Unconquerable Sun

by Elliott, Kate

  “Persephone?” Aunt Moira has already walked on. She pauses at a round gate. “You’ll come with me. Kadmos can see your people are taken to the proper venue.”

  I ping Kadmos on the school net with my only to have the message bounce back. I’ve been kicked off the school net at some point in the last seventy-two hours. Sun’s ring vibrates gently against my skin. A ping from Tiana drops in.

  LET ME KNOW HOW TO PROCEED.

  I ping back: HOLD FOR NOW. BE READY TO MOVE FAST.

  I do a quick broadcast ping to the entire ring. ANYONE THERE?

  In any other network I’d get back an off-line signal for people who had dropped through a beacon, which naturally cuts them off from any intrasystem net given the vast interstellar distances leaped by the beacons.

  The ring says: WAITING FOR CONTACT.

  Years or decades from now, if we’re still alive, will the ping have worked its slow route across space to reach them?

  In silence my aunt and I walk through the family garden and past the dining gazebo and two beautifully decorated salons where friends may gather for an evening of music and poetry contests. A ping on the ring network startles me, because I was sure Sun took everyone else with her.

  CANDACE REPORTING. IS THIS PERSEPHONE LEE?

  HOW ARE YOU???

  BROKEN LEG, A BRUISED SPLEEN, AND HEMATOMAS. I’LL HEAL. MEANWHILE ALIKA HAS DROPPED A BIG ASSIGNMENT INTO MY IMMOBILE LAP. BY THE BY MINH SAYS WHAT HEY. SHE SAYS TO TELL YOU SHE TOLD ME YOU’RE FUN WHEN YOU WANT TO BE & ONLY OCCASIONALLY A SACK OF DICKS.

  LATER, I ping back, feeling unexpectedly warm and supported. BE READY TO MOVE. YOU CAN TRUST MINH, AY, AND IKENNA.

  “What are you smiling about?” Moira asks.

  “Just happy to be home.”

  “I don’t need to be a seer of Iros to know that’s a lie.”

  She leads me upstairs to the inner compound’s barrier wall. We stand at a railing looking over the interior lagoon. Fish flash around bright coral. The sunlight soothes my face, and a lazy breeze cools me with its salty kiss. The fine white sand of what we all call the baby beach beckons with its shallow swimming area netted off from the main lagoon.

  Moira says, “You never liked it here. I could never understand why. I thought you had what it took to be named as next governor of Lee House, to take my place in time.”

  “You had Resh for that. She was the obedient daughter.”

  “How poorly you understood her. She was the worst rebel of all. Her recklessness contaminated you and even Manea, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Reckless? Resh was the least reckless person I know.”

  “Pff. You were too young to see her for what she was. Ereshkigal’s act of heroism was an act of suicide that shouldn’t have worked.”

  “That’s not true!” My hands clench. I want to punch her, but I breathe myself down.

  “Let’s not debate her death now. It served Lee House well enough at the time.”

  “Her death served you well? Is that how you think of it?”

  “You took it too hard, Persephone. You went to CeDCA because you thought such a journey took you closer to her, but she has waited here for you all along.”

  She’s chosen this balcony because of its proximity to our household altar. We descend a spiral staircase to the room where we keep images and remembrances of Lee House ancestors alongside bronze spirit tablets. Since Perseus’s tablet will go to the palace, that means Resh’s is the most recent. I wonder if anyone has figured out that the one here is a forgery, because I took the real one when I left five years ago.

  Moira dutifully lights a stick of incense and steps aside so I can light one as well. The scent tickles my nostrils, a reminder of the respect we owe to our ancestors and the virtues we should cultivate in ourselves.

  As for Moira, she wants something from me. It’s why she brought me here.

  “You said you would give me access to the security grid,” I say.

  “Yes. This way.”

  We descend past the family quarters into an underground level, past two security gates, and to a chamber where lesser scions of Lee House work at consoles and monitor surveillance screens. These people belong to branch lineages, and I realize that Moira might be desperate. The gamble with Manea marrying Eirene means I am the last child of the three sisters’ direct line who can take over the governorship. If I don’t, my refusal will trigger a war among the secondary branches. The winner will be elevated to the place Moira now holds. It happens in every Core House at intervals. If I recall my gossip correctly, it’s how Alika’s branch of Vata House got exiled to a grim posting on a terminus system two generations ago: they lost a takeover bid.

  Moira leads me into an even more private room. A security officer stands as we enter and, at a nod from her, leaves us alone. The door seals behind him.

  “Sit. Put both hands on the surface. Look directly into the aperture. I know you bought a retinal adaptor and got a palm print seal to alter your signature, so the old one we have on file for you isn’t sufficient.”

  I do as she says and let the console imprint me. When it finishes it blinks green.

  I say, to test it: “Locate Kiran Seth de Lee.”

  A message flashes into my net: Kiran Seth de Lee is resting in his private chamber under privacy filter.

  According to its timeline he has been there for eleven hours.

  “That’s not right,” says my aunt with a frown. “I spoke to him eight hours ago. He was going to finish the interrogation of the company representative from the firm on Molossia who did maintenance on the tender.”

  “The tender?”

  “The tender … the little boat attached to the yacht. Perseus and his cee-cee died when its engine exploded.”

  “Then why did my father say it was an accident?”

  “That’s the official line and will remain so until we have proof it was rigged to malfunction.”

  She blithely overrides the privacy filter to my father’s personal rooms. Cameras sweep through the suite, investigating every nook and cranny of its three sparsely decorated rooms.

  He’s not there.

  Her eyelids flicker. Her lips press together, and she makes a noise in her throat like a growl of annoyance. The image shifts to my mother’s suite. Its gaudy décor assaults the senses: too much gold, too many sparkles, too many drapes. Mother is reclined on a couch, arms limp at her side, head tilted back. Manea sits beside her patiently dabbing her forehead with a damp cloth and murmuring platitudes as Mother sucks in tremulous breaths and lets them out in shaky wails. The sound is unbelievably grating. I wish I could find something to like in her, but I can’t, although I’m impressed by Manea’s fortitude.

  There’s no sign of my father in her rooms.

  Aunt Moira is looking quite disgruntled.

  “Where else could he be?” I ask. But I’m already formulating a theory. Transportation systems link up in logical ways if they’re well built. The links between this series of events and their lacunae is starting to make an ugly kind of sense to me.

  “Come with me.” It’s a command, not a request.

  We leave the office and descend through two sealed doors and down a long flight of stairs to the deepest security level, where Moira uses a retinal scan to unlock a final door. As I cross the threshold, Sun’s ring network cuts out.

  A surveillance walkway overlooks twelve cells that are sheer-sided pits. Seven are lit red, unoccupied, while five are green. It’s here the family meant to confine Sun. Three of the prisoners are sleeping. A fourth crouches by a waste bucket, licking feces off his left hand.

  I recoil. “What did you do to him?”

  She doesn’t answer, doesn’t even pause, but at the adjacent cell she halts to look down.

  “That asshole,” she murmurs.

  The asshole in question is reclined comfortably on a cot, engrossed in reading a paper book and looking entirely too relaxed. I have no idea what the prisoner is confined here for—they might be
an innocent political prisoner or a vile mass-murdering traitor for all I know—but I admire their insouciance.

  At the end of the walkway there’s a thirteenth chamber, larger than the others, with a baffle of mirrors to bring sunlight into its pit. The walls currently display a landscape of towering horsetail trees swaying in the wind. There’s a shelf with a rolled-up futon, a sling-back chair, and a fold-down table laden with a tray on which sit a bowl, cup, and spoon. Metal glints in the shadows: a mechanical has been dismembered and spread out, gears and pistons arranged in a spray like a fractal, oddly unnerving.

  A person whose age I can’t determine is seated in the pool of light rolling a toy van back and forth, in and out of shadow, gauging the line between light and dark. The prisoner is humming, but I don’t know the tune.

  “Kiran isn’t here either,” says Moira. “He spends more time with her than anyone else does.”

  “He spends time? Like hanging-out time? Interacting time?” He rarely spent time with me!

  Moira is too distracted to register my peevish tone or the gist of my words. “He can often coax fragments of sense from her.”

  “Who is she?”

  Her frown darkens as she studies the woman’s round, pallid face and its odd lack of expression. “Your cousin. My firstborn.”

  “Your firstborn?”

  “Born three years before Ereshkigal.”

  “I … I didn’t even know … I thought Manea was your only child.” I lean against the wall to steady myself. “Why in the Eighteen Hells do you hide her down here? That’s grotesque!”

  “It’s for her safety.” She speaks flatly, but her eyes are haunted.

  “What does that even mean? You don’t lock people up to keep them safe.”

  “She has a rare illness brought on by the beacons. Your Aunt Nona’s only child had it too. That child died before its first birthday.”

  All my life the household altar has included the spirit tablet for my eldest cousin, born years before Resh, a ghost at the table. I’m reeling from the revelation that there’s a cousin I’ve never known existed. How do people keep secrets like that?

  Moira goes on. “Your mother had several miscarriages before Ereshkigal. So did I. So did Nona. Any weakness in a ruling line will be attacked by rivals from within and without. We raised you children to do your duty, did we not?”

  I cannot close my mouth, which is popped open in utter shock. “I … I…”

  “Always ‘I’ with you, isn’t it, Persephone? Let’s go. Your father’s not here.”

  My father. The hells! Time is ticking, and I have a job to do. One thing at a time. This locked family closet I must deal with later. “Take me to a console that allows me to access visual records.”

  “We’ll go back to my office.”

  I race up the stairs, a mere 178 steps, and then have to wait at the sealed door because Moira gets winded before she reaches the top.

  “You’re fit,” she says grudgingly as she pants up beside me.

  “You could give me the codes.”

  “It’s early days for that, don’t you think?”

  When we reach the office I triangulate a search of the external walls of the Lee House compound on the day of the wedding banquet. It looks pretty damning, what with lines of armed guards taking potshots at the boats we are fleeing in. When I find the segment I’m looking for it’s obvious Navah is signaling with her bracelets to someone on the wall.

  “Where did Hestia Hope’s cee-cee come from? Her name was Navah.”

  “Was?”

  “She’s dead. Where did she come from?”

  Moira sniffs. “She came from Yele with the Honorable Hestia Hope. Hestia is half Yele, you know. Her Yele father is an obscure scholar of linguistics. So Yele of him. Studying meaningless minutiae as if such things matter just because they belong to the forgotten languages of the Celestial Empire. But those Yele always walk around like we lesser beings ought to be grateful they bother to speak to us, much less share their exalted philosophy and scholarship with us impoverished ignorant souls.”

  “She was a spy.”

  “Hestia? I would be delighted to get proof of that, if you have it!”

  “No, not Hetty! If you think that, then you’re…” Bigoted, but this isn’t the time to launch that argument with my aunt. “You’d be a fool to think Hestia is anything except Sun’s most loyal Companion. I meant Navah. The cee-cee.”

  “Princess Sun favors Hestia Hope too much. There are rumors the two are lovers. Companions are never meant to be lovers. Sex does nothing but complicate the pure and trustworthy bonds of friendship.”

  There’s such a sour edge to her tone that I look at her in surprise, wondering what I’m missing. She shoots me a dagger’s glance.

  “Was Navah spying for you?” I say with a smirk, pleased to have gotten under her skin even if I don’t know quite what set her off.

  “For Lee House? Of course not. We don’t hire or allow foreigners to work here.”

  “The queen-marshal lost her temper at the banquet. But lost tempers cool. Did you try to kill Sun after we left the banquet?”

  “Kill her? As tempting as that might be, such a drastic action would backfire on us. Sun was well on her way to undermining her own position with her reckless temper. Our plan was to imprison her and let Channel Idol spill gossip to poison her reputation.”

  “How nice. Well, as it happens, someone tried to kill her as we were fleeing Lee House.”

  In a defensive tone Moira says, “The guards were only using stun guns and beanbag projectiles.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. “Except for the late bloomer.”

  Her chin comes up sharply. “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone shot her bodyguard, Octavian, using a late bloomer. I believe they were aiming for Sun.”

  She touches the wall to steady herself, then sits, gaze flat. “A late bloomer,” she mutters. “Persephone, how could you possibly think we would use such technology?”

  “Oh come on, Aunt Moira. You’re concealing your own child as a prisoner in your deepest dungeon. Don’t pretend you’re not capable of it. Manea is pregnant. You want her child to be heir instead of Sun.”

  “And why wouldn’t I? A true Chaonian—”

  “A clone’s progeny!”

  Moira slaps me. “Who said that?”

  My cheek smarts, but my heart is clean and strong. “Zizou is the proof.”

  “Who is Zizou?”

  This is too much, too soon. I need ammunition in reserve. So I change tactics. “Never mind. I didn’t mean anything by it, just getting a rise out of you.”

  “How like your mother,” Moira says, trying to get a rise out of me, but I’m too busy clicking layers of facial recognition over the security people who were running along the walls and shooting at us. It doesn’t surprise me when I get a match.

  My father was supposedly secluded in mourning with my mother. Instead, he stands on the wall-walk imperfectly disguised in a spruce-green Lee House gendarme uniform with a hood pulled tight around his face. He sights a weapon on the boat I am steering.

  The surge of pure visceral loathing is almost like triumph. Her, who bullied Percy mercilessly until he was saved by being sent to court. Him, for letting her do it because he cared more about his agenda than his children. One pulls the trigger while the other covers it up.

  In my calmest tone I say, “Who else knew about the lab’s existence?”

  “Why are you still on about the lab? Manea told me, of course, and…” She breaks off, seeing Kiran’s face on the screen.

  “Aunt Moira, who did you tell?”

  “I told Aisa,” she mutters in a harsh voice.

  “She would have told my father. Did it ever occur to any of you that my father might be an anti-Chaonian Yele agent who’d found the perfect way to worm himself into Chaonia’s secretest ministry—as a marriage partner? Was my aunt Nona that stupid? Just because my mother is out of control and you thought it
made your lives easier to have someone else around to manage her?”

  “You have no idea how much worse Aisa was before Kiran.” Moira’s already starting to tap on the console’s input pad, calling up information I can’t see. Her lips are pressed as tight as if she’s choking down a gush of catastrophes. “The seers of Iros belong to a religious order. They are apolitical.”

  “Sure.”

  Her expression closes into taut concentration as she hammers through the information pouring into her feed. “Aloysius Voy has always counseled accommodation.”

  I’m feeling pretty damn vindicated. “Sure, there’s a whole contingent of Yele politicals and philosophers who counsel alliance with us. But there’s always been that other contingent who hate us, hate the queen-marshal, and hate everything we are. Don’t you see the connections? Two botched murder attempts on Sun. The Phene raid on the lab. A surprise attack on our forward positions in Aspera System. And who knows what else is coming down the pike?”

  I jump forward to today’s visuals. First I search the boat hangar—all boats accounted for, and according to records nothing has been taken out in the last day, not even by maintenance. I drop in an algorithm to scan through the visual feed to make sure there’s no footage missing, but I’m betting against the boat. My father has never liked the sea.

  Moira says, “He didn’t take an aircar. All are here.”

  “Did you check for a glitch in the time stamps?”

  “Goodness, Persephone, that would surely never have occurred to me after all my years of experience.”

  Her sarcasm rolls right off me as I find what I’m looking for. A cargo train left seven and a half hours ago. I don’t bother to check our end. He’ll have managed a simple workaround to get on without being seen. The line ends at our dedicated transit warehouse just outside the military spaceport that keeps the queen-marshal and her high officials able to head into action at speed.

  Scanning the operator logs I count twelve stevedores and twenty mechanicals who unload, service, and load the train. At the end of the one-hour turnaround, thirteen stevedores depart the train. One splits off from the break room to go to a lavatory, then departs the warehouse to the street. Facial recognition isn’t giving me a match, but he’ll have ways around that.