CHAPTER 17 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
In the pit of my stomach, there’s a hollow gap for terror that should be present and most definitely isn’t. The rest of me feels set alight, struck like a torch amidst the endless night, blooming and crackling with newfound possibility.
This is what I wanted, isn’t it? A chance to try and live—really live, not just maintain life-sustaining functions—beyond Chloe’s ever-present grasp.
So what if that chance is amidst the Daylands’ enemies, cloaked in near-impenetrable darkness, and offered by a shadow queen who could silence my breath with the idle flex of a claw?
I know I should be afraid. I’m foolish, not dead. But those teeth are arranged in something that’s almost a smile, that clawed hand steady and honest and cold as truth in my gloved one. Possibility overwhelms my good sense.
I tell myself that her smile—brightening the blue-tinged white of her high cheekbones, making her violet eyes sparkle like gems—has approximately nothing to do with it.
Or at least a marginal effect. Aspect is better at statistics and percentages than I am.
I’m sure it’s negligible in the grand scheme of things.
We wander the archives for some time, my fingers trembling at the sheer wealth of information. Adria catches me by the wrist and slides my hand toward a particular rectangular record with a blinking orange identifier on the rim.
“Your people live out their days underground as much as possible. Send mechs to the Passage to do their grunt work. But the nightfolk have spent many sleep cycles in the gap, exploring it for themselves. You might learn something valuable to your people’s future.”
I can’t help but notice what Adria doesn’t say, but must be thinking: If I were to obtain data on the Shadowlands itself, that information could be used by the Daylands military upon my return home, if they ever wanted to challenge the nightfolk for total control of Pagomènos.
But data on the Passage, by comparison, can’t easily be weaponized against the nightfolk.
I narrow my gaze. “I thought this tour was supposed to be a gesture of trust.”
She’s still holding my wrist, tightly but not painfully. Adria seems to register that the contact, even if it’s over the glove-armor mesh of my wrist, has gone on for too long, and she withdraws.
“Trust goes both ways, Kori. You can at least have a look before you dismiss the data’s value.”
My name in her voice, low and rumbling like an approaching quake, mangles my center of gravity. I tell myself it’s the fear I should’ve felt long ago, making a delayed but welcome appearance.
“All right,” I say, and slide the tablet from the shelf.
The tablet’s surface blinks and hisses to life in a shower of pixels.
The file’s title slides across the dark screen in neon green: THE PASSAGE.
There’s a hyperlinked table of contents at the top, varying in subject from flora and fauna to standard temperature expectations, but my brain stops and seizes on the introduction, aptly titled, THE PASSAGE AND THE GREAT EXILE.
“Exile …?” I feel like someone’s pressing down on my shoulders,
crushing me into the floor. “Chloe … my mother, that is … always told me that the nightfolk destroyed the land.”
“And why would we do that?”
“So dayfolk couldn’t live there.”
Adria cocks her head, curious violet stare wide on mine, not unlike her three-headed pet. “Read,” she says curtly.
I do. The file proceeds to detail the nightfolk account of how the Passage came to be.
AFTER THE CATACLYSM, THE DAYFOLK REJECTED THE DIAKóPSEI’S GIFT, FEARING WHAT THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND.
THE NIGHTFOLK TRIED TO ENLIGHTEN THEM WITH THEIR REVELATION, BUT THE DAYFOLK WERE WARLIKE, FEROCIOUS IN THE DEFENSE OF HOW THE OLD THINGS HAD BEEN.
WITH WHAT REMAINED OF THEIR EARTHSIDE TECHNOLOGY, THEY DROVE BACK THE NIGHTFOLK, NOT ONLY FROM THE DAYLANDS BUT ACROSS THE PASSAGE BETWEEN.
THE EXPULSION WAS SO FEROCIOUS, AND THE NOW-LOST WEAPONRY SO DEADLY, THAT THEY OBLITERATED THE PASSAGE IN THE PROCESS.
THE DIAKóPSEI, IN ITS INFINITE WONDER, HAS SINCE RAISED MANY OF THE FLORA AND FAUNA TO NEW FORMS AND NEW LIFE.
BUT THE GROUND, WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN PAGOMèNOS’S LAST RECOVERABLE LAND BY DAYFOLK STANDARDS, WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.
THE NIGHTFOLK FLED TO REGROUP IN THE SHADOWLANDS AND MOURN THEIR DEAD. THIS IS CALLED THE GREAT EXILE.
My eyes sting. I reach for them instinctively, only to remember I’m wearing a helmet. I lightly tap a button on the side, which sends a light gust of air to clear my vision.
“Is this supposed to make me feel merciful? Guilty?” I feel both those
things wrestling inside me, and I resent them. “Your people attacked first. They wanted to infect all of us, make us like … like …”
Adria has taken a step away from me, but not nearly far enough to slow my pounding pulse.
I expect her to regard me with disappointment.
I wish she, too, were forced to wear a mask, so I could superimpose my preferred emotion over her face.
Instead I’m forced to look upon the cool, serene line of her mouth, the piercing depth of her gaze that invites me to keep speaking and yet stills my tongue in the same moment.
“Like me?” she says, her tone serpentine. “Are we going backward so soon? I believe we established that I am not the monster you expected.”
“You are nothing I expected,” I say without thought, and I avert my eyes from hers again. “But neither is this. I can’t copy this into Aspect’s memory core.”
“Why not? It might broaden their perspective.”
“Because it’s historical heresy, that’s why!”
“After trespassing in my territory for a single glimpse of nightfolk perspective, are you so afraid of encountering it?”
“Aspect can’t distinguish between fact and opinion. They haven’t reached that level of critical cognition yet. This would throw their entire perception of the Daylands, of me, of themself, into total chaos. They might run away. And then how would I find them? How would I fix them?”
“Kori.”
She’s standing behind me now. I know it from the phantom heat of her breath against where my helmet melds with my torso armor.
The hairs at the nape of my neck stand on end, even though I can’t fully feel the temperature shift through my suit.
I don’t look at her, keeping my eyes firmly fastened on the sun-forsaken bookshelf and its damnable false history.
“You told me you were trying to raise Aspect to sentience, did you not?”
“I am.”
“A sentient comes to their own conclusions.”
A bitter laugh escapes me at that. “Do they, now?”
Adria sounds genuinely perplexed. “I fail to see the joke.”
I don’t know how to tell her that my formal education consisted entirely of Daylands government-approved—that is, Chloe-approved—records.
Questions were met with larger files to download, not space to fashion answers.
I don’t think I’ve ever been given the opportunity to reach my own conclusions.
By this measure of humanity, I’m no more human than Adria or Aspect. I’m hardly sentient at all.
Head spinning, I forcibly change the subject. “How do you know your historical records are true?”
“How do you know yours are true?”
“You can’t just turn all my questions back in on themselves.”
“It seems to be working so far.” I sigh deeply, but Adria continues, “I believe it was an old Earthside saying, that history is written by the winners. Regardless of who started the conflict, your people drove mine out of the Passage, and its potential for ongoing original floral and fauna growth was shut down. I would say you won.”
I think about the vast swath of dead land, the skeletons I’ve seen scattered below Charon’s flight, the strange animals fighting over what few scraps remain. “Nobody won the battle over the Passage. So I suppose it doesn’t matter who started it.”
Adria blows out a breath and crosses her arms, defiant. “Then what are you so afraid of?”
I grit my teeth. “Copy the file onto a data drive. I can plug it in directly, run a duplication, and transfer while Aspect is powered down. If they have an existential crisis, it won’t be anything I haven’t experienced while trying to fall asleep.”
Adria seems to tense at that. “Is sleep restless for your people, what with the constant light?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Just me.”
I had another terrifying dream when I last closed my eyes.
Fragments, nonsense, but they all wedge inside me like shrapnel, persisting even when I’m awake.
My limbs, pinned down to a medical table.
Swirls of colors without names, language without meaning, too much input, and I’m choking.
Chloe’s voice, I think, somewhere faraway. Kori, can you hear me?
“Then we have something else in common,” Adria says, but though the words sound pleased, her voice sounds like it comes from the bottom of a well.
I manage a sad smile before remembering she can’t see it through my mask. “I’m smiling, I promise. Excuse this sun-forsaken thing.”
“I must say, you’re in an awfully advantageous position for a prisoner.”
“Honored guest.”
“Temporary resident.” She smiles back at me then, before continuing: “You could be sticking your tongue out and rolling your eyes right now, even hissing under your breath, but between the voice filtration and the radiation mask, it’s impossible for me to tell.”
“I could take it off, if you’d like to watch me choke and die from the unfiltered atmosphere.”
“I should probably take you to dinner first.”
I laugh, then—a real laugh, so alive that even the mask’s filtration can’t fully flatten it.
I thought I’d be lucky to emerge from the Shadowlands with only a few counseling sessions’ worth of trauma, but here I am, wandering a forbidden library with an equally forbidden girl, beyond the grasp of the sun or school or my responsibility of succession, enjoying myself.