Viv had heard this kind of story before, though without so many unfamiliar names. You took your audience through the whole thing cause by cause and effect by logical effect, because if you just spat out what you did and why, your mistake would be too plain. “So you stole a ship, and a squadron, and went after the miracle yourselves.”
“You dog!” Zanj put down her porn and clapped Hong on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. “And this whole time you’ve been playing the priggish monk—you’re a proper pirate after all!”
He rubbed his shoulder, and looked uncomfortable with her praise. “There is no property among the ’faith. What we did is not technically theft.”
“Angry warlords,” Viv pointed out, “don’t tend to respect technicalities.”
“The Grand Rector is no warlord. We were the Archivist’s students. How could we let the greatest miracle in generations slip away? We took ships, and sought liberation. Many I have fought and studied beside passed on into the Cloud, where I pray they seek liberation still.”
Viv remembered the stained-glass sparks dying in the night, against the Pride, and robed bodies lying amid the wrecked Kentaurs. The monks’ faces had been death masks of quiet contemplation more than pain. Passed on, he said, into the Cloud.
She said, “Thank you,” and, “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not the miracle you wanted.”
He shook his head, wondering, sincere. “You are better than a weapon or a grail. You are a clue to the worlds within the Rosary, to the Empress’s divine purpose, to workings that have been a mystery to us for centuries. You could change the balance of the ’fleet. You could bring all our factions together. And with us behind you, you would stand a better chance of catching the Empress than with any other allies in the galaxy.”
“After they poke and prod you, and assuming they let you go at all—by which point,” Zanj observed several jumps later, while she guided them through a nebula’s murk, “the Empress will have retreated beyond the borders of her Citadel. If they can keep out the Bleed, they’re damn sure going to keep out Hong’s cultists. While a pilot from Orn, crystal city of starships, could catch the Empress without tangling you in a religious war.”
“This Citadel of hers,” Viv said. “It’s, what, a planet?” She was getting tired of all these new words and concepts, but then, a learning curve was to be expected after one woke up in the year a million and a half.
“The Citadel is a sector of space near the galactic edge where the Empress reclines in contemplation of the cosmos.” Hong sounded close to rapture again. “A stellar fortress into which none may pass, its Cloud locked, its borders patrolled by the Diamond Fleet.” At this point, logic caught up with his rapture. “Wait. Zanj.” His voice still hooked when he said her name, like Viv imagined hers would if she met someone named Napoleon—or Satan. “How do you know She isn’t there already?”
“I couldn’t track her if she were traveling alone,” Zanj said. “But your Lady’s moving in style, dragging a singularity and a palace ship and a whole pile of Grayframe. She leaves a wake.” Zanj flicked a switch, and a new image painted the cockpit glass: a single long line with their ship on the far left, a cartoonish castle on the far right, and a green crown moving between them—still near the left of the line, but ticking forward twice for each tick their ship advanced. “She’s faster than we are, and gaining speed. Still think you have enough time to stage a revolution, gather a strike group, and catch her, kid?” Before either of them could answer, she swiveled her chair around and kicked her feet up onto an unused console. “Or we could go to Orn, which is, as I said, the crystal city of starships, and find a racer to take you straight to the lady. Once that’s done, you let me go, and I promise I’ll not harm you—I’ll dart around bringing ruckus to distract her, while you sneak into her ship, get home, and—” She slapped her palms together as if banishing dust. “—that’s all. Easy.”
“That does sound simpler,” Viv admitted.
“Except,” Hong said, much later, in the cargo hold, far from any windows, as the ship performed vertigo-inducing rolls Zanj claimed involved eating a tungsten asteroid for its raw materials; she’d banished Hong and Viv from the cockpit for fear of nausea, “Orn is a myth.”
“It’s not,” Zanj called back from the controls.
“Everyone tells stories about it, but no one knows where it is.”
“Because they hide. The Empress has a habit, in case you hadn’t noticed, of killing civilizations that get too big. If you were running an interstellar commerce hub, would you tell her fan club where you lived?”
“Maybe things have changed,” Hong said. “You were in that star for a long time.”
Zanj stalked back down the hall from the cockpit. The ship continued to fly itself without her guiding hand, and the turns grew vicious. Zanj’s face looked like the face of a thunder god, and while Viv forced herself to match her glare for glare, she felt faint as she did, and grateful when Zanj turned her gaze on Hong. “I know.” She heard the rawness in those words, the edge of cutting humor not quite on the good side of despair. “Orn had a good system—stealth, expertise, generations of augmented Cloud-spliced pilots. They dream spaceways. They dance in formation. They sing babies preflight checkup songs while they nurse. If anyone anywhere in the galaxy can catch the Empress, it’s a pilot of Orn.”
Hong looked to Viv the way friends had looked to her after too long spent arguing on the Internet. Help. I’m drowning.
Hong was right—his knowledge would be more up to date than Zanj’s. But she thought about life inside a crystal box, studied and prodded and poked and praised. If she’d wanted that, she would never have left her family in LA.
“We go to Orn,” she said. Once she’d made the decision, her misgivings vanished, as always. Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.
Zanj nodded, self-satisfied, as if she’d never doubted Viv would make the right choice. “Good.” The ship lurched and settled. Gravity changed—softened, grew more complex in a way that reminded Viv of the difference between listening to a Beethoven quartet on good headphones, and playing it yourself. This was real gravity. “I’m glad you made the right decision. Because we just landed. And we’re out of fuel.”
“Wait. What?”
Zanj marched past her toward the ramp. She did not spare so much as a glance for Hong, frozen in apoplexy behind. “I figured this was what you’d choose, and I didn’t want to waste time.”
“And if you were wrong?”
“That’s why I dumped our fuel before we landed. Don’t worry, Orn has a manufactory, we’ll get more. Or we’ll mothball this rust bucket and take a faster ship. They have thousands here. Don’t let it bother you, Viv. You made the right choice.”
“Is this your idea of a choice?”
“Let’s leave questions like that to the philosophers.” Zanj thumbed a button. The ramp hissed and began to lower. Blue sunlight flowed in from outside. “Come on.”
“We had a deal.” Hong had recovered enough to use his words. “We’d each make our case and let her choose freely.”
“I got bored.” Zanj turned her back on the lowering ramp so she could direct the full force of her salesmanship against them. “Besides, kid, you’ll love Orn. It’s an oasis of civilization—like we used to have in the old days, before the Bleed and your Empress got so damn good at wrecking everything. Orn, crystal city of starships, Orn of the towers, Orn of the spaceways, best seafood this side of anywhere, gladiator matches alternate Saturdays, pleasure pits and simulated depravities to choke a zekk, hell, they even have a temple network if you’d like to talk to a few gods up close and personal. I’ve spent more years than you can count missing this place, and if you’ve never been here before, you should damn well thank me for bringing you.”
Hong didn’t answer. He was too busy staring out of the ship.
“Ah, Zanj,” Viv said.
“What?”
She pointed.
Zanj was right, after a fashion. Orn had been a great city once.
It was a ruin now.
11
ORN, CITY OF starships, had been beautiful.
An oasis of civilization, Zanj had called it, in the wreck of the cosmos. Viv saw its former glory in its ashes: crystal towers snapped by a mighty hand, their shattered peaks filling the broad avenues. Heavenly bridges led nowhere, ended in splinters. Among the ruins Viv saw amphitheaters, arenas, market squares, perhaps a shopping mall—she knew she was misreading all of this, painting the dead city with categories and purposes she understood, but she could not help it any more than she could help hearing sorrow in a song in an unfamiliar tongue. Orn, city of starships, Orn of the best seafood this side of anywhere, Orn of the simulated depravities, Orn where you could talk to gods. This city’s people had loved her, and built her so well that an outsider, stepping tender, scared, from her ship a thousand years—more?—after her fall would know the depth of their love. They built her so well even her ruin awed.
Spires lay in shards. Broken windows stared blind. Moss blighted murals. Glass walls warped. Vines choked trellises. Trees pierced the hearts of office buildings, spread canopies of metal-green leaves. Birds sang. The city had died so long ago that its birds came back. Doubled suns burned overhead, descending; stars pierced bright through the faint blue sky. The air was heavy with damp and growth.
Orn’s people had loved her. One loved her still.
Zanj staggered down the ramp to the cracked call-it-asphalt of their landing strip. Her arms swayed as she walked, and so did she; Viv had not appreciated the grace with which the other woman moved until that grace left her. Her weight sloshed from foot to foot. She was a blade of tall grass in tangled winds. Between slabs of crumbling pavement lay patches of bare—okay, technically it wasn’t earth, but why quibble over vocabulary? So.
Zanj fell to her knees on the bare earth.
Viv thought about time, which Zanj and Hong claimed only ran one way. She thought about the distant spark that was Magda, that was her world, that was everything the Empress had stolen from her. She could still get back there, if she was strong, lucky, clever. If she lost, she would die knowing she could have won.
For all her power, Zanj had no such luxury. What had been stolen from her, she could never take back.
Viv started down the ramp. Hong put out a hand to stop her. From him, in his eyes and the set of his shoulders, she read: Zanj is hurt now, and she hates to be weak. If you go to her, if you try to comfort her, she’ll have to accept that she’s fallen to her knees, that she may be weeping—or she’ll have to fight you. Or both. You might have to kill her to save yourself. We don’t know how that crown works yet. Best let her go.
All that was true enough. But, though Zanj had tried to kill her, and threatened her after, Zanj had also come to her in the night, watched her, offered help. Viv could not let her suffer alone. And how dare Hong try to stop her?
So he retreated from the weight of her eyes, and she descended the ramp; her bare feet made little sound on the metal, and the asphalt underfoot reminded her of broken playgrounds. There had been no rocks on the station or on the ship, and the deck plates were all warm—nothing had made her feel her lack of shoes. She neared Zanj; the woman’s ears twitched. Her claws tightened on the ground. One tore troughs in soil, the other in asphalt.
“Let me go,” Zanj said before Viv’s hand could reach her shoulder. Viv stopped, unsure what to say or do. Zanj raised her face, hard and sharp and jagged as the broken towers. The iron band did not change color. It had darkened before, when it hurt her. This pain came from inside. “Let me go.” In Zanj’s chest, again, that tiger-deep roll.
“Zanj, it’s—” She almost said okay, but it wasn’t. Viv didn’t know what it was, but she could see that okay had long since left the running. “I’m so sorry.” Her hand shook between them, not quite touching the place where Zanj’s shoulder used to be.
“You don’t know sorry,” Zanj hissed. “None of you children know sorry. You’ve lost your fleet, your home, and because you are so small and brief you think those little losses are a fit measure of another’s pain. You can’t conceive of what I’ve lost. Of what stood here, when it stood, and what you’re too brief to mourn.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Since when, Viv, has the universe or any god you know given one fuck about what’s fair?” The heat of her voice settled, chilled, dangerous. “Let me go. I don’t know this world anymore. I’m no use to you as a guide, but I can be a weapon. Let me go, and I’ll gather forces to stagger even her, and I will hound her with all my fury, and maybe I will die, but by all that burns I will make her bleed. Maybe I’ll even slow her down enough for the kid to get you home.”
“Will you kill me, if I let you go?”
She was standing, and close enough for Viv to feel the heat of her, and smell her sharp sweat. There was no world save the space between them—certainly not enough world to contain Hong, who said eloquently, “Um,” only for Zanj to talk right over him: “Maybe I should. It would be faster for us both.”
“Friends,” Hong said, closer, “perhaps we should continue this conversation back on the ship?”
Viv waved him off. She glared at Zanj. “You think you’re so far above us. Above me, above him—nobody can touch you, nobody can possibly fix the mess you’ve convinced yourself you are. And if I reach out, you try to piss me off, hoping, what, I’ll hurt you? Because you need someone else to be the reason for your pain, because you can’t admit that it’s the world that hurts so much?” With an expansive wave to the broken city, the burning stars, the whole damn universe at once, everything that was and could be lost. “I’m not letting you go off and die. There’s hope. It’s slim, but we have a chance: me for home, you for revenge, Hong for understanding. Together. We need each other. We don’t even have fuel. If I let you go, who the hell will fly the ship?”
Zanj snarled. “How convenient.”
There was a fire in Viv’s chest, and it grew as it ate fuel. “I’m sorry. Can you point out the part of this that looks convenient to you? Because I must have missed it.”
“Poor stranger in a strange land, lost far from everything she knows, can’t touch the Cloud, can’t fight worth a damn. She was someone back home, sure, everyone was—but now she’s on her own, scared, with no purchase on anything except for this.” She jabbed a claw at the crown. “You like it, don’t you? Really? Deep down, it must thrill you to know you can hook your finger and make me crawl.”
“I don’t.” She put more force into that than she had meant—and knew she was covering her own uncertainty.
“Friends,” Hong repeated, conciliatory. “Please.”
“Shut up, Hong. I don’t.” Not a truth, but a wish that simply saying so could make it true. “I stopped you from killing us. But I’ve never given you an order. You’re angry. I know. She hurt you. You think you’re so hard to understand? How about this: you led your friends on a big adventure, and it all came crashing down, and now you’re scared and desperate for everything to be someone else’s fault. You’re telling me to let you go because you know I won’t, and that gives you a reason to hate me, and you want one, because otherwise you’d have to hate yourself. Am I close?” She saw Zanj’s shell crack; there was meat in there. She should stop, but she could no more stop herself than stop a tidal wave after a quake had come. “Pretty close, I think. Maybe I should let you go after all. I wonder what you’d do without the crown to blame it on.” And that, she knew even as she said it, was too far. She could read it in Zanj’s body, she could hear the growl building in the woman’s chest. The earlier anger had been flame kindled on despair, pain seeking a shape to hide weakness. This was fury that needed no fuel. It burned its own exhaust. But Zanj had no words big enough for the rage she felt, and she would not hit Viv.
At least, that’s what Viv hoped. She’d seen what happened to things Zanj hit.
“Friends!” H
ong shouted. They looked to him then—they had to look at someone else.
“What?” Both voices at once, both snarling.
He held his clubs, and was not watching either of them. “We are not alone.”
They were, in fact, surrounded.
Viv counted twenty, in a loose semicircle, approaching the ship from the broken city, human-shaped and hunched forward, rifles drawn, or things that looked a lot like rifles, anyway. They wore weird postapocalyptic assemblies of cybernetics and armor, no flesh visible, if there was flesh under there. They moved with preternatural smoothness, without words Viv could hear. Bright smears of red and blue and green marked their armor like war paint.
Zanj kept her body facing Viv, but she turned her head, and saw them coming, and looked … pleased. And hungry.
She rolled her shoulders back, and tightened her fists. Viv heard no joints crack, which felt more ominous than the human noises would have been.
The figures stopped as one and aimed their rifles. Hong brandished his clubs, and Viv wondered what he thought that would accomplish. A single voice emerged from all the figures at once, a woman’s, speaker-amplified: “Outsiders! Set down your arms. The Ornclan bids you welcome if you come as guests, but if you stand as foes, we hold our blades and guns ready.”
“The Ornclan?” Zanj still hadn’t turned all the way around to face the new arrivals, so only Viv received the benefit of her sneer. “There isn’t any Ornclan, kid. There isn’t any Orn anymore. And you’ve had the misfortune of catching me on a very bad day.”
“Zanj,” Viv said, “these people might be able to help us. They might have fuel.”
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