I followed Bofa and Roel as they left the meeting. At a distance, of course. I walked casually, greeting the staff as I passed them but staying out of sight of my quarry. Eifni had these sick ether-linked goggles that could show you where your target’s attention was pointed, but I didn’t have any on me, so I was just falling back on my Academy training for this. It was pretty easy mode—Bofa was blocking Roel’s line of sight, and Roel was commanding his attention. They weren’t in a hurry, so every so often I started a brief conversation to give myself a plausibly-deniable reason for not overtaking them. Not with Alouren, who passed me and tried to get my attention. She would definitely keep me there all night.
“Godsmile, Alouren,” I said. “Sleep well.”
“Actually, I was thinking about what happens to the soul during sleep,” she said quickly. “What are dreams?”
“They’re—look, I don’t know, kid. Can’t you ask a priestess about this stuff?”
“They don’t know anything,” she said, apparently oblivious to the irony. “You know all sorts of stuff. I thought you might know.”
I tried to watch Bofa out of the corner of my eye while wracking my brain for ways to end the conversation. “Well, I don’t. Maybe next time.”
I managed one step down the hall before Alouren squeezed past me to stand in my way.
“Wait! I have another question!” she said.
I looked at her, then looked down the hall.
“Are you stalling me?” I said.
“No,” Alouren said uncomfortably.
“You suck at lying,” I said, crossing my arms. “Why are you stalling me? Did Roel put you up to this?”
“I, uh,” she said, glazing wildly around the hallway as though inspiration were hiding right behind my shoulder or something. “I’m not?”
“Sure, whatever,” I said. “I’m going that way. Please move.”
“You can’t!” she said.
I nodded slowly, sizing her up. She was shorter than me—bit of a waif, really. No way she topped a hundred thirty pounds. I could bench her no problem.
“Okay,” I said.
I reached under her armpits and lifted her up. She squeaked in surprise. I turned ninety degrees and set her down.
“Goodnight, Alouren,” I said. I set off at a brisk walk. Alouren didn’t follow.
“I’ll tell her you’re spying on her,” she called after me.
I turned. She looked almost frightened.
“Dude,” I said. “My bedroom is this way. Are we cool?”
“I—” she frowned. “I’m not a man.”
“Dude is—actually, forget it. Are we going to avoid unnecessary drama, or do I need to tell the head cook that you’re shirking cleanup duties?”
“But I’m not—”
I leaned in. “You make shit up, I make shit up. Understand?”
She looked pretty unhappy at that. A cool evening breeze filtered through the hallway, bringing the scents of the sleeping city to our noses. I know that sounds kind of nice, but actually it didn’t smell that great.
“Fine,” she said. “Don’t hurt Roel. Okay? If you’re going to—I don’t know, just don’t hurt her, okay?”
“I really don’t know where this is coming from,” I said. “Goodnight, Alouren.”
She watched me turn the corner to the hallway where my room was located, then ran off somewhere else. I rolled my eyes, cloaked, and went after Roel again.
“How many freaking wannabe spies do I have to deal with?” I whined over the comms as I made my way to the edge of the second floor balcony.
“What happened?” Val’s voice came to me.
“Well, Roel’s clearly up to something, and now she’s got Alouren running interference,” I said.
“If you’re struggling to outmaneuver untrained teenagers, I’ve heard tell of an ancient technique called ‘subtlety.’”
“Yeah, but have you used it?”
Val’s scoff rippled through the etheric channel. “I am the very soul of subtlety.”
“I feel like I would have noticed.”
“Quite.”
I snorted. “Touche.”
For whatever reason, losing the verbal spar didn’t carry the bite it normally did. That was nice. Felt like I’d beaten something.
“What’s the provenance of the word you just used?” Val asked. “It felt martial.” Undercurrents of approval ran through the question. He thought I’d done something right too.
In proper Velean fashion, I left all that unsaid and answered the literal question.
“It’s French,” I said. “There’s this sport, fencing, where people fight with rapiers. Uh, thin, wobbly kind of sword.”
“A show weapon?”
“I mean, it’s a sport weapon, so it’s blunted. We can’t come back if we get killed. But they’re meant for stabbing. Someone stabs you, you’re supposed to yell touche.”
“Mm. The closest equivalent in Velean is ‘good strike.’ I appreciate that you have a single word for it.”
“The French do, anyway.” I scanned the courtyard to see if Bofa and Roel were down there. Literally—I set my eyes to thermal vision. The ghostlights along the inner balcony showed up as tiny pinpoints, but the only human-sized heat signatures were the wrong shape to be my target. I leaned on the balcony railing and sighed. Alouren might not have been subtle, but she’d managed to slow me down.
Stolen novel; please report.
Nice try, kid. Eifni cheats.
I pulled up the surveillance camera feed and flipped through until I found Roel. It was a lot less fun this way. Both of them—or Bofa them eyyyy gottem—were hanging out in the workshop. Peres was asleep by now, but it looked like Bofa was doing Roel’s bidding instead. They’d come a long way from Roel’s initial frostiness toward Kuril’s boy-toy.
“What motivation does she have to build in secret?” Val asked. He must have been tracking my comm activity. I pursed my lips at the thought.
The sucking emptiness of the cloak pressed in around me, insistently tugging on my soul like the last bit of pool water draining out of your ear. I focused on my presence meditation, trying to keep my heart rate from spiking.
“Look at the sketches on the table,” I said, as if the designs there were new to me. “I guess she’s got trust issues.”
“A mobility device,” said Val. “I see.”
I didn’t respond. I could only pretend ignorance for so long before the two-hundred-year-old Velean caught some tonal cue or microexpression and figured me out.
“Trust issues,” he said thoughtfully. “But she trusts you, surely.”
There was no etheric content to his tone, as was often the case when he was totally making fun of me. I shoved my annoyance aside and acted like it didn’t bother me. Or—wait, if I didn’t react, did that make it look like he got one past me without me noticing? Ugh, Velean social fencing was obnoxious sometimes.
“If you’ve concluded your reconnaissance, the commander requested you back on the ship.”
“Is that so,” I said, pushing down a spike of anxiety. “She knows I’m running an op here, right?”
“It’s training,” Val said dismissively. “As long as your skills improve, the outcome doesn’t matter.”
I breathed out sharply. “There’s real people here, man. They matter.”
“Real, yes. But not enduring. In a hundred years they’ll all be smeared across etherspace—unless we fail, in which case they’ll be god fodder—and all that will remain of this operation will be the perfection of your art.”
There were a couple dogs having some kind of squabble a couple streets away. My fists bounced leisurely on the balcony railing. It drifted in and out of focus as I kept my attention on the flame of my soul, forcing myself to remember I was here.
“You’re a cold motherfucker,” I said. “You know that?”
“Fires die.”
“Whatever, edgelord.”
Val laughed. “That would be the commander. Come on back.”
*
“Turn off your comm,” Abby said when I entered the exercise room. The lights were dimmed. She was kneeling in perfect stillness in the center of the mat, hands on her knees. Her eyes didn’t open as she addressed me.
“What part of active operation is not getting through to you people!?”
Now her eyes did open, considering me in absolute blankness. She’d set her irises to a piercing, luminescent green. They glowed harshly in the shadows.
“Markus has performed in his role for longer than you’ve been alive,” Abby said. “He’ll survive the night. Tonight, you will be learning a secret of the Old Ways, passed down from master to apprentice for nearly ten thousand years. So turn off your comm. We will speak in Velean. You will think in Velean. We will speak mind to mind, preserving the ambiguities and the struggle of intent that marked human relationships before the invention of facilitated communication.”
“Alright, alright.” I knelt across from her, telling my comm to shut down nonessential functions as I closed my eyes. I considered leaving my etheric translator running, but something told me that was a horrible idea. “Are we meditating?”
“As you think necessary,” said Abby.
“Okay,” I said in Velean. “Battle-ready.”
“Follow as best you can,” said Abby. “What will you be when you die?”
“Uh, reincarnated?” I said.
“I meant between bodies.”
“A soul only,” I said.
“What will you carry with you?”
“I have no ideas,” I said honestly. “It worries me about that.”
“You’ve shared your worries before,” said Abby. “And they’re not baseless. The brain isn’t a mere physical reflection of the soul. Even with the Ragnar’s stored images of your neural connections, you will lose memories and skills. Parts of your past life will become dreamlike, insubstantial.”
“Why would you ever flash, if that’s so?” I said.
“Because I am no longer a child,” said Abby. “You will suffer the same personality degradation if you live a hundred years—likely worse, in fact, especially if you develop a neurodegenerative disorder. We haven’t eradicated those on Veles, you know. Elective reincarnation is culturally normative and cheaper besides. One way or another, your life will be shorn away.”
I sighed. “That’s big depress.”
“It’s a challenge,” she said. “The blade-lords of the Old Ways apprehended this truth long before Eifni mastered reincarnation: we are built up and torn down every day. If you allow yourself weakness, the universe will grind you to nothing. But if your will is strong, then the blade of your self will cut heaven and earth.”
“Fuck yes,” I said. “Therefore uh… how do I do that?”
“We begin with the self. Velean psychology draws a distinction between the self and the identity. The Old Ways do not. They are a unified system of action and belief, termed the ‘blade of the mind.’ You think of yourself as a fighter because you were in the top of your close combat class. You think of yourself as intelligent because you out-performed your peers during your childhood. And so on.”
“Why is that a blade?”
Abby made a noise of approval at the question. “Have you noticed that when Val makes you feel stupid, you strike at him?”
“That’s just… me being insecure, I think.”
“No,” said Abby. “It’s lack of experience. When that edge of your self is perfected, your strike will land decisively. As Val’s strikes do, when you try to make him feel stupid.”
I perked up. “I have made him feel stupid?”
“I said try.”
My shoulders slumped. “Oh.”
“You must be aware of two truths in order to hone your self,” said Abby. “The first is that it is zero-sum. To be fast or strong, you require someone else to be slow or weak. And the reverse is true: I am faster and stronger, so you are slower and weaker. You may find this uncomfortable—I heard you take a breath to interrupt, Lilith, I’m not letting you pretend that you’re not. Understand that the ambition behind that discomfort is something to be embraced, but you will always be a child until you can control that act of comparison.”
I wanted to say something, but then I’d be proving her right about finding it uncomfortable that I was weaker than her or something and I wasn’t. Also, she kept beating me in spars because she had like centuries of practice, not because she was like, actually faster, so I could totally still be faster than her. Which I didn’t actually care about, I didn’t go around thinking “yaaaay I’m super fast,” it’s just I could have been faster than her, you know?
But in the end I didn’t say anything, so Abby never heard my explanation of why she was wrong.
“The second truth is that the self carries the danger of any weapon: You will always be tempted to use it when it is not required. The self warps our thinking and drives us to react without strategy. It will manipulate your memories and sabotage your estimation of your opponents in order to confirm itself. So, as with any weapon, the first and most important consideration is maintaining control of it. If you can do that, death will be nothing to you.”
“Because it will preserve ‘me’ through the process of flashing?”
“Understand this, Lilith. The language of my native culture was called Xhepotre. I wrote poetry in that tongue. I used it to propose to my wife and teach my children—but all I remember of it now is the name. I left the rest behind a hundred years ago. It was no loss. Do you know why?”
I opened my eyes in shock. Abby sat in perfect stillness, those neon green eyes fixed on mine. The question hung between us in a long silence.
“No,” I admitted. “I can’t imagine.”
“Because I had no further need for it.” She said it matter-of-factly; no regret, no wistfulness, eyes betraying nothing but placid attention. “I am I. That which is I, I will carry with me even if this body is destroyed and no other awaits. And with that blade, I will cut heaven and earth.”