Adria gives her head a stern shake. “It belongs to the planet, all of it, as surely as any of us do. It was never meant for a mortal touch,” she says, stepping forward to stand between me and the asteroid. She hesitates, breaths heavy and uneven, before adding, barely audible, “It made me what I am.”
Somehow, all I can think to reply is, “Then it can’t be all bad.”
Adria curls one hand into a rigid fist, wipes her eyes with the bone-white knuckles.
I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”
She turns her head to meet my gaze. Her own eyes are watering now—whether from the staggering strength of the Diakópsei’s light or from repressed emotion, it’s impossible to tell.
“Because you should be afraid, Kori.” Adria’s wings flare wide, blocking the brilliant light, casting me into cold, hard shadow. “One false step could open your armor and condemn you to death. Rebels scrape and claw at the gate. The court, the army, even my dearest friend, all question your presence here, and part of me fears they’re right. The Shadowlands aren’t meant for you.”
Squaring her shoulders, Adria looks away again. Stares into the light. “And they were never meant for the likes of me either. Nothing on this planet is.” She hangs her head. “Azarii’s rebels are radicals, terrorists, but of this, they too often speak the truth. I should notexist.This power was never meant for any of us. It can only inspire destruction.That,” she says, pointing forward with an extended claw, “is why I brought you here, Princess. Because if fear of both me and my feuding people still eludes you, perhaps fear of my maker would instill an inkling of self-preservation. Andyet—”
Swearing under her breath, she stomps one foot on the stone in a cloud of dust and gravel. “I bring you here to humble you. I bring you here to look into the face of what Elysium callsgodand know it could breed only the cruelest of disciples. And you reach out a hand that cannot even bear to be free of its glove—and try totouch it.” Her wingsidly flap, the shifting shadows rippling over me like so much dark water. Oxygen feels very far away. “In your final moments, before the radiation overtook and unraveled you, would you truly want so badly to become like me? Do you not see what I’ve become?”
I know she wants me to look at the massive muscles flexing beneath her strained, bruised, blue-white flesh. I know she wants me to look at the wings and the claws, the breadth and the might and the severity of her. But all I can see is that the fists at her sides are so clenched as to control a relentless trembling.
All I can see is the girl who, upon encountering her first vision of sunlight, collapsed to her knees outside my cell.
My voice emerges as an unexpected snarl through my teeth. “I’m not some foolishchild, Adria. I knew what I was doing by coming to the Shadowlands,” I say. “And I know what I’m doing by staying here.” I cross my arms. “You’re wrong that I’m not afraid. I’m more afraid than I think I’ve ever been in my whole life—but I’m more hopeful than I am frightened. And you’ve given me that hope.You.” I spit my words like daggers at her back.
Still she doesn’t look at me, only at the asteroid she believes changed her beyond redemption. This room feels too small, suffocating. My breaths drag up and down my throat.
“You ask what you’vebecome?” I half scream. “I’ve spent almost my whole life underground. Hiding from the light as surely as I was hiding from the shadows. Aspect may still be reaching for true self-awareness, truebeing, but they’re the only person I’ve ever really trusted. And you’ve helped me to help them to keep reaching out, reaching further. Closer. When you could’ve slaughtered both of us. When we could already be in the process of being truly, utterly forgotten.”
I step forward and lay an open hand on the back of one velvety wing, fingers curling to grip the membrane, and it stills at my touch, the anxious flapping dulled to the barest of movements, undone. All at once my anger burns out of me. I lean forward, eyes driftingshut against the vicious azure light, and rest my forehead against her spine.
“So I would say you’ve become something of a friend, Adria,” I murmur into her robes. “And I don’t have many of those.”
Adria simply shakes her head. Silence stretches, interminable, between us.
At long last, she says, with hard finality, “We should go.”
Turning to face me again, she seizes me by the arm with shocking force, pulling me after her and eventually onto her back again as we take flight out of the underground.
Another message breaks the tense, shimmering silence between us as we fly back.
FROM THAANE: You didn’t dream that earthquake along the fortress’s front wall. A particularly volatile rebel practically tore the ground’s maw open to swallow our defense forces. He’s dead now, but losses were sustained.
The rebellion takes more from Adria every moment. When we first met, she told me her parents fell in the fighting. Somewhere on Pagomènos, she presumably visits their graves. But the whole flight back, I can’t shake the feeling that, even more so than those familial skeletons, I’ve met the being that birthed and molded and made her—a creature without words or face or flesh, like an eldritch deity of Pagomènos and its people, staring, bodiless, right back into my unblinking eyes.
Time passes, inexorable.
Sentience seemingly continues to evade Aspect. But joy has indeed found them—unreasonable, unexplainable in a place like this—like a shard of fallen starlight, alighting in their open metallic hand. Theycheer like a fitness coach during my training sessions with General Isek, throwing triumphant fists in the air as I complete even more exercise rotations without collapsing.
They gambol about with Adria’s three-headed dog, Russ, even riding on its back—two of the heads sporting toothy grins, the third taking half-angry, half-playful snaps at the unexpected rider. Sometimes, instead of recharging in the standard upright position, I find Aspect’s powered-down body curled into the sleeping canine’s side.
It’s far from the awakening I want. Nevertheless, I pore through the archives whenever possible, trying and failing to find what will actually elevate Aspect to personhood. But it’s yet another glimmer of hope, and that isn’t nothing.
Several sleep cycles, all haunted by fractured dreams of needles and my whispered name, pass before I see Adria again. I can only guess where she goes. The new shadow queen’s responsibilities are many: Meetings with Thaane and her other close advisors. Ordering soldiers to halt every fresh insurgent assault beyond the fortress.
Most curious among Adria’s constant barrage of messages are automated reminders for meetings with another prisoner: a young nightfolk named Neo, apparently. That’s all she’s been willing to tell me, and most of the other nightfolk hardly speak to me at all, only catching me at the corners of their eyes like an inconvenient ghost. Exceptions to this rule are few and distinct: General Isek, with his firm but loving criticism of my fitness. Thaane, bluntly reminding me to move wisely in this unfamiliar land.
Even more so than her political gatherings or even physical altercations, it’s the visits to Neo that leave their mark on Adria’s whole body. I can always recognize when she’s gone to see him without sleeping afterward—her wings like wilted flower petals, her visage set like ancient granite, her sharp teeth absently worrying at her lower lip, though it’s already crusted with dried blood.
While Aspect stays just outside my quarters to power down and recharge, I almost dare to ask Adria about it, on one of the rareoccasions when we’re in close enough proximity to communicate but also not making eye contact. Eye contact seems to have the unforeseen side effect of shutting down all language functions in my body.
I’ve told myself it’s anxiety, maybe even fear, but I know anxiety like an ever-present younger sibling, always tagging along. It’s a glacial creep of tension from the nape of my neck to the tips of my toes. That thing Adria’s eyes do is nothing like that. It’s hot and fast and clenches like a flaming fist around my heart if I don’t look away or deflect with sarcasm.
