WIND BLEW SPLINTERED metal through the spot where Zanj had stood. Viv watched the dust settle, heard the sizzle of broken circuits, and realized Zanj was gone.
And why shouldn’t she go? Viv had caught her, tortured her, held her. She said she’d never wanted to make Zanj her prisoner, that she only left the crown on Zanj’s brow to protect herself, but seconds later she’d given her an order, and watched her collapse. Worse: it felt good. Beneath the hook that dug into her gut as she watched Zanj fall, beneath the ache of sympathy and shame, she had felt a drunken swell of strength, like a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, the whole world full of things to burn. She knew where that joy came from, that relief. Weakness had snuck up on her since she woke on High Carcereal in space, in the future, a weakness that built on the weakness she’d felt in the months before her flight from Saint Kitts. And when you were weak, strength was a powerful drug.
Even now, she wanted to call Zanj back.
She told herself it was to apologize. Maybe that was true. But she didn’t know, and didn’t trust herself.
Instead, she ran to the fallen guard. To the woman whose life she’d saved.
She was still breathing, shallowly, her eyes rolled back. Viv reached for her, tried to sort out scraps of half-remembered Girl Scout first aid classes in her head. She’d paid attention, thinking, I might need this someday, but she never had until now.
Don’t move someone who might have a neck injury. Had Zanj broken the guard’s neck? How would Viv tell? You were supposed to check airways. But what if moving her jaw made the neck injury, if there was a neck injury, worse?
Viv touched the woman’s cheek; awake, she had been too afraid for Viv to get much sense of her features, but she resolved in repose: large round eyes, closed now; a flat dark face with high cheekbones; full mouth, fierce and breathtaking. She looked young, early twenties, though who knew how fast people aged in this world, or how slowly, or whether early twenties still counted as young. Someone’s daughter, anyway, someone’s lover, someone’s soldier—like Viv, though separated by who knew how many years.
Zanj might have known, but Zanj was gone.
Hong knelt beside them, hand to chin. “Is she well?” Too polite to ask if Viv needed help.
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “My CPR certification’s a few thousand years out of date. Did the ’faith teach you first aid?”
He flowed past her, hands to the woman’s throat, then mouth, then forehead, checking limbs, joints, muttering under his breath; the translation gimmick threw up its hands at the half-voiced words. When she could no longer understand him she lost her sense of him as a person, his professorial comment, his priestly remove, his eagerness and his fear. He seemed more alien to her than he ever had before.
As he touched the guard, she groaned. Her eyelids fluttered. The blue lines on her skin pulsed. “She should be fine,” Hong said, and when he spoke she made sense of him again. “She tore a muscle in her leg when she fell, but it’s healing. Slowly. She won’t walk until tomorrow at least.”
“If you think that’s slow healing, wait until you see me get hurt.”
Hong hadn’t mentioned Zanj’s disappearance, or their argument; Viv felt too numb to find the right words to thank him for that. She’d said so many of the wrong ones to Zanj just now to trust her own choices.
Good job, Viv. Stress takes over, and at the first opportunity you alienate one of the only two people you’ve met since waking up who have done anything but try to kill you. Zanj had been doing her arrogant, lethal best to help. But should Viv have let her kill this woman, who was breathing deeper now, who had done little enough to hurt them—who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, on the wrong patrol? If Viv hadn’t pissed Zanj off, she wouldn’t have been so murderous. And Viv had been angry, because Zanj was angry, because Viv was angry, because … Because of everything.
This woman was hurt, because of her. And alive, for the same reason.
Her eyes snapped open. They were an alien blue-gray that swirled like mercury, and they locked on Viv, wide with fear for a heartbeat before she could make herself brave. Viv liked her at once—for that moment’s terror, and for how fast it turned to fight. “Get away from me!” Her language was tonal and throaty, her voice rich, deep.
Viv did—backed up on her knees, hands up. Hong had rolled away and risen in the same motion to his feet. Dork. “It’s okay,” Viv said. “You’re fine. You’re safe. We just wanted to be sure you were still alive. Our—” She stopped herself from saying friend. “—our traveling companion, she’s gone. We chased her off.”
She was clear as glass. This girl—this woman, not a girl at all, not here—she knew how to fight, she’d probably lived harder and more violently than Viv could imagine, but she had the fluid, open look of a person who never had to lie.
Viv had not seen a face like that in a long time. She always thought of it as Shanda’s face, Shanda whom she’d met at a charity tennis thing back when Shanda was only number eight in the world, so direct, as open on the dance floor, at the bar, on the court, as she’d been in bed that night. A handful of actors Viv breezed through the summer after they broke it off could almost fake that breathtaking translucence. (Viv had sworn off actors when she realized that was why she’d gone for them. Never trust a rebound.) Seeing that same earnest expression here, so far from home, made her feel dizzy.
The guard’s suspicion parted like water before a whale’s back, replaced by wonder and gratitude. She accepted Viv’s hand and pulled herself to her feet, favoring her hurt leg. “You saved my life.”
“Viv saved you,” Hong said.
“Lady Viv,” the guard breathed. “Are you from—are you from beyond the sky?”
Viv squirmed, and looked away—embarrassed by the guard’s openness, and a little afraid of her beauty. When she realized she was afraid she made herself turn back, and meet that gaze that wasn’t exactly Shanda’s but wasn’t not, because the right thing to do now, she felt certain, was to accept her thanks like a grown woman, respectfully, and ignore the size of those eyes, the way the husk on her voice made medically interesting things happen to Viv’s heart and lungs.
Christ, Viv. At least try to pretend you’re not a goon. “Just Viv. Don’t mention it. It—you—we were, ah, just passing through. From, um.” She couldn’t bring herself to say from space. “From up there.”
The guard’s eyes went wide with wonder. Her grip was strong; Viv felt a thrill at her strength that she did her best to ignore. Stay cool, dammit. “I’ve met gods before, but never a woman from the stars.”
Gods? But what she said was: “What’s your name?” Yes. So very cool.
“Xiara,” was how Viv would spell it, because even though Mom and Dad came from Taiwan, the Chinese school where they’d sent her used Pinyin. Hsyara, maybe, almost Sierra but not quite. “Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter. The Chief sent me to patrol these ruins, and I heard—” She gasped. “Is that your ship?”
She was past Viv in an instant, all injury forgotten in wonder.
“I’ve never seen one so—” Xiara put too much weight into her bad leg, and a yelp of pain interrupted her exuberance. Viv caught her as she folded and tried not to think, much, about the body beneath the armor in her arms. Xiara barely seemed to notice. She had eyes only for the Question. She lurched away from Viv and limped slack-jawed toward the ship. She tugged her glove off with her teeth and stroked the hull with one hand, as if she’d been trusted with a relic. “So old—and intact! We have pieces, but I’ve never seen anything so old in working shape. Are you pilgrims?”
Viv opened her mouth to give some kind of clever lie, and realized she had no idea what a convincing lie would sound like. She turned to Hong, help please, and to her surprise he answered with the ease of rote practice. “I am a simple monk of the ’faith, and Viv is a sojourner. We were passing through your system in quest of miracles, but our ship has run out of fuel, and our temperamental companion’s departure has left us without a pilot. As poor seekers who have left the family, we beg your aid.”
Viv had almost been impressed. She stopped when he revealed the weakness of their position. “We do need fuel,” she said, “but I’m sure we can figure out how to fly the ship.”
But Xiara had turned already, and this time only the Question’s hull at her back kept her from falling. But she didn’t seem to notice the pain—it was quashed beneath her awe. “You have no pilot?” As if Viv had just said, We have this old Holy Grail lying around, don’t know what to do with it, any ideas? “Viv, you came from beyond the stars, and angered a powerful being to save me, though you did not know my name.” As if Viv weren’t the reason Zanj had been about to kill her in the first place. But Xiara didn’t know that, and her voice was heavy with awe and purpose, and Viv was too weak to correct her. “I owe you my life and service, but your accepting the service I now offer would be the greatest boon I have received of any woman. Will you take me as your pilot?”
Viv hesitated, not just because of take me. “You can fly?”
“Flight,” she said, “is the blood of Orn. We sing our children songs of the sky.” But whatever she saw in Viv’s face, it was not the answer she was looking for. Viv did not know if there was enough sincerity inside her to answer Xiara need for need. Xiara blushed. “I am sorry. I have been too forward. I should not have dared to ask.”
“No,” Viv said, feeling like a jerk. “That’s not it at all. It’s … Hong and I are going on a long journey, to find the Em—”
“To find relics of saints of ages past,” Hong said politely but with enough force to shut Viv up. She notched her estimation of Hong’s competence back up a few points. At least Xiara didn’t seem to have noticed the slip.
“Relics,” Viv said. “Right. It would be a long trip. Journey. Quest. Very dangerous.” But she could tell from the eager light in Xiara’s eyes that danger would not discourage her.
Xiara could not be serious. This city had been ruined for centuries, and she’d never seen the Question. How could she fly it? After weeks watching Zanj and taking notes, Viv barely knew what half the controls meant in realspace, let alone how to plot a course through the Cloud. She looked to Hong for help—but Hong seemed ready to defer to her on this one, and self-satisfied in his deference. He must have noticed the glare she shot him when he’d let on about the weakness of their bargaining position. But Xiara was still standing in front of Viv, expectant, and Viv felt a rare stab of empathy. How would it feel to grow up here, knowing you had lost the sky?
Anyway, they did need a pilot.
“We are not worthy of your service,” Viv said. “But we would accept your friendship. After we fuel the Question, we’ll see if you can fly her.” Viv didn’t trust her eyes not to betray her doubt, but she knew how to fake a confident handshake—so she put out her hand.
Xiara caught her by the wrist and pulled her into an embrace that made Viv catch her breath—because it was tight, and for other reasons. Xiara’s dark eyes shimmered with emotion. “Then you will be my guests, for now. We shall do you honor; the Ornchief controls the great manufactory of Orn, and we can make fuel in abundance. And then we’ll fly.”
And they set forth, boldly, into the ruined city.
Or, they tried. On her third step Xiara winced and almost fell again. Viv slipped her arm around the other woman’s shoulder, and Xiara grabbed Viv in turn—she was strong beneath that armor, and that strength encouraged another wave of embarrassingly physical speculation on Viv’s part. She thought she caught Hong’s eyebrow drift upward, the corner of his mouth incline a hair, but she must have imagined it—when she narrowed her eyes at him he looked impassive and serene. He hid his hands in his sleeves, and walked beside them as if Xiara’s limping gait were his natural pace. “Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter,” he said, “tell us of your world.”
As they walked, Orn took shape around them. To see the ruin from the broken landing strip was to see a painting on a wall, an image of desolation and loss reclaimed by green. To enter that space was to feel it as a landscape. People once lived here. They built this place, and it wrecked them. But, broken, the city had another beauty. Life grew and flew and crawled and climbed and slithered without care for time’s passage or what was lost. “The Ornclans hunt in the old places,” Xiara said, “for meat from animals, for parts from machines. We patrol in case other Ornclans come to raid us—for food, for goods, for attention, or because a god told them to.”
“Do many gods come here?” Hong asked, and Viv thought at first that he must be joking—but he asked the question in full sincerity as he examined a rusted, twisted metal skeleton that had, perhaps, once been something like a car. If he was joking, he hid it well.
“Not so many as in the old days.” Xiara guided them up a marble staircase between two rotten buildings. “They’ve picked through most of the ruins by now. All the other Ornclans traded off their great relics for blessings, save mine: we hold the manufactory, and none may take it from us.” She sounded insistent on that point, defiant, which made Viv wonder what she was defying. Before Viv could ask, Xiara slipped out from under her arm and skidded down the scree slope at the staircase’s end. She tried to stop herself at the bottom, but her leg folded under her again and she sat down hard, and laughed and waved up at them at the hill’s crest. Xiara might heal fast—everyone here seemed to, except Viv, whose ankle cut wouldn’t stay closed, and who chose her steps with care to avoid cutting her foot open on a sharp rock—but Xiara kept testing her wounds and hurting herself again. Viv admired that, in a way, even if it was dumb. She had never liked waiting either.
“Can she really fly the Question?” she asked Hong as they crept down the slope.
“There are strange miracles in the world,” he said. “And the pilots of Orn are legendary.”
Useless answer. But, speaking of miracles: “Was she serious about the gods?” Zanj had used that word once or twice, but Viv thought it was a joke or a mistranslation.
Hong chose his path with care, but he never winced when he set his bare foot on a sharp rock. Socks, Viv thought, and her pants slithered down to make her socks, but the fabric couldn’t quite get the hang of soles. The cloth didn’t tear, so her skin was more or less safe, but sticks and gravel still hurt. She hissed down after him. “There are many types of minds in the Cloud,” he said. “Some once wore flesh, or silicon, or something like either, and some did not. Many, most, build themselves pleasure palaces, or dungeons to scourge them, and shelter there. They cannot help themselves. If you do not train your mind while it is subject to physical constraint, once liberated from the flesh it seeks pleasure by reflex, and so binds itself in unbreakable chains. Trillions drown in joy-loops, unable to rise above the desire to satisfy desire. Even those who escape that fate rarely ponder the world below. Rather, they seek higher knowledge. But some minds reach down. Those so bound to this space that they seek power here become gods.” Viv had thought there was something odd about the way he pronounced that word before, but she only placed it now: he spoke as if godhood were something regrettable, a perversion, an embarrassing fetish. “They seek power over a world that has no power over them—they are the greatest victims of illusion. Orn, in the first centuries after its shattering, would have many wonders for which they might trade. What a god may value, mortals may not comprehend—and what a god may give, some mortals would die to earn.”
“Hand up?” Xiara asked when they made it to the bottom. She’d been piling rocks while she waited. “It’ll be dark soon, and we have a ways to go.”
Viv helped her up, took her weight again. The declining sun lit broken towers orange and yellow and red, as crystal refracted that light to rainbows. “What happened here?”
“The Empress.” Xiara answered matter-of-factly, with only a little pain. Of course the Empress. “Our mothers and teachers were giants. They broke the Empress’s great law. They built a republic in secret—a web of worlds—and thought they could escape her notice.” She sounded faraway sad, talking of ancient ancestors’ fallen temples, of Mongols at Kiev, of tragedies that only seemed inevitable in retrospect, and in whose shadows she now lived. “She came in glory with her Diamond Fleet, broke us, broke our ships, and cut us from the sky. It has been many hundreds of years since an Ornclan pilot took to the air.” She reached for the canteen slung over her shoulder, found it empty, scowled. Viv, wincing on her not-quite-bare feet, recognized that trick: you took a drink to remind yourself your body was here, and save yourself from the mess of your own thoughts. “Come on,” Xiara said. “There’s a stream over here. We can fill up, and still reach home by dark.”
The stream had once been a fountain, the features of the statue worn away. A bull, perhaps, or something like a bull, the pose heroic, the eyes enormous even after acid rain decay. The stream was clear, but Xiara’s canteen filtered slowly.
Viv drew back to Hong, and asked him: “The Empress did this?”
“This,” he said, “is what She does. And that is why I argued with our companion when she sought to bring us here.” He had never used Zanj’s name in Xiara’s hearing, and neither had Viv. Could Zanj’s name still carry weight after three thousand years, even on this devastated and long-abandoned world? What had she been, when she fought the Empress? What had she done?
Whatever, she was gone now.
Xiara, humming to herself, examined a flower growing by the stream, nodded, satisfied, then settled again, and watched the setting sunlight on the water. Hong continued: “The Empress has one iron law: do not grow too large, for complexity draws the Bleed. She breaks worlds that risk the cosmos. Nothing like the Orn of legend could last for long without drawing Her eye. The ’faith survives on the thin edge of Her prohibition, and protects itself by movement.”
The ruined fountain statue stared, proud and hungry, at the sky. Xiara had looked like that when she stared at their ship. A planet of pilots, wings broken. “This is evil,” she said. “This isn’t protection. It’s abuse.”
“You saw the Bleed.” His voice was simple and sad: the voice of a man who did not know what else was to be done. “Where they come, none survive. What would you do?”
“Fight them.”
“She has fought them, time after time, at great cost to the galaxy—as have others. But they always come back.”
“If she let civilizations grow, she would have allies in the fight.”
“But She has seen them grow, by scores, by thousands, and always they make the same mistakes. And always the Bleed come.”
“You like this? Agree with it?”
He lost all serenity at that suggestion—eyes wide, speechless, shocked. “Of course not. She is not right, nor is She good, though the Grand Rector and her followers sometimes think so. She is…” Words gone again, or else exhausted, he gestured to the ruins, to the pitted statues, to Xiara filling her canteen at this stream in this city her mothers’ hands had built. “She is massive. She is power. She strikes as She chooses. She has bent the arc of history. She built wonders and fought wars we can only describe by allegory, because we cannot work the math of them. The Archivist says we must understand Her, we must learn Her tools, so that we may stand against the darkness. I hope one day we will pass beyond Her, and find a better way. But we cannot even understand Her path now.”
“And … our friend … fought her.”
“Yes.”
“How? I mean, she’s a badass, but.” Her own wave at the destroyed city felt less poetic, more futile.
“We have seen her fight without weapons. When she fought in Heaven, she was fearsome.”
“Well!” Xiara spoke the word like a bell peal—yes, indeed, the world was well! She stood with her canteens, or tried to, forgetting her injury again. Viv rushed to her side; she thanked her with a grin and an offer of water, river cool.
The waters of Orn tasted silky rich and clean. Viv wondered what the filter filtered out.
Xiara pointed with her chin. This way.
Buildings thinned as night closed in. They passed fewer toppled towers, fewer piles of broken glass, as they entered what Viv would have called the outskirts of the city if the skyline had not continued unbroken to every horizon—perhaps a park or warehouse district?
There were new structures here, too, mostly empty, made of wood and bamboo and rope: lean-tos and traveler’s hutches, and there, just visible past an overgrown hill that used to be a house, a lookout tower. The dirt road was narrow but well trodden. Xiara hobbled surer, faster, eager for home; the doubled suns set and released the sky.
More stars shone, and more after those, a thick full vault of golden fire webbed with hair-thin glittering arcs. Rings maybe, or stations still orbiting after all these years. Orn, city of starships, had its crown.
The day’s heat faded. Viv smelled a night-flower musk she could not name. She wondered if Xiara or Hong had ever smelled a rose. If there still were roses.
“Beautiful,” she said into the silence. Hong walked in contemplation, hands sleeved, head down, but Viv didn’t like where contemplation led her: home, her unfinished conquest, Magda, the hand in her chest, and Zanj.
“If you like the stars,” Xiara said, “just wait. There is a balcony behind our hall, and by the Chief’s command all lights are covered to hide us from the sky. I’ll show you stars like you have never seen—and you will know what drew Orn’s daughters to the sky.”
“I’d like that,” Viv said, but Xiara said nothing, and Viv found herself, as if she were still goddamn fourteen, wishing she’d said something cooler, or more grand.
Then she noticed the bandits ahead.
Armored figures emerged from the shadows, rifles and spears ready. Hong had seen them first, and strode forth, clubs glittering to his hands, voice calm. “We are simple travelers,” he said. “Pilgrims who have left the family. We seek only peace and knowledge. Name yourselves.”
Viv wondered if he’d noticed the flanking team on the rooftop to their right. Probably. So he was just pretending not to see them. Maybe it was an honor thing. “We don’t want trouble,” she said. Obviously, her role here was to be the one who didn’t lunge for weapons at the first hint of danger. Not that she had any weapons. Old gamer instincts suggested she should find some. Practical experience, on the other hand, suggested that weapons in the hands of jumpy, untrained folk rarely made anyone safer.
Back on Earth Viv had relied on a sort of coolant system to protect her: subtle, and less subtle, mechanisms for drawing violence away from the places she spent her time, and dumping it in places where people couldn’t defend themselves. That wasn’t so much nonviolence as a willingness to let bad things happen to other people. Here, if she didn’t want to fight—and the fact that every second person they met seemed to be some sort of highly advanced cyborg suggested fighting was a bad idea—she’d have to find a more genuine path.
That would be a challenge.
“We’re not from around here,” she said. “This woman’s hurt. We’re just trying to get her home.”
“Lies!” shouted a voice from the firing line. A bearish figure wielding a rifle in one hand and an enormous spear in the other marched from the shadows.
“I’m not lying,” Viv said before he could speak again. She was starting to get a sense for the rhythms of speech on Orn, which were slower than her own. She could use that to slip through them. “There was a misunderstanding, and she’s been hurt, but it’s all sorted out now, we’re just—” What was the phrase Hong used, ah. “—pilgrims who have left the family, seeking…” What were they seeking again, not the Empress, something else …
“You have attacked Ornclan guards!” Armor-bear shouted again. Even after everything, Viv almost wanted Zanj back. It would have been nice to watch someone deck this bozo. “You have taken a princess of Ornclan hostage!”
Princess?
“I’m not—” Xiara started to say, but Hong was already talking.
“—will meet you in single combat for the right of passage through your lands, as the Star Tablets decree—”
Armor-bear didn’t wait for the formula to finish, just held out his rifle until one of his flunkies took it, and strode forth with the spear. “Very well! As is meet, I who have been challenged choose the weapons of our—”
“Shut up!” Xiara’s voice echoed off the walls, and while stunned silence reigned she slipped out from under Viv’s arm, limped forward, and fixed their ambushers with a glare of withering command. “Both of you just be quiet! I am no hostage, Djenn Ornswarden. These are my guests. They have come from beyond the sky, seeking aid and fuel, and I am their pilot. Now, take us to the Chief, and let’s get all this sorted out.”