Minna Alone • Grafting • A Spy • Treasures in the Ice • The Moveable Empire • He Brings the War

Then I (Minna) was the most alone I have ever been, the only living thing bigger than bacteria on a space station above a dead world. I made little tendrils from my fingertips to stretch through the cracks in the glass box and opened the door from the outside. Then I came tumbling out and tried to push away the panic, because I do not do well in places where there is no life. In places like that I feel like there is no air even when there is plenty of air. I no longer fall apart and cry like I did the first time I woke in a place with no trees, but it is not because I do not feel like falling apart and crying, it is because I have adapted as best I can.

I made myself breathe in and out, slow, slow, and then I searched the station. It is true that I am sufficient unto myself in most times and places, but I can still be hurt, and in a place that is too dark or deep or where the sun is too weak or broken, I could still starve. I get cold and I get scared and I get thirsty. I get lonely too but I could not think about that, or I would curl up and in on myself like a fiddlehead fern.

I found a sack and filled it with supplies of freeze-dried food and pouches of water and nutrient goo to squeeze. It was a small pile but it was something, and to have anything at all was a comfort to me. I then went to the lab and massaged a spot on my thigh until the skin slid aside and revealed the little hidden cavity I had grown in my flesh, and the tiny vial of Zax’s blood that I had stolen and secreted away during my work on the Polyp.

I was glad that I had guessed the mind of the Lector properly. If he had set the station to sterilize itself again, I would have died, and if he had put me out the airlock, likewise. If he had tried to kill me I would have had to fight and fight and fight, and against him, with his augmented muscles and his strengthened bones and who knows what other powers, I was not sure I would have won, even at my thorniest and most poisonous. With Polly by his side I could not have prevailed, I am sure. But I thought: the Lector is cruel. He will leave me here alone to suffer when he is done, I think. I gambled, and I was right.

Now that I had time and privacy, I set about grafting Zax’s blood into my own.

The process was tricky. Several of my fingers withered and fell off before I adjusted the blood to sufficient compatibility with my own. Luckily I had watched the Lector use the strange machines to multiply the blood volume so I was able to make more material to work with.

After a day my blood was happy with Zax’s blood, and tasting it, and savoring, and recognizing the use inside the cells. There is something strange there, yes, something that makes the worlds pass, and I do not understand it, but I do not have to understand it to copy it. I taught my body to make my blood be like Zax’s blood. I adapt myself. I do not alter the whole of the world to suit me. This is why I will never be an emperor. (It is one reason anyhow.)

Once my blood was like Zax’s blood in the necessary way I prepared myself and I went to sleep.

The next world was where I began my life as a spy.

First I changed how I looked: I made my hair very light from when it was dark, and my skin and my eyes too, and it took a while but I grew my nose longer and my chin more pointed and I made myself a little taller and more slender. I say “first” but it is slow, to change that way. If it is not done little by little the skin tears among other things, so I made the change across several worlds.

That world was made of ice, and there was not much life there, but a little. I crept through the crevasses, glad of gravity but unhappy with everything else. In the ice there were people and machines and houses all frozen. Some of the people looked surprised, and I wondered if the ice had come quickly and how it had done so. I climbed over a ridge and saw smoke on the horizon and crept toward it, slow, slow, patient. Closer in I heard a noise like bang-bang-crack, bang-bang-crack.

My eyes were sharp as sharp and soon I found a high place with the sun behind me, hiding me in the glare of the light on the ice, and I looked down. The Lector was there, with Polly. I do not know what they were burning but they had a fire and I longed for its warmth. Polly wore a hood to hide from the sun and had a sharp tool and she hammered at the ice, and the Lector picked up small things she excavated and exclaimed over them. Soon she hit a sort of tunnel in the ice and went down, past where it was translucent and into where it was dark, and then she brought out something like a person but made of metal, with four arms and a head like a dome and spidering legs in multitudes. The Lector did something to a panel on the metal person’s back and it began to whir and spin and clamber, and after that it dug in the ice for them, and brought out more small things that the Lector looked over and put away. I wished Victory-Three was with me because they know the workings and meanings of machines, and all I knew was to be worried.

I wished for a weapon for murder, but I knew the Lector was tough and I would need something more than a sharp piece of ice to crush or pierce him.

I watched them all that day until the Lector did something to the robot, and made it pull in its arms and legs and become a sort of cylinder small enough to hug, and then he hugged it, and Polly hugged him, and they all flickered away.

I investigated their camp but could not tell what they might have taken, except the things they left behind looked like broken guns, so perhaps they took the unbroken ones. After some time I slept too.

From a cliff top in the next world I saw giant creatures, like people but bigger, grown as tall as three of me and broad enough to match. They moved slowly and plants grew all over them and that made me happy, the way the giants lived together with the plants here. I followed the Lector to a village of theirs, where he made a lot of noise and fuss.

The Lector stayed there for five days, using his drugs to keep himself from sleeping, and in that time, the village was transformed. The biggest of the giants wore a strange cap of metal and I think it made him do what the Lector wanted. I saw him building things like that on the station, though he hid them away when he noticed me looking. Some of the other giants waved their clubs and tried to fight and it was a terrible thing. The robot – the Lector named it Calamitas, I learned later on, and it was a machine with a mind like Vicki is maybe, but altered by the Lector to be loyal – turned on the giants and cut them down as easily as it had cut through the ice. Easier even because flesh is softer than ice most of the time.

The Lector gave the leader of the giants a shiny gun, and where the gun was pointed, things froze into ice. There were little bombs that did the same thing, ice grenades, and I think that the world before was the victim of a bigger bomb or many bombs that did the same thing, but more so.

On the third day one of the giants began to make a statue of the Lector, standing even bigger than the giants themselves, and holding a war club in one hand and an ice gun in the other.

On the fourth day, the giants sent out a party with weapons, and later, on the horizon, smoke rose.

On the fifth day Polly nearly found me, doing a slinking patrol around the village, and I had to hide in a crevice between two boulders. I found some interesting lichen inside though to pass the time.

(Oh. I stayed awake and did not travel because I do not have to go to sleep all the way all at once. The brain has two halves, did you know? I made it so I can let one half of my brain sleep while the other half is awake, and then switch. Some animals do it and I can do what some animals can do, when I make the effort to make the changes inside. I am sort of slower and not as bright when I am half asleep, but I can respond to dangers, and, more importantly, being half asleep does not make me travel. It is a helpful thing for a spy to be awake as long as she needs to be.)

Then they were gone. I went into the village – they had greeted the Lector peacefully enough and I thought they had courtesy rules for strangers. Perhaps they did once but they didn’t anymore. I was seized and dragged to the largest dwelling and forced to kneel before the leader with his crown of metal. “Who are you?” the leader said in a shouty way.

“My name is Minna. I am a stranger here. What is this place?”

The leader preened then, proud, and stroked the ivy that hung down his chin like a beard. “This is the First World of the Collectorium, little thing. The foundation of the Moveable Empire. We were told to beware strange creatures who seem like they don’t belong. Such creatures might threaten the empire, and the Lector’s plan. Put her in the cage. She will await our Lector’s return, and face his justice.”

I went right to sleep right then right away. (I couldn’t always do that – for a long time I needed the drugs like Zax did – but when I made my plan on the space station I realized it would be better if I could sleep quick whenever I needed, so I made some changes.)

Next I found myself in a city and I whimpered and said oh no, oh no. The buildings were like jewels, all glitter and blue, and they rose so high that clouds spun by, a forest of buildings all grace and height. I was on the roof of one building, the floor shimmering and translucent, and near me was the wreck of a flying machine that had once looked like a dragonfly and now looked like a dead and mangled dragonfly that had been on fire and was now cold.

Some of the buildings were currently on fire, and flying machines zoomed by overhead and belowfeet, some of them shooting at each other, some of them smashing into buildings and making them quake.

The Lector has not been here long, I thought, half a day maybe before me, perhaps this place was at war before him?

I soon learned, no. The Lector brought the war with him. He brings the war wherever he goes.