THEY LEFT HER in a glass bubble on a clawfoot pedestal in a cornerless room decorated with golden filigree, with nothing to do but pace.
She had hoped they would use Imperial technology to bind her, some forcefield she could slip through or cage she might unlock. Instead the war monks dragged her to this room, and dropped her on this pedestal. One cut off her chains with shears; Viv tried to jump her and take the shears away, but was thrown back with casual ease, while another war monk drew a circle around her in the air with a gray metal rod. The circle remained where it was drawn, glimmering fuzzily in a way she recognized, with a heartsick pang, from Gray’s transformations. It revolved around her, knitting a glass shell from thin air, anchored to the dais.
Then they left through a door that vanished behind them, leaving her stuck inside a Fabergé egg.
When she punched the glass it rang so loud it hurt her ears, but did not break. She threw her body against it and bounced off. She worried about air at first, but there was a circle of tiny holes in the floor just inside the glass, spaced ten to a fingerpad, and a cool breeze passed through them. She would not suffocate by accident. Of course, they could stop giving her air at any time. Or mix other gases with her air supply. Or evacuate the air altogether. Raise the temperature to boil her, lower it to freeze her.
March in a circle ten feet across, and that was her world. For all she knew, they’d already moved her—with the right technology, she’d never notice. She imagined the gold filigree egg lowered onto a shelf lined with other eggs that held other bodies, other versions of her, the Mirrorfaith’s collection. They wanted to study her. Take her apart. Just like she’d told Hong, way back when. Just like Zanj had said.
She had to use the bathroom. The floor of the dais bubbled, and the bubble popped, revealing a chamber pot and a small box of tissues and a tube of something that smelled (when she sniffed it, with some reluctance) like sanitizer. No curtain, though. Of course, the fact that they knew she had to use the bathroom without her saying anything suggested she was under the kind of surveillance that would have made the presence or absence of a curtain immaterial.
Okay. Imprisoned, yes. Forgotten, no. She did her business as defiantly as possible under the circumstances. She’d never had cause to piss vehemently before, but there was a first time for everything.
When she was done, the floor burbled up to cover the basin and tissues, and settled flat again. She’d considered holding on to the sanitizer, but what would that accomplish? Unlikely that glass was alcohol soluble in the future. At any rate, now she knew the floor could strangle her on its own, without any help from gas, which was nice.
She paced. She did a few push-ups, and that rising-up-on-your-fingertips-while-in-lotus-position thing, which looked cool when Nicolas Cage did it in Con Air. She entertained fantasies of jumping the next guards who came for her, then considered the likely outcome of jumping guards who spent most of their lives training to fight evil cyborgs. She decided against it.
Eventually she was hungry, and soon after that the floor bubbled again to produce a bamboo box containing two of Hong’s nutrient paste packets and a glass of water. She ate, drank; the packaging melted when she was done. After a span of time she could not precisely judge, the light from the walls dimmed and died without warning or pretense of sunset. Keep deducing, Ms. Liao: they want you alive, contained, and fed, but they don’t care about boredom, or exercise. They’re more interested in your body than your mind.
“I’ve been on dates like this before,” Viv said, then realized she had spoken out loud, and felt for the first time—save, maybe, when the Pride had been about to kill her, or the Empress—nervous. People lived for years in solitary confinement. Years and years. Some of them didn’t go irretrievably mad as such.
Everything was still, more or less, going according to plan.
After nervous, she felt sleepy. She tried to remember when she’d last had a good night’s rest. Back at the fleet, with Xiara, barely counted. Certainly not as they chased the Empress, or fled from her. On Refuge, maybe? Worn out after a hard day’s work? But then, she’d known each night’s sleep was one night farther behind the Empress, one night farther from home. She felt farther away than ever now, curled on the floor in this glass cage, trusting her captors’ goodwill to keep her alive. If only the board of directors could see her now.
This was such a bad idea. But none of them had come up with a better one.
She dreamed of an ocean seen from overhead, of tumblers in a lock, of needles of light that pierced her skin, of green hands and flame and melted flesh, and sat up wide awake and panting in darkness, in her glass cage.
“This was such a bad idea,” someone said. This time, it wasn’t her.
By the time she stopped screaming, she realized it was Zanj, wearing ’faith robes and her own face, leaning on the Star. Her palm glowed a ghoulish green, which didn’t help the whole night terror schtick. Viv steadied herself against her bubble’s wall. “What the hell was that for?”
“Fun, mostly.” She raised her open hand. “The flame will foil their sensors while it lasts. Thought I’d check in and see if you wanted to give up yet.”
“I had to try the easy way. We need them.”
“Sure, sure. We need their spare parts, is what you mean. Come on. I’ll bust you out of here, we’ll crash down into their library, find what we need to fix Gray, then pick up Xiara before they can wine and dine her into pledging allegiance, and get out and on with our next bad idea.”
“We need more than tools. We need allies.”
“These allies? Trust me, Viv. I’ve seen all sorts of monsters in my time, and the Grand Rector is a piece of work. She’s not coming over to your side.”
“The Archivist might. Hong’s teacher. I think that was her, with the white hair and the big eyes, back in the audience chamber.”
“Oh yeah. She looked super important, kneeling over that seaweed guy.”
“Hong thought she was.”
“Hong turned you in!”
“We all messed up on Refuge. Hong was right about some things.”
“Oh yes, from what I’ve seen it really looks like Hong could have started a revolution, won the ’fleet over. That’s why he was in chains the last time we saw him. Because he’s such an excellent judge of political reality.”
“We have to stop the Empress. The ’faith is better positioned than anyone to do that.”
“They’re children playing with guns.”
“So we take the safeties off and teach them to shoot.”
Zanj laughed at that. “I didn’t know what to expect, when you decided to go to war. It’s a good look.” The flame dimmed. “Time’s wasting. Okay. We’ll stick with your way for the moment.”
“Have you found Hong?”
“Not a trace. Everyone knows he was taken. They had this big trial; he confessed to heresy, and accepted the sentence of some kind of meditation retreat. It’s pretty common around here. But I sweet-talked the penance ships—the inmates spend most of their time hard-dreaming their way through difficult decrypts, it’s pretty gross—and they don’t have him either.”
“Look harder.”
Zanj rolled her eyes. “Fine. Well, at least Xiara’s enjoying herself. Lots of glad-handing, tours, the whole hospitality game. The Grand Rector can smell Groundswell on her, and she’s got her teeth out for that ship.”
Viv tried not to think about the strength of that woman, about the piercing consideration of those eyes, and about Xiara, earnest as a morning breeze. But then, Xiara was native to this world. She’d be fine. She would probably, certainly, almost definitely be fine. “We’ll be fine,” she said out loud, hoping that would convince her. This had been the hardest part of the plan: thinking of Xiara alone, exposed, in the ’fleet. Her hand rose to the cut the Grand Rector’s claw had drawn in her cheek. “For now, we wait. We need these people on our side.”
“Okay.” Zanj tossed the flame in the air. It guttered, flashing. “But if you get yourself killed, I’ll kill you.”
Viv stopped pacing. The gravel sincerity in that threat, and Zanj’s immediate glance away thereafter, as if she’d said nothing notable, the nervous twitch of her hand up to scratch the back of her neck—it all clicked, and Viv felt warm all through. Nothing sexual about it. She was more than sufficiently in tune with her various lusts to track that sort of thing. No, this was the far simpler, and stranger realization that Zanj, for all her bluff and bluster, would care if Viv were gone. She wanted her safe. She wanted to hurt people who hurt her. Viv remembered how she had felt in the Empress’s throne room, Zanj hanging from green light in agony, the Star fallen from her hand—that overwhelming rage, so intense it verged on nausea, how dare this nonsense Empress of however many stars set one damn glowstick finger on her friend.
She stammered, but managed, “Thank you,” and, “I care about you, too.”
“Look at that,” Zanj said, “flame’s out, got to go, see you later, take care.” And she left Viv in the dark.
But not alone.