Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) by Niall Teasdale (best summer reads txt) 📕

Everything was monochrome. Or, more or less monochrome. There were colours, but they were so muted that they were all shades of grey tinted with a hint of variant wavelengths. The leaves on the evergreen bushes were a dark grey tinted with green. The rendering on the apartment building was a light grey tinted with very light brown. It had been night the last time she had done this and it was daylight today. The sunlight came to her as though through a particle filter; there was a graininess to it, a granularity. It was almost as if she was perceiving individual photons. She was sure she was not really seeing reality with her eyes this time. She was not sure how she was perceiving things, but sight was not it.

There was another weird feature of this reality she had yet to explain: the dimensions seemed all wrong. It was not that the physical objects were distorted. Everything looked the same as it had, barring the flattened colours. Instead, if she turned her head, it seemed as though she was looking at a lot of two-dimensional objects which turned to keep themselves looking right, but with a slight lag. It was disconcerting. Perhaps more so since, when she looked at her own body, that appeared entirely three-dimensional and solid.

Enough sightseeing, pulling Flight forward in her mind, Nava lifted into the air and made straight for the side of Carina’s apartment building. Unhindered, she flew through a wall, through the apartment of an oblivious male student who was hard at work browsing some form of comic strip artwork, through a corridor, and into Carina’s apartment.

‘… stuff is easy,’ Carina was saying. Her voice sounded muted, as though Nava was hearing it through a wall or earplugs. ‘I could do this when I was twelve.’

‘Just be careful that you don’t get complacent,’ said the Harbinger standing behind her. ‘Teachers have a terrible habit of– Ah! How did you find me? What are you doing here?!’ The last part was addressed to Nava, who the alien had just noticed, and it appeared that Carina had not heard it.

‘Trudy?’ Carina looked around, twisting in her chair. She did not, however, look at the Harbinger. Instead, her gaze fixed on a spot to her left where she, apparently, perceived ‘Trudy’ to be.

‘Some sort of mental illusion?’ Nava asked, speculating. ‘She sees this girl in a rainbow outfit you’re projecting into her head rather than the real you.’

‘Yes,’ the Harbinger said, ‘but that’s beside the point. Why are you–’

‘We’re going to have a chat. I want to know what you’re up to. I want to know what you want with Carina.’

‘Trudy,’ Carina said, ‘is something wrong? You just cut off mid-sentence.’

The Harbinger stared at Nava for a second and then looked down at Carina. Looking down was easy for something that was well over two metres tall. ‘It’s nothing, Cari. I need to take care of something, so I’ll be vanishing for a bit.’

‘Okay…’

‘You know what you’re doing with this homework. It’s just metaphysics. Be careful you don’t overlook anything in the problem.’

‘Okay, but come back soon.’

‘I will.’ The Harbinger turned its cold, blue eyes back on Nava and pointed upward. Then it began to glide up through the ceiling and Nava followed. They stopped on the flat roof, though having something under their feet seemed to be largely a matter of convention. ‘I wasn’t aware that humans had worked out how to enter the Q-field like this,’ the Harbinger said.

Nava decided to answer the implied question, mostly because it suited her needs. ‘Last year, someone brought a Harbinger device here for study. Everyone was very excited because it appeared to be functional. It turned out that it was some sort of prison and the inmate got out.’

The Harbinger actually flinched. ‘A discorporated Harbinger sealed within a shell of force? That punishment was reserved for really bad people.’

‘It was a particularly sadistic serial killer. It liked to possess people and then use them to torture their loved ones to death. The Ascend spell was developed to allow me to meet it on its own ground and destroy it. Which I did. I used a burst of quintessence to reduce it to… well, nothing.’

Harbingers were basically tall, thin, blue aliens with elongated limbs. They had a large cranium, but little in the way of facial features. Their noses were a couple of slits; their mouths were small and had thin lips. Their angular eyes had black sclera – assuming what they had could be described in human terms – and icy-blue irises. If they had expressions, nothing was obvious. Somehow, this one gave off the impression that it was grinning in a knowing fashion. ‘That was a moderately subtle effort to indicate that you could kill me if you wanted.’

‘Correct,’ Nava stated flatly. ‘It also indicates, I believe, that I don’t have a good history with your species. I prefer to take people on an individual, case-by-case basis, but I am obviously somewhat sceptical of the motives of a transcendent alien being who appears to be pretending to be a human in order to talk to a delusional human girl.’

The alien opened its mouth, paused, and then closed it again, holding up one very long finger to ask for a pause. It was a rather human gesture. This being had clearly spent quite a while learning to act in a human manner. Nava could empathise in some ways. It had also learned English quite well. There was a weird accent to its words, probably the result of slightly incompatible vocal equipment. P and B sounds came out a bit wrong, as though its lips could not quite form the sounds. Also, the voice did not really register as female to Nava’s ears. Then again, it did not quite sound male either. It did have a lighter tone than the other Harbinger Nava had met.

‘We,’ the Harbinger