I feel like a porcelain doll, empty and breakable, as Syn Ieads me around and acquaints me with my new home. My closet—which has both a skylight and an open second level—is stocked with all my clothes from back home, as well as a floor-to-ceiling mirror screen and the most sophisticated garment synthesizer I've ever seen. Under normal circumstances, I'd be bursting with excitement over the possibilities. But instead I just find something comfortable from the selection I already have and throw it on. From there on out, all I can do is smile weakly at each new sight and bit of information my Companion shares with me.

"I'd expected a lot more questions from you, this early on in your new life," Syn says as he leads me from the magnificent palace library and down a narrow hall with an incongruously vaulted ceiling that drips with clusters of illuminated smoky crystal. "Considering everything, of course, it's unsurprising. That said—I'm meant to ensure you have a basic understanding of everything before you attend University."

"I'm listening," I say, voice flat. Barely my own.

Syn's eyebrows knit as he regards me for a moment. "Well, the first question I was expecting was—why blood?"

I swallow, remembering my first experience as a newborn Variant. Again my hand goes to my throat. We come to a stop before a set of elevator doors, which slide open silently as we approach. I follow Syn inside, and it begins to move upward the instant the doors are closed, without so much as a glance at the touchpad from either of us.

"We don't know either. There are conflicting stories in the histories, and equally conflicting opinions as to which are true. Some hold that it was an accident, a job poorly done, others believe it was sabotage or the tampering of someone out of their mind. After all, the pseudovirus was engineered last-minute, in desperation."

I nod. That last bit I know. Everything about the exodus from Old Earth had been an act of desperation. They'd crammed what people they could in the one ship they had that was capable of both interstellar travel and sustaining thousands of lives. Just in time to escape the Cataclysm.

But the ship was unfinished. Untested. Unfit to complete the journey to the beautiful, Earth-like planet to which it'd set out. Instead they'd been forced to land here—on Elysia, a tidally locked world with one side perpetually scorched by the sun, and the other cast in eternal, icy shadow.

And so they'd adapted. Modified the artificial virus that had been engineered to allow the refugees to acclimate to the alien environment of New Earth. But the new pseudovirus required that colonists spend their childhood and teenage years as ordinary humans—another consequence of their desperation. Exposure to the virus's full impact at too young an age meant death. True death.

The dome which had been meant as a temporary shelter became a permanent fixture. Limited space in Gaia made it easy to understand why Variants and the unchanged kept their distance. I'd never before suspected there might be another reason for it.

The elevator slides to a smooth stop. My Guardian precedes me through the door, though Syn steps aside for me, gesturing me out ahead of him.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

We're on the Palace's rooftop. Or, one of its rooftops, I should say—the entire thing essentially being three great towers clinging to the side of the plateau, bridged together by more rooms and halls.

And we're not alone.

Forty or so Variants lounge about the open space—again shielded from the winds by force fields, but otherwise open to the air. Seven-foot-tall statues of icy stone line a huge glowing pool that dominates the center of it all—and it's there that most of the others are gathered.

"I'm beginning to notice a pattern," I say, breaking my silence at last.

Syn smiles. "Would you like to dip your feet in?"

I give him an incredulous look—or what I think is one. May face still feels more like a mask than anything else.

"It might help you feel a little a better," he prods. "I won't let anyone bother you if you're not up for it."

"I'm definitely not up for it," I mumble, though I begin to drift with him in the direction of the pool. For a few heartbeats, all eyes are on me—a pale array of grey, violet, green, blue, and amber. Pupils flare and contract. Then the amount of time past which looking becomes staring passes, and most revert their attention to where it'd been before. Or at least, they pretend to.

The nearer we draw to the pool, the more confused I get. Something's moving in there, something other than my fellow Variants. A lot of somethings, shimmering and translucent and as luminous as the water itself.

"What are they?" I wonder aloud as Syn steps up behind me to look over my shoulder.

"It's easier demonstrated than explained," he says. "All it takes is the barest touch." He drops to his knees—dipping in a synthetic fingertip, spiralling it sinuously through the fluid.

Frowning, I mirror his action, kneeling to touch the water with the barest amount of skin.

Energy like gentle lightning snakes up from the point of contact, into my blood and straight to my brain. Flooding it with images, memories, knowledge that goes beyond all of those things, a sort of totallity I can't describe. Immediately the hairs at the back of my neck raise on end. I'm rooted to the spot.

The source of the water's glow is a microscopic, communal organism that resides in all the naturally flowing waters of Elysia. Condensed here at the edge of night and dusk, where hot water coming up from the depths of the ground and melting from far away glaciers come together to form the unending ring of the river Styx. A network...a mind. It lives also within the translucent, eel-like things that twist around my finger now—whose constant energetic pulse forms the connection between the Blue and anything which touches its waters.

In contact with it, I become a part of it. Losing the particulars of myself as I become something more. It should be terrifying—but instead its intoxicating.

Gently, Syn wraps his fingers about my wrist and draws my hand away from the water.

"It can be very overwhelming at first," he says. "It's best to have someone with you the first time, and to start small."

I don't need him to tell me that this is a sacred thing, a sacred place. I look more closely now at the statues surrounding us, recognizing them on closer inspection for what they are. The Daimon—personifications of the different psuedovirus strains. Gods from the dark age before our true history was rediscovered, whose legends are too deeply entrenched in our culture now to ever truly fade away. Even more so here, in the Variant world.

My eyes fix on Hades—the one for whom my fiancé, his house, and the entire side of this planet is named. The Lord of the Dead, of unending night. Beautiful in the severity of his features. He even looks a bit like Aidoneus.

The sounds of someone sliding rapidly through the water snatch my attention away. I feel my eyes go round with surprise as Hecate, Left Hand of the King, cuts her way toward me—a broad, sharp-edged smile lighting up her dainty features.

"Congratulations, Kore," she says. "You passed."