Chapter 1: Everyone Died

When everyone in town died, we heard no scream. We were only a kilometer away, every sound should have carried up that forest gorge. Winters on the south tip of Noé carry no birdsong, no rustle of leaves, just the crinkle of my feet rolling over the snow as softly as possible so as not to spook the deer. My brother Iden tipped his bow in the quiet, as still as the trees staring down. The deer died in the silence of that winter morning. A village of three thousand did too.

At fourteen, I stood almost to my full height, my lanky frame already capable of lugging back game, wood, or baskets of whatever herbs, berries or mushrooms we could gather from the forest. Iden, a year older, stood just as tall and strong—though the scrubby blond stubble he called a goatee still eluded me. Each day, we tested our muscles to hunt or gather what we could until we were old enough to do our part in the mineral mines. I gutted the doe that morning amid trees as wide as I stood tall. Iden prepped the pole to carry it between our shoulders. 

 I inhaled earthy blood as we trudged back to the cobble road, eager to get that deer butchered in our shed. We made it down the road a ways, talking about the venison stew Mom would soon bubble over the fire, adding chives, potatoes, and wild root vegetables to make it perfect. I dreamed about a good shortgrain bread to go with it, but Iden reminded me we’d have to wait until spring to save up. Imports were expensive, and money was tight since Dad died last year.

Death wouldn’t be new to me that day, just the scale of it. We’d all banded together after Dad’s death because we knew all Chaeten had to. Our ancestors already survived the death of a planet, coming to a new one as refugees, and a war when the native humans on Nara Mnaet couldn’t agree if we were coded human enough to say so. Through these last few generations, we’d changed everything about our genetic code to live here, to make ourselves belong. Dad always said Chaeten don’t break, we mod ourselves stronger and move on. We’d stood tall in that town for three generations, stubborn enough to flourish in a place where our Asri neighbors once slaughtered as many of us as they could.

“It shouldn’t be this quiet,” Iden said as we reached the maple grove.

I shifted the deer on my shoulders. “I’m fine with quiet. The twins just learned to whistle.” 

He groaned. “Yeah, they woke me up this morning with a new whistle-song.”

“Yep. Told them you’d love that.” I’d relished my little sisters’ smiles just as much as Iden’s annoyance.

“You shit.” He laughed, but he’d been right about the quiet. There were no work trucks on the road, or rumbles under our feet from the mine. A breeze chimed through the icy trees, then running footsteps. The moment I first saw the Red Demon will be etched in my mind forever—every slow second of it.

I didn’t know what she was then, or what to call her, but I recognized she was something special, powerful, beyond the human I was. My eyes were sharp enough to see her on the far edge of the field, to make out the maze of scars down her golden arms and the long, wine-red hair streaming behind her. I hadn’t seen hair that shade before, glowing a little more than it should, hovering with something brilliant on the edge of perception. Her hair bloomed as all colors do when we’re children, warm and shining bright. She moved fluid, precise, flawlessly fast. I couldn’t pinpoint the otherness of it, but I couldn’t look away, even when she swerved to charge us. 

She came from the village, all lean muscle and grace across the field of white powdered snow. She crossed twin swords in front of her, their blades glinting with blood. I’d dropped the pole from my shoulder, but I still stood there like an idiot, too transfixed to be afraid. Iden drew his bow.

Mid-stride, she wiped one blade in the snow with a flash of sunlight. Another step, she flipped it and cleaned the blood off the other side. Lunge, wipe; lunge, wipe, all without changing pace.

“Get your knife out, Jesse,” Iden said. His voice sounded calm, too calm. All the same, his green eyes flitted with panic when I didn’t jump immediately.

I unsheathed my knife, my heart pounding when only a few paces remained between her and my neck.

She stopped, letting out one slow, frosty breath. Her blades shone clean as she stared at us with vacant yellow-green eyes, meeting our wide-eyes for a moment before her gaze flitted down the road beyond us.

Iden breathed in deep beside me, his bowstring taut, every muscle prepared as we waited for her to speak or take one step forward to meet his arrow.

That armor of hers, once well-crafted, hung tattered and torn: a studded leather bodice and bracers over a ragged shirt. Iden could still target a mortal wound to her neck or her eye, but she’d left little else exposed. She wore black Chaeten leather pants: a thin, alloyed fabric, patched with dyed deer hide. I could also aim for that patch on the inner thigh if the bow missed. But by then, I was shaking. I’d seen how fast she could move. 

“Who are you?” I smiled, hoping for the best. “I’m Jesse. That’s Iden.”

Iden’s eyes flitted to me in warning, then back to the Red Demon, his bow still trained on her.

I nodded at my brother. “He’s friendlier than he looks.” I hoped I looked calm even as my heart galloped in my chest.

The Red Demon glanced my way, then beyond, emotionless. She sheathed both blades at once with a thud, so fast I could barely track it. Then she veered off with long strides toward the trees, hair flaming behind. We watched every step.

Iden kept his bow trained on her. “Wait until we know the Chaeten-sa isn’t circling back.”

Chaeten-sa. I suppose I should have put it together the instant I saw that hair, but the portraits in my history books of the warriors that won our right to live on this planet painted a different picture. General Alexander, second in command to our queen, has similar hair and features. However, our Chaeten-sa general stands immaculate and grinning in his portraits— nonchalant in front of the white stone palace, a bustling capital in the background. Although “sa” meant “demon” to his Asri enemies, General Alexander co-opted that slur with pride, formally adopting the name for everyone in his genetic spec line.

She shouldn’t be here. Chaeten-sa veterans should be in places of power, not roaming the frontier in ragged armor.

I could no longer hear her footsteps among the trees. “Whose blood do you suppose that was?”

He twitched a frown, lowering the bow half-way. “Let’s find out.” He nodded toward the town, and we crept down the road, leaving our deer behind.

On the first street, a young girl lay face down in the snow, long brown hair under her cap. Iden and I ran, then flipped over her frigid body, not yet stiff. It took us a moment to accept what should have been clear from her pallid skin, but no blood stained her clothes, no wounds. We could see nothing to explain how she died. I didn’t remember the girl’s name, but knew her parents ran the corner store. 

“Help!” I yelled.

 “Someone, please help!” Iden called out.

Our voices echoed between the frosted gorges. A dog barked, but no one called back. We started running. By the time we reached the market, the dead lay everywhere.

Do you know what most people do in a crisis, when the right thing to do is act fast? They fucking stand there. They freeze, until someone tells them what to do or shows them by doing it first. There must be some primitive part of our brains our engineers have yet to mod away, though I’ve since tried to train it out of me.

We stood there, mouths agape, at the dozens of friends and neighbors leaning on the market booths, apples toppled into the street where my old tutor lay slumped by a cart. Then there was Marc, that little girl’s dad, lying in the street in a puddle of blood, fresh and freezing on his coat. He lay next to a bright display of flowers, the sign for his corner store streaked with the last of his life. The two women beside him were unmarked: no blood or wounds, neither bruises nor signs of broken bones. They just stared up at the sky with frost-glazed eyes.

I made myself forget much of what I saw in that square, but Marc was important: that blood. He lay stabbed while most others were not, and I knew who stabbed him.

“Keep your knife up,” Iden said, his voice as icy as the wind in his hair. 

“What good is that? A knife didn’t do that,” I whispered, gesturing to the woman crumbled by the apple cart without a mark on her. Ms. Carter had lived three houses down. I was breathing hard, struggling to stay calm. “What happened to her?”

Iden opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes darting as fast as mine. “Home,” he said, his jaw set. “Let’s go home.”

Iden turned into an alley, his bow up in front of him. I followed, my mind racing, thinking about Mom and my sisters. I didn’t see a point in his ducking down under windows, or choosing the alley over the street. The enemy would find us if they wanted. They’d gotten everyone else. When the alley ended, we jogged in the open, down the road home.

I tried to make sense of the threat. It would have taken some heavy tech to kill our town. But what, and who had it? Queen Azara had outlawed anything she thought the Asri could abuse to hurt us, and she’d outlawed anything she thought we Chaeten could use to hurt them. The priests said Asri magic can corrupt even little things, like electricity, without the right protections. On the fringe of an empire surrounded by Asri towns, we did without a lot of tech our ancestors found essential, to prevent tragedies like this.

“Asri tech—magic, whatever.” I couldn’t get that thought out of my head. “It has to be.” They didn’t teach us at school how that magic worked. They didn’t want to give anyone the key to abusing it. But it had wiped out communities before.

At first, I thought Iden would keep his mouth clamped shut as we rushed on. “Maybe,” he said. “Let’s go home. Hurry.”

We ran.

We crossed the alley between the school and the temple. Ice clinked in the branches of the bushes along the street. A cat mewed from a porch with a door wide open to the winter cold, the body of Dr. Garla lying in the doorway. I recognized the purple in her hair and blue tint to her skin—a more traditional Chaeten, wearing bold, unrepentant colors when the rest of us were coded to blend in.

A pram drifted slowly across the road toward us, blood smearing the outside. We slowed our pace, but I avoided stepping closer to that carriage, too fearful to look and confirm if it was a baby’s blood that stained those blankets. A woman lay cloaked in indigo down the road, blood on her arms and chest—the mom, perhaps.

On every street we jogged down, only the dead greeted us. Then we were home.

Our gate creaked on its hinges. My pulse pounded in my ears. And then I saw my sisters.

The twins, Cara and Samantha, lay sprawled in the front yard, a dusting of snow on their winter clothes. At five, the twins doted on the youngest, Sora. She lay dead beside the twins on the icy ground, her thin blonde hair rustling in the wind. Brushing the snow off did nothing to warm their little bodies.

I wanted to lose it, to scream, but I didn’t. Iden’s chest heaved, and I gripped a hand on his shoulder. Mom taught me there will always be someone else to cling to when a pillar of our life falls down, and she taught me to be that pillar in turn. We kept it together, holding each other up.

Mom lay dead in the kitchen, near the fire… very near the fire. I’ve never had a nightmare that hollowed me out as much as pulling her red, blistered body away from the embers, seeing the mutilated face of someone I loved so much.

I can tell you what it felt like when I realized she wouldn’t be there to turn to. My hope died. It didn’t feel possible that I was here, and she was gone. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing her, or stop feeling as if she is missing, even if I know she’d hate that. The Chaeten way would be to let her go and never look back. She left me too young to see that lesson home, to teach me how that’s possible.

Resilience is often mistaken for coldheartedness, especially so for us Chaeten. We coded ourselves to survive our near-extinction, never surrendering to fear or heartbreak. When they cut us down and we’d hold our heads high at the end, the Asri saw it as inhumanity, not bravery. But heartbreak sums the same for all of us. I didn’t break that day, but the cost would come later, in my dreams, and in so many quiet moments where I could never fully surrender to joy.

“I’ll check the basement,” Iden said.

“I’ll check the other rooms.”

The bedroom door just off the kitchen creaked as I opened it to see what, at this point, I was expecting. My sister Bella died at twelve, tucking in the young neighbor kids for their nap. There were always extra kids around the house, whose parents were on shift in the mines. That’s how Mom earned coin. Bella’s long blonde hair spilled across the multicolored blanket, her head down as if resting her eyes. I checked her cold body for blood, then lifted a bright-squared quilt to look for clues on the children’s faces and little bodies. Nothing; I’d hoped it felt like sleeping for all of them when they died.

It started snowing out the window. I stayed until I heard Iden’s footsteps behind me. 

“Downstairs is clear.” Iden sheathed his knife and stood for a moment, eyes fixed and overcome. He gripped the doorframe, painted over in bold green and blue geometric designs.

“Should we burn them?” I asked, trying to be practical, to not fall apart.

“The mines.” It looked like he considered his own words as if they hadn’t just come from his mouth. “Mal and Oren won’t be back for hours. They might be—Jesse, they might be okay.”

I bit my lip. All seven of my siblings lived at home with me, odd for Chaeten standards, I know, but the frontier was different.

Iden paced the room. “The Asri don’t use our tech. They wouldn’t want our mine. They’d just want to kill us.”

“The Chaeten-sa had blood on her sword. That’s no accident, and she’s no Asri rebel.”

Iden massaged his forehead. “She didn’t attack us, though. Maybe she killed off the people who did it.”

“Then where are their bodies?”

Iden turned to the bodies of the children in bed, his eyes unfocused. “So, the kids, that bloody baby—” He shuddered. “You’re right. It has to be her.” It still didn’t explain the ones with no wounds. Squatting beside the bed, I held Bella’s cold hand, too exhausted to speculate further. I pushed blond, curly hair from both our faces.

“Mr. Gell was lying by the temple. I saw him.” Iden gripped the door frame so tight I wondered if it would splinter.

“I liked him,” I said. Mr. Gell was the only Asri in town, a bearded man with a bright smile and hazel-ringed eyes that came alive when he taught his classes on history or the Asri language. He left out the parts my mother taught me—things Asri called us in the war—things that rebels still called us in secret, but he meant well. If the killers didn’t check Mr. Gell’s irises for those two shades of color, I suppose they wouldn’t have noticed which kind of human he was.

The embers in the kitchen provided little warmth through the open doorway. I’d have to see my mother’s body again to stoke the fire. I wanted to sink into the chilled wood floor, numb and cold as the dead. Iden had the same glazed-over look as I must have. Seeing him snapped me out of it.

“Iden, we should go.”

Iden nodded, pursing his lips. “Go-bags. Mines.”

Dad had made sure we were prepared for emergencies. I was grateful for a routine that took little thought. I packed food and water, wrapped in the best blankets. Iden took our best hunting gear, our warmest clothes. I picked up a bracelet from Mom’s jewelry box, the only memento I allowed myself that didn’t serve a practical purpose. Not everything in our house would fit in our packs. I took the rest in my memory, vowing to never forget the walls painted in a rainbow of little hand prints, the smell of spices in the pantry, the feeling of being in a room worn down with love and laughter.

Because I knew this house would never be home again.

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