“Scars will fade, but your sarcasm’s back. That’s good. The first week out, the only effluence one could expect from your mouth was drool.”
He’s not wrong. My first week after the surgery, I gibbered like a drunk. My feet wouldn’t work till the second. I felt like I was operating a puppet body until the third. Only on the fourth did my body finally begin to feel like mine again. Most important, my memories are mine, safe, horrible, precious. But would I even know if they weren’t there?
If I was…what did Matteo call it…tabula rasa? A blank slate.
Matteo did not visit every day, and when he did the visits were not for long nor of much substance. But considering I’ve spent the last five weeks with only the company of shiny robots, his smile makes me feel grand when I exit the bathroom.
The elegant Pink reclines on the sofa. The man sits like silk. All folds, no creases. In brilliant blue and green, he’s the only thing in the room not bleach white or gray steel. His smile fades and he raises a delicate eyebrow at the grid in front of me. “Grid proof, please.”
“Again?” I say, exasperated.
“One last time. Think of my heart. I can’t very well send you back into the worlds wondering if you’ll go cross-legged.”
His eyes return to his personal planner. I can’t see it, of course, but I see his fingers twitching and know he’s working on something. I start the grid’s program and begin sorting the holographic blocks. Halfway through, the color-coded blocks begin to emit frequencies meant to elicit certain emotions. I sort based on nostalgia, terror, regret, jealousy, love, amusement, pity, joy—putting the emotions on a sliding scale between the light and dark side of the grid. When I’m finished, nine and a half minutes later, Matteo stands and examines my results.
“Horrific,” he says.
“What?”
“Your personality.” He winks. “Your mind is yours again, Lyria. Almost. Do you still feel it?”
I search my mind. The parasite is gone, but I still feel…something. They say people who lose a limb still feel it years later. Must be like that. Except it was never a limb. It was always an alien inside me I couldn’t control. Yet I find myself missing its security. With it, I felt I was due for something great. It consoled the part of me that feared how small I am in a world of giants.
“I feel it.”
He nods, stands, and walks to the far side of the room. I follow the man, clumsy in his elegant wake. We stop before a metal basin bathed in harsh light. Matteo hands me a small circular control. “Destroy it. It was never you. You were never it. Draw a triangle with your thumb on the prism. Destroy it, and be clean.”
I look down at the parasite.
It lies inert in the basin, harmless yet seductive. Its core is as small as my pinky nail, and flat, and around it lie its thousands of translucent tendrils, a halo of angel hair. I’ve not seen it since it left Figment and burrowed into my own brain that day Victra, Volga, and I crashed down on Mars. That thought, that memory of violation, moves my thumb.
I draw the triangle.
The harsh light over the parasite intensifies. Matteo turns my head away from the light. Heat radiates from the basin over my back. When it’s dim enough to open my eyes again, the parasite is a pool of liquid metal. It trickles down the drain. Matteo clinks his glass to mine.
“Well done, Lyria. You are free now.” I feel free, finally. “You’ll be happy to hear the Sovereign’s envoys have arrived. Darrow is expecting you.”
I stare at him. “What? He’s here?”
“Yes. One room over. His hardware needed tuning. But he won’t be here for long.” He pauses. “He’s bound for the Rim.”
“The Rim.” My mind races. “Why the Rim? Mars will come under attack soon.”
“Oh, Mars is already under attack. And so is the Rim. By Volsung Fá, in fact.” He smiles, and touches his pendant through his jacket. “I thought that may be of interest to you since he killed your friend Ephraim.”
“Ephraim wasn’t my friend.”
“No, it was the other, wasn’t it? What was her name? Vulgar? Volgana?”
“Volga,” I say. “Which you remember perfectly well.”
He winks. “Just making sure your memory’s scratch.”
* * *
—
Darrow is not the hugest man I’ve ever met, but he is the only man I’ve ever met who makes his own gravity. I grow heavier the closer I come to his orbit. He lies on a medical bed under red light, accompanied only by medical drones. Sweat sheets off his muscled, scarred body. He has more power in one of his legs than I have in all of me.
It was easier to criticize him from afar. Up close, seeing his body is enough to make me realize the distance between our experiences. What type of enemies must a man fight to need to be built like a war machine and still get so many scars?
His voice is deeper in person, and sends chills down my spine.
“You must be Lyria of Lagalos,” he says from the bed without opening his eyes.
“I want to go with you to the Rim,” I blurt out.
His eyes open. “And how is it you know where I’m going?”
“Matteo told me.”
He pauses for a moment. Even his silence is terrifying.
At last he asks, “What else did Matteo tell you?”
“That you didn’t get the ships you needed here, so you’re bound for the Rim. Which is under attack by the Ascomanni, well Volsung Fá.”
“He told you that?”
“And more,” I say.
He grunts.
“Must miss the Hyperion gossip circuit.”
“I’ve seen Volsung Fá,” I say.
“Have you?” I hear the interest in his voice.
“He chased me down a hallway once. All in black armor. With thorns on it.”
“Thorns?”
“He impaled men with them. He wanted Volga.”
“Ah, the time you fled the Pandora,” he says.
“You know who I am. What I’ve done then,” I say.
He’s still looking straight up. “According to my wife, we’ve forgiven you. And I’m supposed to make sure you get home safe.”
“Forgiven? Slag that. I’m done feeling guilty for something I didn’t intend. I was asking because if you know who I am, you know I am close with Volga. What I don’t get is why you wouldn’t take me with you, seeing as how I’m the only friend Ragnar Volarus’s daughter has in all the worlds.”
Only when I stand up to him, and only then, do his eyes finally meet mine. He’s pained from his treatment. Still, I sway knowing only a portion of what those eyes have seen. Eo hanging. Armadas burning. A Sovereign dying on his blade. For a horrifying second, I realize what it must be like to be him. The man cursed to use the weapons of the enemy to liberate people like me.
All for what? People like me to stand with their hands on their hips and scold him?
All the anger I’ve had for him over the years dissolves in the reality of his existence. I wouldn’t want to be in an Iron Rain. I wouldn’t want to fight a Peerless Scarred. And he’s fought them all.
“I am not going to rescue Volga,” he says. “She’s probably already dead or brainwashed. Sorry. Those are the hard truths. This Fá doesn’t seem to play with his food.”