MANY-MOUTHED, GRAY AND bloated, sharp-toothed and ten-handed, the monster curled atop a platform of pearlescent metal marked with glowing circuitry. A fountain of light and heat gushed from the center of the dais into the large vertical mouth in the center of the monster’s chest. (Were those ribs or teeth that pierced the red flesh of his torso gums?) He swallowed in huge wet spasms and dregs of matter dribbled gray from the corner of that mouth, down the swell of his translucent belly. When his mouth gaped, Viv could see his heart beating far back in his throat. The smell alone turned Viv’s stomach: sour milk and spoiled meat and burnt sugar. Ten feet tall lying down, naked and rubbery, smeared with slime, with filth, he rolled, twitched, belched, gurgled, and fixed Zanj with six yellow eyes arranged in two ranks of three.
“Finally.” Zanj tossed aside her tree trunk as if it weighed no more than a broom, and marched into the clearing. Her head was raised, her shoulders broad, her movements fluid, lively, all anger and no scorn. Viv, watching, took note: this was Zanj faced with an opponent she respected. She wasn’t scared—just ready. “Are you Gray?”
The monster did not stop swallowing—but its highest mouth, the one just above its eyes, said, “I am hunger and peace: Worldgnasher, Form-Eater. In my gullet all finds place and—” Its voice was wet and heavy bass, and the monster interrupted itself with a burp. “Purpose.” Viv had to turn away at that, and managed not to throw up. Hong, beside her, wore an expression between terror and disgust; the kid watched with wide scared fascination, unable to turn away.
“My friend here has asked me not to kill people unnecessarily,” Zanj said. “So—even though you tried to catch me in a want-loop, even though you’ve grown fat on the fantasies of these poor groundling bastards, I’ll give you a chance. Surrender the manufactory and get the hell off this dirtball. I won’t hurt you. Much.”
The kid giggled, high, hysterical, the sound lost beneath the monster’s tree-shaking guffaw. The monster reared, twenty feet tall now, slithered forward, and spread six massive arms, each tipped with three thick-nailed fingers. All its mouths spoke at once, their voices ranging from a child’s treble pipe to a rumble on the lower edge of hearing: “Bold words for a tasty morsel! I have supped on the blood of worlds, and I will clean my teeth with your bones!”
“Your teeth,” Zanj admitted, “do need cleaning. If we’re trading riddle-stories, here’s mine. I have stolen suns, and burned inside them. I, Cloud-borne, a-wander through my mother’s body. I raised the armies of Ilion and watched them shatter. I am Queen uncrowned, now crowned. I fought first and last; I am whole and I am scarred. And you should have taken my first offer, because I never give a second.”
Steam hissed from the monster’s thick hide; its eyes widened, and one of its six arms smeared gray guck from the eyes on its chest to give it a clearer view. “Zanj?”
Wind whistled through the clearing, over the shattered trees. Viv heard the battery pop inside Zanj’s skull.
Her eyes burned white, and she moved.
With a single leap, Zanj struck the monster in the stomach. Her claws sank into his thick gray hide. She stuck in midair somehow, anchored, stained by the slime on his skin, then with a surge of back and waist lifted, twisted, tossed his great bulk down to the ground. His tail lashed toward her, but she let herself fall and it whipped harmless through empty space. Zanj sprang forward, skidded under the monster’s backhand, caught its arm, wrenched that arm sideways in a loud crack of bone, and landed, only to slip in monster-muck, recover, and leap to safety. Zanj was an insect against Gray’s bulk, and she fought like one—a wasp, stinging, slipping away, zipping in to sting again. She moved too fast for Viv to see. She traced her by the trails she tore in the earth, by the claw marks in the monster’s flesh, oozing oily blackish blood. By roars.
And the roars turned to laughs as the monster began to change. More hands unfolded from its body, grappling Zanj, but she slipped away, her fur muck-slick and matted; somersaulting through the air. Pustules swelled on that thick hide, burst, and the viscous stuff they wept hardened to armor as it met the air. The monster’s bulging mass warped; the tail split, each fork now tipped with a poison-weeping stinger.
And Zanj, too, transformed.
Quicksilver angles covered her—not splitting her skin, but rotating from an unseen dimension into place. She grew larger, supple, sprouted another pair of arms; there seemed to be many of her, or else she slipped through time, her smile growing, growing as she grew, and her eyes doubled. Many rows of teeth glistened in her mouth.
Viv had wondered offhand, as Xiara and Hong told stories of Zanj’s prior exploits, how one woman no matter how strong or fast could have stolen suns and shattered fleets and stood against the Empress. She’d assumed there was some collective collapse at work: Zanj the leader emerging as a mythic figure when her exploits had in fact been team efforts, the way old Greek heroes stood, in stories, for the forces under their command, the way Viv herself stood for the work of the thousands of engineers and coders and salesfolk and marketers and support techs and factory workers she’d employed.
But Xiara and Hong had both spoken of the exploits of Zanj’s armies, and still said that she stole suns. Hard to believe of the woman Viv had rescued from High Carcereal, but easy to believe of this sharp-eyed glistening Being.
Was this silver shape a form Zanj could take on when she wanted? Or was the Zanj Viv knew the false shape—or, if not false, then partial as an anglerfish’s lure, the bright darting sprite over the immense eyes, over the mouth that gaped with teeth?
Zanj flickered blue, turned on invisible axes through the Cloud—and so too did the monster, tail stabbing through nothingness to emerge behind, above. Watching the fight, the part of Viv that never was where she was, the part that thought to save herself from feeling, recalled Modernist paintings, Duchamp, canvases that showed all angles and stages and frames of movement superimposed. Nude Wrestling a Monster, Number 2 in a series.
Viv followed the roots of that thought back to herself in the present: terrified, frozen, deer in headlights, toad staring at a snake. She stank with the tree’s slick goop, with her own fear—of the creature, of failure. But fear, also, of this beautiful terrifying battlecreature that was Zanj.
For the first time since Viv pulled her from that star, Zanj was having fun. She was not winning; or at least, not winning easily. Each time she seemed on the verge of tearing off a limb or crushing a windpipe, the monster wriggled away, reshaped itself, rejoined the battle. And Zanj laughed and changed herself in turn, became grander, stranger, less—well. She never had been human. But less recognizably herself.
When they struck the earth, great deep fissures opened, and earthquakes shook the ground. Viv kept her balance, barely.
This, for Zanj, was a kind of heaven: to fight, forever, against an enemy she never could quite kill, before whom she would never yield. Striving, always striving. And in that, more even than in her scars, Viv felt she understood her.
Hong’s voice cut through the chaos. “We have to help her!” His clubs out, he stared into the roil of claw and flesh and Cloud, over the cracked ground—brave, ready to die.
“Are you nuts?”
“The Gray’s drawing power from the manufactory.” The fountain of liquid light that rose from the platform had dwindled to a trickle of sparks. “Zanj’s batteries won’t last much longer. We have to stop the Gray’s power supply.”
“So we just run through … that?” The monster caught Zanj, threw her into the earth with bomb-blast force; dirt rained down upon them, and Viv shielded her eyes.
“We have no choice!”
And beside him the kid watched the battle, eyes wide and glassy, jaw slack, rigid with awe. His mouth twitched as the monster roared.
“Maybe we do,” Viv said, and hit the kid over the head with her stick.
Hong had a good set of lungs on him, or else the Mirrorfaith trained its initiates on vocal projection. For all the roaring and crunching and screams, his shouted “What!” came through just fine.
So, for that matter, did the thunk of the stick against the kid’s skull. As if the battle weren’t happening at all, or as if it were happening in a space removed from where they stood. The kid sprawled on the cracked ground, dazed. Viv jumped on his back, caught his neck in the crook of her arm, and ignored her own doubts. The kid bucked beneath her, stronger than he looked. She shouted to Hong: “Help me, you idiot!”
“What are you doing?” He managed to get the whole sentence out this time. Probably they’d drilled some rules into him back in the monastery about honorable combat, which didn’t include guidelines for dogpiling children. But—as muscles writhed under the kid’s skin, as his neck bulked beneath her arm, as he bucked again, broke her grip, sent her flying to land in a cloud of dirt—Hong got the picture. Not everything that looked like a child, was.
The kid hunched to his feet, breathing heavy, half his body still reed-thin, half plumped with muscle. A pale silver mix of blood and spit smeared his mouth. He wiped it with the back of his hand, and stared at it in peevish shock. “You hit me!”
Hong hit him next, with a club, in the side of his head.
“Ow!” The kid swirled around, unbalanced, metamorphosis incomplete, his thick arm clutching, but Hong had already rolled away. “What did you do that for?” He lurched toward Hong, step by heavy step. “I just wanted to make you happy.” That last word punctuated with a swing Hong ducked around and punished with a club strike that the kid, still growing, didn’t seem to notice.
“What are you?” Hong shouted.
If the situation had been a bit less life-threatening, Viv would have rolled her eyes. “He’s the Gray.”
“But that’s—” In the center of the clearing, Zanj, ten feet tall now, suplexed the monster to the soil, only to be knocked off-balance by a foot-claw, to spin through the air and land, all fierce grins and battle joy, and launch herself once more into the fight. Hong got it then. Finally. “Oh. I see. The battle is another trap.”
The kid spun from Viv to Hong and back, gaping. His musculature kept filling in, but his face was still a hungry child’s, gawping in disbelief. “A trap? I’m giving you what you want! I’m giving you all exactly what you want.”
“You fed on us,” Viv said.
“I didn’t feed on you!” The kid—Gray—grew larger now, swelling in scale, but his face was no less a child’s. “I don’t need any food from you. In here, with the matter siphon and the manufactory, I have whatever I want. Anything I could dream!”
Zanj kicked the monster in the head, twice; it tried to punch her in the mouth, but she tucked her chin and rammed her forehead into its knuckles. Bone, or something that served the same purpose, shattered.
“And you wore your dreams out,” Viv said. It was a guess. “You rubbed your fantasies raw, and went looking for others that weren’t yours.”
He made a wrinkled face as if he’d smelled something foul. “No! Gross. Do you think I like all your weird animal dreams, all those gasps and wriggling? I don’t want them, I don’t understand them. I just need them, that’s all.”
Anger filled her until her skin was taut and trembling. Maybe rage was not the best emotion for dealing with a nearly invincible immature god-thing—but Viv always made her best decisions on instinct. For a given definition of best that might not correspond to any in common use. “Those aren’t yours, kid! They don’t belong to you.”
“Look—I’m trying to make up for a mistake. When people come to me, I ask their souls what they want, and give it to them. I just collect the data. People were happy, and it was going fine until you came to wreck everything.” Zanj chucked the monster through the air and it landed on the platform—but she was slowing, even in her joy. “This is all going so wrong! Just let me put you back in the tree for a bit, okay? I’ll fix this. We’ll settle up later.”
Viv ran toward him, not knowing what she could do against something with his power; she had no plan other than distracting him from Hong, who’d worked around to flank him. But the kid caught her in his hands, sprouted other hands from his back, and caught Hong too. Viv growled, shook, kicked, but could not free herself. The ground bubbled up beneath her and caught her legs, climbed her, vine-supple and hard as concrete, locking her knees, her waist, reaching for her arms. Tendrils curled into her mouth, her throat. “Zanj!”
Not a command, even then, but a plea—one word against Zanj’s battle joy.
Zanj stopped in midair, over the recovering ruin of her foe. She revolved toward them.
Gray’s face went slack, and his ashen skin paled; what he said sounded like static, but Viv’s translation gimmick rendered it “Oh, shit.”
Then Zanj hit him, and he splashed.
This battle lacked the brutal glory of Zanj’s fight with the monster: that had been a sort of fantasy in itself, Zanj’s need for an opponent fed into an optimizer powered by all the manufactory’s might. Zanj enjoyed this less: Gray a mess of formless sand pouring over Zanj’s body, taking form after form, thornbush and flame, horrible longheaded alien, writhing teeth, each assumed for the split second Zanj took to master it, then splashing back to sand again.
Zanj did not fight for pleasure now. She fought to win.
She flickered blue, into and out of the Cloud, caught some invisible thread in the whirl of Gray and twisted her hands in a circle; the grayness gathered, spun in, closed itself in a diamond shell, which she raised overhead and threw down so hard it shattered.
Viv and Hong’s stone chains snapped; the ground beneath them broke, healed, flattened. A cold wind tore through the grove. The few great umbrella trees still standing withered.
The gray sand gathered into a puddle, assumed a shape not unlike the kid’s, but softer: a round-faced coltish gray-skinned adolescent, eyes wide, mouth slack with fear. “I didn’t mean it! I didn’t, I swear, I’m sorry, I just—I shouldn’t have, I know. I messed this up, like I mess up everything—”
Zanj’s form returned to its usual number of dimensions, though her face held no less fury; mixed there, Viv saw recognition. “I know you.”
“Um.” Whatever Grayteeth had expected, that wasn’t it. “I really don’t think so?”
“You were with the Empress. Her page, her lackey, her servant, when she cast me down.”
His fear smelled of ozone and burnt insulation. “You’re really her. You’re really Zanj.”
“And you,” she said, “are about to die.” She raised her hand, claws sparkling, vicious.
“That wasn’t me! I swear. That wasn’t me, that was old Great-Great-Great-Aunt Gray, I only entered the service a hundred years ago, I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you before, I’ve just heard stories.” His wide eyes fixed on the tips of Zanj’s claws. “Um. Good ones?”
Zanj rolled her eyes and raised her claw.
“Wait.” Viv lifted herself from the withering grass. The ground beneath her hardened, lost that loamy cushion, felt more like the soil of broken Orn. “Please.” Zanj seemed unimpressed, but hadn’t killed him yet. “You worked with the Empress?”
The kid knew a lifeline when he saw one. “I served Her—we all do, the whole Grayframe. But I spoiled a … I guess you’d call it a meal. A meal of dreams.” Viv wondered what that meant, and remembered the Empress’s voice, the burning hand in her chest, and stopped wondering for now. “She wanted to make an example out of me—to shame my family, my brothers and sisters. So She broke me, banished me, cast me out into the black. Away from everyone I knew. Alone.”
Zanj wasn’t buying it. “And you stole people to keep you company.”
“No! I mean, at first I didn’t know what I was doing. We share wants, hopes, thoughts all the time, back home. That’s how we talk. When I found the matter siphon, I was almost dead; I drank, desperate. When people wandered toward me, I caught them without meaning to. But they kept coming. It took months before I realized what was happening, and when I did—” He paled and shrank. The trees around them curled down fernlike, shrank into the ground, revealing rubble and skeletal ductwork; the pink sky flickered, paled. “I started saving them instead. I hoped I could give them to Her. To replace what I lost. I thought maybe if I offered Her enough dreams, She’d forgive me. She’d forgive the Grayframe. But I guess you’ll kill me now.”
To Viv’s surprise, Zanj looked to her for directions. “Well?” Viv hadn’t thought she would remember her ground rules in the heat of victory.
Viv knelt beside the kid. He looked lost, simple, scared. What he had done, what the Ornclan did to appease him, made her feel dirty. But he did seem contrite, at least when faced with the prospect of punishment. And she could use him. “Do you know the Empress’s ship?”
“I grew up there. Know it up, down, in the Cloud and out. My family serves Her—that is, unless She’s killed them by now.”
“I want to steal something from her.”
His expression, which had been hopeful or at least desperate, closed at once. “Okay, never mind. You’re crazy. Kill me now.”
“If we got you to her ship, could you help us?”
“I’ve been banished. If I try to pass through the borders of the palace She’ll notice me at once, burn me from the soul out.”
“I can get you in,” Viv said.
“Bullshit.”
Zanj, still holding Gray down, looked done with this whole conversation. “Can I kill him now? He did ask.”
“I broke Zanj out of her prison. I can help you.”
His eyes widened, flashed blue, narrowed. He made a face like he’d just seen a car wreck. “What are you?”
“Just meat,” Viv said. “Meat without a soul. The Empress can’t bind me, and I can get you home. If you guide us, and fuel our ship.”
“Ship!” Gray laughed at that, claws notwithstanding. “Who needs a ship?” He looked, expectant, from Hong to Zanj, then at last to Viv again, and his face fell. “Oh. Right. You’re really all meat? That must be so frustrating.”
Zanj growled. “I still say we kill him.”
The wind of crumbling paradise blew through Viv’s close-cropped hair. “If you’re traveling with us, I need you to promise—as binding an oath as you can make—that you’ll give up stealing dreams. And swear you’ll help us.”
“Swear,” Hong said, “on the Lady you serve.”
“I’ll do you one better.” Gray closed his eyes, and stopped struggling. His voice lost the squeak of adolescent protest. He sounded younger, reciting words he’d learned singsong from teachers long ago. “I swear on my death, on the chain of all my family since the first, on old Earth.” As he spoke, the words spread golden through the gray of his body, and sank like treasure into him.
“Wait,” Viv said. “Earth? You know Earth?”
“Of course,” he answered, confused. “Earth is the egg that hatched the world.”
She’d unpack that later, if there was anything there to unpack. “Does that work for you?” she asked Hong, who said, “Yes.” Zanj rolled her eyes, but she released Gray’s neck and stepped off him.
Viv offered him her hand. “Welcome to the crew. Don’t make me regret it.”
He took her hand, eyes wide as if seeing for the first time. Viv wondered if this was the first promise he’d made—or if he was simply shocked to find a thread of hope, a rumor of home. His hand felt soft. “I won’t.” She believed him. “Thanks, boss.”
“Don’t call me that.”
The last of paradise blew away in a stiff breeze and left them in the rubble atop the manufactory dais, ringed by broken steel and crystal arches, crumbled masonry, and the dead. The real Orn smelled of dust and metal. Amid the ruins, she heard cries, groans, Ornclan waking from long slumber to find their perfect visions melted into this. And among them, a woman’s voice, aware, alive, in full command of her faculties: Xiara running toward them, calling Viv’s name.
Viv felt barren, wrung out, and happy. She’d solved the problem. Seen through illusions. Worked with Zanj and Hong not as a passenger or package, but as a partner. A leader, even. No one died today. She’d saved lives, and gained a source on the Empress whose information wasn’t three thousand years out of date. Not bad for an illiterate meatbag without a smartphone to her name.
Then she looked up. And up. And cursed.
They’d been trapped in the tree for hours, Zanj said. At the time, Viv hadn’t worried—they had more pressing concerns than their deadline. Survival, for one.
Not anymore.
Not with a three-mile-long hate fractal ringed by fighters overhead.