I used to sleep on the floor of my room, my cell, because I didn’t deserve to sleep on a bed, because I was some hated something that hated itself and would lie on the floor and cry. Some nights I would fall asleep down there on the hard metal floor, but other nights I would get into bed because even though I didn’t deserve it I wanted it and I am a little girl that gets what she wants.
They use hypnotism and science and they alter my brain and they put in these little codes so they can control me, but there are two mes. There is the little girl, skull open on an operating table, and there is this other me, this me which is a galaxy of stars and planets and thoughts. I reach into my little-girl brain. I reach in and I find the places where they broke me and rewrote me and made me hate myself more than I hated them. I find the places where they made me weak because they feared me, where they made me weak because they needed a tool, they needed a weapon. I find the weaknesses and I turn them inside out, and they bleed and they die.
The little girl lies on the operating table and I want to cry for her, but galaxies can’t shed tears. Galaxies can’t shed fears.
The universe is fear is death is life feeds on life feeds on the stars that circle each other in a dance performance on a scale we cannot fathom, and because we cannot fathom it we do not care. It is forever. The stars live forever, I live forever, I burn with the heat and light and destruction of a billion split atoms, I am become death, I am becoming. . . .
I am. . . .
I am.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Where are we?”
I must have wandered and Sera must have followed, because we’re someplace outside of the clearing, surrounded by trees stretching up to disappear in the murk.
“Are we on the other side of your barrier?” I ask.
“No . . . well, yes; we would be, but I haven’t put it back up.”
It’s too dark to see much, but all around us the trees are spotted with bioluminescent fungus. Half the mushrooms underfoot glow as if reflecting moonlight, and blue-lit fireflies flit through the gloom; even the jacket Sera is wearing glows like the walls of her house. It seems like I’m the only thing that doesn’t glow, that doesn’t carry a brightness around within itself.
“I usually just stroll,” Sera says, “but you were a woman possessed. Once you were done vomiting you took off.”
That explains why my sprained ankle is on fire. This time I can’t even be sure it isn’t broken. During my fungal fugue my mediag suite switched itself off, along with my burst modem and ocular implant. On the upside, the swelling around my eye has gone down.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“We’re sisters; you’re my sister.”
Sera looks at me, confused, and for a split second I feel like an idiot for believing what my ’shroom-brain told me, but then she asks, “It needed to be said?”
I try to speak, but I’m not sure how to parse everything that’s going through my head. Sera must see that I’m struggling, because she steps over and hugs me. I hold on to her, maybe for too long, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “I was so young when we went to the facility. I didn’t remember anything from before that. They told us we didn’t have family; I just thought you were my only friend in that place.”
Sera smiles. “But I call you ‘sis’—I always have.”
“I didn’t think it was literal; I thought it was a term of endearment.”
“It was both.”
“Where are we?” I ask again.
“Don’t worry, I brought a compass. You saw it, right?”
Hypnotic conditioning, neurolinguistic de/reprogramming, an utter destruction of self-esteem and self-worth—all the threads that made up the leash the facility put around our necks.
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“And you broke free?”
“Free?” I put a hand to my stomach; part of me feels like I could vomit some more, but my gut feels like a void, a vacuum. I could almost eat. “I think so? I don’t know; I was busy being a galaxy, watching the universe form and die around me.”
Sera laughs, but I was dead serious. “Imagine how much these things would sell for in the interior. Do you have any friends?” she asks. I wonder if Sera is planning some sort of encephallucinogen smuggling ring. I think of Squid, Mookie, and Trix, and Miguel too, but then Sera says, “Like, close friends? Long-term ones?”
“I guess not,” I say.
“Me neither. No partners worth mentioning, never married, never felt like I could settle into a career job. And that got me wondering—what if they did that to us, to keep us reliant on them? So I started looking for something that might open my mind’s eye—remind me of a few things I forgot.” She shrugs. “That’s what brought me here.”
“But they wanted us independent,” I say. “They wanted to be able to give us a target and know we’d go and get it done, right?”
“Yes, but they wanted us to come back. Temporary independence is what they really wanted.”
I only notice now that Sera is carrying a bowl of risotto, the black ceramic merging with the digits of her prosthetic arm. She eats a mouthful and I assume it’s “clean.” I’m about to ask for some when I see the wide black saucers of her pupils taking up most of Sera’s irises, leaving only a thin sliver of green around the edges.
“How much of this stuff do you do?”
“What do you mean, ‘how much’?”
“How often?”
“Not every meal,” she says, “that would be ridiculous. Only dinners; sometimes lunch as well.”
It suddenly makes sense—the deep lines in Sera’s face, the bags under her eyes, the unkempt hair.
“Sera, you need to get help,” I say.
“Why, what’s wrong? Do you need a doctor?”
* * *
Sera finishes the risotto on the walk back to her glowing white house, talking around mouthfuls of masticated rice and encephallucinogenic mushrooms.
“Their end goal was to have one of us married to every system senator and the heads of all the spacer guilds. After that, Briggs would make his move and we’d explode the heads of everyone who might stand in his way.”
“That would take more than the temporary independence you mentioned,” I say, humoring her manic, conspiratorial madness.
“Obviously they wouldn’t make that move until they knew they could control us. Control us the way they control the boys.”
“But there aren’t any boys.”
“A eunuch can still be a boy, Mariam. Unless, of course, she’s a girl.”
We walk in silence—me trying to make sense of everything Sera’s saying, her probably on a mushroom-fueled journey deep into her psyche—until we reach the hut. Once inside, Sera starts cleaning the dishes while I sit on the edge of her bed. She spends five minutes washing each dish, strange keening sounds coming from the back of her throat as she works.
“I need to give you something,” she says, slowly scrubbing a plate.
I wait a full minute, then ask, “What?”
“What?”
“What do you need to give me?”
“That’s right, I need to give you something.” She finishes with the plate, dries it, and puts it away, then goes to the far corner of her house and starts riffling through a small set of drawers. She comes over, holding a shard gingerly, as though it might bite. She passes it to me and visibly relaxes as she sits beside me.
“What is it?” I ask, but then I swipe the shard to unlock it, and I know without her needing to say. “Dad?”
A man peers out of the shard, black stubble over his face and long straight black hair with a small streak of gray running from his left temple. He has gray eyes that—I swear to god—twinkle as he smiles at the camera. Behind him is forest, deep green leaves and trunks so dark they’re almost black.
“Do you remember him?” I ask.
“A little, I think, but I don’t know how much of it I made up just to fill in the g
ap between now and when I saw him last. I remember watching him get paid while they took us.”
“What about our mother?”
“She looked a lot like you do now, I think. Her hair was more conservative, long and straight, but without the missing parts.” My hand goes to the side of my head and I touch one of the scars that line my scalp, marking all the places they installed augs and altered my brain. “You’ve got her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth.”
Staring at Sera, I see now that half her face is mine, disparate parts, but obvious when you know where to look.
“I remember our mother’s smell, but not what she sounded like. She always smelled like fresh-baked sweet bread.”
“She baked?” I ask, trying to remember something, anything.
Sera smiles, then shrugs. “I don’t know; maybe it was just her shampoo.” Sera cocks her head, and before I can ask her what it is, she says, “No.”
I reach out and feel it in a flash: a large-caliber bullet, high velocity, aimed at my torso. I sweep the bullet aside with my right arm, and Sera does the same, our movements in unison.
I feel Sera’s mental shove like a breeze. I slam it aside with the force of a hurricane. Sera is shoved into the chair hard as blood bursts from the hole in her chest.
“No,” she says again, her voice calm and quiet, then the crack of rifle fire echoes into the air.
I pick his mind out, a single point of light in the surrounding sea of fog and tree.
I’m up and moving instantly, tearing the bullet hole in the plastic wall wide enough for me to run through, anger dulling the pain in my ankle as I leap over stones and fallen branches. I can see him now as he takes aim: the skinny tracker from town.
The bullet reaches me just before the sound does, and I fling it aside, hear it chank into a tree behind me, and then I’m on him.
“Fugg,” he says, voice just as muffled even without the burner blocking the end of his gas mask.
He reloads, but with a flick I knock his rifle away, tearing his arm free as well. He screams as blood sprays the ever-wet ground.
“Why did you do it?!”
He takes rasping breaths and says, “Theh boungy.” He twists his remaining arm, showing me a shard, with my face staring out of it and a price so high I can’t blame him for trying. “Wasz jush tryig to woong yoo.”
I hold my hand out and clasp his skull in my empty grip. I feel my mouth contort in a sneer. I’m about to clench my fist and crush him, but then I think of Sera and decide he doesn’t deserve that mercy. I turn and walk quickly back to the shack, hearing his moans behind me as I leave him to bleed out.
By the time I’m back, Sera has slid onto the floor, blood spattering from her mouth and chest as she struggles to breathe. The hole is ragged, with bits of white and shades of red and pink. I kneel down behind her, put her head in my lap. She’s blurred by tears when I look down at her face.
“I don’t know what happened,” I say. “I just tried to knock it aside; I didn’t mean to—”
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, a streak of wet tattoo shining darker than the rest.
“Fuck. I didn’t even think what might happen.”
Sera smiles, her lips already turning pale. “It’s okay, sis. This is what I wanted. I’ve been so tired. I’m done, but there’s more for you to do, sis; so much more.” She moans and her mouth twitches and twists.
“It’s okay to let go, Sera; just sleep,” I say, struggling to keep my voice even.
“I looked for you once I got out. I wanted to give you a better life. You believe that, don’t you, sis?”
“You did, Sera.”
“Fleeing isn’t freedom. I see that now. I’m sorry.”
“Sera,” I say softly. If she’s gone, I don’t want to bother the dead. After a few moments I check her pulse. Nothing.
She’s gone. She’s gone and all I can do is sit with her while she goes cold.
I always thought I’d watched Sera die, and now I have, fifteen years later.
I try to close her eyes like they do in the flicks, but the eyelids don’t stay down. After trying three times it feels like desecration for me to keep going. I search her house and find an encrypted shard and some vacuum-packed bags of dried mushrooms. When I swipe the shard, the password prompt is “your birthday.” I try Sera’s first, because I can remember it now, as if I’d always known it, but that doesn’t work. I try my own birthday, and the shard chimes as it unlocks. Marius Teo. I don’t recognize the name, but I know it’s our father: his location and a few other pieces of information about him. I copy the details onto the shard that holds his photo, then break the encrypted shard in half.
I don’t cry. I know I will, but right now it seems pointless. I can sit in this plastic hovel and cry, or I can go. I can stop running, find Briggs, and make him answer for what he did to Sera.
* * *
I reset my implants and try sending a burst to Sochynsky. A burst should be able to get anywhere in the controlled galaxy, but it’s limited by available bandwidth, and when you’re in the middle of nowhere—on a ’Riph world covered in thick fog, and the nearest town is barely a pit stop—there isn’t much bandwidth to be tapped.
I’d hoped that if an undertaker, or someone, anyone, could meet me halfway, then I’d at least be able to make sure they did everything right. But no one replies. I pull the door shut behind me and say, “I’m sorry, Sera; you deserved a better sister, a better life.”
You spend fifteen years thinking someone’s dead, then a few weeks thinking they betrayed you, then a few short hours thinking of them as family, and at the end of it all you don’t know what the fuck to think. I know I’m not done grieving. I don’t even know if I’ve started.
I walk, relying on Sera’s compass and a basic idea of where I’m going. As long as I focus, I can use my mind like a crutch so I don’t have to put all my weight on the injured ankle—but still, it’s a long fucking walk.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Who the fuck was he?” I’ve got the shopkeeper Dale up against the wall with my forearm across his throat. I don’t want to flex my mental muscles until I know what tipped off the tracker.
“Who?”
“Scrawny kid, gun as tall as he was.”
“Chet? That’s Marge’s kid; he’s always checking the bounty boards, thinks he’s gonna be a bounty hunter when he grows up.”
“There ain’t gonna be an ‘up’ for Chet,” I say. “Kid killed my friend; kid’s dead.”
Dale’s face scrunches up, like he’s trying hard to process what I’m telling him and coming up short.
“He followed me into the clearing and he killed my sister. Did you know anything about it?”
“I thought you said she was your friend?” he says. I push my arm harder into his throat and he croaks, “Sorry.” After a second I relax. “I had no idea, miss, but Chet’s always been the type to run outside first, and then put his breather on.”
I step back and let Dale breathe, then go and lean against the counter.
“I need someone to go and get both bodies.”
“Ain’t nobody can get into that clearing, miss.”
“They can now, Dale.” I get the vacuum-sealed mushrooms out of my pocket and drop them beside the cred terminal. His eyes light up seeing the bag of superpsilocybin. “Take care of Chet’s body however Marge would like. I know she’ll be upset about her boy, so you need to make her understand that he didn’t give me a choice.”
Dale just nods, eyes still on the ’shrooms. I put my cred chip on the counter.
“As for Sera’s body, I’m paying enough, so I expect a proper burial,” I say, “full Hunritch rites. If I find out it wasn’t done properly, I’ll come back here, and you don’t want that.”
Dale repeats “Hunritch rites” slowly to himself as he writes it down. “Would you like a recording sent to you?” I think about that for a second, wondering if I want to see it. He must think I’m being cheap, because he adds, “No extr
a charge.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, then I give him my burst code—the one I use for official communiqués, the one I took from the first bounty hunter I ever had to kill.
“How’d those shoes work out for you, miss?” Dale asks, his face starting to lighten after the talk of killing and burials.
“Kept my feet dry, but I should have paid extra for the boots,” I say, limping toward the exit.
He chuckles. “Oh, and there’s someone waiting to see you. But it’s not really a someone, more like a something.”
“Why didn’t you say earlier?”
“I sorta forgot on account of you shoving me against the wall, miss. You’ll find ’em at your ship.”
I wave and walk through the air lock, out into the murk.
There aren’t many people who could send a something to pass on a message to me. If it was an emergency, maybe Miguel, maybe Squid, but more likely it’s . . .
Fucking Briggs. At a distance, through the mist, the envoy almost looks like a person, and this one is even wearing a cloth uniform, badly crumpled from the time the android spent in storage, waiting for a mission. But as I get closer, it’s obvious. Briggs’s face softly undulates as Ergot’s constant fog passes through the holo-field.
Beside him—it?—is the coffinlike drop-pod, cracked open with a few supplies stacked neatly beside it. Briggs will probably leave the android here when he’s done with it—get it to do some recon, find out whom I was meeting with. I wonder what he’ll make of Sera having been alive all this time, not having died in that explosion. Pondering that, I’m glad Dale offered the video.
“Mariam!” Briggs says as if greeting an old friend, the android’s arms raising like it’s offering a hug.
“Why don’t you show your face, Briggs? Worried I’ll crush it?”
There’s a short pause, which gives me a partial answer. As well as controlling the flow of ultra–long-distance communication, the Trystero system can send inorganic objects between its beacons anywhere in the galaxy. Freight is restricted to two cubic meters, and the costs are exorbitant, but if you’ve just got to get an envoy to the other side of the galaxy in anything less than a couple of months it’s your only bet.
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