Chapter 9

I'D NEVER SEEN ONE OF THEM DIE BEFORE, I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THEY COULD DIE. BUT I REMEMBER THE BATTLE OF MIRA STATION. I REMEMBER SKIPPERS IN THEIR MACHINES, BLINKING IN AND OUT LIKE FIREFLIES, AND I REMEMBER SEEING THE BURNING SKY DYING FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME. IT WAS THE FIRST DAY SINCE WE LOST OUR HOME THAT I GOT TO REMEMBER WHAT HOPE FELT LIKE.

-ASHLYNN JONES, PERSONAL ACCOUNTS OF THE BURNING SKY.

.•° ✿ °•.

I could feel it, and I think that was why it was so easy for me to accept the truth of the words Lilt had fed me, even despite all of her lies and misdirection. If I were thinking, then I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could have thrown her. But I was a Skipper, so I was feeling, and something was resonating with my feelings. With delicate steps that left no sign of evidence, I paced around the Faering, every fiber of my skin tingling, reminding me of the way I felt when I was walking past the transformer coils on the lower decks of the Station.

The air just felt... charged.

The form of the construct didn’t differ greatly from my Faering, like any of those my Skipper Sisters might have taken into cold deep vacuum. Three rings of wedges, each smaller than the one preceding it, and the Truss suspended and hovering in the center. The material construction was what set things apart, though, and I could only have described it as otherworldly because it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Except for every single day when I looked in the mirror, that was.

“Is this Skipper technology?” I asked with equal parts curiosity and awe. My words were soft and hesitant, as though this was a question that I wasn’t ready to hear the answer to.

When my words hung in the air and Lilt didn’t answer me, though, I looked over my shoulder and saw her talking to a middle-aged woman with black hair and almond-shaped eyes that clouded with a milky white pallor in the same shade as the cane she held in her hand.

Without any acknowledgment of my question, and outside of the supervision of my escort, I gave into temptation and stepped up the adjacent stepladder to bring me closer to the Truss in the center of the Faering. I came chest to chest with the suspended figure in between the three rings, floating as if by magic. My eyes shined with compulsion, my feelings flared, and I reached out one hand to touch the strange, almost alien figure before me. And where my fingers were softly cream colored, pale and milky, child-like and precious, the Truss was dark pinkish gold, designed to look metallic at a distance, intended to evoke feelings of artificiality. We contrasted, not flesh and steel like we usually would, but in every other way.

“Are you curious?” Despite the soft excitement in Lilt’s voice, I almost jumped out of my too perfect skin, and felt myself falling back into her arms on the way down from the startled leap. “Oh hey, it’s alright, you’re good. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I’m a Skipper,” I spat, then faded, “I don’t get scared,” I moped in embarrassment, and Lilt smiled the way my Mom used to.

“Well now that’s not true at all. You don’t have to posture here, Cadence, you don’t have to live up to an image of some ever-perfect hero. It’s alright to be afraid. It’s alright to be excited, to be trepidatious, it’s okay to feel things.” She smiled at me, and her arms were still around me, wrapping me up in physicality the way her reassurances wrapped up my insecurities. “Are you alright? We don’t have to do this right now, you know.”

I looked up, craning my neck to see her gaze as she stood behind me, arms wrapped around me, and her upside-down smile was just as pretty as right side up.

“I felt something, Lilt. Like it was giving me something.” My brow was furrowed as my inflection dropped; my gaze moved back to the Truss in the center of the Faering. “I think I’m just feeling ghosts, though, probably something to do with your ship?” My tone was inquisitive, doubtful, maybe hoping to be told otherwise. Lilt didn’t give me that, though.

“Maybe.” Her voice had melody, “Maybe not. This is all new technology; this is something that can save the world. We don’t know how your Skipper body is going to respond to it, and that’s why you’re here.” Something about her candor put me at ease, despite the fact that I was literally terrified of the prospect, and that let my child-like wonder and excitement shine through.

“Put me inside, let me link.” I asserted in earnest, and stepped forward away from her, pressing my hand to the uncanny carapace in front of me, as though I was proving something to myself. Nothing happened. Lilt was looking at me curiously when I turned around, a little smirk on her too-pretty face, and I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly, trying to act so much cooler than I felt. “What? We’re not saving any lives just standing around here.”

I felt something that wasn’t mine. Pride.

Something gave me pride.

.•° ✿ °•.

“Just try to think of this like any other Delinking, Cadence,” Lilt’s tone was detached, she didn’t make eye contact, and she was going down a checklist on her tablet, trying to force the kind of confidence in her process that came naturally to Laurent.

He’d been a handler for decades; he’d fought the Burning Sky and he’d paid his prices. Lilt was a spook, a ghost, a figment living in excess, hailing from the inner machinations of some unified governance that nobody even believed we had anymore. She might have been good at wearing masks, but that didn’t answer for her lack of experience.

“Have you seen a Delinking before, Lilt?” She looked up from her little computer, like I’d asked a dumb question, and I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t mean it personally, I know you’re one of the creators of the Faering, but I don’t know what you actually do.” She didn’t seem any more impressed with what I was saying. “I just mean...you might be a systems analyst for all I know, and the theory is pretty different from the reality.”

“The reality is fine, Skipper Cadence,” She answered back, almost defensively, and I puffed my cheeks at her response. I was only trying to be considerate! And maybe a little bit I was trying to shake the vapid feelings being broadcast through the ether of nothingness. Had I upset her? I hadn’t meant to. “Alright let’s do this! Genna, you’re clear to start Delinking our Skipper.”

I watched the blind woman - Genna, I supposed - up above me and to the left. I saw the smile spread across her lips as she used the positioning of her fingertips on one hand to center her other on the controls. She was confident, she was excited, I didn’t even know her name until Lilt had said it, and I still felt safe in her care.

With a mechanical sound, heavy and clunking, old-world and oily, a familiar looking gantry slid along crane rails inset into the ceiling. Some things were the same no matter where you were. The arrangement moved left and forward, left and down, the blind woman guiding the movement with more precision than any of my myriad linking technicians on the station could have mustered. The steel rig dropped slowly down around me, clunked heavily, and then little spikes pushed into my joints to separate unseen connections.

My arms and my legs pulled gracefully away from my body, bound to the two side sections of the gantry as they split away from one another.

And then just like, I was flying.

“You know, you really sold the whole being freaked out by my arm being Delinked in my quarters, Lilt,” I called down to her, nothing more than a torso and a head right now, and she laughed and rolled her eyes in return, but she didn’t sass me back. Maybe I’d made her uncomfortable, or maybe right now I was just another variable in a long-form formula.

Maybe this was another mask she was wearing, and I was just another piece of equipment to this version of Lilt.

The rings of the Faering began to hum and resonate, and one-by-one they rotated noiselessly from vertical to horizontal, inner to outer; like a gyroscope, revealing access to the top of the Truss as the jig positioned me centered to the opening from above.

“What’s this going to be like, Lilt? Anything I should know?”

“Nothing I can tell you without invalidating the usefulness of our data, Cadence. Just relax, think of it like any other Linkage.” Was that earnest focus in the tone of her voice, or was it worry? Concern? Was there something she wasn’t telling me?

The crane began to lower and at the same time the top half of the metallic torso began to bloom open like the petals of a flower. It was a grotesquely alien display applied to what had at least looked remotely human - if headless - a few moments before. My alabaster skin disappeared inside of the dark form and the petals settled in place around my chest, linking to every aspect of my nervous system all at once.

It was intense.

And I was no stranger to intensity, but this was so much more intense than usual. If the sensations of linking were like waves washing over me on the shore, then right now I felt like I was drowning. Like every wave was a tsunami and they got closer and closer together until I couldn’t breathe.

I focused.

I felt.

I didn’t think.

This was normal, my feelings told me; the way muscle memory told me how to put one foot in front of the other. They told me that this was expected and that I just had to... calibrate, to synchronize. This was, after all, why I had a whole team of technicians on hand - I had to trust them to be my thoughts so that I could be my feelings.

And what did I feel? I felt cold.

I felt warm.

I felt scared.

I felt brave.

I felt anxious.

I felt confident.

I felt dizzy.

I felt grounded.

I felt alone.

... until I wasn’t.

I opened eyes that I hadn’t realized were closed and saw a blue sky above me. I felt grass beneath my bare feet, and there was the smell of salt from the ocean and the smell of berries and childhood. I looked at my hand and found soft pinky flesh, chubby little fingers with chipped purple polish and cuts from playing among the blackcurrants.

My head spun and I spun with it; I saw the crops behind me. The crops, the berries, the blue sky, the happy giddy feelings like a blanket wrapped around my brain. What had I done? What was I doing? For a moment I heard my heart pound in my inner ears, and then just like that, all was quiet within.

I’d charted a maze through the berries, and I just knew that I had to find the way back!

I could hear my own giggling as I ran, the soil shifted between my toes and the blackcurrant bushes felt familiar and comfortable against my fingers as I ran and laughed, turning left, and turning right, following the path that had led me here. I could remember it vividly; I’d spent all morning here; I’d made the most impressive maze ever! And I’d hidden a coloring book and crayons at the end of the maze; I’d left myself a reward in the form of coloring and a picnic basket and a happy afternoon, even if Mommy and Daddy couldn’t play with me today.

Left. Right. Right. Left.

I couldn’t imagine feeling any happier than this, this summer would last forever, the dances and the games, the sunshine, and the happiness, me and the berries and my family.

Right. Right. Left. Straight! Left.

I emerged into a clearing, laughing, gingham dress stained violaceous and torn from when I’d ran too close to the bushes, my feet smeared with dirt and a little bit of sweat beading on my brow as one of my pigtails fell in front of my shoulders and the other behind. I saw my picnic basket, and I saw my coloring book, and I saw my crayons, and I saw another girl here, another girl my age, a ten-year-old in a very pretty dress, sitting on my picnic blanket.

Confusion showed on my baby face as I wondered who she was. Then I knew who she was.

Obviously.

“Hi, Carmen!”

This was going to be the best summer ever, and it never had to end.