by Yoon Ha Lee
Shit. Just how fast-acting were Gwa-an duels, anyway? He missed the sensible kind with swords; his chances would have been much better. He hoped the symptoms wouldn’t be disabling, but then, the woman couldn’t possibly have had a chance to tailor the infectious agent to his system, and maybe the immunizations would keep him from falling over sick until he had found Meng and their crew.
How had he offended her, anyway? Had he gotten the word for “coat” wrong? Now that he thought about it, the word for “coat” differed from the word for “navel” only by its tones, and—hells and foxes, he’d messed up the tone sandhi, hadn’t he? He kept walking, hoping that she’d be content with getting him sick and wouldn’t call security on him.
At last he made it to the lifts. While stealing the medic’s uniform had also involved stealing their keycard, he preferred not to use it. Rather, he’d swapped the medic’s keycard for the loud woman’s. She had carried hers on a braided lanyard with a clip. It would do nicely if he had to garrote anyone in a hurry. The garrote wasn’t one of his specialties, but as his girlfriend the first year of Shuos Academy had always been telling him, it paid to keep your options open.
At least the lift’s controls were less perilous than figuring out how to correctly pronounce items of clothing. Jedao had by no means achieved reading fluency in Tlen Gwa, but the language had a wonderfully tidy writing system, with symbols representing syllables and odd little curlicue diacritics that changed what vowel you used. He had also theoretically memorized the numbers from 1 to 9,999. Fortunately, Du Station had fewer than 9,999 levels.
Two of the other people in the lift stared openly at Jedao. He fussed with his hair on the grounds that it would look like ordinary embarrassment and not Hello! I am a cross-dressing enemy agent, pleased to make your acquaintance. Come to that, Gwa-an women’s clothes were comfortable, and all the layers meant that he could, in principle, hide useful items like garrotes in them. He wondered if he could keep them as a souvenir. Start a fashion back home. He bet his mother would approve.
Intelligence had given him a good guess for where Meng and their crew might be held. At least, Jedao hoped that Du Station’s higher-ups hadn’t faked him out by stowing them in the lower-security cells. He was betting a lot on the guess that the Gwa-an were still in the process of interrogating the lot rather than executing them out of hand.
The layout wasn’t the hard part, but Jedao reflected on the mysteries of the Gwa Reality’s penal code. For example, prostitution was a major offense. They didn’t even fine the offenders, but sent them to remedial counseling, which surely cost the state money. In the heptarchate, they did the sensible thing by enforcing licenses for health and safety reasons and taxing the whole enterprise. On the other hand, the Gwa-an had a refreshingly casual attitude toward heresy. They believed that public debate about Poetics (their version of Doctrine) strengthened the polity. If you put forth that idea anywhere in the heptarchate, you could expect to get arrested.
So it was that Jedao headed for the cell blocks where one might find unlucky prostitutes and not the ones where overly enthusiastic heretics might be locked up overnight to cool it off. He kept attracting horrified looks and wondered if he’d done something offensive with his hair. Was it wrong to part it on the left, and if so, why hadn’t Haval warned him? How many ways could you get hair wrong anyway?
The Gwa-an also had peculiarly humanitarian ideas about the surroundings that offenders should be kept in. Level 37, where he expected to find Meng, abounded with fountains. Not cursory fountains, but glorious cascading arches of silvery water interspersed with elongated humanoid statues in various uncomfortable-looking poses. Teshet had mentioned that this had to do with Gwa-an notions of ritual purity.
While “security” was one of the words that Jedao had memorized, he did not read Tlen Gwa especially quickly, which made figuring out the signs a chore. At least the Gwa-an believed in signs, a boon to foreign infiltrators everywhere. Fortunately, the Gwa-an hadn’t made a secret of the Security office’s location, even if getting to it was complicated by the fact that the fountains had been rearranged since the last available intel and he preferred not to show up soaking wet. The fountains themselves formed a labyrinth and, upon inspection, it appeared that different portions could be turned on or off to change the labyrinth’s twisty little passages.
Unfortunately, the water’s splashing also made it difficult to hear people coming, and he had decided that creeping about would not only slow him down, but make him look more conspicuous, especially with that issue with his hair (or whatever it was that made people stare at him with such affront). He rounded a corner and almost crashed into a sentinel, going by Security’s spear-and-shield badge.
In retrospect, a simple collision might have worked out better. Instead, Jedao dropped immediately into a fighting stance, and the sentinel’s eyes narrowed. Dammit, Jedao thought, exasperated with himself, and this is why my handlers preferred me doing the sniper bits rather than the infiltration bits. Since he’d blown the opportunity to bluff his way past the sentinel, he swept the man’s feet out from under him and knocked him out. After the man was unconscious, Jedao stashed him behind one of the statues, taking care so the spray from the fountains wouldn’t interfere too much with his breathing. He had the distinct impression that “dead body” was much worse from a ritual purity standpoint than “merely unconscious,” if he had to negotiate with someone later.
He ran into no other sentinels on the way to the office, but as it so happened, a woman sentinel was leaving just as he got there. Jedao put on an expression he had learned from the scariest battlefield medic of his acquaintance, back when he’d been a lowly infantry captain, and marched straight up to Security. He didn’t need to be convincing for long, he just needed a moment’s hesitation.
By the time the sentinel figured out that the “medic” was anything but, Jedao had taken her gun and broken both her arms. “I want to talk to your leader,” he said, another of those useful canned phrases.
The sentinel left off swearing (he was sure it was swearing) and repeated the word for “leader” in an incredulous voice.
Whoops. Was he missing some conversational nuance? He tried the word for “superior officer,” to which the response was even more incredulous. Hey, Mom, Jedao thought, you know how you always said I should join the diplomatic corps on account of my always talking my way out of trouble as a kid? Were you ever wrong. I am the worst diplomat ever. Admittedly, maybe starting off by breaking the woman’s arms was where he’d gone wrong, but the sentinel didn’t sound upset about that. The Gwa-an were very confusing people.
After a crescendo of agitation (hers) and desperate rummaging about for people nouns (his), it emerged that the term he wanted was the one for “head priest.” Which was something the language lessons ought to have noted. He planned on dropping in on whoever had written the course and having a spirited talk with them.
Just as well that the word for “why” was more straightforward. The sentinel wanted to know why he wanted to talk to the head priest. He wanted to know why someone who’d had both her arms broken was more concerned with propriety (his best guess) than alerting the rest of the station that they had an intruder. He had other matters to attend to, though. Too bad he couldn’t recruit her for her sangfroid, but that was outside his purview.
What convinced the sentinel to comply, in the end, was not the threat of more violence, which he imagined would have been futile. Instead, he mentioned that he’d left one of her comrades unconscious amid the fountains and the man would need medical care. He liked the woman’s concern for her fellow sentinel.
Jedao and the sentinel walked together to the head priest’s office. The head priest came out. She had an extremely elaborate coiffure, held in place by multiple hairpins featuring elongated figures like the statues. She froze when Jedao pointed the gun at her, then said several phrases in what sounded like different languages.
“Mongrel language,” Jedao said in Tle
n Gwa, remembering what Haval had told him.
“What do you want?” the high priest said in awkward but comprehensible high language.
Jedao explained that he was here for Ahun Gerav, in case the priest only knew Meng by their cover name. “Release them and their crew, and this can end with minimal bloodshed.”
The priest wheezed. Jedao wondered if she was allergic to assassins. He’d never heard of such a thing, but he wasn’t under any illusions that he knew everything about Gwa-an immune systems. Then he realized she was laughing.
“Feel free to share,” Jedao said, very pleasantly. The sentinel was sweating.
The priest stopped laughing. “You’re too late,” she said. “You’re too late by thirteen years.”
Jedao did the math: eight years since he and Meng had graduated from Shuos Academy. Of course, the two of them had attended for the usual five years. “They’ve been a double agent since they were a cadet?”
The priest’s smile was just this side of smug.
Jedao knocked the sentinel unconscious and let her spill to the floor. The priest’s smile didn’t falter, which made him think less of her. Didn’t she care about her subordinate? If nothing else, he’d had a few concussions in his time (real ones) and they were no joke.
“The crew,” Jedao said.
“Gerav attempted to persuade them to turn coat as well,” the priest said. “When they were less than amenable, well—” She shrugged. “We had no further use for them.”
I will not forgive this, Jedao thought. “Take me to Gerav.”
She shrugged again. “Unfortunate for them,” she said. “But to be frank, I don’t value their life over my own.”
“How very pragmatic of you,” Jedao said.
She shut up and led the way.
DU STATION HAD provided Meng with a luxurious suite by heptarchate standards. The head priest bowed with an ironic smile as she opened the door for Jedao. He shoved her in and scanned the room.
The first thing he noticed was the overwhelming smell of—what was that smell? Jedao had thought he had reasonably cosmopolitan tastes, but the platters with their stacks of thin-sliced meat drowned in rich gravies and sauces almost made him gag. Who needed that much meat in their diet? The suite’s occupant seemed to agree, judging by how little the meat had been touched. And why wasn’t the meat cut into decently small pieces so as to make for easy eating? The bowls of succulent fruit were either for show or the suite’s occupant disliked fruit, too. The flatbreads, on the other hand, had been torn into. One, not entirely eaten, rested on a meat platter and was dissolving into the gravy. Several different-sized bottles were partly empty, and once he adjusted to all the meat, he could also detect the sweet reek of wine.
Most fascinatingly, instead of chopsticks and spoons, the various plates and platters sported two-tined forks (Haval had explained to him about forks) and knives. Maybe this was how they trained assassins. Jedao liked knives, although not as much as he liked guns. He wondered if he could persuade the Kel to import the custom. It would make for some lively high tables.
Meng glided out, resplendent in brocade Gwa-an robes, then gaped. Jedao wasn’t making any attempt to hide his gun.
“Foxfucking hounds,” Meng slurred as they sat down heavily, “you. Is that really you, Jedao?”
“You know each other?” the priest said.
Jedao ignored her question, although he kept her in his peripheral vision in case he needed to kill her or knock her out. “You graduated from Shuos Academy with high marks,” Jedao said. “You even married rich, the way you always talked about. Four beautiful kids. Why, Meng? Was it nothing more than a cover story?”
Meng reached for a fork. Jedao’s trigger finger shifted. Meng withdrew their hand.
“The Gwa-an paid stupendously well,” Meng said quietly. “It mattered a lot more, once. Of course, hiding the money was getting harder and harder. What good is money if you can’t spend it? And the Shuos were about to catch on anyway. So I had to run.”
“And your crew?”
Meng’s mouth twisted, but they met Jedao’s eyes steadfastly. “I didn’t want things to end the way they did.”
“Cold comfort to their families.”
“It’s done now,” Meng said, resigned. They looked at the largest platter of meat with sudden loathing. Jedao tensed, wondering if it was going to be flung at him, but all Meng did was shove it away from them. Some gravy slopped over the side.
Jedao smiled sardonically. “If you come home, you might at least get a decent bowl of rice instead of this weird bread stuff.”
“Jedao, if I come home, they’ll torture me for high treason, unless our heptarch’s policies have changed drastically. You can’t stop me from killing myself.”
“Rather than going home?” Jedao shrugged. Meng probably did have a suicide failsafe, although if they were serious they’d have used it already. He couldn’t imagine the Gwa-an would have neglected to provide them with one if the Shuos hadn’t.
Still, he wasn’t done. “If you do something so crass, I’m going to visit each one of your children personally. I’m going to take them out to a nice dinner with actual food that you eat with actual chopsticks and spoons. And I’m going to explain to them in exquisite technicolor detail how their Shuos parent is a traitor.”
Meng bit their lip.
More softly, Jedao said, “When did the happy family stop being a story and start being real?”
“I don’t know,” Meng said, wretched. “I can’t—do you know how my spouses would look at me if they found out that I’d been lying to them all this time? I wasn’t even particularly interested in other people’s kids when all this began. But watching them grow up—” They fell silent.
“I have to bring you back,” Jedao said. He remembered the staticky voice of the unnamed woman playing in Essier’s office, Meng’s crew, who’d tried and failed to get a warning out. She and her comrades deserved justice. But he also remembered all the gifts he’d sent to Meng’s children down the years, the occasional awkwardly written thank-you note. It wasn’t as if any good would be achieved by telling them the awful truth. “But I can pull a few strings. Make sure your family never finds out.”
Meng hesitated for a long moment. Then they nodded. “It’s fair. Better than fair.”
To the priest, Jedao said, “You’d better take us to the Moonsweet Blossom, assuming you haven’t disassembled it already.”
The priest’s mouth twisted. “You’re in luck.”
DU STATION HAD ensconced the Moonsweet Blossom in a bay on Level 62. The Gwa-an they passed gawped at them. The priest sailed past without giving any explanation. Jedao wondered whether the issue was his hair or some other inexplicable Gwa-an cultural foible.
“I hope you can pilot while drunk,” Jedao said to Meng.
Meng drew themself up to their full height. “I didn’t drink that much.”
Jedao had his doubts, but he would take his chances. “Get in.”
The priest’s sudden tension alerted him that she was about to try something. Jedao shoved Meng toward the trademoth, then grabbed the priest in an armlock. What was the point of putting a priest in charge of security if the priest couldn’t fight?
Jedao said to her, “You’re going to instruct your underlings to get the hell out of our way and open the airlock so we can leave.”
“And why would I do that?” the priest said.
He reached up and snatched out half her hairpins. Too bad he didn’t have a third hand; his grip on the gun was precarious enough as it stood. She growled, which he interpreted as “fuck you and all your little foxes.”
“I could get creative,” Jedao said.
“I was warned that the heptarchate was full of barbarians,” the priest said.
At least the incomprehensible Gwa-an fixation on hairstyles meant that he didn’t have to resort to more disagreeable threats, like shooting her subordinates in front of her. Given her reaction when he had knocked out the sentinel,
he wasn’t convinced that would faze her anyway. He adjusted his grip and forced her to the floor.
“Give the order,” he said. “If you don’t play any tricks, you’ll even get the hairpins back without my shoving them through your eardrums.” They were very nice hairpins, despite the creepiness of the elongated humanoid figures, and he bet they were real gold.
Since he had her facing the floor, the priest couldn’t glare at him. The venom in her voice was unmistakable, however. “As you require.” She started speaking in Tlen Gwa.
The workers in the area hurried to comply. Jedao had familiarized himself with the control systems of the airlock and was satisfied they weren’t doing anything underhanded. “Thank you,” he said, to which the priest hissed something venomous. He flung the hairpins away from him and let her go. She cried out at the sound of their clattering and scrambled after them with a devotion he reserved for weapons. Perhaps, to a Gwa-an priest, they were equivalent.
One of the workers, braver or more foolish than the others, reached for her own gun. Jedao shot her in the hand on the way up the hatch. It bought him enough time to get the rest of the way up the ramp and slam the hatch shut after him. Surely Meng couldn’t accuse him of showing off if they hadn’t seen the feat of marksmanship; and he hoped the worker would appreciate that he could just as easily have put a hole in her head.
The telltale rumble of the Blossom’s maneuver drive assured him that Meng, at least, was following directions. This boded well for their health. Jedao hurried forward, wondering how many more rounds the Gwa-an handgun contained, and started webbing himself into the gunner’s seat.
“You wouldn’t consider putting that thing away, would you?” Meng said. “It’s hard for me to think when I’m ready to piss myself.”
“If you think I’m the scariest person in your future, Meng, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“One, I don’t think you know yourself very well, and two, I liked you much better when we were on the same side.”