The Genesis of Misery Page 3
“The trading docks.”
He frowns, confused. Not called the trading docks, then. “Thing is, I left some stuff on the transport, things with a lot of sentimental value, from home, you know, things I really don’t want to lose. I need to catch the captain before they move on.” She scratches behind her ear, plays up the lilt of her accent. “I’d trace my steps back, but I got in the weeds, there’s so much station…”
“Are you looking for the transit jetties?”
“Yes. That. Sorry.”
A nod of understanding. “It’s a bit of a journey. We’re on the other end of the Capital. But don’t worry, there’s transport, and it’s free. Here, let me show you.” He moves his wrist, encircled with a silver band, toward Misery’s ear.
“Whoa.” Misery draws back. “What’s that?”
Momentary surprise melts into understanding, and a prying curiosity. “You don’t have an implant?”
“No,” she says. “I’m from Rootsdown.”
His returning frown exposes that he’s vaguely heard the name, but isn’t sure where that is. “It’s an outer colony,” she says. “The Black Hole Moon? Stonemining colony?”
“Ah.” Curiosity manifests as a hunger: Tell me what it’s like living in a true shithole. “You really are fresh from the gates, huh?”
Hunger looks ugly on Bear Foltzer. Misery sees the shape of his life laid out before her: a bright-eyed boy hoping to make a piece of himself at the center of all things, all excited by the prospect of glamour and in denial about his obvious place in the world. He thinks he’s better than her, more worldly.
People are so easy to read once you study them.
Still, she plays nice. “It’s my first time offplanet. Never knew a space station could get so big.” Which isn’t a lie.
He smiles, and his hunger shapeshifts. It’s not exactly predatory, but it’s become an eager, almost hopeful, sniffing. Misery is too practiced to roll her eyes, but she is tired by how predictable people are. “I know how it gets,” Bear Foltzer says. “Hang on.” A few seconds riffling under the counter and he reemerges with a thin bronze cylinder between his fingers. “We have physical maps. Some sects won’t get implants, for belief reasons.” He twists the cylinder and it wakes, projecting a fist-sized miniature of the Capital, perfectly rendered, glowing as it rotates. “Do you know how to use this?”
“I do.” She quickly lifts it from him as he turns it off, because she saw a hint that he was about to grab her hand as she reached for it. “Thank you, this will be very useful.”
“No problem.” He smiles again. “And listen, if you need a primer on station life, or just a friendly face to talk to, you can come find me. My shift ends in six hours. I’ll be at Eclipse, it’s a bar located in Sector Five-Delta, in the Libra quarter. The map will tell you.”
“Sure.” She thinks that he might be a nice person under it all, but she’s not sticking around to find out.
“Wait.” He calls after her as she begins to turn away. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Silver Tatucha,” she says, borrowing the name of a childhood friend who has since returned to the arms of the Forge. Better to settle his mind than to leave him wondering. She believes in those things.
Between the reception counter and the doors Misery fusses with the map, working its controls to highlight the transit jetties. Shit. Bear Foltzer was right about the distance. And transport will be monitored for sure, probably crawling with those voidcursed saints. No way in the void she’s getting on that. Dammit. None of this is ideal. She’ll have to go on foot, and pray for grace and luck to tide her over, because skill alone won’t be enough. She’s never faced an adversary like the Capital. There’s something so, so wrong about this place. Rot in the center of Empire she can’t have imagined. She needs to get out. Fuck. Leave it all behind.
The first hurdle is the door. And those void-shot saints. The closer Misery gets, the more unsettling they become.
As she comes within shouting distance of the doors, the frontmost pair of saints put their identical hands on the identical handles and pull the giant gleaming slabs inward. Air shudders in displacement, and a wall of cooler, flatter atmosphere comes in. Beyond the doors are lights stretching to the horizon, and Misery fixes her gaze on that great glittering expanse, head held high, stride unwavering. Yet as she passes the gauntlet of the twin saints, one of them on the left moves hir head, and Misery’s concentration breaks and she turns to look. Their eyes meet for a second, long enough for her to notice the pale-gold irises.
Zie blinks, and Misery looks away, heartbeat racing. Something had shifted minutely in the saint’s expression when zie looked at Misery, as though zie recognized her. A bad feeling knuckles under her rib cage as she steps into the openness of the Capital and the doors swing shut behind her. She tries not to let it show, striding over the path of rough stone that unfolds before her. But she mouths a soft “fuck.” She’s got to move quickly.
The sooner out of this voidmaw, the better.
In the Capital, City of Eternal Starlight, night rules at all hours. The great bowl of stars shimmers over the ambassadorial quarter, a tiered oval lobe topped with acrylplex, where eighteen ziggurats form a curved row on the top tier. Eighteen embassies for the eighteen duchies. Hedge-lined gardens sprawl from the stoops of each one, and the droopy crowns of unknown trees line the horizon. The stone path takes Misery through the embassy’s front garden, where shrubs burst with color and scent and flasklights hover between trees, pooling gold in the shadows. Everywhere she looks, there are more silent white saints: tending to garden machinery, chaperoning nobility in flowing capes, or simply standing around. Waiting. Every now and then one detaches from hir post and heads for destinations unknown. Ruin was right about their ubiquity. Her fingers tingle with unease.
Misery’s brisk stride takes her to the edge of the ambassadorial tier, a border of woven metal and holy obsidian that projects an aegis so big and thin it’s invisible. It’s layers all the way down, cunningly overlapped so each one gets a sliver of starscape. A blaze of lights and activity marks the shops tier. Below it is a bank of contemplative silence, a brush of green. “Saint Ono’s Park,” Ruin offers.
She likes the potential of dark and overgrown corridors. Maybe it won’t be crawling with cursed clones. On the map Saint Ono’s Park stretches from her current location in the Venus quarter to the halfway point of the next (Sagittarius). It’s a big chunk of the journey she needs to make. A good chunk. “Let’s go,” she says.
The Apisian embassy shares an elevator bank with two others. Between the walls of glass and glossy deadmarble stands a pair of dignitaries in Apisian colors, gossiping. Misery recognizes them the vague way one does celebrity: House of Banter and House of Ehi, minor nobility in the duchy. Saints, both of them, their sandy hair tinted with iridescence. The target of their opprobrium is another couple Misery can’t place, likely nobility from another duchy, with a child in tow. The child, barely three or four, nestles in the arms of a silent white saint. Its parents chatter in a language Misery cannot parse—perhaps high Piscean—but she doesn’t need to. Their faces tell everything. They’re talking about the war, worried that the Heretics’ sawing away at territorial borders, plus the new siege they’ve laid, is fraying the Truce of Logan to uselessness. The child sucks at its thumb, staring blankly, almost curiously at Misery.
The Apisians tut in their home dialect. “It’s a travesty,” sniffs the man (Banter Croquette, he/him). “Hiring a nanny like that to turn the child. Spitting in the face of the Larex Forge.”
“Disgusting,” adds the woman (Ehi Sodalite, she/her). “To think they would go to such lengths to make their child a saint, when the Demiurge didn’t see fit to bestow them one.”
Misery scans the family unit. None of them are saints. Is she hearing this right? The Apisians’ convo implies that sainthood can be induced in children, which—that’s not how it works, is it? Yet the pair seem sincere in their belief, for all Misery can tell.
Again, what are the nobility of the Capital up to?
The Apisian saints, perhaps catching on to her eavesdropping, have turned aside and continued their gossiping in lower tones. Misery stares at the bored child and its blank-eyed minder. The white-haired saint blinks like zie can read her thoughts. Goose static crawls across the surface of her arms.
A soft ping announces the arrival of an elevator. The couple, child, and saint are first into that clear pod, followed by the whispering Apisians. Misery backs off to wait for the next one. She needs space to breathe. Couldn’t be her, getting into a glass prison with a bunch of strangers and a potential abomination.
Thankfully, the replacement arrives empty, and Misery steps inside for a solo journey to the garden tier. Breathes in and out. It’s ridiculous that she’s afraid of these saints and what they represent when she’s already voidmad enough to hallucinate. But things could always get worse. Oh, she knows how much worse they can get.
She studies her reflection superimposed on the glass as the layers of the Capital’s mantle flash past her. Short-haired, broad-featured, one bold scar tracing a line between eye and lip. She looks at home in the blue slipsuit, which is just as well. All the better to blend in with. Back on Wolf at the Door, the Duke’s personal ship, she was often mistaken for cleaning staff. The Duke had brought her on quietly; most of the crew didn’t realize she was a guest, much less one meant to be exalted.
“Good on them,” Misery says to her reflection. “They’re smarter than their boss.”
The glass doors open to a different world entirely. Saint Ono’s Park bristles with huge-leafed palms and flower-laden bushes, and every few steps the air offers a new scent, fresh but unnameable. Misery pads carefully t
hrough the deliberate hush, trying to remain invisible. The rhythms of life linger at the periphery of her senses, light and sound from the busier, bustling tiers just filtering through. The Capital going about its business, unperturbed by war and heresy and now by a fugitive in its midst. Funny, that. Growing up Misery was told so many times that the peace in her life only existed because of the sacrifices made elsewhere by Church and Throne. Every time they had a shortage of something—gellose cubes, holy charge, protein packs—the denizens of Rootsdown were told it was because of the war, the war, the hardships they experience are nothing to compared to the suffering of those facing the brunt of the war. They should be grateful. But the truth of the Capital and the life of the nobility speaks for itself. They’re doing fine, with their clean air and bright lights and polished floors. On the Duke’s ship Misery ate fresh plants—real plants!—every day, with every meal. The extravagance! Yet his crew groused about the food, speaking of how those stationed on the Capital got meat, the real thing, carved from the flesh of living creatures.
She should have known they were depraved here. The signs were there all along.
The park is not empty; a scattering of families amble in the dappled light, conversations muted. Several look like the family in the elevator lobby: mundane parents, burdened with worries, accompanied by a silent saint and a child carefree with ignorance. One such unit perches across a bench of warm slate. As the saint-nanny bounces the child in hir lap one of the parents looks on, feeling pleased. The baby has recently gotten fussy around food, and grows cranky without a daily walk to starbathe. Sainthood is surely just around the corner. Perhaps it’s time to invest in a radiolight.
Misery shakes her head as if she can rattle the thoughts out of it. It’s a bad habit of hers, pretending she’s in someone else’s mind, reading too much into their thought processes, filling in gaps where she shouldn’t. When she’s right she’s always very right, so it’s hard to resist. But she knows nothing about the lives of these absolute strangers, and she has no business imagining she does. She’s merely projecting her fears onto them. Focus. Misery puts one foot ahead of the next and pays attention to her greater surrounds instead.
Around her the Capital vibrates like a living thing. With enough effort she can separate the melodies of the different stones that live in the metal of the station: the high, happy whine of holy opal, the warm notes of holy obsidian, the percussive bass of holy tigereye. She holds these lines in her head like reins, ready to pull on them should the need arise. Adrenaline has cleared her head of the lingering salve slowdown; it no longer feels like her mind is dunked in a vat of glue.
The Capital is so big. There is so much more station, extending beyond the thick crowns of these trees, stretching below her feet to a point where her stone-sense cuts out. This light-drenched confabulation, the setting of a hundred wave dramas and dioramas, the center of the aspirations throughout the Empire of the Faithful. Misery would be lying if she denied the childhood hours spent fantasizing the ways she would explore the Capital after getting rich and/or famous. She’d go see the Spire of the Larex Forge, basking under the Celestial Dome, commissioned by the first Emperor of the Faithful. Walk the Messiahs’ Park and do pilgrimage at the gravepods and memorials of the six Messiahs interred there. Not that she cares about pilgrimage, she just wants to see. Maybe she’d drift through the Shiptimes Museum and witness the carbonized husk that was allegedly the mainframe of ALISS, the AI that betrayed humanity. So on, and so forth. In her tender mind the Capital was a place of infinite abundance and infinite possibility and she would take every advantage of it.
She’s a fool. A sentimental, stupid fool. Who believes everything they see on the waves?
Halfway through the park Misery catches unusual movement at her periphery. The terrifying white saints are gathering: a loose, silent cloud turning into dragnet. She casts a sideways glance at Ruin, who strides coolly beside her, unperturbed by these developments. Something’s happening and she doesn’t like it.
“You were identified as you left the embassy,” Ruin says, like zie’s discussing oncoming rain. “A number of entities with different interests are now headed your way. I wonder which will reach you first?”
“Shut up,” Misery says as her heart rate spikes. Fuck. Who was it who chirped? The saint at the door? Bear Foltzer? One of the workers on break? It doesn’t matter. She’s been rustled. She keeps her expression and stride neutral, but begins yawing left. Hidden by foliage is the hanging edge of the park, and beyond that is open fallspace, and therefore freedom. Misery keeps the melody lines clear in her head as she picks up her pace: holy obsidian, holy tigereye. She knows what she’s doing.
From behind comes the heavy sound of boots, in plural. Misery picks up her pace, then breaks into a jog. Someone calls out: “Misery! Wait.”
It’s the Duke. Forge end him. Misery runs, and the clatter of boots becomes an avalanche. The edge is close, there’s just the aegis, which she can turn off—
A line of silent white saints blocks her from freedom. Fuck. Misery comes to a halt, recalibrating, and the Duke catches up to her. “Misery. Listen. Let’s just talk, you and I. Come on.”
She drops her shoulders and slowly turns to face the man who brought her here. Lord Bichap Amran Argan, the seventeenth Duke of Apis, he/him pronouns. Can’t miss him in a crowd. Tall as statuary, blessed with the dusky skin, strong nose, and wide-set eyes of his family line. Handsome (but not her type). Today he’s decked out in silk and leather, white cape cascading off gold jacket embroidered with the honeycomb of House Apis. Still on his bullshit even in pursuit of a fugitive. The dim light does not dull his saint’s crown, dark brown and curly and cascading to his shoulders. Teal iridescence flashes in its depths as he approaches slowly, hands up, as though Misery were a grimclaw ready to snap.
Ah, the Duke. The dear, gullible man. She shouldn’t have lied about being sent by the Larex Forge when they caught her breaking into the base on Rootsdown. And shouldn’t have repeated the same lie when the Duke showed up, having schlepped all the way to her asspit moon colony because she claimed to be divinely sent. The lie worked, but at what cost?
“I know you’re upset by how you’ve been treated,” he says. Voice smooth as oiled leather. “I get it. I feel the same way. What the Throne has done is terrible. It’s unfair, and unjust, and it’s not your fault. They shouldn’t be treating you like a criminal. You’re not.”
Misery shifts her weight to the other leg. The Duke is backed up by a dozen soldiers in Apisian gold and shiny silver faceplates, and their armor and guns obliterate the friendliness he’s trying to project. She’s half listening to him, half tightening her grip on nearby stone. The white saints have circled around, cutting her off from escape. She lets the Duke keep talking.
“Misery, I am not your enemy. If you come with me, I promise, I will fight to keep you in my protection while we’re here. The Church and I will take care of you. I know right now things look bad, but the Throne can be swayed to our side, with faith and with prayer. All we need is time.”
She can’t read him and it galls her that she can’t. Back on Rootsdown she got by on her street smarts; her knack for reading people got her through more pinches than she could count. It has been jarring—to put it mildly—being tossed into upper society full of saints and nobility and finding herself flailing, unable to guess at what they’re thinking. From their body language to their facial expressions, everything sits strange and wrong, and one frown could mean a dozen different things. Right now Duke Argan is inscrutable to her. She’s stymied by a mortar wall from behind which come muffled shouts in a language she cannot understand. “Trust me,” he says, but can she really? She barely knows him. A week ago he was a distant administrator, the high authority in their little neck of the void, someone she never envisioned meeting and never wanted to. Now he’s someone she’s watched partying and praying in equal fervor for a week, and she still doesn’t know him.
To be fair, he doesn’t know her either. He still thinks she’s wise and holy, some sacred nixen sent by the Larex Forge to end the war with the Heretics. Idiot. Sucker. Fool.
He holds out a hand. “Come with me, Misery.” Then a subtle flick of the head, pointed and urgent. “Before the rest of them get here.” She follows his sightline and it hits her that he’s indicating the white saints, who are not under his command. Whose orders are they taking, then? The Emperor’s? Enough playing. This is getting out of hand.