words.
“My name is Lunae.”
“What are you?” The woman stepped up to Lunae and thrust her face close. Lunae moved back and around her; she noticed that people were starting to edge away. She heard someone mutter, “Possession!”
There was a low, uneasy susurrus of sound from the crowd. Lunae, becoming frightened, tried to turn, but the woman reached out and grasped her by the arms.
“I asked you what you were!” The woman was even more blurred now, as if shaken in agitation.
“I do not understand you,” Lunae answered. She pulled away, but the woman clasped her by the hand.
Lunae felt her fingers enveloped in something hard and spiny. Startled, she looked down and saw the woman’s small fingers and bitten nails, but it felt nothing like a human hand. She felt as though she was clutching a lobster. She tried to tug free, but the woman’s grip was too strong.
The next moment, the street cracked open, splitting with soundless speed. The apartment blocks, the crowds, were all gone. Lunae was standing on a great plain, gazing toward the banks of a river. The grass was hazy with pale flowers; there was no sign of sun, or moon, or any living thing. Then something brushed her face and the grass rippled as though a bird was flying across it. She thought she glimpsed a shadow moving swiftly over the land.
“Where am I?” she asked aloud, but the words vanished into the empty air. She could not breathe. She spun around, panicking, but there was no one to help her. The plain stretched into an immensity of distance, the horizon a faint black line.
Then she was back in the street, gasping for breath.
“What are you doing?” someone cried. An armored hand reached over her shoulder and struck the woman in the face, sending her bloodied into the gutter. The crowd vanished like a conjuring trick, fleeing into doorways and beneath awnings. “Lunae? Are you all right?” Dreams-of-War’s face was a mask of fury.
The woman clambered up from the gutter and fled. The Martian sprang forward, but the woman was gone into the maze of the lower Peak. Lunae looked up at her guardian with grateful trepidation.
“What was that woman?”
“A Kami.” Above the throat-spines of her armor, Dreams-of-War’s face was pinched and pale, but her eyes were firecracker-bright. With alarm, Lunae realized that Dreams-of-War was not only angry, but afraid.
CHAPTER 2
NIGHTSHADE
Upon the day of her nineteenth birthday, Yskatarina hastened through Tower Cold, heels tapping across the metal floor, sending out glassy codes to the ever-present listeners, the ears of the Elder Elaki. Devices flickered within the walls, monitoring, reporting back. They could be fooled, and she had learned how to do so, but Yskatarina could still hear them at night—or, perhaps more accurately, when she slept, for there was no such thing as day on Nightshade. And sleep was fitful, often disrupted by the murmuring, spined embrace of the Animus. The Animus’s needs were becoming insistent. He was, after all, a male.
Yskatarina did not mind, however. She had needs of her own, and moreover, it marked the Animus as something that was truly hers, even though they were both supposed to be the property of the clan. Her aunt was always trying to make more: coaxing embryos out of the growing-skins, mingling monkey and dragonfly and bee, scorpion and marmoset with the old genes of Earth. But although the Animus had been a success, the great-eyed, thorn-armed creatures lived for no more than a night before expiring with a sigh.
Elaki made others, of course: the mute-kin that worked on the production lines, the disposable workers who were sent out into the Sunken Plain. All of these beings slid without difficulties from their growing-bags, overseen by the mourn-women. But these were lesser creatures, with limited sentience or none at all, and they did not live long. The Animus had been her greatest success, and Yskatarina knew that this infuriated Elaki. She was aware that her aunt had tried to replicate the Animus, scraping off cells, carefully experimenting with shed fragments of scale and skin, but the clones never seemed to take. She was unsure whether the Animus could feel true amusement, but on the news of yet another failure, Yskatarina thought that he had. But to dwell on this more closely would have meant criticizing her aunt, and Yskatarina found this too hard. The guilt at her own disobedience often came close to overwhelming her.
She ran a hand down a nearby tapestry, as if admiring it. The tapestry glowed briefly, the nerve-threads woven within it sending out ambiguities, false information, bewilderment to the ever-present spy-eyes. She knew that it would give her no more than a minute’s grace, but it was enough to slip behind the tapestry, out of the sight of the spies, and into the glassy hollow of the wall. From here, she could make her way up Tower Cold to the genetics lab. Here, she was forced to double over, for the labyrinth of the wall was really only large enough for a child. But even at nineteen, Yskatarina was more flexible than a whole adult. An artificial arm could be unscrewed, or legs removed to permit her to snake through gaps, like a grub within a hive. And she wanted to find out what Elaki was really planning. Her aunt, on the previous night, had told her little: only that a child had been grown on Earth that would somehow be a threat to Nightshade.
“But who grew the child?” Yskatarina had asked.
“Our enemies,” Elaki answered.
“But who are they?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Elaki said. Yskatarina settled down to listen, for she loved her aunt’s tales: the story of how the Ship of Elders had fled from Earth to Nightshade a thousand years ago, bringing their forbidden males with them, the perils they encountered on their long journey, how the ship sacrificed itself to grow the little colony . . .
But the story that Elaki now told was different.
“A hundred years ago this clan held key information about modifications to the human genome, prepared by its greatest scientists—two sisters, of Tower Cold.” A pause. “My sisters. We worked together, united, while the other clans sank into an atrophied insularity from which they have never emerged. And together, it was we who contacted the Kami, and learned so much thereby. Together, we developed the paradigms of haunt-tech. But when our clan offered that technology to the Martian Matriarchy, there was—a disagreement. The sisters and their Animus—for they had only one between them—fled to Mars in a prototype haunt-ship, taking the data store with them. They vanished for many years and I believed them to be dead. But recently I have tracked them down, to a place called Fragrant Harbor. It seems they have been biding their time, plotting against me, preparing a weapon.”
“What kind of weapon?”
“The girl whom you are to kill.”
“How can a girl be a weapon? And why do you not go to Earth and kill them? Why not slay this child when it is still in its bag?” Elaki scowled and Yskatarina added, panicking, “I do not mean to criticize, please do not think that. Only—”
“It is a fair question,” Elaki said, somewhat grudgingly. “I could not get near them. They know me too well, and—apart from yourself—they know those close to me. They have been keeping an eye on those members of our clan who inhabit our Mission on Earth.”
“Could not someone there hire an assassin?”
“I do not wholly trust those at the Mission,” Elaki said after a pause.
“Why
