Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

16 · Drenard · Twelve Years Ago

Tears streamed down Anlyn’s cheeks. She tried her best to blink them away while yanking the control stick left and right, up and down, but nothing she did helped. No matter which way she dodged and spun the Interceptor, her fiancé Bodi was able to match her. Twisting and turning, swooping and diving, jittering her ship nervously in space, she did everything she could to shake him, all to no avail.

Her stolen flightsuit did what it could to minimize the Gs, its small pockets of anti-grav fluid coursing through the suit and removing as much of the force on her body as they could. But no technological marvel existed to remove the pressure within her: that clawing at the hollow of her stomach born by a day of far too much tragedy.

“Anlyn Hooo, that is enough.”

Bodi’s voice came through her helmet clear enough to twist her heart in knots. The disgust she felt at the sound of his words were another sort of nausea the grav suit couldn’t touch. Anlyn ignored his commands—she was utterly sick and tired of his commands. She kept yanking on the stick, hoping to create enough space to jump away. She needed to get away from Drenard, away from her home. She desperately needed to get away from the emptiness her father’s sudden death had left, both in her heart and upon his throne.

“Don’t make me shoot out your thrusters,” Bodi warned.

As if she were the one inconveniencing him.

Anlyn glanced down at the dash where so many lights and knobs twinkled in her tear-blurred vision. Royal flight training had only touched on the basics—a professional pilot had kept his hands on the stick at all times while he showed her how to jump, taught her the rudiments of SADAR, and had allowed her to transmit over the radio. It had been just enough instructional ceremony to satisfy ancient traditions of Drenardian royalty without exposing one of the empire’s precious women to an iota of potential harm. But now, without someone pointing out which switch did what, Anlyn felt overwhelmed by the dizzying array of readouts and blinking indicators.

“The royal guard is on their way, Anlyn. Take your hands off the controls. You’re embarrassing me.”

Anlyn looked up through the canopy where Bodi flew inverted, matching her every movement. She could clearly see the glint of his visor just a dozen paces away. Yanking back on the stick, she tried to throw her craft up into his, her hot side stoked by his constant badgering. Bodi moved out of the way easily; he fell back around her, then looped up on top. She dove the opposite direction, but he matched her move for move.

Giving up for a moment, Anlyn allowed her craft to straighten itself out while she took a few deep breaths not encumbered by the squeezing of her gravsuit. She wondered how she had gotten herself in this position. She was pretty sure it had started with her Wadi Rite, not that long ago. Things had been different between her and Bodi after that. And then her father—it felt like weeks since she’d learned of his passing, days since she had fled to the Naval base and commandeered a ship to run away. It had probably been a few hours—she had no idea.

She looked to her display screen where she had the hyperdrive help file pulled up. As far as Anlyn could tell, she had the drive cycled properly and good coordinates for an empty patch of space plugged in. Still, the blasted engage button wouldn’t work. A flashing indicator kept blinking “proximity alarm.” Anlyn scanned the help file while Bodi continued his jabbering:

“Very good, Anlyn. Stay on that course. I’m going to lock my ship to yours. Steady, now.”

Anlyn ignored him and read something about a jump override. There were two pages of cautions and warnings before it got to the explanation. She scrolled down, ignoring the paragraphs about “slingshots” and “unintended arrival coordinates.” Nothing in the universe turned her brain off like tech-speak and such gibberish.

“Steady, now.”

Bodi said it as if he were chiding a youth. She hated that tone, especially when he did it to her in public. He had always spoken to her that way when her father, the King of their empire, was around. She had long dreamed of the day she would stand up to Bodi in front of her dad and her uncles. Now, that would never happen. Her father was dead, and she would be forced to marry an evil man, a cold and fiery man. She scanned the override instructions—then heard a metallic bang as his ship touched hers.

Anlyn’s hand flinched, just as if he had touched her body. Just like when he touched her body. She yanked her flightstick the other way, worried he might lock the two Interceptors together. As she created a few paces of space—and before she could reconsider—she followed the instructions in the help file and typed in the override commands, entering them in triplicate and agreeing to all the warning messages.

The jump switch finally turned from black to solid blue.

Anlyn punched it without hesitation.

The twin suns of Hori disappeared, replaced by a blanket of alien stars and a maelstrom of violence. Plasma blasts the size of solar flares ripped through the distance, arcing toward a blazing ball of destruction the size of a planet. Anlyn saw, just in time, that similar plumes of racing fire were heading her way. She slammed the thrust forward and dove out of their path as the columns of sure death slid by in silence.

Where have I jumped? she wondered. It certainly wasn’t the empty space she’d been aiming for.

Besides the large rivers of marching plasma fire, Anlyn saw that the cosmos around her was peppered with a swarm of racing ships and the less powerful streaks from their cannons and missile pods. She banked her own ship around—still getting used to the feel of the controls—and searched for a way out of the commotion.

But the chaos was everywhere; it seemed whatever star system she had jumped into was embroiled in an outright orgy of war. At first, she thought it was a trinary star system, an alien land with one more sun than even her own Drenard, but eventually she recognized the other two glowing, fire-stricken orbs to be planets. Former planets, anyway. Both were being devoured by all-encompassing blazes, almost as if the crust of each had opened up to reveal the molten mantle beneath.

Anlyn headed up the star system’s orbital plane, hoping to escape the flat battleground where most of the activity was taking place. She threw the accelerator all the way forward and felt her body sag back into her seat with the ever-increasing velocity.

What have I done? she thought to herself.

Red alarms winked across her dashboard in answer. Anlyn fought to unravel them, her eyes darting from one to the next, none of the alarms ever having come up during her brief training regimen:

MISSILE LOCK_ HOSTILE TARGETS_ PLASMA SIGNATURES_

Her hands shook as they hovered over the hundreds of keys and knobs on the dash, so few of which she knew how to operate. The trembling worked its way up her arms, through her shoulders, back into her heart, and all the way to her legs. Anlyn wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold her body still, trying to prevent herself from flying apart like the distant planets, quaking from their onslaught. She pulled her knees up to her chin, dug her heels into the seat, and tucked her head down, quivering and crying.

And then the first missile struck.

The ferocious blast vaporized one wing and ripped the fuselage in half. Anlyn was slammed into her flight harness, the pilot’s suit coping with a majority of the Gs, but not all of them. Her head whipped to the side, her arms and legs fortuitously protected by her tight fetal position as the wounded Bern Interceptor spun out of control around her, the physical whirlwind of disintegrating machinery exploding into the cosmos.

A bolt of plasma ripped through the Interceptor next, punching a clean hole, ringed in red and dripping sparks, right through the ship’s body. Anlyn heard her visor snap shut automatically, cutting off the banging of steel and the whine of a dozen alarms. The sound of air moving, of a tiny fan somewhere in her suit circulating her precious oxygen, was all she heard besides her heartbeat.

The end had come for her, she realized. Bodi had been right. She wouldn’t last a second out in the galaxy alone.

The next missile cruised her way, its red tip armed and hungry. As it plowed through the cosmos after a warm body to devour, a countdown in Anlyn’s Interceptor ticked toward zero. It was a warning, giving her the chance to override an automatic safety system.

But Anlyn wasn’t aware of it. She tried to hold herself together as her ship screamed and was wrenched apart. The missile drew near, pushing through the fuzzy sphere of her Interceptor’s already-expanding field of debris. The counter on the safety system reached one, the alarm high and pleading, begging to be overridden before it did something that could not be undone.

It finally reached zero.

The auto-eject systems fired, launching Anlyn—still strapped to her flightseat—out into the cold blackness of space.

But that vacuum didn’t remain cold for long. The second missile finally found its prey, consuming itself and all else in a bubbly froth of fire and carnage.

17 · Drenard · A Longer Time Ago

In Anlyn’s dreams, the fan inside her helmet was a roar. It was the roar of the Wadi winds, those never ending blasts of air that flowed over her planet, etching the canyons from solid rock. Her heartbeat became her footfalls—the clomping of her hunting boots on the dry stone. Anlyn incorporated these sounds and constructed a dream world. A world that existed only in her memory, in her not-too-distant childhood.

There were five of them in her exclusive Rite group when Anlyn went to claim her Wadi. They were cousins, all. None of them were as near to the throne as she, if measured by begottens, but her three male cousins were lightyears closer for other reasons. Anlyn didn’t mind. She had no desire to sit where her father sat; she couldn’t stand the thought of giving speeches for a living or having to decide matters of galaxy-wide importance. Her ideal life involved moving to a frontier planet, something along the rim of the Drenard arm of the Milky Way, and finding some peace and quiet to surround herself with.

She had imagined her life there a million times in a million different ways, but every variation revolved around common themes: They started with a large plot of land, something not constrained by perpetual night on the one side and day on the other, but spread out. The land would be rolling in places and flat in others. At least one gurgling creek would pass through, playing and skipping over the rocks in little white leaps. The grass would be kept tall so it could wave to and fro with fickle, unpredictable gusts of wind, nothing like the perpetual hurricane roaring around her home world.

And there would be days. There would be a growing light expanding in the morning to swallow the sky. The sun would move through the air, shimmering and becoming white-hot as it rose to its peak. Then the nightfall would come to cool the sweat from her neck. She had heard about days from her uncles who governed distant planets. She had heard and imagined for herself the gradual sinking of suns, like balls of molten lava, crashing through the horizon.

Supposedly, the colors weren’t as severe on these other planets when their suns rose and set—they weren’t nearly as beautiful as what she’d grown up with on Drenard. But she could do without the frozen sunset of her home. Maybe, as the sight varied with each day, she would love the lesser spectacles even more. Their temporary nature might make them dearer, if drearier. She had heard as much from elders visiting from other planets.

And after the setting of the sun on her dream world, the night would come. It would be like the dark side of Drenard, but not deadly. The world would cool, shedding itself of its aura of trapped heat. The stars would begin to flash and twinkle, the sight of them temporary and fleeting. Anlyn and her husband—chosen by her and madly in love with each other—would lie out in the waving grasses and shiver and snuggle up together as their land began a plummet in temperature.

But the cooling wouldn’t go on forever. It wouldn’t freeze like the always-night on Drenard. Before the land could continue to grow cold, that forever-moving sun would race back around, hurrying through its task of warming the far side of her planet, keeping everything lovely and temperate by constantly orbiting and heating things just a little piece at a time.

Anlyn loved to imagine a sun doing that: Moving. She knew it wasn’t what really happened, that other worlds just spun in their orbits so fast that they experienced day and night, but the illusion would be hard to ignore. And it made her imaginary sun, this sun on her dream world, feel as if it had a noble chore to perform, like a spotlight of energy working tirelessly to evenly distribute its powers across all the lands.

“Hey, we’re here.”

Anlyn snapped out of her sleepy dreaming and found the shuttle had stopped. Her cousins were already out of their seats and following the cluster of guards and officials toward the exit. Outside, her uncles and her aunt strode toward the Royal Wadi hut. Anlyn gathered her things—just a small pouch of good-luck items her mom had left in her will—and hurried after her cousins.

The interior of the Wadi hut was very different from the ones Anlyn had visited in museums and on fieldtrips. Instead of bare walls and confined spaces, it looked more like a getaway mansion for a Circle member. Blue and purple finery slathered the walls and furniture; there were even hints of real wood trim framing the large windows and doorways. Anlyn would like to have pretended the differences between the huts were due to the eras in which they were built, but she knew that wasn’t the case. While most of her friends from private school were riding subways to normal Wadi huts, she and her cousins were being coddled in royal finery. And where the males would be allowed to hunt real Wadi, Anlyn and her cousin Coril would be relegated to snagging eggs, making them Drenards in the most limited of ways. In name only, really.

As they gathered inside, out of the feisty wind, their escorts gave them a brief overview of the hut, showing them the ready room and their private quarters. Anlyn and Coril picked out neighboring rooms while the boys fussed about in the ready room clashing with Wadi Lances to the chagrin of their poor escorts.

“It sucks Thooo eggs to have to wait a whole sleep,” Coril told Anlyn as the two made their way back to the lounge.

“Are you feeling anxious to get going?” Anlyn asked.

Coril nodded. “Just to get it over with. This whole charade seems like a waste of time.”

Anlyn didn’t say anything. Part of her agreed with Coril, knowing that their coddled female version of the Rite did nothing but make a mockery of what the old Wadi hunts were used for. In the days of thin living—many Hori cycles ago—the band of hospitable land on Drenard between cold night and hottest day made population growth a real concern. Back then, the Wadi Rite served a sick culling purpose, a twisted and sanctioned system of eugenics designed to weed out the weak. Now, with offworld settlements and two wars absorbing as many offspring as Drenard couples could make, the Rite had become a hierarchical selection process for some quasi-meritorious caste system. Except, paradoxically, it now meant bureaucrats and office workers were selected for their physical prowess, their tendency toward risk-taking, and their aggression. It was a trifecta of traits that had predictable consequences for the ruling of Empire: the hot-headed now dominated discussions and stifled other sorts of progress.

In Anlyn’s much cooler opinion, at least.

“You’ve been awfully quiet on this trip,” Coril pointed out. “You’re not scared or nervous, are you?”

Anlyn shook her head. “No. I think I’m like you, just wondering what we’re doing here.”

Coril looked out at the colors wavering above the canyons. The two cousins were currently much closer to the twin stars of Hori than normal, which made the light shimmering through the air look different.

“You’re not bummed about the throne one day moving off to another family, are you?”

Anlyn shrugged. “Maybe a little. But not because I’d ever want to be king, or because I wish I were a boy. Maybe I just feel a little guilty, or something. I guess I feel bad for my dad for only having me to pin his hopes on.”

“I would never want to be king,” Coril said. “All they do is get blamed for everything.”

“Yeah, but if you were king, nothing would ever go wrong,” Anlyn joked.

The two girls laughed. Everyone said Coril could do no wrong—that problems rolled off her like wind on marble.

“Oh, I’d make plenty of mistakes if I were king,” Coril said. “Don’t forget, I’d have to be a boy.”

They laughed even harder at that, the two of them bending over, panting, and wiping at their eyes. Anlyn peeked back at the hallway and saw one of their uncles leaning against the doorjamb, frowning.

“I think we’re supposed to be taking this more seriously,” Anlyn said.

“Yeah? Well, then they should take us more seriously, first.”

Anlyn spent that night tossing and turning, her head full of nightmares of large empty eggs and hatched Wadi scratching at rock. She awoke from one of the nightmares with a start, her heart pounding and her mind overwhelmed by the sensation of a nearby presence. She sat up, clutching her sheet—and a large figure at the foot of her bed shifted, as if startled by her movement.

Anlyn flinched.

“Gil? Is that you?”

“Not so loud,” he hissed.

Anlyn leaned closer, blinking away the sleepiness and peering at the dark form sitting at the foot of her bed. “Gil, what in Hori’s name are you doing in here?”

“I can’t do this,” he said softly.

Anlyn saw him shake his head, her eyes gradually adjusting to the soft light filtering in from the hallway. Gil had always been one of the few male cousins Anlyn didn’t mind being around. He rarely teased her, possibly because he was familiar with being on the receiving end so often. At the age of two Horis, he was just barely double the size of a female youth, which put him on the small side among his more manly classmates, who rarely let him forget it.

“You’ll do fine on your Rite,” Anlyn told him. “Our uncles wouldn’t send you into any trouble you couldn’t handle.” And certainly not us girls, she thought to herself.

Gil scooted closer, forcing Anlyn to tuck her feet up under herself.

“But I don’t think I can do it at all. I mean, kill a real Wadi.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big one, Gil. You can always—”

“I know, I know, size doesn’t matter for me. My dad’s got a cushy job waiting no matter where I end up ranking. It’s not that. And it isn’t the moral objections, I mean, I fantasize about killing one as big as my dad.”

“And shaped like him, too?”

Anlyn and Gil had to stifle their giggles. The two of them scooted even closer.

“I’m scared,” Gil said flatly.

The cousins sat in silence, digesting the concept.

“I think I’ve always known I couldn’t do this. I don’t know how I even got here.” Gil reached out and fumbled for Anlyn’s hands. She squeezed him back.

“Is there anything I can do?” Anlyn asked. “Anything I can say?”

Gil shook his head. “I wish you were bigger so we could swap places. No one would know with our Wadi suits covering us from head to toe.”

Anlyn felt a sudden sadness for her cousin as she realized just how terrified he must be to utter such craziness. She rubbed his arm. “And I would do it, Cousin, but the escorts would know. And anyway, I’ve heard rumors that they use tracking devices to make sure nothing bad happens to us. But I promise, if there was a way…”

Her voice trailed off, and the two of them sat together on the bed, their brains consumed with shame and pity.

“I should go try and get some sleep,” Gil said. “Thanks for talking.”

“You’re welcome,” Anlyn said, but she felt like a fool as soon as she uttered the words. She couldn’t remember saying anything that might’ve made him feel better. She only began to conjure up decent reassurances as Gil slid out of the room, his large silhouette hunched over and sad as it turned out of sight.

18 · ???

Anlyn woke when it became hard to breathe. It was her body’s way of jostling her into consciousness, telling her to do something. It was a warning that the air in her suit had grown too thin.

As she came to, she had a moment’s doubt about where she was. She had been dreaming of her Wadi Rite, and now she found herself floating in space. All around her were bright stars and pyrotechnics—the flash and silent explosions of a major war.

A circulating fan whirred near her ear, moving air around her helmet, but her lungs told her that precious little oxygen remained inside. Her breathing had become wheezing—each laborious inhalation a vaporous disappointment. Her suit was kind enough to filter out her toxic exhalations, but it couldn’t create oxygen from nothing. Gradually, a vacuum was forming within her suit to match the one embroiled with fighting beyond.

As she spun around in her ejected pilot seat, Anlyn got a sweeping view of the action taking place around her. Bolts of plasma the size of Drenardian skyscrapers could be seen coursing through the cosmos. They travelled near the speed of light, but the distances they crossed meant their path could be followed, actually watched. Anlyn tracked them with surreal detachment. One of the bolts impacted the bright orb of a nearby planet. The cylinder of energy punched through an atmosphere choking with smoke. It struck land, already little more than magma, and a red crack appeared in the crust. The energy was so great, chunks of the planet’s continents exploded away with enough force to drive them into orbit. Some of these jetted through space, glowing and trailing coronas of fire. Others fell back to the surface, throwing up destructive echoes of the initial blow.

Amid this chaos, two fleets swarmed, intertwined. The crafts seemed impossibly fast and agile, but they all were, and so a continuous stream of them winked out in puffs of spectacular coordination and aim. Dozens of orbital stations seemed to be the targets of these buzzing attack fleets. Swarms of missiles agitated around each one, brought down by equal swarms of countermeasures. Another column of hellish plasma erupted from a nearby station and began its lightning-quick stampede toward another planet in the distance.

Anlyn sucked in fruitless gasps while she lost herself in the swirling battle. Her head had already begun to throb with dizziness. When she spun around in the direction of her ship, she marveled at the cloud of debris it had become. Flashes of light caught on the tinsel and confetti of the craft’s remains. All that was left of any substance was half of one wing, blown off before the second missile struck. There was that, plus Anlyn and her ejected flightseat.

She labored for another breath. Her chest swelled with effort, pushing on the harness restraints pinning her to the seat. Since the flightseat no longer served any purpose, Anlyn unbuckled herself and floated away from it. She tried, once again, to wick some oxygen from what little air swirled inside her helmet. As her gasps quickened into frantic, shallow pants, Anlyn felt her mind slipping away. She had a sudden impulse to pull off her helmet, a hallucinatory feeling like it was the thing constricting her breathing, keeping her from taking in the air that surely must be all around her. She felt like she was underwater. Drowning. She needed to come up. Needed to kick and swim and break the surface of her awful torment.

Anlyn fumbled for the latches on the sides of her helmet. She fumbled for them, even as some receding and sane part of her screamed not to do it. She groped along her collar with her too-big flight gloves, the unwieldy padding making it difficult to do anything. Her lungs burned as they starved for air.

And then the hallucinations grew worse. Something like a ship, but silver and gleaming and fluid, danced in her vision. It hovered in front of her, windows like giant eyes, like a metallic and curious face watching her die. Anlyn screamed. She beat her hands on her helmet, her palms smacking her visor. She was frustrated she couldn’t open it, couldn’t pop it off to take in a deep breath. She pawed at her gloves, trying to tear them off, but her fingers had already grown tingly. Her entire body was becoming numb. She shook her arms, and a spasm vibrated through her chest. With a throat deadly empty, she took one last feeble pull on the thinning air. The great metal face sat there, watching.

Watching as the black fell over her eyes once more.

“Girls to the right,”

The voice filled Anlyn’s head, relayed through the D-bands worn by each of her Rite mates. Anlyn and Coril exchanged looks but obeyed. The three boys jockeyed for position to their left, lining up to receive their great Wadi lances. Gil flashed a quick, sad glance Anlyn’s way, then continued his half-hearted charade of feigned excitement as he shuffled closer to the other boys.

“Settle down, you three.”

One of Anlyn’s uncles—a former member of the Circle—joined the other Rite leaders by the lobby’s window. Anlyn assumed it was he who had spoken the last, though it was improper for her to guess. During the Rite, all were supposed to be equal, the questions and answers made diffuse by the power of the bands.

“Come forward to take your maps.”

The boys scurried toward the Rite leaders as the Drenard adults reached for a table that had been draped in layer upon layer of blue honeycloth. They each picked up one of the fabric maps laid out on top and turned to present them to the boys.

Anlyn and Coril approached a smaller table to the side where their Aunt Ralei stood. Anlyn accepted her map blindly; she was distracted by the flurry of excitement around the boys’ table as they took their own maps. Gil turned and met her gaze, and a shiver of fear leaked into her band. Her poor cousin was doing an awful job of concealing his inner thoughts.

Something pinched Anlyn’s hand, drawing her attention away from the lads. She turned to find her Aunt Ralei giving her a severe look. Her aunt’s eyes darted down to the map she was pressing into Anlyn’s hands.

Anlyn looked. The map had been folded over several times, leaving one section exposed. It showed an intricate tangle of Wadi canyons.

Her aunt’s finger moved from Anlyn’s hand and slowly traced one of the canyons. Anlyn felt Coril leaning against her arm to see, and her Aunt Ralei twisted the map to better facilitate this, showing both girls some specific route through the labyrinth. Anlyn wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be looking at; the bands were silent, no thoughts leaking through them save for a twinge of Gil’s fear.

She watched her aunt’s finger tap one spot in particular, then the same finger slid to the edge of the map and up the back of her Aunt Ralei’s arm, pulling her cloak back to expose a pale-blue wrist.

It was there that Anlyn saw what her aunt was speaking of. Trailing out of the woman’s sleeve were three parallel scars, the knotted flesh heaped high and sinister, looking like white ropes laid into her skin. Anlyn gasped at the sight of them; she felt her deep thoughts leak out as she looked up to her aunt’s face. But gone was the scowl her aunt had been giving her earlier. It had been replaced with a grim smile. Her aunt now bore a look of happy, hopeful, and raw determinism.

When Anlyn passed out the second time, gasping for air, she had felt certain it was her last moment of life. Her final thoughts had been like a sliver of shimmering oxygen, piercing the black suffocation coiling itself around her. She had thought how nice it would be for the end to come, to find an escape from the slow torment. And if there was something beyond—a peaceful afterlife for those with sound souls—she thought, right at the last, that she was about to discover it.

She came to once again to find her journey had been delayed.

Her helmet was off. She could feel something pressed over her mouth and nose and the pinch of tight straps wrapped around the back of her head. Above her, the silvery curve of a ship’s hull arched up, its surface spotted with portholes of varying sizes. Through these, Anlyn could see the bright bolts and explosions of a battle still raging beyond.

Someone leaned over Anlyn. She blinked and tried to sit up, but a gentle hand kept her in place. Large, wet eyes blinked slowly, her own reflection clearly visible in the black dome of them. When the head pulled away, Anlyn recognized the race immediately, even though she’d only ever seen them in books. It was a Bel-Tra, the mysterious surveyors of the universe.

Anlyn tried to say something, but she managed only a groan. Her head felt as if it had been split in two. Now that she was out of her flightseat’s harness and back in gravity, she could feel how traumatized her body had been by the explosion that destroyed her ship. She felt bruised all over and completely empty of air.

The Bel-Tra brushed Anlyn’s forehead with the back of its hand, then reached to its side. Anlyn turned her head to follow and saw that she was lying on the spaceship’s decking. Clear tubes led away from a mask over her face and trailed to a small canister by the Bel-Tra’s side. The figure freed a device—one of many hanging from its belt—and slipped it over its wrist. It looked like a flat rectangle of some sort, like an LCD display. When the Tra turned it around for Anlyn to see, words were already marching across the screen:

I DID NOT DO THIS.

“I know,” Anlyn whispered. She saw, down in the lower part of her vision, that her spoken words did no more than frost the inner coat of her mask. She reached up and pulled it to the side, then let her hand drop to her chest.

“I know,” she said again. She closed her eyes and tried to summon back her voice. “Thank you.”

She couldn’t tell if the Bel-Tra could hear her, didn’t know if it even understood Drenard. She opened her eyes to see more words flitting across the screen:

I MEANT TO SAY: I DID NOT RESCUE YOU.

Anlyn read the words several times, but they made little sense. They disappeared before she was ready for them to.

WE ARE ONLY SUPPOSED TO WATCH.

These new words came fast. They seemed to pulse with extra light, giving them an urgency of some sort. Anlyn realized the device was something like her people’s bands, but different. She lifted her arm and reached for the Tra. “I won’t tell anyone,” Anlyn said, finally understanding.

The Bel-Tra clasped Anlyn’s hand. The slim creature’s large eyes blinked, pale lids snapping down over Anlyn’s reflection. When they reopened, Anlyn saw thick tears welling up at the base of them. They ran out over the lower lids and dashed down the Tra’s long and narrow face, past a small mouth, pursed with thin lips. The alien squeezed her hand, then pulled the device up in front of her, blocking her view of it crying. New words slowly worked their way across the screen, the light behind them dim, each one coming hesitantly, as if wary of being seen:

I AM SORRY.

Before Anlyn could ask what the Tra meant, or even begin to puzzle it out herself, the alien took hold of her mask and put it back in place. Anlyn tried to shrug it away, no longer needing it, but it was pressed down too tight for her to resist.

She caught a whiff of the gas that had replaced the flow of oxygen, and the apology began to make sense. As the darkness gathered, squeezing down around Anlyn’s vision, the last thing she saw was the face of the Tra, tears dripping off its chin, and the bloom of her own complaints frosting the mask in the tightening edges of her consciousness.

19 · Drenard

The winds howling out of the Wadi canyons were deafening. Anlyn and Coril had begun their march by angling away from the Rite shelter, and once they were out of the building’s lee, the flap of their Wadi suits in the stiff breeze had begun to erode their hearing. They soon pulled back their thin and shimmery hoods, tucking them into their collars to keep the fabric quiet. Walking side-by-side, they let the gusts push at their backs, driving them toward the deepening canyons while they discussed the looming Rite.

“I’m pretty sure Aunt Ralei meant for us not to go there,” Anlyn complained, still trying to convince her cousin that revealing the scars had been a warning of sorts.

“You can go wherever you like,” Coril shouted. “I’m going to catch the Wadi that scratched her.”

Anlyn turned and looked back over her shoulder. Even squinting into the wind, she could feel it desiccating her eyes. Off in the distance and laboring to catch up to them, she saw Gil’s bulky form standing out on the horizon. The poor kid had followed along after the other two boys for a thousand paces before finally breaking off in the girls’ direction. Anlyn felt a hollow tugging in her chest. All she should’ve been thinking about was the completion of her own Rite and getting back to her studies, and now she found herself dealing with a frightened relative on the one side and a zealous and overeager one on the other. It was like the hot and cold sides of Drenard hemming her in.

“If you’re gonna insist on hunting Wadi, you might want to wait for Gil. He’s at least got a proper lance.”

Coril looked back at their larger cousin, still quite a distance behind them. She didn’t slow her pace. “He’ll catch us before we get to the dayline.” She looked down at the egg graspers and sunshields the two of them had been given. “You make a good point, though.”

Sure enough, Gil caught up to them a dozen or so paces from the dayline. He arrived huffing, his eyes wide.

“Thanks for waiting up!” he said, his sarcasm nearly lost between his pants for air.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing your Rite alone?” Coril asked with a mocking tone.

Gil looked back and forth between his female cousins. “Well, why do you two get to hunt together?”

Anlyn shrugged. “That’s the rules, Gil.”

“Well, I don’t like the rules. Besides, what’re they gonna do to me if I come back with an egg? Tell me I’m not a Drenard? So what?”

Coril shook her head and turned away from the two of them, seemingly disgusted by her cousin’s attitude. She walked toward a near section of the dayline that stretched across the wide and deepening canyon. Anlyn patted Gil on the back and hurried to catch up.

As she joined Coril, Anlyn saw her cousin had her map out and folded in thirds to keep the ends from flapping. Ahead of them, the canyon split off in two, a sharp wedge of a cliff rising up in the center and bisecting the dayline. Coril stopped and surveyed the tall feature. She looked back down at her map, then rotated it to match the direction she was looking.

“I think we’re at the edge of the egg canyon,” Anlyn told Coril. She pointed off to one side where a shadowpath hugged the base of a cliff, the first smattering of Wadi holes visible along its smooth face.

“You can go down there if you like,” Coril said. She looked up and pointed around the other side of the narrow wedge. “But that’s where Aunt Ralei was telling us to go.”

“I still think she was warning us to not go there,” Anlyn shouted above a ferocious gust of wind.

Gil lumbered up beside them, still short of breath from the long and hurried hike. “Who warned you of what?” he asked.

“You should go with Anlyn,” Coril said. She folded her map and tucked it into her supply belt, right behind her thermos. Reaching up to her shoulder, she unstrapped her sunshield and brought it around in front of herself. Her egg graspers were attached to the back of it. She pulled the device out of its clips and held it out toward Gil.

“Take this.”

Gil looked at the graspers, which were just a long set of telescoping rods with a trigger on one end and a padded set of clamps on the other. He reached out and accepted the graspers, then glanced at his Wadi lance. Coril held her hands out for it.

“I’ll need it back,” Gil said, so quietly they could barely hear him over the wind and the howling of the canyons.

“I’ll even clean the blood off it for you,” Coril said snidely. She took the large weapon from him and pulled it toward herself. Anlyn couldn’t help but notice how it dipped down and nearly touched the canyon floor, the heft of the thing taking Coril by surprise.

“What about the sunshield?” Gil asked.

Coril looked to the path leading off toward the egg canyon. “Do you really think you’ll need it?”

Gil peeked down the canyon as well. He shrugged. “Maybe.”

Coril sighed. “Alright then.” She handed over the shield.

The three of them stood still for a moment, and Anlyn’s mind raced as she tried to sort out what was about to take place. This was not how she had imagined her Rite going. Gil turned away from Coril’s glare, pulling on Anlyn as he went.

“Hold on a second,” Anlyn told him.

“C’mon,” said Gil, urging her toward the egg canyon.

Anlyn pulled her sunshield off her back and rested its edge on the ground. The top came up to her waist, and the thing was only two hands wide with its panels retracted. She kept one hand on it and reached around to unclip her thermos.

“Take this,” she told Coril, holding out her full vessel of water.

Coril glanced down at it, then back up to Anlyn. “Are you really not coming with me?” She didn’t move to accept the thermos.

Anlyn felt her shoulders sag as her cousin’s disappointment swirled around her on an eddy of wind.

“Who do you think you’re gonna impress?” Anlyn asked. “Do you really think this will change anything? Do you think a single door will crack for you if you do this? Because they won’t. What few paths you do have will just slam shut.”

Coril frowned. Gil tried once more to tug Anlyn away.

“I don’t give a flying Wadi about any of that,” Coril finally said. She stepped closer to Anlyn and pushed away the thermos. “I don’t care how they measure me by this. I really don’t. I simply mean to measure myself.”

She clasped Anlyn’s arm. Her face flashed a glimpse of seriousness before her famous smile came back to wash it away. “Good luck on your Rite, Cousin,” she said.

With that, Coril lifted the heavy lance in both hands and trotted away, aiming for the shadowpath on the other side of the tall wedge.

Anlyn watched her go, fearing it would be the last time she ever saw her dear cousin alive.

“C’mon,” Gil said. He pulled Anlyn toward the egg canyon. “Don’t worry about her,” he shouted into the wind. “Nothing bad ever happens to Princess Coril!”

Anlyn reluctantly turned away. She followed after Gil as her large cousin strode toward the dayline and the wide path of shade snaking along the base of the canyon wall. She unclipped her egg graspers from her sunshield and tried to remember where she was—what she was supposed to be doing. Looking back, she saw Coril had already rounded the wedge of rock, disappearing up the canyon her aunt had shown them. She felt a powerful urge to run after her, to either bring her back or to join her, but not knowing which was the right action somehow paralyzed Anlyn into doing neither.

So instead, she simply followed Gil down the dark path ahead, past that line in the rock where eternal day abutted an endless night.

20 · ???

The pitch black of Anlyn’s unconsciousness was shattered by a brilliant flash of light. She awoke to find herself lying flat on her back, the same tumultuous war from earlier roiling above as darting ships and blooming explosions popped in the distance. Nearby, the gleaming and curvy ship that had rescued her from the vacuum of space began to rise up, pulling away from some sort of a landing pad that Anlyn had been left to one side of. The Bel-Tra’s ship lifted in complete and eerie silence, and noticeably without the flare of chemicals belching from any sort of thruster. It just floated higher and higher, departing as mysteriously as it had appeared.

The stomping of heavy boots thundered all around Anlyn, chasing away the quietude. Figures appeared in her peripheral. A group of men—Humans!—garbed in dark suits formed up around her. One of them shouldered a large weapon of some sort; he raised it up toward the departing ship and Anlyn heard something click.

There was a swoosh and a spit of fire before a lozenge of metal popped out of the weapon. The projectile paused, seeming to struggle against gravity, then took off in a flash, spiraling up after the Bel-Tra’s ship. Beyond the craft, Anlyn could just barely make out the shimmering curve of a dome of some sort, whatever material was holding in the atmosphere around the landing pad. Even in her dazed and confused state, she felt a pang of fear for the Tra as the craft seemed to be pinned between a hard barrier on the one side and a dangerous projectile on the other.

And then, with what was either a miraculous display or a desperate and suicidal leap, the Tra’s ship disappeared. It winked out with all the suddenness of a hyperspace jump, despite the threat of matter and gravity all around.

One of the men above Anlyn shouted something—something in a tongue that was alien and yet familiar. The rocket continued to chase after the missing ship, finally slamming into the dome and erupting in a ball of orange hellfire.

“Gotammeet,” one of the men said, as phonetically as Anlyn could place it. As the fire drained away and the smoke cleared, she could see the dome itself hadn’t been scratched. The men in the strange cloaks—with clinging bottoms fitted to each leg and tops that met in vertical seams left open—turned from the dissipating fire and looked down at her.

Their reactions were sharp and immediate. All four men jumped back, eyes wide. What were obviously weapons became trained on her, and the men began shouting back and forth. Anlyn couldn’t tell if it was her they were shouting at, or each other.

She tried her best to sit up, but her stomach felt like one giant bruise. She raised her hand. “Sheesti Looo,” she said in Drenard, knowing it would be ineffectual.

One of the figures pushed the others back. He fiddled with something on his belt, and suddenly the fabric of his suit began to shimmer like a tunic made of honeycloth. He came forward with his arm out, his palm reaching for Anlyn’s outstretched and much smaller hand.

“Sheesti Looo,” she said again, this time with more relief than fear as the weapons were returned to the folds of the strange and open cloaks. She sat up further and pressed her hand into the Human’s—

Something electric jolted through her body with the contact. A burning fire shivered up her arm, into her chest, and down through her thighs. It filled her with a trembling power, a surge of agony higher and harder than any pain she’d ever known. Her body became paralyzed, her muscles seizing up.

It wasn’t until the jolt rattled her brain, knocking Anlyn unconscious once again, that she found some sort of escape from the pain.

“I can’t feel anything.”

“That’s because there’s nothing there.”

“Let me try one more.”

Anlyn blew out her breath, but the gesture was lost among the stiff wind and the shrill howl of the Wadi canyon. She watched as Gil removed his egg graspers from the small hole and inserted them into one further down.

“Gil, I’m telling you, no Wadi in its right mind would lay its eggs in there.”

Gil reached in as far as his thick boyish arms would allow and fiddled with the trigger. It was obvious he’d never practiced with a set of graspers.

“How do you know where they’d lay them?” he asked.

Anlyn leaned away from the canyon wall and looked back to the dayline. It was still visible in the distance. “Because it’s too close to the nighttime,” she said. “This would all be in the shade during the slightest of cycles.”

Gil ran his tongue across his lower lip, concentrating. After a pause, he pulled the graspers out and shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “You’re in charge.”

Anlyn pulled out her map. “Our best bet is to go to the end of this canyon. It terminates in a pocket several thousand paces from here, and that’s where the females would most likely go to lay their eggs. There’s plenty of shade on this side.”

Gil moved to her side and peered at her map. Anlyn pointed to the spot where their canyon dead-ended.

“See? The rock on the other side gets a full blast of heat from both Hori’s, which means plenty of condensation inside for the eggs. There’s probably a lot of convection currents and watering holes in there.”

Gil scratched his neck and wiped his hands off on his shimmering Wadi suit.

“Alright,” he said. “Lead the way.”

They walked in silence. Anlyn left her graspers clipped to her sunshield and strolled along by the edge of the shade, marveling at how hot the air blowing through the canyons felt. The high-pitched wails on all sides seemed to resonate with the deeper groans echoing from further ahead—the sounds of larger Wadi holes.

The noise gave her chills, even as she reminded herself that male Wadi would be rare in an egg-laying canyon; supposedly, the smells and pheromones were enough to keep them at bay. Anlyn tried to picture all those scents traveling up and down the dayside on the heavy winds. She wondered what the world must look like to a Wadi. It must be so different from how she saw it, mostly through sights and sounds. She wondered if the Wadi ever pondered in kind just how the world appeared to these silly Drenards stumbling through their canyons in their silvery suits.

As she walked along and pondered these things, Gil lagged a dozen paces behind, despite his longer legs. Her cousin seemed wary of their journey into the deepening canyon, preferring to hang back and to stick close to the canyon side of the shadowpath. Anlyn glanced back periodically to make sure he was still with her. They’d walked a few thousand paces already, and Anlyn had consumed roughly half her water. Then again, if she read the last bend in the canyon correctly, the map showed them almost to the dead-end. Once they rounded the next curve, they should be able to see it.

The next curve, unfortunately, proved to be one they couldn’t just walk around. On the other side of the bend, the canyon wall arched back the other way, putting its face in the full sunlight of the two Horis. There was a shade bridge crossing to the other side, so Anlyn waited for Gil, testing her sunshield while he caught up.

“You didn’t say we’d have to cross a bridge!” Gil said.

Anlyn turned to see him resting by the wall, one hand clinging to a hole in the rock. He still had his graspers out, his fingers working the trigger over and over without seeming to realize he was doing it.

“I think we’re almost there,” Anlyn told him. She looked to the bridge. “Besides, it’s a wide one. Just stay low and keep your shield ready.” She turned back to see him probing a Wadi hole with his graspers.

“Gil, seriously, we need to keep moving.”

“Fine,” he said.

Anlyn shook her head. She wished—and not for the first time—that she’d gone with Coril. She held her shield out and pushed the deploy switch a quarter of the way down its glideline. The top and sides of the shield immediately grew, the overlapped panels sliding away from one another. She adjusted the switch until the shield was wide enough to cover her in a crouch but not too big to catch excess wind. Once she was satisfied, she stooped down and crept out onto the bridge.

They were called bridges, but of course she walked across bare rock hardly different than the last thousand paces of stone. The actual bridge was a metal column embedded in the canyon walls much further ahead. That column spanned the canyon horizontally, positioned in just the right way to throw a shadow back to the exact spot a path was needed. On the other side of the canyon from Anlyn, the bright sunlit wall ended, and another shadowpath began right at the bend in the rock. Anlyn knew that in most cases, the shade bridges were situated at turns in the canyons just like this one. The shift in angle brought an end to the shadow on one side of the valley just as it began creating a new one on the other. The bridge simply allowed them to move across the boiling hot wasteland in between.

Once out on the beginnings of the bridge, Anlyn waited for the wind to pick up a little more. It was dangerous to cross during the lulls, for the lulls never lasted for long. All they would do was make her complacent, causing Anlyn to relax her muscles before the gusts came. She waited until the howls sounded about average, then shuffled out, keeping the sunshield sideways to the wind ahead of her.

Anlyn had practiced with the shields on windy rooftops where the force was steady, but had never operated one in such unpredictable gusts. She had very little warning before a stiff blast of wind hit her. There was a slight increase in pitch from the shrill calls upwind—just enough to make her adjust the angle of the sunshield—and then the mighty breeze wrapped itself around her. Anlyn fell to one knee and placed a hand out on the rock; she angled the shield to provide suction, just like an atmospheric flyer’s wing, and used the flow to pin herself in place. Behind her, she heard Gil curse. She glanced over her shoulder to see that he had already started out on the bridge with her.

One at a time! Anlyn yelled in her head. But of course, without their D-bands, he couldn’t hear her.

The distraction of him crowding the bridge caused her to lose focus for a second, and she felt the stiffening breeze claw at the edge of her shield. Anlyn got it back under control as the wind passed, the breeze dropping down into a dangerous lull. Before she could steady herself, preparing for the next gust, Gil thundered by. He ran, fully upright on his long and powerful legs, knocking Anlyn out toward the sunside.

She fell, off-balance. She nearly threw her hand out onto the sunrock to stop her fall, but some innate sense of self-preservation won out over her instinct to brace herself. Instead, she swung her sunshield out, digging its edge into the floor of the steaming rock. Her hands and arms went into the full fury of the Horis, but the suit easily reflected their sunshine. It was the rock in the always-heat that could hurt her.

Pushing off with the shield, Anlyn threw herself back into the shade of the bridge. She heard a cry from the canyons, heralding the arrival of more wind. Her legs, already shaking from the near-fall, kicked off, responding in fear just as Gil had. She retracted her shield and ran. She ran like a fool Wadi being chased by a pack of males.

21 · Darrin

The first weeks of Anlyn’s captivity in the Darrin system were the worst in some ways but the best in others. Best, of course, being a relative term. The bad parts came from the confusion. Anlyn was kept in a cell by herself, the other cages around her packed with anywhere from several to a dozen aliens, mostly Humans. She was treated as a curiosity by a few and as a scourge by most. Even the younger Humans spat at her between the bars, using words Anlyn could figure for cussing just by the energy and invective put behind them.

Lots of adult males came and paid visits; they were always careful to shimmer their suits before they stepped in the cell with her. Anlyn learned quickly not to put up a fight. If she thought there was a chance of hurting her captors—or possibly ending her own life with the effort—she would have. But any sort of kinetic blow just shocked her with more of the electricity, jolting her like a blast from a Drenardian guardlance. And so she allowed the Humans to inspect her, prodding her in the most humiliating fashion in front of the sneering, spitting spectators.

When her captors weren’t around, Anlyn spent her time huddled, her knees to her neck and her back to the lone solid wall. They had taken her stolen flightsuit and left her with the short undertunic she’d put on so long ago, back when her father was still alive and only one person ever touched her against her will. She sat like that, enduring the odd cycle of artificial light and dark, as she watched the Humans and the others come and go from their cells, their energy to yell at her and spit at her seeming to fade with time.

It wasn’t until much later—many, many sleep cycles later—that Anlyn would see anything good about those first weeks. It took her that long for the confusion to be understood as a blessing, for her to appreciate how wonderful it could be to not know what was going on around her.

After at least two dozen sleeps, the men in the dark tunics with the thread-thin stripes began pulling her from her cell, just like they did the others. They first led off a group made up mostly of Humans. They paused before bringing Anlyn out and marching her off in the same direction.

The sight of her along a new stretch of prisoners elicited fresh howls and new volleys of saliva. The Humans banged their palms against the bars, a sound that wouldn’t have been too loud if there had only been a few of them doing it. So much anger directed at her made Anlyn cower deep inside her own skin. But then, some other part of her wished she could speak their language. She wanted to yell at them, to let them know that they were only alive because of her people. She felt an urge to spread the seeds of doubt among them, to detail the treacherous nature of the Bern and that they were likely infested with them.

Had she known English at the time, she probably would’ve yelled all of that and more. And of course, she would’ve been ignored as their enemy and as a raving lunatic.

Outside the hallway of cells, her captors led her through several gates and down a long corridor. They finally passed through a door at the end and into a wide room humming with electricity. Anlyn could feel heat from the machines hanging in the air—the stuffiness that came from cabinets of computing power inadequately ventilated. Along the far wall, the other prisoners were already being situated, made to lie flat on their stomachs on padded beds. A dozen men in the dark, tight-fitting tunics cinched straps across their backs and clipped wires here and there. White helmets studded with more tangles of multi-colored wire were strapped down on the prisoners’ heads. Some of the Humans tried to twist away; they shook their heads in an effort to resist the procedure. Others seemed to prefer not to get the small jolts from the shock-devices that came from putting up a fight.

As Anlyn was pulled toward one of the padded tables, she felt a compulsion to disobey, to kick out at her escorts, to put up enough of a struggle that they’d be forced to kill her—but her body was too fatigued to do her bidding. Or perhaps it disagreed with her mind’s wish to have their combined life snuffed out. Before she could summon her courage, she felt herself being lifted up and shoved flat on the padded table. She turned her head to the side as they strapped her painfully in place.

A man in a white tunic—a proper one with a flowing bottom—rushed over. He seemed to be arguing with the ones in the dark, open-front tunics. There was a lot of shouting, then the pinch of straps across her back and the bite of more straps into her legs. The man in the white tunic was shoved away. More yelling followed. Painful pricks bit Anlyn’s skin as wires were clipped, unclipped, and reclipped. Several people seemed to want to be in charge at the same time and disagreed on where things went.

The helmet came on last. They held her head in place, being rough with her as they strapped it beneath her chin. Anlyn shouted her own string of curse words, unleashing a fury built up over so many imprisoned sleeps that the time seemed to stretch back into forever.

She cursed at them and was still cursing at them when her first nightmare began—

It was a chasing dream. As it would turn out, they would always be chasing dreams. It took Anlyn so very many of them before she figured out what was going on, how they were using her. At first, she thought it was just for torture. She thought every bad piece of propaganda she’d ever heard about Humans was correct, that they were tormenting her for the mere sport of it. It wasn’t until much later that she learned the truth and realized the propaganda had been tame in comparison.

The machine tapped straight into her fears. It placed her in immediate danger, turning her loose in a dream world and leaving her to survive on pure adrenaline. Her brain was made to feel the worst sort of panic, its entire computational powers melding with her most primal fears. And so Anlyn found herself in a Wadi canyon, chased by a hoard of scratching, clawing, hissing males. The nightmare was so powerful, so real, that Anlyn could feel with complete surety that she would die if they caught her.

And so she ran.

She ran faster in the dream world than she could in real life. Her brain was alive with terror and made powerful by a surge of hormones. As the Wadi came after her—a handful, a dozen, hundreds—Anlyn twisted and turned, dashing along the shaded paths branching out in a knotted web before her.

She looked left and right as she sprinted along, trying to make sure she saw them all. Wadi were everywhere: darting and leaping, pawing the air where she had been just moments before.

Anlyn became consumed with the awareness of them. Her autonomic fear response—her overwhelming urge to live—told her where to cut and dive and dodge to avoid them. The scenario set up by the nightmare felt impossible to survive, but it became ever less so the longer she ran. Eventually, the hundreds of Wadi dwindled to dozens, then down to a handful of the biggest and sleekest ones. Several times, these ultra Wadi grazed her, nicking her leg as she spun out of the way a blink too slow, gashing her arm as she swung it out for balance or to fend off another attacker. Each time, the pain was real—Wadi toxins could be felt spreading through her nerves with painful electricity. Anlyn dug deep, summoning every drop of will she had to outrace the rabid animals. She pounded her feet, choosing one turn in the shady paths after another, running toward a hole she somehow knew was just ahead, a hole only she would be able to go through.

When it came into sight—this magical place where she would be safe—there was only one Wadi left behind her. Anlyn felt a powerful urge to forget the beast and run straight for the hole, but a smarter part of her knew it would mean her death. If she were to forget the danger for even a moment, if she were to make the mistake of dreaming too fondly for an end to the nightmare, her foolish hopes would surely just worsen the torture. She knew without knowing how she knew that a twisting path would be shorter in the end.

With renewed vigor, she darted to and fro, cutting a mad and winding course across the flat rock. The last Wadi skidded behind her, slipping now and then, cutting across the sunrock when it had to, its scales gleaming in the fury of her nightmare Horis.

Anlyn lunged left and right several more times, her thighs so heavy and sore that they threatened to collapse with each powerful juke. She forced her feet to grip the stone, forced her arms to pump along with her legs, took one more spin, faked to the side, then dove, headfirst, through the hole of her imagined and longed-for safety—

When the helmet came off, there were even more men around her than before, more in the dark suits and especially more in the white tunics. They were yelling even louder, but no longer at each other. They seemed to be cheering. The wires came off her skin with sharp stings. The straps were pulled away, and Anlyn was forced up. She could see that the room was empty of other prisoners; all the padded beds were vacant, which left her with the impression that she’d been in the nightmare for much longer than it had felt. Then again, in other ways, it felt like she’d been in that horrible place for several sleeps.

The Humans were obviously happy with their experiment. A large group of them continued to speak loudly with one another as her escorts led her back to her cell. Along the way, there was more spitting and yelling. This was followed by more hours of sitting alone, hugging her shins, and then another sleep during the confusing cycle of light to dark. The only change was in the quality of her water and the amount of food she was given later that night. Neither, however, were enough to overcome the residual shaking the nightmare had left in her bones.

The next day, they did it to her again. It was another Wadi nightmare, very similar to the last one. The fear and pain did not lessen, but Anlyn at least knew what was expected of her. She made it to the hole once again, cut up and bleeding by the time she got there. The dream wounds felt so real that her flesh was tender as they drug her back to her cell. She half expected to find actual scars or dried blood on her somewhere. She slept with real aches and with the perpetual fear of the nightmares finding their way into her cell.

And so it went: Wadi dreams for a dozen sleeps. Anlyn became exhausted by the ordeal, which at least meant she was able to pass out for the entirety of her imprisoned nights. During a subsequent march down the cell-lined corridor, one of her escorts lashed out at a spitter, which was different. Anlyn hardly cared. She liked it better when they left her alone in her cell.

During the next nightmare, she learned something new. The Wadi could be turned on one another. Not purpose-minded, but on accident. She could taunt them along on colliding vectors, sending the imagined animals into each other, which made them vanish even quicker than outrunning them. At the beginning of the dream—when there were lots of them giving chase—this tactic worked well to thin the herd. It was after a few days of experimenting with this that she reached the hole for the first time without getting touched, with nary a nick. The Humans were oddly silent after that dream. A group of them huddled together, their heads bent close, as she was led out. It was also one of the few times other prisoners were still strapped to their beds when she awoke. She saw them twitching with shocks of pain as the guards marched her out of the room. She tried to feel some twinge of joy at seeing the spitters get their own, but she couldn’t quite manage it.

And even though Anlyn hadn’t gotten nicked in that last dream, she was already losing her sense of feel. She could hurt while not being touched and feel numb as she was struck. It left her in a confused, permanently anxious state. Her environmental cues did not match her feelings.

After that first untouched nightmare, the Humans gave her a sleep cycle off. The following day, they took her to a different room, one with more of the white tunic men and fewer of the black-suited ones. That was her first day of learning English, one word at a time. They used pictures and repetition. They showed her words made of letters, the shapes of which she recognized as Human, just as she knew the florid script of the Bern. Her meals were served as she followed along, the two feedings framing the extremely long sessions. Even though her mind was numb from her conditions, Anlyn fought to absorb the lessons, knowing that communication was the way out. If she could explain who she was, perhaps appeal to their leaders, she might be able to return home.

And so she learned. And the next day they forced her to suffer a nightmare. And the next day she learned some more.

And so it went for many sleeps.

And what they were teaching her was war.

22 · Drenard

Anlyn was glad she and Gil had only one shade bridge to cross, for his moment of panic had nearly gotten them both hurt—or far worse. She was already furious, her hot side dominating, as she dove into the shadowpath ahead of the next strong gust of wind. Before she could vent her anger, however, Gil fell to his knees before her, panting.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, over and over.

“It’s okay,” Anlyn said, though she didn’t mean it.

“I just got scared.” Gil wiped at his face, a sheen of sweat mixing with his tears.

“We have to be more careful,” was all Anlyn could say.

He helped her up, and they walked together the last few hundred paces, a tense silence settling between them. Their quiet left just the canyon moans and the whipping winds and the flapping of loose bits of their Wadi suits to pace their march.

Anlyn let Gil walk ahead of her, perhaps to keep an eye on him, perhaps because her excitement for the Rite had abated. She took another swig from her thermos, careful to not drip any, and looked through the Wadi holes to her side.

The animals’ tunnels had grown in size over the last few thousand paces, moving from something a single fist could get caught in, to holes almost large enough for a young child to squeeze through. The wall was also quite thin, being a part of the narrow wedge that had divided the canyon in two. Some of the tunnels went straight through to the other side and were lit up almost all the way across. Anlyn knew that these were getting to be a better size for grasping eggs, but the canyon’s pocketed dead-end was visible just ahead, which should offer them a bounty and save them time in hunting.

“This is gonna be embarrassing,” Gil yelled over his shoulder. He held the egg graspers to his side, the pinchers clicking together nervously.

“You’re just now realizing that?” Anlyn asked.

Gil shook his head slowly. He stopped and waited for Anlyn to catch up. “Well, maybe I am,” he said. “All the other boys are gonna have stories to tell.”

“We’ll make up something heroic for you,” Anlyn told her cousin. “C’mon, let’s go get our eggs.”

“Anlyn?”

The voice came through a Wadi hole, high and tight, nearly lost among the cries of the wind passing across the face of the cliff. At first, Anlyn thought she’d imagined it.

“Anlyn!”

There it was again. Anlyn stopped and leaned close to one of the holes beside her.

“Hello?” she called into it. “Coril? Is that you?”

“Hey!” Her cousin’s voice came through with an echo and a crispness borrowed from the cool stone. “I’m on the other side of the wall!”

Anlyn ran back to the hole her cousin’s voice seemed to emanate from the loudest. “How are you?” she yelled. “Have you got your Wadi yet?”

“Go back another hole,” Coril shouted. “I saw you guys go past a second ago.”

Anlyn looked ahead to see that Gil had already begun rummaging in one of the holes with his graspers. She moved back down the cliff face, peeking through caves high and low and looking for one straight enough to see all the way through.

“Go back,” Coril yelled.

Anlyn moved the other way and bent down. There, across from her and through a half dozen paces of stone, was Coril.

“Hey, Cousin!”

“Hey,” Anlyn said. “So where’s your Wadi Thooo?”

“I had one,” Coril said, “but he got away. There’s a ton of watering holes in a pocket canyon over here. You really should’ve come with me. We’d both have one by now.”

“Probably right,” Anlyn said. “Well, I’m already half done with my water, so I’d better find an egg.”

“Okay. Keep an eye out, though. The one I wounded went into this system somewhere. I heard him fighting with some females, so he’s probably pissed.”

Anlyn looked away from her Cousin’s dim face to see if Gil had heard; she’d rather not have to deal with him if there was a male Wadi loose. She turned back to whisper through the tube to her cousin, only to see something dark descend across the hole. Anlyn leaned close, thinking Coril had pressed her face to the other side, when her cousin screamed. She let out a blood-boiling wail of fear and pain.

It was the sound of someone being attacked.

When Anlyn accidentally jumped into the Darrin system, she did more than simply jump into the middle of a civil war, she jumped into a universe of nightmares and pain. And the more she tried to avoid both, the more curiosity she aroused in her captors—and so the more things began to change for her. After another dozen sleeps, and another half-dozen untouched nightmares, the English they were teaching her began to hone in on its target. It veered away from the rudimentary basics of communication and made aim for a vocabulary of armaments and defenses. They taught her about missiles, about thrust velocities, about tracking systems. They taught her how projectiles flew and every way to defend against them.

The lessons frustrated Anlyn. It wasn’t just that she loathed technobabble, it was more that she wasn’t learning the kinds of words she needed in order to plead for her release. And no matter how hard she struggled to alter the course of the lessons, she found her instructors just as reluctant to budge. So she satisfied herself with what she could glean from the sentences they spoke between each other. Along with snippets she overheard in her cell, the instructors’ banter helped flesh out a language heavy on the hate. And in the meantime, she continued to allow the Humans to drag her into the room with the padded tables and strap her down. She even learned how to stay calm while the buckles were being cinched, how to make herself “swell out” so they didn’t feel so tight afterward. She learned to relish the few moments of peace she had lying there, face down, cheek to cushion, before each descent into the tiring chases.

She had no idea how long that routine went on before they showed her what she was really doing. It could’ve been for what she had come to learn was a “month.” It could’ve been several of them.

Nothing seemed different about the apparatus. She still had to suffer the wires being clipped to her skin, each spot on her body sore and tender from the habit. The helmet came on last, Anlyn lifting her head so they wouldn’t do it too rough. But this time, instead of an immediate plummet into nightmare-land, one of the Humans in the white tunics knelt down in front of her.

“Red is for rockets,” he said in English. He held up a white card with a red rocket on it. Anlyn felt a wash of confusion at the break in the routine. It was reflected in the Human’s face as what she now knew to be annoyance. She nodded as much as the helmet straps would allow her, letting him know she understood.

“Good,” the Human said.

It was a word they used a lot, which made Anlyn doubt she truly understood what it meant.

“Blue is for bolts.” Another card came up, this one showing a blast of plasma fire leaping out of a cannon. The barrel of the cannon and the plasma were both blue, even though she’d never heard of the weapons firing in that color. She nodded anyway.

“Green is for good.” The last card came up. It was a drawing of a young Human, colored green, getting up from the padded table, his helmet coming off. He was surrounded by men in white tunics all beaming with joy.

Anlyn nodded. She realized why the bolt was blue and the rocket red. It was the same sort of tool they had used to teach her basic words, with the beginnings of each pair starting in the same manner. She expected some final instructions, but the man nodded to someone else and stood up.

And another nightmare began.

Once again, Anlyn was launched out of a Wadi hole, a handful of angry beasts on her tail. Over the past few nightmares, the scene had changed a little, perhaps as she learned new things to be frightened of. Now and then, the canyon walls were lined with bars; spitting Humans clutched them and waved their arms through the gaps to grab at her and hold her down for the Wadi. There was some of that in this dream, and even a Human or two chasing among the Wadi, but most of it was more of the same. It wasn’t until she had dodged around the first few creatures, sending them smashing into each other, that she noticed what had changed.

A bright circle loomed in one corner of her vision. It was outlined white and full of colored blobs. Anlyn puzzled over this, then felt something slash across the back of her leg. She stumbled, dodged out of the way, and went back to her zigzag patterns, cursing herself for her break in concentration.

She shook her pursuer and sent two others into each other. With a bit of space created behind, she took a moment to glance back at the circle hovering in the corner of her vision. There were even more blobs inside, just as more Wadi had appeared behind her. It didn’t take long for the pattern of shapes—the way they were moving, emerging, colliding, disappearing—to make sense. The blobs were the things running after her. She could see them all in one place, just like the ship’s tactical display from her rudimentary flight training.

The red ones seemed to go with the slower, dancing Wadi. They were the ones that could leap up a wall, circle around, then come for her in another direction. Slow, of course, was relative only to the blue Wadi, which came fast and in straight lines, or with just a little curve. These were the bolts. The others were the rockets.

The connection kicked in another level of awareness for Anlyn. She suddenly knew what she was. She finally understood what they were doing with her. She looked down at herself, at her running form, and saw that she was red.

She was a rocket.

One of the Wadi swiped at her, punishing her for another lapse of concentration. Anlyn felt the gashes across her back; she felt herself wobble, losing momentum. She pressed on, drawing two of the red Wadi into the path of an oncoming blue one, the three of them vanishing from her nightmare and also from the display.

After that, she used the vectors from the circle to help her with the beasts chasing behind. She knew what the game was now. She wondered if people from some enemy prison were virtually strapped into the other rockets, the ones chasing after her. She wondered what that enemy was using to stoke their fears and make them strain as hard as she. She wondered if that was why she could always outrun them, finding that safe spot at the end. Maybe it was her extra fear that made her special. Maybe it was a lifetime of Wadis and Bodis and forever running.

And that made her wonder just what the safe spot was that waited for her at the end of each canyon run. What was the hole she dove into at the end of her nightmares? Just where was she guiding these rockets day after day, sleep after sleep? And why did she sense that they were safe places, but only for her?

23 · Drenard

“Coril!”

Anlyn peered into the Wadi hole, which was now unobstructed and lit with a dull glow. She could see out the other side and through to the brightly lit canyon’s far wall, but there was no sign of her cousin. She yelled Coril’s name through the hole again, and by the time her echo dissipated, her cousin’s screams had come to a sickening halt. Anlyn could hear the thrumming of her own heartbeat over the canyon’s cries.

“What happened?” Gil asked. He arrived by Anlyn’s side and peered into one of the holes.

“A Wadi—” Anlyn gasped. The rest of the thought remained unformed in her head. She looked upwind, back toward the distant nightside, and thought about how long it would take her to get around, even at a full sprint. She turned and scanned for the largest of the holes, but none were quite the size she needed to crawl through. She looked up and considered the ludicrous.

“What do we do?” Gil asked.

Anlyn secured her graspers to her sunshield and slung them both across her back. She reached for the highest hole she could grab, stuck her foot in another, and lifted herself up. The next hole was a lunge, but she got a firm grip and found a spot for her other foot. Higher up, the holes were smaller, but more tightly packed. The wall was completely shaded all the way to the lip; she hadn’t thought any further than that.

“What are you doing?” Gil yelled up after her.

Anlyn looked down at him through her feet. She was already quite a few paces up, enough to not want to fall. She was about to answer when Coril’s screams resumed. It sounded more like someone waking up in a nightmare than a person engaged in a fight for their life. After a few moments, the screams changed into more of the latter. There were shrieks of surprise and pain. Anlyn froze. She watched numbly as Gil dropped his gear and ran off toward the nightside, running with the same mad panic he had displayed earlier on the shade bridge. Anlyn cursed him and reached for the next handhold, clawing her way toward the top.

A dozen paces higher, she ran out of safe spots to put her hands; her arms were already sore and shaking from the climb. She wasn’t sure she could hold on with one hand to do what she needed next, so she reached inside a small hole up to her elbow and made a fist. Leaning back on her arm, she felt her expanded hand wedge itself tight, allowing her to hang from her bones and give her muscles a break. She let go with her other hand and found herself comfortably secure, if quite a ways up.

There was no way to grab the hot stone over the top of the canyon wall—that rock sat in the light of both Horis for day after day. It would melt her skin, right through the suit. She did know, however, that the suit could take the brunt of a full-on shine for a minute or more. She just needed a way to get across a few paces of rock without touching it. She reached behind her head and pulled the graspers off her shield, then stuck the long device inside a hole near her waist, leaving just enough sticking out to form a step. Anlyn pushed down on the arms of the protruding graspers, testing them. Satisfied the device would hold her, she lifted one foot and placed it on the graspers. Still leaning back on her expanded fist, Anlyn lifted her other foot and balanced fully on the small handle. With her free hand, she pulled her hood over the top of her head, all the way down to her eyes. She wiggled her chin in the lower half, then pulled the sunshield off.

She had no idea how this was going to go. She could imagine roasting alive, could picture falling to the solid rock below. She could see herself tumbling off the other side. As Coril’s screams stopped for the second time, she wondered if the effort, the risk, even mattered. But she was going on autopilot—acting without thinking. She had forgotten the Rite and all else. All that mattered was her cousin.

Holding the shield with her free hand, she slid the lever to “full open” with her chin. The shield extended to its maximum length and width, nearly pushing Anlyn off her perch in the process. She had to swing it out wide to give the panels room, which let it catch the wind like a sail, twisting her around painfully on her trapped fist. Anlyn nearly let go of the shield to keep from falling, but it banged into the side of the canyon, its sharp edge digging into the rock. She steadied herself, grunting with effort, and finally managed to push herself back into place.

Before she exhausted any more energy, or her persistence wilted, Anlyn lifted the shield to the top of the canyon wall and let it slam down flat. The heat on her exposed hand was sudden and surprising. Hesitating would make it worse, so she stood up on the lodged graspers and extended her upper body into the two suns. With a shove, she forced her trapped fist deep, relaxed it, then pulled her hand out. Both hands went up to the top of the shield, which was already warming but was much, much cooler than the forever-exposed rock. Anlyn pressed down and launched herself from the graspers, jumping up onto the shield, leaving her Wadi tool behind to poke out of its hole.

The dual suns began heating her suit immediately. Anlyn looked to the end of her fully extended sunshield and saw that it wasn’t quite long enough; the thin wall’s other edge was still a few paces away. Holding the shoulder straps below her feet, she scooted forward, throwing her weight up while she shot the shield along the surface of the rock. Each lunge won her a few fractions of a pace. Her thighs soon burned with the effort; they had already grown sore from the climb up.

Another fraction of a pace with another lunge. A few more fractions. Bit by bit, Anlyn jittered across the top of the Wadi canyon’s narrow wall, totally exposed and hardly aware of the inhospitable vista around her. All she cared about was the edge of her shield and the end of the sun-soaked wall. She threw herself forward, bringing them a fraction closer. Again and again she went, sweat pouring from her hood. Her face was on fire. Her legs had grown numb, moving only by a repetitive act of iron will. Anlyn yelled at herself to keep it up. She grunted with pain and exertion. And finally, the edge of the shield shot out enough to hang in the air on the other side.

Anlyn felt like crying out in relief, even though she had done little more than strand herself halfway to her goal. She moved to the edge of the shield and looked down. Coril could be seen far below, lying on her belly, unmoving. There was blood everywhere, tracks of it leading across the ground in curvy patterns. The heat on Anlyn’s suit forced her to stop gawking. She spun around and lowered herself over the cliff, careful to grip only the edge of her shield. Even that, however, had now been in the suns long enough to singe her fingers through her Wadi suit.

Dangling her legs, Anlyn found a hole for her foot and rested for a moment on a locked knee. She reached down for the nearest hole and held the bottom edge of it, which was shaded a little by the top. The wall she clung to was sunlit for the first half of the climb down, but the inner parts of the Wadi holes were shaded. She only had to brush her knee against the lit rock once to know not to do it again—the Wadi suit hissed in complaint and melted, sticking to her flesh. Anlyn considered dropping the rest of the way but knew she’d break or twist something in the fall.

Still, she went down faster than she should have. It was a mad, desperate scramble, running toward the pull of gravity but fighting the urge to give in altogether. Once she hit the shaded part of the wall, she was able to go even faster. She flattened herself out, resting her poor legs by applying friction across the whole of her. When her feet were head-high off the ground, she dropped the rest of the way, her numb thighs giving out and leaving her in a heap beside her cousin.

“Coril—”

Anlyn crawled next to her. She reached out and tugged on Coril’s shoulder, oblivious to the pain in her blistered hands.

“Cousin, wake up.” She crouched by Coril’s still form. She lifted one of her shoulders, trying to roll her over, but her body had all the heft of a thing that would never again move of its own accord. Purplish blood was everywhere, and the imprints of Wadi marks trailed away and into a nearby hole.

Anlyn wanted to cry in frustration. She wanted to shout the canyons quiet. She wanted to pound her fists into something. Rage and fury leaked out of her, trailing off as rich and powerful pheromones on the wind. She couldn’t see the columns of smoke she created, of course. She was oblivious to the bright trails of emotional screaming her pores leaked out around her.

Anlyn couldn’t see these things. But the creature lurking nearby, licking blood off its paws, certainly could.

24 · Darrin

The Darrin Civil war lasted just over a year. Anlyn spent most of that time remotely guiding missiles for Darrin I, sending them to various targets on Darrin II, especially its heavily defended orbital stations. Even though the command structures on both sides of the conflict were too fractured for any one person to have a full grasp on what went on where, how the war even started, or why it came to an end, there were many on both sides who knew of Anlyn, even if by rumor. Word of a captured Drenard, who had been left like a gift by a mysterious Bel-Tra, became the stuff of unbelievable legend. Despite the swelling gossip, and the growing doubts that soon followed to swallow them, there were many who would swear to their last day that the war would’ve ended sooner without her—but that it would’ve been a Darrin II rout.

Anlyn wouldn’t learn of this until later, long after her months and months of bad dreams and worse wakings. The pattern that formed around her made little sense on the surface. All she knew was that she had to avoid the ungodly pain the wires clipped to her flesh could bring, and so she needed to guide her missiles well. The motivation to do so—the fear that kept her senses sharp—meant her nightmares couldn’t end or let up. Her captors found themselves in a tricky game of keeping her both informed and full of fear. It meant Anlyn’s reward for her continued success was a gradual deterioration in her conditions. Her captors could be heard urging on the spitters on either side of her cell, even as they looked to her for salvation. The only way they could reward her was with more hate, lest her abilities become dulled by a diminishment of fear.

Often, as Anlyn lay on her padded table, she considered giving in to the wires and their electricity. She wondered if there would be enough pain to kill her, even though she doubted it. She would have gladly martyred herself if she’d thought it possible. She would have steered her guided missile right back around on the very installation they held her in—if only she knew which Wadi hole represented it. But her fear and the pain kept her forever running.

Over time, the nightmares changed. The Wadis completed their morph into scrambling, spitting Humans. The canyon labyrinths became mazes of cell-lined corridors. All that remained constant was the primal fear of bad things descending upon her neck and the allure of finding that safe place. It was always about that safe place, even long after she understood what sort of explosive death it meant for someone else.

Along the way, Anlyn forgot who she was. She forgot where she came from. A pampered childhood spent skipping through rooftop gardens with her cousins became a dream, something that couldn’t possibly have ever actually happened. Not to her. Wadis became something mystical that haunted her occasionally in nightmares, not something that she had once hunted. Bodi nearly transformed into the memory of someone she would seek solace beside. Nearly.

Anlyn lived in a shell. She curled into a ball when she was left alone. When called upon, she did what was expected of her with all the pent-up ferocity she could muster. She was an animal, docile and meek if untouched, embroiled and calculating when threatened. Those who could use such a thing mastered the art of threatening her and aiming her rage.

It all came to an end with little warning. Looking back, Anlyn could possibly see that her pursuers had become fewer in number, but it was all as much a blur as the blue bolts. One day, all she knew was that there were no more nightmares to make. The war was over. Now there were just papers to sign.

Anlyn was brought along to the ceremonies as some sort of display. They led her out in front of the dignitaries, and she rattled her chains dutifully. The electricity her handlers could send through her shackles kept her in line.

One of her original captors—one of the Humans in black who had watched the Bel-Tra ship disappear—seemed to be a major player in the treaty proceedings. His suit shimmered and caught the reflection of the bright stars, the alien constellations barely visible beyond the overhead dome, occluded by the new debris field Anlyn had helped create. The large gathering of Humans all stood on what was left of one of the orbital stations and seemed pleased with themselves for what their efforts had won: Two belts of barren rock, chunked and splintered and all but uninhabitable.

Some of them, of course, had won something more. Part of what Albert—the man in the shimmering suit—had won was Anlyn. After papers were signed with many pens and much smiling, he took her in the inferior ship he had bartered for to the inferior asteroid he had bartered for and bragged about having bartered so wisely.

He would be right in the long run. It didn’t take long before Anlyn’s finely honed skills and reflexes were translated to ship flight. Soon, Albert’s home and spacecraft began their steady incline of upgrades as Anlyn wrangled in more customers than any dozen pilots combined. Before long, she was the most feared thing in the most fearsome corner of the Milky Way, a thing rumored among its inhabitants but hardly believed. She was whispers in the darkness that sent chill bumps up the arms of other pilots. She was the sort of bluff that caused nervous laughter among hardened men, eyes glancing around to see if anyone believed, or if anyone else could smell their fear.

The years went by, and Anlyn gradually morphed into a thing that lived in other people’s nightmares.

All of it made possible because she could never escape her own.

Anlyn was leaning over Coril’s motionless body, her heart bursting with sorrow, when the Wadi lunged at her from above. She turned as soon as she heard its claws cracking stone. It flew at her in a flash of shimmering scales, catching and scattering the very shade. It landed all-claws before she could turn to defend herself, slicing into her back through her thin Wadi suit.

The toxins leapt through her veins, jolting tired and numb limbs alive with the bite of their poison. Anlyn lurched to the side, her body spasming and jerking reflexively.

The Wadi lost its grip and skittered across the rock. Anlyn spun around and tried to locate the beast before it struck again. She moved to the other side of Coril and tugged at the lance pinned beneath her cousin’s body. It wouldn’t budge. She tried to roll Coril away when the Wadi once again became an airborne blur.

Anlyn tried to move, but the creature was faster than the wind. The Wadi slammed into her chest, knocking her backward. Snapping jaws came for her neck, teeth scissoring open and shut in anticipation of her flesh.

Anlyn’s arm was pinned. She yanked it free, but her hand caught on something—her thermos. She yanked the small cylinder free and shoved it in the animal’s face, and the Wadi bit down, crunching through the metal skin and leaking what remained of her water.

The Wadi shook its head, the thermos caught on its teeth. Water sprayed out into the sunlit part of the canyon, evaporating as soon as it hit. Anlyn scrambled away, eyeing the creature and the pinned lance. The Wadi took a step forward; it rested one paw on Coril’s back and tried to use another to pull the thermos off its fangs. Anlyn didn’t think it would take the animal long to figure it out. She moved to grab the tip of the lance, but the Wadi howled in its throat and swished its tail at her. Anlyn glanced around but didn’t have her grippers, her shield, or anything.

She looked up. The edge of her shield was still sticking out over the lip of the wall, high above.

Anlyn turned and grabbed the holes in the cliff. She climbed up, willing her weary limbs to operate, ignoring the burning gashes on her back as she stretched out for the next hold. She lunged from one to the other, scaling the shady portion of the wall as fast as she could. She only glanced down when she heard her empty thermos clatter across the rock. The Wadi howled, its jaws free, and then shot up the wall after her.

Anlyn climbed even faster. Dangerously fast. She reached the edge of the shade halfway up the pocked rock and continued on, careful now to keep her body and knees off the steaming wall. She felt something brush against her foot—she pulled her leg into the sun, then looked back. The Wadi hung from a hold down in the shady part, its head bobbing from side to side as it rocked on its eager arms. Anlyn remained still, watching it. They both studied one another. Anlyn’s legs trembled with fatigue. Her suit began to heat up in the light of the Horis.

The Wadi broke away first. It darted into one of the holes.

Anlyn froze. She heard the clicking of claws deep within the hole near her head. She looked up at the shield, its razor-sharp edge poking out above. She thought about how hot it must have already gotten from sitting there so long. The clicking near her head grew louder, the Wadi worming its way through the warrens. Anlyn let go of her hold and grabbed a lower one. She raced down the wall like it was no more than a ladder, reckless and brushing against the blistering rock, the suit melting and sticking to her flesh in ever more places.

She ignored it. When she hit the shady portion, she began a half-fall, half-plummet down the face, clutching at holds just to slow her descent. Her boots hit the rock floor with a jarring thud, forcing her knees up into her chest. She dove toward Coril as a frustrated wail erupted from above. Throwing her weight into her cousin’s body, Anlyn rolled Coril to the side; she grabbed the large Wadi lance, unsure of how to even wield it. Lifting the sharp end—unable to pick it all the way up, her muscles were so weary—Anlyn kept the hook on the rock and rose shakily, looking to the sky—

The Wadi Thooo was a blur of falling claws and open jaw. Anlyn braced herself; she pulled the lance between her and the Thooo. She felt a jolt of electricity as the Wadi screamed, its open throat yelling right by her ear.

But the scream was one full of rage and fear—a wail of the dying.

Anlyn fell to the rock, exhausted and unable to hold the lance.

Something heavy collapsed on top of her, moving and groaning. She pushed herself away and scrambled deeper into the shade. When she looked back, eyes wide, fear still gripping her throat, she saw what she had done: She saw the Wadi lance had pierced the wild animal’s stomach and had erupted out its back. One last wicked groan, and then its twitching arms fell still. The Wadi was dead.

Anlyn Hooo had killed it.

When Gil finally reached her, Anlyn was passed out, her head resting on Coril’s back. She had fallen asleep in the shade, her body too weary to move, the last of her adrenaline scurrying away.

Gil woke her and held his thermos to her lips. He was panting heavily from his long run around the wedge-shaped wall, his breathing dry and labored. Anlyn took deep gulps from his thermos, then pushed his hands away so she could breathe. She watched him survey the messy scene scattered around her.

When his eyes fell back to hers, the two of them sat in silence, looking at each other, no words large enough to fill the mood. Gil gave her more water, which Anlyn accepted eagerly. She held his hand while she drank, then he helped her sit up.

“What now?” Gil whispered. He worked the cap back on the thermos, his hands shaking and a paler shade of blue.

Anlyn looked back at Coril, the youth and vitality of her small frame incongruent with its stillness. All she knew was that she needed to get her cousin home, but there was no way she could do it alone. She looked to the Wadi, which was just as motionless as her Cousin, the lance still shoved through its body. From tip to tail, it was almost two paces long. Big, but not so big she couldn’t carry it.

“What do we do?” Gil croaked.

Anlyn turned to him. “We do each other a favor,” she said sadly.

25 · Darrin

Anlyn’s homeworld of Drenard had forever been shaped by its cycles, by the slow orbit of its two great stars swirling around each other like two beads on a circle. Known as the Horis, these twin suns dominated her planet’s environment, its weather, even its culture. They burned one half of the planet and left the other to freeze. They would slowly wobble across lands out on the border of the planet’s habitable halo, parts that burned at times and cooled during others. There, the rocks cracked open and the blowing sand found wounds in which to sift. It was these unpredictable parts that Drenards looked upon with skepticism and worry, more perhaps than the frigid night and burning day.

Those changes occurred over a Hori cycle, the time it took for all things to come back around to where they had started. It was a cycle of burning followed by a cycle of cooling. Some temperate average may have been held over time but rarely in any one moment. And so Anlyn’s burning years, her great and wasted adolescence, ended how they began: With two ships matching move for move, one trying in vain to latch on to the other.

Only this time, Anlyn was flying expertly amid the rubble of Darrin, not above her home world of Drenard. And unlike her mad run from Bodi—her desperate escape from her father’s death and her forced marriage—this time Anlyn was the hunter rather than the hunted.

She closed in on the old GC-290 ahead of her, leaving Albert’s many competitors behind. It had become a familiar sight: Her ship chasing down the customer of Albert’s choice while the rest of the pack scavenged for leftovers. Anlyn went into each pursuit with a detached calm. Her body had shriveled on a Wadi’s diet of water and nothing else, leaving her fractured and tormented mind to wither. She had her fear, her sensitivity to pain, and her fine war skills etched back to razor sharpness—but only shadows and ashes of her true former self. The long burning had charred her down to her blackest essence.

She was halfway to the GC-290, only a few other pilots keeping up, when she realized she actually needed to concentrate. The pilot of the 290 had nearly shaken her by setting up a false pattern. He had teased to port before juking starboard, the sort of habitual twitch even expert pilots had a difficult time avoiding because they were normally unaware of their own tells. After a few false habits like this, the pilot did the opposite, which sent two of Anlyn’s companions into one another and nearly made her lose ground.

The skilled fighter in her awoke, coming out of its autopilot daze. It had been many years, going back to the civil war, since she had faced a worthy adversary. Anlyn pressed in further, ignoring the complaints and grunts from Albert in the nav seat as excess Gs wracked his body.

The 290 pilot changed tactics again. He was employing a vast array of strategies in rapid sequence. There was skill in the maneuvers, but a hint of desperation as well. He wasn’t trying anything long enough to see if it would work, preferring instead to toss all his tools out into space, hoping one would fit and secure his escape.

Anlyn knew the strategy was foolish; regardless, she couldn’t help but admire the shape and precision of each tool. This pilot wasn’t playing around if he was trying to make sure he attracted the Darrin salesman with the best gear. Anlyn pushed hers and Albert’s top-of-the-line grav suits to their limits as she pulled in tight to the 290. She darted around it, mere paces away, doing what Bodi had once tried so many sleeps ago. She readied the airlock to grab on.

When they finally collided, and Lady Liberty’s hull latched on to a ship identified as “Parsona,” Anlyn felt the tension of piloting drain from her limbs. Her job was over and Albert’s about to begin. It had been an unusual skirmish, a challenge to awaken something within her, some worm of her former self wiggling deep beneath the ashy layers. She didn’t feel quite alive, but she sensed the stirrings of something that could be once more. At the very least, she felt some of the stiff tension exiting her body, perhaps leaving room for an old vitality to return.

What Anlyn didn’t know—what she couldn’t know at the time—was that her feelings of release were far more than mere tension leaving her body. The moment she locked with this other ship signaled the momentous end of one great cycle for Anlyn Hooo.

And the silent, inauspicious beginnings of another.

Anlyn and Gil stopped half a thousand paces from the Wadi shelter. Anlyn lowered the Wadi she had been carrying, and Gil did the same with Coril. There was no way she could’ve carried her cousin so far; she wasn’t even sure she could make what few paces were left.

Gil bent over, exhausted, and rested his hands on his knees. He coughed several times into his fist, wheezing for breath. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, his voice nearly lost on the wind.

Anlyn nodded. She was sure.

She stepped in front of Coril’s still form and crouched low. Gil lifted Coril and rested her on Anlyn’s shoulders. The extra weight on her open wounds—the deep claw gashes in her back—made each of them sing out, sending a chorus of cold pain down through her arms. Anlyn ignored it. She held her cousin’s wrists in one hand and wrapped her other arm behind her bent knees. Shifting the weight more up her neck, where so much seemed to already weigh on her heart, Anlyn tensed up wiry muscles already weak from so much ordeal—and gradually, haltingly, stood.

“You’ve got her?”

Anlyn didn’t waste her energy nodding. She took her first lumbering step forward. As she fell into a numb, silent routine of step after step, Gil hurried up beside her, the dead Wadi slung easily over his shoulder.

They were a hundred paces away—close enough that Anlyn could count down the end of her heartbreaking, trying ordeal—when her aunt and several other Rite counselors burst through the door of the shelter. They ran out, the worry visible on their faces even from so far away. When they got closer, that worry morphed into fright and disbelief. Coril’s closest uncle clasped his hands over his face, then ran up to Anlyn and seemed about to remove her burden.

Something in Anlyn’s guise, however, held him back. Instead of moving to help, the counselors formed a rough circle, a bubble respecting the Rite. Anlyn trudged the last dozen paces as moans and wails from her elders joined those from the distant canyons. A door was held open, which she stumbled through. She collapsed to her knees on the worn carpet and twisted to the side to lower her cousin flat. The adults went to Coril immediately, even though there was nothing they could do for her. Gil fell to the carpet beside Anlyn and sprawled out, his chest heaving from the long hike with so heavy a burden.

When Anlyn looked up, her aunt Ralei was standing before her. Tears streaked down the woman’s face, flowing around an expression of shock, or shame, or something of both. When their eyes met, Anlyn knew the ruse of Gil’s Rite would not last. The new hardness she felt inside her was reflected in the way her aunt stood before her, her adult carriage tense with respect. As the Counselors removed the Wadi from Gil’s shoulder, they too looked from it to Anlyn, then to the drying, heat-scabbed wounds across her back, exposed beneath her shredded suit.

The room stood silent, stuffed with sorrow and thick with somber respect. It pressed in on Anlyn, as stifling as the canyon heat. It filled her lungs, stung her eyes, burned her wounds with the stitch of healing.

The severity and importance of the moment—the loss of her cousin’s life mixed with the awesome power of her own survival—concocted a rapturous joy smothering under a blanket of regret. Anlyn was too happy to cry, too sad to smile, too guilty to exult. She felt near to bursting with all the conflicting emotions.

And in that moment, it suddenly occurred to Anlyn that whatever happened next, whatever followed for her, it wouldn’t be anything like all that had come before.

She was sure of it.