SWOLLEN, CORUSCATING PINK, the dome-field beckoned. Xiara called it a fortress, built by Grayteeth to guard the manufactory he stole. It peeked out from behind walls, floated above broken towers, but without Xiara’s guidance Viv would have lost herself trying to reach it in this labyrinth of mossy ruins and splintered glass.
They marched from the Ornclan camp in an eggshell silence—sturdy in some directions, fragile in others, and all around smooth.
That silence had congealed around them in the hours since Zanj agreed to go, since the Chief ordered the Ornclan to bring waterskins and pemmican for the journey. While warriors scurried, Xiara paced, glaring at her fellows among the Ornclan. Guards watched Zanj warily, spears to hand, rifles never quite raised but never quite stowed either. A kinder person would have acted wary, or at least respectful, of the armed and anxious warriors, but Zanj sauntered past them to the banquet table, poured herself a glass of wine, and drank. She didn’t need the drink—she wasn’t thirsty and Viv doubted she could get drunk without wanting to. She just wanted to show them she could do whatever she wanted in their hall, without their permission, and lick her lips when she was done.
The packs came, and they marched out. When they left the grove behind and cleared the palisade, Xiara waved to Viv, unslung her pack, and drew out—“Boots!” Ragged leather, patched and repaired, clunky as hell, more beautiful than diamonds.
“I think you’re about my size.”
A bit loose but only just, with socks of some sort of clingy gray silk. Viv’s feet, bruised, dusty, scraped but miraculously intact considering, melted into fur lining. Viv felt a moment’s frission, a how-the-great-have-fallen sort of thing, at how good it felt to wear shoes again—but for the most part, she just liked the boots. She liked, too, that Xiara had thought to bring them.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about anything else right now. The Ornclan had drugged her, chained her, sold her to the Pride for dissection, and here she was trying to solve their problems. But, hell, she couldn’t just let Zanj kill anyone she didn’t like. Soon there’d be no one left. Including Viv.
For that matter, how did she feel about Xiara? The Ornchief’s daughter hadn’t warned them, but at least she tried to save them. Maybe Viv would have noticed the trap herself if she hadn’t been so damn thirsty for the woman under the armor. That was wrong, too—why did Viv feel quite so fourteen again, aching for someone to bite into? Maybe it all came down to control. She still didn’t know the rules of this world, hell, this galaxy. But she did know just what she’d do if she lay beside Xiara on a bed.
Hong took point beside Xiara, clubs out, steps dancer-light, head up, eyes alert, a shorebird seeking fish in surf. If his injuries troubled him, or Xiara’s her, they didn’t let on. Viv’s shoulder still ached where the Ornclan guards had wrenched it, holding her down. The scar on her wrist burned, too, for some reason.
Zanj walked beside her, hands in pockets, glancing idly from cloud to cloud. After a half hour Zanj began to whistle. Hong looked back when she started, shocked, and Zanj stopped—until he looked away. Zanj had not spoken to Viv since her return, walked with her now investigating broken rooftops, odd flowers, kicking gravel, silent—yet by her side. Offering the first move to Viv.
“So,” Viv asked, “did you have a good vacation?”
Viv’s first moves tended to fall on the brusque-to-vicious spectrum.
Zanj replied: “Don’t think this means I’m not still mad at you.”
“You know, it turns out, it was a good thing I stopped you. Xiara wasn’t just a bandit. She’s a princess. Or prince. Something like that.”
“Good kisser?”
She most certainly did not flush. “I didn’t—”
“Too soon, then. She’s interested, in case you couldn’t tell.”
“My point is, you shouldn’t just kill people for no reason.”
“How nice. So you expect me to forgive you?”
“I won’t apologize for saving her life.” That part was easy. The harder was forcing herself to say: “I am sorry I hurt you.”
Zanj slid her toe under a rock, kicked it up, caught it between thumb and forefinger. She inspected the rock with a jeweler’s squint. “I’ll kill you for that.” Her voice held all the emotion of a teacher suggesting a student would find her questions answered in the syllabus. “After you let me go, I guess.”
“You’re not giving me good incentives there” was probably the wrong response. “Why did you come back?”
No answer save trudging footsteps.
“If we’re going to travel together,” Viv tried again, “we need ground rules. One of mine is, don’t just kill people for no reason.”
“Define people.”
Good point. She didn’t have a clear answer.
“You don’t know this world at all, Los Angeles.” Zanj scraped a bit of dirt off her rock. “I’m not asking you to let me go. But I need you to understand: it’s hard out here for a pirate. The Ornclan would have given us fuel by the time I was done with them. They hurt you. They don’t deserve your mercy just because you happen to have a crush on the Chief’s daughter.”
Viv raised a finger to her lips and glanced meaningfully toward Xiara, who, thank god, had shifted ahead to scout a path through a vine-draped fallen skyscraper. Zanj made a great show of ignoring Viv’s signs. She tossed her rock in the air, caught it in her mouth, and chewed.
“Fine,” Zanj said around mouthfuls of dust. “I’ll play along. No killing. But I wonder how long that rule will last, once you understand what we’re up against.” Xiara reappeared at the mouth of the ruin and waved them on, eager: pink light behind her, their destination. “Which you will!” Zanj grinned, and broke into a jog just fast enough that Viv had to run to keep up.
She stopped beyond the vines, before the dome.
It loomed, obscene, so much larger than it had seemed over rooftops: smooth as geometry and mottle-colored, humming. It bathed them in pink light.
Viv reached for it, and the darker pink mottling gathered, concentrated beneath her hand. She thought the hum shifted pitch. “Do we just walk through?”
Zanj shrugged. “I still say we go back, kill them, and take their stuff.”
“Hey,” Xiara said. “That’s my family.”
“Everyone has a family,” Zanj replied. “If that were a good counterargument, I’d never kill anyone.”
“Ground rules.” Viv moved her finger in a circle above the dome’s pink skin. The darkness followed, like fish massing beneath food.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous this thing is?” Zanj cocked her head toward the dome.
If Viv moved her finger fast enough, close to the dome, she could make a sort of smiley face in black. The smile faded into a bruise. “Sounds like a gray goo sort of deal. Eats everything, turns it into more of itself.”
“They call themselves Grayframe, singular Gray. Grayframe devour everything you are, and in that devouring read you into themselves, run permutations by the millions. They will know and use your echoes in their imagination forever. Through there, you will see horrors beyond your wildest nightmares.”
“So, basically, I was right?” Was she scared? Sure. But she’d had it with the whole mysterium tremendum et fascinans routine, the religious awe, the wonder. She might not know much about this place, but she was done playing the rube, gawping at each new vista. Plus, Xiara looked full of fear and trembling enough for both of them, and Viv was pretty sure Zanj was using this schtick at least as much to scare her as to warn Viv. So Viv stood tall, and saw Xiara brighten.
Hong looked impressed, too, respectful but familiar. She remembered, back in her churchgoing days, how Father Cho held the grape juice and spoke the words he thought sacred. “Grayframe serve the Empress,” Hong said. “This one must have displeased Her. They often do, and seldom survive. Down thousands of years, we’ve found their corpses scattered through space; we study them, store their remains in the ’fleet. I have never seen one alive and whole before. It must have been terrible indeed, to survive Her displeasure.”
“Great!” Viv said quickly, to cover Xiara’s gasp. “No sweat. You know how these things work, and Zanj is super deadly, and it can’t mess with me using the Cloud since I don’t have a soul. So Xiara stays out here, and we go in and take him apart. Right?”
Zanj stretched her arms over her head, popped her shoulders, her neck, her knuckles. She glared at the wall. Mottled pinks shaped themselves into her shadow. “I have won every battle I ever fought, save one,” she said. “But Grayframe are too dangerous for war. We might die here.”
“You never said why you came back.”
Zanj bared teeth—and this time the grin was real. “I missed the company.”
Without cue, and as one, they stepped forward. The dome rippled over their skin, cool as a kiss, and when Viv opened her eyes she stood in paradise.