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When in the Course
“Remember old Amricia, whose free men bowed to no Generosus, only to Adon!”
—Amrician saying
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Last Era Libraratory, Gens Nethress Duchy of Acerbia
22 Rising Dying, 1885 CE
To find a way into a room with only one entrance, and a guarded one at that, was an impressive trick, Eztli reflected as she scanned her violated office. The Nethress Wolfmen, elite soldiers, who stood guard at the door were straight-backed and flat-faced, but Eztli could sense their discomfort in the heat radiating from their faces, the sounds of their elevated heartbeats, the slight sheen of sweat on their palms.
As a Nxtlu Generosa, Eztli was not truly welcome in Acerbia. She and Dorsin had an agreement, however. These men clearly expected she would blame them, and by extension Nethress, for the incursion.
“And you did not see the intruder?” Eztli walked around her carapace-covered desk and opened each of its drawers in turn.
Nothing was out of place, aside from the black desk itself, which hardly belonged between the steel and gold walls of her office in the Libraratory beneath Acerbia. She had not seen a single piece of black carapace furniture anywhere in the Libraratory. The ancients, or these ancients, at least, were more fond of metal, apparently.
“No, Ductrix,” one of the Wolfmen said. “By the time we received word from the Den that the heat sensors were engaging, it was already gone.”
Eztli ran her hands over her datavial-filing cabinet. Each of its drawers was locked and unforced. “It? So you did see the intruder?”
The Wolfman blinked. “No, Ductrix.”
The other Wolfman, Sergeant Ulter, spoke up. “Not exactly, Ductrix. It was a…” He shook his head. “You won’t believe it, Ductrix. I hardly believe it. There was a smell, a bit like sulfur. And a mist.” He pointed at the small grating near the apex of the curving chamber wall. “It went back in there. Just a little discoloration.”
“Hmm. A Chimera, then.” Eztli frowned. “One that can contort itself into the smallest of spaces. And which gives off a mist. Pheromones, perhaps.” Not poison, since they were still standing here.
Ulter nodded, looking relieved. “That’s what I thought, Ductrix.”
“Which does not explain how it was able to enter without being noticed by the heat sensors or the nucleic acid tracers.” Eztli had insisted on placing alarms into her room to sense when anybody other than herself had entered it. Now she regretted not including ocular units as well. A visual recording would have been helpful.
“We don’t know—” began the other Wolfman, but Eztli held up a hand. The inkwell on her desk had been disturbed. The quill was different.
Eztli didn’t care innately about quills or ink. Inkwells had been ancient by the time the Heavenfall happened unknown millennia before. She’d never even used the things; a god who regressed to such archaic methods was a god fallen to mere beasthood. But towards his end, her dear cousin Yaotl had had a soft spot for long-discarded ideas, and Eztli had had to admit that the calligraphy that he practiced with the old technologies had been beautiful.
She’d kept his inkwell among her effects ever since his Chimerization three years prior. A reminder. Weakness, perhaps, but she was a god, not an inanimate slab of wood.
Which was why it was so shocking to see the iridescent rainbow-colored plume in place of the original quill.
“Leave me,” she commanded. The Wolfmen happily complied.
She picked up the feather, studied it, and thought of that night.
She and Yaotl had stood on a balcony of the Princeps’ palace in Tzintzuinco, the Nxtlu capital. Her new orders had been in her hand. Crushed.
Exiled to Acerbia, away from the jungles of her people? Placed beneath her brother’s authority? It was an outrage.
“Don’t look so glum,” Yaotl had said, and bumped her gently with his hip. “Every Generosa must prove her worth.”
“You sound like a Nethressian beast,” Eztli had grumbled back to him.
He’d laughed, rather than take offense. Even then, Eztli had known there was something wrong with her cousin. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I misspoke. I meant that you sound like an Amrician idealist.”
“The Amricians are to be commended for many of their beliefs.”
That sort of talk had led familial discussion as to whether Yaotl needed to be exiled and his immediate genes purged from their bloodline. No good Generosus of Nxtlu ought to see Amricianism as anything other than a regressive heresy.
But the way he’d smiled at her then had melted her heart a little, and she’d held her peace as he raised his hand. His quetzal, a rainbow-feathered avian, had settled on it.
“For my cousin,” he’d said. He plucked a feather from the quetzal’s plumage and offered it to her. “To celebrate her first true responsibility.”
She snorted but took the plume. “Hardly. I’ve commanded men in battle.”
“Don’t I know it!” Yaotl had turned back to the night sky. “Snapping finger-commands, refusing to accept anything less than total victory…You were a true slave driver, Eztli.”
She’d smiled at the compliment.
“But the Comitatus is as far above wartime command as command is above slavery. Your decisions will direct an entire city.”
“Even though my brother is to be Dux of Acerbia and I a mere Comes.”
“Especially then,” Yaotl had said. His voice grew solemn. “Your responsibility will be to keep him from looking too long into the Smoking Mirror.”
Eztli had understood all too well what Yaotl meant. Ilhicamina was…had been…a man whose force of personality often outstripped his prudence.
“And if this is not worthy of celebration,” Yaotl had said, turning back to Eztli and pointing to the plume, “think of it as a promise. That I will come visit you.”
His smile… oh, how he’d smiled.
Eztli had always had a soft spot in her heart for her cousin, her brother-in-arms; perhaps, had matters been different, her betrothed. Unfortunately, Yaotl’s heresies had intensified over the course of Eztli’s first year in Acerbia. The Comitatus of Gens Nxtlu had initiated anaesthematization proceedings against him.
Eztli had fought them, casting her votes in opposition, but she’d known it was a losing battle. As word of his appreciation for Amricianism and even Adonism spread, more and more of her fellow Comes and Duxes cast against Yaotl.
His Chimerism had settled the question.
Nxtlu, like every Gens, kept genetic samples of all their Generosi in a number of archives. When a Generosus endured the Chrysalis and became a Magus, additional samples of Symbiont-infused flesh were taken and the differences against his pre-Chrysalis flesh catalogued.
If a Magus devolved into a Chimera, his post-Chrysalis samples transformed at a distance as well. No one knew why, but some inquirers postulated that the effect was analogous to how Magi could communicate instantaneously across the planet using Synapsis.
A month before a scheduled anaesthematization vote, Yaotl disappeared. Soon thereafter, his post-Chrysalis samples demonstrated genophagic alteration.
Chimerism had taken him.
So why, if Yaotl was dead or corrupted beyond recognition, was there a plume in Eztli’s hand that looked as if it had come directly from his favored quetzal? Was somebody sending her a message?
And how had the invader gotten into her office?
Eztli left the room, ignoring the sideways looks of the Wolfmen guards.
The genalyzer in the libraratory was far more advanced than those of any of the modern Gentes, another reminder of how far mankind had fallen since the Last Era. The device itself was contained in one of the libraratory’s spherical rooms. Its red veins stretched across the walls, and a hundred small orifices opened like tiny mouths at chest level from those veins.
Eztli picked one and placed the plume within so that it stuck out, as if resting in its own tiny inkwell. “Tool, analyze species of sample.”
The response came back a moment later in the cool, womanly voice of Tvorh’s mother. “Human sample. Two DNA signatures found.”
Eztli frowned. She had expected three: herself, the avian that had sourced the feather, and the being that had placed it. Barring that, she would have assumed the Tool would return an indefinite response, indicating at least one Chimerical source.
Just to make sure, she placed the tip of her finger into another of the mouths. “Tool, is one of the DNA signatures equal to the second sample?”
“Yes.”
One of the signatures was definitely hers, then. And the other? “Compare autosomal DNA of the two signatures,” she commanded.
The response came back a moment later in the cool, womanly voice of Erus Tvorh’s mother. “Genalysis indicates three point one percent match.”
Eztli drew a sharp breath. She was second cousins to whatever had left this plume. Human cousins.
Perhaps someone had stolen one of Yaotl’s pre-Chrysalis samples from a Nxtlu archive and grown a feather from one of them. Eztli used the Synapsis chamber in the libraratory to enter a request with the Tzintzuinco Archive Tool, then waited on spines and spurs for half an hour for the response.
“All two hundred thirteen samples of former Magus Yaotl Generosus Ortus Nxtlu across the continent are accounted for,” her interlocutor told her. “There are no records of any sample being checked out.”
Another dead end. Eztli could put in a request for any information that the Sodality had, but that would mean speaking to Ambassatrix Rosabella, and even after all these months, Eztli wasn’t prepared for that.
Her heart still hurt too much.
Eztli took the feather back to her office. She turned it over and over, watching the way the light played over its fine barbs. Was it possible that Yaotl’s Chimerization had been a trick?
The light caught on the feather. It was a little blur on one of the barbs, a momentary hitch in the way the illumination from the gold lumins glinted. Eztli blinked and turned the feather back.
There was the hitch again. And now that she was looking for it, it wasn’t just there; a series of glints disturbed the surface of the plume. The barbs were too fine for Eztli to see what was causing the anomaly, so she had her SOPHIOS enhance her eyesight.
The surface of the feather seemed rough to her zoomed-in gaze, but there was a regularity to the barbs. The vanes formed flat surfaces disturbed at predictable distances with knots of two, three, four, or five barbs.
There was something about those knots…
In each case, if those plumes were fingers, the knots in them were Nxtlu military finger-speak.
Eztli read the feather, her eyes passing from one knot to the next, noting the start and end of each new word by the state of the surrounding plumes. “Alone. Exit. Hallway.” Tunnel, perhaps? “Five, left. Seven, right. Down. Four, right…”
They were directions through the Labyrinth. Eztli leapt to her feet, got halfway to the door, then stopped. There was no sense in running half-cocked into possible danger.
She wouldn’t have brought anyone else even if the instructions hadn’t specified to come alone: Nxtlu Blooddrinkers weren’t welcome in Acerbia, and she certainly wouldn’t invite Nethress Wolfmen.
But she could, and did, suit up in her skinsuit and strap her pistol to the Symbiont-compatible armor.
Then, prepared for a long hike, she left the libraratory and entered the Labyrinth.
*
Four and a half hours and two pistol magazines later, covered with Chimera ichor and with a Symbiont exhausted from nutrient deprivation squirming around her nervous system, half a mile under the city of Acerbia, Eztli stepped into a rectangular hallway and stopped.
Not because somehow ferns grew in this chamber, despite the fact that they were thousands of feet underground.
Not because the bioluminescent light of moss running up the walls illuminated a metallic wall sloping from the floor at the other side of the chamber.
Not even because of the smell of sulfur.
Senrii stopped because in the dim light that should never have been able to grow plants, a hulking monstrosity rose from a crouch.
Light glinted from eyes—too many eyes on the dark shape of its head, though they opened and closed so quickly that Eztli couldn’t keep count. One arm ended in a crab’s pincer claw. The second had a hand, but there were too many fingers on it.
The third — did this monstrosity have three arms? Or was that it a tail? Regardless, it looked like nothing so much as a scorpion’s stinger.
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Those too-numerous eyes blinked at Eztli, and she raised her pistol. From long habit, her eyes scanned the background to make sure it was safe to shoot. There was a circle three times her height on that back wall of metal, a darker spot among the shining steel…
The pause could have cost her dearly if the Chimera had chosen to attack then. Instead, it did something that Eztli would never have predicted.
It spoke.
“Am… I…” its voice ground out. “So… changed? Cousin?”
Stunned, Eztli lowered her weapon. The Chimera shuffled forward. Shadows and light danced across its face. A hideous face, smiling a hideous smile…
But those white teeth. Eztli knew that smile.
The monster stopped in a puddle of luminous moss. Lit from below, it somehow looked even more ghastly. It held up a hand.
Eztli raised her pistol again.
A single plume sprouted from the Chimera’s palm, an iridescent feather gleaming in the light. “I am sorry. That I did. Not come to visit.”
The pistol felt as heavy as a forgebone girder in Eztli’s hand. She holstered it instinctively. “Yaotl?”
The monster approached, stopping a mere meter away. That crab claw, that scorpion tail, could have ended her in an instant, but the Chimera merely proffered the feather.
Amazed, Eztli reached out and took it from him. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
The Chimera nodded. “Ya. Otl. Forgive me. The Wisdom fights me. The genophage. Changes me. My voice.” It gestured with trembling fingers at its throat. “Not made for.” It cleared its throat: a wet, sickly sound. “For speaking.”
“You Chimerized, Yaotl,” Eztli said, staring at the monster.
He nodded: a ponderous movement.
“How? How can you speak? How can you think?”
Eztli read pain in the dozen eyes spattered across Yaotl’s face. “Symbiont… Wisdom… is not what we. Thought.”
Eztli blinked, unsure of what to say.
“The Amricians. Cousin Eztli.” Yaotl gestured back toward the far wall, the steel door, the circle that Eztli couldn’t quite make out. “The Heavenfall.”
“The Amricians? Your obsession with them almost led to your anaesthematization.”
Yaotl chuckled, the disturbing sound echoing eerily in the chamber. “Led to. More than that.”
“The others called six votes, you know.”
Yaotl nodded.
“I voted against them every time.” Eztli wasn’t sure why Yaotl needed to know that, but he did.
“My cousin.” Yaotl raised a hand toward her. Eztli stiffened, and his hand hung there in midair.
Eztli took a deep breath and relaxed, and Yaotl’s fingers touched her cheek. They lingered there only for a moment.
They felt like human fingers. For a moment, Eztli wondered what could have been.
“Why am I here, Yaotl?” she asked. “Why did you bring me here? What does this have to do with the Amricians? What is this place? How are you still… still human?” Because as horrible as it appeared, this thing before her could talk. It could think. It was something never seen before: a Chimera that was more than a monster.
It was no beast; it was human.
Yaotl cleared his—its?—throat. “I meant to Chimerize.”
“You what? Are you mad?”
Yaotl shook his head. “Not mad. We needed access. I needed access. I needed. To know.”
“Access to what?” Eztli stared at the misshapen face of her once-beloved cousin. “What could possibly have compelled you to —”
“Milintica.”
“The original Nxtlu bloodline?” The Milintica, once the ruling branch of Gens Nxtlu, had been a secretive group, keeping power close to their chests, but they had been a dead end for centuries. The tutelae of the branch had been shattered in a strike by Gens Utulo during an ostensible peace conference and the remainder wiped out in the war that followed.
Much like the tutelae of any modern Gens, Milintica’s tutelae had been Keys, and Milintica had been fanatical about gencrypting every bit of useful information it ever discovered. With the tutelae gone, many of the most ancient secrets of Gens Nxtlu had been lost.
For the crime of gencrypting the most precious secrets of the Gens and then losing their Keys, the Milintica family had been anathematized, their entire line put to death. The General Principles of Nxtlu had been amended to disavow the use of tutelae. The Generosi of Nxtlu would themselves become the Keys to their own data. Never again would Nxtlu lose its past; not a single nucleobase of Nxtlu data would lack a Key as long as Gens Nxtlu’s line existed.
Yaotl nodded. “Do not. Have much more time…Milintica. Their history. I needed to learn it.”
“So you Chimerized? How would that help, Yaotl?” Eztli knew it was foolish to be angry with him, because the past was immutable. She couldn’t help it. “Help me understand why!”
“Changing DNA. Changing base pairs. Rapidly.” Yaotl’s eyes swam, and they moved like a dozen white-carapaced insects crawling across his face. They merged into two luminous oversized orbs.
Aside from their size, they looked human. Eztli could see gold circles ringing the pupils within those brown irises. Yaotl had always had the most beautiful eyes.
The colors of the eyes shifted again. The sparks and speckles of Yaotl’s irises twisted like stars dancing in the sky, settling into a different pattern. And a different one, and a different one.
Different iris signatures. Different DNA signatures.
“Took years to piece together,” Yaotl ground out. “Old records. Lost genetic codes.” He chuckled, though it sounded more like a growl. “Nobody else could see the patterns. Reconstructing…human genes. Too dangerous. The genophage. Chimerization.”
Direct human gengineering was forbidden ever since the fall of the Last Era. Certain genes universally had to be modified in order to allow direct gengineering to take properly, and the endemic genophage—the only variant that existed prior to her brother’s mad attempt to poison Gens Nethress—targeted exactly that modified genetic profile.
“I became… Milintica tutela. I gained access. To the lost.”
The man had gengineered himself, and then he’d spent years fighting Chimerization. Worse; he had Chimerized. Completely.
Yet here he was, talking to Eztli.
“Had little time. In our archives. I did find…these coordinates.” He pointed to the ground. “And this.” Yaotl reached a trembling hand into a humorously tiny pack slung at his side, one covered in blood and other fluids. Eztli hadn’t noticed it before. He withdrew a short strip of paper. Eztli took it from him and squinted in the low light.
There were eight symbols written on it in indelible ink. Though the pre-Exarchian languages were long lost, there remained enough scraps of books and documents that an educated woman could identify pre-Exarchian numerals.
Like these.
Yaotl turned. “Come.” Claws and talons scraping, he led the way to the metal wall behind him. The dark circle resolved as they drew closer. It was a door.
A door of metal. A shocking, awe-inspiring waste of metal.
Eztli noticed other textures on the wall as they approached. One part of it bulged out in a shape too even and quadrilateral to be accidental. Broken pipes swooped between the bulges.
Next to the door was a keypad with ten squares, each one marked with a different pre-Exarchian numeral.
Her hand. Her fingers. Ten glyphs…ten digits.
In what order should she input the numbers on the paper? Which way did the Exarchs read? Top to bottom? Right to left? She couldn’t remember learning that.
Yaotl tapped the paper with a misshapen figure, drawing her attention back to him. “Left. To. Right,” he said, as if reading her mind.
“How do you know?”
“I input them.” He gestured to the door. “Before I came to you. Inside…Weapons. Drove me out. I can’t enter. Genophage. Symbiont. They will kill me.”
“How do you know it targeted you because of the Symbiont?”
Though his eyes had broken apart again into a dozen misplaced orbs, the look Yaotl gave Eztli was almost human. “I know. Not the first time…it fought the Symbiont. It remembers. But you.” He touched her shoulder gently. “Human. Not a Chimera. Half-formed.”
“You brought me here so I could…”
“Finish. What I started.” His grin was ghastly, and Eztli loved it. “Always the best of us. You…stood up for me. Amrician heretic.”
“But I am not an Amrician heretic myself.”
Yaotl shook his head. “No. Not yet. Eztli. They knew things. The Exarchs. This?” He pointed to the paper again. “An important number for Amricians. A precious secret.
“Now. Eztli. I am tired.” He growled wetly. “I feel it. Silver desert. It makes me…mad. Makes me breed. Makes me angry. Makes me build the volcano.”
“Build the volcano?”
“I don’t know why. Eztli. It hates you. I…I sleep beneath the waves. Sometimes I wake and surface. I take a breath. Seeing you. It is a breath.” His smile was horrible and lovely. “But water. It always overcomes. Always drags back down. Chimera; man. Chimera, Chimera; man. Chimera, Chimera, Chimera; man. And then…”
“The man drowns,” Eztli whispered. “And all that’s left is the Chimera.”
Yaotl nodded. “You understand. It has… a mind. It has… a will. Not random, Eztli. You understand? Mutation… meaningful.”
The Symbiont in Eztli’s nerves shivered coldly. It didn’t like this talk.
“I. Am. Ended.” Yaotl’s voice came out in short spurts now, as if he couldn’t breathe. “My… will… com… plete. En… ter. Bur… den. My…”
“Your burden is mine.” Eztli forced herself to favor this monster with a smile. For old time’s sake.
“Swear,” Yaotl pleaded.
“I swear it.” Eztli glanced at the door. “I’ll discover what remains behind this portal for you, Yaotl.”
The monster bowed his head. One leg at a time, he went to his knees. Seeing him there—submissive, exhausted, his body crawling as new organs bulged and deliquesced beneath his skin—brought out an emotion that Eztli hadn’t felt for years, and certainly never had expected to feel for a Chimera.
Pity.
“Please,” Yaotl croaked. “E…nough.”
Eztli cupped Yaotl’s cheek with her left hand as she drew her pistol with her right. She leaned forward and forced herself to kiss that scaled, slimy forehead.
“Hear…O…Salem…”
Eztli placed her pistol underneath Yaotl’s chin and pulled the trigger.
Her beloved cousin went limp.
Eztli stepped past the corpse and up to the door. She looked at the piece of paper, studied the eight glyphs, and then punched the keypad eight times.
07041776
A whispering, whirring sound came from beyond the door. A voice rang out and spoke words that hadn’t been spoken on Tellus for millennia.
What Eztli would have given to understand the meaning behind those alien sounds…
The door slid open. It didn’t dilate like an iris. It didn’t swing on a muscular hinge. The metal of it just vanished like an evaporating liquid, revealing a room darkened by shadows beyond.
Eztli stepped inside. As she did so, an orange light flared in midair, and she walked straight through it. She stumbled in shock and spun.
The orange light hung like a transparent wall in the doorway. It was a readout, hovering in the air. There was a diagram of a box outlined in orange. Something that looked like liquid filled up the bottom of the box.
Only the very bottom. In the center of the box, there was a dot followed by several circles—each meaning zero, Eztli recalled—but the rightmost numeral was different. Eztli thought about the keypad and summoned up memories of studies from decades ago. Left to right, top to bottom, base ten… That numerical glyph meant “six.”
After the last number there was a diagonal line with circles over and under it, but Eztli didn’t know what that meant.
Around the diagram, there was a series of glyphs and additional readouts that Eztli couldn’t read. She had little time to stare at them, because a whir farther in drew her attention.
Lights flickered on, revealing a room that reminded Eztli of a skywhale bridge, save that it was wholly inorganic. The angles of the consoles were hard, and they were largely made of metal. Chairs were formed of plastics. A series of lockers along the wall were square and made of metal, without a single growth or tumor among them.
It reminded Eztli of the libraratory, but during the Last Era this place had been as ancient as the Last Era was today.
Blood spattered the steel floor here and there, and pocks marred the metal. Scattered among ancient bones—Eztli counted three skulls—small chunks of lead and copper were liberally salted across the floor.
Why lead and copper?
Eztli stepped farther into the room to get a closer look, and a horrendous whirring filled her ears. Three slots along the ceiling, three slots along the floor, and an additional three on each wall slid open, and before Eztli could blink twelve ancient gun turrets were trained on her.
Now she would find out how accurate poor dead Yaotl’s assessment had been. Perhaps these turrets would shoot any intruder, not just a Chimera.
But whatever the turrets were sensing, it was clearly not enough to trip the suspicions of whatever ancient Tool ran this place. Did the Exarchs have Tools? Perhaps not; the aesthetic here wasn’t biological. But without a Tool to make the decision, how could the turrets know to slide back into their apertures and leave her alone?
Which they did.
Eztli cursed herself for a fool. She should have spent more time looking at the inorganic lines and angles of those multibarreled weapons and less time worrying. The things she could have learned about Exarchian technology from them! She wasn’t about to try reopening one of the apertures to study one of the weapons more closely. They might take that as a threat.
Still, just the fact that their weapons slung lead and copper rather than bone or forgebone was fascinating.
The lumins flickered, and that strange voice, female yet metallic, announced something new.
Halfway through the room — the bridge; Eztli was sure of it — there was a half-stairway down to more consoles and chairs. Another picture of pure light glowed above a circular console against the far wall. It was the same readout she’d stepped through, writ larger.
Now the glyph following all the zeroes within the box represented “five.” The final glyph, the circles above and below a line, didn’t change, which surely meant it wasn’t part of the number. Perhaps it indicated a proportion or a fraction?
Either way, the second glyph wasn’t part of the number. This place was counting down. Eztli rushed over to one of the lockers and flung it open.
Empty.
She flung open the next locker, and the next. Every one was entirely empty.
Of course. Milintica had known about this place long ago. They would have ransacked it for any technology they could find without waking up the turrets. Surely she wouldn’t find anything of use here.
Eztli slammed the locker shut. Then her eyes fell on the console situated in front of one of the nearby chairs. It was circular and came up out of the floor, much smaller than the one beneath the light-wall at the end of the room but otherwise identical.
The lights flickered again. The woman’s voice became more urgent. Eztli glanced over at the light-wall.
The final glyph read “four.”
Eztli scrambled for the nearest console. To her anxious delight, it glowed blue and orange, and a design of light sprang into the air in front of her.
It showed the same readout hanging in the entryway and against the wall. Frustrated, Eztli passed her hand through the light.
The display changed, showing a diagram of…
Was that a Heavenfall vessel?
It was a skeleton of a view, but there was no mistaking it. It showed dozens of cylinders nested within each other in concentric layers. A tiny piece of the vessel near the fore of the structure on the outer layer glowed blue. The rest of it showed red.
Blue: the room she was in. Red: the destroyed remainder of the…the heavenwhale.
There were plenty of glyphs, but Eztli couldn’t read them. She swiped at random through the light, and the view of the vessel spun wildly. It hurt Eztli’s eyes to look at.
The lights flickered. The woman started speaking urgently, and this time she didn’t stop.
The final numeral ticked down to “three.”
SOPHIOS. Auditory and visual recording. The new organs built themselves in Eztli’s body in moments. They would permanently store the images and sounds around her so that they could be decanted into a datavial to be replayed later.
Eztli stuck her hand into the image. It stopped spinning. She turned it slowly, being sure to scan up and down with her eyes, taking in every inch of the schematic, including any incomprehensible Exarchian words. Then she pressed her hand into what she could only call a phantasmal button near the bottom of the view.
A dizzying array of documents flared across the light. Words, pictures she didn’t understand, all arranged in a grid like the soldiers of a legion.
Eztli poked one at random. A gun! A schematic for a weapon. She committed it to her SOPHIOS’s nucleic memory, then poked an array at the bottom of the view.
Some kind of vehicle?
Scan it.
She managed to memorize two dozen more documents before the lights flickered again.
They were down to two. The voice spoke yet more loudly, more insistently.
Eztli picked another option from the unreadable menu at random.
Documents. They looked like they were inside the view. Not pictures of paper, but words written directly onto the lights themselves.
Perhaps these would provide the code for cracking the language. She stored a dozen of them.
The lights flickered. The voice was urgent now.
One.
A few more documents… Eztli scanned them rapidly.
And then stopped in surprise as she stumbled across a picture of a document. It wasn’t written on light; the holographic image clearly showed ink on a page. Some kind of ocular unit had stored the image itself, much as her SOPHIOS was memorizing it now.
It looked like it had been ancient even when the picture had been taken. It was a single page of small but elegant writing.
There was something about it, some reason Eztli had stopped on it…
The lights flickered. The remaining number glyph on the light-wall became circular, like the ones around it.
Zero.
The voice changed, announcing something new. Liquid metal sloshed behind Eztli.
Eztli scanned the final document an instant before the room’s power failed, dashed for the door, leapt through it a moment before it flowed shut, and tumbled out into the Labyrinth.
***
Seated at her carapace desk, Eztli stared at the graphene screen she’d spread across it and studied the images she’d decanted.
Graphene…when they’d decoded the libraratory records on the technology a month ago, it had seemed so advanced. But compared to those displays of light, it was pathetic.
Eztli scrolled through the images, forcing herself to take at least a moment to look at each one. She was a god, not a beast. She was not ruled by her instincts, even when those instincts insisted that she go to the last image she’d taken before escaping the Heavenwhale shard.
Unable to read the language, she progressed quickly enough. Soon she reached the final document. She could pick out every line and curve of the glyphs in the impressively ancient document. Looking at it now, she realized why it had brought her up short.
Eztli pulled Yaotl’s slip of paper out of her pocket and compared it to the image.
There was a large chunk of writing across the top of the image. Partway down, a line separated that smaller writing from larger glyphs, beneath which the writing continued. The very first line of those large glyphs ended with the last four of the numbers that Yaotl had given her. Five, if one discounted a small mark and a space between the first and the second number.
The document’s text was stylized, whereas the glyphs Yaotl had scribbled were flat and undecorated. But they were the same numbers.
Eztli couldn’t help but think she’d discovered something very precious, even if she didn’t know what it meant. And it was all thanks to the dedication of a beloved cousin.
Yaotl had given his life for this secret. Eztli would see it through. Smiling to herself, she drew from her pocket the feather that he’d given her in the Labyrinth. She reverently traced the last five glyphs on the scrap of paper.
41776
She placed the plume gently on the table next to the scrap and drew the feather from the inkwell. She studied its shape, the little knots that Yaotl had worked into its barbs. A code. Words, glyphs with a secret meaning known only to her.
But other than that, the two plumes were the same.
She placed the tip of the quill against the graphene screen and traced the top line of incomprehensible glyphs on the original document.
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The plumes were the same. So were the glyphs.
The plumes were a code which Eztli knew. This ancient document was also a code, one which she would break.
For Yaotl’s memory.