VIV DROWNED THROUGH space.
The Fallen Star refused to let her die. It moved against her, through her, infinitesimal gears feathering her skin like caterpillar hairs. It fed oxygen to her blood, it part-filled her lungs, it swallowed her and held her whole and cushioned her organs against their acceleration. But it did not make her feel like she was breathing. It did not preserve the illusion that her blood was still driven by her, rather than by itself. The Star pulled her through the Cloud, a woman become a vector, undying, undead, unable even to cry, tasting the last pressure of Xiara’s kiss.
She lost senses she did not know she had until she gained them back. Time. Proprioceptive unity, the sense of her body as an integrated whole—she felt as if she’d been dismembered. Perhaps she had, for ease of transit. She lost the left part of the world, then the right. The well-ordering of memory: ringing the bell on the Stock Exchange, her first time in a Jesus camp bed, stone sober, observing herself as Susan sank between her thighs, a fistfight age eight, drowning here, walking out of her house age sixteen with nowhere in mind to go and no plan for coming home, in jumbled order, in no order at all. In the dark.
After who could say how long, she became aware of light.
She did not see it, not really. Her eyes were not open. But still she saw … an image triggered in her optic nerve, a grayish flickering shape on a mottled surface not quite like stone. Her shadow.
She tried to turn, and the image whirled, though her body remained frozen within the Star. Her inner ear suggested that she moved, pebbles seemed to crunch beneath her feet, but she was still.
She stood, and did not stand, in a chamber made of almost-stone, and in its center burned a gritty, blocky fire, its flames rising grayscale, and across the fire sat a suggestion of a form that was not precisely Gray.
He looked up, his eyes shining with poorly rendered reflections. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried to make this place more comfortable, but Zanj needs all the processing power she can get. She’s driving us so fast—I’ve never moved like this before. I didn’t know anyone could. We’ll catch the Empress, and I’d thought that was impossible. But I don’t want you going mad on the way.” He poked the fire with a stick, and sent up voxelated sparks.
She wanted to weep, she wanted to clutch Xiara, who wasn’t there anymore, whom she could still taste. She wanted to curse Hong, to scream her frustration to whatever Cloud spirits and small gods had gathered to hear them. But what was the point? It was done. They were gone. She had always been leaving. The knowledge turned in her stomach. She made herself sick. “Thank you,” she said instead of all the other, worse things she felt. At least, she thought she’d spoken the words aloud, and heard them, though her lungs insisted she had no breath to voice them, and her mouth would not open to set them free. A rock sat across the fire from Gray, glistening not at all the way real rocks glistened when struck by real flame. She did not sit down. She paced, stretched. The motion made her dizzy, and did not relieve the tension her real muscles felt, in a place that was not this place. “What is this? A game? Virtual reality?”
“More or less. It’s so inconvenient that you don’t have a soul—we can’t address it directly. We’re working this into your nerves, adjusting your neural homunculus without manipulating the flesh. It’s all wet and squishy in there—gruesome.” The simulation was too low-res for him to shudder, so he seemed to have a kind of seizure instead. “I don’t understand how you operate.”
“Comfortably.” She sat to wait for the dizziness to pass. The fire spat sparks. She reached toward it, fanned her fingers, and felt real warmth. “So, we’ll make it.”
“Home sweet home.” He nodded. “I didn’t dare dream of this. And you made it possible. I could throw you a parade, cook you a feast, but…” He spread his arms to indicate their surroundings: a cave just large enough for the two of them to sit, walls marked with crude animal paintings, an indifferently rendered starscape visible through a narrow opening meant as a chimney for simulated smoke she couldn’t smell. Not that she could smell anything else here. “I do the best with what I have.”
“It’s wonderful. Thank you.” Outside, something some sound designer somewhere thought sounded like a wolf howled. Helpless, locked, she remembered Hong, chained, Hong, who sought freedom, liberation, knowledge—who had saved her life time and again, and then betrayed her, and himself. She remembered Xiara, the wheels within wheels within her eyes, how she’d screamed the first time she touched the fleet, and the resignation in her voice when she told Viv to go.
Viv was going home. And so was Gray. “What’s it like? Her ship, I mean.”
“You’ll see. I—I’m not sure I can describe it in ways you’d understand. Not that I think you’re not smart enough. Just, I didn’t have a body most of the time I was there, or eyes like yours. I remember data, high-amplitude telemetry streams, information. For me, the palace was a flower blooming on all axes at once through time, writing and rewriting itself, bubbles of memory and purpose forming to split and splitting to form. I wished, and it was. It was…” He dropped his hands, and stared into the fire. “Perfect.”
“Better than Refuge?”
His eyes darted up: gray as the rest of him in here, and reflecting gray flame. “Different. I’ve never been a man before—even something like one. It was … odd to live with those limits. One shape, and only so much strength and time in a single day. Friends to help, or to disappoint, or devour. It was scary. Not bad scary. Just, scary.”
“I know what you mean.” She tasted the ghost of Xiara’s kiss. “Gray, why did she kick you out?”
He glanced up from the fire, scared, and his form derezzed. She imagined being left here alone, waiting for the fire to burn out—worse, imagined returning to that drowning dark.
“No! I’m sorry, I don’t—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
His outline grew steady once more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wasn’t expecting that. What did I tell you? I forget. I’ve lied a lot since I left home. I told the Ornclans I was a god.”
“You said you’d spoiled her meal.”
“That’s … right. More or less. You’ve seen what she does to the worlds she breaks?”
“Like Orn?”
“Worse,” he said. “Orn was a rush job. Mostly, she waits for them to ripen. That’s what she calls it: the century or so before they draw Bleed, when their network’s as tangled and creative as it can get before they hit the boundary condition—tiny republics surging through the galaxy’s empty corners as if they were the first. There’s always a chance they’ve come up with something she can use: some weapon, some new principle to perfect her powers, some shield the Bleed can’t overcome.
“And when they’re ripe, she harvests them. That’s what we’re for—one of the things we’re for. We eat and archive worlds. We take them apart to learn how they work, how they think.
“She sent me to a little culture, twenty worlds, asteroid colonies, a few orbitals. A simple mission, my first solo: to harvest what was useful, so She could shatter the rest. But I … I liked them. Their music. The games they played. The little stupid sculptures they made for mating partners. Their children sang at school to help them memorize the characters they used to write. They made amazing food, spicier than you could conceive, skin-melting curries, they had this carnivorous migratory lizard that tasted kind of like duck but better and if you crisped the skin right, just—ah.” He kissed his fingertips. “So I seeded myself through their network, and when the time came, I ruined it. The collapse started with a little thing, a knot of code. It spread through the Cloud, undid their communications systems, scattered their fledgling minds to madness. The lines that bound their worlds across the void snapped. I ate memory banks and factories. The civilization fell back centuries. They’ll piece it all together again someday—or maybe not, since they’ve mined out most of their surface metals. But they’ll live. So here I am.”
“You…” She wasn’t certain how to finish that sentence.
“Destroyed a people. And saved them. When I was done they weren’t developed enough to be worth eating—they wouldn’t be ripe for centuries, if ever. She cast me out into the void for it. That’s why I gathered dreams and nightmares on Orn. I thought if I showed Her another way, if I made up for the meal I’d spoiled, She might forgive me. I don’t think that anymore. When, if, She finds that I’ve come back, She’ll kill me. But I’ll see my family again, and they can try to hide me, and beg mercy in my name.”
“You still want to go home.”
“Of course,” he said. His eyes were flat and shiny in the low-res firelight, and Viv wished she could see them in the real world, wished she could read them. “I’m a Gray of Grayframe. I serve my Lady. I live on Her ship. Without that, what am I?”
“Xiara’s monster,” she replied. “Gatyen’s friend. My friend. You danced with spiders on a corpse the size of an island. You fed our ship. You learned to sing. You’re more than someone’s tool. You could go anywhere.”
“Well, what about you? Where are you going?”
He didn’t ask it viciously. If he had, she would have closed down.
She stared into the fire, and remembered the drunk she’d felt when she looked at Xiara, and the vine that had grown from that drunkenness to wrap around her body, and sink its roots into her heart—and the desperate confusion she’d felt when Xiara told her to leave. No. We’re not done yet. There has to be more than this.
But of course there wasn’t.
She thought, too, of Hong helping her climb, Hong saving her from the Pride, Hong her ally and friend, Hong bleeding out in that eggshell room on High Carcereal. The fear in his eyes, the shame, in chains, of his betrayal. She’d helped him escape Pride drones and his own people, and cross the galaxy, and he’d turned against her because he knew, of course, she would not stay.
Where are you going?
She sat by the fire, drowning, and tried to remember. Her enemies. Her plans. Her family. Magda.
But in the end, all she said was “Home.”