Esme moved forward, her steps small and stumbling. The queen Radiance stared at her with its black eyes, the other Radiance watching her from the sidelines. When she was close enough, the queen Radiance whipped out her arm and pressed her hand against Esme’s face. Esme cried out and jerked back, but something stopped her—it was the other Radiance, half-invisible, holding her in place. A surge of panic washed over her. She thrashed, trying to move away. Will, she screamed in her head, as if he could help her.
“Think of Issssabel,” the queen Radiance said.
At the sound of her sister’s name, even in that hissing, scratching voice, her panic slid away. And she did think of Isabel. Seeing Isabel as a baby for the very first time, and the promise she had made. Isabel in the hospital bed, staring at her through the holo. Isabel lurking in the hallways, sullen and quiet and Esme not knowing what had happened to her. Not understanding. And she wasn’t afraid anymore because she was swollen with guilt, with sorrow. Eighteen years ago, she had looked down at her sister and promised to protect her. And she had failed.
Her face was wet when the queen Radiance slid her hand away.
“Sssssissster,” the queen Radiance said.
Esme nodded, sucking in deep, choking breaths of air. The Radiance were still pressed in a crush around her, their slick skin cool through the layers of her damp clothes. “My sister,” she said. “I just want to find her.”
“Hurt,” it said. “You hurt her.”
“Yes.” Tears streamed down Isabel’s face. “I didn’t do it on purpose, but I hurt her. Please. I just want to make it right.”
“I Sssssaw.” The queen Radiance stepped back, and the others parted from her, shimmering into invisibility. “You hurt ussssssss. Make that right?”
Bile rose in Esme’s throat. “Yes,” she choked out, worried that her whole plan was falling apart. They didn’t understand her. She didn’t understand them. “That was what I was saying. I’ll work with Aiden and the others, and Isabel, if I can find her. We won’t keep you trapped here.” She tried to gesture at the room, wound up knocking against one of the other Radiance. They were so close. “But we’ll have to work together. Because you hurt my people, too. You killed us.”
The queen Radiance said nothing. A few seconds later, a sound rose up through the crowd of Radiance.
Esme swooned. She swayed to the side, stumbling. One of the Radiance caught her and shoved her upright.
“Hurt ussss firsssssst,” the queen Radiance said.
“I know.” Esme wished she could sit down. The room felt too big and too small, both at the same time. “But we can stop hurting each other. Please.”
The queen Radiance said nothing. Esme stared up at her, weeping. Her vision blurred. She could taste the tears on her lips.
“Please,” Esme whispered.
“If you lie,” the queen Radiance said, “we kill you.”
“I’m not lying.”
The queen Radiance lashed out with her arm again, pressing her hand to Esme’s face. The scales felt like water that didn’t leave a wetness behind. “I Seeee that,” it said.
“Please,” Esme said. “Please. Just tell me where my sister is.”
And in one voice, the Radiance told her.
• • •
The shuttle landed on a frozen tarmac, icy wind slashing across the windows. Esme stared out at the unfamiliar landscape of Quilla. No trees, no vegetation. Just endless stretches of white. The only break in the whiteout was the lights of Watchet, the largest city on the planet. They glimmered in the distance, looking like candles through the snow.
“Your driver is waiting for you, Ms. Coromina.” The steward smiled at her from above his jaunty blue scarf. He’d put it on as they descended into the atmosphere. The terraforming on Quilla had been damaged mid-process, presumably by the Radiance. But the planet’s climates existed only in the extreme. Unbearable heat at the equator; frozen wastelands at the poles. The cities here were all self-contained, like old moon colonies in the days before terraforming.
Esme stood up and stretched. The steward held out a thick, full-length coat and a scarf of the same cut and color as his—a part of the Coromina Group uniforms, a new piece updated from the days when Esme traveled the Four Sisters for Planet Maintenance.
“Thank you.” She infused her voice with chilled professionalism. Anxiety gnawed at her insides, but she wasn’t going to let anyone, not the steward, not the driver waiting for her in the cold, and certainly not Isabel, know about it.
The steward nodded politely and helped her into the coat. It was bulky and uncomfortable and Esme wasn’t used to wearing layers. She twisted the scarf around her throat.
“Gloves are in the pockets,” the steward said. “You’re certainly going to want them.”
Esme slipped them on. The voice of the Radiance kept bouncing around her head. The top of the smallest world, they had told her. And a string of numbers that Will had recognized as coordinates. Not the sort used by the Coromina Group. He had fought with Aiden until Aiden translated them: an apartment building in Watchet called the Lacheta. It had not taken much for Esme to pull a list of residents, to find the name Christina Sulka. She had been a minor character on The Intensity of Days nearly ten years ago. And Esme knew: there was Isabel.
“Are you ready?” The steward picked up her suitcase—a small one, as she didn’t plan on staying there long. He grinned at her. “Brace yourself.”
Esme didn’t respond, but when the steward pulled the door open, she realized that his warnings weren’t a joke. The wind was as sharp as a knife, slicing across her features, cutting her face to shreds. Her eyes watered. She turned away and pulled the scarf up over her mouth and nose.
“Driver’s just down there.” The steward pointed. The air glinted with dried snow, but Esme was able to make out the dark shadow of a car waiting for her. “Follow me. Keep your head down.”
Esme did as he said. The wind howled and shrieked, sounding like a woman’s screams. The steward scurried over the tarmac. Esme couldn’t walk as quickly. The ice was too slick, and she had to hold out her hands to her side and concentrate with each step.
“May I help you?” The voice next to her ear was soft and female and unfamiliar. “It’s difficult if you’re not used to it.” She took Esme’s hand, and Esme glanced up, caught a glimpse of glowing blue eyes. The driver.
“Thank you,” Esme said.
The driver smiled. The steward was already at the car, loading the suitcase in the back. Esme and the driver walked in tandem across the tarmac. Esme felt as if she were learning how to dance. Her steps were so clumsy.
The driver helped her into the car, which was, mercifully, filled with heat, a dry manufactured heat that was nothing like the sun-heat Esme knew. The door closed and Esme pulled her scarf away. She shivered violently, her skin burning. The wind was muffled but she could still hear it howling and shrieking.
This was the place Isabel came, of all the places in the universe. In a way, it made sense. It was one of their father’s few failures, this unlivable planet.
The driver climbed in, bringing with her a blast of cold air. Esme shivered. The door shut but the cold air lingered, fighting with the heat. The driver hooked into the car without saying a word. Esme had scheduled her itinerary on the shuttle. They were to go straight to the Lacheta.
The driver glanced up in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes glinted. “Are you certain about this?” she said.
Esme frowned. “Certain about what?”
“The Lacheta. It’s not—well, it’s not a good part of town—”
“It’s not your job to ask questions.” Esme didn’t mean to sound so sharp, but sharpness was easier than kindness right now.
“Just trying to warn you.” The driver seemed nonchalant about the whole experience. “Don’t want you getting into something you can’t handle.”
“I can handle it,” Esme said. She had negotiated with the Radiance. She could speak with her sister.
The car lurched forward through the snow. The engine had a faint humming whine to it, and a red glow wrapped around the car as it glided forward. A heat wave. Melting the snow until they came to Watchet.
Esme leaned back in her seat. Melted snow splashed across the windows, smearing her view. That was fine. Nothing to look at, anyway.
It took longer than she would have expected to get to the city—the car couldn’t go as fast as it could in warmer climates. The drive gave her time to think, to practice what she was going to say. I spoke with the Radiance. She shook her head. The Divested. She needed to call them the Divested, to think of them as the Divested. I spoke with the Divested. We are going to find a way to live together in peace. No more weapons manufacture. No more exploitation. You can help.
Come home, Isabel.
Esme didn’t know if it would be enough. It had barely been enough for Adrienne and Daphne, and they had been human. Their DNA had never been used against them. But it was all Esme had to offer. Their father was dying, and she was CEO. She could shape a new future.
The city’s lights grew brighter. Outlines of buildings appeared in the snowy haze, all of them that twisting organic shape of terraformed architecture. They were like extensions of the ice, jutting out at odd angles, sparkling from the surrounding lights. It didn’t look like a human city. But of course it was. That war had been won twice over. Everything on the Four Sisters was a human city.
Did Esme want to change that? She thought maybe she did, if it meant she could bring her sister back.
Soon, they came to the boundaries of the city. One minute they were out in the wilderness, and the next the car flooded with light as they passed through the shields keeping the cold at bay. Ice and snow vanished from the landscape, and the car picked up speed, winging through the narrow streets. Esme dropped her head back against the seat. There was no point in looking out the windows anymore. Everything blurred together.
She closed her eyes.
She thought about what she was going to say.
She thought about the Divested pressing around her. About the queen, the leader, laying her hand on Esme’s face and Seeing something inside her mind.
She thought about Isabel.
The car slowed to a stop.
Esme’s eyes fluttered open. She straightened up. The driver looked over at her, the glow in her eyes dimming.
“We’re here,” she said. “I’ll wait if you want me to, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t. This is a bad area for a Coromina car.”
Esme looked past the driver, through the window. All she could see was an apartment building streaked with dark smears, like soot or ash.
“I don’t know how long it’ll take,” she said. “I’ll send a holo when I’m done.”
The driver smiled. Her eyes faded to their former dull blue. “Headquarters set you up at the Grand Watchet Hotel,” she said. “It’s a lot nicer than anything you can find around here.”
“I’m sure it is. I’ll leave my bags in the trunk.”
The driver’s smile flickered. “I expected you would.”
Esme took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. The city slammed into her: a smell like mold, a buzzing from the shields, a blast of freezing air. Esme pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders and rearranged her scarf so she didn’t have to breathe that rotten air. The apartments rose up around her. They were shoved up close to another, so close you could stretch out a hand from the window of one building and touch the windowsill of another.
The car sped off, its electric whine echoing through the buildings. The street was hardly wide enough to accommodate it. Esme turned to watch its bright blur disappear around the corner. Then she turned back to the apartment.
WELCOME TO THE LACHETA, read the sign hanging above the door. The letters flickered and popped. Esme went up to the entrance. The door didn’t close all the way. She nudged it open with her foot. Apartment number 4903, that was where the resident list said Christina Sulka lived.
The foyer was as small and cramped as the road outside. A few squares of dirty tile, a wall with a flickering holo flashing weather reports, a narrow elevator. That was it.
Esme pressed the call button for the elevator, grateful she was wearing gloves. The elevator creaked open immediately. It smelled of must and damp and an odd salinity, like the sea. Esme stepped on. The floors went all the way up to 75. She pressed the 49 button.
The elevator groaned upward.
It took a long time. This was not like the elevators at the office, sleek and modern and designed to take people where they needed to go as quickly as possible. Esme stood in the center of the elevator, her arms wrapped tight around her chest, watching the numbers go up. She didn’t know what she would do if someone climbed on the elevator with her. The CEO announcement still hadn’t gone public. But if there was anti-corpocracy sentiment—and of course there was, there always was where the poor lived—they might already know.
As it turned out, it didn’t matter. The elevator reached the forty-ninth floor and expelled Esme without her seeing another soul. But the floor itself showed signs of life—voices filtered through the walls, shouting, laughing. Music. Footsteps. Esme drew herself into her coat and marched down the center of the hallway until she came to 4903. She knocked.
No answer.
Esme closed her eyes. The sounds of the apartment swam around her like they were trying to draw her in. She had a key, of course. She’d gotten it from PM. Secretly, shamefully, without telling Will. She was CEO, and she could get keys to cheap apartments.
A few doors down, there was the sound of breaking glass and then a chorus of screams. Esme fumbled in her pocket, yanked out the key, and swiped it across Isabel’s lock.
The door popped open.
Esme let out a long breath. She knew she shouldn’t go in. All her careful planning would be for nothing if she violated Isabel’s privacy. But the screams continued, and the driver wasn’t waiting, and Esme was a coward.
She went in.
The lights were switched off. Esme closed the door behind her and made sure it was locked. “Lights,” she said, but nothing happened, so she slid her hand over the wall until her fingers hit a switch. A single bare bulb flicked on.
The apartment was a room, with a bed in one corner and a sink and a toilet and a hotplate in the other. It wasn’t very warm, either, but Esme slid off her coat and scarf and draped them across the bed. She looked around the room. There was nothing of the Isabel she remembered in it, and she wondered if her suspicions were wrong, if Christina Sulka wasn’t Isabel after all. The walls were bare, and clothes lay in piles around the floor. There was a single window above the sink that looked into a window across the way. Something hung next to the glass, glittering a little, and when Esme moved closer to examine it, she saw it was a teardrop crystal exactly like the crystals hanging from The Intensity of Days chandelier in Adrienne’s dining room.
This was Isabel’s apartment after all.
Esme sat down on the bed. She felt numb. Thirteen years ago, Isabel had lived in a private estate on the Coromina peninsula, with a pineapple garden and a beach and an entire suite of rooms to call her own. Now she lived in one room that was smaller than any one part of that suite.
Esme closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t cry. This was her fault. Her father’s fault, too. They had done this.
Something plinked against the window, startling Esme. But it was only snow. It left dirty streaks against the glass. Esme stood up. She shouldn’t be there. But she wasn’t going to leave. Not until she saw Isabel.
She began folding Isabel’s clothes.
It was simple, mindless work; it distracted her from the waiting. Dishes were stacked in the sink as well, and Esme could wash those once she finished the clothes. It was a nice gesture: I entered your apartment without permission to ask you to see a father you hate, but at least I folded the clothes.
Yes, it was stupid. But Esme wasn’t going to sit there, either
.
She plucked each item of clothing off the floor and folded it over itself, her movement clumsy and unsure—Esme had never lived in a place where she had to fold her own clothes, because there had always been staff or the auto-cleaners on hand. But she had done more difficult things than fold clothes in her life.
She picked up a flimsy little dress, more like a slip, and something fell out.
Esme stopped. It was a cheap cloth bag, the sort of thing they sold in historical amusement parks. She knew she shouldn’t look at it—clothes were one thing, mysterious bags were another. But she was overwhelmed with a wave of curiosity. All she wanted was insight into her who sister had become. Maybe it was selfishness; maybe she wanted to know that she hadn’t fucked Isabel up too irrevocably. Or maybe she didn’t want to know, so she could do her penance.
Esme leaned down and picked up the bag. It was heavy. For a moment, she just let it sit in her hand, a dead weight. She ought to tuck it back into the dress and leave the dress lying on the floor. But she didn’t. She upended the bag and dumped its contents on her empty palm.
A glass vial, filled with a pale white liquid.
A self-heating metal slab.
A dropper.
Esme stared at it for a long time. She’d seen this sort of thing on holos, and she had a vague idea of how it worked: you dropped the liquid on the slab, and heated it, and held the slab under your nose to take in the fumes. They called it Salamander. It was a low-class drug, and on the rare occasions that Esme went to company parties, she’d find her people doing the higher-class version in the bathrooms sometimes, dropping it straight onto the tongue or into their eyes, depending. She’d turned a blind eye, the way her father had instructed her to do. People have to have their fun, he’d said.
Esme dropped the metal slab and the dropper on the bed. She held the vial up to the light, where it glowed a sickly yellow. This is what Isabel had become, breathing Salamander in this box of an apartment in the coldest part of the system.
Her chest was so tight, she could hardly breathe. Blood rushed through her eyes. Without thinking, Esme walked over to the sink. She unscrewed the vial. She dumped its contents down the drain.