A carriage, exposed and burning at the foot of a sheer silver peak. Sunlight, intense sunlight. Smoke. Stillness. Blood.
No movement. Then: a solitary figure moving away, stumbling from shadow into light. A change claiming him, deep and irreversible, making him something other.
But go back. Trace the train’s journey through this unnatural place. See who, and when, and why.
###
The sky lit up with nausea when the bilestorm roared. For the people on the train, these tiny, meaningless sightseers in the horrorscape of the Actinic Mountains, it was a display apparently worthy of applause.
Giraud ran a three-fingered hand through thinning hair. Pitched lower than the scattered clapping, the woman beside him chuckled to herself. He gave her a sidelong look.
“Stupid fuckers,” she said, still smiling. She seemed to think that was all the explanation required, and Giraud supposed it was.
He watched the scenery stutter by. Scabbed slabs of toxic rock, steaming teal and seaweed green, in stages of decay ranging from harassed to distraught. Peacock needles lancing the bellies of clouds that strayed from the stormfront. Vertiginous mirror-faces veined with cyan and cobalt, delicacy belying their danger like tendrilled things in the deep.
Of vegetation or human habitation, no sign. No roofs among the cut-glass hills, no trees on the serrated skyline. Partly this was because the Actinic Mountains were, geologically, a new phenomenon; an anomaly erupting in response to war. Mostly, it was because they were inhospitable to the point of hostility.
This train line itself was no shrewd enterprise, if you asked Giraud. It took people through a part of the world that should not exist and was certainly not made for them. Any incursion into the Actinic Mountains, Giraud knew, bore a list of potential outcomes as long as his arm and as cursed as his half-beating heart.
A drip-feed from insiders in the rebel years had given him a better idea than most about the carriages that never made it through. The ones that people didn’t hear about, and never thought to ask. Even without the killing eye of the sun through this fume-dense, poisonously reflective place, he’d heard tales of shinewolves out there, and spasmodic drifts of crystal-flesh parasites, and the unknowable frequencies of glassquakes.
Hell, if they were really lucky, they might fall victim to the final lunge of the Runyard Coax. If that bastard shows up, Giraud thought, the search crews won’t find so much as a hair or a rivet.
###
More scenery, more anxiety. Giraud just wanted to get to his last stop. At the farthest point of the Actinic Loop, where the line nosed out of the foothills into a dismal but predictable wasteland, was a remote rest stop on a bluff where passengers could stretch their legs in less belligerent scenery before the return trip. Giraud’s plan involved stretching his for a little longer.
Nobody was waiting for him there; he’d refused to endanger old contacts by reaching out, even those already intent on avoiding the riots and protests he’d left behind. Distance was what mattered now. Putting the natural deterrent of the Actinic Mountains between himself and the violent discomforts arising from his past was the most critical action he could take.
The train he’d chosen to help him do that was a bleeding-edge creation, reflected in the riotously expensive price of passage. Snub-nosed, caterpillar-like, a long segmented carriage sliding from beacon to recharge beacon through the savage grandeur of the peaks. Giraud had read that no rails would grip this diamond-hard terrain; instead, the train moved like a vermiform, low-slung airship or a land-based submersible.
The technology was a mystery to him. The benefits of your iron-fisted autocracy doubling as a corporate monopoly, he mused. The anger was so old now, he’d almost forgotten the taste.
He stole another wary glance at the other passengers. Broadly, the mix he’d been expecting. From thrill-seeking friends and solo flyers trying a trip with a little more of an edge to older folks, retired and well-travelled, driven by draconian border policies to explore less conventional excursions. That latter group included Iris and Rafe in the seats behind Giraud, an elderly couple who’d introduced themselves upon boarding with courtesy born of an earlier generation, and the solemn, funerary-looking Hoek in front, who’d neglected to remove the seat reservation ticket stamped with his name.
All of them craned their necks to watch as they crossed the Char Pergussa, an eerie, half-mile-wide river of unformed sound tumbling invisibly through mountain clefts. Passenger voices sank to whispers as the train careened over the natural bridge. Through the speakers came the unearthly crashing of rapids and the endless sigh of impossible erosion; beneath it, the thunder of bombs long gone and, at last, the retaliation of an enraged earth. No screams. No time for screaming.
Giraud looked down at the bone-dry channel, at the gulf of nothing through which the noise swept and swelled. He looked up at the enraptured faces of his fellow passengers.
This fucking place, he thought.
###
Several minutes since the last bilestorm flare. Sick light through tinted wall-length viewports told Giraud that the sun was starting to emerge from the roil above the mountains, a queen sweeping imperiously through the haze of a witch-burning.
This, now, was the most perilous time. The storms were a rowdy business, but kept their violence in the aether where it would do no harm to others. What would inflict harm, and worse, was these libertine mountains in the full light of the sun. The atmosphere was pregnant with acidic chemicals, not just churned up from hidden fissures but baked into the landscape itself. The last exchange of arms had altered the world forever.
Even the passengers now seemed on edge, watching heavily filtered light dance across their clothes and skin. On cue, the speakers chimed, and the driver’s smooth tones assured them that the vehicle they’d chosen offered market-leading protection against any discomfort.
In the ensuing silence, the woman next to Giraud leaned in and said, “I’m curious.”
Giraud stiffened. Quickly, he tried to piece together all he’d observed. The woman was middle-aged, severe-looking but unremarkable. They were surrounded by other passengers – in front, behind, across the aisle. The driver’s compartment was only a few rows ahead and within it, Giraud could see the red-haloed security panel from which enforcement droids would unfold like metal-boned marionettes in the event of disorder. He wasn’t alone.
“I’m curious,” she repeated, “Mr. Giraud.”
Now, he turned to look her in the eye.
“What is it you’re curious about?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said with a shrug of one shoulder, “you know. Your opinions.”
Another viscous crack resonated as the bilestorm gave a final protest, prompting a game half-cheer from the passengers.
Giraud forced calm into his voice. “I paid the price for those opinions.”
“You did,” she agreed. “Once.” She regarded him for a moment and blinked, slowly and owlishly, as if to illustrate her point. Giraud’s insides crackled with frost.
“The problem, you know,” she continued, “is one of the phases. People’s ways of thinking ebb and flow. When… difficult viewpoints get out there, they stay out there.” She coughed. “You’re aware, Mr. Giraud, that your historical opinions and writings on the autocracy have resurfaced of late.”
Giraud’s lungs were labouring. “I can’t help what people latch on to. All I did was share some things I learned long after the fighting. I never told anyone what to think.”
“But you agree that your… lack of discretion continues to cause harm to the autocracy?”
He closed his eyes and focused on breathing. He felt the weakness of his damaged body with awful clarity. “I’ve done nothing to offend the autocracy in years. You have no grounds to take me back in. You can’t.”
“And yet you take the possibility seriously enough to be running.”
His growing panic made him erratic. “Fucking autocracy,” he hissed at her. “You started wars!”
“And ended them,” she countered.
Giraud felt the stakes of the moment escalating – but in the next second, the carriage speakers chimed again, an expectant silence fell, and their driver announced the approach to the Bas Okalis.
The Cold Temple. There were many pretentiously named natural tunnels through these otherwise unbroken peaks, and the Bas Okalis was the only one through which the train would pass. It was also the safest vantage point for the phenomenon that these passengers had come to see.
The sunslide.
A chill fell as the tunnel gathered them in. Dying, the stormlight sunk into a strange marine luminescence; the stalactites hanging from the Cold Temple’s high arches glimmered a mournful deep-sea green. For Giraud, struggling, it all brought to mind toxic weed trailing down from a surface too far above.
His confrontation with the woman remained in check. The other travellers were silent, some excited, some a little overawed; one that Giraud had been watching earlier, a tattooed man who’d grudgingly given his name as Omar to a garrulous neighbour, closed his eyes and crossed himself.
When the train slowed and stopped some distance from the tunnel’s end, the driver requested silence so that everyone could appreciate the spectacle. Whispers once again burred up and down the carriage.
###
Ahead lay miles of spilt pillars, quartz-frosted wedges of lithosphere-like architecture overturned by an emerging god. And beyond that, angled to the north-west like a portrait on a shelf at impossible scale, the vertiginous face of Raka Galva. Highest of the peaks currently boasted by the Actinic Mountains; ‘currently’ because the terrain was always subtly shifting, only tenuously mappable. For now, scorning the distance between them with the rawness of its height, Raka Galva presented an unmatched canvas.
All Giraud wanted was to keep moving. But the timing was immaculate, the weather cooperative, and the show was on.
It began erratically as the sun took time to dig itself out from a fugue of purpled cloud. But once that was done, it reached out and struck the face of the mountain with a touch that was close to divine.
From the summit, liquid light rippled down the crystal wall. Widening into first a cascade and then, within seconds, a deluge, rolling and bouncing off each jut and shelf, leaving no niche untouched. Painting the vast surface with honeyed wonder, glowing like an invitation to places infinitely better than this.
It was beautiful, blindingly beautiful. But Giraud recognised it as a beauty rooted in abnormality. Something to be feared, a punishment in waiting, not this sideshow for the gratification of a people who set aside their sins far too easily.
The light, the heat, the very texture of the atmosphere within the carriage shifted. The sunslide reached the foot of the mountain and caromed over the shattered columns, distant but encroaching at speed. Giraud watched with stifling unease, waiting for the wave to go rushing by the mouth of the Cold Temple so that they could tick this sacrilegious box and move on.
###
“If you’ll excuse me,” said the woman next to him.
Giraud’s fear spiked again. He opened his mouth to ask where she was going, struck by an incongruous urge to tell her to stay in her seat. But she was already moving towards the front of the train.
Overwhelmed once again by this more intimate danger, his mind whirled. How had they found him? What would they take from him this time? Was there anything he could do, apart from the one thing he urgently wanted not to do?
Panic urged him to run, to break this moment of awe for the other passengers and plead for sanctuary in numbers. He didn’t. He reached for years of self-taught calming techniques as his heart faltered dangerously, forcing him to stay put. He willed it to defy its sutures and beat evenly.
Only when someone shrieked did he look up again, and immediately, his vision shrank to the long ceramic blade being extracted with delicacy from the back of the driver’s neck. The man jerked and slumped forward. Giraud had no idea how the woman had even gotten into his secure compartment, but by the time the driver’s head hit the control panel, she’d already keyed in an override code. More cries of alarm went up as the train jolted and began to glide slowly forward again, into the path of the light.
Alarms did not blare. Security droids did not deploy.
The woman looked directly down the aisle at Giraud as havoc blossomed in the carriage. People yelled and tore at their restraints. They piled into the aisle driven by fear, fury, both. For a moment, he thought the mass might protect him, but the woman made no move to approach. She regarded the blood-streaked blade in her hand with an almost wistful expression, tossed it aside, and turned to face the tightly secured external door.
“What are you doing?” Giraud cried from his seat, voice cracking. “Who the hell are you?”
She looked back over her shoulder. “6188,” she said.
Oh fuck, Giraud thought immediately. Autocracy clone. A one-shot. Fuck fuck fuck.
She waited to see his face go ashen, then smiled and turned her full strength upon the exit mechanism.
###
The door yawned wide, and the wave hit the train, refracted through a chemical cauldron. The effects were instantaneous.
As a clone, the woman was disposable but not immune to pain. The worst, most concentrated excesses of the mountains’ poison light saturated every part of her. Her skull swelled, sockets and cartilage cracking. Giraud recoiled. The woman keened as crystal jags blossomed from the fractures; she raised her arms instinctively only for glassy knives to split the flesh, not intentionally forming weapons, just random, abominable transformation.
She swung back to the aisle, and Giraud stared into the shrinking pellets of her eyes as the viscerocranium came apart like an eggshell.
The clone lunged at him, still shifting, limbs divergent as tree branches growing in accelerated motion. Bone began to curlicue from her skeleton and lacerate the skin of her arms, shoulders, torso. Blood slicked the panelling underfoot.
The passengers who had risen from their seats at the assault on the driver were first to go. The crystalline chimera tore through them like a coral reef through rotten planking.
###
Only two things saved Giraud that time, neither his own doing. One was the clone’s immediate spiralling madness, a diffusion of its original target into a whole conglomerate of lives to snuff out. But even that would have only bought him moments without the second attack.
As Hoek’s blood sprayed into Giraud’s face, the man raked by a limb that tore through upholstery, metal and bone like cigarette smoke, something else bounded through the air and attached itself to the clone’s back. Giraud recognised the dreadful vestiges of their driver. The sunlight had poured through the doors like sin as he lay bleeding out, violating his last moments of life. Even as Giraud stared, the man’s teeth sprayed from his split-mouth, quartz shards shaded red with blood slicing through cheeks and gums. He sunk them into the back of the clone’s neck as she turned to fight him off.
Giraud cast around in terror. There was a stampede now; the front half of the carriage was a charnel house, the rear half a crush of people yelling and shoving in their desperation to get off the train. But it was still in the grip of the sunslide. They had drifted free of the tunnel, become an island in a sea of profane light.
Even if he’d had the breath to shout a warning, it would have been useless. Giraud’s stomach lurched at the thud and whoosh of the rear carriage doors acceding to the frantic hands of the mob, all security annulled. Passengers began to pour out into the light and a redoubled clamour of screams.
Nobody made it more than a few seconds in any direction. They fell as they ran, warping and bursting. He saw Iris tumble when Rafe, trying to help her down from the carriage, caught the full force of someone’s knee and was sent sprawling backwards into the flow of light. When they both rose back into view, they were merged, conjoined by bone hooks and crystal barbs, staring into one another’s eyes with mouths wide open until their hands and faces flowed together and hardened like glass.
Giraud turned away.
###
He had never been on board a vehicle like this before. But conditioned by years in a low-level state of fight or flight, Giraud had cased the interior as he boarded. Now, with horror beyond his most paranoid fears unleashed at both ends of the train, he dove for the long, narrow maintenance hatch in the floor.
His missing fingers defied him, slid over the bloody grips. “Someone help me with this!” he called out.
The only other person still seated, a man in an ill-fitting suit who’d looked highly strung even at the journey’s outset, dropped and scurried across the aisle. He offered his name as Bose. Giraud angrily waved it away. He grabbed one bar of the double seal on the trapdoor, waited until the man had his hands on the other, nodded, and pulled hard. Hissing, the panel eased up and to one side with all the unhurried speed of a plundered sarcophagus.
“We need to get under the train!” Giraud shouted into the carnage at the rear doors, then dropped through the hatch without waiting to see who followed.
The severely cramped space beneath came as no surprise, but he thanked whatever gods were still alive and listening that the train’s width left an oasis of shadow, hot and rippling and stinking but survivable. Outside the conditioned atmosphere of the carriage, his brain struggled to process the stench: a thick oil-and-water swirl of sulphur, wet ash and, oddly, rosemary. The texture of air in his lungs felt instantly wrong and left him wrestling with another wave of disorientation.
He had no way of knowing how long anyone could survive exposure to this place, this crazed, violent aberration. The idea of it being repurposed for tourism and profit was beginning to feel like a fever dream.
Bose dropped down beside Giraud as his mind reeled. Together, they scrambled to keep up with the train, to stay in the shade. The ground’s sharp facets and mineral blooms tore at their knees and palms.
All around was chaos. If this state-of-the-art vehicle carried any external deterrents, those had been shut off, too. Of the passengers not already splayed out dead in the sun, only legs and feet could be seen – running, kicking out in terror, erupting in crystal tumours and bone spurs as the light surged over and around the train, a pack comprising one vast and indiscriminate predator.
###
The carriage shook with impacts from within and without. More bodies dropped through the hatch in various grievous states. One, headless and carved from neck to waist exposing a surface of rough geode, knocked Bose flat and left Giraud struggling to drag him free before their sliding shade left him behind.
His chest was full of fire now, eyes swarming with embers. Blind instinct kept him surviving from one second to the next. It took several before he realised the tattooed half-a-body had been all that was left of Omar.
A crash and throat-rending roar above them finally sent an alarm booming through the train as it lurched to the left. Giraud visualised quartz-heavy bodies being pistoned into control banks. All he and Bose could do was cling to the edge of the hatch, letting it drag them along. A second crash – and a third – threatened to bring the whole carriage down on them but succeeded only in forcing the train so far off course that it collided sickeningly with a crag the colour of aged silver.
The impact left it ringing like a bell. Then came the unmistakable whoosh of fire breaking out at the front of the carriage. As it listed like a stricken ship, a knot of brawling shapes barely recognisable as human fell heavily through the hatch, rolling with the impact back out into the light that resumed reshaping them into newly abhorrent forms.
Giraud was reaching the limits of his own compromised endurance. He risked raising his head through the hatch to see if the purge of bodies had made way for the possibility of shelter.
Instantly, the clone woman came at him. As he cried out and dropped back onto the ground, he caught a split-second glimpse of corpses strewn around the carriage – including the driver, snapped backwards and trailing from the doorway like a sodden flag, mutation finally slowing in death.
Giraud’s eager assassin landed astride the hatch. Her transformation was rampant. She was as much crystal as flesh, spines drilling through neck and shoulders like a mane flowing down from the bifurcated skull. She rasped and rattled and screeched through the gap. One weighty limb swung down like a clawed pendulum. Giraud and Bose scrambled back, driven almost too close to the light oozing by on either side of their stalled and burning sanctuary.
Giraud’s gut matter-of-factly informed him that this was it – he would die here, now, under this carriage. But the woman’s cells continued to diverge as she thrashed. The animal snarling ground down to nothing as crystal anomalies packed her throat. From her skull and shoulders, they spread out and jigsawed, restraining her struggles until what had been her upper torso mere minutes ago was now a rough, glittering surface the colour of a shadowed sea, almost entirely sealing the opening.
Finally, she grew still. Only a calcified arm and half a ravaged face remained on the outside of the hatch, a death-mask hung on a door. Giraud made a tentative effort to check for any life left in her eyes, but by that time, her eyes were long gone.
###
Slowly, one at a time, the last few voices ebbed away. The alarm circuits had melted. Everyone outside the train was either dead or too far gone in transformation to be mobile or sentient. Inside… Giraud had already gauged how survivable those circumstances were. A growing heat from above suggested the fire was still finding fuel. The sunslide continued to flow.
“This fucking place,” he wheezed. “None of us should have been here. It’s insane. It’s insane. Fuck the autocracy for trying to monetise this nightmare.” Even impaired by exhaustion, his rage at the state of the world was impossible to keep in check. “Fuck everything it does to feed itself. Everything I tried to expose and after all of it, everything I went through, it just got fucking worse.”
A moment of quiet, broken only by his ragged breathing.
“There it is,” Bose said softly. “The old fire.”
Giraud felt the ceramic blade slide between his ribs, a cold, hard tongue. There was more astonishment in it than pain. But as the signals from the damaged tissue began to burn through him, he looked down at the fabric of his shirt, already slick and poppy-red, and breathed a tired curse. Stupid. Why would they only send one? When they were ready to write off the entire train and everyone in it? Stupid, stupid.
Bose didn’t stick him again. Just sat there, watching dispassionately, knife in hand. He knew he’d done enough.
“8053,” he said.
“I don’t care what your number is,” sighed Giraud, “you factory-made fuck.”
Bose tutted. Giraud slumped numbly to one side, suddenly more tired than he’d ever been. It seemed an oddly mundane end, given all the alternatives that could have come for him in this lawless place.
“Shame you had to get swept away by all this, the whole suicidal act of revenge business,” Bose was saying. He waved the knife around vaguely. “Destroying autocracy property, making a statement, taking all these innocent people with you. That’s what happened, you understand.”
Giraud shook his head. Their narrative didn’t matter now. There wasn’t much time. Bose’s strike had been an assured kill, just not an immediate one. Orders. The blood kept coming. Giraud felt the looming loss of everything.
However.
All those years ago, his incarceration by the enemy had taught him crucial lessons. That regardless of the ‘balancing’ they performed on him, everything they took and degraded and lessened to force atonement for the damage of his dissent, he’d never be safe from further judgment. He’d foreseen a day like today. He’d made plans for the mountains.
Not everything done to Giraud’s body had been done against his will. Some of it had come later, by design and at great cost.
“You might not know this,” he mumbled almost conversationally, “but I’ve had a bit of work done.” Blood spilled down his cheek as he coughed. Hard to know whether it was from the stab wound, the deep-set implants now shivering to be triggered, or both. “Not even sure what’ll happen, to be honest. All I know is,” he looked at Bose as he braced a hand against the ground, gazing out through guillotine shadows and burning white light, “it’s a shame you won’t be able to run.”
Scraping together the very last of his strength, the rebel crawled out from beneath the train and stood to face the sun.
