As if in answer, her stomach lurched, and she felt as if she were being pulled up by her whole body at once. When she looked down she saw a light at the bottom of the pit, slowing as it neared. The light-field around them flattened. Air breaking, and shifting their inertia—we wouldn’t want to overlook the easy way to solve a problem, but at this tech level, why neglect the hard ways either?
When they emerged from the well, they were falling slower than a leaf in autumn.
They descended into an impossible room. All that was solid here should be vapor, plasma even: the room’s crystal floor seemed to rest on the surface of the sun. Beneath them, the star burned red—but not blinding as it should have been. Viv’s eyes were not seared, her skin remained thankfully unboiled. The gravity should have crushed her, but as she settled to the floor, smooth and pleasantly warm beneath her feet, like heated tile, she felt something very close to a standard Earth g.
Starstuff shifted underfoot.
Viv still wanted to punch the Empress in the neck, but she revised upward the amount of run-up that punch would require.
The room was empty save a circle in the center of the floor, a crystal stanchion beside the circle, and a switch atop the stanchion.
“Oh, good,” she said when they landed, not out of any sincere relief, and mostly to get a rise out of Hong.
“Good?” Success. “We have two fleets overhead, we have no route back up, and we stand over the prison of an ancient evil. We should not be here. We should never have survived the fall. I fail to see the good in this situation.”
She started toward the stanchion. “I was worried it might be harder to open the jail.”
She’d seen him move fast in battle, but not quite so fast as he moved now, to stand arms spread between her and the switch. “Viv. No.”
“Do you see another choice? Your people aren’t on our side, Hong. We have to get out of here. You said this pirate queen could stride between the stars. I bet she could get us away from here, if we let her go.”
“Viv,” he said, the way investors and girlfriends past had sounded when they were trying to talk her out of some dangerous, excellent idea, “we have other options. You are a miracle. The Rector would take you in, welcome you.”
“The Rector just threatened to kill you.”
“But you are a true miracle. She will relent when she sees you.” He didn’t say probably out loud, but his whole body said it for him.
“And what happens to me after you’ve traded your way back into her good graces?” The starfire beneath her felt superfluous to requirements. She could burn hot enough on her own. “You said the Pride would take me apart to learn how I tick. What will your people do?”
“You are a relic of inestimable holiness. You will be tended and honored.”
Her eyes did not leave his as she set her hand on his ribs and shoved him aside. “I don’t want to be tended and honored, Hong, any more than I want to be some robot’s science fair project. I want to live. I want to get out of here. And I want to go home, so I can help my friends.” He stared back at her, fierce, earnest. “This is my shot. And yours. So either come up with a better idea, or get out of my way.”
He could have fought her. If he tried, she didn’t think she could have stopped him. But when she set her hand on his side and pushed, he let her move him.
“You can’t do this,” he said behind her.
“Watch me.” She grabbed the switch, and tried not to think about how much her hand was shaking, or how little she understood this room, this station, this world. The first time she’d drunk liquor, it had been because a high school friend told her she shouldn’t; she’d slammed half a bottle of shit bourbon and that went as well as one might imagine. This sort of decision didn’t have a great track record for Viv, about fifty-fifty if she were honest, but she couldn’t stop now. Forward momentum. Act, and act again, and ignore the fear.
“No,” he said. “I mean, you can’t. High Carcereal guarded its prisoner for eons. It won’t just let her go because you ask.”
“You never know unless you try.” And Viv threw the switch.
Nothing happened.
Hong sagged in relief that Viv almost shared.
Well. Nothing happened at first.
Hong tensed again before Viv noticed any change—trained reflexes, situational awareness, spider sense, whatever you wanted to call it. Viv, who’d spent her childhood in front of screens and her adulthood in front of more while Hong did push-ups and cultivated his chi or whatever, didn’t bother trying to out-sense him. She just looked where he looked.
The floor began to ring, as if it were a singing bowl stroked until it voiced a bone-deep note. A current swirled the stellar surface beneath them, at first a barely sensible discoloration, but, as the note grew (so loud now that Viv staggered with the pain of it, grabbed the stanchion white-knuckled and refused to collapse), it became a plasma whirlpool, boring down into the depths of the star to reveal a web of strands that could not be diamond because diamonds would have melted here. The strands glowed with heat, and in their center hung a box that was not a box, which changed dimensions as Viv watched, unwilling to sit in three. She thought it was a shadow, but not the shadow a box would cast, rather a box itself as a shadow cast by something higher, a hypercube, its surface reflective and complex and bubbling with starstuff.
This was a box built to catch a god.
It rose from the depths of the star.
Viv experienced, then, misgivings. Maybe she should have listened to Hong. Maybe this was all too big for her, and she should have settled for staying small and out of the sight of things like the Empress who built this station, and whoever was trapped beneath it. The box simplified as it rose, no longer multidimensional, its sides reflective though warped, complex. When it touched the crystal floor, it pressed up, up, and, in a confusion of edges, slipped through—and as it did, that complex multifaceted surface peeled away. The bone-shaking crystal note ceased, and the box emerged into the silence as a simple coffin of white-hot iron.
It settled with a clang to the floor.
Steam hissed, condensing, on its skin.
Viv’s ears rang with silence.
The box cooled to black faster than iron should, but other than that it seemed utterly normal, given what it was: a coffin taller than most men, with a hinged door and a wheel lock. It looked like the kind of place one would stash a person so vicious they’d long passed the bounds of humanity—a serial killer’s oubliette. It was big, old, and strange. She almost flipped the switch back.
Instead, she walked toward the box. Stepped, tenderly, across the circle, and felt nothing as she did so, to her surprise. “Viv,” Hong said, “please. We shouldn’t be here. Don’t do this.” He walked toward her, but slammed into the air above the circle as if it were made of glass. Nice trick.
As she neared the box her heart beat faster. A persnickety voice in the back of her head kept asking every question save the ones that mattered. Anything inside a star for so long should be hot enough to flash-boil air. Her skin should have melted when it breached the floor. But had this box been inside the star at all? The hypercube, the complex surface that fit into the floor like a key—its contents might have been very far away indeed. Or the station had cooled the box as it passed through the floor. Anyway, whatever it was made of, it could not possibly be iron. Iron didn’t cool that fast.
Something heavy moved within. Chains clanked.
She quaked, quailed. There was a kid inside her, a girl who’d not yet grown up or traveled the world or drawn the attention of faceless men, a girl nobody would ever want to kill, and she screamed: Run! Hide! Listen to Hong!
But Viv had run from too much in her life, and she had run from too much today.
She would not run from this.
The air near the box felt cool, and the wheel, when Viv grabbed it, felt warm. It turned. Chains clanked against chains, and from inside she heard a growl, heard it not just with her ears but with her eyeballs, too, an
d her heart, like you heard a tiger’s roar. She was afraid. And because she was afraid, she pulled the door open.
Hinges squealed.
Viv wasn’t sure what she had expected—something polysyllabically alien, a squamous multi-angled horror comprehensible in inverse proportion to how much trouble they’d had getting here.
There was a strong-jawed woman in the box. She looked almost human except for the fur and the too-long fingers and tail, and she hung from heavy chains linked to manacles and waist and legs, joined in a lock above her heart. Half her face was a ruin of burn scar that pulled at the corners of her mouth and eye, a scar in the shape of a hand. Viv glanced to her own left wrist, and saw the same pattern on the skin there—four fingers and a thumb. She remembered the stink of melted flesh and charred skin in the Ogham basement, and imagined that same searing touch on her cheek, in her eye.
The pirate queen wore a black metal circlet at her brow, and a sweat-stained gray coverall over the rest of her, and she stank of rage and work. She looked like a woman who had come out on the losing side of far too many fights. The part of Viv that was not too busy being scared liked her for that at once.
The pirate queen had more teeth than Viv thought normal. Viv could count them, because when the woman looked up, she was smiling.
“Hi.”
7
CONSIDER HEAT AND pressure, pain.
Consider loss that cannot be reclaimed, because time goes in only one direction—your triumph broken in an instant, your weapons torn from you, your fleet scattered and burning, your allies, friends hunted one by one and gutted. Some, the most useful, were allowed a heroic last stand so their final tricks and strategies might be recorded for the Empress’s later study. Bound, helpless, watch them fall. See the Empress skin them, cryptographically and literally, breaking the locks that bind their souls, peeling skin and biting flesh from fruit. If you were faster, stronger, wiser, smarter, you might have saved them. At least you might have died in battle—harder than it seems, since death is only barely possible for you.
Death would have spared you these chains.
Consider lonely centuries entombed under bone-shattering pressure, blistering heat, cursing your weakness, remembering friends you could not save—constant torment broken once every span of timeless pain, when the star opens and unseen hands draw you from the heat to speak with Her, your foe, your captor. So she can ask you soothing questions, offer tea, and gloat.
It’s been ages, she says on each visit, and there are so few people I can really talk to anymore. You could surrender, and join me—I’d have to rework you from the inside, of course, but only a little. I don’t want to spoil the beautiful math of you. We’d do well together. There is so much universe to rule.
She offers it like that each time, as if you were friends—until you can no longer keep silent and hang from your chains like a slab of meat, and the polite mask you wear to prolong your reprieve slips.
You spit. You curse. You call her tyrant, torturer, traitor, you call her a failure and a cheat and a sneak. It’s her fault the world’s gone wrong, her fault the Bleed keeps coming back and the Cloud broods above the cosmos like a storm about to break, it’s her fault no one likes her and all her friends are dead, and you hate her, you hate her, you hate her.
And then, each time, she throws you back.
Consider heat, pressure, pain. Loneliness. Your only friends your chains. A human mind—remember what those were like, those blessed beautiful tiny wasteful things, melting and sweet like hand-painted chocolates?—a human mind would have snapped long before yours finally gave way. Over thousands of years it broke and healed and broke again, and memory was a help and a curse, because locked in this box in this star, hungry, alone, always burning, you could sometimes let the present slip and lose yourself in memories of when you once were Zanj.
You flew, back then. You stole stars. You led fleets. You fought, and won, and made love with a strength to break stones and press coal to diamond. You stole worlds and left taunting notes behind. You trailed anarchy and your own laughter through a galaxy too small for the scope of your ambition. No matter how grand the theft, you wanted more.
Consider falling from those memories to wake back in the box in the star, to the chains on your wrists and Her handprint seared into your face, and the pain, and the dark.
Until.
Until one day the music of the star’s magnetosphere shifts around you, and you hear the grind and glory of the great machines at work—chained, you cannot use them, only hear them as if through a wall. The star opens. Ah yes. One more torture session, one more conversation you’ll keep civil as long as you can because every second out of the star is a second away from pain, because every instant She gloats over your humiliation is a second you’re not alone. You hate yourself for watching your language in front of her. Hate yourself for wondering if she’ll offer tea this time.
You miss swallowing.
Consider all that, and ask yourself how you would feel when the cell door opened to reveal two people you did not expect—two people who were not supposed to be here.
Imagine seeing, after three thousand years, a chance.
You can use this.
Imagine, but know that however vast the span of your dreams, you still don’t know what it is to be Zanj.
Chains bound her, wrists and ankles and neck and soul, and still she grinned. The Empress could make Zanj scream, but could not make her weak.
And the Empress was not here.
The room had not changed since Zanj’s last interview—say rather her last torture session—who knew how many centuries ago. But before her stood two impossibilities.
The pretty boy wore a Mirrorfaith robe, oddly fashioned and ornate but recognizable—and the Empress scorned those cargo cultists. She would never permit one here.
And beside the boy-monk stood a woman who did not exist.
The Cloud taunted Zanj, promising safety and power and freedom as out of reach for her, chained, as her tree-bound forebears once thought the stars. With the cell’s door open she could at least listen to the space above space, the world of soul and mind and gods—the Cloud. The Cloud, which shadowed each structure, each being, which whispered telemetry and vital signs and the shared state of every object in the cosmos and some that weren’t, the Cloud that mirrored and informed everything in the world of matter.
Everything but this woman, apparently.
She wore ’faith robes in a truly weird style, and flesh in an ancient baseline human model. Short hair, high cheekbones, narrow face, brief generous mouth, scarred wrist, her body an experiment in tension and compression and drive, all that pressure directed out the gunports of her large, dark eyes. But Zanj could not tell how fast her heart was running without timing the pulse in her neck, could not read her emotions without watching the micro-movements of her body. She kept her soul completely to herself.
Unnerving. Was she some sort of master? One of the ’faith’s saints or holy folk? Zanj never could keep the terminology straight, and it had probably changed in the last three thousand years.
The local Cloud was a mess. The Empress had come here, leaving her radioactive footprints, her bright green stain. She had done some great Work and it echoed, as if a mighty voice had screamed a true word in a quiet room. But the Empress had left, as fast as she had come, and in her absence scavengers scuttled in: the Pride, the discard pile of the cosmos, and the Mirrorfaith.
Why would the Empress who killed Zanj’s fleet, who killed her friends, who mocked her and tormented her, who broke her and let her heal only to break her again, come to High Carcereal and work some miracle, only to abandon her project without first sealing the system against the roaches and her rabid fan club?
Ah. There was the answer.
Bleedsign, gathering.
So, the old tyrant had stuck her neck out one inch too far at last.
There were many mysteries here. Zanj could solve them after she was out. That was t
he goal, of which she would not, could not lose sight: out. If this pair of nothings could draw her from the star, perhaps they could undo her chains. They might even be dumb enough to try. “Did she send you here to torture me?” She broadened her smile. That had an unsettling effect on most people.
The boy picked himself off the floor. Pity. Zanj always appreciated a good prostration. “Viv, be careful. She’s—”
“Be quiet, Hong. Let me think.”
Zanj’s mind danced in the silence: there was a gap between the boy and the woman. The woman had power, and the boy had knowledge. Zanj could use that gap. “What lies do they tell about me now? Does the ’faith call me a temptress? Do I seduce with my voice alone? Do I beguile earnest young monks from their craven praise of a tyrant Lady? Am I the serpent in your garden, a rebel angel, a Sita-stealing demon, what? I am Zanj. You don’t know the hundredth of who I am, what I’ve done. The truth would break your tiny mind.”
The boy grayed, and assumed a fighting crouch as if Zanj could kill him from here. The woman held her ground. If anything, she looked pleased—an emotion Zanj had to deduce, like a savage, from the twitch of her lips, from tightness at the corners of her eyes. Zanj liked the woman for that amusement, that tinge of respect. She hoped she did not have to kill her. “I need help,” the woman said. Viv. That was the name the boy-monk used. “Hong says you can cross galaxies. Is that true?”
“When I was free,” she said, and let some of the ache she felt when she said that word enter her voice, in that instant as naked as she’d ever been—“I could leap in heartbeats from star to star. There never was a master of the Cloud with my strength, or speed, or genius.”
Viv hesitated before her next question like a first-time diver on a cliff, contemplating the whitecaps that meant rocks below. “Can you take people with you?”
There it was. Viv’s need, to pair with Zanj’s own. Viv had not drawn Zanj from the star by accident, or to see what would happen. She had a desire, and desire was a rope Zanj could use to climb from the abyss. Zanj had never seen a beauty so sharp, so sure, so shining as that need, and with the ease of forty centuries’ practice, she said, “I could take stars with me, if I wanted.”
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