THE FIRE PASSED, leaving a trail of blistery embers irritating the back of her mind, a nagging itch Daggeira couldn’t scratch. In the scorched wake of hours . . . of days . . . spent in the delirious agony of every buried secret and every ragged nerve laid bare to merciless alien scrutiny . . . she slowly returned to herself. Even with the harassing irritation lingering in her awareness, the ordeal was over. She had come back.
She was still herself.
But . . .
Daggeira opened her eyes and light flooded in. All light. Every octave of every color she had ever seen and more. Spectrums she had no words for dazzled from the stars overhead. Closing her eyes, she attempted to get her bearings. Frozen rock encased her. Hollowed-out mines dropped away below. Cold void blanketed above.
A heavy impact rattled through her body. Again, she dared to open her eyes and see. The corpse of a broken moon spread across her vision. Shards of rock and ore twinkled in the black. One end of the trail of destruction stretched into empty space. The other end, caught in the dwarf planet’s gravity, fell bit by jagged bit onto the surface. Their impacts turning amber ridges into smoking craters. Evaporating teal lakes of frozen gasses. Pelting her body like ballistic artillery.
This was not her body. These were not her eyes.
Yet, somehow, she was still Daggeira.
She knew this was true like she knew her own name. She repeated it over and over to herself, trying to find reassurance in the thought, in its repetition, in her ability to even think it. But the blistery itch told her she was something different. Something more. Her body had been transfigured before. She knew what that felt like, what it meant. Whatever had happened to her in the fire of the Final Masters’ attention, in that strange world of liquid crystal, she was still herself. She was still Daggeira. Only her body had changed somehow. More than just transfigured. It was . . . It was . . .
Godsfall.
They had given her the superweapon. They had made her the superweapon. She was still Daggeira, yes. But in a new form, in a new body.
Godsfall.
I beat them all. The Final Masters. Trickster’s Black Devil.
Sabira.
I won.
The Gods see me.
But where were They?
Spear had been right. They had passed through the Shattered Gates of Heaven, yet no Gods or Heaven waited on the other side. Only a broken old man. Only mechanical abominations and pathetic, ugly aliens withering away for thousands of years in their cold hell, dreaming of a vengeance they could never have.
Wait.
How could she still be Daggeira and not have her body?
She remembered waking in the heart cavity, suspended over the rotating geometry, hanging by cables fused with her implant. Focusing on that memory, on that feeling, she opened her eyes. And she was there. Cold air whispered over her bare, fevered skin. The whole cavity pulsed with each turn of the floating shape at its center. Wwaawuum. Wwaawuum. Rings of orbiting aku-vayk and the softly glowing sarcophagi of the Final Masters hovered in the air.
There had to be a way to possess Godsfall and her body. After all, what glory could she have hanging from the ceiling, cold and naked as a slab of meat? So alone . . . How could she be seen? Or touched? A familiar panic froze her guts, pressed against her lungs and throat. The same ball of cold fear that always swelled within her when she was trapped, confined.
That hot itch again. It pulled at her, irresistible as gravity. Daggeira squeezed her eyes shut. The terrible prickling subsided, and when she opened her eyes, she was in that realm of liquid crystal, floating in the depths of purples and pinks. Somewhere in the distance, the heat of the Final Masters pressed at her senses. This time, they didn’t draw near to overwhelm her. The cold ball of fear melted away, replaced by a surge of confidence, by a sense of unrivaled power.
The power of Godsfall was hers now. Nothing in this universe could trap her, hold her down in the darkness. With that surge of power and confidence, a wave of bliss and focus crashed over her. Her concentration flowed effortlessly, like when she had timed her escape from the tumbling drop ship with Spear. She let go, riding the flow back into the body of Godsfall. Back into her body.
With new eyes, with senses beyond any human, she saw that she was alone in this body, too. When she had looked with her Godsfall eyes before, she hadn’t noticed any sign of Spear or Sabira or any other living being. Now, she expanded her senses, feeling every long, spiraling meter of Loshan Bastion. And found no one. No one to see her victory. No one to behold the grace the Gods had bestowed, the victory Conqueror had granted.
But where were the Gods? The question lurked in the back of every thought, irritating beneath every sensation.
And where had Spear gone? He couldn’t have really betrayed Warseer Zika. Not him. Had to be another of the apostate’s lies. He must be dead.
Warseer Zika was dead, that part was true. Mostly. Zika’s fading warmth was the tickle of a bug crawling over Daggeira’s skin. She reached out for the warseer, and a small fleet of mechanisms extended her will. In the twisting bowels of Loshan Bastion, some of the remaining automatons fused together, transformed, unified, and became something more powerful. What she had once called an abomination became a new part of herself—new eyes to see in a new body to command.
The abomination found the crumpled warseer in a small hub of intersecting tunnels. Laser scorching blackened her armor. Her helmet lay off to the side. Three vacant eyes stared from a drooping gray face. With the abomination’s hands, Daggeira lifted Zika’s shoulders. Plasma fire had disintegrated the back of her head, cauterizing the wound with its heat. No pool of congealing green blood surrounded her.
With the abomination’s fingers, Daggeira dug into the ashy remains of Zika’s brain and found the nearly lifeless switches and triggers for her to tug and pull. An empty shell for her to play with. The abomination pulled Zika’s corpse to itself. Tendril-like tubes grew from the machine and penetrated the joints and cracks of her armor, fusing with her wounds. Melding its limbs with the warseer. Through some deep instinct or programming, the abomination knew how to incorporate flesh and technology, how to articulate limbs and pump fluids, and how to sustain life on the teetering brink of death, until abomination and corpse were one. With a flicker of thought, Daggeira summoned Abomination Zika to her as she had the vaidu. Creaking, shambling, the undead warseer marched through Loshan Bastion’s tunnels to the Hara, to Godsfall within, to her new master.
Daggeira searched again. She found the shredded remains of their vaidu, too mangled and bloodless to be of any use. No one else, living or dead, remained. The apostate, the Black Devil, and their traitorous khvazol were gone. Defector or not, if Spear was alive, he must have gone with them.
In the distant vacuum, a flare of light and gravity fluctuations hinted at their retreat. Just beyond their fleeing torch, a pinprick of dormant power awakened, and the torch of Sabira’s ship vanished. Fountains of exotic particles and tentacles of twisting space spewed forth. Its beauty beyond description, its energies beyond fathom. It tore open reality like the birth of a God. That’s how the Shattered Gates of Heaven truly appeared, for those who had the eyes to truly see.
The Gates called to her in songs without sound, promising her the stars. Promising her everything.
Instinctively, Daggeira knew that she could follow. That the knowledge of how to move her Godsfall body was somewhere within. For hours—maybe it was even days—she tried to rise and ascend, grinding against the foundations of the Hara dome. It wasn’t until she exhausted her will that clarity finally came. Daggeira realized that when she stood, when she ran, when she fought, and when she drilled, she didn’t try to do any of it. Didn’t will it to happen. She merely let her body do what her body knew how to do. And this body knew itself. Had known itself for millennia. She merely needed to let Godsfall do what it was made to do.
She stood, and the frozen shores of the dwarf planet cracked and splintered. Hara’s dome split open, and the vast crystalline sprawl of Loshan Bastion shuddered and fell away like molted skin. The twisted nest of spirals crumbled into dark mine shafts. Frothing geysers of sublimated gasses spewed from the depths. Daggeira ascended into the cold void and left the used-up world behind, a cracked and discarded eggshell.
Instincts scratched at the back of her mind. She knew more of what the Final Masters and Subaru knew, like suddenly remembering a name she had never heard. The part of her that was once Subaru understood how to open and safely pass through those Gates now, as he had learned from Black Devil’s ship.
With a blink, she sliced through the void, sliding faster than light through the weave of space itself. She emerged outside of the spherical shell enclosing the Gates of Heaven in an invisible horizon. A thousand eyes blinked open at once, and cascades of sensory inputs flooded her awareness. The warm itch flared hot. Daggeira remembered the satellite network of snares that had waited long eons outside the Gates for her to come through. They called out to her, and she answered, beckoning them. The twelve-sided satellites joined themselves to her will. She sent two ahead to prime the Gates for her arrival. The rest fused with the diamond-shaped body of Godsfall.
Using the satellites as propulsion jets, Daggeira pushed through the stochastic horizon and into the realm of the Gates. Through her priming satellites, she stretched out etheric hands to caress the ancient structure, awakening the reality-bending pinprick within. Coaxed its tentacles to spark with life and electricity. Guided and refined its immense wells of power. Exotic particles showered her skin. Dazzled her eyes.
The Shattered Gates of Heaven opened wide and let her in.