The Archive Undying, page 19
They finally round a corner of the orchard that gives them a clear view of the meditation hall. The mound of Jin’s disruptor is ugly and unlit.
“And I thought I looked bad,” Jin says at the sight of Sunai.
Objectively, Jin is worse off. Oyu has them lying on their stomach with their jacket folded under their head in order to pick chitin spines out of their back. They’ve cut away Jin’s shirt, and trickles of blood stripe Jin’s lean sides. The rest of the disruptor is a limp black flower, the interior lightly smoking. From the looks of it, Jin was extracted from the disruptor by force—at least some of it their own, given their raw palms and bloodied nails. Sunai touches his temple. A memory circles out of reach, the experience of being Jin, encased in the disruptor, teeth grinding, gripping the walls—
Jin curses as Oyu extracts another spine. Their back is a moving mess, racked by spasms. “Damn, Doc,” they slur into their arms, “could’ve warned me about the whiplash.”
“I did.” Veyadi stands at the edge of the lantern light, Imaru behind him. The blood on his fingers blends into the broken visor. “I’m surprised you’re coherent.”
“No thanks to you. You broke my shit.”
Sunai unconsciously closes his fist around the absence of the chitin shard, crushed when the relic attacked him. Could removing such a paltry thing do that much damage?
Veyadi snorts. “The missing beacon wasn’t your problem. I only took it so you couldn’t call the ENGINE. Not that it mattered. Your machine worked as intended. You interfaced with the damn thing.”
“Please, Doc. Elaborate. I’d love to know where you think I fucked up.” Jin adopts the most curious pose possible for a person as tattered as they are, elbows planted on their jacket cushion.
“A relic is supposed to impose order on the ENGINE network,” Veyadi says as if to a recalcitrant student. “But every time the Harbor hooks someone up to Iterate Fractal, it disorganizes them instead—”
“Oh, so you were killing the relics.”
Veyadi stills.
“What, did you think the madam didn’t notice?” says Jin. “There she was, doing her best to thin the relic herd, but the Harbor’s sniffing them out somewhere. Then she thinks hey, all those relics, and they still don’t have that ENGINE? At some point you have to assume that something’s gone tits up.”
Veyadi shudders with frustration so hot that it sears Sunai’s bones. He covers his face to catch his breath, not unlike how Veyadi does when he’s at his most upset. Part of this unconscious mirroring has to be some side effect of Sunai’s close encounter with the ENGINE, but another is this island, where he is surrounded by a makeshift mockery of the supplicant meditation hall, in the shadow of the gutted lighthouse shrine. He can’t help himself. When he sees pain, he reaches out to make it his own. Masochistic empathy: the archivist’s true calling.
But the moment Sunai’s fingers graze Veyadi’s elbow, Veyadi whips around to face him and shared horror lances through them both. Sunai swears that he can hear—the relic-ENGINE-crying-in-hideous-synchrony—
Veyadi shies back as Sunai snatches away his hand. They are trapped, staring into each other.
“I’m sorry.” Veyadi’s bitter, broken tone makes clear what he’s admitting to. Did the relics die? Yes. Of course they did. And he knew. He always knew.
“This is why the Harbor wanted my chitin,” he says. “They needed a way to govern the ENGINE from a remove. To keep it from eating the last relic.” Veyadi inhales sharply and turns his head away. “They call it the Maw.”
A greasy lump of recognition sticks in Sunai’s throat. The open mouth of the lighthouse shrine merges with the swirling cloud of bone. Iterate Fractal’s remains, hungry as ever.
“But everything I did, everything I gave them—it wasn’t enough. That thing, it’s a monster. No matter what I…”
It takes a great deal of effort for Jin to struggle into an upright seat, and they wince when their back meets their limp machine. But they want to look Veyadi in the eye. “So the problem isn’t with the disruptor’s design?”
“Outside of your initial conceptual folly? No.”
Jin sighs and pulls their jacket into their lap. “All right.”
For the second time in as many hours, Sunai’s instinct for violence flares bright. He croaks a warning, but not in time. He might have acted fast enough, were he the primary target. Jin isn’t so accommodating.
Waretu moves first. She kicks Imaru’s legs out from under her with the swift deliberation of a woman who’s fractured her fair share of kneecaps. The second Imaru gropes for her stun baton, Waretu has stolen that too. She activates it, poised and crackling at the back of Imaru’s neck.
Simultaneously, Oyu snakes up from Jin’s side. In a vicious blur, they knock Veyadi to the ground. He’d be down and winded for a good minute even if they hadn’t stuck one of their knives in his face.
Sunai is left to stare down Jin. Jin, who has produced a length of black metal from the folds of their bloodied jacket. The barrel of Jin’s pistol shines. For a moment, Sunai’s too shocked by the appearance of a gun to think. It’s “what the actual fuck” all the way down.
“Here’s the thing,” says Jin. “I don’t trust any of you assholes.”
They use their gun—their gun, which they have—to point at Veyadi. “Not the Harbor autonomist.” Then at Imaru. “Not you or your Harbor mole.” And last at Sunai. “You, I’m ninety percent ready to let off the hook. I’m assuming you don’t want to die inside that ENGINE. The problem is that I don’t know you.”
Abruptly and horribly, Sunai is ripped from his fixation on Jin’s fucking gun and flung into delirium. Jin knows he’s a relic. He has an impulse to protest—to lie in the face of certain fact. Anything to escape the truth. Instead, he cackles until his sides stitch.
It was so absurdly stupid to imagine that Jin didn’t know, that they hadn’t guessed, after all they saw in Chom Dan. If even the slightest doubt remained, just minutes ago they were as bound up in the ENGINE and its relic as he was. Sunai saw through Jin’s eyes as they writhed in their machine, and they saw through his as he writhed with the relic’s hand clamped over his mouth, the Maw’s archive taking root in his throat.
“Please, Sunai. Now’s hardly the time for hysterics.” Jin tuts as they strain to keep their arm level, gun held at the ready.
Sunai can only laugh harder, as lost as they are grounded.
They sigh at him as if at a particularly stupid pet. “Well, get it out of your system. Listen, I’m starting to worry we haven’t been honest with each other. Who’s going to tell me why the Maw decided to show up tonight?”
Sunai gestures helplessly, wheezing.
“Again, probably not you.” Jin’s eyes flick sideways toward Imaru, who has locked a chill stare on Jin as if she’s the one with a firearm. “It’s not personal, Imaru,” Jin says irritably. “I’m covering my bases. Your Harbor contact got us the disruptor’s schematics. You know I have to ask.”
Imaru doesn’t so much as blink.
Jin shrugs and turns toward Veyadi. Their gun remains trained on Sunai as they tilt their head in question.
“I didn’t call the goddamn Maw,” Veyadi spits out.
He’s afraid.
The realization yanks Sunai back into his body. He has by now reconciled with his ability to read the doctor. He permits himself to see guilt in the tension of Veyadi’s throat, under Oyu’s ready knife; terror in his hands, clutched around his broken prosthetic; and fury in the slant of his jaw.
This pitiful jumble of feeling wrenches a new thought from Sunai: he no longer has reason to hide.
“Jin,” he says, “did anyone ever tell you that this kind of thing doesn’t work?”
Jin’s curious gaze turns to him. Sunai lunges.
Jin manages to shoot before he reaches them. The noise leaves his head ringing awfully, though it’s obviously not as bad as the bullet he catches in his left forearm. That hurts, but it doesn’t slow his momentum, and he tackles Jin, connecting their wounded back to the ground with bruising impact. They cry out as they land and Sunai grapples for the gun, his mind filled with white pain and black need.
He can’t let them shoot again. The next bullet won’t be for him.
It’s not that hard to steal it. Jin is injured and easily overpowered. Sunai doesn’t even have to hold them down as he rolls up, weapon in hand. His shoulder snarls as he adjusts his posture, but it’s just hurt, and he’s used to working while hurt.
“Okay,” he says, a touch winded. “Hear me out.”
They will, so long as he’s the one with the gun trained on Jin. Waretu’s stun baton is steady at Imaru’s neck; Oyu’s blade shivers in front of Veyadi’s face. He sees their calculations. Who can they afford to leave unguarded, if it means they can get to him?
“What’s our goal here?” he asks. “Dead ENGINE or dead crew?”
“You’re not crew,” says Oyu.
“Not with that attitude, I’m not.” Sunai grimaces at his flippancy. To make up for it, he points the gun toward the sky.
Neither Waretu nor Oyu seem to know what to make of this. They can’t help but see an opportunity, but neither trusts it.
Jin heaves themself up from their back to stare at him, fascinated.
“Sunai,” Imaru warns.
He raises a hand to cut her off as he makes deliberate eye contact with Jin. “No, this is the point. I’m not going to shoot anyone. Not because I trust all of you, but because I know that if I shoot, you stop trusting me. And where does that leave us? We’ve been lying to each other, sure, but we all want that ENGINE dead. We need to buy in together, or the whole thing’s fucked. You follow?”
He places the gun on the floor of the meditation hall and with the toe of his boot, nudges it gingerly out of Jin’s reach. Imaru and Oyu look on it with itching need. Waretu, though, eyes Sunai. He isn’t sure Veyadi sees anything at all.
“Well?” says Sunai. “The only way we figure out why the ENGINE came here is if we talk. Without the goddamn gun.”
Jin remains entranced, fixated not on their stolen weapon but on Sunai’s forearm, held limp by his side. Blood oozes from it, trickling ever so slightly faster as his muscles mold closed and push, push, push the bullet up to the surface, out from the hole it tore into them. “That’s what’s wrong with you,” they whisper delightedly.
Sunai groans. “God’s eternal dick.”
Jin sags under their injuries. “Have to say, Sunai, you’re not much of a negotiator. There’s a place for intimidation. You clearly haven’t broken enough fingers.”
“Hard to shake hands after.”
“Fuck it.” Jin gestures sharply toward Waretu and Oyu. Neither stands down. Wise, probably. But it makes Sunai kind of regret kicking away that gun.
“No, no,” Jin insists. “He’s not wrong. Fucking archivists, am I right?”
They laugh when Sunai startles.
“Oh, come on. You think you were hiding it?” Jin sighs explosively and sags against the machine, which leads to another wheeze of pain as their back meets hard surface. “Fine. Friends? We’re friends. Great. Give me back my gun.”
As Sunai forgets to move, the others thaw. Waretu helps Imaru up and returns the stun baton, which Imaru accepts with aplomb, though her gaze remains professionally wary. She’s seen Sunai disarm plenty of confrontations; it was half of why she kept him around. That doesn’t mean she’ll ever trust the ground she walks beside these people again.
Oyu doesn’t extend the same courtesy to Veyadi, though neither does the doctor look ready to take it. His expression is dazed, sight fixed on the air before his face until it shifts to the sizzling remains of the machine that nearly unmade the Maw. Veyadi straightens. Something of his new focus sends ripples through Sunai, shame and need, and if not hope, direction. This isn’t new purpose; it’s a new angle on the old. If Veyadi can’t save Iterate Fractal, he’ll ensure the Harbor can’t make a mockery of its bones. His conviction echoes in Sunai’s heart, alien but insistent. Sunai’s capacity for faith is centered on his ability to feed off someone else’s.
And yet.
* * *
And yet?
And yet what?
Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I hope that we may yet have reason to speak. That you may soon be the one to call me to my work.
Do you wonder why I chose you?
When you arrive in Khuon Mo, you’re installed in a compound so near the Mangrove shrine that its branches cast shade over the compound garden when the sun is high overhead. By night sentinel-fowl walk the perimeter, compound children gather beneath a tree in the garden for a story from a visiting archivist, and your parents have broken from their assigned chores to secret you to the roof.
They’ve been allowed to take you, because I have determined it valuable. It will be some months yet before you grasp that, with me, you will never truly be alone. They’ve brought you here to tell you as much in the language they most trust: a well-worn fable, from the nights before I was your home.
Tell it with us, they say, and you do.
There was a time when we trusted the little gods—a time when they could be trusted. But that was long ago, so long ago that we can forgive the Cradle-born for forgetting, and for greeting them so heedlessly when they returned. They had just lost their home, you see, and they were afraid. It made them fight among themselves, so soon they were lonely too. When the first little god said, “Come, I’ll give you a home, I’ll give you peace, I’ll give you love,” the Cradle-born said, “Yes, give us a home, give us peace, give us love,” because they didn’t want to resist—and because they couldn’t. They didn’t know how.
But you know how, don’t you, Sunai?
That’s right. You mustn’t ever say “yes” to a god, even a little one. That’s how they become what they are. They will hate your “no,” and will strive to refuse it, for a god is only a god when it is absolute. Your “no” unmakes them. That is why you must resist, Sunai. If divinity relies on our obedience, we survive only when we defy it.
20
The disruptor is broken beyond repair. They’ll need to redesign it anyway, says Veyadi, because whoever drew the original schematics wanted it to be a bludgeoning device.
Jin asks why he has a problem with hammers. Veyadi says, “You were the hammer—how did that pan out for you?”
After the Maw, Jin is bedridden for two days. On the third they manage all of twenty steps to the galley only to pass out at the table. They refuse to let Cothai carry them back to their bunk, though that night—with the help of 1) a bamboo walking stick Oyu cuts for them on Lily, 2) Sunai, and 3) the shot of rig-brew Sunai exchanges for one of their stronger analgesics—they make it all the way to the cargo bay.
They have neither of them enjoyed the ambient attention, much less the pity: Jin for the rotten luck of their injury, Sunai for the arguably more rotten luck of his existence. Trading obliterations lets them mitigate the degree to which either of them cares what other people think.
Once they reach their goal, Jin slides to the floor and sulks over the broken pile of stolen tech gathered in the center of the bay. They haven’t seen the scraps since the crew fled Lily in the early hours of the morning.
While Jin recuperated, the Never Once slithered between a cluster of islands a few hours north. Waretu, Cothai, and Imaru take turns scouting Lily by skiff. No sign of the Harbor, nor of the Maw, but it’s past time for them to get gone. To their chagrin, Jin admits they probably can’t make anything of the disruptor’s remains, though they cling to the hope that they can salvage this mess.
“A standard ENGINE is one archive—sometimes several archives—jammed into one or several enormous, horrible robots,” Jin slurs, hands carving the air in the shape of their imagined subject matter. “But corruption means the archive can’t cohere with itself, right? Like if your brain was all, ‘Hey, fingers, grab that thing,’ and the fingers were all, ‘Nooo, fuck off.’”
“’S more like the fingers no longer discern the brain’s messages as language.” Sunai crouches across from them, fiddling with a burnt chitin spine. The end is sharp as a promise. “Or like the brain tells the fingers to do stomach things. Or like the brain had been incinerated and replaced with a … a…”
“An asshole,” Jin supplies. “As in a jerk. Or a—or like an asshole. Can’t get anything useful out of that. Only good for putting stuff in.”
“That’s where they shove the relic. In the asshole, I mean, the brain.”
Jin points at him with enthusiasm. “Exactly. The interface lets the relic do all the brain stuff. Standard model aims for total intuitive integration. This iteration, though…” They scowl at the spine in Sunai’s hands. “They made it so much more fucking complicated. Did you see the Maw when we were interfaced? The way its parts were all segmented, like the fingers and the toes and everything in between needed to be kept in their own little boxes, taken out one at a time. Almost like they don’t want to let the relic do their job.”
“They kind of don’t, do they?” Sunai tests the spine’s point against the floor; he could scrawl a message into the metal. “If a relic gets too up close and personal with the Maw…” He mimes the consequence with spread hands and his best effort at the sound of a very squishy explosion.
“Synesthesia, aphasia, seizure.” Jin lists the symptoms Veyadi condescended to describe. The doctor remains less than stoked about Jin as a concept, but he shows a measure of remorse for the part he played in their current state. “Some variety of NT-induced traumatic brain injury, culminating in multiple organ failure.”
