The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  Solomon shot her a look over his shoulder. He, too, looked fevered in his own way, pale and sweating. But he somehow managed to smile at her. Saskia wondered if it was an apology or a goodbye.

  “They won’t get far,” the chancellor was saying. Saskia needed to get higher, too, but she’d have to go another way. She watched them curve up to the right, so she would have to go left, get to the other side of the core. She saw a scaffold there above her, hanging over the empty void. She hoped the chancellor was too distracted to notice her, and judging by the rant pouring out of him, he was.

  “Disloyalty on every side. Don’t any of them understand? You do, Rathgar. You’ve always understood.”

  The sirens abruptly shut off, but Grant didn’t seem to notice. “Lochlan,” Solomon said, carefully using the name. “You seem to know something more. The gate hasn’t changed. What do you —”

  “But I’ve changed,” Grant said abruptly, as they were getting closer to the control bridge. “I’m going to go through and prepare the way. It’s what I was built for, what this machine was built for.”

  He let go of Solomon and slammed his key in, and Solomon did the same. Their hands were poised to turn the Apex on as the readout panel told them the system was at eighty-five percent.

  “I can’t let you do that,” Solomon said, though there wasn’t concern in his voice. Only defiance.

  They just needed to turn the keys. C’mon, she thought at Solomon, just do it!

  Suddenly Solomon backed away from Grant, towards the railing that looped around the Apex, his head blocking Grant’s view of Saskia. Even with this block, Saskia could see that Grant had drawn a weapon. Saskia ran, full tilt, the last few metres that led to the scaffold directly across from them.

  “You are rather predictable, Grant. I don’t need to be a mind reader to anticipate that,” Solomon said, voice raised against the rising noise of the turbine at his back.

  In a handful of strides, Grant had the muzzle of his gun pressed into Solomon’s cheekbone. “I should have lobotomized you when you offered yourself to me seven years ago.” He smiled. “But you did serve your purpose well. I don’t think you needed to be a mind reader to know I was going to kill you today, either.”

  Solomon shrugged, as if his brain wasn’t seconds from being outside his skull. “I don’t intend to convince you otherwise. If you really want to leap over and see if your precious machine will do what it’s built for, be my guest.”

  “I think I’d rather test it first with you. Hindsight being what it is.”

  Grant backed up a step, the gun still trained on Solomon. A cold mechanical voice spoke: “Apex ready to engage.”

  “You creatures with your fraught attempts at self-sacrifice,” said Grant. “You can’t even go to your precious afterlife. I suppose I’m in the mood to know why, then, before I tie up this loose end. Why you didn’t try to save your own skin.”

  Solomon let his cane go, and it clattered to the metal grate. “Skin is just an illusion when the spirit is willing.” The grin was evident in his words. “And you’re right. I will get no rest in death. But I’d rather go now, knowing the one thing that you could never rip out of my head.”

  Grant pulled the safety free, the gun charging noisily. “And what’s that?”

  “That you’ll finally get everything you wanted. And then some.”

  The trigger pulled abruptly, and Saskia saw surprise flare on Grant’s face, as if he hadn’t pulled it. Solomon’s body tipped over the railing, and Grant lunged for the panel, engaging the keys with both hands. The machine was on.

  She watched Solomon sail quietly down into the void, but she hadn’t done her part yet. Of course he wouldn’t go through. But now, standing on the precipice, her hands moved on their own as she placed the Fractal, heavy with the Onyx, back on her head.

  The chamber sang.

  Grant, leaning over the railing, watched Solomon disappear into the black. The sparking noise and electricity turned bloody and were resolving into a crimson circle. His sharp face split wide with horrible glee. “Yes!”

  Then he looked up to the scaffold across from him and saw Saskia, staring at him, mouth open, the crown about her head making a song that was a searing, matching red to the portal that had just unfurled below.

  “No,” she saw Grant mouth. “No!”

  Saskia glanced down, one foot poised to push herself off, like from a diving board. She felt a shiver at her back. Engulfing her were thousands of moths, unified and ready, even if she wasn’t.

  The Onyx crackled. The noise was a powder keg going off in her head, and Saskia jumped.

  Part III

  Corona

  Wings and Reunion

  Time is much more savage in small increments. The nights are wrong. The days hold too many opportunities. But inside the mind, consumed by memory, there is no time. And that was the only blessing.

  In the margins of the work he and his mother undertook — sorting trauma, zigzagging into each other’s lives in a faraway world — Eli wondered, even if the realms were in harmony, did time in the Roost matter? Phyr’s duty was to make sure the trains ran, but no one said anything about such a god keeping any time for herself.

  Finally, one day — which could have been the next day or a year later, for the devastating scope of retracing the wreckage of his entire life — Eli opened his eyes.

  He felt his heart. Felt his blood. Touched his face and felt hair there — a beard, something he’d never fathomed — and it was thick, and the fingers that sorted it were bony but strong. He was still alive, still in his body, still himself.

  “I’m proud of you.”

  Demelza shimmered before him, a filmstrip with a few frames cut out. Her bright piercing gaze was full.

  Eli rubbed his eyes, sensitive to the light as if he hadn’t ever opened them. The migraine was so magnificent he was certain he’d been lobotomized. Then it was wiped away, and he inhaled sharply. “How long . . . ?”

  He felt his mother’s shade move beside him, but he was transfixed by the sky above, the dark ring of Owl shades revolving above them as if on a wheel.

  “Without Phyr to manage time, I can’t say.” Demelza’s voice was threaded with concern. “But a long while. The realms below are different. And your friend is different in them.”

  Eli jerked to see what she meant. “Different how?”

  The landscape was still speckled like a spilled-over map, dozens more dark obelisks peppering the distant treetops, the steppes beyond the trees . . . had the forest canopy thickened?

  Different didn’t matter. Roan did. She was still alive.

  Eli stood. “Then it has to be time. It has to be now.”

  As it hadn’t in so long, the wind touched Eli’s skin, but it felt papery, unreal. He’d take what he could get, though, letting the gust curl around his wrist, over his fingers, holding it gently.

  Demelza reached for him, and he let her. “Grief is never truly gone, though, only managed. It’s my fault you had so much of it to carry. I’m sorry, Eli.”

  Her hand cradled his face. He shut his eyes and felt lighter. “You won’t remain, will you? You’re . . . fading.”

  He had seen it, when they’d shared a mindscape, how she’d waited here for him, watching his progress, brought to pain by it, but determined to help him. Before the stones broke, she could have been reincarnated — whatever that meant to Denizens — but she’d stayed here. Now her intentions had run their course.

  She smiled all the same. “The dead can rest idly for only so long. But my time, as this” — she ran a flickering hand over her stretched shadow form — “is done. A spirit is only energy, after all. What made me can be redistributed across the universe. Perhaps not now. Perhaps when the imbalance is corrected.”

  Eli turned for the edge. She moved behind him like a whisper, and her fading hands grasped hi
s shoulders.

  “And what if it isn’t corrected?”

  Above, the swarm of shades had stilled.

  Nothing can last, Demelza said, into his mind this time. But energy can’t be destroyed. Neither can love.

  Her tone became more urgent. Find your friend, and do so unburdened, she said. You have too much life left to spend it with the dead.

  The blood-crusted claw tracks down Eli’s back felt fresh and burning as Demelza’s fingers plunged into the old wounds. He grunted, vision spotting.

  Shades came down in a torrent from above and behind, and her voice was in his head again. You are ready to let go.

  Eli’s foot slipped, and he tipped over the edge of the Roost, a thousand dark wings blooming as he hurtled down.

  * * *

  He fell long enough to see, to plan. The air rushed by and the realms below came up so slowly, as if he were falling for decades.

  Eli’s mind was open, and it felt a new kind of sore, like something only just born and raw, open to the whistling air.

  It hurt. It was freedom.

  The dead would not carry him for long, though. There’d be time to revel later, he hoped. Demelza was using the last of her power, her energy, to make him these wings, and the other Owl shades had helped accomplish this, too. But it was a Cinderella curse with a countdown.

  Find Roan. It was the only plan.

  Eli was a missile, a shard of atmosphere slicing. Please still be alive, he begged. He was a freight train, a nosedive, falling fast, falling forever. Fall faster, dammit.

  He broke a sound barrier. The incoming canopy shuddered, splitting. An obelisk sang by him like a skyscraper. The wings of the Owl shades, a part of him but not him, flapped like a hummingbird mid-decibel shift.

  The ground soared towards him.

  “Faster!” he screamed at the Owl shades on his back.

  A falling star. A roar — distant. Too close.

  Brace for impact. TKO in the ground.

  Eli forgot to gasp.

  * * *

  She cocked her head, fingers tangled in the undergrowth as the quake rocked the sediment. Shades scattered, but not hers, not those that followed her loyally and had made themselves almost a part of her shadow.

  They were Foxes. They waited.

  This wasn’t the usual quake. An impact wave raced visibly for them, and she stood as it crashed into her, never faltering. It made her laugh.

  Once the ground stilled, the echo of the blast left in her hardened flesh, she pointed her body west, to a wall of dust in the distance rising higher above the wilderness where the black streak from the sky had made landfall.

  From the trees between her and the thing that had hit the ground came the same blood-curdling howl she’d been tracking since morning.

  “Looks like you have competition, Mistress,” said the Rabbit shade at her ankles.

  Lowering her helm over her eyes, all that could be seen of her face was the grin. “You know how I love a race.”

  She took off across and into the trees like fresh-fired buckshot. The shades bounded after her.

  * * *

  Eli stared up at the lip of the crater he’d made.

  “I’d appreciate some new material,” he grunted, mostly to make sure his voice was working.

  The Owl shades were long gone. You’re on your own, their absence said. With any luck, he wouldn’t be for long.

  The air down here was hotter than it had been in the Roost, light above blaring from a red-cloaked sun. Eli imagined a newly terraformed planet waiting for him beyond the crater as he raised his arm to shield his eyes. Dark blotches above circled then vanished from sight. The powerful scent of resin, rotting leaves, and the cones of Jurassic-looking evergreens clogged the back of his nose.

  Eli rolled slowly to his feet in one piece. “And that’s three points from the Russian judge . . .” He must have really gone loopy if Harken’s jokes were coming out of his mouth.

  He flexed his fingers, rotated his shoulders. He felt . . . remarkably fine. Likely the time spent meditating in his mindscape had allowed old injuries to rest, allowed his body to heal — but he could still break anew at any given time. There would be more threats down here than above.

  He gave one last look skyward and raised his hand, wondering if Demelza could see him. He cast his mind out, but it was too far to reach. He just had to believe she could hear him, wherever she’d gone, whatever she’d become. Thank you, Mum.

  Enough of that now. He exhaled and took stock. Luckily, the crater was only slightly taller than him. He held out his fist, pumping it like a blood donor with shy veins.

  “Come on . . .”

  The air shifted slightly. It threaded around his limbs, weaker than a breath but better than nothing. Feet sliding apart, focus sharpening, he tensed his back. All he needed was a boost —

  “Yes!”

  The wind pushed him up and he went clumsily over the lip of the crater, scrambling through a somersault on level ground.

  With a grunt he staggered upright. “Phyr on a flamingo,” he snarled. He felt flabby, out of shape, like he had been as a novice squaring off against the Owl-raised children at the Rookery.

  Square one was not a good place to be again, but it was all he had.

  “Fine,” he said, dusting himself off and surveying the terrain beyond his landing’s wreckage. “Let’s see what we have to work with.”

  He was indeed in the woods. The trees were enormous, a cathedral of trunks reminiscent of redwoods, sequoia. Trees that, on Earth, worlds away, would be a thousand years old. For all that they blocked the light above, the ground steamed from buried vents. A ripe stench came up with each burp of vapour, and Eli covered his face. Some other nasty smell lurked deeper in the woods, downwind.

  He took a step aside, slow, trying to move into the shrubs for cover. There were animal sounds around him and chirping above, but he couldn’t take the chance of staying in the open. The farther he walked, the deeper cold doubt burrowed in. He truly had no idea where he was, or where he was going, or if there were environmental mechanics he could depend on.

  A newly terraformed planet, indeed.

  He plucked his shredded clothes away from his skin to try to keep cool, the sweater clinging to him with the oppressive heat, his bare toes grinding into layers of stabbing pine needles. He didn’t get much farther, though, because close by, in the thick conifer growth, something roared.

  Bare feet be damned, Eli remembered how to run.

  Ducking low under twisting branches, crashing through brambles, Eli chanced a look over his shoulder and saw trees bowing and breaking in half as he was pursued. He couldn’t see what was coming for him — all the better. The sound alone, a choked gutter-shriek through a mouth like a whistling hole, was enough to make him surge ahead, legs burning.

  Luckily for his legs, but not for the rest of him, Eli stepped directly off a steep hill and the world tipped over.

  He came down hard on his bad shoulder, sky and ground a spinning cavalcade, coming to a pitiful crumpled stop covered in new scratches, debris, and half of his body submerged in foul, too-warm muck. He lifted his head, and spread behind him was a bubbling, reeking bog.

  Get up! he screamed inside. He tried, untangling his long legs out from under him, caught in a net of mud and panic. He made it midway onto shore, then he went still. He canted his head to the crest above him to see that black and bearing down on him was a huge garbling shade. A Rabbit.

  But barely — its body writhed like an anemone flicking in a current. A wave of red dots opened, hundreds of eyes and puckered mouths in the sludgy body. A king rat–Rabbit amalgam all tangled together. Its many ears, huge like trees themselves, shivered, sloughing back, stirring ground matter around ten razored paws.

  Eli tensed once before he got back up, the mud sucking at his feet, unable t
o take his eyes off the abomination. Crooked trees above circled the creature’s head like an unholy diadem.

  The bog was at Eli’s back, the hill in front of him, and no way around, either. He’d been down in this horror show five seconds, and he was about to die? Really?

  He pulled himself up in one swift, defiant movement, then held his arms out and howled. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted, giving the last of his fucks. “Come and get me!”

  The beast opened its many lamprey mouths and screamed again. Eli planted himself stolidly in the filth as the monster leapt.

  Then something split its head clean in half, like an axe through the face.

  Eli gaped.

  Whatever had done the job had come at great speed from behind, a mass made pointed spear-sharp by a long blade held in front of it. The black muck misted from the impact. Then the point of the blade ripped up, and a body behind it unfolded, sending a hand out to grab at the beast’s tumbling body before it, swinging backward onto the head and clenching the ears like reins. Two legs stretched, standing tall on the neck as it fell faster, and Eli dove out of the way when it landed clean in the bog where he’d lately been standing.

  He caught himself on a fallen log, turning to see the beast’s killer still taut and ready, their back to him. He tensed as the creature popped under the hunter’s boots, screeching waves of shadow streaming out of the mouths. There was nothing left of it but loose, sagging skin, still enough to use as a raft in the wallowing muck, sinking slowly.

  All of this, and the hunter themselves hadn’t moved.

  Eli let the air out of his lungs, a mix of gratitude and shock. The hunter, drenched head to toe in steaming black blood, turned their head towards him at last.

  No eyes, just dark holes. The head was misshapen, too; then he realized it was a mask, or a helmet of some kind. Their body seemed human, and in one hand, at the ready, was a sword, dripping.