“She broke them,” he said, simple as a slap. “That’s—them. All of them. My mother, my cousins. I can see their pieces. But they’re … gone.” He blinked. A diamond formed in the corner of his eye. “But they didn’t do anything. That was me. It was me!” he screamed up at the monster, and the monster roared in answer.
Viv remembered the Grayframe’s wedded lightning music, but she heard nothing in that roar but rage.
Zanj stepped forward, light as an offer, heavy as a grave, and drew the Star.
But Gray shook his head. “They’re mine,” he said. “They’re my family.” He sounded older than he’d ever been. “Go.”
“Gray—”
“Go!” With a cry he grew, and spread his arms, whirling fire and blades, a formless, pulsing will, the last child of a broken place.
He met the Grayframe in the sky as Viv and Zanj ran on.
70
THEY CLIMBED, BATTLE behind them and battle above, friends in-system and beyond, as green needles of light twisted in the meat of Viv’s world. Perhaps they’d lost already. Perhaps even now Xiara bled out in a shipwreck light-years distant. Perhaps the Empress had broken the singularity, perhaps the friends Viv had left sleeping on a seashore thousands of years ago were dead, Magda and Victor and her husband already melted into data for the Empress—for Viv—to extract.
But those were phantoms. The stairs beneath her feet were real. Zanj, by her side, was real. She looked over and caught her looking back. How long had they been climbing? Ever since Viv dragged Zanj from her prison; ever since Zanj caught Viv’s throat in her hand but did not kill her. How much longer would they climb?
As long as needed.
Together, they reached the top, and the Empress.
* * *
GRAY WRESTLED WITH his dead.
If he had been only himself, only the child cast out for his failures and left to drown in the deep between the stars, he would have died at once, crushed beneath the Grayframe’s bulk and might. But in the Mirrorfleet’s dueling ground he had taken thousands of his ancestors’ mindless hungry corpses into himself. He was a multitude now, though no less the Gray he’d been—stronger than any, ancient, and true.
Still the battle tore him; the Grayframe’s million million mites wrestled with his own, trapping them to shapes, freezing them with static or cold breath, locking them in webs that drained their plasm. The Grayframe changed shapes and so did he, each form an answer to the last: a hunter for a hare, a boar to skewer the hunter, a lion to take the boar, a crane to flee the lion, a snake to snare the crane, all at once, twenty changes at a time.
But beneath and above these transformations—fire to burn the tree, water to quench the fire, a tub to gather the water, a drill to bore through the tub—beneath their seeming chaos lay a simple logic, the terms of war between Gray and Gray.
Form is strength, and form is weakness. Dispersed, you are a breath, insubstantial and immortal. Concentrated, you have mass, direction, momentum, power. But any form you take may be answered by another skilled in changes. Of course, the same is true of the form they take to answer you—so draw them in, commit, disperse, re-form, devour. Unless they, expecting this, mislead you as to their commitment to their counter-form, and change shape to answer when you spring in for the kill. Unless you, in turn—and so on.
The closer you draw to victory, the nearer to death. Rationally, no one would ever fight such a battle, because no one could ever win. If two Grays had reason to fight, they should just circle each other, never take a form, never risk themselves. That had been his objection when his mother taught him, as she taught them all.
Ah, child, his mother said: If you can pass your life without fighting, do. If your problems can be solved with reason and argument, solve them. But you may find yourself with no choice but war. And when Grays fight, they are hungry: driven by fear and desire, for victory and the feast thereafter. Hunger is their curse. It drives them to jump, to push, to take forms they do not understand, to strike without elegance and shift wildly in defense. To win, master hunger. Stay formless even when you take form—and when you take form, let it be a form you’ve mastered so well you can dissolve from it to formlessness again.
Learn what your enemy wants, draw them out, and strike.
His mother had taught him that, and he fought his mother now. His siblings and his cousins had practiced with him, turned and tumbled with him, and he fought them, too. He had never learned their lessons. He never understood.
But he had learned from other masters since. He remembered Hong’s touch, his transformation. Form was empty. So, too, was self.
This monster the Empress had made in her rage was not a brother, a sister, a cousin. It was not his mother. But when their swarms mixed he smelled her. When some form-pair twisted halfway to existence, and their bodies rubbed together, when a claw of his caught its side, when its body snaked around his leg, he tasted his cousins. They were all here, in pieces, confused. Scattered cards of self, pages of a book torn free and tossed to the floor without any index or ordering principle save hunger.
He remembered pieces of this monster raising him. He remembered arms opened in homecoming, and Grayframe singing with thunder voices. He remembered how they wailed when the Empress cast him out, and the pain of knowing he’d not come home again.
He did this to them. He had made his choice, he had taken his form, he had saved Viv—and the world, more vicious than any Gray, took this form in response.
He owed his family more. He owed them everything.
He had to give something back.
* * *
THE EMPRESS STOOD robed in silk and light upon the platform, her shining arms spread and her radiant eyes cast up to where the singularity warped the sky. As her fingers moved, so did the crystal arms that circled the black hole, and cast the needles of light that pierced Viv’s home. Earthrise painted her a pearly blue, and even in that soft glow she looked severe, the tyrant in absolute control.
Viv recognized that expression from pictures of herself, taken when she sat coding, writing, rapt, at work.
“Empress,” Zanj said, and, when that produced no reaction: “Viv.”
“I wish you’d waited,” she said without looking. “A few more minutes. More or less. You know how those last minutes go, don’t you? Each minute gives you a few minutes more, and soon you’ve spent a day, or five, on the last few minutes.”
“I’ve been there,” Viv said. “You know I can’t let you do this.”
“You know what’s at stake. You’ve seen enough to work out the moral calculus yourself, even if you don’t trust me. I should have expected this was you. But even your old slow brain should be able to wrap itself around the issue. The Bleed eat complexity. They gnaw the Cloud. They cap the development of any species. They must be stopped. You know this. And you know that if you stood where I stand, you’d make the same choices. Because I’m here.”
“No,” Viv said. “I would have made better ones. We know that. Because that’s my world you’re destroying to find your answers.”
The Empress waved one hand as if shooing the objection from her ears; out in space, the probes linked to her hands went wild. “Thought processes are random and path-dependent. A difference of ion decay or environment yields a new breakthrough. You have no inherent virtue. Neither does your world. They have tools I need. That’s all.”
“Did you save Magda?” Viv asked. “Or did you let the code compile?”
* * *
AS THEY FOUGHT, Gray flickered faster from form to form, committing more to each exchange. He became a forest and the Grayframe a fire, immense and crackling, smoke billowing to the stars. He became a mountain, granite shoulders gathered above the lunar plain, and the Grayframe a gushing torrential river that wore the mountain until its cliff faces shattered. He raised himself up as a vast field of rice, drinking the water with his roots, and the Grayframe formed itself to farmers, gathering, cutting, threshing.
He becam
e one rice grain among the mounded thousands, a single hulled seed, all his mass compressed to form, immobile, silent, concealed, dense.
And quick as thought, the Grayframe became a rat and ate him.
* * *
THE EMPRESS’S RADIANCE dimmed. The light around her hands died. She turned from the apparatus, and fixed Viv with a dead expression, and she did not answer.
“That’s when you came for me,” Viv said. “That must have been the divergence point. You called me a disappointment, and you hurt her. When I hunted you down, you never asked me what I did right, what I discovered, what went differently, because you knew. You didn’t save her. You let them find her. You let the code compile. And this is where it got you. Alone, with all the power in the universe, and nothing on your side but fear, and the Bleed coming in.”
“Your friends,” the Empress said, “are fools. Their struggles, their goals, their dreams, are insignificant. I am so close. Whatever you think you know, whoever you think you are, you are only a distraction.”
She came for Viv in a blur, a blink, green light crackling around her fist.
And Zanj hit her.
* * *
THE GRAYFRAME MOLDED itself to rat-shape, pouring all its resources into the reality of the rat, its digestive acids and enzymes, its teeth to crush, its muscles to swallow.
Within his grain of rice, Gray came apart, and as he did, he reached for them.
Not for the Grayframe as a whole, but for the pieces scattered, jumbled, inside. For his cousins, his siblings, his mother—for the generations behind them, all those scraps of data, bits of identity without an index to bind them into selves.
He gave them memories. Stories. Instructions. This is how you fight. This is how you eat, how you live. How you serve, how you sing. This is how you mother; this is how you raise a child. These are colors. This, the taste of water. Here is how we touch, and how we play.
He gave them back. He gave them all back, the pieces of his mother, the pieces of his family, the frame he had used to make himself. And more: the ancestor bodies he had eaten, the memories of generations of Gray back to the first, parents of parents of parents, his family seen through other, older eyes. In their madness he told them stories of themselves. And those stories, wandering, found their partners in the Grayframe, other perspectives, memory fragments that in turn drew other fragments, bit by bit, stitch by stitch.
He faded, and around him, as the Grayframe sparked and fought and failed, new minds, old minds, began to bloom.
He had thought he might die. He half expected it. But he had grown beyond them when he left, when he traveled, when he loved and fought and died and lived again. He was more than what he gave them: he was Zanj, and Xiara, and Viv, and the sun on his back as he worked the fields of Refuge, and the cold of a cell. He was Hong of the Mirrorfaith. He could be them, when he lost all else.
Always know the shape you take—know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again.
What is a grain but a seed?
And from a seed, you can grow anything.
Like, say, a family.
* * *
THE EMPRESS FLEW back, but stopped her tumble in midair, skidding, leaving a trail of light. Zanj did not stop. She struck her, and the Empress blocked with one arm, and landed teeth bared at the platform’s edge. A spear formed in her hand, a fact of will with a long curved blade. “You didn’t learn the last time we tried this?”
“Crown’s off,” Zanj said. “Not just off, but broken. You have no hold over me.”
“You stupid child.” The Empress slid a stray hair back into place. “You’re still in the palm of my hand.”
She blurred toward Zanj, and spear met Star, and the crash rippled through the platform on which they stood. Zanj held the clinch for a second, grimacing, all over silver and blades and teeth, then sidestepped away, tumbled, landed, came up still between the Empress and Viv.
The Empress smirked, tossed her spear aside, and stretched out her fingers.
Zanj stiffened, as if held in an invisible grip.
“You don’t get it,” the Empress said. “None of you ever do. Age after age some hero rises up, thinking to best me with my tools. You invent some new variation, some twist, but every time you reach for the Cloud you find me already there. That space existed before me, but I claimed it. I built the infrastructure you use, the temple where you pray, the systems that power your devices, that let you cross space, and think. Your bodies are made with my machines. You don’t even call what you have implants anymore. They’re organs to you. But they answer to me.”
Zanj took one step forward. She roared with pain. Her limbs seemed to weigh tons. The silver shell around her peeled away, and Viv saw the bulges beneath her skin, against her bone, lines and ridges of machinery wedded to her body. She panted with the pain of it.
The Empress walked toward her, face composed in another expression Viv knew: the shallow, cheerful, half-compassionate head tilt of triumph she wore because it really fucked up losers when you looked like you didn’t have to work to beat them. Nothing ground glass and lemon in a wound quite like the sense that your defeat was effortless and inconsequential.
“You’ve been a distraction,” the Empress said, and formed her light into a scalpel. “And I’m bored now.” She drew near to Zanj’s trembling body, and reached for her throat with the blade.
Zanj, with a scream, with a sickening, tearing sound of burst flesh and chipping bone, lurched forward.
Zanj had built her body strong, her limbs swift, her bones hard, and reinforced them with machines and batteries and circuits to make her stronger, swifter, harder, fiercer. Now she left those added bits behind. Microlattices burst from skin, slit her with their departure, engines and enhancements tore away. Bloody, screaming, free, she threw herself upon the Empress, wrapped her arms and legs around her burning green, and held her fast. “Viv! Now!”
And Viv ran toward them.
She did not have time to think as she ran, but thoughts clustered around her anyway, filling time between her footfalls. She had been thinking for weeks, in captivity, in dreams, guarding her thoughts with other thoughts in case the Empress could hear her.
Back on the Empress’s ship the first time it all went wrong, when Zanj hung bloody in emerald bonds and Viv turned from home to save her, it had not occurred to her to wonder why the Empress refused to fight her hand to hand. When Zanj attacked the Empress, she’d fought back, but when Viv came for her she melted away into walls and floor and obsidian columns. The Empress only returned to physical form after she’d caught Viv in her crystal trap. Even then she’d kept her distance, save for that one searing touch. She’d ordered the Grayframe to kill Viv rather than eating her herself. Why?
She was not squeamish, this tyrant who’d grown from Vivian Liao. She’d thrust her hand into Viv’s chest—while Viv was stuck in her simulation, bound by her rules. But the Empress was old and wary of risk. And she feared Viv’s touch.
Because Viv could open any lock the Empress made. Including the Empress herself.
The Empress’s physical form was but a shadow of her true self within the Cloud, all green, all-seeing. That was where Viv would have to hold her down, and beat her.
Unless she was wrong. Unless she was about to die, and Zanj, too. But, hell, everyone had to die sometime.
The Empress burned Zanj’s arms, and snapped at her face with her teeth.
Viv jumped toward them. Toward her.
No, not toward—into her, and through, as if the Empress of a hundred thousand stars had no more substance than the surface of a pool of water.
In the great fluid Beyond, in the Cloud, she closed her arms and caught an immense form which, as she clutched it, twisted and reshaped into a body she knew—herself, real, braid-crowned and furious.
And into the water, into the green, they fell.
71
A MOUTH OPENED in Xiara’s sky.
; There had been nothing but the battle, Groundswell burning the manufactory as it produced wave after wave of new ships for its defense, the wrecked hulk of glaiveships and torches left behind, the Ornclan fleet joined as one in song. Then the lightning came, a cut across the sky. And, abruptly present in the local Cloud, all of a sudden there from some unguessed direction—a mass greater than suns, and, splitting space, the mouth.
It closed on the manufactory. Shields burst. Gossamer strands thick as continents collapsed. Sparks lit the manufactory’s surface—reactors going critical, matter siphons spewing neutrons in all directions. Ships fired, but their shots passed through emptiness, and then the ships themselves disappeared into the mouth.
Xiara knew the stories. None of them mentioned what she was supposed to do now.
And beneath her, the Cloud rippled, its logic straining as more Bleed passed beneath it, onward, in.
* * *
GRAY, SPRAWLED ON the lunar surface, felt the alarms in his bones. (Oh, so he had bones now. Interesting.) He couldn’t rise. Around him spread the cratered lunar surface, and in each pit a Grayframe puddle taking form. He reached for their names, but the names escaped him.
He should feel— They should do—
Something.
Scatter, that was the idea, scatter, spread complexity, survive. Drag the Bleed in all directions, confuse them. The Bleed could not see much of the physical world, only sensed it by its impingement on their domain. The beyond. The depths. There were strategies he could use against them, tricks that might make a difference—or not. Worth a try, if he could remember. If he could rise. If he could move at all.
Far above, Yannis and Nioh’s fire dance was almost done. The Empress’s many forms had pierced them, clad them in crystal, needling in for nerves and access, closing them down circuit by circuit. But the emerald mandalas around each twisted, broke, the statues suddenly maddened and unsure.
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