Taryka turned from her, listening to the tinkle of the glass mobile and the whir of the warm air moving across the promenade. She stared at the image on her tablet and heard her sister’s voice again: “You always meddle. This isn’t a world for meddlers.”

  She wiped away the mark on her tablet. She went back to her flat and mediated for an hour. Flickers of the dreams from the night before kept bubbling up, jerking her away from awareness and back into the cold, hard world of thought.

  Taryka went back to her analyzer. “Tell me when Doctor Divati has his shift today.”

  “Doctor Divati is working the overdark.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome, Taryka.”

  Taryka prepared for work as the darkness descended, and the overdark approached. There had once been painfully bright light in the ship, all the elders said. Light so bright it made you want to dance all day and celebrate all night. There was no overdark then. The overdark, the powering down, was a way to conserve energy across the ship. No one knew what or when their final destination was, but clearly, the leadership understood that to get there, they needed to ration and preserve what resources they had.

  Taryka went about her work, processing the first body of the overdark, until Doctor Divati arrived. Then she quietly put down her tools and went to his office.

  Divati beamed at her when she entered. “Taryka, to what do I owe this audience?”

  “I have a question about an autopsy you performed.”

  “Of course,” he said, but she saw a flicker of unease in his face. “Have a seat.”

  “A body came in last overdark,” she said. “I ... I did some of the processing, before you had it taken away. She was not from here.”

  “Certainly,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “We have many strays—”

  “People from other places.”

  “Indeed.”

  “The processing I did was not consistent with violet gas. I believe an error was made in the autopsy.”

  “Really? Well, I will look into that.”

  “Doctor, I know that her tattoo was from … the Others.” She watched his face, trying out her bluff. He frowned for the first time, and when he looked at her now, it was more seriously.

  “What do you know about the Others?”

  “I know there have been more and more,” she said, “even as all of us here seem to be less and less. I must know what’s happening, doctor. She haunts my dreams. I fear a great wrong has been done here, and there are more great wrongs to come.”

  “You are too young.”

  “I will go mad, not knowing. The way my sister went mad.”

  “Your sister had an unfortunate sickness. It was not caused by a lack of knowledge.”

  “You know there is madness in us. You treated my sister. My mother. You owe me this one truth.”

  “You want to know?” Divati said. “It will drive you mad?”

  “I want to know,” Taryka said. “I will bring this to leadership.”

  “That would be foolish,” he said. “They will kill you.”

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll take it to them.”

  Divati mush have seen the resolve in her face, because he said, “Come with me.”

  He took her down to the elevator near the flooded pond. They entered the elevator. She expected him to choose a level, but he did not. Merely stood there in the silence until the transparent door closed. Behind him, there was damage to the back of the elevator. Taryka could see through to the mesh beneath, the thin filament that protected the inner hull from the outer hull.

  “She was not from here,” Divati said. “There are a few who know this. It may be that you should be among those few in this next generation—one to know the truth of things, so you can protect the others.”

  “Where? The ships? That’s all there is, Divati.”

  Divati closed his eyes and sighed. “It’s not,” he said. “There is more out there. Much more. We cannot let them know.”

  “Let who know?”

  “We can’t let them know that we have landed.”

  Taryka felt numb. “Landed …?”

  “Our ship has reached its final resting place. The people we bring in, the bodies … they are those who have settled here. We need them to replenish our organic stores.”

  “When did we land?”

  “A decade ago,” he said.

  “You kept us … We are in the dark.”

  “The dark is all we know. The light would kill our people. New bacteria, the radiation, and we know almost nothing about the microbiome here. You think you can just unload everyone on some new planet, when three generations have known nothing but deep space? You can’t.”

  “But the ones who sent us—”

  “We have learned how to live in this bucket,” he said. “The transition to outside … it could kill us.”

  “But clearly some other ships have made it work!”

  “We study them, these bodies, to see how they are adapting,” he said. “The results are … inconclusive. We can’t risk losing this.”

  “Or your power,” she said.

  “What?” Sharp.

  “What happens to your power when people have a whole world to explore? What happens to your power when we can … leave? When we are no longer fast?”

  “You’re naive.”

  “This is mad.”

  “It is practical. You understand, Taryka. You are the most practical of all the processors. You can help me with these studies. You can—”

  “People need to know.” She thought about Paya and her three cups of tea. “People shouldn’t have to live this way for no reason.”

  “People like being told what to do,” Divati said. “There is quiet here. Order. Safety. What’s wrong with that?”

  Taryka firmed her mouth. What was wrong with it indeed? All these generations, all of her ancestors, Divati’s ancestors, sacrificing to get them to some other world, and here they sat, too terrified of the light to leave the darkness.

  “I understand,” Taryka said.

  “Do you?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good.” Divati took her hand. “Come now, you just need to rest. This is a great revelation.” He walked with her back to the processing center. The overdark was beginning to lighten; her shift was nearing an end.

  “Here we are,” Divati said, guiding her to a seat. “Let me get you something, just a little something, for the shock—”

  Taryka burst up from her seat. “No!” She tried to run past him. He hit her across the face with the back of an instrument tray. The shiny metal tools crashed to the floor. A spray of blood from her face arced across the front of his gown. Her gaze met his, and she knew in that instant that her instinct had been right: he was going to make her mad, put her away, silence her, just like Makrolai.

  Taryka rushed out of the processing center as the rest of the level woke. She ran through the promenade, blood streaming from her face, shouting, “They’ve lied to you! We’ve landed! We’ve landed! We are free!”

  Those around her recoiled. A few market vendors pulled down their awnings to shield their wares from her as if she were a threat to them.

  “We have already arrived!” Taryka said. “Don’t you see? Don’t you know? There’s no vacuum of space beyond these walls! No ships out there! The strays live on the planet. There’s a planet out there, everything we were seeking. They’ve kept it from us.”

  Paya ran up to her, took her by the shoulder. “Hush now, Taryka, you are exhausted. Where have you been?”

  “I’ve seen it, Paya,” Taryka said. “We aren’t bound here any longer. We are free.”

  Paya smiled and stroked her hair. “Of course, of course.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I have seen many who came to believe this, in my time,” Paya said. “It’s... a type of sickness. You are just a little ill.”

  “You listen!” Taryka said and twisted away. “I’ll show you!” She ran. Several others followed, including Paya. Taryka ran to the end of the promenade and went down into the yellowing park, through the flooded paths where the pond overflowed its boundaries, and to the elevator. She picked up a great length of metal pipe near the pond worksite and unlocked the elevator.

  There, where the metal mesh was rotten, she began to hammer at it with the pipe. Again and again, she hammered, until the mesh broke away. She peeled at it, revealing gooey, glistening flesh beneath.

  “Stop!” Paya yelled. “You will kill us all!”

  Taryka pressed the elevator closed. Paya banged on the translucent doors.

  “This is all an illusion, Paya! All a lie!” Taryka dug her hands into the flesh beneath the metal. She took out great fistfuls of the stuff, gelatinous goo, the consistency of liquefied organs. A pool of the stuff started to form around her. A great stench began to issue from the wound, so great she almost passed out. Her breathing came ragged; sweat poured down her face. Eventually, the hole was big enough to crawl into.

  She looked back. A large crowd had gathered around her. The order police were coming down the promenade.

  Taryka crawled into the fleshy tunnel and continued her work. She dug with the pipe now, deeper and deeper. A tapping at the elevator doors. Raised voices. The order police would be through soon.

  She jammed the pipe into the end of the tunnel. Resistance, then—the pipe slid forward, broke through. She gasped and yanked it out.

  Until the moment the end of the pipe came free, she was still uncertain of what to expect: the vacuum and a cold, blistering death; some other world, its violet sky too bright to endure; or a wave of police, simply waiting for her to crawl her way to them.

  What she did not expect was to pull the pipe away and see only darkness on the other side. Stillness. Nothingness. It was as if she stared into death itself, into the black during overdark.

  Taryka threw away the pipe and used her hands to widen the hole, pushing the engorged flesh out past her feet as she propelled herself forward, ever forward, and slipped into the darkness of the unknown.

  The Judgement of Gods and Monsters

  The most monstrous of the collaborators were put on trial, found guilty, and condemned to death in their absence as it had been done for centuries. As it would be done for centuries more.

  The Justice Commission saved the worst of the collaborators for last. Already, the day had been long with sessions beginning well before the first rising of the sun. The room had warmed and cooled with successive rotations of the bloated orange star riding high in the sky, and the assembled spectators had pulled on smoked glasses or jackets as appropriate with the shifting heat and light. Eight sunrises into a ten-rotation day, the six judges on the great stone dais at the center of the court theater were slumped and weary. But the prosecutors still came, an endless stream of them, enough to condemn today’s five hundred named collaborators.

  Finally, the last prosecutor of the session rose from her seat, the folds of her munificent violet robe shifting like ripples of storm cloud, and said, “Now we come to Elodiz Ta Muvard, former navy officer and one-time harbormaster for the city of Cerize.”

  She paused and the crowd in the public boxes that ringed the great court theater leaned forward. Many had waited throughout the day’s rotations just to have a good seat for this condemnation.

  She continued, “Ta Muvard has been tried by the Justice Commission and found guilty of the following crimes.”

  Once more she paused for effect and the silence stretched; the result of hundreds of held breaths. The crowd had heard of Ta Muvard only recently, his crimes exposed by a family member. Had he been the worst of the collaborators during the war, this man they knew as one of the great heroes of their city, the benevolent master of commerce for their rich harbor, the man who sponsored the educations of dozens of poor youth and gave generously of his wealth each year, paying four times that required in religious tax to the city’s patron god, Savazan? Surely, it could not be. It was an impossibility. They had heard wrong.

  The prosecutor began her recitation: “Ritual cannibalization with the intent to call nefarious magics aligned with the Enemy’s purpose. The mass killing of over forty infants in the Mosov hospital, their bodies delivered to the Enemy to power the sentient machines that killed tens of thousands of our soldiers in Fuzil. The facilitation of murder in the death of fifty-seven mentally unsound patients of the Sazid Retreat with the intent to revive them through dark magics for insurrection against the home state. The capture, abuse, and sale of three thousand young people over the course of forty years for conscription in the Enemy’s army. Identifying and aiding in the murder of General Ozian Te Soliviar and her family during the ceasefire he conspired with the enemy to negotiate for just this purpose, removing her from the field to her less secure family estate. Aiding and abetting the Enemy with information leading to the deaths of ten thousand soldiers on the fields of Gavozia, and forty thousand more burned alive at the front near Hovash. Channeling city funds collected via the harbor tax to the Enemy and Enemy agents. Facilitating the theft and shipment of weapons from Cerize harbor to Enemy weapons caches.”

  The prosecutor shuffled the green billets in her hands. “There are another three pages, your worships.”

  “Continue,” the Senior Judge said.

  And so the prosecutor did until even the eager crowd began to become restless and uncomfortable. One of these was a young reporter from the Cerize Standard, the first of the free media to capture and record the opening of the Justice Commission sessions. A copper recording device was affixed to his shirt like an oversized metallic boutonniere. The device smoked occasionally and for the last three rotations of the sun, he had expected it to set him on fire. But it continued to whir away without issue and he was glad of it now because the exhaustive list of Ta Muvard’s crimes was so long as to be unbelievable. The absurdity of it, that a single man had committed so many crimes over forty years, was the sort of story that a fictioneer would never have had the audacity to dream up.

  Beside him sat a meaty, squinty-eyed woman with a wide rump that pressed comfortingly into his, a closeness among strangers that would have been impossible a decade before. She wore the red-and-black linen suit of a Justicar. She was the only Justicar in the building, at least the only one on duty, and he thought it odd that she was here to listen to a list of crimes instead of out there capturing men like Ta Muvard as was her sworn duty. Her fingers absently caressed the edges of the hat resting on her left knee. Her face was impassive as the prosecutor rattled out the charges and the reporter thought that curious, too, because Ta Muvard’s crimes were truly the most stomach-churning he had yet to hear in this court theater since he had taken this beat six months before. Of course, Justicars had been bringing collaborators to trial since the end of the war five years ago, so there was the potential, certainly, that she had seen worse. But if so, the public would have heard of it. Wouldn’t they?

  Finally, the prosecutor below finished her long sermon of horror. The reporter found that he had blanked out the last few paragraphs, letting his mind wander. Well, that’s what the recording was for. He couldn’t remember everything.

  Senior Judge Corvoran rose from her seat at the end of the table of Judgment. The reporter leaned in to get a better recording. People loved Corvoran as she was the only commoner to be given a seat on the Commission.

  Corvoran said, “We, the Thirty-second Justice Commission of the Sixth Age, do hereby find the citizens on trial today guilty of their crimes. We legally condemn them to be labeled collaborators henceforth. The sentence for their crimes is heretical death. This sentence may be commuted to consecrated death only if they agree to appear before this court within ninety days’ time and provide full written and spoken confessions of their crimes, willingly and without duress. Those who do flee from the Justicars who serve their warrants, or who refuse to cooperate with the Justice Commission hearings, will be buried alive, their names expunged from all historical record, and a list of their crimes engraved on their tombs for all the gods to see here and in the afterlife. It being so ordained, we arraign this hearing. The Commission shall recommence after the Maliter holiday season.”

  The other judges rose and bowed to the crowded theater of justice. At that, the assembled citizens finally began to mutter and shuffle, searching for belongings or making quick exits in search of the lavatories.

  The reporter stretched his legs and turned to the Justicar beside him as she, too, shuffled to her feet.

  “I admire what you do,” the reporter said to her, “bringing monsters like that to justice. “Someone so vile …” He shook his head. “It’s incredible no one knew of his crimes before the Commission convened. Had you heard of him before today?” He fiddled with his recording device. It was smoking again.

  “I have,” she said, pulling on her broad black hat. “He’s my father.”

  Darkness came up from the south forty years ago. I wasn’t alive then, but I had heard about it, of course. They were the stories I learned around the warm hearth on a cold night as my mothers mended fishing nets and baked bread and cobbled shoes. None of us were fighters then. Even the community guardians we appointed were trained in little but the art of restraining a drunk widower or mischievous teenager bent on stealing chickens for sport. The Enemy, the darkness, brought with them war machines steeped in magic, already well-oiled with the blood of countries they had destroyed before they reached ours. The young people back then thought they could halt the encroaching armies with the words and gifts and fine speeches they had been taught in school for quelling personal arguments and community disputes. But the elders knew better. The elders knew we had faced the Enemy before and knew the only way to fight monsters was to become monsters ourselves. There was a guidebook for it. The plan was all laid out. It was the only way we could survive.

  The darkness was an old evil, one we had purged from time immemorial, as predictable as the rotation of the heavenly bodies. They came every two hundred and twenty-eight years, their emergence perfectly timed with the aphelion of the ever-present winking green star in our sky called the Mote. We had fought them so many times that we had a strict protocol for the aftermath of that conflict. When the Great War was over, we were to appoint Justicars to hunt down what remained of the Enemy’s machines and black magics and the monstrous people who had collaborated with them and we were to expunge them from the face of the world. Then the guidebooks and the records would be shut up again until they were needed during the next cycle. Until we began it all again.