shackles now lay in a neat pile in the corner of the cell. The cell consisted of a cramped but clean space with two berths, a window and a wall of bars. Miriam didn’t suppose the ship took prisoners often.
On the other side of the bars was a narrow hallway that ran past the cell, the ends of which stretched beyond what perspective allowed Miriam to see.
The floor was textured duralumin and the wall that faced the cell was white. There was, however, a solitary guard.
It sprouted from a simple rectangular pot lined with what looked like shallow brown soil. The pot sat on a short corbelled shelf, eight feet away according to Miriam’s diaglyphs.
In the pot was an organ, pale and rigid as a Pplarian phallus and covered with what looked like tiny black eyes. It rose vertically, at an organic angle. Fungoid. Whether it could see or hear or both, Miriam didn’t know. She spoke in cant to Autumn. “Are you going to bite your tongue?” She was only half-joking.
“If I have to.” Autumn smirked.
“You’d think they’d have come to check on us by now,” said Anjie. She nudged the pile of restraints with her foot.
“I imagine they’ll bring breakfast,” said Miriam.
After a short interval, Autumn scowled and said, “Can you hear that?”
Miriam had no idea what she was talking about.
“It sounds like—”
“I hear it,” said Anjie. “It sounds like someone screaming through the wall.”
Miriam still couldn’t hear it. “Maybe they’re torturing the High King.”
Autumn looked out the window at Sena’s ship. “You know,” she said. “There’s enough blood on this boat to jump across.”
Anjie nodded.
“There’s only three of us left,” said Miriam. “I think we should regroup. I think we should go back to Skellum.”
“I agree,” said Anjie. “We should regroup.”
“But she’s right there,” said Autumn.
Miriam didn’t know how to say it. Yes, Sena was right there. But Miriam knew Sena, far better, and Sena frightened Miriam. How did she communicate the wisdom of that fear without demoralizing her ancillas?
A door clanged open at the end of the hallway. The sound was accompanied by the loud echoing rattle of a wheeled cart moving over the textured floor.
It stopped almost immediately.
“I’m not eating!” The sharp voice of Dr. Baufent made Miriam smile. She could picture the physician sulking three or four cells down.
The sound of plastic scraping against metal was followed by a crash. Autumn looked at Miriam and covered her mouth. Only Anjie remained grim in the aftermath of what had probably been an entire tray of food, scattering across the floor.
A man spoke with a thick Ilek accent. “Suit yourself. Maybe at lunch you’ll be hungry.” While he spoke, Miriam heard keys being applied, probably to the physician’s door.
“What’s that?” asked Baufent.
“Nothing,” said the man. “Just going to draw a little blood. We have to make sure you’re healthy.”
Miriam looked at Autumn.
“I’m healthy as a horse!” snapped Baufent. “Get your hands off me.”
“They’re checking for the plague,” whispered Anjie.
Miriam nodded and put a finger to her lips.
“Please try to relax,” the man was saying.
“What’s going on out there?” demanded Baufent. “I heard screaming.”
“Nothing,” said the man. “Everything is fine.”
“Ouch!” Baufent cried. “You cradle-custard … ouch! Sozzling … are you even trained to do this?”
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “I’m doing my best.” But his voice was tense and strained. He did not sound as if everything was fine.
The words were an invitation. Miriam signaled Anjie who started whispering fast frantic syllables, searching for holojoules. Just a drop. A small bead soaking into a cotton ball that might have been taped over Baufent’s arm, for instance.
Anjie made the hand sign for yes and Miriam heard the result. Enough holojoules had been gathered to breach the specimen vial the Iycestokian had used to collect Baufent’s blood. It shattered with a pop. The men— Miriam could hear both of them—gave out panicked cries.
It was Autumn’s turn to start talking. She quickly gathered the ounces into a stronger equation. A far more dangerous sum. Miriam listened as Autumn turned the fresh holojoules toward the task of understanding what she could not see: the region out of sight, down the hall, the landscape of the breakfast cart.
There wasn’t much energy to work with and Miriam felt a pang of anxiety that Autumn might squander the small gift they had been given. But then Autumn’s equation changed gears and Miriam knew she had succeeded in finding a tool to manipulate.
With a final word, Autumn ended her sequence and Miriam heard a scream.
There was no point being quiet anymore. Miriam called out to the new supply, a coursing torrent pouring from the man’s chest, spattering over the floor from where a butter knife had been driven between his ribs. She used it first and foremost to slice—with numbers—through the other man’s throat.
This used all seven cuts from the first body and left her with seven from the second.
But seven was not a small number in holomorphic terms. It was the threshold of sacrifice. It represented enormous possibilities.
Dr. Baufent was shouting. The strange phallic fungus in its pot was screaming and men armed with living weapons were pouring through the hallway door. Miriam watched them slip in the blood as they scrambled down the hallway, searching for the perpetrators. They did not move gracefully. They seemed ill. She turned her math. Their weapons betrayed them.
Now there were gouts and torrents of blood, holojoules singing in the air.
Miriam and her sisters exited the cell through fringe space as the violence continued to spread through the ship. Miriam guided it carefully, avoiding Baufent, avoiding those they had flown with on the
Miriam looked back on the world as if it were a litho. As if they stood on a color image of a prison. A two- dimensional picture of a cell … and no more capable of holding them.
Miriam stepped off the image and moved past copper wires, tubing and thick-lensed dials caked with grime. On the edge of the vessel’s cockpit she found a woman that might have been the captain of the ship. She did not look healthy.
Miriam felt the darkness boiling behind her. She skirted the lip of the abyss, pulling her ancillas with her. The window back to reality shifted beneath her feet at absurd angles: she saw the Iycestokian airship from top down, the foot of a passing bird—stark against the sky. She didn’t have much time to deliberate.
She glanced into another room and saw a man with silver skin curled up on the floor.
“It’s not worth it,” she said to Autumn. “We need to regroup. I’m taking us home.”
Miriam dragged them north. Her decision meant that she would not be Coven Mother. She would remain Sororal Head. But she had had enough. Her girls had had enough. She didn’t care what happened to the High King of Stonehold. Her little group had suffered too much.
With the holojoules of a hundred eighty lives propelling them, Miriam found the places where the starlines intersected the planet and calculated her coordinates.
She pulled her sisters along the outside. They travelled vertically in a higher dimension, up reality’s thickness, thumbing through the pages to find the right place to reinsert themselves.
At her back, Miriam felt the void. She had crossed lines before and while there was the worry of losing touch with her window back, this time it was different. This time she felt something
