A fire born of exile, p.9
A Fire Born of Exile, page 9
‘I’m sure you have a bright future ahead of you.’
The one Mother had traced for her – the thread that led from examination to posting to marriage and beyond. Predictable and safe. Comforting. Minh deflected.
‘The hope of all parents.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Was your mother proud of you? Sorry. If you’d rather not speak about her…’
‘No.’ Quỳnh looked at her, as if turning over some thoughts in her head. At length she said, ‘Mother never really got a chance to see what I turned out to be. Sometimes I think it’s for the best. There have been… hard years.’
‘Ah.’ Minh started to say she was sorry again, but it was trite and by now meaningless. She felt the weight of her bots all over her clothing. ‘It’s so hard to tell. What our dead would have thought, whether they’d have been proud.’ She thought of her own mother – not Mother, but Second Mother, the one who’d borne Minh. The lesser spouse in the marriage, who’d died too early of a sickness that couldn’t be cured. ‘We’d so like to believe it, and yet we can’t really know.’
‘No,’ Quỳnh said. Another of those silences. ‘They take up so much space, don’t they. The dead.’
Of course. The altar.
‘Sometimes,’ Minh said.
They sat together companionably, staring at the room.
Minh looked at the overlay again, at the translucent furniture and the twist that made the room larger in virtual than in physical. Beneath it all, she saw metal and wires, rivets and filtration exhausts, bot alcoves – and a shadow, right where the room appeared to dip and narrow. Not, not a shadow. Yellow. A distinctive shade of yellow.
‘Wait,’ she said.
Quỳnh’s face froze. ‘What is it?’
‘Behind the dais, to the right. Can you turn it off? The virtual? I think…’
Minh’s bots were already scuttling across the floor, making for that patch of oddly shaped shadow near the corner. Quỳnh turned the overlay off – Minh had the dizzying feeling of local topology twisting itself out of shape, distances and orientations suddenly vastly compressed. Her first bots, still following instructions given before the overlay disappeared, hit the wall; the following ones slowed down and only gently bumped into it.
There was a hole, but that wasn’t what had caught her eye. The yellow was a sharp point, a mere triangle poking through the hole, but she would have known that colour anywhere. She’d grown up near the tribunal.
‘That’s a finger bone,’ Minh said, in fascinated horror. ‘Wait…’ Her bots’ sensors and the network kept telling her she was mistaken: that the hole was small and there wasn’t space for the rest of the finger. Her bots pulled at it, couldn’t move it. ‘The network says there’s nothing there.’
‘I see it.’ Quỳnh’s voice was grim. Her gaze raked the wall from top to bottom. ‘The network is wrong.’ She did something with her hands, something too fast for Minh to see it – a sound like metal tearing, and everything around them shivering for a mere blink. ‘There. It’s gone now.’
‘What…?’
‘A privacy filter. A very strong one. I’m not sure even accredited government officials would be able to breach it, unless they noticed it. And it was made not to be noticed in the first place.’ Her voice was slow and thoughtful again; her bots travelled down her extended hand, towards the wall.
It wasn’t a hole. It was a room, a whole space that had been sealed off and hidden away. It was a metal partition; she couldn’t see anything behind it and neither could her bots. But she could guess, couldn’t she?
A hand, on her shoulder: Quỳnh’s touch, cool and steady.
‘Help me?’ she asked. ‘It’s riveted shut.’
‘Help. Yes. Of course.’
Minh sent the commands to her bots, watched them march across the wall, painstakingly undoing bolts and rivets that had been welded shut. Too slow, too tortuous – she kneeled and started helping them, her fingers tearing away at old, rusted metal.
Quỳnh’s hand, on her shoulder again.
‘Don’t,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll just break your nails and your skin. Let them.’
Minh watched the bots. Watched the rivets coming out one by one, the wires being snipped, the old, fragile metal being bent. Watched the bots’ sensors finally coming online as the first of them crept into that large, hidden alcove.
‘Bones,’ she said, softly, slowly. ‘It’s full of bones.’
There were so many of them, trembling in the light projected by the bot. As its crown of sensors swivelled, it caught on fingers and arms and femurs, and the hollowness of eye sockets, everything yellowed, a rich brown, like leather being tanned.
‘There’s more than one corpse there.’ More than two or three, and all piled together in disarray, like the discarded scraps of a child’s game. ‘There’s—’
‘Fifteen or sixteen, I would say,’ Quỳnh said, her hand still on Minh’s shoulder, steadying her. ‘And they’re quite old. Perhaps seven or eight years.’
Minh took a deep, trembling breath. ‘I’m all right.’ She swallowed, feeling bile in her throat. ‘I’m sorry, but we have to call the tribunal.’
Quỳnh smiled, and it was oddly satisfied. ‘I wasn’t here seven or eight years ago. I appreciate you’re worrying about what might happen to me, but this discovery is hardly going to touch me.’
‘I think… I think you probably should find another compound if you want to throw a banquet.’ Minh was on the verge of laughing – because she badly needed to lose control, and it seemed safer than any of the other options. She kept it bottled up, but it cost her. ‘Mother will take care of this.’
Quỳnh’s voice was smooth and reassuring. ‘Of course. I have absolute trust she will.’
Chapter 5
The Affairs of Mindships
Hoà was packing a box of equipment to go to Flowers at the Gates. Thiên Dung had been watching her through the vid-link on her bots, but she’d grown dizzier and dizzier, visibly struggling to follow what was going on until Hoà cut off her feed, sternly reminding her she should be in bed. Thiên Dung, not to be deterred, was now making suggestions through text-chat, which Hoà was steadily ignoring. The only thing Hoà was interested in was how in Heaven she was supposed to get to the mindship, because all Thiên Dung’s employers had given her was a docking address and a dodgy-looking chat channel that looked like a set-up for kidnapping or murder. It was probably neither – rich kids were bored, and generally had as many scruples as a scorpion, but this was a lot of effort to go to when they could just grab Hoà or Thiên Dung from the shop with few consequences. But the lack of detail made Hoà anxious, and the last thing she needed was more anxiety.
A chime at the door made her look up. They did have a few customers due to pick up their orders. Hoà had left them all in boxes keyed to their auth-tokens, but since she was there, she might as well…
‘Coming,’ she said, and found herself staring at Quỳnh. ‘Oh. Oh.’
Quỳnh was wearing a simple grey-blue robe with a matching sash, and a fur-edged grey cape over it. Both physical and overlay were the same: extremely simple, almost homespun, the clothes of an outer ring bots-handler rather than a scholar. Her face was bare of make-up: just her eyebrows, expertly shaped to mimic moth’s wings. She smelled of cedar and jasmine flowers and she bent towards Hoà – Hoà thought, for a bare moment that it was to kiss her – but she simply sniffed Hoà’s cheeks, the way Hoà’s aunts used to do back on The Azure Serpent.
Hoà felt obscurely disappointed, and angry at herself for being disappointed.
‘Big sis. I didn’t expect you so soon.’
Quỳnh laughed. It was crystalline.
‘That’s on me. I wasn’t exactly very clear, was I, on when I’d come.’ Her eyes took in the shop, the tools spread out on the table. ‘If it’s a bad time—?’
‘No, no, not at all.’ Hoà felt herself colouring. ‘Hang on. I’ll get you some tea.’
Her bots, which had been packing the tools, hastily rearranged themselves to find teacups and tea.
‘There’s no need…’ Quỳnh actually looked flustered and embarrassed, and much younger. Much more vulnerable. She was close to Hoà – too close, the heat of her body a palpable thing.
Don’t go there. That’s such a terrible idea.
‘Sit,’ Hoà said, surprised by her own boldness. ‘I’ll find you some snacks.’
They didn’t have steamed buns any more, but they had leftover fried rolls, which Hoà hastily had her bots re-fry so they didn’t seem too shabby. She mixed the sauce herself, scrambling to open the lime.
‘Here,’ Quỳnh said.
She laid her hands on Hoà’s own hands, gently guiding them to split the fruit apart. Hoà felt something twisting and rising within her again.
‘Sit,’ she said again, putting the bowl of dipping sauce between them, with its load of shrivelled salad and mint leaves. Most of them were half-black. ‘I know it’s not the fare you’re used to.’
She was absolutely not going to apologise for not being able to afford the freshest vat-grown vegetables, but still, she felt obscurely ashamed.
Quỳnh smiled. ‘I grew up on it.’
She sipped the tea, the perfectly formed leaves, the aroma of jasmine that was too smooth to come from planet-side. It tasted exactly like a Jade Spiral tea should, with barely any variance for harvest or shaping: the fare of the outer rings.
‘You did?’ Hoà stared at her, but she looked utterly sincere. ‘You can’t…’
Quỳnh’s laughter was mesmerising, transfiguring her. ‘Scholars don’t grow fully formed from a bed of perfect earth and wealthy tutors. Sometimes the examinations do work as they should.’
As a system to give everyone – even the less wealthy, the less privileged – a chance to join the government.
‘Not here.’ Hoà wasn’t even bitter about it; she knew it was the way the world worked, not the way it was described in Thiên Hạnh’s old stories.
Quỳnh gracefully dipped a fried roll wrapped in salad and mint into the dipping sauce.
‘No. The Belt is small and insular, isn’t it? It’s funny. I had this exact conversation with someone else recently.’ She didn’t say who, and Hoà didn’t probe. ‘How is your younger sister?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said she was sick.’
‘I didn’t think you’d remember.’ Of course she would. Of course she had bots, even if she didn’t remember herself. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You apologise much too quickly for too many things.’ It wasn’t said as a reproach, more as though it made her sad.
Hoà coloured again. ‘She’s fine. Recovering.’
She wasn’t sure if Thiên Dung really was fine, but it was simpler to not start a conversation where Quỳnh might end up paying for a doctor. Thiên Dung was messaging Hoà non-stop. Hoà paused, briefly, to say she was busy with someone – she didn’t say a customer because it wasn’t quite true, but it was in the service of customers, wasn’t it? She finished her fried roll, enjoying the crunch of it, the way the dipping sauce, acid and sweet and salty, filled her mouth, a memory of how Thiên Hạnh – and their dead parents before Thiên Hạnh – had mixed it.
‘You know I’m not going to offer you anything you don’t ask for.’ Quỳnh’s gaze was piercing. Too perceptive.
Hoà felt as though she was burning inside, a heat that rose to her cheeks and entire face. The only thing that came to her was the truth.
‘No. I don’t. Not yet. I barely know you.’
‘Fair.’
They stared at each other for a while, over blackened salad leaves and twice-fried rolls. Quỳnh’s lips were tinged purple, a thin, elegant line. Would they feel cold, like the vacuum of space?
‘The mindship,’ Hoà said finally, because she couldn’t trust herself with anything else.
‘Yes.’ Quỳnh’s gaze was sharp. ‘Tell me about the ship.’
‘Her name is Flowers at the Gates of the Lords. There was some kind of… accident, thirteen years ago. I haven’t inquired because it’s outside the scope of the work.’
‘Wise.’ Quỳnh nodded. She appeared to be mulling on something, but didn’t speak.
Thirteen years before had been the height of the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising. An accident was most likely to be divided loyalties, or a battle, or both.
‘As I said… a bunch of rich kids want to fix it, and they hired us to help. They’re all young.’ Hoà hadn’t set foot on the ship, but she’d seen them when Thiên Dung had negotiated the contract: five or six of them, including the mindship, all painfully naive and sheltered. ‘Babies.’
‘You feel sorry for them.’
‘No. I feel scared. Fixing a mindship is the job of a Master of Wind and Water. I’m a small-time fixer of machinery and devices. They’re young enough to expect results, and spoiled enough to be explosively unhappy when they don’t get them. And a mindship is such a huge undertaking I’m not even sure Thiên Dung could do it. But with Thiên Dung sick, it’s on me.’ She laughed. ‘And my total lack of expertise.’
Quỳnh watched her, for a while. At last she said, and she sounded surprised, ‘You’re not bitter.’
Why would I be? Because most people are? That isn’t how I work.
‘Of course not. I know where my skills stop. And my prerogatives. But—’ Hoà bit her lip ‘—we need the money. We need to survive. I need to make sure I seem competent and proficient. So what can you teach me, and how fast?’
Quỳnh laughed. Hoà could have listened to that sound all day; could watch the way it transformed her, made her younger, more vulnerable, yet genuinely happy, instead of looking as though she was looking for a way to hurt someone, anyone – including herself – all the time.
‘I’ll show you the basics, but you’re right that it takes time. How long are you working for?’
‘Today? Three to five hours. And later this week as well.’
‘Mmm. Mmm.’ Quỳnh’s bots came alive while Quỳnh’s face stilled. Finally, she extended a hand, with a bot perching on the end of it, its crown of sensors glinting in the light. Unlike the rest of her clothes, it was modern and elegant. ‘If I may?’
‘May what?’
‘Will you agree to take some of my bots with you, and a comms-link? That way I can guide you on board. I can’t be there the entire time, but I can at least advise for a few centidays, should you need me. And my bots know some of the routines for fixing mindships.’
Hoà stared at the bots, and back at Quỳnh. It was… It made sense. Of course it made sense. It was just… She struggled to voice something. Sharing bots was a thing when on board a mindship, but between people it felt… like an offer of intimacy which was both attractive and frightening. But it was the only way she’d appear even remotely competent. She reached out: the bot climbed from Quỳnh’s hand to hers, and as its legs touched her palm, a dozen pinpricks of steel – Quỳnh’s request to open a comms-link – flashed on her overlay. She accepted it, feeling as though she’d just thrown herself into the vacuum without a shadow-suit.
‘There,’ Quỳnh said. ‘Now let’s talk about mindships.’
* * *
‘She’s an older mindship,’ Quỳnh said. ‘Smaller, less refined, and not designed for multiple failures.’
She’d called up an overlay with a comprehensive privacy filter. Hoà had watched her warily, like someone who knew all the conjurer’s tricks and was looking to see exactly how that one had been achieved. She was smart and careful, like someone who had been betrayed too many times by life. And yet not bitter. It made Quỳnh feel a pang of something she couldn’t quite name, something twisting in her heart.
It wasn’t much of an overlay: a dark sky above and below, and that same flock of white birds whirling in the air, singing a mournful lullaby from The Azure Serpent, from Quỳnh’s childhood. Somehow it felt fitting for Hoà, and for the memory of who Quỳnh had been.
She opened her hands, and between them was a model of a mindship. She’d taken one from the same generation as Flowers at the Gates of the Lords. As she talked, her hands moved, and various parts came into sharp relief. Hoà watched her, utterly entranced by every word.
‘Everything small can be fixed, just like you would fix a bot.’
She made schematics briefly flicker into existence.
‘You have these?’ Hoà asked. ‘They look private.’
It would certainly have made things easier to have the schematics.
‘Not for the whole ship, no. They’re classified, if they exist at all. This is from a comparable ship. The layout remains the same, and the smaller parts have schematics. I can share these with you, and my bots will be used to processing them.’
Hoà scrunched her face, considering a problem.
‘Changing cables. Refitting connectors. Making sure it all flows properly, I can do all that.’ She stopped, then, and looked straight at Quỳnh with an intensity that would bore through metal. ‘How do I do this without killing her?’
Quỳnh hadn’t expected that; it came out of nowhere, like Hoà’s remark on her own expertise, with no trace of self-deprecation or self-hatred, a simple question cutting through all the clutter to what Hoà judged the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter, because she was right: ultimately a ship was a living person. Hoà’s words jolted her, made her remember what mattered: being uncomfortable and gloriously alive, much like Đình Sơn had made her feel when he’d looked at her with his entire heart in his eyes.
Hoà’s voice cut through her reminiscences.
‘You think so very little of me, don’t you?’
Quỳnh, startled, looked at Hoà. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Before. When you said I wasn’t bitter. And now. Both times, you were surprised. As if I gave you more than you were expecting. As if you’d already dismissed me.’
She was breathing hard – Quỳnh’s bots could track it, but beneath it all her heartbeat was level, her skin dark. There was no fear. Minh had been absolutely terrified when she’d confronted Quỳnh, bracing herself for some tongue-lashing or cutting remarks – and no wonder, with Prefect Đức as her mother – but Hoà appeared to believe, deep down, that she was safe with Quỳnh. It was new and unsettling. Quỳnh hadn’t come to the Belt to reassure anyone.
