the princess of sunlight tumbled into the dark,
and it swallowed her whole.
CHAPTER
9
KORI
Idon’t know how I walk, my good arm trying to hold the ruined one as still as possible. Every step is excruciating for me, and Aspect’s feet cough smoke like a robotic sneeze. Blessedly, we reach Alpha before long. Even in the Shadowlands, where the entire landscape is an inky assembly of bleak silhouettes, Alpha’s form is immediately noticeable from an impressive distance. They’re at least seven feet tall, outlined by shimmering, preternatural blue power. Alpha waits beneath what was likely a tree before the Cataclysm. It’s charred black now, empty branches reaching for me like a blackened skeleton’s outstretched hand. Unlike the dayfolk, Alpha doesn’t need to protect their body from the planet’s ever-present radiation infection. Nightfolk have become one with Pagomènos’s curse, born and bred by it, infused with its power.
I recognize their form from our previous communication, though it’s far more striking in person, in full color. Blue-white skin stretches across the thick muscles, small horns poking through cascading white hair that descends past the shoulders of six separate arms, two of whichthey walk upon like legs. Despite the wildness of their mutations, if I had to guess their age, it would be close to my own, perhaps a tiny bit older.
My voice is filtered, mechanical, through my protective mask, but remains evidently choked in pain. “Alpha.” I incline my head in greeting. I want to be formal, professional, but all I am is desperate and afraid. My whole body rattles like a malfunctioning machine, shock slowly overtaking me from my injury. “Please, my ship crash-landed. My arm …” I gesture to its horrible angle. “I have no way home, no way to call for help. If you could—”
“Did you bring the memory?” Alpha’s voice is smooth and syrupy, designed to put me at ease, which only sets me more on edge.
“Y-yes,” I stammer. “Yes, of course I did.”
“Then first, Monarch, our trade,” Alpha says, with a little nod. “Then I will see what I can do to help you.” Their single gray eye darts about warily, then settles on Aspect. “What in the Beyond is that?”
“My mech.”
“You said we were meeting alone.”
A chill darts down my spine. “A mech isn’t a person.” I want to cover Aspect’s auditory processors even as I say it. Maybe they aren’t a person in a traditional sense—at least, not yet. That may very well change after today, once I’ve expanded Aspect’s consciousness with their first nightfolk memory. “We—the dayfolk—use them for all kinds of tasks. But they aren’t recording. They aren’t transmitting. See for yourself.”
Alpha slowly blinks their singular, centered gray eye. They saunter over to Aspect, feeling around the mech’s angles and joints with all four free hands. Anyone being so close to Aspect makes me tense from neck to toes, but despite their powerful, faintly glowing frame, Alpha tests Aspect’s joints with poised curiosity, bending each of the fingers in wordless awe. When Alpha gets to Aspect’s neck—still twisted and stuck at that terrible sideways angle—it doesn’t budge at all. Aspect giggles, somehow finding morbid amusement in our compoundingperil, but I shoot them a glare that keeps them still. Eventually Alpha completes their assessment, steps away, and declares, “Fair enough.”
I smile in relief, even though Alpha can’t see it through my mask. “Your Morpheus sphere?”
“Yours first.”
With my good arm, I gingerly roll my sphere from my pocket into my gloved hand.
Alpha nods in acknowledgment. Then their tail whips abruptly around, and for an instant, I think I’m about to be attacked. My left hand instinctively wanders to the heatshot pistol at my hip, despite knowing it has no way to recharge in the frozen Shadowlands, meaning my ammo is strictly limited to stored charges. Thankfully, I don’t need it. Alpha’s tail ends, absurdly, in a seventh hand. Said hand is holding their Morpheus sphere.
A thought abruptly occurs to me: How did a nightfolk, absent an installed Morpheus chip, even transfer their memory into a sphere? They could have acquired the sphere from a rogue wanderer, like the dead man I found in the Passage, but without a Morpheus chip, implanting their own nightfolk memory should be impossible.
Then again, haven’t I already shed what I formerly thought possible like a childhood coat, reality grown far too broad to fit? I’m transforming a mining machine into a sentient friend. My fate is in the (seven) hands of a mutant. Does it matter how they installed a nightfolk memory into a Morpheus sphere, if it’s what finally raises Aspect to independent personhood?
I swallow my questions down alongside the roaring pain in my arm. We exchange spheres, dropping them into each other’s outstretched hands—not daring to touch, even through my protective gear.
“Temp access,” I say, as Alpha’s hand taps their new Morpheus sphere.
Normally, a person’s unique handprint is permanently linked to the Morpheus sphere, its only key. But I won’t officially transfer permissions until we’re both satisfied with the merchandise; this access willwork only once. Following my verbal directions, Alpha does the same for the sphere in my hand.
My new Morpheus sphere spins, like our planet once did, a little whirlwind in my palm. It glows faintly, beeps, and my eyes go wide and blank inside my helmet. Then, all at once, I’m gone.
My name is Lail, and I am full to bursting with hope.
This is the first time I’ve looked at myself in at least a dozen sleep cycles. I stare firmly at my reflection, and I’m not afraid of it. Not of my seven hands, my singular eye, my rows of muscled shoulders. None of it. My name is Lail, and I am nightfolk.
I may be a monster, but I will put an end to glorifying this twisted form we have embraced. And that is beautiful.Iam beautiful.
I clench one hand’s fingers tightly around the freezeshot sniper rifle at my back. It’s time to end the brief but all-too-lengthy reign of the rebel princess. Once we take the fortress, once we return the empire’s iron fist to the people, we can begin seriously considering how to contain the Diakópsei’s radiation. Under Azarii’s leadership, we can begin anew. Maybe, just maybe, we can slowly return to the proud human species we once were, more flesh than unnatural power, more skeleton than shuddering strength.
My name is Lail, and I feel hope. I believe things can get better.
