What It Was to Be a Nóakal

Aēól gave her parents and brother a last round of tight embraces before boarding the shuttle. She didn’t bother looking at the Kuraē flanking the shuttle’s entrance; they were sure to be snickering, taking this show of affection as a sign of weakness. Aēól couldn’t bring herself to care. She knew there was a possibility that she would never return. The Kuraē had her in their registry; her powers were the strongest on Upper Taēkellár. Granted, if the Kuraē were going to start culling powerful Nóakal, they likely wouldn’t resort to some cloak-and-dagger routine involving a (fake?) request from the Interplanetary Alliance to help with an important mission, but the secrecy involved was making Aēól and her family suspicious all the same.

It was making her family suspicious enough that they didn’t want her to go. “We’ve already lost one child,” said her mother. “We can’t lose you too.”

“We’re Nóakal, Mom,” Aēól had said in reply. “All Nóakal parents are prepared to lose their kids.”

When her mother hadn’t argued, only touched the bright red and yellow streaks in Aēól’s hair—the result of a Kuraē’s gene gun that had been fired at her when she was only a toddler, the lurid colors marking her as a Nóakal—Aēól had known she was right. Her father hadn’t said anything, but he had suddenly developed a habit of touching the red streaks in his own hair.

“What if the Interplanetary Alliance really needs me?” she had told her brother Autóma when he had broken down and begged her not to go earlier that morning. “If the mission goes well, I can advocate for better treatment for the Nóakal. The IA might be able to help us.”

“No one will help us but us,” Autóma had insisted.

He was probably right. But no one could change Aēól’s mind once it was made up, and she hadn’t been willing to count out an alliance so new it hadn’t had the chance to fail the Nóakal yet, and so her family had come to see her off. Aēól had almost managed to convince herself that the summons she had received wasn’t a trap, but now, boarding a shuttle in a tiny cleared-out spaceport in the dead of night, she was forced to school her expression as her stomach churned in terror.

“Be brave,” she said to Autóma, touching his cheek, and to her parents, she said, “I’ll do my best.”

“We know you will, Aēólēni,” said her father. It was a childhood nickname she hadn’t heard since the day Vēku died. Her father had once called his three children Aēólēni, Autómēni, and Vēkēni. It was as if those names had been part of a set, and once one had vanished into the silence of the grave, it was wrong to use the others. Aēól swallowed past the lump in her throat and wrapped a hand around the small heart-shaped locket in her pocket that would be her only reminder of home while she traveled. She ordinarily wore it on a cord around her neck, but she didn’t want the Kuraē seeing it. Her mother called the locket “a morbid keepsake,” but Lluraíl’s mother had said Lluraíl would want Aēól to have it. Aēól would join the Kuraē (not that she’d be allowed) before doing anything that even smacked of disrespecting Lluraíl’s memory.

“Aēól 274? It’s time.” The Kuraē soldier sounded more bored than malicious.

“Right,” said Aēól tersely. She turned her back on her family, trying to hold the image of them huddled on the dock in her memory lest it be the last time she saw them, and followed the soldier up the ramp to the shuttle’s airlock. She heard the footsteps of another Kuraē behind her. She couldn’t help but breathe an internal sigh of relief at the fact that the soldiers were wearing brown, not green. Their uniforms seemed to have gotten an update in recent years; either that or the green uniforms meant a lower rank, and some higher-ranking officials had been sent to collect her. She knew she would be curious later—she’d crawl through the shuttle’s ventilation shafts to explore the whole craft if she had to, gaining all the information she could—but for now, she didn’t give a konotuy why the Kuraē’s uniforms were brown. As long as they weren’t green.

The soldiers marched her to a set of quarters. Her sharp eyes took in every detail of the shuttle’s shabby interior; the hallways were cramped and austere, the guardrails rusty, and dull metal pipes and other machinery snaked along the ceiling. She memorized the route from the airlock to the lodging area, planning to explore later and knowing she’d rather eat sand than ask a Kuraē for directions.

In a tone that epitomized disinterest, one of the Kuraē told her the hours when meals would be served, a few of the ship’s regulations, the time to launch, and the estimated time to the rendezvous point where she would meet the others who had been called for this assignment. “Oh, and you can’t run around the ship without an escort,” the soldier added, and Aēól bristled.

“Don’t trust the dirty bióku Nóakal, right?” she snapped. She felt her veins thrum with adrenaline. Goading the soldiers—especially with foul language, which didn’t exist in their dialect—was foolhardy and she knew it. But her self-control had seen better days; a day when she was whisked away by Kuraē to participate in a mysterious mission assigned by a fledgling galactic alliance was a strange one indeed.

The soldier rolled his eyes and walked off. The doors slid shut. Aēól lunged forward and punched the buttons on a console by the doors to no avail. She pounded on the doors with a fist, spitting out every curse word she knew, and Ukuy had one of the most extensive profane vocabularies known to sentient life.

After a few moments, Aēól’s unchecked rage passed, and her hand began to throb with inchoate bruises. She took a few deep breaths and walked the few steps—the quarters were poky—to the cot, climbed onto the thin mattress, and began mechanically punching the pillow. She had attacked the doors because of her frustration over being locked in; now she was just venting fear and anxiety and always, always rage against the Kuraē of Lower Taēkellár.

When Aēól had worn herself out, she lay on the cot, focusing on her breathing. Sometimes, one’s own breath was all one could control. When that was the case, it was best to get a grip on it. That would lead to the rest of her body relaxing; she had to stay calm. If she lost her temper at another soldier, she could get a much worse reaction than rolled eyes. But Aēól’s deep breathing left her unprepared—nothing could prepare her—for the doors to her quarters to open, revealing a Kuraē dressed in green.

Later, Aēól would be proud of herself for not screaming. As it was, she jerked upright, her spine feeling as though it had turned to ice. There was a sensation like her soul had shot out through the top of her head, leaving behind an empty, stricken body. And then she was lying beside a dirt road, woozy and helpless and bleeding from a head wound inflicted when a Kuraē had pushed her into a pile of rubble. She watched powerlessly through three-years-younger eyes while a Kuraē in a green uniform put his blaster to Lluraíl’s eye and pulled the trigger. Lluraíl’s body fell to the ground with a terrifyingly final thud.

Aēól heard a voice screaming itself raw and only vaguely recognized it as her own; it was the sound of a young woman who had never seen a raid before, who was learning what it was to be Nóakal for the first time. The Kuraē who had just murdered her lover eyed her curiously. “T minus ten minutes until launch,” he said, but the voice was high and feminine; it did not match the body. “I’m sure First Lieutenant Tēnma told you we were launching in half an hour, but…Miss 274?”

Aēól blinked. Her head still throbbed where the wound had been three years ago, but she was seated on the small, hard cot in the shuttle again, looking at a puzzled young female Kuraē officer. Who was wearing green.

“Konotuēn green,” Aēól breathed. She pressed her hands into the cot as hard as she could, feeling the firm mattress and the scratchy blanket. Yes, she’s wearing green. Don’t scream, Aēól, she told herself. Don’t scream. You’re safe. Well, for a given definition of “safe.”

“Sorry, what was that?” asked the soldier politely. Her face was uncommonly round. She looked like she might be younger than Aēól herself.

“Nothing,” said Aēól. The voice that came out of her mouth still wasn’t entirely recognizable.

“Well…we launch in ten minutes. You’re going to want to strap in.” The soldier indicated a couple of cushioned seats bolted to the wall. The seats were furnished with what were unmistakably seat belts to be used during launch and planetfall. “I’m Officer Cadet Bíllu. I’ll be your escort.”

“Aēól Yittá Nóakal,” said Aēól automatically. She swallowed. Swallowing helped, she had noticed, when she had felt like she had been outside of her body. The person in front of her was a Kuraē, a filthy, bióku, konotuēn Kuraē. A murderer. Part of her felt like she should be flinging obscenities at the least, warping this little wisp of a girl out of existence at the most. She was young, yes, but she’d be as evil and bloodthirsty as Lluraíl’s murderer after a few more months serving as a Kuraē.

The mission, Aēól hissed to her raging temper. I’ll never know what this new mission is if I get shot for attacking some nobody.

“I would be Aēól 274 to you, seeing as you don’t honor Nóakal surnames,” Aēól continued. She wanted to sound frosty; she sounded hollow.

Officer Cadet Bíllu appeared to not know how to respond for a moment. “Right. Miss 274. I’ll be by to check on you after the launch.” She hurried away and the doors slid shut.

Aēól lay back on the cot and let herself cry, feeling herself slowly come fully back into her body. She wrapped her hand around Lluraíl’s locket and remembered.

The images came rushing back: Lluraíl fighting against the groping hands of the Kuraē soldier, Lluraíl being forced to the ground with a blaster to her eye, Lluraíl falling over lifeless, her empty face staring at nothing.

The still-warm locket in Aēól’s trembling palm as she removed it from Lluraíl’s neck so she would have something to show Lluraíl’s mother.

The throbbing agony of Aēól’s head wound as she ran to the burning town square, the screaming rage she had felt as she watched Kuraē soldiers firing gene guns into the faces of adults and children alike, power flowing through her mind like a rushing river as she warped every konotuēn green-clad Kuraē in sight out of existence, her vision blurring as she passed out from the pain and exertion.

Waking up in her parents’ house, her mother telling her that her father and eight-year-old brother Autóma were still alive, her mother’s voice trembling so violently it was hard to understand as she told Aēól that her three-year-old brother Vēku had been killed when the Kuraē had sprayed the house with blaster fire.

Lluraíl and Vēku. Both her fault. She hadn’t protected Lluraíl, and then she had angered the Kuraē by killing dozens of them, resulting in them taking vengeance by shooting random innocent people...including her brother.

Aēól lifted the locket to her lips and kissed it. “I miss you, Lluraíl,” she whispered. “Whatever this mission is, I’ll get in good with the Interplanetary Alliance. I’ll make them see the plight of the Nóakal. I won’t fail this time, Lluraíl. Not like I failed you. And if I do die…we get to be together again.”