Chapter 1

On this planet, there is a Church, but no God. Kieli realized this fact when she was four or five years old, and she always thought it strange for a world to have such a prominent church even when it seemed so obvious there was no God. When she was seven, she finally hit on a very satisfactory answer to her dilemma. “Grandmother, after I heard the sermon today, I finally figured it out.” In her excitement, Kieli would sometimes skip or twirl around as she announced her brilliant discoveries to her grandmother on their way home from church. That day, the head priest had given a sermon on the Church’s history. Apparently, a spaceship carrying the legendary “Eleven Saints and Five Families” had landed on this godless planet hundreds of years ago and built a church. But that ship had left its mother planet hundreds of years before that, and the very patient Saints had traversed the universe for many generations before arriving. Now no one remembered the name of that place. “God wasn’t very patient, was He? I think our planet was so far away, He got tired and went home before He got here. I wonder why the important people in the Church can’t figure it out. It’s so simple! Do they think that God will stay with them forever?” “Kieli,” her grandmother said quietly, walking beside her. She would repeat her granddaughter’s name like this whenever she did something she wasn’t supposed to. She would never yell or lecture. Without changing her expression or her gaze, she would just say, “Kieli,” in a sad, quiet voice. Kieli had promised that she would never, ever talk about the absence of God when she was outside of the house. If she talked like that, she had been told, “the Church’s Soldiers would gouge her heart out.” The warning that this is what happened to bad children who didn’t keep God’s teachings was a story adults used to make their children behave. It came from the legend of the Undying, demon soldiers who killed many people in the War long, long ago, and had been defeated only when their hearts had been torn out. “I’m sorry, Grandmother. I won’t say it anymore.” Dejected, Kieli shut her mouth, stopped skipping, and faced forward. But what Kieli was sorry about was that she had gotten carried away and broken her promise; that childish threat never scared her a bit. There was a reserved kind of bustle on the streets as worshippers walked home on Sunday morning. They all wore hats of myriad shapes to worship in and bundled themselves up in dark-colored overcoats. The Colonization Days holiday was approaching once again, and the air was beginning to carry the scent of winter. To Kieli, the smell of winter was the smell of the smog spewed out by fossil fuels. An exhaust pipe stuck out of the roof of every building that lined either side of the street and sent thick gray smoke into the sky. Kieli turned around again and walked backward for a little while. Pushing back the brim of her hat and looking up, she could see the grand and imposing domed roof of the cathedral standing in the center of the town, peeking out between the other buildings. Suddenly, behind her there rose a commotion. The jeers and screams in the distance drew closer, and as she turned around in surprise to see what was going on, a man pushed aside a passerby that had been walking ahead of Kieli and jumped out right in front of her. “Wah!” Kieli instinctively drew herself back, and then… Fwa-boom! If she’d been forced to describe the sound of such an explosion, she’d have said it was like the heavy atmosphere being tightly compressed and released all at once. The sound roared through the morning street. Before her eyes, Kieli saw the man’s chest burst open. Through the gaping, round hole, she could see men covered from head to toe in strange white armor. Wisps of smoke rose from the barrels of several guns aimed her way. She heard a woman gasp somewhere, but Kieli just stood there, unable to remember to breathe, let alone scream. Finally, she managed to stagger backward and fall back onto the paved street. As if in response, the man fell to his knees, then collapsed at Kieli’s feet. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle, and his face turned toward her. His unfocused gaze rested on the air in front of Kieli. As someone came running toward her, Kieli regained her senses and the crowd’s stirring came back to her, as if she’d just remembered how to hear after a temporary loss. “Kieli, are you hurt?” her grandmother asked as she knelt beside Kieli and embraced her. Her aged, wizened hands trembled slightly. Kieli took her hand and answered in a monotone that she was fine. Amidst intermingling whispers of both fear and awe, the crowd moved aside, and metallic footsteps echoed as the armored men marched through their center. Kieli, still sitting, watched them, and as a corner of her mind thought, “Oh, they’re coming this way,” she returned her gaze to the fallen man. Something had rolled out from the hole in the man’s chest. It was a black stone, about the size of an adult fist. It wasn’t unlike a strange machine component. A few torn, narrow tubes that looked like both cables and blood vessels hung from it, and a thick liquid that resembled used oil puddled around it. Inside the stone, a dull, amber-colored light blinked rhythmically, like a heartbeat. She unconsciously reached out for it, but another hand snatched it up first. It was a grim, armored hand, wearing a white gauntlet made of special metal fiber. When she looked up, a soldier was mumbling something inside his mask. We have just executed a wicked man. There is nothing to worry about. You didn’t see anything. She thought they said something like that, but none of it stayed in Kieli’s mind. After that, no matter what she did, she couldn’t remember the face of the man who had died right in front of her. Only the mysterious black stone and his open, empty eyes remained, burned forever onto her memory.