Yoon Lee - Ninefox Gambit

She had eaten the fox’s eyes. She had seen what he had seen.

At the center of the blast, there was a mass of fossilized pasts and devalued futures. The better part of a Kel swarm reduced to carrion glass. Over 8,000 Kel and those in service to the Kel, all to guarantee the death of one man.

The deltaform wanted to know where they were going.

Cheris smiled crookedly at it. She yanked off her gloves and set them neatly to the side. There was a cold, pale fire in her heart. The hexarchs had no idea how badly they had fucked up.

She had gone to a lot of trouble to put herself into the black cradle, one bad option among many worse, so she would have time to run her campaign against the heptarchate. But she couldn’t win her own war. The key to calendrical warfare was mathematics, and the only mathematician she had access to, Nirai Kujen, was more monstrous than she was.

Now she had an alternate mathematician, so to speak.

I’m dead, she thought, very clearly, as I wanted to be, but I’m alive enough to carry on the war.

All her life, she had lived to the hexarchate’s high calendar. Now she lived to another calendar. She would measure her years by the death-day of her swarm, and not by the cold, prim feasts of the Rahal, the Kel’s parades, the Vidona’s cutting remembrances. Her every maneuver would be to the sandglass necessity of rebellion. The tide in her heart turned to the memory of amputations and evaporated soldiers, to deaths spent like counterfeit coins.

Cheris finally knew the meaning of Hellspin Fortress. She had killed a terrifying number of people for the heptarchate. When it came to the Lanterners, she decided she was done. A Lanterner’s life had worth the way a heptarchate soldier’s life had worth. A life was a life. It was a simple equation, but she hadn’t been a mathematician then, and Kel Command had failed to understand the notation.

That hadn’t been the only reason – she couldn’t help being a Shuos – but it was the one that mattered.

Calendrical warfare was a matter of hearts.

But numbers could move hearts, with the right numbers, and with the right hearts.

She had learned that not all masters were worth serving. It was time to carry the fight to the hexarchs.

I’m your gun.

Calendrical rot had set in again.

Thank you to the following people: my editor, Jonathan Oliver, and the wonderful folks at Solaris Books; my agent, Jennifer Jackson; and my agent’s assistant, Michael Curry.

I am grateful to my beta readers: Sam Kabo Ashwell, Peter Berman, Joseph Betzwieser, Daedala, Helen Keeble, Yune Kyung Lee, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Nancy Sauer, and Sonya Taaffe.

This one is for Yune Kyung Lee, best sister ever, who was there when everything began.