Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Read Free Page A

said, curtly. “What of the house?”
    “Not a soul left living,” Anshi said, flicking through the bots’ channels. “Not much left whole, either.”
    “Good,” Zhiying said. She gestured; and the men dragged the next victim — a Mheng girl, dressed in the clothes of an indentured servant.
    This — this was what the bots had wanted her to see. Anshi looked to the prisoners huddled against the wall: there was one San-Tay left, an elderly man who gazed back at her, steadily and without fear. The rest — all the rest — were Mheng, dressed in San-Tay clothes, their skin pale and washed-out in the flickering lights — stained with what looked like rice flour from one of the burst bags on the floor. Mheng. Their own people.
    “Elder sister,” Anshi said, horrified.
    Zhiying’s face was dark with anger. “You delude yourself. They’re not Mheng anymore.”
    “Because they were indentured into servitude? Is that your idea of justice? They had no choice,” Anshi said. The girl against the wall said nothing; her gaze slid away from Zhiying, to the rifle; finally resting on the body of her dead mistress.
    “They had a choice. We had a choice,” Zhiying said. Her gaze — dark and intense — rested, for a moment, on the girl. “If we spare them, they’ll just run to the militia, and denounce us to find themselves a better household. Won’t you?” she asked.
    Anshi, startled, realized Zhiying had addressed the girl — whose gaze still would not meet theirs, as if they’d been foreigners themselves.
    At length, the girl threw her head back, and spoke in High Mheng. “They were always kind with me, and you butchered them like pigs.” She was shivering now. “What will you achieve? You can’t hide on Felicity. The San-Tay will come here and kill you all, and when they’re done, they’ll put us in the dark forever. It won’t be cushy jobs like this — they’ll consign us to the scavenge heaps, to the ducts-cleaning and the bots-scraping, and we won’t ever see starlight again.”
    “See?” Zhiying said. “Pathetic.” She gestured, and the girl crumpled like the man before her. The soldiers dragged the body away, and brought the old San-Tay man. Zhiying paused; and turned back to Anshi. “You’re angry.”
    “Yes,” Anshi said. “I did not join this so we could kill our own countrymen.”
    Zhiying’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Collaborators,” she said. “How do you think a regime like the San-Tay continues to exist? It’s because they take some of their servants, and set them above others. Because they make us complicit in our own oppression. That’s the worst of what they do, little sister — turn us against each other.”
    No. The thought was crystal-clear in Anshi’s mind, like a blade held against starlight. That’s not the worst. The worst is that, to fight them, we have to best them at their own game.
    She watched the old man as he died; and saw nothing in his eyes but the reflection of that bitter knowledge.

    White Horse Hall is huge, so huge that it’s a wonder Wen didn’t see it from afar — more than a hundred stories, and more unveil as her floater lifts higher and higher, away from the crowd massed on the ground. Above the cloud cover, other white-clad floaters weave in and out of the traffic, as if to the steps of a dance only they can see.
    She’s alone: her escort left her at the floater station — the older man with a broad smile and a wave, and the second man with a scowl, looking away from her. As they ascend higher and higher, and the air thins out — to almost the temperature of Felicity — , Wen tries to relax, but cannot do so. She’s late; and she knows it — and they probably won’t admit her into the hall at all. She’s a stranger here; and Mother is right: she would be better off in Felicity with Zhengyao, enjoying her period of rest by flying kites, or going for a ride on Felicity’s River of Good Fortune.
    At the landing pad, a woman is