Shaper (The Mi'hani Wars Book 1) Read online

  A NINESTAR PRESS PUBLICATION

  www.ninestarpress.com

  SHAPER

  ISBN #978-1-945952-71-5

  Copyright 2017 Christine Danse

  Cover Art by Natasha Snow ©Copyright 2017

  Edited by Amanda Jean

  Published in 2017 by NineStar Press, New Mexico, USA.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, NineStar Press, LLC.

  Warning

  This book contains sexual content, which is only suitable for mature readers.

  SHAPER

  THE MI’HANI WAR

  CHRISTINE DANSE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  About the Author

  DEDICATION

  For Chelsea, with love.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I ran.

  The buildings on either side of me rose in strange shapes, defying gravity and every other law of physics. Here, a narrow base of mortared river rock gave way to five floors of glass windows. There, a tall shanty structure of mother-of-pearl sagged like a house of cards, but it wouldn’t fall. It would never fall, not until the government came with its agents and its wrecking balls to dismantle the structures and the commands that had been pressed into them by the people who’d built the city, who could shape the world with their thoughts and tell an edifice to stay.

  Shapertown. I recognized the impossible structures, even if I had no idea how I’d come to be here. I’d burst into the present moment running, shoes thudding on the empty street. A terrifying reality to wake into, sprinting full-out down the street of abandoned Shapertown with no knowledge of who chased me, just the need to run.

  Hungry vines crowded upward, casting the street in permanent twilight. I caught glances of sunlight dazzling off glass walls above, but otherwise the street was an uninterrupted shadowscape.

  I hadn’t seen another person in the several minutes I’d been aware. Just an empty road, stretching on.

  I glanced back, almost tripped, and caught myself against the wall of a building, fingers closing around a fistful of woody vine. Blood pounded too hard in my temples. My leg muscles burned. I must have been running for a while, longer than I’d been aware. I tried to remember where I’d come from. What door I’d walked through, what destination I’d set out for. Home? Work? School? Nothing came to mind.

  Nothing, except a strong echo, the memory of having been here before, fleeing down this street. It came so strong I looked up in alarm, heart slamming, but I was still alone.

  Run.

  I lurched forward but couldn’t spur myself into more than a stumbling jog. I recalled my own footfalls and men’s voices raised in shouts.

  Shapertown. I knew this place and its history, though I couldn’t recall my own. It’d been one of Mi’hani’s original cities. Now only the buildings remained, emptied by superstition, silent survivors of the long-ago witch hunt.

  Not every building in Shapertown had been touched by a shaper’s command. Some had been built the traditional way, using engineering and ingenuity, and were subject to the effects of time. You could find one if you stepped down the wrong side street: a hollow-eyed edifice with stained walls crumbling around the edges, all the more disturbing tucked between its pristine neighbors.

  I dodged down a narrow alleyway, past the garbage some creature had heaped into a nest, and found a place where the buckling face of a building had compressed the front doorway into a hole just big enough for a small animal—or one desperate girl. I squatted down and pushed my shoulders through, plugging up the little bit of light that came in. I ignored the detritus of wood chips, grit, and gods-knew-what under my hands and pulled my torso through. The jagged edges of the hole dragged against my skin like teeth.

  I was in up to my hips when the structure groaned and shuddered. The jaws of splintered wood gripped me tighter, an old sleeping beast that stirred. In a moment it would wake and crush me.

  I froze. Somewhere above, the structure whined. With a surge of adrenaline, I pushed through and lurched to my feet.

  For an instant, I was saved. The doorframe collapsed and I was clear of it—in the dark and with bruised hips, but in one piece. Then the walls and ceiling shifted, and the entire room came down.

  I put my hands up. Dumb instinct, as if I could hold the ceiling up while it crashed down around me. A slab like the entire ceiling itself struck my palms. Stone and wood thundered to the ground.

  And there I stood in the aftermath, arms still raised. Silence rang.

  I was alive. And— Oh gods, I was holding up the wall. I let go and made a wild leap. The stone crashed down with enough force to send shrapnel across the room. A piece struck my cheek.

  The collapse of the ceiling and wall had opened new holes. By the dim light coming in, I could make out the ruins, including the wall I’d been holding up, now a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, I remained whole, my arms straight and unbroken. Blood trickled from cuts, making black rivers through the fine white rock powder that dusted my skin. The powder made me look so pale in the dim light, and the blood so stark.

  A strangled sound escaped me, echo of the noise I should have made when the room had come down, though I’d remained silent.

  I scuttled through the inner doorway, farther into the building. Thank gods it held together.

  I turned a corner and then another, until I found a small room with the remains of a dresser. I crouched behind this. My harsh breathing filled the small space. I held my arms tight to my chest.

  After a time, my breathing calmed. I pried my arms away and looked at my shaking hands. The blood had stopped and dried in smears. My wrists were sore, but that was it, nothing injured.

  I sagged back against the wall and slid to my haunches. Safe for now. Yet still my heart pounded. The crash echoed in my head.

  Dead. I should have been dead.

  I closed my eyes and willed my breathing to slow, swallowing down the pulse that pounded in my throat.

  There was a good chance I was trapped in here. Alone and with no memory of myself or who might miss me. Probably alone. Rumor had it insurgents lived here, hidden in plain sight behind layers of illusion. It couldn’t be true; not even the rebellion, with its powerful shapers, would squat under the government’s nose in these vacant buildings. I wasn’t sure if I wished the story to be true or not. Impressions of fire came to mind, of fear and huddling in the dark listening to voices.

  I slid the last inches to the floor and tried to remember. I was…twenty? Twenty-three? Neither of those seemed right. I must have finished foundational school, because I remembered at least some specialty classes—nothing in particular, just a sense of being on campus. Maybe I’d lived on campus, but that didn’t seem right. Probably I’d lived at home, but I couldn’t recall that either.

  My heart returned to something approaching a normal beat. In the silence, I heard little sounds. The settling of the collapse in the other room, wood cracking, gravel raining down.

  And footsteps. My spine froze. A very faint, careful tread, but it came again, unmistakable, the cautious placing of a shoe. The following silence thrummed with tension.

  A desolate panic came over me, and I thought, Don’t find me. But I also thought, fainter but just as clearly, Find me. Because inevit
ably, I would be found. Where did you run when you had nowhere to go?

  I held my breath. The footsteps wandered closer. They lingered awhile in another room and I heard the sudden sound of a rock falling, and knew that the person had paused at the collapse.

  The careful tread headed straight toward my room after that. It stopped a moment in the doorway. I held very still. A boot stepped into view, brown and laced with red string. The person had found me almost as if following a line leading straight to me. I looked up, but before I could make out a face, a light-headedness came over me, a rushing in my ears, like someone had pinched the arteries in my temples.

  I went out like a light.

  * * *

  I didn’t dream.

  I existed in a black space where for a time I almost had a family and friends, school, the everyday pleasures of domestic life. I drifted close to the shores of memory but didn’t make landfall.

  The sound of voices pulled me out again, a man and a woman. They drew me out to sea and up into the sky, into my skin.

  I came to on my side under the warmth of covers. Home, in my bed.

  But no, not my bed. Not my room. No room I recognized.

  Instinct told me to kick to my feet and bolt, but like a small animal, I felt safe under cover.

  I scanned the contents of the small room. White dresser, table against the side with two chairs, one door. No more than that.

  I made another pass with my eyes just to be sure, but there was only the one door, so only one way out. The voices came from just on the other side of it, so I wouldn’t be slipping out unseen. I would have to wait this out. I had no choice. It had nothing to do with the fact that the pillow was soft under my head, the blankets a bank of clouds atop me. A comfort like home, which I hadn’t known for…

  For a long time. The feeling didn’t quite come with a memory, but a strong sense of hard surfaces and shivering sleep.

  “I realize,” the woman was saying. She spoke in a hushed tone, but I could just get her words.

  The man responded in a low rumble I couldn’t make out.

  “I know that,” she said. “But you must understand the position this puts me in.”

  Something about her voice made me uneasy. Maybe her tone. There was an edge to it, a wariness and also a weariness.

  “I’m retired,” she said at last, flatly.

  Nothing after that. They might have moved off, leaving me, forgetting me. But I didn’t move, just lay with the blanket pulled up to my eyes and held still, waiting for something, because something always came.

  The rattle of the doorknob warned me just before the door opened. The man entered first. Tall, with dark brooding eyes and a presence like a storm cloud compacted into a man’s shape. But it was the woman at his elbow who scared me. Thin, with straight brown hair and luminescent blue eyes. Beautiful but tired, mouth in a line like it had never known a smile.

  I sat up and clutched the blanket, never mind that I was clothed. I pushed back my curls.

  “You’re awake,” the man said. He drew out a chair and sat. The woman stood leaning back against the doorframe with her arms crossed, seemingly impassive, but our awareness of each other pulled like a taut string.

  “I’m Nero,” the man said. “And this is Natalia.”

  After that came a pause. They seemed to be waiting for something. I looked between them, fingers curled around the top edge of the blanket. My gaze caught the woman’s and snagged.

  He prompted: “Can you tell us your name?”

  I opened my mouth and— “No.” I felt an instant pulse in the air, like a throb of hostility from them, and added, “I don’t know.”

  The man’s eyes flickered. The woman shifted from one leg to the other and propped the foot against the wall.

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “I don’t know my name.” The edge of panic crept into my voice.

  They exchanged a glance.

  The man asked me more questions. It was a terror and a relief not to have the answers. They could get nothing out of me. I could betray no one.

  He seemed to get the same idea. He stood and exchanged a conversation with the woman that consisted of a look, a subtle glance in my direction, a scowl, and a tight nod. Then the man told me that Natalia would make me comfortable.

  “I’m comfortable here,” I said. At that moment, I would have rather been huddled in the corner of that crumbling building like a dog behind the dresser.

  The woman, Natalia, dredged up a smile that didn’t quite make it to her eyes but also wasn’t unkind, and held a hand up, gently beckoning. I couldn’t decline.

  I left the blanket behind and followed her out of the room. The man fell into step behind me.

  We exited into a larger room that looked like it could be a clinic. A potted plant sat on the clean counter. A coat and a gown hung from a rack. Other doors led to rooms like mine. We were alone.

  I looked at my hands. White dust still mottled them but the blood was gone, my skin clean in broad swipes where the blood trails would have been. My skin didn’t have a scratch.

  We went through another door into a large space like a lobby. A couple of armchairs flanked a small tea table, both vacant. A woman exited a hallway with a small stack of papers in her arms. She glanced at us, exchanged a nod with the man over my shoulder, and kept walking.

  We went up a flight of stairs, Natalia glancing back once to check that I followed. I threw a look over my own shoulder, but the man was already gone.

  “Come on,” Natalia said. She pushed open a door and I followed her into another lobby, this one filled with voices and activity. People congregated in the open space and sat on the couches ringing it. I smelled food. Someone laughed loudly.

  I jumped as something hurtled our way—jaws and teeth, run—but the two low, fast shapes were only children, a boy and a girl, each attaching to one of Natalia’s legs.

  “Oof!” she said. Her hands raised automatically but only to rest on their heads. She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. “Are you two behaving yourselves?”

  The boy nodded while the girl, slightly older, only smiled. A bit too old to be clinging to the legs of an adult, and she knew it. Her gaze strayed to mine, then darted back.

  Natalia caressed their hair. “You aren’t giving Dmitri any trouble, are you?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “We miss you,” the girl said. “You aren’t in class today.”

  “I know. I miss you, too. I’ll be back soon. Have you shown Dmitri the turtle yet? No? Go show him. Tell him what you named it.”

  They launched from her. “You mean what he named it!” the girl shot back over her shoulder as they ran off.

  I looked up to find Natalia watching me, and my insides did a flip.

  I didn’t understand my reactions toward her. Neither the uncontrollable, nameless, instinctive fear, nor this response in my gut. Her blue eyes met mine and I just felt—

  She turned away and gestured me to follow her down the hall. I went, glad to leave that thought. I glanced at adults and children as we passed by, at doorways opened and closed. School? Too disorganized, and too many adults. Maybe an apartment community space, but there was a conviviality that felt stronger than neighbors, a familiarity almost like kinship. It gave me the beginnings of a suspicion.

  The woman led me down another hall and another. I lost track. It seemed like a very large building, one with no windows and with halls that stretched on for longer than the length of any building I knew, until I got the creeping feeling we weren’t in a building at all but underground. We exited a back hallway into a tall gray-walled tunnel. Pipes traveled the corners of the ceiling. We must have been walking through some old city infrastructure. My suspicion deepened.

  The only sound here was our echoing footsteps. Natalia walked just ahead of me. She didn’t ask me anything—she hardly glanced at me—but I could feel her focused attention.

  She led me up a couple flights of stairs. I didn
’t consider running. She obviously knew these halls, and I didn’t. She would chase me down or I would lose myself or I would find the exit but be on the run from the danger that lay outside. These were the possibilities. I preferred the danger posed by these people to the one outside that I couldn’t remember—even if my suspicion was correct, which could mean anything for me, for what interest would I be to a group of rebels?

  We came to the top of the stairwell and stood on the landing facing a single door.

  For the first time since we left the living area, those blue eyes slid to mine. She pulled something from her pocket, a strip of black fabric. She held it up and I backed away, not knowing what she intended but already shaking my head.

  “Put this on,” she said. A blindfold. It was a blindfold.

  No. I wouldn’t.

  “You won’t like the alternative,” she said wearily.

  She didn’t move, only held out the fabric, and I believed her but couldn’t bring myself to take it from her. She folded it in half lengthwise and stepped toward me. I had nowhere to go save down the stairs, so I let her. In angling my head down to receive it, my gaze fell on her boots. Brown boots with red laces, scuffed with white dust.

  Then she drew the blindfold on and tied it snug. She took my hand. It was smooth and warm against mine.

  She opened the door and we stepped into outside air smelling of cement and green rot. My feet fell onto the rough surface of a street. Something about the smell of the air here tickled my memory, but it was just that sense of flee again, so deep inside of me it’d become a part of my cells.

  I didn’t, though. However little I trusted these people, they hadn’t tried to kill me yet. They were safer than whatever chased me in my memory.

  “Watch yourself,” she said at one point, and slowed me.

  I was aware of our sounds—footfalls, the scrape of grit under shoes—but no city noises beyond that, so we had to be in Shapertown still. Through the grip of her hand, I could almost feel where she would turn before she guided me in that direction.