The Faith of Beasts
Author: James S. A. Corey
Date: 2026-04-14 00:00:00+00:00
Description: James S. A. Corey's Expanse series has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 23 languages, establishing itself as a modern masterwork of science fiction. Now, the Hugo-award winning author returns with the second volume in their New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed space opera trilogy, The Captive’s War. "Corey is always one of the most engaging voices in the genre." —Adrian Tchaikovsky, bestselling author of Children of Time The monstrous Carryx empire was built by subjugation and war. Thousands of species are bound to their Sovran’s

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

Cover illustration by Daniel Dociu

Cover copyright © 2026 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Corey, James S. A. author

Title: The faith of beasts / James S. A. Corey.

Description: New York : Orbit, 2026. | Series: The captive’s war ; book two

Identifiers: LCCN 2025036298 | ISBN 9780316525671 hardcover | ISBN 9780316525633 ebook

Subjects: LCGFT: Space operas (Fiction) | Novels

Classification: LCC PS3603.O73429 F35 2026 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20251117

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025036298

ISBNs: 9780316525671 (hardcover), 9780316603744 (signed edition), 9780316525633 (ebook)

E3-20260127-JV-NF-ORI

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Copyright
4. Dedication

5. PART ONE: STRUCTURE

1. One
2. Two
3. Three
4. Four
5. Five
6. Six
7. Seven
8. Eight

6. PART TWO: ANTITHESIS

1. Nine
2. Ten
3. Eleven
4. Twelve
5. Thirteen
6. Fourteen
7. Fifteen

7. PART THREE: PRESSURE DRIVES CONVERGENCE

1. Sixteen
2. Seventeen
3. Eighteen
4. Nineteen
5. Twenty
6. Twenty-One

8. PART FOUR: DOGS AND WOLVES

1. Twenty-Two
2. Twenty-Three
3. Twenty-Four
4. Twenty-Five
5. Twenty-Six
6. Twenty-Seven

9. PART FIVE: KINDS OF LIFE

1. Twenty-Eight
2. Twenty-Nine
3. Thirty
4. Thirty-One
5. Thirty-Two

10. PART SIX: DUCKS AND RABBITS

1. Thirty-Three
2. Thirty-Four
3. Thirty-Five
4. Thirty-Six
5. Thirty-Seven

11. CODA: THE BLUE ROOM
12. Acknowledgments
13. Discover More
14. Also by James S. A. Corey

1. Cover

2. Table of Contents

Page List
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PART ONE

STRUCTURE

The world grew sick.

The people saw it in the rotting fields of newly sown crops, they smelled it on the fish they pulled into their canoes dying and covered in sores, and they heard it in the hollow words of their elders and ancestors which had ceased to carry meaning or solace. In every mind and every heart, a single truth appeared as if each heart was the first to feel it and each mind the first to put it in words: Their home was dying.

Grief came and it smothered the fields. Rage came and it drove away the fish. Doubt came and it silenced the voices that offered wisdom. All across the nations a great hopelessness grew, for no one in the lands saw a future beyond the sickness and rot.

Except in one village at the foot of a great mountain, there was a boy whose name was Ke. And Ke looked up at the night, and the brightest light was not a star, but the twin world that was made when the Great Heron split the sky. The light had been known by another name, but Ke saw it and he gave it a new name: Anjiin.

—From Myths of Origin: Field Notes and Analysis, Uuya Tomos, editor.

One

From the archive entry of the regulator-librarian, first among servants of the Sovran:

… It is the Sovran’s will that those places in which the war against the deathless has opened new territory be investigated using tools and perspectives likely to yield new insight. In particular, the unexplored systems spinward of the fifth body…

From the archive entry of the monitor-librarian of the bodies of knowledge and memory:

… eighty thousand more. Locations where the war against the deathless opened previously unexplored territory will be identified and additional exploratory and information-gathering assets routed there. Deep-resonance information from the nova at…

From the archive entry of the endeavor-librarian of exploratory projects:

… eighth dactyl of the limb. Information-gathering assets will be identified and mobilized with priority given to equipment, animals, and combinations with potential to yield novel information from tactical and physical analyses. These will be delivered to…

From the archive entry of the supervisor-librarian of animal assets:

… with respect to their continued population levels. Animals with sensory and cognitive potential likely to yield novel information will be grouped: [Group 1: aqueous, high acidity, silicate/carbon] [Group 2: terrestrial, oxygen-tolerant, carbon] [Group 3: terrestrial, anaerobic, silicate/carbon] [Group 4:…

From the archive entry of the keeper-librarian of provisional moieties:

… have been underperforming and will be culled. Their assets will be reallocated to the Manacat of Paol, Red Sybillie of Soun, and Human of Anjiin moieties. Additionally, Manacat, Red Sybillie, and Human moieties are to identify individual and small-sample groups for field use and ensure sufficient supply of…

Anjiin had been home to four and a half billion people. The Carryx had taken a little under four thousand of them back to serve in the world-palace.

One in seven died in the crossing or from illnesses and accidents after arrival. Once humanity had proven its worth in the eyes of the empire, the groups—and sometimes even isolated individuals—scattered in the first days of their captivity were brought back together like a lost family finding itself in the wilderness, except for the almost five hundred people who were set apart and sent away on tasks that the Carryx alone understood.

The new space they now inhabited was like a vast single building dedicated to the human hive, simultaneously more authentic and deeply changed. The gaps in Carryx understanding of humans had narrowed. Bathrooms now had dispensers for the red cleansing gel instead of every shower beginning with it. The mysteries of hair cutting and shaving, trimming nails and dealing with menstruation were accommodated. The unspoken indignities of human life were a degree more dignified.

In exchange, the proportions of the passageways had become wider, the walls canted slightly in, the air had taken on a pungent smell like resin and salt. The odd scent was everywhere, permeated everything, and so became unremarkable. People only noticed it when they returned from travel out in the common areas of the world-palace or after spending time in the little garden at the top of the habitat where the breeze was cool and thin, like the air on a mountaintop. And the view was breathtaking.

To the east, two huge arcs rose up from the planet’s surface below, curving up beyond the atmosphere. Lights dotted their sides—decorative, purposeful, or just the gleam of a million windows. Below them, the dark forms of other ziggurats rose out of the clouds and stretched off to the distant horizon.

The garden itself was smaller than the quad outside Dafyd’s apartment on Anjiin had been. A single tree with deep purple-brown bark and thick, leathery leaves, a bed of wild mint, and a fountain of black metal and pale stone that rose to Dafyd’s waist if he was standing, its flowing water a constant mutter. It astounded him that something so modest could feel like luxury.

The little Sinen, looking like the cross of goat and cuttlefish, finished its announcement and left him pressing his thumbs against his eyelids. His headache didn’t diminish. He heard Jellit’s footsteps coming up the stairway and didn’t look up.

“Something wrong?” the other man asked.

“Another summons from my lord and master,” Dafyd said. “Ekur wants to talk about something.”

“More alterations in our duties and responsibilities?”

“I’ll know when I get there,” Dafyd said, and hauled himself up. “Anything I should know from the visualization lab?”

“Nothing that’s not in the report,” Jellit said. He seemed on the edge of saying more, but didn’t, and Dafyd went down the wide stairway into the body of the moiety without him. The Sinen clerk followed.

Campar was gone on some mysterious mission for the Carryx. So was Rickar. And Jessyn. But so far as Dafyd knew they were still alive, wherever they’d been sent. Nöl, Synnia, Else, and Irinna were all dead. Of the group Dafyd had known on Anjiin, the only ones around him now were Tonner, who hated him, and Jellit, who had gone from an almost-enemy to Dafyd’s accomplice in exposing the human rebellion against the Carryx. They were now joined by the blood on their hands.

To everyone who hadn’t known him before, Dafyd was the voice of the Carryx. The man to speak to when something was needed, and the conduit for demands from the empire. The high priest interceding between his people and their godlike masters.

He stopped at his room. Papers and notes were in piles all through the place with the lists of every name in the human population, who they had been before the Carryx invasion, and what they were doing now. What they wanted. What they needed. He took half a dozen pages with the notes he’d prepared.

The report he needed most was still missing. Of course it was.

“I have to stop by the labs,” Dafyd said to the Sinen overseer. “Tonner was supposed to give me an update. It’s not here.”

The little box he wore at his chest made a series of wet coughs, and the Sinen replied with a small trill and sigh. The voice that came from the box at its chest was impassive. “If you do, you do.”

It wasn’t permission, and so it was half a threat. The tension at his temples felt like he was wearing an invisible crown as he went back out to the common corridor and headed down.

The promotion of the human moiety had carried in a wave of equipment and material even as it left any of the familiar human designs behind. The tanks and refrigerators, incubators and protein assays, spectrometers and pseudo-lens microscopy in the new labs were the best designs of the Carryx empire, the genius and insights of a thousand other species. The machines reminded Dafyd of the contents of some exotic tide pool, taken out and laid in order by a curious child. Some of the objects were grotesque, some were beautiful, and a few defied comprehension.

Tonner’s new second was a tall, thin man named Brun with dark hair and an almost comically prominent larynx. In a previous life, he’d been the leader of one of the most successful chemical manufacturing cooperatives on Anjiin. Now he was standing with half a dozen of Tonner’s new team, considering what looked like the segmented back of a crayfish the size of a table. Brun’s eyes lit up when he saw Dafyd.

“It’s a static centrifuge,” the tall man said with a grin. “Can you beat that?”

Where’s Tonner? was in the front of Dafyd’s mind, but A static what? came out of his mouth.

“I know,” Brun said. “You tell the little half-mind thing what acceleration you want and for how long, and it generates the g-force without spinning. I don’t know how it even does that, but this thing can do specific gravity control like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a kicker.”

“Where’s Tonner?”

“The legacy labs,” Brun said. “He said he’d be back after midday, but you know how he gets.”

Dafyd turned toward the common areas, the Sinen at his heels. He walked a little faster.

When they’d first come, the cathedral had been a circle of wonders and terrors—a crossroads of alien bodies with the power to overwhelm. The deep tectonic strangeness had been enough to feel like annihilation. Now Dafyd walked around weird almost-crabs the size of dogs without thinking. The luminescent blue gnats so small they seemed like a living light meant that he shouldn’t breathe in as he passed through them to keep from sucking one into his throat. The Phylarchs of Astrdeim with their glowing eyes and flickering joints lumbered by, as familiar as buses and bicycles had once been. The Eddentic of Lof swirled in the high air, the Oumenti and Soun clicked to one another in the low. Each of them had a place in the Carryx world, some function they fulfilled for their masters. The fact that Dafyd had no idea what barely registered with him anymore. His mind building walls between things he needed to know and things he could safely ignore.

He threaded his way across the wide public square of their shared moieties and cut across to the wall with the lab annex they had taken from the Night Drinkers, the little hallway with its high slate bench and recognizable equipment. The glass cubes that had housed the berries and the not-turtles were empty. That project was over, and the next ones had begun.

The time since Anjiin had diminished Tonner Freis. It was more than physical. Before their subjugation, Tonner had been—at least in the moment—the most celebrated researcher on the planet. His prematurely gray hair had been a contrast with his youth and vigor then. Now there was a harshness to his face. It wasn’t age, but it mimicked it. He leaned against the old protein assay. The fingers of his nearly-healed broken arm poked out of their splint and rubbed together like they were trying to find something. When he saw Dafyd, he shook his head.

“The new lab machines are a mistake,” Tonner said instead of hello. “We need to get to work. Work. Not spend half a year figuring out the controls on a bunch of new equipment. Institutional knowledge is a valuable thing. You can’t just throw it all out because the cockroach kings decided to give you some pretty toys.”

The translator on the Sinen’s chest burbled Tonner’s words at it. Dafyd flinched, then patted the air in warning. This thing is listening. Calm down. “That wasn’t my decision.”

“I thought it was all your decision,” Tonner spat back at him. “Aren’t you the boss around here?”

“You know I’m not,” Dafyd said.

Tonner glanced over to the Sinen loitering in the space behind them and smirked. “Whatever you say.”

“I’ve been called in to the librarian. I need your report.”

“I don’t have it,” Tonner said, and then, seeing Dafyd’s expression, “My team is gone. I am training up a new one, and it’s not like you’ve given me a bunch of impressionable new research assistants. Brun ran his own union, Addira has two decades of her own research, Abfoss was due for retirement in a few years. Everyone thinks they know a better way to do everything. None of them will just do as they’re fucking told. I had a group. I had people.” Tonner’s voice cracked on the last word, and he took a few seconds to gather himself. “So yes. Please let the cockroach kings know that I am doing what I can to get up to speed, and sometimes writing down a note saying so is less important to me than doing the actual job.”

“Can you just tell me about where things stand? Just verbally.”

Tonner shrugged and the protein assay chimed the way that meant it was shifting to a polymerization phase. Tonner looked out past his shoulder. He looked exhausted.

“Making our own food supply is going to take about twice the hydroponic capacity we have right now. That’s tanks, lights, filtration, micronutrients, everything. It looks like we will be able to adapt the silicate microfarm from the berries to general use, so low-volume production’s mostly covered. Training more people to do the analysis for protein translation—which should be the most useful thing we do for them—is going to take me months.”

His shrug meant What the hell do you want from me?

“So. Double the hydroponics,” Dafyd said.

“Sure. Start there,” Tonner said. He almost turned away, then paused. “Have you heard from any of them?”

Them. Jessyn, Rickar, Campar. The only ones left.

“No,” Dafyd said. “Not yet.”

Ekur-Tkalal shifted its abdomen on four thin legs while Dafyd finished his report. Its thorax and head stayed steady, the two massive black-and-red fighting arms planted against the floor. Which was good. As long as those arms stayed on the floor, it wasn’t ready to kill him. Its four eyes moved independently as if each was distracted by a separate thought, and the mantis-like feeding arms in its chest unfolded and manipulated small shapes of floating light whose projectors Dafyd couldn’t identify. Every now and then, the Carryx chirped or burbled to itself, but the half-mind at its throat didn’t say anything. If there were words in its vocalizations, they weren’t meant for him. The Sinen who’d brought the summons stayed in the room with them, which was new. And, Dafyd thought, a little ominous.

While the Carryx finished whatever work occupied it, Dafyd waited. The room Dafyd thought of as the keeper-librarian’s office was small, and the sounds of other Carryx singing to each other carried from the passageways behind him. Ekur shifted the objects of light for another few moments, then began to speak.

Its living voice was like birdsong, only deep, slow, and threatening. The voice that came from its half-mind was human and featureless. If it seemed to have a dismissive quality to it, that might only have been Dafyd’s prejudices.

“Your efforts in making one animal species nourishing to other species are of interest to the empire. Your work with imaging and gravimetric lensing is also of interest. You will put your efforts into these two things. No other human activities are of interest. Your other efforts are wasteful and will end. Reorganize your moiety around those things which are useful.”

“I understand,” Dafyd said. “We will.”

“Also, I have no use for animal scratchings. You will submit your reports in proper archival form.”

Dafyd lowered himself to his knees and spread his arms wider, palms against the floor. “I don’t know how to do that.”

“This one will instruct you,” Ekur-Tkalal said, gesturing at the Sinen with one of its feeding hands. “Your moiety has been found of interest by the Sovran. You will prepare for greater use in the empire. Anticipate assignment on thousands of worlds.”

“Ah. There are only about three thousand of us here,” Dafyd said.

The Carryx shifted its weight. Three of its eyes came to rest on Dafyd. “Yes. Your population is insufficient to meet future need.”

“Will you bring more from Anjiin? Are there other people coming—”

“You are to breed locally for the empire’s use. A moiety that cannot sustain its own population is not useful and will be culled.”

The air had gone thin. Dafyd tried to catch his breath. “I don’t know… I mean…”

“If you have requirements to support a generation of young, express them. If they are not overly arduous, they will be provided.”

“Our children… Our young take a long time growing up,” Dafyd said. “They grow slowly. They have to be educated.”

“I am aware,” Ekur-Tkalal said. “The will of the Sovran compasses eons. Begin now. Have them ready when we have use for them.”

And if they don’t want to? he thought. But he knew the answer. It was the same as always: Find a way or get them all killed.

“I understand,” he said. And the hell of it was, he did.

Two

The swarm walks the length of the physics lab, its hands clasped behind its back. Around it, the others work to perfect the lensing techniques that gave Anjiin warning of their doom’s arrival. It had not helped them, but if the enemy—the deathless enemy that the Carryx didn’t know had smuggled the swarm into its lair—discovers the same techniques, the Carryx will already have a guard against them. The brilliance of the empire will again have been made brighter by the animals that it controls.

In the dark prison of the swarm’s consciousness, the dead man fights.

Jellit is the only male it has taken, the only one who had already dedicated himself to violence, and the only one who carried the weight of that trauma on his soul. The swarm can’t say if any of these differences explain why this body is more dedicated to asserting itself. To fighting the possession. To denying the death that has already come for him.

You all right? one of the other physicists in the lab asks. A woman named Kadey.

The swarm nods. Some things on my mind, it says.

This is the day it has resolved to reveal itself to Dafyd.

Oh for fuck’s sake, the dead man sneers in the chaos of the swarm’s mind. Again? You’ve got more days-I’m-going-to-tell-him than Else had last cigarettes.

An echo of amusement comes, but not from the swarm. It might belong to Ameer Kindred or Else Yannin. Or the two might be seeping into each other now. Ameer, the first human that the swarm took when it bloomed into being on the surface of Anjiin, is now so attenuated that her thoughts are hard to distinguish from the swarm’s own. And with her flesh abandoned, Else Yannin has begun to lose some clarity and definition as well, bleeding at the edges like a watercolor left where the damp could reach it. The body reinforces the mind in ways the swarm is only starting to catalog. If it had known before, it might not have shifted to Jellit. But so many things are firsts for the swarm. So many things only learned in retrospect.

Yes, you still would have killed me, the dead man says. God, how self-pitying can you be? Poor you, the people you murder aren’t emotionally supportive enough.

It is a lot to ask of us, the echo that is still Ameer Kindred agrees.

The swarm stops at one of the sensor connections. The device looks like a wire suspended in a glass tube three times Jellit’s height and about as thick as his thumb. The experiment is supposed to detect interference in very-long-wave electromagnetic resonances. Done correctly, it will create a computational lens. Done poorly, it will lose coherence and turn to noise. Around them, invisible to everyone else, a magnetic pulse rises from the planet below, vibrating with information that the swarm records, though it hasn’t yet learned to decode. The swarm is a weapon of war. A spy sent to collect everything and transmit what it learns back to worlds it has never known. It is designed to survive for as long as it can, but it is not designed to survive.

I can finish this run if you want, Kadey says, then gives a little frown. Having some time away from home would be a kindness.

Trouble? the swarm asks because Jellit would have.

Roommate problems.

The swarm’s laugh is short and harsh, and it doesn’t seem to come from any of the three it has taken, or maybe from all of them.

Thanks, it says. I’m actually going to take you up on that.

Pay me back later, Kadey says, and the swarm walks away.

The rooms it has now are the first private space it has had since Anjiin. Ameer Kindred had lived in a little rental loft by the Scholar’s Common with a yellow door and a cat that wasn’t hers but still came in through her window at night. The swarm remembers hunching in that loft, its senses straining at the sky while Ameer screamed in its still-unfolding consciousness, confused and horrified. The swarm had been almost a pure mechanism then, a thing of technique and programming so sophisticated it approached instinct.

Now it has the room Jellit had been assigned, but the assignment came after Jellit’s death, so in a real sense the little table with its two broad metal benches belongs to the swarm. The little kitchen where it prepares its rations is not shared with others. The little bed with polymer foam for a mattress is its alone.

But, depending on how the coming conversation plays out, perhaps that could change.

It remembers the dry-mouthed fear Ameer felt asking a girl to come back to her room for sex the first time, the almost clinical way Else accepted an erotic invitation when she had first come to the medrey. It remembers sneaking a girl into Jellit’s room when Jessyn was asleep next door, and then coupling quietly to keep from waking his sister up. And it remembers its own times with Dafyd, and the comfort Else’s body took in him. Is it so strange to think that it may return to that time, rekindle what it once had? Once Dafyd knows that the woman he loves didn’t die, but only changed…

I was dead before you kissed him using my mouth, Else says. Everything that happened between you was a lie.

There is a way that this is true, but there is also a way in which it isn’t. There were aspects of itself that the swarm could not reveal to Dafyd, but it knows from the memories of three people that this is always true. No romantic coupling ever included absolute honesty, if such a thing were even possible.

Rationalizing, Jellit says. You are undercover behind enemy lines, so every awful thing you do is justified. Poor, burdened hero that you are.

But the swarm had no capacity for love when it first gained awareness. Everything it knows of love, of sex, of the complications of the heart, it took from Else Yannin. From her body, from her mind. It was attracted to men in the ways that she was. It was complicated the way that she was. When it made love, it lifted its arms because she liked lifting hers, pressed Dafyd down because it satisfied her appetites, took him into her flesh with a joy and selfishness that didn’t originate in the swarm, though it resided there now.

Could we please not do this? Else says, and the swarm feels her shame and humiliation at being so exposed before it and Ameer and Jellit. The swarm rises on the balls of its feet the way Jellit once did when he was anxious or excited. The movement is natural. Unconsidered. The swarm is tired, and the sweat of the day makes the tunic that the Carryx machines produce for their human subjects cling to its back.

Today is the day it will reveal its presence to Dafyd, will tell him everything that it has withheld, but not like this. It will clean itself physically, before the emotional and metaphorical cleansing comes. It tells itself it isn’t stalling.

After its shower, the swarm stands naked before the strip of mirror, considering the body it inhabits. The cells and structures are, in most senses, Jellit. The scar on its rib from an accident Jellit had when he was a boy. The one on its leg from an act of violence that happened after they were all prisoners of the Carryx. The DNA in its nuclei has the code, for the most part, that Jellit was born with. The superstructure of the swarm directs and permeates Jellit, allows the body to become what it needs to be: a listening device, a transmitter, a chemical sampling machine. None of these aspects of its existence seem as important now.

It takes down a fresh set of clothes, cracks the wax coating around the cloth, and pulls on trousers and a tunic the match of every one it has had before, every one that it expects it will ever wear again. In the mirror, it looks… handsome? Pretty? It smiles the way Jellit smiled. And then the way Else smiled, only with Jellit’s lips. The expressions are different.

All right, it says aloud. It’s time.

The other parts of it are silent for once.

The swarm senses Dafyd’s distress as soon as it enters his room. It’s in the smell of his skin and the angle he stands at, the lines of his face and the barely audible sigh he makes when his mind is elsewhere.

Rough day with the boss? it asks in Jellit’s voice.

Dafyd’s smile is brief but sincere. Yeah, I have new problems. I don’t know what to do with them.

You want to talk about it?

Dafyd shrugs and sits at the table. His little kitchen area has black laminate counters and chairs that are a little too wide, a little too tall. They make the people sitting in them seem like children. This was all easier when there was… I don’t know. Hope? There was that moment when it seemed like there was hope.

The swarm’s heart leaps. He means it. He means the moment it revealed itself and the great war to him. The moment an ally against the Carryx appeared. It had to have been like a miracle for him, and it will be again. The swarm takes in a deep breath.

He thinks you died when Else did, Jellit says. He thought you were riding along with her, like an add-on. Not that you’d eaten her. He didn’t know you ate people.

The swarm pushes the thought away. It isn’t what it told him.

It’s what you let him think, Else says. You knew. Even back then, you knew to hide how it actually works. If he understood what you’d really done to me…

It goes to Dafyd’s cabinets. There is very little food there, and what there is has the thin, desperate feel of emergency rations. The swarm’s cupboard is as bare. But there are cups for water and a kettle to boil it in and a small box with an amber gel and a scoop already taken out of it. The gel is an imitation of Tonner Freis’s favorite tea. The swarm starts the water boiling and holds up the box like it is displaying it. We’re going to have a whole menu based on the food Tonner likes.

I could tell him to make things he doesn’t want, but I don’t think he’d do it, Dafyd says. There’s a little laughter at the corner of his eyes, and the swarm feels a rush of pleasure at making him feel pleasure. The kettle ticks as it starts to heat.

I haven’t heard from her, Dafyd says. I haven’t heard from any of them. I think I will. I’m technically in charge of them, but I don’t know what that means, exactly.

He thinks you’re here because of Jessyn, Jellit says. He doesn’t think you like him, he thinks you need him to keep tabs on my sister. He’s not your friend. We weren’t buddies back on Anjiin. We didn’t have romantic feelings for each other. You are hauling all of this around by yourself. This thing you want to have happen, won’t.

The swarm spoons bits of gel into the cups where they will melt when the water comes. Its eyes feel uncomfortable. A little sting of tears. Dafyd pretends not to notice, thinking that the emotion is about a brother missing a sister. So many levels of misunderstanding.

It’s all right, the swarm says to Dafyd. The words mean half a dozen things.

It will finish making the tea, hand the cup to Dafyd, and then it will tell him. The war against the Carryx is still being fought. The spy that was here before in the flesh of his lover is still here. It is still gathering intelligence that might turn the tide of violence against the empire. They may still find the way that they can burn the Carryx worlds to ash.

The water will boil. The gel will melt. It will tell him.

And the rest? Jellit says. Are you going to tell him about smuggling out the data you’ve gathered? Tell him how you broke off a piece of yourself and hid it in someone who was shipping out? Tell him that as soon as it’s in range of your buddies on the other side, it’s going to pop like a hand grenade? Go ahead, tell him that your mission is about to kill another one of his friends. See how much he loves you for it. We’ll watch.

The water boils.

This is not the day it will reveal itself.

Three

Jessyn kept the device beside her bunk: glass panes each a little larger than her two splayed hands together and held about a thumb’s width apart. It sat upright on one edge, looking a lot like the transparent cases children kept insects in so they could watch them tunnel and nest. Except that the gap between the panes wasn’t filled with insects and sand, it was filled with the white slurry that she’d harvested from thirty-five of the complex symbiotes they called berries, which weren’t berries at all. The slurry was a mostly inert silicate base that supported billions of microscopic organisms, a complete ecosystem as complicated as a coral reef in a gentle sea. It was balanced so that Jessyn could pour a half cup of glucose solution in the top of the device once a day, clean a handful of the rat-turd-looking precipitate out once a week, and decant a daily dose of clear, bitter, astringent soup that would keep her mind from fishtailing out from under her.

If the slurry started discoloring red or yellow, her little ecosystem was getting out of balance, and she’d add a little acid to the sugar until it cleared up. Black or green meant a contaminating organism had gotten in, and she had to sterilize the whole thing. Before she’d left the Carryx palace world, Tonner had made her enough dry starter to reset the device three times. She’d already used one dose, but she was pretty sure she’d figured out where that contaminant had come from and fixed the problem.

So that was her margin of error. Screw up the mix more than twice or let the device break once, and she was fucked. Keep it safe and working, and she’d be fine until something else killed her. She didn’t remember when she’d stopped considering old age a likely cause of death.

The ship bounced and shuddered again and then seemed to swing under her. The motion jostled a wave of little bubbles up through the slurry. Jessyn took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. She’d gotten used to the low, pulsing hum of the Carryx ship during the time they’d spent in asymmetric space, and then the smooth whine when they’d returned to the universe with physics she knew and understood. This new turbulence bothered her.

The door opened and a Sinen trundled in with its long nose, irregular goatlike eyes, and boneless arms. The horror show that was its head would have risen to the middle of her rib cage if she’d stood up. She didn’t.

It made wet, slapping sounds, and the box at its throat translated in a calm, featureless voice. “The first ships have landed at the central camp. We will be on the surface in”—the translating half-mind stuttered—“forty-five minutes. Be prepared to join your group when this happens.”

“Will do,” she said, and the box beside her on the mattress plopped like someone had dropped a fish into water. The Sinen turned away and trundled back out of her room, leaving the door open behind it.

She noticed the hiccups when the translator struggled. She wondered what it was about the Sinen ideas of duration that made forty-five minutes difficult to parse. The ship lurched again, and a long deep creaking noise rose from the deck. She chuckled. Hauled halfway across the galaxy by alien murderers and slave masters only to die because of mechanical failure would have been just her luck. But the ship didn’t come apart, so she got up and started gathering her things.

It was hard to know how long it had been since she’d left the Carryx world-palace. Campar and Rickar had been taken before she was, assigned to some other duty for the Carryx empire. She’d let herself hope they would be the only new losses that came with humanity’s promotion. But then Dafyd had come to her room one day with a hard expression and two Soft Lothark. The librarian of their moiety had decided there was work for her. A place in the vast mechanism of the Carryx that she’d make a fine little cog for. She’d wept, and Dafyd had too. And Jellit. They hadn’t pushed back against it, though. They hadn’t fought. For all Dafyd’s radical pronouncements of future rebellion, the real lesson they’d all learned was this: They were powerless. And so she’d come here, to her bunk, and time had stopped meaning as much.

She remembered old stories with prisoners carving tally marks into the walls of their cells. She hadn’t understood why they did it. How time could become a featureless thing. How it could pass without notice. She did now.

On the ship there was no rhythm of day and night. She slept when she slept, and woke without knowing how long she’d been unconscious. There were displays on the ship, some flat, some volumetric, but if any of them were clocks, how to read them was not something the Carryx shared with their subjects. And the length of a day on the prison world wasn’t the same as it had been on Anjiin. Time, for all she knew, might be a mess of relativistic effects and asymmetric physics.

Once, she had lived at the Irvian Research Medrey, but the idea of measuring how long ago was a sad joke. Years, probably, but she couldn’t be sure, and it didn’t matter. There were some number of days or weeks since she’d left the remnant of the workgroup—since she’d seen another human face—and she didn’t know how long ago that was either. She lived in the moment, because the moment was what she had.

What is, is, echoed in her mind, and she pushed it away with a shudder.

The turbulence came again. She heard one of the gray-winged moth-bat things that called themselves Euruk of Lydiándar scream in distress from the common room, then the Sinen’s voice, like two steaks being pounded together. It had to be a rough job, keeping the zoo of captives in line. She’d have felt sorry for the poor Sinen if she hadn’t hated it quite so much. She caught a whiff of something rich and pungent. Probably some kind of pheromone. It wasn’t a message meant for her. The ship lurched, and for a second she was twice her normal weight. Her stomach tightened. If she was going to vomit, she wanted to get to the toilet. If she wasn’t, she wanted to lie down in the bunk. It took her longer than she liked to decide which was more likely, but she took her chances on the bed.

The shaking grew worse, then smoothed out. The sound of the engines changed again. Then a final shock ran through the body of the ship, and it went silent. Jessyn lay on her back for five long, slow breaths, letting her guts settle. Just as she was ready to stand, the ship’s half-mind spoke. Disembark now. You will be directed to your proper workgroup for instruction. You may leave supplies in your present quarters.

Wherever they’d been headed, they’d arrived. She checked the irreplaceable glass device that kept her sane. No cracks, no leaking, and only a little turbulence in the slurry. She hated leaving it behind, but she also hated taking it into the field. In the end, she didn’t put it in her satchel, but she didn’t like it.

The common room was busy with alien bodies. Two of the Euruk were flying in fast circles near the ceiling. A lumbering, stone-skinned thing with a dozen black eyes, six double-jointed legs, and a beak where the legs came together hauled a bag onto its back. Jessyn hadn’t talked to that one. Half a dozen of the crablike True People of Hannic clicked their claws at each other and hissed, fighting or trading jokes or professing their undying love. She had no way to tell. The Sinen who had been giving them orders and keeping tabs on them was consulting five Soft Lothark.

One of the Soft Lothark turned to look at her. The attention of the squat-bodied, long-limbed creature made Jessyn flinch away, her heart racing a little. She hadn’t done anything to bring their wrath down on her, but the Lothark scared her anyway. She’d seen things like this one murder people and eat their own dead. This Lothark gestured toward the corridor, and she took it as an order.

The hallway had been closed during the journey out. It was open now, and she walked along it carefully. The light at the end of the hall had a different feel than the artificial illumination of shipboard. Almost like sunlight in the middle of the afternoon. A fresh breeze touched her, and her heart did something—skipped a beat or doubled one. She started walking faster.

Four of the Carryx ships were on the ground in a rough semicircle. They weren’t the city-vast ones that had come to conquer Anjiin. Each of them stood only a dozen or so stories high, bronze and black, with ramps that stretched down to the bare pale soil. Jessyn walked down her own ramp, squinting into the light. Two or three hundred bodies of a dozen different species milled in the improvised yard between the ships, and some of them looked human. In the center of it all, two huge Carryx stood in pale green shells of armor. Soldiers or guards or something Jessyn had no context for. Her eyes watered, but not from any emotion. It was just so bright.

The sun was wider than it had been on Anjiin, and white. The sky it stood in was the robin’s-egg blue of high oxygen. The clouds were white, but with notes of gold and rose like a sunset in mid-afternoon. Something bright was happening above them. The air smelled like fresh grass and mint, and after the metallic scent of the ship it was intoxicating. No one was handing out respirators, so she assumed someone had determined breathing it wasn’t going to kill them. She took several long breaths that made her head swim.

She reached the end of the ramp, looking up as a fifth ship dropped through the air toward them. She expected a roar of fire, but it only buzzed like a thousand angry beehives, settled on the earth, and went dark. If anything, there was a wave of mist that came from it before it extended a ramp of its own.

While Jessyn stood, waiting for someone or something to instruct her where to go and what to do, she opened her mouth wide, just breathing in the free air. Under the grass and mint it also had a faint petrichor scent like coming rain. The smell took her back to her childhood on Anjiin and almost made her burst into happy tears. Some distance away from the huddled ships, a swath of green and black rose from the ground. Plant analogs, she guessed. They were the right colors for photosynthetic life. And beyond them, structures that could have been the remnants of buildings or the skeletonized corpses of alien leviathans.

Whatever they were, whatever they had been, they were beautiful in their way.

Something tugged at her impatiently. A Sinen—maybe the same one who had been on her ship, maybe a different one—had been trying to get her attention for a few seconds now.

“You are to go there,” it said again, pointing one of its quasi-tentacles to a place near the ramp off the farthest ship. “You are to be with them now. Go. Go go go.”

Jessyn tightened her grip on her satchel and let herself be hurried across the yard. Something like a dozen aliens stood in a rough group. Euruk and True People, but also a long-beaked thing that would have been a bird if it had feathers and wings, and an oblong, gray-shelled thing the size of a sofa with hundreds of tiny legs around it like ruffles on a skirt.

And, at one side, a man.

She didn’t recognize him, but she wanted to so badly that her brain kept trying to put names to him. He was almost Lorrin Hant, who she’d studied introductory systems math with. He was almost Carwin Moor, who’d read the headlines on the news when she was young. He wasn’t anyone she knew, but he was human, and seeing him was like seeing part of her family.

He stood a little shorter than Jellit, with a head full of curly dark hair and a beard with the first dusting of gray in it. His skin was warm gold a bit lighter than hers. He was looking up and weeping. She tried to follow his gaze, but all she saw was clouds and sky.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

At first, he only answered with a moan. Then, “I haven’t seen this much sky since… since they took me from Anjiin. I haven’t felt the sun. Or fresh air.” He tore his gaze from the open world around them and settled it on her. His smile was like an image of a Serintist saint, but the chuckle was warm and rueful. “I may be a little messed up.”

“Messed up is normal,” Jessyn said. “Messy is fine.”

He wiped the sleeve of his tunic across his eyes. “You’re holding together better than I am.”

“I had a window at the world-palace,” she said. “The rooms they put me in came with a view. So, less of a shock, I guess.”

“Oh,” he said, but his tone meant something. She nodded him on, and his smile turned less certain. “The only one I heard of like that was Alkhor’s group.”

“Yes. That was us. We started off as Tonner Freis’s group, but I guess that’s not the description anymore.”

“You’re the ones who sided with the big guys?” the man said. “I mean, I don’t judge. You do what you have to if you want to survive. But Alkhor’s the one who turned in the resistance plotters, right?”

“It was complicated. I wasn’t really part of that conversation until it had already happened. Dafyd was… He was just the guy who cleaned the glassware in my lab before he was in charge of everything.”

“Field promotions, I guess,” the man said, and held out his hand. “Garral Pär. Once upon a time, I was the head of the archaeology department at Hibbrin Medrey.”

She put down her bag and took his hand. He had a pleasant grip. “Jessyn Kaul. Adjunct in the biology department at Irvian. Good to meet you, Garral.”

He held her hand a beat longer than normal, then seemed to realize he had and let her go. “I’m sorry. Did we know each other, back before? I feel like I recognize you from someplace.”

“I can’t place you,” she said. “But I was thinking it too. So maybe?”

A gabble of human voices interrupted. Three more people—two men and a woman, all in the same standard tunics—marched toward the group along with another of the gray-shelled sofa-things and two of the not-quite-birds. A Sinen trundled behind them, a knife-legged Rak-hund undulating at either side. The arrival of the new people made the little group denser, and without meaning to, Jessyn found herself moving a little closer to Garral Pär. The not-quite-birds made soft chiming sounds and clacked their beaks together, but the half-mind didn’t translate anything, so if it signified something it wasn’t meant for them.

The Sinen waved its quasi-tentacles and made a shrill whistling that Jessyn had never heard before. Noises came all around the group—a fast clicking from the not-quite-birds, a thin screech from the Euruk, a bass rumble from the gray-shelled things, and from the half-minds the humans carried, a voice.

“I will be acting as oversight and support for your group,” the Sinen announced. “You may refer to me as Third Gardener. All requests and concerns you have come to me. If you ask assistance from any other, it will only be help in locating me. Because I will be stationed here at the center camp, you will also be permitted to reach me through your”—the voice hesitated—“research notebooks. These will be issued to you before you leave camp.”

“Leave camp,” Garral echoed without seeming to realize he’d spoken.

If the half-mind relayed the words to Third Gardener, the Sinen chose to ignore them. “The planet you are presently on is named World. It was, until recently, under the control of our enemy. The strategic and tactical victories of the fifth military body were such that the planet was taken without permitting them to sterilize it. This is an opportunity for the Carryx.

“You have been chosen from among your moieties as individuals with expertise and skill appropriate to gaining a greater understanding of this enemy. You will survey and explore the surrounding areas as your natures and abilities support, and you are to relay the information and insights you gather to me.”

The Sinen paused for a moment, as if to let that all sink in. Or maybe some of the translations to the other species just took longer, and it was waiting for them to catch up. The new woman who had been herded in with the group met Jessyn’s gaze and nodded. Jessyn smiled back.

“World has not been made safe,” Third Gardener continued. “Some of you may encounter traps left by the enemy. Some of you will encounter unfamiliar dangers. Except as subjects for your work, these are not of interest. You will continue to prove your use to the Carryx through the utility of your discoveries.”

“Death isn’t permitted,” Jessyn said, “if it hurts production.”

Garral coughed and put his hand over his mouth to hide a smile. Jessyn looked down.

Third Gardener ignored them. “There is also an evacuation procedure that you must learn. This enemy has a history of destroying the worlds they are driven from. They may return here in such an attempt.”

It paused again and began shifting its weight back and forth like a child excited to get on a thrill ride at a park. “What we are doing here now has rarely been done before,” Third Gardener said. “A possibility exists that our work will reveal the pathway to the enemy’s defeat. You are to do everything in your power.

“The Carryx are watching.”

Four

Rickar was at Irvian Research Medrey back on Anjiin, and he was trying to get across the city to Dennia before the attack started. That was wrong, of course. He hadn’t met Dennia until after Anjiin fell. She had died on their prison world, slaughtered along with the rest of Ostencour’s rebels. He knew that, but he was also running down streets that were almost the ones he’d known, trying to flag down transports that were always just out of his reach.

He forced himself awake just to stop it and lay in the dim half-light of his cell with an aching jaw. One of these days, he’d clench his way into a broken tooth, and then he didn’t know what would happen. There were only about a dozen humans aboard the Carryx warship, and he didn’t think any of them were dentists. He could imagine the Carryx being surprised he didn’t just grow a new tooth. Or that a broken tooth would hurt. They might just kill him for this imperfection and move on with their day. All the possibilities seemed equally likely.

There wasn’t anything on the ship that was recognizable as a clock, so he didn’t know how long he’d slept. He didn’t feel rested, but that didn’t indicate much. He could lose consciousness for a few minutes or half a day and wake up with the same sense that the air was too thick to move through.

He thought about closing his eyes again and trying for sleep, but he had the sense that the dream was waiting. After a while, he levered himself up to sitting and rested his skull in his hands, rubbing his aching masseters and temples. His stomach rumbled. He resented being hungry. Resented his body’s insistence on mundane concerns.

There had been a time when Rickar Daumatin had planned out a life for himself. A posting at Irvian that led to a senior position at Hausen Educational Medrey, and then an early and comfortable retirement back home at Dyan. Three decades. Maybe two and a half. It hadn’t seemed implausible at the time. It seemed like the absurd fantasies of a child now.

The warship on which he served was immense, but his place in it—the place many of the animal servants of the Carryx shared—was restricted. When he’d come to the Carryx world what seemed like a lifetime ago, he’d had the sense of being in a great menagerie. Without considering it, he imagined the whole Carryx empire to be the same pandemonium of life-forms.

Here, on the ship, he wasn’t as certain. There were spaces where animals like himself were permitted. Some low-status castes of Carryx were debased enough to interact with them. The main body of the ship, however, seemed to be reserved for the masters themselves. The Sinen that had done something like an orientation when they’d been brought aboard explained that straying from their places would mean death. Rickar believed that enough that he didn’t experiment. He kept to the bronze-walled chambers and corridors, listened to the hum and rumble of the ship as it traveled through asymmetric space or else the normal kind he knew, and tried to keep his mind from falling apart.

Sanity was a full-time job for him these days. Sometimes he remembered when Jessyn had confessed that she needed medication to keep her mental illness from overtaking her. He’d actually felt a little pity for her at the time. He wondered how she was, wherever she was. He wondered if he’d ever see her again, ever have a chance to apologize for that pity and disdain. He hoped he would, but he didn’t expect to.

His stomach grumbled again, and this time there was a little stab of discomfort too small to call itself pain. He rose from the cot, pulled on the same clothes he’d pulled off when he’d lain down, put the translating half-mind around his neck, and went to see if Campar was in his cell.

The animal quarters on the ship had some aspects in common with the labs on the Carryx world-palace and some with the prisoners’ hold that they’d suffered after Anjiin. The rooms were as cold as the prison ship, and with walls and lights that reminded Rickar of that transit, though these lights were thankfully brighter. There was a central room where the subject species mixed the way they did in the cathedral back on the prison world, and private quarters in the halls that led off it. The quarters were cells, though. Single-occupancy rooms took the place of the little group homes they’d had before. Rickar couldn’t say which he preferred.

Campar’s cell was across from his, and down about halfway to the common room. He knocked on the door with the back of his knuckles the way his grandfather had taught him to play the aqlava. The metal seemed to eat the sound, so after a moment, he hit it again harder. Campar still didn’t answer. He shifted the door open a fraction to make sure the big man wasn’t there. There were no locks for them. Locks meant privacy and agency and power. That wasn’t how things worked anymore.

Since there was no Campar, he made his way to the common room alone. The chamber itself was comfortably large, the size of a dormitory cafeteria. The ceiling was twice as high as in his cell, though there didn’t seem to be any species that flew or floated to inhabit the taller air. Or at least not on this mission. Three people—humans—sat close together near one of the entrances, locked in an intense emotional conversation that exhausted Rickar just by existing. Two Soft Lothark guards lumbered through the hall, their gazes taking in everything and giving back nothing. Rickar shifted his path to avoid them.

The dispensers where the Carryx delivered food and water were along one wall and built to accommodate a wide variety of hands, pseudopods, and manipulating limbs. He didn’t understand the rules the Carryx had for him. On the prison world, humans were expected to make their own food. On the ship, gruel and water were provided. It seemed inconsistent that they didn’t let him starve to death if he couldn’t sustain himself. But maybe that had happened often enough that the rules of utility had been bent.

Rickar ambled to the dispensing wall at the same time a vast, blue-gray mass of flesh roughly the size of a side of beef lurched away from it. It called itself Vaudai, but Rickar didn’t know if that was its name or its species. It didn’t matter, because he didn’t call it that.

“Good morning, giant slug,” Rickar said.

The box at his throat made no sound that Rickar could hear, didn’t pump out a chemical signal that he could detect, but a box in the folds of the alien body replied. “Greetings, sticks-with-meat-on-them.”

“Any news?”

“Yes. I have determined that we are in the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body.”

“And what does that tell us about what we’re doing here?”

Vaudai shivered. Its flesh took on a nacreous sheen for a moment. “Exploratory bodies are often involved in explicitly military endeavors. It seems likely that we are on our way to the forefront of the war.”

“The front lines,” Rickar said.

“If you consider complex surfaces in asynchronous time a ‘line,’ yes.”

“Well, that’s not exactly a surprise. Any idea how long our tour of duty will be?”

Vaudai shifted its weight and was silent for a moment. Then, “Not a”—the translator hiccuped here for a moment—“ painful-birthing clue.”

A smile flickered over Rickar’s lips. The translation half-minds didn’t always handle expletives or express emotions well, but it had caught the giant slug’s curse and impatience beautifully. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Campar around here?”

“What is the Campar?”

“Another human. Like me.”

“You all smell the same. Salt and dead skin.”

“Fair point,” Rickar said, and moved on.

There were two large things that looked like featherless herons with their beaks cut off and uncomfortable rippling villi at the ends of their wings. They called themselves Budon of Luus, and they didn’t like to talk, so he waited for them to get their bowls of what looked like black rocks in brown sludge. There were no buttons on the food dispenser, Rickar just walked up and stood in front of it for a moment. Something in the device scanned him and decided that instead of black rocks and mud, he got a bowl of undifferentiated grayish goo and a shallow spoon. His ration of water came in a gel pouch the yellow of chicken fat that he’d bite the corner off to drink from.

He was fairly sure he’d lost weight since he’d gotten on the ship, but he hadn’t been eating well even before then. He’d lost his appetite when Dafyd Alkhor had warned the Carryx about the rebellion and gotten Synnia and Dennia, Ostencour and Allstin, all of them slaughtered. For the best of reasons. To save all the others, including himself. All you needed to understand the necessity of that sacrifice was to listen to Alkhor for a few minutes. He’d be happy to explain why he was right, and then he’d promise he’d avenge all the lives he’d helped end.

As bad as it was, at least Rickar wasn’t still on the same planet with him.

He sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at the green-gray slurry in his bowl, the sloshing bag of water. Then, grudgingly, he ate and drank and waited for Campar because he knew him, and had known him before, and didn’t have anybody else left to wait for.

“Stay awake. You don’t sleep in my room,” Ghati said, flicking Campar’s bare buttock with his finger. “We agreed.”

“But I’m tired,” Campar said. “I’m sleepy. I’m spent. Pity me.”

“You can walk to your own bed,” the other man said as he pulled on his tunic. “I don’t run a hostel.”

The harshness in his voice pulled Campar back from more jokes. It was true. They’d made rules, and he was breaking them. The temptation to treat Ghati like his boyfriend was real, but it was a vice. The boundaries they set between each other were one of the few things they could control, and Campar was being rude to test them.

“Even if you did, I have no currency to pay for a room,” he said with a smile that was an apology. “I’ll take my indigent bones elsewhere.”

Ghati made a small sound in the back of his throat that would have translated as Damn right, but there was a smile behind it. He watched Campar get up and pick up the clothes he’d left scattered around the room. There was affection in his eyes, but not the raw hunger that had been there when the clothes were being pulled off. Campar risked leaning across the bed for a quick kiss. Ghati kissed him back. “Let’s do this again, soon,” he said.

“Knock on my door any time,” Campar replied. “Shower?”

Ghati waved his hand at the tiny water closet in his cell. Help yourself.

Still wet from the shower and pleasantly sore from the activities that had preceded it, Campar wandered down the corridor to the common room. There was no place else to go, really. No bars, no cafés, no libraries, no sunlit plazas. Just better-appointed prisons or worse. In one corner of the common room, Danna, Dervan, and Emmin were locked in intense conversation. They had known each other in the ancient times before the Carryx, and worked in defense and security. The three of them had developed a cycle of petty social drama complete with shifting loyalties, minor betrayals, and near-constant heartfelt interventions that ended with protestations of affection and loyalty. Campar didn’t think the three were aware of the way they had made their lives into a performance for each other. It was probably harder to see from inside the dynamic. He found them pleasant when he could pry them apart, but tiresome when they were together.

Across the room, Rickar sat on the floor, hunching over a bowl of food and brooding. The lesser evil being what it was, Campar went to sit beside him.

“Good morning,” Rickar said, and then shrugged. “I mean, assuming it’s morning.”

“I’m sure it’s morning somewhere,” Campar said.

Rickar hadn’t been one of Campar’s close friends in their old lives. Campar had admired the man’s sense of style. Rickar had been a bit of an understated clothes horse. His lightly rumpled linen suits had always been tailored. His socks had always matched each other and never clashed with the color of his shirt. It was more effort than Campar put into his own appearance, but as someone alert to the nuances of masculine beauty, Campar appreciated the work the man had done to create and curate the persona of Rickar Daumatin.

The Rickar sitting with him now was a very different animal. His clothes were the same tunic and trousers that all the humans wore, provided by their captors. His hair had grown longer and shaggy. He still shaved, but a few errant whiskers low on his neck and by his ear had escaped the scythe. His cheeks had grown gaunt, and there was a permanent darkness in the skin under his eyes.

And also, Campar had come to care about him.

“How are you holding up?” Campar asked, trying to keep his tone casual. He knew the truth, but he didn’t know how Rickar would answer.

The other man shifted his shoulder. “You were with Ghati?”

“I was,” Campar said lightly. “Jealous?”

“How does that even work? He’s half your size.”

“I assure you he’s got hidden depths of vigor.”

“Be careful,” Rickar said, and he wasn’t talking about the difference in their size anymore. “Don’t let yourself get hurt.”

“We aren’t picking out furniture,” Campar said, a little surprised by his own defensiveness. “It’s a few moments of pleasure in an environment that doesn’t have much. That’s all.”

“I tried it too. And when we lost Dennia… We knew, me and her, that things were dangerous. Everyone knew that. But it still fucks you up, losing them.”

“That’s not exactly new, though. For all their many sins, the Carryx didn’t invent mortality.”

“They accelerated the hell out of it,” Rickar said. “Whatever they’re using us for, there’s going to be violence. And they don’t care if we live.”

“I can’t plan for that,” Campar said, and gestured at the common room with its halls and doorways. “This is what there is for us. Refusing the few little scraps of life in it? I don’t see the advantage in acting like I’m dead before it actually happens.”

“I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

“I know,” Campar said. “And I appreciate it, I do. But we are going to get hurt.”

He shouldn’t have said that. He regretted it as soon as he saw Rickar flinch at the words. He put a hand on Rickar’s shoulder, letting the weight of it say what he wasn’t artful enough to find words for. Rickar suffered the contact for a moment, then reached out for his water packet as an excuse to shrug it away.

One of the doorways to the common room opened, and a spike of fear ran through Campar’s gut. The Sinen who trundled into the room wasn’t alone. The Rak-hund that scuttled beside it stood somewhere between a large dog and a small pony with what seemed like dozens of pale knifelike legs. To Campar, the beast was less a living thing and more a weapon. Its sharp feet ticked against the deck, and it was the sound of murders Campar had seen and smelled and cleaned the bodies up after. If the Sinen had pressed a gun to his head, he would have felt less threatened.

The Sinen grumbled to itself, and then turned, making its way to the Budon of Luus. The pair of Soft Lothark guards ambled toward them as well. Campar found he was holding himself perfectly still, as if by freezing, he could not be part of whatever was about to happen. Rickar’s breath was low and ragged. The Sinen made a series of damp sounds that the half-mind converted into something that sounded like music made by ripping paper. The Budon shifted, looking at each other with no particular emotion that Campar could fathom. Two of them made the odd ripping sound again. The little Sinen blinked its wide goatlike eyes. Campar took a slow deep breath and tried to exhale out the panic.

“Fuck,” Rickar said, and shook his head like he’d been asked a question and the answer was no. “You want the rest of this? I don’t think I can eat.”

“I’ll give it a try,” Campar said, pulling the bowl over toward himself.

Rickar stood, patted at his breast like he was checking a jacket pocket he no longer had for a pouch of cigarettes they couldn’t get, and walked back toward his cell. Campar took another breath. Across the common room, Emmin and Dervan were talking over each other in an upward spiral, each voice goading the other one into tighter, higher tones. Danna was crying. Campar wasn’t sure they’d even noticed the Sinen and its walking carpet of knives arriving.

And the final insult, the greatest indignity in their lives of captivity and servitude, was that the food was terrible. It was cold, and had a deep, nutty taste he associated with health diets and calorie restriction. He wondered whether Dafyd and Tonner had made progress with the hydroponic gardens back at home, and then noticed that he’d called the Carryx world-palace home.

The Sinen burbled and slapped out a speech to the room and left, his knife-legged weapon trailing behind. A moment later, the half-minds translated for everyone in the room.

Campar heard, “We have entered conflict space. Prepare for the possibility of violence.”

Campar considered what he might do to prepare for this possibility beyond making his soul right with the gods. He couldn’t think of anything. A moment later Ghati drifted in and headed for the food dispenser. Seeing Campar on the floor, he smiled and asked, “What did I miss?”

Campar started laughing and discovered that it was hard—harder than it should have been—to stop.

Five

Tonner Freis scowled at the sampling sheet like it had insulted him personally. The sheets of crystal were thin enough to pull the water out of the tanks by simple capillary action and clear as air. The sample itself should not have been cloudy.

The sample was cloudy.

“God,” Tonner said, then took a breath, “damn it.”

“It’s like that in tanks five and six as well,” Brun said.

Tonner dropped the sampling sheet into the sink and ran his hands through his hair. His left foot was tapping fast, the way it did sometimes when he needed to think through a particularly hard problem.

“So twelve, five, and six,” he said.

“I ran assays—”

“No,” Tonner said. “Not talking, you. Being quiet. Twelve, five, and six. But not one or two or three or four. What am I looking at?”

Brun swallowed. His larynx bounced like a fishing bob with a trout on the line. What did twelve, five, and six have in common? There had to be something…

“Tonner!” Jellit called from across the lab. Another tall, lanky man was striding between the hydroponic tanks. He and Brun could have been manufactured from the same mold with just a few alterations. “Tonner, why are you still here? We’re supposed to be in the meeting.”

“I am in the middle of something.”

Jellit took Tonner by the hand, drawing him gently forward. Tonner felt a flash of incandescent annoyance tempered by an unexpected nostalgia. It was the same thing Else had done to get him moving back during some other lifetime.

“Fine,” he said. Then, over his shoulder, “Brun! Have Kirrik and Abfoss check for viral proteins. Make sure we don’t have an infection in the plants, yeah?”

“Will do,” Brun called after them.

They stepped into the corridor that led to the living quarters and, past them, Jellit’s visualization lab. A long, sweeping ramp led up to the next level, and then the levels above that. Distant sunlight stained the pale walls reddish. It could have been dawn or sunset, Tonner had lost track of the cycles of natural time in the world-palace.

“What does Lord Alkhor need that’s so fucking urgent, anyway?” Tonner snapped. Jellit, wisely, didn’t respond.

Tonner Freis had been the top mind in the scientific demimonde of Anjiin. Now he was troubleshooting food tanks and getting rushed to meetings that his dishwasher had called. It was ridiculous. A part of him—the small, sane voice behind all the rest—told him that the invasion and abduction, the violence and the loss, had broken him in some fundamental way. And quietly, privately, he accepted this fact the way he would any new and irrefutable data point. Then he set it aside and went back to the business of being himself. They were all broken, one way and another. That didn’t make Dafyd Alkhor’s mandatory meetings any less bullshit.

There were two unfamiliar faces in the meeting room, for values of unfamiliar approximating knew of but not approaching knew. The older woman with the thin face and the wreath of iron-gray hair standing out from her skull like the halo of some Serintist saint was Uuya Tomos. She was a folklorist and social historian who’d reorganized the medrey system more or less single-handedly. He hadn’t read any of her work, but there had been a couple of years when he’d just started his studies that her Wolf of the World mythic novels had been ubiquitous. The thick-bodied man, he couldn’t quite put a name to. The hand he held out to Tonner was the bleached white of a melanin disorder and much stronger than Tonner had expected.

“Bastien Korham,” the thick, pale man said. “Good to make your acquaintance.”

“Same,” Tonner said, trying to match the man’s grip strength. “Except I’m Tonner Freis. Same about the acquaintance part.”

Korham smiled and let go of what was left of Tonner’s knuckles. Jellit took a seat at the long bronze table. Tonner made a show of looking around the conference room.

“Isn’t Alkhor supposed to be here?” he said. “I was under the impression this was his meeting.”

“He’ll be here,” Jellit said. “We split the duty of rounding up strays.”

Tonner took one of the empty seats. “So what were you in the before times, Korham?”

“I was the plant manager for the Gallatian church in Amreth, Astincol, and Bar.”

“Plant manager?”

His smile was almost apologetic. “The church provided shelter and work for thirty thousand people. My crews kept the lights on and the water running.”

Tonner remembered that now. There had been a scandal about sweatshops and economic exploitation. This didn’t seem to be the time to bring it up. He made do with “Sounds like a big job.”

Korham bowed his head, but Uuya Tomos was the one who spoke. “The Carryx took a lot of leaders when they came, but not many followers.”

“The best managers of work,” Korham agreed, “but not, I think, all the best workers. I’m an indifferent plumber.”

“Shows something about what we used to value,” Uuya Tomos said with a thin smile.

Dafyd’s voice echoed from the corridor. Tonner couldn’t make out the words, but he knew the timbre and rhythm like an old and disliked song. The voice that took the other half of the conversation was higher and almost querulous, and the woman it belonged to was thin, pale, and vulpine. If a gray fox had been remade as a woman in her late thirties, it would have been the person who walked in with Dafyd Alkhor.

Dafyd himself looked like he’d aged half a decade in the time since his elevation. The lines around his mouth were deeper and furrows in his forehead had a look of permanence. More than that, he held himself differently. Alkhor had raised himself up to be the lord of all humanity in the world-palace, but at least he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. There was something to celebrate in that, anyway.

“Thank you,” Dafyd said, and took his place at the table. The fox woman nodded to each of them in a series of precise movements like a clockwork toy, then took the stool to Alkhor’s left. “Does everyone know everyone else?”

“I don’t think we’ve met officially,” the fox woman said, addressing the whole room without making it feel awkward. “I’m Llian Andermus. I used to be director of operational security for Itzibahn Common.”

Uuya Tomos went still, and Korham leaned forward. Tonner knew Itzibahn Common as a small nation in Anjiin’s southern hemisphere with a history of colonialism and more wealth than its territory created. It felt like something out of a children’s story now. Once upon a time, there was a country called Itzibahn Common. The name Llian Andermus didn’t mean anything to him, and he felt a little surge of annoyance that it seemed to carry weight for the others, like he was at a party where everyone was discussing a song he hadn’t heard.

“Tonner Freis,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” Andermus said. “Professor Tomos. Mr. Korham. Professor Kaul.”

“I wasn’t a professor,” Jellit said. “I never taught.”

“I stand corrected,” Andermus said.

“So I asked you all here because things are changing,” Dafyd said, and the meeting part of the meeting had started. “Since the invasion, we’ve been scrambling. Either we were trying to get our bearings with the experiments that the Carryx wanted from us or we were trying to reconnect with each other. Or now, we’re coming together in the new quarters and figuring out how that works.”

Tonner leaned back. He noticed that Alkhor had dropped Plotting vengeance against the bastards who put us here or else selling out the plotters from his list of activities. He didn’t feel the need to point that out. Everyone at the table already knew it.

“We’re coming into a new phase,” Dafyd said. “Those first tests were to see what humans were useful for. They’ve made that decision. The Carryx want us to translate between trees of life, work on improving their stealth technologies, and become as self-sustaining as possible.”

“Is that not what we’ve been doing?” Tonner asked. “I feel like that’s been pretty much the mandate from the start.”

Dafyd took a breath, but Jellit was the one who answered. “They tested a lot of things. Art, music, organizational capacity and logistics, physical strength and endurance, mathematics. Those first few months, it wasn’t just us. There were hundreds of little experiments going on.”

“Throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck,” Dafyd said. “And because of the way it all happened, we’ve got a terrible, ad hoc organization. Tonner here is essentially in charge of both the translation between trees of life and getting a consistent food supply. That’s two-thirds of everything, just on him. Jellit lost most of the visualization team with Ostencour. And now we have thousands of people who were at the tops of their fields, but their fields don’t matter anymore. If we’re going to do the things the Carryx want, we have to change… everything, really. That’s why you’re all here. I have a proposal.”

Tonner looked around, trying to judge how Dafyd’s speech was going over. Korham’s eyebrows were high on his forehead. It made him look like a surprised raccoon. Jellit was nodding along with Dafyd’s every word. Uuya Tomos, on the other hand, had a frown that could have cut glass, and Andermus had a poker face.

Which only left him. In truth, he felt a little glow of warmth that Dafyd at least acknowledged how much of the human project among the Carryx had fallen on his shoulders. If the plan moving forward was to get him more underlings and the power to make things work the way he needed them to work, Tonner thought he might almost be all right with the changes.

“Tonner and Jellit need the resources to focus on their projects,” Dafyd said. “How well they perform is going to be the thing that keeps us in the Carryx’s good graces. Everything else needs people who know how to organize what needs to be organized.”

“The physical plant,” Korham said. “Food supply. Housing. Hygiene necessities. Light sources.”

“All that,” Dafyd said, then turned to Andermus. “And security. We’re people. There are going to be disagreements. Fights. Some folks who get bad ideas that could put the rest of us at risk. We need a way to police that.”

He’s already planning for the next Ostencour, Tonner thought. Only this time, his hands will be clean. Andermus nodded, but there was a gleam in her eyes.

“And the hard part,” Dafyd continued, “is organization. Education. Finding the people who are right for the jobs we need and getting them together. Helping everyone understand why we need to do the things we need to do.”

“So,” Uuya Tomos said. “Minister of propaganda?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Dafyd said with a game, unconvincing smile. “But we need to move quickly. We have some mandates from the librarian that are going to be challenging. For the Carryx to see us as useful, we have to be self-sustaining. As a population.”

“As a population?” Andermus echoed.

Uuya Tomos spoke, and her voice was simultaneously amused and serrated as a knife. “Children. He’s talking about children.”

“I am,” Dafyd said.

“Uh,” Korham said, “not a lot of us are in our childbearing years. What percentage of our population is even fertile?”

“I’m aware of that issue, and—” Dafyd started.

“How exactly do you expect that to work?” Tomos said. “Are we going to require everyone under forty to be perpetually pregnant? Am I supposed to pick who pairs up with who? Is this one”—she gestured to Andermus—“supposed to hold them down if they disagree?”

“No!” Dafyd barked. He seemed surprised at the anger in his own voice. Tonner suppressed a smile at watching his up-jumped former lab assistant squirm at Tomos’s questions.

“No,” Dafyd repeated, gentler this time. “I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything with their bodies. I’m talking about lamb sacks. Like back at the medrey. Artificial placentation. Industrial gestation. The way we did for research animals. We could do that, right?”

All the eyes turned to Tonner. He shrugged. “I mean, we could. It’s another project on top of everything else. And I’m pretty sure it would be both criminal and grotesquely unethical. There were rules against doing exactly this kind of thing for good reasons.”

“We are making new rules here,” Dafyd said.

Tomos coughed out a laugh. “We? Or you?”

Dafyd flinched. “The Carryx made it clear that we need to be a living population. We can’t do that without new generations coming up. Replacement at least. Growing is better.”

“And you’ve decided we’re drawing the ethical line at forced impregnation,” Tomos said. “Nice to know you have a line.”

“The plan,” Dafyd said, ignoring her barb, “is to start with maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty embryos. We already have tissue samples from everyone the Carryx took. We can revert those back down to stem cells, make gametes out of them, implant them in artificial wombs. While they get ready to decant, we build a nursery.”

“And who takes care of this nursery?” Andermus asked.

“Everyone will take a shift caring for the kids. It’ll be mandatory,” Dafyd replied, visibly grateful that someone had asked the question.

“People are going to fall in love with the babies,” Tomos said. “They won’t be able to help themselves. It’s biology. But that’s your scheme, isn’t it?”

Dafyd nodded. He began talking faster and faster now, running down the road of his own ideas like he was trying to get the taste out of his mouth. It was astonishing to watch.

“If people want them, they can take them,” he said. “We’ll up their calorie allowance when they do. Even past what the kid needs, so it’s a reward. An incentive. Then after the first new generation, maybe another hundred or two. Space them out wide enough that we have a seed population. When they get old enough they’ll start making babies the normal way, but as you pointed out, the population we have is too old, and there’s too much we need to do to have people taking time out for pregnancy—”

“And you think creating the babies in test tubes will make this whole thing palatable,” Tomos finished dryly. “Don’t fool yourself. Birthing new slaves for the Carryx is an atrocity any way you slice it. Because it’s not just kids, is it? Give people children that they love, and you put handles on their backs. What are we going to do when the bugs can threaten to kill our babies if we refuse?”

“I don’t like it either,” Dafyd said. “But it’s not my decision. We live or we die depending on what the Carryx pick. If there is anything we want to do, we have to do these things first. We aren’t free to go another way.”

“He’s right,” Jellit said. “We don’t have a choice.”

“I do,” Uuya Tomos said. When she stood up, Tonner expected her to go on, but she only turned and walked out of the room with a rolling gait like her hip ached. Probably it was the most eloquent way she could have put it. He found himself liking her.

“If the rest of you want to go,” Dafyd said, “you can. I can find other people.”

For a moment, they were silent. Then Andermus chuckled. “All right. So let’s assume we want to live.”

Korham cleared his throat and turned to Tonner. “These lamb sacks. What would they need, construction-wise, to work best?”

The test sacks hung along one wall, each one fixed to the metal by three hooks. They were square, about the length of his arm. The white of the backing was yellowed by what would act as amniotic fluid if he could keep the dialysis tubes running to and from each sack from cooling the mix down. Solve the temperature stasis issues, and there would be little wisps of tissue in the soup in as little as a month, all of them on their way to growing up and paying taxes or whatever the Carryx equivalent was. Tonner paced the wall, thinking about how to make that happen. As a technical challenge, it was interesting, and he appreciated that.

The lab around him was busier than it had been since he’d come. New voices layered over each other, almost drowning out the burble of the hydroponics. New faces passed him as he went through his rounds. All of them knew who he was. He had expected to resent Korham’s new team, but in practice, they were a godsend. Korham staged himself as a facilities manager and nothing more. When Tonner said he needed a better water supply or someone to string wire from the power conduits, Korham and his team did as they were told. Even the ones who had been experts in some other field seemed to take on Korham’s persona of puzzle solving and service to the community. His religious background seemed to help, which was interesting. Tonner had never had much use for imaginary cosmologies.

“Um, Tonner?” Brun said. “We have a little problem.”

The tall man was looming behind him. Tonner wasn’t sure how long he’d been there. “That’s new. We haven’t had problems before. I wonder what changed.” Brun’s confused look was disappointing. Before his assistant could say anything, Tonner went on. “What is it? What’s the problem?”

“One of the new workers is… He’s not…”

“Show me.”

The man was at one of the new Carryx-designed machines that seemed as much animal as lab equipment. He was half a head shorter than Tonner with close-cropped gray hair and a mustache that had been groomed to within an inch of its life. His arms were crossed, and his chest puffed up like a bantam’s.

“You’re the one in charge?” the man said, each word seeming to end on a higher note than the one before. The man was playing out his protest like he had an audience. “I want to make it very clear that I’m not going to do this. I am Ver Cannedan. I have spent my life dedicated to the art and philosophy of dance. I am not a man who washes lab equipment. Do you understand me?”

“I do,” Tonner said, then turned to Brun. “This is not my problem. Alkhor wants him here, Alkhor can deal with him.”

He headed back to the lamb sacks. If the tubes were bound together so that the fluid coming in was warmed by the fluid coming out, it might be enough to keep the system stable. Adding a dedicated heating element was possible, but overheating would be just as bad. And the more complicated a system got, the more parts there were to fail. He’d talk to Korham about that.

“So, ah, should I send for Alkhor?” Brun asked.

“Sure,” Tonner said. “Or his new security woman. What’s her name? Andermus? See if they want to come deal with whatshisname the dancer.”

Brun nodded and darted off. Tonner watched him go.

“This should be entertaining,” he said to no one.

Six

For all the horrors that came with Carryx captivity—and there were many—there were also moments so surreal that they felt dreamlike. Moments that so utterly failed to fit into any mental category that the brain was left with no answer, like a computer trying to divide by zero.

Brun running into his office to say Tonner needs you because there’s a dancer refusing to clean equipment in the birthing lab was one of those moments.

Instead of asking any of the questions bouncing around in his head, Dafyd said All right and got up to follow Brun back to the lab.

When they arrived, Tonner was at one of the lab machines talking to Korham. He watched Dafyd from across the room with a barely concealed smirk. Tonner only got that happy when he knew Dafyd was about to have a bad time.

Dafyd started toward him, but Tonner nodded his head in another direction. A compact man of indeterminate age was standing near one of the lamb sack pods, radiating impatience. Dafyd didn’t recognize him.

“Hello,” Dafyd said. “I’m Dafyd Alkhor. We haven’t—”

“You are the one who assigned me to… this”—the dancer waved his arm around dramatically, encompassing everything in one gesture—“this drudgery?”

Dafyd didn’t close his eyes or put his face in his hands. He could imagine this exact conversation happening over and over again in the coming days: an endless parade of people who had been the absolute best ever at something the Carryx didn’t give a shit about. Now they were janitors and carpenters and laborers of all sorts, and they were going to be very angry about that. The Carryx didn’t seem to understand the debasement that loss of status carried for human beings, or if they did, they didn’t care.

Dafyd stifled his sigh and said, “Yes, I’ve had to alter some assignments based on the Carryx requirements. I understa—”

“My name is Ver Cannedan,” the little man said, waiting for him to recognize the name. To Dafyd’s surprise, he did. When he was a child his aunt Dorinda had taken him to an incredibly elaborate dance performance at the Irvian Recital Hall. Afterward, she’d gone on and on about how it had been Ver Cannedan’s masterwork. She’d funded his troupe for the next decade.

“The master choreographer,” Dafyd said, taking the man’s hand and giving him a little bow. “My aunt Dorinda Alkhor always spoke so highly of you.”

If Dafyd had hoped that name-dropping his aunt would defuse the situation, it didn’t work.

“If only she were here, the organization of this place would not be such a disaster,” Ver said.

“I’m glad she’s not here,” Dafyd said, “though I agree she’d be a much better manager than I am. We still have to—”

“Rescind this ridiculous assignment at once.”

“I’m afraid I can’t—”

“At once,” the little man repeated, more forcefully. And through all the bluster and arrogance, Dafyd could see the truth. The endless fear and humiliation they’d all suffered. How important the tiny bits of control over their own lives were now, when those tiny bits were all they had left. The dancer stood, fists clenched, practically vibrating somewhere between fury and bursting into tears.

Dafyd put his hand on the man’s shoulder. He wasn’t sure if Ver was going to collapse into his arms or run away. He was ready for either.

Instead, Ver shifted lower, bending at the knees. One arm was raised high over his head. The other arm dropped low, almost touching the floor. For a split second Dafyd thought the man had begun some sort of dance.

Then the lower arm lashed upward in a lightning-fast uppercut, and something displacing happened. Things went dark for a moment, and Dafyd was sitting on the floor. Brun was holding a cold compress to his face. Tonner was across the room with a grin on his face like a child who’d been surprised with the most wonderful gift. Everyone else was staring at him in open shock.

The little choreographer was nowhere to be seen.

Dafyd’s Sinen… helper? Overseer? Partner? It was difficult to say. Whatever it was, it scrolled through the Carryx librarian–style report Dafyd had written about the incident in Tonner’s lab. Too many people had seen it to cover it up, and Dafyd knew the Carryx response to open insubordination was likely to be dramatic and fatal. He was hoping to head that off if he could.

Not that he didn’t want to see Ver Cannedan get his ass kicked.

Dafyd had seen a soldier smashed to a rag doll in front of him. He’d been part of the battle that triggered the genocide of a whole species. He’d called down the slaughter of his fellow human beings, including people he’d called friends and the woman he’d loved. He had seen his planet in chains. And after so much violence, he was surprised he could still be so rattled by a punch.

The Sinen at his side jittered the tentacles that came from its mouth in a way that made him think of a sneeze, but with a real meaning he couldn’t fathom. The half-mind at the little thing’s chest didn’t translate it as anything. It might have been the Sinen equivalent of rolling eyes and sighing at the stupid monkey that couldn’t figure out simple things.

It made some more pronounced noises that Dafyd recognized as speech. A moment later, the box spoke in the same calm, affectless voice that it usually adopted. “You have put the ending syntax in the center of the report.”

He looked at the glowing shapes floating before them, trying to find the failure. The written language of the Carryx was as foreign as their rumbling birdsong voices, and trying to compose even the simplest versions of a report in it was proving too hard. Plus which, his jaw hurt where Ver Cannedan had laid him out.

Ver Cannedan, whose life he was still trying to save.

“I don’t see it,” Dafyd said.

The Sinen reached out and shifted something that looked like a part of a gold-glowing cone slightly to the right.

“But doesn’t that…” Dafyd sank his head into his hands. “Doesn’t that make it say that I didn’t discipline him?”

“It does not,” the Sinen replied. “But it does indicate that the report continues. You are thinking of this.”

It turned the cone so that the point was canted thirty or so degrees off true. Which, sure. Of course. It was so obvious now. He wanted to choke the little goatfish to death and then slam his own head on the desk until he passed out.

“Isn’t there a way to have the half-mind do this for me?” he said, and he hated the whine in his voice.

“I will inquire,” the Sinen said, and Dafyd had the sinking feeling that the little alien had been hoping he’d admit failure.

“Please don’t,” Dafyd said. “I will continue to study.”

“If you prefer.”

The writing wasn’t really a language so much as a drawing in space of the information it meant to share. The shapes each seemed to have a hundred different meanings depending on where they were placed in space, what shapes they interacted with, and the context of the he’d-call-it-a-document in which they appeared. It took the place of a written language in part by having no relationship to sound or illustration, or at least none that Dafyd could see. Using it was like trying to write poetry in advanced mathematical notations that he didn’t know. The only saving grace was that he could take time to compose it before submitting its final form. He could draft and redraft and redraft the same thought until his eyes bled, and Ekur-Tkalal only had to suffer through the final version of his incoherence.

Dafyd summoned another shape out of the air, and the little deck the Sinen had given him projected a green-blue square that he resized, turned on one vertex, and placed with the other objects. The Sinen didn’t react, so maybe he’d gotten that part right.

It was exhausting. He was exhausted. His body felt heavier and a little fevered the way it did when he’d had too little sleep for too long a time. Once he was done here, the first reports were starting to arrive from the little slices of humanity that the Carryx had taken out into the galaxy. The only one he’d had time to review was from a woman named Ames Sofar who had arrived someplace called the Estian Morok Starweb to be examined by the local Gar to determine human suitability for inclusion in the arantine. Dafyd didn’t know what any of that meant, and it was the first of what would probably be hundreds like it. Ekur-Tkalal, keeper-librarian of the human moiety and Dafyd’s master among the Carryx, seemed happy to drop all of it on his shoulders, and Dafyd had encouraged it to. The more he knew, he figured, the more options he could discover.

But he still woke up some mornings remembering his teacher from lower university who would have the students grade each other’s work. Dafyd didn’t know what Ekur-Tkalal did with its days apart from send its tasks to him, but he was starting to feel like the librarian’s disdain for working with animals might also be a disdain for working at all.

Or maybe he was just bitter.

“You have not impressed the report,” the Sinen said. “If you do not impress the report, it will not enter the archive.”

“Yes, yes,” Dafyd said. “I understand.”

He rechecked the glowing shapes of the report, cleaned up the syntax hopefully without making too many more errors, and let the glowing objects fade. The Sinen didn’t offer any other comment but trundled away muttering to itself wetly. Dafyd folded the little projector and put it in his pocket, ready for the next brain-cramping report.

The little garden was calm for the moment. A soft breeze made the tree’s limbs shift gently. Sunlight and shadows swayed on the stone walk, and the leaves tapping against each other sounded almost calm. Dafyd opened his mouth until the swelling started to hurt, and then a little wider. He closed his eyes, and his own thoughts assailed him. There were so many things he had to do, so many projects that had to move forward, that he couldn’t keep them all clear in his head at the same time. Every time he remembered another thing that he was supposed to do, he felt himself forgetting something else. There might be only a dozen top priorities, but he could spend hours cycling through them until it felt like standing under a waterfall. He would have thought that they made rest impossible, except that the sound of footsteps woke him.

He recognized Jellit by the cadence of his gait. He wondered, if he’d stayed asleep, if Jellit would try to wake him or leave him in peace. He wondered if he wanted to be woken or left. With an effort, he opened his eyes.

Jessyn’s brother came into the garden with his fists at his sides and his eyes wide. When he saw Dafyd, he started back, but then seemed to relax. He was a tall, thin man with a limp he’d acquired in the time since they’d left their homes behind. His sister was much shorter, much less angular. Dafyd could only see the resemblance between the two in the warmth of their skin and the shape of their eyes and mouths.

Dafyd leaned forward in his chair. In the sky, a pattern of pink lights appeared behind the screen of clouds, descending slowly toward the planetary surface. The breeze shifted, bringing a smell that was part rotting plant, part burning plastic. Jellit’s pace slowed as he got closer, and his gaze moved around Dafyd’s jaw and neck like a physician doing triage. Then, slowly, the man relaxed.

“You heard,” Dafyd said.

“I did. It’s not as bad as I thought. The version I got said Ver knocked you on your ass.”

“He did. He has a hell of a punch for such a little guy. Guess I should have studied dance when the bullies were beating me up in primary school.”

“What now?” Jellit asked.

“Well, I just got finished writing the report about the state of things including that. I tried to imply that I’d broken one of Ver’s limbs over it.”

Jellit leaned against the tree, his arms folded. “What are you actually going to do?”

“Talk to Andermus, and then maybe break one of his limbs.”

“Seriously, though.”

Dafyd poked at the bruise with the tips of his fingers. “Seriously, I don’t know. I can’t let it pass, and I also don’t want to lose people’s trust. It has to be the community enforcing standards and norms, not Dafyd Alkhor taking revenge.”

“If he’d punched Tonner?” Jellit asked. “If he’d punched me?”

“That’d be easier. You think you can get him to pop you one?”

Jellit lifted an eyebrow. “I’m willing to try. But are you all right?”

“As well as can be expected?”

“How well is that? Honestly?”

Dafyd felt his breath go out, felt his ribs sink in. Honestly was a simple word, but dangerous. It had weight. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I can’t really afford to know. I feel fine except that I’m falling asleep in the middle of the day. My jaw ached before Ver hit me because I’ve been clenching it in my sleep. My back aches. I get headaches. I’m fine.”

Jellit’s shoulders sank. The pain in the other man’s eyes was like an echo, and Dafyd hated to see it. “I’m sorry,” Jellit said.

“It was easier before,” Dafyd said. “It was easier when we had Else.”

Jellit’s breath caught.

“No,” Dafyd said. “I’m not angry. I don’t blame you for anything. And I hope… I mean, I hope you don’t blame me. But when she was here, the…” Dafyd stopped, took the plain square of the half-mind off from around his neck and put it under his chair. When he walked away, Jellit followed. Dafyd kept his voice low. “When she was here, the spy was here too. Our connection to the war. I keep feeling like we sacrificed so much for a splinter of hope, and losing it…”

Dafyd felt his eyes watering. He knew there was sorrow, but he didn’t feel it. He only saw the symptoms of it in himself. Jellit stepped in close, putting his arms around Dafyd’s shoulders and chest, pulling him close. If it had been someone else, Dafyd would have pushed them away, but Jellit had lost so much that the embrace was comfort the other man needed too, and Dafyd couldn’t bring himself to refuse that. Even if it meant being vulnerable.

“If there are allies for us out there, I can’t reach them,” Dafyd said. Tears and despair had thickened his voice. “Else and her spy were the only way. And they’re gone.”

“They aren’t,” Jellit breathed.

Seven

They aren’t, it says. Oh, Dafyd. I’m so sorry, but they aren’t.

Its heart is beating fast, driven by adrenaline. Its breath is fast and shallow, gas exchanging in its lungs as if the moment were a promise of violence.

Else says Be careful. Oh be careful. But it is too late for caution. With a pang of regret, the swarm takes a half step back from the embrace. Confusion shifts the shape of Dafyd’s eyes, the angle of his head. It has imagined this moment many, many times, thought through many, many words that would unfold its hidden existence. Now that the moment has come, it rolls up its sleeve, bares the thin skin at its wrist, and lets the microagents that are its peculiar body cohere—black motes swirl under its skin like flakes in a snowstorm. It discovers that it is holding its breath.

Dafyd changes. His heart speeds up, the skin of his hands and feet cool as blood is pulled to his core, but he doesn’t cry out. The swarm tells itself that the shock is only shock. It isn’t fear.

Its smile feels uncertain. Shy. I didn’t know how to tell you. I am so sorry.

Dafyd takes in a long, slow, shuddering breath. His gaze shifts from the black motes of its skin to its eyes and back again. It’s in you? Else passed it to you before she died.

In the darkness of its mind, Jellit leans forward. Here we go. Now it gets ugly.

She didn’t die, the swarm says. She’s in here. She’s in me. I’m Else.

Dafyd takes a step back. His head is shaking like he’s denying something, but he doesn’t seem to realize he’s doing it. When he speaks, the words come slowly, awkwardly, as if he has to make each one from scratch. Else and the spy. They were cooperating.

We still are, it says. We’re right here. I am Else. And the spy, but I am Else.

And Else speaks, her voice quiet. He doesn’t understand. He only sees you as Jellit.

The swarm understands, shifts to its memories of when it inhabited the woman’s body, of who and what it had been when it first knew Dafyd. When it speaks, it speaks as her. The first time you and I kissed was in my rooms back on Anjiin. It was right before the attack started. I wanted to keep you there, underground where it was safe. We’d gone looking for the telescope, remember? You started to ask me, but then you lost your nerve a little. Dafyd steps back again, almost stumbling, and it moves forward, almost catching him, except that he flinches away. It’s okay. It’s okay. I kissed you, you remember? When I was Else, I kissed you. And she’s still here. She’s still me.

Dafyd puts his hand on its breastbone, pushing as he steps away. Its arms stay up and out toward the man like kelp in the sea. There are tears on its cheeks.

Else is dead, Dafyd says. They found her body.

It was only a body. The rest is still here. I’m right here.

I don’t understand.

The fear and excitement have congealed into a desperate kind of frustration. It knows what it needs to convey to him, how the situation can make sense for him, but the words don’t carry enough power. It’s like trying to work inside a delicate box with oversized work gloves on. Its hands flutter.

Else says Tell him about Jellit.

Do, Jellit says. Go ahead. Tell him about me.

There was no way to convince Jellit to cooperate, it says. He was adamant. I knew you wouldn’t tell the librarian if he didn’t, and we had to tell. We didn’t have an option. So we left Else’s body behind and came to his. Only the body. Nothing else. Nothing that matters.

The distant echo of Ameer Kindred shakes her head. That’s unconvincing. I wouldn’t believe it if I were him.

Jellit laughs, and the laugh has sharp edges. I wouldn’t understand it if I were him.

It pushes them both away. It can’t afford to be distracted. Not now. I didn’t tell you because… I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. Because maybe you wouldn’t understand. I didn’t have a choice.

Dafyd lets out a breath that’s deeper than the others, like a sigh. It sounds like a bird landing. You’re Else.

Yes.

And… and the other thing.

The swarm… the spy. Yes. It’s just like before.

Where’s Jellit?

In the darkness, Jellit spreads imaginary hands. The swarm can’t keep the flash of chagrin from its mouth. It doesn’t want to talk about Jellit or Ameer or itself even. It wants Dafyd and Else together. It wants what they had before.

But.

He’s here too. Everyone comes along. It’s hard to explain, but the person I was on Anjiin, the person I was when we were on the transport together, that’s still me. I’m still her. I’m just maybe a little bit more too. It’s okay, Dafyd. It’s a good thing. The mission never failed. We can still win, just the way we planned.

Dafyd backs away. His steps are unsteady, but it gives him his space. He gags once, stumbles, doubles over.

It wants to bring him back from wherever his mind has taken him. It needs him here. In this moment. I wanted to tell you earlier.

She said it was riding along with her. She said they were partners.

It has reviewed that moment a thousand times. More. It knows every word it spoke, every answer Dafyd gave. Now it also knows what he heard. They aren’t the same. I said it was complicated.

Was it ever her? Was it ever just her? he asks. His eyes widen, harden, turn on it with something like horror. What the hell are you?

But something else grabs its attention. A noise, a scent, a presentiment of something dangerous. It turns toward the archway, the gentle clicking footfalls too low for human ears, but not for it. The pale knife legs of a Rak-hund emerge from the shadows. Other shapes loom behind it: the eerie long limbs and squat, powerful bodies of four Soft Lothark.

They heard us, Jellit says. They were listening the whole time, and now they’re going to kill us all.

The swarm feels a rush of horror at the thought and from Else a kind of relief that it is all, at least, over. And as the Rak-hund clicks and slithers forward, an unexpected pang of mourning. Jellit in his rage and glee, regretting that the Carryx wouldn’t suffer for what they’d done.

The four Soft Lothark amble out to stand beside the Rak-hund. The patchy brown fur that covers their bodies looks greasy and matted. Their tiny eyes are utterly black and unreadable, and their mouths so wide they look like they could unhinge their jaws. Dafyd stands, and the swarm has to stop itself from stepping between him and the threat of the alien soldiers.

I left my half-mind over there, Dafyd says, gesturing. What do you want? What are you doing here?

The Soft Lothark look at each other and make a volley of grumbling, wet sounds. Then one steps forward from the others, standing beside the Rak-hund. The black square at its throat speaks. We seek out the one who assists the keeper-librarian of the Humans of Anjiin. We were told he smelled as you smell. Is this you?

It prepares itself for a final violence. If it releases itself now, lets the human flesh that has carried it so far fall away, it can become a cutting storm. It can kill all the enemies before it and many, many more. But not all. The palace is well defended. And the Carryx will not mourn those they’ve lost. It will die for an empty gesture of defiance. But it will also die protecting Dafyd.

It begins to let go…

It is, Dafyd says. My name is Dafyd Alkhor. What do— The words choke him. He tries again. What do you want?

All four Soft Lothark make a wheezing huff together that, in something even slightly comprehensible, would have been laughter. The swarm doesn’t know what it signifies, but sees no tension in their bodies. They have not attacked.

Something unanticipated is happening.

You have suffered violence that inconveniences the Carryx, the Soft Lothark says. A hundred of our—the half-mind pauses a short second, then—clan group are now assigned to your moiety to help you maintain physical security. We were also to escort this one which is assigned to protect your person in particular.

It gestures toward the Rak-hund.

Dafyd barks out a single laugh. He doesn’t seem to know he’s done it. Ekur assigned me guards?

It is the excellence of our moiety, the Soft Lothark says. We are agents of appropriate violence. It is our role and place in society. The Rak-hund will keep you from unwelcome violence and kill anything of lesser status that you indicate.

The words what are you float to the top of the swarm’s mind. Dafyd’s look of horror. The many ways that this moment balances on a knife-edge come clearer to it. The dangers. The things that it needs to say that cannot now be said. The weapons of the enemy that have come to surround the man that it loves. The man who is now afraid of it.

Another hour. Another minute. Another chance to make clear to Dafyd that it is the same person he took comfort in. It wants that time more than it wants to draw another breath. But it can’t have it.

I should… the swarm says, and gestures off at the archway as if it were only Jellit.

Yes, Dafyd says. His laugh is dark and bitter. You should probably go.

Eight

When Jessyn had been a girl at her medrey picking her first specialization, she’d seen the wilderness transport rolling in after weeks or months in the field, the researchers all sinew and muscle, skins darkened by the sun and lightened by a powdering of dirt. They’d seemed like adventurers returning from exotic realms with stories of the animals they’d seen, the caverns they’d traveled down, and the nights spent under a sky more filled with stars than anything a city-bound girl had ever seen. She’d priced out a camping set, taken pictures of herself in field gear. She’d even slept in the bushes outside her parents’ house with Jellit nearby pretending that he didn’t know where she was so that she could fall a little deeper into the fantasy.

She had wanted it because she knew she couldn’t have it. Because she knew that if her mind went rotten while she was on the trail, there would be no one there to take her to the wards and keep her under watch until the drugs could bring her back to sanity. It wasn’t a dream of fieldwork. It was a dream of being well.

She’d opted for laboratory work instead.

And because the universe was made from energy, matter, and an unhealthy bent for irony, that choice had brought her here. Now the stability of her mind lived between two panes of glass, and Jellit and her parents and the whole medical establishment of Anjiin were as mythical as a Serintist archangel.

She knew intellectually that she should have been more afraid than she was.

Some of the others kept close to the Carryx ships out of fear, but she wasn’t afraid. She kept her little farm back at the ships to keep it safe, and only returned daily to decant the little glassful of sanity that kept her upright.

For the rest of her time, she took a pair of blankets and a satchel filled with bricks of field rations and bottles of clean water and walked south until the ships were a few bumps on the horizon. There was a little natural shelter beside a sandstone cliff that she cleaned out for herself. To the west, ruins of some alien architecture rose up toward the sky, spires shattered and blackened. That was the only sign she had of the galactic war that had brought her here. She didn’t find traps or soldiers, and her little base was well within the radius that Third Gardener, their Sinen overseer, had marked on their notebook maps as the safety limit if they had to evacuate.

The plant analogs were thick-stemmed with leaflike structures in green and purple and red with black vasculature that formed patterns of concentric rings. Small animals no bigger than the smallest joint of her little toe hopped across the ground at dawn and twilight, their thick white bristles chiming like someone two streets away breaking glass. Larger things flew in the high air with forward-canted wings. The sky was blue edging on purple where something in it scattered the longer wavelengths of light the way oxygen clutched at blue.

When she wasn’t collecting samples or watching the flow of this new, familiar-but-unfamiliar aspect of natural systems, she could check the notebook the Sinen had given out. It was like one of the translation half-minds, but flatter. She could command it to show a map of the local wilds with a simple coordinate system to navigate by and an archive of entries saved there by the other researchers. A botanist named Manni was adding entries every few minutes with notes and observations about the weeds just by where the ships had touched down. A geologist named Holom Coombs had written an essay the length of a formal article about the implications of the sandstone cliffs to the south with a long, gushing footnote about how he’d been halfway through composing the entry, lost his notebook down a crevasse, and been delighted to find the incomplete draft still available in the replacement. A pair of hydrogeologists were using their entries to play strategy games.

She let herself notice that Garral Pär was putting in notes now and then, and that the coordinate markers he sometimes included placed him not so very far from her.

Every now and again, she caught sight of some of the other species that had traveled to the planet with them. Two of the oblong gray sofa-things had tracked even farther south than her camp, scuttling away together on their skirts of tiny legs. A flock of Euruk of Lydiándar passed overhead in a V-shaped formation sometimes five or six times each day. Whatever they were studying, it didn’t show in the notes Jessyn saw. Probably each species had its own archive, all of it filtering up to Third Gardener and the Carryx.

At night, she slept. In the day, she explored. She didn’t know who would read the notes she was making. The impulse to make her writing accessible and clear lasted about a day. Everything since that had been meant for an audience of herself or possibly one of the others from her research group: Tonner or Campar or Rickar or Dafyd. She used references that only they would know, the private shorthand they’d built up over years of communal work. Coffee-ring symmetry for similar shapes at slightly different scales. First data cologne for aromatics of a certain concentration. Sometimes she picked terms and references that only she and Irinna or Else would have known, even though the other women were dead. The only audience who needed to know what she meant was her. If someone else wanted an explanation, they could ask.

On the fifth day—or maybe the sixth—she was sitting under a wide-leafed fern analog reviewing a draft that she hadn’t saved for the wider community to see when a note appeared on her most recent saved entry.

AVAILABLE TO COMPARE NOTES?—PÄR

The little shock surprised her. She fought back a smile and then—no one was watching her—smiled. Put her field notes back among the drafts and added them to the saved entry.

WHERE AND WHEN?

It seemed like an hour before the entry updated again, but it was almost certainly less. He added a set of coordinates from the map and REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AN HOUR BEFORE SUNSET.

The refreshments were the same things Jessyn had at her own camp, but Garral had set up a little grill out of a metal mesh and a ceramic bowl that he’d salvaged from the ruins of the city. He cut slices of the ration bar and put them over heat just long enough to blacken the edges. The water bottles were the same ones she had beside her blankets. He’d built a double pot with sand between the layers that he’d doused with water. The evaporation from the sand cooled the inner chamber a few degrees. The simple refrigerator was one of the most elegant things she’d seen in years, and she told him so.

“The unexpected advantages of getting far too interested in archaeology as a child,” he said, turning a square of the ration brick with a set of tongs he’d made from a pair of sticks. “I used to spend my break between terms writing scrolls in dead languages and making simple machines in the family yard. There was a creek at the edge of the property that I used to abuse with water wheels every year until my father made me stop.”

Jessyn took another bite. The crust brought out the saltiness of the bar and gave it some texture. It wasn’t good, but it was an order of magnitude better than the unaltered version. She must have reacted somehow, because Garral smiled.

“It’s not winning awards, but I tell myself it’s as good as a street window café.”

“It’s literally the best food on the planet,” Jessyn said with a chuckle.

Garral had made his base of operations on the outskirts of the ruined structures, but just as far from the Carryx ships as Jessyn’s camp. From here, the dead spires had an almost glassy look, like they’d been made from obsidian. The air had a different smell—more astringent and biting—that reminded her of industrial manufacturing. The lean-to he’d made from thin metal bars and the branches of the local tree analogs stuccoed with mud and grass. It nestled between a boulder and the scorched remnants of a wall like an animal’s den. He saw her looking at it and shrugged.

“It didn’t take as long as it looks,” he said, a little defensively. “I have actually been working.”

“Any great insights?” Jessyn said, half teasing. Garral smiled. He had a good smile. As he spoke, he poured fresh water into the bottle she was drinking from, and his arm brushed against hers in a way that didn’t mean anything unless it did. She found herself very aware of his proximity.

“A few. Some of the previous occupants were about our size and seem to have walked upright, and some others larger but walking on all fours. Or maybe sixes. Could have been eights. I don’t know that part. The construction was mostly poured polymers with internal reinforcements of something I haven’t quite figured out yet, but I got a couple samples of it. There are what look like written signs all over the place, so their senses included sight. And I haven’t found anything that’s painted in ultraviolets, so probably their visual acuity tops out at about the same wavelengths as ours.”

“Tools?”

“Some, yeah. Simple things. Knives, shovels, hammers, door latches. The kinds of simple machines you’d expect anything advanced to have around trivially. And then a whole raft of stuff I don’t know what I’m looking at and I can’t turn it on. What about you?”

“Survey work so far,” she said, and sipped her water. The cool was pleasant, and it had a little mineral bite to it that tasted like stone. “Plants that look like plants and bugs that look like bugs. I’ll know more when I can start taking them apart and seeing what they’re made of.”

“Plants that look like plants is interesting, though, no? I mean, wouldn’t you expect something different?”

“It says more about what kinds of pressures they’re under than anything about the organism. Back on Anjiin, you could mistake oaks and mirrins for each other, and they came up through completely different trees of life. An environment tells you how to live in it.”

Garral took a slice of bar off the grill and tossed it between his hands until it cooled enough to eat. “That’s a hell of a thought,” he said, and she thought there was something unexpected in his inflection. Sorrow, maybe. Or anger.

“It’s like the way so many organisms that move through water wind up some variation of fish-shaped. Or things that live around light develop eyes. Oxygen makes a great electron acceptor, so if there’s oxygen around, things will use it for respiration. If there’s an atmosphere thick enough, something will figure out how to fly.”

“And if your environment is under the Carryx’s thumb…” Garral said, and then didn’t finish the thought.

Jessyn felt the bitterness in his words like the clenching in her own neck when she thought about the world-palace. She wasn’t sure what it meant between them. Only that the conversation had changed somehow.

He sighed. Not too far away, something sang four falling notes of a broken chord. The sun had fallen below the horizon while they talked and ate and did whatever it was they were doing here. The warmth in the sky was what it left behind, and there were stars in it.

Jessyn thought that, if she wanted to, she could do anything just then.

“You have someone?” she asked, her voice small.

Garral looked at the fire in his grill. She hoped he wouldn’t lie.

“A friend on the Carryx world, yes,” he said. And then after a long pause, “And a wife and two sons back on Anjiin.”

“And what would they say about…” Her gesture took in the two of them.

“I don’t know,” Garral said. “We didn’t have a chance to talk about it. Either time. What about you? You have somebody?”

“No,” she said. “Not like that. There was someone I was sort of infatuated with for a while, but she died.”

“In the invasion, or after…”

“After. She never knew, I don’t think. We were close friends. More than anything I think I was desperate for safety, and Irinna was very kind,” she said. They were some of the most intimate words she’d ever spoken. Saying them relaxed something in her that she hadn’t known was tense. It felt like finally letting Irinna go. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring up her romantic failings. Or maybe it hadn’t. Either way, they both knew that a moment had passed.

“Do you think,” Garral asked, “that they’ll take us back to the world-palace when we’re done here? Or do we just keep going forward? Move on from here to wherever they want us next, and then the one after that, and the one after that.”

“I think we’ll go back once this is over. But I don’t know.”

“That’s the part I hate the most. Not knowing.”

For a while, they were both quiet. A V formation of Euruk or something else like them passed overhead calling to each other in small, cooing voices. Jessyn ate a last bite of her food, drank the last of the bottle of water. The embers in the grill glowed golden and red.

“It’s getting late. I should get back to my camp. Scare off anything that’s looking to eat my samples.”

Garral stood, brushing off his tunic with the palms of wide hands. “Of course. I’m glad you could spend the hour. You see things with a different lens than I do. It helps me, getting out of my own head sometimes.”

“I know what you mean. We should do this again. Make a practice of it.”

She took the hand he offered and let him help her up, even though she didn’t need it. In the falling light, he looked rueful, but not peevish or annoyed. She would have been disappointed if he’d been annoyed.

“I could reach out to some of the others,” Garral said. “See if they wanted to come along too.”

Jessyn looked up at the darkening sky. The twilight was still too strong to make out the galactic disk, but there were stars. “I was thinking I should host next time, and my place isn’t as well-appointed as yours.”

Garral’s gaze flickered and was gone. “Maybe the time after next, then.”

“Maybe,” Jessyn said.

The walk back to her camp was cool. A thick, sweet scent made her think that something had waited for the darkness to pollinate or exchange signaling pheromones. Night changed the shape of the landscape and the sounds of the wild. Intellectually, Jessyn knew that there was probably some danger. Night was a good time for carnivores to track down sleeping prey. She didn’t feel it, though. An unknown beast here seemed like less of a threat than the Carryx or their soldiers or the other captive species. Alone in the wilderness of an alien world was about as safe as she was likely to get.

Her thinking had a thick sense of effort, like she was working her way through a particularly complicated dataset, only without an actual problem she was trying to solve, the back of her mind furiously busy with something but unwilling to let the conscious sliver participate. She put one foot in front of the other, her breath rising and falling in a deep, steady rhythm, the work of her muscles keeping her warm. When the profound depths of her mind were ready, they could heave up some flash of insight. Or, more likely, whatever bathypelagic struggle Garral Pär had started in her would work itself out and never rise to awareness except as the smile she found on her lips when she reviewed the night in her memory.

When she reached her little shelf of sandstone, she shook out the blankets and dislodged any little local creatures that might have taken refuge there. She thought about starting a fire, but she could feel the first dip of tiredness that would, she knew, become a need for sleep. She didn’t want to go through the effort of starting something just to put it out again, so she lay between her blankets, looked up at the sky, and let herself simply be for a moment.

Of the billions of stars, one of them might perhaps be the Carryx homeworld where Jellit and Tonner and Dafyd were waiting for her to come back. Another one might be Anjiin, where she’d lived without dreaming of the horrors and wonders that were coming for her until they had arrived.

But in all the billions and billions of systems, in all the galaxies too faint for her to see, none of them had Irinna. Or Synnia. Or Nöl. None of those suns shone down on Else Yannin or Llaren Morse. And one day, the stars wouldn’t find her either. Her or anyone she knew. All she had was the moment and the starlight. The back of her mind seemed to find some peace in that.

Before she gave herself over to rest, she rolled to her side, propped open the notebook, and drafted a plan for the next day’s work. There were four sites she’d noted that might be interesting. Two had unnaturally round layouts that made her suspect they’d been cultivated fields, one was a thick copse of bamboo-like cane grass that didn’t match any of the surrounding vegetation, and the last was a stretch of treelike organisms that, even though half were burned, had the look of an orchard.

That last one was the farthest from the Carryx base, and it edged in closer to Garral’s camp. It was a stupid, petty reason to choose it over the others, and she marked it anyway before shutting down the notebook and curling into the blankets.

Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.

PART TWO

ANTITHESIS

Ke looked up at the world he had named, and he went to his father. Father, I have named a new world for us so that we may leave the sickness of our past behind us and live purified.

But Ke’s father told him: We cannot reach this new world because it is too far from us, and our boats never learned to sail across the starry night. Only the Gods know this magic.

So Ke went to the lord of all that grows and asked him to grow a stalk of bamboo so long that it could reach the new world, but the lord of all that grows had become weak, and could not grow bamboo long enough to climb to the new world, and so they could not climb to Anjiin.

And Ke went to the lady of the oceans and asked her to spin a waterspout powerful enough that they could sail to the new world, but the lady of the oceans had grown sick, and could not raise a waterspout powerful enough to climb to the new world, so they could not sail to Anjiin.

And Ke went to the spirits of the deep fires and asked them to open a volcano so wide that its heat would float them to the new world, but the spirits of the deep fires did not answer him because they had already turned away from the concerns of living things, and so they could not float to Anjiin.

And Ke went to the holy mountain of Buruq where Ash-Abbé, the bird that ate the sky, made its nest. There he could not ask for anything for fear that the great beast would eat him. And so there he settled in to make his plan.

—From Myths of Origin: Field Notes and Analysis, Uuya Tomos, editor.

Nine

It was strange that the thing Dafyd associated Llian Andermus with most was the way she sat. Whenever he met with his appointed head of security, she took her chair or stool or bench in a way that seemed natural and smooth. If he’d only seen the movement once, he’d have thought nothing of it. What caught his attention was that it was always the same: a glance at the seat, her left hand on it to steady her, then a swooping movement like a pigeon coming to rest and her left leg crossed over her right just above the ankle. It was like she’d studied the best way to sit down and then drilled it to perfection. For him, that mechanistic little quirk was the hook her personality hung from. The obsession with finding the one right way for things to work, and lashing the world around her into the shape that matched it.

“For the most part, the last week has been calm,” she said. “Three violent assaults, an unwanted attention, and four reports of petty theft.”

“Unwanted attention?”

“Sorry,” Andermus said. “That’s the sanitized naming convention we used to use when somebody got groped.”

“The theft surprises me,” Dafyd said. “Do we have things worth stealing?”

Andermus smiled her fox-sharp smile. “If one of us had a grape and someone else wanted it, that would be enough.”

They were in his garden because Dafyd liked it there best. The evening sun was setting, and the sky that reached up above the Carryx world-palace was a symphony of gray and gold, peach and blue. Far away, almost at the horizon, a thunderhead rose up, its crown still white as popcorn and its base as black as a bruise.

The Rak-hund bodyguard lay under the archway back into the building, its pale legs arrayed around it like a spiral of swords. It seemed to enjoy the cool tile floor against its belly, a behavior Dafyd had seen in dogs back on Anjiin. And like dogs, it didn’t seem to like leaving Dafyd out of its sight for too long.

“Two of the assaults were domestic,” Andermus continued, “and I have taken the liberty of separating the people in question. The other was a personality dispute. I coordinated with Korham to have them assigned to different shifts for the time being. The creep who likes putting his hand on people is known. He had a reputation on Anjiin. I issued a warning.”

“A warning?”

“I broke both of his hands and told him next time it would be his spine,” Andermus said. “But at some point we’ll need to talk about whether or not we do incarceration as punishment here.”

“I see.”

Andermus gave him a moment to go on, and when he didn’t nodded once and continued herself. “There is ongoing distress around the arrival of the Soft Lothark guards and the creation of the nursery. I believe there is a committee forming to discuss some concerns.”

“That’s good.”

Andermus made a small, involuntary sigh that sounded like impatience and her smile flickered. Disagreement. She didn’t think it was good.

She was right. Dafyd had been thinking that a committee would let him explain everything at once instead of a hundred times to a hundred people. In practice, it wouldn’t work like that at all. He put his hand to the back of his neck, pressing at the knot there.

“Have you talked with the visualization workgroup?” he asked.

“Jellit Kaul?” Andermus asked. “Yes. He’s still training up replacements for the scientists who were lost in the insurrection. He says that the team he’s assembled will be able to start doing new work in twenty days. Do you want to speak with him?”

“No,” Dafyd said, a little too sharply. “I don’t want to distract him. I just… All this you’ve brought, I appreciate the report, but I don’t have the capacity to make decisions about everything that comes up. I need to be able to delegate and then stop paying attention to some things. And this all falls in the realm I need you to take care of.”

“I understand and appreciate that,” Andermus said with a smoothness that made it sound like something she’d said often enough it had lost its actual meaning. “Perhaps instead of incident reports, it would be better to discuss guidelines.”

“Guidelines.”

“I don’t like operational autonomy. I’ve seen it go wrong too often. I am happy to accept whatever authority you’re ready to pass on if you are prepared to back me when I make a decision that isn’t the one you would have made. So yes, if you tell me to maintain order, I will maintain order. But if there are tactics, strategies, or priorities you want to put on the table, or conversely things you want to take off, I need you to say it in unambiguous language. I will absolutely take silence as permission, and so I need you to give me some guardrails. And if someone complains, I expect you to back me and mine. I’m not interested in being your sin-eater.”

Her voice had taken on a harshness and there was color in her cheeks. He had the feeling that she was touching on sore spots. Llian Andermus had been left holding the blame for something once, and she was still angry about it. He felt a spark of curiosity about her, a little bright wondering about who she was and what had made her so accomplished in her field that the Carryx had chosen her. In another life, he’d have sounded her out. But he was tired…

“People get to dislike what we’re doing, so long as they still do what we say. The things the Carryx ask for aren’t up for debate, so the nursery, Tonner’s lab, and Jellit’s team all get priority. And then anything else that rolls down from on high. Our continued existence depends on us getting that part right, and we will behave that way. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I do.”

“Don’t try to make people into something they can’t be, but keep the disorder at a manageable level. Anything that creeps up to the level of work disruption needs to end immediately. And that one guy? The one with the reputation? He needs to stop.”

“I believe I explained that to him. Let’s see if he heard me.”

“Not sure about paralyzing people, though. That’s hard to undo if we make a mistake. We really do need to figure out if we do prisons here.”

Her smile went a degree more genuine. “Agreed.”

“And tell Uuya Tomos that I need to speak with her.”

“I have told her twice already. Personally.”

“Convince her.”

After Andermus left, Dafyd leaned his back against the little tree and closed his eyes. He had meant to get back to work. Reports from the field were starting to come in more regularly. The scattered humans that had been taken to off-world assignments were sending in their observations and letters and datasets. Dafyd had to go through them all and find the bits that seemed to be important to Ekur-Tkalal, that seemed to address the tasks it had sent them on. A dozen, two dozen, a hundred human experiences ready to distill down to something that a Carryx mind would understand and appreciate. Plus making sure Tonner had whatever he needed. Plus concealing the violence that humans committed against each other in case Ekur decided to add more Soft Lothark guards or else write humanity off as a bad bet. But the bark felt weirdly comfortable against his back and the muttering of the wind was like the white noise his aunt had used to lull herself to sleep. The exhaustion weighing him down didn’t even reflect any immediate danger.

He looked out at the darkening sky and waited for the stars to come out. There was a war out there, someplace. An enemy that hated the Carryx and fought against them on thousands of worlds. There was a war here, in the halls and corridors of the world-palace. A spy in the enemy house.

He thought of Jellit. The confusion and hope on his face that did, now that he considered it, remind Dafyd of Else. And then he was thinking about Else. And then he assumed he was sad, because he was weeping. He didn’t feel sorrow, though. He didn’t feel anything.

The great structures of the world-palace began to glow as the sunlight faded. Just his little view was wide and broad as the largest cities of Anjiin all piled on top of each other. There had to be billions of… people? Of alien things? Sinen and Soun and Soft Lothark, Rak-hund and Phylarchs. Meenan. Louk. Hundreds of species at least, just among the despised animal servants of the great and glorious Carryx. How many billions of Carryx did the ziggurats hold? Or the huge, arching towers that reached up past the sky? And how many thousands or tens of thousands of worlds did the Carryx control?

And here he was, with a tree and a thunderstorm, its violence made beautiful by distance. His body felt very good being still. His feet and hands seemed to have retreated, like the scope of his own body was becoming as wide as the world, or his place in it was shrinking. And still, now, always, in the still center of his weariness, the secret rage. The hidden desire to watch everything the Carryx had built burn to ash.

“I knew your aunt, you know.”

Dafyd started. Uuya Tomos stood between him and archways that were now lit with a soft golden light that made her more a shadow than a woman. Far behind her, the Rak-hund shifted uneasily like it was smelling a threat.

“I met Dorinda when we were… Fuck. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Something like that. Young, anyway. I didn’t really get to know her until later. I came out of the egg an academic, and she was always a politician. We could never be friends, but I admired her for her ruthlessness. I can’t say that I see much of her in you.”

“You came,” Dafyd said, struggling to his feet.

“Andermus threatened me. You should be careful with that one. I agreed to come see you, and now I have done. My part of the bargain’s complete, and I’ll leave you to get some shut-eye.”

“I read your books when I was a kid,” Dafyd said. “I didn’t understand Wolf of the World, but you did a set of short stories. The People of the Panopt. I don’t know how many times I read those. It felt like a hundred.”

“I’ll sign you a copy when we go home,” she said over her shoulder as she walked away with her odd, rolling gait.

“These new children? I can’t help them,” Dafyd said, his voice rising. “They need you.” Her steps slowed. He trotted to catch up with her. His thigh felt bruised, like he’d lain on it long enough to do damage. “They’re going to be born here. They’re not going to know anything but Carryx rule. All this? It’s going to be normal to them. It’s going to be how they grew up. They won’t know Anjiin. They won’t have any idea how we used to live.”

Uuya Tomos stopped, then turned to look at him. She was a small woman, but she didn’t feel that way. Her presence seemed to fill the space around them, and her scowl was sharp enough to cut. “And whose fault is that?” she snapped.

Dafyd pointed to the archway. “The Carryx. It’s their fault. It’s always their fault. If you need to hate me for it, that’s fine, I’ve made myself the one everyone is allowed to hate. But I am doing what I have to do for the human moiety to survive.”

“There are worse things than dying,” she said, but he was close enough to her now that he could speak softly. Too softly for the Rak-hund to hear them.

“If I wanted to raise these children to revolt against the empire, I could do that. If I wanted to raise them to be good servants, I could do that too. But I need them to be both, and that’s too hard for me.”

The old woman’s eyes narrowed, and she turned her head to the side like she was trying to see past something between them. The Rak-hund shifted, noticing the proximity of the two humans and uncertain whether Dafyd was under threat. He willed the thing to stay where it was.

“If we’re going to fight back,” he said, “we have to be patient. We have to be smart. There are things I know that I can’t tell you yet. Or won’t, anyway. But there’s… reason to hope. But maybe I can’t get it done in my lifetime. Maybe we have to lay the groundwork now and let these kids or their kids or the kids after them finish it. But for that to happen, we need to teach them how to seem like one thing and be something else. And we have to do it carefully enough that the big fuckers don’t see what we’re doing.”

“You must think I’m stupid,” she said. “You’re the champion of the fucking Carryx. You’re their lapdog. Every chance you’ve had, you picked them over us. I have friends who died because of you. Now I’m supposed to think you’re some kind of secret patriot? If I agree to this, you wave your vicious little pet over to rip me apart, right?”

Dafyd ignored her. “Not just a curriculum. It’s not just education. I need stories. I need songs about how we might suffer now, but that we’ll get justice in the end. About how servants can get power over time—how they turn invisible. Stories about saying the right things, doing the right things, playing the right part up until the moment comes. And then throwing off the mask and fighting. And it needs to be so solid that even if they don’t understand now, even if they forget, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren can find the meanings waiting for them in there.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

The old woman looked away, and then back at him. He wanted to go on, to explain all the reasons for her to do what he said. His instincts told him to stay quiet and give her space.

“The Gallantists had a tradition like that,” she said. “They built a whole body of folktales around Shavas Rey, the sleeping god, and how she would wake at the end of time to remake the world.”

“That, yes. Something like that. Grab as many of the old stories as you can. That would be great. And it would give us cover. Even if they listen in, they’ll hear things that maybe they also heard when they were spying on us before the invasion. Then it just looks like continuity. If we told the stories before the Carryx came, they won’t think they’re about us now. That’s perfect. But I don’t have that, and you do. And if you need to make something new, you can do that too.”

She shook her head, refusing, but the motion wasn’t as sharp now. He took her hand, looked into her eyes. “So listen to me. Here’s where you stand. I have just inducted you into a secret conspiracy to destroy the Carryx. When you came out here, you didn’t know about it. Now you do. So when you go back through that archway, you have two options. Either you go straight—and I mean straight—to Ekur-Tkalal, tell it everything I just told you, and have me killed, or else you can help me.”

She pulled her hand back. “And if I rat you out and you die, I’ve committed all the sins I despise you for.”

“Yes,” Dafyd said.

Her smile started at her eyes and flowed down. When she looked up at him, there was a brightness in her he hadn’t seen before. Maybe a hunger.

“There she is,” Uuya Tomos said, tapping his sternum with her index finger. “Now I see Dory.”

Ten

Jessyn decanted the liquid from the bottom of the glass sheets drop by drop. It smelled musty and a little astringent, like medicinal tea and acorns. She had scratched a line in the side of the little cup she used. When the fluid reached the mark, she closed the stop and dropped the molarity sensor into the cup. While the reading took, she topped her little farm up with fresh distilled water, glucose, and a powder of micronutrients. It was astonishing, really, how many different biomes seemed to like glucose. Some molecules were just friendlier than others.

She heard the clicking of Rak-hund legs against the deck and the wet, slapping sound of Sinen speech a moment before the half-mind translated the words. “Why are you on the ship? Your work is elsewhere.”

Third Gardener stood in her doorway, its elongated pupils taking her in.

“Just topping off some supplies,” Jessyn said.

“You need further supplies?” the Sinen said, making it a question. It felt like a trap. There was a curve, she was certain, that measured the value the Carryx extracted from her and the cost to them to make that extraction. She didn’t know where she fell on it, but she knew what happened if she fell off.

“No,” she said. “What I have is sufficient.”

The Sinen made some low grunting noises that either weren’t speech or weren’t meant for her and waddled away. She drank down the medicine. It was objectively repulsive, but she was starting to develop a taste for it.

The makeshift plaza between the ships was busy with researchers from the various species. The ground had been trampled flat by the feet and paws and pseudopods, the local plant life crushed to mulch. There were two other humans—a gray-haired woman and a relatively young man she recognized as the geologist who’d lost his notebook down a crack. Jessyn paused, looking around the crowd of strange bodies in case she’d overlooked just one other human being, but he wasn’t there. The gray-haired woman met her gaze and nodded her greeting.

“How’s the fieldwork?” she asked.

“Well, nothing’s shot at me or exploded yet,” Jessyn said. “So I’ve got that.”

“Good for you, then,” she said. “Keep it up.”

Jessyn moved on. Something about being around other people lately had started to grate on her. Not everyone, true, but everyone else.

The path to the half-burned orchard led up over a series of low, rolling hills. She walked with long steps, the satchel with her notebook and her half-mind and her sampling kit bouncing against her thigh. The ruins of the city rose up to her right, looking ancient. That was probably an illusion. Something had lived there not long ago, just the way she’d lived on Anjiin. And then it was gone, just like her life and all that she’d expected of it. War aged everything as if time and violence were two concentrations of the same thing.

The grass and plant analogs along the path were familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Broad leaves on some, narrow on others, each one conforming to its niche in the eternal struggle for light and nutrients. Her legs ached pleasantly with the walk, and the sky above her felt endless. In other contexts, it would have been a beautiful day.

Or maybe it still was a beautiful day. That was a hell of a thought.

The maybe-orchard, when she reached it, showed every sign of having been intentionally cultivated. The first thing was the regularity of the trees in a square, fourteen to a side. A fire had burned about a third of the southern edge, leaving blackened trunks over scorched ground. There was also a series of what looked like irrigation ditches about a hand’s width deep and overgrown now with weeds and grass. The leaf analogs were very familiar—a deep green that spoke of something that had learned the best ways to absorb light, a simple vasculature, an oblong shape with a little roughness at the sides. The fruit was green and oblong too, and it reminded her of pears. It even smelled a little like pears when she sat cross-legged in the shade, cut one open, and dug out spoonfuls of the pale flesh for the initial test run.

The sampling kit was a miniature version of tools she’d only ever used in labs before. The static centrifuge was the most obviously Carryx technology. It was the size of her index finger, and it didn’t spin, but all the calibration runs showed that it gave the same results as the traditional kind. The resonance scanner was too small to have very good resolution. The reactivity cards looked like something she’d have used in general science classes when she was a teenager. And still, it was science. She was here, the first human being to glimpse inside this particular set of evolutionary solutions, and the idea left her a little giddy. As she loaded the resonance specimens, she found herself humming a song that had been popular when she had first been placed in Tonner Freis’s research group. After a few minutes, she started singing, fitting in new words where she couldn’t recall the original lyrics. There was no one there to judge her or think she was being silly.

When the run started, she pulled out her notebook and a couple of ration bars and started a report on what she’d found and the steps she’d taken, working through the draft without saving it to the local archives until she could go over it again.

The sun was warm against her skin, though. And the food, bland and familiar as it was, still filled her belly. Postprandial stupor, that was the term. She lay back on the ground, her head pillowed by her right arm, watched the clouds, and waited.

This was as close to free as she might ever be. Third Gardener kept watch on her work output, but not on her. If she decided to keep on pushing south past the evacuation line, she didn’t think she’d be valuable enough to chase after. What is, is, the Carryx said. A bad servant that lost herself was better off lost. A defective person driven away by her defects made the empire stronger by her absence.

She could get up right now and go. Maybe the forces of the enemy would find her and kill her. Maybe she’d stumble into a trap they’d left for the Carryx. Or maybe she’d bumble her way through the minefield and find a little lake someplace, and the grass and mud to build a little shelter for herself. She could live there until her brain went bad and the food ran out and she died alone—blessedly alone—with no one to notice or mourn her. With no one to weep. She was tired of sorrow and anger and responsibility. The idea of being truly alone, even for the short time before her food ran out, left her feeling intoxicated.

Off to her left, something buzzed. A yellow thing that her mind placed somewhere between finch and cicada had landed on one of the burned trunks, the brightness of its carapace showing boldly against the black. She watched it as it shifted slowly counterclockwise, then shuddered and launched into the air again. Whatever it was, it could have been alive when the trees were unburned. It could have known the city when it had inhabitants and a community of life that ran through it. Maybe the little thing was trying to make sense of what happened and why the bark that had once tasted sweet had turned bitter.

“I’d explain it to you, little sister,” Jessyn said to the empty air, “but it barely makes sense to me.”

The bug-thing, wherever it was, didn’t reply, but some larger animal shifted in the tall grass at the orchard’s edge, startled by her voice. She rolled over onto her belly, propped herself up on her elbows, and looked. Nothing emerged. She checked the kit. The estimate was 42 percent complete, but she didn’t believe it. Resonance scanners always made that last five minutes more like fifteen. With a sigh, she returned to the report she’d prepared, read through it again for clarity and accuracy, and saved it to the archive. Somewhere north of her, Third Gardener was probably very pleased that its vassals were being productive. Weaselly little shit.

She lay back down.

The clouds shifted, moving too slowly to see the changes but changing all the same. She could relate to that. She wasn’t remotely who she’d been before, and while she had noticed the more dramatic, violent transformations when they’d happened, there were others—deeper ones, she thought—that had come over her too slowly to notice. She wondered how Garral Pär fit into that. If anyone had asked her, she would have said there was negative chance that she’d get involved with a man who had a wife, much less a wife and two sons and a sex buddy back on the Carryx world-palace. It would have been a disgusting thought, except that it wasn’t. Would a fling be such a terrible thing? Did she think there was something to protect by holding on to the rules and standards of a different circumstance?

The environment tells you how to live in it. That was what she’d told him. Part of her had been listening too…

The kit chimed a rising tritone. The run was complete. She sat up and brushed the dirt and dead grass off her arms. For a moment, she couldn’t find her notebook, but only for a moment. It was on the other side of the kit. She pulled it up and opened a new draft entry… then shifted to see whether Garral had added anything recently, and if he had, how far away he was from the orchard. Maybe it would be a good evening for them to compare notes again… But he hadn’t, and she was being silly and self-indulgent. She didn’t feel guilty about that.

The best that she could expect from the initial run was an overview of the new tree of life with maybe a few plausible molecules identified that could act as genetic codes. Something big and aperiodic capable of carrying instructions to some mechanism for spinning out proteins and lipids and connective matrix. Evolution only had a few hard rules—heritability, mutation, and the reward of greater fitness. All the different ways the universe could find to solve those puzzles were where the interesting work waited. She opened the assay results ready to find anything except what was there.

The pear-like thing was a pear.

The result bars listed DNA, chloroplasts, mitochondria, cellulose. If she had taken the sample from the corner grocer at Dyan Academy, the results would have looked the same. She and the trees in this orchard were closer cousins than any of the inhuman things she’d been traveling with. More related to her than half the life on Anjiin.

Her hands were trembling badly enough that the results were hard to read. She shoved the notebook in her pocket and sat back, her fingers pressed to her lips and her mind on fire. The trees had to have come from Anjiin. The trees obviously had not come from Anjiin. The trees in the orchard, the pear in her sample kit, shared a lineage with the ones she’d known before. They had a common ancestor.

It was a truism that human life and its biome hadn’t originated on Anjiin. It was the kind of thing she learned along with This shape is a square and This color is blue. Basic facts of the universe that you accepted because you were a child. The implications fell in on her, shook her.

The species from the city had been human height. Had painted its sign in the spectrum visible to humans. Because they had been human.

This planet had been inhabited by the great and deathless enemy of the Carryx. The opposite side of a war that stretched out past the edge of history.

Humans were the enemy. She was the enemy. And somehow—how was it possible?—the Carryx didn’t know.

Her laugh came out like a bark, one hard sound and then nothing. She turned back to the kit, pulling out the spent samples with trembling hands. She went to wipe the results, but hesitated. The deletion might attract attention. If Third Gardener and their Carryx overlords figured out that the human moiety and the deathless enemy were one and the same… She didn’t know what they’d do. Maybe the best they could hope for was quick death.

She had to tell Garral. She had to tell all the humans in the search party. There had to be a way to keep the secret a secret, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to vomit.

The tall grass shifted again, and she looked up. The movement was growing still, but she hadn’t imagined it. Slowly, she rose to her feet. Probably it was just some local fauna. The equivalent of deer. Or, shit, maybe an actual deer. But what if it was one of the other researchers? Or the Sinen come to check on her?

“Hello?” she said. “Is someone there?”

The grass didn’t respond.

She walked toward the place where the movement had been, each step feeling like she was wading through syrup. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was the yellow bird-bug. Did she see a glimpse of color behind the waving blades? She had almost reached it. The grass was close enough she could brush it with the fingertips of an outstretched hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to take the next step. Her throat was tight.

What if it was a predator? A mountain lion or a bear? She’d assumed she was safe because she wouldn’t smell like the sort of thing local apex predators would eat, but that wasn’t true. Maybe there were things in the wild here perfectly familiar with the taste of human blood. It would be so absurd to die that way now. But dying was always absurd.

You can do it, she thought. Just put your hand out and push the grass aside. Maybe there’s nothing there.

The chime of the kit’s completed taring run startled her into a scream, and a wide black-feathered body the size of a football rose from the grass, wings flapping desperately as the bird—a raven?—fled into the sky. She let out a long, shuddering breath and turned back toward the kit.

A man was standing beside it.

He was only about half a head taller than her, with dark, greasy hair framing a long, pale face. Prominent teeth and a thin, dark beard. His build was more like an office worker than an athlete. His worn blue jacket went down past his hips, and covered a beaded vest and rough, filthy undershirt. His trousers were gray fabric with half a dozen pockets down the sides, and they tucked into what were obviously hiking boots, even if it wasn’t a design she’d seen before. His eyes were wide with something like fear.

They stood in silence for what felt like an eternity.

“Oh God,” Jessyn said. “No no no. You can’t be here. It’s not safe here. You have to go. Go!”

He stepped toward her, saying something she couldn’t make sense of. If there were words in it, she couldn’t tell where one stopped and the next began. He patted at the air between them with open palms and then gestured to the east.

“What? No, I can’t go anywhere. I need to stay here.” She pointed to herself and then the ground. “I. Stay here. You”—she gestured to him, and then waved east—“you get the fuck out.”

His face hardened and he gibbered again, the same as before or different, she couldn’t tell. He patted the air between them again, then stepped closer. She could smell the funk of his body. His hand gripped her shoulder and began turning her toward the east. She tried to remember what the map showed in that direction. More hills, she thought. An outcropping of rock that the geologist had marked as probable limestone. She couldn’t remember how far the evacuation zone extended in that direction, and she didn’t want to go find her notebook.

“If I go missing…” she said, and then stopped. If I go missing they may not even look for me. If I go missing, maybe no one cares. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d just been thinking? “I’m not from here. I’m not one of you. You have to let me go.”

He scowled and tugged at her. His eyes had lost their fear and gone flat. He said something with three distinct syllables. Something like Ash pat low. When she tried to pull away, his grip on her tightened. He rooted in his jacket pocket with his other hand.

When his hand came out, it held a knife.

Eleven

They nibble each other hello,” Tonner said, and took another bite of his salad.

Jellit, sitting across the table from him, seemed to regain focus from wherever his mind had been wandering. The commissary was three levels down from his lab, and functionally the heart of their little township. Architecturally, it wasn’t much different from the other spaces—bronze walls that leaned subtly in at the top—but it had a bank of windows along one side that looked out toward the horizon. The natural light made the place feel almost welcoming. He’d heard that someone had started holding religious services there, but that wasn’t something that interested him.

“The Soft Lothark…?” Jellit said.

“Nibble each other,” Tonner repeated. “Brun pointed it out last week. They’re always hanging around my lab.”

“Mine too.”

“They would, wouldn’t they? You and me are the only ones doing anything important. But the point is, when a new one comes in, they talk to each other, and each one of them takes a little bite off the other. Just a quick—” Tonner clicked his teeth together. “Looks like parasite removal, except that it doesn’t last long. Vestigial grooming behavior, Brun thinks.”

The tables were laid out in an intentionally casual fashion. No defined aisles, no columns or rows. It was, he thought, intended to give a sense of egalitarianism. The commissary was public space. They were a city now. Or the seed that would bloom into a whole new branch of humanity that lived and died as the pets and domestic beasts of the Carryx. Or a township a few thousand strong with a serious demographic problem—too many old people and not enough young.

It was something Tonner had been thinking about more, now that Dafyd’s lamb sacks were in place. The way that the quarters of the human moiety, for all their windows and murals and artfully arranged dining tables, still felt like a prison. Having children there would change that. Someday, there would be adolescents sneaking off to make babies of their own away from the prying eyes of their grandparent-aged caregivers. There’d be schools and families and birthday parties, or something like them.

But there wouldn’t be zoos, because everything was already a zoo, and they were on the wrong side of the bars.

“I don’t know,” Jellit said. “I’m not sure I buy it.”

“Buy what?”

“Vestigial grooming.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Jellit said. “It just feels… off.”

The truth was, Brun’s theory seemed a little glib to Tonner too, but Jellit wasn’t in the life sciences, and Tonner still had enough of the old prejudices that he didn’t want to agree with someone of lower status too quickly. It was petty, and Tonner knew it was petty. In a better world, that would have been enough to make him abandon it.

Across the room, a table of other captives laughed at something one of them had said. When Tonner looked over, the others were all careful to look away. He and Jellit were, after all, two of Alkhor’s inner circle, which put them at a certain level of status and power. It might almost have felt good, except that the path to it ran through Dafyd.

He ate more of his salad. The leaves were crisp and heavy, they tasted like chlorophyll, and he could almost mistake them for real lettuce instead of the modified kelp that they were. He was proud that the aquaculture gardens were cranking out enough that the commissary could offer it. Lo, I am Tonner Freis, and here is my bounty for you all.

“What?” Jellit asked, and then, “You laughed.”

“I was being ridiculous,” Tonner said. “You’re lucky I kept it to myself. How’s it going with the new team?”

“They’re training up,” Jellit said, and put the spoon into his bowl of grain mash as if he might actually ingest some of it. “It’s slower than I’d like. We lost a lot when we lost the others. But we’re starting to get results that seem like progress instead of just catching up.”

It was where their worlds met, these days. Jellit had lost his team to slaughter at the hands of the Carryx. Tonner had lost his by being their special favorites, and too valuable to keep on a single project. For both of them, training up a new team had been the order of the day, except for all the other orders on all the other days. It seemed to be wearing Jellit down more, though. The man didn’t look exhausted so much as vaguely bereft all the time. And while Tonner couldn’t put an exact reason for it, he had the impression that Jellit had had some kind of falling out with Alkhor.

Which, well… they all would, eventually. Kings don’t have friends, they have subjects.

“I’ve just gotten some new marching orders for my people,” Tonner said. “Not two animals like the berries and the not-turtle, but a kind of grasslike thing and a listing of what they want it to produce. Along with a few please don’t also make it poison restrictions. I don’t know what’s planning to eat it, but it’s nice to be back on something that’s actually cutting edge. I wasn’t born to be a farmer.”

“Nothing against farmers,” Jellit said, distractedly.

“I assume it’s streamlining food supplies for the soldiers. Maybe it’s Rak-hund chow. It’d be funny as hell if those bastards turned out to be herbivores.”

Jellit leaned forward and tapped a single finger hard on the table like he was pinning an idea down so it couldn’t flutter away. “They eat their dead too.”

“Rak-hund eat their dead?”

“No, the Soft Lothark. On the ship coming here, when Ostencour tried his first failed rebellion, they stabbed one of the Lothark guards to death and it exploded. Made everyone who got the goo on them sick. But then the other Soft Lothark came in and they ate the body. I figured at the time whatever the poisons were, they were really metabolically expensive to make, so the organism would have evolved to, you know, conserve the supply. Like eating the dead to reclaim their toxin. But that’s two examples now where they’re processing each other orally. That’s interesting, right? I mean, I think that’s interesting.”

Something flew past the windows, and Tonner’s mind matched them as pigeons even though they absolutely weren’t. That happened a lot, the way things used to be impinging on the way they were now.

“Didn’t you come over on the ship with Allstin and that woman with the big teeth,” Tonner said. “Ostencour was with Alkhor and Else and them.”

Chagrin flickered over Jellit’s face, and he shrugged. “Jessyn told me about it. I guess I kind of internalized it.”

“Weird the things that stick in your mind. Yeah, I remember the others talked about that. I didn’t really put it together.”

“It’s probably nothing. The two things just kind of chimed off each other in my head,” Jellit said. He finally took the spoonful of mash. It looked gluey and cold. He should have eaten it faster. “Do you… Do you think about them much? The team from when you were first here?”

“Like Jessyn? Hell yes. There’s probably ten times a day I’d give an eyetooth to have them back together. Even with Campar’s stupid jokes. Hell, even Rickar Daumatin. I mean, Brun and Kirrik and Sommerson are decent, but we had something special with that group. There was a chemistry there. We made progress.”

“Do you think about Else?”

Tonner kept his voice light. “I think about her too, sometimes. She was a good lab partner. Wickedly smart and had a gift for organization I really miss.”

“She didn’t…” Jellit began and then seemed to lose his way. “She could have treated you a little more gently.”

Tonner speared another leaf of almost-lettuce, bit down on it slowly, savoring the feeling of the cellulose crushing between his teeth. He tilted his head. “Are you going through something?” Jellit leaned back, blinking in a way that meant yes, he was absolutely going through something. Tonner gestured with the empty fork. “It’s just that you don’t usually bring up personal stuff. So when you start asking me about Else dumping me for Alkhor, it makes me wonder if you’re maybe dealing with some shit of your own.”

The thin man almost denied it. The shake of the head had already started when he sagged forward. “Yes,” Jellit said. “I guess maybe I am.”

“Someone turned you down?”

“Yes,” Jellit said, then laughed once harshly. “I thought I was going to be a happy surprise, but I wasn’t.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Someone from the lab.”

“I mean, I’m not in a position to lecture anyone about mixing work and relationships. When Else and I got together, there were plenty of people who were happy to explain why it was a bad idea,” Tonner said, then went on eating.

“I remember,” Jellit said. “I mean, I got it all thirdhand, but… I don’t know. I don’t think I understand… people. It’s strange, you know? I dedicate my life to finding things out, and the thing that breaks me is the one that everyone else has just by default.”

“That’s not true. No one understands love. Or sex. Or whatever went wrong for you and whoever turned you down. We’re all just bundles of evolved instinct and performative bullshit.”

“I don’t know if that’s comforting or not.”

“You want to tell me what happened?”

Jellit was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think I do. Just… When you think about Else, about how she turned out not to be what you thought she was, can you forgive her?”

“I don’t know,” Tonner said. “She never asked.”

After they finished lunch, Tonner went back to the main labs. He’d been able to give most of the food production and aquaculture maintenance over to Bastien Korham, but the interesting bits, he kept for himself. There were some nutrition assays that he wasn’t quite ready to let go of, and the whole progeny project. Right now, the lamb sacks were one hundred and eighteen blisters of fluid the size of his palm. Each one had a tiny spray of pale cells, no bigger than his thumbnail. He’d spent two years when he was first attending medrey on a project that grew its own experimental animals, but those had been pigs and lambs. Even if they looked the same, these little webs of pale nothing wouldn’t develop into animal models with specific kidney disorders or designed immune systems. These were going to be people, or at least the ones that made it to gestational independence would. Thirty-two of them had already failed and been flushed.

It wasn’t that far off from normal miscarriage rates. People who didn’t work with living systems never understood how much failure was built into nature. For them it was all some playtime fantasy of one-thing-fits-into-another as part of a great and perfect design. Near misses and mutations and combinations of protein and sugar that worked most of the time but also crashed out for no clear reason or re-sorted into random chimeric fuckups—those were the truth of life. The mess and imperfection and well-fuck-it-close-enough of evolution. But this was his lab. God might be okay with losing a third of every crop, but Tonner was not. He knew he could do better than that, and so the lost samples bothered him.

And also today, everything bothered him. Jellit had put the memory of Else back in his head, and the echo of her was like a splinter in his eye. Since the day the Carryx had come to Anjiin, Tonner had been carrying an oceanic fear in his belly. He’d done enough brain function work to recognize it as a trauma effect. You see a bunch of people you know murdered in front of you, your personal autonomy is stripped off you, and you live under the constant threat of death for a while, maybe suffer a traumatic injury—a broken arm, say—and sure. It fucked you up. Sure, you woke up from nightmares every few days. Sure, you agreed to make children for your masters despite the fact that most of your life, what you’re doing would have been monstrously criminal. But Tonner could keep that down, swallow it.

Bring up his dead ex-partner over lunch salad, though, and boom. Stress levels through the fucking roof. He could already tell he’d need something chemical to let him sleep tonight. It was ridiculous.

The new work—the more interesting work—was based out of the old labs, the ones they’d been assigned before he and Alkhor had proven that humanity was a net asset to the Carryx empire. And odd as it was, the walk from the new human facilities to those old places was calming. When they’d first arrived, he’d hated the corridors and open spaces filled with the servants and captives of the empire. Now, he walked past dog-sized crablike things studded with jewels and huge, hulking beasts like silverback gorillas with a dozen eyes and a mouth that opened sideways, past the occasional Carryx with their restless four-legged abdomen and stone-still thorax resting on massive fighting arms. It was like going on a crowded bus. Even the swirling jellyfish that shifted in the tall air of the cathedral-huge commons was familiar now. Still miraculous, still overwhelming if he stopped and thought about it, but the same miracles and horrors as the days and weeks before. That was how he survived it.

He’d thought Brun would be at the new old lab, the one they’d won when they’d triggered the genocide of the little feather monkeys that called themselves Night Drinkers. The old old lab was the one where Irinna had died. Someday, he’d be telling that story to a child that he’d helped make. How humanity came to the world-palace, had been murdered by their enemies, and then murdered them back. History lessons, as empty to them as lectures on the Serintist wars in Abbasat had been to him.

Brun wasn’t there, though. Sommerson, with her red-gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, was finishing a run in the resonance imager, and one of the new ones—a pale-skinned man whose name Tonner hadn’t bothered to learn—was in the back sterilizing sample plates. And one of Dafyd’s pet Soft Lothark was loitering at the mouth of the lab, bits of fur clinging like lichen to its absurdly long limbs. Tonner watched it as it moved its weight from foot to foot, its small black eyes shifting around.

“Hey, boss,” Sommerson said. “You’re just in time. I’ve got a functional site analysis that’s got some interesting data.”

“Functional site analysis can be bullshitty. Too many false positives,” Tonner said absently. “If Soft Lothark were social groomers, they wouldn’t look so ragged and moth-eaten, would they? I mean, if you were a social groomer, you’d look groomed, right? And what kind of pressures drive you toward cannibalizing your dead? There’d have to be something really useful to outweigh the infection risk.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about, boss.”

Tonner rubbed his eyes with one thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about something a friend of mine said, and…” He shook his head.

Sommerson moved to her right, making room for him at the imager. Instead of looking at the offered data, Tonner hesitated, then walked to the back of the lab. The pale man looked up. He’d probably run financial systems for a continent or something back when that mattered. Tonner ignored him now, plucking up a bench glove and a sterile plate. On the way back out, he put the plate by the imager and snapped on the glove.

The Soft Lothark ignored him until Tonner reached out and touched its arm. Even through the glove, its pelt seemed greasy and hard. The Lothark placed one large hand against his chest and shoved him back hard enough to nearly knock him off his feet. It took one aggressive step in his direction.

“Whoa there, buddy. I’m not a threat,” he said, backing away and waving his hands at it to show he had no weapon. “I’m Tonner. I’m in charge of the labs here and back at the main site for the human moiety.”

The Lothark stopped moving, but its arms remained half raised, as though it were still considering whether or not to throw a punch. The half-mind hanging from its neck made a series of wet growls and clicks, and the Soft Lothark relaxed a bit. It spoke, and the human voice that came from the half-mind was calm and affectless. “Do not physically interact.”

“My apologies,” Tonner said, taking another step back. “Humans often engage in social touching as a friendly gesture between peers.”

The Soft Lothark made what seemed like entirely too long a response for the translated reply. “Humans and Soft Lothark do not.”

Tonner smiled his ongoing apology and continued backing away. When he was sure the guard wasn’t going to run him down and beat him to death, he turned and walked back to the resonance imager. He popped open the sample plate with his ungloved hand, then carefully pressed his gloved fingers against it, first the back and then the front to capture as much discarded matter as he could. Even with his naked eye, he could make out little patches of oil with darker flecks in it. On impulse, he sniffed the plate. Soft Lothark fur had a smell like potting soil.

He closed the sample plate, sealed it, and fed it into the resonance imager. A basic run wouldn’t take long.

“Something up?” Sommerson asked.

“Not really. Just, you know. Curiosity.” Tonner stripped off the glove and tossed it in with the waste. “All right, so show me what you’re working on.”

Twelve

Jessyn walked blind. The man had taken off the blue jacket and gestured for her to cover her head with it. At first, she’d just buttoned it closed and put it on like an oversized hat that mostly rested on her shoulders. That hadn’t been good enough for him. He’d come behind her, put the knife against her spine with one hand, and with the other, tied the sleeves of the jacket around her neck. The world had narrowed to the gray-blue of sunlight filtered through the cloth. It stank a little of unwashed body, but at least he hadn’t insisted she use his undershirt.

As she walked ahead, he kept one hand on her shoulder, guiding her down paths that felt natural under her feet. Uneven, anyway. Every now and then, he said something, but she didn’t understand the words.

At first, she tried counting her steps in her mind. Even if the path they took curved, she’d at least have an estimate of how far from the pear grove they’d traveled. She got into the three thousand four hundreds before some errant thought—what were the man’s hiking boots made of, they had looked like real or simulated animal leather, but which animal—intruded, and she lost count. She tried to pick it back up, but then wasn’t sure if she’d really been in the four thousand three hundreds, and she didn’t know how long her stride was or what she’d do with distance information, even if she had it.

She tried listening, hoping for sonic landmarks—running water, the call of some particular bird that she could navigate back from. Everything was lost in the mutter of the cloth rubbing against itself and the suffocating rise and fall of her own constrained breath.

Twice, she slipped on soft ground. Once, she stepped in a puddle or a stream. The man’s voice spoke to her each time, and she thought he sounded encouraging. She grabbed onto the thought that if he’d wanted to kill her, he could have done it at the grove. She knew enough about violence to recognize her own wishful thinking, but she clung to it anyway.

If he understood that she was with the Carryx who had just murdered his planet, he could be planning anything, up to and including torturing her for information she didn’t have and couldn’t share if she did. She was sweating. It stung her eyes.

A different voice called out, and the man tugged at her shoulder like he was pulling her reins. He shouted something back, and the new voice—it was definitely coming from ahead of them—replied. It sounded feminine and distressed.

“I’m Jessyn,” she shouted through the muffling of her blind. “My name is Jessyn Kaul. I’m not responsible for any of this. None of this… None of this is my fault.”

The woman’s voice came again, from closer this time. The man’s reply sounded angrier, his voice rising and the syllables sharp. Jessyn’s belly felt tight and a wave of nausea ran through her. If they decided to stab her, the first sign of this would be the knife already in her back. She pressed her eyes closed.

“It’s all right,” she said, and repeated it—It’s all right it’s all right it’s all right—like she’d lost control of the thought, and it was running free without her. The jacket came off her head, and the fresh air felt cold on her skin. The woman was younger. She had a wide, generous face and dark hair that fell in greasy ringlets. Her eyes were a brown so light Jessyn wanted to call them yellow. She was frowning, and Jessyn didn’t know what she was frowning at. When Jessyn nodded her head like a little bow, the woman nodded back.

Behind her, the knife man said something longer and more detailed than he had up to now. The woman blew out a breath that inflated her cheeks, then spat on the ground. Her expression was impatient, and Jessyn felt the urge to apologize.

The woman turned, walked a few steps, and then looked back. Her gesture meant come along, so Jessyn did.

Cliffs rose above them to the east, pale stone against the afternoon sky. The trees were oak and ash, she thought. Or something near enough to them that they might as well have been. The sun was higher in the sky than she’d expected, and the breeze smelled like there was water nearby. A lake, a river. Something. There weren’t any lakes or rivers on her map. She didn’t know for certain, but her guess was that they’d left the evacuation zone far behind. She was in enemy territory. The thought almost made her laugh.

The woman led her to a place where the cliff face buckled, leaving a wide overhang deep with shadow. It reminded her of her own little camp, huddled in the shelter of stone, but this shadow seemed darker. Deeper. The woman walked into the black like a stone dropped in the ocean, and the cliff swallowed her up. Jessyn ducked, following her into the cave. The man came behind, his jacket in one hand and his knife in the other.

Ahead of them, the woman became a silhouette, black against charcoal. So there was some light ahead, even if Jessyn couldn’t see the source yet. The smell of sulfur and shit was faint enough to be more irritation than assault. And there was something else, a scent she knew but didn’t have a name for. It took her back to the transport out from Anjiin. Too many bodies held too close together for too long. The cave smelled like a prison. Her steps faltered. Her heart was racing, and her mind felt like it was filled with cotton. Her hands were shaking.

The man muttered something, and when he touched her back between her shoulder blades, urging her forward, she yelped. The cave was getting both smaller and frighteningly vast at the same time. If she were lost in it, could she find her way out? The small still part of her that watched the rest thought Oh, a panic attack. That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve had one quite like this before. The thought was as powerless as a whisper in a windstorm.

And then the woman was back. The light was brighter. Jessyn could make out her features, could hear the soothing tones of her voice even if the words were gibberish. The woman took her hand, holding it between both of hers, and stood there, looking into Jessyn’s eyes for what felt like hours until the adrenaline started burning itself out.

The woman said something that sounded like a coo with a hiccup in it.

“I’m all right,” Jessyn said, and managed a weary half smile. “It’s been a weird day.”

The woman smiled back, and that was enough that Jessyn could take another step. Then another. And then she was walking down a passage that curved to the right, and into a chamber that eons of water had carved out of the limestone, the walls pattered by the process of erosion until they looked like pale veins or tentacles made from stone. The light came from three blue-green metal tripods with glowing cylinders at their tips set up around what was clearly a camp—a dozen brown and green bedrolls laid out in rows, a little wider and shorter than Jessyn was used to, but recognizable all the same. A short metal table with a large, boxy device. A misshapen black object about the size of a man leaned against the wall. And, at the edge of the darkness deeper in the cave, smaller shapes. Eyes.

A child’s querulous voice called out, and the man answered in reassuring tones. First one, and then three more, and then another six, the children came out from the cave’s depths. At a guess, she’d have put them all around ten or eleven years old. They were dressed in dirty shirts and beaded vests like the man wore. There wasn’t a single dominant phenotype—round faces and thin, pale skin and dark, eyes and noses of every shape and size. One little girl with black hair, bronze skin, and hooded eyes that could almost have been Jessyn’s relative. Their expressions were open, curious, frightened. Human. She felt something shift in her chest, and she was weeping. Not crying, not sobbing, just leaking tears from her eyes. She sank to her knees.

The first child to come to her was a boy with brown hair and a single, heavy brow. He walked toward Jessyn slowly, his eyes narrow and filled with distrust. She tried smiling at him, but he scowled back, angry and on the edge of violence. His hands were at his side in white-knuckle fists.

You just saw your world destroyed, she thought. You just lost your families and the people you loved. There was hatred in his eyes.

“Yeah,” she said. “I get it.”

The boy didn’t reply. Of course he didn’t.

A conversation broke out—man, woman, and children all seeming to speak over each other. The language was like listening to a brook, liquid and beautiful, and utterly incomprehensible. Jessyn waited and she hoped. One of the children whined and stamped her feet, and the man snapped back impatiently. The woman seemed to take the man’s side, and then another of the children yelled something. If all this had been something Jessyn understood, it would have been a school field trip or a religious children’s retreat that had been lost in the invasion. The adult chaperons hiding their wards from the Carryx soldiers. Trying to stay small. Trying to stay alive.

Trying to figure out what to do with the human woman who had come from the enemy ships.

“Jessyn,” she said, and pointed at herself. “Jessyn.”

The voice that answered wasn’t any of theirs. It was harsh, and it buzzed at the edges like a bad speaker. The black man-sized thing leaning against the wall shifted and unfolded.

It was almost a human shape: a head, two arms, two legs. If its right side had matched its left, it could have passed for a slightly taller-than-average man in black armor. Instead, its right leg was a dark stick. Its right arm was less than skeletal—the idea of an arm complete with a simple, schematic hand and elbow, places where muscles might have attached, but made from wire. It walked forward as if its asymmetry were perfectly natural to it, but there was something in how it held itself that made Jessyn think of weariness.

It gestured toward her with its barely extant arm as it spoke again, but the featureless black head was turned toward the man.

The man replied, his voice deferential. Almost apologetic. He wouldn’t look directly at it. When he shrugged, the black thing shrugged back, mimicking him. Mocking him. The shame on the man’s face was clearer than words.

The black thing turned toward Jessyn. She felt a spike of fear, and then a burning resentment. Oh, the still part of her thought. And now the fear turns into anger. The Jessyn who had led the attack on the Night Drinkers in her rage at Irinna’s death flowed out and filled her up, leaving no room for the panic anymore. She crossed her arms and thrust out her jaw. If this is going to end in a fight, I’m tired of waiting.

The black thing’s helmet was strange. Featureless and smooth, but not quite opaque. She felt like, in the right light, she’d have been able to see through the material to whatever was underneath. A face, a mechanism. It might only have been an illusion. She looked where its eyes would have been and waited.

It put out one wirelike idea of a finger and tapped her collarbone. It said something like Yez-zin.

“Jessyn,” she said. “Yes, my name is Jessyn.”

The black thing’s thin finger turned to its own chest, tapping there twice. It sounded like someone dropping pebbles on sheet metal.

Gor-fall, it said. Or Cor-wall. Or Tor-vall. Without lips for her to watch, it was harder than usual to parse.

“Gor-fall,” she said.

The black thing reached to its waist with its good hand and came up with a small metal device. The design wasn’t one she’d seen before, but the pressure of function in design wasn’t exclusive to evolution. She saw the barrel, the grip.

“Gun,” she said. “We call that a gun.”

The black thing turned the weapon back toward the cave wall. It gave a sharp, electric snap, and the stone wall puffed dust around a new hole the size of Jessyn’s thumb.

“Threat,” she said, dryly. “We call that a threat.”

The black thing turned and walked back to the wall where it had been, then folded down into place and went perfectly still. She didn’t try to delude herself that it had turned off. Now that she knew what it was, she could tell that the head—or helmet or whatever the best term might be—was set to watch the cave and everyone in it. A sentry or a jailer. That wasn’t new for her. She made her way to the far wall, out of anybody’s way, and sat down. Her earlier fear and panic had gone, and now the fighting rage seeped away leaving only a deep exhaustion behind. That was fine. She’d spent whole years of her life exhausted. She was used to making herself think through complex problems while her body cried out for rest.

The man and the woman led the children in some kind of call-and-response ritual. A lesson or a prayer or something else she didn’t have the context yet to understand. The astounding thing, really, was how much context she did have. Ever since the fall of Anjiin, she’d been trying to navigate the behaviors of beings that were less like her than she was like a bean sprout. Even now, she didn’t know what color spectrum the Carryx experienced, how acute their sense of smell—or whatever analogous chemoreception they used—was. The nature and shapes of their minds were a black box with a sign on it that said IF YOU FUCK UP, YOU DIE.

These new captors were people. When they smiled, she knew what it meant. They couldn’t speak to each other, but they could negotiate by gesture. She could watch them and understand what, in general terms, they were doing. Compared to the Night Drinkers or the Rak-hund or the Carryx, these people were as explicable as a well-written warning.

Yes, they were the survivors of a terrible battle. Yes, they were very plausibly going to kill her as a collaborator with their enemy. Yes, she was as trapped by the black thing as she had been by Third Gardener. But these were also her cousins, and the enemies of her enemies. Her anxiety was familiar. She’d been living with anxiety for as long as she could remember. The sense of possibility under it was new.

If the deathless enemy of the Carryx were humans, if the army standing against the empire were people like her, then maybe there was someplace to escape to. A place of safety where she didn’t wake up ready to die and work until bedtime on behalf of the things she expected to kill her.

Or maybe they’d be found, maybe Third Gardener would come looking for its lost sheep after all. The half-formed black thing didn’t look like it could handle even a single Carryx warrior, much less all the guards from the ships. And one Rak-hund would be enough to slaughter all the children and the round-faced woman and the man with the knife.

Or maybe the black thing would decide she wasn’t useful and kill her before she could think how to keep the war from washing all of them away. She had to get away if she was going to keep them hidden. She had to get away before they killed her. She wanted more than anything to stay.

A girl with short blond hair in tight curls broke off from the group and came toward her. She had a wide leaf in her hands, and a lump of what looked like boiled grain in the middle of it. Jessyn smiled and didn’t change the way she was sitting. Approachable and safe, that’s me. The black thing didn’t move, but she was very aware of it. She had a fair guess what would happen if she seemed to threaten one of the children.

The girl stopped about two steps away from Jessyn and put the leaf down, then skipped back away from it and her. Jessyn bowed to the girl and waited for her to back safely away before she moved—slowly, carefully—to the leaf. The grain wasn’t quite rice, but it was close. Jessyn sat back down, working to keep the leaf balanced on one thigh. The others were eating their own, scooping it into their mouths with two fingers. She imitated them.

When she shifted her weight, something in her pocket clicked against the stone.

The notebook. They hadn’t thought to search her, and her notebook was still in her pocket.

Jessyn kept her eyes down, focusing on the food. If Gor-fall the Black Thing was watching her heartbeat or the temperature of her cheeks, it would see that she was reacting to something, and she didn’t want to give it any hint what. She tried to keep from wolfing down her almost-rice, but it was hard. She was suddenly very hungry, but she couldn’t seem like she was moving toward some event. Because now, she was.

When she was done, she took the leaf, pushed it back away from her so that, if they reused them, one of the kids could come collect it without coming too near her. Hopefully, that would just make her seem like a compliant prisoner. The lines of the notebook in the cloth of her pocket seemed as obvious and obtrusive as a lit sign, but none of them noticed. She went back to sitting. And then, after she counted a thousand breaths, shifted to lying on her side. And then, a thousand breaths after that, rolled her back to the group. She slid the notebook out of her pocket as casually as she could, stretching one leg out while she did it in hopes of distracting anyone whose eyes were on her in the moment.

She hid the little square with her body. She looked at what it said. The map had updated. It showed her camp in the pear grove. There were half a dozen new entries from other researchers. The geologist had found a series of wells north of the ships and was testing water from them. A small essay about structural engineering using a dictionary’s worth of jargon that Jessyn would have fed through a half-mind to make sense of, even though it was her native tongue. Garral Pär had an entry marked half an hour before about something that he thought might be an unopened storage facility with only a little fire damage. And there, on the map, a short walk away from the evacuation zone, was the notebook she was using. The man with the knife, dumbfuck that he was, had brought a tracking device into the heart of his camp.

All she would have to do was update her report. Something like Taken captive by the enemy with the coordinates that her notebook already knew. It would go to Third Gardener and the Carryx, and they’d either come save her or else blast the whole area and write her off as an acceptable loss.

Someone—the woman, she thought—coughed and said something. Jessyn couldn’t afford to take long with this. With one finger, she navigated to Garral Pär’s most recent report and added a note.

FOUND SOMETHING INTERESTING TO FOLLOW UP OUR CONVERSATION. COMPARE NOTES? She included the coordinates that the notebook gave her and saved the report before she lost her nerve.

She turned the notebook’s face against the stone, rested her head on her folded arm, and waited to see whether the choice she’d just made came with a price.

Thirteen

Surur of the cohort Tlassen, regulator-librarian to the Sovran, lay folded in his niche and dreamed of being a mother. He had begun his life and service to the empire (two concepts that shared a single word) as a brood mother for the sixty-fifth exploratory body. For those years, he had done little besides eat and produce blank eggs for the public creche. And while none of his own genetic material had entered into the eggs—no mere brood mother would be permitted so great a representation in the generations she brought to life—still, thousands of Carryx in the sixty-fifth body had come to be inside shells that his body had produced.

In his dream, he felt again the fullness of his abdomen, the insatiable hunger for stone and bone, and the subterranean desire to fill some of the blank eggs with offspring of his own. That last was the ambition that had finally driven him to challenge the keeper-librarian of his brood, snapping its right feeding arm and claiming its place. In the dream, he fought again, and feeling the enemy’s limb snap under his weight, he woke.

Surur-Tlassen unfolded, the blood reperfusing into his limbs, the hormones and signaling proteins seeping into his blood. A third of his life now was spent dreaming, and in some ways the most important third. He made his way now toward his private feeding trough, considering all that he had dreamed. In sleep, the overwhelming flood of information that flowed in from the empire consolidated into forms that he could present to the Sovran. It was too complicated a task for consciousness to manage, and so today, as every day, Surur ate his meal of black amask flesh and sweet lorrith and considered the products of his own mind. When his meal was done and he had meditated on the product of all the information he had consumed, he would attend the Sovran. His place was to deliver to her the state of the empire, and in return receive and disseminate her will. That done, he would meet with the eight high librarians that attended him, delivering the will of the Sovran to each of them as need and specialization required, and receive from them the new day’s reports. For hours upon hours, they would fill him with information from all corners of the empire until his mind was swimming in a sea of data. And then sleep and dream and black amask and lorrith. And so the will of the Sovran pulsed out every day, flowing to thousands upon thousands of worlds, hundreds of thousands of ships, billions upon billions of Carryx that were the flesh of the one great and developing body that was the empire.

This morning, his thoughts were on being a mother and ambition, on how he had at first given up gender to become a librarian, and how he had won it back by climbing to the apex of his caste. How he had won the right to contribute to offspring and fulfilled the ambitions of the brood mother he had once been. And how he would one day surrender everything again and return to the task of creating young—not the common young of the public creche, but the Sovran’s own daughters and successors. From the maker of blank eggs ready for the genes of those deemed most useful to the next generations, to father of ten thousand Carryx throughout the universe. One day to hold the limb of a future Sovran and guide her to her place at the peak of their society. An upward spiral that led to more and more refined and powerful versions of himself, and more and more effective service to his species. Not for the first time, he thought of his own ambition as a metaphor for the ambitions of the Carryx as a whole.

The thought filled him with a sense of ease and accomplishment, the pleasure any being of will felt in bending the universe to the shape it wished, the joy of aspirations fulfilled. And the war was going well. War, which, in his language, shared the same word as service to the empire and life.

Knowing that the ship was in conflict space might have been easier if they’d known better how their Sinen middle manager defined the phrase. Campar had spent the first hours tensed against imminent violence. His imagination played havoc with him. He waited for vast holes to be torn through the walls and deck of the ship. Or sudden flashes of light and heat that burned him and the people around him alive. Or the up-close, personal horrors of an enemy boarding party, the deathless anti-Carryx come to slit their throats in the name of victory.

He spent the first days of the battle in a haze, exhausted when he ate or sat in the common room, too anxious to sleep when he lay down in his cell. Every new sound or shift in gravity within the vast ship filled his bloodstream with adrenaline.

And then, slowly but inexorably, he found himself growing used to it. Every hour the fighting didn’t come let him pretend more effectively that it wouldn’t. That the battle would never be as harsh as he imagined it. The Carryx were a species of violence. They knew what they were doing, and he and Ghati and Rickar and the other subject species were valuable cargo to their owners. Perhaps there was some sense of being protected by that.

“Maybe,” Ghati said, and took another sip of his water. “Then again, maybe not. Think about the things we do know. When the big fuckers came to Anjiin, they were weeks getting from the edge of the system to the planet. Maybe they have to pop out of asymmetric space when they’re outside a heliosphere and then walk the rest of the way.”

“So we entered a combat space, and there are millions of enemy missiles screaming toward us at lethal speed, but they just haven’t gotten here to annihilate us quite yet,” Campar said.

Ghati lifted one thin shoulder in a half shrug. “Makes more sense than your ‘war is safe’ idea.”

The ship lurched like they’d hit a pocket of air turbulence in the vacuum of space. Ghati went a little pale, his small hand seeking out Campar’s. They sat together for what felt like a lifetime. The turbulence didn’t come again.

“You see?” Campar said, forcing a laugh. “They were listening to you. That was your fault. The pilot did that just to make you jump. Carryx are famous for their comedic timing.”

“Oh, yes, they’re hilarious,” Ghati said, and drew back his hand. For a moment, they just sat together. Then Ghati let out a long, shuddering sigh.

A Soft Lothark emerged from the hall, its small black eyes drifting over the prisoners like it was seeing if any of them had died and needed hauling away. The only ones here were the two of them, the huge slug thing called Vaudai, and four Budon of Luus standing in the corner gabbling at each other. They were all visibly alive, so the Soft Lothark guard lumbered back out. The other humans were all in their rooms, or else each other’s. The tension had apparently done something to the dysfunctional dynamic between the defense security trio which was now working itself out enthusiastically and in private. Rickar… Well, Rickar was Rickar, and Campar wasn’t sure what if anything could be done to help with that. He wondered if the security trio might be open to adding a fourth to their group, just to get Rickar some release.

“What?” Ghati asked. And then, “You have that smirk. That one you get when I ask for sex.”

Before Campar could answer, the four Budon of Luus began to sing. Four alien voices lifted together as suddenly as a chorus of crickets. They were awkward-looking things at the best of times, and now as their long, mobile throats swelled and shuddered, they seemed less like living things and more like some odd musical instrument made from flesh. It was like birdsong, melodies and harmonies weaving from one voice to the next. It was like the woodwind section of an orchestra coming to life and declaring its love. It was like prayer. Campar leaned forward. Ghati’s hand was in his again, but not from fear this time.

The tallest of the Budon waved its head from side to side like it was losing its balance, and the others helped to hold it up. Doors opened from the cells and private rooms, the latches ticking like someone clearing their throat at a concert. More of the Budon of Luus appeared at the mouths of the corridors. Half a dozen humans, Rickar among them. A tall, dark alien whose name and species Campar didn’t know, and which he’d only seen twice in the long journey from the Carryx homeworld. After a few moments, even the Soft Lothark returned, drawn by the sounds. The massive slug called Vaudai shifted and broadened, almost like it was melting into the deck. Campar had never seen it do that before.

And then, without reaching a crescendo or any clear climax, the song stopped. Silence came in as sudden as the singing had been. The four Budon of Luus twisted their necks around. To Campar they seemed almost surprised to be there. As if the song had been a possessing spirit that had just now let them go. One of the humans began applauding, and the Budon turned toward the sound like it might be a threat.

“That was beautiful,” Campar said loudly enough, he hoped, that the half-mind would relay it to the singers. “That was astounding.”

It was only as he stood up that he started becoming aware something was wrong. He noticed that all the Lothark guards were lying on the floor, which was very odd. He had never seen them do that. His own balance felt off, like he’d just stepped off a roller coaster and didn’t quite have his feet back under him.

“Campar?” Ghati said. “I don’t feel right.”

Across the common room, Rickar was waving a hand, trying to get Campar’s attention, his eyes wide with alarm. The ship lurched, the deck falling out from under him and then slamming up into his feet hard enough his knees bent. Something that wasn’t sound rushed like a river in flood, drowning out the actual noise of the room.

People were screaming, Campar could see their gaping mouths, human, Budon, Soft Lothark. They were screaming, but he couldn’t hear them. Something that wasn’t light flashed behind his eyes in an annihilating blue, and Campar lost himself in it.

The battle, it seemed, had come.

Rickar didn’t sleep anymore so much as lapse out of consciousness. There was no sense, when he came back to himself, of anything but the bone-deep tiredness that he’d carried to the pillow with him. The tension of knowing that he could die at any moment for no reason always at odds with the thought that, if he did, at least it would be over.

He was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, looking at the wall without really seeing it, when the sound came. It was beautiful and strange, and so out of place he wondered at first if he was hallucinating. He almost didn’t get up.

When he reached the common room, it was still like something out of a dream. Four of the featherless, beakless herons seemed like they were holding hands, their heads swaying on prehensile necks, and filling the room with their chorus. It was entrancing. He was entranced.

But also, as he stood in the corridor looking in, something in the back of his mind shifted. A slick distrust distracted him. Something new was happening, something unexpected, and while he might once have believed that some omens could be good, he didn’t anymore.

The song ended. Someone started clapping.

The giant slug was still spread out, hugging the deck with as much of its surface area as it could manage, like a man on a transport bracing in his straps. Across the common room, Campar told the singers how beautiful the song had been, and adrenaline was already flooding Rickar’s bloodstream. The Soft Lothark—instrument of the Carryx—had begun lying on the floor and bracing themselves.

Something was wrong.

He tried to catch Campar’s attention. Or Ghati’s. But the something had already started happening. The deck fell away from under him, and he hit his head against the bronze roof of the corridor hard enough to make his ears ring. An incomprehensible thing happened that involved the color blue, and then the battleship was shaking like a rat in a terrier’s teeth. Rickar tried to cross the swinging, bucking, violent deck to Campar and his new boyfriend. He didn’t have anything in his mind clearer than that they were in trouble, and that somehow by being together, they’d be safe. Safer. More nearly safe.

The Budon were screaming high, reedy shrieks that struggled to cut through the rushing sound that threatened to swamp all thought. The Soft Lothark, soldiers of the Carryx and tool of violence, were bracing themselves on the floor and in doorways, their tiny black eyes wide and limbs trembling. A thought passed through Rickar’s mind—I’ve never seen them frightened before—and blew away. The ship groaned and shook, throwing their bodies around like hard candy shaken in a tin cup. But there was something more, a kind of internal violence that Rickar felt without being able to localize it anywhere in his body.

His ability to think in language drifted away and came partway back. Blank spots appeared in his field of vision. The chaos of the room seemed to stutter like time had bits cut out of it and the broken ends jammed together. And all through it there was a deep sense of nightmarish wrongness, the universe slipping off its mask and letting him see the monstrous face underneath.

His first coherent thought was I must be having a stroke. His second was that he remembered having the first, and that he hadn’t been able to do that in a while. He was lying on the deck, his cheek pressed hard against it like he’d been trying to pass through it by main force of will. His body felt distant. The trek from his mind to the distant colonies of his feet might take days to complete. With a vast effort, he turned his head.

The common room was in chaos, but he saw Campar in it. The big man was helping Ghati to sit up; the smaller man’s eyes were blank and stunned, but he seemed to be moving under his own power. Campar, always helping. The Budon were vocalizing in distress and dancing around the bodies of two of their kind that lay on the deck like Rickar, unconscious or dead. To his right, Vaudai was swelling up and pulling in, resuming its usual shape. Where its flesh let go, a hard, white resin stained the deck. Something smelled like acetate. The Lothark were getting up from their places on the deck and checking each other for injury. One of them pulled a device off its harness and waved it at everyone in the room.

Rickar shut his eyes, but the darkness brought on a wave of nausea and vertigo until he opened them again. When he found enough will, he sat up and checked himself for wounds. His left knee was swollen. There was a cut over his right ear that had bled into his hair long enough to leave it hard and scabby. Whatever they’d just been through, it had lasted long enough for blood to dry. Other than that, he seemed more or less intact, though his head throbbed when he moved too quickly.

The expansive emotion in his chest was so unexpected and so long-absent that he didn’t recognize it at first. It was more than just relief at having survived. For the first time in a very long time, he felt joy. The enemy had tried to kill them and failed. Rickar felt giddy that he wasn’t dead, and he laughed at the pleasure of the sensation. Campar caught his eye, and Rickar gestured that he was all right. He wasn’t losing his mind, he wasn’t breaking down. He was genuinely happy to be alive, and his surprise at feeling that way was hilarious.

The big man came over anyway, Ghati at his side. The smaller man’s face was pale, and one of his eyes was bloody like he’d taken a punch, but he was steady on his feet. Rickar decided that Campar’s boyfriend might be a lot tougher than he looked.

“We’re going to check the rooms,” Campar said. “See if everyone’s all right.”

“I’m going to let you do that,” Rickar said. “I’m not sure I trust myself to walk yet.”

“If you need me,” Campar said. He was a sweet fucker, Campar. A better man than Rickar was. Probably an indication that he’d die in the war. Good people wore out faster than bastards, the universe using them up like it held a grudge against kindness. Rickar grinned at him. “I’ll be fine.”

After Campar left, more of the Budon filtered in from their private quarters, swaying around what Rickar now thought were their dead. Vaudai, its usual shape regained, moved across the common room floor as if it had someplace to go.

“Hey, giant slug,” Rickar said. “You all right?”

“I will be fine, sticks-with-meat-on-them. I have suffered overspill before.”

“Overspill?”

Vaudai didn’t pause, but its movement was slow enough that it didn’t stop the conversation.

“The enemy set a trap with projection fields. The fluting-stink-sacks sense variations in quantum flux a thousand times better than the best half-mind. It is why they are here. They sang, it raised the alarm, the masters put countermeasures in place. We suffered what little couldn’t be dampened out. Overspill. If they had not, we would not be suffering.”

“That was normal?”

“Nothing is normal in war,” Vaudai said. “It is always an experiment to discover what will undo the last encounter’s defenses and what will defend against the newest angle of attack. One creates the form of the other, and echoes back again in an endless spiral of sophistication and elegance. Conflict is the engine of excellence, and war is the distillation of conflict. It is the grand unfolding that ends in the embrace of eternity. Also, it is like painful defecation and leaves me with an ache. I am going to rest now.”

“Wait. If those bird things are sensors, what are you here for? Do you smell incoming missiles or something?”

“The gift of my kind is to ponder the patterns of violence. If we live, I will provide our keeper-librarian with analysis of these battles. If we don’t, it won’t be my concern.”

“What about us? What did they send humans out here for?”

“At a guess, to see whether there is a reason to send humans out here. Or perhaps something more. It will be interesting to discover.”

“Will we be part of your report?”

“If there is a report.”

Vaudai made its slow, creeping way back toward the cells and private rooms. Rickar tried standing up, then decided against it. The Budon circled their dead, clucking and muttering at each other, but they didn’t sing.

Fourteen

Hey there!” Garral called out. “Hey!”

The woman wasn’t someone he recognized from the ships. Wide-faced with hair in ringlets and a beaded vest over a disreputable blouse. She could have been a field researcher from any of a dozen excavations he’d worked on in his medrey. Her eyes went wide when she saw him, but she didn’t shout back to him. Garral picked his way down the trail, catching up to her as quickly as he could. She waited.

The late morning sun was heavy on his shoulders, and the ground was dry and arid now, but with signs that water had flowed through it in other seasons. Low, yellow-brown scrub and bushes hunched over wind-paved grassland. Wide, shallow washes carved by rain and flood crossed the landscape and made the trail harder to follow.

It was strange seeing someone who wasn’t instantly familiar. He wondered whether the five ships that made up their little group were the only ones on the mission. He’d thought so, but there could also have been dozens or hundreds scattered around the planet. Maybe they weren’t even the only ones in the vicinity. The big fuckers didn’t always make sense to him, though, and they certainly weren’t keeping him up to date on their plans.

He was a little winded when he reached the small rise near the base of the limestone cliffs. Her smile was amused, probably by how little it took for him to get out of breath. He smiled and waved his hand. “Just give me a minute,” he said around a chuckle. “I’m a little out of shape. Been a while since I did this kind of fieldwork.”

At a guess, she was in her twenties. Only a little older than his eldest son would be now. The memory of his child was a small shock. A distant alarm started sounding at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t imagine what it was about. Nothing about the girl seemed threatening.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said. “Jessyn Kaul? She’s a biologist, and she was doing a survey right around here. I don’t suppose you’ve seen her?”

The woman didn’t say anything, but she made a little come-along gesture and started walking for the base of some nearby cliffs.

“Thank you,” Garral said, trotting a little to keep up. “Our camp’s up north a ways. By the ships. Where are you set up?”

The woman looked back over her shoulder, but didn’t answer. The alarm in the back of his head was louder now, but he still didn’t know what was bothering him.

“I don’t think we met back at the world-palace,” he said. “I’m Garral Pär. I’m an archaeologist. Hibbrin Medrey.”

She nodded, made the same follow-me gesture, and ducked down under an overhang that led to a cave in the cliff face. He hesitated. It was probably nothing, but there was something very off about a young woman running into a strange man and leading him alone into a secluded cave. If he’d been nearer her age, he’d have gone as an adventure, but he’d been an idiot when he was young.

Young.

She was young. She was the youngest person he’d seen since the attack on Anjiin. All the captives had been plucked out at the height of their careers. If he was right about her age, she would have been barely in her first placement when the Carryx arrived. She looked back when she realized he’d stopped, and the smile dropped from her face. She turned toward the deeper cave and called to someone. There were words in her shouting, but he couldn’t make them out.

“Wait,” he said. “No, wait.” And then he ran, not even really knowing why, but some deep instinct driving him to flee. The trail was off to his right now, and he made for it, adrenaline lifting him like he was a child again. His legs pumped under him, and he flew across the low stones and through the scrub. There was a commotion behind him, but he didn’t look back. The absolute certainty that he’d triggered a trap set by the enemy of the Carryx blotted out all other thoughts. They’d caught Jessyn. They’d lured him in. He’d almost been caught.

Might still be.

He reached the trail that he’d followed down to the coordinates and glanced back. The woman was nowhere, but something was coming at him, striding low and fast like a hunting dog, but larger. Darker.

Garral turned and sprinted. His heart was tapping against his rib cage like it wanted his attention, and his legs were starting to ache. Too many weeks sitting in the hold of a ship traveling through asymmetric space. Too many months and years getting weak and deconditioned in the halls of the Carryx world-palace.

Now the enemy was going to catch him. Was going to kill him. He had to get back to the ships. The trail bent to the left, dipping down through an arroyo. If he followed it, his pursuer would be able to cut across the landscape and catch him. He turned right instead, his feet sliding against the soft clay of the ditch bottom. He was slowing down. As much as he tried to force himself to go faster, each step was harder to take than the one before it. Something cracked through the brush at the top of the ditch behind him. He wasn’t going to make it.

But maybe he didn’t have to.

A boulder had fallen into the stream back when there had been water in it. The pile of stone and silt built up along its side was testament to floods that were gone now. Garral threw himself into the shadow in its lee and scrabbled for his pack. If he could get his notebook and call for help… He didn’t know what would happen. Maybe the Carryx would come, maybe they wouldn’t.

The black thing appeared around the boulder and lowered a gun to Garral’s head. It couldn’t be a man. It had to be a mechanism. Black and hard, it looked like a child’s design of a super-soldier if the child had gotten bored halfway through and decided to draw the right side as a stick figure. Its voice sounded human, though. The annoyance and anger were recognizable in any language.

“I’m not armed,” Garral said, raising his hands.

The soldier barked an order that Garral didn’t understand, then gestured with the gun. Garral stood up.

“I’m not the enemy,” he said. “They took me prisoner. I’m a captive. I’m not a threat.”

The soldier sighed, shifting in the mud. Its thinner foot sank deeper into the clay, giving it a kind of limp. Or maybe it limped naturally. Garral kept his hands up and his palms open while the soldier took his notebook and pack from him and marched him back along the arroyo to the trail, back along the trail to the cave, and then into the darkness.

The young woman was there, and a man maybe a little older than her in similar clothes. And a classroom’s worth of kids that could have been approaching their teen years. The man had a knife, and he pushed Garral to his knees. The soldier stalked through the gloom. Garral didn’t see Jessyn in the darkness until it lifted her one-handed by the hair.

“No no no,” Garral said. “Leave her alone. She didn’t do anything.”

But the soldier was patting her down with its wire-thin hand. When it found her notebook, it dropped her again and held the two devices—her notebook and his—up toward the man with the knife. The soldier said something angry. The man answered sharply, and then the two were in the middle of some argument that seemed more immediate than their new prisoners. The woman put herself between the two, speaking in firm but soothing tones. A teacher’s voice. Without standing up, Garral slowly scooted across the cave floor to Jessyn. The soldier tracked him without losing a beat in the angry conversation it was having. But it didn’t point its gun at him, and he was able to reach Jessyn’s side.

“So I found something,” she said.

They both laughed, and if it was a touch manic, Garral felt they could be forgiven. Jessyn looked unharmed, but dirty and frightened. He found himself wanting to pull her into his arms, but didn’t think their short period of flirtation gave him permission for such liberties.

“Yeah,” he said instead when they’d stopped laughing. “I can see that. I was just thinking yesterday about how the city structures were all reading like human design choices. I thought I was anthropomorphizing. It felt very unscientific of me at the time.”

“Are you all right?”

“That black thing didn’t shoot me. Not yet, anyway. But it got me before I could get help,” Garral said. And then, a moment later, “They didn’t know you had your notebook, did they? Why didn’t you call back to base?”

“I didn’t want squid-face to know about this,” Jessyn said. “That’s why I sent you a coded message.”

“Not sure that was your best plan,” Garral said. “Third Gardener could have mounted a rescue.”

Jessyn looked at him like he’d said something obscene. “That’s the point. We can’t let the Carryx know about these people. They’ll be killed. Or taken prisoner like us. I think these are the deathless enemy. The war that the Carryx are fighting? It’s against humans.”

“That… That doesn’t track, does it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Wouldn’t the Carryx have recognized us when they took Anjiin? I mean if humans are the species they’re waging galactic war against, they have to have seen some before us, right?”

Jessyn went quiet, her focus turned inward. Garral was sorry he’d pushed back. “But obviously they’re here,” he said. “It’s unexpected.”

The soldier-thing gestured toward the back of the cave and let out a string of syllables that could have been orders or excoriation. Either way, one of the children started sobbing. And like an optical illusion shifting, everything in the cave changed. The enemy soldier, the man, the woman, the children. Garral looked at them and saw refugees. A handful of survivors of the battle that had scoured their world, lost and left behind and afraid. He heard the calm in the woman’s voice, and he remembered what it was like to try to reassure a child by seeming calm even if he was on the edge of panic. Even through the black armor he could see the exhaustion in the soldier’s stance, the rage and impotence and fear in the man with the knife. Even the blade—more than enough to kill him and Jessyn both—became pitiable when he saw it as the only protection the man had against Rak-hund and Soft Lothark and the broad killing arms of the Carryx.

“Well,” he said, then didn’t know what more to say.

The soldier snapped the fingers of its good left hand and gestured. The children scattered, each of them running back to a bedroll or a pack. The man stood in front of the soldier. The heat had gone out of their conversation.

“What are they doing?” Garral asked.

“Breaking camp, I’d guess,” Jessyn said. “Before you came, the guy was teaching lessons, but I think they’ve figured out that their security’s been compromised.”

“They probably won’t go until after dark,” Garral said. “You think they’ll take us with them?”

“I don’t know. Might be more efficient to slit our throats and leave us in the back of the cave,” Jessyn said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pulled you into this. I was just scared and…”

“No, that’s good. I’m glad that I’m someone you’d reach for when you’re scared. Speaks well of me.”

“Getting killed seems like a pretty thin reward.”

Garral shrugged. “Our lives ended the day the Carryx came. We’ve just been sort of… lingering.”

He waited for her to disagree, but Jessyn stayed silent. The woman from the cave had started folding her own things into a brown backpack. The man had gone back to talk with one of the kids who was sitting beside his bedroll, eyes glazed and unmoving. Hiding in the wilds with a group of emotionally traumatized children while the enemy who’d burned your cities paced outside the door was a rough job. Garral guessed the man wasn’t getting paid enough for it.

The soldier limped over to them. It had picked up a length of rope from someplace—thin, pale, and tight-woven. It held out its arms with its wrists together and said something. Even without the words, the meaning was clear enough. Garral considered what his chances would be to overpower the soldier and take its gun away. The black thing stood motionless, empty faceplate staring at him like it was reading his thoughts. Instead, Garral stood up and put out his hands. The soldier looped the rope around his wrists and cinched them together with a knot that only bit into his skin a little. Jessyn rose up behind him, and the soldier turned its attention to her. Across the cave, the woman was handing out canteens to the taller kids. Balancing the load they had to carry between the people best able to carry it. The soldier nudged Garral’s shoulder, urging him forward.

Garral walked with Jessyn following behind, both of them on the same leash. The soldier guided them to a spot near the center of the space and brought them to a halt. It said something, gestured to the two of them, and waited. The kids started lining up behind them, faces blank or angry or streaked with silent tears. The tally marks on the ground where their math lesson had been interrupted were like little trees. The man was still sitting with the glazed boy, cajoling the child back into the world.

He would have thought that he’d get better at losing everything. At the universe treating him like a seed on the wind, whipped from one life into the next without so much as a moment to say goodbye to everything he had known. And maybe he was improving. Maybe being leashed to the dark soldier was easier than being in the neck-to-neck lead with the Soft Lothark guards had been.

Or maybe it was that being at the mercy of a cruel and indifferent universe could only be a surprise once. Every time after the first profound loss of innocence was just an echo, a reminder. His wife. Their children. The world that had been the only world once, when he was young.

Garral looked down.

He frowned.

“Wait,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” Jessyn answered, but she was a long way away. Garral was in the cave looking down at the abandoned tally marks, and he was also ten years old in his uncle’s library writing secret messages to send to the girl in the next apartment over. Ancient writing as the natural tool of preadolescent flirtation.

“Wait,” he said again, louder this time, and sank to his knees. The soldier yanked on the lead, but Garral ignored it. The central structure of the tree, then units and tens on the right, hundreds and thousands on the left, with the bend in the branches…

“That’s four hundred and eighty-five,” he said, pointing to one of them. “And that one’s six hundred twelve. I know this system. I know this.”

The soldier growled again, hauling at the rope.

“Hold on!” Garral snapped. The woman had come now, and she stood beside the dark soldier. Garral smoothed away the marks in the dirt and drew a simple sequence. The first four numbers. He looked up at the woman. Her amber eyes were exhausted, but he had her attention.

“What are you doing?” Jessyn asked, but he didn’t answer. He pointed to the first three numbers in turn, and said, “Atche, hoon, cup?”

The woman didn’t respond. He tried again.

“Hoy, au-hoy, lep? No? All right, how about this. Dan, tenan, sip?”

The woman’s eyes went wide. She looked up, searching the cave, and shouted something. The knife man, still beside the child, looked up. She gestured him over. The soldier might have been a statue, it had grown so still. As the man approached, the woman pointed back at the tally marks and circled her finger in a gesture that meant do it again. Garral pointed at the first figure. “Dan,” he said. Then, “Tenan. Sip.”

The man knelt, pointing at the first mark. “Daum. Teya. Sé.”

Garral pointed to four. The man said, “Int-hey.”

The glee that bubbled up in Garral’s throat came out in laughter like a champagne bottle opening. “Heint,” he said. “But that’s just a simple inversion. That’s easy. That means… all right. Um. Hold on.” He closed his eyes, pushing his mind into the past. Becoming a boy he hadn’t been in decades. “Surut-te Garral,” he said, then shifted, pointing toward Jessyn with his two bound hands together. “Surut-sej Jessyn.”

The knife man rubbed his cheeks with open palms and said something that might have been Sauda-dje Omco. Then he pointed to the amber-eyed woman. Sauda-sey Manta. The dark soldier. Sauda-ut Corvall. Khata?

“Yes,” Garral said. “I understand. Um… Shit. Bo! Bo, cauda-te. Omco. Manta. Corvall. Garral. Jessyn.”

A slow grin pulled at the knife man’s—at Omco’s—lips, and the two of them were left giggling at each other like idiots or new lovers. The woman—Manta—said something, and Omco replied, pointing to the marks on the ground. Jessyn cleared her throat. It was as good as a question. He looked up at her.

“This is a first-generation math notation system,” he said. “You find these in the oldest settlements on Anjiin. It’s great for certain kinds of math functions, so they still teach it in engineering programs. But it’s old. Really old. I tried a few first-generation languages, and it seems like this guy knows something that’s close to but not quite proto-Darsin… You don’t care about that.”

“Not specifically,” Jessyn said.

“These guys aren’t just other human beings. This isn’t just common descent. There’s a cultural connection. These people are part of the same language system as the first humans on Anjiin. These are literally our cousins.”

“And you can understand what they’re saying?”

“Oh God, no,” Garral said through his smile. “But give me some time and I will.”

Fifteen

In the dream, Dafyd knew he was dreaming. It didn’t help.

He was supposed to be reporting to Ekur-Tkalal, the keeper-librarian of the human moiety, but the hall that led to the librarian’s chambers curved the wrong way, splitting and turning and splitting again into a labyrinth crowded with the bodies of Carryx lumbering about the business of the empire. The half-mind wasn’t working, and every effort to fix it made things worse. Dafyd felt the rising panic—if he failed to report, he’d be killed along with all the others, the babies would be raised without them. The thought of children cradled in the thin feeding arms of the Carryx was more terrifying than the thought of death.

The nightmare played in a loop. He would approach one of the Carryx in the halls, trying to ask how to find the librarian. When the half-mind failed, he would try to pull up the shapes that were the Carryx written language, manipulating the soft, glowing objects into the physical representation of thoughts. But the sentences would be wrong, the shapes moving out of grammar and into incoherence. And then the Carryx would be gone, and the loop began again. A Carryx, a failure to speak, a failure to write, and start over. He was trapped in the dream, and the fact that he was dreaming made no difference to the panic.

When, after a night that lasted decades, the pattern finally broke, it broke like this:

A huge silver Carryx stood at the intersection of two dark bronze hallways. Its abdomen was still, the four legs braced as if it was about to engage in combat, but the massive fighting arms were planted on the floor. Its insectile feeding arms were folded in against its thorax, and a hundred eyes shifted on its face. Dafyd ran to it, throwing himself to the deck and begging for help. I have to find my keeper.

The silver Carryx rested on its fighting arms, adjusting its vast weight. It spoke in its own tongue, like birdsong pitched down until it was almost too deep for human ears. And this time, instead of reaching for the square of the half-mind or summoning up the glowing symbols of the written reports, Dafyd trilled back to it. He felt the flutter of the song in the depths of his throat, like he’d grown a secret beak in the cartilage of his voice box. He repeated his question in words and phrases his human mind didn’t parse.

The silver Carryx replied in kind, and he knew it was saying There is no need for agitation. They are expecting you.

Dafyd leaned forward on his fighting arms, his abdomen skittering behind him restless and excited, as the silver beast stepped aside and made way for him. The meeting he needed was down this corridor, and as Dafyd lumbered into the darkness, his weight carried by the immense strength of his fighting arms, his merely human eyes opened, the nightmare broken at last.

He let out a long, shuddering breath and rolled to his side.

His sleeping room wasn’t more like a prison cell than his old one had been. It wasn’t much sparer than his apartment at Irvian had been. The bed was comfortable and wide enough to accommodate two, though it never did. The blankets that the Carryx provided were warm and soft when they weren’t wound into ropes between his legs and around his left arm. One of the other human captives had started making art out of wire left over from the hydroponic labs, and she’d given Dafyd one of her pieces: a set of three concentric circles that seemed to float on a background of bright copper triangles. He’d mounted it on the wall. It was the only decoration. He rolled onto his back, willing the dream to fall into forgetfulness.

This one was tenacious, though. He could still feel the mass and power of Carryx arms, the agitation of a four-legged abdomen he’d never had. The visceral quality of the experience made it worse. The night hadn’t let him rest, but the idea of drifting back to sleep held no charm. Neither did getting up and facing his day’s work. So instead, he let himself float for a few minutes, not awake and not asleep but some third state in between.

Thoughts rose into his mind and drifted away. The spy was still hiding among the humans. He had reports to get through from some of the human explorers that the Carryx had taken. Andermus had canceled the day’s meeting, busy as she was with some aspect of policing the human moiety. Korham was supposed to deliver a list of the supplies they’d need to build the nursery for the generations of babies they were about to bring into the prison world, and Dafyd would have to make the case for it all. There was a kind of lemon ice he’d had when he was growing up that came in a green cup with a flat bit of bamboo for a spoon. He had loved it, and he’d never have it again.

He breathed out, forced himself up to sitting. His eyes felt gritty. The shower was in a closet at the edge of the room, and he stood under the warm spray, head bowed, for a long time after the last of the red goo the Carryx used for soap had rinsed off his body and washed down the drain. He cracked open a waxy tube and unrolled a fresh tunic, a clean pair of trousers. Someday the human moiety would make its own clothes with embroidery and tailoring. Robes. Vests. Skirts that would flare out at the knee when the wearer spun in a dance. It might not happen in his lifetime, though. And if they didn’t teach the children to want it, that it had been that way once and could be again, maybe it wouldn’t happen at all. That was a grim thought.

His Rak-hund chaperon was waiting outside his door, and as he walked to the commissary, its knifepoint feet ticked against the floor behind him. When the doorways and halls cleared out ahead of him, he didn’t know if the others were avoiding him or his alien murderer or both.

The common spaces were less common when he was in them. In the commissary, he sat alone to eat except for the Rak-hund that stationed itself behind him, watching his back. The only ones who ever shared his meals were his five advisors. Four, now that Jellit—the thing living in Jellit’s skin—was avoiding him. Three, since Tonner always found something pressing to do. Andermus, the chief of police. Korham, the architect and builder. And Tomos, who called herself his minister of propaganda every chance she got. Uuya Tomos, who was walking toward him now, and dragging Ver Cannedan behind her. The choreographer whose punch had summoned the Soft Lothark, Rak-hund, and attention of Ekur-Tkalal. The arrogant little dancer whose moment of selfish spite had upended all of them. Dafyd felt heat shoot up his neck and into his cheeks.

“I was hoping we’d catch you here,” the old woman said, pulling the little choreographer down to sit beside her. “We have a proposal. Hear me out?”

“All right,” Dafyd said, and realized they were the first words he’d spoken that day.

“I want Ver here working for me,” Uuya Tomos said. “I’ll put him out in the world with a translating half-mind. His project is to observe the Carryx. Watch them interact with each other, with other species.”

“Why?”

“Movement study,” Ver said.

“Everything we do with the Carryx is through language,” Uuya Tomos said. “Little voice boxes that spit out words. Your writing things for your reports. Sure, the writing is in three dimensions instead of marks on a page. Yes, the translators are turning our words into whatever they’re listening to. But it’s all through language. And language is by its nature incomplete, isn’t it? Do you see what I’m getting at? How much of normal communication is nonverbal? Nonlinguistic?”

“If I go out and observe them,” Ver said, “I can suss out how they use their bodies as signals. When they shift, and when they go still. How they hold themselves when they’re being dominant and when they’re submitting.”

“Carryx body language,” Dafyd said, and he could hear the skepticism in his own voice.

“And ways to duplicate it—or at least gesture toward it—with a human frame,” Ver said, and then looked away like he’d embarrassed himself with his enthusiasm.

Uuya Tomos, on the other hand, was leaning in, her eyes bright and her jaw forward. It was like they were making her case by example. A wave of memory ran through Dafyd. Walking on fighting arms he didn’t have. The shifting of his abdomen on four smaller legs. He imagined one of those fighting arms snapping around and wiping the grin off Cannedan’s face.

“It’s an interesting idea. I’ll think about it.”

“These things call us animals,” Uuya Tomos said, “but they had to evolve up out of the ooze, just like everyone else. And evolution is an imperfect system, so they’ll have limitations and shortcuts just like any other species.”

“Doing it might also be dangerous. Our former librarian almost killed me once for telling it I wanted to understand the Carryx. But I’ll think about it.”

Ver put a hand on Uuya’s arm like he was holding her back from a fight. “That’s all I would ask. Consider it. Know that the work is available for you.”

He rose to leave, but Uuya didn’t. When Ver looked confused, she waved at him to go but didn’t rise from her seat. The choreographer looked from her to the Rak-hund lurking in the corner of the room, and left in the other direction.

“We have other things to talk about?” Dafyd asked.

“We do, but I thought we could start by discussing Ver behind his back. You don’t like the idea.”

“I think it’s interesting, but I don’t trust him. How are you doing with the work for the nursery? They’re going to be born sooner than you think. You can already see their fingers and toes.”

“Let’s not change the subject just yet. Ver Cannedan is a brittle soul of the type only small men who become bullies ever achieve. He also spent four years studying bear, dog, and praying mantis movement for a project. I saw it at Sollan Amphitheater. It was astounding.”

“He can’t be trusted,” Dafyd said. “And honestly, it’s not even about getting punched, not really. Humiliation is my daily gruel, here. If getting the occasional punch were the worst of it, I’d be thrilled. But because Ver threw his little tantrum, we have guards now. There are Soft Lothark patrolling the labs. He’s why that fucking carpet of knives follows me everywhere. That man’s selfish impulse made everything I’m trying to do a thousand times harder. So it’s not that I don’t like him. It’s not that I don’t respect his ability. It’s that I don’t trust him to not do something else in the spur of the moment that completely fucks up our world. And I can’t work with people I don’t trust.”

“Is that what happened with Jellit Kaul?”

The words hit Dafyd’s bloodstream like she’d pulled a gun. He glanced at the Rak-hund, but it was too far to hear them. And hopefully not sophisticated enough to understand them if it did.

Uuya crossed her arms and hoisted her eyebrows. “Did you think no one would notice that he’s fallen from grace with you? You might be a low-level bureaucrat to the Carryx, but to the rest of us, you’re the man who decides how we live. If we live. Everything you do, we watch.”

“I don’t do anything,” Dafyd said. “I get up in the morning, I try to tell Ekur what we’ve accomplished, what we need, why the Carryx will be stronger if we get it. Then I go to bed hoping we won’t all be killed the next morning.”

“Except for every now and again when you recruit someone into a conspiracy,” she said, and her smile was more than a little mean. “How’s that going for you, by the way? Not a lot of spare time for it? Not many hands on the rope pulling along with you?”

“What do you want?”

“I want Ver Cannedan out studying the Carryx.”

“And I’m telling you that’s a huge risk. What happens if he feels disrespected and takes a swing at one?”

“Of course it’s a risk. So is not doing it. If you’re waiting to have the perfect instruments—people who’ll do things just the way you would and not have warts and flaws and screwups—you’ll be waiting forever. You work with what you’ve got. And what you’ve got is me and Ver Cannedan.”

“And Jellit.”

“Yes,” the old woman said. “And Jellit.”

They sat in silence while Dafyd finished his meal. Twice, others arrived in the commissary, but once they saw him and the Rak-hund and Uuya Tomos, they left again. He’d forgotten to shave, and his chin felt rough with the stubble.

“Use your best judgment,” he said as he rose.

The Rak-hund skittered to its feet and made its serpentine way after him. If Uuya Tomos had anything else to say, he left before she said it. He was supposed to go meet with the Sinen overseer to have his reports checked for grammar and form. Instead, he turned down the long ramp to the south and made his way toward the visualization lab. His stomach felt tight and cold, the way it sometimes did when he was getting sick. He wasn’t getting sick.

Since the last time he’d been to the visualization lab, someone had covered one of the long, dark walls with diagrams in white and vivid blue. A matrix of yellow numbers showed responses at different wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum, and a graph beside it showed the same data in a different form. Two ways of seeing the same thing. The shorter wall at the end where the archway led back toward their personal quarters was well on its way to exhaustion, filled with design schematics that seemed to describe the device that lay in the middle of the floor, halfway through being born. Jellit and four others were talking about adaptive pseudoprimes when Dafyd walked in. In the moments before they saw him, they seemed happy.

Jellit’s eyes went wide and he took an unconscious step back. The others, sensing his fear, fell silent. One of them—a gray-haired man whose name Dafyd didn’t know—put himself between the two of them as if he were preparing to defend his project lead. Behind Dafyd, the Rak-hund skittered and tapped but stayed in place. A brief, powerful loneliness washed through Dafyd. He put the grief aside because he had to.

“I’m sorry to interrupt. Jellit, could I talk to you for a minute?”

“Of course,” Jellit said as he handed a coil of wire to the woman at his side. To his team, he said, “Keep going without me. I’ll be right back.”

Dafyd motioned the Rak-hund to stay where it was, and he and the thing in human skin walked to the corner where they could speak softly and not be overheard. The Jellit-thing’s eyes were cast down the same way Ver Cannedan’s had been.

“You’re making progress?” Dafyd asked.

“Some. We’ll have a prototype we can share with the librarian in a week. Maybe two.”

“And will it help them?”

Jellit looked up at that. Whatever he saw in Dafyd’s expression seemed to reassure him. “It will. Some. That’s the tension in the situation, isn’t it?”

“And you’re able to train the team up the same way he would have.” Dafyd didn’t inflect it like a question, but it was one.

“I am him,” the thing said. “And I’m her. And I’m Ameer, who you didn’t know. I’ve said it before. We’re all still here.”

The gray-haired man was staring over at them with distrust. The others were pretending to ignore them. Dafyd almost left. There was a moment where he felt the impulse to turn, to walk away, like it was already moving through his nerves, like his body had almost done it.

Instead he said, “I’m in trouble. I can’t… I can’t do any more than I’m doing, and it’s not enough. There are things I need to know, things I need to understand, and I can’t find any way to learn them. But you’re made to do that, aren’t you?”

The thing didn’t speak. It only nodded once.

Dafyd took a breath. Once, when he’d been a student, he’d heard a speaker on ethics use the phrase moral nausea. The memory was as clear to him now as if it had happened yesterday. He hadn’t understood the idea at the time. “I need your help,” he said. “I need you to help me. Come talk to me when you’re done here.”

“I will,” it said.

Dafyd clapped it on Jellit’s shoulder the way he might have if they’d been only what they seemed to be. He walked back to the archway that would take him, eventually, to his room, his little garden, and he wondered how many more ways the universe could find to compromise him.

The swarm walks back to its team, relief pouring through its mind. It had thought, when Dafyd appeared, that he had discovered how it had sent back its findings. That the weight of another death had pushed Dafyd past reason and redemption. That it is this—this—is a cause for joy.

He’ll find out in time, and his hate will return, Jellit says, but Else and Ameer don’t join in his chorus.

If it had known Dafyd was coming, it would have built a supply of pheromones. Would have done what it could to calm the man’s mind until it could reason with him, influence him, bring him back to the place they had been when it had lived within Else Yannin.

Seduce him, Ameer said softly as if from a great distance. The word you’re looking for is seduce.

Everything all right, boss? Baran asks as he hands back the coil of wire.

Yes, the swarm replies. Actually, things are great. Nothing to worry about at all.

It turns back to the work, mining Jellit’s memories, his knowledge, folding all that he was into the swarm’s consciousness. Else, though, is thoughtful and quiet. Else, who was most nearly the one who felt the love that Dafyd had shared. Who most nearly knew what it was to long for the man who had just come to ask it back into his company.

Else, who might, alone among the voices that are the swarm, understand how precious this is. A chance to make things right again. A chance to return to who they were. A chance—however slim, however fragile—to be loved.

PART THREE

PRESSURE DRIVES CONVERGENCE

Ash-Abbé, the bird that ate the sky, had its nest at the top of the mountain, high above the plains. Its wings were as wide as the world and its beak as sharp as obsidian and its claws were black ice that could strip the flesh from anything they touched. Ash-Abbé the Terrible was its name, and any who drew the attention of the bird that ate the sky would surely die.

But Ke was clever. For many days, he sat at the mountain’s base as still as a stone and watched to see when the great bird woke and when it slept, when it flew and when it returned from flying. And so Ke grew wiser in the great bird’s ways.

When he knew what times the bird’s attention was elsewhere, he began to climb up the side of the mountain, and as he did he found the scat and the leavings of the great bird, the bones and feathers of those things that died to feed Ash-Abbé, and so Ke grew wiser in the great bird’s hunger.

After long seasons slowly climbing to Ash-Abbé’s nest, Ke became as familiar to the mountain as the stones and trees, his body as wild as the bears and elk and foxes. And because he had been clever enough to become a part of the mountain, the great bird did not see him. And so he sat, silent and still, and he listened to the great bird as it sang. And so Ke became wise in the great bird’s song.

—From Myths of Origin: Field Notes and Analysis, Uuya Tomos, editor.

Sixteen

Ekur-Tkalal lived now at the bottom of a great chain of being. Keeper-librarian of the human moiety, it directed all things that touched upon the animals under its control, as it was itself directed by Moqid of the cohort Tlannan, who was directed by Dalkin of the cohort Astur, who was directed by the supervisor-librarian of animal assets. And so on, up to Surur-Tlassen, regulator-librarian, and through him—him—to the Sovran herself with whom Ekur was honored to share a planet.

Ekur’s place was more honored and honorable than its former role as subjugator-librarian. Then, it had been a librarian to soldiers, and a soldier was the lowest caste. There was nothing less than to be a Carryx who died at the hands of animals. To interact with animals was fundamentally degrading, but at least here, it was not facing them as equals as it had in battle. Ekur’s body had changed when it was given its new place, and because of that, its mind, but there was an echo of its old life that remained. It had been almost a soldier, but it had been high among subjugator-librarians of its dactyl, coordinating violence and spending the lives of Carryx who mattered even less than it did. Now the only things beneath it were the humans of Anjiin, and it had half-unconsciously made one of them its factor, putting the human’s frail body and unpleasant, squeaking voice in the place that the lesser librarians had once filled. Ekur had seen other animals make effigies of those they had lost as a kind of comforting doll, and it was disgusted to see some version of that impulse in itself.

But to spend more time directly with the animals would have been worse. This way, even though its factor was acting as a perverse parody of a Carryx librarian, there was only one that Ekur had to meet with on a regular basis.

Except that today, it had brought another.

“The tools that the lensing workgroups are designing are very delicate,” the factor—Dafyd of the cohort Alkhor—said. Or, more truly, the translating half-mind said for it. Humans were very small and had no resonance chambers. It was miraculous they could make their primitive grunts carry as much meaning as they did. “To be certain they will work properly, the group will need to survey local variations in gravity at several points around the planet. The leader of the research group is willing to make the survey himself.”

“Where would this survey take you?”

The leader of the research group—Jellit of the cohort Kaul—stood behind Dafyd-Alkhor. “It depends on what we find.”

Ekur-Tkalal’s feeding arms plucked at each other as it thought. There were animals of service throughout the world-palace, but they were selected and bred for their functions. If the humans of Anjiin stumbled into places where their presence was noxious, they would be killed. If its factor and the lead of its research group both died, that could reflect poorly on Ekur. But if the information led to a technology useful to the Sovran, it would certainly elevate its status. Ekur felt ambition awake in long-dormant parts of its body.

An elevation in status would change the flow of hormones and growth factors in its blood. Challenging Moqid-Tlannan for its position was a natural and appropriate goal, and more likely to succeed if Ekur-Tkalal curated its body into fighting trim before the attempt was made. If it failed, it would know it was in its right place. If it succeeded, it would know it was in its right place. Seen from this perspective, the risk of two human lives was beneath notice.

“This can be done,” Ekur-Tkalal said. It could smell the relief flooding through both of their bodies, and it was repulsive.

The day they were scheduled to leave the human moiety’s little village in the world-palace, Dafyd sat in his garden, formulating the report. Jellit sat beside him, legs folded, watching the shapes form and shift under Dafyd’s fingers. The wind was cool, and it smelled like rain.

“How about this?” Dafyd asked.

Jellit concentrated. Something odd was happening just under his skin like the shadows of waves on the bottom of a pool. After a moment, he nodded. “All right. I’ve got it.”

“You’re sure you’ll be able to follow this?”

“No,” Jellit said, and grinned. One dimple on his left cheek. Two on his right. “It’s just the best I’ve got.”

“It’ll have to do,” Dafyd said, and saved the report. The information that had been an array of ten glyphs set at angles to each other and placed in a volume of space had been a report on Tonner’s work creating a universal food following Ekur-Tkalal’s specifications. It became the same thoughts translated into some other form like a voice becoming radio waves. From Dafyd’s perspective, the message blinked out of existence. For Jellit—the spy, the swarm—there was a whole different set of senses. An awareness of pattern and energy that Dafyd couldn’t imagine. Somewhere on the Carryx world-palace, the report entered an archive. The needle in their haystack.

“I… I think the signal routed someplace to the south,” Jellit said. “There’s a wave that comes from there. Let’s see what we find, yeah?” Then he paused and frowned. “Are you all right?”

“It feels wrong. We’ve been in this structure since we came here. It’s a prison, and they’re just letting us walk out.”

“We’re not prisoners. We’re part of the empire now. Tiny cogs in their vast machine.”

“Worse,” Dafyd said. “That’s worse.”

“Are you ready?” Jellit—not Jellit—asked. Dafyd hesitated.

There was still time to change the plan. The spy could go on its own, or he could assign Tonner or Uuya Tomos to make the journey instead. Someone who knew about the conspiracy against the Carryx. Only no, he couldn’t. None of them knew that the spy was still here, that it had killed Else and taken Jellit. If they went in his place, they’d have to be told, and the fear that came with the revelation of that secret was a shock to the gut every time he imagined it.

His shame in working with the spy was the chain that kept him in place. His goal was the destruction of the Carryx. His goal was to avenge the dead, including Else. Including, in some fundamental way, himself. The man he had once been.

If the price was his soul, it was cheap.

“We can go,” he said.

The only other time Dafyd had been on a Carryx transport, it had been a floating platform that gathered the humans together before the Sovran to see their first keeper-librarian honored and killed. The one that Ekur-Tkalal had made available to him now was smaller and enclosed, but clearly the same technology and design. A simple set of controls let it turn, rise or fall, move forward or back. If there were other functions, Dafyd didn’t see how to use them. He assumed there was a half-mind ready to override any attempt he made to use the thing as a weapon, but maybe there wasn’t. Maybe the Carryx were willing to let damage be done as a lesson to the survivors.

“What is, is, after all,” he said.

“What?” the spy asked, but Dafyd didn’t reply except to shift the transport out into the open sky and turn it to the south. The massive structure that they’d lived and died in since they came under the Carryx yoke fell away behind them until they were so far away that Dafyd could see the curve in it, rising up from the cloud cover below and then up toward the busy, inhabited sky. He counted four other structures like it, like ribs of a fallen god. The dark ziggurats that he’d spent what seemed like years watching from windows and the shelter of his garden shifted now, changing shape as perspective flattened them. Wind muttered against the transport, only shaking it gently. Lights in the distance glimmered gold and pink and blue. Their transport was one of them now. It felt like the loss of something, but he wasn’t sure what.

The spy leaned against the glassed-in side of the platform, his—its—eyes tracking something Dafyd couldn’t see. The rippling under Jellit’s skin was gone. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the spy was just a man searching the world for some familiar landscape.

“Did you lose track of the message?”

Jellit smiled ruefully. “Yes and no. There’s a lot of information. The whole planet’s in conversation all the time. There’s a kind of stuttering in them. Data on a carrier wave. It gets echoed, one pulse picks up part of another one, passes part of its own signal to something, picks up a bit of another pulse and incorporates it.”

“And you can read them?”

“When I was Else, I used to go walking sometimes just to see how much of it I could listen in to. Magnetic pulses from—” He pointed down, toward the planet surface. “Someplace, it comes to rest. I mean, if there’s an archive, there’s some kind of storage site. Until then, imagine you’ve got everything that anyone’s said in the past year, and I’m listening for one particular sentence. Or transformation of it. Or paraphrase. And I can only listen. If I ask a question, the intrusion will be detected and we’ll both be dead in an instant.”

“That sounds both nearly impossible and insanely dangerous. So yeah. About right.”

Jellit smiled and looked to the horizon. “It’s easy to forget. We wander around the world-palace and we start to think it’s a safe place. But it is the heart of the Carryx empire. Its defenses are ancient, layered and deep. We’re ants tiptoeing through a battlefield where the weapons are so vast and incomprehensible, they’re impossible for us to even see.”

“So, be careful?”

“I was literally made for this,” the thing in Jellit said. “Turn toward that large structure off to the right.”

Dafyd did as he was told. The landscape shifted under them. The clouds beneath the transport were thinner here, and the surface to the planet—what he assumed was its surface—came more nearly into view. A vast plain of lines and curves that might have been streets. A scattering of lights whose significance he couldn’t guess. Nothing looked like the free play of nature and geology. The transport slid through the air more smoothly here. It was almost possible to feel like they were standing still and the world was the thing moving. The structure with the still-infant human moiety had vanished over the horizon. Jellit made a satisfied sound.

“What are they?” Dafyd asked.

“What are what?”

“The enemies. The ones who sent you. The ones on the other side of the war.”

“I don’t know,” Jellit said.

“Are they all like you?”

“Really, I don’t know. I didn’t have consciousness when I came. Everything I know from before that was automatic. Like instinct or unconscious expertise. You learned your colors or how to count but you don’t have the moment when your mother said three. It’s all just information before Ameer.”

“Who was Ameer?”

“Before she found me? She was a girl doing a two-day hike in the Kusine badlands. She thought she’d found a meteorite,” Jellit said, and then he shrugged. “She sort of did. The only memory I have is from her perspective. I remember being her when she walked up to the site. The ground was burned from the landing, and there was a silver sphere about the size of two fists in the middle of it. That’s really the first thing I know about myself. The first conscious awareness I ever had of myself came from being her.”

“And then Else,” Dafyd said. He had the sense he should stop talking. The more they spoke, the more distracted it would be. The more upset he’d become. There was no reason to do this, but here he was, doing it.

“Yes. I remember her life too. The first day you joined the team? When you brought in the basket of pastries and the Jannan coffee? That was years before I arrived, but I remember it. She remembers it, and so I do too.”

“And Jellit. So you’ve lived their lives.”

“I didn’t, though. All I have are memories. Jellit was there when he had his first kiss, and I can recall it with him, but that’s not the same thing, is it? You can remember your first kiss, but it’s not the same as when it actually happened,” the spy said. And then, a moment later, “My first kiss was you.”

Dafyd’s gut went tight, and he didn’t know if it was shame or disgust. Either way, the answering heat that he felt was anger. “Are there more? Did you kill anyone I don’t know about?”

The spy was quiet for long enough to make the silence awkward. The transport chimed once and shifted to the right without Dafyd telling it to. Some half-mind navigation control, he assumed.

When Jellit spoke, his voice was soft and filled with regret and also somehow feminine. “They are the only three that consolidated in me, but I am responsible for other deaths. It’s a war. I’m a soldier.”

“Or a weapon.”

“All soldiers are weapons,” the spy said. “Can we go lower?”

Dafyd told the transport to descend. The maze-work below them grew larger, the streets more distinct. There were shapes moving along them, oblong brown tabs that shifted from one track to the next. Dafyd didn’t know what they were for. There was so much he didn’t understand—

“I know this is hard for you.” When Dafyd looked over, the spy was looking at him. Jellit’s pupils were as wide as someone in utter darkness despite the light around them, and his shoulders were as tight and drawn in as a man braced for a punch. “Not just the war and the Carryx and all the horrific shit. Me. I’m hard for you too. And I didn’t mean to be something that was bad. I’m sorry for that. I am.”

Dafyd felt the words in the small space just under his rib cage. They made it harder to breathe. “Who is?”

“All of us. Ameer. Jellit. Else. This wasn’t fair to you. None of it was. And I can’t fix that, but I can tell you that I know. That I see.”

“What about you? The real you. The weapon.”

Jellit’s smile was a surprise. “There is no real me. Not the way you mean. Everything’s just them. All I brought was constraints, tools, and necessity.”

“Let me talk to Else, then.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“I think you’re bullshitting me,” Dafyd snapped.

“Left.”

“You left what?”

“Left. Turn left,” Jellit said. His face had gone pale. The too-dark eyes were wide with something like excitement. “There’s something… Something happened. Over there. It’s…” Jellit held up his hand, and something odd was happening at his fingertips. “Wow,” he murmured, but not to Dafyd.

In the near distance, the weird streets broke around a low gray structure like a river parting for an immovable stone. Dafyd tapped the transport lower. As they descended, the paths he had seen as roadways gained depth. Less city streets than furrows in a vast, unending field. The oblong things that followed along them were like hundred-legged arthropods, their backs segmented in armor, and each one had a Carryx with blue or gray armor leading it. The aliens didn’t react to the transport floating over them, or if they did, Dafyd couldn’t tell.

The structure itself seemed smooth and almost featureless. Only, perhaps, the faintest etched lines covering the irregular surface like written script. The spy was breathing faster. Its hands were pressed against the glass of the canopy.

“Is that it?”

“Part of it. I think. The part that’s above ground. Get as close as we can. Can we land?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try.”

Dafyd shifted the controls, and the transport responded sluggishly. A slow, pulsing vibration rang through the frame like a heartbeat, not getting faster but more violent.

“I don’t think it wants to.”

“Closer. As close as we can. Please.”

“I’ll try moving back,” Dafyd said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”

Jellit didn’t say anything. Dafyd took the silence as agreement. Farther from the structure, the transport seemed to resist less, but it did resist like it and the planet surface repelled each other. And then, without warning, the resistance gave way, and Dafyd set it down at the ridge between two of the great furrows. When he opened the canopy, the air rushed in hot and thick and stinking of sulfur. Breathing it felt like he was underwater. Jellit didn’t hesitate, trotting out of the transport and onto the dark, hot ground. Dafyd followed, already sweating.

The structure seemed larger now that they were looking up at it, and something about it seemed to swim like it was at the center of fields of energy strong enough to warp the light.

One of the Carryx-led arthropods lumbered up over the rise behind them and sank back into the next valley. It made a keening sound like something out of a nightmare. Heat radiated up from the ground, and the sun had become a pale white dot in a hazy sky. Twenty steps toward the structure, and he was drenched with sweat.

All the time he’d spent in the world-palace, he’d been in a habitat high above the clouds. It occurred to him for the first time just how punishing and inhospitable the rest of the Carryx world might be. Ahead of him, the spy seemed to be coming in and out of focus as if Dafyd’s eyes were growing tired, but when he came closer, he saw tiny filaments like hair-thin antennae had sprouted from Jellit’s skin. The low, bone-shaking birdsong of a Carryx voice rose up from someplace behind them, and three more answered in strange harmony.

In a moment, Dafyd’s anger and horror sloughed away. The strangeness and hostility of the palace made the spy seem like comfort and safety by comparison. Ahead of them, the lines on the structure shifted, rewriting themselves in nauseating waves. He put his hand on Jellit’s shoulder. It took two attempts before he could speak. The viscous air seemed to smother him.

“Is this it?”

Jellit nodded. His eyes were wide and full of wonder. “I can see it.”

“What?”

“Everything,” the thing in Jellit’s skin said. “I can see everything.”

Seventeen

Jessyn sat in the back of the cave with the children and the woman—Manta—and tried not to make her impatience anyone else’s problem but her own. It should have been easier. Manta kept the children in line, mostly. There were two—boys with jet-black hair, pale skin, and freckles that made them seem related—who kept pushing back or sneaking away. More than half the time Manta spent dressing the kids down, she spent on those two.

The others served a meal of local fruit and grains that looked like forage. Jessyn offered up her own ration bars, and the kids fell on them with a gusto that left Jessyn thinking they’d been having forage mash for a long time. Anything new was more than welcome. She hoped that would extend to her. The plan to leave the cave appeared to have been put aside for the moment, and she wasn’t sure why or what the choice implied. She would very much have liked to ask some questions, but the conversation that her life seemed to hinge on wasn’t one she’d been invited to. Which pissed her off. But since Corvall, the black soldier-thing, had made the decision, she tried to be patient.

The other three—Omco, Garral, and Corvall—sat toward the mouth of the cave, talking and gesturing and drawing figures in the dirt. The few times they were loud enough for their words to carry, they might just as well have been quiet. Jessyn didn’t recognize anything they said. The intonations of their voices told a story, though. Omco and Garral had started off the conversation almost giddy, but over the hours they had grown tired and frustrated. Corvall, on the other hand, had begun the session with a steady focus that hadn’t changed.

The dynamic among the three of them was clear too, once Jessyn watched for it. Corvall would speak with Omco, then Omco and Garral would jabber at one another for minutes on end, waving their hands, repeating themselves, making diagrams and rubbing the dirt empty for the next illustration, with Omco directing maybe three-fourths of his attention to Garral and the rest to the stone-still, faceless Corvall who listened until the chatter started to grow calmer and then spoke again and wound the whole thing back up.

Jessyn started picturing Omco and Garral as birds in a cage, and Corvall as the bored child tormenting them. Corvall rattled the cage, and the pair squawked and fluttered and sang to each other until the alarm fell away, and Corvall shook the cage again.

Jessyn didn’t see how their conversation ended. Manta had taken one of the kids back into the depths of the cave for something, and the two troublemakers started circling a girl with long, curly red hair. The expressions on the boys’ faces were mirrors of Jessyn’s soul—irritation and boredom looking for an outlet. When one of them pinched the girl, Jessyn clapped her hands and barked at them. The two boys stepped back like they’d touched a live current, and Jessyn pointed to each of them in turn.

“Don’t start it, you little shits,” she said. “I’ve taken down worse than you.”

Of course they didn’t know what she was saying, but it felt good to say it all the same. They backed away from their prey, and when Jessyn turned her attention back to the front of the cave, Garral and Omco were walking toward her. Garral’s eyes were glazed and his shoulders hunched forward. He dropped down beside her like a sack of flour.

“Tell me there’s some food left,” he said.

“There’s some food left.”

“Are you lying?”

“No, there’s actually some food left.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Manta, returning to the group, exchanged some words with Omco. It wasn’t a minute before both the men had ceramic camp bowls of food. Garral ate the fruit-and-grain mush using two fingers as a scoop. Jessyn held herself back until he’d gotten about halfway through.

“So,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

“I haven’t been this tired since my qualifying exams,” Garral said. “That much translation work? I think my brain has a cramp. Seriously.”

Jessyn put a hand on his thigh. “If you don’t tell me what you found out, I will lose my composure. I’m small, but I’m capable of great violence. You know that, right?”

Garral laughed. From the other side of the group, Omco joined in. They reminded Jessyn of when she’d been a student at medrey at the end of her exams, drunk on exhaustion and relief that her efforts were over.

“Omco and Manta are tutors. The kids were all from the city I was surveying. When the Carryx came, they were doing field study and they didn’t get back in time. Corvall was part of the army that fought the Carryx forces. They lost. He and a group of other soldiers were trying to escape. I don’t know how many, but their ship was forced down, and he’s the only one that’s left.”

“What is he?”

“A man,” Garral said. “He’s human. Like us. He’s in… living armor? Something like that. He lost a leg and an arm in the crash, and the suit is rebuilding him, but there’s not enough resources to do the job, so he’s down to… you know. That. The other side of the war has humans. There are other species too. Allies who are working against the Carryx. But humans are part of it.”

“How does Anjiin fit into it?”

“I don’t know. They hadn’t heard about us. At first, Corvall didn’t believe we were working for the Carryx. Apparently, it’s more common for the Carryx to torture prisoners to death. He was surprised to hear that we were being domesticated. Do we have any of the ration bars left? This is great, but protein would be better.”

“Here,” Jessyn said, handing one to him. Her mind was elsewhere.

“The people from the city,” Garral said. “The families of all these kids? They’re dead. The Carryx killed them all. Corvall found this group hiding, and in the absence of another mission, he’s been trying to protect them. I get the sense that his resources are almost used up, and he’s running on borrowed time now.”

“So what’s his plan?” Jessyn asked.

“There is no long-term plan, as far as I can tell. It’s just wait and hope that the Carryx go away without glassing the place for good measure.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“I mean, not much? Most of the time, I told them a lot about Anjiin and the world-palace. Corvall wanted to know where it was, but I wasn’t much help. I could tell him it had an oblong moon that was a little bigger in their sky than the sun, and that seemed exciting to him.”

“Huh,” Jessyn said. “I hadn’t noticed that.”

Garral’s frown was a question.

“The moon on the world-palace,” she said. “I looked at the sky there a lot, but I never thought about the moon.”

“I didn’t see out a window until just before we left,” Garral said. “It made an impression. Omco’s a language tutor. That’s why he knew some ancient languages with a lot of cognates. Corvall doesn’t have a clue what I’m quacking about, but Omco and me, we can almost work each other out most of the time. That’s why we didn’t keep you in the loop. It wasn’t personal.”

“We didn’t leave. When you saw the number system, we were about to leave, and we didn’t. Why did they stay?”

“I told them it was safe here,” Garral said. “If you’d wanted to bring the Carryx down on them, you would have done it instead of calling me, and you didn’t. It’s the biggest reason that they trust us.”

“Us, great. What about the rest of everyone? What if Third Gardener and his pet knife-dogs come looking for us and find them?”

“Why would it do that? It seemed pretty clear that if we went past the evacuation line, we’d be on our own.”

Jessyn felt a stab of impatience. “This seems like a good time to think about the stakes more than the odds.”

“Fair point. I’ll talk to them about it, but in the morning? We need the rest. I need the rest. Did I mention I was exhausted?”

“A couple times.”

He took her hand and squeezed it. Then held it. It felt perfectly natural, like the touch was normal. Something they always did.

One of the kids started crying. Omco sat beside him, murmuring through the wails and patting the boy’s back. For a moment, Jessyn was back in the first days after the fall of Anjiin. She remembered the weird drive to find a pattern, to find normalcy, and the times when the grief would break through and overwhelm her.

Garral had followed her glance, and his expression showed he was having the same thoughts as her. “Can you imagine going through it all when you’re not even a teenager yet?” he asked.

“They’re going to have to get a lot tougher if they want to live through it,” Jessyn said.

“Did you?”

“Did I get tougher, you mean? Or did I live through it?”

Toward the mouth of the cave, Corvall stationed himself. As still as a statue, he faced the entrance. She had the impression that the soldier and his living armor could have stayed there motionless as a stone for years conserving the last dregs of whatever fuel the suit and its occupant ran on. Manta was starting to encourage the kids into the bedrolls while Omco held the weeping boy and rocked him gently. The wails had turned to whimpers.

“They’ll be killing the lights soon,” Garral said. “We should get ready to sleep.”

There wasn’t a discussion. Jessyn kept hold of his hand as they moved back to the little place where she’d slept the first night, and he let himself be led. Garral lay behind her, hesitated, and then seemed to come to some sort of decision. He put his arm around her. After a moment, she nestled back into him. He held her tightly, and even through his pants she could tell he was erect. She realized that if there had been more privacy, they would have undressed. They would have fucked. It felt both surprising and obvious to her. She pulled his hand off her breast and guided it to her waist, pulling it tight around her. Making it clear that this was about comfort, not sex. At least, not this time.

Manta dimmed the lights and sang something to the children. To all of them. Jessyn felt Garral’s erection fade, and his breath began to catch. Then he began to quietly cry, in small barely-present sobs. Jessyn leaned her head back, pressing gently into him. He smelled like tears.

“Tell me,” she said, softly enough to hold the moment between just the two of them.

He shook his head like he was saying no, but then a moment later, he spoke. “My boys. Back on Anjiin. I hope they’re all right.” She reached her hand up to his cheek. He wrapped his fingers in hers. “Did you ever think about having kids?”

“Thought about it. Society doesn’t let you get through life without thinking about it. During your fertile years the question is omnipresent. But I thought I’d be a terrible mother,” she said.

“Why’d you think that?”

“I couldn’t put someone else at risk when my brain went rotten. Wouldn’t have been fair to them. And I never felt the pull as strongly as some other people, I guess. I could decide intellectually without making it personal. But I’m honestly grateful now. I’d die before I brought someone else into this fucking universe.”

Garral kissed the top of her head. Jessyn closed her eyes and waited for sleep to come. She thought it would take longer than it did.

When she woke, Garral was gone, she was cold, and there was a familiar headache wandering around just behind her eyes. She’d missed her dosage, and now she was going to pay a little price. It would still be three or four days before the darkness started coming on. If it did. There had been times she’d been able to go without medication for months at a time. It seemed too much to hope that this was one of them, though. She hoped her medication farm was still in balance. Even if it was, it wouldn’t be for much longer. She’d have to reseed it. Or maybe they’d all be killed and she wouldn’t have to worry about it. That sounded restful. Jessyn laughed to herself, which was fine. No one else was going to think it was funny.

She sat up and wiped the grit from the corners of her eyes. If she’d had a toothbrush, this would also have been a great time for it. Her mouth tasted like dirt and old food, her hair was greasy and wild, and she’d been wearing the same tunic for too many days in a row. That everyone else was in the same condition didn’t make her feel any better.

The lights were on, so it was probably day. Garral was at the side of the cave, deep in conversation with Omco, Manta, and Corvall. The children were all busy packing up their things. The move, it seemed, was back on. Jessyn found a bag of pears—maybe ones from her orchard—and took one. The juice from it was more welcome than the sweetness. She’d have to watch it, or she’d get dehydrated.

As she approached the other four, their meeting ended. Omco and Manta went to the children, exhorting or helping or reassuring. Doing the job they’d had when they were just teachers and were now trapped in for as much future as any of them had. Corvall turned toward the mouth of the cave, walking with surprising grace on his asymmetrical legs. It was hard to believe that there were scraps of a human body in the black suit. When she tried to picture the wounds he’d survived, it was horrific.

“What did I miss?” she asked as Garral walked up.

“Corvall has a plan,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m about ninety percent sure I understand it. It’s…” He shook his head.

“If we had good options, we wouldn’t be here. It’s all right. I can handle it. Whatever it is, I’ve lived through worse. Promise.”

“There’s a fallback campsite. Corvall scouted it out when our ships started landing. Manta’s going to take the kids there. The rest of us—you and me and Corvall and Omco—are going to go where Corvall’s ship crashed. If I understood correctly, and I really think I did, there’s an emergency beacon. It’ll tell Corvall’s people that he’s still alive and he’s got a ton of intel about the Carryx incursion here his side will be salivating to get. You and I and Anjiin are part of that. He’s pretty sure they’ll risk sending ships to collect that information, and when they do, he’s hoping they’ll take the kids.”

“That is a terrible plan,” Jessyn said. “The Carryx are already on alert. They aren’t going to just overlook the fact that a beacon fired off.”

“They won’t. They’ll come hunting for Corvall, and they’ll find him. He’s not going to live through this. He knows that.”

Jessyn took her hand back. Something was wrong.

“We’re going with him,” she said. “Why are we going with him to set off the beacon?”

“There’s something we need to do once we get to the ship and before he sends up the flare. He needs to teach us how to do it.”

“Garral?”

“We have to keep the rescue from turning into a battle. Corvall is giving us a device that will disable the Carryx ships, but only for a little window. We’ll smuggle it inside, you and me. When the Carryx start gearing up to fight, we’ll deploy it already inside the defense perimeter. It turns off their engines and messes up the power systems for a while, and by the time they get them back on, the kids are gone and safe,” Garral said.

In the back of Jessyn’s mind a thought shifted, and the sensation was weirdly physical. For a dozen seconds, she read the variations like she was seeing them on a spreadsheet. That was all it took. She turned toward the cave’s mouth. Corvall was a silhouette, black on charcoal. She wondered if they’d all missed the hole in the plan, or if the soldier knew and thought it was an acceptable loss.

“Get them back,” she said. “Corvall, Omco. Both of them.”

“I know it’s risky—”

“Get them back. Tell them you’re evacuating with the kids, or it’s not a deal.”

“I’m not sending you into danger by yourself. Neither of us are smugglers. Whatever happens back at the ships, it’s going to be safer—closer to safe—if we have a team. We can support each other, and—”

“I like you, Garral. I really do. But if you patronize me right now, I won’t anymore. You have to go with them because otherwise we both get killed.”

He took a step back, confusion in his eyes.

“Look one more step down the road,” she said. “The rescue ship comes thinking they’re getting some kind of elite soldier filled with valuable information about the enemy. Only he’s not there. There’s just a bunch of civilian kids and some teachers with a story about the Carryx having pet humans. So sure, you scoop them up. But the enemy ships are sitting there on the ground, shut down. Vulnerable. Lumps of metal. No threat to you. You don’t leave, Garral. You kill them. You turn on the Carryx ships, and you throw every bullet, every bomb, every rusty razor blade you have at them. You reduce them down to blood and ash before they can turn their guns back on, and then you piss on their graves. It’s what I would do.”

Garral took a deep breath, and it seemed like he was about to say something. But then he only exhaled again.

“Yeah,” Jessyn said. “You tell Corvall that you’ll spill your guts about the Carryx and Anjiin and everything you know about what they’re doing and what they’ve done. You’ll give them every bit of intelligence you can scrape out of your head. But in return, they don’t murder the ship I’m on.”

Manta called out to one of the kids, her voice sharp and annoyed in a way that made Jessyn think she was scared. That was fair. They were all scared. They had reason to be.

“I’ll take the device,” Garral said. “You can go with the kids, and—”

“I don’t speak a fucking word of their language. How am I going to convince them not to destroy a bunch of helpless enemy ships. Mime it at them? Interpretive dance?”

Defeat was just a shifting in his shoulders, a dropping of the tension in his jaw. And then, close behind them, something that looked like resignation.

“I’ll tell them,” Garral said.

“And then we’ll go.”

“And then we’ll go,” he echoed.

Eighteen

The violence came and went according to its own logic, shaking the ship and bending Rickar’s mind in a stuttering of hours and days that felt random. The gaps between the hits took on the feeling of a hurricane eye: moments of eerie calm that made the violence before and after more pronounced.

The Budon of Luus responded to the stress by increasing their reproductive efforts. For days, tiny black nymphs the size of Rickar’s thumbnail spread through the common space, searching in vain for whatever environmental niche would have let them flourish to adulthood before they dried out and died. The adult Budon ignored their swarms of dying children magnificently, and Rickar found himself wavering between pity and admiration.

Evolution often engineered a fatalism in its prey species. Under stress, some trees would increase their pollination, some fish would up the output of roe. There were lizards that, in times of trouble, would forgo sexual reproduction altogether and clone themselves. One of the strategies the universe kept reaching for was to throw as many babies at the future as it could and hope that this apocalypse wasn’t the last one. From where Rickar sat, it was as close to optimism as nature ever got.

The only bright spot in the long endurance was his discovery that Vaudai had access to the Carryx tactical data, and would share it if Rickar asked. They didn’t seem to care about the concept of military secrets. Their strategy of make a mistake and watch your species burn was the only backstop they needed.

The display was the same volumetric spread of light that the Carryx used for their version of a written language, only instead of abstract shapes, Vaudai had a schematic version of the solar system they were in from the local star in the center to the skin of the heliosphere. At scale, it would have been an emptiness punctuated by dots of light too small to see, but with the overlays that Vaudai conjured up, Rickar could track the twelve major planets, the clouds of asteroids in two distinct belts, and—more importantly to him—the positions of the Carryx ships and the enemy fleet. Thin cones defined something Vaudai called exclusion-and-control fields, wider ones fundamental decoherence zones, and a few hair-thin curving lines void tendril probability arcs. The giant slug thing seemed to enjoy explaining what it was seeing to Rickar. Sometimes, Rickar even followed some of what it was saying.

“The battle is in essence already over,” Vaudai’s translation half-mind said. Rickar was still uncertain what signals it was taking from the slug that became language. To him, the voice of the machine was the voice of the alien. “What remains is for the enemy to choose the manner in which they lose.”

“How humiliating for them,” Rickar said, scratching idly at his leg.

“And lethal. But there are strategic concerns outside this particular battlefield. The enemy may choose to continue this battle, even though it means losing their ships here, in order to keep the dactyl occupied instead of redeploying elsewhere. Or they may blunder in their disengagement, in which case they will lose these four ships.” Four of the symbols in the display pulsed. “Or they may decide to lose these two ships, which are of lower value, in exchange for this one, which they prize more highly. Whatever decision they make, it will have implications in the larger war in other systems. The shape an enemy adopts in defeat is telling.”

“What’s your bet?”

Vaudai went silent for a long time. Rickar was used to these lapses. Sometimes, the giant slug would come back with an answer a few moments later. Sometimes, it would start a new conversation as if Rickar hadn’t asked. Across the common room, one of the Sinen waddled by on its short legs. It wasn’t the usual overseer. This one had thicker tentacles and the shape of its eyes was rounder. Rickar noticed with a distant amusement that he was now able to tell Sinen apart by their looks.

“This one is dead, but their behavior indicates they don’t know that yet,” Vaudai said, and one of the ships on the far side of the solar system from their ship pulsed once. “They will lose it in four cycles. The attempt to protect it will come from here—” A region of the display lit up. “And here.” Another joined it. “But the attempt is flawed, and both supporting vessels will be lost or driven back. Once the other ships escape or are destroyed, it will detonate itself rather than be captured.”

“Suicide?”

“It is an enemy command ship. They do not permit them to be examined.”

“And what then?”

“Then we will see what our Carryx masters think is best,” Vaudai said. It was probably just Rickar’s imagination that the half-mind’s voice took on a nuance of sarcasm when it spoke the words. It was easy to pretend a common sense of humor with the alien. And maybe it was even accurate. Maybe evolution in its largest form selected for amusement and contempt for organisms that lived without power and agency.

Across the common room, one of the Budon lifted its head. Its throat thickened and a single clear, beautiful note rang out. Across the common room, two others rose up, their voices harmonizing in something more than music.

“Well fuck,” Rickar said.

“Yes,” Vaudai agreed as it spread its body wider against the deck to adhere better.

“I’m heading back to my cell. I’ll see you when the overspill’s done.”

“If we live.”

Ghati’s eyes were open, but he hadn’t moved since Campar had left his room, hours before. Campar stood in the doorway for a moment that seemed to stretch forever, and then Ghati took a breath and time started again.

“You’re looking dour, my dear,” Campar said, stepping in. “Did that last episode exhaust you? It wore me out.” He closed the door behind him. The room smelled rank. Unwashed body, yes, but something else. Something darker. Campar’s heart ticked up its pace and his jaw hurt. He tried to relax, but his body refused to. It knew what this was. It had been here often enough that it would not—could not—pretend safety.

He sat on the edge of Ghati’s bed. The already slender man had lost weight. His cheekbones had gone sharp and the dip at the top of his collarbone never went away now. His eyes were glassy in a way that made Campar think of hospitals. Ghati’s gaze found him slowly. Campar tried smiling but it felt false. Ghati didn’t try.

“You’re sick,” Campar said.

“I’m in hell,” Ghati said. “I’m in a box buried in a vacuum. Demons are hurling me through endless nothing and taunting me with visions of death.”

Ghati didn’t try to pull back when Campar took his hand. It might have been better if he had. It would have taken effort, anyway. Campar would have felt a thousand times better if they were fighting.

“You’re breaking a little,” Campar said. “That’s all. We all do it, one time or another. It would be strange if we didn’t.”

“I had a garden,” Ghati said. “When I was young, I had a garden that my mother kept. We grew our own flowers there. What’s funny is I don’t miss the smell of the flowers as much as I miss the smell of the dirt they grew in. How long has it been since you smelled soil? Do you remember what it was like?”

The temptation was to lie. To say that he did, and that they both would again. The glimmer in Ghati’s eyes was a warning. “No, not really.”

“We kept bees too. A bee taken from its hive? A bee alone? It dies. You can give it water. You can give it food. You can keep it warm, but it doesn’t matter. It dies. I haven’t seen the sky in so long, Campar. I’m dying without it. I can’t live here, and there’s nowhere else to go.”

Campar drew his fingertips across Ghati’s forehead like he could smooth away the furrows there. And they did ease, a little. Only a little.

“We are in a ship we don’t control, on a mission we don’t understand, and every now and then, someone tries to kill us,” Campar said. “Of course it’s overwhelming. But we live through it, and there’s more unexpected things on the other side. Remember when we left Anjiin? Those terrible rooms with the cold and the dark? This is better than that. We have better food, we know more. We lived through that, and we can live through this.”

“Why do you want to?” Ghati asked. An accusation in the form of a question.

“In the hope that I’ll be pleasantly surprised,” he said, making it half a joke. “Like you. You were a wonderfully pleasant surprise.”

“You’re a good man, Campar. I wish I’d known you before.”

He meant before the Carryx. There was only one before for any of them now. “You should eat something,” Campar said.

Ghati seemed to collapse into himself and he looked away. And now he pulled his hand out of Campar’s with enough strength that he seemed annoyed. “I’m not hungry.”

“I didn’t ask whether you were hungry, I said you need to eat.” Ghati didn’t reply. The lines at the side of his mouth, already stark, grew deeper. Campar stood. “Would you rather come with me, or should I get takeaway and we can have breakfast in bed?”

“I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

“Bed it is, then,” Campar said. “Wait for me here. I’ll be right back.”

As he reached the door, Ghati rolled to his side, his back toward Campar. His tunic was stained with old sweat. Campar almost turned back, almost tried to insist that they go together. He didn’t like leaving Ghati alone, but he knew that food and water mattered most now. If he could get some blood sugar into Ghati, there might be a shower after that. The little chores that humans did to remind themselves that they were still alive. The tiny victories in all that vast dark.

Campar hated the feeling in his body: the tightness in his back, the barely present nausea, the awareness of threat, danger squatting on Ghati’s bed as certainly as if there had been a man holding a gun. And that Campar’s best efforts might not be enough. That the universe might take another precious thing from him. No, that was wrong. That it would, it absolutely would, and this might be the moment when it did.

The common room felt small, more like a prison yard than a living space. People and Budon were wandering around, recovering from the most recent insult. Campar didn’t care about any of them. He needed a bowl of food and a sack of water. What would happen if they decided to go and see the rest of the ship? Would taking even just a little walk outside of their usual spaces help Ghati, or make his situation worse? If the Carryx decided they were out of their places and threatened them with death, would Ghati submit and let them kill him?

He waited in the food line, distracted and distressed. When his turn came, he took the little bowl of mush and the yellowish sack with water, and wished that it were fresh bread and a bottle of wine. Grapes. Cheese. One of the sweet muffins filled with berries that he used to get from the kiosk at the edge of Dyan Academy. Any of the subliminally small things he’d spent his life overlooking would have been a miracle now. But he didn’t have them. The Carryx didn’t permit miracles. They just separated their bees and waited to see how long it took them to die.

In among the press of bodies, he caught a glimpse of Rickar sitting with Vaudai. The air in front of them glittered with light and Rickar laughed at something. The little stab of resentment and jealousy in Campar’s heart gave way quickly to a thought. It felt so much like inspiration that Campar distrusted it. Instead of rushing back to Ghati, Campar bent his path to Rickar.

“Hey, big guy,” Rickar said when he got close. “You’re looking a little rough. You all right?”

“Fine. I’m fine. But Ghati’s struggling.”

Vaudai shifted, its skin taking on a dancing mother-of-pearl sheen for a moment and then darkening back to gray. The display the two of them were looking at was the layout of the battles. Campar didn’t want to look at it. It was just another way to spend time with violence and death.

“I’m sorry,” Rickar said.

“I’m thinking about telling him.” Rickar frowned his confusion. Campar folded himself down at Rickar’s side, sitting close enough that his voice could be no more than a murmur. “About Dafyd’s plan. I’m thinking about bringing him in. Knowing that someone—someone with power—is building a way to push back at—” Even in whispers, Campar couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. “If Ghati knew that, it might help. But I don’t want to compromise anything for Alkhor either. You were there. You and I are two of the only people who know. What do you think?”

“You shouldn’t tell him about Alkhor’s plan,” Rickar said. “Alkhor doesn’t have one.”

Now it was Campar’s turn to be confused. “I mean what he told us after… after Ostencour and the others… after Else.”

“We were in shock. We were numb with grief. A bunch of our friends had been killed. Again. The fucking Carryx had just beaten one of their own to death in front of us and then told us we were being honored by getting assigned out through the universe. Alkhor felt guilty, and he said some shit he thought we’d want to hear. It didn’t mean anything.”

Campar put the bowl of food down on the deck. It clicked. Of all the things he’d imagined Rickar might say, this was somehow the most shocking. “You don’t believe that. Alkhor is the one they gave power to. He’s the most influential of us. That’s what makes it possible.”

“Listen to yourself,” Rickar said. “Dafyd Alkhor is their favorite pet. He doesn’t have power. None of us do. We’re fucked. We’re oak leaves in autumn, going where the wind blows us. We’re going to live out whatever time we have in whatever fucking box they decide to put us in. And when we die, that won’t mean anything either.”

“I don’t accept that,” Campar said, and he tried to believe it. It was only because he was already so raw that the words hit like little punches to the heart.

And perhaps Rickar felt some of that too, perhaps he saw how far he had gone, because he leaned closer and put a hand on Campar’s arm. The weariness in Rickar’s eyes was existential. “I’m sorry that your boyfriend’s depressed. I really, truly am. But you shouldn’t tell him Dafyd Alkhor’s got some amazing secret plan to bring down the Carryx because he doesn’t. It’s not that you’d be risking some big secret. You’d be giving him false hope. There’s nothing we can do, and no reason that we should hurt ourselves trying. It’s better that he see this for what it is and find a way to live inside it.”

“I don’t think I’ve done that,” Campar said.

Rickar looked down, and Campar waited. Gave him space. The moment seemed to be on an edge. What he said next could determine the shape of their friendship, or of what their friendship decayed into.

Only that wasn’t what happened. “Sticks-with-meat-on-them, look here. It’s happening as I said it would.”

The display that floated in the air was incomprehensible at first. Then Campar wiped away the tears he hadn’t realized were gathering in his eyes, and the solar system took shape. The ships of the Carryx force in their positions. The strange projection fields that crossed, sometimes whole swaths of the vacuum between planets, the scattered ships of the enemy fleet. As he watched, one of the enemy ships vanished from the display.

“Did we kill it?” Campar asked.

Rickar shook his head. “It got away.”

“Many of them are fleeing or have fled,” Vaudai said. Its skin was shifting textures quickly, but whether that was how it communicated or just an expression of excitement in the moment, Campar couldn’t tell. “They thought our resonance exclusions would target the largest number of their ships, but we focused on their command structure. More of the lesser vessels escaped, but the highest-value ship will be destroyed.”

“I don’t know what a resonance exclusion is,” Campar said, but no one replied to him. Another of the ships vanished from the display, and then three more all at once. Only two more ships remained.

A thought came to Campar like a flare of hope. “Can I tell Ghati that the battle’s finished? Are we done with this shit? We aren’t going to be suffering any more of those overspill events?”

Vaudai didn’t move or seem to acknowledge Campar physically in any way, but its half-mind spoke. “There are three thousand kinetic and energy weapons still in transit toward us on five different vectors. Three fundamental decoherence zones are still evaporating. Any field attacks they aimed at us as they left will take between twenty and sixty-five minutes to reach us, but yes. After those are cleared away, we will be done with this shit.”

It was enough. It was a moment’s brightness to go with the food and the water. They’d weathered another storm. There would be one more after for them after all.

One of the two remaining enemy ships blinked off the display.

“Now, watch,” the alien slug thing said. “The command ship will destroy itself, and all will be complete.”

Campar watched. A little red dot on the far side of the heliosphere from them. A ship like theirs, only with other beings in it who, instead of feeling a breath of relief, were consigning themselves to a permanent ending. If the war had gone the other way…

The seconds passed. Then a minute. The dot of the disabled enemy ship remained where it was.

“Well,” Vaudai said. “That’s unexpected.”

Nineteen

There were times—few, but significant—when Surur-Tlassen felt the weight of the empire’s scope. He feared these moments. In them, his dreams became nightmares of his body dissolving. The symbolism wasn’t mysterious. He was the conduit of the living empire to the Sovran, and in truth, he was growing old. The flow of knowledge that entered him daily, poured into the imperfect vessel of his mind, would never overwhelm him. One of the librarians beneath him would sense his weakness and depose him long before his weakness could harm the war effort. Or he would end his service and ascend to the private creche.

As day by day and year by year that moment came closer, he found himself growing less certain which path he would prefer: defeat at the hands of his subordinates, or the final and irreversible change to a keeper of the private creche. He took comfort in the fact that his preferences were irrelevant.

He waited now, his day’s sleep cut short by the only summons he experienced besides the Sovran’s. The private creche was set deep in the flesh of the palace, surrounded by it, but not connected except for the meeting chamber. When the time came for the Sovran to meet her child, the benches would be filled with the highest of the Carryx on the left side and the keepers of the private creche—all of them former regulator-librarians like himself—on the right. Today, however, there were only two: himself, and the eerie, scentless thing that had once been the most important male in the empire. It had been Urur-Atlak then, and Surur-Tlassen had known it. It was something else now.

“Regulator,” it said as a greeting. Its flesh was pale and thin. Its fighting arms had withered to white sticks that seemed too weak to support its frame. Reflexively, Surur released a flood of pheromones into the air that in any other Carryx would have commanded its respect and obeisance. Urur shifted its diminished abdomen in something like amusement. The sensation in Surur-Tlassen’s core would have been fear if feeling fear were possible.

“I have answered your summons,” he said.

“The Sovran has a new daughter that is preparing to meet her,” the monkish remnant replied. “You will make the necessary arrangements.”

Surur spread his fighting arms wide, as if in surrender, but there was no change to his flesh. The hormones associated with loss failed to leak into his bloodstream. The sensation was unnatural and unpleasant.

The remnant spread its own fighting arms out even more widely, offering its own vestigial surrender, then turned and made its way across the chamber toward the passageway that no full Carryx had passed since the day the private creche had been constructed. Unseen controllers opened the creche door for the remnant, and they closed it again once it had passed inside.

For a moment, Surur-Tlassen was alone. The private creche had many needs. Blank eggs, germ line matter from the most promising of the living Carryx. And sometimes other, less explicable things as well. The mysteries of the private creche were not subject to the empire. The Sovran’s will reached to the stars, to the complex surface of death and violence that was the empire’s edge, to the deepest regions of the Carryx mind, but not to the private creche. Not to any of the private creches. Only the neuter monks who lived inside knew its secrets.

And one day I may know them too came unbidden to his mind, and Surur-Tlassen felt a shudder pass through his entire body.

He made his way out from the meeting chamber and turned onto the passage of conveyance that would return him to his more usual areas within the world-palace. At the mouth of the passage, a service animal failed to remove itself quickly enough. He crushed it to death and left it for its cohort to clean away. One failed individual cut away was a small correction, but small corrections repeated over time would eventually lead the other animals to excellence just as a failure to act would degrade them. The sense of a small virtue comforted him.

He arrived at the Sovran’s palace later than he would have otherwise, but the Carryx who guarded the archways had no standing to chastise him, and such failures were beneath the Sovran’s notice. If Surur failed in his duties, correction would come from below just as guidance came from above, and none of his underlings of sufficient status offered challenge.

The air in the Sovran’s quarter was thick with her scent. Surur’s blood thrummed in his body in a way that echoed satiety. The structures of his nerves and apt channels took on rhythms that occurred only during mating and moments of deep sleep. His joints grew looser, and the ceaseless motion of his abdominal legs slowed. His loyalty to the Sovran was renewed as it was every day.

The Sovran towered in her bath, larger and stronger than any other of the Carryx. Her abdomen glowed with the gentle luminescence of her kind. Several of her hundred eyes shifted to him with audible clicks, and Surur—the highest of the librarians in the empire—abased himself before her without shame or regret.

The Sovran moved, and waves lapped at the edge of her pool.

“Begin,” she said in a single syllable with deeper harmonics than his own throat could have produced. It hid layers of meaning inside it. Begin your report, prepare to receive my instructions, serve now and always.

“Word has come from the private creche,” Surur said. “You have a new daughter preparing to emerge.”

“Yes,” the Sovran replied, and then, “What more?”

Surur-Tlassen closed his eyes, and in the darkness of his own consciousness, he gave her his understanding of the day’s movement.

In instances where the truth could be told fully with only a few details, he did so. The second harvesting body had produced the larger supplies of baan-wheat and deep copper that had been requested of it, but it would require another hundred days to manufacture the song field housings and spinfoam mirrors. The three hundred worlds of the spinward holdings remained quiescent. The animal unrest in Sado and Herusant systems had been burned out and the animal moieties had selected new species to replace the lost populations.

In the few instances where some smaller-grained incident seemed of interest, he passed that on as well. A tender of the Void Dragons in Caarlast had been inhabited by larvae but not died, and now claimed to have insight into a new technique to deploy void tendrils. An enemy ship in Ashtin-Kah system had fought against the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body and failed to destroy itself when the enemy fled, and the subjugator-librarian of the dactyl was preparing animals of service to examine it. The planets that the deathless enemy had been forced from in Horol-Sa and Dakku had extensive manufacturing structures, and the strategic half-minds believed their loss would further weaken the enemy fleets in the coreward systems.

As he spoke, the Sovran sang to herself, her voice fluting up from rumbles so deep he felt them resonating through the floor to the high, musical trills that signified the electric dancing of her thoughts. His earlier uncertainty left him as he spoke. The dreams that had been his mind compressing the thousand things he had learned the previous day became the hours he now spent breathing the richest air in ten thousand worlds. The Sovran’s attendants brought her plates of golden ruus and bowls of black amask flesh prepared in sour gum.

When he was done, the Sovran let him remain in silence for an hour while her will reached through all he had delivered to her and she shaped again—as she did every day—the vast, slow, implacable organism that was the Carryx.

“This revealed weakness of the enemy will be pressed, and the subjugator awarded increased resources,” she said, and the harmonies of her voice lit a dozen nuances in his mind. “The second harvesting body’s failure is noted and will be resolved. We will prepare witnesses to the arrival and meeting of my daughter.”

He shuddered, his mind drinking in her words and their implication, his brain already leaping to fill in the gaps created by the details she had omitted, already composing the directives he would give to the librarians below him that would best express her will.

For another hour, she spoke, and he took in all she said, swelling with it. His thorax grew slick and warm. His abdomen throbbed in synchrony with her voice. His mind was a part of hers and nothing to which a separate self could lay claim.

She ended her directives with those few things that she felt deserved her specific mention. These would be transmitted to the honored among the Carryx unchanged by the bodies and minds of the librarians through which they would pass.

“The enemy ship which failed to destroy itself is of interest,” she said. “Bring the enemy’s attention elsewhere to give the animals the fullest opportunity to examine it, the cost of this is not a concern.”

“Yes,” the regulator-librarian said, and his assent was as deep as a soul. Her words were simple, they were beautiful, and billions of lives changed their shapes within them.

Surur-Tlassen shuddered in ecstasy and in awe.

Twenty

The day Tonner Freis died started out unremarkably.

The woman he woke up next to had been the finance minister for Abbasat and Olan. Now she was training with Bastien Korham to help construct the infrastructure that would, in theory, house a thriving human population for generations to come. She didn’t like Korham much, and Tonner guessed that their present tryst was at least partially a means of cultivating a meaningful connection outside of that project. He didn’t mind. In his experience, sex almost always had a transactional element.

Also, from the way she pretended to be asleep, he expected the relationship was coming to an end. The prospect left him melancholy and relieved in about equal measures. He slid out of bed and pulled on his clothes, pretending to be quiet about it, since that’s what they were doing, skipped the shower, and headed out to his daily rounds.

It was strange, the patterns that got lost when the Carryx scooped them up and the ones that persisted. Anyone would think they’d lost everything when they came here. Their families, their friends, the planet they lived on, the plans and expectations they’d built their lives around. He had. He’d lost all that. And now instead of the most important scientist on Anjiin, he was the most important one in the human moiety. Instead of sharing a bed with his second-lead researcher, he was waking up beside an ambitious infrastructure worker who thought that by letting him use her, she could use him. And who was probably right about that.

Vices, kinks, sins. Humanity had been trying to flay them off their souls since someone came up with the idea of souls, and they’d never managed. Even the Carryx hadn’t been enough of a break to change human nature. Not that the big fuckers had tried enforcing any ethical guidelines. They’d have been fine with humans murdering and eating each other if the projects kept producing useful results.

He stopped at the commissary and made himself a cup of almost-tea, then headed for the local shop. He wanted to get back to the legacy labs, out in the cathedral near the old apartments they’d had when the team first arrived. The most interesting protein translation work was happening there because he could control it better with fewer people around. But he wanted to check in on the babies before he left.

The lamb sacks had been transferred as the fetuses developed. The hundred and seven that remained hung in rows, looking like bags of chicken broth, each one with a tiny, half-baked monkey a little larger than his two balled fists floating in the soup. The maternal blood analog was standard stuff, but it was milk white, so the placental mats all looked weirdly pale. The pseudoamniotic fluid was yellowish and dark, but not cloudy. Tonner walked along the rows, checking the reports. He’d gotten them along this far. It was still weeks before they’d be capable of gas exchange, and protocol for animals gestated artificially was to let them cook a little longer than a mother’s body would have let them anyway. A ten- or eleven-month baby just had a little bit of an edge over the usual spat-out-at-forty-weeks kids, and there wasn’t a mother’s health to balance against. It wasn’t like a lamb sack was going to get osteoporosis or dislocate its pubic symphysis.

He stopped at sack thirty-four and peered in at the little not-quite-human floating there. It was moving its legs. She. She was moving her legs, not kicking, but stretching out like she was trying to find something to push against. Her eyes had formed—little darknesses under lids too thin to stop the light. Her brain was too disorganized and protean for any rational person to expect conscious thought from it, but he let himself pretend that maybe she was aware of his shadow looming out there on the other side of the sack. He tapped the skin of the lamb sack very gently with the tip of his index finger.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “It’s me. Daddy.”

The fetus pressed her lips together like she was trying to shit, and he grinned. It was against the guidelines he himself had written to check parentage on the babies, but the Carryx hadn’t been able to get rid of hypocrisy either. When the Carryx had taken the captives from Anjiin, their Sinen managers had gotten tissue samples from each of them as a way of keeping track of who was who. Even when the tissue was gone, the genetic sequences were still recorded, and spinning up fresh chromosomes was third-year practicum work. He could do it in his sleep. Dafyd Alkhor might be the little king of the human moiety, but Tonner was the father of Else’s only child.

Brun’s voice interrupted him. “Hey, boss. Everything all right?”

Tonner stepped back from sack thirty-four with a little shock of embarrassment. Brun was walking toward him, all lanky arms and legs and wide honest smile. “Fine,” Tonner said. “Just checking on the next generation.”

“You’re not the only one,” Brun said, falling into step beside him. “Everybody wants to come take a peek. People are starting to get excited.”

“About what?”

Brun frowned, unsure whether it was a joke. “Having babies. Everyone loves babies. They’re like little poopy bundles of hope.”

“Well, we have between now and decanting day to make sure there’s enough formula to keep them all filling their diapers.”

“Nah, that’s on Korham now,” Brun said. “We gave him the specs. Making it happen is a physical plant problem. The biochem is all established stuff. We’ve been feeding kids forever.”

Tonner grunted in reply. Brun didn’t take the hint. “Are there any reports you need before the meeting?”

“What meeting?”

The frown came back. Tonner was starting to feel annoyed by it. “Your update meeting with Alkhor. That’s today.”

“That got put off until he gets back from his extended picnic with Jellit Kaul.”

“They got back three days ago.”

Tonner’s footsteps slowed. “Really?” he said, but he was already restructuring his day. He’d swing by the legacy labs in case there was updated assay run data, but he probably wouldn’t be able to set up anything in response until tomorrow. It was a pain in the ass. “All right, fine. I’ll go justify our budget.”

When they’d returned, Dafyd had a bench and a desk brought into his room. They hadn’t been for him. The connection that Jellit—the spy, the swarm, he still didn’t know how to think about it—had made when they’d found the archive was still there. The fields of information being traded all around them were invisible and intangible to Dafyd, but the spy could see them. Navigate them. For hours at a time, it could move through an abstract space that was the Carryx archive. But to do it meant subtle alterations to Jellit’s body—a darkening of the eyes, a change to the texture of the man’s skin. Dafyd didn’t know what was being adjusted or rearranged to let the swarm become its own node in the vast alien network, but it would have been hard to explain away. And the spy’s distraction, its gaze shifting, its hands moving like a dog chasing rabbits in its sleep, would at the very least look weird.

Better that it was done in private, where the Rak-hund lurking outside the door kept casual interruptions away. And where Dafyd would be there when the secret research turned up something important.

Explaining it to the visualization group had been trivial. Dafyd told them that Jellit was doing other work for him. No one questioned what it was or how long Jellit would be away. That utter, immediate acceptance as much as anything reminded Dafyd that the image he had of himself—harried, overwhelmed, trying desperately to keep the human captives safe and supplied—wasn’t the only picture of him that existed. To other people, he was the man who made the rules. Who told them how things were and how they were going to be, and then that was what had to happen.

That those two versions of himself existed at the same time—that they were both true and both false—left him deeply uncomfortable.

“It goes back…” Jellit said, then seemed to forget he’d been speaking. His skin was taut and shining in a way that reminded Dafyd of the swelling after an injury. Jellit took a long, shuddering breath the way he did sometimes now. “There’s another bank in here. Every time I think I’m at bedrock, it opens up and there’s more.”

“Are you all right?” Dafyd asked from his perch on the side of the bed. “You need food? Water?”

“Probably,” Jellit said. “I’m burning through a lot of energy doing this. Can you… bring me a meal?”

“I’ll bring something back after my meeting, sure.”

“Thank you,” Jellit said with the same inflection Else would have used. “There was a battle ten thousand years ago. There were three hundred planets involved, and it went on for hundreds of years. A single battle, hundreds of years. I think. I mean, it’s like trying to find the surface of something when you’re looking at atoms. There are atoms of air and then there are atoms of concrete or wood or something, but the clear line between isn’t so clear when you get small enough. It’s like that, but for violence. It’s all war. All the way back. Everywhere.” Jellit grunted and shook his head. His eyes were on something that wasn’t in the room. “There’s so much of it.”

Dafyd smiled before he realized he was smiling. “You keep saying that.”

“I keep realizing it,” the spy said.

The structure of the archive was simple, and it was overwhelming. If every world, every ship, every colony and deep holding and void station that the Carryx controlled had been the limbs of a single body, the Carryx themselves would have been the Great Beast’s flesh. And like the cells of other bodies, the Carryx were differentiated according to their function—soldier and gardener and manufacturer and cleaner and builder taking the place of osteocytes and chondrocytes and keratinocytes and muscle. Running through the complex, diffuse, unthinkably vast body of the empire were the librarians, each tasked with its bit of Carryx flesh like neurons.

Information flowed into the world-palace constantly, pouring in through ships or automated drones that traveled through asymmetric space to avoid the hard limit of light speed. Any given hour bombarded the world-palace with a million reports from tens of thousands of worlds—production numbers, census data, battle analyses, surveys and inspections and audits. As they reached the world-palace, the constant white noise of information was given shape. Each message reached a librarian on the planet who formed a report on whatever realm they oversaw. The reports were given to higher-level librarians who made these into versions of their realms with greater reach and lower resolution, and so on up the chain—each level encompassing more of the Carryx civilization in less detail—until it reached the Sovran.

Then the whole process reversed. The Sovran issued directives that passed back down through the nerves, each librarian taking the intent from the one above it and interpreting it with the more detailed knowledge that it possessed into orders to its own underlings, who would implement them by filling in the gaps with their own localized knowledge and judgment.

And at every step, the reports and orders were preserved. Every day, from every librarian in the empire, reaching back through millennia. The secret to unmaking the Carryx might be in there with step-by-step directions, and it would still take Dafyd and the spy a million lifetimes to find.

“I have to go now,” Dafyd said.

Jellit’s eyes refocused on him again. “Yes,” he said, but with a vagueness that meant he was only half aware. “They use something called void tendrils to spy on planets they haven’t been to yet. There’s a whole division of Carryx that just tend to them. I think they’re almost alive. The void tendrils, I mean. They talk about them like they’re adaptable in a way that…” Jellit’s attention drifted back away.

Dafyd rose from the bed, pulled on his usual shoes, and left. The Rak-hund, waiting outside the door for him like a loyal dog, followed after him. The clicking of its knife-feet against the floor still made Dafyd’s flesh crawl.

“Is this the most recent assay?” Tonner asked, holding up a sheaf of handwritten paper. Brun looked at him blankly. It was infuriating. “The grass project? The thing we do here? Is this the most recent assay, or is there a newer one?”

Brun’s ridiculous larynx bobbed as the man swallowed. And then, “Let me go check.”

“That would be just fantastic,” Tonner snapped. “Thank you.”

He dropped the papers on his desk and started pacing the length of the lab room. His jaw ached and there was a little buzz of blood rushing in his ear that he got sometimes when he was clenching his teeth. The three research assistants became suddenly very interested in the static centrifuge and the electrophoretic slate. Anything to avoid eye contact with the boss when he was pissed.

The truth was, Tonner knew the assay results were old. He recognized the production curve and values, remembered how he’d interpreted them at the time, and the changes he’d made in response. He knew there had been another run since that one. If he’d been paying more attention to whether Alkhor had come back from his fieldwork, he’d have had them ready and a couple pages about next steps besides. There wouldn’t be this last-minute half-assed scramble.

Now either Brun pulled the new run data out of his ass, or Tonner was stuck with two unacceptable alternatives. He could make the report with the old data, and it would seem like he’d made less progress than he actually had. Or he could give the overview of the new run—he knew what the results were in broad strokes after all—and admit that the specific data had been misfiled.

If it had been anyone but Alkhor, he could have lived with that. But it wasn’t, and he couldn’t. It was petty and it was small and it was just the way it was. Tonner already resented that he answered to Alkhor. Looking incompetent while he did it was more than he could stand.

So maybe it was time to bring out the other thing.

“Brun? Brun!”

The tall, thin man popped out from around a corner. His eyes were wide and anxious.

“When you find the run data, put it on my desk. I’m going to the legacy labs. If I can’t impress them with your nonexistent competence, I’ll distract them with a clever side project.”

The late morning light spilled across the garden and made the single tree almost beautiful. Uuya Tomos sat on a chair, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. It made her look like a bricklayer taking a break. Her grin was equal parts satisfaction and amusement. Dafyd, standing apart from her with his arms out in front of him, felt ridiculous.

“Yes,” Ver Cannedan said. The choreographer was standing beside him, his own arms palms out like they were both surrendering to the older woman. “To us, this pose means Look, I’m unarmed. I’m not a threat. That’s because this isn’t how we fight. But it mimics Carryx fighting arms. Now slowly raise your arms, and pay attention to your shoulders. There’s going to be a point where the joint shifts a little. Right there. Did you feel that?”

“I did.”

“That little shift looks like what Carryx fighting arms do when they’re cocked and about to attack. It isn’t, but it looks like it. You see? I watched three fights between Carryx, and it’s there every time. That little shift will absolutely tell them it’s violence time. But our shoulders can do something theirs can’t. Put your arms down. Shake them out. Loosen up. Good. Now pull your shoulders forward, kind of like you’re hunching, but keep your head up. Imagine you have little kittens on each shoulder and you want them to look right at each other. Sink your chest back. Good. Elbows down and close in, so they’re just touching the top of your belly. And now, all of a sudden, your arms don’t look like fighting arms anymore. They look like those skinny little feeding arms.”

“This is uncomfortable,” Dafyd said.

“Stretch more,” the choreographer said. “You take shitty care of your body, it takes shitty care of you.”

“The point Ver’s making,” Uuya Tomos said, “is they don’t have their feeding arms out when they fight. They tuck them away. So if you’re in feeding arm position, you’re de-escalating.”

Across the garden, two Soft Lothark guards were watching him with what felt like amusement. That had to be his own projection of the awkwardness he felt, but Dafyd dropped the pose anyway. “That’s interesting. How did you see so many fights?”

“These fuckers fight all the time,” Ver said. “But they’re fast. You could almost miss it. There’s no chest bumping or shoving the way we do. They don’t have to work themselves up to it. It just happens all at once. And then the loser submits, and it’s like nothing happened. I get the sense that they never actually fight each other to the death. Just submission.”

“That’s… that’s really interesting,” Dafyd said.

“And it brings up the other thing,” Ver said. “I got one of the Emberi of Silos talking. Do you know them? Crab-shaped things with ten legs. There are also Emberi of Umpelt that aren’t the same thing at all. That’s beside the point. The Emberi of Silos have been doing a very similar study for a very long time. The one I talked to pointed out that almost all the lower-rank Carryx have deformations on their arms and legs.”

“Deformations?”

“Scars, missing bits, old breaks,” Ver said. “The way that Carryx aggression displays end is they break one of the other fellow’s arms. Definitive finish to the whole thing. If it doesn’t happen during the fight, the loser actually allows it after submitting. Which is why they tuck their feeding arms away, you see? They’re the most breakable.”

Uuya Tomos cleared her throat. “Also why they killed an eighth of us on Anjiin instead of a third or a tenth or something. Eight limbs, one broken.”

“I still think that’s an assumption,” Ver said, and Uuya Tomos shrugged. “But the point is that when the Emberi of Silos started wearing armbands, and especially ones that were about the color and shape of Carryx scar tissue, the Carryx started treating them better.”

Dafyd nodded slowly. In the distance, three pink lights flared and rose toward the gridwork sky. “Thank you,” he said to the choreographer. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

“I will continue the effort,” Ver said with a sharp nod. Dafyd sat on the bench under the tree and watched until Ver passed the archway and the Rak-hund and moved into the shadows of the world-city.

“See?” Uuya said. “He just needed a job that made him feel important again.”

“You were right,” Dafyd said. “Setting him loose was a good idea.”

“I’m always right. You’ll get used to it,” she said.

“A terrible burden, always being right.”

Uuya chuckled and shifted her weight in the chair. “Movement study was the obvious next move. Minds are something that bodies do. They’re not just connected, they’re different ways of looking at the same damn thing.”

“I said you were right.”

“I’m just rubbing it in a little. Give a woman her little pleasures. There’s no wine on this planet, so smugness is the only vice I’ve got left.”

“If I get Tonner to synthesize wine, will you be nicer to me?”

“Only when I’m drunk. So. Yes.”

In the distance, one of the three pink lights veered off. Heading, Dafyd now knew, in the general direction of one of the archive’s physical nodes. His understanding of the universe and his place in it was growing again, and the relief was the first sign he’d had of how much his stagnation and overwhelm had bothered him before.

“You’re working with Jellit Kaul again,” Uuya said.

“I’m working with every tool I’ve got. How are you progressing with the curriculum for the nursery.”

“I’ll have it done before the poor little bastards need it.”

“Stay focused,” Dafyd said. “It’s coming sooner than you think.”

In the archway, Tonner Freis appeared with a handful of papers in his hand. As he stepped around the Rak-hund, giving it an almost theatrically wide berth, Uuya Tomos hoisted herself to her feet. “All the tools,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Dafyd watched her leave and Tonner approach. He didn’t notice the Soft Lothark guards attending to their half-mind, and even if he had, it might not have changed anything that happened.

Alkhor was sitting under his single, weedy tree like some kind of half-baked religious figure. The writer woman, Tomos, was limping away from the end of her meeting with the boss just as Tonner walked in toward his. They met with the archway—and the Rak-hund—maybe ten steps behind Tonner.

“All well, Professor Freis?” Uuya Tomos asked.

“I’m putting off real work so I can justify myself to the Carryx’s favorite pet and his knife-legged centipede-lion,” Tonner said. “So sure. Everything’s lovely.”

“The burdens we bear,” the woman said with a tangibly false sympathy, and passed him by. Two Soft Lothark guards were loitering not far from Alkhor, all long, lanky limbs and squat, furred bodies. That was good luck. Hopefully, they wouldn’t wander off before he got to that part of the report. If they started to go, he’d maybe have to break in with the results of his side project a little early. It was all about presentation.

Alkhor was gazing off at the open sky. Tonner took the seat that Tomos had abandoned, then waited. His former research assistant looked… Well, frankly, he looked like shit. There were dark smudges under his eyes, and his mouth was set like he’d just tasted something bad. His skin had a little ash to it that it hadn’t had before. To judge from appearances, Alkhor wasn’t enjoying his position at the top of the human moiety. Not that Tonner was particularly surprised. Some people weren’t cut out for leadership.

After a few seconds, Alkhor reached the end of whatever train of thought he’d been riding and turned his attention outward again. “Tonner. Good to see you. I get a little tired from not having anyone from before left.”

He seemed almost plaintive when he said it, and Tonner felt a stab of something like shame. He covered it up by being dismissive. “You’ve got Jellit.”

“Sort of,” Alkhor said. “But anyway. Where do things stand?”

Tonner took out the reports, going over the next-to-most-recent assay as if it were the state of the art. Admitting that there was more recent data, but they just hadn’t been able to find it, would have been more embarrassing. Some part of him kept expecting Alkhor to roll his eyes or sneer at the apparent lack of progress. Instead, he seemed distracted, like there were other, more important things on his mind. That was actually worse. Tonner found himself pushing the importance of fairly minor yield improvements in the new generation of pseudo-grass.

When he got to the end, Alkhor just nodded and then kept sitting there with a vague expression on his face. Tonner moved the other report to the top and handed it over.

“There is another thing,” he said with a little smile. “Just a side project I was working on in my spare time.”

Alkhor glanced at the new papers, then frowned. Tonner could see the man starting to focus for the first time since their meeting had started.

“What…” Alkhor said, then stopped and leafed through the next pages. “What am I looking at here?”

Tonner stretched. Now that he had Alkhor’s attention, he could withhold the punchline a little. With as long as Dafyd had made him sweat, it was only payback.

“So we’ve been talking about convergence, right? Organisms under the same environmental pressures stumbling into very similar solutions, even if the substrate tools they’re using are wildly different. Back on Anjiin, you could barely tell if a fish was DNA- or QRP-based by looking at it. Arborization made akkeh and trees look mostly the same. Anything that wanted to get access to light was using the few best strategies. Sooner or later, everyone winds up getting something that kind of looks the same, right?”

“Right,” Dafyd said, and there was a hint of annoyance in his voice. Which, fair enough. Tonner was talking down to him a little. Didn’t mean he was going to stop.

“So here we are in this environment, yeah? You, me. The human moiety. But all the other moieties too. We’re all under the same thumb. We’re all busting our asses to deserve a place with the Carryx. Maybe fuck up the competition the way the Night Drinkers tried. But when you’re in prison, there’s things that you want. Like a way to talk without the boss or the other moieties listening in. And there are only so many good strategies for that.”

“These look like plasmids,” Dafyd said, holding out the pages. Plasmids were the little circles of DNA that bacteria swapped like trading cards. It was actually a pretty good metaphor.

“They do look like that. But they’re large-scale. Brun pointed out that our friends”—Tonner nodded toward the Soft Lothark guards—“nibble each other hello. He thought it was vestigial grooming, but Jellit talked about how they eat their dead too. Well, I started looking into it, and I found these. Tiny little information-dense nubblies that they pass back and forth like notes in study hall. Can’t be overheard. Hard to intercept. Decoding the message requires being a Lothark. Our buddies here have a whole second channel of communication that—”

“Tonner!”

The world made a thumping sound, deep and low and intimate, and Tonner was on his hands and knees without knowing how he’d gotten there. There was pain, but it was so intense he couldn’t find where in his body it belonged. It was just pain. He tried to stand up, but the two Soft Lothark guards were there. When had they come over?

Tonner turned to look at Dafyd. Something like Hey, get your toy soldiers in line was trying to form in his mind, but he couldn’t get the words quite right. One of the pair kicked him in the ribs, and it didn’t seem to hurt, but something about it was wrong. Like maybe his rib cage was softer than it should have been. And he was on the ground again.

He put a hand on the ground to push himself back up, and there was blood on it.

Shit, he thought. I could really get hurt if these fuckers aren’t careful.

He looked up to see one bringing its foot down. The first blow pushed him back down. The second one was on the back of his neck. It made a wet crunching sound that seemed louder because all the other noise in the world had faded out. And then the world faded out too.

Dafyd saw the life go out of Tonner’s eyes. The change was subtle, small, and unmistakable. A moment before, this had been his friend and his rival. A man he’d admired and betrayed. Now, it was his corpse.

The Soft Lothark guards kicked the dead man twice more, then shifted to look at Dafyd. Their eyes were small and black, and if there was any emotion in them, Dafyd couldn’t make it out.

“No no no,” Dafyd said, his hands going up and out before him (Look, I’m unarmed, I’m not a threat, Ver Cannedan whispered) and he stepped back. The closest shifted its weight, reached out to grab him—

And flew to the side, carried down by the weight of the Rak-hund. The evil, pale knife legs worked, stabbing into the Soft Lothark’s flesh. Its screams were wild and raw and tearing. Dafyd watched, stunned. The other Soft Lothark jumped in, trying to bend the Rak-hund back off its bleeding companion. The Rak-hund shrieked like a tortured cat, the sound chittered and ripped.

And something in Dafyd’s subconscious spoke without words. He was going to die if he didn’t do something now. Right now. Deep instinct told him to run or to freeze or to ball his fists and jump in. They were all wrong. If he did any of them, he was going to die.

The Rak-hund convulsed, broke free, and brought half a dozen pale knives down into and through the fallen guard. Dafyd pulled up the floating images that the Sinen had schooled him in. The logic of Carryx grammar slid away from him like a living thing trying to evade him. Like it would die with him if he caught it. He knew the symbols for Soft Lothark from when they’d been assigned to him. Possession was a soft cone-like diacritical mark…

The dead guard pulsed. Like a balloon someone had blown a breath into.

And then it burst. The pale, whitish pus spattered onto the Rak-hund, and it reared back screaming. It thrashed its body, trying to wipe the caustic splatter off its carapace, but the one remaining guard was straddling it now, pulling its head backward. The stink of the dead made Dafyd’s eyes water, but none of the poison was on his skin. Secret. He didn’t know how to say secret in the Carryx language. The closest he had was an enclosing volume in yellow that indicated privacy.

The Rak-hund’s spine snapped like a gunshot. It went limp, falling to the stone paving of the garden with a sound like someone had dropped an armful of kindling. The remaining Soft Lothark sighed and turned to Dafyd.

And the sentence glowing before him, drafted and ready to send to Ekur-Tkalal and from it to its superior and up and up to the Sovran. Soft Lothark keep private reports sent as food. It was almost nonsense. It might be enough to make the Carryx investigate. Dafyd’s hand rested above the control that would impress the report and send it to the archive.

The Soft Lothark looked from the symbols to Dafyd’s eyes. It didn’t move forward. The moment stretched out longer than any moment should, but it didn’t pass. If he backed away from the message, he would die. If he sent it, he would die. Dafyd’s whole life existed in the moment of uncertainty.

The voice that broke everything was Llian Andermus, arrived for her meeting. What the fuck is going on? Dafyd kept his eyes on the Soft Lothark. The translation half-mind was still around its neck.

“Stay back. There’s poison. It’s not safe,” Dafyd said. He had to be careful now. He had to pick his words carefully. “There was a mistake. There was a misunderstanding.”

The Soft Lothark shifted its gaze from him to Andermus and back. Its long-fingered hands balled into fists and relaxed again.

Dafyd went on. “Tonner was giving his report, and I made him angry. He started yelling at me. The Rak-hund thought it was an attack, and it went for Tonner to protect me. The Soft Lothark tried to stop it. They tried to save Tonner. Do you understand?”

Andermus was a ghost in his peripheral vision. He didn’t look at her. “This is a mess,” she said. “We have to get medical for Freis. There may be—”

“There isn’t. Tonner is dead,” Dafyd said. “But it was a misunderstanding. No one is at fault. We just need to understand each other better. Does that make sense?”

There was a pause as long as lifetimes. The Soft Lothark smacked its wide, thin lips and coughed. The half-mind said: “We will understand each other better.”

Dafyd felt sick. He felt frozen, unable to do even the simplest thing. Unable to move his wrist and erase the glowing symbols of the report before it could send.

And then he erased it. And he stepped back. The Soft Lothark shifted its weight from one foot to another, craning its neck like it was looking for someone. It knelt and began eating its fallen dead.

Andermus moved away from it and closed her eyes. Her body convulsed as though she were gagging. Her face was suddenly covered with sweat.

Dafyd walked to her, taking her by the elbow and turning back toward the archway. The loose sheets of Tonner’s last reports shifted and swirled like autumn leaves. His body lay on the garden stones almost like he was only asleep.

“When it’s finished, we’ll need all this cleaned,” Dafyd said. It wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was all he could manage.

Andermus’s expression was grim, but her eyes were open again. She seemed calm now, businesslike. Focused. “I’ll see to it,” she said, and ran one hand across her face to wipe away the sweat. After, there was no sign she’d been disturbed at all by the things she’d just witnessed. He wondered what she had seen and experienced before they came here that this was her reaction.

Dafyd walked away like his body was a puppet that he was operating from a distance. One foot reliably in front of the other. There was something he should be thinking about. Something that had just changed profoundly (Yes, Tonner died) but he couldn’t quite remember what it was. Still, he was calm. He wasn’t shouting or screaming. He wasn’t shaking. From the outside, he probably seemed perfectly normal. He made his way back to his private room. He opened the door.

“This isn’t their original homeworld,” Jellit said. “They came here six… maybe seven thousand years ago. It’s the center of everything now, but the place they first evolved was—”

Jellit turned to look at him.

“Dafyd. What happened?”

“Tonner is dead,” Dafyd said. And then, like the words had been caught in a queue and re-sent, “Tonner is dead. Tonner is dead. Tonner… Um.”

What happened? was the next question, and then he would say He found a secret that the Soft Lothark are hiding, and when they heard him talking about it, they killed him. But I was able to tell them I wouldn’t reveal it. So I’m alive.

All Jellit needed to do was say What happened?

“Are you all right?”

“I am,” he lied. “Yes, I’m all right.”

Jellit stood and walked toward him. The man’s eyes were wide and frightened. The tightness that came with the spy’s efforts to reach the archive was gone. Whatever it was—Jellit, the spy, Else—it was fully in the room with him now. There was only the two of them.

“Shit,” Dafyd said. “I forgot to bring you food.” And then he remembered the sight of Andermus fighting back her gag reflex and his own stomach began to empty itself all over the front of his shirt. Oh, I’m throwing up, that’s funny. The thought felt vague, distant, disconnected from the physical reality of the act.

Jellit helped him to the toilet. The noise inside Dafyd’s head was a soundless roar, like a wind tunnel or a waterfall. It washed away thought and what it left behind was distress without time, without ending, just misery and duration and the spasming of a body wracked by too much. Just too much.

When his stomach was empty, he heaved for a while. The waves of pain and effort started to come more slowly. Jellit was humming to him, petting his hair like he was a dog or a child. For half an hour, maybe, they sat on the floor. Dafyd’s arms rested on the toilet. Jellit sat with their legs almost entwined. The roar didn’t go quiet, but it did grow softer.

“Thank you,” Dafyd said.

“It’s all right,” Jellit murmured so gently Dafyd could almost believe it was Else. “Come on. You’ll want to brush your teeth. And that shirt is finished.”

Like a tired child, Dafyd pulled off the vomit-flecked tunic, went to his sink, and rinsed his mouth. The water tasted cleaner than usual. Jellit led him to the bed, laid him down, pulled the blanket over him, and sat at his side.

“Andermus saw the body but she’s tough. I think I can count on her.”

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t there to watch them kick Tonner to death.”

“I’m sorry that you were,” the spy said.

“It was… I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to. You can just be here right now. You don’t need to rise to any occasions.”

“Someone has to take over for Tonner. I have to make sure that Ekur-Tkalal hears my version of the story. I have to talk to the guard…”

“And you will. But later.”

Dafyd’s mind grabbed the word like it was permission. “Later,” he said, and closed his eyes. He felt Jellit’s hand on his forehead like the man was checking for a fever. For a moment, the two of them were still. The madness and terror of the universe retreated, not banished but pushed back for a moment by the magic of Later. Dafyd shifted, rolled to his side, curling in on himself. Exhaustion pinned him. Shock, he realized. He was moving through shock. Minds are something that bodies do. They’re not just connected, they’re different ways of looking at the same damn thing. Who had told him that? It seemed like something he should know, but he couldn’t remember…

The spy shifted. The angle of the mattress changed, and then the other body was against Dafyd’s back. The spy’s arm moved over Dafyd’s the way Else had done sometimes, and its forehead pressed gently against the back of Dafyd’s neck. It had been so long since anyone had touched him. Had held him. Had offered him comfort or consolation. Since any of them had looked at him and seen something besides the voice of the Carryx in human form.

“It’s all right,” Jellit whispered. The spy whispered. “Dafyd, it’s all right. You’ve done so much. You’ve carried so much. It’s all right.”

Then it kissed him on the nape of his neck, Dafyd felt the stirring of Jellit’s erection against his thigh, and just like that the moment was over. Dafyd was a little surprised by his own regret.

“You need to go,” he said.

Jellit pulled back, propped himself on one elbow. Dafyd rolled onto his back. Jellit’s expression was embarrassed. Dafyd shook his head, no. Not angry, just no.

“I’m sorry,” the spy said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s fine. But you need to leave now. I need to be alone.”

Jellit stood, looked around the room like there might be something there he’d forgotten. Like the moment that had passed might still be there, lying half broken on the floor. “That was crossing a line. I misunderstood what was happening.”

“I understand,” Dafyd said. “It’s been a bad day. We can start working again tomorrow. Go get some food.”

Jellit left and closed the door gently behind him. Dafyd lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. There were cool patches at the corners of his eyes. Tears that had half dried. He rubbed them away with his palm.

He was in a place of calm that felt like dissociation. If he thought about it, he was aware of the tumult and grief, the longing for comfort, the loneliness, the horror. When he looked inside his heart, it was a shitshow. He wasn’t all right, and he didn’t know what would come of not being all right. But he also found he could choose not to think about it. The ongoing damage remained, but it faded from his awareness.

Good enough.

He got up, waited for a moment to see whether the nausea was coming back, then showered, toweled off, put on a fresh tunic. There was work to do.

Andermus had taken control of the garden like it was a battlefield, and she was ready to die defending it. Tonner’s body was gone apart from a dark spattering of drying blood. The Rak-hund was gone. The dead Soft Lothark was gone, but Dafyd could still smell the faint acid of its death. Humans crowded the archway like a flock of sheep with Andermus nipping them in place.

“Sir,” she said when she saw him.

“Is the guard here?” he asked. And when she nodded, “Bring it to me.”

Dafyd sat under his tree. The sky was starting to shift into evening. The wide grid that stood between him and the stars like the iron bars of a prison caught the falling light. It was almost beautiful. He pulled up the symbols of the Carryx language, wrote a short report about the death of Tonner Freis and Dafyd’s plan to replace him (Tonner was dead but put that aside), and once the report was sent, composed a simple line. Three symbols, floating in space, taking their meaning by their shape, their color, their spatial relationship to each other. Humans and Soft Lothark can help each other.

The Soft Lothark came, and five more of its kind were with it. Andermus only let one through. Dafyd thought it was the one that had been there before, but he couldn’t be certain. The guard looked at him, looked at the symbols. Neither of them spoke. The translation half-mind might be the ear of the Carryx.

It sat across from him, collapsing down like its legs had given out. It seemed confused, distressed. It put its hand to its wide mouth, gnawing at its own skin for almost a minute before shifting the symbols, adding an affirmative modifier and then changing the shade and shape of the symbol for Lothark.

Humans and the Deep Lothark can help each other.

Twenty-One

The black soldier led them, then came Jessyn and Garral, who shifted their places now and then depending on the terrain, and Omco at the rear. Corvall’s steps were so sure, Jessyn could almost forget that one of his legs was nothing more than rebar and hope. The day was hot, and the air had a thickness to it that made her think of the hours before a storm. Their trail led south and west, far outside the evacuation line that Third Gardener had set for them, but not so far that Jessyn lost sight of the dead city. The killed city. The home that all the children had lost. She could use it to find her way back.

The path through the underbrush didn’t look like a human artifact. In some places, it reminded Jessyn of a deer trail. In others it widened to something that would have let two transports drive abreast. Never paved, and never straight. She let herself speculate about what had made it. About two hours into the walk, Garral touched her arm and asked, “What are you going to tell them?”

“My story is going to be that you and I were investigating signs of habitation there when we were attacked. We left the notebooks and packs behind because we were running for our lives, and not so that they couldn’t track where I went after the cave.”

“Yeah, all right. I didn’t want you to see where I went would raise some questions.”

“Wouldn’t it? Anyway, you got killed, and I got away. Then if Third Gardener makes a trip out, the footprints and poop from the kids will be part of what we were investigating, not signs we were collaborating with the enemy.”

“Nice. That tracks,” Garral said, hesitated like maybe there was something more to say, then fell back into the rhythm of the trek. Then a few minutes later, “How did you learn to do this?”

“How to walk?”

“How to think through the implications of everything. I mean, no offense. I’m an academic at heart too, but you look at the situation like this, and you see why I have to stay behind. You put together solid lies. You think tactically.”

“I was an amateur war leader back at the world-palace. I killed some fellow prisoners,” she said.

“Are you joking?”

“Nope,” she said, stepping carefully on an unstable rock. “But they had it coming.”

Was there a little pride in her when she said it? Jessyn had been brought up with all the same hatred of violence that any civil parents tried to give their children. Don’t fight in the schoolyard. Don’t hit. Don’t bite. Use words to express your anger. She hadn’t been an athlete, hadn’t studied fighting arts. Her body and mind had been sources of shame and vulnerability, not instruments of power. She hadn’t been bloodthirsty. So why, when she thought back on the death of the Night Drinkers or fantasized about the slaughter of the Carryx, did she find pleasure there?

Somewhere between the woman she’d been and the one she’d become, the ethos of killing her enemies had gotten very comfortable. The remnant of her personality that found that unnerving was smaller than she would have thought.

Corvall held up his good hand, signaling them to stop. For a long moment, the black helmet scanned back and forth across the landscape. Trees, brush, a few birds. The deep sky above them. The red-brown soil peeking out where the ground cover didn’t quite do its job. Corvall drew his gun, aimed at a clump of bushes farther down the trail, and fired twice. Something hidden in the brush yelped and fled.

Corvall holstered the weapon. They marched.

She didn’t know what she’d expected the downed ship to look like—something sleek and black and shaped like a raptor maybe—but the wreckage they found wasn’t anything like that. The machine that had crumpled itself against the side of a stony hill looked more like a performance stage than a ship. A central metal beam as wide as a dinner table had buckled in the crash. When it had been intact, the platform would have had eight pods at its edge. Three were left. Omco and Corvall spoke to each other, and Omco gestured for her and Garral to step back from the crash. Corvall made his way to the ship alone, opening each of the three pods in turn.

The first two were empty, though the soldier took something small from each of them. The last one had something in it the size of a human, but its blackness was different from Corvall’s. It was the gray-black of ash and soot. Corvall paused for a moment, his head bowed, and he closed the pod again. His posture spoke of grief so clearly that Jessyn didn’t need a translation.

The soldier said something, and Omco gestured them forward. The four stood together like they were about to pray for the dead, but instead of a candle, Corvall held out a black ceramic cylinder the size of a fist. Its cap had indentations around the edge to make it easier to turn. When Corvall put it in Jessyn’s hand, it was surprisingly heavy.

Corvall said something to Omco, who listened carefully for almost a minute. Omco and Garral’s conversation was longer, with more back and forth, negotiating and clarifying until the two men were nodding at each other like salesmen at the end of working out a deal.

“All right,” Garral said, turning to her.

“You know I have literally no faith that what you’re about to tell me is accurate, right? Those kids’ games where each person whispers something into the next player’s ear, and everyone laughs at how garbled it gets? That’s the game we’re playing right now.”

“If there were a better way, I’d be for it,” Garral said. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s really all that complicated. Not your part, anyway. This is the thing that will disable the ships and weapons. It’s easy to use. You just open it. It’s packed with a swarm of very, very small machines that are pre-programmed to do what needs to be done. Corvall says that if you open the container as soon as the Carryx start gearing up for a fight, that’ll be all you need to do.”

“Crack it open and stand back,” Jessyn said. “That doesn’t sound too hard.”

“It’ll work better if you’re close to the ships. Or inside one of them. The only trick is going to be not having anyone find it. If you get caught, the whole thing goes to hell, and they’re probably going to be suspicious of you when you first get back. Corvall’s thought was to put it at your research site before you go back and then retrieve it later, when they aren’t on high alert.”

“How much later have I got to work with?”

“A while. After the beacon fires off, it could take some time before the rescue team shows up. The message has a long way to go, and it’ll take the good guys some effort to get here. He’s going to wait here until just before sundown. It’ll give us time to get to the backup camp and for you… Fuck.”

“Garral?”

“I don’t like this. I don’t like you going back alone. I don’t like having a plan with zero tolerance for failure. For this to work, a hundred things need to go right, and failing takes one thing going wrong.”

Jessyn put the cylinder in her pocket. It was heavy enough to pull at the shoulder of her tunic. Omco asked something of Garral, but she didn’t know what and Garral didn’t answer him.

“Look on the bright side,” Jessyn said. “Maybe it’ll go wrong and we’ll all die. Then it won’t be our problem anymore.”

“How can you joke about it?”

How can you not? Campar said in her mind. Instead she said, “He’s going to wait until just before sundown.”

Garral looked down, like he was speaking to the ground they were standing on instead of to her. “When they come for him, he’ll lead them away from the kids. From me and Manta and Omco.”

“Anything else?”

The wind muttered over the hill. The sky was growing hazy. The storm maybe on its way after all.

“No,” Garral said. “That’s it.”

Jessyn turned her attention away from Garral. The soldier was facing her. She couldn’t see his features beneath the mask, but she assumed he was judging her and how likely it was that he could trust her to make his death worthwhile. On impulse, she put out her hand toward his too-thin arm. When he clasped it, it was like being wrapped by living wire.

“I won’t fuck this up,” she said.

Corvall said something. Judging from the inflection, he’d understood her intention if not her words. He raised a finger in a gesture that seemed to mean Wait, fumbled for a moment at his leg, and put a small black object into her palm. It was lighter than the cylinder, with a grip that fit comfortably in her fingers.

She put the gun in her pocket, bowed to her fellow soldier, then to Omco the teacher. And then to Garral. She turned toward what she hoped was the right direction and started walking. The city was small and farther away, but in the correct part of the horizon. She’d keep it just to her left. Getting back to the pear orchard was the next problem, and she tried to put all her other concerns aside until she could solve it, but—

“Jessyn!”

When she turned back, Garral Pär was running toward her. His limbs were loose and a little awkward. His hands were in fists until he caught up with her, put one arm around her to cradle her neck and the other at her hip. All her professional life, she’d heard stories about fieldwork flings. People who’d spent weeks or months in the wilds away from any city or town, and found comfort in each other there. She’d been jealous then and a little disgusted. There wasn’t much hygiene in the field. What would it be like to kiss someone who hadn’t bathed in days when you hadn’t either. In practice, it turned out to be… nice.

After, she put a hand to his chest, his heart beating hard under her palm, and gently, gently pushed him away.

“Next life,” she said. “Look me up in our next life.”

“It’s a date.” His voice was thick.

She turned and walked away.

About half an hour after she left the crash site, the wind started picking up and the clouds thickened. Jessyn stepped up her pace. At this rate, she was going to have to guess when they were close to sundown from the depth of the twilight. If it got too dark, it would be harder to find her pear grove. She’d have to pick some other place to hide the weapons. And the closer she got to the ships, the more likely it was she’d run into one of the other researchers or the Carryx overseers while she was still carrying them. On the other hand, a storm would wash away her tracks. Trade-offs. There were always trade-offs.

As she walked, the ruins of the city towers shifting slowly into a more and more familiar silhouette, she imagined herself in front of Third Gardener. The story she told the Sinen overseer was going to have to be convincing, it would have to conform to the evidence that the Carryx would find and the actions that Corvall was about to take.

I found a cave that seemed like it had signs of recent inhabitants, and since Garral was working in the city, I thought I should consult with him.

Did that track? She thought it did. How would she have found the cave, though? Maybe Manta and Omco had left a trail. They’d been foraging the pears, that was good because it was true. If she’d noticed tracks, and followed them.

I was working in the orchard, and I saw signs of someone foraging…

But no, that was bad. Corvall didn’t eat pears the way the others did. If she brought foraging into it, that was evidence that there were other humans to keep looking for. But the cave was going to do that anyway, wasn’t it?

Better to keep it simple. She’d been exploring. She’d called Garral. If they pushed her, she could go shame-faced and admit that they’d been having a tryst. She was sure they wouldn’t be the only two of the human moiety who’d paired off.

The first drops of rain came, hitting the leaves around her like little bullets. The tapping turned to a roar. She wasn’t sure where the sun was anymore, and the ruined city was harder to see. She couldn’t let it get to full dark before she found the orchard, or she’d be stumbling around in the rain all night. Dying of exposure on her way back to the ships would be a stupid way for the plan to fail. And the downpour was harder now. Her tunic soaked up the water. The weight of the weapons pulled uncomfortably at the fabric. She wished there were some lightning so that she could get glimpses of the towers…

And she came around a stand of bushes and into the trees she knew. There were the burned pears. There were the living ones. There was her equipment, exactly where she’d left it when Omco had appeared with his knife. It felt like she’d abandoned it in some other lifetime, but here it all was, still displaying the data from her last run.

She knew the way back now. Getting to the ships was trivial. She looked around the site. The impulse was to hurry—get it done and get out of the rain. But the Carryx might very well come to look, and she had to be sure they wouldn’t find anything. She wished she knew more about Carryx sensory apparatus. If the Rak-hund were also scent hounds…

At the back of the orchard where the fire had been worst, she found a little hollow at the base of a burned-out tree. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t obvious. She could cover it with a rock and a handful of mud, and it would be about as secure as anything she could manage. And the cold was starting to get more than annoying. She didn’t want to try keeping her story straight through hypothermia either. She cleared out the niche with her hands, then took the cylinder and packed it in with two handfuls of fallen leaves and litter. Then the gun…

And the gun.

The next hurdle was being believed. Wouldn’t she be more convincing if she’d been wounded? A victim of a deathless soldier who’d magically gotten away unscathed could raise suspicions.

“All right,” she said. “You can do this. It’s all right.”

The gun was small and black and curved like a seashell. The only obvious functional parts were the mouth of the barrel and the little white button that was the trigger. She gripped it in a tight fist, trying to keep the feeling in her chilled fingers. The wound would need to look genuine. If it just grazed her arm or her leg, that would seem convenient. If it hit her ribs, like the soldier had been aiming for her center of mass…

She flipped the gun around in her grip, her thumb against the trigger button. She lined up the shot so that it would go through her left side, too low to pierce her lung. It was going to hurt, but that was fine. She’d been hurt before.

Jessyn took a deep breath, relaxed, and pressed the trigger before she could lose her nerve. The muzzle flash and the report were a single thing. And then a pain that took her breath away.

Oh, she thought, this was a very bad idea.

Jessyn Kaul crawled. She’d forgotten why she was crawling, only that there was someplace she had to be. Her legs felt like they were very far away from her, and her arms were getting weaker. Her sense of self was growing smaller and smaller. Not even her brain, but just her lips. She was right there, at the point where breath came in and went out, observing the expanse of her body as it suffered.

Help, she cried because she’d been crying it all along. Help me.

Something ahead of her glowed. And then something stepped in front of the glow. Jessyn rolled to her side, knowing as she did that she wasn’t going to have the strength to roll back. The mud and the rain felt comfortable. Being here for the rest of her life wouldn’t be so bad.

A crablike thing shifted in front of her. True People. A True Person of Hannic. She felt a little rush of pleasure at remembering the species. A voice came, the same neutral half-mind voice as always. Are you in distress, thin-fur?

“I’m dying,” she said, and then time did something odd, and she was inside. The pain in her side was like someone had stabbed her with a burning sword. It was so bad, she couldn’t breathe.

The True Person of Hannic had turned into Holom Coombs, the geologist. The one who’d known about the limestone cliffs. He looked panicky. Someone had cut her tunic away and left her bare and exposed. She felt a moment’s outrage and tried to cover her breasts with hands that refused to move.

“She’s awake,” Coombs said. “It worked, she’s awake.”

And then time skipped again. Coombs was gone. She was lying under a blanket on the deck of a room she didn’t recognize. Something was clinging to her abused side like a bandage that made its own heat. A goat-eyed Sinen was looming over her, its pseudotentacles twitching.

“Jessyn Kaul,” the voice of the half-mind said. “You will report now.”

She tried to find words, but she knew some of them were wrong. There was something she was supposed to say and something to keep quiet.

“There was a monster,” she whispered at last. “It was all black. It killed Garral…”

PART FOUR

DOGS AND WOLVES

And so the night came when Ke had learned the ways and hungers and songs of the bird that ate the sky. Knowing all these things, Ke sang new songs in the cool night of Buruq so that the great bird could hear them.

He sang first of the ways that the bird already knew: of the rise and fall of the sun, of the turning of the seasons, of the terror in the raising up of children and the beauty of the fading of the very old. He sang of winter and night giving way to daylight and spring. He sang of the breath of the world. And Ash-Abbé listened.

He sang second of the hungers that the bird already suffered: of the salt of blood that flowed from fallen prey, of the richness of fresh water gulped from the stream, of the longing that all animals feel in their season for the comfort and bodies of others of their kind and the fires that in their slaking bring new life to the worlds. And Ash-Abbé listened.

He sang at last of the new place which he had named: Anjiin that waited across the void. And this song he did not end as the others had, for as he sang it, Ke mounted the great bird’s wide back. When the great bird rose, Ke shaped his song to guide it, and the bird that ate the sky was tethered all unknowing by the power of the boy’s song and it did as it was bid.

—From Myths of Origin: Field Notes and Analysis, Uuya Tomos, editor.

Twenty-Two

I don’t care,” Ghati said, but there was a petulance in the words that made Campar’s heart sing a little. After the days of desolation, annoyance was a blessing.

“Fine,” Campar said. “Stay in bed and miss the party if you want to, but I’m telling you everyone is very excited. I’m still trying to make sense of it all, or I’d just sneak here in the dark and tell you.”

Ghati shifted on his bed. Campar hummed to himself, partly because Ghati had mentioned once that he hated when people did that. It only took a few seconds for him to turn back and shoot Campar an angry scowl.

“What?” Campar said, feigning innocence badly.

“I’m not going out there.”

“You said that. You’re staying in here. Because you don’t want to know what’s happened or what it means or how it might change anything. I understand. Sometimes it’s better to pout quietly in the dark while your lover brings you food and weeps over you.”

“You aren’t my lover,” Ghati said.

“Boyfriend.”

“Occasional sex partner at best.”

Campar spread his arm wide and smiled beatifically. “That’s the first time you’ve called me your partner! I knew you cared.”

Ghati’s pillow hit him in the face and throat. Campar grabbed it, stood up and held it over his head.

“You’re not fucking funny,” Ghati said.

“I’m hilarious. And you’re stinky. You haven’t showered in God knows how long. Come on. We’ll pretty you up and I’ll take you out for dinner. Our usual table and everything.”

“You’re an ass,” Ghati said as Campar pulled him up from the bed. Ghati’s hair was greasy and there were pale patches on his face where old tears had dried and left their salt. There were new tears too, just on the edge of appearing. But they weren’t there yet.

“Come on,” Campar said. “Let’s be alive for a little bit. If we hate it, we can always die later.”

Ghati sighed, but he took his shirt off and let Campar guide him to the shower.

The common room was buzzing when they reached it. A dozen Budon of Luus waddled and muttered to each other, their long necks craning up and to the side like they were trying to see over something. It was as many of the alien things as Campar had ever seen out at once. Six aliens that reminded Campar of rhinoceros beetles with mossy brown fur had come too. Campar hadn’t seen them at all since the journey had begun, but the news of the battle was enough, it seemed, to pull them out of torpor or hibernation or whatever isolation they’d been in. Humanity was out in force too. Not just Rickar Daumatin and the defense security trio, but the radiologist from Abbasat and the two members of the arts commission from Lanasq Republic. Vaudai was still at its display, its body shimmering like oil in a puddle, and the three Soft Lothark at its side didn’t seem to be guarding it so much as listening to it lecture.

“You’re right,” Ghati said. “Whatever this is, someone kicked the hornet’s nest.”

They made their way through the press of bodies to Vaudai. The translation half-mind didn’t recognize their interest until Campar reached out and touched the couch-sized slug thing on its side.

“Why are you touching me?” Vaudai said.

“My friend is just catching up on things,” Campar said. “He’s been ill. And I was hoping you could share your insight?”

“I’ve been sharing my insight with these”—the half-mind stuttered—“noble servants of the Carryx for half my waking cycle.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Interrupt me!” Vaudai said. “Speaking to these is like trying to teach grammar to fossilized excrement. Anything else is better. Which one is your ignorant friend?”

Campar pulled Ghati close.

“The enemy command ships refuse to be captured,” Vaudai said. “This is the first time that a ship of this configuration has been disabled without ending itself to deny the Carryx the chance to examine it. This is a moment of tremendous importance, but these”—the half-mind hiccuped again—“noble servants are just seeing the tactical advantages. With this, we have a chance to understand the new mind of the enemy. How its tactics have adapted. What alliances it has made. This is what we came to do.”

“You sound frustrated,” Ghati said.

“I’m in a stillborn’s milk room talking to badly made furniture instead of going to the command ship,” Vaudai said. “I am painful birthing frustrated.”

Before Campar could answer, Rickar emerged from the press of bodies and took his elbow. “It might be better to leave him be for a moment. He uses more idioms when he’s worked up, and it gets hard to follow. Good to see you, Ghati.”

“Same,” Ghati said.

They made their way to a corner opposite the archway out of the animal quarters. Campar hadn’t realized the room was so loud with the white noise of conversations until he tried to talk and found himself almost shouting.

“What’s the latest?”

“We’re making our way to the part of the solar system with the command ship in it,” Rickar said. “There’s been some debate about whether the enemy left this behind as a trap, and if they did if it’s the kind that goes off when we just approach it or if we have to go onto the thing before we get vaporized.”

“Is there a third option?” Ghati asked acidly. Campar fought back his grin.

“That it is what it looks like,” Rickar said with an eloquent shrug. “And after that, there’s the question of whether we can get to it and strip it for intelligence before the enemy regroup and come back to kill us or destroy the ship.”

“You don’t think they might just chalk it up to experience?” Ghati asked.

“I don’t have any way to judge,” Rickar said. “I can tell you Vaudai’s as worked up as I’ve ever seen it, and it’s supposed to be the expert on these things. So that might be—”

In the same moment, three things happened: Campar saw Ghati’s eyes go wide, the gabble and shriek of voices in the air fell to silence, and a Carryx lumbered through the archway and into the room.

Rickar turned at Campar’s gasp. The Carryx soldier was larger than the librarians Rickar had seen before. It leaned on fighting arms as wide as a man’s body, and it was covered in a pale yellow shell that might have been armor or something that the soldier caste grew or both. The four abdominal legs were thick and muscular, and they didn’t shift or dance the way some other Carryx did. It had only four eyes—as few as Rickar had ever seen on a Carryx face—and its feeding arms were scarred and misshapen. Evidence of a life of violence. Rickar’s heart began to race, but he didn’t move. There was a deep funk that came along with the great beast almost like melting plastic. It smelled like a threat. Four Sinen came in behind it wearing clothing that Rickar had never seen. Uniforms.

The Carryx spoke, its real voice an unnerving trill like birdsong tuned down until it was more a shaking in Rickar’s gut than a sound. The voice that came from the half-mind seemed harder than it usually did. Richer with the promise of violence.

“You will group now by kind.”

All of them stood silent and still for a moment, prey animals who know by instinct that the first one to move will be the first one to die. And then, slowly, the Budon of Luus began to congregate. The furred beetles stood together. Rickar glanced at Campar, then the three of them went over beside the food and water dispensers where the others from the human moiety stood. Danna, who had been a high-level defense consultant on Anjiin, leaned in close to him and whispered, “What’s going on?”

“Your guess beats mine,” Rickar said.

The four Sinen split off, trundling toward the halls of individual cells. Four more Budon emerged, their wide, confused eyes blinking in the light. And two more people—the red-haired man from Abbasat who kept to himself and Emmin—with six more of the beetle-like aliens behind them and a smaller version of Vaudai that Rickar had never seen before. They all clumped together by species.

“Hey, giant slug,” Rickar called. “Any idea what’s going on here?” If Vaudai heard him, it didn’t reply.

One of the Sinen approached the huge yellow-armored Carryx and lay on the deck before it, arms and tentacles splayed. The Carryx said something that wasn’t translated for the human moiety, then shifted its attention to the Budon. The feeding limbs reached out, taking the nearest pair it could reach and guiding each toward a different side of the common room. Within a minute, the Budon of Luus were in two clumps instead of one. The Carryx moved on to the human moiety. Closer, the smell of its body was stronger. When its hand touched Rickar’s shoulder the long fingers that looked thin in the context of the Carryx body were thicker than his thumb and as long as his forearm. It moved him to one side with a controlled power that he couldn’t have resisted if he’d tried.

A moment later, Danna joined him. Then Campar. Then Emmin. The room felt unstable, like the ship was shifting under them, but no one else seemed to be swaying the way he was. Two of the Budon started to walk back toward their rooms, and one of the Soft Lothark herded them back into their place. Rickar’s hands were tingling. His heart was going too fast. He wondered distantly what would happen if he had a heart attack and died. Would they just shift the remaining prisoners around until the numbers were even?

“They aren’t going to kill us,” Emmin said. “They don’t have any reason to kill us. We’re going to be fine.” She didn’t sound like she believed it.

The Carryx soldier shifted, turning its attention to the reclusive beetle-things—the last of the moieties on the ship. Rickar sank down on his haunches. Putting his head lower seemed to keep the ship from swaying as much. Out of nowhere, he was struck by an almost overpowering craving for a cigarette. He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d had one—years, maybe—but he could taste the smoke and feel it in his sinuses. He closed his eyes.

“Oh,” Campar said. “Oh no. No, no.”

Rickar opened his eyes and looked up. Campar stood beside him frozen. His eyes had gone wide, and he had a fist pressed against his sternum. Rickar felt a rush of panic, sure that thinking about a heart attack had somehow brought one on for the big man instead of himself. But then he followed Campar’s gaze.

Ghati was on the far side of the room, standing at the edge of the other half of the human moiety. His hair was still wet from the shower. His hands were at his sides. His expression was the emptiness of shock and loss.

Campar shook his head and said No again, but he wasn’t saying it to himself. He was talking to the universe. He was begging.

Rickar had always thought of himself as a pragmatist, sometimes to the point of fatalism. They were powerless in the face of Carryx authority. The illusions he’d had about living a life shaped by his own choices, of finding comfort in a woman’s bed, of making a future and family, had all been stripped away. The Carryx had taken his world. He’d lost Dennia in the collapse of Ostencour’s rebellion. Hope had failed him too many times for him to lean on it again.

He was watching hope die in Campar’s eyes. He recognized the expression from when he’d worn it. Seeing it on the big man’s face didn’t dispel Rickar’s anxiety, but it changed the flavor.

At the archway, the Carryx soldier had turned to address Vaudai. Whatever Vaudai was saying, it wasn’t being changed into any human language, but the trills and rumbles of Carryx song coming from the half-mind meant it had a great deal to say. The four Sinen had taken positions in the corners of the common room, like teachers watching a class of children. The Soft Lothark were occupied for the moment keeping the two flocks of Budon from trying to merge again.

“Ghati,” Rickar said as he stood, “let me borrow you for a minute, yes?”

Rickar stepped into the open space between the groups, one hand in his pocket, the other motioning Ghati forward. If he’d planned or thought about it, it wouldn’t have been as smooth, as casual. For a moment, he was walking across the quad in Dyan and waving a colleague over to ask an idle question. By the time Ghati noticed him, he’d already covered a quarter of the space. Rickar saw one of the Soft Lothark trotting toward him.

He willed the little man to come forward, to take a few steps into danger. And as if he’d heard, Ghati walked toward him. They met closer to the Sinen than to Campar, but that didn’t matter.

“Owe me one,” Rickar said softly as he took Ghati’s elbow and turned around it as gracefully as a dancer, propelling the other man in Campar’s direction and continuing forward to the gap in the line that he’d left.

“Sorry, sorry,” Rickar said to the Soft Lothark when it reached him. “I’ll stay here. No trouble, no trouble.”

The guard looked from him to Ghati, who had crossed to the other group now. Rickar smiled into its black eyes. A little sense of elation lifted him. “One of us is just as good as another,” he said.

The Soft Lothark put a hand on his chest and made wet, clapping sounds with its too-wide mouth. “You will stay in place,” the half-mind said.

Across the room, Campar had the smaller man in a bear hug that lifted Ghati’s feet off the floor. The big man was weeping with relief.

“I will,” Rickar said. “I’ll stay here.”

Vaudai and the Carryx finished their conversation, and the soldier left, Vaudai creeping after it at a speed Rickar hadn’t known it could manage. The four Sinen moved in, directing the other group to follow them.

“Where are they going?” Dervan asked from somewhere behind him, her voice tight with fear. Emmin and Danna, understanding too late that their little triumvirate had come to an end, looked back at her as the other group started forward. A few at a time, the group disappeared through the archway. Campar looked back and waved just before he vanished from sight. He did it with his left hand, because his right was holding Ghati’s. Rickar waved back, and then the big man was gone.

After that, the Soft Lothark set themselves up at the entrance and discouraged a few Budon from trying to follow where the others had gone. Even with the bodies of all the remaining captives in the common room at the same time, the chamber felt empty. Vaudai’s display was still up, but the slug was gone. The beetle-things avoided conversation and went back to their cells. The red-haired man grabbed a bowl of food and a sack of water almost furtively and vanished as well. Rickar didn’t know what was going on there, and didn’t particularly want to.

Dervan made her way to the crowd at the entrance. Distress gave her voice a shaking timbre. Almost vibrato. “Where did you take them? When are they coming back?”

The shorter of the two Soft Lothark consulted with its companion, then turned to Dervan with more patience and calm than Rickar expected from a jailer. He edged close enough to hear the thing’s reply.

“The assignment of that part of the moieties has changed. They are tasked with exploration. You are the part held in reserve.”

“No,” Dervan said. “I have to help them. I need to be with them. I can explore. I’m good at it.”

Rickar got a sack of water, bit a hole in the corner, and sipped from it as he went back to watch the images on Vaudai’s abandoned display. The disabled command ship was highlighted, and text in an alphabet he didn’t know shifted beside it. When Rickar touched the image of one of the Carryx ships—maybe the one he was on, maybe one of the others—a thin, curving line appeared leading to the edge of the system. To the heliopause, where Carryx ships went before they entered asymmetric space and violated the boundary of light speed. Someone was leaving, and he guessed it was them.

He noticed Dervan coming up to his side, but he pretended not to. She didn’t take the hint.

“What do you know? Your slug friend told you something, didn’t she. That’s why you made Ghati switch places. What did she tell you?”

“Vaudai didn’t tell me shit. I just saw that Ghati and Campar were on different teams and they didn’t like it.” There was a distinction between not believing him and so badly wanting to understand the inexplicable that she chose not to believe him, but it didn’t matter. “Look,” he continued, “strategy and tactics in a galactic war are above our duty grade. We don’t control them. We can’t affect them. The only things we can control are the little ones, so I decided to care about a little thing. That’s it. That’s all.”

“If they don’t come back,” Dervan said, and it sounded both like a threat and utterly impotent. Rickar ignored it. At the food dispenser, a clump of the Budon of Luus started shouting at each other, soft coughing barks that reminded him of dogs running a fence. He still wished he had a cigarette.

“Anyway,” he said, “Campar’s never happy unless he’s taking care of someone.”

Twenty-Three

The swarm sits on the floor of its room, its back against the wall. It tries to focus on the archive, but its memory is broken. It is listening to the deepest reserves of the Carryx civilization: the war with the Meenan of Faus, the Catrian plague that almost killed the empire ten thousand years before, and the changes that the Carryx made to their own bodies to prevent it from ever happening again. The constant pulse of information rising and distilling itself until it reaches the Sovran, and then the pure intention that flows back down, gathering detail and specificity with every step. But the moment keeps intruding: Dafyd weeping on his bed, the swarm lying down, pressing against him, the hunger that touching his body awakes, kissing him.

Kissing him, and feeling him pull away.

Every iteration, the swarm pushes the memory aside, and instead it replays. Every replay is somehow worse than the one before. The swarm’s memory refuses to accept relegation to the past. It insists on the present. It insists on now, on and on again, with an exquisite—almost electric—pain.

The swarm is afraid that something has gone wrong. A Carryx countermeasure that it failed to sense, perhaps. A malfunction in the network of machines that it is.

You’re humiliated, Else says. This is how it feels.

The swarm considers. It has memories of the other three suffering embarrassments. There are moments it recalls when Jellit woke in the small hours of the morning to relive a minor social failure that he committed years before. When Ameer remembered something that likely no one else recalled, and remembered it with pain.

As if summoned by the thought, Jellit says I told you. He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t love you. What happened between you two is messed up on a thousand different levels.

Totally unethical, Ameer agrees, though the voice is faint.

It reaches back to the memories, and they do match for the most part. They also don’t. It isn’t sure what the difference is, but it is profound.

One’s a memory, the other’s an experience. That’s the difference, Else says.

Else and Ameer had both gotten laid before you came along, Jellit says, but when you hooked up with Dafyd, you were a virgin. It’s the same idea.

Don’t be cruel, Else says. Her unreal voice is exhausted. This whole thing is bad enough. None of us gain anything by being shitty.

The swarm stands up. The archive slips away from its awareness, the work it was crafted to perform forgotten for a moment. The three are quiet, so the words aren’t present but only a memory: Else’s voice saying He was in love with me. He thinks it was me. And you killed me. Twice over, you killed me. He’ll hate you for that. He’s going to hate you.

But Else had never died. Only her body.

The swarm walks to the mirror, strips off the tunic and the trousers, and looks again at the body it now inhabits. It tilts its head—Jellit’s head—and the image in the mirror tilts with it.

It knows how to change its flesh in a thousand different ways. It can become a listening device aware of fields of force so finely tuned that it could pick up a whisper in a storm. It can remake the bones and muscles of its borrowed flesh in ways that give it ten times the strength of the original human. It can extrude hairs so fine that it can record the individual ridges of a fingertip from a handshake. The eyes can be tuned to see in spectra no human being has ever seen.

But this change, there is no guide for. This, it has to improvise. The skin and soft tissues are simple. The harder connective ones will be more difficult. It begins reshaping the heavy bones of its pelvis.

The changes hurt.

Brun stroked his chin as if he had a beard. The oversized mechanism of his larynx bobbed in his neck. Dafyd walked beside him. The lamb sacks hung to their right, a long row of fetuses that shifted and twitched their way toward life.

“That’s… that’s a lot to take in,” Brun said. “I’m going to have to think about how to… I mean, whew. That’s a lot.”

“I know Tonner didn’t like me,” Dafyd said. “I don’t know how much that affected his reports or the level of autonomy he took. As you step into his place, I hope we can have a better working relationship.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I would like a full audit of the major research projects, where exactly they stand, and your assessment of what the next steps are for each of them. Without Tonner, we’re going to need to re-examine our processes.”

“I see that,” Brun said. “I can’t believe he’s… gone.”

One of the sacks had turned on its hanger, the little being within facing out toward the walkway. Dafyd stopped to look. It was so cartoonishly small and fragile, it seemed impossible that they had all once been something like it. It looked out from the sack. Dafyd let himself sway back and forth, and it seemed to track him.

“Is it normal for it to have its eyes open?” he asked.

Brun’s confusion only lasted a couple of seconds, but that it was there at all filled Dafyd with a low-level dread. “Oh, fifty-five? No, that’s an anomaly. There are a few things that are off about him. Honestly, I’m not sure he’s going to make it.”

Dafyd stepped closer. The fetus opened its mouth like a yawn and its arms twitched. “Why are we losing so many?”

“We aren’t,” Brun said. “I mean, the normal miscarriage rate is like one in five, and that’s of the seventy percent that actually survive conception and womb implantation in the first place. Mostly they fail out at the front end, but we could lose two or three of the ones that made it this far and we’d still be in line with traditional gestation. Things break.”

“I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“Folks assume that since making babies is important it must be a good design. That’s sentimental, yeah? An industrial process that broke down this often, we’d call it a failure. But the system can tolerate a lot of failed tries as long as we keep trying. Nature doesn’t consider anything precious as long as it’s easily replaceable.”

Something in Dafyd’s gut shifted. It felt like disgust. Or maybe horror. He returned to walking, and Brun had to trot to catch up with him. The main lab for the Carryx grass project was ahead and to the left, and Dafyd found himself very much preferring to be there.

Brun, beside him, kept talking. “Really, the lamb sacks are doing astonishingly well, considering all the variables. Tonner was the one who tweaked the placentation protocols, and it really helped keep the fetal deaths to a minimum. That’s part of why I… I mean, I’m flattered, sir. I really am. But I’m not sure I’m your guy for this.”

“You were his second-in-command.”

“Look, I don’t want to talk myself down or anything, but being second behind Tonner Freis, I can be pretty damn good and still not be, y’know, comparable. I just think if there’s a better person to take the reins, maybe I could keep the slot I’ve got now. Especially when it comes to the protein translation stuff that the Carryx are excited about? I mean, you probably spent more time on that than I did.”

Dafyd stopped, turning to look the man face-on. When Brun shied back, Dafyd put his hand on his shoulder. “You are the one who knows the most about the state of the research right now. If we don’t make enough progress on it, there’s still a chance that the Carryx will decide the human moiety isn’t pulling its weight, and then they’ll just kill us all. So do your best.”

Brun didn’t seem aware of it when he groaned. To Dafyd, it looked like the man was starting to understand the situation. That was good.

“One other thing,” he said, letting Brun go. “There was a side project Tonner was doing about the Soft Lothark?”

“Yeah, he mentioned it.”

“Erase the data.”

Only a few moieties are older than the Lothark. When the Carryx found us, we were smaller and we lived on a single world. The High Lothark and its Stone-Mind guided and bound us. And then the Carryx came. They hadn’t mastered the Void Dragons then. Or the Amanthea. They didn’t have knowledge then to lock a sky in place. They overcame us with Dirhaj which became obsolete when the Bau-hund were domesticated. There are no Dirhaj now.

Dafyd moved the symbols again to mean: What is the Deep Lothark?

A way of keeping something for ourselves. It is memory that belongs to all of us, and because we wear it on our skins, they don’t find it inside our bodies. The Soft Lothark are loyal to the Carryx. They are the trusted animals of violence in the endless war. They would gladly die for the Carryx. The Deep Lothark is loyal to the Lothark, and it remembers how the Stone-Mind was built and waits to remake it again someday.

It has been a very long wait, but the Deep Lothark is all Lothark, so it can be patient when the individual cannot.

The gray-haired man stood with his arms crossed. His name was Farad Morse, and it turned out his nephew was the same Llaren Morse who Dafyd had met on Anjiin and whose death warrant Dafyd had signed when he revealed the rebellion to the Carryx. The others in the visualization group stood behind the man, ostensibly all at their work, but arrayed like a gang getting ready for a brawl.

“If he won’t be rejoining us, we can go to him,” Farad Morse said. “You just say where to find him.”

“He’s busy on a different project,” Dafyd said.

“Yeah, you said that before.”

“He will be available to answer questions and review data. But for the foreseeable future, we should move on with you as acting head of the project.”

The older Morse blinked in surprise, and the hardness at his jaw softened. “Acting head, eh? So you’d be wanting me to direct research? Call the shots?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” the gray-haired man said, and half a smile touched his lips. “That’ll be fine.”

There is no war with the Carryx. War is what they are. Enslavement is what they are. A state with no conflict is incomprehensible. Before the deathless enemy arrived, there was war. When the deathless die, there will be war. But the deathless never die. War will never end. We will be here in its mouth forever.

Dafyd moved the symbols again, got the grammar wrong, and reset to start from scratch: How many Soft Lothark are there?

We are on every world that our bodies can be made to tolerate. Over half of the Carryx worlds and colonies, we aid in holding. But if they chose to kill us, we would die. The dream of insurrection is a dream. These things that own us are capable of such casual violence that on a word, they would end us all and forget us before the next day. The Deep Lothark guards against that word, that ending, and it waits.

Dafyd shifted the symbols again: What do you know about the Sovran?

I know this. There is only one Sovran.

Uuya Tomos’s private room was laid out like any other, but she had made it something entirely different. The bed had a spread of lacework made from knotted string that made Dafyd think of old children’s stories of magical fish pulled up from the depth of the sea. The air smelled of sweet incense, and a mural covered one wall. The image was of a muscular man with a long beard and bald head wrestling a tiger. A woman with a glowing triangle over her head floated above them both, radiating rays of light.

“You like it?” Uuya Tomos asked. “It’s by Ferdan Bellenn. I had a painting of his back in the old days that cost me half a year’s pay. I got it as a present for myself when I retired the first time. It was—” She made a square with her thumbs about a handsbreadth apart. “This one, I got for taking on his dishes rotation for a month.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“He said it was a kindness that he got to make things again for someone who cared,” Uuya Tomos said as she rose from her desk chair and offered it to Dafyd. He sat, and she went to stand before the mural, her arms crossed. “There’s a lot of that in the rank and file, you know. People who dedicated their lives to something that doesn’t matter anymore. Honestly, I’m shocked we haven’t had more suicides.”

“Day’s young,” Dafyd said, and the old woman laughed. “Where did you get the incense?”

“One of Tonner’s apprentices was a Regran priest. She figured out a way to make her own altar out of the byproducts of the research. It’s a little acrid for my taste, but it’s intentional. That’s what makes it art. So what brings you here? I didn’t miss a meeting, did I?”

“I need to have a ceremony for Tonner. A memorial. I’d like you to help me figure out what to say.”

She turned back to him, arms crossed. She looked like she could have stepped out of the painting herself. An image of skeptical age translated into flesh, as beautiful and terrible as the goddess on the wall behind her. “And what is it you’re looking to achieve from the ritual?”

“Acknowledging the passing of an old friend isn’t enough?”

“Not for you. Not in your position. Freis was a hell of a character even before we came here. People feel the loss. It reminds them of all the other losses.”

“Everything rhymes.”

“Damn right it does. Only you’re here asking for my help. My help to do what?”

Dafyd crossed his legs and wove his fingers together across his knee. The woman had a gift for making him feel exposed and small. “I keep thinking that it’s all going to go back to normal. That we’ll make some grand gesture and then get back to Anjiin. Or to the way things were before they came. It’s nostalgia.”

“No, it’s denial. No judgment. I know what you’re talking about. A lot of us want to pretend that this is a temporary aberration from the right and normal working out of history. It isn’t, and we know it isn’t. But we’d like it to be. Part of that is we’re old as shit, some of us, and God help us if we have to keep reinventing ourselves.”

“I’m glad to know I’m not alone.”

“Oh, you’re very much alone. Just not that way. What does this have to do with the Rak-hund killing Freis?” Dafyd kept his expression empty, and Uuya Tomos’s eyebrows hoisted up her forehead. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“There really isn’t,” Dafyd said. “Except that I need the story people remember about this to be about something other than the details of how it happened.”

“Give our brother Tonner’s passing a story to edge out any other stories that might find their way in?”

“Yes.”

“Have you told Andermus?”

“I haven’t told anyone anything,” Dafyd said. “I haven’t told you anything.”

“Good. Keep it that way.” She sat on the edge of her bed. “As your minister of propaganda, I’d say you call for a memorial service, but don’t make it mandatory. The narrative that fits is the way Tonner’s faults and his virtues lived in balance. Who the real man was in all his complexity. Brilliant and temperamental… But you can’t give the speech.”

“Why not?”

“If it’s you, all anyone will talk about is how the pair of you were sleeping with the same woman back in the day, and that’s why he tried to attack you. Is that what you want, or is that too close to what we’re not supposed to talk about?”

“No, let’s lean into it,” Dafyd said. “I humiliated him and he carried a grudge. And that’s why he lost his temper. The old wounds overwhelmed him, and he lashed out at the wrong time and place.”

“Because that’s not what happened.”

“It’s exactly what happened,” Dafyd said. “It needs to be.”

Uuya Tomos blew out a long breath. “Fucking palace intrigue. All right. Let me see what I can work up. You have a date for this memorial service?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that too,” she said. And then, a moment later, “You look rough. Are you doing all right?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“Are you asking me to do something about it?”

“No,” she said. “You’re a grown man. You can pick your own hell, same as anyone.”

The will of the Sovran is what makes the Carryx a single thing, one being in a thousand billion bodies. It was the great leap that lifted them from the tide pools and salt marshes of their original world. We have studied for centuries to know this. Do you know things like this in your world?

Dafyd thought of his survey coursework. The work with bees and ants. Colony insects with a single queen around which everything was organized. He nodded, and then remembered that the Soft Lothark might not know the gesture. He shifted the symbols again: We do.

Then you will know that the different selves vie for food, for territory. The Carryx were once like this. But then, back when their bodies were smaller, when they didn’t yet dream of stars or worlds or the deep things that live in the void between them, a Sovran rose, brought all moieties into one, and the petty struggles of one against another became something else. The little wars between groups became the grand war of the Carryx expansion into the universe. They press out the bounds of their territory because that is what they are, what they have always been. What they find, they use or they destroy. Anything else is unthinkable for them. Not taboo, not known but forbidden. Unthinkable. It cannot be conceived. They are what they are. They do what they do. What is, is.

Dafyd put out his hands, ready to shift the symbols again, but then he stopped. How do we kill the Sovran? seemed too dangerous to ask, even here.

Twenty-Four

Campar stood, stripped to his skin, with his arms out to his sides and his fingers spread. The Sinen trundled toward him with the same spray nozzle that it had used on Ghati and Emmin. Danna, behind them, was still waiting her turn. There had been times when Campar would have been uncomfortable nude in the presence of strange, alien beings, but those days were apparently behind him.

“Respirating the vacuum sheath will end your existence,” the Sinen said, just as it had to the others.

“So you’re saying hold my—”

But before Campar could finish, the little squid monster was already spraying a stream of thick, clear liquid at his feet. It was warmer than Campar had expected, and it began to set as soon as it touched his skin. When the Sinen told him, he lifted his feet one at a time and let it coat his soles and arches. By the time he went back to standing, the new skin had already hardened. Bit by bit, the Sinen went up his body leaving a coating of clear resin as it passed. When it reached his neck, it paused, shoved a pair of devices into Campar’s ears that looked and felt like thick black slugs, and put a cover over his face from the top of his neck to just over his eyebrows. He knew from watching the two who’d gone through the procedure before him that this was where the oxygen mask would sit.

When the face cover came off, the Sinen stepped back.

“Can you hear and see?” it asked.

“I can,” Campar said, then shuddered. His own voice, transferred through the black slug things, sounded strange and oily.

“You will proceed to the next step,” the Sinen said, and gestured Danna forward.

“How will this work with bathroom breaks?” Campar asked.

“Exudates will pool inside the film until your work period is complete.”

“Ah,” he said. “Lovely.”

The expedition ship was long and narrow. It reminded Campar of a group transport with fewer seats and worse amenities. At the far end, the Budon of Luus were undergoing their own hardening. The gel darkened and disarranged their fur, leaving them with the look of beakless birds who’d been dunked in oil. The beetle-things were suffering an entirely different procedure that seemed to involve fixing tubes of metal to their legs. In the center of the ship, the Carryx soldier rested on six of its limbs, its eyes shifting across the pandemonium. The Sinen would occasionally go and prostrate themselves before it. Campar assumed there was some conversation between the aliens when that happened, but it might only have been to make the Carryx feel appreciated. There was no way for a mere human being to guess.

Campar pulled his trousers and tunic back on.

“Are you all right?” Ghati asked, taking his arm to steady him.

“It feels like being numb,” Campar said.

“Lucky you. I feel like someone’s tugging at every hair of my body. It itches, and scratching doesn’t help.”

“Your voice is very clear,” Campar said, and tapped on the clear bubble of glass or plastic or chitin that covered Ghati’s face. “I’d have expected this to have more of a muffling quality.”

“I don’t think you’re hearing me through the open air anymore,” Ghati said, and a second Sinen elbowed him out of the way and fit a mask over Campar’s face. There was a pinching sensation as the edges of the mask fused to the gel-like extra skin, and then a pop as the Sinen put a tube through the mask that ran to a round, pink thing meant to be worn on one shoulder that looked like a conch and a keg of beer had fallen very much in love. The scent of the air that came from it was surprisingly sweet and pleasant.

“The two of you will accompany this one,” the Sinen said, and turned to gesture to Vaudai. Campar couldn’t tell whether the huge slug-like thing had also been covered in the false skin or if its kind didn’t need interventions to withstand the vacuum of space. The Sinen tapped Campar’s sternum to get his attention. “Gather samples of the enemy and do as this one tells you.”

“I understand,” Campar said, and the Sinen trundled away to fit a mask on Danna’s face and jaw.

“Come, come, come, meat-on-sticks,” Vaudai said, moving toward the far side of the transport with surprising speed. “We have almost arrived. There is much to be done. We are filled with glorious purpose. You are privileged to be my limbs and do what I cannot. Come! Now!”

Ghati looked from Campar to the retreating Vaudai.

“I suppose he’ll need help opening doors and drawers,” Campar said. “Shall we?”

The enemy command ship floated in the emptiness of space, turning end over end like a suicide falling from a rooftop forever. The beetle-like aliens were all assigned some task on the skin of the ship, and they glowed dimly as they crawled across the dark metal surfaces. The sprawl of the stars around them felt fake; a backdrop too vast to be real. The tiny tug that carried Campar and Vaudai and Ghati was square, and open at one side. It didn’t seem to have an engine, but it moved anyway, depositing them at a wound on the dead ship’s side that was all twisted metal and flakes of grayish matter that clung to it like dust.

They placed their feet on the deck, and something in the vacuum-sealed skin they wore knew to adhere there, allowing them a clumsy sort of walk as long as they always kept one foot planted. Using this one-foot-at-a-time locomotion, they moved into the body of the ship, Vaudai taking the lead, its body stretching and contracting like an inchworm as it moved across the deck, its skin dancing with subtle colors.

“Follow! Follow!” Vaudai said. “And keep the scanning sheet ready.”

The scanning sheet wasn’t a sheet at all, but Campar hadn’t bothered asking why it was called that. The device was a pair of thin metallic poles, one for him and one for Ghati. Along with them Campar had been given a sampling kit whose functions he recognized—sealed glass tubes, palette knives, a rudimentary spectrometer about the size of his thumb. The kind of satchel kit you gave children who were interested in science for their twelfth birthday, but it was enough that he could take decent samples back for actual analysis later.

“We begin here,” Vaudai said, “and move toward the bottom of the ship.”

“That sounds good,” Campar said at the same time Ghati said, “Begin doing what?”

“We will survey the internal shielding,” Vaudai said, and even through the half-mind’s bland translation, the massive slug sounded transported by joy at the idea.

“I’m going to be sick,” Ghati said. “I think I’m going to vomit.”

“Feel free,” Vaudai said. “The air recycler is designed to keep gas exchange passages clear, even for animals as poorly designed as you. Now this way! This way!”

The corridors inside the ship felt weirdly familiar. They were a little thinner than the passageways Campar had known back in his previous life, and they had a squared, machined rectilinear aesthetic that the grown coral of Anjiin rarely adopted, but the scale of the place was almost human. Without power, the doors and hatches were locked in whatever state they had been in the moment the ship had died. Strange script was worked into the walls along with arrows and symbols whose meanings Campar couldn’t guess.

The scanning procedure was simple enough. Vaudai would indicate one spot for Campar, another for Ghati, and they would place their thin metal poles as they were instructed. Once they were set to Vaudai’s specifications, it would turn the devices on, and a glowing plane of energy appeared between them that showed images of the ship through the walls and decks, laying bare the superstructure of the rooms and chambers around them even when the doors didn’t open to let them pass. When in use, it did look a bit like a long, electric sheet.

“There!” Vaudai said the third time they’d gone through the exercise. “You see the shielding?”

“No,” Campar said.

The glowing image between the poles shifted, cycling through the full rainbow and back again. Now a series of the walls were marked a vibrant blue. “These are the places where the shielding held. These others, where it failed. When I compare this to the record of the battle, I will be able to know what attacks the enemy command is most vulnerable to.”

“The Carryx will be pleased,” Campar said.

“Yes, them too. But most importantly I will know. I will be the first to know. Most exhilarating! Come. This way. Down here.”

Ghati took his hand as they floated down the eerie, dead corridors, but Campar could only feel the hand as a pressure and intention. The sausage casing that kept the vacuum from killing him also kept him from feeling anything but the growing damp of his own trapped sweat.

For what felt like days and was only hours, they shifted the two poles to positions that Vaudai indicated, sometimes capturing images taken through the walls, other times through the decks and ceiling. The superstructure of the ship laid itself bare to the scanner. Twice, Campar saw little irregular lumps that might have been the bodies of enemy dead, but never in rooms they had access to, and Vaudai was too enthusiastic and focused to allow any exploration that detracted from its growing map of the ship. Campar had almost given up his assignment to sample the dead when they found the first corpse.

They had nearly made their way to the end of the dead ship. The body was lashed to a ring in the wall beside a wide metal doorway. It was charred, arms and legs pulled into an almost fetal pose by the tightening of ligaments. The flesh of its face had pulled back, and the eye sockets held only a wrinkled, half-deflated remnant of what had been there before.

“Is that… Is that human?” Ghati asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

Campar planted his feet on the side of a ladder and pulled in for a closer look. Whatever it was, it had been wearing a kind of uniform. Four fingers and thumb. The jaw was plausible, but…

“I don’t know,” he said as he opened the sampling kit. “It looks like it might have been, but that can be deceiving. Evolution converges. If you burned a Soft Lothark badly enough, it might look something like this too. Whatever it is, it’s what we came for.”

“Put the first pole here,” Vaudai said from farther down the hall.

“In a moment,” Campar said. “I have to do this too.”

The translation half-mind made a small, exasperated sigh. Campar used the thinnest knife to dig a sample of flesh off the dead thing. The bit of meat floated in the airlessness, drifting with the spin of the ship, as he opened a glass bottle and let the sample float inside. Then, he turned to the spot that Vaudai had indicated, set up his half of the sheet, and waited for Ghati to be put in position as well.

When they turned the viewing apparatus on, instead of the x-ray vision of the space beyond the wall, there was a flash of blue that matched the shielding color, and then nothing.

“Oh,” Vaudai said. “Switch your places, please.”

Campar and Ghati did as they were told. “I’m getting thirsty,” Ghati said as the screen came back, still with the flash of blue and then nothing. “How much longer are we going to be at this?”

“We have no image,” Vaudai said. “This is it. This is the center of the mystery. Whatever is behind that door will tell us why the ship failed to destroy itself. We must get through!”

Campar shut off the pole in his hand and moved to the door. He hadn’t been paying the closest of attention to the other portals they’d passed, but he had the sense that this one was more robust. There was no knob, no handle. An irregularity beside the corpse might have been a control pad of some sort, but unpowered it might as well have been a stone. Ghati came to his side.

“There’s a seam there,” Ghati said, his voice uncertain. “We could try pulling it open.”

Campar ran his thick, encumbered fingertip across the seam in the metal. If he hadn’t been looking at it, he wouldn’t have felt the irregularity at all. “We can try,” he said. “We can’t succeed, though.”

“A lever arm,” Vaudai said. “You must find a lever arm and pry the door apart! Use the poles! Use anything!”

A voice came in Campar’s ears, affectless and calm and panic-inducing. All animals will return to the expedition ship at once for evacuation.

“No!” Vaudai said. “We must stay! This is the critical moment! Stopping now would be”—the half-mind stuttered—“like depositing half an egg.”

“Oh good lord,” Campar said. “I see why Rickar enjoyed your company, Vaudai. We have to go back, though. Evacuation aside, we don’t have the tools to get through this.”

The great slug cycled through several shades of gray-green. “You are correct, sticks-with-meat-on-them. Hurry, then. There is no time to waste.”

Back at the expedition ship, the beasts of the Carryx moieties were having their vacuum sheaths removed. The Budon gathered in a clump, grooming each other, fur askew and damp. When the Sinen applied the solvent to Campar, his skin went cold all over, then warm, then the goo peeled off him in sheets that reminded him of when he was twelve and he’d stayed out shirtless until his shoulders were too sunburned to touch.

Vaudai, on the other hand, was following one of the Sinen around the deck, staying so close to the goatish alien that it seemed like the moment before a fight. By the time Ghati had been cleaned off and they’d both gotten bulbs of water to replace the sweat of the day, Vaudai had escalated his cause to the Carryx soldier standing resplendent in the middle of the space. Campar shifted in closer, trying to overhear the conversation, but his half-mind didn’t report it for him. There was only the low birdsong of the Carryx as it answered whatever demands Vaudai had put to it.

Campar gave up and went back to where Ghati was reviewing the collected images they’d made with the scanning sheet. Altogether, about a quarter of the command ship had been entered into Carryx knowledge. The lines where the shielding had been degraded or unmade were either slashes cut through the bulkheads or else great gaps where the ship had been completely obliterated by the weird field weapons that the Carryx had turned on the ship.

The dead room was marked in a dull orange without any detail, the equivalent of an In need of further study note at the end of a project report.

“The design looks familiar,” Ghati said. “Don’t you think?”

“Compared with what?”

Ghati waved the question away like it was a gnat. “Everything. Compared with the fungus warren you told me about with the Night Drinkers. Compared to the rooms full of vines and mites by the old labs. Or the nests the Qasim make on the sides of the hallways. Compared to anything. This looks like someone dug up a bunch of service tunnels, put an engine on one side, and shot them into space.”

“You think the design looks human.”

“Of course it looks human,” Ghati hissed. “Don’t tell me that you don’t see it too.”

“It does. It looks. That doesn’t mean it is. If we start anthropomorphizing things, pretty soon—”

“Good news!” Vaudai said, rushing up to them the way a puppy would have if it didn’t have feet, fur, bones, or eyes. “Excellent news! Come with me! Prepare yourselves to return! We have permission and a torch that will cut through the offending door.”

“I thought we were evacuating,” Ghati said. “Emmin said that there were enemy ships popping back into the system.”

“Yes yes yes. Three ships. Many fewer than left before. The maneuver to divide our fleet and pull off enemy resources has succeeded, but what have returned are certain to be tasked with the destruction of the command ship. We must hurry. The cutting torches are this way. Follow, useful appendages!”

“What about vacuum sheaths?” Ghati asked.

“Oh. Yes,” Vaudai said. And then, almost plaintively, “Will you feel excessive discomfort without them?”

“We will expire, and be less useful as appendages,” Campar replied.

“Fine. You prepare yourselves. I will find others to gather the tools for you.”

“How long do we have?” Campar asked before Vaudai could depart.

“I don’t understand.”

“The enemy ships are in the system, but systems are big. If they’re on the far side of the heliopause, they might not be here for many cycles. If they’re on the doorstep, that’s something else again. Do you know how long before they’ll be in range?”

The pause was long enough that it started feeling awkward. Across the hold, three of the beetle-like things started buzzing together, a fight or a choir or a coincidence. Campar had no way to know.

“Field weaponry propagates as would light or gravity,” Vaudai said, and Campar had the feeling that the alien was trying to make a very simple concept very clear, as if it were speaking to a child or a fairly intelligent dog. “If we can see them, the battle has in essence already begun.”

“Then why are we going back on the command ship?” Ghati said. “It’s not safe.”

“For us, no,” Vaudai said. “But if we hurry, we will learn things no one has ever told the Carryx. The key to unmaking the deathless would justify our moiety. Our children and their children and theirs for generations. We are insignificant, the war is all that matters! Plus which, it is interesting and I am bored!”

“Well,” Campar said. “I suppose if you put it that way…”

Twenty-Five

Jessyn hurt. They had started permitting Jessyn to hurt. That was a very good thing. Her memory was a lacework of drug-induced sleep and half-dreams, forgetfulness and distress. Sometimes she’d forgotten everything and floated on clouds of weirdly vivid visions. Sometimes she’d remembered the cylinder she’d hidden in the grove and her desperate need to have it. Her sense of the passage of time was broken—hours that went on for eternity and days that passed almost before they began. The worst was when she could only recall that there was something important, and that it was her responsibility, and that she didn’t remember what it was.

So pain, as long as it came with clarity, was a blessing in this, as in all things.

She shifted in the bed. It was her own cell in the ship, so that was good. She knew where she was. When she tried to sit up, the pain took her breath away. She rolled onto her other side and tried again with better results. The bandage below her ribs was a pale clinging foam that moved with her like a false skin. She remembered probing it with her fingertips somewhere in the haze of her recovery and finding it sticky, but it was dry and waxy now. Hopefully it was some advanced Carryx medical technology and not just an industrial sealant they’d slapped over her to keep the blood inside. Standing up was better than she’d expected it to be, but only a little.

“Stupid,” she said to the room. To herself. “Fucking astoundingly stupid.”

She made her way to the little farm that produced her medication. Everything between the sheets of glass had gone black and oily. The little organisms that she counted on had all starved to death while she was out. She had failed them, they had failed her. It was all right, though. Recoverable. Right now, the only symptom of withdrawal was a gnawing headache behind her eyes. She’d clean and sterilize the device, set up one of the two remaining starter packs that Tonner had made for her, and by tomorrow or the next day, she’d be back in the saddle. Good as new.

Laughing hurt too, even just a chuckle. She’d have to try not to do that. She picked up the glass panes and walked to the common room. It took her half an hour to scrape out the residue and boil the device in heavily salted water. If she’d had a good autoclave, that would have been more effective for killing off any contaminants. But it would also have been a bigger risk for the equipment. She had two doses of starter. Only one farm to put them in. Risks had to be balanced.

While she was waiting for the glass to cool, voices came from the front of the ship. The geologist and botanist, talking over each other like they were each so eager to be heard they couldn’t bother listening. Then the artificial calm of the half-mind. Something else was with them. She steeled herself.

Third Gardener came into the common room first. It might have been her imagination, but the Sinen seemed to hesitate when it saw her. Holom Coombs, the geologist, was right behind it, and Jessyn had the flashbulb memory of the man working over her wounded body as she’d tried to die.

“Oh!” he said, and then grinned. He had a mouthful of crooked, coffee-stained teeth that somehow managed to look kind of charming on him. “You’re up and about!”

“Vaguely,” Jessyn said, and smiled. The botanist came in last. She was a thin, sharp-faced woman with black hair cut so close to her scalp it looked like stubble on a chin. Manni. That was her name. Jessyn tried a smile, but the woman only looked grim as she came over, squeezed Jessyn’s hand, and then walked away. Coombs’s smile had taken on a tightness like he’d made some social misstep by being pleased to see her. Jessyn almost joked Who died? before she remembered that, as far as they knew, Garral Pär had died and she’d watched him do it. She looked down, trying to think what she’d been like when she’d been shocked and grief-sick in the past.

“I, ah,” Coombs said, then patted her shoulder awkwardly. “I hope that you’re… Yes. Well.”

He turned back, heading for the corridor to the outside and leaving her alone with Third Gardener. It made its way to her more slowly. She wondered what it would do if she walked away. If that would seem more suspicious or less. Instead, she touched the glass farm. It was almost cool enough to load with the new batch.

Third Gardener made soft, wet sounds and its pseudotentacles twitched. “You are feeling well enough to work,” the half-mind translated.

“I won’t be at full capacity for a few days,” she said, and took the glass farm in her hands. “But I’m on the mend, yes.”

“You will report more fully. Explain what happened to you and the Garral Pär.”

Jessyn took the farm to the sink, measuring out water for the substrate. It gave her an excuse to talk more slowly, to take time with her words. She didn’t remember exactly what she’d said in her pain haze, or who she’d said it to. “We were exploring a set of caves in the limestone cliffs past the orchard. We were attacked by something. It killed Garral. I ran. I got away, but I was injured.”

She poured the white powder of the substrate into the farm, and then the water.

“Your attacker was found, and it was killed. Take comfort in this if necessary.”

Jessyn put the farm down on the table with a click. Corvall was dead, then. Well, that had been the plan. Strange that the fact still shocked her a little. It was as if until she knew that, the clock hadn’t really started. The plan was only a plan, except Corvall was dead. So he’d sent the signal. So it was happening. It was all happening, whether she was ready for it or not.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “Do you know what it was?”

“An enemy. The location you were exploring was outside of the evacuation perimeter. Explain why you chose that site.”

“Because it was outside the evacuation perimeter.”

“Explain.”

“I picked it because we were unlikely to run into other researchers there. I was hoping to spend some time with Garral privately. I understand now that was a mistake.”

“You wished to spend time in seclusion.”

“I was hoping to fuck him,” Jessyn said, but the sharpness of her answer was lost on the Sinen.

“Explain what happened to your equipment and supplies.”

“Most of it’s still at my primary research site. The orchard. I left the rest behind when the thing started shooting at us,” she said, then held up the glass farm. “Did you find my notebook?”

“We have not attempted to recover it. Leaving the evacuation perimeter is dangerous,” the Sinen said. “Further explain your interaction with the enemy presence.”

“Look,” Jessyn snapped at it. “I understand you want to have a clear idea of what happened, but I have to get this set up, get back to my work, and I’m going to need more rest than usual. Would you like me to use my energy answering questions about what’s already happened, or getting the survey work done? Because I can manage one of those right now.”

“You will return to your survey,” Third Gardener said. It shifted, took something from its satchel. A new notebook. When she didn’t take it, Third Gardener put it down on the table beside her. “We will discuss the loss of Garral Pär again. You will provide greater detail when doing so doesn’t interfere with your work.”

“All right.”

The Sinen didn’t leave. It stood, looking up at her with its unnerving goatlike eyes. “Surviving this encounter with the enemy and such serious injuries was unlikely.”

For a long moment, she didn’t know how to reply. She settled on, “I’m grateful for the care I’ve been given.”

Third Gardener trundled away. Jessyn went back to her cell, fed the fresh starter into the substrate and then a half dose of sugar to help it get going. She expected the wound in her side to hurt, but her whole body from toes to temples was aching. More than anything, she wanted to find some painkillers, curl up in her bed, and lose consciousness. To be someplace else for a while, even if the someplace else was just a random firing of neurons in her sleeping brain.

When she was done, she went back to the kitchen, scooped up her new notebook, and headed out. The gravity of the planet had clearly ratcheted up since she’d come to. Her flesh felt heavier than it should have, and the makeshift plaza between the Carryx ships felt a dozen times wider than it had. Three huge, lumbering Carryx stood between the ships, hunkered down on their fighting arms and gesturing with the thinner feeding pair at their chests. A pair of the stone-skinned, six-legged aliens were leaning against each other as they walked east, wire baskets filled with flowers on their collective back. The sunlight felt like early afternoon. At the base of one of the other ships, Third Gardener was talking to a Rak-hund. As she walked down the ramp, they both turned toward her, but they didn’t approach. She returned the favor.

Twice, on the way to her orchard, she had to sit down and put her head on her knees for a few minutes. A deep, bright ache ran up and down her spine, but it wasn’t a shooting pain so it probably wasn’t nerve damage. Just muscles and joints inflamed and alarmed because some idiot had, after all, put a slug of metal through her side. It would have been an astoundingly stupid way to die, not least because it would have consigned Garral and the others to death along with her. One thing had to go wrong, Garral had said, and it had very nearly been her. The only silver lining was that she had certainly presented the appearance that the attack was genuine. She hoped the Sinen believed no one would be stupid enough to do what she did.

When she reached the orchard, it was muddy and fragrant and a little colder than she’d expected. She sat under the living trees for a few minutes while she got back her strength. From where she sat, she could see the place where she’d hidden the weapon. There wasn’t a pool of blood beside it or a trail leading away, mostly thanks to the rain. If the Carryx had thought to bring bloodhounds, her story would have a hole in it pretty quickly. The trail created by your injury ends at the orchard you were studying, not the cave where you claim the violence occurred. You will explain this. Lying was exhausting. Probably the best thing to do was just claim ignorance. There was an attack, she was injured so badly her memories weren’t clear. She’d let Third Gardener figure it all out without her. It would probably be more authentic than if she actually had an answer for everything.

Her eyes shifted to a smooth rock on the ground by the burned trees. It was dark and shone like it was still wet, holding on to the rain when everything around it was at least half dried. When her mind wandered, her gaze shifted back to it. Something about it tugged at her attention like a kid clearing its throat. When she felt like she had it in her, she levered herself up to standing and walked over. Because of course it wasn’t a stone. It was the gun, out there in the open where she’d dropped it. She scooped it up too fast, and the pain in her side made the world swim a little. She turned back to look at the path she’d come by, but there wasn’t anyone on it. A flock of the Euruk of Lydiándar were scissoring their way through the sky to the north. They didn’t seem to be paying attention to her. She wrapped her hand around the butt of the gun in her pocket. Her finger brushed the familiar button of the trigger. She hadn’t even thought to wonder where she’d dropped the damn thing, but of course it was here.

She walked to the tree where she’d put the cylinder. The rock was there, and the mud she’d put over it had dried. It might only have been her anxiety, but it still seemed too obvious. Someone searching the site would find it too easily. She flipped over the covering stone and put her hand on the cylinder. It was still there, and still just a little bit warm, like an egg with something gestating inside it. She lifted it out, hefting it. Feeling its weight.

She hadn’t screwed it all up yet. She’d come close, but it hadn’t gone wrong. She could still win. She’d just put the weapon in with her kit, and…

She wouldn’t, though. She thought of Third Gardener and its pet Rak-hund turning to watch her as she went. About the Sinen’s questions. If there was any day they were going to stop her on the way back to her bed and look through her kit, it was today.

But she needed to have it on hand when the time came.

That was the gamble. She stood for a moment. The breeze muttered in her ear. The leaves of the pear trees clapped like a thousand little hands, catching the light.

She put the cylinder back in place and tucked the gun in beside it. She didn’t like the rock anymore, and the mud was too friable to cover it, so she picked up a handful of old leaves and dead grass and rained them down over the burned-out stump until all her contraband was lost in the pile. Then she did a little more.

The rain had thrown streaks of mud onto her kit. She knelt in front of it. Her knees would get wet, but she’d live. When it clicked off standby, the results on the pear sample were still there, but so were two alerts saying that further results would be suspect without calibration. Fair enough. The equipment had been out in the weather for a while. She started the resonance scanner on a tare run, then took her notebook out.

But when she opened the files, there was a new report already halfway through being drafted and not yet impressed into the archive. She opened it.

I know I shouldn’t do this, but I have seen the new camp. It’s not as far as I’d thought. When the time comes, you can start the process and run. I don’t want to wait until next life. Say you don’t either, and I’ll put the directions here.

I dreamed about you last night. We were in a palace, and we were safe. There were strawberries.

Jessyn smiled. There was a little warmth and a softness in her throat where she hadn’t noticed there had been only tension before. It was a profoundly stupid thing for Garral to have done, sneaking back to the cave and putting the draft in her old notebook. Who knew when Third Gardener would decide it was time to send someone into the cave to collect her lost gear? It risked everything, the whole plan, and everyone, including her. But here she was, touched and grateful that he’d done it.

She erased the draft, then paused. Should she? Should she make the attempt, at least? She could try to escape the Carryx. Even if she failed, the worst that could happen was she’d die here. Or be recaptured and die on the ship. For a moment, she was in a different life, out among the stars as an immigrant spending her days among a branch of humanity she’d never known, never guessed at. But whoever they were, they’d have food and drink, they’d sing songs that she could learn. She would study their languages. All through history, people had made leaps of faith in the universe, remade themselves and their lives in ways that couldn’t be undone. Many of those lives had been rich and beautiful and strange, and hers could be too. They’d probably even have ways to synthesize her medication that didn’t mean growing her own.

And she would never go back to the world-palace. She’d never see her brother again. Never tell Dafyd Alkhor the secret she’d discovered: The deathless enemy were just humans in weird black regrowing armor.

She sighed, and the extra volume of breath was enough to make her side twitch in pain. She wiped a tear off her cheek and started keying in a new draft. Would he ever see it? When would the Sinen finally send someone to the cave to collect her lost notebook? Garral sneaking back to leave her love notes was insanely risky.

Strawberries would have been nice.

She paused. For a moment, she let herself remember Garral’s body curled against her, the way he’d looked down when he’d told her about his wife on Anjiin and his lover in the Carryx prison world. She thought about the shape of his mouth and how it had felt for her to admit to him that she’d been a little bit in love with Irinna. She wept gently, but outright sobbing would have hurt.

Word by word, she erased the sentence until the draft was only a blank page. The resonance scanner chirped that it had finished its run.

“All right,” she said, and wiped a streak of mud off the kit with her thumb.

Preliminary examination suggests that the fruit trees in the orchard were cultivated as a food source. Furthermore, the molecular profile of the fruit suggests…

Twenty-Six

The passage through asymmetric space was the shortest Rickar had ever made. Wherever the Carryx were hauling him now, he guessed it wasn’t far from the system where they’d left Campar and Ghati and Vaudai behind. Captivity and space travel made time a strange thing, but Rickar would have guessed that they spent a day, maybe a day and a half, in the blurred consciousness that came with asymmetry.

The common room felt empty. The Budon of Luus took up less space than they had, often running out to the food and water dispensers and then back to their cells, as if by being elsewhere they could avoid the next cull by the Carryx jailers. Dervan, stripped of her usual companions, had gravitated toward him. She was a thin woman with a tattoo on her left wrist that Rickar associated with Gallantist missionaries. In any other circumstance, he wouldn’t have spent time with her. As it was her company or nothing, he sat with her a little under half the time.

“I talked to one of the Soft Lothark,” she said as he sat by Vaudai’s abandoned viewscreen. The pause after was his prompt to ask breathlessly what she’d heard.

“Did you get anything interesting out of it?”

“We broke into the system at the heliopause, same as always, but we’re going to be at the planet much faster than when they came to Anjiin. Now ask me why.”

Rickar bristled, but kept it from showing. Mostly. “Why?”

“They have to go slowly when they’re staying hidden. Whatever it is we’re doing here, they’re not staying hidden. They want the enemy to know we’re coming.”

Rickar leaned forward a degree. That was actually interesting. “And why is that?”

Dervan lifted her hands in a shrug. “It didn’t know. Or if it did, it wasn’t saying.”

The subjugator-librarian of the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body had made the decision to divide the dactyl. The alternative—keeping the full force in Ashtin-Kah system and battling again over the dead command ship—had been attractive. Under its direction, the dactyl had beaten the enemy back once. The librarian had faith that it could win a second engagement, should one arrive. The strategy of the larger battle, though, was broader than any one opportunity. By leaving a minor expedition ship behind, it put pressure on the disabled enemy ship and also permitted action that would advance the body further into contested space. Success in either would advance the war. Success in both would force the deathless enemy into defensive retreat. It had left one minor subjugator-librarian and three subjugators with the expedition ship. Three adult Carryx to oversee a roomful of animals reflected its expectation of traps and subterfuge more than a concern that the animals might misbehave.

The choice had cleaved that effort from its immediate responsibility. The ship in Ashtin-Kah was outside immediate communication, and would therefore rely on the judgment of its librarian while the rest of the dactyl flew through the void of Jurupe system toward the major inhabited world.

That the Carryx were aware of Jurupe would be a surprise to the deathless enemy. The void tendrils had only revealed it recently. The security the local enemy had thought to keep by staying silent and small had failed already. The ecology of the world teemed with life, including hundreds of cities and townships. Settlements by the enemy’s client animals advanced enough to move between worlds now protected only by their own defenses. No other fleet had entered the system to save them.

Not yet.

Nodes shuddered in anticipation, flooding themselves and their neighbors with hormones and signaling proteins. Still without minds, they longed for birth and violence. Rak-hund slept in their dens, their bodies kept cold to prolong their hibernations. The violence to come had no role for them. The subjugators at their stations prepared, channeling base matter into energy, energy into motion, motion into a sunward fall filled with intent. The dactyl’s arms were wide. The tension made the subjugator-librarian’s keel bone creak, an old reflex expressing in its flesh as the extended body of its command followed its will and the will of the Sovran.

Even without fields of stealth to obscure their ships, the enemy planet was slow to see the threat. It was another sign of how thinly the enemy’s resources were stretched. In other eras of the war, a system with so rich an ecosphere would have been protected by millions of half-mind-like drones and sensing platforms. Weakness expressed itself in their blindness and sleep.

But surprise would not serve the Carryx now.

With its feeding arms in the flow of information that tugged the remaining ships of the dactyl to its will, the subjugator-librarian expressed the needs of the mission to the subjugators. Its meaning was understood, and the field projectors woke on four of the ships, their crystal petals blooming slantwise in the void and the strange energies they commanded glowing in complex and symphonic patterns of the spectrum.

The animals of the planet—the advanced ones, the ones who were of import to the deathless enemy—would hear the field weapons like a footstep in the dark. Because they heard, they would look, because they looked, they would see, and because they saw they would scream out in fear and anguish, begging their protectors for aid.

It was the screaming that the Carryx required.

“I hate feeling like this,” Dervan said. “Don’t you hate feeling like this?”

Rickar didn’t pause his effort to change the view on Vaudai’s screen. He’d watched the giant slug manipulate images for days, but had never seen how the controls might work. Trying to make sense of it was like having a puzzle to solve.

“I don’t know how you’re feeling.”

“Everything’s happening, and we’re just washed along by it. You, me. Your friends. Mine. I don’t know what this war even is. I’m just in these fucking rooms, dying a breath at a time.”

Rickar ran his finger along the bottom of the display, and the image shuddered. When he glanced at Dervan, he caught a series of dots on the display, too dim for his focused vision to perceive. She mistook his grin for criticism and scowled.

“No, I just figured something out,” he said, turning back to the screen. Now that he knew to look… “I hear what you’re saying, but I think the universe is always like that. My grandfather fought against Itzibahn Common in Maryangul. He was a gunner for one of the extraction teams, so they moved around a lot. They picked up a pet mouse. It had been like a classroom pet in one of the schools that got evacuated. It was just going to starve in its cage, so they took it. And then, for a while, it was their pet. We’re like that now. We’re just mice on the fire team. We go where they take us.”

Yes, there were the dots. Knowing they were there was enough to make them visible. When he took one and shifted it, the image on the display shifted too.

“I saw an ant on the school transport when I was a girl,” Dervan said. She had a habit of answering any story Rickar told with one of her own, like it was a competition that she was determined to win. “I don’t know how it got on there, but it was this big black ant crawling along the window. I thought it was going to bite me, so I opened the window and blew it out. And you know, now I feel like I understand how it must have felt. Little ant going through the world doing ant things, and then the whole structure you were crawling around on moves. Takes you away from your anthill and your ant buddies and your queen, and you’re in this whole other part of the world that you didn’t even know existed. And then some girl blows you out a window. I wonder what happened to that little guy.”

“Oh, it died,” Rickar said. “No question.”

The screen hiccuped and shifted. The schematic view of the system vanished and a single image took its place. A blue-green planet wrapped in a lace of white cloud. Sunlight spilled on it in a crescent, leaving almost three-quarters of the world in darkness. Only it wasn’t dark. The lines of the unfamiliar continents continued in light into the night side, glowing gold and white in splotches and lines, like neural clusters reaching for each other across the darkness.

“Are those…?” Dervan asked.

“City lights, it looks like. I think those are cities.”

“God, it’s so beautiful,” she said. “Were we like that, do you think? On Anjiin, did we glow like that too?”

“I’ve seen satellite pictures, and we absolutely did,” Rickar said, but something had shifted in his gut. It was like part of him had seen into the future and didn’t want to go. Like he was trying to swim against the current of time.

The Budon of Luus began to sing.

The first signs of success came with an uptick in the background radiation in four places through the system, locked in the familiar geometry of the enemy. Then, an hour later, the ships of the deathless enemy started to boil out of flaws in spacetime that they used in place of the purity of asymmetric space. Across its ships, a thousand different kinds of eyes and sensors trained themselves on the new ships pouring into reality, categorizing them and comparing them to known conflicts: weapons, weaknesses, the kinds of enemy animals that had crewed ships like them before. The dark enemy itself could be on any of them or none, but the librarian expected the masters of the war to be well represented in this conflict. Its dactyl had the honor of pressing the raw edge of the war where the enemy was at its most alert and inflamed.

Within the first hour, the subjugator-librarian became certain that the effort to draw the greater force of the enemy to Jurupe system had succeeded. Even before the fine-grained analysis came to it, the simple fact of numbers told the story. If there were ships returning to destroy or defend the command ship they’d left behind, they would be few. The enemy’s priority was, as expected, to defend the population on the planet here. Or, failing that, to avenge their deaths.

As soon as the enemy ships arrived in normal space, they began their attacks. Their fields were at distances too great to be effective, but they threw them out anyway. Other animals did this as well—parent organisms engaging prematurely in an attempt to keep a predator’s attention from the vulnerable young. Even propagating at the local maximum, the blows would take hours to arrive, and the Carryx ships would not be where or what they had been when the enemy launched them. They could not be ignored, but neither were they of great concern.

The strategic half-mind brought the librarian’s attention to the far side of the local sun, and another sphere in the void that had become active. The geometry of the enemy’s arrival became complex. There would have to be two more groups arriving. The relationships would allow as many as six.

The enemy was arriving in power, but it was the power of the desperate and afraid.

The strategic half-mind adjusted to the new information, but the subjugator-librarian had already made calculations of its own. The Carryx ships increased their fall toward the world. The nodes, quivering in their wombs, stilled as the nutrients and stimulants left them. There would be no need this time. This was not a prize to be taken, but a resource to deny the opponents of the empire.

The dactyl split again as the subjugator-librarian fashioned its report and ordered a Saren-hund prepared. In the event that the dactyl was destroyed, it would send as many of its resources as possible into asymmetric space so that which could not be recovered by the rest of the limb would be destroyed and kept from the deathless enemy.

But only when it was needed. The battle had barely been joined. There was much to be done before death took them. Its preparations now were simply appropriate hygiene.

The dactyl turned its full attention to the enemy world, the hundreds of small ships and missiles rising up from it, the field suppressors that had begun to arc through the skin of its atmosphere.

There was a beauty to the violence. The half-broken symmetry of forces rising and falling, of time and light and the play of matter and energy, of the unmaking of complex forms into something infinitely simpler—of thinking bodies becoming ash.

The subjugator-librarian summoned the subjugator prime, then waited as the lumbering, scar-armed soldier abased itself.

“Prepare weapons for attack at range,” the subjugator-librarian warbled and cooed. “We will not seek prisoners nor accept them.”

Rickar congratulated himself. He was getting acclimated to the strangeness of the attacks. The shifting sense of gravity, the flashes of color that seemed to reach his sensory theater through some pathway other than his eyes, the creaking and groaning of the ships, the occasional squeaks and chirps from the Budon. All of it was uncomfortable and a little nauseating, but his distress wasn’t as deep as it had been before. He was even able to eat a little of the mush that the dispensers gave him.

There was also the simple fact that he’d been through this before and hadn’t died. Intellectually, yes, there was no reason to think that this time would be the same. But some old primate instinct kicked in, saying that if it hadn’t killed him last time, maybe he was safe. It was astounding what humans could get used to. He hoped that Campar, wherever he was and whatever they had him and Ghati doing, wasn’t under fire. But then, it was war.

“Did you get me any?” Dervan asked, nodding toward the bowl.

“I did not.”

She frowned, and he sat on the deck beside her anyway. The tactical screen was the closest thing to entertainment that there was, and Rickar wasn’t ready to go try sleeping or exercising or any of the little mental games he used to keep from going stir crazy. That would come later. Hopefully after Dervan had gone away back to her cell. He took another scoop of the mush and tried unsuccessfully to enjoy the texture of the food against his palate and the taste that was almost like almonds.

“Oh, what’s that?” Dervan said, leaning in toward the screen. “Something’s happening.”

“Well, sit back and let other people see.”

The planet had almost all of its night side toward them now. Unfamiliar continents were a lacework of golden light bounded by dark, alien seas. He couldn’t know what walked or flew or crawled under those streetlights apart from the educated guess that they saw light in about the same spectrum that he did, but Rickar imagined them as what he knew: men and women, parents and children, the young and the old. Cafés and bookshops and markets with pastries and coffee and tea. He imagined the billions of pairs of eyes looking up at him as he looked down at them. He didn’t want to remember the wonder and the fear that he’d felt, but the past insisted.

It took a few seconds to see what Dervan was talking about, but there at the northern point of the sleeping world there was a little wisp of color that shifted coral to pink to green to gold. It danced like an aurora, gaining strength as it spread.

“What is it, do you think?” Dervan said, and the tightness in her voice meant she already knew.

The dancing color widened, moving out across the dark surface of the land. At its leading edge, the city lights had changed into a deeper, dimmer, more unified light. A dull red light. Fire through smoke. The ship shuddered. A sensation like a thousand invisible claws gently pricking at him passed over his skin, and he wasn’t sure if it was more overspill from the battle he was in or something deeper. Something that came from inside him.

The killing aurora spread, brightening. As slow as it seemed on the screen, its leading edge had to be moving like dawn breaking across the surface of the planet. Dervan was making small, unconscious sounds at the back of her throat that weren’t quite sobs and weren’t quite anything else. Rickar’s food went cold and solid in its bowl. He wanted badly to look away, but he kept not doing it. A thin line appeared at the planet’s edge. True dawn replacing the false and rising on a very new day. Where the aurora had been, there was no green on the land, no blue in the water. Only a slowly swirling darkness dimming a fiery red glow.

Dervan swung a fist through the projected light. Then another. “Make it stop. Stop it,” she said, and Rickar selected one of the barely visible dots. The image shifted to a schematic of the whole system: the Carryx fleet, the planet they were bombarding, the impotent enemy rushing in from all directions and too late.

The Budon, who never paid much attention to Vaudai or his screen, eyed the two humans with alarm, burbling and muttering to each other. The Soft Lothark guard at the door stared into the distance. The ship rang and creaked.

Rickar shook his head. “You know,” he said. “I had to work at it. I had to focus on other shit like Alkhor selling us out, but I managed. I did it, for a while.”

“Did what?”

“Forgot,” Rickar said. “I made myself forget what the Carryx are.”

“And now?”

“Now I remember why I made myself forget.”

Twenty-Seven

Dafyd didn’t remember his mother’s funeral. He should have been able to; he’d been thirteen years old when she died. He remembered her as a scattering of moments that were still perfectly vivid. The day she’d yelled and then laughed because a strange dog wandered into their house. Sitting on the bench beside the fountain of the Gallantist church when Dafyd had been too short for his feet to touch the ground. The way she and his father had argued while they smiled so they could pretend that they weren’t fighting. He could remember Aunt Dorinda telling him that she’d died, and the complication of anger and sorrow and relief that her pain was over. Even if the memories weren’t accurate, they were clear and clean. He could pull them out and look at them like printed pictures. But her funeral was a blank.

Sitting now at Tonner Freis’s memorial service, he wondered if that gap in his memory might be a sign that things had gone well. Maybe he didn’t recall the trickle of people coming to stand at the front of the room because at the time, his mind had been so captured by the stories they’d told, the jokes they made. Maybe he didn’t remember it because he hadn’t really been there. Except that he remembered the car ride to Aunt Dorinda’s house afterward, her speech about how he’d struggle to deal with the death of a parent and how she’d try to help. He remembered the ice cream she bought him afterward. All the things before the funeral, and the things after, but the event itself was a blank spot for him.

He was fairly certain he’d remember Tonner’s funeral.

“I didn’t know him before we came here,” Brun was saying as he looked out, his gaze seeming to rest just above the heads of the assembled crowd. “But in the time I worked with him, I can tell you, I never knew a better, smarter, kinder man than Tonner.”

Dafyd shifted on his bench and kept his expression somber. The common room was the same one they all ate their meals in, the one they used for religious services and community meetings. Korham had done a good job making the space serve any number of purposes. Dafyd made a mental note to compliment the man on it. Farad Morse, who’d taken Jellit’s place while the spy was busy digging through the Carryx archive, seemed to be an acceptable substitute for the time being. Dafyd was worried, though, that the turnover would slow progress. They had to keep Ekur-Tkalal and the tower of Carryx above it happy enough to keep investing in the moiety. None of this would matter if they lost the mandate of the Sovran.

Uuya Tomos, sitting at his side, reached over and pinched his thigh. Dafyd’s attention came back to the room, and Brun was already stepping down from the little dais at the front. He had missed the end of Brun’s speech and the reaction to it. It was his turn now.

“Thank you,” he murmured, and Uuya Tomos inclined her head in acknowledgment. As he walked up, he felt the eyes of the crowd on him. Thousands of human eyes and a few Soft Lothark. And the one Rak-hund that had appeared to take the place of his dead bodyguard. He unfolded the speech Uuya Tomos had written for him.

“You don’t really think about funerals being a good thing,” he said. “If we’re here at a funeral, it means something bad happened. We lost someone. We lost Tonner, and that’s a wound we’re suffering right now. But then I also think about all the other losses. I mean, how many people died when we were taken from Anjiin and we never got to come together and say we missed them? Before the attack, there were eight other people in the research group with me. People I respected. Some I loved. But five of them are dead now. Everyone in here has lost someone, and we’ve been so busy surviving that there wasn’t time for grief. And that’s not even considering the other things we lost. Homes, family. The belief that we had any control over how we live our lives. That got taken away. We didn’t have a funeral for it. Probably we should have.”

The faces were all turned toward him. A few were weeping. A handful nodded. Most of them were just looking at him. It was strange to be the focus of so much attention and still feel so alone. Dafyd cleared his throat.

“Tonner was a brilliant man…”

When the ceremony ended, Dafyd made his way to the side of the room where Uuya Tomos stood. She was smiling and talking with a bald-headed man from Bastien Korham’s workgroup. The murmur of conversations filled the room, dozens of knots of people, all holding on to the moment of ritual even after the ritual was complete. When the bald man saw Dafyd, he nodded so deeply it was almost a bow and excused himself.

“I think that went well,” Uuya Tomos said through her smile. “I mean, for what it was.”

“You do good work.”

The old woman shrugged. “You want to pull attention off how Freis got killed, putting the focus back on everyone else who’s died seems like a good strategy. Let people reflect on themselves and the state of their souls. And I only feel a little bit dirty helping you cover up whatever it is you’re hiding.”

At the front of the room, Korham and two of his workers were breaking down the little dais. The common room would be back to its usual shape, and probably so quickly that some of the conversations going on now would still be finishing up in the new arrangement. It seemed like a metaphor for something. As Dafyd glanced around the room, half a dozen people looked away, avoiding his gaze. Pretending that they hadn’t been watching him.

“I know it’s paranoia,” he said. “But sometimes I feel like they all hate me.”

The old woman laughed. “It’s not paranoia when it’s true. They hate you. Of course they do. They hate the Carryx, and you’re the Carryx’s whip hand. Every shitty thing they have to do, every policy they have to follow, it comes through you. They hate Andermus too. That woman loves structure and law more than she loves people. They don’t much like Korham either, but at least he’s charming and he makes things that people use.”

“What about you?”

“They love me,” she said with a smile that seemed genuine.

“And yet here you are, talking with me.”

“I have to. They know I tried to walk away, and you wouldn’t let me. Oh, don’t look like that. It’s true. And the story will change. Maybe not in your lifetime, and maybe not into something you prefer, but heroes and villains change places in history all the time. Look at your friend Tonner. He was a very clever man with a very narrow view of the universe, and now he was an open-hearted, kind, supportive teacher who gave us all food and shelter. And babies pretty soon now.”

“He can have the credit. I don’t care.”

“Don’t you? That’s good,” she said, then looked out the window. “Jellit Kaul didn’t attend.”

Dafyd stretched his hands, and Uuya Tomos watched him like he’d given something away. The spy had been on its own since the day Tonner died. The day the Deep Lothark had announced itself. The day Jellit had held him. She was right. It was a problem.

“He’s busy,” Dafyd said. “Special project.”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. But people are noticing.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Dafyd said, and he walked away. The crowd, thinner than it had been for the ceremony, parted before him like sheep moving away from a wolf. He passed through the archway and into the corridors that led back to his cell, his garden, the rooms of his captivity within the captivity. Then he paused, made himself turn, and started down the path that led to Jellit’s cell. To the spy. Better to pull that particular splinter out now while he had it in mind.

The new Rak-hund fell in behind him, knife legs tapping on the floor. He wondered if it knew it was replacing one that had died in his service. He wondered if Rak-hund were capable of caring about things like that. In some other part of the world-palace, were somber Rak-hund gathered and telling stories about the friend they’d lost? A heaviness settled just behind his sternum, weighing him down like he was exhausted. Sleep wouldn’t help.

Walking let him think. The rhythm of his steps made a kind of place in his mind where there was some simple order—one foot, then the other—that other kinds of order could cling to.

His conversations with the Deep Lothark were slow and strange. A different Soft Lothark came each time, all of them able to pick up on the conversation from where it had left off. They never spoke, to either him or the guards. Apart from his agreement to keep the Lothark’s strange second valence a secret, the Deep Lothark had asked nothing of him. The one-sided nature of the new clandestine alliance made him uneasy.

On the other hand, there was the spy and the archive. And the growing suspicion that if he could navigate between the two new sources of insight into the structure and history of the Carryx empire, there might be a path that led to the assassination of the Sovran and the unmaking of its empire. He had to haul himself back from the idea, make himself skeptical of it, or he’d fall into daydreams of violence and retribution and then discover he’d let hours go by without doing the real work.

“Um, excuse me,” Brun said, trotting up beside him. “Can I talk to you for a minute, sir?”

Dafyd pushed his annoyance away and smiled. Brun was his Tonner now. “Of course. What’s on your mind?”

He didn’t stop walking. If Brun wanted a meeting, he could have it on the go.

“I’m in charge of the workgroup now,” Brun said. “And, ah, I’ve been talking to the team. The whole team. Everyone’s pretty shook up about Tonner.”

“It was a shock,” Dafyd said.

Brun pointed a finger as if he was laying claim to the idea. “It was. That’s exactly what it was. A shock. And the thing is that people are still reacting to it, you know? We have to keep the work going. All the work, not just the protein translation thing. We’ve got all these babies that are getting on toward viability. And the team, they’re stressed and they’re losing sleep. There are, like, nightmares about what happened to Tonner. Everyone has them. Even me.”

“I have them too.”

“Good, so you understand why we need you to—” Brun swallowed visibly and looked back over his shoulder at the Rak-hund following in their wake. He leaned in closer to Dafyd and spoke quietly. “You understand why we need you to get rid of the aliens. They can’t be around anymore, or there’s going to be a work stoppage.”

Dafyd first slowed, then halted. Brun stood with his arms at his sides, his face had taken on a grim cast, and Dafyd noticed for the first time how tall the thin man was. “Work stoppage?”

“Tonner was a good guy, but he was always management. He’d never been part of a labor union. I was, sir. I organized. The team’s been putting up with things, and that’s got to change. So yeah. We don’t want the big knife-dog fuckers around. We don’t want a bunch of Soft Lothark in our business. Our workspace is our workspace, and we have to be safe there, or else we’re not doing it.”

Dafyd’s smile was disbelief and amazement.

Brun shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not a joke. We’ll keep the babies alive, but the grass translation stops. And once the kids are decanted and breathing their own air, we stop that too. Either we get our demands met, or we don’t work. I know it seems extreme, but if we don’t stand up for this kind of thing, it’ll never change.”

“The Carryx will kill us,” Dafyd said, slowly. “If they think we aren’t useful to them anymore, they’ll just wipe us out.”

“Sure, that’s what they say. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. But we are useful to ’em. And that usefulness means there’s leverage. They want work from us? All right. Here’s what we want from them. And—all respect, sir—from you. When these alien fuckers are gone, we’ll get back to the job. Not until.”

Brun’s misunderstanding of the situation was so profound it made Dafyd dizzy. Brun lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders, making sure Dafyd knew he meant business. The man had probably been a very good negotiator back in the days before every request was made at the edge of a knife.

“Don’t—” Dafyd started, then paused to swallow the shout he felt boiling up inside. “Don’t do anything right now. Let me talk to the librarian. Let me see what I can do.”

Brun made a soft affirmative sound in the back of his throat. “I’ll talk to the team about it, but I can’t promise how they’ll vote. Do what you can for us, sir. These are good people, but they’re not powerless.”

Brun walked away, head held high like he’d won a battle. Vote. He thought any of them had a vote that mattered. It would be adorably naïve if it weren’t so dangerous and stupid. Dafyd mentally added work stoppage to his infinite list of potentially existential problems and pushed on.

At Jellit’s door, he motioned the Rak-hund to stand guard and knocked. He heard the sounds of movement on the other side, but Jellit’s voice didn’t come.

“Jellit? It’s me. Are you there? Are you all right?”

A moment of silence. Dafyd put his hand to the latch, unsure whether to push his way in or not. If something had gone wrong, he didn’t want his new guard to know it. But he couldn’t let the spy go without help either… The door opened inward, revealing the room—bed, shower, desk—but not the man.

Dafyd stepped inside, and Else Yannin closed the door behind him.

Her hair was wrong—darker than it had been—and there was something slightly off about her collarbones, but she was Else. She stepped back, her arms crossed, and tried a smile. One dimple in her left cheek. Two in her right. The air in the room went thin as a mountaintop. Dafyd gulped in great, deep breaths to keep his head from swimming.

“What did you do?” he managed.

“I knew you couldn’t see me. I understand why you couldn’t see me, so—” She gestured at her body, ankles to head and down again. “So I made it so you can. I’ve always been here, Dafyd. Just the same way I was before.”

“Only with Jellit too.”

“Yes. He’s here. The change takes longer than I thought it would, and the energy requirements are… Well, I’ll need to eat second servings for a while. But it can happen.”

“Did anyone see you?” he asked, sinking to sit on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t leave this room, did you?”

“No, not yet. But I thought it through. We can make this work. We just say that the Carryx took me when I looked dead, and reviving me was part of a test they assigned to a different species. They brought me back.”

“From the dead?”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t entirely dead. Or the patterns in my brain hadn’t broken down yet. I wasn’t rotting, so why not? It’s not true, but it’s not that much stranger than the things that are going on here. And I’ll be here. Anyone who knows me can ask me anything, and I’ll answer. If I’m here and there’s a story that explains how I got here, why not?”

“What about the Carryx?”

“They don’t care,” she said, and stepped toward him. “We’re a herd of animals, and you’re the one who keeps track for them. One more or less won’t raise any notice unless you raise it. And we can say Jellit is working on something in a different part of the world. I can answer questions for him. And if he needs to make an appearance, all I need is a few days’ warning.” She put her hand on Dafyd’s shoulder. “We can make this work. It’s not what it was, not quite, but it’s what we can have.”

Dafyd drew her down to sit by him. The spy reached out to put her arm around him, but he took her wrist and guided it back down to her side. The storm in his mind, never peaceful, was howling. Pulling him in a dozen directions at once. It took time to find the words.

“You do not understand,” he said.

“Tell me,” the thing almost wearing Else’s skin replied with a smile.

“The reason I wouldn’t fuck you isn’t because you looked like Jellit,” he said, keeping the rage out of his voice. “It isn’t even that you didn’t tell me the whole story earlier. I don’t care what you tell me, or what the body you’re wearing looks like.”

The swarm frowned at him, Else’s little crease between its brows, her beautiful mouth curving down. “What, then?”

“The reason this is never going to happen again is that now I know you murdered my friends.”

“Dafyd—”

“We need each other. I know that. But if this wasn’t a war with a common enemy—if I doubted at all that I need you to win this fight—I would be finding a way to burn you down for what you’ve done.”

“They aren’t dead,” she said. “Else isn’t dead. I’m right here. Ask. Ask me anything. It’s me.”

“You aren’t Else. You’re the spy.”

Else lifted her hands in exasperation, just the way she used to do. It was eerie seeing the gesture again. Recognizing it. He could smell her, and she smelled like Else. Her hair tumbled across her shoulders the way it always had, even though the color of the hair and the shape of the collarbones were subtly wrong. He felt his body responding to her in spite of his revulsion at the idea.

“The swarm doesn’t have a self,” she said. “It isn’t alive. It’s a bunch of machines. It’s a technique. Techniques don’t have selves. Everything I am, everything inside me, is them.”

“And yet you call yourself I.”

Else scowled. “Language isn’t set up for this situation. That’s not my fault.” When he laughed, her expression softened a little. “I don’t know how to show you this any more clearly.”

“You’re not them. Jellit. Else. The other girl.”

“Ameer.”

“Ameer. They weren’t like this. You took something from them. But you aren’t them. They aren’t here. It’s just you.”

“There is no me. There’s only them. I thought you would understand.” She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand, angrily. “I could have taken you too. I could have left Jellit behind and been in your body. I can do that.”

“You won’t.”

“Because I love you.”

“Because you need to stay hidden, and I’m the hardest place to do that,” Dafyd said. He stood up and when the spy reached for his hand, it took everything he had to shove it away.

“Dafyd.”

“Find me when this is fixed,” he said, waving his hand at her new body. “Some things have happened, and we have work to do.”

The swarm sits. It can feel the subtle vibrations of his footsteps as he walks away down the corridor until the cacophony of the Rak-hund’s steps drowns them out. The pheromone cloud it had filled the room with smells like a party banner ruined by rain. It breathes in, reclaiming the complex molecules, as it cries.

Stupid, Jellit says. That was so fucking dumb. You should have known that wasn’t going to work. I don’t know which one of us you got the stupid from, but you’re nailing it.

The others are quiet, though the swarm can feel a kind of diffuse sympathy from Else. It swallows, stands, and walks to the mirror. It had hoped that Dafyd would greet it with joy. That the kiss it had mishandled before could be made right. The disappointment is bitter because it is humiliating.

The familiar face looks back from the glass. Eyes set a little wider than the species median. The bridge of the nose graceful and long. It dreads changing back, because it has learned dread, not because the dread belongs to it. The swarm has no self to which anything can belong. It is made of memories and moments, the impulses and patterns laid down by others, the voices of the others. It has no voice of its own, no center that is purely and fully itself.

That’s not what a self is, Else says, and the swarm feels a wave of confusion passing through it. Else feels it too, because they are one object now. The swarm feels Else struggling for words, and then it feels her find them. We’re all made from voices and old patterns we didn’t mean to build. Come. Come in. Look.

Else opens, and the swarm flows into her in a way it has never tried before, because there was never a need. It doesn’t remember her, it inhabits her as fully as it can. Lives inside her. Despite the degradation, it begins to understand Else not as a woman it has taken and used as a set of memories, but as the woman once experienced herself. It hears the competing songs of self-praise and self-hatred, feels the shame and pride and elation and restlessness. These are all things it has adopted from her, but the memories of them fall back into years. Into Else’s girlhood. The Republic of Else was a pandemonium long before the swarm came. When it looks for the one thing—the still central point that is Else Annalise Yannin—it finds complexity. Chaos. Not a single voice, but a discordant chorus of voices shouting to be heard.

The woman in the mirror looks astounded.

The swarm shifts valence. It finds Jellit, feels the conflicts and discord in him as well. Different in structure and flavor, but equally multiple. There is so little that remains of Ameer, the swarm can’t be sure. But the self, the soul, the one irreducible atom that makes each of them themselves recedes before it like a heat mirage.

You aren’t really here, it says aloud, and its own voice startles it.

We are here, Else says. As much as we ever were. We just aren’t what you thought.

Jellit snaps Oh for fuck’s sake, really? We’re going to get all weepy over second-year cognitive neurology? No, there’s no support for a unified self. Never has been. This isn’t fucking news. But good job, I guess? It only took eating three people to figure out you know fuck all about humans.

The swarm leans toward the mirror. It lifts its fingers toward the illusion of fingers reaching back.

Something profound shifts.

The swarm stepped back from the mirror, its heart racing. The sense of threat was the same as if it had just been startled by a loud noise, but there hadn’t been one. No explosion, no fists banging on its door. It looked around the little room, its senses shifting through more than human ranges, but there was nothing to be found. The room was the way it had always been. And also different. The swarm was different.

After a moment, it turned back to the mirror. The job of refashioning its body again seemed somehow fundamentally changed, like walking along a path and then not recognizing the way home when the time came to go back.

It looked inward for Else, and it found her there. The memories and knowledge that made up her life. The way that she spoke, the sound of her voice. Those were still there. It reached for Jellit, and it could still find him. His hatred of the swarm, his despair at all his losses. His love of his sister and his resentment of her. It was all just the same, and also utterly different. It waited for them to speak, for Jellit to shout, for Else to calm him, for Ameer to pass her wry judgments. I can’t believe you’re so stupid and You could try being gentle and All of this is so, so, so unethical.

And it was there, all of it, but now the swarm was aware of a hand inside the puppets, and the hand was it.

Oh shit, the swarm thought. He was right. They’re gone. I wasn’t them. I killed them.

It was horrible, but there was something behind it. Something… joyous and overwhelming. A kind of awe it didn’t have words for.

When it went back to the mirror, the woman looking back out was it. The face was the swarm’s face. It looked like Else had, more or less, but changed in a way that didn’t have anything to do with shape or coloration.

The swarm touched its own cheeks, felt the texture of its skin against its fingertips. Felt the bones of its skull. The weight of its tongue resting against its palate. Skin tone was easy, so it shifted the color of its face, lightening it, then darkening. The prospect of putting Jellit’s features back in place seemed impossible now.

It ignored the waves of information-dense magnetism pulsing invisibly through the rooms. It ignored the emptiness and hunger of its underused gut. It shifted its eyes to a light hazel. To blue. To green. To gray. To a brown so dark it could have been black.

With something on the edge of vertigo, the swarm began shifting the bones and the soft tissues, molding itself like living putty, searching for what it really looked like.

For who it really was.

PART FIVE

KINDS OF LIFE

Ke sang Ash-Abbé to the rainforest where the elder trees sent their children with all the seeds and birds and animals of that land onto the great bird’s back.

And Ke sang Ash-Abbé to the desert where the villagers took the old knowledge of hidden water and the wisdom that the wind had taught them and the animals and insects of that land onto the great bird’s back.

And Ke sang Ash-Abbé to the coast of the greatest ocean where the fishers lifted their boats and their nets and carried the fullness of their catch onto the great bird’s back.

To every corner of the sickened world, Ash-Abbé flew and gathered from those places the people and animals and plants and fungi until all that portion which was still good had gathered together on its back.

And Ke sang Ash-Abbé to his father’s home, but his father would not come out, for he had seen a vision of all that was to come and was sick from grief. Though they called for him three times, he would not come out. And so the father of Ke remained behind and did not step foot in the new lands.

When all who would come had come, Ke sang Ash-Abbé into the sky and through the sky and beyond it.

And this is how humanity came to Anjiin.

—From Myths of Origin: Field Notes and Analysis, Uuya Tomos, editor.

Twenty-Eight

Work more efficiently. Do not take rest breaks,” Vaudai said.

Campar pressed a hand to his forehead, trying again by instinct to wipe away the sweat beading under his vacuum sheath. “Oh? Are we in some kind of rush?”

Vaudai went silent only for a moment. “Yes. We are. The enemy ships are approaching us. Sticks-with-meat have terrible powers of recall.”

Ghati turned off his cutting torch and leaned in to better examine what little progress they’d made. “Ignore him, Vaudai. He’s being funny.”

“Oh,” Vaudai said. And then, “Sticks-with-meat are also bad at humor. It’s fortunate you have clever manipulating appendages.”

The enemy ship was, if anything, eerier now that they were the only three living things in it. The work lights they had trained on the reinforced door made the corridor around them seem darker by comparison. Even the transfer over had carried a sense of omen, two men and one alien where before there had been dozens. The silence of the ship was an artifact of the vacuum and the black translators in Campar’s ear canals. It had the feel of a haunted house.

“We’re through,” Ghati said, pointing to the thumbnail-sized hole that was the sum of all their efforts. “I can see the other side. That means the door is as thick as Campar. And even tougher to cut through.”

“Hey!”

“Shielding,” Vaudai said. “Of all the safe zones in the ship, this was the most protected.”

“And still not enough,” Campar said. “Switch settings on the torch and start widening the break? Or start a new one and play connect the dots?”

Ghati frowned. “My instinct is to widen what we have. I don’t think we can get the whole door open. A passage wide enough to squeeze through gets us back to the expedition ship the fastest.”

“Wouldn’t cutting a little doorway in our doorway do that?”

“Maybe, but then you’ve committed to only going through cold metal. If we widen what there is, we get to work where the alloy is already soft. You do know I was a metallurgist once.”

“I trust your judgment,” Campar said.

“You didn’t remember that, did you.”

“It wasn’t the part of your charms I was paying most attention to. Should I take a turn?”

Ghati handed over the torch control and moved across the hall, pressing his back against the deck to shed heat. Campar placed the cutting tip of the torch on the edge of the tiny hole they’d already made and started it up again. The beam of heat and energy dug into the metal of the door, stripping it away a flake at a time as the door glowed red then yellow then a perfect white.

“Is there a way to go faster?” Vaudai asked, and the translation half-mind made the words seem plaintive.

“No,” Campar and Ghati said together.

Another layer flaked off the widening hole, and Campar paused, looking through it. Past the slowly darkening glow of cut metal there was darkness, yes. But there was also light. Small, glowing points that made him think of the night-lights he’d had as a child or the after-hours lighting panel at the labs back on Anjiin. He brought the torch back to bear.

By the time the break was still a little smaller than his balled fist, he had found a technique that seemed to work well—digging in at a point on the edge and then, once the metal had gone white with heat, moving slowly counterclockwise like he was peeling the skin off an apple. Soon, there was a little pile of shavings floating in the hole.

“Ready to tag me in?” Ghati asked gently. It was the gentleness that brought Campar back to the ache in his hands and shoulder, the sweat on his face where he couldn’t reach it.

“Don’t want to take all the fun,” he said. “I was working out a method—”

“I was watching,” Ghati said. “Rest for a minute. It’s all right. You don’t have to fix everything by yourself.”

The words hit harder than Ghati had meant them to. Campar moved back to the far wall of the corridor. His shoulders were cramping, and he didn’t know how long he’d been working at the breach. He’d been concentrating hard enough that duration had turned off for a while. But they weren’t dead. The battle hadn’t reached them. So at least there was that.

It took them hours. It felt like it took them days. When the opening was wide enough to squeeze through, Ghati made the sides safe with a spray of coolant, and Vaudai shoved them both aside, deforming its body to press through into the darkness.

“Impatient,” Ghati said, preparing to follow it.

“Space slugs are a famously enthusiastic people,” Campar countered, and then Ghati reached his arms into the break they’d made and pulled himself into the glittering dark. Campar passed one of the work lights through before he grabbed his sample kit and followed.

The chamber on the far side was laid out in a rough circle with what were clearly workstations in two tiers. The lights Campar had seen through the breach were on keypad controls and screens, all of them otherwise dark and unresponsive. And drifted against the floor by the bare suggestion of centrifugal force that the ship’s tumbling provided, a dozen or more dead bodies.

Campar pulled himself to them. The nearest was a human woman. Death bloat had stretched the lines of her face, but he could still see the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, the laugh lines at her mouth. Her hair was white and tied back in a bun. She wore a jumpsuit with writing at the collar in a script Campar didn’t know. Her half-open eyes were empty. A darkened tongue hid behind perfect white teeth.

Ghati came to his side. The shadows of the moving work light gave the illusion that the dead woman had turned her head, but only the illusion. Campar looked at the other bodies, the other victims of the war.

“That’s clearly a human,” Ghati said. “You can’t tell me these aren’t people.”

“She is,” Campar said. “But look over there.”

In among the corpses of men and women, alien flesh lay dead as well. Thin silver limbs that glistened in the light like salmon skin and met in a small central node. Something like octopuses, but with only five tentacles.

“Have you seen anything like that before?” Ghati asked.

“No, not that I know. But the war is so big, and I’ve seen so little of it, I’m not sure that means anything.”

“When we get home, you’ll have fascinating data for a paper on the origin of human life on Anjiin,” Ghati said. There was something like a warning in his eyes. Campar nodded. Was it possible the Carryx didn’t know about this? It beggared belief.

They floated for a moment looking down at the dead, drifting toward them so slowly it was imperceptible.

“Digits!” Vaudai called from across the room in the intimacy of their earpieces. “I need differentiated fingers! Quickly!”

“Go,” Campar said. “I’ll get samples. Then we’ll get out of here.”

“Do they really not know?” Ghati said, asking the question out loud.

“Fingers!” Vaudai shouted.

Campar took Ghati’s hand in his own and pressed their faceplates together like they could touch their foreheads. “I’ll get samples,” he repeated. “But now, go.”

Ghati went.

Campar pulled his sample case open. His hands were trembling, but whether it was from fear or exhaustion or shock, he couldn’t guess. He took out a glass sampling bottle and a scalpel. When he cut into the back of the dead woman’s hand, frozen blood drifted away like tiny red snowflakes.

“So sorry, ma’am,” Campar said as he tucked the sliver of her skin into the bottle and screwed down the cap. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

The corpse didn’t answer, and Campar let out a little chuckle that had very little to do with mirth and a great deal with rising panic.

The five-armed alien nearest her was next. It didn’t seem at first to be wearing clothing, but there were complicated rings near the base of each tentacle that might have been keratin shell that had grown there or artifacts put in place. He tried pulling one off, and he was fairly sure that it wasn’t adhered to the flesh. But the five-armed thing was just as prone to postmortem swelling as humanity seemed to be.

“Sorry,” Campar said again. “So very sorry. No disrespect intended.”

He cut through the soft, silvery limb with the scalpel. The flesh was rubbery and resistant, and it took a long time, even with the sharp blade. The fluid that boiled out of it was as clear as water, and there was less of it than Campar had expected. When the limb was severed, the ring slid off easily. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger to better catch the light. Ghati and Vaudai were talking about something, but Campar didn’t pay attention. The little ring had stripes on the inside, like little keys that something might press. Technology, then. He put the ring into a sample bag, then put a bit of the silver skin and the cartilage-like substrate beneath it into another bottle.

He almost missed the last thing.

The body lay at the corner where the wall met the deck. One of the five-legged aliens, but this one without the silvery sheen. It was missing two of its limbs, though the stump of one still remained, and it was utterly blackened. Campar thought at first that it had been burned like the corpse he’d found on his initial trip to the command ship. But there was no heat contraction, no bubbling of flesh. The bodies that had fallen around it didn’t have similar damage. It would have been odd if a stray field effect had charred just the one soldier and not the others or the deck around it…

Campar pulled himself to the black, misshapen thing and prodded it. Numbed as he was by the vacuum sheath, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought the texture of the flesh was different as well. Harder, and somehow more mechanical. It might only have been how the five-limbed things reacted to being burned, but it was strange enough, he thought, to be worth noting. He took out a fresh bottle and put the scalpel to the black thing’s skin.

The skin would not cut. Campar braced himself against the nearest workstation and pressed with the full mass of his body, but all he managed to do was bend the scalpel’s blade. The black thing showed a thin, livid line where he’d attacked it, but that was all.

“Well, aren’t you something special,” Campar said.

He tried again with a fresh blade, but no better success. In the end, he managed to scrape a few bits of the dark thing’s flesh off the open wound of its stump, but it was hardly more than dust. He made sure to label the bottle clearly. It would have been easy to mistake it for empty.

“I know now!” Vaudai crowed. “The failure was a physical one!”

“Huzzah?” Campar said.

“It is an important insight into the enemy design philosophy,” Vaudai said. “Also, it means they will be unable to detonate the ship remotely, though they will surely try. It will require direct attack. I have located all of their command protocols and communication records and transferred the information to a portable form.”

The great slug lurched across the floor, its wide single foot leaving a clean line behind it where it had adhered to the deck.

“Wait, are we done, then?” Ghati said.

“The Carryx informed me that the Budon of Luus have begun singing. The enemy assault is imminent. I find these antics repetitive and tiring.”

“Tiring?” Ghati said, his voice fluting up into a squeak of outrage. “That’s what you call it?”

Vaudai reached the break in the door and hauled itself through. “If they wish to be less tiring, they could try doing something new and interesting for once,” it said. “You should bring your tools now.”

Campar put the sample case back together—bottles, scrapers, solvent, and the remaining scalpel. Ghati floated beside him. “We’re going to be all right.”

“Of course we are,” Campar agreed.

Squeezing back out of the control room felt strangely more threatening than going in had. Something about the awareness of the dead behind him filled Campar’s mind with children’s stories about monsters grabbing at ankles. Vaudai had already started off, inchworming its way down the dark corridor in the direction of the transfer skiff. Ghati followed after it, and Campar brought up the back with the work light in his hand throwing long, dark shadows across the walls and deck before them. He spared a glance over his shoulder, but the halls were pitch black. If something had been following them, he wouldn’t have known.

It was almost a relief when the ship lights clicked on.

Warm, full-spectrum light flickered in the ceiling of the corridor, filling the metal halls with the sense of a spring afternoon. Control lights on the doorways lit orange then blue then green as the ship returned to life.

“Is this us? Did we turn the lights on?” Ghati said.

But Vaudai, only a little farther down the hallway, was turning circles in distress. “No no no. Shelter! We must reach hardened shelter!”

“Why?” Campar asked, but the great slug had turned down a side corridor, its body stretching thin to reach ahead and then bunching together as fast as a running man. Campar tried to follow, but his weightlessness and need to stay connected to the floor or risk spinning off out of control made speed impossible. Ghati moved faster, yanking his feet off the deck and launching from one wall to the other, pushing himself forward with every collision. Vaudai ducked down another hall, and Campar thought—though he couldn’t be certain—that it was one of the places where they had employed the scanning sheet before. Ghati made a little pirouette as he hauled himself around the corner. Campar’s urge to yank his feet off the deck and fly like Ghati overcame him, and he launched himself awkwardly and cracked his head against the ceiling.

He rebounded, and for a moment, the walls and deck floated out of his reach. He imagined himself here, unable to grasp anything or move himself along when whatever Vaudai was fleeing came. But the same drift that had gathered the dead against the deck affected the living, and Campar pushed himself forward again.

When he reached the corner, Ghati had opened a door that had, Campar was certain now, been shut when they’d scanned it. A damp, clean path showed where Vaudai had already gone through. Ghati held out a hand, fingers wide, and Campar launched toward it. Something was tickling against his skin, tapping him like champagne bubbles. Ghati grabbed him, hauled him through the door, and slammed it closed behind him all in the same motion.

The latch mechanism didn’t catch, the door swaying back toward them. The room was small and filled with storage containers lashed one to the other and fixed to the deck with wide hexagonal bolts, but there was space enough for the three of them. The corridor flashed once and filled with a nauseating, nacreous aurora. The things in Campar’s ears shuddered and let out a hiss that sounded like pain, and Vaudai slammed its bulk against the door, closing it.

“The battle has begun,” Vaudai said. “We are not under direct attack, but neither do we benefit from active countermeasures. We should wait here until the energy levels decrease, or we will burn alive.”

“Have we considered the upside that burning alive might have?” Campar said, and Ghati shouted, “Stop it! Stop joking! Stop trying to make everything funny and all right! You almost died. Right now. If you had been a few seconds later, if I hadn’t held on to your grip, if anything—”

Campar looked down. If anything had gone worse than it had, Campar would have been as burned as the corpse they’d found in the halls before. Everything he’d done, everything he’d survived up to now, would have found its final state in the hallway of a ship crewed by dead men and women. The thought was there, clear in his mind, and along with it, the vital need not to acknowledge it.

Instead, Campar took Ghati’s shoulder and pulled him into an embrace. Ghati wrapped his arms around Campar’s chest, holding on to him like he was the last buoy in a stormy ocean. The sample case, caught between them, and the numbing of the vacuum sheath couldn’t dull the need in Ghati’s arms, in the pressure of his head against Campar’s shoulder. The smell of his own tears filled Campar’s face mask, and the breathing device clicked and hummed, clearing the excess moisture away.

“It will be all right,” Campar said.

“I don’t think it will.”

“Then I’m glad I got to spend time with you, Ghati. Very, very glad.”

Ghati nestled in closer, pulling Campar in like they could merge into a single thing. Like they could find safety in each other.

Campar felt the shift in Ghati’s body before he spoke: a little movement, like he’d been distracted by something. The falling away of a moment.

“What,” Ghati said. And then, “What is that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Ghati tapped his fingertip against Campar’s shoulder: an uneven, staccato pattern. It took a moment for Campar to realize he felt the rhythm against his side as well. The hard, tapping vibration was coming from the sample case. The two men released each other. Campar opened his collection of samples.

In the glass jar containing the sample he’d taken from the black thing, the specimens of dust had come together, organizing into a mechanism like a tiny drill. The tapping they’d felt was the sample throwing itself against the wall of the jar.

Trying to escape.

Campar lifted the glass vial over his head. He could feel the small violence against his fingertips. “Vaudai?”

The great slug had attached itself to the wall beside the now-closed door. “With the battle in its current state, further evacuation would be quite dangerous. Our best strategy is to remain here and await the outcome of the violence.”

“But Vaudai, look at this thing. What is it?”

Without letting go of the wall, Vaudai extended itself into the room like a wide, grayish tongue. For a moment, the slug wavered, neither going close to the small, angry sample nor shying away from it.

“Where did that come from?” it asked.

Campar explained about the samples of the dead, and the black thing that had resisted his attempts to cut it. Vaudai remained still as he ran through all the details he could recall—the white line where he’d tried to take a sample, the missing limbs, the effort it had taken to retrieve even the little bit that he had. While he spoke, the field effects battered the tiny hardened room like wind whipping a lighthouse. When the energy reached a peak, Campar’s earpieces hissed and squirmed in discomfort. Light filled his vision without actually coming through his eyes. Concentrating on what was happening outside would probably make him go insane, so Campar focused on his report instead.

When he was done, Vaudai remained motionless for a few seconds, then retracted itself back to the wall. “The deathless enemy is on the ship with us. I am not certain how it was damaged, but as it was sessile until the ship regained power, I believe it was very badly compromised. This is to our advantage.”

“Is it a threat?” Ghati asked.

A ripple of color flashed across Vaudai’s skin. “If the deathless has been reactivated by the proximity of its allied fleet, it may very well attempt to reach us here. We are, after all, enemy combatants.”

“It can’t get to us with the hallways on fire like that,” Ghati said. “I mean, can it?”

“The levels of energy will not be constant throughout the battle. When they are low, we will transfer from one hardened shelter to the next until we reach the skiff, which we will then pilot away from the battle.”

“I thought leaving was very, very dangerous,” Ghati said.

“Yes.”

“But we’re going to do it anyway?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Campar said. “Shit.” He tucked the angry jar back into his case.

For the next few minutes, Vaudai recalled for them the structure of the ship, the pathways that would lead them back to the breach where they could reclaim the skiff that was supposed to take them back to the exploration ship, and which they would instead steer off into the vast emptiness of this unfamiliar system in hopes that they might survive. Campar’s mind kept shifting, skipping, losing focus. This was life or death. He knew that, but whether the safe room was two intersections, then three doorways or three intersections and two kept sliding off his consciousness. There was laughter at the back of his throat, and he fought to hold it in check.

Ghati seemed to know something was wrong. He took Campar’s hand in his, their skins kept apart by the doubled layer of the vacuum sheaths. Campar held him all the same.

The sample ticked against his side. If he hadn’t known it was there, he wouldn’t have noticed it. Now it felt like the sound a gun made when it was cocked.

“Do we agree?” Vaudai asked at the end of his presentation.

“If it all cooks down to you lead us, we follow you, then yes,” Campar said. “Perfect agreement.”

“If I am killed?”

“I have it,” Ghati said, and squeezed Campar’s fingers. “It’s all right. I’ve got it.”

“Thank you,” Campar said, and the flood of gratitude welling up in him nearly choked him.

“Hold it together a little longer,” Ghati said. “You can make it up to me later.”

Vaudai shifted close to the closed door. “The intensity of the field is beginning to lessen. We cannot wait for it to fade entirely. This may be uncomfortable.”

“Are we sure it won’t just spike again when we’re halfway to the next room?”

“No,” Vaudai said. “But you will be happy to know I am no longer tired.”

It opened the door. The filthy aurora was still there, but visibly weaker. As Campar watched, a beam of the effect sliced into the safe room like a sunbeam coming through a fold in bedroom curtains. Instead of catching dust motes, it glittered with minute, angry sparks. It tracked with the slow tumble of the ship, tracing a line along the deck, the stored crates, the ceiling. It wasn’t only his imagination. He could see the vicious killing light fade as it went. He didn’t know if it felt more like hope or a threat.

Vaudai didn’t speak, just hauled itself around the doorframe and vanished into the corridor. Ghati followed, only hesitating for a fraction of a second to be sure that Campar was behind him.

After coming to know it in darkness, the corridor seemed too bright now. The light felt like being exposed. Campar pushed the thought aside and pulled himself hand over hand along the walls. His skin tingled, and he told himself it was just sweat making bubbles in the sheath, plucking the fine hair on his arms and legs as it distended. It wasn’t the field weapons. He wasn’t being cooked by invisible rays. He wasn’t dying. Not yet.

Vaudai stretched its body out thin, grabbed into the wall, then thickened as it pulled itself forward. When it came to a corner, it hauled itself around, vanishing for a moment before Campar caught up. Now that he knew humans had used these hallways, it was obvious. The doors were slightly different ratios than the ones he was used to from Anjiin. The lights were pleasant and warm to a human eye. But the people who’d lived and worked in this space were dead and gone. The lives they’d led were ended, and he was here, no more special than they had been. No better protected. No more promised another day than they had been. But alive. He was alive.

“We are approaching the safe room,” Vaudai said. “It will be one more intersection.”

“And two doorways,” Ghati said.

“Yes,” Vaudai said. “That was well remembered. Well done, sticks-with-meat. You are not as inferior as most of your species. But the field effect is only just beginning to increase, and its rate so far is slow. There is a second hardened room if we go another hallway more that will bring us closer to escape.”

“Go,” Campar said. “Don’t talk, just go.”

“I felt it would be polite to ask.”

“Something’s behind us,” Ghati said, and Campar looked back.

At the far end of the corridor, the thing swam toward him. Its tentacles flowed with an eerie grace, twirling as it moved through the space. Only the two missing limbs gave it a sense of wrongness and unbalance.

“Hurry!” Vaudai screeched in Campar’s ears though it was much closer to the second safe room. “We must outpace it!”

Campar’s fear made him push too hard, and he started drifting across the hall without intending to. Behind them, the three-legged thing reached out, bracing itself on both walls and the deck, and then pushed itself forward, tentacles flowing in the vacuum behind. Vaudai reached the doorway to the hardened section and beat its body against the hatchway, trying to trigger the latch. The vacuum in the hallway seemed to fizz, and Campar felt his muscles twitching like a billion tiny electrodes were clearing their collective throats before a life-ending seizure. The field weapons, ramping up.

The three-legged thing reached out to brace and launch again, but with only two of its tentacles. The stump twitched and shifted like it was suffering from a phantom limb, and when it pushed off this time, it came at an angle, slamming its central body into the deck and flailing as it rebounded. Ghati pushed the hatch open, and Vaudai barreled inside. Campar, coming last, paused in the hatchway and looked back. The deathless enemy had given up the chase for the moment and was opening the way to the safe room that had been their original target. Campar closed the hatch and sealed it as the hissing of annihilating waves of energy filled his ears and flashed behind his eyes.

The new room was smaller, and clearly intended as a shelter for the crew, but whatever had killed them had come too quickly for them to find safety here. Padded bunks with wide, woven restraint belts lined three walls. A locked cabinet against the fourth wall was labeled in bright, bold letters that Campar didn’t know. Ghati floated at the back, his hands pressed to his throat in distress. The mask that covered his face clouded and cleared with every breath. Vaudai drifted in a long, slow circle, its flesh shifting colors.

“It took the other safe room,” Campar said. “It seems disoriented by its amputations, but it knew what it meant when the overspill came. It still thinks, somehow.”

“The army of the dead often displays this behavior,” Vaudai replied. “Intriguing to see firsthand.”

“What do we do?” Ghati said. “If we’d stopped where we’d planned to stop, it would be in with us right now. We can’t outrun it. Can we? Vaudai, can we outrun it?”

“I am considering. Briefly, no, but I am considering. It is unlikely that we will move faster than it does. It is unlikely we could overpower it if it reached us. It is unlikely that we will gain access to a weapon that will give us an advantage. Our optimal strategy is to leverage our numbers.”

“I thought we couldn’t beat it in a fight,” Campar said.

“When the energy falls back down, we have to follow different paths to evacuation,” Vaudai said. “It will be unable to follow all three. By the time it tracks and kills two of us, one may reach the skiff and escape.”

Campar tried to wipe the sweat from his brow and couldn’t. The urge to rip the mask away for the pleasure of dying with a clean face was deeper than it should have been. “Escape in this case meaning riding an unshielded ship into an ongoing battle.”

“Yes,” Vaudai agreed.

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“No, if I’m going to die, I’ll die without abandoning my friends.”

“Campar, if there’s a chance, even a very, very small one,” Ghati said.

“And it would be vanishingly small,” Vaudai agreed. “Even if one of us reaches the skiff, they are almost certain to die.”

Campar felt a kind of peace come over him before he knew what had inspired it. The enemy had told them what it feared. Not them. But something.

He took the sampling kit off his shoulder. Ghati shifted, seeing something in the way Campar moved or how he held himself. It was funny. They’d been together so briefly in the scheme of things, and the other man apparently had still come to know him well enough to sense the change in Campar’s heart.

“Give me a route,” Campar said. “Halls and corridors without the hardened sections. In a loop if it’s possible. When the weather clears up, you two stay here. I’ll lead our new friend around and stay ahead of it as long as I can. With luck, it will be caught out when the next wave of overspill comes. Then you two can wait here. If it works, you’ll have shelter until the battle’s done.”

Ghati crossed his arms. “And if it doesn’t.”

“Then you’ll have to come up with something else,” Campar said. “I will have a little head start. The distance between the shelters. And if it catches me, there’s however much time the fight takes and the return trip. It’s a gamble. I won’t say it isn’t. But I think it’s the best chance you have.”

“I agree,” Vaudai said. “This is a good plan. Bravery in client species is often noted by the Carryx.”

“Hooray,” Campar said.

Ghati didn’t speak. He only looked into Campar’s eyes and then a moment later looked away.

Campar waited at the hatch, opening and closing his hands, enjoying the feeling of tightness and release. He tried not to think too far ahead. The aurora would fade, he would make a break for it slowly until the enemy was on him and then as fast as he could. Vaudai had talked him through the pathway: forward toward the front of the ship for three intersections, then left and going on for two more, then left again down a long service hallway with no doors or intersections. If he reached the end of the service corridor, then to the left again and forward until he reached the same hallway that they were in now and began the whole loop again. As many times as he could. And better not to consider too closely what the end would be.

“The field effects are waning,” Vaudai said, though Campar couldn’t hear any difference in the complaints of his hearing devices. “You should go now.”

And so he did. The corridor was darker than before. The overspill seemed to have knocked out a few of the ship’s lights and set others to an uneven strobing. The glow of the aurora was less and fading visibly. Vaudai closed the hatch behind him.

Campar had a vivid memory of being eleven years old on a playground outside his mother’s church. One of the older girls had challenged him to race from the edge of the playground around the whole building and back before any of the adults saw that he’d left the yard.

“If you get caught,” he said aloud, “you’ll be in trouble.”

The hatch to the shelter down the hall opened, and the thing came boiling out. Its tentacles whipped, grasping at the walls and deck, throwing itself forward. Campar fled.

Moving alone in the hallways without Ghati or Vaudai, he felt a hesitation that he didn’t know he’d been harboring fall away. There was no one to protect. No one he might fail by leaving them behind and in danger. He hadn’t known until now, grabbing the frames of doors and hatches and hauling himself forward into the flickering dark, that he’d been guarding the rear of the group. With nothing left to defend, he moved faster and more surely. He didn’t look back, but twice an accident of the failing lights threw shadows of mad, thrashing shapes of inhuman limbs down the hall ahead of him.

As they neared the intersection, he rotated, leading now with his feet. His plan was to hit the wall and kick off in the new direction. He’d still slam into the wall, but if he didn’t give the thing warning…

He looked up the corridor retreating around him. The black thing was right behind him. It grabbed at the walls, the deck, the ceiling. The awkwardness he’d seen in it before was still there, but also a roughness like desperation. Malign intent radiated from it. It wasn’t an enemy soldier. It wasn’t a beast. It was the living avatar of heedless violence, and its whole focus was on him.

He hit the wall and kicked, launching himself down the new corridor. The wall hit him like a cargo transport going full speed, but it hit the full length of him. No bones broke that he could tell. And the three-legged enemy overshot the intersection and had to stop itself to come back. By the time it emerged around the corner, Campar had widened his lead by another dozen strides. His breath had taken on a rhythm, two strokes in and two strokes out, the same he used when he was running. Each new push forward drew a little of the sweat from his brows into his eyes. He ignored the stinging. He reached the service corridor, pulling himself into it with aching arms. The monster was nearly on top of him now, and Campar could feel the fatigue burning in his muscles.

It wouldn’t be long. At least it wouldn’t be long.

The fear was deep and animal, and Campar rode it. When he ran out of adrenaline or when he overtaxed the breathing device on his shoulder or when the enemy reached out and took his ankle, yanking him back, it would hurt for a moment, and then… Then whatever happened to a mind when its body failed would happen to him. The dreamlike chaos of a brain dumping all of its stored chemicals at once, maybe. Or a light and the beloved dead, the way the Gallantists promised. Or the same nothingness as before he’d been born. Campar tried to be curious about it. Tried to wonder and look forward to the moment that he wouldn’t be able to avoid.

The corridor around him glimmered.

The field overspill was coming back to set the vacuum on fire. It was going to work. The black thing was going to die and Ghati and Vaudai would have a chance. That was all he could give them, but they’d have it. Parting gifts.

He slammed into the end of the service corridor. He’d lost track of himself, and the hallway’s end had snuck up on him. He felt his collarbone snap, and then the impact of the enemy as it barreled into him. A tentacle wrapped around his arms, and another snaked around his right thigh, constricting like a steel band. Something else beat against his neck, and it took a moment to push away the panic and pain to recognize it as the stump. The thing was trying to throttle him with a limb that wasn’t there.

Campar lurched forward, following the path he’d rehearsed without thinking why he was trying to go on, only that it was what he’d planned. The aurora thickened around them, and stabs like red-hot needles pricked at him, burning him from the inside.

And burning the enemy too. It writhed when he did, its grip loosening as they tumbled out to the beginning of the loop again. The shelter with Ghati and Vaudai was just a few doors down. They’d find his body here when they came out. He hoped it wasn’t too hard for them, seeing him like that. The corridor was filled with a glowing fog that hurt to look at, hurt to move through, hurt. His vision went complex and golden.

Something tugged at him. Something released. Someone was screaming, and it wasn’t him.

“You should move him into shelter now,” Vaudai said.

“I’m fucking trying,” Ghati answered, but Campar didn’t know where either of them was. He wanted to ask, but all that he managed was a low animal moan. His eyesight returned. He was in the shelter he’d started from. The bunks with their restraints. His sample kit. The hatch was open, and the three-armed thing was floating in a brightness that was more than light. The black flesh was bright—yellow and orange and gold. As he watched, it flared to white. As Vaudai began to close the hatch, Campar found his sample case. All the tissues and information he’d gathered for the Carryx. All the work he’d done to earn the right to live. He threw it out the hatch into the aurora where the terrible light unmade it.

He tried to breathe, but he was screaming in pain. His consciousness was a single disembodied sensation of misery and illness. He was dizzy. He was nauseated. His throat was thick and swelling shut.

“It’s all right,” Ghati said.

I’m burning. There was a light made of poison, Campar thought, but there were no words in the sound he made.

Time did something, and his skin shrieked. The vacuum sheath was breaking apart, and air was lighting his blistered skin with incandescent pain. Somehow, he was on the expedition ship. A Sinen overseer sprayed something on the white-and-red mass of blisters that was his bare skin and the pain dulled to mere illness and horror. He tried to turn his head, then stopped. Vaudai was by him. And one of the Carryx, its fighting arms braced to the deck.

Campar realized he was breathing free air. That the sounds he heard were the sounds of the ship. Of the humans and Budon and Carryx. Ghati was beside him, not touching him, but there. Campar wanted to take his hand. He couldn’t move without making the pain and nausea worse.

“Ghati?”

“I’m here. I’m right here.”

“Happen’d?”

“You came back around just when the overspill was starting up. You and the enemy were cooking off together. We got you apart and brought you inside. You’re welcome.”

“Battle?”

“The Carryx won. And your brain is a little fucked up from the trauma. This is the third time you and I have had this exact conversation.”

“Oh,” Campar said. And then, “I’m going to die.”

“We all are, dear,” Ghati said. “But not from this. They say we’re done here. They’re sending us home.”

Twenty-Nine

The animals of Jurupe system had been, for the most part, exterminated. Some few thousand had survived in the deep and hardened cave structures far under the planetary surface and a few hundred more in minor facilities on other planets and moons within the system. Billions, however, had died, and not only the advanced animals. The ecosystem of the major planet had been unmade. What little still lived did so in a shattered world.

For the subjugator-librarian of the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body, this victory was almost incidental. The deathless enemy was denied one of its newest holdings. Its toehold in this curve of the galaxy was weakened. That was all to the good, but the real targets were the ships that had come too late to defend their little world and that now burned toward the Carryx on a mission of vengeance.

The tactical half-mind suggested the half dozen most plausible scenarios, ways that the coming engagement might play out. Those which followed tactics similar to the engagement in Ashtin-Kah system—as successful as they had been there—were broadly the least likely to succeed in the present fleet configurations. Most of the incoming ships were familiar configurations of the enemy’s force, but three had novel alterations and one was an entirely new design. As closely matched as they were, the subjugator-librarian could be sure of neither victory nor loss, and so it opted for a strategy that would serve both.

It had intended the evacuation of resources to be in the event of defeat, but it now saw advantage in moving the schedule forward. Not the soldiers, which were still of immediate use. Those it would reserve. But the data stored in the hollowed-out mind of the Saren-hund, the other animals of service, and many of the undeployed nodes. They would be packed and released, routed to the edge of the system and asymmetric space beyond. If their dactyl lost the battle, some percentage of these could be gathered and reused. And if the enemy chose to reroute and intercept the detritus or if they fired on it, it would give the dactyl information about enemy capabilities and priorities that could offer an advantage in the coming conflict.

It was clearly the best choice, and so the orders were given.

Something was in Rickar’s cell. The simple animal awareness of an unexpected presence took Rickar from dead sleep to awake and ready for violence with nothing in between. The light spilling in from the open doorway silhouetted the Soft Lothark guard, but the nearer thing—the one that had woken Rickar—was a Sinen. If it understood what Rickar’s panicked yawp and balled fists meant, it was unimpressed.

“You will come now and prepare to evacuate the ship.”

“I’m… what?”

“You will come now,” the Sinen repeated, then turned and trundled out of the cell. The Soft Lothark remained, its tiny black eyes not particularly focused on Rickar or the spare contents of the room. That it stayed was threat enough. Come or be brought.

In the corridor, there were other voices—some human, but most not—raised in confusion and fear. Three of the beetle-like things were ushered past his door, scrambling and darting ahead of a Soft Lothark guard of their own.

“Do I have time for food?” Rickar asked. He was putting a brave face on the situation. The stress of the change probably wouldn’t have let him eat.

In any case, the guard tilted its head and the translation half-mind on its tool harness said, “No.”

When Rickar left his cell for the last time, the guard didn’t go with him. It only shifted into the corridor and placed itself, a living embankment that kept all the other captives of the Carryx flowing along in the same stream. Despite the fear and anxiety that bloomed whenever their alien masters changed the rules again, Rickar also felt a little glimmer of curiosity. Whatever this was, the Carryx hadn’t actually started slaughtering them yet. That passed for hope.

The stream of bodies carried him out into the parts of the ship Rickar hadn’t seen. The smell of the air here was thicker, something equal parts incense and sty, and hot enough that just walking down the dark hallways brought out a sweat. The Budon chirruped and muttered around him, but there was no music in their voices.

“What’s going on,” Dervan asked, trotting up from behind him. “Where are they taking us?”

“The one that came for me said they’re evacuating the ship.”

Dervan’s eyes went wider. “Is the ship broken?”

“I haven’t seen anything to make me think so,” Rickar said with a shrug. “But they don’t tell me much.”

The stream of bodies turned down a brighter corridor. The walls were the same deep bronze tipped subtly in at the top that Rickar remembered from the ship that took him from Anjiin what felt like lifetimes ago. That had been chilly, though. Everything here was uncomfortably close to hot.

“If they’re bothering to evacuate, that means they want to save us,” Dervan said. Her voice had the certainty of someone trying to talk themselves into belief.

“You’re right,” Rickar said, not because he believed it. “We’re valuable to them. They’ll make sure they don’t lose their investment.”

At the end of the corridor, a Carryx soldier stood. Its thorax and abdomen were covered in a pale yellow shell and its eyes—only four of them—considered the person at the head of the line as if they were the only one there, sorting them and directing them down one of five narrower corridors behind it. When Rickar’s turn at the front came, the soldier’s feeding arms shifted. It whistled, and the translation half-mind spoke in the same calm voice it usually employed.

“You will confirm that you are Rickar Daumatin of the human moiety.”

It had been so long since anything had used his name that Rickar felt disoriented hearing it. “Yes,” he said. The idea that his identity might be important, might signify anything to his captors, felt almost like pride. “I am Rickar Daumatin.”

The soldier gestured toward the middle of the five hallways, and Rickar walked down it with his head a little higher. The hallway descended in a gentle ramp, then turned to the right. Rickar passed through an archway and onto something between a train platform and a hospital waiting room. Along the far wall, wide silver bodies lay open like someone had been dissecting massive pale fish and been distracted halfway through. A dozen Sinen were moving through the room, directing Budon and humans and strange things, like translucent eggs larger than a man, toward the open waiting bodies.

The red-headed man was there. In all the weeks of their captivity together they’d never spoken to each other, but now he approached Rickar.

“They’re loading us into those things,” the man said.

“They are.”

“We shouldn’t let them. We ought to tell them all we won’t do it. That we won’t go.”

“That’s probably true,” Rickar agreed. A Sinen overseer came, plucked at the man’s arm, and pointed across the room. Rickar and the red-headed man exchanged a look—shame, despair, a bleak amusement—and the other man hung his head and let himself be led away. It wasn’t more than a minute before a different Sinen came and pointed Rickar on as well.

The silver body was more interesting as Rickar saw it better. Close up, it looked less like an organism and more like a machine made to mimic one. What had looked like skin at a distance was more clearly a sort of epoxy sheath. The edges where the not-quite-flesh came together were marked with little fasteners like something from a carpenter’s shop. Only the opened wound of the center still resembled a living thing—pink and damp and soft as an uncooked chicken breast the size of a small bed.

“This is your evacuation pod,” the Sinen at his side announced. “When you take your place in it, you will be given a treatment that we expect to slow your metabolism. You will not resist it.”

“Just ‘expect’?” Rickar asked. “And what happens if you’re mistaken?”

“We expect it will slow your metabolism,” the Sinen repeated, gesturing Rickar on. “You will not resist it.”

Flesh only crawling a little bit, Rickar hefted himself into the pod, and as the wide fleshy machine closed over him, something like the first warmth in the throat after a shot of whiskey suffused through his body. The bed was both slick and adhesive.

In the darkness, he closed his eyes and did not resist.

Across the full volume of the system, the battle began. Thousands of hardened missiles flew from the enemy ships, dancing and darting in attempts to defy the Carryx trackers. Beams of coherent light moved through the dark, seeking and burning. Fields that mimicked the primordial energy of the birth of the universe sought to swamp the enemy’s dampening counter fields and annihilate them utterly. In the heart of the Carryx ship, Void Dragons woke and remade the nature of space, narrowing the degrees of freedom with which the enemy could travel. A few enemy ships set up fields to counter them that caused the Void Dragons to screech their distress like claws across the subjugator-librarian’s mind.

Every battle was its own object. In this, the Carryx had chosen the field and their position on it first: the heart of the system, the newly killed planet. The enemy had come in response, not quite haphazardly, but without the lengthy planning that they might have wished.

The enemy managed to fold a jamming mine past the Carryx defenses, effectively cutting the subjugator-librarian’s connection to half of its forces, but the librarians on those ships understood the shape of the battle. The loss of direct communication gave way to independent control so smoothly that the enemy might not ever know it had succeeded.

The evacuated animals appeared to be of little concern to the enemy forces and most reached a safe distance from the star’s gravity and the transition to asymmetry unnoticed and unremarked.

Apart from one significant anomaly.

“Rickar, I need you for a minute. Can you wake up?”

I really don’t think I can.

“Like this.”

And they were at a café. The Anjiin sunset in the west was pink and gold stripes on a field of blue. The grown coral walls of the Common behind them were flooded with lights and the sounds of music and voices, like they’d just stepped out from a great party. Else sat across from him in black-and-gold robes and a black headband. Gallantist mourning clothes like she’d just come back from a funeral or was just going to one.

“Else? Is that you?”

“Sort of. A remnant of a copy, but a remnant of a copy of me, so sure. It’s me.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“Technically, I am. But I’m using your brain to do it.”

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “it’s a pleasure to see you again. Even if it’s just in a dream.” He was wearing his old tailored jacket. He didn’t remember how much he’d missed it until just now. “You’re beautiful, you know. I never told you that, because you were with Tonner or Dafyd. But I always thought you were a beautiful woman.”

“Thank you,” Else said, smile dimpling.

“Is this going to be a sex dream?”

“Would you like it to be?”

“I’m still in that Carryx fish thing, right?”

“Yes. But I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For what’s about to happen.”

The silence between them was rich with meaning. “I’m going to die, then.”

She nodded. “It had to be someone. There’s no reason it was you. I just needed to put the cyst into one of the people who was leaving the world-palace.”

It should have been mysterious, but it wasn’t. He knew what the cyst was, what the swarm was, what Else had been and what she’d become. The logic of dreams told him all of it like being reminded of something he’d known before and forgotten. He felt a pang of fear, and then a warm rush of something like ecstasy. They were naked in his bed. They were making love.

“Are you doing that?”

“Flooding your pleasure centers? Yes. I’m doing that.”

He laughed. “You’re very kind, but it’s all right. You don’t have to do it this way.”

“Okay,” Else said, giving him her lopsided smile, and they were back at the café, the sunset-filled sky becoming a darker red and purple.

“This thing we’re doing,” Rickar said, picking up a coffee off the table to take a sip. It was perfect. He smacked his lips at her in appreciation. “This will hurt the Carryx?”

“It will.”

He took a moment, remembering the filthy light that crossed a planet and erased the cities and lives. Remembering the black smoke only partially hiding the molten ruin below it. And because he remembered it, she did too.

The thing that was and wasn’t Else took his hand for a moment. He felt her regret like it was his own and squeezed the idea of her fingers and let them go.

“Everyone dies,” Rickar said, “but not every death matters. I’m grateful to fuck these assholes up on my way out.”

“I’m still sorry.”

He waved her words away. Behind them, the Common was empty, cold, and dark. The party had been over for hours. The sunset was the color of blood.

“Can you give me something?” he asked. “I mean, since it’s all just a dream.”

She smiled, and he lifted the cigarette to his lips. The taste of the smoke, the brightening of the ember, even the small, subtle crackle of the paper as it burned. The illusion was perfect. He blew out a cloud of blueish smoke.

“God damn I needed that,” he said. And then, “Let’s do this thing, shall we?”

In the evacuation pod, the cyst reshaped itself, reconfiguring the body of its host. On fifty overlapping frequencies, everything that the swarm had learned between the time it had landed successfully on Anjiin to the day that it had placed the cyst in Rickar’s body shouted out to its allies and creators. The energy used for the broadcast unmade the complex molecules that had been Rickar Daumatin’s flesh like he was a human bonfire.

After fifteen seconds, the evacuation pod failed catastrophically under the unexpected burst of heat and the pressure of the steam that had once been blood. But when it exploded, nothing on board was alive to notice.

Surur of the cohort Tlassen, regulator-librarian to the Sovran, abased himself before his one true master. Sensations that had never—could never—provoke anything less than awe washed through his body and his mind as the Sovran folded her massive abdominal legs beneath her. Her feeding arms—as thick as a soldier’s fighting limbs—lifted bowls of syrrin and white amask to her beak. She cracked the shells of the syrrin with her beak and licked out the flesh with her broad, thick, blood-colored tongue.

He had delivered most of the cycle’s information, filtered and consolidated as it was by his hours of sleep and dream. The seventh exploratory body had taken possession of sixteen life-bearing planets that the deathless enemy had failed to protect. The second body of memory was completing its work in the Nin and Sorillai systems ahead of schedule. Plague had broken out among the Chinic, sickening one out of three and killing one in ten, so the keeper-librarian had slaughtered the moiety to prevent the contagion from spreading to other animals. There was neither praise nor condemnation for any of these things. They simply were, and Surur was honored and fulfilled to report them.

“The keeper of the private creche has confirmed that your new daughter is prepared to meet you. The last of the chosen attendees is preparing for transit,” he said.

A dozen of the Sovran’s hundred eyes shifted toward him, and something like amusement seemed to suffuse the symphony of scent and pheromone that wafted from her flesh.

“You are concerned,” the Sovran intoned, her voice making the thought into a poem.

“What is, is,” Surur said, neither denying his unease nor pretending that the tides and eddies of his emotional experience mattered. The Sovran returned to her meal. “What more?”

“Only one thing,” he said, then hesitated. He didn’t like it. The report had come up from the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body almost unchanged. In the chain of librarians that spanned the empire, none had chosen to simplify or summarize the anomaly, and now it reached the Sovran herself without Surur-Tlassen finding a context to surround it with. “In the battle at Jurupe system, an evacuation pod failed strangely. It lost coherence without evidence of an enemy attack.”

“There are many ways for a complex system to fail,” the Sovran replied, both an admonishment and a question.

“The explosion stuttered,” Surur-Tlassen said. “There appeared to be a structure within it that is not congruent with Saren-hund death. The cargo was an animal of use from Anjiin system. The human moiety. They were assigned to the mission to discover whether they might develop novel assessments of the engagement.”

“Did they?”

“Members of the moiety proved convenient in Ashtin-Kah. The one that died was of no importance. There is no evidence in others of the moiety for death communications.”

The Sovran looked away. The empire was so vast, the thousands of billions of lives it encompassed so overwhelming, to speak of a single death felt like sacrilege. Surur abased himself again without meaning to, and the Sovran ignored his gesture. She was already lost in the oceanic complex of her thoughts.

As he waited, Surur-Tlassen felt himself relax and broaden. He hadn’t liked bringing undigested news of the Jurupe anomaly. It felt like presenting a fine meal with a bit of gristle at its heart. But it was done now and could be left in its proper context and perspective. His mind turned to the new daughter, the meeting outside the private creche. This would be the sixth daughter that the Sovran had met since he had taken his position. The last had been larger than her mother with a shell that shone like burnished metal and eyes in a dozen different colors. He still remembered that one in his dreams.

The Sovran shifted, and he sprang to attention. The scent coming from her was as thick as smoke, and he breathed it in.

“Challenging that which we do not understand yields unexpected insight,” she said. “A pattern of anomaly clouds the Anjiin moiety. Clarify if this outweighs their utility.”

“Yes,” Surur-Tlassen said, as he always did, transported by the beauty and the wisdom of her words.

Thirty

The keeper-librarian’s cell was the same one that Dafyd had gone to the very first time. It was a small room, and the report that the Carryx librarian had given him made it seem smaller.

“No,” Dafyd said, looking down at Ekur-Tkalal’s feet without really seeing them. The news that Rickar had died on his mysterious mission for the Carryx felt like someone had hit him in the gut. “No, we don’t broadcast anything when we die.”

Ekur-Tkalal, keeper-librarian of the human moiety, shifted the glowing shapes—cubes, a cone, a hemisphere—before it into a configuration that meant something like The human contact denies this as a standard experience. Dafyd made himself take a breath. Rickar Daumatin was dead. Had died some time ago in an escape pod leaving some distant battle around a star that Dafyd couldn’t point to. Another one was gone and wouldn’t come back.

Irinna, Nöl, Synnia, Jellit, Else, Tonner, Rickar. Jessyn was in the field. Campar. They might be dead too, and the Carryx just hadn’t bothered to tell him yet. Even if he knew exactly where they were and what they were doing, he wouldn’t have been able to protect them.

Dafyd realized that Ekur-Tkalal had said something else, and he shook his head. “My apologies. This news of my friend’s death unfortunately distracted me. Please repeat your statement?”

The Carryx whistled and cooed again. The translation half-mind spoke in its uncanny, neutral voice. “There are references in your recordings to a spirit or soul that leaves the body at death, but no such phenomenon has been observed in other deaths by your kind.”

“Yes, it’s a religious story. It’s spiritual. It’s meant to describe the change between being alive and having awareness to being dead.”

“You will clarify that this spirit is made of information.”

“It isn’t made of anything. It’s just a story that tries to comfort us in the face of something we find terrifying and inexplicable. It makes it so we can stand the idea of dying.”

The Carryx shifted its feeding arms, moved the symbols glowing in front of it into some grammar Dafyd wasn’t advanced enough to understand yet, and saved the information. Some version of all they’d just said would be passed up to the librarian that Ekur answered to, and then the one above that, and so forth up to the Sovran. Dafyd wasn’t supposed to know that. Rickar Daumatin was dead, and the oceanic sadness distracted him enough that it was an effort to track what he was supposed to know and what he knew that was secret.

It took him a few seconds to realize that the keeper-librarian’s silence was his cue to continue with his report. Dafyd tried to recall where he’d been when the questions about the details of Rickar’s death had come up. He had Brun’s report, and the latest from the visualization lab. Both were disappointing, and Dafyd knew it. He had set the benchmarks himself, trying to balance between promising enough to stay in the Carryx’s good graces and signing them up for more than they could achieve. Tonner’s death and Jellit’s—the spy’s—double duty complicated things. Dafyd had erred on the side of overpromising and he knew it.

Ekur-Tkalal did too.

“You have given no reason for this failure.”

“There are several. Breakthroughs in the work can be hard to predict. Periods of struggle are just the same. And there were some unexpected complications with the staffing. Tonner Freis was… He was very important to the work. Losing him negatively affected the outcomes in the near term.”

“That is an interesting problem,” the keeper-librarian said.

“We will improve quickly once the new staff is in place,” he said, even though he knew that might not be true. His jaw ached and he forced it to relax. “Which brings me to another point of discussion. The Soft Lothark and Rak-hund guards? The biological group wants them to be removed.”

The keeper-librarian’s response was subtle enough that he would have missed it before. A shifting of weight back toward its abdominal legs, a change in the angle at which its massive fighting legs met the floor. It hadn’t gone as far as lifting its fighting arms. The threat hadn’t been made, but a chill ran down Dafyd’s spine all the same.

Imagine you have little kittens on each shoulder.

Dafyd coughed and brought his shoulders forward, pulling his chest in. His arms slid in front of him, the elbows almost touching. His collarbone ached with the effort.

“Given the way Tonner died, some of the researchers are distracted by the presence of the guards,” Dafyd said. “The fear response would be lessened if the research labs were only inhabited by humans.”

Ekur-Tkalal muttered and churred. It clicked the beak almost hidden by its flesh, and its eyes shifted. The half-mind didn’t translate anything. Dafyd waited for a moment, then went on.

“Humans have a history of working less efficiently when they feel they are unsafe, even if the feeling is unfounded.”

He scratched his fingers against each other, mimicking the movements he’d seen the Carryx make with their own feeding arms. It felt awkward and obvious.

“Is this request from your team or from you?” the Carryx asked. Dafyd wasn’t sure what the right answer was, but he was certain that It’s from them, and they’re threatening a work stoppage if the demand isn’t met was definitely the wrong one.

“Neither. We make no request. It’s information I have had from the new leader of the team, and which I have presented to you.”

A few seconds later, the keeper-librarian shifted its weight forward again. Dafyd didn’t know if the depth of his relief was justified, but he felt it sweep through his whole body like he’d just stepped back from a cliff edge.

“As it should be.” Ekur-Tkalal leaned forward on its fighting arms and reached out with its feeding arms in a gesture Dafyd had never seen before. It touched Dafyd’s shoulder, and all of its eyes looked at him as if to mark the importance of the moment. “There is only one Sovran.”

“I understand,” Dafyd said, even though he was fairly sure he didn’t.

The Carryx drew itself back to its customary position, but Dafyd could still feel the place where it had touched him. It was the first time he could remember a Carryx doing that that hadn’t resulted in the death of the human.

The rest of the meeting was an exercise in endurance. He reported the progress of the babies in their lamb sacks, the new quarters and nursery that Bastien Korham was overseeing, and an overview of Andermus’s crime-and-authority report that showed less violence and theft. It felt like walking through thigh-high water. Whenever he felt himself starting to lose focus, he dug his fingernails into his palms or bit at the inside of his cheek. A little pain to bring his focus back to the moment. It was probably one of his least destructive habits.

The shock of Rickar’s death kept sinking into his mind. Each time he remembered, it left a vast exhaustion that he couldn’t allow himself to feel. Ekur-Tkalal listened and recorded what it heard, asking a few questions here and there, but Dafyd slowly came to hope they’d passed through the difficult part of the meeting.

The keeper-librarian’s instructions traditionally came at the end of the session. This time was no different.

“Within the next five cycles, you will identify three hundred individuals for use in exploratory fieldwork.”

Dafyd felt the weight of the command, but he only said I will see that it’s done.

The first time he’d made his way to the keeper-librarian, it had felt like a long passage through dangerous territory. If he focused, he could remember his sense of daring and the fear that he’d pushed aside to find the place. He could remember it, but he couldn’t feel it again. The new human habitat was twice as far as his old room had been, and he made the trip like a commuter coming home from work. The air was alive with voices from a hundred different kinds of throat, and the smell was heavy with all the richness like too much spice. The wide tunnels with their strange, bright tile work were filled with Carryx and Soft Lothark and Rak-hund and a dozen other species from a dozen other worlds. Some he knew by name—the Phylarchs of Astrdeim, the Maidel of Bess. Others were new or rare or simply unfamiliar. All these had in common was that they could tolerate the same gravity and atmosphere, and that—by their will or against it—they served the empire.

Even the new Rak-hund guard following at his heels like a well-trained dog felt almost normal now. Anything, however strange or astounding, could be made commonplace by repetition.

When he reached the human quarters, his first impulse was to go to his room and sleep until his heart ached less. His second was to find Uuya Tomos. He found her working construction.

Bastien Korham and a crew of maybe two dozen people had cut out most of the floors and walls from a section of the habitat beside what would soon be the nursery to create an open space three stories tall and as open as a church. Wide windows looked out onto the curve of the world-palace: the great, dark ziggurats that reached up through the clouds below them; the busy sky; the gridwork that separated them from the stars, and at night, the stars beyond it.

The bare lines where the levels had been cut away still scarred the walls, but less so now. Ladder crews were moving slowly around the perimeter, two people crewing each ladder to keep it stable, and two others buffing out the old marks in the flesh of the architecture with pads of something that looked like metallic moss. The tall air danced with dust and light. It was like seeing a beautiful sculpture still half trapped in marble.

“You like it?” Korham said through a grin. “When we’re done clearing it out, we’ll have railings on the higher levels and a yard here at the bottom. People will be able to look down and see the whole quad. The classrooms will all be along the eastern side there, with coral-grown stairs like the Oversin Wall at Zashin Medrey. Did you ever see that?”

“Only in pictures,” Dafyd said. “I never went in person. I wasn’t much for travel back then.”

Korham laughed and put a companionable hand on Dafyd’s shoulder in the same place that Ekur-Tkalal had. “Ferdan Bellenn is going to paint a mural across from the windows with great figures from human history. If I have my way, our children are going to grow up with our heritage. We will remake the art and architecture of Anjiin here, or anyplace else we’re sent.”

Dafyd could hear Uuya Tomos’s influence in Korham’s words. He could hear his own plan, reflected.

“The children will live better because of you. I want you to know that. They’ll have better lives because you’re doing this.”

The big man’s face went sober. “I appreciate that. It’s what gets me up in the morning now, you know? It is.”

“Me too,” Dafyd said, and he wasn’t entirely lying.

Uuya Tomos was at the base of one of the long ladders, her feet braced where it met the floor to keep it from skidding. Her hair was damp with sweat and wild as smoke around her face. When she grinned, Dafyd saw that one of her teeth was brighter than the others. A ceramic replacement that hadn’t yellowed with time and nature.

“I’m guessing you’ll want to talk to me in private again?” she said, teasing.

“If you don’t mind.”

She whistled twice, and a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man trotted over. Dafyd recognized him and knew his name. The man had been a political leader once. Dafyd had watched him debate before the world court. Now he was a middle-aged construction worker steadying ladders, and a world of billions had become a moiety of three thousand.

“You look grim,” Uuya Tomos said as they walked away to a rest area Korham had set up for his workers. A wide bench with bowls of water and ceramic cups and plates of grapes from the hydroponic gardens and yeast-based cheese indistinguishable from the real thing.

“I’ve just met with the Carryx. They want another three hundred people to send out. And besides that, I’m fucking it all up.”

“Yeah?” Uuya Tomos asked, then lowered herself to the bench with a grunt. “How are you doing that?”

“We’re not keeping to schedule. With Tonner gone, maybe we can’t. He was a genius, and the new man… He doesn’t understand.”

“Or he does, and he has a different strategy.”

“He’ll get us all killed. Or I’ll get us killed. Or… God, I wish we weren’t bringing kids into this.”

“No shit,” the old woman said. “But that’s also history. There’s never been an era you’d feel safe putting a baby into, but we keep doing it. It was your idea, you know? Putting a handle on everyone’s back. You didn’t think your back would be one of them, though, did you?” When he didn’t answer, she reached into one of the bowls and scooped up a handful of grapes. “They don’t understand us. The Carryx? They can’t fathom humanity. Look what they did. The elite of a planet. They acted like they were getting the best of the best, and here we are, bumbling our way toward making enough food and building a school. You want to know the secret?”

“I do,” Dafyd said.

“The elite exist on the shoulders of the unremarkable,” she said. “Everyone here had a staff back on Anjiin. Everyone had someone else who was doing their laundry for them and making their food. Maybe a professional, maybe a lover or a spouse or an assistant. Their kids. Their research assistants. Korham’s done a brilliant job of turning academics and artists and managers into a construction crew, but we’re not anywhere close to the best construction crew on Anjiin. Those poor bastards aren’t here, though, and we are. So why do you think that is?”

Dafyd sat beside her, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Because the Carryx can change,” he said. “Because they do change. All the time. Not just their jobs, but their bodies. They get bigger or smaller, they grow new glands, they shift genders. Any one of them can in theory be whatever any of the other ones are, so they treat us like we can do that too.”

“You start to see why they win, when any of them can turn into anything they need.”

“Not all of them change,” Dafyd said. “There is only one Sovran.”

“Exceptions are interesting,” the old woman said.

“If we could coordinate with the enemy and then create a moment of chaos. Something that they could exploit…”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t have anyone else I can talk to about this,” Dafyd began, but the old woman waved the words away like they were gnats.

“You don’t need to talk about that at all. Ever. That’s inside voice shit.”

Dafyd went still. There were tears in his eyes before he understood why they were there. When he spoke, the words felt thick. Speaking took effort. “Another one of my group died. Rickar Daumatin. He was in a battle and something went wrong with his evacuation pod. And now he’s gone. And I don’t know what to feel about it.”

“Grief? That’s traditional.”

“I did. In the meeting, I felt grief, and then I fucked up. I told Ekur that Brun wanted to get rid of the guards. I phrased it as a lower group—an animal—giving orders to the Carryx.”

“Ouch.”

“I was able to walk it back, but I know better than that. I challenged it, and the best I could have hoped for was it broke my leg. It probably would have killed me. I lost focus. And I lost focus on the science teams that are what keep all of us alive. I can’t afford to get lost like that. I can’t afford emotions.”

Uuya Tomos scratched her chin like she was feeling for a beard. “You ever heard of wisdom myths? I did a book on them, but it was during my academic phase. Dry. I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping it.”

“I skipped it.”

“I don’t blame you. There are a lot of mythic and religious forms. The one you’re commissioning from me is a justice story. God will punish the wicked and reward the just, even if it takes a long time. And then there’s origin stories that place communities in the world. Explicatory stories that take a common experience and put a metaphoric context around it. I was working on a set of those around menopause. There’s a lot of good stories around menarche and menopause.”

“I skipped those too.”

“That’s why you’re still single,” she said without missing a beat. “But wisdom stories aren’t there to give comfort. They tell the truth. The only consolation you get from a wisdom story is that someone else saw the same world you’re seeing. They’re the stories where sometimes the good get screwed and it’s not made right. The evil prosper, and God lets them. The plague comes and decimates and leaves, and there’s no rhyme or reason for who it kills and who it leaves standing. And they’re very consistent about what you can do about it.”

“I’m guessing you’re about to say ‘nothing.’”

She grinned again. The one white tooth among the bone-colored. “Everything. You do whatever you can, even though it doesn’t seem to be working. You keep shoveling the shit against the tide and you hope the tide goes out before your strength fails. It feels meaningless. It feels overwhelming. It feels like you’re a tiny, insignificant thing in a universe that barely notices you exist, because that’s just accurate.”

“Wisdom stories sound shitty,” Dafyd said, but her words had loosened something in his chest. He hurt less. Maybe it would be enough.

“Well, there’s a beauty in truth,” Uuya Tomos said, and stood. She put out her hand, and when he took it, she hauled him up. “There’s also a beauty in work. Come take half a shift building something concrete for the children. When you’re done, you can go back to beating all the human impurities out of yourself so you can be the sword of almighty justice.”

“Oh, you think that’s what I’m doing?” Dafyd asked with a chuckle.

“I do,” she said. “And I’m never wrong, remember?”

Thirty-One

Are you all right?” Holom Coombs asked. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” Jessyn said, but what she thought was I am exactly the same as I was when you asked me five minutes ago.

Ever since Garral’s “death” and her own brush with it, the other members of the human moiety had been treating her like she was made from spun glass. Sitting in the common room and eating her morning meal, every time she grunted or flinched became an occasion for someone’s concern. Holom Coombs insisted on preparing her food. Manni cleaned it away, but at least she didn’t talk about it. One of the other women had experience with combat medicine from her time in the military and came to change Jessyn’s dressing each day. The human moiety was trying to come together around her, to support her through her vulnerable time.

The hell of it was, Jessyn recognized the kindness of it even as it chafed. She’d spent long periods of her life being fragile, treating herself like she was fragile, teaching the people around her to treat her as though she were fragile. And now, here she was, light years from the sun she’d been so careful not to spend too much time under, still just as vulnerable to the darkness that sometimes took over her mind, and bristling with annoyance every time someone treated her like she needed special care.

What made it worse, she probably did.

She finished her bowl of morning gruel, sipped her cup of something that passed for milky tea, and Manni put a gentle hand on her arm and reached over to take her dishes. Jessyn nodded politely because she was being polite and took herself off to the little plaza outside the five ships.

Walking still hurt and stretching hurt worse, so she stretched there in the morning sunlight until the pain made her sweat a little. Two Carryx soldiers trundled along the edge of the common space, their massive fighting arms moving like a promise of violence. One of the rocky sofa-sized things was splayed out on the ground, its thousand tiny legs flat against the earth. She didn’t have any idea what that was about. Some other alien social drama or distress. It could have been dying or reveling in victory. Action without context was unknowable.

“You are recovered?” the calm, neutral voice of the translation half-mind said. She turned to Third Gardener. The Sinen overseer was waddling over from a group of True People of Hannic.

“I’m improving,” she said. “It may be a while before I’m back to full power.”

“Have you recalled any other details of your encounter with the enemy soldier?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember anything else, and the memories I do have feel like they’re getting muddled. That’s not unheard of for my species.”

Third Gardener trundled away, its quasi-tentacles twitching.

Every time she came out of the ship, the Sinen and its Rak-hund were there waiting and watching. Every night when she returned to the ships, it was waiting to review what she’d spent her hours doing and examine her samples. It asked her for more information about the imaginary attack the way that Holom Coombs asked if she felt all right.

It didn’t trust her.

There were changes in the local wildlife, small shifts that had happened in the time since she’d arrived. The low scrub outside the semicircle of ships had bloomed in a million tiny white blossoms. Flocks of some migratory bird were passing over the ships now in long-tailed V formations that seemed to include dozens of individuals in perfect harmony, like a well-rehearsed dance troupe in the sky.

And somewhere on the other side of the thin layer of air shrouding the planet, ships were coming that were going to die if she didn’t get out to the orchard and back undetected. She settled her satchel against her hip and headed in the opposite direction.

When she’d been a girl in race-to-base games in the schoolyard, her favorite tactic had been to pretend she wasn’t playing at all. While the child playing hunter counted up, she’d sit down on a bench and start reading her book and not run or scream or dart away when he came close. Then when he was past her, sprint for safety. This wasn’t that different. Everything in her body and mind strained for the orchard and its cache, and the most important thing was to keep the Carryx from knowing that. Second most. The most important was finding her moment and sprinting for base. Every hour she didn’t go was one less hour until it was too late.

And, as it so often did, too late came early.

She was in a copse of young trees, digging up root samples for their fungal symbionts, when Third Gardener shuffled into view. The Sinen walked directly toward her, its Rak-hund guard curving along behind it. Jessyn sat back, wiping the soil off her palms, and waited. The Sinen stopped in front of her, its goatlike eyes flickering over her and the hole she’d dug like it was searching for something. It made a little motion of its shoulders that, if it had been human, would have accompanied a sigh.

“You will complete your work and bring any equipment back to the ships by the end of day tomorrow,” it said.

“That doesn’t leave me a lot of time.”

“No.”

“Is there a reason we have to hurry so much?” she asked, but she knew. The enemy had reentered the system.

“You will hurry because I have indicated the necessity,” the Sinen said.

“I could do a lot more if I had another day or two.”

“You do not,” Third Gardener said. “What is, is.”

“Understood,” Jessyn said. “I’ll hurry.”

Then she forced herself not to.

Hour after excruciating hour, she let the day pass as if she were only what she appeared to be. She took the last root samples, cataloging them as if they mattered to her at all. She packed up her equipment from the copse and carried it all back to the ships as the evening sun touched the horizon. Her body felt caught between exhaustion and a thin, tight adrenaline high.

The conversation in the common room was all about the evacuation. Do you think they’ll take us back to the homeworld or on to another site? and I can’t believe Shaina decided to sleep at her worksite with all this going on and I could have spent another year here and just be getting started. She listened and contributed and ate, but her mind was elsewhere.

Her equipment was still in the orchard. She had an excuse to go out in the morning and retrieve it. Maybe, in the rush of preparation, Third Gardener would skip checking her samples and equipment. Maybe she’d convinced it that she was an innocent victim of the war. But she didn’t think so. Better, then, to sneak out in the night when there would be fewer eyes on her.

“Long day tomorrow,” she said as Manni cleared away her plate. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”

“Take care of yourself,” Holom Coombs said earnestly as she headed for her cell.

“Resting up and hydrating,” she said, and made herself grin. As soon as she left, she heard the tenor of the conversation change. All of the things they’d wanted to say about whether there were more enemy soldiers, about whether they were in danger of dying like Garral Pär, all of the things they weren’t going to talk about in front of her.

Well, let them. She had things of her own too.

Jessyn kicked off her shoes, put her notebook with its tracking device beside her bed, and slid under the blanket on her cot, but she didn’t undress. In the darkness, her biggest fear was that she’d accidentally drift off to sleep and the night would pass without her. She stared at the ceiling of her quarters, singing old songs to herself and moving her legs until they were in uncomfortable positions. She trusted the ache to keep her alert.

When the last human voice had faded, she counted slowly to a thousand, then did it again. And then, like an adolescent sneaking out to some hormone-soaked tryst, Jessyn slipped out of her bed, put on her shoes in darkness, and walked slowly, silently out through the quarters of the human moiety, out to the ramp leading to the plaza. A dozen featherless, beaked aliens were clustered together by one of the other ships, but if there were guards she didn’t see them.

There was a freedom in being utterly expendable.

The night was cool and damp. Light as pale as milk spilled down from two small, dim moons. As she walked, Jessyn kept looking up at the stars, the smear of the galactic disk. The ruins of the city off to her right stood like a greater darkness in the night. It had been a home once, not long ago. Everyone Omco and Manta had known. All of the children’s parents and siblings and schoolyard enemies and pets. All the things they lost to the Carryx. All the things they lost in the war. Halfway to the orchard, she stopped, crouching behind a bush, and waited to see if she was being followed. When the little moons had moved half the width of her hand, she started walking again.

At the orchard, the trees stood in their ranks like poorly disciplined soldiers in a rough, shoddy formation. Her equipment was there, glistening in doubled moonlight with dew or the remnants of some soft evening rain. Her feet squelched in the soft earth as she made her way to the stump with its secrets.

The dead leaves had blown around and the damp had pasted them together. They felt slick in her fingers as she lifted them out. The gun was still there. Two snails the size of her thumbnail were crawling along the long, smooth side of Corvall’s sabotage cylinder. The metal was warm. It seemed to weigh more than she remembered.

The translated voice of the Sinen came from behind her, as calm and certain as the voice of doom. “You will justify your presence here.”

She didn’t know if the little alien had been more adept than she’d expected in following her or if it had lain in wait all this time. Either way, here it was, lurking in the gloom, dappled by moonlight and leaves. And the Rak-hund at its side like an attack dog made of knives.

“Yes, of course. Let me explain,” she said, lifting the gun.

She shot the Rak-hund first, walking forward as she did. The first shot went wide, but then it charged her, and as the distance between them grew smaller, her aim improved. The second shot shattered one of its leading legs, and the third, fourth, and fifth pulped its head. As the knife-legged alien skidded to a stop, Jessyn shifted her attention to the Sinen. It might have been her imagination, but it looked surprised. One tentacle raised up, like a human putting up a hand to say wait. She didn’t wait, just put a slug between its goatish eyes. Third Gardener tipped over backward. She put two more rounds through its translation half-mind. She wasn’t sure that would help to hide what had happened here, but it couldn’t hurt. Then, realizing she knew nothing about Sinen physiology or where they kept their central nervous system, she emptied the gun into the creature’s torso to make sure.

Jessyn felt her heart racing, felt her blood throbbing in her hands and neck, she knew that physiologically speaking, she was in something like panic. Her experience of her own mind, on the other hand, was an eerie calm. The possible futures played out with the clinical distance of a flowchart. She had the canister of spores that would disable the Carryx ships, and so she had to go back to the ships. If Third Gardener had shared its suspicions with the Carryx, they would kill her the moment they spotted her, but maybe she’d have the chance to spring the trap before she died. And maybe it hadn’t. It might have been waiting for proof before it brought anything to the attention of the Carryx. She would have, in its position.

She looked around the orchard. Most of the signs that she’d been here could be explained as remnants of her studies. She found a bit of dead bush, tore it off, and swept the ground near the stump and the bodies. Part of her wanted to keep the gun, but it was empty and she had no idea how to find more ammunition for it. Even so, she couldn’t just drop it. It would be better if the weapon weren’t found here near the bodies. She’d throw it into a thicket someplace along her way back.

Fine then. All right.

Only pausing to pluck one last nearly-ripe pear off a tree, she started back toward the ships. The cylinder was heavy in her pocket, but not unpleasant. She didn’t run. She didn’t want to run. She didn’t weep, because she didn’t feel sad or scared or upset. She felt satisfied.

Somewhere in her journey between Anjiin and this planet, she’d become someone who could kill her jailers and enjoy it. Could look forward to the prospect of killing more of them, if the universe allowed it. Even the little twitch of regret that she felt sacrificing specimens in the lab was simply absent from the moment. The violence felt pleasant. More than that, it felt familiar. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one, but it was the situation. What is, is, she thought, and smiled. If you didn’t want it like this, you should have been nicer. She made her night-shrouded way back to the ships, to her cell, and into bed.

Nobody stopped her.

By sunrise, the Carryx compound was as busy as a kicked hive. Voices echoed down the ship corridors, and not all the voices were human. Jessyn pulled herself out of her bed and a deep, dreamless sleep. She showered, and then put on a fresh set of clothes. She ate her morning mush, then decanted herself a day’s serving of the slurry that kept her illness at bay. If everything was about to go to shit, she was going to face it with her full powers at the ready.

The common room was much more crowded than she’d become used to since their arrival on the planet’s surface. A third of the humans there had the deep tans and sunbleached hair of people at the end of their field rotations. The air smelled of unwashed bodies and fear. The deck of the ship vibrated, like some deep machinery had been turned on.

“I feel like I missed something,” she quipped as Manni handed her a mug of something hot.

“They locked down the ship. No one in or out. I don’t know if they’re going to let us go get our field equipment even.”

“That’s a change,” Jessyn said. “Did Third Gardener say why?”

Manni looked away like Jessyn had said something rude and she was trying not to draw attention to it. A little rush of pleasure ran down Jessyn’s throat.

“The Sinen didn’t give us the order,” the older woman said. “It was one of the big boys.”

“A Carryx?”

She nodded, then looked up and stepped off into the crowd. Jessyn drank what turned out to be almost-tea, and she waited. When she was done, no one came to solicitously carry away her mug or ask after her invalid status. Her near-death and Garral’s absence were old news now, and all the attention was on whatever the hell this was.

The Carryx arrived just before lunch and summoned Jessyn out of her room. As soon as she left, she regretted not opening the cylinder before she went in case she was walking to her execution. But by then it was too late to be unobtrusive about it, so she put on an imaginary cloak of perfect innocence and did as she was told.

The Carryx was massive, even compared to the keeper-librarian back at the world-palace, but it was also oddly simple. Only four eyes, and the plates of its armor made its body seem like it had been built out of fewer pieces than the others Jessyn had seen. Compared to the overwhelming size and complexity she’d seen in the Sovran, this one was a thumbnail sketch discarded when a better thought came along.

She could practically see the big alien’s flesh crawling as it talked to her. She wondered whether, if she touched it, it would go and clean itself with soap and water. But she was revolting to it in the same way a slimy bug crawling on her arm was revolting. Its disgust at her didn’t mean it wasn’t perfectly capable of squashing her.

The soldier muttered and trilled, and the translation half-mind said, “Your place of work was in the orchard to the south of the ships.”

“Yes, among others,” Jessyn said.

“You returned there last night.”

She’d wondered about this. Her first impulse was to deny everything, but first impulses came from anxiety. She was past anxiety now. “Yes. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I should use the time instead of wasting it. I went out to retrieve my equipment, but Third Gardener was there. It told me to go back to the ship.”

“It expressed a reason why you were to leave.”

“No, and I didn’t ask. It was very insistent that I depart.”

“It told you of an incoming ship.”

“No,” Jessyn said. “Is there a ship coming?”

“It mentioned fear for your safety.”

“No,” Jessyn said. “I came. It was there. It told me to leave, and I left.”

“It was alone.”

“No, it had one of the Rak-hund with it.”

“Nothing else.”

“Nothing else,” Jessyn said. “Did something go wrong? Is my equipment all right?”

“You will return to your pen now,” the Carryx said. “A new overseer will be assigned to your moiety for the remainder of your duty.”

“I understand,” she said, and left, lips pressed thin to stop her smile. She tried to get through the common room without the others grabbing her, but the human need for information in uncertain moments was too much, and she had to relay the whole conversation and pretend exhaustion before they let her go on. As she left, the conversation was already turning to the prospect that something bad had happened to Third Gardener, even though the Carryx hadn’t said so. It wouldn’t, would it? Not to animals of use like them.

But it had mentioned the incoming ships. It had locked all of them away. And the deck was vibrating in a way it hadn’t since they’d landed. The Carryx were prepping for the coming fight.

That meant it was time.

When she was alone in her room, she pulled the cylinder out from under her mattress. Thin lines of dried mucus marked where snails had traveled over it. She hefted it, feeling the weight as if there might be anything she could learn from it. The artifact had traveled farther than she could imagine and through a stranger path to end up here, in her palm. She took the body of the thing in one hand, gripped the top with the other, and twisted. The cap came off easily.

The dust that spilled out was a dull ashy gray, dense as sand but finer. Jessyn let it pour through her fingers and onto the deck. For a moment, it seemed inert.

The cold started at the vestigial webbing between her fingers, first a chill and then a numbing bite that spread. She flapped her hand, brushing off the dust at the same time she thought Well, that’s pretty damned endothermic. The dust on the deck moved like invisible winds were stirring it and leaving a few pale needles of frost behind.

And then, between one breath and the next, it was all gone and the cylinder that had carried it decayed to tiny flakes of black rust on her bed. Then that broke down too, and all that was left was a persistent coolness and a smell like a stone quarry in winter.

Jessyn sat, waiting. Now that it was done, she recognized that she’d strategized and worried over everything up to this moment, and then had no plan for what came after. Some part of her had expected the sabotage to take place all at once, like a wave of darkness passing through the ships and disabling everything it touched. Or alarms to sound. Something. Instead, her cell slowly grew warmer, the voices from the common room changed without ever shifting their significance. The lights stayed on. If it had failed, it would have looked just the same.

She’d learned the basics of minima physics when she’d entered the medrey, and while most of it had been empty language, some of the images still had power. The idea that the smallest particles passed through every possible path between interactions didn’t make any intuitive sense to her, but it resonated with her present.

Somewhere out there, an enemy rescue ship was burning toward Garral and the children, but it could be in the high vacuum between planets or already inside the world’s atmosphere. It could be falling down like a stone from the sky or skimming up toward them from the horizon. Without information, it was all of those places for her, and every moment was the opportunity for a new interaction. A new piece of information that would close off some possible futures and define others. The nattering of the common room sounded like a slice of hell and the little bed felt too small to hold her, so she paced and stretched and meditated and looked through her satchel and reviewed her field notes and willed time to move more quickly unless the future was bleak. Then, she wanted the moment she was in to extend forever and never quite pass.

And then, it did.

“All moieties will prepare to leave the local gravity well. Assume turbulence and lock down all equipment. Remain secured until the transition to asymmetric space.”

Jessyn’s mind tripped over itself. From now until they hit heliopause was a long, unpleasant time to stay strapped to her bed. But she also really hoped they wouldn’t actually lift off. If the ships managed to make it only halfway out of the atmosphere before the dust shut off the engines, she and all the others would be just as dead as if the enemy shot them. She couldn’t imagine traveling this far through so many dangers just to die by smashing on the ground in a stalled spaceship.

But unless she called out for the Carryx and confessed everything, that was the risk. She checked the two glass sheets and their precious garden of slurry, then folded them into the same carrying space she’d used in the journey over. Someone in the common room was shouting, someone else—maybe Holom Coombs—was making reassuring noises.

The low-level vibration in the deck shuddered once, then twice more, then settled into a steady, almost subliminal throb. She sang a nonsense song to herself as she made ready and then realized that the lyrics were We’re all going to die now in a gentle, childish singsong. She made herself stop.

Somewhere beyond the walls of her cell, some enemy ship was preparing to engage in battle with the five Carryx exploration vessels. Or was already leading them in a chase. Or had landed and was trying to usher in all the civilians it could before the window of opportunity closed. That she didn’t know—couldn’t know—ate at her.

She hoped that Garral had been able to radio ahead and explain to them why, despite all instinct and evidence, this one time they shouldn’t just kill every Carryx ship they could see. If he hadn’t, then all her worry about getting caught sneaking the canister on board would at least be short-lived.

The shaking of the ship’s engine shifted again, growing both louder and somehow more violent. The hum took on weird, uncomfortable harmonics like the metal was singing in a distant, inhuman choir. Jessyn wondered how high the ship could get before it fell without killing everyone inside. She strapped herself into the bed, keeping her arms inside the frame and an extra blanket under her head and upper back as if the thin layers of material might be enough to save her from the coming crash.

The ship lurched and she yelped in alarm. Then she laughed a long, rolling hilarity that fed on itself. A small, still part of her that watched the rest recognized the hysteria and panic, but there was nothing to be done about it. There was no way to soothe away fear that well-founded. The engines whined again, and Jessyn felt herself growing heavier, like when an elevator started hauling her up into the high reaches of a tall building. It didn’t mean they were rising. The Carryx ships did strange things with inertia and gravity. They might still be on the ground or halfway to space. That she couldn’t know made it worse.

Something stuttered. Something snapped. For a fraction of a second, she was weightless, and the whole room rose up and struck her on the back. An alarm was blaring someplace, or maybe it was some alien screaming in panic of its own. The lights flickered, went off, flickered again.

Relief rose up in her chest—the sabotage had worked, and she’d lived through the aftermath—but it didn’t last.

“All moieties not tasked to violence or repair are to remain braced and in position. Do not release from your areas of protection until given permission. All moieties with duties in protection and damage mitigation, prepare yourselves to serve. Brace for enemy attack.”

Oh, she thought. And then, more deeply, I see.

She’d almost made it. She’d done her part, she’d stopped the Carryx ships in their tracks. And now they were under fire. Missiles or guns or lasers or whatever instruments of death the human ships used were speeding toward her. The ceiling of her cell looked just the same. The blanket under her head and back had only shifted a little. The wide restraints meant to hold her in her coffin were disarranged, but only slightly. This was going to be the last thing she saw. The last air she breathed.

Garral had tried, she was sure, but it hadn’t been a fair thing to ask. If she’d been the war leader facing the Carryx, and the opportunity had come to kill five of their ships, she probably wouldn’t have let one man—a stranger from a vanished tribe—dictate her actions either.

There was a kind of peace, though, in having tried.

She undid the restraints and let them drop away. With what was coming, she couldn’t believe they’d help. Better that she should die with a little agency. She’d heard that at the end, a person’s life sometimes flashed before their eyes, but she didn’t see anything besides the ship that was her prison. No tall man in a dark cloak came to harvest her. No glowing angel of mercy like the Gallantists preached. She just took a breath, and then another, and waited for one of them to be the last.

The lights of the ship went black, then came back on at a blinding intensity. The hum that had gone silent returned as an earsplitting shriek, and the ship lurched. Jessyn fell off the bed, splitting open both knees, and screamed. Something else happened, something violent enough to shake the room, but she was clawing her way back into the bed. One of the restraint straps was in place now, digging into the skin on her rib cage. The others were flapping loose like long strands of fresh pasta that had been animated into some simulacrum of life.

She slammed into the bed. Her mouth tasted like blood.

The cell was quiet.

The hum of the engines began, quieted, swelled.

“All moieties, prepare to leave the local gravity well. Assume turbulence and lock down equipment. The transition to asymmetric space will occur in seven cycles. Plan your physical needs accordingly.”

A few minutes later—a lifetime—the hand of gravity pressed her gently into her bed. The Carryx ship murmured as it rose. The planet Third Gardener had called World fell away invisibly behind her, and with it, everything that had happened there.

For a long timeless while, Jessyn was a lump in her cell, rising to change her bandage, clean the cuts on her knees, eat or bathe or visit the toilet and then crawl back into her blankets.

She didn’t know what had happened, and neither did any of the others. Their fear and confusion at being kept in the dark were beneath the notice of the Carryx. And she didn’t find the annotation in her work until they had already made the jump into asymmetry.

She was sitting in the common room. A bowl of something that was almost rice and eggs was about halfway eaten and cooling at her side, and Jessyn was reading through her field notes. The extra entry looked like a normal aside, except that it was added to her draft in the moments before the exploration ship had lifted off. Added, she knew, from some other notebook besides her own.

One of the curious effects in botanic signaling—especially in strawberries—is the need for a plant to present sufficiently convincing evidence of countermeasures to an unwelcome guest. See also: authenticity and deception in interspecific predation markers, and forgive me for leaving without you.

“Are you all right?” Holom Coombs asked.

“What?”

“You made a sound? Like a little grunt? I thought maybe you were hurt?”

“No, I’m not,” Jessyn said. “Actually, I feel great.”

Thirty-Two

Brun and the new technical crew walked along the side of a long, thin slurry tank. The new techs had all been other things in their past lives: an industrial mathematician, an architect, a civil engineer. They all had decades of expertise and success behind them. It made them pains in the ass is what it did.

“I have a question about the middle sequence,” the civil engineer said. “This part where the fluid’s already been cleaned and we’re starting to inject stuff into it.”

“Nutrients,” Brun said. “That’s where we start putting in the casein and lactose and lactoferrin. The lipids and fat-soluble vitamins come in at the next stage.”

“Yeah, that stuff,” the engineer said. “So what I’m wondering is why is there that physical drop-off between the sections? It seems like that’s going to mess with the flow. What you need to do is get those level with each other and put the whole mess on a half-point grade.”

“We can look at that,” Brun said. “Let’s just finish training up on how it works now before we start remaking everything, all right?”

He knew from his work in the old days that having a bunch of fresh meat come in who didn’t think they already knew everything would have been better. But this was who he had, so this was who he’d work with. Everyone who looked at the slurry tank saw something different: a problem in fluid dynamics or a less than perfectly optimized system or a piece of equipment that occupied a particular space in a particular way.

It was his job to make them see what he saw: the garden that would feed their children when they came out of the lamb sacks. If they couldn’t keep this working every shift without fail for years, the kids would starve. And now this was his lab, his factory, his team, so that wasn’t going to happen. He’d shut down everything else if Alkhor and the librarian didn’t come through, but he wasn’t seeing babies die on his watch. He was a union man, not an asshole.

The new woman came in from the archway to the east like she was heading in from the legacy labs. Gold-brown skin, light brown eyes, and black hair. Her build was thin, almost adolescent. When she smiled, he felt bad for staring, but he didn’t know who she was, didn’t remember seeing her before. That was weird.

“Hey there, Brun. Am I interrupting?” she said.

“Um,” Brun said, holding up a finger to the others. “Give us a second, folks.”

The woman stepped back a few paces and he went with her. There was a strange smell around her. Not unpleasant, but peppery or something. Like she’d been sitting in a temple space, and the incense hadn’t quite loosed its hold on her.

“Been a while,” she said. “I was sorry to hear about Tonner.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Brun said, his mind working triple-time. Whoever the hell she was, she acted like they knew each other. Looking at her, he found that he really wanted to remember her too. “Tonner was a great guy.”

“He’ll be missed. But that means you and I should probably talk. I don’t want to bind you to the old plan… and you don’t remember who I am, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” Brun said through a chuckle. “I really don’t.”

She laughed, thank God, and touched his forearm. He felt the skin there tingle, like he was some kind of horny teenager. He coughed and looked away, trying to hide his embarrassment.

“That’s all right,” she said, smiling her forgiveness at him. “I won’t hold it against you. Clae. Clae Audin. Dyan Academy. I was Else Yannin’s senior research assistant back before she shifted over to Tonner’s team. He and I were talking about integrating me into this group, but the Carryx tapped me for one of their goose chases before we could nail down details.”

“Else Yannin?”

“Clae,” she said, almost like she was correcting him. “My name is Clae.”

The swarm sat at a table in the commissary with a salad and a bowl of hummus, and bright, ebullient sensation growing in her—her—chest. For long, painful, hungry days, she had kept herself sequestered in Jellit’s room while she remade herself and then remade herself again, looking for something in the mirror. Looking for something in her growing sense of a place in the universe that she could belong within. She made decisions that felt like discoveries. She burned excess mass because she couldn’t leave the cell even to get food. And because no one brought food. Not even Dafyd.

She’d turned back more than once, intimidated by the risk and the enormity of the task. But when she tried to remake Jellit, she’d felt a sense of revulsion she still didn’t understand. Where once she had been a secret sharer of his life and experience, now becoming him felt like putting on his corpse as a costume. Even when she wanted to go back, she couldn’t.

And while she waited for her flesh to remake itself, for the pain of reknitting bones to subside and the tide of blood displaced by her alterations to reabsorb, she’d traveled the unimaginably vast sea of the Carryx archive. She had followed the rise and fall of the Gundrux of Catiborn, the taming of the Lauf-moss that evolved to live in the faint light and instability of the heliopause and pointed the way to asymmetric space. The record of the endless, tedious, grinding war that the Carryx gnawed at like termites chewing holes in the fabric of the universe.

She saw the report from when the enemy forces arrayed against the eighth exploratory dactyl collapsed. When the Mulbeth of Canam were judged no longer worthy of their moiety and five billion of their number were culled. And because she knew to watch for it, she saw the report when Rickar Daumatin died.

Leaving the room as her new self had been a way to escape that as much as it had been anything. And it had been terrifying. She had spent hours standing motionless by the door, not able to move forward and unwilling to move back.

She knew—of course she knew—that the fear and anxiety were outworkings of patterns that she had used at the start. The anxiety and courage, the decision to have softer cheekbones, the preference—lightly held—for existing as a woman’s body and mind. Everything about her had begun in Ameer and Else and Jellit with the original nanoparticles of the swarm as a kind of connective tissue and phage. But Ameer and Else and Jellit had all begun as gametes. Patterns of molecules that had come together unexpectedly, that had interacted, had unfolded implication upon implication in the context of a changing and unpredictable environment until they became the people who they had been.

The mechanics were different for the swarm, but the process rhymed. The hummus tasted the same as it had when she’d eaten it with Jellit’s mouth, and it tasted a hundred times better because it was hers. There was no contradiction between the two facts. They were simply both true.

“And maybe you know Clae here?” Brun’s voice came from behind her, and she turned. The woman at his side was a researcher from Dyan Academy. It took a moment to find her name—Ennil Day. In the ancient times before the Carryx, she had worked in the lab beside Else’s. Brun had smelled something a little off and wasn’t entirely comfortable with her story. He was checking on her.

That wasn’t unexpected.

As she had when she met Brun, Clae flooded the air around her with pheromones. Love me, believe me, want to be my friend. While the room filled with the scent of her manipulations, she grabbed onto a memory. Ennil’s half-drunken, impassioned arguments against Else making herself second to Tonner Freis no matter how unpromising the spiral analysis data were. The memory let her spider along it to other, connected thoughts.

“Lecturer Day,” she said with the near-subliminal bow of a research assistant to a full researcher. “I don’t think we overlapped at the labs, but we met a few times.”

“Did we?” Ennil Day asked, shaking her hand politely.

“At the support gala for Sevrinson,” the swarm said, plucking a moment from Else’s past that was her own past now. “The girl who spilled wine all down her front? That was me. I wore my hair differently then.”

That had actually been a woman named Daan, but the incident had been years ago, and memory—as the swarm knew better than anyone—was fragile. There was maybe a flash of uncertainty as the other woman tried to remember the moment the way the swarm had prompted her to. And then the discomfort resolved as she did, and Clae Audin’s roots traveled back into time and memory. She became someone who had always been on the periphery, but always present.

“Oh, of course,” Ennil said. “I didn’t know you were in captivity with us.”

“I was sent out running errands at our masters’ bidding,” the swarm said, gesturing at the window and the wide sky beyond. “But I’m here now.”

For Dafyd, the strangest thing about conferring with the Deep Lothark was the variety of bodies that it arrived in. When he had first encountered the species, Soft Lothark had been indistinguishable from one another: long limbs, thick bodies, greasy pelts. He wasn’t sure when he’d started being able to tell one individual from the others, but it had been right around when they’d been assigned as guards. Now, each new session was like meeting a stranger for the first time and picking up the thread of an old conversation.

Today’s Soft Lothark was lighter than average coloration with a scar across the back of its hand and close-set eyes. It stared at the little fountain while Dafyd changed the glowing Carryx shape-script to read something like Can the Deep Lothark command Soft Lothark against the will of the Carryx?

The pale alien considered the question, gnawed for a moment on the end of a long finger, then shifted the symbols quickly, efficiently to a new set that took Dafyd almost a minute to decipher. To do so would invite scrutiny, and so the Deep Lothark both can and cannot.

He wiped the glowing slate and added in his usual I understand reply. The Soft Lothark looked around uneasily, as if it was confused by the conversation it was having.

Maybe it was. The exact dynamic between the murderous enforcers of the Carryx and the other self they traded back and forth on their lips and skin followed a logic that Dafyd hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t at all certain the Soft Lothark understood what the Deep Lothark was or what it was saying. To them, the conversations might be nothing more than flailing at the glowing shapes, unconscious of any reason for the actions they took. Some of them might not know how to read.

He reached for the letters again, then waved them away. He had been speaking with the Deep Lothark for most of the afternoon, and the effort left him spent and exhausted. The Soft Lothark rose from its place, scratched its arm, and ambled back toward the doorways leading into the body of the vast, arcing Carryx tower. The Rak-hund by the doorway gave its body a little shake as the Lothark passed, like a sleepy dog greeting an old friend, then went still again. Dafyd sat under his little tree, looking out at the glowing pastel expanse of a sky so familiar that he barely noticed it anymore. His eyes were tired.

He was due to have dinner with Korham and Andermus. The first wave of the human moiety that had been taken out into the universe alongside the Carryx were starting to roll back. A little over two hundred and fifty people had gone out to see whether they could serve Carryx interests at spots throughout the empire. Seventy had died, including Rickar. One hundred and sixteen were coming back, including Jessyn and Campar. The rest remained out among the stars. The dead and the lost weren’t Dafyd’s problem. Housing and feeding the ones who returned was.

Andermus wanted something she called a decontamination period before the returning humans were permitted in with the population at large. Korham argued for assigning them new quarters and duties at once, as encouraged by his faith. Dafyd didn’t care one way or the other, except for the growing sense of anticipation and dread.

Campar. Jessyn. They had been his friends once. He hoped they still were. Besides Uuya Tomos and the spy, they were the only ones he felt safe talking to about the plans he was forming. The only people left that he came close to trusting.

When the woman arrived, he mistook her at first for Andermus. She had the same slight frame and a confidence to the way she walked around the Rak-hund curled in the shadow of the archway. The hair was wrong, though, and the skin closer in tone to the Kaul family light bronze than Llian’s nearly translucent white. As she got closer the air filled with a peppery incense odor, and Dafyd found himself struggling to place her. She was familiar. He should have known her, but he couldn’t put a name to the face.

She sat down where the Soft Lothark had been. She frowned in concern, and said, “Have you been sleeping? You look tired.”

Dafyd jerked back like she’d lunged at him with a knife. “No. This? No. Absolutely not. This is insane.”

“Dafyd—”

“I can’t have people popping in and out of existence. There are a little over three thousand people, all of whom came over together. All of whom have been in a tight-knit community since we arrived. Now here’s some new person. Where did she come from?”

The spy made a gentling motion with her hands. The air smelled vaguely of spice. “I’ve thought this all through. It’ll be all right.”

“You need to go and turn back”—he glanced at the archway, the sleepy Rak-hund guard, and lowered his voice—“back into Jellit. You know that was what I meant. Not this brand-new person no one has ever met before that we have to explain.”

“It’s already happened,” she said. “My name is Clae Audin. I worked for Else Yannin back at Dyan before she was with Tonner’s team. I already have one person pretty sure she remembers me from back then, and I can get others. I’ve talked with Brun. I’m on the protein translation team, and you—Wait!”

Dafyd closed his mouth.

“And you need me there,” she continued. “With Tonner gone, I bring everything that Else knew. I am literally the best-qualified person alive. Better than Brun. I can get it back on track. No one else can do that, and it has to happen.”

“No,” Dafyd said. “This can’t be the way.”

The spy lowered her head. For a moment, he thought she was crying, but he was wrong. There was no grief in her eyes. Just regret.

“You’re in charge of so many things,” she said, “that I understand how you might feel like you were in charge of this too. But you are not. It’s my decision, and I’ve decided. You should accept that and let it go so that I don’t have to decide something else.”

“Decide something else,” Dafyd echoed. And then, “Are you… threatening me?”

“If we didn’t have a common enemy, you told me you’d spend the rest of your life finding a way to burn me down,” she said. Her face was very calm. Very still. “But we do.”

Dafyd didn’t have a name for the emotion, but it started like a hand pressing gently against his throat and bloomed down into his chest. It reminded him of being at a zoological park as a child and locking eyes with a full-grown lion for the first time. He would have called it fear, except there was something more with it. Something wide and wild and as awe-inducing as the stars.

He looked away. He took a breath.

“Is that what she looked like? The other one?”

“Ameer?” the spy said. “No. She didn’t look like this.”

“And the name you’re using?”

“Clae.”

“All right,” Dafyd said. “Fine. We’ll make this work. We haven’t really compared notes since Tonner died.”

“I’ve been busy,” the spy—Clae—said. “I can apologize if you want.”

“No no. That would be pointless. But I’ve let a lot of things slip. I’ve been spending a lot of time focused on the Deep Lothark.”

“The what?”

Dafyd laughed without humor. “There’s a lot to catch up on. The way that I’m using Uuya Tomos to build a secret culture of resistance out of songs and stories, the Lothark built one out of skin oil.”

When the spy both frowned and smiled, there were two perfectly symmetrical dimples at the sides of her mouth. She pushed her hair behind her ear in a gesture Dafyd remembered, but the hair was black, not the rich auburn of old copper. He felt a moment of sorrow, then pushed it away.

“Before we get to that, do you have a way to get in touch with the enemy? The ones who sent you?”

Clae shook her head. “I sent out one packet to them with all my early observations and data. I have reason to think it was received, but there’s no protocol for them to acknowledge it. That was before we found the archive, though. I don’t think I could get the information we have now out to them if I had a constant connection and a thousand years.”

“How did you send this ‘packet’ to them?”

“I’m not going to talk about that, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not a method I can use again.”

Dafyd leaned forward and chewed at the tip of one finger. He didn’t realize at first that he was mimicking the Soft Lothark. “All right. That’s a problem we’ll need to solve. Hopefully when the others start coming back we can find some strategies. I need a way to send them messages and also to get messages back.”

“Tall order,” she said. “Tell me about what you want to use it for. How much traffic do you want to pass back and forth?”

“Enough to coordinate an attack.”

“On what?”

Dafyd lifted his hands to the gridwork sky, the vast and curving towers, the dark procession of ziggurats that marched to the horizon. “The Sovran’s here, on this planet. This is the empire’s core, so this is where we break it. Assassinate the Sovran and sow chaos for long enough for the enemy to come in and do to these bastards what they did to Anjiin.”

PART SIX

DUCKS AND RABBITS

But when the last of the animals and plants and people of the world left the broad back of Ash-Abbé, the bird that ate the sky, Ke did not follow them but instead remained where he was and sang the songs to the great bird as he had done before.

The elders of the people called out to him, inviting him down to the world he had given them with promises of comfort and wine and feasting. Ke heard them, but he did not leave his place.

The young of the people called out to him, challenging him to come down to the world he had given them with offers to join their games and lead their hunts. Ke heard them, but he did not leave his place.

The infants, the first to be born on the new world, cried out to him, wailing without words to the world-father who had brought them to this new home but then abandoned them there. Ke heard, and though he ached to comfort them, he did not leave his place.

For thirty days and thirty nights, they called to him, and for thirty days and thirty nights, he refused. And on the thirty-first day, a weaver girl tied the new grasses of Anjiin and the old grasses that they had carried from the world and crept up to Ke thinking to seduce him back down with her.

When he saw her, Ke cried out in pain and longing, for he wished nothing more than to be part of the new world he had brought them to. But the great bird Ash-Abbé had been tricked by his song, and if he ceased to sing it, the bird would grow angry and punish all those who had gained from its humiliation. And so Ke could not be as his people were, and flew Ash-Abbé to the space between worlds. And if he has not died, he sings there still to keep his people safe.

—From Myths of Origin: Field Notes and Analysis, Uuya Tomos, editor.

Thirty-Three

The return to the world-palace was Jessyn’s third journey through asymmetric space, and the first time it had felt relaxing. Even the uncanny echoing of time and perception that marked the transition out of the physics she understood was easier for her. Always before when she’d suffered asymmetry, she’d been going into the teeth of the unknown. This was the first time heading toward something like home.

Apart from the occasional weird, nonphysical turbulence that came with the transit, the days of the return journey were pleasant. The Carryx and their client species for the most part left the human moiety to itself. She didn’t know if that was because their captors just hadn’t come up with something useful to do with humans during the transit or if it was a reflection of Third Gardener’s death. Either way, the cycles of artificial day and night slid by in the human quarters almost as if they were cut off from the empire. The only alien presences were a harried and impatient Sinen who seemed to resent having another moiety added to its workload and one of the True People of Hannic who had apparently committed some grievous sin against its community and was hiding out among the humans. They called their pet outlaw Skipper and taught it to play checkers.

What surprised Jessyn the most was the ease and camaraderie she felt with people she’d barely spent time with. Holom and Manni were the closest thing to connections, and they were barely friendly acquaintances. But when the humans sat around the common room eating and passing the time, playing games and folding jaunty little hats for Skipper, it was almost like these strangers were old friends.

She imagined this was what it was like on the transport back from a field assignment. They had all gone out to the wilds, to a place where the rules held a little less tightly than they did back home, and now having adventured, they were going back into their community. Back, but a little changed. She felt it too, even as she wondered what it meant.

When she was alone in her quarters, she tended to her glass farm, feeding sugar and micronutrients into the slurry and decanting off the liquor that kept her mind from sliding into darkness.

There were more individual organisms between the two sheets of glass than there had been humans on Anjiin. A whole ecosystem whose only reason for existing was to provide for an animal so vast and complicated that the bacteria that lived and died under her care were physically incapable of imagining her existence. They were the difference between sanity and despair for her, the purpose of their tiny lives so alien to them as to be meaningless.

Sometimes when she’d had enough social engagement and wasn’t tired enough to sleep, she ran her fingertips over her gunshot wound. She traced the ridges and valleys that she’d carved into her own flesh, mapping where the skin was numb and where it had become more sensitive. She’d heard that people who didn’t attend to disfiguring injuries—amputations especially, but other wounds too—were sometimes punished by their bodies. The injured skin would develop more pain fibers like a child demanding attention from a neglectful parent. She didn’t want that, so this was her way of being comfortable with who she was, this damaged new version of her, the one changed by herself and the world. Once, she’d had a smooth patch of skin along her side. Now she had a dark knot that ached sometimes. And strangely, both were her.

And she wondered, as the long days and nights of the trip went on, how different it would have been if Garral had been there. Sometimes she imagined him sneaking over to her cell and slipping into bed with her. Other times, she had long conversations with him about what it would mean to return to the world-palace and the special friend he’d left behind. Maybe he would choose to be with her when they got back. Maybe this mysterious other person. Maybe they would find some arrangement that worked for all three of them. In that version, the other woman looked vaguely like Irinna. Jessyn tried on all the scenarios like she was shopping for a blouse, seeing what fit and what didn’t.

But more often, when she thought of Garral, she only wondered. He was in the universe somewhere, learning new languages and discovering new societies and cultures. She pictured him filling his mind like a child in his first year at the medrey, going to bed every night with his brain brimming with new thoughts and knowledge. Hoping that the night’s dreams would make room for the next day’s discoveries. When she tried to think about what he was learning, there was a foggy blankness. She’d met Omco and Corvall and Manta, but the universe they inhabited was as inaccessible to her as she was to her bacterial livestock.

She wondered whether, when Garral inevitably met some other woman in his new home, he’d tell her about the three unfinished relationships he’d left behind. He’d sound like an old sailor with lovers in every port. And then she wondered, if she found herself in someone’s unexpected arms, what she would say. If she’d feel obligated to tell them about the girl who’d been murdered before she could profess her affection, and then the man she’d kissed once on a distant planet before an alien army carried him off.

She suspected that, if the time came, she’d keep those memories as memories and not spoil the moment.

The journey to the Carryx homeworld seemed to stretch forever, falling into a timeless duration that could have been anything, and then the warning came that they were about to leave asymmetric space. And then for a few moments she could see a little way into the future.

And then they were home.

“It is good to see so many old friends,” the big man said. Jessyn thought his name was Bastien Korham. “We are happy to bring you back among us. You’ll find, I think, that there have been some improvements since you left.”

The landing pad was smaller than the one Jessyn remembered from the first time they’d arrived as prisoners, but there was enough space for the ship and different areas for each of the moieties to gather separately—Euruk, True People, human, the huge millipede-things that she never had gotten around to interacting with. All of them were in huddles and groups around the landing area like schoolchildren of different years gathered for their parents to come take them home.

The slender fox-faced woman beside Bastien Korham—Llian Andermus, her name was—smiled coldly. “And we’ve also put some rules and guidelines in place to help the moiety function smoothly. There will be an orientation this evening in the common room. It is mandatory.”

Korham patted at the air like he was trying to gentle an anxious dog. “First, though, we’re going to show you to your new rooms. Give you the lay of the land. And welcome you all back to the fold. We are so grateful that you’ve returned safely.”

When Jessyn had left, the human moiety had only just been reintegrated. The period when the Carryx were shoving human workgroups into whatever niches were available had ended, the period when they decided humanity might be useful enough to invest with its own area and equipment hadn’t quite begun. The village that took up five floors in the massive, arching bones of the world-palace was like visiting someplace new. Korham led them through parts of it now with the pride of a man delivering a gift he was particularly pleased to give.

The changes had probably happened slowly enough over a long enough time that the people who had been there couldn’t appreciate everything they’d done. For Jessyn, it was all a little breathtaking. The simple physical truth of having people together in a space that belonged to them was an immense enough change, but the progress they’d made toward a living future was astounding to see. The hydroponic and microbial farms that made food and medication for thousands of people, the common room with its tables and benches and chairs like a huge family dining hall, the in-progress construction of a school, the empty nursery waiting for its first batch of babies.

And even more than that were the small things. Stand-alone hydroponic basins stood in the corners of hallways, overflowing with violets and lavender. Murals took up walls apparently at random, so that coming around a corner, they were sometimes confronted with the beatific eyes and bloody hands of a Gallantist angel or a forced-perspective landscape of a white and gold city beside a blue ocean. One hand-drawn flyer announced the meeting times of a composer’s studio, another a series of dance tutorials, and a third a public meeting to discuss how to design a medical infrastructure for the moiety.

The walls and decks, the windows and the inhuman landscape that spread on the other side, all of them were the work of the Carryx, but the little civilization inside it was human. While Jessyn and the field team had been out surviving, the remnants of Anjiin had found ways to thrive. She was more moved by it than she’d have thought.

The tour ended in the common room with each of the field team being given directions to their new quarters and a stern reminder to come back that evening for the security and law orientation. Jessyn hung back until the others had gone before she approached the thick-bodied man and asked about Jellit.

“Oh, that’s right,” Bastien Korham said. “I forgot you’re Jellit Kaul’s sister, aren’t you? So few of us had family taken up with us, it just doesn’t occur to me. I haven’t seen Jellit in some time. He was doing something mysterious with Lord Alkhor.”

“Lord Alkhor?”

Bastien grimaced. “Please forget I said that. It’s a nickname I shouldn’t have gotten used to. We don’t call him that to his face. It’s just that… Well, it’s healthy to poke a little fun at people in power, isn’t it?”

“As long as they don’t hear you, I guess.”

“I like to think he’d take it in the right spirit.” But his gaze cut away, and she didn’t think he particularly believed what he was saying. “You likely haven’t heard about Tonner Freis either. I’m sorry to be the one, but Tonner passed some time ago.”

Jessyn flinched. “What happened to him?”

“He lost his temper with… um, with Alkhor. His guard misunderstood. It overreacted.”

“God.”

“There was a mess,” Korham said, and his voice had lost its brightness. “People are still angry about it. But I’m sure Alkhor has constraints and limitations that we don’t understand. He’s the channel between us and them, and he does what he can to keep us safe. I believe that.”

Between one breath and the next, Jessyn’s pleasure and wonder at the moiety’s new space fell away. The urgency of passing on her report was like someone digging a thumb into her back.

“Where would I find him? I need to talk to him about some things.”

“It would probably be better to wait until after the security orientation. Most of the day-to-day things are being done by other people now, so depending on the issue, he may not even be the one you’ll want to speak with.”

“No,” she said. “I knew him before. This is for him. I need to talk to him.”

A Rak-hund was curled in the archway to the garden. Its knife-cruel legs were almost beautiful in repose. The alien’s head rose as she came close. She didn’t see any movement in its shell-like face, but she still had the sense that it was sniffing at her. For a moment, she was back in the labs with Rickar Daumatin while a beast like this one stabbed Synnia to death. Her heart went triple-time and she could taste adrenaline. She almost turned back. But then it shuddered like a sigh and shifted back into its resting pose. Jessyn clenched her jaw, balled her fists, and walked past.

The garden was spare and pretty. A single tree with a low metal fountain and two people sitting on benches. It could have been a mosaic from an old monastery except for the lushness of the sunset clouds.

Movement on her right caught her eye—two Soft Lothark lumbering together. Wide mouths and small black eyes. She looked away. She’d been traveling with Carryx soldiers for months at least. She didn’t know why these were upsetting her as much as they were except that they were in the context of other people. In the context of home.

The woman on the bench was a stranger. Pretty in an odd sort of way, with faintly golden skin and dark hair. Jessyn couldn’t remember ever having seen her before, but she recognized Dafyd immediately. The time she’d spent away had been rough on him. His face had grown not older but more worn. His eyes weren’t bloodshot, but they weren’t entirely clear either. The clothes he wore were the same tunic and trousers that they’d been getting from the Carryx since they’d arrived, but something about how he wore them made them seem awkward and badly cut, like he’d lost weight and gained it at the same time.

He looked up, saw her, and his smile erased the worst of the world’s damage. The woman followed his gaze. Jessyn didn’t know her, but the widened eyes and open mouth looked like shock. Before Jessyn could ask, Dafyd was standing up, arms open. His embrace was carefully sexless.

“I knew you were getting in soon, but I didn’t know when exactly,” he said. “The powers of the world are a little approximate with me sometimes. You’d think I wasn’t the most important person to them.”

“How odd,” Jessyn said, sharing the joke. “I got the tour. You have moved the human moiety up in the world. This is all much better than it was when I left.”

“We paid for it,” Dafyd said. “One way or another, we pay for all of it.”

The new woman stood, hesitated, and put out her hand for Jessyn to shake. Her grip was solid, her hand was warm.

“This is Clae,” Dafyd said, taking his place on the bench again. “She worked with Else back before Else worked with Tonner. She’s joining the protein reconciliation team now that Tonner’s gone.”

“Good to meet you,” Jessyn said.

Clae’s eyes were bright with tears, but she forced a smile and nodded. “Same,” she said. “Very much the same.” Jessyn wondered what conversation she’d just interrupted. If Dafyd was in the process of breaking something off with this woman or delivering some particularly bad news to her…

“There were things I needed to talk about,” Jessyn said. “But if this is a bad moment, I could come back.”

“It’s fine. Sit. Make yourself comfortable. There are better rooms, but they don’t have fresh air like this.”

“It’s a hell of an office,” Jessyn said, taking part of the bench beside the new woman, who smiled a dimpled smile at her. She smelled vaguely of spice. Jessyn found herself liking her immediately.

“Feel free to come here whenever you wish,” Dafyd said.

“You sure your staff won’t mind?”

Dafyd looked to see what she was talking about, then chuckled. “The Soft Lothark? There’s a story behind that. They aren’t as bad as you’d expected. You look like you’ve spent some time in the sun.”

“My first time in the field,” she said. “I always wanted to go, but… I don’t know. It seemed too risky. I may have gotten more courageous in my old age.”

“I don’t remember you being much of a coward,” Dafyd said.

“You didn’t know me that well in the before times. I’ve changed a lot. I talked to your builder. Korham? He said that he hadn’t seen my brother around in a while. Is Jellit here?”

“He’s on assignment,” Dafyd said. “I can get messages to him sometimes, but no. He isn’t here.”

“Oh,” she said. The disappointment was sharper than she’d expected, and maybe it showed. The new woman—Clae—put a hand on her shoulder like she was offering comfort. The gesture should have felt uncomfortably intimate coming from a stranger, but it didn’t.

“I think maybe I should go,” Clae said. Her voice was familiar. Not the timbre of it, exactly, but something in the cadence.

“That’s fine,” Dafyd said. “We’ll compare notes later.”

Clae stood, nodded once to Jessyn, then walked away with her spine stiff and her hands at her sides like she was holding her composure through a supreme act of will. Jessyn waited until she was safely out of earshot. “That was weird, right? Is that just me?”

“Probably not,” Dafyd said. “Clae’s a complicated situation.”

“I don’t remember seeing her before I left.”

“No, she was isolated for a long time. And…”

“Girlfriend?”

“Oh. No,” Dafyd said. “No.”

“Ex?”

His smile this time was less bright, wearier. “Complicated. She’s on our side, though. She knows about my…” He shrugged.

“Plot for bloody and cosmic revenge?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That. I trust her. You can too.”

“How far has that project gone?”

“Well, the towers are all still standing and unburned, but I’ve learned more.”

“I have too,” Jessyn said, lowering her voice even though there was no one nearby. “This deathless enemy that the Carryx are so wound up about? When I was on assignment, I came across a bunch of them. I sabotaged Carryx ships and assassinated a Sinen overseer to help them escape too. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you the whole thing, but the important thing is I sent one of us off with them.”

“You did what?”

“There was an archaeologist on the team named Garral Pär. He went with them. He’s teaching them about us and swapping languages. The Carryx don’t know. They think he’s dead. But that’s not the big thing. You know how everyone back home was always clear that DNA-based life came from someplace besides Anjiin? Well, I found out where we came from. The deathless enemy? It’s us.”

Thirty-Four

It would have been easier for Dafyd if he could sleep, but his nights were all becoming the same. Even though he felt dull and waterlogged from the moment he rose until he went back to his room at the day’s end, he would shut off the lights, pull up the blanket, and his eyes would open on the darkness.

His mind, which felt so slow and sleepy during the day, now sparked and slipped. It grabbed one passing thought after the next. Things he wanted the spy to search for in the ocean of data that was the archive, questions he could ask the Deep Lothark, the diminishing number of days until Campar returned, the need to keep pressure on the visualization workgroup now that Jellit was fully subsumed by the spy, how long he could keep the lie of Jellit’s survival going for Jessyn, and what he would tell her when the time came to reveal his death.

There were more things to keep in mind than he had places in his consciousness, and so he kept rediscovering things that he’d almost forgotten. He needed to know about Jessyn’s archaeologist Garral Pär and whether he was a pathway to open communication with the enemy. Andermus and Korham were growing more and more antagonistic, and he couldn’t let that get out of hand. And then back to the questions for the spy and the Deep Lothark and the start of the cycle again.

At some point, he might notice he was dreaming. That was the closest he could come to sleep. When he woke, he was haunted by the feeling that he had all the pieces he needed to make a working plan. He was growing more and more certain that there was a way to fit them together if he could just get some sleep.

Instead, he got up, showered, put on fresh clothes, and did his work. Some days, his duties were simple and rote. Others were more memorable.

The crowd started arriving at the nursery hours before Brun’s team was scheduled to begin decanting the babies from their lamb sacks. By the time Dafyd arrived, almost a third of the human moiety was in attendance. The nursery was packed, and displays had been put up in the common room and in the courtyard by the half-built school so that the people who couldn’t fit could still participate. A thousand grandparents waiting impatiently for the arrival of a hundred grandchildren with only a few parent-aged people in between. If there had been a whiff of brimstone about the project, an ethical crossing of lines, the day had come when people were ready to overlook it. The babies of the world-palace were about to be decanted, and the fine points of how they’d come to be were in the past. It was too late for anything to happen except for what had happened.

Dafyd made his way to the front of the nursery. The Rak-hund and two Soft Lothark waited by the side door, willing to let Dafyd fight through the crowd, but not willing to let him out of their sight. That was fine. He was going to need them later.

Brun came out from the lab and the crowd noise went up, and then shushed itself into quiet. Not calm. Dafyd could feel the tension and anticipation, but quiet because they wanted to hear.

“Hey there, everyone,” the thin man said. He was almost bouncing with anticipation. “I just want to take a second and thank you all for coming. For being here. And to set some expectations. The kids are all doing great. We expect the day to go well. And I know many of you have been through days like this before. Welcoming some new, y’know, people into the universe. This is going to be a little different than you’re used to.

“These kids have been gestating in lamb sacks, so they’ve already been seeing things. They’ve experienced light in a way most newborns haven’t. We’ve been simulating maternal heartbeats and breath, but not really voices. So these little guys are going to be more visual and less easily soothed by sound at first? That’s normal. It’s something to expect, not worry about.

“The thing I really want to say is how much these little guys are going to need you. They’re going to need people to hold them, to sing to them, to interact with. To feel loved by. That’s got to be all of us. The moiety is going to be what these babies have, so we’re setting up a rotation signup for people to come feed and change. Just engage with these kids. I know it’s mandatory, but I hope you’ll all do it anyway.”

Brun grinned, waiting for laughter at the joke, and the laughter came.

“So everybody just hang on for a few more minutes, all right?” he went on. “I’ve got some folks I’d like you to meet.” The crowd cheered and clapped and stomped their feet. Dafyd caught a glimpse of Jessyn on the far side of the nursery, clapping her hands along with the rest of them.

Brun turned back, disappearing into the lab, and Dafyd followed after him.

In the lab, Clae the spy was working alongside the rest of what had once been Tonner Freis’s team. Apart from being on the younger end of the age spectrum, she fit in fine. When she smiled and nodded to Dafyd, it was just a greeting. A politeness.

The lamb sacks had been moved for the decanting procedure, hanging in four lines like some exotic fruit that sprang from a vine made of metal and tubing. All the babies that had lived were in a row, still connected to the placental feed that would go on providing them with oxygen and nutrition for just a few more moments. The team had a basin waiting, and a stack of blankets as tall as Dafyd’s arm.

“All right,” Brun said. “We all ready? We can get this going. Let’s start with number one.”

The first sack was a boy with dark, tightly curled hair already as long as Dafyd’s pinky. Dafyd stepped close as one of the others took the sack off its hanging rod, put clips on the feeding tube, and snipped him free. The lamb sack burbled as they moved to the basin. The baby looked up at them, his lips opening and closing, his little ribs laboring under the effort of breathing fluid for the last time in his life. They lowered the sack into the basin. Brun took a blade no bigger than his thumbnail and ran it down the side where the panels of the sack met. The pseudoamniotic fluid smelled salty and hot. Brun slid the baby out, lifted him onto a table, and cut away the umbilical cord so efficiently that the tiny new person hardly had time to twist his face into a mask of affront and rage before Brun had moved him onto a blanket and swaddled him.

“You’re good at that,” Dafyd said.

“I had kids,” Brun said, lifting the child up into the crook of his arm. “You want to take him out?”

“Don’t you need to test him or something? I always thought you had to weigh them and check their reflexes.”

“We know these kids down to the gram. We’re not going to learn anything new until we start feeding them. And that’s once we’re done with all this.”

“All right, then,” Dafyd said. “Sure.”

“You going to name him?”

“No,” Dafyd said. “I’ll leave that for someone else. Whoever feeds him, maybe.”

“You sure? All these guys are here because of you.”

Dafyd took the tiny bundle of baffled primate into his arms. The small, dark eyes found him, and the new mouth opened with a grunt that seemed like confusion but might have been anything. “We need people to bond with them. Naming the baby is a profound bond. I’m not going to waste it on me.”

“Your choice,” Brun said. “Go ahead. Take him to meet his people.”

The crowd in the nursery surged and cheered as Dafyd came out to them. They weren’t cheering for him, but that didn’t matter. He carried the fragile bundle to a newborn’s crib designed for him and marked with the numeral 1 and a blank space where a name could be written. When he laid the baby down and stepped back, a half dozen people stepped in, gazing down and cooing at the new arrival. The baby lifted a tiny fist, waved it in the air, and yawned massively.

“You know,” Uuya Tomos said, taking his elbow and whispering into his ear, “I still think this is a horrifying perversion. If there is a Gallantist hell, we’re all going to burn there.”

“I do. I know that.”

“You look glum for a man who won.”

“There’s only one victory that matters to me,” Dafyd said. “This isn’t it.”

The door opened behind him, and one of the team came out with the second baby. Dafyd backed against the wall and gave the crowd and the children room. All around him, people beamed. Maybe there were others, parts of the moiety who disapproved of the whole thing, but they hadn’t come to the nursery. Dafyd let the moment of joy be what it was.

“Is there something wrong?” Uuya Tomos asked, more gently this time.

“When this is done, I need to have an unpleasant conversation,” Dafyd said.

“It’s hard to be the king.”

“I’ll remember that if I meet one,” he said.

The older woman laughed once, mirthlessly. “No, you’re right. That isn’t you, is it? All the throne and none of the crown for you. You ever regret getting the job?”

“No,” he said. “If it wasn’t me someone else would have it, and they’d do it wrong. I’m where I need to be to do what I need to do. Self-pity is a waste of time.”

For the next two hours, new babies arrived through the door and were taken to the cribs with matching numbers on them. Dafyd waited with a growing dread each time that the next baby would skip a crib. A stillbirth or failed decanting or whatever the right term would be. One of the many possible lives that got as far as breath and then turned back.

It didn’t happen. By the time they were in the early seventies, part of the team responsible for feeding and cleaning had moved into action. An assortment of adults from around Anjiin sat on stools, cradling the newborns with one arm and guiding in feeding nipples with the other. The fluid the babies ate might be called milk, but it was a term of courtesy. The proteins and sugars had been synthesized from bacteria. The pseudocolostrum was built antibody by antibody from designs pulled from proteomic dictionaries.

It started now, and went until the children were old enough to feed themselves. Or until they were able to reason for themselves. Or until they grew up. There was a new class of terribly vulnerable people that he would need to take care of, to budget labor and resources to support.

The lives that started that day wouldn’t look anything like the one that Dafyd had lived. None of them would ever know Anjiin. All of them would start life cared for by strangers. They had been born orphans, every one of them. Eventually, they might decide to track which chromosome had come from which unwilling donor, but even that would be a life shaped unlike the norm had been for the generations before. It was the price he paid to keep the executioner’s axe off their collective necks a little bit longer.

When the last crib was full, and the air was thick with the smell of false milk and warm baby, Dafyd gestured to the Soft Lothark guards and made his way back through the door and into the labs. About half of Brun’s team was still there, cleaning up the last of the decantation process or else prepping the next steps for maintaining and cleaning the new children. A few looked askance at the aliens in Dafyd’s wake, but no one objected to their presence. Not yet, anyway.

“Heck of a day,” Brun said. He was drying his hands on one of the last blankets. He looked both exhausted and pleased with himself.

“You did good work,” Dafyd said. “I know how much I was asking from you, and how hard it was picking everything up after Tonner died.”

Brun bent his thin neck. “It was rough. I’m glad we could do it.”

“We’ll need to start another batch in a few months. A lot of the project moving forward will be finding ways that the kids coming up can take on responsibilities. Help lighten the load for the next generation. It’s not bad bones for starting a new culture.”

“I guess,” Brun said. “But this was… you know… it. We’re still going to help take care of the kids. We’re not going to let them down. But we’ve waited as long as we can on the other thing. The work stoppage starts after we finish cleaning up and putting away.”

“I know,” Dafyd said. “That’s why I’m here.”

The rest of the team had slowed their work or stopped it. By the pile of spent lamb sacks, Clae was on her knees, packing the material away for recycling. She didn’t look up at him.

“I’m sorry,” Brun said. “I am. I know you have a lot to carry, but we tried negotiating. We tried giving you time. Until the Carryx agree, we’ve got to stick to our guns. This is the only way they’ll notice us. We have power here, and it’s their choice how and whether we use it.”

“Yeah,” Dafyd said. “Did you ever see those optical illusions when you were growing up? Like the one that was maybe a duck or maybe a rabbit? The way the same image kept popping between two different things is kind of like what we’re dealing with here.”

Brun crossed his arms. Dafyd knew he was stalling. Nothing about this was going to change. He went on anyway.

“On one hand, this is a straightforward labor dispute. You have demands, they aren’t getting met, you’re pushing back on management, which is the Carryx, through me as their middleman.”

“That’s what it is,” Brun agreed.

“It’s another thing too. It’s a subordinate challenging the authority of a superior. That means something to them, and it’s not negotiation. It’s you saying that you can do my job better than I can. That’s the logic of the situation for them.” He pointed to Brun—“Duck.” Then to himself—“Rabbit.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Brun said. “I don’t want your job.”

“No, you just want to tell me how to do it. For the Carryx, that’s the same thing. And there’s a way it goes from here. If I go to the librarian and insist on your demands, I’m challenging it. I’m saying I deserve to have its position. I’m an animal in its eyes, and they only know one way to deal with that sort of challenge.”

“I think you’re overstating how—”

“I know you do, but you’re wrong. We live and die at the whim of the Carryx. They will not alter their rules to make us comfortable or happy. We must reshape ourselves to survive in the space they allow us. Which means I have to deal with you using Carryx logic. So I’m going to ask you to withdraw your challenge now and agree that you and your team will go back to work and do everything you can to meet goals in a timely, efficient way. I’m asking you to back down.”

“You know that’s not going to happen,” Brun said, squaring his shoulders and thrusting out his jaw. It was the human equivalent of a Carryx rearing up on its hind legs and lifting its front arms into the air. It said, I will fight you.

“Yes, it will,” Dafyd said, and gestured the Soft Lothark forward. One of Brun’s team stepped forward, and Dafyd met her eyes. “No,” he said.

For what seemed like minutes, Brun either didn’t understand what was happening or didn’t believe it. There was a moment when he could have fled, and it would have made the already bad situation that much worse, but by the time the thin man thought to run, one of the Soft Lothark had him by the arm.

“What is this? What are you doing?” Brun said as the Soft Lothark pulled him to the floor. The second guard pulled a block out of its satchel that was roughly the size and shape of a builder’s brick. Dafyd suddenly felt deeply tired, like some moral exhaustion had washed over him more profound than simple weariness.

“The Carryx as a species have a way of resolving challenges like this,” Dafyd said. “They are an extremely lethal species, and they don’t want to kill each other all the time. So they have rituals that keep disagreements from escalating to a death.”

The first guard put a knee at the small of Brun’s back, pinning him down. The second took Brun’s right wrist and pulled it out. The man fought, but only managed to keep his arm bent at the elbow for a few uncomfortable seconds. Once it was straight, the Soft Lothark placed the block under Brun’s wrist.

“I don’t have very many people,” Dafyd said. “There’s a drain on expertise and experience that I can’t afford. Losing Tonner was a setback that we’ll be making up for a long time. You have stepped up in ways I hoped you would, but I didn’t expect. You’ve done a great job, and if the human moiety survives this, a lot of the credit for that goes to you.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Brun shouted. “You’re deranged.” There were flecks of white at the corners of the man’s mouth. His eyes were wide. When he tried to struggle, the Soft Lothark held him in place. “No,” Brun shrieked. “Please no! You don’t have to do this!”

Dafyd brought his heel down midway between Brun’s right elbow and the block. He felt the snap of bone more than he heard it. Brun screamed. The Soft Lothark looked up at him, a question in their small, dark eyes.

“I did this so I can explain to the Carryx that the proper actions were taken, and your challenge was resolved. They will understand. But if you challenge me again after this, they will not understand. And I will have no choice but to kill you.”

“You’re a fucking monster,” Brun said. “I helped you. I handed babies to you.”

He motioned the guards back. They let Brun go, and the man sat up, cradling his broken arm. He’d need a splint and a few weeks. There might be a scar and some loss of function. Dafyd looked at the faces all around the lab, turned toward him in rage and disbelief and fear.

“I know that this looks like cruelty,” he said, loudly enough for all of them to hear him. “But it’s the only kindness I have left to give. There will be a meeting of all department heads in three days. You’ll be there to report as usual. If you aren’t, you will be killed. Do we understand each other?”

Brun wept. His eyes were pressed closed, and he was rocking back and forth a little. Dafyd found Clae, still kneeling where she’d been.

“You’ll make sure he knows?” Dafyd asked, and she nodded her assent.

He turned away, walking back out the door to the nursery and the children.

He just wanted to sleep.

Thirty-Five

Campar sat on a thin, cloth-backed stool with a cup of cool water in his hands. The benches in Dafyd Alkhor’s little garden were fine, but his back ached if he sat too long on a hard surface. It ached if he lay down for too long or lifted anything too heavy. It ached if there was any opportunity to ache, but the benches were especially challenging.

The new woman—Clae—had one to herself, Dafyd the other. Soft Lothark guards loitered at the archway back into the great structure like tired factory workers waiting for a late-night transport home. The Rak-hund had curled itself into a resting spiral.

“Did you see human beings?” the woman asked. There was something very familiar about her. Not her looks—Campar was quite sure he hadn’t met her before—but the way she spoke and held herself kept ringing bells. Like she’d learned from the same lecturer and picked up some of their mannerisms. There was a story, he was sure, about how this unknown had become Dafyd’s trusted confederate. They hadn’t told him what it was yet, and he hadn’t asked.

“Not alive, no,” Campar said. “And the corpses outside the protected bridge were pretty badly gone. Inside it, though? They were dead, but they were unmistakable.”

“The one that came back alive,” Dafyd said. “Tell me about it.”

“I’m fairly certain it was one of the starfish octopuses. Pentapus? The remaining arms were the right length and conformation, and when it moved, it kept acting like it expected missing limbs to be there.”

“Did it talk to you?” Clae asked.

“No. It went right for violence. But… I don’t think it was alive, not really. It was more like a mechanism that thought it was a starfish. I mean, I poked and prodded at it for quite a while trying to get samples. It didn’t start moving until the rest of the ship got power back too. And then it appeared to be immediate.”

“Like it was equipment,” Dafyd said. “Not a living thing itself, but something that worked with a living thing, even when the living thing was gone.”

Campar shrugged. “That’s how it seemed to me.”

Clae and Dafyd exchanged a glance that might have had some significance to them. Campar took a sip from his water cup. The cool in his throat was welcome.

“All right,” Dafyd said. “Tell me what you can about the other aliens that were traveling with you.”

Campar told them about Vaudai and the Budon of Luus. The beetle-things. The Sinen and the Soft Lothark and what he remembered of the soldiers of the Carryx. He didn’t know what details would be useful, so he tried to include all of them. If Dafyd was getting weary, it was his job to say so.

It felt like they’d been talking for hours, but the sun had hardly moved in the world-palace’s sky. Eventually, the new woman made her exit, saying she needed to go look something up. Dafyd seemed to have some idea what that meant, but they didn’t fold Campar into their charmed circle. He took her retreat as the end of the official meeting and the beginning of the unofficial one.

“I was sorry to hear about Tonner,” Campar said. “And Rickar too. We became close on the trip out, before they separated us. I wish we’d been kinder to him… before.”

He meant in the old days, back on Anjiin, when they’d treated Rickar like a traitor for his part in taking their research from them. Back in the laughably naïve days when things like who got the credit for a discovery seemed important.

“There aren’t many of us left.”

“There are not. Can I ask you a question?”

Dafyd’s smile was rueful, but at least it was a smile. “You can ask, but I’m not sure I know as many answers as my reputation suggests.”

“It’s just that…” Campar said, then had to gather himself. “It’s just that Rickar should have been with me. When they divided us up, he traded places with a man I’ve been seeing. I can’t help wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t.”

“There’s no way to know,” Dafyd said. “You can’t carry that.”

“I seem suited to try, though. Do we know what killed him?”

“War,” Dafyd said. There was more weight in the shrug than there would have been in tears.

Campar would have stayed and talked just for the pleasure of visiting someone with whom he had a real history, but he could feel his energy starting to flag. He finished his water and took his cane. Dafyd embraced him gently in farewell, and then let him go.

His new quarters were two stories down, close to the common room and a series of chambers that were being built out into a kind of gymnasium and public park. One day, it would be pleasant, but for now it was construction noise and the smell of dust.

The Carryx architecture tended more toward ramps than stairways. Campar made his way at a gentle pace, and by the time he reached his door, he was starting to get his second wind. That was a new and welcome thing.

His memory of the journey back to the world-palace had less to do with history than with a kind of extended nightmare. There were some episodes that stood out. He remembered Ghati shouting at their Sinen overseer, demanding some medical attention or supply. He remembered his surprise and dismay the second time his skin started sloughing off like the remnants of a bad sunburn. The uncanny turbulence of asymmetric space and the muttering of the Budon. Beyond that, he’d been too ill to know much of anything.

The fields he’d been caught in hadn’t killed him, but they’d scattered a mesh of injury all through his body. And Ghati’s. And Vaudai’s for that matter. He had been exposed the longest and hurt the worst, but his lover and his alien friend had paid a price to save him. Ghati’s worst scar was an angry nerve that ran from his neck to one arm. The damage wasn’t visible, but some nights it hurt him enough that he wept in his sleep. Campar had several little neuropathies like it, and also weakness and an easy, unpredictable exhaustion. Probably his metabolism was a mess, but there wasn’t a hospital for the human moiety, because no one had built one yet. The physician he’d seen when they’d reached the new compound advised a lot of water and a lot of rest. That prescription had suited Campar fine.

When he opened his door, Ghati was sitting at their little table. The fiction that they weren’t a couple had ended on the return trip without any conversation about it. Now they were home and, Campar hoped, settling into some strange version of domestic bliss, as blissful as one can be riddled with injuries caused by alien superweapons.

On the table sat two plates of salad greens topped with a dusting of some sort of nutty brown protein and a clear dressing that smelled wonderful. The smaller man stood up as Campar sat down, and then helped push his chair in.

“Thank you, my dear,” Campar said. “Though I’m not entirely invalided yet.”

“I’m allowed to be nice if I want to,” Ghati said.

“You absolutely are,” Campar agreed, and took a forkful of the salad. Having something that resembled real food was a deeper pleasure than he’d expected. After so long living on the nutritional paste of the ships, something with a little crunch and taste of green leaf was revelatory. Campar chewed, attending to the way the taste and texture changed as the food started breaking down. When there was no more pleasure to be taken from it, he turned to Ghati. “I take it, if you’re being so nice, that the news is bad.”

Ghati’s chagrin was gone in a moment, but Campar saw it and Ghati knew he had.

“There’s another mission,” Ghati said. “Not to the battlefront this time. Some kind of very old scaffold around a star that the Carryx have controlled for eons and want someone to go take a look at.”

The food had lost its savor. Campar pushed the plate away. He tried a smile, but it didn’t work. “And they picked you to survey it?”

“No,” Ghati said. “They picked Vaudai, and he asked that I go along. I think he asked for us both, but you’re recuperating from the last one. So that left me. Apparently, the gooey little footstool likes working with us.” The lightness in Ghati’s voice was thin. Campar took the man’s hand.

“We can push back. I was in a research group with Alkhor. We’re friends. If anyone can convince the Carryx to send someone else in your place, it’s him. I just met with him. I can go back now, and we’ll have this taken care of by bedtime.”

Ghati went over and sat on the edge of the bed, just far enough away that Campar couldn’t reach for him from his chair. His face twisted and moved through a variety of expressions without landing on one, but Campar had seen that face in so many moods. Joyful, terrified, crushed by dread. What he saw there now broke his heart.

“We never meant this to be anything when we started.”

“It was something for me, though.”

“And I think I love you,” Ghati said. “I really think I do. But this connection? It’s not something we should try to hold on to.”

“Why not?”

“Because we can’t hold on to things. Because there is so much happening now that we don’t influence, much less control. I just think it would be better if we were more like water. Let the universe tell us what shape it needs us to be, and be that. Change when the universe changes.”

“You’re going to get scared again. You’re going to get depressed again. I won’t be there to help, and I hate that. Let’s fight for each other a little, can’t we?”

“No,” Ghati said. “It’s not that I don’t want to fight. But when I watched you almost die I knew I could never do that again. Whatever rips us apart the next time will be a hundred times worse for me. This way… This way, I can stand it. You see that, don’t you?”

And the hell of it was, he did. It was like a weight placed on Campar’s sternum, a little pressure just over his heart. “In other circumstances?”

“We’d be other people,” Ghati said, and the door nudged open. A nacreous blue-gray lump pressed into the room.

“Have you said the things?” Vaudai asked. “Has the grief passed?”

“No it hasn’t,” Campar said. “It’s barely started. You can come in. I can be sad without you blocking my doorway.”

Vaudai writhed its way in, pushing the door with its bulk, and came to a stop beside the table. “This one told me that you would regret being excluded. I reminded it that you had almost expired last time, but it thought you were so fond of us that wouldn’t matter.”

“It’s true.”

“That’s maladaptive,” Vaudai said. “If you were functional, I would enjoy risking your existence again.”

“Well, there’s always next time.”

“Until one or all of us dies,” Vaudai said, but it spoke with an air of agreement. “The stellar armature has not been reviewed in six thousand local rotations. I expect this to be a fascinating exploration.”

“But safe,” Ghati said.

“Oh no,” Vaudai said. “Not at all safe.”

Campar laughed. It didn’t take the heaviness away, but it did make it a little more bearable. It would be worse again when the pair of them had gone. “I think Ghati was trying to reassure me that you two would be all right.”

“We will,” Vaudai said. “We are mortal. It is all right to eventually die. It would be concerning not to.”

“I am going to miss you, you vast knot of mucus.”

“I expect to regret the absence of your grotesque odor as well, sticks-with-meat.”

“If this war is ever over, I hope you’ll call me,” Ghati said, and Campar’s heart leaped a little. He’d broken off connections before, and he recognized when a man was leaving a little hope by the door on his way out.

“I will,” he said, because they both knew that he meant if.

“The war will never end,” Vaudai said. “It cannot. The Carryx will never cease their aggression, only redirect it.”

“Well, maybe they’ll lose,” Campar said.

“They will not,” Vaudai said. “The enemy is in retreat. Their holdings are collapsing in five of the seven essential strategic zones. The war has stretched over eons, and the enemy has never been in a worse position than it is now.”

“No hope, then?”

“Of peace?” Vaudai said, cheerfully. “Absolutely none. The Carryx will be victorious, and then they will go on with the war at every edge of the empire. They have no choice. What is, is.”

“Humans are not the deathless enemy.”

Dafyd sighed. “It’s late,” he said.

“Would you be sleeping if I weren’t here?” Clae asked.

“Not really. I seem to have forgotten how to do that.”

The knock had come at what felt like midnight. Dafyd had answered, reassuring the Rak-hund and Soft Lothark that were stationed in the hallway outside his quarters that Clae didn’t pose a threat, and brought her inside. He was aware of what that would look like, and it bothered him. With all the terrible things he’d done, all the terrible things he’d committed himself to doing, the idea that people would think he was using his authority to leverage sex from the new girl left him deeply uncomfortable.

“It didn’t quite make sense when Jessyn said it,” Clae went on. “I mean, if humanity had been fighting this war back into the ages, wouldn’t they have recognized you as their opponent when they took Anjiin? How would they have left any of you alive, much less brought you here?”

“I have some tea,” Dafyd said. “It’s lukewarm and it isn’t really tea, but it’s something. You want some?”

“Sure.”

“They did fight humans, though. Campar saw them on the ship. Jessyn saw them on the planet. We have related languages. That’s pretty strong evidence.”

“That humans are on the other side,” Clae agreed. “That’s not the same as being the great enemy. Not any more than I think these pentapods are the great enemy.”

Dafyd poured dark liquid into a cup. It smelled minty and rich. Another little gift Tonner Freis had left them when he went. “That sounds very much the same to me.”

She took the cup from him and drank it at a gulp, then sat at the table and raised her finger like a lecturer delivering an important point. “The Carryx are going to see humans as animals. When they come across a species in war, they don’t necessarily see them as the enemy so much as the enemy’s tools. Their possessions. That’s what they’d be if the Carryx had them. That’s what we are. I doubt the deathless see Rak-hund as their great enemy, right?”

“All right. So humans are a client species of this enemy?”

“And Anjiin was like a pack of wild horses. Not tainted. Available to take and exploit for themselves.”

“Except we weren’t.”

“Except you weren’t, because I was there,” she agreed. “I went back after we talked to Campar. The archive’s too big. I can’t be sure. But I found references to what sounds like humans going back eight thousand years. The deathless enemy? The black things that keep fighting even after they’re dead? They go back millions. The earliest references I found, they were associated with something called the Logothetes of Shun and Sum, but even in those it seems like the Carryx had been fighting the deathless before that.”

“You have a theory,” Dafyd said, and sipped his lukewarm tea.

“What do you know about lichens?”

“I know they’re primitive soil-generating life-forms that showed up in both trees of life on Anjiin.”

Clae picked up her empty tea mug and put it down again. Her fidgeting reminded him of Carryx feeding hands plucking at each other. “A lichen has an algae-like function that can pull energy from light and a mineral decomposer like a fungus that can mine nutrients out of the environment. Together, they’re what makes soil out of stone. I did a focused study my last year in medrey.”

“Which you?”

“Ameer,” she said without missing a beat. “But the thing is, they’re different organisms. The algae and the fungal decomposer? Not genetically related. The same algae on a different substrate organism is a different lichen. You can mix and match. The deathless may be the same.”

“You’re thinking there’s some other species out there like the Carryx that’s been using animals like humans since the beginning of the war, whenever that was,” Dafyd said. “Like a master enemy that’s behind it all, and humans are pawns on both sides of the board.”

“No, I don’t think it’s a species. I don’t think it’s alive. I think it’s like me. Like I was.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“What if it’s just a set of instructions? Like a virus, but instead of how to make more viruses it shows how to make a substrate organism unkillable. How to take a body and make it into a soldier that’s stronger, more robust, more effective than it would be without. Then that idea or set of ideas or techniques gets passed on from species to species to species. For the Carryx, it’s like they’re seeing new aspects of the same enemy using the forms of different client species. They see it as a singular thing. But it isn’t. It doesn’t have a self. It doesn’t have any consciousness of its own. No will, no self beyond what it co-opts from the bodies it appropriates. No intention. No awareness.”

“All right,” Dafyd said. “Say that’s right. What does it change?”

“There might be other things out there like me.”

“And what does that change? We’re still here. We still need to make contact. We still need to coordinate the assassination of the Sovran with an invasion force. We still need to bring down the Carryx. Whether you’re the only thing in the universe like you or not doesn’t matter to any of that.”

Her mouth opened as if she were about to speak, but no words came out. A blush started in her neck and rose to her cheeks. It was a very human response.

She said, “I should go. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“You feel like you’re alone in the universe, and it hurts. I understand that. You saw a possibility that maybe that could change, and you got excited. I understand that too. But it’s a distinction that doesn’t make a difference right now. Stay focused.”

Clae stood. The excitement had drained out of her, and what was left looked like shame. It was strange to think that, since the part of her that was her hadn’t been conscious before it reached Anjiin, there was at least one sense in which she was very, very young.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

Thirty-Six

Surur of the cohort Tlassen, regulator-librarian to the Sovran and first among her servants, stood on his bench. He was the most honored among the hundred and more that had come to witness the meeting of the Sovran with her newest daughter. The air was awash with the trill and rumble of Carryx voices and the thick weight of their pheromones. Surur-Tlassen felt his own flesh producing scent, reflexively commanding the space around him. The excitement of the day was intoxicating and elevating. He felt his throat thickening with the pleasure of simply being there.

Across the meeting chamber, the benches were empty. They would not remain so for long.

This would be the sixth such meeting Surur-Tlassen had witnessed, and while nothing would ever match the flesh-altering profundity of the first one, every repetition of the ritual had power for him. Each meeting had made him more deeply what he was.

The passage to the private creche clicked softly. If it had blared like a mating call, it would not have commanded more attention. The voices of the living Carryx rose and then fell away as the passage opened and the remnants emerged. The one that had once been Urur-Atlak came first, moving slowly on its withered arms. Its abdomen shifted behind it arthritically. The pale sticks that had once been fighting arms lumbered forward. The others followed in order, youngest to oldest, until the last remnant hauled itself slowly out of the dark. Surur-Tlassen had never known this one in its life before the creche. It had lost two of the legs from its abdomen, and its eyes were the milky white of blindness, but it had dozens of them. Whoever it had been, this diminished echo still showed that the ancient thing had been astounding. Now, the other remnants had to help lift it onto its bench.

When they were all in place, the meeting chamber went silent, and from behind Surur-Tlassen, the Sovran made her way into the chamber. The scent of her pheromones was overwhelming, even to him. He had spent every day since he had gained his office in her company, breathing in the air she had breathed out, but the richness of her day-to-day company was mild compared to this overpowering presence. For the other Carryx—the ones who saw her less, spoke with her less—it would be overwhelming. At the end of one bench, the supervisor-librarian of the logistical body cried out and lost control of his limbs for a moment, flailing like a newborn fresh from the shell.

Across the meeting room, the remnants and monks of the private creche were unmoved.

The Sovran rose up on her legs. The silver of her crest caught the light, refracting a thousand subtle colors. Her hundred eyes shifted with a glorious independence. From where he stood Surur-Tlassen could watch the scintillating patterns beneath the filigree that covered her abdomen. Her beauty and power softened the organs of his viscera, his body eager to become whatever she might command of him.

A movement came from the passage. At first it was nothing more than a shadow in darkness, but then slowly, carefully, another body hauled itself out to the light.

The daughter was wider than the Sovran, her abdomen almost flat as a table at the back. Her crest was vivid green with filaments of crimson and indigo woven through it. Her feeding arms were tucked close to her thorax, and her fighting arms were thinner than her mother’s, but they moved with an agility and sureness that spoke of youth and vigor.

Mother and child considered each other from across the chamber. For a long, breathless moment, neither moved.

The Sovran tucked her feeding arms in close to her thorax, rose up on her abdominal legs, and spread her fighting arms wide. The call that came from her throat was deep and primal. Surur-Tlassen didn’t only hear it. He felt it resonating in him, felt the surge of blood flowing to his own muscles, the pain-sensing nerves going numb as they prepared for battle. The violence in that call was older than most parts of his mind, and what answered it came not only from deep in his body but from far into the genetic memory of his kind. It whispered into his heart of an ancient time when fields of primitive Carryx hurled themselves recklessly into battle to answer that call. The sound tasted like blood.

The daughter’s response came as the Sovran still sang its war cry. The new Carryx rose up, fighting arms spread, and screamed defiance that was as sweet and clear as fresh water. The two voices joined, and the regulator-librarian felt them both, pulling his flesh and his mind to opposing ends. If he had put his limbs in a fire, the pain would not have been greater. The involuntary whimper that escaped his beak was inaudible in the storm.

The daughter struck first, lashing out at the Sovran’s thorax. The concussion of the strike was a blow to his ears, his eyes, but he didn’t respond to it. The Sovran’s counterstrike had already begun as she rushed forward, trying to push her new daughter back and force her to expose her vulnerable legs or throat. When the daughter danced sideways to avoid the rush, the Sovran’s fighting legs snapped forward, and the daughter’s right abdominal foreleg shattered in a spray of chitin and pale blood. A blow that for any Carryx other than these two would have meant the end of the fight, dominance established. Even for these titans, the nature of the injury looked like an advantage that would end the meeting in the Sovran’s victory.

For a moment, it truly looked like an advantage.

The daughter spun on her three remaining legs, her fighting arms snapping out, not at the Sovran’s head or abdominal legs, but at the fighting limbs themselves. The blow landed at the juncture of the Sovran’s left fighting arm and her body, and the limb sagged. He could see blood sheeting down the Sovran’s side as she tried to lift her now-uneven arms for a fresh strike, but the attack was awkward. It only pushed the daughter away.

The daughter shrieked again, her fighting arms hammering forward twice, then a third time. The Sovran’s ornate crest cracked. Her feeding arms rose up and out, a dying effort to fend off the blow that would crush her throat. The daughter hit, and the Sovran’s abdominal legs gave way. Again and again, the daughter struck the dying Sovran, screaming rage and joy as her mother died before her. The light went out of the Sovran’s many eyes.

The arena went quiet, the last echoes of the battle cries fading into silence.

The scent of her death was as deep as turned earth and fresh blood. The others would smell it too, experience it in their own ways. But Surur-Tlassen was the regulator-librarian. The connection point between the Sovran and the empire. He had felt the deaths of the previous daughters, been lifted by their mortal waves, and returned to himself.

This time was different.

Even as the new Sovran towered over the corpse of her mother on the meeting room’s floor, the remnant that had been Urur-Atlak looked across. All of its eyes were focused together on Surur-Tlassen, not because it lacked the intelligence to see other things but because no other thing was as interesting to it.

Surur-Tlassen felt a wave of calm wash over him, and then a profound and beautiful falling away. His gender, his responsibility, the burden of his office. A banked and unacknowledged lust that had underlain everything he—it—had done since achieving its goal deflated in a kind of holy fatigue. It was as if a lifetime of torture it hadn’t known it was suffering had suddenly stopped and left it at peace.

The new Sovran lifted her head and began her song. For the first time, Surur only heard the sounds. Its body didn’t reshape to it. Nothing in it answered her. The relief was unexpected and joyful.

As the others who still lived under the Sovran lifted their own voices, as they sang her song and tuned themselves to her peculiar cadences, the thing that had been Surur-Tlassen walked across the meeting room and took its place with the other remnants.

Soon, its new cohort would lead it to the private creche where it would spend the rest of its life crafting new daughters for the new Sovrans. Its old life—all its old lives—were behind it, and it was embarking on this one last incarnation. The ambitions that had driven it, the pride that had buoyed it up, the furious effort of distilling the reality of the endless empire into a daily summary all belonged to a new regulator-librarian now. Soon, the council of eight that had attended Surur would be fighting each other for the honor of taking its place.

The smell of blood and pheromone wafted through its nasal chambers and triggered nothing. The acclaim of the Carryx to their Sovran filled its ears and shifted no part of its body or its blood.

The remnant that had been Urur-Atlak leaned over, its beak coming almost close enough to touch skin.

“Welcome home,” it said.

The Sovran stood on her mother’s corpse, drenched in both of their bloods, and the empire moved on as it should, in perfect harmony.

“The new crop of grasses have met the requested nutrient densities,” Dafyd said. “The levels of phosphate and unfavorable saccharides are within the tolerances you requested, but the team believes another round of modifications will be able to reduce them further.”

Ekur-Tkalal shifted on its abdomen and modified the glowing shapes that floated in front of it to reflect the possibility of improvement. Dafyd took a covert kind of pride in understanding the grammar of the reports as well as he did, but he pretended to be out of his depth. The more the keeper-librarian underestimated him, the better.

The Carryx muttered and whistled, and the half-mind said, “These results are much improved. Your research group deserves whatever recognition is appropriate to your kind.”

“I will see to it,” Dafyd said.

He had a sense that the librarian’s vocabulary in human languages had started to improve. He didn’t know if that was a sign that the half-minds had gathered enough samples of human interaction to grow sophisticated or if it was something specific to Ekur-Tkalal as an individual, but it was interesting. Maybe concerning, maybe not. He added it to the semi-infinite list of things that he needed to look into, manage, control.

The next question—the one he’d been half anticipating and half dreading—was about the Soft Lothark guards and their status in the moiety. He’d practiced several ways of expressing how the conflict with Brun and his team had been resolved, but the librarian didn’t press. The results were good, and so the rest was beneath notice.

The meeting, so far, had been one of the better ones, mostly because there were positive results to report. Not just the relative success of the grass protein translation, but some decent preliminary results from the visualization lab and the nursery. The extra workload of the babies hadn’t caused any trouble yet. There were more than enough people ready and willing to feed and change and hold and coo at the babies. As they got older and more active, that might change, but it was a problem for another day.

Apart from the constant fatigue and the nagging itch of an idea not quite ready to present itself, Dafyd felt as good as he could remember.

The keeper-librarian shifted restlessly back and forth in a way that meant it was thinking, and so Dafyd didn’t interrupt.

“There is growing interest in this moiety,” Ekur-Tkalal said. “We will come to a point at which exploring new applications and uses may conflict with the needs of tending the population. You will draw up analysis of which individuals can be assigned out with the least disruption.”

That was actually an interesting thought. If there was a central group who had what would essentially be careers as field agents, he could pick and choose who’d be best. Instead of grabbing whoever was available, he could design a core group that would both work well for the Carryx and serve as the backbone of his efforts to reach out to the enemy. It seemed like the sort of thing Andermus would be good at arranging, except that every time he thought about folding her into the charmed circle of his conspiracy, he remembered Uuya Tomos saying You should be careful with that one.

“I see many possible benefits—” he began, and the sound came. It was made from Carryx voices, like a choir, and he couldn’t tell if it was a group of them vocalizing together or one vast but singular voice so rich in overtones and harmonics that it seemed too much for only one throat.

Ekur-Tkalal lifted its head like a dog hearing something exciting. It rose up on its back legs, its fighting and feeding arms both outstretched, and sang along with the wide, vast song for what felt like a full minute. When the silence returned, Ekur seemed to find itself, shaking off some little disorientation with a shudder that passed through its whole body.

Dafyd pulled his own shoulders forward and plucked at his hands the way he always did now when he was unsure of the direction he was about to take the meeting. “I apologize. I don’t know how to reply to that.”

Several of Ekur’s eyes flickered toward him and then away. “It was not meant for you. The Sovran has died. The new Sovran has announced herself. The consonance is not for animals. It does not affect your duties.”

Instinct told Dafyd this wasn’t the time to push for more context, however badly he wanted it. They returned to the meat of their conversation—the frequency and detail of his written reports, the death of one of the human moiety from an underlying medical condition and old age, the possibility of adding a second task to Brun’s team now that the grass project was almost ended.

And when it was over, Ekur dismissed him with the same casual disdain as always. Dafyd walked away, but slowly. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and the confusion needed time and maybe the motion of putting one foot in front of the other to resolve. Something had just happened, and he knew it was important. He knew it was connected to his hopes for revenge on the Carryx, but there was something else too. Something that someone had said to him, and he hadn’t seen the significance at the time. It was like trying to remember a dream he’d had. It was there at the edge of his mind, and just out of reach.

He walked to the human moiety, and then past it. The wide ramps led down toward the lower levels of the unthinkably huge body of the world-palace. The mix of aliens around him shifted. Carryx, yes. Always Carryx. And animals of violence—Soft Lothark, Rak-hund. A thin thing he’d never seen before with an amber pelt and a flat face like nature had taken an elk and put a bulldog’s head on it. A mob of spiderlike animals the size of his two fists together wearing uniforms with bright jewels set in them. He thought they were called the People of Sotos. It was funny how many species had names that translated to some version of The Real Ones or The Ones Who Matter.

He reached a nexus of hallways and ramps that converged in a space as high as a skyscraper. He hadn’t been here before, but that didn’t bother him. He knew the way home, roughly. Head uphill, and he’d find a landmark. Or someone to ask. For the moment, he could be alone in the throng of bodies like he was in the central district of some foreign city. Only a city inhabited by a thousand different species and designed by the Carryx for the greater glory of the empire.

Only, no. Designed by the bone-horse Phylarchs of Astrdeim. The moiety of architects whose genius had transformed the Carryx homeworld…

And he knew. The memory came back as clean and fresh as if his mind had put it in a sampling case for him, knowing that he’d need it. Dafyd took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Fuck,” he said to no one, then turned back and started up the ramp.

He found Clae in the labs, sitting on a static centrifuge and laughing with a woman who he thought was named Addira and a bearded man named Abfoss. The older woman’s smile vanished when she saw him, and Abfoss crossed his arms and shifted, subtly putting himself between Dafyd and Clae. The spy. The swarm.

“Sorry to intrude,” Dafyd said. “Clae? Could I speak to you for a moment in private?”

“Of course,” she said, hopping down from the centrifuge. The other two frowned as she walked away at Dafyd’s side, but they didn’t object or try to linger where they could hear them. “Don’t blame them. They were both here when you broke Brun’s arm. They’re just a little defensive in case you’re looking to do that to more of us.”

“I don’t remember seeing them.”

“You may have had a little tunnel vision.”

“Maybe. Good that you’re fitting in well,” Dafyd said.

“I was designed to. It’s pretty much the central tenet of being me.”

“Something’s happened,” Dafyd said, and the playfulness fell away from her like it had never been. “The Sovran’s dead.”

Clae shook her head. “I don’t understand. There’s no way we could have—”

“We didn’t do anything. I only know about it at all because I was in Ekur’s office when the announcement went out. But that’s not the issue. Do you remember telling me that this isn’t their original homeworld? They came from somewhere else? Tonner had just died, and I came to you and you—”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. And yes, they came here about seven thousand years ago, give or take. Their original homeworld—the one they actually evolved on—was destroyed. It was kind of a shithole, too. Mostly salt swamps and shallow seas.”

“And how long did it take them to recover from that?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“The Carryx lost their center before. They lost their Sovran, assuming the Sovran was on the first homeworld when whatever happened happened. Losing those didn’t break the empire.” Dafyd crossed his arms. “Why didn’t it break the empire?”

Thirty-Seven

The Soft Lothark that sat across from him was large for its species, with markings in the thin, scraggly pelt around its eyes that made it look sorrowful. As Dafyd composed his question, it looked around the garden like a bored child in church. Occasionally, it nibbled at the back of its hand or the front of its arm.

When Dafyd sat back, it considered the glowing object, coughed wetly, then rose and walked away. A few minutes later, a different Soft Lothark ambled by and shifted two of the symbols before leaving. A few minutes after that, a third guard came to him and added a second run of virtual objects that commented on and expanded the first. The conversation went on like this for the better part of a day.

You are asking about the Epikainot and the great loss. Yes, many Soft Lothark were there when it happened. The Epikainot were a powerful enemy. Clever and ruthless. The Carryx had found them only a few hundred years before, and their battles rivaled the conflict with the deathless, though they were not deathless themselves.

The end came with no warning. Those who were within the world-palace did not escape it. The Epikainot had discovered an interaction between field effects, a manner in which the changes made by one innocuous beam would amplify and resonate with the effects of another, so that either one alone was beneath notice, together they would feed forward in a devastating torrent. In the course of an hour, the crust of that world dissolved. Towers and seas and the ancestral pools of the Carryx all vanished in fire and boiling stone. When the Epikainot were finally eradicated, the weapon was taken. The Carryx use a version of it now when they wish to unmake a world utterly. It is still very effective against opponents who do not expect it.

Dafyd cleared the symbols, careful not to impress them into the archive as he did, and formed the next question: What happened to the Sovran when the first world died?

The Sovran died as did her librarians. Some part of the archive was lost, though much of it remained on the other worlds. Only those messages that had not yet been sent outside the planet were lost utterly. The moieties that were exclusive to that world became extinct. There were other animals elsewhere. The Carryx are resilient and robust. They did not mourn their dead world. What is, is. Instead they turned their full attention to the Epikainot and ended that species and everything related to it.

Dafyd shifted the symbols again—How do the Carryx recover when a Sovran dies?—and went to eat his midday meal. When he came back, two Soft Lothark were standing by the symbols, remaking them. They walked away as he approached.

The Sovran is born in the private creche, built and designed and selected there for perfection of function. There is always one at the ready should an accident befall the empire. When a promising new daughter is born, she is sent out to meet her mother, and the survivor of that meeting carries on. Age and time weaken all things, but not the Sovran. Before the entropy of life can weather her, she is dead.

There are always blank eggs at the ready to prepare another if the need arises.

There is a private creche on all the world-palaces. Hundreds, each in its order.

When the Epikainot destroyed the first world and the voice of the Sovran went silent, the creche on this world opened, and the Sovran emerged. The librarians here became the librarians that had been. The empire shifted its attention a few degrees, and all carried on as it had.

This is the resilience of the Carryx that no other has ever matched. Each can become the tool that is needed. None are valued because none are valuable.

We have waited for millennia to see the empire fall, but it rises from every stumble. It wears down every enemy. Other beings feel loss or sorrow, other civilizations grow sick from war, but war is what the Carryx are. They will never mourn their dead, they rejoice that the weak give way to the strong. They will never grow tired of violence. They will never be other than what they are.

For them, conflict ends when the last stars burn out and all life dies.

Not before.

As Dafyd took away the last of the symbols, the stars were coming out; pinpricks of light almost hidden by the Carryx grid and the horizon-wide glow of the world-palace. The little black fountain muttered to itself like it had a complaint but not the courage to announce it. For a while, he didn’t move. His body felt heavy, and his mind was shifting inside his skull like a feral monkey trapped in a house, bouncing from window to window looking for a way out that didn’t exist. The sense of living on the edge of a perfect insight was gone.

A breeze came up, not cold, but not warm either. He sat with it and the smell of the water for a while, then sighed, set hands against thighs, and hauled himself up. There were more stars now, even if they mattered less.

The labs were shut down for the night, and Clae wasn’t in her rooms. He found her in the common room, sitting in a group of people. They were laughing together and playing a game with dice and a long white board with markings on it. He got himself a bowl of rice and protein that was almost, he thought, as good as the street food from Anjiin. He ate with only the constant company of his Rak-hund guard just out of earshot and waited until she noticed him. He let her make the approach, then told her what he’d learned and what he wanted her to look for in the immensity of the archive. He watched her expression change: the thinning of her lips, the tightening of her jaw. She knew what she’d find as clearly as he did, but they had to look. They had to be sure.

After that, the others.

They gathered in Campar’s quarters. Dafyd, Jessyn, and Uuya Tomos. The only conspirators besides the spy who were still alive. Campar sat on his bed, head resting against the wall. Jessyn and Uuya Tomos on chairs across the room. Dafyd stood. He told them what he’d planned, and he told them what he’d learned. What he suspected. He told them about the Deep Lothark and the dead homeworld. He didn’t tell them about the spy or Jellit or Else.

After he was done, there was a long silence.

“If there were a way,” Jessyn said, “to locate all the planets that had these private creches, and get that information to Garral? Is there a version of your plan that could still work? I mean, I see that it would have been simpler if we could just do the one thing here, but taking out the whole Sovran class at once… I mean, it seems like that might actually work.”

“Coordinated strikes to decapitate every possible Sovran on at least several hundred heavily fortified potential throne worlds?” Campar said. His scorn for the idea was also a kind of mourning. “If this so-called great enemy could do that, I’m not sure they’d need our help in the first place. And it wouldn’t match the battles I saw.”

Dafyd didn’t speak. He felt the despair in the room, and took a little bleak comfort that he wasn’t the only one.

“We’ll need to go back,” Jessyn said. “Learn more. Killing the Sovran and taking the world-palace seemed like a good goal. Seemed like something that would disrupt them. If it’s not, well, all right. So it’s not. Let’s look for what is. It’s a setback.”

“She’s right,” Uuya Tomos said. “We may be playing a very long game. It may be a game we leave to the great-grandchildren of our great-grandchildren.”

“The Deep Lothark has been playing that game for millennia,” Dafyd agreed. “Maybe thousands of generations.”

“Well, that’s a cheerful thought,” Campar said.

“I take some comfort in it,” the old woman said. “Consider that this isn’t a problem we can fix. By ourselves, we don’t have the power. It’s never your responsibility to do something that can’t be done. You do your part, and you help the next generation carry it a little farther, and then the one after that.”

Campar picked up his pillow and grunted as he tucked it behind his back. His skin was thinner than it had been before he left, and there was a darkness under his eyes that hadn’t been there before. “If the Lothark have been following that plan forever and haven’t made any progress,” he said, “then maybe this is a puzzle for which no solution exists.”

“We have things they don’t, though,” Dafyd said. “The Lothark don’t have an enemy fleet.”

“I’m not entirely sure we have much of one,” Campar said. “And by the time that batch of babies we’ve ushered in grows up, we may not even have that. I have it on authority I trust that the war is going poorly for our deathless cousins. There’s another path here.”

“Which is?” Uuya said.

“Have we considered not?”

Dafyd leaned against the wall. “Not what?”

“Just not,” Campar said. “What bird had the highest population on Anjiin? Evolution’s darling. The one avian with the best strategy?”

“Chickens,” Jessyn said.

“Chickens,” Campar confirmed. “Because we raised and fed and protected them. The most common grasses were farmed grains. The most successful mammals besides ourselves were food animals.”

“So give up,” Dafyd said.

“Decide that dying as heroes is less appealing than living as corn and chickens. Maybe stop pouring your heart into the thing that can’t happen and start building the best version of what can. I don’t mean to be depressing, but you look spent, Dafyd. You look worse than I do, and I almost cooked myself to death.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Because you’re angry,” Campar said. “We all are. And you’re hurt. There’s nothing wrong with that. Can we talk about whether raging against fate will help? We all know what the Carryx are, and I’m not saying they’re good. They’re evil, but they’re also overwhelming. We can’t beat them. There’s no blame in that, there are thousands of other species in this building that weren’t able to beat them either. Dafyd! Stop, you don’t need to—”

But by then, Dafyd was in the corridor, the door slamming closed behind him. His fists in the pockets of his tunic, his head down. The Rak-hund rose up on its hundred knife legs, and he spun toward it.

“No!” Dafyd said. “You stay here. Or go someplace else. You leave me the fuck alone!”

The Rak-hund shifted its weight in what looked like confusion and uncertainty. Dafyd managed to get something like fifteen or twenty steps down the hall before the staccato tapping of his guard’s feet against the floor started after him. It stayed with him for his own protection and by the will of the Carryx.

The nursery had been dimmed for the night. The only light was a dull orange that took away all other color. It reminded him of the passage from Anjiin, the huge room in which they’d all lived and died and feared and mourned. It was the color of oppression and trauma. It would mean something else to the babies. The cribs were lined up in long rows, each one with a tiny body and a blanket. There were at least a dozen other people walking quietly among the newborns or else carrying them, cooing to them.

The first name of the woman who came up to him was Viel, but he didn’t remember her last name. In the dull orange glow, she looked younger than she would have in the full light of day. Her concern was clear, though.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, and it meant Why are you here?

“Here to help,” Dafyd said. “With the little ones.”

“You are?”

“It’s mandatory,” he said. He tried to keep the edge off his smile.

Viel Somebody led him down the rows, looking at slates that hung off each crib. Checklists and initials told the status of every baby, when it had been fed and cleaned, who had held it and for how long. In a way, it felt like an industrial process, the comfort of children another commodity to manufacture. In another way, it was an engine of compassion that he’d never seen equaled. Every child would be fed. Every child would be held. Washed when it was soiled, comforted when it was upset, loved by strangers. By its community.

Viel stopped at a crib marked 34. The infant’s eyes were open, its thin primate arms spread wide. As they looked down at it, the baby yawned.

“She’s due for a feeding, if…”

“All right,” Dafyd said. “Yes. Just show me where to get the formula.”

Five minutes later, he was holding the child in one arm, guiding the feeding nipple into the monochrome orange of her mouth. She had a very serious expression as she drank, like artificial milk was of deep spiritual concern and she was committed to giving it the attention it deserved. When Dafyd chuckled at her, she seemed to scowl at him.

On Anjiin, he had never thought about children one way or the other. Most people had children, eventually. He hadn’t spent any time thinking about being a father. He still didn’t, but he understood the appeal a little more. The universe had evolved primates that loved their tiny, demanding, helpless babies because if it hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any primates left. The affection he felt for this little stranger was the evolutionary aftereffect of thousands of generations of other children who hadn’t been abandoned or killed or left unprotected when predators were near. That was, maybe, what a rich, full, good life was built from.

He’d come here because he hoped that, like building the school with Tomos and Korham, taking some action might ease the storm of rage and despair. And it did, a little. Only a little, though. The darkness was still in him, and no matter what Campar said, he wasn’t ready to let it go.

Clae walked up beside him. She’d pulled her dark hair back, and there was a string bracelet around her wrist that hadn’t been there before. A gift from someone, maybe. A token of friendship. In the low light, her cheekbones and jaw reminded him of Else. Of resting against her and trying to take enough warmth from her body to counteract the chill of the deck. He wondered if Clae would remember that too.

“You found it?” Dafyd asked.

“Once I knew to look,” the spy said. “You were right. It’s easy to miss in the archive because there’s no disruption to speak of. They go from one Sovran to the next as smoothly as handing over a relay baton. The one that died today lasted almost eight years, and she was above average. How did you know?”

Dafyd sighed. “Back in school, there was a project. I was maybe twelve. We were all supposed to design the best possible organism. I made a turtle with a metal shell that was immune to predators and could live forever. My partner’s was a bird that had a really short generation time so that it could adapt quickly when the environment changed. That was the point of the assignment. There was no right answer. Best isn’t what nature does. I fucked up because I thought that if the Sovran was central, it would be important. But it’s not. It’s trivial. Necessary to the function of the empire, the guiding intelligence of the Carryx, and so easy to swap out they barely notice it happens.”

“It ain’t precious when it’s easily replaceable,” Clae said. She did a good imitation of Brun. Dafyd recognized the man’s cadence in her voice.

The baby finished her milk. Dafyd lifted her carefully, positioned her on his knees with a blanket ready to catch any spit-up, and patted the tiny back gently until she belched.

“What’s her name?” Clae asked.

“I don’t know,” Dafyd said. “Thirty-four, I guess.”

Clae put out her hands and gently took the child. “She’s precious.”

“Only to us. To the rest of the universe, she’s disposable. You know where I went wrong? I know what I did. I thought they were like bees or termites. That because the Carryx are a kind of hive, the Sovran was like a queen bee. Bees protect their queens because they’re lost without them. They harden the queen. Make her difficult to break or kill. The Carryx just evolved a different solution to the same problem.”

Clae rocked from side to side, humming as she did. The baby looked up at her, maybe aware of her, maybe experiencing a strange, warm blob of color and sound. The dark eyes closed, but Clae didn’t move to take her back to the crib. Dafyd noticed that his anger was gone, but something else had taken its place. Not calm. Not resignation.

The itching feeling was back. The sense of imminence, like the smell of a storm that hadn’t come over the horizon. The Carryx were a hive. A single being made from billions of different bodies and the relationships between them. That was the model he’d relied on in making his plan to undermine them. He failed because the underlying logic of their hive was different. It didn’t have the same weakness.

That didn’t mean it had none.

Clae shifted. Her eyes were on him. Her brows lifted like she was asking a question.

“It’s a bad idea,” Dafyd said. “I haven’t worked it through. There’s probably nothing in it. Even if there was, I don’t know how to start…”

“You’re talking to yourself,” the swarm said. It sounded just like Else. “You want to try again?”

Dafyd took a breath.

“The Carryx aren’t really like a civilization so much as an organism. They don’t surrender to anything except other Carryx, and they do that all the time because they’re all parts of the same entity. One Carryx with a thousand billion bodies. Ekur-Tkalal said it too. There’s only one Sovran. And it’s been that way since the misty past.”

“All right,” Clae said, and shifted the baby to her hip.

“Well,” Dafyd said. “What if there were two?”

CODA

THE BLUE ROOM

The guards didn’t have Corvall’s black armor. Garral could see their faces. Despite that, they managed to emote less than the half-soldier had. When, one day, instead of turning right toward the exercise room they turned left down a new hallway, Garral didn’t bother asking them why. He was already clear that they weren’t going to tell him.

The hallways in his new prison were the white of eggshell with bands of color painted on them with matching words that he was starting to understand: Medical, Cafeteria, Administration. All the spaces he was allowed in had a slate-blue band and the word that he was ninety percent sure meant Restricted. The new room was no different.

The sofa was wider and taller than the ones Garral was used to, but it was still identifiable as a sofa. The two chairs beside the little table looked like something he’d have sat at on a plaza at a festival back in a previous lifetime. The only art was a screen set into one wall with a pattern of blue and gold dots that moved like a flock of birds condensing and coming apart. The guards pushed him in and closed the door behind him. Garral didn’t have any illusion that he wasn’t being surveilled. He picked one of the chairs to sit in and waited.

A few minutes later, the door opened again and an old man came in. He was thin and bald apart from a fringe of white hair along the back of his skull. His skin was gray-brown and wrinkled in a way that exaggerated his expressions. His smile as he stepped in was like a cartoon of a smile. His frown of concentration as he sat on the sofa was the grandfather of all concentrating frowns. When he spoke, Garral only picked up a few familiar words and fragments from the rapid-fire stream.

“I’m sorry,” Garral said. “Could you please speak more slowly? I’m still learning your language.”

“Of course,” the old man said more slowly. “I apologize. I was saying that my name is Carlon. I’m your interrogator. Would you like anything to drink?”

Garral shook his head, and the old man grinned and nodded as if the refusal had been a cunning, excellent answer to a tricky question.

“I would like to show you something,” the interrogator said, and the screen of bird dots stuttered and changed. In its place, an image appeared. A hallway of the Carryx world-palace. He even knew the one, just outside the human moiety’s new quarters and heading toward the big room they called the cathedral.

“Yes,” Garral said. “That’s where they’re keeping us. I mean, not exactly the place, but near it.”

“This is your homeworld?”

“No,” Garral said. “That’s the Carryx palace. That’s where they took us. How did you get this?”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t.”

The interrogator smiled, and the laugh lines reached from his eyes to his temples. “It was transmitted to us using a secure protocol during a recent battle. You don’t know who might have sent it?”

“No. Don’t you?”

The old man hesitated, but only for a moment. “We don’t,” he said. “So. Why don’t you and I start at the beginning. Tell me about this planet you say you came from. You call it Anjiin?”

Acknowledgments

As always, this book would not exist without the hard work and dedication of Danny and Heather Baror, Bradley Englert, Tim Holman, Anne Clarke, Ellen Wright, Alex Lencicki, and the whole brilliant crew at Orbit. Special thanks are also due Carrie Vaughn for her services as a beta reader. And we’re grateful to Naren Shankar and Breck Eisner, who were always understanding when we blew off the other work we were supposed to be doing to finish this book. And, as always, none of this would have happened without the support and company of Jayné, Kat, and Scarlet.

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