Icarus Descending Read Online Free PDF Page A

was at the NASNA Academy, there was a game we used to play late at night, after our rectors had gone to sleep. It was a small group of us who gathered in Aidan’s room—Aidan Harrow, his twin sister Emma, Neos Tiana, and myself, Margalis. Occasionally John Starving, who years later served under me in the Archipelago Conflict and died there, poisoned by the embolismal parasite known as kacha —sometimes brave John joined us as well, though he was several years younger than the rest of us, and risked expulsion if he was found on our floor.
    The game was called Fear. Aidan invented it, Aidan who was always the ringleader among our cohort, with his long pale legs and streaming hair the color of old blood. The game went like this. We would sit in a circle on the floor beside Aidan’s bed, Emma always beside her brother, then Neos, then John, then me on the other side of Aidan. In the center of the circle would be a bottle of something—cheap wine usually, though once Neos brought a slender venetian-glass decanter of apsinthion, and another time Emma presented us with a vial of the caustic hallucinogen greengill. Whatever it was, it would be passed around the circle, along with bread hoarded from our suppers all week and a small jar of lime pickle that Aidan kept only for these occasions. The Academy was notoriously stingy in feeding its cadets; there was not a night that I recall when I did not go to bed hungry, and I think it was hunger as much as our desire for companionship and the dark thrill of violation that brought us together on those cold evenings.
    So you must imagine us, crouched in the shadow of Aidan’s bed (he often shared it with his sister, but we pretended not to know that) with a single lumiere casting a greenish light upon our thin faces. We were all seventeen years old, except for John Starving; and his name notwithstanding, he was the heartiest of us. Aidan and Emma were skinny as planks, white-skinned, with that reddish hair and green cat-eyes. Neos was like a curlew, all bent knees and long beak, but with bright black eyes and black hair like an oiled cap close against her skull. John was nearly as tall as myself, but broad-shouldered and with a wide, dark face. I was nothing but bones and nerve in those days: very tall, not yet stooped from the burden of my command, and popular enough with my peers. I knew that Neos fancied me, as did Aidan; but Emma feared me because I had killed a boy in a fight several years earlier. At the Academy one was not expelled or even suspended for such misdemeanors. After the investigation I was given a private tutor, a replicant named Vus, and my time in the gymkhana increased from two to four hours daily. If my rations had been doubled to make up for the extra exercise, perhaps I would not have been so eager to attend Aidan’s soirees.
    There was always something uncanny about Aidan Harrow. In all the years that have passed since our youth together, it still does not surprise me that there is a line I can draw, from Aidan to his sister Emma, from Emma to the empath Wendy Wanders, and so to the dark one who has imprisoned me here. It may have been simply that Aidan was beautiful, with that angular grace and his witch-eyes; and of course it helps that he died young, by his own hand, so that I always remember him laughing in the half-light of his cadet’s room. Unlike his sister, doomed to live another twenty-odd years before succumbing to her own private auto-da-fé at the Human Engineering Laboratory. Emma was never the beauty that Aidan was, even though sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. Perhaps she simply didn’t share her twin’s unabashed delight in her own appearance, or maybe it was just that odd apportioning of features that takes place sometimes between siblings, with the boys stealing all their mothers’ beauty, and the girls left with hard mouths and wary eyes.
    Whatever it was, there was always a subtle pressure to be next to Aidan. In the near dark