Gemini Point
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.3.14 Interstellar
The last two days of the Trials were also the most physically uncomfortable for Janus. The symptoms of acute radiation syndrome started within an hour of their leaving Prometheus, and while Mick was able to medicate them to an extent, they still had a night and a half of ground to cover while they were at their worst.
Janus adjusted by having them drive shorter, slower legs, with three full stops and as much sleep as they could manage, but there was no compromise in having to drive 1,500 kilometers while their bodies tried to die. Every bump felt like it bruised, every jolt snapped aching bones. The lights of their headlights were too bright. Even the stars were needles in their eyes.
Janus’s suit was a cocoon of pain, radiating from every inch of his skin. The smell of burning flesh wafted through his helmet, making his stomach churn with revulsion. Every breath was a laborious task, his throat raw and swollen. The thought of setting up the day tent filled him with dread, but it was the only choice. The three of them moved with a sluggish, otherworldly gait, weighted down by the relentless barrage of radiation. As they struggled, Janus couldn't help but wonder if this was what it felt like to die.
There would be no cooked meal today. They could barely keep protein tubes down.
“They’ll be waiting for us at Gemini,” Mick said, wiping the vomit from his lips.
Janus nodded, head hanging heavy and shoulders slumped.
“We could run,” Mick said. “Your uncle made it twelve years before they caught up to them.”
Janus raised his aching eyes to meet Mick’s.
The two men laughed.
“You two are idiots,” Lira said, but she couldn’t quite keep the grin off her face.
There was nowhere Janus would rather be. They’d known it would end like this from the moment they decided to go to Prometheus Base, and while Janus was sad they were in pain and their journey was ending, he was glad of Mick and Lira’s company.
As the day wore on and even their limited banter trailed off, leaving them each alone with their thoughts, Janus realized he’d only had a few choices in his life.
He’d chosen to put his family before himself, and from what he’d seen of Callie’s life so far, it had been worth it.
He’d chosen to be unapologetically himself, and that was why the void was able to find him when it came looking.
He’d chosen to spare his worst enemy, and Lira had saved his life in return.
He’d chosen to trust people who might have hurt him, and they’d been there to support him when he needed them.
He’d chosen hard knowledge over easy certainty, just like he told Nikandros he would, and it had left him with more questions than when he started but with few regrets.
Those questions kept him going, hour after hour in the dark.
As the night wore on and the legs they could manage got shorter, the void reached for Janus, pulling at him, promising respite if he would only let it in. But Janus spoke back to it, letting the void know he had nothing it could take from him, and that it held no sway over him anymore. He knew the void. It had touched his skin, and he had looked up through it at the ancient stars.
They limped into Gemini Point within the deadline set for the Trials.
He was in no shape to fight when cult zealots seized him and his team before they could make it through the main airlock. They injected him and the others with some kind of tranquilizer. When Janus woke, he’d been stripped of his suit, his wrist-comm had been surgically removed, and he was attached to an IV bag full of anti-radiation meds.
A burly cultist escorted him to an interviewing room.
The Trials were over. Whatever protections they’d had from the cult had lapsed. All that remained was to hear their sentence.
Janus wouldn’t have said he was angry when Uncle Ivan walked into the room alone. He’d expected Nikandros, but that was his fault for underestimating how much the void still had to take from him.
“How are you feeling?” Ivan said, sitting across from him. “Are the meds working?”
Janus swallowed and set his arms on the table. “What did they promise you?”
Ivan sat back. “Now, or then?”
Janus gave his uncle a pained smile. He got the message. The cult had betrayed Ivan before. “I still want to know.”
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Ivan looked away, eyes distant and face downcast. “Back then, the people I was dealing with in the cult promised me a surgical strike. Our family would be spared, and they would only do enough damage to make sure we never try to leave this place again.”
“You must have known Mom and Dad wouldn’t cooperate,” Janus said. “They would have tried again.”
Ivan shrugged. “They could have been taken elsewhere. They could have joined the cult and learned things that make spaceflight seem trivial. In any case, they refused and the cult broke their promise, so I guess I was the only fool at the table. Still am, come to think of it, since I’m hoping they’ll keep this new deal. It was the only way to save your life.”
He looked up at Janus, maybe hoping for some kind of forgiveness.
“I understand,” Janus said. He knew the road was hard, and that being an aspirant didn’t make you smarter or wiser, it just gave you the opportunity to make bigger mistakes. “What now?”
“You get the same offer they did. Maybe this time, it will even be true. You’ll be taken elsewhere, somewhere you won’t be a threat. You’ll never come home. I’ll take care of Callie, make sure she knows what an amazing man her brother grew into.”
Janus kept tight control of his emotions over the thought of Ivan raising Callie. Forgiving his uncle and hearing his promises were one thing, but Janus had made his own plans for Callie’s future. “How much will she know?” he asked.
“She’ll be told you died of radiation poisoning after winning the Trials, like everyone else,” Ivan said.
Janus sat back, letting that sink in. That was the real cost of his convictions, the guilt over the people who’d died for his choices, and never getting to see his sister grow up. He’d gone from being an outsider to winning the Trials, and yet his greatest fear, exile, had still come to pass. “Mick and Lira?”
“They’ll go with you.”
“Good,” Janus said, glad they were alive, ashamed he’d taken so much from them, and thankful for their company. “I guess that’s it, then,” he said, looking up into his uncle’s eyes. He still had questions, but he doubted Ivan had the answers.
After a moment, Ivan laughed and shook his head. “You saw it all coming, didn’t you?”
Janus smiled. “Not all of it. That big bug at the end was a surprise I could have lived without. I thought more of the Hunters would make it. I hoped the decisions I had to make would be easier, and that the truth would be easier to swallow, but to be honest, Uncle? I’m just tired, and part of me knew that someone like me would never have the power to change Irkalla.”
Of course, that last part was a lie.
Uncle Ivan leaned forward and looked Janus in the eyes. “You’ll still have changed Prime Dome. Your friend Ryler showed me that much. Best aspirant to run the Trials in years, and everyone wants to hire an outsider hoping to strike gold with some new way of thinking. You did that, Janus. No one can take that away.”
It was strange, having Ivan look at him like a peer. It made Janus proud, in spite of it all. Hard not to want his approval, even now.
“I’m proud of you, Janus,” Ivan said, looking away as his eyes teared up. “Some people might have let this turn them bitter. Survivor knows, I did, and I wasn’t as good a parent to you and Callie as I should have been. But I am proud of you. Sometimes strength is knowing when you don’t have the power to change things.”
“Strength is knowing,” Janus agreed, although he didn’t mean it in the way Ivan thought he did.
His whole life, he’d been kept under control by the things he didn’t know.
His status as the nephew of an aspirant.
His rights and the real limits of his ambitions as a citizen of Prime Dome.
The reasons Lira had hated him.
The reasons the cult had wanted him to go back to Prometheus Base.
His birthplace had been destroyed, but Janus had no doubt the cult would be poring through the data file he’d brought back from the hidden lab as well as his stolen wrist-comm, squeezing them and the suit recordings for every point of data that had made Janus and his people outliers in the cult’s master plan for Irkalla.
Still so many questions, he thought. Why didn’t the cult want their people to return to space? Why had he been spared when the rest of Prometheus hadn’t? What had killed the megalith as they escaped, and were there more of the dome-ending creatures hidden under the ground, waiting to be awakened? What had triliths hunted before humans came to Irkalla, why did they change, and why, if they had evolved in a vacuum, did they have the ability to roar at all?
Janus wasn’t sure where the cult would take him, but he knew that the first thing he would do when he got there was learn—about his new environment, about the cult, and about the levers he could pull to gain control over his destiny.
Because if Janus had learned anything in the last month, it was the danger of thinking you had all the answers and the power of knowing things others didn’t.
***
Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.4.12 Interstellar
Callie left Administrator Bennin’s home and headed toward Sector One for her morning classes. The temperature in the hub was an even 22 degrees centigrade, as cool as it was worth dome maintenance’s time to make it. It was amazing how much progress could happen when people were hopeful and united, and that was what the records of Janus’s Trials, the ones Uncle Ivan had brought back to Prime Dome, had given them.
Everywhere Callie looked, there were reminders of Janus, Lira, and a Hunter they’d met on their travels—prayer shrines, holograms, and images, or people wearing the Survivor’s gray sash of mourning. Sometimes that was hard. Sometimes she asked to go to the bathroom when she needed to cry or get mad. But sometimes, it made her smile. There were no guards at the transit point to Sector One, and she didn’t just see hub dwellers or even Primers walking the streets, but even outsiders were being allowed to go where they pleased.
A woman in Hunter gray with a bright, purple stripe in her hair was moving toward her. Callie picked her up right away. Uncle Ivan had told her to be extra careful. People might try to get to her because that was as close as they could get to Janus, and they might have good intentions or bad ones.
Callie wasn’t the type to be scared, though. She stopped, turned to face the woman, and waited.
“Callie Invarian?” the Hunter asked.
“Yeah. Who are you?” Callie said, locking eyes with the stranger.
The stranger smiled. “I knew your brother. He wanted me to give you something.”
Callie stiffened. She felt… shocked, and sad, and hurt, like she’d just reopened a wound. She hadn’t realized how much she’d normalized the hero worship people lavished on her brother, tuned it out. This was personal, and it made her mad. “This had better not be some sort of scam.”
“It isn’t,” the woman said, handing her a memory card. It was thicker than usual, like a piece of military-grade equipment dome-sec might use in the dust. “I can’t stay. Make sure you’re not connected to the network when you open it.”
The woman turned to go.
“Wait!” Callie said, grabbing the woman’s arm. “What’s on this?”
The woman grinned at her. “Stolen fire.”