CHAPTER 14 ADRIA
CHAPTER
ADRIA
I‘m so lonely.
Without a Morpheus chip of my own, Kori’s memory is already a fleeting imprint, a curtain of thought just barely brushing my brain. But every point of contact stings.
I am bathed in sun. After so long underground, sick and wan, I’ve returned to the surface.
Its brilliance beckons and rebirths me, saying, Come out, come out, and every piece of me longs to lunge back into the day.
My lungs want to scream, but I know the sun won’t scream back.
I’m free again, but only ever free to be alone.
I close my eyes. The heat, even dimmed by my protective gear, could melt me down like the rivers of lava beneath the planet’s surface.
I want to let it happen. I want to feel something. I’m so lonely. I’m so lonely.
I’m so lonely.
The shadows beckon, promise to hide me away from even myself. Soon, I tell myself, gloved fingers curling into fists. Soon I’ll go beyond these sun-streaked plains, beyond even the scattered ruins of the Passage. Soon I’ll build something worth remembering.
Even if I have to do it alone.
“Damn you,” I snarl, leaning against the corridor wall, struggling to catch my breath.
Kori tried to offer me a glimpse of daylight, and yes, it was beautiful.
It was more than I could’ve ever imagined.
Albeit secondhand, I’ve now felt the sun’s all-seeing gaze, its heat flooding my veins with brutality matching the Shadowlands’ cold.
I’d wondered why anyone, even a fully accustomed dayfolk girl, would willingly remove a memory of the sun. But now I understand.
Beneath the comforting sweep of sunlight, the chasm at Kori’s heart yawns canyon wide.
I’m so lonely.
I lean so hard against the wall, my wings leave indents in the stone. Every part of me screams. I lock my jaw shut against the sound. If it starts again, I don’t know if it’ll ever stop.
I caught this girl as a bargaining chip, a transaction valuable enough to fund my new regime and crush the insurgents.
After negotiating with the Shadow Court, we’ve determined an asking price to transmit back to the Daylands: an armory of newly assembled heatshot guns, a type of weaponry that Azarii’s people will be utterly unprepared to contest. Such weapons won’t be able to recharge in the Shadowlands’ freezing temperatures, but there’s enough blazing sunlight in the Passage to do it, and the terms of the agreement dictate that should a regiment of my army be spotted there, the dayfolk are to leave us unmolested.
That’s all I should be thinking about right now: brokering a weapons deal for Kori’s life. I didn’t ask for sunlight to dawn on my doorstep. I didn’t ask for my own silent torment to whisper across the freezing wall between us, sharp enough to stab.
I’m so lonely.
Even through her mask, I felt her gaze steady on mine. Afraid, certainly. But not looking away. I wonder what color her irises are. I’ve never seen the eyes of the dayfolk, not yet altered by the Diakópsei’s
power, but I’ve heard stories. Blue like an Earthside sky. Green like the last surviving plant life of Pagomènos. Brown like untouched earth. In my mind’s eye, the colors all blur together, a kaleidoscope iris framed by dark lashes, looking straight through me, daring me to look back.
Zalel waits outside my quarters. His breath, emerging in quick, nervous pants, sends little bouts of blue flame from his nostrils.
I push past him before he can say a word.
Quickly dropping to all fours, I fumble for the other box beneath my bed, the other souvenir of my first encounter with a dayfolk girl.
The mech’s leg remains wrecked, connected to its torso by a single stubborn wire, frayed almost to breaking.
Its feet were already in a state, anyway, sparking and smoking even after I turned the entire system off.
Internally, its voice box is a crumpled husk, and externally, its head remains at that dysfunctional bent angle.
Its optical processors are dim in shutdown, but the ridiculous expression on its metallic face remains.
Two eyes, almost but not quite the same size.
A smile wide enough to invoke revulsion.
“Do the dayfolk really take you seriously?” I mutter to myself. If I had a face like that, I wouldn’t even blame the insurgents for wanting to blow it clean off. “Was all … this … really necessary?”
I’ve never fiddled with a dayfolk mech before.
I’ve never even seen one, but I know something of their technology.
After all, my own fortress has sections of radiation-forged Pagonian plate, better designed for dayfolk prisoners than where I’m currently keeping Kori.
They’ve been abandoned for ages. We never thought we’d see another dayfolk trespasser in my lifetime.
“My lord?” Zalel’s voice cracks like static at the end. He’s still at my doorway, eager to be of use.
I’ve treated him as less than even a servant, and he’s become something of a friend. I let loose a long breath. “Zalel. Can you bring me a comms tablet repair kit from storage? And some spare parts, if you can find them?” We may not have full, proper replacements for the ruined
knee, but the mech will need something to walk on—alongside several new gears in the voice box, a head realignment, and something for those half-burnt feet.
“Of course!” Zalel shouts, thrilled to have a mission. But then, after an instant of hesitation: “What for?”
“Our prisoner may be with us for quite some time before we can contact the Daylands for her ransom.” I trace the mech’s obnoxious smile with my claw. “It would be a shame if she were lonely.”
Kori is asleep when I arrive. I suppose for a creature unaccustomed to the Shadowlands, the eternal night makes sleep a perpetually enticing option, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s not her unconsciousness that strikes me—it’s the peacefulness of it.
The radiation mask still conceals her face, warping it into strict lines and protective angles, but the arch of her spine has gone from a coiled spring to a delicate curve.
Her gloved hands, once fists, have opened like flowers, reaching for the light on Pagomènos’s other side.
The mask regulates her breathing, whether she’s sleeping or awake, but in sleep, it’s the gentlest whisper, the exhale more like a sun-kissed breeze than a mechanical rasp, steady and soft.
For a brief moment, I don’t want to disturb her supine form. I stand with all four limbs locked to the floor, afraid that if I turn away and depart too quickly, the thudding of my steps will startle her awake.
Unfortunately, the mech’s haphazardly assembled personality persists, despite one leg having been reduced to an unbending rod.
It talked the entire way to Kori’s cell, oddly preoccupied with Earthside methods of time tracking that have been long abandoned on Pagomènos.
By the mech’s rough estimate, after drilling me about how many torch lightings I’ve lived through, I am “seventeen years” old—which means nothing to me but seemed to please the robot well enough.
Reuniting with Kori pleases Aspect even more than useless measures of time.
“KORI!” the mech wails, launching itself into the freezing wall of her cell.
I’m already beginning to regret realigning its head and retooling its voice box, once again enabling speech with utterly unnecessary volume and projection.
The concentrated cold makes the mech’s every joint audibly rattle.
It steps back, shuddering violently. “Pain. Not fun for Aspect. Not recommended—by Aspect.” But as soon as the shock subsides, the mech shrieks her name again and catapults back into the wall.
Kori jolts awake. “Aspect?” she mumbles, groggy; then, coming back to herself at the sight of her mech doing its damn best to self-destruct, she says, “Aspect, stop it before you hurt yourself!”
The mech curls into a contrite ball on the floor, one knee pulled to its chest, the other leg now an unflexing peg. “Aspect is—very sorry.”
Kori’s mask pivots. I know her eyes are fixed on me. I wonder if they’re glaring or brimming with tears, or both. “What do you want?”
“Must every action I take be out of want?” My rib cage feels hollow, every heartbeat’s echo reverberating.
“I already fulfilled my intent here. Your life will earn a handsome ransom for my regime. But, in the meantime, it won’t do to have you rotting in that cell.
I need you suitably healthy for when the dayfolk retrieve you, or your mother may be displeased, even revoke the ransom. ”
Kori points at her mech. “What does that have to do with Aspect?”
“It’s a precaution, if you will.”
“They have a name.”
“What sort of dayfolk citizen grants her machinery a name?”
Kori hesitates. I imagine her biting her lip behind the mask. “They’re more than a machine. Maybe less than a person, so far. But surely you’ve seen it. Those glimmers of personality, flickers of near-organic choice.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you telling the dayfolk would only compound my crimes, thereby decreasing my ransom. And I think you want to be paid exorbitantly for the time spent suffering my presence.”
I smile a bit despite myself. This absurd rebel of a girl, utterly unafraid of even the Shadowlands’ own monster princess, is beginning to amuse me.
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it suffering.” I gesture to the mech. “So how did you program them?”
“Memories,” Kori says, without missing a beat.
I blink, stunned. “From what I understand of the Daylands, that’s not what mechs are meant for.”
“And dayfolk girls aren’t meant to spend their lives dutifully isolated from meaningful human interaction. But when you’re the Daylands’ heiress, daughter of the monarch, the rules change. I decided I might as well change them for my own creation, too.”
I turn my gaze to Aspect, half disbelieving, but the honesty in Kori’s voice is obvious despite the mask-filtered tone.
Aspect straightens, wobbling a bit on their new makeshift leg. They chirp, “Aspect is still—learning how to—people!”
“And doing a bang-up job.” Kori laughs.
I shake my head. “Where did you get the memories?”
“Sellers on the market. Myself. Bodies I’ve found in the Passage.
I came to the Shadowlands to see if the installation of a nightfolk’s perspective might finally awaken something properly sentient.
Instead Aspect lost a leg. Almost lost their ability to power on altogether.
” And I took out their voice box with my foot, but despite the uncomfortable twist in my gut, Kori doesn’t need to know that; I fixed it, after all.
Her voice trails off. “And that’s on me. ”
The mech twitches. “Aspect is not—experiencing—repulsion—from Kori!”
“Maybe that’s because I was too selfish to program it.”
“You are not—a shellfish! You are an—organic—with your—crunchy parts—inside your—squishy parts. Aspect—does not have—squishy parts. Aspect is very—crunchy.” They tap their new leg rhythmically on the floor. “Leg—went CRUNCH!”
Kori shakes her head and turns her attention back to me. “So why bring them back to me, Adria?” My name in her mouth does something strange to my insides, makes them curl like rogue vines around each other.
I tap Aspect’s head. “It’s obvious from their—ah—quirks, that they prefer never to leave your side. So I’ve installed a tracking chip.”
Kori snorts. “Well, that makes two tracking chips in Aspect. My mother installed one, too.” When she sees me tense, she frantically clarifies, “I never actually let that thing work. It’s set to indicate a randomized series of locations right now, so my mother doesn’t wonder what I’m up to.
But I doubt it can transmit back to the Daylands from this far away, if it even survived our crash landing.
And I’m sure any intact illusion will only last so long after I don’t come home. ”
Fair enough, I suppose.
“My tracking chip,” I clarify, “notifies my comms panel where Aspect is at all times. And if they are ever outside this fortress, I will know.”
“What’s to stop me from telling them to stay here and making a break for it?”
“You offered me sunlight from the depths of your despair. I’ve known you only for a short time, Kori, but you and I both know you won’t leave your friend to wander the dark forever in search of you.”
Kori stares at her boots. “So what are the rules?”
“You should consider them gracious allowances. You are a criminal in your world and a trespasser in mine.” But the snarling venom in my voice is fiercer than I intended, and I grit my teeth, trying to clamp it down.
“We maintain living quarters of Pagonian plate, designed for dayfolk like yourself should diplomatic relations between our people ever reopen.”
“Is that also why you have dayfolk rations on hand? Potential for … diplomatic relations?”
“Does that shock you?”
Kori gives her head a little shake. “After all that’s happened to me lately, my ability to feel shock is rapidly dying.”
I almost laugh at that. “I will lead you to your new quarters. You can wash, properly eat and drink, whatever you like, without fear of the planet’s radiation. Aspect will go with you.”
Aspect raises their arms victoriously. “Aspect will—follow Kori—everywhere!”
“They can’t spend too long in the plated area,” Kori notes. “They run on the same radiation that could kill me. Even at home, I have to let them take their little walks aboveground.”
“Then the mech may step outside the chamber to recharge. They’d best not wander far, and you’d best not leave the chamber yourself at all, if you don’t want your head to leave your shoulders.”
She shudders at that. I don’t know when violence became more to me than a desperate final resort, now simmering in my bone marrow, bubbling, boiling, always ready to explode.
This girl delivered me sunlight, and with it, a glimpse behind her mask.
I know the loneliness that writhes within her.
I don’t need to employ threats to make her understand, but it’s as though I don’t know another way to speak.
Swallowing anger and shame alike, I tap the button on the wall. The freezing cell barrier collapses into nothing. Slowly, Kori rises to stand on legs nearly as unsteady as Aspect’s. The mech hops up and down, clapping and singing her name as a joyous refrain.
“Follow me,” I say, when the reunion’s volume dies down. “I’ll show you to your quarters.”