CHAPTER NINE

1664

YEAR OF THE CRUX

Siinkai

Bei Continent

The Planet Teros

In the predawn, Jun wakes to learn Masar has secured them a ride from the innkeeper’s niece, and he’s given the village his warhorse to scrap for compensation. The machine’s Trini-son steel frame alone is worth thousands, and the innkeeper’s niece is driving an ancient ground shuttle sarcastically known as a warbunny—no defenses and built small. The hustler in Jun is offended on principle, but it’s Masar’s choice. They’ll have money enough for hundreds of warhorses if this goes right.

In the bathroom, she turns on the shower and tries calling Liis again but gets no response, same as last night. She leaves a message, equal parts apologetic and easygoing. Tells her they have to zip down to the Cliffs for some equipment and after that she’ll call again.

Hours later, there’s still no word. Not even an acknowledgment. Something starts to wriggle in Jun’s brain, pinging back and forth until she’s generating enough anxiety to power the bunny twice over. Liis can be a grumpy fucker, but she’s not petulant and she’s not passive-aggressive. She ought to have responded by now.

“Who do you keep calling?”

Masar’s voice startles her. He’s sitting in the front passenger seat, Jun crammed in the back, and she doesn’t know how he can even see her checking her comm. The innkeeper’s niece, sporting a perpetually blasé look, glances at her in the rearview.

“I’m not calling anyone.”

“You did this morning.” Masar turns around to glare at her. “And last night.” Jun scowls, refusing to answer, and his look sharpens. “I’m a fairly laid-back person. But when I start to think my partner is keeping secrets from me, I—”

“Partner is a stretch. And you made calls last night, too. Don’t think I didn’t notice.” He doesn’t relent, and she rolls her eyes. “Look, I’ve got family in the Ma’kess System and she’s not answering my comms. That’s it, all right? Relax.”

Masar looks taken aback. “You have family?”

“Why the fuck shouldn’t I have family?”

“I dunno, you just seem like—”

“What, you think I’m some kind of intergalactic loner criminal who’s sprung out of nowhere with no family?”

“Kata’s tit, don’t be so dramatic, I was only—”

“Might be the blocks won’t let your comm through.”

The Jeveni teenager interrupts with all the arch composure of someone used to rolling her eyes at her parents. Jun and Masar stop, looking at her. She can’t be older than seventeen and she’s a fascinating mix of Jeveni tradition and modern fashion. The jet studs in her ears and nose are pure Jeveni. The black twists of her hair are a Katish fashion. She’s wearing a black band around her left forearm, which usually signifies mourning but has become a macabre affectation among Makessn teenagers in recent years. It goes great with her silver eyeliner, drawn out in whorls on her cheeks that proudly accentuate her Jeveni tattoo. Her clothes are all hand-me-downs, but there’s something proud in her tilted chin. What must it be like for Jeveni kids to grow up in backwater villages cut off from most of the Treble? Jun feels a flicker of affinity.

Masar repeats, “The blocks?”

“She means the casting net blockers. Cities have started throwing them up in the past twenty-four hours, to stop protesters being able to collaborate. It’s a good thought, kid, but the blocks aren’t quite up to the challenge of me.”

The girl shrugs. She’s been chewing a mint reed all morning, insolent and cool. “Then she’s probably mad at you. Give her space. Get her a present. It’ll wash, yeah?”

All said with typical teenage bravado.

“Maybe I’m talking about my ma,” Jun says.

Another shrug. “Nobody sweats over their comm like that unless it’s a sweetheart involved. Just saying.”

Masar’s face splits with a grin, and Jun barely stifles her own amusement. She leans forward, gesturing at the black band on the girl’s forearm.

“Why do you kids wear that shit?” she asks.

The girl flicks her a look in the rearview mirror. It’s assessing. Like maybe Jun doesn’t deserve to know the fashion logics of today’s youth.

“My cousin was on The Wild Run. The ship with all the casters.”

If it were possible to drop into the earth and never reemerge, Jun would. Her whole body turns heavy with shame, and the tightening along Masar’s jaw, the way he looks away from them and out the window—he’s clearly as embarrassed for her as she is for herself.

“I heard about that,” says Jun. She hasn’t had much time to follow the caster forums still discussing the attack, but most of it is depressingly unsympathetic. Why were so many Jeveni traveling together? Why did they break the law by gathering in those numbers? A tragedy, yes, but—

Only a few people have challenged the pirate attack story, positing that it was actually Kindom retaliation for the trouble in the factories. If that’s true, Jun determines to prove it. Just as soon as she’s got some time on her hands.

“I’m so sorry it happened. Sorry for your loss.”

The teenager shrugs, as if Jun’s apology is another embarrassment. Shit if it isn’t. Masar, apparently well versed in how not to make an ass of himself, says, “May the barren flourish.”

“May the barren flourish,” agrees the girl. Then she points at an upcoming road sign. “Ten miles to the first Siinkai exits.”

Relieved, Jun looks out the window. Sure enough, the weedy countryside is starting to give way to developed plots of land, and on the road ahead she can already see the sprawling breadth of the coastal city of Siinkai. The Cliffs, however, are a distant structure, built into the sheet of rocky outcropping on the city’s southern flank.

“Don’t go into the city itself,” Jun instructs. “Take the Noor Ma exit and follow the highway southeast till we’re out of the suburbs. I’ll show you.”

It’s another forty-five minutes. Eventually the traffic thickens, then crawls as drivers fight over intersections and exits. The teenager is an adept driver, for all her country life, and she gets them through the worst of it, following Jun’s directions to exit onto a nameless road that winds up into the soaring coastal cliffs.

Within minutes they are high enough to see the ocean beyond the city. It’s an incomprehensibly blue and beautiful thing, shaming the interminable red glut of Bei continent’s ordinary landscapes. The radiation shields actually reflect the ocean out here, which makes the air seem clearer and cleaner. As if Teros could actually be beautiful.

The road dead-ends in a dilapidated courtyard that abuts the cliff face. Wide stairways are carved into the rock, climbing upward toward a dozen towers of stone and the half-destroyed body of the abandoned palace that is the Silt Glow Cliffs. When Jun steps out of the warbunny, she’s caught between equal impressions of grandeur and decay. In its heyday, the palace was a marvel of engineering, carved out of the very mountain, all its columns and arches and staircases of a single piece. Today, that master class of architecture and stonemasonry remains—but only in the east wing. The other wings are no more than broken sheets and collapsed rubble, bombed into obscurity during the civil war of 1512, which the Khen family only survived through Kindom intervention.

Masar leans into the warbunny’s window, speaking to the teenager in Je. Jun switches on her translator bot, watching text scroll across her ocular.

“—stop anywhere. Get home to your uncle. I promised him.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Are you going on pilgrimage?”

The kid hesitates, hems, picks at her thumbnail, and tosses the masticated mint reed out the window. “People say it’s not safe to go. Lots of mobs at the docks, looking for Jeveni.”

Masar frowns. After a moment he says hesitantly, “You’ve got a right to go.”

She cocks an eyebrow at him. “What do you know about it? You don’t live out here.”

Masar looks taken aback, even wounded, but the girl only stares at him placidly. After a minute he sighs and gives her shoulder a tight squeeze. “All right. Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, and Masar steps back.

“Stay safe, kid,” Jun calls out in Teron.

The girl gives a dismissive wave. She brings the bunny around and zips back down the road. Jun watches Masar watch her go. From the bits of Je she’s overheard, it doesn’t seem like he walked into Fezn a stranger. He hasn’t got the wheel tattoo, and even the ones who have assimilated wear the tattoo. So he can’t be Jeveni himself. But what kind of pirate is friends with Jeveni separatists?

“Speaking of keeping secrets,” she says.

He frowns at her. “What?”

But they don’t have time to get into it. “Nothing. We should go.”

She watches him absorb the cliff face and stairways above them. He has his giant shotgun gripped in one hand and makes no move to strap it to the holster on his back. Jun, aware that plenty of bandits could be watching for them from the cliffs, is suddenly grateful for his weapon, and his size. The swelling in his face from Captain Foxer’s beating has gone down enough that he’s got both eyes open now, and that doesn’t hurt, either.

“Is there anything up there?” he asks doubtfully.

“The east wing,” Jun replies, heading toward the appropriate staircase. “It was mostly guest quarters and a casino. The rebels ignored it to take out the main palace, and by the time they could have finished the whole thing off, cloaksaan had arrived. The Khens relocated to Trini-so. Worse climate, but fewer detractors. Perfect place to breed more murderers. All this was abandoned until the casters took over.”

They climb for fifteen minutes. Jun flatters herself she does enough sparring with Liis to remain in relatively good shape, but by the time they reach the top she’s dripping sweat and breathing hard. If she had her ship, they could have landed on the flight deck (the only surviving piece of the west wing) and walked from there. But The Gunner is still in Lo-Meek; the dockworkers have probably already sold it to settle her unpaid rental fee—and lined their damned pockets with the excess, those fuckers.

But now, standing on the flatlands that face the entrance to the east wing, there’s at least the prospect of success.

Inside the dilapidated receiving room, the ground is unevenly tiled in white and gray stone, echoing what was once a mosaic of Terotonteris. Intricately carved and crumbling columns support a shadowy mezzanine some fifteen feet above their heads, and there are moldering armchairs and couches scattered throughout the space, one or two occupied by figures that appear to be sleeping. Jun has no doubt they’re armed and ready to spring. It’s all just as she remembers.

Directly ahead, a large elevator shaft with no car spears the mezzanine and disappears into higher, unseen levels. There are no staircases. It is the only way in or out. But it’s guarded by a massive stone desk, and the single active figure in the room: an archivist.

At the sight of them, Masar looks suspiciously at Jun.

“What’s an archivist doing in a caster den?” he demands.

Jun walks forward. “You’re pretty naive for a pirate. Archivists run the Silt Glow Cliffs.”

Masar follows her, muttering, “I always took archivists for respectable.”

Jun shakes her head. “Yeah, well. Some of them can’t afford to stay that way.”

As for the archivist themself, they are hunched over the stone desk with insectile posture, hands dancing across what Jun knows to be a projected casting table. They wear the traditional white uniform, linen pants and tunic hanging loosely on a skinny frame. They’ve added elaborate goggles to the ensemble, and their hair, which most archivists keep short, tumbles down their shoulders and back in matted clumps. When Jun and Masar stand before them at last, she notices the rough green tattoos on their pale brown forearms, typical of the kind one gets in work colonies.

The archivist doesn’t react to her approach, though of course they know she’s there. After a moment, she knocks her knuckles on the desk. Its dense stone absorbs and mutes the sound, yet the archivist looks up with a start, buggy goggles ridiculous.

Jun bows over her hands. “Learner and Light. We need a casting room, tier seven or higher.”

The archivist stares at her, as if they don’t understand. Then, with measured movements, they pull off the goggles, blinking rapidly. There are heavy impressions around their eyes from where the goggles fit, and a sore on the bridge of their nose. She recognizes the glazed look in their stare. “Tech face,” people call it. Like hypnosis or a dream. It takes them a moment to fully incorporate again. Only then do they give her a thorough perusal. Jun recognizes that look, too.

“You’ve brought a name, nah?” they ask.

Jun narrows her eyes. “Look at my face, friend. You’ve seen me before.”

The archivist pouts their lower lip like a peevish child. “How should I know you? You—who disappear behind my goggles. You invisible thing. I can see you now.”

Jun is familiar with the performative absurdity of archivists, who would prefer the world see them as shamans rather than glorified casters who come from money.

“Fine,” Jun says. “Let me show you who I am.”

She curls the fingers of her right hand, as if to grip a ball, and tosses it gently, underhand, into the orbit of the casting table. The archivist fumbles their goggles back into place, immediately running hands through the contents of her offering—a bit of code she wrote up last night, good for hacking several guardsaan casting hubs in Siinkai. The archivist’s fingers pluck an invisible harp as they start to mutter and hum.

“Ah, you,” they grumble. “Come upon us with your head covered, nah? Very shy. Try to make up for it with gifts.” They sniff wetly. They stare at the space where she is standing, even though they can’t see anything. With her Hood program enabled, she is utterly invisible. “So all right then, all right. Have a room, have a good room, tier eight. Good? Good. And a back door, as well?”

Jun thinks of her bank account, whose numbers she has always guarded like a dragon.

“There’s no need to gouge me for—”

“Have a back door,” they interrupt, something different in their voice. They flip up their goggles again, eyes bulbous and rheumy. “Everybody needs it, sometimes, the way out. The hunters are hunted, nah?”

A million tiny hairs stand up on Jun’s body at once. For all their meaningless jabber, archivists do drop useful hints, sometimes. She leans closer.

“What have you seen?”

They make a silly gesture in the air, as if casting information for her review, but nothing appears, and their eyes remain locked on hers.

“Just a feeling. Just a whisper. Sunstep, Junian Graylore—or is it Jun Ironway?”

Jun flinches—makes very certain not to glance at Masar.

“What a non-face you have. Still, names catch on. Be safe, nah? Put your eyes on the back of your head, it’s good, it’s good, here we are!”

Behind the archivist, a car begins to descend the elevator shaft, dropping into place on the ground floor with a smoothness that belies the decrepitude of the Cliffs. Its doors open silently. The archivist bows them toward it with over-the-top solicitude, and Jun knows she won’t get any more information from them. She homes in on the weight of the gun at her hip and takes reassurance from Masar beside her.

The last thing Jun sees before the elevator doors close is the hunched archivist, grinning wildly.

“Are they always that creepy?” asks Masar, as the car lifts upward.

Jun shakes her head distractedly. “Only when they want to be.”

That name is burning in her thoughts: Ironway Ironway Ironway.

“I’ve been to the archivist’s academy in Riin Kala. They all seemed like your average asocial scholars.”

His mention of the academy only heightens Jun’s unease. She makes a dismissive gesture, hoping he’ll drop it, glad he didn’t seem to notice what the archivist called her. Either that or the name meant nothing to him. And why should it?

“Living on the fringes makes everyone weird,” she says.

The car halts on the eighth level of the palace. The doors open on darkness. In the courtyard below, they had brilliant sunshine and the ocean behind, but now they are enclosed in a shadowy stone tunnel. The average person would find this claustrophobic, but for the people who visit the Cliffs, it brings the comfort of all hiding places. The sensation of anonymity, however feigned. Jun’s breaths come a little easier, and she scans the hall with purpose. There are doors on either side, all dark except for one about halfway down, frame lit gold.

She’s there in moments, and a quick ocular scan snicks the door open.

It’s a small room, but exactly what she hoped for. The casting table is state-of-the-art, with shadow lines connecting it to every major hub in the system, and enough processing power to manage anything Jun can throw at it. She shuts the door as soon as Masar is inside, gratified by the sound of the lock engaging, and by the hum of the working machinery. The only light comes from the monitors and console themselves, glowing gold like the door did.

Finally, she looks up at the ceiling. Masar follows her gaze and then whistles.

“Shit. I thought it was a metaphor or something.”

It wasn’t. The square outline of the escape hatch provides an unanticipated jolt. Not least because she has no idea where it leads. Jun drops her eyes back to the machinery in the room, breathing deeply.

“All right,” she says to herself. “All right.”

From that moment, it’s as if Masar isn’t even there. It’s as if she’s a swimmer, dropping into a deep lake. Jun wakes the casting table with an operatic sweep of her arms, using her own neural link like a lure that catches the flowing power of the Silt Glow Cliffs. Images flood the walls in flat and three-dimensional projections, turning the room into a cacophony of lights. First order of business is to sever the connection of any peeping eyes. She visions the spybot programs as so many amorphous ghosts in archivist white, lurking in corners. They are easily disbanded. She coaxes the contents of the memory coin out into the world, spreading them out on the operating table of her own mind. Every frame of the memory is obscured, strangled within the fragile netting of the encryption. But now, here, with an arsenal of illegal casting lines available to her, Jun can see so much more. The hack job Masar made of things appears to her now even balder and more corrupt, but with tender fingers she repairs the damaged code, tucking the images back into the repaired encryption. She must start everything from scratch.

The origin of the constraining net is obvious now—a program of limitless iterations that traces back to the fourteenth century. She visions it as a thousand-yard snake coiled into an armoring network, with fangs in every scale, sunk into the flesh of its target. Try to loosen them, and the fangs will lock on, and shred. They are all of a single mind, imbued with a knowledge of past attacks and parries. Nothing that has ever been tried before will work. When Jun limns the boundaries, tests the defenses, touches a little too close to the nerve, she can feel the code hiss its furious warning.

She discovers her advantage: The captor does not want to destroy its captive.

Other encryptions will detonate at the barest hint of attack, incinerating what they shield with no regard for the lost contents. This encryption is a rattler. How else did the coin survive Masar going at it with an ax? The encryption showed him what his sloppy efforts were doing and gave him a chance to back away. The solution, then, is not to attack the fanged creature. The solution is to slip between its fangs and become part of what it protects.

Jun blinks heavily, slipping out of the fugue in which she’s been working. She’s conscious again of Masar, who leans in the corner, his shotgun propped against the wall beside him. With massive arms crossed over his chest, he looks bored.

“Welcome back. You’ve been twitching and mumbling to yourself for half an hour.”

“I may have found a solution, but I have to go back in. It’ll take longer this time.”

Masar huffs in exasperation, then meets her eyes directly, speculatively.

“You’re as creepy as the archivist when you do that, you know.”

In this state, Jun feels a little drunk, a little disarmed, and maybe that’s why she admits with uncharacteristic honesty, “I trained to be an archivist, once.”

He looks at her without expression, wheels clearly turning.

“Didn’t care to finish?”

Jun almost smiles. Through her mind flash images of the academy halls in Riin Kala, and the casting labs as large and holy as temples. But that way lie thoughts too dangerous to indulge, and she doesn’t want to distract herself from the work at hand.

“Didn’t have the opportunity,” she says, flippant. “You can’t interrupt me. I’ll be going deep this time.”

He makes a gesture, as if to say, Go on, then.

Time loses all meaning. She adjusts her ocular to white out everything but the projections before her, dims her aural link until she’s swimming in a cool and silent river. It’s this, her disappearance into the code, that betrays her training as an archivist. Street casters are like mechanics, navigating casting technologies as machines separate from themselves. Archivists turn casting into a poem, where encryptions become insects, or stars, or kernels of sand; where the flow of information between a casting link and the wider net creates subterranean tunnels.

Jun makes herself a spelunker, a fox, a slipstream. She becomes a microorganism, approaching the fanged scales of her snakelike adversary, and crawling between its coils. She has no knowledge of the memory’s contents beyond Lucos Alanye and a sphere of jevite. So, she images the sphere. She sees it as a chunk of the Black Ocean itself, polished and liquid. It has no stars—only threads of bloody viscera, caught in the creature’s fangs.

It’s fragile. Volatile. She’ll never get it past the lattice cage it’s caught in, but she can clone it, reproduce it into the little box she’s brought with her. She sees Alisiana’s hands, lifting the jevite out of the box—and then reverses the sequence, lowers it back in, pristine and untouched, not even fingerprints marring the surface. It exudes heat. It pulls with gravity. She compresses it between her open palms, feeling its very molecules condense—until it is a thumb-sized memory coin, easily tucked in a single pocket.

Getting out is harder than getting in. She can’t make herself small again. All the weight and girth of the pilfered coin has spread her out and stretched her wide. She begins to feel the press of the snake’s coils on her skin, and the prick of its fangs along her nerves. It flexes its clever body against her, and it’s in this crucial, delicate moment—that something shoves her.

“Jun!”

The voice is an echoing warble. Her body jolts again and the encryption hisses. Around her, the fangs dig deeper.

“Jun, for fuck’s sake!”

Shit, this is not the time. If she pulls out now, the net will shred the cloned memory right from her imagined pocket. It’s already going into paroxysms. It’ll detonate everything it touches and toss her back into the real world with nothing but empty screens and a fried memory coin.

“Jun!” something shouts at her.

She has only one more trick. She thinks of the warhorse with its protracting, infallible shield. She makes herself into a warhorse. She swathes herself in steel a half dozen inches thick, and before the encryption can blow them all to pieces, she lobs her own destructive code into the fray, and dives free just as the bomb goes off.

Her ocular resets. Her aural link switches on with a deafening crack. Masar stands over her, shaking her with a wild look, and the projections and the casting desk have all gone dark.

A bleating alarm shrieks at them.

“Evacuate,” warn the Silt Glow Cliffs. “Evacuate. Kindom raid is imminent.”