Dusk

by Ashanti Luke

  “Feralynn,” was all Cyrus needed to say, the rest moved between them on its own.

  “You took for granted what you had. What, even after you squandered it, even after you left it behind for your own desires, I could never have.” And now the space between them was filled with anger, and it moved both ways.

  “All this because you were spurned by my wife after I left?”

  “Still, at the very precipice above it all, you fail to see. I didn’t do this because of her. I did it because of you. Ruining her life was just one in a grand litany of sins.”

  “Numerous as they may have been, they were my sins. Mine! Not Darius’s.”

  “Well, you know what they say about the father’s sins.”

  And then a stream of laughter, as bitter as it was unexpected, streamed back at Kalem from Cyrus. “And now you are the blind man who heralds the kettle’s retort.”

  “You twist and wheedle as you always have, but you cannot turn this conversation.” Behind his words was a hint of something, almost like a scent, and one Cyrus knew all too well—fear.

  The laughter from Cyrus morphed into a fire, caustic despite its lack of form, stoked by the ambient shroud of betrayal that hang over both of them. “The conversation turned when you found the vein of gold inside the Scar. You always loved to play the martyr. That’s probably why Feralynn never took to you. Because you could never bring your troubles directly to the man. But the martyr’s robes, this day, are stained with the blood of his victims. Because a true martyr never sees the fruit of his labor; he doesn’t hide away so he can collect his spoils. And therein lies the sordid truth. You didn’t sacrifice my son for something as noble as the honor of my wife. You just used her as an excuse so your liver could drum up the bile and rancor you needed to pull this off. And at the end of the day, what does it amount to? Just more digits on a cred stick. You have always wanted to be Rex Mundi, the King of the World, but you were always too much of a coward. In the scenario where you play the hero, I pay for my sins, but you die in contentment five hundred years ago—and yet, here you stand, alive and spineless as ever, floating around some dark, distant star, waiting to reap the bloody crop you’ve sown.”

  “Well...”

  “Enough!” the force of the word dispelled every emotion that moved between them. “I’ve heard all I can stomach. Perhaps I should have paid more affection to my wife. Perhaps I should have been less selfish, been a better husband and father, but if any absolution for me exists, it will be in the utter destruction of your miserable plot.”

  “The seeds I have sown were in the wake of your plow,” the words were shakier now, the laughter, the hubris, lingering in a past that could not exist here.

  “Perhaps, but when you return to Earth, you will find your field fallow, and me standing there with salt in my hand. Your pathetic plan you’ll find trampled beneath my boot, and finally, Darius, my son, shall have his earth and water. Make haste, little man. Do not keep me waiting.”

  And then they were no longer connected. The sphere folded into itself, and Cyrus, moored by some ethereal cable that had escaped his awareness previously, was snatched back into his lonely body, where, before his warped senses could reorient themselves, he collapsed to the floor.

  When Cyrus regained his senses, Tanner was standing over him. “What happened?”

  “My best friend. My brother. Kalem. He did this to me.” Cyrus’s pupils adjusted to reveal a look of bewilderment from Tanner and Milliken. “The Ark. It’s a communication device, but it seems to link the users’ consciousness without any kind of red shift or time lag. They must have reverse-engineered it to make the Whisper Node.” Cyrus held his head as he stood. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel stable either. Whatever using the Ark had done to him had not quite subsided.

  “Some strange stuff happened on this end too,” Tanner added, checking Cyrus’s eyes to make sure he was okay.

  “So Mundi wasn’t on the other side of that thing?” Milliken asked eagerly.

  “Kalem is Mundi. Always has been. This was all his doing. But it gave me an idea. We take the Apostates back to Earth. They can have their reprieve, and I can have my druthers.”

  “How will we get them there?” Tanner’s perplexed look intensified.

  “The ships under the pyramid.” Cyrus stood now, arching his shoulders to send hollow pops down his re-aligning spine.

  “But how will that stop Mundi?”

  “Mundi plans to emerge as the savior to a starving Earth, bearing gifts of gold. But it is hard for people to starve if they don’t need to eat.”

  The bewilderment in Tanner’s face subsided like the shadow of a waning eclipse, “The Eos.”

  “What use is gold to a man that has learned to live off the light?”

  “But how?” Milliken asked.

  “How do we get the Apostates and the ships together?” Tanner added.

  “That, given our current situation, may be easier than it seems.”

  Torvald saw Cyrus sitting by himself in a dark corner of the compound. Normally, when he wandered off by himself to contemplate, it seemed best to leave him to his thoughts. But today it seemed as if something was amiss, as if whatever kept him going was winding down. Torvald believed that when someone had something pressing on their mind, that once they could no longer take the pressure, they would speak up, but this seemed different. Belligerence kept Cyrus going as much as pomp kept Paeryl—they were things that could be construed as negative qualities, but the fact that they used them to keep the wavering worlds around them on the level made them qualities to be admired, despite not being healthy prescriptions for everyone. Perhaps that was why, despite drastically disparate approaches, they had so much respect for each other. It was most assuredly why Torvald had respect for both of them, even though he may not have expressed it clearly. But here, Cyrus seemed as if whatever fire had burned within him was dwindling.

  “Are you okay?” Torvald asked, kneeling next to Cyrus in the shadow of the promontories.

  “I’ll be fine,” Cyrus said unenthusiastically, continuing to stare toward the side of the crater.

  Torvald smiled, staring at the orange aura over the summit. “You know that day Sifu ransacked us in the Paracelsus?”

  Cyrus nodded wordlessly.

  “You know what was going through my head when I ran into your room?”

  Cyrus turned to face him.

  “I didn’t know what you would do. Hell, I didn’t even know you that well. But something about you told me that if anyone could stop him, it would be you.”

  Cyrus nodded again. He paused for a moment, and before Torvald was about to speak again, he let out a guttural sound. Torvald turned to look at him and words finally formed in Cyrus’s mouth, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Anything.”

  “In Eurydice, when we escaped, you said you froze. What got you unfrozen?”

  Torvald let out a light chuckle, “You know, I remembered something from my childhood, but the clearest thought that passed through my mind, and I’m almost ashamed of it now, was that you were in trouble, and if I didn’t help you, I wasn’t going to make it.”

  Tanner was walking over to them from the light corner of the crater carrying his Bible with a stern look on his face. “I came over here because my ears were burning.” Then he smiled wider than he had smiled since the day cycles on the Paracelsus. “I heard the whole reason you had to land the Paracelsus at half-speed was because you went back for this.”

  Cyrus shrugged.

  “I also heard you took on five Echelon soldiers single-handedly, and that you set yourself on fire.”

  Cyrus shrugged again.

  “Incredibly stupid,” Tanner added with spite, eliciting a scowl from Cyrus, but arresting his attention, “but thank you.” Tanner reached his hand forward to shake Cyrus’s, but when Cyrus accepted his, Tanner yanked him from the ground and hugged him, patting him brusquely on the back. Cyrus felt something warm and wet against h
is ear, but when Tanner finally pulled away from him, there was no trace of it on his face.

  “You seemed a little lost without it,” Cyrus said matter-of-factly.

  Tanner smiled again, wiping his face for certainty. “You know, losing it, may have kept me from hiding behind it. Maybe stepping from behind the duck blind will make it easier to find what I’m looking for. Especially since what I think I’m looking for is me.”

  Cyrus patted him on the back. Torvald looked to Tanner and spoke, “Don’t you turn sacrilegious on me too. I think one heathen in our van is enough.”

  Even Cyrus smiled now.

  Torvald did not smile, but inside he felt his mind at ease. This was still the same Cyrus. Whatever had stricken him in that storage room was fleeting, temporary. And that’s what made Torvald run to that room that night cycle. What got him to fight through Ashan soldiers to get to Cyrus—the only thing that could lift Cyrus’s spirits was the need of others to have theirs lifted. Cyrus, himself, may not have realized it, but it didn’t matter.

  Cyrus nodded, but before he could turn, Cyrus said more to himself than them, “How could Kalem do this?”

  Tanner stopped for a moment and grabbed Cyrus by his shoulder until he raised his head. “You see this,” he held up his Bible, “this helped me through a good part of my life. So did training. But coming from the Scar was the worst I’ve felt in a long time—maybe the worst ever. And you know what brought me out of it?”

  Cyrus looked as if he may have known, but he did not feel like it was his place to say.

  “You did. And it wasn’t with sweetbars and houndshit. It was with the truth. The truth. All these years, I’ve been looking for it, never realizing it was always right in front of me. You were right. We are the truth. No more, no less. And as you say, the only reason it’s so hard to find is because we always look for it where it isn’t.” Torvald could see some of the fire rekindling in Cyrus’s eyes, but it wasn’t enough for Tanner. “Remember, after the shock of it all, it’s still here.” He took his hand from Cyrus’s shoulder and tapped him forcefully over his heart, “so how in Hell to come is what you believe today any different than what you believed yesterday in there?” He tapped him in his heart again with enough force to move his torso, his voice was louder now, bellowing, and tiny droplets of spittle sprayed with each accent. “I understand betrayal hurts, but we ain’t quite at the bottom of this barrel of monkey shit just yet, so hurt or not, we need you. And I’ll be goddamned, you hear me, goddamned, if I let you bow out before we do. So when you get yourself together, you come see us so we can finish this, complete.” The look on Tanner’s face was stern, unyielding, but Cyrus met his eyes. The strength of Cyrus’s own gaze returned as his jaws clenched, raising his temples slightly with each contraction. They stood that way, face-to-face, for a moment that was as unyielding as their opposing stares, and then Cyrus took a short step back, clasped his right fist in his open left hand, and bowed his head. Tanner met his bow, and then, as they met eyes once more, hugged him again and whispered something long-winded and sincere in his ear. Torvald wasn’t quite sure he heard the words Tanner said to him, but he didn’t need to, he felt them too. You may have lost a son and a brother, but you have gained an entire family. Your legacy is in all of our hearts. And we, even through the Cimmerian fires of Hell itself, we will never leave you.

  • • • • •

  The EMD 423 was an amazing piece of technology. No matter how many times Septangle Dagobert Manitoba watched a target pass by unawares while he sat there in plain view, he had difficulty keeping his skin from crawling as he wondered if this one would see him. But they never did. Not even today, when the Apostates stopped four times to scan the area both coming and going. He had been ordered to keep watch over the fallen Earth ship Paracelsus after the salvage crew’s shift ended each DC, and each DC, glimmer mode activated even upon approach, Dagobert sat next to an outcropping of rocks, waiting for something he never expected to happen. But today he was surprised.

  The skiff had shown up so close to shift-change that Dagobert initially thought it was a salvage crew returning to retrieve something. But there had been no chatter on the radio frequencies he was monitoring, and the four men who had emerged from the craft had spent under an hour inside the ruined husk of the outmoded space craft before emerging with several boxy pieces of equipment levied on conveyor lifts.

  They had not dallied, but rather moved quickly and efficiently back into their skiff. On the holomonitor zoom, Dagobert had easily identified them as Apostates from the sparseness of their clothing and the jaundiced tint to their skin.

  They had turned their skiff away from the sun, and had moved toward an outcrop of hills barely visible from this distance. Fortunately for Dagobert, he was able to move his craft in behind them, as with their backs to the sun, the twilight haze rendered his glimmer ship even more difficult to detect.

  Dagobert issued an alert call and began transmitting his telemetry to the Metatron network. He dropped back to ensure stealth, but he made sure to keep the skiff on his holo-imager.

  They were most certainly leading him back to the base of operations that had eluded the Echelon for too long.

  He would receive another vertex for this.

  • • • • •

  It took several evensongs to convince the elders to agree to Cyrus’s plans. Several presentations on the ecologies and habitats of Earth were necessary to get them even to consider leaving their home, however inevitable an Echelon attack was. The prospect of losing the sun once each day cycle had been abhorrent to them, more abhorrent than the potential of predators and diseases that would be alien to their bodies. After considering different regions, and after Cyrus and Milliken gave warning that the climates of the planet might be altered after the Advent, they decided on landing initially in the Fertile Crescent. While they deliberated, Torvald and Davidson prepared the soil processing lev from the Paracelsus to carry the Eos, while Toutopolus, his arm healing but still in a sling, worked with Darius to figure out optimum conditions for the Eos in the ship’s hold. Jang used wiring schemes he phreaked from the Echelon network to plan how to most efficiently connect the suncasters to the ship they were planning to requisition from the pyramid, and he worked with Doree to facilitate the most effective way of transferring the Xerxes and Agamemnon units to the new ship that Tanner had already christened The Sweet Chariot. Tanner spent the time training Apostates and scientists alike with renewed vigor. His original liveliness had returned, as if whatever demons had surfaced in Eurydice had been exorcised, or at the very least, relegated back to their respective cages in the depths of his consciousness. Cyrus himself felt something he had not felt before. For once, he was able to realize an end to all of this. He knew Kalem well enough to know that he would not leave this to this end. He anticipated Kalem would come back in some capacity or another, but he looked forward to it—any resolution to something that taxed the souls of so many would never quite be resolute until whoever was at the helm on either side met face-to-face; there would be no mate in this match unless it was king-on-king. And even though he knew that day would be a dark one, he looked forward to it, because though the light had been reintroduced to him in a way he could never have anticipated, darkness was now an inexorable part of his soul—and that darkness demanded its reprisal.

  As the finishing touches were placed on each of the necessary requirements, and the elders finally conceded to all the terms, Paeryl pulled Cyrus aside one evensong. He was uncharacteristically quiet, but with the lower volume came a candor that was not indicative of him; he was a man who said what was on his mind as far as it pertained to the arid world around him, but he never moved to speak so much about himself—at least he hadn’t before. “It seems for once there is no reason to ask,” he smiled, patting Cyrus on the back.

  “Yes, finally, I feel like we are winning,” Cyrus himself smiled, returning the pat on the back.

  “You have given me something I never imagine
d I could possess,” Paeryl’s eyes were fixed on Cyrus’s, the creases at the corners of them and around his mouth shuddered, but the rest of his features seemed relaxed.

  “What’s that?” Cyrus met his gaze, but was unsure of where the conversation was going.

  “A solution. A goal. Something to win, finally, that might set all this to rest.” He smiled, stilling the wrinkles of his face.

  Cyrus nodded, unsure of how to respond. “Your people are lucky to have such a wise and compassionate leader.”

  “Yes. Yes they are,” Paeryl’s lack of modesty seemed odd, until he gripped Cyrus’s shoulders with both hands and held them there, a lone tear streaking from his own eye, and Cyrus realized he was not talking about himself.

  “But I… I can’t…”

  Paeryl just nodded, strengthening the embrace. “You already have.” He shook Cyrus’s shoulders firmly, and then turned to walk away. But before he walked into the light cast by the setting sun, he stopped and faced Cyrus again. “Our people need only one leader, and that leader is plenty strong. I have decided to stay here, to rescue any wayward souls that may wonder into the wastes of Asha from the darkness of the Miasma. Just as you have done for us.”

  “But…”

  Paeryl just raised his hand to stop Cyrus’s rebuttal, and then he turned to take his betrothed’s hand and stand in the fleeting rays of the orange sun.

  twenty-nine

  • • • • •

  —Dada, why do I have to learn Farsi?

  —Because it’s part of your heritage. You are half Persian.

  —I don’t understand. The whole Uni uses Commonspeak. Why do I have to spend Saturdays in class learning something for no reason?

  —Well, it’s not for no reason. Your mother speaks Farsi. Uncle Xander speaks Farsi. Your grandmother and grandfather spoke it.