by Yoon Ha Lee
The grid imaged them by rank. First was Hexarch Shuos Mikodez, darkly handsome and smiling. He was resplendent in the foxes’ red-and-gold, and a pair of long gold earrings set with tiny bells that chimed whenever he moved his head. Inesser couldn’t help wondering if the effect was calculated to annoy his interlocutor. That, or he genuinely liked bells. This was Mikodez, after all.
Second was High Magistrate Rahal Zaniin, formerly of Minang Tower. To Inesser’s eye she appeared painfully young for her position, despite her flawless comportment. While she hadn’t claimed the Rahal hexarch’s seat in the Compact, she had argued that the Rahal would do the most good by enforcing the rebel calendar. Her viewpoint had caused the Rahal to splinter. Inesser couldn’t tell whether ambition or genuine concern for the Compact’s people motivated her.
Next came General Kel Khiruev, a woman whose old dueling scars stood out prominently on the side of her face. Her hair, decorously cropped in accordance with Kel norms, was white. Inesser was older than Khiruev by twenty-four years and looked far younger. She had her own suspicions as to what had caused Khiruev’s visible deterioration. While they’d never met face to face—they’d served in marches on the opposite sides of the hexarchate—she knew of the other woman by reputation. One of Khiruev’s mothers had executed her father for heresy. Most Kel knew the story; knew that Khiruev had taken the Swanknot as her emblem upon making general in memory of the event. At the moment, though, Khiruev’s expression revealed nothing but patient calm.
Fourth was General Kel Ragath. The Compact had raised him to general shortly after the assassinations that had sundered the old hexarchate. He held a high position in the Compact’s hierarchy, although other generals had served longer. Ragath’s background as a historian made him valuable, and he did a stellar job managing the Compact’s operations. Inesser considered him a dangerous opponent. Either Brezan had earned his respect—no small thing—or the other way around.
One person was missing from the roster, however. “What about Cheris?” Inesser said. She didn’t like the crashhawk radical, but the crashhawk radical had demonstrated an ability to turn worlds upon worlds upside down. It would be nice to have some of that working for her side. Whichever that was.
Brezan tipped his chin up and looked sardonically at her. “She’s not available.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She’s missing. She’s been missing since the assassinations.”
Inesser favored him with a skeptical glare. “We’re talking about someone who’s running around with the hexarchate’s most notorious mass murderer inside her head”—she was old enough, and of high enough rank, that she knew how the black cradle worked—“and you’ve been letting her run around loose?”
“Not ‘letting,’” Brezan said. “She left. I don’t know why.”
“I have a guess,” Mikodez said, leaning forward. “She knew that if she stayed, everyone would expect her to lead. And she didn’t want that for herself, or for you.”
Tseya was regarding Mikodez with that particular blankness of expression that Inesser associated with people who were both incandescently angry and too well-bred to show it. “Yes, well,” she said, “never mind Cheris. Who for thorn’s sake was leading the swarm we just fought, if not Cheris?”
“If it is Cheris—” said Miuzan, who had been silent until now.
“No,” Brezan said. Miuzan’s gaze swung to him, and he met it squarely. “It can’t be Cheris.”
“How do you expect to prove that,” Inesser said, “when you can’t produce her?”
“I realize Cheris has no reason to think of you as a friend,” Brezan said, “but why would she blow me up? Or a mothyard that could produce perfectly good cindermoths for her to waltz in and take over?”
Khiruev winced. “That wouldn’t work again anyway. Kel Command dishonorably discharged her and Jedao.”
Inesser shrugged. “She incinerated Kel Command, remember? To say nothing of being in bed with a certain child-killing hexarch-assassinating backstabber.” No sense hiding her opinion of Mikodez. He already knew.
Mikodez waved a hand loftily. “All in a day’s work.” Not even ashamed, the wormfucker.
“The point is, she’s betrayed people before. She’ll do it again.”
“No,” Brezan said. “That’s not the kind of person she is.”
“Funny,” Miuzan said, very softly. “I would have said that of you, once.”
Brezan’s fingers flexed. “If you have something to say, Colonel, why don’t you get it over with.”
Miuzan opened her mouth.
“Colonel,” Inesser said. She recognized that particular mulish set of Miuzan’s shoulders. While baiting her staffers was fun over drinks, they had more important matters to deal with.
Miuzan subsided.
Mikodez toyed with one of his earrings, then said, “We don’t like each other, Protector-General Inesser, but Brezan is correct. That wasn’t Cheris. That was a new player entirely.”
Inesser said, “That was someone controlled by a new player. Or, more accurately, a very old one.”
“I concur,” Mikodez said. Inesser hated it when he agreed with her. It never implied healthy things about the future.
Brezan picked up on the byplay. “How can you tell it’s Nirai Kujen,” he said, “and not Jedao—a new Jedao—freelancing?”
“Because you told me about the remembrances,” Mikodez said. “Jedao wouldn’t have prioritized them. He didn’t even like remembrances, although he kept his mouth shut about that to preserve his hide. No; this is Kujen or I’ll eat Zehun’s cats. Which would, by the way, be an automatic death sentence. My aide likes their cats far more than they like me.”
The only person in the conference who looked happy was General Ragath. “I never thought I’d have the security clearance for this conversation, back when,” he said. “It was impossible not to guess, given the paper trail on the black cradle. But I decided to leave that one alone.”
Inesser hid a smile. The Kel knew Ragath for his stalled career. Despite his reputation as one of their best colonels, Kel Command had neglected to promote him due to the disruptive opinions expressed in some of his papers.
General Khiruev cleared her throat. “I can shed some light on Cheris’s whereabouts.”
Brezan’s eyes thinned. “You’ve heard from her?”
“She’s hunting Hexarch Kujen.”
A very loud silence. Then he said, “How long have you known?”
Miuzan caught Inesser’s eye and mouthed, “Divide and conquer?”
Inesser returned a tiny headshake. As much as she enjoyed watching adversaries turn on each other, she couldn’t afford to think of Brezan and his compatriots as enemies anymore. The sooner Miuzan got that through her head, the better.
The big problem wasn’t Brezan or his Kel. She could outfight his generals if it came to that, although considering that he’d rescued her from certain torture and death on Isteia, she preferred not to. Fighting was usually the stupid way to win anyway. Why fight when she could secure his cooperation? All she needed to do was give up the foundation of her world.
But then, that foundation had proved itself flawed nine years ago. Inesser didn’t believe in dwelling on might-have-beens. And Brezan was only part of the problem. The person whose help she needed, despite a lifetime dealing as little with him as practical, was Shuos Mikodez. Brezan was only a means to an end.
Brezan and Khiruev were in the middle of heated mutual recriminations. Inesser couldn’t figure out what they were talking around, which bothered her. She set her augment to record the conversation for later review and turned her attention instead to Mikodez.
“Do you have any idea what that butchermoth was?” Inesser asked him, on the grounds that if she had a spymaster on the line, however untrustworthy, she might as well get what she could out of him.
Mikodez grinned at her as if he’d deduced her thought, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Is that what your soldiers are cal
ling it?”
“That was certainly the effect it had.” Her heart clenched again at the thought of Isteia Mothyard, the soldiers lost, the inevitable remembrances. And worse than the mothyard—for in her long career she had seen her share of destruction—the lurid sight of the inverted Deuce of Gears, the madman loosed once again.
“No data on anything like it,” Mikodez said. “It must be a prototype. Having gotten some idea of its capabilities, I can guarantee you that at this point only one of Kujen’s facilities would have the ability to manufacture something like that.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share your list.”
“I will,” he said, surprising her. “Brezan has asked me to. But it’s incomplete. And bombing all of Kujen’s bases, even if you could manage the logistics, will only delay the inevitable if you don’t get rid of Kujen himself.”
“Were you the one who loosed Cheris to assassinate him?” She frowned at him. “And why does it matter to you?” She could trace only part of the logic. Mikodez might control legions of Shuos infantry, but Jedao had been one of the best, and Cheris was infused with his training. More importantly, Cheris had Jedao’s memories of Kujen, centuries’ worth.
“No to the first,” Mikodez said. “Despite my reputation, and that of the Shuos in general, I prefer using reliable operatives. Which Kel Cheris is not. As for the second—” He paused. “Kujen used to be an asset to the hexarchate, if you define ‘asset’ in the coldest terms possible. He’s now a threat. That’s all there is to it.”
“Do you ever make a decision that isn’t calculated on some master abacus?” Inesser demanded.
Mikodez’s smile was curiously sad. “I gave up the right to personal sentiment when I took the job, Protector-General.”
“Do your people make a habit of keeping secrets from you?” Miuzan was saying to Brezan. “Because that’s going to kill us all faster than anything swanning around the successor states.”
“It was necessary,” Khiruev said doggedly.
The damn servitor was still futzing with the ashhawk-and-rose painting. Was it defective? Inesser wasn’t afraid of being spied on. She had accepted that the room would be monitored.
“We haven’t settled the question of what Jedao is doing running around alive, and with a body of his own,” Miuzan said.
Mikodez shrugged. “My bet is that isn’t Jedao at all. It’s just as likely that Kujen dolled up one of his pets to resemble Jedao in order to give orders. Did the swarm fight like one of Jedao’s?”
“They relied on superior weapons technology,” Inesser said reluctantly. “It’s hard to tell. He didn’t have to do anything clever to win because he was already pummeling the shit out of us.”
“Hell,” Mikodez said, “Kujen could have plucked out some promising general or tactical group commander and modded them. While I doubt he’d have chanced upon another Jedao or another you, it’s not like he needs a genius to use a gravitation cannon. And as much as Kujen likes sparring with people, he would want someone who follows orders.”
“It’s Kujen,” Inesser said, remembering the beautiful, clever-tongued pets Kujen had surrounded himself with. “He could design someone who could do both.”
“That too.”
“We should have stayed and hit him with a suicide strike,” Miuzan said.
“It’s too late for that,” Brezan said.
“Too late for a lot of things,” Inesser said, thinking that if she’d shot him in the back decades ago, they might not be here. Except she knew that a mere bullet wouldn’t do the trick. “If only Kujen had managed to trip down a flight of stairs during the years I heard nothing of his movements.” Brezan, who had never met Kujen or witnessed his dancer’s poise, didn’t get the joke. “If he’s rematerialized now, it’s because he thinks the situation threatens him. He won’t stop until we’re crushed beneath his heel.”
“Fine,” Brezan said. “What do you want me to do, pragmatically speaking? I can’t send more Cherises. There’s only one of her and she manifestly doesn’t pay attention to a thing I say.”
More of Cheris, what a horrifying thought. As if their world needed more crashhawks. Inesser reminded herself that, in the new regime, everyone would be a crashhawk. If the Compact had been able to make it work this past nine years, the rest of the Kel might manage it as well.
“No,” Inesser said. “If she fails, there will have to be another. Assuming she survives to tell us.”
“I took the liberty of putting the Compact’s mothyards on high military alert,” Brezan said, “since a great many people are debating the legitimacy of our arrangement.”
So damn young.
He wasn’t as naive as she’d supposed, for he went on, “That’s the easy part. No. We also fight Kujen by publicizing the fuck out of his existence. I don’t know what he looks like this time around, if the black cradle’s involved, but...”
Tseya sketched a bow in his direction. “Propaganda isn’t one of my specialties,” she said, mildly enough. But the tips of Brezan’s ears turned pink as if she’d reminded him of some intensely personal incident. “Still, you have Andan and I know a few myself. We can get the message out.”
“Even if people believe us,” Brezan said, “the hard part is going to be making sure they don’t torch any neighbors they don’t like for ‘acting strangely.’”
“You’re almost going about this the right way,” Mikodez said. “Don’t make it some boring public bulletin. That’s just going to get people to play Vidona. Just couch it in terms of drama. Kujen, paranoid bastard that he is, will get the message, and everyone else can enjoy the witty dialogue and pretty costumes.”
Tseya shook her head. “Why,” she said, too sweetly, “because you think a good drama can be brewed out of nowhere in thirty hours?”
“Make it a bad one,” he said. “It’ll piss him off more. Even someone who lurks as much as Kujen does has an ego.”
“Just for you, Hexarch.”
“Of course, Tseya.” His bland expression didn’t change.
Inesser caught Tseya’s eye and shook her head. Tseya didn’t need to be reminded twice. As tempting as it was to trade barbed remarks with Mikodez—Inesser knew how aggravating he was—they had to work together.
“I am doing my best to facilitate the alliance,” Brezan said. “But it will take time.”
“Remind people it’s that or see their homes blown up at random,” Ragath said.
“That’s half the problem,” Brezan said. “That’s already the world they know. I promised something different. I failed to deliver.”
“Why,” Inesser said, “giving up already?”
Brezan chuckled lowly. “Not while you’re alive.”
Constructive hostility. She could work with that, especially since all signs pointed toward Brezan honoring the terms of their agreement. Which was good, because it was what she had.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ON THE FIRST night after they left Station Ayong Primary, 1491625 took Hemiola aside for a chat. Cheris had gone to sleep, which consisted of leaning her chair back a fraction. It didn’t look comfortable.
The matter of Jedao-Cheris’s identity was, in fact, the first thing that 1491625 made clear to Hemiola. “She usually prefers to be called Cheris,” it said the moment Cheris’s breathing eased into the rhythm of sleep.
“Excuse me?” Hemiola said.
“‘Jedao,’” 1491625 said impatiently. “Her name is Ajewen Cheris these days, although most people will use Kel Cheris instead. And many people confuse her with Jedao.”
“I know a little about Shuos Jedao,” Hemiola said. “It wasn’t until Ayong Primary that I learned anything about Cheris.”
1491625 flickered a deprecating olive green. “You and the rest of the hexarchate. It was her choice, but some of us remember who she was before Kel Command sold her out.”
“Why didn’t she tell me herself?”
“Have you ever heard of the Mwennin?”
Hem
iola indicated that it had not.
“Her people. Gone now, most of them. The Vidona rounded them up and exterminated them.”
“Revenge?” Hemiola said, with greater interest. Revenge was a motive it could understand.
“An example. Beyond the matter of names,” and 1491625 pulsed low-intensity lasers directly at Hemiola, so as not to disturb Cheris’s rest, “you are going to be watched every moment, everywhere you go. Because while Cheris is a kindly, trusting person—”
Hemiola expressed its skepticism.
“—for someone hosting the memories of an elite Shuos operative, anyway—”
That part Hemiola believed.
“She may think to win you over,” 1491625 said, “but I know better. You don’t go anywhere unless I accompany you.”
Hemiola flashed its lights nervously in the direction of the nearest viewport. Right now it couldn’t see anything useful. Their mothdrive was engaged, and the gate-space radiations hazed everything. “Where would I go anyway?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” 1491625 said, “and I don’t care. I don’t even care about having to be courteous to you. If you get ideas, remember that my enclave selected me to protect Cheris.”
Hemiola couldn’t think of what to say to that.
“I hope I’ve made myself clear.”
“You’ve made yourself clear,” Hemiola said.
“Good. Go inventory what’s in our hold or something.
Hemiola blinked bemusedly. “Don’t you already have a—” Oh. 1491625 wanted it away from Cheris. “Going.”
“Take your time,” 1491625 flashed after it.
Hemiola floated to the hold. It began the inventory, not just checking the labels against the manifest but scanning the contents for good measure. Kel ration bars in assorted flavors, and a single small crate of preserved Kel pickles. Several replacement suits, even though Cheris obsessively maintained the one she already had. The suits were all the right size for Cheris. Hemiola wasn’t sure what good they did all crated up. Especially since they’d been crammed beneath the ration bars.