by Ada Harper
“End?” Sabine blinked. “That’s all? You had to have said more.”
Lyre shook her head. “Not in that report. It didn’t seem...necessary.”
“The next report then.”
Lyre made a disgruntled whine and slumped against the wall next to Sabine. “Is this it? This is my punishment? To recite every damned boring report I ever filed since I was fourteen? Couldn’t you just execute me instead?”
“The Empire doesn’t believe in the death penalty,” Sabine said. Besides, this was better. The amusement she felt was only partially sadistic. She made it a command. “What did you report about me?”
The strangled sound Lyre made was adorable. She wrinkled her nose and scrubbed her face before speaking to the ceiling. She recited off a few mechanical facts—the death of her mother, her father’s decline, before getting to descriptors. “Sabine de Corvus. Unremarkable but sensible heir of House Corvus. Pliable with no revolutionary thoughts of her own.” Lyre paused, as if flipping through her mental recall of intelligence. “Empress-Select Sabine will prove a stable if unremarkable figurehead. Beloved by the people. This agent does not recommend action. Destabilization would likely not go uncontested, as Corvus attained deep House ties during its rise to the throne. Empress-Select presents a beautiful figurehead, and her charms are pleasant but dull, leadership forecast to prove unambitious and unimaginative.”
Unambitious. When their childhood game had been plotting how they’d fix the world’s woes. Unimaginative, when Sabine had delighted Lyre with art and visions as bedtime stories. Dull, when Lyre had stared at her across the coronation floor like she’d swallowed the moon.
The wounded feeling clogged in Sabine’s throat began to melt into something softer, more overwhelming. She caught her breath. “You lied.”
“You’ve accused me of that already.”
“No.” A feeling fluttered in Sabine’s chest, lightening. “You lied about me.”
Lyre diverted her eyes. “Only some.” Her lips tilted into a bitter kind of smile. “You are beautiful.”
“Liar,” Sabine breathed, but her heart felt full as pieces clicked together. “You made me uninteresting to the Cloud Vault. Too dull to be a threat, too popular to be a target, too plodding to be a tool.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t going to hold up once anyone watched you for five minutes on the holo but...” Lyre shrugged.
She’d protected her. She’d betrayed her, make no confusion on that, spying against the Empire was betrayal, but in that own flawed, covert way, Lyre had protected her. It’d been the only way Lyre ever knew how.
“Why?” This time, Sabine couldn’t make her words carry any accusation. She felt dizzy, hurting, needing an answer to ground her, to make sense of the confusion of feelings fluttering in her throat. “Why keep reporting to them if you were going to lie?”
Lyre drew a breath. “Because?”
Sabine blinked. “Because? Come now. You never have less than five reasons and three contingency plans for doing anything.”
“I think if that were true, we wouldn’t be ankle deep in bilge water right now.”
“Lyre.”
Lyre sighed and looked for the answer on her hands before responding. “It was something I could keep. I owed everything to the Vault. I couldn’t keep my home, my name, anything. I couldn’t—I definitely couldn’t keep you. I kept reporting to feel like I would have anything left afterwards. But the way you were in private, the memories—I got to keep those. I wasn’t going to share ’em.”
There wasn’t a precise moment Sabine forgave Lyre. Just a moment when the need to love her outweighed the need to punish. She snatched Lyre’s hands away from her face and kissed her.
It was awkward, not the most graceful maneuver—and it irked Sabine to be less than graceful—but all that was forgotten feeling the warmth of Lyre’s lips again. Lyre froze, then made a soft sound, and something wet touched Sabine’s cheek. She pulled back, and Lyre blinked, eyes wet and wary.
“What was that for?”
“That was for telling the truth.” Sabine touched Lyre’s cheek, kissed her again. “And that’s for telling lies.”
A pink tongue danced out as Lyre licked her lips. Sabine studied her as her brow furrowed. “Are you feeling okay, Empress?”
She was still using her title. Sabine missed being “Sabs,” and yet she appreciated the distance. For now. She rose to her feet, did a slow stretch, and said the only thing that was true at the moment. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Chapter Eighteen
Frost made carapace shell slick. Lyre’s fingertips were already starting to go numb as she paused at the entrance of the engine core. It reminded her of the nautilus pattern that dotted her personal washroom at the Imperial estate. The shell had been engineered to clasp around the giant engine like a clam, supporting and sheltering the moss that fed off the ambient heat. Inside, it thankfully wasn’t a solid pack of moss. The natural curve of the nautilus created ridges the moss didn’t adhere to, allowing a small clear path to the heart of the engine.
It was an elegant design, Lyre thought, even as her cheeks tingled from the cold. Every step inside the casing was a steep drop of temperature. The moss clinging to the crevices were fat, happy clumps of inky fuzz, absorbing the engine’s heat and leaving the air freezing. Lyre was glad they wouldn’t have to spend much time here. It wouldn’t take long for body heat to be a precious commodity. It made her too aware of how Sabine grew closer to her back. The warmth of her breath raised a shock of gooseflesh along her neck. Lyre practically startled when Sabine laid a hand on her lower back to steady her.
“Don’t slip.” Sabine paused to wrinkle her nose at the black moss, passing judgment in a glance. Completely unaware of the way she was leaning into her space. Her hair still smelled like cinnamon soap, even down here.
It wasn’t the moss that was going to be the gods damned death of Lyre.
Though if she died here, she probably deserved it. Her only job had been to protect Sabine, and here she was leading her into the black instead. It seemed like a fitting burial, smothered in the moldy, frozen, rotten heart of the Cloud Vault. Lyre had never had the luxury of poetic justice, so instead she snubbed a tendril of moss into the ground and tapped her comm. “Having fun over there, kiddos?”
“Oodles!” Alais’s chirp was reliable, a banter Lyre could cling to. “The Cloud Vault’s genius truly is a marvel, to engineer an organic substance that is both slippery and sticky when applied directly to one’s garments! My compliments to the chef.”
“You can send us the laundry bill once we get off this boat.” Lyre wrinkled her nose before adding, “And Lady’s tits, do not eat anything in there.”
“Toxicity rates typically high in black-colored organics. Natural predators avoid it. Inadvisable to experiment further,” Cian rattled off helpfully in his monotone calm.
“I assume that means everyone’s in position,” Sabine said with that reedy, bladed tone she got with Cian.
“I left Cian and Kitra at the archive core. This engine has a port with a lovely view of the ground, by the way. And how very, very far away it is.”
“Spare me the whining. We’re not crashing the thing, we’re only going to make them work a little harder.” Lyre put no force behind it. She was relieved by Alais’s chatter. The altus woman had never met a life-threatening situation she couldn’t quip at. She freely offered ridiculousness like others would serve tea—an idle something to soothe the nerves and keep the hands busy. Lyre reached the final turn of the nautilus and gestured for Sabine to hang back. “You got the roots?”
“And they’re trying to eat through my coat, yes.”
“Sir Kitra has them,” Cian affirmed, and at the end of the line Lyre could hear a muffled cuss and what sounded like “It bit me.” She could sympathize.
Sabine had shifted in her sleep, curl
ing an arm around Lyre’s shoulder, fingers brushing possessively over her breast. It’d required merciless will—and a mild act of acrobatics—to drag herself away without waking Sabine. All to clamber back down the junction and find a few creeper vine tendrils not big enough to eat her yet. There was a satisfaction in ripping them out by the roots and watching them squirm, though. Lyre had never liked gardening. The shock of cold in the core had slowed them, but she could still feel the wormy roots squirming at the lining of her deepest pocket.
“And I’m still not clear on how this is supposed to work,” Alais added.
“What, the famous northern lords were too busy mining to teach you a little agriculture?” Lyre entertained herself by taunting as she climbed.
“You were hardly raised on a farm yourself.”
Sweet lady, Alais didn’t know how true that was. Though the Cloud Vault was a botanical project of a different sort. The moss was thicker here, leaving only a tiny toehold of walkway uncovered. Combined with joints numbed by the cold, she almost slipped twice. That was half of the reason she had asked Sabine to wait closer to the opening of the shell. A gunk-covered Empress would only complicate things.
The other half of the reason presented itself as Lyre finally wiggled past the final barrier. The shell’s inner chamber held the engine, and not much more. The moss was a black, suffocating presence around the ancient engine. It was the size of a tank, and ate up most of the space of the shell. The crawlspace between was only perhaps a meter of air, swirling with a strange current. Immense heat baked off the engine’s low, humming metal, searing the first twelve inches before being sapped away and turned to frosty chill by the moss. The constant battle between the two left the air strangely segmented, and as she climbed into the chamber, Lyre’s fingertips chapped with frost as the back of her neck sweltered.
“We’re conducting biowarfare 101 today, boys and girls and gentlethem.” Lyre paused to kick a small colony of growth out of an elbow of pipes. It gave her enough of a perch to conduct her task. “Introducing an invasive species to a closed environment.”
Cian sniffed. “Failing to arm priority flora populations with a predator repellant would be a critical oversight.”
“Nope. The creeper vines naturally don’t feed on the moss itself—it’s growing all over the ship after all. And the shell is too closed for vines to get in, normally. Nope, here’s where the terrorism part comes in, kiddos. You want to bring something down, you never attack something head-on, you target and break down the connective nobodies first.” Lyre swiped a daub of moss between her two fingers, rubbing it speculatively until the black fuzz crushed and revealed what she was looking for: starlit specks of tarnished silver. “You mighta noticed the engine creates its own mini-climate in here. Prime environment for lichen.”
A simultaneous knowing and confused sound grunted over the comms, presumably from Cian and Alais respectively. It was getting hot crouched on the pipe. Lyre hurried up her explanation. “This brand of lichen grows symbiotically with the moss in engine chambers. Harmless stuff. The moss stabilizes the lichen, the lichen helps in transmission of heat energy between moss outcroppings. Everywhere else on the flotilla, creeper vine treats lichen like abandoned organic matter.”
“And what happens if a colony of moss is destabilized by the sudden, violent dying out of its lichen counterpart?”
“Something exciting, let’s hope,” Lyre said. She could have said more, but Sabine was listening.
There was the second half of the reason Lyre had made Sabine wait outside. The engine core was a carefully balanced environment of extremes. The plasmic heat of the flotilla’s engine. The frost-gilded gases put off by the moss. Lyre was about to tip that balance in the engine’s favor. In nature, an invasive species would take time to propagate. It would be days, weeks, months even before a predatory plant overtook an existing ecosystem. But the Vault was the farthest thing from nature, despite its foliage. Creeper vines were engineered to strike fast. And gases didn’t tend to react well when heated too quickly.
Unless your definition of “well” included explosive, shrapnel-producing expansion.
She’d not precisely told Alais and the others about that part. She’d warned them, of course, to conduct this next part and get the hell out of the engine shell as quickly as possible. She just hadn’t said why. It was a judgment call she’d made often when leading the Imperial scouts. Give your people every warning and instruction necessary to do their job safely. Don’t fill their heads with frivolous or morbid what-ifs. Worrying about the fail states was what got you distracted and killed.
Declining to explain wasn’t a lie. Precisely.
Lyre lived by the precisely.
She was just fishing the creeper roots out of her pocket—they had somehow managed to entwine themselves with the lining—when she heard muted footfalls on the walkway. It was a slipping kind of sound. Like mud-caked formal shoes against shell. Lyre sighed. “Your Grace, I asked you to keep an eye on the front—”
“There is something,” Sabine said, with a soft preciseness that brought Lyre to her feet, “moving around outside the nautilus.”
It took some effort to leap down from the ducts quietly and without breaking her neck. “What did you see?”
“Nothing. I heard a...a click. Fast like a purr. A vibration. And metal creaked. I didn’t venture out to investigate. I suppose it could have just been the wind—”
“It wasn’t the wind. Or settling pipes.” That much, Lyre was sure. She knew every creak and groan of a centuries-old floating city. None of it vibrated like that.
A soft curse came over the comms. Kitra’s voice was low. “There’s something here too.”
“Nothing here. Yet,” Alais said.
“Act on the logical presumption there is,” Sabine said. A bit of Imperial order slid into her voice there. No wonder. Lyre could see the tension ratcheting up her shoulders. Sabine was the picture of calm as long as there was an audience to perform for. Lyre was glad she didn’t count.
“Wait here.” Lyre shoved the roots back into her pocket, ignoring one tendril’s weak attempt to nip at her thumb. Her shoes were getting caked with moss slime, so she slipped them off and silently felt her way back down the nautilus on bare feet. The cold shot straight through her toes, but she didn’t risk stepping outside. She stopped a few feet away from the opening and listened.
It was too dark to see. Something large moved between her and the dim glow of algae on the opposite wall. Her mind fell back on the word something because that was what it was. No discernible head, or perhaps multiple ones, thick not-quite solid bulbous growths dotting the outline indecipherably. A frill on its haunches caught with a flash of white. She heard the click Sabine mentioned, low and wet in a way that sent an alarm up Lyre’s spine. It moved out of the glow, fast. Very fast.
Lyre didn’t feel the cold in her feet anymore. It had spread through her brain. She backed away from the door, one numb foot behind the other. “New plan.”
“Lower your voice,” Kitra snapped before adding an uncertain: “Uh, ma’am.”
“Don’t bother. I don’t think these things hunt by sound.”
“What are they?” Alais asked.
“I don’t know, but I know what they’re not.”
There was a catalog of underworks critters that Lyre knew—functional, effectively designed creatures created for Vault maintenance. And those, while annoying and dangerous in their own way, were not malicious. Didn’t bother you unless you got in their way. Lyre knew how to work around that.
But since they’d descended this far, Lyre had begun to tally a whole other catalogue. Filled with creatures that weren’t designed. Creatures that were grown, mutated. Whatever origins and purpose the creature outside had once, it no longer drove it. It was hunting, like a wild animal.
Lyre rounded the curve of the shell tunnel and nearly ran into
a damned wolf. Lyre twisted to avoid tripping over Goji, and Sabine put out a hand to steady her. She was shivering. The fine formal dress of an Empress provided significantly less protection from the cold than Lyre’s military formal. But Sabine didn’t appear to notice the cold, her gaze roved over Lyre once as if assessing for damage.
“I thought I told you to stay back,” Lyre said.
A color unrelated to the frost in the air rose in Sabine’s cheeks. “The benefit of my position is sovereign discretion.”
“‘No one tells me to do anything.’” Lyre toyed with a smile before discarding it.
“Ideas, you said,” Alais prompted from the other end of the line, tired sounding.
“Keep your pants on,” Lyre grumbled, turning away from Sabine’s concern. “I only caught a glimpse, but I’ve seen those white fronds before. On a smaller scale. In labs. It’s heat-sensing.”
“Like the moss?” Kitra was still whispering, probably because it gave him the illusion of being hidden.
“With teeth. The moss absorbs and processes heat from the air. These things just use a kind of infrared sense to track prey in the dark.”
“Why would you make something like that, let alone dump it down the sewers?” Alais was aghast.
“Why not? It’s an excellent testing ground,” Cian mused. Oh dear sweet Lady, the Syn was getting ideas.
“Budget cuts.” Lyre shrugged even though they couldn’t see her. “The point is, I bet the engine cooling core is fucking with their ability to find us.”
“A minor inconvenience since we were just about to disable said cooling system.”
“We still are,” Sabine said in a way that brooked no argument.
It was a character flaw Lyre loved and hated in her empress. The more dire the peril, the more dangerous the circumstances, the more certain Sabine got in her moral rightness. Sabine’s idea of self-preservation was to protect her legacy, not herself. That was, Lyre had to suppose, what she kept the rest of them around for. “We couldn’t stay in here without freezing to death anyway. Do you have a clear shot out of the cold core to the tunnels, Kitra?”