"You know... Beyond the clouds... What's after?"
I knew the answer.
It was right there - sitting at the front of my mind, fully formed, ready to be spoken. A memory I hadn't remembered in quite some time but that had never faded, never softened into the blurred approximation that old memories usually became. It was sharp. Vivid. Complete. I could feel the words forming in my throat, feel my mouth beginning to shape the first syllable.
And then something stopped me.
I don't know how to describe it. It wasn't pain. It wasn't a thought, or a hesitation, or the normal process of deciding not to say something. It was physical - a sensation in my throat, just below the jaw, as if something had closed around it from the inside. Firmly enough to hold the words where they were and prevent them from traveling the last few centimeters from my vocal cords to the open air.
An invisible hand. That was the closest comparison I could find, and it wasn't close enough.
I tried again. Pushed the words forward, intentionally, the way you push through resistance when you're lifting something heavy. The answer was simple - a few sentences, nothing complicated, nothing dangerous. Just a description of something I'd seen with my own eyes. There was no reason not to say it. No strategic concern, no classified information, no oath of silence. Just a man answering a kid's question about the sky.
The hand held.
And then my face did something I didn't tell it to do.
I smiled.
Not the smile I would have chosen - not the easy grin I used when deflecting serious questions with humor, not the warm expression I gave Raizen when he did something worth praising. This was a different smile. Calm, simple, slightly apologetic. The smile of someone who doesn't have the answer and wishes they did.
It wasn't mine.
"No, Raizen." I heard myself say. "I don't."
The words came out steady and natural, carried by a voice that sounded exactly like mine and was being operated by something that wasn't me. The tone was right. The cadence was right. Even the slight head tilt - the one I did when I was being honest about a gap in my knowledge - was right. Whoever or whatever was driving my mouth knew how I spoke, knew how I moved, and had produced a lie so perfectly constructed in my mannerisms that Raizen would have no reason to doubt it.
Raizen looked at me. Those sharp eyes, the ones that missed less than people assumed. He studied my face for a moment, and I felt a spike of something between hope and dread - hope that he'd see through it, dread that if he did, I'd have no way to explain what had just happened.
He nodded. Accepted it. Turned back toward the walkway.
And I was left standing there with a lie in the air that I hadn't chosen to tell, wearing a smile I hadn't chosen to wear, and absolutely no understanding of why.
I walked beside him in silence. My jaw worked slowly, testing the muscles, opening and closing my mouth in small movements that I kept below the threshold of visibility. The sensation was already fading - the invisible hand loosening, the pressure in my throat dissolving back into nothing, my face returning to my own control. Within thirty seconds it was gone entirely, and if I hadn't been paying attention, I might have convinced myself it had never happened.
But it had happened.
I had known the answer. I had wanted to give it. And something inside me - something that lived beneath my conscious mind, in a place I couldn't access or examine - had decided that the answer would not be given, and had taken control of my body just long enough to make sure of it.
I'd been a soldier for twenty years. I'd had my body fail me in dozens of ways - exhaustion, injury, illness, the slow mechanical breakdown that came from decades of using it harder than it was designed to be used. I knew what it felt like when my body didn't obey. This wasn't that.
This was my body obeying something that wasn't me.
I pushed the thought aside. Put it in the same drawer where I'd put a hundred other things I didn't understand and didn't have time to investigate. The drawer was getting full. One day I'd have to open it and sort through everything inside, but tonight wasn't that night.
Except the lie kept sitting there. Taking up space in my chest that it hadn't earned.
Because I had seen the sky.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was twelve years ago. Maybe even thirteen - the years blurred together when enough of them were spent doing the same kind of work in the same kind of places. A Phalanx operation in the far northeast, in the mountain ranges that formed the border between the Neoshima-Ukai territories and the sea beyond. The kind of operation that didn't get written up in reports because the people who authorized it preferred that it hadn't happened.
There were all seven of us. No vehicles - the terrain was too steep and too unstable for anything with wheels or treads, and the air was too cold, with storms that could knock over anything flying. Also, no heavy equipment - too much weight for the altitude, too much bulk for the narrow passes. Just us seven Phalanx, a few cans of old food that tasted like the metal they came in, and our weapons.
The mountain was called Karith. I don't know if that was its real name or just what the locals called it - the settlements at its base were small and spoke a dialect that none of us fully understood. The peak was around four thousand eight hundred meters. And yes, it rose above the cloud line.
We started the climb at dawn and hit the clouds next day's afternoon.
They were thick. Not the wispy, decorative clouds you sometimes saw clinging to hilltops in the lowlands - these were dense, grey, and wet, a wall of compressed moisture that swallowed visibility the moment you entered it. Two meters of visibility. That was the limit. Beyond two meters in any direction, the world ceased to exist - just grey, featureless, directionless nothing, pressing against your face and your clothes, filling your lungs with air that tasted like metal and cold.
We had to use Eon to move through them.
Short bursts - channeled attacks aimed forward, displacing the cloud mass long enough to see the path ahead before it closed back in. Everyone took turns, but my hammer was the most efficient tool for the job. Wide head, broad swing, enough displaced air to clear a corridor of maybe ten meters for maybe fifteen seconds before the grey rushed back in.
It became my primary job. I walked at the front and swung the hammer every ten steps, carving temporary tunnels through the clouds while the others followed in my wake. It was exhausting, monotonous work - the same motion repeated hundreds of times, the same grey closing in the same way, the same brief window of clarity before the same grey returned.
I started hating the clouds. Not philosophically, not metaphorically. I hated them the way you hate an early Sunday alarm, or a boot that gives you blisters. A small, personal, physical hatred directed at something that was making my arms tired and my patience thin.
We climbed through the cloud layer for three days. Three days of continuous grey, and swinging, and grey, and swinging. The temperature dropped until our tea froze mid-spill. The clouds's moisture soaked through every layer of clothing and settled against the skin, and nothing we did could keep it out.
It was a really hard journey – hardest one in my life. Steep ridges, one wrong step and you'd be dead, more than two hundred meters below. There were sections where the ascend was literally vertical – Kori had to drag up the weight up of three of us, all hanging from her legs, whist she climbed with her knives. The mountain itself felt like you were never supposed to climb it. But us, the Phalanx were just built different.
Then we broke through.
The cloud ceiling had a top. I hadn't thought about that - hadn't considered, in all the years I'd spent living underneath it, that the grey blanket that covered the world was a layer with an upper surface. But it was. We climbed through the last dense bank and stepped out onto a ridge that rose above the clouds by maybe two hundred meters, and the grey fell away below us like a floor we'd just risen through.
Above was open air. Clean, really thin and hard to breathe, oxigen levels low, cold enough to burn the inside of my nose with each breath. And the sky -
The sky.
I remember stopping walking. My hammer hung at my side. The six people behind me stopped too, and for a long moment none of us said anything, because there was nothing in any of our languages that could have done justice to what we were looking at.
The night sky. The real one. The one that existed above the clouds, above the grey permanent ceiling, above everything humanity had ever known.
And it looked like -
