by Zamil Akhtar
Hours later, Kav came home. With Mother in his arms.
“Mam!” Helplessness gripped Mezzin. “Mam!”
“Stop it. She needs rest.” Kav laid her on her bed and covered her with a rag.
“Nur...Nur don’t let her die,” Mezzin prayed.
“She’s not going to die,” Kav said. “Thank Nur.”
“How did this happen!?”
Kav’s eyes were burning emeralds. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Mezz.”
“Who...who did this?”
It was the fucking Shirmas, Mezzin found out from a Son who saw it happen. They worked her to the limit, and in her weariness, she fell off a ladder while cleaning the roof of the horses’ stables. When it happened, she was writhing in a pile of wood, unable to move her legs. Some of the other Keldanese workers, including the Son, picked her up and carried her to a bed. Then they called for a doctor to help her.
But no doctor came because there “weren’t enough,” or they were “too busy” doing something more important. It was a sign from Nur, for sure, Mezzin realized. That he had seen with his own eyes, that very day, at least five doctors treating that one girl, while his mother suffered for hours without relief. It was a sign that the cause of the Sons’ was righteous, and there was no good in the Shirmas, no matter what they said to bandage broken bones and no matter what great purpose they claimed to fight for.
Back at the safe house, everyone was preparing for war.
“They’re called lightning artillery, you remember?” Bayer laid them in rows on the floor, metal capsules with oddly large gain-medium holsters.
Mezzin nodded. “Yeah, it was four months ago, we trained on how to operate these things. Really simple actually.”
Bayer grinned, showing off his sparkly teeth. “So, this was the big surprise. TEX are in for quite a thunderstorm!”
Twelve wood crates sat there. Mezzin slid one open, and the room filled with luminous heat. The twicrys shards smelled fresh, polished to perfection.
“Know what’s kinda poetic?” Mezzin said. “The weapons might be HEX made, but these twicrys were produced and refined by none other than TEX, and probably right here in Hyseria.”
“Nice.” Bayer nodded. “I’m liking the poetry.”
“Know what else? TEX is probably indirectly our biggest customer. Since our emril holdings are worthless, and all the twinsen we have came from the Settlement, we’re only rich thanks to their greed for slaves. And all that twinsen paid for these weapons too.”
“Damn.” Bayer kept nodding. “Never thought of that. This is why you’re the boss, boss.”
“By the way, where’s Nesmith?”
“Went to see his daughter or something. Want me to look for him?”
“We need everyone here,” Mezzin said. “Go find him.”
Bayer left. The others would be waiting in their rooms, making their final prayers. Light immersed Mezzin. It radiated out of the boxes, synced with the sun, and threaded through his body. But there was something else: a dark star, sucking the soul out of him.
He picked it up, the twicrys Bayer had brought him. It was off-color and dull on the outside, yet within a white flame radiated the milkiest light.
A message hit Mezzin from nowhere.
I know the fears buried within. Let me soothe them with incredible power. You can control your future and the destiny of your people.
No frequency.
Who the hell is this?
The anger inside swelled — waves of oil to be set aflame.
I am the Promiser of Justice. You will be my hand, and I will be your soul, and together we will birth a new world.
That’s nice and poetic. Tell me who this is!
A soothing heat radiated out of the twicrys. That girl had frozen Mezzin and stolen his warmth; he needed the heat in his veins.
Plug it in and you’ll find out.
Desire swam into his arms. His nerves cried for satisfaction. He put the twicrys on a desk, moved his aperture wrist toward it...
“Boss!” Bayer stormed into the room.
Mezzin clutched the twicrys. “What!?”
“Shit! One of our look outs says he saw a whole platoon of TEX soldiers heading this direction!”
“Get everyone ready! Why would they target a slaving house, unless they knew weapons were being shipped here?” Mezzin put the twicrys in his pocket.
War. Caught off-guard, it came to him. Like last week, when his bank was raided after the appearance of that masked man. How miraculous his survival had been. There was no question — that masked man saved his life, only after threatening to take it. Why? This was not the time to wonder.
TEX was at his doorstep. A message boomed through the walls.
“Surrender! Lay down your arms and you will live!”
Glass shattered in a nearby room. Conduction burst off someone’s blade. The first shot of war.
Mezzin crouched at the side of a window — glass still intact, sunlight paling through. He closed his eyes, felt the TEX uniforms on his spectrum. There were sixty or so — a shooting gallery outside his window.
He took out his blade and stuck it through the window, shattering the glass, then aligned the shot in his mind. Sun surged through him and shot off his blade.
Blood exploded; a faceless soldier’s chest turned to char.
One.
Response fire brightened the room and burned the walls. Mezzin dashed into the hall.
Already, death filled the house. Sons lay limp beneath shattered windows, searing torrents of energy ripping through the air. With no command or control, it was fight for your life against the surrounding horde.
Bayer crawled toward the basement stairwell; Mezzin followed. Some of the houses, which were more likely targets, had tunnels networks. Not this one. A last stand then?
There were eight of them holed down there. Mezzin scanned his surroundings — over twenty soldiers on spectrum inside the house.
“Nesmith sold us out,” Bayer said.
“Nesmith?”
“He’s out there with the soldiers! I knew something was up, I should’ve acted sooner. Too late. We have a chokepoint here, we can take ‘em.”
Forget about Nesmith. Am I going to die? Shit...
Mother. Fear welled in Mezzin’s throat. Mother — even though she’ll live, her despair will be permanent. When she finds out I’m dead, when I don’t come home...oh Nur, what have I done to her?
“No...we should surrender,” Mezzin couldn’t believe his tongue.
“Surrender?” Bayer said. “The war has started, every man we kill furthers the cause. Surrender? You’ve lost it. Whoever wants to rot in a TEX prison camp, let me kill you first.”
A flashbang scathed Mezzin’s eyes. He dashed for a corner of the room, where he could curl up and protect his face and body from death. Milky light draped the ends of his vision, but somewhere infinitely far a black singularity stirred with the ambition of worlds. It spoke to him.
I am the Deliverer. Will you take my promise?
He saw the words as if his heartbeat was the rhythm.
Take my promise and protect what matters to you. Pave a new path in the history of your people, one that leads to true justice and a free life.
Mezzin saw the world in his mind’s eye. The Keldanese flag flew — seventeen silver suns. The slums became heaven. Vineyards and gardens adorned every home, and high trees shrouded the people from the sun’s heat — as if Paradise descended on Keldan.
Make it happen. Do you take my promise?
And he saw Mother, walking again, and there was a shadow behind her: Father. He put his arm around Mezzin.
Yes.
The twicrys, he rammed it inside his aperture. Fire lit the world and his blood. His eyes became spectrum; targets pinged around him; he yearned to make them disappear.
On the spectrum, blood spattered and became blue in concentric circles around red spots of death. He picked and chose dots at will, annihilating one after the ot
her. The canvas was blue now, dots of red drowning in its sea.
Twenty dead.
He was the effortless filler of oceans.
Thirty.
His brush painted blue onto the sky, bleeding red on the other side of the canvas.
Forty.
A brush of steel and silicon grew out of his mangled arm, each twitch a ferocious strike.
Fifty.
Each strike colored dozens of souls red. Red-shifted to hell.
Sixty.
There was one dot left. He didn’t want to drown that dot. Mezzin opened his eyes and found the only man left alive here.
“Nesmith, why?” Mezzin pointed his blade-arm at him.
He would be next to feel death’s edge. Mezzin’s broken arm had become smooth sharpened metal, transfused by the Promise.
A soup of blood and the stench of bodies surrounded the man. The old coat was cool beneath a red sky.
“Why? Is this really the time to ask? Just end it, you monster.”
“You betrayed us, the worst sin of all. Why?”
“I did it, because they said they would cure my daughter,” Nesmith said. “They said she would live a good life. They said she would be perfectly fine, as if she never suffered. They said they would pay for her surgery, and get the best doctors, and let her live in the Settlement, and I just wanted her...I just want her to smile again. More than anything else.”
“Even more than our dream?”
“What does a free Keldan matter if my daughter, my only daughter, isn’t there with me to see it?”
Mezzin thought of a girl he’d never known in a hospital bed, her bladder just removed. She looked like the tea maker’s daughter and smiled like all was well with the world. She made a peace sign and said, “Free Keldan.”
“I understand.” Mezzin closed his eyes. “I understand everything.” And he felt the sun in his soul, and his arm became red lava, and the spectrum rained blue, and there was nothing left alive in this place. And now he had to bring this death to many more places.
CHAPTER 13
THE OPENER
Kav woke. Everything around him felt soft, fluffy, like bathing in stuffed animals. That’s because he was actually lying in a pile of stuffed animals: mountain gorillas wearing t-shirts with pink hearts, on a surface rocking atop waves. The ruddy Keldanese sky beamed through the windows.
He picked up a gutted mountain gorilla. Jewels poured out its stomach — twicrys grains the gorilla must’ve swallowed.
Hiding the stuff in shipments of toys, standard smuggling tactic.
For the first time in recent memory, he felt fresh and free. A twicrys occupied his aperture, providing the heat he needed. Blue and red coursed his veins in a circuit of life.
So, whoever brought me here put a twicrys in me too.
After performing the Time Service test to confirm this wasn’t another dream, Kav climbed off the boat onto the pier of a black beach. No noise but waves and wind, and no presence but a small figure sitting on the shore. Saina?
It hit Kav; the wind was green, blowing emerald sand off the surface, exposing the black kernels beneath.
Lucent Winds...I’m in Kerb.
“I’m home.” He went to see what Saina was doing.
She played with the sand, heated it with her hand, and conducted and created a small glass sculpture. She’d dug holes around her, exposing the multi-colored layers of the beach: black, emerald, ruby, turquoise.
“This is insane,” she said. “If this beach were a cake it would be so tasty.” She sculpted a glass ball of mish-mashed shards. At least it was colorful.
“Tasty?” Kav grinned. “Someone is hungry.”
Saina took out a roll of bread and lamb and offered it to Kav. Just looking at it made him cringe. As if his body didn’t want food, as if light was all he needed.
“You eat it,” he said.
“Nuh-uh, don’t be like that. You haven’t eaten, I was saving this half for you, so you better have it.”
“I’m not hungry, not at all.”
He sat beside her and let the dark sand blanket his feet. She played with the ground, struggling to sculpt something of note.
“Hmm-hmm,” Kav observed.
“Something you want to say?”
“There’s a whole branch of art for what you’re trying to do, one I’m quite learned in.”
“Oh? Guess I’ll defer to your expertise then.”
Kav stuck his hand in the rainbow earth, then arranged the colors in his desired pattern. Eyes closed, he felt the texture of the sand, then formed the structure in his mind.
He collected the light; it raced through his veins, into his hand, and the sand glowed and sizzled and built until he had to stand to control what he was creating.
It stood there, almost life-sized: a three-legged camel.
“Wowww!” Saina jumped to her feet and gaped. “A green three-legged dog with one white horse hoof and two black cow hooves. Make another one!”
“Dog!? Cow hooves!?”
“It’s not a dog?” She grinned. “Maybe it’s a chimera. A dog-horse hybrid!”
Kav could no longer see the camel he made; now it was a dog-horse hybrid. “A sad mix. I ought to put it out of its misery.” He wound his leg to kick it.
“Stop! I like it! It’s cute...in its own way.”
He obeyed and rested his foot on the inexplicable sand. Kerb sand. What ruins lay beyond this beach? Kav didn’t want to know. “Saina, how’d we get here?”
“Shar brought us here.”
“Shar?”
“After you passed out, Shar found us. He said he’d been looking for you, and that a war was starting, and that me and you should get as far away from Hyseria as possible. Then he said he had business to attend to and left.”
Kav imagined being asleep on that little boat with a never blinking Shar watching over him. “Yeah? What a nice guy. Too nice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I get this weird vibe from him.”
“At least someone cares about you.” Saina’s irises sank.
She looked like she wanted to pick up the deformed glass dog-horse. She touched it, then darted her hand away. Fresh sculptures stay hot like sizzling meat.
“I’m taking requests!” Kav said. “What would you like?”
Saina’s pupils were made of ruby sand, playful yet sad. “Oh! A, umm...a scorpion!”
“Scorpion? Why out of everything in the world, cute kittens, adorable ponies, questionable three-legged dogs, do you want that?”
She kicked up sand and smiled a cinnamon smile. “Well, back home, whenever we would go out, all of us, and we’d come back home, there would be scorpions at the doorstep, and the girls would be terrified, and Uncle or one of the boys would kick them away. And it’s funny there were so many but I never got stung!”
“Wow,” Kav said. “What a marvel.”
“Except one time, my cousin, he tried picking one up, and it did sting him, but it was one of the bigger ones, and they’re actually less poisonous than the teeny tiny ones. We had to rush him to the clinic. He was so scared, but he was alright!”
Her smile died. She must’ve realized that her cousin wasn’t alright, that he wasn’t anything anymore.
“Things will get better, Saina.” It was all Kav could say, though he didn’t believe it.
She smiled again — sweet and sad. “What about you? Shar said this is where you were born. Does it feel good to be home?”
To be home?
“It’s just a patch of land. It’s not home. Home is...that time, those people, those moments. And that’s all gone, as if it never was. And I know I can never go back, because time doesn’t go back for you, it just pushes you out of the way and doesn’t give a damn.”
Grains of emerald and ruby flickered in Saina’s hair. “So, what should we do? Shar said to get as far away as possible.”
“We can go...to Necia. I’ll easily fit in there, and you won
’t be that out of place either. I’ve always heard it’s beautiful and clean, no war in Necia.”
“Yeah! I know of a really cool place in Necia, my teacher told me about it. An island called Kaysr. It’s a resort island, a lot of royalty there. There’s no city, just beaches and gardens and fish, and lots more fish.”
Kav didn’t like the idea of being near royalty. But fish...
“Let’s not wait then. We got a boat, so let’s go! I can navigate these waters, shouldn’t be too hard.” Kav scratched his head. “Although, Kaysr is on the northwestern edge of Necia, closer to Hyseria than Kerb, so we’ll have to cut through the Deep Blue. Shouldn’t be a problem if I avoid the shore.”
Saina nodded like she believed him. Kav put his hand in the sand, wrote a design in his mind, and let heat mold the earth. It was all ruby red this time, with emerald edges: a tiara. Sapphire in the center — the crown jewel. Of course it was really glass.
Saina giggled. “What’s that now?”
“It came out just the way I wanted. It’s hot so don’t touch it yet. It’s your crown!”
She shook her head, as if to hide how much she liked it. “It’s pretty...but honestly, really lame.”
“Time for your coronation.” He put it on her head. Its redness was dull compared with her eyes. And for a few seconds, Kav couldn’t stop gazing at them. Saina held his gaze. A tingling warmth filled his chest and arms.
Kav finally looked away. “Let’s get out of here, Mother Shah.”
Today the sky shone blue, as did the sea. But on spectrum, Zauri was red-shifted in the sky. Merv could not understand why.
Just how? How can Zauri be airborne and up so high? She’s not moving laterally, maybe she’s inside the tower? I should never have trusted those thugs.
Lightning cracked the blue, thunder shook the world. Another artillery shot fired in the distance, flinging electricity from the sky to earth.
Merv remained covered; there were others approaching. Ducking under a crevice between two buildings, he heard shouting and running — organized, military consistent.
Soldiers. Must be Shirmian.
