12. Ovum

ōvum ~ī, n.

1. an egg

Most of Dravik’s training, I learn with my body. But there are two things I learn with my mind:

One—gravity is stronger than me. I cannot fight it; I can only move with it.

Two—the egg cannot break. The egg cannot break or I will fail.

Again.

And I am done with failure.

“Hold fast.” Dravik’s voice in my helmet barely makes it through the blood rushing in my ears. My eyes blur—the console’s holograph digits strain as Heavenbreaker tears through space at 22 parses per minute. 23. 24. “Ten seconds more.”

The distant stars tremble. I cling for my life to the thin surface tension of the saddle as it bulges, on the verge of expelling me. In my white-knuckled hand, I cup an egg. I tense my thighs to keep my blood pressure from dropping me into a blackout, but the g-forces still play trash compactor with my organs. My head feels heavy, as if it’ll pop off my neck at any second. Every instinct in me screams to grip for balance, but the egg will shatter. I can’t. The egg must survive this ride, or I cannot move on to the next phase of my training. It’s been a week and a half of constant failure, of spiraling thoughts and clenched teeth, and though Dravik won’t say it outright, I know we’re far behind the timeline.

My body is one massive sweat-soaked sore under the padded gray practice rider’s suit—old bruises and new bruises painting a map of my training at lower speeds. I don’t know how many times I’ve been wrenched out of the saddle and thrown across the steed’s hard metal chest cavity; I stopped keeping count at seventeen. At twenty, I started understanding—I can’t resist. There is no going against the unstoppable current of gravity, but I can be in it, like a pendulum swinging perfectly center. Not standing firm but not fully surrendering, either… That’s the only way I haven’t been thrown. It’s something you do, not describe; a razor-thin sliver of perfect balance. Holding for ten seconds feels like ten slow hours. Every millisecond of nauseating speed and hyper-focus scrapes at my willpower, and I clutch at the only thing I can: the pain.

“There!” Dravik barks.

I think the word slow, and the steed slows instantly, pale-blue plasma jets fizzing out and blissful relief washing over my body as the g-forces drop to less, some, and then none. For a moment, Heavenbreaker and I simply float in space, the massive Station and the far larger green orb that is the planet Esther our only company. Even now that it’s functional, Heavenbreaker is stranger than Ghostwinder: heavier to move, harder to control, and yet it feels more…curious. Ghostwinder knew things—Heavenbreaker does not. The feeling in the saddle is like staring down an abyss, an empty slate voraciously watching, listening, waiting. I refuse to give it anything more than what’s necessary to keep it moving; the mind invasion is still too fresh.

Dravik’s voice echoes crisply. “How is the egg, Synali?”

I force my way out of the gelatinous saddle, boots hitting metal floor. The entirety of the steed’s cockpit is smeared with eggshells and dried yolk from all my failures. Heavenbreaker’s engineers clearly weren’t paid enough—they mended the gaping holes on the armor outside but left all the dents and rust on the inside.

I release my helmet seal and tear it off with my free hand. “Broken, probably.”

“Do me the favor of checking.”

He’s been patient. That’s the worst part—that he’s so patient. It’d be easier to hate the noble if he was a fly-off-the-handle type, but he’s kept his composure every inch of the way, through every inspection of my smashed head, every fit I had exiting Heavenbreaker and kicking whatever ozone-scented piece of armor I could reach. When I broke down crying after eight straight days of trying, he left patiently and came back patiently.

“I’m in control of myself.”

His smile was too forgiving. “Obviously.”

I open my fingers slowly, the crescent nail imprints in my palm bleeding, but the eggshell is smeared with red…and smooth. Unbroken. Not a single crack.

I go limp against a steel wall. “I—I did it. I can’t believe it.”

“I can,” Dravik says. “Guide the steed off the field, take a rest for an hour, and I’ll meet you in the weight room for calisthenics.”

On to the next part. Finally.

I chuck the egg at the wall, free of it at last, and pierce into the saddle fist-first again, the silver whorls in the nerve fluid eagerly welcoming me back by writhing along the seams of my graying practice suit. The practice tilt is empty save for me, a silent black arena circled by neon bands of red hard-light. I squint—something in the distance moves. Something red breaks its camouflage in the hard-light and starts coming closer.

A feather-swept helmet.

My stomach drops.

“Dravik?” I activate the intercom frantically. “Dravik? I thought you said I’d be alone in this arena.”

No answer from him, but an incoming ping from one SUNSCREAMER flashes across my visor.

“Reject,” I mutter. Nothing happens. “Reject, reject—listen to me and reject it, you piece of—”

“Hey there.” Rax’s voice and image come through crystal clear—his visor is let down, but his tight crimson rider’s suit and helmet cover everything else. I catch his redwood eyes crinkling before I focus on his right shoulder. “Didn’t recognize your steed’s sig—is it new?”

Heavenbreaker’s model is clearly old as sin. He’s being overly friendly and forcing me into an inescapable corner in the conversation, and it feels overbearing. Stuffy. Sunscreamer floats between the arena’s exit and me.

My first words to him are strained. “How long were you watching me?”

He laughs, the sound a smoky rumble. “Just got here, actually. Ditched a friend’s wedding—evil, I know, but we don’t get to choose when the riding thirst hits.” He pauses. “You practicing for the big day?”

Yes.

“No.”

He clicks his tongue. “Too bad. You got some nice maneuvers—reminds me of the academy. Maybe I’ll see you next decade, yeah, Instructor?”

Arrogant. He might not speak elegantly like other nobles, but every one of his words drips their same arrogance—as if he’s assuming every rider knows who he is, how good he is. Sunscreamer’s posture is exactly his: languid, easy, confident.

My mouth moves when it shouldn’t. “You will be seeing me sooner than that.”

That laugh again—spine-tingling. “Is that a challenge? We could do it right here, if you want.”

He motions around at the practice tilt, the grav-gen glowing dimly and the hexagons on either side shadowed by the two huge skeletal frames of the automatic steed dummies. I’m in no condition to fight him. I’m sweat-drenched, tired. A Dravik-voice in the back of my head tells me to ignore him. Rax Istra-Velrayd is not in the timeline.

But my body doesn’t care; it just burns.

“Whoever does the most damage to the dummy,” I say. “No lance.”

This time, his laugh is incredulous. “You want to have a punching contest?”

“Is that too much for you?”

A beat. From behind my visor, my gaze moves to his—his curious stare like someone trying to solve a puzzle. And then his eyes smile.

“No. I’ll take terrene. Give you the slight gravitational advantage.”

“How kind of you,” I drawl.

We jet off in opposite directions, him to the terrene side—the tilt nearest the giant planet of Esther—and me to the sidereal side, nearest to open space. Every bone in my body aches, but it’s too late to back out now. I won’t let any noble get away with thinking they’re better than me—not even a pseudo-legend like this one. As I tap on my vis to activate the dummy on my side for Rax, he speaks.

“Mind if I ask your name?”

“Yes.” I tap Accept and jet softly away from the tilt. “The dummy is ready when you are.”

“Straight to the point. I like that in a rider.”

“What you like has very little in common with what I care for.”

He laughs. “Ouch. You don’t hold back.”

I raise my chin. “Are you going to ride or not?”

Sunscreamer makes a facetious bow at me. Rax’s holograph feed in my visor cuts out for the descent, and his red plasma jets blast hot and bright, waiting, burning against the metal of the tilt. I pull up my vis to record. Don’t blink. Watch. Absorb it all—every ankle rotation, how he takes his starting stance. Use him. Consume him. I’ll eat whatever scraps he’s foolish enough to leave me, and I’ll become stronger on them.

And then it happens.

“eat”

The word is faint but clear. I look at my vis—is someone still commed in to me? Dravik? No—that was far too young to be his voice.

“Hello?” My voice echoes around the empty cockpit.

The ribbon-tear sound of plasma against metal makes me look up—the nearby dummy’s colorless white jets power on and launch it forward at the same moment Rax launches Sunscreamer. Its limbs shudder rigidly as it barrels toward the sleeker crimson steed. Focus.

The chest is the biggest part—easiest to hit. My eyes strain against letting Sunscreamer just become a blur of red—Rax tilts it backward, not forward like Dravik taught me. Why? Is it because he isn’t holding the weight of the lance, or… The shuddering dummy and steed bear down on each other, the blue glow of the grav-gen making it near impossible to see. There—Rax pulls his left arm back just before impact and snaps forward with it, sending a shower of sparks and cheap metal spinning out everywhere. The wicked tipped claws of Sunscreamer’s hand grip the dummy’s head, and for a second, the dummy strains against him, white jets burning, and then Rax shatters the head in his hands like an eggshell.

He hit the head while moving at 26 parses per minute—a tiny, unreal target; a target difficult to hit even with a lance. The headless dummy, now free of its suppressor, arcs down the circuit and crashes chest-first into the tilt. It bounces and then comes to a ravaged halt. The circuit brings Sunscreamer arcing toward me, and I can practically smell the self-satisfaction in Rax’s voice as his comm reconnects.

“Well?” he asks with a cock of his helmet. “How did I do, Instructor?”

My ears ring and blur out his thinly veiled insult. No database clip has ever looked like that. He didn’t just destroy the dummy—he destroyed it precisely. He stayed back so that the momentum of his arm moving forward at the last second could be precisely controlled and propelled, like a shot from a hard-light pistol. A head hit in a tourney is an automatic win. He chose to hit the head to send me a message. Keeping a resistant stance the entire way down the tilt must’ve been incredibly taxing, but he’s not even panting.

My mind spins as I jet toward my tilt and lock into place. How can I beat that? I can’t.

Seeing his stats in a database and reading the laundry list of things he’s accomplished… It’s terrifying when I can see it for myself, not through washed-out old clips on my vis. How do I do better than that?

I can’t. No matter how much I burn to…I just can’t.

But that’s never stopped me before.

“I guess that means you’re ready,” Rax says as he jets back to his tilt and the fresh dummy there. “All right, then—dummy’s prepped. Give it your best shot, Instructor.”

My lip curls at his patronizing tone. I think go, and the pale-blue jets on Heavenbreaker’s back and ankles burst to life. I can feel them—gentle heat on my skin in the exact same spots, on the still-healing wound from the dog. When I rode Ghostwinder, I didn’t find any switches or levers because there were none; riders don’t use switches to move the steed. They use their mind. The electric current that runs through the saddle somehow links my mind to the steed’s mechanics, but just thinking the word go doesn’t move the steed—it has to be the meaning of the word, too. You have to visualize exactly how you want the movement to be.

If you’re distracted, nothing happens. If you’re uncertain or inexact, something sloppy or too slow happens. It’s an echo of telekinesis, of trying so hard when you’re a child to move a cup with your mind, except this time it’s real, and the cup must be understood down to the last ceramic chip. You have to know, and then hit that meaning hard and clear like a bell in your mind.

More, I think. The metal of Heavenbreaker’s vents squeals as the plasma blasts out against cold space. Since my disastrous first match two and a half months ago, I’ve never gone in a straight line before—Dravik has me on literal learning curves. The dummy at the opposite end of the tilt waits, crouched stiffly against the hexagon. The chest would be easy. The head would be hard. How do I beat him? How do I destroy it better?

“Synali? Are you still riding?”

Dravik’s voice. Shit—he’s reconnected.

I pin my arms to my side and lean forward into the descent, and the comms cut automatically. Go, I think. The speed stuffs the suit into my body, my eyelids into my eyeballs. Going straight is faster, sharper. My collarbone scar aches beneath my sweat-drenched skin. Rax fought Father and lived. He drew even. But I lost—everything. Mother. My life.

I’m stronger now.

I have to show them I’m stronger.

The blue light of the grav-gen shines like a miniature sun, brighter and brighter, and the skin of my face lifts off my skull. I can barely keep breathing, let alone lean back and prepare to strike. How does he resist this force? The dummy shudders toward me, a blaze of white barely held together, and for a second it turns red. Sunscreamer. Suddenly, this is the fight from two months ago and I’m spiraling toward my death…but there’s no lance this time. This time, I won’t pass out. I’m ready.

I’m too far left. Right, I think. I tilt, and Heavenbreaker tilts. I don’t know precision, but I know destruction.

Destroy.

Through the rush of blood in my ears, I hear it echoed back at me faintly, quietly.

“destroy”

Both arms straighten out.

We impact.

I catch it. Chest to chest, ribs stabbing and lungs burning and my fingers digging into the dummy’s threadbare shoulders as it strains against me. The whiplash tries to yank me from the saddle, but I bear down and clench everything—abdominals, thighs, teeth. I have a grip. I could rip it apart.

“rip it apart”

What’s left of me surges through my arms, and I pull. The dummy’s mindless speed grinds against me like sawblades in my torso, and the saddle’s gel absorbs my scream as I give one last heave. The dummy’s chassis cracks down the middle, the blasting white plasma framing its horrible blank face as it starts to bleed black oil. I feel the wet drips on my face, perfect orbs of splatter spinning through space.

Stronger.

The thing in here with me feels closer all of a sudden, like it’s trying to help, a hand reinforcing mine. The crack in the dummy’s chassis becomes a breach, becomes a ravine, wiring and gears popping out and spiraling off like tendon and tissue, and for a terrible, beautiful moment, it feels good. Satisfying. Stabbing Father gave me no satisfaction, but this…this giant thing torn to pieces by my small hands…

When the white plasma finally sputters out, I know it’s dead.

I dislodge from its bisected body, chest heaving, something wrong with my right arm—shooting pain—but dull adrenaline trembles through me like fire and nectar. I lift my head to Rax, Sunscreamer floating limply just a few parses in front of me. My comms crackle with Dravik’s ignored calls and my exhausted smile.

“How did I do, Instructor?”

My ears go dull, drowning out Rax’s answer, and I feel my eyes roll.

Darkness.