THE GRAYMOTHER SWEPT them into the sky on whirlwind wings to a space of brooding mile-high clouds above the ocean near Cape Ann. Flames within flames, green lights, sunflower yellow, aurora orange, sculpted faces from the clouds in the instant they spoke. It took Viv an embarrassing amount of time to realize the many faces belonged to many distinct individuals, some features round or long or squashed or bubbling, and the voices, too, had a thunderous diversity. Grays moved from cloud to cloud, and new ones arose every second, their faces merged and heightened versions of other Grays she’d seen.
Only Graymom stayed in place, a towering pillar of flame. Perhaps this was a consolation to her son, who tried to look everywhere at once, eyes wide, wet, following his many aunts and uncles and cousins through the clouds. Perhaps she could not move, being already everywhere: the cloud palace pulsed with her voice.
“Our son, banished, has returned. Let him speak.”
The tongues of flame fell silent. Gray stepped forward on empty air.
The clouds opened overhead.
The sky above was not the sky of Cape Ann. The silver glass wheels of the Empress’s ship revolved against the unfamiliar stars of deep space split by the Citadel’s broken curve.
“If he fucks this up,” Zanj whispered into that silence, “get ready to run.”
“If he fucks this up, will running do any good?”
“For me? Oh, sure. For you,” Zanj admitted, “maybe not. But getting ready won’t hurt.”
She didn’t answer that. The Grays were, of course, listening.
Gray glanced back to Viv, nervous. She waved her best you’ll be fine wave. She’d encouraged enough friends through presentations, testimonies, and wedding toasts to know you didn’t show your own nerves, if you had them. Reunions with an estranged family of nanorobot genies fell way off to the severe right of that scale, but then, you used the tools you had for the task at hand.
Gray cleared his throat. It sounded wet, and mortal, and nothing like thunder.
“Mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins of Grayframe. I’ve come back.” That much he said with confidence. The rest was harder. “Our Lady banished me to the cold. I waited there for years, gathering desires in hope of earning Her favor. I missed you all so much. Out in the dark, I imagined how you, Aunt, would laugh at a certain surprise, how you, Uncle, would have devoured a particular nuisance. I missed the way our thoughts would fuse. Your voices, and the fire of you. It’s hard to be alone.” He swallowed, took a breath, and began again. “I had a chance to come home. I took it. The Empress shaped my friend Viv to break chains, and she offered to break mine. For our paths to cross out of all the billions in the galaxy: How could it be against the Empress’s will? I am home, and I throw myself on your mercy. If you feel I have done wrong returning, unmake me now. If you want to devour me, devour me. It is enough that I have seen you one last time. I only ask that you help my friend. She was torn from her home beyond the Rosary bead. I promised I would help her find her road home, as she helped me find mine.”
Graymother spoke ponderously into the silence. “Our son Gray. What have you brought us from your travels? What gifts, to earn our welcome?”
Silence once again. Gray stood alone in the circle. Though they were not touching, Viv felt Zanj tense beside her, and traced the line of the pirate queen’s thought as she totaled the worldly goods Gray might offer: some archived dreams of Orn—and Zanj, and Viv. An ancient enemy of the Lady they served, and a woman out of time, whom Yannis had thought enough of a prize to justify war with heavens.
Those might be enticement enough for the Grayframe.
She set her hand on Zanj’s arm, felt the battle tension there, and whispered, “Wait.”
Gray straightened, drew his shoulders back, and breathed in, out, in again. Then he began to sing.
His voice warbled at first, but when it steadied on a pitch, Viv recognized the song from the fields of Refuge, from the digging crew’s voices, the rhythm of planting and the movement of limbs.
Big rat, big rat
Don’t eat my millet
Big rat, big rat
Don’t eat my rice
Viv’s translation gimmick fed her the words, but like any song, the meaning had as much to do with rhythm and melody as lyrics: the pound, the march, the drive. This song had hundreds of verses; you worked through each grain and every other crop, a chorus after each set of four, then started again from millet with the next pest. Just a workers’ song.
Midway through the third verse a drone like swarming bees reverberated through the sky, and other lower notes, on the hairy line between sound and pressure. The Grayframe joined the chorus.
Gray began to clap; thunder echoed him, and clouds roiled and spun into dancing, rumbling helices of flame, burning faces grinning and spinning and singing blues. They spread fiery arms, lifting him up; he blurred out into them, interwoven with his family’s smoke, laughing and singing with the sky.
Viv realized Zanj was glowering, wondered why, and realized she was tapping her feet in time with the music.
ANOTHER PARTING. VIV wondered if she would ever grow used to those.
The Grayframe’s joy seared on around them, spinning, transforming, warping and returning to form. She could barely trace Gray within, swept from cloud to cloud, joining the cascade of thunder, tossed high into the air and caught, spun round by relatives.
“I don’t believe it,” Zanj said with a shake of her head. “They’re all like that.”
Graymother, beaming, shaped herself from the revel: first smoke, then smoke in the vague dimensions of a body, then, in a whirl of construction, step by step as she advanced, nerves, bones, flesh, eyes, skin, until she stood glorious, ten feet tall and full-figured and smoke-wreathed before them.
Zanj seemed nonplussed; Viv felt grateful for the smoke that still surrounded Graymother, because otherwise she might have embarrassed herself. Or—as her eyes tracked over that body built to more-than-human scale, as she blushed and riveted them on that perfect face, and ordered her mouth to close—embarrassed herself more.
“I am sorry,” Graymother said. “You have so small a shadow on the Cloud that I cannot see you without eyes. I hope this form does not disturb you.” Which seemed dense for a being of fire and whim and billions of statically suspended nanomachines—except for the tiny corner-of-the-mouth smirk that tipped her cards.
“I think I’ll live,” Viv said. “It won’t be a problem for you to take him in?”
“The Lady is not merciful, but She is often distracted. Gray’s entire natural life could pass before She notices his return. He had the misfortune to be exceptionally efficient in his infancy, so She raised him up and cultivated him as her herald. We will be fine.” Her hand was larger than Viv’s head, but still she cupped her cheek. Her touch was warm and gentle and tingled on Viv’s skin like peppermint. “You have brought our son home. What can we do for you?”
Viv swallowed many answers, and offered the one that mattered. “I want to go home. I think the Empress pulled me out of the Rosary bead she stole. I need a way to get back in.”
Graymother smiled. “Such an easy thing! Surely you could ask a greater boon.”
“Wait,” Viv said. “Easy?”
“Of course! We’ve been building, and testing, a machine for the purpose of engaging with the bead, ever since we pulled it from the Rosary. The Empress has directed all Her mind to the task, all our strength. Even in its current form, it’s more than enough to send a body through. And you?” She drew her hand from Viv’s cheek—Viv had to restrain herself from pulling it back—and turned to Zanj. Her face darkened. “I believe I should know you.”
“I’m just passing through,” Zanj said. “I’m only here to get Viv home.”
Behind, the party whirled, and Gray led another verse:
Gray goo, gray goo
Don’t take my millet
Gray goo, gray goo
Don’t take my rice
At last, Graymother nodded. “I will fly you to the throne room. Our Lady sleeps there, Her mind submerged in contemplation of the Cloud. We will direct Her attention down, and down—and we will wake the machine for you.”
Zanj looked to Viv; Viv said, “Thank you.”
Graymother called out with a voice much larger than the one she’d used with Viv, in the Graytongue of surf and fire, and the flame revel tossed Gray from one pair of whirlwind arms to another until he sprawled in the sky before them, re-forming into the body they knew: taller, broader, stronger than he’d been on Orn, shaped by sun and work, sweaty and sore from laughter, but Gray nonetheless, their Gray, himself.
When he saw them, he understood. He hugged Zanj, who made as if she’d been too shocked by his embrace to dodge in time, though of course she could have. She patted him on the back, awkwardly.
“I’m so glad I got the chance to know you,” he said. “And that I didn’t kill you when we first met! And you didn’t kill me!”
“It’s a mystery why,” Zanj said. But even she couldn’t sell that line without a waver. “It’s been fun.”
He let her go, and before Viv could think of what she was supposed to say, dropped to his knees before her, eyes raised to her face, with eagerness and respect, and beneath all that, a sorrow she was half surprised to feel her own heart echo. “Thank you. I owe you everything.”
She knelt, and hugged him. He felt more solid than before. He hugged her back, and for once he got the smell right. He drew a breath of her and held it, and as he exhaled with a sigh Viv’s arms slipped through him. His body quickened to lightning and smoke, and that face, that open child’s face, joined the whirlwind of his family.
Leaving Zanj, and Viv, alone.