Heavenbreaker

by Sara Wolf

I will hide our family’s bloodstains as Father did—with white and gold all over.

Nobles never have to survive. They decide who survives.

history is rarely accurate and written only by the victors.

true AI is illegal. Not even nobles are misguided enough to put true AI in their steeds—they want things they can control, and the true AI our ancestors made cannot be controlled anymore.

They say God made man in his image, but so, too, did man make the steeds in theirs.

My mother is dead, and I killed my father. I’m alone in this life. I know that. But for the first time in six months, there’s the barest venting of pressure, a release in knowing something else in this universe—anything else—burns the same way I do.

Still, he can’t help the soft laugh rising from his lips. “I’d ride against a hundred commoners if it meant I could be free from you.”

Brave one—you drugged a janitor, snuck into a highly guarded tourney hall, deceived a rider, hijacked a steed, and stabbed a duke to death. I know crime lords in the Under-ring who have done less.”

My sputter drains to a hiss. “You’re a lunatic.” “And you’re a murderer.” Dravik smiles brighter. “But that’s neither of our faults. Our fathers made us this way, did they not?”

the boy asked what rain was, and his father answered, “A thing that falls but never breaks.”

“Heavenbreaker,” Dravik says evenly. “Call it by its name.”

Mother had told him quite the contrary; it was their acceptance of the end, in totality, that rendered them incomprehensible strength. In any other time, it would have been called a death cult, but in the War for old Earth, it was called a knight’s greatest honor.

Protecting others is an honorable thing—I’m certain of that much. She thinks she’s doing the right thing. “Lady Yatrice,” I say slowly. “There will be no honor in any of this.”

“Riders aren’t riders simply because they’re nobles, Synali. Anyone can descend. Anyone can rise. But only riders can impact.”

“Miss,” Quilliam starts, voice cracking from the corner. “You’re too young to—” “Too young to do anything,” I finish. “But just old enough to be murdered.”

“synali” Heavenbreaker, I think back. “ride again? go fast?” Yes. Until the end.

“We are spiders, brother,” Green-One says. “We make the Web. And we must protect it.”

Space began all life, and it’ll end all life, too, someday.

“How about you? What do you think of space?” “I’m afraid of it.” “Why?” Because the whole universe is full of nothing.

Where does a twisted girl like me fit in the universe? Everyone else is full, whole. No one wants the darkness—they want the stars.

so he handed the kerchief over to Sevrith and prayed to a god who had long abandoned him in the darkness of Sunscreamer’s cockpit.

“You will not win, Draviticus. Even with someone like her.” Rax feels the air go sharp, unseeable glass underfoot, and the Lithroi man smiles so big it reminds him of a hungry fox. “’Tis not my victory I am concerned with, Your Majesty—but rather, your loss.”

The future is not pointless. I’m just afraid of living.

“The pawn is the only piece that refuses to move backward.”

“Well, uh, we took the nerve fluid out of them when we killed ’em back in the War, and we figured out how it worked.

You fucking idiots

what is made always unmakes itself. This is a law neither the king nor his rider nor the board advisors and their many threats can change. This is the universe, and just because they have tamed a small portion of it does not mean it will remain dormant forever—reality is older and longer and braver than humanity will ever be.

He knows they are the devil, but he thinks that God perhaps might feed on the same thing they do—the mind, the heart, the soul.

“You’ve been straightforward with me when no other noble has, and so I will return the favor this once.” I look over my shoulder with ice and salt, blood and throats, fire and truth. “I hate all of you.”

a girl who feels like family.

Are they siblings?

But a girl who will die after she wins the Supernova Cup has no time to heal, does she? She dies with her wounds still open.

They keep us like animals and use us like animals.

A sun becomes a supernova, and a supernova becomes a black hole.”

“There are things in this universe that do not die, Synali; they only change their names.”

“In the name of God, King, and Station!” For a god who’s abandoned us. For a king who uses our dead for his pleasure. And for a Station kept entertained.

“Do you ever wonder, Father, if the devil has memories, too?”

“You murdered your own father, bastard. You destroyed him.”

I make a Dravik smile. “No. Not quite yet.”

None of them knew the answer to the old queen’s question—a question that almost broke the world twenty years ago and would break it again now just as readily.

If she wants to drink pain, I will drown her in it.

Before I die, I will live.

“give them nothing.” As the last petal fades, I finish it. take everything.

I am not the one who strikes first, but I will be the one who strikes last.

They’re still alive—the little wiggly things. If you overload in the saddle, they eat all of you, and they remember you. Keep you there. They’re not allowed to grow back, obviously, because then they wouldn’t keep making the energy.

I am the one who raises the dead and gives them life again.

God forgave them. I cannot.

“I ask every one of you this: Do you know what we do to survive? Do you know the blood we shed that is not our own? Do you know what it means to ride?”