We need to talk about Kives.

My mind raced as I tried to anticipate what Markus was about to grill me over. Was this over what I told Roel about prosthetics, the tiny treason I’d committed? Markus had told me it was fine at the time, but maybe it hadn’t been. Now I was making sudden changes in mission parameters because of my conscience, which Kives could manipulate, which was making me vulnerable, and now Markus was going to tell me I had to learn to betray people like he betrayed Cades—

“Hey,” he said gently. “I can feel you spiking. You’re not in trouble.”

“You can’t just say ‘we need to talk’ and pretend it’s a casual conversation.”

“It’s not,” said Markus. “We’re going to need to make some important decisions. But you haven’t done anything wrong.”

My legs dangled over the edge of the cliff. When I was a kid, this kind of vantage point would have terrified me with visions of the rock breaking loose, dumping me into the sea. Now, I was too aware of the solidity of the stone to entertain any anxious fantasies. If anything, I was wondering how it would feel to jump. This body could probably take it.

“Shouldn’t the commander be part of this conversation?” I asked warily. “Or Val, at least, if this is about Kives.”

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have my own angle here,” Markus said. “But this doesn’t have to be secret. Feel free to talk it out with them afterward if you prefer.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “Look, man, it’s been a long day. Spit it out.”

“I’m seeing a pattern,” Markus said. “As social officer, watching out for this kind of thing is my responsibility. When you reacted to Roel’s injury—”

“Markus, don’t—”

“It’s okay, Lilith. Operatives are allowed leeway, but what you do with that leeway is noted. It’s the Velean way. Same way everyone gets an unlimited amount of subsistence credits, but they audit you if you spend too much.”

I stiffened. “You fucking snitched on me?”

“I covered your ass. I doubt the commander has read the report; for Val, I can’t say either way, but he wouldn’t use it against you. But what is not going to happen is that you come back to a court martial on Veles.”

I gritted my teeth. “Fine. But you should have told me.”

“I just did.”

I didn’t answer. There was some loose rock on the cliff; I picked up a couple of the pieces and starting tossing them into the ocean. My eyesight was good enough that I could watch them all the way until they hit the water.

“At the time, you were concerned that Kives had pushed you into betraying the team.”

I scowled. “You told me what I did was okay.”

“It was. You’re taking on a hard challenge right now, trying to take on Velean culture and learning the job at the same time. The others are too Velean to give you the explicit feedback you need on things like that. Aulof’s forgotten what it was like to learn, and Val never had to. It’s all he knows.”

I leaned back on my hands, staring at the morning sky. “Where is this going?”

“Lils, you’re being really defensive right now. Just hear me out?”

I almost shot back with a no I’m not, but caught myself just in time. I let my silence communicate acquiescence.

“You’ve got a good heart,” Markus said gently.

“I,” I said through gritted teeth, “have had enough coddling from you people. I am not confused. I am not weak.”

“Lils, I’m behind you whatever you do,” said Markus. “But I’ve been around for a while, okay? I’ve seen other people walk the path you’re walking. And more importantly, I think Kives has too. There are decisions you’re going to have to make, and I think that’s put you in her crosshairs. She’s putting her thumb on the scales.”

“Or at least that’s what she wants you to think,” I said, too emotionally exhausted to smirk.

“Why do you think I always say that?” Markus asked.

“I don’t know, something something Velean social expert?” I said. “It’s your job to be twisty?”

“Opposite of that. It’s because it’s dumb,” Markus said. “Veles needs to be less twisty. Sometimes, people just are who they are.”

“Gods aren’t people.”

“Once you start playing the ‘I know you know’ game, you’re using the people parts of your brain to deal with them. And it works. Kives just made it so that you’d succeed at convincing those villagers to make a last stand against the Trade Fleet. We can go around in circles hypothesizing what that accomplishes for her, but only if we’re thinking like Veleans. Think like a normal person for just a few moments.”

Part of me rebelled at that thought. Velean social norms were… powerful, was the only way I could think to describe them. Their whole cultural system was capable of handling way more than anything else I’d encountered. But Markus just kept going.

“She made it so you’d achieve your goal there,” said Markus. “So what happens now?”

“Now we win,” I said.

“Now you sit on this cliff and watch those villagers die,” said Markus. “After being surprised and dismayed that they weren’t just a bunch of dirty ruffians like in those movies you like. All for the mission, but who approved this mission?”

“I’m not going to turn on the team,” I said, exasperated.

“We can’t know what you’ll do,” said Markus. “Or what I’ll do, or the others. But what you’ll feel is pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

I stared glumly down at the port village, where people were moving about with subdued panic. An aura of foreboding hung over the bay. Some were being packed into the ships, awaiting the tide; the rest—men and women, young and old—were strapping on armor and taking up arms. Some sets of armor were incomplete, and just like at the temple, some of them lacked shields.

“You have a good heart,” Markus said again. “It’s a poisoned blessing in this line of work. It’ll let you make connections to people even the commander couldn’t, but on the other hand… well, there’s this. You’ll have to hold both of those things in tension as long as you’re doing deicide work. But I think Kives is trying to force you to make a choice.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“So that’s it, then,” I said. I slumped backward, looking up at the pink, cloudless sky. “The great-motherfucker’s just going to emotionally torture me until I cry uncle?”

“It’s a viable strategy. Veles is a pretty martial place. Even their social maneuvering has a military flavor to it. That opens some blind spots. Aulof and Val think we’re safe just because they’ve threatened Kives off killing us, but she doesn’t need to kill us to make us stop.”

“Not gonna lie, this sucks,” I said. “But let’s be honest, it’s my first fucking recon mission. Does she even have a shot at the rest of you?”

“Yeah, you.”

“Ex-fucking-cuse me?”

“Veles needs you,” Markus said, tone much more wry than you’d expect from his patriotic rhetoric. “Even for an empire of trillions, there are never enough operatives to wage war against all of reality at once. If it ever looks like Kives is about to compromise you—really compromise you, not just mess with your conscience the way she’s been doing—the commander will order an abort before you can blink.”

“Bullshit. I’m not worth an entire planet.”

“Depends on the planet.” Markus was apparently serious. “According to Eifni doctrine, a trained operative is worth three point five six pre-uplift planets. An Eifni operative represents an investment of centuries.”

“That’s—” I huffed. “Look, not that I want to be expendable, but there’s no way that adds up. How many potential operatives do they lose by giving up on this planet?”

“Ask the commander how many times he had to take a soulbox back to Veles. If Eifni made a habit of spending operatives to complete a mission, we wouldn’t have any operatives of his caliber left. There are just too many possible worlds; every team they can field has to be preserved for as many missions as they can. Which is why the decisions you make now will be important for your future. It’s going to be a long one.”

“When you put it that way, I can see why Kives is poking at it,” I said. “Fucking legacy aspect.”

“If it’s any consolation, this is probably the only angle of attack she can hit effectively,” Markus said. “Ignoring centennial drift, Val and Aulof have more or less become who they’re going to be. So if you can stop her, she’ll have played out her hand.”

I pulled myself up to a sitting position, then stiffly hoisted my legs back onto solid ground.

“You’re not very Velean,” I said eventually.

“Oh?”

It wasn’t a denial.

“I noticed something a little while ago,” I said, brushing dirt and plant matter off my uniform. “You were ribbing me about the comm protocols like it was a joke, even though the commander takes them pretty seriously. Then in this conversation, you talked about Veles in the third person. Never ‘we’ and ‘us’, just ‘them.’ ‘Think like a normal person instead of a Velean.’”

Markus seemed unconcerned. “And what do you make of that?”

“Why are you even here?” I asked bluntly. “You’re apparently fine making sacrifices for the mission, but you also think the mission is emotionally painful and the people ordering it think in circles. Am I really the only target Kives can hit, or is there a reason you left yourself out when you told me Kives didn’t have leverage on the rest of the team?”

“They grow up so fast,” Markus said with feigned emotion. “Seriously, nothing so ominous. Got time for a story?”

I sighed. I really was too tired for all of this. The exhaustion blockers should have dealt with the physiological consequences of hiking through the jungle all night, but this tiredness felt more spiritual. I needed to go lie down and not talk to anyone for a week.

“Hit me,” I said instead.

“Eifni hit my planet when I was ten,” Markus said. “The uplift teams, that is. The secularization teams would have come and gone by that point, and the initial recon was centuries ago. Before Aulof, even. So I got to watch the whole process firsthand.”

“Huh,” I said, interested in spite of myself. “What’s that like?”

“In a word: harmless,” said Markus, an ironic tinge to his tone. “One harmless thing after another. They started with medical treatment. Free clinics in every community, with a very strict and very legible code of ethics. The staff themselves were personable and adaptable, but they made it clear they could only compromise so much. We met them halfway. It was only reasonable.”

The contact between our souls was closer than usual because of the ops console. I could feel Markus’s emotions through my comm, a heavy blend of sorrow and begrudging respect.

“My people named ourselves Ao’a. Whether because of the secularization teams or just from history, we had no concept of the afterlife when Eifni came to us. We didn’t have many ideological barriers to adopting reincarnation technology, but the few we had were important. The commander’s not listening, so we could even call them sacred. Brace yourself, your comm’s going to struggle with this word: Ni’apaolo.”

There was no equivalent in English or Velean, but I got the vague shape of the idea: self-song/memory/kin braid/legacy.

“None of the Ao’a die alone,” Markus said, and there was a weight to those words that verged uncomfortably on worship. “We are a living verse in the Song of the Family.”

He’d once told me that he’d learned to sing soprano. I was beginning to suspect it was more than just a hobby for him.

“It was an actual song?” I asked.

“It was. I was allowed to keep some notes on it. Each family had its own melody, and people would use it to write verses about you. One verse from each parent, one from the community, one from yourself. Then when you started your own family, you’d write a new melody. There were some musical rules you had to follow, and the new melody had to harmonize with your parents’ melody so that they could be sung together.”

I smiled. “That actually sounds pretty cool.”

“It was,” said Markus. “Problem is, the uplift teams said it presented the risk of generating an ancestor god. Suddenly that very strict and very legible code of ethics meant you couldn’t go through reincarnation unless you agreed to a filtering process.”

Markus’s sense of loss was clear as day over the the etheric connection.

“The uplift teams took pains to demonstrate how fair they were being. They’d bent every rule they could, but some rules were just immutable. We couldn’t ask them to compromise their own safety, could we? You could go through the white door, but you couldn’t bring the Ni’apaolo with you.”

“Couldn’t you just relearn it afterward?” I asked.

“We did,” Markus said sadly. “But Veles is patient. The first time you relearn the song, it’s missing associations. It’s still the song of your childhood, if distant. The second time, it’s nostalgic. The third time, it’s just an autobiographical curiosity. In two generations, the song of the Ao’a was gone. We had no alternative: it was that, or death. Some of us chose that path, and maybe they were the strongest of us. Or maybe they were victims of Velean social manipulation, set up to polarize the rest of us into taking the pact of immortality.”

“That… sucks, Markus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You know the really fucked-up thing about it?” said Markus. “I can’t even say they were wrong. It was just a bad situation. After I immigrated to Veles, I got a degree in paraphysics just so I could understand why they destroyed my culture. The math checked out, Lilith. The Ni’apaolo really did have the potential to become an ancestor.”

“The math always checks out,” I said.

“So no,” Markus said. “I’m not Velean. I just live here. My personal identity is on file, and they knew that when they put me on this team. The same team, you’ll notice, with a native-born Velean with a grudge against his own culture, and an Old Ways monster who prefers combat drills to navigating the politics back on Veles. Godslayers always come from the margins. No one with real power would willingly unplug from the power structure to go adventure on an undiscovered world. We do the work they’re too myopic to handle, and in return they offer us a chance back into the light.”

“You said I was going to have to make some choices,” I said. “Does this have something to do with that?”

“The Ao’a are gone,” said Markus. “They were a loving, communal people. I think they had something to teach Veles, and after I earn a pile of credits and a few red daggers, I’m going to carve a space for them. It’s an uphill battle, but we’re immortal. I have the time.”

A giggle escaped my chest.

“So you’re saying,” I said, choking back laughter, “that all this time, your master plan was to teach Veles the true meaning of friendship?”

“Yes,” said Markus, sounding very pleased with himself. His tone sobered. “There’s going to come a time when you have to decide who you’re going to be, and what that person wants.”

“I mean, shit, I’ll help with yours. Yours sounds great.”

“Not like that,” said Markus. His mood was affectionate, but with a tinge of grief. “It’s fine to copy us. That’s the idea; we’re supposed to be your role models. But that path starts with facing the deaths down in that bay. Kives will do everything she can to make it intolerable to you. If you want to make it to the other side, you need to hold on to the necessity of this without letting go of that pain.”

I stared grimly at the ships. Only one of them would escape; the rest would perish at the hands of the Trade Fleet.

“We’re saving one,” I said. “We can start there.”

“We can start there,” Markus agreed. “I am so, so proud of you, Lils.”

“Love you too, big guy,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “The Horizon looks like it’s ready to go. Let’s save the ones we can save.”