Neither she nor Etris passes a remark, and neither of them tries to make conversation with the child. Ovuha slides into the water at the deepest end. Above her the broadcast goes on, louder and sharper than life, a ballistic orchestra of combat vessels falling to ruin. Brittle as quartz in their collapse under the lethal pressure of implosive vices, entire warships crushed like castles of salt. Underwater it is easier to ignore, the sound muted, the sight dimmed to smears. She does not mourn the Comet’s forces; she’s lost many of her own to them. Even then. This is different.
She sinks as deep as she can, holding her breath, keeping her eyes open. The senses turn sideways here, the body becomes entirely alert to its processes and limits. The demands of lungs and valves, the turns and tangles of airways. Intricate, interconnected, and absolutely simple. The slow roar of her own rhythms; she knows precisely when that becomes urgent, when it becomes a need to rise to the surface. Each time she pushes this point a little further, bringing herself that much closer to the cusp of mortality.
Her chest burns. The muted roar becomes thunder. She propels, spearing up through water. It is as though she is tricking gravity, tricking the force of nature. Air in her mouth, sound normal again, water on her eyelashes. Everything is of supreme clarity; endorphins make a wireframe of the world. For a time she dedicates herself to strong, fast strokes. One lap, two laps. The broadcast goes on but it has uncoupled from meaning; it is distant noise, image without significance. Her limbs pumping against the water, that is what matters. Her strength, the power of her body, this eternal foundry that burns on will alone.
“I thought you weren’t going to come back up.”
Ovuha doesn’t answer Etris. She suspects it must have happened—drowning is no easy way out, but it is one of the more accessible methods in the camp. The wardens have no desire to clean the pool of bloated corpses, however, and so thus far there have been no successes. She inhales deeply, exhales as deep, readying herself for another dive.
“I know when the transfer deadline is.”
She starts, jolted out of the peculiar trance that exertion can bring. Language reasserts. She wipes chlorinated water from her eyes, from her mouth. The bitter, acidic stink of it. Etris is watching her intently. “The Vaisravana transfer?” Of course everything they do or say is surveilled. But gossip flows freely, always has. It is the primary currency of the camp and the wardens permit it exactly because of that, the way it affects bargaining between inmates, and this information is not precisely classified.
“Yes.” Etris climbs up the pool’s edge, draws her knees close. At the best of times she looks prone to breaking, a thing of dry kindling and dead leaves. The water has wizened her skin, shrunk her down further still. There is hardly any fat on her, but hardly any muscle either. “I spoke to the warden who brought me here. He said I’ll be sent off, the same as anyone else. Nothing he can do about it. Isn’t that funny? Nothing I can do about it, he said that, just like that.”
She waits for the Wyomere woman to speak, to offer something, to open negotiations. Out of the pool she climbs, loosening herself from the liquid pull, the undertow. There is nothing to dry herself with, only the humid heat. On their end, the teenager is floating on their back, eyes shut. Eavesdropping. In here everyone must watch and listen at all times. Anything can become important, become of use.
Etris purses her mouth. “There must be something you want.”
“I want a lot of things.”
“You don’t trade with anyone.”
Ovuha does: she uses meal tickets, exercise and hygiene and medical passes, occasionally clothing or a tidbit of gossip. “If you mean that I don’t trade my flesh, that’s true. Perhaps I’m saving myself for marriage. Perhaps I don’t want anything that badly. But I already fight in the arena, and that’s selling your body in its own fashion.” She smiles. “You don’t strike me as being after sex, especially not with me. I could be wrong.”
Etris squeezes water from her braid. It may be a point of vanity or some cultural quirk—she’s avoided being shaven clean, rare for any inmate, and must have paid for it one way or another. “I have to get out of here—soon. One fight, one win, that’s all I need. You know how to win.”
Soon could be a month, two months, a couple weeks. She expects she will be able to tell by discovering when Etris enters the arena. “I don’t want to be party to your murder. That’s what could happen in there. Our beloved overseer isn’t picky. You might break a bone, perforate a lung, and who knows if you’ll get medical attention in time or at all.”
“I’m not,” Etris whispers, “going to survive on Vaisravana.”
To toil there until her body breaks, never seeing her children again. The terraforming colony there is more brutal than any detention camp, and though the labor can and should be automated by drones, the Bureau has opted to use humans. Potentiates must earn their keep somehow, even in so pointless and punitive a manner as this—it is not as if Anatta is running out of space or resources. Despite herself Ovuha is pierced by the terrible mundanity of it, a warlord’s domain reduced to a penal colony. The Mirror was a proud and worthy opponent. “Most people won’t survive there,” Ovuha says. The choice between dying quickly in the arena or dying slowly on the red world. “Give me the date. I’ll do what I can for you.”
“Nineteenth of July, at five thirty-five.”
The water hides her reaction. It is not the deadline. This is another fragment of what her predecessor has left for her, the puzzle she is meant to find and piece together, because letting her carry this information in her own head was so risky—anything she knows, despite her conditioning and compartmentalizing, stands in danger of being bled out.
Nineteen, seven, five, thirty-five. Scrambled numbers for her to untangle and match with the cipher. The entire Luo family was entrusted with more than just the replicant bird. The methodology, the how of this information passing to Etris, is beyond her purview. Like so much else, the plan had to be hidden from her, its greatest instrument. No other path was safe.
“All right,” she says, recovering. “Let’s get out of the water, I’ll show you some basic forms and we’ll pass it off as warming up exercises—”
The broadcast shifts. The audio blares, the display enlarges until it blots out the skylight. No longer possible to ignore. Ovuha looks up, listens as Samsara’s voice speaks over the news. All citizens are to attend. A channel override; anyone deep in virtuality, entertainment or pornographic, would have been rudely torn out.
The view turns to a single person kneeling on gray, cracked earth. Their armor is white with dust and their skin, what little is exposed, is black with paralytic fetters. Smoke writhes in the distance and a banner snaps in the wind, next to the ruin of a dropship. The battle was fresh, or at least it is staged to look so, this person just defeated and captured. What is on the banner—the stylized flame, the seven-pointed star—is immediately recognizable, absolutely familiar.
Ovuha’s throat tightens.
A Peace Guard proxy comes into view. Without ceremony it rips the prisoner’s helmet off. So roughly that the metal scrapes the face beneath: a line of blood on albino skin, a spill of matted hair leeched of all pigment. And though Ovuha does not know the face, has never seen it in her life, she knows who this is. Save for its unusual pallor this is not a face she would have picked out in a crowd; the features are plain, the mouth thin and the nose slightly crooked.
The Warlord of the Comet raises their head. Their lip is split; more than the fresh cut there are darkening bruises, scabbing wounds. One eye is swollen completely shut, and from the extent of damage Ovuha would guess the eye socket is broken. Nevertheless the Comet’s mouth curves slowly as their gaze meets the camera. “None of you know me. My name means nothing. What title I hold I do not need to declare, but I’ve been told to say it and so I oblige, for it must amuse my audience. I am the Warlord of the Comet, the Marshal of Five Orbits, the Fire that Consumes.” Their voice might have been powerful once, a thing of ringing baritone. It is cracked now, a thing of hairline faults. “For those watching from Anatta: congratulations. You have brought down the last of us. Now you’ll have the universe you wanted, the one under Samsara. By its light alone you will be guided. There shall be no other lord before it.”