Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  Don’t think about it.

  The final modulator coil slipped free of its home and clattered to the floor.

  “Here it comes,” Ovie muttered, and stood.

  Energy pulsed in the center of the Tangled Axon’s heart, the white-hot plasma above us rippling with power. Then, it expanded in an instant, exploding outward into the corridors and rocking the ship in a great crash, sending me toppling over backwards before I could grab anything.

  Tev’s voice boomed over the comm. “Everyone out! Now!”

  I scrambled to my feet and followed Ovie out of engineering at a run, occasionally bracing myself. Every crevice of the Axon was illuminated with the plasma that bled out of the engine and into the rest of the ship. As we cut through the mess area, Ovie stopped, bent down, and linked the enforcer’s limp arms with his, lifting her top half. He tilted his chin at her feet and spoke quickly. “Grab that end.”

  I picked up her legs and helped him carry her through the corridors toward the cargo bay, falling into bulkheads each time the ship quaked. As the Tangled Axon broke free of her restraints and rose in the hangar like an uncaged beast, we jumped out of her mouth and fell where we landed, crashing into equipment and tables and enforcers. The woman we’d carried groaned beneath me, but didn’t wake.

  Gloved hands grabbed my arms and lifted me up onto weak legs. Birke appeared in my line of vision and waved away the enforcer who held me. She left to help her unconscious comrade.

  “What did you do?” she shouted. No matter how many ways Birke tried blocking my view, I kept the ship in my line of sight.

  “Answer me!” Finally, she grabbed my chin and squeezed, turning my face toward hers. “What did you do!”

  “Gave the Tangled Axon room to sing.”

  A wail of frustration rose out of Birke as she let me go and left to find Nova’s containment unit.

  Arcs of electricity haloed the Tangled Axon in three, four, ten rings of white-hot flame, her discharges multiplying the longer she remained trapped there in full cycle without the modulator to soothe her. I wanted to go to Nova and Marre and release them from their coffins, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the spectacle. Wonder and fear warred within me.

  My eyes saw the Axon, but my mind flickered between reality and flashbacks of the Adul massacre. Wild power burst from the ship’s engines, flashing into flame and clouds of spark. Color shimmered in the air between each arc and reflected against the white walls—a storm of ribbons blazing in bright hues. We were awash in light, and it was coming from the Tangled Axon—our vessel, our home.

  Marre.

  Reality itself seemed to thin in the space around the ship. For a breath, silence. Not even the sound of my own heartbeat. The air puckered around the containment units and Birke.

  I took a deep breath, hearing nothing.

  In an instant, a piercing metallic shriek broke the stillness, and the Axon’s engines unleashed her rage into the space around us. Reality folded in upon itself, and then collapsed around us, a singularity of Birke’s macabre intentions channeled through Marre. Plasma arcs broke free from the rings around the ship and snaked into the sky, sizzling and popping with white-hot fury. Sparks rained down on us in a firestorm. I could see no one else; there was only me and the ship in a vast sea of white, though I could feel the collective presence of the others around me.

  Buzzing, snapping, and popping punctuated the Tangled Axon’s screams. Marre’s screams. Fear suffocated me for an instant, but then—as a monstrous branch of lightning reached out for me—I glimpsed a vision of Marre’s night-black eyes and felt the hum of the ship inside me like a balm.

  White, everywhere.

  Pure electrical current consumed me. Cold static charged my flesh, connecting me to every other soul in the hangar in a cacophony of memory and experience and life. Inside that glow, our individualities blurred at the edges, siphoning each other. At the center of everyone, Marre. The Tangled Axon.

  Together we sizzled, froze, illuminated, and ignited at once, unfurling ourselves into an endless procession of alternate realities, each one with limitless possibility. In one reality, I was Birke, and I wasn’t. Elsewhere, I was myself, and I wasn’t. There were universes where I was a mother, a murderer, a spirit guide, a grandmother, a child dead at ten. I was a man, a woman, both, neither. I was a thousand, a million different versions of myself, each one true, because no possibility failed to manifest somewhere in the folds of existence. Birke, myself—we were just two possible outcomes of an unfathomably complex set of parameters that contribute to a human life.

  I knew in that white nothingness (everythingness) that everyone else—from Tev to Nova to the enforcers—experienced the same thing, each one gazing into the infinite regress of their own lives.

  We were alive and on fire, all of us, glowing from the inside out. I felt Lai, my parents, Nova, me. I felt Birke within me, part of me—one self of many that I could have become. I felt the sorrow of her loss, saw her own sister dead at twenty-eight from their version of Mel’s. I watched as Birke’s grief crystallized into feral determination just after her Nova had died. I watched her transform from a woman broken by loss, to the warped person I then knew.

  Never again. Birke’s voice echoed in my thoughts. I will never lose her again. I will build a new universe where bodies aren’t fragile, where the soul is limitless, where medicine is pure magic. And I will tunnel through a thousand realities to find my sister again.

  Her grief resonated with mine. I knew its bitter taste, its color. I knew how it felt to see the empty space they once occupied. To resent even happy memories for the flaying pain they brought to the surface. I understood then that it was true: given the right set of circumstances, I could have become Birke. Any version of me from any reality could have become her.

  My Nova touched my shoulder in the midst of the chaos, and had I found my voice, I would have cried out. No longer trapped inside the containment unit, her body looked more like Marre’s than her own, with patches of translucence dappling her empty skin. No blood or bone. Only light, endless light, bursting from her thinning flesh in rays. She held her hand out to me, electricity arcing from her fingertips. Our palms touched, intensifying the current between us.

  “It’s happening,” she said. Her eyes were spheres of blinding white. “I told you we would be okay.”

  I couldn’t speak. Neither could Nova, I realized; her voice echoed in my mind. Wisps of light peeled away from her, and I knew I was witnessing her spirit spiral out of her body. The Tangled Axon dissolved her, cell by cell. Blood and muscle vaporized. Bone turned to dust and disintegrated inside the white fire I saw in Nova’s eyes. Combusting into pure spirit.

  She was dying.

  I reached out to her, tears vaporizing before they could touch my cheeks.

  Her hands went first. Fingertips, palms, wrists. Plasma arc and flame licked them away, leaving nothing but light and empty space behind. No matter how many times I tried to touch her, I couldn’t. Her body just dissolved where my hands met her skin. My heart split open as I watched my sister burn.

  Nova smiled with what remained of her face, but the rest of her was everywhere. She was within me, outside me. She had seeped out of herself and become something more.

  I’m at peace with my place in this world, Nova thought to me. Are you?

  A memory nibbled at the edge of my consciousness, burrowing through me on its way into the present, and somehow I knew it was Nova who gave it to me. A memory of us.

  Sunlight poured into our childhood kitchen in Heliodor. We sat at a table near the window, waiting for our mother to come home from a biosynth mission on the outskirts of the system. I laid my head on the metal surface of the table, leaning on my arm. Nova ate a plumberry dipped in caramel and talked about the boys and girls she liked in school. A tree outside our kitchen swayed, sunlight turning its leaves into emerald, its veins into intricate shadow-canals. I knew when my mother looked at those leaves, she saw possibility. Worlds
of it—empty, distant planets like bone waiting for flesh. She filled them with green and watched them take their first breaths.

  When I looked through the green and into the light beyond, I saw energy waiting to be harnessed. My mind glided over slipstreams of possibility. I saw sun and sky, and beyond it, the black. Silence and stars.

  Nova-of-my-memory leaned over me and giggled, breath sweet with fruit. “I say there’s two.”

  “Huh?” I lifted my head, and Nova playfully shoved me with sticky hands.

  “You’re not listening, are you? Where’d you go? I said there’s two reasons to have a soul.”

  “I don’t want to practice for your entrance exams anymore. Can we play?”

  “Two reasons,” she said, holding up her two index fingers next to each other. “One—” she moved one finger away from me, toward the window. “—is to feel the all world inside you, from now to then and back again. To breathe the breath of every ancestor, to know where you’ve been and anchor you to the physical world—to your body and everything it touches.”

  I grabbed Nova’s finger and pretended to bite it. She laughed and shook it out, but didn’t break her stride. “The other,” she said, moving the other finger toward me, leaf-shadows shivering across her skin, “is so that one day, you can look into the eye of the universe and burn away that which separates us from God.”

  She paused for dramatic effect, practicing for her oral exam, but she needn’t have. Her words sank into me like teeth as she continued. “Burn all the excess away until you’ve remade the world and there’s no difference between matter and soul anymore.”

  Her eyes were distant, as if she were seeing reality transform right there in our kitchen.

  I shrugged and sucked my teeth, looking back out the window. “What does that even mean?”

  When she spoke again, her voice was close to my ear, sweet breath wafting like breeze across my neck. “It means one day, it won’t matter what you believe in. When the time comes, your soul will leap out of you and give you no choice but to be what you really are.”

  My mind jerked back to the present, but as the memory faded, so too had Nova.

  The Tangled Axon still hovered in the hangar, her electrical arcs sizzling and popping around the ship. The rest was silence.

  Where was Tev?

  The instant I thought of her, I saw her in my mind’s eye. Another memory took shape, one that was neither mine nor my sister’s, but Tev’s.

  I saw the girl she had been. Small, but strong. Skin a touch darker than it was now, from a childhood spent in the sun. Freckles dark across her cheekbones and nose—a dense galaxy compared to the light dusting she bore now. Muscles already developed from hard labor. Clothes pale with dust and wear.

  She had a way with the burt cattle that bordered on the mystic; her parents had high hopes for her taking over the property. But the sky tugged at her like a promise. Hot wind blew across the Wooleran desert, throwing her bright hair around a smiling, upturned face. Days full of riding and herding could do nothing to shake the Big Quiet from her eyes.

  Instantly, the memory shifted like blown sand. A small Heliodoran boy crouched beneath a table, adult legs a dark forest of pants and skin around him. Plastic canines jutted out of his mouth in a caricature of fangs. He held a bird leg between his hands and gnawed on it there on the floor, knocking one of the fake teeth out of his mouth, and when a woman re-crossed her legs near him, she accidentally tapped him with her toe.

  Immediately she bent down. “Ovie Porter, get out from under there! I told you to come right back from the bathroom and sit in your chair like a human boy.”

  Little Ovie growled and bared his plastic fangs. “I’m not a human boy.”

  “That’s enough!” the woman hissed. “You’re embarrassing me. Get back on your chair or we’re not going camping this weekend.”

  She sat back up and apologized to the other adults, while Ovie climbed back onto his own empty chair.

  In the present, another bolt struck one of the equipment tables, scorching and ripping the metal with a crash. I could barely see anything through the blinding light except vague outlines of human bodies, and the ship like a giant, fiery eye.

  “We’re alive,” Marre whispered inside my head. “It’s okay.”

  A flash, and another memory. A sprawling estate on one of Spin’s moons, bathed in spring sunlight. A young woman with long, black hair and a honeycomb tattoo peeking out from beneath a T-shirt that hung off one shoulder. She stood, bare arms outstretched, at the center of an apiary.

  Thousands of honeybees swarmed around her in a winged cloud. Her unprotected physical form flickered, a small smile playing on her face. She said nothing, but I knew her memories in the same way that I’d known Birke and Tev and Ovie—I knew her heart and mind, just as she reached up through time and knew mine.

  Marre.

  Behind her, a Gartik transport ship descended into the open field behind the hives. The vessel’s plasma arcs rotated around the engine with aching familiarity. Her name was not yet Tangled Axon, but Chrysalis, the letters emblazoned along the port rear hull in black script.

  Marre’s face tightened in concentration, her body still blending in with the swarm. I could feel her mind, her memories, her intentions. Her beekeeper family hovered in the background of her awareness, proud of their spirit guide daughter. Other pieces of her mind floated to the surface: Her forthcoming admission interview for the guild graduate program. Her father’s recent acquisition of a ship to ferry their beeswax and honey products to the farthest reaches of the system.

  And the ship inspector who approved the sale of the Chrysalis with only a cursory glance at engine stability.

  The ship landed.

  Marre’s body flickered as she prepared to temporarily project her consciousness into the swarm, rehearsing for her Spiritual Advisory Guild interview. Advanced degrees in guide work were rare, but manage to impress the SAG, and admission would be guaranteed.

  The unstable engine snapped. Marre opened her eyes, but it was too late.

  An explosion discharged energy and fire in all directions, killing Marre’s father instantly, absorbing her fluid consciousness into the Chrysalis, and knocking me back into the present. It happened so fast, I barely had time to process what I’d been shown. All my senses condensed into Marre’s grief and rage over losing her father and the life she’d known. All that loss because one person couldn’t be bothered to inspect an engine properly.

  The omnipresent hum of the vessel collided with the buzzing of Marre’s swarm, coalescing into one harmonic note, ringing in my ears. She was inside me—a vast cloud full of mind and thought and knowledge. Palpable intellect pulsed around me, the same intellect that had been leaking into the ship since the day of her accident with the Chrysalis, suffusing the ship with all the experience and love and soul that Marre once possessed. It leaked out of her in thin strands, day by day, hollowing her out, until she could no longer leave the ship without suffering. Even her body struggled to hold onto its form in the absence of so much of her vital essence—of that which made Marre herself. It was Marre who fueled the ship’s heart, who had breathed life into the Tangled Axon. It was Marre who had called for me in my aunt’s shipyard, coaxing me into the mouth of the vessel.

  Just as I had fallen for Tev, I had fallen for the Axon . . . and now I knew, by extension I had fallen for Marre, in a way. It was Marre who I felt humming to me at night. Marre who reached out to me before anyone else, that first night in my quarters. Marre whose bulkheads I brushed with my fingertips when I needed grounding in something familiar and real.

  A gust of heat blew outward, buffeting my locs and licking my face with flames like a thousand long fingers reaching out from the heart of the Tangled Axon.

  All of us, every person—we were spread out before each other, exposed and raw. Our fears and dreams. Our lives. A vast, endless lake of experience spooled out through the aether and threaded us together. Where we emptied out i
nto the universe, countless others from countless realities surged forward to fill us in. Somewhere in the mélange of souls were Nova and Tev and Marre and even Birke, each of them pulsing like a star.

  And then, like coming to the end of a song, the mass of souls peeled apart, each distinct entity coiling back into its body.

  But not Nova, I thought. She’s gone.

  My heart ached, at once bursting with love and sorrow.

  Perfect silence. Only an occasional buzz and pop dotted the quiet as the Tangled Axon continued hovering inside the hangar, thrusters stabilizing her position. Marre stood in the mouth of the ship, channeling the excess electricity through herself. She seemed stronger now. In control.

  Tev hurried to me, followed closely by Slip and Ovie. Warm hands cupped my cheeks, tethering me back inside my body.

  “Tev,” I said, taking her hands from my face, holding them. “She’s gone.”

  “She’s changed, love. Not gone.”

  Ovie placed a furred hand on my shoulder, shadow-ears pressed back against his locs. Slip gave me a sad smile. “We felt her too.”

  “I know.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out Nova’s knitted veil, pooling it in my hands like liquid. One last gift.

  “What did you do?” Birke said slowly, somewhere behind me. Part of me still felt her echo inside me. In Axon’s storm, we had become part of each other, linked. How cruel it was that, out of necessity and momentum, the world threw her back into a body that was alone.

  “What did you do?” Birke said again, gathering her wits. The ship continued hovering over us, but Marre had pulled back the plasma, corralling it closer to the engine and thrusters, as normal.

  “Where is Nova?” Alarm crept into Birke’s voice, her eyes darting around in search of the sister she’d tried to claim. “Where is she?”

  I felt the clutch of grief threatening to choke my words. “She’s not here, Birke.”