Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  The two humans within bailed. In their position, he would have done the same. They receded behind him, their fall slowed by parachutes that showed up on his othersense as mushroom-billows of thin material.

  Jedao was still accelerating. Shortly after that, they crashed through the top layer of the canopy. More bloody trees, fuck everything, he never wanted to encounter another tree for the rest of his life, and fuck Mikodez’s inexplicable obsession with green growing things while he was at it.

  The trees’ branches flayed him all the way down. Inanely, Jedao thought of some of the pornography videos he’d watched. It had looked more fun in the porn than it was out here. Maybe he was doing it wrong?

  He did remember to decelerate, but he’d left it to the last moment and his control wasn’t as good as he’d have liked. If he had anything left to scream with, he would have shrieked as the world hammered into him.

  Shortly after that, the personnel vehicle exploded. It had physical shielding, sure. Said shielding hadn’t been intended for spaceflight acceleration levels of abuse, let alone this kind of impact.

  Jedao lost consciousness as the fires washed over him.

  He woke an indeterminate amount of time later, aching all over. Shit, how long had he been out? Was the fight over?

  Concentrate, don’t panic. Jedao dragged himself upright, whatever that meant. He wasn’t sure his bones had healed right; something felt off about his balance. But he could deal with that later. All (“all”?) he had to do was repeat the breaks and then set them correctly. At the moment that would take time he didn’t have, so he wasn’t going to worry about it.

  He was in a different part of the forest, small surprise, but reorienting himself took time. After that, his attention was immediately drawn to the non-moving human-sized masses scattered at ground level. At this point, Jedao became aware that he himself had been thrown clear of the explosion—reflex?—and was now uncomfortably draped over a tree limb whose protuberances pressed into his torso.

  If he lived through this experience, he never wanted to see a tree again. Or a plant. Well, maybe the green onion, which he trusted Mikodez was looking after in between coaxing people to eat candies, ordering assassinations, and annoying Zehun. (Jedao didn’t like Zehun, mainly because Zehun thought the best place for Jedao was in an incinerator, but he also had to concede that Zehun had a singularly thankless job.)

  Which of the damn human masses was Cheris? He focused on the shapes of faces until he found her. She wasn’t alone.

  Next time I run afoul of some faction, I want it to be the Rahal, Jedao thought, aware that he was whining. He could have a nice, action-filled month filling out paperwork and getting yelled at for doing it wrong. It sounded like an excellent vacation.

  Heat lapped against his flesh. There was a fire all around him, not surprising considering how he’d gotten here. Based on the change in density of the tree below him, it was on fire. He’d better get down from this stupid branch.

  He didn’t know enough about the atmosphere and the trees’ composition to guess how much danger the fire posed. How much of a conflagration would it take to threaten him? Kujen had said that he should avoid diving into stars, and Jedao was happy to take that at face value, but he didn’t know what was necessary and sufficient, as they liked to say in math.

  He spent precious seconds mapping locations and vectors. Only seven people remained active in the region, plus Cheris. He hadn’t thought he’d gotten that many out of the initial group, but Cheris wouldn’t have been sitting in a tree writing poetry that entire time. (According to Mikodez, most Kel poetry was either terrible or pornographic or both, anyway.)

  This wasn’t any reason to become complacent. He had no way of guessing how many more reinforcements might show up. While he hadn’t gotten the impression that there were that many legitimate inhabitants in the settlement, who knew how many random secret bases the Shuos had elsewhere on this continent, or in space waiting to make orbital drops?

  Be realistic, Jedao told himself, although he couldn’t help shivering, which aggravated the pain in all his joints. The Shuos might want to keep an eye on Cheris, but they also had finite resources. Mikodez hadn’t made any secret of his unending budgetary woes. He could have been faking it, but the Shuos probably didn’t have thousands of agents waiting to capture Cheris and Jedao.

  Seven-to-one odds he could handle. Surely Cheris’s pickup would arrive soon, assuming she hadn’t simply abandoned him. If she had, he’d figure out a way to track her. He was highly motivated.

  (Realistically speaking, Cheris had had two-plus years to prepare to vanish. At this point, as far as resources went, Jedao wasn’t even sure he still had clothing. Modern fibers were tough, but not tough enough to endure this kind of abuse.)

  Jedao gritted his teeth (what he thought of as his teeth, anyway) and climbed down the tree he was stuck in, like an aggravated cat. The heat intensified as he scuttled downward, panting at the screaming pain in his hands and knees and feet. He was sure he looked ridiculous, and he was beyond caring.

  Jedao landed awkwardly. He was positive he had done something bad to his ankle. But as long as he could crawl, he wasn’t finished.

  The soles of his feet protested. Something crunched underfoot, although he felt rather than heard it. Jedao tottered for a second, then steadied. He had good balance, but his feet hadn’t healed straight, just his luck.

  Flames beat against his perception. Jedao turned until he was facing the right direction, then broke into a sprint with a stifled sob at the prospect of more pain. “Sprint” wasn’t quite accurate. He was half-running, half-propelling himself by grabbing space-time and yanking himself forward, although at less hair-raising accelerations than he had when he’d brought down the carrier. His othersense gave him a mental map of the trees, so with any luck he could avoid crashing into them.

  His control wasn’t perfect. Pain and exhaustion made matters worse. A thorn or twig—no appreciable difference at this speed—tore a chunk out of his side. His entire body felt raw. It startled him how much that new, unwanted sensation threatened to distract him, small as it was.

  At least Jedao was going away from the heart of the heat. He didn’t want to test the limits of his resistance to fire. And anyway, his targets were human, and more vulnerable than he was to random environmental hazards. (Maybe not so random, considering that he’d started the blaze in the first place.) He thanked his nameless opponents for their good sense in fleeing.

  Jedao didn’t know how good the remaining hostiles were at keeping watch, but surely taking out the carrier and their commander was worth something. His first target appeared to be completely unprepared when Jedao barreled into them.

  Fortunately for Jedao and less fortunately for his victim, Jedao landed on top, which cushioned the fall. While they wore a combat suit, the impact broke it open at the seams, one of which was at the neck. Jedao jabbed viciously into the opening despite the way the edges of the break tore at his hand, clawed it open further, and began to throttle the Shuos, who struggled. Jedao simply absorbed the damage, the one thing he was good at.

  By this time, although Jedao hadn’t realized it earlier, his hearing had started coming back. He’d mistaken the faint roaring for an auditory hallucination, but on second thought, it was the sound of the encroaching fire. And the person he was fighting was wheezing.

  “Sorry,” Jedao tried to say, except all that came out was a strangled moan.

  This caused the struggles to intensify, not the intended effect. At least the Shuos slumped unconscious shortly afterward. Jedao hoped they weren’t dead, but he needed to keep moving, and it wasn’t like he’d brought any first aid supplies with him.

  He’d said once to Mikodez that he wouldn’t kill again. Two years gone and he’d already broken his promise. He couldn’t dwell on that now; he wasn’t so firm in his convictions that he was willing to let the Shuos recapture him.

  Jedao moved on to the second target, who went down quickly
, and then the third. He didn’t proceed in order of proximity, largely to keep them guessing. No matter what physical advantages he had, he didn’t believe in making things easy for his opponents.

  When it came to the third, he ran into a complication. More of his hearing had returned, damn his body and its unpredictable healing. He’d been doing fine without the distractions, and target three was screaming at him, or possibly just screaming.

  In response to the irritating shrieks, Jedao reared up, then smashed his forehead against the target’s. His mouth stretched wide open—interesting, he was back to having a mouth, even if he could have sworn his jaw wasn’t supposed to unhinge like this—and then he snapped it shut in horror. He was hungry.

  Involuntarily, Jedao gripped the person’s arms to keep them from breaking free, even though he was trembling. Was I seriously going to try to eat them? What in the name of fox and hound is wrong with me?

  Once upon a time, the Revenant had warned him that he needed to eat in order to fuel his regeneration. He hadn’t thought through the implications, especially when coupled with the level of physical trauma he’d sustained. In particular, he hadn’t considered what he’d be driven to do when he was caught without even so pitiful a recourse as the ration bars Hemiola had given him, since they hadn’t survived the earlier stunts.

  Now that he was aware of the intolerable gnawing in his stomach, he couldn’t ignore it. The target continued to scream. Jedao discovered that his mouth was open again, wider, wider, widest, and that he was trying to taste the target’s face through the faceplate of the armor, which he couldn’t imagine had any appreciable nutritional value.

  Jedao stumbled backwards in the initial shock of horror, releasing the person even though he was hurt, he needed to eat, he needed to eat—it was impossible to think past the desire to subdue his prey and suck out the sustenance he required. Fuck, he thought dimly, I should have realized—I can’t regenerate out of nowhere. I need replenishment.

  At this point his target made a fatal error. They threw a grenade, which Jedao was too distracted to dodge or catch and fling back. And then they scrambled backwards, out of the blast radius. It wasn’t the blast radius they should have worried about.

  The grenade exploded in a scatter of shards of fire and stinging hot gases. Red-hot shrapnel pierced Jedao. The concussive blast damaged his hearing yet again. His entire body was a pincushion of agony.

  He didn’t care about any of that. Couldn’t care about any of that. All he knew was that he’d been hurt more even as the regenerative processes that he had no conscious control over demanded more fuel—more food. His self-control shredded.

  Jedao lunged again, snake-swift, and tore at his prey’s armor. His fingers were slick with his own blood. He started hammering against the suit, rapid percussive blows erratically boosted by his ability to accelerate himself. The prey screamed. Jedao’s mouth gaped open wider wider widest to swallow the noise—

  The bullets slammed into him from behind. Two in the head, one for each knee. Not that he was in any condition to count; it would have required too much cognition. The last thing he thought as darkness engulfed him was that more prey had showed up.

  “ARE YOU SURE you want this thing on the moth?” asked the deltaform servitor hovering between Cheris and Jedao. Its name was 1491625, a numerical pattern that it found pleasing, and Cheris had worked with it in the past. At the moment its lights glowed livid red; it wasn’t making any secret of its displeasure.

  “Yes,” Cheris said wearily, prepared to argue. It didn’t argue.

  Jedao didn’t look human anymore, except in broad outline. Frenzied tentacles of shadow boiled and writhed and reached toward her. His mouth stretched wide and snapped repeatedly in her direction. He was imprisoned in the cargo hold, although neither Cheris nor 1491625 were certain that the restraints would hold him if he regained enough wits to accelerate his way out of them. The cramped quarters made her nervous, because when she’d taken him out, he’d been trying to eat a downed Shuos operative, armor and all.

  “You didn’t mention him doing this the last time you fought him,” 1491625 said. Its red lights flared again.

  “That’s because he didn’t,” Cheris said. She studied Jedao, frowning. “Don’t you have some piloting to do?”

  “I only sit in the pilot’s seat because it gives you more room to move around,” 1491625 said, its red tinting a decidedly snippy orange. “I can control the moth perfectly well from any location, including outside. Not that I’m eager to do extravehicular. And I don’t want the creature, whether or not it’s actually ‘Jedao,’ gobbling you down for a snack.”

  Cheris raised her eyebrows and continued to observe Jedao’s compulsive attempts to get closer to her. He was ignoring 1491625 as irrelevant or, more likely, inedible. “Kind of you to care,” she said to 1491625, teasing.

  “I’m serious,” it snapped back. “I thought you called because of some kind of emergency. I didn’t realize you were exfiltrating that.”

  “It is an emergency,” Cheris said. “Or did you not notice the Shuos running around after us?”

  “Kind of hard to miss that when you and your friend set the forest on fire.”

  Cheris had a pretty good idea of how Jedao had achieved that, even if she’d been occupied knocking out a Shuos at the time. The question was, how could he do all this stuff? She’d originally assumed that regeneration was the result of some unholy experiment of Kujen’s, not unreasonable given his obsession with immortality. But the ability to fly?

  Jedao must have burned off clothing, and whatever equipment he hadn’t told her about. While Cheris had witnessed some strange things on the battlefield, usually in connection with exotic effects, she’d never encountered anything like this. Jedao was composed wholly of a wriggling unhuman darkness, not just ordinary shadow. It seeped out from behind her eyes even when she wasn’t facing him. She’d tried closing her eyes and had felt an unnerving sensation inside her, as though the tentacles were trying to squirm free from within her.

  “Do you feel the wriggling sensation too?” she asked.

  “There’s some kind of fluctuation,” 1491625 said. “I don’t have sensitive enough internals to tell you exactly what’s going on.”

  She’d have to ask Jedao about that later, if he ever regained the ability to speak. Which was up to her, at this point. She turned her back on him, trusting 1491625 to keep an eye on him—like most servitors, it could see in all directions at once, and not just in the human-visible spectrum—and opened up a locker. Within it was a stockpile of Kel field rations.

  “You’re not about to do what I think you’re about to do,” 1491625 said, glowing, if possible, even more virulently red. It would have shifted to the infrared for emphasis if she’d been another servitor.

  Cheris shrugged with one shoulder as she began retrieving stacks of ration bars, balancing them expertly. “I have a feeling that we’re going to need to stop somewhere to resupply.” Given that Jedao had been ravenous enough to try to ingest a fellow Shuos, she doubted that the notoriously terrible taste of Kel rations would deter him.

  “If you feed that thing—”

  “Listen,” Cheris said, “the reason he’s turned into a gibbering wreck is that he’s hungry.” He’d told her that he healed into the same shape; ironic that the one he wore now was, however grotesque, less fear-inspiring than that angular face with its tilted smile. Mass murderer. Arch-traitor. He must have crossed some threshold beyond which instinct drowned out his humanity, which raised the question of what he had been before Kujen tampered with him.

  Cheris kept half an eye on Jedao’s snapping jaws as she peeled off the wrappers as quickly as she could. Judging by his attempts to gnaw off the unlucky Shuos’s suit, he would down the wrappers without hesitating if she let him. She doubted that indigestion would improve his temper.

  “Suicide hawks!” 1491625 said in vexation.

  Cheris shook her head in mild reproof and paused long enough
to waggle the fingers of her ungloved right hand at it. “Not for over a decade,” she said. Even after all this time she wasn’t precisely used to going ungloved, but she no longer cringed from every chance touch against the skin of her hands, either.

  Jedao hadn’t worn gloves when he’d come to see her. They had that much in common: cast out by the Kel. But the Shuos had claimed Jedao, whereas she was an ordinary citizen, or as ordinary as she could manage to be. Which, it turned out, wasn’t very.

  Once Cheris had amassed a sufficient pile of peeled ration bars, she hefted one. It didn’t weigh much, and she could smell the flavor: dried roasted squid, one of her favorites, although many of the Kel she had known had hated it. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and lobbed the bar at Jedao.

  1491625 had the good sense to duck. Jedao might not have eyes anymore, but whatever senses remained were acute, and the restraints left enough play that he could snap the bar out of the air. It vanished down his gullet. She wasn’t sure he’d bothered to chew it, if he had teeth. It was hard to tell.

  1491625’s lights dimmed all the way down to an ember pittance.

  “Well,” Cheris said philosophically, “if it was just one ration bar’s worth of hunger”—and never mind that it was supposed to be equivalent to an entire meal for active-duty Kel, minus the water—”I don’t think he would have been resorting to cannibalism.” Did it count as cannibalism when you weren’t human yourself?

  She tossed another ration bar, with the same results. Considered throwing them two at a time. It wouldn’t be any hardship, as she still had excellent reflexes. On the other hand, she didn’t want Jedao to choke to death on a Kel ration bar. Of all the ways to go...

  “You’re taking this awfully calmly,” 1491625 said as it watched her feeding Jedao.

  “We’re not in immediate danger,” Cheris replied. Jedao’s thrashing had quieted as he concentrated on catching the thrown bars. As long as she kept up a steady pace, he seemed disinclined to go after her.