Conservation of Shadows

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Perhaps he heard her, in the silence.

  Black: Check and Mate

  Rachel’s response to the ethics question took 5.47 minutes and three sentences. Mine took more lives, mine and hers and others’, than I can count.

  Rachel’s Season

  In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity’s far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song. I measured mine by Rachel’s deaths. Perhaps she will measure hers differently.

  Your move, my dear.

  The Book of Locked Doors

  The book was bound in leather crinkled pale and rough thread the color of massacres, and Suzuen Vayag carried it in an inner pocket of her coat as a matter of course. Her sister Kereyag had written it in gunfire and witchfire and hellpyre smoke, on the stray cold morning of her death. The least Vayag could do was keep it safe.

  Today’s operation required that Vayag travel to the administrative capital of Territory 5, which was what the Meroi conquerors called her homeland. The administrative capital had once been Nyago-ot of the Seventy Temples, where pilgrims had brought pressed flowers from all corners of the peninsula twice a year. Now the Meroi called it Shadow City 5-1, for the shadow of the Cloud Fortress that flew above it. Most of the temples had been destroyed during the war of occupation. The greatest one, Ten Bells Ten Flowers, had been spared only to be reopened as a museum honoring the Meroi dead.

  The only way to reach the Cloud Fortress was by air. The Meroi controlled airspace tightly and even their dignitaries had to secure permission to visit well in advance. It was an interesting problem. Vayag supposed she ought to be grateful that her orders only required her to shut off the fortress’s communications to the Meroi homeland for a single hour. She thought she saw a way to do it and survive, but her survival wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary.

  The book had whispered to Vayag in its dry voice of fluttering pages and threads rubbing together. It had suggested that she could do more than disable communications; that she could destroy the Cloud Fortress, send it plummeting to the city below. Ever helpful, it had identified the pages that would facilitate the modified operation. Of course there were page numbers. Kereyag had always been meticulous about details.

  Vayag had no intention of carrying through with the book’s suggestion, not least because of the number of bystanders that would die, but she had looked at the indicated pages, the way she always did. On page thirty-one was a picture of a cobweb threaded tremulously across a corpse’s empty eye sockets. The left socket had been cut into the shape of a keyhole.

  Written in neat script, in an alphabet that had been outlawed six years ago, was the corpse’s particular profile. His name had been Khem Myan, and like everyone in the book, he had died in the Snowfall Massacre. He had been unrivaled at the old art of mirror archery: shooting slivers that multiplied themselves through prisms, or sending them around corners with the help of strategically placed reflections.

  Vayag had to admit the utility of mirror archery. She could have unlocked the page and taken it with her, but the ability belonged to a dead man and she would not disturb his spirit this way.

  She entered Subway Station 14 on the blue line, trying to ignore the book’s continued whispering. The station was cleaner than it ever had been during her childhood. Say what you would about the Meroi, but they were excellent administrators. Their firesnake crest was painted on every long stretch of wall. The tiles of the floor shone pale blue, with stippled tiles forming a path for the blind. The trains ran smoothly. There were no beggars—

  There were no beggars, but neither were there sellers of fruit, neither were there players of drums and tellers of fortunes with cards of azalea and crane. Vayag and her sister had come to stations just like this one with coins in their pockets, buying sour-sweet candies on the way home from school. Now when she looked at the station, all she saw were doors opening and closing, opening and closing, in mechanical defeat.

  And although there were still people who spoke the peninsula’s many native tongues, the cool sweet voices that read out the trains incoming and trains outgoing, that reminded travelers of ordinary safety precautions, spoke the Meroi language.

  The blue line from Station 14 eastbound (really north-east-east, if you cared about details, which she did) and six stops would take Vayag to Station 20. Her ticket had a firesnake on it, beautifully rendered in red ink. She used to hope that the machines would punch a hole in its head, but such pettiness did her no good. Besides, they never did.

  She could feel the book rustling its pages against her side. She gritted her teeth and thought of other things: the color of half-turned leaves in the public gardens of Kiiru-ot, that last kite festival where Kereyag had gone around the whole day in an inside-out tunic without noticing until Vayag finally told her after the dinner feast, the savor of quail eggs with just a hint of mustard.

  The windows revealed nothing but darkness pierced by intermittent flashes of light, the pauses where people with no more individuality than silhouettes got on or got off. Vayag assessed them as she stared off at an angle, pretending to be entranced by an advertisement featuring a fine-looking man with improbable hair. That one was a student, slump-shouldered beneath her books. She wore her hair swept up and pinned asymmetrically in the style that the Meroi governor had made fashionable. A man tapped his fingers on his knee in a simple rhythm. An older woman trailed two children, who were bickering amiably over a piece of taffy. The children, like the other passengers, wore the dull, sober clothes permitted to Territory 5’s subjugates by sumptuary law.

  There was really no excuse for what she was about to do, except that the alternative was to watch as her people adopted Meroi names in exchange for greater privileges and better-paying jobs. Even the graffiti, however quickly painted over, was in the Meroi language these days. And more and more often, she heard children speaking their parents’ languages with Meroi accents.

  For that matter, Vayag had cultivated that same accent so as to draw less attention to herself. She imagined the day would come when she would no longer be able to shed it at will, whatever her intentions.

  The conductor announced that they would soon be stopping at Station 20. Vayag got up and shuffled to the nearest doors, behind a woman who was scowling at her timepiece. The timepiece was a thing of beauty: rose gold set with flashing crystals of darker pink. Vayag was tempted to steal it, just to prove she could, but it would have been unprofessional. She had gotten herself into trouble that way during one of her first missions, and she wasn’t going to jeopardize this one now.

  The doors opened and light slanted in from the station, softly bright. Vayag followed the woman with the timepiece out, walking fast, but not too fast. She smiled blandly at the firesnake emblem across from her.

  She joined the amiable jostling of the crowd. As she passed a newsstand, she cast her gaze over the broadsheets. All the people in the photos were smiling. She didn’t get a close look at the figures and statistics and charts, but the photos—lying by omission—told her all she needed to know.

  Turn right. Up the stairs. Emerge into the cloudlight, pale and crisp. Vayag couldn’t help but notice all the reflective surfaces available to her, if only, if only. Polished windows and metal door frames. Lamp posts darkly glossy. The glint of a man’s necklace, a spark of blue from a woman’s earring. The polish of a Meroi policeman’s boots, even.

  It was not too late, the book explained to her, as patiently as if it were instructing a child. Vayag could duck into that teahouse, where there was a line. She could bend her head over the book’s pages, fit her finger to the keyhole, open the page and all its possibilities.

  But her aim was not another massacre, no matter how much the book wished otherwise.

  The book told Vayag, rather sharply, not to be ridiculous. They worked for the resistance, after all. Would freedom be bought with anything less dear than death?

  Not here, not no
w. The words caught in her throat like thorns.

  Down the street. No beggars here, either. They were near the heart of Meroi power, and the Meroi despised untidiness. No more festival banners, no more crisscrossing lines of laundry. The children played in designated areas instead of rambling in and out of the alleys. There was a puddle to one side of the street, a remnant of the thunderstorm that had passed by two days ago. More reflections; one of them was Vayag’s own, murky and sullen and distorted by ripples.

  Vayag went to a noodle shop and made her order: brown noodles with shrimp, which Kereyag had always loved. She sat at a table next to an ostentatious vase and studied the illegible scratches on the tabletop. The server brought her a glass of cold tea.

  Outside, a patrol went by in their red uniforms. She couldn’t hear their footsteps from here, of course, although the rumbling of cars passing was an inconstant.

  Vayag had her own timepiece, a shabby student affair that she had bought two days ago in a pawn shop. She made a note of the time: four more minutes. She had cut it too close, counting on the general reliability of the rail system, but done was done.

  She wore long Meroi-style socks that went up to mid-calf. Taped to her left sock was a ribbon-shaped transmitter. In four minutes—three and change, really—she would activate it with her other foot, and then the cancelers that had been planted throughout the city would direct a pulse toward the Cloud Fortress. After that, it was up to her to escape if she could, and to die if she couldn’t.

  It seemed unlikely that the resistance had a way of disabling the fortress’s defenses, but Vayag wasn’t privy to the details of the plan, and that was as it should be.

  Two minutes. She watched another server, this one sallow of face, settle up with a young couple. The clink of coins sounded the same no matter what the mint. The Meroi coil and its derivatives had largely replaced native coins, which had come in a confusing variety of denominations. As a child she had hated memorizing the relative values: twelve pence to a myon, five myon to a rorogu, two rorogu to a half-jirik . . . fortunately, the full jirik had been the largest denomination she had encountered with any regularity. Naturally, once the coins with their annoying conversions were gone, she missed them.

  One minute. Vayag sipped her tea. It wasn’t very good tea, brewed too strong, but such details didn’t matter. She felt a slow trickle of sweat in the small of her back.

  Her time was up. Vayag twisted slightly and pressed her calf hard against the leg of the table.

  There was nothing: no immediate sound, no vibration from the trigger, nothing to indicate that it had worked. But she had to assume that it had.

  Vayag had just gotten up, a scant few seconds later, when the effect kicked in. The shadows of feathers fell through the window and pierced the tables, the chairs, the floor. She cut toward the back door, surprising the cook, and flung it open.

  The sky above was filled with a silhouette in the shape of a great bird, its wingspan stretching from horizon to horizon. The Cloud Fortress, visible at this distance as a tilted spindle bright with green-gold lights, intersected its heart. In the silhouette shapes moved, outlined in shivers of refracted sunlight: broken ribcages, spent bullets, smoke and fire and cars chewed into jigsaw masses. And eyes: hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, blinking too rapidly or not at all.

  In the mythology of Vayag’s people, three goddesses had shared rule of the world: Minhyen the Bird of Dawn, Khugyun the Bird of Night, and Sarasyon the Bird of Death. Vayag and her sister had left their share of offerings at the goddesses’ altars: sweet spring water for Minhyen, or votive candles in the shapes of lotus blossoms for Khugyun, or burnt barley flatbread for Sarasyon. They had seen a priest of Sarasyon summon the goddess’s living shadow once, when the Meroi warships first sailed up the river to the capital’s harbor. The ships had fallen apart in feather-shaped shards.

  The peninsula’s resistance had doomed itself then: the Meroi were quick to learn, and had spared nothing in hunting down the priests and wonder-workers.

  The patrol from earlier was heading back down the street. A bad sign: she didn’t know the specifics of their technology, but she had hoped they wouldn’t be able to trace the source of the prayer signal.

  The larger issue was that even the resistance should not have been able to summon the goddess’s shadow, not at such a size. Sarasyon would only have responded to direct sacrifice. Vayag hadn’t realized that enough priests remained in the peninsula to carry off such a feat.

  She was spending time thinking about the situation when the proper response was to react. It was difficult to look away from the goddess’s transcendent shadow, but she made herself move one foot, then the other, one foot, then the other, over and over again. It would not do to run, not yet, but the more distance she could put between herself and—

  The patrol had returned. She could hear a woman barking orders for everyone to take cover in the nearest building and to stay put, as if anything as weak as walls would stop the divine. But then, the Meroi had always been fond of technological solutions to metaphysical problems, relying on the logic of gun and circuit.

  The question was, would anyone think to stop an obviously suicidal civilian from walking farther out into the falling shadows?

  “You there!”

  Apparently the answer was yes. Vayag bolted.

  Shouts followed her, but she didn’t hear the words. There was only the hard jolt of the pavement beneath her shoes, wind in her hair, shadows compounding shadows.

  People were yelling, cursing, sobbing. She couldn’t tell the difference between Meroi voices and her own people’s voices in the clamor. But they knew what was to come.

  Page 62, the book said to her in its dry, matter-of-fact voice.

  Vayag knew the page the way she knew all the pages. Heged Alokho, who had been a temple guard, a fast runner over short distances and a master of the sacred knives. She had been survived by two sisters, but they had died a year after she did, hounded out of hiding by Meroi police forces.

  Don’t make me laugh, Vayag thought at the book. She didn’t need supernatural aid for something as simple as running. Even before the occupation, she had delighted in racing Kereyag up hills and down helter-skelter paths, through the wild hills just southeast of the city of their birth, losing herself—just for moments—to the illusion that she could step up and into the sky. She didn’t have a racer’s conformation, but she could sprint when she had to.

  Page 4, the book said, persistent.

  She was tempted. She couldn’t deny it.

  Page 4 contained Yede Marannag, a teenage girl whose life had been dedicated to the Bird of Night when she turned fifteen. A map of the peninsula had been tattooed on her back, where she could never see it. Thereafter she could never be lost, even blindfolded. She used to live in the sacred labyrinth of Nyago-ot with its shroud of mists and its echo-birds. The book had made a note that Yede had been especially fond of tangerine offerings. It wasn’t typical for the book to care about such human details, but then, Kereyag had been fond of tangerines herself.

  All she had to do was scrape the words off the page and swallow them like bitter medicine. If she got enough of a lead, she could probably spare the time. The book was good at such calculations, and it wouldn’t have offered her the option if there didn’t exist time in which to exercise it.

  “No,” she said through her teeth. Six years she had survived since the massacre. She wouldn’t resort to the book after all this time.

  She slowed down as she approached an intersection, quickly assessed her escape options: down to catch the rail? Or should she continue on foot until she could catch a bus? People had seen her fleeing. She had to decide soon.

  No: best to take cover. She saw an open window above a garbage receptacle. Any moving shadows, on-off lights? Nothing so far. She would have to risk it. Vayag vaulted up, then up again, and through the window. She had to be grateful for the peninsular penchant for expansive windows.

  The shadow fea
thers were still falling, only to dissipate when they met solid surfaces. But the sky was growing darker, and she knew there was not much time left before the goddess cried destruction on the city.

  There was a potted plant on the windowsill, with withered pink flowers. Vayag took care not to knock it over. The room she found herself in was unlit, unoccupied. She closed the window—there were no curtains, that was a Meroi affectation—and moved away from it. Against one wall was a small chest worked in abalone inlay and a great scar against one of its panels. She left it alone.

  The book reminded her of page 19, which contained Beherris Leleyen, another servant of the Bird of Night. During the New Moon Festival twice a year, he had folded himself up into shadows. People had come to watch him disappear, to hear his strong voice out of the empty darkness reciting the old chants in the temple language.

  There was no need. She could hear sirens, shouts, but the authorities would be occupied trying to keep order. Instead, she took the door, placing her steps quietly and precisely.

  The apartment was in the peninsular style. Most of the owner’s furnishings were age-worn. The communal sleeping room only had a single mat rolled up in the corner, though. She would have expected a family even in this tidy space: sisters and brothers and elders and grown-up children, and perhaps some of their children, as well. Whatever the story was here, it wasn’t for her to know.

  Vayag spent the most time in the kitchen, where there was a satisfactory collection of knives and chopsticks. She selected the sturdiest one and leaned against the wall, staring at the unlit stove.

  Now that her breathing was starting to slow, she could devote some thought to the bothersome question of how the resistance had triggered the Bird of Death’s appearance. The feathers were only fallout. The real target would be the Cloud Fortress, and on the ground she was powerless to help, or find out what was going on. It was tempting to turn on the television, but the noise might attract attention and she doubted that the authorities would allow any substantive reporting to get through.