“You may go,” the Grandmothers told her. “Remember what we have told you.”
Lunae bowed and backed away, but as she turned to go through the door, she thought she heard Left-Hand say, “Make us proud.”
The kappa was trotting after her, so Lunae dived out into the passage and breathed the stuffy air with relief.
“They did not need to see me! Why couldn’t Dreams-of-War tell me all this? They summoned me to torment me.”
The kappa seized her arm and hastened her down the passage. “Of course they did,” the kappa said into Lunae’s ear, surprising her. “But do not say so where they can hear you.”
“If that’s so, we had best journey to the moon,” Lunae said with bitterness, not caring. “I’m sick of hiding how I feel.” She could still feel the Grandmothers’ presence. It surrounded her, filling her mind, as cloying and sticky as syrup.
“These moments of rebellion do not wholly displease your Grandmothers, you know,” the kappa said, “though they may pretend otherwise. They complained often of the other child—that she was too malleable, too pliant, that she did everything asked of her, with no more protest than a vegetable makes before it goes into the soup.”
“Nurse,” Lunae said, for this was yet another question without an answer, “who was that other child? What became of her? Was she the hito-bashira before me?”
“Yes. She was your sister-in-skin. She was one of the ones who died.”
Lunae searched for a flicker of regret in the kappa’s face, but there was none.
“Did you look after her, as you care for me?”
“No. The Grandmothers summoned me after her death. I replaced another genetic grower.”
“Would you miss me if I died?”
“It is hard to say,” the kappa mused. Lunae felt something cold and pulpy rise inside her throat; she stopped walking and stared at the kappa. “Do not think I do not love you,” the kappa said in sudden dismay. “I did not mean that. But your Grandmothers are compassionate, and will not let me fully feel. If anything were to befall you, they would extract my emotions, store them safely where I cannot find them. They are very kind.”
Lunae was doubtful. If someone else was the governor of your emotions, then what was the good of having them in the first place? Why not simply have them removed, like an overactive gland? But perhaps it was better for the kappa to believe that the Grandmothers had her best interests at heart. If, indeed, she did so believe, and was not merely dissembling.
“And now,” the kappa went on, “come with me. There are preparations to be made.”
MEMNOS
CHAPTER 1
MARS
The Animus hovered anxiously overhead, wings beating like a slow fan. It had taken over an hour of bargaining to allow him to have access to the Tower, and even then a squadron of scissor-women had accompanied him up the spiraling stairs.
Beneath lay Yskatarina, strapped to a high couch. A doctor hovered nearby, with the Matriarch. They had removed her limbs, for fear that she might break free and damage herself or the equipment. She was now secured by straps at the waist and the throat. At first, she had protested.
“Surely the treatment cannot be that difficult?”
“It strips your neurons down to the level of the unconscious. It ransacks the pathways that lead to the farthest parts of your mind. Your aunt will, I know, have planted her seeds of affection very deeply.” The Matriarch’s face, looming above her like a pitted Martian moon, grew pinched. “She tends a cold garden, that one.”
Yskatarina was about to ask how well the Matriarch knew Elaki, for the words made her angry with unthinking affront. But then: I will be glad to be rid of this, a loyalty that I neither asked for nor desired.
Let it burn and bleed out into the red night; let it be gone into the shadows of Memnos. She wondered where such emotions went, whether they seeped from the black light matrix to sink into cold stone and colder air. She listened to the walls of the Tower around her, yet heard nothing, only the Matriarch’s harsh breath and the steady beat of the Animus above her, like the heart that anchored her to life.
“This process,” she said, before the doctor began to key the codes into the matrix that covered the wall and which drifted in cobweb filaments through the air. “How precise is it? What damage might it do?”
She did not like this at all. It made her feel trapped and choiceless. Only two cultures had this kind of technology: Memnos and Nightshade. She felt caught between the dark and the deep. She could not have this done at home, but there was always the thought that Memnos might implant something else in her brain, some treacherous seed that would only grow to fruition when the time was right, to burgeon and betray. She had spent the journey here staring out at the spectral images of the Chain and weighing chances in the balance. Thoughts of losing the Animus had driven her to the final decision, but even that had been a close-run thing. If Memnos messed with her mind, Nightshade would have to put the damage right and she would also have to take the risk that Elaki would not notice that anything else had been interfered with. And now the guilt was kicking in with crippling force, whispering inside her head, aghast that she was about to betray Elaki. But the cracks in that loyalty had grown too wide. It was as though there were a second voice inside her head, another self, buried deep: Elaki will take the Animus away. You cannot risk that. You have no choice. Do it. Do it now.
“Very precise,” the Matriarch answered. “There will be no damage. And we will honor our bargain.”
“If I find that you have not,” Yskatarina said, “then you will find that the haunt-tech that I have given you will turn upon you. I have factored in safeguards that only I can activate.”
The Matriarch’s mouth curled in what Yskatarina initially thought to be her habitual sneer. It was only a moment later that she realized it was approval.
“Are you ready?”
“Very well.” Yskatarina gritted her teeth, helpless as a worm in a vise. From the corner of her eye, she saw the doctor run a hand across the generating tubes of the black light matrix. The room sparkled and filled with unnatural sound. Yskatarina blinked. The Matriarch was no longer there. The draft from the Animus’s wings drifted across her face—soft as snowfall, she thought, and wondered where the thought had come from. And then she was the Animus, a whisper in his head, looking down on her own bound form. She saw the black light matrix sweep across her, outlining first sinew and vein, then bone, then nerve and neuron. Her brain pulsed with neon fire. She plunged downward, boring into her own skull. It was like entering the Chain.
Images flashed by. Yskatarina saw herself in a garden filled with glowing leaves, skeins of tangled vines that pulsed with lights, a tower made of glass and water, ebbing and flowing like the tide. She saw the long ragged edge of the Animus’s wing, curling through stormy air. She tasted salt. She saw a girl with luminous gray eyes and long red hair blowing in a wind from the sea.
She knew that it was here somewhere, though she could not have said what it was that she sought.
The
