Seven of Infinities, page 7
“You brought her here, didn’t you? On your ship.”
“My body,” Sunless Woods said, mildly.
“You know what I mean. When’s the last time you’ve brought one of your flirts here?”
“There was no choice,” Sunless Woods said. Vân had passed out, mumbling incoherent syllables in her sleep. Her shadow-skin—Sunless Woods’s shadow-skin, because it had come from one of her shuttles—was covered in blood and gore and various body fluids. She’d needed a check-up, and Sunless Woods wasn’t going to leave it to some cheap doctor on-station—because that was what Vân would insist on for fear of not being able to afford it, and while Sunless Woods could go full auntie on her, it was much easier to spare herself the argument in the first place.
Sunless Woods had been very carefully holding herself in check—not looking at the room where she’d left Vân sleeping, under the grip of a mild sedative, and with bots on an automated watch of her vitals. She could let it all happen on a thread she was barely aware of, not calling the visuals or audio or anything that would make her fully, consciously present.
“First corpse?” Thiên Hoa asked, and then shook her head. “It’s her second, isn’t it?”
“Mmm,” Sunless Woods said. “The first one wasn’t as gruesome, I should think.”
“Ah.” Thiên Hoa nodded, sagely. “It’s not every day you find a body stuffed in a chest.”
They had, and other things besides—limbs and torn-off fingernails and eyeballs—and once, memorably, enough vials of blood to empty a body twice over. Sunless Woods had called the heist off and they’d quietly tipped off the militia—who’d followed the blood’s owner to a quiet patch of earth on the Twenty-Fifth Planet, which turned out to be the burial grounds of a rather busy murderer. The Measure of Bones Killer, they’d dubbed him when they’d finally caught him, using the word that meant field and earth and village at the same time.
“Mmm,” Sunless Woods said. “She kept repeating ‘they’re dead’. I suppose it makes sense.” Certainly the gender had matched. But…
Thiên Hoa watched her for a while. “Spit it out,” she said. “Something is bothering you.”
Sunless Woods hesitated. “It’s the tone. Like she’d personally known them.”
“But she didn’t, right?”
“No,” Sunless Woods said. “The first body didn’t mean anything to her.”
“Mmm.” Thiên Hoa didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The first body had been so thoroughly altered even her own mother wouldn’t have recognised her. “Well, there is an easy solution to your problem.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Thiên Hoa’s voice was deadpan. “It’s called go and talk to her.”
Sunless Woods felt as though someone was squeezing her bloodless—which was ridiculous, because the core of her was impregnable, a Mind hugging connectors in a locked and sealed heartroom deep in the bowels of the ship—like a brain in a human skull, something no one would ever touch unless there was cause. “No,” she said.
A snort from Thiên Hoa. “Really? You’re backing away from a challenge? You? The thief who sneaked into the Purple Forbidden City to grab the Fifth Emperor’s celadon set? The one who infiltrated the Imperial Censorate and falsified official seals so she could free her crew from penal servitude?”
“I’m not afraid.” But she was, and she wasn’t even sure why. It wasn’t Vân. She could run rings around her—Vân wasn’t a good liar, wasn’t fast on her feet, wasn’t the kind of person who effortlessly adapted to anything and everything. And yet…and yet, she’d marched into the bare house determined to save her student, and had dragged Sunless Woods onto the corpse of The Elephant and Grass. And yet…and yet, she was fundamentally, profoundly honest, ringing as sharp and as whole as a pagoda bell—and Sunless Woods found she didn’t know what to do with any of that anymore.
Thiên Hoa didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She just watched Sunless Woods with that sharp, ironic smile on her face, the same one she’d always had prior to a heist, when everything was so taut it felt a storm was going break; Hải’s children were at each other’s throats, and Wine was busying herself by making wounding remarks aimed at anyone who so much as moved.
“Fine, fine,” Sunless Woods said. “I’ll go and talk to her.”
* * *
IN VN’S JUMBLED, broken dreams, she was younger, bent over the table where she was piecing her mem-implant together—watched over by ghosts and ancestors, all with the same faint expression of disapproval, and billowing in a non-existent wind like the banners of an invisible army . She was sitting alone in the militia interrogation room, her arm aching where the injector had gone into it—and Laureate An Thành emerged from the shadows to look at her, except that she wasn’t wearing the robes and jade belt of a scholar, but the white áo dài of a young girl, and her hair was unbound, trailing down her shoulders and pooling on the floor like an oil slick, merging with the shadows of the room. I know, Vân wanted to say, but the words tasted like shriveling ice in her mouth, and when An Thành looked up her emaciated, bruised face was that of the corpse in the secret safe, was that of Hương Lâm when they’d taken her away.
We protected you, big’sis. Don’t go and waste it all.
She woke up with a start, in a darkened, unfamiliar room. Her heartbeat felt like it would burst through her chest. The shadow-skin she’d been wearing was gone, and she wasn’t wearing nearly enough clothes—just a flimsy, translucent shirt and trousers embroidered with lotus flowers that didn’t stop the faint wind in the room from raising goosebumps on her skin. Recycled air, and it was too sharp and too slightly stale to be a habitat, unless it was one of the smaller outermost ones. Her bots lay on the floor in a tangled mess: they were gradually waking up, becoming available for her commands. Which meant she’d been unconscious for long enough they’d deactivated.
She—
Where was she?
“Good morning,” Sunless Woods said. The ship was leaning against one of the walls—Vân could have sworn she hadn’t been there before. “Feeling better?”
She felt nauseous, and hungry, and wholly out of sorts, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was, “I’m fine.”
“You are demonstrably not.” The ship had changed: her avatar wasn’t quite within human proportions anymore—limbs too long, body stretched towards the ceiling—the stars that had trailed the wake of her gestures now visible even when she was at rest—and in her eyes, an oily sheen that was that on the walls and on the floor.
Certainty hit her like a punch in the gut. “You brought me to you. To your body.” It wasn’t habitat air she was breathing—she was on a mindship. On Sunless Woods. Now that her own heartbeat had slowed down she could hear the faint sound—the steady beat that drew faint, translucent patterns on the walls, that oily sheen that seemed to tremble on everything, and to spread every time she turned away from it…
This was way worse than the shuttle.
“Yes.” Sunless Woods face was grave. “I apologise. It was the simplest.” She moved, fluid, fast, stood at Vân’s side—a mere forelength away, close enough that the odd heat of her presence trembled in the air between them. “You were covered in blood and less savoury body fluids. The corpse was frozen, but Heaven knows what kind of bacteria developed in the time it’s been on The Elephant and Grass.”
The corpse. Vân tried, very hard, to dispel the memory of that ice-white body stuffed in the wall. It didn’t work. “How—how did she die?” she asked. She thought of the earlier corpse, of Uyên’s voice coolly telling her it was a woman called Lê Thị Hương Dinh. Dinh. Her friend, except that she’d come back from the dead only to die again in terrible pain.
“Stabbed,” Sunless Woods said, in a cool voice. “Multiple times.” And, after a pause, “It wasn’t a pretty sight.” It sounded like a reassurance, but her tone of voice belied it.
Vân looked at her hands, wondering what she could say. Laureate An Thành was there in her mind, offering quotes ranging from the flirtatious to the glib—nothing suitable or in good taste. “I thought it’d be treasure in the safe. Or a clue, like the one that led us to The Elephant and Grass.” The Seven of Threads. As if on cue, Uyên’s message popped up on her inter-face, with a helpful picture of the mạt chược tile—instead of the usual strings of copper coins of the suit, this one had actual threads, a delicate tracery of them with highlights picked in red, like the threads of fate. The red seemed to glisten like blood rather than good fortune.
Sunless Woods’s voice was oddly gentle. “We all have secrets. Things we don’t want to admit to.”
Vân felt like she was choking. “I get it. You want to help me, but you can’t do that if you don’t know the truth.”
A silence. Looking up, she found Sunless Woods sitting on her bed—and through the translucent mass of her avatar, she could see the stars, a spread of white, pulsing lights against the darkness of the sky—a vista that kept moving and changing, showing her the habitats of the Belt, and then more stars against the red and purple background of a distant nebula—and a persistent hum like a never-ending song, the same one she’d heard in the asteroid field. “It doesn’t work like that,” Sunless Woods said. “You share with me what you’re comfortable sharing. And I work around that. But I’d rather you didn’t lie. Just tell me what things you don’t want to talk about, and I won’t inquire.”
Bitter laughter choked her. “Like a true gentlewoman? You don’t even know what I’m hiding.”
A raised eyebrow. Sunless Woods closed her hand on hers—she must have shifted something in the overlays, because Vân could feel her, all of a sudden—and when she grabbed Sunless Woods back her fingers interlaced with cool, pliant skin whose touch sent a shiver through her spine. “No. What makes you think I would care?”
Again, bitter laughter. “Everyone does. They just like to say they don’t.”
Sunless Woods was silent. She was looking at Vân—not in the fond, amused way she’d had before, but with head cocked, her eyes with star-studded depths resting on Vân. Assessing her. Judging her. Sunless Woods hadn’t withdrawn her hand, and Vân found herself clinging to it. “You think they’d cast you out, like the poetry club. Take your living from you and ensure you never found another. You’ve worked so hard at being where you are and you’re afraid it would all collapse on a whim.”
How did she know? How could she know? Vân felt exposed, in more ways than just the physical. “You—you take me here and shut me in this room, and give me Heaven knows what—”
“Medicine. You were at risk of contamination—”
“I’m not a child—I knew what I was getting into, and you know perfectly well we could have gone to any doctor in the Belt to get sorted out. But you take me here and take everything from me and then you have the nerve to say that you won’t judge me, that I can keep my secrets! I’m on you! This room is yours—all of it, all of this, this is your body, and you act like I’m free—”
“You are.” Sunless Woods’s voice was quiet. She let go of Vân’s hand, and stretched—and the stars stretched behind her as if she were unrolling the canvas of the heavens, a shift that spread over the entire room until they seemed once more to be in Uyên’s overlay, except that something was different about this one—except that it wasn’t just a poet’s view of stars and constellations, but the stars Vân had seen while she was out there in the asteroid field, immobile pinpoints of light, and over it all the harsh light of the sun glinting on the metal of a ship’s hull. “You’re free here. Always. With nothing expected or demanded. Not ever.” She knelt then, wrapping her hands around Vân’s own—that diffuse warmth again, except it was now pulsing like a living heart—and for a bare moment Vân, feeling it travel through her bones like a pagoda bell, forgot what it meant to breathe or sit—was hanging, weightless, in the darkness of space, watching stars slowly wheel against the light of the sun.
And then Sunless Woods withdrew her hands, and it felt as though she’d just snuffed a candle out. “But I’m sorry if I gave you a different impression. I had hoped—” she shook her head, and the walls shifted to dark again. “Never mind. I’ll have a shuttle ready for you to get back to the habitat.”
Vân expected her to merely disappear, but instead she headed towards the door of the room—it irised open, revealing the oily walls of a corridor with a painting of mountains shrouded in mist. Her body faded as she walked—by the time she was at the threshold she was nothing more than a faint outline, though the stars she had conjured remained in the room, faint dots of light. The noise she’d conjured—that soft, electric song of celestial bodies’ radio waves—remained. A moment more, and she’d be gone altogether. She wouldn’t be in the shuttle either, she’d just drop Vân off at the docks and walk out of her life. Or worse, keep this utterly professional, a favour from an elder to a younger, sorting out things that Vân wasn’t mature or influential enough to do herself—all the while keeping that light, ironic distance she’d had before, in the poetry club.
Vân was up, almost before realizing she’d made the gesture. Her legs wobbled under her, threatening to collapse altogether. Sunless Woods hadn’t seen her—or wasn’t going back. The thought suddenly terrified her.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.” Her voice felt raw and unused, as if she were speaking through a throat filleted by metal.
Sunless Woods paused—coalesced back into her avatar, one hand on the door as if to hold it open.
Vân said, “I’m sorry. I lost my temper.”
A shrug. “And I lost my sense of boundaries.” Her voice was sharp. “Flirting goes both ways.”
“Flirting.” The word was a stone dropped in a pond. “Is that what we’re doing?”
Again, a carefully controlled shrug. Sunless Woods turned, to look at her. She wasn’t human anymore: she was the ship, the immensity of a pitted hull seen from afar, the glint of light on fins and motors, the fluid gestures that weren’t so much moving as diving through the air. Only a faint human outline remained—like a line that defined and constrained her at the same time. “If you want. Or we can investigate a murder.”
Vân’s chest hurt. She finally remembered to breathe. She said, slowly, carefully, “Remember that brawl I was a witness to, five years ago?”
A stillness, like a held breath. “Yes.”
“It wasn’t a brawl. It was my friends—Hương Lâm and Dinh, the people who lived with me. My…younger sisters. You can probably look them up on the network.”
“In a heartbeat. But it’s your story, not the network’s.”
“They—we were angry. At the scholars, at the wealthy, at all those given all the changes, all the honours, all the merit. We wanted to change the world. We wrote pamphlets and protested and memorialised the magistrate, and all the things you get around to as drunk students.” It was all coming out of her in a rush, words jumble with each other. “Except they went too far, and they got caught.”
“Ah.” Sunless Woods’s voice was flat. “A large enough theft to condemn them to death, or so you thought.”
Vân wanted to say that theft was wrong; but Hương Lâm had stood by her, had encouraged her to build Laureate An Thành, bringing rice wine to celebrate when Vân’s patchwork of other people’s ancestors finally came online—but Hương Lâm and Dinh had kept their silence for her sake, going into exile and never once breathing a word against Vân.
You could tell her about me. An Thành’s voice was gentle.
Tell her, and be judged the way Uyên was going to judge her—castigated for turning the rules to her own advantage? “I saw what happened,” she said. “They turned from barely tolerated to pariahs. Even before the trial, no one wanted to mention their names, or be associated with them in any fashion. And I—I just went along with it.”
Sunless Woods was silent. Watching her. Weighing her.
Vân hesitated. In her thoughts, Laureate An Thành said nothing; was merely there, an inescapable reminder of good behaviour. “And they stood by me. I saw them, elder aunt. I—” she clamped her lips on the other pronoun that came to them, the more familiar, intimate one. “Dinh could barely walk. Hương Lâm had white scars on her arms—the marks of the militia’s injectors, and she kept looking over her shoulders for something that wasn’t there.”
“They interrogated them.”
“Of course. They had to get a confession, and make sure they had no accomplices. They could have dragged me down with them. Denounced me to make their own sentence lighter. I was eldest, and living with them. The weight of the law was against me.”
“The law. A justice as clean and as meaningful as the blue of the sky.” Sunless Woods’s voice was mirthless. “There’s rather a dearth of blue over the habitats, isn’t there.”
Vân felt a familiar, almost deadened twist of fear in her chest. “You can’t mean—”
Sunless Woods cocked her head. “That you were treated unfairly? I shouldn’t have to say it to make it come true.” Her voice sounded…tight, taut with something Vân couldn’t name, as if at any moment the ship herself would burst and something else, something large and terrible was going to come out, a butterfly with bladed wings large enough to shred galaxies. She breathed in, slowly—or rather wanted it to be slow but felt only An Thành within her, and the depth of An Thành’s own anger.
You can’t think she’s right. You’re a scholar.
An Thành’s voice was sharp. You say this like it means merciless.
Vân said, because she needed something, anything to paper over the chasm in the room, “They stood up for me.”
“You think you owe them a debt? For being decent?” Vân couldn’t read the emphasis Sunless Woods put on the words.
“For doing the right thing when I didn’t? Yes,” Vân said. “For—” words failed her, and she thought of every moment she’d believed them dead—grief and guilt and beneath it all, the relief they were no longer there, the same relief the orbitals had felt at being rid of thieves. “For everything I failed to do for them.”
