Sixteen #2
Jellit smiled and looked to the horizon.
“It’s easy to forget. We wander around the world-palace and we start to think it’s a safe place.
But it is the heart of the Carryx empire.
Its defenses are ancient, layered and deep.
We’re ants tiptoeing through a battlefield where the weapons are so vast and incomprehensible, they’re impossible for us to even see. ”
“So, be careful?”
“I was literally made for this,” the thing in Jellit said. “Turn toward that large structure off to the right.”
Dafyd did as he was told. The landscape shifted under them.
The clouds beneath the transport were thinner here, and the surface to the planet—what he assumed was its surface—came more nearly into view.
A vast plain of lines and curves that might have been streets.
A scattering of lights whose significance he couldn’t guess.
Nothing looked like the free play of nature and geology.
The transport slid through the air more smoothly here.
It was almost possible to feel like they were standing still and the world was the thing moving.
The structure with the still-infant human moiety had vanished over the horizon. Jellit made a satisfied sound.
“What are they?” Dafyd asked.
“What are what?”
“The enemies. The ones who sent you. The ones on the other side of the war.”
“I don’t know,” Jellit said.
“Are they all like you?”
“Really, I don’t know. I didn’t have consciousness when I came. Everything I know from before that was automatic. Like instinct or unconscious expertise. You learned your colors or how to count but you don’t have the moment when your mother said three . It’s all just information before Ameer.”
“Who was Ameer?”
“Before she found me? She was a girl doing a two-day hike in the Kusine badlands. She thought she’d found a meteorite,” Jellit said, and then he shrugged.
“She sort of did. The only memory I have is from her perspective. I remember being her when she walked up to the site. The ground was burned from the landing, and there was a silver sphere about the size of two fists in the middle of it. That’s really the first thing I know about myself.
The first conscious awareness I ever had of myself came from being her. ”
“And then Else,” Dafyd said. He had the sense he should stop talking. The more they spoke, the more distracted it would be. The more upset he’d become. There was no reason to do this, but here he was, doing it.
“Yes. I remember her life too. The first day you joined the team? When you brought in the basket of pastries and the Jannan coffee? That was years before I arrived, but I remember it. She remembers it, and so I do too.”
“And Jellit. So you’ve lived their lives.”
“I didn’t, though. All I have are memories.
Jellit was there when he had his first kiss, and I can recall it with him, but that’s not the same thing, is it?
You can remember your first kiss, but it’s not the same as when it actually happened,” the spy said.
And then, a moment later, “My first kiss was you.”
Dafyd’s gut went tight, and he didn’t know if it was shame or disgust. Either way, the answering heat that he felt was anger. “Are there more? Did you kill anyone I don’t know about?”
The spy was quiet for long enough to make the silence awkward. The transport chimed once and shifted to the right without Dafyd telling it to. Some half-mind navigation control, he assumed.
When Jellit spoke, his voice was soft and filled with regret and also somehow feminine. “They are the only three that consolidated in me, but I am responsible for other deaths. It’s a war. I’m a soldier.”
“Or a weapon.”
“All soldiers are weapons,” the spy said. “Can we go lower?”
Dafyd told the transport to descend. The maze-work below them grew larger, the streets more distinct. There were shapes moving along them, oblong brown tabs that shifted from one track to the next. Dafyd didn’t know what they were for. There was so much he didn’t understand—
“I know this is hard for you.” When Dafyd looked over, the spy was looking at him.
Jellit’s pupils were as wide as someone in utter darkness despite the light around them, and his shoulders were as tight and drawn in as a man braced for a punch.
“Not just the war and the Carryx and all the horrific shit. Me. I’m hard for you too.
And I didn’t mean to be something that was bad. I’m sorry for that. I am.”
Dafyd felt the words in the small space just under his rib cage. They made it harder to breathe. “Who is?”
“All of us. Ameer. Jellit. Else. This wasn’t fair to you. None of it was. And I can’t fix that, but I can tell you that I know. That I see.”
“What about you? The real you. The weapon.”
Jellit’s smile was a surprise. “There is no real me. Not the way you mean. Everything’s just them. All I brought was constraints, tools, and necessity.”
“Let me talk to Else, then.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“I think you’re bullshitting me,” Dafyd snapped.
“Left.”
“You left what?”
“Left. Turn left,” Jellit said. His face had gone pale. The too-dark eyes were wide with something like excitement. “There’s something… Something happened. Over there. It’s…” Jellit held up his hand, and something odd was happening at his fingertips. “Wow,” he murmured, but not to Dafyd.
In the near distance, the weird streets broke around a low gray structure like a river parting for an immovable stone.
Dafyd tapped the transport lower. As they descended, the paths he had seen as roadways gained depth.
Less city streets than furrows in a vast, unending field.
The oblong things that followed along them were like hundred-legged arthropods, their backs segmented in armor, and each one had a Carryx with blue or gray armor leading it.
The aliens didn’t react to the transport floating over them, or if they did, Dafyd couldn’t tell.
The structure itself seemed smooth and almost featureless. Only, perhaps, the faintest etched lines covering the irregular surface like written script. The spy was breathing faster. Its hands were pressed against the glass of the canopy.
“Is that it?”
“Part of it. I think. The part that’s above ground. Get as close as we can. Can we land?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.”
Dafyd shifted the controls, and the transport responded sluggishly. A slow, pulsing vibration rang through the frame like a heartbeat, not getting faster but more violent.
“I don’t think it wants to.”
“Closer. As close as we can. Please.”
“I’ll try moving back,” Dafyd said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”
Jellit didn’t say anything. Dafyd took the silence as agreement.
Farther from the structure, the transport seemed to resist less, but it did resist like it and the planet surface repelled each other.
And then, without warning, the resistance gave way, and Dafyd set it down at the ridge between two of the great furrows.
When he opened the canopy, the air rushed in hot and thick and stinking of sulfur.
Breathing it felt like he was underwater.
Jellit didn’t hesitate, trotting out of the transport and onto the dark, hot ground. Dafyd followed, already sweating.
The structure seemed larger now that they were looking up at it, and something about it seemed to swim like it was at the center of fields of energy strong enough to warp the light.
One of the Carryx-led arthropods lumbered up over the rise behind them and sank back into the next valley.
It made a keening sound like something out of a nightmare.
Heat radiated up from the ground, and the sun had become a pale white dot in a hazy sky.
Twenty steps toward the structure, and he was drenched with sweat.
All the time he’d spent in the world-palace, he’d been in a habitat high above the clouds.
It occurred to him for the first time just how punishing and inhospitable the rest of the Carryx world might be.
Ahead of him, the spy seemed to be coming in and out of focus as if Dafyd’s eyes were growing tired, but when he came closer, he saw tiny filaments like hair-thin antennae had sprouted from Jellit’s skin.
The low, bone-shaking birdsong of a Carryx voice rose up from someplace behind them, and three more answered in strange harmony.
In a moment, Dafyd’s anger and horror sloughed away.
The strangeness and hostility of the palace made the spy seem like comfort and safety by comparison.
Ahead of them, the lines on the structure shifted, rewriting themselves in nauseating waves.
He put his hand on Jellit’s shoulder. It took two attempts before he could speak. The viscous air seemed to smother him.
“Is this it?”
Jellit nodded. His eyes were wide and full of wonder. “I can see it.”
“What?”
“Everything,” the thing in Jellit’s skin said. “I can see everything .”