Chapter Three
Nightside
B was handling ten different conversations at once, talking to the various branches of the underground that hadn’t been hit, all while giving a running stream of updates to the two vultures leaning over her to watch the console. There was a little good news to come out of it – Nadir, or his exact twin, had been spotted wandering the edge of the market before things went to hell. He had not, damn Apex for making them anxious, been murdering everything that moved, just walking around in a daze. That did mean he hadn’t resisted capture when the military finally got there though, so he’d been carted off with the other captives. Apparently Boots and Songbird had been at the main entrance when it happened – all anyone could talk about was the sound of gunfire from the entrance as they ran for the nearest portals. The two of them must have put up one hell of a fight. For a miracle almost everyone had made it out because of the alarm sounding first, so the current problem was finding places for all of them to hide in the other branches.
“Acknowledged. Butterfingers out,” she said, closing the link finally. She swiveled the chair around to face the other two. “So far we have thirty-two confirmed captures, not counting your Nadir. The three big ones were Boots, Songbird, and Peekaboo.”
Oreo’s hands flew up to her mouth, her dark eyes widening in shock. “Peekaboo? They got the market’s director?”
B nodded grimly. “Report is she went charging over to the entrance to try and fight when she learned they were being raided, instead of running like a sensible person.” She raised one slim jointed finger. “It’s very possible they don’t know who they have, though, they were laser focused on Songbird when they pulled his mask off and realized he was one of their officers, a big one. No wonder the market always knew so much about what they were up to. Seems they excommunicated him or whatever they do, right then and there. Footage is spotty, since a lot of the cameras were damaged, but what the other branches managed to get was enough to confirm that. The direct teleconduits have all been disconnected since, of course – can’t risk them tracing the links.”
Apex, still standing outside the entrance to the hopper, had listened to all of this with a small frown, resting one arm on the roof of the hopper as he leaned down to watch. “If I may ask,” he began, “Who exactly is this ‘they’ hunting you?”
“The government, of course,” B said.
He seemed perplexed by this, opening his mouth to reveal razor sharp teeth then changing his mind and closing it repeatedly, finally stating simply, “Why?”
Oreo dropped her hands finally, and said, voice dripping with sarcasm, “What, you’ve never heard of the government hunting talented people? Had they not banned magic yet when you were awake before?”
“They had not,” Apex confirmed, ignoring the sarcasm. “We were created under the then-empire’s sanction.”
“Wait,” Oreo said, serious now. “Really?”
“Yes.” He tilted his head. “Is that so surprising?”
“That has to have been… thousands of years ago,” Oreo said, waving her hands frantically as her brow knit in disbelief. “Hundreds of thousands! How many planets did you even have back then? Two? Three?”
“Well, there were the five wandering planets, if that’s what you mean…” The man blinked slowly, trying to understand the reference. “What does astronomy have to do with… anything?”
B said, quietly, “She means inhabited planets, Apex. We have more than just the one Earth we live on, now. Not that we’ve taken good care of it, as you’ll see… I thought you might be older than spaceflight when you didn’t understand what nightside meant.”
Apex stared at them by turns with those pale flaxen eyes of his, first B, then Oreo. “I am afraid,” he admitted after a long moment, “That I have no idea what any of that meant in the slightest, mental images notwithstanding.”
B had declined to let Oreo give Apex a brief version of galactic history, stating simply that “she’d make a complete hash of it.” Instead, Oreo was piloting the hopper back to their usual Wallside port, while B attempted to do just that. They had run into an immediate problem: the man was essentially blind when it came to technology. Presented with a tablet, his comment had been that, “This surface is a uniform temperature.” After determining that he couldn’t see anything at all on any of their screens, B had resorted to using various objects from the single cabin above the cockpit to make physical diagrams for him, to accompany the mental images he said he was getting when she spoke. She had at least been pleased to discover that was how he had seen through her camouflage; he hadn’t even noticed a difference because he was seeing her body heat.
They were both seated on the floor in the back of the hopper right now, an upturned laundry basket serving as a table. Apex was too tall to stand up properly inside the little craft, so this had simply worked better. She was just finishing up the part about how Earth had colonized Mars, using an orange to represent the Earth and an apple for Mars (a pencil had served as the ridiculous clunky spaceships they had used back then).
“Once we developed jump technology, of course,” she said, pulling out the bottlecap she’d found, “It became much easier to go between the two planets.” She demonstrated by hopping the bottlecap back and forth between the two fruit. “That’s when the problems started. The colonists had mostly been managing fine on their own up until that point, but now that Earth could drop by any time, they were always going over and sticking their noses in everything, trying to keep most of the best stuff for themselves.” She tapped the apple. “The colonists hated it, of course. They finally got so angry they decided they didn’t want to be a colony anymore, they wanted to be their own planet. That’s how the war started, anyway.” Apex was listening silently, but he nodded at that. Wars were something humans had always been having. Those, he was familiar with.
“Records from back then aren’t great as a lot of them got destroyed – but from what we understand, the war divided both sides on magic. Old Earth had always been more magically tolerant than the colonists, anyway, and they got really patriotic about their magic as things heated up, and so on Mars it became super suspicious to be magically inclined. They started locking people up unless they could prove they weren’t Earth supporters.” She started peeling the orange as Apex watched curiously, not understanding the meaning. “Then, when the last big battle rolled around, Earth’s latest technomagical contraption interacted with mars’ own newest invention in… an unexpected way. The resulting explosion missed Mars, but hit Earth. It was… bad.” She pulled the orange apart. “Really bad.” Apex’s eyebrows had climbed all the way up his forehead as he watched her fingers work. She pulled two slices off one half of the orange, then stacked the pieces precariously on top of each other.
“People tried to fix it, of course, but the damage was done. Holes carved all the way to the core, pieces split off and threatening to fall and smash anything that had survived the initial cataclysm. Emergency magical teams bound those shards safely to their orbits, but the rotation was all wrong, too – suddenly we were tidally locked, one side permanently facing the sun, and the other permanently frozen. Sunside, all the oceans boiled away, and everything was scorched beyond surviving. Nightside was where all the remaining moisture eventually collected, and everything was coated in miles and miles of ice. Most of the population didn’t have a chance.”
Apex prodded the mangled orange gently, nearly knocking one of the pieces off. “And we’re nightside, right now.” B nodded. “And people still live here?” She nodded again.
“It’s not so bad, really, Earth’s not even the only planet we’ve got like it. The twilight band between the two sides is mostly comfortable, and the cities have even begun to edge into nightside a bit, pushing the big wall back into the ice to make room for more people. It takes a while, since there’s a lot of dangerous still things frozen over there from the old war, but it’s happening. Ice mining’s a big thing too, for water. Sunside is a permanent source of easy energy – it’s full of solar farms now. Can’t live above ground there, but there’s plenty of subsurface communities out there.” She was silent for a moment, considering the orange. Apex’s bird was eying it hungrily from his shoulder, but hadn’t moved yet.
“The market was one of them,” she continued. “It was very hard to get to without magic, because none of the eclipse caravans passed nearby – that’s why it’s lasted so long, that and the protections they set up. If you didn’t live there, or weren’t a member of the council or the memory guards, leaving the market meant forgetting the location. It wasn’t our usual part of the underground, so I don’t remember it myself right now, same for Oreo.” She shrugged. “You can’t give it up if you just don’t know it. It’s worked for centuries.”
Apex looked back up at her, and said, “What changed, then?”
B was silent again, rolling the pencil between her fingers. “I don’t know,” she admitted, “And that’s a big problem. Someone has to have leaked the location, somehow. And crossing sunside directly is very, very dangerous, but they did it anyway.” They were both silent for a moment, then looked back at the orange as the magpie pounced and stuffed half of it in its beak, nearly choking in its greed.
Apex returned to the topic at hand. “And somehow, all of this resulted in a complete ban of magic?”
She waved the pencil in dismissal, saying, “New Earth – that was what Mars was calling itself back then, because they were feeling important – felt that obviously the whole disaster was Earth’s own fault for relying on magic, and insisted their clearly superior technology couldn’t have been to blame at all. Earth wasn’t really in any shape to protest anything because they were just trying to put all the pieces back together and survive, and nobody could even deny that it was their own device that had backfired.”
B shook her head in disappointment at those shortsighted lawmakers, and continued, “No one even thought to study the thing to find out what happened, they just destroyed it so it couldn’t misfire again. And the end result was that Mars and their anti-magic leaders got to make all of the rules for the next few hundred years, and that’s how we got here, thousands of years later, fighting just for the right to exist. Except now there’s several million some full planets, not just two.”
Apex opened his mouth and she raised a finger to stop him as she continued, “There’s been steady progress on that front, actually – the purges ended centuries ago, and having magic used on you is no longer cause for quarantine and invasive examinations. There are delicate negotiations happening right now in the Planetary Commonwealth’s congress to finally decriminalize and regulate magic use – which is why it’s very odd that this big of a raid would happen now of all times. It seems far too well timed to be coincidental. Or perhaps ill-timed.”
The man nodded thoughtfully as he spoke. “Put it that way, and I agree with you. I still do not understand all of this, but I believe I have a grasp of the basics. Each planet is like its own country, separated by a vast sea of emptiness. Viewed like that, it is not much different than the islands we sailed between in our time.” He looked back at the android, raising one eyebrow. “I am curious, though – you say we but I sense no magical ability in you.”
B blinked in confusion, then said, “Oh, of course you wouldn’t know – Androids aren’t aether-sensitive, at least no one’s figured out how to make that work yet, but we’re not considered people, legally, so we have a lot of common goals with magic-users, who also aren’t considered full people.”
Apex’s eyebrows shot up his forehead again. “How are you not a person? You have a soul I can read like every other person I’ve ever met.”
She stood up, saying dryly, “Tell that to the government. And figure out a way to prove it, while you’re at it.” It was always nice to hear she was considered a real person, though, and she felt her mood lifting despite everything. After a moment she changed to one of her favorite shell skins, a luminous red, with burnished golden accents and filigree running down the side. It might help persuade other people that nothing was out of the ordinary for her if she appeared to be in a good mood.
Oreo was still navigating her way back to the wall. It had probably taken them twice as long with her at the controls, but at least that had given her a good long time to explain things to Apex.
“Done with the history lesson, finally?” She said sourly, eying the obvious skin change.
“I believe we covered the important points, yes,” B said, ignoring her partner’s mood. “There’s something we haven’t thought about though.” She waved an arm at Apex and his very obviously magical self, still seated on the floor. “How exactly are we going to hide all of that while we get to a secure location?”
Oreo slammed on the brakes, jolting both of the others hard enough to knock them into the walls and startling the magpie into flight. She swore, vehemently. “Fuck. Fuck, we can’t just march him straight through town. Just his height alone would attract every guard and watchdog out there-”
“Like I said,” B continued, propping herself back up against the wall before standing, “We’re going to have to do something. We can’t just leave him here in the hopper while we figure out what he can do about his brother-”
“If I may,” Apex began, having stood up himself, bent awkwardly under the low ceiling, “I can teleport. There is no need to risk exposing me to inimical forces at all.” Oreo turned back in the chair to face the other two, the hopper now idling midair.
“Yeah,” she said, “We’ve seen. But that’s usually a pretty short range talent, isn’t it?”
“I can reform my aetherial composition at any point within a certain radius of one of my marks, and it is a simple enough matter to bring other things with me, such as my robe.” He pointed at Oreo. “You bear my mark. We are linked, now. There is nowhere you can go that I cannot find you.”
Her eyes widened in dismay, trying to focus on that single claw pointed at her. “Oh, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“It was not intended as a threat.”
“I still don’t like it-”
One hand out to each side, the android stepped between them to intervene. “Okay, calm down guys. That isn’t actually important right now, what matters is we can get him out without attracting attention. We can give him an earpiece so we can tell him when we’re in a safe location and then he can just port over. Problem solved.” She clapped her hands together. “Start her up again, Oreo, we don’t want people wondering why we’re stopped in the middle of nowhere so close to the wall.”
Oreo huffed and muttered something especially unpleasant under her breath, but didn’t object, starting back towards the wall at a good clip. “What are we even doing when we get back, anyway?”
B seated herself in the copilot chair and buckled herself in as she said, calmly, “The least we can do is locate where they’ve sent the prisoners, so we can figure out where he needs to go. If it’s close enough he could just teleport there and sort things out. Easy peasy. Plus, it’s information the rest of the underground would also appreciate, so two birds with one stone.”
Apex tilted his head in acknowledgment, sitting back down. “Thank you. I do apologize for the inconvenience. I assure you, once I have ensured my brother is sane and in complete control of himself, there will be no need to impose on you further.”
Red arms draping over the back of the chair, she said, thoughtfully, “You aren’t planning on going back to that crumbling ruin afterward, are you? That doesn’t seem terribly comfortable.”
Apex shook his head, resigned. “In this much changed world, we will need to find a new place. Perhaps you can help with that as well, should you feel so inclined. But I am not concerned about that at the moment. Your government has taken Nadir, and I must follow.”
Thinking, the android spun the chair back and forth, curling her legs underneath it with a dainty little kick. “Easier said than done, I’m afraid. The raid happened over an hour ago. He’s likely been shipped to a prison somewhere by now, and those kinds of records aren’t public. We’d have to find a way to access their files.”
Oreo made a rude noise from her own chair, not taking her eyes off the instruments. “You say that like you haven’t done it before.”
“I am merely explaining,” B said, giving Oreo an unamused look, “that it would require some effort to find him now. I can use my camouflage to sneak into a military base and steal their files, but it won’t be easy.”
Apex leaned back, thinking. “I understand. Is there any way in which I could possibly assist?” He raised a finger, closing his eyes briefly. A wave of darkness swept the man’s body. “I can, for instance, shift my alignment to umbral, as Nadir prefers. I am nearly invisible in the dark like this, and it is far easier to cast complicated spellwork.”
Sitting up, B watched the transformation with interest over the back of her chair. “That does seem useful, but I don’t think it will help right now. The nearest base to us is still wallside, and the light wouldn’t be dim enough for you to go unnoticed.”
The color drained back out of the man as he nodded and returned to his more usual pale gold. Oreo said, still focusing on the flight, “I think we also need to consider that with negotiations where they are right now, it may not be a good idea to do anything at all. Nearly everyone captured will have been charged with minor offenses for magic use or collaborating with magic users – if the legislation passes as it is right now, they’d all be released and their records wiped. Trying for a prison break could actually make it harder to get the bill through.”
B frowned as best she could, tilting her head back and forth, conflicted. Her ribbon swayed back and forth with the movement as she thought. “On the other hand, just finding where everyone was sent and what exactly they were charged with doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. Songbird and Boots will have gotten the worst of it for fighting, of course, but it would be good to make sure your assumption that everyone else got minor charges is correct before deciding what to do.”
Apex’s eyelids lowered as he considered this. “I do not believe leaving Nadir to his own devices for any length of time is advisable, but you are correct that we will need to locate him first in any case. If I have to I will follow him myself.”
“I think it would be best,” B said, “If I were to go straight to the base and get a head start on the files, since you won’t need me to get him somewhere safe, Oreo. I suppose your apartment will have to do for now- unless you have a better idea?”
“It’s certainly closest,” she admitted grudgingly. “I think our usual underground branch would be safer, in the long run, but while we sort things out it’ll work. He’ll just have to stay away from the windows.”
From his seat on the floor, Apex said slowly, “If the market was only one of these underground branches… how do you know yours or others have not been compromised as well?” Both women shared a glance.
“That’s… a very good point,” Oreo admitted. “Did they know what had happened when you were exchanging information, Bee?”
“No, actually. PK did recently issue a general warning to all branches that there was currently an increased threat level, due to suspicious activity and the furor over the legislation, but she didn’t have anything concrete to watch for. This big of a raid was straight out of the blue – caught everyone off guard. They were talking about double-checking all of the gate records to make sure that no one had managed to slip out without seeing a memory guard, because the only other explanation is that someone deliberately betrayed us.”
Oreo whistled. “Yeah, okay, spooky there may be right. Maybe we just stick to ourselves for a little bit, at least until we’re sure there aren’t going to be any other raids.” There was a huffed sigh from the man.
“I am Apex,” he reminded them politely, patience written all over his face. Oreo dropped her head back to look at him over the back of the pilot’s chair, while her partner frantically grabbed for the nearest wheel.
“Everyone gets a codename in the underground, Spooky my dude, my buddy. That way people can’t find you so easy.”
He raised a finger to object, mouth open in dismay, but thought better of it as B interrupted, furious.
“OREO, YOU’RE FLYING DAMMIT.”
