Nophek Gloss
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Essa Hansen
Excerpt from Azura Ghost copyright © 2020 by Essa Hansen
Excerpt from Velocity Weapon copyright © 2019 by Megan E. O’Keefe
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover illustration by Mike Heath
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph by Shawn Hansen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hansen, Essa, author.
Title: Nophek gloss / Essa Hansen.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2020. | Series: The graven ; book 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013067 | ISBN 9780316430654 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316430678
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A7217 N67 2020 | DDC 813/.6— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013067
ISBNs: 978-0-316-43065-4 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-43066-1 (ebook)
E3-20200914-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Tended and Driven
Chapter 2: Feed the Beasts
Chapter 3: Azura
Chapter 4: Sought After
Chapter 5: Passagers
Chapter 6: Multiverse
Chapter 7: Family
Chapter 8: Graven Wings
Chapter 9: Xenid Den
Chapter 10: Registration
Chapter 11: Memory Jog
Chapter 12: Property
Chapter 13: Glasliq
Chapter 14: Starheart
Chapter 15: Nothingness
Chapter 16: Emporia
Chapter 17: Primes
Chapter 18: Acceleration
Chapter 19: Forged
Chapter 20: Sharpened
Chapter 21: Leta
Chapter 22: Flight
Chapter 23: Belonging
Chapter 24: Bravery
Chapter 25: Augmentation
Chapter 26: Found or Forced
Chapter 27: Red as Hate
Chapter 28: Enemy of My Enemy
Chapter 29: Gatekeeper
Chapter 30: Home
Chapter 31: Casthen Prime
Chapter 32: Dreams
Chapter 33: Born and Bred
Chapter 34: Harvest
Chapter 35: Mercy
Chapter 36: Appraisal
Chapter 37: Çydanza’s Universe
Chapter 38: Merciless
Chapter 39: Real
Chapter 40: Rewards
Chapter 41: Valiance
Chapter 42: Armorless
Chapter 43: If You Love Me
Chapter 44: Murderer
Chapter 45: Saved and Salved
Chapter 46: Choice
Chapter 47: Strays
Chapter 48: Uncharted
Chapter 49: Now
Chapter 50: Bait Our Hook with Heart
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Extras Meet the Author
A Preview of Azura Ghost
A Preview of Velocity Weapon
To family, born and found.
To my mother, for introducing me to worlds beyond.
To my father, who is already there.
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CHAPTER 1
TENDED AND DRIVEN
The overseers had taken all the carcasses, at least. The lingering stench of thousands of dead bovines wafted on breezes, prowling the air. Caiden crawled from an aerator’s cramped top access port and comforting scents of iron and chemical. Outside, he inhaled, and the death aroma hit him. He gagged and shielded his nose in an oily sleeve.
“Back in there, kid,” his father shouted from the ground.
Caiden crept to the machine’s rust-eaten rim, twelve meters above where his father’s wiry figure stood bristling with tools.
“I need a break!” Caiden wiped his eyes, smearing them with black grease he noticed too late. Vertebrae crackled into place when he stretched, cramped for hours in ducts and chemical housing as he assessed why the aerators had stopped working so suddenly. From the aerator’s top, pipes soared a hundred meters to the vast pasture compound’s ceiling, piercing through to spew clouds of vapor. Now merely a wheeze freckling the air.
“Well, I’m ready to test the backup power unit. There are six more aerators to fix today.”
“We haven’t even fixed the one!”
His father swiveled to the compound’s entrance, a kilometer and a half wide, where distant aerators spewed weakened plumes into the vapor-filled sky. Openings in the compound’s ceiling steeped the empty fields in twilight while the grass rippled rich, vibrating green. The air was viciously silent— no more grunts, no thud of hooves, no rip and crunch of grazing. A lonely breeze combed over the emptiness and tickled Caiden’s nose with another whiff of death.
Humans were immune to the disease that had killed every bovine across the world, but the contaminated soil would take years to purge before new animals were viable. Pasture lots stood vacant for as far as anyone could see, leaving an entire population doing nothing but waiting for the overseers’ orders.
The carcasses had been disposed of the same way as the fat bovines at harvest: corralled at the Flat Docks, two-kilometer-square metal plates, which descended, and the livestock were moved— somewhere, down below— then the plate rose empty.
“What’ll happen if it dissolves completely?” The vapor paled and shredded dangerously by the hour— now the same grayish blond as Caiden’s hair— and still he couldn’t see through it. His curiosity bobbed on the sea of fear poured into him during his years in the Stricture: the gray was all that protected them from harm.
“Trouble will happen. Don’t you mind it.” His father always deflected or gave Caiden an answer for a child. Fourteen now, Caiden had been chosen for a mechanic determination because his intelligence outclassed him for everything else. He was smart enough to handle real answers.
“But what’s up there?” he argued. “Why else spend so much effort keeping up the barrier?”
There could be a ceiling, with massive lights that filtered through to grow the fields, or the ceiling might be the fl
oor of another level, with more people raising strange animals. Perhaps those people grew light itself, and poured it to the pastures, sieved by the clouds.
Caiden scrubbed sweat off his forehead, forgetting his grimy hand again. “The overseers must live up there. Why else do we rarely see them?”
He’d encountered two during his Appraisal at ten years old, when they’d confirmed his worth and assignment, and given him his brand— the mark of merit. He’d had a lot fewer questions, then. They’d worn sharp, hard metal clothes over their figures and faces, molded weirdly or layered in plates, and Caiden couldn’t tell if there were bodies beneath those shapes or just parts, like a machine. One overseer had a humanlike shape but was well over two meters tall, the other reshaped itself like jelly. And there had been a third they’d talked to, whom Caiden couldn’t see at all.
His father’s sigh came out a growl. “They don’t come from the sky, and the answers aren’t gonna change if you keep asking the same questions.”
Caiden recalled the overseers’ parting words at Appraisal: As a mechanic determination, it will become your job to maintain this world, so finely tuned it functions perfectly without us.
“But why—”
“A mechanic doesn’t need curiosity to fix broken things.” His father disappeared back into the machine.
Caiden exhaled forcibly, bottled up his frustrations, and crawled back into the maintenance port. The tube was more cramped at fourteen than it had been at ten, but his growth spurt was pending and he still fit in spaces his father could not. The port was lined with cables, chemical wires, and faceplates stenciled in at least eight different languages Caiden hadn’t been taught in the Stricture. His father told him to ignore them. And to ignore the blue vials filled with a liquid that vanished when directly observed. And the porous metal of the deepest ducts that seemed to breathe inward and out. A mechanic doesn’t need curiosity.
Caiden searched for the bolts he thought he’d left in a neat pile.
“The more I understand and answer, the more I can fix.” Frustration amplified his words, bouncing them through the metal of the machine.
“Caiden,” his father’s voice boomed from a chamber below. Reverberations settled in a long pause. “Sometimes knowing doesn’t fix things.”
Another nonanswer, fit for a child. Caiden gripped a wrench and stared at old wall dents where his frustration had escaped him before. Over time, fatigue dulled that anger. Maybe that was what had robbed his father of questions and answers.
But his friend Leta often said the same thing: “You can’t fix everything, Caiden.”
I can try.
He found his missing bolts at the back of the port, scattered and rolled into corners. He gathered them up and slapped faceplates into position, wrenching them down tighter than needed.
The adults always said, “This is the way things have always been— nothing’s broken.”
But it stayed that way because no one tried anything different.
Leta had confided in a nervous whisper, “Different is why I’ll fail Appraisal.” If she could fail and be rejected simply because her mind worked differently, the whole system was broken.
The aerator’s oscillating unit was defaced with Caiden’s labels and drawings where he’d transformed the bulbous foreign script into imagery or figures. Recent, neatly printed labels stood out beside his younger marks. He hesitated at a pasted-up photo he’d nicked from the Stricture: a foreign landscape with straight trees and intertwined branches. White rocks punctured bluish sand, with pools of water clearer than the ocean he’d once seen. It was beautiful— the place his parents would be retired to when he replaced them. Part of the way things had always been.
“Yes, stop everything.” His mother was speaking to his father, and her voice echoed from below, muffled and rounded by the tube. She never visited during work. “Stop, they said. No more repairs.”
His father responded, unintelligible through layers of metal.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “The overseers ordered everyone to gather at the Flat Docks. Caiden!”
He wriggled out of the port. His mother stood below with her arms crossed, swaying nervous as a willow. She was never nervous.
“Down here, hon.” She squinted up at him. “And don’t— Caiden!”
He slid halfway down the aerator’s side and grabbed a seam to catch his fall. The edge under his fingers was shiny from years of the same maneuver. Dangling, smiling, he swung to perch on the front ledge, then frowned at his mother’s flinty expression. Her eyes weren’t on him anymore. Her lips moved in a whisper of quick, whipping words that meant trouble.
Caiden jumped the last couple meters to the ground.
“We have to go.” She gripped a handful of his jacket and laid her other hand gently on his shoulder, marshaling him forward with these two conflicting holds. His father followed, wiping soot and worry from his brow.
“Are they sending help?” Caiden squirmed free. His mother tangled her fingers in his as they crossed a causeway between green pastures to a small door in the compound’s side. “New animals?”
“Have to neutralize the disease first,” his father said.
“A vaccine?” His mother squeezed his hand.
Outside the compound, field vehicles lay abandoned, others jammed around one of the Flat Docks a kilometer away. Crowds streamed to it from other compounds along the road grid, looking like fuel lines in an engine diagram. Movement at farther Docks suggested the order had reached everywhere.
“Stay close.” His mother tugged him against her side as they amalgamated into a throng of thousands. Caiden had never seen so many people all together. They dressed in color and style according to their determinations, but otherwise the mob was a mix of shapes, sizes, and colors of people with only the brands on the back of their necks alike. It was clear from the murmurs that no one knew what was going on. This was not “the way things have always been.” Worst fears and greatest hopes floated by in whispers like windy grass as Caiden squeezed to the edge of the Flat Docks’ huge metal plate.
It lay empty, the guardrails up, the crowds bordered around. Only seven aerators in their sector still trickled. Others much farther away had stopped entirely. There should have been hundreds feeding the gray overhead, which now looked the palest ever.
Caiden said, “We’ll be out of time to get the aerators running before the vapor’s gone.”
“I know …” His father’s expression furrowed. The grime on his face couldn’t hide suspicion, and his mother’s smile couldn’t hide her fear. She always had a solution, a stalwart mood, and an answer for Caiden even if it was “Carry on.” Now: only wariness.
If everyone’s here, then—“ Leta.”
“She’ll be with her own parental unit,” his father said.
“Yeah, but—” They weren’t kind.
“Caiden!”
He dashed off, ducking the elbows and shoulders of the mob. The children were smothered among the taller bodies, impossible to distinguish. His quick mind sorted through the work rotations, the direction they came from— everyone would have walked straight from their dropped tasks, at predictable speed. He veered and slowed, gaze saccading across familiar faces in the community.
A flicker of bright bluish-purple.
Chicory flowers.
Caiden barked apologies as he shouldered toward the color, lost among tan clothes and oak-dark jerkins. Then he spotted Leta’s fawn waves, and swung his arms out to make room in the crowd, as if parting tall grass around a flower. “Hey, there you are.”
Leta peered up with dewy hazel eyes. “Cai.” She breathed relief. Her knuckles were white around a cluster of chicory, her right arm spasming, a sign of her losing the battle against overstimulation.
Leta’s parental unit wasn’t in sight, neglectful as ever, and she was winded, rushed from some job or forgotten altogether. Oversized non-determination garments hung off one shoulder, covered her palms, tripped her heels. She crushed
herself against Caiden’s arm and hugged it fiercely. “It’s what the older kids say. The ones who don’t pass Appraisal’re sent away, like the bovine yearlings.”
“Don’t be silly, they would have called just the children then, not everyone. And you haven’t been appraised yet, anyway.”
But she was ten, it was soon. The empathy, sensitivity, and logic that could qualify her as a sublime clinician also crippled her everyday life as the callous people around her set her up to fail. Caiden hugged her, careful of the bruises peeking over her shoulder and forearm, the sight of them igniting a well-worn urge to protect.
“I’ve got you,” he said, and pulled out twigs and leaves stuck in her hair. Her whole right side convulsed softly. The crowds, noise, and light washed a blankness into her face, meaning something in her was shutting down. “You’re safe.”
Caiden took her hand— firmly, grounding— and backtracked through the crowd to the Flat Dock edge.
The anxious look on his mother’s face was layered with disapproval, but his father smiled in relief. Leta clutched Caiden’s right hand in both of hers. His mother took his left.
“The overseers just said gather and wait?” he asked his father.
“Someday you’ll learn patience.”
Shuffles and gasps rippled through the assembly.
Caiden followed their gazes up. Clouds thinned in a gigantic circle. The air everywhere brightened across the crowds more intensely than the compounds’ lights had ever lit the bovines.
A hole burned open overhead and shot a column of blinding white onto the Flat Docks. Shouts and sobs erupted. Caiden stared through the blur of his eyelashes as the light column widened until the entire plate burned white. In distant sectors, the same beams emerged through the gray.
He smashed his mother’s hand in a vise grip. She squeezed back.
A massive square descended, black as a ceiling, flickering out the light. The angular mass stretched fifty meters wide on all sides, made of the same irregular panels as the aerators. With a roar, it moved slowly, impossibly, nothing connecting it to the ground.
“I’ve never …” His mother’s whisper died and her mouth hung open.
Someone said, “It’s like the threshers, but …”