The Genesis of Misery Read online

  There’s only one way forward. Misery pads along the curve of the corridor, left hand against the cool white, feeling for openings. Half her senses pricked for danger and the other half for holystone. She can’t tell if it’s the salves, but her stone-sense is fizzing sideways, like cremoline left uncapped too long. Her ears ring like the aftermath of a night with no sleep. There must be stone everywhere, the guts of the station riddled with it, shredding her focus in a million different directions. On Rootsdown, arid and barren, people lived a hundred to each clay reef and holystone sang across the landscape purer and clearer than church bells. Misery knew where every vein of the glistening stuff lay, and it was good business too, charging millions for prospecting services, dragging it out with surprise delays, invoicing for equipment she didn’t need and never bought. Good times. She’s got to find some like hustle once she escapes.

  At the end of the curve, the corridor takes a sharp left into unseen territory, and she creeps toward it with full caution. It’s unsettling how empty this place is, compared to the squalor of Rootsdown and the lively crew of the Duke’s ship. Feels like a trap. Might be a trap.

  Ruin materializes before her. “You had a window for turning back. That is now over.” But zie doesn’t seem alarmed. Zie seems amused.

  She hears the footsteps before she sees them. Two saints, hair shimmering, gender unknown, burst through the mirage of Ruin’s chest and stop, blinking. One of them? Both? One was the saint that brought her dinner. But which one? They look identical. Dress identical. White hair and white skin and white robes with crisp lines that boat over their figures. Twins?

  No. Not twins. Can’t be. She’s seen more saints dressed like this: on her way in, dotted on walkways at a distance. Even then she thought there was something eerie about the way they were all the same shape and height, same hair color, same haircut. Were they all instaprints, like this? Clones? That couldn’t be. Revulsion heaves through her flesh.

  The saints don’t blink.

  “Hello,” she says. “Nice day out.”

  Silence. No emotion surfaces on their perfect, mirrored features. What are they? Stillness in these situations means danger. The one on the left, calm as a mountain, tilts hir head like a wild grimclaw before it lunges.

  Misery moves faster. A practiced swing connects with the unnatural saint’s ear, and zie goes flying into the other one. Crash. Things are so light here. Misery vaults over them to flee left and down the corridor, straight and double-wide, intersections at a distance that’s rapidly closing. She’s built like a shuttle, squat and boxy, all muscle and adrenaline, and she’s never been more grateful. Rootsdown was a supergrav settlement, and the Capital is just slightly subgrav (or so she’s been told). She’s flying. She’s never run this fast or this effortlessly in her life.

  “If you want to help,” she spits at Ruin, who hovers at the periphery of her sprint, “a way out would be nice.” Nearly upon the crossroads. She needs directions, and her gut’s always been good, so—

  “Go up,” zie says, a voice in both ears, and she goes, “What?” but she’s already looking to the ceiling, and realizing that the paneling is finely gapped, it’s not a solid piece, and she doesn’t know what’s beyond it but what’s to lose?

  She makes a fist of her nondominant hand and rockets upward. Forces her eyes to stay open as knuckle strikes acrylic and pain shoots up her arm. She sails in an arc into a half-height space, claustrophobic, silver, and she’s tumbling head-over-ass into it, tangoing with the panel she’s knocked loose. The vents. Misery keeps moving forward. No time to think. Plunge into darkness. She doesn’t need light to see. Around her the Capital thrums and keens with lodes of holystone, pinging on Misery’s consciousness, forming a makeshift map to navigate by. The huge, beating chunk of holy ruby in the distance: stonecore. Best stay away from that. Other direction.

  Those saints. If they’re clones, what does that mean? Cloning is forbidden. Human clones are empty vessels, invitations to the nullvoid. Is that common on the Capital? What else have they made? Telepaths? Chimeras? AI?

  She’s letting fear run amok. Not paying attention. Suddenly there’s air where floor should be. Misery screams as she drops stomach-first into the void, then her jaw slams into metal and pain shuts her up. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Pain, something crunching, death waiting? She flails, grasps for holy tigereye to stop her fall, misses, falls some more. Fuck.

  Light comes from below. Forge blast, if it’s just air—or some deadly whirring fan—

  A crunch. She slams against something—metal mesh—and it pops loose. A tumble and she lands, hip and elbow flaring with pain. Some kind of metal surface, gridded for friction. Industrial. Grit-smelling. Misery sucks in greasy air and her ribs scream, angry, but she’s felt worse. Gets on palms and knees, all her bones hold. A loud complaint along the tendon as she finds her feet, but she’s fine. She’s standing. She can walk.

  Where is she now? A massive chamber greets her, wider and taller than a reef, curved hullmetal walls so distant they form a horizon. The walkway rings the room, and below that an open pit pregnant with massive gray cylinders, fed by and wrapped in pipes. Has to be some kind of circ chamber, because it’s mostly empty space, drop lights fixed to the ceiling far abovehead. The sense of breath—hot and cool winds blowing over her skin—seems to confirm it. And over there: bright purple rectangle over a recessed door. Universal exit sign. Misery collects her breath, gives thanks for her continued existence, and gathers her determination. Let’s go.

  Several steps away from the exit she halts. Next to the door, under the cone of a portlight, stand four figures in atmo-blue jumpsuits. Staring.

  “Hey,” she says, propping a hand on one jaunty hip. She’s close enough to see their faces, close enough to see they’ve got no name/pronoun tags on, close enough to see they’ve obviously got a game of rumsake going atop the silver crate that’s upturned between them. Skivers? On a break? Workers, at any rate—people on her side. Two taller ones, a third built like Misery, and the last one skinny and feral as a hungry rat. She tries a smile. “I’m just passing by.”

  They don’t mean her any harm. She can see that in their faces. No aggression here, just bafflement, tentative curiosity, and a hope that she’s not gonna mess up their leisure time. She holds both hands up, tender palms outward. “I’m not here for trouble. In fact, just pretend I’m not here at all.”

  One of the tall ones says, “You look like you’re in trouble.”

  The skinny one says, “Your face got fucked up.”

  And the one who’s built like her, the one who seems warmest of them all, points to hir face and says, “You’re bleeding. Are you okay?”

  Misery widens her lopsided grin, and the crust of blood on her cheek makes itself known in a wave of small prickles. “Don’t mind that. Just ran into a sharp edge. You know?”

  Frowns and uncertainty in response. The workers’ Standard is strongly accented and so unlike the crisp phonemes that dominate the waves, but she doesn’t recognize the locality. Nothing like the Apisian lilts she’s used to. None of the four are saints; their hair lacks that telltale sheen. What would a saint be doing as an hourly wage-grunt in the bowels of a space station, anyway? Misery doesn’t want them to get involved either. It wouldn’t be fair. “Just let me on my way. You never saw me.” She points to the exit. “I’m headed right out.”

  The hungry-looking one curls hir lip and snorts. “That door’s locked. There’s no key.”

  Ruin slants against the offending exit, arms folded. “That’s never been a problem for you, has it?”

  Misery smiles to mask a range of emotions. Ruin is right, but she’d rather the workers not know that. “It’s fine,” she says. “I have a key.”

  “There’s no key,” the hungry one repeats, like Misery is an idiot.

  The door in question is rimmed by holy obsidian, the aegis stone, projecting a film of impassable energy, invisible until touched. Misery’s fingertips leave starpoints of light as she brushes against the aegis: old habit, she likes the thrill of static she gets from it. A lively prickle.

  “Please,” Misery says. “Look the other way. You don’t want to get involved.” There are things they would be better off not knowing. But she knows she can’t force them not to watch.

  Misery’s done holy obsidian so many times she doesn’t need physical contact anymore. Important buildings in Rootsdown were lousy with the stuff, and she’s sneaked in and out of them a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times. She shuts her eyes and breathes until her pores are one with the stone. Palms that invisible, intangible switch.

  The aegis turns off. A handle’s set into the thick metal of the door beneath, and Misery digs in her heels to haul it leftward. Lemon squeezy. Thank the Forge for supergrav physique.

  “How did you do that?”

  Ah, right. Misery sighs before she turns around. The four workers are bugging with fear, the deeply held and religious kind. The other tall one, who hasn’t spoken yet, says: “How? You’re not a saint.”

  There are two kinds of people who can move stone. There are the saints. And then there are the voidmad. One look at Misery and they can tell which one she is.

  “It’s not contagious,” she tells them, which is pointless because it contradicts Church teaching, and You won’t catch it sounds like something someone with voidsickness would say. The stout one has withdrawn behind the others, hands clasped in prayer. The others are frozen in place, but Misery can see fear breaking the bar on their faces. Shit. She can’t blame them, but shit.

  “Just forget I was even here,” she says, and slips through the door to close off her guilt. Forge willing, the workers will forget the encounter and go on with their lives, but she knows they’re going to
spend the next Imperial week (or month, year, decade) jumping at lights and sounds, wondering if something they thought they heard is the beginning of the end. Anything and everything could be the first sign of madness. She knows that feeling too well.

  Ruin’s voice whispers in her head. “Fortunately for them, you aren’t voidmad. And in time they’ll come to recognize today as a blessing. A day where they were graced by the presence of one touched by the Larex Forge.”

  “Shut up,” Misery says. Now’s not the time. She rubs her face and pushes every tab of anxiety and regret deep into the primordial cauldron of her emotions where they belong, far away and out of her conscious mind. These workers will be nothing to her once she’s made her flight from here. In a few years—if she’s still alive—this will all be dust in the wind. A misadventure, getting involved with dukes and the Throne and the Church, places she doesn’t belong, but quickly done with.

  For now: Shut up. Focus. Escape. She’s wound up in a service corridor, a grimly lit and humming affair, bank of indecipherable controls to the left and row of supply closets to the right. Locked, of course, but that doesn’t stop her from riffling through till she finds a stack of spare jumpsuits in taffy one-size automesh in that same atmo-blue. Misery pulls off her gray convict’s robe and cocoons herself in a jumpsuit. It takes several seconds to adhere to her body heat. What should she do with the discard? Is there no atomizer nearby? Why are the Faithful allergic to labeling anything on this, their capital city? She’s looking for the holy ruby that would make the heart of the atomizer, but there’s so much background signal.

  Ruin points to a recessed square in the left wall, which Misery had taken for a drawer. Fine. There it is. She jaws it open, dumps in the gray robe, and goes back for a fresh raid on the closets. Boots this time, sturdy ones with reinforced soles, vacuum-proof. Gloves. A bunch of toolkits, because she needs shit to trade for credit. A medpack to fix her bleeding face. She even finds a cap to tuck the wild bush of her unsaintly hair under.

  There. She’s all kitted out in generics. The only thing separating her from a regular drone, she guesses, is the bracelet around her wrist—holy jasper, irresistibly striated, lifeblood of Rootsdown. A dear friend, now deceased, made it. Then there’s her mother’s amulet around her neck. A circle of strange black rock on a string—maybe holystone? Maybe not?—covered in even stranger inscriptions, almost like circuitry. She’s had it since before she was born. Neither ornament will tuck into the jumpsuit. Whatever. Misery will never lose the two; it’s nonnegotiable. She will deal. Otherwise, she’s ready.

  The corridor’s capped by a silver door, rimmed with holy obsidian and graced with a porthole from which light pours. It’s the outside, which glimmers and beckons like an astral promise. Misery marches toward it, practicing her confident stride. Confidence is key.

  She puts her hand on the stone, and pauses to take a steadying breath. Four in, six hold, seven out. Beyond this door lies the Empire, unvarnished and real, full of places and things she has only experienced through the medium of waves and bulletins and old miners’ tales. She doesn’t know what to expect. She doesn’t know what she’ll find.

  “Have faith,” says the delusion, uselessly. “No matter how far you stray from your destined path, you will find yourself guided back to it.”

  Fuck faith. Misery’s in it to survive. And survive she will.

  She shuts off the holy obsidian, and steps outside.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The Capital announces itself—finally, properly—with an abundance of air and light. Misery is tiny in its bosom, an atomic speck. Deadmarble columns hold up a glass dome that closes hundreds of meters overhead; beyond it is the yet larger containment of the station. The domain of the Larex Forge is infinite and incomprehensible to mortal minds, and a good chunk of it is here, in this center of human civilization. A wide plaza gleams before Misery, polished surfaces bright with the butter of a flasklight swarm, which hovers lazily over the bustling, shimmering heads of saints and dignitaries. Holy opal (light) with a holy tigereye (antigrav) core. A glorious waste of stone for a bunch of decorative elements. At regular intervals, small trees, white-leafed and white-skinned, thrust out of manicured dirt patches, and water threads the length of the open space. The air is dirtless, and greaseless, and laced with florals.

  This is it. This is the place where it all happens. Misery has entered the heart of the Empire, the center that holds all the Faithful together, the seat of Church and Throne tasked with keeping the cosmos safe from the Heretics and the nullvoid. She breathes the sweet air and watches the droves of crisply dressed dignitaries mill through the lobby. They all look smooth-skinned, with clean hair and nails. If they have worries, those worries don’t reach their faces.

  Misery finds herself both overwhelmed by the spectacle and disappointed at the same time. This ceasefire the Empire’s had with the Heretics has been on for quite some time. The Truce of Logan happened before she was old enough to pay attention to the news. And yet the texture of her life has always been infused with the fear of war breaking out again. She expected that fear to bear more weight in the Capital. She expected an air of urgency. A feeling that things aren’t right with the wider world. But she’s not getting the vibe.

  “You’re gawking,” Ruin observes.

  Nonsense. Misery strides forward to prove it. She’s not overwhelmed or overawed.

  This atrium has to be some kind of lobby. There’s an information counter, presumably, curved and silver; across from it, separated by a thousand measures of creamy deadmarble, sit enormous doors obnoxiously worked in gold. Parked on either side are those creepy white saints with their diamond-shine hair. The saints turn their heads in unison to look at her, as though they can read her thoughts. Revulsion clogs her lungs and stomach.

  They’re identical. All of them. The ones here and the ones she knocked over while escaping. They have to be clones, there’s no other explanation. What voidtouched business goes on in the Capital?

  “Custom-grown saints,” Ruin says. “Made-to-order servants of the Capital, bred for a singular purpose. You should get used to them; they’re all over.”

  Of course the delusion would voice the worst fears in the depths of her soul. Still, her spine chills and sends cold water running down the fibers of her arms and thighs. The white saints don’t speak. Do they have names? Do they think? Are they walking around with no thoughts and emotions of their own? Are they all void inside? Nausea washes over her.

  “This is the ambassadorial quarter,” Ruin says, like a fucking tour guide, completely unconcerned by her disgust and anxiety. “One reef for every duchy, where the ducal staff and ambassadorial attachés work and live. By the Demiurge’s Grace, of course, you’ve found yourself in the Apisian embassy. Home away from home, as it were.”

  Shit. Is this where Duke Argan lives when he’s on Imperial business? Will she be recognized? Misery ducks a pair of quietly conversing dignitaries, who pay her no mind, and considers the doors with the white saints. Not them. Bad mojo. She wonders if there’s another way out of here.

  “There is not,” Ruin says.

  Shut up, what does the delusion know anyway? Misery makes a sharp left for the information desk. She’ll take a guide who doesn’t irritate the living shit out of her, thanks.

  Behind the warmly lit silver curve is an inattentive lad: tag reads Bear Foltzer, he/him pronouns. Glossy-haired and bored in his starchy trim. Unlike the white-robed Capital workers ghosting through the lobby, he isn’t a saint, and a measure of tension instantly eases from Misery as she approaches him. Something familiar at last. “Hey,” she says, in Apisian.

  Bear Foltzer’s listless demeanor cracks with a grin at the familiar syllables. “Yo. What’s up?”

  His accent is crisp and free of provinciality; Duke Argan speaks like this as well. A transplant from the center of the duchy, then. “Listen,” she says, leaning on the cool silver counter, “I’m new here. Just got in with the flotilla this morning.” Fudging the timeline a little. “I need some directions.”