Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE COMMAND CENTER was full of diffuse reflections, making it difficult to see anything clearly. Cheris spotted her own face in the mirror-maze, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to her. Was there a tipping point past which Jedao’s memories would drive her mad? What if she had passed it already?

There was carrion glass everywhere, memories spun out in great gleaming crystal spindles. Tangible and visible, unlike Jedao’s. She assumed Jedao’s glass was different because he had been a ghost. People sharded across the walls and burnished into the floor. Had the bomb only hit the command moth? Or had any of the swarm survived? It looked like the grid had been mostly knocked offline, but life-support was still functioning or she would be in real trouble.

Either the gravity was settling or she was regaining her coordination. Her breath hitched as she examined a twisted arch of carrion glass. It had once been Commander Hazan. There were faint threaded traces of a tree he had loved as a child, a sister who had died in an accident, things she had never known about him.

She backed away, wondering if he would ever have chosen to share these things with her, and choked down another of Jedao’s splinters.

SHE WAS HOLDING a gun, the same Patterner 52 with which she had failed to kill Nirai Kujen, and the same one with which she would murder her staff three years later at Hellspin Fortress. Next year she would rise to general from lieutenant general, have to listen yet again to the gossip about the unseemly haste with which Kel Command kept promoting her.

This latest campaign, against a heretic faction that called themselves the Aughens, had gotten ugly very quickly, not least because a good many Kel had developed sympathy for the Aughens’ cause. The Aughens fought honorably, made few demands, and wanted mainly to be left alone; but the heptarchate could not afford to cede that stretch of territory because it made the Blue Heron border vulnerable, and that was that.

Cheris stood at the center of a line of Kel with rifles beneath a green-violet sky, down the field from five Kel soldiers bound and stripped of rank. It was a rainy day, and the air smelled of damp leaves, earthy-pungent; of bitter salts. In the near distance she could hear the trees with their branches rattling in the wind, the roar of the sea. She wiped rain out of her eyes with the back of her glove and raised her gun.

The five Kel had failed their formation, and Cheris couldn’t help but think that formation instinct, however repugnant, would have been a great help in the battle. So much had depended on that last siege, and after every battle she ended up executing cowards and deserters. But then, formation instinct wouldn’t be developed until after she was executed for high treason. Back when she had been alive, it would have been a controversial measure. The Liozh in particular would have studied its implications carefully, and others would have protested it. By the time it was invented, after the fall of the Liozh, Kel Command and the hexarchs installed it into the Kel without any qualms.

The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

Cheris fired five times in rapid succession. Five flawless head shots. Her instructors at Shuos Academy would have approved. She had to remind herself to see the blood. The Kel with rifles would have finished the job for her if she had missed, but it was a point of pride with her not to miss.

The Kel approved of efficient kills, too. They had had their doubts about her at first. Most Shuos were seconded to the Kel military as intelligence officers. She had come in sideways as infantry on the strength of her tactical ability, but no one trusted a fox. She had had an opportunity to prove herself, if you could call it that, as a lieutenant: the Kel officers who outranked her had all been killed, and she’d gotten the company out of a bad situation. After that, the Kel took notice of her competence, mostly by giving her the worst assignments. A Shuos was always going to be more expendable than one of their own. It had only given her more incentive to get good faster.

After the Aughen campaign, Kel Command assigned her to fight the Lanterners. Cheris had considered abandoning her original plan and turning coat, Kujen be damned. The Lanterners worried the heptarchs, which was a good sign. For her part, she had spent a great deal of time getting to know the best Kel generals and how they thought. The card games and hunting trips hadn’t been entirely frivolous. If it had simply been a matter of battle, she could have offered her services to the Lanterners. She was confident of her ability to defeat anyone the Kel could field.

It hadn’t been difficult to win the respect of the Kel. The Kel, being practical, liked people who won battles. If she could have done her work with that alone, she would have tried. But two things forced her hand. The first was technological advances in augments. The Kel were going the route of composites, and there was a good chance that she wouldn’t be able to hide her intentions – two decades plotting high treason – from a hivemind. The second problem was Nirai Kujen, who could turn on her at any time. If she was going to act, she had to act sooner rather than later.

The hard part wasn’t getting rid of the heptarchs. It was creating a functioning, stable, sane society from the heptarchate’s ashes. She still had no idea whether it would have been possible to convince the Lanterners to give up remembrances, assuming some alternative could be found that gave them a viable calendar. When the Lanterners used their children as shields, however, she knew they wouldn’t work out anyway.

She didn’t have a lot of time left, so all she had was Hellspin Fortress. The massacre fixated the Kel on her and made her infamous. The Kel had respected her. Now they feared her.

Respect was a good lever, but fear was better. If she was going to make a bid for immortality, she needed a very good lever.

Terrible irony: if only she’d waited, if she had known what the Liozh were debating in their white-and-gold chambers, she could have offered her services to them instead. She wouldn’t have needed to resort to mass murder. But the Liozh heresy reared up two decades after her death and some time before the Kel first revived her. Worse, there was a good chance that the calendrical disruption caused by Hellspin Fortress was what led them to investigate alternate forms of government, which led to their particular heresy. Democracy.

CHERIS STRAIGHTENED. IT no longer surprised her that their overseers had decided to kill Jedao. But they could have used a simple carrion gun to do so. They could even have handed her the gun and ordered her to do it herself, as a loyalty test.

She took a ragged breath, then another. Candied corpses in every direction. The command center’s walls were warped, and the cracks in the floor were webbed together by fused strands of glass.

Maybe she was wrong about the extent of the damage. Maybe there were other survivors. She’d have to check manually. A cindermoth was a large place, but she had nothing better to do.

“Jedao?” she asked, because she couldn’t help hoping.

No answer came.

Jedao had provoked the attack by convincing her to reveal the extent of her mathematical abilities, which alerted Kel Command that they had given him access to someone who could handle a high-level calendrical rebellion for him. But he hadn’t expected Kel Command to risk two cindermoths plus a swarm to execute him. And now the heptarchs – hexarchs, she corrected herself – had finally caught on, and Kujen had abandoned her.

Cheris smiled grimly. She was already starting to think of herself as Jedao.

Jedao had tried to give her what he could. Don’t make my mistakes, he had said. A few words and a lifetime of memories.

He had wanted her to continue the game for him. Or perhaps she was supposed to decide whether the game was worth playing at all. If only he had been able to trust her with more.

Cheris wasn’t done with splinters. But she hesitated. Now that she knew about Nirai Kujen, she had a better idea how his form of immortality worked.

If she abandoned the splinters, Jedao would be truly dead, and his terrible treasonous war with him. If she devoured the last of them, she could carry on the fight, but the person doing so might not be Kel Cheris.

Had he meant to manipulate her into this choice? She didn’t think so, but this was Jedao.

Still, Cheris knew she had already decided.

The next two splinters took her through the eyes like bullets.

CHERIS WAS SITTING at a table outside, shuffling and reshuffling her favorite jeng-zai deck. Normally she didn’t lack for opponents – this was Shuos Academy, after all, and there was always someone who didn’t believe a first-year could be as good as she claimed to be – but the yearly game design competition was going on, and everyone was distracted.

Someone came up from behind and kissed the top of her head. “Hey, you,” said a familiar tenor: Vestenya Ruo, the first friend she’d made here, and her occasional lover. “Dare I hope that I’ve finally gotten the drop on you?” He came around and took a seat on the bench next to her. Like Cheris, he wore the red cadet uniform. The two of them had a theory that the first Shuos heptarch had picked her faction’s colors to make her own people extra-special easy to assassinate from a distance.

Cheris quirked an eyebrow at Ruo. “Hardly,” she said. “You came around that corner by the gingko tree, didn’t you? I saw your reflection in the perfume bottle that guy was fiddling with earlier. Pure luck.”

Ruo punched her shoulder. “You always say it’s luck. Even at the firing range. You don’t get aim that good with luck.”

“I don’t know why you make such a big deal of it when you’re the better shot.”

“Yes, and I’m going to make sure it stays that way.” Ruo grinned at her. “But it’s annoying that I can’t beat your reflexes.”

“I’m hardly a threat to you,” Cheris said patiently. As a point of fact, when they’d first met at some party, Ruo had picked a fight with her. Lots of bruises, no hard feelings, although she had since learned that picking random fights out of a spirit of adventure was the kind of thing Ruo did. She wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, but it wasn’t long before she started hanging out with him, partly because he always thought up terrific pranks, like the one with the color-coded squirrels, but partly so she could keep him from getting into too much trouble.

“Bet you say that to all your targets,” Ruo said. Periodically he tried to persuade Cheris to declare for the assassin track with him, but she hadn’t decided yet. “Say, shouldn’t that girlfriend of yours be done with class about now?”

“‘That girlfriend’ has a name,” said Lirov Yeren, who had come up behind Ruo. Sometimes Cheris despaired of Ruo’s situational awareness. Although Yeren could walk silently, she hadn’t been making any particular effort to be quiet. “Hello, Jedao. Hello, Ruo.” Yeren leaned down, careful not to spill her drink, her curls falling artfully around her face. She and Cheris kissed.

“Hello yourself,” Cheris said. She fanned out her hand, face-up, for Yeren’s amusement.

“Oh, you’re not even pretending not to cheat,” Ruo said. Cheris had arranged to draw a straight of Roses.

“Only because I don’t have any real flowers to offer you, Yeren,” Cheris said, “so I had to make do with the sad cardboard substitute.”

Yeren eyed her sidelong. “I’m pretty sure that line wasn’t in Introduction to Seduction when I took it last year.”

“I hate that course,” Cheris said. “Seriously, all the Andan bars we practice at overcharge for drinks because, hello, the Andan are all rich. You’d think they’d figure it into our stipends, but I think it’s supposed to incentivize us to commit fraud to get by.”

“I don’t see what your issue is,” Ruo said dryly. “You’re terribly good at persuading people to buy you drinks, especially with that whole ‘I just got here from the farm and you civilized city people confuse me’ routine.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Cheris said. Besides, it was technically an agricultural research facility, even if her mother jokingly referred to herself as a farmer.

“You poor thing,” Yeren said. “Drown your sorrows?” She offered her drink.

“See what I mean?” Ruo said.

Cheris took a sip. “That’s a lot of honey,” she said. The local spiced tea was something she was still getting used to. It wasn’t very popular where she came from.

“It’s to cover the taste of the poison,” Yeren said, very seriously.

“Excellent thinking.” Cheris drank again, more deeply, then handed the tea back.

“By the way,” Yeren said, “I keep looking through the competition standings and I’m stumped. Where did you hide your game?”

“Don’t get me started,” Ruo said. “I can’t even get him to play any of the more intriguing entries, let alone admit to entering.”

Cheris shuffled the straight back into her deck and did her best “you civilized city people confuse me” impression. “It’s much less stressful to watch everyone else tie themselves into knots. You heard about how Zheng got caught breaking into the registrar’s computer systems?”

“That’s so yesterday,” Yeren said, “and I don’t believe you for one second. Ruo told me how you volunteered to be outnumbered five to one in that training scenario and you care about stress?”

“Did he also mention I lost that one?” Cheris narrowed her eyes at Ruo, who looked innocent.

“Only after you struck the instructor speechless with your novel use of signal flares,” Ruo said helpfully.

“Got lucky,” Cheris said.

Ruo rolled his eyes. “No such thing as luck.”

Cheris drew three cards in rapid succession: Ace of Roses, Ace of Doors, Ace of Gears. “Sure there is,” she said ironically.

Yeren, who had taught Cheris most of the card tricks herself, ignored this. “I suppose you might take some kind of ridiculous pleasure in an anonymous entry,” she said, “but they’ll trace it to you anyway. Why not put your name on it from the beginning?”

“That’s only if I entered,” Cheris said. “Say, Ruo, you entered a shooter, didn’t you? How’s it doing?” She hadn’t looked it up, but Ruo had talked about it a lot while wrestling with the coding, even if he’d turned down her offer to help by playtesting.

“High middle,” Ruo said, “for its category. As good as I could hope for. I haven’t embarrassed myself, that’s all I ask.” There were always a few entries that did so poorly that they damaged the cadets’ future career options.

Yeren wasn’t distracted. “Jedao, first-years don’t get a lot of opportunities to impress the instructors. I didn’t think you’d pass this one up. Especially considering how much you like games.”

“It’s very altruistic of you to point this out to me,” Cheris said, “but it’s done now, either way.” She touched Yeren’s hand. “We could go for a walk by the koi pond. It wouldn’t kill you to get away from all the competition analysis for an hour or two.”

“This is my cue to go elsewhere,” Ruo said cheerfully. “Don’t scare the geese.” Cheris often thought she should never have mentioned that her mother liked to say that, even if they hadn’t had all that many geese.

“Like you don’t have a hot date of your own lined up,” Yeren said. Ruo looked awfully smug, at that.

“That would be telling,” Ruo said. “Have fun, you two.” He kissed the top of Cheris’s head again, and strolled off.

Yeren shook her head, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Cheris’s, either.

As a point of fact, Cheris had entered anonymously. A small percentage of competition entries were anonymous each year (although Yeren was correct that most didn’t remain that way for long), but Cheris had an unusually good reason. You scored points in her game by manipulating other people, from cadets to dignitaries, into heresies. Celebrating the wrong feast-days. Giving heterodox answers on Doctrine exams. Inverted flower arrangements. Small heresies, for the most part.

Cheris hadn’t intended for many people to fall for it, even if the Shuos had a known love of dares. It had been more in the nature of a thought experiment. The heptarchate’s laws were becoming more rigid as the regime became ever more dependent on the high calendar’s exotic technologies. She had wanted to show how easy it was to inspire people to a little heresy, to demonstrate how fragile the system was. Shuos Academy encouraged games, so a game – especially during the yearly competition – was the perfect vector.

She hadn’t checked up on her entry since releasing it, or any of them, for that matter; that was the kind of mistake that got you caught. In fact, she was asleep in Yeren’s bed when she found out.

“– Jedao,” Yeren was saying urgently. “Bad news.” Her voice shook.

“Hmm?” Cheris said. But she came fully awake.

Yeren was sitting at her terminal, wrapped in a robe of violet silk. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, and blue light sheened in the dark curls. “A cadet committed suicide over one of the games,” she said. “At least, they’re claiming it’s a suicide.”

Cheris sat up and made a show of hunting for her clothes, even though she knew where they were under the covers. She still didn’t realize the significance of what Yeren had said. “Anyone we know?” she asked.

“They haven’t released the name. But I did some poking around. I – I think it might be Ruo.”

Cheris’s heartbeat thumped rapidly in her chest. Yeren was still talking. “It was over one of the games,” she said. “I remember glancing over it earlier. The anonymous one involving heresies. Except the cadet didn’t just fool one of us over some minor point of Doctrine. He got caught framing a visiting Rahal magistrate.”

It was exactly the kind of thing that Ruo would have thought hilarious. Except for the part about getting caught. Shuos Academy might have protected one of its cadets if the matter had been a minor infraction; each faction tended not to surrender its own to outsiders as a matter of jurisdictional principle. But the Rahal were also a high faction, and a magistrate – that wasn’t just an infraction, that was an offense for which the guilty party could be tortured to death in a remembrance.

Cheris had opened her mouth to admit that the game had been hers, that she was the one who had killed Ruo, when Yeren went on, “The game’s not anonymous anymore, at any rate. It looks like Chenoi Tiana has confessed that it’s hers. She’s under investigation right now.”

Both of them knew that “under investigation” was unlikely to result in any serious reprimand. Cheris’s heartbeat had slowed. “Who’s Tiana?” she asked.

She had a way out. And she was taking it. She hadn’t realized she had already made the decision.

“She’s a third-year, no reason you should know her,” Yeren said. “I’m so sorry, Jedao. It – I might be wrong. The suicide could be someone else.”

Cheris doubted it. Yeren was very good at hacking. One of the benefits of dating her was learning from her. And the dead cadet being someone else wouldn’t make the situation much better.

She couldn’t put off the hard part. “Ruo was an idiot if he let himself get caught,” she said with deliberate carelessness. “Suicide’s better than hanging around to have your fingers pulled off, so I can’t say that I blame him.”

Yeren made a pained sound. “He was our friend, Jedao.”

Cheris dressed quickly. “Friendship doesn’t mean anything to the dead, and I don’t think either of us wants to be associated with him anyhow.”

“If that’s your take on it,” she said, her voice shaking again, “get out. Maybe I’ll see you later and maybe I won’t.”

Yeren might have some intention of salvaging the relationship after calming down, but Cheris didn’t. She left without argument.

Cheris headed out to a café. She had arranged for a small null in camera coverage – as the joke went, if you didn’t hack the commandant’s surveillance system at least once as a first-year, you were fit only for the Andan – and she wanted to listen in on the news. People were already gossiping about the suicide.

While Cheris listened to the gossip with half an ear, she started hacking the academy’s grid. The tablet she was using looked like a model that had been popular four years ago, but what wasn’t obvious was that she had wired together the innards from a decrepit laboratory machine she had begged off her mother. Her mother had been amenable so long as she didn’t cause anything to blow up. (She was never going to live down that experiment with the food processor when she was twelve.) She didn’t have any illusions that the tablet’s secret obsolescence would hinder a real Shuos grid diver, but if she worked quickly, she had a chance of getting away with her query.

It didn’t take long for Cheris to find pictures of Ruo’s corpse. Even with the bullet hole in the side of his head, the red-gray mess on the other side, the blood matted in his hair, she recognized him. She would have known him in the dark by his footsteps, or by the taste of his mouth, or the way he always broke left when he was startled. She had assumed that he would always greet her with that kiss on the top of her head, and that they would graduate together, perhaps even apply to the same assignments. All of that was gone now.

Cheris had difficulty concentrating. Up until this point, she had convinced herself that all the game maneuvers existed solely in some abstract space. There was nothing abstract about the fact that she’d killed her best friend.

Still, she wasn’t done yet. As luck would have it, she made it into Tiana’s profile because someone had forgotten to lock it down after making their edits, or someone else had been hacking it before she had and left the doors open.

Two instructors had made private notes in Tiana’s profile. They praised her ruthlessness and her boldness in claiming credit in the wake of a suicide. They praised her mastery of Shuos ideals. And, almost as an afterthought, they recommended that she be placed in two advanced seminars next term.

Cheris closed the connection and stayed in the café until it got dark. During that time, she played seven games of jeng-zai and lost them all.

No one ever figured out that Cheris was the author of Tiana’s game.

“RUO,” CHERIS SAID hoarsely into the silence. She had not spoken his name in over four centuries. It was hard to believe that he had been dead that long, that she was the only person who remembered the brightness of his eyes, his laugh, his unexpected fondness for fruit candies. The shape of his hands, with their blunt, steady fingers.

For a moment she wondered why her voice sounded too high, strangely alien. And then she remembered that, too. Her face was wet, but she tried not to think about that.

Cheris bent herself to finishing the task she had set herself. She already knew how much the splinters hurt. A little more wouldn’t matter.

FOUR HUNDRED AND nineteen years before the Siege of the Fortress of Scattered Needles, on a world whose name had atrophied to a murmur, the heptarchate warred against rebels. The rebels flew many banners: the Thorn-and-Circle, the Winged Flower, the Red Fist. The Inverted Chalice and the Snake Defiant. The Stone Axe. In those days, it seemed that every hilltop, every city in the shadow of a forever cloud, every glimmering moon had its own device.

The battle had passed Cheris and Shuos Sereset by like a red tide. They had been assigned to assassinate the Axers’ general, then position shouters by hand. As it turned out, the assassination had been the easy part. Now Cheris listened to the faraway crash of guns, the hiss-and-sizzle of evaporator fire, the roar of tanks. For hours she had been trying to call the Shuos for pickup; for hours she had sought any indication that heptarchate forces were still in the area, or that the heretics were coming back.

The shouters had proved more troublesome. Their handler had explained, in a cold dead voice, that Shuos drones could have accomplished the task, but their leadership was unwilling to reveal the full extent of the drones’ capabilities to the Kel. The Kel, their allies.

Now Sereset was dying of a stray Kel bullet, pure stupid luck. The bullet was a tunneler, and Sereset’s amputation failsafe had reacted too slowly. All Cheris could think of, looking at the crusts of drying blood, at the messy hardened foam that partly staunched the leg’s stump and the perforations, was how little she knew the other man. At Shuos Academy Sereset had had a habit of keeping his head down and smiling a lot, but he had reasonably good marks and liked working with finicky equipment. None of this told Cheris what Sereset thought about the Liozh heptarch’s rhetoric, or what music he hummed when no one else was listening, or whether he thought the bitter wine served at the Shuos table was better than Andan rose liqueur.

“You should have left hours ago,” Sereset said in a dry rasp.

Cheris crouched closer. It was cold – she’d pulled off her coat and draped it over the other man – but this much cold wouldn’t kill her. “I’m not leaving you,” she said. “No word yet.”

“I didn’t figure there would be. You know, I always looked at you and thought you planned too hard. You always have the perfect answer prepared.” Sereset’s words were slow, dragged out one by one, but clearly enunciated: a matter of pride even now.

“Not a very useful character flaw, is it?” Cheris said. “Didn’t do you much good.”

“It’s not your fault the Kel can’t aim.”

Cheris looked out over the curve of the hills, the silhouettes of blowing purplish grasses in the sun’s waning light, the rubble of buildings blown apart. You could almost mistake this for peace: the wind, the grass, the hills. The way light snagged on the edges of leaves and changed the colors of stone and skin and trickling water.

You could almost forget the trajectories of bullets. You could almost forget that, less than a day ago, the Kel had fought the rebels over control of the nearby city. You could almost forget that the shouters had shouted enemy and ally alike into submission, driving out all thought but the imperative to kneel before the heptarchs’ sign. The shouters were a Shuos weapon, and the Kel were not immune to them. Their weapons had fallen slack from their hands; the engines of war had chewed through the battlefield unguided. The casualties must have been appalling. For that matter, Cheris had to wonder how many of the other shouter teams had made it through.

Cheris had originally intended to pick a track that would make use of her gift for languages. She had been good at a lot of things, and having options worked in her favor. But after Ruo’s suicide, she switched to the assassin track with a side of analysis. It would take more than assassinations to bring down the heptarchate, but it gave her a starting place.

And now, it turned out, she was going to die forgotten on a battlefield before she could set anything in motion.

“How much longer?” Sereset asked after a while.

“I don’t know,” Cheris said. A Shuos hoverer was supposed to have retrieved them over ten hours ago. They had no way of returning to the transport in orbit, and they couldn’t leave the shouters: too dangerous to abandon into enemy hands, too valuable to destroy. In theory, the Kel had been mopping up the battlefield and its shambles of prisoners. Cheris had risked burst transmissions asking the Kel for pickup, but she had her suspicions about what the Kel thought about the Shuos just now.

The wind grew colder, the sun dimmer.

“Stupid war, isn’t it?” Sereset said.

Cheris startled. Careless of her. She should have better control. “Don’t say that.”

Sereset’s grin was ghastly. “Don’t be ridiculous. What can they do, kill me?”

“You know just as well as I do what they do to dissidents. The best thing to do is obey.”

“I expected better of you.”

“You should never expect better of anyone.” Cheris remembered long hours in Shuos Khiaz’s office hunched over lists of numbers. Her imagination wasn’t large enough to encompass the deaths, the cities unmade and the books smothered into platitudes, but that wasn’t any reason not to try.

After another pause, while strange luminous insects started to dance their fluttering dances, Cheris said, “It’s a stupid war.” The words tasted strange. She was unused to taking such risks.

She wasn’t sure that Sereset had heard her, but then he said, “Not much to do about it, I suppose.”

“That’s not true,” Cheris said, more vehemently than she had meant to. “If everyone united to defy their tyranny, even the heptarchs would fall back. We say ‘rebels’ as though they all share the same goals and leadership, but they don’t. They don’t coordinate with each other, so the heptarchate will defeat them in detail. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Indeed,” Sereset said. Perhaps he was smiling. At this point it was hard to tell.

“We shouldn’t be fighting this war,” Cheris said. She had been silent for so long. “The only way to get them to stop, though, is if someone takes on the heptarchate entire. I’m not talking about petty assassinations. I’m talking about defeating them on every level of their own game. It wouldn’t be short and it wouldn’t be pretty and you’d end up as much a monster as they are, but maybe it would be worth it to tear the whole fucking structure down.”

Sereset went white. Whiter. “We’re too big, Jedao. You couldn’t do it in one lifetime and guarantee the results.”

In one lifetime. “Wouldn’t need to,” Cheris said slowly. “The Kel have the key.”

“If you’re talking about the black cradle, they’re not going to hand that over for your convenience. Assuming you figure out how not to go crazy in there.”

“You’d have to manipulate them into it,” Cheris said. “Another long game, but not outside the realm of possibility. Do something spectacular. Make them want to bring you back, over and over, until you’re done.”

There had to be better, less chancy ways, but they were going to die here anyway. Might as well go for broke while they were playing what-if anyway.

Sereset laughed painfully. “Fine, then, you’re already crazy. And you’re going to die in some fistfight over the price of quinces. Or they’ll catch you, and there aren’t words nasty enough for what they’ll do to you.”

“No, I’ll die on this planet,” Cheris said. “But at least we’ll die together.”

Cheris thought she could get to like the glowing insects.

The sun set. Cheris huddled closer to Sereset, warmth overlapping dwindling warmth.

It came as a considerable surprise when the silence was interrupted by a burst of static in her ear, and then: “ – tenant Shuos Lharis of Fireflitter 327, shouter team five please respond.”

Cheris froze. She had broken her own rule, talked to someone, security lapse. Sereset might live with medical attention. But then he might give her away: drunken mutters, drugged mumblings, thoughtless malice. You could never trust anyone.

Her hands flexed. She looked at him, then looked away.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sereset said. His voice shook. “Do it.”

“I can’t,” Cheris said, closing her eyes in shame. “You have a chance.”

“I’ll be a cripple even if I make it,” Sereset said. “And life’s cheap anyway –”

“Don’t say that,” Cheris said violently, “it’s not true. It’s never true.”

“Besides,” Sereset said over Lharis’s repeated message, “you have a plan. Hell of a long shot, but you never know. Go topple the heptarchate for me. Make my death mean something. Hurry, before the lieutenant strands you here.” His voice sounded very weak.

“I won’t forget,” Cheris said. She kissed his forehead.

Then, in a single quick, decisive motion, she snatched up the coat and covered Sereset’s face.

After Sereset stopped struggling to breathe, she said into the relay, “Shuos Jedao, shouter team five, to Lieutenant Lharis. One for pickup.”

“What happened to the other?” Lharis said.

“Stray Kel bullet. He didn’t make it.”

“Pity,” Lharis said. “All right. Two hours and forty-six minutes until I can come get you. Stay put.”

For the first time since Ruo’s suicide, Cheris had found a moment’s furtive camaraderie, and because of it, she had had to murder. Because she had been weak; because she had wanted to talk. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Never forgive me, Cheris thought to Sereset as she put her coat back on. The two hours and forty-six minutes until the hoverer’s arrival stretched forever.

Commit to fire, as the Kel would say.

No looking back.