Heart of a Traitor

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  “And why not?” he said finally.

  “Because you’ll get hurt.”

  “You underestimate me,” he said, throwing out a couple practice punches into the air. “I can be very wily in a fight.”

  “No, I’m serious, I’m not safe to be around...for anybody. You are right to be scared of me.”

  Don Kielter shrugged and leaned back, breathing in the sweet incense.

  Watching him breathe so calmly was clearly irritating Nariko as she worked. “How can you be so calm like that?” she demanded. “You’ve just lost everything. Your fleet, your livelihood, everything.”

  “Not everything,” he clarified, lifting up the burning incense.

  Come, I am going to teach you something,” Don Kielter said as he wrapped another blanket around himself. Nariko sighed. She had been awake for nearly three days and she found she just didn’t have the energy to argue with him.

  Nariko put down her tools and faced him.

  “Okay,” he began. “I want you to close your eyes and breathe in the scent.”

  Nariko closed her eyes doubtfully. He sat back as well and they breathed deeply together for a few moments.

  “Just forget about the cold metal around you and focus on the natural sensation of the scent,” he instructed. “I’ll teach you a relaxation technique I learned once.”

  “The scent is artificial,” she corrected.

  “It is?” he asked, surprised.

  “Yes,” she said tapping her nose. “There is too much farnesol. Real Jasmine is more subtle.”

  “Huh,” he chuckled, examining the incense, “The guy said that they were genuine imports from Hilia. Looks like I got ripped off.” He shrugged to himself and moved to extinguish the stick.

  “Just keep it going,” she gave in.

  “Okay then,” he began again, grinning. “This relaxation technique has been in my family for generations. I’ll show you how I do it for myself and that will guide you in finding your own path.”

  Kielter sat back again and closed his eyes. He breathed the scent in deeply. Nariko sat back and closed her eyes as well.

  “Take each problem you have and form it into a small jewel, that clings to the skin of your body. Some jewels cling to your forehead, others to your back and still others to your legs and arms. These jewels are each a different color and some are of different sizes. Now, imagine that your skin suddenly become slippery. Unable to cling to you any longer, the jewels begin to slide along your skin, slowly at first, then with greater speed as gravity pulls them away from you. One falls off of your skin and lands on the floor beneath you, shattering. A second falls off of you and then a third. One by one they all fall off of your body, until at last they are all gone.”

  His voice was soothing in a way Nariko couldn’t explain. As she followed his words in her mind, she was surprised at how much this exercise was helping her. She really did feel lighter as she imagined the jewels falling off of her.

  As the last of the jewels fell off of her body, she looked down and saw something out of the ordinary. She pulled her wrist closer to investigate and saw that there was a small tear in the skin. She tugged at it with her other hand and was surprised that she felt no pain. Tugging harder, the skin tore revealing a black stone beneath the surface. It glowed with the inner light of balefire and wild images of screaming faces played over its surface.

  It looks like an altar.

  To her horror, the gem began growing. Disgusted, she grabbed onto the stone and tried to pull it free, but it would not budge. She pulled so hard that her shoulder ached, before realizing that the pain in her shoulder was not from the strain. A second black gemstone burst through the skin on her shoulder, growing steadily. Another stone broke through the skin on her leg and another on her forehead. Nariko began tearing wildly at her skin, tearing it off in large clumps, revealing hundreds of the black stones, which dotted her body like blood-sucking leeches.

  Nariko screamed and lashed out. She grabbed a hand that had been just inches away from her neck. She opened her eyes and realized that Don Kielter was standing over her.

  “Are you okay, slave-girl?” He asked, concerned.

  Nariko pushed him away from her and retreated back into a corner, sweating profusely.

  For a long time neither of them said anything. Don Kielter occupied himself by emptying the contents of two more bottles. Nariko went back to repairing the damage to her null-suit.

  Surely you must know that you cannot find peace in meditation.

  Haven’t heard from you in a while.

  I am resting.

  Ah, so using me like a puppet did wear you out after all.

  I was just having a little fun. Sensations were so much more vivid when I had them in my own body. It was positively addictive.

  You mean my body.

  For now. Like I said before, it really doesn’t matter to me if you fall tomorrow or in a hundred years’ time. It is all the same to me. Eventually it will be my body and you will be only a memory.

  “So,” Don Kielter began finally, his words slightly slurred. “Are you going to explain to me how that seal works?”

  “I’d really prefer not to talk about it,” Nariko snapped back.

  “Fine, we’ll just sit here silently until it’s time to die,” Don Kielter asserted slyly.

  They both went silent and the weight of their situation began pressing down on Nariko’s mind. There was nothing her people feared more than space combat. The possibility of being sucked out into space during a hull breach or trapped in a dying vessel like this was a nightmare so terrifying that they rarely spoke of it, even to each other.

  Don Kielter stretched his jaw and released another thin little mist ring.

  In the silence, Nariko became aware of the dripping of water. The sound seemed to grow louder with each echo and after a time the sound seemed to thunder inside her mind as her fear grew and gnawed inside of her.

  “All right!” Nariko finally yelled out loud, breaking the maddening silence, “I’ll answer your stupid questions. It’s not like you’ll get any benefit from knowing though, since you’ll be dead soon.”

  Don Kielter unsteadily stood up, a satisfied look on his face and walked over to her.

  “So,” he began, “If Nariko is not your real name, then what is your real name?”

  “I don’t know,” she grumbled.

  “What were your parent’s names?”

  “I don’t know,” she insisted.

  “Now you’re just being difficult,” he accused.

  “I’m not being difficult,” she defended, “I’d have to look it up. It was so long ago I can’t remember.”

  “Just how old are you then?”

  Nariko checked her chronometer and did the math in her head.

  “I guess it would be four hundred and fifty-two.”

  Don Kielter made a face of shock then whistled.

  “You must be wealthy ’cause you don’t look a day over twenty,” he commented. “The only drugs that extend your life that long cost a fortune.”

  “Hardly,” she commented. “Every cell in my body is reset daily by immaterial induction.”

  Don Kielter looked at her with a furrowed brow.

  “Didn’t you ever attend open-temple days?” she asked. “I thought that was required for the nobles on Ardura.”

  Don Kielter shook his head slowly. “I’m not really the church-going type.”

  “Ugh, I hate dumbing things down,” she sighed. “Okay, I’ll start simple. Where does a thought go after you have it?”

  His expression of confusion only deepened. He looked as if he were watching a small animal crawl of her mouth.

  “Every thought and feeling you have creates energy,” Nariko began.

  “Ooh, ooh!” he said drunkenly, pointing a finger. “I’ve heard this one. Knowledge is power.”

  “Yes, those are not just idle words. The energy from human thoughts and emotions has flooded the ether for what we can
only guess is hundreds of thousands of years. Much of it is harmonious and does no real harm, but the darker passions stick out like a lesion. Over millennias, they collect together and become stronger eventually even gaining sentience.”

  “A demon?” Don Kielter asked, trying to fit all of this into the existing framework of his mind.

  “Yes,” Nariko said quietly. “And they aren’t satisfied to remain in the ether. They claw at the barriers that separate them from the material world, thirsting to destroy all life.”

  Don Kielter scratched his head as he thought on this for a moment.

  “But, if life creates the...the...”

  “Ethereal energy...”

  “Right, the stuff that the demons are made of, then what would happen to the demons if they actually killed everything?”

  Nariko shrugged. “They would dissipate after a time, I suppose.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. They’d be destroying themselves.”

  “Of course it doesn’t make sense,” Nariko huffed. “You are trying to understand them logically. They are not driven by logic. They are hatred without provocation, slaughter without objective, destruction without purpose, madness given physical form.”

  Nariko lost her train of thought as she tried to push out the images of slaughter that kept pushing in from the edges of her vision. She could still hear their screams and resisted the urge to cover her ears.

  “In reality, we’re only fighting the evil within the human heart itself.”

  Don Kielter looked at her sleepily. “Can such a war be won?”

  “No, it can’t.”

  The ship lurched to one side. Nariko and Don Kielter looked around, but the instrument panels had been turned off to save power.

  Nariko shifted her vision far into the gamma range. The ship around them faded away into a dim shadow, illuminated slightly by the bright source of the nearby stars. It was as if she was suddenly sitting in open space, as her vision only registered materials dense enough to reflect the highly energetic photons that existed in this range. Looking up, Nariko could see the dim silhouette of what appeared to be a twisted chunk of debris slowly spinning away from her.

  Nariko shifted her vision back into the normal spectrum and the ship reappeared around her, as did Don Kielter who was looking at her intently.

  “It was just a piece of debris, probably a broken rudder. It didn’t look like it hit us hard enough to do any real damage,” Nariko explained.

  Don Kielter suddenly leaned in toward her, fascinated.

  “Maybe this is just the wine talking, but I didn’t know you could change the color of your eyes,” he mused.

  “Huh?”

  “Just now, your eyes shifted from red to violet, then back again.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Did that let you see outside or something?” he guessed.

  “Yeah, let me try another one.”

  Nariko shifted her vision into infrared, then ultraviolet, then the radio range. As she did, Don Kielter called out chartreuse, pewter, and saffron.

  “That’s really pretty. Is that a mutation?”

  Nariko suddenly found herself feeling a little hesitant to talk. She wasn’t used to talking about herself. As a Senshi, she certainly had never been called pretty before and wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  “It’s not really a mutation, it’s more like an unwanted gift,” she explained. “The demon gods reward those who serve them by altering their bodies. Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they are not. It seems completely random at times. This ‘gift’ came to me after the scourging of Rictan.” Nariko fought off the memories of that brutal campaign.

  Don Kielter laughed to himself. “I can’t believe you didn’t even know your eyes changed color when you do that.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’ve ever done it when I look in the mirror or anything...”

  Nariko trailed off. “I guess no one’s ever really looked at me that closely before,” she admitted.

  Don Kielter smiled drunkenly to himself, clearly enjoying the moment.

  “Besides,” Nariko continued, feeling self-conscious, “Even if I had, it’s not like I would have been able to notice. When you are seeing infrared, green doesn’t look green anyway.”

  “So, what does it look like?” he asked, trying to drink from an empty bottle.

  “Shades of light and dark, more or less. It’s kind of hard to describe.

  “So, that seal on your collarbone. That means that you belong to the demon who changed your eyes?” asked Don Kielter, trying to get back on subject.

  “The demon god Drak’Nal,” Nariko affirmed, “He also gave me a new body to go along with my name.”

  “What, he didn’t like the way you looked?” the Don asked as he pulled a boot off to get a pebble out.

  “He wanted to trap us,” Nariko explained. “Me and my kin. These bodies may look human, but they’re not. They’re just an elaborate cage, designed to erode our resolve and rob us of our free will. The pleasure centers in our brains are several times larger than a human’s and our physical senses are wired differently. We experience tactile sensations far more powerfully than normal humans can and the endorphins released are much more powerful. Given time, it’s possible for us to become desperately addicted to just about any kind of sensation no matter how simple. That is why we wear these null suits. They create a special barrier that numbs our skin and senses to an extent. Without it we’d be animals by now, hopelessly addicted to pleasure and sensation.”

  “So you beat him. That must have really ticked him off,” Don Kielter commented as he put his boot back on.

  “Hardly,” Nariko corrected, “We only slowed the process down. Eventually we will all succumb to the curse. It’s not something we like to think about.”

  Nariko lifted up her slim, delicate hand and studied it. “You have no idea what it feels like to look in the mirror and see the face of someone else staring back at you.”

  The lights flickered for a moment then went out. The room became very dark, with only the faintest illumination coming from the red glow on the tip of the incense stick. The two were silent for many minutes, their breath creating faint clouds of mist in the gathering cold.

  “Gee,” Kielter finally commented. “I thought we’d have more time than that.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she added.

  “Did you know that I was in the Confederate Army once?” Don Kielter mentioned, trying to lighten the mood.

  “You? That’s pretty funny,” Nariko commented.

  “I know. Can you imagine me saluting an officer? I think I lasted about ten months.”

  “I’m surprised you made it through basic training,” Nariko remarked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I thought I wanted to serve the Luminarch. Turns out I just liked to kill stuff.”

  “It’s all we’re good at,” Nariko said, smiling regretfully.

  Nariko noticed that ice-crystals were now quickly forming along the walls. She realized that she was breathing heavier and her mind began to feel hazy. It wouldn’t be long, now.

  “It’s too bad I didn’t put out that darn fake incense stick when you asked me too. We’d probably have lasted a couple more minutes without it,” he confessed. Nariko was silent for a long time before she spoke again.

  “No,” she confessed, “I’m glad you let it burn.” Nariko knew there was no reason why she should feel better talking about these things, but she did. She wondered if this was why commoners went to confessionals so much.

  “So, what happened?” Don Kielter asked.

  Nariko sighed. “Our world was invaded by the Gunoi. We fought them as best we could, but there were just too many of them. We waited for help, we were promised help, but it never came. Toward the end our leaders became desperate. Our Taisho sold our souls to Drak’Nal in exchange for the power to destroy the Gunoi.”

  “You mean, you didn’t agree to it?”

  “No,” Nariko said sof
tly. “I would rather have just died right there. All the men were consumed and all the women ended up like me. Since we didn’t agree to the contract willingly, we were able to negotiate terms for our freedom. Can you imagine that? Sitting down at a table with a demon and negotiating a contract? It was foolish to even try.”

  “So, how is that coming along?”

  “We have managed to recover a few of the necessary components, mainly by serving as mercenaries in the Uragan.” She spit, but it froze before it hit the ground. “But we cannot end the curse without every single component and many of them are just not possible to obtain. It has been too long and they would take too much time to find. I mean, how do you get the blood of someone who has been dead for eight hundred years? No, we’ll fall long before we even come close. It’s all just wasted effort.”

  Both of them were visibly trembling from the gathering cold.

  “Well, we were doing okay there for a while,” Kielter admitted, the fear apparent in his voice. “We all have to die sometime or another, eh? We’ve both been in lots of battles, right? We’ve both looked death in the face before.”

  Nariko’s brow pinched. She could not hold back the pain and fear forcing its way up from inside her.

  “You still don’t understand,” she whispered, unable to keep a slight tremble out of her voice, “When you die, you just die. When I die, the curse will restore my body and force it to live again, but I won’t be how I was. Each time I die, I lose more of myself. There is hardly anything left as it is. Each time, the darkness within me grows stronger. I’ll just keep coming back to life here in this ship each morning, only to die of the cold and asphyxiation a few moments later. Over and over, until there is nothing left of me and I give into the curse completely. And then...”

  Nariko found herself screaming inside and she fought to regain control of herself.

  “And then I become rău-matrice, a womb of death. That’s why our cursed bodies are female, to allow demons to be born directly into your world in a physical body of their own. Demons that cannot be banished because they will be a part of this world.”