The Archive Undying, page 8
They do ask about the shrine, once they’re far enough away to no longer be spooked. They can remember it now, and they cling to the memory like a talisman. When they ask what happened inside, Sunai lies. He doesn’t recall! It was so dark! Jin remembers more, ask them!
Jin doesn’t care to be asked. They mourn Dzira with the quiet intensity of a young person more accustomed to the idea of losing comrades than the experience. Their eyes continue to follow Sunai, but the focus sharpens and hardens, as though they no longer trust what they see. They saw what he did in the shrine, though they’re also holding their tongue. Great! He dodges them too.
The last night before Ghamor, the Third Scrap camps on a hillside overlooking the pine barrens, not unlike the one where they stopped that first night out. Sunai, in the mood for punishment, once more takes refuge on the observation deck, from where he can keep an eye on the Sovereign. It’s easier than watching over Veyadi, who he is terrified might try to talk to him.
It is thus the height of misfortune that Veyadi manages to sneak up on him there; Sunai was relying on the good doctor’s recent infirmity and accompanying inability to climb ladders.
“You’re such an asshole.” Veyadi wheezes as he thunks down beside Sunai, who maintains his calm by biting hard on the inside of his cheek, which sends eddies of—
—yellow lights trailing up from a glimmered sea into the black of the mountains—
—through his mind. He forces himself to talk past it. “Let me guess,” he says. “You’re not going to pay me until we’ve debriefed.”
Veyadi probably doesn’t want to hold pay over Sunai’s head, but after the debacle at the shrine, it’s the best-case scenario.
“What are you talking about?” says Veyadi. “I authorized the captain to pay you out of the rig coffer.”
Sunai digests this in startled silence as Veyadi catches his breath, head hung over his knees. Sunai searches for anger in his posture; all he finds is exhaustion. But Sunai has too often been too wrong to trust his judgment now. What has he missed?
Veyadi sighs over his hands, clasped hard together. “I never should’ve hired you.”
Sunai laughs, genuine. “What was your first clue?”
“Didn’t I tell you to stop pretending you aren’t…”
“Aren’t what?” Sunai asks. Vulnerability makes him belligerent.
Veyadi turns his head just so. The moon gleams off the gold sheen of adhesive. He is exceptionally alien, especially when he says, all matter-of-fact, “When we get to Ghamor, the Harbor’s going to take me in for processing.”
He cannot conceal the tension in his jaw. Sunai’s breath sticks to his throat.
“Don’t look like that.” Veyadi leans the slightest bit toward him. “I’ll be fine. They want me for other projects. But you … They can’t know about you.”
Understanding spills over Sunai’s brain, dyeing his memory of their last moments on the plateau. Veyadi isn’t angry. At least, not only angry. Rather, when Veyadi lost his shrine to the Harbor, he saw in Sunai the last link to his greater work. The jackass who broke that archive is now his only lead. If Veyadi wants to recover any of the time, effort, and resources he poured into the distorted shrine, he needs Sunai. So, he’s less than eager to sell him out to the Harbor—no matter how much leniency he’d earn for turning in a relic.
“I see,” says Sunai. “You don’t want to share me with your friends?”
Veyadi leans the slightest bit closer. The ghost of his breath brushes Sunai’s mouth. “What I want,” says Veyadi, each word trying to choke the next, “is for you to leave.”
Sunai fails to respond.
“The second we get back to Ghamor, get gone.” The heat from Veyadi’s body can’t cut the chill in Sunai’s chest. “I’ll make sure there’s an opportunity.”
Veyadi’s fingers touch his cheek, like they did the night they first faced the shrine. When they fall away, Sunai tracks their absence, his gaze fixed where they land on Veyadi’s thigh.
“Get out,” Veyadi says. “Go live a life, anywhere but here.”
“I don’t know that I can.” The words fall out of Sunai’s mouth sans intent. Otherwise, he’d never dare burden anyone with a truth like that.
Veyadi’s mouth quirks in a rare smile that is bare, wry, and completely unearned. “Sure you can.”
With that, he stands.
Sunai tries to summon the courage to say something, anything. To call Veyadi brave or sweet, and see if that would make the doctor leave with him, at least for a while. He can’t let Veyadi surrender to the Harbor; they won’t ever give him back to himself. It’s become clear that the Harbor didn’t claim him kindly.
Then Veyadi says, “It’ll go better for me if the Harbor doesn’t know to ask about you.”
There’s not a goddamn thing Sunai can say to that. He’s left alone with the ENGINE on the observation deck. He laughs again, laughs until he has to catch his breath, his chest tight with unwanted feeling.
He yearns to rebel, but he has no idea what that would look like, has forgotten how to commit himself to anything worth having. His wants are terminally shallow. This is what the letter warned of. The cost of his mistakes.
For a flash, desire burns hot in Sunai’s chest. He inhales the chill to extinguish it.
An existential crisis of space, time, and your ejection from it.
The second time you die, you expect it to stick.
It is not long since you were remade, when you are more brave than clever, and when Imaru still trusts you. You and she have taken on two trucks full of indentured servants who require transport out of the Immaculate Empire border-state of Apo Il Gong. Your aim is the neighboring Apo Dun, which is about to be absorbed into independent AI-held Bastion, where indentured servitude is illegal and extradition has lately become politically unpopular. An imperial scout decides he has been insufficiently bribed and takes up his grievance with Imaru. He makes his complaint with that rarest of post-Cradle weaponry: a pistol. You interrupt the bullet’s trajectory with your torso.
Imaru has no time to burn your body. She leaves it in the brush, a scant hundred feet off the road. The Apo wilds are all frigid wood—hard, dark, preserving. She means, I think, to come back.
Before she can, you wake under frozen leaves, eyes open to stars through thicket. You have never seen the night so clear, so near and empty and black. You shiver there, unready to move, until Cradle crosses the horizon, lunar glow etched in the cracks of its broken shell.
Unthinking, you shudder to your feet and limp down the hill to the road with pins and needles in your bad ankle, stomach sore where it had been open and wet, where it is now dry and closed.
You’re cold as you walk, and it makes you wonder if you’re truly yourself. An urgent pulse beats in your skull, thudding frantically out of time with the tempo in your chest.
You find Imaru by the light of her cigarette, alone in the dark with her grief and her guilt. She leans on the outside wall of a shabby teahouse at the edge of the downworld enclave where you planned to camp. At the sight of you, smeared with earth and blood, she comes unmoored. She takes you for a ghost, even as you accept her cigarette and inhale deeply beside her, not looking, not daring to think, hearing only the accursed sound of your heart beating ceaseless in your chest.
9
The Sovereign escorts the Third Scrap through the artificial badlands and past the Ghamori militia’s handful of rigs, crewed by the smugglers and so forth to whom the Harbor delivers its usual choice: conscription, exile, or expedient execution. Onward, into the dusty brick thoroughfares of the trade and transport district. They aren’t stopped by Harbor security; what more could the Harbor do to secure them? As Sunai packs and repacks his ruck, he sees neither hide nor hair of Veyadi.
This is extremely on purpose. If Sunai sees Veyadi, he’ll falter. In telling Sunai to bolt, Veyadi gave up his chance to figure out his lost shrine. Sunai is queasy with guilt, and guilt makes him so goddamn stupid.
The engineer, whose name Sunai has already forgotten, has misinterpreted the situation. She hangs in the door to the crew quarters, asking Sunai to give Dr. Lut the benefit of the doubt. Sure he’s a moody jackass, and yeah he’s been in a sulk since they left the plateau, but he pays well, and he prefers a living crew over a successful run, and it’s not like they’re going back to that creepshow, and hey, is Sunai finished with that mag, and will he trade it for one of hers?
Sunai gives her the mag as the captain comes by with his pay: a satchel of barter tokens accepted in city-states across the northern stretch of the continent. Like Veyadi knows Sunai shouldn’t go any farther south, lest the archipelago test his impulse control. Sunai stuffs the tokens to the bottom of his ruck alongside his copy of the Lay, where the letter used to live.
The second the Scrap folds down in the garage, Sunai hops up from his bunk, shoulders his ruck, and sneaks out the foreleg-side service entrance.
The garage is one of several in the warehouse. It’s bigger and cleaner than the average salvage-crew can afford; the ENGINE looming in the launch field outside won them preference. That means a stretch of uncluttered space between Sunai and the exit. It’s fully exposed, but Veyadi is true to his word. No one’s around to see him leave.
Sunai skirts the edge and puts as much service machinery as he can between himself and the view from the Scrap’s open cargo bay. He makes it all the way to the exit before someone stops him. He turns, wearing an indifferent scowl.
Jin throws a poncho over his shoulders and secures it with their arm. Waretu follows close behind, cheerfully carrying both of their rucks.
“Heard you’re looking for another job,” says Jin. “I’ve got a lead.”
Sunai would flee, if they weren’t in view of both the Third Scrap and the Sovereign. Jin has already drawn too much attention, and he knows they’re capable of drawing more. Sunai lets them guide him into the bustling, smoggy street. They thread into a crowd of salvage-rats, peddlers, and traders, down the row of choice garages and around the corner to a lesser line of warehouses. Sunai eyes the alley between a dingy teahouse and lopsided hostel.
Jin squeezes his shoulder. “Don’t run yet. Haven’t even told you who the job’s with.”
Sunai’s blood sludges. Jin keeps him moving, and Waretu pats his shoulder encouragingly.
“You were following me,” says Sunai.
“Never said otherwise, did we?” says Jin. “We kept an eye on you. Kept you safe. Safe as we could, anyway. Didn’t expect Doc’s field trip to get that weird. Point being: we’ve got you. Come on. You’re missed.”
Though there’s only one person who would send Sunai a letter signed with a sigil of the Lay, plenty others would track him down to punch his teeth in. Sunai doesn’t know good people, or rather, none of the good ones talk to him anymore. Veyadi wasn’t the first to notice that Sunai has too much traditional education for a refugee scout, and he’s had worse years. Years when he was too willing to guide people through the wilds for purposes he’d rather not remember.
Unfortunately, those who dare the wilds for such vile business are more than willing to hunt itinerant scouts to the far edge of the continent. He has every reason to turn tail, but he can’t yet. Better to saddle himself with bad work for mean folk than to catch the Harbor’s attention and ruin Veyadi’s sacrifice.
They take him to a shabby sparrow parlor adjacent to the scrapyard lane, where junked rigs go to be shredded, their parts melted down or repurposed. Jin releases him on the concrete stairwell leading to the entrance, which is closed. They expect Sunai to open the door to his own doom. Jerk.
Then it opens for him, and the person beyond it is so unexpected that for a moment, he stops thinking.
A lean, middle-aged Mohani woman leans on the doorframe, her handsome mouth slanting toward the gray at the temples of her close-shorn black hair. She’s decked in the same sort of light road-wear she wore on the way out of Khuon Mo, the kind that says she considers being indoors an imposition.
Imaru.
She greets Sunai with a pat on the cheek and turns with the expectation that he’ll follow. He does. He has never been able to resist her.
They pass the aunty at the till and a scatter of largely abandoned tables to ascend a winding flight of wooden stairs to a narrow second floor. Imaru remembers his pace, even though she hasn’t had to keep it in over five years—since he left her.
He’s reminded, then, of why it’s been so long since they walked anywhere together. The last time he saw Imaru, she wanted to go back to Khuon Mo. The recollection pushes him out of mild awe at her presence into a distinct apprehension. As Imaru opens a door to a private room that probably started life as a supply closet, he catches the sleeve of her jacket.
“Are you dying?” he asks. “You have to tell me if you’re dying.”
Imaru turns on him with a curious frown. There’s an intensity to her focus that makes women giggle and Sunai wary. “Not quickly. How about you?”
“Only as fast as I can manage.”
Imaru snorts and her mouth twitches. Sunai remembers in a terrible rush that he adores her.
He lets her seat him at the spare table within, where an uncle brings them tea. A small, high window makes smoking bearable. Sunai extracts one of his last few cigarettes and offers it first to Imaru. She lights it, takes a drag, and offers it back. They share the cigarette in this familiar way as she pours dark tea and they take each other in.
“You look…” Imaru stops.
Sunai knows how he looks: just like he did five years ago, when he abandoned Imaru in the smoking ruins of Chom Dan. Just like he did when the two of them fled Khuon Mo together, much more than five years ago.
“Miserable and filthy,” Sunai finishes. “I haven’t bathed.”
“The filth part of your disguise?”
“Until it rains. So you’re not dying, but you sent a pair of mercs to kidnap me? What is this?”
“Jin’s not a merc.” Imaru smudges out the cigarette in a clay ashtray. “You get the letter?”
When Sunai grasps the question, he doesn’t understand it. That damn letter, signed with the sigil of Leaf 36—that couldn’t have come from Imaru. Could it?
“God’s multifaceted ass,” Imaru sighs, proving she can read him as well as she ever has. “What are you doing, accepting letters from Ruhi?”
“What are you doing reading my mail?”
“How do you think it reached you?”
They study each other, neither touching the tea. The last time they ran together, neither of them trusted Ruhi. So little else has changed. Why would that?
Imaru shrugs first. “Hard to avoid the man, working out of Khuon Mo. He heard I was looking for you. Asked me to deliver it.”
Sunai lights another cigarette. He needs a reason not to look Imaru in the eye while he swallows sour anxiety spiked with jealousy. Of course Imaru and Ruhi cross paths back home; of course Sunai didn’t know this, because of course, he doesn’t see either of them; he has avoided Khuon Mo for seventeen years, Imaru for five, and Ruhi for nearly one.
Years ago, Sunai and Imaru met Ruhi when they were partners and he worked alone. Later, Ruhi found Sunai trekking through the wilds solo and not speaking of her.
Ruhi knows how to extract the thorns from Sunai’s feelings better than anyone—he has the training, the instinct, the careful, unthreatening touch. Sometimes, as in the case of Imaru, that meant leaving the fullness of the emotion buried where no one had to look at it. He never did ask Sunai where Imaru went. Turns out he already knew.
Sunai has difficulty inhaling the next swell of nicotine. It would be better to stop thinking like this. “I suppose you didn’t come here to play messenger,” he says.
Imaru interlaces her fingers rather than reaching for the cigarette. “There’s a job. In Khuon Mo.”
“Oh. Then, no.”
“The client needs people familiar with Iterate Fractal’s tech. Ideally someone who knew the lighthouse shrine.”
Pain radiates from Sunai’s ankle as he presses his booted toes hard to the floor. “All right. Now you’re being an asshole.”
“Sunai.” Did she always sound so old when she said his name like that? “The Harbor. They built the ENGINE.”
Sunai cackles. Imaru draws back, eyes wide.
“Like hell they did.” Sunai removes his specs to wipe his cheeks. “It doesn’t take the Harbor seventeen years to build an ENGINE. They don’t have what they need.”
“I know.” Imaru stares at Sunai as if he can ground her the way he used to. “Something changed. They found someone, or … People have seen things, Sunai. Something large patrolling the waters in the northern atolls—culling fragtech, demolishing corruption-ruins.”
“That’s nothing. Hearsay. If the Harbor had a new ENGINE, there’d be parades, press conferences, dick-waving ceremonies on par with an ascension to the Immaculate goddamn Pantheon—”
“I’ve seen it.”
Sunai falls back in his seat, unaware he’d gotten out of it. Static roars in his head. He doesn’t want it to be true, and he can forgive himself that. But Imaru says she’s seen it, an ENGINE guarding Khuon Mo. Imaru says she’s seen a dead god walking.
Sunai has long since stopped mourning Iterate Fractal, inasmuch as he can. But he’s been dead seventeen years, dead certain Iterate Fractal is too. If it isn’t—if the Harbor has forced breath back into its corrupted corpse …
The weight of the thought slips through his fingers. Iterate Fractal died, like Register Parse died. Sunai has stood on both their graves. Sometimes corruption leaves enough behind for scavengers to make a Sovereign. Sometimes it leaves nothing but a towering shrine, blackened by a fire long since burnt out.
But the remains of Iterate Fractal—those weren’t nothing. Imaru saw them, when she cut Sunai out of the withered archival heart. Sunai has seen them since, in his dreams on the nights he fails to find oblivion. A year out, two, five, he was still preoccupied by the prospect of its resurrection. Now? Iterate Fractal is a ghost. His mind can’t hold it.
