“This is the whole reason we had that map!” Kalia says, from where she’s tucked her head against my neck. “Let us see it!”
I laugh a little, look over my shoulder at Scurv, who is giving the shuttle a once-over. “Would have been nice if someone told us that ahead of time.”
“Jaqi,” Kalia says, and pulls away from me. “Please. Let me come with you.”
“Kalia, I didn’t take Araskar—or Z, for that matter, why’d you think I’d take you?” I knew she’d have plenty of reasons, so I go and cut her off. “Your uncle needs you. Your brother needs you. Stay here. Guide them. The trouble en’t over, not a bit.”
“Jaqi, you can’t even read those prophecies! I—” She stops. “I think there’s something dangerous waiting for you. I’ve read the prophecies over and over, and I think that this is when the Children of Giants—”
“There’s plenty of dangerous things waiting for me on this mission.” I kneel down, pull Toq in my arms one more time, and signal for her to come here as well. “I got you here, all right? Now your uncle and them other refugees are going to need your help. They got to make their case to the rest of the galaxy, help the worlds see what John Starfire done wrong, turn the worlds against him.” Swez’s words come on back to me. “Most folk en’t thinking beyond their next check, and what makes it easier to cut that check. They en’t going to make a fuss if them bluebloods are gone. You need to make them listen, aiya? Make them see there’s more to worry about than what’s for dinner. You been through hell and back. You got words to say.”
She doesn’t answer. After a moment, she says, “Okay, well, promise me you’ll take the Bible.”
She shoves her own copy of the book at me, all ragged with her notes and folded pages. I hold it up, looking between her and this book. “Am I going to ask Scurv to read it to me?” I say. “Come on now.”
“Please take it.”
I don’t want to, but I do. Hell. This’ll be the death of me afore I even learn the words in it.
-23-
Jaqi
“WE RECOMMEND YOU OPEN YOUR EYES.”
“One second now, slab.”
I’m enjoying the memory. Araskar kisses me again, and I groan and moan, cuz that just makes the slack better, and he rolls over, puts a hand in the small of my back, and it’s so good, so sweet, I don’t ever want to leave that room and don’t ever want to leave the feel of his bare skin, of my chest pressing against the scars on his—
“Look, Jaqi.”
“En’t nothing to see.” But I do so anyway.
There, in front of the viewscreen, is nothing.
Darkness millions of light years in every direction, nothing but darkness, filling the universe, a darkness full of things darker and deeper and more monstrous than any nightmare you ever done had.
A thousand suns and planets swallowed up in there, turned into nurseries for those nightmares.
Here we sit. In our stolen shuttle. On a dark node, one of them I used to use to hide out. This node en’t far from Bill’s, in truth; probably about as far from where I grew up as two star systems is from each other.
“I was having a nice daydream, slab.”
“Was it about us?” Scurv has taken to flirting with me.
“Ask again after we done finished this mission,” I say. Scurv en’t a bad slab vimself, but I find I been looking forward to Araskar again. Once life done turned back to normal.
Scurv sits in the co-captain’s chair, and lights a cigar, smells awful foul and probably far against regulation to smoke on the ship. “You going to kill us doing that,” I say, while vi sucks away on the rolled-up stick.
“Which is more dangerous, a smoke, or a jump into the Dark Zone blind?”
“How about both?” I say.
“Ah, that being the case, we are waiting on you.”
I nearly gag on vir smoke, and think about how nice it would have been to breathe real planetside air on the Thuzerian planet, and then I think there’s probably real air on this planet, this TS-101.
If I can only make the jump through Hell itself.
“Okay. So we’ll go.”
This is it. The Chosen Girl going to do the dumbest damn thing she ever done Chosen to do.
I reach out for the node, and pure space pulls at us, and I think on that node coordinate we got for TS-101, and I don’t think about deep, dark space, about a planet-sized face with jagged spurs of teeth and tentacles could squeeze the life out of a gas giant, about furnaces inside them Shir where stolen stars burn, I just think about Araskar’s hand when it traced the bones of my neck, I just think on that, as we go into pure space . . .
And out . . .
Takes a real long time before I open my eyes.
One single star sits in the sky—a good-sized yellow sun, sort of nice normal sun you see in tourist brochures for vacation planets.
All around it, darkness. Not a star to be seen. Nightmares for light-years.
One single planet, green oceans, brown dots of land, shifting masses of cloud, in the darkness, sitting right above us.
One planet, and one sun. Here in the center of the Dark Zone.
“You told me the truth,” I gasp.
“You think we would feed us to the devil?”
I let out a breath so long and ragged that I end up hacking and coughing. Scurv’s lit another one of them smokes, and vi’s staring at the monitor.
“That’s it, it is. We were there a year, trying to get into the temple.” Vi leans forward, programs a set of coordinates and landing information into the shuttle. “And now we go back.”
“What makes you think we can get in now? Think it’ll be any different?” I ask.
“We have the Son of Stars with us, ai?” Scurv takes a long drag off the smoke.
“I en’t no Chosen Thing.”
“Do not disparage our faith, Chosen Thing.”
We fly toward the planet.
A thousand years of fighting in the Dark Zone has produced a ring of debris, orbiting far out beyond the planet where a moon would be, had this planet a moon. Instead, a silvery thread runs through space, bits of wreckage miles apart. The sensors speak, give me a running list of what’s out there, what’s settled into orbit here in their mechanical voice. Metal and plasticene. And organic matter. Bodies, the sensors explain. Dead crosses, a good million of them, forming a ring. No danger to us, as space is big and we’ve got a good sense-field.
I’m flying past the wreckage of ten thousand Shir battles.
“Sobering,” Scurv says. Vi reads the screen, even though I’ve set it to read the relevant material aloud to me. “Says there’s about a billion corpses out there. And them only a fraction of what’s died in the Dark Zone over the years.”
“Makes you realize why old John Starfire got so popular.”
Scurv finishes that stinking cigarillo. “The people see what the screens want them to see, aiya? The Empire hid these deaths from folk. John Starfire hides those miners from folk. What will your Reckoning keep off the screens?”
“Nothing, ai, and you can put that lip right out the airlock,” I say.
Scurv just laughs.
Well, vi was an asshole in most of them holos, if I remember right. Didn’t lie about that.
But the Reckoning en’t going to have dirty laundry to hide. The Oogie of Stars has decided on that.
We enter the planet’s atmosphere. The heat of reentry swallows the ship, and then suddenly we’re in the rushing wind and wet clouds of upper atmos, and then there’s a dark ocean beneath us. We reach the coast of a big landmass; it’s all wild, tangled forests of big black trees, clinging to the rocks, wide muddy river deltas, not a sign of a sentient-built thing in sight. Kind of planet folk dream about finding, a place untouched by thousands of years, where life’s taken a new tack.
Except no—I start to notice a few shapes, under the trees. I think I see a bit of a wall, and a tower, but they’re eaten by vines, and crowded with flying things, and screaming ani
mals bellow from the woods around them.
“What do you reckon this was?” I ask.
“If we interpreted the words we read right, this was one of the first outposts in our galaxy.” Vi pauses to take another foul breath off that nasty smoke. “Terraformed by the First Empire, during the golden age of Jorian and human. This temple, where we take you—we cannot be sure, but we think, inside there, might be a node to Earth.”
“That’s crazing talk, right out of myth.”
“Is it?” Scurv says. “Do you not feel? Part of us is still cross, and we feel it.”
Scurv says it, and then I realize I can sense it. And it’s—oh hell, it’s music. Just like Araskar done talked about. Soaring music, furious music, notes like I en’t ever heard, and at the center of it all, that song my mother done sung, the one I heard when I healed Z. Bend, pull, bend, pull. Just a field song, but so much more. Wrapping around me, swallowing me, just like when I held that sword over Z, just like when I pulled that node toward us outside Shadow Sun Seven.
“And here it be.”
Jutting out into the ocean, connected to the mainland by a causeway, is this massive complex. There’s a wide round wall around some sort of building, definitely a Jorian building, crystalline glass and steel rising in layers, one on the other. The spun-glass that indicates a Jorian structure, but bigger, more complex than any I ever seen, woven into a metal structure. In a circle around the walls, standing in the ocean waves, are thirteen crystal statues, each of a figure, holding a soulsword out into the sky.
Each one wears armor and a helmet the likes of which I en’t imagined; all curves and twists, like a living thing. Each one has a face like they done seen the most beautiful of all things the galaxy has to offer. Now these folk look like Sons of Stars and Special Oogies.
“The first Jorians,” Scurv says.
“That’s them?”
“That en’t nothing but stone-glass, but that’s what they looked like. Here we go.”
We land on the causeway in front of this place, and I step out. The atmos smells fresher and finer than anything I ever smelled; it’s wild and thick with the salt air of the ocean, and I smell a bit of a sense-field, something protecting this temple.
“We tried to find a way in for ages,” Scurv says.
Together, Scurv and I walk up to the temple gates. They’re covered with plants, half torn down, but I see the sense-field, sure enough, and it’s a nasty, buzzing thing, sort of thing meant to kill anyone trips and falls against it. The lock sure looks like it’s a thousand years old. Just a scan-box, set into the wall, with a plasticene cover gone cracked and half crumbled after so long.
“Made to scan the right sort of DNA,” vi says. “Try sticking your hand in.”
“You think it’ll just open for me? That’s crazing.”
“Is you the Son of Stars, or isn’t you?” Scurv asks, the lit smoke trailing from vir mouth.
All right, then.
I stick my hand into the scan box.
Something groans, and the apparatus roars, and the sense-field vanishes.
Well, shit.
The temple stands open to me.
That—that damn near proves I am this chosen whadyathink. Who’d have imagined such a thing? It’s crazing, crazing Dark, and don’t that seem more apt than ever.
“We go inside?” I say. A rotted pathway, covered in roots and shrubs, leads up to the building. I step in—and the sense-field pops back up, between Scurv and I.
“Aw, hell!”
Scurv groans, and pulls out one of them pistols and shoots, but the green shard just breaks to bits, scatters across the field, and vi shrugs, says something I can’t make out over the buzzing. I look around for some lock that’ll undo the sense-field out here. Nothing. I reckon I need the main controls, in the building.
Separated from Scurv. Vi’s on the other side of the field looking like a lost kitten.
Vi yells things I can’t make out through the field. I shrug. What can I do? I look around for some way to deactivate the field from in here, but I reckon that when this place was people it must have been keyed, and them controls are in the main building.
I turn and walk to this temple.
Didn’t think Scurv would make a stupid mistake like that, getting locked out.
After picking my way along the overgrown pathway, I get finally to a curved entryway, which leads me into an antechamber. There ought to be plenty of animals and bugs in here, if I understand planets with real matter, but that sense-field done kept them out, so it’s overgrown with fungus and vines, but at the end of the chamber, there’s another door and—
The music rises. Triples, roars, beats at me like something physical, knocks me to my knees. My eyes water. My mind’s gone mad, gone empty, and I hear Z’s voice come floating through, each word carried by a surge of music sounds like it comes from a thousand-instrument orchestra.
The Starfire is the fuel that burns in pure space. The original Jorians could touch it, and did great miracles with it, and made the nodes so that the other races could spread across the stars. Humans grafted their idea of a God onto the Starfire, but it is an older, greater force.
When I can see, I see light pulsing from the chamber beyond. Light, moving in time with the music. And I walk toward it—or maybe I’m carried.
And then I’m there, and I’m in the light, and I see—
“Come to me.”
“Mama?”
That’s my mother! She’s smiling at me, showing them big teeth I remember, and her dark skin is shining with a sheen of sweat, just like it did after a long day picking in the fields—“Mater, that’s you!”
I reach out for her, but I touch only music. The notes sift through my hands, dance along my arms up to my ears.
“Come to me.”
“Papa?” There he is, with that curly, gray-touched hair, that broken tooth showing in his smile—he never told me how he done broke that tooth, did he?
“Papa, Mama, I thought the Empire done shot you off the side of some scow! You’re here! You’re alive! I knew you had a life, I knew you mattered.”
Papa reaches out to embrace me and—I touch only music. Notes swirl up my reach, swirl around my mind, scatter at my feet.
The light wraps around me, and then suddenly, it lifts away from me, and I’m standing here on a thin walkway, in a vast, empty chamber, reaching far into the earth, music roaring in deep, vibrating rhythms around me.
“Mama, Papa?” They’re here? Did I walk into some kind of heaven? “Answer me!”
They reappear for a second, formed out of swirls of music. And now they’re looking at me funny. “You’re her,” they say together.
“Of course I’m her.” Am I crying? I can’t tell. “It’s Jaqi! You done—you done come back! I waited. I waited for you to come back. I waited at Bill’s, for so long, and he told me maybe you was all right, but he didn’t reckon so—”
Oh, how I waited, how I wanted to see them come back in through the airlock doors.
“I waited for you to come,” they say, together.
And somehow their faces change—they’re almost my parents’ faces, but they swirl together, and it’s like a vast, whirling set of features, formed of swirls of music—a face that could swallow a whole planet—
I stagger back. This en’t my parents. “You’re the devil!”
The music shifts, moves away from me, a living thing now. I waited for you.
How can this be? How can I be here, in this music, with my parents, and I see the devil? “You’re the devil?”
Not the devil.
It en’t lying. This thing—whatever it is, it’s is one of them devils and it en’t, as they was just cold and whispering voices, but this is whole soaring suites of music, music that’s hit me hard enough to see Mama and Papa alive again, even though I know they’s gone for good.
And suddenly something changes. The thing—whatever it is, whether it be Shir, music, my parents, this thing that’s t
rying to talk to me—it runs, disappearing into the darkness below me, and the music fades in my ears, and I’m left standing on the walkway, and I’m facing—
I’m facing a man.
I don’t know him, but he’s familiar. Where’ve I seen this scab before? A brown beard, peppered with gray, an arm gleaming with a little bit of the steel-and-synthskin that was in Araskar’s leg, and a soulsword. His hand clutches and unclutches the soulsword.
I know this scab’s face. I seen it—I seen it somewhere, on the news—
No.
“Not the devil you know,” says John Starfire.
* * *
To be concluded in:
The Starfire Trilogy Book Three
Memory’s Blade
Acknowledgments
The second book is a real mindf*ck, to quote the philosopher.
Again, huge thanks are due to Beth Meacham, editor of editors, for light but firm guidance in all matters of this trilogy, and to Sara Megibow, agent of agents, for getting it out there. Big thanks are due as well to Katharine and Mordicai at Tor.com for publicity, and Beth Cato, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Wendy Wagner for cover quotes and signings. SPACE BUGS!
Once again, a dump truck of THANK YOU to Langley Hyde who read a very early draft and wisely told me how to BIGGERIFY the space adventure to have more and more adventure, more verve, and a better character journey. The cool parts are all her fault, y’all.
Thanks to the friends who’ve kept me sane during the Battle of the Trilogy, with special credit to Effie Seiberg, Jessica and Brian Holdaway, Cory Skerry, Sean Patrick Kelley, Joey Elmer, Rebecca Mablango-Mayor, and my wonderful coworkers and students at Northwest Indian College.
All credit and love to my family, starting with my father, mother, brothers, and sisters, who have been constant supports and sounding boards. Most love of all to Chrissy, Adia, Sam, and Brigitta, whose love burns so bright I can’t see without it.
About the Author
Photograph by Chrissy Ellsworth
Shadow Sun Seven Page 20
