XIARA CROUCHED IN boulder shadows and wished she had her spear, or her rifle, or her robots, or her ship, or Viv. But here, a million million miles from home, she had only herself—body, formidable; mind, adequate; soul, currently inaccessible—and the monster by her side. Viv was gone.
“They came this way,” Gray said. “I can smell them.” Chiefs and maidens but Xiara missed being able to do that—she would never have called it smell, but on the ship she could have traced Viv and Hong by their heat, the cells they shed, the whine of their nerves. Viv had called the experience “managed synesthesia” when Xiara described it, the Question collapsing telemetry data to her native senses—but no less true. The chants, the exercises, the blood of Orn had crafted in Xiara reflexes for mastering space and Cloud, but those great geometries did not play on her soulstrings like the little changes, the grace notes in the soug. On the Question, Viv smelled of elderflower and warm bread, and here, Xiara could not smell her anymore. So she followed the monster, even if she did not trust him. “The trail ends here.” He pointed at a patch of bare ground, a slope of grassless rock without seam or joint.
“I’m going to look.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Before he reached the end of the sentence she was already moving, Ornchiefsdaughter striding from cover sharp and wary as a spring hare at the whiff of baying hounds. She was unarmed only in the vulgar sense. When you stand unarmed, the world must be your weapon, as the Chief her mother said. And though Xiara never had her mother’s strength, her breadth, her canniness, she had seen more worlds in weeks than the Chief her mother had dreamed in all her years.
She kicked the ground. It did not give. But it did not give strangely—more like metal than rock. “Monster! Help me.”
Gray shook his head, from cover. “I’m not a—look, just get back over here!”
She kicked the rock again, and still it refused to move.
“If something’s wrong,” the monster said, “we can ask about it in the morning.”
“Viv may be dead by morning.”
“She’s snuck off up the mountain before. You said so yourself.”
She did not contest his point. But Viv—Viv of the cunning smile and the sharp eye and the jokes no one understood—had left her bed on the first night, and in the morning Xiara had asked why, and accepted an answer that was no answer. Then Viv left her bed a second night, and in the morning Xiara asked, and accepted an answer that was no answer.
No Ornchiefsdaughter would be denied the truth three times.
On the second night, Xiara crept from bed and saw Viv climb the mountain alone, and come back down; on the third, she’d seen her take Hong, and so she herself went back for Gray, whose monster nose could follow trails her own could not. Even if he was at heart a lazy child. “Hey,” he said. “I need rest. We have work tomorrow. Yannis wants us to close the last of the fissure and start plowing. If I’m exhausted—”
“Come help me, monster.”
“Okay! Fine.” He slouched from the shadows, chastened, lit pale silver by the shipmoons above. She remembered those ships—how they felt from the inside, their voices, their power and their rage. Remembered what she had almost become, drawn into them. She did not shudder with this feeling that was almost joy and almost fear—she was hunting, and hunts were no place for a hunter’s ghosts. “Would you at least stop calling me monster?”
“You held my people hostage for years.”
“I made them happy! I gave them what they wanted, and all I did in return was record what they wanted.”
“You robbed their freedom.”
“Oh, sure, their freedom to fight and die in a broken wasteland. Some freedom.”
“You took them from their homes.”
He looked over to her, and for once his too-large features, his too-big eyes, were truly unreadable. “I didn’t know then.”
She almost believed him, but this, too, would be best discussed after the hunt. “Touch the ground here. It is wrong.”
He knelt, spread his hands out like lily pads, and leaned into the bare rock. “Look. I—when I first fell to Orn, I didn’t understand it. It looked so … boring. Everything stayed itself all the time. And everyone wanted so many things you couldn’t have—basic stuff. I thought I could help. I made mistakes.”
Clearly they did not teach monsters the silence of the hunt. “Do you feel it? It’s—”
“Hollow,” he said. “Yes.” His lily-pad hands sprouted small tendrils at their edges, and those dug into the ground. “Weird. There’s a seam.” Something cracked within the rock, not at all like stone cracked—more like when lightning struck one of Old Orn’s crystal towers.
A perfectly straight line split the slope in two and it rolled apart soundlessly, both doors vanishing into the rock, to reveal a shallow cave which ended in a wall of shadow.
“Um,” Gray said. “Look, we don’t know what this is. We should go back, get help maybe, ask if anyone back in Refuge has seen anything like—”
Xiara marched into the cave, through the wall, and Gray, too late to stop her, ran after.
Shadow parted around her like a thicket, and she found herself in a ship.
This was not a conclusion drawn from evidence, as Viv always sought the why of things. Xiara knew this was a ship, because it spoke like ships spoke to her blood. She answered at once from her soul’s depths, as her secret muscles woke and moved, as fire burned beneath her skin.
A ship, yes, not hers—so vast and alien Zanj’s vessel seemed a raft at best. This one ship, itself, was the equal of all that ruined fleet in orbit. Xiara’s blood sought purchase on it, but her blood was too thin a rope to rein such majesty. For a moment it even sought to rule her, flooding back along the link, a great hand to climb her spine and wield her as its instrument.
But she was a daughter of Orn, and her mothers’ mothers bound her. Fly the ship, do not be flown.
She had lost control, in that great wrecked fleet overhead. It called to her and she failed and crashed them here. She would not let it happen again.
She stilled her secret muscles, made her blood, what Viv called her implants, what Zanj had called her nanome, sleep. She came back to herself, slumped against the white wall of the Aft Anterior Hull Access Corridor 2773-A, Western Cloud Antenna Interproximal, and realized she’d been screaming. There was a siren, too—and red lights.
Intruder alert.
Gray knelt over her, holding her up, eyes wide, an expression that, if he were not a monster, she would have described as scared. “Xiara. What’s wrong?”
“Ship,” she said, which she thought should serve.
“It’s broken.”
“Not ours.” Idiot. “This one. A ship.” Mothers, why wouldn’t he understand. “Everywhere.” Footsteps. She smelled them coming—burnt oranges, copper wire, the fresh grassy snap of a live cricket in the mouth. Tried to warn him, but the words weren’t there.
“Gray.”
A voice—whose? Turn your head, focus the eyes. Ornchiefsdaughter, pilot yourself, if you can. There, at the corner of the hall, stood a hulking shape, aged and bent, with stubby broken horns: Nioh, flanked by two glassy-eyed villagers of Refuge. Behind those three, two white webs—intruder containment point defense, words bubbling out of her contact with the ship, a knowledge that slid snakelike inside her, nested—webs that peeled off the walls, leaving no hollows to mark where they had been. Nano-thickness immobilizing restraints, probabilistically nonlethal, used in case of primary modifier impairment. She didn’t know what most of those words meant—they sounded like the way Viv talked sometimes—but she knew they were dangerous.
“Nioh?” Gray asked. “Gatyen?” Of course Gray recognized them. They had worked side by side. The villagers’ faces were blank, and an orange light played around their temples—but the thickset elder moved with purpose. Gray was talking fast, eager: “We didn’t mean to break anything. We’re just looking for our friends. We think Viv came down this way. Honest, we don’t want to cause anybody any trouble.” Hands splayed, face open. These were his friends. They couldn’t want to hurt him.
Nioh signaled with one hand, and the webs darted forward.
One caught Gray’s arm, and wormed up the limb toward his mouth; Gray snatched the other out of the air before it could hit Xiara, and stared down in panic as it wove around his fingers, up his arm, clinging, constricting. He tried to shake the webs free, and failed. Tried to claw them off, but they stuck together. Xiara took one step back toward the door—she should have run, but fear froze her, and loyalty. She could not leave him.
Gray frowned at the webs that covered his body. He darkened, like the Chief did when solving a problem. Then his skin bubbled silver between the strands of web, and burst, snaring the web inside him; the webs wriggled, scrambled, beneath his skin, but they could not escape. He chewed, somehow, with his whole body, and swallowed, and stood once more unhindered against Nioh. “That wasn’t nice,” he said. “I’m sure this is all a mistake. But I think you should tell me where our friends are now.”
“Surrender.” Nioh’s voice was deep. She gestured again, and more webs detached smoothly from the hall, all up and down its length. And Nioh herself grew: armorfields closed her skin, and her staff sprouted a spearhead dripping light. “It will be easier for you.”
Gray swelled. In seconds, he grew a foot in height, and across the shoulders. He did not have muscles, and his skin wasn’t skin at all—but he grew tissue, strong and tight-wound as cables, to move him through space. His hands thickened, and his fingers sprouted long yellow claws. Red eyes blazed from his child’s face. “If you have our friends,” he said, “please don’t do this. Just send them out. Whatever you’ve done to Gatyen, whatever you’ve done to Viv, I don’t want to hurt you.”
Xiara marched forward then, and joined him. She felt a rush as she did so, the vertigo of standing beside Gray as if he were a clansman. But he had fought for them, again and again. He saved her on Orn, devouring Pride drones. He had sheltered Viv. She would not abandon him now.
Nioh glanced at her, and her broad mouth parted to reveal blunt, heavy teeth.
“Xiara,” Gray said calmly. “Run.”
“I can fight.”
“Not against these guys.” He sounded cautious, tense, calculating. Was this how a monster sounded when he was afraid? “Find Zanj. Tell her what happened. She’ll know what to do.”
Xiara felt the first trickle of her own fear, like the first raindrops before a gouging storm. It made her want to stay and fight. But Gray had withstood Ornclan attack for almost a year without weakening, and he sounded scared. And though Xiara knew, as all Ornclan children knew, the ways of battle, her mothers and teachers had not trained her and raised her simply to fight.
They trained her and raised her to win.
Sometimes, to win, you had to lose. Sometimes, to win, you had to run for reinforcements, and trust your fellows to guard your back.
“I will go for her,” she said. “Fight well.” She did not add monster. Did not even think it.
She ran.
Behind her, Nioh bellowed in a tongue Xiara did not know. She did not care about the words, or about the webs flitting after her. It was not her duty to care. Gray stood behind her. He would hold, while he could manage. Her duty was to run.
She leapt from the cave into the night, skidded down the slope. Flashes of uncanny light and the noise of tearing metal chased her into darkness—darkness that was dark no longer as her eyes opened, adjusted, as she kenned the ground beneath. Shipmoons lit the mountainside: noontime bright to her, as the Ornblood woke. A hypersensitive metacornea, Viv had suggested when Xiara described how she could see in perfect dark, form blooming from nothing as needed. Viv and her magic nonsense words. Xiara’s eyes worked, that was all, as her feet adjusted to stable and unstable ground, skipped rabbits’ holes and cracks in stone without conscious intervention. Xiara was a firm runner, steadiest, strongest in the clan.
Wherever Viv came from, her grandmothers had wrapped her in different enchantments, handed down different teachings through their blood. With the lights off in a windowless room, Viv saw nothing, stumbled blindfolded groping for walls, shuffling over carpet, growing peevish as Xiara laughed, as she slipped from her touch, circling in what to Viv was dark and to Xiara daylight clear, touching her now on the small of the back, now on the side, now brushing her bare arm with a kiss. And when Viv lunged for her and caught nothing, and stumbled into the space only for Xiara to slide behind her, catch her, draw her close, kiss her and press her against the wall and feel Viv’s enchantments, her scruples, the tensions that distant nightmare world had fixed beneath her flesh begin to melt, as Xiara pressed her leg between her legs, and held Viv’s wrists against the wall above her head with one hand … And in the morning after Viv was the same as ever, as distant and assured, precise and complete, pretending herself unchanged, this beautiful, strange, hard, soft woman who never stopped fighting, yet would never kill.
Xiara would save her. Whatever it cost.
She heard a flutter above, as of birds’ wings or a thrown bolo cutting air, and ducked behind a tree—so the web, brilliant blue in the shipmoons’ light, fell on the tree instead of her, and crushed its trunk to splinters. Another web arced overhead—Xiara sprang from her shelter to a cliff, from the cliff to a tree, caught a branch, fell, caught another and dropped and heard, behind her, the wet slap of web on rock. How many more could she dodge? How many were there?
She had made good time. Ten more minutes’ hard run would bring her to the village. She risked a glance back. White webs gathered on the cliff’s edge. Twenty. Thirty. More.
They sprang.
And here she was skidding down an open slope, without cover.
The webs arrowed into the sky, spread winglike at the apex of their arc, adjusted to aim, then curled themselves back into spears and flew.
If she had a shield, she could have blocked them. If she had a spear, she could have parried them. If a rifle, shot them from the sky. If she had cover, she could have hidden behind it. But she was running alone and unarmed on a mountain slope.
When you stand unarmed, the world must be your weapon.
She was not running down a mountain. She was running down a ship: a single vessel of vast confounding mind, dormant and thousands of years mad. She did not know the true name that would master it; without the Cloud to steel and support her, she would crumble in moments before its will. But she did not need to master it. Just to nudge it a little.
She woke her blood, and told the ship: move.
The pain took her at once, the vastness of the ship and its many wounds. Death looped forever in its mind as angels fell and Bleed-mouths opened and the Empress, glorious green, fled. Xiara slipped, fell, struck her forehead on a rock, rolled scraped and torn down the mountainside, thinking, this is it.
She woke a timeless instant later to the ringing of bells.
Xiara opened her eyes. Pressed arms against rock to force herself up to her knees, commanded legs and back and belly to raise her to her feet. Around her, trees swayed. Boulders rocked upslope; gravel and ground sifted, settling after the convulsion she had caused.
All around her lay the mounded webs, spreading, seeking, clutching rock to powder. But Xiara herself was free.
She picked through the webs, limping, toward the village. She could breathe and walk, though her side hurt, though her foot twisted. She wanted to stop, to rest. She had time for neither.
When she reached the village square, the first door opened.
A girlchild stood inside in silhouette, dark against dark save her glassy open eyes and the orange light that circled her forehead like a crown. Arms at her side, mouth open, her body rigid as a carving’s, she ran toward Xiara.
Xiara ran faster.
A second door opened, and a third. An old woman vaulted through a window. Bare feet slapped bare earth; hands reached for her out of an alley and she caught them, shifted weight, tossed the lunger—a little lizard-man she remembered serving wine that first night—to the ground, saw him skid, heard him moan. She spared him a stab of sympathy, but she had to duck away from another lunge and run farther, faster, commanding her joints to ignore their pain, her muscles to ignore their damage, blinking through blood from the cut on her forehead, numbing the ache of her broken rib, scrubbing oxygen, suspending thought.
The world simplified to rhythm. Feet. Night. Wind. Slower. (Stride imbalance. Stabilizers of the ankle strained. Steady. Compensate. Like skirting a black hole: easy, if you know how. The Ornblood knows.) She ran through Refuge, villagers after her jumping from rooftop to rooftop, eerie silent, their footfalls like rain, minds suspended, bodies ridden by their elders’ will.
Open distance. Keep pace.
After a mile, her knee seized, on schedule—which was to say, at the least convenient moment. There stood the antenna, just out of reach. A bedroll spread before it, and on that bedroll, sound asleep: Zanj.
The rainstorm neared, the rushing feet, the open mouths. She couldn’t keep it up. She could. A few more steps. Black spots in vision—bad sign.
She stumbled. Fell to her knees.
The bedroll lay before her. Zanj snoring. Teeth bare through lips. Xiara heard a whisper in the night behind her, a sense of approaching mass—a hammer struck the earth, and she turned, and saw Nioh recover from her landing and rise, smoking, furious, scarred, one horn broken off, one eye swollen, injured from her battle with Gray, but still vast and strong. And advancing. The orange light that bound the villagers burned around her hands. She worked them like marionettes.
Nioh spoke, but Xiara’s heart beat too loud for her to hear the words. She thought of Gray, the boy who was a monster, who fought to give her this chance. She thought of Viv. She wondered if they were still alive. She could not hear herself when she shouted, “Zanj!”
No answer. Nioh advanced a step, light-spear dripping in her hand, and the villagers closed in, breathing heavy, sweating, hungry, silent save for animal sounds.
Xiara shook Zanj’s arm. Pounded on her chest, on her stomach. This woman could shatter gods, if she would just wake up.
Xiara collapsed, weeping, on her chest.
Claws stroked her hair.
She looked up into a pair of red-gold eyes, and a vicious smile on a scarred face.