Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 1, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Aeryn’s audit of what the pill had done for her came back almost immediately, and the total was insulting.
She’d slid off the wall at some point and ended up on her side, cheek near the stone, one palm flat on the floor.
The floor stayed warm under it for a stretch and then stopped, and she’d been down here long enough now to place where it stopped — the heating ran short of the far wall by about a third.
Nobody had told her that.
The floor had.
She kept her hand where the warmth was, and not for comfort.
Heat was the only measuring instrument in the room, and she meant to use every instrument she had.
The pill had gone down without argument.
She’d read its grade in her hand before it went anywhere near her mouth, and read it quickly: third tier, low.
She’d taken it anyway, for three reasons, not one of which was hope.
It couldn’t hurt her, and a thing that can’t hurt you is worth the small trouble of swallowing.
Whatever it did would be more than nothing, and she was working from nothing.
And a woman who refuses the only gift in a poor village, in front of the man who’d arranged the giving of it so carefully around her, has told that man a great deal about herself and can’t take any of it back.
So she’d swallowed it, and then she’d put her hand on the floor, and now she was finding out what it had bought.
Very little, was the answer.
A thin warmth in the gut that had nothing behind it.
Some marginal loosening of the pressure at the back of her eyes, which was the clot behind her eye getting slightly more room and not the clot going anywhere.
It would last two hours, three at the outside, and a body that wouldn’t remember it had happened.
Nothing better existed inside a day’s walk of this room.
The tall one had gone into his storage ring for a scanner and come back with a device four generations behind anything she’d have accepted on a supply manifest, and he’d left the pill on the table without handing it over, which she’d read at the time as a man being careful about consent and was now revising to a man who didn’t want to be watched giving her something that cheap.
He’d known what it was.
He’d brought it anyway, because it was what there was.
So that’s the top shelf here.
Which meant the best medicine this whole settlement had sat somewhere below the worst thing in her own field kit, and she was lying underneath both of them, unable to sit up.
She had better medicine than that.
Better by an order of magnitude, and she couldn’t explain it to a single person on this world without ending up in a room with worse men than the tall one.
Sachets she’d blended herself.
Vials that had to be kept cold.
A bottle whose contents would’ve been under armed guard on any station she’d ever docked at.
And all of it was in her soul space, if any of it had come across with her, and she hadn’t looked in there yet.
Every child of her era had been given a seed, set into the soul early and grown for a lifetime into a place of its own, a whole country inside a person that took the shape of whoever grew it.
The size of the seed depended on how a child tested.
Aeryn had tested at the top and been given the largest one her people made, and she’d spent her whole life filling it.
She’d kept her stores in it the way other people kept them in a locker.
+++
She’d been putting off going in there, and that was worth admitting, in a room with nobody in it.
First the body.
She wasn’t walking into her soul space until she knew what shape the rest of her was in, and she had no idea what state it would be in after whatever had carried her into this body.
Top down, then, the way a survey runs.
That started with looking down at herself, and she hadn’t once done it.
In front of two strangers there had been exits to count, and a wound to judge, and cloth reports nothing a hand can’t report faster.
Alone, she got an elbow under her and looked.
A dress.
Pale pink, washed out, and the only place she’d met that color before was the second day of a burn.
The bodice held.
Below it the garment gave up.
It was cut low enough to make a point of the cut, and from the hip it ran out into panels of lace that were decoration and only decoration, and her legs were bare to anyone standing at the door.
She rubbed a fold of the lace between finger and thumb.
She could see her own skin through it, and the skin was gray.
Not pale.
Gray, the gray of a body that had been running a long time on less than it needed, all the way down both legs and up the arms.
She looked at it until it stopped surprising her, and then a little longer.
Then she went over the dress as kit, because everything she wore was kit.
No closure worth the name, no pocket, and no seam deep enough to sew anything into.
It wouldn’t turn a blade, hold heat, or survive one night outdoors, and it weighed less than the blanket under her.
She went to push the neckline aside to get at her breastbone and found there was nothing to push.
The cut had already done it.
Then the knowing came up underneath it, obliging as always.
Not a village dress.
Not a poor woman’s dress.
Every woman in this civilization wore this, at every rank, from the capital down to a place like this one, and one clan, Ithren, wove all of it.
That one held her still.
A civilization doesn’t dress half its people in something that stops nothing unless it has decided, everywhere and for a long time, that nothing is ever going to happen to them.
Which was a statement about what these people thought a woman was, and it had been sewn rather than said.
Her fingers let go of the lace.
Then her hand found the chain.
A necklace at the base of her throat, and it was storage.
She’d watched a man take a scanner out of thin air an hour ago, and the chain had the same feel to it, a weight that wasn’t on the outside.
It opened without argument.
Dresses.
Nine folded, and the one she had on.
The knowing supplied the rest unasked.
The Covenant made these — the Covenant being what the twenty clans called the whole of their civilization — and they were common enough, and they held about what a purse held, and people kept in them what you’d keep in a purse.
Coins.
Papers.
A change of clothes.
No boots, no coat, no blade, and nothing that burned.
She went through it twice, because the first pass had to be wrong.
The first pass wasn’t wrong.
She closed it and lay with her hand over the chain.
Somebody had hung a storage necklace on a woman being sent to a world like this one and filled it with the single category of object that couldn’t keep her alive a single night in the open.
And an object like that doesn’t get handed over in a corridor.
It goes around the neck, in front of witnesses, and everybody in the room watches a family provide.
Six weeks of clean dresses.
She’d been walking around inside the evidence of somebody’s generosity since the day this body landed.
The skull next, and for that she needed more than her eyes.
She had divine sense, which was what her era still called it, an old word nobody had ever bothered to retire for a plain faculty: perception that went where light didn’t, through skin and into bone, and read what it found the way a hand reads a surface.
Hers had been trained since she was six.
The cut from this morning had crusted under her fingers, tacky at the center.
Under the bone, her divine sense found the bleed behind the left eye where the scanner had found it, and a smaller one behind the ear.
Both slow, from veins.
Both old.
Neither of them the thing that was going to kill her this week.
Somebody had hit this woman in the head at some point, and nobody had treated it.
Then the frame, and the frame was where it stopped being a survey and started being an intrusion.
The pelvis sat narrower than hers.
The clavicles ran at an angle her own had never run at.
The heart hung high and fast in a chest of the wrong depth, and every rib she counted came back as somebody else’s rib.
She pressed the heel of her hand into the point of the hip until it hurt.
It stayed the wrong shape.
Her hands had told her an hour ago that this body wasn’t hers, and she’d been carrying it as provisional and hadn’t let herself finish the sentence.
This finished it.
Nothing here was a younger version of her.
Not a restoration, not a rejuvenation, and none of her civilization’s procedures produced a different pelvis.
This was another woman’s architecture, occupied.
Somewhere a woman had owned these clavicles and this fast, high heart and used them for twenty-seven years, and she wasn’t in here now.
Twenty-seven.
She’d commanded her first vessel at an age this body hadn’t yet reached, and had been doing the work for thirty-odd years after that, and had been old enough to be this woman’s mother twice over on the day she died.
Aeryn stayed with that as long as she could stand, and a little past it.
Then she went on, because there was no version of this where she stopped.
+++
Muscle next, and there wasn’t much of it.
What there was had the stringy, slack quality of tissue kept alive and never allowed to work — not famine, which strips fast and evenly and leaves a body honest about it, but administration, somebody deciding how much.
Somebody had fed this woman a calculated minimum for a long time and had been good at the calculation.
Then the bone, and her divine sense hit it and stopped.
There was something in the marrow.
Reading it took no more effort than reading a bad batch of pills at her own bench, and she’d read thousands.
Not a metal — metals sit heavier and announce themselves at the joints first.
This had gone in soluble and then stopped being soluble, and it had bonded into the mineral lattice itself, which meant it had been built to.
The poison sat in the femurs and the sternum and the flat plates of the pelvis and everywhere else that made blood.
Old.
Layered.
And the layers could be counted.
Six years of them, laid down at intervals regular enough to have been scheduled.
She turned both arms over and found the rest where she’d known it would be.
Inside each elbow, a small hard knot under the gray skin, where a needle had gone into the same vein until the vein gave up and the body built a lump around the memory of it.
She put her thumb on the left one and pressed.
Not one needle.
Not a dozen.
Enough that the arithmetic did itself.
It hadn’t been designed to kill, and she sat with that longer than with any of the rest of it.
A killing dose is cheap work, and any competent poisoner can build one out of a garden.
This was expensive.
This was elegant.
This had been engineered to sit in the marrow and ruin the blood the marrow made, quietly and permanently, in a body that would go on breathing for a long time afterward.
Somebody had wanted this woman alive and finished.
All of it was known to her — the class of agent, what it bonded to, roughly what it had cost to make.
Four ways to pull it out of a body were available to her, and every one of them started with materials she didn’t have.
Total comprehension.
Zero capacity.
That position wasn’t new to her.
Twice, on a bridge, she’d stood watching a readout tell her precisely how she was going to lose.
She hadn’t liked it then either.
Down, then.
+++
The last of it was behind the sternum.
Aeryn laid her hand flat on her breastbone, and her divine sense went through it into a space that shouldn’t have been a space.
A cavity, a closed fist across, walled in scar tissue gone hard and pale and smooth with age.
The edges were clean.
Whoever had done it had known the anatomy, hadn’t been rushed, and had closed it properly afterward, and that was the worst detail in the whole thing.
And the knowing came up underneath the finding and named the thing that belonged there.
A Beast Core.
She stopped.
Not at the theft.
At the noun.
The knowing kept going, obliging and fluent and without commentary.
The organ every one of them is born with.
It sits behind the sternum.
It draws in the energy that’s in everything, in the air and the ground and the food.
It refines that and turns it into what makes a person able: strength past what muscle should allow, the three forms every one of them could take, from the shape they walked around in to the full beast, every grade a person ever climbed.
This world measured everyone it had on a ladder of ten ranks.
Take the Core out and a person dropped to the bottom rung, the one marked mortal, and stayed there.
Every one of them.
On the warm stone she lay still and let the word do what it was going to do.
The tall one, with the fine scale-shaped lines running under his collar and not stopping.
The pupil that had gone to a slit and locked there, which he hadn’t known was happening.
The other one in the doorway, built low and forward, whose eyes went to the exit before they went to the person in the room.
On the floor in there she’d filed both of them as a species she had no word for and gone on counting exits, because a blank in a file isn’t an error and there had been more urgent columns to fill.
The blank had just been filled in.
Not a species she had no word for.
A species defined by the organ she was lying here without.
Every one of them born with it.
She’d spent an hour in a room with two of them and never once thought about what sat behind their sternums, and the answer had been sitting there the whole time.
The thing that had been cut out of her, still in place, working, in both of them, and in every person on this world.
Her breathing had gone shallow.
She noticed, and put it back.
Fine.
New species.
Unknown physiology, unknown capability, unknown limits.
Not a catastrophe.
An intelligence gap, and intelligence gaps close by measurement, and she was lying in the middle of the most detailed specimen she was ever going to get.
Back to the cavity, then.
On with it.
+++
The scar tissue had years on it, not months.
Whoever cut this woman open had done it long before Aeryn got here, had done it well, and had left her breathing.
Following the anatomy out from the empty socket, she mapped what it had been wired into, and the layout came back familiar in the wrong way, like reading a language that shares half its roots with yours and none of its grammar.
The whole architecture ran through that one organ.
Everything routed to it.
Take it out, and there was no secondary path at all.
She went looking for a dantian.
Her own people had been born with nothing — no organ, no channel, no gift — and they’d built the ability by hand.
The dantian was where it started: a seat low in the belly where a cultivator gathered power and held it.
There shouldn’t have been one here.
Nothing in the knowing mentioned a dantian, and a civilization that had one wouldn’t have built its entire physiology around a single organ behind the breastbone.
The site was there anyway.
Low, below the navel, exactly where it belonged.
Her hand went to it without being sent.
Undeveloped.
Never opened, never used, not so much as a pressure mark on it — but there, structurally sound, a seat waiting for something nobody had ever put in it.
Three separate checks, because the first result got written off as an error.
Then she went looking for a root, the channel that draws power in from outside and feeds the seat, and there was no root.
Not a stunted one, not a dead one, not a scar where one had been.
This body had never had one and had never been asked to.
The body could’ve cultivated her way.
The seat was built for it.
The capacity had been sitting there unused in every one of them, presumably for as long as there had been any of them, because they were born with something better and never needed a second door.
They have a door they’ve never opened.
That went into the file under the first genuinely good thing she’d found all night.
Then the rest of it assembled.
Three things had been done to this body, and they were three separate operations.
Somebody had cut the Core out, cleanly, with training and without hurry, and closed her up afterward so she’d keep.
Somebody had put a compound into her vein once a month for six years, a compound that cost real money and killed nothing, engineered to ruin the blood in the marrow and leave the woman breathing on top of it.
And somebody had fed her a calculated minimum across the same span.
That wasn’t neglect, and it wasn’t poverty.
It was a calculation, held steady long enough that the muscle had learned to stop asking.
Take one of those and you have a crime.
Take all three, running in parallel, sustained over years by people who had to keep showing up to do it, and you don’t have a crime.
You have a project.
Nothing about this body was broken.
Broken is what happens to a thing that was working.
This body had been taken down, methodically, one system at a time, by somebody who knew exactly which systems to take and in what order, and who’d budgeted for it, and who’d wanted the result to go on standing up and walking around at the end.
Somebody had made a waste of her.
Deliberately.
To specification.
She lay on the warm stone with her hands open at her sides and let that be true, and it was the first thing all night that had produced any heat in her at all.
Somewhere in it her hands had shut.
She left them shut.
Everything else in this room was arithmetic.
This was a person.
She didn’t know who.
The knowing had shrugged and gone on being helpful about geography.
But somebody had stood over this body with a plan and a schedule, more than once and for years, and people who do that leave a trail, because a project of that length needs money and access and somebody to sign for it.
You put six years into this.
Now I’m putting mine into you.
Then she shut her eyes and went into her soul space.
+++
Going in was easy.
It was the only thing all day that had been.
Her divine sense dropped inward, past the body, past the place where the body stopped being the point — and she came out standing on cracked earth in a space that was far too small.
That was the first thing.
Not the ruin.
The size.
Her soul space had taken the better part of a day to walk across, end to end, and she’d never once thought about that, in the sense that nobody thinks about their own lung capacity.
What she stood in now, she could see the end of.
All of it.
Every direction, and it stopped, at a boundary she could see from where she stood.
She turned once, slowly, and made herself look at what was inside before what was around it.
Cracked earth.
Plate after plate of dried mud curled at the edges, small near her feet and larger further out, the way ground breaks when the water has been gone a long time.
The light was flat and gray and came off the land itself, because there had never been a sun in here, and the land was dying, so the light was dying with it.
There had been mountains along the northern boundary, real geology, veined with the mineral stock she’d drawn on for thirty-odd years of formulation.
Streams off them, running down into a chain of freshwater seas she’d stocked herself, out of a hatchery, back when she was young enough to think it was a small job.
And the gardens.
The gardens had been the work of her life.
Plants that existed nowhere else in the universe, bred by her, from stock it had taken years to put her hands on.
Some of them she’d named.
Two she’d named after people.
Ash and cracked mud.
Not a stem.
Not a root ball.
Not the outline of a bed.
She crouched and put her fingers into it where the nearest bed had been.
It came up gray and fine and weighed nothing, and she let it run back out of her hand.
No tears came, and none were owed.
It was property.
She’d lost property before, and the correct response to lost property is an inventory of what remains.
She made one.
It was short.
It had two items on it, the dead ground and whatever was left of the spring, and she went to look at the second.
+++
The spring had been a lake.
Swimming in it — the memory of that arrived before anything useful did, and she put it down again.
What was left was a hole in the mud the width of her two hands together.
The eye of it, the aperture the water had first come up through, and around it the whole basin standing dry and hard and lifted at the edges in plates like everything else.
At the bottom of the eye, one drop hung.
It had gathered on the lip, and it held there, full and round and impossibly bright against all that gray, not falling.
Getting down beside it took some managing, and once she was down she stayed down.
How long it had taken to form, she didn’t know.
That stopped her cold, and nothing else all night had managed it.
Spring water held no mysteries for her.
Its behavior, its price, what a single drop could do in the right preparation — she could’ve lectured on it, and had.
Whether that drop represented an hour or a month, she had no idea.
Without the rate, she had nothing.
A rate is a plan.
Everything downstream of here was a plan she couldn’t build.
Her hand went flat on the dead ground beside the eye, because you check the soil; you always check the soil; you don’t take a field’s word for anything — and there was something under her palm.