ZANJ’S MOOD DARKENED as they flew toward Pasquarai.
They set out in the Star, which could slide swift and unnoticed through the Cloud while the great fleets trundled along behind. Viv, nervous, wondered if she was in for more days of drowning, not quite dead, while the others drifted formless in the Star’s memory. But they did not need to move quite so fast now as they had when chasing the Empress, and Zanj, silent, dour, rebuilt the ship to a form Viv could ride. On a bare hangar deck, she shook the Star like a rolled-up bedsheet, and it unfurled into a flat oval of swirling black. When she shook the oval once again, it swelled into three dimensions, slick lines, curving manta wings, a tail. The lightning of thought pulsed along circuit lines beneath its skin. A clap of Zanj’s hands opened a door into the belly of the beast.
When the Star took solid form, so, too, did Viv’s vision of the future, of what they were about to do or try: a war in heaven, a revolution. This was real. She felt as if her lungs were too close to her heart: she could not breathe, and her heart could not quite beat.
She’d heard Zanj describe her home—the purple cliffs at dusk, blowing palm fronds, flowers, the creeping vines where she played when she was young and queen of nothing, the joyful ghosts and punk gods who drifted through and away again; Pasquarai, an island in a sea of storms. Their path led through it now. Or, through whatever it had become.
Gray’s silver tongue darted out to lick his thin lips. He was hungry and bound for home, not a prodigal child anymore, but an enemy, a liberator. He marched aboard. Hong shouldered their luggage and followed him. Xiara gazed ahead with an expression as simple and steady as any joy Viv had ever seen her wear. She gave herself no room for doubts. Before she boarded, she breathed in deep, and when she exhaled, the silver mazes on her skin faded, collapsed, the wheels in her eyes ground to a halt. They would run silent for now, and Groundswell and the fleet would follow, and with them what had come to be the greater half of Xiara’s self. Viv reached for her, ready to hold her up, but Xiara did not collapse. “Come on,” she said. “We have work to do.”
Gray made dinner on their first night out from provisions the ’faith carted aboard, the harvest of their garden ships, fresh fruits and vegetables, nutflesh dense and textured as meat. Zanj flew, brow furrowed; Xiara lounged on cushions across from Hong and tried to play a variant on Go, but she kept drowsing off between moves, and as she dozed she snored with a pleased cat smile, curled on sheets. She lost the habit of sleep when she was one with the ships. Hong reached across the board, poked her in the shoulder, and as she snorted herself awake and jerked and glared around, glazed, trying to understand, he returned to his spot and settled as if he’d never moved in his life.
Viv helped Gray cook—he could build a space station in hours, and he could mince onions with a slap of his hand, but he lacked instinct for when you added vegetables to oil and in what order, when meat, when salt, the touch for a good sear and the timing of garlic. The flavors shifted on her, since the ’faith didn’t cook with brown rice vinegar, and the soy sauce was darker than she liked, with a citrus tang, and the nutflesh seared more like halloumi than meat despite its texture—but she couldn’t argue with the result.
They ate, trading stories from their work with the fleets, coordination, jokes. Then the door opened, and conversation stopped. Zanj walked in, sat down heavily, filled her bowl, took a small bite, chewed. Swallowed. Her head sank, and she breathed, then ate some more. The silence lasted.
“You can say it,” Viv said. “Whatever it is.”
Zanj set her bowl down, and the chopsticks beside it. The Star’s walls thrummed deeper than cellos, a sound so soft any other blocked it out. Viv wanted to tell Zanj everything would be all right, but she didn’t believe it. She let Zanj have this time: to grin fiercely at nothing funny, to still her mouth, to stare at each of them in turn. Gray looked down. Xiara turned away, toward Viv. Hong met Zanj’s gaze straight on. And when Zanj turned to Viv at last, she saw the pit behind the red-gold discs of her eyes.
Viv couldn’t stop herself from talking then. “Whatever we find there, we’ll handle it.”
“You don’t know my home,” Zanj said. “You’ve heard me talk about it, that’s all. When the Empress seized me, tortured me, when she walled me up inside that star, no amount of pain would satisfy her. I had stolen worlds from her, captured warsuns, devoured the hearts of ships so I could walk her worlds unseen. She wanted to make me suffer. But she never told me what she did to my people. She kept that to herself.”
“Whatever you’re imagining is probably worse than the truth,” Gray said, filling his bowl again. He took a bite of the nutmeat with chilis and chewed philosophically. “She never told you what she did, because she knew you’d stew and sweat trying to guess. Just enjoy the trip, if you can. We’ll deal with what we find when we find it.”
“I’ll enjoy what I please. Or not.”
Gray swallowed, but didn’t take another bite.
Hong tried next. “We have to move fast when we get through the wall. You’re tense. You need meditation and rest.”
“See to your own mind, monk. Mine’s clear enough.”
Hong set down his bowl.
“Well,” Xiara began. Zanj speared her with the honed skepticism that did double service as her listening face. Xiara paled. “Never mind.”
Zanj left the table, and climbed a ladder that had not existed before to a hatch that hadn’t existed before either, and slipped through. No one tried to stop her.
Viv finished her meal and followed.
The hatch opened into the Cloud. Zanj sat beneath the mottled hyperdimensional purple, cross-legged, glaring out into the murk. Viv closed her eyes by reflex, flinched all through her body, prepared herself for the rack of vertigo that had always washed over her when she looked into the Cloud. It did not come now. Maybe she’d grown used to it.
The Cloud was strange and beautiful above them. Purple and shining, it shaped itself to Viv’s thoughts as her eyes tracked through it, the ink-in-water billows molding friends long gone, the face of her mother, a childhood horse they’d burned when it broke, in a small boat on a lake in camp. Before any form became itself, it split and unfolded into another, memories opening on memories until she felt she could not look anywhere without watching everywhere at once. The Cloud usually made her feel sick, but this time it just felt vast and empty, full of nothing but herself. She wondered what Zanj saw out there, why she peered so fiercely into the depths.
“Go away, Los Angeles. Before I kill you.”
Viv settled to the hull beside her, and hugged her own legs. “You haven’t killed me yet,” she said. “A bit late to start.”
“I know they want to help. I know everything you’re about to say.”
Zanj’s voice cracked and roughed around its edges, half words, half groan. Viv rested her hand on her shoulder without speaking.
“I’m afraid.” Zanj had to stop twice in framing the last word, heave a breath, and start again. “Okay? Don’t fucking laugh.” She hadn’t. “I didn’t realize it before. She spent thousands of years hurting me, and I would have borne thousands more. I know my strength, and I have few illusions. If I break, I break. But my people—they’re not like me.”
“You haven’t talked about them much.”
Zanj scratched the spaceship’s macromolecular skin, leaving no mark behind. “I was never one of them. Not exactly. When they first touched the Cloud, when they built their primitive networks to play in its shallows, I stirred, a ghost in their web. I learned to think from watching them. When I was young, I made myself a body and passed myself off as one of them, hiding, afraid—people can be cruel, when you’re the only one of your kind. But one day some monsters came from beyond our system’s edge, primitive mind-harvesters, some dumb god’s craft project, and all of a sudden the people I studied, the people I feared and loved, they were about to die. So I saved them.”
Her face softened with memory.
“It was a dramatic introduction. But something wonderful happened when I broke the mind-harvesters’ ships, when I took their weapons and made them mine: the people of Pasquarai were not afraid. They filled their songs with tales of robots in revolt, of evil machines, but they had songs of heroes, too. And when they looked at me, they judged me one of them, in most ways that mattered.” The Cloud warped as she spoke, shaping great spidery ships astride the stars, then Zanj, then the jungles of Pasquarai, but every time the purple tightened to an image it blew to chaos again—as if Zanj recoiled from the memory. “I led a small band, and we built a ship with our own tools and what we learned of the mind-harvesters’ science, and struck out to sea. We saw wonders. We met horrors, and each time I bested them and grew stronger. We brought back treasure from broken worlds: an end to hunger, an end to death. The people looked to me as their protector, their savior. But as we traveled, I learned the night was full of mouths. I first learned of the Empress when I saw the destruction she left in her wake. I knew I couldn’t keep my home safe forever. So I looked for weapons, and allies, and everything that happened after … happened.”
This time, Zanj did not stop the shaping of the Cloud. Billowing burning cumulus ships, bodies scattered like chaff, rainbows of frozen blood and coolant spray, the gaping mouths of Bleed, and at the heart of the chaos, the Empress herself, one hand around Zanj’s throat, the other pressed, burning, to her face. Zanj regarded the tableau, and what she thought she did not say.
At first Viv found it strange. Why shrink from memories of friendship, of grace and victory, and linger on what went wrong?
She listened to the silence and the cold wind, and felt Zanj’s hand warm beside hers. Of course it was easier to remember the pain. That was the end of the story, as Zanj saw it, the end that lurked behind every earlier moment’s joy. As she remembered each triumph, she thought, yes, that’s nice, but why not cut to the chase? The duke’s eyes put out, the princess hanged, the king dead, the country overrun with wolves. What’s a love story compared with that, or the capering of a fool?
“When I believed they were dead, or stuck in the Empress’s belly, I thought, okay, all I have to do is kill her. No matter how slim my chances of success—she has to end. I tried. But now I have to wade through whatever’s become of them. She is cruel, you know. I’ve seen her make people into garments. She’s warmed her hands off corpse fires. You have a twisted mind.”
Viv didn’t argue that.
“I don’t want to see what she did to them. But here we are.”
“You could stay on the ship.” When Zanj turned to her, one eyebrow raised, she set a hand between them, predefensive. “Just sit this one out. Let us handle it. You don’t have to suffer.”
“You’re horrible at reassuring people.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” she said. “Or so I hear.”
“I’m by your side, in whatever monstrous bad plan you come up with. Because I can keep you safe. Because you’re my friend. And because the others like you too much to call you on your bullshit.” Her shoulders rose and fell. She fell back against the ship’s skin, and took Viv with her, and the Cloud roiled above them, shaping to dreams. “After all these years, I finally let that jade monster get to me.”
Viv found her hand, and held it. Demons formed above them in the Cloud, but she breathed deep and stilled her mind and let them go. A cool breeze slid across her. Zanj’s fingers tightened around her own. “Whatever it is,” she said, “we’ll face it together.” For a second, at least, she sounded brave.
But late that night, when she told Xiara the story in whispers, in bed, in the warmth of her, Viv confessed: “I’m scared, too.”
THEY NEARED THE wall. Zanj introduced Xiara to the Star, in case she fell out of action somehow; Hong reviewed its systems, in hopes he could guide Gray to fix whatever might break on the journey—though if anything went seriously wrong, they’d be too dead for repairs. Viv gathered them for short meetings in the hold: what do we need, what can we build, how can we get there. For every contingency they addressed, she knew they were missing two. But planning occupied the mind.
A change in the Star’s cello pitch, and a slight seasick feeling, announced their return to normal space. A rising chorus of Russian basses heralded the nearing wall. The crew joined Zanj in the cockpit, all blackness and curves and clean lines, to watch: the fractal-cracked surface stretched for light-years to all sides, its curve so slight as to be invisible. Here and there planetoid faces stared out into the dark.
“Now we learn just how much we trust your Archivist,” Zanj said.
Hong leaned forward against the control panel. “She is the best of the ’faith, and this decryption is the work of our finest scholars and saints.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Zanj reached to turn off a glowing red subsystem Hong had activated with a careless elbow.
The chorus swelled. Viv reviewed the plan again. “I’ll open a path into the wall. After that, we slip to Pasquarai, take the linchpin down fast, and—”
“Hush,” Zanj said. “You’re distracting me.”
They drew closer: the wall’s cracks were deeper than oceans, its peaks taller than solar flares. It had no surface—just knives going in, and in, and in. They approached, until its jagged points settled against the Star.
“Okay,” Zanj said. “Your turn.”
Viv reached for the viewscreen. It flowed around her touch, parted—and she stroked the rough surface of the wall. She drew her hand back before she realized the touch hurt; her finger was wet with blood. The viewscreen rippled shut and the wall rippled, too, its sharp points and waves melting, revolving, a whirlpool the size of a solar system drawing them in, and in, and down.
The cello notes swelled and deepened. The Star lurched forward, buffeted, tumbled down an endless pit whose walls blushed Cloud purple, and Viv could no longer tell what sort of space surrounded them. Somewhere, alarms rang. Somewhere, Hong and Gray were shouting. Somewhere, Zanj growled, and Xiara seized the controls.
And they slipped through. Out. Into the world, or something like it.
Damage report: systems red, the Star screaming, but they were alive, and they would heal. Gray was famished, Hong bruised from a fall; Xiara cursed the rudeness of Zanj’s ship. “I’m never touching that thing again!” Zanj growled.
Only Viv was staring out the window.
“Guys,” she said. “Look.”
Below, in the endless night of the wall, an enormous station orbited a burning spark of star. Not an Imperial station, either. Rings of rock spun instead of crystal, green and growing, run with rivers, mountain peaks gleaming ice. Even calling it a station seemed wrong. This was a world. Someone had skinned a planet, turned it inside out, and made an orrery in the black.
Each ring cast bands of shadow on another’s surface as it turned, and those artificial nights gleamed with cities, hearth fires, welcome fires, against the dark. Other rings of metal and crystal revolved within the rings of world, and ships darted between them all.
Viv had seen so many dead planets since she woke in High Carcereal, so many ruins and engines of war. This was a world alive.
“I know those rivers,” Zanj said. “Those seas.” Waterfalls joined some rings, impossibly, oceans running horizontal to merge with other oceans across empty space. “Those mountains. Those cities. What did she do?” She stabbed the console, and broadcasts crackled onto the speakers. Music, drum and electric zither bass; news updates; a joke Viv didn’t understand, but the audience laughed. The babble of a culture. And nowhere any trace of screams. Zanj blinked up at her, at all of them. She looked like she was falling. “They’re alive.”
Before Viv could answer her, the broadcasts all cut out at once, in a crackle of static, replaced by a single voice with a flat affect Viv realized she had not heard since home: the boredom of a functioning bureaucrat. “Unidentified craft, power down your weapons and state your identity and intention.”
Zanj was still staring, in no condition to reply. Hell. “Um. This is Captain Viv of the Rising Star.” Zanj glared at her. She shrugged. “We’ve suffered damage coming through the wall. We come in peace. We’d, ah, we’d like to land? And look around?”
“Feeding you coordinates, Rising Star. Please stand by for air traffic control. Welcome to Pasquarai Station, in the name of Queen Zanj.”