WHAT WITH THE spears and matronymics and slightly Viking rhetoric, Viv had pictured the Ornclan hall as a Heorot of ring-giving postapocalypse kings, Grendel-haunted maybe. She imagined wood and gables and gilding, a dais and a throne, a woman in a horned helmet.
But when Djenn and his warriors marched them through the palisade, when the spear-bearing guards on watch there, their skin crackling blue with what Viv assumed was some sort of energy shield, drew back to let them pass, as rifle-bots set down their weapons and the drumbeats swelled, Viv found at the core of all those defenses not a palace, not a building even, but a grove.
Pale-barked trees spread skyward, straight and ghostly as birch but redwood thick and tall, so close their branches and flat leaves closed out the sky. Xiara’s people had hung stained glass and dyed paper in the woven branches’ gaps, glimmering in the gloam. Into the grove they drew, stepping with care between and over high, gnarled roots, following the drums and the smell of thick spiced smoke, until they emerged into a frat party.
Okay, fair, Viv was being cultural-essentialist, hegemonic, whatever. There were obvious differences between this and Viv’s last frat party. The frat party’s drums had been electronic, for one thing, while the Ornclan’s were made from skin and wood. The frat party’s floor was sticky, while the Ornclan reveled on soft green grass. The frat party had fewer women, fewer dead posthuman artifacts repurposed as jewelry, and considerably more polo shirts, and the wrestling had been more the mud-and-salacity type than for-the-honor-of-my-fathers. But the Ornclan hall was a good deal like a frat party. Maybe Viv’s beer pong expertise wouldn’t go to waste after all.
As they entered, the revels stilled—but not because of their arrival. The drums beat low, then stopped. All eyes in the room, including Djenn’s and Xiara’s, fixed on two figures standing in a bare dirt ring before the throne.
The wrestlers wore breechcloths and gray vests, armbands of woven cord, and no other ornament. Their arms were thick, their shoulders broad, their hair gathered in braids and knots while most of the other Ornclan wore it loose. They circled one another, steps measured. The wrestler who started the circle facing Viv glared at his opponent as if there were nothing else in all the world, his jaw clenched and his cheeks red. The wrestler who ended facing Viv looked every bit as intent, every bit as fierce and ready—but she was smiling.
They rushed together, clutching, shifting grip, bodies slick, limbs trembling with effort, lips pulled back to bare teeth in expressions half grin, half growl. Their stamping feet replaced the beat of drums. Onlookers clutched wooden goblets and massive drinking horns, but did not lift them to their lips. They leaned closer to the ring. This was it. Whatever “this” was.
Both fighters’ flesh bore finger tracks amid their scars, and bruises, and the dirt of prior falls. They looked well matched in mass and skill. Viv and Hong had been marched—or, as Xiara insisted, escorted as honored guests, not prisoners—into the final act of the wrestlers’ drama.
Just my luck, Viv thought. She always had the worst timing.
Djenn, who had been so eager to show off his captives, fell silent beside the circle, barely daring to breathe. Xiara had been just as ready to present her guests, but she too kept silent, and watched. The large jewel-decked man on the wooden throne on the dais near the ring clearly noticed the new arrivals, and looked from them, to the match, to them, and back—more unsure than Viv expected in a post-Viking, though to be fair she didn’t have a lot of firsthand experience with the type—but he did not stop the match.
From the way they fought, she guessed the rules: the first to lose their feet would lose the match. No gouges, no strikes with fists or feet. The male wrestler huffed through his beard and moved with zigzag motions and fast arcs, all growl and gruff, while the woman favored straight, swift lines, and never lifted her feet from the dirt. They raised dust clouds as they slid, and left clean trenches and tracks the man stamped down. He grabbed for her once, twice, but she drew her hands away. Viv didn’t know why, and wished she did. She’d never been a fighter, she’d never liked physical combat, but she wanted to know what it felt like to be this woman from the inside.
The man surged forward once more, and this time his opponent did not evade. His hands clamped on her thick wrists and he pressed in hard and fast to knock her off-balance, and Viv, sad for this woman she barely knew, thought: this is it, she’s done.
But that smile, which had been a fixed expression before, turned real. Viv realized then why the woman had slipped from her rival’s earlier attempts to engage: they weren’t serious enough for her to use. She had him now. Her arms pressed into his grip and through, and her fingers clutched him, white-knuckled. Her weight and his sank through her trunk into the roots of her thick legs, into the knotted muscles of thigh and calf.
With a roar, she threw him, and as he arced through the air Viv thought, that’s it—but the man twisted, and landed on his feet with a drumbeat thud. There were no cheers. The silence deepened as he crouched low and circled her again, cautious.
In that tense pause Hong almost broke the ritual and stepped out to greet the man on the throne, but Viv grabbed his arm and stopped him in time. None of Djenn’s or Xiara’s party had knelt to the man with the jewels, or even acknowledged him. Djenn watched the match with religious fervor. Xiara stood rigid, white-lipped, her hands balled to fists. And a thin silver circlet hung on the throne-back as if left to bide awhile. The man keeping the throne warm did not seem like the kind of guy to skimp on finery. Hong turned a questioning gaze toward Viv. He didn’t get it yet, but at least he trusted her enough to keep quiet.
The wrestlers had clinched again, each clutching the meat of the other’s forearms. Their shoulders moved as a unit, and they fought the true battle with their feet. The woman pressed forward, dropped her hips low, and used her lower stance and the strength of her legs to drive the man back. He circle-stepped, pulled left, right—then, with a grunt, let his left guard collapse. The woman pushed up and in with that hand—but he must have been expecting that, and danced back, tugging her arm down.
The woman’s foot slipped, and Viv’s heart sank.
But it was not over.
The woman let out a high, piercing sound, almost a cry, almost a laugh, and spun. Her back bent like a sword, and in the firelight she was all lines and cords of muscle from her core through the ridges that flanked her spine. She came out of the spin still holding the other wrestler’s arms, wrists locked against themselves. His hooded eyes widened in shock, and his mouth opened in a silent O, but he had no time to save himself. He had shifted all his weight to one leg for that last maneuver, risking imbalance for victory and leaving himself without a root.
He fell like a mountain.
The woman drew a long, slow breath, and bent over him, and tugged on his cord armband. The knot undid with a single pull. She raised the cord high in the silence and let it fall.
Cheers burst from the crowd, from the jeweled man on the throne, from Djenn and their escort, from Xiara—the drums pounded again, and strings and flutes joined in. The victor offered the loser a hand up, which he accepted humbly, with a broad, tired grin and rueful shake of head. But before he could speak, before anyone else could set the agenda, Viv darted into the circle, dragging startled Hong behind her, and bowed, deeply, to the woman wrestler. “Ornchief, my congratulations.”
Hong almost rose from his bow in shock, but her hand on his shoulders held him down. Guards rushed forward, drawing weapons, Djenn sputtered, and, most importantly, the woman who was Ornchief brushed sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist, examined Viv and Hong, and asked, “Stranger, how did you know me?”
Viv straightened then, though the sudden pressure of spearpoints against her back suggested she was not supposed to do. But she wasn’t interested in the guards’ sense of propriety, or Hong’s, or sputtering Djenn’s, or even Xiara’s. Viv trusted her instincts, and her judgment of this woman, through the daughter she had raised. “Your crown rests on your throne. Your man with the jewels sits there to guard it. Your people look to you, and celebrate your victory.”
“They might as well celebrate a wicked Chief’s defeat.” A guard brought her a cloth, and another guard a basin. She splashed water on her face, toweled off.
“Not to judge from how your daughter speaks of you. Or your camp.”
A raised eyebrow. “My camp speaks? Are you an oracle, stranger, to hear its voice?”
“No.” Viv had dealt with people like the Ornchief before, heavy with true authority, too sure to need arrogance. You didn’t find it often in the circles of anxious overachieving nerds where she tended to run, and less often among the rich—but when you did, you had to be ready. These people would not respect you if you yourself did not. “I have led clans, and built things. This camp was built well, by well-led people.”
“You have led clans?” Confusion—the Ornchief had Xiara’s lucid face, more square, no less expressive. Viv felt very conscious of how little she must resemble this woman’s image of a leader. “Will you join me in the ring? We will compare our leadership.”
“Not clans like this,” Viv said, a bit faster and more apologetically than she would have liked. Self-respect was not easy to maintain before the mass of this woman. “Clans of trade.”
“Trade,” the Chief echoed. Viv had a way of saying the word interesting that her friends always mocked; when she used that tone she didn’t always mean bullshit, but often. I think you’re wrong, but I’ll give you a chance to save yourself. Or dig yourself in deeper. “Are you a tradeswoman, then?”
“We are pilgrims,” Hong said. “We have left the family to walk the path of saints, and seek miracles.”
“They are monsters.” Djenn barreled into the conversation. Viv had hoped to keep this between her and the Chief, but Hong speaking had opened the floor. She’d have to talk tactics with him, so he stopped screwing hers up. (Admittedly, she had a lot to learn from him, insofar as the whole not-dying thing was concerned.) “They broke our guards, took the Princess hostage. They have bound her to their cause with sorcery.”
Which was such an absurd accusation Viv took a few heartbeats to realize the Chief was taking it seriously. Fortunately, Xiara chose this moment to shoulder ringside. “Chief. I am myself, and free. You know me from your own flesh. Viv and Brother Hong came to us from beyond the stars. I found them arguing with a companion, their pilot. This person, enraged, broke our guards, and would have killed me had Viv not stopped her. She fled through the Cloud, leaving Viv and Hong stranded here. They want shelter, fuel; they seek a pilot to take them offworld, and have agreed to let me serve them. I pledged them my protection, and will brook no harm to them within our hall.”
Viv had wondered when the pilot thing would come up—and how the Chief would take it when it did. She’d expected laughter, even scorn, though this woman did not seem the type to scorn her children. But she’d never thought the Chief might take Xiara seriously.
The Chief lowered her head and marched through the murmuring crowd. She climbed the three steps to her throne, which the jeweled man abandoned with a bow; the Chief raised her crown and settled it upon her head. As the metal touched her skin, her broad shoulders slumped, and the boundless strength of her stilled and settled as if to yoke. She sat. Duty gathered about her like a storm. “You have broken guards we cannot cheaply fix. You ask for fuel. You seek my daughter’s service. Yet for a tradeclan, you have offered little. What can you grant us? What trade can you offer, with a monk sworn to poverty by your side?”
For once Hong did not leap to answer. If he really had taken a vow of poverty, negotiation probably wasn’t his strong suit—but then, Viv had no sense of relative value here. What did fuel cost, if these people thought in terms of costs at all and not in terms of gifts? For that matter, what was a fit trade for a Chief’s relative? For all Viv knew, that old dirty magazine of Zanj’s was worth half the broken junk on this planet. Offer too low and she’d insult the Chief, offer too high and she’d seem an idiot, unless there was some sort of passive-aggressive honor inversion nonsense at work here; no, we couldn’t possibly accept something so rich …
There were too many variables.
Starting with trade had been her mistake. She’d read once, maybe in Graeber, that rather than barter, precapital economies held certain sorts of goods more or less in common; you’d borrow a neighbor’s hammer, perhaps even without asking, and one day they’d come for something worth about a hammer; they wouldn’t, though, take your goat, since goats were a different sort of thing. Barter happened between groups without mutual trust—my village might barter with those dangerous foreigners, say. By offering trade she’d marked herself as a threat, closed herself to hospitality. But if she tried to take back her offer and throw herself on the Chief’s mercy now, she’d have to confess her ignorance, give up whatever bargaining position she now held, and look a fool in the process.
That was why the Chief’s eyes weighed her. That was why Xiara tensed with concern. If Viv screwed this up, small chance the Chief would let her go. So Xiara would never leave Orn, and Viv would be stuck here while the Empress retreated to her Citadel.
So, negotiate, Viv. You can’t offer the ship—you need that. And you don’t know what parts of the ship you can sell without breaking it. Hong’s bracelets? The robes that have already saved your life at least once, and which you’re sure you’ll need again? What could they want in this comfortable ruin?
Oh. “News,” she said. “I bring news, which Brother Hong can better tell than I—news of war in the stars, news of an assault on High Carcereal, of battles between Pride and ’faith, of vanishing beads in the Empress’s Rosary, and of the Bleed.” The Chief leaned forward; others, too. Xiara stared, wondering. The music dulled as musicians leaned in to listen and let their rhythm slip. There you go. That’s the hook baited. Now add a little of that old fear of missing out … “What we have seen weighs on us, and it is fearful to mention—but if you would hear of the stars, we will tell you what we know.”
“It is a fair trade,” the Chief admitted, and Viv tried to keep the saleswoman’s grin to herself. “Let there be feasting and wine, and tales of wonder.”
“One more thing,” Viv said before the party got going again.
The Chief extended her hand, flat, palm up, eyebrow raised: continue.
Viv pointed down to her own feet, still bare, much abused. “I could use a pair of boots.”
“That depends,” the Chief replied with a distinctly unbusinesslike grin, “on how well your partner here can wrestle.”
FEASTING, MERRIMENT, DRUMS, a whirl of dance and drink: trade concluded, Viv and Hong were strangers no more, but honored guests who in their future travels would bear tales of Ornclan hospitality, their music’s joy, their wrestlers’ strength, the thick full spice of their food, the vigor of their wine, the rhythm of their dance.
The Chief ordered a party of warriors forth to fetch their ship—to float it home with levipads or fly it if its engines would bear. Even with those warriors gone, the party remained dense, a mass of shapes, mostly but not altogether human—and the dance closed in. Viv felt its beat in her stomach; cupbearers brought her a gold-inlaid horn full of something strong and viney, and brought Hong a mug of dark flower tea.
The Chief raised her horn as well, and Viv matched her and drank. The wine sank a warm plumb line down her throat—her first draft since waking in High Carceral. This drink was her first act in days that wasn’t necessary. She let her second sip open on her palate, tasted river rocks and stonefruit, overtones of glass and velvet. Flavors haunted behind the stonefruit that she could not place save by analogy. This grape was dry beyond belief, if it was a grape at all. But it was wine, or close enough, and it tasted good. She would make this moment normal by sheer force of will if necessary.
Xiara stood at her side. “Come. Eat.”
And the bottom dropped out of Viv’s stomach. “Oh my god. You have food.”
Xiara, laughing, limped beside her to the feast table. “Of course. Do you not eat food?”
“Just watch me.” The smells alone, of spices fuller than cinnamon and sharper than turmeric, of almost-saffron, and of peppers, made her knees weak and the room swim. The Ornclan ate out of bowls with flatbread and knives, and in that moment Viv would not have cared if they’d eaten upside down from funnels. “On the ship, we’ve had, like, Hong has this nutrient paste stuff that I’m pretty sure is ninety percent mushroom, and water, and is this chicken?”
Xiara made a face at her eager expression, and she wondered what the translation gimmick had substituted in for chicken. “Birds at a feast? We would never so insult our guests. This is Emperor Snake. A great delicacy—they take ten warriors at least to hunt, but they’re delicious if you can eat them before they eat you. Djenn led the hunt himself.”
“And nobody died?”
Xiara laughed. “Djenn is a fine hunter, though suspicious of outsiders. Here, try these—” She scooped something that looked like lentils into her bowl. Viv let the smells and her rumbling stomach guide her from tray to tray, pot to pot, and didn’t argue when Xiara added more to her bowl even though she ended up balancing three bowls altogether, two for her, one for Xiara, as they worked back through the crowd to the table and more wine.
“Tell me about your travels,” Xiara said.
“Tell me about this food.”
“Let us trade, then, since you hail from a tradeclan.”
After days of nutrient paste and water, Viv’s first bite of Emperor Snake with peppers and not-quite-cumin tasted so good that she felt embarrassed about eating it in public. Not too embarrassed to swallow, though. “I’ll have to talk while I eat.”
Another side-eyed expression, suddenly brighter. “Oh! You do not eat and speak at once, where you come from? How do you take meals with company?”
“Awkwardly,” Viv said, and reached for wine, only for Xiara to press some into her hand. The weird velvet mouthfeel blushed around the peppers, bit into the Emperor Snake, complemented the meaty flavor of the lentilesques and the buttery aftertaste of the green almost-broccoli sponge. “I’m pretty new at all this, to be honest,” she said, too conscious of Xiara leaning toward her, of the dance they were dancing sitting still. Their knees touched under the table. “We were in the Cloud for a long time. And then—there were stars.” Xiara’s eyes glittered as she leaned in. “I saw rainbows in a comet trail lit by a blue sun. I have words for that, at least. But the rest, I barely know where to start. We don’t have things like this where I come from.”
Xiara tore her meat with her teeth, and mopped sauce from her lip with the back of her hand, and sucked her skin clean. “Where’s that?”
“You won’t have heard of it.” She felt almost human again, and realized how inhuman she had felt before. “I’m still getting used to … space travel. It’s big and weird. If you come with us, maybe you’ll feel the same. Or maybe not. Hong seems to roll with the punches better than I do. He’s a good guy, even if he has awful taste in nutrient paste.”
“He does not seem to mind real food.” Nor did he—deep in conversation with old robed skalds, he scooped up lentilesques and greens with torn strips of bread. Viv reviewed the clearing, the dancing and the music, tracking, searching, and realized that she was looking for Zanj. Who was not here. Whom she had chased away.
Far, far above, wind whispered in the boughs.
She shouldn’t miss Zanj: she was murderous, vicious, quite possibly evil. Of course, people had said the same things about Viv. But then Viv hadn’t actually tried to kill herself, or anyone else, at least not directly. They were safer with her gone, sure. Zanj was not a nice person. But out of all the wonders and dangers in this weird wide universe, Viv felt she got Zanj most—where she was coming from, from the inside. Which was weird. So you woke up in the far future, or wherever, and you felt simpatico with an ancient mythological tyrant who wanted to murder literally everything. What did that say about you?
Whatever it said, you were still looking for her in the party when you knew she was not there.
Xiara had filled her horn with more wine. “Here,” she said, pointing to a kind of stuffed tuber. “I loved these when I was a girl, and no clan on Orn makes them so well as ours. Try some.”
“Thank you,” she said, and ate.
Wine rubbed the details smooth after that and tinted them red-gold, and this meal, this conversation, this woman by her side, felt finally, physically real. But was it?
Everything Viv had once thought was real, everything she had risked her life to achieve, all the fortunes and the Earth that held them—what was all that, here? The past, whatever physics and Zanj and Hong might claim about time travel’s impossibilities? A simulation? Another timeline, another universe? If Viv’s past had happened at all, it had happened so long ago the names themselves had drifted beyond memory, all those people dead, their planet crumbled.
She remembered her home, and she remembered the battles she had fought, and she remembered Magda.
More wine? Oh yes. Thank you.
Xiara drank, too, and she shimmered with the joy of it. She told Viv about tending vines as a girl, about the centipedes you had to pick out of the grapes, how they’d scared her until she learned to chain them together—they’d grab each other’s bodies with their pincers so you could make ropes of them and run through the tall grass waving the ropes after you. Xiara told her about the first time she’d been allowed to taste the wine, and showed the curled-up face she’d made, and Viv told her about the time in grade school when her mother had insisted for some reason that she should taste merlot.
Somewhere in the blurred evening Hong told the Ornclan of their adventure on High Carcereal, with the supple voice and timing of a skilled storyteller. They listened. He only left out the most important bits. In his telling, Viv had been a prisoner of the Empress, not—well, perhaps prisoner was not so wrong a word as all that. He did not make himself the hero. He rescued her, she rescued him. The battle was grand, the Bleed unknowable, the Empress’s deeds profound, Her motives mysterious. Only Zanj was missing.
Zanj would have liked these people. Scorned them, yes, but liked them nonetheless—would have danced with them, would have wrestled ten of their best at once and let them think they might win. She would never have insulted them by throwing a bout. She would have drunk gallons, eaten the whole banquet, gone forth into the city to fight an Emperor Snake solo, then dragged the carcass back and butchered it so they could eat some more.
But Zanj was gone, which was Viv’s fault. There were extenuating circumstances, sure, but if Viv had been the type to make excuses she would never have picked herself up off the ground after bankruptcy one. Zanj was gone. That was that. Carry on.
Applause followed Hong’s story; the wrestler who’d failed against the Chief challenged Hong to a bout, and they threw one another three times before the next challenger arose. Dancing began, a long snakelike pattern of dancers holding hands, stamping, hollering; a spin moved down the snake of dancers and back up, as the snake ate more of the Ornclan and grew.
Xiara pulled Viv toward the snake, and Viv, who had never danced, swam along through the wine, floated, joined the snake’s tail and tried to let the music fill her and scour away all trace of thought. Xiara spun—her injury healed, or at least the pain of it gone soft with drink. She spun Viv, too, grinning, slick. Viv saw things that were not there, faces in the blur, Zanj, yes, Wuchen, Shanda, Gautham, Susan, Magda, long gone, long gone. Xiara rolled her hips, curved and drew and grinned and teased and danced away, and Viv, wine-clouded, felt her body, far away, wanting.
The dance twisted past her ability to follow. Xiara caught her eye, mouthed a question Viv could not hear, so she mimed drink with hand curved as if to hold a cup, and waved Xiara back into the dance. She joined the patterns that opened and closed while other dancers darted between, flower petals and bees at once. Stripy four-eyed dogs yawned on the dais by the Chief. Viv watched.
Hong met her halfway to the wine. “Viv.” He had that knack of not saying things, so she could not really get mad at him.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I have vows.”
“Do vows mean you can’t have fun?”
“Certain kinds of fun,” he said, “yes. That is exactly what they mean.” She almost turned away, but he said quickly: “I’ve been thinking about our friend.”
She felt steadier resting her hand on the table. “You can use her name.”
“It would not be wise. They would recognize it.”
“Really?”
“The whole galaxy tells stories about her thefts, her battles with the Empress. I first heard them long before I joined the ’faith. And now she’s free.”
“To fight the Empress. Like she wanted.” She tried to stand without the table, but decided against it as a long-term proposition. He stood between her and the wine. “It all works out. She gets to be all big ’n terrible.” Consonants betrayed her. “Everybody wins.”
“To fight the Empress, she will need power. To get that power, she will break worlds, steal suns, lay claim to vast swaths of the Cloud. She’ll hurt people, just as she would have hurt Xiara if you had not stopped her. She cannot win, but she can break the galaxy in the process.”
She remembered those burning eyes, the joy Zanj felt in unleashed rage. And she remembered, too, the hand extended in the dark room where she slept. “You think I should call her back.”
“Yes.”
She could stand, then, because she had to, and draw away. “What right do I have?”
“We all are bound, in our own ways. Xiara to her Chief’s wishes, I to my faith.”
“You broke with your faith to find me.”
“I defied the Rector because of my loyalty to the ’faith, not in spite of it.”
“Zanj’s suffered enough.” She wasn’t scared of that name, or of the consequences. “I hurt her. She’s right about that. She wants to come back, she can come. She wants to stay away, I won’t stop her.”
“Even if—”
But she would not let him finish that sentence. “Even if.” And she stalked off through the crowd, holding to the anger that was not sobriety, but a reasonable stand-in.
Back through the grove she marched, back through the dance, seeing nothing, feeling alone. There were stairs worked into a tree near the dais, winding up and around its vast white trunk. She climbed them with heavy feet, on wood worn smooth by generations that have trod, have trod, have trod. Nor can foot feel. Christ, she needed boots. Night wind chilled her after the sweat and smoke of the grove. She stumbled free at last onto a balcony beneath the stars.
The sky burned in no pattern she knew. Massive trees closed out the firelight behind her, and the city of Orn was dead save for a faintly glowing marbled purple-pink dome a mile or so off, mostly hidden by the ruins, its light too soft to taint the sky.
So, matchless, the stars took fire: a galaxy more like a disc than a hoarfrost road. Those brilliant golden and rainbow rings gave depth and dimension to the warm, full black. She thought of a velvet dress Danika had once worn, how it glittered when crushed against the grain and struck by light. Her eyes were hot, her cheeks wet, and she was alone.
She heard a footstep on the stair.
Another. Soft, catlike. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sad.” Not Hong’s voice. She turned.
Xiara had removed her armor; the clothes beneath seemed gray silk, but glittered, and draped a body not so muscled as the Chief her mother’s, but curved with strength and flesh. She shivered in the cold, still flushed from dancing. When she touched Viv’s arm, Viv felt that warmth: Xiara was a skin-clad coal. “Remembering. That’s all.”
“You are my guest,” she said, and drew closer. “You are in my grove. You are strange to me, but I would not see you sad.” Her hand cupped Viv’s ribs, her fingertips pressing skin through cloth that had protected Viv from claws and lasers and did nothing against this woman’s touch. A touch, that’s all, simple and frank, an offer followed by a silence to give her time to think. Someone had replaced her brain with rubber. A touch: Why had she never tried that before? She’d played coy, she’d teased, she’d been blunt and she’d been flush with romantic gesture, she’d been kind and mean. But she had never been this simple.
Xiara’s bottom lip was very full and close. She smelled like a person smells after dancing, after armor, and Viv liked it. Compatible, she thought, as she drew closer, by instinct. Compatible immune systems.
She stopped.
Maybe it was the thought that did it: the vertigo of memory, of reading that scrap about immune systems on some idle airplane afternoon, flying from somewhere she had friends to somewhere she had work. Remembering that, and being here.
She could take shelter in a body tonight. She’d done it before.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am sad. You’re right. And you’re great. And any other day, I would, but—it’s been a long, long time. I don’t even know how long. I’m so far from home, and I don’t know what this would be. I don’t know who you are. I’d like to learn—I really would. But I can’t do this now.”
Teeth trapped Xiara’s lip, and she looked away, and for a heartbeat even the back of her neck seemed disappointed. But it passed, and she turned back, eyes level. “Can I sit with you awhile, at least?”
“Yes,” Viv said. “Please.” She sat down harder than she meant, and sprawled back as if to carve out snow for angels. Xiara settled beside her, and—“May I?” “Yes.”—rested her neck on Viv’s arm. “I can’t imagine growing up with a sky like this,” Viv said. “All these stars. Where I used to live, there was so much light it smeared the sky after dark. The first time my parents took me camping, I thought there was something wrong with the sky.”
“Camping?”
“In tents, you know. Away from the city.” So far as she had seen, there was no away from Orn, city of starships. “In the woods, I mean.”
“You grew up in a city,” Xiara said, “one so vast you had no sky. And yet you do not know how to fly your own ship.”
“It was…” She did not know how to say what it was. “Where I come from, we don’t know about much of this.” Because maybe it hasn’t happened yet. “The Empress took me from there. When Hong found me I didn’t know about the ’faith, the Pride, the Bleed, or Orn. What about you? How do you know about all that stuff?”
“Travelers come. Pilgrims mostly, seeking Orn of old. Gods bargain for sips from the manufactory, to grant them power. The Chief prays to a magic mirror, and hears voices from beyond. We tell stories from the old days. We learn what we need.”
“Can you really fly?”
They were taught, Xiara told her, lying still across her arm, watching stars: taught by songs and old books, by whispers from the Cloud, by their mothers’ memories and their fathers’, by the blood which spoke to some of them in time. (Viv almost argued with that, there was no such thing as blood memory—but why not, here? If you could upload consciousness to the Cloud, why not pass memories? Bodily fluids were not so bad a vector. But she was distracting herself—from so much, including the warmth by her side.) Xiara had dreamt of flight every night she could remember.
“So you’re asking me to trust a pilot who learned to fly from ghosts.”
“Better that, than not to fly at all.”
“Do you really want to go with us? Leave your clan? Your family?”
“I have had clan and family all my life,” Xiara said. “They will not vanish if I leave. I will take them with me to the sky, and they will grow with me as I travel.” She hesitated, looked toward her—Viv mirrored the motion, saw a glint in her eyes just as she looked away. “Hong’s story did not mention your friend. The pilot.” She did not say: the one who almost killed me. “She was not a monk.”
“She was … a prisoner, too.”
“From your world?”
“No. But we were similar.” Viv remembered Zanj’s touch on the scar. The world wheeled beneath her, back, always back, her body strapped to spokes and spinning. She should keep her secrets. She should not trust. That was how she’d lived back home, and look where it had gotten her. “Have you ever heard the name Zanj?”
Xiara laughed, and in that laugh Viv thought, well, good, Hong was making it up, I haven’t done anything I’ll regret, I can just lie here and be happy and Xiara can laugh forever by my side. But no, she had to slow, and stop, and speak. “You must be from a strange and backward world indeed, to ask that question.”
Oh. “Someone important?”
“A fairy-tale monster. A star-stealer. Zanj fought the Empress; Zanj led an army of gods. Zanj outwarred the Diamond Fleet, and stole the Saint’s Cascade and the Cup of the Sun. Zanj gathered the Suicide Queens. She swiped the Fallen Star from a dragon’s forge—watch or she’ll come for you, too! Zanj Girlthief.” She poked Viv hard in the ribs. Viv yelped, sat up straight, rubbing her side; Xiara’s head slipped off her arm and thunked against the wood, and she was still laughing. Viv’s head swam from the vertigo of sudden movement. “Not to know Zanj! They must know nothing where you’re from.”
“Maybe not.”
“Come on.” She patted the platform beside her. “Lie back.”
“I’m drunk,” Viv said. “And it’s been a long, hard day. I really should sleep.” It would have been a bad cover if it weren’t true. Xiara lay still; the world revolved.
She rose, smooth, and slid herself under Viv’s arm. “You helped me all this way,” she said. “Let me help you a little further.”
It all blurred after that—the downward path, the throne grove where Hong and the wrestlers tossed one another about, drunken, giddy, down into the tunnels of an ancient bunker, concrete riven and arched with roots, to a small room with a bed and a lamp. Xiara helped stretch Viv on the bed, and touched her cheek. “I could stay.”
“Later,” she said. “I need sleep now.”
She was not imagining reluctance on Xiara’s face as she left. Felt good about that. Nice. Better than she felt about the dreams that followed: dreams of green, of burnt skin, of a voice too close, too loud. She was used, by now, to screaming. But these dreams were not her usual nightmares, because in these dreams her torture built and built until she could bear no more and still it grew, until all at once it stopped, and the Empress drew back, and there Viv saw above her, battling, bloody, fierce and deadly and doomed but oh so free: Zanj.