CHAPTER 17 KORI #6
They gambol about with Adria’s three-headed dog, Russ, even riding on its back—two of the heads sporting toothy grins, the third taking half-angry, half-playful snaps at the unexpected rider.
Sometimes, instead of recharging in the standard upright position, I find Aspect’s powered-down body curled into the sleeping canine’s side.
It’s far from the awakening I want. Nevertheless, I pore through the archives whenever possible, trying and failing to find what will actually elevate Aspect to personhood. But it’s yet another glimmer of hope, and that isn’t nothing.
Several sleep cycles, all haunted by fractured dreams of needles and my whispered name, pass before I see Adria again.
I can only guess where she goes. The new shadow queen’s responsibilities are many: Meetings with Thaane and her other close advisors.
Ordering soldiers to halt every fresh insurgent assault beyond the fortress.
Most curious among Adria’s constant barrage of messages are automated reminders for meetings with another prisoner: a young nightfolk named Neo, apparently.
That’s all she’s been willing to tell me, and most of the other nightfolk hardly speak to me at all, only catching me at the corners of their eyes like an inconvenient ghost. Exceptions to this rule are few and distinct: General Isek, with his firm but loving criticism of my fitness.
Thaane, bluntly reminding me to move wisely in this unfamiliar land.
Even more so than her political gatherings or even physical altercations, it’s the visits to Neo that leave their mark on Adria’s whole body.
I can always recognize when she’s gone to see him without sleeping afterward—her wings like wilted flower petals, her visage set like ancient granite, her sharp teeth absently worrying at her lower lip, though it’s already crusted with dried blood.
While Aspect stays just outside my quarters to power down and recharge, I almost dare to ask Adria about it, on one of the rare
occasions when we’re in close enough proximity to communicate but also not making eye contact. Eye contact seems to have the unforeseen side effect of shutting down all language functions in my body.
I’ve told myself it’s anxiety, maybe even fear, but I know anxiety like an ever-present younger sibling, always tagging along.
It’s a glacial creep of tension from the nape of my neck to the tips of my toes.
That thing Adria’s eyes do is nothing like that.
It’s hot and fast and clenches like a flaming fist around my heart if I don’t look away or deflect with sarcasm.
On this occasion, though, we’re doing weapons training. Adria’s idea. “If the dayfolk fail to honor the terms of our agreement,” she says, “or if my own subjects decide to try their luck with a freezeshot at your head … you’ll be glad you heeded my advice.”
On the one hand, weapons other than my standard-issue heatshot pistol—carried by any members of the Morpheus Market who would rather not lose a limb in a transaction gone wrong—are deeply unfamiliar.
Chloe raised me to be clever, not strong.
A concealed creature, skittering silently through the underbrush, ready to flee at the slightest sound. A prey animal, really.
But the freezeshot shotgun Adria presses into my gloved palm is a hunk of bulky, rumbling metal—a predator’s appendage, like a horn or claw designed only to charge in and gore.
I’ve grown so accustomed to the surprising lightness of heatshot weapons, my knees nearly buckle under this war-making wreckage machine.
For all my awkwardness, though, staring down the weapon’s sights is the perfect excuse to avoid Adria’s molten violet eyes when I ask, quick enough that I almost hope it conceals the audacity, “So who’s Neo?”
There’s always the slim chance that it’s my overactive imagination, but I swear I hear Adria’s claws scrape against the blue-white skin of her hands as they curl into fists. “You listen to everything.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Knowledge comes with a price, Kori. Say … a clean head shot.”
“I’ve been your captive for all of … ten, twelve sleep cycles?” Honestly, I hardly know anymore. “And already, you’re testing me with a request to commit regicide?”
At that, Adria extends a hand, her claws just barely brushing the side of my helmet, forcing me to readjust my line of sight toward the stone targets.
“Don’t be coy if you’ve got cause to raise a weapon.
If those were real soldiers—your people, my people, visitors from deep space, whatever—you’d be dead before you finished your one-liner. ”
“Not my preferred way to go out.”
“Glad to hear it.”
I smirk despite myself. “Being clever, Adria?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Her tone is slick and cold, but if she meant any harm, Adria’s claws would’ve been buried in my skull a moment ago, ending me even before the radiation could. I swear the little shudder I feel in her body just behind me, watching me take aim, is a suppressed laugh.
I tighten my grip on the shotgun’s barrel, willing this strange automaton to become like my mask and gloves and armor, merely another artificial layer between me and the real world.
A tool to help me navigate it. I draw in the deepest breath I can manage—resenting the jagged edge of it, telling myself it’s not from Adria’s proximity—and exhale ever so slowly as I focus on the closest stone mannequin’s head.
I pull the trigger.
I’ve rarely had to fire my heatshot pistol outside of mother-mandated training scenarios, but I’ve grown accustomed to what that feels like.
A little electric skitter, almost like my weapon hand has fallen asleep, before a surprising shock of warmth up the whole limb to my shoulder, rapidly fading from the sensation of a burn to a light, pleasant prickling. The freezeshot shotgun is … not that.
The trigger clicks, the barrel rolls, and the gun announces its intentions with the loudest noise I’ve heard since the alarm in Charon. My helmet is designed to dampen close-range volume spikes that could
damage my eardrums, but even so, the recoil makes my hearing ring. Where the heatshot’s sensation is of my hands falling asleep, the freezeshot is like my limbs being frozen stiff and hacked off with a rusty blade, and then my new stumps being promptly filled with additional ice because why not?
If I scream, and I honestly can’t tell, it’s luckily drowned out by the shotgun’s bellow. All my focus was on steadying the gun, not steadying my legs, so I naturally careen backward like a second projectile, gun still braced against my throbbing ribs, and collide fully with Adria.
I would’ve thought those massive witchy wings do something for Adria’s balance, but I suppose she’s as surprised as I am that the recoil launched me so hard.
In any event, we land in a tangled heap of arms and legs and now-crooked wings.
I can feel my own mortified heartbeat pounding through me, but I swear I feel hers, too, through all my layers of armor, strong and fierce and unexplainably unsteady.
She must be furious with me. I should be furious with myself. Given an opportunity to explore the Shadowlands, to personally gain knowledge of its queen and its history and its weaponry, I proceed to fall on my own ass like a low-charge mech?
But then I look up. And, despite myself, I smile.
“Look.” I extend an arm to point at the stone targets.
Cursing through her teeth, Adria takes the liberty of using said arm to haul herself upright again, wings sprawling wide like an exasperated shrug.
The farthest stone mannequin is missing one head. Behind it, the chunk of rock that was once its crowning appendage is frozen solid to the wall, nearly split down the middle exactly. Not the mannequin I was aiming for, but Adria doesn’t know that.
“I’d call that the entry fee to more Neo info, wouldn’t you?”
Adria shakes her head. “I’d call that a lucky shot. And if things go sideways, luck won’t be enough to protect you.”
“Don’t worry,” I fire back, “the last thing I’d want to do is leave that to you.”
“Don’t think I’m up to the task?”
Adria gives her wings a lazy stretch, like the boys at my home compound’s gym trying to one-up each other on bicep flexes.
Except I usually roll my eyes at those boys’ boorish antics, but my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth at the ripples of muscle in Adria’s back, the shine of the spikes where her wings terminate, the superhuman heft and bulk of her contrasted with the predatory fluidity of motion.
She certainly could protect me, if I had any idea how to submit to being protected—but it’s clear that isn’t what she’s built for.
Again, the knowledge slithers through me that nightfolk, their new queen not exempted, have evolved to take and break and kill.
It’s the only way to survive in the dark.
So why, as I told her by the preternatural light of the planet’s mutant heart, am I not afraid of her?
“Every adult in the Daylands whom I’m actually allowed to interact with has surrendered their lives to the simple task of protecting me.
And I’m still here—trespassing on the planet’s dark side, nearly injuring myself on alien weaponry, presided over by a seven-foot mutant who could condemn me to death, or kill me herself, with an idle finger twitch.
” I hope she can feel the challenge in my gaze, even behind my mask.
“How do you think that’s working out for them? ”
“Eight,” Adria says, inflectionless.
“What?”
“I’m eight feet tall.”
“Only farther for your pride to fall.”
Adria manages a dry laugh at that. “It’s important to size up your opponent accurately. If I were to lose control around you …”
The sentence inexplicably trails off.
But I’m looking at the regal arch of her jaw, framed by the royal sprawl of her wings, and those piercing violet eyes with all the depth of galaxies, and I’m sweaty and shivering and this anti-radiation suit is too tight, and it’s so much more than not being afraid of her.
I recognize it in a flash of useless intuition in the same instant that I realize she was most definitely just referring to her capacity for murder.
And when she lunges for me, to make her point, it only underscores the severity of my first epiphany.
When my back hits the stone floor, and I’m pinned horizontal beneath someone who, by all accounts, is the planet’s most lethal beast, my heart beats through every soft and breakable part of me—my fragile collarbone and my thinly armored throat and the sweaty palms of my gloved hands.
She could rip my carefully assembled suit of armor off with her teeth.
And, instead of being terrified, instead of recognizing the inherent danger of the Shadowlands and its people that she’s so severely struggling to impress on me, I’m wondering if her hands would feel as cold as her blue-white skin looks, wondering where she might like to put her palms if the whole planet weren’t a plague, if she could leash the power in her claws enough to just pull me close, pin me in place, unable to escape, like I’d even want to.
Well, Kori, I somehow think through the head rush. It’s not like you weren’t already breaking all the rules.