Exodus Nebula

Chapter Twelve

What Shisula found most frightening about her dehumanization was not how quickly she was able to refashion and liquidate her assets to serve her current purpose, but rather, what memories it had hefted out from deep, deep within her.

Memories long abandoned for lack of essentiality.

Between the hills and the trees and the sand and the flowing waters of her current travels, she saw herself tucked into an exposed nook of a transcontinental cargo train, gripping a bindle of essential belongs and rations, spectating the phantom silhouettes of nighttime woodland fronts race by against a canvas of stilled, immensely dark, intimately familiar stars, trying for all her rest-deprived efforts to sleep to the stutters and shocks and continuous groans of the clamorous tracks below.

She had recalled her reasons: her father wouldn't take her, it was too expensive, and he couldn't leave for his work position was at risk.

So, she had simply taken herself.

She had been young then, too young to be venturing from home all by herself, venturing deeper south into unacquainted territories. But she was determined and saw her purpose, even then, so young. Her father worried for her of course, searched for her, perhaps even--despite his character--prayed for her. She knew full well what her actions would bring about as a resultant consequence, yet, she did not mind it; no hesitation, no remorse, only her unremitting purpose. She could have been kidnapped, molested, or killed, though, she knew these risks well. She had been careful, clever, even deceitful. She traveled through cities and states with strictly and enforced laws. When the more lawless territories couldn't be avoided, she had used her size to her advantage in large crowds, traveling through cities and settlements on unusual routes, on the perimeters of things, with relative incisiveness, becoming vanished when demanded.

As that child, she had traveled southward for two weeks by various modes, sometimes narrowly avoiding fates of death or worse, whether by the hands of deviant people or nature itself. The end of her journey saw her in remote woodland less than four kilometers from Yuval's Institute, then, in those days, less fortified and guarded. She camped for three more days in the woodland, approaching starvation and malnutrition, watching, on the third night, at a distance, a steepled, pearly-white rocket being carted to its umbilical tower, and, on the fourth morning, the rocket launch itself. She was close to the launch site. She now had distinctly remembered the radiating heat of the great machine, contrasting the frigid crispness of the fall air.

She watched the rocket rise and further rise until the spontaneity of it had disappeared.

Her second journey began when she started home, returning to a solemn father, undernourished and dying, and since bearing a permanent, internal sickness as a reminder of her foolish, yet, necessary actualization.

Her childhood repeats itself now, though, she travels with greater wisdom and readiness of the path ahead.

Her interpretation was quite clear. The path at her back--the return path to the mass of humankind--scuffed and trodden with fleeting impermanence, did not beckon her back as her father once had. It no longer wanted the likes of her. The last and final thread attaching her to her kind had been severed in that night of spontaneity, a relief of all emotion. Now, she had become a kind of her own, individual, no longer belonging to the label of humankind, no longer human.

The city was named New Ikayu, a name derived from an old, largely extinct language of a long-dead race of people, in translation meaning "Port of the East." New Ikayu predominantly occupied a large, crescent-shaped bay opening eastward to the Basin Sea. The bay itself was connected to a major river system that ran deep inland into the Norland continent. The city has seen many rulers and types of people occupying it; currently, it serves as a gateway for the Commonwealth to control and track what goes into the continent and what leaves it.