I scream on impact, and there is an explosion, a veritable sonic boom. I’m flung back from the wall with tremendous force, slamming into the wall behind me. I wake a moment later with a throbbing headache. I hold my aching skull and take a few tentative steps to reach out and touch the wall. A giant crater divots the surface. It’s like a grenade exploded. I laugh in shock. I did that. I may not have a siren sword, but I have my body. My body is my sword!
Goth howls several floors up. He heard me, and he’s going berserk. There’s a sound of twisting metal. He tears a cell door from its hinges. The crash reverberates as the creature hurls the iron door to the ground and the cell’s occupant screams in desperation. I recognize the screams. It’s the man with one leg who cried for mercy in the Combat, the one who had lost a daughter. He screams for mercy now.
“Ancestors! Forgive me. Help me! Someone, help!”
Do something, Edmon! I could race up several flights to the man’s cell. I might make it in time. He’s going to die because of me, because my noise provoked the monster.
“Please, no!” the man shouts.
I should help. I must help. I don’t move. I can’t. If I face the beast before I’ve mastered this technique, before I’m ready, I’ll be done for. If I die, Nadia’s death, my mother’s, will be in vain. I must do nothing.
The screams escalate as Goth’s talons tear open the prisoner’s belly. The man calls out for his mother in his last moans of consciousness. I hear the sickening crunch of teeth on bone and the snorts of the creature’s chewing as he feeds.
It is the first time that someone has been in danger and I’ve done nothing when I could have helped. The man died because of me.
That’s when I realize the truth of the old saying—those who seek vengeance must dig two graves. I’ve started down a path from which I can’t return.
In the “evenings,” I explore, crawling through the narrow air ducts. I stop at cells and listen. The sounds of other human beings breathing and moving are comforting. They make me believe I’m not alone in my suffering. I want to speak to some of them, but I keep my mouth shut. Knowledge of my presence would only cause more problems than it would cure.
I time the patterns of Goth’s wanderings. I venture into the depths of the tower to find the hidden compartment and the nightscript reader. Faria didn’t teach me to read nightscript, but he showed me the primer. With it, I’m able to begin learning. It takes a few days to navigate the data banks of the thing. It’s one thing to gain ability to see with touch; it’s another thing to apply that ability to learning a language. Over several weeks I discern words, then phrases. Then bits and pieces form sentences, and finally thoughts.
The tablet’s a trove containing everything from the postdiaspora history of humanity to myths and legends of the Miralian Empire. I reread The Chironiad. Chilleus and Cuillan were brothers and lovers who ended on opposite sides of the civil war. Cuillan fell in love with Penalea of Amazonia while Chilleus led the Anjins of the Miralian Empire against the Chironian rebels. In the end, they fought in single combat, and Cuillan died in his brother’s arms. Penalea committed suicide as Chilleus burned Cuillan’s body with his Anjin laser in a victory ceremony. Later, Chilleus went mad and sacrificed himself in an assault on a shield station, which turned the tide of the war in the empire’s favor.
Phaestion once said that we were those ancient warriors reborn.
Perhaps this isn’t the best story to read.
I turn to the tale of Leontes, commander of the Anjin mechs who held off a direct assault on Miral a generation later with only a single battalion. Leontes’s men were slaughtered to the last man, but his sacrifice bought the empire’s armada time to return from deep space and wipe out the Chironian Army. Leontes is the name my father chose for his house. I now know that Faria’s people, his brothers he called them, all died at the end when the Chironians lost the war.
It seems we’re all weirdly connected to this lost history, I think.
I decide I’d be better served by studying something more practical. I’m going to need more information to find Miral and Faria’s lost treasure.
My visits to the room gain in frequency. Days bleed into one another. I sharpen my body during the day; I hone my mind at night.
I read the history of the Second Age. There’s startlingly little. Here’s what I learn—the Fracture is composed essentially of what ancients called “wormholes” or “Einstein-Rosen bridges.” The bridges are tributaries of dark matter that run throughout the universe. The dark matter gives space density, which holds gravity at an equilibrium so the universe doesn’t fly apart at the seams. It runs through the cosmos in great, thick veins. Dark matter, like all matter, is composed of tiny strings that vibrate like music. Ships equipped with a Fracture saw convert the matter of the ship to energy that vibrates at the precise resonance of the point of entry. Thus, ships are able to infuse into and travel along the veins of the Fracture like boats on rivers free of time dilation.
However, Fracture Points are unpredictable. Just as there is dark matter, there is dark energy that counteracts the gravitational force of the matter and causes the universe to expand. Thus the Fracture Points move and shift over the course of eons, just like a living organism would. There was once a point near Ancient Earth, but it closed. The Great Grandmother, birthplace of all humanity, was lost. It’s curious to me, however, that there has been so much movement within the last ten thousand years. Cosmically speaking, that is not very long in the timescale of the universe.
Then I run across a sentence from a science text that catches my attention. Doctor Seldon Jones of the Prospera Institute of Stellar Cartography on Lyria posits that the Fracture Points show evidence of artificial creation and stabilization.
Jones thinks that someone created Fracture Points? Who? I wonder. The Great Song’s science officers also hypothesized that the Tao solar system was not natural. What kinds of beings would have the power to rip open the fabric of space-time, and move and create planets? I don’t have answers and neither does the tablet. The questions are too big for me to worry about now, though.
I read about Market, the intergalactic hub for trade, and its nearest jumping points, Thera and Nonthera. I read that most ships, at least since this data-bank entry was made, are rocket-fuel based and just rudimentary shells made to withstand short flights to and from Fracture Points. Artificial gravity and cryogenic sleep have been tried throughout history for longer flights but are often deemed too expensive.
Artificial intelligence isn’t trusted throughout the Nine Corridors. Human pilots mechanically maneuver ships to the points along with rudimentary navigation computers. AI was prominent on Miral before the fall, but there are no longer any worlds like that. Every planet that developed self-replicating AI suffered some kind of ecological collapse or the Fracture mysteriously closed on them.
Every. Single. One.
I sit for a beat. Humanity seems doomed to plateau in its technological evolution. It burns out, soaring too high as it tries to reach the gods.