VIV AND ZANJ crept into the Empress’s throne room.
Graymother had flown them down the vessel’s winding halls at speeds Viv did not care to guess, through apertures that opened to admit them only to snap closed instantly behind, and left them at the throne room door. She whispered her instructions, then departed with a kiss that lingered on Viv’s cheek and a scent too rich for roses.
The words were easier to remember than the kiss.
Touch nothing, leave nothing. Do not speak. Dare not look upon our Lady Herself, for She can sense regard. Follow the lights. Through them we guide you from afar. When the gate opens, step through, and do not look back.
She’d told herself she was ready, but she was not ready for this room.
In childhood Viv had designed throne rooms and secret lairs the way other kids designed dream bedrooms. In high school she’d tried to remodel her own bedroom to match her visions, but her parents wouldn’t let her paint, so she’d been stuck with pink walls, and her mother kept hanging white frill curtains though each time Viv replaced them with black. Her college dorm had been, in retrospect, a stupid eighteen-year-old’s attempt at the same project, piled with electronics and books, monitor after monitor, bad prints of good art. Her various houses had various versions of the dream, but none ever felt quite right. She just couldn’t lay hands on enough marble, stained glass, and porphyry for what she had in mind.
If Viv had infinite resources, a whole Grayframe at her beck and call, and forever to build in, she might have made a room like this. Diamond arches climbed and curved, meshed, braided, and melded to plummet once more, toward the throne in the center where sat, dreaming—
No. She was not supposed to look.
A galaxy of multicolored lights turned overhead, its stars mostly Imperial green, here and there a luxurious calm sapphire, broken with cracks of black and saffron-orange and red, a map of a galaxy controlled by the woman, the entity, upon that—
Do not look at the Empress. Do not look at the throne.
She walked on.
Walking on hurt. The emerald radiance of the Woman Viv could not see flooded the hall, pulsed through veins in diamond. Black crystal pillars displayed graphs of local gravity, tensor webs of magnetic fields, diagrams of the palace ship itself, and they reflected Her light: the Empress Whose brilliance overflowed Her flesh. If She even had flesh anymore.
Viv tried not to look. She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren’t careful, pretty soon you’d find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk—or worse, speaking German.
She needed that dry laugh now. Here she was, creeping like a rat through the throne room of a woman who’d torn her heart from her chest, who’d melted her skin, who’d hurt her friends—not to mention crushed a galaxy, wrecked Orn and banished Gray, locked Zanj inside a star. This was the Empress: the green the same, the radiance identical. She had wrecked Viv’s life, and this was the closest Viv could manage to revenge: sneaking past beneath her notice. She wasn’t even a rat, here. Rats could tunnel and undermine. She was a mouse, tiny, powerless, scuttling for a hole out of the Empress’s sight.
The portal looked a bit like a hole if you ignored the auroras that curled and uncurled above it, or the banks of machinery, most exotic and crystalline and so complex she could not tell which parts were filigree and which functional. A rippling silver hole, edged by a sapphire ring, down which she could scurry home.
She remembered Natalia back on Saint Kitts, Lucy wondering where her boss had gone or if she was alive, remembered family. She remembered the faceless shadows in suits, the three-letter acronyms who had hunted her, and whom she meant to hunt in turn. She had a war to win, a world to conquer. She had to get home. She remembered Magda, trapped in green.
The Empress was a problem for another world. A problem for other friends. Whom she had abandoned one by one to reach this point.
What else could she do? She was a mouse. Abject. Soulless. A bag of meat. You talk a big game, Vivian Liao, but you’re a coward.
The Empress was behind her now. The black hole of Viv’s old life drew her down, beneath the transparent floor. Light bent around its edge.
She had tried to fight the Empress back in that basement, with as much success as a kitten in a mastiff’s jaw. Her friends had given so much, and she had asked so much from them, to bring her here.
Do not speak, she had been warned, and so she did not speak. She held out her hand to Zanj, who took it.
Zanj stepped between Viv and the hole.
Of course. Even now, she would not kneel.
Her crown was the gray of a still dawn. Again and again on their journey, Zanj had promised to kill Viv, in earnest and in jest, but right now, in the throne room silence, Viv forgot all those threats and remembered her cabin aboard the poor lost Question, touching Zanj’s scar as Zanj touched hers. Pirate queen, perhaps. Stealer of suns, scourge of galaxies. A murderer, certainly. A happy killer in an unkind world. Who tried, when Viv asked, to stop killing. Who was, for all her violent protestations, inspite of Hong’s suspicion and all her own temptations toward betrayal, a loyal friend.
And if Viv removed that crown, Zanj could break her neck in under a second.
She’d given her an order back on Groundswell. In fear for her life, maybe. But Zanj was owed revenge for that, and for so much else.
Her hand shook as it approached Zanj’s brow. She brushed her hair without meaning to. Zanj’s lips twitched up. If she had not been scarred, that might have been a smile.
The crown broke in two at Viv’s touch, as if it had been made of dried twigs. Zanj caught the other piece before it hit the floor. She took the piece Viv held, and set them both on the ground. Eyes closed, she breathed in, out. Freedom’s first breath in three thousand years.
Viv stood before her, slow, fragile, altogether in her power.
When Zanj moved, Viv made a sound—a small, even mouselike, squeak that might have doomed them both had it not been crushed against Zanj’s chest by the force of her hug. Viv felt the strength in her friend’s back and arms. Memorized it, as surely as she’d ever memorized a password or a knot. If she could bear one moment home, let it be this.
But even such moments pass. With a silent thunderclap, the hole opened.
Zanj drew away. Her eyes, always bright, looked more wet than usual, though her face was the same old steel, bent in the same old grin. She stepped out of Viv’s way, ushered her forward, patted her on the shoulder, and withdrew.
Leaving only Viv and the pit.
She counted steps to the edge. So long ago, she had stood on the edge of a boat rigged to blow, with a small watertight sack over her shoulder, under a blue sky she’d never flown beyond. On Earth. With the world at her back, and the world before her.
She had to go.
She thought of Hong. Gray. Xiara. Zanj. All she had to do to honor them, their sacrifices, was close her eyes, breathe in, and leap.
Leaving the Empress at her back.
Turning away forever from the chance to face the woman who built these machines, the will that cowed a galaxy.
Accepting her inferiority.
Fleeing the greatest challenge she could ever face.
Abandoning her friends.
She breathed out, opened her eyes, and turned.
The Empress sat upon her throne, reclined in seeming sleep, beautiful as music, fierce as flame, so bright she left red shadows on the eye.
Zanj stood over her, the Fallen Star clutched in both hands, its tip narrowed to a point, her face a mask of rage and certainty and fear: the face of a woman ready to kill, and, in the instant of her blow, to die.
There was a pop within Zanj’s skull. Her irises flowered brilliant white.
Viv whispered, “No.”
The Fallen Star stabbed like an ice pick toward the Empress’s eye.
It struck her, and drew sparks.
And the Empress woke up.