We had already been beaten into silence, but at hís approach, a few of the bolder called out, raised their bound hands in entreaty. Someone cried: “I am innocent!”
Another: “I know things! I have things I can tell!”
The Shine does not invite its people to go quietly into darkness, for all that is where the vast majority of us go.
A few entreaties set off a great many more, since we were taught never to be outdone even in humiliation, and soon the whole pack of us were yapping and wheedling at hís feet, promising extraordinary lies, ridiculous impossibilities if hé would merely deign to gaze upon us with kindness – just kindness – just this once.
There is nothing Shinier than having power to change another’s world and choosing not to use it.
Hé assessed us as hé might have regarded the contours on a map of some distant land. I would like to say that I sat in bold defiance, an innocent man cruelly betrayed by the system. In truth, I tried to think of something I might do that would catch hís eye, something that would make me special, make me the one hé chose to save, but my mind was blank, everything I could say strikingly banal.
Perhaps it was this – my uncanny silence, my sealed lips – that caught hís attention. For a moment, as hé gestured hís guards to pull me up, haul me forward, I felt an impossible flutter of hope. Perhaps there was mercy, perhaps I had a chance, and I knew with absolute certainty that if they took this collar off from around my neck and told me to go free, I would not look back or think twice on my peers, kneeling in the rain.
When hé spoke, hé had the accent of Yu-mdo, or another world I had never visited, never even really thought about. I had always imagined that our leaders would sound exactly like me.
“What’s your name?” hé asked, voice soft enough to seem unthreatening, clear enough to cut through the cries of my tethered debtor-kin.
“Mawukana na-Vdnaze, sir.”
“I have a question. I want you to think carefully about your answer. What is the one thing the Venture could have done in Heom that would have prevented this? This violence, thisdisobedience. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear; I have people for that. Just tell me the first thing that comes into your head. Just the truth.”
The iris of hís golden eye dilated as hé examined me, and I imagined it seeing straight through skin and bone to my racing heart. I thought longer than hé had ordered, as is always my way, and when I realised hé was growing bored with my stupidity and indecision, I blurted: “If there had been hope, sir. If people had thought it would get better. If they had really believed.”
Later – after I was dead – I would look back on these words and judge them harshly. Not because they were wrong – not at all. They simply lacked Shine.
Hé understood.
Hé nodded.
Hís fingers brushed the silver badge of hís Venture, the marker of hís state, and I didn’t know if it was a comforting thing – a reassurance for himself, a habit that had been ingrained – or something else. I found the gesture fascinating, and then it passed.
“Thank you, Mawukana na-Vdnaze, for your candour.”
A flick of hís fingers; I was pulled back towards the line, back to the debtors, back to a life of indentured labour I knew not where, my life a column in an accounting book. I struggled, called out: “Sir, I was not a rebel!” and hís fingers twitched again, and hé looked at me. There was, I thought, almost kindness in hís mismatched eyes, a thing almost like regret. Then hé reached out, touched my face, my neck, feeling perhaps for the scars of my labours – found the twin cuts on my left ear – then ran hís fingers down to the back of my left hand, where a single electrical burn was etched into the skin. It was the scar I had been given on the day of my one and only minor promotion, and I had never earned any more.
“Tell me,” hé asked, studying the thin, neat line of ridged white. “Did you love someone?”
“?… What?”
“In the city. When it burned. Was there anyone there you loved? Someone you left behind?”
Only later did I understand hís question. For if I had loved someone who had been buried in the ruins of Glastya Row, surely that love would make me a creature of vengeance, a rebel regardless of what I had been before. And if not, then most likely I was also unloved, and my life would pass without significance.
Theodosius Rhode, Chief Operations Officer of Antekeda, the man who would one day lead the Executorium into its bloodiest, most savage of days, saw my bewilderment, smiled with only a little regret, let go of my hand, turned and walked away.
Later – much later – I learned that my mother had died in the bombings. My father vanished in a security sweep, his final fate unknown. But by then I had died a couple of times, and the news didn’t have as big an impact on me as I felt it should.
Chapter 7
Ispent my first ever arcspace jump huddled in a hold with five hundred people, pressed down by the collars about our necks, chained together at wrist and ankle.
Nearly every creature who goes to space has the same initial reaction. After the fear of launch, the terror of it, we look out into the dark and realise that we are tiny, insignificant, nothing. We behold the world from which we came and realise how sacred and precious it is. Many weep – such a delicate, wonderful thing, they say. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I did not have that experience. There were no windows, no sense of place. The ship’s shields kept the forces of acceleration to within mere headache-inducing parameters, gravity a sluggish heaviness rather than a stomach-turning loss or a bone-cracking force. There was no sense of time passing – merely the arrival of rations, the emptying of slop buckets, the locking once more of the hull door. It was only the sudden change in gravity, the dropping-off of weight on bone that alerted me to our shift from sub-light speeds to FTL arcspace insertion.
That, and the other thing. The nameless thing that everyone shudders at when they speak of the dark. The cobweb brushing across skin, a beetle crawling down the spine, a shadow in the corner of the eye. No one quite sees the same thing as another; noone ever agrees on the notes of the lullaby they thought they heard, a tune half crooned, heard through the humming wall.
Someone cries out, they can see their lover – there, there, look, she’s right there!
