She fell and fell, up through a tunnel deep and endless, illuminated by the fires of living words. Glyphs like burning gems, symbols of hidden meaning, enigmas of ever-transforming wonder. Deeper in, the fires burned brighter, alive with wordless meanings, primordial structures of absolute beauty interlocking, supporting, spinning around her.
And still, she fell up.
The most profound feeling of deep, boundless love washed over her. Lifted her. Sustained her. Accepted and forgave and loved her without reservation or condition. Complete and total love, yet always giving more.
And then . . .
Wait. I had it. I understood. I understood. I must remember that… What? What was it? I saw it, I knew. Wait. What was it? What was it?
The zaicha stood there again, silent and patient, looking up at her with tiny, pink and black eyes, growing wide, enveloping her, black like the reaches of space. Stars. Swarms of stars, lights blurring together, milky smears across the night.
Will you see? asked the zaicha.
“Yes.”
Blue skies ripped open, torn by streaks of fire and smoke. Great spires of steel and glass towered over her, pierced the clouds. The towers caught fire, burned like colossal torches. Fear and screaming and ruptured machinery. Human faces. So many. How could there be so many? Thousands, millions, herded like cattle, imprisoned in vast pens of cold ceramic. Sickness, panic. Terrifying, otherworldly faces. Overseer voices booming commands, demanding subjugation.
Another world. Everything felt so heavy. Another nighttime sky, mapped with strange stars. Thick clouds congealed overhead, blocked out the starlight. Rocky, lifeless desolation stretched to the horizon. Ruins of ancient machinery were piled high like rusting mountains in the distance. And farther on, jeweled light wrapped in protective domes. Millions of dry, gaping pits dotted the surface of the dead land. Each pit a hungering mouth of trapped, unseen human bodies and unnamed human lives.
A great, wet swelling weighed on her chest. She looked down at herself, saw the scar squirming across her torso like a pink snake. Her engorged right breast swelled like an over-ripe fruit about to burst its skin. Her nipple erupted, spouting a fountain of oily, brown liquid from her breast. It was eon, not milk, that flowed forth. The sacrament raced across the desert, rushing like a river, pouring into the eager, dry mouths, one after another after another. The eon didn’t cease flowing from her breast until every mouth drank its fill.
The wasteland stretching before her roiled and upturned itself. Green grasses and bright flowers bloomed from the rocky soil. Thin trees sprouted, reaching up with frail, branched fingers. Between the plants, mounds of black dirt arose and then crumbled away. Where there had been parched, desperate mouths before, now stood all the nameless unseen of the Labyrinths. Ownership glyphs dried and withered off their scalps like old, brown leaves, drifted off in the wind, crumbled to dust. Countless millions looked to her.
“Don’t just see me,” she told them. “See each other. See us all.” And they did.
“You who were nameless, take your names for yourselves and for each other,” she told them. And they did.
“You who were slaves, take your freedom for yourselves and for each other,” she told them. And they did.
As one they spread across the wastes of Nahgohn-Za, the seen, the named, the free. A living, raging onslaught tearing down the foundations of the Unity. Crushing nine pyramids to rubble beneath their fury. Breaking the rods that once stung and prodded bare flesh. Shattering the domed palaces of the Divine Masters to rubble like the Gates of Heaven themselves.
33.
IN THE MORNING Sabira gathered the eeshl to her breast and took the lift up to the third floor. The other eon drinkers still slept where they had lain all night. She didn’t see Maia, but on each floor stood a silent, observant lem. The thin, yellow light coming through the curtain told her the sun had only just risen.
She picked up a respirator then brought the eeshl to Edlashuul’s room. A heavy, translucent curtain was draped across the entrance, the regulator inside set for the native atmosphere. The little vleez lay motionless in his brightly colored bed, tubes snaking from his mouth and arms to an array of medical devices. Blotches of brown dotted his ashen-green skin. Cal stirred in his chair when Sabira entered the room, yawned, and adjusted his respirator mask.
Sabira noticed Ed’s room had a hatchway in the ceiling where her room had a window. A textured climbing pole stood from floor to ceiling next to the hatch. In the wall, a partially slid open hexagonal window looked out over the southern slopes of Glish. Streaks of pale light angled in through the window and stretched across the floor. Sabira had a foggy memory of this room. It was through here that she and Daggeira must have been lowered from the roof.
The eeshl’s tendrils perked up at Cal’s movement. The eeshl raised herself so her claws stood on Sabira’s crossed arms, then jumped into the boy’s lap. “Hey, buddy.” He scratched the beast behind her tendrils with one hand and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the other.
“The creature came down to visit us during the ceremony last night. I thought you would want her back,” said Sabira.
“The eeshl’s deep smart,” said Cal. “She goes where she’s needed.”
“I think Edlashuul needs her by his side more than I do.”
Cal placed the eeshl on the floor and stood, stretched his arms wide, and yawned again. He studied the medtech readouts, then picked the eeshl back up and placed her on the bed near his friend. “Anybody else up? Breakfast started?”
“No, I think it’s just you and me so far.” She stepped to the bedside, placed her hand on Ed’s small claw-foot. It felt cold and dry. “Do you mind if I stay in here for a little?”
Cal shrugged, petted the eeshl’s back.
Sabira took that as approval enough and sat on the floor with her back propped against the wall. The medtech displays pulsed color and encoded information she couldn’t grasp. It reminded her of the pulsing, transmuting colors in the vision. Both radiated with unfathomable knowledge.
“Many of the vleez outside who’ve gotten sick, they’ve died already. But Edlashuul keeps fighting. He’s strong,” she said.
“The ones outside don’t have the Embassy’s gear keeping them alive. If it weren’t for them, he . . .”
They sat in silence, watching the sleepy motions of the eeshl as Av rose higher and light filled the room.
“He stopped you from killing me that morning. Why did he do that?” asked Sabira.
“A slave with a gun is still a slave. You were surviving, doing as you were commanded. We all were.”
“But the things I did . . .”
“We were khvazol, what choice did we have?”
“We get to choose our shaft. But even that’s not really much of a choice,” she said. “My bloodline was crafted by the Masters for a particular purpose.”
“Mine too,” he said. “But I still had two years until I chose my shaft. Seems clear I was going to be Staff though. We were made by the Divine Masters to serve the Divine Masters. And if you’re good and obedient in life, maybe the Gods will let you be a slave in death too.”
“But wouldn’t it be better to serve for eternity in Heaven than to freeze, alone in the nothingness, forever? Or be snatched away by devils? If you could get the Gods to see you . . .”
“The Gods don’t see us.” Cal’s pale eyes stared into hers. “We only see each other. That’s what the eon showed me.”
“I don’t . . .” She turned away from his stare. “I’m not sure what the eon is showing me. What it means. I see these other worlds. I feel myself die. And now, afterward, I feel free. I think. I still don’t quite understand what liberation is supposed to mean. And I don’t know how to tell what’s right and wrong anymore. Just a few days ago everything was much clearer.
“Gods it feels like a different lifetime, and it’s only been days. What is happening to me, to us? I mean, look, you’ve even got
hair growing on your head like them.”
“I think Maia will explain more now that you’ve drunk the eon a couple of times. It’s a weird story. But she wants us to wait. She wants to be the one to tell you. Which, you know, is probably a good idea. Other than that, though, I just know we have to see each other. Protect each other. Decide for ourselves what’s right and wrong. Because we belong to ourselves now. And so I guess that’s what Maia means by liberation.”
“Maia is going to tell me a story? What is it?”
“About who we are. As Humans, I mean. All our lives we’ve only been told one story, the Divine Masters made us to serve Divine Will. Our thoughts, our blood, the Masters owned it all. We saw only them and their Overseers. But now you see us. Now we see each other. You’re part of our story, and we’re part of yours.
“Ed knew it right away. You shouldn’t have to go back to the Unity, either. You deserved a chance for liberation, too, just like us. Even if you were a servant.”
“First he saved my life. Then you did.”
“I told you. No more dying.”
“Thanks for—”
“Don’t. Please, don’t.”
“So you were only a couple years from choosing your shaft? I thought you were younger than that. You’re just four years younger than me.”
“My blood-mother was Staff. I was raised in the palace cellars. The Overseers said the Masters made us to age slower than the other shafts. Live longer. Like Rain, he’s over a century.”
“Really? He looks maybe half that.”
“As long as the Warseers don’t ever find us, I’ll probably grow old like him too. But Ed, he’s younger than me. And that’s all he’s going to get.”
“They’re going to find a cure. Should be soon they said. They’ll find a cure, and then I hope that they listen to me and leave here as soon as possible. I wasn’t lying. The Warseers are coming back. It’s just a matter of time.”
“I know.” He paused for a moment, lips pursed tight. “Last night you touched the ancestors, right? Did you see the other place? The place with the blue sky?”
“Yes. I did, I think. How do you . . . Did you see it too? What is it, do you know?”
“You should ask Maia.”
“Why?”
“Because I still don’t know myself what to believe. It’s a deep weird story.”
“What? The blue sky? That’s part of the story?”
“Ask Maia.”
34.
TORQUE AND RAIN came to Ed’s room later that morning. Rain said breakfast was ready in the common room, but Torque also brought a plate for Cal so he could stay if he wanted.
Sabira patted Ed’s foot on the way out. She wanted to say a prayer for his recovery, but what right did she have to pray, now that she had turned from Divine Will?
While they ate in the common room, Sabira’s gaze kept being drawn to the wide vista beyond the windows. “There are more smoke columns this morning,” she said, “and the older pyres are still going.”
“Too many are dying too fast,” said Coraz.
“Last night, before the ceremony, I listened for the dusk song. But there wasn’t . . .” Sabira paused, composed herself. “It was quiet.”
Sabira remembered running across the backs of granks, playing games and nearly getting her ass trampled for it. Those same granks would have been dropped into hive cities all over the planet, rupture fields disintegrating everything in their path, gills leaving a fog of bioweapons in their wakes. Long after the granks were finally killed or withdrawn back to the pyramid, their toll was still being counted, piled into the streets and burned. And to her, they were a game, a tactic for notoriety. She had thought her penance for foolishness with the granks was the nine eyes on her back. Now she knew the true punishment was witnessing the aftermath.
“One more day everyone. We have a lot to do before leaving Dlamakuuz tomorrow,” said Maia as they finished their breakfasts of porridge and fruits. “But first, we held ritual for you five last night. Does anyone want to share their experiences with the eon?”
“I do,” said Rain. He sat near the window, silhouetted by the morning light. “I think that since for Sabira it was the night of touching the ancestors, for me, there must have been some kind of influence. I found it very much like my second night.”
As Rain spoke, Cal came in and joined them. He sat on a divan near Sabira.
“The way I died in the vision was different than any previous experiences,” continued Rain. “This time I was eaten alive by a giant reptile. I swear, its breath, I can still smell it. The reptile ate me whole. In the dark, there in its belly, I saw my two brood. I hadn’t seen them in, well, since we chose our shafts. Both of them chose the pits. Neither made it. My brood-brother died in his first pit, my brood-sister in her second. So long ago. So many years.
“When I saw them, there in the dark of the lizard’s belly, they told me I’d be with them soon. Isn’t that odd? After all this time. All those years, so many lives I’ve seen, and it was them. I think they meant I’m going to die,” he said. “Soon. Much sooner, I think, than I would prefer.”
Maia let the silence sit with the group for a moment before replying. “Thank you for sharing, Rain. I am always impressed by your bravery. Listen to what your heart tells you about your visions, but—and this is important for all to understand—when you drink the eon, though you may encounter the dead, being deceased does not make them right. Or truthful.”
“I know,” he said. “I remember. When I listen to my heart, my brood didn’t lie to me. Or maybe it’s the plague out there. So much death. It’s so . . .” He lowered his face into his palms. “I truly look forward to leaving for Constellation tomorrow. The other side of the galaxy has to be better than this.”
“Me, too, Rain,” said Dawn, sitting next to Coraz. “I wish we could do like Sabira said and leave right away. I understand why we can’t, but I wish we could. I want these babies to be born free and have names. Tomorrow can’t be here soon enough.”
“Life in the Constellation won’t always be easy,” said Gabriel. “We’re comprised of many different planets, each with a wide variety of cultures. Every single one of them might be pretty shocking at first. And you should understand, we are not taking you off to paradise. The Constellation is our home, and we love it, but it’s far from perfect. But you’re all survivors. I believe you’ll adjust in time. And all of you, all of your children will be born free.”
“Does anyone else want to share their vision from last night?” asked Maia.
Sabira felt Cal’s elbow pressing into her ribs. She pushed it away.
“Sabira, would you like to share?” asked Maia.
“Me?” said Sabira. “I can share, I guess. In both nights I saw this world. We were on the surface, like here. No wait, I started underground but came up to the surface. There were other humans. They had darker skin and lots of hair like you. And there were so many plants and animals everywhere, as far as I could see. The sky, I’d never seen anything like it. The sky here is purple. Back on Nahgohn-Za, it’s dark red, like old blood. But this world had a blue sky. Last night I saw it again, but it was all different. The plants were gone. Instead, metal and glass were everywhere, tall as the clouds. Fire fell out of the sky. After that, I guess it’s just more like impressions. Fear. Confinement. And then . . . then the red skies.
“I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. If it even means anything. It seemed so real, but now, it feels slippery. Hard to hold on to. I don’t know. It sounds so silly.”
“Not silly at all, Sabira,” said Maia. “You should heed your intuition. She has much to tell you if you listen. But I want to talk more about the world with the blue sky. You saw this world twice in your visions?”
“Three times. I had the vision of coming out of the cave on both nights. Last night I also saw the metal towers and the fire falling from the blue sky.”
Sabira felt a shift rustle
its way through the room. Everyone seemed to be a little less comfortable, adjusted their posture or crossed the other leg. “What?” she asked. “What did I say?”
Gabriel spoke first. “Sabira, I know you’ve realized there’s been quite a lot we’ve held back, details we’ve not told you, about who we are and where we come from. I can only dream of how confusing this must all be for you. We also did this with the others before you and for good reasons. Your people have been utterly isolated for over nineteen centuries. It would be cruel to not give you time to understand who we are. Who you are.”
An expanding light spread across one of the walls, formatted into a man-shaped silhouette on the surface. The silhouette congealed into finer detail so that a three-dimensional person appeared within the wall’s two-dimensional surface. Orion’s face stared back at them, his wild, spiky hair slowly transitioning through electric hues of blue and green. “What’s crunchy?”
“Sabira saw a world with blue skies when she touched the ancestors last night,” said Maia. “Both nights.”
“Good,” he answered. “I wanted to be here for this.”
“Be here for what?” asked Sabira.
“Girl,” said Coraz, reaching out to take her hand. “Just listen now. Hear what they have to say, then you make up your mind later.”
“I just want to know what everyone is talking about,” she said. “Cal said there was a story . . .”
“I know, girl.” Ahn squeezed her hand. “But you just listen for now.”
“Sabira, you and the others have told me about your homeworlds, your life, your stories,” said Maia. “I am sorry that I have told you little of my home, Tierra. I was born there, obviously. Spent my youth there and all the years I studied in universities. This was before I drank eon and chose to become an Oracle. In many ways, it is much like Dlamakuuz. A little more gravity. And we do not have purple skies. We have blue.
“You may have noticed that in some ways I am different from Gabriel and Orion, though you have not met Orion in person yet, but I am not talking about skin color or hair. I mean the augments, like in Gabriel’s eyes and hands. And how they are able to learn your language faster than me. Though I think I am getting better every day.”
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven: Shattered Gates Volume 1 Boxset Page 22