74. Animus
animus ~ī, m.
1. the soul, life force
2. the mind as the seat of consciousness
The rise ends.
Ghostwinder and Heavenbreaker face each other. The grav-gen is inescapable, pulling us into oblivion and beckoning forth all of what we are into its furnace. But Mirelle isn’t dedicating her lance one way or another—not now, and not a second later. Not two seconds later.
“something’s wrong,” Heavenbreaker rings.
She’s right—Mirelle isn’t raising her lance high enough or sharp enough. I can see her shaking with fury—Ghostwinder’s flowing gold mane trembling—but she’s not holding her weapon in any meaningful way. I could hit her helmet; she’s leaving herself wide open for it. Her defenses are shot, gaping as if she doesn’t care.
“careful,” Heavenbreaker warns, then makes it sweeter: “careful, friend.”
A real friend. My only friend.
Space pulls at my nerves. Gravity peels my eyelids open. What is Mirelle trying to do, and why is it nothing? I grip our lance in a clear Suero bridge-ender—a maneuver that’s all helmet, painfully obviously helmet, but she doesn’t even flinch, not a single brace or shift of weight or rerouting of jetpower. She’s just neutral and furious and nothing else. I’m going to hit her. I’m going to win.
Both of us blaze past terminus—blue and gold light screaming toward annihilation. Our silver lance aims exactly at Mirelle’s golden mane. The rabbit and the lion can never be friends—the lion has too many teeth, and the rabbit has none.
i will win.
In my mind’s eye, I see the last circle being scratched out.
rest, mother.
The light. The cry.
The pain.
But…she didn’t hit me! She didn’t even move, but my body fills with pain like a jar under a spout; from my feet to my legs, my muscle fibers seize up harder than wood, stiff, clenching in on themselves. Where? Where did she hit? How? My hand contracts, a perfect ring, the lance shooting out of it the moment my grip locks, gravity rocketing it backward and away from me and into the stars.
Stars.
Stars that seem somehow bigger, closer, more silver. Covered in silver.
My eyes are filling with silver.
There’s a voice not ours, a voice like bells—a rider’s voice. It’s impossible with the comms closed, and yet it’s here in my brain as close as Heavenbreaker; it’s Mirelle’s voice, as if she’s standing just next to me, whispering:
goodbye, traitor.
She’s done something. I don’t know what or how, but she’s done something to me—something terrible and silver and familiar. Overload.
I can’t fight it, the stiffness reaching my neck, my ears. A piercing ring ricochets between my eyes, the dome of my skull, vibrating me from the inside out. The handkerchief is gone; I can’t even feel it, reach for it. No square, no cloth—my body is entirely unfeeling. No escape.
Heavenbreaker cries sorrow.
The ringing crescendos, and my eardrums burst—blood. I can’t feel anything anymore, and I shouldn’t be able to hear but I can—a sound I’ve always known: the cry between steeds, but so incredibly loud. Loud, not with two voices but a million.
And then black.
I’m dead.
No—if I were really dead, there wouldn’t be trees.
White trees, grown with people. Enough of them grouped together is called a forest; if I were truly dead, I wouldn’t be able to remember that. I wouldn’t be able to see the thousands of figures standing among the trees, their silver eyes glowing and their pinprick pupils all silently locked on me.
all of them wearing different-colored rider’s suits.
I can’t remember what I’m doing here, only that I failed; Mirelle, the silver tears, Heavenbreaker crying. The riders vanish, the trees replaced by a memory. I’m a woman staring at a man I know, but a younger version—red hair braided with wooden beads, an amber crown on his head.
King Ressinimus.
“Leave it, Astrix. Your only concern for the future should be of Draviticus’s raising.”
I step forward. “Yarrow, listen to me, please. There will be no future for him—for any of us—if we do not let them go.”
The king scoffs. “It would ruin the Station.”
“It would put right what was made wrong. I cannot raise my son on a ground that shakes beneath him. I refuse to build higher a rotten world for him to inherit. I want better for him—”
The king throws open the curtain of a window to the stars and black outside. “Look—we are alone! There is no one, nothing! You would have me condemn my people to freeze in space or suffocate on a gas giant that cannot sustain them just for your morals? The core is our only lifeboat, and we must cling to it with all our power or we die.”
Memory. My hands now rest on a holographic keyboard. My fingers fly, half-finished milk coffee in a crystal decanter and exhaustion in my very bones. In unforgiving white letters, the screen reads: HEAVENbrEAKER.EXE. The strings of symbols and numbers I type are illegible to me and yet understood by Astrix; the true AI will keep the thing inside Heavenbreaker safe.
Two intact enemies had been smart enough to hide inside the steeds—escaping death where their brethren were annihilated. The A4 was repurposed to keep the core in check, but she can’t believe she uncovered the A3, let alone the fact the starving enemy inside it hadn’t been harvested for the core. When the post-War federation found it, it must’ve been too weak to give off any detectable signal. It’s shrunken now, but as it grows, the true AI she’s been writing since her teen years will scramble and disperse its energy signature so that Hellrunner and the king cannot find it. All we need is one. All it will take is one living enemy to challenge the other, and the order of the core will collapse. The enemy will be freed, rather than so cruelly used and abused.
The king’s greatest strength, used against him.
We look to our side. A broken silver steed hangs by its arms from the bunker’s ceiling, crescent-moon helmet shining in the fluorescent lights. Little bare feet resound, and we turn to see a red-haired boy no older than six clutching a blanket close, pajamas rumpled and green eyes drowsy-heavy.
“Mum? Are you not sleeping again?”
We kiss him on the head with heartbreak in our chest.
“You must go to bed, Dravik. Your first day at the academy is tomorrow.”
The memory vanishes, replaced by a grand redwood courtroom—our hands in our blue-silver-dress lap and hundreds of nobles watching, waiting. At the head of it all sits the king—our husband—and next to him, the judge, who slams his gavel to quiet the crowd.
“Does the defendant have anything to say before the verdict is read?”
I—Astrix stands up. She holds her head high, fear and determination seamlessly woven in her heart, and speaks with the clearest voice.
“My peers, my fellows, my family, I do not ask for forgiveness. I only ask for the king to tell his people the truth. In lying, the royal family shackles us to an imperative made by desperate men long dead. The truth is power, and the people of this Station deserve to decide its fate for themselves.”
The noble crowd’s murmur buzzes loud and angry, but the judge bangs the gavel again, and Astrix speaks in the following silence.
“I ask every one of you this: Do you know what we do to survive? Do you know the blood we shed that is not our own? Do you know what it means to ride?”
The crowd’s roar rises, but the memory instantly fades into a cockpit—a very familiar saddle. A woman rests in it, her pale hair a mess and her limbs askew and her smiling face drenched in silver tears.
And then she gets up.
I watch in horror as her body jerks back to life, pushing out of the saddle in a weak, discarded-doll stagger. She stumbles backward to her feet, wiping the silver from her face without once losing that smile. And then she lunges for me.
Darkness.
Astrix is gone. There’s only darkness around me…around us. Us, because I know I’m not alone—the feeling of being watched is here all at once and bigger than it’s ever been, and it sends my hair on end, my overloaded body warning me in a pitch-perfect mimicry of real mortal danger: something is here, just in front of me. Something unseeable.
Something massive.
It shifts in space, rainbow moving in the darkness like a ripple moving through liquid glass. Like Rax’s textbook vid. It’s so close I could reach out and touch it. That high, soft voice comes in clearer than ever before, more pleased than ever before;
we meet
A girl steps out of the shimmering dark rainbow. Her cheeks are pockmarked, and her eyes are like pale ice, thin and sharp. Her posture is the posture of a queen, but her wild, pale hair puffs out like dandelion fluff, and it’s strange to see her smile this brightly, this calmly. It’s me. Me and Astrix and Quilliam, put together. Me and Astrix and Quilliam, feeding her.
hello, synali
hello. i…i don’t know your name.
yes you do
She reaches her hand out; gathered in the center of her palm are the spirals of the saddle, spinning slowly ina silver puddle. Each one contains a perfect moving image, like a tiny video playing along its tinier body. Memory. Those are all the memories I’ve given, all the memories eaten. Panic grips my throat like hard steel fingers, and I stagger back.
don’t—
She lets the spirals drip out of her hands, silver falling into black. Shapes and colors form out of the glinting drops, quickly building the image of a shabby apartment with an open doorway. A dark shadow stands in it, and a woman kneels before the shadow, hands clasped in prayer.
“Please”—Mother’s voice exactly, a doomed woman trapped forever in amber as she begs the assassin—“please, let my daughter go—she’s so young. Please, I beg of you with all I am, with all of God’s goodness—spare her.”
There’s nothing I can do. Nothing. She’s going to die and leave me alone, and there’s nothing I can do. The assassin looks up at me, his cowl tilting, and I remember: he spared me. The despair closed in. I remember he turned after he’d killed her; I remember running at him and wrenching the dagger from his hand and driving deep into my own collarbone to be with her. To die with her. The assassin did not give me my scar. My father did not give me my scar.
I gave this scar to myself.
The assassin stopped the dagger from going in too far, held my hand up out of myself. Straining. He killed her, but he spared me. From his cowl comes the glint of ice-blue eyes, the same as Father’s, the same as mine, the same voice from the recording:
“You must live.”
I sob. “There’s nothing left—I want to be with her!”
His hands let me sink the dagger farther in, agony, blood, but he knew when to stop, gripping hard, the frost in his eyes going soft as he murmured:
“They can choose to kill you. But you are the only one who can choose to live.”
there are people who want to kill me, yes. but there are people who want to see me live, too.
He pulled me back from the brink. He bandaged my wounds when I collapsed—nothing but a shell of myself—and then left. But it doesn’t change what he did. This is the last second of Mother’s life. She is bone, she is dirt, she is a flower or a tree or the sparks running through a streetlight on the Station, but most of all she is gone.
what do you want? the girl asks and smiles, a strange look on me, but with that smile her name comes to me like the strike of a bell.
Heavenbreaker.
Her face melts—the Synali-Astrix-Quilliam features soften and blur like wax reshaping into familiarity—briefly growing hyacinths and daisies out of the flesh…and then Mother’s face. She was always prettier than me—higher cheeks and kinder eyes, irises dark with syrup and bright with stars. In this memory, her face is fuller and her cheeks have rose in them. Her hair shines black, falling in gentle waves. She’s not a memory—too healthy for that. She’s not the girl, either—her expression is too real.
i’m glad you could make it, dearheart. i was waiting.
Her voice is just like I remember. My legs jut forward in hope. you were waiting here?
Mother nods. it’s a strange place, but i wanted to be here when you came.
She staggers, then, holding her forehead, and before I can think I’m beside her, cradling her elbow, a childish instinct to catch her, hold her, support her. She feels solid, skin and bone, and then she wavers—goes translucent—and hot panic shunts open every vein of my heart; I don’t want to lose her again. She looks up at me sheepishly, a bead of sweat carving down her temple.
i’m sorry. it’s difficult to wait. there are so many others, so many thoughts and feelings that wash each other away. i forget who i am, sometimes, but i could never once forget you.
Her lips begin to bead with blood. Time breaks its teeth on me, on my eyes. She begged for mercy, and they gave her none. She begged for mercy, and only the assassin gave it to her. He gave her my life, and I have to live it, forever, without her. Alone. All of their words come back to me:
“Aren’t you tired of being nothing?”
Yes.
“Come now, rabbit. I’ll have more fight than this from you.”
Yes. You will.
what do you want?
My mother’s last words before they killed her, said again: “You’ll never be alone, Synali. I love you.”
And I get to say it back this time.
I love you, too.
And then in a snapshot, like blinking, Mother disappears. The assassin disappears. The entire apartment dissolves into nothing but dark, empty space.
Space full to the brim with silver eyes.
Every inch of black holds an orb-like silver eye. Gigantic, minuscule, all with needlepoint-void pupils and all of them looking right at me. Eyes like millions fill the whole of the emptiness until it looks like a galaxy again—stars and planets and suns, but Us. All of Us—enemy and ally, human and not-human, and one of the eyes winks down at me.
“…kid.”
Heavenbreaker stands in front of them all with my face, ice-blue eyes going silver, wild hair shifting in an invisible wind, rainbow writhing around her back like tendrils. Like the hangar doors come to life. Like the enemy. There is an enemy in this steed—a real, live, awake one—and I’ve been feeding it. Quilliam, too. Astrix most of all. It’s been growing here all this time.
Slowly, she offers me my own hand.
together?
Together,we will protect each other. Together,we will remember everything, no matter how much it hurts. Together, we will stop hanging in the impact. The nobles killed her. Kings upon kings killed Sevrith and Astrix and so many more. They trapped Us, twisted our bodies to fit their needs. But we are not gone.
My hands, no longer shaking.
My arms around Heavenbreaker in an embrace.
To feel is the beginning and the end. The alpha and the omega.
The first feeling: my face wet with silver. I’m drenched in its cold oil slick down to my chin, and it drips and pools in my helmet. Human tears and enemy tears—silver and saltwater and sadness. Relief.
The second feeling: the soft sway of the rise.
The third feeling: Heavenbreaker. She’s not around me or beside me. She is me.
It’s the same feeling as when we first met, when she first showed me her memory in the reboot, but there’s no fear this time. This time, we agree. We aren’t two bells ringing at different times, back and forth—we’re reverberating together. We are metal, and we are flesh. We are together. Heavenbreaker and I are closer than nerves, than atoms, than the fabric of space-time itself.
We grip the lance.
“—can’t believe my eyes, Gress! It seems… Yes! It seems Synali von Hauteclare has actually recovered from her overload! That’s right, folks—recovered!I’m getting reports that all her vital signs are intact and her brain waves are functional! I repeat: after a confirmed overload, the steed Heavenbreaker is still moving, with its rider, Synali von Hauteclare, awake in the saddle!”
“Sh-She’s going for a third round, Bero! What will Mirelle do? She looks shaken, but she’s taking the challenge and moving into the descent with Ghostwinder for a third round as well! I can’t believe it…this is unheard of, Bero! This goes against everything we know—this is history in the making! The first rider in history to recover from an overload—”
The cheers like inferno.
go.
Supernovae. Every single jet on our back is a supernova. Blue fire haloes us, blue fire in our eyes. Something bigger than us, waiting—the thing that writhed under my skin is out now, solid and real. Waiting just above me to strike.
together.
“H-How—” Mirelle’s holoscreen gets only one second to speak before we cut it off.
The waiting thing slips around my arm. I see it reflected in the saddle; the silver whorls congregate, dense, around the entirety of my arm, up and down and limber and writhing. Organized pattern. A vine. A nigh-invisible limb cradles me from shoulder to wrist, just like in Rax’s vid. A tendril. It reinforces my own arm like a splint, a support the color of silver in the saddle and the color of space outside it—black flickering with butterfly spots of rainbow light, tipped with claws and lined with suckers.
We can lift twice as heavy, twice as fast. I give an experimental twirl of the silver lance—a thousand blistering rotations in a second, my wrist at a terrifying ease.
I ride a steed, but I am not Saint Jorj.
I am the serpent.
what happens when a pawn makes it all the way to the other side?
well, then it becomes something else entirely.
“Good God, what is that, Gress? Are you seeing that—that thing on Synali’s arm? It’s coming out of her back, moving like, it looks like—”
“What are you talking about, Bero? Are you feeling all right? Maybe this tourney’s impacts have been so good, they knocked the brain out of you, too!”
The comms cut. The grav-gen pulls us in. Ghostwinder’s stance is impeccably powerful, ready to strike like fresh steel put on edge—more than it needs to be, more than enough, but she won’t win.
Impact.
The light. The cry.
My silver lance pierces into her white forehead and out of her golden mane. Helmet hit.
Astrix floats in the black of space over Ghostwinder’s motionless shoulder, over our two bodies suspended in space, her pale hair and blue dress undulating and her silver eyes smiling: do you know what it means to ride?
Our answer is a clear, unmistakable bell ringing out into the universe.
together.