Nophek Gloss Read online

  Sopping with stench that he prayed would protect him, Caiden ran through the desert until his legs throbbed and his side stabbed and he had no choice but to stop.

  He couldn’t run from the image of his mother. He cried until his face was too sore and puffy for more tears. He wept memories instead. His father, grimed with grease and soot; he’d worked himself and Caiden hard but laughed even harder. Caiden’s parental unit had been assigned to him when he left the Stricture at four years old, and the two of them were strangers, their new child a temporary glue. But the three of them bonded fast and easy, and Caiden grew up knowing love. Leta had the opposite, isolated and scorned. It took Caiden ages to break through her protective shell, but every moment since was worth it. She’d been so shy of care and compliments, he’d given as much as he could. She would blush, and it would make his mother giggle. He felt her arms around him in the dark. The grainy slipperiness of her hand as it left his for the last time.

  Keep moving. If this isn’t real, it’ll change. A nightmare— I’ll wake up. He pulled on the lifeline of denial and trudged on, combing over all his memories until they seemed fake.

  The desert sand emitted or reflected a glow that lit everything except the blackness overhead. The white speckles were sharp as nails piercing a far-off surface, but much too far to be a ceiling with tiny lights. Caiden wasn’t sure what to make of it, except that he missed the gray vapor blanket of home.

  Not home. It’s all gone. Each step kicked sand in sprays.

  “This is real.” Caiden’s voice cracked, raw and inappropriate here where there was no one to listen to his grief.

  He plodded on, not worried about the beasts. They had eaten his whole world: they had to be full. The ones that passed by distantly sniffed the air, sensed his shield of blood, and loped on.

  The crags sank while sand curved in dunes. There were no plants, trees, or tracks but Caiden’s mind was too numb to wonder why. For kilometers in all directions lay an emptiness that scooped him out. When had he ever been alone? The Strictures had teemed with other children. He always worked with his father, or the duster pilots, or other mechanics. When he had free time alone, Leta came along. The bovines grazed with soft sounds and scents.

  That world grew harder to imagine the farther he walked. Water pooled in the hollows of dunes, reflecting the sky’s white nails. Half a kilometer away, a tall shape speared up, not a tree, but not as big as the transports.

  “Shelter. People.” Caiden picked up his shivering pace. The glossy black tower sliced up from a pool of water at an angle, mostly submerged, sides clustered with weird vanes and cylinders. It wasn’t any kind of housing he was familiar with, but it was a machine, and Caiden knew machines.

  He circled to where it overhung the shallows. Cracks and dents in its metal-glass surface warped reflections. A few panels were missing off the jutting end, and a hollow gaped open with enough room to climb in.

  Caiden stripped off his bloody clothes. He scrubbed in the frigid water, chafing off the putrid smell and the memories burned in by it, bright as an afterimage. He washed his clothes, redressed, then rinsed the transparent gem he’d found— the only beautiful thing in that slaughter— and tucked it in a pocket.

  He jumped to sling his wet shirt around a jutting piece of the machine’s opening, and swung until he could hook a slippery leg over the edge and pull himself in.

  Light spilled through the opening, and somewhere farther down in the darkness, a broad window let in a glow. The slanted surfaces were messes of metal seams, bars, and alcoves, far more complex than the aerators. Caiden sniffed familiar fragrances of iron and chemical. He lowered himself while tilting his head the way he imagined the machine was supposed to lie: longwise, not up and down.

  Chill and grief killed his curiosity to rifle through compartments, and shriveled his desire to one simple thing: somewhere safe to curl up, not under a rock or covered in blood, not in the vastness of desert or sky. So what if he froze— he had a safe cocoon now in the machine. A grave familiar to him.

  He lowered into the glowing bottom end, a smaller chamber like the cockpit of a duster. The slanted windows were submerged underwater, and through it the sky’s white freckles swayed.

  A ship?

  Anchored to the tilted floor of the room was a single seat, covered in dust. Caiden peeled up a strangely cut coat hanging over the back. Adult-sized and leathery, it reached to his thighs, but he curled up in its cold weight and nestled in the slanted seat, staring up at the milky veil in the darkness. His body heat slowly soaked his damp clothes and the coat, and pillowed him in warmth.

  Everything he’d been pushing aside welled up: the people he’d lost … a hot bath and his soft bed, and the comfort of the vapor gray.

  “It was hiding something. Hiding worlds like this.” His angry whisper hissed through a chattering jaw. The truth was smaller and more manageable in words than it was in his head. “Were the livestock dumped here too? All we ever did was raise food for those beasts. The livestock died out. What food is left? Us.”

  He rubbed the nape of his neck and the slippery lines of his brand. When he’d received it, the overseers had told him he was perfect, and confirmed he belonged, he was valuable, functional— not a piece of fodder that shouldn’t have escaped the maw.

  Pulse ratcheting tight, he curled into a smaller, hotter ball in the pilot’s seat. But I did survive. I need to make it matter.

  The overseers had arranged this. They knew everything.

  A guttural snarl resonated through the machine bay. Caiden held his breath.

  Could the beasts smell him now? He guessed the machine’s opening was too high and narrow for them to squeeze into, but guesses and hopes hadn’t gotten him very far in life.

  He uncurled, snugged the warm coat around his body, and climbed up to the opening. Four beasts prowled along the pool’s edge. Their lean bodies moved in serpentine jerks, struggling for footing in the sand on splayed, clawed paws. Their eyes were reflective circles in ridged black faces. One whined at him, two fought each other, and the last one rammed the side of the machine.

  Caiden clung to the rim, ready to spring into action, while dread coiled up in his stomach. If these animals were valuable enough to feed with thousands of bovine from a world dedicated only to raising that fodder, then the overseers would come to tend them eventually.

  He pulled out the spherical gem he’d pried from inside the beast’s skull. It fit his palm. Through it, his skin looked watery pink, every wrinkle doubled along invisible inner facets. Light caught the surface and rippled iridescent colors like a butterfly’s wing, definitely the strangest and most beautiful material he’d ever seen.

  “Is this why the beasts are special?” he whispered. “A pretty rock? Is there nothing like this in my head?” He squeezed until it hurt, wanting to chuck it at the beasts, but thought better, shoved it back in his pocket.

  He surveyed the empty world. His father hadn’t knocked on the machine, yelling at him to come out. Leta wouldn’t peer up from the ground, too afraid of heights to follow. And his mother was pieces. Ripped. Strewn.

  Caiden surged away from those thoughts, crawling back into the machine. He sought a mechanism to get it working, or resources to stay alive, or some understanding to fill him up. His mother had always told him that focusing on the thankful things made more of them, and his father had insisted that hands at work were better at solving problems than hearts at rest.

  He stuck his head inside a half-jammed door that opened straight down. The room smelled like an engine: cold iron and stale fluids, musty wiring, and floral chemicals that had dried up long ago. But it was different, too, like comparing butterflies and birds by the fact that both could fly.

  Squeezing inside, he ran his fingers over a complex central engine bulk stretching the vertically tipped length of the room. He hadn’t seen such materials ever, even in the deepest sections of the aerators: some white and fleshy, glassy and scaled, coppery rings that bristled wh
en his fingertips drew near. It looked like a hundred different animals stitched together on one set of bones.

  Caiden recognized signal flow. Cables connected modules, pipes ran from canisters to complex bulbs, and hair-thin wires threaded internal networks. Glassy nodes encrusted surfaces like barnacles he’d seen on the rare sea ships of his old world.

  “Maybe you’re alive. A huge creature wearing a hard shell.”

  Ridiculous. Machines weren’t alive. But he smiled and swore that some of the materials he touched inside the machine were warm.

  A shudder rippled through the hull, and he startled, almost slipping.

  “Are you alive?”

  A faint rattling.

  Heart speeding, Caiden climbed back into the bay.

  A howl passed by outside, but it wasn’t any animal. Distant booms followed, building into pulsations that hummed in the metal under Caiden’s grip. Light flashed across the upper opening and a high-pitched shriek tore the air.

  Caiden climbed up enough to glimpse outside. A black shape ripped across the pool’s reflection, followed by a brilliant tail that guttered out to orange.

  “Crimes,” he cursed. More transports?

  A moan filled the air and something massive blotted the sky. Eruptions pummeled the dune pool. Colors frothed across the sky, and dark ships plowed through, much too high and fast, riding air— which was impossible. Electric light spidered through the darkness while waves of boiling air washed to the ground.

  Nothing from his world had looked like this.

  Caiden gaped and clung to the rim of the back opening. The whole machine juddered, rattling up memories of the transport, the stench, the beasts.

  Another blast and the dune gave way, leveling out the ship. Caiden scurried backward to avoid falling out, and instead slid off a ledge into a lower hallway. Metal squealed, and something wet in the hull popped like broken bones and twisted ligaments. Whimpered swears poured from Caiden as he clutched an aching hip. He crawled up a ramp and crept back to the bay’s opening.

  It now nestled in the sand. Not high up, no longer safe.

  The landscape beyond was rubble, mangled vehicles, body parts, charred globs of stone and glass. Veils of orange light waved through the sky, and broken metal fell, trailed by spirals of smoke.

  A vessel screeched by overhead in a burst of pressure that thrust Caiden onto his backside. The sand peeled up in a wave and hissed inside. Following the ship, a second, translucent vessel sliced the air, made of glass or water or simply more air. It resembled a fiery bird, and inside its liquid skin, metallic gills rippled. Frozen on his back, Caiden marveled at the vessel as it hovered right overhead, suspended impossibly by nothing. Then its wings folded in and it sped away, thrusters pink and melodious.

  The first vessel landed or crashed nearby beyond the dunes. Explosions popped, and razor-thin screams sliced the air. Animalistic sounds rioted: screeches, hisses, peals like snapping metal. Over a hundred meters away, two figures approached, human in silhouette, clad in chunky layers.

  Overseers.

  Sparks swelled in Caiden’s insides. If they find me, what am I to them? Meat?

  A third figure rushed them. One of the overseers raised a tool that fired a thread of white light. This pierced the rusher’s chest, and their body expanded, ruffled, and dissolved entirely into a wisp of smoke. Only toppling legs remained.

  “Nine crimes!” Caiden cursed. A light could obliterate someone?

  He squirmed back inside the ship’s twisted opening.

  The overseers were heading right for him.

  CHAPTER 4

  SOUGHT AFTER

  Caiden threw all his weight against the bent panel at the back opening, but it held firm. A sad creak escaped it. Stupid. If I can bend it, so can they.

  He raced to the cockpit, but the console was dead material, no light, no language he could read. His heart sank.

  “Blow it open.” An overseer’s voice outside.

  Caiden ducked behind the pilot’s seat.

  “Can’na risk damagin’ gloss,” a second voice called. “Only hav’ta get th’ one. Be happy yer not chasin’ pups like the Graven boss.”

  Legs darkened the opening. A blue-masked figure crouched and peered in. “Oy, it’s a stray thing, not a nophek.” Metal banged metal. “Sand worm, wriggle out,” they called inside.

  Caiden felt desperately along the panels, switches, buttons, and strange surfaces lining the cockpit, pressing, punching, flicking— everything and anything, pleading with the ship to save him again. Please.

  Metal rapped and echoed.

  “Jus’ blow it,” the other said. They were too large to fit through, but there was plenty of room for their weapon.

  Please, please, please. Caiden flailed against panels and controls.

  “I see it. Human’ish, small.”

  “Freckles?”

  “Can’na see.”

  Caiden pawed at a line of switches, smacked a glass panel, hammered a circle of button dots, exhausting every option in reach.

  A high whine emitted behind him. That obliterating thread of light beamed out from the overseer’s tool. It pierced the hull near the opening and chewed the inner panels’ metal away with sheer brilliance, creating a hole big enough for the overseers to step through.

  “A kid.” One aimed the weapon at Caiden.

  “Not worth the gloss ’less he’s Graven. Fry ’im.”

  Their words mushed into the blood pounding in Caiden’s ears. Ideas dribbled away and he stood there dumbly like livestock about to be slaughtered.

  A thread of light sparked from the barrel of the overseer’s weapon.

  Caiden leapt onto the pilot’s seat and stretched to reach the last strange thing in the cockpit worth trying: a crystalline swell in the ceiling. His palm slapped against it.

  Explosive pressure blossomed through Caiden’s hand. Vibration stripped him weightless, wrung of sensations. He felt turned to liquid, dumped on the ground, splashing into all of its hard angles.

  But he was still actually solid, and watched an expanding sphere peel through the air, thickly rippling like the world folded inside-out along that traveling edge. Particles burbled outward, settling in a bright, peaceful wake. The expanding edge of the bubble shattered the overseer’s beam of light inches from Caiden’s face. He gushed relief as the ripple frothed onward, through the two figures, eating their screams and turning their writhing bodies into calm, dead heaps.

  The metal walls sang with vibrations as the ripple passed through. Inside the bubble, everything appeared normal.

  Caiden lay in a heap as well, his insides hot and seized up. His questions slithered through vertigo. The resonance of the singing walls stilled to a silken whisper lapping around him. The ship had saved him again.

  The expanding energy bubble stopped and stabilized somewhere beyond the ship’s shell, encapsulating it. Through the back opening, Caiden made out iridescent colors twisting like visible wind. Darkness and brilliance frothed in eddies. Beyond that heat haze veil, the desert was a suggestion of dunes and wreckage.

  Caiden lay in this bubble of safety and simply breathed. Time slipped away.

  The overseers’ bodies never woke. A blue-black substance oozed out of the crumpled plates clothing them. How the weird bubble had killed them and spared Caiden, he didn’t know, but he could tell that the world inside it was different and gentle. When he rose to his feet, he drifted farther with each step. The air tasted sweet. The musty scent of old chemicals and aged metal was replaced with a resinous fragrance that strung up memories of wildflowers and oak trees.

  The ship had awakened. Panels lit with symbols, and lines in every surface gleamed with hidden life, as veins behind skin. The metal felt softer than before, and the hull’s rattles quieted as if something solid had filled previous hollows, or muscle knitted between bones.

  “Hello?” Caiden’s cheeks tensed and tears finally spilled— but this time they were relief.

  He marve
led at all the things the darkness had hidden. One gel panel on the wall bore a ring of excited, circling light. Buoyant on his feet, Caiden walked over and pressed his palm on it. A whispery sound crawled around the back entrance of the ship. Jagged folds split open like a flower, letting in rays of light as the whole back of the bay unfolded and revealed more of the bubble that had expanded around the ship. It formed a stationary wall of billowing, iridescent air.

  The open door plates formed a ramp straight through. Caiden reached out, one fingertip grazing the bubble’s transparent surface. The hairs on his arm stood on end. Prickles of temperature played over his fingers; velvet, tingling.

  A smile broke his face, and he strode through the warm sphere’s surface.

  Instantly, his guts twisted like snakes. Acid surged up as the surface passed through him, no better than before. He retched and crumpled on the sand outside the bubble. His eyes watered and lungs chafed, peppery and hoarse. Stupid.

  Outside the bubble, the sky was still chaos. Wreckage spotted the desert, with unfamiliar bodies scattered as if they’d fallen from the sky or been vomited out with the debris. Streaks of radiance filled the air, darkness bubbled, ships flashed past in impossible motions. Many hit the desert in explosions of metal turned liquid turned flame.

  Head craned up to the spectacle, Caiden didn’t realize the beasts were back, until one squealed and sprinted at him.

  He screamed a mangled swear. Paws churned sand. The monster leapt, and Caiden careened back inside the bubble on instinct.

  Vertigo slammed his skull. His insides lathered again, bile sluiced up his throat. The convulsions tripped him as before, and he smacked the bay floor.

  The beast rammed the bubble after him. A bellow shredded up its throat. Its muscles folded on themselves, bones fizzed, and gushing blood flickered apart into shining tendrils. A red-black foam was all that remained of the creature. Dust wafted in, settling gently on the floor.

  Caiden’s racing heart was primed to explode.

  On the other side of the bubble’s blur, the rest of the beasts scattered as several silhouettes drew closer, shooting buffets of light at the fleeing creatures.