THE GRAND RECTOR disappeared, leaving her threat behind, and a dissipating cloud of golden light. But Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter saw her still, not just the ebbing projector fog the Rector used to cast her image across space, but also out in the black past Groundswell’s skin, approaching through the wrecked fleet of the Suicide Queens: the Mirrorfaith, cathedrals with gunports open, fighters darting brilliant as dragonflies above a lake, as minnows in a stream. (Dragonflies and minnows that breathed flame hot enough to melt suns.) With yet another sort of eyes she peered into the minds of those ships, into the Cloud beneath their physical shadow. Drives wove potential to momentum; Groundswell’s deep reflexes, now hers, calculated their probable future paths, built firing solutions for long-silent guns. She peered deeper, tried to pierce the ’fleet’s shipmind cores, but her attention slid off the chanting circles of monks clustered around each mind, shielding systems from attack.
At fireside in the Orncamp, age eight, Xiara had leaned forward, eager to hear grandmothers’ tales of the ’faith and its great fleet, relic and weapon and temple all at once. And now they faced her, these holy warriors and their vicious queen come a-questing.
Back in the world of matter she held Viv with weak arms clad in skin so fragile compared with her hull that she felt as if she had been grated raw; with imperfect, muffled ears, with eyes of variable resolution and strange depth of focus, she heard, saw, Viv pale, her pulse rise, felt her breath quick but measured, parsed pain of her wounds from the chemical cascade of her sweat. Even without the advantage of her systems, Viv would not have been so hard for Xiara to read: she thought herself complex, but she was pure, too, as a nocked arrow, her only mystery the mystery of the archer’s will.
Once, Viv had seemed so strange. Viv, who saved her life, who held herself close and distant, queen of a faraway star. Now, Xiara knew her, and felt strange to herself.
To be a daughter of Orn, the Chief her mother once said, was to see many worlds at once, and walk many paths.
She did not think this all in order, but at once, overlapping, a flowering of thought in the second’s gap after the Grand Rector’s speech and before Zanj threw Gray aside. The pirate queen stamped her foot on Groundswell hard enough to dent the ablative alloy surrounding its monomolecule hull, and screamed: “Fuck!”
Viv tried to pull away from Xiara, toward Zanj, but staggered when she leaned too far into her bad leg. Xiara did not let her fall. “We have to save him.”
Zanj’s raised eyebrows made ripples across her forehead. “Save him? He did this to us. I knew someone messed with the antenna. My work was perfect. The boy must have set up some subsystem. When I spent my battery trying to hop out, he harvested the power—used it to drive his distress call. Your friend screwed us. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
“He thought you would leave us,” Viv said with the slow dawning tone of a woman unraveling a riddle. “He thought this was the only way off Refuge. To get me to his fleet.”
Gray groaned, recovering his form, thinner after his wrestling match with Zanj. “That must be why Xiara couldn’t sense him in the ship. He went straight for his beacon, and left.”
“He tried to warn me.” Viv again, with that still-unraveling tone. “I wonder how early he pieced everything together about Yannis, about Nioh. He was drawing maps to the village, to the mountain. Everything a strike team might need. And I didn’t see it.”
Zanj spat. “Those monks warped his soul half to hell.”
“Are you telling me you would have come back, if you’d escaped?”
Zanj’s answer was a moment of silent, pacing, tail-lashing fury. Her eyes, when she returned Viv’s gaze, were great and golden. “I want to get you to the Empress. Which we can’t very well do now.”
“We have the Fallen Star. The fastest ship in the galaxy.”
Xiara had to squint her shipsenses to look at Zanj—the woman seemed little different physically, but with that immense sucking wound of the Star in her grip, she hurt the mind, a wash of data overloading all Xiara’s systems. She tasted blue. She smelled acid heavy as a mother’s slap. “If we leave now, those ships will follow us. We’ll outpace them, but even an idiot would feel their bow wave through the Cloud. The Empress will know someone’s coming. Good-bye, element of surprise. Good-bye, Gray’s chances of getting home. And yours.”
Xiara saw Viv hesitate. Saw the conclusions fire in her brain. “We have to get Hong back.”
“Are you paying attention? He betrayed us.”
“Because he thought you would betray us first.”
“Whatever I would have done—he did it. We can’t rescue him. That’s not just a small battle group out there—it’s a whole fleet.”
“Are you saying you can’t take a fleet?”
Zanj laughed, teeth bared, haughty and invincible—but checked the answer she almost gave by reflex. “Oh no. You’re not getting me that easy again.”
“He’s saved my life a dozen times. I can’t just let him go.”
“Viv.” Zanj stopped in front of her, and stared into her eyes. “You would have let him go anyway. You’re letting all this go. This is your shot at getting home. Hong always would have gone back to the ’faith to tell his story, and he always would have ended up in chains. You can’t save people from themselves.”
’Faith ships slid through space, surrounding Groundswell. Viv grew taut and still. Xiara had seen archers freeze this way, too, eyes darting from target to target, sorting priorities, measuring the depths of fear. You would have let him go. Not just him, of course. To find her way home, Viv would have to let Gray go, and Zanj. And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter.
She had known, of course. Two nights after they first lay together, Xiara, breathing herself back into her body, into the euphoric afterglow of an instrument beautifully played, looked down at Viv, asleep, mouth soft-parted, naked. She wondered at the curve of her neck, the swell of her cheek, at the tiny oval scar below her collarbone that was the only wound Viv bore which had not come from an Empress, no battle-wound but a child’s scar, a soft flawless flaw—and felt something shift in her that was not desire.
Neither was it song-love, then. They had moved too fast for that, had clutched each other too hard, had been altogether too clear in what they’d asked, each from each, and what they’d offered, taken. Xiara needed a body to remind her what bodies were; Viv was alone in a world far different from the strange, cruel place to which she was so eager to return, and needed a spar to clutch. They were warriors. They had asked, given, received. But that night Xiara lay beside her, drank her in, and felt a rush not of a leg curled across her leg, but of Viv’s leg, in specific, curled across hers, in specific. She had left Orn to sail the stars—but she had left Orn, too, to see this strange wanderer home.
She left everything behind, to lose her.
She had not thought it would be so soon.
“I will go.” Her voice was so soft it was lost in the fight between Viv and Zanj. “I will go.” Repeating the words was harder than saying them the first time—and when she heard the deafening silence after, she realized she had shouted at them, with her voice, and through the Cloud. They were looking at her. Viv was looking at her—for what felt like the first time. Each time their eyes met felt like the first. “I will lead them away.”
Was there a word that meant trapped, sure as a gator-cat in a thorncage, unable to escape no matter how she pulled at the teeth that bound her—trapped like that, but in a good way? She would like to learn that word, or find it, or make it up.
“Xiara,” Viv said, and many other things besides within that name.
“This is your chance. You need Gray to get you through the Citadel. You need Zanj to fly. And I can hold them off. Distract them.”
“One ship won’t do it,” Zanj said into Viv’s silence. “Even Groundswell. There are too many of them.”
“I won’t use one ship,” she said. “I’ll use them all.” She whispered with a voice that was not of her body—and across space, throughout the stretching wreckage of the Suicide Queens’ fleet, other chattering whispers came in answer.
Viv hugged her, her eyes black and wet and wide, her pulse up, endorphins rushing, a mess of adrenaline and pain and love. “No. You said they’d take you apart if you tried again.”
The whispers merged as dead systems woke, as engines touched the Cloud for the first time in three thousand years. She had felt Zanj’s small Question as a second body around her own, warm and welcoming, like sliding into a bath. Groundswell, its colossal ruined hulk, the shattered mirrormaze of its mind, was a lake to that. And the fleet webbing itself together under Groundswell’s guidance was an ocean. “I was scared when I touched the fleet. I wanted so badly to stay … a person. To stay the person I thought I was. To stay with you. But I was born to swim.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Of course you are,” Xiara said. “You’re going home. It’s what you want. Isn’t it?”
Viv nodded, against her cheek. She was crying. Yes. And those were tears, burning in Xiara’s eyes.
“Go conquer your world. Thank you for bringing me to mine.”
The whispers built: the ocean deeper than all measure, waiting for her to break the dam that held it back. Alerts, warnings, damage reports, status indicators, spoke to her from across the star system. She was huge now, and growing. Yet somehow Viv kissed her, gathered her, and encompassed her completely in her arms.
Zanj held out her hand. The Fallen Star burned black and rainbow, preparing to run. Outside, the ’faith fleet warmed its guns, and fighters streaked through the black.
Viv kissed her once more, and accepted.
The Star turned on an axis that, not long ago, Xiara would have thought confusing. Zanj folded inside it, and Gray—but Viv could not fold, so it flowed over her instead, long threads of black claiming her body, sliding under Xiara’s fingers, parting them by microns and forever. She knew it hurt, she smelled the pain, but she saw it nowhere in Viv’s eyes.
The ship’s skin parted their lips, and they were gone.
The Star flew.
And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter dove into the ocean of her fleet.