Ovuha stares at this figure, this creature. “What are you?” Though already she has an idea.
“Ah, I haven’t introduced myself—very rude. Let’s do this properly.” It bows from the waist, its four hands clasped. “To the Warlord of the Thorn, master of the secret world Mahakala, I convey felicitous greetings. I’m Klesa, custodian of humanity, though of reduced circumstances. I was, and am, an instance of the intelligence you know as Samsara.”
Chapter Nineteen
By miracle, or likelier by Klesa’s hand, they reenter Anatta without being shot down mid-air. They pass the angular nests of climate grids, flying over ghost liminals: a desert, a charred mountain range, a prairie of stone brushes and tattered grass. Carcass countries, lands that are also vanquished bodies. Suzhen thinks to ask whether they might each harbor another fragment of Samsara, but she foregoes the question. It is the least pressing, next to others.
From the air, Klesa’s territory is a spread of too-bright greens, the rare edifices that jut through like broken teeth and rotted bones. The shuttle eases down, finding gaps between the leaves and the boughs, brushing past orchids. It drifts like a dandelion seed more than a vehicle of cold metal and hot motion. The landing is soft; the engine goes still by Suzhen’s campsite. Day has broken here, spilling its platinum blood across the soil and canopies. After the coolness of the shuttle this heat gusts over her, warms the back of her neck.
Ovuha follows her out of the shuttle, bearing Taheen and trailing a wake of jasmines that have wilted and fallen off her arm. Klesa’s avatar has dissipated, saying that xe has errands to attend. Ovuha has been mute. Until now, where she says, “I believe now that you’re really you.”
“And you—the Warlord of the Thorn.”
“Yes. I’m afraid so. I wasn’t the only one, as such, though now it’s just me.”
Suzhen tries to think of what to say without revealing too much, or whether she should reveal anything. To admit Vaisravana. To admit the rest. “Why?” She unveils her cabin from camouflage and unlocks it.
“Why am I the Thorn? That would require a complicated explanation.” Ovuha’s mouth crooks. She puts Taheen on one of the cabin’s cots. “Or why have I come to Anatta?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
The woman before her, the warlord, glances at her friend. “Do you have anything to wake them up early?” Ovuha takes the first-aid kit from Suzhen and draws from it an antidote tab. She opens the patch and presses it into Taheen’s neck. “I have a lot of explaining to do, and I’d rather do it just the once. I might need to restrain them. Don’t be alarmed, I have no intention of hurting even a hair on their head.” She withdraws her hand from Taheen. Heaves out a long breath. “I do apologize in advance.”
When Taheen wakes it is with a spasm, the sedative emergency-flushed out of their system. They cough and gag as though consciousness is a noose. “Fuck.” Their voice is hoarse as they take in the sight of the cabin, then Ovuha and Suzhen. “Where am I?”
“Anatta’s surface.” Ovuha moves onto the cot, taking one of Taheen’s arms, positioning herself to straddle them. “In the place where all things end, there the moon is a knife and the sky its savage canvas, tearing at each sunset and healing with every dawn. The cosmos is itself a great wound, eternally renewing.”
To Suzhen this is gibberish, divorced from context or sense. To Taheen it means something else: their eyes widen, their mouth parts. All their features contort as though overcome with agony. They squeeze their eyes shut; open them again and now their gaze is lucid. And furious. “You,” Taheen croaks. “You.”
It happens quickly. Taheen moves in a way Suzhen has never seen before, throwing Ovuha off and lunging at her. They bear Ovuha down, grabbing at her throat. On her part Ovuha bats off their hands, pushing at their midsection with her knees. Taheen topples into a small table, crashing into a pile of machine-parts. They regain their feet almost instantaneously. The two face off, crouched, stances almost identical.
“Please,” Ovuha says, gently. “We’ve much to do. And Suzhen’s well-being will depend on our success, she’s been acting against Samsara. This is more than my—our—original objective.”
Taheen’s fists loosen. “Go fuck yourself. My lord.” They straighten. “I need some air.”
They turn, exiting the cabin without so much as a look at Suzhen. I will keep an eye on them, says Klesa in her ear. What a difficult child, so illogical. I can speak to them, a good opportunity to introduce myself.
“So much for explaining it all to both of you at once.” Ovuha sighs. “They’re one of my soldiers. Sleeper agent, though it was my predecessor who trained and assigned them this.”
Suzhen discovers she’s been gawking. She closes her mouth. “But I first met them when they were what, twelve?”
“Taheen—nominally Cadet Taheen, though they’re surely due a promotion—was sent off when they were fourteen, small for their age. Packed in a stasis box so they could masquerade as biomass cargo. Before departing Mahakala, they underwent a series of conditioning that would suppress their memory, identity, and create a trigger phrase that’d make them remember.” Ovuha takes another antidote tab out of the first-aid kit, slaps it on her jasmine-covered arm. “Fortunately, they haven’t forgotten their martial training. Which takes some doing, considering how long it’s been. Muscle memory is an amazing thing, and they seem to have retained their strength amplifiers.”
“The Thorn uses child soldiers?”
“I was sixteen or seventeen at the time and didn’t make this decision.” A grimace tugs at Ovuha’s mouth. She shakes her arm and the graft of small, white flowers falls loose. “Most of the sleeper agents were adults and volunteered for it—of course, so did Cadet Taheen, but I imagine they have developed… other opinions since. But I hope they’ll cooperate, for your sake if not for mine.”
It is strange to be listening to her like this and, Suzhen realizes, even the way she speaks is different: at ease and at home with such conversation, reducing the universe’s scale to pieces on a board she can maneuver. People to instruments. The real Ovuha. “Why’d they do anything for me?” Taheen’s history, decades of it, incinerated in an instant and replaced with this. A child soldier who signed up to surrender their entire life, not just to die in battle but to forfeit their future.
Ovuha’s eyes dart toward her. “I’ve seen how they talk about you and how they look when they’re thinking of you. They love you. I thought that was obvious.”
“No they don’t, and no it isn’t.”
The warlord opens her mouth, starts to say something, seems to think better of it. “I don’t think I can convince you if your decades of knowing them haven’t. But you wanted an explanation for all this. Before I came here, war was pressing on every side. I tried to open negotiation with the other warlords, thinking I could make them see sense, understand that if we stood united against Samsara we might have a chance—and I was willing to share my information with them, the keys that could unlock Samsara and grant us victory. But to a one they refused to even meet. We’d been fighting too long, generation upon generation, and the only language left between us was one of ballistics. They thought I would let their troops break themselves on the Peace Guard and then I’d swoop in to take the prize, enriching my domain while leaving theirs ripe for the conquering. They believed I wanted to rise as the supreme warlord, the one and only.” Ovuha sweeps aside the last of the jasmines. “In fairness, my predecessors gave them no cause to put much stock in what I had to say. The previous Thorns were brutal, and I wasn’t exactly an image of compassion and empathy.”