Jaqi
IN THE DARKNESS, all I hear is our breathing.
Quiet. Sometimes I like the quiet, but too often it reminds me of space—of the feeling that if it’s too quiet, and too cold, you might have lost atmos. I think of that one moment I was out in the killing vacuum, the moisture in my body instantly freezing. So I twist around in the sheets, next to Araskar, press up against him, just to make a little noise.
Araskar shifts a bit against the pillow too. The running lights of the ship flicker outside, shine through the window onto his face. Plenty of ridges over the face, the imperfect scars where he’s been pieced back together.
I touch the scars that jigsaw across what was the bridge of his nose. “This why you chose your name?” I ask. “Araskar?”
“Ha, no,” he says. Under the covers, his hand rests on my belly. A rough hand, with all them calluses from swordfighting, but still feels nice on my soft belly. “Not at all. I was with my friend Barathuin, and we were supposed to pick names, because vat-cooked crosses didn’t get real names, you know. So we’d go through these old record books with Jorian names, the real ones. Barathuin’s name was some warrior-king, something glorious, and mine . . . I think it was on a list of minor officials. I just liked the way it sounded.”
“That fella still with the Resistance?” I ask him. “Barathuin?”
“No,” Araskar says. “No, he’s dead. They’re all dead. My entire vat-batch, my entire first battalion.”
“Right. I remember now. You said that, on Trace.”
“They all died the moment we hit our first Imperial ship. Rashiya, the girl I killed on Trace, was the last of my battalion. The only survivor, besides me.”
“That’s why it was so hard to face up?”
He doesn’t speak, just grunts a little assent.
“What do you suppose we’ll do when this is over?” I ask him. I said something like this before, back before we fell into bed.
“Told you, I don’t place too much stock in the future.”
“I heard you, slab, but I en’t talking philosophically. Just want to know what you might do if old John Starfire kicked it tomorrow. Come on now, you got any plans?”
He exhales. “Play guitar. Learn how to play it right. I only know two chords so far.”
“That’s a good start, slab. Where is your guitar?”
“The guitar you gave me is still back on the moon of Trace. Thought it would be safer in the desert than on Shadow Sun Seven. I guess I’ll go back there and see the sights again. Then I’ll come back—here, I suppose? Here, and I’ll see if there’s a Thuzerian who’s sworn to fight evil and stay celibate and teach guitar.” He breathes into my hair. “You?”
“Oh, I thought about it plenty. I’m going to go see some plays, visit some museums, do the stuff real folk talk about.”
“Real folk. We’re real folk now, aren’t we?”
“Depends who you ask, I suppose. Crosses have got to be as real as any other sentient, now.”
“We’re real,” he says. “And we’re—”
And that’s where the memory slips away. Araskar’s face blurs. The only part left of his face is the scars, now, an empty field of brown skin with scars dotting it, but no eyes, no nose, no mouth.
He speaks, but I don’t recognize the words.
I think I been dragged somewhere. I reckon I been hurt. Everything else is fragments. My memories break into shards and bounce around my head. Faces blur and names and I don’t reckon I remember a thing and this fella who done stabbed me—who is he?—still talking.
“You don’t get it.”
Am I back with Araskar? This fella got scars. Hard to tell. Araskar had a lot of scars, though I remember him lying next to me, saying things about them after we had slack. But I can’t see his face. Only the scars.
“You killing me?” Why would Araskar kill me? Thought we was getting along real well. We did—a thing.
Can’t recall what it was.
“Ha.” He actually puts something cool on my leg, where he cut me, and another on my arm, where the other cut was. Synthskin gel-packs. Kind of thing crosses use in a battle. Kind of thing heals you, helps you keep fighting till you can get properly stitched. What’s this? “I need to know why it speaks to you.”
“It . . .”
“You felt it, when you came in. The pure-space being.” He, whoever he is, presses another gel-pack to my shoulder. My shoulder, I’m fairly sure. Not anyone else’s. “When did you first hear its voice? When you ran to that Suit mainframe? Before that?”
“It.”
“You know, I wanted to believe you too.” His voice softens. “I thought perhaps I wasn’t chosen, wasn’t fated, and for just a moment, it was a relief. A relief to stop doubting, to stop being afraid.” And then his voice rises again, like some kind of preacher. “Then I remembered how it felt. How the words burned inside me. Do you know what it’s like to speak, and know that the will of the Starfire itself is speaking through you?”
“I . . .” My mouth is dry. No, this en’t Araskar. Maybe this is Z, his dour face locked in anger, muttering to himself. Something about blood and honor, I’d guess.
“I’ve been hunting this place for years. All that trouble to get one memory crypt from Formoz, and you find it first.” He leans closer. “You know why the Shir don’t come here?”
“Don’t name the devil,” I say.
“Devil is more apt than you know. They are fallen, like the devils of old Earth myth. They almost remember what they were.”
He sounds like Z, being all cryptic. “Blood and honor,” I say to him, hoping he’ll respond and turn out to be Z.
“What’s that?”
“Blood and honor. You . . .” No wait, this en’t Z. I en’t even sure I remember Z. My memory done broke. He’s . . .
He’s my enemy. And he’s gonna kill me like this, rip me to bits.
I gotta get out of here.
He’s sheathed his sword in order to slap the gel-packs on me. He turns around. Touches something at the controls. “Why won’t you talk to me?” he mutters. “What did she do to bring you close?”
Okay. I got enough sense in my woozy head to see a way out of here. Just gotta kill this fella. My enemy. I know he’s my enemy. I can remember that.
It’s simple, self. Grab that sword. Pull it out of the sheath and stick him with it.
Simple. Except it’s so hard to move.
I start to move, and blood runs down my arms and legs. Them synthskin packs haven’t had time to meld with my flesh. My wounds are raw and ragged.
“Bend, pull . . .” He mutters a thing. A thing I recognize. A song my mother used to sing. He sings it, only half in tune. “Bend, pull, break your back . . .”
The cadences, the rhythm of the song is all mine. My mother’s.
What did she look like? I should be able to remember her face—that thing had her face, a minute ago.
And I realize I can’t recall my mother’s face.
He took that from me.
Now that pisses me off, and strength rushes through me, the strength born of anger, and I get to my feet, ignoring the pain and the blood.
He’s closed his eyes, focusing on the song, which is how I close the distance before he whips the sword out, and I’m too close, and by some miracle, I get my hands on his sword and yank, but he’s got a death grip on the blade—and I knee him in the thigh, and he must have a wound there because he folds, falls backward—and I get the sword turned, even with his grip still on it—
I stab. He twists.
The sword just connects, tearing through his body armor and into the flesh of his side, below his ribs.
I stab John Starfire, just enough. And blood drips down my arm, wound breaking open, and white fire lashes up when it reaches the blade. And I—
I suck up his memories like I’m a thirsty girl who just found a cache of good water.
The jelly is wet, and sticky. The darkness is pleasant, the light hurts, but somehow he knows he must open his eyes.
Eyes. They are called eyes. He will see with them.
He knows things. He hadn’t known them, and now they are filling his head, one after another, like musical notes crowded on top of one another.
The fear in his eyes is the same fear come rushing into me through this sword. And I’m being born from a vat, in the memory I steal.
Music. He understands music. He had not, a moment ago, but now he has a corpus of the best music in his head, symphonic and rollicking, fuzzy electric and echoing acoustic, all the best music from a thousand years of empire.
Empire. He understands that.
The Empire he overthrew. I overthrew.
Jaqi and John Starfire braid together.
He is a cross. There have to be crosses, because someone has to fight the war, because there are millions of them out there, and they will eat suns and planets without the crosses to man the ships and the planet-crackers and the battles.
And thus the Empire can have peace.
There must be crosses.
Crosses must fight and die.
He twists and with a spray of blood, falls away from the sword.
I face him.
“I en’t you,” he says, sounding a lot like me.
“Not yourself either,” I say, and I sound just like him.
He gets to his feet, shaking, and faster than he should be able to, he leaps on me and grabs the sword away. He faces me, holding up the blade—and crumples, clutching the wound in his side.
But I can’t fight back. His memories en’t like the ones I took before. They feel alive inside me, twisting through me. They hurt.
“What did you take?” He gasps out the words. Drops to his knees, grabs synthskin packs, slaps them on his wound.
I en’t sure if it’s Jaqi or John Starfire talking, but I need to get away.
I run.
I’m remembering a thing, and remembering it is vicious, like living through every hot, angry minute I ever felt. I’m remembering his first battle in the Dark Zone. Where he jumped ship.
One minute he is rushing from one side of the medical bay to the other, plasma packs in one hand, a thermo-regulator in the other, preparing for the influx of the wounded—the next minute the wall of the medical bay is gone, open to the Dark Zone.
The gravity generator shifts, turns up to heavy gravity to lock them to the floor. Something goes wrong—he slides, and vacuum.
Cold. Exploding pain in his ears. He remembers his training and presses the sense-field.
The field, and the oxygen, pop into existence around him. His lungs throb with pain as he breathes in the sweet oxygen. Bright shards flash red across space. Sickly white-blue light springs out of nowhere, danced in patterns, and tears everything apart.
And then the ship comes apart.
And he sees them.
So huge, so dark, lit by the half-light. Enough to see planet-sized faces with spars of teeth, the immense bellies where stars burn.
Their voices are like breaking glass. Little things made to die. Little things made for us to eat. Nameless little ones.
With that memory, of seeing the devil, music rushes into me.
I run into the hall, and immediately regret it. I have to go. I have to go somewhere—back to the ship, back to safety, where I can figure out who I am. “Are you there?” I say to the Starfire itself.
That music cascades through me.
“I gotta get out of here!”
My memories—no, his memories—but they are mine too—they twist, they core me out. The cold almost has him. The sense-field has lost its air, so much of it already passed through his lungs. He scuttles across the surface of the ship he’s found, numb woodblock hands failing to find a port, an entrance that can be opened, anything—
The moisture in his eyes is freezing. His ears burn and ring. The cold of space will take him, like it has taken his entire ship, all his batch-mates, everyone he cares about—
He presses his hand against something like a sensor—and an airlock opens.
The music rushes into me. “Get me out of here,” I say as I slump to the ground, bloody. “Get me somewhere safe.”
And just like that, the music answers and a node opens up around me.