A Fire Born of Exile: A Xuya Universe Romance
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Synopsis
Quỳnh's path intersects that of Minh, the daughter of one of her oldest enemies, who chafes at her own lack of freedom; and of Hoà, a near-destitute engineer who poses a threat to all Quỳnh's careful plans. Quỳnh finds herself inexorably attracted to Hoà, even as her plans upend the fragile political equilibrium of the Belt.
Falling in love wasn't part of Quỳnh's plans; but will she be able to grasp this second chance at happiness, or will she cling on to a revenge that may well consume her whole?
A poignant, heartwarming romantic space opera about love, revenge and the weight of the past.
Praise for Aliette de Bodard:
“Intricate and emotional... a touching sci-fi romance that will delight fans and new readers alike” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“It took my breath away!” —Stephanie Burgis
“So romantic I may simply perish” —Tasha Suri
“Really fresh” —Katee Robert
“Confident, sexy and touching” —Max Gladstone
“Dazzling” —Everina Maxwell
“Swoon-worthy” —Susan, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
“A sumptuous, romantic experience” —The Financial Times
“Fizzingly inventive” —Alastair Reynolds
“A treasure” —Gareth L Powell
Release date: October 12, 2023
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Print pages: 428
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A Fire Born of Exile: A Xuya Universe Romance
Aliette de Bodard
Chapter 1The Tiger Games
Minh had carefully thought out her disguise for the Tiger Games. She’d planned every detail of her physical and virtual appearance, selecting clothes with embroidery that was highly realistic, and an avatar that included fine dragons’ antlers around her face and slowly whirling galaxies on her chest and back – the work was rough and detailed, clearly produced by automated routines or a new designer’s brush. The bots on Minh’s shoulders and wrists were middle of the range: spider-like and designed for show more than practicality, their crown of sensors glittering with jade and silver inserts, and their multiple legs beautiful and fragile, unable to really withstand any kind of exposure to vacuum. There was nothing that would signal Minh as anything other than an ordinary candidate – a scholar without much money awaiting yet another opportunity to successfully pass the imperial examinations. She’d disguised her authentication token, making it look like a student’s. There was nothing that would suggest her mother was the prefect of the Scattered Pearls Belt – one of its foremost and most powerful dignitaries, her shadow following Minh everywhere she went, tainting every interaction she had.
Unfortunately, Minh and her friend The Fruit of Heart’s Sorrow hadn’t been out for more than a couple of centidays before she made her first mistake.
‘One, please,’ she said to a seller of steamed buns, a bot descending to circle her wrist.
The seller – an auntie who must have already been old during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising and who had a stall in the Harmonious Dream marketplace – looked at Minh, frowning.
‘What did you say?’ she asked.
‘One, please,’ Minh said, slowly and loudly.
The seller was still frowning, looking at Minh, and at Heart’s Sorrow next to her.
‘What’s the problem?’ Heart’s Sorrow asked.
He’d already strolled on further ahead into the crowds: now he blinked, making his avatar reappear next to Minh. He had the advantage of being a mindship: his body was parked in orbit around the asteroids, and he was projecting his avatar into the habitats, without having to worry about a physical layer. He’d modified his usual small likeness of his own body to depict a merchant transport, a much larger and bulkier ship, and masked his auth-token. In physical layers he was only large enough for a three-person crew: he was one of the newer, smaller generation of mindships, better suited to the transport of goods than of troops.
The seller was looking at them both with growing suspicion – and any moment now Minh was going to see it: the fear and the craven desire to please them, or rather, to please their parents through them. What had they done wrong? They’d both changed their appearance, physical and virtual; they’d taken care to work on their body language… She asked her bots to play back the scene that had just occurred, looking for…
Oh.
Their accents. Not only was hers pure Serpent diaspora, the one all her tutors had drilled into her, emulating the imperial court on the First Planet, it was entirely wrong for a scholar without means. What could she do? There had to be something…
A distraction, and a correction.
She pitched her voice lower. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t clear. Make that three buns, with pork. And overlay one for my friend here. We’re meeting friends later. Bit of a busy festival?’ As she spoke, she shifted the vowels and pitch of her words, moving seamlessly into something far lower class.
The seller cocked her head. She looked for a moment as though she wanted to argue with Minh, but she gave up. Not worth the trouble.
‘As good as it can be, I guess. Too many people still afraid the Uprising will come back. Too many imperial soldiers – they don’t pay market prices for street food.’
‘Well, that’s my first mother covered,’ Heart’s Sorrow said to Minh via their private comms channel. ‘Hope she’s not going to cover yours, too.’
Heart’s Sorrow’s first mother was the Peach Blossom Lake General, the military administrator of the Belt.
‘It’d be a good distraction,’ Minh said.
The mindship was joking, but he was tense, and she didn’t need that to be obvious. Neither of them had, per se, permission to sneak out in disguise.
‘There.’ The seller handed Minh her pork buns. ‘Enjoy the festival!’
‘Thank you, elder aunt,’ Minh said.
The bot on her wrist sent money to the seller, and then she and Heart’s Sorrow were on their way.
‘So much for our plan,’ Heart’s Sorrow said. His nervousness made him sarcastic.
Minh made a face. ‘I could quote you Tôn Tử’s Military Lessons on plans.’
They both knew them by heart – the Old Earth strategist, the one from a dead planet the scholars nevertheless insisted on teaching as though he was one of their own ancestors, as deserving of worship as they were.
Heart’s Sorrow laughed, but it had an edge. ‘Don’t. That’s dreadfully boring.’
‘Boring the same way we are?’ It was Minh’s voice that had the edge now.
Their first mothers were a general and a prefect, Serpents so senior their origins had ceased to matter. Minh and Heart’s Sorrow had grown up in a rarefied circle of the wealthy and influential, their paths in life determined as surely as if a fated thread had been pulling them in. Safeguarded, sheltered, privileged.
Preserved as carefully as dead things in scholars’ display cabinets.
‘Oh, shush,’ Heart’s Sorrow said.
He was eating his virtual pork bun: a skilful aggregation of layers that would trigger pleasant memories. Minh bit into hers. It felt like drowning, her mouth full of over-flavourful cotton, a riot of conflicting tastes from crumbly egg to the sweetness of the pork.
‘Come on,’ Heart’s Sorrow said, floating further into the crowd, the sheen on his hull flashing under the lights of the habitat. ‘We’re going to miss the best of it!’
Minh followed him, away from the Harmonious Dream marketplace and the wide plaza, with its stalls spread under the overlay of the whole Scattered Pearls Belt – into smaller and smaller spaces, corridors crammed with people, mindships and humans both, a riot of avatars wearing shimmering fabrics in multiple layers both physical and virtual – and not just humanoid or ship ones, but kỳ lân and lions and mixtures of organic and electronic with multiple legs and elongated bodies, scales and fur, and the sheeny, oily light of deep spaces on human skin. Every few measures marked a new ambient poem or music from zither to flute, a new environment. Minh was surprised, again and again, as sight and sound and smells
abruptly changed, an all-out, all-invasive feast of sounds that threatened to drown her at any moment, an utter exhilaration in every bone of her body, every pore of her skin.
It was everything she’d dreamed of. Not tame, not sterile – as vibrantly alive as the pulsing stars, and utterly uncaring of who Minh was. A person whose avatar was briny mist pushed against Minh – their touch a spray of cold water that smelled of pandanus and salt – and then they were on their way down the corridor. And then another one, with metal arms bristling with bots, and a mindship, bringing with them the fractured coldness of deep spaces – and another and another in a ceaseless dance. Minh laughed. This – this was freedom. This was wildness. She could dance and scream and no one would think twice or be afraid of her.
This was like finally filling her lungs after too long holding her breath.
‘Come on!’ Heart’s Sorrow said.
He was ahead, so far away Minh could only see him in a tracking overlay, his position a blinking marker over the variegated crowd. Obviously he would be above everyone; his only physical footprint was the cluster of bots in the shadow of his avatar.
Ahead was a slightly larger space in front of a series of compartments: the sort of space that would usually be claimed by a middle-sized lineage. Now it was filled by a crowd in front of a huge public overlay, an enhanced-depth opening showing the Tiger Games arena. As Minh wended her way through the crowd, struggling to join Heart’s Sorrow near the front, the view in the overlay moved, panning over the higher tiers of the arena, and Minh had a moment of nausea as she saw Mother in the prefect’s private space, wearing the jade belt and tasselled hat of her rank. A blink only, and then it had moved on, showing the other dignitaries, but for that single moment it felt – overlay, perception adjustments and all – as though she stood not an arm’s length away from Mother, close enough to see the disapproval on her face.
Or worse, the disappointment.
A touch, on her hand: one of Heart’s Sorrow’s bots, nestling into the crook of her
palm, the sharp, pulsing warmth of its legs steadying her. She glanced at her friend; he was beside her with absolutely no hint of anything in his posture.
‘Thanks,’ Minh said.
‘Pff,’ Heart’s Sorrow said. ‘Don’t spend days preparing for this outing, and then waste it all on her.’
He didn’t need to say who he meant. Sometimes, she envied him so much it hurt like someone twisting a fist into her belly. He seemed to have taken his own first mother’s measure early on: he loved her but didn’t expect her to be anything more than she was – status-obsessed, always yielding and taking the easy way, always seeking to make herself attractive to the powerful. Minh wished she had his clarity when it came to her own mother, who was sharp, navigating politics and calling in favours as easily as she breathed, extending the shadowed cloak of her protection to her intimates and subordinates. But sharpness also meant cruelty, and distance, and…
And, sometimes, Minh felt scared that Mother just didn’t love her.
The bot bit into her skin.
‘Hey!’
‘You’re daydreaming! Look!’
On the screen, the first of the Tigers was coming in, next to their data artist. It was a huge, translucent beast with five pairs of iridescent wings, a maw large enough to swallow suns, with diamond fangs and glittering eyes – a sleek, smooth shape like an atmospheric shuttle, meant to cut through the air, the wings sharp and gorgeous weapons. It moved fast, seemingly answering the least of the data artist’s commands, their fingers twitching as the Tiger moved.
Their opponent was closer to the old earth animal: a huge, faint mist that suggested stripes, and the vague idea of fire. Its data artist was a young woman with plain, unadorned brown robes that made her seem almost monk-like. She was sitting cross-legged on the arena floor – not a movement, not even a blink, as her Tiger moved to stand in front of its
opponent.
‘She’s good,’ Heart’s Sorrow said, his voice filled with awe.
As the two Tigers sized each other up, the camera moved across the people seated in the arena: the non-scholar classes packed, standing, into the lower seats, the scholars in their booths, and then the higher-end dignitaries with privileged virtual booths, and the corresponding visibility and access, enabling them to watch the games from the privacy of their own homes while being seen. Heart’s Sorrow snorted when the camera stopped, briefly, on the booth where his two mothers were: his first mother, the general, wearing her finest formal uniform with the peach blossom insignia, and his second mother, the retired enforcer, muscled and fit and looking hungrily at the fight beneath her.
Minh squeezed the bot in her hand, gently. Heart’s Sorrow didn’t answer: his attention was all on his mothers.
‘This is the start of the first playoff of the day, with Black Water facing Crimson Rain. A really interesting match, with one of the opponents being brand new to the Games—’
The camera panned again, as the sound of two Tigers clashing drifted from the arena floor. Couldn’t they focus on the fight itself? Dignitaries were so boring.
And then Minh saw her.
She was sitting in one of the dignitaries’ booths: one of the fancy ones with both physical and virtual access, a privacy screen half up – but as the camera panned the screen wavered, and Minh could see her clearly.
She was a woman of indeterminate age: jet-black hair gathered in a topknot and topped with a small golden crown in a butterfly shape, with the rest of the hair falling around the topknot in a cascade of blackness. Stars winked in and out of it in virtual overlay: a subtle touch. Her clothes were similarly subtle, a faint overlay of stars shimmering over a richly embroidered fabric. Her face was… Well, there wasn’t anything specific about her face, but it was the way she looked at the arena, the way she carried herself – as though the entire world was an egg that needed to be broken open to release the hatchling within. The face of someone who’d gladly set things afire with a shrug.
Minh realised she’d forgotten to breathe.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked in private comms.
‘Who’s what?’ Heart’s Sorrow wrenched his attention back to the screen. ‘Her? I’ve never seen her before.’ He made a clicking noise. ‘Mmm. The network says “Sương Quỳnh, the Alchemist of Streams and Hills”. She’s not sharing a family or lineage name.’
The Alchemist of Streams and Hills. A literary name. A scholar, then, but she was obviously not from the Scattered Pearls Belt, or Minh or Mother would know her. Next to the Alchemist was a mindship: a larger one than Heart’s Sorrow but from an older generation, their avatar a bulky metal shape with a profusion of actuators and fins, looking cobbled together from the rejects of other mindships. Guts of Sea, the network said. The woman turned to Guts of Sea, and said something which was caught by the privacy filter. She smiled, her lips the perfect, unsmudged red of a vermilion seal, and turned back to watching the arena. Her gaze, for a moment, went upwards, and Minh was transfixed – as if the Alchemist of Streams and Hills could see her through a camera and a public overlay. As if she knew Minh.
A sharp pain stabbed her hand. ‘Big sis! Big sis!’
She came back to the plaza where she and Heart’s Sorrow were standing.
‘What was that for?’
‘Look,’ Heart’s Sorrow said.
‘I don’t see anything.’
‘On the edges.’
There was some faint fuzzing on the edges of the overlay. And then the camera blinked – and she saw that the fuzzing wasn’t transfer corruption at all, but bits and pieces of the second Tiger, the faint, undistinguished shape of mists and stripes. It had been slowly growing and expanding, and was now filling the arena.
Heart’s Sorrow’s voice was distant. ‘The data artist has lost control of her Tiger.’
Minh watched, unable to tear her gaze away. The Tiger was still growing, officials on the lower tiers scrabbling to evacuate, while in the dignitaries’ booth, the Alchemist of Streams and Hills herself sat utterly silent and
composed, as if nothing could touch her – and then the mist filled the camera, a glitter of stripes in the darkness for a mere blink before it swallowed up the field of vision.
‘Well, that certainly stopped the fun,’ Heart’s Sorrow said.
Minh was still staring at the camera. It showed nothing but that hint of stripes. Around her, the crowd was watching, too – speechless and tense, like a piece of metal stretched too much, in that moment before it broke.
‘We should get moving,’ Heart’s Sorrow said. ‘It’s not going to—’
Someone screamed.
Why?
‘It’s here! Run!’
What?
‘Run!’
The crowd was pressing against her, and there was more screaming. The tension had broken and now it was just a mass of jumbled bodies all blocking her. She couldn’t breathe, or move – she was suffocated by the thickness of the crowd, a multitude of textures. There was screaming and smoke and a press of bodies around her.
‘Li’l bro, what—?’
Minh was being pushed right and left – she teetered, lost her footing, caught herself at the last minute. Panic. They were in the middle of a panic. Something had upset the tightly packed crowd, and suddenly they all wanted to get out. And they’d trample anyone to do that.
Breathe.
But she couldn’t, not when pressed on all sides. She struggled to look up – and finally saw why the crowd was running. The Tiger was in the habitat. And not just that, but it was growing and growing, its contours expanding – and where they touched, metal bent, shrieking with the tortured sound of souls bound in the Courts of Hell.
If it touched people, it wasn’t just going to be metal that died.
How—?
No. How was irrelevelant.
She had to get out.
‘Run,’ Heart’s Sorrow said.
His bots were skittering, dancing under the crowd’s feet. Minh struggled to stay upright. She could barely see him; people had shoved straight into his space, and his body shimmered in and out of existence over a man’s brocaded robes, then a woman’s, then two small children’s.
What was he still doing there?
‘Leave!’ she screamed at him.
‘What? Am I supposed to just leave you?’
‘Obviously!’ Minh said, pushing her way towards the corridor she’d taken here.
The overlays were bleeding into one another with the stress on the network, the ambient music and sounds a cacophonic mixture drowned by the sound of the crowd, swelling like the motors of an atmosphere shuttle about to take off.
‘One of us has to make it. Be sensible!’
‘Sensible?’ Heart’s Sorrow floated, not next to her, but over her, as the crowd surged and pushed, a compact, bristling mass of too many people, too much noise, too many clashing overlays. ‘And how am I supposed to explain to your mother I just left you?’
‘I don’t care!’
More screaming, a shriek of tortured metal – and a high-pitched human wail echoed by others. Something pattered over them – water from the sprinklers in the station? – but when she brushed her hand against her lips, Minh saw that it was blood. She managed, struggling, to turn her head. Behind them, the Tiger had swallowed up the whole plaza, its mist covering the now still forms of those who hadn’t pushed hard enough to escape. Some of them were too small to be adults.
How…? How dare it? How dare it be there, on my turf?
Her anger was white-hot and searing, a feeling that hollowed Minh out like a lantern stretched over its light.
‘Do something,
demons take you!’
The small, translucent shape of Heart’s Sorrow hovered over her chest, his hull plunging between her ribs, his turrets passing in her neck. Minh didn’t feel anything; her perception filters for that overlay were off. Small mercies.
Heart’s Sorrow said softly, ‘I can’t. I’ve tried. I can’t recall my avatar, and I can’t send an emergency signal. Comms are down. Flooded out, I think.’
Or attacked.
Minh followed the push of the crowd into the corridor, struggling. Someone brushed against her, too high to be a bot, too small to be an adult. A small girl, no more than three years old, staring at her with panic in her eyes – in that suspended moment before everything became too overwhelming and she utterly broke down.
‘I can’t find my mommy!’
Minh swept her up, wedging her around her hips, using her bots to provide added stability and support. Ancestors, she hadn’t carried small children since her cousins had become too heavy.
‘Let’s go look, child,’ she said.
Heart’s Sorrow was now utterly focused. ‘Looking her up.’
‘You said the network was down.’
‘Yes. I do have the cache for a lot of things. Hang on…’
A man in a dragon mask tried to push a little too close. Minh glared at him.
‘You related to her?’
The man looked startled, then shook his head.
‘Then move!’
And when he didn’t, she sent a bot to sting his feet. He yelped, which was petty but was mildly satisfying.
The child burrowed into Minh’s neck. It made her job easier, but also she was way too trusting. When they found the child’s mother, she was going to have words with her about teaching her child to be wary of strangers, especially at a major festival.
‘Sweetie, what’s your name? Do you know what your mother looks like?’
A sniffle. ‘I’m Nhi Nhi. Cẩm Nhi. Mommy…’ She flailed.
The noise of the crowd was getting unbearable; Minh asked her bots to set up a noise filter at weak strength. She was half expecting it not to work, with everything down in the sector, but it did, and the sound around them receded to a half-bearable level. She couldn’t keep it up for long: it was exceedingly unwise to try and drown out noise while being pushed in all directions by panicking people.
A high-pitched screech, a tortured noise cut off by the filter. Nhi finally managed to send Minh an image: a small and chubby young woman alongside an auth-token. A Belt one, thank Heaven. Aha. Minh sent it on to Heart’s Sorrow, and asked her bots to scan the crowd at the same time. She pushed back against her neighbours again. The man with the mask glared at her.
Let him.
Her bots couldn’t find Nhi’s mother. If the worst came to the worst, she could find her once she was back home, with the tribunal’s resources, though she would never hear the end of it from her mother.
‘Can’t find her,’ Heart’s Sorrow said.
Tendrils of fiery mist floated their way: the air was stingingly hot, and Minh’s hands were starting to burn and turn red. Nhi wailed in her arms. She could dial the pain down, but she needed the adrenaline rush. She pushed instead, into the crowd that seemed to have reached a complete stop – and then abruptly they were out of the corridor, and back in the Harmonious Dream marketplace, and Minh pushed and pushed and pushed. With the shape of Heart’s Sorrow superimposed on her chest – it was oddly like carrying two people, the ship and the child – they were through, the crowd thinning out at last.
They were in a side street close to the market. Minh stopped to catch her breath and heard only the distant roar of the crowd.
‘It’s gone,’ she said slowly. ‘The Tiger.’
Heart’s Sorrow blinked away from her chest, reappeared above a heap of abandoned steaming baskets, his bots climbing the various neighbouring stalls.
‘The network is still congested, but it’s easing. They say…’ He sounded dubious. ‘They say there was an accident during the first match. The Tiger broke free of the arena restrictions, and the data artist’s control.’
‘Mother—’
‘They’re all safe. My mothers had already evacuated, but looks like your mother barely escaped being mauled.’ He laughed, and it was not amused. ‘It’ll probably make for an entertaining vid.’
‘Auntie…’ Nhi said, in Minh’s arms.
Minh sighed. ‘I know. We need to find your mother, and to get you home. Li’l bro,’ she started, and looked up, to see that Heart’s Sorrow had completely frozen on top of the baskets. ‘Li’l bro?’
‘Don’t bother,’ a voice said. ‘He’s stuck, and he’s not going anywhere. Neither are you.’
There were five of them in the street, two women and three men, with barely any ornamentation to their avatars; they were here in the physical, unpleasantly close, the loose circle they formed around Minh and Heart’s Sorrow tightening.
The one who had spoken – a squat, commanding woman with the wings of a phoenix – smiled, and it was fanged and unpleasant.
‘Poor little rich girl, so lonely.’
‘Me, or the child?’ Minh asked, tightening her grip on Nhi.
An eye roll from Phoenix Wings. ‘I don’t care about the child. I care about how much your mother will pay to get you back whole.’
She had a knife: it shone sharp and wicked, and Minh’s bots very unhelpfully told her it was a vacuum blade, the kind used to cut through metal to maintain the habitats. Which meant it’d shear very neatly through skin and bone.
Shit. Shit. This is bad.
‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ Minh said.
‘How dumb do you think I am?’
‘I can only tell you the truth.’ Minh glanced again at Heart’s Sorrow.
‘He’s not going to help you,’ Phoenix Wings said. ‘We hacked his link to his body. All
he can do is watch.’ She laughed, holding the blade. ‘Now come gently, will you?’
Minh was feeling distinctly ungentle, but she didn’t have a vacuum blade. Or four other people with her, also armed with vacuum blades, too. This must be some kind of bandit gang she’d fallen afoul of, opportunists looking for a quick way to get rich. She eyed them again, forcing herself to breathe. They were a few handspans away now, their heavy, armoured bots even closer than that.
Minh said, ‘I’m going to set the child down.’
Phoenix Wings laughed. ‘The child can come with us. Probably not a great ransom, but she’ll fetch something, one way or another.’
Which meant the bondspeople market.
‘No,’ Minh said. ‘If you let us go, I can get you the money when I get back home.’
Nhi gripped her. ‘Old Auntie…’
Minh forced herself to breathe. ‘It’s going to be all right.’ And that made her angrier than anything else – that she had to lie to reassure a child.
Another eye roll. ‘When you get home? You must really think we have no brains.’
A minute tension: she was going to signal for the attack, and Minh wasn’t going to be able to meet it head-on. She set Nhi down, a fraction of a blink before Phoenix Wings actually gestured – and then her bots moved to intercept the bandits’ bots, except that they were crushed in a blink, their input feeds suddenly going black in Minh’s brain.
Bad bad bad, she had the time to think, before the bandits’ bots leaped on her, and their combined weight pulled her down.
Minh hit the floor with a thunk, her head ringing – her avatar wavering, the dragons’ antlers blinking in and out of existence as everything around her seemed to fold into throbbing pain. Someone grabbed her by her arms, hauled her up: it was one of the men, towering over her and holding her as though she was nothing but a rag doll, clasping restraints on her wrists. They bit as they closed, like ice encircling her. Minh struggled to break his hold, but her legs didn’t even touch the
floor and she had no purchase on him.
‘Old Auntie!’ Nhi wailed and wailed.
‘Bring them,’ Phoenix Wings said, and the man holding Minh threw her over his shoulder.
She was bent double like a sack of rice. Even looking at the floor required her to lift her head, which was too hard and too painful to do. She tried to raise the network, to send a signal – any kind of signal, to anyone – but the restraints were blocking her access, and everything seemed to be fuzzing over the gaping emptiness of her destroyed bots. She must have hit her head badly when she fell.
Phoenix Wings laughed. ‘Looks like she’s going to behave without my having to break anything. Good. We’ll send a ransom demand to the tribunal once our shuttle reaches the hideout.’
Shuttle. Hideout.
They’d be going out of range of the habitats. No one was ever going to find her, because these were outsider bandits. They’d just come in for the festival, and she’d handed them an opportunity on a jade tray.
‘Don’t—’ Minh tried to say, but her tongue felt glued to her palate. At least she’d set Nhi down. At least…
‘Kidnapping people in broad daylight is a terrible idea,’ someone new said. It was a woman’s voice. Not the bandit’s; this was low and cultured, with the faintest suggestion of an accent – from the shipyards, maybe?
‘Who under Heaven are you?’ Phoenix Wings snapped.
‘Someone who makes it her business to interfere in other people’s business.’ The voice was cool and collected. Minh tried to hold on to anything, but she felt darkness encroaching on her field of vision. She was going to pass out. Or vomit. Or both.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Help the child.’ It was a bare whisper, physical and with no network
broadcast.
And yet, when the answer came, it was said right next to her ear, softly and deliberately.
‘I will.’
How—?
The woman said to Phoenix Wings, ‘Put her down, and release the child. I won’t ask twice.’
Phoenix Wings laughed. ‘Making empty threats? She tried that, too.’
‘These aren’t threats. They’re demands.’ Matter-of-fact and cold.
Something clinked: bots’ legs, pattering on the floor. One of the bandit women cursed, something fell, and there was a rapid shift in the air – then something happened, and Minh was falling. She flailed, bringing up her bound hands to break her fall, and bots caught her and gently cushioned her. The restraints opened, hitting the floor with a resounding clink – their insides gleamed with blood. Minh’s blood. They must have been pumping some kind of chemicals into her. Her head felt stuffed with cotton. She tried to pull herself up, managed to stand up for a bare blink, and then fell back to her knees, vomiting all over the station’s floor.
The network came back online – and as it did so, Heart’s Sorrow’s anguished scream filled Minh’s ears.
‘Big sis! Are you all right?’
What does it look like? Minh tried to say, but she wasn’t feeling well enough.
She was groggily aware of someone coming to sit beside her, waiting patiently until she was done: her rescuer. Minh could only catch glimpses of rich brocade. She opened her mouth, gagging on the taste of her own vomit.
‘Nhi. The child.’
‘We have her,’ her rescuer said. ‘Take your time. It’s under control.’
Slowly, carefully – wincing at the pain in her neck – Minh raised her head. The bandits were lying dead or unconscious on the floor. Phoenix Wings had her own vacuum blade rammed into her chest, and the woman who had screamed was lying on the floor, nursing an arm bent at an unnatural angle. The man who’d held Minh was dead, unfamiliar bots crawling over his body; one of them came out of his throat, dragging up mucus and blood. The bandits’ bots were all inert, as if someone had cut their strings. Heart’s Sorrow was beside Nhi, whispering comforting words.
‘What…? What
happened?’
‘I did warn them.’ Her rescuer sounded distant. ‘Pity they didn’t listen. Those who survive will have to face the slow death.’ There was a dark, vicious satisfaction in her voice that sent shivers up Minh’s spine.
Minh tried to breathe. The air felt raw and painful in her lungs. Was it only a few bi-hours ago that she’d put so much thought into her dress and disguise, only a few centidays ago that she’d seen the Games start? It felt like a lifetime ago.
‘Thank you,’ she said – and turned to her rescuer, and stopped. ‘You’re…’ She paused, swallowed. ‘You’re the Alchemist.’
‘I’m Quỳnh,’ the woman sitting next to her said.
‘Minh,’ Minh said reflexively. ‘Pleased to meet you. Not the best of circumstances.’
‘Alas,’ Quỳnh said.
Up close, she was even more of a presence – someone who simply drew all the attention without much trying. Her skin was dark, stippled with a light starlight tan. That great mass of hair spread around her on the floor in a pool of darkness. The golden crown atop her topknot glinted under the habitat lights.
‘But… You were in the arena,’ Minh said. ‘Physically. I saw you.’
‘I left early.’ Quỳnh’s voice was cool. ‘It looked like it was going to turn ugly, and why stay under those conditions?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here.’
‘You sounded like you needed help,’ Quỳnh said simply.
‘The network was down.’ Minh struggled to gather her thoughts together. ‘How—?’
‘Your friend managed to broadcast a message before he got frozen out.’ Quỳnh gestured, and Minh suddenly noticed the mindship hovering behind her. ‘It was garbled and incomplete, but Guts of Sea is good at deciphering.’
Guts of Sea inclined their avatar, but said nothing.
‘Thanks for coming. Sorry. Not to sound ungrateful, it’s just—’
‘You’ve had a nasty
shock. It’s quite all right.’ ‘My ear. ...
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