The barn was absolutely festooned with Aunt Em’s tools, and building materials, and junk. How had she fit all of that in the back of her truck?

  In the middle of it all sat the thing, whatever it was she had hauled up here with her truck. It curved in a largely circular shape, and looked distinctly like Somnifer tech I’d seen in magazines and TV. If Aunt Em wasn’t Aunt Em, I would have been afraid to even be near it. The Aliens didn’t let just anybody get their hands on things like this.

  “What the heck is that?” I asked.

  “A fabricator,” she replied, like I should know what that is. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What are we doing with it?”

  “Nothing right now,” she jumped up on a bale of hay, and patted a space next to her. “Come sit.”

  I laughed, and joined her.

  “What are we doing here Auntie Em?”

  “We are going to make you a suit of armor.”

  She let that sink in. Her eyes reflected back calm. But under the surface of that calm was something scary. It spoke of a kind of seriousness, and determination I’d not seen from her often.

  She was serious about this. That was terrifying. My heart sped.

  Emma Gallahger had fought with the original Knights of the Eternal Beacon. When the war came to what we used to call the United States of America, she was too young to enlist. Several years into the war, we were running out of Knights. A seemingly endless supply of robots poured from the rifts, and at first there were just the twelve Knights.

  Emma enlisted in that second wave of recruits. Like I said before, she quickly became a legend.

  We’d always talked about me maybe joining the Dreadnaught, but that was after Juilliard. That was sometime in the future. What had changed? Why make my armor now? And why unsanctioned by the Aliens? What was happening?

  “You’re kidding,” I said, knowing with everything I was, that she was in no way kidding.

  “Do I usually joke about stuff like this?”

  I leapt down off the hay bale, and paced around the barn.

  “Why now? Aren’t we committing intergalactic treason, or something, by making unsanctioned armor?”

  Knight armor was some of the most technologically advanced equipment in the universe. When the Reformed States of Columbia, of which Rhode Island was a founding member, had announced their intent to poach Knights to fight for them exclusively, the Aliens had gone to war. Aunt Em was one of those that hunted down the rogue Knights herself.

  Aunt Em played with her pocket knife in her lap, opening and closing it absentmindedly, silent for a second, before responding.

  “Not technically,” she answered.

  My mind reeled with the implications. I couldn’t say that I wasn’t floored by the idea. My own armor. It was everything I’d always wanted.

  You spent your childhood afraid of the robots, the metal men that would drag you out of your bed screaming, and whisk you off into the night never to be seen from again. Every year, your class had fewer and fewer kids. I’d stopped expecting the friends I made in school to be the same from semester to semester. Many of those kids fled with their parents to some new opportunity.

  Some lucky few made it offworld.

  Others just… disappeared.

  Being able to fight back was every kid's dream. Not only that, I’d grown up on Emma’s stories.

  She had been at the Siege of Paris, where Commander Parker and Dara and the rest of them had stopped them for good. She’d fought alone at the Battle of Golden Gate, holding off an entire army by herself until all she had was her sword, hacking through dozens by the second. I’d seen video of her dropping from a helicopter at 15 thousand feet, and landing without so much as a scratch.

  I mean, even if it wasn’t my dream, who wouldn't want to be able to do that?

  I looked at her.

  “What do you mean about ‘not technically?’” I asked.

  She hopped off the hay bale, and walked towards me.

  “I mean, If anyone asks who you fight for, as long as you say you fight for others, fight for the Song, no Knight could ever say that you weren’t legitimate.”

  “What about the Somnifer?”

  “Eh,” she replied, “they’re a big deal, but the Knights transcend species and planetary culture. They may pretend to be the rulers of the verse, but they’re just as scared, and broken as we are. And they always need more allies.”

  I looked to the fabricator. It had tubes on one side and what seemed like some kind of hatch on top. I could see in the dark window in the hatch little mechanical arms. I wondered if I said yes, how quickly it could make the armor. How quickly could I change my life forever?

  “What do you mean by ‘the Song?’” I asked.

  “It’s kind of esoteric, pre-Somniferian lore. We can talk about that later.”

  The soft glow of fluorescents lit her face as she leaned against the fabricator. She gazed out the window of the barn. I could see some of who she had been back then, gallant, a hero. But she wasn’t that anymore.

  Could I do this? Back when Emma had talked about me joining the Dreadnaught, it was all some far away thing. I’d always assumed I would be assigned a support role with the men. To be a Knight?

  “Why did you quit?” I asked.

  “I got injured,” she answered.

  “Hey,” I waved to get her attention, “Auntie Em. It’s me. If we do this, I have to know what happened to you.”

  Emma sat back down on the hay bale. Her green eyes seemed distant, as if she were recalling a memory she didn’t much relish.

  “There’s a piece of shrapnel in my leg. If I do a high G maneuver in my armor, or get hit with an EMP, it’ll rip right into my femoral artery. I could bleed out, internally, in seconds. But honestly, if I still believed in what Dara was doing up there...”

  I sat down next to her. Her eyes snapped to me.

  “Look, kiddo,” she said, “there is a reason I brought the fabricator with me instead of sending you to the Dreadnaught. Bureaucracy is a bitch. If you want to do some good, you have to get out there, and do it with your own hands. And people like me have lost the plot. We don’t have the right headspace anymore. It’s up to the young to go out there, and change things.”

  My own hands. I looked at my hands. Long, thin, a lot like hers. Was I just trading one family member’s expectations for another? Dad wanted me to be the musician he’d never had the opportunity to be. My mother wanted me to make money. Aunt Em wanted me to follow in her footsteps.

  But what did I want?

  I wanted to be brave. I wanted to never be afraid again. Hell yeah I wanted this. Also I also couldn’t say I wasn’t curious what it would be like to meet an alien. In the pictures they seemed so alluring with their green skin, and the flower crowns growing out of their heads.

  It all seemed like a grand adventure. I was wrong, but you couldn’t have told me any different back then.

  “Look,” she said. “You don’t actually have to make any big decisions yet. We’re just making the suit. It’ll only take us a couple of days. It’s up to you to decide what you want to do with it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  I smiled in spite of myself. I could feel the rush of doing something without my parent’s permission. The rush of doing something forbidden, something dangerous.

  “Yeah, let’s do it!”

  The rest of the night wasn’t very eventful. The machine scanned me to get my measurements. I ran around, modeling my movements for it. I even did some light sparring with Auntie Em. She could keep up. But I felt like maybe she was holding back. We talked about what kinds of stuff I’d want the armor to do. I had some expectations about that. I’d spent quite a bit of time on the Intranet talking to other KEB stans about what they could do.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I wanted something maneuverable, something with a highly flexible Field Application even at the cost of a lower Estimated Strength Augmentation. Something with a unique sensor array. This meant we were probably gunning for a Dragoon Class armor platform, but a Runic Class may work as well. Aunt Emma sketched some designs out on a pad, and worked to help me understand some of the technical details. I wouldn’t have a gun yet, since that was one of the more difficult things to manufacture, but my aunt had brought her old sword.

  I unsheathed it under the fluorescent lights, and suddenly it was all too real. It was heavier than I thought it would be for its length, maybe eight or so pounds, but well balanced. The blade was long and straight, and black, fading to white where it got diamond hard at the edges. Interlaid in the dark sheen of its blade was an intricate scrollwork in some script I didn’t understand.

  I sheathed it, and we called it a night.

  After a night of talking back and forth about what was possible, and what we could do, I was buzzing with excitement. I crept past my parents room. They were talking in hushed tones. I didn’t want to hear what they were saying, so I continued on.

  Alone in my room, I couldn’t sit still. I didn’t know the connection yet, I didn’t know why, but I felt like writing. I sat down at my keyboard, plugged my headset in, and played different chords and melodies, struggling to put something together but not really worried about it, playing far into the night.

  When I slept, I dreamed in technicolor. And when I woke, I was still tired, but excited to face the day. What we were doing in that barn was important. I didn’t know but that was one of the last days of ‘normal’ I would have for a long time.

  The next morning, I woke up early, and got the coffee started for my parents, like always. They'd be off to work soon, alongside my older sister. My father went to the University to work on site at Brown every Wednesday. I made a quick lunch for my little brother, for him to take to school, then took my earl grey outside. My Aunt was awake already too.

  “We going to the barn?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I got a buddy of mine, or well, his kid. Hopefully he can help us with some of the finer details.”

  I just nodded, and we sat there on the porch in silence for some time. Dew shone on the grass, and fog hung in the air. The pink sky faded into a burnished silver. It was cold, but acceptable with my hoodie.

  I went back inside to work on my audition piece. My parents kissed me goodbye some time later. Then it was just Auntie Em and I, for a while. She seemed nervous. It was a look that I didn’t see on her often. Maybe one time when we were playing Jenga?

  Some time later, Aunt Em, her friend, and I sat in the barn staring at the fabricator. Auntie Em’s friend was named Darsh Mehta. He was probably a couple years older than me, had a well manicured beard, and eyeliner, and while he was attractive enough, he also sorta looked like, well, I think the term is an ‘elder goth.’ He wore a simple black jeans and a t-shirt combo, but I’m fairly sure both were tailored, and he had a leather wristband with metal spikes on it.

  He wanted to be called DiDi. I got the feeling nobody called him DiDi.

  “This is a bad idea,” he said. His voice had a slight British English accent to it that made him sound sophisticated. If he was one of my Aunt’s friends, he probably knew what he was doing.

  “Darsh,” she replied. “It can work.”

  “Look, I can shunt the signal when we power it up, and maybe jerry-rig a faraday cage to mask the power output, but all it will take is the Dreadnaught thinking to ping it while it’s on, and we’re done for.”

  “Can you just crack it open, and cut the transmitter out?”

  “Cut the transmitter? This is pre-Somnifer technology. I’m a software guy, anyway. I could cut something vital, and have no idea what it was.”

  “What are we talking about?” I asked.

  Darsh looked at me, and gave me a sympathetic smile.

  “Ah, I’m excited, as a civilian, to help you make Knight armor. It’s a dream come true, honestly. But If you turn this thing on, I can’t promise they won't find us, and turn us all into a very red, very wet stain on the ground.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Auntie Em said.

  “Oh? And you’ve never killed someone trying to steal Somnifer tech before?”

  “Well that’s different. We’ve already stolen it.”

  “We?” Darsh said incredulously, “Oh there isn’t a ‘we’ yet, darling.”

  “Eh,” Emma said with an exaggerated grimace, “I mean it sort of is. You’ve seen it now.”

  Darsh cursed in Hindi.

  “Why are we even doing this?” he asked.

  I gave my aunt a questioning look. I wanted to know, also.

  “Look, my niece is a once in a generation talent. And with the armor she’ll be able to do a lot of good. The Dreadnought just isn’t ready for her.”

  Darsh made a pensive noise, and thought for a moment before saying, “well, dear, you’ve already convinced me. I just had to put up a token defense.”

  He got to work immediately. They stretched some kind of fabric material over it, but after that, most of the work they had to do was typing on a laptop, and scowling.

  I didn’t have much to do yet, so I put earbuds in, and listened to a podcast I’d downloaded. I started sketching for a future cross stitch. It wasn't a great drawing, but I’d refine it in thread. This image of feathers kept cropping up. I wasn’t sure what they were. Sometimes things just come out of you.

  Auntie Em said something I couldn’t quite hear. I pulled an earbud off.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “It’s a raven feather,” she said.

  “Could be a crow feather,” I replied, fairly sure there wasn’t a difference.

  “Raven feathers are shinier,” she said, as if she could tell by my drawing.

  “How’s the work going? Is the Dreadnought going to come after us as soon as we fire it up?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then why push it? Why now?”

  “Do you want to stop?” she asked.

  I paused my podcast.

  The truth was, I wasn’t sure. Even though we haven't done much yet, I still had this feeling, well, now that I imagined having my own armor I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t put the idea back in the bag.

  I wanted this now.

  “No.”

  “What’s that notation, there?” she asked, referring to the simple chord I’d doodled at the top of the page.

  “Oh, just something I came up with last night.”

  Darsh had headed back to the house for a soda, and to let some code compile, so it was just the two of us. Auntie Em hummed part of the chord to herself. Her face lit up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she asked.

  “It's not a big deal. I mean, none of it is very good.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s just...”

  Her eyes seemed distant. I could tell she was doing that thing where an adult was weighing whether they should lie or not. I mean I was an adult too, but your family never stops treating you like a kid even at 18.

  Eventually she said, “so, what do you know about Plato?”

  If this was a lie, it was a very weird one.

  “Uh. Teacher of Aristotle. Not a fan of art. ‘Is the pious pious, if god loves pious?’ Not much. Why?”

  “Right. Do you know his whole idea of the forms?”

  “Sorta?”

  Emma scratched her head, and continued.

  “There is a world of perfect things outside our own that we draw inspiration from, right?”

  “Sure. Like, in the world of forms is a perfect chair, and every chair in our world is just a reflection of it?”

  “Exactly.”

  I felt scepticism twist my face.

  “Auntie Em. Why are we talking about Plato?”

  “So, imagine that every book, story, song, they all came from a single place. Imagine that there is one single song that encompasses every single thing you could imagine. That is the Song of Creation. That is the thing the Knights draw power from. It’s the thing that powers the design of their armor, and their field applications, like fire or lightning. The Somnifer believe that the previous inter-galactic civilization created it, and they revere it religiously. Other aliens just think they discovered it.”

  I suddenly made a wild connection in my head.

  “That’s why you named your armor Ferdiad!”

  Ferdiad was the name of an old Irish hero. I couldn’t quite understand what the hero had to do with her armor, but I understood that she was tying her armor to a story.

  “Exactly!” Auntie Em’s face lit up in excitement. She grabbed my hand. “This could be the beginning of the song we will write that will encapsulate the armor. This is more important than any blueprint.”

  “Because it is the blueprint!” I said.

  “Precisely!”

  I was suddenly aware of Darsh’s presence in the doorway of the barn.

  “What are you guys talking about?” he asked. He had three bags of chips in his arms, and a soda in each hand. I was honestly kinda impressed.

  “Go finish that song,” she said to me. Then turning to Darsh said, “I’ll catch you up in a bit.”

  I stood, and ran out the door, across the lawn, and back up to the house. My parents would be home in a couple hours. I had to get as much of this song written as I could before then.

  Song writing is difficult, circuitous, painful work. But it was also just playing the piano, and writing down things that sounded good. I worked harder than I had at anything in my life. The armor was this close. I could feel it taking shape.

  Days flew by. I wrote music. I collected quotes, and images, and stories that inspired me. My aunt slowly, but surely revealed more about what the armor needed to be, and how it worked.

  All armors had these special medallions that formed its core. She refused to tell me where she had gotten the extra one, other than that it wasn’t hers. Any one piece of the armor could be replaced except that one.

  The very first piece we made was the helmet. A thin hard band of plates would encircle my chin and ears, with a bubble of clear ballistic plastic covering the rest of my head for maximum visibility. I wanted to put it over my head so bad, but it needed to be connected to the gorget to fit correctly.

  If the fabricator was transmitting our location to the Dreadnaught, we didn’t know either way. It was good enough that nobody showed up.

  Later that week, I sat on that same hay bale I had days ago, when she had revealed what we would do. Darsh argued with Emma about how big the nanite storage tanks should be. He was a bundle of energy once he got his soda.

  We eventually resorted to big two liters we kept in the fridge, to keep him topped off. If my parents minded him hanging around so much, they didn’t say. I did my best to refrain from lying to them, and they didn’t ask many questions since I was on the piano more than I had been. So, anyway, I was on the hay bale, when my eyes fell on the medallion.

  It was about the size of both of my hands put together. Circular, metal, with intricate alien script around it, it looked both incredibly mundane, and impossibly futuristic all at once. In the center was a shining blue crystal, not quite opaque. I reached out to touch it. I don’t even remember when I got off the hay bale, I was just suddenly there.

  I am sitting on the balcony, my feet hanging over a drop of hundreds of feet. The crystalline towers stretch iridescent and shining in the sun to my left and right. I can smell the tea in the twisting, horn-like cup in my hands, it is floral and alien, yet strangely comforting. The barren blue grassy plain below me stretches on for miles. I know they are coming, and I am unafraid.

  I gasp, as if I had been holding my breath, and I’m back in the barn.

  “Are you okay?” Auntie Em asks.