Page 88 of Godslayer
When I look upfrom the screen that’s been educating me on all the specifics of being an augment and realize it’s night, I’m shocked. The time went by so fast. Everything was just…sointeresting. I joke with Jasina about that whole ‘let’s-be-scholars’ life, but it’s a dream. Not something I’ve actually been trained to do.
I’m not really qualified to do anything but open the God’s Tower doors in Tau City. Or, as it turns out, explode Extraction Towers. It’s pretty limiting.
And I’ve never been much of a student. Not compared to Jeyk and Mitch. I got good grades in mandatory schooling, but I knew the expectations for me were lower than they were for them. They were expected to earn their places. I was born into mine.
Still, I am not stupid. It’s just, everything about Tau City seemed old and pointless. And the fact is, if I was born into a scholar family instead of the Extraction Master family, I would’ve enjoyed it. I like history. I like asking questions about things. I like searching for answers.
I never asked questions about the tower, which makes sense. Obviously, it’s a shit job and it’s got a shit history. No matter how exciting the Extraction and Choosing were, no matter how muchpomp and circumstance were put into it, it was still nothing but a celebration of sacrifice.
And while I could make the argument that augmentation is also a sort of sacrifice, it’s me I’d be sacrificing. Not a young woman like Jasina. Or the ninth Spark Maiden like Clara.
Yes, there are consequences for Jasina because we’re together now. What I choose will affect her, so obviously, she gets a say. I won’t do it if she says no.
I won’t sacrifice her for this.
I won’t sacrifice her for anything. By luck or fortune, she’s mine. Even more so now that she’s pregnant. But this Tyse guy, if he thinks he’s gonna come after me and not get a fight? He’s mistaken. And if he knows about me, the chances are high that Xi was telling the truth and he knows about Jasina as well.
I will die to save her.
It is my duty.
This one thought actually tips me in favor of saying yes. My duty. How many times have I heard that phrase growing up? Not from my father, not from my mother, but from the Matrons as they programmed the Pledges into believing that putting yourself up as a sacrifice to a god no one has ever seen, is a duty.
I’ve heard it thousands of times, at least, because the Pledges are often educated in public spaces in the Canal District. Cafes, and parks, and on the beaches. When Clara was just a young teenager, I would make Jeyk and Mitch come with me on the weekends as I watched her from a distance. Waiting to catch her eye so I could wave, or wink, or smile. Waiting for her to see me and respond in kind.
Every weekend I did that. For years. So I’ve heard plenty of Matron lectures on how to be poised, proper, and polite.
“It is your duty,” they’d say.
Well. This is my duty now. To protect Jasina and the baby from whatever terrible revenge Clara is planning for me. She hasevery right, I understand that. But it doesn’t mean I have to give up and let her win.
Not when I’m finally finding my place in this world. Not when I have a family to look forward to.
But beyond duty and loyalty, I find augmentation fascinating. All of it. And I want to know more.
So all day I’ve been up here in the Reconstitution Tower, high up in the Augmentation Dome, sitting at this desk filled with screens, learning about what it means to be an augment.
Didn’t eat, didn’t even drink, didn’t get up to stretch my legs. I just watched as everything played out on the screens in front of me. How the body works, all the different systems inside people and how they’re connected. The brain. The heart. I didn’t know how people hear, or see, or feel things before today. There’s so much about my own body that no one had ever told me before.
And all of it was explained by a soothing neutral voice that seemed to know when I was confused and when I was understanding things, because this teaching-voice inside the machine would explain things over, and over, and over in every possible way, for as long as it took for me to finally get it.
It showed me diagrams of the human body—drawings that moved to make it easier to follow along. Words popped out of the drawings, highlighting key facts. The body would rotate, the heart was pumping blood on the screen, the brain opened up so I could see how all the little threads of nanofibers would integrate into the tissues. How they would become part of me and how, over the course of a week, they would grow so that eventually, these threads would replace my entire nervous system.
Nervous system. I’d never even heard those words before today and now look at me. Iunderstand.
Everything about this day has been exhilarating.
But now that the lessons are over and I can appreciate what augmentation is and what it will do to me, I can’t help but feel… let down.
Not by the teaching-voice or the information, but by my own people.
If this screen-based teaching exists in the same dimension where I grew up—with all these ways to see and understand difficult but interesting concepts—why didn’t we learn this way?
I would’ve paid more attention, that’s for sure. Would have had bigger dreams than simply opening giant doors to sacrifice women.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably why they didn’t teach me anything interesting. I might get ‘ideas’ and decide not to do my job.
And this thought leads directly to the one I am desperate tonotthink about.
