CHAPTER 13 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
I sleep fitfully in the sightless cage. Without proper light in the Shadowlands, even my dreams lack images, but every other sensation is heightened.
Gloved hands, latex, pinning back my hair, prying at my forehead. My mother’s voice, a shudder of heat against my face. “Can you hear me?”
My eyelids feel sticky, my mouth full of tar. I think my lips are moving, but every movement rattles like a rusted door hinge. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
“She’s not ready,” someone says—Ednit—and sensation recedes like a tide, lulling me back into a most unnatural sleep.
The remainder of my rest is dreamless.
Eventually, I wake gasping, my throat raw as if from screaming.
Frantic and choking, I reach to remove my mask before abruptly remembering where I am.
I’m still encased in darkness. Somewhere close by, if I listen closely, I can just barely hear the sibilant hiss of the freezeshot wall that keeps me here.
If I remove even one piece of my protective gear while aboveground, Pagomènos’s radiation will immediately begin to break or mutate my
body—and here in the Shadowlands, that radiation is even stronger than in the light. I force myself to breathe through my nose until the rhythm of inhales and exhales steadies.
Not real. Just another dream. I’ve been having these inane visions for ages at this point, so I should really be used to it by now, but every time I think I’ve made my peace with them, something new arises.
More poking and prodding. A fresh wave of confusion.
I’ve never known where I was in my nightmares, but this time, I’m not even sure if I knew my own name.
Maybe it’s worse because Aspect isn’t here. I have no idea how long I’ve been imprisoned, but I have no doubt this is the longest we’ve been apart since I first started modifying their programming. Their absence feels like a thousand pounds on my back, dragging me down to the floor.
The only indication of how long I’ve been here has been the periodic delivery of tasteless rations, identical to the most budget-conscious ones of the dayfolk military back home.
It seems the nightfolk were always prepared for another dayfolk trespasser, and for potentially having to hold them for trial or otherwise.
There’s also a metal cylinder in the corner of my cell, a simple waste chute whose top slides open and shut at the touch of a button.
My suit uses a series of chambers to ensure I can evacuate without directly encountering the atmosphere.
It’s similar to how I’ve been able to eat and hydrate without removing my helmet.
But food, water, and their resulting waste are weak indicators of time. I feel completely lost to it in this prison. And without Aspect, every passing instant feels infinite.
My anti-radiation gear stabilizes its wearer’s internal temperature against the planet’s extremes, but as indeterminate time passes, it’s increasingly obvious that the suit is optimized for the Daylands’ heat, not the Shadowlands’ bitter, boundless winter.
The tech’s warming abilities are rapidly showing their limitations.
Shivers twist between my ribs. I pull my knees to my chest with gloved hands, rocking senselessly, soundlessly, back and forth in the dark.
The floor shifts beneath me, loose stones leaping, and for an instant, I’m afraid that I’m still dreaming. Then I recognize the steady, deliberate thumps, growing louder. Closer.
Footsteps.
My captor has returned, maybe to bring me home, maybe just to toy with her prey.
“Adria,” I say, forcing volume into my voice. “You came back.”
One clawed hand ignites with supernatural blue light, illuminating the monster.
The bags beneath her purple eyes have softened, and there’s a renewed lightness in her wings, which lightly and idly flap as she approaches.
Her harsh line of mouth arches into what could almost be called a smile.
While most of her skin, even her visage, maintains that eerie blue-white sheen, there’s more blood in her lips, full and red, a contrast that immediately draws attention to her mouth.
“I’ve determined the going market price for a runaway heiress,” she says. “Your life will buy the Shadowlands a new era of peace.”
Her shadow stretches out and swallows me, even taller than her impressive height. Her outline is all horns and claws. None of her smile. None of her gaze that makes my heart stagger between beats.
I swallow. “Why do you need the money?”
“Who’s to say I brokered a deal for money?”
“Well, why do you need whatever you’re trading me for?”
Again, that ghost of a grin, present and then gone. Her brow tenses. “You’ve never been to the Shadowlands before, have you?”
“No.”
“I would’ve expected at least a weak denial.”
“I don’t see a point in lying. We’ve established you need me alive.”
“Things could get much, much worse for you, heiress, without courting death.”
“By the Dreamgiver, at least use my name when you’re threatening me.” I shake my head, a tired laugh threatening to escape.
“Dreamgiver?” The pupils swell, nearly eclipsing the purple irises. Among the nightfolk, I suppose that’s what passes for an expression of wonder.
“You really know nothing of the dayfolk,” I say without thinking, heedless of the deadly claws and falsified flame.
“I don’t need to know.”
“And yet you wonder.”
Adria says nothing. The silence is answer enough.
“My people all have the same biotech installed at birth. The Morpheus chips. Our last chance at not forgetting as quickly as we know, without mutating like you.” I rise to my feet, boldness coursing through me. “But their history, their origins—you know as well as I, it was already forgotten.”
Adria doesn’t move to interrupt, so I keep talking.
“The dayfolk have developed two sects around Morpheus tech. The Dreamgiver Devotees believe it was a gift from a benevolent god. But the Old Seekers, they think if there is a god, then god abandoned us. Or else the Cataclysm was a cosmic judgment. Now all we have is science. Tech.”
“And what do you believe, heiress?” Adria says, her voice balanced on a knife’s edge.
“I’d like to think there’s a god looking out for us,” I say, staring at the floor.
“But this, the Cataclysm, the wrecked planet, the death … this can’t be what that god had in mind.
” I force myself to meet my captor’s eyes again.
If she’s kept me alive for this long, maybe it’s worth trying to pry beneath the surface. “What do you believe?”
Adria is silent for a long moment. “There are no gods but what we become.”
“Is that how you picture yourself?” I pry. “A god?”
Adria laughs, mirthless. “If I’m the planet’s last god, then we’re all well and truly damned.”
Silence stretches between us. The blue-black fire ripples against the freezeshot wall, shimmers against the uneven stone floor. I find my lungs again. “Why did you come here, Adria?”
She takes a step toward me, nearly colliding with the freezing wall.
I flinch, despite knowing she can’t come any closer.
Then she kneels, one knee bent, her height suddenly akin to my own.
One hand, still channeling flames, stays steady.
The other she extends, palm open, cradling both my Morpheus sphere and Alpha’s between her claws.
“Which one holds the sun?”
“The one with the scuffed side.” I point to the first of the two. “Alpha—the one I traded with—she dropped it when you opened up the ground.” I squint in the firelight. “Don’t you want to know what’s in the other one?”
Ferocity gathers in Adria’s voice. “I want to see the sun,” she insists.
Her speech is nearly a roar, her wings and horns a jagged, threatening sprawl, but her eyes are soft. Pleading. A girl born to a sunless world. A girl resigned to dying in it.
“You must understand,” she says, her face not far from mine, the wall between us an icy flicker, “the Shadowlands are troubled. I cannot simply set you free. I have nothing to offer you that I haven’t already.
You are one piece on a far larger board, but you hold the sun in your hands, and it’s beyond me.
” She blinks hard, eyes squeezing tight, then blooming violet again.
“Kori, Kori, I cannot make you any promises, but if you meant what you offered—”
I offered the sun to shame her, to pierce the monster’s armor with reckless grace.
I intended to eventually negotiate for something: Aspect back in one piece, or at least their memory core; a protected place to remove my gear and wash my face without succumbing to the radiation.
But her eyes are galaxies deep, the barest glimmer of tears creeping through, and they ache, and I ache, and I can’t look away.
I don’t let her finish the sentence. “Give me the sphere.”
She stands. Presses a button mounted on the wall, beyond my line of sight.
The freezeshot barrier collapses from the top down.
I could run with all my strength. I could leap out the nearest exit and hope Charon has at least a few salvageable parts.
I could go back to Lail’s rebels and hope they’re still willing to fly me home.
I want to see the sun.
Adria places the Morpheus sphere on the ground, nudging it toward me with one foot. I take it in my hands, opening my palm against its sensor. “Access.”
“GRANTED,” the sphere intones, and it blinks green.
“Test,” I say. The green light turns steady. I extend the sphere to my captor with a trembling hand. “Go on.”
Adria stares as though the technology might abruptly unveil teeth. “What do I …?”
“Just hold it.”
She lifts it between two tremulous claws, and then her eyes go completely white.
Usually, while the buyer experiences their desired memory, I’m checking my half of the merchandise.
This is the first time I simply stand and watch someone else experience a Morpheus sphere—and a nightfolk, at that.
They don’t have the Morpheus chips installed in the dayfolk.
Instead, the memory plunges directly, brutally into her brain.
Adria is utterly rigid, a statue, an outgrowth of the mountain around and about us—her wings spread wide with shock, her eyes blank, milky orbs, her mouth open just enough to show her sharp teeth.
She collapses like an avalanche. Sobs, their sound swallowed up in her shame, rack her whole body, her wings curling as if to obscure her from view.
She isn’t watching me. Her claws aren’t drawn.
Her blue flame flickers out, leaving us in total darkness.
If I ran right now, I could be halfway down the hall before she recovered herself.
The floor shakes alongside her hulking form. She gasps for air.
I don’t move a muscle.
“Adria?” I say, barely audible.
The most absurd desire washes over me, to lay a hand on her shoulder and wait for her shuddering to cease. To comfort this beast who holds my life (and Aspect, my only friend) in her clawed hands. I wonder, distantly, if my own hands could find her without my sight. I almost move, and not to flee.
“You.” A sob; a scream. Black and blue flames tremor around every edge of Adria’s body. The Morpheus sphere lies abandoned at her feet. “Why aren’t you running?”
I shake my head, faster and faster, trying to clear it, getting nowhere. “I don’t know.”
She snarls, then. Suddenly, instead of a tangle of shivering limbs, she’s securely on all fours, scrambling to reactivate the freezing wall between us.
An instant of useless, too-late clarity pierces through me.
I bolt for the threshold. The freezeshot wall plunges down, and I collide with it face-first.
Adria stands eight feet tall again, teeth bared. I’m the one who cowers, sobbing and shuddering, frozen to the floor.
She doesn’t ask me what memory lies within the second sphere. She doesn’t threaten me for my admittedly pathetic escape attempt. She bellows, more monster than mortal, and then she barrels down the corridor on all fours, leaving me alone in the dark.