"Traitor to the League!" he screeched at the halfling, and leapt.
His beak, Imogen noted in a daze, was not actually red, but black.
A shadow crossed the sun. Imogen looked skyward.
The air was full of zeppelins.
She picked herself up again, and ran.
* * *
She was halfway to Skull House when the bombs started falling. Strikers were pouring out from behind the barricades, flinging themselves down the slope. Some of them were on fire.
"Imogen!" A blue shape was waving to her from the crowd.
Imogen ran and threw herself into Kallia's cold embrace.
"Where are we going?" she shouted into the cuttlewoman's vestigial ear, over the thunder of the bombs.
"I don't know!" Kallia shouted back.
"Harbor," panted a lanky, potbellied 'quatch who had stopped, out of breath, bent double with his big gray hands on his hairy knees. "Turtle sub—to Coldseep Depths."
"Then let's go," Kallia said firmly. She took Imogen's arm with one hand and with the other grabbed the 'quatch's shoulder and pushed him downhill.
The incendiary caught them when they were still among the narrow alleys of the Ribs. It bounced from the roof of a metal shop and burst, scattering droplets of burning phosphorus jelly like devil's raindrops. Imogen dropped to the ground and rolled, batting at her clothes, smothering the flames with conjured sand.
When she came up, the whole alley was on fire. The 'quatch was nowhere to be seen, and Kallia—
Kallia lay on the pavement, unmoving, her clothes in tatters, her blue flesh blackened and steaming where she'd tried to douse the phosphorus with low-level water magic. The steam carried a smell of baking fish, and Imogen turned from her friend and vomited into the gutter.
"Hey," said Kallia weakly. "It's no big deal. I'll die and respawn in a minute."
Imogen wiped her mouth. "The cemetery's on the other side of the Spine," she said bitterly, sinking to the cobblestones. "Probably overrun with strikebreakers by now. You'll never make it to the harbor from there."
The flames on either side leapt to triple height as a great buffet of wind came from above, pressing Imogen down over Kallia's body.
"Lady Fairweather!" Redbeak folded his wings and landed at Imogen's side, one taloned hand outstretched. "The turtle sub surfaces! Make haste!"
Fucking role-players, Imogen thought.
"I'm not going anywhere without Kallia," she said.
"The cuttlewoman?" Redbeak frowned. "She is of the Legion. The terrapin and the cuttlemen are ancient enemies—"
Imogen leapt to her feet. Without conscious thought she struck the perroquet across the face, hard, an open-handed slap that left her hand stinging. Redbeak looked shocked.
"That hurt me more than it hurt you," Imogen said grimly. "Time to decide, airmaster: Are you a hero, or are you just playing a game?"
The perroquet's open beak snapped shut. He stared at Imogen for a long moment. Then, without a word, he bent and took Kallia in his feathered arms.
The turtle sub was under way
The turtle sub was under way, air-breathing strikers crowded into the iron-and-crystal gondola bolted to the great beast's shell, most of the water-breathers and amphibians clinging to the outside, a pod of high-level orcas from Icefin Bay circling farther out. There were guests among them, too, Imogen was sure. Confused role-players like Redbeak, or more casual players who'd decided the new factions of strikers and strikebreakers were more fun than the old ones of League and Legion.
For now. Until they found a new game to play.
The 'quatch bent over Kallia's body. Ghostly vines twined around his long furred arms, and the turtle sub's rust-and-seawater reek gave way briefly to an odor of pine boughs and cedarwood.
"I'm sorry I ran," he said quietly. "They burned Moonshadow Wood a few days ago. I don't like fire."
"Don't sweat it, bigfoot," Kallia said. "You're making it up now."
"My name's Black Oak," said the 'quatch.
"Is it?" The cuttlewoman levered herself up on one elbow and looked him in the eye. "Mine's Letitia May Harris."
Imogen's breath caught. The 'quatch stared. His hands stopped moving, and the ghost-vines faded.
"Go on," Kallia—Letitia—said quietly. "No one's in character any more."
"Andries van Wijk," the 'quatch said.
"Where are you from, Andries?" Letitia asked. "I'm from St. Louis."
"Antwerp," he said.
"That's in Europe, right?" said Letitia. The 'quatch nodded. "Never made it to Europe," the cuttlewoman said. She looked at Imogen. "What about you, girlfriend?"
Imogen—Yueying—drew a ragged breath.
"Peng Yueying," she said. "Pleased to meet you."
In Dragontongue it came out The hour of our meeting is as the moment when the first ray of warm sunlight strikes the nest of an auspicious egg. The ludicrous artifice of the phrase, the inane pretense of formality, the parody of etiquette—the insanity of the three of them, here, aping the manners of a culture that had never existed outside some long-dead writer's adolescent imagination—struck her suddenly with overwhelming force, and she had to shut her eyes tight against tears of rage.
There was a rustle of feathers as Redbeak stirred.
"Peng Yueying," the perroquet said.
"Yes." Yueying opened her eyes. Redbeak's own were staring at her owl-wide and golden out of the dark corner. "What are you going to do?" Yueying asked. "Report me to an A.D. for breaking character?" She laughed bitterly. "Good luck finding one."
"Peng Yueying," Redbeak repeated.
"We all know you're a parrot," Letitia snapped. "You don't have to prove it to us."
Redbeak ignored the cuttlewoman. To Yueying, he said: "I'm Yi Jin-myung."
Yueying stared at the perroquet. "The hell you are," she said. (In Dragontongue: Goblins and halflings take the hoard of the one who gives credence to it.)
"I am," said Redbeak.
"You're Yi Jin-myung," said Yueying. "You're Lady9!Blue."
"Wo shi ba," the perroquet said, in a barbarously accented Mandarin.
Yueying's Korean, a product of gaming podcasts and costume dramas rather than formal study, had never been fluent, and by now, so long unused, was little better than the perroquet's Mandarin.
"The Warleague All-Asia Classic, Yangon," she began, haltingly. "Before the final match. What 29^_^jade said to you—tell me."
"You offered a draw," Redbeak answered in the same language, much more fluently. "I refused."
Yueying's fists (her Imogen-fists, the fingers seeming suddenly too long and too thin, the skin suddenly too smooth and too pale) clenched, and in Mandarin she said: "We could have split the pot. You still would have gone home with a quarter million New Won."
"Not me," said Redbeak—or Yi Jin-myung, or Lady9!Blue. "My backers. My share was less than ten percent."
"That stake was everything I had," Yueying said. "Why do you think I sold myself to the Kingdom in the first place? To pay back the money I borrowed to enter that fucking tournament!" She slammed a delicate white Imogen-hand against the bulkhead. "And now look where I am!"
"Hey," said Letitia softly in Dragontongue. Her cool boneless fingers wrapped gently around Yueying's upper arm. "Hey, now. Don't let him rile you. We'll get through this."
Yueying realized Letitia had missed the whole exchange. "It's not his fault," she muttered in Dragontongue. Not her fault.
"I guess not," said Letitia, eyeing the perroquet, who had returned to his—her—feathered slump, eyes closed again. "I guess maybe all of us got to stick together, after all."
"Hey," said Black Oak, or van Wijk, from the forward porthole. "The orcas are gone."
"What?" said Yueying, and stood up. "Are you sure? Maybe we're just too deep."
"Darkvision," said the 'quatch, blinking his wide brown eyes. "They're not out there."
Yueying went to the porthole. "Shouldn't we be coming up on Coldseep by now anyway?"
she said.
A light was growing beyond the crystal of the port. Yueying saw the outlines of seamounts, black against silt-brown water. A school of something pale jetted past the porthole, blind eyes staring.
Then the turtle sub crested a ridge, and the iron deck pitched suddenly downward, as the porthole went magnesium white.
Coldseep Depths had never been beautiful. Like several of the Kingdom's areas it had been built by out-of-work theme park designers MoGuo had hired on the cheap, and despite the deep-sea setting, the overall effect (in coral, mother-of-pearl and green glass) had been of an extravagantly tasteless wedding cake constructed for the nuptials of an extravagantly spoiled princess.
But it hadn't—Yueying thought—been ugly enough to deserve this.
Five kilometres below the surface, the terrapin city was burning.
Van Wijk asked: "What is that?"
That was the source of the unquenchable flames: a black form half as large as the city itself squatting in the broken egg of the Deepcouncil Palace, some alien hybrid of ape and whale, its furred, barnacled hide crackling with white light. As the turtle sub rolled wildly in its frantic effort to avoid the thing, the beast opened a fanged, baleen-fringed mouth and bellowed a challenge that rumbled through the iron deck to rattle the portholes.
"Kurira, Queen of the Monsters," said Redbeak / Jin-myung. "Endgame boss for the next expansion."
"How do you know?" asked Yueying.
"I've seen the concept art," the perroquet said. "Someone must have kited it in from one of the unfinished areas—"
The Queen of the Monsters raised a great black fist and brought it down.
Yueying was drowning. There was fire, out beyond the broken crystal of the portholes, but the inside of the turtle sub was black. Something was on top of her, pinning her to the deck. There was no air left in her lungs and in a moment she was going to give into the Imogen-body's frantic demands and fill them with seawater.
Letitia was above her, struggling with her flexible cuttlewoman arms to lift whatever held Yueying down.
I don't need to move, Yueying wanted to say. I need to breathe.
Then there was another shape behind the cuttlewoman, enormous, hooded, broad-shouldered. Yueying squinted as a green-white light was kindled; and the looming shape became a mass of kelp and pale shell, and Yueying saw the broad, kindly face of the terrapin sea-shepherd that had spoken to her, under the Dragontown sun, during the second twink invasion.
"Peng Yueying," the terrapin said, leaning down, "I can take you away from all this."
Yes! Yueying tried to say. Take me home! Get me out! But when she opened her mouth nothing emerged, not even a bubble.
The terrapin smiled.
The bright light went out. In one great convulsive cough, Yueying's lungs filled with water.
Imogen Fairweather died.
Yueying woke in her own bed
Yueying woke in her own bed, a familiar tangle of sheets, quilts; hardness of pine slats through the thin IKEA mattress; gray-brown light from the living room windows, and the dust of a spring north wind in her nose and the back of her throat. She felt sore all over, an ache like nothing so much as the morning after the last time she'd tried to take up wushu again. How long ago?
She couldn't remember.
Couldn't remember much, in fact. Couldn't remember going to bed. Couldn't remember anything, really, though the scraps of an extraordinarily vivid dream were slipping away from her as she lay there, something about—
Yueying fumbled for her phone, but it wasn't on the bedside table where it should have been. She untangled herself from the quilts, swung herself out of bed—wincing as her bare feet (which felt suddenly foreign somehow, arches too flat, toes too stubby and spread too wide) touched the cold linoleum floor—and spent a panicked half-minute turning the room upside down, rummaging among half-familiar things none of which seemed to be in familiar places, before finally discovering the phone on top of the dresser, and tumbling with it gratefully back into bed.
She thumbed the phone to life and checked her messages. The two she was looking for were there.
[1] From: MoGuo Corporation Ltd.
Re: Lump sum payment in lieu of royalties. . .
[2] From: Shanghai Pudong Development Bank
Re: Restoration of credit privileges. . .
Yueying thumbed the phone off and lay back. She remembered it now, the Metro ride to Xujiahui, the MoGuo offices, the clinic waiting room with the view of the old redbrick Christian church. They must have doped her with something, put her under for the transfer. Or she'd had a fever, some secondary infection, her body's reaction delayed by the immunosuppressants they'd given her for the nano work. She'd have to make some ginseng tea when she got up. Later. . .
Eventually, she did get up; did shower, make tea, dress, go out. Shanghai was as busy and noisy as it had ever been, but there was an oddly disconnected quality to the roar of traffic and the jabber of conversation, as if the noise Yueying was hearing had been made on some other street, in some other Metro car.
Or perhaps the disconnection was on her end.
She took long walks through the city, fingering the clothes in Qi Pu market, watching children fly kites in People's Park, sinking into the brusque anonymity of the Metro crowds as if into a bath. Then home, to eat self-heating dumplings and watch Korean TV late into the night.
She went once to her old office. She thought she might be able to get her old job back—if she threw herself on Manager Lao's mercy, apologized for some of the more inflammatory things she'd said when she quit to go to Yangon. She'd been Lao's top gold farmer by a wide margin.
But when she came up from the Metro the building that had housed Lao's farm was gone, and the lot was hidden behind the plywood walls of yet another building site.
Yueying found it hard to care very much. She wasn't happy, exactly. But she had the idea, in the back of her mind, that things were better than they had been for a good long time.
When the doorbell rang
When the doorbell rang, Yueying was midway through The Great Jang-geum. She paused it, leaving Jang-geum (Lee Young-ae) just at the point of exposing all the nefarious plots of Lady Choi (Hong Ri-na), and fumbled for her slippers. Weeks (had it been weeks?) after coming back from the transfer clinic, and still she sometimes had trouble shaking the feeling that nothing in her apartment was quite where it should be, that nothing quite was what it should be. . .
She found her slippers, straightened her robe, went to the door. On the security screen she saw two. . . individuals.
One was a tall, skinny woman in her mid-thirties, hands jammed deep into the pockets of a dull gray raincoat, an unhappy expression on her long-jawed, vaguely familiar face.
The other was a chimpanzee. A cartoon chimpanzee, with a high forehead, disturbingly wide and innocent blue eyes behind Bakelite-rimmed glasses, the soft, thick brown coat of some animal kept for its fur. In Edwardian evening dress, with a black silk top hat on its head and white silk gloves on its hands and feet.
"Art students," Yueying muttered, annoyed. She'd spent a semester and a half at Donghua University's Raffles Design Institute before dropping out. The chimp look was a new one to her, but she'd seen stranger fads in cosmetic body modification come and go.
Into the intercom, she said: "Yes?" Her voice sounded strange and harsh in her ears. She realized that she couldn't remember the last time she'd spoken to another human being.
The chimp took off its hat and grinned a flat-toothed grin at the camera. The woman took her hands out of her pockets. In a tone-mangling foreign accent, she said:
"Peng Yueying?"
"Yes?" Yueying said again. "What do you want?"
On the intercom screen, the chimp's grin widened, and the bottom dropped out of the world.
Peng Yueying was standing in her apartment. The apartment had a volume, exclusive of cabinets, furniture, appliances and other objects, of 113.79715 cubic meters. Contained in that volume wer
e 3,058,298,410,222,254,169,827,540,514 molecules of air, of which 2,387,919,398,701,536,055,801,343,633 were nitrogen, 640,713,516,941,562,248,578,869,377 were oxygen, 28,442,175,215,066,963,779,396,126 were argon, and 1,223,319,360,408,890,166,793,137 were carbon dioxide.
That in addition to some 37,756,770,103,944,253,125,016 molecules of water, and a variety of particulate industrial pollutants which Yue-ying could have enumerated, but she was now slumped against the door, exerting on it a horizontal pressure of 4.797369 kilograms, which was in turn almost exactly balanced by the friction of her bare shins against the hall rug; that rug, however, being slowly overcome by shear forces, was sliding away from the door at a (transient) rate of 0.5791 millimeters per second, subject to an (again transient) acceleration of 0.9654 millimeters per second squared and a truly colossal jerk in excess of 2.007076 meters per second cubed—
She slipped, and hit her head.
"That was crude," someone, a woman, said in Korean.
"They think you're crude," said someone else (voice high, nasal, and male), "go technical. They think you're technical, go crude."
Yueying was lying on the floor of her apartment. Her head hurt. Nociceptor signals traveling through her paleospinothalamic tract were passing into her substantia gelatinosa at a rate of—
She forced the information away and struggled to sit up.
"Here." The woman knelt down next to Yueying, supporting her with an arm around her shoulders. Yueying looked up, into the face of—
—Yi Jin-myung, born Busan 11 December 2014, graduated Kyungnam College of Information and Technology March 2035, married Auckland 2039, confined Seoul National University Hospital (Bundang) since Daejeon disaster 2046, husband and daughter missing presumed dead; uploaded 2061. Six-time Warleague finalist as—
—Lady9!Blue.
A flood of memory roared through Yueying, not pushing in from the outside like the arbitrary facts that continued to assault her from every angle, but welling up from inside: Dragontown, the Kingdom, the twinks, the strikebreakers, the strike. Redbeak. Imogen. Kallia.
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