“Something on the sensors,” Xiara said. “Slippery. It’s all confused, I can’t—”
“You’re doing great. Just bring us down near whoever’s there. Not on top of them, please. Just … near.”
The hold had thickened since her last passage through, and smelled of lightning; Gray melted the ship’s bulkheads and flowed them forward, wadding the cockpit in metal honeycombs; she wondered what that felt like if you happened to be inside the ship’s mind, then glanced at Xiara’s sweat-slick face, at her lip so tight-clenched between her teeth Viv worried she’d bite through, and stopped wondering. From the engine room, she heard what any office she’d ever been part of would have characterized as a vigorous discussion: “The holy texts say the oxygen mix should be—”
“Don’t start with the fucking holy texts! I know how to mix fuel, you idiot priest, now just shut the hell up and flip the switch!”
She shouted: “Give us thrust!”
“Ten seconds!”
Nine. Eight. She ran back through the hold, all its once-empty space now wadded full of honeycomb. Gray was everywhere, in her eyes—but she did not taste him between her teeth, did not feel him in her throat. Fine. Fine. Five. The planetoid, swollen green, obscene, mountain ridges, clouds, closer than anything should ever be in space, too late, too late—“They’re ready!” Buckling herself into the copilot’s seat: “Go!”
And then—gravity. Screams—oh, that was her, screaming. Giants’ hands pulled Viv in two directions, three. Spinning, stabilizing; thrust sounded like someone tearing a phone book in half, miked through a rock concert’s worth of speakers. Thrust felt like a horse’s hooves plunging into her chest. Her organs bunched up, purple spots bloomed, the ship leveled out, there was a horizon all of a sudden, space was up again, space slicked with flame, and they were slowing, and she tried not to think of airplane crashes, and tried not to think of strokes, of aneurysms, of thin blood vessel walls and the g-forces she was pulling—
Air thickened in her throat, in her chest, coarse, gritty steel between her teeth. She was drowning, but she could breathe. Her skin stiffened; she felt a grotesque tension in between her organs, around her fat, cushioning, and everywhere was silver and rainbows, and she was not drowning anymore.
Gray was in her lungs, and she wasn’t even mad.
They tore through clouds. Hong and Zanj—were they strapped in? There hadn’t been time. She called to them—her voice sounded underwater—thought she heard some answer, we’re fine, but how could she hear in this?
They fell. They fell. They fell.
And then.
Silence.
More like the opposite of that—no, the converse. Think of silence, then think of everything it’s not. Hot. Loud. Bright. Furious. Endless. Painful. Thick. Bursting.
Alive.
Viv blinked, and wept because she could blink, and weep. And breathe. Though not without pain.
Survival alone would have justified the first laugh that ground from her throat. She could see, which justified the second croak that followed. Beside her, in front of her, a moan: Xiara, also laughing.
There was a brightness, of sun—that didn’t make sense, they were far from any sun, but there was sunlight nevertheless, drifting through the shattered viewscreen. Xiara’s laugh became a moan.
“You dead?” It was the best Viv could do.
And Xiara answered: “Not yet.”
She squinted against the light. Tried to raise her hand to block the improbable sun, but everything hurt. A shadow passed before her: a hand severed the straps that bound her to the chair, and she found she could breathe deeper. “Who—”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Zanj said. Viv blinked some large number of times before her eyes moistened and focused, and there she stood: jumpsuit torn and singed, but unmistakably alive. “Come on, Los Angeles. Walk it off.”
“Glad to see. Crash. Sense of humor.” She was missing a few words, but trusted Zanj would get the gist. “Hong?”
“I am mostly whole,” he said, and sounded it. Mostly. “My arm is broken. But it should heal.”
At least they’d have time to face that should. She could breathe, too, she realized, and realized when she did that she hadn’t thought to check, hadn’t thought to ask, whether any of them could breathe this planet’s air. Stupid amateur. “Gray?” No answer. “Gray!” Struggled to her feet, unsteady, grabbing jagged metal to steady herself, Zanj in her way, holding her up.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, I said! He’s fine—just down for the count. Puddled. Spent himself remaking the ship. And saving you.”
“He was—in me—”
“You’re not built for this sort of thing. No collision membranes, slow healing, calcium bones? What a mess. You’d pop in a stiff wind.”
They staggered from the crash site, out of the deep trough their ship had carved through the local soil. Xiara leaned on Hong, whole, bruised, but unsteady, brain-burned; Hong bore her weight, though he winced with each step. Viv hurt all over; Zanj helped her, and carried the sloshing puddle of Gray in a waterproof sack over her shoulder.
As they crested the slope, Viv looked back.
The cockpit lay behind them, a nest of twisted metal at the end of the long glassed burn scar their crash had cut through the fields. Yes, fields, planted with rice, broken-twig green. Six-legged buffalo grazed beneath the not-quite-sun: a diffuse region of brightness overhead like the sun Viv knew when seen through clouds that were not there. The broken fleet hung massive and faint as ghosts behind the blue sky. And that was all: the Question, which had flown them out of High Carcereal, which brought Zanj from Pasquarai, was now a pile of metal foam burning at the bottom of a trench.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Eh.” Zanj shrugged, and the movement sloshed Gray in his bag. “We’re alive. And we wouldn’t be, if not for you.”
“Or you. Or Hong, or Xiara. I’d be dead now if not for Gray.”
“Not dead, probably. Just missing a lung or two. Those eyes probably wouldn’t have made it either. They’re squishy.”
It hurt to laugh.
“That’s the spirit. Now, come on. Time to meet the locals.” But Viv knew Zanj well enough by now to spot when she was hiding pain.
They turned away—Viv turned away, at least, to meet the narrow, gray-skinned, big-eyed people in black homespun approaching them tentatively across the fields, bearing long knives, pitchforks, spades. Viv felt surprised that she could name the tools. Maybe farming was farming all over the galaxy.
That might have been reassuring, if she hadn’t just torn through a few acres of these people’s cultivated fields.
She stepped forward, or tried, but her legs buckled. Zanj caught her on the way down, steadied her. She waved to the aliens. That hurt too, but damn if she’d let pain stop her from waving to aliens. “Hi!” Shouting hurt her voice. Okay, what had Hong said last time? “We’re, ah, pilgrims who have left the family. And we’ve kind of. Crashed. A bit. Do you have a spare ship, or something? A way offworld? A radio?”
The newcomers looked to one another, murmured. One stepped forward from the gathering. Viv read her as a woman; she was old, the scales around her eyes dull, her slitted pupils black and bright. She leaned on a two-tined pitchfork as she advanced, and the murmurs stilled behind her. “No,” she said, her voice deep and rough around the edges, like a cello bowed wrong. “But we will help you, as well as we can. I am Yannis, and all are welcome to Refuge.”
27
REFUGE: A NAME that was a promise Viv could not believe. After the crash, the chaos, the screaming, the sudden stop, she felt reluctant to uncurl. After all that, how could the world be kind?
How could a place be so damn green?
Yannis, leaning on her pitchfork, guided them down a dirt road between rice paddies to the village. Her followers surrounded them, whispering. A heavyset man with a many-plated carapace offered Hong his hoe for use as a cane, and Hong accepted. Two children pointed at Viv and l
aughed, so musical and light that she could not help staring at them, and when she did they stopped, wide-eyed, and ran to hide giggling behind their elders. Xiara, by Viv’s side, seemed stripped of focus, gazing into the middle distance, but when the kids laughed at her, she drew back into her skin enough to stick out her tongue at them. They stuck out theirs in turn, which were triple-forked. Viv squeezed her hand—Xiara’s answering grip felt weak. A child tried to catch Zanj’s lashing tail, but the tail danced just out of reach. Zanj glared at every face and every thing around, looking for the hidden trick.
Workers in the fields raised their hands in greeting, and Yannis raised her pitchfork in answer. “New guests!” Some left their work, their swan-necked oxen and the six-legged almost-pigs they tended, and followed. Others remained.
So they came to Refuge: a cluster of tile-roofed cottages, streets of rolled dirt, sheltered by two high hills and the slope of a craggy mountain, watered by a river that wound down from its cloud-topped peaks. Above, far above, past the blue and past the spark that was not a sun, great ghosts of battleships shifted, ponderous as icebergs in a thaw.
And everywhere the green, vivid as a cut. The village smelled of growth, of manure, of warm stone. The shock—Viv thought it was shock—on villagers’ faces as they left their weaving, their rest, their dumpling-making and their games of shuttlecock, to stare. Most were gray, not quite serpentine, odd-pupiled like Yannis herself; some larger, insectlike; some had flesh that seemed to melt to metal and back. They stared at Viv’s crew and she stared back, both disbelieving. This place was so green, and so whole.
She turned back to the path and saw Yannis watching her, pleased. “Our ancestors did not believe it either: their luck, to survive their fall and find themselves here.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s home. Shit still stinks, as much here as around any star.” She cackled, and Viv decided, in spite of Zanj’s suspicion, that she liked her.
The fence stones looked weathered, and worked with shallow, smooth carvings. “How long have you been here?”
“A long time.”
Zanj’s eyes stayed narrow.
“I’ll answer your questions, I promise. It’s best to do this all at once.” Yannis led them and their entourage, all those who’d left work and home to gawk, to the village square: a well, a large house that might have been a temple or a library or a city hall, a dais the old woman mounted with care and the aid of two young men. When she turned, the murmur that passed for silence in the gathered crowd died. “Friends of Refuge,” she said. “We have new residents.”
“Guests,” Zanj corrected her at once. “We’re not planning to stay.”
“You have business beyond the sky.” Yannis nodded. “I understand. So did our mothers, and their mothers, back into the before time.”
Hong limped forward on his improvised staff. “Mother,” he said, respectful, “we welcome your hospitality. But we cannot remain.”
“Do you have a ship?” Xiara asked, hungry. “Anything that can fly?”
It was Viv’s turn to speak. By all rights she should have been the fiercest of them all—she was the one with the time limit, she was the one who might never make it home. But—Christ. This was a hell of a long way from Southern California, but there were no monsters here, no prison stars, no ruins. Just farmers. Weird ones, but still. There were places like this back home, even if she’d never spent much time there. Refuge wrapped her in warm air and slow time.
“I have to get home,” she said anyway.
“Our mothers and their mothers all said the same,” Yannis said. “If you seek to leave, we will not stop you. Our mothers and theirs never found a way offworld—but they did find a home here. And as others fell to Refuge down the years, we have welcomed them. It is a safe place in a galaxy of war.”
“There’s no place safe from the Empress,” Zanj said. “Just places she hasn’t yet found.”
“There is no Cloud here. Our mothers lost it when they fell, bleeding and aflame, from the sky. We are mortal, yes—but the Empress will never find us here, nor will the Bleed, nor any of the sky’s hosts. We grow our crops, and harvest. We live and we die. And there is room for all.”
Zanj said: “Your mothers fell from battle, then.”
“From war in the heavens. Marooned here, they hid themselves to heal. And ever since, we have remained. We raise food, we burn trees, and we live and die, as does the world.”
“Do you remember their names?” Viv heard the hunger beneath Zanj’s question, the wound. Her sisters had fallen in this battle, the other Suicide Queens she fought beside. If they had fallen here, maybe they survived. Maybe they remembered her.
“When our mothers came to us, they took new ones. They cast off their history to build new lives in this new world.”
“Well, I won’t.” Zanj’s teeth glittered in the light. She drew herself up, and her eyes flashed, and Viv felt a moment’s shame that she had not stood so firm, that she’d felt relief in this moment’s rest. Hell, she just crashed a spaceship. By any rubric, they’d earned a break. “I’m getting out of here.”
“We will not stop you,” Yannis said with a soft inclination of her head. Zanj looked like someone who’d expected to march into a stiff wind—only to meet a calm breeze instead, and stumble, betrayed by her own bracing. “Will you accept our hospitality meanwhile? Our food, our wine, the welcome we offer all who reach Refuge?”
Viv heard wind in the fields beyond, heard the lowing of something that was obviously not an ox, heard the ripple of the river’s clear water. Heard four hundred people not breathing. Zanj, bag over her shoulder, stood ready to fight anything, everything, at once. She growled, as if their welcome were an insult.
“I promise you,” Yannis said, arms spread, “this is an honest offer. Refuge is beyond traps and treason.”
Which, if anything, pushed Zanj closer to wanton murder. So Viv did the only thing she could.
“Thank you,” she said, and stepped between Zanj and Yannis. “We’ll stay. Until we can repair our ship.” If that was possible.
Yannis, and the full weight of that silence, shifted focus to her. “And you are?”
“I’m, um, hi. I’m Viv. Captain. Vivian Liao. Thank you for your offer. It’s a pleasure to meet you all?”
“The pleasure,” said Yannis, smiling, “is ours.” She struck the dais with her pitchfork. “Welcome home.”
At that, the cheers began. And, as soon as the kegs were breached, the party.
* * *
VIV GOT DRUNK. Blame the giddy rush of survival, blame the sincere welcome, blame the smiling faces or the liberal pours of a fizzy citrus drink the locals claimed was made from something her translation gimmick called rice, blame music, dancing, the huge iron woks of stir-fried meat and vegetables the villagers laid out, blame the sunset that bloomed orange and pink and violet across the sky, blame most of all herself, but she got proper goddamn drunk. And, drunk, she missed things.
Yannis guided her through the buffet line, leaning on her fork, which Viv suspected saw less service as an actual farm implement than as a tool of office. “This is paig, in fermented sauce with bamboo shoots, and these eggs with nightshade, and here, try some of these, they’re salty.” Tasty and tastier, hearty, filling, until Viv had mounded her bowl so high each bite felt like Jenga endgame. “Simple fare,” Yannis said, “but what we have to offer, is yours.”
“You didn’t need to go to such trouble,” Viv said.
“Hospitality is a joy of wealth.” Yannis pointed with her chin to a large round tower just visible over the roofs. “We store grain in the silo, we salt and preserve meat. And we have guests so rarely—you’re the first most of us have seen.”
“I thought you’d be worried. We could be anyone.” Zanj, behind them in line, filled her bowl and glared. Viv decided not to elaborate further. “You’re very trusting.”
“You fell from the sky to Refuge. The least we can do is offer you a welcome.�
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“I’m waiting for you to press-gang us into heavy labor.”
“Oh, that comes tomorrow.” But Yannis matched her grave tone with a wink, and Viv laughed. Her ribs hurt. Yannis waited for her to recover. “You can work if you like. We all do. But we won’t force you.”
“Do people not work?”
“Some. A few build, or think. Some don’t want to live here, and walk away.”
“What happens to them?”
“They die alone. Eventually. Most who stay, work, because people like work. But you don’t need to worry about that. We might not know much about the world, but we know it’s hard to fall from heaven.”
Zanj rolled her eyes and stalked off. Locals parted before her hunched shoulders, her narrow eyes, and her thundercloud weight of imminent violence. “Sorry,” Viv said. “She’s—I should—”
Yannis waved with the back of her hand, shoo. “Go.”
Balancing bowl and chopsticks in one hand, Viv picked her way through the crowd, skirting around dancers, waving to locals who waved to her. She thought she’d lost Zanj at first, then saw her at the top of the steps of the wooden temple-library, and shuffled after—sneaking a bite on the way. Crash landings were hard work.
Zanj didn’t seem to notice Viv’s approach. She just sat staring up into the shadowed hall of the, yes, basically a temple—four altars, candle-strewn and flower-decked, each one in front of a statue of a monstrous woman—one with three heads and a scimitar; one snakelike, clawed and hooked, bearing a doubled spear; one fanged beauty with an eye in the middle of her forehead; one massive, six-armed, horned. Dust drifted in the hall’s still air, while music rang below. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Zanj said.
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