The Broken Heavens

by Kameron Hurley

  “You think you can live next to these people?” Zezili said, twisting at Yisaoh’s arm again. Yisaoh fell to her knees. “Send them all fucking back. Murder every last one of them. You can’t build a future next to fucking murderous–”

  “Like you?” Lilia said. “We can’t go back to what we were. We can’t keep doing this over and over again.”

  Zezili snarled at her. “I don’t have any interest in getting out of here alive either. You’re the one who called on me, remember? Because you needed a fucking brute. Don’t pretend your hands are ever going to be clean. You’re as bad as I am, and you know it.”

  Lilia straightened.

  Roh yelled something. A wink was opening on the other side of the room: Kirana’s people, most likely, trying to re-establish a connection here. The room groaned and trembled beneath her.

  Lilia closed her eyes and opened herself to the power of the satellites.

  The warm burst of power channeled through her; the orrery popped into existence, a dizzying array of orbs. So many choices…

  “You’re right,” Lilia said to Zezili. She held out her arm to Zezili. “We are alike. We’ll do this together.”

  “What?”

  “Roh, send her up here!”

  Zezili yelled as a wave of air twisted her away from Yisaoh and propelled her to the top of the pedestal. She landed next to Lilia and grabbed at Lilia for balance, nearly going over again.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Zezili said.

  “I don’t need the instructions,” Lilia said. “My mother gave them to me, and Kalinda.”

  “What?”

  Lilia pressed at Zezili’s upper belly. Zezili hissed and clutched at where the symbol lay twisted within her flesh.

  “It’s broken,” Lilia said. “Like the worlds. Like us. We have to put it back together.”

  Zezili followed Lilia’s gaze to the symbol in the floor, the one that neatly mirrored the one in her flesh. “Oh, fuck,” Zezili said, “fuck.”

  “If I try and put people back where they don’t belong,” Lilia said, “the game ends. Just like the game of spheres. Who knows why? Maybe it’s not allowed. Maybe it destroys worlds. Annihilates universes. You put the Tai Mora back, and who are we? We are them. And it’s true, what Saradyn said. You are from this world. I’m not. I need you to help me do this.”

  Zezili grimaced.

  The spheres continued spinning, their lacey orbits whipping out behind them like tails of smoke. Could she stand here forever, just waiting? No, no. If she closed her eyes and listened, she could hear Roh and Kadaan yelling as their defenses began to give way, just like the last time.

  Below her, Yisaoh was free, running across the great room to Kirana’s arms. If Lilia killed Kirana she would summon a future far worse than this one.

  Zezili pulled off her tunic. The silvery symbol beneath her flesh glowed faintly blue. “This is going to hurt,” Zezili said.

  She pulled a knife from her side and jabbed it into her belly, working it around the piece stuck in her flesh.

  Lilia felt an echo of the pain, a deep ache that helped her focus. She reached for the little green orb nearest her. It was real in her hand. It barely had weight at all, much like having a bird land on one’s palm: all softness and air, brittle bones, no mass. Such a small thing to hold, this ball that represented not only her own life, but the lives of all the Tai Mora and their allies, all at her mercy now, after so long. She didn’t know why that occurred to her, why it was this world, this small green orb, that felt so much like her home.

  Her eyes filled with tears, as Zezili tore the piece of the temple from her flesh and held it in her hand.

  Lilia remembered her mother. Her mother cut down by Kirana’s weapon. And her mother, again, fused with the mirror that was to bridge their worlds before Oma’s rise. Her mother had safeguarded her and protected her, tossed her into some other world so that she had the chance to live. She had done what Kirana had done; they were motivated by the same things, weren’t they? They loved their families. They wanted to live. It was the determination of every creature: those two things. To survive, to reproduce. Who was to say she would have done any differently, in Kirana’s place? She had been selfish, arrogant, since the worlds began to come together, and she had nearly destroyed everything.

  And isn’t that where she sat now, the power of life or death in her own hands? The terrible choice, to let them live here alongside the Dhai they murdered and enslaved or to cast them out to their dead world where they would all be consumed by fire? Two choices. The Dhai choice was to let them stay, to survive, but what then? Hope that they could live beside their oppressors? Those who murdered their kin? That was worse than death. The Dhai, her Dhai, did not deserve that. But the other choice was to be a Tai Mora, to do the very worst thing. The genocide of an entire race.

  Two choices, two choices.

  Shouting, close. Roh’s voice. “Hold them! Hold them!” The clash of weapons. More voices. She could not go back and do this again, not now. There was no way out, no way to buy more time.

  She had to make her choice.

  “Lilia?” Zezili said. “You hear me? Take it! Take the fucking thing!” She held the bloody trefoil with the tail in her hand. Her blood dripped on the dais beneath them.

  Don’t become them, Emlee had said. Lilia closed her eyes and saw the little girl cut in two by the seam Lilia had ordered drawn in the world. The dead she left in Tira’s Temple. She had done terrible things. She deserved this death, to cast herself and the people she had come from back to their rotting husk of a world. She had done all of this, everything, seeking this end. There was never any way back. She had pushed on, committing greater horrors, becoming all that she was fighting, so she could end it here.

  She opened his eyes. Took a deep breath. Infinite worlds purled out ahead of her, casting up and up; when she looked down, they spread low and long beneath her, too.

  She hefted the green sphere that was her life, the Tai Mora lives, and in her other hand she made a motion, like grasping for a hanging branch, and the whole map pivoted, rushed forward. If the Aaldian game of spheres was any indication, she had only one chance at this. If she chose poorly, it wasn’t just she who would die, but also everyone here. Roh and Anavha, Maralah and Kadaan, and Gian, whom she loved despite knowing it was a stupid compulsion.

  There were infinite worlds, and infinite choices. She had only to let herself see them.

  One choice. Choose, Li.

  Li.

  Light.

  “Lilia!” Zezili yelled. “Ah, fuck!” She slipped on her blood, nearly toppling from the pedestal.

  Lilia was rooted in place, transfixed by the orrery. There, curled at the center of a whirl of spheres, was a softly winking white world. White, like the martyr Faith Ahya.

  Choose.

  “Where will we go?” she murmured. Would the Tai Mora murder people there as they had here? Would there be any people at all? Who was she, to further break them apart? Divide them? Division had created this terrible cycle in the first place.

  They had been arguing all this time about whose was the right face, about which body belonged where. But they were all the same people, weren’t they? Broken apart by their foolhardy ancestors, using power they didn’t understand. They were all the same bodies, the same people. Just different choices.

  The realization made her lose her breath. They had broken it all apart. Someone needed to put it back together.

  They were nothing without each other.

  “Fly, fly, little bird,” she murmured. She released the green sphere and let it float back into its orbit.

  She slid to knees, painfully, and took the trefoil with the tail from Zezili’s slick hands. Lilia pressed the missing piece into the base of the pedestal. The light all around them intensified. Zezili screamed. A great wave of power took Lilia into its embrace, lifting her from the pedestal as if she weighed nothing. For one glorious moment, she felt light as air itself, without pa
in, without doubt.

  Suffused in the power of the combined satellites, an infinite number of endings and beginnings before her, every choice imaginable, she brought up her left hand in a long sweeping motion. The billions of worlds drew closer to her, skipping from their paths to collect around her in a great whirling mass. The light intensified again, sparking and hissing. One more move on the board, the last move.

  Worldbreaker, or Worldshaper?

  Lilia swept her right arm out and brought it toward her. The infinite worlds, infinite stars, infinite possibilities, collided.

  And she reset the game.

  49

  Roh saw her move the orrery: a long sweep of stars. No one else was watching. Kirana’s reinforcements broke his defensive wall so forcefully he lost his grasp on Para. The room seethed and buckled, tilting wildly beneath their feet as the temple slid off the sand bar and deeper into the sea. Water rushed in from massive cracks in the walls. Roared from the ceiling. They were going to drown in here.

  “Lilia, don’t!” Roh lurched toward her. She was going to murder the Tai Mora, murder herself.

  Lilia held the green piece aloft, and glanced over her shoulder. For the rest of his life, he would think about the expression he saw in her face: fear, triumph, resolution, defeat… All of them, and none.

  “Li!” He reached for her, fingers grasping, trying to make it across the distance as fast as his legs would carry him, breaking apart the misty worlds, his skin bathed in pinpricks of light.

  Li.

  Light.

  Zezili hung from the platform, screaming. The light suffusing the pedestal became nearly blinding. Lilia was lifted high in the air, hair streaming behind her.

  She released the sphere back into its orbit, and swung her left arm around, drawing all the smaller orbs up into a whirling mass above her head. The ground trembled beneath them. She stumbled, but did not fall. Raised her right hand, and pulled the larger set of spheres from their orbits as well.

  The misty worlds all collided above her.

  Light.

  Roh covered his eyes. The light was so powerful it overwhelmed. It pierced his consciousness even through his closed lids. Pierced him to the bone, like a physical force. But there was no boom. No rush. Just blazing light.

  Then… darkness. Water rushing up below him, carrying him. Saradyn shouting, grabbing for him. Roh called to Kadaan, trying to draw on Para, finding… nothing.

  Roh opened his eyes, but the light had been so intense that he was still blind. He blinked, reaching, swimming back toward the dais where Lilia had stood. His fingers met the lip of the dais, and as his vision returned, his sight confirmed what his fingers discovered – Lilia was no longer there.

  The great beast of the temple was tilting, tilting, collapsing under its own weight, sliding off the sandbar and back into the ocean whence it came.

  He swept his gaze across the room, now dim and dull, lit only by a ring of blue and green phosphorescence along the ceiling, the orrery only a brilliant memory. Others bobbed and gasped in the water all around him. Light pierced his vision again, light and pain in his head.

  He gasped. The sea rushed in from the crumbling wall, pushing him and the others across the cavern. Roh bobbed and splashed, forced against the far wall, which gave under the pressure.

  He was sucked out of the chamber and into the sea. Heaving, desperate, he tried to swim, but he was dizzy and overwhelmed. He vomited. His mind became clouded. Memories. Vertigo. Flashes of something, light – memory:

  He was a farmer in a field, married to Kihin. He nursed his mother Naori through the yellow pox. He died in Saiduan, cut through by Kadaan and torn apart by bears. He and Luna ran off together across the tundra and lived to be old people, settled alone along the far northern sea. His father barred him from going to Saiduan, and instead he died next to Kai Ahkio, fighting shadows in a clan square while the world burned around them.

  Split apart, he thought. They split us all apart.

  Lilia hadn’t murdered them.

  Lilia had pulled them all back together.

  Every single one of them.

  Roh tried to reach for Para – and found… nothing. Panic seized his heart. Para! He reached again, but could not even sense his star. Had it winked back out of existence? Was it descendant again? Who had an ascendant star?

  He was going to drown.

  Strong arms around him, moving him up, up, up. His lungs were near to bursting.

  I’m going to die, he thought. What a time to die.

  50

  Kirana splashed through the rising waters, screaming. That was how she became aware of herself. Cold, screaming. The taste of salt. A rush of memories overcame her, tangling in her mind like hopelessly knotted nets.

  She was cutting down a woman called Nava Sona. Murdering her coldly. Marrying her. She was a cobbler, like her mother, drowned early in the toxic rain that fell from the sky. Her brother was pulling her from a burning building, poor little Ahkio, his hands, his hands… poor Ahkio, whom she loved, whom she had to protect, because Oma was coming and he would not be prepared. He was too fragile for this world. She loved her country. She hated her country. She had no country, a refugee from some other lost star, stumbling into this world during the last two years of Oma’s rise.

  She was all of these things, and more, an infinite number of selves, of memories, of choices, all colliding painfully, overwhelmingly.

  The water filled the room, pushing her toward the far side of the cavern. People were missing – far more than could have been lost already. Zezili was gone, but there, there! Yisaoh!

  Kirana reached for her. Took her by the arm as she whirled past.

  “Yisaoh!” Kirana cried, and embraced her, but Yisaoh pulled away, her eyes so very black, gazing at her as if she were a stranger.

  “No, no,” Kirana said.

  Yisaoh punched her in the face.

  Kirana reeled back in the water, nose burst, bloody. The sea rushed in and pushed her under and out through the back wall of the great structure.

  She screamed under water, bubbles rising all around her. Kicking, up, up, what about her children? Would they know her for what she was? Who would they be? Which version? No, no, she knew who she was, didn’t she?

  Poor Ahkio, too soft, and her mother, too soft, and Nasaka, always scheming. Nasaka…

  No, I am not that woman! Kirana wanted to cry, but there was only the ocean around her, the sea. She flailed, bumping into a bit of detritus: a bit of wood already rising to the surface.

  She came up out of the water and gasped. Spit, choking on seawater. She splashed all around. There were others not far away, heading toward the sandbar. Her mind seethed with memories, hers and others, so many others. I murdered my brother. I murdered my country. I destroyed everything and everyone that mattered to me.

  “No!” Kirana screamed. “I’m not… I did this… I’m not that woman. I’m not a fucking monster, I’m not…”

  Another wave of memories overcame her. She lost her grip on the piece of wood, and splashed further away from the sandbar. She would go back, start over, go to Saiduan, where she had been queen, where she had married the Patron, where her children became gods…

  What life? In what world? In the memory of the worlds, of all her desperate choices: choices that she could no longer flee from.

  51

  Roh burst through the surface of the water, paddling madly. Waves rocked softly against a sandbar nearby, and he made for it as quickly as he could, terrified that the dissolution of the temple would pull him back under.

  “Roh! Roh!” Luna, just behind him, splashing. “I can’t! Roh!”

  He took hold of Luna, slipping an arm under hirs. “Kick!” he said. “The sandbar! Saradyn, help Luna too!”

  They gasped and splashed their way to the sandy rise. Roh vomited saltwater. Luna burst into tears. Roh did not ask what hodgepodge of memories Luna was struggling with. He could barely cope with his own.

  The
body of a woman, face down, floated nearby, and Saradyn splashed out to haul her in. It was Yisaoh. He pushed her over and smacked at her back. She coughed and heaved. Blinked up at him.

  “Roh?” she said.

  “You know me?”

  “Many of… a lot of me does. Does that… I can’t…”

  “She brought us back together,” Roh said. “It’s… I can’t describe it either.”

  “I’ve done terrible things,” Yisaoh said. “So many terrible things.”

  “Who…” he hesitated. Why ask her which or who she was? She was all of them, wasn’t she? Their Yisaoh, the one who had caught him on the stairs, and Kirana’s Yisaoh, and more besides. All and none.

  More stragglers made it to the sandbar, many weeping, some hollow-eyed and unresponsive, too shocked to speak, all stunned by whatever lives were warring for dominance in their heads.

  Kadaan and Maralah came up onto the beach, dragging Anavha with them. Anavha was crying, calling for Zezili and Natanial.

  “Has anyone seen Taigan?” Maralah asked.

  “No,” Roh said. “Lilia?”

  Maralah shook her head.

  Saradyn pointed.

  Roh turned, hoping to see Lilia, but it was Taigan, sloshing onto the sandbank, one hand pressed against his head. His beard was gone, and a great deal of his hair, burned or yanked out, Roh could not tell.

  “That was memorable,” Taigan said. He pulled his hand away from his head.

  “Taigan?” Roh said. “You’re… bleeding.”

  Taigan stared at the watery red tail of blood snaking down his hand. “I… indeed I am. Oh, that is interesting.” He brought up his hands and marveled at the fine cuts and scratches, which still marred his hands, bright and bleeding. “I may even have some bruises!” he cried. He squeezed a bit more blood from the wound on his hand, inspecting it with wonder. “Look at that. It’s not healing! How extraordinary.” He furrowed his brows. “Wait, how long should this last?”

  “For normal people?” Roh asked. “It depends on how deep it is.”

  “Oh my,” Taigan said. “My, my.”