The Broken Heavens

by Kameron Hurley

  “Put pressure on it,” Roh said. “Press hard. That helps.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever bled this much from a single wound,” Taigan said. “This is very curious. Can I die now? That would be… remarkable.”

  “Better not test that out,” Roh said.

  Taigan glanced around the sandbar. “Where’s Lilia?”

  “She… disappeared,” Roh said. “After she… I don’t know. Brought us all together. Do you… are you feeling strange? Do you have memories?”

  “Memories?” Taigan said. “Only the ones I’ve always had.”

  “What does that mean?” Luna said. “I… I have…”

  “Me too,” Roh said.

  “Ah,” Taigan said. “How… interesting. You carry memories of… other lives? Other worlds?”

  “You don’t?” Roh said.

  Taigan grinned. Clapped his hands. “How incredible,” he said. “I am unique! Perfectly singular to this world. How delightful. I always knew I was terribly special.”

  Maralah said, “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Taigan. You’re bleeding. What bleeds can die, now.”

  “Oh, how lovely,” Taigan said. “After all we’ve been through, after all this, you want more death?”

  “No,” Maralah said, gazing back at the beached Saiduan ship. “I want to go home.”

  “What happens now?” Roh said.

  “Now,” Taigan said, “I will go off and have some excellent adventures, and hopefully never see a single one of you again.”

  Anavha lay on the sandbar, sobbing, hugging himself, rocking slowly back and forth. His mind was crowded with memories, from this life and so many others. Zezili, so many versions of Zezili; he had loved her, she had killed him, he had killed her, Natanial had killed her, her sisters had killed her. Zezili, dying by the Empress’s hand. Death, over and over.

  But in nearly every memory of his own life he lived. He married Taodalain. He married Natanial. He married Nusi. He lived alone in a print shop in Aaldia. He became a tailor. He had children. So many children! Oh, how he had wanted children.

  The wave of memories overcame him. He lay on the sand, eyes squeezed shut.

  “Anavha?”

  Was that in his head, or here?

  Anavha rubbed his face and looked up. There was Natanial, crouched nearby, mop of wet hair hanging into his face. “They aren’t real,” Natanial said, “they’re just memories. Let them come.” He brushed the hair away from Anavha’s face.

  “I don’t know what to do!” Anavha gasped.

  “I do,” Natanial said. “I… Every version of me does. I’ve been very selfish, Anavha. No better than the others.”

  “Where is Zezili? Please, I have to know!”

  Natanial cupped Anavha’s cheek. “Is she always there? Every memory?”

  Anavha nodded.

  “Not in this one,” Natanial said.

  “You didn’t see her?”

  “She isn’t on the beach, Anavha. I don’t think she made it out of the temple. Neither did that girl operating the mechanism. They’re both gone, together.”

  “Natanial, I can’t feel Oma anymore. Is it… did it go away?”

  “It did.”

  “I don’t miss it. Natanial, it’s a relief not to feel it.” Anavha squeezed his eyes shut again, seeking that fine sliver of power, the nagging breath of Oma. But there was nothing. Just him and all of his choices.

  “What do you want, Anavha?”

  “I want to go home,” Anavha said.

  “All right,” Natanial said, and lifted him up.

  52

  The seams between the worlds had closed. That much seemed certain, in the aftermath of the shattered temple and broken heavens.

  The satellites had disappeared, leaving the sky empty, save for the double helix of the suns during the day and the three warbling moons at night.

  Had Lilia made the satellites come back to together into a single form? If so, where had it gone? Where had she gone? Sent somewhere else? Blinked out of existence, like so many of the other people that had been brought together from across so many worlds? Whole armies had gone missing, villages scoured of inhabitants. Those who remained went mad, struggling with a rush of disparate memories, of lives lived and unlived.

  The world of Raisa had come back together. They had won. But to win, they had broken the world they knew. They had broken the sky.

  A nascent world began that day. What that world would look like, though, no one knew. That was a future none of them had lived, not in any memory, not on any world.

  It was something entirely new.

  53

  Roh felt a deep sense of loss as he stepped onto the repaired Saiduan ship with Luna, Maralah and Anavha. It had been three weeks since the sky broke, and not a single one of them had an ascendant star. He still woke at night, aching for Para, reaching for a power that was not there.

  There was no more magic in the world. Just people who used to wield it. People who remembered it.

  Over time, the memories of his other lives began to fade and flicker. He was aware of them most often in his dreams, when he experienced some bickering fight with Kihin, or when he woke sweating beside Kadaan, convinced that he had killed him, only to realize that was in some other life.

  Yisaoh met them on the deck of the ship as the wind whipped around them. “I can’t believe you’re going back to Aaldia,” she said. “I thought you’d change your mind before today.” She rubbed her fingers together, as if longing for a cigarette that was no longer there. Roh suspected she would need to find a new habit.

  “I like Aaldia,” Roh said. “And I think we could build a life there. A different Dhai. I’m sure Meyna will be back, soon. You know you’ll have to work something out, with whoever is in charge of the Dhai here.”

  “It’s just as well,” Yisaoh said. “I keep expecting Mohrai to show up, some version of her resurrected by… all this. Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

  “That’s a word for it,” Roh said. “But let’s hope not.”

  For Roh, there were too many memories here, too many burned out orchards and clan squares and death and battle and violent politics. He had no illusion that a Dhai he helped create in Aaldia with the survivors from the Woodland would be much different, but he hoped the past would not haunt him there as it would here.

  “Lots of Dhai still in the valley,” Yisaoh said. “Lots of madness, too. Lost Tai Mora.”

  “You think you can build a peaceful society that includes those Tai Mora?”

  “I think we can build… a different one.”

  “Good luck.”

  “To you, also, Roh. You think we’re the lucky ones?”

  “Yes,” Roh said. “We get to live. The ones who live get to shape what comes next.”

  Luna held out a hand to him, and Roh took it. Kadaan walked up behind him and took his other hand. For the first time in years, Roh felt comforted. Safe. For once he did not mind being merely a passenger, a follower.

  He wanted to go to Aaldia and plant an orchard. He wanted to become a farmer, and die old there in his own grove, back pressed against the warm bark of a tree he had nurtured with his own two hands. He wanted to create something, to build something, because he was weary of destruction.

  And as he gazed over at Luna and up again at Kadaan, he had a moment of audacious hope that such a life was possible, that he could build a home with the people he loved, and that there would be generations of Dhai and Saiduan or whatever they called themselves next, and that their children, and children’s children, would never have to experience what they had. Never again.

  Natanial did not board one of the Saiduan ship to Aaldia, though Aaldia was certainly the only home he had ever truly known. Instead he watched the ships launch into the clear, sun-kissed sea. He stood on the beach, alone, peering out at Anavha’s dark head there on the deck for as long as he could before the ship’s distance swallowed him.

  Saradyn waited beside him, turning his fa
ce up into the double suns and smacking his thick lips.

  “Why didn’t you go with them?” Natanial asked. “I thought you’d follow that boy forever.”

  “He was very powerful,” Saradyn said, pulling at his lip. “But now… Now, I can’t see his ghosts.” He peered at Natanial. “Or yours, for that matter. My head feels… clearer. I feel… more myself.”

  “Which self?”

  “Ah, that is the question.” He peered back at the suns, and Natanial wondered what he saw there; the Thief Queen he had murdered, maybe, or married, in some other life. The children he didn’t kill, the life of a tavern keep, or a drunkard, instead of a king. Natanial did not ask because he did not want to know, did not want to get all those versions of Saradyn mixed up with the monstrous self-styled former king who stood before him. It could be easy to forget who was friend and who was foe, when the world had been unmade and remade again.

  “I think I’ll take up a trade,” Saradyn said. “Making something.” He held up the arm still missing a hand. “Go into making fake hands! Ha! An art!” This seemed to please him, and he began to grin and snort.

  “You’re in a good humor.”

  “What’s left? I’ve already gone mad, once. I prefer humor. But you… You’ll want to get back to your men.”

  “Will I? Half of them have probably gone mad, like you. It’s a long journey out of the Woodland to the valley, and I’m not sure what we’ll find there.”

  “We are all mad, now. Now you know what it’s like.”

  “There will be power upsets,” Natanial said. “You could go back to Tordin and be a king, truly. Unite Tordin like you always dreamed.”

  “That was some other man’s dream.”

  “What does this man dream?”

  Saradyn furrowed his brows. “I don’t know.”

  “I think I’ll go down into the valley,” Natanial said. “That Gian woman is bound to fill the void here, and she’ll need good fighters beside her.”

  “You will still fight?”

  “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

  Saradyn guffawed. “You get after that pretty boy for following, but you are just like him.”

  “Maybe that’s why I tried so hard to set him free. You make a habit of following others, thinking they will take you some place new, reveal something about you, give you some meaning. And when they don’t, you find you’re stuck in the same circle, trying to find comfort in servitude.”

  “Can’t relate.”

  Natanial sighed. “I didn’t expect you to.” He gazed one last time at the blot of the ships along the horizon, wondering what kind of life Anavha would live without him or Zezili, without the burden of being an omajista, existing as a foreign man in a foreign land. He hoped it was a different life than the one either of them had led up to this point.

  “Goodbye, Saradyn,” Natanial said. “You have enough water to make it back?”

  “Always enough,” Saradyn said. “Just going to sit here for a while. I enjoy watching the sea in silence. Did you know, Natanial? The children have stopped screaming.”

  Natanial hefted his pack and turned away from the ocean. He forged back up the beachhead and entered the cool, dark wood.

  Taigan settled into the warm arms of a bonsa tree, near enough the coast to watch the Saiduan ships disappear over the horizon. Taigan snoozed there until the suns began to set, considering what came next. Taigan rubbed at her itching crotch; she’d gotten another yeast infection, which made urinating painful. It appeared Taigan would mostly present to the world with female sex organs and a downy beard that Taigan found most pleasing. Taigan had tried on ataisa pronouns for a few weeks while helping the others repair the ships, but found being “she” fit just fine, for however long Taigan lived in this newly rotting body.

  Would she transform again? Who could say? But the wounds she had received in the slimy temple had scabbed over and healed slowly, as if she were some mundane body, just another anonymous refugee on Raisa, not special at all, not chosen.

  She very much enjoyed being herself, belonging to herself, in a way that had never existed for her, not in the many centuries of memory that she could still recall.

  “Fly, fly, little bird,” Taigan called to the suns, and, though she had succeeded in avoiding such thoughts in the weeks after the satellites winked out of the sky, Taigan thought of Lilia. She considered writing a memoir of this time. Perhaps she could call it: Pretty Little Cannibals: My Life Among the Dhai. That made her laugh out loud. A good laugh that shook her chest and made it ache.

  Foolish Lilia, the ungifted worldshaper, the headstrong burnout, the child she had thrown off a cliff, but who had nontheless become the masterful architect of this new world.

  A world without the satellites. A world without magic. Without immortality. A world where they had only themselves. Taigan thought it would be a duller world, but she had found that bleeding and coughing made the experience of being alive far more exciting than it ever had been for her before.

  She could die now. Really die. If she chopped off someone’s limb, it would stay chopped off, forever. She had watched a man in the camp fall off the ship and break a leg a few days before, and the tirajista who ran to help him had a look of utter horror and confusion as she realized she could do nothing but set the bone and bind the leg. A new world. A broken world.

  Taigan slid down the tree, scraping her hands as she did. She marveled again at the little flakes of skin, the small beads of blood. How extraordinary. The prick of pain, the warmth of the tree’s bark, the tangy smell of the sea: it all felt somehow more brilliant, more beautiful, knowing that any moment could be the last she experienced of anything.

  Mortality. What a wonderful gift.

  EPILOGUE

  She lay in a field of heavy-headed poppies, staring at an empty lavender sky. Her body felt light, only a little painful. When she pressed her hand to the place where her wound had been, her tunic was still cut and crusted with blood, but there was no scar. The air was warm, like the last breath of low summer moving to high fall. The trees above her scattered a few heavy brown leaves, but were otherwise in their full splendor.

  Her last memory of this life, in this world, it had been spring, heading into high summer. Where had all the weeks gone? She did not know. But that other one, the Kai… Ahkio, yes, he had woken missing weeks, too, hadn’t he? After going back in time, he leapt forward…

  Memories skipped across her mind. She remembered bringing the worlds together. But she remembered many other lives as well. She was killed by Kirana as a child, plucked from her mother’s arms in the burning village. She died tumbling from a tree before she learned how to read. Taigan pushed her off the cliff, and it broke her, really broke her, and Gian did not save her. Gian, Gian… She had memories of so many Gians. The Gian who had escorted her away from Kalinda’s. The Gian with the maggot-infested leg, whom she had nursed back to health. The terrible Gian who worked with Kirana. Lilia had the memory of knowing that Gian too, of an arranged marriage they had both thought they would hate, but loving each other anyway. Of walking and running without her twisted foot, but tumbling anyway, pushed from the top of the ark by one of Gian’s rival generals.

  And more, others, but no good endings, no death where they were two old women, drunk on too much hard tea and each other. Lilia’s memories were all of an early death, in every world.

  It was why she was still trying to understand why she had woken up again in this one.

  A cry came from nearby. She slowly rose, and gazed across the field of poppies. She should have known that her view from here would be of Oma’s Temple. Oma did have a sense of humor. Oma, or… whatever beast or creature had helped guide them.

  The shrubbery parted, and Namia came racing through, standing entirely upright now, making a murmuring sound in her throat, and signing over and over, “Lilia!”

  Namia grabbed hold of her, knocking her back over, and Lilia grunted, the breath squeezed from her. Namia
released her and kept hold of her with one hand while signing frantically with the other, so fast Lilia could not keep up. Namia was taller, Lilia noticed, her face rounder, her gangly limbs more robust. Her hair had grown, and been expertly braided with ribbons in a very lovely style that reminded Lilia just a bit of Dorinah.

  “Namia?”

  Another figure came up the hill, pressing through the poppies, and Lilia knew the voice.

  Gian halted when she caught sight of her. She, too, had filled out, and it gave her more softness than Lilia had seen in any of her memories. She had cut her dark hair short in the back and looped the rest up behind her into a topknot. She held a large walking stick in one hand and the lead of a large brown dog mount in the other. The dog moved its ears forward and gave a little yip.

  Namia signed Lilia’s name again, this time in Gian’s direction.

  “Yes, yes, I see her,” Gian said. She came forward slowly, parting the poppies. “We weren’t going to come up this way. It’s far off the path to Mount Ahya, but Namia insisted. I see why.”

  Lilia said, “You look well.”

  Gian laughed at that, and then Lilia laughed too, because it was a foolish way to start, after so much time, in so strange a place.

  “How long has it been?” Lilia asked.

  “When did you get here?”

  “I… don’t know. I remember… all those lives… do you? And I remember the orrery. Did everyone live?”

  “Everyone lived,” Gian said, “and they carried all of their other selves, too. I suppose, then, everyone, on every world, lived. Some more so than others. Not everyone liked what they remembered.”

  “You remember me?”

  “I remember all of the versions of you that you remember of me.”

  Lilia felt her face warm, and pressed her hands against her cheeks. What a strange reaction. A foolish notion.

  Gian laughed. “You just got even darker!” She sobered. “We thought you were dead. A lot of people simply… blinked out, like the stars. We have a theory those were the ones who hadn’t survived in most of their other lives. It’s a question that will keep philosophers busy for ages. Found new religions. Which we will need, of course.”