Page 43 of Tears of Tungsten
Truth of the Sun-Dwellers
Selene
Apsid Quasar
The first thing I became aware of when I woke up was the smell. The heat didn’t startle me, because I’d grown accustomed to the temperatures induced by tachyon manipulation. But the scent was so different. It was floral, and yet, sulphurous, a perfume that had two contrasting layers and couldn’t quite decide what to be.
I cracked my eyes open, only to find myself facing the familiar figure of Jared Glass.
He sat at my bedside, observing me in silence. He looked different than the day I’d last seen him, at the tournament. His skin was a little darker, and his hair had gone completely white, as if he’d exposed it to some kind of noxious chemical. His eyes were lighter blue and seemed to glow from within. He was still wearing his uniform, but beyond that, he could have been an entirely different person.
Even so, I recognized him with ease. The way he was looking at me reminded me of the conversation we’d had during the tournament. At that moment, I felt like I was back in the labyrinth, listening to an apology and a cryptic warning about a mysterious mission. “J-Jared?” I stammered. “Is that you?”
“You could say that, yes,” he answered with a nod. “Although it’s Jar’yd now.”
He pronounced his name as if ‘yd’ was a separate syllable. If we’d been back at the academy, I might have made a stupid joke about jars and their contents. But when I took a quick look around, I realized we weren’t at Tartarus Base. In fact, we might not be in my galaxy at all.
The room I was in didn’t look like anything I’d seen in my life. More than a room, it was a massive sphere. I was lying on a round bed, covered in a crimson blanket with a mild, metallic sheen. The bed itself was floating mid-air, although I couldn’t identify the technology it used. Jared’s seat was similar. It also didn’t look like any chair I’d seen. It seemed like a set of round pillows instead on an actual seat, and I couldn’t understand how anyone could use something like that to float around. Still, a lot of equipment at Tartarus Base used hover technology and I hadn’t discovered every single thing. The floating furniture didn’t take me aback that much. The plants on the walls did.
Bright golden flowers bloomed around us in an explosion of life and color I’d never seen anywhere else, not even on Terra. The roots and stems pulsed in a myriad of shades of red, ranging from a deep burgundy, to a bright orange. The petals even had the occasional sprinkles of cheerful pink.
I extended my hand past the surface of the bed and one of the leaves reached back, brushing against me. It felt warm and alive against my skin.
For the first time, I became aware that I was no longer wearing my uniform, but a strange loose dress that showed as much skin as it covered. I quickly withdrew my hand, suppressing the urge to cover myself better with the material. I’d gotten over my shyness at the academy. I was more concerned with the unfamiliarity of the plant than I was with my clothing.
“We call these Phaeton Hearts,” Jared explained when he noticed my interest. “Do you like them? I’ve never really had time to cultivate plants, neither here, nor at Tartarus Base. But Phaeton Hearts grow naturally and I thought you might enjoy seeing them.”
“They’re beautiful,” I admitted honestly. “But they’re not Terran in origin, are they?
My lovers and I had long ago suspected that Jared had had some kind of connection with the apsids. Had he taken me to one of their dwellings? Was I his captive now?
If he thought I’d happily surrender to be his slave, he had another think coming.
Jared didn’t seem to notice my hostile thoughts. “Good guess. You’re not on Terra, no, or anywhere near it. You’re in Eos, the capital city of Nexus, the core of the Heliad Empire. In human terms, this would be the Apsid Quasar, or the home world of the Sun-Dwellers.”
Well, shit. Fucking wonderful. How the hell was I supposed to get out of this one?
“You can’t keep me here,” I told him. “There will be people looking for me. My unit will want me back.”
Jared’s lips twisted in a tiny smile. “Oh, I have no doubt. But I have to ask you something, Selene. Do you want them to find you?”
What kind of question was that? Of course I wanted them to find me. Why wouldn’t I want….?
A memory flashed through my mind, and all of a sudden, the sound of screams echoed in my hearing. The stench of scorched flesh and toxic fumes replaced the beautiful scent of the alien flowers. The chimeras were right there, in front of me, massacring people indiscriminately and then eating them. Sphinx was with them. She’d lied to me, and when I tried to reach out to her, to figure out why, the only answer I received was silence.
I curled into a ball and clutched my head, desperately trying to banish the nightmarish images. “No. No, it’s not possible. It didn’t happen. It was a bad dream, an illusion. Just another nightmare.”
I’d had a lot of nightmares like that, dreams when the chimeras had been my enemies. Maybe this was something similar. Maybe I’d finally lost my grip on reality and needed to go see a doctor. My teachers at Chimera Academy had already made it clear that tachyon manipulation could be very dangerous for the brain. I might have done a lot of damage to myself in my efforts to master it.
It would also explain Jared’s return from the dead. He might have had a connection with the apsids, but he’d been human. I’d seen him almost daily for months, and he’d piloted a chimera. He couldn’t have miraculously turned into a Sun-Dweller.
“I-I’m ill,” I stammered, shaking. “That’s what this is. I’m going crazy. Professor Strange was right to warn us. I need a doctor.”
Jared left his round chair and sat down on my bed. To cross the space between the two pieces of furniture, he more or less floated, which was crazy, since this space had to have some kind of gravitational field.
The mechanical workings of the room didn’t matter all that much, though. He reached out and touched me, cupping my cheek with a strikingly gentle hand. “Look at me, Selene. You’re not crazy. I know this is overwhelming, and I hate thrusting you into another world when you’re struggling with such a serious loss. But in your heart, you know that what you saw was real. They were there, in that Terran settlement, killing people.”
“But why?” I asked, my voice cracking on the latter word. I wanted to tear myself away from him, but his gentleness disarmed me. “Why would they do that?”
