Stormblood, стр. 20
I leaned out the fogged window to watch the flickering cityscape. Roads winding over neon-stained alleyways and streets, past the hunched shoulders of tenements and apartment complexes to the mesh of the sprawling city beyond. The constant flow of aerial traffic formed a multicoloured strip between the megastructures and soaring highrises. Branching passageways tethered the bones of the cityscape together like joints. Organic art installations oscillated over galleries, clubs and expansive parklands. Glinting clatterlifts and traveltubes thrust into rock, plunging towards adjoining Compass floors and punctured with apertures leading towards parking bays and other hidden areas. Chainships and quickships peeled out of the traffic flow, swooping around overpasses and towards spaceports and massive circular tubes jutting from the ceiling that acted as elevator shafts for ships between floors. The concentric rings blinked white and red in the darkness, ships slipping in and out of its wide mouth. City lights glittering like stars from a million sources.
Maybe I’d have marvelled at it all some other time. Now, it was a poor distraction from my thoughts.
Blinking neon adboards four storeys high shattered through the prism of my glass, turning my gin into molten liquid fluorescence. I slammed half the drink down in a single hit, wishing the booze would dull my senses as the seething metropolis whirled on into the night.
As hellish as our father had made our childhood, Artyom, Kasia and I had always had each other. In a way, it had tightened our relationship. No matter how hard someone tries to knock you down, having someone to lean against, someone who’s got your back, makes it possible to stand up again. When I was twelve, I’d come down with pneumonia, the kind that clogs your nose and turns your lungs into sandpaper. I’d lain in bed, sniffing and miserable and beyond frustrated when Artyom came into the room and sat down on my bed next to me. ‘Leave me alone,’ I’d grumpily told him at some point, a soggy tissue pressed to my leaking nose.
‘Someone’s got to take care of you,’ he’d said with a small smile. He’d cut school to keep me company the whole day. He’d brought his portable speakers with him and the two of us sat there, drinking coffee, talking and listening to music and watching the snowstorm whirl outside. It was one of the most uneventful days of my life. But for some reason, it was also one of the best.
In a blink of a bloody eye, we’d gone from that to here.
We never see the important moments as they happen. Never realise when things start to change. It’s only when we look back on those years and see all the tiny, inevitable steps we took. The things we wished we said. The things we wished we hadn’t done. The opportunities we watched go past.
Maybe it had started when my sister had been killed. When rage for her and fear for my brother had driven me up the windswept mountain to the old observatory. When I’d asked permission to do something I knew couldn’t be undone. Even if I survived, I knew it’d change me. Was that when we began drifting apart? Even before I started rifling through the Reaper conscription benefits, and believing the interstellar progress reports about Harmony using alien biotech to repel the Harvest invasion fleets? Before I started looking for a way off the miserable, backwater planet I’d been trapped on my entire life?
Didn’t matter, now. This was the hand the universe had dealt us and I had to do right by the people that mattered to me. I drained the gin, images stabbing through my mind. My brother getting caught with those stolen stormtech canisters. Reapers going viciously insane, dying on the street because they’d trusted Harmony’s suppressors. Harmony dragging Artyom to a dark cell and cutting away until they dug out the truth.
Unless I found it first.
6
The Unforgiven
The early morning bells chime as I pick my way up to the observatory, the wind howling around the ragged edges of the mountain, slicing on rocky teeth. Snowdrifts are piled around me on the stone steps. Snowflakes rush into my eyes. I wipe them away with trembling fingers that come back wet with tears.
I can’t let her see this. Otherwise she’ll see me for the child I am, not the man I want to be. Not the man my sister made me.
The observatory looms over me. Onion-domed, crimson-red and decorated with paper lanterns. Kanji, Hangul and Cyrillic flowing into one cohesive mosaic. It was an old monastery before she took over. Wild animals still roam these parts, old skeletons peeking out of the snow. I close my eyes and imagine hundreds, thousands of footsteps crossing these timbers, coming to demand the impossible, the unforgivable.
I pause at the top. My chest heaves as I peer out at New Vladivostok, flanked by the primordial blue mountains as if sheltered from the rest of the universe. Watery sunlight glints off windswept cliffs of black rock. Thick, dark forests stab upwards like swords on the horizon. It is everything I have ever known. Looking at it, I feel so small and alone.
I steady my hands, breathe deep, remember my purpose here and enter.
Two guards stand in the atrium like samurai. Arms crossed, they’re wearing traditional dress over their thermal suits. All they need are katanas and sangu armour to become ancient