A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “The Justified changed all that. So the very first thing I did—well, maybe not the very first, but the first . . . choice I made, on my own, for myself, unbound by the old strictures—was to reject the world I used to know, to cast it off, by doing something the elders in my old sect never would have abided. Something I never would have considered in my old life, because it never would have been possible. Whether I believed or not—in their rules, in their strictures—everyone around me did, so I’d always had to follow. It was . . . a simple thing, just a little act of rebellion, a rebellion against old men already dead and gone, but still . . .”

  “What was it?”

  “I dyed my hair red,” she said. “Chopped half of it off, and dyed the other half—and not just ginger, or auburn, or any natural human color, but I mean red, I mean bright, screaming crimson. Red like laser fire. It would have been enough to get me exiled in my old life, if not straight-up executed. Artificial changes to our appearances were completely forbidden.

  “I knew it wasn’t against the rules in the Justified, but you have to remember: to me, it was still something terrifying, something shocking. Mo just took one look at me when he saw it, then said: ‘Looking good, Red. Now come on; you took so damn long in there we’re gonna be last on the chow line.’ And that was it—that was all anybody ever said about it. But from then on, that was what he called me.”

  “Your great act of rebellion was to dye your hair?”

  She eyed my shorn scalp. “We can’t all massively change our appearance just because we’ve been setting our hair on fire, Esa. Plus, you look a good deal better with that cut than I ever did with mine chopped down—it really didn’t suit me. I only did it because I wasn’t supposed to, after all. I looked . . . I looked pretty terrible, truth be told.” She almost laughed at my expression, then cut it off before she could. “What? Come on, kid—I was young once too.”

  It was almost impossible for me to picture, but I tried to smile anyway. “How long did you keep it that way?”

  “I changed it every few weeks, just to . . . again, just because I could, I suppose. Ask Marus about it sometime—when he first met me, I had a purple mohawk. He says that’s still how he pictures me, when I’m not around to contradict the image.”

  “Is that why . . . the sect you used to belong to. Is that why you and Mo always disagreed? About his faith?”

  She nodded. “Faith—religious or otherwise—was used to justify so many of the sect wars. Faith in a species’ supremacy, or in a particular type of governance, or social system. Faith in . . . the history of the galaxy is full of people killing each other over the stupidest, most unimportant details of how or why they worship, what name they called god. I only knew belief as a way to justify extremism. That’s the world I was raised in, after all. So once I was free of that, I took a hard shift in my views, in the other direction. Over the years, especially after we did . . . what we did, Mo began to drift back to the faith of his childhood, toward the answers Islam promised him. I could never understand. I was . . . cruel.”

  “So he left, to look for God.”

  “At least partially because his partner didn’t have any interest in helping him in his search. I didn’t drive him away, Esa—I’ve never believed that—but I didn’t do anything to convince him to stay, either. In the decade after the pulse, we were all so . . . so lost. Mo stuck around for a while, I don’t remember exactly how long, but once I’d decided that I couldn’t run counterops anymore, that I was going to serve by tracking down the next generation instead . . . He made his peace with the idea of leaving, and then he just . . . he did that. A great many Justified—former Justified—did the same.

  “By the time you met any of us, we’d all figured out how to live with what we’d done, with what the pulse had done. But there are plenty who couldn’t. Mo’s response was actually one of the less-extreme decisions made in those years.”

  “Jane . . . he loved you. His leaving . . . it didn’t mean that he didn’t.”

  “I know that,” she said quietly. “I just wish that he’d known how much I loved him back.”

  “He knew.”

  “That’s kind of you to say.”

  “Jane?”

  “Yes, Esa?”

  “I love you.”

  Something like shock passed over her face, briefly, despite the fact that it wasn’t like it was the first time she’d heard me say it; ultimately, though, for all her claims of having abandoned who she was in her old life, I think there was still a part of Jane that would always belong to the ascetic, war-obsessed sect she had been born in, one I was learning, more and more, had given no priority to the bonds between people, preferring instead the theoretical bond between a person and their god. That part of Jane never expected anyone to love her, because she’d spent the first few decades of her life being told that no one should.

  “I love you too, Esa,” she said quietly.

  “And even if you decide to quit the Justified and go haring across the galaxy, looking for God or whatever else—I’ll still love you. But you already know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded, slowly. “I suppose I do.”

  “Then Mo knew you loved him. It’s that simple.”

  “I loved him, and he loved me, and I still got him killed.”

  “No.” Even I was surprised by the force with which the words escaped me. “The Cyn did that, Jane. The Cyn is who gets all the blame for that—all of it, a hundred and ten percent of it.” I’d meant it when I said the same thing to Sho; I meant it now. “And we’re going to go to where I was born, and we’re going to find out what the hell he wants with me, and if he survived all of that back there, if he’s still alive, we’re going to use the information we learn on Katya against him, somehow. Cure for the pulse or not—we’re going to make him pay. Because I love you, and you loved Mo, and I was starting to love Mo too, and if someone hurts the person we love, we hurt them right the fuck back. You taught that to me.”

  Jane nodded, softly. “All right. All right, Esa. You’re right.”

  “I usually am.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  CHAPTER 2

  We didn’t talk much over the next few days, just rested, and trained, and tried to prepare ourselves for whatever might come next, each in our own way.

  I spent some of that time continuing to hone my newfound ability to manipulate energy with my telekinesis; I was gaining more and more control, and spending less and less time setting my hair on fire, when a question occurred to me.

  “Schaz?” I asked, dropping myself into a seat at the kitchen table, exhausted by my latest round of juggling fireballs. Yes, I meant that literally.

  “Yes, Esa?” Schaz replied politely.

  “Did you ever finish your analysis on that mask I stole from the Cyn’s ship?”

  “I did; I didn’t learn much. Is there something in particular you wanted to know?”

  How to kill the son of a bitch, for good, but I doubted Schaz could tell me that. Instead, I laid out my thought process, just to see if the idea tracked once I said it out loud: “The Cyn can scorch flesh, melt metal. Its footprints leave decking blistered. But the armor it wears—it’s immune, somehow. If it wasn’t, it would just melt right off when the Cyn strapped it on.”

  “No different than how the skin of its ship is seemingly immune to laser fire and the blast of the bomb you set in its interior.”

  “Exactly. But how can something be . . . ‘immune’ to energy? If we were talking about matter, it would just be a question of tensile strength, of thickness and density—a bullet won’t penetrate something significantly stronger than the force generated by its velocity and weight. What’s the equivalent for being ‘immune’ to the Cyn?”

  “Our shielding absorbs the heat and energy of laser fire by vibrating at the same frequency as the incoming laser blasts; perhaps the Cyn’s armor does the same thing?”

  “Can something made of matter do that? Vibrate like that?
”

  “It’s certainly theoretically possible. The mask is still in my analysis lab; let me see what I can learn, and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Are you on to something?” Jane had been listening, to the back half of the exchange at least: she’d just entered the kitchen from the cockpit.

  I lifted my hand, shifted it back and forth. “If we can learn why the Cyn doesn’t damage its own armor, I figured maybe we can learn what will damage it. It couldn’t pass through the energy barrier Charon threw up in front of it on Valkyrie Rock, so it’s not able to simply ignore electricity or laser blasts, but we unloaded on it with Schaz’s turret, back on Kandriad—and again, with the satellite fire on Jalia Preserve.”

  “Which may have killed it.”

  “And may not have. And even if it did, we have no guarantee that was the only Cyn out there. If there was one, there might be more.” I could still hear the Cyn’s voice in my head—“a new . . . communion.” That was what he had said.

  “We don’t know that another would be hostile.”

  “And we don’t know that it wouldn’t, either. Are you, of all people, counseling me not to be prepared in case they are? ‘If something might try to kill you, you better be ready to kill it right back.’ You taught me that, like, super early on. I think it might have been just the fourth or fifth ‘rule number one’ that you taught me.”

  Jane nodded, taking a seat across from me. “So even if the laser grid on Jalia Preserve did kill it, you want to know why, when Schaz’s lasers didn’t.”

  “If it’s just a question of overwhelming it—if it has some natural defenses against energy, the same way our skin is a natural defense against minor levels of force—then okay, we can do that. But it came flying out of a nuclear blast, Jane. I think what’s more likely is that Cyn are entirely immune to certain types of energy, the same way humans can, say, be completely immersed in water with no ill effects, but you couldn’t say the same if we were completely immersed in hydrochloric acid.”

  “Really,” Schaz added, “it wouldn’t take a complete immersion in hydrochloric acid to ruin a human’s day. Just a minor immersion would do the trick.”

  “And that’s my point. If we’re ‘immune’ to water, but not acid: what’s the equivalent for a Cyn? Are they immune to certain levels of heat, and light, but not others? Are there certain vibrational frequencies that their natural . . . natural . . .”

  “Vibration,” Jane supplied.

  I frowned at her. “I know, but I already said ‘vibrational,’ and I didn’t want to repeat myself.”

  “Schaz has a thesaurus programmed in, if you’d like to ask her.”

  “Shut it. You know what I mean. X-rays can’t penetrate lead. If the Cyn’s armor is the equivalent of whatever sentient energy the Cyn is made of—the lead to their X-rays—maybe knowing what they can’t scorch through will give us a lead as to what can.”

  Jane narrowed her eyes at me over the table. “You don’t just want to know how to kill him,” she said. “You want to know how to hurt him.”

  “I mean . . . I want to know how to kill him, too. I figured that was implied.”

  “If you think this is a way to . . . force him to tell us how he consumes pulse energy . . . I think we both know that ship has likely sailed. Mo was right. We can’t take him alive. He’s too dangerous.”

  “It’s not about that, Jane. Not anymore. I just need to know how to make him hurt.”

  She was looking at me closely, her gaze impenetrable. “This is a dangerous path you’re walking, Esa.”

  “And having Mo die on us wasn’t? Going up against him blind the way we have been isn’t? If an army of those things shows up on Sanctum’s doorstep, like the Pax did, we need to know how to deal with that, Jane. Of all your ‘first rules,’ like eighty percent of them boil down to ‘be prepared.’ I’m not saying I want to torture the son of a bitch, I’m saying if we have to, I want to know how.”

  “If it comes to that—”

  “Don’t give me some speech about how ‘if it comes to that, you’ll take the lead,’ Jane. This is my choice, my cost, and if that’s what I have to pay, then I will pay it gladly.” I said the words with something almost like savagery behind them, and I think Jane, at least, believed me, but even as they escaped my mouth I heard a voice in my head, as clear as if he’d been sitting behind me: “You don’t mean that. You won’t torture a sentient being, not just to lessen your own grief, not even if you think it’s necessary to save someone else. You’re better than that. Mo wouldn’t want that. Not for you.”

  Shut up, Sho. I’m doing this to protect you.

  Shaking off the quiet voice of my conscience that apparently now sounded like the young Wulf pup we’d been tasked with protecting, I held up my hand in front of Jane, snapped my fingers. I’d taken to wearing a pair of metal rings on my thumb and forefinger that, when struck together, could generate a spark; now I willed that spark to be under my control, let it bloom and spread until I was holding a spike made of frozen lightning above my hand. There wasn’t much energy there—I could control the flow of energy now, to a certain extent, but I couldn’t generate it—but it still proved my point. “I’m the one that’s going to be able to match him, Jane. Not you. I’m the one that’s going to be able to hurt him.”

  Jane just stared at me for a moment, then shook her head. Asked softly: “Have you ever considered the notion that what the Cyn is doing—taking the gifted, starting from where you were born—that it’s all some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? Outside of some vague nonsense about a goddess and a destiny, we don’t know what it believes; the fact that a being made of energy wants to capture a pair of gifted children who can manipulate energy has the ring of correlation to it, at the very least. Maybe all of the missing children—the children he’s taken—maybe they were all similar, their gifts related to energy somehow.”

  “Or he’s after me—after us—because I represent a threat,” I posed an alternate option.

  “Also possible,” Jane agreed.

  “In that case, I’m not going to not learn about my powers just because he might want me to. ‘The more you hunt something, the more it learns to hunt you back.’ ”

  Jane frowned at me. “Who taught you that?”

  “Mo did,” I said quietly. “He said it when I asked him why he varied his hunting grounds every day. If this Cyn thinks I’m its prey, well then, maybe it’s time that fucker learned that prey can fight back too. Especially when cornered.”

  Jane sighed, shook her head. “You know I agree with you,” she said.

  “Then why the hell are we arguing?”

  “Because I shouldn’t agree with you. The Preacher—she thinks that—”

  “I know what she thinks,” I said levelly. “You two have voices that . . . carry, you know.” I left out the part where I’d had to actively work to overhear their private conversation.

  “I’m . . . sorry, Esa. You shouldn’t have had to—”

  “I know what Mo thought too. And you. You think you’re getting old, that you’re not just training me to be your partner, that you’re training me to replace you, to be better than you. But Jane, I don’t want to be better than you; I can’t imagine greater praise than being just like you.”

  Jane shook her head. “If you think that, then I really have kept you too sheltered from the things I’ve done.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve always done what you had to do. To survive, and to protect the Justified. That’s the math; nothing else matters.” The little voice in my head—the voice that sounded like Sho—could go shove it. What I might have wanted didn’t matter, not when set up against the cost of what would happen if I didn’t act.

  Again, Jane shook her head. “You can’t think about people—you can’t think about yourself—in terms of math, Esa. There’s a cost to our actions—a cost to ourselves—that can’t be . . . quantified, can’t be laid out in columns or in rows. Mo thought it was a kind of . . . of spiritual defici
t he racked up, serving the Justified; I just call it a conscience, or lack thereof. I won’t let you kill yours purely in the name of survival. If you go too far down that road, you’re no different than the Pax, no different than this Cyn. For all we know, all the wrong he’s done—that all balances, in his head. As he sees his ‘math.’ ”

  I stared at her for another beat, then had to look away. Maybe she was right; maybe there were still lines I wouldn’t cross. Maybe I was just pretending there weren’t because I was angry, and underneath all that, because I was scared. Terrified.

  But all the same, if I could learn how to hurt the Cyn, I would.

  “Anyway, don’t plan on retiring just yet,” I told her, shifting the conversation to a different note. “You’re still a pretty spritely hundred and eighty-three, after all; you’ve got plenty of good years ahead of you.”

  She almost laughed at that. “Goddammit, Esa, I’m not—wait.” She’d finally caught on. It had taken her long enough. “Every time you say that, you drop a year lower.”

  “Yep.”

  “Are you just dropping a year every single time you make that joke, in the hopes that eventually you’ll actually hit my correct age, and I’ll have to admit it?”

  “. . . Yep.”

  Something quirked at the edges of Jane’s lips; a smile. “Joke’s on you, then,” she said. “I don’t actually have any idea when I was born. Even I don’t know how old I am, Esa.”

  “Seriously? Bullshit. How can you not know that?”

  “The wars were different. The worlds were different. And it was a long time ago.”

  “. . . Your childhood kind of sucked, huh?”

  “That’s one way of putting it, yes.”

  CHAPTER 3

  In a way—a terribly ghoulish way—the pall Mo’s death cast over the interior of Scheherazade was almost useful to me. It meant I could focus on hating the Cyn for what he’d done, that I could focus on the notion that we were headed for our destination to learn why he had gone there, what he had learned that had set him on his path of bloodshed and misery.