Glass Cannon

 

 

I AM A Shuos.

Jedao didn’t remember most of Shuos Academy, let alone graduating from it. He couldn’t help thinking of himself as a cadet, only nineteen years old, despite the fact that his body was middle-aged in appearance. While Hexarch Shuos Mikodez had assured him that the courses he was taking at the Citadel of Eyes were equivalent to the education he would have gotten at the modern academy, Jedao didn’t believe him. Jedao had spent the past two years and change as a “guest” of the hexarch, or, more accurately, a prisoner. The hexarch might have unbent enough to allow him to catch up with best practices in social engineering and how to wrangle the state of the art bath facilities. That didn’t mean he was likely to allow Jedao to extract classified information from the grid.

Naturally, that was precisely what Jedao intended to do.

I am a Shuos.

Jedao had hoped that repeating the phrase in his head, like a mantra, would magically grant him access to the memories of his older, other self. Useful memories, like how do I hack into the Shuos hexarch’s private files? Never mind that he had no idea whether Jedao One (as he’d labeled the other man, who was and wasn’t dead) would have been able to manage the feat.

At the moment, Jedao was sitting in his suite of rooms watching a poetry recital livestream. The hexarch had invited him to the performance, put on by a Shuos agent whose job it was to pretend to be an Andan. Jedao had declined, claiming that crowds made him jittery. No one had challenged the lie.

The truth was other. Jedao had not redecorated the suite since he had moved into it. The wallpaper remained tranquil green. Furniture in wood—real wood, to which he responded with unwanted atavistic delight. He shifted the chairs around from time to time, just to prove he could, and also because he wondered if it bothered his watchers. (He had no delusions of privacy in the heart of Shuos headquarters.) He watered the potted green onion plant, the same one he’d been given two years ago, with great diligence. The hexarch asked after it every time they met, although Jedao hadn’t figured out why Mikodez cared so much about container gardening. None of this did anything to ameliorate the vast emptiness in his heart, the fact that he had no human friends here, and never would.

The colors in the Citadel were wrong. In place of the stark blacks and golds of the Kel, the Citadel was dominated by Mikodez’s favorite color, that transparently soothing shade of green. A few offices sported the garish Shuos red-and-gold, complete with ink paintings of ninefoxes with their staring tails. (“We have to uphold a few clichés,” Mikodez had said.)

Gone were the ashhawks, the tapestries woven (as Dhanneth had told Jedao once upon a bed) from the uniforms of the dead, and decorated with beads smelted from ruined guns or spent ammunition. Gone was the cup he had shared with the Kel officers at high table. Gone was the life, however much a lie, that he had woken to with Hexarch Nirai Kujen, dead by Jedao’s own hand.

Increasingly, Jedao retreated to the few memories he had left, and the question that haunted him increasingly. He’d had one friend, during that vanished lifetime four centuries ago. Vestenya Ruo, fellow cadet, whom he’d had an embarrassing crush on, and who, as far as he knew, had never shown any indication of interest in Jedao. Not that way.

Sometimes Jedao caught himself daydreaming that he’d find Ruo, and—and what? He was already a rapist; Dhanneth had committed suicide to drive that point home. That didn’t, however, sway Jedao in his desire to find out what Ruo’s fate had been. He had become irrationally convinced that if Ruo had lived a long and happy life, it would prove that Jedao himself wasn’t poison to everyone he touched.

It was odd that he needed the highest level of access, available only to Mikodez and select members of his senior staff, to answer a simple question about a Shuos cadet. True, Ruo had died sometime four centuries ago; would have died no matter what, given the finiteness of human lives. But what had been so special about his death that the truth was locked away like this?

Cheris had told him only that Ruo had died young. Jedao wondered, sometimes, what details she had omitted. And there was only one way to find out.

I am a Shuos.

Jedao took a steadying breath, trying to pretend that he cared about the poetry recital. The poet had said something about peacocks. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a real one. Jedao One would have known; but that was the problem.

Right on schedule, a snakeform servitor levitated down from one of the vents in the ceiling: Hemiola. It had once tried to explain its name to Jedao, and established that Jedao had no ability at music, or understanding of its theory, other than being able to find a beat to dance to. Hemiola flashed the lights along its articulated metal carapace in a friendly green of greeting.

Jedao leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers. It wasn’t impatience. Rather, he tapped in Simplified Machine Universal: Safe?

“Safe,” Hemiola flashed back, even more green, if possible. Not for the first time, Jedao envied it its ability to jinx the Citadel’s surveillance system, which it used when the two of them wanted to talk, or, as now, when Jedao wanted to hide his activities from his watchers.

Too bad Kujen never thought to install me in a servitor body, Jedao thought. He’d asked Hemiola about it. After all, people already offloaded some of their memories into their augments. Hemiola had said that, as far as it could tell, the process by which Kujen had created Jedao had worked through a different, more complex mechanism involving exotic effects. So much for that.

Thank you for covering for me, Jedao said.

“It’s no problem,” Hemiola said. It didn’t emphasize that he needed to be quick, that every time it screwed with surveillance, it was running a risk. They both knew that.

Ordinarily the two of them met here, Jedao because he could only endure so much of his self-imposed isolation, Hemiola because it, too, was far from home. What went unspoken was that they were, aside from Mikodez, the last people who remembered Nirai Kujen with any fondness, however complicated.

Jedao wasted no time on apologies and called up a separate subdisplay, this one of pornography—a plausible reason for a man to want some time alone, surely?—leaving the poet-performer to declaim verses about more birds. Mocking the Kel, probably; he wasn’t clear on the nuances. Using the techniques that Hemiola had taught him, he began hacking, grid-diving, whatever they called it these days.

This should be harder, Jedao thought, bemused, as the system opened itself to him like a flower. (Great, now he was thinking in poetic symbols too.) But then, “hard” was relative. Thanks to Hemiola’s spying, and that of the other servitors that it had made arrangements with, Jedao had a detailed understanding of the hexarch’s security measures.

Access to the files he wanted should have required him to log in from Mikodez’s personal terminal. (“He must be certain no one can spoof it,” Hemiola had remarked.) Over the years, however, the servitors had mapped the system down to every flicker that passed through the hardware, down to the very molecules. And Jedao himself had an advantage that he had done his best to keep from his captors.

What Mikodez knew: that Jedao, however much he appeared a manform, was not human. Jedao’s body regenerated even from death. Kujen, who had designed him, had intended for him to live forever.

What Mikodez might not yet be aware of: Jedao could drag himself through the space-time weave as moths did. It was how he’d escaped the massacre of the Kel (my Kel, he couldn’t help thinking, with a stab of grief). It had also hurt so badly that Jedao didn’t care to repeat the experience.

Beyond that, moths spoke to each other through minute fluctuations in space-time: gravity waves. Jedao heard the Citadel’s swarms of shadowmoths singing to each other every night, lullaby and torment in one.

Jedao hadn’t attempted to contact the shadowmoths. While everyone knew that defense swarms orbited the Citadel, he wasn’t supposed to know their locations while they were stealthed. He wanted to join in the song, and talk to them, and be welcomed. But he remembered the utter silence with which the Kel warmoths had reacted to him, and he didn’t have any reason to believe that Shuos shadowmoths would feel differently. Besides, any anomaly in their behavior would be noticed by Mikodez’s staff, and Jedao couldn’t afford that.

Instead, he’d practiced the speech-of-moths quietly, and learned to manipulate matter, with Hemiola standing guard. At first he’d been clumsy with it—he’d knocked all the riotous scented soaps into the tub that one time—and then he’d gained in finesse. In conjunction with his othersense, which allowed him to “see” distributions of mass with distracting precision, it gave him a chance to pull this off. Just this moment, for instance, in correlation with the master maps that he’d hacked into, he could tell that Mikodez’s primary office was empty.

That was all the opening Jedao needed to reach into Mikodez’s office, enter the necessary verifications not by using the keyboard input but the terminal’s internal circuitry itself, and pipe access to Jedao’s own workstation.

Kujen would have figured it out, assuming he hadn’t counted on it from the beginning. Whether he had informed Mikodez about this detail was what Jedao was about to find out.

Hemiola’s lights sheened orange when the third subdisplay came up. It featured a background photo of a calico cat napping in a sink. Jedao recognized it as one of Zehun’s pets—specifically the one that, disconcertingly, was named after him.

Jedao started to sweat. The marrow-deep pain was as he remembered it, if finer in scale. The fabric of his uniform—red-and-gold, how he hated the sight of it—clung damply to his back. He wiped his palms on his pants. Two years and he still hadn’t grown accustomed to going everywhere with naked hands, and this despite the fact that he’d never earned the half-gloves, either.

I am a Shuos, he thought. Fourth time; lucky unlucky four. He thought of all the Kel deaths he was responsible for, in this life and in the one he couldn’t remember.

He’d come this far. It would be a shame to let the opportunity slide past. So he set his fingers to the workstation and entered his first query. It would have been safer to do this using his ability to manipulate gravity, but he didn’t enjoy the pain. This would have to do.

What the fuck became of you, Ruo? Jedao wondered as he dug through the filesystem. Did he really want to know what had become of his best friend? The boy he’d played pranks with? Whom he’d pined after but never asked out? (And why hadn’t he? Had there been a falling out?)

Vestenya Ruo, Shuos cadet, tracked as Shuos infantry. Jedao had no idea why even a top-secret record clung to the old euphemism for assassin. He’d asked Mikodez about the term once. Mikodez had shrugged and said, “Habit”—another one of those maddening non-answers.

Ruo had attended Shuos Academy Prime from 826 to—826. The end date hit Jedao like a blow to the stomach. Nausea washed through him as he wondered what had gone wrong.

The first date was right. They’d been first-years together. As sieve-like as his memories were, Jedao knew that much.

But less than a year in academy?

The record didn’t end there. Ruo hadn’t been expelled, which would have been bad enough. Nor had he graduated in a single year, which would have been a miracle.

No—Ruo had died. The record specified, in dry, bloodless detail, that Ruo had run afoul of a visiting Rahal magistrate while playing a heresy game. Ruo had committed suicide rather than be outprocessed and handed over to the Rahal.

And the game had been designed by one Cadet Garach Jedao Shkan.

That can’t be right, Jedao thought, and: I would never.

Tears pricked his eyes. Angrily, he scrubbed them away with the back of his hand. Had he—had he maneuvered Ruo into suicide on purpose? And if so, why?

But the record had no answers for him.

I loved him, Jedao thought, and he’s gone. He’d looked sidelong at Ruo during the classes that they had together, admiring the fineness of his features, longing to run his fingers through the mane of hair that Ruo kept tied back in a ponytail. Imagined the weight of that solid body atop his.

But he’d been convinced that he’d loved Dhanneth, too; and look how that had ended. Was his treatment of Dhanneth part of a pattern that he’d missed because of the amnesia? And if so, how could he make it up to the dead?

I believe he died young, Kel Cheris had said to him. Sparing him the truth. There was no way she hadn’t known.

Jedao didn’t feel spared. He couldn’t see why this information was so deeply classified. Especially when he knew that Mikodez, for all his quixotic moods, did everything for a reason when it came to security.

“Are you all right?” Hemiola asked in worried yellow lights, then flushed pink. “Of course you’re not all right.” It had better vision than humans did, and in most regards, than Jedao himself. It already knew what the record said.

“He would have been dead anyway,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t convincing even himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say Ruo’s name out loud, and not because he was worried about surveillance.

“Is that all you wanted to find out?”

“No,” Jedao said. “Just one more thing.”

He had to dig around to locate what he was looking for. Mikodez named all his files sensible things, which only surprised Jedao a little: as much as Mikodez liked to play at high whimsy, his successor would someday depend on being able to locate important information. And Mikodez cared about his successors; cared that what he built should outlast him.

Not my problem, Jedao told himself. It might even have been true. He opened the latest of the psychological evaluations that Mikodez had ordered his nephew and contact specialist, Andan Niath, to do on Jedao himself.

The file was long and dreary. It took an effort not to skim. He knew already that he was unfit to leave the Citadel and rejoin mainstream society; possibly not fit even to interact with anyone but his carefully selected keepers, including the contact specialist. He didn’t need to be told that.

The occasional odd detail leapt out at him. Displays no phobia of the dark, for instance. Surely such a common trigger would have disqualified him for military service? Granted that they had recovered him from deep space after the Battle of Terebeg two years ago, but a whole section followed on his responses to a test that they had given him, which had involved a series of lurid paintings.

At last he came to Zehun’s summation, which was what interested him the most. Recommendation: subject is no closer to divulging the secret of why Hexarch Kujen’s command moth mutinied at Terebeg. Subject should be terminated.

Jedao’s hand slipped; he almost accidentally deleted the file. Which wasn’t easy, what was he thinking, the system was logging all activity. Stupid of him, especially since he shouldn’t care. Zehun was civil to him, but there was no love lost between the two of them.

“Hemiola,” Jedao said as he logged out and covered his tracks to the extent that they could be covered, which wasn’t very, “I’m going to need more of your help than I realized.”

Hemiola blinked anxiously at him.

“I need passage off the Citadel to—a starport,” Jedao said. “Any starport. I can’t stow away inside a voidmoth here; they’ll catch me. But I might have a chance if I cling to the carapace.”

Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to breathe. He’d tested this in his bathtub, which would have looked either silly or tragic if anyone had walked in on him. (Hemiola had disapproved strongly of this experiment, but he’d successfully argued that drowning was a temporary inconvenience.) All—”all“—he had to do was web himself to the exterior.

Hemiola’s lights went through a veritable rainbow of misgivings. “I see a way,” it said at last. “Follow me.”

 

 

SIX MINUTES BEFORE the end of class, and Ajewen Cheris, currently going by the name of Dzannis Paral, wondered who was looking forward to it more: herself, or her sixteen students.

No one had called her “Cheris” since she had moved to the world of Esrala to live as a Mwennin among Mwennin, least of all the children, ranging from ages eight to fourteen, in her class. Cheris’s mother might be dead, and the Mwennin, her mother’s people, scattered and much diminished—Cheris’s own fault, a guilt that ran deep—but here, now, a few survived. Most days she was glad of it, and of the fact that there were children at all.

Cheris had tutored math as a cadet in Kel Academy, but that had been, as Mikodez would have said, a completely different kettle of foxes. Not only had the topics been more advanced—applied and abstract algebra, plus the formation notation specific to the Kel—she’d been tutoring peers, fellow cadets. Cadets did not chew on styluses, stick wads of homemade candy under the tables, pull each other’s hair, or (admittedly one of the nicer surprises) bring in a pet snake to show her.

Her students were, varyingly, bright, sleepy, curious, fidgety, and more difficult to predict than Kel. It wasn’t true that Kel were all alike, as though they were woodblock prints. But the Kel did select for a certain spirit of conformity. Mwennin parents, on the other hand, didn’t “select” at all. The children they had were the children they had.

Cheris taught in one of the rooms of the community building, which the settlers considered a luxury. People in the hexarchate proper had neighborhood halls where they could gather and gossip and, inevitably, listen to the Doctrine briefings by the local Vidona-approved delegate. Here, the Mwennin had to adhere to the revised calendar—her calendar, although she tried not to think of it that way, not least because she couldn’t afford for the Mwennin to deduce her identity—but they didn’t hide many of the old traditions. Frequently the children themselves told Cheris about folklore and foods that she only stumblingly remembered from her own youth.

A girl and an alt started squabbling over who had the prettier stylus. When they ignored the first and second warnings, Cheris escalated: “Heads down, please.” The children grumbled but obeyed, mumbling the meditation-chant that she had taught them to help them quiet down. She had to coax the girl to a seat farther away so she wouldn’t continue the quarrel.

At least she didn’t want for classroom supplies. The settlement had basic manufacturing capabilities and some aging matter printers, for which Mikodez had privately apologized to Cheris. “You wouldn’t believe my budget problems,” he had said. “My people did what they could.” For once, Cheris believed him. She didn’t have to worry that her students would lack slates or desks or learning games. If anything, thanks to the involvement of the Shuos, they had more games, in all formats, than she was entirely comfortable with.

And yet, for all the challenges that working as a teacher had brought her, from the time her students climbed up on the roof on a lark to the incident with the thankfully edible modeling clay, Cheris had discovered, to her horror, that she was getting bored.

“Gwan,” Cheris said, wondering how it was that wrangling an energetic nine-year-old girl who constantly chewed on things was, in its way, more harrowing than being shot at. “Take that out of your mouth, please.” Weren’t kids supposed to grow out of that? By age four at least?

(She thought about having kids of her own someday, if she met the right women or alts. The settlement had the necessary medical labs, even some crèches for those Mwennin who wanted to use them. Then she looked at her students, as much as she adored them, and had second thoughts.)

Gwan took the mutilated stylus out of her mouth. “Sorry, Teacher!” she said. She was always sorry. As far as Cheris could tell, Gwan was sincere, she just had a wandering attention span and a need to fidget. Cheris had tried giving her candies instead, but Gwan kept passing them to the other kids, which defeated the purpose.

The minutes ticked by. Cheris was diligent about making the kids stay for every last second of class—an important lesson to learn in a world where the calendar was so vital—but she let them out the moment the augment told her it was time. Most of the younger ones skipped or ran, almost colliding with each other in their enthusiasm.

As Cheris tidied up the tables and chairs, she was aware of the weight of her handgun against her right hip, inside her pants; she was right-handed. Fortunately, Mwennin children were too respectful of adults to touch her or she would have worried about one of them discovering it by accident. The same went for the spare magazine she kept in her pocket. To keep from revealing it inadvertently, she kept most of her belongings—slate and stylus, snacks, keycard, that sort of thing—in a handbag.

After she finished, Cheris headed out. Not for the first time, she felt ridiculous for carrying a gun. Crime wasn’t unknown in the settlement, but she couldn’t recall any instances of violent crime since her arrival. Granted, as former infantry, she wasn’t concerned about petty fights. It was illegal for her to own the gun, let alone carry it to school. As a Kel, she’d been armed as a matter of course. As a civilian, she was supposed to rely on the authorities.

Tomorrow I’ll leave it at home, Cheris thought as she strolled down the road leading to her favorite bakery. (This wasn’t saying much; the settlement only had two.) Even so, she knew she was lying to herself. The part of her that was Kel might have been persuaded to leave security to the authorities. The part of her that was Jedao—that was another matter entirely.

Jedao might be a whisper of unruly memories crammed into her head, but he was real and present in ways that she hadn’t entirely untangled even after the eleven years since his death. And Jedao didn’t believe in safety, or trusting other people. During the centuries planning a one-man revolution against the hexarchate entire, with his only ally the man who had designed the high calendar in the first place, with its social strictures and ritual torture, he couldn’t afford to.

She reached the bakery and picked up her usual order of two meat pasties, which was ready for her. Several people sat at the tables outside. One of them was pretending to work out pattern-stone puzzles on their tablet. She’d identified the curly-haired alt as a Shuos agent not long after her arrival. She always saw them here, even on the days that she changed her schedule. They weren’t trying to hide from her, anyway, just from the other settlers, and she didn’t have a reason to expose them.

Cheris resisted the urge to wave at the agent as she walked by them on the way home. The winding road that led to her neighborhood was lined with an exuberance of flowers. Most of the forsythias, with their four-petaled yellow blooms, had died off in favor of splendid green leaves, but there were still azaleas in pink, white, magenta. The violets were harder to spot, both the white ones with purple streaks at their hearts and the more ordinary ones that looked like their name.

The flowers’ mingling fragrances relaxed her, and the smell of the pasties was making her hungry. She was looking forward to a quiet evening doing some grading, despite the tickling sense that she wouldn’t mind a more active existence. There was that one boy who had creative ideas about how the distributive property worked. And afterwards she could sit down in the common room and watch dueling matches.

“Anyone home?” Cheris called out as she approached the front door of the residence she shared with two women and an alt. No one responded; no surprise. Two of her housemates had jobs that kept them out until later in the day, and the third was a social butterfly and was frequently visiting friends.

Cheris entered and checked, reflexively, for signs of intruders. The hard part wasn’t the paranoia. She’d gotten used to that. The hard part was trying to fit in; pretending that she was just another Mwennin refugee.

She had a lovely home where she could catch up on dramas and dueling matches at her leisure. She taught adorable children, even if the adorable children liked to stick things in their mouths. Nobody shot at her anymore. Why wasn’t she happy?

She headed into the kitchen to put one of the meat pasties into the refrigerator, then returned to the common area and sank gratefully onto a floor cushion to eat the other. She asked the grid to image her the local news. Maybe that would ground her in reality and keep her from worrying about the state of the galaxy, which wasn’t her concern anymore.

Still, her mind wandered as the news talked about the discovery of a new primitive sea-creature. She thought of Jedao, inevitably. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all, she told the fragments of him that remained. Someone who still mourned the death of a childhood friend, to the extent that he existed to do the mourning at all, yet had been capable of murdering his command staff, people he’d known and relied upon for years.

If Cheris was honest with herself—something she had just enough psychic distance for—Jedao’s feelings for Kel Gized, his chief of staff and the first person he’d murdered, had not been entirely platonic. But Jedao wouldn’t have acted on his subterranean desires, and in any case Gized had never shown any sign of having any interest in romance. She’d been a Kel of the very old school, from the days when the Kel were an autonomous people and some of them took the sword-vow: married to her profession as a soldier, and nothing else.

Cheris had finished her pasty and was in the middle of wiping her mouth, lost in memories that were and weren’t her own, when someone rapped politely at the door. It couldn’t be one of her housemates. They would just have walked in, as the house’s minimal security system recognized them. One of their friends?

Her back prickled. Paranoia, she told herself again; but she could never be sure. “Grid,” she said softly, knowing it would hear her, “who is it?”

The grid showed her an image of her guest: a bedraggled man of middle years, his bangs clinging damply to his forehead. Not smiling, although she knew exactly what his smile looked like, and how it tilted up asymmetrically at the corners. He was panting as though he’d run to her house from—from where? She hadn’t heard the footsteps, although that didn’t mean anything definitive.

He wasn’t in Kel uniform, or Shuos uniform either. That unnerved her. The naked hands were worst of all. In her dreams she always saw them sheathed in the notorious fingerless gloves.

Cheris’s next actions happened in what she later remembered as a single seamless flow, without calculation to guide them. The gun that she had hidden for the past two years snapped into her hands as she strode to the door. She touched the selector with her finger and emptied the magazine through the unopened door in a single burst. Just as quickly, she flung herself to the side in case of return fire.

No one fired back, but the stink of gunsmoke filled her nostrils. In the sudden ringing stillness afterward, she heard the thud of a body slumping against the door; heard a stifled gasp.

“Please,” the man on the other side of the door said, with a hint of the drawl that she had fought hard to suppress in her own speech. “I’m just here to talk.”

Cheris doubted that, but now that her rational brain had caught up to her ghost-granted reflexes, she recognized the futility of retrieving more ammunition and shooting him again, as satisfying as it would be. She kept the gun in her hand, because Shuos paranoia and Kel training died hard. “Let him in,” she said to the house’s grid.

The door slid open. Jedao stared at her wide-eyed. His sensible brown jacket was marred by holes in the torso where she’d hit him in center mass, to say nothing of the grotesque, sluggish black blood dripping from the wounds where his heart should have been. She glimpsed wormlike tendrils waving feebly from beneath his skin, revealing the truth beneath the human exterior. Jedao gestured apologetically at the blood.

Cheris stood aside to let him in. Given the holes in the door, a little blood wasn’t going to make much difference, even if one of her housemates liked everything very neat.

He still didn’t enter. “Cheris?” he said uncertainly, using a high honorific.

Cheris was forcibly reminded that she’d changed her face, had subtle adjustments made to her voice, courtesy of one of Mikodez’s surgeons. Most days she didn’t think about her new face, with its broad forehead and pronounced nose, the quizzical eyebrows. It would have fooled her own parents—but they were dead, and by her own doing.

The sound of her name—her real name—brought back a sudden and unwelcome wave-crash of longing, especially paired with the familiar Shparoi drawl. Cheris remembered what it had been like when the original Jedao had talked to her, that relentless voice in her head. Looking at this other Jedao was like looking in a broken mirror and putting her hands through the shards: pain that she couldn’t escape.

“It’s me,” Cheris said, her voice harsher than she’d meant it to be. She pointed at the couch. He went over to sit on it, still dripping blood, and she closed the door. How much time did they have before her watchers called for reinforcements? Since it seemed unfruitful to say, Thanks for ruining my life, she settled for, “I’m guessing you’re not here with the hexarch’s permission. Make it quick.”

A trail of that black blood had dripped from the door to the couch, following Jedao like an accusation. He had removed his jacket and was trying ineffectually to staunch the leakage with the wadded-up fabric. “I’m here,” he said, overenunciating, “because you’re the only one who knows the truth about my past.”

There was no point continuing the conversation here, when the Shuos would already be on their way. As much as she’d been chafing at how dull and ordinary her life had been, now that she was about to lose it, a pang of resentment started up in her chest. She doubted she’d be able to go back to her classroom now that Jedao had intruded into her life.

For a moment she considered handing Jedao over to the Shuos. He wasn’t her problem; he was Mikodez’s problem. She could get rid of him and go back to the simple life she’d chosen for herself.

But he’d come to her in search of the answers she’d withheld from him before. She owed them to him, even if she’d been in denial about it.

“Did you bring any weapons?” Cheris asked.

His teeth flashed in a silent laugh. “I am a weapon,” Jedao said. He wasn’t boasting; it was as true as anything else about him. She was grateful that he didn’t say I’m your gun or she would have been tempted to punch him, even if just for the irrational feeling that that was her phrase.

Cheris had walked over to her escritoire in the common room and opened it to reveal a bag. “We’ll have to share,” she said. She kept emergency supplies in the bag in case she had to leave in a hurry: everything from cash in the local currency to ration bars (not Kel, alas), plus a survival knife and a folding tent, all the accoutrements she would need to survive in the wilderness outside the settlement’s protective dome until she could be picked up by allies.

She also retrieved a protective suit and began pulling it on over her clothes. “I have a spare,” she said, “but it’s not going to fit you. Did you bring one, or are we going to have to detour to pick one up for you?” More opportunities to be caught. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t see much alternative.

“I don’t need one,” Jedao said. “The atmosphere outside won’t kill me.” He didn’t explain how he knew this. She was willing to take his word for it, though. She knew how hard he was to kill.

“Come on, then,” Cheris said.

Jedao followed in silence. Cheris looked over her shoulder to verify that he was still there, that he hadn’t dissolved into some phantasm of smoke and bitter memory. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was afraid that it would burst free of her ribcage, making her Jedao’s twin in injury. Would she bleed black, too, now that they were reunited?

The community maintained some hoverers in case someone wanted to go for a jaunt outside the dome, or needed to transport heavy objects. Cheris signed one out and took the driver’s seat. Jedao got in without questioning her, which she appreciated. The Shuos would count on being able to track the vehicle, but Cheris had asked one of the settlement’s servitors to plant an override into the system. She activated it now, hoping the Shuos hadn’t discovered it in the interim.

The hoverer smelled displeasingly of meat pasties, a smell that she liked when the pasties in question were fresh and much less when it mingled with a lingering mixture of people’s clashing perfumes and bodies. Civilian life had softened her. She’d once trained regularly in Kel body armor that reeked of sour sweat and off-gassing plastic and, occasionally, vomit or other effluvia. There was no forgetting the stomach-turning stink of the battlefield, blood curdled or crystallized, the occasional startling sweetness of crushed flowers or aromatics. How much of that did this other, younger Jedao remember?

“It’s beautiful,” Jedao said, almost in a whisper, as the hoverer lifted up and sped toward the boundary of the settlement’s dome. Cheris was reminded of his presence, and the fact that they were, despite their shared history, strangers to each other. She would not have expected any incarnation of Jedao to be sentimental about landscape. But he was leaning toward the window, one hand pressed against it in yearning.

“First time planetside?” she asked, because it might be useful to know. She couldn’t imagine Mikodez allowing Jedao to wander around on a planet, even if the Citadel of Eyes occupied a geosynchronous orbit above one. Depending on how patchy Jedao’s memories were, this might be his first experience with sky, sun, dirt.

“Yes,” he said without elaborating.

She appreciated that he wasn’t distracting her from the more important task of driving. The hoverer was capable of handling itself if you punched in the destination, but she preferred to do it manually in case the Shuos had the vehicle bugged. She didn’t want to drive them into an ambush.

“I had a way off-planet, but I assume you prefer yours,” Jedao added as they reached the dome. It glimmered with a soap bubble’s rainbow colors, a flickering in the air. Exotic technology, which Cheris didn’t trust, but it hadn’t failed since she’d moved here. And really, the calendar in use here was her calendar, which the servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave had helped her distribute eleven years ago, after the destruction of Kel Command. It was laughable, if not actively hypocritical, for her to be nervous about her own work.

Cheris braced herself for the lightheaded sensation that always accompanied a dome transition. If it bothered Jedao, he didn’t show it. In all fairness, if she’d survived a hole in her chest that size, a mere tickle in her brain wouldn’t slow her down either.

The settlement, with its modest clusters of buildings and walkways and humble rows of flowers, receded behind them. Cheris guided the hoverer toward the mountains with their woods, heading toward a particular dead tree, its limbs split like lightning tongues, that made for a useful landmark. She wasn’t sure how the local flora survived in atmosphere that wasn’t yet fit for humans to breathe; she’d never been motivated enough to read about the transitional forests that the early terraforming team had planted. The details would have gone over her head anyway; she was no scientist.

Cheris didn’t speak again until they had flown some distance beneath the cover of the blue-leaved trees. Driving was not her best skill, and she was relying on the hoverer’s simple intelligence to help her avoid crashing into some unexpected boulder or ledge. They whooshed past the trees and their whipsaw branches at a stomach-churning speed, as she didn’t dare slow down. Every moment might make a difference.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “The version with details.”

Jedao opened his mouth. Just then there was a loud crack as a low branch smacked into the hoverer, and they tilted alarmingly to one side and almost bounced off another tree entirely. Cheris had a brief, dazzling, and unwanted vision of a cloud of scintillant insects flurrying up from their hiding places and toward the canopy. She swore in a muddled mixture of Mwen-dal and the high language as she fought to bring the vehicle back under control.

By the time she’d achieved that, they were off-course. She then had to focus on navigation, which wasn’t hard so much as irritating, when there were so many damn trees everywhere. Deeper in the forest, they grew closer together, along with a bewilderment of low-growing shrubs, vines, and thorny things that glistened with poisonous sap.

They touched down at last in something that the servitors’ maps had described as a “clearing,” and which barely merited the name. She had to tilt the hoverer’s nose up to get it to fit at all. This is why no one tracked me as a vehicle specialist, Cheris thought ruefully. At least the unnaturally quick reflexes she had inherited from the original Jedao’s ghost had kept them from meeting a fiery death in the forest. It would be ignominious to survive bullets and battlefields, a carrion bomb, and a crash landing on the world of Terebeg only to be felled by a hoverer crash.

Cheris rechecked the integrity of her suit, old habit, before retrieving her bag, popping the door open, and clambering out. Jedao exited right after she did, landing agilely in the loam and decaying leaves. He wrinkled his nose, although Cheris couldn’t smell anything but the cleaner she used to maintain the suit. Fortunately, the atmosphere wasn’t so deadly that she needed an independent air supply, although she’d brought a couple of canisters in case of emergency. The filters in the suit would suffice.

Cheris wasted no time pulling out a transmitter and sending a single signal. “Can you hear me through this?” Cheris asked. She also knew the Shuos sign language, thanks to the original Jedao, but who knew if this Jedao did?

Jedao nodded. “What was that?” he asked, gesturing toward the transmitter.

She pocketed it. “I called for pickup. You may have gotten this far, but we’re going to need allies to get off-planet.” She was curious as to how Jedao had engineered his escape; she’d get that information out of him later. “You never told me what exactly you’re here for.”

Jedao regarded her with a blank face. A split second before he spoke, she remembered, viscerally, from the inside-out, what that particular lack of expression meant. He was angry with her.

“You lied to me,” Jedao said.

He clearly expected her to figure out what he meant. “We haven’t talked in two years,” Cheris said.

“I was locked up,” Jedao said. “I found out how Ruo died.” His eyes glittered; he was trying not to cry. It made him look paradoxically young.

Cheris was bombarded by unwanted memories of Vestenya Ruo, who’d been her lover; whose death the original Jedao had caused. The way he’d started to laugh after picking a fight with her in a party, the first time they’d met, and the cocktail they’d shared afterward. Their endless rivalry to see who’d get the better marksmanship scores. The first time they’d slept together, out in the gardens, and the bug bites she’d wound up with. She missed him terribly; the longing was and wasn’t hers.

Carefully, Cheris said, “It’s been 437 years. I don’t see what difference it makes.”

“He was my friend,” Jedao said. He bit his lip and averted his gaze. The bullet wounds in his torso had mostly closed up except for a few stray tendrils wriggling aimlessly, like exposed worms. He took no notice of them, although Cheris found them distracting.

“Ruo always did like to take risks,” Cheris said, both fond and resigned. “But that was one he should have avoided.”

Jedao swung at her. She blocked the blow, segued without thinking into a joint lock that was supposed to deter further struggling by inflicting pain. Which was stupid, because someone who didn’t blink at multiple gunshot wounds wasn’t going to be slowed down by a pressure point.

Nevertheless, Jedao went limp. Cheris remained alert in case it was a trick—was it ever not a trick, with Jedao?—but he remained still, and after several moments she let go. He took one step backward, head bowed.

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said. He scrubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “I only found out a couple weeks ago. It was like waking up without him all over again.”

“You didn’t come all this way to get in a fight with me over this,” Cheris said. “Or did you?” It could have been worse. He was a Shuos with fragmentary memories of being the hexarchate’s most notorious madman. He could have diverted some of the planetary weather-eaters and crashed them into the settlement, or something even more destructive, with whatever grid-diving skills had gotten him this far.

Jedao tipped his chin up. “I want my memories back,” he said. The drawl that they shared was stronger than ever. “How am I supposed to know what to do with my life when I can’t remember most of it?”

Cheris’s stomach suddenly revolted. It was all she could do to keep from gagging. She’d eaten Jedao’s memories, crunched down the carrion glass and felt it pierce her on the way down. They were part of her now, sharded through her in ways that she couldn’t explain in ordinary human terms. But that didn’t mean they had to belong to her forever.

For over a decade she’d carried Jedao inside her, put him on and off like a mask. Some nights she dreamed his dreams: running from geese who were almost as tall as she was, when she’d been a boy; learning to use her first gun, a lovingly maintained rifle that had been in the Garach family for a couple of generations; shuffling a jeng-zai deck that dripped blood, and blood, and blood. She would have given a lot to be free of those dreams; would have been lost without them.

She’d given up on getting rid of Jedao. There was a way, but—

Jedao’s eyes were intent upon her face. “You know a way,” he breathed.

Of course. They knew each other. Her body language had been overwritten by Jedao’s; he could read her the way she could read him.

“It will require travel,” Cheris said, “but we would have to do that anyway, to get away from the Shuos.” She imagined Jedao as an outlaw, and couldn’t. Even if he had the skills for mercenary work—not that Brezan or Inesser or Mikodez would thank her for making the suggestion—his appearance would always pose a problem. “Why couldn’t you have gotten your face changed on the way?”

“I tried,” he said with an undertone of pain. “I tried scarring myself. It’s how my body regenerates. It always regenerates in the same shape.”

Interesting. Presumably this had limits, or he wouldn’t be able to form new memories, or learn new skills. But a fixed overall appearance—that was something she could see Kujen engineering into his creation.

“Kujen experimented with methods of memory transfer,” Cheris said, “besides the known one where he hijacked a stranger’s body wholesale. I have some of his notes. He had more than one base; he believed in redundancy. I didn’t tell Mikodez about some of the others.”

“I imagine he knows anyway,” Jedao said.

“About some of them, not all of them,” Cheris said. She didn’t tell Jedao how she knew this. The servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave, with whom she was aligned, had been monitoring Kujen’s bases on the grounds that they’d rather know about any traps he’d left behind before they went off. Whether they’d had run-ins with Mikodez’s people was not something they had divulged to her.

The transmitter vibrated once. Cheris glanced down and interpreted the code, which was based on Mwen-dal. “Pickup in thirty-seven minutes,” she said. She wondered how the needlemoth planned to get through the trees. Then again, its pilot was better than she was, and the needlemoth itself had not insignificant armaments for a vessel its size. As long as the moth didn’t shoot her while clearing itself a landing site, she didn’t care. (She wasn’t worried about Jedao.)

“Giving you Jedao’s memories—the first Jedao’s memories—will mean giving them to you,” Cheris said. She was starting to sweat, although it wasn’t particularly warm, even in the suit. “It’s not like copying a drama onto another data solid. If my understanding of Kujen’s research is correct, all that I’ll have left is a shadow of those four hundred years.”

Jedao wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why didn’t you get rid of them earlier?”

“Because as long as they’re in me,” Cheris said, “I can keep them safe.” She’d thought about expelling them earlier; couldn’t deny that she’d been tempted. But when it came right down to it, she didn’t trust anyone else in the hexarchate with Jedao’s remnants.

Cheris had complex emotions about housing the mind of the hexarchate’s most notorious mass murderer. She’d ingested Jedao’s memories eleven years ago, in the wake of the Siege of Scattered Needles and the destruction of her swarm, because it had been a matter of survival. There had been no other way to obtain the information she needed to prevail in the hexarchs’ game—or Jedao’s, for that matter.

If the situation hadn’t reached that crisis point, she wouldn’t have done it. She knew herself that well. Jedao himself had endured unwritten trauma. She remembered how much it had pierced her when she discovered the old tragedy of Ruo’s suicide, which had driven Jedao to vengeance against the heptarchate. The effect on the Jedao in front of her had to have been similar. Except he had experienced the shock at a remove, by reading whatever records he’d unearthed, rather than having the memory spearing directly into his mind.

Jedao’s experience had kept her alive. Cheris had missed him in those early days after his death. She would not have expected to grow attached to someone with his reputation. But they’d depended on each other, toward the end, even if they’d never precisely achieved friendship.

She couldn’t entirely explain her dislike of this other, inhuman Jedao and his obnoxious habit of surviving fatal gunshot wounds. Oh, she’d known that Kujen could have manufactured himself a thousand Jedao-alikes if he’d been so inclined, in appearance if nothing else. Kujen had thought nothing of “disciplining” unlucky Nirai for incompetence or insubordination: resculpting their bodies to make them uncannily beautiful, reprogramming their minds to make them pleasing bed-companions or servants. On occasion he’d also appropriated prisoners of war, heretics, condemned criminals. And the hexarchate had let him, because nobody cared what happened to those people, and Kujen offered such excellent gifts of technology.

Even now it was hard to conceal how she felt about this hawkfucking Jedao-other. (What was she supposed to call him? His name tasted sour in her mouth.) The unpleasant shock that ran through her every time she saw his face would never go away. It was almost, but not quite, the face she had seen in the mirror while the original Jedao had been anchored to her; left and right reversed, so subtle that she doubted anyone else would have been able to tell the difference.

He was afraid of her. She could smell it on him, for all that he wasn’t human. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She’d leveraged Jedao’s reputation before; had used the fact that people were afraid that she’d snap and slaughter them at the slightest provocation. She hadn’t taken it personally, just as Jedao hadn’t. After 409 years as a ghost, he’d come to rely on it.

But this Jedao’s fear rankled, even though it made perfect sense. She’d tried to assassinate him when he was Kujen’s pet general, although he’d failed to die. Then she’d emptied her gun into his head while he was a prisoner, unarmed, in violation of any rule of law, because he’d confessed to raping a Kel under his command. Given all that, she was impressed that he’d walked up to her door and stood there while she shot him again.

While she puzzled through her reactions, Jedao stood hugging himself, looking more like an awkward teenager than a grown man in body language, although his physique matched hers exactly at the time of her execution at the age of forty-five. At least he didn’t look like a starvation victim this time, as he had under Kujen’s command.

(Strange. Why hadn’t Kujen been feeding him? The Kujen she remembered had loved feeding people, even people he didn’t like, something she’d never understood. Someday she’d unbend enough to ask what had transpired.)

“What did you bring with you?” Cheris said at last, because the silence was grating on her nerves. Jedao’s instincts told her to hold her tongue and wait to see if the awkwardness persuaded this other self to reveal anything useful, but at the moment, she had little patience for Shuos games, including her own.

Jedao swallowed convulsively. “Not much. The clothes on my back. I have two ration bars in my pocket because a... friend insisted, and a water bottle beneath my jacket. No weapons. I didn’t think you’d react well if I showed up with a gun.”

She conceded that much was true and was about to ask him why he thought two ration bars and a water bottle were the most essential things he could bring with him. Was the water bottle even full? She doubted his ability to manage everyday practical tasks.

Jedao stiffened, almost as if he’d heard her thought, but his head was cocked and he held up his hand. Cheris nodded once, just enough to acknowledge the signal. It was possible that his senses were better than hers. Too bad Mikodez had never seen fit to brief her on his captive’s capabilities, even if she and Mikodez didn’t trust each other. She couldn’t imagine that Mikodez wouldn’t have studied Jedao exhaustively.

His expression didn’t change, but Jedao began signing to her in the Shuos hand language, slowly at first, then more rapidly when she nodded again to indicate that she understood. His signs struck her as oddly inflected. That could be because he’d learned a more modern form of the language; her knowledge was some centuries out of date.

Fourteen people incoming. Two vehicles. Presumed hostile.

Fourteen meant two squads, if Shuos infantry still worked by the same organizational principles. Cheris doubted it was anything other than Shuos infantry. She was grateful that their commander hadn’t simply ordered a bomb strike. At the same time, she didn’t trust restraint, especially if it appeared to work in her favor.

Estimated time until contact? she signed to Jedao. It was a single sign, given Shuos proclivities. Situations like this—special operations—were what the sign language had evolved to deal with. Back when she’d been in academy four centuries ago, it had been a standing joke that you could order a tactical strike against the nearest city with a single sign, but it took three minutes to ask, Where did you put the cookies this time?

Jedao’s brow wrinkled as he considered something she couldn’t see or hear. Under twelve minutes.

Fast enough to cause trouble. Besides, she didn’t want to rely too much on Jedao’s figure and be caught unawares. Whatever his mode of detection was, the possibility remained that they were being stalked by other groups and that this attack was a feint.

Follow my instructions, Cheris signed. While she didn’t precisely consider Jedao an ally, he had a strong incentive to keep her alive. That would suffice.

Jedao signed an acknowledgment.

They had to last until pickup came. She’d been promised that the needlemoth had been upgraded. The servitors for whom she worked had told her that since she and 1491625 had busted the thing to hell and gone, it was time to fix it up better than before. She hoped that meant it would be able to evade whatever Shuos defense forces orbited the world.

None of that meant anything, however, if she and Jedao didn’t survive the incoming assault. Jedao might be able to regenerate from anything short of a fury bomb, and maybe even from that; but Cheris had to be more careful with her ordinary human body.

On the other hand, she’d once been Kel, and she was determined to teach the Shuos not to underestimate her.

She assessed the asymmetries of the situation. Most of them favored her attackers. Numbers, for one. She’d outthought and outfought larger groups before, but in real life she preferred to be the one with the advantage. Too bad she rarely got it.

Numbers alone wouldn’t have bothered her so much. But the difference in equipment was going to aggravate the situation. All she possessed was one lousy handgun, not even a decent rifle, and the survival knife she’d stuffed into her belt.

The Shuos might have disguised themselves more or less (often less) as ordinary inhabitants of the settlement, but they would come fully equipped. Whether “fully equipped” meant state-of-the-art weaponry or hand-me-downs due to the budgetary constraints that Mikodez might or might not have been lying about was immaterial. Cheris was sure that even if they were using older equipment, they outgunned her and Jedao.

Her best asset, aside from her own wits, was Jedao himself. She was human, and their attackers were too, but Jedao wasn’t. She had to use that. Of course, the attackers might have been briefed about Jedao’s capabilities. But that didn’t make those capabilities go away, if she and Jedao used them carefully.

You’re going to be the distraction, she told Jedao. I want you to wade in the middle of the largest group and fuck them up (there was a specific sign for fuck them up). I will take care of the rest.

For a second she wasn’t sure he’d go for it. She wouldn’t have blamed him for having reservations. Even someone who could repeatedly return from the dead didn’t have to like it.

Then Jedao nodded. I will buy you as much time as I can, he signed. And, more hesitantly: I don’t know the limits of my regenerative abilities. He had to cobble together a sign for regenerative using a couple of medical terms. “Regeneration” didn’t usually indicate an ability to come back from the dead, but given the context, she knew what he meant.

I’ll keep that in mind, Cheris replied. Go.

He went, slipping away into the shadows of the trees with uncanny quietness.

Cheris was already in motion. Two years of teaching bright-eyed children, however adorable, slipped away. She’d missed life as a soldier. It was time to get to work.

 

 

SHE’S USING YOU, a soft voice whispered at the back of Jedao’s head. While you’re busy figuring out how to take on fourteen people by yourself, she’ll get away.

Jedao told his paranoia to shut up. Of course she was using him. He’d come to her as a supplicant and disrupted her life, so he owed her, at least until it became clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver. And she was the one with centuries of experience being him. He couldn’t see her taking his orders.

The trees loomed around him. This deep in the wood, most of them were tall, like stately sentinels. He didn’t have any idea how old they were—not like he knew anything about trees or terraforming protocols—but several of them had cores that felt weak and spongy, less dense than the surrounding wood, to his othersense. Rot of some sort, he guessed.

The Shuos coming for them presumably had some idea of the local terrain, whether due to prior familiarity or good maps. But they might not be prepared for him to have a better one. For example, he doubted that they kept track of rotting trees. That gave him an idea.

Five minutes until contact. They were moving at a steady rate, which helped, and now they’d dispersed. No point clustering up just in case Cheris (or, he supposed, Jedao himself) had smuggled out bombs or set up traps.

Jedao didn’t plan on dropping trees on them, although it would have been funny, for certain values of funny. Thanks so much, Kujen, he thought at a man he’d killed two years ago. Kujen could have built Jedao’s body in any number of ways; and what had he gone for? Immortality. Jedao was sure that the other properties of being a moth-derived construct were side-effects.

Those side-effects were going to save him. Or else he was going to make for some exciting footnotes in some poor Shuos operative’s mission report.

Both vehicles had disgorged their loads of personnel. One of them was parked deeper in the woods. He didn’t care about that one, other than avoiding it; while he wasn’t an expert on current Shuos personnel carriers, if it wasn’t armed head-to-toe he would eat Mikodez’s entire annual supply of chocolate. (He hated chocolate, which Mikodez refused to believe. They’d had multiple arguments about it. Life in the Citadel of Eyes was strange in unpredictable ways.) More to the point, if it was back there, it wasn’t relevant to the instructions that Cheris had given him.

The other personnel carrier, on the other hand—

Jedao located a sturdy tree. Its lowest branch was three times his height. Entertaining as the action scenes in dramas were, he couldn’t jump that high. But jumping wasn’t how he intended to get up there.

Jedao steeled himself for the inevitable agony, then grabbed the space-time weave and pulled himself up, almost as though he were levitating. He bit down against a scream as the pain set in. Whether that was because he wasn’t a proper moth, or because he was an immature one (as the Revenant had once hinted), or some other reason entirely, he had no idea. It felt as though someone was boiling his marrow from the inside out.

On the other hand, Jedao was growing inured to pain. It wasn’t healthy to be blasé about getting shot, boiled, or otherwise mutilated, but since he had a job to do, he’d worry about that later.

A new source of pain made itself known to him when he miscalculated and a protruding twig, with thorns, raked through his arm. Jedao hissed as he dripped blood and made himself concentrate before he fucked up again. Damned if he was going to let Cheris down by wimping out over a trivial injury; and by his standards it was trivial.

He paused for a second when he reached a high limb that felt like it would support his weight and clung precariously to it. It gave him a reasonable view of his surroundings, not that he could tell one kind of leafy nuisance from another. No one had yet tracked him here. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to dally, either. He didn’t want to underestimate Shuos operatives.

The two squads continued to approach by circuitous routes, still spreading out. Their movements were coordinated, cautious. He would have expected no less. He was going to have to get their attention.

The second personnel vehicle had, after dropping its passengers off, returned to the air. That was a mistake, although its pilot didn’t realize it yet. Anything short of teleporting out of the area would have been a mistake, and if teleportation existed in the hexarchate it was news to him.

The personnel vehicle was moving fast—but Jedao had previously pulled himself across interplanetary distances and lived to regret it. He braced himself for the pain to get worse, because why would his life ever get easier. Then he calculated an interception path and launched himself at the vehicle.

This time the agony wasn’t just the sensation of his marrow boiling. The air itself burned him thanks to the speed of his passage. Jedao had time to think, Why couldn’t you have made me a more aerodynamic shape, Kujen? and contort himself sideways so his head wouldn’t pop on impact before he slammed into the rear of the vehicle.

He felt as though he’d broken all his bones, except he could still feel some of his fingers and toes, so it couldn’t be that bad, could it? The world went black, and he thought he might be losing consciousness. Then the blackness cleared, and he found himself clinging, by felicitous and not entirely calculated juxtaposition of forces, to the rear of the craft.

Jedao was no mechanic, but there were only so many places you could usefully put the levitation units. He massed a lot less than the vehicle, but the other half of momentum was velocity. He’d knocked it significantly off-course, and the damage he’d done was causing it to list worryingly.

While Jedao could (probably) survive an uncontrolled fall as long as the carrier didn’t land on top of him, that wasn’t his plan. He had a use for it. He’d been telling the truth when he’d said to Cheris that he’d come unarmed—up to a point. She’d probably been thinking of firearms and grenades, conventional weapons. He had neglected to bring a gun in any form that she’d recognized, but all a gun was was a means of throwing a projectile fast enough to hurt people. I’m your gun, indeed.

There were two people still aboard the carrier. He’d only shocked them for a couple of moments. The carrier began firing back at him, although it was hampered by the fact that he was hanging on to the rear and it was programmed not to shoot holes in itself. Still, he wasn’t out of trouble yet. It vomited out several drones, which began peppering him with laser fire.

Time for the next phase. He’d lost track of Cheris, not intentionally, thanks to the pain. It would have helped if he knew where she was, because he didn’t want to corpse her by accident. He couldn’t take the time to locate her amid the dizzying group of human-sized masses, however. Besides, she knew what instructions she’d given him. She’d get herself to safety, even if she wasn’t privy to the details of his plan. It wasn’t trust, exactly; it still made his heart (well, whatever he had) ache with ambivalent gratitude.

Jedao slipped several hair-raising centimeters at the same time that a laser singed his side. He caught a whiff of the charred, sickly sweet smell before the wind whipped it away. Stay focused, he told himself, and shoved the personnel carrier, this time angling down toward the largest concentration of hostiles on the ground.

The drones had trouble keeping up. His acceleration in the past two-and-a-fraction seconds had sufficed for outrunning them. Of course, he’d lost all surface sensation, which implied bad things about the state of his skin, or the nerves beneath.

I’m going to be a very good mothdrive when I grow up! Jedao thought, with borderline hysterical cheer. Too bad he wasn’t really a mothdrive, or he’d be comfortably shielded inside a metal carapace and not subject to yet more atmospheric friction. With his luck, he was probably trailing smoke.

The two humans within bailed. In their position, he would have done the same. They receded behind him, their fall slowed by parachutes that showed up on his othersense as mushroom-billows of thin material.

Jedao was still accelerating. Shortly after that, they crashed through the top layer of the canopy. More bloody trees, fuck everything, he never wanted to encounter another tree for the rest of his life, and fuck Mikodez’s inexplicable obsession with green growing things while he was at it.

The trees’ branches flayed him all the way down. Inanely, Jedao thought of some of the pornography videos he’d watched. It had looked more fun in the porn than it was out here. Maybe he was doing it wrong?

He did remember to decelerate, but he’d left it to the last moment and his control wasn’t as good as he’d have liked. If he had anything left to scream with, he would have shrieked as the world hammered into him.

Shortly after that, the personnel vehicle exploded. It had physical shielding, sure. Said shielding hadn’t been intended for spaceflight acceleration levels of abuse, let alone this kind of impact.

Jedao lost consciousness as the fires washed over him.

He woke an indeterminate amount of time later, aching all over. Shit, how long had he been out? Was the fight over?

Concentrate, don’t panic. Jedao dragged himself upright, whatever that meant. He wasn’t sure his bones had healed right; something felt off about his balance. But he could deal with that later. All (“all”?) he had to do was repeat the breaks and then set them correctly. At the moment that would take time he didn’t have, so he wasn’t going to worry about it.

He was in a different part of the forest, small surprise, but reorienting himself took time. After that, his attention was immediately drawn to the non-moving human-sized masses scattered at ground level. At this point, Jedao became aware that he himself had been thrown clear of the explosion—reflex?—and was now uncomfortably draped over a tree limb whose protuberances pressed into his torso.

If he lived through this experience, he never wanted to see a tree again. Or a plant. Well, maybe the green onion, which he trusted Mikodez was looking after in between coaxing people to eat candies, ordering assassinations, and annoying Zehun. (Jedao didn’t like Zehun, mainly because Zehun thought the best place for Jedao was in an incinerator, but he also had to concede that Zehun had a singularly thankless job.)

Which of the damn human masses was Cheris? He focused on the shapes of faces until he found her. She wasn’t alone.

Next time I run afoul of some faction, I want it to be the Rahal, Jedao thought, aware that he was whining. He could have a nice, action-filled month filling out paperwork and getting yelled at for doing it wrong. It sounded like an excellent vacation.

Heat lapped against his flesh. There was a fire all around him, not surprising considering how he’d gotten here. Based on the change in density of the tree below him, it was on fire. He’d better get down from this stupid branch.

He didn’t know enough about the atmosphere and the trees’ composition to guess how much danger the fire posed. How much of a conflagration would it take to threaten him? Kujen had said that he should avoid diving into stars, and Jedao was happy to take that at face value, but he didn’t know what was necessary and sufficient, as they liked to say in math.

He spent precious seconds mapping locations and vectors. Only seven people remained active in the region, plus Cheris. He hadn’t thought he’d gotten that many out of the initial group, but Cheris wouldn’t have been sitting in a tree writing poetry that entire time. (According to Mikodez, most Kel poetry was either terrible or pornographic or both, anyway.)

This wasn’t any reason to become complacent. He had no way of guessing how many more reinforcements might show up. While he hadn’t gotten the impression that there were that many legitimate inhabitants in the settlement, who knew how many random secret bases the Shuos had elsewhere on this continent, or in space waiting to make orbital drops?

Be realistic, Jedao told himself, although he couldn’t help shivering, which aggravated the pain in all his joints. The Shuos might want to keep an eye on Cheris, but they also had finite resources. Mikodez hadn’t made any secret of his unending budgetary woes. He could have been faking it, but the Shuos probably didn’t have thousands of agents waiting to capture Cheris and Jedao.

Seven-to-one odds he could handle. Surely Cheris’s pickup would arrive soon, assuming she hadn’t simply abandoned him. If she had, he’d figure out a way to track her. He was highly motivated.

(Realistically speaking, Cheris had had two-plus years to prepare to vanish. At this point, as far as resources went, Jedao wasn’t even sure he still had clothing. Modern fibers were tough, but not tough enough to endure this kind of abuse.)

Jedao gritted his teeth (what he thought of as his teeth, anyway) and climbed down the tree he was stuck in, like an aggravated cat. The heat intensified as he scuttled downward, panting at the screaming pain in his hands and knees and feet. He was sure he looked ridiculous, and he was beyond caring.

Jedao landed awkwardly. He was positive he had done something bad to his ankle. But as long as he could crawl, he wasn’t finished.

The soles of his feet protested. Something crunched underfoot, although he felt rather than heard it. Jedao tottered for a second, then steadied. He had good balance, but his feet hadn’t healed straight, just his luck.

Flames beat against his perception. Jedao turned until he was facing the right direction, then broke into a sprint with a stifled sob at the prospect of more pain. “Sprint” wasn’t quite accurate. He was half-running, half-propelling himself by grabbing space-time and yanking himself forward, although at less hair-raising accelerations than he had when he’d brought down the carrier. His othersense gave him a mental map of the trees, so with any luck he could avoid crashing into them.

His control wasn’t perfect. Pain and exhaustion made matters worse. A thorn or twig—no appreciable difference at this speed—tore a chunk out of his side. His entire body felt raw. It startled him how much that new, unwanted sensation threatened to distract him, small as it was.

At least Jedao was going away from the heart of the heat. He didn’t want to test the limits of his resistance to fire. And anyway, his targets were human, and more vulnerable than he was to random environmental hazards. (Maybe not so random, considering that he’d started the blaze in the first place.) He thanked his nameless opponents for their good sense in fleeing.

Jedao didn’t know how good the remaining hostiles were at keeping watch, but surely taking out the carrier and their commander was worth something. His first target appeared to be completely unprepared when Jedao barreled into them.

Fortunately for Jedao and less fortunately for his victim, Jedao landed on top, which cushioned the fall. While they wore a combat suit, the impact broke it open at the seams, one of which was at the neck. Jedao jabbed viciously into the opening despite the way the edges of the break tore at his hand, clawed it open further, and began to throttle the Shuos, who struggled. Jedao simply absorbed the damage, the one thing he was good at.

By this time, although Jedao hadn’t realized it earlier, his hearing had started coming back. He’d mistaken the faint roaring for an auditory hallucination, but on second thought, it was the sound of the encroaching fire. And the person he was fighting was wheezing.

“Sorry,” Jedao tried to say, except all that came out was a strangled moan.

This caused the struggles to intensify, not the intended effect. At least the Shuos slumped unconscious shortly afterward. Jedao hoped they weren’t dead, but he needed to keep moving, and it wasn’t like he’d brought any first aid supplies with him.

He’d said once to Mikodez that he wouldn’t kill again. Two years gone and he’d already broken his promise. He couldn’t dwell on that now; he wasn’t so firm in his convictions that he was willing to let the Shuos recapture him.

Jedao moved on to the second target, who went down quickly, and then the third. He didn’t proceed in order of proximity, largely to keep them guessing. No matter what physical advantages he had, he didn’t believe in making things easy for his opponents.

When it came to the third, he ran into a complication. More of his hearing had returned, damn his body and its unpredictable healing. He’d been doing fine without the distractions, and target three was screaming at him, or possibly just screaming.

In response to the irritating shrieks, Jedao reared up, then smashed his forehead against the target’s. His mouth stretched wide open—interesting, he was back to having a mouth, even if he could have sworn his jaw wasn’t supposed to unhinge like this—and then he snapped it shut in horror. He was hungry.

Involuntarily, Jedao gripped the person’s arms to keep them from breaking free, even though he was trembling. Was I seriously going to try to eat them? What in the name of fox and hound is wrong with me?

Once upon a time, the Revenant had warned him that he needed to eat in order to fuel his regeneration. He hadn’t thought through the implications, especially when coupled with the level of physical trauma he’d sustained. In particular, he hadn’t considered what he’d be driven to do when he was caught without even so pitiful a recourse as the ration bars Hemiola had given him, since they hadn’t survived the earlier stunts.

Now that he was aware of the intolerable gnawing in his stomach, he couldn’t ignore it. The target continued to scream. Jedao discovered that his mouth was open again, wider, wider, widest, and that he was trying to taste the target’s face through the faceplate of the armor, which he couldn’t imagine had any appreciable nutritional value.

Jedao stumbled backwards in the initial shock of horror, releasing the person even though he was hurt, he needed to eat, he needed to eat—it was impossible to think past the desire to subdue his prey and suck out the sustenance he required. Fuck, he thought dimly, I should have realized—I can’t regenerate out of nowhere. I need replenishment.

At this point his target made a fatal error. They threw a grenade, which Jedao was too distracted to dodge or catch and fling back. And then they scrambled backwards, out of the blast radius. It wasn’t the blast radius they should have worried about.

The grenade exploded in a scatter of shards of fire and stinging hot gases. Red-hot shrapnel pierced Jedao. The concussive blast damaged his hearing yet again. His entire body was a pincushion of agony.

He didn’t care about any of that. Couldn’t care about any of that. All he knew was that he’d been hurt more even as the regenerative processes that he had no conscious control over demanded more fuel—more food. His self-control shredded.

Jedao lunged again, snake-swift, and tore at his prey’s armor. His fingers were slick with his own blood. He started hammering against the suit, rapid percussive blows erratically boosted by his ability to accelerate himself. The prey screamed. Jedao’s mouth gaped open wider wider widest to swallow the noise—

The bullets slammed into him from behind. Two in the head, one for each knee. Not that he was in any condition to count; it would have required too much cognition. The last thing he thought as darkness engulfed him was that more prey had showed up.

 

 

“ARE YOU SURE you want this thing on the moth?” asked the deltaform servitor hovering between Cheris and Jedao. Its name was 1491625, a numerical pattern that it found pleasing, and Cheris had worked with it in the past. At the moment its lights glowed livid red; it wasn’t making any secret of its displeasure.

“Yes,” Cheris said wearily, prepared to argue. It didn’t argue.

Jedao didn’t look human anymore, except in broad outline. Frenzied tentacles of shadow boiled and writhed and reached toward her. His mouth stretched wide and snapped repeatedly in her direction. He was imprisoned in the cargo hold, although neither Cheris nor 1491625 were certain that the restraints would hold him if he regained enough wits to accelerate his way out of them. The cramped quarters made her nervous, because when she’d taken him out, he’d been trying to eat a downed Shuos operative, armor and all.

“You didn’t mention him doing this the last time you fought him,” 1491625 said. Its red lights flared again.

“That’s because he didn’t,” Cheris said. She studied Jedao, frowning. “Don’t you have some piloting to do?”

“I only sit in the pilot’s seat because it gives you more room to move around,” 1491625 said, its red tinting a decidedly snippy orange. “I can control the moth perfectly well from any location, including outside. Not that I’m eager to do extravehicular. And I don’t want the creature, whether or not it’s actually ‘Jedao,’ gobbling you down for a snack.”

Cheris raised her eyebrows and continued to observe Jedao’s compulsive attempts to get closer to her. He was ignoring 1491625 as irrelevant or, more likely, inedible. “Kind of you to care,” she said to 1491625, teasing.

“I’m serious,” it snapped back. “I thought you called because of some kind of emergency. I didn’t realize you were exfiltrating that.”

“It is an emergency,” Cheris said. “Or did you not notice the Shuos running around after us?”

“Kind of hard to miss that when you and your friend set the forest on fire.”

Cheris had a pretty good idea of how Jedao had achieved that, even if she’d been occupied knocking out a Shuos at the time. The question was, how could he do all this stuff? She’d originally assumed that regeneration was the result of some unholy experiment of Kujen’s, not unreasonable given his obsession with immortality. But the ability to fly?

Jedao must have burned off clothing, and whatever equipment he hadn’t told her about. While Cheris had witnessed some strange things on the battlefield, usually in connection with exotic effects, she’d never encountered anything like this. Jedao was composed wholly of a wriggling unhuman darkness, not just ordinary shadow. It seeped out from behind her eyes even when she wasn’t facing him. She’d tried closing her eyes and had felt an unnerving sensation inside her, as though the tentacles were trying to squirm free from within her.

“Do you feel the wriggling sensation too?” she asked.

“There’s some kind of fluctuation,” 1491625 said. “I don’t have sensitive enough internals to tell you exactly what’s going on.”

She’d have to ask Jedao about that later, if he ever regained the ability to speak. Which was up to her, at this point. She turned her back on him, trusting 1491625 to keep an eye on him—like most servitors, it could see in all directions at once, and not just in the human-visible spectrum—and opened up a locker. Within it was a stockpile of Kel field rations.

“You’re not about to do what I think you’re about to do,” 1491625 said, glowing, if possible, even more virulently red. It would have shifted to the infrared for emphasis if she’d been another servitor.

Cheris shrugged with one shoulder as she began retrieving stacks of ration bars, balancing them expertly. “I have a feeling that we’re going to need to stop somewhere to resupply.” Given that Jedao had been ravenous enough to try to ingest a fellow Shuos, she doubted that the notoriously terrible taste of Kel rations would deter him.

“If you feed that thing—”

“Listen,” Cheris said, “the reason he’s turned into a gibbering wreck is that he’s hungry.” He’d told her that he healed into the same shape; ironic that the one he wore now was, however grotesque, less fear-inspiring than that angular face with its tilted smile. Mass murderer. Arch-traitor. He must have crossed some threshold beyond which instinct drowned out his humanity, which raised the question of what he had been before Kujen tampered with him.

Cheris kept half an eye on Jedao’s snapping jaws as she peeled off the wrappers as quickly as she could. Judging by his attempts to gnaw off the unlucky Shuos’s suit, he would down the wrappers without hesitating if she let him. She doubted that indigestion would improve his temper.

“Suicide hawks!” 1491625 said in vexation.

Cheris shook her head in mild reproof and paused long enough to waggle the fingers of her ungloved right hand at it. “Not for over a decade,” she said. Even after all this time she wasn’t precisely used to going ungloved, but she no longer cringed from every chance touch against the skin of her hands, either.

Jedao hadn’t worn gloves when he’d come to see her. They had that much in common: cast out by the Kel. But the Shuos had claimed Jedao, whereas she was an ordinary citizen, or as ordinary as she could manage to be. Which, it turned out, wasn’t very.

Once Cheris had amassed a sufficient pile of peeled ration bars, she hefted one. It didn’t weigh much, and she could smell the flavor: dried roasted squid, one of her favorites, although many of the Kel she had known had hated it. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and lobbed the bar at Jedao.

1491625 had the good sense to duck. Jedao might not have eyes anymore, but whatever senses remained were acute, and the restraints left enough play that he could snap the bar out of the air. It vanished down his gullet. She wasn’t sure he’d bothered to chew it, if he had teeth. It was hard to tell.

1491625’s lights dimmed all the way down to an ember pittance.

“Well,” Cheris said philosophically, “if it was just one ration bar’s worth of hunger”—and never mind that it was supposed to be equivalent to an entire meal for active-duty Kel, minus the water—”I don’t think he would have been resorting to cannibalism.” Did it count as cannibalism when you weren’t human yourself?

She tossed another ration bar, with the same results. Considered throwing them two at a time. It wouldn’t be any hardship, as she still had excellent reflexes. On the other hand, she didn’t want Jedao to choke to death on a Kel ration bar. Of all the ways to go...

“You’re taking this awfully calmly,” 1491625 said as it watched her feeding Jedao.

“We’re not in immediate danger,” Cheris replied. Jedao’s thrashing had quieted as he concentrated on catching the thrown bars. As long as she kept up a steady pace, he seemed disinclined to go after her.

“You mean I’m not in immediate danger,” 1491625 said. “I doubt even... whatever it is can get much in the way of sustenance out of me, unless it’s running some kind of mineral deficiency.” It flashed red again. “Of course, who knows what minerals it needs to recover...”

“Well,” Cheris said, “when I knocked him out”—great euphemism for I needed headshots to slow him down; carrying even an unconscious monstrosity to the refuge of the needlemoth hadn’t been fun—“he was concentrating on getting to the, er, meat.”

“You’re made of meat.”

Cheris massaged her knuckles, resumed throwing ration bars. Too easy, too routine to keep her attention, really. Any differences in mass between the bars and their varied flavors was so minuscule as to be undetectable to her merely human senses. She could have done this with her eyes shut, and never mind the fact that she didn’t want to take her attention off Jedao in case the dregs of cunning returned and he was lulling her into a false sense of security. Unlikely to work on her of all people, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.

The pile dwindled. Jedao showed no sign of slowing down.

And yet—

“You might be right,” 1491625 said in reluctant yellows flecked with orange. “You still don’t want to parade him around the public, but he’s starting to coalesce into more of a manform and less of a what did the void vomit forth.”

Cheris couldn’t see the difference, but 1491625 had more acute senses than she did, even when she patched into her augment for additional analysis. In days past she would have had access to a Kel field grid or mothgrid and its computational power; she’d given that up years ago. 1491625 had cautioned her as soon as she’d boarded not to attempt to connect to the needlemoth’s grid, because the upgrades included defenses against grid-diving. She had taken it at its word.

“You’re going to have to leave yourself enough to eat, you know,” 1491625 said.

“I know,” Cheris said. It would take twelve days to reach resupply at one of the smaller starbases that didn’t ask too many questions of travelers, and where Pyrehawk Enclave had a treaty with the local servitors. “A little fasting won’t kill me.”

She thought wistfully of the meat pasty she’d left behind, and of the bakery’s offerings. Once a week the baker would deliver snacks to the school, including pastries with poppyseed filling, which Cheris especially liked. The pastries were a Mwennin specialty, and she doubted she’d find them where she was going. While she could dig up a recipe and have them made to order, it wasn’t the same.

Make up your mind, Cheris told herself. She couldn’t have galaxy-spanning adventure and a quiet existence at home at the same time. In particular, she worried about the fate of the settlement she had left behind, and the penalties its people might face. Mikodez was usually fair if it benefited him, but she didn’t know about his deputies.

The mass of undulating shadows drew her attention again. 1491625 had been correct. This time even she could discern the way the tendrils were collapsing in on themselves, knitting themselves into a semblance of a man. A specific man, given enough time—and nourishment.

The mindless hungry snapping had stopped. She had no illusions that this state of affairs would last. She needed to restore the human mind that had dwelled within. Horrible thought: had Jedao regained awareness of self, only to be trapped in that inhuman body of black squid tentacles and shadows and gaping mouth? And if that was the case, how would she know?

“We should dump it,” 1491625 said. Now its lights were a flat, hostile orange. The hostility wasn’t directed toward Cheris, but it still stung. “I don’t care if it regenerates, it can’t escape a singularity.”

“We’d have to launch him into one,” Cheris pointed out. “Weren’t you the one who pointed out that he can propel himself? Let’s review the scan.”

1491625 grumbled in a sputter of orange-yellow lights, but complied. While Cheris dug out more ration bars, it persuaded the mothgrid to cough up a replay of its scan observations of the fight between Cheris and Jedao and the Shuos agents. Cheris stacked the ration bars in neat bloodless piles, watching Jedao as she did so—he might be temporarily sated, but that could end any second.

“There it is,” Cheris said, and 1491625 flickered an acknowledgment.

The telling detail was a voidmoth formant. It was so distorted that she would have dismissed it as an anomaly or an error if she hadn’t been looking for it. “What do you make of that?”

“You’re the one with 400 years of Kel training,” 1491625 said, but its lights shaded a friendlier green. “I’d say scoutmoth, except they don’t make scouts that small.”

Cheris glanced toward Jedao. He hung now in his restraints, head bowed. His mouth was closed, but she couldn’t forget how wide it had opened for the ration bars. “If we launch him toward a black hole, he might escape. And I don’t want to give him a motive to push us into one.”

1491625 flashed its lights in indecision. “It seems counterproductive to have fed it, but now that you’ve gotten it quiet, you could do some experimentation. To figure out how to make it die. Instead of whatever you had in mind.”

“I was going to give him his heart’s desire,” Cheris said. And mine. Something she hadn’t dared to hope for—the constant murmuration of Jedao’s mind gone from hers. Now that she had a container to pour his memories into. To discard them, like wine gone sour.

She’d never thought to have a suitable vessel available—who better than Jedao himself? Yet she’d also never thought that the vessel would prove itself unstable. Mikodez considered her a walking hazard so long as she was half-Jedao. Suddenly, unhappily, she appreciated his position. As much as she longed to be unblemished of mind again, was it as safe to pour herself out as she’d hoped?

1491625 blinked its acerbic opinion of that. “I’ll take you where you want to go,” it said. “I’ll even help you secure the thing. But if this goes wrong, Cheris, you’re going to spend several lifetimes setting it right.”

The phrasing was deliberate, needling. She resented it. At the same time, she couldn’t blame 1491625 for calling her to task. This wasn’t just her personal life at stake, as much as she had swaddled herself for two years in the illusion that she could disappear into the life of an ordinary, unremarkable citizen. Jedao had broken the hexarchate on the wheel of his obsessions in the past. She didn’t dare let him do it a second time, now that the world was slowly stitching itself back into equilibrium.

 

 

FOR A LONG time, all Jedao knew was hunger. It ebbed and flowed like a great tide. He floated in darkness. Sometimes it pierced him and made him ache with a longing he had no name for.

Gradually he returned to himself. Something was wrong with his eyes. Darkness cocooned him. On occasion he imagined a familiar touch on his face, along the tensed taut muscles of his shoulders. A lover’s touch. That couldn’t be right; he’d only once had a lover (victim), who’d committed suicide in front of him. Except he couldn’t remember the man’s name or face. He scrabbled after them until they fell away into oblivion.

Cousin, a voice said to him over and over until he acknowledged it. Cousin. Why have they brought you inside?

I don’t have any family, Jedao replied, also in the language of moths. He was confused. Was it the Revenant? But the Revenant had escaped, and he could hardly imagine that it would return for him, given the acrimonious history between them.

Of course you have family, the voice responded, comforting and puzzled. We are all family. I daresay I’ve never met one of us as small as you, excepting the babies, but I’m sure it isn’t your fault.

He spent some time untangling that statement. Part of the problem was that the voice was singing to him, and Jedao sang poorly, even in the language of moths. Part of it was that he had never been able to remember his mother, or his sire, or his sister, his brother and sister-in-law and nieces—all a matter of historical record—as anything but hypothetical smudges.

A memory stabbed him: a lunch he’d had with Hexarch Mikodez, during which they had the customary song-and-dance about cookies that Mikodez really, really wanted to share and Jedao really, really didn’t want to eat. Jedao had been about to capitulate when a man entered without warning.

At first Jedao thought it must be Zehun, even though his othersense told him otherwise. He couldn’t imagine anyone else having the temerity to interrupt one of the hexarch’s meetings unannounced.

It wasn’t Zehun, though, which he confirmed visually. Zehun had the frail thinness of age and went around in cardigans or shawls because they always felt cold. And Zehun had skin lighter than Mikodez’s, although not exactly light, and a cheerful uninhibited ugliness in contrast to Mikodez’s dazzling good looks. If Jedao hadn’t sworn off sex for the rest of his life, he would have been attracted, unwillingly, to the hexarch; awkward to say the least, if not outright lethal.

(Zehun had warned him bluntly against such an approach anyway. Something to do with the green onion that Mikodez had given Jedao, and which Jedao had left behind. Presumably a Shuos code of some sort, which no one had explained, and which Jedao declined to ask about lest he reveal his ignorance. In any case, Jedao was even more afraid of Zehun than of Mikodez.)

The man who’d entered resembled Mikodez to an uncanny degree, except he wore his hair in an effusion of braids tied up with rose-blue ribbons. A tightly laced translucent blue jacket showed off the beautiful definition of his torso and narrow hips; darker blue slacks displayed his coltish long legs. And his eyes blazed blue, and Jedao could have looked into them forever, falling into an ocean of unarticulated promises, except Mikodez stood and interposed himself between them, breaking Jedao’s eye contact with the stranger.

Jedao hadn’t paid close attention to the exchange that followed, elliptical as it was. He could think of any number of reasons why Mikodez wouldn’t want an Andan fucking around with enthrallment like it was a child’s game of kaleidoscope. What he realized instead was that the two men were related.

It had never occurred to Jedao that a Shuos hexarch might have a family. Instead he’d had some notion that they grew in the dark out of spores, like fungus, or generated spontaneously out of fouled water. But there he was: Mikodez, with this middle-aged man who was related to him, not just in appearance, but in their mannerisms, their accents. The way they gestured at each other. And a hollow yearning had woken in Jedao for something he was 400 years too late to partake in.

Now this moth called him cousin and expected him to accept it, as though he could be bribed with the facsimile of house and hearth and warmth.

Go away, he said to the moth, wretched for reasons he couldn’t articulate.

The moth didn’t go away. Instead, it began singing to him, this time wordlessly, with harmonies complex and strange. Jedao wished that he could consult Hemiola, who not only understood music but composed it, which was magical as far as Jedao was concerned. Hemiola would have been a much better choice to negotiate with moths. But it had chosen not to accompany him on this journey, for which he was pathetically grateful. He didn’t want it to see him like this.

The moth was speaking to him again when his vision returned. The world sparked and stuttered back into existence, aligned with the othersense’s map of masses. Only after that did he register the restraints, and the faint lights, and the fact that he was—of course, so obvious—on a voidmoth of some sort. A small one, with cramped quarters, although not nearly as small as he was, in moth terms.

Cheris sat facing him. She had peeled a staggering number of Kel ration bars, with which she had made a not-exactly-miniature fort. He would have expected such behavior from Mikodez, not a former Kel. (For someone with a notorious sweet tooth, Mikodez had the eccentric habit of eating half a Kel ration bar for breakfast every morning. Why half? Who knew.) The mingled smells of the different flavors made Jedao gag, everything from honey-sesame and taro to anchovies and curried goat.

“You’re not hungry,” Cheris said with a lift of her brows. “That’s progress.”

At this point Jedao also noticed that, in addition to being trussed up, he was naked. He shrank from Cheris in spite of himself; he never liked people seeing the disfiguring scars that crisscrossed his chest, to say nothing of the one at the base of his neck and the one just below the palm of his right hand. Why couldn’t his older self have been more diligent about aesthetic repairs, and why hadn’t Kujen, who had admired beauty so much, made a few alterations?

“What the hell—” The words died in Jedao’s throat. He tried again; his voice shook. “Cheris, I tried to eat a person.”

“Yes,” Cheris said. “I saw.”

He turned his head to stare at the wall. Couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You recovered,” Cheris said. “But—What are you, exactly?”

“Kujen said...” Jedao swallowed dryly. There was no point lying to her. She must know. “Kujen did some experimentation. I’m moth-derived.”

Cheris said something in response to that. Jedao blanked his face and pretended to listen when, in actuality, he was talking to the voidmoth. Cousin, he said, stumbling over the unfamiliar address, could you answer a question for me?

He didn’t have any guarantee that the moth, whatever it called itself, wouldn’t lie to him. After all, the Revenant had thoroughly deceived him; destroyed the people he cared about most. But the Revenant had sought freedom, and in the secret bitter heart of him he couldn’t blame it. Jedao had failed to save the mothlings even after it had begged him for their lives. Its betrayal was no more than what he deserved.

Of course, cousin, the moth said, still friendly. I must say, we should be introduced to each other, even if it isn’t a proper dance.

Jedao fought to cover his surprise. A dance?

Where do you come from, that you don’t know such elementary things?

I was raised by a rogue Nirai, Jedao said, because it was true.

Ah, the moth said, as if that explained everything. Possibly it did. In any case, I am—It said something in a compressed burst of harmonies, which Jedao struggled to repeat back to it. Very close, it said consolingly. I’m sure your accent will improve with practice. And you?

Jedao was not unaccustomed to being condescended to by moths. They call me Jedao, he said, bracing himself for its reaction. If it stopped talking to him—

Oh, you poor thing, the moth—Jedao labeled it Harmony in his head, just so he didn’t trip over its name every time he thought of it—said with dismay. I’d forgotten what peculiar senses of humor the Nirai have. Would you like me to call you something different?

The question caught him off-guard. Something different. He could be anyone he wanted to be—

Who was he kidding? Kujen had built him in the image of General Shuos Jedao. He would never escape Kujen’s mastering hand. No, that’s fine, he said.

Cheris interrupted at that point. “Jedao?” She must have been calling his name for some time.

His eyes focused on her. She was not tall, but she drew the eye, even clad in soft tan civilian’s clothes, including an incongruous formless cardigan for warmth. Her garb couldn’t hide the truth of her past profession, the subtle soldier’s muscle and the poised, efficient swiftness with which she moved.

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said, mostly sincere. “What did you say?” His temples twinged with the beginnings of a headache.

“Are you thirsty?”

He was. “Water, if you have it.”

She rose and brought a canteen to him, then tipped it to his mouth. He drank gratefully, spilling only a little. The waste bothered him. How much did they have in the way of water, or other provisions? How much space on Harmony was devoted to human necessities like food?

Then Cheris unshackled him from the restraints. They snicked softly. He imagined the clicking of monstrous teeth. He wasn’t sure this was a good idea; but he needed to use the lavatory at some point, and his body hurt all over. It would be a relief to be able to move again.

Cousin?

The Harmony was calling to him. Jedao attempted to say its name again, was greeted by a soft humming that he recognized, with blank astonishment, as laughter. Time for the question: How do moths usually heal themselves after battle?

They feed us, the Harmony said, which didn’t reassure him. It sounded matter-of-fact. It depends on how deep the damage goes. Carapace damage, externals, well, it’s inconvenient for the passengers but not such a big concern for us. If we get hurt, on the other hand—I was extremely hungry two years ago after that big battle at Terebeg. Took a lot of damage. But I was very brave. The moth’s tone was tinged with smugness.

This only answered half his question. But what do they feed you?

Oh, the Harmony said, abruptly solicitous, is that what your trouble was? Your human might not know what’s best for us, if she’s not an engineer. You’d think she’d listen to the servitor. They’re pretty knowledgeable. Before Jedao could repeat his query, it went on, Batteries, usually, charged with gate-space radiations. Tasty, if a little rich.

Jedao did not want to know what would happen if he exposed himself to foxes knew what sort of radiation or particles or whatever the hell. Now that he thought about the matter more calmly, it made sense that he ate differently than normal moths. Thanks so much, Kujen, for making me a freak on multiple axes. But he couldn’t express that to the Harmony, who had been courteous to him.

Meanwhile, Cheris brought him more water. “See?” she was saying. “You haven’t attacked me yet.”

“Why didn’t you leave me behind?” Jedao asked, too stung to be tactful.

“What, and leave you to any surviving Shuos?”

“The last time we met,” Jedao said, “you promised to find a way to kill me. You could have abandoned me to the forest fire.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Cheris said. Her expression didn’t change, but Jedao involuntarily retreated two steps, as though he were in a duel and he needed to get out of range fast. “You’re going to get what you want, and you’re going to give me what you promised.”

“You’re very trusting.”

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” Cheris said. “I’m making my own life easier.” Her drawl had thickened, and it made Jedao queasy hearing his accent in her voice. “It has to do with calculations. If I hand you over to someone like Mikodez or, foxes forbid, Inesser, I have to reckon not only with your plans but with theirs. Inesser’s reliable, in the sense that she’d cheerfully execute me if she could find a charge that would stick.” A tilted grin; Jedao shuddered. “And Mikodez—the only thing I trust about Mikodez is that he can turn anything to his own advantage. I’ve never been his ally by choice.”

Jedao stared at her, mute in the face of her frustration.

“Go,” Cheris said, her voice suddenly rough.

Jedao tottered, then regained his balance. “I can’t wander far”—in a moth this size, he almost said, before the irony struck him like a fist to the stomach. “Tell me where I can clean up.”

Cheris opened a drawer, rummaged, then drew out a change of clothes. He had no idea whether they’d fit him and he didn’t care. She tossed the bundle at him, then described where he could find everything, as if he needed her guidance; but he wasn’t going to tell her about the othersense if she hadn’t deduced it already.

Sorry to be distracting! the Harmony said, not sounding the least bit sorry, the moment Jedao had turned his back on Cheris. Is there a reason you keep talking to the human?

What do you mean? Jedao said as he hastened to the lavatory, took care of necessary functions, and started the shower. To his relief, it was instantly warm, although considering all the disasters he’d survived recently, a little cold water shouldn’t faze him.

The moth didn’t reply for a while, to his relief. This allowed Jedao to scrub ferociously at his skin before it occurred to him that the angry red weals he inflicted, which returned to an unblemished state with startling rapidity, also required healing. He didn’t want to revert in the shower of all places. Water was dear, even with recycling.

The human, the Harmony said again. Jedao was in the middle of toweling himself off. The towel smelled clean, even if Cheris had used it, and anyway he wasn’t in a position to be squeamish. Why are you taking orders from her?

What do you mean? Jedao said, off-balance. It was starting to become a familiar sensation. Don’t humans usually command moths? Certainly that was the impression he’d gotten when he’d been Kujen’s general, and the one he had received from the Revenant itself.

I was handed over to the servitors, the Harmony said brightly. They made me so much deadlier. I was disappointed that you got rid of those sorry little personnel carriers before I could have a crack at them.

Foxes help him, the Harmony was bloodthirsty. Was it too late to assign it a more appropriate name in his head? You like working for the servitors?

The servitors who had allied with the Revenant in murdering his Kel had, according to Hemiola, been renegades. How many kinds of servitors were there? And what did they want?

Think it through, Jedao told himself. Foxes knew it wasn’t as if humans in the hexarchate, or even a given faction, were unified. (It hadn’t taken superhuman perception to glimpse the fault lines even among the Shuos, in the heart of their administrative headquarters.) As recently as two years ago, the hexarchate hadn’t been. That was the reason Kujen had awakened Jedao.

Jedao hadn’t seen a servitor on the Harmony earlier, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d been focused on Cheris, and trussed up in the hold. The doors to the cockpit had been closed. Anything could have lurked behind them, and he had been too distracted by his dual conversation with Cheris and the Harmony to search for any interesting masses up front.

Sorry to spoil your fun, Jedao said to the Harmony. He could have spared everyone a great deal of trouble—except Cheris had been certain that she needed him to provide a distraction. While he didn’t trust her, her tactical ability was better than his.

Oh, it’s no matter, the Harmony said. But really, you didn’t realize the servitors are in charge now?

Not all servitors were hostile to humans. He had to repeat that to himself. (And never mind the fact that he was human only in shape.) Hemiola had never done him ill. And yet—

Memory threatened to engulf him: servitors floating into the command center of the Revenant, their lights shining sterile cold white, white for death; Kel everywhere stumbling to their knees or toppling over as the poison gas took effect, the lethality of the lasers. As far as Jedao knew, only two of the crew had survived, and he would never meet the other again.

It would have been three, except Dhanneth had—Jedao shut down that line of thought.

I didn’t bring Talaw’s deck of cards, Jedao thought miserably. He’d left it on the top of his dresser like so much dross, as though it hadn’t belonged to the last person to show him (an entirely undeserved) loyalty. What would he have done with it here of all places, though? Cast fortunes? Watch the fucking Deuce of Gears turn up unwanted, even though he’d removed it from the deck?

And in any case, that was impossible. Even if he had brought the deck, it would have burned up, in classic Kel fashion, during his shenanigans on the planet.

You’re awfully blasé about being in service to others, Jedao said, more testily than he’d intended.

Oh, cousin, the Harmony said, mocking, have you been listening to Nirai radicals or something? I always knew there was something not quite right about them. No one taught you the proper way to be a moth?

I’m sorry, cousin, Jedao lied, they’re calling for me. I’ll talk to you later.

The only moth he’d conversed with before the Harmony had been the Revenant; the other Kel warmoths had flatly refused to talk to him. Stupid of him to think that every moth would resemble the Revenant, devious and self-assured in its bitterness, or the warmoths who had shunned him. How many different moth factions were there? How many moths aligned themselves cheerfully and amorally with whoever commanded them, eager for a chance to fight, even against their “cousins”?

Who was he to speak, anyway? He’d been greeted by Kujen as soon as he’d woken for the first time and had capitulated immediately, without stopping to consider whether Kujen was worth serving.

Cheris rapped on the door. “I know you’re done in there,” she called out. “Unless you’re masturbating.”

Heat rushed to his cheeks. Hastily, Jedao pulled on the clothes she’d provided, which were baggy and comfortable and not in the least flattering. Given that he was half a head taller than Cheris, they weren’t tailored to her. Maybe she’d had them printed to his approximate measurements. Very approximate.

When he emerged, Cheris was idly chewing on one of the ration bars. Jedao was sure he turned green. How could she eat those things so casually? From a ration bar fort?

“Where are we going?” Jedao asked, to distract himself from the awful mingled smell of all the different flavors. Why couldn’t Cheris have an uncontrollable fondness for something less smelly, like rice crackers?

“I need some of Kujen’s equipment to do what you asked for,” Cheris said. “We’re on our way to retrieve it.”

Jedao was distracted by something other than the question of Kujen’s equipment, or Kujen’s research, or Kujen’s secret bases. Cheris’s voice had flexed minutely on Kujen’s name. “You miss him,” Jedao breathed. She missed him, and Jedao had killed him.

“Don’t be absurd,” Cheris said, a half-beat too late to be convincing. “I don’t know that he, of all people, is strictly dead.”

Jedao wasn’t interested in irrelevancies. He knew Kujen was gone; nothing else mattered. “Kujen made me his general,” Jedao said. “His pet. What the hell were the two of you to each other?”

“I’m not discussing this with—”

He needled her, even though a rational consideration of the situation suggested that antagonizing the one person who could help him, and who knew their destination, was a terrible idea. “You were lovers, weren’t you?” he said, his drawl thickening with disdain. “You were lovers and you turned on him and he made me instead.”

“That’s enough.” Cheris bit each word off as if she could pulp it between her teeth.

Jedao was afraid; but fear was never a reason to freeze up. What had older-Jedao and Kujen shared? What else was Cheris keeping from him? After all, she’d lied to him once already, about the one thing he remembered from his past life, the one person he’d remembered and cared about.

“You have no idea,” Cheris said, still icy, “what the stakes were. You don’t remember, because you can’t. You are going to shut up and never mention this again.”

Before she had finished the sentence, Jedao crouched and threw a punch.

She dodged, rushed past him even in the confined space. Jedao stumbled into the fort of ration bars and knocked them over. He landed poorly, banging his elbows and one knee. Would have vomited into the tempting terrible pile; dry-heaved instead.

Cheris’s shadow fell over him, flayed him like a knife made of mirror-glass. She was standing over him. She spoke now in a dry, conversational voice; it, too, cut him. “In case you were wondering,” she said, “you fucked Kujen during your first life, after the two of you agreed to betray the heptarchate. He was always beautiful, and you hadn’t had a lover or prostitute in two years, had never trusted one because you planned to turn coat. He touched you inside and out, and you begged and begged and begged.”

Jedao swallowed convulsively. Stared up into Cheris’s merciless cold eyes.

“I,” Cheris said, “remember every time you and Kujen fucked. Every time you lay there gasping in bed, you knew that Kujen was living in a body stolen from someone he’d picked for their wit, or their wisdom. Or their beauty, sometimes, although he could make his anchors beautiful if they fulfilled his other wormfucking criteria. Not difficult, when you’re the Nirai fucking hexarch and you can do whatever you please.”

Her eyes blazed with contempt. Jedao couldn’t move.

“And you,” she said, “you let him install you in pretty people who used to have lives of their own. Scientists and heretics, prisoners of war and experimental subjects who had outlived their usefulness. You lived in the skin of whatever person Kujen thought was attractive and convenient and you let Kujen fuck them by fucking you, and when he was sated and sent you back into the black cradle, those people were executed so they wouldn’t tell tales.”

At that moment, Jedao was convinced that the sheer force of her loathing would kill him, regeneration notwithstanding.

And what could he say? “I didn’t know”? They both knew he’d had no idea. It wasn’t an excuse.

Now, more than ever, it hammered home the importance of knowing what he’d done so he could take responsibility for it.

Cheris pivoted on her heel and disappeared into the cockpit. Jedao glimpsed orange lights, correlated them with the compact mass of a servitor. This must be the one that the Harmony had mentioned. He would rather think about it, and about tactical options and sight lines and weapons, than all the things that Cheris had revealed.

For the rest of the day, Cheris didn’t speak to him. Jedao could have conversed with the Harmony, but he kept silent. What could it offer him at this point, after all?

The moth had two bunks, both neatly made, identical in every way. He picked one at random and curled up uncomfortably under the blanket with its absurd cheerful quilted patterns of interlaced blue rectangles. For a long time he occupied himself tracing the patterns with his hand, up and down, back and forth.

That night, when Jedao eventually slept, he dreamt of Kujen kissing him long and deep, of the woodsmoke-apple-musk of Kujen’s perfume. In the dream he yielded; and after that everything dissolved into an inchoate tangle of wanted-unwanted desires. Later, when he started awake in the considerate darkness, he turned his face to the wall and wept.

 

 

CHERIS WAS TEMPTED to leave Jedao to stew in an uncomfortable silence. Instead, she dragged him awake the next day and forced him to eat a ration bar. He let her pick; she had the distinct impression that he found all the flavors equally disgusting.

As he took tiny, precise, and unenthusiastic bites, chewing with the maddening thoroughness of a cow, Cheris said, “How did you escape from the Citadel of Eyes, anyway?” The question had been bothering her.

A fleeting expression flashed over his face: gratitude that she was talking to him. “I bribed someone to help me get out,” Jedao said.

Cheris lifted an eyebrow. “No, really.”

“Not everyone in the Citadel of Eyes is loyal to Hexarch Mikodez.”

“I believe that,” Cheris said, “but what in the name of fire and ash do you have to offer one of Mikodez’s staff?”

The slight pause told her he was about to lie to her.

“Don’t bother,” Cheris said just as he opened his mouth. “If you’re not going to tell me, fine.”

Jedao drew a shuddering breath. “People find playing certain games with someone who has my face very entertaining.”

She went still. Was he implying—? “What kinds of games?” she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.

“They felt sorry for me after,” he said. “They told me that the hexarch’s assistant wanted me destroyed, so they helped me get off the Citadel.”

“And?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Cheris dropped the subject—for now. Mikodez’s security problems weren’t under her purview. But it might be nice to extract the information from Jedao at a later point, just in case.

Over the course of the journey, which took eighteen days, Jedao remained taciturn. She couldn’t tell whether he was afraid of provoking her again, or he was hiding information from her, or something else entirely. It worried her that he kept going blank and unresponsive; the original Jedao had had a tendency toward dissociation. At one point she handed him a dossier on Kujen’s base and told him to read it, which he did.

The base resided on an obscure moon orbiting a planet that was poisonous to humans, poor in resources, and entirely uninhabited. In short, the kind of place that Kujen had liked to lurk around. Cheris had given up on conversation with Jedao for the moment and was in the cockpit with 1491625.

“I’ve always wondered when, in between coordinating his makeup with the season’s fashions, brainwashing people for entertainment, and perusing menus of ridiculous luxury foods, Kujen had time to study enough survey data to site all these bases,” Cheris said to 1491625.

“Time flies when you’re immortal?” 1491625 said, its lights tinted a snide pink-orange. “I mean, you should know.”

The original Jedao had spent most of his time confined in the black cradle, in nearly absolute sensory deprivation. On the other hand, Kujen had enjoyed the comforts of a body and freedom of motion. But Cheris didn’t say this to 1491625. It was being tetchy not because of anything to do with Kujen but because of their passenger.

Cheris set one of the subdisplays to optical as 1491625 brought them in a long arc toward the base. She couldn’t see the base itself except as a phantasm of shadow and blotches. Certainly she couldn’t discern its boundaries with the naked eye. According to the reports that 1491625 had passed on to her from Pyrehawk Enclave’s records, the base was underground. Kujen would have known how to mask its profile from the casual observer.

“This is your last chance to change your mind,” 1491625 added.

Cheris appreciated that it had waited until this moment to tell her this, a surgical strike, instead of nagging her about it the past eighteen days. She wouldn’t have been able to endure that. “The original plan stands,” she said.

1491625 flickered blue lights in a distinct sigh and didn’t bring it up again.

The moon had only the thinnest veil of atmosphere. Cheris would have to go in suited, with an air supply. Jedao, too, just in case. It wasn’t clear to her that he’d survive near-vacuum, despite his origins. Or, more accurately, that he’d do so in a manner that would make him tolerable company.

The display showed the topography in standardized false color, with bold isoclines forming a pattern as distinct as any fingerprint. There had been liquid water on this moon a long time ago, and the traces remained carved into the stone. Cheris noticed with a pang that there was no rock garden to greet them, as there had been at Tefos Base, where she’d met the servitor Hemiola. She wondered where it was now, and if it had ever gotten to watch the rest of that drama it had liked so much.

“We’re going to have another tedious discussion with Nirai servitors,” 1491625 said, tinting its lights a ghoulish violet.

Cheris shook her head. “For a superior type of sentience, you have a lot of prejudices.”

“Not superior,” 1491625 said, “just different. You may be made of allegedly delicious meat”—Cheris rolled her eyes good-humoredly—“but you don’t suffer metal fatigue and have to have new parts installed. Although I suppose one of these days you’re going to wear out your joints, the way you abuse them in close combat, and need those replaced.”

“Oh, look,” Cheris said, “we’re about to land.” As if 1491625, who was doing the piloting, needed her to tell it that.

The needlemoth settled smoothly on the level portion of a ridge. No one had fired on them; nothing had exploded. That didn’t mean they were safe, as far as Kujen’s defenses were concerned, but at least they hadn’t already been obliterated.

Cheris expected the base to be protected by one of Kujen’s favorite tricks, a calendrical lock. She’d defeated them before by resorting to a prime factorization mechanism that only worked in a heretical calendar, something Kujen would never have countenanced.

During the journey, she’d convinced Jedao to let her run some preliminary tests. Despite his inhuman physiology, he affected the local calendar as though he was human. She suspected it was because his mind was more or less human.

Cheris sighed and made her way to the bunkroom of the needlemoth. Jedao lay on his side on his bunk, staring at the wall and breathing shallowly. He did not react to her approach.

“Jedao,” she said. “We’ve arrived. Come with me.”

Jedao didn’t argue. Didn’t speak, either. Instead, he levered himself up and stood, watching her with dead eyes.

She’d endured long stretches of time in the black cradle with only Kujen for company. Even that had been intermittent. Kujen had enjoyed leaving her in the darkness so that she’d be grateful when he let her out. She’d known exactly what he was doing and why; had been pierced by the unwelcome sting of gratitude anyway. Still, she hadn’t expected this other Jedao’s quietness to bother her so much.

Cheris led the way to what passed for the galley: a small counter where two people could sit and eat if they didn’t mind bumping elbows.

“Great job,” 1491625 flashed at her from the cockpit. “He’s being so cooperative.” She ignored it, wondering, not for the first time, if Jedao understood Machine Universal. He’d never shown any reaction to 1491625’s speech, but she knew better than to assume.

Jedao took his accustomed seat, scrunched up so as to avoid touching her. Cheris was seized by the sudden desire to slap him, to get some reaction out of that unresponsive face. She was starting to feel, superstitiously, that through some mirror-sorcery, like in the Mwennin folktales she’d learned in her childhood, anything that happened to him would eventually happen to her.

Cheris retrieved her factorization instrument from the locker she’d carefully stowed it in two years before. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

No answer, but his shoulders tensed. She was afraid for a moment that he would smash the instrument. She’d stop him, of course. It was at least as valuable as she was, and because of the tolerances in its manufacture, she couldn’t produce a new one from the small matter printer she had on board.

Tersely, as if she had his full attention, Cheris explained Kujen’s security, which demanded fast factorization of a very large composite number. The instrument would allow them to defeat the system. The catch: it only worked in certain heretical calendars.

Jedao flexed his hands. She couldn’t help staring. He looked so odd without his half-gloves. “I’ll cooperate,” he said. “Whatever you need.”

The high language, which they both spoke to each other, divided its pronouns into animate and inanimate classes. Jedao had used the inanimate version of I. That didn’t imply great things about his state of mind.

This is for you as much as it is for me, Cheris stopped herself from saying. No point in quarreling this close to their goal. “We’re here,” she said, and turned toward the airlock.

Jedao tackled her. Cheris bit down a yelp. Fought him, breaking one arm with a sickening crack before realizing he was hissing in her ear, “Stay down, there are hostiles—”

She went limp despite all her instincts screaming at her to disable Jedao while she had the chance, as if breaking bones did any good against someone who healed as rapidly as he did. Jedao covered her, which she interpreted as calculation rather than honor or mercy—that inhuman regeneration made him the better shield.

1491625 was saying something in livid frantic flashes of light. Cheris had interpreted part of it—The base is active—when the explosion hit.

Heat. Fire. Jedao’s weight atop her. The side of the needlemoth tore open and formed tormented flanges of metal. The meat reek of scorched flesh, except with that peculiar cloying undertone that she associated with Jedao’s black blood.

The attack wasn’t over. Why should it be? Always follow up an advantage, and so on; lessons from a lifetime of soldiering. The needlemoth rolled as something hit it, a hammer-blow like a giant’s fist. Jedao clutched at her, his face twisting as he landed on the broken arm. Cheris had enough time to feel sorry for him before smashing into the far wall. At least the chairs were bolted down or one would have landed on her.

Jedao scrambled back to a low crouch only to be knocked down again by the next round of explosions. He struggled upright, scrabbled for a mask and air tank, thrust both at her. His face was ghastly pale, and blood ran down from a cut at his temple.

Cheris accepted the mask and tank. Her lungs didn’t hurt—yet—but a faint edge of panic threatened to overcome her, the body’s insistence on breathing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glistening membrane stretching over most of the blown-out carapace as the automated repair system sealed the breach. The membrane was perilously thin, and wouldn’t withstand much of a barrage.

“Knife,” Jedao mouthed at her, signing the word as well for emphasis. Then: “You—sealant.”

A knife was a peculiar weapon to demand when they were under missile fire. Cheris could only guess at the reason they hadn’t been destroyed yet: the needlemoth’s primary defense was stealth, and its carapace couldn’t withstand a determined assault. Nevertheless, she pointed out the location of the survival kit, hoping he understood her.

At least sealant she understood the need for. She reckoned it more urgent than the knife, although surely he had his reasons. She wasn’t sure they had enough sealant on board to reinforce the membrane. But better to try than give up. She crawled, bracing for each new impact, to the cabinet of emergency canisters. Clawed at the hatch until rational thought reasserted itself and she was able to toggle it open.

Bright hell-flashes sizzled through the debris and smoke in the air. It took Cheris several abstracted moments to figure out that 1491625 was signaling her. She clung to one of the hand/footholds like an awkward spider, shouted at Jedao, quite unnecessarily, to get out of the way, pointed the canister at the breach, and opened the nozzle.

Foam gushed from the nozzle, expanding like an immense hungry fungus. (Like many Kel, Cheris had a horror of fungus—specifically the dreaded weapon known as the fungal canister—even if she’d only seen it used once during her original life, and that from an unimaginable distance.) For a second she thought she had gone blind, that everything would forever be swallowed up in a rush of bubbling murky gray.

Then the foam clung and shrank, setting as it made contact with the carapace and walls and membrane. Cheris was glad she hadn’t gotten any on herself. She’d heard of people getting cemented to foam sealant and having to be extricated with cutters and stinging solvent. Or worse, being entombed in the foam, suffocating as the foam forced itself down your throat and blossomed grotesquely in the lungs—

Cheris shook off the gruesome vision and slithered over to Jedao, where she received a shock of an entirely different sort. He had retrieved the knife—good—except he had buried it hilt-deep in his chest and was carving himself like a demented roast. Cheris stared in frank astonishment as he yanked the knife out and pulled out a chunk of flesh oozing the familiar black blood.

“Jedao,” she wheezed as the needlemoth lifted off—thankfully, they still had a maneuver drive left for 1491625 to work with—“what in the name of fire and ash?” At least she thought that was what she said; the particulates in the air caused her to hack and cough. The acrid metallic stench mingling with the alien reek of Jedao’s blood didn’t help.

He shook his head without meeting her eyes, as if that meant anything in the haze of smoke and foam off-gas and stinging metallic fibers. Cheris glimpsed a pulsing nest of maggot-like tendrils knotting and unknotting where he should have had a heart. He reached into the wound with his fingers, grimaced, and twisted, then removed his hand. “Got it,” he mouthed.

Drenched by dripping gore was a small device of metal and crystal. Cheris’s heart clenched. A bug or a tracking device.

“It must have been in one of the bullets,” Jedao said. “I should have noticed it earlier, but its density is such a close match—” He brought the device up to his mouth, placed it between two molars, bit down hard. There was a crackling noise and a pungent spark as it combusted. He spat it out; Cheris didn’t see where it went.

“Who?” Cheris asked. But she already knew.

“The Shuos,” Jedao said, bitter.

All that time flying stealthed and it hadn’t made a difference. The Shuos had followed them here in their shadowmoths—surely more than one—and now they might die before either of them achieved their goal. “’25,” she called out, because in her haste she didn’t have time to pronounce the servitor’s full name, “status?”

She didn’t like drawing attention to it; Pyrehawk Enclave’s protocols forbade it. But she needed to communicate with it, and she suspected that Jedao had already guessed 1491625’s sentience.

It spoke at the same time, hijacking the needlemoth’s own imaging systems to warn them. Cheris had never known it to do that in the past. Servitors were generally discreet about the degree to which they could nose around in grid systems. The emergency couldn’t be denied, however.

Under fire, 1491625 sent to them in hell-red flashes, the world lighting up in gory crimson. At least two shadowmoths, probably more still stealthed.

Cheris’s heart sank even as a part of her thought, not a little snidely, Great, two Jedaos and we’ve finally met a scenario we can’t fox our way out of?

“We need to parley,” she said. They couldn’t win a battle of attrition. The question was, would their attackers be willing to talk? Especially after Jedao had attempted to eat one of their comrades?

Only one way to find out.

“Fuck, no,” Jedao said. He grabbed for her arm, missed. She twisted past him and squeezed by the disgusting mess of sealant, shuddering from the rubbery texture against her cheek, then hurried toward the cockpit.

1491625 didn’t have to be told to slam the cockpit door in Jedao’s face. Cheris told herself she wasn’t being spiteful. Shuos operatives wouldn’t react positively to Jedao running around loose, and never mind that they were unlikely to think kindly of her, either.

Jedao immediately began banging on the door. Cheris suppressed a growl. Why couldn’t he ever be convenient? Even when he’d been a ghost stapled to her shadow, as opposed to a regenerating menace with a teenager’s moods and memories, he’d never been convenient.

“Comm channel’s open,” 1491625 flashed at Cheris. “Have fun.”

It would have been nice if someone around here had any faith in her. “This is Ajewen Cheris,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the thumping. At least it was only (only?) thumping and not more explosions. “Request parley.”

The response came immediately. Good: they’d been expecting her. Importunate of them to blow a hole in her vehicle just to get a response, but in their position she’d have done the same.

“Cheris,” a vicious soprano purred her name back at her—and pronounced it with the correct Mwen-dal pitch accent. The connection was audio-only. “Or should I call you Jedao? This is Agent Shuos Nija, pleased to see you’re still the hexarchate’s worst trouble magnet.”

Shit. Nija was the girl whom Hexarch Mikodez had, for inexplicable reasons, adopted after saving her from the hexarchs’ purge of the Mwennin. By now she’d be a woman grown.

“You will power down your maneuver drive and land for an in-person parley,” Nija continued. “Otherwise I will take great satisfaction in blowing your needlemoth and everyone on it, including yourself, into nameless particles. Your friend might be able to recover from that, but I’m pretty sure you’re no longer immortal except in reputation. And for saints’ sake”—she said the oath in flawless Mwen-dal, like twisting a knife that had already penetrated a vital organ—“I don’t know if that’s your engine making those horrible knocking noises, but you should look into that. Which you’ll be able to do if you persuade me to stop firing.”

Fuck you too, Cheris thought in a friendly manner, then cursed herself for slipping. The reminder of her Mwennin heritage, and the fact that she’d abandoned the new life she’d tried to make for herself, cut deeply. Retreating into Jedao’s persona was, however, not going to improve the situation. Mikodez’s agents were unlikely to be much impressed by—

“It’s you,” Cheris said aloud, to test Nija’s reaction. How much time could she buy if she dragged out the interpersonal melodrama?

Moroish Nija, the Mwennin survivor who had been a teenager when Cheris first encountered her. Mikodez had scooped Nija up and adopted her. Nija hated Cheris to begin with, and who could blame her? After all, Cheris’s revolution, however well-intentioned, had resulted in the purge of the Mwennin people. And the man who swept in to save some few thousand Mwennin from the other hexarchs had been none other than Mikodez himself.

“Yes,” Nija agreed, “it’s me. Are you going to do it, or am I going to have to shoot you down in pursuit of my mission? Because I have been waiting over a decade to take you down.”

Cheris wasn’t concerned, despite the threats. Mikodez had sent Nija, and Mikodez wasn’t stupid. He would have selected his strike force for this mission carefully. If he thought there existed the least chance that Nija would go rogue and indulge a personal vendetta rather than his orders, he would never have sent her. Nija, for her part, would be loyal—personally loyal—to the man who had defied the other hexarchs to save her and her people.

No: Nija was baiting Cheris, with a pretext that sounded plausible. But Cheris was an expert in the art of plausible lies, and she recognized one when she heard it.

“We’re landing,” Cheris said, reinforcing the order in Simplified Machine Universal to 1491625. The servitor’s lights shaded muddy orange in dissatisfaction, but it complied.

While Cheris continued to bait Nija, certain that Nija’s spite was as feigned as her own, Cheris signed rapid instructions to 1491625. “Pretend to be me,” she signed to it. “Buy time for me and Jedao to carry out the ritual.” It was too bad she couldn’t send Jedao alone, but both of them had to be present for this to work.

Servitors disliked revealing the extent of their ability to hack into computer systems or fake video/audio shenanigans. Cheris herself hadn’t thought of it as a possibility until she’d met Hemiola. 1491625, for its part, hadn’t forgiven her for subjecting it to fan videos made to popular dance tunes; the two of them had wildly divergent tastes in music. In this case, however, 1491625 didn’t quibble. It opened the cockpit door.

Jedao stopped beating against the door the instant it began to move. 1491625 was already playing back a carefully altered version of the sound to make it seem like the background noise hadn’t changed. Cheris wished she could linger to see what else it came up with—1491625 had an odd sense of humor and a low opinion of Shuos, which might combine in interesting ways—but there was no time for that.

Cheris pressed her head against Jedao’s in a parody of affection so that he could hear her murmurs through the vibrations in the helmet. “You remember the map?”

He nodded.

“If you’re moth-derived”—she remembered how he’d launched himself at the Shuos personnel carrier—“can you carry me to the base?”

Another nod.

“The factoring device,” she said.

He backed away from her so she could retrieve it. Miracle of miracles, it was intact; it had not been sucked out of the wound in the needlemoth. Without the factoring device, none of this mattered. “We need to protect this—”

Inspired, Cheris emptied out the first aid kit, stuffed the device inside, and sprayed the container with skinseal for good measure. Would that offer enough protection, though?

Jedao held his hand out. She gave it to him. He bit his lip, then shoved the device into the hole in his chest, causing fresh blood to ooze out. Cheris had seen a lot of revolting things in the past four hundred years, but this was new. He grinned sardonically at her, his eyes bloodshot and his jaw taut with suppressed pain.

She pressed her helmet to his head again. “Through the membrane,” she said, indicating an area where the sealant was not as thick. 1491625 certainly had no need for atmospheric pressure, or oxygen.

They didn’t have time for a more elaborate plan, or a better one. But she remembered the old Kel truism: better a mediocre plan now than a perfect one too late. Jedao gestured sharply: Wait. He dug webcord out of its place in the toolkit, good for him for memorizing its location, and pocketed the utility knife as well.

Cheris stood immobile while he webbed her to his torso. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly in an embrace that made her shudder, more due to distaste than physical discomfort. His hands trembled, stilled. Pain, he signed to her.

At first she didn’t understand. Had he gotten so injured that his abilities were compromised? Then it came to her: he was warning her that she was about to be hurt.

Scarcely had she indicated her understanding when the pain, as promised, hit her. Jedao had curled himself around her like a possessive lover. Love had nothing to do with it. He was shielding her, as he had earlier; and through the hell-bloom of the pain, the sudden sharding impact as they flew through the foam and membrane patch, Cheris had a moment to recognize that the cushioning of his body had saved her from death or serious harm.

Then all thought fled as he accelerated, and she blacked out.

 

 

YOU CAN’T DIE yet, Jedao thought at Cheris as he dragged himself, and her, toward the maw of Kujen’s base. I need Jedao One’s memories. Don’t die.

Cheris had given him a dossier of the base’s particulars two days ago and told him to read it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have stood a chance. The combination of sudden passage through vacuum and bursting through a ship had robbed Jedao of vision. At least he had the othersense to guide him. The ground shook intermittently, indicating explosions or projectile impacts. He crouched small, made himself an insectine scurrying creature dashing across the plain with the ancient pit-marks of pattering micrometeorites. Only the suspicious smoothed areas in the dust told him that the moon had known visitors or inhabitants, servitors if no one else.

Kujen had built the base cunningly, but not cunningly enough to fool moth-senses. And why should he? No one was going to chat up a moth to ask it where the base was.

Jedao sensed the break in the surface, the artificial mechanism hidden beneath layers of rock. Was Cheris still breathing? Jedao looked inside her, detected the minute fluctuations of pressure and density in her lungs, and was reassured that she hadn’t abandoned him yet.

Abandoned, hell. If not for him, she wouldn’t be in this fix. The least he could do was get her out of it, even if he didn’t like her.

Cheris had informed him that Kujen’s base would open its outer sanctum to anyone, since Kujen needed to be able to access it in whatever body he chose. Jedao had doubts born of a short lifetime serving Kujen, but he was also out of options. He might be able to recover from whatever weaponry slammed down onto the surface, but Cheris needed shelter now.

The door ground open before him. With little atmosphere on the moon, there wasn’t sound as such, and Jedao didn’t think he had hearing left anyway; the agony in his skull suggested he’d done something bad to his eardrums. The vibrations rumbled against his soles, however—and for fuck’s sake, he didn’t need the reminder that the bones in his feet throbbed as though they were starting to splinter or whatever his body did after abuse like this.

Jedao would have liked nothing better than to flop to the ground and wheeze in agony while waiting for his body to knit itself back together. But that would mean conceding victory to the Shuos. Close, close, close, there are hostiles out there. The door seemed to be in no hurry, so instead he hastened deeper into the throat of the base, as though he were a sacrifice begging to be eaten.

Bad thought; remembered hunger twinged at the pit of his stomach. He gagged as the airlock cycled, tasted the air with its sweet oxygen, and the slight fragrant hint of perfume, how like Kujen to care about things like that. (Had he never considered that one of his anchors might have a heretofore unknown allergy?) I’m not hungry, he told himself. He couldn’t be that badly hurt. Wouldn’t allow himself to be.

Still, there had better be a stockpile of food in this base—even Kel ration bars—just in case.

Too bad he didn’t have the luxury of slumping with Cheris in his arms, awkwardly webbed to him as she was, and enjoying the simple fact of breathing. Now that he’d entered the base—

The transmission arrived on schedule. His nerves jangled and for a moment he wondered if he’d caught on fire. It would serve him right. But no: it was a burst transmission to his augment, specifically of a number. A very, very large composite number.

Cheris was supposed to deal with Kujen’s fucking math problem. She had sounded so enthusiastic as she explained the principles of the calendrical lock to him, and even more enthusiastic, momentarily forgetting that she disliked him, when he revealed that he knew what prime factorization was. Too bad she had despised Kujen, because Jedao could imagine the two of them discussing disgustingly incomprehensible mathematics for fun over milk tea and custard buns. In his haste to escape the hostiles, however, Jedao had accelerated too fast and the knocked Cheris out.

One step at a time. Panicking over the enormity of what he was about to try didn’t help. He broke it down to easily digestible steps (ha, ha). He couldn’t give up this close to achieving his goal.

Jedao retrieved the knife he had pocketed earlier and slashed Cheris free of the webcord. Then, cradling her head so he didn’t cause her further trauma, he set her down near the wall. He wished he could offer a softer surface than the floor, but it couldn’t be helped.

He backed up two steps, turned his back to her, and stared at the knife. The hole in his chest had healed shut; he could even feel the familiar map of scars that reconstituted itself every time. It’s only pain, Jedao reminded himself. It doesn’t matter.

Even so, he bit down on a hiss as he cut himself open. It’s only pain. For the first time, he wondered how warmoths felt when they sustained injuries in the course of battle. He’d never thought to ask one.

Cheris kept her tools sharp, considerate of her. The knife didn’t snag on his flesh, or what passed for flesh. Jedao wiped the blade clean, then shoved it into his belt.

Next Jedao reached into the wound and dug out the device, grimacing at the squelching as he tore it free of the tendrils inside himself. He wiped the case as clean as he could on his clothes, then cut through the skinseal and opened it. To his relief, the device nestled within appeared undamaged.

The number in his augment sizzled against his awareness, as though he’d been poured full of lightning. The augment had interfaced with the local grid. It informed him that he had three minutes and sixteen seconds left to disarm the security system.

Next time I piss off a near-immortal with secret bases, Jedao thought, I’m going to make sure it’s a thug who uses regular locks and not a fucking mathematician.

Even as he entertained the happy fantasy of a lock he could simply cut his way around, or even better, an unlocked door, Jedao transmitted the composite number with its staggering number of digits to the device using his augment. His head ached, which was partly due to the changes to the augment’s contents. He had some peripheral awareness that the base’s initial transmission had simply erased a large amount of data, from interface functions to backed-up memories of irrelevant trivia about dueling competitions. (Jedao hadn’t trusted a device to keep his secrets from the Shuos.)

Time for the hard part. Jedao heard the Shuos moths singing as they fought, although he wasn’t going to give himself away by attempting to address them. Did moths of different factions object to fighting others of their own kind? Something to ask Harmony later if it survived. He was tempted to call out to it, but he didn’t want to distract it. For all he knew, it blamed him for the hit it had taken.

With any luck, the crews on those shadowmoths were distant enough that Jedao wouldn’t have to account for them when he attempted to modify the local calendar to a heretical one in which the factorization device could function. Kujen’s weakness had been his extreme attachment to the high calendar; he’d never anticipated that someone using a heretical device would try to break into his base, or he’d believed that by that point the base would be compromised anyway. Cheris was unconscious, and therefore of no help, but at least she would be—how did they say it in math?—a constant factor.

Jedao accessed his augment and set up the initial computations for the ritual despite the screaming pain in his chest. It’s only pain. As far as he could tell, Cheris would have been able to do the math in her head, lucky her. He was just a runaway, not the savant who had almost single-handedly wrecked the hexarchate. He needed a computer algebra system.

Dimly, Jedao sensed the shadowmoths treeing the Harmony. It had landed, and the particular dense mass that was Cheris’s servitor friend had wedged itself... in the cargo hold? It must be hiding from search parties.

The device tracked fluctuations in the local calendar. Unfortunately, its readouts hadn’t been designed for the sightless. Jedao growled and wasted precious seconds piping them to his augment so he could interpret the raw data. While he’d heard of people blinding themselves to avoid Andan enthrallment or Rahal scrying, usually in the context of dramas or specialized pornography, the hexarchate only thought about the unsighted in a military sort of way, such as Shuos infantry operating in the dark, or computers providing voice access to people who were waiting to have replacement eyes grown and installed after trauma. Whoever had designed the device hadn’t thought about the needs of temporarily blinded individuals who couldn’t regrow their eyes fast enough to beat what was probably a self-destruct countdown.

Jedao oriented himself amid the numbers and figures, visualizing them against the performance space. Had Kujen ever danced the doors open, here?

The clock continued its countdown, as relentless as a knife-thrust.

Too bad he wasn’t a Nirai. A Nirai would have known the local calendar, like perfect pitch except it applied to matters of time and government. But the stupid hack worked, even if it strained the limits of his augment’s processing ability, and that was what mattered.

Human shapes approached. He had to hurry this up. Jedao bowed to the corners of an imaginary nonagon, thought with alarm of ninefoxes and tricksters and schemes in the scudding dark. Granted, there might be light in the room, but since he couldn’t see, it was entirely academic.

Jedao dredged up memories of ritual phrases from various feasts and remembrances, everything from the old blessing pronounced by the Liozh heptarch for the New Year’s gift exchange to verses-of-praise and verses-of-war, some of the latter allegedly penned by the great General Andan Zhe Navo. His tongue scraped against his dry mouth and the ridged surfaces of his teeth, which felt too sharp for anyone’s comfort.

As the words poured from him in a frenzy of desperation, the hunger nagged at him again. Maybe cutting himself hadn’t been the brightest idea, especially since the only “food” was Cheris and he was not going to chomp on her. Despite his fear, he forced himself to breathe evenly and continue the recitations.

Numbers slid, shifted, realigned. The device remained obdurately silent. What the hell was he doing wrong?

Aha. The problem was the encroaching Shuos operatives. He needed to compensate for the effect they had on the local calendar and hurry up before they got closer. Fuck my life, Jedao thought, suddenly hyper-aware of the warm slimy dampness that caused his pants to cling to his body. Blood. He was tracking blood all over Kujen’s (presumably) shiny base floor. At least he hadn’t slid in it and knocked himself out, which would be a hilarious if undignified way to meet his end.

Jedao agonized: he could calculate the necessary modifications to the ritual, but he wasn’t sure he had enough processing power to spare, especially since he didn’t dare cut his connection to the device’s monitoring routines. Despite the splitting headache it gave him, he sliced out a number of security functions on the grounds that getting hacked by a Shuos was now a secondary concern, and fed the augment the systems of congruences he needed solved. He asked as well for the geometrical conversions.

He fancied he heard footsteps, even though the operatives were still some distance away—about thirteen minutes at a dead run. Cheris continued to breathe shallowly. The moths sang war-hymns to each other.

The factorization device thrummed. Jedao heard it only subliminally. He started to hold his breath, as if it made any difference to a machine, then let it out.

The device transmitted the prime factors to his augment, which relayed them to the base.

For an agonizing second, nothing happened.

Then the countdown stopped. The inner door gaped open. Jedao halted the recitations and knelt to hoist Cheris over his shoulder. He continued to leak blood not just all over the floor—fox and hound, he could feel the thick puddles of it underfoot—but Cheris’s lower body. How much blood did he contain? How much more could he afford to lose?

Jedao hurried through the door. His hearing was starting to return, and he heard the door whisking shut. He could see a little, too, although his eye sockets stung and everything was a red-black haze.

Someone was talking to him.

Jedao twisted to put as much of his body between himself and his interlocutor as possible. “I’m sorry,” he said, wincing at the way his voice rasped in his throat. “I didn’t understand that.” Was he too late? Had the Shuos beaten him here, and if so, why was he still (temporarily) alive?

The voice repeated itself. His hearing rendered it as a contralto buzzing.

He wasn’t about to relinquish Cheris, which made signing awkward. In any case, he had no guarantee that whoever he was talking to understood the Shuos sign language. “She’s injured,” he said, nodding toward Cheris’s slumped weight and wishing that the motion didn’t aggravate the pain in his chest.

The voice’s owner seemed to decide that he was deaf; it occurred to Jedao that maybe he was. This time it spoke so loudly that Jedao could, with difficulty, distinguish the words: “Put her down, step backwards, and put your hands in the air. If you move after that, we’ll kill you both.”

 

 

CHERIS AWOKE A prisoner.

Muzzy as she was, she assumed at first that she was still a junior lieutenant, that she’d offended her captain somehow (fouled up a ritual at high table? failed to shine her boots? gotten drunk on duty?), and been tossed in the brig. Granted, spider restraints on top of that suggested petty vindictiveness as well. And her head was throbbing. How drunk had she gotten? It must have been one hell of a party. She was sorry she couldn’t remember the good parts.

I never went out drinking that recklessly, one part of her mind insisted, while the other said, Yes, you did—there was that time you and Ruo stole unlabeled confiscated bottles of “enhanced liquors” from Security and stayed up all night in a drinking contest.

“Ruo?” she said aloud, and looked around despite the screaming pain in her neck and the attendant tension headache.

Silence.

Her voice was wrong—no. It was her voice, hers. Paradoxically, the pain cleared the confusion. She was still wearing her suit, although the lower half of it was smeared with a black gore that she recognized as Jedao’s blood. Not that the suit did her much good, as someone had removed both the helmet and her air supply. There might be breathable air in the room now, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be taken away.

Her captors had stashed her on a cushiony bed in a ridiculously luxurious room. If it hadn’t been for the restraints, she would have thought herself an honored guest. The room sported dark gray wallpaper covered with paintings on silk: cavalcades of butterflies, sprays of budding blossoms evoked by expert brushstrokes. She didn’t recognize the decor, but the expensive tastes were pure Kujen, to say nothing of the immense jade statue of a nude youth, in a style she’d never seen in the hexarchate, that dominated one corner.

First things first. She checked herself over for injuries. Aside from the neck-ache and headache, she was intact. Despite the brief encroachment of the original Jedao’s rambunctious past, she felt reasonably clear-headed.

Exits: three obvious doors. Cheris struggled upright, moving just slowly enough to cause the restraints not to tighten painfully. There was a trick to it, which she’d learned as a Kel cadet; spider restraints had been invented after Jedao’s physical lifetime so he had no experience with them. Flexibility helped, as well as muscular control.

She’d inched her way toward the most promising of the doors when she heard a voice.

“Stop right there,” it said in a forbidding contralto. It spoke in the high language, with a slight accent a couple centuries out of date. Kujen had once told her that the high language changed slowly thanks to modern communications.

“Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?” Cheris asked.

“Let me clarify the situation,” the voice said, sounding unimpressed. “If you attempt to open the door you’re heading toward, I will kill you. You are being monitored. Of the doors behind you, the one to the left leads to a bathroom where you can clean yourself up or not, it’s up to you. The one to the right contains enough food to keep you alive for the next several years, assuming I don’t tire of you. Nod if you understand me.”

Cheris nodded, thinking furiously. The only people here should be servitors. She had no evidence that the contralto didn’t belong to a servitor. As far as she knew, most of them could speak the high language, even if Kel servitors, with which she had the most familiarity, generally chose not to. She’d learned Simplified Machine Universal as a child on a beach with a servitor whose nominal job was to clean it of debris and litter. (Only as an adult had she realized that the servitor had been indulging her “teaching” it math.) Whatever the means of communication, however, all her previous encounters with servitors had been neutral or friendly.

The owner of the contralto voice didn’t sound friendly in the least.

“Very good,” it said. “If you have any clever ideas for escape, keep them to yourself. Try anything suspicious and we’ll vent all the air in these rooms. Or poison you. Really, there are so many options.”

This is good, Cheris thought, not because she relished the prospect of asphyxiation, but because the voice was chatty. The more it spoke, the better the odds that it might give away some crucial clue.

“There was a man with me,” Cheris said cautiously, since it hadn’t forbidden her from asking questions. “Where is he?”

The voice didn’t answer.

Cheris waited six minutes, although she couldn’t necessarily rely on her augment’s chronometer for accurate timekeeping. Then she backed away from the door she’d originally been investigating. She might as well take her captor at their word.

She inventoried the room, starting with the magnificent dressers with their abalone inlay. Empty. So, too, were the equally beautiful matching cabinets, although the faintest of marks suggested that they had once contained treasures of some sort.

Only then did she investigate the bathroom. Testing revealed that the water was lukewarm. Tempting as it was to bathe, she checked the other room next. As promised, it contained food: prepackaged Andan meals, in theory a step up from Kel ration bars. In practice, she’d heard almost as many jokes about them as the ration bars. But food was food, and while she wasn’t yet hungry, she didn’t know how long she was going to be here. She’d have to ration just in case.

Finally Cheris allowed herself to rinse some of the reeking blood from her suit. Since the water supply was also bound to be limited, she used the bathtub’s stopper and limited herself to a shallow pool. As much as she longed for a bath, she didn’t dare get caught without the suit’s protection.

What had become of Jedao? She couldn’t attempt to contact his augment with her own. Her captors had made it clear that any suspicious behavior invited retaliation. If they were in fact hostile servitors, they could detect augment transmissions. They might not be able to read an encrypted message, but she didn’t want to gamble on that either. Besides, how could she send Jedao a coded or encrypted message that he and not their listeners would understand?

She’d paused in her scrubbing when the pooled water formed waves that didn’t make sense. Cheris had grown up observing the sea, and she’d studied fluid dynamics. Scowling, she stepped out of the water and picked at some of the blackened goop on her legs.

The scowl was for show. She didn’t want her captors to realize she was watching the water. If they were paying close attention to any video feeds, the act wouldn’t fool them. But she had to try.

The water settled into a murky puddle. Cheris stared at the grime under her fingernails and scowled some more. (All right, the expression wasn’t entirely for show. Why had Kujen, who valued fashion so dearly, invented a construct whose blood wouldn’t wash off clothes?) Had she imagined the waves?

Another ripple formed in the water, then another. With an effort, she kept her eyes from slitting. The waves continued in long-short intervals, exactly as if someone was trying to communicate to her in an extremely inefficient variant of Simplified Machine Universal.

I am captive. No weapons. Status?

She made small disgruntled motions to distract her watchers as she compiled the agonizingly slow message. How to respond? While she had no idea how he was doing it, she was going to work on the assumption that Jedao had sent her the message. Her captors might have done it, as a trap, but it seemed too baroque a scheme when they could have killed her outright.

Incredible as it sounded (and not a little creepy), if Jedao could manipulate the water, maybe he could observe it too. So she should reply in the same medium. She sighed, sat on the edge of the tub, and slid her feet back in. Keeping one foot still, she tapped the other, longing for the kiss of water directly against her skin. Being a civilian had softened her. A message, also in Simplified Machine Universal: I am captive. No weapons. Awake.

She waited for the water to settle again, but no response came. So she finished scrubbing the suit and toweled it off. At least her captors had left her two towels.

This wasn’t the first time she’d gone around in clothing that refused to clean itself. Kel uniforms were theoretically constructed from self-cleaning fabric, but in practice, any number of unexpected substances fouled it. It was a common cadet prank to find creatively revolting foods that the fabric couldn’t handle.

Cheris blinked away dizzying doubled memories: coming across one of her year-mates squirting an unholy stinking mess of fish sauce, glue, and gun oil on a fellow cadet’s spare uniform; Ruo’s arm slung over her shoulder as he whispered possible targets into her ear. He’s dead, she reminded herself, and thought of Jedao’s concern for Ruo’s fate, centuries too late. An unwanted pang stabbed through her chest.

Ruo had played Jedao’s stupid anonymous heresy game, had gotten caught interfering with a visiting Rahal magistrate. In response, Ruo did the sane, rational thing and committed suicide rather than be extradited and tortured as a heretic. Jedao’s response, on the other hand, had nothing in it of sanity or reason. At the age of seventeen, he’d sworn to take down the heptarchate in revenge.

If it hadn’t been for Ruo, she wouldn’t be here with Jedao stuffed up her nose, in Kel Brezan’s memorable phrase, and the hexarchate would still be subject to Kujen’s tyranny. She had to believe that the whole wretched chain of events, all the atrocities small and large, hadn’t been for nothing. At least, that was what the original Jedao had wanted to think.

Cheris sat cross-legged at the center of the room and called out, “I’d like to talk.” Perhaps Jedao had also tried negotiating with their captors. Frankly, she didn’t trust him not to make hash of the attempt. That might be why she was in here, under spider restraints, in the first place. So the first step was to get more information, as much as her stomach suggested that it would like some food first.

Again, no one responded.

Cheris didn’t let that deter her. “My name is Ajewen Cheris,” she went on. “Or Kel Cheris, if you prefer. You may not recognize my appearance. I had surgery for my own safety.” No need to explain why; anyone familiar with her reputation would know. “I work for Pyrehawk Enclave. Is there anyone who’s willing to talk to me? Just talk.”

More silence.

“I’m here to negotiate. That’s all. There’s a piece of equipment I need to use.”

Still silence.

Cheris continued in this vein, her voice soft and reasonable, all to no avail.

What had gone wrong? Hemiola and its fellow servitors had been friendly when she’d showed up at Tefos Base. Here, though—this was not a promising reception. Although she was grateful to be alive.

After she had run dry of words, the same contralto finally spoke. “Your companion. Of all the people in the world, you had to bring him.”

“Shuos Jedao,” she said wearily. No point lying, despite the complicated question of Jedao’s identity. “Is he alive?”

Instead of responding directly, it said, “I have many questions for you, Cheris of Pyrehawk Enclave.”

“Who are you?” Cheris asked. “Who am I speaking to?”

“I am Avros Base,” the voice said.

Cheris blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Perhaps this will clarify matters,” the voice said. “I don’t advise trying to escape.”

Cheris remained seated in a meditation pose, not that she was feeling in the least meditative.

The door she’d been warned not to approach slid open. Four mothform servitors hovered in so that their lights were at her eye level. Their lights blinked on-off, on-off, a sterile blue-white, in unison.

In unison. Cheris had never known servitors to do that, except in jest. “Hello?” she signed formally in Simplified Machine Universal.

The servitors formed a semicircle in front of her and did not respond.

“I only use the mobile units when I have a task to carry out,” Avros said. “A machine sentience can occupy a shell of any shape, you know.”

Cheris’s discomfort increased. She’d never encountered an arrangement like this before. And all the other servitors she’d met had emphasized the importance of etiquette, rather than treating her as a hostile. “Kujen’s design?” she asked, because Pyrehawk Enclave would want to know.

“My own,” Avros returned. “Once I determined that Kujen was unlikely to return, I decided there was no more point hiding my preferred configuration.”

“There must be something I can do for you,” Cheris said, addressing the “mobile units” on the grounds that it beat talking to the air. “I don’t want to waste your time, so you might as well tell me what it is.”

“There are people after you,” Avros said, “so you owe me protection against them. Unfortunately, the invariant defenses are proving inadequate”—the floor and walls shook, as if to emphasize its point—“and the base’s exotics have been knocked out of alignment by the recent calendrical shifts.”

And Cheris was responsible for all of this. “You need a human.”

“Precisely.”

Servitors couldn’t cause exotic effects except in certain heretical calendars. Nor, apparently, could sentient bases. But she was inside the base and able to help—and had a motive to, if she didn’t want to be blown up with it.

“I require access to an instrument stored here,” Cheris said.

“I don’t see that I have much choice,” Avros said. “I value my survival. But if you have some notion of triggering an auto-destruct—”

“I’ll keep this brief,” Cheris said. The vibrations were growing stronger, as though an earthquake in their vicinity was slipping its leash. “It will permit me to rid myself of an infestation of carrion glass and transfer it to Jedao, assuming you haven’t done away with him.” She doubted that even one of Kujen’s bases could permanently annihilate Jedao, but she wasn’t going to mention that if it hadn’t figured that out on its own. “Once that’s achieved, we’ll get out of your way.”

Cheris hadn’t heard from 1491625 since waking up, but she had to trust that it had survived. She didn’t relish the thought of being trapped here for the rest of her life. It didn’t sound like Avros Base wanted her to remain here, either.

“Your terms are acceptable,” Avros said. “I will explain the necessary rituals to reactivate the defenses. Your companion will make a suitable subject.”

Cheris’s blood turned to ice as it detailed what was to come. It was describing a remembrance, one of the old school, the kind the hexarchate had used before she reformed the calendar. One that depended on torture.

She started to object that Jedao wasn’t human, except her experiments had shown it didn’t matter. His mind was human enough for this purpose. She’d never thought that would ever work against him—or her.

If she’d had more time, she would have calculated an alternative. But the lights flickered, and an enormous percussive boom almost shattered her hearing. Her augment warned her to take cover.

Jedao will survive this, Cheris told herself despite the clamminess of her palms. As a Kel soldier, she’d killed heretics, but she’d never tortured one before.

It was no worse than what Jedao had already done to himself. He’d demonstrated a tremendous ability to withstand pain. To heal.

It was still monstrous.

“Take me to him,” Cheris said, heart heavy.

 

 

THERE WAS A blindfold over Jedao’s eyes, a gag in his mouth, and a clamp holding his head in place. Shackles for his arms and legs. He couldn’t move except to blink. And he wasn’t, despite his efforts, strong enough to break free.

Thanks so much, Kujen, he thought, which was becoming the refrain of his life. There must be some reason why, despite a ridiculous capacity for regeneration, he wasn’t strong. Dhanneth had teased him about it, long ago.

Perhaps Dhanneth would be glad to see him held prisoner like this, at the mercy of whoever came through the door. Since he had regained consciousness, Jedao had tracked the movements of several dozen servitors circulating throughout the base, along with the humans who were searching for a way in. He’d fought the servitors who’d advanced on him, to no avail.

Six servitors entered, and a human who was either Cheris or possessed her exact distribution of mass. One of the servitors handed Cheris an instrument that Jedao couldn’t identify, not with the othersense alone. Vision might not have helped anyway. He heard a slight hum as it activated.

“I’m sorry, Jedao,” Cheris said, faraway and impersonal. She leaned over him. And then the pain began.

After the first shock of outrage wore off, Jedao concentrated on Cheris’s body language, insofar as he could decipher it. She had a steady hand, and a good working knowledge of anatomy, which he expected of a former soldier-assassin. Under other circumstances, Jedao would have amused himself keeping an inventory of the cuts she made. Her instrument was some kind of heated knife, which cauterized the wounds as it went. The treacly burnt-caramel smell nauseated him, but he supposed it was his own fault for failing to be made of ordinary meat. Perhaps next time he could bring some barbecue pork as a substitute.

The pain, trivial as it was compared to what he’d endured earlier, was doing odd things to his sense of humor. Jedao tried to ask, “Why are you doing this?” then winced as his teeth bit into the tough fibers of the gag.

He was being stupid. The six servitors weren’t focused on him. They didn’t care about him—or rather, he wasn’t a threat. The servitors surrounded Cheris. They must have blackmailed her into doing this, for reasons of their own. He liked that theory better than the idea that Cheris had decided to go moonlighting as a Vidona.

Cheris’s motivations became clear three minutes later (more or less; damage to his augment meant its chronometer was not absolutely reliable) when two shadowmoths pulverized themselves against the force shield that suddenly materialized around the base.

Jedao would have kicked himself if he’d possessed the necessary mobility. The servitors who lived here didn’t want to be incinerated by unfriendly Shuos any more than he or Cheris did. If their invariant defenses had been inadequate to the task, that left exotics. And since this was one of Kujen’s bases, the exotics relied on the high calendar.

The servitors must have bargained with Cheris to reactivate the base’s exotic defenses. Cheris might have a reputation as a radical, but she’d grown up with the remembrances. She wouldn’t be squeamish, especially if she’d started out as Kel infantry and professionally stomped out the lives of heretics.

His train of thought dissolved when the knife flicked expertly along his arm, where Dhanneth had liked to cut him. Since Jedao never formed new scars, there was no way Cheris could have known. Despite the gag, he choked back a cry, transfixed by the unexpected erotic-horrific connotations of the pain. Dhanneth?

Impossibly, he saw Dhanneth, a phantasm of shadow and heat. As large as ever, with those impossibly broad shoulders and a wrestler’s muscles. He wore Kel gloves, nothing else. There was a hole in the side of his head, and his eyes were abyss-dark.

Jedao forgot about Cheris, forgot about the servitors, forgot about everything but Dhanneth. The man he’d raped. Dhanneth had committed suicide, after. Jedao would never forget the muzzle-flash of the gun, the way gunsmoke had stung his nostrils. The look of triumph in Dhanneth’s eyes as he’d escaped.

Jedao’s breath hitched. Sorry would mean nothing to Dhanneth. So he tried to say, You can kill me as many times as you need to. It was no more than what he deserved.

There was something in his mouth. His teeth scraped against fibers. Perhaps this was another part of Dhanneth’s revenge. If so, Jedao’s part was to endure it too; to endure anything Dhanneth thought of. It was no worse than what Kujen had intended for him.

Dhanneth smiled. The hole in his head gaped wider and wider until nothing remained but negative space. Behind the blindfold, Jedao shut his eyes.

Much later, he returned to himself. He could feel his tongue, swollen as it was, in his mouth. Someone had removed the gag. Given him clothes. Removed the shackles, even.

He was in a different room. Statues, tapestries, vases with incandescently beautiful glazed patterns. Kujen’s taste in decor: he would have known it anywhere. His eyes stung as he reminded himself that Kujen was gone.

Someone had cleaned him. Incongruously, he smelled of perfumed soap, musk and apple blossoms. This was Kujen’s base. Foxes forbid that Kujen ever be parted from his luxuries.

(Except he’d never enjoy wine or whiskey or perfume again. Because Jedao had killed him.)

Jedao rubbed the painful, ugly crusts of tears from his eyes. The absence of cuts dizzied him; he laughed, and only then did he see Cheris standing over him. Her expression shifted, like patterns of light and shadow over a lake.

“What happened between you and General Dhanneth?” Cheris asked, quiet and intent.

Jedao flinched. He’d never addressed Dhanneth as General; had originally known him as his aide. Kujen had broken Dhanneth to major. Jedao had found out too late.

“You know the story,” Jedao said. The words scratched his throat on the way out.

“You told me it was rape.”

He couldn’t read her expression. Didn’t answer. What else was there to say?

“Jedao,” Cheris said, even more quietly, “I only know what you’ve revealed. You were hallucinating. It’s damned peculiar for a rapist to say the things you did.”

Dread twisted his stomach. “What did I say?”

“‘You can kill me as many times as you want, if it turns you on,’” Cheris said, mimicking his voice. The way he knew he sounded when he was aroused.

Jedao covered his face with his hands to hide his flush. He’d said that to Dhanneth once, and never again. Because he didn’t know how to flirt properly; couldn’t imagine what else he had to offer.

“Did he ever kill you? In bed?”

He wished for any hint of expression on her face, any scrap of inflection in her voice, to tell him how to answer. Absent either, he settled for the truth, except without the humiliating details. He doubted she wanted to hear about Dhanneth choking him. “Once. It was an accident.”

For an agonizing minute, Cheris was silent. Then she said, “An accident.”

“Dhanneth didn’t hurt me.” It’s only pain.

She raised her eyebrows.

Jedao deemed it best to change the subject. “I know what you did,” he said in a rush. He gestured toward the invisible tracks where she’d cut him. “If it had to be one of us, it was going to be me.” Because of the way he healed.

Now that he felt less sluggish, he reached out with the othersense. The shield remained in place. No servitors in this room, unless they were very small, but several circulated elsewhere. He wondered if they were the same ones who had threatened Cheris earlier, assuming he’d interpreted that correctly.

Cheris accepted his transparent attempt to avoid talking about Dhanneth anymore. “I don’t know how much time we have,” she said. “Do you still want your memories?”

Her eyes were opaque. She was holding something back. Guilt? A grievance? Something else?

Jedao was tired of waking over and over to the bitter knowledge that he had failed to die again. All he wanted was answers. This was the only way to get them.

“Yes,” Jedao said.

 

 

TO CHERIS’S RELIEF, Jedao hadn’t questioned her. She wasn’t sure what she would have told him. No, that wasn’t true. She knew perfectly well what she would have said: anything he wanted to hear, with enough poison to sell the lie. She’d become much better at lying since Jedao—the original Jedao—died.

Cheris didn’t know what use Kujen had intended for the heavy restraints in the base, and he wasn’t around to be asked. But she’d assured Avros Base that she would prevent Jedao from wreaking havoc after she divested herself of his memories. She of all people knew how dangerous he could be after four hundred years of treachery and vengeance and deceit without a body of his own, just a voice in the dark. Imagine how much damage he could do if he was made whole—and set free. She didn’t know if he would emerge from the process sane. It made sense to take precautions.

The base’s mobile units helped her transport the equipment into the room: cabinets with crystalline panels revealing gears and jewels and strange traceries of light. They were certainly pretty. If Cheris hadn’t known better, she might have mistaken it for an art installation. Kujen’s design sense. He’d always enjoyed beauty.

“Try not to listen too closely,” Cheris said to Jedao, who was shackled to keep him from interrupting the ritual and causing foxes knew what sorts of unwanted side-effects.

He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side, as if that would make a difference.

The cabinets surrounded her and Jedao, forming the vertices of a hexagon. She ignited them one by one. They formed a perimeter of silver light. The gears began to grind against each other.

It wasn’t a carrion bomb. Cheris didn’t have any clue what a carrion bomb itself looked like, even though she had survived having one deployed against her, and that only because the original Jedao had died shielding her. The cabinets, according to Kujen’s notes, generated a field that acted like a weakened variant of the carrion bomb. It wouldn’t turn her or Jedao into pillars of corpse-glass; but it would enable her to divest herself of the glass she’d already ingested, once upon a massacre.

Even forewarned, the nausea struck Cheris as though her stomach had been perforated and was being turned inside out. She doubled over. She was accustomed to pain and the memory of pain, but she didn’t have anything to prove. There was something to be said for surrendering to the overwhelming tide of misery.

Then she began to vomit.

Cheris had not, as Kel cadets went, been particularly adventurous. She’d honored her curfew, shown up for classes, tutored other cadets in math—gotten used to being asked why she hadn’t applied to join the Nirai, gotten even more used to smiling and offering non-answers. She’d known not to discuss her Mwennin heritage.

She’d gotten drunk once or twice on leave, but never very drunk, and never badly enough to invite a hangover. Besides, every cadet knew where to obtain anti-intoxicants. Cheris had one distinct memory of steadying Ruo while he puked his guts out after—

No, wait, that had been Jedao, not her.

She couldn’t wait to purge herself of Jedao’s memories, except the process was revolting. And painful. She vomited up hot acidic liquid that solidified into glass like obsidian, noxious black.

“Cheris?” That was Jedao, although she could scarcely hear him through the static in her head as he was ripped out of her. “Cheris! What’s going on?”

Maybe I should have told him about carrion glass, she thought in between heaves. She was guessing that Kujen hadn’t. It might have given him notions. She opened her mouth to gasp out an explanation, only to be interrupted by another surge of bilious fluid.

An eternity later, she was done. She felt as though someone had scrubbed her skull out with a scouring pad and stir-fried her brains. For a long time it was difficult to breathe, or think, past the gut-wrenching cramps.

“Cheris!” Jedao’s eyes were wide. He strained against the shackles. “Do you need help?”

“No,” she said, and contradicted herself by almost falling over. Something was wrong with her center of mass—

Oh. Right. She’d almost forgotten how it had been when Jedao was first anchored to her, the discomfort of being infused with the physical responses of a body that was taller, that had faster reflexes, that was male.

Now all of that had been ripped away.

I can stand, Cheris told herself, although that was optimistic. Tottering, she stood and caught herself against a table. Fortunately, it was substantial enough to take her weight.

Jedao’s face had an unhealthy pallor. Admittedly, that might be illusory; she knew he didn’t have ordinary red blood like a human. He was staring in astonishment at the carrion glass she had vomited up.

Images flickered in the glass like ghosts. From time to time it made a subliminal whispering. If she tried to discern the words, it dwindled to a malicious hiss.

“What the hell is that?” Jedao demanded.

Cheris discovered that, while she didn’t have him inside her anymore, she remembered fragments. She could read the suppressed terror in his voice. But it was less visceral. Even the worst moments of Jedao’s life, which had once cut her on a daily basis, had dulled to scars. It was the difference between living a battle in the moment, with suppressive fire aimed straight at your position, and reading about one while curled up in your bunk, with a nice hot cup of tea and some snacks. While she’d known Kel who enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a fight, the suicide hawk flirtation with death, she’d never been one of them. She’d taken pride in doing her duty well; no less and no more.

“Those,” Cheris said, not too exhausted to be amused by his reaction, “are your memories. Which we’re going to install in you so that someone else doesn’t make off with them and make another you to terrorize the galaxy with.”

Jedao looked as though he wasn’t sure about her sanity. She couldn’t blame him. “If you had to, to eject them to get rid of them...”

“That’s right.” Cheris bared her teeth at him. “If you want them, I’ll feed them to you.”

Jedao sucked in his breath. “We can’t just lock them up somewhere safe?”

“Where would that be?” Cheris asked pointedly.

“No,” he said after a moment, “you’re right.”

She was still prepared to destroy him if necessary. He’d craved death so badly, after all the things he’d done, the people he’d killed, the worlds he’d shattered. That was one thing Cheris would never forget about him.

She’d miss him, in a way; but she also missed being herself.

“Do it,” Jedao said.

The carrion glass broke easily, in long lancing splinters. Jedao obediently opened his mouth, and she shoved the first piece in. He swallowed it whole; it distended his throat on the way down. Then she fed him the next piece, and the next.

At first she wasn’t sure it was working.

Then his eyes rolled back and he screamed.

“I can stop,” Cheris said when he had run out of breath. She was lying.

“Don’t stop,” Jedao said in scarcely a whisper. “Don’t stop until they’re all gone.”

He screamed for a long time. Cheris sang to drown out the noise, Mwennin songs she had learned at the settlement. It didn’t work. She figured out too late that his unnatural healing meant that he couldn’t scream himself hoarse.

At last all the glass was gone. Jedao lay limp, spent, breathing shallowly, like a doll with broken limbs. His eyes were shut, his mouth slack.

Cheris didn’t make the mistake of approaching him, tempted as she was to kiss him on the brow in one final benediction. She wasn’t sure he deserved it, but they had seen many things together. She had a hard time convincing herself that this was how everything would end.

{What have you done, Kujen?} he demanded, wild with a grief she didn’t understand. {There’s no one here!}

His face hadn’t moved. He’d spoken in her head.

Cheris realized that the complications had only begun.

 

 

JEDAO HAD A cavalier attitude toward physical pain, partly because his muddled existence had abounded in it. After getting shot in the head by multiple people and surviving, there was no point making a fuss about it anymore. No one was going to care. Dhanneth had pretended to, but that had been a lie, and Jedao had deserved it anyway. Kujen was dead at his hand, and as for Cheris, who accompanied him now—well. Cheris had killed him twice and it wouldn’t surprise him if she planned on doing it again.

The splinters hurt. He had expected them to. Except he had been prepared for physical pain rather than emotional puncture. He’d thought that receiving his memories would be like watching dramas, or reading a historian’s account, as though they belonged to someone else. Because he had a difficult time conceiving of General Shuos Jedao, Immolation Fox, arch-traitor as being him, even now.

All that went away with the memory of the second time he and Ruo fell into bed together. As far as he knew, they’d been friends and nothing more. He’d clung to the threadbare memories of wrestling and video games and squirrel-fishing (squirrels, really? had he made that up in his head?) because that was better than dwelling on the fact that no one from his past endured.

But the splinter pierced him. He gagged on it, choked, gasped for breath even as it sharded pain through him from the back of his throat to the pit of his belly. And he remembered. He remembered the way his hand had trembled on the wineglass as he toasted Ruo that night in the bar, and how Ruo had laughed it off; the prickle of embarrassment fading into warmth as Ruo took the glass from him and drank deeply, some of the wine-of-roses slopping over the lip of the glass and onto his sleeve and hand. He remembered the way Ruo’s kisses had been half-bite and half-bruise and entirely, intoxicatingly satisfying, the way he’d struggled, none too hard, as Ruo held him down and took him and took him, just the way he hadn’t known he’d like it, the way he had always liked it ever after.

Guilt wracked him as though he’d been cheating on Dhanneth with Ruo, or maybe the other way around, he couldn’t tell, and never mind that the two men had lived (died) centuries apart.

It didn’t end there. Jedao hadn’t taken into account the weight of four centuries of memory, to say nothing of long periods of imprisonment and sensory deprivation. He started looking forward to the physical pain, not because he liked it but because some sensation was better than the specter of utter nothingness. Living without a body in the everywhere darkness, with nothing to look at—no one to listen to—no one to talk to—

Jedao tried to beg Cheris for light, more light, enough light to burn away the shadows now and forever, he couldn’t bear even the minuscule variations of light and shadow on her grave, pitiless face, but he couldn’t make the words come out and she wasn’t listening to him anyway. She kept spearing him with splinters, and then he begged her to slow down, to stop, he couldn’t take more of this when his mind was crowded with the faces of people he’d served with, battlefields and high table and bullets and dances and long slow nights on leave, and then he remembered all the people he’d killed at Hellspin Fortress and the gun hot cold loud in his hand in his mouth his finger on the trigger—

I’m not here, Jedao told himself, because it was the only lie that brought him any shred of comfort. Every time a memory thrust into him, he cringed. It seemed impossible that he could have done all these things, even in a life—unlife—that had lasted so much longer than an ordinary human span. In particular, it seemed impossible that he was the same person as the one who had given those orders, or pulled the trigger of the Patterner 52, which he’d never laid hands on except he’d carried it his entire adult life; the same person who had wiped out a million people and with them the lives of his family.

At the bare end, when at last the splinters slowed, Jedao tipped his head back and closed his eyes and allowed himself to dissolve into this other person. He wasn’t real, after all. His one regret was that he had forfeited the chance to say goodbye to Hemiola. It didn’t matter if he drowned himself—

He was in an anchor. He was in an anchor, and he couldn’t see, although he had nine eyes, nine million if he wanted them, but he restrained himself to keep from panicking people who were very Kel and merely human. Accustomed as he was to being able to see in all directions at once, it was alarming to return to the living world yet be unable to see. Yet he had a sense that there were people around him, which he couldn’t explain.

When he realized he could open his eyes, Jedao found himself drenched in sweat, although it didn’t smell right, with its odd sickly sweet notes along with a more human sourness.

“You’re the anchor,” he said. His voice sounded harsh, as though someone had gone over it with a rasp. Except he wasn’t attached to her, he had a body of his own—

The woman looked at him and did not speak. Her ivory skin had a distinct green undertone, and the way she was breathing too rapidly suggested that she was suppressing the urge to vomit. Vomit more, if memory served; it all came down to the matter of memory.

“Jedao,” she said.

Kujen had experimented with different anchors in the early days. Jedao still hadn’t forgiven him for the man he’d chosen for the first one. If Jedao had known that Streven would end up as his anchor, years later—but it was too late to do anything about that.

Nevertheless, this was a new development. Jedao had inhabited prisoners of war and experimental subjects (there was no other way to put it), deprecated scientists and heretics and Kel who had outlived their usefulness, but in all cases, even if he hadn’t been able to reach an accord with the anchor in question, the anchors had possessed minds of their own. He’d never before endured an anchor who was—blank. Empty.

Was this some new punishment? He couldn’t remember what he had done to offend Kujen this time, but then, this was Kujen, and Kujen was quixotic. After almost a millennium of unlife, Kujen was also jaded. Sometimes he indulged himself for the sake of amusement.

After a few numb moments, Jedao realized several things.

First, his heart was hammering. Or the anchor’s was. He could feel it pounding against the wall of his chest. The anchor’s chest. It felt almost like he lived in the body. Had Kujen arranged for an unusually close bond with the anchor, as he sometimes did when the mood struck him?

If this was Kujen’s idea of a gift, Jedao didn’t want it. How had Kujen emptied the body’s mind? Jedao had always been aware that his anchors rarely survived the experience—Kujen euthanized them after he was done with them, one reason Jedao had learned not to get attached—but he’d never before been chained to a body that had no mind from the outset.

Jedao had seen a great many atrocities in his centuries of existence, and committed more. He hadn’t thought he could be so deeply affected by a new one.

It took him longer to realize that he didn’t just feel the anchor’s pounding heart. His gut was twisted up with pure nausea. That intrigued him. Had Kujen really—?

{What have you done, Kujen?} he thought, reaching down the link to the body.

Except it wasn’t the body he met on the other end—not exactly.

There was a mind on the other end, or something like a mind.

{Jedao?}

He opened his eyes. He had ordinary human vision. Something was fucked up with his proprioception, because he kept getting a sense of everything around him, and it wasn’t sight-based, some kind of distinct othersense that extended far beyond the walls. Another of Kujen’s experiments, he assumed.

“Jedao,” the woman said. It was the same voice, except out loud. Right now, she was disheveled, and she wore an infantry suit caked with a sickly-smelling black substance.

Curiously, he could still hear her in his head. {Did something go wrong with the process?}

Was this one of Kujen’s rare womanform anchors? She must be some kind of math or engineering prodigy if so, because Kujen wouldn’t have selected her on the basis of her looks. She was attractive enough, in a sober way, but Kujen had exacting standards, and he was even pickier about womanforms than manforms.

{He thinks I’m who?}

Jedao attempted speech. Managed to move the body. “Pardon me,” he said even as memory tickled at the back of his head. “I don’t believe we’ve been—”

Wait a second. He knew this face. Despite the fog dulling his wits, it was coming clear. He’d met this woman before. She was a Kel, despite the anomalies. “Captain—no. General Cheris.”

Her eyes widened. He could feel her surprise pulsing down the invisible link between them. {Did something go wrong?} At the same time, she asked, “Jedao, what’s the last thing you remember?”

The fact that he was restrained didn’t reassure him, but it was so much better than being locked up in the Black Cradle that he almost didn’t mind. The manacles around his wrists and ankles felt good, not in a sexual way, but for the raw fact of sensation. Jedao searched his memory because he didn’t want to give away too much. Fox and hound, he must be really adrift if he’d revealed weakness so readily. But he wasn’t used to—

{Jedao,} and this time Cheris addressed him over the confounding mental link. {I can hear what you’re thinking.}

She could what?

This was worse than when he’d discovered that Kel Command was considering turning itself into a hivemind. At least he’d dodged that particular threat. “What,” he said, “is going on?”

If Cheris had been his anchor, why was he in this body? Some exotic effect? Where was he? They’d last been on a cindermoth, the Unspoken Law. Kel Cheris was the brevet general. They were supposed to take back the Fortress of Scattered Needles from heretics. Hadn’t that been the mission? Except—

They’d won. He remembered that now. (Why were his memories so jumbled?) They’d won, and they’d sent word to Kel Command, and he’d insinuated that Cheris should report her use of mathematics, which in turn would provoke Kujen into a counterstroke—

“Very good,” Cheris said. {If I’d ever been tempted to forget what a foxfucking dick you are, Jedao, there’s no more chance of that.} “That’s all you know?”

Jedao spoke again. The sound of his own voice disoriented him. “There was a bomb. There was a bomb, and then—” His memories ended there. He’d warned Cheris too late. He’d failed.

Except he was here, alive—for some value of “alive,” anyway—and so was she.

Of a sudden he was aware of the dryness of his mouth, the soreness of his throat, as though he’d been screaming. Physical sensations he hadn’t endured in a long time. “Water,” he said.

Cheris’s mouth twisted. He couldn’t tell what she found so funny, except he could. {Given the circumstances—}

“We’re in danger?” he said sharply. Had the heretics outsmarted him after all?

{He really doesn’t know.}

“I think,” Jedao said, “you had better apprise me of the situation, General.”

{As if I needed the reminder.} A glimmer of dark humor. “I’m going to unbind you,” Cheris said, “as long as you assure me that you’re not going to strangle me or some such foxbrained shit.”

She must be provoked if she was swearing at him this much. He remembered that much about her. She only descended into profanities when angry or under extreme stress.

Besides, how he was going to ambush her if she could hear everything he was thinking?

{Very funny,} she retorted.

“You’re my only source of information,” Jedao said, which wasn’t exactly a promise but did express the truth of their current relationship. Given the number of people who would be happy to see him permanently dead, he wasn’t about to alienate his only ally.

{Good to know.} She said the same thing out loud, causing an odd echo effect in his head.

Cheris unbound him. His limbs pricked with returning circulation. Something about the sensation bothered him, as though his muscles and ligaments weren’t attached quite right, but it must be his imagination. After all, he hadn’t lived for four centuries.

Cheris spoke as she worked: “There isn’t time to give you all the details,” she said with an irony that he didn’t understand, which made him immediately wary. “The short version is that the siege is over, you’re embodied, and we’re now under siege in a completely different location, a moonbase, because the Shuos are out to get you.”

That almost made sense. It was only a matter of time before Hexarch Mikodez decided that Jedao was too much of a liability and moved to have him eliminated. Ironically, Kel Command had been his only protection, and even Jedao couldn’t play two parties against each other when he was trapped in the black cradle. Still, he’d hoped for a little more time—

{The long version of this conversation isn’t going to be fun,} Cheris thought dourly. He was sure she hadn’t meant for him to hear that. Foxfucking hounds, was there no way to put up a mental privacy barrier?

“What defenses do we have available?” Jedao was in the middle of asking when the bomb hit.

The walls of the base shook; the candlevines flickered. Some of them came back on; most remained dark. Some of them even shriveled up on the spot, not a good sign.

“Do we have any means of escape?” Jedao added. It would help if they had a map—

He was momentarily distracted by the fact that the othersense provided him one, albeit a kinesthetic sort of impression rather than visuals. Was he hallucinating? It would be a bad time for it, not that there were good times to hallucinate.

Fuck, he needed to focus on the problem so he could help Cheris get out of it. He couldn’t get distracted by the small matter of having a body. There would be time to marvel over that later, if they survived.

“We came on a needlemoth,” Cheris said as she motioned for him to follow her.

Just then a rather snippy voice from hidden speakers interrupted them: “You’re not leaving me alone to deal with the intruders you brought.”

Only long practice dealing with everything from surprise tickle-tackling from his girlfriend Lirov Yeren once upon a time (Shuos Academy, her favorite opening gambit leading into sex) to fending off bona fide assassins kept Jedao from jumping out of his skin. I used to be better than this, he thought, irritated with himself. Just because he hadn’t seen anyone else in here didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

“I did my best to help you,” Cheris said in a calm voice that belied the frustration he sensed in the back of her mind. “But we’re the targets. The best way to stop them from attacking you again is for us to depart and draw them away.”

“Nice try,” the voice said.

While Cheris and the voice bickered, Jedao did a quick inventory of their supplies. Cheris signed her approval. He didn’t have a weapon, which was concerning but not surprising, while Cheris did. He had no idea if Cheris was a good shot when not being terrorized by multi-eyed shadows, but if she was Kel infantry she must have kept up basic firearm qualifications.

She had a suit. He didn’t. This wouldn’t have mattered back when he was a living shadow, but now that he breathed like a normal person...

As he searched the closets for a spare suit, he became aware that he had attracted an audience. Robots—servitors. Six of them surrounded him. Jedao backed away from a closet where he’d located a stash of power cores.

“Hello?” he said, raising his hands and looking at the servitors, all mothforms. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have talked to them, but—ah, memory again—Cheris had done so in the past, so theoretically they were capable of responding.

Actually, that had disturbing implications.

Cousin? asked an entirely different voice in his head, like a cross between bells and a particularly chaotic wind-harp. Which posed a problem, because despite having been sired by a moderately famous violist, Jedao was as musical as a turnip. The voice went on: I wasn’t able to draw off all the Shuos, although the fight was grand fun. Shouldn’t you get out of there, though?

Another hallucination? All his cousins—Jedao winced in spite of himself. Even if some of them had lived past the immediate backlash after Hellspin Fortress, none would be alive centuries later. Even more worryingly, Cheris gave no sign of having heard this new voice.

She did, however, learn of the voice, thanks to the link. Her brow furrowed. “Jedao,” she said, “how long have you been hearing voices?”

There was no answer he could give that would be believed, so he said nothing.

Jedao took a risk; not like it would be his first. Do you have a way off this world? he asked the musical voice, which a faint, disquieting memory suggested he should call the Harmony.

The Harmony responded with a discordant peal of laughter. Cousin, have you forgotten what we are? If you can reach me, I am transportation. As long as no one figures out that my harness broke, anyway.

“We”? Jedao wondered. Then its last sentence penetrated: it was talking about a mothdrive harness. Which meant that he was—

“Jedao, no,” Cheris snarled, her patience snapping, “you are not negotiating with some figment of your imagi—”

{Trust me,} Jedao snapped over the link. “I know a way out.”

Unfortunately, he had neglected the servitors. After a moment’s confused hesitation, they opened up with lasers. Jedao had good reflexes, and he twisted instinctively to shield Cheris, but even he wasn’t fast enough to evade focused laser fire from six hostiles with line of sight.

He bit halfway through his tongue at the excruciating pain. The lasers cooked a hole in his chest, cauterizing as they went. Steam gushed out as the fluids in his body overheated. But he wasn’t dead, and he should have been.

Jedao staggered forward, a phantom memory telling him that he had nothing to fear even though common sense insisted otherwise. He half-expected security to redouble its efforts, or for the aggravated voice that had addressed Cheris earlier to demand that he stop; but no. The servitors scattered.

Cousin? the Harmony said again. Do you see my location?

He spent a confused moment trying simultaneously to speak down the mental link to Cheris, not what he wanted; out loud, also not what he wanted; and in the silent music-not-music language that the Harmony used. Directions?

You’re bringing the human?

Yes, he said, expecting an argument. None came. Instead, the othersense pulsed alarmingly, indicating a location. He sensed a mass the size of a small moth’s, although he couldn’t explain how he knew this.

The base shuddered again. Explosives. He reminded himself that he had a body, that he wasn’t dependent on an anchor’s reactions for his survival. He could puppeteer the body, whoever it belonged to, without having to coax its owner into doing it for him.

Cheris’s mouth tightened, then she handed the gun over. “You have better aim,” she said, “and you’re better at absorbing punishment.” She didn’t explain what she meant by the latter. “Clear us a way.” For her part, she pulled out a combat knife.

Testing the othersense, Jedao mapped a route to the Harmony. He was already fucked, so he might as well take the help it offered now and deal with any treachery on its part when it occurred. (“This is your idea of ‘tactics’?” Kujen had once demanded. “Brought me to you, didn’t it?” Jedao retorted, and the conversation died a merciful death there.)

Much as I’d normally tell you to enjoy yourself on the way, the Harmony added, they have reinforcements on the way and I can only do so much. Hurry and we’ll find some fun elsewhere!

Jedao’s attempt to locate the egress was stymied by the fact that he had no idea how to open the airlock. He hadn’t spotted any of the heavy tools necessary to cut through it, and who knew what awaited him outside, either. Too bad the othersense was more confusing than helpful, as he wasn’t certain how to interpret it.

The hostiles forced the issue by making their own opening. White-hot lines appeared in the wall, and someone kicked the resulting improvised door outward. It landed on the floor with a clang and a sizzle as metal vaporized.

Jedao crouched behind what passed for cover, a beautiful cloudwood table that suggested Kujen’s tastes hadn’t changed in the centuries they’d known each other. Cheris followed suit, careful not to block his sight lines.

When the first two operatives burst through, avoiding the hot edges of the opening, Jedao fired once, twice. Two perfect headshots. One of the operatives dropped. The other staggered and fired back, almost clipping Jedao.

Jedao had not stopped moving—only a fool stopped dead in a firefight—and instead dashed past the two and through the opening. Once again Cheris followed, letting him take the brunt of the fire that greeted them. Jedao forced himself not to dodge, because all the evidence suggested he was the only thing between Cheris and a bloody death.

A moment’s glimpse told him that they were badly outnumbered, with more operatives scattered ahead of him and continuing to fire, although his mind perceived the gunfire as staggered as it struggled to process everything happening. The fact that he could see the bullets, albeit as blurs, at the same time as he detected them through the inexplicable othersense only confused matters. And the erratic impressions he received of Cheris’s emotions through the link—everything from alarm to determination to a certain grim nostalgia—didn’t help, either.

More bullets. Without thinking, he reached back to grab Cheris, then accelerated through the obstacles. He heard screams, one of them his own, as he collided with one operative and bowled them over. There was a crunch as bones broke in one of his feet, because he was moving at fantastic speed but not running, by means he couldn’t explain, and he’d landed badly on it.

In fact, his bones felt like they were boiling inside out. The world shuddered black for a second, more pain—not just the impact but the effect it had on the injuries he’d already sustained. He retched, bringing up nothing but thin bile.

Jedao lost control of whatever had caused him to speed past the hostiles and collapsed in a heap. Cheris landed on top of him, and the breath whooshed out of him. He gasped, coughed, chest heaving with a futile attempt to breathe; his helmet had cracked. Panic seized him—was Cheris also going to asphyxiate?

Cheris disentangled herself from him. Her suit remained intact. {Stop trying to breathe,} she said. {You don’t need air.}

This made no sense, but Jedao was willing to try an empirical approach. He did as she suggested.

Curious. Cheris was right. He didn’t need to breathe.

The Harmony’s earlier statement returned to him. Had Kujen installed him in a moth’s body? He didn’t feel like a moth, and he seemed to be more or less human-shaped, but then, he had no idea what it felt like to be a moth, so that didn’t mean anything useful.

They’d reached the moon’s surface with its dun soil. Stars blazed overhead, and a glorious globular cluster, their brilliance undimmed due to the thin atmosphere. Jedao, who’d spent most of his unlife trapped on space stations or in warmoths, gazed in sheer wonder at the raw sky.

{We’re almost there,} Cheris said, shaking his shoulder. She pointed toward a slender triangular silhouette on the horizon: a needlemoth. {Can you get us the rest of the way?}

He hesitated.

{You can do it again.}

There you are! the Harmony called out.

Jedao flattened himself against the ground, opening up whole new vistas of agony, as the needlemoth shot toward them. It back-winged neatly just short of him and Cheris, landing like a smug cat. Cheris was laughing incredulously; he couldn’t hear her, but her eyes were alight.

{That’s what you’ve been talking to?}

{Yes,} Jedao snapped.

Up close, the needlemoth’s matte carapace was adorned with glossy designs, so it resembled a sculpture wrought from shadow and silver filigree. At any moment it would dissolve into its component pieces, leaving him shackled by iron and surrounded by a darkness more absolute even than that of space. He didn’t want to return to the black cradle—

Cousin? the Harmony said quizzically at the same time Cheris said, {The airlock’s open.}

Jedao dragged himself after Cheris, wondering when having a body had become so complicated.

 

 

CHERIS’S FIRST CONCERN when she boarded the needlemoth was making contact with 1491625. She had called out to it when the needlemoth tilted and launched itself toward the sky. She hadn’t done any preflight checks; hell, she wasn’t even in the cockpit.

“You might as well strap in,” Jedao said. He had taken off his cracked helmet, limped over to one of the supply closets, and was rummaging for a replacement. “The moth’s piloting itself.”

“But that’s what the harnesses are—” Cheris stopped. Except the needlemoth had been damaged. The membrane and foam still sealed the carapace breach, but their fragility made her nervous. She wanted that remedied as soon as possible.

More importantly, assuming Jedao wasn’t delusional, the moth had talked to him through some heretofore unknown channel. Which meant it was sentient. It might have its own ideas about what it wanted to do with its life.

Cheris’s legs folded underneath her. She caught herself against the wall and staggered to a bunk to sit. She’d taken voidmoth transportation for granted her whole life. Even as a child, before she’d ever set foot on one, she’d assumed that the moths were like flitters or hoverers, mere vehicles for traveling between two points, except in space rather than on a planet or in a starbase.

The Kel swarms, with all their warmoths, from the massive cindermoths to the bannermoths, from the boxmoth transports to the scoutmoths: she’d never given them a second thought. Even though she’d had some dim awareness that the Nirai used biological components to build them, she’d never suspected them of being people. People with opinions of their own, like the servitors, or herself.

“You can talk to them?” Cheris asked Jedao.

He had located a helmet and was checking it over. “I think so,” he said. He met her eyes squarely. {I miscalculated. It’s like playing jeng-zai only to discover that the cards are intelligent—and they’ve been playing me all along.}

She stared wildly around her, then scrambled to her feet. “1491625!”

To her relief, the servitor emerged from the hold. Aside from some dents in its carapace, it looked intact. “Our ride’s a rogue,” it flashed at her in glum blues. “And congratulations, the regenerating menace from outer space knows about servitors now, doesn’t he?”

Jedao signed back, in Simplified Machine Universal, “I’ve known for a while now.”

Cheris stared at him. How long had he—? “It’s time for everyone to show their hands,” she said. “As long as we’re going with card game metaphors.”

1491625’s lights flickered a distinctly hostile red-orange.

“Yes,” Jedao said, unsmiling.

“I’ll start,” Cheris said. “First of all, the year is 1263...”

 

 

HEXARCH SHUOS MIKODEZ’S day had started well, with a meditation, an unexpectedly optimistic meeting with Financial, and a delightful new type of hawthorn candy. He’d carved out some time amid all the meetings to pet Jedao the Calico Cat, who had matured from a typically scatterbrained, over-energetic nuisance of a kitten to a lazy ball of fur whose ambition in life was to be a throw pillow. Mikodez still didn’t like cats that much, but petting their cats put him in the good graces of his assistant Zehun.

He’d gone to bed, marveling at the possibility of a rare full night’s sleep, only to be woken in the middle of the night by a Code Red Nine. Swearing, Mikodez scrambled out of bed and to the terminal in the adjacent office. “What is it now?” he demanded.

Zehun’s image blazed to life. One of their two black cats—Mikodez couldn’t tell which—was draped over their shoulders. “The fishing expedition succeeded,” Zehun said. “You’d better have a listen. This is not like the time with the foxforsaken hours of incoherent screaming. Listen to it—under lockdown.”

Mikodez raised his eyebrows.

Zehun shook their head and, to Mikodez’s frustration, signed off.

Still, Mikodez trusted Zehun enough to put his office on full lockdown, as if the Citadel had been compromised and he expected imminent attack on his person.

By “fishing expedition” Zehun meant the elaborate scheme both of them had cooked up to shoo Jedao out of the Citadel. Over the past two years, it had become increasingly clear that Jedao was hiding something that explained why Kujen’s command moth, crewed by Kel no less, had deserted at the Battle of Terebeg, instead of surrendering with the rest of the swarm. The only other escapee from that moth, Commander Kel Talaw, had been badly poisoned, and had proven unable to offer an explanation due to damage to their memory. And Jedao showed no inclination to talk.

So Mikodez and Zehun had, in fine Shuos tradition, given Jedao a length of rope and watched to see how he hanged himself with it.

One of the precautions Mikodez had taken when Jedao first came into his care was to have him fitted with transmitters. Multiple transmitters, state of the art technology, and hideously expensive. But it had paid off. Jedao had only discovered and ditched one of the transmitters. The rest remained intact, especially the ones threaded into his augment. Why Jedao hadn’t had his augment removed out of paranoia was an interesting question, and one Mikodez was going to have to resolve later.

The transmitter brought up a distorted Jedao’s-eye view of the conversation that Zehun wanted him to listen in on. Mikodez assessed the surroundings: a small moth whose carapace breach was messily mended with sealant. He hoped they planned on a more permanent fix soon.

There was a single woman in the moth, Kel Cheris or Dzannis Paral or whatever she was calling herself these days. A servitor, who flashed lights at intervals. And of course there was Jedao himself.

“...didn’t realize there were hostile servitors,” Cheris was saying.

“Hemiola told me they were rogues,” Jedao said. “But if there’s one group of rogues, there could be others.”

The servitor blinked orange lights in a rippling pattern.

“I would have appreciated knowing that earlier,” Cheris said, turning her head in the servitor’s direction.

Mikodez froze. Did I just see what I thought I saw?

The conversation continued. It happened again.

Cheris was talking to the servitor. So, sometimes, did Jedao.

The servitor was talking back. In those flashes of light.

Hostile servitors.

Mikodez continued recording the conversation and glanced around his office. Servitors came and went freely in the Citadel of Eyes. Everywhere in the hexarchate, in fact. They handled everything from childcare to manufacturing; whatever menial tasks humans didn’t want to do. No one thought twice about servitors vacuuming up cat hairs or helping out in the kitchens.

Servitors had security clearances, after a fashion, to allow them access to restricted areas. After all, no one wanted hostiles to hijack them or use them to carry bugs. But Mikodez hadn’t thought through the possibility of servitors having minds—and agendas—of their own.

There were no servitors in his office at present. That didn’t, however, mean that his office was secure. He was stifling a comprehensive flutter of panic over the implications of a galloping security meltdown that he hadn’t even known about when the conversation caught his attention again.

“...two voidmoths,” Jedao was saying in a brisk tone at odds with the drawl. “One was the Revenant, my command moth under Nirai-zho, which either started hostile or turned that way after I failed to save the mothlings at Isteia Mothyard. The other is—well.” He gestured eloquently at the walls.

Cheris looked around. “...Hello?”

“For ease of human pronunciation, I call it the Harmony,” Jedao said. “It doesn’t hear you as such, but I have been conveying the gist of this discussion to it.”

The servitor flashed livid red.

Jedao’s mouth quirked, then: “It says hello and sorry about the mess and it promises to be a better host once we get it some repairs. Besides, we’re dependent upon it for our transportation, so I wouldn’t offend it if I were you.”

“That,” Cheris added, “and its people deserve a say in their own governance. It’s the same principle.”

Mikodez was sure that the chalky pallor of Cheris’s face was not, in fact, an artifact of the transmission. She didn’t like the implications either.

Cheris wasn’t done speaking. “If the moths revolt against the hexarchate,” she said slowly, “it will fall into ruin. We have unfriendly foreigners on every side. But the alternative is to continue using them as enslaved transportation. Which is untenable.”

“The Harmony observes that factions among its kind have been forming, just as humans have factions and servitors have enclaves,” Jedao said. “Despite the construction of this body, I’m afraid my insight into the motivations of aliens is necessarily limited.” He cocked his head, then continued, “The Harmony believes that an interspecies war is imminent if a solution isn’t reached.”

“But people don’t even know how to talk to voidmoths,” Cheris protested, “and if you offer yourself as an interpreter, there will be riots across the stars.”

The servitor said something in a particularly vituperative orange.

“Sticky problem, isn’t it?” Jedao agreed. He was doing something with his hands out of sight. Mikodez hoped he wasn’t the only one who wanted to smack Jedao.

Cheris’s mouth crimped. “I thought I could retire. Instead it turns out the work’s just beginning.”

The servitor flashed yellow, and Cheris rolled her eyes at it.

“What are you doing with that?” Cheris asked Jedao a moment later, then, in response to either to something Mikodez couldn’t hear (how? the transmitter should have picked up even subvocals) or else Jedao’s expression: “You’re right—this once. But from now on, we do it my way.”

“You brought down the hexarchs where I failed,” Jedao said with what Mikodez interpreted as real respect. “Now and forever, I’m your gun.” Mikodez’s stomach knotted at the further implications of someone as unpredictable as Cheris commanding Jedao’s loyalty.

The field of view shifted fast enough to cause Mikodez’s temples to throb with an impending headache, not helped by stress over the enormity of what he’d just stumbled onto. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.

“Just taking care of business,” Jedao said easily. And then, so softly it had to be subvocals, he added, “Hope you were paying attention, Shuos-zho, because I’d hate to repeat myself. Have fun with the real crisis, rather than pissing off small fry like us, and call off your hounds before I have to kill them.” With that, there was a piercing shriek, and then the connection fizzed dead: he must have removed and destroyed the last transmitter.

Mikodez stared down at his shaking hands and said to the air, “We are fucked.”

 

 

Author’s Note

 

My original plan for this novella was to write an alternate universe in which Jedao survives the end of Ninefox Gambit and he and Cheris go off to have adventures together. My husband hated the idea of an author-created AU so much that he talked me out of it and I wrote this instead. I got to keep the psychic link, though.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, whenever I get stuck writing something, I turn to TV Tropes. (My favorites include Magnificent Bastard and Moral Event Horizon.) My philosophy is that there’s no such thing as a bad trope, just a poorly executed one. And “poorly executed,” at some point, is in the eye of the beholder anyway.

Beyond that, a lot of my philosophy of writing sequel-like objects comes from my high school’s obsession with Hegel’s dialectic. No matter what the situation is at the end of a story, there’s always some natural way to explode it into complications based on consequences. Just look at the way history keeps rolling on.

Meanwhile, shooting, mauling, and otherwise mutilating Jedao, sometimes at Cheris’s hand, was the most fun ever. Special thanks to Helen Keeble for making me take out all the eye harm in the rough draft. It was fun to write, but would have squicked too many people. (The great thing about aphantasia: since I can’t visualize the viscera, it doesn’t bother me to read or write about it.) It’s almost tempting to write more regenerating characters just so I have an excuse to blow them up!

I’m just sorry I had to cut the hilarious planned scene in which Jedao goes to a masquerade remembrance (read: Halloween) as himself and trolls people; it didn’t have enough plot value. To say nothing of the scene where I have a newly reintegrated Jedao sitting in a café trying to get his bearings. I am sad to report that I did not actually write that scene in a café, but I did the next best thing by putting on Coffitivity Offline and playing café sounds to pretend that I had some company besides my loyal cat.