“No, Aspect finishes checking the helical engine.”
Aspect’s optical sensors gleam. “And Aspect—will watch—the cake.”
“Actually, I—I already ate it,” I stammer, grateful that Aspect probably can’t detect the shiver in my voice. I haven’t obtained any Morpheus spheres that introduce the concept of lying yet. Even memory smugglers are often loath to admit untruths in their pasts, via business transactions or otherwise. “It was delicious. Thank you, Aspect.”
“Kori is—welcome. Back soon?”
“Back soon,” I promise, flashing a quick smile at the mech before steeling myself, shoulders squared.
Once we get back to the settlement, it’s just one appointment with Ednit. One brief stretch of smiling at my mother, dutifully present, perfectly happy, as the Daylands heiress should be. I lift my jaw, tighten the brown braids at my back, poise the arch of my spine. I can do this.
Reaching down to my hip, I retrieve the latest Morpheus sphere, tracing its seamless edges with a fingertip. “What are you?” I mutter to myself, curiosity sparking.
I’m not supposed to view the memories that Chloe requests from the market. I’m the delivery service, not privy to such things. But whether it’s my apparently chronic lack of sleep or my fresh annoyance at another medical appointment, my wonder overwhelms my good sense. Looking left and right as though I might get caught, despite such a thing being impossible, I roll the Morpheus sphere in the palm of my hand.
“Test,” I whisper.
A red light shifts to green on the sphere’s surface.
“IDENTIFICATION,” the device chirps.
Since I was the smuggler assigned to retrieve it, it’s set up to permit access to my code name, triggered by my registered voice sample on the marketplace. “Monarch,” I say, as clearly and crisply as possible, though my voice shivers with anticipation.
“ACCESS GRANTED.”
The entire sphere exudes a faintly blue light. Eyes shut, I press an open palm to the surface, knowing what to expect, but the initial lurch of entering a stored memory never ceases to be jarring. And amazing. White light overtakes the darkness behind my eyelids as my eyes fly open of their own accord, wide and unseeing, doubtless more pupil than white.
I plummet like a wounded butterfly into someone else’s memory.
CHAPTER
2
ADRIA
The Shadowlands are ensconced in absolute, unrelenting night, pockmarked by winking stars to which we can no longer travel. In the center of my family’s fortress, on the highest of its towers, elevated like a fallen celestial body to light our world, a massive torch burns brilliant azure. Visible from any of the smaller surrounding structures, and reignited by the torchbearers every time its fuel dwindles, it is the only way we nightfolk deign to track time’s march. The only fixed, final indicator of when one ought to lie down and when one ought to rise.
It’s completely invisible from the Depths.
When the asteroid Diakópsei first collided with Pagomènos, it seemed like a thoughtless force of nature. But it was, in fact, a borderline sentient thing—a stone that exerted will, whose sediment shimmered with intent. The twisting, underground labyrinth whose entrance looms just ahead of me was built not by nightfolk hands, but by the explosion of energy from the impact site.
The Cataclysm site should’ve become a crater. Instead, by the sheer force of its far-flung, interstellar power, the Diakópsei fashioned itself a home. A cathedral, if you ask the Elysian cultists who live here.
The Elysium cult, dedicated gatekeepers of the Depths for generations now, are the only ones who are supposed to come down here—the only ones who abandoned a system of time tracking altogether, their labyrinthian abode perpetually lit by the pulsing indigo light of the asteroid itself. It’s the same blue as our blood, the same blue as the undercurrents of our people’s skin, the same blue as the Diakópsei’s unique gifts to its people. If I could see the sky as it once was, set afire by Pagomènos’s sun as the Daylands are, I imagine it would be this blue. This impossible, endless, unflinching blue.
Yet the color feels purer here, undiluted, when it emanates directly from the asteroid. The light is to my eyes what swallowing a spoonful of raw spice powder would be to my tongue. Even at the Depths’ entrance, still a while away from the Diakópsei itself, my vision stings and waters. My throat twists as if on a withheld cough.
The Diakópsei raised us nightfolk from our merely human origins and imbued us with alien magic.
Uplifted. Empowered. Transformed.
Monstrous, the dayfolk say, but their minds are rotted by the endless sun. Or so I’ve been told.
The subterranean Elysium cult worships the Diakópsei for obvious reasons. So why, at the threshold of beholding it firsthand for the first time, do I feel cold all over when I should be thrilled?
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Father says, laying one of his four clawed hands on my shoulder. “Soon, my child, with our own eyes, we will behold that which made us what we are.”
It doesn’t escape my notice that, per usual, he calls mechildand notdaughter.For all my parents’ attempts to evade any mention of the truth, it’s been glaringly obvious since my earliest memories: They wanted a son. But asked to choose between a childless future, absent ofheirs, and accepting the miracle (or perhaps cruel joke) that was their daughter’s birth, they chose the latter.
