A Universe of Wishes

by A Universe of Wishes (epub)

  Breach.

  “No no no no no no,” I whispered as I swung into the module, activated my grav boots, then sprinted down the hall, hurdling toppled furniture and ducking dislodged paneling. “Please be just the hallway, please be just the hallway, please—”

  A bright-red light blinked on and off above the door to my lab, and I swallowed the sudden lump of fear. The outer doors were partially ajar. I keyed the entry code, but nothing happened. I entered it again. Still nothing.

  “Let me in,” I shouted at the door, but that didn’t work, nor did slamming my fist into it. My chest heaved in the tight harness, and I glanced about wildly, looking for anything that could help. I ran back to where some ceiling panels had come loose and wrenched off a rectangular piece the length of my arm. I shoved it into the cracked door, threw my shoulder against it over and over, and finally somehow managed to slide it open far enough that I could squeeze inside if I crawled.

  Inside my office I stood up and surveyed the damage. My books and papers were everywhere. The inner door to the lab was closed, and the wall light faded in and out, so there was still power of some sort. I connected to the console and took a deep breath.

  “Authorize.”

  The console remained quiet.

  “Liberia, authorize.”

  My breathing echoed in my helmet, and it sounded shallow and panicky, which annoyed me, and why wasn’t the damn ship responding? It had power!

  “Authorize?”

  “Auth-o-rize.”

  “Authorize! Please!”

  My office chair lay overturned beneath a bookshelf and the desk. I pulled it free and was preparing to hurl it at the inner door when a gleam caught my attention. Partially buried beneath the debris of my office lay the twisted metal bangle Tomas had given me.

  “Papi’s Last Resort,” I mumbled. I set the chair down, picked up the lockpick, and slid it into the door release in the top right corner. My shoulders sagged with relief when a loud click sounded and the seals disengaged. Papi was going to get a case of his favorite bourbon after this was all over. I chuckled at the thought of his face when he opened it, then headed into the lab.

  The smile froze on my face, then melted into horror at the sight of mangled plants strewn about.

  “No.”

  Snarls of kudzu lay everywhere, as if the curtain of creeping vine had been snatched aside by some angry hand.

  “No no no,” I said.

  The hover-pots lay in piles—in corners, half buried in mounds of soil—cracked and broken shards sprinkling the floor. Tufts of herbs could be seen here and there, but very little was salvageable.

  “Sweet God, no.”

  Broken cassava stems poked out everywhere I looked, like small groups of bristling stakes warning me away from what I needed to collect. What we needed to survive. Fresh green stems sported white gashes that were rapidly browning.

  The air, I realized. There was a leak somewhere, and soon the harvest would be worthless.

  “Nana?” I don’t know why I called out to the large cultivar as if she could answer me. Darkness shrouded her corner, though I could make out bits of her form, and I shook my head, the corners of my eyes burning.

  “Nana, don’t play with me. Don’t play!”

  Something hissed and popped, causing me to jump a yard in the air and come down clutching at my heart. My suit’s audio system had activated. I was about to turn it off, but the thought of scrabbling around in the dark by myself with only the dying plants and my breathing to keep me company—no, I decided to let it play.

  “So, look,” Nana Gbemi’s voice said into the darkness. “Just ’cause it feel like you been workin’ all your life, and it keep pilin’ up and don’t look like there’s an end in sight—don’t think you alone now. Hear me? You ain’t alone. Ha! You ain’t never been alone, you ain’t never gon’ be alone.”

  I got on my hands and knees and started working. The cassavas were the most important—everything else could be started from seed if we landed. When we landed. For now, I just had to bag and seal the tubers off from the atmosphere.

  “You gon’ face a whole heap of mess.” Nana Gbemi laughed. “If you only knew. Every time you climb one heap, you gon’ stumble into another one. Probably bigger too.”

  Somebody paged me, and I answered automatically. I didn’t know who it was, but somehow I communicated the emergency. All thought, all concern and sorrow and fear, had been shoved into my own personal lockbox. The only thing that mattered was saving the harvest.

  A flashing icon interrupted the recording, and INCOMING blinked on my display in bright-red letters.

  “Kweku here,” I answered.

  “Kweku, it’s Harry. Status?”

  “Uh, it’s bad down here, Harry—there’s a breach in the lab. I’m trying to save what I can now. Any help you can send would be a blessing.”

  Silence stretched on the line. I continued to sift through dirt, snagging cassava tubers—two, sometimes three, at a time—and stuffing them into the protective transport bags.

  “Jen says we’ve got an hour before we need to force the separation. I really need you to come back so we can go over the emergency landing proto—”

  “I know the protocol, Harry. We all do. What I need is time and help.”

  “Jesus, Kweku, this is no time to pull stunts.” Harry sounded tired, and part of me felt sorry for him. But the other part of me continued to rescue as many plants as possible, knowing it might mean the difference between a successful harvest and slow starvation.

  “Harry, just give me time, and make sure Tomas has that pod ready to go. In fact, send him with it—I’m going to need it soon.”

  “No.”

  The word echoed softly in my ears, so softly I thought I misheard it.

  “What?”

  “I can’t jeopardize the safety of the crew for the garden you’ve got down there.”

  “Harry,” I said through gritted teeth. “We’re jeopardizing the survival of the colony if we don’t grab as many—”

  “You don’t know that. I’m—”

  “I ran the numbers, Harry. I do know that.”

  We were talking over each other now, comm etiquette clearly forgotten. Lights started winking on at the bottom of the comm feed—the others were joining the line, though no one else had spoken up yet. Tomas. Jen. Sirah. Even Francis was there.

  “Those numbers weren’t verified, and this isn’t a discussion.”

  “I ran the numbers, Harry. They’re verified.” I didn’t have time for this—I dropped back to my hands and knees and moved quicker. A line of transport bags was scattered behind me, yet I wasn’t even a quarter of the way into the lab.

  “Kweku, cut the losses, grab what you can, and come back up. That’s an order.”

  “I still need to grab the cultivar, and there’s a bunch of tubers still—”

  “That’s an order!”

  “This isn’t—”

  “Leave the cultivar and that garden, and come on!”

  “Give me forty-five minutes, Harry. Jen can buy me forty-five minutes. Send the pod down.”

  “Leave it, and let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

  “Thirty minutes.” My arms were getting tired, and I shook them out. “Gimme thirty minutes and the pod, and I’ll be up.”

  “Damn it, Kweku, leave—”

  “I’m not leaving her behind, Harry!” I shouted into my helmet. “I’m not. Leaving her!”

  Nobody spoke.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m not leaving our shot at survival. This is…This is all we’ve got. All I’ve got. I can’t leave another piece of us behind, Harry. Not one more piece. I can’t do it. I can’t do it and think we can survive. We need this food. I know you don’t believe the numbers or the projections or the estimates. I
know you think this is a silly project, but it’s more than just a project, Harry. It’s all of them. All of them that couldn’t make it with us. My mother and your mother and grandmother and grandfather and…every single one. They all worked on this, kept her alive, just so she—and they—could make it home.”

  My chin sagged to my chest, my breath fogging up the display.

  “I know you don’t believe in that ancestral nonsense,” I went on. “Just…believe in me. Trust me. Give me the thirty minutes and the pod. Please. I’m begging you.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “C’mon, Harry, thirty minutes and the pod. Thirty minutes. That’s all I—just thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! Please!”

  Tears burned down my face as I continued to scrape in the cold dirt. There were too many. Too many were going to be left behind, too many weren’t going to see the future, but if I could just take what I had and rescue Nana, maybe we could press on.

  Maybe.

  “Harry.” Jen’s voice broke into the silence. “We can dump the fuel reserves the Research module carried. That should help Kweku get her….That should be enough.”

  “Pod’s up,” Tomas added. “Ready to run it down.”

  A few more heart-wrenching seconds passed before Harry sighed. “Fine. Thirty minutes, then you’re all back up here and strapped in. Got me?”

  “Roger, Harry,” I whispered. “Roger.” And I resumed digging, trying to bring as much of my old home with me to my new one.

  * * *

  “It ain’t gon’ be easy. Never is and never will be. But harvest time come ’round, you gon’ see your family show up right beside you, singing and working until that whole field is stripped to the bare. Hear me?”

  Nana Gbemi laughed her harsh cackle in my ears as we all watched the Research module—and a third of the cassava harvest—tumble away slowly into space. The cultivar pod sat strapped next to me, taking up the rest of the row, and I draped an arm over it as I yawned and settled in to nap during the eight-hour reentry. The last thing I heard were the adults of my family, my uncles and aunts and my older brothers, who just missed the cutoff—generations of farmers who’d put their all into ensuring our future, guaranteeing that the chain linking us all remained unbroken—and I smiled as I recognized each voice.

  “Now how do I turn this durned thing off? What? Oh, I see it—well…this is Gbemisola Aboah, signing off.”

  “Transcribed by Ahmed Aboah, signing off.”

  “Digitized by Mama D, signing off.”

  “Reedited by Ammar Aboah, signing off.”

  “Transferred and uploaded by Baba Ahmed ibn Ammar, signing off.”

  “Cleaned and audio reimaged by Sister Afo, signing off.”

  “Downloaded to the colony ship Liberia by Anja Aboah, signing off.”

  “Packaged and beamed to Colony 031, New Africa, by Kweku Aboah. Signing off.”

  Set in the world of Shades of Magic, this story reveals the beautiful beginnings and tragic end of the affair between Rhy Maresh and Alucard Emery, long before the events of the series unfolded.

  I

  Alucard Emery stood at the prow of the Night Spire, watching the river turn red.

  To normal eyes, the water below glowed with a steady light, but he could see the threads that twined and tangled beneath the surface, ribbons of power slowly darkening from pink to red, like blood dissolving in a stream.

  His chest tightened at the sight of it, every moment’s progress carrying the ship farther up the Isle.

  Toward London.

  Toward home.

  But of course, it hadn’t been his home in years.

  There was an old saints’ tale—he couldn’t remember the words—about the dangers of getting lost trying to find what had been, and wasn’t anymore.

  The past was like a heavy wind, best kept firmly at one’s back.

  Speaking of one’s back—

  “If you’re planning on stabbing me…”

  “You’d already be dead,” answered Lila Bard.

  She had a thief’s tread, steps swallowed by the shallow sounds of the ship. But he knew when she was there. He could feel her power, could see the silver threads of her magic dancing at the edges of his sight.

  His white cat, Esa, trailed in her wake. Bard hated the cat, and it seemed to hate her back, and yet it followed her around the ship, its violet eyes watchful.

  Bard ignored the cat and leaned her elbows on the rail, looking down at the reddening water.

  “Don’t worry, Captain,” she said, misreading his concern. “I’m sure you’ll hold your own.”

  She was talking about the tournament. Their reason for returning, or at least their excuse. The Essen Tasch—the greatest competition in the three empires.

  He held out a hand, as if to cup the misty air. His lips moved: the soft, almost soundless ushering of magic. A tendril of water drew up, gathered in his palm. His fingers twitched, and the water hardened into ice.

  The Essen Tasch—a place where power mattered more than title, more than name, more than anything. A place where futures were made, and pasts erased.

  Even now, his heart beat too hard in protest, a warning to turn the ship, to go back out to sea, where the deck felt steadier than any land beneath his feet.

  Perhaps he was making a mistake.

  Perhaps three years was too long, and not long enough.

  Perhaps—

  Bard cleared her throat.

  She turned, putting her back to the river as she folded her arms. “It’s funny, though,” she said, almost absently. “I’ve never seen you flinch in the face of a fight. Four months on this ship, and I’ve never seen you so much as nervous. Makes me wonder what else we might be sailing toward.”

  Delilah Bard had always been too sharp.

  Alucard let the ice melt between his fingers. “London and I did not part on good terms.”

  Bard’s smile flashed. “I didn’t know a city could fall out with a man.”

  “It can,” he said, “when a man falls out with its prince.”

  Three years ago.

  They stumbled down the narrow hall, fingers tangled in each other’s clothes.

  The prince pressed Alucard back into the nearest wall, and he winced as the unhewn stone dug between his shoulders. The secret passage was rough, unfinished, so unlike the polished marble that lined the rest of the palace, the parts always on display.

  Alucard pushed off the wall, drawing the prince farther down the corridor. A few small lanterns lined the passageway, each burning with a low, enchanted light that was just enough to see by.

  And he could see.

  He could see the shape of the corridor, and the place it split, each branch leading to a different room. And he could see the door at the end of one passage, embossed with the royal seal, and the letter R inside. And he could see Prince Rhy Maresh, his edges laced with gold. It ringed his fingers and trimmed his cuffs; it dusted his lips, and rested in a narrow band against his temples, and shone, like molten metal, around the pupils of his eyes.

  He had watched Rhy grow from boy to youth, and youth to royal, had always felt a certain warmth toward the prince, but four years was a chasm between children. And yet, in the last year or two, it had begun to close. And this past spring, at a saint’s day feast, when the prince’s eyes met his across the room, the gold in them had spread like blush on summer fruit. And when the prince came toward him, full of pleasantries, his voice was deeper, lush and smooth. And when the prince’s hand had come to rest on his arm under the pretense of a laugh, a sudden need for steadying, his grip was firm, an unspoken question—almost an order—in the touch.

  And when the prince kissed him in a shadowed corner of the hall that night, there was such hunger in his lips, his racing heart,
but Alucard was the one left out of breath. Where was the boy he’d teased growing up, the powerless prince? Rhy, seventeen, and Alucard, almost twenty-one, and yet he was the one who felt unsteady, thrown by the passion in the other boy’s kiss.

  “Are you sure?” he asked when he could speak again.

  “Are you certain?” he asked with every stolen breath.

  “Do you want this?” he asked, again and again, until Rhy broke away, exasperated.

  “Am I not making that clear?”

  “You’re young,” he said, as if it were an answer.

  “Nokil Maresh took the throne when he was my age,” Rhy shot back. “I am old enough to rule the empire, and old enough to wed.”

  “Are you proposing, then?” asked Alucard, but the prince only laughed, and dragged him down into the bed.

  And so began a courtship in dark corners.

  An affair of stolen looks and knowing smiles, of fingers tangled out of sight, of kisses along collars, and hands pressed over mouths to stifle sounds of pleasure.

  They found the door, their progress halted only by Alucard’s teeth along the prince’s shoulder, and Rhy’s hands questing beneath his shirt.

  Alucard felt blindly behind him for the handle, and it gave, just as Rhy pressed flush against him. They gasped, crashing backward into the prince’s room. Alucard laughed, too loud, and Rhy pressed a hand over his mouth. He smiled into the touch, gold rings grazing his lips.

  Around them, the royal chamber was a thing of beauty. Dark wood furnishings, threaded with gold, and gossamer gathered into a sunset on the ceiling, and silk curtains, spilling down the wall around his massive bed.

  Like the prince, it was immaculately groomed.

  And like the prince, he could not wait to cast it into disarray. To knock the furniture askew and sweep the pillows from the bed.

  He hooked his finger in the prince’s crown.