Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Cheris had finished her pasty and was in the middle of wiping her mouth, lost in memories that were and weren’t her own, when someone rapped politely at the door. It couldn’t be one of her housemates. They would just have walked in, as the house’s minimal security system recognized them. One of their friends?

  Her back prickled. Paranoia, she told herself again; but she could never be sure. “Grid,” she said softly, knowing it would hear her, “who is it?”

  The grid showed her an image of her guest: a bedraggled man of middle years, his bangs clinging damply to his forehead. Not smiling, although she knew exactly what his smile looked like, and how it tilted up asymmetrically at the corners. He was panting as though he’d run to her house from—from where? She hadn’t heard the footsteps, although that didn’t mean anything definitive.

  He wasn’t in Kel uniform, or Shuos uniform either. That unnerved her. The naked hands were worst of all. In her dreams she always saw them sheathed in the notorious fingerless gloves.

  Cheris’s next actions happened in what she later remembered as a single seamless flow, without calculation to guide them. The gun that she had hidden for the past two years snapped into her hands as she strode to the door. She touched the selector with her finger and emptied the magazine through the unopened door in a single burst. Just as quickly, she flung herself to the side in case of return fire.

  No one fired back, but the stink of gunsmoke filled her nostrils. In the sudden ringing stillness afterward, she heard the thud of a body slumping against the door; heard a stifled gasp.

  “Please,” the man on the other side of the door said, with a hint of the drawl that she had fought hard to suppress in her own speech. “I’m just here to talk.”

  Cheris doubted that, but now that her rational brain had caught up to her ghost-granted reflexes, she recognized the futility of retrieving more ammunition and shooting him again, as satisfying as it would be. She kept the gun in her hand, because Shuos paranoia and Kel training died hard. “Let him in,” she said to the house’s grid.

  The door slid open. Jedao stared at her wide-eyed. His sensible brown jacket was marred by holes in the torso where she’d hit him in center mass, to say nothing of the grotesque, sluggish black blood dripping from the wounds where his heart should have been. She glimpsed wormlike tendrils waving feebly from beneath his skin, revealing the truth beneath the human exterior. Jedao gestured apologetically at the blood.

  Cheris stood aside to let him in. Given the holes in the door, a little blood wasn’t going to make much difference, even if one of her housemates liked everything very neat.

  He still didn’t enter. “Cheris?” he said uncertainly, using a high honorific.

  Cheris was forcibly reminded that she’d changed her face, had subtle adjustments made to her voice, courtesy of one of Mikodez’s surgeons. Most days she didn’t think about her new face, with its broad forehead and pronounced nose, the quizzical eyebrows. It would have fooled her own parents—but they were dead, and by her own doing.

  The sound of her name—her real name—brought back a sudden and unwelcome wave-crash of longing, especially paired with the familiar Shparoi drawl. Cheris remembered what it had been like when the original Jedao had talked to her, that relentless voice in her head. Looking at this other Jedao was like looking in a broken mirror and putting her hands through the shards: pain that she couldn’t escape.

  “It’s me,” Cheris said, her voice harsher than she’d meant it to be. She pointed at the couch. He went over to sit on it, still dripping blood, and she closed the door. How much time did they have before her watchers called for reinforcements? Since it seemed unfruitful to say, Thanks for ruining my life, she settled for, “I’m guessing you’re not here with the hexarch’s permission. Make it quick.”

  A trail of that black blood had dripped from the door to the couch, following Jedao like an accusation. He had removed his jacket and was trying ineffectually to staunch the leakage with the wadded-up fabric. “I’m here,” he said, overenunciating, “because you’re the only one who knows the truth about my past.”

  There was no point continuing the conversation here, when the Shuos would already be on their way. As much as she’d been chafing at how dull and ordinary her life had been, now that she was about to lose it, a pang of resentment started up in her chest. She doubted she’d be able to go back to her classroom now that Jedao had intruded into her life.

  For a moment she considered handing Jedao over to the Shuos. He wasn’t her problem; he was Mikodez’s problem. She could get rid of him and go back to the simple life she’d chosen for herself.

  But he’d come to her in search of the answers she’d withheld from him before. She owed them to him, even if she’d been in denial about it.

  “Did you bring any weapons?” Cheris asked.

  His teeth flashed in a silent laugh. “I am a weapon,” Jedao said. He wasn’t boasting; it was as true as anything else about him. She was grateful that he didn’t say I’m your gun or she would have been tempted to punch him, even if just for the irrational feeling that that was her phrase.

  Cheris had walked over to her escritoire in the common room and opened it to reveal a bag. “We’ll have to share,” she said. She kept emergency supplies in the bag in case she had to leave in a hurry: everything from cash in the local currency to ration bars (not Kel, alas), plus a survival knife and a folding tent, all the accoutrements she would need to survive in the wilderness outside the settlement’s protective dome until she could be picked up by allies.

  She also retrieved a protective suit and began pulling it on over her clothes. “I have a spare,” she said, “but it’s not going to fit you. Did you bring one, or are we going to have to detour to pick one up for you?” More opportunities to be caught. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t see much alternative.

  “I don’t need one,” Jedao said. “The atmosphere outside won’t kill me.” He didn’t explain how he knew this. She was willing to take his word for it, though. She knew how hard he was to kill.

  “Come on, then,” Cheris said.

  Jedao followed in silence. Cheris looked over her shoulder to verify that he was still there, that he hadn’t dissolved into some phantasm of smoke and bitter memory. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was afraid that it would burst free of her ribcage, making her Jedao’s twin in injury. Would she bleed black, too, now that they were reunited?

  The community maintained some hoverers in case someone wanted to go for a jaunt outside the dome, or needed to transport heavy objects. Cheris signed one out and took the driver’s seat. Jedao got in without questioning her, which she appreciated. The Shuos would count on being able to track the vehicle, but Cheris had asked one of the settlement’s servitors to plant an override into the system. She activated it now, hoping the Shuos hadn’t discovered it in the interim.

  The hoverer smelled displeasingly of meat pasties, a smell that she liked when the pasties in question were fresh and much less when it mingled with a lingering mixture of people’s clashing perfumes and bodies. Civilian life had softened her. She’d once trained regularly in Kel body armor that reeked of sour sweat and off-gassing plastic and, occasionally, vomit or other effluvia. There was no forgetting the stomach-turning stink of the battlefield, blood curdled or crystallized, the occasional startling sweetness of crushed flowers or aromatics. How much of that did this other, younger Jedao remember?

  “It’s beautiful,” Jedao said, almost in a whisper, as the hoverer lifted up and sped toward the boundary of the settlement’s dome. Cheris was reminded of his presence, and the fact that they were, despite their shared history, strangers to each other. She would not have expected any incarnation of Jedao to be sentimental about landscape. But he was leaning toward the window, one hand pressed against it in yearning.

  “First time planetside?” she asked, because it might be useful to know. She couldn’t imagine Mikodez allowing Jedao to wander around on a planet, even if the Citadel
of Eyes occupied a geosynchronous orbit above one. Depending on how patchy Jedao’s memories were, this might be his first experience with sky, sun, dirt.

  “Yes,” he said without elaborating.

  She appreciated that he wasn’t distracting her from the more important task of driving. The hoverer was capable of handling itself if you punched in the destination, but she preferred to do it manually in case the Shuos had the vehicle bugged. She didn’t want to drive them into an ambush.

  “I had a way off-planet, but I assume you prefer yours,” Jedao added as they reached the dome. It glimmered with a soap bubble’s rainbow colors, a flickering in the air. Exotic technology, which Cheris didn’t trust, but it hadn’t failed since she’d moved here. And really, the calendar in use here was her calendar, which the servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave had helped her distribute eleven years ago, after the destruction of Kel Command. It was laughable, if not actively hypocritical, for her to be nervous about her own work.

  Cheris braced herself for the lightheaded sensation that always accompanied a dome transition. If it bothered Jedao, he didn’t show it. In all fairness, if she’d survived a hole in her chest that size, a mere tickle in her brain wouldn’t slow her down either.

  The settlement, with its modest clusters of buildings and walkways and humble rows of flowers, receded behind them. Cheris guided the hoverer toward the mountains with their woods, heading toward a particular dead tree, its limbs split like lightning tongues, that made for a useful landmark. She wasn’t sure how the local flora survived in atmosphere that wasn’t yet fit for humans to breathe; she’d never been motivated enough to read about the transitional forests that the early terraforming team had planted. The details would have gone over her head anyway; she was no scientist.

  Cheris didn’t speak again until they had flown some distance beneath the cover of the blue-leaved trees. Driving was not her best skill, and she was relying on the hoverer’s simple intelligence to help her avoid crashing into some unexpected boulder or ledge. They whooshed past the trees and their whipsaw branches at a stomach-churning speed, as she didn’t dare slow down. Every moment might make a difference.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “The version with details.”

  Jedao opened his mouth. Just then there was a loud crack as a low branch smacked into the hoverer, and they tilted alarmingly to one side and almost bounced off another tree entirely. Cheris had a brief, dazzling, and unwanted vision of a cloud of scintillant insects flurrying up from their hiding places and toward the canopy. She swore in a muddled mixture of Mwen-dal and the high language as she fought to bring the vehicle back under control.

  By the time she’d achieved that, they were off-course. She then had to focus on navigation, which wasn’t hard so much as irritating, when there were so many damn trees everywhere. Deeper in the forest, they grew closer together, along with a bewilderment of low-growing shrubs, vines, and thorny things that glistened with poisonous sap.

  They touched down at last in something that the servitors’ maps had described as a “clearing,” and which barely merited the name. She had to tilt the hoverer’s nose up to get it to fit at all. This is why no one tracked me as a vehicle specialist, Cheris thought ruefully. At least the unnaturally quick reflexes she had inherited from the original Jedao’s ghost had kept them from meeting a fiery death in the forest. It would be ignominious to survive bullets and battlefields, a carrion bomb, and a crash landing on the world of Terebeg only to be felled by a hoverer crash.

  Cheris rechecked the integrity of her suit, old habit, before retrieving her bag, popping the door open, and clambering out. Jedao exited right after she did, landing agilely in the loam and decaying leaves. He wrinkled his nose, although Cheris couldn’t smell anything but the cleaner she used to maintain the suit. Fortunately, the atmosphere wasn’t so deadly that she needed an independent air supply, although she’d brought a couple of canisters in case of emergency. The filters in the suit would suffice.

  Cheris wasted no time pulling out a transmitter and sending a single signal. “Can you hear me through this?” Cheris asked. She also knew the Shuos sign language, thanks to the original Jedao, but who knew if this Jedao did?

  Jedao nodded. “What was that?” he asked, gesturing toward the transmitter.

  She pocketed it. “I called for pickup. You may have gotten this far, but we’re going to need allies to get off-planet.” She was curious as to how Jedao had engineered his escape; she’d get that information out of him later. “You never told me what exactly you’re here for.”

  Jedao regarded her with a blank face. A split second before he spoke, she remembered, viscerally, from the inside-out, what that particular lack of expression meant. He was angry with her.

  “You lied to me,” Jedao said.

  He clearly expected her to figure out what he meant. “We haven’t talked in two years,” Cheris said.

  “I was locked up,” Jedao said. “I found out how Ruo died.” His eyes glittered; he was trying not to cry. It made him look paradoxically young.

  Cheris was bombarded by unwanted memories of Vestenya Ruo, who’d been her lover; whose death the original Jedao had caused. The way he’d started to laugh after picking a fight with her in a party, the first time they’d met, and the cocktail they’d shared afterward. Their endless rivalry to see who’d get the better marksmanship scores. The first time they’d slept together, out in the gardens, and the bug bites she’d wound up with. She missed him terribly; the longing was and wasn’t hers.

  Carefully, Cheris said, “It’s been 437 years. I don’t see what difference it makes.”

  “He was my friend,” Jedao said. He bit his lip and averted his gaze. The bullet wounds in his torso had mostly closed up except for a few stray tendrils wriggling aimlessly, like exposed worms. He took no notice of them, although Cheris found them distracting.

  “Ruo always did like to take risks,” Cheris said, both fond and resigned. “But that was one he should have avoided.”

  Jedao swung at her. She blocked the blow, segued without thinking into a joint lock that was supposed to deter further struggling by inflicting pain. Which was stupid, because someone who didn’t blink at multiple gunshot wounds wasn’t going to be slowed down by a pressure point.

  Nevertheless, Jedao went limp. Cheris remained alert in case it was a trick—was it ever not a trick, with Jedao?—but he remained still, and after several moments she let go. He took one step backward, head bowed.

  “I’m sorry,” Jedao said. He scrubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “I only found out a couple weeks ago. It was like waking up without him all over again.”

  “You didn’t come all this way to get in a fight with me over this,” Cheris said. “Or did you?” It could have been worse. He was a Shuos with fragmentary memories of being the hexarchate’s most notorious madman. He could have diverted some of the planetary weather-eaters and crashed them into the settlement, or something even more destructive, with whatever grid-diving skills had gotten him this far.

  Jedao tipped his chin up. “I want my memories back,” he said. The drawl that they shared was stronger than ever. “How am I supposed to know what to do with my life when I can’t remember most of it?”

  Cheris’s stomach suddenly revolted. It was all she could do to keep from gagging. She’d eaten Jedao’s memories, crunched down the carrion glass and felt it pierce her on the way down. They were part of her now, sharded through her in ways that she couldn’t explain in ordinary human terms. But that didn’t mean they had to belong to her forever.

  For over a decade she’d carried Jedao inside her, put him on and off like a mask. Some nights she dreamed his dreams: running from geese who were almost as tall as she was, when she’d been a boy; learning to use her first gun, a lovingly maintained rifle that had been in the Garach family for a couple of generations; shuffling a jeng-zai deck that dripped blood, and blood, and blood. She would have given a lot to be free of those dreams; would have be
en lost without them.

  She’d given up on getting rid of Jedao. There was a way, but—

  Jedao’s eyes were intent upon her face. “You know a way,” he breathed.

  Of course. They knew each other. Her body language had been overwritten by Jedao’s; he could read her the way she could read him.

  “It will require travel,” Cheris said, “but we would have to do that anyway, to get away from the Shuos.” She imagined Jedao as an outlaw, and couldn’t. Even if he had the skills for mercenary work—not that Brezan or Inesser or Mikodez would thank her for making the suggestion—his appearance would always pose a problem. “Why couldn’t you have gotten your face changed on the way?”

  “I tried,” he said with an undertone of pain. “I tried scarring myself. It’s how my body regenerates. It always regenerates in the same shape.”

  Interesting. Presumably this had limits, or he wouldn’t be able to form new memories, or learn new skills. But a fixed overall appearance—that was something she could see Kujen engineering into his creation.

  “Kujen experimented with methods of memory transfer,” Cheris said, “besides the known one where he hijacked a stranger’s body wholesale. I have some of his notes. He had more than one base; he believed in redundancy. I didn’t tell Mikodez about some of the others.”

  “I imagine he knows anyway,” Jedao said.

  “About some of them, not all of them,” Cheris said. She didn’t tell Jedao how she knew this. The servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave, with whom she was aligned, had been monitoring Kujen’s bases on the grounds that they’d rather know about any traps he’d left behind before they went off. Whether they’d had run-ins with Mikodez’s people was not something they had divulged to her.

  The transmitter vibrated once. Cheris glanced down and interpreted the code, which was based on Mwen-dal. “Pickup in thirty-seven minutes,” she said. She wondered how the needlemoth planned to get through the trees. Then again, its pilot was better than she was, and the needlemoth itself had not insignificant armaments for a vessel its size. As long as the moth didn’t shoot her while clearing itself a landing site, she didn’t care. (She wasn’t worried about Jedao.)