She took in a deep breath, and dived in.
It was restful at first. Oily light crept along her hull, things shifting and changing, a cavernous noise like the booming of a heartbeat, resonating in her corridors, being held and loved—and then, as she got deeper in, as the light changed—as the cold seared the metal of her hull, as the warmth turned into a spike that seemed to pierce her heartroom and her core, she remembered.
Corpses. Lieutenant Hanh, torn apart as the rebel ship took out the docking bay, her sharp and angular face above the ruin of her body. The damage spreading out, engulfing the living quarters and the motors and driving through her entire body, incinerating paintings and furniture on its way to the heartroom. The privates, scattered in her now airless corridors, their screams and moans as they died still resonating in her memories. And Captain Vinh, struggling to reach the heartroom, her face tightening and changing, her skin awash in light—deep spaces pulling her apart and the scrabbling on the heartroom’s door giving way to a low whimper, and then nothing. The Shadow’s Child reaching, again and again, for controls that slid out of her grasps, feeling everything grow distant and meaningless, her bots clattering one after the other, her corridors growing numb, until only the cold and empty heartroom remained, locked tight, as if any locks and double doors could change anything going on outside...
Turn back.
There was still time. She had to—
“I can’t,” she whispered.
Long Chau had reached Tuyet. She’d wrapped her arms around the girl. She was fumbling, trying to shield the girl from deep spaces. As if she could: there was no protection there, not from what was shredding the shadow skin to unrecognisable filaments, and turning the body the colour and harshness of jade. Long Chau turned, for a moment. The link showed the dark, faraway shape of The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen. She said, slowly, “Tran Thi Kim Oanh.”
It was such an incongruous thing that The Shadow’s Child forgot, for a moment, where she was.
“She was my student,” Long Chau said. “A bright, quick girl—a delight to teach.” Again, no emotion. No hint of where she was, of what she was recollecting. “Such an intellect. If she’d been allowed to be properly trained—”
They were tumbling deeper and deeper, carried away by the current, everything blurring and shifting around them. Tuyet’s face rested on Long Chau’s shoulder, her long hair turning dark and brittle, breaking away in chunks—her tears turning into hard, jeweled things—eyes starting to bulge out. “Until she vanished,” The Shadow’s Child said. She was surprised to find old, familiar anger, strong enough to burn away everything else. “On your watch.”
A silence. Then. “Her family wanted her to enter the army,” Long Chau said. “The fastest way for her to rise—to earn honour and reputation for the family. It was a disappointing choice. A waste of my work and of my time.”
“A waste?” She was now so angry she shook. In the background, her motors continued to run, fuelling the dive, the minute adjustments that made her leap from point to point, struggling to hold her course against the currents of unreality. “That’s why you decided to earn your money the other way.”
“You don’t understand.” Long Chau’s voice was mild. “She asked me to help her vanish. I had to choose which loyalty to uphold—to her, or to her family. Not that it was much of a choice, in the end. The answer was obvious.”
“She—”
“She’s alive and well. I get messages, sometimes.” The Shadow’s Child couldn’t see the smile, but she could imagine it all too well—slow and lazy and gradually taking over Long Chau’s entire face. “And if the price for that is people wondering about what I did—let them wonder. The tribunal did interrogate me, but there are ways to mislead them, if you’re determined enough.”
“The money—”
“She paid me. For, ah. Services rendered.”
“You—you let her family think that she was dead.” The Shadow’s Child was almost there. The pressure against her hull was now unbearable. Claws, raking her again and again, a memory of struggling, powerless and broken, hearing only the screams of the dying.
She—
She could do this.
“Of course. The moment they find out she’s not, they’ll hunt her down and drag her back home. For her own good.” The sarcasm in her voice was almost unbearable.
And Tuyet—of course Tuyet, young and running away from family troubles, would remind Long Chau of her former student.
“Your time is almost up,” Long Chau said, sharply. In her arms, Tuyet hung limp. Her fingers bent at odd angles, and black hard beads streamed from her nails and hair. “Tell me that was useful.”
She could see them now, not at a remove through the suit’s coms feed, but through her own sensors. Two bodies—Long Chau’s tall and bulky shape holding Tuyet tight, arms and legs wrapped around the other woman’s hardening, fragmenting body.
One last jump—into the darkness where she’d once so desperately prayed for an end, through space that felt dark and heavy, like hands desperately trying to drag her down one last time. And then she was close enough to both of them to touch, to open an airlock and send bots and a shuttle to retrieve them.
“I’m here,” she said.
* * *
The militia was not happy. They knew Long Chau, but they certainly didn’t expect to be called from a hospital and handed a case that was almost shut. But they took it in stride, with visible ill grace.
After they were out of hospital—after Long Chau had watched, silent and composed, as Tuyet came out, sleeping on sweat-drenched sheets, with thin, round scars on the tips of her fingers, and a skin the unhealthy colour of funeral shrouds—Long Chau headed straight for the tribunal and the holding cells.
Much to The Shadow’s Child’s surprise, the militia let them both in.
Grandmother Khue was waiting for them there, seated on the hard floor of the cell, under the
