Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Take it easy. Control your heartbeat. This is just a new observation. Orient: there’s no easy exit. Decide: you’ll have to make your own.

  Act.

  She curled herself into a ball, dug her toes into the floor, and pressed her hands into the bubble’s skin. They slipped. Tried again, and again, slip.

  Lights danced between her and the world. She didn’t have long. She leaned forward. The lights weren’t all inside her—a flash, a tremor, suggested movement outside. She imagined her captors watching her, laughing, taking shitty CIA-salary-sized bets, five bucks says she lasts the minute, you’re on. I hope you’re enjoying this, assholes. Fingernails wouldn’t work? Fine. She pressed her teeth against the bubble, and bit, and tore. The skin gave. It didn’t break, but stretched enough for her to hook her hands beneath.

  She wouldn’t have strength for a second try at this. All or nothing, all at once. Vivian Liao, deadlift for your life.

  Her muscles strained, her heart beat faster with work and rage and fear. But decades of practice at the role of Vivian Liao, supergenius, had trained her into a kind of double selfhood. Yes, there was a part of her that quaked, that wanted, that hid or wept or yearned, a part that had spent the first ten weeks of ninth grade marinating in a full-body crush on Susan Cho with her slightly curly hair and her tight pink sweaters and that gold cross on the thin chain at her throat which her father the pastor gave her—that deep animal tangle, the meat of Viv.

  Then there was another Viv who sifted through the meat and muck, found what had to be done next, and did it. Sometimes it found her alone with Susan Cho, on a museum trip, between two dinosaurs, and made her ask, fast as tearing off a Band-Aid, whether she’d ever thought about kissing girls, and whether Susan would like to kiss her. That part won her the kiss—and the breakup after, but what the hell. That part won her fortunes. This was not the first time it saved her life.

  Her arms strained in their sockets, her legs, her knees, use proper form, dammit, it’s more efficient, spread the earth with your feet, trick every microcontraction you can out of this goddamn meat puppet, just get this motherfucker up. Up!

  The skin tore.

  The bubble ripped up the side and the green gunk rushed out and so did Viv. She burst free on the flood and collapsed, coughing green, choking until she drew her first breath of cool pure air, sweet as Susan Cho.

  Her lungs hurt as if she’d never used them before. She sobbed between gulps of air, and tried to stop herself, and eventually succeeded. She realized she was cold, and realized after that that she was naked. Her nudity had not been worth noting in the bubble, since clothes were far down the hierarchy of needs past “not drowning.”

  Observe.

  She heard a muddled commotion, growing more distinct as fluid drained from her ears. The thunder sharpened into the clang of metal striking metal, and there were screams, pained grunts, cries—not cries of terror, not canned McDojo kiais, but the unbidden roars human beings made when they tried as hard as they could bear to do something, and found, against all odds, that they’d succeeded. Some of those cries cut off abruptly. There were more screams. Whoever had caught her was under attack. Something was not going according to someone’s plan.

  Good.

  She rubbed green from her eyes, and blinked away the blur.

  Where was she?

  In a puddle, most immediately, alone on a dais in the center of an egg: eggshell white, eggshell round, eggshell empty. Small bright lights flickered and swarmed behind the alabaster wall. LEDs, maybe. No wires she could see, no fixtures. No visible cameras or mics, though that meant nothing. As torture cells went, it was more Silicon Valley than she’d expect from the current administration.

  No exits, of course.

  She was just trying to work up the urge to look for one when a door-sized section of wall bulged and petaled open.

  Viv scrambled to her feet. She didn’t know where she was, or who was holding her and why, but whoever walked through that weird door might confuse her collapse, reveling in kiss-sweet air, for surrender. She refused to give these assholes the satisfaction.

  She skidded, slipped, to hide against the wall near the improbably opening door, tensed to run, tensed to fight.

  And a robot walked in.

  Her OODA loop locked again.

  Viv knew robots. Robots cleaned her house, robots drove her to work, robots built most everything she’d ever owned. Creepy blank-faced receptionist robots had long since replaced bank tellers in Japan.

  But she’d never seen a robot like this.

  It walked with unsettling smooth grace on oddly bent legs, and scanned the room with burning ruby eyes rather than cameras. She didn’t recognize the design of its joints, or the materials that composed its body—black sharp tines and what looked like broken glass, illuminated from within by pulsing red light. What tech was that? Nothing Viv knew, nothing she’d even seen gestures toward in Kenya’s best android labs. Viv’s robots moved like demon puppets. This moved like a person comfortable with killing.

  The head spun toward her, and the torso followed. Eyes pulsed. Long fingers, three to each hand, shifted to extend knifelike claws.

  Viv was still trying to figure out how the robot worked when it lunged.

  She dodged too late, but her foot slipped and the fall saved her from the first sweep of its blades. Competence saved her the second time: she rolled to one side as its claws plunged into her cell floor, and kicked the robot hard in a span of its side that looked less spiky than the rest. Its claws tore free, and as she scrambled to her feet the robot’s limbs gimballed and wheeled until it found traction. It glared at her, red-eyed and furious.

  And she almost died.

  The robot opened its fanged mouth. A brilliant glow built within its throat, and if she’d spent a split second wondering why rather than diving left, landing hard on her side, and skidding in green goo, the bolt of light would have gone straight through her stomach rather than simply tearing a hole in the wall. The swarming lights behind the eggshell sparked and the chamber went dark.

  She smelled ozone. Get up. Run. Don’t just fucking lie here. But her arms wouldn’t move.

  She breathed rabbit fast and shallow and lay still and she could see nothing but the robot’s thorn-tree silhouette in the light through the open door. Its red eyes revolved toward her, and its fangs flickered as the weapon in its throat recharged. Laser? But she’d seen it—so, no. Plasma? But the light was so coherent, so directed. Even if it had been some kind of laser, all the weapons she knew that worked on similar principles needed a car-sized power source. But this one was a single integrated component of a robot already more complex than anything she’d ever known.

  And in that moment, her preconceptions collapsed. She had no idea what was going on. Where she was. What was happening to her, and whose fault it might be. What might happen next. All her nightmares of basement rooms and torture electrodes and government agents were a kind of comfort compared to this: a structure of certainty telling her what was going on, who might come for her, how bad it could get. She’d built waterworks to contain her fear and convert it into options.

  Lying naked and cold on the floor in the green goo before the robot, she felt those waterworks give way. Whoever had caught her, they weren’t government. She hadn’t mapped this territory. She was a stranger here.

  But she knew who she was, and she would not lie down and wait to die.

  So when the fire built in the robot’s mouth again, she tried to dodge.

  Her left leg slipped out from under her, and she slammed against the floor again and skidded and, well, it hadn’t been much of a dodge but at least it wasn’t lying there to wait for death.

  She heard a whipcrack and an explosion of sparks, and smelled more ozone, and curled herself into a ball and tensed for pain that did not come. Then she opened eyes she hadn’t realized were closed, and saw a monk standing between her and the robot.

  It was a good thing she’d already given
up. Now she could stop denying what she saw, and actually observe.

  She’d thought monk because his head was shorn, and because he wore a red-and-yellow robe—but he was corded with muscle, and he held a club of multifaceted crystal in each hand. Lightning crackled along his left club, and from its glow and the light of the open door, she saw he was beautiful, dark, and strong.

  He glanced toward her, earnest, concerned, and opened his mouth to speak—but the robot leapt at him, and his expression shifted back to oh shit as he spun to block with his clubs. They moved in silhouette. The robot’s claws tore into his robe and drew sparks, but did not pierce through. Its fanged mouth snapped at his throat, and he stepped back and knocked it in the face.

  She’d seen people fight for money and for need, and she’d never seen anyone fight like this man: every movement natural and intent. The robot wasn’t strange to him. And he’d saved her life.

  She found her feet, and circled around the battle’s edge. If she could get behind the robot, maybe she could jump it.

  Or, a more practical part of her suggested, she could run for the door. What did she think she was going to do? Kick the robot to death? If she wanted to feel better about leaving the monk behind, she could tell herself she was looking for a weapon, a way to contribute. But what did either monks or robots have to do with her?

  Before she could decide which way to run, toward the robot or the door, the robot’s head spun all the way around on its neck, and it lunged for her again.

  So did the monk. He tackled the robot in midstride, and as its mouth opened and the fire built within he jammed his club down its throat and twisted with all his weight. The robot’s neck cracked. The monk fell first, and the robot fell on top of him. Viv heard a loud wet sound as the long blade on the robot’s elbow pierced through the monk’s robes into his stomach.

  He growled his pain through clenched teeth. He forced his free arm up, club held in a reverse grip, and drove it down into the robot’s chest. With a loud pop and a hiss, the red light in the machine went dark, and its burning eyes died.

  Viv stood naked over the dead robot and the bleeding man. The light from the door cast her shadow over them both. The monk’s arms went slack and he let go of his clubs, but rather than falling they flowed and swirled into crystal bracelets at his wrists, because why the hell would they not. He tried to push the robot body off him, and groaned when its elbow blade moved in his gut. He tried again, but his second push was weaker, and the pool of blood on the floor beneath him spread.

  The door stood open.

  She didn’t know anything about this man. A glance, that was all. She was alone here.

  There might be more robots. Knowing her luck, there probably were. She should go. She should have gone already.

  She’d never seen this much blood coming out of a person before. He was stapled to the floor. What could she even do?

  She’d never seen a man so close to death—let alone a man so close to death for her own sake.

  She took a step closer.

  His eyes were wide with pain, with fear he would not be strong enough. Whatever story of adventure and heroism he thought had brought him to this dark eggshell room, this, now, was real: the blood, the blade in his stomach. He would die. And it was her fault.

  He looked nothing like Magda at all.

  Viv knelt over him, and guided one of his hands to the entrance wound. “Press down.” She demonstrated. He blinked, confused, but obeyed.

  She heaved with her arms and legs and he screamed once as she lifted the robot off of him. She’d half expected a fountain of blood as she relieved the pressure on some cut artery, but there was less than she’d feared. Without the robot’s weight, he could breathe, shallowly. His teeth showed. One hand fluttered at the sash of his robe, which was thick with pouches and ornate tools, some of which she recognized. He kept trying to open one particular pouch, but his hand was bloody and his fingers slipped.

  She opened it for him, and removed the contents: a thin silvery cloth that, unfolded, was a little larger than her palm. “What do you want me to do with this?”

  He hissed, and pointed weakly at his stomach. “Patch.”

  The sound his mouth made had nothing to do with the English word patch, or any word in any language she knew, but her brain connected sound to meaning as easily as if he’d been speaking English or Spanish or Mandarin.

  She nodded. He took his hand off the wound, and she saw his robes had somehow drawn away as well. The hole gaped. There was meat inside him, and the wet walls of organs. But there was metal, too, and some weblike black tissue over the organs, and rather than throw up she covered the wound with the silver patch.

  At least, she tried. The patch wiggled in her hand as it neared the wound, and she would have pulled away had he not grabbed her wrist and tugged her down.

  The patch slapped against his skin, and he roared. It burned and moved beneath her palm, and his hand went deathly cold on her wrist. She felt his flesh knit, and where her fingers had once been able to tell where the metallic cloth stopped and his skin began, that divide blurred. The worked muscles of his abdomen flexed and so did the patch, which was neither metallic nor burning hot anymore, though quicksilver still against his dark skin. Then he lay still, sweaty, breathing.

  Outside, the battle raged on. In here, they breathed together.

  He tried to sit up, and though he winced with pain he did not scream. His eyes found hers and he said “Thank you” in that language she did and did not understand.

  “Thank you,” she said back. “That thing would have killed me if you hadn’t shown up.”

  “Sister,” he said, “you are naked.”

  “I noticed.” She decided not to quibble about the sister part. “But unless you’ve got another robe stashed somewhere—”

  He brought his hand to his sash, opened another pouch there, and in a confusion of dimensions, like a magician drawing a rope of scarves from his pocket, produced a new red-and-yellow robe like the one he wore. The way his draped his body made no sense to her, so she found a hole, stuck her arm through, and felt the fabric slither over her skin, parting, framing itself to a shirt and leggings. Then it was over, and she was clothed, if barefoot.

  Could have used jeans, she thought, and the cloth thickened against her legs.

  Weird. But she ignored it. So much of this was weird—don’t obsess. Focus on the dark, on this man’s eyes.

  “I do not know your name,” he said. “Have we failed?”

  He looked so ready for her to say yes, so heartbroken and resigned to the possibility of defeat, that she didn’t know how to answer him. “I’m Viv. And, I mean. We’re both alive. So I guess not?”

  He shook his head. “What of the miracle?”

  There were few words in Viv’s lexicon harder to say than what she said next: “I don’t know.” She covered faster: “I don’t know what you mean by a miracle. I don’t know where I am. I woke up here alone, and that robot thing came in, and then you.”

  His smooth face seemed unused to confusion. She had a sense that he’d get a lot of practice if this conversation went on much longer. “You do not recognize a Pride drone. You are not of the ’faith?”

  “I mean, my pastor and I had a pretty strong difference of opinion about the whole kissing-girls thing back in high school, and ever since—”

  He rolled to his feet before she could stop him, as if he hadn’t just had two feet of metal buried in his exquisitely muscled gut—he did wince, at least. He stood in a puddle of his own blood, but his robes were clean. Either they didn’t show blood, or it didn’t stick to them. He tried to take a step, and found his limit. She caught him before he made it all the way down.

  “Come on, man. You just got stabbed. Take it easy.”

  He searched the dark eggshell room: the dais, the green goo, the dead robot. “There was a miracle in this place. We heard it out in the ’fleet, and followed its oracles from star to star. And you … woke up here.
Who are you?”

  “I already said. I’m Viv. Who are you?”

  “Hong,” he said automatically, “Brother Heretic of the Mirrorfaith. Where are you from, Viv? How did you come here?” The sounds of her name went weird in his mouth.

  “The last thing I remember, I was in a server farm in Cambridge.” That didn’t seem to make an impression. “Boston?” Glass-clear confusion, as if Hong had never once lied. “The United States?” Christ. Desperately: “Earth?”

  Nothing.

  She felt colder than she had while naked. She tried to convince herself this had to be a mistake—she didn’t know what weird effect was translating his words, maybe it had messed up somehow. That was a flimsy cover, but the alternative was too shudderingly immense to contemplate. “Look. I was trying to help my friend, and some green glowing chick showed up out of nowhere, and grabbed me, and I woke up here. Now, we should get somewhere else before another one of those spiky things finds us…”

  He fell. Her first thought was of his wound, and she bent to help him up—but this fall was controlled, and he stopped when he reached his knees. When he looked up, his eyes were still large, but strange. She didn’t like this look. There was too much awe in it, on a face that had so recently reminded her of Magda. “My Lady.”

  She ignored the guilty thrill she felt at that. “Okay, Hong.” She grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to guide him to his feet. “Come on, buddy. We don’t have time for this. I doubt we’ll have this room to ourselves much longer.”

  “It’s you,” he said. “A miracle in flesh. The Empress brought you from your land for some strange purpose, and I did not see it.”

  “This Empress—is she a glowing green lady? Deep voice?” Viv remembered the scorn in that voice, the smell of her smoldering shirt, the hand that had torn her heart from her chest and dumped her … wherever this was.

  “The Jade Queen is one of the Most High Lady’s guises. Please, forgive my blindness. I called you sister.”

  “I’d rather you call me Viv.” He shook his head. “Look, Hong. Are there more of those, what did you call them, Pride drones? Looking for us? For your miracle?”