To save my planet, I will become even more inhuman than any nightfolk ever were.
Once upon a time,
the princess of shadow
became darkness itself.
CHAPTER
5
KORI
“Ready to—progress into—the Passage?” Aspect shrieks, as soon as I return toCharon.“The cake—gives strength. The cake—fuels—ADVENTURE!” Aspect waves their arms, violently enthused, before apparently recalling a contradictory memory from someone else. Their whole body freezes mid-flailing. “The Passage—dangerous—must exercise—precaution—”
I remember installing the memory in question. During a smuggling run,Charonflew above what I thought was a stranded Daylands traveler whose starship had malfunctioned. Instead, it was a recently deceased body.
Even through my anti-radiation gear, I felt waning warmth where blood had recently pulsed. It was an old man, pale, grizzled, with white-gray stubble scattered across a face that looked stern even in death. Quickly, and only with my hands, so as not to draw undue attention from sun serpents, I buried him in the sand, offered a moment of silence. But I also took his Morpheus sphere, where he’d deliberately stored his final memories.
I’d hoped to determine the man’s cause of death via his last recollections, but what I found was that he’d done the unthinkable, even toa memory smuggler. He’d deliberately fled the Daylands, fixated on a supposed better life in the Shadowlands, where dayfolk are forbidden to tread. Above all other rules, licensed members of the Morpheus Market never fraternize with the denizens of the Shadowlands. Children of the light do not deign to dip even a toe into the dark.
Honestly, though, there are moments when I’ve wondered what it would feel like to be cast into boundless blackness and left to define yourself—absent your heritage, your settlement, even your former name, if you so willed.
This man died in the Passage as an enemy of the state, a potential shatter point for a fragile peace that has remained for generations. My mother, by necessity, would have branded him a traitor and seen the body incinerated, tossed into a trash chute and served to the magma like so many half-eaten ration sandwiches. Better for him to have gone missing. Better for his family to mourn whatever idea of his passing gave them the most peace.
But I kept the Morpheus sphere, if only for the flicker of purest fear that the man felt in its final recording. Aspect had leapt from an impossible height the day before, nearly snapping both their legs like ancient driftwood. I needed to teach them some degree of hesitance.
Apparently, all I’d taught Aspect of humanity was anxiety. I suppose that makes two of us.
“Hey,” I say softly, the way Ednit speaks to me when I wake from frightening dreams on his examination table. I do a one-eighty with my spinning chair, before taking Aspect’s metal hands in my own. “When I found that man in the Passage, when I scavenged his last moments for building you up, I did it to teach you caution. Not to make you afraid. You have nothing to be afraid of, Aspect. Not when I’m with you.”
Aspect’s visual processors flicker now, accompanied by a low whirring—another memory slotting into place.
“Kori will be—with Aspect—forever, correct?”
My flesh will decay. Aspect’s mech body is quite literally fueled by Pagomènos’s radioactivity, built to withstand the Daylands’ savage heat waves and the inexorable passage of time alike. But I give their hand a squeeze. Their visual receptors hold my gaze without the slightest flicker. “Forever,” I say.
“Affirmative?”
“Affirmative.”
Briefly, I expect a human thank-you from my mechanical companion, but Aspect remains only a hodgepodge of pilfered human experiences. They straighten, whirring and beeping, and return to duty, at once a machine again. “Is Kori ready—to depart—into the Passage?”
I grin despite myself. Aspect isn’t wrong about the dangers of the Passage, but I live for those moments between the two worlds of our divided planet. They’re my only chances to make memories of my own.
“Lock in,” I say, snapping my pilot’s harness into place over my head. “I have a few new flight maneuvers I’d like to try today.”
Another memory flickers across Aspect’s body, indicated by a disconcerting collision of creaks and whirs. “IfCharonspins—upside down—again, Kori—Aspect may—vomit—all over the shiny—cockpit.”
Mechs don’t vomit, and I installed that memory to excite Aspect about the thrills of aerial tricks, not the discomfort of stomach trouble. That’s one memory I should definitely uninstall. But I don’t tell Aspect that.
Instead, I imagine oil all overCharon’s viewport and laugh. “If you do, you’re cleaning it up.”
Then I reach forward to the main control panel, pulling the launch lever tight to my chest. In response,Charonseizes beneath me like a fossil drawing breath, twin engines bursting light against my mirrors, even brighter than the never-ending sun.
Aspect screams like a disconcerted microwave, frantically locking into the copilot restraints. A fraction of an instant later, the ship blasts into the stratosphere.
Storing my journey through the Passage as an autopilot path is risky, I know, and has the potential to expose my Morpheus Market membership to those other than Chloe and Ednit if ever my ship were investigated. That could create a whole convoluted mess for my mother to clean up, both burying knowledge of the Morpheus Market from the general public and concealing my own involvement in it. But no one looks twice at me. They look at my mother, resplendent in her governance gear, her outstretched arm like a promise to the dayfolk that we’ll continue to survive.
