning me into more statue than woman, but I just cracked my neck to release some of the tension and pushed through the pain. I worked to the rhythm of the Tangled Axon’s plasma heart crackling above us, and the sounds of Ovie’s effort. Metal against metal as his tools made music alongside mine. The sighs and grunts of hard labor. Occasional profanity when his finger slipped or a wire snapped backward, cutting into flesh.

  Sweat dripped from my forehead and into the ship’s engine—a part of me becoming part of her. Never had my locs felt so heavy and hot, even tied back. Frustration coiled at the base of my neck. What if we didn’t get this done in time? What was happening outside the ship?