by Yoon Ha Lee
“If only I weren’t out of coolant, I’d—” Jong muttered some other incomprehensible thing after that.
In the helter-skelter swirl of blinking lights and god-whispers, Jong herself was transfigured. Not beautiful in the way of a court blossom but in the way of a gun: honed toward a single purpose. I knew then that I was doomed in another manner entirely. No romance between a fox and a human ever ended well. What could I do, after all? Persuade her to abandon her cataphract and run away with me into the forest, where I would feed her rabbits and squirrels? No; I would help her escape, then go my separate way.
Every time an alert sounded, every time a vibration thundered through the cataphract’s frame, I shivered. My tongue was bitten almost to bleeding. I could not remember the last time I had been this frightened.
You were right, Mother, I wanted to say. Better a small life in the woods, diminished though they were from the days before the great cities with their ugly high-rises, than the gnawing hunger that had driven me toward the humans and their beautiful clothes, their delicious shrimp crackers, their games of dice and yut and baduk. For the first time I understood that, as tempting as these things were, they came with a price: I could not obtain them without also entangling myself with human hearts, human quarrels, human loyalties.
A flicker at the edge of one of the screens caught my eye. “Behind us, to the right!” I said.
Jong made a complicated hooking motion with the joystick and the cataphract bent low. My vision swam. “Thank you,” she said.
“Tell me you have some plan beyond ‘keep running until everyone runs out of fuel,’“ I said.
She chuckled. “You don’t know thing one about how a cataphract works, do you? Nuclear core. Fuel isn’t the issue.”
I ignored that. Nuclear physics was not typically a fox specialty, although my mother had allowed that astrology was all right. “Why do they want you so badly?”
I had not expected Jong to answer me. But she said, “There’s no more point keeping it a secret. I deserted.”
“Why?” A boom just ahead of us made me clutch the armrests as we tilted dangerously.
“I had a falling out with my commander,” Jong said. Her voice was so tranquil that we might have been sitting side by side on a porch, sipping rice wine. Her hands moved; moved again. A roaring of fire, far off. “Just two left. In any case, my commander liked power. Our squad was sworn to protect the interim government, not—not to play games with the nation’s politics.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose any of this makes sense to you.”
“Why are you telling me now?” I said.
“Because you might die here with me, and it’s not as if you can give away our location any more. They know who I am. It only seems fair.”
Typically human reasoning, but I appreciated the sentiment. “What good does deserting do you?” I supposed she might know state secrets, at that. But who was she deserting to?
“I just need to get to—” She shook her head. “If I can get to refuge, especially with this machine more or less intact, I have information the loyalists can make use of.” She was scrutinizing the infrared scan as she spoke.
“The Abalone Throne means that much to you?”
Another alert went off. Jong shut it down. “I’m going to bust a limb at this rate,” she said. “The Throne? No. It’s outlived its usefulness.”
“You’re a parliamentarian, then.”
“Yes.”
This matter of monarchies and parliaments and factions was properly none of my business. All I had to do was keep my end of the bargain, and I could leave behind this vexing, heartbreaking woman and her passion for something as abstract as government.
Jong was about to add something to that when it happened. Afterwards I was only able to piece together fragments that didn’t fit together, like shards of a mirror dropped into a lake. A concussive blast. Being flung backwards, then sideways. A sudden, sharp pain in my side. (I’d broken a couple ribs, in spite of the restraints. But without them, the injuries would have been worse.) Jong’s sharp cry, truncated. The stink of panic.
The cataphract had stopped moving. The small gods roared. I moved my head; pain stabbed all the way through the back of my skull. “Jong?” I croaked.
Jong was breathing shallowly. Blood poured thickly from the cut on her face. I saw what had happened: the panel had flown out of my hands and struck her edge-on. The small gods had taken their payment, all right; mine hadn’t been enough. If only I had foreseen this—
“Fox,” Jong said in a weak voice.
Lights blinked on-off, on-off, in a crazed quilt. The cockpit looked like someone had upended a bucket full of unlucky constellations into it. “Jong,” I said. “Jong, are you all right?”
“My mission,” she said. Her eyes were too wide, shocky, the red-and-amber of the status lights pooling in the enormous pupils. I could smell the death on her, hear the frantic pounding of her heart as her body destroyed itself. Internal bleeding, and a lot of it. “Fox, you have to finish my mission. Unless you’re also a physician?”
“Shh,” I said. “Shh.” I had avoided eating people in the medical professions not out of a sense of ethics but because, in the older days, physicians tended to have a solid grounding in the kinds of magics that threatened shape-changing foxes.
“I got one of them,” she said. Her voice sounded more and more thready. “That leaves one, and of course they’ll have called for reinforcements. If they have anyone else to spare. You have to—”
I could have howled my frustration. “I’ll carry you.”
Under other circumstances, that grimace would have been a laugh. “I’m dying, fox, do you think I can’t tell?”
“I don’t know the things you know,” I said desperately. “Even if this metal monstrosity of yours can still run, I can’t pilot it for you.” It was getting hard to breathe; a foul, stinging vapor was leaking into the cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t toxic.
“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered.
“Wait,” I said, remembering; hating myself. “There’s a way.”
The sudden flare of hope in Jong’s eyes cut me.
“I can eat you,” I said. “I can take the things you know with me, and seek your friends. But it might be better simply to die.”
“Do it,” she said. “And hurry. I assume it doesn’t do you any good to eat a corpse, or your kind would have a reputation as grave-thieves.”
I didn’t squander time on apologies. I had already unbuckled the harness, despite the pain of the broken ribs. I flowed back into fox-shape, and I tore out her throat so she wouldn’t suffer as I devoured her liver.
* * *
The smoke in the cockpit thickened, thinned. When it was gone, a pale tiger watched me from the rear of the cockpit. It seemed impossible that she could fit; but the shadows stretched out into an infinite vast space to accommodate her, and she did. I recognized her. In a hundred stolen lifetimes I would never fail to recognize her.
Shivering, human, mouth full of blood-tang, I looked down. The magic had given me one last gift: I wore a cataphract pilot’s suit in fox colors, russet and black. Then I met the tiger’s gaze.
I had broken the oath I had sworn upon the tiger-sage’s blood. Of course she came to hunt me.
“I had to do it,” I said, and stumbled to my feet, prepared to fight. I did not expect to last long against a tiger-sage, but for Jong’s sake I had to try.
“There’s no ‘have to’ about anything,” the tiger said lazily. “Every death is a choice, little not-a-fox. At any step you could have turned aside. Now—” She fell silent.
I snatched up Jong’s knife. Now that I no longer had sharp teeth and claws, it would have to do.
“Don’t bother with that,” the tiger said. She had all her teeth, and wasn’t shy about displaying them in a ferocious grin. “No curse I could pronounce on you is more fitting than the one you have chosen for yourself.”
“It’s not a curse,” I sa
id quietly.
“I’ll come back in nine years’ time,” the tiger said, “and we can discuss it then. Good luck with your one-person revolution.”
“I needn’t fight it alone,” I said. “This is your home, too.”
The tiger seemed to consider it. “Not a bad thought,” she said, “but maps and boundaries and nationalism are for humans, not for tigers.”
“If you change your mind,” I said, “I’m sure you can find me, in nine years’ time or otherwise.”
“Indeed,” the tiger said. “Farewell, little not-a-fox.”
“Thank you,” I said, but she was gone already.
I secured Jong’s ruined body in the copilot’s seat I had vacated, so it wouldn’t flop about during maneuvers, and strapped myself in. The cataphract was damaged, but not so badly damaged that I still couldn’t make a run for it. It was time to finish Jong’s mission.
Copyright © 2016 Yoon Ha Lee
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Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Bonedrake’s Penance” in BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2. His first novel, Ninefox Gambit, is forthcoming from Solaris Books in June 2016. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators. Visit him online at www.yoonhalee.com.
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CALL AND ANSWER, PLANT AND HARVEST
by Cat Rambo
Cathay is a Chaos Mage and doesn’t care who knows it. Fear and envy are fine emotions to set someone spinning into a roil, and Cathay can sip from that cup as easily as any other, wandering through a crowd and watching people edge away.
She dresses sometimes in blue and other times in green or silver or any other color except black. Today her sleeves are sewn with opals and moonstones and within their glimmer here and there on the left sleeve, glitters another precious stone, set in no particular order, random as the stars. Her skirt and bodice are aluminum fish-scales, armored though she expects no fight. Her only weapon is her own considerable wit.
Cathay stumbled into Serendib through a one-time doorway, like so many others. She was walking in a tulgey wood one moment. Then her foot came down and she was in a city. It made her laugh with delight, the unpredictability of it all.
She soon learned that she had come to the best possible place for a Chaos mage, the city of Serendib, made up of odd pockets and uncomfortable niches from other dimensions, a collision of cultures and technologies and economies like no other anywhere.
When she arrived in the city, she had three seeds, a dusting of lint, and a peppermint candy in her pocket. She found an empty lot, precisely between a street where water magic ruled, in constant collision with the road made of fire and iron, so daily fierce sheets of steam arose, driving the delicate indoors and hissing furiously so it sounded as though a swarm of serpents was battling.
She popped the mint in her mouth despite its linty covering and dug a hole with her little finger, and then one with her thumb, and a third by staring at the dirt until it moved. Into each she dropped a seed, and covered it up, and sat down to wait, sucking on the candy and listening to the steam’s whispers.
It was not long till the first inquisitive sprout poked through the dirt, followed by a second, delicate frills of tender green uncurling like butterfly’s tongues.
Cathay waited for the third, but it was, by all appearances, still sulking underground. She shrugged; two were enough for now.
The vines that sprouted grew up and around and alongside each other, looping and re-looping till finally a house stood there, of middling size, and with many doors and few windows.
And there she lived. It was as good a place as any other, with pigeons and pixies murmuring in the roof gutters, with the steam-nourished ferns and fungi of the yard outside, with the city sky that roiled with auroras some days and zeppelins flitting among clouds on others and drift of snow or feathers on still others and—rare and precious—sometimes shone with an Easter egg pastel in blue or pink or green.
* * *
Today the air in this neighborhood is crisp with cold brine, although the actual sea the wind has blown over is parsecs away, in dimensions far from this one. Cathay comes through the fishmarket and admires the coiled heaps of octopi, whorled like a fruit-bat’s ear and the shimmering piles of sardines, the squat tubs of flaky lumps of pickled herring, and the vast thirty-foot shark that hangs suspended head-down from a vast gibbet.
As she passes, the shark twitches and snaps the left hand off the fishmonger measuring it, but that is all the Chaos that she sows this morning, for she is in a good mood, and her destination is the Gilded Cock, a gaming house where they play with a fresh pack of paper cards each hand and gamble chips of latticed disks of mother-of-pearl, light as dried fish-scales.
There the air smolders with the steam from fish-tea, and the game-players in the backroom are stoned and slack-eyed on sour smoke.
Though the neighborhood is from a city in another world, as often happens in Serendib, the clientele are a mix drawn from all over the city’s many corners. Back in that city, the neighborhood will have acquired a reputation as an odd one, an eerie one, where anything can happen. Sometimes boarded up, or guarded, or isolated with fences made of fire or glittering flakes of nannites or demonic bile.
Among the crowd, Cathay sees a smooth shoulder, a fall of rainbow hair, eyes of earth and amber. Mariposa.
Mariposa.
* * *
“You love to gamble, they say.” Mariposa leans on a windowsill. Cathay mirrors her position in another window for a second, then breaks the symmetry, shifting forward to cross one foot over the other.
“I do.”
Mariposa’s lips purse, her eyes squint. They hold a line of green in certain lights and moods, and right now that green thread shimmers, seems to wiggle like a seeking root.
“Come and prove it.”
* * *
“The object is to secure the jewel held in magnetic suspension in the center. Whoever gets it and returns to their starting platform is the victor. For the loser, there are two ways to opt to pay the penalty: through an electrical stimulation directly of the nerves or to be flogged with thorn branches, then healed through regrowth on the cellular level, which leaves no scars,” the assistant explains. “If the gem falls out of the arena, both lose.”
Cathay studies the silver cage, thirty feet across, that hangs over a pit of fire. Highbacked arena stands surround it. Faces press forward, shouting, booing, cheering the two lizard people wrestling in the cage, shaking it back and forth.
This is a high-tech quarter. It shows in the decor’s brushed duralite and plasteel lanterns. In the trays that the slim-hipped servers carry back and forth: long crystal rods, and flasks filled with layers of colored liquid, and hallucinogenic pyramids colored grape and tangerine and lemon.
“Such healing has been known to take its toll on the body,” Mariposa says from the sidelines where she watches.
Cathay glances at her. “You would prefer I take the penalty in lashes?”
“I would prefer you win.”
“Very well,” Cathay says.
* * *
No one can be graceful clambering into a hanging cage and onto a tiny platform, but Cathay consoles herself that the figure opposite her does it even more awkwardly. She studies it with bodily and psychic sight. A construct, earth-magic mixed with a touch of circuitry, strong but predictable.
Once in place it stares stolidly ahead. Its eyes roll, granite balls in rough-hewn sockets, its fingers like a blacksmith’s implements.
The crowd murmurs and hoots and chatters and calls out a thousand things.
The first chime sounds. On the third they are free to move.
The golem is dead still. Cathay inhales and sees a constellation of moves shimmering in the aftermath of the second chime
.
Now.
As the third note enters the air, she’s already in motion, riding the edge of the rules in a way she’s always been prone to, seeing the corruscating possibilities around her, flexing like origami.
The golem moves forward and rather than match its pattern, she goes sideways.
The cage shifts, tilting in unison with the crowd’s scream.
The stony feet grind on the metal surface, sliding, sparks sizzling in its wake. It hits the bars with a crash and the silver lengths go helplessly awry, spilling it out.
At the last moment, its hand closes like a shark’s jaws on the edge of the floor, clamps irrevocably closed.
The wild swing goes lurches further.
Cathay doesn’t care. She hasn’t even paused to look to see what’s happened, but has seized the gem. The jerk sends her in the opposite direction from her starting perch, though. She executes a few wild stork steps before falling on her ass, though with fist still firmly clenched around the gem.
Patterns sparkle spin dance in the air. They used to dizzy her to the point of blindness but now she knows them, knows how to dance in the spaces between them, tweak them to her own unpredictable desires.
The golem’s other hand comes up, latches onto the floor itself, fingers digging into the metal, which groans as it gives way.
Cathay could gawp like the rest of the crowd. She’s tempted to in fact, because something that dense shouldn’t be able to move that fast but on the other hand it is moving that fast. So she goes hand over hand along the bars, since the cage is nearly entirely on its edge.
Seeing what she is doing, the golem also moves sideways, setting things further atilt, making the bars judder and shudder in Cathay’s hands. She tries to move faster, going in a long arc that almost goes awry at an unexpected thud when the golem’s fist goes entirely through the metal of the floor.
It reaches for her ankle and the crowd’s screams go up in volume as though they’d been next door all this time and the door had just opened, yelling for blood...