A CRYSTALLINE FREQUENCY chapter 3
recursion, unspooled
Vex throws me over his shoulder and hauls me from the pit before the guards can drag me away, hissing at any who come close. “I’m painting a mural with her blood,” he announces, and no one dares question him, not even his uncle.
I imagine the Grand Monarch is too busy preparing a goading victory speech to rub in my family’s faces to care.
Despite my distinct memory of these corridors, I have no idea where Vex is taking me since I’ve closed my eyes against his powdery back. Slowing my heart rate and acting dead is nearly impossible with the anxiety of the unknown.
The mechanical whir of a door sliding open interrupts his aggressive footsteps, and his spicy, earthy scent washes over us tenfold, confirming where we are. His hovel.
As the door shuts behind him, I try scrambling off his shoulder, but he throws me onto his bed first, leaving me flustered and disoriented. My eyes struggle to adjust to the dim lighting, and once they do, the state of his spherical room jars me.
The curving walls glow with the neon colors of Lupheria, the only source of light in this dark hole. He’s painted all manner of jagged depictions on the dark stone, from wilted flowers to dead butterflies to broken skulls.
The images alone imply doom to all things Lupherian, but the paint disturbs me more. Nothing natural produces such colors on this planet. Unless colorant was synthetically crafted…he decorated his walls with the blood of my people.
I push upright, rage coursing through my battered body. “What is wrong with you?”
On the opposite side of the room, Vex stops rummaging through tools to cast a baleful look over his shoulder. “Should I have slammed you on the floor? I’m starting to think I should have.”
“What was that about—in the pit? Everyone thinks I’m dead now! You…you are planning on killing me. I’ll tell you how to infiltrate Ziphoter, and you’ll kill me. Then no one will know you lied.”
Slowly, he pivots toward me, a thin metal instrument in hand. “You thought, for one second, I would let you live after all you’ve done to hurt my family?”
I eye his pointy little weapon, knowing I won’t stand a chance if he decides to torture me in here. This fortress’s windows are impenetrable, and the electronic doors only open at the behest of residents or workers. In our youth, Vex gave my holosleeve access, but I’m sure by now he’s fortified their whole system against me.
Besides, my holosleeve is still disabled, a useless chunk of metal in my forearm. I can’t contact anyone to save me.
“I’m not telling you anything if you don’t uphold your agreement to spare me.” I try to square my shoulders, but the right one is sore from our fight, so I probably look as pathetic as I feel.
“Oh, I will spare you. For now.” He twirls the tool between his fingers while closing the hatch to the rest of his stash. “I want your corpse’s blood fresh for rituals on Ziphoter, once I’ve claimed it.”
“That’s not—” My argument evaporates when he unbuckles his weapon belts and discards what remains of his strappy shirt. Even with the dark powder covering his skin, I spot the darker patch of black blood oozing from the one cut on his side. I expect him to heal it with a salve, but he stalks toward me instead. “What are you doing?”
He stops beside his bed, eyeing me up and down. “Not whatever you’re thinking.”
Before I can scurry away, his tiny weapon is at my throat, pressing into the superficial wound.
Dizzying pain flares from the contact, but I resist the urge to flee, fearing he might kill me quicker if I move at all.
“I haven’t…told you…yet,” I manage through gritted teeth and shallow breaths.
“Oh, how silly, I forgot,” he says, all sarcasm. Removing the tool from my throat, he taps the dull end to his own temple and backs two paces away. “No brains in here.”
Ignoring his words, I focus on the instrument, its tip beading with my iridescent pink blood. As he presses it to his sternum, the color is swallowed by the dark powder, inking black lines into his flesh.
Those rumors are true, then.
“I’m not dead,” I point out, failing to break his concentration. “You can’t carve your victory doodle yet.”
His lip twitches upward, but otherwise he doesn’t react to the pain as he drags the tool through his skin, creating a cracked hexagonal pyramid—a broken crystal. “It’s my promise to you. Your death is set in flesh.”
“Guess I’ll have to decompose it, then.”
“You had your chance in the pit and squandered it. Pity pity for you.” He tosses the carving tool toward his stash and walks backward into his bathing chamber. When he returns a second later, the taunting gleam hasn’t left his eyes, and he pelts a jar that’s probably intended to crack my skull.
I catch it and cast him a skeptical glare. “You’re giving me the means to heal myself?”
“Can’t have my precious prisoner attracting an infection. At that, you’re actually superior.” He pops the lid off his own jar and smears the gray paste on his wounded side, again without flinching.
The sight nauseates me, and if someone I trust were here, I would’ve shamelessly asked them to tend to all my cuts for me. I almost consider just leaving my ravaged body as is, but I can’t on Rakillon. Lupherians aren’t well adapted to the microbes here, and what’s innocuous to the Rakis can be deadly to us.
Still suspicious, I sniff the paste for the scent of poison, but none I know of are present. As much as I wish for a reasonable excuse not to utilize the salve, none exist, and with a grimace I start lathering my plethora of wounds.
“So squeamish,” he jeers, crouching before me in a perfectly kickable position. I refrain only because I’m too busy scrubbing my calf, the initial wound healed but a scar remaining.
“Why isn’t the scar—” I begin, but then I check the jar’s ingredients label and answer my own question. “This doesn’t have all the necessary biomaterials to heal scars.”
“You spent enough time on this planet to know that’s not how we operate here,” he chides, delighting in my indignation. “You can’t erase your scars until you’ve dealt me the same blows—or worse.”
“Or death, you mean,” I correct sourly, locating the scar on his side. Unless he has a few on his legs I can’t see, it’s the only one on his body, meaning I’m his only opponent he hasn’t killed.
Part of me wants to believe it’s because somewhere, deep down, he still cares about me, but I’m not that hopelessly optimistic. This boy has heartlessly murdered tens, maybe hundreds, of my people. If not for my bargain, I would be just another tally on the list.
“You sound like you want to settle the score, Valah.” He extracts a small knife from his pants, presenting the hilt to me. “Have your way. On me, scars never last.”
Without thinking, I snag the knife, but as soon as he bares his throat, my bloodlust fades. What if I accidentally slice too deep? What if I purposely slice too deep?
Being here, in this room, where I used to study and play and live for months at a time…it tangles my heart in a paralyzing snare. I desperately want to slit his throat—tear out the vocal cords that betrayed me by spilling my family’s secrets to Nahaurius.
But I can’t. I can’t. I can’t smother the vestiges of the boy who once shared a soul with mine. A piece of me would rip from this plane of existence along with him, and I know I’d never coax it back.
Not even logic can nudge me into killing him. The door is electronically locked, and Nahaurius’s stewardess will know if Vex’s holosleeve goes offline. Guards will rush here to check on him, find me over his corpse, and shoot me on sight.
And even if I could sneak out of this room, there’s no hiding who I am on Rakillon. Not only am I particularly recognizable, but I can’t possibly disguise myself as a Raki long enough to acquire an escape vehicle. Their whole species exists within a spectrum of black and white—their whole planet does. I’m literally a glowing target here.
That doesn’t mean I can’t use this weapon to my advantage, though, at least momentarily.
Lunging forward, I angle the blade toward his eye, close enough to slice his retina if the mood strikes me. The fact he doesn’t move—doesn’t even flinch—is proof that I wouldn’t succeed.
“Tell me where my crew is,” I say, masking my anger as confidence.
A slow smile stretches across his face, black teeth gleaming on display.
“What did you do with Maknus?” I demand, the despair seeping through this time.
Vex inches his eye a little closer to the knife. “I have no clue who you’re talking about.”
“The one who tried to save me—the one you stabbed.”
He shrugs indifferently. “No idea.”
The knife trembles in my hand as the endless possibilities of Mak’s torture flash through my mind. “I will tear you apart one cell at a time if you hurt him.”
“You already saw me hurt him, so you’d better get started on the tearing process.” He shifts so tip of the blade touches cheek, drawing a tiny tear of blood. “Should take…a few million years—probably more, considering you’re you.”
“I mean did you—did you kill him?” My voice breaks as I fight not to cry, and Vex’s smile evaporates, like he’s just now realizing this isn’t a fun game.
“I don’t know what happened to him. I left him to haul you away, and he wasn’t with the rest of your crew when we rounded them up. Trust me, I looked.” The violence in his tone confirms he would’ve tortured Mak if he’d found him, but my jitters subside because he didn’t. Mak got away, and hopefully Azaria and Harvel healed him.
I hope I hope I hope.
“I’ll pass on your offer, then,” I say, shakily retracting the knife from his face. “These scars are my promises to you.”
Putting on a collected demeanor, I smear the paste over my severed throat. And immediately gag.
Vex snatches his weapon, smirking. “Is that a challenge I smell?”
A challenge—that would be the best way to ensure my safety. If I challenge him to see which one of us can secure the ziphium crystals first, he’ll have to let me out of this room, off this planet. And if I conquer Ziphoter—conquer him—in a fair competition, his uncle will have to accept the outcome and end the war.
But this all means I actually have to give him my secrets about Ziphoter, like I did when we were ten, this time knowing he’ll use them against me.
I finish healing my throat and swallow bile—whether from the pain or what I’m abou to do, I don’t know. Somehow, my voice sounds steady as I say, “A formal challenge, in fact.”
Idly fidgeting with the knife, he holds my gaze. “You sure you want that after the pit?”
“This won’t be a fight,” I say, rubbing paste on my arms. “It’ll be a race.”
“To Ziphoter?”
“On Ziphoter. We noticed a pattern with our troops that have made it to the surface. The creatures—the Ziphs—they only go after people younger than twenty-five.”
The way he leans closer is reminiscent of his younger self, the boy always eager for knowledge, but it stems entirely from greed now, from his hunger for conquest. “Why?”
“We think it’s something about our brains. They’re not fully matured before twenty-five. It’s possible we emit a different smell to them—or a different frequency.”
He watches the blade twirl between his fingers, contemplating. “So I could eviscerate them.”
“Your brain’s nowhere near mature, so you should be good.”
He stands so abruptly, I assume he’s about to stab me, but he ignores my insult and apparently my challenge, because he stalks toward the door like he intends to depart for Ziphoter this instant.
“Wait.” Dropping my jar, I hurry after him, grabbing his shoulder before he can activate his holosleeve. The moment I touch him, he whirls around, pressing his knife beneath my chin.
“What do you think you’re doing?” He side-eyes my hand frozen in the air between us, and I carefully lower it.
“What do you think you’re doing? You’re really going to walk away from a challenge? I extended this knowledge to you. The honorable response would be to accept my proposal.”
“And what exactly is your proposal?”
“As you probably know, the Ziphs don’t respond well to our vehicles. We’ll have to land far away from the most abundant cave of ziphium crystals—the one that’s heavily guarded by Ziphs. I challenge you to a race from our landing point to the cave. Whoever arrives first claims Ziphoter, and no further retaliations will be warranted. Loser has to forfeit the war, a full surrender.”
He steps closer, knife still to my skin. “You would trek through an unfamiliar planet with me, alone?”
“I’ll be ahead of you,” I assure him with a cheeky grin. “And I thought we might have teams—three companions each to aid in our journeys.”
The fact he doesn’t arrogantly defend his ability to travel alone is a testament to the dangers of Ziphoter. Due to the Ziphs attacking whoever enters the atmosphere, little is known about the surface beyond scans from space, and all the younger soldiers who’ve survived Ziph ambushes have wisely fled the planet in haste.
Even with a group of four, our survival is tentative. I work better in small groups, though, and I only trust three specific people in such a weighty endeavor.
Vex takes another step toward me, invading my energy field. The flat side of his blade tilts my face up toward his, forcing me to glimpse the crafty glint in his eyes. “You wanted me to know about this. That’s why you engaged in such a risky assassination attempt—why you invaded our magnetosphere. You wanted us to capture you—”
“I wanted to end this war,” I cut in, and that’s my official excuse, but it sounds even weaker when I say it aloud. “I wanted your family to stop slaughtering mine.”
“Then why not go to Ziphoter? You know how to claim the planet. Now you’ll have to contend with me and the alien lands. We all know which is worse.”
“I was going to Ziphoter. The assassination was meant to be a distraction, for your people and…and for mine. My father forbade me from going. He wants to wait until we have more information before we start sending young troops to the surface. He wants to know exactly why the Ziphs don’t react to immature brains, and that discovery could take months—or years. I couldn’t stand to watch the destruction go on for so long.”
Vex shakes his head as it tilts sideways. “You wanted to challenge me, and you don’t even know it.” His knife drags up my face with just enough pressure to avoid breaking skin, stopping once the tip rests at the center of my brow. “That’s how deep I’ve wormed into your mind. I’m the unseen bedrock beneath your every choice.” Retreating a step, he twirls the knife back into its holster. “That, or this is a ploy for my demise—you plant false information that leads me to landing on Ziphoter, where the Ziphs tear me limb from limb.”
Honestly, I should have done something like that, but maybe he is right; maybe all I’ve wanted for the past seven years is to challenge him. In my heart, I’ve deemed him a figure of insurmountable importance, like a fifth ventricle that’s crucial to its functioning, even as he poisons me.
I need this race as a physical symbol of his eradication, my triumph.
“I’m not lying.”
Animating the holographic blue keypad on his forearm, he opens the door and then throws me over his shoulder like a corpse before I can even think about escaping. “We’ll see what my uncle says about that.”
this is the last free chapter. thanks for reading <3