The Sentient Read online

  NADIA AFIFI

  The Sentient

  FLAME TREE PRESS

  London & New York

  •

  To my grandmother, Joan.

  Chapter One

  Wilderness

  The Green line to Bedlam was the oldest train route through Westport, a clogged, aging artery through the city’s industrial zone. Inside one of its trembling cars, Amira Valdez pressed her face against the cool window, exhaling with forced steadiness. She had not felt this anxious on a train since her escape from the Children of the New Covenant Compound ten years ago. The train shuddered as it passed over a battered section of the tracks. Amira clenched her fists, digging her nails into her whip-scarred palms, another remnant of the compound.

  Amira’s morning commute to the Academy was normally a pleasant one, but today was Placement Day, and far from ordinary.

  She pulled away from the window, where the tracks ascended above ground and the dense, grimy brick buildings of the Riverfront district came into view. Academy students filled the train car, all prepared in their own way for the most important day of the year. A gangly young man with a green mohawk leaned against one of the central poles, muttering a string of equations. Another student grimly performed lunges near the door, inciting glares every time new passengers boarded. No one made eye contact. Talented students abounded at the Academy and assignments were limited. Assignments in space would be even rarer.

  Space. Her mentor, Dr. Mercer, called it the world above the world. For Amira, the research stations orbiting overhead represented everything the compound was not – unburdened by the past, a place that welcomed the unknown and challenged the idea of the unknowable. She belonged there. But if she failed to place well in the Aldwych district, the epicenter of the city of Westport’s Lower Earth Orbit industry, today’s exams would mercilessly destroy her dreams of working spaceside. Those countless hours she’d spent as a lonely child, hiding on the roof and searching the night sky for space-bound shuttles, would mean nothing. She had to succeed. Amira chewed her lower lip, forcing down her doubts.

  The outlines of Aldwych’s imposing skyscrapers rose in the distance as the Green line turned east. A faint trail of smoke from the Galileo building signaled a recent shuttle launch. Amira ran her finger along the condensed window glass, tracing the shuttle’s skyward path toward the stations. Waves of adrenaline pulsed through her small frame, growing stronger as she neared the Academy’s stop.

  You’ve waited a long time for this day, her inner voice encouraged. You know you’re ready. This is what you were meant to do. This is who you’re meant to be.

  The train announced its arrival at the Academy with a dull, screeching wail. The student reciting equations switched to a torrent of expletives. As she stepped outside, Amira’s heart quickened at the sight of the Academy’s elegant, angular walls, the sleek architecture of its buildings amplified by the comparatively grim, industrial neighborhood that surrounded it. Despite Oregon’s mild climate, the Academy adopted a distinctly tropical aesthetic. The school’s founder conducted her research in the Brazilian rainforest and brought the jungle back with her. Synthetic palm trees lined the walkways and vines crawled over the self-consciously modernist buildings, their concrete walls made to look like timber. Amira touched the founder’s statue every time she passed it, as though she could absorb the late scientist’s essence through the marble.

  The Academy’s main building hosted the Placement Day trials. Its corridors were remarkably silent save for Amira’s echoing footsteps and the occasional somber-faced student shuffling by. A dull-eyed teaching assistant ordered Amira to Room Four. So her fate would be decided there. Amira took a steadying breath and followed the instruction, striding with as much confidence as she could muster beyond the lecture hall.

  A small, pale figure emerged from the lecture hall’s towering doors. Amira’s best friend, D’Arcy Pham, grinned excitedly, raising her fist in triumph. Though the knot in her stomach tightened further, Amira returned the smile and they clasped hands briefly. D’Arcy mouthed the word ‘Pandora’ before turning around the corridor.

  Amira blinked with surprise. The Pandora project, spearheaded by a team of elite Aldwych scientists, was really a collection of projects with one common theme – a desire to push the boundaries of science as far as law, budget and human understanding would allow. It was no surprise that D’Arcy, a top quantum programmer at the Academy who custom-made her own Third Eye, had placed well – but Pandora? The project was both unusually prestigious and clandestine, even by the standards of insular Aldwych.

  And there it was – Room Four. Amira found no external indicators of what awaited her beyond the door, but she had a reasonable guess. She managed to evade one test in her ten years of study, but she would not face the panel without completing it. Just as police officers had to be shocked before they could inflict the pain of a nano-pulse Taser, Amira would have to lay her own mind bare before she could become an Academy-approved therapist and holomentic reader.

  She exhaled, memories of glimmering space stations and night skies dancing in her mind’s eye, and walked through the door.

  * * *

  Amira sat still, arms folded in her lap with sensory pads attached to her forehead and temples. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes when the first needle entered her wrist. The standard dose of Nirvatrene, cooling as it found her vein.

  “Are you ready?” A lanky young man with horn-rimmed glasses pulled up a seat next to her, monitor hovering over his knees. “Nervous? I can change our background to a beach or park, or whatever you prefer.”

  “I’m fine.” The walls were white, windowless and sterile.

  “All right then. We’ll submerge in a few minutes.”

  In the seconds before her thoughts would no longer be hers alone, Amira allowed herself a final moment of calculation. Her skills as a holomentic reader, the latest breakthrough in thought-visualizing neuroscience, did not interest the Placement Panel. This exercise was ultimately a psychological evaluation, intended to deliver a verdict on her emotional stability for a position that gave her access to patients’ innermost thoughts. A verdict on the soundness of her mind, not what she could do with it.

  The sensory pads warmed against Amira’s face, joined by an odd, pulling sensation in the back of her head, as though an invisible hand tried to reel her in like a fish on a hook. She struggled to concentrate on the door, but it grew harder and harder to focus. The hologram table to her right projected images from her brain as she experienced them, in flashes of shapes and color that formed three-dimensional scenes. Initially dim and blurry, they took form while the man, her assigned reader, adjusted dials and dragged his fingers across a large monitor.

  Amira clenched her fists. She fought to keep her expression neutral, but the glimpses of memory continued to appear, gaining clarity and strength under the reader’s skilled navigation.

  This was only the first step. The reader probed the first level of her consciousness and would move in deeper as he navigated the complex neural map in front of him. Any Academy student could learn to read the map of the human mind – the real skill, one Amira possessed in abundance, was knowing where to look.

  Amira shivered. If this reader could find points of weakness the way she could, the next hour would test her like nothing else.

  “Ok, Amira, let’s start,” he said. “In the interest of treating this like a proper therapy session, let’s focus on a moment from your past and dissect what it means together. In your profile, it says you were originally born in one of the religious compounds in the southwest. Correct?”

  Amira suppressed a sigh. As she had dreaded, she would have t
o relive the compound, the epicenter of all her traumas, to pass her final test.

  “Yes,” she said. No sooner had the words escaped her lips, the tugging sensation returned.

  “What do you think of when you remember life on Children of the New Covenant?” he asked. An open-ended and vague question, a common tactic to start off a holomentic therapy session. Amira closed her eyes and centered her thoughts on the word ‘compound’. Other words darted into her thoughts as well, along with images and sounds – of violence, of terror – that would never leave her, but she resisted, struggling to focus on the word alone and not the memories it evoked.

  And there it was, clear and vivid on the nearby hologram – the compound, at night. It gave off an otherworldly light from a distance, its pale, round buildings glowing like craterless moons rising out of the Sonoran valley. It was the only source of light for hundreds of miles on those typical nights marred by ashy clouds or smog from the western cities. Its inhabitants left those cities generations ago to escape the modern world’s liberties and license, but civilization still found ways to reach them.

  With the luxury of distance and time between her and her place of birth, Amira let herself see the unsettling beauty of the place, the hushed calm that descended over the desert when the sunlight dissolved over the mountains. The solar power that fueled the compound left the pathways and low buildings glowing with an eerie, bluish light at night. But Amira knew the secret lives that existed within each of those orb-like houses, the hidden violence and despair contained within every wall. The way people disappeared, never to be spoken of again except in quiet whispers. The way women and girls barely ranked above livestock, a means to an end.

  Her face grew clammy at the sight of the barbed wires around the compound walls and she pushed the image aside with effort, closing her eyes. Her heart quickened as sound replaced sight, screams and cries from old punishments. The burning of Chimyra, warm and thick in her throat, at the start of the Passage Ceremony. Another tug in her head.

  The scene in the hologram shifted to a young girl with long black hair. No older than thirteen, the girl shivered on her knees in a small shed. She lifted her shaking hands to gaze at her palms, which were raw and bleeding in thin trails onto the floor.

  “Amira? Are you ok?”

  The man’s voice, though distant, cut through her thundering heartbeat. Amira swallowed and nodded. Biting her lip in frustration, she redirected her thoughts back to her first image of the compound at night, but she could feel the man probing deeper into her thought patterns, the sensors warming slightly against her temples.

  “Ok, let’s focus on that memory for a minute. I see a lot of fear activated around the prelimbic cortex, very conditioned fear, of course. Why are you in that small space and what brought you there?”

  Amira’s mouth went dry. That was the first night she tried to escape, and the punishment was predictably severe. She had spent months building her resolve to leave, knowing the consequences of failure…and then she had failed. Residual pain flashed across her palms, and she balled her fists.

  Opening her eyes, Amira could see the images in the hologram shifting again, from the shed to a large crowd in a clearing. Most were children or teenagers, rapt and bright-eyed, flanked by stony-faced adults in long black coats. No trees or clouds shielded them from a fierce sun, though shadows from nearby hills stretched in their direction. The Gathering.

  Amira grimaced, trying to redirect her thoughts to the shed, to the smell of blood and fear, but it was too late.

  “The Gathering?” the man asked with interest, dragging his fingers along the words that appeared on his monitor. “What does that mean? Is that what I’m looking at right now?”

  He’s good, Amira thought. He knew when to prod further and follow an idea, and when to hold back on what he suspected to be true. They were moving closer together toward a defining moment, one that ultimately brought her to this very room. A moment she never wanted the Academy, or anyone, to expose. She dug her fingernails into her palms.

  “Let’s focus,” the reader said, not mentioning whether he registered Amira’s mixed feelings of respect and resentment. “Tell me about the Gathering, and how it led to your first escape attempt.”

  “The Elders brought all of the children from the three biggest compounds together,” Amira said carefully. “My compound participated in the Gathering, along with the Trinity and the Remnant Faithful compounds. Everyone here thinks they’re all the same, but the compounds don’t trust each other. They hate secular life, but they still have different doctrines, different cultures and methods from each other, which is why they fought separately by the end of the Drought Wars. The Gathering was meant to unify the compounds, make them stronger against outside influences trying to change them. To mobilize fractured communities against a common enemy.”

  In the hologram, a line of young girls walked along a rocky trail, Amira among them. She fidgeted with her silver lace veil, a flimsy shield over her hair and eyes that let splinters of sunlight through, and an older woman appeared at her side, swiping, cat-like, at Amira’s hand. Further ahead, a similar team of boys marched in single file, singing one of the Trinity Compound’s spiritual hymns. The Elder at the forefront sang louder than all the boys combined in a surprisingly rich baritone. He bore the same traits as most compound spiritual leaders – older, charismatic and zealous, or able to appear as such. He had multiple wives of various ages, who hovered silently around him like shadows.

  “I notice the hike is gender segregated,” the reader said, pulling Amira back into the room.

  “It was for the Remnant Faithfuls,” Amira said. “Although I’m sure the other Elders didn’t object. My compound – Children of the New Covenant – was only strict when we became teenagers, but on the Remnant Faithful Compound, they separate boys and girls at the age of five, even within the family home. When they first arrived at the Gathering, the kids watched us like it was Sodom and Gomorrah in action.”

  The reader laughed lightly before raising his hand to extract a still image from the hologram, showing a blonde girl lunging at Amira. On the still-moving hologram, the girl shoved Amira to the ground, wiping her hands theatrically on her billowing dress. She kicked sand in Amira’s face for good measure. The old woman leading the hike remained at the front, defiantly oblivious.

  “What happened there?” he asked. Amira sighed.

  “That girl came from the Trinity Compound,” she said. “They saw those of us with darker skin as ‘polluted’ and unclean.”

  “White supremacy, from what I’ve read, is a core tenet of Trinity’s values,” the reader said bluntly.

  “Less so than before, but it’s still there,” she said. “They believe that only light-skinned people can access the Nearhaven, the parallel dimension that’s untainted by modern evils, when we die. It’s part of what’s kept the compounds from uniting, despite how small they are alone. Some of the Trinity Elders probably fought against the Gathering in the first place.”

  The hologram cut to the last day of the Gathering. Young Amira stood in the heart of the crowd, flanked by rocky hills and sparse patches of juniper trees.

  In the absence of other outlets in the compounds, ceremony became a competitive sport. Children learned the rules of the game quickly, waving their arms in a trance the way they watched their parents pray at Passage and Unveiling ceremonies. Though most were too young to consume Chimyra, they knew enough to mimic its effects, swaying and shrieking at imagined sights from hidden worlds. The Elders had other tricks to convince their followers that they were glimpsing into the Otherworlds – tricks Amira only learned after escaping. Holograms, sensory machines and bubble screens embedded in the temples, parlor trickery enhanced by the hallucinogenic powers of Chimyra. But on Gathering day, they deployed no illusions on their youngest congregants. The ceremony relied on faith alone.

  Three banners loomed be
hind the podium, one for each compound. The Trinity leaders stood on the platform, all Elders save for a teenage boy in the corner. The boy scowled into the distance, past the crowd in an impressive display of apathy.

  Another young man, handsome and smiling, led the crowd in a hymn. The hymn they collectively swayed to originated from Amira’s compound, no doubt a political concession on the part of the Trinity, the unmistakable leader of the event. Elder Avery Cartwright, hero of the Drought Wars and discoverer of Chimyra, was Trinity, after all.

  The singer delivered the simple harmony with such conviction that Amira had hummed along, though by that stage, she no longer believed in the words. The simple melody struck a chord with her, reaching those deep corners of her heart that she kept hidden and buried, even from herself. Music, a binding agent in her loneliest moments.

  The men at the podium surveyed the crowd with cold appraisement. Amira barely noticed the small group at the time, but with hindsight, they became sharp and clear in her mind’s eye. Time gave memories power and form – with each revisiting, it illuminated new angles to the same moment. The singer raised his right arm and the children’s voices swelled.

  Through the Cataclysm’s embers, I walk without fear

  Through faith and submission, Nearhaven is near

  A strange buzzing sound cut through the chorus and faces turned upward toward a pentagon-shaped drone, hovering ominously over the crowd. It darted from side to side briefly before it ascended and turned south. The children stopped singing and began chattering excitedly about the machine from the cities. Amira glanced at a widening gap in the crowd. Two compound men ran downhill toward the ceremony, arms aggressively waving. Scouts, alerting the presence of intruders.

  Seconds later, loud bangs cut through the hum of voices, followed by colorful plumes of smoke. Panicked screams erupted, and the crowd scattered in every direction.

  At the top of the surrounding hills, a pack of imposing armored hovercrafts, bearing the North American Alliance’s insignia, materialized from nowhere. Armed men spilled from the sides of each vehicle, weapons pointed. They moved in formation around the frenzied throng’s perimeter.