“Things could get much, much worse for you, heiress, without courting death.”
“By the Dreamgiver, at least use my name when you’re threatening me.” I shake my head, a tired laugh threatening to escape.
“Dreamgiver?” The pupils swell, nearly eclipsing the purple irises. Among the nightfolk, I suppose that’s what passes for an expression of wonder.
“You really know nothing of the dayfolk,” I say without thinking, heedless of the deadly claws and falsified flame.
“I don’t need to know.”
“And yet you wonder.”
Adria says nothing. The silence is answer enough.
“My people all have the same biotech installed at birth. The Morpheus chips. Our last chance at not forgetting as quickly as we know, without mutating like you.” I rise to my feet, boldness coursing through me. “But their history, their origins—you know as well as I, it was already forgotten.”
Adria doesn’t move to interrupt, so I keep talking.
“The dayfolk have developed two sects around Morpheus tech. The Dreamgiver Devotees believe it was a gift from a benevolent god. But the Old Seekers, they think if there is a god, then god abandoned us. Or else the Cataclysm was a cosmic judgment. Now all we have is science. Tech.”
“And what do you believe, heiress?” Adria says, her voice balanced on a knife’s edge.
“I’d like to think there’s a god looking out for us,” I say, staring at the floor. “But this, the Cataclysm, the wrecked planet, the death … this can’t be what that god had in mind.” I force myself to meet my captor’s eyes again. If she’s kept me alive for this long, maybe it’s worth trying to pry beneath the surface. “What do you believe?”
Adria is silent for a long moment. “There are no gods but what we become.”
“Is that how you picture yourself?” I pry. “A god?”
Adria laughs, mirthless. “If I’m the planet’s last god, then we’re all well and truly damned.”
Silence stretches between us. The blue-black fire ripples against the freezeshot wall, shimmers against the uneven stone floor. I find my lungs again. “Why did you come here, Adria?”
She takes a step toward me, nearly colliding with the freezing wall. I flinch, despite knowing she can’t come any closer. Then she kneels, one knee bent, her height suddenly akin to my own. One hand, still channeling flames, stays steady. The other she extends, palm open, cradling both my Morpheus sphere and Alpha’s between her claws.
“Which one holds the sun?”
“The one with the scuffed side.” I point to the first of the two. “Alpha—the one I traded with—she dropped it when you opened up the ground.” I squint in the firelight. “Don’t you want to know what’s in the other one?”
Ferocity gathers in Adria’s voice. “I want to see the sun,” she insists.
Her speech is nearly a roar, her wings and horns a jagged, threatening sprawl, but her eyes are soft. Pleading. A girl born to a sunless world. A girl resigned to dying in it.
“You must understand,” she says, her face not far from mine, the wall between us an icy flicker, “the Shadowlands are troubled. I cannot simply set you free. I have nothing to offer you that I haven’t already. You are one piece on a far larger board, but you hold the sun in your hands, and it’s beyond me.” She blinks hard, eyes squeezing tight, then blooming violet again. “Kori, Kori, I cannot make you any promises, but if you meant what you offered—”
I offered the sun to shame her, to pierce the monster’s armor with reckless grace. I intended to eventually negotiate for something: Aspect back in one piece, or at least their memory core; a protected place to remove my gear and wash my face without succumbing to the radiation. But her eyes are galaxies deep, the barest glimmer of tears creeping through, and they ache, and I ache, and I can’t look away.
I don’t let her finish the sentence. “Give me the sphere.”
She stands. Presses a button mounted on the wall, beyond my line of sight. The freezeshot barrier collapses from the top down. I could run with all my strength. I could leap out the nearest exit and hopeCharonhas at least a few salvageable parts. I could go back to Lail’s rebels and hope they’re still willing to fly me home.
I want to see the sun.
Adria places the Morpheus sphere on the ground, nudging it toward me with one foot. I take it in my hands, opening my palm against its sensor. “Access.”
“GRANTED,” the sphere intones, and it blinks green.
“Test,” I say. The green light turns steady. I extend the sphere to my captor with a trembling hand. “Go on.”
Adria stares as though the technology might abruptly unveil teeth. “What do I …?”
