by S. M. Beiko
The Brilliant Dark
The Realms of Ancient, Book III
S.M. Beiko
Contents
Part I: Flicker
We Are the Flame
Primer
Task Guard Teeth
The Dark Eye
The Way Ahead
The Last Deer Left Behind
Marked by the Dark
Signal Across the Void
Part II: Flash
These Many Broken Realms
Training Day
Grief Is Always Hungry
A River Frozen Still
Red Song
Zephyr Rising
All Our Precious Undoing
The Unsealed Chamber
A Risk Worth Taking
The Adamant Onyx
Plunge into Shadow
Part III: Corona
Wings and Reunion
The Exiled Archivist
Spark of the New Gods
The Heartwood
Hollow Talk
A Prison of Memory
Wind Dancer
The Only One Who Knows
Strains of Adamant
A Cold, Cosmic Wind
Part IV: Nova
A Sisterhood of Bones
Calamity’s Restoration
These Roots Go Deep
The Conceit of the Gods
Wake and Wonder
Part V: Umbra
This Marvellous Wreckage
Straight to You
Last Stand of the Dead
The Fox and the Owl
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
For all of you — the darkness doesn’t last.
We cast our own light. Tomorrow is a golden sliver that,
once slipped through, leads into a brighter country.
Part I
Flicker
We Are the Flame
Stick the landing.
That’s the only phrase — a dumb one, a desperate one — that clung to Saskia’s brain. She didn’t know who exactly she was talking to in her head, since only stupid people gave themselves advice (so said Phae). But what she was doing tonight was plenty stupid, so she’d take what she could get.
And no one knew she was out here, either. Not the curfew wardens. Not the neighbours. Not even Phae. Saskia was quiet, knew when to watch, when to listen. And you had to be stupid not to know that any authority would be otherwise occupied with what was going down at the Old Legislature. They wouldn’t be for long, and the time to hesitate was over.
Ultimately, Saskia didn’t trust that she’d stick the landing, but as she scampered between buildings up Broadway, under flickering street lights, her canvas bag smashing heavily across her chest, she figured she had nothing else to do but jump.
It was dark. But the dark wasn’t much of a threat to her — and hadn’t been for a long time. Sometimes it felt safer in the dark, considering what the world looked like during the day. Saskia kept her hood up. It wasn’t the dark that worried her, but the cameras. The constant feeds. In the 4,067 scenarios she’d run in her stress-addled brain, she didn’t dare consider anything other than success. There was no alternative.
Saskia flattened against the wall and turned her face away, stiffening — members of the Elemental Task Guard rushed past, grunting under their heavy packs, faceless under their full-helm visors. Her heart sped up when she flicked her head back to see where they’d gone — towards Memorial, which was now called Reclamation Street. She focused on her breath, forcing her pulse to slow, but those cracks of burning doubt crept in. This is so stupid. Why are you out here risking your neck for them, anyway? They wouldn’t do the same for you.
She shook her head, hands diving into her pack at the hip and pulling out the battered tablet. Plastic and steel, the weight of it slightly more reassuring. It made her feel in control. Stick to the facts — and the facts were that she was already out here. If she went back now, she’d just pace in her room until sunrise, knowing she could’ve done something and that she’d chosen to be afraid. No more of that, no matter what they said.
Saskia pressed the power button, checked the time against her wristwatch. Fifteen minutes. A few keystrokes and swipes and the app was up. So were her firewalls, old code that would do better in a pinch than nothing. Her pulse was back up, eyes darting, and when she zeroed in on exactly where she had to go to make this work, it played out in her head as cinematically as it had when she’d programmed this weeks ago.
Now all she had to do was not get caught.
* * *
“I don’t know why you think this is, like, the best idea you could possibly come up with to pass the time.”
Ella’s bottom lip curled at Saskia’s comment, but she still kept stuffing her bag. “This isn’t some game, Saskia. You wouldn’t understand. You’re not one of us.”
Saskia felt the stab between her ribs just as acutely as she always had over the last seven years. Anger roiled up in place of the shame, no matter how she tried to shove it down. “I think I know more about any of this shit than you do!”
“Shut up!” Ella whirled, but this time Saskia could see on her best friend’s face how torn she was. “You don’t get it, do you? You can leave this crummy apartment and be, like, normal. Have a future. You can have all those things that Mundanes want. But I can’t. My Family can’t.”
The two girls jerked at the sound of something crashing in the apartment hallway, as Ella’s bedroom was close to the fire escape and the walls were so thin. A woman yelling. A baby crying. The electricity flickered and went out, but it wasn’t dark for long. The palm of Ella’s hand lit her stricken brown eyes with bright Denizen flame.
“I just . . .” Saskia’s jaw was tight, eyes bone dry. She was upset, but she hadn’t cried in years, not really. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I don’t want to lose you.”
Once, Ella might have put her arms around Saskia, and they would have hugged fiercely, feeling each other’s bones move with their love, but they were older now and knew better, and these days, Denizens should stick together, trust only each other. Mundanes were the enemy.
“If you want to help me,” Ella said, focusing now on her little flame, which was growing wider and wider, “you won’t get in my way.”
* * *
Instead of heading back out into the street, Saskia shuffled along the building she’d hidden against, farther into the back lanes of houses and small apartment buildings crushed against Young Street. Even before the Restoration Project, coming down here after midnight would have been dangerous, but with the Task Guard posted everywhere, especially downtown, especially by the Old Leg, no one dared. Not even errant, Mundane drug dealers. A cat yowled, darting out of the shadows. Saskia froze when it threw her a withering stare before scampering back to the much-safer hole from whence it had come.
It’s just a cat, she told herself, twice for good measure. It wasn’t a f— well. It couldn’t have been that. Not anymore.
But the line from the story leapt up like a familiar friend whispering in her ear. Once upon a time, a girl was followed home by a fox . . .
Saskia shook it off. Pull it together. Across the back lane, she rushed a collapsing fence and vaulted over it, landing shy of one of many huge piles of trash crammed between houses, against chain-link. A quick survey with her watch’s flashlight showed it to be more of the same — charred old tech, probably seized from a Denizen house, decommissio
ned and flung out here to be collected for precious metals and scrapped. The Task Guard didn’t want Denizens to be connected in the ways the Mundanes got to enjoy. Wouldn’t want them to assemble. To think twice about putting their powers to use. Saskia scavenged these junk piles often, their contents filled her bedroom nearly floor-to-ceiling. It kept the quickly tumbling world on some kind of keel.
It kept the shadows quiet.
. . . and after the fox followed the girl home, Death came for the both of them . . .
Saskia bent over, digging the heels of her hands — callused from soldering wires and pinching receivers — into her eyes. Stop. Not now. Her heartbeat was picking up. This was what she wanted, she reminded herself. To be the damned hero for a change. She wasn’t going to freeze up. Not this time.
She took a breath. She counted. She straightened her spine and dropped her shoulders. Not this time.
The cat was long gone, and Saskia was alone in the back alleys of a city she’d never known except under the rule of anxiety. Of caution. Of an undercurrent of fear that she carried everywhere with her. She took another sharp breath and darted from light post to light post, feet quick and legs strong. Just like Barton had taught her, each stride like she was pulling against a current, and somehow, the stronger the bursts, the more her heart evened out. It was in running that she felt him most with her, and though she desperately wished he were here now, wishes were no good to the logical mind even at the best of times.
She’d have to cross Reclamation Street eventually, be out in the open with little protection. Saskia had known the risks, made all the calculations. But she was still more human than all the half-finished devices strewn across her workbench. Machines that had been her closest friends . . . apart from the one she was stupidly trying to save tonight.
Saskia dashed up another side street when she heard nearby bootfalls, more shouts. She crouched, gripping her black hood tight in one hand. She squinted at her watch and then at the app. Not yet. She still had time to stop this.
Saskia’s head jerked up. Quick-checking the map, she was ten feet from the outskirts of the building’s side lanes, the perimeter of cameras waiting for any opportunity to catch her. She ran through probabilities. Getting caught was becoming the likeliest. Stupid brain. She didn’t condemn it long — she’d need every neuron to make this work.
Keystroke. Flick. She realized she was close enough to deploy the code. A sudden rush — she could pull this off from the shadows, be home quick before Phae noticed she was gone. A flush of premature triumph. She —
The explosion rattled the windows of the rundown apartment block she hid beside, hammered the ground. Saskia went flying into a dumpster at her back, though she didn’t land hard enough to do more than knock the wind out of her. Screams and shouting, the heavy, horrible noise of weapons charging up to fire the first sonic salvo. Saskia winced, looking up at the wall emblazoned with an icon that was seared into her eyelids whenever she tried to sleep.
The fox head wreathed in flame, the red spray paint shining bloody in the luminous dark. The face of a girl. A face Saskia knew once, though briefly.
Beneath the icon: WE ARE THE FLAME.
Saskia’s jaw set, and she leapt up on shaking legs, racing into the open street.
* * *
It wasn’t a bomb, per se.
Explosives weren’t Saskia’s style, plus she wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. The Elemental Task Guard may have been at the forefront of the changing world, may have had the right Denizens on their side, and all the tech the nation could muster to keep the weirdos in line, but like people, every machine had a weakness. Every gear or line of code could be outmatched. All it took was one person who stepped back and saw things from a different angle to pull the wires apart and expose the throbbing core.
That was Saskia’s superpower, negligible as it was. But she’d relied on it for the past seven years as if it were a gift from whatever had touched her when she was small and more desperate than she’d ever been. That little darkness that had crept out of the earth and stayed with her — it made her see things more keenly, especially in the dark.
The Task Guard cast its own shadow, especially over school. And after they got what they wanted, their perceived peace after Denizens were outed, they liked to gloat. That was their first mistake. There were so many ETG presentations at school, talking about their fancy tech, their one-up techniques to keep the enemy down.
Even though her classmates often slept through these presentations, Saskia had always listened.
Each guard is equipped with state-of-the-art optical enhancements, utilizing government-sanctioned augmented reality programming, helping them to identify those Denizens who don’t wish to take part in our peace. There had been a sad irony to that. This new regime had invented a Spirit Eye. Death’s patent had been stolen.
But now these devices, little more than contact lenses, could suss out any Denizen wishing to hide their identity. Their power. It fed information back to the guard through the optic nerve. It made things easier for them.
And it certainly would for Saskia.
She made it to the range road — the ring of high-security fencing and military vehicle access roads around what was once the provincial parliamentary building of Manitoba. Now it was an army palace for Task Guard only, hiding gods-knew-what beneath the sprawling complex.
There was still some kind of commotion going on towards the front of the building, likely where the blast had originated, and Saskia threw herself down into the cold, wet grass as another explosion went off. A siren was sounding. She had to act fast.
Her bag was already on the ground beside her, and she yanked out the heavy spikes, their cords trailing thick as her thumbs. She hooked the clamps at the end of them to the posts on the enormous control box, then shoved the spikes into the ground. Atop these were the caged speakers. She turned every dial up, and though the buzzing was low, it vibrated harshly in her shivering stomach. She hesitated only another second before hitting the main button on the huge device.
The sound that the device emitted was like the weapon the Elemental Task Guard favoured — a hand-held baton, shaped almost like a spear, that gave off a terrible smell of ozone before it was slammed into the belly of anyone not cooperating, shocking them to a crumpled pile. Set phasers to stun. Except Saskia’s version put out a high-pitched sonic wave that temporarily shorted out the electricity on the perimeter fence, including all spotlights directed on camera blind spots, and the sirens.
It also left a gap in their digital fence, something Saskia was about to burst through.
Body low, she rushed towards the part of the fence that had been taken out in the blast. The Task Guard soldiers were otherwise occupied at the front steps of the building, and she’d have the element of surprise on her side now that they were shouting, scrambling. She took out the VR visor, slid her finger across the banged-up tablet, and shoved it into the back of her jeans. The firewall was down. Her code was doing its parasitic work in their periphery system and would provide ample distraction for those in the Old Leg’s control centre in the massive dome Saskia stared up at.
The Dome was once the eye of the Owl’s authority, but no longer, the story went on. A lot had changed. But that wasn’t going to stop her now.
Saskia dropped the VR visor over her eyes, slid on her micro-sensored gloves, and lowered into the stance she’d seen her real hero, first-hand, drop into before rushing in.
“Showtime,” she muttered.
* * *
“Get away!” Ella screamed, arms and fists flaring bright with fire, and every time she lobbed a flaming shot at an advancing guard, her elbow felt the kickback of a sawed-off shotgun.
She wasn’t the only Fox still standing, but there weren’t many left after the first bluff. The Guard had known they were coming. That was the risk they always took. She hadn’t wanted it to escalate like this
, or so quickly. They hadn’t even gotten inside, to the chancellor. They were still within the main courtyard. They hadn’t made it very far before the sonic clubs were out, before Denizens had gone down.
Now Ella was trapped, cornered on the huge limestone steps she’d only ever seen through industrial fencing. She’d gone on a tour of the building, once when she was very small and the world had been different. Damien was on her right, but he was coughing up blood, and Ella wasn’t exactly the strongest of the lot of those who had rushed in here in the first place. Clare, on her left, was cradling her shoulder, and when her crisp eyes met Ella’s, they were wet with tears. Ella had never felt more like a kid than at this moment. And she was definitely no Roan Harken.
She wished Saskia were here. To tell Ella one more time that she was an idiot, so that Ella could tell her she was right. And though she knew it would fall on deaf ears, Ella prayed, stupidly, to anyone who would hear: To Deon. To Ancient. To Roan Harken herself. Prayer was futile: the guards charged up their weapons and advanced.
Then the sirens and the lights died. And the Task Guard wasn’t looking at Ella anymore. There were surprised shouts, the blue sparking light of the sonic batons fizzling along with the certainty of their trigger-happy owners.
“What the hell is that?” she heard a guard cry, pointing towards the ruined fence in the murky dark. He dropped his weapon and fled, screaming.
Ella lowered her fists, squinted. They were all looking towards the gates, the ones she’d blown apart to barely make it past the first wave, and the guards were scattering now, terrified. Some staggered, as if struck, and with each blow of this invisible monster chasing them out of their own turf, there was an awful roar, like a house fire, like a howl, and Damien nearly fell down the stairs when they all glimpsed what was on one fleeing guard’s visor monitor.
“Deon?” Clare hissed. Ella caught Damien, and the three of them decided that, divine intervention or not, it was time to go.
