Gael woke for the first time in five years, rough stone beneath him. It was night, yet the constellations he would have used to find his place were gone. A moon, small and blank-faced, shone an unfamiliar grey. The Core was the only piece of sky he recognized, but he took no comfort in it. It had once rested on the horizon, safely hidden behind the trees sheltering his village. It had grown while he’d slept, becoming a banner of mottled lights the size of his open hand. Or, at least, the size his hand had once been.

  The sky was not the only thing that had changed.

  Gael had been a small child among a small people. A life on the tides, hunting red whales and sifting nets for the day’s catch, had left his hands marked. He had known those hands, known their scars and their stories. There had been a place on his right palm furrowed by a whale’s lunging teeth. A thumbnail had been missing, ripped out when he was overbold with a great hawkfish. These and a hundred other scrimshaw memories had charted the moments of his life.

  Now he moved a stranger’s hands: unmarked and pale, hands that were bigger and stronger than they would ever have been had he not been chosen for the sleep. Gael traced his body with those strange hands, finding other changes. Rounded nubs of metal were scattered in constellations across his skin. The lines of his body had been corded with lean, iron-hard muscle. The shape of his face had changed, his jaw grown broader, his brow high and proud. Even his teeth had changed: rearranged, straight and unchipped, the fit as he closed them grown unfamiliar.

  He stood, grinning, and leapt straight up. He left the ground like a thrown rock, wind whipping in his hair, and laughed as he landed with the grace of a cat. This was all no more than what the Caretaker had told him to expect. He had known there would be changes, known he would sleep and wake in a strange place. Knowing a thing and experiencing it, though, were two very different things. His parents had often said as much in their lessons.

  And yet… and yet, there was something familiar in it, too. Nothing so clear as his own memory, but still there. He could feel it at the back of his mind, some knowledge that wasn’t his waiting to be remembered. It was like a song he’d heard once and then not again until years later, at once old and new. Broken notes of recollection danced within him, pieces of déjà vu, of rising from long sleep find oneself remade. Those fragments whispered that he was only the latest of a long line. The latest, one of many… and also something different.

  Moonlight glittered from something at his feet. He knelt, finding a backpack and… and something truly familiar. Gael reached for it and pulled it free of its sheath. A knife in the same shape as his father’s, long and narrow. A knife made for slipping through muscle as easily as water, for skinning and boning, for sinking through a red whale’s eye. It was larger than his father’s, nearly the length of his forearm and made of metal rather than bone. It sat well in his hand, clearly new and yet perfectly fit to his grip.

  The knife tugged at the ghostly memories as insistently as his hands. Images flickered across his mind’s eye, similar blades being cleaned after use. Red blood, black ichor, and stranger things coated the blade for a moment before fading. He sheathed it, and for a moment he wasn’t sure where. Was it at his hip, opposite a gun? Perhaps across his chest? Over his shoulder, secured in the niche between plate and pack? He blinked, and saw the sheath resting in his hand.

  He would be tested. The Caretaker had told them. Placed on a strange world and remade in the image of the Martyrs, instructed to survive, to find his fellow recruits if they could, and be ready for when the Caretaker returned to collect the survivors in a year’s time.

  No-one, however, had bothered to tell Gael that he’d have the memories of Martyrs past leaking into his thoughts like the smell of spoiled fish.

  He sighed and took stock of his surroundings. He was atop a wide pillar of rock, meters above… Well, it looked like a beach someone had forgotten to put next to the ocean. Sand stretched in frozen waves far as Gael’s new eyes could reach. Finally there was the backpack of strange, dark fabric at his feet. He picked it up, tucked his arms into the straps, shrugged a few times to settle the pack in place and nodded.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The wind came up suddenly, small particles of sand ticking off the metal studs on his arms. He turned and saw a dark cloud churning across the horizon. Had he still been a child at sea with his parents and seen such a cloud it might have worried him, for it had the look of a boat-cracker. Now, in startling clarity he realized he was no longer a child. With a sudden recklessness he leapt down the rock face and out of the wind, falling some thirty feet and landing with a crush of shifting grit. He ducked into what shelter the stone offered and then blinked, staring.

  A deep crack sank into the rock face, several steps deep and wide enough that he could comfortably fit. The dark didn’t trouble his new eyes. Rows of deep scratches, hundreds of them, marched in ordered ranks across the walls, sheltered from the wind and clearly very, very old. He gently ran his hand across them. He drew his knife reverently, sensing the importance of the moment. It was, after all, his turn.

  Morning didn’t come. At least, Gael’s patience ran out first. Hours sitting in the small cave, long after the storm had passed with only his own thoughts and the thoughts of Martyrs past for company, brought several things to mind. His new body, while a marvel, was not about to feed itself. Water was an even bigger problem, though he didn’t feel thirsty yet. Instinct told him he had days before it would even begin being a problem, but Gael didn’t want to play games with his limits when he had to last a year.

  The little cave had no signs of use, not even signs that animals rested there. Instinct, and more than instinct, told him that he should move on. That he should, as the caretaker had put it, “search for his fellow recruits.”

  As he stood to leave, Gael noted that he wasn’t thinking of himself as a Martyr. The village elders had taught of the Martyrs, how the Caretaker took a child to join their ranks once a generation. The Caretaker itself had a rather different, much more interesting explanation for taking him. Yes, he was meant to become one of them, but worthiness was in question. Hence, a test. A very, very long test.

  He pushed out of the crevice and strode into the light, heading toward the moon. A life at sea told him to chart by a fixed point, and it hadn’t moved since he’d first hidden from the storm. The sand was soft underfoot, worn fine by the nearly constant wind. And as he walked, he dreamed.

  Liam, soldier of twenty-seventh, looked down on his dying sergeant. The old man coughed wetly, spitting a writhing knot of metallic fiber into his hand. It wove itself into a small pellet, which Liam took. His sergeant nodded, going still even as Liam put the pellet to his lips and swallowed it.

  Cora, soldier of three-hundred ninety-third, stood at attention, tears wetting her cheeks as the coffins floated past. So many squads, just like hers, lost. Every Martyr stood shoulder to shoulder, united in grief…

  Japheth, sergeant of eleven-nineteen, power thrumming through his body, surged forward. His knife held high, his squad at his back, nothing could stop them…

  Gael wasn’t particularly troubled by the wash of images. There was no pattern or pressure to them, no sense of drowning in someone else’s memory. They were like daydreams, faint things that that he could put aside if he wished. However, he knew that they had been real. They were too clear, too charged with emotion to be anything else.

  The land rose and fell beneath his feet, the pillar fading quickly behind him. The sand slowly dotted with small, thorny plants that scratched his feet until he learned to avoid them, then eventually became scrubby grass. A sun, yellow as his own but somehow harsher, finally began to rise at his back. Gael found a stone and turned to watch, patiently watching the world turn from grey to rugged greens and browns.

  He’d stopped at the foot of a slight rise in the land, and when he reached the top of the rise he stared in surprise and delight. He was standing atop a cliff, and far below him he could make out the rolling hills of a vast prairie, dotted with trees and etched by a small river. A rushing noise he’d thought was the wind turned out to be a waterfall. It came rushing out of the cliff wall to form the river’s mouth. He considered jumping into the waterfall and riding it into the pool below, but stopped as the thought of what his mother would say stopped him cold. He carefully picked his way down instead and walked to the pool, intending to look over the contents of his pack and, hopefully, fill something inside with water. He was digging in his pack when he heard a splash and looked up.

  That was when he saw the body.