I watch the recording for the third time, trying to understand.

“The attempts on my life haven’t stopped. Even after we removed all synthes from my residences, terrible things kept happening. It was as if, well…” She falters, trails off. Her hand goes up to rub her shoulder at this part, drawing my attention momentarily to the wallscreen just behind her and the strange, macabre image displayed there. Her eyes have deep purple shadows beneath them.

“I wasn’t safe at home. So I’m being moved to a hidden, secret location until the day of the Renewal. I…I won’t be able to communicate once I’m there.” She takes a long, shaking breath. “I’m scared, Kore. I’m not sure I really believe I’ll be safe anywhere.” Again, she rubs her shoulder—this time her pointer finger lifting up for a moment, backlit by the screen with its horrible image.

But she’d always set her wallscreens to shimmer with abstracting, melting colors…when she wasn’t watching movies on them, at least.

“If they don’t find out who’s behind this before I return for the Renewal, I don’t know what we’ll do. And if I never emerge from this exile…it means I’ve misplaced my trust. That those closest to me here are the ones to blame. And the people of Gaia will have to look to you and your husband for help.”

She pauses again, glances briefly to the side.

“I love you Kore. I miss you. I…I believe in you.”

The message cuts off.

“Syntrofos.”

“Yes?” My companion, who’s sat by my side throughout, responds immediately.

“What is that hideous painting that’s displayed on the screen over her shoulder?”

“That is Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco Goya, an Old Earth artist. Would you like to know more?”

Why in Hades would she have that on display?

“Yes, please.”

A chill snakes down my spine as I listen to the story he goes on to tell me, of an artist with an ever-darkening mood, sickened by the world around him. Of a god who ate his children to prevent them from ever taking his place. Of a son, sent away and hidden where he might be safe.

I believe in you, she’d said.

I’m silent for a long time. Syn’s hand goes up to squeeze my shoulder.

“Kore, are you alright? Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes,” I say. “Call Aidon.”

~*~

It’s a strange experience, talking to my husband through the medium of Syntrofos’ body.

“Don’t worry about Syn, he’s off in Overkill’s head with him. I think he said something about watching a movie.”

“Oh, alright,” I flash a look over at my Guardian, who has indeed taken up a seat on one of my couches to stare blankly in the middle distance. Then I look back to the Synthe wearing my husband’s mind, trying to process the disconnect.

I’ve seen how Aidon does this. A large device set into the wall made of a rippling, silvery material. He steps into it, and it engulfs him—connecting his mind to a linked Synthe somewhere else in the world and allowing him control of its form, access to its senses.

As I step into his embrace, the scent of Syn’s ichor sparks my appetite. I stifle it, ashamed to even be capable of such a thing at a time like this. For a while I just let him hold me, melting into his presence. I pull back, and he takes my hand and leads me to the chaise near my window.

Everything pours out of me then. Not just the mystery of my sister’s message, but all that’s happened since he left. When my words are spent, we watch the recording side-by-side, one of his borrowed arms squeezing me about the shoulders.

As the recording comes to a close, his synthetic brow is furrowed and his citrine eyes narrow, lips drawn in a hard line.

My gaze flicks to Overkill where he sits, statue-like on the other couch, and I wonder if my husband’s thoughts have carried him down the same path as mine.

“I’ll come into the city early this weekend. Aphrosday night. It’s time you saw our penthouse.”

I blink at that, but by the next blink I’ve caught on. He has had the same thought as I have. Relief breathes through me, and my hands—which have been clenched into clammy fists into my lap—uncurl. I reach out to lace my fingers with his, squeezing our palms together. A physical reassurance of our invisible bond.

I’m not alone in this. I’m never alone in anything.

“We’ll talk in person then. Just you, me, and the sky.” Then he drops my hand to wrap both his arms around me, pulling me into his—Syn’s—lap, and strokes my hair as he whispers into it.

“It’s going to be alright, my love. We’re going to make it be alright.”

He pulls away from me then, enough to lock his gaze with mine, his essence piercing through Syn’s artificial eyes as he reaches up to brush away the moisture streaming down my cheeks.

“We’ll find whoever’s caused these tears, and we’ll drown them in their own.”

~*~

I don’t get much sleep that night. After hours of researching Saturn’s devouring of his sons and the rabbit-hole of information the subject leads me down, I manage perhaps a few miserable, nightmare-chased hours of unconsciousness. Then, all too soon, it’s time to rise for my first day of classes.

Finished with my morning ichor-feeding, I leave Syntrofos, Pompom, and most of Overkill behind to their own devices—bringing only Kill's hovering back-piece for a guardian.

“It’s my first day, and I’m distracted enough as it is,” I say firmly, putting down Syn’s protests. “I don’t want to be any more of a spectacle than I already am.”

With my hunger for ichor satiated, my need for food comes into sharper relief. Kill, programmed with the schematics of the school and indeed, the better part of the city—directs me to the main dining hall.

It’s vast and high-ceilinged, with a wrap-around mezzanine floor for additional dining space and one force-field wall that opens onto a great balcony overlooking the river.

It’s there where I take my second breakfast, once I have it. Finding not only more tables, but also couches and lounge chairs set about pits of blue glass and even bluer fire, I find myself a chair in a sparsely populated corner near the balcony rail. Even if it weren’t for my anxiety over my sister, my experience of the day before would have put me off socializing for a while.

“Warn off anyone who tries to approach me, please,” I throw over my shoulder to my hovering Guardian. It bobs dutifully in the air, pivoting to face outward.

The force fields here are minimal, sheltered as the space is by the architecture rising to three sides of it. I breathe deep of the comfortably frigid air, savoring the rare experience of being truly outside.

The food’s delicious, of course. Mango chutney, creamy spiced potatoes, and flavorful flatbread packed with nuts and bits of dried fruit. I can practically taste the sunlight in the berries, which must have been imported from Gaia. I wonder what sunlight will feel like to me, now. Maybe this is the only way I’ll be able to enjoy it? I think of the Renewal, the next time I’m set to see the light.

A Renewal that may not happen as planned, if my sister never returns from exile. A ceremony that might hide a deadly trap if she does.

Again I feel the warm threat of tears, but without Aidon’s arms to fall into, I wall them away instead. Sit up a little straighter, relax my face to betray nothing.

My first class is also one of my most mundane—Elysian History. When the lecture lands on the subject of Gaia and its life cycle, I resist the urge to sink into my chair under the weight of the other students’ regard. Instead I square my shoulders, shifting my focus back to the professor.

“It is unknown,” continues the elder Variant, a sage-eyed individual of indeterminate type who wears no gender-signifiers, “at what point exactly Demeter I realized her influence couldn’t hold forever, that she would need an Heir. Five hundred years in, perhaps more. This is when the first of her children were born. But it’s not until the birth of Demeter II that any are capable of taking up her mantle. By then, of the course, the First of Her Name was slipping, her mind almost entirely subsumed by Gaia’s.”

They gesture, and the hologram in the sunken center of the classroom flickers and changes, the portraits of my foremothers becoming instead a scene of violence—warped humanoid forms ripping into struggling humans with teeth and claws, gorging themselves on flesh and blood alike.

“At this point, we see the appearance of the first of the Corrupted as the dome’s AI struggles to maintain control,” continues the professor whose name I’ve already forgotten. “Since the defeat of the last of the Corrupt and the installation of Demeter II, it’s said that every daughter born to Gaia’s queens is almost identical to the last.“

Again I feel the eyes at my back, and again I shrug them off—fighting the temptation to excuse myself to the bathroom. I’ve never liked hearing any of this. I take some notes, mostly just because it feels wrong not to, and count the minutes to the end of class. When it finally comes, I bolt up to spill out into the high halls ahead of my peers to find my way to the next one.

Everyone’s got orientation classes for their Variant types for the first two years at university. As the only one of my own, I’ve been bundled in with the next closest thing. The Demeter Variants.

I’m bemused when Kill’s directions lead me briefly underground and through a ceiled, temperature-controlled chamber. But then I step onto the landing of the stair at its other end to find myself standing before a set of grand glass doors, a bronze plaque above which reads simply The Greenhouse.

As antiquated as most of the school appears, its technology isn’t so much outdated as it is well-integrated. That couldn’t be more obvious here, a place that resembles nothing so much as the most magnificent greenhouse Old Earth Victoriana ever conceived. But rather than glass, here there are sun-panels similar to my own back at the palace—translucent in appearance, but producing both the light and color of a sunlit day.

Birds sing in the upper reaches of the greenhouse canopy, and my heart lifts at the sound of them. For a few sweet moments I nearly forget everything else as I soak in the atmosphere of the place. Lush and cultivated and just a little bit wild all at once. Lovingly overgrown. Everywhere I look I see blooms and leaves, fruits and fronds of plants I’ve never heard of, and others I’ve read about but never seen or thought to. I reach out to touch the silky trunk of a tree whose bark is peeling away to reveal layer-after-layer of pastel color. Something shifts in the branches overhead, and I look up to see a drowsy fruit bat blinking down at me.

I’m so entranced by the flora and fauna that I’m barely aware of my classmates filtering in. Then Phoebus’s voice booms out behind me, and my spine goes rigid.

“Kore!”

I turn slowly, fighting to keep my emotions off my face.

“Hey Little Queen,” he slows, smiling crookedly, a hand reaching up to rub at the back of his head. Is he trying to be charming? Kestrel and Thanatos filter in behind him, but linger at the door, standing off to the side to make way for other students.

“There’s a thing that I wanted to tell you about—”

“Alright,” I cut him off, again feeling the prickle of unwanted attention as the Demeter Variants who actually do belong here observe our exchange. “But can it wait until later? I’m kind of about to start a class right now.”

“Of course, of course. I was going to mention it last night, but you hightailed it before I got the chance. Didn’t see you at breakfast either, though I got there kinda late.”

Good.

“It’s just that it’s time sensitive. Right after classes get out tonight—“

“Why don’t you tell me about it at lunch?”

He looks like he’s about to argue, but then our professor makes an entrance—emerging like an errant shadow from the trees at the further reaches of the greenhouse. Phoebus’s eyes flash to him, then back to me.

“Sure, at lunch. ” He reaches out to clap the back of my shoulder, that sun-bright sardonic smile stretching across his face again. Kill Buzzes a warning, and he withdraws it hastily. “See you then, Your Majesty.”

I turn from him as he leaves with his cronies, avoiding the gaze of my watchers. Some take their time in turning their attention away, trying to make their disapproval apparent. But I give my focus to our teacher instead, who observes us all with arms crossed and a slight smile twitching at the corners of his lips. Branches like antlers grow from the crown of his head, sprouting bursts of fir needles, and a cloak of needles and pinecones cascades from his shoulders. His eyes are the rich amber-gold of resin.

“If we’re all quite ready?” There’s some murmuring at that, and warmth rushes to my cheeks—a reaction I can never seem to quell. “I am of course, Professor Cernuios Hatch. But I’ve resigned myself to students referring to me simply as Hatch. I understand you have time to save.” He smirks. “Now, with that out of the way, I’d like to welcome you to The Greenhouse. This place is not only my pride and joy and that of many who came before me, but it will also be your most important resource for the entirety of your career here. Forget the library. This is your treasure trove of knowledge. All of it writ in the most sacred of languages. DNA.”

As he speaks, he paces, flourishingly grandly. Between that and the cloak and antlers, I almost forget I’m not watching a thespian at work.

“We have a reputation, our type, of being nurturers. And while it’s true we foster growth, it’s important to remember the full potential of growth. Of life.”

He reaches upward, practically begging for a spotlight as the leaves of a strawberry plant burst to life in his palm, flowering in the next heartbeat and fattening with fruit the one after that.

“The potential to nourish.” He rips the berries casually from his hand before coaxing a student forward with the crook of a finger to deposit it in hers. “The potential to destroy.” A rainbow-array of fuzzy mold and fungi erupts to life, eating away the remains of the greenery in his hand. A vividly red amanita mushroom rises at the heart of it all.

“And the potential to remake.” He plucks the fungal fruit from his hand, offering it about—but no one comes forward. One of them twitches towards him, but seems to suppress herself with some effort. Again, that smirk.

“Ah, well.” Stuffing the mushroom into one of his pockets, he goes quiet for a moment, eyes a little far away. “Now that my entrance is made.” He shrugs off the cloak of growth as if it’s nothing, hiking the robes up at his back to cover the freshly exposed skin of his shoulders. He cocks his head to one side and then the other, and the antler branches fall away too. And then, much to my dismay, his gaze lands directly on me.

“But today we have the company of one with yet more potential—one with the power to add to our library, and make all of us the greater for it.”

I swallow, not sure I like the hungry way his eyes search mine.

“Please come forward, Miss Demeter-Hades. I’d like to start this class with a little experiment.”