“What have you done to me?” Isek howls, earsplitting, as the ground threatens to devour us all whole at his command.
Only now does Er, the Elysian, peel himself away from the entrance, sauntering toward us, his bootsteps heavy on the stone floor. “So we see, it is as the Elysian scholars always predicted,” he half snarls through his teeth. “The Diakópsei graced us with visitation, but its divinity is beyond us. It is to be beheld, not crudelyheld.Not violated with mortal flesh.” Telekinetically, he pulls his hood back, at last revealing his face. Yellowed, sulfuric eyes. Wrinkled black-blue flesh. Long, dutifully polished horns. He is an old man, set in his ways, those ways now as validated for him as ever by the horror that deviating from them has produced. He wheels upon my father. “You will fix this.” It’s neither a question nor a request.
The splintering ground worsens. I stagger as a new crack opens between my feet, nearly knocking me down to one knee. Isek keens and cries and howls. Understanding eludes me. Why go through all the trouble of convincing the cultists to run this experiment? Why sacrifice a child, of all people, to science? How will they possibly soothe his torture now?
He’s suffering, I try to say, but my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, no sound forming at all.
“You’ve done well, Isek.” Father smiles at the child, the way I’ve always wished he would smile at me. “You’ve honored your people, honored your father.”
I am the inheritor of the Shadowlands, a warrior in my own right, the only inhabitant of Pagomènos who could possibly hope to standagainst my father. But when I see that smile I’ve craved for years, that explosive joy spread across his face, I resent every bit of the longing in my body. Whatever I do, whoever I become, I hope to the Beyond that I never, ever make him proud.
I fear I’m making him proud now, my strength brought low in his wake, very nearly the deadly, deferent daughter he always wanted—my feet stuck to the rumbling floor, my jaw slack, my voice caged like a domesticated beast. I can’t find the will to move. I can hardly breathe.
Isek recovers himself for the briefest instant. The ground stops splitting, though it does not reform. The surrounding dome of the chamber rattles but doesn’t threaten to entirely collapse and bury us. Not yet, anyway.
Isek straightens, teeth gritted, shoulders drawn back, and pleads in the steadiest voice he can manage, “I want … to see … my mother.” Flames flicker in his newly blue eyes. “She … will be … so proud.”
“Indeed she will,” my father says.
Two of his four hands seize either side of Isek’s head. The child stares at him, irises blazing with indigo power but watery, shimmering, a baleful plea beyond language. Father doesn’t break their locked eyes, doesn’t so much as blink, as he twists, andtwists, like tearing a weed out at the root. The first twist isn’t enough. The sound, forever seared into my memory, is one of breaking, but not ending. A life dangling by a frayed thread, swinging loose from the tapestry, still fighting stubbornly against a merciful release.
“Finish it,” says the Elysian.
My mouth tastes like sick. Father adds his two other hands, all four on the child’s head now, and twists, twists,twists, until Isek’s skull snaps clean off the shoulders.
CHAPTER
3
KORI
Amirror’s surface, clear as crystal. I observe my own reflection: pitch-black hair in an unhindered cloud of curls, framing my deep-brown eyes and deeper brown skin, my teeth absently worrying at my lower lip. “I am Jelza.” My breath fogs the glass. I say it again, willing steel into my veins, calling courage into my knocking knees. “I was chosen for a reason. I was deemed worthy. I am Jelza, and I can do this.” I turn on my heel, away from the mirror. The monarch of the Daylands is waiting. I refuse to disappoint her.
I jerk, nearly losing my footing as I boomerang back into myself, but I’ve entered foreign memories enough times that I recover my balance. ThankfullyCharonhas been on autopilot during this entire memory dive. I’ve never seen that woman before, but clearly, she knows my mother. She was selected for an honorable role that elevated her own sense of self. But what sort of role? Why remove this memory of her initial hesitation? And why, after the removal, buy it back from the Morpheus Market?
The questions gnaw at me, but deep down, what settles in my stomach is disappointment. I was hoping for an entertaining dive, atleast, as a reward for daring to break the rules. This memory couldn’t possibly have been more innocuous. At least now, if I’m asked whether I interacted with the merchandise, it won’t be difficult to lie. This memory … it’s hardly worth remembering at all.
My tablet blinks and vibrates again. I curse under my breath. I don’t even want to look at the digitized hourglass and see how little sand remains in its upper half.
The dayfolk settlement’s surface entrance is coming into view—a single elevator, not unlike the Morpheus Market, but broader and more prominent, even from a distance. I switchCharonto a landing sequence, already feeling Aspect’s impending absence at my side.
“I’m coming, Mother.” I sigh, slipping the Morpheus sphere into my waist pocket.
Like an Earthside dog on a leash, at its master’s beck and call.Coming, Mother. Always. Wouldn’t dream of anything else.
Here’s hoping, sun serpent be damned, that I’m not too late.
The walk from the docking bay to my waiting mother is long, but I know every step by heart.
The Daylands colony is a complex network of underground tunnels and sub-settlements, but it’s also the only location most dayfolk see in their lifetimes, so we memorize the layout in early childhood. When the Diakópsei struck, the Cataclysm forever altering our planet, most aspects of Pagomènos were infected. Altered.
When the planet stopped spinning, radiation spread, and every surviving animal or human who was left unprotected mutated into something new, something strange and unfathomable.
Our surviving society retains only scribbled snippets of what our ancestors wrote—the ones who predated Morpheus tech’s invention—and lost an unknown breadth of broader knowledge that will never berecovered. The records we have are … sparse, but not without value. Enough to know that we came from Earth, powered by helical engines, and that we settled unpopulated Pagomènos as the first interstellar human colony. We also have simple knowledge of Earth’s inhabitants, both human and animal.
But communication with Earth was severed when the Cataclysm stalled the planet, destroyed the helical engines’ functionality beyond repair, and began the creeping process of irreversible mutation. Countless pieces of Earth-linked technology exploded when the asteroid hit, torn apart by the first wave of radiation even before it affected organic life. And when memory slipped away, so did knowledge of how to ever restore or rebuild the helical engines.
Earth is a thing of the past; we’re all purely Pagonians now.
