Azura Ghost by Essa Hansen

Author:Essa Hansen [Hansen, Essa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

WE

The lift stopped flush with the rooftop: a flat, empty rectangular deck, half a kilometer long. No walls or ceiling except the pale-peach film of a universe rind encapsulating most of it. A smaller opaque indigo rind attached on one side at an angle, and a little pink sphere was nearly contained all the way by one corner.

Leta gaped at the surrounding vista. Countless universes of all sizes foamed across the surface of the Harvest. The megastructure itself was a complex architecture of deep pits and arching scaffold, looking more like a grown shell than a built structure. Gardens were encapsulated by it or spilled from it, along with rivers and chaliced lakes. A dim bronze twilight bathed it from the horizon.

Far past the atmosphere lay the fractured spacetime planes of the vast lightseep obsidian structure encompassing the little planet and its sun. It spread immeasurable kilometers, strung on crystalline vertices of light that resonated together. Space itself seemed to harden into a labyrinth jewel of light-bending angles.

Threi gulped outside oxygen as he peered up.

Abriss picked at the Aurasever’s threads while she also gazed at that Graven sky. “Trapped.”

He looked over quizzically.

“When Unity shattered or bubbled off,” she elaborated, “these rinds would have split it up like walls, making rooms out of one gigantic space. It trapped these wonderful Graven things inside and changed them.”

Leta caught the subtext in Abriss’s sideways glance. Both she and Threi knew what it was like to be trapped. He wore a pinched expression that Leta wanted to translate as guilt or regret—at least, it resembled how those emotions had looked on Caiden. Guilt meant redress.

“If this world was returned to Unity,” Abriss said, “would this lightseep husk turn back into a city, galaxies wide? A creature that sprouts wings and soars the cosmos? A flowing river of cosmic energy?”

“Ever the romantic idealist, Riss,” Threi said. The nickname slipped from him easily, but Abriss missed a step.

She cleared her throat. “If a structure this magnificent can exist out here in these broken worlds, think what it would be if Unity’s laws were everywhere again. Grand-scale structures would be revealed and transformed. The Graven’s world would surface from hidden dimensions, just like this.”

Leta was caught up in Abriss’s familiar excitement, her imagination fleshing the massive structure in scales and wings and a ferocious pulse, like something from one of Abriss’s storybooks.

Threi strode to the middle of the rectangular deck. “It’s not quite the shard field of Solthar, but it’ll do.”

“Reminds you of home?”

He laughed. “Depends if home is a place you were born or the place you love most.”

Abriss glanced back at the Proxies. “Home is where you’re most comfortable. Sometimes that’s among certain people.”

Threi stopped walking. “Then I would say welcome home, but you’re only here for an exchange.”

Time hasn’t done these two any favors. He’s as defensive as Caiden was, driven by a deeper desire to reconnect. He’s just ill equipped to achieve it.

The hope in Abriss, by contrast, was so palpable, her wishing to share excitement with someone genuine, unable to abide a forced version.

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