CHAPTER 24 ADRIA #2
“I mean, I assumed if we’d activated independent thought, then you were likely experiencing an independent emotional psyche, as well,” Kori sputters, drifting into technician mode, “but it’s totally okay if you aren’t.
There are plenty of sleep cycles to alter the connections, examine the new spontaneous wiring—”
Aspect waves their arms wildly about. “ASPECT IS HAVING FEELINGS!”
Abruptly, Russ lunges forward. At first, I think Aspect’s bursts of volume and newfound instability have alarmed my dog, perhaps into attacking.
But instead, two tongues lap at Aspect’s head from either side, Russ’s center head nudging itself into Aspect’s chest. Aspect wraps both arms around the head and pulls it close, like a safety blanket or a stuffed toy.
The robot has no true mouth to speak of, but they press their crudely drawn smile to Russ’s big, wet nose all the same, making artificial kissing noises.
Still my comms tablet screeches at me with increasing urgency.
My stomach twists, fearing what I’m going to find when I open its display.
But how can I check my messages while this …
this … madness is happening? Against all odds, the dayfolk robot …
is sentient. The robot is sentient and using their newfound self-awareness to aggressively cuddle my three-headed dog.
When was the last time my life made even a lick of sense? I don’t know anymore.
“Okay, you are having feelings.” Kori runs a hand through her hair, struggling to process almost as much as her creation. “That’s … that’s …”
“Amazing,” I finish for her. “You’re amazing, Kori. No one else would’ve dared to try this, let alone crossed the planet’s borders to make it happen, even gone so far as to trust me with the results.”
“It would appear I made the right decision.” Kori beams as Aspect continues to feign kissing my dog.
“I never really let myself think I’d get this far.
I have so many things I want to try. I could teach them how to pilot a starship.
We could workshop jokes to annoy my doctor together.
” Her jaw drops as another realization dawns. “They could do my homework.”
I can’t help but laugh at the homework bit, but the previous sentence catches my attention. “Your doctor?”
“Oh, Ednit. My mother insists he give me regular checkups on my Morpheus chip to ensure everything is running correctly. Basically he just sedates me and pokes around in my brain for a bit and—”
“Is he a regular doctor, or just a Morpheus chip technician?”
“Both.”
“Then shouldn’t he have known if Pagonian radiation wouldn’t kill you?”
Kori blinks hard. “No. He would tell me. He can’t … He wouldn’t …” But realization closes over her, swallows the syllables. “He must have known. And if he knew—”
But she never gets to finish her sentence. Because the sliding door to my chamber shrieks open, and standing on the other side, hands fisted at his sides, chest heaving, deep-set gray eyes brewing a veritable storm, is Thaane.
“The generals are all trying to reach you. I have been trying to reach you. What in the Beyond are you—” But that’s when he spots Kori, unarmored, unmasked, and I can practically see lightning in his eyes flash to join the thunder in his voice.
“What is the meaning of this? Why is she here? Why … how is she …?”
“I wish I knew,” Kori answers before I can. “But I’m going to go home, and I’m going to find out.”
“Oh, now you’re going home.” Thaane saunters forward, arms swinging rigidly, and I half think he’s about to take a swing at Kori himself with one clenched, three-clawed fist, but he doesn’t. “Before we ever get Adria’s precious ransom, and long after you brought sun serpents to our doorstep.”
I’ve trusted Thaane all through my cruel childhood, straight into an adolescence forcibly mutated into adulthood as I seized a throne by force that I never even wanted by birthright. But in this moment, perhaps for the first time, I lie to him.
I lie to him, and it’s so incredibly easy. “We have no reason to believe Kori is at fault for the serpent attack.”
Thaane snatches my comms tablet from the bed and waves it overhead like a blood-drunk warrior would an axe.
“You would know otherwise if you checked your messages.” I want to protest that surely, they could have spared a messenger or gotten a telepathic close enough to deliver updates indirectly, but I’m afraid that if I dare lash back at Thaane, I’ll only learn more about how horribly I failed my soldiers during this attack.
So I keep my lips locked tightly shut. “Those broken fragments of the Diakópsei, the ones Elysium continues to insist are securely caged—Azarii must have gotten into a rogue cultist’s head, because one of his rebels got her accursed claws on a fragment.
Enough to temporarily overcharge herself.
Enough to send out a telepathic message strong enough that it summoned every sun serpent for miles, specifically to go after Kori. ”
“What?” My voice feels like it’s coming from someone else.
I feel cold all over, goose bumps trailing down my arms. None of this makes any sense.
Azarii’s rebellion could have simply targeted me directly, if they had power over sun serpents, so why attack Kori?
Why go through so many extra steps? “When did this happen?”
“While you were pleading with Neo to free you of your foolish affections,” Thaane snarls, “your enemies were moving to take advantage
of your most obvious weakness. And she is a weakness, Adria.
” He points at Kori with a singular claw, and my throat clenches.
“Surely even you can’t deny that anymore, or you wouldn’t have been on your knees before your own prisoner, begging him for some measure of relief.
Which you could’ve obtained yourself, mind you.
You could’ve just sent the dayfolk heiress home. ”
I open my mouth to protest, but Thaane barrels straight on anyway, undeterred.
“But no, you had to wrap your adolescent crush in false promises of a dramatic ransom, a chance to turn the tide of war—a war you’ve practically stopped fighting, because you’re busy training your own prisoner to defend herself amidst shadows she should never have entered.
She doesn’t belong here, Adria. She never did. ”
Kori’s face has gone terribly pale. Russ hunkers down into himself, all three heads tucked in, a ball of shuddering fur. Aspect wobbles, wordless, from foot to foot, which produces some awkwardly loud squeaks from their peg leg in the process.
“And by letting her stay here,” Thaane says, “you’ve put your entire kingdom at risk.
I see it. The Shadow Court sees it. What are you going to tell them when they demand your report of the sun serpent attack?
Was it all worth it—to treat a trespasser like a princess, no ransom in sight, your fortress blown through by sand beasts, your army bleeding and afraid before a rebellion that only grows stronger?
A rebellion that looks more and more right with every passing sleep cycle? ”
“How dare you,” I burst out, but Thaane simply continues to shout over me.
“How can you possibly hope to lead us? Where is your courage? Torn away by a foreign princess’s lips, perhaps?
Lips you should never have touched.” He glowers at Kori, who looks unbelievably small by comparison, even with Thaane being shorter among the nightfolk.
He can’t possibly know that we kissed, but I suppose the tension between us has become impossible to hide.
“Where is your armor? You should be dead.”
“ENOUGH.” My voice is a scream, a bestial bellow.
My voice is a surge of rising energy in my throat, burning brilliant blue, and I almost choke from the effort of swallowing it down.
“She just told you we don’t know what’s happened.
And she’s exiting the Shadowlands. She’s going home to find answers, and to leave me to focus on our war. ”
“Now you decide to focus?” Thaane scoffs. “And you expect me to believe she’ll stay away, when you look at her like the sun itself alighted in your open palm?”
Kori steps forward. I extend an arm to hold her back, but she brushes it aside, and I don’t have it in me to physically restrain her.
“You’re right,” she says, sickness churning in me at her words.
“I should never have come here. But when I come back”—and, oh, how my heart somersaults that she says when and not if—“it will be with weapons, perhaps even with soldiers. If Adria hasn’t already ended your civil war, then even without a ransom payment, I’ll be the final push to finish it.
To bring lasting peace.” She extends a bare hand to Thaane, open, as if he doesn’t tower over her, as if he couldn’t turn the ground beneath her to shattering glass with a mere twitch of his gift.
“But for now, I will leave. You have my word. On all of it.”
Thaane looks from Kori’s outstretched hand to her wide pleading gaze to my own surely stunned face. He sputters. He spits and stammers.
Behind all of us, Aspect says wistfully, “Aspect—will miss—triple dog.”
Russ gives the robot’s face a big, wet, sticky lick.
Thaane turns his back in a whirl of dark robes.
His shoulders heave, his head cast down toward the floor, his arms crossed over his chest, all four wings folded tightly at his back.
“Since you don’t check your messages, my lord, I’ll tell you General Isek is in the infirmary.
One of the serpents shook him by his right leg, tossed him into a wall that crumbled completely.
He may lose the leg … if he doesn’t lose his life.
I know you’ve grown fond of him.” He punches the button to reopen the door.
“Perhaps his life in the balance will be enough to restore your priorities.
I trust you will be prepared to defend as much
to the Shadow Court.” And with that, he steps out, the door sliding shut with finality behind him, blanketing us all in horrible silence.
After an unbearable stretch of quiet, the only words I can find are “I’m so sorry, Kori.”
“He’s right, though,” Kori says, stumbling back to sit once again on the edge of my bed.
She buries her head in her hands, fingers tangled in her brown hair, the tight braid coming increasingly undone.
“I should never have come here. And the moment I saw that my presence here was distracting you, putting you at risk in the war …” She stares at the floor.
“I should’ve gone home a long time ago.”
“A-and then y-you would never have awakened Aspect,” I stammer. “Or discovered that the radiation said to kill you only makes you stronger.” Or pressed your mouth to mine and breathed into me again the will to be more, to be better.
“At the expense of so many lives.”
“None of this is your fault.”
“Whether by my mother’s orders or Azarii’s, the serpents were here for me.”
“And if I’d done a better job as queen,” I protest, another chill shivering through me, “there would be no rebellion and no Elysian oversights allowing access to a pocket of overcharge.” Russ brushes up against my leg, trying to offer some moral support, but nothing can slow my pounding heart right now.
“This is my kingdom, Kori. When it bleeds, I’m the one stained scarlet.
I’m the one who has to answer to the court for what my people have become.
” A sharp exhale takes all my oxygen with it.
“General Isek. So help me. Of all my soldiers … I will never forgive myself if he doesn’t pull through. ”
“He will,” Kori says, rising defiantly to her feet, even though she can’t possibly know that.
“You all will. You’re going to end this war, Adria.
I’m going to find out what’s happened to me, before whatever secrets lie in wait lead to war for the dayfolk, too.
And when all is said and done, despite all the wrongs we committed along the way, we’ll both have
made things right, made things better. For dayfolk and nightfolk. For everyone.”
Despite myself, I reach for Kori’s wrist. I need to feel the blood pulsing through her veins, the warmth of her skin, the promise that we are both still alive, still fighting.
I wish it were just us. I wish there were another universe, a far-off galaxy, even just one planet where we could be together, hidden away from political conflicts and rising wars.
I want to fall asleep and wake up in our own little pocket of private time, orbiting each other, spinning on the selfsame axis, our days and nights in sync until we have no more left to give.
“For us,” I say. “A better world for you and me, despite the desert between us.”
I know we need, at long last, to part ways; there’s no way around it.
But I want to live in our kiss forever. For so long, even without having the words, I yearned to touch her.
She should’ve died in my arms, and instead, she clung to me with newfound strength, with impossibly echoed want.
She was delicate as light in my hands. The dip of her collarbone.
The broad muscle of her shoulders. The shooting star curvature of her spine.
The gentle dip of her hips under my fingertips.
The unapologetic desire of her lips moving with mine.
I could taste her wordless promise that this is not the end, the memory immediately searing itself over all the others—a flame-bright burn across my entire brain, impossible even by the wildest imagination to remove.
“And Aspect,” Aspect says brightly.
I blink, lost in my reverie. “What?”
“You both—have Aspect.” They lift one hand, struggling to independently raise one finger in a facsimile of a thumbs-up. “Even at—the end—of the world. And triple dog—too.”
In evident approval, Russ lifts all three heads toward the ceiling and barks.