CHAPTER 3 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
A mirror’s surface, clear as crystal. I observe my own reflection: pitch-black hair in an unhindered cloud of curls, framing my deep-brown eyes and deeper brown skin, my teeth absently worrying at my lower lip.
“I am Jelza.” My breath fogs the glass. I say it again, willing steel into my veins, calling courage into my knocking knees.
“I was chosen for a reason. I was deemed worthy. I am Jelza, and I can do this.” I turn on my heel, away from the mirror.
The monarch of the Daylands is waiting. I refuse to disappoint her.
I jerk, nearly losing my footing as I boomerang back into myself, but I’ve entered foreign memories enough times that I recover my balance.
Thankfully Charon has been on autopilot during this entire memory dive.
I’ve never seen that woman before, but clearly, she knows my mother.
She was selected for an honorable role that elevated her own sense of self.
But what sort of role? Why remove this memory of her initial hesitation?
And why, after the removal, buy it back from the Morpheus Market?
The questions gnaw at me, but deep down, what settles in my stomach is disappointment. I was hoping for an entertaining dive, at
least, as a reward for daring to break the rules. This memory couldn’t possibly have been more innocuous. At least now, if I’m asked whether I interacted with the merchandise, it won’t be difficult to lie. This memory … it’s hardly worth remembering at all.
My tablet blinks and vibrates again. I curse under my breath. I don’t even want to look at the digitized hourglass and see how little sand remains in its upper half.
The dayfolk settlement’s surface entrance is coming into view—a single elevator, not unlike the Morpheus Market, but broader and more prominent, even from a distance. I switch Charon to a landing sequence, already feeling Aspect’s impending absence at my side.
“I’m coming, Mother.” I sigh, slipping the Morpheus sphere into my waist pocket.
Like an Earthside dog on a leash, at its master’s beck and call. Coming, Mother. Always. Wouldn’t dream of anything else.
Here’s hoping, sun serpent be damned, that I’m not too late.
The walk from the docking bay to my waiting mother is long, but I know every step by heart.
The Daylands colony is a complex network of underground tunnels and sub-settlements, but it’s also the only location most dayfolk see in their lifetimes, so we memorize the layout in early childhood.
When the Diakópsei struck, the Cataclysm forever altering our planet, most aspects of Pagomènos were infected. Altered.
When the planet stopped spinning, radiation spread, and every surviving animal or human who was left unprotected mutated into something new, something strange and unfathomable.
Our surviving society retains only scribbled snippets of what our ancestors wrote—the ones who predated Morpheus tech’s invention—and lost an unknown breadth of broader knowledge that will never be
recovered. The records we have are … sparse, but not without value. Enough to know that we came from Earth, powered by helical engines, and that we settled unpopulated Pagomènos as the first interstellar human colony. We also have simple knowledge of Earth’s inhabitants, both human and animal.
But communication with Earth was severed when the Cataclysm stalled the planet, destroyed the helical engines’ functionality beyond repair, and began the creeping process of irreversible mutation.
Countless pieces of Earth-linked technology exploded when the asteroid hit, torn apart by the first wave of radiation even before it affected organic life.
And when memory slipped away, so did knowledge of how to ever restore or rebuild the helical engines.
Earth is a thing of the past; we’re all purely Pagonians now.
If, on the other side of the infinite unknown, Earth retains galaxy-spanning travel capabilities, Earth’s citizens seem to be in no rush to use them. Nobody ever came for us. We are a world to ourselves now, severed from history, slowly shifting beyond recognition.
After the Cataclysm, our ancestors sought a threefold solution.
For the sun’s brutal heat, the dayfolk escaped to a colony beneath the earth, deliberately far enough from the magma pockets to draw on them as needed without simply being flambéed alive.
But a few layers of sand and stone weren’t enough to protect us from the radiation, and it took the most precious thing we had: the extended reach of memory.
In response, we developed a new metal, uniquely equipped to resist radiation.
And for our rapidly fading memories, we created a neurological implant to serve as extended storage: the Morpheus chip, now mandatory for all dayfolk.
It’s the only reason any of us know who we are.
It takes careful application of both the Daylands’ heat and lingering radiation to craft Pagonian plate, the new metal that forms the exoskeleton of our colony, interweaves with the armor we wear to venture out, and more.
The layer on mechs is the thinnest, since every mech—including Aspect—is powered by the radiation itself.
Since only mechs can craft Pagonian plate at a reasonable speed, it’s a painstaking process, the mechs risking damage by the environment or its predators whenever they venture beyond the colony.
So our underground home grows, but slowly.
I’ve never been surprised by a new hallway or additional room.
I know this place’s layout as surely as if it were programmed.
Ednit waits for me after six halls, two left turns, a right, a U-turn, and a ride down one of our reliably chugging escalators. My mother, Chloe, stands beside him, comically tall and pale beside the squat brown doctor. I hear her talking before she notices my approach.
“She needs to focus on her studies, Ednit, and her health. I’m tired of her endlessly tinkering with that mech. A hobby is one thing, but not at the expense of her well-being—”
I see the moment Chloe spots me. Her lips press into a tight pale line, her jaw setting firmly, locked. Meanwhile, Ednit’s expression betrays no emotion.
“Kori.” Quiet and dutiful as ever, Ednit doesn’t even tell me off for arriving inefficiently late, the last specks of sand in the upper hourglass reduced to flickering pixels on my comms tablet display. “Good to see you well.”
“Ednit.” I incline my head in greeting. Despite my resentment for these overly frequent medical appointments, a smile stubbornly spreads across my face.
It’s impossible to dislike Ednit. He’s only doing his job, and he’s beneath my mother’s sway as surely as I am—as surely as everyone in the colony is.
And frankly, with the rest of my spare moments occupied by either fiddling with Aspect or attending to my academic studies (for fear of parental retribution), I don’t have many people close to me.
Certainly nobody who has known me even half as long as Ednit. Certainly not boys.
Chloe has always been adamant about keeping boys away from me, since she “knows what they think about” and I “deserve so much better.”
I’ve been getting lectures about denying “the pull” (usually stated with her fingers curled into actual quotation marks) to boys for as long as I can remember.
The joke’s on Chloe, really—I feel the pull all the time anyway.
My heart skipped when bulky gym rat Brett slid his thigh close to mine and asked if I’d ever attend “real school” and sit with him, as surely as my breath caught when Hyrra from the mechanics division demonstrated how to oil a malfunctioning mech and I couldn’t take my gaze off the deft movements of her hands.
But in both instances, I promptly tripped over something (a fallen homework sheet with Brett and a discarded wire with Hyrra) and spat out a distinctly unladylike four-letter word through the pain.
No pull has a stronger hold on me than gravity. Chloe has nothing to worry about.
Chloe nudges her shoulder into mine, almost playful. The unexpected tenderness brings me back to the moment, but deep down, I know she’s all business. Passionless isn’t just her default—it’s her only setting. “You have the merchandise?”
Normally, given the sensitive nature of my assignments, she wouldn’t dare mention them in front of anyone else, but Ednit is practically her left hand, far more pliable and obedient than her right (which would be me). I’m not surprised he knows everything. Probably knows more than I do.
“Of course.” I slide the Morpheus sphere out of its compartment at my waist, before pressing it firmly into Chloe’s waiting hands. “One memory, fresh from the Morpheus Market. That’ll be thirty-five credits.”
I’m joking (mostly), and she knows it (probably), but Chloe sighs, “I raised you, Kori,” and slides the sphere into her own hip pouch.
I’ve never been paid for these monarchy-sanctioned memory-smuggling runs, unless, of course, you ask her. My mother will gladly list everything she’s ever done for me, presumably starting with my conception and including every moment of parental obligation since
then, from clean bedsheets to healthy meals to a monarchical inheritance I never asked for.
With the Morpheus sphere handled, Chloe turns her attention back to Ednit. “I know I don’t have to tell you to take good care of my daughter.”
“You don’t,” Ednit says, “and yet you do.”
She laughs at that; it’s a high, thin noise, fragile from disuse. There are so few people who can easily joke with my mother. Most of the time, I’m not one of them.
“Come,” Ednit says, waving me forward with one white-gloved hand, and I follow, leaving my mother blessedly behind.
There’s a pregnant pause. My boots click on the synthetic floor, while Ednit’s surgical booties squeak and shuffle.
“She worries,” Ednit says.
“She does.”