The Index -|-
Kpleeb hung in the invisible Qon web and let the pain become a landscape. His right shoulder was in tremendous pain, and his left knee was definitely going to hurt for days. Blood from his nose had filled his mouth and dried there. Each breath drove the Qon threads deeper between his ribs, and each exhale was a wet, ragged thing that tasted like dying.
But his right hand was still working. His fingers found the seam in his armor vest, just below the collarbone, where he’d crafted a clasp himself months ago in his room aboard the Greki. The clasp was made from kerflk just like the vest. Inside it was a reservoir no bigger than his thumbnail, filled with a suspension so fine it was almost not there at all.
He had tested it on several Xi subjects and each had turned to riiat within minutes. The virus was elegant in its specificity: it targeted the silica-based cellular structure unique to Xi physiology, leaving everything else untouched. Humans, Ganix, Hkkli, and others. Only the Xi were destroyed.
He drew a breath. The threads cinched tighter, and something in his chest gave way with a hot, tearing sensation. He ignored it. His fingers found the clasp and pressed.
“Defile,” he breathed hoarsely.
The word left his lips as little more than a whisper, lost beneath the murmuring of the Predominant and the faint hum of the chamber. But the virus heard it. It moved in the air, invisible, odorless, a ghost of particulate so fine it caught the light only as a momentary haze, like heat rising from a tundra stone during the hotening.
No one noticed. The Predominant were still enjoying themselves.
“—pathetic,” Ka was saying, its voice carrying haughtiness. It had moved closer to Kpleeb, close enough that Kpleeb could see the individual etchings on its armor and notice how the light caught the swirls and made them seem to move. “All this way for vengeance, and you die without landing a single blow. I almost respect the commitment.”
“The child held Qon for so long. That’s a record. We should document the decay rate before…“
“Before I’m done with her,” Na finished, and its glow had warmed to something almost amber, eager and maternal. It circled behind Zara, one hand reaching toward her hair with terrible gentleness. “Such a waste of a child.”
Kpleeb waited. For several long seconds, nothing happened. The Predominant continued their performance, Ka pontificating and Na weirdly caressing the air near Zara’s terrified face. Kpleeb’s vision grayed at the edges again, and he forced himself to breathe through it. One breath. Another. The threads bit deeper.
Then Ka stopped mid-sentence.
Its brow furrowed. Not dramatically, just a slight crease between those piercing blue eyes, a momentary confusion, as if it had forgotten the next word in a well-rehearsed speech. Its hand, raised in some grand gesture, paused in the air.
Ja noticed as it noticed everything. Its bioluminescence flickered, a quick, irregular pulse, and its hand went to its throat.
“What—“ Na began, and then made a sound. Not a word. A small, puzzled noise, like a child who has touched something hot by accident. Its glow stuttered, the warm amber fading toward something pale.
Kpleeb steadied himself. The pain was still there, vast and consuming, but beneath it he felt something new: a shift in his bindings. They hadn’t completely loosened, not yet, but the tension had changed. The Predominant’s control was wavering.
Ka took a step backward. Its neck slits fluttered rapidly, then slowed, then fluttered again in an irregular rhythm. It looked down at its own hands as if they belonged to someone else, and something in its throat made a low, grinding sound.
Na had both hands pressed to its stomach, where the bioluminescence was pulsing in frantic, disordered patterns. Its eyes had gone wide, pupils dilated, and it was making a small yelp over and over that increased in volume.
For a moment, all three stopped talking, and the chamber fell quiet. They stood in their triangle and gazed unexpectedly inward, breath labored, faces confused.
Ka’s knees buckled first. It folded at the joints as if its bones had turned to water. Its neck slits fluttered in wild, panicked rhythms, opening and closing faster than any Xi’s should. One hand rose toward its own throat and hovered there, trembling, fingers curled inward.
Kpleeb watched the confusion become fear. Soon, fear become something worse. Ka’s eyes rolled, the whites showing as they rolled back, then forward, then back again in shuddering spasms. Its jaw worked silently, mouth open, and a thin gray fluid began to seep from the corner of its lips. The virus was in the crystalline structure of whatever passed for its organs. Kpleeb had seen this before, but never in a Xi as large or powerful as this one. The effect was similar and a bit slower.
Ja made a sound like a pipe cracking. Its bioluminescence stuttered and died out, then flared bright enough to throw stark shadows across the marble floor, then reduced again in rapid, disordered pulses. It dropped to one knee, hands braced against the stone, and its breathing came in jagged, whistling gasps through fluttering neck slits. “I don’t—“ it managed, and then the word dissolved into a long, rattling exhalation. Its fingers curled against the marble, nails scraping thin white lines in the polished surface, and it began to shriek loudly.
Na was the quietest. It simply folded, curling in on itself, arms wrapped around its stomach where the warm amber glow had gone sickly and pale. When it looked up at Kpleeb there was nothing there but animal bewilderment.
Slowly at first, then all at once, the invisible web unraveled around Kpleeb and Zara like a net coming undone. He dropped.
His knees hit the marble with a crack that shot pain up both thighs. He caught himself on his palms, fingers spread against the cold, stone floor and waited there for a moment, breathing. Each breath was a ragged, painful thing, and he could smell sweat and riiat in the air. His chest felt like it had been stepped on, ribs creaking with the expansion of his lungs. Dried blood from his nose adorned his upper lip, and his mouth tasted of salt and iron tang. The threads had left burning lines across his neck, wrists and forearms, but it had been unable to pierce through his armor. He could feel every one of them, a map of pain written across his skin.
Zara landed beside him with a thud and a gasp. He heard her choking, coughing, drawing air in desperate lungfuls. He didn’t look at her. Not yet. He had one thing left to do.
He planted his right hand flat on the marble and pushed. His shoulder ached deeply, and his knee screamed at him. He pushed through it, teeth clenched, and rose to his feet in one graceless, swaying motion. The room tilted around him, then settled. His right hand went to his back and found the sheath hidden beneath his armored vest.
The kerflk blade came free with a soft sound. Yellow stone, made by the Xih, shaped by Kpleeb’s own hands and voice over long nights aboard the Greki when sleep wouldn’t come.
Ka was on its knees now, head hanging, gray fluid dripping from its mouth to spatter on the marble below. Its armor glinted dully, the etched swirls of cloud and storm gone dark. Kpleeb stepped toward it, each footfall deliberate despite the pain that lanced through his knee. He adjusted his grip on the kerflk blade. The stone was warm against his palm.
He drove the blade into Ka’s ribcage from behind, angling upward beneath the armor plates. The wet crack of bone fracturing echoed through the chamber, and it was a sharp, definitive, sound that carried to the dome and back. Kpleeb felt the blade bite through whatever passed for cartilage in a Xi, felt the resistance give way, felt the warm rush of fluid around his knuckles. He grunted and shoved with his left palm against Ka’s shoulder blade, driving the blade deeper, twisting it slightly.
Ka made no sound. Its body went rigid, back arching, neck slits fluttering in one final, desperate rhythm.
Kpleeb watched the black lines reach into Ka’s eyes and turn the piercing blue to something dark and vacant. He pulled the blade free. Ka remained upright for one impossible moment, balanced on its knees, head tilted back as if still issuing some silent command to the empty air. Then it crumbled.
The dissolution was swift and complete. Its body collapsed inward, armor and all, compacting into a swirling plume of gray-white dust that billowed outward across the marble floor. The dust caught the light from the dome, each particle glowing briefly before settling. It drifted in slow, lazy currents, settling over the cold stone in a thin, fine layer. The armor pieces clattered and rang as they hit the marble, empty shells with nothing inside them.
The echo of the bone crack faded into silence. Kpleeb stood amid the drifting plume breathing the dry, chalky scent of riiat, kerflk blade dripping Ka’s internal fluid. Ka was gone. Reduced to dust and memory as it should be. He turned toward Ja, but saw only a pile of riiat.
###
Qon’s golden tendrils were leaving.
Zara watched them from the floor where she’d landed, her palms pressed flat against cold marble, breath coming in short, painful gasps. Threads of Qon unwound from the air around her, pulling back from the walls, from the dome, from the shattered remains of the Ganix warriors who lay scattered across the chamber. They retracted like the tentacles of some vast, wounded creature, coiling inward toward the center of the room where the three thrones stood. For a heartbeat they gathered there, a knot of brilliant gold light pulsing with what looked almost like panic, and then they fled into a wall behind the thrones.
The light seemingly dimmed as Qon went, at least to Zara. Golden brilliance fading to amber, then to a dull yellow glow, and then nothing. Her muscles ached from hanging in those threads, her ribs throbbed where they’d been compressed, and her right shoulder felt like it had been dislocated and roughly shoved back into place. She pushed herself to her feet, swaying, and the world tilted sickeningly before righting itself.
She saw her Da pull a long, kerflk knife out of Ka’s back, and turned to look for the others.
Na was on the ground ten paces away, curled on its side, twitching violently. Its bioluminescence had faded to a sickly, pulsing glow that made its gray-green skin look jaundiced. One hand clutched at its stomach where Zara had punched it earlier; the other twitched weakly.
Zara remembered Na’s hand reaching for her hair. Remembered the soft, maternal tone as it said “Let me have the girl. Just for a little while. I want to feel her break.” The memory landed in her chest like a hot stone.
She launched herself forward with no plan. No Qon to guide her. Just her body, hurt and furious, driving forward off her back foot with all the strength she had left. She swung her leg back and put her whole weight behind the kick. It impacted Na’s head like a wrecking ball. The edge of the bottom dais step and Na’s head connected with a sickening thud. Something in its neck gave, and Na stopped moving. In a few moments, the body began dissolve, a finger first and thn slow, the rest followed until riiat was all that was left.
Zara sighed heavily and turned to look for Ja. As she moved, she staggered backward and stumbled, arms pinwheeling for balance that wouldn’t come.
Kpleeb’s hand closed around her upper arm. His grip was firm, steadying, his fingers warm through the fabric of her sleeve. He pulled her upright and she leaned into him, breathing hard, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.
The chamber fell silent.
Their ragged breathing was the loudest thing. Zara’s came in short, pained gasps; Kpleeb’s was deeper, slower, each exhale carrying the wet edge of damage to his lungs. Flickers of light played across the devastation. The dome above cast shifting pastel hues over scattered debris—broken weapons, fragments of Ganix armor, the empty shells of Xi plate mail lying where their wearers had dissolved. Spent riiat dust covered the marble in thin, ghostly veils, catching the light in brief flashes before settling. Near the center of the room, the three thrones stood empty on their raised dais, gold and purple cushions undisturbed, as if their occupants had simply stepped away for a moment.
The Predominant were gone. Reduced to dust and memory.
Zara remembered the poem Viinox had quoted. “They rule with wisdom, age, and fear. Their power increasing every year.”
Kpleeb wheezed out something that might have been a laugh. “Not anymore.”