“Sydney?” he asked, patting my back. “What is that?”
“Gah,” I replied. “It’s terrible!”
I wiped my forearm across my mouth, smearing blue on my skin. It was like ink.
At that moment, Zara appeared from the crowd. I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed her.
“Now, imagine if that had been poison,” she said, her eyes sparkling like she could barely contain her laughter. “Today’s lesson: always check your food.”
I groaned. I’d just been assassinated for the third time in twenty-four hours. I picked up what was left of my sandwich and tried to chuck it at her, but Zara darted away from our table before I could take aim.
Looking at me—my blue mouth, my frustrated expression—my uncle was trying not to laugh now, too.
“I warned you not to pet the Vulpin,” he said.
23
My next few days were packed with the math and science classes required by the institute, plus my seminar on conversational Denzan so that I wouldn’t be so reliant on the translator wedged in my ear. Back on Earth, I’d rarely felt challenged in my sporadic high school appearances. The intense concepts I was getting on Denza were a totally different story—complex formulas that tied into fundamental principles of space travel. You know, basic shit. I went to bed with what felt like low-grade brain freeze every night and was too exhausted to even wake up for a Zara ambush.
So it was a relief when Rafe Butler’s The Etherazi Incursion class showed up on my schedule. Or Propaganda 101, as Darcy had called it.
The Chef’s lecture was held in one of the biggest rooms at the institute, and every seat was packed, not just with cadets but also with ordinary Denzans from off the street. The class was open to the public. For all the antihuman static I’d observed during my first few days, there were still plenty of Denzans who worshipped the First Twelve.
Rafe shed his pizza-maker persona for the occasion. Instead of a flour-covered apron, he wore a light blue suit, expertly tailored to emphasize his bowling ball shoulders. He sat on a stool at the front of the lecture hall, sipping from a silver flask and every so often blazing up a sweet-smelling hand-rolled cigarette.
Basically, he was the picture of an aging war hero. Equal parts polished and damaged.
“That day on Mossisle, it was me, Marie Reno, and Sal Rogers,” Rafe’s lecture went. “I remember the way the cleats of our Battle-Anchors crunched across the sand-glass . . . like each bit of debris was a memory . . . screaming at us. A little girl approached us—she couldn’t have been more than five or six. Told us . . . ‘I saw my father transformed . . . to bones. You’re stepping . . . on his bones.’”
The dramatic pauses. The distant looks. The gritty details that seemed so perfectly rehearsed. I wondered how many times Rafe had gone through this story. The class wasn’t The Etherazi Incursion so much as it was Rafe Remembers.
I understood Rafe’s angle—to remind the people of Denza that humans were their protectors. He just took to the whole thing with too much gusto. Chef, mayor, smuggler, war hero—Rafe Butler had too many identities to count. I’d had a lot of identities back on Earth, and I knew from experience, the more characters you played, the harder the truth was to find.
I’d wanted to learn more about the Etherazi. The gold one in particular. I wasn’t going to get that from this class, though. The Etherazi in Rafe’s stories weren’t there to be studied, they were there to be shot at.
Looking around, no one else in the classroom seemed even a little disillusioned. The Denzans hung on his every word.
“We were on the trail of the Emerald Stalker that day,” Rafe continued. “She had an affinity for the jungle. Where there’d once been a thriving village, the Emerald Stalker had upended reality . . . turned the entire island back into its primordial state. We all felt like there were a thousand eyes upon us. She haunted the treetops . . . I always call the sneaky ones ‘she,’ the more brutish ones ‘he’ . . . We don’t know that they have any gender, that’s just a random observation from an old warrior . . .”
That was also the closest thing I got to insight from Rafe’s yarn. I mean, look, it was interesting to hear a firsthand account of the war my grandfather had fought in—and the sci-fi lover in me was definitely a little roped in when Rafe started talking about blasting a diving Emerald Stalker with his suit’s laser array—but I hadn’t come to Denza to hear old war stories. I needed information, and so far, all of the electives I’d signed up for were withholding it. Hell, I’d probably learned more from Zara than both Rafe and Coreyunus put together.
I was sitting next to Batzian and Melian. As Rafe’s performance droned on, I found myself watching their reactions. Batzian was practically on the edge of his seat, his hands clasped between his knees, vibrating every time Rafe described some burst of violence. His sister, on the other hand, seemed a little more distracted, her eyes wandering the room like mine. She caught me looking and smiled.
I leaned behind her brother to whisper, “Are his classes always like this?”
Mel tilted her head and whispered back, “Like what?”
I struggled to put it into words. “Like . . . a one-man show?”
“Shh!” Batzian cut me off, his rebuke way louder than any of my whispering. Multiple heads turned in our direction, and I sank down in my seat, feeling like I’d gotten caught farting in church. Rafe’s eyes flicked up at me, and I thought I caught a glimmer of amusement there.
After class, I walked onto the concourse with the twins. Batzian was practically grinding his teeth the whole way, and his sister seemed a bit cowed by his judgmental silence. He stopped on the walkway and pulled at his ponytail, making sure his squirmy hair was cinched extra tight. He gave me a look like he wanted to say something, so I opened my hands.
“What’s up, man?” I said. “I can tell you’re pissed.”
“It’s disrespectful to interrupt Mr. Butler’s lecture,” he said. “The man is a hero.”
“I met Rafe the other day,” I said casually. Batzian widened his eyes slightly, jealous of my being on a first-name basis with one of his heroes. “He’s a chill dude. I don’t think he minded.”
“A chill dude,” Batzian repeated sourly.
“Yeah, he’s not like that grizzled war vet in there,” I continued. “He makes crappy pizza. You should go see him on Little Earth. I’m sure he’d hook you up with an autograph.”
Batzian tossed his head. “Absurd. I would never bother him.”
“We’ve never been to Little Earth,” Mel said, trying to change the subject. “Maybe we should go.”
Batzian didn’t take the hint, still staring at me. “You have a lot to learn here, Sydney.”
“Okay, man,” I said, whistling. “I just think some of his material was a little over-the-top.” I slipped into an imitation of Rafe’s gravelly voice. “The jungle was eerily quiet . . . like two ghosts . . . making love . . . in a graveyard.”
Mel had to stifle a giggle after a sharp look from Batzian.
“The man is allowed to be”—he slung air quotes at me—“‘over-the-top.’ He saved our entire planet. By the tides, I know you’ve only been here for a few days, but I would think as a half-Denzan and the descendent of one of the First Twelve, you could appreciate what Rafe Butler means to us.”
Son of a missing Denzan theoretician. Grandson of a dead war hero. Dirty looks for being too human. Guilt trips for not being Denzan enough. It seemed like everyone on this planet had thoughts on how I was supposed to act.
And I still didn’t have a clue.
I was taken aback by Batzian’s passion, though. Maybe I was being too cynical about Rafe. “Look, I didn’t mean anything by it—”
“It’s fine,” he concluded curtly. “I have to get to my next class.”
With one last icy look, Batzian briskly walked away.
“Sorry about him,” Mel said with a gentle smile. “My brother doesn’t have the most developed sense of humor.”
“Nah
, it’s my fault,” I replied. “I’m still new at all this interspecies diplomacy stuff. Just a dumb-ass Earther saying whatever comes to mind.”
“It’s not that,” Mel said, shaking her head. “Baztian actually loves humanity.”
“Seriously?”
Her friendly face turned sober as she explained. “The islands we’re from were absolutely decimated during the Etherazi invasion. Our ancestors were among the only survivors. When we were little, Batzian worshipped the First Twelve. You think Rafe’s stories are a little played out? My brother has probably heard them a hundred times already. He used to talk about how he wished he’d been born human so that . . .” She looked around, lowering her voice. “So that he could fight. An interest in physical violence is considered unnatural among our people.”
I nodded. I’d seen enough of Denza to know that most of the people here were pretty much pacifists. My mom had bitterly told me how the Denzans wouldn’t even fight for their own planet; they needed humans for that.
“We worked our butts off to get accepted here,” Mel continued. “Not a lot of people from our village ever leave. Batzian’s so uptight because he’s worried if he slips a little, they could send us right back. He was so eager to rub elbows with the next generation of heroes like you, but—”
Melian was interrupted by a shout from farther down the concourse. We both turned to see Hiram, leaping down from the landing above, and landing in the midst of a group of Denzan cadets studying on their tablets. He whooped, jostling them badly enough that one dropped her device. Without so much as a backward glance, Hiram flung himself over the landing to the next one below.
“Well,” Mel finished, a little sheepishly. “He’s been kind of disappointed in the humans he’s met so far.”
I cringed on humanity’s behalf. “I’ll try to set a better example for your brother,” I said. My tone was light, but I really meant it. I didn’t want anyone lumping me in with Hiram.
Melian touched my arm. “Oh, you’re doing fine,” she said. “He wouldn’t stop talking about how you tried to fight an Etherazi without a Battle-Anchor.”
I couldn’t imagine sullen Batzian in a state where he couldn’t shut up, and it made me a little uneasy to hear how my encounter with the Etherazi was getting interpreted, so I changed the subject.
“Can you point me in the direction of the library?” I asked. “I still have to plan for the class I’m teaching tomorrow.”
“The library . . . Oh, you mean the archive. It’s actually back in there.” She pointed toward the institute. “Take the elevator all the way down.”
The archive was a cavernous vault built deep into the mountain. Unlike the rest of the institute, where there was almost always a breathtaking view of either the ocean or of Primclef, the archive was completely shut in. The huge room was artificially cold to the point where my breath misted a bit as I stepped inside. It was like being in the center of a giant server; the walls were three stories in height, and all of them were covered in blinking data slots, a repository for all the information the Denzan people had collected over the years. They’d buried it all so deep to keep it safe, knowing no Etherazi could burrow through all the ultonate veins rippling through the rock.
A Denzan librarian greeted me at the front desk with a warm smile. “Good afternoon, Cadet. Is this your first time?”
I must have been gaping a bit at the towering data centers. If those were shelves—like they would’ve been at a traditional library on Earth—they could’ve contained every book ever written.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I need to pull some books for a class. Do you have Earth stuff?”
“Of course we do,” she said. She pulled open a drawer next to her desk and held out a wooly bundle. “Sweater? It can get a bit chilly.”
Back home, half the libraries I’d been to were getting shut down. Meanwhile, on Denza, the librarians gave out cardigans.
The librarian led me to a cubicle in the middle of the room—there were like a hundred workstations spread out across the tiled floor, most of them occupied by a combination of other cadets and older Denzans. A touch-screen terminal took up the entirety of the desk. The terminal connected wirelessly to the handheld tablet the institute had issued me, and the librarian explained that any data I wanted to copy from the archive could be downloaded directly to my machine.
Basically, I was now connected to the most powerful search engine in the universe.
And, with all that information at my fingertips, I completely blanked.
I wasn’t sure what to teach or where to begin.
I browsed the seemingly endless scroll of popular topics in the sidebar. There was everything from “Panalaxan Rebirth Dirges” to “Vulpin Grooming Demonstrations” to “Earth Comedy (French).”
Apparently, the Denzans had a real thing for mimes.
Eventually, I just typed “EARTH + SCIENCE FICTION” into the search bar and skimmed through thousands of names: Octavia Butler, Alfred Bester, Richard Morgan, Ray Bradbury. So many choices.
“Screw it,” I said. “I’ll take it all.”
I downloaded their entire catalogs straight to my tablet. Didn’t even need to pay a fee. Honestly, it felt a little like stealing. The books were all considered cultural artifacts by the Denzans, though. A whole planet of brazen internet pirates hiding behind the guise of anthropologists.
Once I’d downloaded pretty much every sci-fi book in existence, I lingered at the terminal. Rafe’s class might not have been the deep dive into the Etherazi that I’d been hoping for, but I had all of intergalactic history right here at my fingertips. I could do my own research.
I punched “ETHERAZI” into the search field.
A warning popped up. Proceed with caution. These results contain traumatic events.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled and swiped forward.
A stream of information filled the screen. There were news-vids from the Etherazi invasion, scientific research papers on everything from Etherazi physiology to psychology, detailed reports on battles and attacks, and even a bizarre Panalaxan opera dedicated to warding the creatures off. I was confronted with literally tens of thousands of pictures and articles and videos.
“Okay, let’s narrow it down,” I said.
Because I was really only interested in one Etherazi: my buddy Goldy. He knew so much about my future, I wanted to learn about his past.
ETHERAZI + GOLD.
A much narrower selection of items. At the top of the list was a video from the last days of the Etherazi invasion.
I hit play.
The footage was recorded from the deck of a Denzan interstellar vessel. The screen was filled by Denza’s largest and grayest moon, where it looked like some kind of light show was happening: flashes of gold mixing with deep purple.
“A bizarre scene played out today on the surface of Ebos,” said a Denzan newscaster, her professional voice edged with unease. “While our filtered vid-stream should mitigate the harrowing appearance of the Etherazi, for those who are highly susceptible to their dread visage, it’s recommended that you look away.”
The camera zoomed in on the lights. At first, the whole thing looked a bit like fireworks, purple and gold blossoms appearing against the darkness, motes breaking off and fading into the Vastness. The more I focused, though, the more I could see, albeit with a dull ache in my sinuses that increased the harder I stared.
Two Etherazi were intertwined above the moon, twisted around each other. A monstrous purple one and my buddy Goldy. Somehow, I knew it was him and not just some other Etherazi of the same shade. I recognized the way his energy moved—a very particular kind of chaos.
The purple one’s head took shape—serpentine and fanged—and tore a chunk out of Goldy. In response, energy spikes shot out of what I interpreted to be Goldy’s belly, burrowing deep into Purple’s body. There wasn’t any sound on the recording, but I got the sense that both Etherazi were shrieking.
“Scientists and theoreticians have be
en unable to explain this phenomenon,” the newscaster continued. “As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, the Etherazi have begun to retreat from Denza thanks to the heroic efforts of our human protectors. However, the purple creature you see on-screen was detected emerging from a wormhole this afternoon, seemingly headed toward our planet. It was intercepted on its way by the gold Etherazi, which was apparently lying in wait somewhere around Ebos.”
The two Etherazi surged against each other, ripping off limbs of pure energy that disintegrated into the Vastness. It was like watching two dragons wrestle, although I couldn’t be sure if that was just how my mind interpreted their shapes or—
“Whoa, it’s like Godzilla versus Ghidorah,” H’Jossu rasped over my shoulder. “Never seen this one before.”
For being a nine-foot-tall mold-covered sloth-monster, H’Jossu was pretty light on his feet. Or maybe I’d just been too engrossed by the footage to realize he’d ambled up behind me. He leaned right over my shoulder—his dry fur tickling my ear, his floral odor in my nostrils—but I couldn’t even get skeeved out. The Etherazi brawl had my full attention.
“Who do you think’s going to win?” he asked.
“The gold one,” I said immediately.
“Oh, damn,” H’Jossu said, the realization clicking. “Is that the same . . . ?”
I nodded.
The fight went back and forth, although it was hard to say who was doing more damage. One Etherazi would shrink down to near nothingness, only to burst back to life as a roiling wave of energy. At some point, though, Goldy started to really worm his way inside his opponent, until soon it seemed like every bit of the purple Etherazi was infused with gold—little spikes of energy coursing through the darker Etherazi, tearing it apart, opening it up.
For a moment, I thought I could see the purple one’s heart—the glowing eye in its center. Goldy exposed it to the Vastness. But then—
A burning flash that rocked the ship recording the footage. All the purple energy seemed to funnel in on itself, imploding down to nothing, blasting all the way out of this universe.
Ashfall Legacy Page 21
