by S. M. Beiko
They all emptied out from the chamber towards the stairs. Saskia lingered, staring at that red ring that, crudely drawn as it was, spoke of a promise.
One she was going to have to break.
The Adamant Onyx
Chancellor Grant startled awake the moment the plane landed back in Winnipeg. He wasn’t one to sleep through a night — it was when he was most productive. He had been writing feverishly in his journals. I feel like I have to get back. Back to the Apex. I feel like we’re close now. And once the door is open and Denizens are gone, the moon will be stopped, and I’ll be the hero now and forever.
It was childish but the notion had put its hooks into him. The clarity to his thoughts was overwhelming, sonic, like he’d been delivered a shot of adrenaline straight to his brain. It was a message. Today, Project Crossover was going to work. All he had to do was turn it on. All he had to do was walk through. And it would be his great legacy.
The U.N. meeting had been just an impression of order in a world thrown, as usual, into chaos. But Grant had their unyielding support now. Do what you can to get rid of this damn moon, they’d said. He’d smiled his promise. All his work had been for something. He’d known that before they did.
In his airplane seat, he stretched, thumbs digging into his eyes. He’d had a dream, and he was trying to grab hold of it before it slipped away. He’d turned on the reactor. It had worked. Before him shone another land, one he was destined to conquer.
There had been . . . someone else, and a black stone. The door had shut . . .
No. The dream was gone. An aide came by with today’s briefing on a tablet. He flicked through. The sun had barely risen. Grant stood, pushing his way through the private plane as he bundled his coat on, tucking the tablet into his breast pocket.
Mi-ja was there, holding an umbrella at the bottom of the movable stairs as they walked together to the car.
“I want to see Rathgar as soon as we arrive,” he said. “I want to test the Apex within the next two hours.”
Mi-ja didn’t blink, but faint uncertainty creased her brow. “Sir? The team hasn’t yet completed the receiver —”
“I don’t care,” he said, waving a hand, though of course it was all he cared about. “Make it happen.”
They got into the car and didn’t speak again as it moved across the city towards downtown, towards HQ, and towards the blessed future.
* * *
Solomon stood at the back of his testing facility, the white room where he had spent many years screening for potential traitors.
The door was to his back. He had to be ready to do this, but, most of all, he had to prepare to face his son, if he was still alive. Or face the reality that he wasn’t. He hoped at least Eli had managed to wake Ancient, wherever he was now. All Solomon had to do was hold the door open for Ancient, and their hopes, to rise.
Solomon brought a hand around and opened his fingers, looking down at a pocket watch whose opposing face held a faded photograph of Demelza. Bright, lovely, unforgettable. She had done everything to push Solomon and his ambitions away. She’d been correct. If he’d never gone after the Moonstone, or thought that imbalance could be corrected by the forces that had caused it in the first place, they would have been a family, the three of them. That should have been enough. Eli would have known how much he was loved, and it would have kept him safe. And Solomon could have destroyed the stone and protected Demelza from the madness it caused in her. All the choices he’d made had been the wrong ones. He would pay for them forever.
Solomon slid the watch into his pocket. This time, things could be different. The choice was his.
He sent his mind out across the roving labyrinth that was the Old Leg. He found her quickly; Saskia’s presence vibrated with a monochrome melody, edged in scarlet, but much more balanced than the last time he’d been in her head. He didn’t question this change.
Are you ready? he asked her, but he knew that she would be.
She seemed to flinch, but he felt her nod. I’m just going to my lab. I need to run a few diagnostics against the Quartz. Meet me there in an hour, and we’ll use your clearance to get to the Apex.
Solomon chuckled. The girl had seemed so fragile at first, but she had put herself right in the thick of things. He knew why she was risking so much. Love was a powerful motivator. Solomon knew that without having to read anything in her head.
“Sergeant Rathgar.” The voice was coming from the communication panel in front of him, the image of Mi-ja blooming there abruptly.
His heart skipped. “Yes, Lieutenant?”
“You’re requested upstairs immediately,” she said. “We’d like to run the Apex this morning. Please bring your reactor key, and we will all go down together.”
Upstairs? To the parliamentary offices? Solomon wanted to reach out through that communication, but if Mi-ja was already in those offices, they would pick up his prodding frequency. He’d need to go and to see what this was about.
“Yes, all right.” The comm went dark, and he snatched up his cane, moving as quickly as he could.
Saskia, he sent out quickly as he went up the corridor, something has changed. I will still see you in an hour. Please be ready.
She sent a feeling of alarm back to him but added, Okay.
As Solomon ascended from the labs and into the parliamentary space, he cursed inwardly. Nothing could ever be simple. At least this created the opportunity to see Mi-ja, who had Grant’s reactor key. He’d only have a moment to slip into her mind, suggest she give it to him, and be on his way to Saskia’s lab, then the reactor. Time might still be on their side.
The guards outside the last door at the end of the hall nodded and muttered “In unity,” as Solomon passed. He raised a hand at them. That there was a guard contingent meant someone important was inside. Someone Solomon dreaded seeing, though he wasn’t set to be back for another day, couldn’t —
Mi-ja admitted him into the room, her trademark welcoming expression thin as she turned, and standing at the window was the chancellor, his jacket slung over the desk as he buttoned up a fresh shirt. Beneath his shirt was the reactor key, its twin hanging heavy around Solomon’s neck.
A snag if ever Solomon dreamed it, and he should have.
“Rathgar, good. A pleasure as always.”
The furthest thing from a pleasure, but Solomon inclined his head. “You’re back early.” He kept the tartness out, but barely.
“No rest for the wicked,” Grant replied, slinging his tie around his neck and knotting it neatly. “I’ve read the engineering reports. I imagine you have, too. My ingenue has been hard at work.”
Saskia.
“Indeed,” Solomon said, unable to search for her up here with his mind. If she did as she was told, she was still in the labs. Time ticked away. “No results yet, though.”
“Oh, I have a feeling there are some,” Grant said, and Solomon’s guts twisted. “Anecdotally, the rest of the staff have reported her working industriously on her own. Many are bitter about it. Which means she’s onto something. I want the both of us to meet with her, and I’m giving you full access to pull whatever you can out of her if she’s non-compliant.”
Solomon felt like he was going to snap the top of his cane off. “Are you sure that’s wise? Is there proof she has made any kind of remarkable breakthrough?”
The chancellor slung his jacket on, grey and black with a white starburst, winking with its many medals and patches of service. “We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we? After we meet with her, the three of us will go to the Apex. I have a feeling today things are about to change. The world, after all, is depending on us.”
The world. Of course. Solomon bowed again. “For the greater good.”
They made their way down. Solomon wouldn’t have another chance to warn her until they were in the lab corridor, barely outside of where Saskia currently
was.
He realized, suddenly, that either he or Grant would have to die today to make this work.
* * *
Saskia ran the diagnostic as quickly as she could. Solomon’s urgency had scared her, but luckily she had been here early enough to get everything set up. To get started on what might either be an abrupt end to her involvement, or just the beginning.
The plan was simple, and the group had gone over it before parting ways from Cecelia’s house this morning. Saskia said a tense goodbye to Phae, Natti, and Jet, all of them promising to see each other later. “I’ll even bake a cake,” Phae had said, somewhat desperately, and Saskia had laughed, knowing the cake was a stretch; Phae was a terrible baker.
“Take care of everyone while I’m gone, Jet,” Saskia had said to him, ruffling his hair. Ella had tried to say her own kind of goodbye, but Saskia wanted to get away quickly and hardly relished the quick hug before running off.
Phae hadn’t given her any last advice, but she’d told Saskia enough through the years she’d been in her care. So as Saskia looked the device over, preparing to add the Quartz to its prescribed notch, she thought of all the times Phae had talked of her journey to the Glen.
“It was important that I remembered myself,” she always said. “What made me, what brought me there. It was seductive on the other side. It made you forget home. It made you want to stay.”
Remember yourself, Saskia repeated in her mind, in Phae’s voice, and it steeled her for the work. Solomon promised that things would be all right. Saskia knew everyone would be breaking at least one of these promises by day’s end.
She was already breaking a fundamental one, right now, in this lab, as she adjusted the stone in the device she’d built.
She had piggybacked on the principles of the Fractal, the crown that Solomon had used to manage his psychic ability, or his “Owl frequency.” Based on that, then the signal and Denizen powers were all frequencies, which would run through the harmonizing Quartz, could be quantified, read, and managed. Like any line of code.
She would run the recorded signal that the Apex provided through the Quartz, and hope the result opened that terrible Bloodgate. She could do all this with the tablet she’d been running all her work through, patched against the ETG network so they couldn’t pull any of her work from it. They’d notice that soon, though. Luckily it was all about to be brought to bear.
She checked her watch again, as she had frantically the last hour. The final diagnostic was running — it would later time the release of the signal into the stone, which was wired and strapped into the Fractal, still a crown, but easier to manage this way. Part of the signal, or the song, or whatever it was, was inside of Saskia. Maybe her mind, maybe her soul. The stone would resonate against that fragment of sound, the last piece of the puzzle, and when Solomon, with the stolen second reactor key, turned it all on, she would jump headlong into that void, because she was the only one who could.
He probably knew she’d try this. Hell, so did Phae, probably. Both of them were trusting her either way. Saskia had already broken Phae’s trust, and badly. She’d be discovering, any time now, that the Quartz was missing, but it’d be too late.
Saskia was glad Phae wasn’t going to see her doing the exact same thing Barton had, but she was going to succeed. And she’d bring him back. She had to.
In any case, the Quartz, shining black inside the sock she’d wrapped it in, was not the Quartz anymore. It was something else. Saskia had done that, too. The crack that once divided it had been made whole. It didn’t shine; it sucked the light in and appeared flat and strange. Less a quartz now, more an onyx.
The diagnostic blipped and Saskia stared into it, thinking back to last night.
* * *
Saskia had spent too long, after everyone else had fallen asleep in the Owl-protected dorm, trying to figure out how she was going to get through the fire door.
Ella had opened it earlier. After that, Natti had blasted her way through, and a Rabbit from the Cluster gathering had repaired it. Saskia didn’t have any means of opening it, and she wasn’t about to involve Ella, who slept soundly now on the other side of the room. She had to do this herself. She was already getting used to that.
She had to trust that whatever was inside of her would help her now.
Saskia touched the basement’s back wall, and it glowed red. The sigils asserted themselves in the cold mud brick, but she didn’t read them. The door opened, and she went down alone.
The ring in the floor had been pastel, a crude sketch. Only a shadow of the potential. She knew what would happen if she crossed it — one ring turning into three, interlocking. Unmoving. So far.
At Saskia’s back, the Moth Queen sat. Her little moths flickered towards Saskia, then banked away, uncertain.
“You were offered help from your human companions,” she said. “What kind of help do you seek here?”
Saskia didn’t turn, just faced the rings. “Yours. Theirs.”
The Moth Queen’s thorax crunched as she shifted. “You wish to repair the Quartz. But you can’t. It must become something else.”
“How?” Saskia did turn, then, holding the stone between them. That it could help was only a theory. It was, after all, broken.
The Moth Queen’s many hands passed over the Quartz in a swerving pattern, like they were weaving, but the stone resisted. “It is the heart of a god. That god is still inside there, but they cannot come forward. They need help.” Death’s eyes flicked up, and the sound was a thousand lights going out at once. “You know that Fia made the Darklings.”
Saskia nodded slowly. “And Fia’s heart, the Quartz, is the key to the Brilliant Dark.” All of it was falling into place, but there was still a knot, a question unanswered, and no god alive to speak about it. Why did Fia make them at all?
There were three others who might be open to chatting.
“If I call down the Darklings” — Saskia couldn’t believe her own words, the plan forming grain by grain — “can they repair the stone?”
The Moth Queen picked up the Quartz, then, tenderly, as if it were one of her larvae. “I can put part of myself into the stone. You can have the blessing of Death, which you will need, in a place where the dead rule.” She passed the stone to Saskia, and it was ice cold. “The Darklings do have a power that may help you. And since their mark slumbers inside you alongside mine, they may provide it. You pour all of their influence into the stone, too. It becomes a part of you no matter how separate you keep it. Just know that such a thing cannot be undone. Just know that there is a cost.”
There always was. “But helping me might assure their destruction. How can I convince them?”
All of those devastating eyes neither offered guidance nor tried to stop her. “It is your choice.”
Going back would help no one. So Saskia stepped forward, across that drawn red threshold.
At first, the room was still. Then all at once it felt like a magnetic field was blooming. The floor vibrated and the red rubbed markings disintegrated on the black stone, which flashed and shone as if it were new, a blank slate.
Then, crimson light, and surrounding Saskia’s feet now were the three rings, interlocked and rotating around her, the intersection. The Moth Queen hadn’t stirred. Saskia lowered herself slowly to the floor, Death at her back, and possibility at her front.
She placed the Quartz down on the ground before her and waited.
The piercing wail was in her head, and she covered her ears as if that would help. She flicked her gaze on the Quartz and saw it shiver. Then, in the shadow accumulating before her, something separated from the dark. Something . . . alive.
“I call . . . you to my name,” she stammered, unsure how exactly to address this thing that had come when she’d called — and come so easily. “I call you down to speak with you. To ask your help. Under the watch of Death and by the mark y
ou’ve given me.”
The figure before Saskia resolved. She was afraid of what, or who, it might be, and what they might do to her. But, as she’d seen when watching Seela speak with his infernal parents from across the void in his summoning chamber, the Darklings couldn’t harm you if you called them. They weren’t corporeal. They were the dark moon in the sky. It was basically FaceTiming . . . with the void.
This Darkling looked like a horse, its neck stretching up and out, body reposed sideways on its haunches at rest. It held its forelegs before it, ending in hooves that glistened like metal. Hair hung lank from its face and body, and it had no mouth, but its green eyes were striking.
Zabor was the snake. Kirkald had many human hands and a wicked grin. Balaghast, surely the one before her now, was the most mysterious and, Saskia always fathomed, the least harmless because they couldn’t speak.
There was an edge to those green eyes that said otherwise as they swallowed her whole. But she didn’t move.
“Thank you for coming,” she croaked.
The Darkling tilted its head.
Saskia held out the cracked Quartz. “Do you recognize this?”
Balaghast stared at the stone, then reached for it, their hoof passing through the stone like vapour. They made a sound like longing for the god that made them.
“What do you wish to ask?” the Moth Queen intoned. “Ask it now, and lay out your terms clearly.”
Right. A deal. Saskia cleared her throat. “There are no gods left. Their hearts are broken. You came tonight because you recognize me, don’t you? Or something in me.”
Balaghast inclined their head respectfully. The red rings seemed to pulsate, strobing a heartbeat.
Saskia made sure to catalogue every detail in the Quartz as it was. It was a broken thing, and beautiful, but of use to no one as it was. It, like Saskia, needed to change.
“Your monsters recognize me, too. There are more monsters like them, in the Realms of Ancient, aren’t there?”
