The maadiregi at the temple of the talking drum say that there is a word in old Sauúti, the high language of our ancestors, that when spoken backwards, allows the speaker to fly.

To take to the sky like a bird, unshackled from the persistent pull that Órino-Rin’s gravity exerts on us all. To be free from the weight of your own being, that intractable thing that always pulls you down to the earth like a parent’s expectations. To float up high into the pale sky where the two suns Zuúv’ah and Juah-āju blaze fierce like the unblinking eyes of Our Mother Goddess.

Now that I know that I am trapped here below the yededek’iyan where atmospheric conditions are unsurvivable, the first person to reach these depths of Órino-Rin, our world of heavy air and breathlessness and lightning, I desperately wish I knew that word so that I could speak it and take flight, return to the mountain city above. To my home, to my mother.

But no. I don’t know the word or if such a word truly exists. I do know that without the BAV—my buoyancy adjustment vessel—there is no way back up to Moki-gu, just the way I know that there is no way to unbreak a mother’s heart or unkill a friend or make time go back in the direction from which it constantly flees.

And so, I keep moving. One unsteady step at a time. Half-walking, half-sinking through viscous atmosphere. Descending the steep, jagged slope of the mountain-continent along the direction I programmed from the radar into the atmospheric exposure suit before I abandoned the broken BAV. The only thing I can depend on now is the thing that brought me here—gravity—to keep taking me down slowly and hopefully to not kill me before I reach the end. Despite the front-mounted fan and the heater and light beam of the bulky atmospheric exposure suit, I can barely see my hand in front of my face. I cannot hear anything except the hum of the suit sensors, the battery beeping a persistent warning. In this cold, acidic, supercritical fluid environment, I could convince myself it was a false reading—electronic components generally do not do well under these conditions—but I am certain this is real. I’m low on power. I’ve been down here and exposed to this unforgiving environment for far too long. Much longer than we had planned for even in our most pessimistic scenarios. I ignore it all and keep heading toward the place that my radar altimetry and acoustic signals all indicate as the lowest elevation point, despite the dense atmosphere making it impossible to confirm.

I already know that I will die here.

There are three things that breach the surface of my mind as I tend toward my final breath.

One. Gratitude.

For the fact that my mother will never have to bury my body, will never hear the menigari march out in their flowing black robes to perform a farewell dirge for me, will never have to sing my soul to Eh’wauizo, the place of the ancestors. My people believe that it is an abomination for a parent to have to bury their child. Dying here will spare her that shame.

Two. Satisfaction.

Because I will have superseded her. No matter what happens after this. No matter what I find below besides death. She may be the authority on the theoretical geodynamics of our world, but I will always be the one that was the pioneer, the one who first descended and saw what lay below the natural curtain of dense phase fluid. Even if no one ever knows I was here.

Three. Regret.

Because even though my mother isn’t my real mother in the biological sense of the word, and we have spent most of our relationship at each other’s throats, I still wish I could see her and hug her and listen to the steady beating of her heart and maybe say goodbye one final time before the brutal pressure and bitter cold and the erratic energy bursts and the many other strange mechanisms that I have witnessed at work in the basement of our strange planet finally crush me into nothing more than a memory.

Part One: Flight

The temple of unbroken light stood beside the Moki-gu military fort like an old friend. Knowledge and power, always side by side. That was the guiding principle of the Kin-Kali family, who ran much of the city.

The Kin-Kali family was one of the first to learn how to extract and store the energy released by the unpredictable, naturally occurring plasma-like energy and vibrational discharges of sonic storms that ravage our planet. The release of energy was intense and sometimes they could be heard continents away, triggering seismic activity that lasted for hours. But they could also be harnessed and used as a resource. And mastery of this process was one of the reasons Kin-Kali rose to prominence, along with a dedication to innovation and an unmatched ruthlessness in eliminating their competition. Once they controlled enough of the sonic storm mining business, they set up many temples, including the famous temple of the talking drum on the other side of Mogi-ku, to study music and magic, and this one, to conduct research on geodynamics, meteorology, and planetary energy systems. Always seeking more knowledge. More power.

The temple of unbroken light was a towering, weathered stone building of awkward edges that poked out from the ragged mountain peak like a natural extension of it. A sharp contrast to the smooth white dome of the fort where soldiers milled and hovered about like dangerous insects.

I paused to remove the mask of my breathing apparatus as I stepped out of the elevator that linked all the levels of the Moki-gu vertical city, even those just below the meridian, below which the density of the planet’s atmosphere rapidly increased, beginning its transition from a gas to a supercritical fluid and making it thick and soupy and so much harder to breathe. Where the sonic storms that plagued our world became more intense and more frequent and more destructive. Where both the petty criminals and the poor of this planet often settled like sediment once the rich and privileged had claimed the mountain tops. Where I now lived.

I didn’t need any breathing apparatus up here like I sometimes did below. Wiping my face with my hands, I inhaled the familiar delicate air of the place where I had spent my youth. My stubble was rough and abrasive against my palms. I hadn’t shaved in a while. The air felt good in my lungs, and I took a moment to savor it, taking a deep breath and holding it for a few seconds before exhaling. Preparing. And then I headed into the temple to see my mother for the first time in five long juzu. The heel of my boots crunched dust and small rocks with each step.

One of the guards at the gate recognized me as I approached. Not that I was hard to recognize—there weren’t many people in Moki-gu or even all of Órino-Rin that had half of their faces covered with metal. Some members of the rich Kin-groups had chrome skin implants but those were usually small patches in their skin. Decorative. Like tattoos. Or tribal marks. Mine ran deeper than skin. Half of my face was artificial. Reconstructed by my mother and a team of experts after the accident that nearly killed me as a young boy.

“Gwaato? Is that really you?”

It was Beni-maru. A soldier who’d been at the temple since I was a child. I hadn’t seen him in many juzu. He was older of course, his full head of thick, curly black hair balding at the top now, with deep smile lines radiating from the corners of his mouth. He used to smile at me or make small jokes whenever I went into or out of the building and he had even watched over me once or twice when I was much younger, and my mother was much busier. In some sense, we’d been friends. As much as I could call anyone at the temple a friend anyway.

“Hello Beni-maru. Yes. It’s me. Kanje e bu Ya’yn mara,” I greeted in the traditional Ts’jenene tongue. May The Mother’s sky be kind.

“Kanje e bu, Gwaato.” He smiled with the greeting, but it was strained, a bit less jovial than the version I remembered.

“I’d like to see my mother,” I told him, without giving any space in my tone for extended pleasantries.

“Ah . . . ” He seemed confused at first. Understandably. My mother and I had fallen out very loudly and publicly and it had been a long time since I’d shown my face at the temple. He considered a moment, putting a finger to his temple, and then he said, “Of course. Follow me please.”

Beni-maru escorted me into the temple, through the long winding corridors where less important sound-artifacts recovered from all around the planet were displayed, some of them from the time before the solar flare that had killed off many of our ancestors and destroyed so much of their knowledge and technology. We went past open rooms where new initiates diligently recited both prayers and technical analyses just as I used to, so many juzu ago. Then up the stone stairs where murmuring people gave me surprised second looks and, finally, through a thick wooden door into an office chamber where my mother stood overlooking the cliffs and the sea of greenish-yellow clouds that marked the meridian below. The other three corners of the room had no walls. Two sturdy round pillars of the same thick wood as the door ran from ground to ceiling as supports, giving the illusion of free hanging, like the entire office was an extended ledge. A stone desk sat at the center of the space, the door to its left and the open view to the right.

“So—” She turned to face me as Beni-maru quietly retreated and shut the door behind him. “—you finally decided to come back.”

She looked tired. Skinnier than I remembered in the white lace blouse and thick wrapper tied around her waist. The thin braids of her hair had picked up new, broad streaks of gray, the skin of her forearms seemed more wrinkled, and even her cheeks sagged more than I remembered. But her brown eyes retained the same blistering flame of intense will that had incinerated so many of my childhood whims.

“I came to ask for your support,” I told her, instinctively pulling up my trousers as I took a step forward.

“For?” she spat out; her eyebrows arched.

“I’ve submitted another technical proposal to the temple council.”

“A proposal for what?”

“I believe there is a method by which we can descend below the yededek’iyan and potentially reach the surface of the world. I want to test it.”

She threw her hands up. “Divine Mother of the immaculate sound, of all the children I could have adopted, why did you curse me with this stubborn, useless boy! Gwaato, haven’t you listened to the records of any of my research lectures? There is no solid surface. Our planet is a giant mass of ultradense fluid atop which our continents float like rocky ships. The atmosphere continues all the way down to the center.”

“You don’t really know that,” I said, ignoring her outburst.

She glared at me. “I have proved it numerically. I have performed the calculations, recited the extrapolations, sung the simulations. It is all consistent. I know you are stubborn, and you don’t like to listen to your elders or to anyone else for that matter but surely you have heard me articulate the arguments clearly enough.”

“I have,” I confirmed.

“Hmm.” She walked to her polished stone desk and sat down with her arms folded. “And did you hear any mistakes in my logic for deriving my conclusions?”

“No. I did not.”

“So, if you agree that my logic is sound, and thus my conclusions, then what is this stupid proposal for?”

I approached her desk, keeping my hands folded behind me to hide the fact that they were shaking. “Your logic is consistent, but it only provides an explanation based on what we can measure and observe from up here and then extrapolates to explain what is happening below. This is gba’agbo.” Reasonable belief from inference. “Not ii-mo.” Knowledge based on physical evidence or experience.

In our traditional Ts’jenene epistemological tradition, both are considered to be truths but there is a difference, and she knew it. Ii-mo is considered more valuable. She has not observed anything below the yededek’iyan, the depth below which the pressure is so high, and the temperature is so low that no known material can survive for more than a few minutes. No one has gone below it and returned. Even remote instruments that have been lowered by wireline tether fail beyond a certain depth. No one has ii-mo of what lies beneath. Not yet.

“So, you seek ii-mo? At the cost of your life? Do you know how many have died trying to lead expeditions below the yededek’iyan?”

I nodded. “Yes. I do. Fifty-eight. I have listened to reports of all the past missions.”

“And you still want to try?” She shook her head just like she used to whenever one of the temple instructors recited my progress reports as a child. She was always perpetually disappointed in me. At least that was consistent. I grew angry as the childhood memories of being derided churned, but I choked my emotion back. Instead, I tried to make my case based on the only thing we have always had a common love for: technical detail.

“I’ve done my research. I won’t repeat their mistakes. I am not just trying reinforced and revised versions of the same materials and methods they used. I have devised an entirely new type of material and a unique vessel for the descent. Two spheres, one attached to the other, the upper one to control elevation and the other to carry people and equipment. Both will have a triple hull system that manages the pressure and buoyancy by controlling the ratio of atmospheric gas between the spaces of each hull. It can take us down to more than a hundred times the meridian pressure.”

She focused on me and cocked her head like she was mentally visualizing the system. “You are sure this new material you have devised will not rupture like the hundreds of others before it?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“And how exactly do you know that?” she asked.

I flinched before admitting, “From my calculations. I have derived it numerically and sung simulations of the descent.” She’s sharp, my mother. Always has been. I should have seen the trap she set.

She leaned back in her chair. “So, you arrogantly come into my office after more than five juzu, without a word of apology or proper greeting, to ask me to help you plead your case for funding before the council, a case for acquiring ii-mo over my own well established gba’agbo, based on nothing but your own gba’agbo about some rubbish contraption you came up with while living in the city’s flatulent anus?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

“Let me make it very clear to you,” she continued, leaning forward in her chair. “I will do no such thing.” Her eyes were wide with that familiar consuming fire. “The council does not fund pointless, dangerous research and I will not risk my position on it by suggesting that we start now. I suggest you withdraw your proposal before you lose what credibility you have left at this temple.” She shook her head again and her eyes narrowed as her anger rapidly transmuted back to a familiar disappointment. “You have always had such potential and yet you continue to waste it. After your accident, when they used my soundcode to repair and rebuild your brain, I had such high hopes for what we could do together, you and me. But now, as more and more time passes, I am starting to realize that you are just another one of my failed experiments. Perhaps the greatest failure of them all. Now please get out of my office.” She had fully assumed the voice and manner I remembered so clearly from my childhood: calm, cruel, and sharp. Just like her aura. The shaking in my hands had spread to my entire body, and it took the full effort of my will to keep from breaking into tears. But I’d promised myself when I left the temple, left home, left her, that I would never let her make me cry again.

I turned to leave.

As I pulled open the door, she said, “We Ts’jenene are nomadic people. Our traditional epistemology is more complicated than you know. This is your problem. You know just enough to confuse yourself. Not enough to truly understand. Ii-mo is essential but belief, gba’agbo, is the boundary condition for all knowledge. To continue seeking ii-mo is folly. Maybe you will learn that eventually.”

She was still trying to lecture me even as she cast me out.

“I hate you,” I said, the words finally spilling out of my chest like long-pressurized venom. “And don’t worry. You will never see me again.”

I shut the door and walked out of the temple the same way I came, ignoring Beni-maru’s wave goodbye.

---

I was in a bar back below the meridian called The Mother’s Navel, and already halfway through my second gourd of hoguro, the sweet brew made from the fermented sap of the palm trees that grew in the upper regions of Moki-gu, when I saw Beni-maru again.

“Hey Gwaato!”

I turned to see him shouldering his way through the mass of bodies towards me. He looked different, no longer in his leather armor. He was wearing a flowing red boubou and white cap that covered his balding head and made him look even more out of place than he already was. When he was close enough to grab a stool and sit down, I said, “Hey Beni, I wasn’t expecting to see you twice today. And definitely not here of all places.”

The Mother’s Navel was frequented by the poor of Moki-gu because of the cheap prices and the reinforced outer walls made of unique no’orin composites that protected it from the worst of the sonic storms that plagued Órino-Rin more intensely below the meridian. The bar had even served as a storm shelter on more than one occasion. But the prices weren’t low enough to bring anyone down here from the upper levels. Especially not soldiers in the employ of the temple. Beni-maru had to have come down seeking something else. Like drugs, or sex or some other illicit vice. But he didn’t seem like the type for such things.

“What do you mean?” he asked, gasping, a little out of breath. He was clearly not used to the thicker atmosphere below, despite the air conditioning in the bar.

“You just don’t seem like the type that frequents The Mother’s Navel,” I told him, taking another swig of hoguro. “Now me, I’m here all the time. I live just two levels below. And I’ve never seen you here before.”

“Hmm.” He took a few deep, slow breaths. And then, without answering my question, he turned to the server, “One gourd of cold hoguro please. And another for my young friend.”

As the server dipped below the bar to retrieve more of the brew, Beni-maru turned back to me, his eyes focused and clear. “It has been so long since we spoke properly. And today when I saw you at the temple again it brought back memories. We didn’t really get a chance to catch up. You were just a boy when you left the temple and now, you’re a grown man.”

He took a long look at me. The din of the bar was loud but not too loud. “Let us drink first, Gwaato. Then we talk.”

I briefly entertained the idea that my mother had sent him to make peace. Perhaps she’d reconsidered, had a change of heart and would quietly support my proposal after all. The hoguro had made me optimistic. Too optimistic. I took one of the cold gourds of fresh drink when the server placed them in front of us, poured its cloudy, off-white contents into my smooth clay cup, and took a long deep swallow. Then I waited for Beni-maru to do the same. He only took a small sip of his.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” I asked. Beni-maru and I had been relatively close when I lived at the temple. Or, perhaps not close, but comfortable enough with each other to say we were friends. And while I didn’t think of him often after I left, when I did, it was with a kind of misty fondness, like a memory of dew.

“You know, you’re smart. You’ve always been. But when your mother fixed you, she also broke something in you,” he started. Whatever I had been expecting him to say, it certainly wasn’t that.

He continued, “I think she is afraid of your potential and that is why she has always held you back, tried to make you feel small. Or at least smaller than she is.”

Surprise, and a mouthful of hoguro, kept me silent as he went on.

“I was there when she brought you to the temple, you know. It was just my third juzu working there but even then, I knew it wasn’t right, the way she held you, looked at you. I’ve seen my sister with her own children, and I could tell there was something missing in your mother’s eyes. She didn’t want a child; she wanted a devotee, an assistant she could cast into the shape she wanted. I see how she treats you. Talks to you. It has always been the same. She is eager and excited to see your intellectual potential flare up because in a way, she believes it is partly her doing, but at the same time she is always quick to snuff it out when it threatens to become brighter than hers.”

The fleshy side of my face tingled with a rush of blood, and I held my hand up to the other side, the one covered with metal.

When I was seven, I had tried to escape from the orphanage by climbing out of the window of the dormitory I shared with forty-eight other boys, a window overlooking the meridian clouds. I don’t know exactly why but I thought that if I could climb high enough, to the top of the city, that The Mother Goddess would see me, and I could ask her to reunite me with my birth parents whom the Silent Sisters that ran the orphanage had informed me were dead. It was foolish yes, but I had squeezed through the bars and climbed out, digging my tiny fingers into the spaces between the rocks and hauling myself up, through the near-meridian fog of Moki-gu. I thought I was making good progress until my fingers slipped and I fell, cracking my skull against the hard earth of the courtyard.

I was in a coma for three months. At the time, my mother had been working on soundcode for a simulation of the formation of the universe and some of her subroutines had been so innovative and complex that they were being adopted in several other fields, including neuroscience. It was her soundcode that was used to create the neuroprosthesis that replaced my damaged prefrontal cortex and gave me back much of my cognitive function.

I remember seeing her face for the first time when I opened my eyes. She was sandwiched between the shoulders of two tall men—members of the team of uroh-ogi and maadiregi that had saved my life. I noticed her because she was the only one who didn’t smile. Her eyes were bright and inquisitive though, focused on me with the intensity of a blast furnace. Her short and curly hair scattered the light from behind her into something like a halo. A luminous crown. She could have been an angel.

The news of my recovery made her even more famous than she’d already been in academic circles. She became a household name. The one whose genius not only explained how the world worked and the mechanisms by which The Mother Goddess had animated the universe but had also saved the life of a desperate orphan. She was appointed to a seat at the council, which she accepted, and she formally adopted me when I was released from the care of the uroh-ogis at the Fehinti’ti treatment center.

“I think she took you in not because of love, but because she saw you as something she could control,” Beni-maru said when I didn’t respond. “To her, you will always be the poor little broken orphan she fixed.”

Even though I knew that most of what he was saying was true, it hurt to hear it. To know that her lack of motherly love for me was so plain, so obvious, that it could be seen from outside our relationship by an external observer. A dense and visible absence, like a black hole at the center of a galaxy.

“I understand exactly who I am to her,” I said, perhaps a bit too defensively. “I don’t need you to remind me.”

“Good.” Beni-maru nodded. “It’s good to know the truth of things. Even when that truth is bitter.”

“So why are you bringing all this up now?”

Beni-maru looked around the bar like he was scanning the room for something and then said, “Because it’s important. I need you to know that I understand your position. And I need to be sure you are clear that you don’t owe her anything before I go any further. Do you understand that?”

I nodded, already suspicious that he was going to ask me to betray her even if I didn’t know exactly how. I felt a tightness in my chest, like the air in the bar had suddenly changed.

There was more to my relationship with my mother than what Beni-maru had outlined. Despite bitter memories of her persistent disapproval, she’d raised me. Fed me. Taught me to recite equations that described all the wonderful and strange ways the universe worked. Hugged me. Sung me to sleep on nights when the wind howled, and the sky roared. Told me stories of The Mother Goddess. Kissed my forehead. Held my hand in darkness. These memories too were layered in the geology of our relationship like bright white marble intercalations. Perhaps they were the reasons I kept trying to get her approval, why I had gone up to the temple today. But no more. Today had been the last time. So, I told Beni-maru firmly, “I understand my position. I have already completely cut ties with her. And I owe her nothing.”

“Then we have an understanding.” He flashed a smile briefly, the lines of his face deepening, like mudcracks against his dark skin. And then, “The proposal you submitted to the council, the one you spoke to your mother about today. Is it real?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly full of renewed hoguro-induced hope at hearing my proposal mentioned. I didn’t even ask him how he’d overheard our conversation since he was supposed to have left the room, left us in privacy. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that Beni-maru was more than just a friendly temple guard.

“Are you sure?” he asked. Something about the way he leaned in and gripped his cup as he asked made me realize the seriousness of the situation.

“As certain as I can be about anything. I’ve been working on the design since I left the temple. I have thought about it in detail for many juzu. It will work. You said it yourself. I’m smart.”

Beni-maru laughed and pressed down the front of his red boubou with hard, firm hands. “Good. Because I know someone that is willing to give you all the resources you need to build your vessel and fund your expedition below the yededek’iyan,” he said, eyes narrowing to slits.

“Not the council?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Not the council. Or anyone affiliated with the temple. No one there will even talk to you. Your mother has made sure of that.”

“Then who?” I asked, concern nipping at my mind like small carnivorous fish.

“Finish your hoguro. I will take you to them.”

I regretted how much I’d drunk already but I didn’t want him to pick up on my change of demeanor. On my eagerness and fear. So, I held the gourd with both hands to hide the fact that they were trembling and made a show of drinking it, like I was taking a swig when I only took a short sip.

“I’m done.” I lied, pushing the half-full cup back toward the young server who gave me a brief, confused look but took it away anyway.

Beni-maru stood up, thin, wiry limbs peeking out of the folds of his boubou like curious tree branches. He put down four owo notes, more than enough to pay for our drinks, and made for the exit.

I followed him out of The Mother’s Navel, and into the greenish haze of Órino-Rin’s transition zone—the region between the meridian and the yededek’iyan. Visibility was poor and we could only see a half-dozen steps or so ahead of us at a time. Thick olive-colored clouds clung to sides of the mountain face and the perfect cuboid exterior of the elevator. Beni-maru put on his breathing apparatus but I didn’t put on mine. I didn’t need it. Not for brief exposures anyway. In the distance, I saw streaks of white and blue light chase each other through the clouds and the air around us seemed to rumble. A sonic storm was coming. A small one.

We went to the elevator, and he paid the fare for us to enter one of its dozen pods. The thick doors shut with a metal groan. The elevator pod rose, and we rode it silently, the haze thinning and visibility steadily improving until we were back above the meridian.

A tapestry of stars poked through smooth sky that had been stained pink by the setting of the two suns, and the sweep of clouds dropped away below us in all directions. I could finally see outside as we whizzed past other elevators and rocky outcrops and the smattering of small stocky trees that grew all along the upper slopes of the mountain-continent, their leaves bright green and their trunks scarred from tapping to make hoguro. In the distance, the spires and towers of Mogi-ku and Laima’farwa’wa and all the other mountain-continent cities stood erect, stabbing their dark silhouettes into the sky.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Beni-maru asked.

“Yes,” I replied. Such sunset views were impossible below the meridian, and I had almost forgotten how spectacular they could be.

We exited the elevator onto a wide-open ledge surrounded by craggy, angry-edged rocks on all sides. On the flat ground around us lay scree and an assortment of cables, wires, flat sheets, and incomplete sections of spires like deconstructed millipedes. It was a city maintenance station. It looked abandoned. Sitting right on the lip of the ledge, where the flat ground gave way to dizzying escarpment, an old Tanti’ti shack sat like a giant spider. I froze for a moment. Tanti’ti shacks were traditional nomadic Ts’jenene flying homes and transports. Used to travel the short distances between the mountaintop cities and the less inhabitable mountain peaks of Órino-Rin. A Tanti’ti would never survive a flight below or even close to the meridian, but up here, up high, where the atmosphere was lighter and less temperamental, their manipulation of warm air buoyancy and winds was enough to get them where they needed to go. The Mother’s truth be told, my buoyancy adjustment vessel design had been partially inspired by the working mechanism of Tanti’ti shacks.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked Beni-maru, who was already moving confidently toward the shack.

“Up,” he said without looking back. “Where we can be sure no one will see or hear us. Don’t worry, we are not leaving Mogi-ku. Just floating above it. Your potential patron likes privacy.”

There was something different about Beni-maru now. We had crossed some threshold and our relationship had permanently changed; I could sense that. But I retained enough childhood memories of our times together to trust him. Ignoring the dread that was growing in the pit of my stomach as the hoguro slowly cleared its way out of my system, beading my forehead and my back with sweat, I followed him to the perched Tanti’ti shack.

It was mostly white, with a solid black and red pattern of dots, waveforms and ovals ringing its lower parts—a traditional design—just above the soft curve at the base of its conical top, where the six metal legs extended out to grip the ledge, like an insect. A rectangle of red light blinked steadily just above the pattern band like a twitching eye and when we reached the shack, the light turned bright green. A door slid open, and we entered.

The walls were lined with a complex arrangement of pneumatics—metal pipes, fiber tethers, glass tubes, and large leather air bladders that were steadily inflating and deflating like the shack itself was breathing. Circular viewports punctuated the busy walls. The pneumatic arrangements converged at a point, the pilot’s standing station directly opposite the entrance, which was slightly lowered with a wide window and a control console in front of it. The pilot was a tall and unusually skinny young woman dressed in traditional Ts’jenene blue and brown leather tunic, trousers, and headscarf. Bright blue tribal marks ran all along her exposed forearms. She didn’t turn to look at us, focused instead on the window ahead. But I could tell she was not the one we had come to see.

There was another woman sitting on the floor at the center of the shack, an aura of casual intensity about her. She was wearing a flowing white sleeveless dress that showed off her arms; the toned, muscled arms of someone that had grown up doing manual labor. The dress was of the same pattern as the band outside the shack. Dots, waveforms, and ovals arranged in some symbolic way, their black and red colors stark against the white material. Her head was shaved clean and daubed with ash, and her eyes shone like diamonds even though the area around them was darkened by thick eye shadow. She didn’t look like a Ts’jenene nomad.

Beni-maru quietly sat down on the floor, crossing his legs and I followed suit. The woman on the floor snapped her fingers and the skinny pilot responded, adjusting something at the controls with long tentacle-like arms. There was a click and a whoosh and a series of small movements all along the walls as the pipes vibrated and the air bladders around us inflated.

I tried not to show my panic when I felt the shack lift off, leaning to one side before returning to even keel, drifting steadily like pollen in a garden of rock. I was entirely at their mercy. Through the port holes, the sky was clear.

It was only when we were airborne that the sitting woman finally spoke.

“Kanje e bu Ya’yn mara.”

“Kanje e bu,” I greeted back.

“You don’t know me, but I know you. So, allow me to make things balanced. My name is Ochoyo-Tananari,” she said with the calm confidence of someone used to recognition by reputation.

And she was right. I recognized the family name. The Kin-Ochoyo clan was a rival to the Kin-Kali family’s sonic-storm mining monopoly. The Kin-Ochoyo did not have the resources to set up research temples like the Kin-Kali did, but they had their own ways of conducting research and development and gaining a competitive edge. Like spies. Spies, I now understood, like Beni-maru. I shot him a look, but he didn’t return it, focused instead on the pilot.

“And that is Njeriri,” Ochoyo-Tananari added, angling her head toward the pilot who gave a single, stiff wave without turning around. The veins on the back of her hand and forearm were so prominent, they looked like a strange roadmap.

“So,” Ochoyo-Tananari continued. “I wanted to speak with you because Beni-maru tells me that you have devised a way to descend below the yededek’iyan without destroying yourself. Is that true?”

“Yes,” I replied nervously.

“And you need resources to build it.”

I confirmed that too.

“Then it seems The Mother may have aligned our interests. My family and I have been developing something special of our own. Tell me, what do you know of sonic storm mining?”

I knew enough of the general principles even though it was not my area of expertise.

“I know it’s hard and dangerous to extract the energy from the storms,” I told her. “And I know that the Kin-Kali use devices that can absorb the vibrational energy produced by the storms by using synthetic materials whose resonant frequency has been calibrated to match the storms. Once absorbed, the sonic energy can be transferred and stored in special crystals.”

“Ririni crystals,” she interjected.

“Yes. Thank you. Ririni crystals.”

And then rolled her finger, which I took to mean that she wanted me to go on.

“The crystals are easy to transport and use in different applications because of their high energy density per unit volume.”

When I paused, she rolled her finger again.

“Apparently, there used to be people who mine sounds from the sonic storms without any equipment,” I added. “People who could survive direct exposure to sonic storms and even channel some of a storm’s power directly to Ririni crystals.”

“There are,” she corrected. “Conductives. The Ts’jenene call them Iji-omoji. The children of the storm. The ones whose inner fragment of Mothersound, the sound that animates all things, hums close to the natural frequency of sonic storms. They are rare now. Or at least only a few of them are known. There was a time when Iji-omoji used to be kidnapped and forced into servitude, mining sonic energy. But that was long before the vibrational panel technology was developed. Things are far more civilized now. A few of them remain a ceremonial part of the sound mining process in some areas, others wander the skies, helping small communities but they mostly keep a low profile.”

“I see.”

Her stare indicated to me that she still wanted me to continue.

“I have heard that the naturally occurring Ririni crystals can hold immense amounts of energy in the structure of their lattices. Estimates of their storage capacity vary widely. Some maadiregi theorize that some crystals can hold more energy than the twin suns release in a hundred juzu without shattering.”

“Ah! Not that again. It is gba’agbo. Not ii-mo. And not even good gba’agbo at that. An extrapolation from one single study that used a questionable methodology which some maadiregi got carried away by,” she said, smiling at Beni-maru. “But yes, it is true that some crystals have been used to store all the energy from multiple storms without any damage to their structural integrity. Still, it is difficult to test them to their limits, as you can probably understand.”

“Indeed, I do,” I replied.

She twirled her finger again, but I had told all I knew. So, I bowed my head, waiting for her. A silence swelled to fill the pause as the Tanti’ti shack hovered steadily over the mountain continent. The pilot was good. Very good. I barely even noticed any movements as I had on previous Tanti’ti flights.

Finally, Ochoyo-Tananari said, “You know enough about how sound mining works to understand what I am about to tell you. The key limitations of sonic storm mining are not in storing the energy, but in predicting where and when the storms will occur and how much energy they contain, and in building a device that can vibrate at the right frequency long enough and stably enough to transfer all that energy to a Ririni crystal without being destroyed.” She leaned forward. “Up here, it’s nice and safe for us to live because the storms are relatively weak and infrequent despite their almost aleatory nature. The strongest storms that those of you who live near the meridian experience might release enough energy to destroy a small, unprotected settlement, but that is barely enough energy to power a small industrial complex. Not even enough to launch a small probe beyond the gravitational grip of our planet. And the Kin-Kali almost always beat us to them.” She looked at Beni-maru and her upper lip tightened. “But the storms below the yededek’iyan are much more powerful, much more destructive. They release so much more energy in a single occurrence. Those are the most valuable storms. Those are the storms we want to extract sonic energy from.”

She paused again, allowing the implication to sink in. The intensity of her gaze was all-consuming, like fire.

“I see,” I said because I finally understood what she wanted. Why she had asked Beni-maru to bring me here. The Kin-Kali were very good at predicting storm occurrences and arriving before anyone else could. The army of researchers at the temple of unbroken light, my mother among them, had made sure of that, with major advances in sonic storm forecasting using detailed soundcode that ran complex probabilistic mathematical models of Órino-Rin’s geodynamics. The same base soundcode that had given me my cognitive function back, after the fall.

It seemed Kin-Ochoyo was taking a different approach. No longer trying to beat the Kin-Kali at their own game. They wanted to change the game completely.

“We have developed a new type of resistant vibration panel that can absorb and transfer energy to the Ririni crystals rapidly so that they don’t get overloaded and destroyed while vibrating at sonic storm frequencies. But we need to test them on a large enough storm. A supermassive storm of the kind that only occurs below the yededek’iyan. One that holds enough energy to power all the cities on Órino-Rin for a whole juzu, perhaps more. Do you understand?”

I knew Ochoyo-Tananari didn’t care what lay below or what the surface of the planet was like, or even if it had one at all. About whether my mother was right or wrong. She didn’t care about any of my academic curiosities. About ii-mo or gba’agbo. She only cared about her sound mining business. About getting a competitive advantage. About winning. She was focused on only one goal. I could see it in her eyes because I had seen the same look in mine. I recognized it. That need that had set deep into my bones.

The familiar tingle where the flesh and metal parts of my face met returned. It was the excitement. Excitement at the opportunity to finally build the buoyancy adjustment vessel I had been dreaming of for so long. And I knew that if this worked, the Kin-Kali would lose their iron grip on the city and my mother would lose her position, her funding, her prestige. I wanted nothing more than to see my device work, to be hailed as the visionary, the explorer. I could already imagine my mother’s face when she heard the news of what I had done and, I am ashamed to say, the thought gave me pleasure. The all-consuming desire to achieve something significant that would wipe away decades of my mother’s disappointments swelled. I was going to do it by surpassing her. I would do what she could not. Maybe then she would see how wrong she’d been about me.

“Yes,” I said, using as few words as I could to choke back the flood of emotions swirling behind my throat. “I understand.”

“Excellent. Then we are aligned in our purpose. We will give you all you need to build and test your vessel. Beni-maru will oversee this effort—we have other eyes and ears in the temple of unbroken light, and besides, I trust him more than anyone else to manage this.”

Beside me, Beni-maru nodded quietly. I knew that by to manage this she really meant to manage you. But I didn’t care.

“Once your vessel is functional, we will use it to descend as far as is possible below the yededek’iyan and test our new vibrational absorption panels there.”

“I agree. On one condition,” I said, trying to sound as confident as I could.

She cocked her head. “Condition? What condition?”

“I want to go. On the descent mission. I need to see.” I needed to obtain firsthand ii-mo to displace my mother’s gba’agbo.

She shook her head. “No. You are more valuable to me up here. In case something goes wrong, and we need to rebuild.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” I insisted.

“And you are willing to bet your life on that?”

“I am. I have been designing this system for many juzu. I have thought of everything. And we will test it before manning it to be sure.” My nervousness had been completely replaced by that intense desire. The same need that had been driving me to study relentlessly, to recite calculations long into the night in my squalid sub-meridian home, trying to come up with some innovation or discovery that would surpass my mother. The same desire that had driven me to climb out of the orphanage window and up the cliff trying to show myself to the Mother Goddess so that perhaps she would see me and hear me and maybe bring my parents back.

“I must go.” I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. “I need this. Please.”

Ochoyo-Tananari stared at me silently with her star-bright eyes for a moment and then looked away to the side. I followed her gaze and through the porthole I saw the blur of snowy mountain peaks drifting by. Njeriri had flown the Tanti’ti shack high up towards the upper edge of the mountain range that hosted Mogi-ku. The jagged brown peaks stood solemn, a shadow cast on the side closest to us, hidden from the light of the twin suns.

When Ochoyo-Tananari turned back to me, the space between her eyes furrowed and her tone lowered.

“Fine. You will go. But only when I am reasonably confident your vessel works.”

“Thank you.” I bowed low, touching the cool floor of the shack with my forehead to show my gratitude.

She leaned forward. “Do not disappoint me.”

It was not a request.

Part Two: Fall

The dream of breaking the veil of the yededek’iyan had taken me to the edge of my sanity. The effort and the cost had been greater than I or Ochoyo-Tananari anticipated. But after eight months of calculation songs, prototyping, soundcoding, design revisions, construction, and rigorous testing, we were finally ready to sink into our planet’s unforgiving lower roil in our cocoon of hard-won technological armor.

The four of us chosen by Ochoyo-Tananari to go below stood atop the brightly lit cliff on the western edge of the city, behind a field of spires rising through thin clouds. Beni-maru, Njeriri and a tall and bulky Aq’pa named Ráxaxar whose large claws, poking out of his webbed hands and feet, made me uncomfortable.

The bright edge of the Juah-āju’s rising upper disk was already visible. It was almost first sunrise. The vessel I had dreamed of for so long and birthed into reality by force of will and an abundance of Kin-Ochoyo funds stood in front of us, set against the young light.

It was a gleaming white assembly of two triple-hulled, no’orin composite spheres attached to each other by a thick, short cylindrical pipe and three equidistant solid struts that ran tangential to both spheres. The entire vessel stood exactly twenty-two meters high and seven across—the same as the diameter of each sphere, and the struts extended a half meter below to form a triangle of three retractable short legs on which the entire assembly stood. Ochoyo-Tananari had said it looked like an hourglass when she first saw it and while I didn’t get what she meant at first, because I thought she was simply reminding me of how much of her time and money I had consumed to create it, I eventually saw the resemblance.

A system of thirty-six ports and vents pockmarked the surface of both spheres—to manage the internal pressure and buoyancy of the assembly by controlling the ratio of atmospheric gas between the spaces of the three hulls. Every element of the structure was made of no’orin composites created using a unique process I invented—layering long-chained no’orin polymer in nanometer-thick membranes to each other via hydrogen bonding until they were solid, impermeable slabs with strengths more than a hundred times that of any other no’orin composite. To rupture the hull would require not just enough energy to rip the individual molecular strands apart, but also to overcome the incredible intermolecular bonds holding the entire polymer bundle together like an army of overprotective mothers. It would take an incredibly powerful sonic storm of the sort that had only ever been theorized by the maadiregi to even make a dent.

The autocatalytic templating mechanism I used to achieve the planar structure of the no’orin polymer and give it the proper orientation to enforce its structure had required the construction of an expensive custom factory beneath the Kin-Ochoyo sonic energy transport facilities, but I was sure it would make Ochoyo-Tananari very rich once she and her other maadiregi found a way to scale it up. Not as rich as they would be if their vibrational panel worked, but enough to relieve the pressure of the entire enterprise’s expense on me just a bit.

The material engineering had been difficult and expensive, but it was the design of the control system for the triple hull that had been the most complex aspect of the construction, soundcoding each to semi-automatically channel the air at the right flow rate and temperature on command from the pilot, while absorbing the impact of winds and storms. We’d spent thousands of hours on fine-tuning it. I’d sung every equation until they were a constant chorus in my head. Tested it in every condition we could simulate. It was ready. I was sure.

“Let’s go,” Beni-maru said, stepping forward.

Njeriri grunted and walked quickly, moving ahead with steady steps, as if she was eager to enter the vessel she was going to pilot. I couldn’t read her expression though. Her long hair was braided close to her scalp like the crop rows that grew in the soil-and-volcanic-ash-filled flank craters of Moki-gu. Her eyes were sunken, but clear, making her seem even more gaunt than her barely concealed drug habit usually did. Her family was Ts’jenene, which was how she’d become expert at piloting—by illegally racing Tanti’ti shacks close to the meridian. They used to be rich, until poor choices and unpaid loans had driven them from the nomad skies, down into the bowels of Mogi-ku and sent her into a drug habit she had still not escaped.

Ráxaxar followed close behind her, carrying a heavy black box, his long talons pressing against its base. The Aq’pa are strong, very strong but hardly ever interact with humans. Amphibious, with gills in front of their chests that ran all the way up to their necks, and bodies covered in thick brown scales, they were indigenous to this planet and were here on Órino-Rin long before our ancient ancestors arrived. Most of them lived below the meridian. Ráxaxar didn’t speak at all, he only ever communicated in sign with Beni-maru and Njeriri, and I still wasn’t sure why exactly Ochoyo-Tananari wanted him to come with us, except to haul the precious vibrational panel cargo. She’d said he was a sonic storm mining technician who would help Beni-maru run the test when we had descended far enough, but the lifting and lowering of the panels could have been automated. I’d even offered to design a mechanism to do it, but Beni-maru and Ochoyo-Tananari had declined, and then refused to tell me why.

As we walked toward the vessel, Beni-maru raised his hand and gave the signal for the Tanti’ti carrier that would drop us over the cliff edge to get prepared. Somewhere behind all the activity on the cliff, I knew Ochoyo-Tananari was watching.

We entered the bottom sphere of the vessel, one by one, its air-tight door sliding up to let us in like a theatre curtain going up to reveal a stage. Inside, it was an open chamber with the upper sphere forming a top dome and a flat elevated floor on which there were four stations with chairs facing each other and straps to hold us down. The chairs could be rotated with a mechanism to lock them in place if needed. Between each station, there were atmospheric exposure suits with air tanks attached, in case of emergency. Each suit had been custom designed to fit our body shapes, one for each crew member. They stood upright, held up by suspension hooks and supported by a series of buckles to keep them in place along the curved wall of the vessel. The space was illuminated by a ring of lights. It was clear and clean, the complex network of circuits, cables, motors, gears, and valves that made everything work was hidden beneath the floor and behind the smooth white walls. It made the miracle of what we had achieved appear almost mundane.

“This is your doing, Gwaato. You made something spectacular here. You should be proud of yourself,” Beni-maru said, patting my shoulder as Ráxaxar set down the black box he was carrying next to his chair and latched it into place.

Surprised, I simply said, “Thank you,” and smiled at Beni-maru as we sat down in our stations, next to each other. We’d grown closer over the last eight months. He was a quiet and firm but supportive supervisor, always asking more of me but unwavering in his support whenever something went wrong or there was a delay which had to be explained to Ochoyo-Tananari. And he was effusive with praise whenever we hit a new progress milestone. It was obvious he had been wasted as a spy, and I came to know that he had been requesting another assignment for almost three juzu, but they had kept him there waiting for one more morsel of information that was juicy enough to justify his replacement. This wasn’t just my opportunity, it was his. His face seemed to radiate something like pride and in that moment, as his look lingered, I half expected him to say something like your mother would be proud of you. But he didn’t. Because he knew better. And because she wouldn’t be. Or would she? I wasn’t sure. She’d probably find something to criticize.

I pressed the button to open the window shutters in front of each chair. Natural light flooded into the vessel. Each window was composed of six separate layers of transparent no’orin polymer, including the impact shutters. The inner layer of the windows had been fitted with filters to manipulate the various light spectra from outside, automatically adjusted to give the best resolution possible. Once we were below, the filters would adjust so that we could see as much as possible and navigate our way down. The windows had been the second most complicated thing to design since it had meant putting portholes in the reinforced no’orin shells and every seam and joint and attachment was a potential failure point. But they were important. I needed ii-mo.

Njeriri planted herself in the chair at the station opposite us, next to Ráxaxar, her thin hands wrapped around her body like she was shivering.

“Hey Njeriri, are you good?”

“Fucking perfect,” she replied without even looking at me.

“She’s always good,” Beni-maru said. “I’ve seen her look worse and still win a Tanti’ti race over the eastern Moki-gu ridge.”

She sucked her teeth with a loud, dismissive hiss.

If I hadn’t seen her pilot the prototype effortlessly—like it was an extension of her own body—during our testing phase, I would have been concerned. Still, I was glad we wouldn’t need her to take control of the descent until the Tanti’ti carrier dropped us.

“All systems live,” Beni-maru said, initiating the pre-launch checks.

Njeriri, Ráxaxar and I turned on the receivers on our ears and ran our fingers over the control panels to feel the vibration of information coming through. The onboard vessel sensors transmitted data to our receivers as direct cochlear transmissions. Velocity, depth, pressure, rotation, buoyancy ratios, temperature, all that we needed to know. We all raised our hands with our index fingers pointed up and other fingers curled back—the Ts’jenene hand signal for “good.” Everything was in order.

“Ready for launch,” Beni-maru said through the transmitter on the panel in front of him. It would be Ochoyo-Tananari that gave the order. All we had to do was wait until we felt the tug of the carrier.

“Rombo’obo kanakara.” Good luck, came her voice from the receivers. “And may The Mother bring you back up safely.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Njeriri snorted. “I’m the one bringing us back up, not some imaginary sky-woman.”

Beni-maru shook his head at the blasphemy as he replied to Ochoyo-Tananari. “Thank you.”

Ráxaxar made a sign with his hands that I did not recognize.

And then, we waited.

The launch was really nothing more than a complicated fall. Three large Tanti’ti carriers, modified for the purpose, navigated to our position, and dropped cables that latched onto the struts of the vessel. They lifted us up from the lip of the cliff and drifted in unison away from the launch station until we were between the two great mountain-continents that hosted Mogi-ku and Laima’farwa’wa, the cities growing on their sides like lichen.

Beni-maru turned to me and indicated my panel with a jut of his jaw. He wanted me to give the final launch request.

A warmth filled my chest as I said, “Ready to drop in three.”

There was only the hum of equipment for a moment and through the window, I could see second sunrise beginning. The edge of Zuúv’ah’s disk was peeking into the sky, smaller due to its distance, but still blazing light and adding bright yellow streaks to the white light of Juah-āju already shining down on the thick carpet of meridian clouds below.

“Great Mother be with us. May we be instruments of your will,” Beni-maru prayed.

Three.

Two.

One.

Into the open space between the mountain cities, above the yawn of cloudy murk below, the carriers let go.

We fell.

Faster and faster, accelerating as gravity seized our bulk. My heart lurched in my chest as the vertical mountain-city swept by in a blur.

We stayed upright and stable because our crew weight served as live ballast and Njeriri was already adjusting the air intake to slow our fall. She activated the heat exchanger to fill the upper sphere with heated air while venting the outer hull of the lower one to give us more buoyancy.

She turned her head from side to side and mumbled to herself as she worked, obviously in her element, enjoying herself, surfing the edge of some arcane high. Beni-maru had closed his eyes, retreating inward. Ráxaxar’s face remained an inscrutable mask, the pink gills on his neck throbbing distractingly.

I needed something to focus on, so I turned away and touched the information vibration slab on the control panel to take in the direct cochlear transmission of vessel performance data. The information came like a voice in my head. I took it all in quickly. Radar indicated there was nothing solid within two kilometers of us. Wind speed was moderate, not too high. Pressure was rising. Temperature was dropping. As was our speed.

When it hit a stable, low, terminal velocity that didn’t make me feel like my stomach was going to come out of my mouth, I looked up to the display through my window. We were still above the meridian and the city of Mogi-ku looked beautiful in the distance, a smattering of domes and shacks and towers and caves climbing up the mountain like the appendages of some vine-creature. The long line of the central elevator running through it from top to bottom like a vital vein. I could just about make out the sub-meridian part of the city where I lived, where Beni-maru had come to find me in The Mother’s Navel. That day seemed so far away now.

When we crossed the meridian, the air changed. A familiar vibration rang through the vessel like a gong, setting my teeth to chatter as we dropped past the critical pressure and temperature of the atmosphere. The light of the two suns dulled and visibility dropped to less than twenty meters as the denser air seized us.

The vessel began to wobble. The wind had picked up and the new air density was throwing us off center.

“We’re fine. I’ve got it under control,” Njeriri called out. I could hear her quickly clicking her fingers across the panel to vent air and balance the change in opposing forces that were tugging at us. She muttered an incantation as she worked and there was a subtle glow around her fingers that let me know she was using sound magic to augment her piloting skill.

Soon, we were stable again and falling at a moderate velocity as we had agreed for the altitude between the meridian and the yededek’iyan. The transition zone was troublesome, yes, but not particularly dangerous. Many people lived not far above those depths in the greenish-yellow haze of supercritical air. There was the occasional electric blue flash of a sonic storm and the solid black and brown edge of a rock overhang across the screen, but we continued unmolested by our planet’s atmosphere.

Suddenly, there was a loud crack and through all the windows, flashes of lightning like angry blue seams appeared. I knew what it was before we felt it.

“Sonic storm!” I shouted just as we felt the shockwave hit. The release of energy set the vessel vibrating and we began to spin. We were still high up and I was certain our no’orin composites could handle the impact. We just needed our pilot to do the same.

“Got it under control!” Njeriri yelled back, already working with the controls to adjust the thrust of air through the vents. We rode the inconstant amplitude of the storm like it was a wild beast, spinning at an axial tilt for a few seconds. Everything was a blur of cloud and rain and light, and then when the fangs of the storm briefly receded, she rapidly pressurized the upper sphere, reducing our buoyancy. We plunged, back to vertical, and out of the storm, into the sub-meridian haze. My heart thumped wildly in my chest.

“Njeriri, we’re falling too fast,” Beni-maru said, almost in a whisper.

I gripped my chair and pressed myself into it, praying to The Mother that my design had held, that nothing had been damaged by the storm.

“I said I’ve got it under control,” she insisted, sounding annoyed.

There was the clicking sound of more adjustments, some more urgent incantation, and finally our descent slowed. We stopped carouseling. I let out a deep breath.

“Good work,” Beni-maru said to Njeriri, his voice calm, too calm.

“No problem, old timer.” There was a venom in her voice that told of the history between them. I knew some of it through rumors at the facility and the half-sentences from a few of Njeriri’s drug-addled rants. Njeriri and Beni-maru’s nephew had been romantically involved and Beni-maru hadn’t approved because of her habit. The way Njeriri told it, it was Beni-maru’s words of disapproval, not his sister’s, that had made the boy break up with her. She said she didn’t care about the boy or the relationship and that she never truly had, but her persistent resentment for Beni-maru indicated otherwise.

Still frazzled, I looked to my side.

Ráxaxar remained silent and his face remained the same. Emotionless. He could have been a statue, the Aq’pa. I wondered what his motivation was for joining us. Aq’pa typically avoided the company of humans. They were the true descendants of Órino-Rin, having evolved on this planet, and they largely resented us for coming to their world and claiming it as ours. Was he an outcast? Did he owe a debt to Ochoyo-Tananari? The inscrutable mask of his face gave no indication.

Through the windows, the visibility kept dropping and my heart was still fluttering so I focused on the windows whose filters had auto-adjusted to infrared displays. There was nothing around us. It was like falling into a dream. A dream of a planet with no solid surface, nothing but a ball of gas with mighty rocks drifting on it like gods swimming an ocean, each breath a sonic storm. Just as my mother had theorized. The screen next to the vibrational panels showed a blinking radar.

Seeing the endless sea of haze, it was easy to believe then that perhaps my mother had been right after all. But the easy thing to believe wasn’t always the right thing, the true thing. And no one had seen beyond the veil of atmospheric impossibility. We wouldn’t know for sure until we crossed the yededek’iyan. I needed to see for myself, to obtain ii-mo.

We continued to fall.

---

When we finally crossed the yededek’iyan, it was not obvious.

It’s less a well-defined dividing line and more a theoretical smear—a short, extended region that marks the lower boundary of the transition zone. Its exact starting depth varies from place to place and from time to time. The edges of the yededek’iyan are always in flux. Unlike crossing the meridian, there is no noticeable change in atmospheric phase from gas to supercritical fluid which has the density of a liquid but the viscosity of a gas and feels like moving through a particularly thick cloud. Instead, the already-supercritical atmosphere simply reaches a pressure and temperature condition that is impossible to survive in and keeps getting worse. And then there is the exponential increase in sonic storm frequency. You know you have crossed the yededek’iyan when all your protective equipment begins to break down. When you begin to die.

Inside the buoyancy adjustment vessel, the pressure sensor vibrated a warning to my cochlea that indicated we were close to my estimate of where the yededek’iyan would be, at the bisector of the two mountain-continent ranges. The temperature was already far below freezing, and the vessel shuddered frequently like it was suffering a fever. Outside, the world around us was chaos. Carbon dioxide, methane and the thousand other gases that made up the atmosphere whirled and eddied with the wind around us, pelting the windows with condensed droplets of carbonic acid and solid crystalline hydrates. Visibility was nearly zero, all we could see was the white and yellow-ish green of the haze. But I wasn’t worried. I had designed the no’orin polymer composites to handle all of that, including the corrosion.

Cocooned in the vessel’s warm womb, with Njeriri taking us down slowly like we were a falling bubble, I kept staring at the display screens on the control panel. She had increased the buoyancy in the upper sphere so that we were falling even more slowly, more cautiously, just in case there was a solid, hard surface below, waiting for us to break ourselves on it. But the radar still pinged that there was nothing around us within a two-kilometer radius.

“We have been favored by The Mother,” I announced, breaking the long silence since the storm. I turned my chair around and the others followed suit. “We have crossed the yededek’iyan and are now deeper than anyone on Órino-Rin has ever been before.”

“Indeed,” Beni-maru replied, touching his shoulder with his index finger, the sign of thanks to the mother. “The Mother gave you the wisdom to build this device. It appears she finally wishes for us to fully know the planet she gifted us when she guided our ancestors here from across the stars.”

Ráxaxar grunted, turned around and signed a word I did not know. The first thing he’d said to me, and I couldn’t understand it.

“Congratulations,” Beni-maru translated, seeing the confusion on my face. “He said congratulations.”

And then, Ráxaxar moved his hands rapidly as he signed something to Beni-maru, keeping his arms tight to his torso so that he did not expose the sensitive reproductive buds that ran across his side, from the hip to the underarm. The Aq’pa’s expression did not change but Beni-maru’s did.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not mean it like that. Of course, The Mother gifted the world to the Aq’pa and the Tetekute first. You are the ones who evolved here. We did not discover it. I’m sorry if I implied otherwise.”

Ráxaxar signed one more word and Beni-maru gave a slight bow.

“Thank you,” he said.

Njeriri started to laugh, throwing her hands out to her sides and making a big show of it.

“What’s so funny?” Beni-maru asked.

“You.” She pointed disrespectfully at Beni-maru with her left hand. “You are funny. Hilarious even. Hypocrisy is always funny when it is exposed.”

Beni-maru remained calm. “What are you talking about?”

“You know you and your temple friends don’t believe that the Aq’pa and Tetekute truly own this world. You think The Mother led our ancestors to come here and seize this world from them because it was our destiny to rule the stars.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard the jokes and the comments you all make when you think you’re alone. But now that Ráxaxar called you out on it, you backtracked. Why don’t you say what you truly believe? Say it proud, say it with your chest.”

“I don’t think any of those things. I respect the first people of this world.”

“Liar.” She said the word like she was spitting at him.

Beni-maru flinched. “I am not a liar.”

Njeriri laughed her scornful laugh again. “You think you’re so clever, so much better than the rest of us. But you aren’t. You pretended to be an honorable man while you spied on your employers at the temple of unbroken light, betraying their trust for more than a decade. You say you don’t meddle in other people’s affairs and yet you poison other people’s relationships. You privately despise the Aq’pa, calling them primitive and inferior while you pretend to be Ráxaxar’s friend, smiling to his face. You are a hypocrite.”

Beni-maru shook his head. “I don’t know how much of that filth you put in your body today of all days, but I think it’s starting to affect your judgment.”

“Oh please. As if you never experimented with drugs or drank some hoguro to help you deal with a difficult situation. The drugs aren’t doing anything except making me feel good and dampening my anxiety to make me a more effective pilot. My hands are steady, as is my mind. You know that.” She held her hands out to him as if challenging him to inspect them. “And yeah, I am an addict, so what? That has nothing to do with what I am talking about now. I’m just tired of your hypocritical shit, that’s all.”

Beni-maru’s left eye twitched and anger briefly flashed across his face. “That’s enough.”

But she didn’t stop. “You’re not better than any of us. We are all just people—human, Aq’pa, Tetekute, whatever—we’re complicated pieces of biological material that are neither good nor bad, just trying to make meaning of this messed up world and make the best choices we can at the time and find things and people that love us, which we can love back. Nothing wrong with that. But you don’t accept that. You think you can pass judgment on people when you’re just another piece of Dwandeki shit like everyone else. The only problem I have with you is that you won’t admit it to yourself.”

Beni-maru did not respond. But his fists were clenched so tight his knuckles were pale.

Njeriri sucked her teeth with disdain and then turned to me. “Yay for you, Gwaato, you crossed your precious yededek’iyan.”

I could tell she didn’t care at all.

“I hope it’s all you expected it to be. Just don’t trust this one.” She indicated Beni-maru with a jut of her jaw. “He will say whatever he thinks you need to hear to convince you to do what he wants, what’s best for him. Remember he lied to your mother’s face for more than a decade.”

“Njeriri, that’s enough. I hope you got out whatever you feel you needed to. But we have a job to do.” Beni-maru’s calm had returned.

“See what I said? He’ll say and do anything to get what he wants. Even swallow my insults.”

Njeriri raised her hands in mock surrender and glared at Beni-maru for a moment before deciding that it actually was enough.

She signed something to Ráxaxar and he responded with a single sign that had all the communication complexity of a shrug.

Then Ráxaxar signed more words, this time at Beni-maru.

“He is asking how much further you want to drop before we test the vibrational panels,” Njeriri translated for me.

I looked to Beni-maru but he looked back to me and said, “As deep as Gwaato says we can go. His design. His vessel. His call.”

I thought about it for a moment, still rattled by her outburst. “We planned to go as far as possible. To the surface, if there is one. That was the agreement with Ochoyo-Tananari.”

“But we can’t just keep descending forever, can we?” Njeriri translated Ráxaxar’s rapid hand gestures. “We need to test the panels.”

“The deepest probe that has ever been dropped below the yededek’iyan gave out at about fifty kilometers below the meridian. We are now deeper than that.” I replied, voice trembling. “By my estimates, if there is a low-density core with a solid surface, it should appear between sixty-five and eighty kilometers below, depending on the density gradient.”

Ráxaxar grunted and signed again. More forceful this time.

“How far?” Njeriri translated again, returning her focus to Beni-maru.

“It’s Gwaato’s call,” he repeated firmly.

I decided to end it. “We can deploy the panels and test them at seventy-five kilometers below if we haven’t reached a solid surface yet.”

She looked from him to me, laughed and said, “I hope you know what you are doing, because he is only letting you decide so that if something goes wrong, he can blame it on you,” then she turned back to the control panel.

“What’s her problem? She seems more agitated than usual,” I whispered to Beni-maru when things were quiet again. I tried to mask my concern with a cavalier tone but Beni-maru simply shook his head and turned back to his panel.

I did the same, hoping that the tension between them would stay contained for the remainder of the mission. The last thing we needed was to fight each other at a critical moment.

For a few minutes, it was quiet in the vessel. There was nothing but the low thrum of the heat exchanger and air filter, the low, steady pinging of the vessel’s vibration and the occasional rustle of clothing when someone adjusted position in their chair.

We continued to drop through the dream of clouds like an insect swimming between two gods. Closing my eyes, I took deep breaths and tried to clear my head of the turmoil Njeriri had planted by imagining what the surface of the world would look like, feel like, if we reached it. Would it be muddy soil? Some solid, crystalized form of the atmospheric gas mix? Smooth wet rock like the mountain-continents, with supercritical fluid adsorbed onto its surface? There were so many possibilities. And then I tried to imagine what my mother would say when I described it to her, this surface she’d said didn’t exist. How she would react when I told her I had seen it with my own eyes.

A question from Njeriri suddenly penetrated the silence, “Why in the name of The Mother is atmospheric density falling?”

I opened my eyes to see what was happening outside. The hazy gas around us was thinning rapidly. Visibility was rising and I saw flashes of light in the distance.

I turned around. Saw Njeriri’s fingers do their practiced dance across the slick white control panel to slow our descent. She seemed genuinely frazzled for the first time since we started. And she kept repeating, “It doesn’t make sense,” over and over like it was a temple mantra or a prayer.

I touched the slab on the control panel, and it vibrated a warning to my cochlea that the atmospheric density was now about eighty percent of the expected value for this depth.

Njeriri was right, it didn’t make sense.

Outside the vessel, the thinning haze loomed but breaking beneath was a sea of bright light rushing up to meet us.

“What is that?” Beni-maru asked and a frisson of fear-tinged excitement surged through me because I had no idea. Everywhere on Órino-Rin, we had observed that atmospheric density increased with depth. There were no known exceptions. This inversion was an anomaly.

When we fell out of the bottom of the haze and into the light, I was seized by a deep and profound awe.

Visibility exploded out to hundreds of meters. I saw two towering throats of hard, brown and black and jagged rock, swallowed by two decks of haze—the yellow-green upper deck we had come through and an inscrutable gray, like gigantic dark rainclouds, below.

Njeriri gasped.

It was a vista of lovely desolation. These were the lower regions of the mountain continents that held up our home cities, tall and wide and yet so small set against the anomalous atmospheric cavern we’d fallen into. They looked like pillars set between two skies to hold them. Just like the struts that kept the upper and lower spheres of our vessel together. For a moment, I could not tell which direction was up or down and a rush of vertigo overtook my mind like a cup of fresh hoguro.

“Great Mother!” Beni-maru exclaimed.

Ráxaxar didn’t react audibly. I expected that the wonder of what we were witnessing would be enough to change his usual unflappable demeanor. But it was not.

The alarms were screaming that the temperature had shot up by more than a hundred degrees even though the pressure remained mostly the same. It had to be some kind of thermal anomaly that had warmed the air above the critical temperature, sending it back into the vapor phase but the atmosphere was still so dense that refracted light made the horizon curve upward like an unexpected smile.

Along the surface of the two mountain continents, there were gleaming red volcanic fractures vomiting black sulfuric smoke and lava domes seeping magma like blood. Gigantic frothy geysers of yellow vapor were erupting into the sky. The vapors arched high and when they fell, they dissipated before touching the lower deck of haze below, like a painting of a waterfall that the artist had abandoned before finishing. A raging flow of giant disappearing springs.

It was a part of Órino-Rin no one had ever seen before. No one had even theorized such a layer of our atmosphere. It was spectacular. It was terrifying. And we were the first to witness its glory.

“Brace yourselves!” Njeriri shouted as we fell out of the thermal inversion layer and into the gray sea of haze below. The vessel groaned with the sudden spike of density and temperature. The windows displayed nothing but dark clouds bruising the world and a maelstrom of blue-white lightning. We’d been so distracted by the planet’s beauty that we’d forgotten its danger. We’d fallen right into another sonic storm. A supermassive one. A terrifying turbulence seized our vessel and set us tumbling wildly, losing all sense of direction, of control.

My heart lurched madly in my chest with each sudden change in direction and orientation, following the whims of the sonic storm. We couldn’t hear it, but we could feel it unleashing its fury against the vessel. My teeth chattered and I could hear my blood pounding its way through my body. A feeling like the prelude to a scream pervaded my senses but terror froze my lungs with an icy grip. My body jerked madly against the harness and the vessel shuddered ceaselessly. The temperature swing, the density change, and the sonic storm hit us at the same time. Njeriri could not react quickly enough, even with sound magic spurring her fingers on.

We were in freefall.

The filters of the windows couldn’t keep up and everything was a blur. Screens were flickering. Alarms were blaring. The world was spinning. The vessel was groaning. Our bodies were straining. We were all screaming and even Raxaxar was screeching a horrible sound that made me feel faint and made my eyes water. I couldn’t breathe.

“Parachute! Now!” Njeriri cried out.

In the chaos, I caught sight of Beni-maru pressing the button on his panel to deploy the emergency parachute. A thin sheet of n’orin composite that would hopefully spread out and slow our fall.

We jerked hard against the pull of gravity and were violently reoriented. But only for a second. Not enough time for Njeriri to take control of our descent, only enough for us to be hit by another sonic storm. I felt the lurch as the parachute’s drag gave out, but my heart didn’t truly sink until I heard the low whoosh of gas leaking. There’d been a hull rupture. That was supposed to be impossible. Unless the material connection points for my no’orin composite structure had failed. But how? I’d designed them to handle even the most powerful theorized storms. Was this a storm more powerful than any we’d imagined? Or was there some error in my design? I didn’t know. And with the seal of the vessel broken, our protection from external sound waves rendered imperfect, I could finally hear a muted version of the fury of the storm outside, and it was like the entire planet was screaming at us. If we heard the fullness of it, we would be deafened forever.

“I can’t slow it down!” Njeriri yelled over the cacophony, still frantically trying to rebalance the gas volumes to account for the leak.

Raxaxar leaned over his chair and was holding onto the energy vibrational panel tight like his life depended on it. Beni-maru dug his fingers into the armrests of his chair.

“Brace!” he shouted. And then I heard him say something that sounded like, “Blessed Mother, have mercy on us,” but I couldn’t be sure. Everything was too loud. Everything was too much.

Gritting my teeth, I tasted iron on my tongue. I kept willing myself not to pass out as we hurtled down, lashed on all sides by the rage of the supermassive sonic storm.

Something slammed into the vessel with the force of a scorned god’s vengeance. The sound was so loud that I could barely hear myself screaming over the cacophonous violence of no’orin polymer composite groaning, glass shattering, metal screeching. The smell of smoke seeped up from my control panel. When darkness finally invaded my consciousness, I was sure we were all dead.

Part Three: Descent

In the darkness, I dream of flight.

And I dream of my mother.

In this dream, we are flying at an angle through the pallid haze, ice frosting the tips of our wings. We only stop flying when we burst through the curtain of dense atmosphere into the wondrous beauty of the thermal inversion. We swoop down in wide arcs towards the pillars of the world, the bright red lava and the thick black smoke and wispy yellow vapors erupting from their rock-skin.

“It’s beautiful,” she tells me. “I could have never imagined anything like it.”

I smile until my heart becomes a flower. I reach into my chest and pluck it out, a bright red hibiscus the color of blood.

She takes it and kisses my forehead.

We continue to fly.

We follow the curve of a mountain continent, peeking into the deep rocky caverns and tunnels that pockmark its surface. We fly, descending until we are under the arc of a hot geyser, and then we touch the surface of a lava lake as we glide low. We fly and we fly, and we twist, and we loop. She starts to laugh and laugh and laugh and then she flies right up to me and hugs me and tells me that she loves me and that she is proud of me and that I was right all along to come here, to use my restored mind independently, to think beyond her geodynamic theories, to seek ii-mo. I cry. My tears fall and become birds that sing a song she’d taught me when she first adopted me. A song about how The Mother made the universe, sculpting the formlessness of unreality like clay until it was a new and beautiful thing. Our embrace lasts forever. When she lets go of me, she beams a smile, spreads her wings gracefully and flutters upward, until she catches an updraft and soars back into the upper deck of haze, back toward Mogi-ku. The birds that were my tears ascend with her.

I hover, lingering in the inversion and the afterglow of the moment, and then I flutter my wings too, trying to rise to meet her but I cannot. My wings are heavy, like lead. They feel cold. So, so cold. And then they catch fire, turning to gray ash with a rush of bright red, like a wave of embers. Then my wings are gone, and I am falling.

Falling. Falling.

Falling into endless gray.

When I hit the hard, rocky surface of the planet, I explode into a million meaningless pieces.

---

I awoke to a world of pain and cold. There was the steady hiss of gas escaping, and my lungs felt like they were full of liquid, but the roar of the sonic storm was gone, receded into background.

Against the grip of ice forming on my eyelids, I opened my eyes. I was upside down, still strapped into my chair, surrounded by wreckage and smoke. The curve of the vessel’s lower sphere had refused to yield to the force of the storm—my design had held there at least. But the rim of the connecting pipe had cracked. That was where the hiss was coming from. Already there was frost forming on the walls. It would not be long before we lost all our air and warmth.

I blinked rapidly and unstrapped myself from the chair, falling onto the top dome of the lower sphere. That motion disturbed the unstable equilibrium of the vessel enough for it to tumble over and fall on its side. I lost my balance and fell too, into Njeriri. Her knee dug into my back, and I cried out. She didn’t react. I picked myself up and saw her head hanging limply at an unnatural position like a damaged doll’s. Her neck was broken. When I lifted her face, I saw that her eyes were empty, glassy things, already glittering white and crystalline with the first of growing frost. The hiss of the leak seemed to grow louder. And there was a new sound too. A buzzing in my ears. All around me, the windows showed nothing but the dead gray of the lower atmospheric haze we had fallen into, and the panels and consoles and viewscreens clicked and hummed erratically.

Ráxaxar screeched and groaned as he too slowly regained consciousness. There was a large, jagged piece of glass from one of the broken viewscreens poking out from his side, where the sensitive buds that ran from his hip to his underarm were. The shard looked like a strange barnacle growing between his outer scales. Thick black blood leaked out from the wound. It must have been incredibly painful. When he stood up out of the chair, he coughed out more thick blood.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He gave me a single nod, lifted his index finger, and went to check on the vibrational panels. He was single-minded, that one.

“Gwaato! Can you hear me?” It was Beni-maru.

“Yes, I’m here,” I said, turning to see him unstrap himself from his chair. He rolled out of it clumsily and stood up to face me. His face was scratched badly, and he favored his right leg as he came over.

“Ráxaxar?”

I cocked my head in the Aq’pa’s direction. Beni-maru nodded.

“Njeriri?”

I shook my head and pointed at her corpse beside me.

“Shit.” He cursed when he saw her. But there was no shock or sadness in his reaction. And then he said, “The hull is breached. We have to get into our atmospheric exposure suits,” loud enough for Ráxaxar to hear.

The strain of breathing increasingly cold and dense air was a miserable weight in my chest. I stepped toward the side compartment of my console where we stored our suits, each one custom made to fit our anatomies. A last resort in case of worst-case scenario and we were indeed in the worst-case scenario. Or not far from it anyway.

As I slid my limbs into my suit, my face began to tingle where metal met flesh. I touched a hand to the metal half of my face, and it was like touching a block of smooth ice. Cold. Too cold. With a leak in the inner hull, there was a next-to-nil chance we would make it back up to Mogi-ku. And without Njeriri, the next-to was tending asymptotically closer to that nil. The vessel was designed to withstand external pressure and impact, but not to lift with an internal rupture. We would never be able to gain enough buoyancy in that condition.

Tears ran warm onto my cheeks before turning to ice. Crystal frustrations. I looked down, trying to hide the tears from Beni-maru and Ráxaxar who had already donned their bulky custom suits and connected their air tanks and radios.

“Can you stop the leak?” Beni-maru asked, voice muffled through the bulky helmet.

Pulling my suit up to my torso, I said, “I can try to use the sealant. But it’s not even half as strong as the no’orin composites.”

“Will it hold, though?” He seemed preternaturally calm. Emotionless almost, like he was mentally checking items off a checklist and not facing the prospect of death.

“No.” I shook my head. “But it could keep us alive a bit longer. Give us more time.”

“I see,” Beni-maru said.

With the words said out loud, realization settled on me like a heavy cloak. We were all going to die. A wave of nausea hit, and I felt lightheaded for a moment as bile surged up my throat. We had fallen farther into the harsh atmosphere of the planet than anyone else ever had, and we would never live to tell the tale. Perhaps no one would ever find out. Ochoyo-Tananari would probably cover up this failed expedition and take the financial hit. Maybe use the catalytic polymer compositing process I developed to make herself a nice profit or improve upon it and try again later with some other smart and desperate fool seeking ii-mo in the treacherous depths of the world.

“Then it is as The Mother wills it. We move to the backup plan for returning to Moki-gu. Get your suit on. We will go outside and test the vibrational panels.” Beni-maru indicated the door with a jut of his jaw.

“The panels? Now?” I asked, confused. I hadn’t even known there was a backup plan for returning to the city that could work without Njeriri. “We should be focused on figuring out a way to survive and get back home.”

“Right now, those panels are our only chance. They are the backup plan,” he said firmly. And then he added, pointing to the waiting Aq’pa. “Ráxaxar is a conductive.”

My eyes went wide as it all suddenly made sense.

Ráxaxar was a conductive. Of course. One of the Iji-omoji. One of the children of the storm, whose internal frequency could align to the natural frequency of some sonic storms. Resonate. Survive direct exposure to the weaker storms and even channel some of a storm’s power directly to Ririni crystals without destroying themselves. They’d used those abilities to manually mine sonic storms near the meridian long before the vibration panels had been invented. But they could only do that with smaller storms up above. But down here, below the yedede’kiyan the storms did not discriminate. Their sonic frequency may have been the same as the storms, but the storm’s amplitude was too thunderous to be contained or channeled by any living person. Iji-omoiji or not.

I had overheard researchers in the Kin-Ochoyo facility speculating on what would happen if an Iji-omoiji used their ability to help control and amplify the absorption potential of the new Kin-Ochoyo panels while they were channeling the storms. Something would happen, but what? Would there be constructive or destructive interference?

“That is the main reason he is here,” Beni-maru admitted. “To help us execute the backup plan. We test the panels. If they work, we will attempt to use some of the energy absorbed from a supermassive storm to trigger a launch and send ourselves back up to Mogi-ku. Ráxaxar will try to control the release of energy to stabilize the ascent as much as possible.”

I understood then why Beni-maru and Ochoyo-Tananari had kept their backup plan from me. Perhaps it was in part because they did not want me to know they were even considering the possibility that the vessel would fail but it was also because this backup plan was not a plan at all, it was madness. An uncontrolled launch in a compromised vessel under manual control by an Iji-omoiji? I shook my head at the thought. It would be a rough ascent at best, and the chance of it working was slim. But then, I considered that at least it did what all good backup plans did—it gave us a chance. And if Ráxaxar truly was an Iji-omoiji, perhaps that chance was further away from zero than I had thought.

Besides, we had no other options. And very little time.

I nodded and hurried to catch up, sliding my arms awkwardly into the stiff suit and pulling the helmet up and over my head. The echo of my own thoughts and the smell of my own breath, ripe with rising bile filled my head. My body was a collection of aches where the suit pressed against my flesh. I activated the life support system and felt the vacuum hiss of the suit sealing. Lights flashed messages on the front of my visor, the voice of the onboard computer began to reel off data. Battery power, pressure, temperature, all the basics that let me know I was still alive. Suddenly, a red blinking light appeared in the lower left corner of my visor and flickered there. The onboard computer began to insistently warn me that the mounted heat exchanger on the back of my suit was malfunctioning.

“Shit.”

I requested additional diagnostics, and the computer sang out a string of numbers.

It was the controller on the heat pump that had failed. When we crashed, the suit had come loose from the storage area brace and must have hit something hard enough to scramble the internal electronics. It would take hours to repair or try to replace it with the one from Njeriri’s. There wasn’t nearly enough time.

I choked back a sob.

Without the heat exchanger on my suit, I was doomed. It would last a few minutes at best, but it could only slow my death, not protect me from it.

“Gwaato! Hurry up,” Beni-maru called to me.

“Yes,” I shouted back, my voice rising to a whine. “Yes.”

The falling tears turned to rivulets.

It was cruel.

To have come so far, so close to what I had dreamed of for many juzu only to die before I could witness it with my own eyes because of a badly stored suit. I tried to blink the tears away, angry at the humiliation of weeping but even more angry at the stupidity of the manner in which my death would arrive. Not from the storm, or the crash, but from fucking equipment failure. I didn’t want to die, and certainly not like that.

I wiped the tears with the back of my hand.

“What in The Mother’s blessed silence is taking you so long, Gwaato? We need to get going,” Beni-maru said, helping Ráxaxar awkwardly carry the box of panels toward the door. The emergency repair kit was attached to the arm of his suit.

My damaged suit would not last long outside. Ten to fifteen minutes at best. But wearing the suit inside the vessel would slow down the freezing and give me more time, perhaps an hour. Not much more, but perhaps that was all I could hope for.

“Hey Beni-maru, can I stay inside?” I asked.

“What?”

“Can I stay here, inside the vessel?”

I didn’t say why because I didn’t want him to know my suit was damaged. “Do you really need me outside to test the panels?”

“No.” He seemed irritated by the question. “I need you to help me rig the Ririni crystals to the base of the vessel for thrust. Staying in here will achieve nothing except dying slower, so whatever is making you hesitate, get over it and get your suit on. We don’t have time!”

All the care in his voice was gone, replaced by something colder and more calculating. He didn’t sound like the man I had come to think of as a friend. He seemed to notice it too.

“I’m sorry, Gwaato. I didn’t mean it like that. But please, we need to hurry.”

I remembered what Njeriri said about him and decided it was better to be seen as a coward than a liability.

“Sure,” I replied.

I finished my suit checks and turned on the radio, my mind still racing, trying to figure out another way to survive. I couldn’t die. Not after coming so far. Not while the chance to get back to Moki-gu existed. Not while we still had a plan B, however unlikely it was. I had to find a way to get back up and hear my mother tell me the words I had dreamt of—that she was wrong, and I was right all along. Or at the very least, see the acknowledgement in her eyes even if she couldn’t form the words.

The steady whoosh of escaping air and the beeping of the heat exchanger warning reminded me that my time was limited. There was a clock attached to my life.

“Ready,” I said over the radio.

Beni-maru grunted and pressed the panel to open the lower sphere door as he and Ráxaxar carried the box of panels out. The vessel sat on its side, so it slid open to the right, revealing a strange, murky white-and-gray world.

I could barely see more than a meter ahead. I turned up the gain on my helmet visor and blinked rapidly as my eyes adjusted. We were on a slope, the side of one of the mountain continents. I could hear the roar of methane geysers and erupting lava all around us, but I could not see where they were coming from. The rocks near us were not the pure black of those in the inversion layer, but interbedded with layers of rich reds and whites and yellows that reminded me of the Ochoyo tribal band pattern on the Tanti’ti shack. Ice had corticated on the surface of our fallen vessel like hyaline moss.

When I saw the warped structure of the damaged connecting pipe from outside, I finally knew what had doomed us. Thermal fatigue. I hadn’t accounted for the effect of a reversal in thermal stresses and strains due to rapid temperature changes from cold to hot and back again. The material strength of my polymers was hysteric in nature, but no one, certainly not me, had expected a thermal inversion layer in the atmosphere, especially not one hot enough to warm the atmospheric gases above critical conditions. The temperature reversal had weakened the polymer mechanical strength enough for the storm to do its damage.

I shook my head. I was so sure I had thought of everything. Considered every possibility. I was wrong.

“We need to get close to a storm without getting killed,” Beni-maru said over the radio, pulling my attention back to the moment and the fact of the horrible fate barreling down on me. He and Ráxaxar set the black box down on the ground and looked around, adjusting their helmets.

Beni-maru pointed east. “I think I see a flash of light. Ráxaxar, can you carry the panels a few kilometers in that direction by yourself while we stabilize the vessel and rig it for launch?”

The Aq’pa signed something that I assumed meant that he could, the articulated joints of his suit making him appear clumsy.

Only an Iji-omoiji would willingly walk in the direction of a sonic storm.

“Good,” Beni-maru said. “Be careful, and don’t get too close. The storms here aren’t like the ones you’re used to.”

I could already feel my breath getting cold, the damaged heat exchanger meant that I would soon be breathing air with the consistency of glassy slush.

It took all the will I had to not just sit on the cold, rocky ground and cry from fear, waiting to die.

Ráxaxar awkwardly lugged his load, moving into the distance until he was out of sight, his form swallowed by the white and gray haze. I could still hear his laboured breathing on the open radio channel.

Beni-maru pointed to the fallen upper sphere. “Quickly, I’ll inspect the vessel. Patch it up enough that its integrity will survive an uncontrolled launch. You can start opening the base of the vessel where we will position the Ririni crystals.”

“Okay.”

He moved toward the vessel and grabbed onto a strut, inspecting the vents. And then he turned on the friction pads of his suit and climbed the bottom bulb of the vessel, up to the connecting pipe. He seemed completely uninterested in observing the environment around us, in witnessing the wonder of what had never been witnessed before.

I walked past him, taking in as much of it as I could. All the ii-mo. There was so much I wanted to gather. Geological, electromagnetic, biological, all kinds of new and wonderful data. But the rising cold in my lungs kept drawing my focus back to survival. I had only a few minutes before I’d start to die. But what else could I have done except go along with his plan?

I was about to start opening the reinforced base of the vessel which supported the weight of the control chamber we’d been cocooned in, when I heard a loud hiss, a thud and then a cry. It was Beni-maru.

I got up and ran over to the side of the vessel to see him sprawled out on the ground, unconscious. If Ráxaxar had heard the fall, he didn’t react to it. The open channel stayed quiet.

I switched to Beni-maru’s private channel. “Beni-maru!”

Had he slipped and fallen? Had the residual gas vented and thrown him off? I didn’t know, but he wasn’t responding.

Seeing him there like that, so still and unmoving, the solution to a horrible calculus resolved itself in my mind. Beni-maru was close enough to my size that I could fit in his suit.

I choked back nausea at the thought, but the insistent beep of the failing heat exchanger did not allow me to let go of the evil thought.

I knelt by his side and inspected him. His suit looked undamaged by the fall, and I looked through his visor. He’d probably just landed in a bad position and temporarily lost consciousness. It looked like he was still breathing. My own icy breath drove desperation deeper into my mind with each lungful.

Before I could stop myself, I yanked on the two emergency release cables to open his helmet. The polymer joiners unlatched with a snap and a hiss. I gasped.

He didn’t move at first and so I thought that he’d truly died from the fall but then his eyes shot open, and his mouth opened wide, a scream frozen in his throat.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered as I scrambled away from him on my haunches, taking his helmet with me. He grabbed at his neck, his body trying to process the viscous, cold, and dense air but he was drowning. His limbs thrashed and spasmed. Wide, his freezing eyes fixed on me with glassy accusation.

I turned away, struggling to keep my stomach from spilling out its contents.

“I’m sorry, Beni-maru,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I’m so sorry.”

Once I was sure he was dead, I put his helmet back on his head, grabbed his legs and pulled him back inside the vessel. I waited a few tense seconds for the hiss of the door to vent most of the heavy unbreathable air that had followed me in and bring the temperature back to survivable levels. Then I pulled Beni-maru’s suit off, taking care not to look at those vitrified eyes. But the feel of his cold lifeless hands reminded me of the time, so long ago when they had held mine as I waited for my mother to return from one of her travels. I could not hold back the tears, but I could not stop what I was doing either. I did not want to die.

The persistent hiss of the hull leak followed me through every action, every thud of limbs falling, and latch undoing was loud against the background noise of gargling and sighing and buzzing of malfunctioning pumps, electrical systems, and filters that were desperately trying to the keep the breached chamber endurable. But my sobs echoed back to me loudest of all.

I fumbled Beni-maru’s body into my own damaged suit and sealed the helmet so that Ráxaxar would not know what I had done when he returned. And then I got into Beni-maru’s suit. The fit was a bit tight around the midsection, he was thinner than I was. I sucked in my stomach and pulled the suit up. It was good enough to seal. I wiped away my tears and donned the helmet, reactivating the suit. The vital signs monitoring came online, a steady vibration of information to my cochlea. The radio light came on too, sound crackling quietly into my ear.

I exhaled relief and inhaled fresh guilt.

It was all my fault. Njeriri was dead because I had overlooked a calculation of thermal hysteresis. Beni-maru was dead because I was not brave enough to bear the weight of my own failure and accept the fate I had been dealt.

A wave of light-headedness came over me and I took a moment to let it pass. Three quick shallow breaths, one especially long and deep and then I was ready to go out again. It wasn’t over. I’d just bought myself more time. We still had to launch the vessel.

Back outside, the wind had picked up and was roaring despite the noise isolation of my helmet. Tiny carbon dioxide crystals clinked against my suit. The visibility had reduced to nearly nothing and the visor gain couldn’t compensate enough for it. The world was all rock and ice and wind and the broken vessel next to me which meant either Ráxaxar had found a nearby sonic storm to test the panels with or a sonic storm had found me, and I was going to die anyway.

I activated the suit’s friction pads and carefully climbed the bottom bulb of the vessel, up to the connecting pipe, as Beni-maru had done. I could see where the material had warped with the rapid temperature changes. A swelling of the polymer like a skin inflammation. And at the junction, the tiny fissure that had doomed us.

I detached the emergency repair kit from the arm of the suit and was about to start applying the special polymer sealant when I heard Ráxaxar’s clicking and bellowing explode into the radio. It was a low guttural sound that made my skin crawl, but it was impossible to miss the absolute terror it carried.

Something was wrong.

I looked up from the fissure. Three luminescent balls dancing with electric blue fire appeared from the hazy atmosphere like angry ghosts. They slammed into me with an explosion that was so loud, it drowned out the transmission of Ráxaxar’s agony and the sound of my own scream. It blotted out every other sound except my own heartbeat. I felt the crackle of lightning surge through me as the world tilted at an angle—steep.

As I fell, I saw more orbs of bright azure lightning sweep by like bizarre electric hail. I had never seen or heard of anything like it before. Was this too a previously unrecorded phenomenon? For a moment, falling through the haze, a flash of the excitement of discovery shot to my head. And then I crashed back to the reality of the situation, hard. Hit the rocky ground with a sickening crack. For a moment, I feared that the helmet was broken, and I remember thinking that The Mother, in her divine irony, was going to do to me what I had done to Beni-maru, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t die.

I scrambled to my feet and crawled to the door of the vessel, crunching dry ice and rock underfoot. Another sonic storm. But I knew that even with compromised structural integrity, the no’orin polymer of the vessel was still my best chance of survival.

Long chains of lightning tore down from above, explosively digging into the ground all around me like the planet itself was setting down pillars of pure energy to claim its domain.

I dived inside the vessel just as an impossibly loud guttural sound blotted out my senses. Darkness fell like a curtain and my feet were lifted off the ground. I vibrated violently, like every cell in my body had been set to some powerful sonic frequency. I lost all sense of direction, of time, of everything. I know I was screaming but the sound was the world, and I was nothing but a whisper within it.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Or what happened to me while it did. But when it was over, and the edges of reality became clear and well-defined again, I opened my eyes and saw chaos.

The vessel was intact, but barely so. Cracks ran all along the sphere like it was an egg, radiating out from the fissure I had tried to seal. The windows were cracked and all the viewscreens next to the panels were broken. Njeriri and Beni-maru’s bodies had been flung to opposing sides, their limbs at acute, impossible angles. And yet, I was still alive, unharmed except for a terrible pain in my left shoulder.

The altimeter of Njeriri’s pilot panel was still beeping out our depth. Seventy-eight kilometers below the meridian. We’d fallen far. Perhaps my mother had been right after all. Perhaps there was no surface. I walked on wobbly legs to the door and opened it.

I entered a ribbon of pure white haze. Beneath, I felt the ground still sloping down. Wherever the sonic storm had dumped the vessel, I was still on the mountain continent’s edge. I walked forward, gingerly taking steps, unable to tell what lay ahead of me. I wondered briefly if I could find Ráxaxar in this shrouded, desolate landscape. If the Aq’pa was still alive. Perhaps the sonic storm had shown mercy to him, being an Iji-omoji.

I’d only gone a few meters when my suit picked up a tremor. The ground shivered and there was a rumbling in the distance just ahead. Something could have been happening right in front of me and I couldn’t see it through the haze. The terror of unknowing seized me and I rooted myself in place, trying to decide if I should run back to the broken vessel or press ahead. Suddenly, the ground beneath me gave and began to move, solid rock and ice flowing fitfully and unevenly, like some strange porridge.

“No. No. No,” I repeated as I fell on my hands and knees. By the time it was close enough to see, it was too late. An avalanche of scree and ice, glittering and glinting bright against the sea of white.

I shouted as I was swept away, sliding atop the moving slice of ground that had given up its grip on the mountain continent. The sensor alarms of my stolen suit were a riot of warnings I could not heed.

Was this some tectonic after-effect of the sonic storm? I wondered as fear gripped me again. It was becoming a familiar sensation. This part of the planet was a wild creature made of rocky fangs and icy claws: the temperature and the pressure and the ball lightning and the thermal inversion and the methane geysers and the lava and the starlike floods of ice and rock that mocked the very concept of survival.

Our kind was not meant to be here.

I hugged myself as I slid down. Then there was a lurch, and I was flung up and off the edge of the slope. A cliff. Flailing, I reached out, hoping my fingers would find purchase on something, anything before I fell and scattered on jagged rock below.

My heart leapt when I felt the fingers of the suit dig into rock. I activated the friction pads and dug into the vertical edge of hard icy rock. Flattened myself to the cliff wall, feeling for better handholds and footholds as I thanked The Mother that I could not see how far the fall was. Ice and rock spray rained down on me, but I bent my head down and held on and waited.

When it stopped, I hauled myself up, one hand at a time, over the lip of the ledge, breathing heavily. I lay there, for a moment, eyes closed, gasping.

The weight of everything that had happened settled on me. The mélange of emotions thundering their way through my mind crashed against each other. I felt too much. It was too much.

I started to laugh. It was a strange laugh, a foreign sound, even to me. I laughed for a while and then I screamed and then I started to cry because I realized that Ráxaxar could not have survived the storm or the avalanche without the vessel which meant he was dead and so that meant I would soon be dead too. There was no more plan B. Despite what I had done, death was inexorable, like gravity.

I rose to my feet. There was no way to climb back up. It would take weeks and the suits were not designed to survive more than a dozen hours or so. There was nothing left to do but continue for as long as Beni-maru’s suit would take me. Continue to descend until I found the bottom of the mountain-continent and fell off, drowning in supercritical atmosphere, or I reached the solid surface my mother said didn’t exist. The best I could hope for was that I would finally find ii-mo, true knowledge before I found death. If the planet was so determined to kill me, then I would trade it my life for its secrets. I continued my slow walk downslope, one step at a time, feeling my way down the rough terrain.

---

So here I am.

I have been climbing my way down the frigid rock slope for more than eight hours without incident and I am yet to reach the end of the world, but my battery is finally giving out.

The sensor in the suit reads more than thirty times the normal atmospheric pressure near the meridian and the temperature is negative hundred but the heat exchanger still seems to be running at a normal efficiency. Oxygen pressure is lower than it should be, but that’s to be expected with the low battery.

I cannot go back up, go back home, so I must continue to go down, pulled by an emotional alloy of curiosity and guilt like an anchor—three are dead, one by my own hand. It has to be worth something, some knowledge of what lies below. It has to.

I keep moving along the slope, until unexpectedly, my feet sink into what feels like a puddle of water. Beneath, the ground is flat and smooth, nothing like the craggy edge of the mountain-continent. I look down. I can barely see so I ramp up the heat exchanger and vent some of the warm air. Burn precious battery. The temperature goes up with a whirr and some of the hazy atmosphere in front of me clears away like a ghost retreating to rest with the ancestors in Eh’waizo. I can see the silver liquid comes up to about the height of my ankles and runs as far as I can see, which is only two meters or so. I take a few more careful steps forward and it’s the same. I’m walking through a kind of shallow silver lake. I take in a long breath, struck by the possibility that the planet has a shallow water body or even an ocean, a thin rim of liquid running all along its surface. Its smooth, crystalline surface.

Great Mother.

Signs of a surface. I should feel elated. But I feel nothing but a hollow sadness and resignation.

I step forward, sinking deeper into the silver water and into a sudden, perfect silence. I can see the concentric silver ripples spread out where my body makes contact, but I hear nothing, so I turn up the external audio receptors of the suit. Still, nothing. Not even the whirr of the heat exchanger. Or the rush of wind. Absolute silence. When I take a step back, sound returns to the world.

I know what it is then.

The maadiregi at the temple of the talking drum call them The Silences. Naturally occurring bubbles of soundlessness where nothing vibrates even at the subatomic level, except living creatures animated by the Mothersound. Pockets of divine quiet, the antithesis of the sonic storms. Considered holy sites for communion with The Mother, to hear her more clearly. The maadiregi that visit The Silences sometimes sit there, stripped of their magical abilities, waiting upon her revelations.

I am amazed to find one here, so far down, sitting atop a shallow silver ocean.

I step forward, again into The Silence.

The hush returns. Soul-deep and soothing. I let out a yell, but I cannot hear myself, only feel the stretching of my face and neck muscles, the tension in my jaw, the strain on my tongue. I walk forward, wading through the silver ocean, deeper into The Silence, relishing the preternatural quiet.

As I progress, a chill seizes my bones and I start to shiver as though the cold air has finally found a leak in my suit to thread its way into. I cannot hear any sensor warnings, but instinctively, as though The Mother has told me herself, I know I am not shivering because of a leak. I am shivering with awe at this vast and terrible and wonderful and strange world.

I press on until I take a step and feel myself float up, suspended for a moment, before dropping down again. Just above the interface between the silver liquid and the supercritical fluid above, the atmosphere is so dense that I can almost swim in it.

Floating in The Silence is freeing. I do it again, leaping higher and floating longer this time. I reach up into the misty world with the bulky arm of the atmospheric exposure suit. The supercooled atmospheric molecules that are balanced on some thermodynamic tightrope I don’t fully understand turn to crystals at my touch, like magic. I gasp noiselessly.

I am in a daydream at the bottom of the world where the natural magic and physics of the world have conspired to birth something impossible. A place where I can hardly see in front of me, where gas and liquid are undifferentiable twins and crystals bloom from the air at the slightest touch, where bubbles of silence swell like The Mother herself has hushed the world as bursts of incredible sonic energy appear at random in tantrums, wild and untamed.

I am overwhelmed and exhausted. I sink to my knees in the silver liquid. I close my eyes and take in a deep breath.

And then I hear it.

I brought you here to see this.

The voice enters my mind with a force I am not expecting, breaking the silence like glass. It sounds like my mother’s voice but with an infinite chorus. Like every word she says is repeated by every woman who was and is and is to come.

I wonder briefly if I am losing my mind.

It is time for my children to know more of their world. You have fulfilled your purpose. Those that come after you will find what remains and know that you succeeded. That you were the first to descend.

I open my eyes but there is no one and nothing but white and silver in the hazy landscape.

“Are you . . . ?” I ask, not daring to speak her name.

Yes.

Another shiver streaks through me.

“Can you save me?” I whisper into the silence as a surge of hope swells in my heart. “Can you tell me the word for flight so I can return home, to my mother?”

No.

“Please,” I beg.

No. You cannot return. You owe a life.

The shivers turn to a persistent tremble.

There is a balance. An accounting. Between every word, there is a pause. For every action, there is a reaction. Life and death. The light and the dark. The sound and the silence. The known and the uncertain. There is a balance.

My head falls and I remain quiet for a while. And then, “Will my mother ever know?” I ask. “Will she know that I was the first to reach the surface?”

Yes. And it will not matter. You sought to see below the yedede’kiyan and now that you have, you have only found more mysteries. You seek to know what causes my sonic storms? What causes the thermal inversion? What creates The Silences? What animates your reality and what unfolds at the edges of the universe? Then seek. You will find answers, but at the end of every answer, there will always be another question. There is a balance. The boundary condition of all knowledge is faith.

I blink at that. Those are the last words my mother said to me. Maybe I am imagining all this. Maybe there really is a leak in my suit, and I cannot tell so my mind is succumbing to hypothermia. Maybe I am having a conversation with myself as I die.

My creation is unknowable in its fullness. It is to be experienced. Not analyzed, not controlled, not fully understood. I have let you experience this world and allowed you as much understanding as you deserve. Now, pay the cost of what I have given.

It all makes a kind of bitter sense in my mind, so I say, “I accept. I will pay.”

There is a glow ahead, like diffuse light streaming through the haze.

Walk.

I rise to my feet and continue to press forward toward the light, wading deeper and deeper into The Silence until I emerge from the other side.

Sound returns and I hear the splash of silver liquid beneath, the rush of wind whooshing by and the steady beeping of all my atmospheric exposure suit alarms. The battery has failed.

Return the sound that animates you.

Suddenly, the atmosphere hisses and there is a sound like the end of the world that sets my head pounding with deep reverberations. A blast of pressure hits my suit, and the oxygen valve screams open to compensate, but not quickly enough. My ears ring and my sinuses ache.

The sonic storm appears in front of me like a beast in all its bright blue rage and wild glory. Gigantic tendrils of lightning vein out of the haze like a spreading infection, so large it seems they are moving in slow motion. My breath turns to ice, and I clutch at my chest as the heat exchanger and all the other life support equipment connected to the battery finally, completely, give out.

As I am swallowed by the sound and the surge of energy scatters me like a dried out, brittle husk, I finally accept it. I accept it all. I accept my death and I pray for entry into Eh’waizo. I accept that nothing is certain. That nothing is clear. That faith and knowledge are inseparable. That The Mother has created us for both joy and suffering. That life and death are two sides of the same thing. That I am a pioneer. That I am a follower. That I am an orphan, and I am my mother’s son. That I am a murderer. That I am human. That I love my mother even though I hate her deeply. That the search for knowledge is endless and futile but necessary. That there is a balance and a price to all things, even knowledge. Especially knowledge. That, in the end, we must all learn to both conquer and submit to Órino-Rin, this strange and lovely and terrible world of sound and fury that both nurtures and destroys us, like an inconstant mother.

Author’s Note: This is set in the Sauútiverse. For more information visit sauuti.com.