CHAPTER FOUR
Jei
There’s no sound in space.
But inside the needlecraft, there were tinkling dings as tiny bits of rock and ice bounced off our hull. There was the hum of the biosupport system. The soft beep of the onboard computer. The rustling, as I shifted my weight, of the plain clothes I wore now instead of the uniform that constantly reminded me how painfully I’d lost my rank. Our breathing: her, the rebel too off-script for the rebels, and me—whatever I was, now.
Louder than all these sounds echoed the words I’d said to her last year. We might as well be there now, bathed in the burnished-orange glow of the underground tunnels thick with the sweaty scent of clay as the bomb vest wires slipped under my fingertips and my jaw gnashed on the acrid meal of certainty that she’d joined Diebol and he’d double-crossed her anyway and I was surrounded by her lies, Morda’s lies, bloodseas, lies from Njandejara himself, it felt like, as my self-hatred for caring bored through my midsection while I filking saved her life anyway, and the longing to punish her for starting it all just slipped out between my bitter lips.
Last year.
I was the one who told her the heat death secret she wasn’t supposed to hear—who turned her vision of herself from hero in waiting to villain in embryo.
“Can you?” she asked me now.
“Can I what?” I turned back to face her. I wasn’t going to help her remember this.
“Handle me. If things go sideways.”
This wasn’t her standing challenge to spar, eyes sparking like the red mace that used to twirl over her wrist right before our boots hit the forest floor with a blast of earthen scent and flying leaves. Her eyes now stared dead at the wall as she slouched in her seat, chin in hand, brooding far too much like our mutual archenemy. “I asked Cinta,” she said. “It was true, what you said. That I’m supposed to end the universe somehow.”
I forced my shoulders to stay loose and my face assured. “Lem—I’m definitely not in a place to question your relationship with Njande, or with your adopted brother, but to my understanding, all that stuff’s kind of vague, right? You run the risk of making it self-fulfilling. The point of the story was to bring you closer to Njandejara, keep you from cracking, so what if it’s a metaphor? An internal universe?”
“A metaphor would be a shyte thing to get tortured about.” Her grumble was muffled in her fist. “Cinta lost his claws over it.”
“Maybe you don’t understand what your internal universe is worth,” I answered.
She almost scoffed—I saw her consciously hold her breath to stop herself, and the uncharacteristic cynicism perturbed me. Her eyes stayed on the wall; her mouth still hid behind her cupped hand as she leaned on her elbow.
“Diebol believes in the heat death,” she said finally. “Bricandor’s finding a way to make it happen.”
Heat flared in my tone. “Diebol is a liar, and Bricandor? The old man talks to himself, and lets his top officers kill each other off in the name of ‘moral natural selection.’ Bricandor is literally insane.”
“And yet over and over again he’s eons ahead of Frelsi diplomacy, sucking planet leaders into his orbit with the gravity of his mere personality.” With a flair of lavish vocabulary, again more like our mutual enemy than herself, Lem sat up and met my eyes. “Jei, he’s got pacifist educators preaching kid-killing—people who won’t even raise a shoe to squash a bug.” She pointed behind us toward the mined-out hollow planet. “There’s this whole parents’ rights movement on Beryllia right now where young civilians think it’s progressive for parents to euthanize kids who might be Contaminated. Or disabled. Or just inconvenient to career goals. I don’t think you realize what a feat of mental gymnastics Bricandor accomplished to pull that off. You have to really know how to package this mercy killing shyte to make people believe it, and that kinda manipulation requires a solid grip on reality. He’s not crazy.” She pulled a data chip from her pocket, and slapped it into my hand. “Look at this.”
I turned the chip over in my fingers. Hmm. Civilian made, one of the newer models about the size of a fingernail, with silvery-blue lining, and four prongs. I snapped the small compatibility viewer off my wristband—couldn’t plug unknown chips directly into the Frelsi network—and slipped the chip into the viewer.
An image appeared on my palm: an educational grant document, addressed to Beryllia’s top education officials.
“The Growen want to fund hands-on material science engineering classes for youth?” I narrowed my eyes. “That’s awfully charitable. In exchange for what?”
“In exchange for nothing. No strings attached. Look at the terms. It’s not weapons research. But look at the curriculum.” She motioned with an upward jerk of her chin, and I scrolled down.
“So—they want people to dig for large crystals.” I tilted my head. “With … very specific neodymium impurities.” The skydancing warrior who now haunted my dreams used to use her mace’s neodymium crystal to focus her abilities. We all did it, but no one quite like her … I shook my mind back to now. “You think they’re upgrading the Stygge super-soldiers?”
Lem shook her head. “Nah, they can make neodymium laser cores for super-soldier maces from any industrial ore, and look! They’re asking for intact, natural neodymium crystals. There isn’t even anything in the curriculum about YAG doping.”
YAG—yttrium aluminum garnet—was the sister compound to neodymium in the crystal cores of most lasers. Aside from industrial magnets, Nd:YAG crystals were the only practical neodymium use I knew.…
Lem pointed at the document displayed on my palm. “This is a huge amount of money just to find naturally-occurring neodymium crystals,” she said. “And it’s not just Beryllia. Online there’s a surge in bounty hunters and treasure-seekers looking for precious gems with neodymium impurities. And I happen to know the Frelsi are monitoring another Growen search for something that sounds a lot like these same crystals on Forge.”
I tapped my finger in the center of my palm to copy the document, then squeezed the compatibility viewer to spit the chip back out into Lem’s hand. “I get that you’ve been reading hunter forums, but since when do you know about Frelsi missions I don’t?” I asked.
“Since they hired bounty hunter Lark Scrita to escort a clandestine Frelsi operative to Forge yesterday,” Lem said.
Ah, that made sense. I’d never quite gotten a read on Lem’s relationship with the Bont lizard mercenary, but I knew they had an understanding that involved a lot of sharing. Lem gave me another upward nod: “When was the last time Command wanted something so incognito they wouldn’t send their own special forces?”
“The Spaces Treaty, Lem,” I answered. “They can’t have our guys getting caught in Uncontested Zones, you know that.”
“So why didn’t they send you? Don’t give me any bull about disgrace or treaties. You’re cheaper than a civilian mercenary, you still do illegal retrieval missions for them all the time, and here they trust you to take out an entire city’s worth of Growen opposition on your own.” She leaned in, her eyes on fire. “No, Jei, the last time they brought in the Ebon Shadow and Lark Scrita it was because you and I were not available. You were AWOL, I was Growen. For whatever reason, for the purposes of this neodymium mission, they can’t trust you. Wonder why?”
I leaned back, chewing my lip as my fingers tapped on the leather of my pilot’s seat. She waited while I finished her analysis: “You think Bricandor’s building something that will focus and amplify someone’s powers to accelerate the heat death of the universe. You think Frelsi Command has reason to believe that someone is you, and that I’m too close to you to trust.” I shook my head, but made sure to keep my tone kind. “Lem, I’m sorry, but you’re neither a god or a devil to these people—if they really thought that, they’d be hiring someone to assassinate you.”
She became much smaller now, her knees tucked up by her chest. “No, I know. I don’t think they know it’s me. I think they know Bricandor’s doing something weird, and they’re trying to figure out what it is. And I think they left you out of it because they think it has something to do with electromagnetic powers, and after last year, they know what people like you, or Sterba, can do when pushed.” She swallowed. “No one suspects me. I don’t think Bricandor even knows it’s me. But if the trail does lead back here … if it looks like I’m going to ruin everything …” Her big eyes seemed to glow in the dim light, focused on my face with painful earnestness. “I need you to take me out.”
I wanted to shake her. They weren’t delusions of grandeur—not coming from someone who’d foreseen the Frelsi nightmare last year—but—shyte, this was premature. “Lem, you don’t know what kind of super-weapon he’s building. We can look into your theory, but I’m not going to kill you before you’ve done anything wrong.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m just asking—”
“You don’t need to ask, then.” I looked outside for a moment as my face heated. “After last year you know damn well I’d take you out if I had to.”
“No. You saved me from the bomb. Even as your enemy.”
“That was Njande, not me,” I said.
Njande. His name on my lips lit up my mind with a memory from an ancient text—where two or more are gathered with my name, I am there. I’d invoked him. Summoned him, if you could “summon” a being that existed outside of the timeline, around time, even—like a feathered cat curled around a toy. I couldn’t feel him anymore—after last year, I couldn’t even hear him—but he was here, and the tightening in my chest softened with a solution to Lem’s angst.
“Lem, Njande already told you how to get around this whole issue,” I said. “Just stay close to him. That’s it. Maybe it’s not that dramatic, anyway. Maybe there was some tiny action from you that was supposed to set in motion a bunch of other actions toward the end of time, and since you didn’t give way in the interrogation center, that future’s already changed—no more heat death. Either way, you can just stay close to Njande. Should be easy enough, right?”
She … didn’t answer? She fidgeted, dropped one knee, and looked back at the wall.
Shyte.
It shook me that she didn’t find this easy anymore. Her confident love for her invisible one was so core to her identity that it’d annoyed me in the past. And now? It was as if the sky was wondering whether or not to stay up. I gripped the back of my head. “Bloodseas, did I do this, or did it happen gradually while you were on Beryllia?” I asked.
Her shoulders slouched. “I just … I’m not convinced Njande wants me anymore. And …” I recognized a faint hollowness in her eyes as she turned back to me. “Something else does.”
I laid my chin down on my crossed arms. Shyte, I knew Lem had been plagued by a dark interdimensional force while working for the Growen, but she hadn’t mentioned in our distant communiqués that it still haunted her now. “That what you mean by the weight of the Growen uniform still on you? Heavy?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. But on Beryllia everything’s muffled. Like by believing it enough, the population’s willed the ba-eaters, and Njande, all far, far away, almost out of existence. So now instead of a pounding voice from the Accuser, it’s just this constant vague thought that maybe I’m the enemy … like I was supposed to take up Sterba’s cloak or some shyte. Stupid shyte. Like Njande hates me.”
“At least you can still hear Njande,” I said. There was no bitterness in my voice, but she cringed now.
“You haven’t been able to fix it?” she whispered.
“Even went with Cinta to one of the Biouk healers.” I wasn’t angry about it, just … sad, like I’d sold all the color in my vision and all the music in my ears for a cheap win, and now couldn’t go back on it. “I think there’s a genetic component. The Admiral stopped hearing Njande over thirty years ago.” I still didn’t call my biological father dad. “He was always kind of against me hearing. Like tolerant, when I came out to him about it, but like he knew it would just be a phase. I think there’s a deformity in the part of his brain that picks up theta waves.”
“Theta waves?” she asked.
“When you meditate, or pray, or you’re in a deeply relaxed state of mind, you give off theta waves. That’s how you connect with interdimensionals. You know how Diebol thinks Njande wants to use our brains as a portal to enter and destroy our universe? The theta waves are the energy frequency he thinks Njande will use.” I smiled, and shook my head. “I’m surrounded by crazy people with apocalypse theories, and I might be the one with the actual brain problem.”
“I’m … so sorry.” Lem looked down at her boots now. Oh, Lem. Emotional, hyper-readable Lem.
I reached out for her shoulder with a soft punch. “It’s okay. It’s why I’ve been memorizing those ancient texts like crazy now. I can speak to him through them. It’s like getting a letter from a friend, in another time.”
She leaned into my fist, and dropped her head on my forearm with a sigh. We were quiet for a moment.
“It’s good to see you again, man,” she said. “We’re gonna get you hearing Njande again, I promise.”
“And you’re not going to destroy the universe,” I said. “Not even a dent.”
She chuckled, and finally looked like herself again, crouching on the chair as she nodded toward the compuwall behind me. Her eyes blazed with excitement over a dangerous, toothy grin. “All right. Enough talk. Show me how we’re going to take revenge on the city that ruined your lady’s life.”