11

ORN, CITY OF starships, had been beautiful.

An oasis of civilization, Zanj had called it, in the wreck of the cosmos. Viv saw its former glory in its ashes: crystal towers snapped by a mighty hand, their shattered peaks filling the broad avenues. Heavenly bridges led nowhere, ended in splinters. Among the ruins Viv saw amphitheaters, arenas, market squares, perhaps a shopping mall—she knew she was misreading all of this, painting the dead city with categories and purposes she understood, but she could not help it any more than she could help hearing sorrow in a song in an unfamiliar tongue. Orn, city of starships, Orn of the best seafood this side of anywhere, Orn of the simulated depravities, Orn where you could talk to gods. This city’s people had loved her, and built her so well that an outsider, stepping tender, scared, from her ship a thousand years—more?—after her fall would know the depth of their love. They built her so well even her ruin awed.

Spires lay in shards. Broken windows stared blind. Moss blighted murals. Glass walls warped. Vines choked trellises. Trees pierced the hearts of office buildings, spread canopies of metal-green leaves. Birds sang. The city had died so long ago that its birds came back. Doubled suns burned overhead, descending; stars pierced bright through the faint blue sky. The air was heavy with damp and growth.

Orn’s people had loved her. One loved her still.

Zanj staggered down the ramp to the cracked call-it-asphalt of their landing strip. Her arms swayed as she walked, and so did she; Viv had not appreciated the grace with which the other woman moved until that grace left her. Her weight sloshed from foot to foot. She was a blade of tall grass in tangled winds. Between slabs of crumbling pavement lay patches of bare—okay, technically it wasn’t earth, but why quibble over vocabulary? So.

Zanj fell to her knees on the bare earth.

Viv thought about time, which Zanj and Hong claimed only ran one way. She thought about the distant spark that was Magda, that was her world, that was everything the Empress had stolen from her. She could still get back there, if she was strong, lucky, clever. If she lost, she would die knowing she could have won.

For all her power, Zanj had no such luxury. What had been stolen from her, she could never take back.

Viv started down the ramp. Hong put out a hand to stop her. From him, in his eyes and the set of his shoulders, she read: Zanj is hurt now, and she hates to be weak. If you go to her, if you try to comfort her, she’ll have to accept that she’s fallen to her knees, that she may be weeping—or she’ll have to fight you. Or both. You might have to kill her to save yourself. We don’t know how that crown works yet. Best let her go.

All that was true enough. But, though Zanj had tried to kill her, and threatened her after, Zanj had also come to her in the night, watched her, offered help. Viv could not let her suffer alone. And how dare Hong try to stop her?

So he retreated from the weight of her eyes, and she descended the ramp; her bare feet made little sound on the metal, and the asphalt underfoot reminded her of broken playgrounds. There had been no rocks on the station or on the ship, and the deck plates were all warm—nothing had made her feel her lack of shoes. She neared Zanj; the woman’s ears twitched. Her claws tightened on the ground. One tore troughs in soil, the other in asphalt.

“Let me go,” Zanj said before Viv’s hand could reach her shoulder. Viv stopped, unsure what to say or do. Zanj raised her face, hard and sharp and jagged as the broken towers. The iron band did not change color. It had darkened before, when it hurt her. This pain came from inside. “Let me go.” In Zanj’s chest, again, that tiger-deep roll.

“Zanj, it’s—” She almost said okay, but it wasn’t. Viv didn’t know what it was, but she could see that okay had long since left the running. “I’m so sorry.” Her hand shook between them, not quite touching the place where Zanj’s shoulder used to be.

“You don’t know sorry,” Zanj hissed. “None of you children know sorry. You’ve lost your fleet, your home, and because you are so small and brief you think those little losses are a fit measure of another’s pain. You can’t conceive of what I’ve lost. Of what stood here, when it stood, and what you’re too brief to mourn.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Since when, Viv, has the universe or any god you know given one fuck about what’s fair?” The heat of her voice settled, chilled, dangerous. “Let me go. I don’t know this world anymore. I’m no use to you as a guide, but I can be a weapon. Let me go, and I’ll gather forces to stagger even her, and I will hound her with all my fury, and maybe I will die, but by all that burns I will make her bleed. Maybe I’ll even slow her down enough for the kid to get you home.”

“Will you kill me, if I let you go?”

She was standing, and close enough for Viv to feel the heat of her, and smell her sharp sweat. There was no world save the space between them—certainly not enough world to contain Hong, who said eloquently, “Um,” only for Zanj to talk right over him: “Maybe I should. It would be faster for us both.”

“Friends,” Hong said, closer, “perhaps we should continue this conversation back on the ship?”

Viv waved him off. She glared at Zanj. “You think you’re so far above us. Above me, above him—nobody can touch you, nobody can possibly fix the mess you’ve convinced yourself you are. And if I reach out, you try to piss me off, hoping, what, I’ll hurt you? Because you need someone else to be the reason for your pain, because you can’t admit that it’s the world that hurts so much?” With an expansive wave to the broken city, the burning stars, the whole damn universe at once, everything that was and could be lost. “I’m not letting you go off and die. There’s hope. It’s slim, but we have a chance: me for home, you for revenge, Hong for understanding. Together. We need each other. We don’t even have fuel. If I let you go, who the hell will fly the ship?”

Zanj snarled. “How convenient.”

There was a fire in Viv’s chest, and it grew as it ate fuel. “I’m sorry. Can you point out the part of this that looks convenient to you? Because I must have missed it.”

“Poor stranger in a strange land, lost far from everything she knows, can’t touch the Cloud, can’t fight worth a damn. She was someone back home, sure, everyone was—but now she’s on her own, scared, with no purchase on anything except for this.” She jabbed a claw at the crown. “You like it, don’t you? Really? Deep down, it must thrill you to know you can hook your finger and make me crawl.”

“I don’t.” She put more force into that than she had meant—and knew she was covering her own uncertainty.

“Friends,” Hong repeated, conciliatory. “Please.”

“Shut up, Hong. I don’t.” Not a truth, but a wish that simply saying so could make it true. “I stopped you from killing us. But I’ve never given you an order. You’re angry. I know. She hurt you. You think you’re so hard to understand? How about this: you led your friends on a big adventure, and it all came crashing down, and now you’re scared and desperate for everything to be someone else’s fault. You’re telling me to let you go because you know I won’t, and that gives you a reason to hate me, and you want one, because otherwise you’d have to hate yourself. Am I close?” She saw Zanj’s shell crack; there was meat in there. She should stop, but she could no more stop herself than stop a tidal wave after a quake had come. “Pretty close, I think. Maybe I should let you go after all. I wonder what you’d do without the crown to blame it on.” And that, she knew even as she said it, was too far. She could read it in Zanj’s body, she could hear the growl building in the woman’s chest. The earlier anger had been flame kindled on despair, pain seeking a shape to hide weakness. This was fury that needed no fuel. It burned its own exhaust. But Zanj had no words big enough for the rage she felt, and she would not hit Viv.

At least, that’s what Viv hoped. She’d seen what happened to things Zanj hit.

“Friends!” Hong shouted. They looked to him then—they had to look at someone else.

“What?” Both voices at once, both snarling.

He held his clubs, and was not watching either of them. “We are not alone.”

They were, in fact, surrounded.

Viv counted twenty, in a loose semicircle, approaching the ship from the broken city, human-shaped and hunched forward, rifles drawn, or things that looked a lot like rifles, anyway. They wore weird postapocalyptic assemblies of cybernetics and armor, no flesh visible, if there was flesh under there. They moved with preternatural smoothness, without words Viv could hear. Bright smears of red and blue and green marked their armor like war paint.

Zanj kept her body facing Viv, but she turned her head, and saw them coming, and looked … pleased. And hungry.

She rolled her shoulders back, and tightened her fists. Viv heard no joints crack, which felt more ominous than the human noises would have been.

The figures stopped as one and aimed their rifles. Hong brandished his clubs, and Viv wondered what he thought that would accomplish. A single voice emerged from all the figures at once, a woman’s, speaker-amplified: “Outsiders! Set down your arms. The Ornclan bids you welcome if you come as guests, but if you stand as foes, we hold our blades and guns ready.”

“The Ornclan?” Zanj still hadn’t turned all the way around to face the new arrivals, so only Viv received the benefit of her sneer. “There isn’t any Ornclan, kid. There isn’t any Orn anymore. And you’ve had the misfortune of catching me on a very bad day.”

“Zanj,” Viv said, “these people might be able to help us. They might have fuel.”

Zanj rolled her eyes.

“We offer welcome to guests and friends,” the voice said. “And death to foes of Orn. Declare yourself.”

“Declare yourself.” Zanj mouthed along with the voice, mocking. “I’ll give you one chance. Toss those toys away, take your helmet off, and apologize. Then we’ll talk. If not, I’ll break your metal friends, then you. Slowly. Your people tell stories about me around your campfires, and those stories made you wet yourself with fear. Do not—”

One of the rifles spoke. Even as the sound reached Viv’s ears, Zanj was turning, so fast a whirlwind rose at her feet. Her hand spun out—the gun’s fire was a dart of blinding green, too fast for the eye to follow, but Zanj’s backfist met it and slapped it away, into the dirt. The whirlwind settled. Zanj’s fist smoked. Through the burned-off skin, Viv saw more of that whitish not-bone, and other things, too, metal and light, unfamiliar substances that did not belong in bodies as Viv understood them. Wiggling things. The rumble in Zanj’s chest swelled to a roar.

“No,” Viv said, but she put no force behind it.

She heard the wishbone pop of Zanj’s battery. Back on High Carcereal Zanj had said she was running low on power, and would need weeks to recharge. But they had been traveling for a while.

Zanj glanced back to Viv, slow as a taunt, and her eyes were white.

The guns spoke all at once, and most of the blasts passed through space where Zanj had stood a half second before. They struck asphalt, stone, the ship, without effect; Hong’s clubs blocked two blasts. One struck Viv straight in the chest—and when her senses returned moments later she found herself sprawled on the pavement, alive, singed, breathless. Her robe-shirt’s weave crackled and gleamed with lightning for an instant, and her skin hurt where the seams had seared her. Oh. So that was why Hong wore his robes loose.

Hood, she told the robe, and threw the one it made over her head, and ran after Hong toward a mound of asphalt that would serve for cover. The stone hurt her feet. But just because these clothes had blocked one shot didn’t mean they could stand up under a barrage. Hong, certainly, didn’t seem to trust them.

She dove into cover, chased by more bolts—a rock sliver clipped her ankle, a wound she felt only as a tug and hoped wasn’t serious. The broken landing strip stank of hot rock and plasma. Blood made noise in her ears. Apparently her adrenal system understood rifles better than it understood Pride drones. She gathered herself behind cover, checked her ankle—bleeding, but not as bad as she’d feared. Beside her, Hong didn’t seem worried about their predicament. Though that might have had less to do with their odds than with the fact that, after the second volley, none of the fire had been directed at them.

She risked a glance out of hiding, and saw Zanj as a blur between broken bodies. Zanj kicked out the center of one of the armored figures’ chests—it sparked and flew back and lay smoking, bleeding oil. She tore off a metal limb and batted off a second figure’s head—another bot—then grabbed its rifle, snapped it in half, and tossed the pieces spearlike into two more helmets. In a minute, the twenty were ten.

Viv’s stomach churned. The armored figures were made of metal, circuits, recognizably robotic, but they looked like people. Hell, in this future, they might well be people. And once she made that leap, she thought of the Pride—the Pride, the hate fractals, who cared for their dead. That hadn’t occurred to her back on Rosary Station. She’d focused on staying alive, on her fear, on their monstrosity, but of course the Pride were alive.

Fewer of them, though, now they’d met Zanj.

Zanj pulled off one guard’s head, jumped on a second’s shoulders, and beat in the second’s skull with the head of the first. Eight left.

Easier to count down than to describe. As far as Viv could tell, Zanj found the fight as easy as counting anyway. Seven. She was showing off. Six. She was angry. Five. And these things just happened to be. Four. In her way. Three. She shrugged off a volley. Two.

One.

Viv realized she was standing in the open. She’d left shelter as the battle turned to a slaughter.

The last guard scrambled back from Zanj, not so smooth anymore, and tried to raise his rifle—Zanj closed the distance between them in a blur, grabbed the rifle, broke it. The guard slipped, turned to run. Zanj stood in front of him, eyes white fire, smile wicked. Caught him by the neck, and lifted. Zanj glowed with fury and waste heat. She caught the guard’s helm beneath the chin and lifted, and the helm popped off, rattled to the ground.

The guard was human-ish—webs of blue lines flanked the corners of eyes wide with terror, but that could have been makeup or aftermarket modification. She—Viv revised her original judgment, barring future clarification with regard to the pronoun, and observed that in real life, comic books to the contrary, you couldn’t tell much about sex when people were wearing armor—kicked Zanj in the crotch without producing any visible reaction. The guard clawed for Zanj’s eyes, but Zanj held her at arm’s length, off the ground, without apparent effort. The guard bared her teeth. She pried at Zanj’s grip on her throat, and Zanj did not seem to care. “Where’s your respect, Daughter of Orn?” She sounded almost mournful. “Your grandmothers welcomed me with song.”

The guard’s next kick found only air; a third might as well have struck cement.

“Where are your topless towers, Daughter of Orn? How did your mother’s mother’s mothers fall? Do you even remember them? Do you remember what you were?”

The guard’s breath rattled in her throat. There were tears in the corners of her wide round eyes. Her lips bared white teeth, a panic rictus. Her nails slipped over Zanj’s skin as if it were marble.

Viv remembered the Empress’s hands in her chest. Remembered how it felt to fight her, futile, desperate, and saw that same look in the guard’s eyes.

Zanj spread her jaws, and leaned in.

“Stop!”

Viv saw the pain hit Zanj—saw her jaws snap shut, saw her buckle as the crown went black. The guard found a breath, though not freedom, as Zanj’s grip weakened. She looked so scared.

Zanj roared. Her eyes were bright white and blinding, and her breath steamed even in this warm air. “She was trying to kill us.”

“You threatened her first. She’s from here. She’s the people we came here to find.”

“She’s an echo. A by-blow. Less than a child. And she tried to shoot me. For that alone—”

Viv didn’t wait for Zanj’s grip to tighten, didn’t wait for her to use those brilliant teeth. “Let her go.” With all the authority she could muster.

The circlet burned night black. Zanj stood firm, as if she would never fall—for a second. Then her eyes dulled to red, her hand trembled, and she collapsed to the broken earth, clutched her temples, screamed. The guard, too, fell; her leg twisted under her. She lay still, but breathing. Alive.

The circlet faded to its normal gray. Some time later, Zanj stopped shivering and fought back to her feet. She swayed, but stood, and spat her own rainbow blood onto the ground. Behind them, shards drifted down from a broken tower. “How did that feel, Lady? Good?”

Many answers leapt to mind, many justifications. All she let herself say was “No.”

“Fine,” Zanj said. “I’m going. Command me to stay, if you want. Make me dance. Order me to feed you, bathe you, I don’t give a shit. I know how the Empress builds—this thing will bring me running from anywhere in the universe. You say you don’t want to control me? Bullshit. Jailer. Call me back when you’re done lying to yourself. But as far as I’m concerned, you and I are done.”

And then she turned on an axis Viv had not noticed before, and in a flash of Cloud blue and static, she was gone.