NONE OF VIV’S fitful dreams prepared her for seeing Magda Lopez grown and married, reading a romance novel in line for the Clover food truck on Boston Common.
Thin rays of silver graced Magda’s dark hair. There was more of her than there had been in school, which was healthy considering that back in school she’d run ten miles every morning before eight, and she wore a thin gold ring these days. But she thumbed her place in her book just like she used to—she hated folding pages but could never keep track of a proper bookmark—and when she looked up to search the Common’s crowds her eyes were just the same, breathtakingly brown and kind.
They had been freshman-year roommates, one of the few pairs that stuck. They’d seemed destined for disaster at first, Magda a lean coltish track star from Texas, Viv faking sophistication far too well thanks to her parents’ coaching and her own relief to be a continent away from them at last.
Magda had left a boyfriend behind. For the first week she spent an hour on the phone with him each night, and on Thursday of the second week Viv came home tired from studying and tipsy from wine after studying to find Magda lying still and staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes glittered open and her breath was deep and forced. Viv climbed into her own bed, rolled onto her side, and turned out the light. As the dark closed in Magda let herself cry again. Viv listened, and wondered what she was supposed to do, and thought of Merlin in The Once and Future King, and felt like a foolish girl a long way from home.
When Magda trailed off but had not yet gone to sleep Viv sat up in her pajamas and said, “Hey” quietly. You didn’t throw a life preserver at the person drowning, but next to them. And Magda drew a ragged breath and said, “Hey” back.
Viv took a bottle of wine from underneath her bed, unscrewed the top, poured the wine into paper cups, and asked, “Do you know how to pick a lock?”
“No.” But she was sitting up at least, with a weak smile behind the thicket of her hair.
“Do you want to learn?”
She had, and then she’d played Viv a song from Into the Woods, and Viv slept through her quiz the next day but didn’t care.
That was how it started.
And now, after years and countless miles of road, Viv held her breath as Magda searched the Common crowd for her, and wanted more than anything to be seen, for Magda’s eyes to widen and for her to wave and call Viv’s name across the grass, even though the microphones in the trees and the robot dogs on patrol would hear her. Viv needed Magda that much, and she had not let herself know until this moment. When Magda paused on her, considered her face, then looked away without a blink of recognition, Viv thought, Good, the disguise was working, but she felt like she’d taken a wrong step on false ground and fallen through.
Hands clenched around her tourist map, she made her way to Magda.
Viv had never met her old friend’s kid; Victor was born right before the Collapse, when Viv’s life turned the bad kind of interesting, so he’d be two now. She wouldn’t meet him on this visit. Magda wouldn’t take her home, too dangerous. Helping Viv even this much risked dragging in her husband, and her son. But Magda had come, just like she’d promised in the coded message she’d sent six months ago after Viv looped her in on the plan.
She couldn’t turn Viv down.
Viv had never deserved her friends.
Of all the mean and lousy things the weasels on Viv’s heels had forced her to do, by far the hardest was to tap Magda on the shoulder, watch her turn, watch her eyes light up when she saw past makeup and earrings and cap—to do all that, and not embrace her.
She wanted more than to hug her friend. She wanted, though she’d never admit it, to be hugged herself, held and anchored so the wind could never blow her away, even if her fortunes, her fame, the Mountain View house, her companies, had all been torn from her, leaving her a runaway with a rucksack, a painted face, absurd earrings. A woman with fake papers in a country that didn’t used to care so much about that sort of thing.
She wanted to be human in her old friend’s arms.
But to be human was to be weak, and she couldn’t allow that now, here, as robot dogs wandered past sniffing the Common for bombs.
She shoved her map between them, open, and her grip was so tight she ripped it at the corner. “Excuse me.” Her voice shook. “I’m sorry, I’m lost. I’m trying to get to Faneuil Hall?” She mispronounced it like a tourist, and tried to look Magda in the eye but had to look away again fast, as if she’d stared into the sun. “Where am I?”
“Right here.” Magda kept her voice almost casual. She tried to take the map and for a second Viv did not let it go and they were touching through the tense paper. Viv forced her fingers to part. “Here, see, you just go up this road—it’s not straight, exactly, nothing really is here—” Another laugh, also forced. “—until you get to a plaza with a blocky concrete building, then down these steps.” A pause. Tongue touched lip. Eyes darted up, away. “Are you here for long?”
“Just the day.” They’d arranged the code phrase in advance. I’m not being followed, as far as I know.
“If you have time—there are a few other places you should see.”
A robot dog sniffed Viv’s ankle and moved along. Magda’s breath hooked, but she did not look down. She drew a pen from behind her ear and circled the Pru, the library, other landmarks, then folded Viv’s torn map and passed it back. When Viv forced herself to thank Magda and turn away she found the map’s folds held a key, and one of the circled landmarks was not a landmark at all.
PEOPLE VIV’S AND Magda’s age still called this kind of place an Airbnb even though that site rebranded after the murders. Same sort of thing, though, a nice one-bedroom night-by-night rental in Beacon Hill with a skylight above the bed and that bright early autumn Boston blue above. Champagne chilled in the fridge, decent stuff, actual AOP, rare these days with the climate; a shopping bag on the kitchen counter held a packet of fake rose petals, scented candles, and, separately wrapped, a few pieces of leather Viv didn’t examine closely. A Happy Anniversary card. A ruse—wasn’t it? Magda’s wedding had been in summer, though Viv couldn’t remember precise dates anymore without her screens.
Magda arrived in late afternoon, and as the door shut behind her Viv found herself enveloped.
She couldn’t breathe. Some of that was the hug—Magda had been working out—but wetness welled in her eyes and nose and a hot fist caught her windpipe. She held her like that long-gone life preserver. Oh, god, she was losing it. And if she lost it here, if all the disintegration came over her at once, she’d never pull herself back together for tonight.
“Viv.” Magda kept repeating her name, a murmur like waves washing the North Carolina beach where Viv had lain exhausted after her swim ashore, sprawled in flotsam beside the sack that held her braid and the remnants of her life. In a way Magda’s voice was that surf. In a way Viv had only now made landfall. “I’ve been so worried, Viv, they said maybe suicide”—good, she’d hoped for that—“and I knew you wouldn’t, I knew the plan, but, Viv, Jesus, you’re alive, I can’t believe it, and—your hair.”
Magda pulled away at that, hand on the back of Viv’s skull, and Viv grinned and wiped her own nose on her sleeve like, what, I have a cold. She turned the convulsions in her gut and lungs into something someone charitable might call a laugh, and lied, “I like it better this way.” There was so much she wanted to say about how grateful she was, about what a risk Magda was taking, but those words were too big to speak. “Thank you,” she said, and Magda’s look when she said that, her shock that Viv might feel she had to say it, almost broke Viv’s last thread of composure. But Viv had been through too much to take friendship or faith for granted.
For a while neither of them moved. They didn’t mention the stain Viv’s tears left on Magda’s shirt.
“Oh! That reminds me.” Though Viv hadn’t said anything. Magda reached into her purse and removed a small package wrapped in striped paper with a red bow. “It’s not much, but happy birthday.”
Viv blinked down at the package, then up at Magda, then down again. “Magda—I’m not—I can’t—” She didn’t trust herself to finish the sentence.
“I know, you’re traveling.” She didn’t say on the run. “So it’s light. Go on, open it.”
She slipped a thumb under the seam and popped the tape, and there inside was a battered old black paperback with a seated Buddha ringed in rainbows on the cover. A woman stood behind him, glowing, with butterfly wings. Viv’s laugh caught. “You’ve sent me this book, what, five times?”
“Seven. Did you ever read it?”
She shrugged, feeling only a little guilty. She hadn’t had much time for reading in a while.
“I thought maybe you’d have time now.” She was trying to keep her voice light. “I’ve never been a fugitive, but I hear there’s a lot of riding in boxcars. And trains are slow. And before you say anything, I bought this in a used book store about ten years ago, cash. So it’s probably safe.”
If Viv had been a better person she would have been able to say out loud all the things she was still thinking, like I love you, and I should have stayed, I never should have gone off and made myself big, I should have stayed here with you and the others and built small and had dumb little fights and remembered everyone’s anniversaries. But she didn’t believe that last bit really, no matter how she felt it, so she hugged her again instead, less desperate now but more firm. “I thought about you all the way here.” It wasn’t true but it approached truth sideways. She couldn’t bear to think about her. “I missed you.”
“Of course you did. I bet all the rich jerks you invited to your birthday got you, what, stock certificates or something? Come on, let’s have wine.”
“God, yes.”
Magda poured this time, and the cups weren’t paper.
Viv asked about Victor, about work, about whether she still ran and what she’d been up to in the six months since it got too dangerous for them to talk, and did not mention what she’d come to do, or how she felt. Magda had always understood Viv, even at school when there was barely any Viv to know yet, just a passel of immature reflexes drawn from her parents, her grandma’s cultural revolution horror stories, and the science-fiction section of the public library. Viv needed to be strong. So it was Magda, blessed Magda, who took the silence that opened between them after the first glass of wine and said: “It’s all ready. Just like you asked.”
That night, she would break into Ogham.
MAGDA DIDN’T WORK for Ogham—she never had, technically; all the code she’d written for them had been part of a subcontractor consultant sort of gig, and she was never listed as an employee, so unless the feds did the kind of legwork nobody really remembered how to do these days except the Russians and Israelis, no one would be waiting for Viv, and no one would trace her intrusion back to Mags.
Ogham wasn’t Ogham anymore, after three acquisitions, an inversion, and two name changes, but the service was more or less the same—like a police precinct surviving each new junta that rolled through town. They cached the Internet, and served it to everybody.
Here was the problem: everyone wants everything instantly, but light only goes so fast. Easy solution: you move the Internet—most of it—closer. In a place like Boston, full of universities and hospitals and biotech and normal tech—including several of Viv’s own once and future companies—Ogham served machines with more processing power than the entire planet had back in the benighted oughts. Probably enough for what Viv had in mind.
Which was war.
Not the nuclear sort, at first. In a way, her enemies had betrayed themselves by coming for her now, when they’d let her other offenses slide. She wouldn’t have known she’d found a real threat otherwise.
When Lucy asked what she was doing in all those hours blocked out on the calendar for “Research,” Viv had said machine learning stuff, which was almost true. Viv’s project—the root of all this trouble—this idea she’d been piecing together in secret, sideways, while she saw what happened to the real visionaries in this space, so many surprise bankruptcies and leveraged buyouts and “market fluctuations,” not to mention the cancers and the deaths in the family and that one particularly grisly murder-suicide, this idea that led to the audits and “discrepancies” and talk show warnings that made her cut and run because, let’s face it, a lot of those “real visionaries” had been white boys and if that’s what the suits did to them, she didn’t want to find out what they’d do to her—Viv’s project was machine learning stuff like the Death Star was laser pointer stuff.
She had come within a hair’s breadth of a real self-optimizer: a smart program that could make itself smarter, without limit. Machine uplift, changing the destiny of the human race forever.
But what concerned Viv most, for now, were the ancillary benefits.
The most obvious was that, in a world run by machines, she’d own the machines. Hello, robot army. All those cameras, all that surveillance tech, all the levers of censorship and control—her cameras now, her tech, her censors, her control. She could walk out of any prison and into any vault. Which sounded fun, but that was thinking small. The entire global financial system depended on the strength of its encryption. A truly strong, self-improving machine intelligence could tear through crypto. Simply revealing what she’d done, let alone doing anything with it, would shatter markets. She’d have a gun pointed at the head of the world.
And of course, she’d control the nukes.
The fuckers would crawl. Or she’d crush them.
She’d enjoy that.
Oh, and once that was done she’d fix the planet. Geoengineering to put the climate back where it used to be. New math would pave the way for microtailored cancer treatments. Give a system like that the silicon and iron it needed to run, and it would solve global problems by the shovelful. A silver bullet. Bang.
Next stop, the stars.
Once she built the system, she could talk to it through a wristwatch—but first she had to make a trillion-node distributed protosentient mind. The easiest way to do that would be to seed a tiny bit of code on some appreciable fraction of all the computers in the world. To do that, she needed a zero day exploit or five—easy, if you had money like hers—and a distribution system—hard, with her enemies watching.
So she’d left, and gone underground.
There weren’t many places where you could reach as much of the Internet as Viv needed without bouncing off some censor gate. If Viv was really lucky, the government still thought she was dead. If she was less lucky but still generally on the ups, they’d expect her to go for the transatlantic cable anchor in New York—it would be ideal, if she had some way to slip past the DHS security and, worse, the Google security. Ever since New York became one of those euphemistically named High Watchfulness Zones, you couldn’t hide from its cameras anymore. Ogham was almost as good, and safer.
In the Amazon rain forest there lived a parasitic fungus called the Cordyceps, which grew inside a particular species of ant. The Cordyceps hijacked its host’s tiny ant brain and forced it to climb to a high place inside the colony, where the fungus bloomed through the back of the host’s head, killing it and raining infectious spores on the colony below.
Viv would be the Cordyceps, and Ogham would be her ant.
Bad analogy. It made this whole thing sound sinister. Viv wasn’t a mad scientist. She just wanted to crush her enemies, and save the world.
And after a few more hours on the couch with Magda talking about anything else, drinking in stories about Victor, his first word (book, Magda was so proud), teething and attendant lack of sleep, and oh did Magda mention they got a dog, this chill waggly pibble so strong she doesn’t even notice when Vic tries to ride her—after an afternoon’s safety, Viv felt almost ready.
SO DID MAGDA. That was the problem.
“No.” Viv moved away from her on the couch, hands out. “You’re not coming with me.”
“Once you’re in, you just let me in through the side door.”
“There will be cameras.”
“You’re already dealing with the cameras. And the rest of the security.”
“I can’t let anything happen to you.” After saying this most naked truth, Viv felt a burning sensation all over her skin and inside, only it wasn’t shame. Pride.
“Then don’t.” As if Viv had that kind of power. “Viv, I won’t let you do this alone.”
“It’s dangerous.”
She gripped Viv’s arms and met her eyes, level, firm. “It was dangerous when you sent me your first letter. I answered because you needed my help. Do you think I’d stop halfway? You need someone to watch your back. There’s no way you’re talking me out of this.”
“Give me the key card, Mags.”
“No.” Her voice was flat, her gaze sharp, her body rigid and earnest, and Viv fell silent before the fierceness of her. “Not until you agree: I’m coming with you. No tricks.”
And Viv, after all her careful preparation, was caught.
THAT NIGHT, AS she approached the building in shadow and streetlight, she thought about Victor, whose first word was book, and wondered what kind of monster she was to let Magda come.
She had been alone. She didn’t want to be alone again. And Magda wanted—
No. Viv could have lied, made herself out to be stronger, more controlled, less afraid. She could have turned Magda away, refused to let her come, faked an argument. It would have hurt, but she had hurt herself enough over the last few days—she was used to the prospect.
Perhaps there was some brutal subconscious calculus at work. The more incriminated Magda was, the less risk she’d sell Viv out under pressure. But that wasn’t the whole story either. She wanted Magda there. She’d come so far alone.
Had Viv arranged all this? Not consciously. Consciously, she thought this was a horrible idea.
Did that matter?
Could your subconscious be evil?
She considered ditching her, leaving Magda out in the cold. But she had promised.
Focus on the job.
If there had been a better option than a physical break-in, Viv would have found it back in Mountain View. The digital security here was top notch, built to resist advanced persistent threats, which people who weren’t security geeks tended to call governments. The physical security wasn’t a pushover either, but it came from a company that licensed tech from companies owned, through a double handful of sock puppets, by Vivian Liao.
Not that she built back doors into clients’ systems. That would be very wrong. No, she just kept plans to their systems around in case she ever needed to analyze her way through them. To improve them. For example.
Magda’s key card opened the door. Viv slipped in. The lights here were too bright, the halls too soft and silent. She breathed deep, stepped into the light and the security cameras’ field of view, and trusted to her makeup.
She’d spent weeks before she left, and three hours this afternoon, testing this idea, making sure she could pull it off with Magda’s over-the-counter makeup printer. Her face looked like a melted checkerboard, black and white swirled and spiraling. Back in high school the game had been to fool face recognition on her friends’ phones by painting her face weird patterns. She’d just taken that idea one step further.
The cameras asked the security system whether she was on the master list of People Who Were Supposed to Be Here. The security system tried to check—which meant reading Viv’s face. But where were her eyes under that makeup? What was her mouth? The system used math to break the black-and-white grid down to meaning, but since Viv knew the math it would use, she could control the meaning it would find. So when the security system read her face, it interpreted the melted checkerboard into a few dense lines of code, and executed them.
That was the plan. In ten seconds she’d know if it worked. She tried not to hold her breath. If she’d screwed up somehow, she’d need all the air she could draw for running. Ten seconds. She pressed her palms against her jeans and tried not to think about failure. At least if she slipped up here, Magda would still be safe.
Ten seconds. Six heartbeats. Well. Under these conditions, maybe more like twelve heartbeats. Or eighteen.
The hallway lights flickered three times, and she gasped with relief—and for air. That was it. For the next hour, the security system belonged to her.
So don’t waste time, Viv. Go.
Through the front hall, left, downstairs to the side door. Footsteps froze Viv solid, but it wasn’t a guard, just some dork trudging past with a monitor under his arm. He vanished around a corner, taking with him a few months of Viv’s life.
When Viv reached the side door she knocked shave-and-a-haircut against it, and the sensors heard her and popped the lock. Magda waited outside. She waved with her fingers, smiled parade broad, and Viv, still unsure, still scared, couldn’t help smiling back. She was enjoying this too much. At all was too much.
“You look ridiculous. I love it.”
Viv raised a finger to her lips. Magda placed one beside her nose like she was in The Sting. Viv rolled her eyes, nerd, but it felt so good to see her that Viv couldn’t sell the tease.
Viv led the way. Down and down, and then—the server farm.
It was cold here. Viv breathed out ghosts of fog. Another knock, and they were in. Take that, retina scanner.
Servers stood in racks. The room was silent save for fans and the air conditioner’s hum. Viv’s first step tested the tile floor as if it might crumble underfoot. The tiles gave slightly into the storage space below, but did not rattle. Magda followed her, steps light.
This was a new experience. Nerves expected. Viv had been a lot of things in a career newspapers sometimes called meteoric, which Viv liked because it made her think of dinosaurs. Now she was a thief. Stealing her life back. Stealing the future.
Magda watched. There was a console at the far end of the racks, some ancient hunk of desktop wired into the iron. Viv crouched beside it and drew her kit from her shoulder bag: AR glasses were more portable than a screen, but nothing beat a keyboard for input. She still felt pissed at Bill Gibson for promising her transcranial electrodes and failing to deliver. Also from her pack: a single-board computer the size of an old USB key, which contained the software she needed for the job, and the Ziploc bag that held her braid.
For luck, she told herself.
She plugged her computer key into the console. The glasses dazzled Viv’s eyes and made her sick when she swiped them on. She’d logged who knew how many thousands of hours in glasses by this point, but after two weeks off, your eyes forgot.
Her fingers remembered keys just fine, though.
Usually Viv did this sort of thing to music, but she had no player here, no earbuds, no phone. No matter. Between the fans, her heart, the clatter of the keys, she made her own soundtrack. She shivered from the cold, and anticipation. After two weeks away, her wrists didn’t even hurt when she typed.
This part never looked as dramatic as movies made it seem. The command prompt was a simple bracket, and the cursor hadn’t stopped blinking since 1983 or so. In arcane tongues, she asked some of the most powerful computers in the world to do her a favor.
Some of the most powerful computers in the world said yes.
There wouldn’t even be a progress bar if Viv hadn’t coded one herself. It crept up one percentage point at a time. Viv was changing the planet with less bandwidth (for now) than some kid in Allston needed to stream his latest Disney princess fix.
A red warning light burned in the top left corner of her field of view.
“Oh,” Viv said.
“Oh?” Magda did not sound happy about the prospect of an “Oh.”
“Don’t worry about it, but … we’re being tracked.”
“We?” and then: “Tracked?”
It’s fine, Viv thought, it’s fine, this is the kind of thing that’s fine. A red timer ticked down as layers of her anti-tracking onion peeled away. “They’re too slow!” She laughed. It felt good to be good. It would be close, half a minute maybe, but they wouldn’t catch her before the script did its work. Thirty whole seconds to spare. Numbers don’t lie.
“You’re sure?” And in Magda’s voice Viv heard the first sign her friend might finally understand that she should not be here. Magda was remembering her son, remembering that she was not pranking university security anymore, and that was a bad idea even way back then.
Viv could be honest. She was not one hundred percent positive. Systems made mistakes. Even her systems. But the progress bar was at ninety, ninety-two, and even if it got stuck for a second, like it did just then, they’d have plenty of time to escape.
The ground shook.
Viv fell back, sat down hard. The keyboard clattered to the floor, and she lunged to still it with one hand, overcome with vertigo and fear. That must have been an earthquake—even in Boston. She recognized the gut-level uncertainty, a hiccup, a skip. But an earthquake strong enough to knock Viv on her butt should have rattled the servers in their racks and set the racks themselves swaying. Instead Magda was glaring at Viv like she, Viv, had just gone mad. “Did you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
Not a quake, then; the world had gone weird but not quite quakes-in-Boston weird. Was that how fainting felt? Viv couldn’t afford weakness now, even if she had pushed herself hard all the way from Saint Kitts up the coast. She needed more coffee, more water, more sleep, maybe a square meal. She’d have time after this. Maybe give herself a day or two in the Airbnb before she hit the road again. As soon as this was done.
She glanced at the progress bar.
It was stuck.
Ninety-six. Ninety-six. Ninety-six.
And still the red trace counter counted down.
Magda looked at Viv, and Viv saw her fear, all this suddenly real. But that last four percent, that was Viv’s life, her salvation, everything for which she had fought, died (at least, they thought so), and run. Shadowy motherfuckers in suits were tearing down her life to stop that four percent.
But Magda wouldn’t be here if not for Viv. The fake rose petals. That bottle of real champagne.
Viv had no idea what the script, ninety-six percent executed, would do—if anything. She had no idea what she would do, if she left it ninety-six percent executed and ran with Magda into the night. This chance would not come again.
There were other data centers. Other options. The New York deathtrap, for example. But when they found what she’d tried to do here, they’d be on their guard.
Ninety-six. Still. And the red counter neared zero.
She swiped the glasses off, pulled the computer key. Jesus. She was doing this. She’d done it already. The earth shook again, or was that her? All the gear, in the bag. She ran to Magda, grabbed her hand—“What are you doing?” “Getting us out of here.”—in the server racks, in thousands, hundreds of thousands of computers around Boston and the world, her ninety-six-percent-done script did whatever it could do—and there was no time to explain, she was dragging Magda to the door, glancing back—
She’d forgotten the braid.
No time. But (she reasoned, sprinting back down the hall) if they found her braid they’d know she was here, and if they knew that—
She snagged the braid, left sneaker skids on tile as she turned back to the door.
And in those seconds, everything had changed.
A glowing woman stood in the space between the server racks.
Once Viv saw her, it took her a while to notice anything else.
The woman was a cutout of light without shadow or contour. Viv thought the woman was two-dimensional at first, but when she rose from her crouch—Viv knelt before no one—the shape changed in a way that suggested three dimensions, or more. Vantablack statues looked like this in person. Fuligin, but green. The light that came off her throbbed.
The woman wore a crown and a robe and none of this made any sense, but that didn’t matter, because this weird glowing figure had her hand on Magda’s shoulder, and the green light trickled from her shadowless luminescent fingers like sap, and Magda was stuck inside it with her mouth half open, reaching out, afraid.
The air conditioner hum had stopped.
Viv thought of cats in boxes. Alive and dead at once.
“After all this time,” the woman said, “I’d hoped for something more.”
Her voice was not loud. Just close.
Viv wheeled, but the woman was not behind her. Wheeled back, and she was standing so near that her face filled Viv’s field of vision. Somehow she’d closed the twenty feet between them in a second. They’d be eye to eye if the green woman had eyes, but what she had instead was a hint of a mouth, the only feature in that perfect face, a pure black line.
Viv flailed her pack around like a mace. It passed through the woman as if through fog, but when the woman grabbed Viv’s wrist, the wrist stayed grabbed. The green woman’s strength was not a thing of muscle but a fact, like fear, and like fear it burned. Viv’s flesh began to smoke.
The black mouth opened, and something glittered inside it, but the green woman’s words did not pass through air. They ignored Viv’s ears entirely and flipped switches inside her brain instead. The voice was rich as velvet cake and cello deep, the calm, inhuman warmth voices had when spoken softly with perfect diction close to a good microphone. “Don’t fight me,” she said. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”
Viv’s skin blistered. She growled, shoved all her weight against this woman, and fell through her to the floor. Her wrist burned like nothing she had ever felt, but she was free. She came up off the floor like the world’s worst sprinter, staggered, and ran straight into Magda—but bounced off her like she might have bounced off a concrete pillar. Viv reeled. When she looked up, the green woman stood over her again. She had not crossed the intervening space. She just moved, from there to here.
Viv couldn’t flex her left hand. Her fingers were wet, but she only knew this because they slipped on the floor, leaving bloody tracks.
“Disappointing.” The green woman knelt. This close, her raiment—fuck no, Viv refused that word, refused all the majesty of her—her clothes rustled, overdubbed, too rich, like the green woman’s voice. This close, Viv felt the heat of her. This close, her light had shifting patterns, shadows, patches like the surface of the sun.
Viv was going to die.
She had suspected, accepted this might be the case when she tried to run. She had just imagined the set dressing differently. A basement, or a room in an abandoned hotel. Wires. Pliers. She’d seen beds in a schoolhouse in Phnom Penh, where they tortured people for the crime of wearing glasses.
But whatever this green woman was, whoever she was, she was just another thing like that, another form of a fear Viv was ready for. So when the woman pressed her hand to Viv’s shirtfront and the cloth smoldered, Viv tried to keep herself together. Learn what you can. Escape if you can. “Who sent you?”
“No one,” that voice replied. “I don’t enjoy this, you know. But I must learn.” She wasn’t smiling. The set of that slit mouth made her look annoyed. Viv’s burning shirt stank of knives and fear-sweat. “We are being interrupted. I would have liked more time.”
The green woman hadn’t glanced at Magda once. If her control slipped, maybe Magda could get away. Viv’s shirt burned to ash, left her chest bare. The green woman’s fingers curled. Her sharp nails glistened.
Maybe, Viv thought, desperate, grasping at shreds of logic, maybe the green woman can’t be both here and not at once.
So when the woman’s hand plunged into Viv’s chest and cracked her ribs, Viv shoved her own body up, and slammed her forehead into the crevasse of that open mouth. Hard teeth printed Viv’s skin, and she felt a bone break near her eye, but none of that mattered. There was a hand around her heart. The green woman roared, and her mouth was large, and Viv understood its glitter now. There were stars in the green woman’s mouth between her diamond teeth, and somewhere a siren wailed, and the green woman cursed, and Magda screamed. Good. If Magda could scream, maybe she could run. Maybe she could escape. Maybe Viv had saved her after all, from herself.
She felt another earthquake that wasn’t one. The green woman gripped her heart, and lifted.
The world snapped, and so did Vivian Liao.