Issue #91 • Mar. 22, 2012

Special Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month

“The Book of Locked Doors,” by Yoon Ha Lee

Author Interview with Yoon Ha Lee

“Juggernaut,” by Megan Arkenberg

Author Interview with Megan Arkenberg

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

THE BOOK OF LOCKED DOORS

by Yoon Ha Lee

        The book was bound in pale, crinkled leather and rough thread the color of massacres, and Suzuen Vayag carried it in an inner pocket of her coat as a matter of course. Her sister Kereyag had written it in gunfire and witchfire and hellpyre smoke, on the stray cold morning of her death. The least Vayag could do was keep it safe.

        Today’s operation required that Vayag travel to the administrative capital of Territory 5, which was what the Meroi conquerors called her homeland. The administrative capital had once been Nyago-ot of the Seventy Temples, where pilgrims had brought pressed flowers from all corners of the peninsula twice a year. Now the Meroi called it Undercity 5-1, for the shadow of the Cloud Fortress that flew above it. Most of the temples had been destroyed during the war of occupation. The greatest one, Ten Bells Ten Flowers, had been spared only to be reopened as a museum honoring the Meroi dead. Vayag had had to go there once on an assignment and had almost blown her cover arguing with a Meroi tourist about who had really suffered in that war. She had been younger then.

        The only way to reach the Cloud Fortress was by air. The Meroi controlled their airspace tightly, and even their dignitaries had to secure permission to visit well in advance. It was an interesting problem. Vayag supposed she ought to be grateful that her orders only required her to shut off the fortress’s communications to the Meroi homeland for a single hour, which would in turn enable other agents to disable the Cloud Fortress long enough to carry out sabotage elsewhere. She didn’t know the details, but that was a sensible precaution.

        The book had whispered to Vayag in its dry voice of fluttering pages and threads rubbing together. It had suggested that she could do more than disable communications; that she could destroy the Cloud Fortress herself, send it plummeting to the city below. Ever helpful, it had identified the pages that would facilitate the modified operation. Of course, there were page numbers. Kereyag had always been meticulous about details.

        Vayag had no intention of carrying through with the book’s suggestion, not least because of the number of bystanders that would die, but she had looked at the indicated pages, the way she always did. On page 31 was a picture of a cobweb threaded tremulously across a corpse’s empty eye sockets. The left socket had been cut into the shape of a keyhole.

        Written in neat script, in the temple alphabet that had been outlawed six years ago, was the corpse’s particular profile. His name had been Khem Myan, and like everyone in the book, he had died in the Snowfall Massacre. He had been unrivaled at the old art of mirror archery: shooting slivers that multiplied themselves through prisms, or sending them around corners with the help of strategically placed reflections.

        Vayag had to admit the utility of mirror archery. She could have unfastened the page and taken it with her, but the ability belonged to a dead man and she would not disturb his spirit this way.

        She entered Subway Station 14 on the blue line, trying to ignore the book’s continued whispering. The station was cleaner than it ever had been during her childhood. Say what you would about the Meroi, but they were excellent administrators. Their firesnake crest was painted on every long stretch of wall. The tiles of the floor shone pale blue, with stippled tiles forming a path for the blind. The trains ran smoothly. There were no beggars—

        There were no beggars, but neither were there sellers of fruit, neither were there players of drums and tellers of fortunes with cards of azalea and crane. There were no priests offering public prayers to the three bird goddesses, or people pressing offerings of sweet fruit into their baskets. Vayag and her sister had come to stations just like this one with coins in their pockets, buying sour-sweet candies on the way home from school. Now when she looked at the station, all she saw were doors opening and closing, opening and closing, in mechanical defeat.

        And although there were still people who spoke the peninsula’s many native tongues among themselves, the cool sweet voices that read out the trains incoming and trains outgoing, that reminded travelers of ordinary safety precautions, spoke the Meroi language.

        The blue line from Station 14 eastbound (really north-east-east, if you cared about details, which she did) and six stops would take Vayag to Station 20. Her ticket had a firesnake on it, beautifully rendered in red ink. She used to hope that the machines would punch a hole in its head, but such pettiness did her no good. Besides, they never did.

        She could feel the book rustling its pages against her side as she stepped through the doors and onto the train. She gritted her teeth and thought of other things: haggling over eels swimming round and round in tubs of water in the open marketplaces, that last kite festival where Kereyag had gone around the whole day in an inside-out tunic without noticing until Vayag finally told her after the dinner feast, sharing quail eggs with the neighborhood children and taking turns dipping them in sesame salt.

        The windows revealed nothing but darkness pierced by intermittent flashes of light, the pauses where people with no more individuality than silhouettes got on or got off. Vayag assessed them as she stared off at an angle, pretending to be entranced by an advertisement featuring a handsome man. That one was a student, slump-shouldered and clutching a bulging book bag. She wore her hair swept up and pinned asymmetrically in the style that the Meroi governor had made fashionable. A man tapped his fingers on his knee in a simple rhythm. An older woman trailed two children, who were bickering amiably over a piece of taffy. The children, like the other passengers, wore the dull, sober clothes permitted to Territory 5’s subjugates by sumptuary law. Vayag missed the days when everyone had gone around in gaudy colors.

        There was really no excuse for what she was about to do, except that the alternative was to watch as her people adopted Meroi names in exchange for greater privileges and better-paying jobs. Even the graffiti, however quickly painted over, was in the Meroi language these days. And more and more often, she heard children speaking their parents’ languages with Meroi accents.

        For that matter, Vayag had cultivated that same accent so as to draw less attention to herself. She imagined the day would come when she would no longer be able to shed it at will, whatever her intentions.

        The synthesized voice announced that they would soon be stopping at Station 20. Vayag got up and shuffled to the nearest doors, behind a woman scowling at her timepiece. The timepiece was a thing of beauty: rose gold set with flashing crystals of darker pink. Vayag was tempted to steal it, just to prove she could, but it would have been unprofessional. She had gotten herself into trouble that way during one of her first missions, and she wasn’t going to jeopardize this one now.

        The doors opened and light slanted in from the station, softly bright. Vayag followed the woman out, walking fast but not too fast. She smiled blandly at the firesnake emblem across from her. She had a great deal of practice doing just that.

        She joined the amiable jostling of the crowd. As she passed a newsstand, she cast her gaze over the broadsheets. All the people in the photos were smiling. She didn’t get a close look at the figures and statistics and charts, but the photos—lying by omission—told her all she needed to know.

        Turn right. Up the stairs. Emerge into the cloudlight, pale and crisp. Vayag couldn’t help but notice all the reflective surfaces available to her, if only, if only. Polished windows and metal door frames. Lamp posts darkly glossy. The glint of a man’s necklace, a spark of blue from a woman’s earring. Even the polish of a Meroi policeman’s boots.

        It was not too late, the book explained to her, as patiently as if it were instructing a child. Vayag could duck into that teahouse, where there was a line. She could bend her head over the book’s pages, fit her finger to the keyhole, open the page and all its possibilities.

        But her aim was not another massacre, no matter how much the book wished otherwise.

        The book told Vayag, rather sharply, not to be ridiculous. They worked for the resistance, after all. Would freedom be bought with anything less dear than death?

        Not here, not now. The words caught in her throat like the teeth of a key.

        Down the street. No beggars here, either. She was near the heart of Meroi power, and the Meroi despised untidiness. No more festival banners, no more crisscrossing lines of laundry. The children played in designated areas instead of rambling in and out of the alleys. There was a puddle to one side of the street, a remnant of the thunderstorm that had passed by two days ago. More reflections; one of them was Vayag’s own, murky and sullen and distorted by ripples.

        Vayag went to a noodle shop and made her order: brown noodles with shrimp, which Kereyag had always loved. She sat at a table next to an ostentatious vase and studied the illegible scratches on the tabletop. The server brought her a glass of cold barley tea.

        Outside, a patrol went by in their red uniforms. It was hard not to tense up at the sight. She couldn’t hear their footsteps from here, of course, although the rumbling of cars passing was a constant.

        Vayag had her own timepiece, a student affair that she had bought two days ago in a pawn shop. She had made sure to have it calibrated accurately, though. She made a note of the time: four more minutes. Next time she had to make sure to allow more time; she had been counting on the general reliability of the rail system.

        She wore thick Meroi-style socks that went up to mid-calf. Pinned inside her left sock was a ribbon-shaped transmitter. She had stolen the plans for it from the Meroi over two years ago; only in the past half-year had the resistance figured out how to put it into production. In four minutes—three and change, really—she would activate it with pressure, and then the cancelers that had been planted throughout the city over the course of the past months would direct a pulse toward the Cloud Fortress. After that, it was up to her to escape if she could, and to die if she couldn’t.

        It seemed unlikely that the resistance had a surefire way of disabling the fortress’s defenses, but Vayag could only speculate.

        Two minutes. She forced herself to breathe evenly and watched another server, this one sallow of face, settle up with a young couple. The clink of coins sounded the same no matter what the mint. The Meroi coil and its derivatives had largely replaced native coins, which had come in a confusing variety of denominations. As a child she had hated memorizing the relative values: twelve pence to a myon, five myon to a rorogu, two rorogu to a half-jirik...fortunately, the full jirik had been the largest denomination she had encountered with any regularity. Naturally, once the coins with their annoying conversions were gone, she missed them.

        One minute. Vayag sipped her tea. It wasn’t very good tea, brewed too strong, but such details didn’t matter. She felt a slow trickle of sweat in the small of her back.

        Her time was up. Vayag twisted slightly and pressed her calf hard against the leg of the table.

        There was nothing: no immediate sound, no vibration from the trigger, nothing to indicate that it had worked. But she had to assume that it had.

        Vayag got up. A scant few seconds later, the effect kicked in. Shadow feathers fell through the window and pierced the tables, the chairs, the floor. She cut toward the back door, surprising the cook, and flung it open.

        The sky above was filled with a silhouette in the shape of a great bird, its wingspan stretching from horizon to horizon. The Cloud Fortress, visible at this distance as a tilted spindle bright with green-gold lights, intersected its heart. In the silhouette shapes moved, outlined in shivers of refracted sunlight: broken ribcages, spent bullets, smoke and fire and cars chewed into jigsaw masses. And eyes: hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, blinking too rapidly or not at all.

        In the mythology of Vayag’s people, three goddesses had shared rule of the world: Minhyen the Bird of Dawn, Khugyun the Bird of Night, and Sarasyon the Bird of Death. Vayag and her sister had left their share of offerings at the goddesses’ altars: sweet spring water for Minhyen, or votive candles in the shapes of lotus blossoms for Khugyun, or burnt barley flatbread for Sarasyon. They had seen a priest of Sarasyon summon the goddess’s living shadow once, when the Meroi warships first sailed up the river to the capital’s harbor. The ships had fallen apart in feather-shaped shards.

        The peninsula’s resistance had doomed itself then: the Meroi were quick to learn and had spared nothing in hunting down the priests and wonder-workers at the first opportunity.

        The patrol from earlier was heading back down the street. A bad sign: she didn’t know the specifics of their technology, but she had hoped they wouldn’t be able to trace the source of the prayer signal. It was probably a coincidence, but she couldn’t take the chance.

        The larger issue was that even the resistance should not have been able to summon the goddess’s shadow, not at such a size. Sarasyon would only have responded to direct sacrifice. Vayag hadn’t realized that enough priests remained in the peninsula to carry off such a feat.

        She cursed herself for freezing up and ruminating when the proper response was to react. It was difficult to look away from the goddess’s transcendent shadow, but Vayag made herself move one foot, then the other, one foot, then the other, over and over again. It would not do to run, not yet, but the more distance she could put between herself and—

        The patrol had returned. She could hear a woman barking orders for everyone to take cover in the nearest building and to stay put, as if anything as weak as walls would stop the divine. But then, the Meroi had always been fond of technological solutions to metaphysical problems, relying on the logic of gun and circuit.

        The question was, would anyone think to stop an obviously suicidal civilian from walking farther out into the falling shadows?

        “You there!”

        Apparently the answer was yes.

        Vayag bolted.

        Shouts followed her, but she didn’t hear the words. There was only the hard jolt of the pavement beneath her shoes, wind in her hair, shadows compounding shadows.

        People were yelling, cursing, sobbing. She couldn’t tell the difference between Meroi voices and her own people’s voices in the clamor. But they knew what was to come.

        Page 62, the book said to her in its dry, matter-of-fact voice.

        Vayag knew the page the way she knew all the pages. Heged Alokho, a temple guard, a fast runner over short distances and a master of the sacred knives. She had been survived by two sisters, but they had died a year after she did, hounded out of hiding by the Meroi police.

        Don’t make me laugh, Vayag thought at the book. She didn’t need supernatural aid for something as simple as running. Even before the occupation, she had delighted in racing Kereyag up hills and down helter-skelter paths, through the wild hills just southeast of the city of their birth, losing herself—just for moments—to the illusion that she could step up and into the sky. She didn’t have a racer’s conformation, but she could sprint when she had to.

        Page 4, the book said, persistent.

        She was tempted. She couldn’t deny it.

        Page 4 contained Yede Marannag, a girl whose life had been dedicated to the Bird of Night when she turned fifteen. A map of the peninsula had been tattooed on her back, where she could never see it. Thereafter she could never be lost, even blindfolded. She used to live in the sacred labyrinth of Nyago-ot with its shroud of mists and its echo-birds. The book had made a note that Yede had been especially fond of tangerine offerings. It wasn’t typical for the book to care about such human details, but then, Kereyag had been fond of tangerines herself.

        All she had to do was scrape the words off the page and swallow them like bitter medicine. If she got enough of a lead, she could probably spare the time. The book was good at such calculations, and it wouldn’t have offered her the option if there hadn’t existed time in which to exercise it.

        “No,” she said through her teeth. Six years she had survived since the massacre. She wouldn’t resort to the book after all this time.

        She slowed down as she approached an intersection, quickly assessed her escape options: down to catch the rail? Or continue on foot until she could catch a bus? People had seen her fleeing. She had to decide soon.

        No: best to go to ground, now that she had gotten some distance between herself and the Meroi patrol. They would be seeking cover themselves if they had any sense. She saw an open window above a garbage receptacle. Any moving shadows, on-off lights? Nothing so far. She would have to risk it. She vaulted up, then up again, and through the window. She had to be grateful for the peninsular penchant for expansive windows.

        The shadow feathers were still falling, only to dissipate when they met solid surfaces. But the sky was growing darker, and she knew there was not much time left before the goddess cried destruction on the city.

        There was a potted plant on the windowsill, with withered pink flowers. Vayag took care not to knock it over. The room she found herself in was unlit, unoccupied. She closed the window—there were no curtains, that was a Meroi affectation—and moved away from it. Against one wall was a small chest worked in abalone inlay and a great scar against one of its panels. She left it alone.

        The book reminded her of page 19, which contained Beherris Leleyen, another servant of the Bird of Night. During the New Moon Festival twice a year, he had folded himself up into shadows. People had come to watch him disappear, to hear his strong voice out of the empty darkness reciting the old chants in the temple language.

        There was no need. She could hear sirens, shouts, but the authorities would be occupied trying to keep order. Instead, she took the door, placing her steps quietly and precisely.

        The apartment was in the peninsular style. Most of the owner’s furnishings were age-worn. The communal sleeping room only had a single mat rolled up in the corner, though. She would have expected a family even in this tidy space: sisters and brothers and elders and grown-up children, and perhaps some of their children, as well. Whatever the story was here, it wasn’t for her to know.

        Vayag spent the most time in the kitchen, where there was a satisfactory collection of knives and chopsticks. She selected the sturdiest one and leaned against the wall, staring at the unlit stove.

        Now that her breathing was starting to slow, she could devote some thought to the bothersome question of how the resistance had triggered the Bird of Death’s appearance. The feathers were only fallout. The real target would be the Cloud Fortress, and on the ground Vayag was powerless to help, or find out what was going on. It was tempting to turn on the television, but the noise might attract attention and she doubted that the authorities would allow any substantive reporting to get through.

        The book sounded impatient this time, which was at least a welcome change from its customary smugness. It pointed out, very painstakingly, that Vayag had never matched the count of the dead against the book’s own pages.

        “I never needed to,” Vayag retorted, surprised into speaking aloud, but now she wondered. The Meroi government had never released an official list of casualties, and even the reported deaths were probably well shy of the actual figure.

        For that matter, Vayag had been there herself, but in the mist and chaos and the hectic gunfire, she had had no good way to tell how many people had failed to survive.

        Then why, the book said relentlessly, did it surprise her that someone else might have compiled their own book out of the massacre?

        Or indeed, of the other massacres, great and small, that had happened in the past years?

        Vayag was sweating now. The thought that the shadow government could have manipulated its own people in this fashion was intolerable.

        The book informed her that it had welcomed death; welcomed the reduction of blood and sinew into curving letters, words of entwined red and black.

        Vayag didn’t address the book by name. She never did. It hurt too much to think of Kereyag’s easy smile, Kereyag’s laugh, Kereyag’s footsteps next to her own.

        “I have a new target,” Vayag whispered. She had to discover the truth, and only another member of the resistance would know for certain. “Stand with me or against me.”

        The book had always been her ally, even as she refused to make use of its capabilities.

        All right. The next step, then, was to seek out her handler and pry information out of him. This meant going out directly into the feather-storm, but there was no help for it. She could only hope that, if the Cloud Fortress were indeed about to fall, it didn’t land on top of her.

        Vayag left by the door and took the stairs down to the ground floor. She made sure to lock the door behind her, out of an obscure sense of courtesy toward the individual whose home she had entered.

        The air had grown cold and restless. She could almost feel the wind’s fingers creeping through her hair, along her face, up into her sleeves. There was the sound of fire, roaring and directionless, but no sign of heat or light.

        Her handler wouldn’t be expecting her to check in. Indeed, their next contact was to be in nine days, which would work in her favor. It probably wouldn’t surprise him that she knew his usual hangouts, the clerk’s job that he had assumed, the tisanes he liked to order from the tea-shops.

        A sudden motion on the ground caught her attention, and she started. The pavement had cracked in the shape of a perfect keyhole, one large enough to swallow her foot if she placed it wrong. The inner section slowly crumbled into particles of shadow. It was followed by another keyhole, and another. The particles swirled, gathering themselves into the shapes of vertebrae and tibias and mazed circuit boards.

        She had to get out of here. Now.

        On foot, taking adequate precautions under these conditions, it would take her the better part of three hours to reach her handler’s neighborhood. There was no help for it but to start walking. The book reminded her of page 62’s runner, as she had known it would. It was less easy than usual to ignore its suggestion.

        Vayag kept to small, shadowed streets and away from major intersections, sprinting whenever she thought she could get away with it. Thankfully, she had always had good direction sense, and as she neared the city’s northwest-central district, the streets became familiar. About a third of the way there, she emerged from under the rain of shadow feathers, although she could still feel the dread wind and a more worrying, almost concussive force that transmitted itself in brief pulses, just below the threshold of human hearing.

        She passed an eclectic variety of people. Children who were gawking at the spectacle, despite the best efforts of their parents and aunts and uncles. Looters who were taking advantage of the confusion to slip into the few stores still open; she gave those a wide berth, not because she feared them, but she couldn’t waste the time to deal with them. On one street corner she spotted a circle of older women and men with their arms linked and raised toward the treacherous sky, singing the old hymn of the three goddesses dancing the dawn of the world. The occasional Meroi, brandishing guns and sticks to get people under cover. A beggar sifting patiently through one of the keyholes in search of stray change, her arms covered with skull-shaped soot-marks all the way up to the elbows.

        Vayag found herself wishing that the resistance’s gambit would succeed, given that they had tried it at all. The fact that the goddess was having difficulty with a Meroi Cloud Fortress was itself worthy of note. But then, she supposed, the problem was not the people but the technology. The Bird of Night was most concerned with people, and not at all with flying machines, and the Meroi were great believers in automated failsafes.

        Vayag, the book said. It rarely addressed her by name. It told her to run. There was no playfulness in its tone at all.

        People were watching. She shouted a warning, but couldn’t find the words. And then she ran as fast as she could. Not as fast as page 62 would have run—under other circumstances she would have been ashamed that the name had escaped her—but fast enough.

        For a while there was nothing but the jolt of her feet against uneven pavement, watering eyes, the thumping of her heart. And then she heard the Bird of Night’s scream. It scratched every cloud out of the sky. Even the feathers stopped falling.

        The book told her she could stop now.

        It took her several moments to convince herself that this was the case.

        She backtracked because the people who had been standing were standing no more. She had been perilously close to the boundary line, and she had to wonder if the book had protected her in some fashion.

        She only checked six corpses, but six was enough. Each one had a bloody gaping wound in the shape of a keyhole where its heart should have been.

        Bile rose in her throat. Had the resistance’s plan failed? How could they have allowed it to go so wrong?

        It was by no means certain that her handler would have answers, but she had nothing else left to try. She continued heading northwest. The sun was so bright that it was giving her a headache, but it was better than the rain of shadows.

        She made sure to mop the sweat off her face with a handkerchief before she approached her handler’s favorite place for afternoon tea. It was a small tea-shop with a wooden unsign, well-weathered and unpainted.

        A glance through the door told her he wasn’t there, although the place was crowded with excited, anxious people. She left before anyone could talk to her. Well, it was too much to expect to get lucky so early. The book was curiously silent about her options, although she knew perfectly well that page 98 contained someone with a tracking ability. Since the sun was in the sky it would even work right now.

        Vayag had no luck with the next three places she tried. People tried to get her to stay and tell them what she had seen, but she feigned worry for someone who might not have escaped the area of effect and moved on. She was considering risking his workplace when she thought to go back to the tea-shop and ask if they’d seen him. She pretended, not very gracefully, to be a worried lover, but the woman at the tea-shop was too distracted by the news on the television of this latest massacre—in her home city, at that—to need much convincing. It turned out he had not shown up today, so chances were that he was either sick or pretending to be.

        Vayag lingered a few moments to listen to the television news coverage. The announcer was a woman who sounded worried despite the platitudes she was uttering, and the footage showed Meroi police in bold formation but no corpses, no cracked pavement, no keyholes.

        Her handler was not only at home, he was cooking a late lunch: fried rice with shrimp and strips of pork. She came directly through the door—picking the lock was absurdly easy, but then he wouldn’t want to arouse suspicion with unusually high security—and wavered for a moment out of sheer hunger.

        “I take it they stopped all the trains,” was the first thing he said to her. “But you’re days early, you know. Do you want something to eat? There were going to be leftovers anyway.”

        “We have to talk,” she said shortly. She supposed this meant sharing a meal with him, and she really didn’t want to be burdened by thoughts of hospitality customs.

        He turned off the stove and dumped the pan’s contents onto two plates, divided evenly. “Sit, then.” He gestured vaguely toward a table and two plain oak chairs.

        She sat but didn’t touch the food. She did pick up the chopsticks he had provided, though.

        Her handler eyed her, then shrugged and began eating. After a while, he said, “You really know all you need to know. If you’re going to ask for operational details—”

        “It’s already out on the television,” Vayag said pointedly. “What’s there to hide?”

        He wasn’t looking her in the eye, although that could have been because he was very interested in his lunch.

        “What was the objective?” she said. She wasn’t shouting yet. “A lot of people died because we fucked this up.”

        She was under no illusions that the six corpses she had seen were the only ones.

        Still no answer. Now she was certain that he was avoiding eye contact. She reached across the table and shoved the plate violently. It spun off the table, scattering fried rice everywhere, and shattered against the floor.

        “That was uncalled for, agent,” the man said in a dead, even tone. Still, he made no move to defend himself when she abruptly got up and leaned forward to grab him by the throat.

        Vayag still had a chopstick in one hand. She set its point against his lower eyelid. “I need to know,” she said, “why those people had to die. The people whose freedom we are supposed to be fighting for.”

        “An agent who can’t follow orders isn’t of much use to us,” he said.

        She increased the pressure of the point, angled the chopstick up toward his eye. He only flinched a little, to his credit.

        “I have killed people for you,” she said. “I have risked death for you. I need to know that you’re doing it right.”

        “All right,” he said slowly. “But I’m going to have to remand you to a higher authority, and they could just as well decide to have you killed for being a security risk.”

        “I’ll take that chance,” Vayag said.

        “What did you think the objective was?”

        “To disable the Cloud Fortress, I suppose,” she said.

        “You know what the Meroi industrial capacity is like,” he said. “I won’t say that it’s trivial for them to manufacture and maintain Cloud Fortresses, but they have them over all their occupied territories, so it’s clearly doable. No; the objective was the expertise that goes into a Cloud Fortress. Its operation, its design, everything.”

        “You’d have to get that from the Meroi themselves,” Vayag said slowly.

        He smiled; it barely lit his eyes. “And that’s what we just did. The other deaths in the city were an unfortunate side-effect. You gave us the idea, really.”

        “I what?”

        “Your book is no secret,” he said.

        There was no point in denying it.

        “I don’t know how you persuaded a temple scribe to make it for you, or how often you use it, but the concept was sound: a Meroi ‘sacrifice’ would enable us to scribe their spirits for future use.”

        The temple scribe in question had been her sister; it was just as well he didn’t know that. “That’s not right,” Vayag said blankly. “I’ve never used the book. If it isn’t right to use our own spirits for gain, how can it be right to use Meroi spirits taken unwillingly?”

        She felt like a hole had been carved out of her heart.

        “I don’t believe the Meroi ever gave us a choice worth speaking of,” he said.

        “No,” Vayag said. “I suppose not.” She dropped the chopstick.

        And then, when her handler relaxed, she grabbed the blade out of her sleeve and cut his throat with it.

        The dead, reduced to words chained to a page, could not consent to being used in this fashion. All her life she had heard, from Kereyag even, that the scribe’s art was for use only to present an accurate picture of the dead. Siphoning their aptitudes and abilities out of them afterwards was disrespectful to their rest, and scribes caught abusing their ability in this fashion could expect to be tortured to death.

        Kereyag had thought it no longer mattered, that last cold morning. Dying, she had recorded all the dead that Vayag could find for her, and then scribed herself into the book with its rough pages.

        Now Vayag had to find a way to stop her own people from conquering the Meroi by throwing away their own beliefs. It was too late for second thoughts. She had committed to this course the moment she had threatened her handler.

        She washed up and went to find a change of clothes.

        Then she found an empty space at the kitchen counter and opened the book. The last page was blank. Trembling, she wrote, in unstable, spidery letters: Anything I can do with your help, I can do better by relying on my own heart and my own hopes.

        The book’s answer formed below Vayag’s sentence:

        This isn’t my book, sister sweetest. You are.

        Vayag slammed the book shut, but couldn’t bring herself to leave it behind where someone would come across it. She left the dead man’s apartment, then, and walked out into a world of ashfall and crumbling keyholes.

Copyright © 2012  Yoon Ha Lee

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Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed, and three times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

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AUTHOR INTERVIEW: YOON HA LEE

by Kate Marshall

In a special author interview for BCS Science-Fantasy Month, BCS Assistant Editor Kate Marshall talks with Yoon Ha Lee about “The Book of Locked Doors,” magic and technology being in opposition, an occupied people as neither passive victims nor virtuous heroes, and carved keyholes and giant bird-gods.

BCS: You’ve published work in a variety of genres. How do you approach genre in your work? Are you conscious of genre boundaries and sub-genres when you craft your worlds?

Lee: Based on observation, my working definition of “fantasy” is “has magic in it, usually actively called magic” and my working definition of science fiction is “has spaceships in it, even if their workings have nothing at all to do with the laws of physics.” There are obviously other types of fantasy and science fiction, but I don’t write them so I don’t worry about the classifications.

        I used to think the difference had to do with a certain type of rigor, but that’s clearly not the case. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy has a very rigorously worked out magic system, whereas Warhammer 40,000, as far as I can tell, runs on Lovecraftian horrors but has Space Marines and spaceships so is clearly science fiction. (Not hard SF, admittedly. But still, spaceships.)

        I can say that the thing I like about SF/F generally is that you get to choose your battlefields. I avoid writing anything set in the contemporary world or in the historical past because there are constraints based on what is or was actually true and the reader will know about them. If I write in a secondary world, I control the situation, I control much more of what the reader knows about the world, and that allows me to corner the reader more easily. So in that sense, genre is a tactical decision.

BCS: In “The Book of Locked Doors,” magic and technology are largely in opposition to one another. At the start of the story, the technologically savvy Meroi are the dominant faction. How have the societies been shaped by which type of power they embrace?

Lee: What’s interesting to me about the Meroi is that they’re imperialists, and they can succeed as imperialists because whatever their military doctrine is, it works with their technology base.

        Vayag’s people have some magical abilities with clear military applications, but their magic is largely used for religious purposes. Which is great up until the point that invaders show up with levitating fortresses.

BCS: You draw a vivid portrait of an occupied people, neither passive victims nor virtuous heroes. Can Vayag’s people and the Meroi be divided into right and wrong?

Lee: When I wrote about the two peoples, I was thinking about the Japanese occupation of Korea. I’ve been struck for years by something one of my teachers said about the occupation, that the Japanese did a lot to modernize and industrialize Korea, both of which are true. But I can’t help but think that Korea did not choose to be occupied and that it’s a bit much to expect us to be grateful.

        I imagine most of Vayag’s people go along with the occupation because resistance is difficult and genuinely gets people killed. The resistance has been using terror tactics, but when you’re weak, a full frontal assault on the strong is just stupid.

        I honestly don’t know which side I come down on. I’ve never been forced to make that decision; even if you look at my family history, you have people who made opposite choices during the Japanese occupation, and I don’t feel I’m in a position to judge.

BCS: Vayag’s possession of the book puts her in an important position in the events of the tale, but it is her personal, moral struggle which drives much of her action. Why did you choose to have her main drive be at such an intimate level?

Lee: Once upon a time, in high school, I wrote a novel (which was terrible), in which the motivation for war was economics. A resource shortfall, basically. When I put the thing through beta, I learned that people fall asleep when you make characters go to war over a resource shortfall.

        I decided, once I’d figured that out, that you should still have the resource shortfall so the war makes sense, but throw in some kind of personal conflict on top so the reader has something to relate to at the character level. It’s the same thing here.

        I spent a lot of time in high school trying to write very abstract stories about ethical dilemmas, and it never worked out (or anyway, it never did for me). You have to personalize the conflict.

BCS: The magic in your stories is full of powerful imagery, such as the carved keyholes and the giant bird-god. How do you choose these striking images?

Lee: The keyholes fell out of the air years back in a short story that I started and never finished. It was about an archer who shot keyholes into people. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, so I scrapped the story for parts and recycled the image.

        As for the bird-god, I confess that that is my thank-you to Harlan Ellison for “The Deathbird,” which was one of the stories I read in high school that blew my head open with what you can do with storytelling.

        My basic rule for imagery is that you pick something that the reader knows and will respond to out of rote – fire, flowers, a bird – and then you give it a ninety-degree twist through an axis they’re not expecting, to make it stick out in their head. It’s a ridiculous trick, and I keep thinking people are going to get bored of it, but it works enough of the time that I keep using it.

BCS: What other work do you find inspiring, either fictional or otherwise?

Lee: K.J. Parker’s works take my breath away. For this specific story, I also found the anime Code Geass inspiring. It’s an interestingly plotty and symmetric story about two men taking opposite approaches to reform/rebellion against a background of imperialism and mecha.

        Most of the time, though, I get most of my inspiration from nonfiction: math, music theory, military history, skimming random articles on Ars Technica, whatever I can get my hands on. Sometimes roleplaying games as well – you can find some terrific worldbuilding in RPGs, and although I haven’t played in a campaign in years, I still love reading the sourcebooks.

BCS: What’s next for you? What are you working on at the moment?

Lee: I currently have a space opera novel going through beta—it has a dystopian society that runs off abstract algebra and a protagonist whose worst enemy is the brilliant undead general assigned to her as an advisor. I had to be talked out of putting more math in, but at least I’m going to blow things up? After that, I have to decide whether I want to work on the tactical linguistics or try to come up with some more science fiction. It should be fun figuring that out.

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JUGGERNAUT

by Megan Arkenberg

        “I had to fight my way past two dozen Dragons to get here,” Casimar said, bending to unbuckle her sandals. “This had better be worth it, boy.”

        We stood at a crossroads in the BarisWaterGarden, cut off from eavesdroppers and the sounds of the city by a massive evergreen hedge. The water flowing down the path around us was soft and cool, the first rush of snowmelt from the Rose Court and the UpperGardens. Barefoot, Casimar waded onto the smooth marble with a sigh of pleasure.

        “You won’t like what you hear,” I said.

        She turned to me, frowning tightly. Between the paleness of her hair and the high collar of her bodice, her face stood out like a chip of mahogany. “Try me.”

        “Do you remember Aysun Edom?”

        “Of course.” Casimar pressed her fingers against her lips, her single ring—a large square of glass-green stone—glittering blue in the water-light. For a billionaire who owned over half of Akshayavat’s gem trade, her jewelry was rarely remarkable. “He was your lover, as I understand it.”

        “Yes... before he was yours.”

        “He left me three months ago.” She paused in the center of the path. “I’ll bet he regrets it now.”

        “He doesn’t,” I said. She raised one perfectly straight eyebrow; I shrugged and forced my voice level. “He’s dead, Casimar. The Dragons arrested him the moment he could no longer count on your protection.”

        The shock didn’t show on her face—nothing ever did—but it lined her voice like silver backing on a glass diamond. “What for?”

        “What?”

        “What did those Tourkis bastards arrest him for?”

        I shrugged again. “Who knows? It could have been anything.” I remembered standing in his rooms the day after the arrest, remembered the mess of blood and shredded curtains and the overturned contents of his jewelry box. Only one piece was missing—a diamond pendant with Casimar’s name. If she wasn’t entirely to blame for his death, I knew she wasn’t blameless, either.

        I shook myself roughly. That was not the path I needed my thoughts to wander. “But that’s not what I’m here to tell you,” I said.

        “You think they’ll go after you next.” It wasn’t a question; as the only woman on Akshayavat whom the Tourkis Dragons feared, Casimar was used to requests like the one I was about to make. “You’re probably right.”

        “I want your protection, Casimar.”

        “I know you do.” Her hand closed over my shoulder, cold and sharp where her ring dug into my flesh. Now that I could see it up close, I realized my error in calling the stone plain; it was a massive, flawless emerald, so rare as to be thought a legend. Just one of many impossibilities, I thought, of which Casimar Altan was fully capable.

        “What I don’t know,” she continued, “is why I should give it to you.”

        We were completely alone in the WaterGarden. Once the last strains of Casimar’s voice faded into the morning air, all was silent except for the wind in the hedges and the faint bubbling of the path. I shivered despite my heavy wool coat; Casimar, despite her bare arms and shoulders, stood like a marble column in the sunlight. Her expression was firm, defiant but merciless.

        “Casimar,” I said softly. “What does your protection entail?”

        “I can get you off Akshayavat.” I made an involuntary sound of surprise, and she smiled faintly. “I own the only oil field on the planet, Levent. Even the Tourkis System needs to ship their fuel from Ergonath and Banu. I could let you fly away right before their eyes and there’s nothing they could do about it.”

        “But where would you send me? And why—?”

        “They’re the same question.” Casimar released my shoulder, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from her gray ones. “What have you heard about Juggernaut?”

* * *

        Casimar was born on Sarasvati in the year the Dragons attacked and conquered the nearby orbit of Ergonath. She was five when war broke out between Sarasvati and Tourkis and twelve by the time her planet became another stepping stone between Tourkis and the oil fields of Banu. The Dragons crushed her father’s ship-building business immediately; her mother’s investments protected the family a little longer, until General Kaysura Soner, self-proclaimed “Game Mistress of Tourkis,” set her sights on the house of Altan.

        All this, Aysun told me the night he traded my bed for Casimar’s. It wasn’t until two years later, when I met them both at a ball celebrating the Altan Company’s purchase of Juggernaut, that I learned from Casimar just what Kaysura had done.

        “It was two hours after sunset,” she said, dabbing wine from Aysun’s lips with a lace handkerchief. We sat on cushions around a low table in one of the Umut Center’s many private dining rooms, Aysun with his head on Casimar’s lap, I with an arm around the waist of a topaz-skinned beauty whose name I never learned. I was a secretary in the office of the Volkan Mine; Casimar was the wealthiest woman on the planet and, as far as the law was concerned, could have sold me and my labor to the highest bidder; yet we ate at the same table and drank the same wine. As far as the Dragons were concerned, there was no difference between us. We both could—and probably eventually would—be disposed of with a single shot through the head.

        “I was sleeping at the foot of my parents’ bed when the shots rang out, and I heard a voice calling for the servants to leave the house and the Altan family to assemble in the courtyard.” Casimar sighed—for effect, I thought, since her eyes were coldly dry. “I wish you could have seen our house, Aysun. You would have loved it. It was low and white and sprawling, easily covering the area of the cityGardens. Very few rooms had all four sides enclosed; there were painted silk screens we could set up for privacy, but we could always feel the sun. And the wind.”

        Aysun turned and pressed a kiss to Casimar’s knee. I nearly shook with jealousy.

        “Anyway,” Casimar continued, “I began to follow Ana and Baba to the yard, but my mother grabbed me around the waist and flung me into her massive cedar clothes chest. I was terrified. I could hear sounds coming from the other rooms, and from the gardens—gunshots, screaming, and one woman’s voice raised above all the others. That was Kaysura, though I didn’t know it then.”

        From the way she fell silent and Aysun gently patted her hand, I knew that she still dreamed of that voice.

        The entire Altan household was killed that night, not just Casimar’s ana and baba but the servants and the family of the Banu trader who slept in the guest rooms. Casimar never knew exactly how they died, but she had a good guess; the Dragons didn’t have time to search for her until dawn.

        “The Game-Mistress herself opened my mother’s clothes chest,” Casimar said. “I stared up into the room, hoping Ana had come back for me, and all I could see was her face. I don’t know if the Dragons had started wearing masks by then—I think they probably did. If so, Kaysura had taken hers off. Her face was white like a moth’s wing, very round, with two black holes for eyes. She had something red on her lips... I was young and didn’t understand. I kept wondering why her carmine was dripping down her chin.”

        Kaysura had dragged Casimar out into the garden, to a place where three rose hedges made a small courtyard, and forced her to sit on a cold marble bench. She had just fitted her gun beneath Casimar’s jaw when the girl leapt to her feet and bit her hard on the wrist.

        “I’d never shown such a vicious side before; my parents would have been horrified. But there was something about Kaysura that terrified me past all reason. My only thought was to get away from her.”

        Casimar folded her handkerchief and pensively tucked it up her sleeve. “I didn’t draw blood, but Kaysura howled in pain. She dragged me back up by the ear—by the earring, I should say. I was wearing a pair of diamond studs Baba had bought for me that summer. Kaysura pulled so hard, she tore the earring out.”

        From Aysun’s expression, he had heard the story before and knew what was coming. I leaned closer to the table; the topaz girl had long since left my side.

        Casimar’s fingers toyed idly with her right ear. In the dim light, I could just make out a knotted scar running down the lobe. “‘You have a strong jaw, girl,’ Kaysura said to me. ‘Let’s see just how strong it is.’ She pried my mouth open with one hand and pushed the diamond earring inside. ‘Let’s see your teeth break that,’ she said. ‘If you can bite that diamond in two before the sun comes over that horizon, I’ll let you go free. If you can’t....’”

        I shuddered, and Casimar laughed without humor. “She wasn’t called the Game-Mistress for nothing, Levent.”

        “How did you manage to get free?” I asked. “Surely you didn’t break the diamond....”

        “Why not?” She popped a grape into her mouth, her white teeth splitting its silky red skin. “I tried hard enough, certainly. Two of my teeth were shattered beyond repair, and I nearly choked on my own blood. But I had two advantages.” She smiled and licked grape juice from her lips. “One was that Kaysura was notoriously inattentive. The second was my other earring. I slipped it into my mouth when she wasn’t looking and used the edge to carve the first stone in half.”

        I fell silent, overcome by hatred for Kaysura Soner and all the power-fattened Dragons like her.

        Aysun yawned and stretched out on Casimar’s lap like a cat. “What does this have to do with your plans for Juggernaut, dearest?” he asked.

        Casimar arched her eyebrows. “Nothing, love, except that it was my first.”

        “Your first what?”

        “My first Juggernaut. If I’d failed, Tourkis would have destroyed me.”

        “And since you won?” I asked softly.

        She turned to me, her expression as inscrutable as a Dragon’s mask. “You can’t beat a Juggernaut, Levent. You can only outrun it. Sooner or later, you’ll be crushed beneath its wheels.”

* * *

        “Let me see if I understand this,” I said, folding my arms on Casimar’s desk. “You own the planet, correct?”

        “My company has owned Juggernaut for a year and half.” Casimar stood at her office window, staring out at the expanse of black roof tiles. The hem of her skirt was still wet from the WaterGarden, but her sandals were laced and her hair combed to perfection. “Unfortunately, the ruling body of Juggernaut is no longer satisfied with that arrangement.”

        “They’re trying to escape your control.”

        “They’re trying to escape my ownership; I have no control on Juggernaut, at least not the kind a revolution would take from me. The economy of the Tourkis System sleeps safe in my hands, and I doubt even Hazan Kudret wants to steal that.”

        “Who’s Hazan Kudret?”

        Casimar sighed and sank into the chair behind her desk. “She’s Juggernaut’s governor, and the leader of this asinine resistance.”

         “Does she truly think that, with you out of the picture, her planet will stand any chance against Tourkis? The Dragons will eat her alive!”

        “Which is exactly why she needs to be stopped.”

        Casimar stood and walked to the wall opposite the window, which was covered by a colossal map of the Tourkis System. Starting from the sun at the center, she tapped each of the six planets in turn, saying its name in a tone like the tolling of funeral bells. “Tourkis Prime, Ergonath, Sarasvati, Banu, Akshayavat. Juggernaut.” She flatted her hand across the planet’s blue-black face. “The last free planet, Levent, short of the godforsaken orbit of Vivasvant. Oh, sure, there are pockets of resistance on Akshayavat—there used to be resistance on Banu and Sarasvati as well, though I think the Dragons have burned it all out—but Juggernaut is the last real threat to Tourkis. As long as men may think freely on Juggernaut, men will think freely anywhere; they will know it is possible to hold out, possible to resist.”

        “They just shouldn’t resist you, is that it?”

        Casimar pressed her forehead against the map so that I couldn’t see her face. “If you want my protection, Levent, this is what you need to do. I will send you from Akshayavat to Juggernaut; you’ll be out of the Dragons’ grip, out of reach of Tourkis. In exchange, I need you to speak with Hazan. Tell her Juggernaut is mine; she cannot buy, bargain, steal, threaten, negotiate, or legislate it out of my possession.” Casimar threw a wry smile over her shoulder. “Hazan would shoot me on sight, but you should be able to get a word in before she pulls the trigger.”

        I closed my eyes and lay my head on the crux of my folded arms. I wanted to say yes to Casimar, and not only because I needed her protection. Every word of her argument was true; if Juggernaut denied itself the safety of belonging to Casimar Altan, if it let itself fall into the hands of Tourkis, the Dragons’ power in the Tourkis System would be absolute. Like the fuel-starved orbit of Akshayavat, it would be nearly impossible to escape. Even Casimar would no longer be able to guarantee her protection.

        And even if Juggernaut did hold out against Tourkis, even if Hazan Kudret abandoned her own hopeless resistance and let the planet remain in Casimar’s possession, I knew I would not survive another month on Akshayavat.

        And yet....

        “Well?” I looked up to find Casimar staring down at me, one hand on her desk, the other tangled in the white waves of her hair. “You’re the only one I trust not to fail me, Levent. Your life depends on it. What do you say?”

        I swallowed dryly, licked cracking lips with a desiccated tongue. “Yes—I want to say yes. But Casimar....” I made a weak motion with both hands, like grasping at dust motes in a beam of sunlight. “Akshayavat is my home.”

        Casimar shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said, turning again to the window. Off in the distance, a Tourkis flag sent its snaky shadow slithering across the black tile roofs.

* * *

        “What did you do after escaping Kaysura?” I had asked that night at the ball, when the silence became unbearable.

         Casimar ran her fingers through Aysun’s long golden curls, her eyes fixed on my face as though she were seeing me for the first time. “I like you, Levent,” she said in a strange, faraway voice. “How is it we haven’t met before? You listen well, and you’ve learned how not to ask the questions you’re really wondering about.”

        I glanced at Aysun, hoping for a hint at how to proceed, but his eyes were contentedly closed. “What do you think I’m really wondering about, Altan?”

        “Call me Casimar. And I think that what you really want to know is how the thirteen-year-old girl who bit a diamond in half on Kaysura Soner’s command became the thirty-six-year-old woman with enough money to buy a planet directly from its inhabitants. That would be a rude question to ask, don’t you agree?”

        I mumbled that I supposed it was and looked down at the bowl of fruit in front of me.

        Casimar cleared her throat, following my gaze with an expression that might have been amusement. “When Kaysura let me go, I ran down the street to the house of Tutku. He was an old jeweler, a friend of my mother’s; she had invested in several of his supply routes from Akshayavat. I offered to work for him and he took me in without question. That was how Sarasvati was in the old days; neighbors traded with each other, instead of selling each other to the Dragons for the best possible price.”

        “And how did Tutku stay safe from Kaysura?”

        Casimar made a face like a woman finding a dead fly in her wine. “Game-Mistress, Levent. He won one of her games, same as I did. I think she made him drink a bottle of vinegar strong enough to dissolve pearls. Anyhow, he passed her test, and if there’s one good thing I can say about Kaysura Soner, it’s that she kept her promises. Tutku and his family were as safe as anyone was on Sarasvati—at least until I was sixteen, when Kaysura got herself blown up in a raid on the Direnç magazine.”

        I sat up straight in surprise. “Kaysura died? What happened then?”

        “Many things. Most significantly in the long run, they appointed an incompetent fool named Derya Burak as her successor.” She spat into the ashtray in the wall behind her. “Less significantly, Tutku’s hard-earned protection ran out. Derya was at our door in a week, ready to carve our heads off with his belt buckle.”

        I winced at the image, provoking a bark of laughter. “Poor Levent,” Casimar sighed. “That would have been cleaner than what Derya actually did. I told you Tutku was a jeweler? Well, he had an apprentice—his name was Bünyamin, and he was the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. Even lovelier than Aysun.”

        Aysun stirred at the sound of his name but said nothing.

        “At least some of my affection for Bünyamin must have been reciprocated, because he hid me in the chemical storage cabinet in his workroom when Derya raided the house. There was a pressure-release valve in the door, and by balancing on top of the solvent canisters and putting one eye to the valve, I could see into the shop. Bünyamin had just closed the door and shoved a work bench in front of it when Derya burst in, blood beneath his fingernails and a toothy grin plastered across his slack, brainless face. Bünyamin tried to run, but Derya caught him and tied him to a chair with copper wire.”

        She took a long drink from her wine goblet; for a moment, I thought she had decided not to share the rest of the story. But she set her glass down heavily and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “I don’t like to think about what happened next,” she said. “I was spared my parents’ murder, and I didn’t see the bodies of Tutku and his family until later, but everything Derya did to Bünyamin, I remember in perfect detail. He started with the soft pliers, the ones Bünyamin used to clip gold settings. He ended with a diamond-tipped faceter.”

         Casimar’s voice wavered, almost imperceptibly; she covered it with another sip of wine. “It took all day. All goddamn day. I think Bünyamin died before sunset—he stopped screaming sometime around noon—but Derya didn’t stop until it was too dark to see anymore.”

         A second silence fell, heavier and colder than the first. The only sound came from Aysun’s soft breathing; he had fallen asleep sometime during Casimar’s story.

        I looked out the window that covered most of the UmutCenter’s western wall. The sun had set several hours before, but the deep purple sky was still empty of stars.

        “I lived on the street for almost a year after,” Casimar said softly. “The Dragons knew which of us were strays, which of us they could do anything to and not have to fear the consequences. When Banu fell to Tourkis, and people started talking about Akshayavat as the last free planet, I knew I wanted to come here.”

        “Where did you get the money?” I asked, almost afraid to learn the answer.

        “Probably not the way you’re thinking. I’d managed to scavenge some jewel scraps from Tutku’s house.” She shrugged, as if pushing a weight off her shoulders. “It didn’t cost much to get to Akshayavat in those days. They hadn’t discovered my oil fields yet. The problem wasn’t getting on Akshayavat; it was getting off.”

        “You haven’t gotten off yet, have you?”

        “No.” She waved her hand dismissively. “I could if I wanted to, but I don’t. I did a little, at first. Akshayavat was in anarchy—survival of the strongest—men killed each other for bread in the marketplace. But if I could survive the Dragons’ attention on the streets of Gotama, I could easily survive the streets of Baris. I remembered that Tutku had gotten most of his jewels from the mines of Akshayavat, and I began looking for a mining job as soon as I stepped off the ship. I found one within a week. By the end of the month, I was giving orders; by the end of the year, I was practically running the company. Now, I own half the jewel trade on the planet.”

        “And that’s how the girl who bit a diamond in half on Kaysura Soner’s command became the/ woman with enough money to buy a planet.”

        “And enough money to leave Akshayavat, if I wanted to.” Suddenly, Casimar slammed her hand palm-down on the table. “Levent,” she said, her voice still deadly soft, “the day the Dragons took over Akshayavat was the worst day of my life—worse than the day Bünyamin was killed, worse than the day I lost my family. That day, I saw the last free planet in the Tourkis System fall into the hands of murderers and torturers. Our last hope was nearly out of reach—a vapid blue-black planet in a distant orbit, inhabited by a handful of rogues and rebels. Yet, I realized eventually, it was hope.”

        She smiled wryly at the expanse of sky out the window. “That’s why I bought Juggernaut. That’s why I’d die before I let it go. But you know what?” A new timbre tinted her voice—irony, and disgust. “Even without armies at my command, even if the Dragons decided tomorrow that they didn’t care what I did to their economy so long as they could overrun Juggernaut, they still couldn’t take it. Tourkis may torture and murder her people, but she will never steal their property.”    

* * *

        “But it isn’t stealing.” Casimar sighed. “That’s what perplexes me. Hazan actually wants to set herself up for takeover by Tourkis.”

        We had reached the edge of the Baris foundation, where the cool green stone of the city streets faded into gray earth and brownish tufts of grass. A mile or so to the south, nestled in a bend of the Pharsin river, the blue marble façade of the Tourkis Docks reared like the head of a ground-burrowing beast. Casimar’s own ship, the Argonaute, was docked in an underground hanger some twenty yards from where we stood.

        “Maybe she thinks she can defeat them.”

        “Then she’s an idiot as well as a traitor.”

        “I thought you didn’t mean to rule Juggernaut,” I said. My valise bumped along the ground, stirring up clouds of dust as I struggled to keep up with Casimar. “Can you be a traitor to a woman who doesn’t rule you?”

        Casimar stopped, turned and took my shoulders in a vise-like grip. “Protect my property, Levent. Keep Juggernaut in my hands and out of Tourkis’s. We’ll argue morals and politics when my planet is safe and the Dragons are all frozen in Hell.”

        I didn’t want to argue—politics or morals—but before I could say anything, a faint grinding sound stirred the air. Casimar took a step back as the ground opened at our feet, whitish sheets of dust pouring down the walls of a shallow limestone basin. At the bottom, the Argonaute glittered like an iridescent beetle in the rush of sunlight.

        “She’s been programmed for Juggernaut for the past two weeks.” Casimar folded her arms and looked down at the ship with an expression of pride. “The main deck’s unlocked; I imagine you can guess the code to get her launched. From there... it’s a twelve -day flight to Juggernaut. Have Hazan send answer in her own ship.”

        A yard to my left, the hanger’s limestone wall disappeared behind a flight of cast-iron stairs. I hefted my valise over my shoulder and set my foot on the first step, pausing suddenly as the hollow clang echoed down into the basin.

        Casimar half-smiled. “Afraid?”

        “Tell me the truth, Casimar.” I glanced at her over my shoulder. “How likely am I to survive this?”

        “More likely than you are to survive another month on Akshayavat. Less likely than I am to survive a month trapped in the Volkan Mine.” She shrugged with practiced nonchalance. “If you have anything you want to ask me, I suggest you do it now.”

        “Did you really break a diamond in your mouth?”

        Her eyebrows shot up, her lips twisted out of the half-smile. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

        Then she shrugged again, crossing her arms over her chest and resting her hands on her shoulders. “Do you know where I learned the word ‘Juggernaut’?”

         I shook my head.

        “It was my father’s pet name for me. When the other children were throwing rocks at wild dogs or sawing through each others’ kite-strings with shards of glass, I would always stand back. Baba said I had a ‘blind and destructive devotion’ to my own safety. My life was my Juggernaut.” Casimar’s hands slid down her arms and clasped at her waist. “Not anymore. It used to be I’d do anything not to die—even bite a diamond in half. Now....” She nodded towards the ship at the bottom of the hanger. “I’ll do anything to stay alive.”

        She would have gone herself, I realized. The ship had been programmed for the last two weeks. By the third, she could have talked herself into going. It might have meant her death.

        It might still mean mine.

        “Goodbye, Casimar.”

        “Goodbye, Levent. Beat this Juggernaut for me, will you?”

        I raised a hand in farewell and tried not to wonder why her words send drops of ice dripping down my spine.

        The Argonaute was designed to carry up to fifty people; I only needed a suite on the main deck and access to the steering equipment. A type-pad was set into the wall below the massive oculus windshield. There I paused for a moment; only five gears connected the pad to the engine room, too few for the launch code to be ‘Juggernaut.’ After a few seconds’ thought, I typed ‘Aysun’ with an uneasy smile.

        The engine roared to life.

        I went into the smoking lounge, lit a cigar, and leaned against the seven-foot window. The icy feeling hadn’t left me, and now I knew its source.

         You can’t beat a Juggernaut, Levent. You can only outrun it. Sooner or later, you’ll be crushed beneath its wheels.

        There was nothing else for me to do. I stood at the window and watched as the purple sky of Akshayavat vanished behind a screen of stars.

* * *

        On the ninth day of my voyage, Juggernaut came into view.

        It was a wild planet; I had not realized just how wild. Its oceans, though they covered less area than Akshayavat’s, were a thick, captivating blue-black. The land itself ran in serpentine tendrils through the water, vividly green and red. Storm clouds gathered and retreated; dots of light appeared over cities like flakes of gold in a stream.

        By the tenth day, as the Argonaute began preparing itself to enter orbit, I determined that it was programmed to land in Alcor, the capital of the northern continent of Vasudeva. Most of what I knew of the city came from my paperwork at the mines; Alcor was a major importer of diamond-edged saws for its quarries. I recognized it by the gouges in the pale pink rock that made a horseshoe of shadows around the city.

        The Argonaute breached Juggernaut’s atmosphere two days later. Soon I was near enough to make out individual holdings—the gray-slate roofs of cities, the red bricks and vibrant green fields of plantations, the miles of cream-white sails that marked harbors and ship-makers. Though Juggernaut’s coal and oil supply was vastly superior to Akshayavat’s, high winds and limited opportunities to refuel along the treacherous shorelines made sails infinitely preferable to steam.

        Another underground hanger opened in the outskirts of Alcor to receive the Argonaute. Unlike the naked limestone of Akshayavat, the Juggernaut basin was lined with thick wooden boards; a spindly staircase of some pale wood led to the surface. I found no one waiting for me when I stepped out of the ship and wondered, with a sinking heart, whether Casimar’s interference might be unexpected as well as unwelcome.

        Fortunately—perhaps—my fears were unfounded. As I reached the top of the staircase and the hanger vanished into the ground behind me, a woman came striding towards me through the rose-colored sand.

        “That ship belongs to Casimar Altan,” she said, spitting the name out as though it would leave a bad taste in her mouth. “You must be her excuse for a negotiation.”

        “My name is Levent.” She hadn’t shot me on sight—a good sign, by all evaluations—but that didn’t mean she was my ally. I narrowed my eyes, struggling to study her in the excruciatingly bright sun. Juggernaut was thousands of miles farther from Tourkis Sol than Akshayavat, but here the ground itself seemed to capture and emit its own light.

        The woman’s clothing heightened my impression of painful brightness. Her loose, full-sleeved shirt was bleached to perfection; the buttons on her vest and trousers glittered like chips of ruby. Despite the dust, I could see my reflection in her boots. Make no mistake, I told myself, this woman could rival Casimar for precision.

        “Hazan Kudret.” She offered her hand with a smile that said she knew what I had been thinking. “I don’t suppose you have a surname, Levent?”

        Her face was friendly, but her tone was not. I did not return her smile. “We can’t all be as democratic as Juggernaut, Kudret. Tourkis saw no need to differentiate between common laborers; it’s now a crime for anyone but the most, ah, ‘socially essential’ to use a surname.” I didn’t touch her hand; after a moment, she lowered it. “My mother was a dowser in one of Casimar’s mines.”

        Spots of red appeared on Hazan’s bronze cheeks. “Does that Altan bitch take us for fools? She sends a common laborer in her own ship to negotiate with us?”

        I had never struck a woman, but if the governor didn’t change her tone, I was going to put a stain on that record. “Oh, Casimar doesn’t plan to negotiate with you. Nor will she issue an ultimatum. She simply wishes to tell you that the moment you slip her grasp, Tourkis will gather her armies against Juggernaut and crush you the same way she crushed Ergonath, Sarasvati, Banu, and Akshayavat.”

        “That’s quite a speech she’s trained her parrot to recite.” I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me, but a pistol had suddenly appeared in Hazan’s hand and I wasn’t about to turn around. “How do you think we should answer, brothers?”

        A rumble of voices answered her, too layered for me to make out. Hazan smiled and raised her pistol.

        Better to die here than on Akshayavat, I thought, and smiled back. “Casimar says to send your surrender in your own ship.”

        “Really?” Hazan raised an eyebrow, stretching the features of her face into a blur of contempt. “Somehow, I doubt she’ll like the look of it.”

        Another rumble filled the space below the voices. I glanced over my shoulder and felt my heart drip like acid down to my gut.

        Hazan’s ship hovered above the ground, white-sided and thin like a razor’s edge. A painted dragon’s head covered the bow, and a knot of snakes writhed around the stern. A Tourkis flag hung from the hatch cover.

        “Traitor,” I spat, as the barrel of Hazan’s pistol landed across the back of my head and the world dissolved into sparks.

* * *

        For one endless second, I couldn’t breathe.

        I rolled flailing onto my hands and knees, pushed the wet rock floor away from my face and panted, drinking in air through my mouth. A four-inch string of fire ran down the back of my head. The pain proved I was alive; if I was alive, I must have been breathing.

        It would have been nice if I could tell that to my lungs.

        Behind me, someone cleared his throat dryly. “Don’t like enclosed spaces?”

        I froze, all my weight supported by my wrists and knees, and thought hard about the question. From what I had seen during my frantic breathless roll, I was trapped in a near-pitch room around six steps square. If I stood, I could probably touch the ceiling with a bent arm. It was like being trapped in Casimar’s underground hanger, only infinitely worse because the hanger at least was broad and tall and I knew how close it sat to the surface.

        I had never before been in a room with no windows.

Even the deepest of Casimar’s mines had a six-foot wide shaft overhead leading to the surface. I remembered what Casimar had said about her house on Sarasvati where she could always feel the sun; I thought about her hiding in her mother’s cedar clothes chest or trapped in a workroom closet watching Derya Burak torture and kill her sweetheart. No, I didn’t like enclosed spaces—but if a sixteen-year-old Casimar could bear it, so could I.

        I sat back on my knees and turned to face the man who had spoken. His coloring was like Hazan’s, a blend of bronze skin and gold-streaked hair that made him look hard and metallic. His eyes were shaded by heavy lids, but from the chain of emeralds around his neck and the general impression of taste his attire conveyed, I guessed them to be deep green.

        “How long have I been here?” I asked.

        “Fourteen hours, perhaps. I can’t be sure. I’ve been down here with you the entire time.” He smiled, a flash of brilliant white teeth. “You’re lucky Tourkis owns the fastest ships in the System. It’ll probably take them less than a week to negotiate your release.”

        “Negotiate what?”

        “Haven’t you guessed? Hazan is holding you hostage.” His smile flashed again; I wondered where the light was coming from. “We’ll give you your freedom when Casimar gives us ours.”

        I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; from the sounds bubbling in my throat, I was about to do both. Of all my spectacular failures, this attempt at negotiation was certainly my worst—and probably my last. “Better prepare yourselves for disappointment,” I said. “I’m not worth a grain of sand to Casimar, much less a planet.”

        “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Hazan seems to think she holds cards Casimar doesn’t even know are in the deck.”

        I inched my way to a wall—since I couldn’t see a door anywhere in the room, I was having trouble deciding back or front—and pressed my shoulders against it, willing my lungs to breathe easy and my heartbeat to slow. My guard didn’t seem to be armed, a fact that both soothed my nerves and gave me the courage to turn the conversation.

        “Does Hazan truly think belonging to Casimar in name only is worse than selling her soul to Tourkis in truth?”

        The guard laughed—uneasily, I thought, as though he hadn’t been expecting me to say so much. “You’re a laborer without even a surname,” he said in a voice tinged with disdain. “You’re used to belonging to people, aren’t you?”

        He sounded uncomfortably like Aysun.. You aren’t a lap-dog, Levent, he’d say. You don’t need to come whenever someone calls. But Aysun was one of the privileged, protected by either his father or Casimar. He never understood the value of being a possession until it was too late.

        Tourkis may torture and murder her people, Casimar had said, but she will never steal their property.  

        I sighed in exasperation. “You have no idea what Tourkis does to her conquered planets, do you?”

        His mask slipped for a moment, revealing naked uncertainty; but he recovered quickly. “We’ve been safe so far.”

        “Because of Casimar! Because Casimar will murder the entire wealth of the Tourkis System if the Dragons threaten her possessions! All she needs to do is stop selling jewels on Akshayavat and fuel on Sarasvati and ships on Banu. It’d be suicide,” I said, my voice as sinister as I could make it, “but she’d do worse than that to save Juggernaut.”

        “Oh.” For the first time, his voice matched the uncertainty I had seen fleetingly exposed on his face. “You... you really think she’d let you die? Just to keep from signing some paperwork?”

        “To keep from giving Juggernaut to Tourkis, I know she’d kill me herself.”

        Forget uncertainty; the look on his face was naked fear. He turned away from me—trying to hide it, I thought, but then I saw the hairline crack in the wall. “I guess we’ll find out in a week,” he said as he stepped through the door.

        I flung myself at the wall after him, but it was already closed. I shut my eyes tight and tried not to think about the darkness.

* * *

        In fact, it was exactly seven days later when the guard returned and told me Casimar Altan had arrived on Juggernaut.

        I knew because I had been counting meals and keeping an elaborate tally in my head. Akshayavat ate three meals a day; on Juggernaut, that was upped to four, with a slice of flatbread and fish around midday. This, I calculated, was because Juggernaut’s days were somewhere around four-thirds as long as Akshayavat’s.

        In spite of all this, I was both exhausted and starving when the guard dragged me from my cell to a washroom down the corridor and ordered me to prepare myself to meet with Casimar and Hazan.

        The water was frigid, the soap as hard as a chip of limestone, but it had a sweet scent my mind could only identify as “sunlight.” Juggernaut’s perpetual brightness seemed to have spread to me, I thought as I looked at myself in the full-length mirror; washed and dressed in fresh linen clothes, I could make Hazan look like a common mine-worker. There was even a chain of topaz with my clothing, picked, I suspected, to match perfectly with my eyes. That, I left where I found it; Aysun had always been fond of gems, but to me, they were a sign of labor rather than luxury.

        When I was done dressing, the guard took me up a flight of stairs and out into a street. Alcor felt surprisingly dark without the gleam of reflected sunlight off of windows—one of the few light sources in Baris, where fuel for indoor lighting was a rare indulgence—but I was overwhelmingly grateful for the sight of the sky, even if it was faintly rose-tinged.

        We took a steam-powered carriage to a building of black-and-gold marble on the outskirts of the city, not far from the stone quarries and the Argonaute’s hanger. Hazan was waiting for us in the front room, a windowless space about the size of a dining room at the UmutCenter. Seated on the floor next to her, legs stretched across the pile of cushions as though nothing in the world was amiss, was Casimar Altan.

        “Levent.” She nodded her head in greeting. My heart rose in my throat. Around the perimeter of the room, masked Dragons held blades and pistols at the ready.

        My guard, who had taken a mask from somewhere on his person and fitted it over his eyes, prodded me in the back. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to Casimar, kneeling on the cushions beside her.

        She ignored me. “Well, Hazan,” she said with a smile like a shard of glass, “you promised me a persuasive argument. I hope this isn’t your excuse for persuasive, because it seems to me Levent did a very poor job of persuading you.”

        “I drive a hard bargain.” Hazan crooked a finger at one of the Dragons, who stepped forward and presented her with a long ebony box. I felt an unexplained shudder run down my spine and glanced at Casimar; she sat as still as a statue.

        “I’m asking very little of you, really,” Hazan continued conversationally. “Your name on the bottom of a sheet of paper. You don’t even need to sign in blood—though we’d be happy to let you.” The Dragons made sounds that I interpreted as approval. I wished—more desperately by the second—that I had managed to steal a knife at some point during the last week. “We simply want you to relinquish your hold on Juggernaut.”

        “I bought Juggernaut as a land investment,” Casimar said. If she hadn’t been sitting so still, I wouldn’t have known she was terrified. “Why would I give my land away for no reason?”

        “Reason?” Hazan flipped back the cover of the box and made a show of examining its contents. Neither Casimar nor I could see what was inside. “Well, at least you’ve stopped worrying over Tourkis. That’s an improvement—don’t you agree, brothers?”

        Another rumble of approval. I inched closer to Casimar—whether to protect her or myself, I couldn’t say.

        “I haven’t stopped worrying about Tourkis,” Casimar said. “They’ll still destroy you if you give them half a chance. But since you seem to have the self-preservation instinct of a fly in a diamond-spider’s web—”

        “Funny you should mention diamonds,” Hazan interrupted. “You see, ever since you’ve refused to negotiate with me, I’ve been studying your history. People tell the most amazing stories. For example....” She lifted something out of the box and held it out for Casimar to examine. “I seem to remember an encounter between you and Derya Burak that centered on one of these.”

        “Not me,” Casimar said in a voice that sounded like breaking glass. I glanced over her shoulder and felt suddenly, violently ill. The thing in Hazan’s hands was a diamond-tipped saw.

        “No? Well, I wouldn’t dream of putting a stain on that record.”

        Four Dragons appeared behind me. I leapt to my feet, fists clenched and raised, but one of their pistols struck me across the forehead. I feel heavily. Two Dragons grabbed my arms and pinned me to the floor; another pair held my legs. Hazan moved to sit at my head, trailing a hot hand down my cheek.

        “I hear your little boyfriend screamed for mercy,” she said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or Casimar; both Aysun and Bünyamin had died at the hands of Tourkis. I snarled in impotent anger, but Hazan’s eyes were no longer on me. “Have you ever wondered, Casimar, what would have happened if you’d simply stepped out of the closet? Would Derya have killed the jeweler’s apprentice quicker and turned his attention to you?”

        Casimar gave a strangled cry. Twisting to see between the shoulders of two of my captors, I saw that my emerald-eyed guard was holding a gun to her temple.

        “Well, this time you don’t need to wonder.” Hazan seized my hair in one hand and pressed the diamond tip of her saw to the hollow of my throat. It was so sharp, it took me fully a second to realize I was in pain. “It will all stop the moment you let go of Juggernaut.”

        And she began to cut.

        “No!” Casimar screamed.

        Agony—agony I could never have imagined burned through my chest, made my head roll back on Hazan’s lap. I felt hair tearing from my scalp, but it was distant, indirect. Her hand moved steadily, tracing a line of flames down across my stomach, back up along my side and across my ribs. Someone was screaming—I thought it was me, but it could have been Casimar.

        “Stop!”

        All at once, the pain abated, replaced by icy silence. I felt more than heard my labored breathing. Hazan’s hand hovered over my face, the diamond saw-tip throwing radiant light into my eyes.

        “Do you surrender?” she asked.

        “Yes,” Casimar said, her expression brittle as cold iron.

        “You release Juggernaut to us?”

        “Yes!”

        “You will allow us to ally ourselves with Tourkis?”

        “Yes, damn it, yes!”

        “You won’t declare war—”

        Hazan never got to finish her sentence; Casimar began to laugh.

        “Oh, no,” she said, her whole body shaking with hideous amusement. “My battle with you is over, Hazan. I can’t beat this Juggernaut, and I’m damn sick of trying to outrun it.”

        Turning suddenly, she struck the gun from the hands of her guard. The other Dragons moved as one to stop her, but Hazan waved her hand dismissively. Still laughing, Casimar lifted the gun from the floor and started towards the door.

        Dread gave me the strength to move. I lifted my head, my torn neck and shoulders weak with pain. “You can’t do this!” I cried. “Casimar, what are you thinking? Let them kill me! Casimar, don’t you dare—”

        “Shut up, Levent.” Hazan’s voice was brittle as iron.

        Casimar was still smiling, her eyes on Hazan, as though she hadn’t even heard me. “Give my regards to Tourkis,” she said, “and whoever their Game-Master is today. You’ll get along famously, I’m sure; you deserve each other. Just remember, when you’re licking dust off those shiny black boots of theirs, that you had my protection and you threw it away.”

        She turned to me; her eyes softened for a fraction of a second, but her voice remained hard. “Goodbye, Levent. This wasn’t your war to fight. It’s not your fault this... it’s not your fault.”

        The door slammed behind her. Hazan didn’t move.

        Her breath was hot on my face, her blade still inches from my cheek. Blood ran down my neck and chest, hot and sticky and foul-smelling. I didn’t move.

        From somewhere outside the building, a single gunshot cracked the air.

        None of us moved.

* * *

        Winter came fast to Vasudeva.

        The first snow fell three days after Casimar’s suicide. She had shot herself at the edge of the quarry, and no one had yet braved the white and icy stone to recover her body. The Dragons moved fast, snapping up her mines, her oil fields, her ship yards. Snapping up Juggernaut.

        They would have taken the Argonaute, but the ship was gone, its hanger swallowed up in the same snow that had swallowed Casimar. I was glad. Of all the things she owned, it was the only one they couldn’t take.

        The Dragons left me to myself, now that I had so flawlessly served my purpose. I stayed in a suite of rooms in the black marble building, thinking about Casimar and Aysun and Akshayavat, eating whenever and whatever my guard fed me. I didn’t know why I bothered—eating, thinking, or living. Once again, I had proven myself worthless. Once again, I had fallen in love with something impossible—with a Juggernaut, though I was learning to hate that word—and it had destroyed me.

        Finally, after three weeks spent growing intimately familiar with the four walls of my bedroom, I decided to take a walk.

        It was freezing cold; Alcor had no parks, no gardens for me to visit. The Dragons watched me leave with a concentrated boredom that told me they, too, did not expect me to return.

        The railroad tracks to the quarry were closed for the season. Ice had frozen between the ties, making a smooth raised pathway that reminded me of the marble walks in the BarisWaterGarden. For a moment, I contemplated taking off my shoes and letting the cold kill me that much faster, but I was not as brave as Casimar. I walked down the tracks.

        A low wood-and-iron bridge took me across the quarry and into the fields of unmarked snow that stretched endlessly towards the horizon. The world was too bright to look at. I kept my eyes on the slippery track beneath my feet.

        You can’t beat a Juggernaut. How true that had turned out to be. Cruelty fed on cruelty, power fed on power, fear fed on fear—but resistance was finite. You could only run until you ran out of places to run to.

        “There’s nowhere left,” I said to the empty fields. “There’s nowhere left to go.”

        In the snow at my feet, something sparkled.

        I kicked the ice away and stared down at the thing. It was a diamond—not bort shards fallen from a train car but a cut jewel. I picked it up, felt its balance in my palm. The cutting was amateur but by no means shoddy—it was the work of an apprentice learning from a skilled master.

        The thought leapt unbidden to my mind; how much had Casimar remembered from her years in Tutku’s house?

        I cleared snow from a wider patch of ground. There, about a yard from the track, a ruby glinted in the sunlight. It had been shaped by the same artist. A few more steps, and I found a yellow sapphire; another yard, a cat’s-eye chrysoberyl. The trail lead me through the snow to a small clump of shadows I hadn’t noticed before.

        The shadows proved to be a grove of trees. Within, the ground was dark and bare of snow. A few more jewels lay scattered about; I recognized the paler circle of earth beneath them as the entrance to an underground hanger.

        “Brilliant, Casimar,” I said aloud. My heart sang eagerly in my chest. “Now how the hell do I open it?”

        Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a line of scratches in the pale bark of a tree. It took me only a moment to recognize the dark shape in its roots as the gun Casimar had struck from a Dragon’s hands.

        I squinted to read the writing, and smiled uncontrollably when I realized what it said.

        “Vivasvant.”

        At the sound of my voice, a grinding noise filled the air and the roof lifted away from the underground hanger.

        The Argonaute was inside, a bit battered from what must have been a two-week journey and self-piloted landing. The doors on the main deck were unlocked and the corridors empty. In the steering room, on the type-pad beneath the windshield, I found a note in Casimar’s handwriting.

        I’ve been wrong to run, it said. I’ve been wrong to ask others to fight my wars. I thought I could protect what was mine, but I realize now that the only way to win is to not protect. It is time to stop running and start to fight. Vivasvant is a wild, dangerous planet—the perfect place to start a rebellion. Will you follow me, Levent? I’m asking; the choice is yours. As for me, this is the last time I will ever run.

        The note was signed Juggernaut.

        I stood there for a moment, looking at the hard, unyielding letters. I thought of the hand that had shaped them, the hand that had shaped diamonds. Slowly, I typed my answer into the keypad. I will.

        The engine roared to life.

        You can’t beat a Juggernaut, I thought, standing at the oculus windshield and watching as the snow-blanketed ground dropped away beneath me. Sooner or later, we will crush them.

        The stars sparkled like a chain of diamonds around me. Below me, the serpentine face of Juggernaut vanished beneath clouds of dust.

        “Sooner or later,” I said to the stars, “we will be free.”

Copyright © 2012  Megan Arkenberg

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Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Ideomancer, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine, among other places, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: MEGAN ARKENBERG

by Kate Marshall

In a special author interview for BCS Science-Fantasy Month, BCS Assistant Editor Kate Marshall talks with Megan Arkenberg about “Juggernaut,” the machinery of subgenre, why an oppressed underclass is allowed economic power, and the unique perspective of a character outside the power struggle.

BCS: You’ve published both science fiction and fantasy. How do you approach genre in your work?

Arkenberg: As a writer, I don’t find broad genre divisions particularly useful. A story’s subgenre has much more influence on its plot, setting, voice and point-of-view, and I find that some of my favorite subgenres—dystopia, steampunk, cosmic horror—blur the lines between science fiction and fantasy anyway!

        I think there are two important things to keep in mind when purposely writing in a certain subgenre. The first is to remember that subgenre is an ongoing conversation. Your dystopia is not the first dystopia your readers have ever read; if you’re going to use these devices, you need to question them, examine them from different viewpoints, deconstruct them.

        The second is that subgenre is not a plot blueprint, a checklist of clichés to incorporate. The machinery of subgenre needs to evolve seamlessly (or appear to evolve seamlessly) alongside the world-building, plotting, and characterization. You have to strike a balance between relying on subgenre as a roadmap and reducing it to set dressing—if you’re writing dystopia, the forces of oppression don’t have to be the focus of the story, but they can’t appear just once in the background, either.

BCS: Would you call “Juggernaut” science-fantasy? Where would you place it in the genre?

Arkenberg: I started writing “Juggernaut” as a steampunk adventure story. Some traces of steampunk appear in the Argonaute’s engine room or the steam-carriage tracks in Alcor, but overall, as I was writing, I found myself de-emphasizing the gritty nineteenth-century feel of steampunk for a streamlined, vaguely Ottoman futurism. I started borrowing what I saw as futuristic elements from other sources—the BarisWaterGarden, for example, is based on Chicago’s MillenniumPark, where I saw a flock of shoeless tourists gather one summer day.

        The end result resisted my attempts to label it. I didn’t think the “science” behind the space-travel or mining techniques was adequately explained for the story to count as science fiction, but at the same time, the inter-planetary setting seemed more scifi than fantasy. The science-fantasy label seemed like an acceptable compromise.

BCS: Casimar’s influence and decisions shape the events of “Juggernaut.” Why did you choose to show Casimar through Levent’s perspective? What does Levent’s perspective bring to the tale for you that Casimar’s cannot?

Arkenberg: I think telling the story from Casimar’s point-of-view would have eliminated a lot of the tension at the ending. Casimar knows more or less what she is going to do; she can be surprised or driven to despair, but overall, a story from Casimar’s perspective would consist of watching her move from point A to point B, with only a few emotional stumbling blocks.

        Levent’s point-of-view lets us see Casimar not as she sees herself but as she wishes to be seen. Casimar is consciously building a myth around herself—her own backstory comes to Levent and the reader through her own words, with little or no corroborating evidence. How much of it is true, how much exaggerated for effect? These are questions Levent asks that Casimar would never even consider.

        Finally, I think that the conflict between Casimar, Hazan, and the Dragons is more visible from the perspective of Levent, who is powerless to control it, than from the eyes of the major players, who would all focus on their own plans and advantages.

BCS: The Dragons are glimpsed mostly in memories and related stories, but their impact is felt throughout the narrative. How do the Dragons reshape the worlds they’ve conquered?

Arkenberg: The Dragons create a unified culture of fear and violence on the planets they’ve conquered. They follow Machiavelli’s maxim to strike so suddenly and so forcefully that their victims’ vengeance need not be feared. They understand the value of dehumanizing and humiliating their victims; emphasizing the powerlessness of the people they destroy.

        But they also live in a system with limited resources, and they know that threatening access to these resources—threatening it too much, anyway—is a sure way to create a rebellion; that’s why they create a wide berth around people like Casimar, who control large amounts of the Tourkis System’s resources, and focus the bulk of their cruelty on people like Aysun and Levent, who can’t fight back.

BCS: The relationship between Casimar and Levent is rooted in their mutual ties to Aysun. How do their feelings for Aysun shape the way they view one another? Do you think their relationship is changed by the end of the tale?

Arkenberg: Witnessing Aysun’s relationship with Casimar taught Levent that Casimar can provide protection. At the beginning of the story, Levent is too concerned about gaining this protection to be blinded by past jealousy. Along the same lines, Casimar sees Levent the way she sees almost everyone around her—as a tool to use and protect.

        At the end of the story, Casimar and Levent have both been humanized in each other’s eyes; Casimar finally sees Levent as a person rather than a possession, and Levent realizes the limits of Casimar’s power. Their alliance at the end is on much more equal footing than their agreement at the beginning.

BCS: Casimar has strong economical power, but she remains under the oppressive rule of the Dragons. How do these different types of power interact in her world?

Arkenberg: Casimar herself is safe from the Dragons as long as her efficient management of her resources is more useful to them than confiscating her property (and dealing with the inevitable rebellion that produced) would be. The Dragons have nothing against theft on moral grounds; it would just be inconvenient to them to have to distribute things like fuel and ships when someone like Casimar is perfectly capable of doing it herself, provided they do her the small courtesy of not interfering.

        But this is a precarious balance, requiring constant vigilance on Casimar’s part, and her sphere of protection is not nearly as large as she would like to believe. As the theft of Juggernaut shows that, provided the prize is big enough, the Dragons actually have little reason to respect Casimar’s property.

BCS: What other work do you find inspiring, either fictional or otherwise?

Arkenberg: Music is a great motivator—I especially love the work of Two Steps from Hell/Thomas Bergersen. For stories, I find inspiration in weird places (who doesn’t?). Most of the stories I’m working on now had their genesis in what I call “throwaway lines”—metaphors, images, etc. that authors introduce briefly in poetry, stories, or essays, often for only a sentence or two, but that are too striking not to be examined in depth. For example, in John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, there is a sentence about “fairies of the furnace as well as of the wood” that I can’t get out of my head....

BCS: What’s next for you? What are you working on at the moment?

Arkenberg: Most of my current works-in-progress include non-human characters: angels, dragons, fairies, cosmic monstrosities. This is pretty unusual for me, but I think it’s also an excellent exercise, forcing me to really focus on characterization. I’m also trying to write more for anthologies. School, work, and editing have taken up so much of my time that I really need deadlines to encourage me to finish things!

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COVER ART

“Gone,” by Mats Minnhagen

Mats Minnhagen is a digital artist living in Sweden. He has worked as Concept Artist on EA Dice and currently freelances with role-playing-game, book, and popular science illustrations. His fantasy painting “Floating Fish” was the cover art for Issue 19 of Clarkesworld Magazine, and his painting “King of Ruins” was the cover art for the BCS website before our premiere issue. His online galleries can be viewed at www.minnhagen.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

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