7

CONSIDER HEAT AND pressure, pain.

Consider loss that cannot be reclaimed, because time goes in only one direction—your triumph broken in an instant, your weapons torn from you, your fleet scattered and burning, your allies, friends hunted one by one and gutted. Some, the most useful, were allowed a heroic last stand so their final tricks and strategies might be recorded for the Empress’s later study. Bound, helpless, watch them fall. See the Empress skin them, cryptographically and literally, breaking the locks that bind their souls, peeling skin and biting flesh from fruit. If you were faster, stronger, wiser, smarter, you might have saved them. At least you might have died in battle—harder than it seems, since death is only barely possible for you.

Death would have spared you these chains.

Consider lonely centuries entombed under bone-shattering pressure, blistering heat, cursing your weakness, remembering friends you could not save—constant torment broken once every span of timeless pain, when the star opens and unseen hands draw you from the heat to speak with Her, your foe, your captor. So she can ask you soothing questions, offer tea, and gloat.

It’s been ages, she says on each visit, and there are so few people I can really talk to anymore. You could surrender, and join me—I’d have to rework you from the inside, of course, but only a little. I don’t want to spoil the beautiful math of you. We’d do well together. There is so much universe to rule.

She offers it like that each time, as if you were friends—until you can no longer keep silent and hang from your chains like a slab of meat, and the polite mask you wear to prolong your reprieve slips.

You spit. You curse. You call her tyrant, torturer, traitor, you call her a failure and a cheat and a sneak. It’s her fault the world’s gone wrong, her fault the Bleed keeps coming back and the Cloud broods above the cosmos like a storm about to break, it’s her fault no one likes her and all her friends are dead, and you hate her, you hate her, you hate her.

And then, each time, she throws you back.

Consider heat, pressure, pain. Loneliness. Your only friends your chains. A human mind—remember what those were like, those blessed beautiful tiny wasteful things, melting and sweet like hand-painted chocolates?—a human mind would have snapped long before yours finally gave way. Over thousands of years it broke and healed and broke again, and memory was a help and a curse, because locked in this box in this star, hungry, alone, always burning, you could sometimes let the present slip and lose yourself in memories of when you once were Zanj.

You flew, back then. You stole stars. You led fleets. You fought, and won, and made love with a strength to break stones and press coal to diamond. You stole worlds and left taunting notes behind. You trailed anarchy and your own laughter through a galaxy too small for the scope of your ambition. No matter how grand the theft, you wanted more.

Consider falling from those memories to wake back in the box in the star, to the chains on your wrists and Her handprint seared into your face, and the pain, and the dark.

Until.

Until one day the music of the star’s magnetosphere shifts around you, and you hear the grind and glory of the great machines at work—chained, you cannot use them, only hear them as if through a wall. The star opens. Ah yes. One more torture session, one more conversation you’ll keep civil as long as you can because every second out of the star is a second away from pain, because every instant She gloats over your humiliation is a second you’re not alone. You hate yourself for watching your language in front of her. Hate yourself for wondering if she’ll offer tea this time.

You miss swallowing.

Consider all that, and ask yourself how you would feel when the cell door opened to reveal two people you did not expect—two people who were not supposed to be here.

Imagine seeing, after three thousand years, a chance.

You can use this.

Imagine, but know that however vast the span of your dreams, you still don’t know what it is to be Zanj.

Chains bound her, wrists and ankles and neck and soul, and still she grinned. The Empress could make Zanj scream, but could not make her weak.

And the Empress was not here.

The room had not changed since Zanj’s last interview—say rather her last torture session—who knew how many centuries ago. But before her stood two impossibilities.

The pretty boy wore a Mirrorfaith robe, oddly fashioned and ornate but recognizable—and the Empress scorned those cargo cultists. She would never permit one here.

And beside the boy-monk stood a woman who did not exist.

The Cloud taunted Zanj, promising safety and power and freedom as out of reach for her, chained, as her tree-bound forebears once thought the stars. With the cell’s door open she could at least listen to the space above space, the world of soul and mind and gods—the Cloud. The Cloud, which shadowed each structure, each being, which whispered telemetry and vital signs and the shared state of every object in the cosmos and some that weren’t, the Cloud that mirrored and informed everything in the world of matter.

Everything but this woman, apparently.

She wore ’faith robes in a truly weird style, and flesh in an ancient baseline human model. Short hair, high cheekbones, narrow face, brief generous mouth, scarred wrist, her body an experiment in tension and compression and drive, all that pressure directed out the gunports of her large, dark eyes. But Zanj could not tell how fast her heart was running without timing the pulse in her neck, could not read her emotions without watching the micro-movements of her body. She kept her soul completely to herself.

Unnerving. Was she some sort of master? One of the ’faith’s saints or holy folk? Zanj never could keep the terminology straight, and it had probably changed in the last three thousand years.

The local Cloud was a mess. The Empress had come here, leaving her radioactive footprints, her bright green stain. She had done some great Work and it echoed, as if a mighty voice had screamed a true word in a quiet room. But the Empress had left, as fast as she had come, and in her absence scavengers scuttled in: the Pride, the discard pile of the cosmos, and the Mirrorfaith.

Why would the Empress who killed Zanj’s fleet, who killed her friends, who mocked her and tormented her, who broke her and let her heal only to break her again, come to High Carcereal and work some miracle, only to abandon her project without first sealing the system against the roaches and her rabid fan club?

Ah. There was the answer.

Bleedsign, gathering.

So, the old tyrant had stuck her neck out one inch too far at last.

There were many mysteries here. Zanj could solve them after she was out. That was the goal, of which she would not, could not lose sight: out. If this pair of nothings could draw her from the star, perhaps they could undo her chains. They might even be dumb enough to try. “Did she send you here to torture me?” She broadened her smile. That had an unsettling effect on most people.

The boy picked himself off the floor. Pity. Zanj always appreciated a good prostration. “Viv, be careful. She’s—”

“Be quiet, Hong. Let me think.”

Zanj’s mind danced in the silence: there was a gap between the boy and the woman. The woman had power, and the boy had knowledge. Zanj could use that gap. “What lies do they tell about me now? Does the ’faith call me a temptress? Do I seduce with my voice alone? Do I beguile earnest young monks from their craven praise of a tyrant Lady? Am I the serpent in your garden, a rebel angel, a Sita-stealing demon, what? I am Zanj. You don’t know the hundredth of who I am, what I’ve done. The truth would break your tiny mind.”

The boy grayed, and assumed a fighting crouch as if Zanj could kill him from here. The woman held her ground. If anything, she looked pleased—an emotion Zanj had to deduce, like a savage, from the twitch of her lips, from tightness at the corners of her eyes. Zanj liked the woman for that amusement, that tinge of respect. She hoped she did not have to kill her. “I need help,” the woman said. Viv. That was the name the boy-monk used. “Hong says you can cross galaxies. Is that true?”

“When I was free,” she said, and let some of the ache she felt when she said that word enter her voice, in that instant as naked as she’d ever been—“I could leap in heartbeats from star to star. There never was a master of the Cloud with my strength, or speed, or genius.”

Viv hesitated before her next question like a first-time diver on a cliff, contemplating the whitecaps that meant rocks below. “Can you take people with you?”

There it was. Viv’s need, to pair with Zanj’s own. Viv had not drawn Zanj from the star by accident, or to see what would happen. She had a desire, and desire was a rope Zanj could use to climb from the abyss. Zanj had never seen a beauty so sharp, so sure, so shining as that need, and with the ease of forty centuries’ practice, she said, “I could take stars with me, if I wanted.”

“You sound confident.” Circling, circling, the prey examines the bait. Come on, stranger. No—come on, friend. It’s tasty, it’s safe. Take a bite.

“Who needs confidence,” Zanj said, “when they have skill?”

“Good.” Viv nodded. “You see, we need transport. We’re trapped here. Like you.”

“Not quite like me.” Zanj shifted her weight, and rang her chains. Viv looked almost chastened then; Zanj had meant it as a joke, in part, and in part to test the woman’s ignorance. The boy-monk Hong knew her, or whatever stories they told about her now, enough to doubt any pangs of sympathy he might feel. But there was real shame on Viv’s face, Zanj thought, and real sympathy, which few who knew her story would dare to show.

“No,” Viv said. “Not like you. Do you want out?”

“Oh, after the first thousand years or so down there, it’s not so bad.” What a moronic question, she said with her eyes, and with the flatness of her voice. “I spent the last century catching up on my reading while I was endlessly roasted in a star. Of course I want out.”

“Promise you’ll get me to safety, unharmed, alive, and I’ll unlock those chains.”

“You can’t trust her,” the boy-monk protested, as of course he would. Small-minded cretin. Unfortunately, Viv listened to him. When Zanj got out, she’d kill him slowly.

“Your friend,” Zanj said, as levelly as she could manage with freedom so near and so far from her grasp, already cursing herself for letting this chance slip even though she hadn’t yet—she could still talk herself out of this hole, just watch her—anyway, your friend, “has no idea who I really am. He’s heard myths and echoes, rumors, slander on a mythological scale. Why would I kill you? You have nothing I want except my freedom. And you’re in more trouble than me. If the Empress finds out you freed me, that you came even this close, she’ll hunt you both to the depths between the stars and spend centuries inventing new tortures just for you. Your only hope’s to let me out. I’ll cause her so much trouble she’ll never trouble herself with you. And first, I’ll take you wherever you want to go.” For a moment, Zanj even believed herself—a virtuoso performance. She could taste her stars, feel the tickle of hard vacuum on her skin again. Hell, she’d settle for being able to move her arms, or lift a leg, or get herself off. Swallowing wasn’t the only thing she missed. “Just unlock these chains.”

“Don’t,” the boy warned, and Zanj resisted the urge to snarl. His time would come. If she did this right.

“Aw,” she said. “I barely even bite.” She kept her fangs sheathed.

Viv reached for her, the slightest tremor in her fingertips. Zanj loathed the eagerness she felt as that hand approached, hated that she could feel so fixed on so small a motion, that some mere robed human might stand between her and freedom. She had to keep calm. She had to let this go at its own pace. A few seconds more in another’s power, that was all. A few seconds to look helpful, solicitous, even eager. They ticked on forever.

Until, at last, those trembling fingers graced Zanj’s chestplate, and her locks clacked and rolled like thunder in gas giant storms, and the chains fell from her arms, her legs, her waist. Weak with newfound freedom, she slumped against the wall of her box, slid to the floor overcome by the rush of possibility, by the glory of moving her goddamn arms under her own power, by shame at her relief. The Cloud roared in her ears: telemetry, wire data; she could hear stars gone nova a hundred thousand light-years away and ago, hear container fleets idling uncrewed and full of treasures in deep space; she heard gods born and heard gods die. She was vast, and still so much smaller than she had been, without the Fallen Star and all her lesser weapons, without her friends, without the Suicide Queens, without the fleet she’d lost, and her people back on Pasquarai.

She was small and slow and wounded. But she was free, and that would do.

Now she just had to deal with the local nuisances.

Zanj didn’t have much to work with—the Fallen Star still locked in the heart of a Bleed-possessed battleship thousands of light-years away, her allies long dead. But she had her own body, and three batteries at the base of her skull that after all this time held fractions of charge. She could milk perhaps fifteen seconds’ operation from each unit, and she’d need days to put herself together again afterward. She wouldn’t get a second chance.

Fortunately she never needed more than one.

She popped a battery, upspun her personal time, and unsheathed her claws.

Then she moved fast.

The boy had better reflexes than she expected. By the time she breezed past Viv he had raised some low-rent vajra weapon; its particles whirled from his bracelets, cohering into crystal. Not a bad trick—Zanj could use it, once she skinned those bands off him. So, rather than killing him outright, she swept his legs and elbowed him in the chest. He flew back, eyes wide with the shock of sudden speed, hit the wall, fell. Zanj’s fur glowed, radiating waste heat and crackling with ionized air; she jumped, twisted around, landed facing the other direction, and saw Viv half turned toward her, so slow, one hand drifting out, her vocal cords buzzing with the roots of a word.

Zanj felt momentary misgivings. It was bad form to hurt people who helped you. And she did like this woman. But it was a hard universe.

She wasn’t cruel. She didn’t relish screams. Good thing she didn’t have to listen to this one. All she had to do was get her hand around Viv’s throat and lift her from the ground, and squeeze, and squeeze—while Viv croaked out: “Stop.”

And Zanj did.

The pain would have been beautiful if Zanj didn’t have to feel it. There was a band of fire at her brow, and it spread suffering through all the lines of her, nerves and implants and soul knotted into a tangle of fury and flame. Her skin crisped. Her stomach tried to strangle her heart. The pain went on forever, and forever was so brief no time seemed to have passed at all.

She’d thought she had known pain inside the star.

This was worse.

She came back to herself, panting on the floor, drooling rainbow blood on crystal. She’d bitten into her cheek. Viv was staring down at her, mouth open, horrified—by what she had done, by what had almost been done to her. Zanj sheathed her fangs and clutched her forehead. The pain passed and left her scoured. Her searching fingers found a circlet of metal like a cuff around her brow; her claws bit into her skin, tore, but the cuff did not move. Blood leaked down her face. The bone beneath the circlet creaked. “Free me,” she commanded. It was not a plea. She had not begged in three thousand years.

She felt sick. To be so close, to be out of the box and free, and yet to feel this chain around her skull, as if the Empress still crouched above her body, her burning hand on Zanj’s face, her skin flowing, sealing, searing—it was a joke. A lie. Her eyes screwed shut, and there were no tears, no. She would not allow them. She would choke first. “Free me.”

Viv stammered, drew back. “I. Um. I don’t have much reason to. Since you almost—”

“I will kill you,” Zanj roared with all the fury her long captive years had watered and let grow. She came up off the floor, unsteady, claws out, but all Viv had to say was no, and she collapsed again.

The next broken moment did not last so long as the first, because she surrendered faster. When she came back to herself, she felt her limbs sore with seizure, smelled the sweat of her own fear, tasted the burned metal of her own blood. She wanted to hurt this woman. She needed her dead. For vengeance, for freedom—but also because her death, the boy-monk’s death, would let Zanj hide, leave her alone here to pant and shiver with her shame. So what if Viv had hurt her? She had been hurt before. But Viv had seen her in despair.

This wasn’t fair. Fuck fair, she’d never much cared for fair—but still, this wasn’t. She should be free. She should be herself again. She had talked herself out of the box. But this damn iron circlet gripped her brain. A poison crown. The box had been more honest. Wherever she went now in all the world, she’d take her prison with her.

The station shook.

“It’s coming apart,” Hong said, recovered from the shock, holding his ribs. “They’re firing on High Carcereal itself.” With horror, because of course for him the salient fact of the goddamn moment was the offense the Pride offered to his bitch goddess by attacking her work. Zanj laughed, bitter and sick and mad and soft, because of how far away his bullshit cultist concerns felt from everything that really mattered. And because he was wrong.

She heard the madness in her laugh, after so many centuries, after such a failure even here. But to her surprise, Viv heard it, too. And sounded, when she spoke, almost kind. “Zanj? Why are you laughing?”

“Because it’s fucking absurd, you speck. You mayfly. Because I’m stuck here, because that little monk thinks his fleet and all the Pride’s relics and their greatest planet-scorching weapons, all those gnats and peashooters, could make this station shake. Because I’m free for the first time in longer than either of you could imagine, and I can’t get this crown off. And we’re all about to die, because that’s not weapons fire. That’s Bleedsign.”

Viv did not understand. The boy did not believe. “Impossible,” he said, as if saying a thing made it so. Zanj just kept laughing.

“Hong,” Viv said carefully. “I don’t know what she’s talking about, but let’s keep impossible off the table for a moment.”

“There can’t be Bleed here. There’s nothing for them to eat.”

“Your Empress, your Lady, your evil mistress, chained cubic light-years of local Cloud to some mad purpose—recently. She built machines around this star that all you small-brained monks networked together could not comprehend. To the Bleed, that smells awful tasty.”

“Could one of you explain, please?” Viv asked. “What’s a Bleed?”

Zanj boggled at the question, so much that she almost forgot her own absurd predicament. “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles,” Viv said. “Originally.”

Which meant nothing much to Zanj; she recalled fifty or sixty planets named Los Angeles, ruins, cinders, poison balls, and one pretty nice place actually, and Viv might mean any of them or none. Even during a Fall, new planets popped up all the time, and long-silent worlds sent feelers out, wondering if the coast was clear, if the Bleed had moved on, if the Empress had stopped her raging. So Viv was a rube. So what? “The Bleed eat civilizations. And since there aren’t many of those at the moment, they’re hungry.”

Zanj could fight them. Maybe. Alone, on low power, without weapons, she wouldn’t get far. She could run. She could try. But Viv’s command, stop, had passed through the Cloud, not through any medium so slow as air. All that woman had to do was crook her finger and Zanj would come crawling back.

Viv knelt beside her, just out of reach. “The Empress chained you here. She gave me this scar. We don’t have to fight. We can help each other.”

It sounded so simple when she said it. There would be time for vengeance later. She wanted this woman to die. She wanted her blood on the walls, she wanted her eyes somewhere else. Not because she’d hurt Zanj—she hadn’t meant to, she still looked sick and shaken beneath the mask of her concern—but because she was a piece of this whole situation that Zanj wanted over and done with. But while she wanted Viv to die, she wanted out more. You made bad deals with your back against the wall. “Give me your hand.”

The boy objected. “Viv—”

But Viv raised one hand to cut him off. “Hong. We don’t have a choice.” And he listened. Good monk. Back to Zanj: “Bring him, too.”

“Give me your hand,” she said again.

Viv offered it. This time, her fingers did not shake. Brave. Brave jailer.

Zanj reached into Viv, probing her soul, initiating the handshake to prepare for encryption and jump, and found … nothing. Her eyes snapped open, and she looked closer. She’d assumed Viv was some kind of saint or master, or else a gifted idiot, to cast no shadow on the Cloud. But she was wrong.

“What’s the problem?” Ah yes, Hong, the killjoy kid, so interested in their success now that he didn’t have to take the blame.

Zanj rose from her crouch. This could not be. Yet all ten or twelve of her senses claimed it was so. The Cloud curled beneath and around her, full of everything but Viv. “I thought you were just being private—keeping your soul to yourself. But you don’t have one.”

“What do you mean?” Viv’s hand tightened on hers, weak, human, physical—as if mere pressure could prove she was really there. “What are you talking about, a soul?”

“Don’t tell me you monks forgot about souls.” To have her chain held by children hurt, but for a fool to hold it, and blink at her stupidly when she snarled—that curdled in her mouth. She would kill them, crush their gormless faces in. Even the thought of violence sent pain cascading through her skull. Was that the crown, fucking with her? Or was that only her memory of agony, promising its return if she acted? She was training herself already. That damn crown hooked through her, a puppeteer’s hand gloved in her guts.

Viv must have felt the heat of Zanj’s ire; she drew back. “I’m sorry.” Not apologizing for her ignorance, Zanj thought, but for everything. She was afraid. She was alone. She was, even worse, sincere. And for whatever reason, she did not want Zanj to suffer. That excused nothing, but it made the visions that filled her brain, of choking Viv out, of breaking her limb by limb, feel sour. “I’m not a monk. I’m not from,” a hesitation, a hitch, and then, “around here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Clouds parted, metaphorically speaking. The prospect of murder receded, and with it pain. Zanj drew ragged breath, gathered herself. “Do you think I cross the galaxy by just … throwing atoms around? The soul is a map to the body. I compress my soul, send that through the Cloud, and build a new body where I want to land.”

“The Cloud?”

She could not possibly be this dumb. And yet. “The Cloud is an echo of the universe. Souls live there, and go there when they die. In the Cloud, distance is a matter of math, not physics; in the Cloud, you calculate yourself from place to place. We can, at least. But you’re just meat. No ghost. No soul. Flesh.”

“That can’t be,” Hong said helpfully.

“Yes,” Zanj snapped back, “because a pissant monk who doesn’t know how his own weapons work is the final judge of can and can’t. You didn’t even notice she was dead.” She glowered back to Viv. “You have no shadow in the Cloud. When your meat goes, that’s it. No resurrection, no heavens or afterlives. You’re gone. So that’s good news for me, at least. Maybe I can’t kill you. But all I have to do is wait.”

The station shook again. Viv looked scared, still, and brave, which made Zanj’s pain, her crown, her captivity, all worse. If Viv had cackled, if she’d driven screws into Zanj’s eyes, their respective places would be clear. But she wasn’t evil. She wasn’t even mean. She was just working with very few tools.

Then Zanj saw something strange. Viv drew all her fear and confusion into herself. She inhaled, breathed out, and when she opened her eyes again they were still and steady as the gaps of space. “I don’t want to die,” she said. “And if I do, there’s no one left to set you free.”

The station groaned. Dark thunder darted through the Cloud.

“Promise you’ll let me go,” Zanj said. “If I get you out of here.”

“You tried to kill me,” Viv replied. “I promise nothing. But if I die here, you’re stuck.”

The Bleed neared, great shadows in the computational murk, all their many dimensions full of teeth, smacking their lips and wiping the drool from the corners of their mouths, ready for dinner. Viv did not know how much pain she would face when they came, how far she could fall into their starscape maws. She didn’t know the first thing about the waters in which she swam, or the monsters that haunted them. She was strong, but ignorant; she could be swayed.

And Zanj, in that harsh moment watching, judging Viv, saw a woman much like the one she’d been a long time ago, a woman who had left the safe gravity of home for a sky she did not yet understand, seeking life among the stars.

She realized then that she had made her choice.

She listened to the Cloud. Battle raged overhead: many ships, too far away to touch, too dumb to seize. But, nearer—oh.

The Empress had been cruel indeed, and petty. But this kind of cruelty, Zanj could use.

And anyway, Zanj couldn’t free herself—or take revenge—if she was dead.

“I have an idea,” Zanj said. “Better than an idea. I have a ship.”