Page 106 of Last of Her Name
I stare at the thing hanging in space, my breath still, my heart suspended.
“The Prismata,” says Zorica, turning to smile at me. “This is where Prisms are born.” As we get closer, the Prismata takes shape, less a glowing ball of light and more a defined structure. Unlike the simple diamond-shaped Prisms, the Prismata is a complex, tessellated form with hundreds of points. A beautiful, sparkling crystal that burns like sunlight at its core. It spins slowly, generating just enough gravity to form an orbit of Prisms in a brilliant ring. Its many facets flash and shimmer as it turns, light playing across the ship and glancing off my skin.
I cannot speak for the beauty of it. Overwhelmed, I stare until my eyes begin to burn.
“Who knows how long the Prismata spun in the void of space, all alone? How startled it must have been to have heard my voice calling out, light-years away.” Danica smiles at the great Prism. “In all humanity’s trekking across the galaxy, we’d never found another sign of life. Until now.”
“It’s … alive?” Tears prick my eyes.
She looks at me, the Prismata’s light shining on her face. “Haven’t you heard its voice? Haven’t you heard it calling you?”
“The code was deactivated …”
“The door was closed, but you heard the whispers behind it.”
I blink, and a tear drops, runs down my cheek. The beauty of the crystal takes on new meaning as I stare into its heart.
“It’sClio,” I whisper.
Danica nods.
I shake my head, unable to comprehend it, but feeling the truth of it in my bones. “All along, shewasreal. She was the Prismata, connected to my mind. But—but how did I imagine thatthingas human?”
“How else would a child’s mind make sense of the vast consciousness linked to hers? With the help of the Firebird code, you gave that consciousness a face, a voice, a personality. The Prismata was the soul that inhabited a mask you yourself created.”
She looks back at the crystal, her gaze fond but also a bit sad. “You aren’t the only one who knew Clio, Anya, though she’s worn many faces over the centuries. I was haunted by a boy with a violin. Zorica often saw a woman with one blue eye and one brown. The Prismata took on a different form for each of us, shaped by our individual personalities. But the consciousness behind them was always the same. We called themClioafter the cybernetic code which made them possible.”
Danica turns to me again. “She has always been with the Leonovs; her voice has whispered in the ear of every emperor and empress to rule the Belt. And every iteration of Clio was as unique as the person to whom it was bound. Knowing what they were, we saw through them and understood it was the crystal’s consciousness we felt, while the faces were fabrications of our own minds. But you, Anya, you had no one to tell you the truth, to explain that what you saw was the Prismata, transformed by your imagination into the figure of a girl.”
So Cliowaspartly my own creation, my mind’s way of understanding this alien life-form to which I’ve always been linked. But how much of Clio was me, and how much of her was the Prismata? Will I ever know where I ended and it began?
I look back at Danica. “Why did she—it—never tell me what Clio was? Why let me think she was a person?”
“The Prismata doesn’t speak, not the way we do. It communicates through feeling, emotion. The words it used wereyourwords, Anya, so how could it tell you what you did not already know?”
“And my parents—myfosterparents—they never said anything. They thought Clio was part of the Leonov madness.”
“It’s likely they feared breaking your delusion, lest they break your mind. They could have tried everything to cure you, but it wouldn’t have worked. Until you knew the truth about who and what she really was, Clio would always be there.”
“And they needed the princess more than they needed Stacia,” I mutter. “That was always their first objective: to use me in their war.” I shake my head, looking from the Prismata to Danica. “And what about Clio? Where is she? Will I see her again?”
“You don’t need Clio anymore, now that you know the truth. This is how we cured ourselves of the hallucinations—by remembering what and who was truly real. You may glimpse her in the years to come, but she will never again be as clear as she was.”
Of course I need her. I’llalwaysneed her. She might be a part of me, but my connection to her is still real. She is scattered throughout my memories, intertwined with me in every way. Maybe her body doesn’t exist, but her soul does.
I’m staring straight at it.
“But whyhideall this? Why not tell everyone there’s an alien life-form powering their whole society? That we’re not alone in the universe?”
“We tried, in the beginning. We told the ruling council of Alexandrine about the Prismata, as soon as we returned from our voyage to discover it. And the moment they heard that the thing powering our world was sentient, they launched every battleship we had, determined to destroy it. They feared it would come to resent us for harnessing its power, and that it would one day turn against us. By then, Prismic energy was already integrated into our everyday lives. We were rediscovering the other human colonies, piercing the stars with our faster-than-light ships. But the council feared the Prismata more than they dreamed of unifying humanity. They didn’t understand that the power we drew from it was given freely. We’d never asked for its light—it had offered it to us in friendship. For all our flaws and ephemerality, it loved us. And in return, we tried to kill it.”
She shakes her head, her eyes darkening. “We stopped them, but at a high cost. Zorica died defending the Prismata. The rest of us swore our bloodline would protect it from then on, and tell no one of its true nature. We took control of Alexandrine, temporarily, we thought. But then someone whispered the wordempress, and … well, here we are.”
“Yes,” I murmur, an acidic taste on my tongue. “Here we are, the great House Leonov, who took that energy—so freely given, you say—and turned it into a personal fortune and an empire and a superweapon to knock down anyone who threatened us. Aren’t we thegreatest?”
Danica blinks at me, her expression impassive. Of course. She’s not the real Danica, just a message, and my anger doesn’t seem to register with her. I’m not even sure whowrotethis message. Most likely, I suppose, it was Emperor Pyotr. Maybe he composed all this in the days before the palace fell, in case he didn’t survive, and plugged it into my infant DNA like an update to a computer system—or a virus—at the same time he deactivated the Firebird code.
She continues as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Now, as the last of our name, it isyourjob to protect it, for the sake of all humanity and the sake of the Prismata itself. There are many who would fear it. Some, like that ancient Alexandrian council, would stop at nothing to destroy it.”