Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  Connect the wire to the secondary track running behind the far side of the mirror chamber. It would reach, but my palsied, pain-crippled hands were another matter. Tilting one shoulder down, I shifted my body so it was closer to the floor in an effort to angle myself toward the opening. I kept a firm grip on one wire despite my body’s distress while reaching around the other side to fish out the one I’d seen earlier.

  Every movement was crucial. Every breath. Every minute twitch of my fingers. Every muscle in my body was engaged as my legs and torso held me up, my arms reaching through the device and my hands doing what they were made for, illness be damned. The heat inside the object rose, making me sweat even more. My hands were slick. Moisture dripped down my back.

  Endless screaming from the ship throbbed in my head.

  I couldn’t let myself slip and fall forward. Although I was vaguely aware of frightened human voices, I refused to let them in. The Axon kept bellowing, drowning out all other noise.

  One wrong move and I could make things far worse.

  The two gossamer-thin wires finally caught and twined together behind the waveguides. “Yes!” I shouted. Instantly, the device started to cool and the sparks subsided.

  I collapsed forward, resting my forehead on the object, arms limp inside it.

  I didn’t even care that the metal was hot.

  We were safe. The ship was safe.

  I let myself breathe.

  The quiet in the hold sent a chill up my spine.

  I wiped my hands on my pants, leaving behind black streaks, and stood up.

  “Alana,” Tev said. Quietly, but her low voice still carried, tone flat. “What did you do?”

  I didn’t want to see the damage, but my feet were moving all the same, betraying my desire to hide. Those feet turned me around, moving me past the warped, blown-off door now lying in the middle of the hold, past the blurry pilot in my peripheral vision, walking me toward the now-open room. My footsteps were an unwelcome noise, loud and clumsy in the dead quiet.

  Slip and Ovie checked out the stairwell damage, but they tossed looks at me and Tev. Ovie kept scratching behind his ear with frantic fingers and yawned loudly, like a nervous dog. Nova clutched her white silk robe, watching Tev, who stood with her back to me inside the doorway of her charred room. The sickness that crept into my stomach felt like a hundred insects clawing at me from the inside out.

  Her hands clutched either side of the bulkheads, shoulders hunched. Her sleeveless shirt exposed the rigid muscles of her back and shoulders. Even from here, I could see rage boiling beneath the surface. Every centimeter of my skin felt too heavy and too tight.

  “What did you do,” she said again. Not a question this time. A command to report.

  I was a few steps away, but I couldn’t make myself come any closer. I was afraid to see what I’d done, what was in there. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “What were you doing, Quick.”

  My legs and mouth felt weak. “Trying to disable the device.”

  “But you were aware your orders were to investigate it, not disable it.”

  “I just—”

  “Answer the question, yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew it was wired to detonate if—”

  “I did, but—”

  She slammed her hand against the bulkhead to shut me up, the sound ricocheting through the cargo bay.

  I wanted to reach out to her, but I wasn’t that stupid. “I’m sorry.”

  Time stretched out. Quiet murmurs drifted through the cargo hold as Slip and Ovie continued examining the damage.

  When she spoke again, her voice was soft. “You could have left us dead in the water.”

  What could I say? She was right.

  “I’m going back to bed. Don’t touch the device again, don’t look at it, don’t even think about it, unless I order you to do so. Just . . . stay out of the cargo hold.” She turned around to leave, and as she passed me, I caught a glimpse of eyes red with sadness.

  Every part of me ached. I had done this to her ship. To her.

  I didn’t realize I really was reaching out to her until she stopped and looked at my barely outstretched hand with cold resentment.

  “Tev. Captain. I . . . ”

  She continued staring at my hand, which I couldn’t seem to pull back. It just hung there in space while failure and shame clung to me like an iron vest.

  Eventually, she left, dodging Slip and Ovie on her way up the mutilated staircase, even as Slip reached out to her in comfort. They watched Tev go, then Ovie continued working and Slip looked at me, raising her hands in a What the hell were you thinking? gesture.

  I shook my head and just turned toward the scorched room. I had to see what I’d done.

  Despite the char and ash, I could still see it. Tev’s big secret, her tightly guarded space.

  A garden.

  Suddenly, the ship’s hum grew loud between my ears and images flooded my mind, a recording dropped into my head like a datachip: Tev bends over the soil of a makeshift garden in the center of the room, arranging each plant with careful hands. Fingers trail over the leaves. She speaks in a soft voice as she offers them water. Blond hair brushes the plants, gathering the scent of rosemary between strands. She plucks pieces of it to make infrequent cooked meals feel like home. Dirt lives under her fingernails, rich and earthy and real. She comes here to grow new worlds in the sky. I see flowers emerging from her body. She blinks petals from her eyelids, dusts soil from her arms, and plucks roots from her hair, offering pieces of herself to the garden she carries between planets.

  I wandered through the destroyed room, carrying my shame and guilt with me on a chain, not sure what it was I was looking for until I saw it. Two plants, side-by-side, hidden under a fallen plate of metal. Pitiful stems and leaves bent like injured limbs. The sight of it made me feel monstrous. I didn’t know anything about gardening, but I moved the metal aside and promised the little plant I’d do something to make up for this. Salvage what I could, try to give Tev a piece of her garden worth keeping. I didn’t want to deliver the plants to her now; if they died, it would be a fresh loss for her to endure. Besides, my face was the last thing she’d want to see. I’d just have to keep them secret and see if they survived.

  I breathed deeply to loosen the frustration winding around my stomach, transforming it into determination.

  The next sleep shift, I waited even longer than usual to leave my quarters. I swiped two large mixing bowls from the mess hall, wiped them clean of accumulated dust, and hurried to the stairwell leading to the cargo hold. I wondered how long it had been since anyone used real kitchenware.

  I made my footsteps as quiet as possible as I headed down the corridor, maneuvered the mangled stairs, and slipped into the torched garden room. I crouched down next to the soil, letting my fingers linger over a patch of unscorched earth. Not knowing the first thing about plants, I almost reached for my comm link to access the net for information. My hand lingered behind my ear for a moment before dropping.

  Oh, right. On my own on this one.

  Behind me, there was a sound like a spray of water or a hand gliding across paper, and then the buzzing started. I turned to see Marre standing in the doorway, half her jawbone exposed, hands missing, honeycomb tattoo staring at me again. Her voice came in waves of sound—buzzing crashing into me like the ocean, quiet-loud, quiet-loud, words overlapping each other. Even her voice struggled to maintain its form. “You’re awake.”

  I nodded.

  “This is Tev’s room.” Muscle and skin grew over her jaw as her shoulder faded down to bone. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Please don’t tell her,” I whispered, still crouching. White spots encroached on my vision, cold vertigo washing over my head. I closed my eyes and placed a palm on the floor to steady myself, feeling the Tangled Axon’s hum underneath me. Grounding the live wire I had become.

  When I opened my eyes, it was to Marre’s face inches
from mine. Her smile reached her eyes as she mimicked my posture, crouching low on the ground with one palm connecting her to the ship, her too-large shirt hanging low over her shorts, her bent, skinny legs making her look much like an insect. Black hair fell over her right shoulder, ripples shimmering through it like light. Like hair made of glass. A crystalline girl.

  We had to help her.

  “What does it feel like?” I said, glancing at a skinless finger on her left hand.

  “What does it feel like for you?” she said. “When you disappear into yourself?”

  Thoughts dislodged from my unconscious mind. It feels like I’m looking at life out of the corner of my eye. Like my body doesn’t know how to be painless. Like I’m becoming grief and loss, except when I’m with this crew and this ship, when I’m with Tev.

  Marre’s fully invisible hand rested on my knee as we crouched there, her uncanny touch interrupting me, bone and muscle exposed at her wrist in a gradient of disappearing pilot. “Me too,” she said.

  She disappeared.

  Not faded, not dissolved, just . . . one moment she was there, touching my knee, and the next, she was gone. Blinked out of the room so suddenly I wondered if my medication was making me hallucinate, or if my grief had pushed me over some edge I hadn’t realized I’d been toeing.

  Alone in that room with the echo of Marre still prickling my skin, I wanted Aunt Lai. Not Heliodor or even the shop—just Lai. I wanted her to plop down in front of me with that earnest face and tell me I needed to focus on what mattered.

  “Pain’s not real, girl,” she’d said to me, over and over again. The one person in my life who could talk about pain without making me feel erased. “It’s all electricity, like everything else. You’re what’s real. Those ships are real. Our work is real. Pain’s not, no matter what it would have you believe.”

  She’d wipe the sweat off her brow and wink at me, face blotchy with dirt and grease. “Pain is just the world wanting us to pay attention to it because we’re so damned beautiful, it can’t stand being ignored.”

  Thinking of her sharpened the edges of my loss.

  I exhaled to push out all the memories that tried to surface. I turned back to the garden and collected enough soil to fill each bowl, thinking about plants instead of my family or incarceration. How much soil did they need? I figured too much was better than not enough and hoped I was right. Then I looked around and gathered anything that seemed helpful, hoping I’d be able to wing it if I had the right supplies. A spade, for one. A bottle of fertilizer. Both were charred, but the bottle was still at least half-full and the spade would work just fine.

  Kneeling down in front of the surviving plants, I took a deep breath. I really, really hope I don’t kill them trying to save them. One of the rosemary plants had survived, but I didn’t even know what the others were, much less how to take care of them. I’d just have to hope water and fertilizer was enough. And talking to them. You were supposed to talk to plants, right?

  If pilots could disappear, and engineers could be wolves, then surely plants could thrive on words.

  Carrying them back to my quarters, I passed the device that had caused all this destruction. The eye stared at me, threatening. Black hatred for what the othersiders had done to us bubbled up in me. Fire scorched my heart at the thought of Adul crushing my parents along with the native Adulans, all at the hands of the people who had ripped apart reality and shoved their way through the breach.

  Staring at the object, I stoked my anger, kept it alive.

  We’d go to Spin and take care of this damned device. We’d find a way to help Marre and Lai, find a way to clear our names, and then I’d burn Transliminal to the ground.

  Chapter Ten

  I ran out of my medication.

  Each hour dragged its heavy feet through the ship in the wake of the cargo bay disaster. One day passed, then another, until almost the entire three weeks had gone by and we were only half a day out from Spin, still without any clear sign of the enforcers. Occasionally we’d hear a creak in the hull or a snap of electricity that made everyone stop in their tracks, afraid it was the sound of weapons fire.

  They were out there, though. Searching for us. All it would take would be charting the wrong course through the wrong space, crossing paths with a single patrol.

  As Dexitek’s side effects started wearing off, in some ways it was an unexpected blessing. Less nausea, more presence of mind. Sometimes I could even stomach the nutrient bars without wanting to gag. That was a first.

  But I knew it was a brief reprieve. The real pain would wake up soon enough; Mel’s was a long-hibernating hunter that would be eager to make up for lost time. With so much thick, immutable silence between me and Tev, I almost welcomed the oncoming symptoms. At least they’d be a distraction. Can’t think about caring for a woman who hates you when your body is busy lighting itself on fire.

  Her only words to me were an order here, a quick engineering-related question there—and only if Ovie was unavailable. When we passed in the corridor, the memory of our time on the observation deck sat heavy between us. Her eyes flicked toward me a few times, but I never could read her expression. She just looked away and walked on. Each silent, inscrutable exchange was a knife in my heart. This chilly disregard was worse than watching her with Slip.

  So I spent our trip to Spin nursing the pitiful plants hiding in my quarters. Taking care of them helped me feel like I retained some small measure of influence over my life and the world around me. I couldn’t tell whether the herbs were thriving or just barely holding on, but they were alive, and that was something. Maybe it would be enough for Tev to speak to me again.

  That, and convincing my sister to willingly help Marre.

  Twelve hours away from Spin, Nova sat in my quarters and plucked more strands of light from nowhere, adding them to her growing project. Tev’s plants sat like a couple of children before her, soaking up a pale glow pouring through the crevices of her fingers.

  “I’m curious,” I said, eyeing her tedious work. “If you don’t want to help us, why haven’t you tried harder to get them to drop you off somewhere?”

  “Maybe I was planning to disembark along with you when they drop you off.” Another strand, plucked. The light played with contours of her face. “You’ve clearly outstayed your welcome.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Even so, you don’t have to be here. I do.” Knit, purl. “My contract obligates me to stay on board, even if you are running from the enforcers. I’m not about to jeopardize my reputation by reneging, even if I do think you’re making a mistake by throwing your life on Orpim away.” She paused and looked thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “Although maybe there’s a loophole in the SAG regulations that would allow me to get out of a contract with known fugitives. Are you sure they’re not planning to drop you off somewhere?”

  “I’m not sure of anything, Nova. And where exactly would I go, anyway? I’m better off on the Axon than I am out there on my own.” Assuming Nova wasn’t right about me overstaying my welcome.

  She shrugged. “Oh well. So what’s this about helping ‘us’? Are you one of them now?”

  Damn it, Nova. Where’s your grief? Where are you hiding it?

  “So if you’re fulfilling your contract,” I said, “that means you’re willing to convince Birke to find cures for me and Marre? And for Aunt Lai.”

  She shrugged. One sleeve of her gown slouched off her thin shoulder. “Depends on whether I’m still here.”

  “You just said you can’t leave.”

  Her eyes flicked at me over her work. Knit, purl. “Alana. Don’t be naïve. You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Huh?”

  She sighed. “Don’t you ever listen to anything I say about my work? I’m referring to transmutation. Ascension. Shedding the flesh.”

  “I’d rather talk about Birke—”

  “You’re preoccupied with things that aren’t going to matter, in the
end.”

  “So you think resenting life is the answer?” I don’t know why I asked. I knew it was true; I hadn’t seen her eat much since she came on board. A handful of nuts here, an injection there. All that unsated hunger carved a hollow path across her cheeks.

  “Do you really think starving yourself—”

  “Yes, I do!” She said with frustration. “We’ve been over this.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Your approval is irrelevant. This is what it means to be a spirit guide.”

  “To starve yourself. Great.”

  “To thin oneself until catching a ride on death’s back is as easy as taking a breath. A gasp, and the body is gone. Death waits for no one, so spirit guides turn to it with grace.”

  “For crying out loud, Nova, stop being so melodramatic. You’re not even forty years old! Just because Mom and Dad died doesn’t mean you need to!”

  A hurt expression flashed across her face. “You don’t understand. I can already feel my body browning at the edges, curling in on itself. Others won’t see it for years, for decades, but it’s happening all the same. Can’t you feel it too? Don’t you feel yourself dying, every day? Spirit guides would choose our own paths out of the body rather than wait to be ripped from it in a bloody shriek. Or fall victim to some—”

  She caught herself, but I knew what she was going to say. Fall victim to some disease. Sickness. Illness. Something like that. She’d spent a lifetime tiptoeing around my perceived fragility, not realizing I was stronger because of my disease, not weaker.

  “No.” I placed my hand on her thin, cold fingers, and they relaxed—barely. “I feel myself living, Nova. Not dying.”

  “But you’re dying all the same. I’m not some piece of trash to be taken by an ebb tide. Most of us feel this way, you know that. I tried preparing you for it. Mom and Dad knew—”

  “I’m not Mom and Dad.”

  “Well, either way, most guides are working toward ascension. Just because we soothe dying clients and help them cross over doesn’t mean we’re so easily taken ourselves. Even the worst guides prepare their bodies; even they will feel death’s breath upon their necks and dematerialize before she can take them. We’ll all of us hide from her grasp, ride her skirts to the next plane. By choice, not by demand.”