THEY ESCAPED.
Viv whooped, slapped Xiara on the back. “You did it!” In the wash of adrenaline and relief she realized just how much doubt had filled her, sliding like sand through cracks in her confidence. Now that sand streamed away, and all the force she’d mustered to drive her through the fear and the battle thrust her forward and she realized she had her arms around Xiara and she wanted to kiss her.
But Xiara was driving. Her muscles were rigid. Wheels turned in her dilated eyes and air hissed through those full lips, too regular for normal human breathing. She was in the ship.
Born pilots, Zanj had said.
“Are you still there?” Viv asked, and at first Xiara didn’t seem to have heard her. Her tongue tip peeked between her teeth, and disappeared.
Her voice came like voices came from deep wells in dreams. “Yes,” she said first, the sounds drawn out. “I’ve just … I’ve never felt the Cloud before. Not like this. Through the veins, the harp strings, the depth. I can hear my grandmothers.” She blinked slowly, to clear the water welling in her eyes.
“You can stop,” she said. “If you want. We’re safe.” She didn’t know that, but it seemed likely. “Zanj will come back soon, and she can fly.”
“No.” Xiara’s certainty shone through the piloting trance. “This is right.” The control panel lights, Viv realized, blinked in time with Xiara’s breath. Others kept the beat of her pulse. The Cloud unfurled before them, and Xiara’s tears had nothing to do with sorrow. “Go,” she said, soft and sure and full of wonder. “Check on the others. I’m fine.”
Viv drifted, dazed, from the cockpit. Hong, bouncing, triumphant, caught her and hugged her in the hall. At first she looked at him like he had grown a second head, but his smile was open and unforced and bright with their survival. Viv relaxed. They’d made it out under their own power and under her direction. Together. Her crew. “Where’s Gray?”
Gone, it seemed at first.
The engine room was not so much a single room as the whole of the ship that wasn’t given over to living space, a jungle of pipes and circuitry not so different from the tech she knew. When she climbed down the ladder, she found engines thrumming and ticking and gurgling and humming, and Gray himself nowhere. A blue ring on the floor pulsed softly a little faster than her heartbeat. She wondered if it served a purpose, other than reassuring passengers the great machines functioned. But she did not see Gray, so she called his name, feeling the first creep of panic, until she noticed the air’s slight bright frostlike sparkle. She grimaced. “You better not be in my lungs.”
A gust of him tickled back up her throat, out past her teeth. “You didn’t even notice me,” he complained from all around her at once. “I’m subtle, and don’t metabolize. It’s not like I’d stay in there forever.”
“It’s gross. And I like to look people in the eye when I talk to them.”
He manifested two eyeballs in the air before her, just the eyeballs without a skull, and rolled them. “Is this better?”
“I was coming down to thank you.” Though now she was thinking better of it.
“Don’t, yet. I’ve done what I can, but we’ll need more fuel soon.”
“You can’t just, you know.” She waved her hand imprecisely. “Make more?”
The air blushed peevish orange, then turned clear again. “I need matter to eat, and to convert. Unless you’ll give me some of the ship?” She must have frowned, or her heart sped up, because he laughed.
“Troll,” she said.
“We’ll find more fuel.” Zanj sidled back into three-space in the hold above the engine room as if she’d been there the whole time, slapping nonexistent dust off her palms while Viv and the floating eyeballs stared up at her in shock. “I ditched the Pridemother in a black hole cluster. Don’t everyone applaud all at once.” She sounded sated, smelled of smoke, and leaned back against the wall, cool as cool. “Anything else you’d like, Your Majesty? Foot massage?”
Viv didn’t remember climbing that ladder—just the jump of her heart, the excited blur up, arms spread to embrace Zanj before she realized they’d so rarely touched before. She smiled, broad and open and foolishly happy and she didn’t even mind. “You’re back!”
Zanj buffed her claws on her jumpsuit. “Did you really think one Pridemother could take me out?” She shook her head, tsk tsk, tongue against teeth, poor form, bad play, an aunt critiquing her niece at majiang.
“Never,” she said, and realized she was being honest. Zanj, eyes on her nails, grinned—sly and small and real. How would it feel, Viv wondered, to be Zanj? To have such power and be so constrained, for so long? You would start to doubt yourself—to worry your comrades would look at you and see a failure. What would such a person need to hear? Viv, startled, found she cared. “I never thought you’d lose. Only that you might not come back.”
“You would have called me if I didn’t.”
“No.”
Zanj looked at her sidelong, with a gaze Viv could not yet understand. “Getting you home will spit in the Empress’s eye. That means more to me than stars. Don’t worry, Viv. I’m not going anywhere.”
VIV HAD EXPECTED Zanj would take the conn again when—if—she came back, but Zanj took one look at Xiara’s grip on the controls and stepped away, hands raised. “I can’t argue with true love. I told you: there’s no pilot like a pilot of Orn.”
Rapt in union with the ship, Xiara flew without pause for a day and a night. She flipped switches by hand when she wanted; they flipped themselves when she asked. She charted their course, adjusted bearings, whispered of engines and thrust, looked into the Cloud and through swelling chaos to their path.
No one knew what to do with her.
The Ornclan had loaded the ship’s larder with food—some salted meats Viv did not recognize, but which tasted vaguely like ham, and vegetables in a wider range of colors and contortions than she remembered from supermarkets back home, but which, when tasted, fit more or less familiar categories: tubers, alliums, herbs, squash. A taste of raw pepper–adjacent purple apple-fleshed thing made her knees weak. Viv hadn’t realized how much she’d dreaded returning to nutrient paste. She cooked. She cooked! Nothing fancy, sautéed vegetables with a dash of meat in a rich nutty oil, served on that pillowy Ornish flatbread. She’d been years out of practice at a stove even before she woke up here, but still, working the pan and knives, she felt almost home.
But when she took a plate to the cockpit, Xiara shook her head, her eyes still fixed on the Cloud Viv could not watch without feeling sick.
“Different pilots take it differently,” Zanj said. “Give her time.” And they did, bandaging wounds, cleaning, fixing, with Zanj’s guidance, what systems the ship’s own maintenance bots could not. Viv tried to meditate with Hong, but bored fast; tried to work out with him, and tired faster. They left Xiara merged with the controls, peering through spacelanes as she stitched them into the Cloud and out. Her union with the ship seemed so pure, so deep, Viv felt guilty watching.
But when Viv woke halfway through the second night to a steady ship, its singing engines quiet, and padded into the hall—she’d grown used to bare feet aboard ship—she found Xiara slumped in her chair, hands off the controls, staring hollowly at the void beyond the cockpit. She trembled. Her eyes were metal wheels still, but red, too, worn by starlight.
“Hey,” Viv said without result.
She’d seen this before. She’d been here before—not with ships and cybernetics, but with code first, then with business plans and meetings and all that accumulating damn work, her mind so stuck in ideas she couldn’t work back into her meat. For years she’d been that person, wired in, and she’d bent a world to her will. Who needed bodies, anyway?
Everyone, it turned out.
She fetched a blanket from the closet, and a cup from the canteen, and heated some of that not-quite-tea Zanj made from leaves that smelled like chocolate and cedar, and colored the water pink. She draped the blanket over Xiara’s shoulders, set the tea beside her hand. Xiara came back slowly: her pupils dilated, then shrank to pinpricks, settled in a middle, and the parts of her eyes that should have been white were. The bright circuit lines faded from her skin, her black veins ran blue-red once more. She shivered all through her body, and took a deep wet heavy breath. Viv held her close, rubbed her arms—her body was so cold. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“I was far away.” Her voice cracked; she tried to raise the tea, and it slipped. Viv brought it to her mouth instead, soft, settling the cup against Xiara’s lower lip; Xiara did not sip the tea so much as suck it down.
“You need rest.”
“I could go forever. I could live there. In the ship.”
It occurred to Viv, then, that she’d not asked before interrupting—just assumed. She wanted, so badly, to say, I don’t want you to, but what she said instead was: “I can put you back, if you want.”
Xiara caught Viv’s wrist before she could draw away, her grip cold and mechanical at first as if she’d forgotten how bodies worked, how they could be soft or gentle. Viv gasped, tensed, too, stared into inhuman eyes. But the eyes melted as the grip on her wrist warmed, and Xiara remained. She guided Viv’s hand to her neck, her cheek. “No.”
Viv helped her back to the cabins. Xiara’s legs steadied as they walked, and her hand sought the wall; she leaned on Viv less as she recovered, then leaned against her more. At the door to the room they’d made up for her, Xiara stopped and her shoulders shook. Crying, Viv thought at first, uncomfortable, and debated how to respond, rifling through her experience of mother and girlfriends and finding little that would help—but then Xiara found her voice, and the first peal of laughter rang through the hall.
Viv was thoroughly confused.
“What’s so funny?”
“I did it!” She couldn’t stop laughing, doubled over, dragging in huge heaves of breath. “The first Ornclan in centuries offworld. I didn’t expect it to feel so good. We didn’t lose the stars at all. They’ve been up here waiting for us this whole time.” Her face was raw with wonder. “There are muscles singing I didn’t know I had. I never want this to end. I was scared at first, scared my body wouldn’t be here when I found my way back, but here I am, and here you are, and I did it, and I want to kiss you.” She blanched when she realized what she’d said, opened her mouth wide as if she could snatch the words and swallow them back down. Before Viv could speak, she rushed on, torrential: “I’m sorry, I mean, everything feels so full and sharp and hot when I’m not in the ship, and home’s far away and I don’t know when I’m going back or if and I don’t want to be alone tonight, and I scared you, didn’t I, I’m a fool, I don’t know how this goes where you come from—”
“About like that,” Viv said, and leaned in.
She needed this, too. Not wanted it, though, god, yes, that as well, but needed: the more or less familiar feeling as Xiara crashed into her hungry and they tumbled through the door into her cabin, as Viv pressed her against the wall, as she spun around and pressed Viv there in turn, Xiara’s cool fingers exploring her waistband, her pants sliding free, Viv’s teeth on the curve of Xiara’s neck, and then they were bodies naked in a sparely furnished room that could have been any sparely furnished room in any age in any galaxy. This she needed most of all, the tension, the curl, the strain and stress and susurrus of breath to build, and build, and ease into calm: a meat feeling, a meet feeling. And she’d thought cooking felt good! She knew so little in this time, but she knew her body; she knew how to play with a lover. Knew how to devour and tease, and let herself be caught, pressed, teased herself, how to rock and hold and breathe. The sudden pressure of a thigh or knee as weight shifted, the slide of breasts over her belly—and, after, as they drowsed, with her arm under Xiara’s neck, her fingers growing numb—it felt like home.
We never lost the stars.
They lingered in the aftersilence, and after a while she said to the ceiling as much as to Xiara: “So, what is this?”
Xiara answered with a hum.
“It was great, I mean, it is great. But I’m alone here, and you’re alone, and we’re both obviously, you know, reaching for something, we barely know each other, and I don’t have any problem with that, but I don’t want to make this anything, um, you’re not ready for.” For all the times she’d had this conversation, each time it rose again she stumbled, as if she were nineteen again, younger. As if she were following Susan Cho through the dinosaurs. You didn’t grow past the old things, just enclosed them like rings in a tree, so someone feeling the bark of you could suss out your old scars. “I liked this. I’m just wondering, you know. What you think.”
Beside her, Xiara mewed, and shifted, and began softly, undeniably, to snore.
IN THE CLOUD the dead tumble aimlessly, and the living travel fast.
They made good time. Xiara skimmed them through the Cloud at will, crossed star systems in hours, slid back to normal space to take bearings, or to recover, or whenever Zanj told her they were near a good view. Black hole accretion discs and plasma fountains burned in the depths, and nebulas, though not so rich as false-color telescope pictures led Viv to believe back home, still glistened and refracted starlight, shaping ghosts in space.
The nebulas just looked like ghosts, of course, but real ghosts lingered in the Cloud. Viv, by now, could sometimes bear to sit in the cockpit and stare out into the chaos of colors and watch immense bodies form, merge, split, birth lesser shapes that rippled and divided and birthed themselves again. When she was a kid, she loved those pictures in magazines that looked like static, but that, if you fuzzed your eyes just right, gained depth and form. This reminded her of that: sense from nonsense, the vertigo of a reality unlike your own.
She no longer feared the dead, or the gods they became.
Still, she did not sleep in the Cloud. Or much outside of the Cloud: Xiara, drunk on pilot’s euphoria, came to her eager—she told new tales each night, poems almost, trying to describe what she’d seen, felt, done in the Cloud or through the ship, groping with a huntress’s vocabulary to describe n-dimensional hyperspace topology. “You’re just using me for an audience,” Viv teased one night: “Nobody else will—oh—sit still long enough to listen to you.”
“You’re not sitting still. And you’re free to ask me to stop, anytime you like.” An eyebrow raised, a turn of head, a press of the hand, and Viv had better things to do with her breath than answer.
When their fuel supply ran low, Zanj guided them to ruins: to husks of hollowed world orbiting listless swollen stars, to webs of glass the size of moons, to docks built to serve the shattered fleets that drifted in space around them. Hong offered his own suggestions after one too many of Zanj’s leads turned out to have been picked clean eons since, and at his guidance they found a depot floating between layers of a gas giant, and stopped at a double-cupped crystal chalice several hundred miles on a side that emitted streams of high-energy particles. Twice they had to hide from a Pride fleet devouring an immense corpse which might have been machine or meat.
They made good time, yes—but still Zanj’s brow darkened, she paced, she frowned. Finally, as the four of them, clad in suitfields, worked to free a large lumpy ferrocrystalline beast from a trap the Empress had left to guard a matter fountain near a spinning star, Viv asked Zanj what was wrong.
“We’re not going fast enough.” The great beast was trapped in a net of light. Its herd milled several astronomical units away, grazing on asteroids and lowing plaintively in Cloudband (or so Zanj claimed, though Viv found it hard to imagine anything that large sounding plaintive). The net’s strands rewove as fast as Zanj could snap them, but she claimed she’d found the critical nodes in the network, and directed Gray and Hong to overload them all at once.
Viv, still blissing out on the notion of a spacewalk, didn’t respond at first. Xiara’s voice came through her suitfield crystal clear: We’re going as fast as the ship can.
“Down and to the right.” Zanj pointed.
Grayteeth said, “Sure thing, boss,” sprouted several extra legs, scuttled over the beast’s skin, leaping over the shifting strands of net.
Zanj continued: “I know we’re going fast. But we’re losing time. The Empress moves with all her power, and we’re stuck with this antique.”
“Which is why,” Hong said, strain evident in his voice as he gripped the struggling node he’d caught, “we should go to the ’faith. We have newer ships, reclaimed Imperial technology. We can catch Her.”
Zanj’s laugh was short and heavy with scorn. “We don’t need to lose even more time to get ships that won’t keep pace either. Only one ship can catch the Empress when she doesn’t want herself caught—and that one’s mine.”
“Isn’t the Question your ship?” Beneath Viv, the beast bucked, twisted, a convulsing landscape; her suit rendered its static roar as a bass pulse in her chest too low for human hearing. Plasma played about its mouth. As it thrashed, the net tightened, cracking plates of rocky armor to vent Cherenkov blue into space. Viv jetted in and laid a hand on its shell. “Hey. Come on. We’re almost there.”
Maybe it heard her. Maybe it was just tired. Either way, it stilled; Zanj shouted, “Now!” and struck, and so did Gray and Hong, and the net stopped shifting. Viv slid her hand beneath the net’s strands and pulled, and they unraveled all at once. The beast trumpeted joy; in the asteroid field, its fellows turned, grunted, and neared, blueshifting toward them with joyful speed; Gray could only half fill the ship before the beasts demolished the matter siphon in their enthusiasm.
“This was one of my ships,” Zanj said as they watched the cataclysmic celebration from a safe distance, through telescopic lenses. “My first. The one I rode away from Pasquarai. I’m talking about the ship I used to fight her. We need to find the Fallen Star.”