THEY REACHED THE Empress’s ship as it neared the Citadel.
Viv, seated by the simulated fire, toasting a simulated marshmallow, first noticed they’d arrived by the improved resolution in her sim: color crept into the stone walls, the night air chilled. Her marshmallow crisped gold, then, because she was holding it too close, caught fire. As she cursed and blew out the flame, Zanj appeared, Zanj in her full dimensionality, shoulders sagged, fur dull with exhaustion, tail drooping. “Kids,” she said. “We made it.”
Gray jumped up, sniffed the air. “You did it! I can smell home. I can hear the song. Zanj!” He hugged her in a rush of limbs. She looked down as if confused by the gesture. “Thank you.”
Whatever response Zanj had been about to offer, she thought better of it. “Hold on. The next part might feel a little strange.”
The cave dissolved, replaced with space—more or less. Behind them, stars pricked gaping velvet black. Ahead, the universe was an empty gray curve, vast beyond measure and webbed with cracks, not entirely unlike the surface of Viv’s burnt marshmallow if it had been hundreds of light-years on a side. Though the curve was dark, its mass dazzled, like a snowfield.
“The Citadel walls,” Zanj said. “Don’t everybody thank me all at once.”
“She built that?”
“Build is the wrong word,” Gray said, rapt. “The whole Grayframe together couldn’t build that in a thousand years, if you gave us a hundred stellar masses to chew and build it with. But the Empress commands the Cloud, and the Cloud describes the Citadel into being: a surface more mathematical than physical, a boundary condition on the outside universe.”
“That doesn’t sound less intimidating than build.”
“It’s not,” Zanj said.
“There!” If Gray had a body, he would have been pointing excitedly, but he didn’t, so it took Viv a moment to see what he meant. “There it is!”
Viv knew on an intellectual level that scale was hard to judge in space. Humans measured size with a bunch of instinctive tricks like binocular parallax that worked fine for stuff roughly human-scale: dogs, houses, aircraft carriers. These tricks failed for things meaningfully larger than people or farther away than people tended to be, like mountains, or moons. While there was no convenient moon nearby against which to judge, Viv would have laid most of her fortune that the ship beneath them was considerably larger than Earth’s. Or than Earth itself, for that matter.
Jupiter might be closer to the mark, though misleading, since the planet wasn’t hollow and the Empress’s ship was. Judging from what Viv had seen so far, the Imperial aesthetic, which Viv decided she shared, could be summed up as “Monster Lace.” Crystal arches the size of continents, filigree webs, vast refractive snowflake spans arced by green fire: a wire globe with spikes growing inward toward a burning hole, a ring of bent light around factual, essential, eternal black.
That was the stolen Rosary bead. Through there was home.
Everyone she ever loved or hated, every triumph, every disaster, every night she’d slept or spent sleepless, every ship she’d ever sailed, every run she’d ever taken and every problem she’d solved before High Carcereal, that sphere held them all. Somewhere in there, her friends thought she was dead. Somewhere in there, a world waited for her return.
If you looked at it that way, it made sense how much she’d lost to get here. How much she’d give up to go back.
She would not let herself cry in front of Zanj, or Gray.
“Viv,” Gray said. “Are you okay?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Zanj answered for her.
The Star slid down, dizzyingly fast, toward the ship. As they drew alongside, Viv’s stupid mammal tricks started working again. The stellar object became landscape, the landscape became a structure, and if Viv could have breathed, her breath would have stopped in her throat as she comprehended its scale. “Where should we go?” Zanj asked. And Gray suggested, “The memory bay. I’ll paint it for you.”
They swept over what Viv had taken at a distance for filigree: conduits broad as oceans, coursing with green light. “Did you build this one?”
“Yes.” Gray’s voice rang with pride. “This, we built. Took a day and we ate a star to do it: good star, too, one of the crunchy ones.”
“Crunchy?”
“Don’t ask,” Zanj said. “You don’t want to get them started on stars.”
“Sixth or seventh generation. Lots of heavy elements, a dirty burn. You know it’s horrible for you, but you can’t help yourself. Like when you wrap bacon around, you know. Things. Like more bacon. Go left. Now down a bit—good.”
They settled beside an arc of crystal hull. “Okay, Viv. Do your thing.” And for the first time in she did not know how long, she could move. The Star bulged around her arm, bubbled out, touched the palace hull, made a seal. Viv could not breathe, but she could raise her arm. Stretch out her hand.
The crystal hull felt glassy smooth at first, but as she trailed her fingers across it, it caught her skin as if tiny gears within the surface were spinning off her touch. When she pressed the hull, it gave way.
And she fell.
She hit the deck hard, in a confusion of reversed gravity. She should have been silent, she should have been careful. She had meant to be. But she could breathe, and breathing, she could scream. Her heart could beat again, and her blood move, and that blood was full of unprocessed endorphins, of the chemical pain of broken bones, not to mention heartbreak, anger, guilt, betrayal, adrenal fear. She’d thought she’d worked through all that in those long campfire hours, and in her mind she had, but they still marked her body: the dislocated thumb, the broken ribs, that final kiss.
She came aware of time again, gut-heaving, eyes red, breathing so deep she felt queasy, would have thrown up if there had been anything in her stomach to throw. The world’s red blush burnt off. Someone spoke. Gray. “Viv? Are you okay?”
“No.” She tried to push herself up, before she remembered her dislocated thumb, her broken ribs—but she did not collapse. Her hand hurt, her hand remembered hurting, but the thumb, when she looked down, was in exactly the right place relative to the rest of her fingers, splayed on a surface that looked more like rock than crystal. Blinking away tears, she felt her side. Her ribs were whole, though sore. “What?”
“I fixed it,” Gray said. “On the way. The ship was all through you already, so it wasn’t hard. Was I wrong?”
“No.” She tested muscles, bones, most of them in the right place. “Thank you.” Then her focus shifted to the looming shape behind him, and she screamed.
“This guy?” Gray laughed, and tapped the ankle of the … it wasn’t quite a tyrannosaur, but something of that ilk, bipedal and enormous and toothy, with great bulging eyes and an elegant prow of skull. “Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere.” He rapped the leg with his knuckles, producing a sound that didn’t quite remind Viv of stone or wood.
“A statue?”
“No, he’s real. Just frozen. Suspended animation, null-entropy field, like Zanj did with you in the Star. I think this one’s my”—he traced the skin with his fingers—“great-great-great-grandmother Gray’s work? Maybe an extra great in there, the names repeat, it’s hard to tell. Good stuff, anyway.” He spread his arms to embrace the jungle around them, not frozen but arrested, a symphony the conductor held on a high note, forever: dragonfly wings paused midbeat, scavengers’ throats mid-swallow. “Welcome to the memory bay.”
“Come on.” Zanj pulled her to her feet. “We don’t have much time.”
Viv scrambled after her through the forest.
Gray explained on the way. “None of us really knows why She does this, but there are theories.” They passed through a burning blue door in the dinosaur swamp, and emerged onto a busy street in a city that had never been on Earth, a three-mooned city of slope-roofed skyscrapers, into frozen traffic. Viv flinched by reflex: if the city started to move, she’d be crushed in seconds. Though the cars probably would have hit Zanj first, and bounced off. “When you’re as old as She is, the grandmothers say, your memory needs a little help.” Another burning door brought them to a hive complex, millions of insects dancing in the air between subhives linked by amber cords in a nesting grove that stretched above and below as far as the eye could see. Viv and Zanj had to crouch and duck through the bugs’ flight plan; Gray fuzzed out and walked normally, his substance drifting through the swarm. “Some think She builds them out of pity for the civilizations She harvests, so a tiny piece of their present will last forever. Or as an archive, in case She finds a use for them later on.”
“Wait. Those dinosaurs were intelligent?”
“Not the dinosaurs. The trees.” They passed through another door into an ocean, so deep the surface was no more than a suggestion, a faint sheen on a distant mirror. Glowing jellyfish bulbs lit immense roiling tentacles of squid. “Some think it’s an art She practices, capturing moments perfectly balanced in beauty or justice. I don’t know. I’ve never walked here before with a body. It feels indecent. I like it.”
“It’s a trophy room,” Zanj said. “She’s wrecked so many worlds. Trillions of lives. She keeps a few of them here so she can feel better about herself.”
The next door dropped them into a basement. Viv stopped. She recognized this tile, these walls, the cement, the frigid air, the servers in their racks. Her stomach tightened, her knees unlocked, and she felt herself sweat, the mechanical reactions of a mammal about to flee. “I know this place.”
“We don’t have time.”
“This is where…” The memory of a hand around her heart stopped her from speaking. “No way. She didn’t eat Earth. When I left, we weren’t near the level of the places you’re talking about.”
“So maybe they’re not trophies,” Gray said.
Zanj scoffed. “There’s more than one kind of trophy.” And she led them through another door.
Viv stood on a beach by a gray ocean. Cotton clouds scudded across a full blue sky. Rocks rose behind her; to her left, boulders jutted from the sand. To her right, the beach curved past cedar-shingle houses to a long arm of mounded rock with a lighthouse at the end. Gulls squabbled over scraps of bread, a scallop shell. A tern glided out above the waves.
The door closed behind her.
Viv sank to her knees in the sand beside a dirty plastic six-pack collar.
Gray had been saying something, probably, but he stopped. “Viv? What’s wrong?”
“This is Cape Ann.” Not Cape Ann as it stood now—as it had stood when the Empress pulled her out of time, out of her world. They’d built a bulkier, squatter lighthouse after Hurricane Xavier, and the sea should be a meter higher at this tide; she saw no jellyfish buoys. “I went to school near here. I used to come up on long weekends, with friends. We’d have drone fights on the beach.” She sank her fingers into the sand, as if she could dig through to the deck below—but there was just more sand beneath the sand. She squeezed what she’d dredged up, and the grains slipped out between her fingers. The more you tighten your grip. She laughed, and heard the cracks in her voice. “I can’t.”
“Viv.” Zanj knelt before her, firm as iron, slightly more kind. “We have to keep moving.” Waves crashed and fell and roared. “This is a big ship, and the Empress isn’t looking for us. But if we stay in one place, make too much of a fuss, she’ll find us.” But, wait. There should be no waves. Each trophy room had been silent, arrested in time, their footsteps hammer blows on grave-still air. “And we can’t fight her here.”
“Zanj?”
“So no matter what you see, I need you to keep driving in, to the center. We’re here for your home, and my freedom. Okay?”
“Zanj.” This time she pointed, and Zanj looked.
Behind her, the water rose.
It gathered into whirlwind pillars, roaring wind-whipped columns hundreds of feet tall, bridging bay and sky. Viv had seen a waterspout once on the open ocean, survived it with her sails in tatters, her mast cracked, her arms aching, her hands blistered from guiding sheets, her side an ugly purple bruise where her ribs had caught a swinging boom; that had been on her trip after the IPO, when she was still wrapping her head around the fact that she’d never have to worry about being out of pocket for a round of drinks again, but if she ever had found herself destitute in port after that she could have just told the waterspout story and drunk all she needed.
But that waterspout did not have burning eyes. Or teeth.
Zanj sighed. She stood, and cracked her neck. With a flick of her wrist, she shaped the Star into being in her hand.
The water-pillars challenged her with voices like shattering rock.
Zanj growled, “Same to you, buddy.” She gathered herself to spring.
“Wait!” Gray ran between them, hands up, eyes wide, smiling like a madman. “Zanj, stop! That’s my mom!”