by Nate Crowley
Again and again during the night, she had told herself she had done the right thing; that a mutiny would have cost them their chance to get to High Sarawak, and to finish the journey. That even once they had reached their destination, there would be no getting back past Dust’s army. That there were no lives to go back to. That for the Bruiser, she had only advanced an inevitable end.
But no matter how much she tried, she would not be convinced. Even when she came near to forgiving herself for the Bruiser, the memory of the refugee boats came back to her, and the sight of the Chancellor on College Hill. After a life spent killing, she finally felt like a murderer.
Murderer... The word echoed in her head, as dawn crept over the map in front of her. It repeated over and over, losing all meaning and chiming like an alarm, until she thought she had finally lost her mind. She shook her head, but the noise kept coming, until she realised it really was an alarm.
Mouana focused on the dashboard in front of her, and the red light flashing above the radar screen. There was something approaching Gunakadeit, on the river’s surface, coming from behind at an incredible pace. She frowned in incomprehension—if anything, they should have increased their lead on the Blades during the night. And the object on the screen was tiny, certainly far too small to be an invasion force.
Panic flared at the thought of a torpedo, then became something colder as Mouana realised what was coming. Wearily, but knowing there was no way to avoid what lay ahead, she left the cabin and made her way to the stern rail to watch the mist.
The fog stirred on the black water. In perfect silence, a boat appeared. Mouana hoped it was a vision, at first, and felt a moment’s relief at the possibility this was all in her head. But it was all too real, and so was the figure that sat in its bows: Dust.
There was the general, eyes yellow and unblinking, staring directly at her as she glided forward. She seemed at once too big and too small; spindled and brittle, but folded, as if she could reach out across the water for her at any moment. Mouana found herself clutching at the armour that concealed her execution wound, and watched Dust’s eyes swivel to follow the gesture.
The boat moved to within a stone’s throw of the stern and held there, silently matching speed with Gunakadeit without making so much as a ripple on the water. Mouana knew she should have powered up her weapons, that it was not too late to shout and alert the crew. But she was frozen to the spot, caught in the gaze of the apparition.
“Only you can see me, and only you may hear me,” said Dust, in a murmur that brushed her left earlobe across thirty yards of water. “I have come to speak with you. We may fight if you like, but it will be quick if we do.” Mouana gawped and searched for words, but Dust spoke again.
“I see you have become strong, my champion. It’s pleasing to see, despite all the difficulties you have caused. Soon, when this is resolved, you must tell me of death.”
The general’s words rang out over the water, yet felt as if they came straight into her head, to be heard by her alone. Still she could find no answer.
“I wonder, do you remember when you came to me, in the fourth year of the siege?” asked Dust. “It was the day you were told of your brother’s death, and you asked to be relieved of your duties.”
Mouana did remember, for the first time, as Dust said the words. Her brother... She had just received the letter while Aroha was sleeping off another night at the flasks, and had looked at him after she had read it, a living example of the mistakes she didn’t want to make. She had already missed the chance to make things right with her brother, but she still had a family, waiting every day for the news she was coming home at last.
There and then, despite the drunken warning Aroha had given her about what to expect of the general’s sympathy, she had resolved to leave the Blades and go home. She had crammed her field pack with whatever necessities she could grab before her mind threatened to change, and headed for the command trench.
“Take a moment to remember that day, commander,” purred Dust from the boat. “Indeed, since your memory in death has not proved as strong as either of us had once hoped, I shall assist you in remembering. Remember, and begin by remembering Mīhini.”
Mouana stared into Dust’s eyes, as golden and chilly as the dawn, and her life before the Blades came back to her at last.
Mīhini, her home. Proud and filthy and ancient; the black jewel of the Diaspora Chain, and its toiling industrial heart. Fed from the valleys of sister-world Kotinga, and watered by ice from far Kōpaka, it was a world of smoke and iron and work. An ugly world, but it made her ache to remember it now.
“An irony,” mused Dust, as the memories pooled. “Your very own Tavuto, long before it made its way to Ocean—back when it was still a warship—was birthed in the Mīhini yards.” Dust sighed. “It’s not just you, Mouana. There is so much we have all forgotten. Now remember your brother.”
Henare’s face, and his name, returned to her with a pang of loss. He had loomed so large in her life; how could she have forgotten? But thinking of him now, she had the queer sensation he had never truly left her thoughts. Henare: the ore-man, the hero-miner, stronger than his father before his fifteenth year, but always smiling, and making others smile.
His life seemed effortless despite his endless thirst for work, and he had become emblematic to the home-block. Even as the machines died and Mīhini slid gradually into decline, people like Henare offered hope that muscle and laughter alone could ward off entropy.
“He was why you wanted to leave me,” said Dust, “but he was also the reason you came to me. A glutton for love, you called him. Always the first to be served when the block gathered to eat, always at the centre of the family portrait. And you? You, so bright and so talented, who kept the ancient pumps alive and the mines open even as the world collapsed? You could only ever be his support.”
Dust’s boat drifted closer, but Moana was powerless to react. All of this, now, was too much for her to bear.
“And so you fled to me, my prize-winner. Onboard a shipment of fresh-forged howitzers I found you, covered in coal dust and determined to make a name for yourself. You were barely more than a child, but I kept you on. I would not have done, but you saw to the workings of old Kronos when he fell sick that winter, and you earned your place.
“But you always meant to go home, didn’t you? You never loved the wars, not like I do. You feared them. You hated the life, but you wouldn’t stop living it until you knew for sure you had eclipsed your brother. I admired you for that, Mouana; for what you would do to prove a point.”
Mouana couldn’t stand to hear the words, but they were true. She had never felt at home as a soldier, had always longed to be away from all the hardness and the aggression. But she could not leave. At the end of each campaign, it became traditional for her to write to say she was coming home, then burn the letter.
Time and again she had gone through that bitter ritual, all the way to Lipos-Tholos, the Queen of Sieges. And then, a year in, the word came; Henare had developed the greasy lung, the miner’s plague. He was still walking, but his best hope was to die sooner rather than later, and still Mouana had elected to stay. Her brother was strong, and she knew he might hold out for years. Years in which, if the Blades lived up to their reputation, they might finally take that bloody city. Each day, she had prayed her brother would last longer than Lipos-Tholos, so she could return to him as an equal.
The City outlasted him. Henare had died in a mine collapse, working despite his illness, as the siege entered its fourth year under the Blades. The whole block had turned out for his funeral, and a statue was forged in his honour to stand at its heart. That was the day Mouana had decided to give up trying to outdo her brother, and admitted it was time to go home and make the most of things as they were.
“When he died, you came to me,” said Dust. “On a morning like this, after a storm, you told me at last that you had to leave. You told me my own story, as Aroha had told it to you, in the hope it wo
uld sway me.”
Mouana had remembered Aroha’s warning not to expect sympathy from Dust, and never to mention her past on pain of death. But that morning she had been in the mood to say whatever she felt like.
Dust remembered for her. “You told me I knew how it was to lose a brother, that surely—forced into loss by circumstance as I had been—I would not begrudge you your redemption. That was when we hatched our plan, my prize-winner.”
To Mouana’s surprise, Dust had not been bothered by anything she said, despite all Aroha’s warnings. But she hadn’t for a moment entertained her request to leave. The general had shamed her for wanting to give up. When Mouana had said there was no way she could compete with the memory of a man who had died a hero, she had told her she was wrong.
That was when Dust had revealed the truth about Tavuto, and she had volunteered to die in order to capture it. The long months of training had followed, ending with the vast, staged assault where she, Aroha and five hundred others had been captured. Then had come the mass execution, the blade through the chest that had so haunted her, and then...
“And now look at you,” soothed Dust, her voice like warm honey in Mouana’s ear. “You have walked through death, conquered the unconquerable city, and snatched its prize even from my grasp. You make me proud.”
Mouana glowed at the words, and immediately hated herself for it.
“But I must have it,” said Dust, and although patient, her words were limned with ice. “And if you keep it from me, Mouana, understand that you must suffer after I defeat you. I must make an example of those who would steal from me. However, there is still a way this journey can end in triumph for you. Before my army comes, Mouana, I come to make you this offer.”
“Teuthis. You want me to give it to you,” said Mouana, her words emerging papery and fragile. Dust’s boat closed in until it was only ten yards away, and the general stood to her full height.
“No, commander; I wish to give it to you. I have never offered a traitor a second chance, but today this is what I bring. Because death has made something truly great of you. I see in you not the ambitious fool who went to Lipos-Tholos to die, but something more akin to a partner, a successor... a reflection.” Dust stopped for a moment and took a long look around her, her eyes flickering as they roved over the trees on the mist-shrouded bank.
“Did you know,” she said, studying the forest, “my people were once as soft as any in all the worlds? Our home, the most beautiful of all. Warm and calm of weather, a world of shallow azure seas and bright atolls, white sand and glowing tides. The most peaceful, the most complete, of all the gartenwelten. Our forebears bred synaesthesia into their children just for the pleasure of existing there.” Dust’s eyes closed for a moment, and she tilted back her head as if drinking the air. Then her head snapped back and she fixed Mouana with a glare.
“It died. A munition from the old wars, something even those who fired it had forgotten, so long had it been travelling. And all it left was an endless salt flat, and a scorching wind. Dust was the name of the wasteland, Dust the name of the world. Dust the name of the city that survived, and where we clung to life, bred for joy but with none to experience.” There was something like longing in the general’s voice, and Mouana found herself growing almost drowsy, intoxicated by the rhythm of her words.
“Children there were never children, commander. To feed our parents and thin our numbers, we were sent out to hunt the salt lakes, where the ichthydaimones lived. Pained, hastily-engineered things they were, but lethal quarry for starveling runts with arrows and spears. Those who survived the hunts went on to take the rites, and these you know of.” With this Dust gave her a strange look, and she nodded, her mouth hanging open.
“The cave,” said Mouana, in little more than a whisper.
“Two children, two months in the dark, and enough food for one to survive. And so it went; weeping at first, then bargaining, and then blood. Then more weeping, until all weeping became meaningless, and a certain... hardening of the soul. I came out of the cave harder, and later I took this company as my own. The first thing I did with it was to level that old city, and leave Dust empty at last. I took its name, and this much you know.”
Mouana remembered. Dust’s story had been what changed her mind about leaving—in her grief, she had seen her as a model of strength. To accept her brother’s death and let go of the past, she had volunteered to die, and come through hardened, like the general had done. But now Dust held up a finger, and challenged the memory.
“Of course,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper like the desert wind, “I never told you the whole story. Just as you have done since your death, Mouana, I did something they did not expect me to do when they put me in the cave. I did not kill my brother.”
“Then how did you survive?” asked Mouana, as she general’s eyes bored into her vision.
“I told him we would escape the world together. That rather than staying in the cave, we would travel on foot to the Petrichor Gate, hunting along the way. Together we unsealed the entrance and left, with all the food we could carry.” Dust looked down at the deck of the boat, and let out a scornful, rattling sigh.
“Of course, we had no hope of hunting without weapons, but my poor brother didn’t realise that until too late. He was not a bright boy. Nor was he strong. On the second night while he slept, I blinded him with a stone and bound him with cord. We walked for days on end like that, my brother following behind me, taking sips of water as I allowed it, but no food. When he collapsed, I carried him on my shoulders, and his body kept the worst of the sun from me.”
When Dust met Mouana’s eye again, there was a fervour in her gaze, an elation.
“When the food ran out,” she said, “I began to eat my brother. I do not know how long he sustained me on that walk, or where along the way he died, but when I saw the Gate shimmering in the distance, I dropped what was left of him and ran.
“I was crawling, by the time I reached its pillars. There was no shelter there, and the sun roasted me until I lost my wits, but I knew nothing living could pass a transit horizon unshielded, and so I waited. When vision began to fade, I dragged myself through with my hands, and I felt my heart stop as I crossed the horizon itself.
“I woke, much later, in the hospital of a Petrichor border krepost. And you know the rest of my story, save for one more thing. Much later, when I took command of the Blades and went to raze Dust to the ground, I did it not out of hatred or vengeance. I did it out of love.”
Then Dust smiled, and the sight of it made Mouana gasp, but the general was too lost in rapture to notice. Her boat was right off the stern now, and she stared up, not at Mouana but through her, at the memory of flame. Then her eyes focused, and seemed to pin her to the spot.
“I owed everything to that city,” hissed Dust, fierce as a serpent. “It had given me everything. It had made me who I was. A debt was owed. So I gave colour and feeling back to its people, after so long living in a world that starved their senses. The flames that night were the brightest, the most beautiful things that world had seen in centuries. And as the city burned, I knew it loved me back.”
There was a long pause, and then Dust held out her hand across the water, reaching for her own.
“You understand now, Mouana, what I see in you. When you captured the Teuthis device, you weren’t so docile as to bring it back to me like a dog. You ran with it, to your own ends, as I did with my brother—and you’ve used it to keep going, just as I did with that fool boy. You’ve seen off my army this far, and even now you may see it off for another few days. But you can’t run forever, and this story can only end in defeat for you.
“Give me the device now, and we will use it to build a new world. With the power in that terrible brain, we can raise an army the worlds have not seen since the old wars. And you, Mouana, my pride, will command it for me. Teuthis is simply the mind of animal. With you piloting it, it will be something fearsome—a union of life and death,
a creature of pure will.”
Dust shook her arm, and her voice rang with passion. “Do this with me, Mouana, and let us become history together.”
Mouana extended her hand towards Dust’s, staring into the depths of those yellow eyes. The general was mad beyond measure, but there was no way to look at the situation, no way to make sense of it, other than to accept. She could not refuse. She was just opening her mouth to say ‘yes,’ when she thought of Wrack.
For all that Dust knew, and all she had planned, there was one card still hidden from her. She had called Teuthis the mind of an animal, and hinted at the power it might take on under human governance. She had no idea that awful union had already been made by her friend, or of the suffering it had put him through. Dust had no idea about Wrack.
Wrack who, without her knowing, had become the brother she had missed, and loved, and hated for so many years. And who she was about to surrender to a woman who had blinded and eaten her own. The Bruiser’s accusation rang in her head, and she stood with her mouth open, gaping in disgust that she had even considered the offer.
No, thought Mouana. No matter how slim their chances, and no matter the consequences of refusing Dust, there was no way she was going to abandon Wrack now. She would carry her brother, and feed him, until they had no strength left to walk.
The Bruiser’s words echoed in her head again, as she primed the cannon built into her arm. This is for you, mate, she thought.
“Fuck off,” said Mouana, and shot Dust into the river.
The general disappeared into the water with barely a splash, and her boat drifted back into the mist like a fading nightmare. The shot startled birds from the forest canopy, and their cries brought life back into the world. Back came the hum of cicadas, the churning of the water, the hoots of waking apes; a swell of sound, as if the world had been holding its breath.
