27. Althea
ALTHEA
The airlock opens on a cathedral, and I forget, for a second, that we're standing in a tomb.
We go in small — Saren, Vasha, Caelis, me — through a breach in the city's flank, into a hall so vast our lamps lose the ceiling.
And as Saren steps over the threshold, the city knows him.
Light blooms ahead of us, panel by panel, a path lighting itself toward the heart of the ruin, and the harmonic in the walls shifts into something I can only call welcome.
"It's reading him," Caelis breathes. He's got a scanner out and his hands are shaking. "Genetic. The whole city's keyed to Ishani blood. Captain, you just — you turned the lights on for the first time since the fall."
The hall opens onto galleries, and the galleries are full.
Not bodies. Art. Sculpture and mural and instrument, libraries of crystal that hum when our lamps cross them, a memorial colonnade where ten thousand names are cut into a single curving wall.
Vasha stops in front of it and goes so still I think something's wrong, and then I understand: she's looking for a name, the reflex of a woman who's spent her life pressing her palm to walls of the dead.
She finds it. Some ancestor, some clan-line that survived long enough to carve her into being.
She presses her hand to it and her shoulders shake, once, and Caelis pretends very hard to be reading his scanner.
In a side gallery I find an instrument I have no word for, a frame of crystal rods strung with something finer than wire, and when my lamp crosses it the thing sings — one pure sustained note that floods the dead hall and does not stop, a sound stored in the crystal itself three centuries ago and only waiting for light to set it loose.
Caelis goes pale. "A memory-string," he whispers.
"Elsyn told me they existed. You play into it once and it holds the song forever.
That note, Thea. Somebody played that note.
Somebody real, with hands, sitting right here.
" So the four of us stand in a tomb and let a dead musician finish their last note, and not one of us bothers to hide what it does to our faces.
I move through it with my scavenger's eye, the eye that reads value, and what it reads, this once, isn't anything I could sell.
It's a people. A whole, beautiful, gentle people, rendered in their own hands at the height of what they were, and I think of the gray scarred crew waiting on the Hollow Wake and I want to drag every one of them in here and say look, look what you come from, look what they couldn't burn all the way out of you.
It's Caelis who finds the gallery that breaks us, though none of us say broken out loud.
A low room off the main hall, the ceiling close, the murals scaled down — and it takes me a moment to understand why the proportions are wrong, and then I understand all at once and wish I hadn't.
It's a nursery. A children's hall. The walls are covered in small handprints pressed into soft stone and then fired, hundreds of them, the way human children leave them in playgroup paint, except these have lasted three hundred years.
And above the handprints, the Ishani young themselves, painted by someone who clearly loved them: round-faced, soft-horned, laughing, nothing of the gray armored thing the Badlands would later make of their descendants.
Beautiful. Ordinary. Beautiful the way all children are — which is exactly what makes what was done to them unforgivable.
Saren stops in the doorway and does not come in.
I have seen this man walk through gunfire and vacuum and his own dead without breaking stride.
He cannot make himself cross the threshold of a room full of children's handprints.
'This is what we were,' he says, very low, and his voice does a thing I have never heard it do.
'Before they decided a gentle people sitting on old technology was a waste of a good resource.
These hands. These small hands. Every Reaper child born wrong in a famine ship, every one we lost because the cold remade us faster than we could feed ourselves — they all trace back to a choice somebody made to put these hands out.
' He finally steps in, and he presses his own enormous gray palm against one of the small fired prints, and it covers four of them, and he stays like that a long time.
I go and stand beside him and I press my own hand against another, my knuckles a map of small scars beside prints that never got the chance to scar at all, and neither of us says anything, because there is nothing to say that the wall hasn't already said better, in the only language a dead child ever needs.
Saren has gone to a central dais, where a console older than the city waits, and the moment his hand finds it the records begin to open — and the first fragment that surfaces, projected huge into the dark above us, is not art.
It's a warning. Ishani script, the formal kind, the kind you use for things that must not be forgotten, and Caelis translates it in a voice gone thin: To any who survive — remember that we did not fall. We were pushed.
Saren grips the edge of the console hard enough that I hear the metal complain.
And on the long-range, far behind us at the dead zone's mouth, the proximity board lights with contacts — many of them, moving fast and deliberate, sliding past the dead guns we already cleared a path through. Jorek. Of course Jorek. We left him a road straight in.