Nyxia Unleashed

by Scott Reintgen

  Speaker nods. “Almost without exception.”

  “I like this,” Azima says with satisfaction. “Women are better rulers than men.”

  Speaker smiles. “You will hear no argument from me.”

  “But anyone can become a tyrant.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud. Speaker and the others glance back. “Sorry. Just…that’s how it goes, right? Power corrupts? You know, more money, more problems.”

  “More money, more problems.” Speaker looks dumbfounded. “A strange concept.”

  Omar laughs. “Emmett, you can’t just quote 50 Cent as a universal truth, man.”

  I grin back at him. “Correction: Diddy said it first. I’m just trying to keep the legends alive. Sorry, Speak. Must be an Earth thing.”

  He shakes off the confusion and leads us forward. The Sanctum consists of what the Imago call sanctuaries. After the first was built, each successive generation of rulers wrapped a newly styled sanctuary around it, echoing the already built rings of Sevenset.

  Speaker informs us that we’ve already passed through the outer sanctuary. The gardens were constructed by the youngest generation, the current rulers of Sevenset. We all gasp as we cross the threshold into the next sanctuary.

  Walls stretch thirty meters high, all lined with books. The dark wood shelves curl around every corner, tower to every ceiling. Even the floor beneath our feet shows faded spines through glass.

  “Nearly every book ever published in our history,” Speaker reveals. “The Daughters of that generation valued reading and education. Some won their favor by hunting down the rarest volumes. The Imago who recovered the first translation of the Parables of the Maker ended up marrying one of the queens.”

  We wind through the endless library and pass into the third sanctuary. Speaker gathers us on a stone platform that overlooks a floorless hall. “The Daughters responsible for the third sanctuary were fond of clockwork and mechanisms. It’s the most famous. Even after all these years, all of their inventions and workings have not been discovered. They built something they claimed was as complicated and unique as any living creation. Most historians agree.”

  He tugs the nearest lever, and our platform grinds to life. Gears spin and chains rattle as we’re lifted into the air. We go up about ten meters before our platform tracks with something in the walls and glides smoothly across the gaping black below. Speaker gestures to Jazzy.

  “Go ahead and tap one of the stones.”

  She grins at him and reaches out, then knocks twice on a granite square.

  We all wait and watch, but movement stirs along the wall directly opposite. The stone splits on an invisible seam, opening like a cuckoo clock. A miniature rope unfolds over the side. As our platform passes, we have to turn to watch a pair of wooden soldiers lower a bucket. At first we can’t see what’s inside, but then little heads peek out from blankets, identical to the half-hounds we’ve seen around Sevenset.

  “The Parable of Bane and Bless,” Speaker remarks. “I’ve only seen it once before.”

  Our platform continues its grinding way, and we watch as the rope retracts back into the walls and the stone clamps shut. Jazzy can’t stop talking about it as the platform kisses the edges of a second landing. There’s a lot of nervous laughter as the floor shakes, then quiets. Speaker leads us away, turning yet another corner. “And the oldest sanctuary,” he announces. “The first queens created calm with word and deed. You’ll see their desires for simplicity and comfort here.”

  It’s a vast room of fountains and cushions and distant light. The roof is open to the elements, coloring the room with gold. We cross to the nearest fountain, and Speaker has us press our hands to the stones. They’re impossibly soft, almost like feathers.

  “Not an easy manipulation,” Speaker says. “To the water, the substance is unyielding. To flesh, it is giving and comfortable. Every stone here boasts unique properties. You just have to make sure you don’t roll into the fountain while you sleep.”

  On cue, Azima leans too far forward and goes splashing into the water. A hilarious chaos follows as Speaker and Longwei try to help her out, but she grins and splashes away from them.

  “Come in,” she calls. “The water is warm!”

  The revolution starts that easily.

  Speaker’s eyes widen as everyone strips off shoes and socks and clothes. Jaime’s the first one to figure out that all the fountains are separated by little underpasses. Speaker gives up his efforts to get us out and agrees to oversee a game of freeze tag instead. Maybe he realizes this is what a sanctuary is supposed to be. For thirty eternal minutes, we’re children again.

  It’s a nice surprise to discover that Alex is the best swimmer instead of Morning. We set up our teams, splashing wildly, calling fish out of water, and cheating, because pool games aren’t fun if you don’t cheat a little. Alex weaves his way through a drainpipe to make the final tag on a flailing Parvin. He smiles for what feels like the first time since Anton launched into space. The whole thing feels like a regained paradise.

  The game ends and we climb out of fountains, dripping and splashing, almost untouched by the burdens that brought us here. While the others pull clothes back on, laughing and complaining, I walk over to where Speaker is standing.

  “Why’d you show us all this? Why show us the rings? Any of it?”

  “We wanted you to see what we stand to lose,” he says quietly. “Our entire world, Emmett. Thousands of our kind will not make the voyage through space. I am one of them.”

  He notes the shock on my face.

  “I volunteered to stay with my queen. It was an easy choice,” he says. “But remember that none of what we built will travel across the universe either. If our plan works, we’ll leave behind our histories, our legacies, our everything.”

  He smiles sadly before slipping away. My eyes trail him. He’s not putting on a show like he did in the early days of our time together. I can only imagine what it was like when they discovered what was about to happen. How long have they spent counting down the hours until the day their entire world would be destroyed?

  I look around at the paradise they’ve carved into this place. Each stone so precise. The fountains formed with such delicate care. How long before all of it vanishes in fire and smoke?

  The rooms we’re given are simple. Bright balconies overlook the distant ocean. We split off into sections designed for three. Jaime claims a bed in the first room. I’m about to follow him in when I spy Alex glancing down the hallway, looking unsure where he belongs.

  “This way, man.” I wave to him. “We’ve got an open bed in here.”

  I’ve wanted to talk to him for a while. Jaime, Anton, Alex, and me, we are brothers by force. Babel’s final experiment bonded us in some dark, impossible way. It’s kind of unfair that three of us landed together. We got to work and talk through the pain. But Alex landed alone. I’m guessing he talked with Anton here or there, but when Anton launched into space, it left Alex alone again.

  Alex is all polite nods. His golden curls toss whenever he walks. He’s got light brown skin that the otherworldly sun has darkened since landing. It doesn’t take us long to start exploring the room like we’re staying at some fancy hotel.

  We kick our feet up on the balcony right around sunset. It takes a few minutes of awkward conversation to get where I promised I’d go. I force myself to talk about those dark minutes before we launched down from space.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk with you,” I say, sounding more like Pops than I ever thought I could. “I know what Babel put you through. With Loche.”

  In a breath he goes distant. His smile retreats. He cracks a knuckle, lips sealed. I know the feeling. “You don’t have to talk about it,” I say. “I get it, you know? But if you haven’t talked to anyone about it, you should. Jaime and I talked about it after we landed.” I nod over to him. “Ant
on too. He was there. We actually got to talk it out.”

  Alex looks up. The bright color of his eyes seems to be fading.

  “No one else in my landing party went through it,” he finally says. “I saw their faces after. I thought—I don’t know—that maybe I was the only one shaken by it. Took a few minutes to figure out that none of them had to fight. None of them even knew there were fights.”

  “So you didn’t bring it up?”

  “With Katsu in my group? Hell no, man.”

  I nod. “He makes everything into a joke.”

  Jaime grunts at that. He’s been on the end of Katsu’s jokes more than most.

  “Not this,” Alex says.

  “No, never this.”

  He looks down at his hands.

  “The worst part is that I wanted to do it in the end.”

  “Because you had to do it.”

  “No,” Alex cuts back. “They put me with Loche on purpose.”

  I shake my head. “Why Loche?”

  “We had a history.”

  I cock an eyebrow. “Before you launched?”

  “Nah, nothing like that.” Alex glances nervously at Jaime. “I’m—well, Anton and I…”

  “You go together.”

  He nods his thanks for putting it that simply. “Early on. I just…I like him, you know? We got along so easily. He thinks I’m a little too much sometimes, but let’s be honest, Anton needs a little too much in his life. Loche was the first one who picked up on the fact that it was more than a friendship. Anton didn’t like talking about it. He’s from Russia, so I understood. I grew up near Bogotá. It was easier there. You didn’t have to jump through hoops because of who you were. You could just be yourself.

  “Anyway, Loche noticed and he kind of dug into us about it. Never anything crude, you know, but he outed us to the rest of Genesis 12. He said he thought they knew, that he’d be the last one to notice. That’s how he was. This tough rugby guy, always so macho about things. Anton and I would be hanging out at breakfast and I’d glance up, catch him smirking at us.”

  “I’m guessing Anton fixed that.”

  Alex nods. “I told him not to, but that’s Anton. Cornered him one night, and we didn’t see too many smirks from Loche after that. I got over it.”

  “Until Babel put you two together,” I say, piecing it all together.

  “In the room, he tried to use it against me. Told me that Anton and I weren’t like him and Ida. We didn’t have the connection that they had. He told me that he and Ida talked about having kids. All he really meant was that their relationship was normal.”

  I shake my head. “That’s so messed up.”

  “He ranted about it,” Alex says. “And the second I let my guard down, he went for me.”

  Alex lifts up his shirt. His skin is tan, but slashed white beneath his ribs is a sharp, winding scar that’s healed all kinds of crooked. He lets the shirt drop and shakes his head.

  “Gutted me,” he says. “Made it easier to gut him back as he fumbled through my pockets for the key. The part that gets me, man, is that Ida still doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that he’s dead, and she doesn’t know that I’m the one who killed him.”

  I shake my head. “Knowing wouldn’t do anything but make her aim at the wrong target. Give her time. She’ll realize Babel is behind all of this. Not you or me or Jaime. It’s Babel.”

  “Maybe,” Alex hedges. “But it was easy in the end. Easier than I expected it to be. I know Babel set it up and all that, but I’m the one who did it. My hand drove the knife in. In the end, it wasn’t even hard to do.”

  “Except it was,” I say after a few seconds. “Listen to yourself. The fact that it’s eating you up is proof enough. You didn’t want to do it. If you had the choice, you never would have done it. But you didn’t have a choice ’cause Babel took it away. That’s not your fault.”

  Alex nods, but his eyes are proof he doesn’t completely buy what I’m saying.

  “Still. I killed him.”

  It’s the simplest, cruelest truth. Still. I killed him. Beneath all the justifications and rage, beneath Babel’s forceful hand and their own desire to stay alive, is the simple fact: Alex, Jaime, and Anton are killers now. It’s a clean, twisted kind of truth. I glance over at Jaime.

  “They made us this way,” he says simply. “They can face the consequences now.”

  It’s a brutal stance, but it’s talk I’ve heard before. In the hallways of my school. On the streets of my neighborhood. Answering like for like, taking blood for blood. Travel across the universe and some things just don’t seem to change.

  “My pops used to tell me to be good.”

  Alex looks up. “Huh?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever I messed up—and man, I messed up all the time—he wouldn’t even talk about the bad thing. He’d just tell me to be good. Like, hey, next time, be good.”

  “I like that,” Alex says.

  “Maybe we can be good. The next time. Maybe there will be a way to be good again.”

  He runs a hand through his golden locks. The motion makes him look twenty years older, twenty years a wanderer. “You mean like what you did for that beggar, Axis.”

  “You were the first one to join me,” I remind him.

  “So what, we just keep doing that? And maybe one day all the little things will take away the big thing.” He hitches on the thought. “Doubt it, but hey, it’s worth a shot.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” I agree.

  I reach out and offer him a handshake. He clasps my forearm, and just like that, he sees me as a brother too. More than what Babel would make us. We both glance over at Jaime, but he waves the idea away. “They’re the ones who changed the rules. Now that I know what game they’re playing, I’m going to make my own moves. I’m going to take what they took from me.”

  Alex nods his respect at that. It’s such a dark promise. I decide to keep working on Jaime, to keep pulling him back to something better.

  Speaker interrupts, knocking on our door to remind us we should sleep. He tells us the Daughters will host us in the throne room early the next day. We start claiming beds around the room, but Morning appears in the entrance and waves me over. “Isadora,” she whispers. “She’s here, you know?”

  “She wanted to use the Daughters against me,” I remind her. “But the whole pregnancy thing. It’s not worth as much as she thought it was, is it? I guess if I’m in danger, we’ll know tomorrow when we meet with them.”

  Morning frowns. “I’m nailing your door shut.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Just for tonight.”

  She squeezes my hand before closing the door behind her. I can hear her messing with the lock as Jaime turns the lights off and we settle in for the night. We talk a little bit about home, a little bit about nothing. It has the taste of a normal conversation, the kind we would have after school or eating burgers on a Friday night.

  It’s almost enough to forget the dead, and all those we’ve left behind.

  But the dead rise sometimes. Revenants from graves.

  I wake to pressure. Just a hand on my chest. I confuse it for Morning, but the face that looms in the darkness doesn’t belong to her. It’s not Jaime needing to be helped to the med bay, either. This face has walked out of my nightmares and into real life: Isadora.

  “Do not move,” she whispers. “Do not speak.”

  One hand is on my chest. The other dangles a knife over my throat. My eyes roam to the door. It’s closed, sealed. But another glance shows the curtains by our balcony entrance rustling in the wind. We actually left it open. I can’t believe I left it open.

  “Have you ever read the Bible?” she whispers. “There’s one story I always hated. King David? You know him?”

  I nod carefully.

 
“He’s being chased by Saul. What an awful king. He promises David a good life but betrays him, then hunts him across the wilderness. Do you know the story?”

  A whisper shakes through my lips. “No.”

  “David hides in a cave. It just so happens that Saul goes to that same cave and falls asleep outside of it.” Her eyes glint down at me. Moonlight frames her. I am about to die. “And I hated this story, because it was the perfect moment for David. His greatest enemy made weak. Delivered at his feet like a gift. But what does David do?”

  Isadora’s off hand moves down to my waist. She pinches the fabric of my shirt up. I swallow as she slides the knife away from my throat and starts to saw through the hem.

  “He cuts off a piece of Saul’s robe,” Isadora says. “He doesn’t gut him like he should have. I always thought, ‘What a fool.’ If I had the chance, I would punish my enemy. But now I understand. David needed proof of who he was. Later he took the piece of robe to Saul and explained. He could have killed him, but he didn’t. Saul was in his hands, but he showed mercy.”

  Isadora finishes sawing. She rips at the dangling threads before holding up a patch of fabric no bigger than a fist. I can see her jaw clenched, her eyes narrowed.

  “If I kill you, Morning will come for me,” she says. “If I hurt you, the group will turn on me. I can’t afford this. My baby needs to go back to Earth. So tomorrow I’ll show this to Morning and you’ll explain to her what happened. This fabric is a promise that you won’t come to harm. When I attempt to rejoin the group tomorrow, you will support me.”

  It takes me a second to realize she’s waiting for me to agree. I nod in disbelief.

  “I will not be left behind in this world,” Isadora says softly. “My baby will go home.”

  She waves the fabric once before retreating into the shadows. I watch as she heads for the balcony. I follow her movements until she disappears down one side. It’s all I can do to roll out of bed. My legs aren’t working. My lungs won’t take in oxygen. I gasp my way to the balcony entrance and slam the doors shut. Jaime rolls over in his bed. Alex groans awake.