CHAPTER 17 KORI #4
I still can’t explain what it does to me to hear her address me by name.
Not even name and title, just name, like we’re on equal footing despite her holding all the power here, like she’d like to know the person before she collects the ransom.
She towers more than two feet above me, a bulk of muscle where I’m only lean limbs, a queen where I’m a trespasser, utterly capable of commanding this situation according to her desires.
But yet, she lets me take my awkward verbal swings at her, toys with me in turn.
It isn’t just that I’m not properly afraid of her anymore; it’s that I think I like this.
The push and pull, the easy banter, even when she could uproot my safe political standing in the Shadowlands with a stray word, even when she could easily lift me clean off the ground and pin me to the wall with a single clawed hand and—
I can feel my heartbeat hammering in my throat, and I really, really don’t want to analyze why that is.
Thankfully, Aspect has launched into another independent monologue about the evils of my people and the virtues of the enormous, wickedly grinning winged woman before me, so that gives me an excuse to look away.
“Actually …” Despite my continued avoidance of her gaze, Adria lays a hand on my shoulder. “I may have a solution for you. A happy memory.”
I blink, not understanding. “You mean another record.”
“No, I mean a memory.” The hand on my shoulder squeezes, a reassurance; she’s so much stronger than me that it still hurts a bit, but I can tell that wasn’t the intent.
I don’t pull away. “Lail—the one you call ’Alpha’—was taken into custody as well, after I captured you.
She revealed in interrogation that the contents, while treason against me and my kingdom, were to her a moment of hope.
An instant of belief that things could get better.
I have yet to gain access to the Morpheus sphere myself, but if she could be convinced to transfer access rights … if you think the memory would help—”
“Yes,” I say without hesitation. This is what I came here for in the first place, isn’t it? Alpha’s memory? An instant of utterly human hope, set alight in someone the dayfolk would have called a mere mutant? “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”
Unthinking, overcome with wild hope of my own, I throw my arms around the hulking mountain of muscle that is the Shadowlands’ queen.
She tenses like a rifle’s trigger, poised to lurch away, but then she doesn’t.
Not at all. Instead I feel one clawed hand, large enough to palm my entire skull, lightly settle against my back, barely brushing my armor but returning the gesture.
Trembling. Afraid of breaking me? Afraid we’ve broken a boundary that can never be erected again?
All I know is she’s restored my best chance at bringing my best friend to life, and I’m unspeakably grateful.
Even as Aspect continues raving in the background. “Kori does not—deserve hugs. Kori deserves—JUDGMENT!”
The following cycles fall into a battle-march rhythm, though I hardly know what I’m fighting anymore, save for sleep’s ever-encroaching, gnarled grasp. The night visions only grow worse in the Shadowlands’ eternal void, and no matter how I try to extend my time awake, I’m
pulled back into sleep like it’s a stubborn tide always dragging me back under the dark water. Aspect, who has never spent so much uninterrupted time by my side before this doomed adventure, quickly starts to recognize my nightmares’ symptoms.
But I’m so bone-deep tired that I’m falling asleep in impossible positions—knees curled to my chest in an alcove of the hallway, forehead pressed to the side of a mattress I never actually reached, and one regrettable occasion when I woke up because I’d started drooling (drooling!) on the inside of my mask, which my sleep-deprived self had apparently decided was a perfectly functional pillow all by itself.
The exhaustion is so severe that even Aspect rattling my teeth in my jaw (or squeaking their peg leg as obnoxiously as possible) isn’t enough to rescue me from the nightmares.
It’s always the same series of piercingly vivid sensations, the order remixed but the content the same. The medical table, cold against my naked back. The splitting pain in my skull. The needle at my wrist. Chloe’s voice: Kori, can you hear me?
My waking moments offer little more hope than my unconscious ones. Adria and I install Alpha’s sphere into Aspect together, but while it tempers their rage against the Daylands and their calls for vicious justice, it shows no signs of having awakened sentience.
Aspect is a comforting presence when I wake screaming. A loyal friend, even in this strange, shadowed inverse of our usual world. But they remain a robot, ultimately an elaborate algorithm.
I don’t stop searching the archives for new installation ideas, but nevertheless, my optimism wanes like melting wax.
Did I risk everything for nothing? Did I bring my closest friend to this land of frozen death, put their body through all manner of abuses, and further tinker with their mechanical brain … just to fail them at the finish line?
All I know is I can’t return home until I’ve tried installing absolutely everything (and then some) that the Shadowlands have to offer. Let my mother worry herself sick. Let them raise the ransom to the stars.
My feet are firmly planted here until I know, beyond even an inkling of doubt, that I’ve done everything I can for Aspect’s potential awakening.
My only respite from both the night visions and conscious anxieties is when I’m with Adria.
She remains a newly risen queen trying to quell a civil war, so she has responsibilities besides babysitting me—but when we are together, our waking moments land like a steady rain of blows, frequently interrupted by worsening messages on her comms.
FROM GENERAL ISEK: An energy blast knocked out a hunk of the fortress’s front wall. A telekinetic is repairing it as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, we’ve posted a constantly rotating guard.
FROM THAANE: The prisoner you saw fit to release, Eridian, has been stirring the rebels with her firsthand account of the monster queen. I fear she will only intensify Azarii’s resistance. But the consequences of your mercy are yours to bear.
FROM GENERAL ISEK: Our low-torch watchmen caught a solo assassin near the breach, with a shimmering freezeblade tucked securely into the wrist of her robes. The watchmen wrung her neck, left the head staring glassy-eyed at the stars. I can only hope it serves as a meaningful deterrent.
FROM THAANE: I fear Azarii’s influence only grows.
A layman appeared at the gate yesterday, white-eyed, staggering, bleeding profusely.
He’d tried to tear one of his wings from its socket.
Zalel called for a more advanced medic, anyone to help him.
Before that could happen, the madman took a freezeblade to his own throat.
Adria insists on rigorous exercise and training, for fear that the shadows will sap the life from my body and reduce my value to the Daylands. Most of it is with the same general who so frequently sends
the war updates: Isek—a lean, winged statesman with a solemn face and a baritone voice that carries unexpected notes of deep-set kindness. I vaguely remember overhearing his voice, which sought to temper Thaane’s violence, when Aspect and I cowered behind that tapestry.
When Adria is otherwise occupied with her queenly duties, General Isek leads me through fitness routines like stretches and laps.
I don’t think he’s supposed to be checking on my health beyond that, but he keeps squeezing my arms and legs anyway, prodding at my ribs, asking if I’m eating and drinking, if I’m sleeping, if the darkness has broken my brain yet.
Eventually, I can’t help but ask why he extends such compassion.
Cradling the side of my mask with a quivering hand, he whispers that I remind him of his son.
He also tells me that, while Adria would rather I didn’t worry, starships have been spotted deeper in the Passage than dayfolk have flown in generations.
Looking for me. Maybe feeling out the Shadowlands’ defenses.
Adria’s digital message to the Daylands promised I would return alive in exchange for her needed war supplies, but that doesn’t mean they won’t consider simply snatching me themselves and dragging me home of their own accord, ransom unpaid.
It’s no wonder Adria wants me readied for anything under General Isek’s wise tutelage.
The most intense of my training sessions, though, are not with Isek but with Adria herself. Rather than rote exercise routines, our sparring with words extends into drills with fists, the air electric hot between our warring bodies despite the Shadowlands’ permanent winter.
Increasingly, as my courage reignites like a stubborn flare in a sandstorm, I launch questions alongside my knuckles.
The innocuous ones, she answers, though I get the feeling half her replies are jokes.
Things like, “So how tall can nightfolk get?” (one monster of a soldier was measured at nearly ten feet), or “Don’t you ever get cold in those overdramatic robes you all insist on wearing?
” (apparently all the cold is absorbed by Adria’s cold, cold heart), or “What’s your favorite color? ” (black, predictably).
Then there are the bolder ones.
“Tell me about your mother.”
“Tell me the first thing you really remember.”
“Tell me where you feel the safest.”
Most of these, Adria deflects as effectively as she does my punches and kicks. But when I cautiously venture, “Have you ever seen the radiation’s source for yourself?” her brow furrows in actual thought rather than reflexive sarcasm, and she tells me we’re going on a little trip.