IN A KINDER world there would have been weeks to rest, to heal, to love and grieve. Now they barely had space to catch their breath.
Viv tried to rise, and sank back to her knees beside the body. Her bones weren’t broken besides the obvious, and few of the cuts ran deep. Her hand was a mess of agony that might have belonged to someone else. Her palm wept blood, and the finger—the space where her finger had been—should have been bleeding worse. She was holding it, but her left hand wasn’t slick or sticky; she looked down, or thought she should, but her head did not move at all. Will and deed had come unglued. She moved herself like a puppet. Stare down. See it.
Her trembling hand sank to Hong’s sash—to a pouch she remembered, that held a silver patch. It wriggled as it neared her pierced palm, the stump of her finger.
She remembered his hand pressing hers down, and felt it now, in memory.
The patch burned. It wrapped around her hand like a glove. She sobbed, and held him close. He had not wept, much, back then. And he had risen. Why wouldn’t he rise now?
Zanj closed his eyes in the end. “He stopped her.” She sounded distant, wondering. “It was all sick and green inside her, writhing with the Empress, like maggots. But she was as strong as me, as fast, as fierce, as mad. And he stopped her.”
“He was more than himself at the end,” Gray said. “We were all part of him. He was part of all of us. Even you, I think.”
Xiara touched his still hand. “I don’t think it was just at the end. I think he always was part of us. Or we were part of him. Maybe—” But she could not finish what she had been about to say.
Viv heard the rest. Her heart filled it in. Maybe he still is. Maybe we still are.
Beneath them, the tower trembled. There was a war going on down there—worse than war. Pasquarai’s stunted children all growing up at once. The bonds that held their hearts snapped, and they flailed with wills they had never used before, as the world began to break.
“Let’s go,” Zanj said. “Let’s finish it.”
She set the Star upon the floor, and spread it to a disc of black. They stood upon it and it rose, swift and soundless, from the fires of Pasquarai toward the station’s false sun.
When they stood between the station and the star, Viv asked, “What do we do with him?”
“We’ll take him home,” Zanj said. “To the ’fleet. After this is done.”
Viv looked at her, black eyes into red. Do you think there will be an after? But she held the question in herself, and did not ask it, for all their sakes. So she said, “He’d like that,” and watched as the Star closed over him like the waters of a lake over a sword.
Viv’s hand ached beneath its bandage, and each breath was a knife. There were few words. They did not need them.
Xiara took Viv’s unmangled hand, but could not look her in the eye. Zanj placed her hand on Viv’s right shoulder, ready for anything. Ignore that twitch of her tail. Ignore that ready for anything meant ready to die. And Gray held Zanj’s hand, and Xiara’s, too. He’d worn so many forms but this one seemed to hold them all, the pale starved child, the monster, the work-hardened young man of the Refuge fields, and beneath all that, held by his skin, the flame.
And in Viv’s heart Hong stood beside them still, and she could see him telling himself the story he always told, that this moment should have no more meaning than any other, that the world was always changing and any claim of significance for changes in which one participated was just a failure of perspective. Telling himself, and believing it, and living it, and scared anyway.
He had been part of them. She wished she’d been able to share that, at the end, the souls melting into souls.
But the teaching was not a thing of the Cloud. It expressed itself through every tool available, but it was not through the Cloud that she felt him in her now, inside them all, passing from touch to touch, glance to glance. She had fought her way back from the edge of the universe to save him, and so had Xiara and so had Zanj.
She’d half hoped Gray might make some joke to break the silence, yes, look at ourselves, how funny it is that broken things like us can stand here as if we matter, a pirate who was caught, a servant who refused to serve, a pilot without wings, a woman without a soul, all watching one another so severe, set to do a thing that, if we’re lucky, will change the world forever.
There were no jokes to offer.
Viv gripped Xiara’s hand, and they kissed like continents.
“We’ll win,” Xiara said.
It was a young woman’s answer. A young warrior’s. Viv hadn’t much felt the difference in their ages before now—she had so much to learn, and Xiara so much to teach. But for all the loss Xiara had seen, for all she’d fought, she had not yet lived enough to give those losses weight. Nevers and onlys and forevers grew as you did. The sky went on forever, but if you had no context save the height of the nearest trees, you could fool yourself into thinking the blue hung just beyond your reach, when in fact it was never there at all, and what was, was deeper than you could dream.
Viv heard Xiara hear how hollow those words were, how deep the sky.
There would be so much more to learn, if they made it through. So much to find. Stories they loved; tics in each that pissed the others off, leaving beds made or unmade, laughing too loud when drunk, a tendency to grump when beaten in an argument or game. Missing an item on the shopping list. What did Zanj do for fun, aside from cosmic larceny? Did she even know? What was Gray’s favorite meal? Did he read?
What had been Hong’s name, before he was named?
They were galaxies, all of them. More than galaxies: brighter, older, and deeper.
She had all that to lose, if they failed. And all that to gain.
Had Viv never left her home, had the Empress not come for her, had she never woken to this war, had she never been to space, there would have been no end to the glories of the world.
When afraid: live.
She told them now, told Gray and Zanj and Xiara, too, on the round platform before the star. “We’re here for our sky. Our homes. For freedom from collars and crowns. That’s what we’re fighting for. And him. Whatever happens.” They each said yes in their own way: Zanj with a nod and a tightening grip on her staff, Gray, shifting weight, nervous and trying not to seem so, Xiara with a warrior’s glint in her eye.
And Hong said yes through them.
“I want to live. I want to know you all without this hanging over our heads. I want to make you watch me get old. I love you. Let’s do this. And when it’s done, let’s do something else.”
“Dance party,” Gray said. His voice was raw. They all were. “We can get those spider guys to do the music.”
Xiara laid hers on top. “You’ve never seen an Ornclan dance.”
“Better than you sing, I hope.”
Beneath them, the rings of Pasquarai burned.
Viv turned, at last, to Zanj. “You haven’t said anything.”
She shrugged. “We hit her where it hurts. What was the kid’s line, anyway? For the liberation of all sentient beings?”
“For the liberation of all sentient beings,” Viv said, and each of them echoed it in turn. She thought she heard another voice join theirs.
They held their hands together, and looked from one, to the other, to the next, to the last. And as one, they broke.
Xiara left first—faded like mist through the Cloud, to Groundswell far away. Zanj unrolled the Star into a sleek single-cabin needle, shaped for speed. The ramp descended. Gray was first aboard, and Viv followed. Zanj lingered, watching the rings of Pasquarai aflame and the fake sun overhead.
“You coming?” Viv asked.
“Yeah,” Zanj said. “Just … this place looked so much like home.” She raised the sun-gold bar before her, in both hands, and breathed out. “Here goes.”
She broke it.
The sun went out.
The wall fell.
The stars came back.
And Zanj marched down the ramp, toward the rest.