Faven Sythe was told two lies on the day her mother’s organs finished crystallizing. The first was an updated work assignment. The banal notice only reached her because she’d flagged the name attached. It told her that Ulana Valset, Faven’s mentor, had been reassigned to Amiens Station. A mere microdot of an orbital on the lacy edges of the galactic center. There, Ulana would train younger navigators—as she had once trained Faven—until the crystallization took her.
Alone in her rooms high in the Spire, Faven touched the petrified cheek of her mother’s corpse. She had chosen a gentle position in which to spend eternity, kneeling upon the floor with her arms cradled across her stomach, as if rocking a babe.
Soon Faven would have to alert the architects that her mother had fully succumbed. That the last vestiges of her skin had transmuted to scales of aquamarine, and at long last, even the irises of her eyes had switched from dusky umber to the teal glow of the cryst. Faven kissed her mother’s forehead, the mineral scales smooth and cold beneath her lips. A small patch of scale already marred the corner of Faven’s own mouth, bracketing her smile and tugging at the skin when she laughed.
“I’ll see you moved to the Rosette Pond,” Faven said. “Where you can watch the gleamfish swim. I promise.”
She did not tell the corpse of her mother that the order would be sent remotely, and that Faven would not be there to see the enshrinement done. The statue kneeling on Faven’s floor was just that—a statue. A memory. Her mother’s consciousness had long since transmuted to light. Her mother had become a star.
Faven wrapped a plain grey cloak around herself and flipped the hood up to hide the shining web of sapphires that veiled her hair and shoulders.
That her mentor had been sent to Amiens was a lie as pretty as the lustrous corpse kneeling on soft velvets in Faven’s sitting room. Faven’s world was constructed of such lies, the dull solder between shining panes of cryst-glass. Most of the time she did not see those lies, for she did not care to look.
But when Ulana had last left Votive City, there had been tension in her eyes. An anxious clutching in the long fingers of hands armored with the aquamarine blue scales of cryst that eventually took all those who walked the paths between the stars. After leaving, Ulana had stopped answering all attempts to contact her.
And so, Faven had snooped. A grave sin. A terrible violation. The paths a navigator wove were sacred, the creative expressions of their very souls.
Ulana Valset’s soul led her into the dark.
Faven had been certain she was incorrect. That in spying upon the starpath Ulana wove into the lightdrive of her ship, Faven had somehow corrupted it. When you live steeped in lies, you grow used to telling them to yourself.
Ulana’s route did not go to Amiens Station. It led into the Clutch. A dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star. It was the graveyard of their predecessors. An expanse of rubble held sacred only because it was the last known concretion of the technological artifacts of the cryst, the ancient species whose leftover research had given the navigators their art.
A place of reverence. A place for dying. And all that technology was as dead as its progenitors. Save the Black Celeste.
A rumor. A fairy tale. A derelict ship called the Black Celeste was very real, but the stories that clung to it breathed mystery into its dead walls. Young navigators titillated one another with stories of it waking up. Of its halls filled with the spectral shapes of the cryst. Sometimes, the young navigators would whisper, you could see a light inside, burning. Sometimes that light moved.
The stories had fascinated Faven when she was too young to have learned that the unknown was a lot less scary than the ugly truths of the world.
Ulana’s starpath was a twisted, frayed thing. A jumbling of punch-through points and scrambled orbital grooves. But its intended terminus was clear, for the Black Celeste was the only known structure within the Clutch said to move outside of orbital drift, and the path accounted for such a possibility.
Ulana had gone into a ghost story, and Faven couldn’t even ask her why. But the second lie, well. That might have something to tell her after all.
Faven skimmed the other message—the ugly, clumsy lie. It was simple enough. A contract offered, with saccharine platitudes, for Navigator Sythe’s services in weaving a starpath into the lightdrive of a merchant vessel that wanted to transport quartz wine from Votive City to Orvieto Station.
Faven knew that she was coddled. That her thirty-six years of life had slipped by wrapped in fine silks studded with gemstones. But she was not uninformed on matters of commerce. Quartz wine was plentiful in Orvieto Station, and the fee involved in her weaving a custom path would far outweigh any profit. The merchant wished to meet to discuss the matter in a sector of the docks known for dark-dealing. A place infested with the pirates that plagued the skies presided over by the Choir of Stars.
Faven was being fished.
The hubris of such a thing, to bait your hook for the mouth of a god, amused her. But the Choir of Stars would not tell her about the Black Celeste. Would not tell her why her mentor had gone into the dark.
Ulana wasn’t the only one to have disappeared in recent years, and the Choir refused to answer the questions of those who’d gone looking for their loved ones. No, Ulana was not the first. She was merely the first that Faven cared about.
She’d lost two mothers on the same day, and she was so very weary of being lied to. Pirates, while not known for their honesty, made a habit of scavenging the Clutch. That baited hook might very well possess the answers she sought.
Faven had not been born of her mother’s womb. She’d been a shard of sacred cryst that had grown beneath her mother’s skin and then been plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman.
When she closed her eyes, she and the other cryst-born could read the paths between the stars. Find the secret ways through the fabric of the universe and teach them to the lightdrives of ships. Sometimes, the navigators saw other things when they closed their human eyes.
She was no auger. No farseer nor futurespinner. If a confidant were ever to ask her if she believed in fate or magic, she would scoff like all the rest of her kin. Their craft was trade. Travel. Gods of commerce and expansion, and the rest was fairy-whispers.
But they all had their little quirks. Some cryst-born heard notes of music when they charted their paths. Discordant vibrations that warned them off dangerous routes and sweet notes for safer shores. So common was the phenomenon that they named their governing council for it—the Choir of Stars.
Faven saw light. Shades of color guiding her way, illuminating secret pitfalls to her as she worked paths between gravitational grooves. When she closed her eyes and meditated upon Ulana’s lie, she saw an empty space in her future. A violet-soaked nightmare of a moment, red-shifted, rushing closer.
She conjured the fishing message to mind and was filled with the wavering glow of indigo. Safe, perhaps, though eager to shift into the dangerous realm of violet, if she was not careful. A static moment. A moment she could take, or leave, while the other came for her all the same.
In the end, it was no choice at all.
Faven summoned a travel censer and went to be kidnapped by pirates.
Bitter Amandine was reasonably certain that Tagert Red was about to get himself killed or mortally embarrassed, and she wanted to be there to see it when it happened. Tagert thought himself so clever, scheming with his crew in a dingy side room of the Broken Mast. Their voices were tight with anticipation, and not nearly soft enough to evade being picked up by the listening devices Amandine had planted in every single room of that pirate-lousy bar.
The owner, a person with more sense than muscle but a deft hand on a shotgun trigger, chose to ignore Amandine’s spying. It was a pirate bar. Any pirate daft enough to talk real business in a pirate bar deserved to have their score scooped on them.
Every so often, some soul with a lick of sense would scan the bar before talking plans with their crew, then make a damn racket about the devices. The owner would, with a shrug, toss them in the incinerator. Amandine was always back within the week with one fist full of bugs and the other fist full of cash.
And so the cycle repeated. And Amandine stayed one step ahead of every dodder-headed pirate working in Votive City.
Tagert’s crew left the Broken Mast, making their way to the nearby docks for their supposed “meeting.” Amandine flipped up the camera feed Kester had patched her into. She leaned back in the captain’s seat of the Marquette, cradling a hot mug of tea with a dash of rum tossed in to really warm her up, kicked her boots up on the dash, and watched in real time as Tagert’s crew made a mess of getting into position.
It was almost painful to watch. She had half a mind to make Kester patch her into the dock’s speakers so that she could bark out some real orders. Tagert had put his lookouts in positions where they only had 120 degrees of view, for light’s sake.
“He gets worse every year,” Becks said. The mechanic slotted themself into the second-in-command seat and wove their fingers together, stretching their arms forward until their knuckles cracked.
Amandine smiled into her tea. “He stays the same, but the world changes around him, and his already questionable techniques grow clumsier in their execution.”
Becks wrinkled their nose and jabbed at the console, checking the cloaking tech wrapped around the Marquette. It’d been fritzing lately, and it’d be rather embarrassing if it fuzzed out now and revealed her position, hovering above Tagert’s pitiful tableau. Amandine had checked it twice herself. Becks checked it three more times.
“Didn’t sign up to stomp boots with no philosopher-cap’n,” they grumbled.
“You didn’t sign up at all, Becks. You tromped up my gangway and told me my thrusters were overheating and going to strip the enamel if someone didn’t do something about it, and that someone was going to be you.”
“If I hadn’t, you woulda been stuck out in the black somewhere twiddling your thumbs with a hold full of stolen cargo waiting for a tug and hoping they didn’t look too hard and start asking questions.”
“And every day I pray my thanks at the altar of your illustrious being for that timely intervention.”
“Best be praying for better pay, Cap’n,” Becks said, but a curl to the corner of their lips meant their ego was assuaged, and now Amandine needed to bite her tongue and let them work, lest she annoy them into distraction.
Amandine had her own distractions. A travel censer swept down from the high peak of the Navigator’s Spire. The hexagonal conveyance was constructed of the same multicolor glass as all Votive City. It hung perfectly straight, a teardrop in variegated shades of blue dripping toward the docks from on high.
She leaned closer to the screen and set her mug aside. A silhouette of a person waited within, their shape obscured by the soft fall of a cloak, a hood pulled up to hide their face.
Amandine couldn’t believe it. She really couldn’t. Faven Sythe hadn’t exactly made a name for herself, but she’d spent all her life training and working in the Spire’s hallowed halls. She should be too clever and too skilled by far to fall for Tagert Red’s clumsy attempt to lure her out. Either the woman was daft, desperate, or had a trick up her sleeve.
The first two options were more likely. The last was more fun.
“Kester.” Amandine jabbed her finger onto the button for the intercom between the pilot’s deck and the armory. “Tell me your scans are picking up weapons, or guards, or something. Tell me this fool-headed goddess isn’t going to meet with Tagert Red about a phony deal alone.”
“I cannot tell you such a thing, Captain,” she said.
Amandine rubbed her hands together. That delicate bird riding down from on high was up to something. It’d been a long, long time since Amandine hadn’t known what, exactly, she’d be walking into.
“You sure about this, Cap’n?” Becks’s hands stilled on the console as they cocked her a sideways glance. “Tangling with a navigator, I mean. Our cloaking is up. We could sail out of here without anyone ever knowing we’d been.”
“Come on, Becks.” She clapped them on the shoulder. “Live a little.”
“I’d like to keep on living—that’s the trouble!”
Amandine tapped a small photo she kept taped to her dash for luck—the cabin her grandfather had built, swaddled in the mists of Blackloach—and gave Becks a thump on the back as she swung out of her chair.
Whatever they shouted after her, she didn’t hear it. She was already striding toward the armory to join Kester and Tully in preparing. The more scores they scooped up, the sooner Amandine could get back to living life in that peaceful cabin, spending her days baiting hooks for fish instead of ships.
The sooner she could retire her captainship of the Marquette and stop looking over her shoulder every damn time someone so much as sniffed in her ship’s direction.
Tagert Red might be about to have a very bad day, but things were looking up for Bitter Amandine.
Faven twitched the hood of her cloak forward to better hide her profile from prying eyes. Though the cloak was plain grey, soft as water and thick with warmth, the Vigil stripped away all pretense of simplicity.
The largest of humanity’s stations, the Vigil was a many-faceted jewel whose exterior walls were constructed entirely of cryst-glass plating salvaged from the derelict constructs of the Clutch. Cryst-glass was the most resilient material in the known universe, the gleaming panes letting through the brilliant wink of stars and passing lights of ships while still shielding the station within from radiation and the endless, hungry maw of the vacuum beyond.
In the dock district, the ceiling was patterned with the Sixteen Cardinal Weaves. Spiky compasses representing those starpaths painted myriad shades of gold and violet over the plain grey of her cloak. Auspicious and dangerous colors.
Those sixteen starpaths were free for any starship captain to make use of, no votive required, as they were the starpaths that kept their society operational. A gift. A necessity. Anything more refined than that, any clever path that shaved hours or days off the cardinal routes or brought you closer to your destination, cost dearly.
The man awaiting Faven could not even afford the deposit for a custom starpath.
He wore last year’s fashion, a tunic cut tight to his waist in the seven colors of the visible spectrum. The cloth was ratty at the seams, his slim trousers deep black to offset the prismatic hues of his tunic. He held himself with the stiff posture of an amateur actor playing an aristocrat, and the bulge of a weapon hidden against his back rather ruined the sleek lines of his outfit.
She guessed him about forty, or in the early range thereof, though hard years spent living on ships with haphazard radiation shielding had drawn deeper creases across his face. Laugh lines framed his lips and furrows traced old frustrations across his brow.
This man had lured her to an abandoned corner of the docks to take advantage of her in some way, but those wrinkles told her he was quick to laugh and often befuddled—crunching his brow as he thought. A pang of sympathy rang within her. Was it right to take advantage of a man who would send her such a clumsy fishing attempt, and be foolish enough to believe it had worked?
No matter. She had questions about the Clutch that she needed answered. Whether or not this man realized he was in over his head, he was a pirate. He’d know a thing or two about that field of dormant treasures. She met his eyes and inclined her head at the sharp angle of a superior greeting their inferior.
“Mr. Clairmont?” Faven asked.
He swept her an elaborate bow. “Navigator Sythe. I’m so very pleased that you agreed to meet with me to discuss a votive.”
Faven tsked. There was only so much pageantry she could take. “Dear man, you and I are both quite aware that the cost of a shipment of quartz wine from the Vigil to Orvieto would never provide enough profit to cover the expense of a custom starpath. What is it you truly desire?”
He blinked, a foot sliding back instinctually, a very unnoble motion. That was not a merchant’s or trader’s natural reaction to surprise, but the bracing foot of a brawler. Faven gave him a flat smile, cryst-scale tugging at the corner of her lips, and lifted her eyes deliberately from that foot to the man’s eyes.
“Gotta admit.” He dropped the crisp elocution. Faven arched a brow. His accent had been convincing enough that she hadn’t thought twice about it. The man had some experience in the upper echelons, then. Perhaps this would make her dealings with him easier. “Didn’t think you’d bite. Clumsy letter like that, only the dullest would take the bait.”
“Ah.” She fingered the cool metal of the armillary hidden within her flowing sleeve. “That explains the nature of your overture but not the desired outcome.”
“Coin, Navigator.” He rolled his shoulders in a halfway apologetic shrug and reached back, producing a snub-nosed shotgun. He didn’t point it at her, not yet, but instead rested the barrel against his shoulder, finger on the trigger guard in silent promise. “What else is there? I don’t mean you any harm, but you should know you’re surrounded.”
At the word, five unsavory figures emerged from various hiding places around the dock. These hadn’t bothered with the false finery the man wore; the weapons in their hands were better cared for than their clothes. Faven’s heart gave a delightful kick. Her vision felt sharper, her mind bright. It was the most vibrant she’d felt since her mother had stopped speaking, and she craved more.
“Ransom, then,” she said. “I suspected as much. Who am I addressing?”
Beneath the cover of her sleeve, she clutched the armillary, assuring herself by waking the familiar thrum of its energies. If things went too poorly, she could weave herself a path to safety in seconds. And if she was truly motivated, she could weave the pirates a path into the heart of a star, and brush her hands of their ashes.
“That dunderhead is Tagert Red,” a drawling voice said, rich with amusement.
Faven turned to meet this new curiosity. A tall, broad-shouldered woman strode into the center of the pirates. Her copper-red hair was tugged back under the wrap of a bandana, but Faven caught glimpses of gems woven into thin braids. The brown leathers she wore were scuffed but well mended, and the matching coat that flowed open around her frame did a much better job of hiding extra weapons than Tagert’s tunic had.
Between the woman’s swagger and the easy way she tapped the barrel of her own shotgun against her shoulder, Faven would have believed it if the woman were to tell her she’d wrestled the leather she wore off the animal that’d grown it.
“Amandine,” Tagert said with a growl of frustration. “This ain’t any of your concern.”
“Bitter Amandine?” Faven asked, unable to help a small gasp of surprise. The infamous pirate shot her a viridian-eyed wink.
Bitter Amandine. Even in the high towers of the Spire that name had floated up to Faven’s ears. The only surviving protégé of Captain Amber Jacq, a man whose name still made Choir captains look to the stars in silent prayer. The Choir claimed Amandine was little more than a nuisance, but the fact that they knew her name at all revealed she was more than that. Infamous for exclusively targeting corporate vessels, she was rumored to have ears to the ground in every corner of the galaxy to facilitate her daring heists.
If anyone had answers, and access, to the Clutch, it would be her.
“That’s what they call me.” She stopped a few feet away from Tagert, spreading her arms wide. “But my friends call me Amandine, and we’re all friends here, aren’t we, lovelies?”
Tagert responded by leveling his shotgun straight at her heart. Amandine didn’t seem to mind. “Scurry off,” he said.
“Nah,” she said. “You’re here to take advantage of a navi responding to a genuine request. For shame, Tagert, for shame. We got a code, don’t we? Mess about with the navis too much and they might stop doing business with us.” She leaned toward him and dropped her voice. “With those of us who can actually afford them.”
“You overstep.” Tagert’s finger slid off the guard to rest on the trigger.
“I step where I fucking like.” Amandine snapped her fingers.
Faven flinched at a sudden brightness. Floodlights stung her eyes, made her throw up an arm to shield her vision. A ship hovered a dozen or so feet above their heads, its spotlights pointed straight at them.
It appeared to be a Rayonnant model, a favorite of merchants and mercenaries both, but its sleek body was longer and broader than any Rayonnant Faven had ever seen. Trefoil windows banded its hull with cryst-glass scenes. In the nearest, an abstract woman with carnelian hair stood victorious above three crashed ships that looked suspiciously like Choir freight haulers. Faven had no doubt that the red-haired woman depicted in the glass was meant to represent Amandine during her many exploits.
The light faded back to bearable levels. As Faven lowered her arm and blinked tears from her eyes, she could make out another figure circling the knot of pirates with predatory grace. There was an angularity to the person’s frame that prickled Faven’s senses, and the light seemed to bend away from them, so that it was difficult to see them clearly.
Amandine’s shotgun was still propped against her shoulder. But she’d taken Tagert’s, and had his own weapon pointed at his chest, one-handed.
“Scurry off,” she said.
Tagert’s cheeks went so red he nearly turned purple. “This ain’t over, Bitter.”
She merely waved the barrel of the shotgun at him in response.
Tagert’s fists clenched, and a fake smile that Faven believed was supposed to be an intimidating sneer painted his lips. He spat at her feet, then waved a hand through the air and stomped off, vanishing between the crates with the rest of his crew. Amandine waited, unmoving, until her head tipped to the side and she nodded to herself. Then she slung her own shotgun back into its holster inside her coat, letting Tagert’s rest against her shoulder in its place.
“Right, then.” She turned to face Faven. “It’s time you and I had a chat, Navi.”
Faven gave the pirate a wide and genuine smile, inclining her head with far more respect than she had for Tagert. “At last,” she said. “I was beginning to worry I had wasted my time.”
Faven looked a fragile thing, by Amandine’s reckoning. She had the kind of long, willowy limbs that Amandine could grab in either hand and snap over her knee, should the mood strike her, but not the height to go with the narrowness, which only added to the impression of being insubstantial. A twig that could wash away on a strong breeze.
But her chin was held high, and the white freckles that painted her night-dark cheeks gleamed like stars. Cryst-scale had broken out around one side of her mouth, adding a sucked-in look that gave the impression of a permanent smirk.
Long enough ago that Amandine filed the story under “legend” and not “history,” the cryst had come to humanity and lifted them up. Gave them starfaring ships and stations and then they’d either left or died off, depending on the favored theology of the person telling the tale. Their reasons aside, the result was the same: Humanity had foundered until the intrepid souls who’d become the Choir of Stars discovered a way to fuse leftover cryst-tech with human biology.
They’d kept on doing it until they got a result that wasn’t quite human anymore, nor was it purely cryst, but the cryst-born were capable of making starpaths and forging lightdrives, and that had been good enough to keep humanity alive in the structures the cryst had left behind.
Amandine didn’t know what the cryst had looked like. No one did. The only depictions they’d left of themselves were abstract, floating points of light rendered in cryst-glass.
To hear the navis tell it, the cryst-born were more cryst than human. Amandine had heard rumors that the two species couldn’t interbreed, but Faven looked human enough to her. Stuck-up, to be sure, but all the confidence in the world couldn’t have tricked her into thinking that meeting Tagert alone was a good idea. The navi had something else in mind. Something she hadn’t yet said.
She was an interesting woman, this Faven Sythe, but the most interesting part of all was the thrill that had sparked in her eyes when the guns had been drawn. And the obvious weapon hidden up her sleeve.
“I’ve shown you mine.” Amandine hoisted Tagert’s shotgun for emphasis. “You show me yours.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”
Faven drew her weapon and held it up to view. It appeared flat at first, the size of a dessert plate, but it unfolded, rising to hover above her palm. An elaborate silver-toned metal and gemstone-encrusted armillary. Holograms teased between the orbital rings, hinting at the paths the navi’s power could draw between the stars.
Amandine had been told two things about armillaries: A skilled . . .
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