I moaned, stiffening as his other hand slowly closed around my wrist. His words echoed in my mind—
… very useful during wartime…
“It’s gone, my powers are gone!” I cried frantically. His grip tightened as I tried to pull away. “I—I went without my medication for too long—the visions left me, it’s gone now, whatever power I had is gone—”
Trevor shook his head, his voice soothing. “That doesn’t matter, Wendy. I told you, I am a very fine surgeon. Nothing matters, except that we understand each other.”
Abruptly he let go of me. I staggered back, my hands flailing as I tried to find something to use as a weapon; but Trevor only laughed, as though I had been frightened by some shadow on the wall of a sunny room.
“But we have a long time to learn how to do that, don’t we?” he said. “All winter, in fact. And I’m certain that you will come to see how worthy our cause is.”
He bent and began picking up empty baskets, stacking them inside one another. “Would you mind handing me that?” he asked lightly.
I stared at him warily, but he only continued to gather his things. Indeed, he seemed to have forgotten me. Finally I looked to where he had pointed and saw a willow basket, its contents lost in shadow. As I leaned down to pick it up, I heard him turn and walk back toward the steps.
“A remarkable theoretician, Emma Harrow.” His voice rang faintly in the dank air as he began to climb the stairs. “But a rather clumsy surgeon.”
I waited until I heard the door creak open upstairs. Then I followed him, the basket clutched between my cold fingers. It wasn’t until I reached the top step that I glanced down to see what I held—
A skull.
A human skull with a number of small perfectly round holes bored into it. Between the holes words had been scratched into the flaking bone, and a crude image. Tiny cracks radiated from the letters like tears.
EMMA WYSTAN HARROW
Sic semper tyrannus
The Alliance was not subtle in its methods. With a cry I dropped the basket and fled to my room.
5
Cisneros
NEITHER NEFERTITY NOR I had any need for sleep. Sleep is for humanity, to ease its tragic passage from dreams to waking, and eventually from dreams to death. I had already crossed over to the other side, and could only look back upon my own dreams as one would review a distant landscape from some unimaginably high lookout: as something lovely but detached from oneself, as though one did not breathe the same air they breathed down there, or sip the same passionately blue water.
So I no longer dreamed, but during my months in the regeneration vats the biotechnicians did not apply the usual course of neural treatments to my swollen brain. If they had, I would have been as other rasas are: a mere corpse with the use of limbs and locomotion, with no will, no speech, nothing but the faintest haze of memories to cloud my dull eyes.
But the Ascendants had more ambitious plans for me. Shiyung Orsina, the margravine who monitored my progress, had the twin vices of sentiment and vengeance to interfere with my rebirth; and so it was that I made my reentry into the world with my memories intact.
More than that. My masters wanted me to lose nothing of the decades of training I had endured, all that time of being heated in the crucibles of their wars and planning rooms, fired by my own ambition until I was as finely tempered and lethal a weapon as they could devise. To this end all of my memories were reactivated—a simple thing, really, merely a series of electrical pulses administered to the proper quarters of the brain, and then a wash of proteins to these same nodes. The result of this excessive stimulation was ironic. Like all successful Aviators, I had spent my life suppressing memories. To do otherwise was to court madness, because who could live with the knowledge of what we must endure, between the equatorial war zones and the orbital colonies above us? My own mind had already reached its limit of guilty horrors, like a sponge soaked in acid that is slowly eaten away by its burden. That was the cause of my degeneration in the capital; but now the Ascendants had squeezed me dry, plucked from my decaying body my mind like a small overripe fruit and set it into this new shining shell, where it could neither wither nor flourish, only continue. And with me my memories, fresh as yesterday’s rain. No, more so: because while I could no longer taste or smell or feel the rain upon my tongue, my memories of storms fifty years past were enough to whiten my sleepless nights with lightning and lancing hail.
And so, all unknowing, the Ascendants had imprinted me with the undoing of all their efforts. By electing my regenerated corpse Imperator, they thought they had created at last the ideal military commander: bloodless, heartless, but with the mind of a tyrant and the deathless teguments of their most sophisticated constructs. But they neglected to consider the power of memory, of desire that can outlive even the body. They had restored my past to me. In so doing they also restored my soul.
On the edge of the rise Nefertity stood in silence, watching the dawn stretch its cold gray hands across the prairie. I remained by myself, brooding on what could have befallen the HORUS colonies and wondering what I might learn when I sought out my masters once more.
Did I say I stood by myself? Ah, but it did not seem so to me! I was besieged with memories, like Androcles butterflies swarming about a corpse. The dead came back to speak with me, and others whom I had long forgotten—childhood friends and lovers; janissaries who had served under me at the battles of Nng Dao and Recife, and who died there when the Shinings came; fellow Aviators and cadets from the NASNA Academy, their minds and wills not yet broken by our Ascendant masters, their voices so clear and loud, I could hear them crying out across the years as though they stood no farther from me than did Nefertity.
And thus it was that Aidan Harrow came to me again. Or rather, I went to him, my memories leading me until all about me the prairie faded and once more I was a youth: my arms aching from early-morning fencing practice with my replicant tutor, my bruised knuckles poised above the door to his room while in the distance I could hear bells wailing to signal the start of first reflections. Our floor rector, a slender, sallow woman named Elspeth Mandodari, had sent me to awaken the newest cadet.
“He has a sister in the Auris Wing,” she said, adding in a voice tinged with disapproval, “A twin. But I’ll get her.”
It was common for cadets to sleep late during their first days at the Academy. The best of intentions and most sophisticated of alarms could not conspire against our need for sleep, especially since our days started before four A.M . In the summer this was not so bad. The Academy was located on the northeasternmost shore of the continent, on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean that was supposedly the first place in North America where the sun struck each day. By May or early June sun slanting through the gray-filmed windows would wake us at three-thirty; an hour later it would look as though it were midday outside. But even this had not been enough to rouse me during my first week at the Academy. Instead I was kicked out of bed by the boy who would later be my partner in Gryphon training, a bullying mulatto named Ivor French.
I had resolved to be kinder to the unknown somnambulist twin. I rapped gently at first on the heavy oaken door—a gesture more to ease my own conscience than to actually cause a stir inside, since to be heard at all one had to practically batter the planks with iron staves. But someone was already awake. A moment later a cheerful voice called, “ Entrez! ” And so I did, somewhat reticently, the door groaning as it swung in upon rusted hinges.