The Archive Undying, page 13
“Moral? Me? Please, Sunai. I’m setting the stage. I let you bring your boyfriend. Now I get my favor in return.”
Sunai squeezes the crowbar; his injured palm brings focus. He remembers Imaru and Jin on the deck, days ago. Imaru’s hardened accusation, Jin’s blithe reply. Jin, whose good word earned Veyadi his place on the Never. “You want his … expertise. Imaru doesn’t trust him to give it.”
“There you go,” Jin enthuses. “Though can you blame her? Doc’s not exactly forthcoming. Guess we’re lucky he can’t hide how much he likes you.”
Sunai’s chest stills. The sheets of chitin glint under his palm.
“Here’s the deal, Sunai. Me, I don’t care why Doc made this shit for the Harbor. I don’t even care what he’s doing here—whether he’s ready to betray them for another chance at your dick, or if he thinks he’s going to rescue you from our clutches, or whatever. What I want is for you to make him teach me whatever he already taught them. Otherwise I might be obligated to do something piratical. I’m afraid that after Lily, the madam just doesn’t fucking care for archivists. You know?”
Sunai shrugs Jin’s arm away. They retract it with grace, as if they’d intended to. When they inhale to say more, Sunai points their way out the door with his crowbar.
Jin smiles. “Keep the postcard.” They leave him in the dark, confident that they’ve made their point.
13
Sunai breathes in, out. He lets his hand and crowbar fall to the rim of the chitin-filled crate. In the darkness beyond, he hears Veyadi’s attempt to close another. The thunk echoes in his head, hollow and off.
Veyadi creeps forward, a shadow resolving into detail. His face, half-obscured in black, stops the breath in Sunai’s lungs.
“Divine convergence, am I right?” says Sunai, because if he doesn’t say something now, he might never speak again.
Veyadi’s either baffled or sucker-punched. Hard to say. Might not matter, might be the only thing that does. He designed something for the Harbor that Jin thinks can assassinate an ENGINE, and somehow, he found his way onto the rig transporting that stuff to said assassination. The cherry on top: he maneuvered his way onto the crew via a rogue relic of the very ENGINE they’re hoping to murder. That’s either prodigious manipulation or the most ironic coincidence in the last millennium.
The question isn’t when Jin decided to bring Veyadi along, it’s how much Veyadi knew about the plan, and when. It’s going to be an issue if he had any idea that he was stepping in shit; it would imply he did it on purpose.
“Pretty sure I should be asking what this chitin stuff does,” Sunai says.
Veyadi’s fist clenches over a crate. The sight of the chitin upsets him. Given that Veyadi’s an archivist, and that the Harbor mostly stabs archivists on sight, he probably didn’t devise it under ideal conditions.
Sunai tucks the crowbar under his arm and hauls the lid up from the floor. “But I’m past the questions phase. You have to leave.”
He almost loses Veyadi’s soft “What?” under the thud of cover on crate.
“Hate to break it to you, Adi, but I don’t think this rig is safe for you.”
Veyadi stands in stunned silence as Sunai continues resecuring the bountiful evidence of Veyadi’s collaboration with the enemy.
“You clearly have good reason to be afraid of Madam Wei,” Sunai goes on. “Archivist trained, Harbor beholden—you’re basically her worst nightmare. And now Jin thinks they get to hand you to her? No! Jin can posture all they want; this plan didn’t start with you, so it can survive your absence. You just need to get out. Obviously you can’t go back to the Harbor—you know that, right? But if you cross the estuary, seek amnesty from Fun-Size—”
“No.”
“I mean, I know they’re not great, but they’re a hell of a lot better than what’s waiting for you in Khuon Mo.”
Sunai’s next thought shorts out because Veyadi’s hand covers his on the splinter-flecked edge of the crate, compelling him to be still.
They haven’t touched in weeks, outside of accidental grazes in tight quarters. Veyadi’s mouth is tense as he crosses the unspoken boundary. “You can’t stay either.”
Sunai tuts. “If you didn’t want me on this rig, you should’ve stopped me in Ghamor.”
“I didn’t know about Madam Wei in Ghamor.” Urgency builds in Veyadi’s tone and grip. “I don’t know what Imaru was thinking, bringing you on one of her operations—”
“Whoa, slow down. What don’t I know?”
Veyadi breathes shakily; the exhale warms Sunai’s cheek. “You asked me why the Harbor never made Iterate Fractal into an ENGINE.”
“I did.”
And Veyadi had described the problem in theoretical terms rather than concrete details; this might have been tactical evasion. Nervous energy collects down Sunai’s spine as Veyadi continues.
“There were multiple problems, as I understand it. One was a lack of relics. Iterate Fractal’s corruption left fewer than most. Couple theories why. A good proportion of the relics were archivists, but when the Harbor moved into Khuon Mo, they killed every archivist they could find. On top of that, Iterate Fractal’s corruption effect was uncommonly vicious, so a portion of the surviving candidates died within the first few months regardless of Harbor intervention. There were rumors of additional survivors in the following year … but most disappeared before the Harbor could reach them.”
No need to spell it out. Given Madam Wei’s proven disdain for both the Harbor and Iterate Fractal, she’d have ample reason to loathe a relic. Naturally Veyadi assumes that if the madam gets wind of Sunai, she’ll disappear him too.
Sunai laughs. Quiet at first, vaguely aware of the need for secrecy. Then he’s wheezing with the creeping onset of hysteria.
“Stop it—what’s wrong with you?” Veyadi hisses.
“Adi,” Sunai says through cackles, “no one’s going to kill me.”
“No, they won’t. I won’t let them.”
Sunai is about to remind Veyadi that he has no relevant combat skills—the man barely knows which end of a knife to hold, as evidenced by his kitchen—but then Veyadi lifts Sunai’s hand from the crate, cradled in his own. There’s no excuse for that kind of touch, no purpose for that gentleness but to hold a hand, or to pull that hand closer.
Veyadi is already so close that Sunai can differentiate the wet heat of the world from the tingling heat of body near skin. The complicated line of Veyadi’s mouth is infuriatingly legible. He is about to say something that Sunai would hate to hear.
Panic spikes from the crevices scarred into his brain. He can’t listen to this. Not anything like it. Not ever again. He has to interrupt him. He doesn’t think about how until he does it.
Veyadi’s stronger than Sunai, but he’s surprised, so he lets himself be pulled forward. For the first time since Chom Dan, Sunai kisses Veyadi, whose mouth is stiff with shock. Sunai intends to break away, but the mouth under his softens, and then hands envelop Sunai’s ribs, and Veyadi pulls back, but only to push forward again, for more, with purpose—
Sunai has just let himself put hot weight on Veyadi’s shoulders, chest, hips, when the man curses against his throat and pulls away for real. Only so far. His hands stay planted on Sunai’s sides. He slows his breath, head tilted down, away from Sunai’s face. “This isn’t … no.”
“Right. Yeah. Okay. Good call.” Sunai worms out of Veyadi’s grasp.
Veyadi’s hands hang limp at his sides as he watches Sunai straighten his hair, specs, shirt. His masked attention is fixed on Sunai’s hands, his lips parted until he closes them to swallow. “I’m not leaving without you.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to.”
“What if I want to stay?”
“I told you, I’m not going to die.”
Veyadi presses a hand to his visor. “You give me the biggest goddamn headache. Listen, you have never demonstrated the first sign of self-preservation. If I want you alive, I clearly have to stick close.”
“So what if I go with you?”
Veyadi has only a moment to stare. Sunai has only that moment to discern the meaning in his face—skepticism? Hope?
A sound interrupts them. The muffled creak and thunk of the gangway coming down from the deck to the dock. Someone leaving, or more likely, someone coming home. The window for their decisions has precipitously narrowed.
“Go to your bunk,” says Sunai. “Get packed.”
Veyadi hesitates, but he goes. Sunai has left him with so few options.
For once, Sunai would like to be slightly less of a fuck-up than usual. He’d also selfishly prefer not to be the reason Veyadi gets killed. He’ll do what he can to ensure he isn’t. If that means they’re both gone when Imaru wakes up tomorrow, well.
It won’t be the first time Sunai’s run out on her.
* * *
Sunai does his level best to resecure the crates before the door opens again to admit someone new. His back is to them; they say nothing as they approach, which means it’s Imaru.
He turns to find her carrying a package the length of his arm, wrapped in white oilcloth. She doesn’t seem surprised to find Sunai in the cargo hold. In fact, she barely registers his presence.
Sunai shifts out of the way to let Imaru at the chitin crate. Her gaze lingers on him before she opens it. His heart twinges with memory: the hard set of her mouth and the distraction in her eyes add up to a tired old sum. She’s disappointed. Not with him, but with herself.
Instinct makes him pluck the package from her hands and settle it in place. She doesn’t resist, though her brow furrows. She allows him to close the crate as well, and when he gestures her out of the cargo bay, she nods.
He is unable to leave her like this. Even as Sunai asks himself what the hell he’s doing, he does it. This might be the last thing he ever gives her.
It’s no great task to maneuver Imaru to the other end of the Never, where the galley waits. She watches him gather supplies from the silent murk below the plane where people normally operate, but at his direction, she begins cutting fresh vegetables. Midway through a slender pepper, her lips turn down.
“Where did these come from?” she asks. She means: You didn’t leave the rig, did you?
“Downworld uncle came by on his motorboat.” Sunai surreptitiously took the opportunity to practice his trade pidgin. “Got ’em for cheap. He said they’re old.”
Imaru turns over the remaining pepper. No sign of blemish or age. “Right.” She gives him a sidelong look with an ounce of life in it. Her mouth moves, a momentary upward slant. Then she remembers whatever it was that made her so tired, and she cuts the rest of the veg without comment.
Sunai has seen this before. A dozen times—a hundred. When something pushes Imaru into her head, the only thing that pulls her out is pure mechanical purpose. Cut these vegetables. Boil the rice. Now wash the dishes as the fish fries. At last they sit across from each other at the galley table, knees butting. She eats with the small silence of a woman who has exhausted her last mental reserves.
“Shit or get off the bucket,” Sunai says.
Imaru’s mouth crinkles. She holds the truth under her tongue to reconcile with the taste. “There was an aunty who remembered me. Us. From back when we started.”
“Not a nostalgic reunion?”
Imaru snorts. Quiets. “There’s a Mohani contingent in Elanu Tha. Some of them want to leave. Rumor is that the Immaculate Empire’s expressed interest in Fun-Size, and they’re nervous about what next year looks like if it’s invited to ascend to the pantheon. They’ve already seen signs that the imperial network’s coming to town. Buildings condemned where they mean to install hubs … She asked if we had room.”
There could be room—two vacant bunks—but Sunai knows too well why Imaru had to say no. She’d take on a refugee if she could ferry them somewhere safe, but her rig is heading into even greater danger. No wonder she’s so miserable. She’s never happy to leave a problem to someone else.
Sunai’s recollection of their first year after corruption is a blur of downworld outposts, salvage-rat coves, and the daunting revelations of rig travel—the grime, the noise, the constant dangers of the wilds—punctuated by Imaru’s dogged refusal to abandon him. She built him up from nothing. Every time the remembered horror of Khuon Mo or the unfolding horror of his corrupted body made him panic, cry, or vomit on her shoes, she was there to hold his head to her shoulder, clean up the sick, and coax him out of terror. In the end, when he’d regrown a personality around the work she chose for them—the chores of moving salvage, then later moving people—she finally let herself crumble, in her own distinct way, where she stayed upright but her insides went ashen.
It’s one of trauma’s funny tricks. It lurks in the wings until you’ve proven your strength by carrying everybody else through the performance, and just when you’re about to take your final bow—bam! Kicks you right off the stage. Imaru’s fine, so long as no one reminds her that she can’t save everyone.
She doesn’t eat much of the meal they cooked together. It makes Sunai yearn for one of Veyadi’s vile protein bars to hide under her pillow. He gets her to their shared room, rolls her into her bunk—without those boots, please—and has turned off the light before she says: “Sunai.”
He crouches by her head. “Present.”
Nothing for a breath, then, “Thank you. None of this would be worth it, without you.”
He remains on the floor to watch her slide into low, easy breaths. When she settles, he thinks: Fuck.
Sunai isn’t much capable of commitment. Ever since he was a child, he’s never met an ideal he couldn’t doubt, a maxim he wouldn’t question. He’s certainly never been one to see things through. But Imaru has a capacity for hope so tangible that it can make him feel real and alive in his own body even when he’s trying to forget that he has one.
It was hard enough leaving her the first time. He only managed it because she was leaving too. It frightens him to think that if he abandons her now, she might not go forward. That even if she does, she might break down along the way, and he wouldn’t know.
Sunai scrapes himself off the floor. A colorless compulsion drives him across the hall to the bunk where Veyadi waits.
Veyadi sits on his mattress, hands between his knees in a posture of thought. He raises his eyes to meet Sunai’s, his mouth carefully shut.
“I can’t leave,” says Sunai.
“I figured.”
“I need you to, though.”
Veyadi considers this. “Tough.”
Sunai wants to present a better argument, but every solution he can think of has an instantly obvious counter. He is trapped in himself, unable to imagine how to fix what he’s broken.
“Do you think you should move in here?” Veyadi asks.
“I do,” says Sunai. Moving in will give him something to do, and if they’re going to stay he’ll need to keep a close eye on the doctor. Veyadi can’t ever be safe on Madam Wei’s rig, so if Veyadi refuses to leave, the least Sunai can do is make sure he doesn’t get murdered for it.
14
The next hours pass in a blur of movement. Sunai explains the bunk switch to Waretu, who seems more amused than suspicious, but she’s a better liar than Jin. She remarks on his disquiet and offers to paint his nails. Sunai lets his eyes rise from her manicured hands to the whorls of stylized flowers tattooed at her wrists: Mohani ginger, toothed in bloom.
All night, the Ginger Company and Madam Wei loom over Sunai’s every thought, as large as Iterate Fractal’s unseen ENGINE. One of them is going to squish Veyadi, and it’s going to be Sunai’s fault. He watches the door to their bunk and tries to plan. He doesn’t sleep. As a shadow in the murky morning light, he buys a chicken and coop from the motorboat uncle.
“It smells,” says Veyadi as Sunai fits the chicken coop onto the end of his bunk nearest the door.
“And she’s loud,” says Sunai. “Built-in alarm.”
Their door hangs open, letting in morning conversation from the galley. If Sunai can hear them, the crew can hear his warning. Veyadi’s hands flex at his sides, in want of a tool.
“But look, protein!” says Sunai, presenting an egg.
“Yeah, okay.” Veyadi manhandles Sunai up onto the bunk. At a loss, Sunai holds the egg out of the way as Veyadi removes his boot to properly wrap his ankle. “You need to take care of this. It’s giving me a complex.”
Veyadi’s daily wrapping and rewrapping his ankle is the most they touch for the next week. Every time, the glide of his fingers is a ghost on Sunai’s skin for hours after.
Otherwise, Veyadi defiantly busies himself with rig chores. Sunai would prefer him to get hold of a harpoon gun and put his back to the wall of their bunk. It gives him the twitches to see Veyadi assist Cothai with a skiff tune-up while Oyu—who never has fewer than two knives on their person—observes silently from atop a nearby crate.
“It’s like he wants to die,” Sunai mutters to the chicken.
“No one ever said anything about killing Doc, jeez,” says Jin from the doorway. “Hey, what do I need to do for dibs on tomorrow’s egg?”
If Jin wants an egg, they should stop sidling up to Veyadi and leaning on his shoulder. Alternatively, they could surrender the butterfly knife in their left boot.
Instead Sunai offers tomorrow’s egg to Imaru, who says, “Is this a bribe?” To which Sunai asks, “Is it working?”
It isn’t. Imaru gives Veyadi the same icy look every time they share a field of vision. This has the slight benefit of making Veyadi climb walls to avoid her. Unfortunately, if Imaru wants someone stabbed, she’s liable to delegate.
They reach the southwestern tip of the mainland coast on their fifth day out. Sunai recognizes the pool of diffused illumination a half mile off from the ruins of Jhen Miro. There lies a sandbar, the last fifteen-story fragtech of Reconcile Elegy, which fell over and failed to get back up shortly after it demolished its city-state. Its unblemished silver face watches them over the hem of low tide, the curve of its gleaming shoulder untouched by erosion but lightly speckled with birdshit. At its sides, the waves take on an unearthly reflective quality. Lengths of white fabric stream from the fragtech’s shoulders and ripple within the current, sodden yet unmarred.
