Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Hello yourself,” Cheris said. She fanned out her hand, face-up, for Yeren’s amusement.

  “Oh, you’re not even pretending not to cheat,” Ruo said. Cheris had arranged to draw a straight of Roses.

  “Only because I don’t have any real flowers to offer you, Yeren,” Cheris said, “so I had to make do with the sad cardboard substitute.”

  Yeren eyed her sidelong. “I’m pretty sure that line wasn’t in Introduction to Seduction when I took it last year.”

  “I hate that course,” Cheris said. “Seriously, all the Andan bars we practice at overcharge for drinks because, hello, the Andan are all rich. You’d think they’d figure it into our stipends, but I think it’s supposed to incentivize us to commit fraud to get by.”

  “I don’t see what your issue is,” Ruo said dryly. “You’re terribly good at persuading people to buy you drinks, especially with that whole ‘I just got here from the farm and you civilized city people confuse me’ routine.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” Cheris said. Besides, it was technically an agricultural research facility, even if her mother jokingly referred to herself as a farmer.

  “You poor thing,” Yeren said. “Drown your sorrows?” She offered her drink.

  “See what I mean?” Ruo said.

  Cheris took a sip. “That’s a lot of honey,” she said. The local spiced tea was something she was still getting used to. It wasn’t very popular where she came from.

  “It’s to cover the taste of the poison,” Yeren said, very seriously.

  “Excellent thinking.” Cheris drank again, more deeply, then handed the tea back.

  “By the way,” Yeren said, “I keep looking through the competition standings and I’m stumped. Where did you hide your game?”

  “Don’t get me started,” Ruo said. “I can’t even get him to play any of the more intriguing entries, let alone admit to entering.”

  Cheris shuffled the straight back into her deck and did her best “you civilized city people confuse me” impression. “It’s much less stressful to watch everyone else tie themselves into knots. You heard about how Zheng got caught breaking into the registrar’s computer systems?”

  “That’s so yesterday,” Yeren said, “and I don’t believe you for one second. Ruo told me how you volunteered to be outnumbered five to one in that training scenario and you care about stress?”

  “Did he also mention I lost that one?” Cheris narrowed her eyes at Ruo, who looked innocent.

  “Only after you struck the instructor speechless with your novel use of signal flares,” Ruo said helpfully.

  “Got lucky,” Cheris said.

  Ruo rolled his eyes. “No such thing as luck.”

  Cheris drew three cards in rapid succession: Ace of Roses, Ace of Doors, Ace of Gears. “Sure there is,” she said ironically.

  Yeren, who had taught Cheris most of the card tricks herself, ignored this. “I suppose you might take some kind of ridiculous pleasure in an anonymous entry,” she said, “but they’ll trace it to you anyway. Why not put your name on it from the beginning?”

  “That’s only if I entered,” Cheris said. “Say, Ruo, you entered a shooter, didn’t you? How’s it doing?” She hadn’t looked it up, but Ruo had talked about it a lot while wrestling with the coding, even if he’d turned down her offer to help by playtesting.

  “High middle,” Ruo said, “for its category. As good as I could hope for. I haven’t embarrassed myself, that’s all I ask.” There were always a few entries that did so poorly that they damaged the cadets’ future career options.

  Yeren wasn’t distracted. “Jedao, first-years don’t get a lot of opportunities to impress the instructors. I didn’t think you’d pass this one up. Especially considering how much you like games.”

  “It’s very altruistic of you to point this out to me,” Cheris said, “but it’s done now, either way.” She touched Yeren’s hand. “We could go for a walk by the koi pond. It wouldn’t kill you to get away from all the competition analysis for an hour or two.”

  “This is my cue to go elsewhere,” Ruo said cheerfully. “Don’t scare the geese.” Cheris often thought she should never have mentioned that her mother liked to say that, even if they hadn’t had all that many geese.

  “Like you don’t have a hot date of your own lined up,” Yeren said. Ruo looked awfully smug, at that.

  “That would be telling,” Ruo said. “Have fun, you two.” He kissed the top of Cheris’s head again, and strolled off.

  Yeren shook her head, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Cheris’s, either.

  As a point of fact, Cheris had entered anonymously. A small percentage of competition entries were anonymous each year (although Yeren was correct that most didn’t remain that way for long), but Cheris had an unusually good reason. You scored points in her game by manipulating other people, from cadets to dignitaries, into heresies. Celebrating the wrong feast-days. Giving heterodox answers on Doctrine exams. Inverted flower arrangements. Small heresies, for the most part.

  Cheris hadn’t intended for many people to fall for it, even if the Shuos had a known love of dares. It had been more in the nature of a thought experiment. The heptarchate’s laws were becoming more rigid as the regime became ever more dependent on the high calendar’s exotic technologies. She had wanted to show how easy it was to inspire people to a little heresy, to demonstrate how fragile the system was. Shuos Academy encouraged games, so a game – especially during the yearly competition – was the perfect vector.

  She hadn’t checked up on her entry since releasing it, or any of them, for that matter; that was the kind of mistake that got you caught. In fact, she was asleep in Yeren’s bed when she found out.

  “– Jedao,” Yeren was saying urgently. “Bad news.” Her voice shook.

  “Hmm?” Cheris said. But she came fully awake.

  Yeren was sitting at her terminal, wrapped in a robe of violet silk. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, and blue light sheened in the dark curls. “A cadet committed suicide over one of the games,” she said. “At least, they’re claiming it’s a suicide.”

  Cheris sat up and made a show of hunting for her clothes, even though she knew where they were under the covers. She still didn’t realize the significance of what Yeren had said. “Anyone we know?” she asked.

  “They haven’t released the name. But I did some poking around. I – I think it might be Ruo.”

  Cheris’s heartbeat thumped rapidly in her chest. Yeren was still talking. “It was over one of the games,” she said. “I remember glancing over it earlier. The anonymous one involving heresies. Except the cadet didn’t just fool one of us over some minor point of Doctrine. He got caught framing a visiting Rahal magistrate.”

  It was exactly the kind of thing that Ruo would have thought hilarious. Except for the part about getting caught. Shuos Academy might have protected one of its cadets if the matter had been a minor infraction; each faction tended not to surrender its own to outsiders as a matter of jurisdictional principle. But the Rahal were also a high faction, and a magistrate – that wasn’t just an infraction, that was an offense for which the guilty party could be tortured to death in a remembrance.

  Cheris had opened her mouth to admit that the game had been hers, that she was the one who had killed Ruo, when Yeren went on, “The game’s not anonymous anymore, at any rate. It looks like Chenoi Tiana has confessed that it’s hers. She’s under investigation right now.”

  Both of them knew that “under investigation” was unlikely to result in any serious reprimand. Cheris’s heartbeat had slowed. “Who’s Tiana?” she asked.

  She had a way out. And she was taking it. She hadn’t realized she had already made the decision.

  “She’s a third-year, no reason you should know her,” Yeren said. “I’m so sorry, Jedao. It – I might be wrong. The suicide could be someone else.”

  Cheris doubted it. Yeren was very good at hacking. One of the benefits of dating he
r was learning from her. And the dead cadet being someone else wouldn’t make the situation much better.

  She couldn’t put off the hard part. “Ruo was an idiot if he let himself get caught,” she said with deliberate carelessness. “Suicide’s better than hanging around to have your fingers pulled off, so I can’t say that I blame him.”

  Yeren made a pained sound. “He was our friend, Jedao.”

  Cheris dressed quickly. “Friendship doesn’t mean anything to the dead, and I don’t think either of us wants to be associated with him anyhow.”

  “If that’s your take on it,” she said, her voice shaking again, “get out. Maybe I’ll see you later and maybe I won’t.”

  Yeren might have some intention of salvaging the relationship after calming down, but Cheris didn’t. She left without argument.

  Cheris headed out to a café. She had arranged for a small null in camera coverage – as the joke went, if you didn’t hack the commandant’s surveillance system at least once as a first-year, you were fit only for the Andan – and she wanted to listen in on the news. People were already gossiping about the suicide.

  While Cheris listened to the gossip with half an ear, she started hacking the academy’s grid. The tablet she was using looked like a model that had been popular four years ago, but what wasn’t obvious was that she had wired together the innards from a decrepit laboratory machine she had begged off her mother. Her mother had been amenable so long as she didn’t cause anything to blow up. (She was never going to live down that experiment with the food processor when she was twelve.) She didn’t have any illusions that the tablet’s secret obsolescence would hinder a real Shuos grid diver, but if she worked quickly, she had a chance of getting away with her query.

  It didn’t take long for Cheris to find pictures of Ruo’s corpse. Even with the bullet hole in the side of his head, the red-gray mess on the other side, the blood matted in his hair, she recognized him. She would have known him in the dark by his footsteps, or by the taste of his mouth, or the way he always broke left when he was startled. She had assumed that he would always greet her with that kiss on the top of her head, and that they would graduate together, perhaps even apply to the same assignments. All of that was gone now.

  Cheris had difficulty concentrating. Up until this point, she had convinced herself that all the game maneuvers existed solely in some abstract space. There was nothing abstract about the fact that she’d killed her best friend.

  Still, she wasn’t done yet. As luck would have it, she made it into Tiana’s profile because someone had forgotten to lock it down after making their edits, or someone else had been hacking it before she had and left the doors open.

  Two instructors had made private notes in Tiana’s profile. They praised her ruthlessness and her boldness in claiming credit in the wake of a suicide. They praised her mastery of Shuos ideals. And, almost as an afterthought, they recommended that she be placed in two advanced seminars next term.

  Cheris closed the connection and stayed in the café until it got dark. During that time, she played seven games of jeng-zai and lost them all.

  No one ever figured out that Cheris was the author of Tiana’s game.

  “RUO,” CHERIS SAID hoarsely into the silence. She had not spoken his name in over four centuries. It was hard to believe that he had been dead that long, that she was the only person who remembered the brightness of his eyes, his laugh, his unexpected fondness for fruit candies. The shape of his hands, with their blunt, steady fingers.

  For a moment she wondered why her voice sounded too high, strangely alien. And then she remembered that, too. Her face was wet, but she tried not to think about that.

  Cheris bent herself to finishing the task she had set herself. She already knew how much the splinters hurt. A little more wouldn’t matter.

  FOUR HUNDRED AND nineteen years before the Siege of the Fortress of Scattered Needles, on a world whose name had atrophied to a murmur, the heptarchate warred against rebels. The rebels flew many banners: the Thorn-and-Circle, the Winged Flower, the Red Fist. The Inverted Chalice and the Snake Defiant. The Stone Axe. In those days, it seemed that every hilltop, every city in the shadow of a forever cloud, every glimmering moon had its own device.

  The battle had passed Cheris and Shuos Sereset by like a red tide. They had been assigned to assassinate the Axers’ general, then position shouters by hand. As it turned out, the assassination had been the easy part. Now Cheris listened to the faraway crash of guns, the hiss-and-sizzle of evaporator fire, the roar of tanks. For hours she had been trying to call the Shuos for pickup; for hours she had sought any indication that heptarchate forces were still in the area, or that the heretics were coming back.

  The shouters had proved more troublesome. Their handler had explained, in a cold dead voice, that Shuos drones could have accomplished the task, but their leadership was unwilling to reveal the full extent of the drones’ capabilities to the Kel. The Kel, their allies.

  Now Sereset was dying of a stray Kel bullet, pure stupid luck. The bullet was a tunneler, and Sereset’s amputation failsafe had reacted too slowly. All Cheris could think of, looking at the crusts of drying blood, at the messy hardened foam that partly staunched the leg’s stump and the perforations, was how little she knew the other man. At Shuos Academy Sereset had had a habit of keeping his head down and smiling a lot, but he had reasonably good marks and liked working with finicky equipment. None of this told Cheris what Sereset thought about the Liozh heptarch’s rhetoric, or what music he hummed when no one else was listening, or whether he thought the bitter wine served at the Shuos table was better than Andan rose liqueur.

  “You should have left hours ago,” Sereset said in a dry rasp.

  Cheris crouched closer. It was cold – she’d pulled off her coat and draped it over the other man – but this much cold wouldn’t kill her. “I’m not leaving you,” she said. “No word yet.”

  “I didn’t figure there would be. You know, I always looked at you and thought you planned too hard. You always have the perfect answer prepared.” Sereset’s words were slow, dragged out one by one, but clearly enunciated: a matter of pride even now.

  “Not a very useful character flaw, is it?” Cheris said. “Didn’t do you much good.”

  “It’s not your fault the Kel can’t aim.”

  Cheris looked out over the curve of the hills, the silhouettes of blowing purplish grasses in the sun’s waning light, the rubble of buildings blown apart. You could almost mistake this for peace: the wind, the grass, the hills. The way light snagged on the edges of leaves and changed the colors of stone and skin and trickling water.

  You could almost forget the trajectories of bullets. You could almost forget that, less than a day ago, the Kel had fought the rebels over control of the nearby city. You could almost forget that the shouters had shouted enemy and ally alike into submission, driving out all thought but the imperative to kneel before the heptarchs’ sign. The shouters were a Shuos weapon, and the Kel were not immune to them. Their weapons had fallen slack from their hands; the engines of war had chewed through the battlefield unguided. The casualties must have been appalling. For that matter, Cheris had to wonder how many of the other shouter teams had made it through.

  Cheris had originally intended to pick a track that would make use of her gift for languages. She had been good at a lot of things, and having options worked in her favor. But after Ruo’s suicide, she switched to the assassin track with a side of analysis. It would take more than assassinations to bring down the heptarchate, but it gave her a starting place.

  And now, it turned out, she was going to die forgotten on a battlefield before she could set anything in motion.

  “How much longer?” Sereset asked after a while.

  “I don’t know,” Cheris said. A Shuos hoverer was supposed to have retrieved them over ten hours ago. They had no way of returning to the transport in orbit, and they couldn’t leave the shouters: too dangerous to abandon into enemy hand
s, too valuable to destroy. In theory, the Kel had been mopping up the battlefield and its shambles of prisoners. Cheris had risked burst transmissions asking the Kel for pickup, but she had her suspicions about what the Kel thought about the Shuos just now.

  The wind grew colder, the sun dimmer.

  “Stupid war, isn’t it?” Sereset said.

  Cheris startled. Careless of her. She should have better control. “Don’t say that.”

  Sereset’s grin was ghastly. “Don’t be ridiculous. What can they do, kill me?”

  “You know just as well as I do what they do to dissidents. The best thing to do is obey.”

  “I expected better of you.”

  “You should never expect better of anyone.” Cheris remembered long hours in Shuos Khiaz’s office hunched over lists of numbers. Her imagination wasn’t large enough to encompass the deaths, the cities unmade and the books smothered into platitudes, but that wasn’t any reason not to try.

  After another pause, while strange luminous insects started to dance their fluttering dances, Cheris said, “It’s a stupid war.” The words tasted strange. She was unused to taking such risks.

  She wasn’t sure that Sereset had heard her, but then he said, “Not much to do about it, I suppose.”

  “That’s not true,” Cheris said, more vehemently than she had meant to. “If everyone united to defy their tyranny, even the heptarchs would fall back. We say ‘rebels’ as though they all share the same goals and leadership, but they don’t. They don’t coordinate with each other, so the heptarchate will defeat them in detail. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Indeed,” Sereset said. Perhaps he was smiling. At this point it was hard to tell.

  “We shouldn’t be fighting this war,” Cheris said. She had been silent for so long. “The only way to get them to stop, though, is if someone takes on the heptarchate entire. I’m not talking about petty assassinations. I’m talking about defeating them on every level of their own game. It wouldn’t be short and it wouldn’t be pretty and you’d end up as much a monster as they are, but maybe it would be worth it to tear the whole fucking structure down.”