The Forgotten Sky

by R. M. Schultz

  I’ve seen plenty of mornings like this. Another fight … or something worse?

  “You should be ashamed,” the girl says over the ringing assault in his head. “Again.”

  Elion wipes the back of a svelte wrist over his eyes and forehead, brushes his misaligned v-rim, pushes back a lock of dark hair with threads of gray. Sits up. A mesh-work mattress of spindly fibers groans and sags beneath his pelvis.

  Someone is lying in bed beside Elion, a woman. She’s naked, her back to him. His vision bobs and jostles as he reaches out … he stops, not wanting to smear blood across her. A thin stream of it is already running down from her hairline, gathering around the nape of her neck.

  A shudder of ghostly breath runs up Elion’s spine and down his extremities, carrying all the way out to the nails of his fingers and toes.

  Elion grabs the woman’s shoulder and shakes her, having no memory of who she is, where she came from, what happened. She doesn’t respond, her skin cold—a fillet of raw fish—clinging to his fingers like putty.

  Elion jerks away, and the woman rolls toward him, her limp arms and breasts flopping down. Lifeless eyes stare into his, haunting, empty tunnels of darkness. Long brown hair and a face that still shines of sculpted beauty even in death, her skin pale like ancient ivory but spoiled.

  An image of a black sun dripping black liquid stains her forehead. Paintings of dead men and women and a field of glacial blue roses stretch across her bare chest and abdomen.

  Elion’s erratic heartbeat riots against his ribs.

  What the … Who is she? And why’s she in my bed?

  “Save her!” the voice of the girl in his head shouts.

  Elion grabs a bottle and throws the remainder of its contents into his gaping mouth. Lukewarm liquid burns as it rolls in tendrils down the desert of his parched tongue and throat, carrying a burgeoning fire into his esophagus and chest, flames spreading as if through a forest of dead trees. He glances back at the body.

  It’s far too late to save her.

  The woman’s appearance drives a spear of pain through Elion’s chest. He stares without blinking.

  Has he seen this woman before … or does she just look familiar?

  Many men desire women with blond hair, a well-endowed backside, large breasts. For Elion, a plainly beautiful woman with long, dark brown hair that shimmers and is unyieldingly straight strikes him as if he were in love, as if he loved her all his life. His reaction to them immediately drives the women away. It’s happened several times, with several different women who fit the profile, a look few women possess these days. This is the first time he’s seen one of them as a corpse in his bed.

  Images of hands run against the backs of Elion’s eyelids—not his hands. Other hands, slender, struggling, pushing against him, screams of fright, the smell of a body sloughing its insides, something he’s grown far too familiar with although he can’t remember why this time.

  “You didn’t use that weapon on her, did you?” the girl’s voice asks.

  Elion stumbles back and bumps into a chair, its legs screeching against the hard floor. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You do that to everyone.”

  “No.” Elion grabs his slick hair and pulls it at its roots, dropping a hand to his contoured abs. Spokes of red light seep through the slats of a metal blind and slowly rotate across the floor. “Not just anyone. She must’ve wanted something, used me, an agent of the opposition.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  Elion’s shattered memories will not congeal into a single thought; only a dream persists: a shadowy man floating in the wind, through pearly mist, holding something in his hand. His fingers unfurl like the petals of a flower to reveal a red fruit inside, the fruit pulsing.

  The dream evaporates in morning fog.

  I need to get out of here, before someone finds me with this woman.

  Elion tips the green bottle of pills to his mouth and dry swallows more than usual, little lumps sliding down between his lungs. He washes the blood from his hands, grabs a pack, two small guns, and a long, nondescript case. Finds the door release mechanism. Locking bolts hiss, and the door whooshes up.

  A warm light assaults Elion’s eyes, and he squints against an orange sun, most of its sphere eclipsed by a moon. His dynamic lenses are damaged, becoming a flutter of energy across his eyes. The sky is indigo, royal blue, warm pink.

  Elion stumbles outside into an ocean of parched desert strewn with black sand and rolling dunes. Fissures the width of his torso and as long as rivers crawl along the desert floor, their depths unknown. Small abodes of whitewashed adobe stained with black smudges create a small city on this outer cluster planet, their housing and living expenses much more manageable than most, their lives more private. A haze of black dust smears the air overhead.

  A girl with drifting hair and a green cloak floats through an adobe wall.

  Elion is fairly certain she’s only in his mind, is not a real ghost.

  “I’ll come with you,” she says.

  Elion paces through the black desert and the city of adobe, rubbing his temples. He recalls that he was supposed to meet a contact last night and retrieve a package, something the recent beating sun made a timely commodity. He now owes thanks to a rogue sun for his most recent contract.

  A rogue sun. Elion imagines a sphere strobing between circling planets, threatening to explode and cover them all in blood and fire. Maybe that change will kick off his own. Maybe he will deliver these spines and everything in his life will settle.

  Except who was the dead woman in his bed? It looked like some cult or ritual murder, nothing like his preferred method of removal. And why would he kill this woman? He shakes his head.

  Better not have fucked this contract up.

  Hopefully his supplier is still here.

  Elion slips past whitewashed houses with black stains, past shops already alive with the barking of haggling merchants whose wares are piled on antigravity stalls, past multi-level hotels. The crescendo and decrescendo of intragalactic Ridian rattles his ears and his throbbing head. Clouds composed of the dark bodies of gnats swirl and buzz over the area, around his hair, over the black sands. Their swarms speckle a pastel sky.

  A news report from the black-side—what the galaxy refers to as the smugglers, pushers, dealers, and connoisseurs of other unsavory aspects of human life—plants voices inside his ear and visually strews headlines across a three-dimensional feed in his peripherals, a product of his v-rim link to the network.

  Elion’s not really listening, and none of the headlines grab his attention. Standard reports on whereabouts and activities of those in power and known information on shady deals. The Northrite’s latest sanctions on some other organization rising in wealth and power. The sun that started beating, stringing fear across the galaxy like streamers. Everyone everywhere is moving faster now, acting against and preparing for something they do not understand.

  Elion needs to move with them, move faster now or fall behind. The sun seems to become a fiery whip in his mind.

  The promenade draws him along. A man whose yellow cloak is ravaged by black symbols shouts to passersby and waves his hands like a vivacious teenage girl. Others hurry past him, avoiding eye contact. Sand crows caw from scattered perches, from bowers, from the black dirt. Aromas of fresh breads and spicy sausages drift out of open doorways and mix with the stale sweat, refuse, and fuel scents hovering in the air.

  Elion’s stomach folds and sends the first threads of nausea crawling up the back of his tongue.

  Don’t people ever fucking sleep in?

  Half an hour later, Elion stands outside a doorway at the back of a hotel and knocks in a rhythm of two and then three.

  After a minute, the door folds upward. A short man with hair cropped around the sides of his head stands in the doorway, holding a pulser gun aimed at Elion’s chest, pulser rounds likely armed instead of shudder rounds. A long knife waits in his other hand, the blade a black sha
dow, a specter, something intangible.

  “Who are you?” The man stands as tall as he can manage.

  Elion is of below average height but still looks down on him. “I’m here for the package.”

  “No, that delivery was scheduled for last night.”

  “Fuck you, Sanderis, you Manipulator creep.” Elion points to the knife.

  “Should’ve assumed that you’d be late.” Sanderis sets his knife aside and grabs something from behind the doorway. “And I’m no Beguiler, you fucking addict ridden glow monkey, I’m a Paladin.”

  Elion pushes the muzzle of the gun aside, attempting to sidle into the room. Sanderis holds out a shielding arm, a metal fiber backpack dangling from his hand.

  Elion grabs the pack, hits a code into an electropad hidden under a shoulder strap, and opens the largest compartment. Black spines are piled inside, and something else: the skin of an animal’s face, purple, with three eyes.

  “Skinned?” Elion asks. “The hermadores were to be kept alive, only their spines harvested.”

  “I don’t do ‘take them alive,’ and the Pearl knows it.”

  Elion stares at the short man puffing up his chest like some bird preparing for a mating dance. “You’re a creepy fucking Paladin of a Manipulator.”

  “You have the saddest brown puppy-dog eyes I’ve ever seen.” Sanderis lowers his gun, stepping back. “For a bounty hunter or smuggler or addict or whatever the fuck you’re supposed to be … the Pearl’s bitch. You have the look, except for your eyes.”

  Elion flings a smaller backpack onto the floor. Clear tubes spill out like scattering roaches. “Here’s a tip from the Supreme Emperor of the Pearl.”

  “What’s all this shit?”

  “Mind Melter. The latest. Quite a rush.”

  A female voice cries out. A woman as thin as a skeleton—virtually no ass, breasts, or even fat or muscle—appears in the bunker behind Sanderis, crawling across the floor completely naked, snatching tubes. Sanderis turns and helps, stuffing everything back into the pack.

  Elion shudders.

  This will be my life one day.

  Elion turns a few digital dials on his black case, setting a dose for half a gray. A soft whining sounds from within as he points one end at Sanderis.

  But I wouldn’t have butchered the hermadores. “Why do the ghosts of haunted men feed on brain tissue?”

  Sanderis looks up; the concerned wrinkles on his forehead are slithering snakes. “What?”

  Their answer is always the same: what?

  The scaly eyes of Elion’s soul widen. He pulls the trigger. A soft click.

  Sanderis jumps.

  Silence settles on Elion’s eardrums as tension saturates the air like humidity. Nothing happens.

  Elion shoulders the backpack of spines and his case, and marches away. He has a delivery to make. And he’s already late.

  You’ll wonder why your skin turns red and itches, why you start shitting blood and vomiting in the next few hours, for a couple of days. A decade after that you’ll be a thousand times more likely to get cancer, asshole.

  The ghost girl descends from a nearby rooftop, her eyes of blackness unblinking. She folds her arms across her chest, judging Elion.

  Jaycken

  A door irises open. Gray fog awaits Jaycken and Kiesen as they step outside the cruiser ship, having flown and landed in the mountains of Jasilix in the predawn morning. Jaycken directs an antigravity crate of updated equipment from the port city to follow him, and he carries the package for Officer Ethanial.

  Wind skirls and keens in Jaycken’s ears; cold air bites at his exposed skin. Snow and ice lie in scattered fields amongst rocky crags.

  Glad to see that the comfortable little nook I left a few days ago hasn’t become a tropical paradise.

  The massive, attention-sucking backdrop of a purple planet streaked in orange and brown—the planet the moon Jasilix orbits—hovers on the horizon like a giant ball immersed in clouds. This entire system is drifting away from the mass of the galaxy.

  Jaycken stands on a mountainside, upon a precipice, but the mountain is incomplete: four skyward projecting masses of land without a peak or center, as if the original mountain had been peeled open like a giant fruit, the inner flesh consumed, leaving only empty space plummeting down to a layer of clouds swarming the lower altitudes.

  Jaycken glances back at the horizon, to the massive planet, to the endless bowl of gray sky above. It’s so close he’s part of it, as if he can reach up and touch the stratosphere. The gray stretches to infinity, to some irreconcilable point where the clouds blend with the gray of the mercury sea far, far below.

  A recurring dream, which Jaycken experienced again during his short rest on the flight, infiltrates his thoughts: a figure in black holding something in a closed fist. A soft wind. It seems important, but details fade.

  The woman from the pier with the bone-white skin and mauve cloak, who introduced herself as Quar, steps out of their hired cruiser, nudges Jaycken, and walks down a winding path of dirt, shale, and patchy snow.

  Jaycken allowed her to accompany them as she claimed she needed to go to the station, and she had a Frontiersmen passcode that Jaycken’s v-rim authorized.

  At least she can’t be too dangerous surrounded by the Frontiersmen army.

  Kiesen follows her.

  Jaycken closes his eyes, hugging the package he’s supposed to deliver to Officer Ethanial, part of him wishing he could send Kiesen away with a thought, send him away to safety, to grow up and become a man, to inherit the family business, wishing for his best friend to stay alive. Another smaller part of Jaycken wants Kiesen at the station with him, but Jaycken won’t give into that selfish desire.

  Would Ost still be waiting below, trying to understand the strange phenomenon of the beating sun? They should hurry, before he’s gone again.

  Jasmonae and Jennily should be running Ost’s shipments in the port city … maybe growing closer to each other. They acted like friends and seemed to get along better than either Jaycken or Kiesen did with Jasmonae. Slyth, Ost’s hired tutor for Jaycken, would probably arrive back at the station soon.

  Jaycken steps down the trail and rolls the package over in his hands. Is there a way to look inside without disrupting the ancient-style wrapping? Jasmonae said Ethanial would know if he looked. Why is it so important that he not look?

  A folded corner entices Jaycken, and he gently peels it up, lifting a flap. Beneath is an old-fashioned photograph inside a wooden frame. Only the heads of several old men are visible beneath the lifted flap, all of them wearing crowns. A note stuck to the glass has Our Ancestors scribbled on it.

  Jaycken folds the flap back down and tucks it into place.

  Scree slides under Kiesen’s boots, and he slips on the narrow trail. He wobbles and falls to his knees, clinging to the rock cliff along the inner wall, his eyes wide with fear.

  Jaycken tucks the package under his arm, leaps forward, and grabs Kiesen’s collar, helping him back to his feet.

  An empty abyss plummets into a layer of swarming clouds far down the cliffside.

  Scarier than falling overboard into the mercury sea. “Careful.”

  Quar glances back but continues on.

  After a few minutes, Kiesen breathes easier and walks, slowly, descending into the lower clouds, becoming ensconced in mist.

  They see into the inner margins of this peeled open dome of a former mountain. Stone buildings emerge from cliff faces; bridges of ancient wood creak as they sway between cracks in the cliffs and between towers that spiral upward.

  Quar leads them down as if she’s lived here longer than Jaycken. Two men in dark, visored helmets and gray and royal blue suits, unlike the gray recruit suit Jaycken currently wears, stand sentry. Both men hold pulser guns at their sides.

  There are more Frontiersmen guards on duty now. Because of the beating sun? At least they seem cheerful enough in those dark masks.

  Quar passes between the soldiers unh
indered, without a word.

  “Frontiersmen.” Jaycken salutes with the back of a closed fist against his other open palm and splayed fingers. He pushes his identification over to them on a transparent v-rim screen. “I’m returning with requested materials and bringing another potential recruit, Kiesen. We’re in a hurry to meet with Ost before he departs.”

  One soldier grunts without moving.

  Jaycken steps between them and nods at Quar. “Is that woman a Frontiersman?”

  “You’re cleared, Recruit,” the other says with a tone of contempt.

  Jaycken and Kiesen march on.

  Dispersed trees cling to rock and stone as they pass, lonely, swaying in solitary dances of discomfort. Waterfalls of silver trickle down the inner cliffs in shimmery braids of mercury.

  Jaycken stops at the entrance of a stone archway.

  A group of twenty brand new recruits, dressed in gray suits like Jaycken, wait in the distance, tapping feet, blowing on their hands. They are unaccustomed, unsure of this place.

  Jaycken turns to Kiesen. “Are you volunteering just to see Dad?”

  Kiesen runs a hand through his sandy blond hair. “I wasn’t going to let you leave me with Jasmonae forever. I either sit at home or go with her and Jennily and work all the time, which is as boring as waiting for Dad. Lately, I don’t enjoy traveling with them at all.”

  “You’re going to have to leave once we talk to Dad.”

  Kiesen shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Hot fingers of anger creep up Jaycken’s neck and cheeks, and he grabs Kiesen by the collar. “You are going to leave with Dad. It’s too dangerous here.”

  Kiesen pulls back, using his forearm to shove Jaycken away. “You think you can handle it. Do you mean too dangerous for a lazy idiot like myself?”

  “You don’t understand!”

  The brand-new recruits all turn and stare at them.

  Jaycken clears his throat, scowling at Kiesen.

  Quar watches but turns and disappears through the open archway.

  She convinced Kiesen somehow. He must be gullible as fuck. Now our relationship or his health will crumble.