Chapter 17 #3
Then, as if it rose up to meet me, I was suddenly standing on solid ground, though I couldn't see it through the dense, dark fog that covered my boots and rolled along the surface.
I took off running, shouting for my crew, for Kora, for anyone.
Click was nowhere to be seen, and I wondered in horror if he'd been left behind.
Maybe they were all gone. Maybe it was just me here.
I didn't know if that was worse or better.
"Juno!" A voice called through the fog, faint but unmistakably Cypher's.
"Here!" I shouted back, sounding muffled. "I'm over here!"
I spun in place, trying to determine which direction the voice had come from.
Sound behaved strangely in this place, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Then I saw it—a pinpoint of blue-white light cutting through the darkness, growing larger as it approached. The familiar glow of an anchor crystal.
"Cypher?" I called again, moving toward the light.
He materialized from the fog, anchor crystal held high in one hand, his other gripping the hilt of his sword. Relief flashed across his face when he saw me. "You did it," he said, closing the distance between us. "You brought us back to the First Dark."
I blinked at him. "I didn't mean to—"
"Intentional or not, we're here." His eyes scanned our surroundings, though there was little to see beyond the small sphere of light cast by his crystal. "We can find the Engine now."
"The others," I said, head on a sudden swivel. "Kora, everyone—where are they?"
"Scattered, most likely. The transition was chaotic." He gestured to the darkness around us. "First, we need to locate the crew. Then we can search for the Engine."
A terrible thought struck me. "What about Pike? His men? Did I bring them through too?"
Cypher's expression darkened. "Possibly. Anyone within range of your power when it manifested could have been pulled through."
"If he’s here, he'll be looking for the Engine too."
"It won't work for him even if he finds it first," Cypher said with absolute certainty. "The Engine responds only to those touched by the First Dark. To anyone else, it's just a pretty crystal."
I wasn't comforted. "But he could still take it, hide it, destroy it—"
"We'll find it first," Cypher said firmly, raising the anchor crystal higher, illuminating more of our surroundings. The light caught my face, and his eyes hardened into something dangerous. "You're still bleeding," he said, reaching toward the cut on my cheek.
I slapped his hand away, stepping back. The concern in his eyes might have once moved me, but now it felt like another manipulation. "Don't," I warned. "Don't touch me."
His hand dropped to his side, but his eyes remained fixed on my injury. "It needs attention."
"What I need," I spat, "is for you to explain what that was back on the ship.
That dark magic. Those shadows. Why is this the first time I'm seeing it?
If you had that power all along, why didn't you use it before?
Against the krell and the scathers? Against the Assembly guards? Why keep it a secret?"
Cypher's face went carefully blank, a mask I recognized all too well. He was weighing his words, calculating how much to reveal—probably preparing another half-truth designed to placate me.
"And don't bother lying to me. There's nothing you could possibly say that would make this any worse for you. I don't trust you, but I'm really hoping you aren't as much of a bastard as you're trying to make me believe you are."
He looked at me in silence for a long moment, and I wondered if he was actually planning on lying to me, or if for once, he might respect me enough to hear the truth.
"I told you I escaped the collapse of Nytheris," he said.
Every word sounded strained. "I told you I was found by a wayfarer captain who raised me.
That I was one of the lucky ones." He shook his head slowly, running a palm over his face in utter exhaustion.
"I lied. Not about all of it. But I didn't tell you the whole truth. "
A chill skittered across my skin. "Cypher—"
"The Assembly was waiting for us at the evacuation portals the day Nytheris collapsed.
They knew the realm was falling long before it happened.
They knew we would be vulnerable, panicked, easy to corral.
So they rounded us up—me, my mother, and over three hundred others who had managed to claw their way to the gates.
My sister was lost already. They told us we were being taken to a waypoint.
A processing center for refugees, promising us we could seek asylum in the Prime Realm. "
He looked at me then, and the emptiness in his eyes terrified me more than the krell, more than the Gideon Pike, more than anything I’d faced in the Gallery yet. This was a broken man.
"They took us to the Dredge."
My heart sank as memories of that horrible place flitted through my head. I'd been there for several hours to speak to my father and that was enough for a lifetime. But I didn't understand. Why would the Assembly take them to the Dredge of all places?
"Ten years. I spent ten years in that fucking pit.
I grew up in that darkness. They kept us in the lowest levels, down where the hull plating was so thin you could hear the void on the other side.
They wanted to see what would happen to Nytherian soul magic when exposed to the Deep Gallery for long enough.
We were an experiment. They collared us with dampening iron to suppress our magic and fed us tonics that kept us docile.
And when the tonics didn't work, they used their air batons.
They beat the defiance out of us until we were just meat waiting to expire. "
I covered my mouth with my hand, nausea rolling in my stomach.
"The whispers started after the first year.
The echoes outside the walls whispered to us.
Promised us freedom. Promised us revenge.
Most of the others went mad. My mother...
" His throat worked as he swallowed. "She lasted three years.
I watched the strongest woman I ever knew turn into a hollow shell who didn't recognize her own son.
And when she finally died, the guards just tossed her body into the chute like she was garbage and not a queen or even a person. "
Tears blurred my vision. "Cypher, I... I didn't know."
"I didn't want you to know. I didn't want anyone to know.
" He looked down at his hands, turning them over.
"Ten years into our imprisonment, the elders who were left organized a riot with the help of a handful of Assembly guards who were sympathetic to our cause.
They organized an escape route, rejected food and water for days and gathered what little soul magic they had left.
They pushed through the pain of the dampeners, and detonated themselves against the outer hull. They blew a hole in the Dredge."
"Only a couple dozen of us made it out on skiffs that were waiting for us outside the blast zone.
I was the only one who didn't make it in time, and my skiff was destroyed.
I drifted in the Deep Gallery for a week before I was found, and all I could see when I closed my eyes were our elders, screaming as they expelled every morsel of power in their bodies just to give us a chance at freedom.
So don't tell me I'm obsessed. Don't tell me I should let it go.
I owe my people a home. I owe them a world where no one will ever put them in a cage again.
And if I had to trick you to get you here, if I had to become the monster the Assembly made me to get the Genesis Engine, then I will fucking do it.
I will live with your hatred if it means my people get to live too. "
I was speechless for a long moment, having expected literally anything but that.
I'd known that Nytherians were rare, that most of them were long dead or scattered across realms, but the idea that the Assembly had kept them locked away instead of granting them asylum…
I suppose I couldn't say I didn't believe it.
Not when my father rotted in the Dredge for helping people.
The Assembly had secrets, and it made me wonder what would happen if the public learned of them.
"The Genesis Engine," I said, my voice trembling. "How did you plan on accessing it before you knew what I was? What was your plan? Or did you even have a plan until you pulled me from the Gallery."
Cypher closed his eyes, and for a moment, taking a deep, shaky breath before he met my eyes again. "Because, Juno. I'm a rift."
I shook my head. "That's... you can't be. You said you needed me because—"
"I am a rift," he repeated, taking a single step towards me.
He raised his hand, and a tendril of darkness that looked like a slowly undulating smoke curled from his fingertips.
It was oily. Wrong. It moved with a jerky, spasmodic rhythm.
I took a small step back, eyes wide, heart pounding. This wasn't elemental magic at all.
"The Dredge didn't just break my mind. It broke my magic.
After so many years locked away in darkness with the echos calling to me, it corrupted.
I can feel the fabric of the First Dark, but if I try to channel it, if I try to shape it like you do, it rebels.
The last time I tried to connect to the First Dark, I killed three of my own crew.
The bridge wasn't stable enough, and by the time they went through it was too weak and they were gone. "
I sucked in a breath, my stomach sinking. He never mentioned losing his crew before. Never mentioned names and neither had the rest of the crew. How long ago?
He clenched his fist, extinguishing the shadows. "I can't use the Genesis Engine. It requires someone who can handle it without corruption. Someone whole. I am… not… whole. I haven't been whole since I was eight years old."