The last I saw of Amon Russ was the black Carapace Suit rising from the medical bed. It got to its feet slowly, unfamiliar with its own body. Looking into those eyes of flickering red light, it was impossible to tell whether anything of Amon was under the dark mask. I wasn’t even sure he had a face anymore, under that helm which seemed more like a second skin. I remember him taking one breath from his new mouth, and I didn’t hear him breathe again.

  Tut handed him the two zero-swords which Amon sheathed at his side. Ingrish and I followed the Carapace Suit to the airlock where Oberyn awaited, flanked by two android servants. The Rhodeshi smiled and offered Ingrish a large medallion—something that was apparently an ancient tradition. Disgusted, she handed it to Rykar, who weighed it curiously in his talons.

  And then, without saying a word, Amon departed with his Honored Storyteller.

  …

  Rykar had been hard at work, renovating the mess hall with a holo-table to watch the death games. The round, low projector was crudely bolted onto the floor with three thick wires running into an open wall panel. He was soldering some internal circuitry while Ingrish tried to hold my attention with a lesson. Kybit was taking inventory of the food stores. It was unnecessary, but it was the only task that would’ve kept her in the dispensary with the rest of us.

  Many times I’ve tried to get the Nekomata to explain how she felt emotions—if indeed she felt them at all. We think of heartbreak or loss as generally something pondered much after the fact. And I think this is a much different experience than the actual infliction of pain. Like a wound aching after an injury—this is different than the knife parting flesh. For Kybit, she couldn’t experience what we might call sadness or melancholy. She could, however, set her algorithms to keep her in the moment. She could stay in that sliver of time when Amon departed with Oberyn, even as she allowed her lower heuristics to take care of inventory.

  Rykar finally set his tools down and turned a dial with his talons. The holo-table slowly whirred to life as large display orbs flickered on, hovering in the air above. I jumped down from my seat and walked over, inspecting the many images. Ingrish gave up on the lesson and followed as well, as the three of us looked on at the galaxy’s entertainment.

  One of the spheres rendered the spiral game board of Pa’Zac, and with a voice command from Rykar, it zoomed in on Oberyn’s starting sector. It was a collection of stars bordered by a red nebulae. All sorts of statistics appeared, showing each player’s opening moves as they invested into Ibis technology and sent out probes into the outer edges of their systems. These would lay the foundation for terraformers and mining colonies, which would give their own starting bonuses. But not knowing the rules, the numbers meant nothing to me.

  Another display orb showed the game rooms. The darkened lounges were filled with Rhodeshi on great cushioned chairs. They were surrounded by holograms, and their fingers raced across the screens like lightning. There were other aliens too, silhouetted forms just as, if not stranger, than the Rhodeshi. The play would last eighteen hours a standard cycle with a six hour rest duration. Contestants were expected to take their meals during game hours. And indeed, I already saw android servants delivering breakfast to some hungry players.

  My eyes turned to the empty coliseums. The first matches weren’t expected to begin until the end of the cycle—as that would be how long it would take for the Ibis Drives to be developed and for players to start encountering one another. The great arenas were already predicting the first encounters and changing rapidly. I saw pipes pour forth lava for fiery death worlds. I saw false jungles being printed by swarms of tiny drones that flew like insects. I saw the floor open as a carbo-alloy sphere extended, in preparation to be filled with a toxic atmosphere for fights on gas giants. And of course, there were the fleets of ships waiting patiently in the void, to be used for the countless space battles.

  I could go on and on. Another orb showed the gambling pools. Another with aliens discussing game commentary and gossip. Another showed the parties on the pleasure cruises, with interviews with the passengers. Everything was available to watch for our entertainment. None of it meant anything to me, except that in all the orbs, I couldn’t catch one glimpse of Amon Russ.

  Content with his work, Rykar sat back on the couch and lit up a zakon dart. With a wave of his hand, he enlarged the orb with the gambling tables and promptly bet two thousand heat units on Amon.

  “What are you doing?” Ingrish snapped angrily.

  Rykar blew a breath of smoke in her direction. “What? You want me to bet against him?”

  “No, but…” Ingrish came around, crossing her arms. “It’s crass.”

  Rykar couldn’t raise an eyebrow, so he just stared incredulously with his yellow eyes. As I reflect back, it was remarkably uncanny. The best way to describe Rykar’s expression was like the distant gene memory of some hunting animal, a trait not uncommon in the galaxy. And indeed, Rykar looked like a hunting animal. With red plumage, a great beak, and a necklace of scrap around his chest, he was every bit the image of a wild bird of prey.

  I will mention, I have often pondered the origin of so many aliens I have come across, even though such speculation is pointless. Not only is Terra gone, but Rykar’s kind had not been molded by natural evolution—if such a process even exists.

  Among all the worlds I have visited, I do not know a single part of the galaxy that has not been tampered with, knowingly or unknowingly. So much life has been created or mutated or combined—or even split apart, and all of it by someone’s, or perhaps some thing’s appendage. There is no natural line of descent to aid me—only the faulty handiwork of someone else.

  Writing this now, I realize Tut was correct. In the end, we are all artificial things.

  “Don’t you want to know the odds on the betting pools?” Rykar clicked the display orb to a different channel. “Or is that too crass for you?” He nodded his head, giving Ingrish a knowing look.

  The Bakke lasted for about five seconds before she quickly swiped at a display orb. The channel turned back to the gambling pools, and peering over the image, she hesitated. “Amon has eighty to twenty odds? Why is it so low? Why isn’t it a hundred percent certainty?” she asked, worry entering her voice.

  Rykar rapped a talon on his leg. “That’s a complicated question. How much do you understand about betting on Pa’Zac games?”

  “Nothing,” Ingrish replied, exasperated.

  Rykar laughed, a harsh, shrieking sound which was too loud for the room. “Well, there’s two main philosophies, if you could call them that. The first one is to look at the stats. The Game Wardens host a public database that updates how much a piece is worth on the playing board. You look at strategies, players, and so on. You treat Pa’Zac like any other gambling game in the galaxy.”

  “And the second?” Ingrish demanded.

  “You’ve never done work for the Rhodeshi.” Rykar took a puff from his zakon dart. “I did some freight jobs selling slaves. Here’s what you need to understand about the krok-ta.” I blinked as Ingrish was careful not to translate that word. It was frustrating, that ever since our conversation with Oberyn, she had been extra anxious about what I got to hear.

  Rykar dipped the zakon dart into an ashtray, thinking for a moment. “You ever wonder why they host the most expensive games in the galaxy, but only keep to single combat? Have you ever wondered why they don’t want a random Tobeccan chem warrior? They want a Tobeccan out to avenge his dead clone-parent? It’s because they’re control freaks. It’s because they don’t take chances. Those games out there? You think those geniuses don’t already know the outcome?”

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  Ingrish shook her head, confused. “You’re saying it’s rigged?”

  Rykar rolled his eyes, which for his species, was more of a motion of his head. “You’re still thinking like it’s a game. Like it’s a thing they need to cheat to determine the outcome. You’re not thinking like a Rhodeshi. Pa’Zac isn’t a tournament. It’s the story of their race. Everyone goes to those betting tables looking at fighter stats or the player’s GLA rating or what have you.” He clacked his beak. “That’s not the strategy. The strategy is to predict what story they are going to tell. And some people on the betting pools think the story is Amon losing.”

  “How does that make any sense?” Ingrish stamped her foot.

  Rykar took a breath. “Well, if I had to make a guess… Taking down Amon, it’s not about the board or the pieces. It’s about the Rhodeshi people defeating the greatest weapon ever devised. From their perspective… it would be their victory over humanity. One gigantic spectacle. One of the last humans in the galaxy competing for his race and losing. Now that’s a story to tell.” Rykar puffed a cloud of smoke.

  “Do you think Oberyn is in on this? Why would he agree to help us if he knew he was going to lose?” Ingrish looked as though she was about to throttle the bird.

  Rykar raised his taloned hands in surrender. “Whoah! Whoah! I’m not saying anything here! You wanted to know why the betting pool is eighty twenty, and I told you. Some people just have a more creative approach with their money—that’s all. It could be Grugk pacca for all I know.”

  “Okay, but continue this thought experiment. Why would he help us if he was going to make Amon lose?” Ingrish asked.

  Rykar paused, slowly opening his beak and shutting it, like he was figuring something out. “You’re the telepath, shouldn’t you be the one telling me?”

  Ingrish stopped and thumbed her hands for a moment. “Because I don’t want it to be true. Because I want someone else to say I’m wrong. Because I just want everything to be okay.”

  Rykar seemed caught off guard by that quick admission, and he leaned forward and uncharacteristically, tried to be as delicate as possible. “Listen, those Rhodeshi freaks—they don’t care about anything sensible. From Oberyn’s point of view, losing the game isn’t what matters. It’s that he’s representing humanity in this tragic tale. If he wins, it’s an embarrassment. The tournament gets buried in the Rhodeshi history books. But if he loses, he’s going to secure himself as a playing actor in the greatest triumph of the Rhodeshi way of life.”

  Ingrish silently lowered her head.

  “I told Amon all of this by the way.” Rykar tried to comfort her. “I warned him, and you know how it goes with him. But Amon knows what he’s walking into. He’s going to be fine. No amount of mind games is going to mess with him.”

  One of the display orbs, the one with the game commentary, suddenly showed a picture of Amon in the Carapace Suit. The audio cone widened, dimming the rest of the noise from the holo-table as everyone’s attention turned to the small sphere orbiting far from the others.

  Ingrish glanced back, sighing. “And they’re still sending the eidolons after him.”

  …

  The Salazarii people specialize in creating eidolons. Custom to the order, all the artificial replicas Amon would have to fight were made of blood and bone, not plasteel of course. That wouldn’t be realistic enough. Instead, they sourced blank flesh, a biologic substance molded to a construct template. Able to be regrown, reshaped, retextured into anything, it was the modern fab-matter, just waiting to be sculpted.

  The next step is the installation of a sub-dermal response mesh and actuation fibers. These would mimic the automatic functions of the body, sweat, tics, the swift recoil from pain. They served every function of the unconscious without having an actual unconscious.

  That was for the shape and the basic design, but the memories, however, they were far tricker, especially without the originals to draw upon. The Salazarii made due with neural nets, generating false equivalences and implanting from there.

  This is where creating eidolons transitions from an ordinary trade to true artisanship.

  It is not enough to make something alive. You must counterfeit the soul as well, and that relies upon careful precision. With incomplete and often flawed records, they had to bring back not only the way a dead man spoke and acted and believed, but also the accumulation of those things into a convincing whole. It is not that the mind and the body are two separate things, meat and consciousness. But the mind feeds into the body and the body into the mind, woven so inextricably that it is a foolish notion to believe you could ever have one without the other. After all, for the Salazarii’s task, what is a memory of unimaginable horror if it does not send a chill down your spine?

  Without this detail, the flesh sculpture would be precisely that, a hollow model. But with an artist, you could almost swear the dead had been brought back to life.

  Which is precisely why the Salazarii were paid so much. As Amon stepped into that coliseum later that day, as we all watched from the holo-table, we saw another figure on the other side of the arena. The stage was a perfect replica of Charys, a wintry plain, Amon’s homeworld. And his opponent…

  Ingrish ran a search on the Aphelion’s database, quickly using facial recognition to cross reference the individual.

  I looked up at her, amazed to see the face of another human. “Who?”

  She didn’t look up from the data-slate in her hands. “An old friend from the war,” she finally said.

  We watched as the two approached one another. The black monster in the Carapace Suit, and the confused, nervous man with sandy hair and pale features. He wore a frayed blue jacket and a thick set of trousers. I saw many scratches and grease smudges and dirt on his weary features. He looked like he had wandered in from a battlefield, as if the Fifth Aberrant War had been no more than a day ago.

  I don’t know what I expected. I guess I had never seen a human who wasn’t marred, like they hadn’t been torn up by something. Amon was old. The Tyrell man too, though he showed it in a different way. But the stranger on the cold, grassy plain seemed as if he was just entering life. It was later what I would call boyish features, the kind you see on a young man cheerfully going to war.

  His face brightened as he got closer to Amon, his blue eyes lighting up with recognition. He waved his arms excitedly and broke into a sprint. Calling out Amon’s name at the top of his lungs, he was no more than a few feet away, shouting, “Amon! You’re alive!” And he opened his arms for an embrace of brothers.

  The thing in the Carapace Armor ignited the zero-sword and decapitated the friend with the bright blue eyes. The howling black blade shrieked as it effortlessly cut through.

  Ingrish’s hand tightened around mine. “It’s not real,” she assured me.

  As if to prove her words, the headless man did not fall dead. Instead, it wrapped its arms around Amon, hugging him all the same.

  I blinked. I suppose to any other child this might cause some trauma, that it might leave an imprint on the psyche. But Ingrish had no need to assure me of anything. From my childhood on Ghiza VI, I knew what dying looked like. I saw Mantza dissolved in acid, yes. But there were plenty of other examples. Industrial accidents, skiff malfunctions, an arcology collapse, I had seen them all without a mother’s watchful eye.

  It struck me then, and it strikes me now, that these so-called artisans, these skilled craftsmen who create these eidolons, they all miss that most important detail in imitating life. They never create something that dies lifelike. Those things of synthetic flesh and blood, they don’t rot. The earth practically spits them out.

  There was nothing horrific in that display for me. I saw nothing except the materials in the shape of an imitation—and nothing more.

  Amon seemed caught off guard by the gesture. And in one final moment, he reluctantly placed a hand on the body’s back, as if to comfort the fake thing in its fake death. Suddenly the picture of the orb went white. Ingrish gasped as the coliseum’s force shields contained the collective energy of a small star.

  “What happened?” She stood up, nervously glancing at all the display orbs, desperately hoping what we saw had been a malfunction.

  And just as Ingrish leapt to her feet, I suddenly felt a presence behind me.

  “A player who was unhappy with the match-up,” Tut’s wheezing voice uttered behind me. “I discussed this possibility with Amon. Some of the players may be so angry with being matched against an unwinnable opponent that they might break the rules. Fusion bombs are against game regulation, but well… some see losing as worse than disqualification.”

  “If they’re against regulation, then how did this happen!?” Ingrish shrieked at the doctor.

  “It’s difficult but not impossible to smuggle in such a device. I expect the actual bomb was too small to be detected by normal scans. Must’ve been extraordinarily expensive.”

  “And Amon?” Ingrish cried out.

  Tut glanced towards her. “The Carapace Suit was designed to fight worse than the Star Spawn. You have no need to worry. Neither the temperatures nor the pressure will heavily tax it.”

  Tut said that, but it was hard to believe in the broiling fire. The force fields intensified, allowing the spectators to more easily see the inferno in the coliseum. I stared at the small star, amazed at the sight and wondering what Amon experienced in its heart.

  This broke the final straw for Ingrish. Horrified, she stood up and turned to Rykar. “Can you find General Kairon? Where he’s residing? I need to talk with him.”

  “I’m not sure you’re aware of this, but trying to interfere in the Pa’Zac tournament once it’s underway is illegal. They have laws about this, and if we’re caught…”

  “I know.”

  “Not to mention I have no idea where the General is. I would have to discreetly search the whole system.”

  “I know.”

  “And you should know we probably have our own set of eyes on us. Both the Rhodeshi and the Dalfaen. Just in case we do anything.”

  “Please! For Amon’s sake!” Ingrish all but fell on her knees to the former pirate lord.

  Rykar couldn’t grin. He didn’t have the lips for it. But as he puffed on the last of his zakon dart, his eyes had that focused stare, like he was sizing up a worthy challenge.