I can only imagine the conniption Chloe would have if she knew what I’d really been plotting in the Morpheus Market. Imbuing metalwith being … it’s unthinkable. I already feel like I’m reporting to a parole officer anytime my homework is late. If Chloe found out I’d been dropping pieces of personhood into glorified mining equipment? I might find myself tied to a rusty chair with nothing but an algebra notebook to keep me company until I died of sheer boredom.
I set the sea meat Morpheus sphere to test mode, accessible at anyone’s touch, and leave Aspect to access it repeatedly. Which I know is happening not only from the tiny flashing light on the sphere each time it’s activated, but from Aspect’s renewed shriek of delight at every go-around.
Exhausted from the entire gremlin-merchant ordeal in the alleyway, I setCharonto autopilot us back to the settlement. My eyes remain heavy, my wrist sore from Aspect’s perpetual nervous hold, my lungs uneasy from the smoke bomb. I could sleep on the trip instead of just waiting to return home. But my mind races even behind closed eyes, scattered thoughts darting through my consciousness. What did that mysterious merchant really want? Could they eventually provide me with a memory capable of awakening Aspect’s sentience? And what sort of memory did my mother send me to retrieve this time around, anyway?
I should’ve known that snooping on Chloe’s memory sphere would never be an isolated incident. Now my whole body craves knowledge, if only because it’s forbidden. Huffing out a breath, I seize Chloe’s new sphere from its pouch at my waist and press an open palm to its surface.
“Test,” I blurt before I can think better of it.
And I dive, the memory closing over and around me.
Nothing hurts.
Everythinghurts.
I curl one finger inward at a time, until my right hand (not my hand) is firmly balled into a trembling fist, attached to a trembling arm that feels like it belongs to someone else. I clench harder to still the shaking, and my nails bite into my palm. It bleeds; why does it bleed?
“Is it not brilliant?” the doctor says, from somewhere behind me, from another world entirely.
I uncurl the fist. I reach up and thread my fingers instead through perfectly woven braids, not a hair out of place, as gorgeous a crown as I’ve ever had. A crown from someone else’s kingdom. An obligation I am only now beginning to fully comprehend.
My queen chose me for this, the highest of honors. I should be proud beyond words. I should be leaping, dancing, alight with the fervor of youth, but I feel numb all over.
“Jelza?” the doctor says, and my name might as well be a foreign language.
I don’t look at him. Instead I cast my gaze down, at the handheld mirror on the rolling table. I lift it, and I look, and the reflection is me, and not me. Will I ever not lurch, as if sighting a poltergeist, when this woman blinks slowly back at me from beyond the glass? Will Dawn—
“I want to see my daughter.” My voice; not my voice.
“I’m afraid that is unadvisable, so soon.”
Again my hand becomes a fist. I press it against the wall—no, Ilaunchit like a killing blow, and the wall crumbles in on itself, the indentation of my knuckles pressed unflinchingly into the metal.
“Appropriate limitations, to prevent rapid wear and tear, take time to become active, I’m afraid,” the doctor says. “And the pain receptors—”
Pain. Oh, the pain. It seizes upon me all at once. I’m on one knee, clutching my hand, tears in my eyes. It isn’t broken; it should be.
If I’m unbreakable now, why do I feel so broken anyway?
“—take time to recognize those limitations,” the doctor finishes, matter-of-fact, like he’s talking about filing financials.
I clutch my gorgeously, hideously unbroken hand to my chest, over the place where my heart roars and roars its too-late warning. I stare, wordless, again at the mirror. Alert brown eyes, rimmed with thick lashes. My braids, my deep brown skin, the strong curves of my cheeks and jaw and lips.
I don’t know her.
Will my daughter know this face? Can I wipe her tears away with this hand? Dawn, Dawn, I named you for beginnings in a world long dead, for light breaking golden and unstoppable across a velvet black sky. Is this a beginning? Do I even want to see it through to the end? Do I have a choice?
Somehow, my voice still emerges clear as crystal. “What have I become?”
“Only what you volunteered to become, Jelza.”
“I want to see my daughter.” The room shimmers and blurs. Everything tastes like salt. I hurt and I hurt and it isn’t pain, and it’s never ever going to stop. Eternal midnight, thick as the Shadowlands could ever be, opens in my chest like a sinkhole pit, ready to swallow me alive, bones and all. “Please, please,” I’m pleading, tears streaking this other Jelza’s cheeks, her lips quivering, her composure unwoven entirely, “I want to see my daughter.”
I jerk back into myself so abruptly that my head smarts where it smacked the seat.Jelza.The same woman, again. And with Ednit. He knows more about this than he ever let on. I don’t understand anything about what I just saw. What sort of procedure did Jelza undergo? Some sort of experimental limb replacement? Had her arm been in an accident? Been suffering from a progressive disease? Prosthetics would hardly be new tech in the Daylands, but one so visually convincing at first glance would be a breakthrough, right down to still drawing blood at the prick of her nails. But then, why was she so distressed? Does the body reject this advanced prosthetic like a stranger’s mismatched organ?
And why remove the memory? Was this new limb tech so advanced, so wildly experimental, that even the recollection of it had to be hidden as scientific research toward perfecting it continued? Then perhaps Chloe lost track of it in a mishap, and it found its way to the open market, from which I needed to retrieve it. Or was Jelza’s haunting distress so intense that she removed this memory independently and sold it to get it as far away from herself as possible? Chloe has eyes everywhere; she could easily have found out about such a thing, ordering me to retrieve the memory. Regardless of how it ended up in the Morpheus Market, why was ending its circulation so critical? I don’t know what I expectedto unearth in Chloe’s Morpheus sphere, but it most definitely wasn’t this.
“This makes no damn sense,” I mutter.
