PROLOGUE
Once upon a time, the planet Pagomènos stopped spinning. An asteroid—massive, merciless, over a mile in all directions, gleaming with a distant galaxy’s heretofore unknown power—lurched free of its belt. Whether by idle fate or by the thoughtless hand of a cruel god, the rogue rock struck Pagomènos, rapidly pursued by the tongues of its sun. All at once and forevermore, the planet’s spin lurched to a near halt.
Tidally locked, Pagomènos’s rotation synced with its solar orbit, and the planet was split into light and unrelenting dark. Days, nights, seasons, and a lifetime tracked in seconds and minutes and hours became confined to a distant past.
This cosmic change bore natural disasters: vicious wind storms at the intersection of night and day, and unwavering pressure from either extreme heat or cold on the the planet’s far sides. In time—though it would become impossible to track how long—the people would find that the meteorite, which had embedded itself in the planet’s surface, bled power and poison. Their world had been irrevocably changed, and with it, their bodies.
Preternatural energy warped every living thing it touched, transforming it to be as fierce as the increasingly hostile planet.
Even before the physical changes revealed themselves, the Pagonians were terrified. While core memories—identity, recent events, simple tasks like food and sleep—remained untouched, the people found their broader understanding slipping through their fingers like so much sunbaked sand. Where had they come from, before they settled Pagomènos? How had the technology that enabled such interstellar travel been built? History crumbled to ash in their minds with every passing moment. They feared their very senses of self would soon dissolve alongside it.
In the daylight, the people fled belowground. They gathered their wisest inventors, their most advanced technological prodigies, and constructed a memory-storage device for every survivor: a simple microchip, surgically installed as a ward against eventually forgetting all they had ever been. Aboveground, where the remaining animals achieved ever more alarming new forms—evolving at an impossible rate, fueled by the asteroid’s unimaginable power—the daylight people never dared to tread without armor. Apocalypse be damned, they would not join the ranks of Pagonian mutations. And they would not forget what it was to be merely human.
In the darkness, the people scraped and clawed for purchase, but they simply could not prioritize invention when utter sightlessness loomed supreme as a challenge. Cut off from Pagomènos’s sun, they sought the gleaming asteroid itself, and their exposure to it accelerated their mutation beyond even the planet’s animals. Soon there were people who could move objects with a thought, others bearing wings to carry them through the frigid wind currents. There were even those who could produce azure energy, like the asteroid’s own, from their hands—with which they would build a looming torch for their shadowed home.
The people of the light had worried that, absent microchip installations, they would forget even their own names, deteriorated by the asteroid’s energy, becoming ever less and less. But the people of the night, embracing their invader as one might a godlike visitation, found instead that in fully giving themselves to its power, they became much more. Their knowledge of extended history, former technology, and the like were laid like sacrifices before their intergalactic interloper. Of events yet to unfold, they would keep meticulous records. And unlike what the daylight people had feared, they never forgot themselves entirely.
After the cataclysmic impact, Pagomènos should have been a graveyard for human life, sentience erased from its surface as surely as if an Earthside starship had never landed. Instead, as the asteroid’s energies permeated everything, the dead planet became undead, its people walking monuments to purgatory. In the daylight, there were armored, sheltered beings, still clinging to technology, constructing ever more advanced methods of living somewhat as they always had; but in the nighttime,
wings and claws and teeth overtook the land, lit by impossible fire conjured by hulking, powerful creatures who hardly recalled what their bodies had once been.
Once upon a time, half of Pagomènos descended into eternal night. Once upon a time, half of Pagomènos ascended into eternal day.
Once upon a time, a whole world slipped and fell out of time as they had known it.
CHAPTER1KORI
Icame to the Morpheus Market to buy a memory, but instead, it seems I’ll be making one I’d rather forget.
I’m only partway through my transaction, trading a pilfered memory of a starship crash for a useful nugget of firsthand mech-repair knowledge, when everything goes sideways.
Every joint in my right hand stings from 45P3C7—better known as Aspect, my own personal mech—anxiously gripping my fingers, a stark reminder that I’ve instilled an alarming amount of humanity in what was once a hollow machine. Memories are meant for human experience, not installation into a synthetic. But making friends is next to impossible when your mother rules your entire society—which, unfortunately, also includes every detail of your life. So I took friendship matters into my own hands. And nuts. And bolts.
Hopefully, buying this new memory will only broaden my (mildly to severely illegal) modification possibilities. One step closer to sentience. One step closer to Aspect truly seeing me.
In my left hand, my comms tablet buzzes, insistent. I glance toward its message from my mother, sliding across the screen in electric-blue text.
CHLOE: KORI, WHERE ARE YOU?
Licenses to trade in the clandestine Morpheus Market aren’t as simple to acquire as standard settlement rations or a freshly printed set of clothes. Chloe didn’t grant me market access so I could trade for whatever memories I liked. She definitely didn’t do it so I could build simulated neural pathways in a government-issue mining mech. Usually I would hurry through a personal transaction like this, do my best not to raise any inkling of suspicion, but the seller won’t stop haggling.
The mechanical hand in my own squeezes hard. Twin optical processors meet my eyes. No eyelids—just twin bulbs, like headlights on a starship, flashing on and off as the gears and servos whirring behind them process my undoubtedly frustrated expression. “Message—for Aspect?”
“No, message for Kori,” I mumble under my breath, trying to focus on the transaction. I give their hand a reassuring squeeze back. A standard mining mech has limited touch sensors, primarily to identify either extreme heat or a total system malfunction. I took the liberty of enhancing Aspect’s hardware long ago, to the point of practical pain sensors—so while a hand squeeze may not be enough to calm them, at least I know they can feel it.
I can’t see the seller’s face through the full-body anti-radiation gear that all dayfolk, myself included, wear outside our settlement, but I have a very vivid imagination. In my head, he has beady black eyes, with hardly any whites to speak of, and a profound, judgmental outcropping of jaw, like a cliff’s edge about to collapse into an avalanche.
“You can’t provide more than a single flight memory in exchange?” the seller drawls. The sign above his crooked booth displays MECHANIC MEMORIES, the neon light on the second M rapidly blinking.
Dayfolk masks flatten emotion and tone, but even so, I can tell he’s not annoyed with me. He’s amused. Haggling is a hobby for this man. He’s not arguing with me; he’s toying with me.
I suffer enough of that from my mother.
But I school my voice into unmistakable neutrality, even as the message from Chloe buzzes again. “Two-for-one trades are commonplace only for rare or classified memories.”
“Message—for Kori—important?” Aspect chimes, gesturing to my comms tablet with one elbow.
“Not now,” I whisper. This time I grip their hand less as a comfort, more as a plea. Please do not decide to develop full-blown anxiety before I’ve even installed a proper personality, okay?
The seller scratches his head. I doubt he can actually feel his nails through his helmet, which means he’s stalling for time I don’t have. “This is very high-level mechanical insight you’re buying.”
It’s one I could easily learn from Hyrra if my stomach didn’t do somersaults every time she and I made eye contact at the repair station, but I swallow my frustration. “I showed you what I’m offering. Take it or leave it.”
The seller releases a deliberately dramatic groan.
“Or I could report you to the Coalition,” I press, “if you make a habit of raising prices after receiving an offer.”
It’s a low blow. We both know it. The entire Morpheus Market functions always and only at the whim of the Coalition. When you break the Coalition’s rules, your Morpheus Market license goes bye-bye. Sometimes your known whereabouts along with it. Maybe a few fingers and/or toes. Your average citizen isn’t even supposed to know the Morpheus Market exists, unless an insider recommended them for a license. Getting kicked out of the market often means getting kicked off this plane of existence, too.
Memories also can’t be stored on a remotely accessible network. Early in Morpheus tech’s development, settlement records report attempts, but the memories went sour like forgotten rations; they turned strange, wrong, like waking nightmares when accessed. So, even if you escape a ban from the Morpheus Market with your life, getting kicked doesn’t just make it harder to obtain new memories for sale. It makes it impossible.
Aspect’s head bobs. “Kori is mean—when Kori has—maybe important messages—not for Aspect.”
Aspect’s insistence on always calling me by name—even here in the Morpheus Market, where everyone only uses codenames—is also a security risk if anyone connects that name with the monarch’s daughter. If Chloe ever realized this was happening, she’d probably have Aspect reduced to scrap metal. I try not to think about it too often, or else I can’t breathe. If Aspect ruins this trade, I’ll have only myself to blame. I’m the one who couldn’t settle for a mining and general maintenance mech like every other dayfolk citizen. I’m the one who tried building a friend out of wires and metal.
The seller releases the longest, fakest sigh I’ve ever heard in my admittedly short life. Finally, blessedly, he says, “You have a deal.” He presses a shiny Morpheus sphere into my palm.
Somehow, even though we’re both wearing gloves, it feels slick and sweaty. I wince a little as I tuck the sphere into my belt pouch, before handing over my own in exchange. Thankfully, the armor we all wear includes an extensive array of pockets and pouches, primarily concentrated at the waistline, for carrying items. I’ve been told that at one point, the men’s armor had more pockets than the women’s, but the public complained so much, the government officials eventually standardized everything regardless of body type.
The comms tablet buzzes a fourth time.
Aspect raises their free hand to get my attention, but I quickly nudge it back down to their side. Multiple messages shimmer across my tablet.
CHLOE: KORI, WHERE ARE YOU?
CHLOE: I SENT YOU ON ASSIGNMENT, NOT VACATION.
CHLOE: I NEED THAT MEMORY ASAP.
I huff out an exasperated breath. Once again, just like every previous trip to the Morpheus Market, my actual assignment is cutting the visit short before I find a memory I’m confident can begin prying Aspect’s possible self-awareness open. I suppose it doesn’t help any that I don’t know what I’m looking for. A sentient mech has never been—should never be, if you ask the government’s engineers—created. Nor are human memories supposed to be installed in a machine. I haven’t the slightest idea what sort of memory could jar Aspect into being more person than science project, kicking their servos into something more akin to neurological synapses, but I’m determined to keep looking. I will always keep looking. Somewhere in this bundle of bolts, I know there’s potential for the truest friend I have to feel what I feel, to choose me back.
But every visit to the market, without fail, ends with a flat, unfeeling reminder that I’m on a schedule, my mother impatiently awaiting my return with
her merchandise—without any knowledge of why I really want to be here.
CHLOE: I MIGHT JUST FIND EXTRA HOMEWORK FOR YOU IF THIS MEMORY ISN’T ON MY DESK WITHIN MY CURRENT SLEEP CYCLE.
Briefly, I tab over on my comms tablet from the messaging module to the hourglass. There’s hardly any sand left in the upper half on my display, and Chloe tracks her sleep cycles more religiously than most, always turning in when the hourglass turns over. My margin for error is rapidly shrinking if I’m going to make it home before she wants to sleep, and I haven’t even picked up my assigned memory yet. In my defense (not that my mother would care), Aspect’s detour became a full-blown digi-game side quest.
I want to ask why Chloe needs her own memory delivery so urgently, or what the memory even is, but I’ve learned the hard way not to pester my mother with questions. It never leads to answers. And it usually leads to an even more watchful parental eye monitoring my every move. Not to mention extra homework.
I stifle a groan. If I see one more math sheet in my next ten sleep cycles, it’ll be too soon.
Another squeeze of cold metal fingers on mine. “Aspect is—”
“Leaving,” I interrupt, tugging them away from the Mechanic Memories booth. “Kori is leaving, and so are you.” The second M on the seller’s sign sparks and dies entirely as we depart.
We’re immediately sucked back into foot traffic.
The Morpheus Market is a hub of constant motion, but it’s confined to a limited space. To evade notice by unauthorized dayfolk (or too-curious nightfolk), it’s miles beneath the planet’s surface, with a singular elevator entrance connecting to four narrow, stacked floors.
Each floor is piled with vendors in a very literal sense. It’s a strange, metal vegetation gone wild, booths overlapping like shoddily stacked teacups. Every wall blossoms with merchants, each of their spaces encroaching on one another’s territory. Walking at all means asserting yourself through an ever-shifting horde of bodies, everyone here for their own glimpse of someone else’s life.
No two vendors are the same. Some stalls offer secondhand tastes of rare cuisine, others a recollection of advanced education few can access, and so on—the embrace of a lover like you’ve never had; the thrill of victory in a contest you’d never dare to enter; an understanding of depression’s bleakest depths.
Neon signs hum at varying frequencies. Voices chatter, mumble, and curse all around. Aspect locks one cold, metal hand around my wrist and doesn’t let go.
I check my tablet again for Chloe’s specific instructions. Per usual, she’s provided coordinates for a certain booth and the salesperson’s code name, but nothing else. Because the universe hates me, the person I’m looking for resides on the fourth and bottom floor, while I’m currently on the first. I break into a sprint, Aspect in tow, spiraling back toward the central elevator units, various vendors’ setups passing rapidly through my peripheral vision in jagged sweeps of color and light. An elevator is bound to be faster than running multiple flights of stairs down to the fourth floor, and I don’t want to risk losing my hold of Aspect in the dash—or gamble the integrity of my finger joints from how tightly Aspect grips back.
It’s impossible to really memorize a route through the Morpheus Market; the ecosystem of buying and selling is practically a living organism. Every time we visit, vendors have shifted, maybe merged, maybe swallowed up smaller ones in a power grab, maybe begun actively fighting over a particular corner of shop space. But despite the everchanging layout, I travel like a heatshot rifle bolt, straight and true, to the elevators—undeterred by the haphazard pressing, pushing, pulling of so many bodies.
Eventually, we reach the booth where Chloe’s vendor is waiting.
“Echo,” I say, by way of greeting.
It’s a clever code name. What is a memory, really, but an echo of a person?
“Monarch.” Echo inclines their head, having obviously been expecting me.
I can’t help but grin at the moniker, which is why I chose it in the first place. Even black markets have unspoken rules. If you want to sell, trade, or buy a memory, you need a licensed alias. Mine is Monarch, ostensibly like one of the orange-winged creatures native to the former Earthside world; it’s also a pun for obvious reasons, me being the heiress of the Daylands and all.
I’d love to blame Aspect for my terrible sense of humor, but the nickname precedes them. I’m just like this.
I have only the most basic details for my first impression of this seller: a narrow set of pinched, birdlike shoulders; arms akimbo as if in a confused first flight; a voice high and clipped, even through the mask’s filtering.
I slide Chloe’s provided memory from my waist pocket. I could’ve snooped on this sphere, too, I suppose, but I haven’t bothered investigating Chloe’s trade materials in ages. They’re always the same self-referential snippets: The architecture of Chloe’s quarters when she first assumed the throne. The settlement’s meeting chamber, as seen from the dais from which she gives her speeches. An agonizingly slow, panning shot of her jewelry, or her library, or her damn crown, which she only ever wears for the most painfully dramatic formal appearances.
Everyone wants to know how the queen of the Daylands—the last celebrity on our far-flung, interstellar settlement—lives. Might as well monetize it, Chloe says. But I gag when I think about it, recoiling as if from curdled soup. She’s nothing special, really. It’s all gilded trappings for an ordinary woman.
And her ordinary daughter, who will be expected to uphold the illusory legacy.
Echo climbs onto an overturned crate, rifling through another container somewhere above us. Spare Morpheus spheres clatter and roll across the floor. Aspect winces, repeating, “Mess, mess, mess,” in a low whisper.
Great. The mech 100 percent has anxiety, courtesy of yours truly.
With a self-satisfied snort, Echo careens off the crate, sphere in hand. We authorize each other’s code names as users via voice commands, so that the respective spheres can now be verbally opened by their new owners, and exchange the goods wordlessly, barely a nod passing between us.
Aspect tugs at my elbow. “MESSAGES—FOR KORI—”
I swallow a scream. “I know, Aspect. I know.”
Chloe’s memory in hand, we slide back into the crowd. Aspect’s unwieldy tension always spikes in a throng, hence the death grip on my hand, the low hum they emit like a radio tuned to a dead channel.
But I love the untamed collision of people that is the Morpheus Market’s open floor. I wish I could slow down and enjoy it, rather than feel my heart climb into my throat as I slip between buyers and sellers, struggling to maintain speed. Here, body to body, sharing subterranean air, legs tangling together like so many rogue vines, voices fighting for territory like so many wild beasts … Here, I am simply part of the everyone. A code name, a passing breeze of a girl, unburdened, unnamed, all expectation revoked.
Here in the Morpheus Market, I could be anyone.
But if I don’t get back to my starship now, what I’m going to be is royally screwed. And swamped with unnecessary math homework.
Aspect and I all but sprint to the exit lift. It’s a compact cylindrical chamber, barely large enough for both of us, almost akin to an escape pod—but instead of ejecting us into the world below, it projects us rapidly toward the realm above. We rise, lightning fast, to the surface from which we came. If there’s a memory in the market that could activate self-awareness in my metal bestie, it’s farther away with every passing instant, and my stomach churns, nearly sick, at the nagging thought.
My ears clog from the lift’s rapid ascent; I force a yawn to clear the eardrums. “Goodbye, Monarch,” the lift’s automated voice intones as the lift doors slide open, reintroducing us to Pagomènos proper.
Despite the planet’s light being much gentler in the Passage than in the Daylands, it’s always a jarring transition from the artificial underground illumination of the Morpheus Market to the actual sun that defines our world. Tears wet my vision, and even Aspect, with their entirely mechanical visual processors, raises one hand to shield said processors from the brightness.
When my vision clears, the vastness of the Passage once again sprawls before me: Dunes rolling into still more dunes, viciously blown to and fro by the Passage’s wild winds. Assorted outcroppings of heavily worn sandstone. Chunks of wrecked starships from the Territory Wars, when the nightfolk attacked the dayfolk and were driven back across the Passage and into the shadows for good. Now-lost weaponry and tech blasted some kind of massive explosive that tore through everything in range and formed the wasteland: uneven rock formations, pieces of starships, and odd hills and dips throughout the landscape, amidst the unending sand.
The Morpheus Market is basically right on the planet’s terminator line, directly between the Daylands and Shadowlands. It’s a striking visual contrast depending on where I look. To the west, there’s even more blinding brightness where the Passage becomes the Daylands, the sky going from semi-twilight obscured by sand to a brutal, nearly cloudless crimson. To the east, after the beautiful miasma of reds, yellows, and purples that is the eternal sunset, the Shadowlands loom—a line of dark, jagged peaks, partially cloaked by cloud cover, their accumulated snow and ice chaotically lit by an unnatural blue glow. What animal life persists in the Passage is either heavily armored and hunkered down or simply underground like the Morpheus Market to escape the wind and sandstorms. I’m the only living creature I can perceive, as far as my eyes can see. Aspect’s hand in mine, though chilly and robotic, helps steady my breathing as the inescapable eeriness of the Passage again sets in.
A field of parked starships would quickly expose the Morpheus Market’s existence in the Passage, so visitors usually let their transports fly free until it’s time to depart. I tap the summoning signal on my helmet, just above my left ear, and my starship’s autopilot voice chirps just beside it: “COMMENCING RETRIEVAL.”
Charon waits for me. It may have more scuffs and scratches than most, given my frequent Morpheus Market runs across the Passage, but thanks to my mother’s insistence that I focus on bettering myself instead of bonding with my peers, I have plenty of time alone with the ship to keep it spick-and-span. Its surface, battered as it is, gleams like a mirror. I’m sure it would reflect my mounting panic over my pending lateness if I weren’t wearing my mask.
Few dayfolk have access to one of the remaining Earthside starships. Most are collectively owned by branches of the settlement’s government, used for ferrying mechs out to do mining aboveground, offering classes of schoolchildren brief opportunities to see natural sunlight, or checking tech functionality like the sonic-wave deployments around the settlement that keep predators at bay. As the Daylands heiress, I’m one of the privileged few to have my own. And having this ship, my beloved
Charon, may be one of the only “perks” inherent in being Chloe’s daughter that doesn’t feel more like a bedazzled set of shackles.
Charon could be a standard-issue starship from when humans first settled this planet. It could be a military vehicle. It might have originally been intended for something as dramatic as ferrying diplomats or something as simple as delivering mail. Nobody actually knows what any of our remaining Earthside starships were first meant for. But to me, Charon is more like home than anything else in the actual dayfolk settlement. Charon is one place where, even if only for a brief moment, I’m out of my mother’s reach.
She tries to track me, of course. She hired a security detail at one point—five grizzled soldiers of varying genders, all very “cut to the chase” and “don’t make this harder than it has to be.” I tormented them with all manner of pranks until, one by one, they all abandoned their posts with such passionate exasperation that my mother decided hiring another security detail would be a total waste. My personal favorite prank remains when Aspect feigned a software glitch, in which they were forced to sing the same obnoxious song over and over and over, for multiple sleep cycles in a row. I nearly lost my own mind by the end of it, but I laughed so hard, I nearly peed myself at the increasingly pained expressions of my unwanted supervisors, all desperately trying to pretend they weren’t bothered.
The security detail having proven pointless, my mother decided instead to install a tracker in the one thing I would always, always have with me—Aspect. But my mother failed to consider two things: One, Aspect would happily let me tinker with that newly installed tracker. And two, I would inevitably find a way to hack it. That tracker is now spoofed with semi-randomized, totally believable routines that can override my actual location as needed. Like when I need to make unrequested stops in the Morpheus Market. (Or if I don’t particularly care for my mother to know how long a bad serving of rations kept me confined to my quarters one morning. Curse you, artificial chicken!)
My mother never really sees fit to enter Charon. If she needs me, she sends a message to my comms tablet or, if she really wants to grind my gears, sends another person to retrieve me under her orders. But she can’t really be bothered to
trek all the way from her luxury quarters to the private hangar where I dock Charon in the settlement. She has the ship periodically inspected to ensure my safety, but I don’t think she’s ever actually been in it. And that makes it feel more like home than anywhere else.
Charon descends from orbit, its silhouette primarily an X with two additional vertical bars reinforcing the shape near the center on either side. In the center sits a long horizontal space where its occupants actually enter. While I may call Charon homey, that doesn’t mean it offers extensive room.
The boarding ramp drops from its center and brings me and Aspect through a closet-sized decontamination chamber, where we’re blasted with a chilly surge of dense white smoke and rapid scan of neon-green laser sensors, confirming the outside radiation has in fact been purged from us before we move to the inside.
It’s a single space that I collectively call the cockpit, even though the pilot’s chair, passenger chair, and assorted controls occupy only about the front quarter of the area. The rest of the room is a cramped dome, with assorted storage units on basically every wall to make the most of it. There’s a rectangular table and accompanying bench (both a little rickety but still securely attached to the floor) where I’ve eaten meals, done homework, or simply tinkered with Aspect. Since we’re in the Passage, basically the entire viewport dome above us is transparent, allowing the sun to naturally illuminate the cockpit. In the Daylands, where the sun rapidly becomes too much, I can close an outer shell and switch to the same harsh, fake white light as the Morpheus Market’s secret halls.
Now that we’ve been through the decontamination chamber, it’s finally safe to collapse the various segments of my armor. Aspect absently whistles to themself while they wait. My helmet peels back like a cocoon from my face, the rush of fresh oxygen intoxicating.
The bunched, stretchy compression rings around my gloves and boots loosen, no longer needing to protect every joint from potential radiation poisoning, and allow the armor plates to roll back to my shoulders and hips respectively. I’m wearing a full standard outfit beneath, but at least now it isn’t clinging to my body.
Ripping off my gloves for a better grip on the controls, I collapse into Charon’s pilot seat. “One memory delivery, coming up.” ...
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