Hexarchate Stories

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Try not to listen too closely,” Cheris said to Jedao, who was shackled to keep him from interrupting the ritual and causing foxes knew what sorts of unwanted side-effects.

  He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side, as if that would make a difference.

  The cabinets surrounded her and Jedao, forming the vertices of a hexagon. She ignited them one by one. They formed a perimeter of silver light. The gears began to grind against each other.

  It wasn’t a carrion bomb. Cheris didn’t have any clue what a carrion bomb itself looked like, even though she had survived having one deployed against her, and that only because the original Jedao had died shielding her. The cabinets, according to Kujen’s notes, generated a field that acted like a weakened variant of the carrion bomb. It wouldn’t turn her or Jedao into pillars of corpse-glass; but it would enable her to divest herself of the glass she’d already ingested, once upon a massacre.

  Even forewarned, the nausea struck Cheris as though her stomach had been perforated and was being turned inside out. She doubled over. She was accustomed to pain and the memory of pain, but she didn’t have anything to prove. There was something to be said for surrendering to the overwhelming tide of misery.

  Then she began to vomit.

  Cheris had not, as Kel cadets went, been particularly adventurous. She’d honored her curfew, shown up for classes, tutored other cadets in math—gotten used to being asked why she hadn’t applied to join the Nirai, gotten even more used to smiling and offering non-answers. She’d known not to discuss her Mwennin heritage.

  She’d gotten drunk once or twice on leave, but never very drunk, and never badly enough to invite a hangover. Besides, every cadet knew where to obtain anti-intoxicants. Cheris had one distinct memory of steadying Ruo while he puked his guts out after—

  No, wait, that had been Jedao, not her.

  She couldn’t wait to purge herself of Jedao’s memories, except the process was revolting. And painful. She vomited up hot acidic liquid that solidified into glass like obsidian, noxious black.

  “Cheris?” That was Jedao, although she could scarcely hear him through the static in her head as he was ripped out of her. “Cheris! What’s going on?”

  Maybe I should have told him about carrion glass, she thought in between heaves. She was guessing that Kujen hadn’t. It might have given him notions. She opened her mouth to gasp out an explanation, only to be interrupted by another surge of bilious fluid.

  An eternity later, she was done. She felt as though someone had scrubbed her skull out with a scouring pad and stir-fried her brains. For a long time it was difficult to breathe, or think, past the gut-wrenching cramps.

  “Cheris!” Jedao’s eyes were wide. He strained against the shackles. “Do you need help?”

  “No,” she said, and contradicted herself by almost falling over. Something was wrong with her center of mass—

  Oh. Right. She’d almost forgotten how it had been when Jedao was first anchored to her, the discomfort of being infused with the physical responses of a body that was taller, that had faster reflexes, that was male.

  Now all of that had been ripped away.

  I can stand, Cheris told herself, although that was optimistic. Tottering, she stood and caught herself against a table. Fortunately, it was substantial enough to take her weight.

  Jedao’s face had an unhealthy pallor. Admittedly, that might be illusory; she knew he didn’t have ordinary red blood like a human. He was staring in astonishment at the carrion glass she had vomited up.

  Images flickered in the glass like ghosts. From time to time it made a subliminal whispering. If she tried to discern the words, it dwindled to a malicious hiss.

  “What the hell is that?” Jedao demanded.

  Cheris discovered that, while she didn’t have him inside her anymore, she remembered fragments. She could read the suppressed terror in his voice. But it was less visceral. Even the worst moments of Jedao’s life, which had once cut her on a daily basis, had dulled to scars. It was the difference between living a battle in the moment, with suppressive fire aimed straight at your position, and reading about one while curled up in your bunk, with a nice hot cup of tea and some snacks. While she’d known Kel who enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a fight, the suicide hawk flirtation with death, she’d never been one of them. She’d taken pride in doing her duty well; no less and no more.

  “Those,” Cheris said, not too exhausted to be amused by his reaction, “are your memories. Which we’re going to install in you so that someone else doesn’t make off with them and make another you to terrorize the galaxy with.”

  Jedao looked as though he wasn’t sure about her sanity. She couldn’t blame him. “If you had to, to eject them to get rid of them...”

  “That’s right.” Cheris bared her teeth at him. “If you want them, I’ll feed them to you.”

  Jedao sucked in his breath. “We can’t just lock them up somewhere safe?”

  “Where would that be?” Cheris asked pointedly.

  “No,” he said after a moment, “you’re right.”

  She was still prepared to destroy him if necessary. He’d craved death so badly, after all the things he’d done, the people he’d killed, the worlds he’d shattered. That was one thing Cheris would never forget about him.

  She’d miss him, in a way; but she also missed being herself.

  “Do it,” Jedao said.

  The carrion glass broke easily, in long lancing splinters. Jedao obediently opened his mouth, and she shoved the first piece in. He swallowed it whole; it distended his throat on the way down. Then she fed him the next piece, and the next.

  At first she wasn’t sure it was working.

  Then his eyes rolled back and he screamed.

  “I can stop,” Cheris said when he had run out of breath. She was lying.

  “Don’t stop,” Jedao said in scarcely a whisper. “Don’t stop until they’re all gone.”

  He screamed for a long time. Cheris sang to drown out the noise, Mwennin songs she had learned at the settlement. It didn’t work. She figured out too late that his unnatural healing meant that he couldn’t scream himself hoarse.

  At last all the glass was gone. Jedao lay limp, spent, breathing shallowly, like a doll with broken limbs. His eyes were shut, his mouth slack.

  Cheris didn’t make the mistake of approaching him, tempted as she was to kiss him on the brow in one final benediction. She wasn’t sure he deserved it, but they had seen many things together. She had a hard time convincing herself that this was how everything would end.

  {What have you done, Kujen?} he demanded, wild with a grief she didn’t understand. {There’s no one here!}

  His face hadn’t moved. He’d spoken in her head.

  Cheris realized that the complications had only begun.

  JEDAO HAD A cavalier attitude toward physical pain, partly because his muddled existence had abounded in it. After getting shot in the head by multiple people and surviving, there was no point making a fuss about it anymore. No one was going to care. Dhanneth had pretended to, but that had been a lie, and Jedao had deserved it anyway. Kujen was dead at his hand, and as for Cheris, who accompanied him now—well. Cheris had killed him twice and it wouldn’t surprise him if she planned on doing it again.

  The splinters hurt. He had expected them to. Except he had been prepared for physical pain rather than emotional puncture. He’d thought that receiving his memories would be like watching dramas, or reading a historian’s account, as though they belonged to someone else. Because he had a difficult time conceiving of General Shuos Jedao, Immolation Fox, arch-traitor as being him, even now.

  All that went away with the memory of the second time he and Ruo fell into bed together. As far as he knew, they’d been friends and nothing more. He’d clung to the threadbare memories of wrestling and video games and squirrel-fishing (squirrels, really? had he made that up in his head?) because that was better than dwelling on the fact that no one from his past en
dured.

  But the splinter pierced him. He gagged on it, choked, gasped for breath even as it sharded pain through him from the back of his throat to the pit of his belly. And he remembered. He remembered the way his hand had trembled on the wineglass as he toasted Ruo that night in the bar, and how Ruo had laughed it off; the prickle of embarrassment fading into warmth as Ruo took the glass from him and drank deeply, some of the wine-of-roses slopping over the lip of the glass and onto his sleeve and hand. He remembered the way Ruo’s kisses had been half-bite and half-bruise and entirely, intoxicatingly satisfying, the way he’d struggled, none too hard, as Ruo held him down and took him and took him, just the way he hadn’t known he’d like it, the way he had always liked it ever after.

  Guilt wracked him as though he’d been cheating on Dhanneth with Ruo, or maybe the other way around, he couldn’t tell, and never mind that the two men had lived (died) centuries apart.

  It didn’t end there. Jedao hadn’t taken into account the weight of four centuries of memory, to say nothing of long periods of imprisonment and sensory deprivation. He started looking forward to the physical pain, not because he liked it but because some sensation was better than the specter of utter nothingness. Living without a body in the everywhere darkness, with nothing to look at—no one to listen to—no one to talk to—

  Jedao tried to beg Cheris for light, more light, enough light to burn away the shadows now and forever, he couldn’t bear even the minuscule variations of light and shadow on her grave, pitiless face, but he couldn’t make the words come out and she wasn’t listening to him anyway. She kept spearing him with splinters, and then he begged her to slow down, to stop, he couldn’t take more of this when his mind was crowded with the faces of people he’d served with, battlefields and high table and bullets and dances and long slow nights on leave, and then he remembered all the people he’d killed at Hellspin Fortress and the gun hot cold loud in his hand in his mouth his finger on the trigger—

  I’m not here, Jedao told himself, because it was the only lie that brought him any shred of comfort. Every time a memory thrust into him, he cringed. It seemed impossible that he could have done all these things, even in a life—unlife—that had lasted so much longer than an ordinary human span. In particular, it seemed impossible that he was the same person as the one who had given those orders, or pulled the trigger of the Patterner 52, which he’d never laid hands on except he’d carried it his entire adult life; the same person who had wiped out a million people and with them the lives of his family.

  At the bare end, when at last the splinters slowed, Jedao tipped his head back and closed his eyes and allowed himself to dissolve into this other person. He wasn’t real, after all. His one regret was that he had forfeited the chance to say goodbye to Hemiola. It didn’t matter if he drowned himself—

  He was in an anchor. He was in an anchor, and he couldn’t see, although he had nine eyes, nine million if he wanted them, but he restrained himself to keep from panicking people who were very Kel and merely human. Accustomed as he was to being able to see in all directions at once, it was alarming to return to the living world yet be unable to see. Yet he had a sense that there were people around him, which he couldn’t explain.

  When he realized he could open his eyes, Jedao found himself drenched in sweat, although it didn’t smell right, with its odd sickly sweet notes along with a more human sourness.

  “You’re the anchor,” he said. His voice sounded harsh, as though someone had gone over it with a rasp. Except he wasn’t attached to her, he had a body of his own—

  The woman looked at him and did not speak. Her ivory skin had a distinct green undertone, and the way she was breathing too rapidly suggested that she was suppressing the urge to vomit. Vomit more, if memory served; it all came down to the matter of memory.

  “Jedao,” she said.

  Kujen had experimented with different anchors in the early days. Jedao still hadn’t forgiven him for the man he’d chosen for the first one. If Jedao had known that Streven would end up as his anchor, years later—but it was too late to do anything about that.

  Nevertheless, this was a new development. Jedao had inhabited prisoners of war and experimental subjects (there was no other way to put it), deprecated scientists and heretics and Kel who had outlived their usefulness, but in all cases, even if he hadn’t been able to reach an accord with the anchor in question, the anchors had possessed minds of their own. He’d never before endured an anchor who was—blank. Empty.

  Was this some new punishment? He couldn’t remember what he had done to offend Kujen this time, but then, this was Kujen, and Kujen was quixotic. After almost a millennium of unlife, Kujen was also jaded. Sometimes he indulged himself for the sake of amusement.

  After a few numb moments, Jedao realized several things.

  First, his heart was hammering. Or the anchor’s was. He could feel it pounding against the wall of his chest. The anchor’s chest. It felt almost like he lived in the body. Had Kujen arranged for an unusually close bond with the anchor, as he sometimes did when the mood struck him?

  If this was Kujen’s idea of a gift, Jedao didn’t want it. How had Kujen emptied the body’s mind? Jedao had always been aware that his anchors rarely survived the experience—Kujen euthanized them after he was done with them, one reason Jedao had learned not to get attached—but he’d never before been chained to a body that had no mind from the outset.

  Jedao had seen a great many atrocities in his centuries of existence, and committed more. He hadn’t thought he could be so deeply affected by a new one.

  It took him longer to realize that he didn’t just feel the anchor’s pounding heart. His gut was twisted up with pure nausea. That intrigued him. Had Kujen really—?

  {What have you done, Kujen?} he thought, reaching down the link to the body.

  Except it wasn’t the body he met on the other end—not exactly.

  There was a mind on the other end, or something like a mind.

  {Jedao?}

  He opened his eyes. He had ordinary human vision. Something was fucked up with his proprioception, because he kept getting a sense of everything around him, and it wasn’t sight-based, some kind of distinct othersense that extended far beyond the walls. Another of Kujen’s experiments, he assumed.

  “Jedao,” the woman said. It was the same voice, except out loud. Right now, she was disheveled, and she wore an infantry suit caked with a sickly-smelling black substance.

  Curiously, he could still hear her in his head. {Did something go wrong with the process?}

  Was this one of Kujen’s rare womanform anchors? She must be some kind of math or engineering prodigy if so, because Kujen wouldn’t have selected her on the basis of her looks. She was attractive enough, in a sober way, but Kujen had exacting standards, and he was even pickier about womanforms than manforms.

  {He thinks I’m who?}

  Jedao attempted speech. Managed to move the body. “Pardon me,” he said even as memory tickled at the back of his head. “I don’t believe we’ve been—”

  Wait a second. He knew this face. Despite the fog dulling his wits, it was coming clear. He’d met this woman before. She was a Kel, despite the anomalies. “Captain—no. General Cheris.”

  Her eyes widened. He could feel her surprise pulsing down the invisible link between them. {Did something go wrong?} At the same time, she asked, “Jedao, what’s the last thing you remember?”

  The fact that he was restrained didn’t reassure him, but it was so much better than being locked up in the Black Cradle that he almost didn’t mind. The manacles around his wrists and ankles felt good, not in a sexual way, but for the raw fact of sensation. Jedao searched his memory because he didn’t want to give away too much. Fox and hound, he must be really adrift if he’d revealed weakness so readily. But he wasn’t used to—

  {Jedao,} and this time Cheris addressed him over the confounding mental link. {I can hear what you’re thinking.}

  She could wh
at?

  This was worse than when he’d discovered that Kel Command was considering turning itself into a hivemind. At least he’d dodged that particular threat. “What,” he said, “is going on?”

  If Cheris had been his anchor, why was he in this body? Some exotic effect? Where was he? They’d last been on a cindermoth, the Unspoken Law. Kel Cheris was the brevet general. They were supposed to take back the Fortress of Scattered Needles from heretics. Hadn’t that been the mission? Except—

  They’d won. He remembered that now. (Why were his memories so jumbled?) They’d won, and they’d sent word to Kel Command, and he’d insinuated that Cheris should report her use of mathematics, which in turn would provoke Kujen into a counterstroke—

  “Very good,” Cheris said. {If I’d ever been tempted to forget what a foxfucking dick you are, Jedao, there’s no more chance of that.} “That’s all you know?”

  Jedao spoke again. The sound of his own voice disoriented him. “There was a bomb. There was a bomb, and then—” His memories ended there. He’d warned Cheris too late. He’d failed.

  Except he was here, alive—for some value of “alive,” anyway—and so was she.

  Of a sudden he was aware of the dryness of his mouth, the soreness of his throat, as though he’d been screaming. Physical sensations he hadn’t endured in a long time. “Water,” he said.

  Cheris’s mouth twisted. He couldn’t tell what she found so funny, except he could. {Given the circumstances—}

  “We’re in danger?” he said sharply. Had the heretics outsmarted him after all?

  {He really doesn’t know.}

  “I think,” Jedao said, “you had better apprise me of the situation, General.”

  {As if I needed the reminder.} A glimmer of dark humor. “I’m going to unbind you,” Cheris said, “as long as you assure me that you’re not going to strangle me or some such foxbrained shit.”

  She must be provoked if she was swearing at him this much. He remembered that much about her. She only descended into profanities when angry or under extreme stress.