REFUGE: A NAME that was a promise Viv could not believe. After the crash, the chaos, the screaming, the sudden stop, she felt reluctant to uncurl. After all that, how could the world be kind?
How could a place be so damn green?
Yannis, leaning on her pitchfork, guided them down a dirt road between rice paddies to the village. Her followers surrounded them, whispering. A heavyset man with a many-plated carapace offered Hong his hoe for use as a cane, and Hong accepted. Two children pointed at Viv and laughed, so musical and light that she could not help staring at them, and when she did they stopped, wide-eyed, and ran to hide giggling behind their elders. Xiara, by Viv’s side, seemed stripped of focus, gazing into the middle distance, but when the kids laughed at her, she drew back into her skin enough to stick out her tongue at them. They stuck out theirs in turn, which were triple-forked. Viv squeezed her hand—Xiara’s answering grip felt weak. A child tried to catch Zanj’s lashing tail, but the tail danced just out of reach. Zanj glared at every face and every thing around, looking for the hidden trick.
Workers in the fields raised their hands in greeting, and Yannis raised her pitchfork in answer. “New guests!” Some left their work, their swan-necked oxen and the six-legged almost-pigs they tended, and followed. Others remained.
So they came to Refuge: a cluster of tile-roofed cottages, streets of rolled dirt, sheltered by two high hills and the slope of a craggy mountain, watered by a river that wound down from its cloud-topped peaks. Above, far above, past the blue and past the spark that was not a sun, great ghosts of battleships shifted, ponderous as icebergs in a thaw.
And everywhere the green, vivid as a cut. The village smelled of growth, of manure, of warm stone. The shock—Viv thought it was shock—on villagers’ faces as they left their weaving, their rest, their dumpling-making and their games of shuttlecock, to stare. Most were gray, not quite serpentine, odd-pupiled like Yannis herself; some larger, insectlike; some had flesh that seemed to melt to metal and back. They stared at Viv’s crew and she stared back, both disbelieving. This place was so green, and so whole.
She turned back to the path and saw Yannis watching her, pleased. “Our ancestors did not believe it either: their luck, to survive their fall and find themselves here.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s home. Shit still stinks, as much here as around any star.” She cackled, and Viv decided, in spite of Zanj’s suspicion, that she liked her.
The fence stones looked weathered, and worked with shallow, smooth carvings. “How long have you been here?”
“A long time.”
Zanj’s eyes stayed narrow.
“I’ll answer your questions, I promise. It’s best to do this all at once.” Yannis led them and their entourage, all those who’d left work and home to gawk, to the village square: a well, a large house that might have been a temple or a library or a city hall, a dais the old woman mounted with care and the aid of two young men. When she turned, the murmur that passed for silence in the gathered crowd died. “Friends of Refuge,” she said. “We have new residents.”
“Guests,” Zanj corrected her at once. “We’re not planning to stay.”
“You have business beyond the sky.” Yannis nodded. “I understand. So did our mothers, and their mothers, back into the before time.”
Hong limped forward on his improvised staff. “Mother,” he said, respectful, “we welcome your hospitality. But we cannot remain.”
“Do you have a ship?” Xiara asked, hungry. “Anything that can fly?”
It was Viv’s turn to speak. By all rights she should have been the fiercest of them all—she was the one with the time limit, she was the one who might never make it home. But—Christ. This was a hell of a long way from Southern California, but there were no monsters here, no prison stars, no ruins. Just farmers. Weird ones, but still. There were places like this back home, even if she’d never spent much time there. Refuge wrapped her in warm air and slow time.
“I have to get home,” she said anyway.
“Our mothers and their mothers all said the same,” Yannis said. “If you seek to leave, we will not stop you. Our mothers and theirs never found a way offworld—but they did find a home here. And as others fell to Refuge down the years, we have welcomed them. It is a safe place in a galaxy of war.”
“There’s no place safe from the Empress,” Zanj said. “Just places she hasn’t yet found.”
“There is no Cloud here. Our mothers lost it when they fell, bleeding and aflame, from the sky. We are mortal, yes—but the Empress will never find us here, nor will the Bleed, nor any of the sky’s hosts. We grow our crops, and harvest. We live and we die. And there is room for all.”
Zanj said: “Your mothers fell from battle, then.”
“From war in the heavens. Marooned here, they hid themselves to heal. And ever since, we have remained. We raise food, we burn trees, and we live and die, as does the world.”
“Do you remember their names?” Viv heard the hunger beneath Zanj’s question, the wound. Her sisters had fallen in this battle, the other Suicide Queens she fought beside. If they had fallen here, maybe they survived. Maybe they remembered her.
“When our mothers came to us, they took new ones. They cast off their history to build new lives in this new world.”
“Well, I won’t.” Zanj’s teeth glittered in the light. She drew herself up, and her eyes flashed, and Viv felt a moment’s shame that she had not stood so firm, that she’d felt relief in this moment’s rest. Hell, she just crashed a spaceship. By any rubric, they’d earned a break. “I’m getting out of here.”
“We will not stop you,” Yannis said with a soft inclination of her head. Zanj looked like someone who’d expected to march into a stiff wind—only to meet a calm breeze instead, and stumble, betrayed by her own bracing. “Will you accept our hospitality meanwhile? Our food, our wine, the welcome we offer all who reach Refuge?”
Viv heard wind in the fields beyond, heard the lowing of something that was obviously not an ox, heard the ripple of the river’s clear water. Heard four hundred people not breathing. Zanj, bag over her shoulder, stood ready to fight anything, everything, at once. She growled, as if their welcome were an insult.
“I promise you,” Yannis said, arms spread, “this is an honest offer. Refuge is beyond traps and treason.”
Which, if anything, pushed Zanj closer to wanton murder. So Viv did the only thing she could.
“Thank you,” she said, and stepped between Zanj and Yannis. “We’ll stay. Until we can repair our ship.” If that was possible.
Yannis, and the full weight of that silence, shifted focus to her. “And you are?”
“I’m, um, hi. I’m Viv. Captain. Vivian Liao. Thank you for your offer. It’s a pleasure to meet you all?”
“The pleasure,” said Yannis, smiling, “is ours.” She struck the dais with her pitchfork. “Welcome home.”
At that, the cheers began. And, as soon as the kegs were breached, the party.
VIV GOT DRUNK. Blame the giddy rush of survival, blame the sincere welcome, blame the smiling faces or the liberal pours of a fizzy citrus drink the locals claimed was made from something her translation gimmick called rice, blame music, dancing, the huge iron woks of stir-fried meat and vegetables the villagers laid out, blame the sunset that bloomed orange and pink and violet across the sky, blame most of all herself, but she got proper goddamn drunk. And, drunk, she missed things.
Yannis guided her through the buffet line, leaning on her fork, which Viv suspected saw less service as an actual farm implement than as a tool of office. “This is paig, in fermented sauce with bamboo shoots, and these eggs with nightshade, and here, try some of these, they’re salty.” Tasty and tastier, hearty, filling, until Viv had mounded her bowl so high each bite felt like Jenga endgame. “Simple fare,” Yannis said, “but what we have to offer, is yours.”
“You didn’t need to go to such trouble,” Viv said.
“Hospitality is a joy of wealth.” Yannis pointed with her chin to a large round tower just visible over the roofs. “We store grain in the silo, we salt and preserve meat. And we have guests so rarely—you’re the first most of us have seen.”
“I thought you’d be worried. We could be anyone.” Zanj, behind them in line, filled her bowl and glared. Viv decided not to elaborate further. “You’re very trusting.”
“You fell from the sky to Refuge. The least we can do is offer you a welcome.”
“I’m waiting for you to press-gang us into heavy labor.”
“Oh, that comes tomorrow.” But Yannis matched her grave tone with a wink, and Viv laughed. Her ribs hurt. Yannis waited for her to recover. “You can work if you like. We all do. But we won’t force you.”
“Do people not work?”
“Some. A few build, or think. Some don’t want to live here, and walk away.”
“What happens to them?”
“They die alone. Eventually. Most who stay, work, because people like work. But you don’t need to worry about that. We might not know much about the world, but we know it’s hard to fall from heaven.”
Zanj rolled her eyes and stalked off. Locals parted before her hunched shoulders, her narrow eyes, and her thundercloud weight of imminent violence. “Sorry,” Viv said. “She’s—I should—”
Yannis waved with the back of her hand, shoo. “Go.”
Balancing bowl and chopsticks in one hand, Viv picked her way through the crowd, skirting around dancers, waving to locals who waved to her. She thought she’d lost Zanj at first, then saw her at the top of the steps of the wooden temple-library, and shuffled after—sneaking a bite on the way. Crash landings were hard work.
Zanj didn’t seem to notice Viv’s approach. She just sat staring up into the shadowed hall of the, yes, basically a temple—four altars, candle-strewn and flower-decked, each one in front of a statue of a monstrous woman—one with three heads and a scimitar; one snakelike, clawed and hooked, bearing a doubled spear; one fanged beauty with an eye in the middle of her forehead; one massive, six-armed, horned. Dust drifted in the hall’s still air, while music rang below. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Zanj said.
“I don’t blame you.”
“What?” Zanj looked at her as if she’d made some obscene joke.
“For the crash, I mean,” she said. “For us ending up here. There’s no way you could have known the Cloud would still be broken. We took a risk. It didn’t pay off. That’s okay.”
Zanj’s scar made it hard to read her expression, but her confusion would have played for the cheap seats. “What are you talking about? Of course it was the right decision. Of course it’s not my fault.”
“Okay, then. Why are you so pissed? These people seem nice so far.”
“Maybe I don’t like nice.”
“Would you rather they attack us? You’re not even trying to look grateful.”
“For what? Food? I don’t need it. Company? From a bunch of groundlings? Rescue? We saved ourselves.”
“They’re trying to make us comfortable.”
“They want us to feel comfortable,” Zanj said, “because they expect us to stay.”
Behind, the song ended to cheers. The goddesses watched, silent, growling many-toothed from the shadows. “We’ll get out of here.”
“I don’t think you understand the extent of our current fuckery. We have no ship. We can’t touch the Cloud—so if we want to build a ship to get us back, we’re stuck with what we can remember about basic metallurgy and physics. My batteries can’t recharge, and Gray—” She shook the bag that held him, and he sloshed inside. “I’ll be surprised if he can pull his body back together without the Cloud. Which leaves us a man down, while up there the Empress pulls farther ahead. Even if we can’t catch her, I refuse to sit here and play pig farmer.”
“We’ll get out.”
A sparrow—what Viv would have called a sparrow on Earth, its wings iridescent, chitinous here—launched itself from the rafters into the sunset. As the sky darkened, the grim shapes of orbiting battleships swelled in the twilight, like distant moons. As shadows shifted, the goddesses seemed to move.
“I know them,” Zanj said softly.
“Who?” Viv said, and then, “Oh.”
She nodded to each in turn, in greeting more than indication. “Old Tiger, who prowled between galactic arms. Heyshir, who sees from shadows. Al-Zayyd in her glory. The Black Bull. Not the only Suicide Queens, and not the names they gave themselves, but the Empress tracked down each one but these, and made me watch her kill them. I thought they died in battle. I hoped maybe they were out there fighting.”
“Your friends.”
“And here they are—statues in a temple. You see what happened, don’t you? They fell just like we did, and got stuck. They must have tried to leave, with their followers, their lovers and minions and children and soldiers, and failed again and again, until they gave up. And then they died, and generations of marrying and mixing later their descendants have become those sheep out there, so ready to offer hospitality and pastoral paradise. My friends gave up their names and their children forgot their stories. And if those women, those brilliant fierce women, couldn’t get out of here in all their lives, do you really think we’ll make it in three weeks?”
Below, the fiddlers and the drums started again, and there were cheers. The temple smelled of dust and cedar.
Viv said: “You might be wrong about them.” Candles flickered at the statues’ feet. “Maybe they didn’t give up.” The flames cast light through flower petals, prismatic, dancing. “Anyway, we won’t. I want to get home. You want out. We’ll make it.”
“Enjoy the party.” Zanj’s voice was more of a mask than her face. “We’ll start tomorrow.” And: “Here.” She thrust Gray’s bag sideways into her. “You take him. My shoulder’s tired.”
Which was a lie, but Viv took the bag. It weighed more than she expected, and pulled her sideways as she descended to the party.
She found Hong and Xiara sitting side by side by a fire, empty bowls on the ground by their knees, in a small clear space within that mass. Viv sat, raised her bowl to toast them, tucked in. “Here’s to survival. And to friendly locals. So long as they don’t drug us and try to steal our dreams.”
Xiara stared into the fire.
“Sorry. Just a joke.” Viv took a bite of seared paig. Delicious. “Come on, guys. We’re alive. The odds of surviving that crash sure weren’t good. We’re stuck, yes, but not forever.”
“I cannot feel the Cloud,” Hong said. “I recite my formulas, and they are only air.”
She chewed, swallowed. “Look, I manage without the Cloud all the time. We’ve come out of harder spots than this. There are no gods here, nothing trying to eat us. Not even Gray.” That fell even flatter than she had expected. “We just have to save ourselves. And we could have picked a worse place to catch our breath.”
That got Hong’s attention: riveted him to her, eyes dark, staring. He leaned forward, face ghost-story orange. “They don’t have souls, Viv. There’s no Cloud here. When they die, they die—unarchived, unremembered. They’re lost, and alone, and they don’t even mind.”
“Neither do I.”
“You’re different,” he said. “You’re—you’re of the Empress.”
“I’m of no one but myself, okay? I was born, like all these people, and I’ll probably die like them, too. They seem fine to me, even if they don’t have what you would call a soul.”
“If we had gone to the ’fleet, we would not be marooned here now.”
“No,” she admitted. “Your people would be halfway through round one of probes and prodding, and you’d probably be in prison somewhere. This still seems better.”
“They would have helped us.”
“You don’t believe that. Just watch. We’ll be back out in space again no problem in a few days, on the Empress’s heels, and think of all the stories you’ll have to tell your order.”
He stood smoothly. “I must meditate.” And, without a glance back at her half-voiced objections, he walked from the fireside into the shadows, alone.
She finished the paig, dropped her bowl, and leaned back on her elbows. “Xiara, I don’t know why everyone’s acting so weird.”
She reached for her hand, but Xiara’s slipped away. “I’d like to be alone.”
And then Viv was.
Okay, she told herself in the silence beside the crackling fire, under the cheers and songs. I get it. They’re upset. Doesn’t mean I have to be. She stood, slid back through the dancing crowd, and found herself another drink. And another. The little lizard-man serving the booze gave her a look when she got her fourth glass, but, hell, it tasted good.
“I get it,” she told Gray, who was a better listener than she’d expected when he was in a puddle in a bag. Bags of unconscious friends in fluid form didn’t get all weird and desert you for no reason. Okay, sure, there were reasons. She just didn’t want to face them. The fire was very bright. “I mean, Zanj has her thing. And, for Hong, this is like, he can’t see all of a sudden, and maybe he’ll die for real, which doesn’t sound so bad to me because it’s not like living as an uploaded brain is really living. Really. Except maybe it’s different if you grew up part of the Cloud. Anyway, he’s feeling lost, and Xiara, she was in the ship when it crashed, and she probably feels like she let us all down, and—hold on. I’ll be back.” The lizard guy tried to wave her off glass five, but she grabbed it anyway, stumbled back, plopped beside the bag. “They’re having a weird shitty day, we crashed a spaceship and we’re all in shock. Including me! But I don’t see why they have to be such dicks about it. We’re all in this together. Right, Gray?”
She patted the bag.
It did not slosh.
It did not slosh, because there was nothing in the bag to slosh. It was completely, sickeningly empty.
Oh no.
Viv stood, panicked; the fires and dancing and music spun around her, and the planetoid seemed to be spinning, too—did it spin? Had she noticed it spinning from orbit? The dead fleet in the sky shifted and bubbled but she was pretty sure most of that was her booze. Gray wasn’t anywhere. He hadn’t leaked out—hadn’t fallen—she’d been careful—hadn’t she been careful?
“Gray!” Her voice vanished in the music.
God, she was drunk. Even the buildings had started to wobble—not evenly like the stars and warships, though. Only one was really wobbling: the grain silo Yannis had pointed out before. The village’s food supply.
Good thing she was drunk, because it would be really bad if anything happened to that silo. She liked Refuge for many, many reasons, including this one: she could tell, here, what was good and what was bad, and, yes, that, that would definitely be bad.
Then she heard the villagers’ screams. It turned out she wasn’t the only one staring at the grain silo, which meant it wasn’t just shaking because she was drunk, which was a bad sign—and the screams rose as the silo tilted, cracked, and fell.
Viv didn’t remember running, later—just a tide of people tossing her flotsamlike through mazy backstreets, through choking demolition dust and airborne rice flour, to the edge of town, to the narrow cleft in the mountainside where the silo was.
Where the silo had been.
Its wreckage lay in piles, enormous toothmarked stone blocks tossed like packing foam about the slope. There should have been a flood of rice amid the dust and shattered rock, a year’s food for a hungry village, but only a few grains slipped under Viv’s feet.
Viv pushed to the front, knocking Refugers away—shoved past pitchforks pointed in, past Yannis in the lead, to reach the pale figure reclined atop the rubble, moaning and stroking his grotesquely swollen belly.
Viv shouted, “Stop!” though nobody had started anything yet. “I know him.”
Gray opened his eyes, blinked twice, and said, “Heya, Viv! Boss! Glad you made it! Man, isn’t this place great? All this food, jus’ lying around.”
Speech completed, he slumped back to the ground, and began to snore.
Viv looked from Gray, to Yannis, to the wreckage, to the villagers, to Gray again, but her eyes kept tracking past him, and there were so many villagers. They all looked angry, and, but—no, the ground wasn’t really shaking, don’t be silly, she knew earthquakes, she grew up with earthquakes, and this, sir, was no—
She made it to the bushes, at least, before she threw up.