Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“You need me, General. You won’t find a better mathematician anywhere in the heptarchate. Besides, you’ll always know exactly where you stand with me, none of this pathetic hiding behind niceties. Face it, if not me, then who?”

Cheris was silent.

Kujen’s voice softened. “You’ve been fighting alone for a long time, Jedao. You never get close to anyone, no affairs that last longer than a couple of weeks. The Shuos aren’t the only ones who like to pry, you know. I imagine the Kel figure you’re standoffish because you’re being a fox. They have no idea what kinds of secrets you’re trying to keep safe. I’m not your ideal ally, no. But I’m better than nothing at all. We can do this together. You won’t have to be alone anymore.”

“I’m not sure what the point of this discussion is,” Cheris said, because she didn’t want Kujen realizing how well he had her figured out. “You’re a heptarch. You can destroy me at any time. What kind of assurances can I possibly expect from you?”

“That’s what I like about you,” Kujen said. He came around the corner of the desk and leaned against the side of Cheris’s chair. Cheris wished her gun were back in her hand, even if she knew better. “Here you are, exposed, and you’re still maneuvering for an advantage. Just what is it that runs in your veins, Jedao?”

“You’re welcome to cut me open to find out,” Cheris said dryly. “Knife’s on my left hip if you forgot yours.”

Kujen’s smile was slow and sweet and utterly untrustworthy. “Oh, I intend to,” he said. “Tell you what. There are things the other heptarchs won’t forgive. Being caught conspiring against them is one of them. If I stick my neck out under the same axe, will you believe my sincerity?”

Cheris didn’t move when Kujen leaned over her. His hand rested on the back of the chair, fingertips brushing her shoulder. What is this, Cheris thought with a flicker of irritation, secondary school? Even so, it was difficult not to react to the sensuous mouth, the long sweep of those ashy eyelashes.

“I have one question,” Cheris said.

“Ask,” Kujen said. His breath smelled of smoke and spice.

“If immortality is so wonderful” – hard to see the downsides for the practitioner if you didn’t care about little things like murder – “why aren’t all the heptarchs doing it?” Assuming they weren’t better at hiding it than Kujen was.

“So you’re interested after all.”

Cheris shrugged. Let Kujen think what he wanted.

“It can drive people crazy if it’s not calibrated correctly,” Kujen said. “I don’t mean sociopath values of crazy.” The corner of his mouth tipped up for a moment. “I know what I am. I’m talking about useless raving values of crazy.”

“No good to me either, then,” Cheris said. It couldn’t just be that sociopaths were immune. The heptarchate’s leadership didn’t lack for those, historically speaking.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Kujen said. “They can’t get rid of me because I’m the only one who understands the math, including the black cradle’s governing equations. I can handle the calibrations. If you’re useful to me, I can arrange for you not to end up as a raving wreck. That being said, you’re a little young to be getting panicky about your lifespan, choice of career notwithstanding.”

“Oh, that’s not the issue,” Cheris said. She had never been afraid of long odds. “I’m more concerned about the fact that I can’t see what’s in it for you. You already have everything.”

“Is that what you think?” Kujen said. His fingers trailed down Cheris’s back, traced a shoulder blade, came to rest. “You want to strip the system down to its component gears and build something new, if I’m not mistaken.” It was impossible to look away from his eyes, darkly avid. “You’re going to make a new calendar. I want to be there when it happens, and anyway, you can’t do it without me. I can slaughter the math on my own, but I’d never ram this by the fucking sanctimonious Liozh or their pet Rahal. You could handle the calendrical spikes if someone solved the equations for you. You need a mathematician. I need a weapon. We can’t do this without each other, Jedao.”

“I can already tell you’re not a tactician if you’re pinning your hopes of revolution on one game piece,” Cheris said. “Unless you have your hands on a bunch of mutinous Kel that no one’s told me about.”

Kujen laughed. “Mutinous Kel are your department, I’m afraid. But we’re two of a kind; that has to count for something.”

There had been a time when she would have hoped that she and Kujen were nothing of the sort, but by now she knew better. “Fine,” she said, because it was important to preserve the appearance that she was making a choice. “Does it particularly matter to you what I want to install in the place of what we have now?”

“I can control the technology parameters that matter to me,” Kujen said. “You do whatever the hell you want with the social parameters. I could care less.”

Cheris didn’t believe this, but they could fight over that later. She rose. Kujen stepped backward to give her room, still with that dancer’s awareness of space. His eyes were both dark and bright. Cheris knelt before him in the formal obeisance to a heptarch, and said, “I’m your gun.”

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.