Amon refused to have his wound tended by Tut, citing that it wouldn’t make sense for slavers to take care of it. The doctor acquiesced, but the Belazzar demanded that he run a scan to make sure there were no poisons or microbes or nanites that had been coated on the knife, to which Amon agreed.

  Tut ran the handheld device along Amon while the old man sat and stared distantly, not paying the slightest attention to the horrific wound. I do not believe Tut had administered any anesthesia. It was just that Amon was used to this sort of thing.

  I watched from a corner, clutching the data-slate. I hadn’t shown what I had discovered to Amon, not yet. With all things with the man, you had to wait for the right time, for those windows of vulnerability. I wasn’t a fool. I knew there wasn’t a happy ending waiting for me, that what I might see was worse than I could imagine. But if only I could have a body to bury, if only I could rescue something from that nightmarish world, then maybe that emptiness I always felt inside would go away. And failing that, maybe I could look upon a face that hadn’t been just another alien, just another stranger. And maybe that would be enough to satisfy.

  It’s just that I was very different than Amon. He was a man who wanted to hold tight everything he had—everything he had lost. He spent so much time grasping for it that he could stare a million miles away while his ear had been cut off. I simply wanted to forget, to go back to those days on Ghiza VI, although I find I greatly romanticize that period. As that barely grown child, I wanted to be content with all that had happened, to exist at peace with myself. What I realize now is that I wanted that open horizon again, those rare nights on Ghiza VI where I saw the stars, and I thought there might’ve been good answers for the questions I so often pondered. That is what I really wanted—answers that were not like all the others.

  And so, I trepidatiously approached with the data-slate.

  Amon didn’t notice my presence, not until I was right in front of him. Then as the man came back to himself, he glanced down at me. “I wish you didn’t have to see any of what happened,” the man said.

  “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” I replied.

  Amon shook his head. “No, I am sorry you had to see the Rakasa. They were a mistake we should’ve wiped from the face of the universe. If not for our ancestor’s failure, you should’ve been reading of the Rakasa from history books and fairytales. Instead, that evil was passed onto us.” Again, Amon looked distant. Again, I waited for my moment.

  I glanced at Tut as the doctor finished his scans and nodded to Amon. Packing up his equipment, the doctor quickly left the medical bay, being ousted from his home by the insufferable presence of two humans. I watched as Tut left, wondering exactly what the doctor thought of us that was so terrible to him. Now I understand it was the fumbling ignorance, the sheer inability, from his perspective, to see what was truly important.

  “What do you want, Vas?” Amon looked down on me, knowing well enough that I had chosen this moment for something important.

  I hesitated, but I decided that there was no better opportunity. “This is what I want.” I handed Amon the data-slate with my answer. I did not want to voice my request, in fear of so what often happened—that I spoke in the wrong way. So often what I did elicited the worst possible response, so often I created the outcome I feared the most. It was true I didn’t need Ingrish anymore to understand words, but it was also true that I pushed her away when I had needed her most—to communicate the words behind words.

  Amon grew immediately pale at what he saw, and he looked at me with worry, something he rarely did. “Ask for something else. You don’t want to see this.”

  “But—”

  “No!” The man yelled at me with a voice that silence everything, and I shrunk under the force of his presence.

  Amon suddenly looked away with regret and he glanced at me with the greatest pity. “I’m sorry I didn’t find this out sooner. If I had, I would’ve deleted it from the list. Please, I don’t want you to see what they did to her.”

  …

  I sulked in front of Ingrish’s door for a long time. I placed my hand on a nearby window, watching the rolling clouds of dark space. My mood was such that I sometimes wished I could’ve ended it all, not by killing myself, but embracing that worst future just to get it over with. Sometimes I wished that the Xurak could’ve finished their dark designs and therefore I wouldn’t have to suffer with hope. There is something quite liberating in the fact that you were meant for the worst of all ends, that you were cursed, that nothing you could’ve done would’ve prevented this fate.

  There is something quite comforting in knowing that you were never meant for happiness or joy or hope. It is soothing, in a way, to throw yourself into darkness, and to tease yourself with the possibilities of a good future is its own form of torture. Better to forget, I thought, watching those dark clouds. It is better to be damned because at least then you are not hurt by what you lost. The chance that I might’ve arrived earlier, the chance that I could’ve gotten away from Ghiza VI sooner, the chance that I might’ve saved my sister, that was too terrible a thought to be reckoned with. Instead, I preferred that it was always destined to be this way. And therefore, I would have my reason to curse the universe.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  But as I stood over that dark window, the doors to Ingrish’s room suddenly opened. She threw herself over me, in some way trying to protect me from those terrible thoughts. “Please, don’t ever think that. Don’t think like that ever again,” she begged.

  I reluctantly held my mother, old and decrepit as she was. Happiness with what you had was something I wished I had learned from Ingrish while she had still been alive. That way, I could’ve been a better son. But as I was, I did not understand that she had never grown a day, not one second older than the moment she met me—unlike myself. She had not forfeited her life to despair, and for that, she had lived a dozen lifetimes longer than I ever could. The last seven years were a blink of my eye because so much of it was empty, and I preferred to just forget. For her, it was longer than an eternity.

  I have often wondered whether she would’ve approved of the man I became. It is rather that she knew the boy as he was, and so she loved the man he would grow into.

  …

  I sat numbly on the cushion, holding a cup of tea that nevertheless tasted bitter in my mouth. Resting uncomfortably, I was still plagued by the thoughts of Amon in the medical bay. I could not disobey him, and yet, I didn’t see any other choice. When we touched down at the museum, when Kybit would upload her virus, setting off all alarms across the city and tricking the Rakasa into thinking it was a training exercise, I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  I had memorized the layout of the complex for the raid. I knew exactly where the fuel rods were. I knew exactly where she was. It wouldn’t be a long detour. It wouldn’t jeopardize anything, except that Amon had forbidden it. And maybe he was right. Maybe it was better that I didn’t see what the Rakasa had done to her.

  But it still felt wrong that I should leave it at that.

  “You shouldn’t ache over it. You think everything is already decided when it’s not. All you need to do is ask Amon again.” Ingrish advised me as she sipped her tea.

  “What would be the point?” I didn’t lift my eyes from the floor. “As soon as he’s made up his mind, he never changes it.”

  “Because he thinks it’s something he can protect you from,” Ingrish said, sighing at the hard truth. “But it’s not. Even when we leave this place, it’s going to stay with you unless you do something. Ask him again. He needs to know that you need to confront this.”

  I toyed with the idea, but it seemed useless to me. Conversation seemed pointless because it always seemed to make things worse. It wasn’t a matter of finding the right words because so often they never seemed to be there. Instead, it was more like finding the least bad answer. I worried that if I told Amon, he wouldn’t trust me for the mission, and then I would be another liability he would have to worry about.

  I wanted to reach into that part of me that had never left Ghiza VI, that monochrome world of flatness that so often felt like a better alternative to the world I found myself in now. If only I could embrace the Mantza part of me, the part that had been thoroughly instructed into my mind, that seemed my only real escape.

  It is a strange thing, to be envious of the Mantza and what I perceived they had. Of course, it was the opposite that was the case. They were so dispossessed that they had nothing. And I falsely assumed I too could be content with nothing. But humans were not made to be empty like the Mantza are. No matter how much we try, we are containers that need to be filled with something. And if we find ourselves desolate, then we still fill that void with despair because at least then we are not empty. To be like the Mantza, I would first not have to care about what the Rakasa did to my sister.

  That word, sister, still felt strange in my head. I didn’t know what to do with it. It felt real to me in a way that so many other words didn’t. Language was still something foreign to me I suppose. I used words to describe everyone and everything—except for me. There was no identity that felt grounded to me, something that couldn’t be changed, or more accurately, something that couldn’t be taken away. Even my own name felt like something that wasn’t real. It was my only memory of the time before Ghiza VI, but who’s to say it wasn’t something I misremembered or made up? Maybe my name was something different, not like I would ever really know. The people who could tell me for sure were all dead or worse.

  The only thing I knew for certain was what was in that museum. Yes, the Rakasa stole this person away from me—a person I never knew. But that didn’t change the fact that at one time I did have a family. I had proof that I wasn’t always just another drone on the maggot farms of Ghiza VI. I was a human, and with that, all the human things. There was a time when I had a mother and a father and…

  I stopped myself from thinking what logically followed next. It hurt too much, thinking about everything I had lost. And more, what would I say to Ingrish? That she hadn’t been good enough? That she wasn’t able to fill that void despite everything? What did that imply? That despite being dead, that family was more real to me than her or Amon?

  I raised my eyes to the old Bakke, knowing she was skimming my thoughts. I wondered if she was insulted by that prospect, and I didn’t have the strength to hide it like I usually could. So much inside me was crumbling away to the one thing that was real—the Rakasa and what they had done.

  Ingrish looked at me for a long moment, eyes concealed behind the blindfold, yet seeing everything anyway. She had been silent, letting me wrestle with my thoughts because that was the only way through.

  “You’re not a bad person for wanting your family back,” she finally said. “And you don’t need to worry about me or Amon. We understand. We feel it too.”

  “It’s so strange,” I struggled to put what I was feeling into words. “I’m home, but I’m not. And I don’t think that will ever go away.”

  The teasing memories that weren’t memories threatened to bubble out in my mind. This non-existent dream of a life I could’ve had. Tears tried to well up in my eyes, but I did what I always did when such emotion began to overwhelm me.

  I strangled it once again, and I looked at Ingrish with the same face as I had met her on Ghiza VI. “I don’t think I’ll go looking for her,” I said flatly. “What would be the point? It wouldn’t change anything.”