LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 2

      NIGHTSHADE

      Yskatarina Iye was named for the sounds she made on her emergence from the growing-skin—first a hiss and then a cry. A daughter of the lab clans, grown in Tower Cold, on the world of Nightshade at the Chain’s end and the system’s edge, a very long way from the sun.

      The name—her child-name, not the appellation of her Nightshade clan—proved difficult to dislodge and Yskatarina retained it into adulthood, along with the Animus that grew beside her from a hatchling no bigger than a dragonfly. The Animus, spawned from the ancient genetic lineage of the clan just as Yskatarina herself had been, possessed no name. Yskatarina tried various permutations, yet none seemed to fit.

      Her aunt Elaki told her from an early age how fortunate she was to have an Animus: how women on other worlds could not be bonded with a male, for there were so few remaining, and those were inferior. She was lucky, Yskatarina knew, that the Elders of Nightshade still sought to return to the old ways, when men and women walked the worlds together, when both genders lived in harmony, each seeking their other self. And the Animus was not a human male, for they had proved too weak, but something better.

      Her Animus whispered to Yskatarina as she slept, throughout the long illnesses that marked her childhood: dreamfevers, feral malaises, and the modified infestations that would enable her not only to suffer the transformation when the time came, but to welcome it. She spent the endless dark of Nightshade with the Animus crouched beside the cot like a murmuring spider, spinning webs of words.

      Transformation nearly killed her. It had been explained to her by her aunt that it would make her stronger, but she did not understand what “transformation” meant.

      “What am I to be transformed into?” she had asked Elaki. But her aunt replied only, “You will see.”

      When the time came, Yskatarina lay, a small uncomprehending form, in the sparkling dark of the black light matrix as the engrams rewrote her: a process of alchemical change she was powerless to resist.

      The black light powered down into a gleaming cube of air. Yskatarina blinked, waking. It felt as though she had been wrenched across a vast distance, torn through the remnants of boiling suns. There was a smell of fire and a terrible heaviness, a weight. She tried to raise her head, but it felt too large for her fragile neck. Someone bent over her. Yskatarina looked up, but it was several moments before the strange shape floating before her congealed into human features.

      She saw a long face, cheeks puffed out into veined pouches on either side of a thin, hooked nose. The skin was unlined, unnaturally smooth and shiny as porcelain. The eyes were set in deep hollows, filled with bloodshot gold. The hair was feathery: dirty-black, coiling in wispy tendrils from beneath the high hat.

      Then, Yskatarina’s vision shifted and she realized that it was her aunt Elaki peering down at her. Yet for a moment it seemed that there was someone else looking out from Elaki’s eyes, someone who cried out in horror.

      “You!” Elaki shrieked.

      “Aunt?” Her own voice sounded faint, a thin croaking. Elaki reached down and shook her.

      “It’s you, isn’t it? I’d know you anywhere.”

      “Aunt, what is wrong?” Something squirmed inside Yskatarina’s head, running in turn from Elaki’s anger, tunneling down to hide in the deep channels of her mind.

      Elaki’s face became thoughtful and cold, as if a crucial decision had been reached. She turned on her heel and spoke to someone unseen, probably the Animus Isti, who followed always at her heels.

      “Prepare the matrix once more. There are some further modifications to be made.”

      Darkness swept over Yskatarina like a wing. There was a tearing, rending sensation, a lightning bolt through her brain. It felt as though she were being split in two, and the pain sent her squealing down into the abyss.

      She did not wake for a long time. At last, swimming up through unconsciousness, she found herself no longer in the black light chamber, but in her own room. Her head felt like a great hot bag, too heavy to lift. She put up a hand to feel her brow, but nothing happened. Alarmed, Yskatarina tried to move her arms and legs. There was no sensation at all. She cried out for Elaki.

      “Ah! You’re awake,” her aunt said, bustling in.

      “I can’t feel my arms, or my legs!”

      Elaki placed a clammy hand on Yskatarina’s forehead. “I fear that is because they are no longer there. You suffered a rare meningeal infection after the transformation process, and your limbs were damaged by gangrene. We were forced to remove them.”

      “Aunt?” Yskatarina whispered, in fright and shock.

      “We will make new limbs for you,” Elaki promised. Her face softened, almost imperceptibly, but there was something behind her eyes that alarmed Yskatarina beyond measure. “Better ones. So do not make such a fuss.”

      When Elaki left, Yskatarina stared numbly up to find the Animus above her, in chrysalis form. She reached out for him, before she remembered. He hung in a motionless silver-black shape from the ceiling of the laboratory, depending from a piece of growing bone. After her own experiences, Yskatarina did not expect the Animus to emerge alive, but emerge he did, gliding from the tinsel wreckage of the chrysalis: arachnid, escorpionate, baleful.

      Yskatarina knew then that there was nothing she would not do to keep the Animus beside her. Hadn’t they always been together? And after the dreadful experience of transformation, the Animus was the only being on which she could rely.

      There was another change, too. Before, Yskatarina had been afraid of her aunt: dreading the touch of Elaki’s pale, plump hands, hating the way her aunt’s great eyes would gaze at her with such chilly calculation. But after the transformation, she also became aware of how much she truly loved Elaki. The feeling overwhelmed her. She sat shivering on the cot, filled with longing, and when Elaki next came to see her, she threw her new arms around her aunt’s shrouded form. Elaki pushed her away, wincing.

      “You must learn to operate your limbs with more care, Yskatarina. The servomechanisms are powerful.”

      “Thank you, Aunt. Thank you.” But she could not have said what she was thanking Elaki for. It occurred to her, vaguely, that this should have bothered her, but somehow she dismissed it.

      When she was well enough to venture forth, Yskatarina and the Animus wandered together through the shadowy passageways of Tower Cold. They learned the secret ways between the walls; they slipped past hidden chambers as Yskatarina’s artificial feet crunched and crackled on the thousand-year-old bones of mice. Concealed behind living tapestries, they watched as the Steersmen Skull-Faces bottled up the canopic jars and dispatched them into the boats that would carry them to the gates, there to be launched upon the Night Sea for their endless journey. They traveled down to the depths, where the mute-kin slaved on the production lines, assembling haunt-devices. They sat for hours above the docking bays as the service ships headed out toward the Chain. They scuttled through the Weighing Chamber, while the mourn-women sang the ancient songs, conjuring—so they said—the spirits of the future dead, untied from the rivers of time. But Yskatarina did not understand what they meant by that, and when she asked her aunt, Elaki only laughed and said that the mourn-women were filled with superstitions and nonsense. The only places Yskatarina and the Animus did not go were the haunt-laboratories of Tower Cold, sealed behind horrifying weir-wards, open only to Elaki.

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