Page 105 of Last of Her Name
She holds out her hand. I stare at it, wondering what more she could possibly tell me, what truth I’ve still not yet uncovered. And it frightens me, to think there might be more—another twist, another secret. I’m so weary of secrets. But this ghostly woman knows precisely which pressure point will shatter my resistance. After everything, Clio’s name still works on me like a hook, tugging me forward, always calling me deeper and further.
I crossed a galaxy for her. What’s one more step?
I stand up and take the woman’s hand again. “I’m ready.”
The Solariat blurs away like smoke, to be replaced by the curving walls of a spaceship.
I flinch, caught off guard by howrealit feels. The cabin we’re in is long and boxy, with high, narrow windows looking out to the stars. Tables line either wall, cluttered with scientific-looking but long outdated equipment. I recognize a few things as old versions of Dr. Luka’s machines—gene sequencers, microscopes, brain scanners. There are food wrappers and empty coffee cups scattered around. The windows are covered in markered equations; in some places the numbers have been scribbled out by a frustrated hand, the lines sharp and angry.
After taking it all in, I realize who the woman is.
“Danica Leonova,” I whisper. “You’re the first empress.”
“Not yet,” she replies. “This was my only dominion in those early days.”
She pulls me down the deck, her eyes shining. “My sister and I bought this ship, made it our lab for our less … legal experiments. Human augmentation and genetic enhancement were our business, but our society frowned on such things back then. We had to take our work offworld, into no-man’s-sky. It was here, aboard theFirebird, that we developed our most powerful cybernetic codes.”
“Like the code the tensors have?”
She nods. “It was our first big success. After that, we began working on a new neural enhancement, a code we hoped would spark telepathy. The joining of human minds, the most powerful form of communication that could exist.”
I pull my eyes away from the lab and stare hard at her. “You said you could tell me about Clio. Not ancient history.”
“If you want to know who you are,” she replies, “you must understand who youwere.”
The air around us blurs, and we seem to rush forward without ever taking a step. We’re still on the same deck of the ship, only at a different time. A dark-haired woman is lying on the floor—another, older version of Danica herself. She looks exhausted, defeated, surrounded by lab equipment and flickering holograms of neural networks. Now the windows are so covered in messy equations and formulas that I can’t see the stars at all. The mess of cups and wrappers has deepened; there’s hardly a bare spot on the floor or counters. It looks like the lair of a madwoman, and the other Danica perfectly fits the role. Her hair is a mess and her lab coat is covered in stains. She doesn’t look like she’s slept or showered in days. Her bloodshot eyes stare without blinking. As I watch, she picks up a small object and cradles it in her hands.
I catch my breath. “I’ve seen one of those before. The tensors call them Legacy Stones.”
The metal flower unfurls over the other Danica’s palms, and then long, searching tentacles, thin as hairs, sprout from its center. They reach for her, wrapping around her head and inserting their tips into the skin at her temples and the base of her skull. That is something the tensor’s Stones definitely didnotdo. Perhaps over time, theirs had broken down, unable to perform their original purpose, instead becoming nothing more than relics. But the object Danica holds is still new. I hold my breath as its filaments begin to gleam, beads of light trailing along their lengths and sinking into her brain.
My guide looks down at herself, eyes soft. “All my efforts to activate human telepathy failed. But we had sunk everything into this project, and we couldn’t afford to lose. In my final moments of desperation, I grafted the experimental code to my own DNA.” She shakes her head. “But it didn’t work. My sister, only a deck above, couldn’t hear anything of my thoughts, no matter how hard I broadcast them.”
The Danica on the floor vanishes like smoke.
My Danica turns to me, a slow smile spreading across her face. “But my failure would become our first connection with something even greater. A discovery that would change the course of civilization.”
She wipes off some of the equations on the window, and through the glass, I make out a tiny object spinning just outside the ship, like a bright, curious butterfly.
“Is that a Prism?”
“It’s the very first one we found, drifting in the void of space. And not by accident.” Danica looks at me. “We’d tried to project our thoughts to each other, and failed—inhearingthem, but not in sending them. The messages were getting lost in transmission, adrift in the dark channels of space-time. And as we soon found out, someoneelsewas listening.”
“The Prisms …heardyou?”
She nods. “They heard, and they came looking.”
I stare at the crystal outside the window, then notice another appear beside it.
Danica presses her hand to the window, smiling fondly at the Prisms, which begin to multiply, more and more materializing out of darkness and clustering at the glass. “Soon, we were finding a new Prism every few days. All we had to do was close our eyes andreach, and we could feel them spinning in the dark. So we gathered them up and studied them, and learned we could even manipulate the energy they produced, using the telepathy code. Before long, we realized they were leading us somewhere, bread crumbs scattered across the stars. And the deeper we went into that sky, the farther we chased the trail they made, the more they called to us. We were terrified of what we would find, of where they would lead us, but all our lives we’d sought the answers to impossible questions. So what could we do but follow?”
The scene changes again, to a larger ship, this one equipped for warp. A Prism in a rudimentary diamantglass box spins on the dash. Danica stands at the controls, with another woman close enough in appearance that I know they are sisters. The new one must be Zorica Leonova. They both look older now, perhaps forty or fifty.
The ship wades through space teeming with spinning Prisms. They are thick as sand in a Rubyati wind, thousands,millionsof them glinting in the darkness.
“We finally found the main cloud, in a bit of space we’d come to call theVault,” Danica says. “We had made a fortune such as no human has ever known. We were already rulers of Alexandrine in practice, thanks to the Prism trade. But the crystals still called to us, drawing us deeper and deeper into the cosmos, light-years away. And this is where the trail ended.”
She points at an orb shining ahead, which I at first mistake for a star. But as the ship drifts toward it and the cabin floods with golden light, I realize it’s only a little larger than a moon.