The Index -|-
They found a quiet corner near the chamber’s eastern wall, where the devastation was thinner and the marble retained some of its original polish. Zara leaned against the cold stone and let her weight settle. Her right shoulder had stiffened to the point where raising her arm sent white-hot pain lancing across her collarbone. She missed Qon and ached with a constant, dull throb that nothing seemed to touch.
Kpleeb stood beside her, one hand braced against the wall, his makeshift cane propped between them. The lines around his eyes had deepened, carved by pain and whatever damage the Qon threads had done to his chest. He looked older than he had that morning.
“Da,” Zara said. Her voice came out thinner than she’d intended. “Qon left me. It just pulled away when they called, and it went to them like it was going home.”
Kpleeb leaned his weight against the wall beside her, the broken spear shaft propped between them. His breathing was rough and ragged. “It acted like an entity, not a mindless energy. Entities have their own allegiances.”
“But it was with me for years.” She flexed her right hand, and the motion sent a jolt of pain through her stiff shoulder. “I could feel it thinking, sometimes. Not in words, but… it had a mind of its own. It wasn’t just a tool.”
“Tools have preferences if you know how to listen.” Kpleeb shifted, wincing, and adjusted his grip on the makeshift cane. “My favorite hammer back on Phaedro always balanced better in my left hand. Never figured out why. The wood was cut the same as the others.”
Zara almost smiled. “This isn’t a hammer, Da.”
“I know.” He was quiet for a moment, his gaze looking across the chamber to where Kanta and Viinox worked over the chalk map. The light from the dome caught the care-lines on his face. “But if you believe you can control it, you should try to call it back. We’re going to need every asset we have against whatever comes next. The Predominant may have been just… caretakers, maybe. Or puppets. If it’s the Xih really running the Xi empire, well—” his shoulders shrugged slightly as his brow furrowed. “They probably have resources we can’t even imagine.”
The suggestion landed in Zara’s chest and sat there, heavy and complicated. Part of her wanted Qon back with a desperation that bordered on hunger. She felt awkward without it. The confidence it had given her, the sense of being more… all of it was gone. She felt like a limb had been amputated. But another part, colder and more rational, remembered the way Qon had fought to leave when the Predominant called it.
“What if it doesn’t want to come back?” she said quietly.
“Then you make it want to.” Kpleeb’s voice had that particular flatness it took when he was stating something he believed was obvious. “You’re the Ixant, not it. You’re the one with the hands and the brain. Qon is just energy with opinions.”
“Is it, though?” Zara pushed herself straighter against the wall, ignoring the protest from her shoulder. “Where did it come from, Da? The Predominant called me their creation. Did they make Qon too? Is that why it went to them when they called?”
Kpleeb was silent. His jaw muscle tensed, and she could see him turning the question over, looking for angles. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But if they made it, they made it to serve. And right now, it’s not serving anyone. The bulk of it is hiding like a scared animal. That’s an opportunity.”
“For them or for us?”
“For whichever of us is brave enough to reach for it first.”
Zara looked down at her hands. Her right knuckles were swollen where she’d punched Na, the skin split and dark with dried blood. She remembered how Qon had felt, its silky touch and the electric joy of use it. She hadn’t really thought to question what it was or where it came from. It was just there, a close companion when she needed one, power when she had none.
But friends didn’t abandon you when stronger voices called. Tools didn’t choose new masters.
“What if it was loyal to them all along?” The question came out quieter than she’d meant it to. “What if everything it did for me was just… training? Preparation? The Predominant said I was a success. What if Qon was the leash, and I just didn’t feel it tightening?”
Kpleeb’s hand found her uninjured shoulder and squeezed. His palm was warm through the fabric of her sleeve, callused and solid. “Then you take the leash and you put it around their neck instead.” His voice had lost its edge, replaced by something quieter that she recognized as the tone he used when he was being careful with her. When the subject mattered too much for bluster. “You’re my daughter, Zara. You’re stubborn and smart, and you don’t quit. Whatever Qon is, whatever it wants, you’re stronger than it is. I’ve watched you be stronger than it for as long as you’ve been alive.”
She wanted to believe him.
“Try,” he said. “Not for me. For both of us. We need our best strength if we expect to conquer the Xih.”
She closed her eyes. The marble was cold against her back, the chamber silent around them except for the soft murmur of Kanta’s voice as she worked and the occasional click of Viinox adjusting its hologram.
After a long moment of contemplation, she opened her eyes and met her Da’s gaze. His face was lined with pain and something harder beneath it, a resolve that had carried him across the galaxy for blood. She saw her own reflection in his eyes. Smaller, more sensitive, and afraid. She didn’t like what she saw.
“I’ll try,” she said. “Let’s help Kanta first.” She clambered to her feet.
Kanta produced a dozen, large vials from her satchel, each one as long as Zara’s hand, sealed with stoppers of some pale material that caught the light like bone.
Viinox took three and moved toward the largest concentration of riiat. The plume that had billowed from Ka’s dissolution, now settled in a fine, gray-white layer across the marble near the center of the chamber. Its three-fingered hand moved with delicate precision, treating the riiat as it was: the remnants of the Xi soul. It scooped the powder with the edge of a vial, careful not to spill. The dust was lighter than it looked. It caught on the slightest air current, swirling in faint eddies around Viinox’s wrist before settling into the glass.
Zara took a vial and knelt beside what remained of Ja. The riiat here was fine and powdery with a faint bluish cast that the others didn’t have. She dipped the mouth of the vial into the dust and watched it fill. The powder felt strange against her skin as she scooped and brushed it toward the vial. It was not quite like sand, not quite like ash, something between the two. It was dead, in the most literal sense. The remains of something that had thought itself a god reduced to sediment she could carry in a bottle.
She sealed the second vial and held it up to the light. The dust inside caught the pastel glow from the dome and held it, each particle a tiny, dull mirror. Three Predominant. Six vials of dust. She slipped hers into the pocket of her vest and felt the weight of it there, cold against her ribs.
Kpleeb had gathered Na’s remains himself. He worked methodically, his injured knee braced against the marble, one hand steadying himself while the other swept dust into the vial with brisk efficiency. When he was done, he held a sealed vial and examined it with an expression Zara couldn’t quite read. Something between satisfaction and a quieter emotion she thought might have been disappointment.
“It’s not enough,” he said quietly. “For everything they took.”
“No,” Zara agreed. Nothing would be. “But you got the Predominant. You avenged Mama.”
Kpleeb grunted noncommittally. “It doesn’t feel like I expected. Are you going to ask Qon to come back or what?”
Zara nodded.
They finished their work and stood in a loose circle near the center of the chamber, where the three thrones sat empty on their dais. The marble here was veined with threads of gold and purple that caught the light and seemed to pulse faintly, as if the stone itself remembered what had happened here. The air felt charged. Not with threat, exactly, but with potential.
Zara stepped deliberately into the center of the circle. Her boots left prints in the thin layer of riiat that still coated the marble. Her right shoulder throbbed in a hot, insistent rhythm. The emptiness in her ached.
She closed her eyes and reached.
Not with her hand, really. With something deeper. The part of her that had always known how to find Qon and the other aji. That instinctive sense of a power waiting just beyond the edge of perception, warm and silky and alive. She reached into the hollow space outside of her and pushed against its edges, and for a long moment, nothing happened. She opened her senses in a way she had not done since she was kidnapped on the Hsstak and Mangas had falsified every sense.
Then she felt it, a flicker, distant and faint, like a star winking once behind thick cloud. Something stirring in the distance beneath her feet. Not answering, not yet. Listening.
Her jaw tightened. Her shoulders stiffened, the injured one protesting as she squared them. She could feel the conflicting currents moving through her, dread, cold and sharp, remembering how Qon had fought to leave her; and beneath it, a harder resolve that felt like her father’s hand on her shoulder. She was not going to beg. She was not going to negotiate. Whatever Qon was, whatever it wanted, she was the Ixant.
She placed her right hand on her chest and called silently.
The response was not immediate. For several heartbeats, nothing changed. The chamber remained silent, the light shifting across marble floor, Kanta and Viinox watching from the periphery with still, attentive postures. Then Zara felt a tremor through the stone beneath her boots, subtle as a sigh.
A thread seeped from the floor below here. Not a flood, not the brilliant surge she was used to, but something slower and more cautious. Thin tendrils of golden light crept across the marble like searching fingers. They were invisible to anyone who couldn’t see aji, she knew. To Kpleeb, to Kanta, to Viinox, there would be nothing to see but Zara standing in an empty circle, her expression fixed in concentration. But to her, the chamber began to flood with gold.
The tendrils found her boot first. They coiled around her ankle, hesitant and testing. She felt the contact like a question. She didn’t answer it with words. She answered it by opening herself. It was not surrender the way she had when she was young, but deliberate and controlled, a door opened on her terms.
The tendrils rushed up her leg. They wrapped her thigh, her hip, her torso, coiling around her ribs, and the feeling was so familiar it made her breath catch. Familiarity flooding back into her core. The smooth brush of something alive against her skin, beneath it, through it. Qon wound around her forearm, and the contact sent a shock through her that made her teeth clench.
It was different. The Qon that returned to her was not the same that had left. There was a wariness to it now, a hesitation she hadn’t felt before. It pulsed against her glove in irregular rhythms, testing her grip, probing for weakness the way it never had. She felt its confusion or what she interpreted as confusion, that wordless, emotional sense she’d sometimes had of Qon’s state. It had been called away by masters it recognized, and then those masters had died, and now it was being called back by a hand it knew but didn’t entirely trust.
Zara closed her fingers around the thickest coil. The golden thread flared, and she felt Qon resist. It was not fighting, but a push, firm and questioning. She pushed back. Harder. Her jaw set into a line so tight the muscles in her temples ached.
“I am not a servant,” she said aloud, though the words were really for Qon. “And neither are you.”
The resistance held for one long, suspended moment. Then it broke. Not in surrender, but in something closer to recognition. The golden tendrils tightened around her arm not as bindings but as an embrace. Familiar and strange all at once. Qon was home, but home had changed, and they were both learning the new shape of it.
She turned to face the others. Her Dad was watching with a concerned look mixed with something she couldn’t name. Kanta’s large eyes were wide behind her helmet, water sloshing gently as she tilted her head. Viinox stood very still, its neck slits fluttering in that rapid pattern that meant something complicated was happening behind those blue eyes.
“Qon is back,” Zara said.
Kpleeb nodded once, sharp and satisfied. “Good. Now let’s find out what the Xih built at Yefrtil.”
