Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

“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.