We submerged, flattening ourselves against the side of the pool when someone barged in. My heartbeat had thundered in my ears as we held each other down under the water, locking gazes as the flashlight arced around the room, each of us trying to stop the other from moving, from giving us away.
An eternity later, the light had vanished. We surfaced in the same moment, both of us desperate for air, both of us still trying to be quiet. We must have stayed in the water for an hour before the coast was clear. We’d dried off on the hotel towels before slipping out of the highrise and onto the predawn streets. Leaning against each other, hungover and high with the thrill of danger, trickles of faint light yawning down to the streets around us. We couldn’t quite believe we’d got away with it. We’d stumbled to the shabby train terminal and collapsed into hard plastic seats. ‘How many shots did you have?’ I asked Artyom.
‘Eight,’ he mumbled. Blinked. ‘No, nine.’
I shook him playfully by the shoulder. ‘Liar.’
‘Ten! Who cares, we didn’t pay for it.’ Artyom shook water out of his hair and grinned up at me. ‘Same again next week?’
But I’d been looking up at the brightening sky. Searching for the chainship I’d seen, while knowing it wouldn’t be there, knowing I’d never see it again. I remembered the little moment of quiet peace I’d experienced, seeing it gently soar away to be swallowed up by the stars, imagining for a moment that I was escaping on it. And I remembered too, the harsh reality that came crashing down when the moment passed and I was still a sixteen-year-old boy stuck on a backwater planet. It made me realise how truly confined I was on New Vladi and that I’d never find that peace here.
It wasn’t until Harvest declared war and Harmony put out the call for combatants that I’d found my chance to be free.
All these years later, here we were.
We don’t choose the cards we’re dealt. We can only choose how we play them. No matter what the universe throws at you, you’ve got to keep swimming. Doesn’t matter how bruised and broken and bloody you’ll be by the end. We’re all orchestrations of carbon. Blood and bone and dreams and madness and love and hate swirling inside us all. And with it, the capacity to destroy or save ourselves and everyone around us. You just have hope you won’t destroy, because, in the end, hope’s all we have. Hope that you won’t self-destruct. Hope you’ll do right by the people you love. Hope that you’ll be a better man tomorrow than you were today. You lose sight of hope, and you’ve already lost.
20
The Book of the Dead
The Compass Academy building was a mad hybrid of animal and architecture. Merging squid, elk, wolf, bat, its flesh was made out of sheer cliffs of bright steel, columns of black marble and glass. The wings were forged of hollowed obsidian, the thrashing tentacles from an alloy threaded with grinding machinery, the howling jaws a dense polymer, the antlers a sparkling cobalt. It was twenty kilometres in diameter, carved with angles and wacky, geometric complexities. Everything was disorderly, nothing symmetrical. You couldn’t tell where one animal’s biology began to fuse and bleed into the next. They sported bizarre fungal growths and jutting body-modifications. A series of black spires burst out of the creature’s shoulders and back at random intervals, extending from its spine like spikes and turning the whole building into a gothic superstructure for the space-age. It was as if they were trying to look monstrous but had fallen just short of succeeding.
If you didn’t know its backstory, you’d assume it was the creation of insane architects, who’d fought each other over every metre of space. The truth was, this sector of the inner asteroid had been particularly rich in minerals. Instead of gutting it, the architects had hollowed the rocks out, carving the exterior into this bizarre mesh of creatures and honeycombing the interior with walls, gaskets, supports, electricity, all the usual plumbing, turning it into the asteroid’s biggest and most prestigious place of study.
If you ask me, it was an outrageous and bizarre expense. But no one was asking me.
Determined to stick out like a bloodied thumb, Grim was dressed in an underskin that gave him the appearance of being made of charcoal and perpetually moving black ink, as if he was a hand-drawn figure in some grotesque artbook. Drones designed to look like flying gargoyles swooped overhead. We’d hiked up steps carved into the wolf’s claws and into an elevator climbing its hind leg. In the southwest quadrant, the xenomuseum had been built inside one of one extended squid tentacles. Dedicated to showcasing the diversity of known civilisations, cultures and history of intelligent life across the Common, it was designed to allow humans and aliens alike to learn about their own and other species. Could be our next port of call if this didn’t work out.
We crossed the gently lit atrium, past departments dedicated to astrophysics, dark-matter energy, megastructures and xenobiology. Groups of students, technicians and teachers walked past, deep in conversation. The modern gothic aesthetic didn’t let up as we entered the huge, catherdral-like space of the Academy library. Sweeping shelves stretched all the way up to the arched ceiling, packed with stained glass windows and intricate machinery like dark grey clockwork that appeared to be dripping with slime-coloured wax. Rows and rows and rows of books, folders, dossiers, articles covered the shelves, each shelf attached with a robotic appendage, gears and cogs whirling and sending them tunnelling away
