ABW1

It never occurred to the interrogators that they were torturing a little boy. The only child of the most-wanted terrorist on the planet, he wasn’t a boy at all. He was an opportunity for promotion. His crime was being born outside the system, to a father whose legacy of violence and bloodshed permeated the lives of ordinary people. The people of Thalassinus turned to their respective governments for guidance and support, longing for an end to the bombings, liberation from the constant threat of death.
No one knew when the boy’s father would strike next.
For the boy, none of this made any sense. He heard words like “terrorist” and “murderer”, but what he knew of such things didn’t align with what he knew about his father. He remembered the man working with sickly strangers–rarely sleeping, rarely eating, pausing only to stand by the window and light a cigarette, blowing smoke into the cool, endless winter air. It was true that his father was often gone, leaving him in the care of men with and women with strange, twisted faces, but his absence was not on account of blowing up retirement homes.
People who murmured apologies to lab rats didn’t do things like that. They didn’t build an army of incendiary drones to terrorize the Emperor of Terasu’s annual picnic and didn’t release lethal bacteria in schools. He’d had never even seen his father angry with anyone. Before she died, his mother had occasionally berated the man, but he always accepted the criticism. The boy remembered knocking something over in his father’s lab, paralyzed by the raw terror of knowing he’d done something wrong. He’d stood there like a shivering statue, bleeding from jagged shards of glass impaled in his skin, furious with himself. It wasn’t long before he w...

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...ind, like deep gouges left by the progression of glacial ice.
A star like ours doesn’t die the way most people expect it to. There’s no gradual weakening–a steady decrease in light, a growing absence of warmth. It doesn’t fade back into the depths of space, calmly retreating to the womb. Instead, as the last of its resources are consumed, it burns bigger and brighter, swelling like an infected gash, incinerating planets nurtured from their inception. It’s the final, desperate act of a diseased mother. So you see, if it’s close enough to a dying star–a red giant–a planet will get warmer before it gets cold. That’s how I know something’s not right. Everything we’ve been told is a lie.
Kuroda knelt beside him, slipping a hand through the bars to graze the back of a sow, “The Emperor is a bit of a brat when it comes to people like that. He finds other uses for them.”