Prologue #5
Airik’s senses strained against the sharp smell of antiseptic and the beeping of machines.
His parents were two nearly unrecognizable heaps, their faces bloody. If not for his mother’s red shirt that she’d sewn herself, he wouldn’t have known it was her.
He rushed forward, pressing against the glass, banging on it to break through.
A thick band wrapped around his throat, pulling him back straight into Aelior’s outstretched arm. “You’ll die,” she hissed.
“The regeneration chambers—” he cried, turning to the pods at the edge of the room.
“The chambers can’t fix this. And even if it could save their bodies, kudra breaks minds.” Aelior’s tail loosened, allowing him a shuddering breath. “They wouldn’t be yours anymore.”
Of course not. Nothing good could have ever stayed his.
A green powder covered his mother’s hair, pulsing with a malignant yellowish glow.
Airik shot up, hearing a shuffling within the box, his heart soaring.
His father’s eyes were open, and though the shine was weak, they still glowed blue. Alive.
“Father?” Airik rushed back to the glass.
He heard Aelior behind him issuing commands. The room was cleared of healers and attendants.
Aelior returned, leaning against the glass. Black iridescent tears traced the scales of her cheeks, a jagged river of emotion that Airik found strange for someone who should have disappeared from their lives.
She said something to his father. Strange words in a language Airik didn’t know.
Airik’s father tried to nod. A braid of his blood-streaked hair slid over his face.
Aelior nodded to his father, then left, the door clicking shut behind her.
His father’s gaze flickered from Airik to his mother.
“Is he here?” his mother’s scratchy voice said.
Airik dashed to the foot of their bed, where he could see them both and hoped they could see him. “Yes—I’m here! Mother, look at me. I’m right here.”
His mother smiled, her teeth covered in blood. “My beautiful boy,” she croaked. Her eyes were open, but she looked at his father.
They fell into silence with no more movement but the erratic, weak rises and falls of their chests.
As if a hand had thrust into his own chest and broken through his ribs, Airik’s heart raged with a crushing cold that consumed him.
He circled them, dozens of times, searching for a flicker of something. His breath came ragged, and his skin was slick with sweat.
His father wore a black shirt—another of his mother’s creations. A handkerchief Airik had made as a child peeked out of his pocket. A thin green kudra spike—precise and centered—pierced through it into his heart.
His mother’s hand moved, her fingers flexing and pulling across the sheets, dragging its weight to his father’s chest that now remained completely still.
Airik’s heart was too large and too small at once. With profound embarrassment and desperation, he wished to lie between them, to join them where he knew they were going, beyond all the light he could see in this life.
His mother raised her forefinger and traced the crooked, uneven stitching of the handkerchief. “Perfect,” she said, inexplicably.
The light in his parents’ gazes dimmed—the blue-green hue of their shared eye shine faded into nothing, overshadowed by the darkness cast by machines that no longer detected any life.
He stayed with them—for a few moments or hours, he couldn’t tell—drifting in and out of consciousness, a depression of senses pushed to the edge of endurance to stay awake by his grief.
Then, finally, far too late, Airik said, “Goodbye.”
It had been reapers, civil enforcers told Airik.
Unbound insurgents who bartered weapons in the shadowed war markets off-world.
Morphed kudra was a coveted harvest. Airik’s parents’ killing had been an execution of a debladed morazir who’d once defended and slain reapers on sight.
Reapers were among the greatest threats to Veynari control, as kudra could kill and destabilize powered technology at once.
His mother, bound to his father, had been forced to share the same fate.
They gave him three days’ reprieve to mourn—progeny weren’t meant to care for their progenitors. But the Veynari, understanding his unique—“unfortunate” was the exact word General Vorn had used—situation, allowed him time.
Airik slept. He slept so long that he woke up and wondered who he was.
Sometimes he stared at the ceiling, memorizing each crack and imperfection.
In those moments, a slow poison seeped into his mind, whispering that it was best never to be caught in love the way his mother and father had foolishly done.
If his father had remained untouched, untaken, unconquered, then he’d still be alive, and Airik would never have existed to feel this endless sorrow swallowing him alive.
There was a reason the word love had been lost to progress. It had killed them and damned him. In his loneliness, he could only ever see them as two giant suns, burning each other up, trapping him utterly in their gravity until he, too, was destroyed.