“Be good.” Chloe presses a fleeting kiss to my forehead. My heart stumbles. I want so badly to feel something other than nagging resentment, but I feel more like a mech than a dutiful daughter. My heart of stone slows, wearily, against my ribs of steel. “Be safe.”
“I’m always safe.”
“And when you’re rested, Kori …” Her voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “There’s another package I need you to retrieve from the market. Sorry to send you back so soon, but I wasn’t aware of the second when I gave you the first assignment. Monarchical duties have been … hectic. I’ll send the details to your comms tablet. Whenever you’re ready.”
I nod, this time with real instead of feigned enthusiasm. Doing her dirty work is the same burden as always, but a formally sanctioned visit to the market means another opportunity to buy memories for Aspect. I remain ignorant of what exactly I’m looking for—something that will finally raise Aspect from a consumer of thoughts to a creator of their own—but I’m consumed with the countless possibilities, all the angles of human experience I have yet to offer them. I can hardly wait to get back to the market. And if I’m brave (or foolish) enough, I can also investigate what other memories Chloe wants me to retrieve, and why.
I follow Ednit to the hangar and dismiss him at the threshold. Then I run, full sprint, casting exhaustion aside like a too-heavy jacket, all the way toCharon’s boarding ramp. Whatever else happens here in the colony, far below Pagomènos’s surface, I still have the skies.
I still have a world’s worth of memories to explore.
CHAPTER
4
ADRIA
Overcharge. That’s what Father calls it after Isek’s body has gone cold, after the severed head rolls abandoned across the stones and comes to a lifeless, wide-eyed rest. Father carries the dead child with two of his four arms like a sack of supplies, like athingand not a vessel forbeing—shattered far too soon. Er uses his own telekinesis to levitate Father out of the Depths and back to the surface, while Mother and I use our wings. Mine feel impossibly heavy at my back, almost too much to move them at all.
The Elysian and my parents exchange reassurances that I hardly hear over my mounting headache, my heartbeat roaring through my entire skull. Only when Er is long gone, completely swallowed back into the Elysian labyrinth, does Father turn to me, his gaze wide with wonder where it should be deathly serious. “For so long, my child, we’ve approached the Diakópsei with open hands, waiting to receive. But we’ve grown stronger since the Cataclysm.” He seizes either side of my face with his free pair of hands, the ones that aren’t carrying the murdered child. Forces me to look at him, and I glare, unblinking,back. “Now we can take that power for ourselves, seize it in a closed fist. Become more.”
I don’t know how to tell him that I can’t imagine anything worse than being more of what he is, of what I’m expected—maybe biologically destined—to become. Forgetmore.I would settle forother, for being anything or anyone but the sort of leader who prods a child into the Depths, knowing full well that they’ll never see the surface again.
“That isn’t what you told the cultist,” I say, in a terribly steady voice that seems to come from someone else. “You said this was a mistake. That this would never be repeated.”
“A child could not be trusted with such power. Even a soldier’s son.”
“Why use a child at all?” My throat cracks, splintering the edges of my words. “You have how many loyal soldiers? You could’ve sent any one of them. Hell, even the boy’s father would’ve been a willing volunteer—”
“What if the experiment had failed?” Mother interrupts, brow furrowed gravely. “A grown soldier is not so easily replaceable.”
I turn away in a rush of wind and wings, my pulse pounding. “Do you think his father considered him replaceable?”
“His father knows his betters,” Father snarls at my back, “unlike certain children.” My stomach roils. “There will be a ceremony,” he goes on, “that both yourself and our most revered soldiers shall attend. And together, they will witness their lords’ ascension to a higher state.” I barely hear him through the pulse in my eardrums.
“We won’t be confined to the shadows anymore,” Mother breathes, voice rich with awe, devoid of regret. “With this sort of power at our command, perhaps also gifted to our most trusted warriors, we can seize the Daylands, too. At long last, after generations of lost history, we can take their archived memories for ourselves—and so honor where we came from, even as we grow far beyond those origins.”
I swallow a thousand curses, instead saying only, “Elysium will never allow it.”
“Elysium,” my father says, even as he slams Isek’s corpse to the ground with a horrible, wet, fleshy sound, “will have no choice in the matter.”
“You mean to go to war.”
“Not a war,” Mother says, arms and wings both folded, poised. “It will be apurge.The Elysians provide nothing to the Shadowlands. They cower below ground like accursed dayfolk, grovel before a power that would elevate us all if they only had the boldness to claim it. They will concede before our proper nightfolk army, or they will be consigned to the annals of history, where they belong.”
Father takes one knee to retrieve Isek’s body, now even more mangled just so he could make a point. I don’t know where they intend to dispose of it, but surely the boy’s family will never know what happened here. They’ll be fed a false story of some fashion, then made to march into the Depths and execute a merciless genocide, goaded by promises of the Diakópsei’s power—which was clearly never meant to directly touch mortal flesh.
How many will lose their minds upon overcharge? Will their fellow soldiers snap their necks, too, leaving only the most resilient to return to the surface and rule less evolved nightfolk with unholy strength? How many lives are my parents willing to trample underfoot to secure leadership beyond challenge, to prevent someone like Uncle Azarii from ever daring to raise claw or freezeshot rifle against our dynasty ever again?
Words claw their way from me without my consent. “And then what?”
“Then what?” From Mother, the echoed words are a laugh. “Anything we want, Adria. At long last, as it always ought to have been, the planet will truly belong to the strong—to the ones who fully embrace what the Diakópsei gifted.”
I tense against a full-body chill as the realization dawns. “You mean to invade the Daylands.”
Father nods as though I were merely commenting on the weather. “Yes.”
“With an overcharged army.”
