The Rift Coda

“That’s very kind of you, but I believe our time would be better spent debriefing in our quarters, thank you.” Arif shrugs amiably, and Levi and I head to my room.

We walk there in silence and I close the massive wooden door to my quarters and lean my body against it. Levi sits on the lushly piled rug and leans against the bed.

The bed frame is so high that his entire back is bolstered by it. We don’t say anything to each other, not at first. Soon enough there will be plenty of words and so we enjoy a few blissful moments of quiet.

Today we’re going to do our homework. We’re going to be soldiers. We’re going to pore over every intel file we have on the other Citadel races. We’re going to learn their languages. We’re going to see how they fight. And we’re going to make sure that Iathan and the Roones back on their Earth aren’t hiding anything from us. I’m not about to get blindsided again.

“Okay,” he says finally, snapping me out of my own head. “Where do you want to start?”

“With the Spiradaels. Those pig things ate the one hostage we had, and I want to know more about them.”

“I don’t think they can be turned, Ryn.”

“Neither do I. I just want to figure out the best way to kill them.”

“Other than getting eaten by pigs?” He holds up his hand to make it clear that’s a joke and pulls out his laptop so we can begin.

We spend hours learning the Spiradaels’ guttural language, which lacks any sort of flair and only a handful of words that are more than three syllables. We study the footage we have of the giant spindly Citadel race. We watch how they use their hair as a razor-like whip. We see how they block and punch. From fighting them personally, I know they don’t use their legs. It’s all upper body with them. I think I understand it now. It seems the joints on their arms, necks, and shoulders allow them to contort these appendages almost 360 degrees. I don’t think their knees do the same, so they focus on the chest and hair to win.

Over and over again we watch their fighting style and then we practice on each other, blocking and overcoming Spiradael attacks. I never could understand why the Blood Lust never kicked in during sparring, but it never has. This is just yet another mystery of how ARC works—how specific they were when they programmed us with the Blood Lust. It never interferes with our ability to fight an enemy. It only inserts itself if we try to have a life off the battlefield. After we finish with the Spiradaels, we begin with the Orsalines.

It takes all of an hour and forty-five minutes to learn their language. They simply don’t have that many words. I still can’t believe the altered Roones would choose them. If their genetic fuckery is this big gift, why waste it on dumb bear people? The secret must lie in not just their strength, which I am learning is far greater than I gave them credit for, but their devotion to the altered Roones. It’s religious with the Orsalines. They’re zealots and that might make them the most dangerous Citadels of all.

Levi and I study their fighting style. It’s actually not so much a style as out-and-out berserker mode. They don’t kick, because, well, bear legs. They don’t exactly punch, either, as much as they do maul. Mostly what they do is either claw opponents to death or squeeze them until their organs burst. Sometimes, they will just hurl a boulder at them. Or a tree.

Once again, Levi and I do maneuvers and I am grateful for this huge, almost empty room with its cathedral-like ceilings so that we can use the walls and beams to hang and jump from. Technically, we are stronger than the Orsalines. We have more physical strength than any other Citadel, but I would hate to be on the receiving end of one of those hugs. We each find effective ways to get out of these holds and how to keep moving to make sure their nails can’t get at us. They couldn’t penetrate the uniform, of course, but a lucky swipe at the neck while going for the face would lead to death pretty quickly.

After that, we hurry ourselves to the canteen, grab something that looks like a sandwich with some kind of meat and bottles of water with additional electrolytes. We’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time until the council we’ve agreed to have tomorrow.

The Daithi are the next Citadels we study. Their language is nuanced and many words are difficult to pronounce as they don’t use a lot of vowels, almost like Welsh. While the pronunciation and grammar is harder to grasp, the Daithi lexicon is more straightforward than most. There are very few words that mean the same thing, and it is abnormally absent of adverbs and adjectives. It is a language of nouns and verbs, of naming and doing. This in and of itself gives us further insight into their culture. The Daithi are as small as children, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. They are remarkably fast and their fighting style is more like a dance than combat. They move in quickly with deadly accuracy and move to another place in the blink of an eye. The Daithi rarely block. They seem to have little use for defensive fighting because in the footage we’ve seen where they engage, no one—not even the Settiku Hesh—gets close enough to land a punch.

Levi and I quickly realize that the only way to defeat the Daithi is if we don’t rely on sight. We need to use our other senses—smell, their heartbeats, the whirring rush of air when a fist or leg swings toward a body. This is especially difficult for me because of the stupid Kir-Abisat and the sound my own body is throwing off, but in a way, it’s good practice. It forces me to learn how to dampen it even more.

Levi blindfolds me, like the Jedi I’ve always wanted to be, and begins to attack. The first hurdle is just getting out of the way. I focus on his heartbeat and the heat signature his body gives off. When he lunges, eventually I get the hang of spinning away, ducking and rolling in a different direction. As cool as this is, it won’t actually help us defeat the Daithi. Together, Levi and I come up with strategies that will help us strike immediately after deflection. For this, we use not only combinations of punches and kicks from very strange angles, but our knives as well. Guns would be the most useful, of course. I’m never above just shooting someone, but if things go down the way they did with the Spiradaels, we’re going to need to fight them off long enough to talk to them.

We don’t bother leaving the room for dinner. We stuff our faces with the tasteless gel cubes provided by the SenMachs. They will give us the nutrition we need and save us valuable time. Besides, I’m not in any mood to deal with Ezra. I’m actually enjoying today. It feels good to be doing something I’m actually good at as opposed to all this fumbling around, second-guessing every word I say and how it will be interpreted.

When we move on to the Akshaji for the first time, I begin to feel truly afraid. I had been worried up till this point and anxious, of course, because of the sheer volume of puzzle pieces the altered Roones were trying to put together. The Akshaji are barely Citadels. They’ve been enhanced, certainly, but it’s clear they see the Rifts not as a call to duty, but as a form of endless entertainment.

The language does not take us long to learn, and soon we’re able to converse in Akshaj as we study their fighting. But while learning Akshaj is easy enough, learning how to defend yourself from and beat a race of Citadels with six hands at the end of six arms is another story entirely. Levi and I use the sensuits to give us the illusion of this, a visual, just so we know what to avoid and how, but other than looking terrifying, it’s a fairly useless way to train as the four “pretend” arms just kind of hover. In the end, Levi and I devise a high/low strategy and just have to hope it will work.

We spar, taking turns being Akshaj. As humans, we aim for the feet and calves in an attempt to get them off balance, on the ground preferably. Alternately, we go right for the head and throat, aiming killing blows there or using the leverage of what’s around us to jump up and straddle our legs around the necks. Again, guns are always a bonus, but in the case of the Akshaji, we wonder if machetes or scimitars wouldn’t be preferable. It would be a lot easier to just hack off those extra appendages than try to avoid them.

It is near midnight when we finish, but our day is hardly done. We ask Doe to show us any pertinent documents about the Roones that might help us. I had Doe download their entire database when I was on their Earth—unbeknownst to them, of course. We ask Doe to look for anomalies and inconsistencies in the data when compared to the story we were given by Iathan. Doe shows us videos, official documents, health records, experiment hypotheses, the various species the Roones spliced with their own to create the “altered” Roones and the Karekin. Doe assures us that the story Iathan told us is the truth, or at least, the Roones’ version of the truth. The altered Roones would have a very different take on things.

So, for all of Iathan’s arrogance and posturing, he wasn’t lying. We can trust him as an ally. This should make me feel better, but for some reason it doesn’t. It’s so obvious from the research that a civil war was inevitable. I saw it coming years before it actually arrived. Politicians at one another’s throats, rhetoric and propaganda about superior species. There were demonstrations and marches and strikes. The Roones didn’t like what was happening to the Immigrants. The Roones practiced civil disobedience, but it was their civility that was their downfall. There is no reasoning with crazy. There is no compromising with tyranny. None of them thought in a million years it would get to where it would, and when it did, the Roones were more offended at first than they were tactical.

When we finally finish, I feel tired in a way that I haven’t for a while. It is the exhaustion of a full day of hard work, of goals accomplished and the odd clarity you can sometimes find through busywork. I stretch my legs out on the carpet, flexing the arches of my feet and rolling my neck clockwise to get the kinks out. Levi is sitting on the only chair in the room. His back is resting against it, but there is an intensity to his gaze that lets me know he’s far from relaxed.

“What?” I ask him hesitantly.

“We have to talk about this, Ryn. You need to tell me what the hell is going on with you and Ezra, because it’s messy and it makes us all look bad.” I don’t answer Levi right away. Instead, I walk over to the tall leaded-glass window. It is pitchblack outside and all I can see is my reflection. Why don’t these windows open? It’s not like the Faida would be worried about someone falling out. I inspect the seams, I run my fingers over the cool metal, and I hear the window shift and creak. I move my hand away and the sound stops. I wave my hand over the window again and this time it swings open fully. Motion sensors. That’s the kind of thing you might want to tell a guest.

I open the remaining three windows and a cool breeze rushes in to wash away the stale air. There is the faintest smell of eucalyptus and burning wood. The night creeps in slowly like a tired ghost. It’s one thing to see the hour and quite another to actually feel it.

“I had sex with him,” I tell Levi boldly. There’s no point in lying. Ezra and I were together—though, perhaps, the reality was our togetherness was more of a technicality. Still, I believed I loved Ezra and maybe I did or even still do, but it was an indulgent love. It was selfish and myopic, as almost all first loves are.

Yet I also cannot deny that there is—and always has been—something between Levi and me. I can’t say for certain what it is, though Levi seems to have a better idea of it. I also know that he hasn’t allowed himself to feel much of anything for years, which means his feelings cannot necessarily be trusted. His emotions are just unfurling. They are gilded petals, bright and shining, too fragile yet to pluck and examine.

I watch his body change with this admission. His knuckles turn white as they grip the wooden armrests. His back molars grind together, squaring off his jaw. “Okay,” he says softly. “Then what happened.”

I bite the corner of my lower lip. I don’t want to talk about this with him. It’s none of his business. But … it is his business, and he’s right to ask. There’s too much obvious tension among us three right now, and that puts us at a disadvantage. Whatever we feel for each other, at this moment us humans have to put up a united front here. What’s at stake is just too important.

“Everything changed. I don’t know,” I say as I shake my head. “He said there were rules. That once we’d been together like that, we were a proper couple and that I couldn’t deprogram you anymore because it wasn’t right to be intimate with someone else.”

I watch as Levi gives a giant exhale out, as if there had been a weight pressing down on his chest and now his lungs were finally free to let go of a breath fully. “So, basically, he gave you an ultimatum.”

I undo the topknot from my head. “I don’t blame him. He’s not wrong,” I say as I let my long hair fall. I rub my fingers into my scalp to help relieve the pain of having it pulled back all day. “He just could have handled it better. I mean, I really thought he understood me. I thought he would have known for sure that I don’t respond well to that kind of pressure.”

Levi slides off the chair and crawls toward me on the floor. “But that’s because he doesn’t know you. You guys knew each other for a couple months and there were only two weeks of that time where you were actually together, right? Isn’t it possible that the deprogramming sort of fucked with your ability to have perspective about him? Isn’t there a really good chance that the love you feel for him is mixed up with a bunch of other things?”

A laugh escapes my mouth. “And don’t you think you could say the same exact thing about you and me?” I chide.

Instead of laughing with me or even cracking a smile, Levi’s eyes become even more serious. “No,” he says firmly enough to wipe the grin off my face. “Because I know you. I’ve known you since you were a little kid. I’ve watched you train. I’ve fought beside you. I’ve been amazed by your ability to keep getting back up even when I know you’ve been hurt really bad. You’re a good friend. You’re an excellent commander. You hate ice cream and except for your uniform, I’ve never seen you wear the color green, ever, which is probably a question that answers itself. I know you and I never would have done what Ezra did to you.”

I draw my knees up and wrap my arms around my legs. I am making myself small. This conversation is rolling around inside my chest like a marble in a tin can. “Well, that’s easy for you to say—now. But trust me, things do feel different after you sleep with someone.”

Levi throws his hands up in surrender. “That’s what you’ve got to say to me after what I just said? You think it’s cool to be casually rude? Are you trying to pick a fight?”

I actually don’t want to pick a fight at all, but his speech was somehow both totally emotional and entirely logical. He might be right. And I don’t want him to be right. Still, I tell him no, but I can hear my voice becoming harried. “It’s just that if you and I had sex right now, you wouldn’t want me dealing with Ezra. Right? You wouldn’t want me touching him or holding him.” The whole time I don’t let go of my legs. I’m like a little khaki blob on the floor.

“Of course I wouldn’t, but the difference is, I never would have had sex with you in the first place. Don’t you get that? I wouldn’t do that with you until I knew a hundred percent that it was you and me and no one else. I’m a Citadel. I know how to be patient. I understand the benefits of waiting it out. We both know that your aim is pretty much useless when you’re trying to lock in on a moving target.”

I sigh and bring my head up. “I don’t even know if I made a mistake. Was I not supposed to get involved with Ezra? Was I not supposed to try to deprogram you in the field? Because neither one of those things felt like choices.”

Levi sighs, almost sadly. “I’m not saying that,” he assures me. “I know why you slept with him.”

This ought to be good, I think to myself. “Oh yeah? Why is that?”

“Because you could. Because you had a choice. For the first time, in years, you got a say in what you wanted to do with your own body.” Levi wipes his palm over his face. “I get it, because I want that power, too.”

Levi isn’t wrong, but he isn’t completely right, either. I had sex with Ezra, yes, because I could, but also because I wanted to. Because I care about him. Because I found him sexy and attractive and wanted to feel him as close to me as possible …

I push what feels like a literal swamp of emotions aside. They are sticky, murky things. I don’t need to wade through them right now. Right now, I am looking at a boy who can’t do what he wants, and I hate it. It’s not fair. Levi doesn’t get a say. He can’t own his body the way that I can own mine, and the weight of those bonds is suffocating him.

“You should take some red pills,” I tell him gently. “We should get your Blood Lust under control as soon as possible, especially here.” I give him a wide grin. “There’re a lot of really pretty girls here.”

Levi looks up, but he does not return my smile. He opens his mouth to say something and then he closes it again with a brief shake of his head. “Ryn, I …”