Heart of a Traitor

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  Despite the danger, the repairs had to continue. Apprehension and curiosity permeated the room as the ship’s senior priests stood in a broken circle around the rebuilt ether core. They lacked one member for the rite of cognition, the most holy and complex ceremony of their order. The holy oils and incense placed in the room were running low as they waited.

  They felt trapped. A dangerous monster was roaming the ship, but the ceremony could not begin until all members were present and none of them could leave the circle until the rite was completed. Despite the guards positioned nearby, they shuffled expectantly, voicelessly communicating their indecision and discomfort.

  A faint hissing sound broke the silence and the priests breathed a sigh of relief. Now their attention shifted to a different matter. None of them had seen or heard from Episcop Mitchels since his death and they looked at each other anxiously, wondering what to expect.

  The inner seal hissed open, bringing with it a faint rush of fresh air. Standing in the seal lock, with head lowered and shoulders hunched, was a short and mousey young woman, her blonde hair tucked awkwardly into a cap that was lowered to cover as much of her smooth slim face as possible. On her right cheek was a fresh seal of Asfanţit.

  She seemed impossibly frail, like a stiff breeze would just knock her over. She wrapped her arms around herself timidly and the priests could tell that she felt as delicate as she looked. Her robes had been re-sized, but looked out of place on her as she walked awkwardly into the room and took her place in the circle, her face red with embarrassment.

  “O-Onikano, recognize re-key of identity, replace Mitchels Iwata with Konami Iwata,” she squeaked out in a high, timid voice. The other priests fought to suppress their amusement.

  The youngest of the gathered priests lowered his head and began singing in the ancient tongue, the clear and pure tones filling the room and focusing the minds of those present.

  A small holo-window appeared in front of one of the priests, containing the image of Nori, who looked like she was about to collapse from sheer exhaustion.

  “We are ready to begin,” the young priest said.

  Keiko breathed a sigh of relief as she dropped down onto the catwalk. Down below her were the massive rotating rings of the ship’s essence generator. Perched at the end of the catwalk, crouching like a gargoyle looking over the edge, was Nariko.

  As Keiko walked toward her, she could see that Nariko’s white skin was dry and cracking, pieces of it falling off when she moved. Ash falling through cracks in her skin as she breathed.

  “Everyone has been looking for you,” Keiko mentioned as she sat down quietly beside her.

  “Have they?” Nariko asked distantly. “I can’t fathom why.”

  “Well, I had to bring you your dinner; it’s one of my assigned duties.”

  “Duty...such a strange word,” Nariko said quietly. “I can’t imagine what it means.”

  “Well, I suppose it means something you are told to do, something you are told to want to do on your own.”

  “And if you don’t do it? What then?”

  Keiko looked at Nariko, her hair changing to indigo. What concerned her most was that Nariko was not being sarcastic.

  “Well, I suppose if you don’t do your duty, then you will be punished,” Keiko said.

  “Punishment,” Nariko said lifting her head up. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”

  Nariko brought her knees up to her chin and wrapped her great white wings around her, bits of skin flaking off.

  “You know, sometimes, I wonder if any of this is real. It feels like a dream. I think, maybe none of this is real. Maybe I died back on Correll and ever since then I’ve been in purgatory, paying for my sins.”

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  “Maybe I am dead. Maybe this is what death is like. Maybe this is what I deserve for my pathetic life.”

  “Nari, you’re scaring me.”

  Nariko chuckled, bits of her chin breaking off. “Look at me. I’m arguing with myself.”

  “This is real, Nari,” Keiko insisted, grabbing Nariko by the shoulder. Nariko’s skin crumbled under her touch. “I’m really here.”

  “Are you?” Nariko asked as she turned her head. Her red eyes seemed to look right through Keiko without recognizing her.

  “Yes, I’m really here and I am here for you. Look...” Keiko pulled out something from her uniform pocket and thrust it into Nariko’s clawed hand. “Look, I brought you one of Ami’s cookies to say I’m sorry.”

  Nariko looked at the cookie in her hand. It was heart shaped with pink frosting. The frosting had been fashioned into letters that read, ‘Get well soon.’

  Keiko placed her hands tenderly on Nariko’s forearm. “Please stay with us.”

  Nariko lowered her hand, her eyes slowly becoming more focused. Nariko looked at the cookie again and felt a little less distant.

  “You really should take Ami off the active roster.” Nariko said quietly. “You’ve tolerated it up until now, but she is going to get someone hurt.”

  “It’s all she has left. I can’t take it away from her,” Keiko explained.

  Nariko sighed heavily, a strand of white hair falling in front of her eyes.

  “I don’t understand how you can be so freakishly loyal to her. She acts so darn cute all of the time that I just want to throw up all over her,” Nariko remarked.

  Keiko sat back, her hair changing to a sad aquamarine. “Did I ever tell you the story of how I came back to the order,” she began.

  Nariko shook her head. Her long white tail flicked curiously.

  “Really, I thought I had told everyone about it,” Keiko chided. “I was traveling with a Guelhar explorer team in the halo stars. We were trying to make successful contact with a race we called the Felelina, although they had no name for themselves...”

  “Sounds humble,” Nariko commented.

  “No, it’s because they didn’t communicate verbally. They talked with each other using scent.”

  “Scent?”

  “Yeah, pheromones and odors. They didn’t even use body language. They just stand near each other, eyes-half closed, exchanging scents. You could have a bunch of them in a heated debate and it would look like they were all asleep.”

  “So how did you communicate with them?”

  “Well, fortunately they did have eyes. It took us about six months, but we were able to at least state our intentions by using pictures of people trading and exchanging goods.”

  Keiko chuckled to herself. “You had to be really careful, though, because if you came to a meeting with bad-breath, you might accidentally start a war.”

  Nariko smiled at this, in spite of herself.

  “That’s when the Irathsa came.” Keiko felt a shadow fall over her heart. Her hair turned a dull gray. “They attacked us during the night, slaughtering their young and old and taking prisoners at random. I was able to send a signal off to the Third Division before I was captured, but they hadn’t heard from me for nearly two centuries. Of all of my former division, Ami was the only one who came looking for me. She set out alone, against orders, hitchhiking and hijacking ships along the way. She followed them to their black city of Fäulnis where they held me prisoner. I had been their play-thing for several months by then.”

  Keiko paused and looked down, biting her fingernails. “Ami came for me, but she was captured. Somehow they figured out that we heal at a certain time each day, so they set about burning her. They experimented for a while, pushing the limits of how much they could burn her without actually killing her.”

  Keiko grew quiet. Her hair turned a lighter gray.

  “It took her weeks to break her way out. She chipped at the door lock in the few moments she had each morning before they laid back into her. When she finally broke her way out and rescued me, there was nothing left of the person I knew.”

  Keiko could feel the fear welling up inside of her and she shivered as she thought on it. The curse didn’t
remove their fear of death at all. All it really did was increase exponentially their ability to suffer.

  “That’s why you’re so loyal to her,” Nariko said, half to herself.

  Keiko nodded honestly, her hair shimmering a light pink.

  “I figured that somewhere inside of her is still a piece of her real self. I thought that if I stayed with her long enough I could bring it out, a shadow of the person I used to know.”

  “Have you?” Nariko asked.

  Keiko shook her head; her hair turned a sharp gray.

  “There’s nothing left. At least, nothing that I can see. Do you know what the worst part is? She doesn’t even remember why she is afraid of fire.”

  The two sat there silently for a long time.

  “But why does Ami behave like she does? The curse is supposed to darken us, not make us more juvenile,” Nariko inquired.

  “I have no idea. Psychology doesn’t even begin to cover a situation like hers. My guess is that the trauma of her experience, combined with the effects of the curse, caused her mind to regress severely, which is why she acts like a child sometimes.”

  The air was thick with suffering. At times like this it felt unbearable to Keiko. The universe had made them suffer and suffer and had given them nothing in return, like a black hole that took and took and took and was incapable of giving in return.

  “That’s why I came out here looking for you,” Keiko admitted.

  “What do you mean?” Nariko asked defensively.

  Keiko looked down at the coils below them, her hair jade. “I’m worried that you are planning to hurt yourself.”

  “Hurt myself?” Nariko asked, looking down into the coils. “No, I’m just trying to wake up from this dream.”

  “Did you know that Inami was a chaplain before the fall of Correll?” Keiko asked.

  “Yeah,” Nariko scoffed. “I thought it was a glitch when I first saw it in the personnel records.”

  “You wouldn’t think it to look at her,” Keiko admitted. “She couldn’t handle it when the curse fell on us. She’d assign herself to the most dangerous missions and would charge in full-force. Suicide by Gunoi. At that time we still didn’t know about the soul fragmentation. She was just hoping that if she died enough times she’d stay dead. By the time we had all realized how the curse worked, there wasn’t much left of her, either.”

  “I know you are trying to talk me out of this.”

  “Of course I am. You’re my friend.”

  Nariko shifted her weight, bits of skin breaking off and falling away. “Please try to understand. I’m not doing this because I am a coward...”

  “What other label is there?”

  “You don’t understand. I have to do this. Right now, my body has been severely weakened. The Kuldrizi starved it of ether. Right now, if I throw myself down into the coils...it should be enough.”

  Keiko stood up and put her hands on Nariko’s shoulders. “Look, just three days ago I watched a demon world get conquered. That proves that anything can happen, even things we can’t believe might happen.”

  Nariko grabbed Keiko’s wrists and pulled them off of her. “I have to do this, before my body has a chance to heal. Before she comes back.”

  “You can’t give up hope Nari,” Keiko said, struggling. “You have to keep fighting.”

  Nariko’s long white tail came up and wrapped itself around Keiko’s neck. “It’s too late for me. She is in control now. It doesn’t matter how hard I fight, it’s like a tiny person standing in the middle of a river. The only reason I’m myself right now is because she is so terribly weakened. You...you still don’t get it, do you?” Nariko asked, her red eyes swimming.

  “What don’t I get? What are you trying to say?” Keiko coughed.

  “I...I’m saying that I am a demon who had a dream and in that dream I was a human. It was a nice dream; there were parts I even enjoyed. But...now the dream is over. Now, you need to get away from me, because if you don’t, I will hurt you. And I...I don’t want to hurt my friend. But, I won’t be able to stop her. I won’t be able to stop myself.”

  Keiko winced and Nariko looked down, realizing that she was hurting her. Nariko let go and apologized awkwardly. For several minutes they sat there in uncomfortable silence.

  “So, what did it smell like?” Nariko asked, trying to change the subject.

  “What?” Keiko asked, confused.

  “When the felines talked to each other, what did it smell like?”

  “Fele-lina, not felines. A feline is something you keep as a pet.”

  “Whatever. They’re all just aliens to me.”

  “Most of the time I couldn’t smell much of anything...except when they were saying hello. Then, it smelled like strawberries, to me,” Keiko recalled.

  They both smiled. Sometimes life hurt enough that you had to laugh just to bear it.

  Suddenly Keiko remembered something and began fishing around in her pocket.

  “It took me a while, but I managed to find this in one of my traveling trunks.”

  Keiko handed Nariko a small tektite cube. In the center of its clear surface was suspended a small flower, withering and dry, but otherwise perfectly preserved. A yellow carnation.

  “What’s this?” Nariko asked.

  “It’s yours,” she answered.

  Nariko handled the cube suspiciously.

  “I accidentally took it with me when I left the order. It was starting to fall apart, so I had it encased to preserve it a while back. It had been so long I’d forgotten about it until this morning, but it belongs to you,” Keiko explained.

  “Why do you have it?”

  “Do you remember that last Shogatsu festival before the Gunoi came?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because of the curse?”

  “No. The alcohol. I drank too much that night and blacked out.”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten about that. You challenged three members of Aka squad to a drinking contest and passed out on the table,” Keiko said, her hair a light pink.

  “I beat the first two guys, but three in a row was just too much.”

  They both chuckled at this for a moment, enjoying a fond memory. They had been very different people back then.

  “Anyway, before your third contest, you showed me that flower. You confessed to me that it was a gift to you from your mother the day the tithe-masters came to take you away to begin the trials.”

  Nariko looked at Keiko inquisitively, wanting to hear more.

  “You tried to run away when they came for you. Your mother tried to persuade you to go with them, but you stubbornly refused. As the first-born child, you were the tithe of the Amano family just like all the first-born children of the warrior class. She knew that they would kill you if you did not go willingly, but you clung to her. You told her that you’d rather die than go with them. It wasn’t until she started crying that you gave in. You’ve always been stubborn that way. She gave you this flower from her hair and made you swear that you would keep it with you to remember your promise to her.”

  Nariko strained as she listened to the story.

  “Can you remember anything?” Keiko asked pensively, her hair a dark jade.

  Nariko balled her clawed fists tightly, cracking the skin.

  “Nothing,” she whispered. “Not her face, her name...nothing.”

  They both sat there quietly for a moment.

  “What about your father?” Keiko asked, trying to change the subject.

  “All I have from him is a feeling,” Nariko admitted softly. “Disappointment. I can’t remember the events or the circumstances, but I can remember that nothing I ever did was good enough for him.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Keiko interrupted. “I’m sure you made him proud. Just because you can’t remember the good parts doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”

  “What difference does it make?” Nariko whispered. “It doesn’t matter if he was proud of me or not, if all I ca
n remember is that he wasn’t. The end effect is the same.”

  Keiko squinted her eyes as she searched through her remaining memories.

  “I think it was that way for all of us,” Keiko admitted. “Without love in their arranged marriages, our parents looked elsewhere for it. Our mothers poured it on their children, while our fathers found it in the arms of their aijin. From the moment we were conceived, our fathers knew they would lose us and the pain of that kept them distant from us.”

  Keiko placed her hand on Nariko’s shoulder.

  “Even though you may only remember the bad, that does not mean you have to believe that there was nothing else.”

  They both sat in silence. Nariko’s fists trembled slightly as she fought to keep her emotions in check.

  “I have 452 years of memories in my head and they’re all bad.”

  “Oh, that’s not true,” Keiko said gently, her hair lightening to a serene blue. “Remember the songs in the Luminarch’s Temple? Remember the restaurant on Ardura? Remember laughing in that swamp water? Those are good memories.”

  Nariko held up the cube and inspected it thoughtfully.

  “Why did my mother give this to me? What did she want?”

  “She wanted what all mothers want for their children. She wanted you to live. She wanted you to be happy.”

  “Then why did she stop me? If she really loved me she should have just let them kill me right then and there.”

  “You always focus on the negative, Nari-chan. You’ve always been like that. You completely fail to recognize the opportunity that you have here in the Seventh.”

  “The opportunity to wear mini-skirts and dodge confetti grenades? The opportunity to sit in a cell all day?”

  “NO!” Keiko shouted, her hair turning red as she stood up. “Your whole life you have only been given one choice: To obey or to die. No one asked you if you wanted to be an Amano. No one asked you if you wanted to become a Senshi. No one asked you anything at all. We were all told what to do and anyone who refused was killed. But here in the Seventh it’s different. Inami lets us do pretty much whatever we want. Think about it. For the first time in your life you have a chance to find out who you really are.”

  Nariko studied Keiko closely. “That’s why you left the Third Division,” Nariko said, looking into Keiko’s eyes.