NOVEL NEXT 091 - Revelatory Restoration
Blake wiped blood from a split lip with one hand and cleaned ichor from his knife with the other. Both hands shook. Sheathing Fang, he used both hands to push his sweat-slickened hair back from his face before replacing his helmet. The adrenaline spike from the last fight was already fading, leaving him hollow and sluggish.
He was tired.
Not just of the fighting—though fuck, he'd kill for fifteen minutes without something lunging from the shadows—but of the cycle itself. How many times had he gone through it in the past few hours? Sprint, fight, crash. Sprint, fight, crash, think. Question every choice he'd ever made. Repeat.
Christ, he was sick of thinking. Sick of examining every violent impulse, every tactical decision, every goddamn philosophical implication of his choices. Rax's voice had finally gone quiet, but the questions remained. Was he a protector or a killer? Did the distinction even matter when the result was always more bodies? It felt like it should.
When had survival become so complicated?
From somewhere distant in his mind, Rax chuckled. And he was right to, the bastard. It was complicated because he was refusing to let it be simple. If he cared less about being the bad guy, survival would pretty fucking simple.
But he thought of Rax's men, screaming with incoherent pain and fury as their implants drove them to kill, all the while burning their insides to cinders. Just data points to be reported to some asshole Aeon.
Or these poor souls.
His latest kill—the Outsider's latest victim—lay in pieces at his feet, still twitching. Blake nudged its skull with his boot. The face was still recognizable. It was humanoid, if not human. That's what he was fighting almost exclusively now, at least for the last hour or so.
People.
Or what used to be people. The one at his feet wore the remnants of a uniform, some utilitarian coverall. Someone's son, maybe. Someone's father. Not a soldier, if the uniform was an indication, just a hapless civvy. He had been just like the rest in the end: twisted, animated, desecrated.
He clenched his fists. Rax, Malrik, the Outsider … Blake was happy to remain far removed from whatever part of the moral and ethical landscape those fuckers holed up in. If that meant agonizing over the nuances of his Path until the System was satisfied, then it would be worth it.
He sighed and made a conscious effort to let the tension bleed out of his muscles. Now wasn't the time to go back down that rabbit hole. He was getting close to the fourth sub-core, now, so he'd save further whining for when Kitt was there to either help him sort out his thoughts—or to tell him to pull his head out of his ass. Either way, he'd welcome a friendly voice.
Blake shouldered through a ragged doorway into a cramped side room. The walls were completely lost under a layer of the Outsider's pulsing, sickly, multi-colored corruption. His HUD painted a green bracket over one wall, showing him where his target was hiding.
"Found you," he muttered. Kitt was still busy putting Humpty Dumpty back together, but after activating the most recent sub-core, the Leviathan's local network was back online. Sometimes. It was patchy and low-bandwidth, but it was enough to supply Blake with regular updates to his map data, courtesy of Kitt and the Leviathan. That was proving useful now.
Drawing Fang again, he sliced open the grotesque organic mess with a wet, tearing sound. Sizzling fluids bubbled and spurted as he worked, and he did his best to avoid them lest he get another scolding about acid damage to his armor. Soon enough, the awful tissue fell away, revealing the dented face of an electrical panel.
The latches were fused, so he drove the knife's tip in and pried until metal popped. Inside, a row of breakers sat, most of them flipped to the off position. He began resetting them, one by one. With each click, a low hum started up somewhere in the walls. After the fourth, he heard the satisfying sound of motors engaging in the hallway behind him. The heavy blast doors were powered up again.
That was good. There'd be no need to waste a Singularity Shot. He could save that for when things got really bad. He turned and left the closet, not bothering to look back at the mess he'd made.
The way forward was clear, so he checked his navigation once more. The sub-core was supposedly just ahead, through a roughly 12-meter-long hallway, but the map was a bit unclear. Blake fiddled with the display mentally, and after a moment, the map expanded to fill his vision. In this wider view, Blake could properly place the location of the sub-core. It was in the middle of the next room—a massive open area ringed with other rooms that all seemed to open into the main space. Blake wasn't positive what he was looking at, but he pulled Verdict preemptively.
A large space meant lots of room for surprises.
***
The mind of the ship was a cathedral of broken glass.
Here, within the mental domain of the ancient living ship, Kitt perceived the Leviathan's core as the ship herself did: an immense crystal sphere, struck by a malice so vast it had shattered the whole of it. But where the Leviathan felt only the endless, screaming discord of its million shards, Kitt still maintained her initial perspective: It was a puzzle. A 4-dimensional puzzle made up of immaterial shards of psychic energy and fractured memory, sure, but still just a puzzle.
And it was starting to come together. Kitt could see the whole of it, now, even accounting for the gaps. The Leviathan's identity was taking shape once more. Soon, she would be more than just the Leviathan: she would remember her own name. She could be Caprea again.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Kitt's will attuned to yet another of a thousand thousand pieces that had yet to find their way home. It was a shard of pure, jagged trauma, a note of a life-that-was-not-life. She didn't try and control the emotion that poured from it. She listened to it. She felt the shape of its edges, the unique frequency of its pain. Then she turned it, a quarter-turn in a direction that had no real name, and slotted it into place within the crystalline psycheform. It did not click when it fused into place. It sang. A single, clear tone that cut through the cacophony, and Kitt basked in its resonance.
Another note settled. She reached for the next.
This one flared, and creation tore itself open for her as she embraced it. A memory of the Leviathan's—no, Caprea's—first flight outside of a gravity well. This was something beyond precious for Kitt. She had been denied that birthright. Someday she would sail between stars under her own power. For the moment, however, she quietly embraced Caprea's experiences, immersing herself in the memory.
Power erupted from her core, warp mana responding to her desires in ways that she could not articulate but understood on the same level as she understood her own heartbeat. The stars did not streak as she slipped around and behind normal spacetime. Instead, they bled across the black, ripped into vectors of color that had no proper name.
Kitt smiled. The memory was a soaring, dominant chord, a blast of untamed joy. She found its place in the grand, spherical design, and when it settled, its glorious, foundational hum vibrated through the very structure of the puzzle, a promise of power returned.
A new shard drifted close, carrying the hush of hearth-warmth. Amber light glimmered at its center. When Kitt grazed its surface, communion washed over her—cedar heartwood on the breeze, sun-rich royal jelly on the tongue, and the deep knowing of a mind braided into a living hull. Two wills becoming one: Leviathan and pilot. It was the bedrock of what had turned into centuries of devoted partnership. She tucked the tender pulse beside the lattice's forming heart, a whispered petition for the future stolen from them both.
Progress crawled, but Kitt held steady. Each glittering sliver demanded absolute focus and a needle-fine precision to coax it home. She let the fragments flow over her: from the cool, silver hush of a meteor shower viewed from airless orbit—quiet sorrow writ in starlight—to the raw, teeth-rattling shriek of the first crash Caprea had ever suffered. Every fragment pitched another jarring note into the chorus, but each one brought the broken melody closer to harmony.
Then, something shifted. Caprea stirred. Kitt could feel the Leviathan's active attention on her as the next few fragmented memories found their way into alignment. And eventually, blessedly, Caprea began to remember how to be whole.
It started small—an echo of Kitt's own intention. As she guided a memory fragment (the scent and taste of ozone from a dying power conduit), another piece moved by itself. A ghostly projection of will, mirroring her own, nudged a stubborn shard defiantly into place.
More projections bloomed. A dozen. A thousand. Pure intention surged from Caprea's awakening core, joining the effort. They moved with a speed and certainty Kitt could never replicate, a primal, bone-deep instinct for where every shattered piece of herself belonged. The screaming discordance of a broken mind began to resolve. The screaming discord began to resolve. The crushing weight on Kitt's consciousness lifted as hundreds of phantom hands shared her burden. Caprea was healing herself.
The roar of Caprea's awakening mind became a tide. Kitt let go, drawing back from the incandescent heart of the work. A thousand sparks of will moved with their own purpose now. The fractured crystal shimmered, its shriek climbing into a clear chord as Caprea's essence wove the fragments home.
It was nearly over; the worst of it, anyway. Caprea was saving herself.
Medea's presence, distinct and familiar, settled beside her. Kitt felt the subtle shift, a deepening of the calm that already permeated the mindscape. Medea's own resonance hummed, perfectly attuned to the spiraling dance of Caprea's mending light.
"It's a beautiful sight," she whispered. She sounded almost reverent, and Kitt couldn't blame her in the slightest.
"It is."
The last echoes of dissonance faded, swallowed by the rising harmony of the Leviathan's mending. Grief and ruin were being rewoven into a song of wholeness, a chord that grew stronger with each slow, resonant pulse. For a long while, there was only that: the sound of a self being made new. Then Medea's attention pulled away from the spectacle, turning inward, settling upon her. A shift.
"I suppose you want to get back to work fixing our own psycheform now."
Kitt felt a flicker of her old irritation. "Bold of you to call it ours, but yes. I'm tired of feeling like a stranger in my own memories."
"Right, then. Let's proceed," Medea's tone was grim, heavy with secrets unshared. "I will fill you in on everything you've forgotten. The fracturing of the Tylwyth royal house of Orestes, the proxy wars fought for control of the throne, and how that all led to Vylaas's death at his own brother's hand."
Kaelen Orestes—the crown's chosen heir, once meant to bond with her. One training accident, one damaged core, and the King tossed him aside like dull scrap. So he'd sold his loyalties to his father's rivals in the imperial military, and they'd sanded his edges, loaded him up with the best cybernetics money could buy, and polished him into a gleaming "hero of the people".
Nobody in the cheering crowds tracked the innocent corpses propping up that myth—including, in the end, his own brother's. Had he climbed the ladder to patricide yet? Or was it regicide, maybe, when the patriarch wore a crown? Titles blurred when blood ran that freely.
"Kaelen," she muttered. "What an ass."
"You don't know the half of it."
The tone of Medea's voice drew Kitt's attention more than the words. There was something dark there. Stories and memories that Kitt wasn't privy to, ones that she was all too certain that she needed to be.
Medea sensed Kitt watching her, but still took her time continuing. She looked to be struggling with how to begin. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Kitt's impatience won out, and she jabbed Medea in the ribs. Wincing, Medea turned to face her.
"Why are you making it sound like killing Vylaas wasn't the worst thing he did, Medea?"
"Was it? How much worse is Vylaas' death than the deaths of the refugees in the camps he wiped out? The caravans he bombed?"
"Don't equivocate with me, M. You're not worried about reading off Kaelen's war-crime scorecard. What did he do to us personally that I'm not remembering?"
Medea sighed, turning away once more. Kitt gave her time to find her words. After a moment, Medea turned back, tears shining in her eyes.
"For starters, Kitt, he killed you."