Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Zanj rolled her eyes. “Okay. Viv and Hong. And fuel. And you forget. That’s the deal. Or I kill…” She added some numbers on the fingers of her free hand. “All of you.”

  “We can’t.” The Chief, for someone dangling by her neck from someone else’s grip, managed an impressive amount of gravitas. “Grayteeth seized our manufactory. We have no choice.”

  Zanj’s smile widened, as if she’d been hoping to hear that. “Good.” She began to close her hand. “Then neither do I.” She didn’t use her claws, just the strength of her fingers: closing, closing, slowly and without strain, as if the Chief’s muscle and sinew were soft as pulp, enjoying the Chief’s purpling face, her futile attempts to pry free.

  Xiara broke from Viv and ran toward them, swept a spear through the air, broke it on Zanj’s back; Zanj turned casually and caught Xiara, too, by the throat. “Hi again. Missed you. So good to be back.”

  “Zanj, stop it!”

  Viv’s voice rang loud in the clearing. Zanj stopped. But she did not collapse. The circlet did not blacken on her brow. She looked from Xiara, to the Chief, to Viv, confused. Wondering.

  There was no pain. Viv didn’t want it; had thought to herself, as she cried out, don’t hurt her. Don’t force her. This is not an order. “Let them go. Please.”

  Zanj let the Chief breathe. She released Xiara, who stumbled, found her balance, and backed away from the sharp line of empty air that connected Viv’s eyes to Zanj’s. “They bound you,” she said. “They would have given you to the Pride.”

  She didn’t think about that, or about revenge. “There has to be a better choice. The Pride are coming?”

  Zanj nodded. “They’ll be here in hours. I passed them on the way.”

  “You, and I, and Hong, are going to the manufactory. We’ll stop this Grayteeth thing. Then the Ornclan will be free, we’ll have our fuel, and we can get out of here.”

  “We don’t even know where the manufactory is. I’m sure these losers have fuel stashed somewhere. If I kill a few of them, the ones left will show us.”

  “I’ll take you to the manufactory,” Xiara said—soft, insistent, slow. “Please. Don’t kill my mother.”

  Zanj looked skeptical. The Ornchief breathed; no one else dared.

  “Are you saying you’re afraid of Grayteeth?” Viv asked.

  Zanj’s eyes narrowed, and for a heartbeat Viv worried she had pulled the thread between them too hard, and it would snap. But then the corner of Zanj’s scarred mouth crept up, and she chuckled to herself, and let the Ornchief fall. “Okay, kid. Lead the way.”

  18

  SWOLLEN, CORUSCATING PINK, the dome-field beckoned. Xiara called it a fortress, built by Grayteeth to guard the manufactory he stole. It peeked out from behind walls, floated above broken towers, but without Xiara’s guidance Viv would have lost herself trying to reach it in this labyrinth of mossy ruins and splintered glass.

  They marched from the Ornclan camp in an eggshell silence—sturdy in some directions, fragile in others, and all around smooth.

  That silence had congealed around them in the hours since Zanj agreed to go, since the Chief ordered the Ornclan to bring waterskins and pemmican for the journey. While warriors scurried, Xiara paced, glaring at her fellows among the Ornclan. Guards watched Zanj warily, spears to hand, rifles never quite raised but never quite stowed either. A kinder person would have acted wary, or at least respectful, of the armed and anxious warriors, but Zanj sauntered past them to the banquet table, poured herself a glass of wine, and drank. She didn’t need the drink—she wasn’t thirsty and Viv doubted she could get drunk without wanting to. She just wanted to show them she could do whatever she wanted in their hall, without their permission, and lick her lips when she was done.

  The packs came, and they marched out. When they left the grove behind and cleared the palisade, Xiara waved to Viv, unslung her pack, and drew out—“Boots!” Ragged leather, patched and repaired, clunky as hell, more beautiful than diamonds.

  “I think you’re about my size.”

  A bit loose but only just, with socks of some sort of clingy gray silk. Viv’s feet, bruised, dusty, scraped but miraculously intact considering, melted into fur lining. Viv felt a moment’s frission, a how-the-great-have-fallen sort of thing, at how good it felt to wear shoes again—but for the most part, she just liked the boots. She liked, too, that Xiara had thought to bring them.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about anything else right now. The Ornclan had drugged her, chained her, sold her to the Pride for dissection, and here she was trying to solve their problems. But, hell, she couldn’t just let Zanj kill anyone she didn’t like. Soon there’d be no one left. Including Viv.

  For that matter, how did she feel about Xiara? The Ornchief’s daughter hadn’t warned them, but at least she tried to save them. Maybe Viv would have noticed the trap herself if she hadn’t been so damn thirsty for the woman under the armor. That was wrong, too—why did Viv feel quite so fourteen again, aching for someone to bite into? Maybe it all came down to control. She still didn’t know the rules of this world, hell, this galaxy. But she did know just what she’d do if she lay beside Xiara on a bed.

  Hong took point beside Xiara, clubs out, steps dancer-light, head up, eyes alert, a shorebird seeking fish in surf. If his injuries troubled him, or Xiara’s her, they didn’t let on. Viv’s shoulder still ached where the Ornclan guards had wrenched it, holding her down. The scar on her wrist burned, too, for some reason.

  Zanj walked beside her, hands in pockets, glancing idly from cloud to cloud. After a half hour Zanj began to whistle. Hong looked back when she started, shocked, and Zanj stopped—until he looked away. Zanj had not spoken to Viv since her return, walked with her now investigating broken rooftops, odd flowers, kicking gravel, silent—yet by her side. Offering the first move to Viv.

  “So,” Viv asked, “did you have a good vacation?”

  Viv’s first moves tended to fall on the brusque-to-vicious spectrum.

  Zanj replied: “Don’t think this means I’m not still mad at you.”

  “You know, it turns out, it was a good thing I stopped you. Xiara wasn’t just a bandit. She’s a princess. Or prince. Something like that.”

  “Good kisser?”

  She most certainly did not flush. “I didn’t—”

  “Too soon, then. She’s interested, in case you couldn’t tell.”

  “My point is, you shouldn’t just kill people for no reason.”

  “How nice. So you expect me to forgive you?”

  “I won’t apologize for saving her life.” That part was easy. The harder was forcing herself to say: “I am sorry I hurt you.”

  Zanj slid her toe under a rock, kicked it up, caught it between thumb and forefinger. She inspected the rock with a jeweler’s squint. “I’ll kill you for that.” Her voice held all the emotion of a teacher suggesting a student would find her questions answered in the syllabus. “After you let me go, I guess.”

  “You’re not giving me good incentives there” was probably the wrong response. “Why did you come back?”

  No answer save trudging footsteps.

  “If we’re going to travel together,” Viv tried again, “we need ground rules. One of mine is, don’t just kill people for no reason.”

  “Define people.”

  Good point. She didn’t have a clear answer.

  “You don’t know this world at all, Los Angeles.” Zanj scraped a bit of dirt off her rock. “I’m not asking you to let me go. But I need you to understand: it’s hard out here for a pirate. The Ornclan would have given us fuel by the time I was done with them. They hurt you. They don’t deserve your mercy just because you happen to have a crush on the Chief’s daughter.”

  Viv raised a finger to her lips and glanced meaningfully toward Xiara, who, thank god, had shifted ahead to scout a path through a vine-draped fallen skyscraper. Zanj made a great show of ignoring Viv’s signs. She tossed her rock in the air, caught it in her mouth, and chewed.r />
  “Fine,” Zanj said around mouthfuls of dust. “I’ll play along. No killing. But I wonder how long that rule will last, once you understand what we’re up against.” Xiara reappeared at the mouth of the ruin and waved them on, eager: pink light behind her, their destination. “Which you will!” Zanj grinned, and broke into a jog just fast enough that Viv had to run to keep up.

  She stopped beyond the vines, before the dome.

  It loomed, obscene, so much larger than it had seemed over rooftops: smooth as geometry and mottle-colored, humming. It bathed them in pink light.

  Viv reached for it, and the darker pink mottling gathered, concentrated beneath her hand. She thought the hum shifted pitch. “Do we just walk through?”

  Zanj shrugged. “I still say we go back, kill them, and take their stuff.”

  “Hey,” Xiara said. “That’s my family.”

  “Everyone has a family,” Zanj replied. “If that were a good counterargument, I’d never kill anyone.”

  “Ground rules.” Viv moved her finger in a circle above the dome’s pink skin. The darkness followed, like fish massing beneath food.

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous this thing is?” Zanj cocked her head toward the dome.

  If Viv moved her finger fast enough, close to the dome, she could make a sort of smiley face in black. The smile faded into a bruise. “Sounds like a gray goo sort of deal. Eats everything, turns it into more of itself.”

  “They call themselves Grayframe, singular Gray. Grayframe devour everything you are, and in that devouring read you into themselves, run permutations by the millions. They will know and use your echoes in their imagination forever. Through there, you will see horrors beyond your wildest nightmares.”

  “So, basically, I was right?” Was she scared? Sure. But she’d had it with the whole mysterium tremendum et fascinans routine, the religious awe, the wonder. She might not know much about this place, but she was done playing the rube, gawping at each new vista. Plus, Xiara looked full of fear and trembling enough for both of them, and Viv was pretty sure Zanj was using this schtick at least as much to scare her as to warn Viv. So Viv stood tall, and saw Xiara brighten.

  Hong looked impressed, too, respectful but familiar. She remembered, back in her churchgoing days, how Father Cho held the grape juice and spoke the words he thought sacred. “Grayframe serve the Empress,” Hong said. “This one must have displeased Her. They often do, and seldom survive. Down thousands of years, we’ve found their corpses scattered through space; we study them, store their remains in the ’fleet. I have never seen one alive and whole before. It must have been terrible indeed, to survive Her displeasure.”

  “Great!” Viv said quickly, to cover Xiara’s gasp. “No sweat. You know how these things work, and Zanj is super deadly, and it can’t mess with me using the Cloud since I don’t have a soul. So Xiara stays out here, and we go in and take him apart. Right?”

  Zanj stretched her arms over her head, popped her shoulders, her neck, her knuckles. She glared at the wall. Mottled pinks shaped themselves into her shadow. “I have won every battle I ever fought, save one,” she said. “But Grayframe are too dangerous for war. We might die here.”

  “You never said why you came back.”

  Zanj bared teeth—and this time the grin was real. “I missed the company.”

  Without cue, and as one, they stepped forward. The dome rippled over their skin, cool as a kiss, and when Viv opened her eyes she stood in paradise.

  19

  A CHILD WEPT in the garden.

  Peach-pink Dr. Seuss trees rose beneath a blushing sky. Diamond waterfalls birthed winding rivers clear as glass and tumbling with purple fish. Dragonfly wings shed rainbow shadows. People hung fetus-curled in translucent fleshy sacs from those pink trees, and they shifted and turned as if in the depths of dream.

  Paradise stank of lilac.

  And still, somewhere out of sight, a child wept.

  Hong moved first, while Viv marveled, while Zanj sniffed the air, claws ready, on guard. He ran through soft blue-green grass, footfalls quiet, leapt over the river and around a flowering bush that settled Viv’s earlier question as to whether there were still roses in the future; Viv protested, “Hey!” but followed him, and she heard Zanj’s sigh as she matched pace.

  The kid might have been eight at most, slender, hair short, all over pale, eyes large as Xiara’s, barefoot, wearing scraps of dirty multicolored cloth. He (Viv was guessing) hugged his knees, stared at Hong, at Viv, at Zanj, then at the vine-trailed forest and the perfect sky, then back, gaze shifting with the speed of fear. Viv, for whom kids were something that happened to other people, wanted to help, but drew up short, uncertain how to start with a child who’d been stuck in this strange place. Hong didn’t wait: he walked over, hands out, and sat beside the kid on the log. “Hello.” He didn’t touch the kid, didn’t sound particularly interested in him even—and yet the sobbing slowed. Some magic in that, Viv thought. Not the far-future kind, just the not-being-awful-with-children kind. “Are you lost?”

  The kid looked up, sniffed, wiped his tears with the back of his hand. Nodded once.

  “Us, too.” It wasn’t totally a lie. “Have you been here long?”

  The kid shook his head, but the shake traveled down his neck into his ribs, his belly. He pointed up to the sky: no sun, no stars, no moon, just pink velvet twilight. Viv looked away. Watching him she saw a part of herself that looked just like that, staring wide-eyed at a large and terrifying world. She wanted to forget that part of her, ignore it, but this kid remained stubbornly in place. It wasn’t his fault. She made herself look.

  Hong, meanwhile, was still talking. “Did you come here with your family?”

  A nod turned into another shake of head; he hugged his knees, bent double. Knobs of vertebrae jutted from his back.

  Zanj leaned against a tree and crossed her arms. “Ask him where the Gray is.”

  The boy’s wide eyes snapped to her, and he started shivering again.

  “Thing’s probably at the center of this mess. You know, kid? Big monster, huge teeth?”

  “It’s fine,” Hong said, his voice kind, but with a glare at Zanj to clarify that while the situation in general might be fine, her behavior wasn’t. “We’re here to free you, and your family. But we need to find the monster. So we can stop it.”

  The boy’s face squinched together, curious, suspicious.

  “Can you help us?”

  Viv saw the decision process tick behind his eyes. He trembled with the effort of thought, then stilled, a sign of solution every bit as obvious as if he’d actually gone ding. Then, without warning, he rose and scrambled off through purple bushes into the forest.

  With a trade of looks—are we doing this, I think so, are we sure it’s a good idea, the time to ask that question was, really, before we stepped into the glowing dome—they ran after.

  Even running felt wonderful here, the air crisp and flowerthick as new spring. Viv’s muscles stretched and her feet in their new boots loved the grass and the springy earth. The kid led them down narrow paths between full bushes, but there were no thorns, and the leaves brushed her skin like silk, like feathers. Her heart sang. She leapt creeks, she took hard corners easy, she let herself forget, almost, the monster. Just focus on the kid’s pale, flashing soles, on his back, on the fact that—

  Wait. What happened to the others?

  The kid ran on ahead, the narrow path unspooled before him, and more path lay behind Viv, bare of friends. From the bushes to her left, she heard Hong cry out, and a crash of breaking wood.

  Damn damn damn.

  She dove off the path, through the bushes, toward the cry.

  She expected breaking twigs, thorns, sharp edges catching clothes, but she slid through the underbrush as if through a feather thicket, past leaves so fine they did not scrape, did not cut, but slid into her mouth, her nose. She tried to slap them away but the ground caught her and she fell:

  —into twili
ght and open arms.

  She fought at first, but Xiara’s voice said, it’s okay, and, I’ve got you, and she was held, and turned in her arms—Xiara clutching her close, skin warm, though Viv was shaking.

  “We have to help them,” Viv said, and “They need me,” but Xiara’s eyes were large, near, and her finger settled over Viv’s lips, and then her mouth followed.

  Paradise.

  She was naked, they both were, falling soft and autumn slow to pillowing grass, to earth that molded to their bodies, to blush skies overhead; nails dragged down her back, fingers cradled her crotch; she breathed in but her throat stopped and her eyes went soft; she clutched the curve of her, explored her body, wanted it, needed it, and as she needed felt it change, and at each change her own hunger grew, the fire of that touch transformed, her leg now between her legs, rising, riding—

  —changing—

  —the hand that climbed her side, that caught her wrist, that pinned it back over her head, was not Xiara’s hand, those green eyes mocking over her belonged to Adrienne, but now they were black like Susan Cho’s, the teeth in that mouth sharp as no one’s she’d ever lain with, sharp as in fantasies she’d only ever confessed to search fields in incognito mode through a VPN, and she was lying in a pickup truck bed and she was wearing clothes she’d never worn and a body that was not her own and everything was all so stupid dumb glorious normal like she’d never ever had and scorned and wanted even as she scorned it, and she reached up and the woman over her caught her neck and closed her hand around it and closing her hand closed a collar gripped her slammed her down jammed mouth against mouth so hungry and the taste of that skin on her tongue and her own throat beneath her hand and her submission, mastery building higher ever higher, and always. Not. Quite. There.

  Like induction. Like an algorithm. Oh.

  —christ—

  Think about Facebook. Think about Acsiom.

  —onward and onward and why would you ever stop or even look away—

  Pleasure-seeking math. The model watches you. Learns what you want. Offers.