CHAPTER 28 ADRIA
CHAPTER
ADRIA
Even with the army at my back, a shuddering mass of lunar blue-tinged white against the black sky, I force my eyes to stay forward, locked on my destination.
It gets harder once I’m close enough to properly see the sun for the first time.
In Kori’s memory of beholding it, she must’ve been wearing protective eyewear that my own people have never needed.
My unguarded eyes well up with water, the whites burning like fire.
I have to hold one hand above my gaze to maintain vision at all.
It’s beautiful beyond doubt, waves of gorgeous gold cascading over the sands, glinting the full spectrum of color off the dayfolk settlement’s narrow entry pad, the only section that’s aboveground.
But it’s also a relentless source of blazing pain.
It’s hard to revel in the wonder of it when I’m squinting to see, sticky sweat quickly drenching me from horns to wings to toes.
Time passes in an uncertain desert haze. A small, squirming part of me desperately fears that my unplanned arrival in the Daylands will be greeted with a wall of heatshot. But when I finally arrive within proper
viewing distance, what I see is a woman armored just as Kori once was, flanked by two similarly armored enforcers. Her gloved fists hold a pair of scarlet landing flares that she waves rapidly in my direction. A welcome.
Now that’s unexpected. But as compared to a heatshot barrage, I’ll take the blessing.
My wings buffet an unpleasant sputter of sand at my face during landing, but feeling solid ground under my feet again is a relief. Squaring my shoulders, I lock gazes with the armored stranger.
Words tumble out of me in a rush. “My name is Adria. I’m the reigning leader of the Shadowlands. I have no quarrel with the Daylands, but a rogue faction went against my orders and is on their way here to raise hell. I need to speak to someone in charge immediately.”
“You’ve found them,” the stranger answers.
Even through the mask’s filtration, there’s something uncomfortably familiar about its tones, its pronunciation even, the way the syllables flow from one to another.
With a cold shock, I realize that I’m speaking to Chloe herself.
Kori’s mother … and lately, her attempted murderer.
I knew there’d never in any universe be a traditional meet-the-parents moment for Kori and me.
But meeting under these circumstances, caught in the heart of a brewing planetary civil war, is a whole new level of mess.
“Chloe. I know of you.” I swallow my revulsion for this woman.
I need to earn her trust or else doom the dayfolk altogether.
“Please, you need to arm those who can fight and shelter those who can’t, as fast as you can.
I can fight with you. With what precious time we have left, I can arm your shoulders with my knowledge of the enemy—”
But it’s then that I belatedly notice another set of footsteps approaching from the landing pad. Multiple sets, actually. Two pairs of boots on metal. One pair of pure metal on metal, accompanied by a periodic squeak.
“Kori?” I gasp, hardly daring to hope as I turn to meet the new arrivals.
“AND ASPECT!” the mech declares, stamping their peg leg with a steely whine.
“And Aspect,” Kori sighs, emerging from behind them a moment later.
Despite her armor, Chloe visibly tenses from head to toe. Her flanking enforcers reach for heatshot pistols at their belts, but Chloe raises a gloved hand, signaling them to stand down for now.
Kori, meanwhile, is armored only up to the neck. Her straight brown hair is fully free of its former braid now, cascading past her shoulders. Her eyes are wearier than I left them, dark circles edging the beautiful brown, but they still spark when they meet mine, quickening my heartbeat.
Beside her, fully armored but nevertheless radiating intense grumpiness, is yet another dayfolk.
I incline my head in the second dayfolk’s direction. “And who’s this?”
“This,” Kori says, as Aspect delivers a vengeful kick to the stranger’s back for good measure, “is my doctor, Ednit. One of many to run my mother’s Evolution Project, transferring whole sets of memories—whole people—into bodies that harness radiation instead of dying from it.”
My vision swims, maybe from the rush of new info, maybe from the relentless sun. “You mean—”
“They stole me out of my body,” Kori says, gloved hands curling into trembling fists.
“Put me in what they deemed a better one—what they call Evolved—entirely artificial. And lied to me about it my entire life.” She turns her piercing stare on Chloe.
“You can drop the act now, Mother. You don’t need that helmet any more than I do. ”
With a mild shrug, Chloe does indeed collapse her helmet, revealing her face.
I expected her to look, perhaps, akin to Kori—but like Kori as seen in a foggy mirror, like Kori more beaten and weathered by time.
Instead this woman is practically her spitting image.
She’s so flawless that she’s not even younger, more so removed from the inevitable crawl of decay entirely, built from something utterly unlike flesh and bone and soul—ageless, deathless, severed as physically as she is emotionally from everything that ought to make her human. Her guards
should be terrified to see their leader outside her armor, fully exposed to Pagomènos, but they don’t even twitch. Are they, too, among these Evolved? How many of them are there?
“You could stand to be grateful for relative immortality, Kori.” Chloe sighs. “It wasn’t without cost.”
“To who?” Kori’s lips pull back from her teeth.
“To me, haunted by memories that you gaslighted me into dismissing as nightmares? To people like Jelza, who found the reality utterly unlike your promises and were denied the chance to turn back? To every other dayfolk citizen, observed by your Evolved enforcers without a lick of knowledge about what their government is really plotting?”
“Kori.” My voice feels strangled in the back of my throat.
I step forward, reaching for her, aching to comfort her, but she only pulls away, roughly shrugging my hand from her shoulder.
“I believe you, and I’m as angry as you are.
But if we don’t work with your mother to warn the settlement now, a lot of people are going to die. ”
Chloe crosses her arms. “Bold words from the leader of those coming to kill us.”
“Those are Thaane’s soldiers, not mine.”
The blood drains from Kori’s face. “Thaane? What? Was he in league with Azarii all along?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, not really. He’s using Azarii just as much as he was using me. His intentions are akin to what my parents’ once were. March on the Daylands. Wipe out anyone too weak to fight back.”
Kori runs a hand through her hair, overwhelmed, before turning her attention back to her mother.
“Chloe …” Kori swallows hard and sets her jaw before correcting, almost pleading, “Mother. Think what you will of Adria. Call me ungrateful, rebellious, obstinate, whatever you damn well please. But if you don’t work with us to prepare the settlement now …
” She gestures to the rapidly approaching storm of nightfolk warriors, bent on bloodshed.
“Thaane’s army will slaughter our people. ”
Chloe barks, “I will never need help from one of your kind.”
“Mother, people are going to die—”
“And so what if we lose a few?” Chloe shouts. “It’s still better than lowering ourselves to work with monsters.”
The gravity of her statement stuns us all briefly into silence, even her twin enforcers; all, that is, except Ednit, who apparently had no idea it would get this bad and lets out a pathetic whimper.
“The Evolved will fight alone,” Chloe says.
“A united front, finally unveiled at the proper moment. We will be heroes to the survivors. Maybe even gods. It will cement our position forever, ensuring that no one dares question the rightness of the Evolution Project, the glory of what we’ve become.
And then we can take the Shadowlands, seize the ultimate source of radiation for ourselves …
and become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. ”
Kori’s face is streaked with stubborn tears. She wipes them away with the back of a glove. “You’d sacrifice your own citizens to ensure you stay in power?”
“Oh, Kori, darling, you always were such a damned idealist.” Shaking her head, Chloe clicks her tongue as if speaking to a petulant toddler. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
“Aspect does not—approve this message,” the mech chimes in before promptly being cut off by a raging Kori, whose veins are practically popping out of her neck.
“This isn’t about the needs of the many. This is about you, what you want, that you want to rule everything, own everyone, cheat death with your twisted science—”
“I have suffered so much for my people!” Chloe raises a defiant fist. “Is it not time that some of them begin to pay me back?”
Everything in me longs to pull Kori into my chest, gently running my fingers through her lustrous hair and down the curve of her spine, reassuring her that no matter what happens next, I’ll fight with her and for her even if it kills us. But abruptly, as if a switch were flipped, her
tears are gone, her rage swallowed up as if by a black hole. Her lips press into a tight line.
Chloe blinks, confused, as Kori breathes, “Please do say that again.”
All at once, I notice a tiny, almost-imperceptible yellowish light on Aspect’s forehead, like a speck of forgotten stardust, blinking in and out.
“Aspect ends—their broadcast here!” they declare, raising both their arms to honor an invisible audience. “Thank yourself for watching!”
The twin enforcers glance between Chloe and each other, hands hovering over their weapons, not knowing what to do about a threat they can’t simply riddle with heatshot—the truth fully unleashed.
Chloe balks. “What is the mech talking about?”