TWO DAYS LATER the Archivist came for Viv. Flanked by mod-bristling war monks, some four-armed, some two, some scaled, one a shadow in space identifiable only by his robes, the Archivist seemed a fragile hook from which Viv could hang her hopes: willowy slim, owl-eyed, careful with her steps, her white hair braided back, light brown skin gently worn with age that Viv, back home, would not have been surprised to learn fell anywhere from midthirties to early sixties. Who knew what it meant here.
She moved like a ghost, now still, now slow, now so fast Viv’s eyes could not track her. The changes of speed were not, Viv thought, affected, meant to startle or distract. The mind within that body worked down its own paths, and some of those took it far from the world of flesh and ordinary time. When her attention wandered back to physical reality, she accelerated to catch up.
In a breath and a blur, she crossed the room to Viv’s bubble and pressed her hand against it, watched her unblinking for seconds that turned to minutes. Viv did not return her stare: she did not know what the Archivist could read from her through those eyes. She watched the woman’s hand instead, its thin fingers crisscrossed with tiny lines, shiny with calluses and scars of thin deep healed cuts. Still hands, untrembling.
“I mean you no harm,” the Archivist said. “The Grand Rector has asked me to study you. Do not fight, and you will not be hurt. Answer questions, and we will treat you with courtesy. Nod if you agree.”
The Grand Rector asked—interesting. That explained the war monks. But Viv had come to find the Archivist, and through her, to find Hong. She nodded once.
The Archivist pressed her fingernails into the glass. It glowed where she touched, bubbled, began to flow. Her nails passed through, and the heat spread in straight lines from her hand, to frame a door of fire. When the Archivist pulled, the glass peeled away. It clanged against the floor when she let it fall. The Archivist blurred back, her hands crossed over the front of her robe, seemingly cool. “Chain her if you must,” she told the shadow monk. “But do not damage her. She is a relic, beyond price.”
She didn’t fight the manacles, or the belt they locked around her waist to chain the manacles through, or the leg irons. She’d accomplish nothing at this stage by clawing eyes or kicking groins—if these monks even had the sort of genitalia she was used to.
She wondered if one of these monks was Zanj, disguised, but if so, Zanj kept such deep cover she didn’t even wink to tip her hand. Probably not, then. Zanj had her tricks and transformations, but Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.
The Archivist led them out a door that hadn’t existed moments ago, down a high, dim hall lit by green and yellow and red stained-glass slits, to a round room with a fountain in the middle, the hub of many intersecting halls. The Archivist stirred the fountain’s clear water with her fingertips, then cupped her palm to draw a handful that now had a rich ruby tint, and, though Viv tried by reflex to pull away, she dripped that red water onto Viv’s forehead, and spoke a complex phrase Viv’s translation gimmick rendered as activate. The liquid felt cool and warm at once; it crawled over her skin and sank through. She felt a weight enter her bloodstream, as if she’d just received an injection.
Then the floor disappeared, and they flew into space.
The war monks held her by her chains, and didn’t seem worried, which was all well and good for them. Viv cursed, for her part, and in the process of cursing discovered that she could breathe, and that her eyes were not freezing or boiling or popping from her head or any of the other things television had warned her eyes did in space. All the skinfields and spacesuits she’d tried had swaddled her in cloth, or electromagnetic barriers, offering only a shadow of this experience: her skin prickling in vacuum, her own eyes wondering at the deep, and the ’fleet.
Diving, as a kid, on the Great Barrier Reef, before everything got bad, Viv had whirled in living jewels: bright red damselfish, spotted trout, butterfly fishes wiggling through the claw-sharp coral, great lengths of grouper and cod and even, once, a massive lumpy wrasse, and, far off, occasionally, sharks. That was the Mirrorfaith fleet: those colors, that darting motion, that range of scale. For every stained-glass continent, there were hundreds of smaller gem craft—not to mention the ranked cross-legged meditators they passed who seemed to need no ship at all, their eyes closed, robes floating in vacuum. She’d seen fleets before this—Xiara’s was nearly so massive—but those were dead, drifting, or dominated by a few minds. This was a civilization.
“Why is it on fire?”
The Archivist turned her head an anatomically improbable degree to look at Viv as they flew. She didn’t speak, save for the furrow in her brow.
“That ship over there—”
“The torch,” the Archivist replied when she saw where Viv was pointing.
“And that one.”
“A dawnblade.”
“They’re burning.”
“We are addressing infections after the most recent assault,” the Archivist said. “You see that temple’s aft pane cracked, those shards which used to be lances.” She indicated each with a precise gesture, always palm up. “Every three days, the Pride strike, in greater numbers. Every three days, we beat them back.”
“I didn’t feel a battle.”
“You would not, in the cell. Not unless it went badly for us.”
“I’ve heard so much about this place,” Viv said.
The Archivist did not ask from whom. She knew.
They approached an enormous tree in spreading vacuum, its leaves green and purple and orange, its trunk carved with stylized faces. One opened its mouth to receive them, and closed it after.
They marched her up a winding stair within the hollow of the trunk, while scholars zipped up and down its core. After four hundred steps they stopped at an unassuming hatch. “You,” the Archivist told the war monks, “may wait outside. Our review will take some time.”
“We will observe,” the shadow said, “and report.”
Which told Viv most of what she needed to know about ’fleet politics. She had been studying the Archivist as they walked, seeking the woman Hong had told her about, the wisdom and calm. She wore her body like a mask. “Very well. If you do not mind boredom.”
The door opened onto a long branch planed flat, with no railings on either side—why would monks who could fly worry about falling? They moved single file along the branch to a spreading leaf at the far end, which supported a table, several straining shelves, and the robed kelp forest Viv had last seen twitching on the Grand Rector’s floor. “This,” the Archivist said, “is my assistant, Brother Qollak.” He bowed, spreading the strands he used for arms like fans. “Please. Sit.”
“You must understand,” Qollak said with a voice of water and vines, “you represent a remarkable opportunity: an organism independent from the Cloud.” He lifted a tray from the top of one shelf and set it on the table before her: on its surface, a puzzle box. “We cannot, as yet, verify your other claims, but we can address the mystery of your cognitive mechanism. There’s never, in the ’faith’s experience, been anyone like you—someone all flesh.”
“There used to be a lot of people like me,” Viv said.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way. As an experimental subject, you are without peer. We must learn the shape of your cognitive processes. Open the box, please.”
She tried to reach for the box, but the short chain clinked against her manacles. She looked to Qollak, then to the Archivist, who was watching, in her own flat way, the shadow monk. Who did not move.
Apologetically, nimbly, Brother Qollak lifted the box from the tray and dropped it into Viv’s lap.
She rolled her eyes, lifted it, turned it over, tested sides. A weight lock. It came apart in her hand. Fifteen seconds. “When they tested me when I was a kid, they put candy in these.”
“I could have Sister Cellarer bring us candy, if you like,” Brother Qollak said.
“I’ll live.”
Twenty seconds. Forty-five. Three minutes. Twelve seconds. Thirty minutes. The next one took an hour and a half, because it was too big to hold in her lap, and the war monks still refused to unchain her.
“I can do more than this,” Viv said after the hour-and-a-half box. “These are toys. Give me a lock you’ve never been able to open. An artifact you’ve never known how to use. I know you have corpses of Grayframe somewhere in this fleet. Hong told me—”
She fell from the chair, and her skull bounced off the floor. Her ears rang. Her cheek was a mat of pain. Pretty colors ebbed from her vision, and the room returned in hazy outline: the shadow monk stood beside her toppled chair, seething, and the Archivist between them, arms out, furious.
“—are present,” Viv heard the Archivist say, once her ears stopped ringing, “on my ship at my sufferance. And you, Brother Lailien, dare strike a relic—”
“She is no relic,” the shadow monk hissed. “She speaks secrets. She speaks the Brother Heretic’s name.”
“We have all said his name,” the Archivist said. “And when his time of penance is passed, he will join us once again.”
“His mind is clouded. He will never survive penance.”
“You are wrong. And she does not know our ways, and is not bound by our discipline. You would not strike an apprentice.”
“She is no apprentice.”
“She is my field of study. The Hierarchs will back me in this. You and your fellows are here by the Grand Rector’s request, not by her order, and at my sufferance. You will not touch her again.”
Lailien said nothing. He did not draw back. But the Archivist turned from him anyway, flitted to Viv’s side, and helped her stand. The room swam. Her cheek ached. Her cut had opened, either when he hit her, or when she fell.
“Are you well?”
“I think so,” Viv said truthfully. “I can take a punch. Even from an asshole.”
Qollak reached for another box, but the Archivist waved it off, impatient—and drew from a pouch at her belt a metal ball the size of a closed fist. She set it in Viv’s hands. “Try this.”
Lailien took a step forward, but came up against the wall of the Archivist’s eyes.
Viv turned the ball in her hands—no shifting weight, no visible seam. Hollow, or else lighter than it looked. The Archivist watched her expectantly; the shadows of Brother Lailien’s body whirled, dense and dark.
Viv tossed the ball on the table. The Archivist caught it before it could roll off. “Is this a joke?”
Lailien stepped back. The Archivist slipped the ball back into her pouch. “That’s all,” she said. “Thank you.”
They walked her back down the turning stair, out the carved mouth, flew her through the ’fleet again toward the ornate vicious beauty of the Monastic Sphere. Down the hall, to the room of golden filigree. She wondered how many days might pass until she left it again. Her dreams were getting worse.
“Leave us,” the Archivist said, and before Brother Lailien could argue, snapped: “You’ve done quite enough already. If we are to study her, we need her trust. Brother Qollak and I can handle her—and you’ll be right on the other side of the cameras if she surprises us.”
The war monks left, Lailien last. The Archivist watched as they receded. When the door shut and vanished, the Archivist drew a small crystal from her pouch, set it on the floor, and stomped down hard. Its shards burned with a familiar green flame, and the lights sank red.
She walked Viv back to the dais, guided her into the bubble, and unlocked her chains. “I am sorry,” the Archivist said. “We can speak privately for now. You must understand, the subject of Hong’s betrayal remains sensitive among the ’fleet. He was loved; that is how he could lead a wing to battle without the Grand Rector’s permission. Even those who loved him now find themselves unable to speak his name. I heard him testify: he liked you. He thought he did the right thing, bringing us to you. I am sorry the Rector’s monks fall so far below his standard.”
“Where is he?”
“In contemplation.” Again, her face was a mask.
“But where?”
The Archivist said nothing, and turned to leave. The green flame had almost consumed the crystals on which it burned.
“Let me see that ball again. Please.”
The Archivist drew it forth and passed it to her as if it were an enormous pearl. Viv hefted it in both hands, and with a twist of her wrists, split it open.
The ball expanded; its seemingly solid surface unwound into a lattice of thin silver wire. A crystal within pulsed twice, then flared, carving bright trails that resolved, once Viv was done blinking, into whirling dots of light: a galaxy, her galaxy, as fully detailed as the map in the Empress’s throne room, points of interest picked out in ruby and orange and green.
She looked across the map to the Archivist, and saw that grim, ever-judging face melt into wonder.
“You’ve never opened this before,” Viv said. “Have you?”
She shook her head.
“I am who I say I am. I am what I say I am. And I can do more than this. But time’s running out. You must have a place where you keep the real treasures: the relics too big, too dangerous, too weird to use. The Grayframe bodies, the star maps, the encrypted gods. There’s so much more to your world than your Grand Rector dreams. You know, I know: you don’t want to worship the Empress. You want to grow beyond her. I can help.”
“The Grand Rector would kill you for that suggestion,” the Archivist said.
“The Grand Rector isn’t the ’faith,” she said. “At least, that’s what Hong told me.”
The side of her face ached—but no blow fell.
The green flame guttered. “Archivist. What’s your name?”
“Lan,” she said.
“Nice to meet you, Archivist Lan. I’m Viv. When you’re ready, come for me. But don’t wait too long.”
The flame died before the Archivist could respond.