Chapter Text
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind—least of all his own—that Prime Adsecla Jonas Spahr is ready for this.
Sure, it’s his first time in a foldmersible—his first time needing to be in a foldmersible, because it’s his first time traveling beyond the light of the Upper Un. But he knows with crystalline certainty that Costigan’s training has prepared him for this.
Jedediah Pom is saying as much into his microphone, winding up the audiences at home. Spahr hopes, privately, that the teletheric signal won’t come through too warped. He’d never say it out loud, of course, but if his debut directing the Company as Prime Adsecla arrives in the Highest Light as nothing but a bunch of garbled static punctuated by Pom’s exclamations, it’s going to be, well, kind of lame.
He has fans back home who are going to be listening, he knows—teen heartthrobs are, as a rule, lousy with fans—and it would be a shame for them, he reasons, for the tales of his exploit to be mulched up by the Fold current in transit. Nothing selfish about this little shard of discontent in his chest.
The transfer of ship they made on the Mediun makes sense, he guesses. Better to approach the land where tearrors go to die from, well, a vehicle designed not to provoke them in their final moments, even if they could theoretically descend into the Delta via Unship. The inside walls have been painted white, a pale evocation of the Un, but they can’t disguise the deep rumble of the engine that pulses through the floors, a far cry from the graceful whirring of the Unships on which Spahr spent his training and found his sky-legs.
Spahr keeps his eyes level, fixed on the front of the ship. He made, about fifteen minutes ago, the embarrassing discovery that peering out of the portholes and trying to track the rippling current of the Fold slithering beneath him makes him queasy enough that he can still taste bile.
He’s focusing now, more than he’d like, on ensuring that Costigan doesn’t also make that discovery.
He glances at her, now. She’s standing on the opposite side of the foldmersible, her jet-black hair twisted up and secured with her trademark, spear-shaped pin (knockoffs are just flying off the shelves back in the Highest Light. Hell, Spahr’s even wearing one. For brand consistency, of course, not out of any kind of fad-chasing).
She’s standing on the other side of the foldmersible, and she is watching him.
Spahr doesn’t tense up, doesn’t flinchingly glance away. He knows better than that now. He meets her gaze, steady as anything, like he’s got nothing to hide.
The corner of her thin mouth ticks upward, and Spahr breathes an inward sigh of triumph. Costigan’s smiles are hard to come by, but he’s been earning more of them lately. He knows he’s a PR stunt to her, or used to be—some kid foisted on her by the media to soften her austere image—but they understand each other now, he thinks.
He means to be great. As great as she can make him. She doesn’t seem to mind helping him get there.
Costigan speaks, raising her voice loudly enough for the microphone held by Jedediah Pom’s aging assistant to pick it up, even as she keeps her eyes on Spahr.
“I have nothing but the utmost faith in you, Jonas,” she says, her tone polished. “I know that you will shine the light of the Trust on the poor souls of the Delta with the confidence and compassion befitting your rank.”
Spahr inclines his head, gives an easy smile. “Thank you, Consector. It will be my honor.”
What Costigan doesn’t say, what she doesn’t need to say, for Jonas to hear it, is that part of a Consector’s job is to ensure that every word spoken in front of Pom’s microphone comes true. He will bring the light of the Trust in all its glory, and he will do so with the utmost precision and grace, or—
There’s really no or. He just will. It’s what the teletheric demands, and Jonas Spahr has never been one to say no to the teletheric.
“Yes, a heartwarming show of confidence and trust from our Prime Consector, as she places the fate of the mission into the capable hands of young Spahr, whose eyes are alight with purpose and determination…” Pom is spooling on flawlessly, narrating the expression arranged on Jonas’s face, when Marion, the Foldcaster aboard the craft, emerges from her observation room at a breathless half-jog.
“Consector, the—”
Costigan fixes her with a withering look and crosses her arms, angling her chin towards Jonas, not favoring the off-script technician with a single word.
“Adsecla,” she says, holding a paper that looks like it’s been hastily torn off of a seismograph, or something like a seismograph, if a seismograph was for reading the capricious moods of a vast inky body of semi-sentient chaos-generating fog. “The activity in the Delta is spiking, heavily. Looks like a tearror of significant size, passing right under our drop point.”
Spahr’s stomach twists, just a little bit, though he keeps his expression mild, his tone calm, as he turns to face the communications officer. “Has any word come through from the settlement?”
Teletherics are next to useless in the Delta, but over the past few days of their voyage, they’ve received a few crackling updates from the mayor of, as Costigan put it, “that little pile of twigs that they think passes for a town.”
The comms officer shakes their head.
“Set me up a broadcast to them,” says Spahr, injecting a note of urgency in his voice, hoping that it won’t read as panic, to the media or to Costigan. “Let’s see if we can get a response.”
The communications officer nods, presses a few buttons and flips a few switches on their teletheric array, before drawing the corded microphone from the side and handing it over to Jonas. “You’re live.”
Spahr inhales once, squares his shoulders. He’s aware of Costigan’s eyes on the back of his neck. He’s aware that somewhere, miles below their feet, under a raging current of Fold, people are dying.
He owes it to them, and to Pom, who stands waiting behind him, to do this right.
“Attention,” he says, his every word crisp and urgent. “This is Prime Adsecla Jonas Spahr with the Consectorial Company of the Trust. Our Foldcasters are reading dangerous levels of entropic activity in your area. Do you require assistance?”
This is a charade, and everyone here knows it. The chances of the people on the ground in the Delta having any ability to respond, even if they need help, is low, and if they do respond—well, there’s not really anything the Company can do about it. Landing the foldmersible in the middle of a tearror would be nothing short of suicide.
But Jonas asks anyway. It’s an Adsecla’s job, to ask. A Company that fails to offer assistance is a fucking sham, and so the media will see the Company offer assistance, even if Spahr doesn’t actually have any to give.
There is no response.
That’s good, honestly. The Company would have to scramble to ask for a safe landing point, if one was given. Trustee lives might be lost, or they might have to withdraw for their own safety and leave Pom scrambling to spin their choice into anything other than raw cowardice for the audience in the Highest Light.
And yet, in that silence, in that relief, something in Spahr’s stomach drops.
“Attention,” he tries again. “This is Prime Adsecla Jonas Spahr with the Consectorial Company of the Trust. Our Foldcasters are reading dangerous levels of entropic activity in your area. Do you require assistance?”
He’s gripping the microphone too tightly, he realizes, and he forces himself to relax his fingers. He’s never addressed the dying.
“Attention. This is Prime Adsecla Jonas Spahr with the Consectorial Company of the Trust. Our Foldcasters are reading dangerous levels of entropic activity in your area. Do you require assistance?”
He tries again, and again, and again, reaching with his voice, hoping for silence each time, and despairing every time that he gets his wish.
“How are the readings?” he asks Marion, who’s returned now to her Fold-monitoring apparatus.
“It’s dwindling,” she says. “We should be clear for a landing at our planned point within fifteen minutes.”
Spahr nods. He still has a little bit of that seasick feeling, even though he hasn’t taken a look out of the windows.
“Company,” he says, “prepare for landing. Fold-safe armaments only. Firearms are to be unloaded and left aboard ship. Remain in pairs, and conduct a sweep of the area. Neutralize any threats, and then clear a path for the medics. The tearror might have left any number hazards, and there is no predicting the destruction it may have caused. It falls to us now to bring the order, and the compassion, of the Trust to those who have survived it.”
He pauses for a moment, the way Costigan always does, locking eyes with one soldier, and then another, testing their courage with his gaze. Every set he finds is bright with resolve.
Perfect.
“To stations!” he calls out. “Make ready.”
Pom is off at a breakneck pace with that, as the Company moves swiftly, precisely into action. He describes, rapid-fire, the shine of their armor, the determined glint of their eyes, as they ready themselves to do battle with the darkness of the Fold.
Spahr circulates himself between the Company—aiding his comrades with their armor, giving out the odd word of encouragement, the occasional well-timed pat on the shoulder—as he maneuvers himself to the head of their ranks, ready and waiting for the airlock doors to open.
He feels his stomach rising as the ship coasts downward through the Fold, keeps his feet planted so that he won’t stumble on landing.
Costigan takes up a place beside him, and he tilts his head just enough to find himself caught by one of her sharp, lancing stares. It finds its mark, leaving a pinprick of fear—no, not fear, never fear, just—urgency, in his chest.
Costigan doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
They both know what awaits him, if his performance is insufficient. The media circus, the condescending headlines about how he was too “inexperienced” for this responsibility. How Costigan’s eyes will turn flat with disappointment. How she will take her words to him as dutifully she takes her shears to her garden. How she will cut away at him until he feels as if he is bleeding—until he walks away from her, shoulders square, eyes dry, and finds a corner of the gardens to fold himself into, where he can pretend not to weep.
She hasn’t done that for a while now.
And she won’t, ever again, provided he doesn’t fuck this up.
He is not going to fuck this up.
The foldmersible doesn’t land the way an airplane or a helicopter, or, more familiar to Spahr, and Unship does. There’s no clunk of a landing gear, no sudden return of gravity and friction. It’s more of a smooth, skating sensation, a paper airplane skimming over the surface of a pond, until the drag of the Fold’s thick waves slows them to a halt. Spahr slides one foot back to steady himself as the craft rocks slightly, and then he calls out for the crew to open the doors of the hold.
The moment that they slide open with a loud, mechanical whir, the humid Delta air sweeps in—not the darkness of the true Fold but a dingy gray, all the particles of Fold lazy and dissolute after the party they clearly had earlier, floating through the air like motes of dust, or ash.
Reflexively, Spahr closes his eyes against it before blinking them open, and when he does—oh god, how to describe what he sees?
At first, there are no words Jonas can fit to the landscape roiling out before him. He finds himself blinking again, against a smog of neon and black and crumbling paint, degraded pixels. He cannot tell if it is his vision or the horizon itself that is breaking down. His throat tightens, his eyes aching just from the effort of taking it all in. The whole world seems to tremble at the edges, still reverberating with the impact of the tearror that just ripped across the plain. His spine feels like a plucked fiddlestring inside of his back.
In his periphery, Costigan shifts forward a single degree, and context snaps into place around him again.
Spahr narrows his eyes against the seething glare of the skyline. “Company, fan out! Stay within sight of the ship at all times. Remember your directives and keep to them. Let’s not give the Fold anything to work with.”
Spahr takes the first step, and then the next, his shoulders square and his chin high. Sure, his heart might be thundering in his ears, his palms might be sweating, and his knees might feel, somewhat, like putty with that dizzying, nightmare vortex swallowing his vision, but that’s no excuse for a Prime Adsecla not to put his best foot forward. So he does. He can hear the rest of the Company following him, their footsteps shuffling over the ridged metal of the ramp that extends from the foldmersible’s bay and then sinks into the brackish surface of the Fold.
Spahr manages not to flinch as his boots break the Surface of the Fold. It’s congealed here, thick and pungent as swamp water, having swallowed and glutted itself on whatever islet—whatever barren scrap of rock—they’ve come here hoping to save.
“Well,” Costigan says dryly, close enough to his ear that the teletherics won’t pick it up. “I suppose our relief supplies can be saved for a later date.”
Spahr’s brow furrows, and he raises his voice. “Bring any survivors back to the ship for triage and medical treatment.”
It’s a stupid, boyish gesture. Naïve. But he wants Costigan to be wrong about this. He wants to believe that there are still lives here to be saved, that he’s not knee-deep in sludge with his eyes burning for no reason.
He takes a step forward and nearly trips over the first dead body he’s ever seen up close.
It’s a man, he thinks, bobbing facedown in the murk, his head and shoulders replaced entirely by a seething mass of bumblebees, all peeling off one by one to founder and sink and drown in the Fold’s thick surf. Their droning fills the air, burrows into Jonas’s ears, and he does the only thing he can—step around the denim-clad corpse without a word. There is nothing to say, in this merciless, fathomless wasteland, that Pom can spin into a good line for the folks back home.
So Spahr just does. Like the other members of the company, he wades out into this fetid swamp of sluggish darkness. Things brush against his legs—cables and roofing tiles, candelabras and shredded ballgowns, things that he hopes are not hands. The graceful white half-cape swept over his shoulder is trailing through the muck, darkness creeping up its surface as Spahr resists the urge to hike it up—the gesture will only look vain and awkward, and he still has just enough presence of mind to be conscious of Pom’s unbroken narration of the horror and calamity that stretch out before them.
He sees the skeletonized remains of what might once have been a house, the walls and ceiling flayed away and the timbers scorched to spindly limbs that still burn against the oil spill of the skyline.
Nothing can survive this. The light of the Trust shines watery and faint on this wasteland, and Spahr feels small, helpless and insignificant, even with his gauntlets shining over his knuckles and his pauldrons widening his shoulders. It’s—not a way he’s used to feeling, at least, not when he isn’t on the receiving end of Costigan’s sharper words. This—this isn’t far from that, actually.
It astounds me sometimes, you know. What a useless creature you are. Preening and showboating for the cameras, but you don’t know the first thing about what it means to be Consector. The sacrifices it demands, the force you must wield. You are nothing but a conceited boy, and unless you follow my guidance, unless you learn to shed your weaknesses… Well. Those sycophants you love so dearly will come to see you for the sham that you are. And then, Jonas, they are going to eat you alive.
He feels now the way he did months ago, when Costigan cornered him in her greenhouse after a photoshoot and talked and talked and talked at him in a perfectly even voice until he wished that she would just pick up the damn shears, because anything they could do to him would hurt less.
He’s learned from it. Heeded all her lessons. She hasn’t spoken an unkind word to him since, and he hasn’t given her a reason to.
And still, here he is, up to his knees in primordial sludge, shaking like a scared kid, with no plan and no smooth line for the teletheric, dizzied by the noxious light on the horizon, and if he stands here much longer, she’s going to know.
Spahr marches on into the ever-warping darkness, nearly fleeing. He can’t risk casting a glance over his shoulder to see if Costigan is watching him. She’s never not watching him. He has to keep moving, keep assessing, keep looking like something other than a frightened boy whose armor is rapidly filling with horrible ooze.
He just needs a moment to compose himself, to figure out what to do next, what words to put next to each other so that when the Company straggles back to the ship in defeat, this whole thing will feel slightly less like the anticlimactic and miserable waste that it is.
His gaze, desperately flitting from object to object, never lighting on any one thing for too long for fear that it will sear itself onto his retinas forever, lands on the bulbous and twisting remains of a tree that looks struck by lightning. Spahr hastens toward it, purposeful, keeping his fists clenched at his sides.
He whips around the tree as quickly as he can without drawing suspicion, and then presses his back to its gnarled trunk and closes his eyes tightly. He breathes in. He breathes out.
Company, he thinks. It matters that we were here today. It matters that we tried.
Does it? Jonas doesn’t know. He doesn’t know fucking anything. He doesn’t know fucking anything, and he has tree sap in his hair now, and any second Costigan will come barging around the side of the tree to deservedly berate him for his obvious fucking cowardice in the midst of his first real leadership mission and—
A splash, to his right. A gasp and then a shuddering exhale.
Jonas’s eyes fly open and he startles to attention, hand going for his mace.
His first thought is that one of the Company members has been sucked under the surface of the Fold by a jellyghoul or worse—that the Delta has decided to show its teeth.
But he can see no glint of armor in the plane of his vision. No one has walked as far as he has.
He moves swiftly but cautiously towards the sound, weapon at the ready, and as he rounds the corner of the bloated, swollen remains something up ahead of him that might once have been a barn, the world darkens.
No, that’s not quite it. The small circle around Jonas is bright, and everything beyond him has faded to an inky, inscrutable black. It’s as if he’s—glowing? He’s not using the Fold-safe flashlight in his gear. A warm, gold-hued light is emanating from him, gilding his armor and leaving him half-blind. That’s—well, that’s weird, that’s troubling, but—
He can see a figure on all fours in the muck in front of him, raising its head to look up at him.
It’s a boy. He looks maybe seven, eight years old? His eyes, caught in the glare of Spahr’s armor, are a wide, frightened blue, set in a pale face smeared with grime. His hair, Jonas thinks, might prove to be blond, if anybody ever decided to go to the trouble of washing it.
It doesn’t look like anyone has ever decided to go to that trouble. It doesn’t look like anyone, ever, has taken on trouble of any kind for the kid in his life, and a warming anger rises up from Spahr’s bones.
The boy is startling up to his knees, his feet caught in a slowly revolving vortex of Fold centered on his battered, scrawny body. His overalls are threadbare, his skin covered in nicks and bruises, and he clutches his hands against his chest, as if he’s trying to make himself even smaller than he is—to hide.
And he is alive.
There is somebody here, in this vast, murderous nothingness, who is still breathing. Who Spahr can help.
And he reaches out for the boy. It is a human thing, a reflex. He forgets his title, forgets even the Valor inlaid into his armor.
“Give me your hand,” Spahr says, offering his own to the boy, holding it out to him and bracing his feet on the jagged ground as the Fold current pulls at his shins. “It’s gonna be okay now.”
The boy stares up at him, his eyes wide and uncomprehending, and for a moment, Jonas is afraid that he will recoil and sink and be lost. The fear in his face is nearly blinding.
But the boy takes his hand, and Jonas pulls.
The Fold fights him on it, dragging at the boy’s ankles, refusing to let him go, but Jonas isn’t going to give up now, keeping his feet firmly planted, wrapping his other hand around the boy’s forearm and pulling him, dragging him out of the muck, retreating step by step, arms straining, until with a final tug, the boy pops free of one of his hopelessly mired boots and the vortex that holds them, stumbling to his feet in front of Jonas.
Spahr, for his part, keeps his hands on the boy’s arms, steering him away from the writhing morass of black that he’s just drawn him free of. He can hear the boy’s breathing now, high and rapid and frightened.
“It’s okay,” Jonas says, again, and again, it’s a reflex. He’s forgotten, entirely, that Costigan is watching him, that the press may be picking him up on their microphones. The words falling out of his mouth are only for the scared kid breaking into sobs in front of him. “You’re gonna be okay now, I promise.”
The kid looks up at him, shoulders heaving, the prey-animal terror in his eyes giving way to a tiny smile, achingly sincere.
It is Jonas, now, who freezes, a deer caught in a bright light. He feels, somehow, undeserving. Any member of the Company might have stumbled this way and dragged this child from the morass.
But the kid doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that Jonas has tree sap in his hair and is scared of cutting it out, or that he sloshed over here trying to hide his panic from Costigan, or that he’s a weak-willed boy whose only true skill is charming the teletheric. He buries his face in Jonas’s cuirass with a sob and trembles, clinging to the front of Jonas’s armor.
Spahr—does not have younger siblings, and has never had cause to find work as a babysitter, so he doesn’t entirely know what to do with a visibly traumatized eight-year-old clutching him like a piece of driftwood in a flood and smearing grime on his breastplate. For a moment, he’s frozen, hands floating at his sides.
This kid trusts him. When he opens his eyes, Spahr’s armor shines in them.
And so, Spahr becomes the knight. He pulls the kid up out of the waves of Fold and hoists him partway up onto his shoulder. For all that Costigan complains of Spahr’s weakness, that weakness isn’t found in his body. He lifts the kid without any difficulty at all—so little that it’s worrying, frankly. The kid is skin and bone, knobbly elbows and hollow cheeks, and Spahr feels a pang as the kid wraps his spindly arms around Spahr’s neck to steady himself.
Spahr turns to see Costigan watching him, Pom hovering only a few yards behind her, boldly narrating into his microphone even in this nightmarish scene.
“But what’s this? It appears young Spahr has found a survivor among the ruins. Yes! A young boy, ravaged by the effects of the tearror, but living still, friends, a new Trustee with a bright future before him, thanks to the efforts of the Company.”
Spahr locks eyes with Costigan. Her own are narrowed, assessing. Something he doesn’t dare to name as defiance thrums through him.
He knows what Valor is, now. He holds the weight of it in his arms—the weight of a life, pulled from the brink of death and into the light of the Trust. There is nothing she can say to him, in this moment, that can break skin. Of that, he is certain.
He glances at the boy sitting in the crook of his arm. “What’s your name?”
The boy is chewing on his lower lip, his own gaze drifting warily between Pom and Costigan. It takes him a moment to answer. “Phineas,” he says. “I—I’m Phineas.”
“Okay, Phineas,” Spahr says, keeping his eyes on the kid, but his pulse has slowed enough that he can focus on raising his voice for Pom’s microphone, “do you know where your parents are?”
Phineas’s eyes dart away. His fingers tighten against the side of Spahr’s neck. “I—I don’t—have…”
He looks almost ashamed, the way Spahr feels when Costigan hits him with a question on Company tactics and his mind comes up empty.
“That’s okay,” Spahr says, as gently as he can. “You’ll have plenty of family soon enough. Let’s get you back to the ship so that you can have something to eat, okay?”
The kid—Phineas—nods, and gives another of those painfully earnest smiles, this one deep enough to reveal a gap where one of his front teeth should be. Pride wells up in Spahr’s chest and tightens his throat.
The rest of the Company are already assembled back at the base of the ship, their own searches fruitless, their steely armor caked with muck. All of their dissolute faces turn to their Adsecla, as he emerges from the gloom, and, to Spahr’s aching, painful relief, they lighten at the sight of him.
The same relief that Spahr feels pushing at the bounds of his own ribs is written across the faces of the Company, of his Company. Though he’s no longer shining with the burning, ethereal light that surrounded him when he first reached for Phineas, he can still feel it radiating from him, bolstering his courage, and his comrades’, too. They realize, as one, that the misery and horror of this day has not been in vain.
That his first mission is a success.
“Company!” he calls out, a grin of pride overtaking his face. “Say hello to Phineas—our newest Trustee.”