“That would be telling,” Ruo said. “Have fun, you two.” He kissed the top of Cheris’s head again, and strolled off.
Yeren shook her head, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Cheris’s, either.
As a point of fact, Cheris had entered anonymously. A small percentage of competition entries were anonymous each year (although Yeren was correct that most didn’t remain that way for long), but Cheris had an unusually good reason. You scored points in her game by manipulating other people, from cadets to dignitaries, into heresies. Celebrating the wrong feast-days. Giving heterodox answers on Doctrine exams. Inverted flower arrangements. Small heresies, for the most part.
Cheris hadn’t intended for many people to fall for it, even if the Shuos had a known love of dares. It had been more in the nature of a thought experiment. The heptarchate’s laws were becoming more rigid as the regime became ever more dependent on the high calendar’s exotic technologies. She had wanted to show how easy it was to inspire people to a little heresy, to demonstrate how fragile the system was. Shuos Academy encouraged games, so a game – especially during the yearly competition – was the perfect vector.
She hadn’t checked up on her entry since releasing it, or any of them, for that matter; that was the kind of mistake that got you caught. In fact, she was asleep in Yeren’s bed when she found out.
“– Jedao,” Yeren was saying urgently. “Bad news.” Her voice shook.
“Hmm?” Cheris said. But she came fully awake.
Yeren was sitting at her terminal, wrapped in a robe of violet silk. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, and blue light sheened in the dark curls. “A cadet committed suicide over one of the games,” she said. “At least, they’re claiming it’s a suicide.”
Cheris sat up and made a show of hunting for her clothes, even though she knew where they were under the covers. She still didn’t realize the significance of what Yeren had said. “Anyone we know?” she asked.
“They haven’t released the name. But I did some poking around. I – I think it might be Ruo.”
Cheris’s heartbeat thumped rapidly in her chest. Yeren was still talking. “It was over one of the games,” she said. “I remember glancing over it earlier. The anonymous one involving heresies. Except the cadet didn’t just fool one of us over some minor point of Doctrine. He got caught framing a visiting Rahal magistrate.”
It was exactly the kind of thing that Ruo would have thought hilarious. Except for the part about getting caught. Shuos Academy might have protected one of its cadets if the matter had been a minor infraction; each faction tended not to surrender its own to outsiders as a matter of jurisdictional principle. But the Rahal were also a high faction, and a magistrate – that wasn’t just an infraction, that was an offense for which the guilty party could be tortured to death in a remembrance.
Cheris had opened her mouth to admit that the game had been hers, that she was the one who had killed Ruo, when Yeren went on, “The game’s not anonymous anymore, at any rate. It looks like Chenoi Tiana has confessed that it’s hers. She’s under investigation right now.”
Both of them knew that “under investigation” was unlikely to result in any serious reprimand. Cheris’s heartbeat had slowed. “Who’s Tiana?” she asked.
She had a way out. And she was taking it. She hadn’t realized she had already made the decision.
“She’s a third-year, no reason you should know her,” Yeren said. “I’m so sorry, Jedao. It – I might be wrong. The suicide could be someone else.”
Cheris doubted it. Yeren was very good at hacking. One of the benefits of dating her was learning from her. And the dead cadet being someone else wouldn’t make the situation much better.
She couldn’t put off the hard part. “Ruo was an idiot if he let himself get caught,” she said with deliberate carelessness. “Suicide’s better than hanging around to have your fingers pulled off, so I can’t say that I blame him.”
Yeren made a pained sound. “He was our friend, Jedao.”
Cheris dressed quickly. “Friendship doesn’t mean anything to the dead, and I don’t think either of us wants to be associated with him anyhow.”
“If that’s your take on it,” she said, her voice shaking again, “get out. Maybe I’ll see you later and maybe I won’t.”
Yeren might have some intention of salvaging the relationship after calming down, but Cheris didn’t. She left without argument.
Cheris headed out to a café. She had arranged for a small null in camera coverage – as the joke went, if you didn’t hack the commandant’s surveillance system at least once as a first-year, you were fit only for the Andan – and she wanted to listen in on the news. People were already gossiping about the suicide.
While Cheris listened to the gossip with half an ear, she started hacking the academy’s grid. The tablet she was using looked like a model that had been popular four years ago, but what wasn’t obvious was that she had wired together the innards from a decrepit laboratory machine she had begged off her mother. Her mother had been amenable so long as she didn’t cause anything to blow up. (She was never going to live down that experiment with the food processor when she was twelve.) She didn’t have any illusions that the tablet’s secret obsolescence would hinder a real Shuos grid diver, but if she worked quickly, she had a chance of getting away with her query.
It didn’t take long for Cheris to find pictures of Ruo’s corpse. Even with the bullet hole in the side of his head, the red-gray mess on the other side, the blood matted in his hair, she recognized him. She would have known him in the dark by his footsteps, or by the taste of his mouth, or the way he always broke left when he was startled. She had assumed that he would always greet her with that kiss on the top of her head, and that they would graduate together, perhaps even apply to the same assignments. All of that was gone now.
Cheris had difficulty concentrating. Up until this point, she had convinced herself that all the game maneuvers existed solely in some abstract space. There was nothing abstract about the fact that she’d killed her best friend.
Still, she wasn’t done yet. As luck would have it, she made it into Tiana’s profile because someone had forgotten to lock it down after making their edits, or someone else had been hacking it before she had and left the doors open.
Two instructors had made private notes in Tiana’s profile. They praised her ruthlessness and her boldness in claiming credit in the wake of a suicide. They praised her mastery of Shuos ideals. And, almost as an afterthought, they recommended that she be placed in two advanced seminars next term.
Cheris closed the connection and stayed in the café until it got dark. During that time, she played seven games of jeng-zai and lost them all.
No one ever figured out that Cheris was the author of Tiana’s game.
“RUO,” CHERIS SAID hoarsely into the silence. She had not spoken his name in over four centuries. It was hard to believe that he had been dead that long, that she was the only person who remembered the brightness of his eyes, his laugh, his unexpected fondness for fruit candies. The shape of his hands, with their blunt, steady fingers.
For a moment she wondered why her voice sounded too high, strangely alien. And then she remembered that, too. Her face was wet, but she tried not to think about that.
Cheris bent herself to finishing the task she had set herself. She already knew how much the splinters hurt. A little more wouldn’t matter.
FOUR HUNDRED AND nineteen years before the Siege of the Fortress of Scattered Needles, on a world whose name had atrophied to a murmur, the heptarchate warred against rebels. The rebels flew many banners: the Thorn-and-Circle, the Winged Flower, the Red Fist. The Inverted Chalice and the Snake Defiant. The Stone Axe. In those days, it seemed that every hilltop, every city in the shadow of a forever cloud, every glimmering moon had its own device.