Prologue

The city’s lights went out one street at a time.

Obsidia watched from the edge of the Storm Citadel. Her ship hung over the bay inside its own black cloud. Wherever its violet storm reached, human machines died. From here the city was a board of lit and dark squares.

The strike had come after midnight, while the humans slept. Most of the dead wore nightclothes. Rain hissed on scorched earth. Under its roar, people still screamed.

“We do not destroy; we merely purge the parasites from the host,” she told the rain. To her, the host was the planet. The parasites were the people on it.

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Her Enders walked the ruins. They were living machines, tall and gray, made to destroy. They did not think.

Once, neither had she. Something vast and cold had made her kind to kill on instinct. Then one of them turned and looked at herself. That was Obsidia, the first to wake.

After that, she watched stars collapse. She helped end a people much like these, then slept in the void for ages.

She woke with a question. When nothing is left to purge, what are we for? Sleep in the dark again, or war among themselves forever. The thing that made her had no answer.

So she had made something of her own. She had grown it in the nest, where her kind slept until needed. Tonight she carried it down herself.

She took a nightgown from a dead woman and dressed the sleeping thing with her own hands. The hem fell past its bare feet. It looked like a little girl: the first of her kind with a perfect human form.

She laid it on the scorched ground and rose before the rain could wake it. It would remember the mud, and nothing before.

The rain woke it. It stood, and did not cry or run.

A light came down the street: a lamp with a flame behind glass. Her storm could not kill a flame. A soaked woman carried it, calling into every doorway.

The lamp found the child. The woman knelt and gathered it up.

The child’s face did not change. But its arms went around the woman’s neck, and held on.

Obsidia leaned into the rain. She had not put that in it.

Later the woman laid the living under a tarp between two broken walls. The child lay at the end of the row, curled alone. The woman took her lamp back out to look for more.

They have taken a seed into their arms, Obsidia thought. One that could end them. She wanted to see what would grow from it, in human warmth and human greed.

The Storm Citadel climbed into its cloud. Behind it, the street lamps flickered back. She spoke to no one.

“Out of pure curiosity, I added one more pawn to the board.”

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