For the Pursuit of the Better by Chey Rivera
3000 words, ~15 minutes reading time
Issue 8, Summer 2025
Karaya was eleven-years-old when Baba fused a small metal cage into her skull. He said this would give her the mind of a god, because the cage contained an imprisoned god inside it.
“Cast your cane aside,” Baba said, staring sternly at my sister during one of their many sessions after the operation. The god fused to the back of his own head remained dim and dormant behind the geometric engravings that bound it. Baba was not using his own power to interfere with Karaya’s progress–she had to do this alone.
Karaya let her rattan walking cane fall to the stone floor. With an eldest daughter’s determination, she raised her gaze to the complex calculations drawn on the wall. As she solved them in her mind, the trapped god in the back of her head glowed gold.
“Go on,” Baba said, “write down your answer.”
Karaya took a tentative step forward. A second attempt brought her down to the floor, hard. I almost ran to help her, but I knew better than to interrupt one of Baba’s sessions. I stayed back, half-hidden behind stacks of thick tomes full of Baba’s poems, prayers, and other compositions used to lure gods into cages.
Baba did not help her immediately. He muttered his displeasure at the decline of my sister’s motor skills, but when he turned his attention to his copious notes on Karaya’s brain function, his frown softened.
“Your mental capacity has dramatically improved since the implant,” he said. “Were you able to solve the problem?”
“Yes, Baba. It was trivial. The answer is the sacred sequence of perfect polytopes that exist in all dimensions—the shapes we use to capture gods. Our enemies have not yet discovered, much less understood, these shapes and their true power,” Karaya said, breathing heavy as she tried and failed to get back on her feet. .
“And they never will,” Baba smiled, his eyes gleaming with pride. How I wanted him to look at me like that!
He approached her and lifted her up, carrying her to the operating table.
“Again?” Karaya asked in a tone that betrayed her fear.
“Our work must be perfect before we share it with the chieftain and the rest of the nobles. They think they can impose limits on me, when it was my science, my polytomancy that has prevented our home from being invaded and plundered like every other Caribbean island. We will show them there are no age limits when it comes to being one with the gods.”
My sister did not protest further. She was used to the constant adjustments Baba made to her god’s cage, perfecting its unique design to better blend with her flesh and bone. To make sure he was not damaging other parts of her brain, Baba kept Karaya awake and talking through the procedure. He always asked her the same questions, and she always provided the same answers.
“What have we learned from our enemies’ failed attempts to invade our turbulent coasts? From the Spanish and English prisoners we have questioned?”
“We know their science and history,” she recited, facedown, as Baba strapped her limbs tight to the operating table. “Their slow ships and crude mechanical inventions. We have measured ourselves against them and found them lacking.”
“So we have. They would have plenty to learn from us. Why is our knowledge forever out of their reach?” Baba asked as his scalpel sliced through the hairless, scarred skin over Karaya’s cerebellum.
My sister gritted her teeth before emitting a low, excruciating sound. Her splinter-scarred fingers clutched the now indented sides of the wooden table.
“Talk to me, Karaya,” Baba commanded.
With the use of a skull saw, he exposed the lower half of Karaya’s brain. I could see the golden tendrils coming out of the small metal cage, how they stuck to my sister’s brain beyond the exposed wound. As Baba tinkered with these tendrils, Karaya stuttered through the pain.
“Our… k-knowledge is out of their reach… because you have m-made sure of it,” she said finally. “And so will I, when my time comes. One day, my intellect will surpass your own, and I will be our lead protector.”
“Precisely. We are gods, Karaya,” Baba said, and I was acutely aware of my own inferiority and uselessness. Still in my hiding place, my dirty clothes blending into Baba’s discarded contraptions and dusty books, I could pretend I did not exist.
Baba sutured the wound with artistic precision. He was thirty years old when he performed the very first implant on himself and, like his colleagues, he never experienced Karaya’s impairments in motor skills. No, those were unforeseen consequences of performing the implant on a growing body. On a child.
When Baba was done, I approached my sister and gently unknotted her blanched fingers from the edges of the operating table.
“Kachi,” she whispered my name as I loosened the straps around her wrists. One of her hands found mine, and I bent down to kiss it. I promised to get her something sweet—guayabas, mangoes, whatever she wanted.
Baba’s laboratory was our home. A large room at the top of a stone tower to the west side of the chieftain’s coastal fortress. There were no stairs and no doors, just a single window from which Baba came and went like only a god could, able to manipulate gravity itself. I was constantly aching, my hands and feet covered in bruises and scratches from climbing in and out of the tower when Baba wasn’t around.
Now, he turned his back as I hoisted Karaya off the table, golden light emanating from his head, and walked straight out the window, landing softly on the ground, forty feet below.
I’d never had any hope of being as smart as Karaya, but five years after her implant, Baba said he wished to perform the operation on me, to make me a god. I was finally going to be useful, to be loved.
Karaya was sixteen years old now, and she was already faster than Baba at building mathematical models to describe the flow of power out of a god’s polytope-shaped cage. Her efficient mind could create parallel mental processes that allowed her to solve complex problems in an instant. There was nothing else Baba could do for Karaya’s remarkable brain except admire his creation. His attention was now on me.
I found Karaya reading by the tower’s single window, as she often did during the sweltering Caribbean summer. A deep sadness creased her features when I told her the news.
“I thought you’d be happy for me,” I said, trying to decipher her expression. “I will be clever, like you and Baba. I will wield power over the physical world. There is nothing I wouldn’t be able to do.”
“Kachi, that is not—” she began to say. For the first time, I saw her hesitate.
My sister never hesitated. She was never at a loss for words. To me, she was all-knowing. Decades later, sitting by her deathbed, I would truly come to understand what she was feeling in this moment: her infallible brain was torn between her belief in Baba’s work and her love for me.
“You have heard Baba urge me not to make the mistakes some of his colleagues made.” As if to illustrate her point, Karaya raised a thin arm and summoned her cane with the power of her mind. “Through them, we learned there are downsides to these abilities. Baba’s colleagues could not stop themselves from using their physical powers. Soon, their bodies began to fail, and eventually, to die.”
“They were heroes, Karaya,” I said. “Gods who could control the ocean itself, who could sink enemy ships before they reached our shores.”
My world was crumbling down. I was fourteen years old, and I idolized my sister. To be like her was all I ever wanted. It broke my heart that she didn’t think I could.
“Polytomancists are scientists first, warriors second,” Karaya said. “It’s why Baba and I channel our power into our intellectual capacities, and use our physical powers sparingly. It takes too much energy to influence the physical world. Our human bodies are not built for it.”
Her eyes were glazed. She was looking inward now, talking more to herself than to me. At the time, I did not realize her world was crumbling down, too.
Baba’s voice echoed in my mind, full of the love and pride he only felt for my sister.
We are gods, Karaya.
My sister, guilt-ridden, as if each word was an unforgivable betrayal to the man who raised us.
“Perhaps, we’re not gods after all.”
To better the self. That was Baba’s mission. What he believed to be the key to survival.
Tight leather straps dug into my skin. Baba had tied my limbs to the operating table, and used his power to further pin me down until I could not move. My body stiffened with the force of his unnatural manipulation of gravity.
“Please, don’t,” I begged him, tears traveling down the bridge of my nose and darkening the table’s wooden surface.
After my conversation with Karaya, I had doubts about the implant. I was no longer sure if I wanted Baba to fuse a metal cage into my skull.
“This is my life’s work, Kachi. Polytomancy is my science, and the next natural step is to determine the best age for god implantation. You will do as I say,” Baba said when I confessed my feelings.
Karaya, for all her brilliance, had been too young, and now Baba would repeat his experiment on me.
He’d shaved my hair, and now the tip of his scalpel made contact with the skin over my cerebellum. I felt sick, nauseous and drenched in sweat. Now I would know my sister’s pain. But before the blade could pierce flesh, the scalpel clattered to the floor.
I was still strapped to the operating table, but I could move my body again. When I turned my face to look at Baba, his mouth was wide open, frozen in a silent scream. Karaya stood behind him, one of her hands pressed against the back of his head. Her eyes shone with godly light, her pupils entirely hidden by the radiance. She was siphoning golden waves of energy off Baba’s head through her arm, transferring a myriad memories into her body with a strange, squelching sound. Baba’s bright gold cage turned blood red as the metal began to crack. Transfixed, I stared at the images that flashed with each wave of energy, an entire life severed from a body. Finally, Baba’s cage broke. His tortured expression relaxed, his eyes empty, his mind devoid of purpose.
Later, I would learn that she had used his god against him, drawing on its power to extract Baba’s intellect. She had discovered the main pillar of modern polytomancy—touch alone could make the cage act as a conduit for the god’s power.
The straps around my wrists and ankles loosened, but I was too stunned to move.
“No one else,” Karaya panted, her body bending over her cane in exhaustion. “I will be the last.”
Since the death of our father, no more implants have been performed. Karaya transformed our father's polytomancy into a science that did not hurt us as much as it hurt our enemies. We still trap gods in cages, yes. A necessary cruelty. But to wield their powers, polytomancists no longer had to sacrifice their bodies, or the bodies of their children.
Karaya was sixty-three years old when the Battle of the Whirlpools, as it came to be known, took everything from her. She had never used her power to influence the physical world to such magnitude before.
That day, we established a defensive position on the northern coast, atop the fortress that protected our capital city—the fortress we called home. Karaya stood at the center, with three polytomancists flanking her at either side, myself included. Trapped gods glowed in our battle crowns—feathered and jewel-adorned headdresses that granted us power that we could remove as we wished.
It was a Spanish attack, a fleet of twelve men-of-war sailing straight for our bay. Following Karaya’s orders like we had done countless times before, we succeeded in keeping them back, summoning great gusts and strong currents they could not fight against. It seemed such an easy victory, then I heard Karaya gasp.
What seemed like a thousand ships materialized behind the first fleet, their shapes darkening the horizon.
“The Spanish are not alone. I see more flags,” Karaya said, her spyglass raised to the approaching enemy. “English, French, Dutch.” She spat on the ground and passed me the spyglass.
I stared at her, uncomprehending. “It can’t be.”
“They truly mean it this time,” she said, her voice vibrating with rage. “It’s a multinational armada. They know what we can do, and they’ve joined forces to claim the last bit of Caribbean land that remains out of their grasp.”
I raised my sister’s spyglass and saw the flags for myself. The sailors pushed against our winds and currents with their large oars, their mouths moving as they sang their battle songs and yelled their war cries.
The world was against us, so what would we sacrifice to defend our home? When I looked into Karaya’s face, I saw she had made her decision.
“Promise me, Kachi,” she said, “whatever happens, you will train more polytomancists.” She looked back at the approaching invasion. “Many more. Keep our fortress strong.”
With the obedience that was expected from her second-in-command, and from a younger sister, I bowed my head in assent. If I risked speech, I would find words to stop her.
Leaning on her whalebone staff with both hands, she faced the armada and closed her eyes, focusing on her power. Slowly, the light emanating from the back of her head traveled through her entire body, giving her fragile form an ethereal glow.
The ocean waters began to stir with an ominous, seismic sound. Karaya opened her arms, her thin chest proud, her staff clattering to the ground. By her command, multiple great currents spun in different directions until a sea of whirlpools stretched between us and our enemies, a dozen colossal mouths eager to consume.
It was too late for them to turn back. They could not escape Karaya’s whirlpools. Trapped by the violent currents, their ships slanted hard, and crashed against each other. With the spyglass to my eye, I saw how the men were crushed by their own cannons, how the powder stores exploded in great debris clouds of wood and gunpowder.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Karaya falter. I rushed to her side before she could fall.
Three weeks later, I was carrying Karaya to bed.
“My efforts have caught up to me, at last,” Karaya said, her gaze fixed on the high ceiling. When she raised a hand to my cheek, I noticed I was crying.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I said.
“You don’t have to. Not completely.”
“What do you mean?”
“To be alive is to know. To know is to be alive.” She flashed me a weak smirk, then brought her fingers to her temple. “Do you think that’s true, Kachi? Is that our highest calling? To know?”
“Baba thought so,” I said. I could never be certain if a thought Karaya voiced was truly hers, or Baba’s. She had consumed his intelligence, his every thought. All this time, he had always been part of her.
My eyes widened. I realized what Karaya meant when she said I didn’t have to lose her. Cold shivers ran through my limbs, my arms covered in goosebumps. We would never be fully rid of Baba's influence, from the demons he passed down to us. What mattered most to him would always matter to us.
“I knew you’d understand,” Karaya whispered. “Hurry, please. I don’t have much time.”
In vain I tried to wipe the tears streaming down my face. I knew I should refuse her. I should let her go. But I was selfish, and she was scared. Most of all, we were Baba’s daughters, and we both hated the idea of surrendering such an intellect to death.
I pulled my silver battle crown from my palm leaf satchel. A captured god glowed inside the intricate polytope engravings of the crown band—my sister’s greatest invention. Her gift to a new generation of polytomancists.
I lowered the crown over my head, and my senses sharpened as I bonded with my god. I felt its power course through me, ready to be wielded, making me feel as if there was nothing in this world that was out of my reach or my comprehension. This was how Karaya felt every second of her life.
“Thank you,” were Karaya’s last words. With some effort, she sat on her elbows to give me access to the god Baba had fused to her brain a lifetime ago.
“You are our strongest warrior,” I said, my right hand pressed against the back of Karaya’s head, “our most remarkable thinker, a god between the sea and the sky, greater than Baba ever was. You are so loved, Karaya.”
A flood of memories burst out of her—complex ideas and abstract concepts that threatened to overwhelm me. But I could also feel her love for me through the waves of energy that exited her body and entered mine. A love that was not tied to my usefulness to her, to Baba, or our country. She simply loved me, unconditionally. My sister, mentor, mother. I could not surrender this love to death, either.
Soon, the images ceased, the room was quiet, and our minds—the parts of ourselves that mattered most—were one.
