26

CRASHING TURNED OUT to be easy. Staying alive was the hard part.

Zanj cursed the controls, tugged and kicked, and in her frustration dented the instrument panel. A number of lights Viv hoped weren’t important turned red. Hong gripped the back of Xiara’s seat, white-knuckled, eyes wide, praying. Gray slumped to the ground, motion-sick. Zanj’s lips peeled back to reveal small, sharp teeth.

Viv found their panic odd at first; then again, she had always met her own impending death, in car crash or spaceship accident or at the hands of robot monsters, with a sense of detachment, what her various shrinks called disassociation. She saw the planet approaching, taking up more than half the sky beyond the cockpit now, and felt distantly aware that this could be it, that she might, just now, after all this, be about to die. She didn’t believe it. But who did?

People who grew up in a war zone, maybe—people the law tilted against, people who had more to fear from a traffic stop or an airport line than Viv. Maybe that was the difference. For her friends all this was real, the blaring alerts, the warning lights clicking on and off, all the precursors to death crushed in metal at high speed. (Could Zanj survive this kind of fall? Could Gray, ionized after a crash at orbital velocities, re-form?) For Viv, the gut-wrenching plummet, the short sharp stop, the pain of every bone in her body breaking at once, more than breaking, was a dream. It couldn’t happen to her—until it happened, and once it happened, she wouldn’t be around to worry about it happening again.

(In the back of her mind, a panicked voice chattered a line from an old physics textbook: an ant, dropped down a mine shaft, walks away. A man breaks. A horse splashes.)

Xiara faced detachment of a different sort, and so did Zanj, and Hong and Gray: impending death, yes, but disorientation, too, cut off from the Cloud Viv had never known how to feel. Blinded, they reeled.

But Viv was born blind.

She looked into Xiara’s wide, staring eyes, and snapped her fingers before them twice until she blinked, refocused. “Xiara. Can you feel the ship?”

“It’s dark.” She licked her lips. Her chest rose and fell, rabbit fast. “So dark.”

“But you can feel it.”

She nodded.

“Great. Hong! Buddy, snap out of it.” He didn’t shake himself from his prayer-trance, so she shook him until he did. “You said this thing had a conventional drive, one that doesn’t need the Cloud. Can you fire it up?”

“It’s ancient.”

“It’s all we have right now.”

“It’s disconnected,” he said. “The power plant’s routed into the Cloud core, the thruster ports are sealed—”

“I’m not asking what you have to fix. I’m asking, can you fix it?”

“I need time. Acolytes. Tools.”

That was a start. “Zanj!”

She growled, bent over the controls. “I’m trying to keep us not-dead here!”

“Hong needs help with the engines. Xiara can fly.”

“Are we talking about the same girl? The one who was going crazy and talking to ghosts just a couple minutes ago?”

“I can do it.” Xiara’s shaking voice didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but Viv would take it. “The fleet’s gone. I can’t feel them anymore. I’m fine.”

“Sure. You say that now. Then you have another fit and smack us right into the ground. Gray can help Hong.”

Viv grabbed Zanj’s shoulder, and pulled her back from the controls. They stared at one another, breathing hard, for seconds they didn’t have, while the planetoid grew. Zanj’s lips curled into a snarl, and the circlet on her brow blackened, began to smoke, responding to her killing rage; her claws tensed. Viv didn’t care. Ah, there was the hit of adrenaline, that rush of fury: Zanj was strong, and smart, and ancient, and Zanj knew the secret ways of the world, but goddammit she would listen. Viv had spent most of her adult life learning compromise, trust, how to get along with humans. She had been born knowing how to decide. You curled yourself into a fist, and bent iron with your eyes. Even if all that kept the iron in question from murdering you where you stood was a single piece of posthuman bondage gear with unknown limitations. “We need you to work on the engines. Gray has to reinforce the ship.”

Gray, still sick, trembling, looked up: “It’s all dark.”

“This ship wasn’t built to crash.” She spoke to him, but it was Zanj’s gaze she held, fierce, refusing to yield to the rage in the pirate queen’s yellow-red eyes. “We need baffling. Restraints. Shock absorbers. We need this whole structure remade to crumple around the cockpit. If Zanj and Hong get the engines running, we might be able to slow ourselves down enough to survive landing, but it won’t be gentle. Every second we spend arguing is one second less we have to figure out how to survive. Zanj and Hong, fix the engines so we can slow down. Gray, make us crash-ready. Xiara, fly. I’ll coordinate. You all listen to me, and maybe we get through this. Okay?”

“Okay, boss,” Gray said, and Hong said, “Yes,” and so did Xiara, though she stammered three times before she managed the word. It hadn’t really been a question, and even if it was, she wasn’t asking them.

Zanj’s nostrils flared. Her tail lashed the console.

Viv could use the crown—command her to comply. This was a life-or-death situation. Trolley problem time. Do you break one woman’s will, and your own word, to save five lives? Including yours? And maybe the lives of everyone you’ve ever known, depending on what that Rosary bead you’re chasing is, on what it contains? Do you use power when it’s easy, and there, and you need it? No matter what it makes you?

“We need you,” Viv said. “We need to work together. Or none of us get out of this alive.”

Zanj’s tail stopped lashing. Her claws uncurled. And then, in a rush of wind, she stood in the cockpit door, grinning at Hong. “Come on, kid. Let me show you how it’s done.”

Hong ran after her into the hold; Viv granted herself a moment’s sag against the console, a moment’s panic, her heart pounding, her sweat cold, her gut churning, her skin tight. Even with that crown on her head, Zanj’s anger felt more real, more dangerous, than the impending crash. Of course, Viv had never crashed a spaceship before, while she’d certainly seen Zanj kill people. She had not commanded her—and the circlet hadn’t hurt Zanj, much. But still she felt dirty and wrung out and not altogether brave.

There were too many sirens and emergencies, not to mention entirely too much planet coming up fast beneath them, for her to worry much about any of that now. They tumbled through the sky. Xiara groped for the controls; her eyes wheeled as she tried to focus. Fiberglass strands slipped from her fingers into the control panel. Viv marched out of the cockpit and Gray scrambled after her, eyes wide. “Boss, just so you know, I, um, I’ve never done anything like this before, I—”

“Do you know how?”

“There’s know, right, and then there’s know. I don’t exactly get a second chance at this! And I don’t have materials to work with, and I’m hungry—”

“Eat the ship.”

“I can’t eat the ship. We’re inside the ship!”

“Not for much longer. Don’t touch the engines or the control surfaces. The cabins, the stores, anything else you want, take it. Eat. Get us out of this.” She checked herself before she asked, Can you do it? because a glance at him showed her what he’d answer: wide, scared beneath all that child’s arrogance, every fiber of him screaming a No! she could not let him feel. Gray was a kid, really: raw appetite and power and no control—no, not control. Backbone.

“You can do this,” she said, level, steady. She set her hands on his shoulders, which felt too slick and wet for skin, like a dolphin’s. “I know you can.”

Something inside him unlocked—self-confidence? Or the opposite, a sort of collapse, giving up his own sense of what he could do and what he could not. He nodded, yes ma’am, brave young soldier boy, and breathed so deep he inflated, and his not-skin fuzzed around her hands, and burst into flying motes of silver-gold dust.

“Stay out of my lungs!” she shouted as she ran back to the cockpit.

They worked, all of them, Zanj and Hong in the engine room, Gray in the hold, Xiara at the controls. Viv ran between them, used the ship intercom, tossed them suit communicators—there was so much to be done in so little time and all at once. Zanj tore open the engines (that blue ring on the engine room floor now burning red), rewired them at Hong’s direction; Viv tossed Hong a skinsuit and donned her own before Zanj ripped open the bulkhead and wedged their improvised thrusters into the vacuum space. Xiara screamed when the ship’s skin tore, but she kept her grip on the controls, milking spin from gyroscopes in the ship’s belly to level out their course. “Are there any people down there?” Viv asked her. “Civilization? Farms? Anything at all?”

“Something on the sensors,” Xiara said. “Slippery. It’s all confused, I can’t—”

“You’re doing great. Just bring us down near whoever’s there. Not on top of them, please. Just … near.”

The hold had thickened since her last passage through, and smelled of lightning; Gray melted the ship’s bulkheads and flowed them forward, wadding the cockpit in metal honeycombs; she wondered what that felt like if you happened to be inside the ship’s mind, then glanced at Xiara’s sweat-slick face, at her lip so tight-clenched between her teeth Viv worried she’d bite through, and stopped wondering. From the engine room, she heard what any office she’d ever been part of would have characterized as a vigorous discussion: “The holy texts say the oxygen mix should be—”

“Don’t start with the fucking holy texts! I know how to mix fuel, you idiot priest, now just shut the hell up and flip the switch!”

She shouted: “Give us thrust!”

“Ten seconds!”

Nine. Eight. She ran back through the hold, all its once-empty space now wadded full of honeycomb. Gray was everywhere, in her eyes—but she did not taste him between her teeth, did not feel him in her throat. Fine. Fine. Five. The planetoid, swollen green, obscene, mountain ridges, clouds, closer than anything should ever be in space, too late, too late—“They’re ready!” Buckling herself into the copilot’s seat: “Go!”

And then—gravity. Screams—oh, that was her, screaming. Giants’ hands pulled Viv in two directions, three. Spinning, stabilizing; thrust sounded like someone tearing a phone book in half, miked through a rock concert’s worth of speakers. Thrust felt like a horse’s hooves plunging into her chest. Her organs bunched up, purple spots bloomed, the ship leveled out, there was a horizon all of a sudden, space was up again, space slicked with flame, and they were slowing, and she tried not to think of airplane crashes, and tried not to think of strokes, of aneurysms, of thin blood vessel walls and the g-forces she was pulling—

Air thickened in her throat, in her chest, coarse, gritty steel between her teeth. She was drowning, but she could breathe. Her skin stiffened; she felt a grotesque tension in between her organs, around her fat, cushioning, and everywhere was silver and rainbows, and she was not drowning anymore.

Gray was in her lungs, and she wasn’t even mad.

They tore through clouds. Hong and Zanj—were they strapped in? There hadn’t been time. She called to them—her voice sounded underwater—thought she heard some answer, we’re fine, but how could she hear in this?

They fell. They fell. They fell.

And then.

Silence.

More like the opposite of that—no, the converse. Think of silence, then think of everything it’s not. Hot. Loud. Bright. Furious. Endless. Painful. Thick. Bursting.

Alive.

Viv blinked, and wept because she could blink, and weep. And breathe. Though not without pain.

Survival alone would have justified the first laugh that ground from her throat. She could see, which justified the second croak that followed. Beside her, in front of her, a moan: Xiara, also laughing.

There was a brightness, of sun—that didn’t make sense, they were far from any sun, but there was sunlight nevertheless, drifting through the shattered viewscreen. Xiara’s laugh became a moan.

“You dead?” It was the best Viv could do.

And Xiara answered: “Not yet.”

She squinted against the light. Tried to raise her hand to block the improbable sun, but everything hurt. A shadow passed before her: a hand severed the straps that bound her to the chair, and she found she could breathe deeper. “Who—”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Zanj said. Viv blinked some large number of times before her eyes moistened and focused, and there she stood: jumpsuit torn and singed, but unmistakably alive. “Come on, Los Angeles. Walk it off.”

“Glad to see. Crash. Sense of humor.” She was missing a few words, but trusted Zanj would get the gist. “Hong?”

“I am mostly whole,” he said, and sounded it. Mostly. “My arm is broken. But it should heal.”

At least they’d have time to face that should. She could breathe, too, she realized, and realized when she did that she hadn’t thought to check, hadn’t thought to ask, whether any of them could breathe this planet’s air. Stupid amateur. “Gray?” No answer. “Gray!” Struggled to her feet, unsteady, grabbing jagged metal to steady herself, Zanj in her way, holding her up.

“It’s okay. It’s okay, I said! He’s fine—just down for the count. Puddled. Spent himself remaking the ship. And saving you.”

“He was—in me—”

“You’re not built for this sort of thing. No collision membranes, slow healing, calcium bones? What a mess. You’d pop in a stiff wind.”

They staggered from the crash site, out of the deep trough their ship had carved through the local soil. Xiara leaned on Hong, whole, bruised, but unsteady, brain-burned; Hong bore her weight, though he winced with each step. Viv hurt all over; Zanj helped her, and carried the sloshing puddle of Gray in a waterproof sack over her shoulder.

As they crested the slope, Viv looked back.

The cockpit lay behind them, a nest of twisted metal at the end of the long glassed burn scar their crash had cut through the fields. Yes, fields, planted with rice, broken-twig green. Six-legged buffalo grazed beneath the not-quite-sun: a diffuse region of brightness overhead like the sun Viv knew when seen through clouds that were not there. The broken fleet hung massive and faint as ghosts behind the blue sky. And that was all: the Question, which had flown them out of High Carcereal, which brought Zanj from Pasquarai, was now a pile of metal foam burning at the bottom of a trench.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Eh.” Zanj shrugged, and the movement sloshed Gray in his bag. “We’re alive. And we wouldn’t be, if not for you.”

“Or you. Or Hong, or Xiara. I’d be dead now if not for Gray.”

“Not dead, probably. Just missing a lung or two. Those eyes probably wouldn’t have made it either. They’re squishy.”

It hurt to laugh.

“That’s the spirit. Now, come on. Time to meet the locals.” But Viv knew Zanj well enough by now to spot when she was hiding pain.

They turned away—Viv turned away, at least, to meet the narrow, gray-skinned, big-eyed people in black homespun approaching them tentatively across the fields, bearing long knives, pitchforks, spades. Viv felt surprised that she could name the tools. Maybe farming was farming all over the galaxy.

That might have been reassuring, if she hadn’t just torn through a few acres of these people’s cultivated fields.

She stepped forward, or tried, but her legs buckled. Zanj caught her on the way down, steadied her. She waved to the aliens. That hurt too, but damn if she’d let pain stop her from waving to aliens. “Hi!” Shouting hurt her voice. Okay, what had Hong said last time? “We’re, ah, pilgrims who have left the family. And we’ve kind of. Crashed. A bit. Do you have a spare ship, or something? A way offworld? A radio?”

The newcomers looked to one another, murmured. One stepped forward from the gathering. Viv read her as a woman; she was old, the scales around her eyes dull, her slitted pupils black and bright. She leaned on a two-tined pitchfork as she advanced, and the murmurs stilled behind her. “No,” she said, her voice deep and rough around the edges, like a cello bowed wrong. “But we will help you, as well as we can. I am Yannis, and all are welcome to Refuge.”