Tendaji Kahinu dies whenever he closes his eyes. The same nightmare haunts him each time, a wretched dream whose hold on him never wanes. It’s the same night that plays in his head, over and over again. Such is his curse.
It always starts with Ten spilling his guts in a meadow. As hot blood flows out, cold acceptance creeps in. He tried his best, but sometimes the job is just the job. He’s served as a greycoat for ten years now––he knows the risks. He knows the enemy. You can’t wage war against the Kivular; they’re too smart for that. You send lone hunters as bait, dispatch predators in the guise of prey. Then all you can do is pray that the Balance will tip in the favor of your dull-cloaked soldiers.
But today is not Ten’s day. The Kivul he was tracking has taken him down. All he saw was a millisecond-long flash—the sharp glint of a meter-long claw—and then he was on his back, a shallow but screamingly painful slash across his middle. Now the Kivul stares down at him in triumph—or at least he gets the impression it does. It has no face, no features a human could recognize. The enemy is neither living nor dead. It is neither flora nor fauna. The Kivular are a virus summoned from the hells of ancient folklore, and have a fitting appearance: impervious angular shells no larger than a human head, balanced on six spindly two-meter limbs. A Kivul does not want. It only needs, and it needs to reproduce. And as with viruses, the Kivular require living beings to do the hard, bloody work.
And now Ten will become a living Kivular nursery, kept just barely alive by the progenitor individual until its offspring are ready to claw and cut their way free, glutted on his raw insides.
The Kivul unfolds its ovipositor. The serrated, needlelike curve of the appendage gleams with the reflected light of the planet’s four gargantuan moons. Ten, immobilized with pain and fear, can do little more than tremble as the ovipositor nears his slashed stomach. He squeezes his eyes shut. And then—
Nothing.
Ten wakes up in bed to find nothing but the silence and shadows of very early morning, the same as he saw when he finally opened his eyes that Balance-forsaken night. He doesn’t know why the Kivul spared him. He doesn’t know why he survived the war, when better soldiers, better people, died. (When Kyauta died.) Ten suspects he never will know, but those questions haunt him all the same.
The telltale chime of an official summons interrupts his musings. Ten groans, but he’s fooling no one, not even himself. He needs this. All he knows—all he will ever know—is that he has to make the life he was given worth it. Otherwise, what’s the point of anything at all?
Ten rolls out of bed without another second’s delay. Duty calls, as it always does.
“My least favorite greycoat,” greets the Silver Pontifex, waving Ten inside her office. “Come in, come in.”
Ten chuckles as he sits down. They’re distant cousins, not that they ever talk about it. The rumors of nepotism are already loud enough; they look more like twins than far-removed relations. They have the same dark brown skin and thick black hair, the same sharp chins and obsidian eyes.
“I’ll get right to it, Ten,” says the Silver Pontifex. “I have a mission for you.”
“Just tell me when and where, sir,” he replies.
“I’m sending you out to the Fringe tomorrow.” There’s a long pause, one meant to be filled with a response.
The Fringe?
Ten is thrown too far off balance to reply at first. He’s being carted off to the jagged edge of explored space, a lawman delivered into a den of lawlessness. Smugglers and thieves aren’t all that end up in the outer worlds, those ungovernable clumps of rock and ice and dust spinning between the stars. With fewer than a hundred scattered settlements in the Fringe, there’s not much light to fend off the dark. So many shadows, so many places for people with something less than a soul to hide in. But the job is the job. Even if it’s increasingly become a massive pain in the ass. Ten will do his duty, because no one else will. The people who would’ve carried out the greycoat mission far better than he are dead. (His best friend included. Oh, if Ten could’ve switched places with Kyauta, Balance knows he would have.)
“Aren’t you curious as to the what of this job, Ten?”
Ten assumes a curious expression. “Of course I am, sir.”
The Silver Pontifex arches a brow. “Tell me everything you know about Eclipse.”
Way back when the Interstellar Federation (AKA, the IF) was in charge, a top-secret government project named Eclipse got their grubby paws on some Kivular biotech. They attempted to raise living weapons to combat Kivular, people with superhuman capabilities that could be dropped into enemy territory to wreak havoc on the monsters. Or they were supposed to be, anyway. Most of Eclipse’s efforts resulted in utter failure. What Eclipse ended up creating were people only a little less nightmarish than the Kivular: ravenous, hematophagic beings that attacked, killed, and ate anything living. Or at least that’s what the recovered files claimed. The soldiers had little to no control over their bloodthirsty rages, which Eclipse had fruitlessly attempted to restrict to programmed time intervals. Eclipse called the poor bastards they created unmortals. (Ten cannot believe that someone got paid to come up with that name.)
In its last year in power, when the IF was losing what little control it had, the unmortals escaped. Or perhaps Eclipse released them, hoping to distract the populace from the government’s myriad failings. (Look, you need us to protect you! Don’t think too hard about how we created the monsters in the first place!) There were a lot of closed caskets that year. Unmortals that couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to control themselves were gradually tracked down by the eventually victorious Republic and given a choice: confinement until they figured out how to manage their condition or lifelong banishment to some uninhabited world beyond even the Fringe.
Flash forward to the present day. Besides the sporadic trade argument or border dispute, humans coexist—unmortals and mortals both.
“…And that’s basically it,” Ten concludes.
“Good enough.” The Silver Pontifex steeples her fingers over her desk. “Unmortal citizens have begun to disappear in the Fringe. I want to know why.”
Ten blinks at her. “Who’d dare?” he asks. “Or rather, who has the strength to take out a single unmortal, let alone multiple?”
“That’s what you’re going to find out.” Her mouth presses into a razor-sharp line before she opens it again. “I suspect the worst: that it’s one of the terrorist cells from the days of the IF. You know, the ones that liked to scream about the loss of ‘human purity’ and ‘the end of human civilization.’ Well, I think one’s been resurrected. But that’s all I have—suspicion. Now it’s up to you to investigate.”
Ten, like pretty much every other denizen of the human-settled galaxy, is glad that the Blessed Republic took over from the Interstellar Federation. Honestly, no one liked the IF in its last decade, not even its own leaders. It was a (mostly) bloodless and (mostly) popular coup. Ten’s grateful the Republic founded the Ashen Order and gave him a job. He’s proud to be a greycoat, proud to protect the citizenry from the Kivular that the IF let ravage the Fringe. He truly believes in the Balance, the natural and net positive order to things, though he doesn’t quite worship it like most of his brethren. He’s so painfully proud to have a purpose, something to give the life he doesn’t deserve some semblance of meaning.
It’s just…The Kivular are on the run, crawling back to whatever awful planet birthed them; he’s getting older; and he’s not quite sure what to do with himself now that the danger is gone. It’s terrifying. Ten was more than happy to fly into the Fringe, blasters blazing, when there was good reason. When there were millions of lives at stake. But…
“Well?”
But the job the Silver Pontifex just assigned him to is obviously busywork. There’s peace and prosperity as far as the greatest telescopes can see; the Republic doesn’t need greycoats anymore, but it cares for its veterans too much to sack them. The jobs Ten and his fellows have been getting lately are just something to keep them occupied, and a way for the Silver Pontifex to burn surplus taxpayer dollars and look good doing it. A win-win, in theory. This isn’t something Ten can turn down. (Because if he can’t do something with his life, then why in all the worlds is he still breathing when the people he loved aren’t? Kyauta had a mission, a purpose. Kyauta should be alive. It’s the worst joke in the galaxy that they aren’t.)
He swallows a sigh. “I’m on it, sir.”
May the Balance damn it all.
Ten lies flat on his stomach on a dusty roof terrace, peering through the painted bars of the balustrade. He’s slept atop this Balance-damned apartment complex for the last three days now, hoping that his contact was right: that this is where he’ll finally find who he’s looking for. If not, he’ll have to go through the trouble of tracking down that contact and making him understand the importance of not wasting a greycoat’s time. Not that Ten’s time is nearly as valuable as it used to be. He scratches moodily at the bristle on his chin, squinting into the infernally eternal gloom of this particular Fringeworld.
His search has led him to Qirisit VII, a web of subterranean settlements hidden away on a rocky outpost world. The surface is an unremarkable shell of dark stone, but underneath lies a natural labyrinth of tunnels connecting underground city-states and vast lakes. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t all so drab. There’s a gorgeous yellow star burning away the darkness of space in this system, but it’s not as if its gentle golden light can be appreciated way down here.
By now, Ten is thirty to thirty-four percent sure his boss just made up the story of the vanishing unmortals to justify her greycoats’ salaries. Whatever. As long as he has a chance to put some good into the universe, and the bills get paid, he’s not complaining—
There.
Movement.
Ten nearly missed it. Rock encases this city-state like an unyielding dark bubble, the swirling darkness cut by a few scattered floating lamps. It’s hard to pick out his own two hands, let alone his target. A man slides from the shadows at the corner of Ten’s periphery and slips into the adjacent building. He moved too fast for Ten to pick out any key details besides his long black overcoat. But that’s all he needs—and all his contact told him about the possible culprit.
He could have the wrong guy, of course. But he can’t risk letting this opportunity slip through his fingers if he’s right. Ten scrambles down the ladder carved into the side of the apartment building, dashes across the alleyway, and vaults through a broken window. He lands like an Arohaan cat, making it inside with nothing more than a few faint scratches from the shattered glass.
Three slow claps. “How impressive.”
Ten whirls around, a sleeperblade flying from his fingers. His target steps into the weak light, melting from the darkness. He catches the knife in midair.
The man examines the weapon with an expression that looks almost amused. Almost. “You’ll need more than this to take me, priest.”
Ten, already on his feet, shrugs. “It was a test.” Sleeperblades are nonlethal weapons, more darts than knives, though they’re coated with enough sedative to bring down a Ngachag bull. But no human—no normal human—could just pluck one right out of the air. “And you passed. Or failed, however you want to think of it.”
“So what now?” the man asks, and Ten can almost believe he’s as lackadaisical as he seems.
There’s something oddly familiar about this guy—something about the squarish cut of his jaw, the low slant of his brows. It sets Ten’s teeth on edge.
“…You have to come with me,” he says, his voice only mostly flat. He’s more taken off guard than he thought.
The man flips the sleeperblade with a twist of his wrist and sends it right into the wood between Ten’s boots. “Hm, I don’t think so.”
(Kyauta would’ve been so impressed by that move. That was always the problem with them—they were excited by everyone and everything. They were constantly in awe of the universe, when they probably should have been more afraid. Maybe then they would be alive. Maybe then Ten could get some sleep—)
Ten lifts his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not arresting you. I’m trying to save you—”
“And throwing knives at me is supposed to help you achieve that?”
“As I said, it was a test. It wouldn’t have hurt you anyway and you know it. Listen, unmortals like yourself have been vanishing all across the Fringeworlds. If you come with me, I can offer you sanctuary with the Ashen Order until we find out who’s responsible for the disappearances.”
“But what if I’m responsible for the disappearances?” The man’s mouth splits into a grin.
The smile yanks at something in Ten’s memory. Recognition pierces his mind. Everything seems to freeze. He reaches for the emergency sleeperblade hidden in his coat. The man moves. He moves like a shadow over sunlit steel. He moves with the speed and silence of death itself.
The man lashes out and grabs Ten’s left wrist. The grin is gone, replaced by an ice-cold frown. “You should probably let go.”
His grip is the type of gentle that only comes from carefully learning how to manage extraordinary strength. Ten knows he isn’t imagining the power in the unmortal’s hand, the promise that a failure to comply will end with broken bones. Ten weigh his options, none of them ideal. He drops the sleeperblade, blood pounding behind his eyes as it clatters to the floor.
“You’re Alexandru Ẹbun-Botezatu,” Ten says, the words squeezing between gritted teeth.
“Sure,” says Alexandru. He has quite a few more teeth than seems normal.
The last-created unmortal. The man who hunted down every escaped Eclipse member after the coup and gave them each a death far worse than the Republic punishment they’d escaped. When the IF president had gone missing a few years into his house arrest, all fingers pointed to Ẹbun-Botezatu. Some called him a saint. Most, a monster.
Ten has to know. “Did you kill the president?”
“Sure,” says Alexandru. “But don’t you want to know if I’m going to kill you?”
He takes another step, coming up much closer than Ten would like. Ten knows that the only reason he hears the movement is because Alexandru is consciously making noise. And that fact alone gives the greycoat his answer.
“I know you won’t.”
Alexandru stares at him. There’s a coldness to the man, that of fresh snow and dead flesh. Ten suppresses a shiver, his fingertips of his left hand going numb. After a long moment, Alexandru sighs a long-suffering sigh. He doesn’t even bother arguing; he just lets Ten go and steps back, taking the chill with him.
“So what, was your whole mission to track down any unmortal you could and whisk us away to the Coreworlds?”
“No.” Ten’s original mission was to hunt down whoever was behind the disappearances. But he had such ill luck with that, his plan eventually transformed into finding unmortals, getting them to safety, and hopefully catching the culprit in the act.
“Seems like a pretty big job. You have a partner, partners?”
“We decided to split up,” Ten lies. He doesn’t know this man well, certainly not well enough to determine if Alexandru just has resting murderface or is genuinely homicidal at the moment.
“You’re lying.”
“I—”
“Don’t bother. I can hear your heartbeat,” says Alexandru. “Whatever. I don’t actually care what your mission is, but it’s over now.”
Ten shakes his head. “No. I need to know what happened to the vanished unmortals. All citizens of the Republic—”
“With no due respect, it’s none of your business,” snaps Alexandru. “Leave me and my people alone.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
“You’re about to find out.”
“All citizens of the Republic,” Ten says again, “are under the protection of the Ashen Order. If you’re killing other unmortals, then go ahead and murder me now, because we’re going to make you pay.”
(Ten likes to think that Kyauta would’ve been proud. The thought makes him stand a little taller.)
Alexandru’s eyebrows lift. “I’m not killing other unmortals.”
“Then prove it. Otherwise, I have no choice but to arrest you.”
“To try to arrest me, you mean.”
“Sure,” replies Ten, mimicking Alexandru’s tone.
Alexandru looks him up and down. “Walk with me.”
Ten’s brows draw together in confusion. “What?”
“Walk with me,” Alexandru repeats, perfectly polite. “And I promise you’ll get your answers.”
Ten suddenly misses his blaster, Wild Thing. The Republic got rid of high-powered projectile weapons when the Kivular left, reasoning that there was no real justification for keeping such potent destructive tech when the only things left to kill were other humans. But if Ten had been granted permission to remove Wild Thing from the archives for this mission, then he’d probably have a chance against Alexandru. Shooting him now would probably save everyone a whole lot of trouble. Certainly Ten himself. He never had much patience for slow intel-gathering missions like these. He’s a greycoat, not a spy, for Balance’s sake.
But—and this never, ever changes—what choice does he have?
“Fine,” growls Ten. “But if you could hurry this up, I’d be much obliged. I have to report back to the Silver Pontifex sometime this century, you know. And there’s a bunch of paperwork that needs to get done before that.”
“And I have three leather jackets, in slightly different shades of black.”
“Excuse me—”
“Sorry, I thought we were talking about things that don’t matter.”
Ten is hit with a sudden punch of presentiment: he’s going to die trying to murder an unmortal.
“Come along!” Alexandru says cheerfully, pivots around on his heel, and heads toward the door Ten missed on his way in.
He holds it open for the greycoat and they step out onto a main road, on the opposite side of the building from which they entered. It’s chaos. The city has awoken. In the Coreworlds, the streets are neat, orderly paths, with clear sections for all categories of locomotion. Not so here. Unfamiliar sounds come from all directions, and the sights are worse. Civilians pack the road, dodging creaking rickshaws and levitating cars alike. Fluffy canine-like creatures snuffle at piles of refuse and paw piteously at people’s legs in search of charitable morsels.
Ten sticks close to Alexandru as he weaves between the tumult. If his mark’s plan was to lose him in the masses, this would be the place to do it. But Alexandru doesn’t run. He leads Ten onto the plant-packed porch of a short, squat house.
He lifts a gloved hand to knock at the door, but pauses at the last second. He turns to Ten, his face expressionless. When he speaks, his voice is grave. “Can I have some money?”
“No,” Ten snaps, mostly out of surprise.
“Come on.” If Alexandru’s voice wasn’t so deeply monotone he would sound pleading. “I know you greycoats are outrageously overpaid. Meanwhile, it’s not like there’s a lot of good job options out here.”
Ten wouldn’t call himself outrageously overpaid, but he does have enough saved to retire comfortably in the Coreworlds whenever he wants. (Which will be never, probably.) He digs in his satchel, combing through assorted currency for a handful of universally-accepted credits.
“That may be so,” Ten says, “but there are a lot of good job options for unmortals, what with your…unique skill sets. You could join the greycoats. Or you could be a bounty hunter. Or—”
“I’m a pacifist,” Alexandru says flatly.
Ten arches a brow. “Just out of curiosity, how many weapons are on you right now?”
“…I’m a prepared pacifist.” Alexandru gives the most self-satisfied grin Ten has seen in his entire life. “What if you’d actually been a halfway decent fighter?”
Before Ten can pull another sleeperblade on him, the door flies open. A little old lady blinks blearily up at them with large brown eyes.
Ten is appalled. What has Alexandru dragged him into? “We’re so sorry to disturb you, ma’am—”
“How long are you two going to stand out here yapping?” she snarls.
Ten nearly gasps. Her voice is the most grating, awful sound he’s ever heard. How could such a tiny, sweet-looking old woman produce such outrageously terrible noises? He almost wants to ask.
Alexandru rolls his eyes. He crosses his arms and looks down at the lady with narrowed eyes. “Do you have what I came for?”
“Of course,” she snaps. But she doesn’t make any motion to hand whatever it is that Alexandru came for over. She gives Ten a deeply suspicious look. “Who’s your friend? He’s dirty?”
“Dirty? As in, a dirty greycoat?” Ten sputters. He’s not the most by-the-books member of his order, but he would never abuse his power for personal gain—
“Very,” Alexandru replies. “Now hand it over, Eku.”
“Money first, boy.”
Alexandru hands her some of Ten’s credits. Eku makes a deeply unpleasant noise that sounds like acceptance. She bustles away for a moment and returns with a package wrapped in icepaper. She shoves it into Alexandru’s hands and slams the door so fast she almost takes their noses with it.
“What is that?” Ten demands.
Alexandru grins nastily at him and tucks the package under his arm. “Guess.”
Oh Balance, it’s probably drugs. Did I just get myself involved in a drug deal? Ten scampers down the porch steps after Alexandru and snatches the package away. He doesn’t stop to consider that the unmortal definitely let him have it, just rips off the seal and tears into the icepaper. If it’s temperature-sensitive drugs, or—he doesn’t know—a stolen organ, then he’s going to arrest Alexandru right now or die trying—
It’s a dozen filets of fish, or something like it. Ten nearly drops the bundle in surprise. Alexandru laughs, high and delighted. He reveals at least two rows of razor-sharp teeth as he does so.
“Find what you were looking for?” he asks.
“What is this?” Ten demands.
“Qirisit pike, obviously.” Alexandru takes back the package and gingerly re-wraps it. “It’s my turn to make dinner.”
Ten is unconvinced. “Okay, but that was the sketchiest-looking woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“That’s rude,” scolds Alexandru. Then he chuckles. “Yeah. Nails on a chalkboard, am I right?”
Ten’s heard ancient recordings from Earth. He briefly considers smiling. “Worse.”
“Well, she has a whole hydroponic system out back. She raises fish that taste better than anything you can imagine.”
Ten follows Alexandru down yet another winding street. “So what now?”
“Now we gather the other ingredients.”
“As thrilling as that sounds, I don’t actually have time for this—”
“You want to know what happened to us?” Alexandru asks suddenly. He drops the fish into a nondescript black bag. “Eclipse may have created us, but they didn’t know the half of it. When we lose control…The lines between being unable to stop yourself, choosing not to stop yourself, and actively giving in are so very thin.”
Ten keeps his mouth shut, expecting more, but Alexandru doesn’t speak again until they reach their next destination. A vegetable farmer waves heartily at Alexandru when he sees him, giving a smile as bright as the flashing green sign above.
Alexandru gives the farmer a hug. “How’ve you been, Lutfi?”
“I’ve been great!” Lutfi spreads his hands proudly over his displayed produce. “Business is booming. I’ve got onions, I’ve got carrots, I’ve got red peppers and celery and potatoes—all heirloom Earth strains.”
With Ten’s money, Alexandru buys one of each, along with two tomatoes and an indigenous purplish herb Lutfi insists is a great replacement for parsley once cooked. They say their goodbyes, and then they head off in search of either a lemon or the local equivalent.
“In case it wasn’t clear, I’m not killing other unmortals,” Alexandru says, apropos of nothing.
“Then what have you been doing?” Ten asks, trying not to sound as exasperated as he feels.
Alexandru takes a moment before he finally responds. Ten can practically hear him think. “I’ve been gathering them so we can protect each other. And other humans.”
Ten considers this carefully, turning the words over in his head. There isn’t even a hint of nefarious intent in the unmortal’s tone. Even if Alexandru isn’t giving him the whole truth, Ten feels secure in the gut-feeling that the man isn’t up to no good, at least for the moment. Being on his best behavior with a greycoat would be the smart thing to do, after all. Especially because this one arrived flinging knives. (Even practically harmless ones.)
“Sorry I attacked you,” Ten mutters, so quietly he knows Alexandru only hears due to his superhuman aural abilities.
“Eh, it’s fine. All’s well that ends well. And—”
“Hey! Alex!”
A trio of gap-toothed kids ambush them, scampering across the street. The girl who’s ostensibly their leader waves her arms wildly.
“I told them about the jaw thing!” she yells excitedly. A creature that looks nothing so much as a chubby mantis shrimp bobs up and down on her shoulder, apparently equally excited.
“Oh, did you now?” Alexandru maintains an utterly straight face, but his eyes dance with mirth.
“Do the jaw thing! Do the jaw thing!” the other children demand.
“What jaw thing?” Ten asks.
Alexandru gives Ten an almost bashful look before he goes down on one knee so he’s at eye level with the kids. Then he opens his mouth and completely unhinges his jaw with a click. The children scream with delight, the way only children can when presented with a dislocated mandible and three rows of fangs. Alexandru pops his jaw back in and stands.
“All right, get lost. I’m on important business, you impolite rodents.”
“Thanks Alex!” exclaims the girl. “Good luck with your important business!”
“I hate kids,” Alexandru says, the moment they’re out of earshot.
An obvious lie. “No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t,” Alexandru agrees. “Not really. But they scare me.”
“Kids scare you?”
“They’re so fragile,” Alexandru says softly. “I mean, most people are, but unmortals, we…We have to be extra careful around them.” He shrugs the strap of his bag up higher on his shoulder. “You know, the people who made me the way I am starved me and let me loose near a village on my homeworld.”
Ten’s mouth flies open, but what could he possibly say to that? He closes it. (Kyauta always knew the right thing to say, whether they were trying to make you laugh or fork over your dessert ration or keep it together after you saw a squadmate get torn apart right before your eyes. But Ten is not Kyauta, and no amount of wishing is going to change that. He knows. He’s tried.)
“The easiest way to create a monster is to make someone believe that they already are,” Alexandru continues. “That’s what Eclipse tried to do with each of us. At first, we all had far too much control to be the obedient weapons they desired. So they did everything in their power to break us, to shred us at the seams—all so they could stitch us back together into something they could use.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened?” Alexandru’s smile is a sharp thing; a thin, tight curve carved into his flesh. “No, I didn’t hurt anyone. Barely. I flung myself into a ravine.”
“I’m sorry.”
Alexandru shrugs. “I’m not. Well, I’m sorry I was forced to do that, but for a moment there I thought I’d get to decide when and how I’d die. And I thought my death would mean something. That’s a privilege few unmortals ever got.”
“Then what happened?”
“I made some friends.” Alexandru’s expression softens. “I survived the fall, obviously, but I was stuck. And still so hungry. But some villagers found me and sent buckets of food on a rope. When I had control again, they climbed down, carried me up, and nursed me back to health. They hid me when Eclipse came looking, said they found my corpse and buried it. We still call every week.”
Alexandru takes them to a port, a small patch of wood and steel creeping out into the massive lake the city sits upon. Vessels of all shapes and sizes knock against each other with soft thunks, crammed between the docks like the morning rush on the streets.
“What do you see here?” asks Alexandru.
Ten looks around. He was trained well; he recognizes the symbols painted on the ships and stamped on swiftly circulating crates. High-risk independent merchants (smugglers) hurry to move their wares (contraband) off boats and into secure storage chambers. Assistants in drab, nondescript garb hop from deck to deck, their backs curved with the weight of illegal goods.
“A good case for harsher trade regulations in the Fringe,” Ten says.
Alexandru snorts. “Life, greycoat. People living.”
“Okay.” Ten looks again. He sees smiles where first he saw scowls and hears laughter where once he heard curses. They look happy. “What happened after Eclipse left?”
There’s a long, colorful row of trees across from the port, the branches hanging heavy with several species of fruit Ten recognizes and plenty more he doesn’t. They walk over, leaving the docks behind.
“It took me a few weeks to completely heal,” says Alexandru, “even with my advanced regenerative factor and all. Almost every bone in my body was broken. But even once I was back to normal, physically, things were rough. I thought I was finally free of Eclipse, but I wasn’t. They’d sunk their claws in deep. I had no idea what to do with myself if I wasn’t hunting down Kivul or enemies of the state.” Alexandru brings the thumb and pointer finger of his right hand together. “I was this close to having a mental breakdown.”
“Your fingers are touching.”
“Yeah, well.” Alexandru comes to a stop beside a lemon tree and starts picking. “You know how falling is fine until you reach the ground? One day I woke up and just thought to myself, I can live better than this. I can help people. That’s what I can do. When that realization hit me, it hit me.” He sniffs a lemon and hums appreciatively. “Truth is, I feel like I don’t have a purpose in this universe besides doing what I can for others. And I know that’s unhealthy, probably, but that’s just how it is— Your heart’s beating incredibly fast.” His tone is a little too casual to be truly conversational. “Is there a particular reason?”
Ten wants to be honest, but lies always come so much easier for him. “I’m not sure.”
“You were right about me not killing you,” Alexandru says, a teasing note in his voice. He smiles with all his sharp, sharp teeth. “I don’t bite.”
Ten scoffs. He reaches up to pluck a lemon, buying himself a moment. “I think…I think I’m like you.”
“I’m sensing there’s more.”
“There’s a lot of good work to do here. I’m excited for you.”
“Excited?”
“Yeah, this—what you’re doing—is good. I like good things.”
“How articulate you are.”
“Fuck off,” Ten shoots back, with no bite at all. “What I mean is, some of us are just hoping for something to justify each breath we take, to make the lives we live make sense. I pray—we pray for something…or someone…worth dying for. But you…you have something to live for. You don’t know how rare that is.”
What Ten can’t bring himself to say, for fear of summoning tears, is this: You should hold onto it, if you can. Beautiful things have a way of leaving you.
The lampposts lining the streets are flickering on. Warm light reflects off the dark water and dances over nearby buildings.
“What’s your name?” Alexandru asks suddenly.
“Ten. Like the number.”
“It’s a good number.” Alexandru extends a hand for him to shake, and Ten takes it. “Call me Alex. No one I like actually calls me Alexandru. Makes me sound like a vampire.”
“That’s a surprise.” At Alex’s arched brow, Ten adds, “That you like me.”
“Ten, do you think that if I did not like you, you’d still be breathing?”
Ten laughs. “I suppose not.” He looks around. “Where are we?”
Alex gives him a thoughtful look. “This is where you decide if you want to come over for dinner and see the unmortals I haven’t killed. Or we go our separate ways. But I think we could be friends, maybe.”
Ten doesn’t quite trust Alex, not yet. But he’d like to try. Kyauta would have. He smothers a smile. “I have to do my job, of course.”
“Of course,” Alex agrees, smirking. “Follow me.”
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Kemi Ashing-Giwa is the USA Today bestselling, Compton Crook Award-winning, Ignyte Award-nominated author of The Splinter in the Sky, This World Is Not Yours, The King Must Die (forthcoming), and several short stories. She studied integrative biology and astrophysics at Harvard, and is now pursuing a PhD in Earth & Planetary Sciences at Stanford. |