Unconquerable Sun

by Kate Elliott

  Seeing Candace’s approach as a potential threat, Zizou placed himself between them.

  “It’s all right,” said Sun as Candace stopped at a prudent distance and clipped the fans back to her belt.

  In a low voice she said, “There’s a security Hummingbird incoming.”

  There it was. The faint chutter chutter chutter blended into the festive beat of a bhangra tune and the buzz of conversation and laughter from the sports garden. A schedule board flashed: 5 minutes to next inbound train.

  “Alika, check security comms traffic,” said Sun, and to Candace, “Estimate for set-down?”

  “Five to eight minutes, going by visual cues.”

  Sun pried a ring from her finger and held it out. “In or out?”

  “Dammit.” Candace’s lips pinched together. She huffed out a big breath, grabbed the ring, and slipped it on.

  Sun looked up and down the platform, but Hetty and Persephone were nowhere to be seen as the schedule board flashed: 4 minutes to next inbound train.

  Alika said, “I’m not hearing any emergency security chatter.”

  “With Navah gone it can’t be her calling them in. They might be conducting a standard search pattern. We’re going to chance we can get on the train before our pursuit spots us.”

  Hetty and Persephone walked onto the platform at the terminus end. Sun flashed them the go-ahead command, two fingers gesturing toward the tracks. Hetty nodded in reply.

  Would the Hummingbird land before the train arrived? Candace wiped sweat from her forehead, fingers tapping on her fans.

  The tiles on the floor glowed to signal an incoming train. The chutter of the descending Hummingbird rose over the noise of the revelers. People on the platform turned to look as the wind off the machine’s blurred wing-blades bent the tips of the cypress. The security vehicle settled into a landing beyond the sports garden, out of sight behind the trees.

  A gust of air heralded the incoming train.

  Its exterior gleamed, the usual projected advertisements tuned for the day to characters for Heart to Heart and Good Fortune. Doors sighed open and passengers trickled out, few enough that Sun and the others could board without waiting for the outward rush to cease. But the sparse crowd also made them more visible. The hearty roar of conversation and celebration from the garden dampened, a sure sign the security forces had left the Hummingbird and were now pushing through the crowd. Looking for Sun.

  “Close, close, damn you,” Tiana muttered under her breath, twisting the strap of her duffel.

  Down the open gangway of the long interior Sun spotted Hetty and Persephone at the rear of the train.

  Candace’s pinged: INCOMING.

  A person wearing the sleek black helmet and spruce-green uniform of the gendarmes trotted into view, helmet camera blinking as it scanned the passengers leaving the platform. Sun stepped behind Zizou, letting his body hide her, as the others turned their faces away. The door-closing alarm buzzed.

  “That’s them!” Just as the gendarme began running toward the train, the doors closed with a whoosh.

  The train jolted forward.

  Sun grabbed for a strap. Through the windows she saw the gendarme give the hand signal for target acquired to comrades reaching the platform. She laughed.

  “How can you laugh?” How quickly Tiana dropped the proper honorific. No flattering titles now!

  “Why not laugh?” Sun retorted. “The doors closed. We’re here. They’re there.”

  “They’ll signal ahead and trap us at the next station or at the Wheelhouse.”

  “They’ll try. That doesn’t mean they’ll succeed. I have a move no one will expect.”

  19

  In Which the Wily Persephone Experiences Turbulence

  The Honorable Hestia Hope and I take a parallel track through the festivities in the sports garden. We walk far enough away from the others that we don’t seem to be together but near enough that we can keep Sun in view.

  She says, “Your father is of Yele, is he not? A seer of Iros—”

  “Yeah. What’s it to you?”

  My brusque interruption does not disturb her equanimity. Her voice is of the timbre people call musical. “I also have a father who’s a seer. A scholar of linguistics who can trace his academic genealogy to Mavva Varc-Gallia.”

  “Who is that?”

  “The foremother of linguistics! Anyway. My scholar father met and fell in love with a Chaonian House–born diplomat.”

  “I’m not sure I’d describe my parents’ bond as a romantic one, and it’s damn sure my mother’s not a diplomat,” I reply ungraciously. But I pause before I say anything worse and instead give her a glance. She gives me a nod like she wants me to know that she gets me, and maybe she does get me about this one thing. So I add, “It sucks to be half Yele in a Chaonian town. I try to keep it secret.”

  “There is no shame in love, or shouldn’t be.”

  “Which only means there all too often is.”

  She smiles appreciatively before pulling back into her own thoughts. We make our way onward in silence, although it’s no longer as awkward. She looks weary, and why wouldn’t she be? They lost Percy and Duke already. The two deaths today came so fast and so shockingly that I can only keep my head in the game by pretending this is a VR scenario, not real. I try to think like Solomon would, keeping my eyes on Sun’s group and the churn of the crowd around her.

  Even though he’s wearing a nondescript gray hoodie I can’t stop noticing the Gatoi soldier. He moves like a sated carnosaur through a herd of oblivious herbivores, deftly weaving in and out to keep his body between Sun and anyone he identifies as a potential threat. Every masked monkey king gets a sharp look, and yet he gives an almost imperceptible flinch each time a person passes capped by one of the snake-haired wigs worn to mock the Gatoi deity known as Lady Chaos.

  Sun’s party passes out of view onto the transit platform. Hestia breaks away from me. For an instant I think she’s dashing after Sun, dumping me while keeping Ti as a hostage …

  Instead she snags a basket of steamed buns from a food cart and hustles back. “Someone has to keep the party fed. Or at the very least, to think of food.”

  We hurry onto the glowing platform. A hot wind whips over our heads as a Hummingbird lands with a loud chutter chutter behind the wall of cypress.

  “The train should reach the platform before the gendarmes do.” I check the train number listed on the arrivals screen. “Oh, good, it’s a Diamondback.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “It’s an older-model train with more manual overrides.”

  From halfway down the platform Sun gives a two-finger gesture toward the tracks, and Hestia dips her chin in reply.

  “It’ll be close,” I add, since Sun’s gesture is clearly an order to go for the train. “Can you tell me why Sun shot your cee-cee? I’m just asking because I want to know if I’m likely to be next.”

  Hestia—Hetty—has a calm gaze and steady hands. I’m guessing she doesn’t rile easily even if she looks miserable right now. “We knew there was a spy within our ranks. We guessed it might be her, but needed proof. When proof we got, we kept her on. You see?”

  “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

  Her eyes crinkle, but whether she’s amused because she approves of me or is angry at what she takes for a jest I honestly can’t tell. “You understand the game—”

  “It’s no game. Four people are dead.”

  “Death takes us all,” she retorts.

  The platform flashes as the train slides in. The doors open. About twenty people push out, and we slide in against the flow. The doors close behind us just as a detail of gendarmes hits the platform.

  “They’ve seen us,” I say.

  The train glides out of the station, back toward the center of Argos. The bay glimmers to the east. The sails of the palace wink and shine under the sun. Assembly Square sits like a black blot in the middle of densely built neighborhoods
roofed with white clay tiles. Solar collectors decorate roofs in elaborate designs.

  Hestia starts walking forward along the open gangway toward Sun. There aren’t many other passengers, and they give her a cursory glance. Me, they look at twice, trying to figure where they’ve seen me before. I’ve pretended for the last two years as I shed my baby fat that the uncanny resemblance between Resh and me is just family genetics, but Sun’s accusation echoes in my head. I know she said it to trip me up. But the question resonates through every part of me: Are Resh and I both clones of our aunt? How nuts is that?

  Sun has noticed us coming, although she’s got her head bent as she speaks to Alika.

  He heaves a dramatic sigh, then rolls his gorgeously lashed brown eyes. “Oh, very well, if there’s no other way,” he says in a resigned tone.

  As Hestia and I reach them Candace adds, “I’ll do it. A flash-invite will make more sense coming from me.”

  Her gaze goes distant as she taps into the global net. I have no idea what she’s doing, although I wonder why she’s back with our group after she quit. Since I am still locked out of the net I have no idea why Ti giggles, a hand pressed over her lips.

  “That’s brilliant,” she says to Sun through her fingers.

  Sun gives a one-shoulder shrug like she doesn’t care about praise, but I’m pretty sure the princess is secretly eyeing Ti to study the effect her “brilliance” is having on my cee-cee. Mine.

  Ti looks at me desperately, although I have no idea why. “Isn’t it a brilliant idea, Honored Persephone?”

  “Sure,” I temporize, not wanting to give away how limited my net access is.

  Alika pulls his ukulele out of its case, sits, and starts tuning. Up and down the train, heads turn and whispers rise.

  Hestia takes the lid off the basket. “You have to eat. I knew you would forget.”

  Sun glares at the steamed buns but takes one. Hestia offers the basket to each of us in turn, although Alika ignores her. I grab a bun more out of habit than hunger. With the first bite the rich sweetness of custard melts so deliciously in my mouth that I gulp down the rest of mine before the others have even taken a second bite.

  “What is this?” asks Zizou in a low voice. His back is to me so I can’t see his face, but he’s holding the bun between his thumb and middle finger like he expects it to explode. His apprehension is kind of cute, if the confusion of violent, dangerous, predatory automatons can ever be termed cute.

  “Bāozi,” says Tiana patiently. “Maybe you have a different word for it. Manapua. Bun.”

  “It’s purple,” he says in a tone that suggests purple is a mark of poison.

  “It’s all right, it’s a kind of yam,” continues Tiana in a soothing voice. With a gesture of thoughtless reassurance, she rests fingers on his forearm.

  He jerks away as if her perfectly manicured and flower-painted fingernails are razors in disguise. The movement so startles her that she, too, steps back, bumps into the seat, and sits down hard beside Alika.

  Taking her impact as his cue, Alika strums what my network identifies as a G7 suspended fourth chord. It’s the distinctive opening to one of the ancient songs he revived as part of his Idol Faire competition last year.

  A girl halfway down the train shrieks as she tugs so hard on her friends’ arms that her mermaid crown falls off.

  “Aaaaaaaa! It’s Alika! It’s really ALIKA!”

  She surges forward. Her friends grab her arms and haul her to a stop with embarrassed titters.

  “It’s all right,” calls Candace. “You can come closer. Gather round.”

  Not everyone in the Republic of Chaonia follows Idol Faire, but it’s hard to ignore Alika. Everyone knows his story: a minor cousin in a minor branch of Vata House. He and his impoverished relatives were struggling to survive on a frontier post where the House had exiled a disliked ancestor who lost a long-ago battle over control of the family ministry. Only after Vata House’s first ten candidates to be Companion to the princess were humiliatingly rejected by Sun did the family trawl the depths of the lineage database. They finally found what they thought would be an insulting and mocking choice: a painfully shy and hopelessly unfashionable boy immersed in music studies. He even lived in the industrial dome of an isolated terminus system on a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere. Although only fourteen at the time, Sun had the acuity to measure his potential. Maybe she also had the gift of seeing how the growth spurt of adolescence would remold his features, or maybe she plotted his Idol Faire rise from the beginning of their relationship and forced him to undergo cosmetic surgery to get that face.

  But the face Alika shows to the people on the train isn’t the face of a pushover or a pretty mediocrity. When he sings, he shines. When he plays, he’s incandescent. As a few of the other passengers timidly venture closer he catches a gaze here, and a shy smile there, and nods to include them in his orbit. The girl with the mermaid crown is sobbing with worshipful tears as he segues from “A Hard Day’s Night” into a virtuosic piece of astounding finger-work. It’s one of his own compositions, “Turbulence,” a soundscape tribute to the poisonous winds of his home world.

  Even I am so caught up in the music that it isn’t until pillars and signs flash past that I realize we have reached the next station. All along the platform people stare at our incoming train, wondering if the flash-invitation that’s just been bombed across the Chaonian network is true. I can’t see the flash-bomb, of course. My network is still in cadet lockdown. But I can guess what it says.

  The train slows to a stop. As the doors slide open I prod Alika forward to the front of the train, right next to the closed door that leads to the operator’s cab. Alika jumps up to stand on the last seat. Tiana slings our bags onto the bench and floor next to him to create some breathing room. We’re fortunate the platform isn’t that crowded, because almost everyone waiting pushes onto our train. People abandon the other side of the platform and their trip to some other destination to grab this unbelievable chance to hear the winning Idol play live and unfiltered. The platform conductor, who makes sure everyone is standing behind the line before the train enters and leaves the station, gapes through the window at Alika, forgetting to do his job as the train pulls away.

  “‘I’m all alone here, without any hope but you,’” Alika confides melodically as if to each new individual who pushes onto the train. At the next stop, his “‘Hurry, get on now, it’s coming,’” gets people clapping along to the beat.

  At the third stop I see a squad of gendarmes trying to push through to the train, but the desperate crowd, hoping for a glimpse of the Handsome Alika, shoves back at the gendarmes.

  The doors open. The way people elbow and jostle to get inside would give anyone pause, but Sun observes it with the calm of a tactician measuring her battlefield. The girl who first screamed is now pressed against me, her purse digging into my hip. She’s glassy-eyed, so close to her idol she could reach out and touch him. So far everyone in the train has behaved respectfully, but this heat of anticipation could break into boiling chaos between a breath and a scream.

  I lock arms with Sun, who locks arms with Zizou, who locks arms with Hestia, who locks arms with Candace, who braces herself against the seat to the right of where Tiana sits.

  “That’s enough, my dear friends,” Alika calls over the melody he’s playing. “Be kind to each other. Don’t push.”

  Those fortunate enough to get on stand crushed together and yet eerily silent as he breaks off to wave at the people on the platform who weren’t so lucky. Their screams of excitement drown out the warning horn that alerts people the doors are about to close and the train to depart.

  There follows a moment of terrifying confusion as people are pressed past the safety line into doors sliding shut, only to be frantically tugged back by their companions as the train jolts forward. As we leave the station I see a gendarme speaking into a wristcom. The tunnel cuts off my view as we race onward through the dark into central Argos.

>   We pass through the next two stations without stopping, which means security has over-ridden the controls. I’m betting they plan to trap us at the Wheelhouse. Once we arrive there, they can deploy an entire division of gendarmes as well as manipulate barriers and gates in the concourse and corridors. Alika’s speed-drenched rendition of “Battle at Aspera Drift” keeps people focused on him, not that anyone cares about a missed stop at this point. My left hip is really starting to hurt where it’s being pinched painfully against the latch of the door into the cab.

  He’s clever in his choice of tunes, pitching a sense of solidarity among the people as he lights it up.

  “‘We’ll start the day tomorrow,’” the crowd sings along to the ancient classic with fevered enthusiasm. They would ride with him all the way around the world if they could.

  But we don’t have that far to go on this leg of the journey.

  By the time we approach the Wheelhouse I’m drenched in sweat and starting to ache from the strain of pushing back against the press of bodies. Sun, Zizou, Hestia, Candace, and I keep holding our tight semicircle of space around Alika. He’s standing on the seat with Tiana sitting beside him on top of her duffel. As he starts in on a plaintive ballad about lost love she plays along, turning to look out the windows, so he ends up singing to her proud back while the rest of us see her perfect profile and stern, regretful expression. Not a voice murmurs or body shifts, as if the audience fears to interrupt his heartbreak.

  “I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, but why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?”

  Together he and Ti make a stunning image, him pleading, her refusing. Half the audience is crying and the other half trembling with adulation. Even I have tears on my cheeks, and I know it is all an act.

  Republic law prohibits personal broadcasting. Anyone wishing to upload live feeds onto the net must have a license for a wasp. But even the government can’t control the twitch. I am certain this is being illicitly broadcast by everyone here. Candace will be streaming it via Alika’s dedicated sub-channel, courtesy of Channel Idol. Three-quarters of the realtime audience on Chaonia Prime is probably bolting from the coverage of the royal wedding to tune into us.