THE WAR MET in the deep places of the sky.
Their attack had many prongs, but its goals were simple. Deny the Empress capacity. Strike the starminds that anchored her grip upon the Cloud and the manufactories that built her fleet. Fight on many fronts at once.
The Empress, looking up from her work, would see a daring raid, and dangerous, and might feel a stab of fear at her sudden exposure to the Bleed. She would devote spare resources to crushing them, and securing the border where Bleed chewed the unprotected edges of her sky. But she would not halt the complex machines at work on the Rosary bead that held Viv’s world, her grail, the secrets that would render all this bother irrelevant. Distracted, she would not notice the needle stitching toward her through the Cloud.
Unless, and until, she did.
No plan’s perfect, after all.
XIARA STOOD AT Groundswell’s heart. The ship hung around her, and the fleet beyond that, however many planets’ worth of metal and rock and flesh she could not guess, all waiting. The crèche, lined with sensors facing in, with arms to hold her, with phosphorescent status lights that winked like eyes, looked like the instruments of torture the Ornclan had inherited from its previous chiefs—those the Chief her mother had broken and fed into the fire when she took office.
The ship breathed, and waited for her.
The first time had been so easy. She had not known what she was doing. She didn’t know how wrong it could go, or how hard it would be to leave the ship behind. Knowing, she ought to be ready now.
It was not pain that made her pause. Pain could be borne.
She felt so ready to give. To slake the machine’s hunger. That was how the crown had trapped her, that was the pit Hong gave his life to free her from. She was eager to be shaped.
She stepped off the catwalk and the ship pulled her up. Its arms spread, and she found herself embraced. Received. Welcomed.
With a thousand thousand eyes she stared out through the Cloud, and flexed a thousand thousand limbs. There was pain, yes, she’d forgotten the fullness of the pain—but there was joy, too, far worse. She wanted the pain to stop, and it did—Groundswell just reached inside her, obedient to her will, and turned the pain receptors off. Its systems embraced her, planet-shattering vast, obedient to her will. It needed her to want things. It needed her will to shape its own, to give its weaponized hulk frame and purpose. She was a girl in a palace, empty and immense, and when she shouted, invisible hands answered her every command. But no matter how she ran, she never reached the walls, and if she demanded a door, it only opened into the palace once again.
She gathered herself in silence, shuddering.
And then, with a thousand thousand ears, she heard her clan.
Voices of Orn, in rhythm and formation and harmony—a war chant, a gathering chant, and she heard their ships gather round her in the Cloud, each will shaped to a greater unity like voices shaped to song.
At their heart, she heard her mother’s voice.
This, she knew.
She gave herself to the song, and flew with the hosts of Orn to war.
VIV WATCHED THE map.
They sped through the churning engine of the Citadel’s Cloud. Zanj, muttering, adjusted the Star’s form, and they surged ahead still faster. The rules were different here, it seemed; the Empress had carved paths for her own use, dedicated transfer and processing circuits, redundant subsystems. Zanj had opened a window so Viv could watch, but gazing into the enormous crash and roll of the machine made her head ache. She preferred charts instead, so Zanj built those: red patterns in the Star’s matte-black cockpit. There was a situation map: the Mirrorfaith’s battle group in position, telemetry dots winking out in the green blizzard of the Empress’s forces, artwork ships torn by slivers, or else obscured, until the Pride descended upon them, hate fractals trailing flame. And, yes, there, the Ornclan struck, deeper into Imperial territory, at a manufactory hub guarded by an Imperial glaiveship and a torch squadron and, of course, thousands more drones of the Diamond Fleet. A logical second-wave target. Just the kind of place they might strike if their first attacks had been mere feints.
They didn’t have to hold out for long. But still, she prayed.
The map marked their destination in blue, nearing fast. Nioh and Yannis had found them as soon as the wall came down, and they traced telemetry helices around the Star, trading pings and data streams. They had no physical form now, vectors of information only keeping pace. Almost there. She tried not to think about Xiara, she tried even more not to think about Hong, but not thinking made it worse. So she thought, instead. Drew them into her mind, and let them shape her.
She felt it near: her world pierced by Imperial light, the bottled universe in which the Empress built her, and Magda, and everything she knew. A hundred thousand hands of gravity and light pulled Viv, caught her, pried her. She curled over the control panel; Gray came to her side, set his hands on her shoulders, but she waved him off. “I’m fine.”
She was not. But they all had their business now, and hers was to survive.
They drew close. Their destination swelled on the map and became a system, a single star necklaced by planets with eccentric oval orbits, rock and metal near the star, gas giants farther out, one of those marked with an hourglass glyph whose meaning she could not parse. Sensors painted the system Imperial green: installations and ships and lines of force, huge Dyson plates near the star, rings and space junk, a built-up system, an ancient system, full of weapons, full of trash. And there, above the third planet, the blue X of their destination: Viv’s singularity, and the systems the Empress built to pry it open.
Red numbers counted seconds left till their arrival. Thirty. Twenty.
The blue X should have drawn her entire focus, all her worry and her will. That was everything; their success, or failure. Her ticket home.
But instead, she studied the system. The single star, the projected orbits. The planets. Eight, if you counted that weird hourglass-thing.
When she was a kid, there had been nine.
“Gray,” she said. “Does that system have a name?”
Before he could answer, they fell from the Cloud to realspace. Normal geometry reasserted itself with a stomach-twist. But, sickened, Viv still forced herself up, made herself look out the window.
And then she did not need his answer anymore, because below her, bluegreen beautiful, was Earth.