Viv settled down beside her, wincing as she discovered new injuries on the way.
Zanj held her hands cupped in her lap, statue still. Her red-gold eyes stared unblinking at the void.
“Do not speak,” Zanj said when Viv opened her mouth. “If you speak, I will try to kill you.”
Viv had arguments to make in self-defense, justifications to offer. She thought of the Empress, and stopped herself. But when she did not speak, neither did Zanj. A few times in her life—often on boats, and rarely, so rarely, with another human being, she had enjoyed a silence of comfort, of settled business, nothing to say, nothing to fear. This was the opposite. There were too many words neither of them could bear to say.
If Zanj really meant to kill her if she spoke, it wouldn’t be worse than what she was doing to herself. She ignored the warning flick of the eyes. “Is he dead?”
She waited for the claw at her throat, for the scream as the crown burned Zanj in her defense. In the Empress’s defense. Because the crown thought they were the same person. Because they were. She felt sick.
But Zanj shook her head once, and held out her cupped hand. Her palm cradled a few teaspoons of mercury. It twitched and trembled, though Zanj held still as stone.
Viv found her voice after a long time that felt longer. “Will he get better?”
Zanj returned her hand to her lap. “I tried feeding him some rock, before you woke up. Metal, too. No response. He’s still there, but he’s hurt. He needs fixing, and the only people who can fix him are behind that wall, along with your world, and my revenge. Which I would have had, if not for you.” She growled the last word. The hand that did not hold what was left of Gray tightened into a fist.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
Zanj hissed. “You woke her up.”
“She didn’t wake until you hit her with the Star.”
“You tried to stop me. You looked at her. You spoke.”
“You hit her with a fucking superweapon! I was worried! You couldn’t beat her.” But Viv’s thoughts caught up with her mouth then, and she chilled. “Oh my god. You didn’t care if you beat her. You wanted her to kill you.” She reached for her. “Zanj.”
But she pulled away, rolled to her feet, her eyes fierce. “If you’d just gone through the damn portal like you said, I could have torn that whole ship to atoms, wrecked the Cloud for light-years. If I’d tried that with you standing there, you would have been burnt to a cinder.”
“And you’d be dead.”
“I’d still have done it. I’d have pushed her to the edge. I’d have torn at her eyes. I’d have made her kill me this time. I’d have won.”
“You’d be dead.”
“That was my right!” She kicked the rock on which they stood, and a huge shelf split off and fell into Viv’s eye far below. The Empress’s eye, she supposed.
“That’s what you wanted. All this time. You didn’t want to get me home. You wanted your glorious goddamn showdown. You used me.”
“Of course I used you! Of course I had my own plan! Do you think the whole fucking universe revolves around you?”
Viv was on her feet. She didn’t know how she’d gotten there. Breath heaved in her chest; her eyes were hot, her many pains forgotten in the rush of anger. She raised one hand, finger out, unsure what she would say, but she knew this tension in her skull—this was how she felt when she was about to say something that would make old friends never speak to her again. She wanted to hurt someone. She wanted to make them suffer.
The person she wanted to hurt was not Zanj.
She dropped her hand. Turned away. Stared down, and out, over the pitted landscape. Tears welled in her eyes. Fucking embarrassing. She sniffed them back, and found that beneath the tears, she was laughing.
“What is it?” Zanj asked after a while, tentative. “Viv?”
“I could—” She swallowed a sob, found her center, started again. “I could be forgiven for that. Thinking the universe revolves around me, I mean. We are standing on a planet-sized sculpture of my face.”
Zanj pinched her temples between her thumb and forefinger, and turned away. Space can be very quiet. Viv felt its silence gather around her, a slow tide pressing against her ankles, her thighs, her belly, her chest, her neck. Perhaps before the world, before the Big Bang, there had been another kind of silence altogether, deeper even than this. The emptiness she now thought absolute was in fact a clamor, an after-echo. What was the silence before silence? She could imagine nothing more still than this.
On the edge of hearing, less a sound than the root of what might someday grow to be a sound: Zanj, dry, amused. “I guess we are.”
She pondered herself. Even pitted here and there by asteroids down who could say how many years, the face remained intact, the likeness clear. How many other faces of Viv drifted along the Citadel walls, watching blind? She asked: “Did you know?”
That was all she could bear to say. If Zanj had not understood, Viv might have never found the will to speak again. But, at last, an answer came. “I suspected. When you first commanded me back on High Carcereal, there was a look in your eye, a set in your shoulders. As I grew to know you, I recognized habits of thought. Turns of the head.” Light steps crossed stone. A hand settled on her shoulder. “She’s not you. You’re not her. You’re not so cruel.”
“I’m not her yet.” Viv drew away, and Zanj’s hand slipped off. “But she’s what I would be in thousands of years. If I won. I dreamed of being her. She thinks the way I want to think, works the way I tell myself I work. I fight. I make the hard choices. When I win, I take what I’ve won, and use that to win more. The world wants to scorn me, trap me, bind me? I’ll make them kneel. I’ll make them listen. With my hand on their throats if I have to, with my thumbs in their eyes. I built myself that way. I carved off all the pieces that weren’t edge. And that road leads to her.” She could not bear to stand any longer, so she sat upon her brow, and stared down into her unseeing stone eyes.
Zanj settled by her side. Their arms touched. Viv was aware of muscles clenching, unclenching, in Zanj’s jaw. “I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “It has been a long, long time since I apologized to anyone, for anything. But I am sorry. I’m sorry I tried to kill you when we first met. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you more. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
Viv raised her hand to Zanj’s brow. It trembled, unsure. She heard again that grim, honest voice, the cutting certainty: I will kill you. Zanj’s fury in the Empress’s chamber, the light and rage in her eyes when she looked at Viv and saw the Empress. Because they were the same.
She was afraid, but she had to try. She had done so much. She had broken a galaxy, in trying to save it. Surely she could do this.
Her fingers hooked around the crown, and pulled. And it did not come free.
She stood and gripped it with both hands; fear tightened in her chest, fear of what Zanj would do if she were free, fear of death, fear of failure, but still she lifted with her arms and back and legs. “Come on, damn you. Open.” Her fingers slipped. She sat down hard, stunned, half broken, and when she looked up she could not meet Zanj’s gaze. She looked away, and closed her eyes hard to keep their wet heat in.
“It’s okay.” Zanj’s voice was gravel-rough and tired, but also it was there, and Viv felt welling gratitude for that, in a moment when if she had the power she might have wished herself out of existence altogether. “Maybe it’s safer like this, for now. I almost broke you in half back there.”
Viv blinked tears from her eyes, and drew a ragged breath—then looked at Zanj crouched before her, unmoving, and at the stars behind. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Hey,” she said. “That makes two of us.”
“That makes two of us,” Viv echoed. They sat unknowing. The Citadel’s wall coruscated behind them. And in the silence a truth formed and turned beneath the surface of Viv’s mind. She felt it first as a stillness, then the swell of its rising, before the broad ribbed back emerged.
Then, when she could see the shape of the thing that breached her, she tried to form it into words. “We’ve been doing this all wrong. I’ve been doing this all wrong. We all worked on our own, even when we were together. I wanted to get home. You wanted revenge. Hong wanted knowledge, and he wanted to do his duty. Gray wanted his family. Xiara wanted the stars. We each used the others to get what we wanted for ourselves, and it all went wrong. But we’re all in this together, aren’t we? And if the Empress wins—if she peels my world, finds the power to break the Bleed, to win for good—all this goes away. For everyone.”
Zanj bowed her head, then raised it, so slow Viv didn’t at first realize it was a nod. “How do we stop her?”
“I’m still working on that part,” she said. “But we can’t do it alone.”
46
SOON, THIS STAR would die.
The fleet clouded near, and kept killing it.
Shardships and great cruisers, worldminds and sunkillers, they drank the star’s light and the heat of fusion from its core, hollowing as they sipped, shaping magnetic fields to funnel plasma columns up through space to waiting mouths. They still bore the carbon scars of ancient battle, but as they drank, breaches filled in their hull, synapses rewove in their minds. Viv could not see the Cloud, but as they approached the fleet Zanj told her of the shadow the fleet cast, filling the hyperdimensional night with three-thousand-year dreams, dragging in information, every meager advance in weapons patterning and science the galaxy had yielded in their silent millennia, and, too, the great art and gripping schlock and cooking shows and tritone mesosymphonies that rose, fell, rose again, surviving the empires that were their cradle. Waking, the ships fed.
Some smaller drones, slipskimmers, asteroid feeders, mistook the Fallen Star, sliding stealthmode from the Cloud, for a morsel, webbed it in their fields, gnawed it with nanocloud teeth.
Those teeth slipped off. Terawatt lasers bounced. Probes and mindweapons turned back on their sources and scattered them. Pickets roused their drowsy murderous minds; cruisers spun up solution modules. Gunports opened. Cloud decryption engines linked, engaged.
At last, rather than start a fight, Zanj told them her ship’s name, and her own.
More gunports opened. Constellations of engines blazed throughout the fleet: those vessels which had been built by things like humans, and as such had a distinct front that could be pointed toward something one might designate as an enemy, did so. Microdrones burned fast to escape the splash zone.
—Good idea, Viv said. She couldn’t speak, exactly, because her lungs were full of spaceship. That really got them to lay out the welcome mat.
—I’m not here to fight, Zanj told the fleet. I have a passenger. She wants to talk.
They received no answer—but neither did the fleet open fire. Ships drifted away, made a path.
At their shifting heart, greater than moons, its skin still the cutting green of fresh rice, dotted with mountains and ribbed with rivers, hung Groundswell.
They slipped around its immensity, in and out of the shadows of its tendrils and antennae. A fresh patch of puckered metal covered the wound the Star made so long ago. Lights guided them along the hull, and as they drew close the ship’s skin flowed and reshaped itself into a hatch just large enough for a human being. The Star matched velocity, twisted, and kissed the hatch.
—You don’t have to do this, Zanj said.
—Of course I do, Viv replied.
—You don’t have to do it alone, I mean. I can’t protect you from out here.
—You mean, you’d lose the fight?
—Don’t be silly. I just wouldn’t win in time.
The door waited.
Viv hung in space, unsure. This had been her idea, but now that she had come to this point, to this hatch, to this ship, the reality of it overwhelmed her, and she wanted to run. The fleet would be useful—necessary, even. And she remembered a kiss, the pressure of strong arms around her shoulders, the sad final giving up.
She stepped from the Star into Groundswell.
There followed her usual collapse, the first harsh heaving breath after the ship left her lungs, the shock as her organs settled into place. Her knees hurt; she’d hit them hard when she fell. With one hand on the wall, she found her feet again. Zanj stood outside the hatch, Star in hand, gold eyes glittering, mouth twisted, unsure.
The door slammed shut, then disappeared.
Viv stood in a long, level hallway, walls curving eggshell white and faintly luminous. She cast no shadow here. She found that funny. She cast no shadow here—but, in a way, this whole thing was her shadow. Her fault.
The hall ran straight before her until it vanished to a point.
She walked, and thought about her exes.
Her breakups, with one heartsick fucked-up hospitalizing freshman year exception, had been, for the most part, amicable. She’d been broken up with far more than she’d done the breaking, which she seldom mentioned to her friends, partly because it wasn’t any of their business, partly because she had no use for the kind of soppy sympathy which inevitably followed sharing that particular piece of information. She did not need any assurances she’d find someone someday, because she either would or wouldn’t, and either way, in the meantime, she wasn’t hurting for sex or companionship. She ate her ice cream and took her seven days plus or minus three of crying jags like a champ; with extensive interval training one year she’d managed to get the turnaround down to a weekend.
There was another reason she didn’t tell people: she didn’t like catering to their disbelief. Someone less secure than Viv would probably have found it flattering; Viv didn’t need anyone’s assurances that she was pretty or smart, and, god, she certainly didn’t need another reminder that she was rich. She understood the story, controlling as well as she could for the distorting effect of one’s narrative of one’s own life. It was remarkably consistent. Whatever words drew the tears, whatever last quarrel snapped the proverbial dromedary’s spine, the underlying logic was the same. And they knew it, too, the ones wise enough to know.
Viv walked her own path. She did not wait. She did not linger, or retrace her steps. Sometimes her path lay alongside another’s for a while. But she would never shape hers to them.
Shanda learned this in the months she’d battered herself against her, trying to make them work. Danika had always known it, but never consciously. Susan Cho understood at last when she marched away from her down Santa Monica Pier, chin high, fists balled, too proud to let Viv see her cry. And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter had known it, before she gave herself to the fleet.
The hall flowered into a vast chamber—no throne room, no space of empty awe or self-regard. An engine room, perhaps, or a heart. Multicolored ferrous fluids pulsed through veins and conduits. Fields of coruscating light whirled, interlocked: nanomachines, lesser versions of the great Grays of Grayframe, mating computations. The cables that were the chamber’s walls surged in pseudomuscular contraction. Thousands of conduits and arcs of light converged to a single node: metal like flesh or flesh like metal, each grown through the other, and, at their center a body she recognized, and burning eyes she’d once seen echo stars.
Viv’s feet left the ground. Fields caught her, bore her up. She thought of Zanj, a mile of ship away. She could have freed herself, maybe—the Groundswell was built on Imperial tech, like the rest of the galaxy. But if she fought free, she would only fall.
Burning eyes swept her, blinded her. A human shape, or something almost human, emerged from that node with a slippery sucking sound; she trailed cables and light like veils and a bridal train. The fire in those eyes focused, tightened, tamped, until Viv could bear to look at them—could bear to look at her.
There were still wheels in Xiara’s eyes, though the heat of their turning burned them white. Slick from Groundswell, adorned with power, she shimmered. Viv had never seen anything quite so beautiful, or anyone quite so not a person. She had left her to this. Xiara had wanted it—no. Chosen it. Because
she knew they could not walk together.
“I came back,” Viv said. This was such a bad idea. The woman she’d left might not be in there anymore. Her heart was spread through a fleet, her mind through millions of tons of body. What could Viv herself, one tiny meat-being, mean to someone who was this? “I was wrong. I’m sorry. I was selfish. I didn’t think about you—about anyone but myself. Nothing was real for me but what I wanted. But I’m trying to change.”
The ship churned. Wheels turned in Xiara’s eyes.
“Maybe you hate me for leaving, or for letting you leave. I understand. I’m not here to ask you to take me back. Though, um. I wouldn’t mind.” Still revolutions. No words. “But the Empress—she’s me. She built me as part of an experiment to change her own past, to make herself stronger. If it works, she’ll burn this universe from the heart out. Zanj and I can’t stop her alone. We need allies—all the puzzle pieces the Empress scattered around the galaxy. Gray’s broken, and we need to fix him. Hong’s imprisoned, and we need to free him. And we need you. If you’ll help us.” She swallowed.
It had been thirteen years since she last felt nervous around an ex. Granted, most of her exes couldn’t blow up planets.
Wheels and wheels, a face as perfect and expressionless as an uninspired angel—and behind those eyes, no woman but the fleet. She’d been wrong. Worse than wrong. The smile, the relief, the strength of arm, the slow workings of that painfully sincere mind, had vanished like a river into the sea. And Viv let it happen. She could have stopped, she could have stayed. Even if there was a Xiara in there somewhere, beneath the fleet, why would she greet Viv now with anything but scorn?
“Please,” she said. “Just be there. Even if you can’t help us, even if you don’t want to see me ever again—I had to see you. I had to know I hadn’t broken you. I’ve spent so long breaking everything else. Curse me if you want. Chain me. I left. I let you push me on my way, because I couldn’t let you mean something to me. I don’t let anyone touch me, or change me. I deserve this. But I’m still sorry.”
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