7. Missing Pieces: Aerie

In the distant planet of Faenya-Dail, men gave themselves wings and the power of flight.

It was a small, low-grav world on the other side of the galaxy. It was colonised in the old days of the First Empire, where mankind set forth on joyous adventures in a golden age. A mixture of scientists and artisans set out for Faenya-Dail, accepted that in the era of A-class stardrives they would be alone when they arrived there, and recreated themselves to be at home.

The world was made for flying. Old planetary troubles had settled down into a landscape full of dizzying, sharp beauty. Needle-pointed mountains split the planet into high jagged spires and deep canyons. Two suns bathed Faenya-Dail in bright, clear light, and created hot updrafts to lift the air. There were no sapient alien species on the planet, or at least none had ever introduced themselves. Four-winged birds dominated the landscape, feeding on jewel-winged butterflies who photosynthesised from the suns. Mosses, ivies, and tenacious plant species grew on the cliffs, hosting smaller flying insects and saprophages.

Faenya-Dail's gengineers modified themselves to join in. Strengthen the human frame, lower the weight, add wings. They became Avariel, winged folk: adapted to live on their own world with as little damage as possible to their environment. They caused hardly any extinctions. They lived on glass structures spread from mountaintop to mountaintop, and flew through the air on wide white wings.

The Empire forgot about this small world on the other side of the galaxy, and they had other problems. The Darkvoid Device wiped out a vast region of space and a hundred inhabited planets in a single instant, and it wasn't until the Emperor Lion's time that starships scouted around the Rim again. The Empire rediscovered Faenya-Dail, and found the colonists' descendants ready and willing to claim themselves for the Empire.

But the Avariel were mutant freaks, in that time of Pure Humanity. Human enough to betray their origins; inhuman enough to be sedition. Pointed ears, exaggerated photosensitive eyes, vast white feathered wings. They were a peaceful people.

If you don't have to blow them to oblivion, laugh at them instead. Faenya-Dail became a tourist resort, and a mine for various minerals used to make plastic bags. Many avariel were made to be servants at the resort, or placed in factories to cut authentic avariel glass. Placing them in the mines was eventually discovered to be inefficient.

Aerie was born in a clan of avariel who were still free, flying across ground that hadn't been terraformed for tourists. She wanted to be a thespian when she grew up; she dreamt of fluttering onto the stage, dancing with her wings in the theatre of the air. She was also a solitary avariel, and liked to wander by herself, watching the birds and identifying the butterflies.

She knew that there were hunters on Faenya-Dail in the tourist resorts, but she had never seen Empire people so close before. She saw a grav-sled long before the humans on it could see her, and watched them with curiosity. Three men, carrying devices in their hands, spilling sticky smoke behind them. Aerie wished they wouldn't be so irresponsible. The birds and butterflies would hate to run into that smoke. But she wasn't brave enough to fly down and speak to the men, so she watched the party as if they were another kind of strange butterfly.

A bird flew by, a giant four-winged Aerdrie-bird, a rare and lovely kind. Their feathers were coloured like a thunderstorm, and they flew faster than any other birds: free, wild, and radiant. Aerie was named after them. She watched the bird and sled soar, parallel to each other, two rare creatures drawing closer.

Then Aerie saw the electronic net. She shrieked: Aerdrie-birds should never be hunted by anyone. The grav-sled shot the net out of the sky, a harsh black thing made of sharp wires. Aerie folded back her wings and dived like a stone, not even thinking about her actions.

She pushed the Aerdrie-bird away. It squawked out like the sound of thunder, outraged, indignant. Aerie hoped it got away.

But the coils of the net tightened around her wings instead. She screamed as the electric current through it began to burn her skin ...

The hunters were after illicit thrills, trespassing off the tourist areas to have rare birds stuffed and mounted. Likely the hunters wanted no trouble with an injured, unconscious young girl, so they sold her off-planet to hide the evidence. Aerie didn't begin to understand what had happened to her until long afterward.

She grew up in a tiny, filthy cage as a circus exhibit, trapped with people whose language she didn't even understand. Children poked her with sticks to make her flap her wings. The cage was too small. Aerie tried to talk to her captors, asking them to let her go or at least put her in a bigger cage, but they didn't. Her wings became putrid with disease. They were going to kill her, because she was worthless, but a kind man called Quayle purchased the freak show.

Quayle drugged Aerie and cut off her wings to save her life, and afterwards he stayed with her when she wanted to die. He taught her how to read and how to listen. Quayle's circus was a cover for other things: espers and other freaks. He was an esper himself and discovered that Aerie too had an esper's power, hidden deep inside her.

As an esper and obviously inhuman, Aerie was doubly property in the Empire, a slave sold to the circus. Her wings were gone forever. But, with her new family, she found some peace. They taught her how to be an esper.

That lasted until a raid by Empire forces murdered her Uncle Quayle. Aerie and the remains of the circus left for the underground, to fight for people like them. Aerie wasn't the most powerful esper around, but she had friends around her to help. She helped her friends rescue espers and clones who asked for help, and treated wounded people as best she could.

Aerie returned home from another underground mission when she was taken by something in the night, something cold that moved at inhuman speed and smelt like blood. Her name was Bodhi, and she was a Wampyr. Aerie realised that much. She laughed when she hurt people.

She took Aerie to the cold man and the group of women with the same face who worked for him. They tortured people. Aerie screamed when the knives cut into her, just as her wings were sliced off years ago. It didn't make him stop.

The cold man wanted things out of her, things she didn't think she could give. He kept saying that an avariel was different and maybe the difference changed his experiments, but Aerie didn't understand. She was a weak esper, she'd always known she was a weak esper. She just wanted to stand up for her friends. She prayed and begged not to talk about the things she knew about the underground, but she hadn't known very much anyway. She was glad about that part.

She'd been brainburned. She couldn't remember where most of her scars came from, only that it was the cold man. He strapped her to a table and cut her open, then injected coloured dyes inside her.

Aerie saw her insides reflected on the cold mirrors that lined his labs. Orange spleen, red uterus, green intestines. He watched it pulse through her and measured her organs. There was another body next to her, the face covered by a cloth, not moving at all. A control sample. Aerie wanted it to be already dead, as she knew what the pain was like.

"Photosynthetic glands in the skin, adapted to the wavelength of Faenya-Dail's primary sun. Smaller stomach, small intestine, colon, bowels, reproductive organs. Lungs comparable to human size, occupying a high ratio of the thoracic cavity. Low inflation rate."

She could feel the glass tubes running into her, keeping her alive, feel her open ribcage. Her bones were cracked open around her. She was naked, her very skin and bones opened to show all that was inside her. Her eyelids were pinnned open, and she couldn't stop seeing the mirror images of her body.

"Differences are statistically significant compared to general human ratio and ratio of control sample," the cold man said to his AI. "Efforts of First Empire gengineers and centuries of adaptation. Genome uploaded and tracked with other samples. A live specimen is suitable for endurance testing."

He wouldn't use any drugs. He never used anything to stop pain. Aerie screamed as he forced her ribs back into her chest, stitched her up with thick black thread. He paused to tie a rag into her mouth, as if the noise distracted him.

He gave another command to the AI. Aerie felt the table shift. She fell on her front, upside down. The stitches burned. Air blew across her shoulderblades. She could only vaguely see what he was doing in the mirrors now. He was an exaggerated giant, the scalpel glinting in his hand.

She'd always known that the scars on her back were shameful to her. Her wings were cut off. She wasn't avariel any longer and could never go home. She couldn't bear for anyone to look at her back. The torturer sliced open the scar tissue and she wept.

"Double scapula, terminated corocoids," the cold man told his AI. He took up a bone saw. "The purpose of this is to test strength."

But Aerie already understood what he was doing. He tore through where her wings once beat. He slowly sawed through the bone.

"This proves all," he whispered. "Hollow, of course, but there is less resilience than the prior literature claims."

The saw's teeth reached deeper, the pain unbearable. But, as the blackness approached, the torturer would inject something in her that made sure it would never stop.

It would never stop.

Aerie lay in her own waste and blood in the cell. She was alone. The nearby esp-blocker saw to that.

Once, she'd known how to fly. She was free, and soared over mountains and valleys with birds. Those memories had only ever caused her pain, and so Aerie let them dissolve away.

Once she had a mother and a father, back on her home planet. She could not even remember their faces, anyway. They disappeared from her mind.

Once, Uncle Quayle taught her everything she knew and kept her from disappearing into the abyss. She tried not to hate him for that. She banished his face into darkness.

Once, she'd helped people. Espers and clones who wanted to escape to the underground, dissidents who wanted an esper's help to survive the Empire. She was once useful, in a small way. Aerie forgot all of that.

Her mind was blank and bleak. She was nothing. The gate to oblivion creaked open.

The flame of her mind guttered to ashes.

When the mind is emptied, a telepath will die.

And if a mind is emptied, there's a danger that something else may enter ...

Irenicus' two esp-blockers flashed out into two intense fires, guttering into nothing the very moment the flare struck.

Aerie didn't notice. She stood, and something else smiled with her mouth.