Fate was ruthless.

Solace had once been the green jewel of the Ealen empire, the home planet of the Ealen where they had built their first ships and sang their first songs of conquest and transformation. Now it was nothing more than a dead gray rock, slowly dissolving into fragments over the last few millennia.

To me, it had been home.

As we approached the disintegrating planet, several white dots slowly grew into massive white discs. These were the stations of the Library Main, home to a population that was greater than that of some frontier planets like Tranquility. Originally created by the Ealen in a time of war, the Library had been a center of research that had terraformed planets and created jump portals upon which the three great galactic civilizations still relied.

Already, the Library’s anthem hummed in my mind, a song that I had been required to sing as a child every morning before classes began.

“We are here to help, knowledge equals life,” I sang, quietly to myself.

Dr. Silver came to stand next to me, watching the stations of the Library grow closer and closer. She visibly shivered. “I never thought I’d come here.”

Library Main-trained Infoists had helped recover lost colonies of humans and shifters alike, and given them back access to the stars and the rest of the known universe. We had discovered cures to dozens of diseases and distributed them throughout the universe, free of charge. We had helped millions avoid starvation by offering them access to more advanced agricultural techniques and helped broker hundreds of peace treaties.

And yet, all that some shifters saw when they looked at Infoists were the Library’s long-dead Ealen founders, the ones who had enslaved, experimented, and forcibly bred them into shape-shifting weapons of war.

The needle scar in my arm itched, a remnant of my father’s efforts to turn me into a werewolf against my will. What did my father see when he looked at me, his long-lost Infoist daughter?

DNA was everything to the shifters. They guarded their blood like the most precious Ealenvium. They didn’t want anyone making monstrous children without their knowledge or consent. No wonder my father was so insistent on converting me, marrying me off, and preventing me from returning to the Library.

The Infoists still had work to do convincing the shifters of their peaceful intentions.

It was rather annoying to me that I could recognize the particular hssh sound of the doors of Kai’s sleeping alcove.

“I was warm,” I said to Dr. Silver, perhaps a little too loudly. I pulled a nutrit-bar out of the pantry and sat down at the table, ignoring Kai as he approached the table. “I was fed regularly, I had a clothing and a place to sleep. All they asked me to do was read and study. After Kjarn, it was paradise.”

Dr. Silver unfolded a seat from the wall with a cup of something steaming, tapping at a floating screen. “How many refugee children do they take into their academy?”

I unwrapped the bar, deliberately turning away from Kai, ignoring Dr. Silver’s wrinkled nose. “Not enough. Out of the dozens of us on placed on Karj, I was one of three.”

Dr. Silver swiped at a number, frowned at the one that replaced it. “How did they choose you?”

“Tests. And a xiangqi game.”

Kai unfolded the seat next to me and sat down.

“Stargazer only gave us tests,” said Dr. Silver. “Plucked from one life and placed in another,” she said, looking at Kai.

“That was the agreement made by the Tigerlord and Varanesian Council hundreds of years ago,” said Kai. “Your leaders asked for peace, solitude, and freedom of worship.”

“In exchange for a yearly tithe of Stargazer’s choice of students to serve,” added Dr. Silver.

“Are you unsatisfied with your treatment by House Stargazer?”

“No. I am able to reach my potential because of the training your House has given to me. I only wish the opportunity was offered to more of my people.”

“Isolation is the choice of Varanesian leaders, not that of Stargazer.”

Dr. Silver saw my confused gaze. “The Varanesians scorn the outside universe, and those who have left. They believe that they must keep themselves and their abilities ‘pure.’” She snorted. “Our Varanesian ‘purity’ is more likely the result of more Ealen genetic meddling.”

The Varanesians were healers with almost legendary abilities. I was an Infoist, but I had never actually heard of the Ealens bioengineering any beings other than tigers and wolves. Well, maybe angels, but they were notoriously insular and claimed to have existed prior to the Ealen.

“It’s a bad agreement,” Dr. Silver said abruptly to Kai.

Was she attempting to argue with the Tigerlord? I had thought tigershifters to be more deferential to their leaders than that.

Maybe I had thought wrong.

Kai leveled that tiger stare.

“For the Varanesians,” she clarified, turning to me to avoid his gaze. “I’m human. My people were part of a movement that believed living in isolation kept us pure. I grew terrified of shifters, and as a child I prayed that I wouldn’t be chosen as a sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice?” I asked.

“That’s what the elders called the ones who were chosen to leave the community.”

“You are free to return to Varanesia when you wish.” Kai looked at me. “Once the Varanesians complete their training and serve for four years with House Stargazer, they are free to do as they wish.” He looked at Dr. Silver. “This is your eighth year, if I’m not mistaken.”

Dr. Silver looked surprised that Kai knew. He shrugged. “Sometimes, it is wise to pay attention to a sister’s friends, especially when that sister is trying to depose you.”

I fought to keep my face from reacting. The doctor was a spy of Kanona’s. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Dr. Silver closed her eyes. “We were once close, yes.”

Close as in, close?

He raised an eyebrow. “Close enough to help her put faonut butter in all of my boots when I was fifteen.”

Dr. Silver tried to hide her smile behind a cup of tea. “How was I, a newly arrived student supplicant to your House, supposed to reject an heir’s request?”

Oh. That kind of close.

Dr. Silver looked at the floating screen. “Kanona doesn’t talk to me anymore. She’s become a different person since your mother was killed.” Dr. Silver looked at Kai. “For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with what she did to you.”

Force my marriage to Kai?

Dr. Silver looked at me. “Does the Library give you a choice in your service?”

“Once we complete our training, our duty station is assigned by lottery.”

“How long are you asked to serve?”

“For most it’s a voluntary lifetime commitment.”

“For you?”

“The same. The Library is our home, our family.”

She focused on her screen. “In my experience, you can never really go back. Once you have gone, you are an Outsider for good. They may welcome you into their house, and to their table, but you are no longer truly a part of them.” Her voice took on an edge of bitterness. “I wouldn’t give up what I’ve learned for anything. But I have no place there anymore.”

“You will always have a place within House Stargazer,” said Kai.

His reassurance to her cut me, even as hot jealousy rattled within me. I envied her easy familiarity with him, the kind that spoke of a long acquaintance.

I had no place in his House, nor would I ever again.

“Have you come to a conclusion about the Ealen nanites in Seria’s blood sample?”

“They’re fascinating. They’re almost impossible to directly observe, but if you look for the signs, they’re definitely there.”

“Did the Library put them in her?” asked Kai.

As if the Library had anything to do with it. I was so tired of him, so tired of his shifter suspicions.

I couldn’t hold it back anymore. “Why would the Library be involved?” I threw my hands up and looked at Dr. Silver. “Do you think the Library has plans for a random orphan?’

Dr. Silver shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. I didn’t even know of the existence of werewolves or First Earth until I was a teenager.

“You’re not a random orphan,” added Kai, “You may keep forgetting it, but you are a daughter of the royal House of Nightclaw and a white-robed Infoist.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

Kai looked at me. “You can’t tell them what I’m looking for.”

I sighed. “They’re not going to censor your research, Kai. The Library is here to help.” The lyrics of the anthem echoed back, and for a moment, they seemed strange in my mouth.

Kai shook his head. “I don’t understand how the Library has come to have such a hold on the Coalition. They scoop up all the information networked on the stellarwebs, every networked device, every message sent and spoken, every act before a camera is all archived in their database. Your government has made the Central Library official archivists, outsourcing storage, indexing and access, without even asking, for what purpose? Don’t you wonder what they plan on doing with all the information they’re taking in?”

I let out a sigh of exasperation. “They are a respectable institution dedicated to the common good. When was the last time the Central Library was involved in a war?”

“When the Ealen were alive.”

I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this argument. “Exactly.”

Kai’s expression was unchanged. “I trust you before them.”

I narrowed my eyes. He was still trying to play that emotional game with me, trying to make me feel as if I was needed.

But we already knew that wasn’t true.

* * *

The doors to the ship exhaled, and we stepped out into one of the public hanger bays of Library Main Primary, which differentiated it from the other stations of Library Main, creatively called Secondary and Tertiary. The Ealen name was actually much more poetic, but no one ever used it.

The hanger bay was full of ships. There were massive gleaming luxury cruisers from New Tokyo next to sturdy little passenger carriers from the Inner territories, as well as well-worn freighter ships from First Earth. It was far busier than I remembered, and it seemed that every one of the five hundred spaces available was full. But then again, the first and only time I had ever seen the long-distance vehicle docks were when I had left. Though I had lived on this station for a good portion of my life, it was a world unto itself with vast sections I never had reason nor inclination to go into.

Above us, a false green sky appeared. Now that I had the luxury of living on Tranquility for a while, the sky looked more artificial than I remembered. As I looked up between the numerous silver spheres, avians in iridescent shimmering colors, dove and swooped, catching the random insectoids that tended to stowaway in ships. Oil and machinery dominated the smells that surrounded us, but there was still a faint flowery scent that I had forgotten.

A silver sphere, the size of a human head, floated over to me. I tapped the surface, entering my Infoist identification code and it unfolded with a hiss, revealing a set of gray robes sealed in plastic. I opened the seal and shook out the robe.

Infoists wore colored robes according to their rank. The circuitry embedded in the robes gave each Infoist access appropriate to their station, and kept track of where each Infoist was.

I shrugged on the robe, and its unmistakable faint floral scent filled my nostrils.

When I had completed my training and left for Tranquility, it was with the knowledge that I was likely not to return to the Library again for a very long time, if ever.

The robe felt so familiar. I was home.

Even so, I never liked my movements being tracked. I shrugged on a pair of gray fingerless gloves lined with a row of the same buttons that I always wore around shifters, and made sure that the fabrics touched. Not that I expected any trouble, but the programming in the gloves disrupted the robes’ tracking signal. It was one of the first things one learned to do as a senior-level student. Technically it wasn’t frowned upon by the upper administration but in reality every student did it. Learning to foil the sensors was considered almost a rite of passage.

Kai’s eyes swept over me in my robe. I wore what his ancestral oppressors wore. But that’s not what it stood for anymore.

“Yes?” I asked, daring him to start that conversation with me again.

There was a pause. Then he turned away. “You look good,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear.

A tall man passed us and I nearly gagged, the stench of body odor rank from a long distance space journey without water surrounding him in a disgusting miasma.

Thank the stars he walked by quickly.

Kai snarled. “This place doesn’t smell right.”

“Space is where you find the great unwashed.”

“No,” he growled. “There’s a strange floral scent, masking everything. I can’t smell anything.”

I thought of the tall stinky man. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

Kai gave me a knowing smile. “Humans lie with their words. Not with their scent. You can almost always smell what a human desires.”

I felt my face turn warm.

I scrambled to change the subject. A floral scent? “Well, jymenae-based disinfectant and aerosols are used to cleanse the air and other surfaces free of viruses.”

He looked as if he were about to snarl, but then stopped himself. “I should expect the Ealen research center to utilize a scent that neutralizes a shifter’s sense of smell.”

I could show him so many studies documenting the efficacy of jymenae, but I knew it would be useless.

But what was more important, was that the very smell I associated with home was a smell this shifter couldn’t stand. If that wasn’t a sign we weren’t compatible, I didn’t know what was.

I ignored the lump in my throat. “Come on.”

The crowds on the dock were thick with people and refugees, some milling, some waiting for who knew what. We headed toward one of the public elevators, and were pressed together, the pack of the man in front of me shoved into my stomach.

A man tried to make his way by, his suit tattered and worn, carrying a child on his shoulders. The child looked at me with wide silent eyes.

I knew that look. It was the look of a child who had seen too much for his age.

A woman shoved the man, making the man stumble. “Get out of my way!”

I reached for the falling child, even knowing there were too many people around me to do anything about it.

But Kai was closer. With shifter-quick reflexes, he caught and steadied the man before he fell over with the child

I rushed over, ready to confront that woman, but another bystander had gotten there first, shoving at the woman, berating her in some First Earth language.

The woman spat at the First Earthian. “It’s everyone for themselves.”

I heard the booted footsteps of the guards but didn’t feel like alerting anyone to my presence, at least not yet.

Kai was shoving something into the man’s pocket.

I headed toward him and snaked my arm around his. “The guards are coming. I know another way.”

Intergalactic war was imminent. And everyone was trying to get out of its way.

Kai followed me through the crowd, and I was suddenly glad that only he and I had disembarked. In his unreasonable paranoia, he asked Dr. Silver and Red to remain on the ship. To me, it was a travesty of proportions. The Library was one of the great Ancient Treasure Relics of the Living Universe. To me, asking them to remain on the ship was like asking someone who grew up in a desert to forego seeing an ocean.

But Dr. Silver didn’t show any interest in visiting a place she thought akin to a forced experimentation camp. To say that I wasn’t a little hurt that my friend Red showed no interest in where I came from would be lying.

In fact, I would be lying if I didn’t say that Red’s easy friendship with Dr. Silver was making me a little…jealous. Friendships had never come easy to me. But I knew that I was being ridiculous, because once they left, the chances I would run into them would be slim.

The chances I would see Kai, almost zero.

I kept walking. It was better that way. Better to do this fast, like ripping off a bandage.

I led him to an elevator and a series of walkways, all with more people than I had ever seen. Gray-robed trainees looked worn down and exhausted. One I actually had to waken because he had fallen asleep leaning against the wall of the elevator.

Through it all, Kai remained as grim and silent as ever, a walking mountain of “get-out-of-my-way.”

I decided not to prepare him for where we were going.

“Let’s start in the main research chamber,” I said. “From there, one of the searchers will help us narrow it down to where we need to go.”

He grunted.

The elevator doors opened and the crowd filtered out. As we stepped into the chamber, I was gratified to see his eyes widen.

A massive tree loomed in the far part of the chamber, its trunk so wide a space ship could nestle within easily. All around us were white columns entwined with green flowering plants. Balconies of ancient paper books and scrolls soared upwards into a sunlit blue sky. Rainbow-hued AI avians flitted across, calling to each other in chirps and twitters, carrying cylinders, books, and chips in their claws. A small bubbling brook ran along a stone path, taking a turn and avoiding the ornately carved gate above us, with the Ealen inscription “Knowledge is Life.”

It was nature nurtured and shaped into useful fashion. On the stellarwebs, images of this place had become a shorthand for knowledge and justice. If there was a heaven for knowledge and books, this was it.

“What an illusion,” he said softly. Even he was awed, I think.

Yes. The sky. The sunlight. The avians were modified drones as were the feathered tree rodents scampering amongst the grassy paths.

“The tree isn’t,” I said, walking forward.

A small yellow feathered qurl the size of my palm, its iridescent tail almost as big as it was, hopped in front of me, blocking our path. It looked at me with a pair of huge dark eyes. I took a deep breath. “Where are the Dragonlords?”

The qurl cocked its head at me. It scampered off.

I followed it.

“We’re following a qurl to the Dragonlords,” I heard Kai mutter under his breath.

“It’s an informational AI designed to help you find what you are looking for.”

“I know what it is. But I don’t have to like it.”

We followed the qurl up an elevator up to the eighteenth level. It took us between shelves of flowing vines, rare plants that were a blend of organics and nanite technology that could be found nowhere else in the universe. We filed past scholars with code floating around them in multicolored chunks, giving them a rainbow cast to their skin.

Kai was not only unimpressed, he seemed more grim and on the edge than before.

The light from the sky dimmed as the plants became denser and the aisles between the shelves became narrower. It was as if we were on the interior of a dense jungle where we could hear nothing but the sound of our own footsteps. Well, my footsteps. In comparison, the forests of Karj and Tranquility were loud raucous places, but this was a Library after all.

“This is unnatural,” he muttered.

“Nothing is going to jump out and try to eat you.”

“Precisely. That is why this place is frightening to me.”

The feathers of the qurl lit up in front of us, guiding our path.

In tiger shifter culture, to admit to fear was no small thing. I looked at Kai in surprise.

“Excuse me?”

“This simulacrum of a forest is an abomination. Nothing lives here. Nothing dies here. There is no life cycle. Just…eternity unchanged.”

I looked around, trying to see how one could ever be afraid of these sun-dappled books. “The Ealen built it to be one of the most beautiful places in the universe.”

“There is no beauty if there is no life.”

* * *

I didn’t know how long we walked. The qurl took me deeper into the archives than I had ever been before, into areas that had originally been forbidden to me as a trainee. I had once thought that upon completing my training I would take some time to explore the places that I had been barred from going into. But I only had had a matter of hours after I had passed my final test when word came that the Infoist on Tranquility had passed, and that a replacement was needed as soon as possible.

And then we came to a wall of dull tarnished metal.

The qurl stopped before the wall and began chasing its tail, a sign that it had completed its task.

“This isn’t what we were looking for,” I said to it.

It looked at me, and I could almost see the algorithms sliding behind those glassy eyes.

And then it took off into the undergrowth and disappeared.

I stood up slowly. Something must have been malfunctioning in that particular Searcher.

“So is there a secret passage here or something?” said Kai.

I leaned against the wall, peering at the vambrace on my forearm. “Secret passages? You’ve been watching too many saga vids. There are no such things as – “

I fell backwards into the dark doorway that opened up behind me.

Kai’s arm shot out, wrapped around my wrist, and caught me from falling. The data vambrace on my arm cracked as he pulled me toward him.

“You were saying?”

I tried to tap on my vambrace, but it was slow to respond, flickering and glowing dim. “This is probably on a map somewhere but I don’t have access to it at the moment.” I shrugged and peered into the darkness. It smelled of metal, machinery, and ozone, like the deeper engine rooms of the station.

Now I was the one who was beginning to feel a sense of foreboding. A chill went through me. Kai was infecting me with his paranoia. “There should be some terminal within,” I said stepping on the threshold of the doorway.

Kai put a hand on my shoulder. “Wait. It doesn’t smell right.”

I brushed his hand away, exasperated. “There are no monsters waiting to leap out at you. As you said, this isn’t a real jungle. It’s the Library. I grew up here.”

I ducked inward, let my eyes adjust to the darkness, wondering why the motion sensor lights weren’t working. Above me was a corner, I suddenly saw it: two vivid blue eyes glaring at me in the darkness.

It gave off a rattling hiss.

I waved my arms around trying to get the lights to turn on, and finally they did, flickering on almost sullenly.

A mix of metal and matted fur, hung from the ceiling with a prehensile metal tail. Gleaming sharp claws extended from furred black paws. Though it had a feline cast to its shape, the metallic raptor’s beak and extended feathered gray wings made it known that this was no ordinary cat.

“Momo?” Shock hit me. I knew her, but not as she was now, a mess of ferality and broken code.

Momo hissed at us, a forked blue tongue flickering out.

Kai yanked me back.

I tried to struggle out of his hold but there was no way he was letting me go. “What are you doing?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not going near that thing, are you?”

“That thing is something I made.”

He released his hold on me, a wary suspicion in his eyes.

And that’s when I realized that I had just confirmed that I was everything he hated about the Ealen.

I turned away so that he couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

“Momo,” I said, reaching out toward the thing. “Momo, it’s me.”

She froze. I could almost see the code running through her systems, recognizing my voice. I added more input. “Don’t you remember me?”

Blue eyes blinked. Then she jumped backed, and hissed again, her fur and wings swelling up to appear almost twice her size.

“Momo, what happened to you?”

“You programmed a bio-based AI,” Kai said, his tone carefully guarded. “You used Ealen technology to shape life according to your whims.”

That statement was precisely why the tigers and the wolves hated their Ealen creators.

A stubborn anger swelled up in me. This was who I was. And he, in a few hours, wouldn’t matter anymore. “Momo was my graduation project,” I said defensively. “She is among the last of her kind. The last nine members of the Gryphonali came to the Library, seeking refuge. Seven of them gave permission for their bodies to be cultivated and studied, and perhaps given new life. Momo was one of them.”

“Momo,” he said. “A cute name given to a pet in lieu of a dead language. Do you even know what her real name was?”

“Fyaalis Yfan Myomoa,” I said quietly, adding the formal series of whistling clicks that denoted her title.

The gryphonali went still, fur settling, wings folding. She walked toward me slowly, sharp claws clacking on the floor.

I reached a hand out, let her examine my hand.

Then she drew her feet beneath her, bowed her head and settled into a resting pose at my feet.

I put my hand on her head, rubbing behind her tufted ears.

There, there was the switch.

Broken, sick code projected above the gryphonali. Some kind of worm had infested her programming, deprived her of speech functions and some higher level thinking processes. Yet, the wall of memories I had built for her remained unbreached.

I could not erase the ravages of the worm, nor could I heal what was broken; that would take time as well as Momo’s own defensive mechanisms. But I could set her systems back on the right path to rebuilding herself.

I don’t know how long I struggled with her code, but when I finished, false twilight had begun to fall, draping a subdued silence over everything. All the while, Kai stood behind me, watching me. Though he said nothing, I could feel his presence burning behind me. Though he might hate me now, it did nothing to quench the bond between us.

At last I rested, and when Momo looked at me, it was with the fierce intelligence I remembered.

“Seria,” she said, her wings fluttering. “You shouldn’t be here. They’re going to kill you.”