Fall and Rising Read online

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Fall and Rising

  Copyright © 2015 by Sunny Moraine

  Cover art: Kanaxa, www.kanaxa.com

  Editor: Carole-ann Galloway

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-300-1

  First edition

  August, 2015

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-301-8

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  Adam Yuga is on the run. Three months ago, a miracle saved him from the deadly genetic illness that threatens the entire population of his former home, the Protectorate. Now he and his lover Lochlan are searching for a way to heal his people. When they receive a mysterious coded message promising hope, they make a desperate grab for it, and are imprisoned—by the very race they want to save.

  On Lochlan’s distant homeship, a young pilot named Nkiruka faces an agonizing choice: stay with her lover Satya and live a life of happy obscurity, or become the spiritual leader—and the last and only hope—for the Bideshi. Nkiruka doesn’t want to lose Satya, but worse, she fears she lacks the strength to carry anyone through the coming storm, let alone her entire people.

  Threads of chance and destiny draw the three together. With the fates of civilizations in their hands, they prepare for a final conflict that might be their only chance for survival—or that might destroy them all.

  For Megh.

  About Fall and Rising

  Tipping Point (in medias res)

  Part One: Descent

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two: Plateau

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Three: Ascent

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Apex

  Glossary

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sunny Moraine

  About the Author

  More like this

  And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.

  —Genesis 21:9–11

  When Rachel saw they also had Becca and Dion, she began to scream.

  It raked her throat, burned high in her chest. But the pain, the fear, the horror—they didn’t quite touch her. Deep down she was numb. Even resigned. Hadn’t there been whispers? About people who’d disappeared? People who hadn’t seemed quite right, who hadn’t seemed themselves. Sick? No, no one on Terra got sick. Long before birth, illness was rendered impossible, the potential for it engineered out of existence. That was where their great civilization had started: with sickness—with its erasure. It was the foundation of who her people were. The endless quest for physical perfection was a tree sprouted from this single seed: people who didn’t get sick.

  But her hands had been shaking for weeks now, and she was so often tired. Part of her had known something was wrong, even as the rest of her denied it. Denied there was any truth to the rumors. Of course she wouldn’t vanish. They would never come for her.

  She had been so wrong. And now they had her children.

  She rose from her bench in the transport shuttle and tried to shove her way past the peacekeepers, ignoring their guns. Trampling everything to get to her children—following an instinct deeper and more profound than any genetic cultivation. Yet if she touched them, she would be sure they were here with her, and she had known the instant she saw them what that meant.

  It meant that she and they might share this weakness. This sickness. Rachel might see them shake and fall, which would be worse than seeing her whole world do the same.

  She was barely two feet from them when the peacekeepers knocked her to the floor with the butts of their guns. Their faces were covered by the white standard-issue helmets with their reflective blast shields, so she couldn’t see if they felt any pity. If they might show any mercy. Her little boy and girl were crying, clinging and crying, her little boy and her little girl, and clinging to each other as another peacekeeper herded them forward—more gently, and she felt the tiniest sliver of icy relief. They might hurt her, but surely they wouldn’t hurt children.

  Rachel wanted to believe that.

  She pushed herself up to her knees. “Not them. Please, not them. Look at them, they’re fine, they’re—”

  One of the peacekeepers raised their gun as if they meant to strike her again. “Get back in there. Do it. Don’t make this a problem and none of you have to get hurt.”

  None of you. It echoed in her mind, heavy and cold. So there was her answer.

  They were willing to hurt children. Children. To maintain the carefully engineered, carefully perfected paradise that had birthed that next generation.

  People didn’t get sick on Terra. No.

  “Where are we going?” Her sweet girl, oh, there were no words for how cruel this was. She would have traded never seeing them again to avoid this. “Mama?”

  They hadn’t even been allowed to pack anything, she realized. Somehow that was the worst part of this. They had their coats on but nothing else. No
ne of their toys, no extra clothes, no pad for books or games. They had only each other, hand in hand. If they were going to be traveling, why wouldn’t they have …?

  She couldn’t. She couldn’t bear that.

  The children moved forward, whimpering, and she opened her arms. It was all she could do. Everything was blurry, but she felt them come to her, pulled them both against her, felt their heaving breaths as they tried not to sob. Young but old enough to grasp the concept of stoicism. She was so proud of them. Now perhaps more than ever. Proud of them for simply being alive.

  “All right, let’s get in the air. They’re not gonna hang around in orbit for that much longer.”

  Two of the peacekeepers slid onto the benches opposite each other. Their heads were bent together, and they were talking, tones low and casual, as if she and her children weren’t there at all. The hatch hissed closed, and the engines rumbled as they fired, the shuttle jolting softly as it began to rise. She raised her head and blinked away her tears, holding on to those two small, trembling bodies—and thinking terrible things.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she whispered—knowing it was pointless. “They’re just kids, you don’t have to … They’re not even sick.”

  She was sure they weren’t going to answer her, but one leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

  “You know that doesn’t matter. They’re yours. They share your code, so they’re as broken as you are. They should never have happened at all. Even if they don’t seem sick now, they will. You’re not an idiot, don’t act like one.” He sat back and turned his head, appearing to shoot his companion a glance before he directed his attention to her once more. “Maybe you’re genetically degenerate, but you can at least have some dignity.”

  Small portholes were set into the shuttle’s sides. As they ascended from the hangar, the light of a beautiful, crisp winter day flooded in, and sunlight gleamed off slender, graceful towers of crystal as they passed them. Left them behind. All those people, some aware of what was happening—and many more not. Many of them with no idea at all. No idea how many things were shaking—not just hands and not just bodies. Foundations.

  They didn’t conceive of the idea of an ultimate fall.

  It’ll tumble down. She lowered her head and squeezed her eyes closed as the blue sky began to darken. They were leaving all that beauty behind, that perfection, and now she understood—or was beginning to understand—that it was all a lie. A lie that, if there really were more like her, probably couldn’t be sustained forever. It’ll tumble down and never rise again.

  And maybe, if this was what it did to children, to the foundation on which the future was built …

  Maybe that was what had to be.

  The Plain of Heaven was a carpet of bodies.

  Adam twitched where he lay in the dust, spasmed—not in pain but in shock, in an ecstasy of terror. He could see them stretched out in all directions, splayed and torn and bloody, staring eyes and faces twisted in agony. Protectorate and Bideshi. Young men and women and elders and little children. All dead.

  All because of him.

  He shuddered but couldn’t turn away; they were everywhere he would turn.

  There should have been screams, shots, metal on metal: the last echoes of the battle. And there should have been someone holding him—Lochlan’s arms warm and strong around him. The pillars of the stone circle rose over his head—the circle where he had been led, the circle that had the power to cure the sickness in him at last. He knew this place so well by now. He knew what had happened here, what must happen.

  But Lochlan was not with him.

  He pushed himself up on shaking hands and scanned his surroundings, at once seeing and not seeing the desolation. He didn’t want to see it, but he had to see it, because it was for him, all for him, a war which, if he hadn’t caused it, he had coaxed to a fevered, lethal pitch. Blood that he had spilled, even if he hadn’t taken up a weapon of his own in the end.

  Lock.

  He wanted to cry the name, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. It was lodged in his throat, choking him. He scrambled onto his hands and knees—and then he did see. What he had known he would see, and from which he had been trying to hide, because some truths were death to face.

  Lochlan’s body, lying broken and bloody at the edge of the circle, a gash in his throat nearly severing his head from his neck, his eyes wide and bulging and bloodshot. His dreadlocks were matted with congealed gore. He stared up at the sky, at nothing.

  “Dead” was not a strong enough word. “Dead” didn’t capture the finality, the violent end of everything. “Dead” didn’t capture the agony, the void opening up inside him as he let the reality of Lochlan d’Bideshi’s corpse crash over him in a poisonous wave.

  His knees and elbows buckled under him, and he fell back into the dust, screaming and screaming. His mouth was full of the dust of the Plain of Heaven, the dust of Takamagahara, and it tasted like ashes.

  “Chusile. Adam.”

  Hands shaking him, strong and firm and very familiar. Adam stirred, twisted—his legs were tangled in something, held down. He let out a moan and tried to free himself. His tongue tasted of dust, gritty between his teeth. He could still see …

  Lochlan bending over him. A hand stroking through his hair. Adam dragged in a long breath and stilled.

  “Chere, that was a dream and a half. Don’t scream like that; you’ll send me into an early grave.”

  “Don’t say that.” Adam shoved himself up and buried his head in his hands, the sheets pooling around his waist. It was too much. Part of him felt relief so deep it was almost painful. And part of him was still only terrified. “Just … don’t.”

  Lochlan was quiet for a moment, hand on Adam’s bare shoulder. Not caressing, not moving, but there, and Adam slowly pressed back against it, releasing himself into the touch. Behind his hands it was dark, and he could hear Volya humming around them, Lochlan’s beloved, alive in her own way, and the life behind Lochlan’s breathing. He was here. The Plain was far away now.

  But it had been real. All that death.

  “You were having that dream again, weren’t you.” It wasn’t a question, and Adam didn’t feel the need to confirm it. Lochlan wasn’t oblivious, and in the weeks since they had left Ashwina, their knowledge of each other had deepened in ways Adam’d never expected. He knew the rhythm of Lochlan’s heartbeat now, his breathing, the ways he moved as he slept, the ways he liked to be touched, what it took to make him smile.

  And Adam was known in the same way. Sometimes it almost frightened him, because no one had ever known him like this. It had been too dangerous in his old world to share such intimacy with a man. That intimacy was dangerous even now in other ways. It gave him so much more to lose. Just the memory of Lochlan, broken and bloody in his dream … That wasn’t how it had gone. Lochlan hadn’t died in that battle. Lochlan was here. The sickness that had sent Adam to the Plain to be healed by power he couldn’t hope to understand, power that had changed him in ways he was still discovering … It was gone. They were both well.

  But the dreams persisted. Because how things had ended didn’t erase how they had arrived there.

  Lochlan sighed and leaned his cheek where his hand had been, pressing a kiss to the angle of Adam’s shoulder blade. “I wish you’d tell me about it.”

  “I can’t,” Adam whispered. He had tried. But it had been like there was a block in his throat, like his body itself was keeping it all back, as if saying it aloud would invoke it in some way and make it true. The horror of the Plain, what had happened there … and the guilt that lay behind the dreams. Because if it weren’t for him, none of those people would have died. Or if he didn’t fully believe that—or didn’t believe it could be so simple—he couldn’t escape the idea. It lay on him, heavy.

  “Dreams mean things. I don’t mean to make it into more than it is, but you could … Maybe I could help. What happened to you back there—I don’t completely understand it but that doesn’t m
ean I know nothing about it.” Adam felt Lochlan smile against his skin, though it seemed faint, and knew without looking that there would be a sardonic edge in it. “I know you Protectorate raya all think this star-reading and dream-seeing is obscene superstition and everything, but given that it did actually save your life …”

  Adam shook his head, but he did find it in him to laugh. “Stop. I’m …” He took a breath. Even now, Lochlan teased—especially now, when he thought it might ease things. “It’s just that so many people died,” he murmured. “Your people. My people. Even Cosaire. ‘Missy,’ I think Aarons called her. Melissa, you know? I don’t know why that one sticks with me at all, but—”

  “You didn’t put the bullet in her head,” Lochlan said quietly. “He did. And it was a mercy killing. She was sick. You know that too. And in case you’ve forgotten, she hunted you halfway across the galaxy and back. She would have killed you if she could.”

  “Yeah. I do know it.” He swallowed. And she killed those people to get to me. Because I was everything she hated. Everything she feared.

  “You survived. We survived. That’s what matters.”

  Lochlan kissed him once more, moving up along the ridge of his shoulder, and Adam let his head drop back and exhaled. Lochlan’s hands could, at times, be a wonderful distraction, and his mouth doubly so. “You should try to sleep again, chusile.” Adam felt him smile again. “Maybe I can help you.”

  He didn’t give Adam time to respond, and Adam wouldn’t have needed to anyway. Lochlan’s hand was already sliding down between Adam’s thighs, his other hand pulling him back onto the bed, and Adam’s sigh turned into a low moan as he gave over. This was real too. He could lose himself in this warm sweetness. He had permission. When Lochlan’s hot mouth closed around him, he clutched at the dreadlocks spread over his belly and hips and held on as he shuddered in slow waves of pleasure.