“Mother?”
“She’s resting. She’s not a young woman anymore, and putting you back together exhausted her.” A pause, then: “How are you feeling?”
Drained, and feeling as if she’d gone through her own version of the purifying circle, as if it had sliced her into ten thousand pieces and put her back together. She took a deep breath. It didn’t hurt. That was almost surprisingly wrong. She moved, and saw a faint, black shadow move on the floor, almost disconnected from her.
“The virus that was killing you is gone, but your soul is still split,” Vu Côn said. “You can be in several places at once if you want, though it’ll be difficult to control, and it’ll exhaust you. I can stitch it back together for you, but it’s a long and complex operation. I didn’t want to take the responsibility of changing you.” She raised a hand. “You don’t have to tell me now.”
“It’s rather cool, actually,” Liên said.
“Lil’ sis.” Thông snorted. And, to Yên: “It’s perfectly fine either way. And you’ll get better if you don’t overdo it. Mother?”
“Yes?”
“Which patient were we supposed to look at? In the sleeping berths?”
Vu Côn shrugged. “You’re old enough to make your own decisions, aren’t you?”
A silence. Then Thông said, “If that’s acceptable.”
Vu Côn shook her head, forcefully. “You’re adults now. Go take your own responsibilities.”
Thông rose, dragging their sister with them. The shadow of sharp, skeletal antlers hung in the air as they did so. “Come on. We’re just preventing Yên from resting.”
“I’m not—” Yên said, and then her gaze met Vu Côn’s, and she stopped protesting.
The doors slid shut behind the twins, and then it was just her and Vu Côn. Words rose, unbidden, into her mind. Her hands traced them before she knew what she was doing. Fish. Gate. River. Storm. Come. Something twisted in her chest: a thick, red thread pulsing like a blood vessel, pulling her up from the bed, toward the dragon.
Vu Côn’s hands pushed her down, slowly and gently. She hadn’t even seen the dragon move. The serpentine shape was on her bed now, coils wrapped over the sheet, antlers against the headrest. “I can tell you’re going to be a troublesome patient.”
Yên smiled. That felt wrong too, like stretching muscles too long unused. And then the feeling passed. “The twins.”
“They’ll get into trouble,” Vu Côn said. “But it’s my fault. I can’t keep them cooped up forever. It’s time for them to make their own mistakes, and to fix them, too.”
Yên thought of Gia Canh and the gardens, and Liên’s pale face. “They could die.”
Vu Côn was silent, for a while. “Yes. And they could do that even if I were watching them all the time. You’re not the only one I was making too many decisions for.”
“I see.” Yên said.
Vu Côn laughed. “Enough about the twins. There will be time for them later, believe me. Thông has so many ideas about how the hospital should be run. How many healers we should bring from the outside world, how many patients we would triage in a given day.... And Liên is already busy tinkering with sleeping berths. Without patients, this time, thank Heaven. It’s only a matter of time until something breaks spectacularly and we have to help them sort out the mess again.” She sounded resigned rather than fearful. She leaned back against the headrest. It creaked, the wood lengthening. Words glowed, in the folds of her robe. Duty. Family. Care. Her eyes, searching Yên’s own, were dark, and in their depths was a trembling light, like a distant lamp seen through layers of rain. Her hands, holding Yên’s own, shook: that same fear Yên had felt, in the laboratory, the one Vu Côn hadn’t shown to anyone else.
“It’ll be all right,” Yên said.
“No more hiding,” Vu Côn said. “Remember? It won’t be all right. It won’t be normal, or easy. But that’s fine.”
“What happens now?”
Cold seized Yên’s fingers, and descended all the way into her spine. “Everything,” Vu Côn said, and her smile was dazzling.
“Everything.” Yên mouthed the syllables again, felt them like saltwater on her tongue, like a spell, slowly coming together to change the ruined world they lived in. “I think I’d like that.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people:
Tade Thompson, Fran Wilde, Alis Rasmussen, Matt Wallace, Mike Headley, Rachel Monte, Liz Bourke, Likhain, Zen Cho, Vida Cruz for reading and comments, sometimes on multiple drafts!
Peter and Emma Newman for helping me have the confidence to tackle this, and Ken Liu for agreeing to be turned into a dragon.
Stephanie Burgis, Nene Ormes, Alessa Hinlo, Victor R Fernando Ocampo, Inksea, D Franklin, Zoe Johnson and Elizabeth Bear for general support.
Gareth L Powell, Jennifer Brinn, and George Cotronis for help with the blurb (and Juliet Kemp for proofreading!). To Juliet Kemp, Juliet McKenna, Michelle Sagara for general publishing advice. To Richard Shealy for very helpful and speedy copyediting.
Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein, Melanie Ujimori and Kelsey Liggett for cover design and cover art.
John Berlyne, Lisa Rodgers, Patrick Disselhorst, and everyone at JABberwocky for putting together this book.
About the Author
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award.
Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese galactic empire, inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings (2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.
Visit her website www.aliettedebodard.com for free fiction, Vietnamese and French recipes and more.
ALSO BY ALIETTE DE BODARD
OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD
Servant of the Underworld*
Harbinger of the Storm*
Master of the House of Darts*
DOMINION OF THE FALLEN
The House of Shattered Wings
The House of Binding Thorns
XUYA UNIVERSE
On a Red Station, Drifting
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls*
The Tea Master and the Detective*
SHORT FICTION
Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship
* available as a JABberwocky ebook
THANK YOU FOR READING
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