Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 5, Yr 76 of the Still Flame — night
POV: Aeryn Veyra
He came back after full dark with the mirror wrapped in a cloth, which meant he’d carried it forty paces in the cold rather than let it be seen crossing the gravel.
In the lamplight, the black mark under his left eye looked darker than it was.
“The Long Count says it was her mother’s and she would like it back,” Vaelith said.
“She also says you are not to hurry about it.”
The mirror went on the low table beside the lamp, still wrapped, and he didn’t unwrap it, which she noticed and filed.
The band took a moment, because the shape of what went on it wasn’t a shape she’d made before.
Thank you.
Vaelith read it and didn’t answer at once, and something went across the room that neither of them acknowledged.
The man had drained a finger, delivered a diagnosis, refused her a prognosis, refused her a history, and been paid for none of it.
Two words on a forearm, and they were the first thanks she’d given anybody on this world.
“You are welcome,” he said.
Then he sat down on the table’s edge and showed no sign of going anywhere.
The band came up.
You can go.
“I would rather not.”
Why.
“Because you have had a long day, you are alone in a box forty paces from the nearest person, and you cannot call out.” No drama in it at all, which was how she knew he’d thought about it before he arrived.
“If something goes wrong in here tonight, nothing happens.
Nobody comes.
There is no sound for anybody to hear, and the first person through that door will be a boy with a pail at dawn.”
All of that was correct in every particular, and she’d built her entire night around it.
I am not going to be watched.
“I am not proposing to watch you.
I am proposing to sit outside the door until the lamp goes out.”
No.
Vaelith didn’t move.
That is three.
“I will go.
I would like you to understand what you are refusing first.” He put both hands on his knees, which was the closest thing to fidgeting she’d seen off him.
“If I sit outside that door, I hear nothing, I see nothing, and I learn nothing about you that you have not written down.
What I do is exist within forty paces.
That is the entire offer.”
The next line got three words in before she cleared it, because it was true and it would have told him something, and she started again.
I have the lamp.
Draveth.
Go home.
He looked at the band longer than the sentence needed.
And then, briefly, both pupils narrowed out of round and went to a vertical line, and were round again before she could be certain she’d seen it.
If he knew it had happened, nothing else in his face said so.
“As you wish.”
At the door he stopped.
“The lamp burns about four hours.
If it is still burning when I wake, I will assume you fell asleep with it lit, and I will not come down.” A pause.
“That is not a kindness.
It is what you have asked for, and I am giving you the whole of it.”
Then the gravel, and then nothing.
+++
Not until the sound of him was properly gone did the cloth come off.
Old and heavy and backed in wood, silvered by hand rather than deposited, and the glass had gone slightly gray at one edge.
Thinblood had one of these.
A woman had carried it down from a better world and kept it through whatever brought her here, and her daughter had lent it out on a stranger’s word.
The pod hummed in its walls.
Aeryn got herself propped against the cot and turned the glass toward her face.
Four days of preparing for this, and the preparation was worth nothing at all.
The face in the glass belonged to somebody else.
Not approximately.
Not a version of her.
A different woman entirely, looking back with her own attention behind the eyes.
A hand went up, and the hand in the glass went up with it, and that was worse than the face had been.
I knew.
I have known since the morning I woke.
I wrote it down.
Knowing hadn’t been the same as seeing, and now the two of them had met, and something under the sternum went out from under her the way a deck goes when the section beneath it is already gone.
She didn’t make a sound, because she couldn’t.
There was nothing to hold on to and nothing to do about any of it, and she sat propped against a cot in a warm room holding a borrowed mirror and shook until it stopped.
It took longer than she’d have allowed anybody under her command.
When it had gone, she went back to the glass and began working.
Six years of the agent had been thorough.
Skin dull and dry, cracked at the mouth, the dark under the eyes gone almost bruised, and a faint discoloration through all of it whose cause she’d found in the marrow.
The hollows under the cheekbones were the ones she’d felt from inside.
Collarbones standing up like a rail through the neck of the dress.
Nails ridged and splitting.
None of it surprised her.
She’d done the survey from inside on the night she woke, and the mirror only confirmed the arithmetic.
Then the strange part.
Lines under the skin of the forehead, opening from the center and running out and up.
Not scars, not veins, though either was a possible reading at a glance.
Pale, fine, very faint, and lying under the surface rather than on it.
She got two fingertips up and traced one out toward the temple and felt nothing at all, no ridge, no give, no change in the skin. This story is hosted at g.com.
It was in her as grain is in wood.
Lines like these were on every face she’d met on this world.
She’d catalogued them and used them to tell one clan from another, and never once considered that she was wearing a set.
It grew.
Nobody had drawn that on her.
It had come up out of the skin and, by the look of it, was still coming.
What came next took longer, and was worse, and it was a while before she worked out why.
Under the damage, the face was extraordinary.
Not pleasant.
Not well made.
Extraordinary, in a way that would’ve stopped conversation in any room in her own civilization, and that was exactly the difficulty, because in her civilization nobody was plain.
Ugliness had been engineered out of the line eleven generations before she was born and had stayed out.
Everybody was well made.
Beauty was a floor, not a distinction, and a face was information about health and nothing else.
Never in her life had she needed to price a face.
She was pricing one now, and the number was very high.
The brows were dark and sharply cut and the lashes long and heavy, and the two together were the only part of the whole assembly the agent hadn’t managed to touch.
Everything else in the mirror said ill.
Those said something else, and said it first.
Then the coloring, which was the part her own era had nothing to set beside.
The hair was black at the scalp and ran out into silver, roughly half and half, and there was no line anywhere in it.
One shaded into the other.
For four days she’d assumed the silver was damage.
It wasn’t damage.
It was the color of the hair.
Dry and dull, cut short a long time ago and grown out uneven since, and two colors on purpose.
And the eyes were purple, with a thick outer band around the iris the color of metal, bright at its edge, moving as the light moved.
Nothing in the Commonwealth made eyes like that, and nothing was permitted to.
Cosmetic gene work had been fashionable for about a decade three centuries back and had gone out with a scandal and a set of laws, and even at its worst nobody had produced a ring of liquid metal around a purple iris.
Aeryn looked at that for some time.
Then she did the only thing she was actually equipped to do with it, which was reason from it.
The knowing in her head was flat about the twenty clans and what each of them was.
It gave her the House of Veyra going back centuries, names and holdings and dates, and not one face to hold this one against.
And it gave her what the House of Veyra was for.
Her house ruled the flying beasts.
All of them.
That wasn’t opinion.
It was the structure of the empire, and it sat in her head with the same lack of provenance as everything else.
So whatever was underneath this face had wings.
Turning it over got her nothing further, and she didn’t push, because a wrong answer arrived at confidently is worse than no answer, and she’d made that mistake twice already this week.
Something that flew.
That was the whole of the finding.
She filed it, and left the space beneath it empty.
The last thing she did with the mirror was the only thing that mattered.
A face like that, on a body that cannot cross a room.
In her own era it would’ve meant nothing, because everybody had one and everybody could fight.
Here it meant a woman alone in a metal box on a penal world, with fifty-odd households on the mountain above her.
The knowing gave forty men to every woman across the Covenant, and that number was old and broad and had never once been about this place.
What she’d seen crossing this village three days ago hadn’t looked like forty to one.
It had looked a great deal steeper, and the reason wasn’t hard to find.
A woman is the thing an empire doesn’t spend.
You don’t put her on a transport to the Ninth.
You keep her, wherever she is and whatever she’s done, because there aren’t enough of her.
Which meant the women on this world were born on it, or had done something nobody was willing to forgive.
She’d read the charge against this body in the records the band carried, on the day she woke, and filed it as a fact about a court.
It went back in, weighing several times what it had weighed before.
Until tonight she’d thought of this body as a wreck to be repaired.
It was also a thing worth taking.
It couldn’t defend itself, and it lay forty paces from the nearest lamp behind a door with no lock on it.
The mirror went face down on the table, and she didn’t look at it again.
+++
The tank was full, and the pod had been holding it at temperature since the boy’s last pail.
The bath took her to the collarbone, the first time she’d been properly under since she woke, and the heat went up into the wasted muscle of her thighs and didn’t hurt yet.
Half a sachet went in, and three vials one after another, and the water changed color and stopped smelling like water.
Then she opened her soul space and went to the spring.
The dim energy crystals she’d left there last night sat in a heap beside it, where she’d put them, and she went past them to the cup.
A tin cup out of the cadet kit, unmarked, dented on one side.
She’d set it under the lip of the spring on the night she woke, with a flat stone wedged under it to hold it level.
Anything that falls and isn’t caught is a rate and nothing else.
Caught, it becomes a quantity, and a quantity can be spent.
One an hour was what she’d timed across two hours that first night.
Twenty in a day was what the cup actually held at the end of one, and she used the second figure and threw the first away, because a measured total beats an extrapolated one, and she still didn’t know how long this world’s day was.
Twenty a day, four days.
Eighty.
Less the four she’d taken back out, one each morning from the day after she woke, swallowed on an empty stomach before the boy came.
A body trying to repair itself will take whatever it’s given, and one drop each morning was the only thing she’d had to give it.
Those four were the difference between a woman who could hold a floor posture for a count of four and a woman who couldn’t have got her knees under her at all.
They were why she’d crossed a village without dying and had a grip left to write with, on pot mash and ration pills.
Nobody on this world knew she was doing it.
Nobody was going to.
Seventy-six, standing about two fingers deep in the bottom of a tin cup.
All of it went in. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Two nights ago, the bath had been an extraction, and it had come out of her marrow like a thing being driven out of a house.
This came the other way, and it came with weight.
Whatever the drops did to the medicine, they didn’t do it slowly.
The water went dense and then it went into her, everywhere at once, through skin and then through everything under the skin, and the pain arrived a half-second behind it and was of a kind she had no reference for.
Not burning and not tearing.
Something being rebuilt while it was still in use.
Her back came off the floor of the bath.
The room started to go, from the outside edges in, in the particular way she’d felt exactly twice before, and both of those times somebody else had been holding the ship.
If I go under, I do not come back up.
That was the whole of it, and it was very simple.
A woman who can’t lift her own arms is a woman who drowns in a bath, and the water was at her collarbone, and there was nobody within forty paces, and the first person through that door would be a boy with a pail at dawn.
So she counted.
One.
Two.
Three, and hold, and again, out loud in her head in the voice she’d used on a bridge, because counting is what’s left when everything else has been taken off the table.
She counted through the worst of it with her jaw locked and both hands dead on the rim and the edges of the room going gray and coming back and going gray again, and at no point did she consider getting out, because getting out meant the process finishing in open air with nothing to rebuild behind it.
The count reached four hundred and something and then the number went, and she started again from one, and the second count was the one that held.
+++
Getting out wasn’t a decision either.
Over the rim on her forearms with no coordination in any of it, down onto the boards, and there she stayed in the dark, naked and wet and steaming faintly on the warm floor, entirely unable to move.
It had worked, and that was the problem.
There was too much in her, and it registered the way a system running over its rated load does: something arriving faster than it could be spent, sitting in the tissue with nowhere to go, and building.
Her hands wouldn’t close.
The jaw ached from counting.
Something in the deep muscle along her spine was firing at intervals in a way she had no name for and couldn’t stop.
Lying on the boards, with the part of her that had never once stopped working, she understood she hadn’t been careless with the dose in the way she’d feared.
The carelessness had run the other way.
She’d put in enough to fix a body and given that body no way to use it, and now she was holding it.
A body that takes the bath without the work will pass what it has been given straight through and hold none of it.
She’d read that on the lid as the second half of a procedure.
It wasn’t.
It was a warning.
Getting her knees under her took a long time.
Longer than the bath.
Longer than anything she’d done since the wall.
It came in stages, on her elbows and then on one hip and then upright on the boards with the water going out through the drain beside her, shaking in a way that had nothing to do with cold.
Knees.
Weight forward.
Line set from the crown down.
And the shaking that had come at the second second every night since the first bath didn’t come.
Nineteen seconds.
Then down.
Up again, and it came easier, and that was when she understood what the rest of the night was going to be.
She couldn’t stop.
Not as discipline and not as will.
The only route out of what she was carrying ran through the sequence, and every position she held bled off a fraction of it and turned that fraction into something the body kept.
So she worked.
First position, second, and the third, which she hadn’t been able to attempt at all two nights ago.
Down, up, hold, down.
When her arms failed, she used the wall.
When the wall wasn’t enough, she went to the floor and worked the positions that could be done lying, and when those failed, she rested with her cheek on the boards until the pressure built enough to make her move again.
The lamp burned out somewhere in the middle of it, and she went on in the dark, because the sequence had never needed light and she knew it by heart.
At some point in it, without any ceremony at all, it turned over.
Three things happened close enough together that she couldn’t put them in order afterward, and she’d been paying attention.
First, the pressure stopped sitting.
That was the largest.
For hours the load had been lying in the tissue with nowhere to go, banked and building, and between one position and the next it stopped lying anywhere at all and started to move, out from the deep muscle along the spine and through the whole of her in a slow circuit that hadn’t existed ten seconds before.
For six hours she’d been a full tank with no line out of it.
Now there was a line.
Second, the pain went.
Not for long.
For the length of one breath there was nothing wrong with her anywhere, and after six hours that was strange enough that she stopped mid-position and waited for it to come back.
It came back.
She was glad of it, because a body that stops reporting is a body that has stopped.
Third, and this was the one she’d write down: the heart changed.
She’d been able to hear the heart since the night she woke.
A high thin fast thing running hard in a chest of the wrong depth, at a rate that was the clearest single measure of how close this body had come to finishing, and she’d counted it more often than she’d counted anything.
It dropped.
Not skipped, and not faltered.
It came down into something slow and heavy and unhurried and stayed there, and the difference between the two was the difference between an engine running over its limit and an engine running.
Kneeling on the boards in the dark, with the water going out through the drain beside her, she didn’t have to be told what she’d just done.
Stage one.
Two nights after the first half, on the second half of the sachet, at a ratio she’d had to invent a second time.
She noted it as she’d have noted a hull section coming back online in the middle of an action, and got up, and kept working, because the noting wasn’t the job and there was still too much in her.
+++
Stopping came when there was nothing left to spend and nothing left to spend it with.
The gray was coming up in the high window.
Somewhere out on the gravel, a boy would be starting for the pump inside two hours.
Aeryn got herself to the cot on her elbows, dragged a blanket over as much of herself as she could reach, and didn’t check the door, and didn’t run the count, and didn’t set any part of her mind to wake at a particular hour.
She slept as the dead sleep, and it was the first time in two lives she’d gone under without leaving somebody on watch.