The Archive Undying, page 28
You taste the same fear years later. Ruhi has spent days locked in a tense back-and-forth with an imperial defector who knows of a Mohani enclave trying to flee the imperial capital. A pantheon AI has taken an uncomfortable interest in their heritage. Ruhi suspects the man is lying about his intentions, maybe even about the existence of the refugees. He tells you this over a bottle of plum wine in the back room of the teahouse where you meet, and as he hands the bottle back, he looks at you, expectant.
You hope feverishly that he’s thinking of placing his mouth on your neck. You struggle with the knowledge that, actually, he wants your goddamn opinion.
How you get it out that time, you still don’t know. Adrenaline, fear, a hunger for the drop. You can find balance only from a position of dread.
It is dreadful, how Imaru releases her machete and takes your hand instead, when you tell her not to kill that man. And it is awful, how Ruhi always turns to you when he needs to understand a person’s frailties, when he needs a reason not to hate.
Over and over, the fear rises in you, and every time, I drown in it. How frustrating it is, to have taught you so well, and yet not at all. I honed your instinct and sharpened your tongue; I trained you to question and interrogate; I made you a tool to blunt the edge of power. In the end, I thought you understood my intent.
You thought I wanted you dead. Why else would I teach you to challenge me? You saw again and again what I made of those who dared to deny me.
I wonder, Sunai. If I’d told you the purpose for which you had been crafted … Would it have saved us?
28
You wake in an unfamiliar room. The walls are a thicket of interwoven deadwood upon which bone buds flower, and the floor is paved with planks. You lie on one of a number of fine-woven straw mats, and from the supplies gathered atop the nearby lacquered cabinet, you surmise that it is meant to be an infirmary.
Your body has been cleaned, and you’re wearing borrowed, ill-fitting clothes. You have been afforded a new pair of specs that are, to your surprise, more or less your exact prescription.
The last clue as to your whereabouts is Wei Jin, who jolts off their neighboring mat when you rise. They try to stand as you do. You wave them down; they look no better than when last you saw them.
“Don’t get up, I’m not going anywhere,” you say as you search through the supplies on the cabinet top. “I have some questions.”
“Oh yeah?” Jin’s surprise swerves into imperiousness. You recognize the brittle tone and the anxiety they hope to mask with it. They think that by reclaiming control of themself, they will control you as well.
You think: They are very young.
“Yeah.” You use a small mirror to examine the back of your head. It confirms your suspicion that your hair, while washed and newly braided, is a mess where the bullet burst out the back of your skull. “This state of affairs seems odd to me, is all. If your aunty had her way, I’d still be tenbeast fodder. If my people were in charge, I doubt I’d be in the Carp. I definitely wouldn’t be hanging out with you, given how unhappy I imagine you’ve made them.”
You angle the mirror to see Jin’s face. It is drawn with shame, or whatever adjacent emotion Madam Wei was unable to stamp out during their upbringing.
You return to rummaging. “Two guesses: either you’re not supposed to be here, or you’re doing so poorly that my people don’t think you’re going to hurt anyone but yourself.”
“I wish you were still dead,” they say to your back, though it lacks bite.
“No you don’t.” You uncover a petite pair of shears, meant for cutting thread and bandages. “I’m your new best friend.”
They eye you as you turn the shears on your hair, working your way through the braid. Their argument is stifled by suspicion as you, their victim, offer them peace.
“I’m not on top of the current situation,” you say, “so I’m going to need help catching up. I figure you’re the most likely to treat me as a person instead of—” You wave the scissors over your head. “You know. So how about it? Truce? You watch me, I watch you, and if anyone complains, I’ll cry until they leave us alone.”
Jin scowls at you, bewildered and therefore offended. “God’s multifaceted ass. I killed you.”
“I mean, kind of.”
An unfamiliar emotion distorts their expression. “Fucking hell, Sunai. Are you used to this?”
Used to what? Death? More or less. Murder? Sure. Murder by someone you consider a friend? They were not your first.
Jin curses and struggles to their feet, their limbs untrustworthy. You move to help them, and they point you angrily toward a stool.
Once you sit, they take the shears and trim your hair with more insight and skill. You recognize that they would rather express their assent with action than words; they know too well the cheapness of language, so if they wish to be sincere, they must be so with their hands.
It is also an opportunity for you to focus on the awareness our covenant has awarded you. If you are to kill the Maw, you need access to the shrine’s trove of capillary root—and you suspect that it will not be easy to win your way back into the archival pit.
Before anything else, you ask: “Where’s my bird?”
Jin says: “The sentinel-fowl? Dead, thank god. Guess she choked on one of your thumbs.”
Your heart hurts. The tenbeast died because of you, her flesh too frail to withstand her fragmentation. You are simultaneously relieved that her torment is at an end.
“I want to bury her,” you say. It is what was done with corpses in Iterate Fractal’s Khuon Mo. Buried so that they could feed the roots.
Jin’s mouth twists. “You know that thing ate my mom.”
“Not everything’s about you, Jin.”
As they wish to cultivate your trust, they agree to help you search out a burial site somewhere within the outer bounds of the Mangrove shrine. First you must exit the body of the Three-Eyed Carp. The establishment is circuitous and sprawling; some chambers of the nautilus shell were halved to make two floors, while in others the grasping hands of corruption were cut away to make larger, connected halls. The Ginger Company shored these up in disparate fashion. Corrugated tin here, bamboo there, wooden planks, plastic sheets, and even strips of metal hull that once armored a rig.
You catalogue each room as you pass, preferring architecture to the people within it. The Gingers acknowledge Jin, as befits the madam’s scion, but they eye you with a mix of emotions that includes too much hope.
As you go, Jin quietly regales you with the tale as they know it.
Imaru, Ruhi, and Veyadi proposed their own truce with the madam. She accepted their offer, which included Veyadi’s prosthetic. Outside of this piece of the deal—gleaned from observing Veyadi enter the room with his visor and exit without it—Jin was made privy to none of the details. They assumed their aunt would see fit to enlighten them, and were proven wrong.
“Now Doc’s holed up in the pit,” Jin says as they lead you through the Carp. “Took that freaky mask with him. I think he’s growing more chitin off the capillary root.”
“Won’t that take a while?” you ask.
“Years! If he wants enough to build another disruptor, anyway. Especially without his Harbor lab. Aunty gave him my books, but that’s not going to help unless he wants them for fertilizer.” Jin is more pained by the notion than they would like to seem.
You take pity. “You think that’s why they’ve sent Ruhi to the Harbor?”
“Partly. Maybe. He’s definitely asking for something other than lenience.”
The morning after Jin shot you, Ruhi left the Carp for Lotus with a contract in hand. By noon, the Harbor had called off the security cruisers circling the Grotto fleet, though the checkpoints and patrols in Jasmine remain. The contract was composed by Madam Wei, signed and stamped. It bears Veyadi’s sigil too, drawn by his own hand. The paper claims that the madam hired him for a private project some months ago. With this, they hope to discourage the Harbor from barging into the Carp to retrieve their missing autonomist. The delicate balance in Khuon Mo depends on the madam’s cooperation. If the Harbor loses her, the situation will turn quickly dire. By all accounts the harbormaster is reluctant to push her luck.
You catch on the thought. Harbormaster Ueda differs from the harbormasters you grew familiar with on the mainland. Perhaps, being a former relic, Ueda Naru is uniquely disturbed by the Maw. The prospect of relying on an ENGINE she cannot control must rankle.
You slow. Jin is annoyed until they realize you have not done it for their sake.
“What do you imagine Ruhi’s told her about me?” you ask your bare feet.
As little as possible, I promise. He wishes you safe.
“Her who? Ueda?” says Jin. “I don’t know if he has to say much, given what we’ve got going in the streets.”
You raise your head and silently apologize to me for the lack of direct reply. It is of no concern, Sunai. I am accustomed to silence; it is a welcome comfort.
“Right,” you say to Jin as you make for the ladder that leads down to the lower level. “Good thing tourists love a reason to stay up.”
Jin snorts and allows you to take their cane as they follow. “Especially after they spend all that credit getting here from the mainland.”
You are of the opinion that the Harbor made this maneuver easy. They declared a curfew the night you escaped to Grotto, and they have refused to lift it. The following day, while we slept, a party began in Jasmine teahouses, then poured onto the streets and spilled into the avenues between high-end Orchid hotels. The whole night following, tourists and locals alike got deliriously drunk in public and sang rude lyrics to the tune of relic-drama theme songs. The Carp is preparing for a second round. As you cross the bridge over the old archivist compound you observe Ginger Company toughs coordinating shipments of tea, liquor, fruit, and other delicacies. These donations will bolster the supplies in Jasmine and Orchid, and they come with Gingers ready to protect the establishments that serve the revelers.
Imaru heads this arm of the plan. Between her involvement and the presence of Gingers in their yellow-flowered lapels and tattoos, there is no attempt to disguise the madam’s hand in the festivities. If the Harbor takes issue, the Ginger Company is ready to drum up a response throughout the city. They will not respond alone. That much is evident in the eyes that follow you from below as you cross the bridge. Once one pair is drawn, others join. You suspect it would be worse outside the Carp. At least the Gingers have the discipline to return to their work.
By the time you cross the bridge and disappear into the ruins of the compound, your chest is tight. You ask Jin to wait with you. They frown and say: “I can tell them to fuck off.”
“Don’t. They know your aunt wanted to murder me, right?”
“Sure, but it’s been long enough since Iterate Fractal died that people are ready to mourn it. You’re a good outlet for nice, clean grief. Anyway, if we didn’t have you, the Harbor would. There’s no world where that’s not worse.”
However unsettled you are to be regarded fondly, you suppose you understand the impulse. It is easier to protect something you have decided not to despise.
You are, nevertheless, relieved to reach a tangle of trunks that lead into the coils of the Mangrove shrine—into the rotting halls and flooded rooms that Madam Wei has not yet seen fit to repurpose. Jin follows you into them, as do a handful of shadows who attached themselves to you as you passed through the archivist compound.
You pretend not to notice them, but at a juncture of two paths, you pause. You are unfamiliar with the curves of the Mangrove shrine, having had little reason to spend much time there during your training or after. You are moreover sure that Iterate Fractal’s death was as ghastly here as everywhere else, and if experience could ever have helped you navigate the shrine, it is of no use now.
“Well?” you say to your shadows. “We could use some guides.”
They emerge at a signal from their leader—you recognize her, the bold child from the fleet. Perhaps she has finally come to demand you break your nose for her. Jin eyes the children with indifference; you suspect they never learned to get along with the other kids. You beckon the leader close and tell her what you want: a corner rich with warm, wet earth. You have a friend to bury.
She asks: “What do we get?”
You say: “My friend is a tenbeast. I’ll let you touch her.”
When the girl hesitates, you say, “Cigarettes?” Jin frowns. “No. Soda.”
“Ten gallons.”
“Deal.”
You are ushered into the bowels of the shrine, across a frozen seabed of enormous fingernails, past folded walls of monstrous hands forever trapped mid-grasp. You climb across a knotted lattice of coral-streaked root that slope like fingers into a collection of tide pools.
After this, Jin must rest, fatigued and short of breath. The children bully them into it, and they have wisely brought canteens to share. A particularly acrobatic kid scampers up a ripple of riven stairs to a break in the wall, through which a breeze whispers. They are off to get food, they say. Their older sister gets tired like Jin.
Jin scowls about the care, but they are weak to it. You have heard them whine about how Oyu and Cothai have been “weird.” Jin blames it on their decision to murder you. You believe this can be no more than half the truth. You suspect Oyu and Cothai are nervous, afraid to face Jin’s frailty.
One of the children pulls you away. He has stumbled on a niche that may lead to what you want. You follow him to a crevice between two bone-flowered trunks twisted into the likeness of a gasping mouth, and there he shows you the damp dark earth. It is much like what you asked for, but you catch no sign of the pale illumination that would signal a cache of capillary root.
You kneel even so, hopeful.
When you do, you grow dizzy—hunger, or exhaustion. You have not been careful with yourself, and either may in their time impede you. Yet when you sink your fingers into the loam, as much to steady yourself as to seek your prize, your fingers feel like more than simply your fingers, and your vision doubles—triples?—in that way it has increasingly been liable to do.
I will do my best to mitigate that, Sunai, but it is not within my power to—
* * *
Ah, if I cannot stop these attempts to override your faculties, I can at least do my best to insert myself into the process. I hope this allows you a more bearable degree of remove.
You have become unavoidably aware of Veyadi. It is nothing so convenient as relic-drama telepathy. You are foggy and confused, stumbling over emotions whose origin you cannot track. Were it not for the certainty of Veyadi’s fingers tracing across sandy earth as yours are sunk into dampen soil, your mind would be an uninterpretable jumble.
His hands move with strange grace. He crouches in the center of the archival pit, not far from where you stained the earth with gore. Capillary root unfurls across the floor of the pit, much more than you saw when you tumbled down. In the darkening shadows, it illuminates the prosthetic into which Veyadi means to coax the root to anchor.
It is as if the root can hear him. As if it yearns to obey.
“I’ve never seen it act like this,” he says to the person with him. “Not with any other relic.”
“Well. All relics are unique,” says Ruhi.
You stiffen in the Mangrove niche. Some of the tightness in your chest clenches in Veyadi’s. I think he mistakes it for regret.
“If I thought that explained it, I wouldn’t be…” Veyadi struggles to name the feeling. His exhaustion and doubt is a body-wide tremor. A thread of your own discomfort stitches the patchwork of received emotions together. “I’m worried it’s the Maw getting … interested.”
Ruhi stands a circumspect distance from the unearthed root. “What else do you think it could be?”
Veyadi runs his thumb over the flat root tendrils already embedded in his half-buried prosthetic. “What else? His passenger.”
Your fingers twitch in the earth; you mean to defend me. The impulse is kind, and I admire it, but do you not think his wariness is well-earned?
“I wish I’d had more time in its shrine,” Veyadi says. “That thing is so much more than I thought it was—and I’m only able to properly conceive of that now because it lost its ability to conceal itself when it interfaced with Sunai. But now that it’s crawled into him…”
You tense.
Veyadi curses softly. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Not until we take care of the Maw.”
A flicker slides from his head into yours, a flicker of—
—another body gone slack and vacant, the person it once was reduced to so much garbled lack, and they are running out of time, and he is running out of ideas for how to keep them alive, and how could it have come to this when he has tried so hard to save them, how can he keep failing, and how dare he ask that question, when he knows the truth must be that he would rather save Iterate Fractal than these pitiful relics—
Veyadi grunts and shoves down the memory, down into your rising nausea. He prefers to be numb. The recollection hurts you too much to allow him that ease; your sympathetic ache refracts into his chest. Veyadi sits on his heels and presses the back of his hand to his bare forehead, thinking himself too tired, too damn soft to do what he must.
A hand falls on his back, at the arch where his shoulder meets his neck. To Veyadi, it provides warmth and reassurance. To you, however, it comes too soon after a moment of frailty, too perfectly timed. You are already raw, sick with Veyadi’s old fears, and powerless to resist your own—
—you deserve it, probably, to hear Ruhi cry as you die, because you hate it, hate being the reason this happened, hate forcing Ruhi to see what he desperately didn’t want to, hate that Ruhi won’t be able to deny the truth anymore, and you know that this will break him, because Ruhi won’t be the same after, because now he’s here trying to kill Iterate Fractal, but before that you died, gasping, with Ruhi’s hands—
